by Arturo Islas
“I check,” she said finally.
“Check,” said Lola.
“A nickel,” Miguel said, and they all threw in their money.
“All right,” Nina said, “let’s see what all you bluffers have got.” She turned up her cards to show that she had a pair of deuces to go with her queens. Lola’s pair of kings was not enough.
“Aces and sixes,” Miguel said, reaching out for the pot and scraping it toward him. “Come to papa.”
“Wait a minute,” Juanita said. “I have three treys.” Nina was delighted. She was always glad to see her cocky brother-in-law defeated.
“That’s my herman,” she said to her hermana. They had Anglicized the word for sister and used it as a term of endearment with each other. “Deal me out,” she told Juanita as she got up from the table. “I’m going to get something to eat. Anybody want some enchiladas? They’re from yesterday, but they’re delicious.”
A few minutes later, Lola joined her in the kitchen. Nina was not able to look her in the eye as Lola went on about the new clothes she had bought for her trip to Los Angeles. She was going to visit her son, who had moved there years earlier. Nina listened to the tone of Lola’s voice and decided that her suspicions were well founded. She wondered how much money Miguel was giving her.
Miguel Grande had told himself many times that he would be able to extricate himself from his involvement with Lola and treat her as he had in the past, as someone important, but not basic, to his life. Now he felt that without her, his heart would dry up like a scorpion in the sun. There was no one to turn to for counsel, and even if there had been, he would have had difficulty admitting that he found himself increasingly unable to control his emotions. Such an admission of weakness would demean him before those very men who gossiped about his exploits with admiration.
“How’s the wife?” they asked. And the more daring added, “How’s the widow?”
“Just fine,” he replied, a hint of the braggart in his voice to let them know he understood what they were asking.
His sister Eduviges’ husband Sancho said to him one day after tuning up his car, “You’re really a disgrace, you know that?” Sancho’s sympathies were with Juanita, for he knew what it meant to be married for life to a member of the Angel family. Miguel pretended not to understand the remark, but the pointed way in which it had been said made him aware that the family knew about Lola. He dismissed Sancho as envious and less than a man.
Any man worthy of the name, Miguel reasoned, must envy the joy and excitement in his heart when he walked into places with a woman on each arm. On one side, his wife and the mother of his sons. On the other, the woman who brought ecstasy to his everyday life. Sometimes his heart contracted with the anticipation of being found out by Juanita or rejected by Lola. In those periods, he treated his fellow officers to such extremes of mood that some of them suggested he take a vacation. He said he would after the new chief of police was named.
By seniority he was entitled to the position and he even allowed himself to feel confident about getting it. The force, like the town, was more than half Mexican now, a ratio he had worked hard for over twenty-five years to bring about. The town seemed ready to accept people of Mexican ancestry in positions of power. Indeed, five years earlier a man from their background had been elected mayor, despite smear campaigns and threats of violence against him and the town’s Mexican people.
Juanita’s oldest aunt, Tia Cale, had even gotten out of her sickbed to vote for the man. In a weak moment, Miguel had agreed to drive her to the polling station if she could get out of the house. Tia Cale had not left either house or bed in all the years he had known her.
“Are you ready?” Juanita had asked him on election day.
“Ready for what?”
“Tia Cale just phoned. She’s dressed and waiting for us to pick her up. She’s going to vote.”
Miguel was annoyed, but he went for her. Tia Cale had lost quite a lot of weight, but she was tall and big boned, and as he and Juanita carried her to the car Miguel calculated that she weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds. She behaved like a young girl on her first date and apologized constantly for the old black hat that kept falling off and for the way her stockings kept sliding down to her ankles.
“Forgive me, forgive me,” she said again and again in Spanish, looking at them to show that she understood what a burden she was. Miguel, normally aloof, teased and tickled her until Juanita got so mad she refused to help carry if they were going to behave like children. “Now they can’t say that I’m an illiterate Mexican,” the old lady said as they put her back to bed and said good-bye.
The man Tia Cale helped elect was an honest, middle-class citizen who had been educated in the public schools they all knew. He served competently and without incident, and his only gesture of rebellion was to apply for membership in the town’s country club shortly after his election. He was denied official, but given honorary, status in the club. After his three-year tenure as mayor he was appointed ambassador to a Latin American country, and in his farewell speech he referred to the high standards of the town’s most exclusive club with an irony that made even those who had opposed him laugh at themselves. But the restrictions remained in effect.
Miguel Grande knew how intransigent the power structure was, but he respected and defended it against Communist ideas like those his son was learning at the university. He bragged about Miguel Chico’s abilities and achievements to others and sentimentally believed that his oldest boy was fulfilling his own dreams of a college education—dreams he had never in fact had—but he believed that all college professors without exception were Communists. In this view, the rest of the state concurred.
When Miguel went against the interests of his own men, he convinced himself that he did so with an eye toward gaining something for them in the long run. His long run was coming to an end and it coincided with the plans he was making to be with Lola. He and the four other candidates for chief had taken the exam, which was only a formality, and they were waiting to hear who would be chosen. As chief, he could make some changes that needed to be made, and he would draw a salary that would get him out of debt for the first time in his life. He would move Juanita to a smaller house and gradually free himself so that he could spend more time with Lola.
The North American dream had worked for him. Only his family reminded him of his roots, and except for his mother he avoided them as much as possible.
“It’s Jesus Maria’s birthday,” Juanita told him.
“So?” He changed the tv channel with his new remote control gadget.
“I bought a present for you to give her.”
“You give it to her.”
“You’re awful, Miguel. She’s your sister.”
“She’s never given me anything except lectures about going to church. I’m not going to her house. Go by yourself.”
Juanita visited his sisters with a regularity that at first pleased Jesus Maria and Eduviges and then irritated them because they were unable to lie about their ages in her presence without causing an argument. As Juanita grew older, they grew younger. The sisters respected Miguel for the esteem he brought to the family name, but they did not approve of him. They wanted him to be chief of police, but they also wanted him to get rid of Lola. “It’s a scandal,” Jesus Maria said to Eduviges. She did not, however, say it to Miguel Grande, even though she was his older sister.
After Juanita left, Miguel Grande stared at the police adventure story unwinding on the screen. Next year he would see it in color. He lit another cigarette and wondered what to do with his women. If his brother Armando were alive he could ask him for advice. Miguel Grande had never forgiven his brother for moving to Los Angeles without him. Armando had been like a father to him and he knew about women. His green eyes, so like Lola’s, had attracted them like bees to honey. Miguel needed someone’s counsel, for the love he felt toward both women was wearing him down.
And so his heart, alternately swe
lling and shriveling, began to humble him. He thought of visiting Miguel Chico in San Francisco and confessing to him. Perhaps his son could say the words that would show him the way out of this tangle. He found himself having to be more careful in ways that made him look back wistfully to less complicated days when he wandered at will among secretaries and waitresses. Lately, he had begun calling one woman by the other’s name. Juanita did not notice. Lola, her nose sniffing danger, said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?” The greatest mystery of all was how much he thought of his wife when he was with Lola. And when he was with Juanita, he could only think of his beloved on the other side of town.
“Asshole,” he said to himself, “you’ve screwed yourself.”
A few nights later, Miguel Grande had just fallen asleep when the phone began to ring. Juanita, lying on her side with her good ear to the pillow, remained sleeping throughout the conversation. At first, Miguel thought it was the chief, for the voice on the other end was authoritative and the words were spoken in a heavy Texas accent. Slowly, he understood that the call was from the army base on the other side of the mountain, and that it was about his brother.
“Are you Felix Angel’s brother?” The man pronounced the last name in English and momentarily confused Miguel.
“Yes, yes, I am. What’s the problem?”
“We’ve got your brother here, and we need someone to identify him.”
“What’s the matter? What’s going on?”
“Just get right on over here, will you?”
Miguel drove to the base in his police car. At that hour there was no need for the siren or the warning lights, but he felt them inside his brain. He drove by Lola’s house on the way to see that all was in order. Her car was parked in its usual place and the bedroom window drapes were partially drawn in their customary way. It calmed him to think of her sleeping quietly and he fought the impulse to let himself in, lie down beside her, and hold her. He had told Juanita that he would return as soon as he had checked on this emergency call. She told him to be careful and rolled over to his side of the bed. He left her asleep. Some moments later a premonition nudged her awake. She got up, dressed, and made coffee. When he returned an hour before dawn, Miguel found her sitting in the kitchen waiting for him.
At the base, Miguel was met at the gate by the man who had phoned him and who now escorted him to a waiting room in the infirmary. On the way, he thought he saw Felix’s car, but he did not ask about it. Miguel suspected that Felix had been caught playing around with a soldier, had gotten into some kind of a fight, and was now in the next room with a few broken bones and some teeth missing. He hoped there were no newspapermen around because such a story would have some effect on his chances for chief.
“Goddammit, Felix, you’ve got a wife and four kids. When are you going to learn not to fool around with the little boys?” Miguel was practicing his speech.
When he was allowed into the next room, two of his plainclothesmen were already there waiting. They responded wordlessly to his greeting, then looked at the table in the middle of the room. A man in white lifted the sheet.
It was unrecognizable. There was no face, and what looked like a tooth was sticking out behind the left ear. Dried blood and pieces of gravel stuck to the skin. The eyes were swollen shut, bulbous and insectlike. The back of the head was mushy. The rest of the body was purple, bloated, and caved in at odd places. One of the testicles was missing.
“That’s not my brother,” Miguel said quietly.
No one replied. His men showed him a wallet containing all of Felix’s identification papers and then they handed him a brown paper bag. In it was Felix’s favorite sweater covered with dirt and blood. When he touched it, Miguel began to yell.
“Who did this? Who killed my brother?”
His men fought him to the floor and he heard the doctor instruct them to bring him into the office. Miguel stopped struggling and asked them to let him go. The doctor signaled his assent, and Miguel, hugging the brown paper bag, followed them down the corridor. Felix had been found in the back seat of his car during the midnight routine inspection. He seemed to be sleeping, turned on his side, his back to the flashlights. The soldiers on duty had knocked on the windows in an attempt to wake him, but when they saw that his head was bleeding they forced their way into the car. Had he been called an hour earlier, the doctor might have kept him alive for a few days, but Felix would probably not have regained consciousness. There were no signs of a weapon and no clues. It was clear he had been beaten to death. At the moment, they were doing everything possible to find out who had driven the car onto the post.
“Felix, you stupid fool,” Miguel muttered.
“Beg your pardon?” the doctor said.
“Nothing.”
“I’m very sorry, Captain. We called you because of the last name. You’re well known around town and we took the chance. Your men seemed certain that he was your brother.”
Miguel was aware of noting the doctor’s Texas accent rather than hearing what he was saying. He felt nauseous.
“Thank you, Doctor.” As he left the room, Miguel instructed one of his men to carry on with the investigation and to call him as soon as they found any leads. Then he asked where the men’s room was.
He began to cry soundlessly as he sat on the toilet, the tooth behind Felix’s ear continuing to glint at him obscenely. In that private place, he felt an odious mixture of rage and grief. In all his years of dealing with humanity at its worst, he had never seen a body so mangled by another human being. “They better not let me near the son of a bitch who did this,” he said out loud. He stopped crying, left the stall, and washed his hands and face slowly. He avoided looking in the mirror. Paper bag in hand, he left the base without speaking to anyone else. He drove home past the canyon and along the mountain road. The moon was setting as he walked from the car into the house. The air was dry ice.
“What’s the matter? What happened?” Juanita asked, handing him a cup of coffee.
“Don’t ask me any questions right now. I don’t want any coffee. Put on your coat, it’s very cold. We have to go to Felix’s house right away. Your comadre Angie is going to need you.” Juanita was the only comadre Felix’s wife could tolerate.
“But Miguel, tell me what happened. Is Felix all right?”
“Wait, will you? I’ll tell you on the way. Get your coat.”
He looked defeated, and his face and the tone of his voice kept Juanita from asking any more questions. The paper bag he held terrified her.
On the way Miguel told her everything as if it were a police report and gave her strict instructions not to repeat any of these details to Angie. He would tell her only that Felix was dead and that the causes were under investigation.
“Oh, my God,” Juanita said, “who would do a thing like that to him? He was the kindest man I ever knew. Who would hurt him like that?” The facts were too monstrous for her, and she, who cried readily over anything happy or sad, remained dry eyed as she faced them. She was thinking of Angie. “You know Angie is going to want a rosary with an open casket, Miguel. What am I going to tell her?”
“Don’t tell her anything. Agree to everything. 1*11 make whatever arrangements need to be made. Please do as I say for once.”
They drove the rest of the way in a silence interrupted only by the police calls on the radio. Miguel listened attentively to each, hoping that his men had uncovered something. Ordinarily everyone, even he, treated the death of a Mexican in a routine, casual manner. This time, because of him, the newspapers would take notice.
“Felix, you never thought about the rest of us,” he said aloud. Juanita did not respond.
They had arrived at Felix’s house. “Wait here until I get them to open the door. I want to tell Angie and JoEl first. You come as soon as you see me go in, understand?” When she saw the house, Juanita started to cry.
“And stop crying before you come in.”
“I can cry if I want to. What do you
think I’m made of?” Looking at the paper bag in his hands, she had the eerie illusion that Felix was inside it. When she had earlier offered to take it from his lap, Miguel, clutching it even more tightly, had refused to let her touch it.
For a moment, as he walked toward the house, Miguel saw Felix as a child dancing in the rain. His throat began to ache and to stifle his thoughts he started pounding on the front door. When, after what seemed a long while, he heard noises from within, the winter light of dawn had reached the front of the house. He shivered, aware of another coldness. Sand from the early dust storm the day before gleamed with frost.
“It’s Miguel,” he shouted. “Open the door.”
* * *
Waiting for the grand jury investigating her father’s death to reach its decision, Felix’s daughter Magdalena sat with Miguel Grande in one of the small cubicles of the federal building downtown. The bar where Felix had picked up the young man who killed him was across the street and around the corner. The sterility of the room made Lena remember the lobby at the morgue where she had waited to see her father’s body. The official in charge had not allowed her to see Felix and told her that Miguel Grande had already made a positive identification.
“But you don’t understand,” she told him, “he was my father.”
“I’m sorry, miss. I’ve got my orders.”
Lena had remained seated opposite the official’s desk until the assistant had asked her to leave. Except for that occasion, she had not been in such buildings.
When Miguel Grande had told her family about Felix’s death, Lena sensed he was hiding something. Later, at the rosary, she was grateful for the custom that had moved her mother to insist upon an open casket. Lena had knelt staring furiously at the body, for the mortician had not been able to disguise the horror her father had endured, and she wept more out of rage than grief.
