“You clean other people’s houses—you call that living?”
She shot him a look. “I work,” she said. She spread out her hands and pointed to each corner of the kitchen, “and because I work we have this house. You? What have you got—you haven’t got a damn thing. You sleep at your mother’s house?”
“Mostly,” he said, his mouth full of her fresh tortilla.
“Well, what happens when she dies? How come you don’t get a job?”
“I don’t want no fuckin’ job, I just want to take up space—I wanna take up lots of goddamned space.”
She stared at the cut above his eye and shook her head. “One of these days you’re gonna mess with the wrong guy, Mundo. You think you’re a real badass gang member, but I see you. I know what you are. You’re a lot of things I don’t like, but you’re not a killer, Mundo. But one day they’re going to find your brown ass out on the street and it’s going to be dead. Dios te bendiga.” She buttered up another fresh tortilla and walked over to Diego and handed it to him. He looked up and took it. “Come out of that world of yours,” she told him firmly.
He took a bite out of the tortilla and nodded.
“He’s depressed,” Mundo said.
“Ahhh, only gringos with money get depressed—they’re the only ones who can afford to.”
Mundo laughed. “No, Doña Luz, you got that wrong. See, when a woman dumps me—man I get real depressed—it ain’t no gringo thing. I mean, I get so depressed I have to hit someone.”
“That’s not depression, menso. Depressed people don’t go around hitting other people.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” she said emphatically, “but I know one thing—if you’d keep your cosita in your pants, women wouldn’t go around throwing you out on your cholo ass.”
He polished off his tortilla. “Marriage ain’t natural—”
“Don’t give me that natural stuff—what the hell do you know about natural? People like you, you think streets and concrete and barrios are natural. A mesquite—now, that’s natural.”
Diego moved his clean pile of pinto beans with one swift movement of his arm; they fell into a pot he held like a pocket in a pool table. The sound of the beans in the empty pot made Luz lose her train of thought.
Diego looked up at her.
“What are you thinking about?” She asked.
He took out his note pad from his pocket. “When are you going to learn sign language?” he asked.
“I’ve learned all the languages I’m going to learn,” she said. “We talk just fine.”
“Did you ever stop to think that my hands get tired?” he wrote. He underlined tired.
“You still in a bad mood?” Mundo asked.
Diego shook his head. He looked down at his pad. “Did you know I’ve never made love to a woman?”
“Yeah,” Mundo said, “I figured that one out long time ago.”
“Is that it?” Luz asked. “Hell, Dieguito, sex—it’s not important.”
Diego stared at her as if his eyes were stone. “How many lovers have you had?”
Luz shook her head. “What difference does it make?”
“Ten?” he wrote, held it up and tossed the paper in the air. “Twelve?” he wrote, and again he flipped the page in the air. “Twenty?” He stared at both of them. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. My body’s just like yours.”
“OK, amor,” she said. “It was a stupid thing to say. Of course it matters.”
“Look, ese, I know where you can get some action.”
“Shut up, Mundo, don’t be such an asshole,” Luz said. “Diego’s talking about something else. ¿Que no entiendes?”
“He’s got to start somewhere.” Mundo looked at Diego. “Look, ese, you gotta stop feeling bad. Feeling bad gets you where, ese? They’re always makin’ us feel bad. Feel bad cuz you ain’t got a job, feel bad cuz you ain’t no gringo, feel bad cuz your cars are too goddamned flashy, feel bad cuz you don’t got no fuckin’ flowers in your front yard or cuz you talk the way you talk.”
“At least you can talk,” Diego wrote.
“Yeah, ese, it’s really taken me places, ese—gone real far.” He moved his hand in the air as if it were a plane. “Look, ese, none of it matters. Everybody’s gonna shit on you. The only thing you gotta remember is not to shit on yourself.”
“Go to hell,” Diego wrote.
“OK, don’t listen,” he said, “I’m outa here. I try to help a guy out by tellin’ ‘em what I know—and what the hell do I get?” He shoved open the door.
“Don’t go,” Luz said grabbing his arm. “You haven’t eaten dinner. I made dinner.”
He nodded and sat at the table. She was too much like his mother. He stared at the empty plate Luz put in front of him.
“Don’t go to hell,” Diego wrote. He placed the note on the plate.
Mundo took the note, wadded it up and threw it at Diego.
Diego blinked as it hit him in the face. They both blurted out laughing.
They’re like brothers, Luz thought. She thought of her sons who had abandoned her. These two would do; she thought. She served them albóndigas and fideos. They all ate as if they were eating something rare, as if they were tasting this common, ordinary, peasant food for the first time. Diego and Mundo had three servings, and between them they ate nine tortillas. Even Luz kept up with them.
As Diego ate, the heaviness and disappointment of the coffin seemed to grow lighter. He had food. He was no longer alone. He had someone. They were good people, he thought, and they had a kind of fight he envied. They knew how to survive. He wanted to have what they had. If only he could get and hold the part of them that was tough enough to fight back. Maybe Mundo was right—maybe you needed some kind of fist to get you through life. He had always felt too fragile, as though he were about to come apart like a very thin piece of paper in a relentless wind. Maybe he would put off starting his suicide note. Maybe he would get the job at the flower shop. The man had been nice. Maybe, if he looked hard enough, he would find his sister and maybe she would look into his eyes and say, “I forgive you.” Maybe was his new word for hope.
As Mundo pulled away from Luz and Diego’s house that evening, he was happy. He liked coming over to visit them. Going to their house was like going home. Maybe Luz was right. Maybe he could change, maybe he could get a job and then Rosario would see that he was worth loving. Maybe there was a place for him in the world where he could be happy like he felt right now. But as he drove toward downtown, Mundo forgot about a job, about settling down, forgot about everything except the familiar pull of the bar. He hadn’t been out to The Hollywood Cafe in over a week. But tonight the thought of a beer and a bar that smelled of a hundred years of cigarette smoke made his throat throb as if it were his heart. He loved the smell of bars, the sound of a cue stick against the ball, the voices of the people who knew there was nothing better in the world than a good place to have a drink. He pictured the cold bottle of beer against his lips, the taste of the cigarette in his mouth awash with beer. He stepped on the gas pedal—maybe tonight something would happen, something new, something that had never happened. That was the good thing about a bar—something new might always happen. He loved the thought of that something. Maybe he would run into El Guante who was grace at the pool table or maybe Rosario who was grace in bed—maybe she had forgiven him. Maybe she would take him back. Maybe, after a few beers and a few games of pool, she would take him in, take him to that place only she could take him. He thought of the way she smelled after they had made love. Maybe tonight, he would be making love again.
When he walked into the bar, the jukebox was playing “Volver, Volver.” It was his mother’s favorite song and he had always hated it. He thought it was a bad sign. It was quiet, just a quiet night, and he was disappointed that there were so few people in the bar—just a couple of guys standing around, most of whom he’d seen before.
Antonio, the bartender gave him a cool gre
eting. “Hey pájaro—no trouble, OK?”
Mundo shrugged. “I don’t like trouble, gringo.”
The bartender shook his finger and placed a bottle of Mundo’s favorite beer on the counter. “Just no fights,” he said, “that’s all I’m sayin’. And I ain’t no pinche gringo.”
Mundo lifted up his glass and toasted him without saying a word. He looked around the room trying to see if he recognized anybody. An older man was selecting tunes at the jukebox. He was eyeing a woman young enough to be his daughter. Nothing special, he thought. The two guys shooting pool were younger than he was. Old enough to drink, but not old enough to know how to do much else. At a small table near the corner, a man in a pressed white shirt was lighting a cigarette for his girlfriend. Those two were always in here, he thought. His eyes moved slowly around the room. He finished his beer in four gulps. “Another,” he said. Antonio placed another bottle in front of him. He stared at the two guys shooting pool. One of them missed his shot and the other one laughed. There was something familiar about the laugh. He looked closer at the young man, studied his face. He laughed again. Mundo ran the laughter through his memory trying to remember where he’d heard it. I’m gonna cut you up—clean as a surgeon. Mundo nodded. It was him. This was the something he loved about bars. He walked up to the man with the laugh, stared him straight in the face. “Remember me, ese?” he said.
The man stared at him. “Don’t know you,” he said.
“Yeah, you know me. One night you were gonna cut me up clean as a surgeon—remember that? Threw me in a fuckin’ trash can, remember that? Thought I was dead, thought it was funny, huh, ese?” He grabbed the poolstick away from him and threw it on the floor. He looked at him, then fast as a gust of wind, he swung his fist. The man fell back on the pool table. From across the room he heard a voice yell, “Hey, T-Bird.” He looked up, did not even see the face of the man who had called him not by his name but by the name of his gang. No face, just the gun. He heard the sharp sound almost as if it were the crack of a whip or the sound of his boyhood on the fourth of July. He felt the pain in his gut, then another pain. His heart. There was no time to think of the life he had lived, no time to curse it or be grateful for it, no time to ask forgiveness, to say good-bye, to understand any of the pieces, to thank Diego for taking him out of the trash, to make love just one more time to a woman, any woman, to finish a beer, no time. There was only the fact of a bullet and the fact of a body that was not made to withstand it. A bullet, simple in design, simple in the way it entered the body, broke the skin, the bone, the simplest of things. In the instant Mundo felt the dance of the simple bullet in his heart, he did not wear a look of terror, but of surprise. It was the look of a man who never believed he would die this way—in a bar—a bullet. Everything in his life had prepared him for this moment from the time he smoked his first cigarette, from the time he had taken his first drink at the age of ten, from the time that he had embraced the streets not as a place where cars drive but as a home, from the time his father had abandoned them, everything, everything he had ever done had led him to a bullet that had found a home in his heart, a bullet that killed faster, if less elegantly, than any conceivable virus. Everything, everything had prepared him for this, and yet he was not prepared.
14
ROSE WOKE AS the sun lifted itself over the heavy desert. She had always liked the morning light, and had wanted to see it one more time. She went to the window and looked out. She stared at the bluing sky and wondered if she was about to become a pan of it. She unlatched the screen, pushed it open, and reached out to touch a limb from the tree. It was hard to make her body reach. Such a simple task. She stretched, grabbed at a leaf and tore it from the tree. She groaned in pain. Rose crushed the leaf in her hand and smelled it as though it were an herb. Her hand was wet and green from the leaf. She licked the bitter juice and the bits of leaf. Everything is water, she thought, even here. She felt faint and tired and cold, and even as the bitter taste of the leaf was in her mouth. Rose felt far away from herself, far away from the tree and the leaf. She willed herself toward the bed and fell into it. “Lizzie,” she whispered, “I had the dream again.” She seemed to flow back into the dream that had taken her over in the night, the same dream she had been having—but this time there was a river and she had begged the river to carry her away from the owls who threatened to mutilate her body. “Carry me!” she had yelled. “Carry me!” In the dream, the only reason she had not jumped was because she had felt her daughter’s breath on her neck. It was a rope that had pulled her back. Rose had returned to the morning to cut the rope. She would miss her daughter, would miss uttering her name. But she would not miss her life, she was done with it. She would not miss remembering the events she had lived and relived too often. Perhaps she would meet Salvador and she would tell him that she had loved him, that she had been forced to give him up; she would ask his forgiveness. If there was nothing after death, then nothingness was painless. It did not matter—she was done with it, with all of it, with the regrets, with the loveless marriage, and even with the skies and the rains—all of it. “Lizzie,” she repeated. Rose willed her daughter to walk into the room. She was not surprised when she walked through the door, “Are you a dream?”
“No, Mama,” the woman whispered. The old woman was moved by the tone of her daughter’s voice, a soft voice, compassionate and warm as the girlhood she had spent in her father’s rose garden.
“Will you sit with me?”
The part of her that was a nurse knew it was useless to call a doctor. “Yes, Mama,” she said, “I’ll sit for as long as you like.”
Jake knocked at Lizzie’s room at dawn. She had asked to go with him on his morning walk, and he had reluctantly agreed. “Lizzie?” he whispered as loud as he could, “Lizzie?” Slept in, he thought. “C’mon, get your lazy legs out of bed.” He knocked a little louder. He turned the knob and poked his head in. She was nowhere in the room. He walked down the hallway, and as he passed Rose’s room, he noticed Lizzie sitting on her mother’s bed through the open door. He wondered if he should enter, then decided to wait for her to notice him. She sat perfect and still. Finally, he decided to clear his throat to get her attention. She moved her gaze slowly toward the door.
“Is everything OK?” he whispered.
Lizzie motioned for him to come in. She reached for his hand as he came near her. “Tell Nena it’s time,” she said.
He stared down at Rose, her labored breathing filling the room. He thought of Joaquin’s breathing, how it had sounded almost exactly like this awful sound, a voice tearing itself away from the very air that gave it life. He said nothing. He squeezed Lizzie’s hand. “I’ll tell her,” he said.
“A candle would be nice,” she said.
“Yes,” he said softly. “You need to eat something,” he added. “Later.”
He left the room and knocked on Eddie and Maria Elena’s door. He heard Eddie’s voice. “Yeah?”
“You awake?”
“That you, Jake?”
He could hear Maria Elena laughing through the door. “You can come in,” she said. “We’re decent—Little Jake needs you to hold him—he’s cranky this morning.”
He opened the door and stared at Eddie and Maria Elena hovering over their son. “So this is what heterosexuals do in the morning.”
“Sometimes they actually have sex,” Maria Elena laughed.
“They do?” Eddie asked. “How would we know?”
Maria Elena was about to make another joke but she was stopped by the look on Jake’s face. Eddie wore the same look when something was bothering him. It occurred to her that he might be feeling sick and something in her panicked. She had gotten used to thinking of him as strong and healthy, and she realized as she looked at him that she might never be prepared for his dying. She sat there silently and waited for him to speak. She heard Eddie’s voice: “What’s up, Jake?”
He looked at Maria Elena. “Lizzie’s in Rose’s room—” He stopped in
midsentence.
“And?” Eddie asked. “Is that significant?”
“I went looking for her because we were supposed to go out walking in the desert. She was just sitting there holding Rose’s hand.” He looked at Nena. “She said to tell you it was time. She said to tell you to bring a candle.”
“Rose?” Maria Elena asked. She was prepared for that particular bit of news.
He nodded.
She handed the baby to Eddie who said nothing. She pointed to the candle that had burned in Joaquin’s room the night he died. “Take that one to her,” she said. “Tell her I’ll be there in a minute.”
Jake took the candle, stared at it, and walked out of the room.
“How did you know it was time for—” He stopped.
“You can say the word ‘die,’ amor.”
“How did you know? What is it with you and Lizzie—what is it?”
“I had a dream, Eddie.”
“What did you dream?”
“I dreamed words.”
“Words?”
“Yes, words. Rose—she whispered them to me. I wrote them down.” She went to her jewelry box and gave him the words in the dream.
He took the folded up piece of paper, opened it, and read it slowly. “It’s a lovely poem,” he said.
“I knew you’d say that.”
“But that’s not what you wanted to hear. You wanted me to tell you that the poem was about Rose’s dying because it was whispered to you in a dream.”
“Yes.”
“That poem is life,” he said emphatically, “it’s not about death.”
“You think death is the opposite of life?”
“Well, of course it is.”
“What if death is just another country?”
“OK, what if it is another country? We can’t go there, now can we? And frankly I’m not really anxious to get there,” He looked at her sternly. “And you better not be anxious to get there either. When Rose dies, Lizzie won’t be able to follow her to wherever the hell she’s crossing. It’s not like going to Juarez, you know? And when Jake dies, I won’t be able to follow him into that other country—wherever the hell he’ll be living. We’ll just be exiled from each other again—and this time it will be permanent.”
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