Ernesto began working five nights a week at the Japanese restaurant in upscale Montclair, and shortly thereafter Raúl was offered a job at an Italian restaurant down the road. This was big money: together they’d be making several hundred dollars every week.
They both spent evenings busing tables, and after the customers left, they emptied the trash, scrubbed the industrial sinks, stovetops, and counters, and mopped the floors. Whoever got out from work first would text the other, then walk to the bus stop to smoke until his brother arrived. Downtown Montclair emptied early, and late at night on the dark streets only the sounds of the nearby highway and the closing of the restaurants could be heard—final customers straggling to their cars, busboys swinging garbage bags into Dumpsters, lights shutting off, and keys jangling into locks. They’d take the bus back into the Temescal neighborhood, where OIHS was located, then wait for the number-one bus to take them back east through the late-night International Corridor, where, at this hour, the sex workers in their high heels cruised for customers. They walked the ten blocks home guardedly.
Once, while waiting for Raúl outside the corner store near their house, a guy Ernesto had never seen before came up and slugged him full force in the face. He fell down onto the pavement, his vision going dark. Before he could say anything, the guy helped him up.
“Whoa, sorry, man,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.” He walked away. Ernesto’s mouth was bleeding, and a hunk of a back molar had broken off. He ran home, hoping not to come across the guy again, and cleaned himself up.
A few weeks later Raúl was taking the bus home one night from work alone, which was rare. As he waited for the bus, a group of six guys, covered in hoods and low-slung skullcaps, ran up to him.
One grabbed him from behind. “Give us your fucking money!” another one shouted.
He froze. It was like he was back in Guatemala, head in the dirt.
“Give it to us!”
He couldn’t move. They frisked him, grabbed his wallet out of his jeans—it had about fifty dollars—rifled through his backpack, and took his phone. They ran off and left him there in the vacant street where he stood, immobilized, until the bus came.
From then on, they came home from work on psychological tiptoe, vigilant of their surroundings while pretending to be fully at ease. Oakland was a great city but not without its problems. Over the years, dozens of Oakland International students had been jumped or mugged on their way to and from school—a few times even at gunpoint within a few-block radius of OIHS, a much safer neighborhood than where many of the students lived. Though increasingly safe, in 2013 Oakland was home to the most violent crime, by far, of any California city over ten thousand people. In 2014 aggravated assault was up 5 percent and possession of weapons was up 14 percent from the year before, though robbery was down 31 percent.
Crime happened at all times of day, but the twins were really wary only at night. From the bus stop, they walked briskly together, trying to appear determined, fearless, and simultaneously fearsome, assuming this armor as they marched each night, puffing cigarettes with counterfeit “don’t fuck with me” expressions, past the corner stores and the guys chilling on the stoops, the barking dogs, the howling babies, the occasional car doing doughnuts in the street, their own little mini-sideshow. They might stop for a minute and watch the commotion with the rest of the onlookers, momentarily joining in the ecstatic, late-night urban thrill of ragtag strangers assembled before a common spectacle, until they remembered themselves again, stiffened, and hightailed it home.
While their new niece had brought a moment of calm to the La Colonia household, tensions were building again at Hillside, and not just between Ernesto and Wilber. Rosalinda’s new boyfriend had moved in with them and had invited two of his friends to rent the fourth room. The already full house now had three more grown men living in it, whom the twins referred to as “the Mexicans.” Sober, they were nice enough people, but in the evenings they became rowdy. They guzzled Coronas and Negro Modelos and cranked music, twanging corridos, their voices growing louder as the night went on. The twins almost never left their room, now.
Only Rosalinda seemed to like the new arrangement, happy to have a man by her side and people her own age—late thirties—to hang out with. The cheaper rent helped, too. The twins got used to avoiding the living room; they’d walk in the front door, nod hello to the trio of men drinking beer, and head straight to their bedroom—no more watching family movies with the kids stretched out on the living room’s couches, wrapped up in pilled blankets.
One night they overheard the Mexicans talking shit about them: about Wilber’s bad attitude, about the mess the boys made in the kitchen and the bathroom. Another day one of them accused Ernesto and Raúl of eating all his cornflakes. That wasn’t their fucking food, he scolded. They had clearly been badly brought up to think they could steal other people’s stuff.
The twins insisted they hadn’t touched the cornflakes.
“Who did it, then?” he wanted to know.
A few days earlier they’d watched José scarf down several bowls with milk that also wasn’t his. But pointing the finger at Rosalinda’s son felt like it would violate the necessary kid code of the apartment. They shrugged.
Within weeks their self-imposed exile became full-blown, their bedroom a homemade fortress. They’d scoop up Nicky and lounge in the bed texting girls and friends from school, glugging down the Red Bulls and generic colas Wilber bought by the pallet at Costco and Mi Pueblo, watching movies and listening to music, posting photos of themselves in flat-billed hats and sunglasses and of their tennis shoes. Ernesto was still heartbroken about Marie, but he didn’t talk about it, even with Raúl. He hoped she’d see his photos online and feel jealous. When José came over, he’d knock on the door and hop into the pile on the bed or sprawl out on the dank carpet.
The Mexicans’ presence was unmooring to Wilber, too, though he kept quiet. But then Gabby overheard them accusing Wilber and his brothers again of eating all their food. “I’m gonna beat the shit out of that fucker,” one of them slurred, referring to Wilber.
“How am I supposed to live with these guys when they want to fight me?” he demanded to Gabby.
“Oh, relax,” Rosalinda told her daughter. “Don’t take it seriously.” They were just drunk, she said, waving him off.
Wilber and the other men began to toughen up in each other’s presence, holding their ground. Wilber, too, was used to this peacocking and feigned lack of intimidation, this tightrope game of trying to appear strong while never outwardly copping to one’s own fear. It wasn’t unlike how it had been in El Salvador at times, though it seemed more complex here on account of all the colliding cultures. But this was no way to feel in one’s own home.
Wilber talked to Rosalinda—this wasn’t what he’d bargained for when he opted to move in with Gabby’s family. But she shut him down. Did he know what it was like to be a single mom of three kids? What was his problem?
Gabby took her mom’s side. “Just ignore them.” Much as she could have done without the Mexicans, in her eyes Wilber’s attitude just made it worse. The couple fought about it, and once the seal was broken on this dynamic, they fought about other things, too. Money was one. Wilber needed to push his little brothers to help out more, she said. Wilber didn’t disagree, but he didn’t like her butting in. The twins could hear them arguing through the walls in low, tense murmurs, then in shouts. Gabby felt Wilber was putting her in the middle, forcing her to choose between her boyfriend and her mother. Wilber would exit the house in a fury and speed out of the driveway in his car, his own fortress, the one place he had to be alone.
One day on the way to school, a tenth grader named Franklin stepped onto the twins’ bus. He was also from El Salvador, baby-faced but nearly six feet tall with a bulky build. He seemed to smoke pot constantly—out of joints, glass bowls, even cafeteria apples that he carved into pipes. The boys sat with their headphones in, tuning the music low enough that they could still hear what was going on around them. As the bus rolled north along Telegraph, Raúl nudged Ernesto. Franklin was talking about them. Ernesto listened and, sure enough, heard Franklin say the word twins a couple of times.
They got off the bus a few blocks early and walked off their rage. Franklin was big, but the two of them could take him, they thought. They made it to school and went to class. But the next period, when Ernesto went to the bathroom, he recognized Franklin at the sink.
“If you’re going to talk shit about me and my brother,” Ernesto said, “don’t talk behind our backs.”
Franklin turned around, drying his hands. “What?” he said.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Ernesto said, marching toward him. He stood nearly a foot shorter but puffed up his chest to appear, or at least feel, intimidating. “If you have something to say to me, say it to my face.”
“Bitch,” Franklin said, taking a step toward Ernesto.
Ernesto pushed him, and Franklin stumbled backward out the bathroom door. They were in the hallway now, where a crowd of kids quickly formed and began cheering. Ernesto punched him in the face, just as an adult came running to break up the fight.
Back in the office, Franklin insisted he hadn’t been saying anything about the twins—he didn’t even know their names. But Ernesto knew what he had heard. Since Ernesto had started the fight, he was suspended for the day to cool off.
The twins had made accidental enemies like Franklin and their Mexican housemates all their lives. But the cause was more than just the fighting words, the bad looks, the accusations that they thought were directed at them. It was what was beneath them, Ernesto and Raúl felt. Those looks accused the boys of being nothing.
One night a few weeks later the Mexicans, drinking Modelos and eating a bucket of chicken with the TV blaring, dropped a plate of bones on the carpet next to Nicky. Wilber and Gabby weren’t home yet, and the twins were tucked quietly into their room. The Chihuahua spent the rest of the evening chewing at the bones, which cracked and split between her tiny teeth.
The next morning Nicky seemed distressed, trembling more than usual. Gabby and Wilber figured she just had the dog flu.
That evening when the boys came home from school, they found Gabby in her room hunched over, crying. Wilber was rubbing her back, trying to soothe her while holding back tears of his own. They went in, and there was Nicky, splayed out on her little blue dog bed, unmoving. Dead.
Later that night Gabby and Wilber scooped up Nicky’s body, wrapped it in a blanket, and brought it out to the car. They drove to a vet, who took X-rays that showed splinters of bone stuck in her stomach and throat.
“It ripped open her stomach,” Raúl said, jaw clenched, snapping his head as if to buck the memory.
“Those fuckers killed her,” Ernesto spat.
The next day Wilber and Gabby dug a hole on the parched hill that cast a morning shadow over their apartment. They held a private burial for Nicky.
Wilber held Gabby while she shook with sobs. “We have to move,” she told him.
The twins agreed. “We’re moving,” they told me gravely the next day. They’d sooner sleep on the streets than spend another night with those fucking Mexicans, they said.
“Mucha falta Nicky,” Ernesto told me in my office a few days later, when they could bring themselves to talk about it.
“Mucha falta Nicky,” Raúl repeated. “I really miss Nicky,” though the direct translation is less personal, more factual: “Nicky is really missed.”
Gabby confronted her mom about what the Mexicans had done, but Rosalinda defended them, insisting that they were only trying to feed Nicky. Gabby accused Rosalinda of choosing her boyfriend’s stupid friends over her own daughter. Rosalinda was furious—after all she’d done to support her daughter, after taking in her boyfriend and his needy little cornflake-stealing brothers?
“Go ahead, move out with your boyfriend!” Rosalinda said. Gabby called her mother’s bluff and left.
Through co-workers at the landscaping company, Wilber found them another apartment, a two-bedroom in a building closer to Fruitvale and downtown Oakland (and closer to school). Wilber, Gabby, Ernesto, and Raúl loaded their stuff into Wilber’s car, ready to start over. It was February 2015, just over a year since they’d moved to Oakland.
Gabby bought another dog from the pound, a little white fluffball mutt they named Nicky Two. The twins showed off pictures of her seated in the front seat of a car with a red bandanna tied around her neck—a gang symbol. Raúl posted on his Facebook wall:
My dog’s an Oakland gangsta.
It was just a joke, he insisted.
The main room of the new apartment was an adjoined kitchen and living room, off of which were the two bedrooms—one for Wilber and Gabby, one for the twins—and a bathroom. Gabby’s brother took up residence on the couch a few nights a week. The house was newly renovated and let in more light than the apartment on Hillside had, which gave the space an air of possibility, notwithstanding the nuggets of dog shit that quickly littered the tile floor.
The new place was more expensive, though, so the twins ramped up their hours at the restaurants, working five to six days a week to pay their five-hundred-dollar share of the rent. They also needed to pay off their legal fees. Though Amy never once pressed them for the money, it was another financial obligation, and they wanted to make sure they kept their promise. They weren’t actually paying monthly, but every now and again they delivered some money to her.
There still wasn’t much left over for paying down the debt in El Salvador.
“You need to be sending at least a thousand dollars a month,” Maricela told them over the phone. Now that she was home again, new baby in tow, she was back to nagging them. They knew she was right; the interest was compounding the debt so much that anything much less than a thousand wouldn’t even begin to hack away at the principal. But she was stuck in that mentality that the North fulfilled its promises. “It’s not as easy as it seems,” Ernesto said. She had no idea of all the things they were trying to balance.
From Maricela’s perspective, her brothers had it great: jobs, school, freedom from the gangs and from their family—everything she didn’t have. Cesar was working and helping to support her and Leiny (and, by extension, Lupita), which helped, but as Leiny grew, she needed more diapers and more milk. He still didn’t have enough for a ring for her or for a wedding; she would have moved in with him anyway, but he felt he still didn’t have enough stability, and things with his parents continued to sour. She waited patiently. Though he had less energy and time to make the trip to La Colonia these days, she still felt confident, if a bit shakier than before, that they’d be together.
She wasn’t so confident when it came to her brothers. She’d seen the pictures they posted online. She knew that Ernesto had bought an iPhone. Beyond the rent and fees, the twins felt they spent relatively little on themselves and that what they did was justified. Raúl needed a new pair of shoes because his were falling apart again, and they had got wet one day and smelled so moldy, he couldn’t keep them in his room. Ernesto needed a jacket—it was cold at night, waiting for the bus after work.
Raúl picked out hundred-dollar Nikes; Ernesto’s jacket was Nike, too, costing seventy-five. From what Maricela could glean on Facebook, these were massive purchases, showing what they prioritized over all else: themselves. Wilber had left promising to help the family; he hadn’t done much, but at least he’d paid off the debt. The twins had dug a deep hole for the family and scrambled out themselves. “Ask them,” their father pleaded, “to not buy so many clothes.”
Maricela thought the threat of losing the land might kill her father. “Why are you still in school?” she wrote to the twins. Surely they could work full time at least for a while, to make sure they weren’t responsible for destroying their family.
The twins didn’t want to leave school—they wanted to learn English and graduate. The irony was that the after-hours jobs they had taken, to make school possible, were ruining their grades. The first year they had earned mostly Cs, but now they were getting almost all Fs and Ds, and every class that they missed put them further behind. By four o’clock they had to run out the door for work. Mostly they had no time for homework. They got home at eleven p.m. on a good night, but with bus delays and on busier nights at the restaurants, they often weren’t home until after midnight. On a good day they woke up around eight a.m.; the school, an hourlong bus ride away, rang its bell at 8:20. And though the new apartment was forty blocks closer to school, the buses were often full by the time they reached the twins’ stop and passed them by. They stood there morning after morning, waiting with their backpacks while drinking Monsters and drawing down their morning cigarettes.
It didn’t help that they’d insisted on enrolling in eleventh grade—which was more advanced than they were ready for. When they’d registered in August, the teachers had suggested they repeat tenth grade, since they’d missed so much school and had only enrolled in February. But the suggestion that the twins couldn’t hack it was unacceptable to them—they’d nearly graduated high school in El Salvador, after all. Yet now, due to their spotty attendance, they were woefully behind their classmates in eleventh grade, even other newcomers and unaccompanied minors like themselves.
Ernesto could come up with enough answers to complete the homework when he tried, and to appear not lost on the days he showed up to class. But when he saw clearly how far behind most of the other students he was, he felt they must all think he was stupid. “I hate my class,” he announced one day, and marched out of school. He was used to being the smart one, and now, after nearly a year without Raúl by his side in class, he felt anything but. Raúl, though he had weaker English and fewer academic skills after years of deferring to his brother for answers, fared much better. Because he was used to needing extra help from Ernesto, he had no trouble asking questions.
Yet neither was even close to passing the eleventh grade. The twins wouldn’t leave school yet, but they did have to make decisions. Their teachers wanted them to create an action plan to right the ship, some kind of agreement about what they could do to improve things at school. But they were tired of people—Wilber, Maricela, their parents, me—trying to force them into doing things. They wouldn’t make any more agreements they couldn’t keep.
“We’ve come to an agreement,” Raúl announced to me, “which is that we’re not going to make any agreement.” What they did decide was that things would be better if they were in the same class. Ernesto took to walking out of his classroom early on in the period and wandering over to Raúl’s classroom, where he’d pull up a chair next to his brother. The teachers repeatedly asked him to leave, but they noticed that—as long as the twins weren’t spending too much time giggling with each other—they got more work done when they were together. Ernesto, especially: no longer did he put his head down on the table or refuse to work with other students.
As the spring semester drew on, things did get better. They almost never made it to school on time and their grades were still subpar, but they weren’t entirely failing. The teachers saw what the twins had long felt: they were better as a duo than apart.
Ernesto started work on his final portfolio, a presentation to be made to a group of his peers and teachers at the end of the semester. An early slide was titled “One Struggle.” “My struggle was that i am absent in the every day in the school,” he wrote in white letters against a blue backdrop. “I try to come every day. I had to work in the afternoon, finished in the night.”
He was proud, looking back. Last year he had been a scared boy: a drunk, stricken with night terrors and guilt. Now, almost a year and a half after breaking down on the camping trip, he had papers, friends, a job, and an apartment, and he knew his way around Oakland. Okay, his grades weren’t good, but they weren’t all failures. Look at him now—presenting in English, raggedy as it was, in front of the whole class.
When he was in the right frame of mind, he could see that his life had righted itself, somewhat, and in spite of all the challenges, his future was, when the light caught it just right, one of potential, again.
These days they barely saw Wilber, returning home late as they did and waking up after he’d already left for his shift. Weekends they sometimes saw him before their shifts began at four p.m., but rarely—the twins tended to use those days to catch up on sleep and then some, as though storing it up for the week ahead.
Occasionally Wilber planned day trips for the family. The brothers sometimes went with Gabby and José to the beach in Half Moon Bay, or the waterfront in Alameda, or for a hike. But Ernesto usually either declined these outings or wasn’t invited. Wilber drove Raúl up to the hills one day, where they walked around and came across a gated-in pack of goats. Like boys at a petting zoo, they stroked them and fed them apples, laughing at the creatures’ diabolical faces. So charmed were they by the goats, so surprised to see them up on these lonely hills, that a passerby might not know that these young men in skinny jeans and flat-brimmed caps had been skilled farmers and shepherds when they were no taller than goats themselves. Raúl filmed the herd munching grass on his phone (he’d bought a replacement after he was robbed, sacrificing a couple hundred dollars), getting as close as he could before they lunged at the camera, and he had to jump back, laughing. When Raúl showed Ernesto the video, his twin rolled his eyes.
Though things had got better between him and Wilber once they moved out of the tension-laden Hillside apartment, after a few months they were back at each other’s throats: Ernesto didn’t clean up his dishes, Wilber didn’t drive him somewhere he’d promised, Ernesto had a bad attitude, and on and on. He and Wilber avoided each other both by accident and by choice.
Things came to a head in May. Convinced that Wilber had taken a stack of his cash, Ernesto exploded, telling his older brother to fuck off, that he didn’t need him, that he was leaving. A few days later he heard from friends at work about an available bedroom that would cost five hundred dollars a month, and it was settled. He moved out the next day.
Raúl, as usual, was in the middle. If he left with his twin, he would piss Wilber off, and his big brother would be stuck with a two-bedroom apartment that he and Gabby couldn’t afford. “He found this place so we could all live together,” Raúl reasoned. But he didn’t like the idea of living apart from his twin or taking on Ernesto’s share of the rent.
Ernesto, prideful and eager to get away from Wilber, told Raúl he didn’t care if he came or not. “Do what you want, doesn’t matter to me,” Ernesto said as he crammed his stuff into his backpack and shopping bags.
“It’s just for now,” said Raúl, “until we figure things out.”
“You’re messy,” he snapped at Raúl, pointing to the soda cans and piles of dirty clothes.
Raúl laughed, but Ernesto didn’t.
Ernesto’s new place was in the three-bedroom lower level of a duplex farther east. He shared it with a middle-aged couple and a single guy in his thirties. He put a lock on his bedroom door so he could come and go as he pleased. After a few days, he decided he liked having a place of his own, apart from Raúl—something he’d never had before. He could keep his things organized, and he didn’t have to worry about family, like Wilber, being all up in his business. Apart from the line in the morning for the shower, it felt like a pretty good place for Ernesto. And anyway, he saw his twin every day at school.
On Tuesdays, their day off from work, Raúl spent the night at Ernesto’s. Sometimes on other days, too. They’d stay up late, listening to low music and texting and falling asleep on the same small bed.
When Raúl wasn’t at Ernesto’s, he was spending a lot of time alone: in his room, on the way to school, on the way home from work. He was lonesome there at the sink, scrubbing the detritus of meals. He hung out with friends during lunch sometimes, and in class, but there wasn’t really time after school to socialize. He had more time alone, to think and to remember.
Through a friend at work, Raúl found a girlfriend, who lived in San Jose. He skipped a few days of school that spring to go down and see her, taking the bus from the East Oakland terminal. They understood each other, Raúl felt, and texting her all night, he felt less lonely.
Was Raúl in love? “I guess so,” he said. “We must be, since we fight so much.” But with his schedule and her living in San Jose, they rarely saw each other.
They liked to play a game where he pretended to be her dad and get her in trouble. “I’m mad at you, mija!” he’d say or write in Spanish. “I’m going to punish you.”
“Papa, I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again!” she’d respond. “I promise!” She’d act hurt and scared, and he’d forgive her for whatever transgression, real or imagined, she’d committed.
One night she admitted to Raúl that she’d smoked pot that day at school. This upset him. It wasn’t good for girls to smoke pot, and he didn’t like that she was doing those kinds of things without him around. Who knew what she did when she smoked pot, who could take advantage of her, or who she was hanging out with?
“Papa, I’m sorry!” she wrote.
“It’s not funny,” he said.
“Papa, don’t be mad! Forgive me!”
But it wasn’t a game this time. Raúl brooded. He wanted to get back at her.
The next day he asked a friend to buy him vodka, which he mixed into a blue Gatorade and drank down. By third period, he was stumbling around campus alone. There had been a party in his class that day, and someone had brought Taki chips; now his lips were covered in red powder, giving him the look of a washed-up drag queen who’d misapplied her lipstick.
I found him sitting on the sidewalk outside school, waiting for Ernesto to be finished with class and take him home. He swayed and rambled like a small-town drunk. “It’s because of my friends!” he said of his drinking. “My ex-friends!
“Do you realize,” he said, finger pointed up toward the sky, gaze veering left, “that my parents, they pray for me? They do prayers every week at church for me.” He paused, almost dramatically. “Prayers,” he said. “For me. And for my brother.
“I just want to show them,” he said. “I want to prove to them…” He trailed off.
“To the ex-friends, or to your parents?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.
“I can’t explain. What those fuckers did to me. But they pray. Every Sunday at church! My parents pray for me to be okay.”
A couple of weeks later Raúl and his girlfriend had another big fight, a permanent one, and broke up.
The twins’ girlfriends came and went that year. They found most of them through friends of friends on Facebook, or WhatsApp or Kik, where their profiles were public. They’d strike up a flirtation, and eventually, if things went well, they’d agree to meet in person. The connections rarely lasted long, though, or got very physical. They never had the time.
Raúl posted on Facebook in English:
I’m fucking single.
Money was tight, and Wilber, Gabby, and Raúl did not pay their rent on time. After four months living there, they thought they’d get some leeway, but the landlord ordered them evicted: they had two weeks to move.
Once they got the eviction notice, Raúl and Wilber decided to part ways. Temporarily, anyway. At least now he wouldn’t have to choose between Wilber and Ernesto, Raúl thought—the eviction had given him a clean break, a good reason for moving in with his twin.
But suddenly Ernesto didn’t seem so sure about welcoming him. “You’re too messy,” he said the week before move-out day, biting into an apple he’d swiped from a friend’s cafeteria tray. “My room’s too small, there’s no space. You’ll have to find some place of your own.”
“Fine,” Raúl said, cementing his gaze. “Whatever.”
Ernesto chucked the apple core into the trash can.
Raúl shook the conversation off and laughed at a joke a friend made in passing. Ernesto was just playing around, was all.
But when Ernesto said the same thing later that afternoon, Raúl took it harder. “You think I want to live with your stupid ass?” Raúl said. “Fucking animal.”
After the final afternoon bell rang, Raúl sat outside school on the cement retaining wall, waiting for Ernesto. His shoulders were hunched, his head hung over his phone.
Passing by, I stopped and sat down next to him. “How are things?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said. I asked if he wasn’t worried about the eviction; he didn’t answer right away. I told him about short-term shelter options in Oakland, where he could go anytime if we couldn’t find him a more permanent place to stay.
“Shelter?” he said. “Like in Texas? No, Miss, thank you, but I can’t go to a place like that.”
Just then Ernesto exited a side door, spotted us, and came over.
Raúl bolted up. “Gotta go to work,” he said, and walked toward the bus stop.
I asked Ernesto how things were going. “Oh, fine,” he said. “Things are good, Miss. Remember how bad they were last year? It’s not like that anymore. Things are really starting to get good.”
Was he not worried about his brother, with all the stress of the move?
“No,” he said. In his eyes, they were getting along great.
They didn’t talk much about the eviction for the next couple of days, but for Raúl, it was the subtext of every conversation. “I guess I’ll be homeless,” he said one afternoon.
Ernesto just shrugged. Not my problem.
“Who wants to live with an animal like you anyway?” Raúl said. “I want my own space. I’ll get a place of my own.”
Every time one of them spoke about housing, it was like a chess move. Ernesto controlled the game, and Raúl’s defensive strategy was to avoid the position of begging, feigning indifference to what Ernesto had to offer: a room with a bed. The clock kept ticking, the drop-dead date approaching. They both knew Raúl had nowhere to go.
When push came to shove, a few days before eviction day, Ernesto relented. “Of course, I wanted my brother to come live with me,” he told me. “Obviously.” He’d just been kidding all along, and he was sure Raúl had known that.
We stuffed Raúl’s possessions into garbage bags and grocery totes. One bag held a cracked DVD, batteries, a razor, a tub of Nivea skin cream, a battered stick of deodorant, and a large wooden plaque with an old-fashioned schooner, embossed in metal, with a message below that read, ENJOY, LIVE, RELAX. Raúl scooped up a pile of thin, polished wooden sticks—a disassembled easel, he explained, for the paintings he would like to start doing. It had stood in his room ready at attention, empty. “You should have seen the paintings I used to do in El Salvador,” he said. “I was really, really good.”
We were taking his things to Ernesto’s before school. In the watery early-morning light of spring, East Oakland was just getting going: the highway was thickening with commuters a few blocks west of us, cars were sputtering into action, people were shaking off sleep on the way to the bus stop. We lifted the easel and bags into the car, which was now blocking an idling minivan. A little girl with pigtails and pink shorts rode in circles on a kick scooter as her friend, to whom she called and waved, approached the car whose path I was blocking.
“It’s time for school, time for school!” the girl’s mother cajoled in Spanish. She was heavyset and wore gray sweatshorts, her hair up in a messy knot. “Let’s go, mija!” She held out her daughter’s lunchbox until she climbed into the minivan. The pigtailed girl pedaled to her door, dropped her scooter inside, and ran to her own waiting mother. We slung the last of Raúl’s things into the trunk and buckled ourselves in.
“Say goodbye to your house!” I said cheerily, trying to lighten the mood.
“I’m coming back later today to clean it,” he replied in monotone, “before work.”
I reversed, getting out of everyone’s way. We drove slowly by the ordinary yet spectacular sight of mothers taking their kids to school.