Early check-in. Bags on the bed. Someone had left a crumpled tissue in the bathroom. It had lipstick on it. It reminded him of the cocktail waitresses. He was disturbed to find this vaguely erotic. They’d all be eighty now, or dead, those alarming women. In Father’s neon cocktail lounge in the sky.
A maid came for the trash.
“Gracias,” he said.
She seemed startled that he spoke Spanish.
When he stepped back outside and walked to the enormous car, it had begun to drizzle. Damn it, he thought, Big Angel broke my nose in that fistfight. He didn’t realize until then that he’d been thinking about that fight the whole time.
* * *
A week earlier, Big Angel’s arrival at his mother’s deathbed was the most heroic thing his wife had ever seen. This, after a lifetime of watching her Flaco be a hero. And the old woman refused to accept it. Perla didn’t like that old witch. But dying, well, that earned her several points.
She knew how much the day had cost him. She could envision him walking back through all their history to be his mother’s child one last time.
He didn’t talk to Perla about La Paz much. He was broody by nature except when he was overtaken by good moods. Or feeling naughty. She still blushed at the memories after half a century. Oh, the things he did with her. Until he got sick.
Even when he brooded, she knew when he was thinking about La Paz and his father and all the things that had happened back there. He just hung his head and stared at the floor. Now that he didn’t smoke anymore, he drank many cups of black instant coffee and thought. And ate too many sweets.
Her thoughts were not of La Paz but of coming north. It was the biggest decision she had ever made, and she relived that terrifying moment almost every day. It wasn’t the trip that had been terrifying, or the destination. Rather, she had known that with this one step she would join her fortunes to his. Forever. Risking everything. A romantic choice, yes, but also one that could have left her with nothing.
She was already the mother of two fatherless boys. She didn’t understand why her Angel had taken to calling her his “Perla of Great Price” when everyone in La Paz saw her as damaged goods, another silly girl used and forgotten by a man whose name she chose not to remember. She wanted to believe what Angel said, and yet she feared it was no more than his nature. She saw how he charmed—and was charmed by—other women, and she was frantic to keep him from their beds. She wasn’t always sure what was real. Only that she needed to be with him. There would be no going back home after this decision.
She and the boys headed north before there was a modern highway. Her bigger boy, Yndio, was a toddler, and Braulio was only a baby. It was one long bus ride that cost all the money she had. Rough roads, sometimes over dirt and boulders. The stops were at terrible taco shacks with outhouses, or gas stations with drooling, stinking toilets much worse than outhouses. The people aboard the bus had brought their own food. She had carried a kilo of tortillas, a clay jug of water, and goat cheese. Four days riding.
South of Ensenada, police had set rocks across the road to stop the bus. They boarded and pointed their pistolas at the passengers and went through their bags. Perla had no money to offer. They ignored her boys. But they put their hands on her breasts. She looked out the window and held her breath and pushed them away with her mind. Angel’s father would have stopped them, she told herself. She didn’t have a father.
She looked at them with her hateful stare. One day, you’ll beg.
The three policemen snagged a man by the arms and dragged him from the bus. They kicked at the doors to let the driver know he should leave. Nobody dared look back or listen to what the man was yelling.
Everybody smelled by the end of the trip, and they were mortified—no Mexican wanted to smell like a barn animal.
Tijuana was another world. Perla and her boys huddled outside the bus terminal on the north end of town, near the riverbed, in clouds of exhaust smoke. La Paz was all deserts and sea, perched at the tip of Baja. It caught ocean breezes and crushing subtropical heat and hurricanes.
She had cooked in her mother’s restaurant. Her sisters beside her—all slaves to the old woman. Her boys had grown up near the ferry terminals, watching huge white boats groan in from Mazatlán. They watched boys not much older sell chewing gum and trinkets to visitors. When the fishermen docked, children haggled for cheap crabs or begged for a tuna. Sometimes they swamped out the boats for sodas.
Yndio considered this training for his future. This was how he was going to care for the family. Sometimes he was able to bring his mother a bottle of Coca-Cola. And though they’d been hungry, it was home.
But now they found themselves afraid and excited, as if Tijuana were El Dorado and all good things awaited them. It was loud and pushy. Scary and tumbledown. Too bright. Too colorful. Perla’s overwhelming impression of Tijuana was twofold: symphonies of noise and endless swirls of dust. And stringy street dogs all of the same stumpy build, the same yellow-red tinged fur, the same black patches of bare skin. All of them moving through traffic with insouciance, like dancers or bullfighters, seeming to bounce off the bumpers of old Buicks and under the two-tone city buses called burras, but bobbing out of the dust clouds again and hopping onto curbs unharmed, where they stretched out in the sun and slept with flies in their eyes. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Tijuana was what they never imagined: the unexpected gringos. Downtown Tijuana was an endless parade of towering, noisy, apparently rich Americans. Perla was astonished to realize the kids were already learning English. That was something she did not expect.
She remembered how Big Angel chose to go hungry so everyone could have a tiny bit of food, even if it was only a mouthful. He’d divide his portion among her sons. That’s when they had taken to calling each other Flaco and Flaca. They would never be that thin again.
Sometimes he brought candy for her two boys, though she scolded him. “Perla,” he said, “life is sour enough. Let them enjoy this.” That first Christmas, he bought the boys a bike to share and bought her a new dress. She had knitted him a sweater, and even though it was hot that year, he wore it every day.
Big Angel was her hero. She did not know his heroism was fueled by fuming rage. He fought anyone who insulted her or her children. He even fought off his own family’s rebukes and married her, then snuck them into the United States when it became obvious that only hunger and dirt and rats and evil police waited for them in the poorest of the colonias where they could afford to live.
Perhaps his biggest mistake was his believing that rage could help him be the perfect father. It was really all he knew about being a father. On some days it almost worked. But Perla was so afraid of losing what she had won that she became more strident in her defense of her man, insisting to the boys that Angel was always right, even when she knew he wasn’t. And the boys’ occasional bruises told them otherwise as well. It fell hardest on Yndio, the oldest. The one who had been his mother’s protector and defended her honor in the streets of La Paz, scrounged for food, done odd jobs, and still remembered his birth father. Yndio, the older brother, who found himself usurped and then disciplined, began a lifelong resistance Big Angel could never overcome.
Families came apart and regrouped, she thought. Like water. In this desert, families were the water.
* * *
Poor Mother América.
Big Angel’s sister, MaryLú, had watched over the old woman at the hospital. Perla’s sister, La Gloriosa, had helped. Retired women themselves, they were called “the girls” by all the older women. The younger women called them “Auntie” whether they were their aunts or not. That was the rule in Mexican families: all older women were your tía or your nina.
They had presided over Mother’s hallucinations in those hours of her dissolution. She saw dead friends and dead relatives and angels and Jesus Christ, and she greeted them and extended her hand to them and laughed with them. The sisters-in-law believed this was really happening, or one of them did.
The other didn’t believe anything but was willing to debate it. Besides, Mother was completely blind and half deaf, so how could she be seeing or hearing anything?
She kept misunderstanding the script of their daily lives. She was confused by the plastic clip from the heart monitor that was clamped to her forefinger like a laundry pin. She mistook it for the handle of a coffee cup, and repeatedly raised it to her dry lips and sipped as if her favorite instant coffee had recently been served by a polite waitress. “Gracias,” she said to the air and slurped her invisible brew.
They just shook their heads.
They had to get Big Angel to her bedside.
This would be a major operation, akin to military maneuvers. Just getting him onto a toilet required strong backs and strong noses. Getting him dressed was a nightmare of clenched teeth and gangly limbs, everybody terrified of some shattered bone or wrenched shoulder blade. Brother had his own problems, pues—they knew better than anyone, they told themselves. Of course everyone told themselves this. That was the funny thing about a lingering death: everybody attached to the spectacle wanted to accrue mastery of the mystery—own it without actually dying. Especially anyone who wiped the afflicted’s bottom.
But Big Angel’s wife felt that she knew better than anyone. As did his daughter. And his son. And his pastor. Everybody had been worn down by death. Everybody had an opinion.
“Call him.”
“You call him.”
“No me gusta.”
“It’s too sad.”
“It’s creepy calling him.”
“You are bad, bad, bad.”
“I never said I was good. Don be estupid.”
They had presided over Big Angel’s last three death scenes, from which he had unexpectedly resurrected and returned home, more arrogant than ever. But now he was carved down to the size of a child and not able to walk more than ten steps, and those while leaning on his walker. True, his son had affixed a bike horn to it and to his wheelchair, so Big Angel could make ah-oo-gah sounds to amuse himself. But it was a diminishment of the patriarch, for sure. Only little kids and cholos laughed.
They called Big Angel’s house and began the major production of getting that branch of the family to rouse him and clean him and dress him and roll him out.
Big Angel was wheeled into the waiting room by Perla, who wanted to be anywhere but there. Hospitals horrified her; she had been in too many. She didn’t like Big Angel’s Old Spice, but she had never told him that. In her mind, it mixed with the hospital smells.
He felt he looked excellent. Only Minnie knew enough to think he looked like the guy in his giant suit in the old Talking Heads videos.
The family was all seated, muttering over the insectile buzz of a game show on TV. Coffee in cardboard cups.
He announced, in his new little reedy voice, “I will not let Mamá see me like this.”
His hands were shaking. His ankles, where they peeked out from under his trouser cuffs, looked like chicken bones. He was biting down on his own agony.
And he rose from his chair, struggling, grunting with effort, grinning like a maniac with sheer fury, and he refused the aluminum walker. It hurt so much the watchers felt it. They leaned toward him but checked themselves from reaching out to help him. His trousers and white shirt fit him like billowing tents. He wiped the tear out of his eye and staggered into her room under his own power.
A feathery hug for MaryLú. A longer hug for La Gloriosa. He breathed in the scent of her hair. But he didn’t look at her. His eyes were on the small creature that was his mother. He walked to her bed and bent to her, as if bowing.
He took her hand and spoke: “Mother, I have come.”
“What?” she said.
He talked louder. “Mother, I have come.”
“Qué?”
“MADRE!” he shouted. “AQUI ESTOY!”
“Ay, Hijo,” she scolded. “I never taught you to be so rude! What’s the matter with you?”
And then she died.
* * *
He had done his duty—had met with his mother’s priest ahead of time, slipped him a check for his services. They didn’t like each other. Big Angel knew this nasty little priest didn’t approve of him. There had been rumors—Big Angel had possibly slept with all his wife’s sisters. That’s what the gossipers in the parish said. And Big Angel’s father may have done the same. And nobody ever went to confession. Rumor had it Big Angel was a Protestant, or a Mormon, or a Freemason. Possibly a Rosicrucian. Or a Jesuit! Or all of the above.
Big Angel didn’t approve of the priest’s teeth. The other thing he railed against, after “Mexican time” and lame excuses, was bad teeth. Mexicans could not afford bad teeth if they expected gringos to take them seriously. And gold teeth didn’t help, though Mexicans thought they looked like rich people with gold in their mouths. This priest had teeth like a rat; they made him whistle a little when he talked. And when he really got going, he sprayed like a little lawn sprinkler.
After slipping Big Angel’s check into his pocket, the priest admonished, “Don’t be late. I am a busy man.”
“Late!” Big Angel said. “How can you suggest such a thing?”
“You know how you Mexicans are.” A small rodent’s smile. A jocular little punch to the shoulder.
Big Angel rolled out of the sacristy fuming.
Gracias a Dios
1:00 p.m.
He never knew when the memory would intrude. The crunch of the club hitting the man in the side of the head. How it hurt his wrist. He hadn’t meant to kill anybody. Sometimes it jerked him from sleep. Sometimes he shook his head violently and said “No” during a TV show or a breakfast, and everybody thought it was just Pops being Pops. He fiercely rubbed his temples now to drive it away. And the smell of the gas on his hands. He was certain the others could smell it. The whoosh of the flames still audible a lifetime later.
“We are late,” he announced. Again.
Everybody was getting tired of his bitching. It was his own damn fault. Big Angel knew this. It had started in his bladder at first, and he had told no one about the blood in his urine. If he hadn’t passed out one morning, they would not have discovered the tumors. Still, he had beat it back. Minor surgery, snipping the little bastards out like grapes. Sticking a long probe up his urethra. His father had taught him to be stoic. Pain was how a man measured his worth, so he didn’t flinch during the probes, and he was asleep for the rest. And suddenly the little grape bundles of tumors were gone.
Until they grew a crop in his belly. X-rays and MRIs and needles and poisons in his arm. Followed by poison pills and pills that smelled like rotten fish and radiation. His reward: spots on his lungs. He cursed every cigarette. Cursed himself. And then his bones withered. The chemicals and the inserted metal going up his urethra and the radiation had shrunk it all. Until it hadn’t.
“You won’t die of the cancer, per se,” Doctor Nagel told him at their last conference. “It’ll be a systemic collapse. Kidneys will go. Heart. Or you’ll get pneumonia. Your will is strong, but your body is worn out.”
“How long?”
“Prediction: a month.”
That was three weeks ago. He smiled as if he’d won the lottery when the nurse wheeled him out. Perla with her eyes red and watery with worry. Minnie wringing her hands and twisting the ends of her hair in her fingers, and Lalo stoic and hiding tears of mourning behind his shades. All believed Big Angel’s smile because they needed to. Because they had always believed him. Because he was the law.
“Flaco,” Perla said. “What did they say?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m sick. But we all know that.”
“But you’re cool, Pops?”
“Of course, Lalo. I told you I was fine.”
Minnie hugged him and made him feel like her hair was smothering him.
“It could be worse,” he told Perla.
“How?” she cried.
“At least I don’t have hemorrhoids.”
She would have smacked his arm, but she’d seen how quickly he bruised, and she never smacked him anymore.
* * *
He was tired of shouting at what was inside his body. His wrath was spilling out on the toxic landscapes all around him. Somebody had killed him. He thought it was his wife’s cooking. He thought it was the coating on the frying pans. He thought it was the trials his family put him through. Salsa. Beef. DDT. He thought it was the mile-high pastrami sandwiches he could not avoid no matter how he tried. He thought it was Mexican Pepsi with salt peanuts in it. The clock—time, you bastard. Or God.
He struck the back of the driver’s seat, but his punch was too weak for his son to feel.
“Don’t get excited, Daddy,” Minnie said from behind, rubbing his shoulders.
He jerked out of her grasp.
“Minerva!” he shouted. “You’re hurting me! Vultures, all of you!”
She wept silently for the hundredth time. But only one tear. To hell with this.
His wife sighed. His son blew a bubble of chewing gum full of cigarette smoke. He held his ciggie out a crack in the window. Big Angel watched the smoke whip away.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember the things his friend Dave had told him: gratitude, meditation, prayer, attention to the small things, which were paradoxically eternal. He reminded himself that soul resided in family and relationships, not only in good times but also in bad. The soul—in potting plants and eating breakfast, Dave said. What a bunch of lies, he decided.
“Goddamn it!” he said.
He apologized to God for taking his name in vain.
But really.
The minivan still had miles to go, and the clock never stopped ticking.
* * *
The fam had rented out the Bavarian Chalet of Rest funeral home on the Mile of Cars. Honda and Dodge dealerships in the distance. All the dads in the family arrived at the parlor and craned their necks to look at the candy-colored ranks of Challengers and Chargers sitting in the lots as they drove up. The young-uns and shorties were scoping the Honda lots for The Fast and the Furious road rockets. Neither generation wanted to drive the clunkers their elders had driven.