The Starving Years

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Someone slammed into Javier’s shoulder, and someone else nearly knocked Nelson off his feet—but then, all of a sudden, they were in the clear. Javier began to run, but he kept hold of Nelson’s hand. Nelson kept up with only a bit of drag, and before they knew it they were around the corner and heading toward the truck.

  The back doors flew open before they even reached the vehicle, and Marianne hopped out. “What happened? Was it her?”

  “It wasn’t her,” Nelson said, and he scooped Marianne up and treated her to a wobbly-kneed spin around.

  “Thank God,” she said. “Oh, thank God.”

  Randy gave Javier a hand up into the back of the truck. They’d collapsed a few of the boxes and covered the stacked cardboard with blankets to make a kind of bench while they were waiting. “Here’s some water,” Randy said. “It’s…cleanish. We all drank from it, anyway.” Javier sat and Randy handed him a fast food cup. He drank—and he hadn’t realized how thirsty he’d been until he did. “And there’s manna. Nothing to heat it up with, but it’s rice-flavored. Not too bad plain and cold.”

  “Too bad we lost my Exotic Spices box set back by the job fair,” Marianne said. “We could’ve put some curry on it.”

  Javier glanced at Tim, who was crouching in the entrance to the cab, before he took a piece of manna. “May I?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, of course. I’m just sorry I…I mean, I didn’t really think about how it might taste. It had a good shelf life.”

  Nelson held the foil pack out for Javier to take a slice, then took one himself, stuffed it in his mouth and swallowed it without chewing. “Preservatives. They don’t list ’em on the package, but when you see the ‘pantry packs’ like this one that don’t need any refrigeration, they’re made with nitrates, sulfides, BHA, BHT….” He popped another slice into his mouth and swallowed.

  Tim said, “Is that bad?”

  Nelson shrugged. “Not unless you’re sensitive to it. Sometimes I get headaches from the sulfides. They’re real strict in France, gotta label everything. But not here. Not since the Pure Food Act. Which is pretty ironic, since that’s what lets the manna makers put whatever the hell they want in their mix, as long as it’s less than point six seven percent by weight…and they can jack up that proportion by adding water.”

  Javier squeezed the manna between his thumb and forefinger. It was moist, and not too springy. His mother would faint to see him eating with his hands—and not because he’d just waded through the morgue and hadn’t had anywhere to wash them. There were manners at stake.

  He shoved the entire slice into his mouth just as Nelson had, chewed it a few times, and swallowed. The manna slid right down, as raw manna, with its smooth, soft texture, usually did. Why had Nelson needed to bring up families? That chapter of Javier’s life was over and done. The door was locked, and the key not simply thrown away, but melted down into a puddle of iron and slag. So why relive it?

  “It does kinda taste like rice,” Nelson said through another mouthful.

  “That’s what flavor it is,” Marianne said.

  “No, I mean real rice. Bà ngoai makes it. The grain, not the flavor.”

  Everyone stared at the mostly-eaten foil packet of off-white manna as if they were trying to picture it as a bunch of fussy little grains, and failing.

  “Here’s the deal,” Randy said, as Nelson finished the last piece of manna. “Tim’s gonna drop me off at home while we’re up here, then swing back south and hit Marianne’s place, and then….”

  Javier had no intention of going back to his empty room. He hadn’t stolen the data from a Canaan Products hard drive to go slinking back with his tail between his legs just because Tim wasn’t attracted to him offline. Although Tim had been the one to slide his tongue into Javier’s mouth…so maybe, once they were alone, he could be convinced to participate in a private celebration about whatever that hard drive contained. Javier looked at Tim and said, “The plans we made—they haven’t changed. Have they?”

  Tim’s eyes darted around to see if any of his other passengers had somehow gleaned their project of exposing Canaan Products for the evil it was from the word plans, though of course none of them had. “Yeah. Totally. We’ll go back to my place and…get right on that.”

  Randy made the “bomp-chicka-wow-wow” porno music sound, complete with “you’re gonna get it on” head motion—then laughed, clapped Tim on the shoulder, and said, “So let’s hit the road. I’m dying to rinse off in my own shower, crawl into my own bed, suck on the big bottle of tequila I keep in my freezer, and watch infomercials ’til I pass out.”

  Randy rode shotgun to direct Tim to his place. Marianne sat on the makeshift cardboard bench beside Javier, then Nelson situated himself between the two of them and rested his head on her shoulder. She took his hand and stroked it. “You call me when this is all over,” he said to her. “We’ll hang out.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Is it safe at your place? You can stay with me ’til it blows over if you’re alone.”

  “No, I’ve got a doorman. If someone walks me in, it’ll be okay. That thing Randy said about sleeping in his own bed? I feel the same way.”

  “That tequila didn’t sound half-bad, either.” Nelson dropped his other hand onto Javier’s thigh. He was persistent. Javier gave him that much.

  The truck rocked over a rough patch of road and boxes shifted. It seemed that they were making good enough time, though. An hour, maybe less, traffic permitting, and Javier would be alone with Tim.

  Nelson’s hand slid higher. He caressed Javier’s inseam with two fingers while he kept chatting with Marianne, perfectly innocent. “So, back at that job fair…were you trying to upgrade your job, or you’re totally out of work, or what?”

  “Oh, I just have a dumb administrative assistant job. It’s boring and it just barely pays the rent. Maybe I’ll move back to Florida. I thought it would be exciting to live in New York, but it’s really just rough and mean and so expensive it blows my mind.”

  Nelson shifted his hand higher still, and stroked the inside of Javier’s thigh just a few centimeters away from his balls. Javier clapped his hand over Nelson’s, and shot his mother’s best withering look. Nelson was entirely unfazed by it. He smiled a temptingly naughty smile, leaned into Javier, and whispered in his ear with his lips brushing Javier’s earlobe, “You could always come back to my place instead. I can think of all kinds of ‘projects’ for us to…work on.”

  “Just because everything’s a euphemism to you doesn’t mean—”

  The truck’s tires squealed, and Javier fell into Nelson hard, as boxes of manna thumped down all around them. Marianne shrieked, and Nelson folded himself around her protectively. “Hold on,” Tim called from the front, while Randy shouted, “Holy shit!”

  The truck leapt back in reverse. “Roadblock…or something,” Randy called. “Cop cars and…maybe an accident? And people…fuck, I dunno, something really shit the bed.”

  “It’s fine,” Tim said, “we’re fine, we’re going around it.”

  Shift—forward—a huge bump, and a box fell sideways, broke open, and spilled packets of T-shirts, socks and underwear across the truck bed. “We’re on the sidewalk.” Randy sounded panicked.

  “We’re fine,” Tim shouted over him.

  Hardly. Javier crawled over Nelson and Marianne and the tumble of boxes to crouch in the cab entrance and see for himself. The street hurtled past in a blur. Cops, lots of cops. Riot gear. Focused on a single building—Javier recognized that building; they were only a few blocks away from his father’s work site. Public housing, with the residents milling around outside and the cops in riot gear holding them back. And dead center, two huge officers hauling a child from his mother’s arms, while the mother clung, screaming, until a solid rap to the head with a nightstick collapsed her into a crumpled heap on the pavement.

  One cop carried the child toward a paddy wagon while the others waded into the crowd, zeroing in on a wailing man…no, wai
t, it was the adolescent girl beside him.

  Tim executed a jerky three-point turn and now the truck faced away from the crowd. The street was just like the rest of the streets they’d encountered—completely deserted, punctuated by clusters of panicked people. Tim swung onto a side street, and braked when he spotted an orange-striped sawhorse with a pair of shotgun-wielding cops on either side. He punched it into reverse, backed onto the main artery, and tried the next street. It was blocked, too.

  “Oh shit,” Randy said, quietly now, and completely dismayed.

  Tim headed back toward Bellevue, but after another two blocks, stopped hard. A spike strip had been stretched across the road, and a jumble of cars with torn-out tires now blocked the route.

  “They’re herding traffic back toward the projects,” Randy said.

  Reverse. Turn. Now there was a spike strip behind them, too.

  “There,” Javier said. He pointed to a one-way street. Tim cast around for somewhere to go, as if the realization that no matter how recklessly he was willing to drive, it might not be enough to get them out of the snare. Javier leaned toward him and repeated in a tone that was impossible to ignore, “Turn left. Now.”

  Tim floored it, and flew up the street the wrong way. “Left again,” Javier said. “Now right. The construction site. There. Stop there.”

  “Where?”

  “The driveway.”

  “But it’s locked.”

  “Go. And honk your horn.”

  Tim swung into the driveway and stopped inches from the chain link gate. He beeped the horn once.

  “Not like that.” Javier reached over his shoulder and laid on the horn, hard. He held it there until a construction worker with a heavy two-foot pry bar in his hand emerged from the security trailer. The worker kept his distance, squinting at the old truck as if he was worried it was some kind of scam.

  Javier couldn’t blame him. He shoved Randy in the shoulder. “Let me out.”

  “D’you know that guy? Can he get us off the street?” Randy tumbled out of the cab and Javier followed. The worker recognized Javier immediately—probably the first time the eye patch had ever been an advantage—and he broke into a jog toward the gate.

  “Abre la puerta,” Javier snapped.

  The worker fumbled with the padlock, the thick chain fell free, and the gate swung open. Javier motioned the truck inside, then helped the worker close the gate behind it and lock it up tight.

  “Your father’s not here,” the worker told him in Spanish.

  “I’m not looking for him. We need somewhere to stay. Somewhere safe.”

  “I’ll get the foreman,” the worker said nervously. The coolly imperious look Javier had learned at his mother’s knee was not lost on him.

  “You do that.”

  Three construction trailers hugged the perimeter of the site—security, storage, and offices. Two vehicles were parked near the security trailer. There was a well-worn groove in the scrubby weeds outside the office, by far the most lavish of the three trailers. But nothing was parked there. Javier pictured the gleaming white Mercedes Sport Utility in those grooves—though it had been nearly half a year since he’d spoken to his father, so chances were, last year’s Mercedes was long gone, upgraded to something newer, and sleeker, with even more ridiculous distractions built into the dash.

  The foreman, unfortunately, was not new. Raul was his father’s top man on site, and Javier had known him since high school—therefore, Raul had undoubtedly seen enough of the family’s dirty laundry to have a good idea of where Javier currently stood with the rest of the de la Rosas. Raul didn’t blanch and stammer under Javier’s gaze, not like the ignorant worker had. Still, he wasn’t a stupid man. He wouldn’t have gotten so far if he was.

  “Alejandro is not here,” he said—much more assertively than the worker had.

  “I can’t go back out in that.” Javier gestured toward the sound of sirens not too far off. “We’ll stay out of your way.”

  “Our way?” Raul gave a humorless laugh. “There is nothing to be in the way of. Yesterday the police came, told us to shut down, send our crews home. We stayed to make sure no one steals the gear.”

  “Why do you give a damn about the gear?” Javier said. “You should be home with your family.”

  Raul crossed his arms over his chest. “Someone takes a jackhammer, uses it to break into a building—a store, a bank, maybe? Who is liable?”

  DLR Construction…though not Raul, not specifically. If anyone should have been there risking themselves for the sake of the company, it should have been Alejandro, Javier’s father. Raul must have realized as much. His expression softened, and he sighed, uncrossed his arms and planted his hands on his hips.

  “Do the phones work?” Javier asked.

  “No.”

  “Electricity? Internet?”

  “Yes, so far. And we have a generator and plenty of gasoline if power goes out—although I wouldn’t be too flashy about using it. The gates are strong…but not that strong.”

  “So far? The phones will be back up soon. They have to be.”

  “You’re too young to remember Venezuela, Haiti….”

  “You think this is a coup? That makes no sense. The trouble would start in Washington, not here.”

  “Not a political coup, no. The politicians…they’re not really the ones who run things anymore, are they?” He pulled a carabiner from his belt loop and tossed the keys to Javier, who struggled, with his horrible depth perception, to catch them. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Stay in your father’s trailer, what difference does it make? And the food…well, someone panicked before I could lock the door. I’m not naming names. If I find anything’s missing in there besides the food, I’ll know who it was. And don’t think I won’t tell him.”

  “Fine.”

  What Javier meant was, “thank you,” though of course to say as much would have made him look weak. And right now, he couldn’t afford to show weakness.

  Chapter 16

  The inside of the office trailer smelled faintly of cigars. Javier stood at the threshold for a moment and scanned the conference room. The navy carpeting was completely wrong for a worksite. It was covered in ashy-looking tracks that began by the front door, but grew fainter as they led deeper into the office. The furniture, too, seemed out of place, as if Alejandro had simply said, “Give me the most expensive of everything.”

  Javier wouldn’t have been surprised if that was actually how the conversation had gone.

  Marianne broke his contemplation of the ridiculous carpet. She pushed past him, and said, “Gotta pee.”

  “Then you should have used the port-a-potty,” Randy said. “Because these temporary buildings don’t have—”

  “This one does,” Javier said simply. The notion of Alejandro de la Rosa allowing his posterior to touch down on the same toilet seat as a humble laborer? Absurd.

  Marianne checked each of the doorways that surrounded the conference room, and confirmed the existence of indoor plumbing with a happy noise and a slam of a door.

  “I can’t believe there’s a bathroom,” Randy said. “This job site’s active for, what? A year?” He seemed genuinely shocked. “Do you realize the expense involved in running the plumbing for a temporary gig?”

  It would take a lot more than that to shock Javier.

  Aside from the bathroom, Javier found two private offices adjacent to the main conference room. The first office was stacked with file folders and binders, and one of the chairs was occupied by a pneumatic drill with a frayed power cord. Javier slid behind the desk. A few photos were tacked to the computer’s monitor. A woman with a wedding band, a child. They were both black. Javier tried to imagine who, among Alejandro’s team, might be the brains behind this particular project—but he couldn’t. He’d been away too long. It was strange enough to find Raul still in place.

  Javier stepped out of the office and closed the door behind him. “Stay out of that one,” he told
everyone, out of respect to the man he might not have ever met. “But as for everything else…mi casa es tu casa.”

  After all, in a sense, it was his. Wasn’t it? Alejandro might have arranged his will to distribute his fortune otherwise once he died, but he was still Javier’s father. Once you put your mark on a child, it was there to stay.

  The bar in the conference room had been picked clean, and the refrigerator, too. But Alejandro’s office was still locked when they got to it. Raul’s key fit into the lock. And it turned.

  There were no file folders stacked on Alejandro’s desk, no tools in need of repair slung on the seats. Javier entered. The office was the larger of the two. Except for the tread of a single ashy footprint just inside the threshold, it was pristine.

  Probably because no work actually happened there. An occasional phone call, perhaps. A transfer of money. But that could happen anywhere. Maybe once, when Alejandro was younger, he’d known how to work. He’d even held the tools, and sketched the plans, and gotten his own hands dirty. Now, though, all he did was move money.

  Javier didn’t suppose he needed to worry about turning out too much like his father. The love of money was the thing that made men act that way. And there was little chance of that happening to him, given how he despised it.

  Javier circled Alejandro’s desk. Top-of-the-line computer. Immaculate blotter. No family photos—no surprise. He rifled through the drawers. Office supplies, mostly untouched. A few spare pantry packs of rice and beans—authentic, not just textured manna. Just like home. Or as close as you could come, and still keep it in your desk drawer. A bottle. Javier pulled it from the drawer. Seventeen-year single-malt, only a few shots gone. He smiled to himself as he appropriated it.

  Because he was here, now. And Alejandro was not. Which meant he was in charge.

  Randy and Nelson wandered into the office, and Randy took in the furniture and gave a low whistle. “Does that couch pull out? I think it pulls out.” Javier watched Nelson help him fold out the sofabed, and tried to decide. Nelson, or Tim? Nelson was better looking—though that had never really been the point. And Nelson wasn’t quite the playboy he liked to paint himself as—that was a plus. Nelson was also interested.