by Jaime Cortez
“Coffee would be good.”
Alex comes in looking like she ate poison.
“Gordo,” she says.
“Hi, Alex,” I say, trying to sound cheerful.
“Let me get your coffee,” says my ma. She pours a cup for Alex.
“Would you like—”
“Black. Please. I like it black,” says Alex. Ma passes Alex the cup of coffee.
“You don’t look so good, Alex. Are you okay?” asks Ma.
“I came home and that cabrona Delia is gone,” says Alex.
“What?” says Ma, covering her mouth with her hand. “What do you mean she’s gone? Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe she went to do some errands,” says Ma.
“No. She left a note. She said she was leaving forever and don’t look for her.”
“Oh my goodness, that is so terrible. I’m sorry, Alex. You must be feeling so bad.” Alex nods her head, and her eyes get teary.
“After everything I did for her. She was escaping from hell. I opened my doors to her.”
“Yes, you were very good to her, Alex,” says Ma.
“Everything she needed, I gave her,” says Alex. “Food. A home. Clothes. A safe place to live. She didn’t even have to work.”
“Ay ay ay,” says Ma.
“I thought she’d stay forever, but now she’s gone.”
“You must be so sad.”
“Yes. I’m sad. And I’m mad too. But this is not the end of the story, Esperanza.” Alex’s face looks hard now. Alex points at her own eyes with two fingers.
“I can see things, señora. I can see things that other people can’t see. I sat there in the empty room, I asked it what happened. And I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“Her man. Her sancho. Pfft. He’s not much of a man. I saw him short. I saw him curly haired. Black hair. Mustache. Piece of shit tiny car. Blue car.” Oh my God. The man she saw in her head is my Tio Hector. Except for the car color, that’s him exactly! How could she know?
Ma pushes back her hair behind her ear and touches her neck. I wish Pa was here. Alex was at work all day. How did she see Tio Hector? Was it with the evil eye that’s gonna follow Delia to Chicago?
I look around and try to figure out what I can hit Alex with if she gets out of control. What do you use to hit an angry witch? The broomstick! I’ll whack her across her face with the broomstick if I have to. Nobody hassles my ma. Except Pa.
“When I find her,” says Alex, “she’s going to pay. That sancho is going to pay too. On that day, she will finally know who I truly am. What I am capable of. If you’re good to me, I’m good to you. But if you’re bad to me …”
“Ay, Alex,” says Ma. “She left you. I’m so sorry.”
“Did you see anything, Esperanza?” asks Alex. Ma breathes in with her nose. She looks Alex right in the eyes.
“No. I didn’t see anything. I was out with Sylvie and Gordo most of the day. Groceries. Visiting my mother. Trip to the Goodwill like always.”
“Before you left, did you see anything suspicious?” asks Alex again. “Did Delia ever say anything to you about leaving?”
“Me and Delia hardly ever talked. When we did, she would always be talking about her country, her family. She seemed so homesick, but I thought she was happy. Who knows why people do what they do? I know it was bad over there in El Salvador, but that is where her blood is. No matter what happens, the blood calls to you. Maybe she went back home to her country.”
“So you saw nothing?” asks Alex.
“Gordo,” Alex says. “How about you? Did you see anything? A man who came to my house and left with that bitch?” I try to gulp, but now there’s a baseball in my throat.
“No. I don’t think so.” My voice is tiny.
“What do you mean, you don’t think so?” asks Alex. She is looking at me hard.
“He was with me all day,” says Ma.
“He ate two Big Macs for lunch at McDonald’s,” says Sylvie.
“You’re my neighbors,” says Alex. “And I trust you.” She looks right into my eyes. My face is burning.
“If you remember anything,” says Alex, “I hope you’ll tell me right away. I’ll find her one way or another. I saw the place she’s gone to. Probably Soledad, maybe Salinas. I saw a taqueria in the barrio. I can find her on my own, but I hope you’ll tell me if you remember anything. Thank you for the coffee.” Alex stands up suddenly. I’m ready to grab the broom.
“Goodbye, neighbors,” says Alex.
“Goodbye, Alex,” says Ma.
Alex walks out. We hear the door close. We hear her walking down the driveway.
“Stay right where you are,” says Ma. She runs to the bedroom. I hear her opening the sliding closet doors. I hear her moving things. She comes back with a small glass bottle. She takes off the lid and swings the bottle at me and Sylvie, sprinkling us with the water.
“Hey, what are you doing, Ma?” I ask.
“Shhh. This is holy water. Blessed by the archbishop of Guadalajara at the Basilica of Our Lady of Zapopan. Nothing is stronger than this water. Not even her brujería.” Ma sprinkles some on herself. She does the sign of the cross on me and Sylvie and then on herself. “There. We’re protected now. Delia is far away now. That witch is all alone, except for poor Choco. If that dog ever says he wants to escape that fat bruja, we’ll help him too.” We all start to laugh hard, and I feel like I’m never gonna stop.
“Ay, Ma,” says Sylvie. “That’s crazy, about Choco escaping.”
“Crazy, crazy, crazy, but you’re laughing, laughing, laughing.”
* * *
That night at bedtime, after I shut the lights, I hear Choco bark a few times in the dark. I peek through the curtains. I can’t see the moon behind the fat clouds. I look at Alex’s house. I see a tiny orange glow near the back door. It’s the cherry of Alex’s cigarette. She’s standing there, smoking in the dark. I can’t see her face, only her outline. She is a shadow, a man’s shadow, blacker than the night. A big dog shadow walks to her, and they become one thing.
I see her other arm go up, holding a long bottle of El Máximo. She drinks from the bottle, then she takes another puff. She puts her head back and looks up at the clouds for a moment, then she looks at my window. Shit! She is looking right at me! I can feel my heart beating, but it’s beating in my back. She can see in the dark, like an owl. No. She can’t. It’s dark outside, and it’s even darker in this room. I only opened the curtain a tiny crack. No one can see me, not even her. It only looks like she’s looking at me spying on her. She watches our house and doesn’t move. I can’t move either. It’s like a spell. I can’t breathe. I can’t stop looking. I’m becoming a statue.
“Hey, stop spying,” whispers Sylvie from her bed in the room.
“Leave me alone,” I whisper. I sound annoyed, but I’m glad she talked and broke the spell that was making me into a statue. I back away from the window slowly, till I feel my bed with the back of my legs. I lie down in bed and pull the blankets up to my chin.
“What did you see?” asks Sylvie.
“Just Alex and Choco.”
“You and Mom helped Delia escape today,” says Sylvie.
“Yeah.”
“You helped someone,” says Sylvie. “That was cool.”
“Thanks,” I say. I lay in bed with my eyes open. I hear an owl.
I want to turn on the lights.
I want to ask my Magic 8-Ball if Alex saw me in the dark.
I want to ask Sylvie to play Uno with me till I get sleepy.
I want to take my blankets and my pillow and go sleep on the floor in Ma and Pa’s bedroom, next to the heater that makes a nice sound.
But I don’t.
I close my eyes. I don’t want to think about Alex, so I try to think of Delia instead. At first, I can’t picture her, but then I see her. I see her sitting in a Greyhound bus. It is almost morning outside, and the bus has lights inside. I see Deli
a covered in a blanket all the way to her chin, like me. The blanket is green, with tiny gold stars. She’s sleeping and has a little smile on her face like she is having a nice dream about snow covering everything and making it new.
The Pardos
The ecosystem of every town requires at least one bad family. If a town doesn’t have a true bad family, it will regularly elevate a somewhat troubled family to bad family status. Watsonville has a bona fide bad family in the Pardos. Most people who know Nelson Pardo or his sons tend to believe the story that he had killed his wife back in El Salvador. The rumor is rumored to have been started by the only other Salvadoran family in town. As the story passes through the rumor mill, it grows and evolves. Garish details are confected, added, and spiced up to taste. Over time, the conjecture gels into a gospel well known to the students at Callaghan High School. The core of the gospel says that Colonel Pardo was an officer in the Salvadoran army and the ill-fated, unnamed wife was the daughter of a powerful banana-growing family. When Coronel Pardo expressed an interest in the middle daughter, Mariana, the family said yes and married off the girl of nineteen to curry favor with the military. In less than three years, she birthed three sons and loved them dearly. She also loved a journalist and met with him secretly. When Nelson learned of this, Mariana promptly became one of The Disappeared whose absence would haunt the country. The state of her mangled corpse was such that a closed-casket funeral was necessary. Nelson did not pretend to cry at the funeral, and within a week, he was quite recovered and chipper, eyeing with hot interest the adolescent muchacha they hired to help with the three boys.
* * *
Mr. Pardo knows of the rumors. He has never shared details of his life that might explain away the dark accusations, mitigate the fear and suspicion of his neighbors. He likes it that way. Back in El Salvador, he had some power within a rogue military. Everyone was rightfully afraid of any officer. The poorest Mayan peasants, shopkeepers, suited elites—all of them knew to fear, bribe, and cater to men like Nelson. Since immigrating to California with his sons, he has labored as a night janitor at the Jolly Giant plant, humping great wheelbarrows of broccoli clippings left behind by the mostly Mexican women who worked the vegetable-processing lines.
As he pitches heaping shovels of stems and leaves, he imagines the hated women, lined up overhead like squat birds on power lines, endlessly squawking and launching green droppings behind them to land on the floor below where he and other worker ants toil through the night, their passing marked only by the dumpsters they leave piled high with wilting vegetable clippings.
At home, Nelson’s long showers never quite remove the chlorophyll stink of his downfall. Broccoli. Spinach. Cauliflower. They offend his nose, but worst of all are the brussels sprouts.
“Fucking puto brussels,” he hisses behind the wheelbarrow. “Those people in Brussels must be assholes to make this asshole vegetable. Who eats these fuckers, anyways?”
He sleeps till noon, and by the time he wakes up, his sons are in school and the house is empty. He lounges on his lumpy recliner and flips through the channels. The color television cost him more than his used pickup truck, but it was worth it. It is the one thing in his life that does exactly what he wants, every time. The television’s high-ticket presence is anomalous in the ramshackle living room. A semicircle of battered, mismatched chairs surround it, as if marveling at its glowing newness. As a night worker, he ends up watching daytime television. After almost a decade in this country, he has learned some English—not enough to understand everything he is seeing, but he has clear preferences. He likes the wild animal programs and the cartoons. He cannot much tolerate the soaps, talk shows, and dramas. His deepest loathing is reserved for the endlessly talking, weeping, emoting women who reign over the afternoon programs.
For all his dissatisfaction, he likes the hypnotic passage of images, the weight of the remote in his hand, which makes him feel as one with his television. As he cycles through the five channels, he imagines the day of liberation, when he finally walks away from his lowly work, never again to deal with the hated line women, the truckloads of vegetables, the Jolly Giant corporation, or the unknowable final consumers of the brussels sprouts who drive the whole accursed scenario.
For reassurance, Nelson unpacks memories of El Salvador and polishes them like family silver. He remembers the moist density of the warm air, the hum and purple flash of colibrí hovering in the garden, and the emerald cast on everything beneath the tree canopy. He remembers that he was considered a tall man in El Salvador. His nostalgia of El Salvador is rigidly compartmentalized, sealing off the beautiful from everything else. Even so, the darker memories infiltrate the reveries, and he remembers. The crack of gunshots. The screams of the defiant guerrillas and ill-starred civilians. The useless pleas for mercy and claims of innocence of those peasant indios. To be at once so powerless and so unbreakable made them equally infuriating and frightening.
“Like animals, they were,” he announces to the circled jury of chairs. “And what happened had to happen. Nothing to be done about it now.” He works the cap off his Budweiser with a quarter, drinks deeply, and doesn’t bother to wipe it off when it runs down his chin.
The loss of Indians and peasants to terrorize leave him with only his boys.
* * *
It is obvious the boys have not had a mother in a while. At Callaghan High School they are the lowest order of cholos, lacking the elaborate grooming, precisely creased pants, and spit shined shoes of their homeys. Inveterate brawlers, they fight constantly at home. The bloody battles are waged over television-viewing rights, snacks, one-on-one basketball calls, and most everything else the brothers do together. Nelson is not bothered by his sons’ fights, but if he gets a whiff of insubordination from any of them, he marches all of them out to the garage to witness the punishment. Nelson hooks the offending boy up to a crude electric circuit powered by a Sears DieHard battery. The hapless boy must hold a naked copper wire in each hand, while his father sits at the switch and flicks it on and off.
“How you like it, hojoeputa?” he asks. The boys grimace and twitch with each surge of electricity. None of them has ever figured out how to answer that question.
Spooky, the oldest of the Pardo boys, has been in juvenile detention for almost a year. The two younger brothers, Tinman and Shy Boy, are fully expected to join him by fellow students and teachers alike. The brothers are all legal immigrants, courtesy of their father’s connections back home, but their true citizenship takes the form of Chicano alienation. They sport shaved heads and shoddy homemade tattoos on their arms. It is 1981, and that is far more than a fashion statement. Spooky landed at Callaghan High School as fierce as a Cossack. The scowling boy seemed to fear no one, even when it would have been wise to be afraid. Within a few days, Spooky began building the Pardo family reputation.
On that day, Tank Brodovich strode down the hall enjoying the view over everyone’s heads, and happy to be done with the school day. On the narrow sidewalk leading to the student parking lot, clusters of freshmen parted before him and re-formed in his wake. All was as it should be. Spooky walked toward him in the opposite. As they neared and their eyes met. Neither boy stepped to the side to avoid the other, and they bumped shoulders.
“Watch where you’re goin’, honkey beech,” hissed Spooky. Of the four Pardo brothers, Spooky had been the slowest to pick up the English language, but he knew enough to form and hurl a basic insult. Tank was taken aback by the audacity of Spooky. He had six inches and about a hundred pounds on this fucker.
“You watch it, runt,” spat Tank.
The fight was legendary. Spooky fought jungle style, a desperate and undisciplined style. Tank curled his beefy, furred fists and pounded Spooky’s face and body, but Spooky just kept coming back. One, two, three times he rose from the sidewalk to continue. Swinging high to reach Tank’s face, Spooky had no body behind his blows, and they landed ineffectually, grazing Tank’s skull, neck, and shoulders. By the end of t
he fight, Spooky’s face was busted out at the mouth, nose, and eyes. A red constellation of specks and streaks spread across his T-shirt. Pinned to the wall by the school security officers, Spooky glared at Tank and spit out a bloody chain of curses through his split lips. Tank was unhurt and victorious, and he walked away with his football friend Gus.
“You okay, dude?” asked Gus.
“Yeah, I’m fine. He didn’t get in a good hit.”
“You fucked him up good, Tank.”
“Gus, did you see his eyes?” asked Tank.
“Yeah, I saw them. Crazy eyes.”
“I’d rather fight three normal dudes at once than have to fight that crazy little shit again.”
* * *
All of the Pardo brothers have struggled to settle into California life, but it’s been hard. Time spent in Callaghan High School is a rather soft but tedious sentence they must serve. They have no friends and never date. Occasionally a girl will favor one of them with a perfunctory hi, a wave, or a subtle upward tilting of the head, but that is the extent of their attention. While the brothers sit together during lunchtime, the girls stroll past them in packs, cool as November. The girls chat at intimate volumes, sizing up the unkempt Pardos.
“Nice shoes they got,” says one hawk-eyed girl.
“Attention Kmart shoppers,” announces the pretty Divina Sanchez, forming a megaphone around her mouth with her hands and whispering hoarsely. “We are having a blue light special on cheap ol’ fake tennies in the shoe department.” Laughter.
“Too bad they don’t have a sale on soap, cuz those vatos need it baaad!” added Rosie Archebeque.
“Stop faking it, Rosie,” says Divina. “Everybody knows you’re in love with Shy Boy.”
“Hell no, I’m not,” counters Rosie. “I need a man, and that vato looks like a sixth grader. I’m not a child molester, homey. Besides, what am I supposed to do with that shrimp?” The girls laugh again.
