Andrés hadn’t been studying long. He’d come back from his session with Grace. He’d put on some coffee and lit a cigarette. He thought about Ileana. Maybe she was still alive. He’d put aside his thoughts, then opened the book he was reading for his history class. Then the phone rang. He picked it up. “How’s it going, Dave?”
“How’d you know it was me, caller ID?”
“No one else calls me but you.”
“You should get out more.”
“My lawyer told me I should study. So I study.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Andrés listened to the long pause.
“Listen. Bad news.”
“I’m listening.”
“Grace Delgado’s son.”
“What about him?”
“He’s been killed.”
“What?”
For a second after he’d hung up the phone, he’d wanted to get in touch with Grace. Isn’t that what people did, get in touch with each other when something bad happened? Isn’t that what people did? He shook his head, changed into his running clothes, and ran. He found himself at the Santa Fe Bridge. He wondered what her son had been like. He wondered if Grace would have time for him now. He clenched his fists for being so selfish.
Mister’s story was front-page news. Everywhere he went that morning on campus, all he heard was outrage. By noon, outrage was beginning to get on his nerves. He didn’t know if the response was good or bad. Appropriate and decent perhaps. But shallow, too. People were outraged by drug dealers and prostitutes and gangs. People were outraged by high property taxes and bad schools. People were outraged by trash on the sidewalks of the city and crooked or stupid or do-nothing politicians. People were outraged by men who killed innocent people. Not that anybody did anything about anything. It was always easier to be disgusted after the fact. It was easier to shake your head and be outraged, as if the outrage was proof of civility—a sign that the world hadn’t died, that it could still scream out in horror, proof that its heart was still beating.
And who the fuck was he to put a bucket of water on those flames of after-the-fact outrage? Except that he was too cynical and too hard to cry about the whole sad affair. In his world, wasn’t that sort of thing normal? What was public outrage to him? Public outrage was as capricious as it was respectable. He’d read too many vacuous editorials in tossed-out newspapers to feel any sympathy for the tender and myopic sensibilities of its virtuous readership. He didn’t even know what virtue was anymore. Was virtue the enraged man who killed transvestites because their very presence perverted the natural order of things?
Hadn’t virtue come to him in the form of an old whore who’d saved his sister’s life? Hadn’t it come in the form of a transvestite whose friendship had pulled him out of hell? This, finally, is what he knew. He knew this man whose name was Robert Lawson. He’d known men like him all his cursed and sorrowful life. Their names were carved on his heart like graffiti. That man, Robert Lawson, that selfish, crazy bastard, had something in common with Mando and Yolie, and with his father. They trampled the world with their sick and twisted and crooked kind of love. The bastard didn’t think that anyone else’s love mattered at all. As if a father’s love knew everything, could see everything, could cure everything. And what would have happened if that man, Robert Lawson, had been allowed to keep his son? What would have fucking happened then? Men like him and Mando, they didn’t understand anything but their own imperfect hearts. That was their sickness—that they believed themselves to be the center of all light. That kind of light was a darkness of the land. A plague that was killing them all.
He spit on the ground. Spit on men like Robert Lawson and Mando Segovia. Screw you all the way to hell.
He dropped the morning newspaper. He tried not to think of Grace. If he thought too much, his heart would soften. And what would he do with a soft heart in a world that killed men like her son? All he was trying to do was adopt a boy.
No. He didn’t want to think about Grace.