“God damn it,” she said through clenched teeth, “you’re not dead yet, so don’t pull this know-all, see-all crap on me, all right? If we’re talking about my life, then let’s talk about my y life, my work, my future, not yours. And by God if there was any kind of paradise around here it’s in shreds now, between these damned dreams and the demands people keep making on me, including your demands, yours.” She stopped, breathless and appalled at what she had said. But he had asked for it. He had no right to tear her whole way of life down around her like this because she didn’t like to live the way he had, out in the world and meeting people, mixing, frittering away his time in aimless wanderings and trivial, half-understood conversations with strangers. Don’t say that to him. Finish. “So you tend to your life and I’ll tend to mine, all right? I’ll keep my own accounts and I’ll thank you to stay the hell out of it.”
He lowered his head. “I went too far. I’m sorry.”
“Good,” she snapped. She felt wobbly and a little sick. “So am I. God. Are we finished with this?”
“I am,” he said faintly. “I need to sit down.”
“Go inside. I’m going to get a drink.”
They sat facing each other over the drinks she had brought, but she kept her gaze lowered. She did not want to look into his face again for a while. But was that in part because there was truth in what he’d said? Why had she become so angry? Not in years, not since before Nathan left, when things had begun going bad, had she felt like this. It was horrible, dizzying, and exciting, too, in a sickly way.
You asked for it, for his judgment on you. Can’t let somebody only halfway into your soul.
“Do you want me to go?” he said.
“At the moment, yes. But not enough.”
He coughed. She waited, not going to him, not speaking. When he was done coughing, he picked up his drink and silently raised it to her.
4
Blanca knew right away that Mina was ticked about something by the way she snapped her high heels on the floor when she walked, crack, crack, crack, like a whip.
“Where’s Beto?” Mina said, looming in the doorway, all red lips, red nails, and furious black eyebrows.
Blanca was sitting at the kitchen table putting a month’s worth of bingo counters into the bingo sheets from the supermarket. She’d already pocketed two that got you a dollar for just turning them in. “He’s down the street with Horacio, playing with the pieces of that motorbike like usual.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Visiting. Mrs. Atencio has some cousins in from Las Cruces.”
“Good,” Mina said. “Maybe I can do this without getting hassled, then.”
“Do what?”
“Split. Leave. For good. I’m moving in with a girlfriend from the office. In the Heights.”
Blanca hurried after Mina and stared from the doorway of the bedroom as her older sister pulled an old suitcase from the top of Mom’s closet and started throwing her own clothes into it.
Blanca watched with envy as the pink sweater she’d been hoping to grow into went into the case with the rest. There didn’t seem to be a lot to say. Mina hadn’t been spending much time around home lately anyhow.
“Goddamn it,” Mina said, holding up a belt. “Did you do this?” The end of the belt had been cut off neatly at about the third hole.
“Well, I borrowed it, and it wouldn’t fit me otherwise,” Blanca said, hunching back a little in case Mina started to throw things.
“I told you a million times, I don’t care if you borrow my stuff! Just don’t ruin it so I can’t ever use it again!” Mina shouted. “I can’t wear this now, it’s too small, and look at it, it looks like shit!”
“Well, you weren’t using it, and it was too big on me.”
“I ought to use it on you,” Mina said. She threw the belt. “Take it. It’s no good to me any more, you fixed that.”
Roberto walked in, wiping his greasy-black hands on his jeans. “Hey,” he said to Mina, “you packing? Where you going?”
“Moving out.”
“Out? Where, out? Does Mom know?”
Mina glared at him. “She will. I’m moving to the Heights, permanent. I’m not going to stay around here and carry the whole job of supporting this place now that you got fired off your job, because I can’t afford it.”
“Job,” Beto sneered. “What job? Fucking slavery is all it was. I couldn’t wait to get out of it.”
“I’ll bet.” Mina slammed the empty drawers of her bureau shut. “You skipped one day too many and got canned, and now I’m supposed to take up the slack, right? Well, think again. You can just go and get yourself some other kind of slavery and fast, if you want to stay around here eating off Mom’s table.”
She pressed the suitcase shut, latched it, and pushed past the two of them. “Hey,” Beto yelled, but Blanca noticed he didn’t put a hand on her. Mina could hit like a prize-fighter, both the younger kids knew that from experience. So he just stomped after her into the kitchen, talking hard. Scared, Blanca thought, because of what Mom would say. She followed after them, not wanting to miss anything.
“I didn’t just skip work,” Beto said hotly. “I had business to take care of right here on the street, remember our street, where you used to live?”
Mina thumped the bag down and went rummaging under the cupboards. “I heard all about it,” she said harshly. “You must think you’re some kind of hero, right? ‘Closing the street.’ Big deal. A lot of people are pissed off with you and those cholo friends of yours, the Maestas, did you know that? They don’t want downtown looking around up here and making trouble because people up here are fussing. Linda Aguilar told me some of the neighbors wanted to get the cops themselves, to throw you and the Maestas in the slammer and get you out of everybody’s hair.”
She put pots and silver and her own mug with the pig on it in a plastic bag to take away. Trying to make herself disappear. Boy, Blanca thought, imagining herself doing the same someday.
“Sticking your nose in everybody’s business,” Mina went on. “Getting the tv down here. You think people like having their place on tv just like that, with no chance to clean it up or maybe put a few things away out of the sight of strangers first? Nobody told you to shut down the whole street like that. It was just an excuse for you to hang out with the big boys and stay off work. If you’re going to do something dumb like that, the least you should do is make sure you’re going to get paid for it.”
Beto said, “Hey, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you know that? Mr. Escobar is with us now, he’s president of Pinto Street Protection.”
“Right, a man who owns a feed store is going to make a real big difference,” Mina jeered. “You dummy. You’re going to need real big guns if you’re going to hold off whoever’s after this street. Where’s my saucepan, that little one with the lid that fits?”
Beto yelled, “The guy they talked to up in Santa Fe only let them into his office because we closed the street!”
“Right,” Mina snapped, “and talk is all he’ll do. Don’t you know what’s going on? Some real estate sharks are trying to tip you all out of your homes cheap so they can renovate and landscape and slap a wall and some gates around the street. They’ll sell it all to a lot of rich Anglos who want security and real old Spanish charm. Call it something cute, you know, like Gato Lindo Lane or Poquito Nido, some damn thing like that, and make a killing. Big money, Beto. Big money buys what it needs to get what it wants. And if they want Pinto Street, they’ll get it, and no bunch of ex-cons and grain-peddlers and lazy high school drop-outs with nothing else to do is going to stop them.”
Suddenly she grabbed Blanca and hugged her hard and kissed her head. Blanca stiffened in surprise, overwhelmed by the sweet cloud of Mina’s perfume.
Beto said, “We know that, we figured all that out! But we’re not going to just let them push us around. This is where we live, man. This house is where Dad wanted us to live, remember?”
Blanca gasped. You didn’t bring Dad into things around here unless you were dead serious.
Mina just glared at him and said in a low voice, “When it comes to Dad, I remember more than you ever did and don’t you forget it. And where he wanted us to live was not in some dumpy little dirt street full of losers.”
Beto turned brick-color. He grabbed a chair and banged its feet down hard on the floor. “My Dad would be proud of me, being on Pinto Street Protection,” he said hoarsely. “What the hell do you know anyhow, hiding up there in the Heights with your Anglo pals? How many Anglo boyfriends you got already? It’s a good thing you’re going, because you sure don’t belong here, Mindy.”
Mina lunged at him, swinging at his head with her suitcase, and he stumbled out backward through the living room onto the porch and down into the yard. She dropped her purse and the suitcase on the porch and tore down after him, punching at his head. He hit back. Blanca heard the smack of his hand on the side of Mina’s face. Mina backed off a step and reached down and yanked off one of her high heels, holding it by the front and waving the spike heel like a weapon.
There was a car waiting at the curb, a maroon Cutlass, with the trunk open. The driver leaned anxiously across the seat to watch.
“Get out of my way,” Mina said to Roberto, who stood between her and the car. Over her shoulder she called, “Blanca, bring my stuff!”
“It’s too heavy for me,” Blanca said, shrinking back onto the porch. Her heart was pounding. She was scared and excited.
“Vendida!” Beto said. “Chicken! Whose side you on, anyhow? When you going to start pretending you don’t speak Spanish?”
“As soon as I can damn-well get away with it,” Mina snapped. “I’m not staying on this shitty street so I can end up pushing a fucking big belly into church with some bum who spends all his time with his head buried in his fucking car engine and thinks it’s a kick in the balls if I don’t make him a goddamn baby every year until my guts fall out. I’m going to marry some nice guy with a house big enough to turn around in and a pool and two cars that both run.”
She spat and crackled like a downed power-line. No wonder Beto faced her but kept his distance, no wonder people were at their doors and windows listening. This time when Mina yelled for her bags, Blanca obeyed. She wanted to see if the driver of the car was a man or a woman.
“What’s the matter, what’s going on?” breathed Great-uncle Tilo odorously, stooping beside her to take the heavier suitcase. She hadn’t even noticed him coming.
“Mina’s leaving,” Blanca said, raising her voice over the barking of Vallejo’s dog, which had joined in the racket.
Beto gave ground, glowering and furious. “Don’t come back,” he said. “Just don’t bother ever coming back, you hear? Nobody wants you here, nobody cares where you go, with your Anglo friends and your swimming pools.”
Mina grabbed her stuff and slung it in the trunk. Blanca got a look at a skinny blonde girl in glasses at the wheel, wide-eyed and blinking with fear, while Great-uncle Tilo made a last-ditch effort to argue Mina out of going. Mina shook him off and got in and slammed the door. Beto leaped forward, yelling something Blanca couldn’t make out, and smacked the hood of the car with his fists. The car rolled forward, slung itself suddenly around, and took off.
Blanca watched it go, full of confusion. Her eyes were smarting. She wished she were in the car with Mina, bad temper and all. She ran back into the house and shut herself in her room, but even with the door closed she could hear Mom when she got home, crying and carrying on.
And later on, in the middle of the night, she had an attack.
It wasn’t her first mad dash to the hospital at night, but each one always felt like the last one. I’ll die, she’d think, in a furious, resentful panic. I can’t breathe, I’m going to die, and it’s all their fault.
The first two shots didn’t work, but the third one did. By then Blanca had been admitted through the emergency room. She was wheeled into an open ward where they put curtains around her bed. Good. She hated being stared at by other patients in the middle of the night while she lay there slowly getting her breath back, slowly loosening up into the warm, drifty exhaustion that always followed an attack. There was a good part, though. The same doctor was there, the round little man from India. Even without him, of course, they would have taken care of Blanca in a hurry. One thing about being carried in wrapped in a blanket with your lips and your fingernails turning blue and your breathing sounding like something out of a horror movie: they paid attention to you right away.
She heard them talk, her mother and the doctor, sifting through all the possible things that might have triggered the attack: smoke, cleaning fluid, paint or paint-thinner? Cold air? Peanut butter, fish, chocolate? Climbing the stairs too fast, laughing too hard, getting too mad — always coming back to the one the doctor favored: stress, emotional tension.
Her mother said, “But she was just sleeping, Doctor, she was only sleeping!”
It’s all crap, Blanca thought scornfully. Crap, crap, crap. Tension! I don’t let them throw me into the asthma with a little yelling. If I did, I’d be here in the hospital all the time. Mom and Roberto, me and Roberto, Mina and everybody — we fight. Everybody fights. Vallejo’s dog barks, Rosa Romero’s boyfriend is hitting her again, but you can’t let things like that upset you. If you did, you’d just have to go live in the Arctic with nothing but sled dogs, like the Eskimos on tv. Nothing going on, just cold all the time, white all around, nothing to bother you, no yelling or anything.
For a minute she lay thinking about that, about peaceful whiteness, loneness, someplace really far away with none of her family there. It felt nice.
So what was she going to get instead? More grief from her mother now that Mina was gone, more thunder-clouds and strutting from Beto, and for her — asthma camp, some dumb place full of mosquitoes and crips.
She could explain this attack herself, if anybody asked her. I didn’t use the nebulizer. I was playing cards with Dolly Armijo before lunch, and I didn’t feel like leaving the game and spraying powder down into my throat like a creepy old invalid. Dolly might get nervous that I was going to have an attack, or she might tease me about it. Nobody wants a sick friend.
I forgot, that’s all. Anybody can forget.
Right away the meeting went sour. It was like a jinx, Roberto thought. His mother had only agreed to let Mr. Escobar use her living room because he was Mina’s godfather and because Father Leo was supposed to come. But Father Leo had an emergency call on Thomas Street, and only about seven people showed up anyhow. Now Jake Maestas was saying they couldn’t really get started until something else got straight first.
Which turned out to be something about Pete Archuletta. Everybody sat crowded into the little front room, looking at Pete. He was not the kind of guy who went to meetings anyhow. He was usually out of work, got into fights a lot, and disappeared for days at a time, nobody knew where or what for.
Jake said, “What’s this construction outfit that gave you this new plastering job, Pete?”
Pete stared back at him. He had plaster dust in his hair still. “J & K Builders, and I been working there almost three months now. Why?”
“Because in Santa Fe we looked up J & K Builders, and the same guys that run that company are on the board of Valley Reconstruction.”
“Valley Reconstruction?” Pete said loudly. “What’s that?”
“You should know,” Mr. Escobar said. “You sold your house to them five months ago. And they’re the ones that’s trying to buy all the places on the street, dirt-cheap, through this ‘inspector.’”
Pete Archuletta stood up. He wasn’t very tall, but he had the reputation of being a mean fighter. Roberto avoided his mother’s anxious eyes and moved closer to the kitchen door. He could see the knives hanging over the sink. His stomach throbbed faintly with tension.
“Who says I sold my house?” Pete Archuletta said.
Rudolfo Escobar, who was little a
nd round and bald, said in the same dry voice, “The papers are on file. The sale is recorded, Pete. It’s a matter of public record.”
Archuletta’s face went dark with a flush of anger. “What the hell gives anybody the right to stick their goddamn nose into my business? It’s my own business if I want to go and sell my own house!”
Mr. Vallejo said harshly from the wicker chair in the corner where he sat, “Sure. And all of a sudden along comes a nice job for you so now you can afford those fancy boots you’re wearing, and that’s your business too. I think they gave you the job to keep your mouth shut. Nobody’s heard till now that you sold your place, Pete, the place you’re still living in. Nobody’s heard you asking around for a new place to move to — have they?” Heads shook, there were negative murmurs around the room. “Maybe that is other people’s business. Why are you trying to keep the sale a secret?”
Archuletta glared around at them all, his thumbs stuck into his belt. He took up a lot of space in the crowded room.
“These buyers offered me good money and I took it, that’s all. A job comes along, I take that too. None of it’s anybody’s concern but mine, you hear? And if I want to take my time finding a new place, that’s nothing to do with anybody else either. I don’t have to stand here and listen to a lot of goddamn accusations. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to have done that’s hurt anybody.”
Roberto put his own sweating hands into his pockets. His mom would have a fit if there was a fight here and things got busted — lamps, pictures, anything. He wasn’t so scared for himself, not really. He’d been working out with Martín Maestas, lifting weights in the yard. Too bad Mina wasn’t here now. She’d see if it was all a lot of nothing.
Mrs. Ruiz said, “Sit down, Pete, don’t run away.”
Archuletta began fiercely, “Listen, mujer—”
Old Mr. Garduño banged on the floor with the tip of his cane. He said in his husky voice, “I guess I better say this before anybody else does. I was the first one to jump on the young men for closing the street. That’s because I sold my place last month. This ‘inspector’ is supposed to come around here with some papers and some money for me. I didn’t want anybody stopping him from delivering. I sold to those same people, Valley Reconstruction.”