“There’s a pulse,” she said.
Tencha stared at the body and screamed, Diego caught sight of her contorted face. Her scream must have been loud because suddenly the residents of the projects gathered as if someone had rung a bell calling them together. One of the ladies grabbed Tencha and tried to comfort her. She enjoyed hysterics, he thought, A group of men ran toward the clinic and came running with Dr. Dominguez.
Diego watched as the doctor knelt next to the nurse and the body. “Lots of blood,” he said. “It’s a wonder this guy’s not dead. These guys are built pretty tough.” He said something else, but Diego couldn’t see his lips. He ripped the wounded man’s shin open and looked at the nurse. “Let’s call an ambulance,” he said.
Diego tugged at the nurse’s arm and pointed to his lips and ear. The body moved his lips. He started to mumble, but Diego could not make out his words. The nearly dead man tried to force himself to speak and lift his head.
“He said he doesn’t want to go to no damn hospital. He says he doesn’t want any cops.” Carolyn spoke directly into Diego’s face.
One of the younger men in the crowd pulled at Diego’s shoulder. He spoke into Diego’s face deliberately. “Hey, I know you—I’ve seen you around—can’t talk, huh?”
Diego nodded.
“Listen, I know this guy, he’s bad news, his name’s Mundo, and he’s always in deep shit. Tell ‘em to call the cops.”
Diego nodded. He took out his pad and wrote, “His name’s Mundo.” He showed the note to the nurse.
The nurse looked at the note and spoke to the man, “Mundo, you’re going to be OK, but we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
He made a face and said something.
The nurse looked at the doctor, then at Diego. “He said ‘No fuckin’ hospitals.’”
For a while the doctor and the nurse looked at each other trying to decide what to do. “Let’s get this guy inside the clinic,” the doctor said finally, “I doubt if he’ll die on us. Jesus Christ! These guys have nine lives. They’re hard as hell to kill.” He shook his head and laughed. He ran inside the clinic and came out with two men and a stretcher. They lifted Mundo and took him inside the clinic. Diego followed them in. The crowd stayed behind staring inside the dumpster.
The nurse took Tencha inside and tried to calm her down. Tencha was unable to control her wailing, and the nurse seemed to walk a fine line between patience and anger. She finally stopped crying, but after a few minutes of silence she began throwing her arms in the air and yelling. Diego kept his distance, afraid Tencha would hit him again. Finally, the nurse cradled her in her arms until she calmed down. One of the other ladies in the clinic came over to them.
“Can you take her home?” the nurse asked her.
The lady nodded. The two old women walked out of the clinic holding on to each other.
Diego looked up at the nurse as Tencha walked out the door. “She gets a little excited, doesn’t she?” he wrote. He flashed her his note.
The nurse smiled. “She can’t help it. You know, her son was killed in a fight a few years ago. She still hasn’t gotten over it. Anyway, she’s prone to theatrics—you should have seen her at her son’s funeral. She threw herself on her son’s casket and when one of her brothers tried to pull her off, she belted him a good one.”
He pointed at his cheek where Tencha had hit him. “Some women are pretty heavy-handed.”
She looked at his note and laughed. “Some of us are determined to leave our marks on the world—one way or another.”
Diego laughed and nodded. “That’s OK with me,” he wrote, “so long as the marks aren’t on my body.”
She let out a strong laugh. “Hell,” she said, “our bodies always take the worst of it.”
“You’re right,” he wrote. “If the people around us don’t kill us first, then time will take care of us sooner or later. Hell, look at my hair—it’s already rotting. See all the white?”
She read the note and shook her head. “You’re exaggerating. You’re a long way from death.”
Diego nodded. He smiled at her—but he thought she was wrong; he never thought of himself as being very far from death. “Do you think Mundo will be OK?”
“I’m sure he will be. Dr. Dominguez is a very good doctor.” She pointed down the hall. “If he were that bad, if he were dying or something, he would have already called the ambulance. I’m sure he’ll be fine. These gang members have nine lives.” She looked at him carefully to make sure he understood.
Diego nodded and motioned her to sit next to him. She looked at him. “If you sit next to me,” he wrote, “you can see what I write easier and we can almost have a normal conversation.” He handed her the note.
She smiled as she read it. “Good idea,” she said. She sat next to Diego and watched his hands as he wrote.
“Are you going to call the cops?”
“We’re supposed to.”
“But are you going to?”
“Probably not,” she said.
“How come?”
“Well, if he’s going to be OK, then what’s the point? The poor guy’s got enough troubles, don’t you think? He’s probably on probation and if we call someone he’ll probably end up in jail. Jail won’t do him any good—it’s too late for that.”
Diego stared at her lips and noticed the faint smell of perfume. “You seem to be pretty calm about all this.”
“It’s happened before,” she said, “they’re always stabbing each other. Only usually, we don’t have to pick them out of the garbage.”
“Do you like them?”
“The gang members, you mean? They’re OK. I mean, they try to put the moves on me when I have them as patients, but it doesn’t bother me much. I think I recognize Mundo, now that I think about it. He’s a real ladies’ man. Anyway, these guys aren’t as creepy as they make themselves out to be, they’re just a little confused. I mean, they’re not smart like rich people—rich people don’t kill each other—they kill other people. But these guys, they’re always killing each other.”
“What do you mean about rich people killing other people?”
“Nothing, never mind—I’m just talking.”
“You think these guys will ever stop stabbing each other?”
She stared down at the pad. “I doubt it. They’re not very different from anybody else—you ever watch the news?”
Diego shook his head. “I don’t have a TV.”
“It’s just as well. All you see are governments warring with each other—all over the globe they’re at war with each other. Governments are supposed to be civilized. They’re supposed to know better.”
“I guess so,” Diego wrote, “I never thought about it very much.”
“Well, maybe you’re better off. It’s better not to think about things you can’t do anything about—gets you into trouble. Makes it hard to sleep.” She noticed a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Do you mind if I have one of your cigarettes?”
“You’re supposed to know better,” he wrote.
She smiled at him. He handed her a cigarette. She looked around. lit it, and inhaled deeply. “I shouldn’t be doing this.” She looked tired. “Why are you waiting for him?”
“I want to make sure he doesn’t die.”
The doctor came out of the room and down the hall. “I think we can handle it,” he told her, “but I’ll need your help, Carolyn.” She put out her cigarette and followed him in. Diego sat and waited. He fell asleep in the chair. Sometime later he felt a hand on his shoulder. “He’s going to be all right.” The nurse asked him for another cigarette. “Maybe now I’ll have enough time to smoke it.” She lit the cigarette and dropped her shoulders. “He’ll have a few more scars to show for it, but he’s going to be fine.”
Diego nodded.
“Do you know where he lives?”
“No. I don’t even know who he is. Just his first name, that’s all.” He handed her the note.
She crumpled
it up. “He won’t tell us his full name, and he won’t tell us where he lives. Stubborn as a mule.”
“So what are you going to do?” He stopped and looked up at her, then wrote, “I like your name.”
She nodded. “It was my grandmother’s name, too.” She took a puff from her cigarette, then put it out.
“Is she still alive?”
The nurse shook her head. “Dead like everyone else.”
“Like everyone else?”
“Never mind,” she said. She stretched her arms and yawned. “I’ve got to get home and get some sleep.”
Diego looked at her.
“Well, Mundo can’t stay here, that’s for sure. This isn’t a hospital. No one’s here to take care of him, and he’s going to have to stay in bed for a few days. I sure as hell can’t leave him out on the street, and I sure as hell don’t want to take him home. I’ve done that before—and I’ll never do it again. If he doesn’t give me some information about where we can take him, I’m going to threaten him with the cops.”
Diego thought a minute. He nodded and a grin came to his face. “I just thought of something,” he wrote.
“What?”
“He can come home with me. I mean, it’s not a great place or anything like that, but it beats the hell out of a dumpster.”
She looked over his shoulder and stared at his handwriting.
“That’s very kind, she said, “but this guy’s a badass. I don’t imagine he’d be very easy to live with or take care of. What if he doesn’t like you?”
“Who cares?”
“What if he makes your life miserable?”
“My life is already miserable.”
She laughed. “He’s going to be a pain in the ass.”
“That’s OK. I don’t hear, remember? All I have to do is look away if he starts insulting me. And it doesn’t look like he’s in any shape to rip me up with a knife, does it? It’s only for a couple of days and these guys aren’t really so bad when they’re away from their friends. I’m not afraid.”
The nurse thought about Diego’s suggestion. “Yes,” she nodded. “I’ll help you get him to your place.”
5
JOAQUIN SAT in the dark apartment and waited for Jacob to come back home. He always left in anger; he always came back; Joaquin always waited.
“You didn’t come home last night.”
“You’re lucky I came back at all.”
“I don’t feel lucky. Not right now.”
“I didn’t mean that. I’m an asshole sometimes, J. I wasn’t with anyone.”
“Doesn’t matter if you were. Other people are not what’s wrong with us.”
“You gonna leave me, then. J?”
“I would if I could.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I can’t. You’re the one that’s going to have to do all the leaving.” He could hear a thousand conversations between them. He had been gone a long time now. But he always came back. Come back. He didn’t want to turn on the lights, “I have to get used to living without them.” He thought of Julimes, of his brother. He wondered what would have happened to him if his brother had lived, if his father and mother had not died. It was so useless to think about things that had long since passed, about people who had already died, and he tried to stop. “Maybe it’s natural to think about the dead,” Joaquin whispered. He wondered why he was whispering. “The dead are alive!” he yelled. “The dead are alive.” He coughed, then laughed. He wanted to think about the bodies who had returned to become a part of the earth because he was more a part of them now than he was a part of the room he was sitting in. He tried to picture his brother’s face, then his mother’s. It comforted him to think he would soon be a part of the communion of the dead.
He remembered the day he crossed the Rio Bravo with his mother. He remembered his mother had felt something—but he had not felt it. To him, it had just been a river. Later, he had understood what the river meant. He remembered learning English, how it had been a game—how he had learned to recognize sounds and how the new arrangements that came from his mouth had become something meaningful. And yet in the deepest part of himself, he felt the sounds he was making to be meaningless. Languages meant so much to the people around him, but he had always been a little indifferent about the sounds of people’s words. But his dreams were still in Spanish. Jacob had told him he’d always be a Mexican. “I’m not,” he’d said, “I’m not a Mexican.” “Well, you’re not really an American,” his lover had answered. “No, and who cares?” He had yelled back. Even now, he had no loyalty toward the place where he’d lived most of his life. It was a country, and in so far as it had deserts and trees and grasses, it was good, but he had never thought of himself as a citizen of any nation. He remembered telling Jacob that his body wasn’t the possession of any goddamned country. Jacob had laughed. As he sat there he remembered the conversation, the condescension in Jacob’s laugh. “Let’s just drop it,” he’d told him. “Are you mad, J?” Jacob had asked. “Don’t be mad. Look, you were born in Mexico—you’re Mexican. I was born in America. I’m American. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” Joaquin had nodded. After that, he’d stopped discussing certain things with his lover. Later, Jacob had asked him, “But you love America, don’t you—don’t you love living here?” He had nodded. He had lied. What he loved was the desert. And in his mind the desert did not belong to a nation. To belong to the desert was enough. If he loved America at all it was because it had given him Jacob who himself was as hot, as wordless, as quiet, and as untamable as the desert itself. Now that he was sick he wanted to go back—not to Mexico, but to the desert. He wanted to die there, there where he had first lived. But if he went back to that place, he would have to go without Jacob. Jacob’s body would have to be enough desert for him to die in.
He felt sleepy, he wanted to lie down, but the bedroom seemed as far away as his body. He slowly pushed himself off the chair he was sitting in. He stared into the darkness of the room. He wondered if he had died. He touched his own arm. He thought it strange that his skin was still smooth. He didn’t think it was an odd thing to be dying—he thought it a strange thing to be breathing. Everything he had done and felt and seen and touched had just been a dream—and he knew he was about to wake and find something completely unfamiliar. He felt tears running down his face, and found it odd and incongruent to find himself crying. Why was he crying when he felt nothing? He fell down on his knees, then crawled around the room as if he were searching for something. He was a baby again. He started yelling for his mother. “Mamá. Mamá.” He started yelling for Jacob, but he didn’t know he was yelling. No one came to him. He prostrated himself on the floor and wept. His mouth was dry. He wanted water. But he could not make himself rise. He fell asleep exhausted.
He was standing in the middle of the desert dressed like a groom, his pure white shirt so bright and perfect it seemed it had been cut from the sun. He watched himself as he undid his bow lie, tossing it on a cactus, the thorns shredding it as if it were nothing more than paper. He took off his socks, his shoes, the desert sand burning his feet. He tugged off his shirt as if it were an enemy killing him, the buttons flying into the sky. He ripped the shirt in half and wiped the sweat off his face. He saw that he was strong, his skin pulled tight around the muscles of his arms and back. He shone in the morning light and, for a moment, he was a god. He let his pants drop to the ground and stood naked, completely a part of the desert. He was not afraid of the burning around him. The desert was in flames and he walked through them, and his skin did not burn. Nothing could harm him. In the distance was a river, and he ran toward it, and the river was calling, “Come.” And the river repeated his name. “Joaquin.” He kept running through the endless flames, and the river did not seem to be getting any closer. Suddenly, inexplicably, the river was in front of him. “Come.” He looked back one last time to see Jacob fully clothed in the distance behind him. “Come back!” Jacob yelled. Joaquin looked into the cool waters
of the river—and jumped.
Joaquin woke up and felt Jacob’s arm around him. “You’re burning up, J,” he said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. He rocked him in his arms. He froze for a moment when he realized Joaquin’s breathing was heavier than his body. “Is it hard to breathe?”
Joaquin nodded. He took a deep breath. “I was having a dream, gringo,” he whispered. “The desert was on fire. And there was this river—”