Where did all this traffic come from?
Mother had died the week before, but his birthday party had been announced a long while before that. Long at least in terms of Big Angel’s diminished prospects. A week was a long time when you were racing the Lupah.
People were coming from everywhere: Bakersfield, L.A., Vegas. Little Angel, his youngest brother, was coming all the way from Seattle. People had made reservations. Taken time off from work. High rollers and college students, prison veteranos and welfare mothers, happy kids and sad old-timers and pinches gringos and all available relatives.
It would be tight.
So he courted outrage by having Mama cremated. There was no time left for a big Catholic funeral in a big Catholic church. What church would they have picked? Half the family had briefly become Mormons, and some of them were in a UFO-worshipping group awaiting the return of the Anunnaki when Planet X came back into Earth’s orbit. Some of them were evangelicals. Or nothing. Lalo was probably an atheist. Or a sun worshipper. The eldest son of Big Angel’s brother César seemed to think he was a Viking. Big Angel truly had no time for these details.
He had made the even more daring move of arranging for her funeral to take place a week later than expected so his birthday party would be the day after. Ashes could last forever. No worries.
Nobody seemed to care—they were happy he was handling everything. That’s what he did. They didn’t want to be responsible, because the Great Mother would have found fault with any funeral they conspired to offer. And Big Angel was reliable. It was simple to get orders from him and follow them. So they had adjusted to the funereal addendum to the birthday party agenda without a fuss. Most of them were relieved because they didn’t have enough vacation days available to make two trips. They certainly didn’t have the funds. One weekend worked for everybody.
More traffic? Where is everybody going?
Big Angel put his hands over his eyes, if only to avoid looking at the blackness seeping up the backs of his wrists. His hands had black splotches on them too. He never looked at his legs, afraid of what he’d see.
Outside, the afternoon sun burned apertures in the clouds, charring the floating crevasses red along their edges and shooting hauntings of yellow light across the city. Like curtains of golden mesh, blowing in a cool breeze. Big Angel calculated in his mind how far toward Hawaii the sun must be; he saw angles and degrees etched into the blue above the flaming clouds. Heaven was a blueprint.
Mother had never been close to him after La Paz. She had coddled his siblings, including his half brother, Little Angel, who wasn’t even her son. She had seen some charm in him that Big Angel had never managed to fully accept.
He watched the sky. He was amassing evidence of any kind of signal sent from Beyond. Anything at all. Braulio? Mother? Anybody? Rain was good. He could work with rain. Many messages in rain. Rainbows were even better.
When he was a boy, Mother had taught him that a rainbow was a bridge where angels walked down from heaven. In Spanish, it was an arco iris. This was so much more lovely than English, like the name of a butterfly or hummingbird or daisy. He felt smug about this: go, Spanish! Sunflower: girasol, he thought.
girasol
mariposa
colibrí
margarita
But no rainbows were visible.
“It was good of Mother,” he said, “to die first.”
“Ay, Flaco,” his wife said in Spanish. “You know. She could not stand to see her son die before she did.”
“Who’s going to die, Perla?” he said. “I’m too busy to die.”
He said that a lot. But he also said “I am ready to die,” and as often.
He had confessed it to his priest. Almost as soon as Doctor Nagel told him the gushes of fresh blood returning to his urine signaled the collapse coming. That moment, oddly, made him feel calm: he had stared at the doctor and thought, Her name is Mercedes Joy Nagel, and I wish I had bought a Mercedes because I would have felt joy. The x-rays had shown grape clusters of death all inside his abdomen and two dark knots in his lungs. He sat small and alone in that office, putting his most stoic warrior face forward, staring the doctor down. “How long?” A shrug, a pat. “Not long. Weeks.” “Can I have a lollipop?” he said. She opened her glass jar. He liked cherry.
He called his priest and confessed over the phone, then told Perla he had been talking about baseball with a friend.
“Pops,” said his son. “I ain’t gonna lie. Grams done it on purpose. Took care of business. For reals.”
“She was like that,” Big Angel said.
“Rainbow, Daddy!” his daughter cried.
Big Angel looked where Minnie was pointing and finally smiled. Good work, God.
* * *
Little Angel had landed.
Baby Brother, he announced to himself, in the house!
Big Angel’s half brother had thought he’d be late. As old as he was, they all thought of him as the baby, including himself. The oldest twenty-eight-year-old on Earth, an age he had managed to remain for an extra twenty years.
You couldn’t miss the matriarch’s funeral. There was no way he was going to be late. She wasn’t his mom—he was often reminded of this in small, pointed ways. He was the footnote to the family, that detail everybody had to deal with when he deigned to appear. Son of an American woman who had been branded in the family legends as the gringa hussy who had taken away their Great Father, Don Antonio. Somehow they even resented his mother’s death. She had managed to join Father in the afterlife before Mamá América could go over to wrestle him back from the American’s clutches.
Little Angel didn’t want to be in California, land of sorrows. And he didn’t like breaching the thousand-mile buffer zone between himself and his origins. But the fear of Big Angel’s displeasure drove him forward harder than his reluctance held him back. He’d forced the plane from Seattle to fly faster by the sheer strength of his will. The overwhelming mural of sunlight ricocheting off coastal peaks and spilling over them to the ocean—going from burning red to blue, then green, then purple—hypnotized him. Then the harrowing plunge toward San Diego, the feeling that his plane was passing between the buildings on its way to the runway…and he was home.
He realized he was at the car rental office before eight in the morning, and he felt silly. Yet relieved. No missing the funeral. No smoldering, wounded stares of reproach from Big Brother. He was on Big Angel’s schedule—always early.
When they were in their cups, Big Angel called their brotherhood “the Alpha and the Omega.” Little Angel thought the tequila really suited him. Let him out of his self-imposed sanctity. The first and the last, eh? Little Angel had parsed the meta-messages in that text enough to earn a PhD in cross-border gnostic sibling ontologies. He smiled, more or less.
Big Angel seemed to think, when he was loaded, that they were some sort of wrestling tag team. He’d announce: “Coming into the ring, weighing two hundred pounds, from parts unknown—the Omega!” Baffled women and kids would clap as Little Angel raised his hands.
Little Angel, somewhere inside himself, felt good when he heard this. He felt witnessed. None of the rest of them had ever paid attention to his boyhood. Hell, they hadn’t even seen it. Their father had made sure they were kept far apart.
But Big Angel saw. He was the eldest, and by then had his own car and job. He came to visit their drab Clairemont house, to the consternation of Little Angel’s American mom. But she made him chicken potpies and tried hard to be a good sport anyway. By then she had learned that Don Antonio would come to their San Diego home with lingerie tucked in his jacket pockets. She was done with him but had nowhere to go. She smiled at the boys even though she was exhausted and always nervous. Even though Big Angel frightened her with his black-eyed glare. She knew he hated her.
Big Angel knew what his baby brother’s Saturdays were like: morning cartoons, Three Stooges reruns, followed by some fat boy lunch of cold spaghetti or frijoles sandwiches on white bread, and chocolate milk and comic books. Or Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Monsters were his mania. And nobody in his version of the family approved. Don Antonio would begrudgingly buy him a copy at the liquor store, even though he berated the kid afterward. Little Angel didn’t care; his mind was crowded with King Kong and Reptilicus, the Wolf Man and King Ghidorah. The monster magazines made his mother despair even worse than Superman comics or MAD magazine.
And after lunch, it was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Followed by wrestling. Big Angel had taken part in this ritual perhaps three times, but he never forgot it. His little brother’s fervid insistence on these things, in order, without interruption. The ridiculous wrestlers falling around the ring in gray-scale black and white: Classy Freddie Blassie, Pedro Morales, The Destroyer, Bobo Brazil. Little Angel seemed to think he was friends with them all.
At 3:00, Moona Lisa appeared on channel 10—Science Fiction Theater. She lounged around a cheap set that looked like the moon, dressed in Morticia Addams skintight dresses. Big Angel thought she was hot. But Little Angel didn’t seem to notice. He was holding his breath for Them and The Brain from Planet Arous.
Big Angel made Little Angel his research project. He had never seen his own isolation mirrored in the world. Little Angel finally understood this, years later, when his brother shouted his faux ring announcements.
They even shared an English slang exclamation they picked up from Dick Lane on KTLA, brought in fuzzy and snowy on the rabbit ears. “Whoa, Nelly!” Lane called whenever The Destroyer made Blassie kneel in the corner of the ring, begging for mercy.
So when Big Angel ring-announced him, sometimes Little Angel would shout back, “Whoa, Nelly!”
The fam had just stared.
* * *
The Dollar car-rental office had only a Crown Victoria available. Black. In his fantasies, Little Angel had imagined snagging something more dramatic. A Mustang GT500 convertible, perhaps. Or a Challenger Hellcat. Something with a horsepower of 700. Kid brother makes good. Bad to the bone.
He initially balked at this fossilized cop car, a car for granddads taking their golf friends to a tasty brunch in La Jolla. But in the end it amused him, and he took it. He could have put ten bags in the trunk. He tossed his overnighter in there—it looked huddled and unloved. His shoulder messenger bag went on the couch-like back seat, and he settled in the front. Professor Little Angel, with a satchel full of notebooks and William Stafford poetry. He would ignore the ten papers that needed grading.
Time to boogie on down there to the south side. Time to think, make up his strategies. Doctor Think Too Much, back in town.
Sometimes, when Big Angel was in one of his moods, he called Little Angel things other than his name. “The American.” What the hell. How was that an insult? But it had some inexplicable sting. Especially coming from a Republican. Or at least he thought Big Angel was a Republican. Why didn’t he just say “The Liberal”? They’d had their only fistfight over it. Just once. Blood on their lips.
Did it have bearing on this day?
The car was vast and pillowy. Little Angel felt like he was driving a square acre of 1979. It smelled like cigarette smoke—reminded him of his dad. He took the turns wide and hit I-5 like a cloud being pushed by a sea storm. Being in no hurry, he decided to go on a slight expedition to the north. He hadn’t been back in years, but you never forget the hometown. Even though it seemed he came home only for funerals.
He could have gone left and rolled up Clairemont Drive to his old neighborhood. Stared at his sunburned house on the Indian-themed streets above Mission Bay. Mohican Ave. He knew his mom’s jungle of succulents and bamboo, geraniums and jade trees, was gone now. It had been dust long before the drought. He knew the front and back yards were bare San Diego dirt, and a dirty Japanese pickup slouched in her driveway, a Ski-Doo beside it. A crooked basketball hoop screwed in above the garage door. People he had never met.
His old Goth sweetheart, Lycia, still lived on Apache. A grandmother now. He could almost smell the scent of sandalwood that came from her thighs.
* * *
Before the family had even gotten Big Angel dressed, Little Angel was speeding off the freeway at Midway to hit Tower Records. He wanted to hear some Bowie. Ziggy Stardust always made it better. The Crown Vic had a CD slot. Keep your electric eye on me, babe. He and Lycia had cried every time that song played, and then they’d made love. And now Bowie was gone.
Even if Tower wasn’t open yet, he was willing to hang out in the parking lot and wait. But he couldn’t find the record store anywhere.
He drove past the Sports Arena. When they were kids, they’d called it “The Sports Aroma.” He pulled a U and rolled back. He never saw Tower. He drove down the long block slowly. People honked, but he didn’t care. Tower was gone. That was some happy horseshit right there.
Back on the freeway, but he wasn’t going to be bested by this disappointing turn of events. He couldn’t seem to find 91X on the radio. He headed south to Washington Street and sped up the slope toward Hillcrest. Off the Record would ease his itch. Damn right—best CD bins in town.
But that was gone too.
Someone had come into his memories and erased whole blocks with an invisible bulldozer. He rolled on to the empty parking lot where The Rip Van Winkle Room used to stand. Alberto’s Tacos was there now.
He pulled in and just stared. His dad had once played piano in there for tips. Rip’s Room, the hipsters had called it. The piano lounge was up a half set of carpeted stairs, in red light. The whole place smelling of cigarettes and liquor and perfume and Aqua Velva. Little Angel’s memory was echoing and ripe: candied cherries, vanilla Cokes, Patsy Cline on the juke when his dad was not tinkling “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” Cocktail waitresses with lips the same color as the cherries, wafting clouds of White Shoulders and musk oil, tracing Dad’s back with their fingernails as they passed. He was there most Friday and Saturday nights.
Walkin’ After Midnight
I Fall to Pieces
Crazy
Little Angel never understood what those songs were about. But he sure understood what those red nails on Dad’s back meant. Don Antonio, with his carefully pomaded hair and his dapper little Pedro Infante mustache, used Little Angel’s charm to help him reel in waitresses and bowling wives and bored retirees looking for a night of passion. He trained Little Angel in the art of making women feel visible. “If you teach a woman to feel like a work of art, you will make love to her every night.” Uh-huh, Dad. Right. Got it.
Dad gifted him with porno cocktail napkins featuring cartoons of busty and idiotic farm girls romping in barns with salesmen. Why were these guys in barns wearing suits and little hats, he wondered. And tricky books of matches with naughty zingers built in. Like the Rip Room’s legendary Baby Bobby matchbook. Wherein Baby Bobby could be observed on the cover fiddling between his legs with chubby fingers. And when Little Angel opened the cover, a single red-headed match in a little pink plastic tube popped out at him, a delighted Baby Bobby with arms outstretched in rapturous erect joy.
Little Angel was in fifth grade.
Love Is Blue
Perfidia
The Girl from Ipanema
The painted ladies loved him. He was like a little darling dog to them. They hugged him as he sat upon his stool, looking at Batman comics, their stout, encased breasts rolling across his cheeks, and he could smell the hot spaces beneath their arms. He tried to hide his personal Baby Bobby situation from them.
A brandy snifter full of ones and fivers glistened on the piano. Swingers sent a steady stream of cocktails to the piano man, but by agreement with the barkeep, they were all ginger ale on the rocks. Who could play a lick after fifteen manhattans? Let alone drive home. Dad split the overage the drinkers paid with the bartender.
Nobody there knew it was his night job. That he spent all day cleaning up after bowlers. Putting sanitary cakes in urinals. Clearing the white tin bins in the ladies’ room. At night, in a dapper cream smoking jacket, he did his Ricky Ricardo routine for drunk Americans. Slicked back hair, no wedding ring, and cigarettes.
This was how Little Angel remembered his father.
He sat there staring at the taco shop and wished he had learned how to smoke. Memories. Game for losers. He had places to be. Too much time travel before 10 a.m.
“To hell with this,” he said, and pulled out of the lot. He drove south again and blissed out on the glittering blue of the sea on one side, the epic sweep of the Coronado Bridge ahead, the dry hills across the freeway with huge jets dropping toward the airport like some invasion of gargantuan moths. And in the southern distance, always there, the mother of them all, the hills of Tijuana.
Nobody went back there now. Not even to visit their father’s grave.
* * *
The American, Big Angel called Little Angel. The Assimilator. Little Angel has an American mother—not as classy as the women in the bar. Laughter. All eyes on him. Little Angel’s job was to take it and smile.
When Little Angel got as far south as National City, he still had hours to kill. His hotel was right off Mile of Cars, where the funeral home awaited. He shook his head. It was tawdry, in a way that only the gnomes of his English department in Seattle would appreciate. How California, they’d say. How San Diego, though a couple of ironic-eyeglasses and small-brim-hat types would call it “Dago.” How Latino, though nobody in his family had ever spoken Latin.
Early check-in. Bags on the bed. Someone had left a crumpled tissue in the bathroom. It had lipstick on it. It reminded him of the cocktail waitresses. He was disturbed to find this vaguely erotic. They’d all be eighty now, or dead, those alarming women. In Father’s neon cocktail lounge in the sky.
A maid came for the trash.
“Gracias,” he said.
She seemed startled that he spoke Spanish.
When he stepped back outside and walked to the enormous car, it had begun to drizzle. Damn it, he thought, Big Angel broke my nose in that fistfight. He didn’t realize until then that he’d been thinking about that fight the whole time.
* * *
A week earlier, Big Angel’s arrival at his mother’s deathbed was the most heroic thing his wife had ever seen. This, after a lifetime of watching her Flaco be a hero. And the old woman refused to accept it. Perla didn’t like that old witch. But dying, well, that earned her several points.
She knew how much the day had cost him. She could envision him walking back through all their history to be his mother’s child one last time.
He didn’t talk to Perla about La Paz much. He was broody by nature except when he was overtaken by good moods. Or feeling naughty. She still blushed at the memories after half a century. Oh, the things he did with her. Until he got sick.
Even when he brooded, she knew when he was thinking about La Paz and his father and all the things that had happened back there. He just hung his head and stared at the floor. Now that he didn’t smoke anymore, he drank many cups of black instant coffee and thought. And ate too many sweets.
Her thoughts were not of La Paz but of coming north. It was the biggest decision she had ever made, and she relived that terrifying moment almost every day. It wasn’t the trip that had been terrifying, or the destination. Rather, she had known that with this one step she would join her fortunes to his. Forever. Risking everything. A romantic choice, yes, but also one that could have left her with nothing.
She was already the mother of two fatherless boys. She didn’t understand why her Angel had taken to calling her his “Perla of Great Price” when everyone in La Paz saw her as damaged goods, another silly girl used and forgotten by a man whose name she chose not to remember. She wanted to believe what Angel said, and yet she feared it was no more than his nature. She saw how he charmed—and was charmed by—other women, and she was frantic to keep him from their beds. She wasn’t always sure what was real. Only that she needed to be with him. There would be no going back home after this decision.
She and the boys headed north before there was a modern highway. Her bigger boy, Yndio, was a toddler, and Braulio was only a baby. It was one long bus ride that cost all the money she had. Rough roads, sometimes over dirt and boulders. The stops were at terrible taco shacks with outhouses, or gas stations with drooling, stinking toilets much worse than outhouses. The people aboard the bus had brought their own food. She had carried a kilo of tortillas, a clay jug of water, and goat cheese. Four days riding.
South of Ensenada, police had set rocks across the road to stop the bus. They boarded and pointed their pistolas at the passengers and went through their bags. Perla had no money to offer. They ignored her boys. But they put their hands on her breasts. She looked out the window and held her breath and pushed them away with her mind. Angel’s father would have stopped them, she told herself. She didn’t have a father.
She looked at them with her hateful stare. One day, you’ll beg.
The three policemen snagged a man by the arms and dragged him from the bus. They kicked at the doors to let the driver know he should leave. Nobody dared look back or listen to what the man was yelling.
Everybody smelled by the end of the trip, and they were mortified—no Mexican wanted to smell like a barn animal.
Tijuana was another world. Perla and her boys huddled outside the bus terminal on the north end of town, near the riverbed, in clouds of exhaust smoke. La Paz was all deserts and sea, perched at the tip of Baja. It caught ocean breezes and crushing subtropical heat and hurricanes.
She had cooked in her mother’s restaurant. Her sisters beside her—all slaves to the old woman. Her boys had grown up near the ferry terminals, watching huge white boats groan in from Mazatlán. They watched boys not much older sell chewing gum and trinkets to visitors. When the fishermen docked, children haggled for cheap crabs or begged for a tuna. Sometimes they swamped out the boats for sodas.
Yndio considered this training for his future. This was how he was going to care for the family. Sometimes he was able to bring his mother a bottle of Coca-Cola. And though they’d been hungry, it was home.
But now they found themselves afraid and excited, as if Tijuana were El Dorado and all good things awaited them. It was loud and pushy. Scary and tumbledown. Too bright. Too colorful. Perla’s overwhelming impression of Tijuana was twofold: symphonies of noise and endless swirls of dust. And stringy street dogs all of the same stumpy build, the same yellow-red tinged fur, the same black patches of bare skin. All of them moving through traffic with insouciance, like dancers or bullfighters, seeming to bounce off the bumpers of old Buicks and under the two-tone city buses called burras, but bobbing out of the dust clouds again and hopping onto curbs unharmed, where they stretched out in the sun and slept with flies in their eyes. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Tijuana was what they never imagined: the unexpected gringos. Downtown Tijuana was an endless parade of towering, noisy, apparently rich Americans. Perla was astonished to realize the kids were already learning English. That was something she did not expect.
She remembered how Big Angel chose to go hungry so everyone could have a tiny bit of food, even if it was only a mouthful. He’d divide his portion among her sons. That’s when they had taken to calling each other Flaco and Flaca. They would never be that thin again.
Sometimes he brought candy for her two boys, though she scolded him. “Perla,” he said, “life is sour enough. Let them enjoy this.” That first Christmas, he bought the boys a bike to share and bought her a new dress. She had knitted him a sweater, and even though it was hot that year, he wore it every day.
Big Angel was her hero. She did not know his heroism was fueled by fuming rage. He fought anyone who insulted her or her children. He even fought off his own family’s rebukes and married her, then snuck them into the United States when it became obvious that only hunger and dirt and rats and evil police waited for them in the poorest of the colonias where they could afford to live.
Perhaps his biggest mistake was his believing that rage could help him be the perfect father. It was really all he knew about being a father. On some days it almost worked. But Perla was so afraid of losing what she had won that she became more strident in her defense of her man, insisting to the boys that Angel was always right, even when she knew he wasn’t. And the boys’ occasional bruises told them otherwise as well. It fell hardest on Yndio, the oldest. The one who had been his mother’s protector and defended her honor in the streets of La Paz, scrounged for food, done odd jobs, and still remembered his birth father. Yndio, the older brother, who found himself usurped and then disciplined, began a lifelong resistance Big Angel could never overcome.
Families came apart and regrouped, she thought. Like water. In this desert, families were the water.
* * *
Poor Mother América.
Big Angel’s sister, MaryLú, had watched over the old woman at the hospital. Perla’s sister, La Gloriosa, had helped. Retired women themselves, they were called “the girls” by all the older women. The younger women called them “Auntie” whether they were their aunts or not. That was the rule in Mexican families: all older women were your tía or your nina.
They had presided over Mother’s hallucinations in those hours of her dissolution. She saw dead friends and dead relatives and angels and Jesus Christ, and she greeted them and extended her hand to them and laughed with them. The sisters-in-law believed this was really happening, or one of them did. The other didn’t believe anything but was willing to debate it. Besides, Mother was completely blind and half deaf, so how could she be seeing or hearing anything?
She kept misunderstanding the script of their daily lives. She was confused by the plastic clip from the heart monitor that was clamped to her forefinger like a laundry pin. She mistook it for the handle of a coffee cup, and repeatedly raised it to her dry lips and sipped as if her favorite instant coffee had recently been served by a polite waitress. “Gracias,” she said to the air and slurped her invisible brew.
They just shook their heads.
They had to get Big Angel to her bedside.
This would be a major operation, akin to military maneuvers. Just getting him onto a toilet required strong backs and strong noses. Getting him dressed was a nightmare of clenched teeth and gangly limbs, everybody terrified of some shattered bone or wrenched shoulder blade. Brother had his own problems, pues—they knew better than anyone, they told themselves. Of course everyone told themselves this. That was the funny thing about a lingering death: everybody attached to the spectacle wanted to accrue mastery of the mystery—own it without actually dying. Especially anyone who wiped the afflicted’s bottom.
But Big Angel’s wife felt that she knew better than anyone. As did his daughter. And his son. And his pastor. Everybody had been worn down by death. Everybody had an opinion.
“Call him.”
“You call him.”
“No me gusta.”
“It’s too sad.”
“It’s creepy calling him.”
“You are bad, bad, bad.”
“I never said I was good. Don be estupid.”
They had presided over Big Angel’s last three death scenes, from which he had unexpectedly resurrected and returned home, more arrogant than ever. But now he was carved down to the size of a child and not able to walk more than ten steps, and those while leaning on his walker. True, his son had affixed a bike horn to it and to his wheelchair, so Big Angel could make ah-oo-gah sounds to amuse himself. But it was a diminishment of the patriarch, for sure. Only little kids and cholos laughed.
They called Big Angel’s house and began the major production of getting that branch of the family to rouse him and clean him and dress him and roll him out.
Big Angel was wheeled into the waiting room by Perla, who wanted to be anywhere but there. Hospitals horrified her; she had been in too many. She didn’t like Big Angel’s Old Spice, but she had never told him that. In her mind, it mixed with the hospital smells.
He felt he looked excellent. Only Minnie knew enough to think he looked like the guy in his giant suit in the old Talking Heads videos.
The family was all seated, muttering over the insectile buzz of a game show on TV. Coffee in cardboard cups.
He announced, in his new little reedy voice, “I will not let Mamá see me like this.”
His hands were shaking. His ankles, where they peeked out from under his trouser cuffs, looked like chicken bones. He was biting down on his own agony.
And he rose from his chair, struggling, grunting with effort, grinning like a maniac with sheer fury, and he refused the aluminum walker. It hurt so much the watchers felt it. They leaned toward him but checked themselves from reaching out to help him. His trousers and white shirt fit him like billowing tents. He wiped the tear out of his eye and staggered into her room under his own power.
A feathery hug for MaryLú. A longer hug for La Gloriosa. He breathed in the scent of her hair. But he didn’t look at her. His eyes were on the small creature that was his mother. He walked to her bed and bent to her, as if bowing.
He took her hand and spoke: “Mother, I have come.”
“What?” she said.
He talked louder. “Mother, I have come.”
“Qué?”
“MADRE!” he shouted. “AQUI ESTOY!”
“Ay, Hijo,” she scolded. “I never taught you to be so rude! What’s the matter with you?”
And then she died.
* * *
He had done his duty—had met with his mother’s priest ahead of time, slipped him a check for his services. They didn’t like each other. Big Angel knew this nasty little priest didn’t approve of him. There had been rumors—Big Angel had possibly slept with all his wife’s sisters. That’s what the gossipers in the parish said. And Big Angel’s father may have done the same. And nobody ever went to confession. Rumor had it Big Angel was a Protestant, or a Mormon, or a Freemason. Possibly a Rosicrucian. Or a Jesuit! Or all of the above.
Big Angel didn’t approve of the priest’s teeth. The other thing he railed against, after “Mexican time” and lame excuses, was bad teeth. Mexicans could not afford bad teeth if they expected gringos to take them seriously. And gold teeth didn’t help, though Mexicans thought they looked like rich people with gold in their mouths. This priest had teeth like a rat; they made him whistle a little when he talked. And when he really got going, he sprayed like a little lawn sprinkler.
After slipping Big Angel’s check into his pocket, the priest admonished, “Don’t be late. I am a busy man.”
“Late!” Big Angel said. “How can you suggest such a thing?”
“You know how you Mexicans are.” A small rodent’s smile. A jocular little punch to the shoulder.
Big Angel rolled out of the sacristy fuming.