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YUÑIOR COULDN’T SLEEP. Lately, his nights were becoming more restless as he dealt with the idea of getting married before having a chance to live. The home he grew up in was no longer quiet. It was full of laughter and babies, and soon he would be adding to the pile of dirty diapers. Sweat covered his body, making him rise from the bed in search of a bit of warm milk to help him get rested before tomorrow’s activities.
Down the front stairs, he went, hearing mumblings in the kitchen followed by laughter and two deep voices. He rounded the corner and came to a complete stop, baffled at what he saw, yet thoroughly amused. He cleared his throat.
Eduardo looked up to see his eldest standing in the entryway and greeted him by yelling, “Yuñior!”
Mr. Yield, equally excited, lowered his voice several octaves and bellowed as if he were hitting the low notes in a country song, “Eddddd!”
“Ah...what is going on down here?” Yuñior asked.
“We were hungry, and I wanted to show Brody the Johnson how to make arepas. We are cooking with the gas,” Eduardo announced proudly.
“Bueno, but why are you naked?” Yuñior sighed, thinking to himself it wasn’t the strangest thing he’d walked in and saw his father doing.
“We were hot!” Mr. Yield exclaimed. “You know we’re only about 300 miles from the equator? It’s so hot in this mufucka, it feels like my balls are in Brazil dangling over the imaginary line.”
Eduardo laughed. “Your balls look like they were shaven by a drunken barber. It is not right for a grown man to shave his snake. A snake needs scales, like me. No, wait. I don’t have scales. I have the man fur!”
“Papa, have you two been drinking the bottle from Bobby Ray the Blakemore?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Yield said with pride, “we had half a bottle of Scotch. That shit was so smooth, it made me want to dance, and I don’t dance. Señor, make your body snake tattoo dance again.”
Eduardo busted into a few old school hip hop moves, and the Fer-de-Lance etched into his skin moved as if it were slithering, but then he stopped. His eyes squinted as if he were trying to recall a memory. Eduardo pointed at Mr. Yield.
“A few minutes prior, he was making his snake swirl around like the helicopter. I made him stop, or I was going to cut him with my favorite knife,” Eduardo slurred, dropping the arepa into the hot oil. He jumped back from the splatter, covering his junk with one hand. “Don’t want to hurt my friend. My wife would not be happy with me.”
“You should let some of that grease burn down that bush. Manscaping is the new thing. No woman wants to stick her face in an afro. My wife appreciates the detailing I take to have a well-groomed, fresh penis,” Mr. Yield announced with his hands on his hips in a prideful boast.
“Señor, I have better things to do than sit about trimming my pubes. If you weren’t married, I would swear you were the gay,” Eduardo answered, thinking more about his statement. “Wait, you could be the gay and still like to poke the puss.”
Finding humor in his words, he laughed loudly, sitting down in the chair. Thinking twice about it, he popped back up on his feet. “My wife would have my head if she knew I was sitting my naked bum on the newly upos...ulpos...new fabric. I cannot say that word.”
“Papa,” Yuñior interjected, “I think you and Brody the Johnson should sleep it off.”
“No, I think you should get naked and join the party,” Eduardo said, “and then we can go out and take a late-night swim as nature intended us to!”
Eduardo’s eyelids began to flutter as he opted this time to not sit in the chair, but on the top of the table, eliciting a frown from Mr. Yield who swore he would never eat at the table again. Yuñior went to the downstairs linen cabinet and retrieved two bath towels. He draped both men and sat them down at the table. Checking the arepas, he flipped them in the pan and started brewing a pot of coffee.
For good measure, he snapped a photo of the two bare-chested, slack-jawed men and sent the image to Saxton Blakemore. The caption read, “Bobby Ray the Blakemore strikes again.”
“Would anyone care to explain how you two got to this point?” Yuñior asked, taking the arepas from the pan to drain on a napkin. The last he saw of the men were after dinner. He had played “Brahms Violin Sonata No. 3” for the guests he’d invited to Las Tierras. After the well-received recital, which shocked both Mr. Yield and his wife, Eduardo made mention of wanting to speak with Mr. Yield, who suggested the women join them as well so everyone could be on the same sheet of music.
In his best hopes, Yuñior prayed his father would take a liking to Mr. Yield, but this was a new step he hadn’t expected.
“I assume your talk went well?” Yuñior asked, and both men offered lopsided grins. “I take that means yes.”
****
THE CONVERSATION HADN’T gone to plan. Eduardo’s objective had been to expose Mr. Yield as an opportunist hedging his bets to get a free ride from his son. Ryanne sat in the meeting to ensure that the kid in Yuñior wasn’t going to be taken advantage of by a grown man with ill intentions. Millicent sat in just hoping to understand the odd people who grew cocaine and coffee, hyping up the world in one form or the other.
“Brody the Johnson, I wish to speak with you in private,” Eduardo said, asking the man to come into his office.
“Señor, if this chat is about what I think it is, our wives should also hear it all,” Mr. Yield said.
“Are you afraid I shall do you harm?”
“Not at all, but it should be clear and heard from my mouth what I’m about to say,” Yield replied.
Eduardo’s response to the strong boast was to close the office door after the ladies were seated and open the closet to his weapons room. Mr. Yield wasn’t impressed as he glanced at the guns, knives, and martial arts gear in the closet. Instead, he took a seat in the chair opposite Ryanne and exhaled in boredom.
“My son is an expert in all of these weapons, yet he chose you...help me to understand this matter since it is perplexing my brain,” Eduardo said.
“Those weapons are part of the problem,” he started, switching over to his professor voice to explain why their son was failing his class. “You’ve trained him to be everything you want, and that’s great, but when he is in the company of men who do that kind of shit for a living, and he makes them uncomfortable, then you might have a problem.”
“When was he in the company of men that do what for a living?” Eduardo asked, raising his voice. Ryanne sat forward in her seat, wanting to know as well.
“A couple of weeks ago,” Yield said, remaining calm.
“Why was he in the company of these men?”
“Long story, but your real question is why me?”
“No,” Eduardo said, “my question centers on why my son in the company of killers? And how did you two meet?”
“Eddie. Eddie?” Ryanne said, taking her husband by the hand and trying to get him to take a seat. “Maybe we should start by asking Mr. Johnson to tell us what he does for a living first.”
“I’m a Technician, and I work for The Company,” Yield replied, watching Eduardo take a seat. The facial expression on the Czar denoted he knew what both the title and the organization meant. “My specialty is retrieving objects which have been taken or lost and returning said items to the rightful owners. I don’t shoot anything; I simply locate and retrieve that which is missing.”
Eduardo’s hands gripped the arms of the chair, his knuckles turning white in anger as he clenched his teeth. His gaze was intense as it bore holes into the man named Yield.
“My handle is Mr. Yield. It was given to me because I have none, and if I’m sent to find a missing item, I won’t stop until it has been located and returned,” Brody said.
“Mr. Johnson, who hired you to find this taken object?” Ryanne asked.
“Blakemore,” Yield said, looking at Eduardo with his good eye. “However, the item wasn’t taken. The object in question was located in the belly of a ship where it went in to locate one ditzy blond who considered herself to be a savior of the lost.”
A bevy of expletives in Spanish came out of the mouth of Eduardo as Ryanne’s hand rubbed his thigh in an attempt to soothe the frothy mouth beast. It wasn’t what the man wanted to hear, but he needed to know in moderation, as Yuñior had put it, what happened that night.
“Since I don’t shoot anything, Blakemore called in backup in the form of Mr. Stop, The Mann, and Mrs. Hump,” Yield said. “To answer your next question, the object didn’t need to be rescued. It took the lead and issued the orders, and the four of us followed without question. He handled himself well, and we had his back.”
Eduardo relaxed a bit in the chair. Ryanne’s hand went to her chest, and her eyes began to mist over. The problem as Yield saw it was that these parents didn’t really know their kid. One only saw him as a kid; the other saw him as something altogether different.
“Don’t get misty-eyed Señora. Yuñior is no longer a little boy. Your sister covered him in kisses, petting and fawning over him, which he explained that it wasn’t appropriate,” Yield offered, “and neither are your tears of concern.”
“You met my sister?” Ryanne said.
“Yes, a couple of weeks ago.”
Eduardo tapped his fingers on the edge of the chair, anxiously wanting to know what he couldn’t ask because it would make him complicit in Yuñior’s wrong-doings. Instead, he waited for Brody to fill him in. He would ask other questions when the opportunity presented itself.
“These men, Stop and Mann, took orders from my son?” Eduardo asked.
“Yes, they did. It was quite amazing to see that with a flick of Yuńior’s wrist, both men knew what to do without Yuñior opening his mouth,” Yield said, watching Eduardo fill with pride. “My concern is that he handled himself with such ease that if not given a chance to love and get hurt to the point of breaking him, the marriage to this intended woman is not going to work. Your son killed without flinching. What if she does something he doesn’t like? There’s nothing to stop him from ending her life without flinching.”
“Breaking him? What does this have to do with his marriage and commanding others? Your logic makes no sense,” Ryanne questioned.
“It all makes sense when the whole picture is taken into a frame, Señora. A man can’t truly love another without first loving a woman that is no good for him and getting his heart broken,” Yield said softly, “because it is then that a man understands what he wants in a relationship and what doesn’t work. He evolves and grows into the man he truly needs to be.”
“I assume from the way you say it that you’ve experienced this type of love,” Ryanne asked, and Yield looked over at his wife, who had remained very quiet the thus far.
“I have the scar to prove it,” he replied, pointing as his eye.
“Since this injury, have you reconciled with the one that hurt you?” Ryanne asked.
“Nope,” Yield countered, “and when I saw her a couple of weeks ago, the anger still bubbled inside of me, and the pain came back like a blow to my chest.”
Millicent shifted in her seat, looking at her husband with squinted eyes. “A couple of weeks ago? Is that why you and Mann looked all crazy when we were on vacation?”
Yield turned in the seat to face his wife. He sighed, trying to give her a reassuring smile, which quickly faded as he stared into angry eyes and saw her balled up fists. The truth was simple. He only needed to stay on track.
“No, Mann and I were still in the moment of realizing that grown men were paying traffickers to take children away from their parents to sell them to the highest bidders for nefarious reasons. Yuñior intervened and sent the children to Juchitán for a better life,” Yield told them. “I thought of Chad and the children we would have. Yuñior thought of his sisters and the culture of a people that would be taken from these kids. It was a difficult night for us all.”
“Why you?” Eduardo inquired, squinting, watching Mr. Yield suspiciously.
“Me? Shit, who you asking? I asked myself the same thing over and over again, but when things got sticky, I stood at Yuñior’s side, ready to pull the trigger if necessary, but my job was to return the object unharmed to Blakemore. That is what I was going to do even if it meant getting hurt in the process. Honestly, the thought of your son getting wounded on my watch meant there would be hell to pay with you and would bring on a war in America that no one needed,” Yield stated. “He chose me because he wants what you have with Blakemore.”
“How do you know what I have with Blakemore?” Eduardo asked, the anger in his eyes coming back in full force.
“Because Blakemore couldn’t shut up about your adventures that none of us wanted to hear,” Yield said, watching Eduardo go all soft at his words. “Blakemore cherishes the friendship, and Yuñior wants the same thing — a friend he can trust who stands at his side through thick and thin for no personal profits.”
“But there is personal gain from you in this matter, is there not?”
“Yuñior offered to pay my salary for a year so I could traipse around the world with him. He also offered to pay my wife as a chaperone for him and Irena when she accompanies him to certain places,” Yield said, “I came here to speak with you to tell you I won’t be taking the job.”
Eduardo seemed offended. “Is it not enough money?”
“Señor, it isn’t about the money,” Yield said. “There are trips I will take with your son, but he won’t have to pay me. My wife doesn’t need to be paid to take a free vacation either to chaperone two adults. I’m going because I like the kid.”
“I’m confused,” Ryanne stated. “You’re going to leave your wife and kid to go bumping around the world with Yuñior?”
“No, Ma’am. Please allow me to explain,” he said, looking at Millicent, who seemed shocked at his confession. This is where the truth mattered, and he was going to be as honest as he could. “I used to be a Professor of Archeology at the University of Texas. I was one year away from tenure with funding for excavations and digs for five years throughout Central America and Mexico, but I took a side job with The Company to find some photos for a Senator. That’s when I met her.”
“Her, as in the woman you saw a couple of weeks ago,” Millicent said with her lip curled.
“Yes, the same,” he replied.
“She gave me this,” he added, pointing to his eye, “and while I bled into my eye, not knowing if I would lose my vision, we had mind-blowing sex. Lizzie is the type of woman to show a young man how his penis is actually supposed to work.”
“Good grief,” Millicent said, crossing her legs.
“I bring her up not to hurt you, but to explain how I lost everything,” Yield said. “One job finding those photos and returning them to the Senator paid me more than I made in a year at the University. Grading papers and listening to parents make excuses for their children folks thought they knew only to find out their kids were assholes had worn me down. I took more assignments from The Company and spent every damned dime I could be romancing Lizzie.”
“What is the point of this story?” Millicent asked.
“There came a time in the relationship when I had to walk away,” Yield said. “It broke me, Millicent. It broke me down to a blubbering mass of emotions. Until you, I didn’t love again. I didn’t even try. See, in order to have her, to save her life, I had to take another. Yuñior found himself in the same situation, but he had to take more than one. He didn’t truly love Melissa. He walked away, ensured that she would be just fine, but he didn’t look back. It took me years not to look back, and a couple of weeks ago, we left Lizzie on the curb and not once did I look back.”
Millicent reached out and touched his hand. She didn’t know these things about him and appreciated him sharing such a delicate matter in front of strangers. It took a great deal of courage to speak his own truth.
“I’m telling you all this because 18 months is a long-damned time until that wedding. There will be another woman before he says I do, and my fear is that if he continues as he is, there’s nothing to stop him from waking up one night and ending the marriage courtesy of his favorite knife,” Yield said, making Eduardo pop to his feet.
“You speak of him as if he is one hair from losing his mind and killing everyone in his path!” Eduardo exclaimed. “My son is not a sociopath!”
“Not yet, but you’ve groomed him to be one,” Mr. Yield said, waiting on Eduardo’s fist to connect with his face. “He sought my friendship to help guide him so he won’t become this heartless man. I accepted because he needs a friend to give him a balance between the two worlds he seeks to walk in. I have no ulterior motives other than going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids, but if I truly wanted to go, I would have done it by now.”
“Entiendo,” Eduardo said. “You shall provide this guidance?”
“Señor, I shall do my best because your son is kinda fucking amazing,” Yield said. “I’m honored that he asked.”
Eduardo waited for a bead. He watched the face of the man his son deemed worthy of friendship. He wasn’t a bad sort, but he was no Saxton the Blakemore. This is what Yuńior wanted. He asked for help from this Brody the Johnson, a man he called a friend. Since he couldn’t fight it, Eduardo decided to allow it to play out and see how it would end.
“Bueno, we should drink and make the toast! I have a bottle of Scotch given to me by Bobby Ray the Blakemore,” Eduardo said, anxious to close the conversation before Yield provided too much information.
“Oh dear Lord, not that bottle of hooch,” Ryanne said, looking at Mr. Yield. “Mr. Johnson, I have to ask about the children sent to Juchitán. I’ve never heard of this country in Mexico. Eddie, do you know of this place?”
“Sí, it is a village in Mexico that is run by women,” he said, retrieving the Scotch and two glasses from the cabinet.
Ryanne asked, “You know of this village?”
“I do. It is where my mother was born and grew up,” Eduardo said, opening the bottle and pouring two fingers in each glass. “I shall send supplies and goods to the village for the children and hire a few extra teachers to accommodate the new load.”
“Not necessary, Señor. Yuñior has already seen to it,” Mr. Yield said with a smile. “I hope I’ve answered all of your questions and concerns.”
“I am satisfied,” Eduardo said, passing Mr. Yield a glass.
“One other thing,” Ryanne added as she stood up, “if your wife is to serve as a chaperone for Yuñior and Isabela, Las Tierras shall compensate her. Free trip or not, she still has to supervise them to maintain decorum. Come with me, Millicent, and I shall cut you a check.”
Millicent smiled, getting to her feet and following Ryanne to her office, leaving Eduardo and Yield alone. Brody watched his wife leave the room only to be surprised when he turned back to face Eduardo. Brody didn’t have time to react as a solid fist socked him in his bad eye.
“What was that for?” Yield said, holding the eye which already had blurred vision.
“Because you deserved it,” Eduardo said. “My son went into that ship to get that silly blond woman, and you didn’t stop him. Plus, you allowed Tito Montoya to punch him in the face. And you called him a sociopath. Of this, I take grave offense.”
“Yuńior killed people with his shiny little ninja stars and collected them from the dead bodies and wiped them off and put the damned things back in his pocket!”
“Really?” Eduardo exclaimed; his eyes bright with pride.
“Yes, really! He also shot two people without looking at where the bullets were going to land while standing toe to toe with Tito, jabbing at the man about his mother being a whore,” Yield exclaimed, holding his eye.
Eduardo started to laugh. “Tito’s mother is a whore,” he chuckled.
“Out of everything I just said, you’re laughing at the man’s mother being free with her loving?” Yield scowled, accepting the glass. “I see where Yuñior gets it.”
“Well, he is ah...how do you say, ah sí, a chip off the old brick,” Eduardo exclaimed, raising his glass and tossing the dark liquor down his throat like a shot.
“A chip off the old block,” Yield corrected, accepting his glass.
“Tomato, potato,” Eduardo shrugged, pouring himself another drink.
