29

“Christo, pass the salt please.”

“Yes, Mama. For the beans?”

His mother reached over to pat his hand. “They just need a little help. Thank you for cooking.”

Christo Emilio Rivero, known on the street as Cobra, reached across the kitchen table to pass the salt to his mother. His father had died on the family’s harrowing flight from Honduras when Christo was ten years old. Like the buried remnants of a terrible nightmare, he retained only flashes of the journey: leaving his childhood village in tears; an exhausting march through a mosquito-infested jungle with armed men prodding them along; eating insects and roots and hoping not to get sick from the water; the screams of women and young girls at night; his father never leaving Christo or his mother alone during the day and tying them all together with a belt while sleeping; Christo understanding nothing except the village had no work and they were going to a paradise called Los Estados Unidos; the hiss of rattlesnakes and bitterly cold nights in the Mexican desert; feeling as if he would die of suffocation when stuffed with thirty people in the back of a stifling hot truck for eighteen hours during the border crossing.

Most of all, he remembered the shootout with the group of armed Latino men in a small town in Texas, soon after he and his family had crawled out of the truck. Later, he had learned that a local gang had not liked the fact that the handlers for Christo’s village had tried to cut out the middlemen. Back then, he knew only that one of the bullets had caught his beloved father in the throat, and he had bled to death on a cracked piece of asphalt in their brand-new country. Forced into another truck, Christo had no idea what had happened to his father’s body.

He could never get the beans right. Though he worked odd hours and sometimes gave his mother a break by cooking lunch, the main reason he tried to make it home as often as possible was the curly- headed boy sitting to his right.

His name was Hugo, after the grandfather he had never known.

Every now and then, Cobra liked to read books for laymen on theoretical physics. Books like The Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time. He didn’t understand all the concepts, and certainly not the math, but he was fascinated by the universe and all its inconceivably bizarre wonders. One thing he did know was that the scientists were all searching for something called the theory of everything: a way to marry macro and micro behavior models, Einstein’s theory of relativity with the bizarre world of quantum physics.

It was easy, he thought. The theory of everything is sitting right beside me. Why did anyone need to search anywhere else ?

Cobra and his mother had struggled mightily in Texas, managing to eke out an existence picking fruit in the daylight hours and cleaning toilets at night. Yet it still wasn’t enough. In addition to paying for room and board in the cement block they shared with two other families—how was this better than the fresh air and fertile soil of his childhood village, Christo wanted to know ?—they had to pay back the men who had smuggled them across the border, who charged an exorbitant interest rate.

They would never pay them back, he had finally realized. These men hadn’t brought them across the border out of the kindness of their hearts, or even for the initial fifteen hundred dollars they had charged.

They had brought them over to work as slaves.

Maybe it would have been different if his father had lived, and maybe not. But once Christo turned twelve and realized this was their fate, this half-life of menial labor and filthy living conditions, he took the only avenue of escape he saw for him and his mother.

He joined a gang.

It turned out he was more suited to crime than tossing watermelons into the back of a dusty pickup. A natural athlete, smart and desperate, Christo rose steadily through the ranks, graduating from petty crime to slinging rock to armed robbery. After surviving an ambush by a rival gang and slaying two of their members with a folding knife, he was promoted to the coveted position of asesino. Christo had never wanted to hurt anyone, but he found that once he started, he developed a taste for it. Not only that, but he knew too much about the activities of the gang to ever leave, and he owed them ten grand for a loan to move himself and his mother to an apartment complex near Chapel Hill. The gang wanted to expand in the Triangle region, and Cobra wanted his son to grow up in a safer place. It was a good fit for everyone.

“Papa, stay and play this afternoon.”

“I wish I could.”

“Please please please?”

Christo waffled. “Maybe for a bit. Just for a few minutes, though. Papa’s very busy.”

“Can we play trucks ?”

Sure.

“Hey Papa, watch this!”

Hugo giggled and folded the two middle fingers of his right hand into his palm. As he held his hand proudly in the air, sticking out his thumb and pinky and index finger, Cobra turned white and yanked his son’s hand across the table. He unfolded the fingers and covered Hugo’s hand with his own. “Where did you learn that?” he said, though he already knew. His was not the only gang family living in the cheap apartment complex.

Though Cobra was a feared enforcer, he was paid very little. It was another form of slavery, he knew, but at least one that came with respect and a far better standard of living. Though Cobra would do almost anything the gang asked, one thing was not for sale: his son’s future.

Cobra had traded his soul for security for his family, but if anyone tried to recruit his son, they would find out exactly how Cobra had earned his nickname.

And so would everyone they held dear.

“Someone showed me,” Hugo said, his soft brown eyes lowering, aware something was wrong.

“Never do that, okay?” Cobra said. “It isn’t a nice thing.”

“Okay, Papa. I’m sorry.”

Cobra pulled his son into a hug and pressed his lips to the top of his head. “It’s okay, niño. Papa loves you very much.”

“Can we play trucks now ?”

Sure.

The buzz of a text vibrated Cobra’s pocket. He pulled his phone out and checked the message. It was Javier. Someone in Greensboro had spotted the girl, Blue, but she had slipped away again. The gang leader wanted Cobra to step in. Ensure the job was done right.

He replied to Javier and replaced the phone. After indulging his son by playing trucks for fifteen minutes, Cobra went to his room to pack. “I have to go away,” he told his mother when he returned downstairs carrying a small duffel bag. “I’m sorry.”

“We’ll miss you,” she said, as she finished up the dishes. She never asked questions. She knew hard choices had been made.

“I hope it’s just for a day or two.”

After turning the water off, she dried her hands and hugged him. “Take care of yourself. Don’t worry about Hugo.”

“Don’t let him play with the older boys, okay? They grow up too fast these days.”

She patted his arm. “You’re a good father.”

“I love you, Mama.”

“I love you, too.”

Before he left, to Hugo’s great delight, Cobra swept him into a bear hug and carried him through the front door, all the way to his black- and-red Yamaha R3 in the parking lot. His mother followed them out. After letting Hugo sit in the seat and rev the motorbike a few times, Cobra released the boy into her arms and drove off.