1:00 p.m.
He never knew when the memory would intrude. The crunch of the club hitting the man in the side of the head. How it hurt his wrist. He hadn’t meant to kill anybody. Sometimes it jerked him from sleep. Sometimes he shook his head violently and said “No” during a TV show or a breakfast, and everybody thought it was just Pops being Pops. He fiercely rubbed his temples now to drive it away. And the smell of the gas on his hands. He was certain the others could smell it. The whoosh of the flames still audible a lifetime later.
“We are late,” he announced. Again.
Everybody was getting tired of his bitching. It was his own damn fault. Big Angel knew this. It had started in his bladder at first, and he had told no one about the blood in his urine. If he hadn’t passed out one morning, they would not have discovered the tumors. Still, he had beat it back. Minor surgery, snipping the little bastards out like grapes. Sticking a long probe up his urethra. His father had taught him to be stoic. Pain was how a man measured his worth, so he didn’t flinch during the probes, and he was asleep for the rest. And suddenly the little grape bundles of tumors were gone.
Until they grew a crop in his belly. X-rays and MRIs and needles and poisons in his arm. Followed by poison pills and pills that smelled like rotten fish and radiation. His reward: spots on his lungs. He cursed every cigarette. Cursed himself. And then his bones withered. The chemicals and the inserted metal going up his urethra and the radiation had shrunk it all. Until it hadn’t.
“You won’t die of the cancer, per se,” Doctor Nagel told him at their last conference. “It’ll be a systemic collapse. Kidneys will go. Heart. Or you’ll get pneumonia. Your will is strong, but your body is worn out.”
“How long?”
“Prediction: a month.”
That was three weeks ago. He smiled as if he’d won the lottery when the nurse wheeled him out. Perla with her eyes red and watery with worry. Minnie wringing her hands and twisting the ends of her hair in her fingers, and Lalo stoic and hiding tears of mourning behind his shades. All believed Big Angel’s smile because they needed to. Because they had always believed him. Because he was the law.
“Flaco,” Perla said. “What did they say?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m sick. But we all know that.”
“But you’re cool, Pops?”
“Of course, Lalo. I told you I was fine.”
Minnie hugged him and made him feel like her hair was smothering him.
“It could be worse,” he told Perla.
“How?” she cried.
“At least I don’t have hemorrhoids.”
She would have smacked his arm, but she’d seen how quickly he bruised, and she never smacked him anymore.
* * *
He was tired of shouting at what was inside his body. His wrath was spilling out on the toxic landscapes all around him. Somebody had killed him. He thought it was his wife’s cooking. He thought it was the coating on the frying pans. He thought it was the trials his family put him through. Salsa. Beef. DDT. He thought it was the mile-high pastrami sandwiches he could not avoid no matter how he tried. He thought it was Mexican Pepsi with salt peanuts in it. The clock—time, you bastard. Or God.
He struck the back of the driver’s seat, but his punch was too weak for his son to feel.
“Don’t get excited, Daddy,” Minnie said from behind, rubbing his shoulders.
He jerked out of her grasp.
“Minerva!” he shouted. “You’re hurting me! Vultures, all of you!”
She wept silently for the hundredth time. But only one tear. To hell with this.
His wife sighed. His son blew a bubble of chewing gum full of cigarette smoke. He held his ciggie out a crack in the window. Big Angel watched the smoke whip away.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember the things his friend Dave had told him: gratitude, meditation, prayer, attention to the small things, which were paradoxically eternal. He reminded himself that soul resided in family and relationships, not only in good times but also in bad. The soul—in potting plants and eating breakfast, Dave said. What a bunch of lies, he decided.
“Goddamn it!” he said.
He apologized to God for taking his name in vain.
But really.
The minivan still had miles to go, and the clock never stopped ticking.
* * *
The fam had rented out the Bavarian Chalet of Rest funeral home on the Mile of Cars. Honda and Dodge dealerships in the distance. All the dads in the family arrived at the parlor and craned their necks to look at the candy-colored ranks of Challengers and Chargers sitting in the lots as they drove up. The young-uns and shorties were scoping the Honda lots for The Fast and the Furious road rockets. Neither generation wanted to drive the clunkers their elders had driven.
People loitered at the double doors.
They had buried Braulio through this place. And Grandpa Antonio. They had a relationship with it—it was their tradition. They felt oddly at home here and chipper in some inexplicable way. Regular attendees knew where the coffee urns were, and the cardboard cups and whitening powders. It was like their own Disneyland of death.
Outside, on the main drag, a half block from the driveway, a watcher lurked. The legendary Yndio. Alone, dressed all in white. His arms were muscular, and he had a tribal tattoo of hummingbirds and vines on his left biceps. Aladdin Sane on the other. A line of Bowie lyric down that arm: THROW ME TOMORROW. Across his left collarbone, above his heart, a name he had never explained and had no intention of explaining: SWEET MELISSA. That was the problem with these people, Yndio thought. They didn’t ever let anybody have a secret, but they were hiding things from one another every day of their lives. Little Angel had given him that Bowie record a hundred years ago. From his choker, a single black enameled feather dangled. He slouched in a white Audi A6 with a pearl paint finish. The car’s interior was all ebony. His shiny black hair spilled over his shoulders and down his chest. And he crept along the block with Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” on the deck, watching them through twelve-hundred-dollar sunglasses.
He hadn’t seen many of these people in years. Not since Braulio’s funeral. Well, he’d seen his mother. Moms and Minnie. Somebody had to make sure their hair was presentable. He had a good facial man who kept them fresh. Waxed away those sideburns Moms had started growing. It was their secret.
It irritated him that the family kept acting like Braulio had been some teenager when he died. Fucker had already served in the army, for God’s sake. He’d been thirty-five! They diminished the boys even in death. He blamed them all for being so stupid.
Damn—there went Tío César, the middle uncle. Dude was tall—he hadn’t remembered how tall César was. And his notorious wife—as tall as he was. They seemed like giants among Hobbits. She was some Mexico City chilanga. He’d never really talked to her, so he didn’t care who liked her and who didn’t. He knew they didn’t like her; Minnie had told him. They didn’t like outsiders anyway. The family suspected everybody of being an invader. He didn’t like most of the family, to be honest. He didn’t see either one of the Angels.
“Cabrones,” he said aloud.
He revved the engine. It snarled like some jungle cat. Just the way he liked it. He wasn’t about to join them. He ripped into a U-turn and vanished north.
* * *
1:20 p.m.
The big Crown Victoria slouched at the back of the parking lot. The funeral home had a fake Germanic facade and stood across the street from a taco shop, a gas station, and a Starbucks. The street smelled of carne asada. The stained-glass windows were plastic. Pigeons flocked all about the alpine roofline, moving neurotically from palm trees to mortuary to taquería and back again, frantic that one of them might have found an onion ring that had been overlooked by the others. Little Angel got out of the car and walked into the building.
Inside, the family was arranging flower wreaths, some of which looked like displays for championship high school marching-band competitions. Banners with glitter spelling out condolences. Pictures of Mamá América in better years stood on easels around the central altar. “What a babe,” one of the grandsons said. They all smiled. The girls had hot-glued white Styrofoam-and-feather doves to the frames of the pictures. It was quite lovely, everyone thought. Little Angel sipped his skinny caramel latte and tried to look comfortable in his sports jacket and black tie. Women he didn’t remember hugged him and left smudges of makeup on his lapels.
Love and sorrow wafted across the chapel like perfume.
So did the perfume.
He didn’t see Minnie. He watched for La Gloriosa. No sign of his big brother either, whom he was scared to see.
The funeral director hid in his back office, watching golf on his phone. He paused it and stirred himself and came out and plugged in a laptop that started playing a slide show of Mamá’s life to a soundtrack of her favorite singer, Pedro Infante. The pictures began to cycle through: Big Angel as a boy, some weird little black dogs, babies, old houses with flower vines on the walls, a desert, Big Angel and MaryLú and César as jug-eared kids with thick eyebrows and skinny bellies, more kids in black-and-white photos taken with a Brownie camera. A motorcycle. A filthy fishing boat. A stack of clam and oyster shells taller than the children. No pictures of Don Antonio.
Mourners started to file in, stunned by the extravagance of the funeral the family had arranged and looking around for Big Angel. Forty-five minutes of embraces and ostentatious arrivals and all the siblings arranging themselves in the front row and the rings of descendants, like shock waves of a meteor strike, radiating back through the room. Paz, the controversial chilanga sister-in-law, cast angelic glares of disdain at everybody she felt was not dressed properly. She watched them as she spread gold lamé sheets over the altar. César’s third trophy wife. Dressed in leopard spots, and her hair in a fancy spiky bob with purple tips. Little Angel stepped up to him and they embraced.
“My sexiest brother,” César said and reached back to grab Little Angel’s ass.
Little Angel looked around to make sure nobody saw that. This seemed inappropriate on so many levels.
Paz sneered.
“Happy to see you too, Carnal,” Little Angel said.
Paz stared at him. He had aged, but not enough. He thought he was so special. Living with hippie gringos far away. No troubles at all. Why would he age? Though he had some gray showing at his temples, she was happy to see. And César, squeezing his brother’s ass. He’d hit on a hole in the ground if he thought there was a gopher in it.
“Let go of my butt.”
César’s sad face crinkled into its first smile in seven days. “Did you miss me?” he said.
“Always.”
César watched Little Angel as his eyes roamed the crowd. He looked at every face as if he didn’t know any of them. He was exactly like Big Angel, César thought: always watching.
Grandchildren were holding obstreperous great-grandchildren on their hips. Americanized teen chicks lurked around the far edges, looking at their cell phones. Everybody had dressed up as best they could, except one old knucklehead in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts.
Big Sister MaryLú came into the room, somber and elegant in her black dress. Little Angel loved her smell—she was all Chanel No. 5. Hugs, air kisses.
“Baby Brother,” she said.
Everybody speaking English.
“Is everybody coming?” he asked.
“Pos, chure.”
“Even El Yndio?”
They looked at the door as if he’d appear.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
The awkward pause felt long enough for a dandelion to germinate.
Finally, Little Angel said, “Where’s the patriarch?”
She looked at her tiny rectangular watch with utter ferocity. “They must be making him late.” There seemed to be a sadistic satisfaction in her smirk, like the face of a teacher who had just caught a kid cheating on his pop quiz.
She took Little Angel’s hand and led him to the pew. They formed a little line there, brother-sister-brother. And Paz—who was MaryLú’s greatest enemy on Earth. Each of the women elaborately ignored the other. César nobly constructed a border between them with his body.
MaryLú opened her pocketbook and produced clear mint Life Savers. Little Angel accepted one and a folded Kleenex just in case. He took a small notebook out of his pocket and clicked his pen.
“You’re going to write?” she said. “Now?”
“No.” He leaned into her and showed her the pages. “I’m taking notes. I don’t know who anybody is. It’s my cheat sheet.”
“Paz,” it said, surrounded by black circles. A squiggly line extended to César. On the facing page, César’s exes were in their own circles, with outriders radiating—various kids. A grandkid or two. These were fractal pages.
MaryLú made the family’s I-know-what-you-mean face. “Mm-hm,” she intoned. “Tell me about it.” She tapped the offspring page. “You missed Marco.”
“Who’s Marco?”
“Satan.”
César leaned around his sister and held his fingers straight up from the top of his head. “Hair,” he said. “Es mi hijo!”
Little Angel added Marco to the pattern, with erect hair atop the little circle.
Meanwhile, the priest, in full regalia, skulked behind the curtain at the front of the room, like Liberace. He checked his watch. He didn’t care if Big Angel was there or not. He burst forth exactly on time, raising his arms and cracking a toothsome grimace. He seemed to lack a theme song. He began shouting straightaway, as though demons were being blown out the back windows. He pointed above the heads of the mourners toward the distant and blessed greeny shires of heaven. He ignored the siblings and their children, firing his evangelical rockets over them. People were shaking their heads and wondering, Is he yelling at me?
They had seen this before. Lately, it seemed Mexican funerals were being reimagined as last-ditch chances to terrorize the survivors into converting. It had happened at Don Antonio’s service and had disrupted Braulio’s funeral as well.
“We mourn Doña América!” he said. “We miss Mamá América! You all claim to love her? Then why have more of your family not come to her service? Nearly a hundred years old, and the rest of you are what? Watching television?”
The general thought, among the mourners, was a version of Oh shit.
The priest was revved up like some kind of Elysian dragster, about to pull religion wheelies all the way down the track. They were in for it now with no way to get out.
“She gave you nearly one hundred years of motherly sacrifice! Good mother, good grandmother, good Catholic, good neighbor! The lines of mourners should be out the door! Shame. Shame. Shame.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong.
* * *
Big Angel’s minivan was just pulling up outside.
“Ahora, sí,” he said. He rubbed his hands.
Lately, his anger often manifested itself in a wicked good mood. The shorter his time on Earth, the more convinced he was that he was invincible. If only everything would comply with his plans. What was it Little Angel had said when he was in college, reading all those European books? “Hell is other people.” Meds worked all right, but his own ability to outsmart and outmaneuver everyone and everything—even death—was his secret superpower. Screw death.
Dying was for worms and chickens, not angels.
Bone cancer? He had found herbs and minerals that would make bones rebuild like coral reefs! Vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin A. Chaga tea. Tumors in his organs? Turmeric! Selenium, by golly.
I am invincible, he told himself. I am not invisible.
Even in his wheelchair, Big Angel believed he could kick the ass of anything that came at him, and everybody else believed it too. They needed it to be true. Even when the kids thought they were fooling him by lying about some ghastly eruption of malfeasance and moral rot, they secretly relied on his infallibility. Big Angel would always catch them, but he would forgive.
I am the patriarch, he told himself for the thousandth time as they wrestled him out of the minivan and got him folded into his chrome chariot. That made him so mad he smiled at his wife and son and daughter. It scared them all.
He heard the wails coming through the door in florid Spanish: “Mother América wanted nothing more than to keep you out of hell! You generation of vipers!”
What kind of squawking was this?
“Yeesus krites.” Big Angel pointed at the double doors of the chapel as if leading a cavalry charge.
He sure as hell had them bang open the doors as loudly as possible. He directed them to roll him down the aisle, front and center. He was taking over. After all, he was named Miguel Angel. Who else in the family was named after the archangel Michael? He wished he had a flaming sword.
Goddamn it. Sorry, God.
His smile grew wider. He was pretty well persuaded that he could outsmart God too.
Perla leaned into the chair and kept him moving. Hungry Man marched behind, bearing the walker. Big Angel made plenty of noise. He coughed. He kicked his footrests a couple of times so they clattered, adding to the percussive cadence.
Poor Minnie stared at the floor and tried not to laugh. Oh no—there was Uncle Little Angel. No way. No way was she gonna look at him. She would pee herself laughing if he looked at her. Everybody was turning around. She avoided Little Angel’s eyes.
Big Angel let his left brow rise and gave them his most ironic glare, letting them know that the sheriff was back in town. The kids and grandkids called him Pops, and that magic word flowed down the gathered clan.
“Here comes Pops.”
“Pops in da house.”
“Check it. Pops is low-riding.”
The elder members of the family never failed to marvel at the attitude of the kids, how Big Angel was a rolling laugh riot to them, arbiter of bad jokes, spiritual insight, ice cream money, and shelter when they were bounced out of their houses or were let out of jail or rehab or needed to come in off the streets at midnight.
He nodded to them, making eye contact with every single one of them, and raised one finger at his favorites, which seemed to each person to be her- or himself.
“Go slow, Flaca,” he told his wife. “Roll me right down the middle. Go slow.”
“Ay, Flaco,” she said softly. “Don’t make a scene.”
“Just watch me, Perla.”
She shook her head and smiled at the gathered faces: I am married to a willful man, she was telling them all with her eyes.
He was as fierce as a falcon in his chair. He could smell the priest’s breath shooting up the aisle like a secret weapon. Big Angel, pointing at his thousand nephews and granddaughters and children. His brothers and sisters were the old generation now. Sitting in a grim line up front. All of them looking at Mamá’s urn and realizing the same thing at the same moment: We are now the oldest generation, and we are the next to die. They looked back and were shocked at Big Angel’s appearance, even though they saw him daily.
Big Angel craned around in his chair to nod at Perla’s sisters. There was steadfast Lupita with her American husband, Uncle Jimbo. In shorts! And there she was, La Gloriosa. As tragic and magnificent as he had ever seen her. He couldn’t remember her real name, just her nickname. He couldn’t remember if he had ever heard her real name. She had always been the Glorious One. Alone. Lost, as always, in the cool meadows of her own thoughts. Shiny black hair with a supernatural silver streak spilling down the left side of her face. Her shades were impenetrably black. He didn’t know if she was looking at him or not.
Her hands smelled like warm, sweet spices. He thought of the side of her neck. Orange peel, lemongrass, mint, cinnamon. She nodded slightly. He looked away.
Perla watched this. She had been noting their shenanigans for decades. She squinted at her sister. La Gloriosa made a Qué? face back at her.
Big Angel was excited to see his youngest brother sitting in the front row. The great lost soul. English teacher who had gone off to Seattle and lived in the rain. Big Angel felt like he had built his little brother from some kind of model kit. Little Angel. His namesake.
i broke my little brother’s nose and it felt good
* * *
Little Angel sat at the far end of the sibling row and grinned at his big brother.
Big Angel waved at Little Angel—he could raise his hand only a few inches off the armrest, but he held it up as if giving a benediction.
Little Angel whispered to his sister María Luisa, “Hey, Lu-Lu—Big Brother has become the pope of Tijuana.”
Everyone still called her MaryLú. It had been so kicky in 1967. When she wore go-go boots and pinned falls in her hairdo. She had never worn jeans or a T-shirt. She used to have a bright pink rattail comb and a jar of some hairstyling phlegm called Dippity-do.
Even seated, brother César was taller than the rest. Everyone joked that Mother must have had a secret lover because nobody could explain his size. His Valkyrie wife sat on his far side, making sour faces. Poor César was utterly crushed by his mother’s death. He was sixty-seven, and his mother had still ironed his shirts for him. She had given him a chocolate orange every Christmas. Always had menudo for him and her old Spanish Reader’s Digests. Being without her made him feel like a child lost in a rainstorm. His hands shook. He could not even consider the details of his big brother’s illness. He reached out for Big Angel’s hand. Their fingers touched. Big Angel’s were as cold as the grave. César clenched his own hands and held them before his lips.
The priest, sensing his grip on the crowd slipping away, suddenly shouted: “Sinners buy ten million condoms for Mardi Gras every year!”
If Mamá América were alive, she would have slapped him for talking about condoms in front of her urn. The two Angels locked eyes and started to laugh. The wheelchair loomed in the aisle between the front pews, about a foot from the priest.
“Aquí estoy,” Big Angel announced, settling a little more comfortably in his chair.
The priest stopped and stared at him.
“Carry on,” Big Angel said. “I give you permission.” He opened and closed his skinny legs and held his hands in his lap. “Go on.”
The good father collected himself.
Big Angel smiled like Saint Francis. He gestured impatiently. Tapped his watch.
“You’re on Mexican time, Padre. We’re working people. Vámonos, pues.”
“I…gave up television,” the priest preached. “For forty days. Not because I had to. But because I wanted to offer it up as a sacrifice!” He was catching his stride again. “Protestants want to take away our saints! Our blessed statues! Our Virgin! And they want to have unmarried sex. Sodomy is the law of the land! And you, the cursed generation, turn from God and the values of your matriarch, who rests before you now! The least you could do is sacrifice! Sí, mi pueblo! Sacrifice TV!”
He held up his hand.
“Our Lord and Savior demands a sacrifice! Sacrifice your favorite television programs.”
“Chingado,” Big Angel said, looking around at his family. “There goes Ice Road Truckers.”
They strangled on laughter. Little Angel had to lean on his big sister’s shoulder.
“Shh!” she and César said.
MaryLú was still a good Catholic girl. Sort of. She covered her mouth with her hankie and guffawed. “You’re bad,” she whispered.
Minnie sat behind Little Angel. “Daddy, for the win,” she said.
He looked back at her, and the look in his eyes said: He always wins. And her look said: You know it.
“Amen,” the priest finally choked out, and he flew through the fake-satin curtain beside the altar.
Big Angel said, “Now the family will speak for itself.”
Nobody was ready to give a eulogy, but el patriarca had commanded them. One by one, they came forward and spoke what poetry each could muster. He sat with his hands folded over his tiny belly, nodding and smiling and laughing, but he never wept.
* * *
3:00 p.m.
“Oh, my mother,” Big Angel said.
He had failed her. He knew he had. He had failed in so many ways, at so many things. Mother, Father, Mazatlán and the Bent family, Braulio, Yndio. But it had taken a while to get control of the ship. There had been mistakes. Captains are not born, he told himself, they are made. He wasn’t yet convinced, however.
But Mother. He felt that she had not respected his beloved Perla, and he had let her fade into the background of his life. He liked to think that a Mexican mother would respect a man who stood by his wife; he didn’t count on the rules set by this Mexican mother. No dissention, ever. No disobedience. So they had been cordial with each other. Still, when she came for a visit, she would have some terrorist act in her bag of tricks. She would wander into the kitchen and somehow get into the cabinets so she could say in a conversationally mild tone, “You’d think these pots and pans would be brighter. Maybe they’re old, not just dingy.” Or a helpful note that Perla should scrub coffee cups, not merely rinse them.
Big Angel had not physically cuddled his mother like his brother César had. Hell, even Little Angel had hugged her more than he had. César ended up sleeping on her couch after each marriage ended. She had still done his laundry and packed him lunches for work.
Every son, he told himself, will suffer after his mother has gone and he realizes how little he thanked her.
“I am nobody special,” he said. “Just a husband, a father. A working man. I wanted to change the world.”
There was no one there.
* * *
Big Angel was turning seventy. It seemed very old to him. At the same time, it felt far too young. He had not intended to leave the party so soon. “I have tried to be good,” he told his invisible interviewer.
His mother had made it to the edge of one hundred. He had thought he’d at least make it that far. In his mind, he was still a kid, yearning for laughter and a good book, adventures and one more albóndigas soup cooked by Perla. He wished he had gone to college. He wished he had seen Paris. He wished he had taken the time for a Caribbean cruise, because he secretly wanted to snorkel, and once he got well, he would go do that. He was still planning to go see Seattle. See what kind of life his baby brother had. He suddenly realized he hadn’t even gone to the north side of San Diego, to La Jolla, where all the rich gringos went to get suntans and diamonds. He wished he had walked on the beach. Why did he not have sand dollars and shells? A sand dollar suddenly seemed like a very fine thing to have. And he had forgotten to go to Disneyland. He sat back in shock: he had been too busy to even go to the zoo. He could have smacked his own forehead. He didn’t care about lions, tigers. He wanted to see a rhinoceros. He resolved to ask Minnie to buy him a good rhino figure. Then wondered where he should put it. By the bed. Damned right. He was a rhino. He’d charge at death and knock the hell out of it. Lalo had tattoos—maybe he’d get one too. When he got better.
People filed out. Cousins hugging cousins. Big abrazos.
He was taking inventory—in his mind, a spreadsheet: he repented of one sin per day, and he moved it to the other column marked PAID. On this day he repented that he had ever loved eating sea turtle soup. Sopa de caguama, how rich it was. With lime and cilantro, fresh rolled corn tortillas with salt in them to catch a bit of broth, and some chile. He didn’t like chile, really, but his father had taught him a man ate chile until he broke out in a sweat. It was supposed to prevent cancer. Old Don Antonio had sneezed every time he ate it—sneezed until he turned purple. But he went back for more. Suffering had been his religion. Big Angel shook his head. But his tongue wiggled from just thinking of that soup. Now all he really wanted was to simply swim with the turtles and beg their forgiveness for finding their flippers so delicious for so long.
“Lotta troubles,” he said. “Y muchos cabrones.”
He observed them all from the short watchtower of his chair.
There were days when he could not recall any sins at all. On these days, he thought he might be through with all his transgressions. Clear. But he was a smart man—too smart to fall for his own tricks. There was always another sin drifting in the shadows, waiting to alight and sting the heart.
When Minnie stopped to check on him, he said: “Mija—a rhino has such thick skin, mosquitoes and flies can’t bite him. They bend their beaks on him.”
“How nice,” she said.
* * *
3:30 p.m.
Home for a minute. He had to get his diaper changed before the burial. Poor Minnie, he thought. Having to deal with that. But you do what you have to do. It’s family, pues.
His friend Dave had given him a nice little set of three moleskin notebooks and had told him to write his gratitude in them.
“Gratitude for what?”
“That’s up to you. I can’t tell you what to be grateful for.”
“This is silly.”
“Dare to be silly. You take yourself too seriously anyway.”
“Gratitude?”
“Try it. Gratitude is prayer. You could always use more prayers.”
“Liking mangos and papayas is a prayer?”
“It all depends on you, Angel. Do you mean it? Will you miss it?”
“Claro que sí.”
“Well, then. Besides, what’s wrong with doing something silly to make yourself happy?”
The notebooks had a title: My Silly Prayers. He kept one in his shirt pocket, when he was wearing a shirt with a pocket. Or he kept it tucked under his left buttock in bed or in his wheelchair. He terrorized his daughter with his demands for a steady stream of blue G-2 pens. He refused to write with anything else. Those were the pens he had used at work, and those were the pens he used now.
mangos
was the first entry. And then:
(dave you idiot)
in case his friend ever saw it.
marriage
family
walking
working
books
eating
cilantro
That surprised him. He didn’t know where it came from. Cilantro? he thought. Then:
my baby brother
Every day, he found his gratitudes more ridiculous. But they were many, and they reproduced like desert wildflowers after rain. He could not stop himself; his daughter had to buy him a second, then a third, set of tiny notebooks.
wildflowers after rain
the heart breaks open and little bright seeds fall out
Before that, he hadn’t realized he was a poet, among his many other attributes.
* * *
He missed sex, even masturbating. All he could hold now was a soft tenderness that filled him with despair. He had been famous in his bedroom for volume, trajectory, and distance. And these things had faded until even the branch itself faltered and nothing could come from him again.
“Ay, chiquito!” Perla cried when they made love. “Eres tremendo!”
He remembered brown nipples—they floated through his days like strange shadows of delicious little birds that he could not touch. Almost buttery against his tongue. His fingers and palms felt cinnamon bellies and backs even as his hands lay at rest on his quilt. He tasted the sea inside his lover. And her milk.
He missed walking, missed his restless flirtations with Perla’s sisters, though he felt repentant about that part. La Gloriosa, especially. Good God—even now, she could stop a truck with a flash of her leg. He hadn’t felt a stirring in his palo for ages, but just thinking of La Gloriosa in a colorful dress and some dangerous heels made him remember the swell and pulse of the branch. For a moment, he believed he had been cured and it would bloom. He shook his head ruefully.
Walking, he told himself. Focus on the subject at hand! Strolling in the park, walking to McDonald’s, holding hands with Perla and perambulating along Playas de Tijuana, watching the Border Patrol helicopters just north of the rusting border wall, eating fish tacos in the stands by the seaside bullring. The ease and pump of his strong body. Comfortable shoes.
He utterly missed his unbroken body.
Somehow Perla knew when he was thinking these things. Especially when he thought about women. So he cleared his mind. He had been the first in the familia to use computers, and he told himself now: Reboot. Reboot, cabrón. Control-Alt-Delete. Absolutely, Delete.
“Es muy sexy, mi Angel,” Perla often announced when they were all gathered.
It was hard to feel sexy with all his bones turning to chalk and his legs aching day and night. Wearing a diaper. His brave daughter asked him often, “Daddy, did you pee-pee yet?” Jesus Christ. Sorry, Lord. But how did he get smaller than she was?
being taller than my kids
Big Angel had always been their leader. Since Don Antonio had abandoned them to starve in La Paz, his siblings had looked to him as their father figure. And now he was his own daughter’s baby. Now she put baby powder on his nalgas. This felt like one of the corny jokes he loved to tell when they were all together.
“You all right, Daddy?” she said.
“I’ll never be all right again.”
He stared for long stretches, and though she knew there was a lot going on inside him, she had no idea how much.
Minerva—she hated that name. But her homegirls right away had changed it to Minnie, which became La Minnie Mouse. Made it easy to buy her Christmas presents—she had quite a collection. Minnies and Mickeys. Plushies and plastic, hoodies and pillows.
He gestured for two of the gathered peewees to come to him. Grandkids, he thought. Maybe great-grandkids. There were always a couple of them around. His children had all had children, and those children were having children. His nieces and nephews even had children.
They crowded around his chair.
“Yeah, Pops?”
“When I was in the hospital the last time,” he said in his delightfully accented English, modeled on Ricardo Montalbán. (Because the peewees could only say “taco” and “tortilla” in Spanish, he spoke English.) “Do you know what happened?”
“No, Pops.”
“There was a guy, a very sick guy.”
“Sicker’n you, Pops?”
“Ay sí. So sick they had to cut off half of him.”
“Gross!”
“Yeah. They cut off the guy’s whole left side!”
“What? Like, everything, Pops?”
“Todo. His left arm, his left leg, his left ear. His left nalga.”
The kids shouted—they valued random butt references.
“But guess what?”
“What, Pops?”
“He’s all right now!”
They didn’t get it.