All that rises, p.29
All That Rises, page 29
The sharp smack of a rock stings his arm.
“Come on, gabacho!”
Quinn shuts his eyes. Adam is waiting, and his knees ache on the pavement, and it’s not even midnight. He closes his hand on the pebbles beneath him and flings them as hard as he can. Then he rises, staggering onward.
* * *
* * *
In the dark of the front room, the stars through the window look so small and cold, they don’t even twinkle. Only Rosario is awake.
She kneels before her borrowed backpack, brushing dust from its latches. This she has hidden under her bed for weeks now, has cradled the weight of it in her arms as she tiptoed in socks from the room where her mother and grandmother converse in cooing snores. Everything is packed. Clothes and toothbrush, soap, water bottle. All in its place. As though there were any other way it could be. She pulls the zipper tooth by tooth.
Now, before she steps into her shoes, she looks back at the kitchen table, to the note she has placed there. Maybe she’s said too much. Maybe not enough. Maybe her last paycheck, cashed and stacked neatly beside the note, speaks its own language. Better that than to be useless inside these weeks of worry and waiting, to learn to want less your whole life instead of more.
Behind the sheet to the girls’ room, she hears someone turning in bed. She can hear them all breathe, their mouths on their pillows. She could probably guess who is who, just from the sound of their breath.
She places a fork on either end of the note to keep it in place. Quietly, quietly, she opens the door.
Mateo is waiting. He leans at the edge of the yard against the glass shard–topped wall, barely visible in the glow of the streetlights blocks away. He wears his regular clothes, jeans and a sweatshirt, and as he gazes out toward the parked truck, he looks serious and tired. Still, he smiles when he catches sight of her. He steps up to take the pack from her shoulder. The army blanket he drapes over it, as he nestles it onto the floor where she too will curl herself, turns it into something invisible.
She looks north, to the other city—toward many other cities—and then back. Ten thousand miles away, someone else’s war rages on.
Are you sure? she asks with her eyes.
His sky-blue eyes in the dark could be any color at all. But his teeth are the color of the first light of day. They almost glow. He holds out his hand.
And together they go. They go.
El Tiempo Es un Buen Amigo / Time Is a Good Friend
2006
Chapter 18
El Otro Lado
They’re definitely going to need to stock up on appetizers before the party. Not to mention ingredients for the main course—something people could eat with their hands would be a good idea. Of course, there will be cake. And two kinds of ice cream. And hot fudge sauce. Jordan digs with one paw through the chest freezer. Up come the frozen pizzas. Assorted Salisbury steak dinners and potpies. An open box of Otter Pops. Chicken thighs with a sell-by date of two years ago. A huge ziplock bag containing a mass of gray lumps is labeled, in magic marker, “pescado.” She wraps it in a towel used for drying the dog and steps out onto the driveway, into the echoing roar that is Miguel crisscrossing the lawn with the power mower.
“What does this say?” she asks when he cuts the engine.
He dips into his shirt pocket for his glasses.
“‘Fish.’” He gives the bundle a dubious look. “You gonna eat that?”
“Maybe,” she says, getting ideas.
“Remind me I’m not gonna eat at your house. You have a good New Year’s?”
She shrugs. She and Quinn watched Dick Clark and drank 7UP mixed with orange juice. The Christmas lights are still on the house.
“School starts on Tuesday. Are you still driving me?”
He removes the grass clippings bag. “If your dad wants.”
“He wants.”
In the kitchen, she shoves the fish into the other freezer. The blender sits beside the sink with half a smoothie in it. The garland of Christmas cards she hung from a string over the kitchen island offers embossed wishes from the so-and-sos, who were mostly wearing Christmas sweaters in their photos and smiling with their teeth under the studio lighting.
On Christmas, there had been take-out chicken enchiladas and cable TV and presents her dad had ordered, prewrapped, from Amazon. And phone calls. Granny DuPre had huffed in her ear, “Well, if I’da known y’all weren’t coming, I’da jumped in the truck and drove out there myself.” Grandma Francine had been more restrained. “Sugar,” she said, sounding, as always, like she was sitting upright on a glass chair with a small purse clutched in her lap, “I just think it would be better if we all waited until your mother comes home.”
Her father had spoken to neither grandmother. He looked like a bear roused too early from hibernation as he lay in the recliner listening to Willie Nelson CDs.
But now it’s a new year. And in a new year, you have to start doing new things. Especially when the old things were gone for good. Because, even though Grandma Francine seemed to think otherwise, that’s how it was going to be from now on, wasn’t it? Even the Christmas cards had been addressed to “Everyone” or “The DuPres” or “Huck and Family,” without mention of a certain name. And anyway, her father had given her a pogo stick and a biography of Stephen Hawking for Christmas, both of which she’d liked very much. She dumps the rest of the smoothie down the sink. She’s going to need to start making a guest list. But who would it include? The kids in her class, who didn’t invite her to their birthday parties? The girls whose parties she’d been to this year? Brittany Gallegos even?
Maybe.
In the dining room, Quinn stares down the sheet-covered hole.
“Dad.” He braces his hands against his knees. “Let’s try this again. So there’s no progress with the labor negotiations or whatever?”
Skyler straddles a backward chair beside him. In the living room behind her, the browning Christmas tree lists to one side.
“When is Lourdes coming back?” Jordan grouses.
Skyler grips her chair. “Wish I knew.”
“Dad,” Quinn says. “Seriously. You can’t go to work at all?”
Jordan points at the floor with her toe. “Whose socks are these?”
“Dad?” Quinn presses. “Hello?”
A mirthless chuckle issues from the hole. “Work is closed until further notice.”
Quinn looks to Skyler. She bites her lip and nods.
“But I thought you wanted—” Quinn begins. “I thought we were going to—” He looks again to Skyler, who pushes her fists into her eyes. He faces the sheet. “I mean—what happened to our vacation?”
He braces at the same time Skyler does, teeth clenched.
Silence in the hole. Then a release of breath.
“I’d certainly like to go on vacation at some point.”
Quinn drops his shoulders. “You haven’t set anything up yet.”
“Nope.”
Skyler rises. “Okay. So Quinn and I, or better yet, Jordan”—she glances encouragingly in Jordan’s direction—“will set something up, and you’ll come. Out. Right?”
“Let me know when you’ve got some ideas.”
“California!” Jordan blurts, standing on her toes. “Didn’t Larry Villalobos say that Mom was in—” She stops with her mouth open. The air feels suddenly poisonous.
Quinn makes an impatient hand gesture that means, Go on.
Jordan shuts her mouth. She irons all expression from her face and lowers herself to the ground. Her old life is gone now. “Never mind. I don’t want to go on vacation.”
Skyler gives her a murderous look, then turns to Quinn, imploringly.
Quinn straightens and bumps the table behind him, triggering a small avalanche of empty Pop-Tart boxes and toilet paper tubes.
“Jesus Christ!” He kicks the phone book at his feet out of his way. “Where the hell is Lourdes?”
Jordan clamps her hands to her hips. “I don’t KNOW. And guess what? Before dinner, I want everyone to take their dirty laundry to the hamper. After dinner, your dishes need to go in the dishwasher.”
Skyler turns in her chair. “Excuse me?”
“Everyone—and I mean everyone—is going to need to clean up their messes before my party.” She turns toward the hole. “That means you too, Dad.”
Quinn rolls his eyes. “Jo-Jo. It’s four months until your birthday.”
“Exactly,” she says, liking how fierce she sounds. “Now are you going to pick up those socks or what?”
* * *
* * *
As Chavela sips her coffee on the bright, chilly deck, listening to the hum of her electric fence, she represses a sigh. The shopping is over. Also the cooking, the visiting, the wrapping and unwrapping, the in and out of the boys—she only dabbed her eyes a little as she sent Adam through the turnstile at airport security for the second time in two months.
Below: her husband, on foot, making slow but purposeful tracks away from the house.
Jerry. Who had emerged from the holidays not with dissatisfaction and lethargy, but with a strange energy. He jiggles his legs under tables. Scowls, mutters, paces. Of course, he walks. And when he’s not walking, he’s driving. And when he’s not driving, he’s working. And when he’s working, he avoids his home office—filthy, disorganized space that it is, she can’t say she blames him—retreating to his campus office instead, no matter the hour or day of the week. And then she is alone. In a house that no longer contains Inez. Which ought to make everything right.
Now her husband pauses on the sidewalk before the DuPres’ house, where Miguel edges the lawn. The edger sputters to a stop. They speak, heads inclining toward each other, like two men at a table playing checkers.
Chavela whacks down her mug. ¡Oye! she could shout. ¡Espérate allá! Then she could walk over and ask Miguel if he knows anything about Lourdes.
She and Jerry had fought over whether to fire her. Could he really invent an adequate reason for not doing so? “We should give her a chance to explain herself,” he said. “Pues, y how long are we supposed to wait?” she countered. “Until Easter?”
He said, “A lo menos, debes considerar that she was a stabilizing force for Inez.”
“Maybe so,” she retorted, “but Inez shouldn’t have been using her as a force for anything, y ya no está aquí, now is she?”
“No,” he answered coolly. His nostrils twitched with what she recognized as the silent language of blame.
“You never even wanted a maid!” she hissed as he left the room.
Below, with a nod, Jerry takes his leave of Miguel. He rounds the street corner like a man with an appointment.
She downs the rest of her coffee. Snatches up her BlackBerry and drills down to her list of housekeeping leads—Claudia, Jimena, María, Amaralis.
No. She taps a phone number on the speed dial instead.
“Oye, cuñado,” she says when Tavo picks up.
He grunts. “Chavela? Or is it one of the other ones?”
“Listen, I need to ask you something.”
“Bueno, let’s get right to the point. Don’t ask me how I am or anything like that.”
“I’m not asking because I thought you hated being asked. Pero, ¿como estás?”
“Lousy.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So, what’s the occasion?”
Good question. She lets out her breath. “I want to know what’s the matter with your brother.”
He snorts. “Who, Momo?”
“Have you talked to him lately? Do you know if anything weird happened to him?”
“You mean, like, other than being born a pompous ass?”
She tilts her head to the sky. Cloudless. “Other than that.”
“It’s been a couple of months since I’ve seen him.” He clears his lungs noisily. “What seems to be the problem?”
“It’s like . . .” She bunches up in her chair, unable to shut her mouth. “It’s like something is bothering him but he’s not saying what, he’s not saying anything, we’re not saying anything to each other anymore, and I just want to know, is it just some male midlife-crisis thing, or is there something else, is there anything you know about?”
The squeak and snap of a recliner chair opening. “What makes you think I would know, of all people? He’s usually pissed off at me.”
“Well, he doesn’t get along with Inez either, but she was the only one he talked to. And you’re sort of the next best thing.”
A silent moment follows. Then an eruption of laughter.
“¡Que la chingada! Finally, somebody comes right out and tells me I’m second best!” The laughter crests, then subsides. “Mira, other than when he called me after Inez took off, the last time I actually talked to him he came over to my house unannounced and picked a fight. Then he gave me a titty twister.”
“¿Cómo que ‘titty twister’?”
“I mean, I don’t know what he’s got to complain about. He’s got a job, even if it’s a pointless job. He’s got his health, his family, and he’s got a damn nice house. Nice neighborhood, that’s for sure.” He falls silent again, then chuckles. “Nice neighbors.”
Chavela rubs her temples. “Eh?”
“Does that good-looking güera still live down the street from you?”
“Who?”
“That little belle of the ball from Dallas. What’s her name—Rosie?”
A strange sensation descends upon her, as though she’s standing below a cliff over which a fine curtain of sand is pouring. And yet she cannot move out of its way. “You mean Rose Marie DuPre?”
“That’s the one!”
The french doors at her back creak open. With a leap, Kiko’s in her lap.
“You’ve met her?”
The chuckling turns lecherous.
“Yeah, and maybe I should meet her again.”
Kiko wobbles. “She’s gone. Left her husband.”
“¿Verdad?” The recliner creaks. “Well, that is a shame.”
“You know you’re a pig, right?”
He laughs. “Haven’t you heard that pigs are one of the smartest animals?”
Kiko turns a circle in her lap and settles, gazing up at her with googly eyes. “Well,” she says, “at the very least, when you meet a pig, you get a pig. You know they’re going to roll in the mud.” She rubs Kiko’s ears.
He’s still laughing. “Anything else?”
“Only if you want to tell me what it’s like to eat garbage.”
The laughter roars in her ear.
She clicks off the phone and looks out over the foothills at the dust-colored, creosote-tufted land, the brown stripe of the river, the toxic gases rising over the city. Everything hazy but also washed out with light, indistinct. She shades her eyes. There—over the houses of her neighborhood, the commercial buildings beyond, the smokeless smokestacks of Asarco, past the freeway—the mountains lead the way into the desert. What is it her husband sees when he stands out here taking in every slope and crevice? What does he want to see? It’s like he’s studying the body of a woman.
A little fissure opens somewhere within her. She has no words to describe its exact nature. But she knows it’s a feeling she hasn’t had for a very long time.
Kiko leans from her lap to the tabletop to lick the inside of her coffee mug.
“I guess that’s the difference between dogs and coyotes,” she murmurs as she pulls both dog and mug back into her lap. “Dogs don’t slink around.”
She drags her nails through Kiko’s coat. The fence below makes an electric pop. Her gaze returns to the desert. Space that begs to be filled with something. Questions maybe. Where are you going? would be a good start. And then, of course, Where have you been?
* * *
* * *
At first, the voice Marcus hears is so distant, so indistinct, he thinks he’s hearing it on a radio. It’s lost in the idling of a hundred car engines. The guy behind the wheel of the battered Lincoln Town Car—jowly, soul-patched—isn’t talking. The car’s plates are from Texas. The tabs are expired.
“Your citizenship, sir?” Marcus repeats.
The guy looks out over the dash. “Mexicano.”
And so it goes. With a tilt of his head, Marcus signals to Ortiz and Mueller. Mueller brings the dog, a German shepherd that trots up alertly, hoping for a whiff of controlled substance.
The dog sits down at the front of the car and looks back for his biscuit.
Pull over to the inside lane, Marcus instructs the driver.
The guy looks around, too quickly, seemingly for any route but the one before him. As if. Marcus bites down on the edge of his bad mood. “Temporary rotations will be in effect,” the department memo said, “in order to best utilize our resources during the current agent shortage.”
Pull over, he reiterates, with more force.
“Ayúdame!” says the radio voice, growing in volume. “Ay, por favor!”
A woman’s voice. Marcus’s eyes dart from dashboard to back seat.
Turn off the car, he barks.
The driver clutches the wheel.
“Ayúdame!”
“Jesus Christ,” Marcus says. He bangs on the hood. “Open it up! Ábrelo!”
The woman is spread-eagled over the engine, facedown, on a singed blanket. He peels her off as she sobs.
“Jesus Christ,” he repeats once he’s lowered her to the ground. She’s tiny and round, Indian-looking and strangely familiar in a way he can’t place, with bobbed black hair. Her face and hands and the fronts of her thighs are raw and pink with burns. How long have you been in there?
I don’t know, she says between sobs. A few hours.
Ortiz and Mueller make a swift dance of removing first the guy from the car, then the wrapped brick of meth from under the engine block.
Where are you from? he asks the woman.
“Chiapas.”
Are those your drugs?
Her face clouds. What drugs?
