The King Is Always Above the People
Daniel Alarcon
Longlisted for the National Book Award for FictionAn unforgettable collection of stories from Daniel Alarcón, one of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40, and one of the best storytellers of our time.Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón’s hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes.In ‘The Thousands’, people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in ‘The Bridge’. A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in ‘The Ballad of Rocky Rontal’. And in the tour de force novella, ‘The Auroras’, a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman.Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.
Copyright (#u776ef136-4f89-546b-9a85-0c5d7a3e88d1)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk/)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © 2017 Daniel Alarcón
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Cover images © plainpicture/Mira/Conny Ekstrom
Daniel Alarcón asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
The following stories have been published previously, in slightly different form: “The Thousands” (McSweeney’s); “The King Is Always Above the People,” “The Provincials,” and “The Bridge” (Granta); “Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot” (Zoetrope); and “República and Grau” (The New Yorker).
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007517367
Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780007517374
Version: 2018-01-02
Praise for The King Is Always Above the People: (#u776ef136-4f89-546b-9a85-0c5d7a3e88d1)
‘Alarcón is an empathic observer of the isolated human, whether isolated by emigration or ambition, blindness or loneliness, poverty or war. His stories have a reporter’s mix of kindness and detachment, and perhaps as a result, his endings land like a punch in the gut … His purpose isn’t to approve or condemn, or to liberate. He’s writing to show us other people’s lives, and in every case, it’s a pleasure to be shown’
NPR
‘Superb … Throughout the collection, Alarcón writes with a spellbinding voice and creates a striking cast of characters. Each narrative lands masterfully and memorably, showcasing Alarcón’s immense talent’
Publishers Weekly
‘Alarcón is a truly impressive writer’
Boston Globe
‘Alarcón throws his characters into high-stakes situations to draw out humanity where it seems little hope is left’
Washington Post
‘Polished and poetic’
Vanity Fair
‘Elegant’
San Francisco Chronicle
‘Smart, political and incredibly engaging … Alarcón introduces readers to countless unforgettable characters along the way’
Nylon
‘Dynamic novelist and journalist Alarcón delivers a collection of loosely affiliated short stories, each buzzing and alive … Alarcón’s gift for generating real, tangible characters propels readers through his recognizable yet half-real worlds’
Booklist
‘Showcases his talent as a master storyteller’
Buzzfeed
Dedication (#u776ef136-4f89-546b-9a85-0c5d7a3e88d1)
FOR THE THREAD™
Contents
Cover (#ucdf1b6f5-20e9-5b94-adf3-eaa111cd4999)
Title Page (#ud4b87f51-b8e7-5e95-9624-321ffed4ec6f)
Copyright
Praise for The King Is Always Above the People
Dedication
The Thousands
The Ballad of Rocky Rontal
The King Is always Above the People
Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot
The Provincials
Extinct Anatomies
República and Grau
The Bridge
The Lord Rides a Swift Cloud
The Auroras
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Daniel Alarcón
About the Publisher
THE THOUSANDS (#u776ef136-4f89-546b-9a85-0c5d7a3e88d1)
THERE WAS NO MOON that first night, and we spent it as we spent our days: your fathers and your mothers have always worked with their hands. We came in trucks, and cleared the land of rock and debris, working in the pale yellow glow of the headlights, deciding by touch and smell and taste that the land was good. We would raise our children here. Make a life here. Understand that not so long ago, this was nowhere. The land had no owner, and it had not yet been named. That first night, the darkness that surrounded us seemed infinite, and it would be false to say we were not afraid. Some had tried this before and failed—in other districts, on other fallow land. Some of us sang to stay awake. Others prayed for strength. It was a race, and we all knew it. The law was very clear: while these sorts of things were not technically legal, the government was not allowed to bulldoze homes.
We had until morning to build them.
The hours passed, and by dawn, the progress was undeniable, and with a little imagination one could see the bare outlines of the place this would become. There were tents made of tarps and sticks. There were mats of woven reeds topped with sewn-together rice sacks, and sheets of pressboard leaning against the scavenged hoods of old cars. Everything the city discarded we’d been saving for months in preparation for this first night. And we worked and we worked, and for good measure spent the last hours of that long night drawing roads on the earth, just lines of chalk then, but think of it, just think … We could see them—the avenues they would be—even if no one else could. By morning, it was all there, this ramshackle collection of odds and ends, and we couldn’t help but feel pride. When we finally stopped to rest, we realized we were cold, and on the soft slope of the hill, dozens of small fires were built, and we warmed ourselves, each taking comfort in it, in our numbers, in this land we had chosen. The morning dawned pale, the sky scoured clean and cloudless. “It’s pretty,” we said, and yes, the mountains were beautiful that morning.
They still are. The government arrived before noon and didn’t know what to do. The bulldozers came, and we stood arm in arm, encircling what we had built, and did not move. “These are our homes,” we said, and the government scratched its febrile head. It had never seen houses like ours—our constructions of wire and aluminum, of quilts and driftwood, of plastic tarps and rubber tires. It came down off its machines to inspect these works of art. We showed the government the places we’d made, and eventually it left. “You can have this land,” it said. “We don’t want it anyway.”
The newspapers wondered where the thousands had come from. How we had done it. And the radio asked as well, and the television sent cameras, and little by little we told our story. But not all of it. We saved much for ourselves, like the words of the songs we sang, or the content of our prayers. One day, the government decided to count us, but it didn’t take long before someone decided the task was impossible, and so new maps were drawn, and on the empty space that had existed on the northeastern edge of the city, the cartographers now wrote The Thousands. And we liked the name because numbers are all we ever had.
Of course, we are many more than that now.
THE BALLAD OF ROCKY RONTAL (#ulink_07120712-9a76-5457-bea4-9c21d28a743f)
1
Let’s say your given name is Adrano Rontal, but they call you Rocky. Let’s say you’re a poor boy growing up in a poor city in a poor region of a very rich country. The richest in the world, or so they tell you. Let’s say there’s no evidence of that, at least not any that you’ve seen.
You have five brothers and a little sister. You’re not the oldest, but you are the bravest. Brave, even though you’re small. Brave, even when you shouldn’t be.
Let’s say the welfare check comes on the first and the fifteenth. Your father gets his cut first. For whiskey. No one sees him until night falls … And then, it isn’t your older brothers who protect your mom.
Instead, it’s you. Let’s say they dress you in layer after layer of clothes: extra sweaters, long-sleeve shirts, jackets, an ad hoc suit of armor, so stiff you can barely bend your arms. And your father, he beats you with a nightstick, like the kind cops use. And still you don’t cower.
Life has a way of punishing brave boys like you. Life has a way of making brave boys like you punish themselves. Particularly here. Where you live. You already know that.
One night your father gets carried away. He locks you in the closet, and your mother spends the night sleeping with her back to the door, to protect you.
In the morning, she sneaks the keys out of your father’s pocket. Let’s say she opens up the closet. And you’re caked in blood.
And so she kicks him out. A not insignificant act of bravery for a young woman with little education and few prospects, suddenly alone, with six children to feed.
You don’t know it yet, but you’re full of guilt. Full of hate.
Within a year, your older brothers are in juvenile. Now you’re ten years old. Now you’re the man of the house.
Let’s say one day a social worker comes by to check on you and your brothers. There’s no food in the pantry. You’re humiliated. You and your baby sister and your younger brothers are sent to a children’s shelter. You escape that same night and come home, but it’s your mother who convinces you, with tears in her eyes, to go back. “Don’t you wanna be with your younger brothers?” “Yes, jefita.” So you spend three months there, in a foster home, across the street from a methadone clinic. You recognize the junkies when they come by. You know them from the neighborhood. “Hey, Rocky,” they say. You can’t wait to go home.
You promise yourself you’ll never let the food run out again.
So when you come home, you start stealing. The first time you ever get busted it’s for breaking into a fruit stand. But before long you move on to bigger things. Let’s say you burglarize houses, taking anything that can be sold, but paying special attention to the food. You fill your father’s old duffel bag with cereal, with bread. You’re obsessed with the pantry. Obsessed with keeping it full. A week before the food runs out, you’re already in motion.
And then: at thirteen you’ve got your first .38. It’s the year you graduate to boosting cars. Let’s say you get a list, three or four a week. Make, model, year, color. You’re going to school now and then, but it’s like you’re not really there. You have other business.
At fifteen, you get picked up and sent to juvenile, like your brothers before you. You see friends from the neighborhood, tough, unsmiling boys just like you. You meet others, from all over California. And this is the first time you realize what you are. Or rather, this is the first time you realize what the world thinks you are.
Let’s say you’re sitting in a group meeting when the counselor calls you a gang member.
You’re offended. You hang around with people of the same cloth, the same experience, the same sufferings. These are your friends, like family. You don’t think of yourselves as gang members, but of course, technically, that’s what you are.
And let’s say you embrace the label.
When you get out, you start doing robberies. Holding up liquor stores, convenience stores. Let’s say you carry a gun, and every night you wave it in the faces of frightened cashiers. You don’t just take the bills; you take the change too. And at the end of the night, when you come home, let’s say you empty your pockets, slipping these coins under the pillows of your little brothers and your sister. It’ll make them smile when they wake up. They’ll know it was you who left the coins, even if they won’t know where they came from.
2
This is a story of three terrible crimes. The first is your childhood.
Here’s the second. Let’s say you’re seventeen when a crew of Sureños come up from Los Angeles. They’re called Vicky’s Town, or VST, and it isn’t long before they’re tagging in the neighborhood.
“Kick on back,” you say. You let it be known. This is how wars begin.
Your house is sprayed with bullets one night when you aren’t home. Your mother tells you, and then immediately regrets it. You know what to do. She begs you not to. Let’s say you do it anyway.
This is it. It’s two in the morning when you drive to your victim’s house. Let’s say you shoot him at close range with a sawed-off pump shotgun. Let’s say his mother and his little sister are in the house.
You don’t let your mother come to the trial. Let’s say you tell your brothers not to let her near the courthouse, not under any circumstances. But she’s your mother, and she comes. Years later, she’ll tell you, “You were always a good boy, mijo …” And you’ll find it astonishing she could say that, much less believe it.
But she does.
Let’s say the day she comes to the courthouse is the day the coroner testifies about your victim’s wounds. You’ll remember this for a long time. He’s on the stand, giving a detailed medical account of what happened, and your mother is sitting behind you, hiding her face with both hands. And on the other side of the courtroom, your victim’s mother is doing the same.
It’s the first time you feel ashamed of what you’ve done. If someone had intervened, right then, let’s say you could’ve been saved.
You’re sentenced to twenty-seven years to life.
You’re inside a year and a half when your little sister and a friend of hers disappear. It’s 1982, and this is the third terrible crime. Your sister’s name is Renee and her friend is named Nancy, and they’re both thirteen years old. Let’s say they were last seen on the avenue, getting into a car with two men. The two girls are found a week later, facedown in a ditch on the outskirts of town.
Let’s say you wonder if your sister paid for what you did. Now you’re sending out messages, lists of people you want executed. You don’t know who did it, so you want them all dead. You want to see bodies stacked up high, a monument to the pain you’re feeling.
Let’s say you want to murder the world.
And then one of the men is caught and tried, and sentenced to death. And one day you see him, across the yard, separated by two fences, and you get him a message. One day, you tell him, after the system kills you, I’ll get out. And I’m going to kill your family. You mean it. He knows you mean it, and that’s the only satisfaction you have.
Let’s say every time you come across someone inside, someone who hurt a child, you think of him. And you make them pay.
But the other man who killed Renee and Nancy gets away. Let’s say his name is Reyes. He gets away and stays away. Let’s say he vanishes somewhere in Mexico.
One decade, two decades, three. Reyes has a life. He gets married. He has children. He’s divorced. He marries again.
And all that time, while the man who raped and murdered your sister is walking the streets, you’re in prison, and your hatred is something sharp in your chest. Something darker, more toxic than rage. You don’t let your family call you. You don’t let them reach you. This is something you have to do alone.
3
Let’s say sometime during your second decade in prison you begin to think about the true meanings of simple words. Words like compassion. Understanding. Consideration. Forgiveness. Simple words.
No one you grew up with could have defined any of them.
Let’s say one night, on the block, you wake up wondering who you are. What right you have to hurt anyone. Is this an eye for an eye? Didn’t you take a life?
You ask yourself why you turned out the way you did, but you know you’ll never arrive at a satisfying answer. But let’s say you resolve to stumble on.
Let’s say in 2012 you’re released. All told, you’ve spent thirty-two years inside.
Let’s say you emerge into a world that’s disappointingly familiar. Your town is the same, only more so. The violence you loosed has become routine, and the kids have learned from you. Perfected what you taught them. Your mother’s dead. Your homies are dead. Some of your brothers have died too.
You go around town and tell everyone you’ve hurt that they don’t need to be afraid of you anymore. It’s a long list. You visit the mother of the boy you killed.
The last time you saw her was in the courtroom, when you were on trial for the murder of her son. Now she has salt-and-pepper hair, and sits in an armchair, both her hands resting atop a cane, her head bent down toward the floor. She’s still afraid of you. You get on one knee, and with all your might you give her an explanation of why you did what you did.
You don’t ask for forgiveness. You accept responsibility. When you’re done, she clears her throat, and says that no one in her family had anything to do with Renee’s death.
She’s afraid of you.
She says she’s seen you in the neighborhood talking to the youngsters. She knows you’re trying to make amends. Then she says she forgives you. It takes your breath away.
Then she changes the subject: “What else have you been doing?” she asks.
“Construction,” you say.
“So do you know how to fix cabinets?”
“Yeah, señora.”
“That’s good, mijo. Do you know how to fix fences?”
“Yeah, señora.”
“That’s good, mijo,” she says. “So now you’re gonna fix my cabinet and my fence.”
4
And then you get a call. Alfredo Reyes has been caught. Before you know it, they’ve brought him back from Mexico, and the trial has begun.
Let’s say you weren’t prepared to see the paunchy, middle-aged man before you, his slouch, his thinning hair. He tells the court that no, he never spent much time thinking of Renee or Nancy. Very rarely did he remember what he’d done.
You spent decades inside remembering what he did.
“It was consensual anyway,” Reyes tells the court, and your heart rate quickens.
“It was the other guy who killed those girls,” he says, and you clench your fists.
But you aren’t the person you were. And still. Let’s say you spent years dreaming of killing this man. And now you’ve sat through weeks of his trial, watching him. Thinking, repeating to yourself: Compassion. Understanding. Consideration. Forgiveness.
These words you’ve taught yourself. Words that suddenly seem meaningless again.
And then you find yourself, at your sister’s grave site, full of rage. And then you find yourself climbing a wall across the street from the courthouse, and up a ladder, to the roof of an old theater. Let’s say from here you can see the garage where the bus pulls in from the county jail. From here you could have a clean shot.
He says it was consensual. He described it.
And let’s say you find yourself on the roof, holding a rifle, the feel of it like an old friend. Let’s say you can imagine the bullet hitting Reyes, and the image of him falling is so clear in your mind, it’s like a movie you’ve watched a thousand times.
You’re watching, you’re waiting for the bus to come.
What happened on the roof of that theater?
Let’s say you saw the man you used to be.
THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE (#ulink_d9064cbc-a638-5134-bcd0-201985c8f008)
IT WAS THE YEAR I left my parents, a few useless friends, and a girl who liked to tell everyone we were married, and moved two hundred kilometers downstream to the capital. Summer had limped to a close. I was nineteen years old and my idea was to work the docks, but when I showed up the man behind the desk said I looked scrawny, that I should come back when I had put on some muscle. I did what I could to hide my disappointment. I’d dreamed of leaving home since I was a boy, since my mother taught me that our town’s river flowed all the way to the city. My father had warned me, but still, I’d never expected to be turned away.
I rented a room in the neighborhood near the port, from Mr. and Mrs. Patrice, an older couple who had advertised for a student. They were prim and serious, and they showed me the rooms of their neat, uncluttered house as if it were the private viewing of a diamond. Mine would be the back room, they said. There were no windows. After the brief tour we sat in the living room, sipping tea, beneath a portrait of the old dictator that hung above the mantel. They asked me what I was studying. All I could think of in those days was money, so I said economics. They liked that answer. They asked about my parents, and when I said they had passed on, that I was all alone, I saw Mrs. Patrice’s wrinkled hand graze her husband’s thigh, just barely.
He offered to lower the rent, and I accepted.
The next day Mr. Patrice recommended me to an acquaintance who needed a cashier for a shop he owned. It was good part-time work, he told me, perfect for a student. I was hired. It wasn’t far from the port, and in warm weather, I could sit out front and smell the river where it opened into the wide harbor. It was enough for me to listen and know it was there: the hum and crash of ships being loaded and unloaded reminded me of why I had left, where I had come to, and all the farther places that awaited me. I tried not to think of home, and though I’d promised to write, somehow it never seemed like the appropriate time.
We sold cigarettes and liquor and newspapers to the dockworkers, and had a copy machine for those who came to present their paperwork at the customs house. We made change for them and my boss, Nadal, advised those headed to customs as to the appropriate bribe, depending on what item they were expecting to receive, and from where. He knew the protocol well. He’d worked for years in customs before the dictator fell, but hadn’t had the foresight to join a political party when democracy came. His only other mistake in thirty years, he told me once, was that he hadn’t stolen enough. There had never been any rush. Autocracies are nothing if not stable, and no one ever thought the old regime could be toppled.
We sold postcards of the hanging, right by the cash register: the body of the dictator, swaying from an improvised gallows in the main plaza. In the photo, it is a cloudy day, and every head is turned upward to face the expressionless dead man. The card’s inscription reads The King Is Always Above the People, and one has the sense of an inviolable silence reigning over the spectators. I was fifteen when it happened. I remember my father crying at the news. He’d been living in the city when the man first came to power.
We sold two or three of these postcards each week.
In the early mornings I wandered around the city. Out in the streets, I peppered my speech with words and phrases I’d heard around me, and sometimes, when I fell into conversations with strangers, I would realize later that the goal of it all had been to pass for someone raised in the capital. I never pulled it off. The slang I’d picked up from the radio before moving was disappointingly tame. At the shop I saw the same people every day, and they knew my story—or rather, the one I told them: a solitary, orphaned student from a faraway city neighborhood. “When do you study?” they’d ask, and I’d tell them I was saving up money to matriculate. I spent a good deal of time reading, and this fact alone was enough to convince them. The stooped customs bureaucrats in their faded suits came in on their lunch break to reminisce with Nadal about the good old days, and sometimes they would slip me some money. “For your studies,” they’d say, and wink.
There were others—the dockworkers, always promising the newest, dirtiest joke in exchange for credit at the store. Twice a month one of the larger carriers came in, depositing a dozen or so startled Filipinos for shore leave. Inevitably they wandered into the shop, disoriented, hopeful, but most of all thrilled to be once again on dry land. They grinned and yammered incomprehensibly and I was always kind to them. That could be me, I thought, in a year, perhaps two: stumbling forth from the bowels of a ship into the narrow streets of a port city anywhere in the world.
I was alone in the shop one afternoon when a man in a light brown uniform walked in. I’d been in the city three and a half months by then. He wore his moustache in that way men from the provinces did, and I disliked him immediately. With great ceremony he pulled a large piece of folded paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and spread it out on the counter. It was a target from a shooting range: the crude outline of a man, vaguely menacing, now pierced with holes. The customer looked admiringly at his handiwork. “Not bad, eh?”
“Depends.” I bent over the sheet, placing my index finger in each paper wound, one by one. There were seven holes in the target. “What distance?”
“At any distance.” He asked, “Can you do better?” Without waiting for me to respond, he took out an official-looking form and placed it next to the bullet-riddled paper man. “I need three copies, son. This target and my certificate. Three of each.”
“Half an hour,” I said.
He squinted at me and stroked his moustache. “Why so long?”
The reason, naturally, was that I felt like making him wait. And he knew that. But I told him the machine had to warm up. Even as I said this, it sounded ridiculous. The machine, I said, was a delicate and expensive piece of equipment, newly imported from Japan.
He was unconvinced.
“And we don’t have paper this size,” I added. “I’ll have to reduce it.”
His lips scrunched together into a sort of smile. “But thank God you have a new machine that can do all that. You’re from upriver, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Which village?”
“Town,” I said, and told him the name.
“Have you seen the new bridge?” he asked.
I said I hadn’t, and this was a lie. “I left before it was built.”
He sighed. “It’s a beautiful bridge,” he said, allowing himself to indulge briefly in description: the wide river cutting through green rolling hills that seemed to stretch on forever.
When he was done reminiscing, he turned back to me. “Now, listen. You make my copies, and take your time. Warm up the machine, read it poetry, massage it, make love to it. Do what you have to do. You’re very lucky. I’m happy today. Tomorrow I go home and I have a job waiting for me at the bank. I’ll make good money, and I’ll marry the prettiest girl in town, and you’ll still be here, breathing this nasty city air, surrounded by these nasty city people.” He smiled for a moment. “Got that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Now, tell me where a man can get a drink around here.”
There was a bar a few streets over, a dingy spot with smoky windows that I walked by almost every day. It was a place full of sailors and dockworkers and rough men the likes of whom still frightened me. I’d never been, but in many ways, it was the bar I’d imagined when I was still back home, plotting a way to escape: dark and unpleasant and exciting, the kind of place that would upset my poor, blameless mother.
I took the man’s target and put it behind the counter. “Sure, there’s a bar,” I said, “but it’s not for country folk.”
“Insolent little fucker. Tell me where it is.”
I pointed him in the right direction.
“Half an hour. Have my copies ready.” He noticed the plastic stand with the postcards of the dictator’s hanging and scowled. With his index finger, he carefully flicked them over, so that they all tumbled to the floor.
I let them fall.
“If I were your father,” he said, “I would beat you senseless for disrespect.”
He shook his head and left, letting the door slam behind him.
I never saw him again. As it happened, I was right about the bar. Someone must have disliked the looks of him, or maybe they thought he was a cop by the way he was dressed, or maybe his accent drew the wrong kind of attention. In any case, the papers said it was quite a show. The fight started inside—who knows how these things begin—and spilled out into the street. That’s where he died, head cracked on the cobblestones. An ambulance was called, but couldn’t make it down the narrow streets in time. There was a shift change at the docks, and the streets were filled with men.
SHORTLY AFTER MY ENCOUNTER with the security guard, I wrote a letter home. Just a note really, something brief to let my parents know I was alive, that they shouldn’t believe everything they read in the newspapers about the capital. My father had survived a stint in the city, and nearly three decades later, he still spoke of the place with bewilderment. He went there shortly after marrying my mother, and returned after a year working the docks with enough money to build the house where I’d been raised. The city may have been profitable, but it was also frightening, an unsteady kind of place. In twelve months there he saw robberies, riots, a president deposed. As soon as he had the money together, he returned home, and never went back. My mother never went at all.
In my note I told them about the Patrices, described the nice old couple in a way that would put them both at ease. I would visit at Christmas, I promised, because it was still half a year off.
As for the target and the dead man’s certificate, I decided to keep them. I took them home the very next day, and folded the certificate carefully into the thin pages of an illustrated dictionary the Patrices kept in their front room. I tacked the target up on my wall so that I could face it if I sat upright in bed. And one night a storm rolled in, the first downpour of the season, and the rain drumming on the roof reminded me of home. I felt suddenly lonely, and I shut my left eye, and pointed my index finger at the wall, at the man in the target. I aimed carefully and fired at him. It felt good. I did it again, this time with sound effects, and many minutes were spent this way. I blew imaginary smoke from the tip of my finger, like the gunslingers I’d seen in imported movies. I must have killed him a dozen times before I realized what I was doing, and after that, I felt a fidelity to the man in the target I could not explain. I would shoot him every night before sleeping, and sometimes in the mornings as well.
One afternoon not long after I’d sent my letter, I came home to find the girl from my hometown—Malena was her name—red-faced and teary, in the Patrices’ tidy living room. She had just arrived from the country, and her small bag leaned against the wall by the door. Mrs. Patrice was consoling her, a gentle hand draped over Malena’s shoulder, and Mr. Patrice sat by, not quite knowing what to do. I stammered a greeting, and the three of them looked up. I read the expressions on their faces, and by the way Malena looked at me, I knew immediately what had happened.
“Your parents send their best,” said Mrs. Patrice, her voice betraying grave disappointment.
“You’re going to be a father,” her husband added, in case there had been any confusion.
I stepped forward, took Malena by the hand, and led her to my room in the back without saying a word to the Patrices. For a long while we sat in silence. There had never been anyone besides me in the room, except for the first time the Patrices had shown me the place. Malena didn’t seem particularly sad or angry or happy to see me. She sat on the bed. I stood. Her hair had come undone, and fell over her face when she looked down, which, at first, was often.
“Did you miss me?” she asked.
I had missed her—her body, her breath, her laughter—but it wasn’t until she was in front of me that I realized it.
“Of course,” I said.
“You could’ve written.”
“I did.”
“Eventually.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Four months.”
“And it’s—”
“Yes,” Malena said in a stern voice.
She sighed deeply, and I apologized.
Malena had news—who else had left for the city, who had gone north. There were weddings planned for the spring, some people we knew, though not well. As I suspected, the murder of the security guard had been a big story, and Malena told me she herself hadn’t been able to sleep, wondering what I might be doing, whether I was all right. She’d visited my parents, and they’d tried to convince her not to travel to the city, or at least not alone.
“Your father was going to come with me.”
“And why didn’t he?” I asked.
“Because I didn’t wait for him.”
I sat beside her on the bed, so that our thighs were touching. I didn’t tell her that I’d met the victim, about my small role in his misfortunes, or any of that. I let her talk: she described the small, cosmetic changes that our town had undergone in the few months I’d been away. There was talk of repainting the bridge. I nodded. She was showing already, an unmistakable roundness to her. I placed the flat of my palm against her belly, and then pulled her close. She stopped talking abruptly, in mid-sentence.
“You’ll stay with me. We’ll be happy,” I whispered.
But Malena shook her head. There was something hard in the way she spoke. “I’m going home,” she said, “and you’re coming with me.”
It was still early. I stood up, and walked around the tiny room; from wall to wall, it was only ten short paces. I stared at my friend in the target. I suggested we see the neighborhood before it got too dark. I could show Malena the docks or the customs house. Didn’t she want to see it?
“What is there to see?”
“The harbor. The river.”
“We have that river back home,” she said.
We went anyway. The Patrices said nothing as we left, and when we returned in the early evening, the door to their room was closed. Malena’s bag was still by the front door, and though it was just a day bag with only one change of clothes, once I moved it, my room felt even smaller. Until that night, Malena and I had never slept in the same bed. We pressed together, and shifted our weight, and eventually we were face-to-face and very close. I put my arm around her, but kept my eyes shut, and listened to the muffled sounds of the Patrices talking anxiously.
“Are they always so chatty?” Malena asked.
I couldn’t make out their words, of course, but I could guess. “Does it bother you?”
I felt Malena shrug in my arms. “Not really,” she said, “but it might if we were staying.”
After this comment, we were quiet, and Malena slept peacefully.
When we emerged the next morning for breakfast, my landlords were somber and unsmiling. Mrs. Patrice cleared her throat several times, making increasingly urgent gestures at her husband, until finally he set down his fork and began. He expressed his general regret, his frustration and disappointment. “We come from solid people,” he said. “We are not of the kind who tell lies for sport. We helped settle this part of the city. We are respectable people who do not accept dishonesty.”
“We are church people,” Mrs. Patrice said.
Her husband nodded. I had seen him prepare for services each Sunday with a meticulousness that can only come from great and unquestioned faith. A finely scrubbed suit, shirts of the most pristine white. He would comb a thick pomade into his black hair so that in the sun he was always crowned with a gelatinous shine.
“Whatever half-truths you may have told this young lady are not our concern. That must be settled between the two of you. We have no children ourselves, but wonder how we might feel if our son was off telling everyone he was an orphan.”
He lowered his eyebrows.
“Crushed,” Mrs. Patrice whispered. “Betrayed.”
“We do not doubt your basic goodness, son, nor yours …”
“Malena,” I said. “Her name is Malena.”
“… as you are both creatures of the one true God, and He does not err when it comes to arranging the affairs of men. It is not our place to judge, but only to accept with humility that with which the Lord has charged us.”
He was gaining momentum now, and we had no choice but to listen. Under the table, Malena reached for my hand. Together we nodded.
“And He has brought you both here, and so it must be His will that we look after you. And we do not mean to put you out on the streets at this delicate moment because such a thing would not be right. But we do mean to ask for an explanation, to demand one, and we will have it from you, son, and you will give it, if you are ever to learn what it means to be a respectful and respectable citizen, in this city or in any other. Tell me: Have you been studying?”
“No.”
“I thought not,” Mr. Patrice said. He frowned, shook his head gravely, and then continued. Our breakfast grew cold. Eventually it would be my turn to speak, but by then I had very little to say, and no desire to account for anything.
Malena and I left that afternoon.
I went to the shop first to arrange my affairs, and after explaining the situation to Nadal, he offered to help me. He loved doctoring official paperwork, he said. It reminded him of his finest working days. We made a copy of the original certificate and then corrected it so that the name was mine. We changed the address, the birth date, and typed the particulars of my height and weight on a beat-up Underwood Nadal had inherited from his days in customs. He whistled the whole time, clearly enjoying himself. “You’ve made an old man feel young again,” he said. We reprinted the form on bond paper, and with great ceremony, Nadal brought out a dusty box from beneath his desk. In it were the official stamps he’d pilfered over the years, more than a dozen of them, including one from the OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE PATRIOTIC FORCES OF NATIONAL DEFENSE—that is, from the dictator himself. It had a mother-of-pearl handle and an intricate and stylized version of the national seal. I’d never seen anything like it. A keepsake, Nadal told me, from an affair with an unscrupulous woman who covered him, twice weekly, in bite marks and lurid scratches, and who screamed so loudly when they made love that he often stopped just to marvel at the sound. “Like a banshee,” he said. She maintained similar liaisons with the dictator, and according to the woman, he liked to decorate her naked body with this same stamp. Nadal smiled. He could reasonably claim to have been, in his prime, extraordinarily close to the seat of power.
“Of course, the king is dead,” Nadal said. “And me, I’m still alive.”
Each stamp had a story like this, and he relished the telling—where it had come from, what agency it represented, how it had been used and abused over the years and to what ends. Though Malena was waiting for me, we spent nearly two hours selecting a stamp, and then we placed the forged document, and the target that I’d removed from my wall that morning, in a manila envelope. This too was sealed with a stamp.
Nadal and I embraced. “There’ll always be a job for you here,” he said.
Malena and I rode home that day on a groaning interprovincial bus. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, and when I saw the city disappear and give way to the rolling plains and gentle contours of the countryside, I was not unhappy. The next morning I presented the documents at the bank in the town just across the bridge from mine. “We’ve been needing a security guard,” the manager said. “You may have heard what happened to our last one.” He blinked a lot as he spoke. “You’re young, but I like the looks of you. I don’t know why, but I like the looks of you.” And then we shook hands; I was home again.
MY SON WAS BORN just before Christmas that year, and in March the papers began reporting a string of bank robberies in the provinces. The perpetrators were ex-convicts, or foreigners, or soldiers thrown out of work since the democratic government began downsizing the army. No one knew for certain, but it was worrisome and new, as these were the sorts of crimes that had been largely confined to the city and its poorer suburbs. Everyone was afraid, most of all me. Each report was grislier than the last. A half hour upriver, two clerks had been executed after the contents of the vault had disappointed the band of criminals. They hit two banks that day, shooting their way through a police perimeter at the second one, killing one cop and wounding another in the process. They were said to be traveling the river’s tributaries, hiding in coves along the heavily forested banks. Of course, it was only a matter of time. The bank I worked for received sizable deposits from the cement plant once a week, and many of the workers cashed their checks with us on alternate Friday afternoons.
Malena read the papers, heard the rumors, and catalogued the increasingly violent details of each heist. I heard her tell her friends she wasn’t worried, that I was a sure shot, but in private, she was unequivocal. “Quit,” she said. “We have a son to raise. We can move back to the city.”
But something had changed. The three of us were living together in the same room where I’d grown up. She smothered our son with so much affection that I barely felt he was mine at all. The boy was always hungry, and I woke every predawn when he cried, and watched as he fed with an urgency I could understand and recall perfectly: it was how I’d felt when I left for the city almost exactly a year before. Afterward, I could never get back to sleep, and I wondered how and when I’d become so hopelessly, so irredeemably selfish, and what, if anything, could be done about it. None of my actions belonged to me. I’d been living one kind of life when a strong, implacable hand had pulled me violently into another. I tried to remember my city routines, but I couldn’t.
The rest of the world had never seemed so distant.
By late summer the gang hit most of the towns in our province. It was then my father suggested we go out to the old farm. He would teach me how to use the pistol. I began to tell him I knew, but he wasn’t interested.
“You’ll drive,” he said.
We left town on a Saturday of endless, oppressive heat, the road nothing but a sticky band of tar humming beneath us. We arrived just before noon. There were no shadows. The rutted gravel road led right up to the house, shuttered and old and caving in on itself like a ruined cake. My father got out and leaned against the hood of the car. Behind us, a low cloud of dust snaked back to the main road, and a light breeze brushed over the grassy, overgrown fields, but provided no relief. He took out a bottle of rum, drank a little, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes. The light was fierce. He was seven years old when my grandfather died and my grandmother moved the family from this farm into town. He passed me the bottle; I handed him the weapon. He loaded it with a smile, and without saying much, we took turns firing rounds at the sagging walls of my grandfather’s house.
An hour passed this way, blowing out what remained of the windows, and circling the house clockwise to try our onslaught from another angle. We aimed for the cornices just below the roof, and hit, after a few attempts, the tilting weather vane above so that it spun maniacally in the still afternoon heat. We shot the numbers off the front door and tore the rain gutter from the corner it had clung to for five decades. I spread holes all over the façade of the tired house. My father watched, and I imagined he was proud of me.
“How does it feel?” he asked when we were finished. We sat leaning against the shadowed eastern wall.
The gun was warm in my hand. “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”
He took his cap off, and laid it by his side. “You’re no good with that pistol. You’ve got to shoot like you mean it.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s all right to be scared.”
“I know,” I said. “I am.”
“Your generation isn’t lucky. This never would have happened before. The old government wouldn’t have allowed it.”
I shrugged. I had a postcard of the dead general buried in a bag back home. I could show it to my father anytime, at any moment, just to make him angry or sad or both, and somehow, knowing this felt good.
“Are you enjoying it?” he asked. “Are you enjoying being a father?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“It’s not a kind of question. It is a question. If you’re going to take everything your father says as an insult, your life will be unbearable—”
“I’m sorry.”
He sighed. “If it isn’t already.”
We sat, watching the heat rise from the baking earth. It seemed strange to have to deny this to my father—that my life was unbearable. I mentioned the bridge, its new color, but he hadn’t noticed.
He turned to face me. “You know, your mother and I are still young.”
“Sure you are.”
“Young enough, in good health, and I’ve got years of work left in me.” He flexed his bicep, and held it out for me to see. “Look,” he said. “Touch if you want. Your old man is still strong.”
He was speaking very deliberately now, and I had the feeling that he’d prepared the exact wording of what he said next. “We’re young, but you’re very young. You have an entire life to lead. And you can go, if you want, and look for that life elsewhere. Go do things, go see different places. We can take care of the child. You don’t want to be here, and we understand.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your mother agrees,” he said. “We’ve discussed it. She’ll miss you, but she says she understands.”
I stared at him. “And Malena?”
“She’ll want for nothing.”
I picked up the gun, brushed the dust off it. I checked to make sure it was unloaded and passed it back to him.
“When?” I asked.
“Whenever.”
And then we rode home and spoke only of the weather and the elections. My father didn’t care much for voting, but he supposed if the owner of the plant wanted to be mayor, he could be. It was fine with him. It was all fine with him. The sky had filled with quilted, white clouds, but the heat had not waned. Or maybe it was how I felt. Even with the windows down, I sweated clean through my shirt, my back and thighs sticking fast to the seat. I didn’t add much to the conversation, only drove and stared ahead and thought about what my father had said to me. I was still thinking about it two weeks later when we were robbed.
It was no better or worse than I’d imagined. I was asked to say something at the manager’s wake, and to my surprise, the words would not come easily. I stood before a room of grieving family and shell-shocked friends, offering a bland remembrance of the dead man and his kindness. I found it impossible to make eye contact with anyone. Malena cradled our son in her arms, and the evening passed in a blur, until the three of us made our way to the corner of the dark parlor where the young widow was receiving condolences. She thanked me for my words; she cooed at our boy. “How old?” she asked, but before Malena or I could respond, her face reddened and the tears came and there was nothing either of us could say. I excused myself, left Malena with a kiss, and escaped through a back door. It was a warm evening, the town shuttered and quiet. I could hardly breathe. I never made it home that night, and of course, this time Malena knew better than to look for me.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAS BEEN SHOT (#ulink_27c307dc-4021-5987-9214-88115c4df9ca)
WE WERE TALKING, Hank and I, about how that which we love is so often destroyed by the very act of our loving it. The bar was dark, but comfortably so, and by the flittering light of the television I could make out the rough texture of his face. He was, in spite of everything, a beautiful man.
We’d lost our jobs at the call center that day, both of us, but Hank didn’t seem to care. All day strangers yelled at us, demanding we make their lost packages reappear. Hank kept a handle of bourbon in the break room, hidden behind the coffee filters, for those days when a snowstorm back East slowed deliveries and we were made to answer for the weather. After we were told the news of the firing, Hank spent the afternoon drinking liquor from a styrofoam cup and wandering the floor, mumbling to himself. For one unpleasant hour he stood on two stacked boxes of paper, peering out the high window at the cars baking in the parking lot. I cleaned out my desk, and then his. Things between us hadn’t been good in many months.
Hank said: “Take, as an example, Abraham Lincoln.”
“Why bring this up?” I asked. “Why tonight?”
“Now, by the time of his death,” he said, ignoring me, “Lincoln was the most beloved man in America.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Or was he the most hated?”
Hank nodded. “People hated him, yeah. Sure they did. But they also loved him. They’d loved him down to a fine sheen. Like a stone polished by the touch of a thousand hands.”
Lincoln was my first love and Hank knew the whole story. He brought it up whenever he wanted to hurt me.
Lincoln and I had met at a party in Chicago, long before he was president, at one of those Wicker Park affairs with fixed-gear bikes locked out front, four deep, to a stop sign. We were young. It was summer. “I’m going to run for president,” he said, and all night he followed me—from the spiked punch bowl to the balcony full of smokers to the dingy bedroom where we groped on a stranger’s bed. The whole night he never stopped repeating it.
Finally, I gave in: “I’ll vote for you.”
Lincoln said he liked the idea: me, alone, behind a curtain, thinking of him.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said to Hank.
“Here you are with me. Together, we’re a mess. And now the wheels have come off, Manuel.”
“Like Lincoln?”
“Everything he did for this nation,” Hank said. “The Americans had no choice but to kill him.”
I felt a flutter in my chest. “Don’t say that,” I managed.
Hank apologized. He was always apologizing. He polished off his drink with a flourish, held it up, and shook it. Suddenly he was a bandleader and it was a maraca: the ice rattled wonderfully. A waitress appeared.
“Gimme what I want, sugar,” Hank said.
She was chewing gum laconically, something in her posture indicating a painful awareness that this night would be a long one. “How do I know what you want?”
Hank covered his eyes with his hands. “Because I’m famous.”
She took his glass and walked away. Hank winked at me and I tried to smile. I wished he could have read my mind. That night it would have made many things between us much simpler.
“The thing is,” Hank said once he had a fresh drink, “there’s a point after which you have finished loving something, after you have extracted everything of beauty from it, and you must—it is law—discard it.”
This was all I could take. “Oh Christ. Just say it.”
There was a blinking neon sign behind the bar, and Hank looked over my shoulder, lost himself in its lights. “Say what?” he asked.
“What you want to say.”
“I don’t know what I want.” He crossed his arms. “I never have. I resent the pressure to decide.”
Lincoln was a good man, a competent lover, a dignified leader with a tender heart. He’d wanted to be a poet, but settled for being a statesman. “It’s just my day job,” he told me once. He was sitting naked in a chair in my room when he said it, smoking a cigarette and cleaning the dust from his top hat with a wooden toothbrush. And he was fragile: his ribs showed even then. We were together almost a year. In the mornings, I would comb out his beard for him, softly, always softly, and Lincoln would purr like a cat.
Hank laid his hands flat on the table and studied them. They were veiny and worn. “I’m sorry,” he said, without looking up. “It wasn’t a good job, was it?”
“No,” I said. “But it was a job.”
He rubbed his eyes. “If I don’t stop drinking, I’m going to be sick. On the other hand, if I stop drinking … Oh, this life of ours.”
I raised one of Hank’s hands and kissed it.
I was a southern boy, and of course it was something Lincoln and I talked about. Hank didn’t care where I was from. Geography is an accident, he said. The place you are born is simply the first place you flee. And then: the people you meet, the ones you fall for, and the paths you make together, the entirety of one’s life, a series of mere accidents. And these too are accidents: the creeks you stumble upon in a dense wood, the stones you gather, the number of times each skips across the bright surface of the water, and everything you feel in that moment: the graceless passage of time, the possibility of stillness. Lincoln and I had lived this—skipped rocks and felt our hearts swelling—just before he left Illinois for Washington. We were an hour outside Chicago, in a forest being encroached upon by subdivisions. Everywhere we walked that day there were trees adorned with bright orange flags: trees with death certificates, land marked for clearing, to be crisscrossed by roads and driveways, dotted with the homes of upright American yeomen.
Lincoln told me he loved me.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. I was hopeful. This was years ago.
That morning he’d gone to the asylum to select a wife. The doctors had wheeled her out in a white gown and married them on the spot. Under the right care, they said, she’ll make a great companion. Her name was Mary Todd. “She’s very handsome,” Lincoln said. He showed me a photograph and I admitted that she was.
“Do you love her?” I asked.
Lincoln wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“But you just met her today.”
He answered with a sigh. When he had been quiet long enough, he took my hand. We had come to a place where the underbrush was so overgrown that the construction markers seemed to get lost: mossy, rotting tree trunks were everywhere, gnarled limbs and tangled vines hung over the trail. Lincoln kept hitting his head as we walked.
“This forest is so messy,” he complained.
I said, “You’re too fastidious to be a poet.”
He gave me a sheepish smile.
Back at the bar, Hank was falling apart before my eyes. Or pretending to. “What will we do?” he pleaded. “How will we pay the rent?”
It was a good question. He slumped his shoulders and I smiled at him. “You don’t love me,” I said.
He froze for a moment. “Of course I do. Am I not destroying you, bit by bit?”
“Are you?”
Hank’s face was red. “Wasn’t it me that made you lose your job?”
It was good to hear him say it. Hank had been in the habit of transferring his most troublesome callers to me, but not before thoroughly antagonizing them, not before promising that their lost package was only the beginning, that they could expect far worse, further and more violent attacks on their suburban tranquility. Inevitably they demanded to speak to a manager, and I would be forced to bail out my lover. Or try to. I wasn’t a manager, I never had been, and the playacting was unbearable. The customer barked insults and I gave it all away: shipping, replacements, insurance, credit, anything to get them off the line. Hank would be listening in from his cubicle, breathing a little too heavily into the receiver, and I knew I was disappointing him. Afterward, he would apologize tearfully, and two weeks might pass, maybe three, before it would happen again.
It took Accounting months to pin it on us.
Now Hank sighed. “What would you have done without me anyway? How could you have survived that place?”
I didn’t answer him.
We emptied our pockets, left the bar, and walked into the night. The heat outside was never-ending. It was eleven-thirty or later, and still the desert air was dense. This time of year, those of us who were not native, those whom life had shipwrecked in the great Southwest, began to confront a very real terror: summer was coming. Soon it would be July and there would be no hope. We made our way to the truck. Hank tossed me the keys and I caught them, just barely. It was the first good thing that had happened all day. If they’d hit the ground, we surely would’ve spent hours on hands and knees, palming the warm desert asphalt, looking for them.
“Where to?” I asked.
“You know.”
I drove slowly through downtown, and then under the Ninth Avenue Bridge, and into the vast anonymity of tract homes and dry gullies, of evenly spaced streetlights with nothing to illuminate. We had friends who lived around here, grown women who collected crystals and whose neighborhood so depressed them that they often got in the car just to find somewhere else to walk the dog. Still, beneath the development, it was beautiful country: after a half hour, the road smoothed out; another ten minutes and the lights vanished, and then you could really move. With the windows down and the hot air rushing in, you could pretend it was a nice place to live. A few motor homes tilting on cinder blocks, an abandoned shopping cart in a ditch, glittering in the headlights like a small silver cage—and then it was just desert, which is to say there was nothing at all but dust and red rock and an indigo sky speckled with stars. Hank had his hand on my knee, but I was looking straight ahead, to that point just beyond the reach of the headlights. With an odd job or two, we might be able to scrounge together rent. After that, it was anyone’s guess and the very thought was exhausting. I felt—incorrectly, it turns out—that I was too old to have nothing again.
Lincoln and I spent a winter together in Chicago. He was on the city council and I worked at a deli. We couldn’t afford heat, and so every night we would curl our bodies together, beneath a half-dozen blankets, and hold tight, skin on skin, until the cold was banished. In the middle of the night, the heat between us would suddenly become so intense that either he or I or the both of us would throw the covers off. It happened every night, and every morning it was a surprise to wake, shivering, with the bedclothes rumpled on the floor.
I’d made my way to southern Florida by the time he was killed. It had been eleven years since we’d been in touch. For the duration of the war I had wandered the country, looking for work. There was a white woman who had known my mother, and when I wrote to her, she offered me a place to stay in exchange for my labor. It seemed fine for a while. At dusk the cicadas made their plaintive music, and every morning we rose before dawn and cleared the undergrowth and dug canals in an endless attempt to drain the land. There were three men besides me, connected by an obscure system of relations stretching back into the region’s dim history: how it was settled and conquered, how its spoils had been divided. There was a lonely Cherokee and a Carib who barely spoke and a freed black who worked harder than the three of us together. The white woman had known all of our mothers, had watched us grow up and scatter and return. She intended to plant orange trees, just as she’d seen in a brochure once on a trip to Miami: trees in neat little rows, the dull beauty of progress.
But this land was a knot, just a dense, spongy mangrove atop a bog. You could cup the dirt in your hands, squeeze it, and get water. “It’ll never work,” I said one afternoon, after a midday rain shower had undone in forty-five minutes what we had spent a week building. She fired me then and there, no discussion, no preamble. “Men should be more optimistic,” she said, and gave me a half hour to gather my things.
It was the freed black who drove me to the bus station. When he had pulled the old truck out onto the road, he took his necklace from beneath his shirt. There was a tiny leather pouch tied to it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a bullet.” He turned very serious. “And there’s a gun hidden in the glade.”
“Oh,” I said.
He barely opened his mouth when he spoke. “That woman owned my mother, boy, and that land is going to be mine. Do you understand me now? Do you get why I work so hard?”
I nodded, and suddenly felt a respect for him, for the implacability of his will, that was nearly overwhelming. When I had convinced him I understood, he turned on the radio, and that’s when we heard the news: Ford’s Theatre, the shooting, Sic semper tyrannis. The announcer faded in and out; and though I would miss my bus because of it, we found a place with good reception and, without having to say a word, both agreed to stop. The radio prattled breathlessly—the assassin had escaped—no, they had caught him—no, he had escaped. It was a wretched country we were living in, stinking, violent, diseased. I listened, not understanding, and didn’t notice for many minutes that my companion had shut his eyes and begun, very quietly, to weep. He closed his right fist around the bullet, and with the other gripped the steering wheel, as if to steady himself.
I’ve been moving west since.
That night we were fired, Hank and I made it to the highway, heading south, and then everything was easy. Along the way I forgot where we were going, and then remembered, and then forgot again. I decided it was better not to remember, that something would present itself, and so when the front right tire blew, it was like I’d been waiting for it all night. Hank had dozed, and now the truck shook violently, with a terrific noise, but somehow I negotiated it—me and the machine and the empty night highway—in that split second, a kind of ballet. Hank came to when we had eased onto the shoulder. I was shaking, but alive.
“What did you do?” he asked, blinking. “Is this Mexico?”
It seemed very real, what I felt: that truck had, through mechanical intuition, decided to blow a tire for me, to force me to stop. I turned on the cabin light. “How long has it been since you stopped loving me?”
“Really?” he asked.
I nodded.
“What month is this?” Hank said desperately.
I didn’t budge.
“Are you going to leave me here?”
“Yes,” I said.
He smiled, as if this were a moment for smiling. “I’m not getting out. I paid for this truck.”
“No you didn’t,” I said.
“Still,” he shrugged, “I’m not getting out.”
Which was fine. Which was perfect. There was a spare in the back, but it was flat too. If one must begin again late in life, better to do so cleanly, nakedly. I left the keys in the ignition. Out here, outside our small city, the air had cooled and I breathed it in. Life is very long. It had been years, but I recognized the feeling immediately. It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself on a dark highway, on foot, with nowhere to go.
THE PROVINCIALS (#ulink_34add9b2-0ec8-58fb-8f37-1dfe49e3c68b)
I’D BEEN OUT OF THE CONSERVATORY for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died. We missed the funeral, but my father asked me to drive down the coast with him a few days later, to attend to some of the postmortem details. The house had to be closed up, signed over to a cousin. There were a few boxes to sift through as well, but no inheritance or anything like that.
I was working at the copy shop in the Old City, trying out for various plays, but my life was such that it wasn’t hard to drop everything and go. Rocío wanted to come along, but I thought it’d be nice for me and my old man to travel together. We hadn’t done that in a while. We left the following morning, a Thursday. A few hours south of the capital, the painted slums thinned, and our conversation did too, and we took in the desolate landscape with appreciative silence. Everything was dry: the silt-covered road, the dirty white sand dunes, somehow even the ocean. Every few kilometers, there rose out of this moonscape a billboard for soda or beer or suntan lotion, its colors faded since the previous summer, its edges unglued and flapping in the wind. This was years ago, before the beaches were transformed into private residences for the wealthy, before the ocean was fenced off and the highway pushed back, away from the land’s edge. Back then, the coast survived in a state of neglect, and one might pass the occasional fishing village, or a filling station, or a rusting pyramid of oil drums stacked by the side of the road, a hitchhiker, perhaps a laborer, or a woman and her child strolling along the highway with no clear destination. But mostly you passed nothing at all. The monotonous landscape gave you a sense of peace, all the more because it came so soon after the city had ended.
We stopped for lunch at a beach town four hours south of the capital, just a couple dozen houses built on either side of the highway, with a single restaurant serving only fried fish and soda. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the place, except that after lunch we happened upon the last act of a public feud: two local men, who might’ve been brothers or cousins or best of friends, stood outside the restaurant, hands balled in tight fists, shouting at each other in front of a tipped-over mototaxi. Its front wheel spun slowly, but did not stop. It refused to stop. It was like a perpetual motion machine. The passenger cage was covered with heavy orange plastic, and painted on the side was the word JOSELITO.
And I wondered: Which of these two men is Joselito?
The name could’ve fit either of them. The more aggressive of the pair was short and squat, his face rigid with fury. His reddish eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. He threw wild punches and wasted vast amounts of energy, moving like a spinning top around his antagonist. His rival, both taller and wider, started off with a look of bemused wonder, almost embarrassment, but the longer the little one kept at it, the more his expression darkened, so that within minutes, their moods were equally matched.
Perhaps ownership of this name was precisely what they were arguing about, I thought. The wheel clicked at every rotation, and though I knew it was impossible, I was certain it was getting louder each time. The longer that front wheel kept spinning, the more disconcerted I became. The combatants danced around each other, now lunging, now retreating, both deeply committed to resolving the issue—whatever it might be—right then, right there.
A boy of about eighteen stood next to my father and me. With crossed arms, he observed the proceedings as if it were a horse race on which he’d wagered a very small sum. He wore no shoes, and his feet were dusted with sand. Though it wasn’t particularly warm, he’d been swimming. I ventured a question.
“Which one is Joselito?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was crazy. He had a fuzzy blue name tattooed on his forearm, blurred and impossible to read. His girlfriend’s name? His mother’s?
“Don’t you know?” he said in a low voice. “Joselito’s dead.”
I nodded, as if I’d known, as if I’d been testing him, but by then the name of the dead man was buzzing around the gathered circle of spectators, whispered from one man to the next, to a child, then to his mother, so that it seemed, for a moment, that the entire town was humming it: “Joselito, Joselito.”
A chanting; a conjuring.
The two rivals continued, more furiously now. The mention of the dead man had animated them, or freed some brutal impulse within them. The smaller one landed a right hook to the bigger man’s jaw, and this man staggered, but did not fall. The crowd oohed and aahed, and it was only then that the two fighters realized they were being watched. I mean, they’d known it all along, of course; they must have. But when the crowd reached a certain mass, the whispering a certain volume, with all these many eyes fixed upon the arguing men—then everything changed. It could not have been more staged if they’d been fighting in an amphitheater, with an orchestra playing behind them. It was something I’d been working out myself, in my own craft: how the audience affects a performance, how differently we behave when we know we are being watched. True authenticity, I’d decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, quickly morphed into something fake. It happened instantaneously, on a sandy street in this anonymous town: we were no longer accidental observers of an argument, but the primary reason for its existence. This awareness on the part of the protagonists served to alter and magnify their behavior, their gestures, and their expressions of anger. The scene was suddenly more dramatic, their taunts more carefully phrased, more pointed.
“This is for Joselito!” the little man shouted.
“No! This is for Joselito!” responded the other.
And so on.
The crowd cheered them both without prejudice. Or perhaps they were cheering the dead man. Whatever the case, soon blood was drawn, lips swollen, eyes blackened. And still the wheel spun. My father and I watched with rising anxiety—someone might die! Why won’t that wheel stop!—until, to our relief, a town elder rushed through the crowd and pushed the two men apart. He was frantic. He stood between them, arms spread like wings, a flat palm pressed to each man’s chest as they leaned steadily into him.
This too was part of the act.
“Joselito’s father,” said the barefoot young man. “Just in time.”
“Naturally,” I said.
We left and drove south for another hour before coming to a stretch of luxurious new asphalt, so smooth it felt like the car might be able to pilot itself. The tension washed away, and we were happy again, until we found ourselves trapped amid the thickening swarm of trucks headed to the border. We saw northbound traffic being inspected, drivers being shaken down, small-time smugglers dispossessed of their belongings. The soldiers were adolescent and smug, wishing, I assumed, that they’d been stationed somewhere more lucrative. Everyone paid. We would too when it was our turn to head back to the city. This was all new, my father said, and he gripped the wheel tightly and watched with mounting concern. Or was it anger? This corruption, the only kind of commerce that had thrived during the war, was also the only kind we could always count on. Why he found it so disconcerting, I couldn’t figure. Nothing could have been more ordinary.
By nightfall we’d made it to my father’s hometown. My great-uncle’s old filling station stood at the top of the hill, under new ownership and doing brisk business now, though the truckers rarely ventured into the town proper. We eased the car onto the main street, a palm-lined boulevard that sloped down to the boardwalk, and left it a few blocks from the sea, walking until we reached the simple public square that overlooked the ocean. A larger palm tree, its trunk inscribed with the names and dates of young love, stood in the middle of this inelegant plaza. Every summer, the tree was optimistically engraved with new names and new dates, and then stood for the entire winter, untouched. I’d scratched a few names there myself, years before. On warm nights, when the town filled with families on vacation, the children brought out remote-control cars and guided these droning machines around the plaza, ramming them into one another or into the legs of adults, occasionally tipping them off the edge of the boardwalk and onto the beach below, and celebrating these calamities with cheerful hysteria.
My brother, Francisco, and I had spent entire summers like this, until the year he’d left for the U.S. These were some of my favorite memories.
But in the off-season, there was no sign of these young families. No children. They’d all gone north, back to the city or farther, so naturally, the arrival of one of the town’s wandering sons was both unexpected and welcome. My father and I moved through the plaza like rock stars, stopping at every bench to pay our respects, and from each of these aged men and women I heard the same thing. First: brief, rote condolences on the death of Raúl (it seems no one much cared for him); then, a smooth transition to the town’s most cherished topic of discussion, the past. The talk was directed at me:
“Your old man was so smart, so brilliant …”
My father nodded, politely accepting every compliment, not the least bit embarrassed by the attention. He’d carried the town’s expectations on his shoulders for so many years they no longer weighed on him. I’d heard these stories all my life.
“This is my son,” he’d say. “You remember Nelson?”
And one by one the old folks asked when I had come back from the United States.
“No, no,” I said, “I’m the other son.”
Of course, they got us confused, or perhaps simply forgot I existed. Their response, offered gently, hopefully: “Oh, yes, the other son.” Then, leaning forward: “So, when will you be leaving?”
It was late summer, but the vacation season had come to an early close, and already the weather had cooled. In the distance, you could hear the trucks humming along the highway. The bent men and stooped women wore light jackets and shawls, and seemed not to notice the sound. It was as if they’d all taken the same cocktail of sedatives, content to cast their eyes toward the sea, the dark night, and stay this way for hours. Now they wanted to know when I’d be leaving.
I wanted to know too.
“Soon,” I said.
“Soon,” my father repeated.
Even then I had my doubts, but I would keep believing this for another year or so.
“Wonderful,” responded the town. “Just great.”
My father and I settled in for the night at my great-uncle’s house. It had that stuffiness typical of shuttered spaces, of old people who live alone, made more acute by the damp ocean air. The spongy foam mattresses sagged and there were yellowing photographs everywhere—in dust-covered frames, in unruly stacks, or poking out of the books that lined the shelves of the living room. My father grabbed a handful and took them to the kitchen. He set the water to boil, flipping through them idly and calling out names of the relatives in each picture. There was a flatness to his voice, a distance—as if he were testing his recall, as opposed to reliving any cherished childhood memory. You got the sense he barely knew these people.
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