She didn’t look at it. “Hello, Carlo,” she said.
“Marco.”
“Yes.”
She was utterly unnerving. “Are you French?” he blurted.
“Why, do I look French?”
He sputtered and made slightly motorboaty sounds. “Yeah. No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“And you, Carlo? Are you French?”
“Marco,” he said. “Do I look French?” Scored a point there, he decided.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know if you look French.”
“What, haven’t you seen French guys?”
“No, Carlo, I have not. I’m blind.”
He hurried away.
* * *
2:01 p.m.
Little Angel tried to go into the house and check on his brother, but Perla stopped him. “Shh, he’s sleeping.”
He went back outside, and as unbelievable as it seemed, the party swirled even without the presence of Big Angel.
Little Angel stopped by Uncle Jimbo’s table to give back the cigar Jimbo’d foisted on him. He didn’t have much time to visit, however. Paz came up behind him and pulled the back of his shirt until he staggered. “Where is Leo?” she said. “I am looking for Leo.” Little Angel extracted himself from her grasp and hurried away.
Lupita watched her beloved Jimbo from the kitchen. El Tío Yeembo. Everybody loved him! Era muy popular. That great buffalo of a man. He had saved her from Tijuana, not that anyone needed to be saved from Tijuana! Viva Tijuana! She loved Tijuana. She told herself to stop thinking like a gringa. He had saved her from poverty.
Though poverty in Tijuana, well, that was its own version of suffering.
She laid into a pile of coffee cups with a scrubber. Yes, what you hate is poverty. That’s what you hate. She remembered working in Perla’s little restaurant. Big Angel, that angel, helped them secure the loan to open it. The sisters made all the food and washed the dishes, and La Gloriosa waited tables because she was so sexy; the men who came in for good food also came in for good flirting and left her big tips, which the sisters shared. Restaurant? Closet! Lupita banged the cups vigorously in a steaming pond of soapy water. Why, it had been so tiny, they could fit only four tables in there and a counter where the cooking was done. It had a room up rickety wooden stairs somebody had made with a saw and some nails. Home, Lupita thought. Cardboard boxes for clothes, two mattresses on the floor. They shared a foul toilet-shower with some prostitutes across the way. They had to remember to take the toilet paper out of the room when they bathed because the showerhead was above the toilet. Still, the putas were funny and shared their makeup and hair rollers. Most of the sisters’ money went into the restaurant—La Flor de Uruapan. No money for lippi-sticky or fancy hairdos or nice clothes. When they needed to buy something nice, they bought something for La Glori, pues. It was an investment in their future, they thought. She was their greatest product. It was easy to take most of the leftover food for themselves and deny her—she needed to keep her figure. It was for their survival as a family, they told her, that she stay slim.
She was forever grateful to Jimbo for so many things. He had been there when Braulio and Guillermo were shot. And he had stood like a post of iron through the funerals. Poor Gloriosa. They all thought she’d die. Perla—she broke. Lupita had been at her house almost every day to try to help Big Angel keep Flaca together. Perhaps she had failed. Because her Jimbo had cracked, and she hadn’t noticed till it was too late. None of them knew what it all had cost him.
Lupita watched Jimbo’s head droop, snap up, droop farther, then rise slowly as he smiled at everyone. Borracho. Is okeh, mi amor. You earned the right to be borracho.
She ran her hands down her sides and belly. It was Jimbo who said to her, when they were courting, “Mexican women sure do love their kitchens. You ever see a thin old Mexican lady? You get nice and gordas, all you girls.” So she’d gone to La Glori for advice. Once again the baby sister saved her. By that point, La Gloriosa was an expert at dieting and maintaining the illusion that hooked men like catfish and reeled them into the pan.
Lupita’s lifelong struggle. Sadly for her, her body believed it was a good thing to have round nalgas and a happy belly, and she was forced to fight against herself every day. Jimbo? Well, he had lost his handsome sailor shape right away. Frankly, it was easier for her—the fatter he got, the thinner she felt. The fatter and drunker he got, the easier it was to get him to sleep. She often snuck out after he was snoring and went over to Perla’s house to help her wash dishes. But mostly to have her late-night coffee with Big Angel. Ay, qué hombre!
Everybody was in love with Big Angel. He was so broody, so dark, and had the little sideways smile that spoke volumes to any woman who saw it. What secrets did Perla know? Maybe she did not know how Big Angel heated the women. No disrespect to her elder sister, but she might not have the slightest idea what kind of man she had in her bed. While everybody knew exactly what Yeembo was. They could even imagine his sleep-apnea mask.
But poor Perla. Well, they all had their crosses to bear. Maybe Lupita was no Glori, but she was all woman. Perla fretted too much about nothing. Silly worries and doubts and suspicions and jealousies. She must have known—look at the way she wanted to kill on sight any other woman who came too close to him.
But that smile of his! Ay. Perla always thought he was amused, and every other woman felt his gaze and was certain in her gut that he was aroused. As if the very sight of her, whoever she was, pleased him deeply, carnally, and he was forced to let her know this secretly, with regrets, for he didn’t want to betray his own woman, but life was life, and one could not control the stirrings of the palo that hid under the edge of the table. Oh hell, all of those brothers were alike.
Big Angel slathered his passion all over Perla. It was a delight to see, really. Delightful, so much love. Cups clanked loudly. So—much—love. Honestly, she and La Glori never quite understood what was so special about Perlita. Why her? She was old and tired even then. Their leader, their taskmaster. Big Angel was one of God’s own challenges to them. A mystery they could not quite comprehend. A spiritual conundrum, a word she had learned on Jeopardy! She hadn’t been able to get an education, but Big Angel had taught her to learn a new English word or concept every day from television.
Perla came into the kitchen. “Yeembo está borracho,” she said.
“Sí.”
“Pobre.”
“Pobrecito el Yeembo.”
Perla went back outside.
Really? Did she really need to report that Jimbo was drunk? As if Lupita didn’t know that Jimbo was drunk. Jimbo was always drunk. He was drunk when they met—a young sailor asleep on the front step of their restaurant in Tijuana. He wasn’t the first drunk American sailor they met. But he was the first who came back.
That night they shoveled him inside and poured menudo into him. It was part of the deal—Jimbo drank. But he was blind to Perla and, even more astounding, blind to La Glori. From the start, he was after Lupita. On his second visit, he brought her flowers. And from then on, he brought little things that got more personal and intimate, until they ended up in bed. Perfume, a bottle of rompope, lipstick, silk stockings. It didn’t take all that long for the silk stockings to drop in a little tan puddle on the floor of a motel near Colonia Cacho. Lupita laughed. Ay, Yeembo! Of course she would marry him. Become an American just like that? U.S. Navy money, a gringo husband, trinkets? An apartment with a bathtub? A new fridge and a color TV and a car? They had a Vista Cruiser station wagon in those days. And her boys, Tato and Pablo, were their bartenders and servers, digging cold Mexican Pepsis and ham sandwiches out of the ice chest. It was as big as the restaurant. He taught her to drive in the Fedco parking lot and then out in the desert, tooling around the Salton Sea.
She had been so poor before Jimbo came that she had to steal napkins from the restaurant every month and fold them into pads f
or herself and her sisters. Oh yes. Jimbo was her savior. He didn’t need to know that when he mounted her she was sometimes imagining Big Angel.
But then, that day, Jimbo watched, helpless, as his nephew’s life pumped out of his body on the sidewalk in front of his own store. And he really learned to drink.
* * *
3:14 p.m.
Marco crept back to the blind girl with two Nehis. One grape, one orange. Choice, right? That was good. Satanic Hispanic, he thought. Whose panic? My panic.
“I brought you a soda,” he said.
“Thank you.” She put out her hand, found the plastic cup, and held it.
“Grape okay?”
“Mmm, grape.” Slight sneer.
He almost ran away again.
“You’re shy, aren’t you?” she said.
“What? I mean, c’mon. I’m in a metal band!” He choked down the urge to shriek Extreme. “Probably. I guess.” He gulped his Nehi. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
Her lips twisted into a reluctant smile. She had learned the greatest trick of the interrogator. Remain silent, and they confessed everything just to fill the chasm of silence.
“Mystical blind people have psychic gifts to offset their disability. Didn’t you know that?”
“No shit?”
“Don’t be silly, boy.”
“I get it. You’re mocking me.”
“I can smell you blush,” she whispered.
He stood there with a rictus on his face he hoped looked like a grin but then realized it didn’t matter. Had he brushed his teeth? He grabbed at a conversational life preserver that happened to drift across the open water of his mind: “Do you speak Spanish?” he said.
“Oh no. Do you?”
“Spanish is for PUSS—” He coughed. “For puh-people. Other people? Or something. Nah. Not a lot.”
She put her hand over her mouth and smiled again.
“I sound stupid right now,” he confessed.
“Only right now?”
He was dancing around in her presence as if she’d been shooting her .45 into the dust at his feet.
“All right, yes—I’m shy!”
“Know how I knew? Honestly? Because you said hi, then you ran away. I scared you.”
“I think you did,” he admitted.
“You don’t like blind people?”
“Jeez! No! I mean, no way. I don’t even know any blind people.”
“If you were PC,” she said, “you’d call us ‘differently abled in terms of vision.’”
He looked over his shoulder. His dad was watching him. Gave him the thumbs-up. Then Pato made a fist and lifted his arm before himself and started pumping it back and forth, in and out like a piston. Paz ignored him and drained her cup.
“Dude,” he said. “You’re fucking with me right now.”
With dreadful mock earnestness, she leaned forward and said, “I simply adore your perceptiveness, and your sweet vocabulary skills are just the thing I’ve been yearning for all day.”
“He’s a chud,” Lalo said in passing.
She turned her head as if she could see him.
“Can I sit?” Marco said.
“Why, Carlo?”
“Marco. I think I want to write a song about you. So I gotta talk to you, even though you suck.”
“LOL,” she intoned, witheringly, and turned her face in his direction. Her lips were parted. She flushed a little. Her hand brushed her right cheek. “Really? A song?”
He nodded. Duh, he thought. Blind, you dummy. But he didn’t say anything.
“Sit,” she said.
* * *
3:30 p.m.
Little Angel found himself in a dance circle with Minnie and the Trailer Park Gals. Minnie was swaying dreamily like Stevie Nicks; Neala was humping and twerking away while aiming her fundament at various stunned males like a shotgun; Velvette relied on a running-man slow-motion strut that had no form whatsoever but was better than the white-boy arrythmic Phish concert “dancing” of Little Angel. Ookie danced with himself, smiling at the sky, hugging his own ribs.
Little Angel called, “The Ookster!”
This made Ookie laugh. Little Angel had never seen Ookie laugh.
Velvette spun Little Angel back around and did weird mask things with her fingers over her eyes as she ran in place, licking her lips at him while nodding encouragingly.
* * *
La Gloriosa watched Little Angel dance. She didn’t want to care. It was stupid. But why was he dancing with them? He never asked her to dance. She went into the abandoned living room and sat alone and told herself not to be ridiculous. He was a terrible dancer.
* * *
3:45 p.m.
Everybody out here on the patio was happy, and he was dying right in front of them. True, Big Angel told himself. But this was what he’d wanted. Well, it was his party, he could cry if he wanted to. Ha-ha.
“Sometimes,” Big Angel said, “I don’t feel like I will die.”
“You won’t,” said Dave the coffee thief, holding yet another cup of Little Angel’s Colombian.
“But sometimes I know I will.”
“Death is an illusion.”
“It feels real to me, Dave.”
“No whining.”
“Damn it! Listen! Sometimes,” Big Angel said, “I feel like I will die right this minute. Like today. I know I am dying today. I am going down a slide. I have only hours to live. And it feels goddamned real to me. Sorry, God.”
Dave sat forward in his lawn chair, hands clutched between his knees. “God understands your anger,” he said.
Big Angel rattled his footrests.
“What we need to understand,” Dave said, oblivious to this outburst, “is that death is not the end. Well, it’s the end of this.” He waved his hand toward the Great Fiesta, where many humans frolicked beneath the sun. “But I tell you truly, it is but a transition. It is but a portal—and believe it or not, on the other side, every second is a thousand years and every thousand years is a second, and it’s all a fiesta better than this one.”
“Bullshit, Dave.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Only one way to find out.” Good ol’ Dave took a happy sip of purloined coffee.
Big Angel sighed. Rubbed his face. Thought about how much he’d miss rubbing his face. Everything was precious to him suddenly. Sighing. What a wonderful thing it was to sigh. Geraniums. Why did he have to leave geraniums behind?
Dave beamed at him. Were his teeth whitened? Big Angel wanted to get his own teeth whitened. Except he was going to die right after the party.
“I have four children with my Flaca,” he said.
“Yes.”
“One is dead. Another is dead to me. El Yndio. What kind of name is that? They aren’t my children, but they are. And Minnie and Lalo are here. They are mine.”
“Yes.”
“They all had children. Except El Yndio.”
“Right.”
“Their children are having children.”
“Gotcha.”
“Why must I leave them?”
“Believe,” Dave said.
Did pinche Dave never waver? “Pinche Dave,” he decided to say, “do you never waver?”
“Of course I do. Of course. Even Ignatius Loyola wavered. That dark night of the soul, man. No one’s immune. It would all be meaningless if you didn’t wonder and doubt. That’s what makes it real. That’s what makes us people. God could have sent angels to flutter around like fairies, delivering rum punch and manna all day on a cosmic cruise ship. But what would that avail us?”
Big Angel made that monkey face and shook his head. “Not fair.”
“You’re being dramatic.” Dave leaned toward him and murmured, so only he heard it: “Bee-yatch.”
Big Angel coughed out a small bark of laughter. “I hate you so much,” he said.
Dave crossed his arms. “Miguel Angel,” he said. “It isn’t hard to die. Everybody does it. Even flies do it. Everyone here is doing it.
We’re all terminal.” He had a tear in his eye; Big Angel could see it brimming. “Your schedule is just different from mine. Dying is like catching a train to Chicago. There are a million rails, and the trains run all night. Some go scenic and some go express. But it’s a big old train yard. It’s easy. What takes balls is to die well. What takes balls is to believe.”
“Big steel balls,” said Big Angel.
“Big clanky balls.”
“Unos huevotes!” Angel cried.
“Grandotes!” Dave agreed.
Perla appeared. She sat down beside her Flaco. She tapped the table with her finger. “Balls?” she said in Spanish. “Huevos? Steel balls? No, mijo. Sorry, Dave. It takes big ovaries.” She nodded at them both and waved her finger. “This life? This dying? Big clanky steel ovaries, cabrones.” She clutched her belly and shook her little paunch. “Ovarios de oro!”
Big Angel raised his eyebrows at Dave.
“Amen,” Dave said.
Blade Runner
more time
more time
more
* * *
If the spirits of Papá Antonio and Mamá América were flying over the neighborhood now, looking down on their children and their children’s children, they would see:
Lalo and Giovanni in another house off a dirt alley, sprawling in a sketchy garage, with little paper envelopes unfolded before their noses and their feet splayed on a filthy carpet. Gio reaching back and slipping a small pistol out of his belt to hand to his father, who trembled and shook his head as he hit envelope after envelope, and a cholo, with teardrops tattooed on his cheeks and other face tattoos of the number 13, coming into the room with a couple of icy 40s;
Big Angel wanting to go inside for a rest, but Minnie stopping him and wheeling him against his will back toward the lawn where the dancers were filtering to the tables, saying, “Just you wait”;
Tío Jimbo asleep, half lying across his table, and Lupita stroking his head;
Perla weeping silently in a corner with two Chiweenies in her lap;
A knot of vatos y rucas gathered in the driveway, passing smokes around and talking shit;