Joker, a grandmaster in arnis and escrima (“No arts are deadlier!” he always said), approached Maxima’s grandmother about training her (“If it’s free, what do I care?” she said). Within two years, Maxima was a formidable grappler and disarmer of weapons; by age fourteen, she could engage in hand-to-hand combat with anyone in the province and defeat them all. She mastered escrima fighting sticks (short and long), edge weapons, could even wield a poison-tipped stingray tail. Though Joker had no children of his own (despite a few romances when he was younger, he was a lifelong bachelor), he never mistook her for a proxy daughter. “I was more than that,” Maxima said after Joker died, “I was his protégé.”
When Maxima was nineteen, she attended the annual Batangas City Merry Christmas Martial Arts Gala-Extravaganza, performing a hand-to-knife fighting demonstration with Joker. It was there that she met Excel’s father, the eye patch–wearing son of a bitch. He approached her after the show, offering a tryout for a Manila action flick he was coproducing, a women-in-prison drama that he predicted would be the next big Asian action movie megahit, a hundred times bigger than Jackie Chan. “I’d never been anywhere, not even Manila,” she’d said. “And that eye patch was sexy, what can I say?” But the audition was the next day, when Maxima and Joker were already scheduled to do a second fighting demo. “Joker said, ‘I forbid you to go with that eye patch–wearing son of a bitch to Manila!’ and I said to him, ‘I’m not asking your permission!’” The next morning, she rode all the way to Manila in the eye patch–wearing son of a bitch’s motorcycle sidecar, believing that the argument with Joker the night before was just that, a slightly heated disagreement, that they’d see each other again in a day or two. “I didn’t know I’d spend the next fifteen years in Manila,” she said. “I didn’t know I’d break Joker’s heart.”
It was an old story, but after Joker’s death, Maxima retold it several times. Excel didn’t know why. Maybe it was a way of keeping him grateful (“We owe him everything,” she always said), a way to honor Joker’s memory. Maybe it was a cautionary tale, to warn him of the hurt caused when you leave the one who loves you behind.
EVERGREEN LAWN HAD BEEN JOKER’S FAVORITE CEMETERY, BUT HIS brother Bingo had buried him instead in the cheapest plot at Meadow of Life Memorial, near the end of a long row of graves, along the edge of a wire fence. Walking toward him, Maxima plucks random, still-good flowers from bouquets left at other graves, so that when they reach him, she has a jumble of carnations, roses, a single bird-of-paradise. She takes a rubber band from her purse and binds them together, kneels down, and lays the bouquet on his tombstone, a simple concrete rectangle embedded in the grass.
She kisses her palm, presses it against the tombstone, right over Joker’s name. “Grandmaster,” she says, “nandito na kami, okay? We’re all here, together again. Ako at ang bata.”
Me and the child.
Maxima takes out the Taco Bell Mexican Pizzas from a small paper sack, sets them on the grass. She turns, looks at Excel. “Say hello.”
He tenses up, feels his face go stiff, mouth sealed tight. He hates that she forces him to talk to Joker out loud, hates that he must act as though Joker exists on some spiritual plane where he can actually hear them.
“Hey,” she whispers, then grabs Excel’s wrist and brings him to his knees, “say hello.”
“Hello Grandmaster, how are you?” He pauses, thinks of more to say. “I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve visited. I’ve been gone but now I’m back.” He closes his eyes, feeling stupid, feeling sad. Joker has been dead for nearly two years, and Excel can’t remember the exact way he and Joker used to speak, if their conversations flowed easily, if they’d fallen into a habit of understanding each other with the fewest words possible.
Maxima turns back to Joker, bows her head, and immerses herself in an orasyon. Excel slowly rises and quietly steps back, retreats to another row of graves.
JOKER AND MAXIMA FOUGHT THE DAY HE DIED. THEY WERE IN THE living room, a blue training mat spread over the rug, and she was on the offense. Joker, in his raggedy YMCA sweatshirt and a terry cloth headband, blew the whistle around his neck and called out, “Laban! Laban!” But he easily blocked every combo punch she threw, then accused her of holding back, the ultimate disrespect to any honorable opponent.
“Ano ba?” she said. “My opponent is seventy-four years old with two bad knees and high cholesterol. What do you want me to do?”
Excel was on the floor by the window, slogging through CliffsNotes for the Iliad, his earplugs failing to drown their sparring out. When he was younger, Maxima had tried training Excel in escrima; even if she’d never become an actual grandmaster as Joker had hoped, she could at least pass his teachings on to Excel. But Excel was a disaster, as klutzy with the fighting sticks as he was with his fists, prone to getting hit despite plenty of time to dodge. It was stupid, he thought, pointless. Why train for battle when there was no enemy to fight?
Maxima and Joker switched; now he was the attacker. He took the fighting sticks, held them high as if ready to strike, and just as Maxima called for the fight—“Laban!”—he froze, his battle face pale and weak. He put his hand over his chest—he looked like he was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance—then stumbled back, falling to the couch.
Maxima knelt in front of him, took hold of his shoulders. “Grandmaster,” Maxima said, “Joker. Iyong puso? Your heart?”
Joker kept his eyes closed, face calm but teeth gritting.
Excel was still on the floor. He thought of the scar on his arm, the deep cut Maxima tried to fix herself. He wondered what she might do to Joker, if she would try to save him on her own. “We should call an ambulance,” he said.
Maxima removed Joker’s headband, fanned him with a magazine. “911,” she said to Joker, “okay?”
He opened his eyes. “911? Tanga kaba? It’s my blood sugar, don’t you know? Look”—he pointed at Excel—“ang bata. He looks like he’ll pee his pants. You’re scaring him.” He caught his breath and straightened up. “I just need to eat.” Maxima looked skeptical and mentioned 911 again, but Joker slammed his fist on his thigh and reminded them that he was the grandmaster, and that they should abide by what he knew was true. It would be stupid, he said, a huge waste of money, to call an ambulance when all he suffered from was hunger. “Come on,” he said, “I want to go.”
“Go where?” Excel said. “What for?”
“To celebrate,” Joker said. “I won the fight today.” He held out his hand for Maxima to take, and she pulled him gently to his feet.
Joker wanted the $9.99 buffet at Sizzler (“All you can eat,” Joker would say, “that’s the best cuisine!”). He put on his one good blazer and his San Francisco Giants baseball cap, grabbed his knockoff Louis Vuitton fanny pack, and they all walked (slowly) to the restaurant, arrived just after five p.m. They paid, picked up their trays, and slid them down the buffet. Excel scooped pasta and red sauce onto a plate, while Joker loaded two plates with double portions of every item (he’d made sure Excel brought Tupperware in his backpack). Maxima lingered behind, her eye on Joker.
“I think he’s okay,” Excel whispered to her, “look at him.” They watched Joker charge ahead to the soft serve machine and take two servings of bread pudding, then head into the dining room to a corner booth.
“Get us drinks,” Maxima said, then followed Joker.
At the drinks station, Excel got 7UP for Joker, root beer for Maxima and himself, and before he turned around to go join them, he envisioned the moment to come—the three of them in the corner booth, their table crowded with plates piled high with greasy, fatty food. They would eat in relative silence, which was nothing new—sometimes, there just wasn’t much to say. And this image of them was so ordinary and familiar that he believed life—their life, his own—would be okay. Not special or remarkable, but enough.
Drinks balanced on a tray, he walked to the dining room, found Joker slumped in the booth, clutching his chest as Maxima rubbed his b
ack in circles with one hand, fanning him with his baseball cap with the other. He was in pain but still conscious, still able to talk, and he whispered to Maxima things Excel couldn’t hear, not until the end, when Joker told her, “Go, go.”
She hurried to the front of the restaurant. Excel stayed standing, tray still in his hands. Joker looked up at him, pointed in Maxima’s direction. “Follow,” he said. Scared, unsure what else to do, Excel set the tray on the table and obeyed, walked out of the dining room and found Maxima talking to the cashier. “There’s a man over there,” she said. “He’s alone and needs a doctor. Can you call 911, please?” She was focused and calm, like a bystander wanting to help, an ordinary concerned citizen.
The cashier went to check on Joker. “You’re lying,” Excel whispered. “Why’d you say Joker was alone?” He tried returning to Joker but Maxima grabbed his arm and pulled him close. “When they come,” she whispered, “don’t say anything. If you do, we could be in trouble. Understand?”
He tried pulling away. She squeezed his arm harder. “You’re hurting me,” he said. She waited a moment, finally let go.
Maxima and Excel stood at the booth across from Joker when the paramedics came, watched as they put a breathing mask over his face and hooked him up to machines. A few other customers watched but said nothing, returned to their food.
“Excuse me,” Maxima said to one of the paramedics. “May I ask where you’re taking him?”
“Are you with the gentleman?” he said.
She shook her head. The paramedic said nothing, asked her to please stand aside so they could do their job.
The paramedics placed Joker on a stretcher, wheeled him quickly away. Maxima and Excel followed (not too closely) behind, stood by the front door as the ambulance drove off, the sirens blaring. Maxima called Bingo to tell him what had happened, pacing back and forth as she explained, replying meekly to everything he said on the other end. “Yes, sir. No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” Excel realized he was still wearing his backpack, then remembered the Tupperware inside. He went back in and went straight to the buffet, filled one Tupperware with fettuccini alfredo, the other with Chinese chicken salad, slipped them into his backpack.
Outside, Maxima was off the phone and sitting on the curb, Joker’s baseball cap on her lap. “What do we do,” Excel said.
“We wait.” She looked up at him. “Why did you go back inside?”
“Grandmaster didn’t eat,” he said. “I packed up some food. He’ll be hungry later.”
They stayed that way for a while—Maxima sitting on the curb and Excel standing behind her, staring ahead at nothing. Finally, just before dark, he held out his hand to help her up, and the two of them went home.
NO WORD CAME FROM BINGO THAT NIGHT OR THE DAY AFTER, AND Excel went back and forth between calm and panic—one moment, he pictured Joker in a hospital room recuperating, undoubtedly complaining about the crappy food; in the next, he imagined Joker lost amid rows and rows of beds, hooked up and plugged into machines, no way of getting home. “We’re just sitting here,” Excel finally said, “let’s call somebody, or check all the hospitals if we have to.” But Maxima just sat on the couch and stared out the window. “That’s not the plan,” she said.
The following night, Bingo came to the apartment to tell Maxima and Excel that Joker had died from cardiac arrest and they were not to attend the funeral. He was younger than Joker by a decade, was dressed in a suit with two cell phones holstered at his waist, and the entire time he stood by the living room window, hands on his hips. “My brother created many burdens by keeping the two of you,” he said, which made Excel feel like they were stray animals Joker had taken in. “We are prominent Pinoys in the community, and if you attend, people will wonder who you are, why you’re here. They will say, ‘Sinong babae yan? Ang bata? TNT, di ba? TNT?’ and point-point-point at you. All that tsismis. We don’t need it.”
Maxima stared at the floor, nodded.
Bingo discussed logistics: though they always considered the apartment Joker’s, it was actually owned by Bingo, and he agreed to let Maxima and Excel stay, on the condition that they pay rent and utilities directly to him, in cash, on the first of every month. Should anyone ask, they were to identify themselves as family friends from the Philippines, here on tourist visas, and, for the sake of property value, he reminded them to be tidy.
“Of course,” she said, fists clenched on her lap. “Thank you, sir.” If she wanted, Excel knew, Maxima could knock Bingo to the floor in two seconds.
Bingo walked to the door. “Is it true,” he said, turning back to Maxima, “artista ka raw? Sa Pilipinas?”
“For a time. Small parts, lang, sir.”
“TNT movie star,” he said, then shook his head with a laugh. “Puwede ba?”
Bingo left. Maxima stayed on the couch for several moments, then got up and picked up one of Joker’s fighting sticks, slammed it hard against the living room wall, again and again. Excel got up and went to Joker’s room, climbed out the window, up the fire escape to the roof.
Those first visits to Joker’s grave, they went together, and Maxima, without fail, would weep. But Excel didn’t, not one tear. He had no right, he told himself, after he’d acted like a total stranger, in those last moments he had with Joker.
Maybe that’s why it troubles Excel even now, almost two years later, that Maxima expects him to speak to Joker out loud, with casual hellos and how are yous, like two people who’ve been apart forever, simply picking up where they left off. “Excel,” she calls out, getting to her feet. “It’s time to go. Come tell Joker good-bye.”
He walks back slowly. He won’t say good-bye, he decides, won’t even speak. Instead, when he reaches Joker’s grave, he takes a packet of black pepper from his pocket and tears it open, sprinkles it over the flowers Maxima gathered from other people’s bouquets, saving them from the deer to come.
11
[email protected] was the e-mail address of Red, an artist from South Diamond in Hello City. He lived in a commune called Infinity Inc., a cluster of RVs and tents that served as live-work spaces for painters, sculptors, and performance artists, the entire perimeter surrounded by a white picket fence looped with barbed wire. Excel showed up at eleven thirty for a noon appointment, waited by the front gate. He watched a woman with a long green braid and paint-splotched overalls dipping small appliances—a toaster, a coffeepot, an iron—into an inflatable kiddie pool of what looked like pink liquid rubber. They made eye contact several times, said nothing.
Just past twelve, a guy in a long red beard and camouflage pants approached. “I’m Red,” he said, “you’re Excel?” He kept the gate closed between them, gave a quick up-and-down look, as though doubtful Excel could do the work. “You read the ad, right?”
Excel straightened up, pulled back his shoulders, tried not to feel his actual height; in bare feet he wasn’t quite five foot six. “I can lift a lot,” he said, “more than you think. I was in the weight-lifting club in high school.”
“There’s a club for that?” Red said, looking skeptical. “Well, just remember to lift with your legs.” He unlatched the gate and stepped out, told Excel to follow.
Red called himself a semi-site-specific installation artist. Junk was his medium, especially big discarded things that aggressively took up space. “Someone left a grand piano in Hello City once,” he said. “I smashed it up and made a giant mobile sculpture.” They climbed into Red’s truck, a beat-up Chevrolet with a missing rear windshield, drove out of Hello City and through Whyling, then onto the freeway toward El Centro. Had he known the job meant leaving Hello City, Excel might not have taken it; departing a place so soon after you’d moved there felt wrong, a waste of arrival.
Red flipped on the radio, searched through stations but found nothing, turned it off. “So,” he said, “what happened to you?”
Excel thought Red meant his face. He checked the passenger side mirror for a rash or bruise. “Nothing happened to me,” he said.
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Red shook his head. “I mean, what happened that brought you to HC? Something must have happened. Or didn’t happen.”
“Neither,” Excel said. “Just looking for a change. New opportunities.”
“Opportunities. Huh.”
“What about you? Did something happen?”
“Everything happened. Booze and drugs. Two bad breakups, two arrests. Then I turned thirty-five and got clean, realized all I cared about, all I could afford to care about, was creating. No better place to do that than HC. Still here, eight years later.”
Excel glanced over, noticed a spread of what looked like cigarette burns on the inside of Red’s left arm. He wasn’t old, but he looked weathered and tough from his years of living in Hello City. Excel wondered how the years to come might change him, too.
They exited the freeway, drove through El Centro to the edge of the city, pulled into the small lot of an old warehouse filled with refrigerators, enormous desktop computers, cash registers, even old electronic slot machines. The only person there was Barb, a short woman with a tennis visor and cargo shorts, who greeted Red with a high five. “It’s all back there,” she said, then led them toward the back, where dozens of television sets lined the floor. They were boxy and old, with channel dials and antennas; some were flat screens, sleek enough they looked brand new.
“Perfect,” Red said. He looked at Excel. “Let’s get to work.”
Red bent down, picked up a television set in a kind of bear hug, loaded it onto a dolly. Excel did the same, one after another. They said little as they worked, though on occasion Red would make random observations out loud, like how a crack in a television screen looked like the number seven, or how the missing keys of an old keyboard were the K, E, and Y. “Cool,” Excel would say, but felt the pressure to be more perceptive, to find something that no one else would notice or know, but all he recognized was the moment itself—here he was, loading TV sets onto a truck with a “semi-site-specific installation artist,” bound for the desert, a million miles away from Colma and The Pie—nothing in the world seemed more random than that.
The Son of Good Fortune Page 9
