Angel Baby

by RICHARD LANGE

  She veers onto the next quiet street she comes to and follows it past brightly painted little houses lined up one beside the other with barely any breathing room between them. A woman sweeping the sidewalk nods and smiles, and a curious dog falls in behind her for a couple of blocks before flopping onto the porch of a blood-red storefront church. She stumbles upon a park—a sad patch of dirt with a few benches and a knot of rusty playground equipment—and stops there to pull herself together.

  Sitting on a bench, she places the backpack containing the money and the gun between her feet and fans herself with her hand. Five minutes and she’ll be ready to go. The hardest part is over, getting away from the house. Now all she has to do is keep moving north, toward Isabel, her lodestar. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the look of disbelief on Maria’s face when she shot her, so she keeps them open, watches a balloon vendor push his cart, watches two children, a boy and a girl, climb the ladder of the slide and slide down, then run screaming to the swings.

  A little girl appears beside her and stares up at her, fingers twisting the neck of her Minnie Mouse T-shirt.

  “What are you doing?” the girl asks.

  “Resting,” Luz replies. “What are you doing?”

  The girl frowns like this is a trick question, doesn’t answer.

  “Conchita!”

  A woman runs up, out of breath, and kneels in front of the girl. She grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. “One more time, and that’s it,” she says. “When I say stop, you stop. Understand?”

  The girl nods but is now watching the children on the swings.

  “I’m serious,” the woman continues. “Look at me.”

  “I understand,” the girl says.

  “Good. Now go. You have ten minutes.”

  The girl dashes off to the playground.

  “She’s pretty,” Luz says to the woman, who sits beside her on the bench.

  “My granddaughter,” the woman says. “Her mother works at the Sony factory, so I take care of her during the day. And here I thought I was done raising kids when my own moved out.”

  The woman sighs and straightens her dress over her legs. “What about you?” she says. “Any children?”

  “A girl,” Luz says. “About the same age as your granddaughter.”

  “How nice!” the woman says. “They’re cutest right now, aren’t they? Learning so fast, but not too smart yet, where they think they know everything.”

  The chaos of the city and the weight of all the years she’s missed with Isabel combine to knock the wind out of Luz. A tear gets away from her and races down her cheek. Now isn’t the time for regret, she tells herself, now is the time to be strong, but it’s no good, the tears keep coming.

  “Is everything all right?” the woman says. She digs through her purse and comes up with a packet of tissues.

  “Problems with my husband,” Luz says.

  “I kicked my bastard out years ago,” the woman says. “Never been happier.”

  Luz takes a tissue and blows her nose, tries to smile.

  A man standing near a shoeshine kiosk draws her attention. He’s staring at her and talking into a cell phone. How stupid she was to stop so soon, with Rolando always bragging about having eyes everywhere. She stands suddenly and picks up the backpack.

  “What’s the matter?” the woman asks.

  Luz hurries away without answering. Rolando could be watching her right now, toying with her before finishing her off, like a cat with a mouse. At the edge of the park she comes upon a taxi parked in the shade of a dead tree and hops into the backseat. The driver awakens, startled from a nap, and begins to protest.

  “I’m off duty.”

  Luz opens the backpack and slides a hundred-dollar bill off one of the stacks of money inside. She shows it to the driver and says, “This is yours if we leave right now.”

  The driver hesitates, ducking his head to see if Luz is being followed. After weighing the risks, he starts the car and pulls away from the curb with a loud screech. They’re soon lost in traffic, one taxi among hundreds.

  “And so?” the driver says, sizing up Luz in the rearview mirror.

  Luz drops the bill onto the passenger seat.

  “Take me to Lomas Taurinas,” she says.

  The colonia looks the same as it did when Luz left it. A maze of tin-roofed shacks clogging a dry, dusty canyon next to the airport. A slum cobbled together out of plywood, old garage doors scavenged from the U.S., cinderblocks, and blue plastic tarps. A barrio where fear rules, and anger flares quickly into violence.

  When Luz was three, Luis Colosio was shot in the plaza down the street from the hovel she shared with her mother and two brothers. The presidential candidate had come to campaign in the neighborhood, and it was like a party, with music and cheering and vendors selling tacos and raspados. Luz thought he was a movie star, the way everyone called out his name and pushed in to listen when he climbed onto a truck to give a speech. She whined and whined until her Uncle Serafin lifted her onto his shoulders so she could see.

  Colosio waded into the crowd after he spoke, shaking hands and hugging supporters. That’s when a man sidled up to him, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. Luz didn’t understand what was happening but was frightened by the screams of those who did. The gunman was apprehended on the spot, a deranged factory worker. There were rumors, however, that others were involved, policemen and rival politicians.

  Luz directs the driver through the maze of narrow streets, past the little store where she used to buy chips and sodas with quarters begged from tourists down on Revolución, past the school with its broken windows and cracked basketball court, past the corner where the neighborhood girls taunted her because of her ratty clothes and bare feet. She shivers to see it all again, everything she ran away from. Stupid, ugly, filthy Taurinas. Her hatred for the place hasn’t cooled.

  They finally reach her mother’s house, a two-room concrete bunker with tattered lace curtains hanging in the barred windows and gang graffiti sprayed across the front door. Luz tells the driver that if he waits for her, there’s another hundred in it for him.

  “Only if you hurry,” he says. “This place is a den of thieves.”

  The welter of electrical lines overhead casts a spider-web shadow onto the house. Two men up to their elbows in the engine of a pickup watch suspiciously from across the street as Luz climbs the crumbling steps to the porch. She smells sewage and burning trash, and her whole childhood returns to her at once. She wants to vomit, to leave immediately, but it’s finally come to this: Her mother is the only person who can help her.

  She knocks once, and the door, unlatched, swings open with a creak. It looks as if someone has emptied a Dumpster in the front room. Beer cans and wine bottles everywhere, dirty clothes, boxes of greasy car parts, a giant stuffed pink elephant, four or five TVs. The only furniture is a worn-out couch. Luz recognizes it as the same one her brothers took turns sleeping on when they were kids. Flies buzz around plastic bags filled with empty cans of beans and fast food wrappers, and someone is snoring in the bedroom.

  “Mamá,” Luz calls from the doorway.

  The snoring turns to coughs.

  “Wake up,” a man grunts. “Someone’s here.”

  “Who?” Luz’s mother asks.

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Who is it?” Luz’s mother yells into the front room.

  “It’s me, Mamá, Luz,” Luz says.

  “Luz?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Silence, then urgent whispers. A few seconds later her mother, Theresa, staggers in from the bedroom. She’s wearing an oversized Iron Maiden concert T-shirt as a nightgown. The bright red dye job on her hair is growing out, her roots showing black and gray, and yesterday’s mascara is smeared around her eyes. She squints at Luz and says, “Yeah, it’s you,” then walks to the couch and digs out a pack of cigarettes from between the cushions, lights one.

  “I’v
e forgotten how many years it’s been,” she says.

  “Nine,” Luz says, clutching the backpack to her chest.

  “Seriously?”

  “Add it up.”

  Theresa sits on the couch, legs curled beneath her. She’s gotten fat. Her face is swollen, her belly. She used to be so beautiful, the most beautiful whore in the colonia, people said. It gives Luz satisfaction to see her looking this bad but also breaks her heart.

  “Carmen wrote to tell me you were living with her in L.A., but I never heard from you,” Theresa says.

  “I didn’t think you cared,” Luz says.

  “I knew how you felt about me. It was stupid to keep pretending.”

  She’s right, Luz thinks. At least the bitch gave her that, the gift of truth. She made sure that Luz and her brothers knew the score from the start: Assume that everyone you meet is a liar, a cheat, a rapist, a murderer. A wolf waiting to rip your guts out. And if anyone claims not to be, trust him even less than those who have their crimes tattooed across their foreheads.

  “Carmen was good to me,” Luz says. “I stayed with her and her family and went to school. I did okay, you know, even got A’s in math and in science, but I had to drop out when I got pregnant. The baby was a girl. Isabel. Her daddy died right after she was born.”

  Theresa focuses on a patch of sunlight on the couch, moves her fingers through it. “I don’t need to hear this,” she says.

  But Luz thinks she does, so she continues. “I went to work at Taco Bell after that,” she says. “It was fine. Not fun or anything, but fine. One day I was at the register and this guy, this sweet-talking pendejo, came in and told me I could be doing a lot better, that I was too pretty to be making burritos. He got me a job at a club, a place where gangsters went, narcos. I started out waitressing, then did some dancing.”

  Then did the other thing. Luz doesn’t say this, though, won’t give Theresa the satisfaction.

  Theresa blows out a cloud of smoke, her foot jiggling impatiently. “And? And? And?” she says. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

  “I’m here for her, for my baby,” Luz says. “I met a man at the club. He asked me to move back here to be with him, offered me an allowance. I was only thinking of Isabel when I said yes, that she should have a future. I left her with Carmen and said I’d send money. Things were good for a while, until another man decided he wanted me, that I should be his woman instead. He and my old man fought, and the other man won. El Príncipe.”

  Theresa’s eyes widen in recognition of the name. “My God,” she gasps, and springs to her feet as if Rolando were about to storm in and shoot her dead.

  “Calm down,” Luz says. “I’ve left him, and I’m going back to Isabel. But I need your help.”

  “I can’t help you,” Theresa says. “I don’t have anything.”

  “I need someone to take me across the border. Give me a name.”

  “No, get out now.”

  “You owe me, Mamá.”

  “I don’t owe you shit.”

  Luz thrusts out a hundred-dollar bill pulled from the backpack. Theresa looks at the money, looks at Luz, then drops her cigarette into a beer can sitting on the arm of the couch.

  “Your little brother, Beto, was killed last year,” she says. “They cut off his head and left his body in a ditch. And Raúl’s in prison in Texas. He’ll never get out. They were idiots who took after their fathers.” She snatches the bill from Luz’s fingers. “I thought you were smarter.”

  A voice comes from the bedroom: “Who the fuck are you talking to?”

  “Shut up, you fucking dog,” Theresa yells back.

  Luz feels like she’ll never get away if she doesn’t go this instant. The old witch will put a spell on her, steal her breath, and feed her to the monster in the other room.

  “A pollero,” she says.

  “Go to Goyo’s Body Shop in Libertad,” Theresa says. “But don’t you dare tell him who sent you.”

  Luz turns to leave without a good-bye, riding the runaway horse of her fear and revulsion down the stairs and out to the waiting cab. Theresa appears in the doorway, a mocking sneer twisting her face.

  “Tell Isabel Grandma loves her,” she calls after Luz. “Give her kisses for me.”

  A jet roars low over the house on its way to a landing at the nearby airport. The noise drowns out Theresa’s cackle and rousts a flock of ravens that had been commiserating on the sagging electrical lines, sends them flapping into the dirty brown sky.

  Luz tells the driver where they’re headed. He holds out his hand and watches in the rearview as she takes another hundred from the backpack and passes it to him. Sensing his hunger, Luz reaches into the pack and grabs the .45. It flashes like a mirror when she pulls it and points it.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she says.

  The driver lowers his eyes and shoves the money into his shirt pocket. It takes two twists of the key to get the car started, and then he heads down the hill. Luz slides low in back and returns the gun to the pack but keeps her finger on the trigger. She breathes easier with every turn that takes her farther from her mother’s house. Now if only it were possible to set fire to the past and everyone in it.

  Colonia Libertad lies right on the border. It’s a crowded, noisy slum with clear views of the new Mediterranean-style subdivisions spreading across the hillsides in California. Residents heave their household trash over the border fence into the U.S., and the Border Patrol launches tear gas canisters into the neighborhood to drive off the rock-throwing kids the smugglers hire to create diversions for their crossings. The Border Patrol agents and the residents know one another by name. They exchange taunts at night and waves and hellos in the morning.

  Luz’s driver pulls into a gas station and asks the other drivers gathered there about the body shop. One of them has heard of the place, gives him directions. Goyo himself turns out to be a sweaty gordo who plays stupid until Luz throws some money around. A hundred dollars gets him on the phone to his boss.

  “Freddy’s on his way,” he says when he finishes the call. “You want to wait in the office?”

  The office contains a cot, a hot plate, and a pile of porno magazines. It smells like the monkey cage at the zoo.

  “I’m fine here,” Luz says.

  She sits on a stack of tires and keeps a tight hold on the backpack. Goyo goes to work with a rubber mallet on a dented fender. Every blow makes Luz jump.

  Freddy shows up half an hour later, a wiry little crook with a busted nose who talks too fast and constantly shifts his weight from one foot to the other, making him look like a snake about to strike.

  “Who sent you?” is the first thing he asks.

  “Who cares?” Luz replies.

  “Obviously I do,” Freddy says.

  Luz hands him a bundle of hundreds from the backpack. She realizes it’s dangerous to reveal that she’s carrying so much money, but she needs to let him know she’s serious about doing business with him. Freddy thumbs the bills and purses his lips.

  “Whose is this?” he says.

  “Mine,” Luz says.

  “Whose before?”

  Luz reaches out to take the bundle back, but Freddy, he’s quick, pulls it away.

  “You seem like trouble,” he says. “Are you trouble?”

  “If you can’t help me, say so,” Luz says.

  “What else is in there?” Freddy asks, gesturing at the backpack.

  Luz hauls out the pistol and gives him a good look at the business end. His eyes widen, but he recovers quickly and shows his teeth. The smiles these men have, Luz thinks. Never a bit of truth in them.

  The gun goes back into the bag, and Freddy flips through the money again. The racket of a passing truck drowns out most of what he says next. All Luz hears is “…lady, right?”

  She shrugs.

  “So I think you want to go first class,” he continues.

  What she wants right now is to get so high that the world falls away and leaves her floating
in that place where nothing hurts and nobody can touch her. What she wants is to be done with all this walking and talking and trying, to lie still in a dark room, her only sensation the crisp coolness of clean sheets against her skin.

  “Don’t fuck around,” she snaps. “Say what you mean.”

  “I mean I can stick you in the trunk of a car and send you out like some Indian from Oaxaca, but that’s always a gamble,” Freddy says. “You might make it, you might not. Or, for more money, I can pull some strings and guarantee you get across.”

  Luz pictures Rolando drawing nearer every minute, creeping up on her.

  “Look, I know you’re fucking me over,” she says, “but I’ll pay whatever it takes to be sure I get to the U.S. The only condition is, I need to go today.”

  Freddy frowns and fingers his mustache. “That I don’t know about,” he says. “A guaranteed crossing takes time to arrange.”

  “Today or nothing,” Luz says.

  Freddy taps his palm with the stack of cash she gave him, considering this demand. After a few seconds, he shrugs and says, “I’ll do my best. Maybe this evening.”

  “So get to work,” Luz says.

  Freddy motions her to a filthy couch sitting in the shade, tells her she’ll be more comfortable there. She says she’s fine where she is. He offers her cookies, a soda, and she refuses both. She tries to listen in when he gets on his phone, but he ducks inside the shop and keeps his voice low.

  A fly buzzes round, sent by the devil to drive her crazy. She swats at it once, twice, then gives up and watches it land and skitter over her sweaty forearm. It pauses and taps at a freckle of dried blood on her wrist, Maria’s or El Toro’s. She scrapes the spot off with her fingernail, and a bigger one on the back of her hand.

  4

  THE WAVES ROLL IN PALE GREEN, VEINED WITH WHITE FOAM LIKE liquid marble, bellies full of sunlight. They rise only waist-high before flopping with barely enough energy left to make their runs up the sand. Malone sits cross-legged above the high-tide line south of the Imperial Beach pier and watches a flock of plovers work the swash zone. The skittish little birds chase the retreating waves, pausing now and then to peck the wet sand in search of mole crabs.