Big Angel was still a boy when he first saw Perla. Barely sixteen. He wore American black jeans and a ridiculous yellow checkered blazer his Tía Cuca had sent from Mazatlán. It came by fishing boat, something that seemed altogether normal in La Paz but would assume mythical proportions later, in San Diego. “Check it, dawg—Pops got his threads off a fishin’ boat, no lie!” The same jacket he would christen on the beach within a year.

His father always made Angel dress up when he came to the police station with him. “Un caballero,” he told his son, “always dresses well and is always clean-shaven except for his mustache, and that has to be trimmed carefully. And fingernails always short and clean. Otherwise, he’s no gentleman.” He also made Angel call the shoeshine man—with the rag tied on his head and an ugly little wooden box with the footrest on top—“Maestro.”

Angel was already too old to ride behind his father on the massive police motorcycle. But he no longer had any physical intimacy with him, and Angel took advantage of the rare days when his father felt disposed to allow him to cling as they sped along. Some days were like that. Inexplicable days of grace.

It was a huge thrill to ride across La Paz with his father. The police uniform was of course intensely dramatic—the shiny badge in bronze and ceramic with its eagle and cactus centerpiece. The mirror-bright black knee boots. The immense pistola in a creaking leather oil-scented holster. And the inscrutable twin pools of nothing when the aviator shades covered his father’s eyes.

But being perched behind the vast oaken back of his father, the Harley thrumming beneath them as they slanted in and out of traffic—that was the greatest thrill of his days. He watched people slow and pull aside, fearing Don Antonio, seeing the Jefe de Patrullas Motociclistas roaring down the road. His thought, beaming it out to the world like a lighthouse beacon: My father, my father.

He would shout into the wind, “Siren!”

And his father would hit the button with his thumb. And the shiny silver klaxon mounted on the front fender would yawp hideously, frightening people and animals for a block. These two burning through the city like furious gods.

Angel might get permission if he had curried favor, but Little Pato and María Luisa were forbidden from even touching the big machine. They all called César El Pato Donald because his rusty voice sounded like Donald Duck, and when he got mad, they laughed until they cried. Their laughter enraged him, so his squawk became more frantic, and they laughed harder. It was his misfortune that, as he grew, his voice lowered into a deep mallard’s squonk, and the name never left him.

But not even Donald Duck could touch the Harley. Don Antonio kept it spotless, polished. Like many houses in La Paz in those days, theirs had a rickety wooden gate that hid a dirt courtyard with a ciruelo and a coconut palm, a woven palm-frond palapa, and a hammock. The motorcycle rested beneath the palapa and a rainproof tarp like some mythical beast that slept standing, that might awaken and eat any of them at the slightest provocation.

In the early mornings—when Mamá América was cooking breakfast in the open kitchen, smoke billowing from the wood-burning stove, tortillas heating on the sheet-iron comal over flames, the green parrot and the mourning doves in their wooden cages—the children would pause outside the small chicken coop and watch the Harley sleep. Their father’s snores were loud, even out here, so they knew it was safe to approach his steed.

He called it El Caballo Mayor.

Mother was aware of their curiosity but kept her back to them. She feigned deep interest in boiling frijoles and chopping tomatoes and onions. She melted a pond of lard in the huge skillet and dropped beans and soup into it with a savage roaring of fat and a vivid white cloud of steam and smell. The parrot gripped his guano-caked perch and flew in place inside his cage, maniacally beating his wings until the cage wobbled on its nail, shrieking warnings to the world that the fire was out of control. She ignored it.

She mashed the beans into the lard, spooning the hot lard back over the beans until it had all fried into a viscous mass. The children were on their own. They had chores to do before school: sweeping, feeding the animals, tending the laundry or taking it down. They were also expected to collect the eggs their three hens offered up. She knew they would waste time before school, looking for iguanas or teasing the idiotic turkey, La Chichona.

They had a fatal interest in the forbidden motorcycle. So she didn’t watch them, and she let them peek. She observed them nonetheless with the supernatural powers of the Mexican mother. Ears that could hear the change in a child’s footstep. That could hear an intake of breath. Or worse, whispering. Her slipper could come off in less than a second, and the dreaded chancla would be flailing at their behinds if they were found misbehaving.

Angel was skinny. Dark. He was already too old to spank, but that wouldn’t stop the chancla. He looked angry all the time because he had inherited his father’s flagrant eyebrows—a jungle on his brow ridge that grew together above his nose. He had combed his hair into an Elvis pomp, though he couldn’t manage sideburns yet.

With his finger over his lips, he led the two chiquitos on tiptoes under the palapa and lifted the edge of the tarp so they could see the motorcycle’s great front tire angled jauntily as if it were the foreleg of a steed, hoof tipped in sleep. And the fat fender above it. They sighed.

“Muchachos!” Mamá said, and they scattered.

*  *  *

The big motorcycle was as loud as a summer storm. Cops in their finned patrol cars with the single red light bubble on top lifted a finger at them or held a hand out the window. Don Antonio merely nodded, his cap at an angle on his head, his hair heavy and plastic with Dixie Peach, imported from Los Angeles or some other exotic gringo place where he had aunts. That Germanic-looking police cap never budged, tipped slightly over his right eye, high peaked, just touching with its gleaming black bill the top of his inscrutable aviator glasses.

For Angel, La Paz was mostly light and smell.

The sunlight, bouncing off the sea and the backs of whales, silvered by marlins and waves and sand, ricocheted from bare rock spires and desert shimmers, was as saturating as a flood. Yellow, blue, clear, white, everywhere vibrating, everywhere frank and blunt and without nuance. Red flowers, yellow, blue as plastic. Light. In cataracts.

Angel also loved the rainy days, when shadows made their mysterious ways around corners and across alleys. And everyone loved sunsets. The light lost its sanity as it fell over the hills and into the Pacific—it went red and deeper red, orange, and even green. The skies seemed to melt, like lava eating black rock into great bite marks of burning. Sometimes all the town stopped and stared west. Shopkeepers came from their rooms to stand in the street. Families brought out their invalids on pallets and in wheelbarrows to wave their bent wrists at the madness consuming their sky. Swirls of gulls and pelicans like God’s own confetti snowed across those sky riots.

Angel was afraid of falling off the machine. He wrapped his arms around his father’s grand torso, laid his cheek to his back, and only then let his eyelids drop. If he held tight to his father, he would not fall. Even though, with his eyes closed, he almost believed his father had levitated them above the earth and was trying to make him tumble through clouds to the desert below. He believed Father would hold him aloft.

He breathed deep—for he could really smell the world if he was focused. Utterly focused. He had already formulated many theories, which is why Don Antonio sometimes called him El Filósofo, for his philosophy was already in place. And this was one of his theorems: to know the world in each of its parts, a seeker must shut out the unnecessary senses and focus on the target.

Today, the day he was destined to meet Perla Castro Trasviña in the Centro police station at eight thirty in the morning in the magical year of 1963, the world was all scents.

It began with his father’s back. Redolent of cigarette smoke and leather, the wool of his tunic, and the bay rum and shaving soap blowing back from his cheeks. The smell of wind and sun in his uniform, and Mamá’s lye soap. And even a hint of her.

Behind these smells, and all around them, the sea—the relentless sea. Salt and seaweed and shrimp and distance. The bitter stench of beached dolphins turning to gray swamps on the rocks. The scent of mysterious Sinaloa somehow coming across the gulf. The choking reek of guano, and the delicious scent of a million miles’ worth of clean, rushing wind.

“Siren!”

“Mijo! Como chingas!”

And the smells of the smoke—everywhere, smoke. The world was made of smoke. The sky collected all the burned offerings and built palaces of scents above and around them.

Cooking smoke was the best. Carne asada. Carnitas. Roasted corn with lime and cheese. Fried fish. Tortillas. Diced nopales in scrambled eggs on a cloud of melted lard. Yeasty bread smoke from the bakeries. Sugar smoke. Shrimp tacos crisp in the breeze.

Trash fires. Incense from the shops and the old women’s houses and the churches. Cigars.

And dust.

If the rain came, the creeping smell of the desert going wet. And diesel and exhaust, especially the big belching trucks and ancient buses. From alleys, the stench of sewage and rotten fruit. Flowers, yes. Flowers. They were not just colorful—but their scents colored the air. There came scents then of onion and tomato, chiles and the faintly soapy strange smell of cilantro. Mint leaves. Charcoal. Perfume and rank old beer in the tepid squalls of air billowing from cantinas.

Somewhere in that vast tapestry of interwoven odors, Angel was sure he could smell the dead. Not their bodies, but their souls. His newest theory was that the dead came as ghosts in sudden finger-thin wafts of perfume or cigarette or hair’s sweet soap scents when it was drying in the sun…

*  *  *

And then they were just past the center of town with its drooping wires festooned with lights left over from Christmas. Tubas were playing in the plaza—Angel opened his eyes when trumpets sounded a nationalistic fanfare. And the engine’s blat and rip grew massive and reverberant as they went between walls and up the narrower street to the station—bucking as Don Antonio slowed, cobbles and fractured chunks of concrete in the street, and they stopped before the jail and police station complex. Smells of urine escaped from the barred windows in back. Hopeless, flat human voices came from the barred and wired high windows. Don Antonio revved the engine and cut its noise, mid-shriek. They sat as though stunned by their own silence.

“You will learn,” he said to his son, as if he had been thinking this during the whole trip, “that pink nipples are more intoxicating than brown.”

Angel looked up to him, his father’s face just a shadow now against the sun, and he thought: What?

And Don Antonio’s big shiny boot lifted and went over Big Angel’s head as he ducked, and his father stood tall, setting his belt, checking his cap. He pinched his balls through the trousers and shifted his lariat to the left. He looked at the boy and pulled off his dark glasses.

He winked.

*  *  *

Inside the station, the usual tumult. The stinging smell of ammonia and pine cleaner. Brash echoes off pitiless tiles. Young cops deferred to Don Antonio with shy glances and slightly sideward motions. Their shoes squealed on the floor. Old cops slapped Father’s back and fake-punched Big Angel. He flinched. It infuriated Don Antonio. Flinching! His dark gnome of a son. Didn’t play guitar or baseball. Brooded like some…poet. Yes, he was hard on the boy. That was love. Look at this world.

He remembered flogging his son. It seemed just yesterday. It had been over a year, but his remorse made it seem fresh, even though he refused to admit to himself that he felt anything but righteousness about it. He was a man, pues. Making a man. He had forced Angel to stand naked in the back room.

“Bend over,” he’d said.

“No, Papá!”

The belt hung from Don Antonio’s fist.

“All right, mijo. Defy me. Make it worse.”

As he lay twenty-five stripes across his boy’s ass and back, he ordered him: “Do. Not. Cry. Cabrón.” One syllable per blow. Don’t. Cry. Ca. Brón. The whistle, and the snap when it hit. The boy’s hands trying to block the blows. “Raise your hands again, pendejo. Raise them to me. That tells me you want to fight me. And I will add twenty-five to this. Yes? It’s what you want. Does that make you happy?”

And he looked to see, for he knew that when he whipped naked men in the jail they sometimes became hard, rising like small branches as they screamed. His boy covered himself with his hand. Don Antonio suddenly lost his strength. His will drained out. His arm fell, and he stared at the network of red X’s all over Angel’s body as if they had appeared miraculously, like the face of Jesus in a cloud.

He looked at his son now. Regretting it a little. He gripped Angel’s shoulder and smiled at him.

“I touch your shoulder,” he said grandly, “for good luck!”

“Thank you, Father.”

He rubbed Angel’s head. “Mijo!” he said.

Honestly, Angel didn’t know what to think. He was pretty sure his father didn’t care for him much. He leaned around Don Antonio and stared at the suspect’s bench. Father turned and looked over there too.

And there they were: the Castro family, bedraggled in the no-man’s-land between the front lobby and the dreaded cellblocks in back. Nobody had yet handcuffed them to the gouged wood of the bench. A skinny young man, dripping blood in slow, fat, greasy drops from a gashed chin, held his hands together between shivering thighs. He had a black eye. Beside him sat a girl—Perla—with skinny, knobby gray knees and cuts on her face still sparkling with bits of glass. No more than fifteen. She had huge eyes, filled with fear, and she clutched the hand of a smaller girl. This would turn out to be the young Gloriosa, playing with a naked doll, twisting its arms as if trying to dismember it.

“What is this?” Don Antonio called.

“Car wreck,” the deskman said.

“Anybody die?”

“No.”

Don Antonio snapped his fingers. “Reporte,” he shouted.

There was no report.

“What do you mean there is no report?”

Shrugs. “It is early, Jefe. This just happened.”

The kids on the bench stared at the floor.

A cop stepped up and spoke: “This pendejo,” he said, pointing to the bloodied boy, “ran into a pickup truck full of ranch hands.”

Una pee-kah.

“Ah, cabrón,” said Don Antonio, looking down at them.

Perla started to cry.

“Sorry,” the boy said.

“Where are the cowboys?”

“They ran away.”

“But you didn’t run.”

“No, señor. They stopped right in front of me—I didn’t have the chance to stop.”

“You couldn’t stop.”

“I couldn’t stop.”

Even Angel knew that in the matter of car wrecks on the peninsula, everyone was arrested and investigated. Even the injured. Guilty until proven innocent.

“You didn’t know enough to run away too?” he said.

“Yes, sir. But I could not leave my father’s truck.”

Angel watched the skinny girl in the middle weep. She was inconsolate. He was immediately in love. He rose into gallantry as if he knew it was demanded of him, pulling his handkerchief out of his back pocket and stepping over to her. He extended his hand. She stared at the white square and then looked at his eyes. He nodded. She took it.

A young cop mocked them in almost-English. “Everybody goin’ to jail!” He laughed, saying yail.

“Ya pues,” Don Antonio said, watching his boy seduce the girl.

Angel was in a swoon. She was a bit younger than he was—Don Antonio saw that right away. And wanton. She had that look about her. She already knew how it felt to have a man. He might have gone after her himself.

He glanced again at his son. Angel was thinking with his little pistola, Don Antonio saw. He took an inventory of the girl. Her eyes were as huge as a deer’s. Her wild hair still dropped pebbles of glass. Her nose was big.

Angel reached over and took some glass out of her short black hair. She stared up at him. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

Don Antonio thought: He can’t even see the smoke coming out of her.

“Can I pay a fine?” the wounded boy on the bench said.

Don Antonio rose in height and inflated his chest. “What are you suggesting?”

“I—”

“Shut your hole.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you suggesting that we accept bribes here?” He used the classic term: la mordida.

“No, sir.”

“Are we dogs that bite?”

“No, sir.”

“Is that what you’re calling me? Do I look like a dog to you, pendejo?”

“No. Never.”

Angel glanced up at his father. His father stared back. Christ. He was smitten. He was imploring his father with his eyes. Don Antonio chuckled, looked over at the deskman. They both laughed. The girl had taken her big brother’s hand. She was willing to protect him. Don Antonio liked that.

“Está enamorado,” the other cop at the desk noted. “Tu hijo.”

“You,” snapped Don Antonio, pointing at the girl. “Cómo te llamas?”

“Perla Castro Trasviña.”

“You could go to jail right now.”

She covered her face with her hands. The others continued to stare at the floor. Portrait of a family trying to discover the gift of invisibility. His idiot son pushed into this bedraggled family group and put his arm over her bony shoulders. As if he could defend her.

“Perla,” Don Antonio finally said. “What does your family do?”

“Restaurant, sir.”

“What’s it called?”

“La Paloma del Sur.”

“If we come to see you, I expect good food. You cook it for us.”

“Yes.”

She was leaning against Angel! Ah, cabrón!

Don Antonio put his hands on his hips. “This is your lucky day,” he said. “Take your brother to a doctor.”

They goggled at him. So did the other cops.

“Go on,” he said. “Get out.”

They scrambled away.

“I like shrimp tacos!” he called as the door slammed shut behind them.

The police all laughed.

Don Antonio put his hands into his pockets and jangled his change and keys. “Mijo,” he said, “I am the law. Never forget.”

“I will remember,” Big Angel promised.

*  *  *

The last time Big Angel saw his father in La Paz was at his own farewell party.

They had conspired behind his back to be done with him.

Parents were mysterious creatures, full of plots and plans and secrets. Angel tried to be the guide for Pato and María Luisa through the strange landscapes of their parents’ marriage. But sometimes even his brilliance was bested by their weirdness. All families were strange, Angel already knew. He didn’t like to visit other families, because he was always ill at ease. The Basque family down at the end of their alley put bizarre sauces on their food, for example. And the hallelujah Christian converts kept saying “Gloria a Dios” and “Amén” all the time. They kept trying to give him Bibles. He palled around with El Fuma (for “Fu Manchu” due to his attempted mustache), but he steered clear of Fuma’s family. They said grace before they ate, and he didn’t know the words. Don Antonio would just take his place at the head of the table and await Mamá América’s food with a rolled-up corn tortilla in his left hand and his elbow on the table. Tortilla raised beside his ear like some weapon about to fall.

After his erotic night on the beach with Perla, however, Angel saw her and her family every day. Don Antonio could have locked him in one of the rebar-fronted cells at the station and he would have tunneled out. He barely completed his classes every day in high school before he was first out and hustling across five alleys and four main streets and one dusted plazuela to arrive at the front door of La Paloma del Sur. Then he tried to act very casual, as if he had happened to wander by on his way home. Hands in pockets, looking up and down the street. Then turning, looking up at the restaurant’s front window, as if startled that he had ended up before it. Squinting in. Elaborate performances of nonchalance contorting his features. And the whole while, the Castro family inside, watching him and laughing.

Perla didn’t go to school. La Paloma was her school. Her father had drowned in a fishing boat accident, and her brother had signed on to the big tuna boats and gone into the Pacific. So it was her and her sisters, Lupita and Gloriosa. Watched over and kept busy by their terrifying mother, Chela. She of the relentless flyswatter who could find a leg even as the girls ran to escape. She whose voice sounded like a frog and whose squat body looked like a clenched fist. She of the prematurely white hair and the most exquisite frijoles fried in lard of all La Paz.

Big Angel would mosey in, blushing like a red electric sign, and the females would ignore him in the elaborate fashion of Mexican women who are watching a man quite carefully. Except for Perla, who fluttered and flushed and rushed to place Pepsis and limes in front of him, and to waste tortilla chips on him. Chela told her and told her and told her: “Make men pay. They come in here to look at you; make them pay for it. Once you give a cabrón anything for free, he’ll be all over you and never think of buying you a ring. Look at him—he’s pole-vaulting across the room every time he sees you.”

“Ay, Mamá!”

In back, there was a small courtyard and a shaky metal stairway that led up to one of those improvised concrete-block apartments found everywhere in Mexico. An outside sink with yellow water, and inside, two rooms and a toilet. Angel never got upstairs to see it. Chela would have broken his legs.

But Chela knew a good thing when she saw it: the policeman’s son. Yes. Mucho dinero, she thought. She could get her girl in that crowd and manage things nicely. It was a terrible fate to have a house full of daughters, she thought, but she had been raised to be a ranchera, and she could trade stock and move breeding heifers around to everyone’s advantage. So she allowed this simpering romance.

Still, she wasn’t going to smile at the horny little bastard.

*  *  *

Perla wasn’t even there when the world changed for Angel. It would take years to see her again. And it would be in Tijuana.

His aunt Cuca had married a pirate. Well, that’s what Don Antonio called him. He was half Sinaloan, from the legendary town of Chametla. Chametla! Where Cortez allegedly sat on a rock on a day so hot the stone was melting, and his nalga cheeks had left a permanent impression. And he was half something else, from one of the many Anglo-Celtic incursions into Sinaloa in pursuit of mining jobs. Vicente, or “Chente.” Chente Bent.

Chente Bent! Skipper of the heinous fishing boat El Guatabampo! It clanged and farted into La Paz’s docks in a miasmic galaxy of stench, attended by hysterias of seabirds engaged in air battles over Chente Bent’s offal. Don Antonio called Chente Bent’s family “los cochinos,” which made the children giggle, while Mamá América scowled; Chente Bent had whisked off her younger sister, and she was not dirty. Her sister was now Cuca Bent. Just like that—the whole name, for Chente Bent announced himself thusly every time he spoke of himself. He made of the name a kind of brand, all run together: Chentebent. He could have been selling nasal sprays or a new model Chevy. The all new Chentebent.

Cucabent, as much as she suffered under the toxic attentions of the pirate, deserved more respect than to be called dirty by Don Antonio. And their daughter was Tikibent. They had a German shepherd named Capitán Bent. Capibent.

More than a name, the Bent surname was a pronouncement.

“Los Pinches Bent,” Don Antonio complained.

*  *  *

El Guatabampo sailed across the Sea of Cortez twice a year, in search of sweet La Paz abalone and little rock lobsters. It was a regular celebration when the boat arrived at the La Paz docks. Chentebent brought flounder and shrimp and sea urchins (whose orange meat made Angel vomit) and octopi and long steaks of oily marlin. Don Antonio would send off for a goat to be shot, and he roasted it in a bed of coals under the ground. They ate and drank beer and belched and gossiped for several days.

Tía Cucabent and the frizzy-haired cousin, Tikibent, sometimes hitched rides on the old boat, and they came into the family’s little courtyard smelling of spoiled fish and perfume. It wasn’t especially agreeable to Angel, though Tikibent showed an alarming interest in him on that last visit, and whenever the adults weren’t watching, she snuck him beers and pressed against him. She had a black eye.

“Son, you have real impact on your cousin,” Don Antonio whispered.

“She smells like Chentebent.”

“Ah, cabrón!” Don Antonio pulled him aside. “Put Vicks in your nose.”

It worked.

They danced.

*  *  *

That day, Cucabent and Tikibent joined Mamá América in cornering Angel. They herded him into his parents’ bedroom like a recalcitrant yearling bull. He didn’t like all the women closing in on him. “Your eyebrows!” Tikibent cried. “You look like a crow is stuck to your face.”

The torture began: tweezers wielded mercilessly, the women clearing the scrub off his brows and pinching him or insulting him when he squirmed or cried out. They harried his poor face until they had sculpted this extravagant hedge into two surprised-looking Rita Hayworth arches. Forever after, he would make this ritual part of his secret life with Perla. No one would ever know.

*  *  *

Don Antonio and Mamá América sat him down after his Spanish Inquisition eyebrow experience and informed him that he was going to Mazatlán on El Guatabampo. He cried out in outrage tinged with delight. He didn’t want to leave Perla! Yet he didn’t mind missing school. And he had never taken a long boat ride. Or seen far Mazatlán. The big city! Where all the sophisticates lived.

They thought he was stupid, as parents often do. Well, he was stupid, as children often are. He had no idea he was being moved aside to facilitate the dissolution of their marriage.

Don Antonio had for years engaged in mysterious visits to the northern border on “police work.” Mamá América knew he was visiting a cousin—a “secret” lover of his in Tijuana. But he really had his eye on the other side. In those days, Mexican men wanted two things: American cars and American women.

He had told her that very week he was leaving her for the other woman. But she knew what the other woman didn’t know: Antonio would leave that woman too.

She never let out one word of this betrayal to the kids. She was not about to beg him to stay or to let her horror show. She knew, however, that she could not deal with Angel’s stormy emotions once the betrayal hit. The little ones would be hard enough. She and Don Antonio would have to move Angel out of the house before the world collapsed around them. Hence the idea for him to leave with Chentebent.

Sometimes she imagined poisoning Don Antonio. A little rat poison in his coffee…

The plan was for Don Antonio to board the long-haul bus as soon as Angel the Sailor set out to sea. By the time their son found out, the damage would already be done and time would have passed. Letters were slow. Don Antonio demanded only one thing of his wife and her sister: that his son never be known as Angelbent.

Mamá América thought of Don Antonio’s old gray upright piano, which sat in a corner of the house. He had bought it from a rotten cantina on the outskirts of town, where desert rats slumped in the dark, drinking pulque and mezcal. The owner had sold it to him for a hundred U.S. dollars. It was covered in cigarette burns and stains. But he loved it. He played it for the family every day. He played a few Agustín Lara tunes now, for the party. After he was gone, América decided, she would chop it up for firewood.

All through that smoky last supper with the Bents crowding the small table under the plum tree, América never dropped her faint smile. The Harley was parked beside the back wall of the garden, exuding malevolent energies from beneath its shroud. She was smiling because she planned to roll it into the sea as soon as her bastard of a husband was settled in his bus seat.

Chentebent was telling appalling jokes that made Mamá América send the smaller children to their beds. Angel was hypnotized by these nights, when his father drank liquor—Chentebent was a notorious carouser, along with his many other attributes, and he caused Don Antonio to drink tequila. An astonishment. And Don Antonio transformed from a carved pillar of righteous strength to a fluid, dancing creature of many voices and filthy uproars. For the rest of his life, Angel would long to reduce a house full of people to a choking, bellowing mess like these men did.

“Ay, Chente!” the women would cry. “Ay, Tonio!” Whether red-faced from laughing or embarrassment, Angel could never tell.

“And then,” Chentebent shouted, “the elephant stuck the peanut up Pancho’s ass!”

Guffawing, Cucabent fell out of her chair, and Don Antonio jumped up and goose-stepped around the courtyard, holding his stomach and trying to breathe through laughing. The parrot screamed in its cage, as if it understood the joke as well.

“Listen, listen!” his father said when he caught his breath.

Their hilarity died down. The meat still crackled in its red-hot pit. Shrimp heads lay all over the table, staring with their black pencil-tip eyes. And Tikibent grinned ferally at Angel with a shiny wet mouth he knew would taste of lime and salt and fish oil. Beer cans and tequila bottles and several glasses covered the table and the ground beneath it. Mamá América thinking all the while of sharp knives and testicles.

“Listen,” Don Antonio repeated, unsteady in the middle of his wobbling shadow, pushed jaggedly across the flagstones by lamps hung in the tree. “I have a joke for you! So. Little Pepe was playing in the garden.”

“Pepe who?” said Chentebent.

“Pepe, pues. Any Pepe!”

Chentebent crossed his arms. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about Pepe! Oye, cabrón! It’s a joke! There is no Pepe!”

“If there is no Pepe, why are you talking about him?”

“Damn you, pinche Chente!”

“You are imagining things,” Chentebent said, draining his beer and belching softly with a luxuriousness that only a liter of shrimp gas could create.

“Listen, you bastard!” cried Don Antonio.

This exchange lived on for Angel as the most deeply amusing moment of the night. It was better than the jokes. He discovered at that moment that he was an absurdist—it came to him as a Zen enlightenment. He fell back in his chair. Tikibent ruined the spell by widening her legs for an instant and allowing him full view of her bloomers.

“Little Pepe,” Don Antonio resumed, “was playing in his yard.”

“Where did he live?”

“Go to hell, pendejo. And his grandfather came along and sat on a bench and watched him playing. He called Pepe over and said, ‘Look at this earthworm on the ground. He just came out of a hole.’”

Chentebent raised a finger. “Excuse me,” he said. “What was the grandfather’s name?”

“Who cares! It’s a goddamned joke! Stop interrupting!”

Angel and the women were snickering.

Wounded, Chentebent said, “It seemed important to you that everybody had a name in this story.” He expressed his sense of futility with his lower lip and the shrug of one shoulder.

Don Antonio released a cry of cosmic protest to the heavens and said, “Carlos! Grandpa is named Carlos! All right? Is everybody happy now?”

“I am happy, Father,” Angel said.

Chentebent yawned.

“Grandpa Carlos showed Pepe there was a damned worm on the ground, wiggling around beside its hole. And he said to the boy, ‘Pepe, I will pay you a peso if you can put that worm back in its hole.’”

“Cheapskate,” Chentebent noted, using the infuriating Mexican term “codo duro”—he of the hard elbow—which Angel never quite understood.

Wisely, Don Antonio ignored Chentebent, which silenced him. “So Pepe thought about it,” Don Antonio continued, “and ran inside. He came out with his mother’s hair spray. He picked up the worm and sprayed it until it was stiff, then he slipped it down the hole. His grandfather gave him his peso and hurried away. The next day, Pepe was outside playing again. His grandfather came out of the house and gave him a peso. ‘But, Abuelito,’ Pepe said. ‘You already paid me yesterday!’ Grandfather Carlos said, ‘No, Pepe. That peso is from your grandmother!’”

Don Antonio stood there with his arms raised.

Suddenly the women burst into cackles, even Mamá América.

“Ay, Tonio!” Cucabent shouted.

After a pause, Chentebent said, “I don’t understand a word you said.”

This exact moment was when hell came through their gate, and Don Antonio showed Angel that he was a madman and a Pancho Villa. As they all laughed, the gate flew open, and a drunk fisherman staggered into the courtyard with a huge knife, one meant for gutting sharks and tunas, clutched in his fist.

“Chentebent!” he shouted.

One of the myriad enemies of the odiferous Bent corporation, come to call.

“I slice you open like a pinche fish, cabrón!”

The knife swung back and forth, held low like a real knife fighter would hold it.

“You slept with my wife!”

The women cried out.

Tikibent jumped behind Angel and wailed like a police siren.

Don Antonio still stood with his arms stretched wide. He wasn’t in uniform, so he didn’t have his pistola on his hip. He was sorely disappointed when he reached for it to blow this asshole back out of the gate.

For his part, Chentebent downed a tequila shot and turned his watery red eyes on his assailant. He didn’t seem inclined to rise to his own defense. He didn’t know this pendejo, nor could he imagine which of his various paramours might be attached to him.

“She wasn’t any good anyway,” he said. Then belched.

Mamá América rushed to shield Angel with her body. And Tikibent moved her aside so she could see the fight. The green parrot in his cage began trying to fly, shaking the cage so badly that seeds rained out on them.

Don Antonio turned to the deadly sailor.

“You shit,” he said.

“What?”

“You vermin. You pig.”

“Watch yourself.”

“You son of a whore. You come into my home and threaten my guests? You dare wave a knife at me? I will kill you and your entire family. I will kill your children, and I will kill your grandchildren. And I will dig up your ancestors and shit in their mouths.”

“Hey.”

Don Antonio tore his own shirt open. “Stab me, chingado. If you think you can kill me, stab me now. Right in my heart. But be sure I’m dead. Because I am about to unleash all of my wrath on you, you fucking dog.”

The sailor stared at him with true terror on his face. He had no idea who this maniac was, but he was clearly the one man in La Paz the sailor did not want to fight. The sailor didn’t even pause to muster his dignity. He spun around, ran into the street, and charged as fast as he could toward the sea, upending trash cans as he fled.

For the rest of his life, no matter what he thought of his father, no matter what hardships or sorrows, what humiliations or horrors befell him, Big Angel remembered that moment as the single most heroic thing he would ever witness. He thought he would never be able to be a man like his father.

Even Chentebent clapped his hands, albeit softly.

*  *  *

The next day, Angel boarded El Guatabampo and sailed into the hazy blue. He had no chance to bid farewell to his Perla. And her family did not have the technological miracle of a telephone. He tore himself away from the land, choking back tears. Chentebent hooted the steam whistle incessantly, in spite of his own hangover. Life was pain, after all. Leaving Perla, Angel was sure, would be the worst of it for him.

The last thing his father said to him was “We need to know—did you sleep with Tikibent?”

“Qué?”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Father! No! She is my cousin!”

“Idiot,” his father replied. “You could have done anything you wanted with her!”

As soon as the boat was out of sight, Don Antonio and his little family walked home. He collected his two bags, gave the two children formal hugs, and—oddly, it seemed to everyone—shook Mamá América’s hand.

“If you could have produced more sons,” he said, “I would not be forced to leave you.”

She had a completely still face, thinking: You vermin.

“Take care of my motorcycle until I send for it” was the last thing he said. He trudged away toward the center of town. Whistling.

América had been planning to murder that damned motorcycle, but she wasn’t stupid. She strode over to the machine and ripped the drop cloth off it. “Play,” she told the children, who had no idea their world had just ended. And later that day, while her older son vomited operatically into the Sea of Cortez, she sold the motorcycle to a doctor from Cabo San Lucas, for she knew she would have to feed the household. But even that money would eventually run out. She and these two would go hungry. They would even eat the doves in the patio cages, and regret that they couldn’t bring themselves to kill and cook the parrot.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, far across the sea, Angel worked every day and saved his centavos for when he could escape the hell he had unwittingly entered. Chentebent barely paid him. Cucabent did his laundry and cooked for him, and, by God, that was generous enough in their opinion. Where Angel had imagined nightly gatherings and uproar as he had known during the Bents’ invasions of his home, he instead found himself in the outer dark. Alone. Miserable. Hungry. Under siege.

At first, he slept in a little lean-to in the family’s small huerta—tucked in among bananas and two mango trees. A date palm full of iguanas. Giant spiders that terrified him. And the washhouse-toilet, where he showered in cold water. Mazatlán was almost always warm enough for a cold shower, and so it wasn’t the water that bothered him as much as the huge roaches that flew out of the drain.

One of his duties was to mop out the evil little toilet room—he had to empty out the tin toilet paper can since the pipes would not swallow soiled paper. It disgusted him. He held his breath. Chentebent wadded up giant knots of awful paper while allowing Big Angel five sheets a day. “Scrub your culo with a sponge!” his uncle said.

Angel started to sense something was wrong when he learned that the neighbors did not like the Bent clan and tended to shun them. Chentebent’s behavior was unacceptable to good Mazatlecos. People on the street were even wary of saying “Good morning” or “Good afternoon,” which was rare in Sinaloa. Rudeness was a real sin to them. He told himself the beatings weren’t so bad—Don Antonio could hit harder than Bent could. At least they weren’t every day. And Tikibent got hit more than he did.

He did toilet duty every morning and night, and he raked the huerta, and he swept the house, and he scraped and painted and mopped and hauled nets on the boat. He was hungry all the time. His growling stomach wouldn’t let him sleep at night. Cucabent and Tikibent filled the little toilet bucket with “los secretos”—things that were best kept secret, in his opinion. And then he realized that Tikibent left him other things: underpants draped casually over the edge of the sink. Or the door left half open as she showered. He missed his mother and father, and he wept at night thinking of Perla.

He didn’t know why it took him so long to write to her. Perhaps it was shyness. Or shame. He could not find the words for her. And it was suddenly six months later, and he borrowed some paper and an envelope from Tía Cucabent. And he bent to it like some monkey transcribing scripture, agonizing over each line and crumpling drafts until he was down to his last sheet and had to let the letter go.

“Mi Dulce Perlita,” he wrote, then tried a fresh opening added to this one:

Perla of Great Price—

I miss you like a caged bird misses the sky. I am in a cage. But I will be free. And I will come for you because I know you miss me as much as I miss you. And we will make a new world!

He went on in this vein for a few more lines and ended with tears and great kisses and exhalations of fervor. He trembled when he took the letter to the mailbox by the docks. In those days, of course, there was only the somnambulistic Mexican postal service to deliver messages. And his ten-centavo letter took almost two weeks to arrive in La Paz. And his response was tardy in the writing, followed by its glacial delivery. So he didn’t hear from her for over a month. A month spent fretting and waiting. It was the epitome of romance in his mind—somehow noble. He felt elevated every day by his suffering for her—a suffering of greater depth and quality than these squalid days as Chentebent’s scut boy. But like many lovers before him, awaiting some imagined billet-doux full of brace, he received the letter all dreamers fear most.

Esteemed Angel.

Oh hell no, he thought. He knew already. Say no more. Life had already ended with those two anemic words of greeting. It could have just as easily said, “Hello, Loser.”

He scanned the bad handwriting for the three lines it took for her to confess: “But you never wrote to me, and I have found another.” Angel immediately burned Perla’s letter. And he crept to Tiki, against his will—he sinned. It was like his little pole dragged him, the most powerful magnet on Earth. Just the sight of Tiki made it start to bounce. Like some band conductor’s baton, counting out the beats of his broken heart. He thought if Tikibent saw this bouncing, she would flee from him. So he wore his shirts untucked. When she saw his shirttails, Tikibent thought he was flying a battle flag to announce his intentions. She took that jumpy twig in hand and strangled it until it relaxed.

He was embarrassed to be alive. His hands shook. And he was sure that God would strike him down. His life was shame. Betrayed and abandoned by everything and everyone.

But before God could be stirred to wrath, Chentebent struck first.

He crept out to Angel’s hut, reeking of spoiled shrimp and rum. He fell on top of him. Breathed in his face. “Are you hard?” he kept saying. “Are you hard? Do you beat it? Do you?” He scrabbled for the front of Angel’s pants. “Let’s see that meat. Let’s see what you’re giving to my girl.” Chentebent, laughing and blowing reek in his face, fat and crushing, no matter how Angel kicked.

Angel kept thinking: I thought you were a good man. I thought you were funny.

Chentebent collapsed into thunderous snores atop him.

*  *  *

He took his first revenge on the pirate the next day.

When no one was looking, he scooped huge globs of lard out of Cucabent’s red cans. Lard being saved for frying beans. And he smeared it inside the legs of Chentebent’s favorite canvas pants. When the outraged howling began, Chentebent coming at him with his legs splayed, waddling, red in the face and squishing with every step, Angel stood up to the blows and smiled at Tikibent, who watched from her window, ripping at her hair and laughing. He lost a tooth that day.

Chentebent dragged him roughly to El Guatabampo, his great callused fingers leaving livid purple imprints on Angel’s arms, as if he had tattooed dark lilies upon them.

“Earn your keep, you goddamn freeloader,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”

Angel had blood on his face, in his mouth.

“Oh, you’ll learn your lesson. You little prick.”

All Angel had to do was wait. He could outlast anything. He outlasted Chentebent’s beatings. He outlasted his uncle’s grunting visits at night.

Only when he was alone did Angel weep, snot all over his face. He slept on a pallet of old blankets in the poxy galley, tucked under the sink. And he scraped and painted and scrubbed and gutted, fished and crabbed and mended nets and served as insomniac watchdog all night, alone. He sometimes had to take gaff in hand and beat back bandits and drunken sailors from foreign ships, who crept to the foul boat along the docks. He listened to the drinking and fighting on other boats, the music coming from the shore, the laughter of whores and lovers, and the barking of dogs. When the church bells rang, he felt that the world he knew was in some other land. Was too far away to ever be found again. He would show Perla the depth of her mistake. “I am worthy, I am worthy,” he recited as if in prayer.

He was cut across the chest by a skinny old sailor, who took the gaff to the face and vanished overboard among the oil slicks and dead fish. He bled, watching the old man drag himself up a ladder at the next berth, slimy and wobbly as he stumbled into the night. Fat blood drops splashed at his feet. Angel never said a word, but he remembered the moment. Kept it inside him.

He wrapped his chest in rags and taped it over, and the fever turned his front red and made him shiver as if snow were falling, but he never told. He stole rum from the galley and dripped it screaming hot into the pus-drooling wound. He bit his lips and cried and kicked his feet.

He carried on in shock and terror for days out there, waiting for God’s wrath or the sailor’s comrades—neither of which came. He suspected this entire life was a turn of God’s displeasure. He hid his meager pay in a coffee can behind the galley sink, and he found Chentebent’s chest of oily pesos—his operating budget for their fishing expeditions—locked in a cabinet in the wheelhouse. Chentebent began to charge him for beans and tortillas.

He preferred to go hungry. He ate only what was in the boat, even raw bait sardines. He saved every centavo he could. Those nights when he ate, and his guts twisted and groaned inside him, and Perla was so far away, and he feared his mother and brother and sister might be hungry and abandoned across the sea, were the darkest of all.

The next time Chentebent came for him, he had the gaff ready. The pirate had come aboard and already opened his filthy dungarees, and Angel swung the gaff with his eyes closed. Blind, flailing. He never really thought he’d connect with the side of Chentebent’s head. The hideous crunch of the club hitting the skull. The startled grunt, and the immediate scent of feces. The crippling spike of pain up his own arm when he hit the big man. And the splash.

By the time he opened his eyes—for he had kept them clenched for just a moment, in the hopes that what he had just done had not really happened—the big man was sinking into the oily water, his undone pants around his knees.

Angel waited for him to surface. But he did not.

*  *  *

The rest of that night came in a panic. His memory was never clear. For he was still just a boy, and although he was terrified of what he’d done, he was even more afraid of getting in trouble for it. A thousand lies pulsed through his head. Some part of him believed the fisherman would climb a ladder over at the next mooring and curse at him. He ran back and forth, but there was no magical portal on the Guatabampo that opened to some fresh new world where things were beautiful again.

The coffee can of pesos went into his mochila with his two extra pairs of dungarees, his shorts and socks, and his three shirts. He got the box of fishing money out from the main cabin. The boat’s extra fuel cans were difficult to lift, but he was strong in his panic. It was all he could imagine now: a fraudulent accident. He saw himself being interviewed by police—perhaps his own father. No, no! He was drunk. He threw me off the boat and told me to never come back. I took my severance pay and bought a bus ticket. I don’t know what happened after I left. I saw nothing. I wanted to join my father.

Mamá América had finally confided to him in a terse letter that his father had gone north. And that she and his siblings would probably follow. He would confront his father for abandoning his family if it was the last thing he did.

So he took a bus north. Express to Tijuana. It would be twenty-seven hours sitting there, smelling of gasoline. He couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking about the throbbing bloom of orange flame visible from the window as the bus had pulled away into the night.

It was 1965, and he felt he had already lived a hundred years.

For decades, he told his mother that he had run away. That he had no idea what happened to El Guatabampo or Tío Chente. He repeated his lie so many times that he almost convinced himself: he had gotten fed up with the work and the bullying, and had saved up his money and caught the bus. He assumed that Chentebent discovered his escape and got drunk and somehow set fire to the boat.

He had thought it was over. But the guilt and the lie burned steadily through all of his life.

*  *  *

Big Angel stood in the shadows of the living room, buffeted by stories of the past, things he remembered and things he had learned. Or maybe things he had dreamed. He could no longer tell the difference. The stories flew in like wind through an open window and whirled around him. He could feel them almost pull him off his feet. They seemed to come by their own volition, leaping over years, ignoring the decades. Big Angel found himself in a time storm. He saw it all as if the past were a movie in the Las Pulgas theater.

*  *  *

Little Angel was born in 1967.

Big Angel lived with his mother and siblings in Colonia Obrera in Tijuana until he snuck across the border to join his father after one of the old man’s infrequent visits to their house. It seemed easy to him. People either crept through the shallow brown Tijuana River down near the coast or joined the crowds running out of Colonia Libertad in Otay to the east. There were regular corridors in those days, and day workers often commuted through the dirt canyons. Big Angel refused to see any other girls. He sent postcards to Perla, which she never answered.

Yndio was born in 1970. By then, Big Angel was camping out at his father’s house and working as a donut cooker on night shift with payments made strictly under the table. One of his first American phrases: “under the table.” It seemed so elegant.

Braulio was born in 1971. Big Angel didn’t know any of this, but he wrote Perla a letter that same year, begging her to come north. Though the letter was later lost, they both remembered the line “Come to me while we still have life and we can wrestle with destiny.” It was the noblest thing Perla had ever heard. And she came, throwing everything away to join him.

Braulio grew up fast. He had them all fooled. Minnie was just a dumb kid—she worshipped all three of her brothers. But El Yndio knew, and Lalo knew what the deal was. And as she got older, Minnie made believe she didn’t know. Mamá Perla—well, Braulio was her angel. Pops took his standard noble route. Sometimes the boys laughed at him when he wasn’t around—so snooty, nose in the air. Making a big show of claiming Yndio and Braulio as his sons. The wisest man in the world, by his own estimation, remained blind to these two. Pinche Braulio—his nickname, Snickers, should have said it all.

Yndio could not stand Big Angel. He was the one who remembered his birth father. Braulio had been too young. Their father had dived for pearls. He shucked oysters with a fat, curved blade and slurped them down with lime juice and red hot sauce. He laughed loud, and when he laughed, his gold tooth shone. And one day, he dove into the waters east of La Paz and never surfaced. Yndio remembered that.

This Angel appeared one day as if he’d always been there. Yndio was so shocked that his mother had some romantic secret. Some filthy little past life. He wrestled with rage—thinking Whore some days when he looked at her.

Not Braulio. He was a prankster. And when he hooked up with Gloriosa’s boy, Guillermo, it was some kind of perfection. They were the same age, the same size. They could have been twins. And the girlies called Guillermo “Joker.” There was a clear theme. Snickers and Joker, down por vida homies. 4LIFE. When poor Lalo came along, he never could penetrate their society of two.

Things weren’t always middle class for the family. They didn’t always live in Lomas Doradas, in the happy barrios of Dago town. And in those years of struggle, when Big Angel would not allow anyone to get government help—no welfare, no food stamps—there were lots of boiled beans and fried beans and bean soups. Braulio’s favorite breakfast was cold fried beans smeared on a slice of Wonder Bread. Eaten while standing in the sad, tiny kitchen of their first apartment behind a garage in San Ysidro, not fifty yards from the border’s barbed wire. Pretty ballsy, since Ma and Pops were both illegal as hell back then.

Nights filled with helicopters and sirens and running feet and break-ins. Days watching out for gangbangers and stealthy Mexican bandits who snuck into the country to steal what little that immigrants like Angel and Perla had. They beat people and stole their watches and were reabsorbed by Tijuana before anybody noticed.

The kids all walked down to Oscar’s Drive-In and pooled their pennies to buy a chocolate malt and share it. Snickers, Yndio, Lalo, and Li’l Mouse. She was funny—no front teeth back then. Yndio mocked her, calling her “Moush.” She chewed the paper straws with her gums and wrecked them, and the boys smacked her on the head.

Later, Snickers came through for her, getting Minnie to school in Pops’s old station wagon. Braulio liked to drive her. He knew he could stab any culero who stepped up to her in a disrespectful way. Everybody was afraid of him, except his family. It felt good for Minnie. No matter where she went in her school, she got respect, because they all believed Braulio would come and set them on fire if they talked shit to the cutie.

Everybody said he had done that very thing to some Mexican outlaw on Otay Mesa. Minnie didn’t believe those stories. Not at first.

*  *  *

In those days, when Big Angel worked two jobs, sometimes three, poor Perla suffered in that dim apartment. She wanted only to return to Mexico. She did not understand his obsession with the U.S. This was not a better life. At home, at least, there was community, laughter. Even hope. In Tijuana, if you wanted to party, you could build a bonfire in the middle of the street.

Here, she found loneliness and worse hunger than in Mexico—worse, because all around her people were rolling like pigs in huge piles of food and clothes and liquor and nice underwear and cigarettes and money and chocolate and fruit. And she struggled to find new ways to stretch a thin chicken and a handful of rice to feed three growing boys and her man. Minnie? She could go hungry like Perla. It wouldn’t do to be a fat Mexican girl anyway.

Snickers and Joker rescued her days. They were wild, hilarious. Joker flirted with her most inappropriately—when she was feeling fat and sagging and old. He’d get up behind her and whisper-growl in her ear. “Tía, me tienes tan caliente!” She laughed and smacked him, but she also felt the hot tickles when he was against her. Oh no. Bad boy. Though she might have pushed back on him once or twice with her bottom.

The boys charged into that place as if it were some palace, blasted the TV too loud, lounged on the couches, and shouted compliments. They always had cigarettes for her. Then chocolates. Then money, which she’d hide from Angel. When Braulio turned sixteen and had gas money, he dragged her out to the car and drove her around. She couldn’t understand where they kept getting so many cigarettes.

*  *  *

Yndio was different. He was always stoic. Iron faced and strict with the little ones. He was always furious with Big Angel for some reason. He never understood his stepfather’s indulgence of the young ones, because Big Angel had been so hard on him. Big Angel tried to be Don Antonio at first—what else did he know? And he had used the belt on Yndio’s back. Yndio was already as tall as he was, and the second time Big Angel thought a whipping was in order, Yndio punched him in the face.

“I am your father!” Angel shouted.

“You sleep with my mother, old man. I don’t have a father.”

When Angel grabbed his arm, Yndio spit in his face.

*  *  *

When Big Angel rented the house in Lomas Doradas, it was a surprise for Perla. He told her he needed to go for a drive to pick something up from his boss. He was working day shifts pushing a broom, and night shifts he learned to sell real estate. One of his million jobs. She didn’t like to leave the apartment, but he cajoled until she agreed to ride with him. The kids were inside the house, waiting for them. When she realized what was happening, she collapsed. The boys had to drag her to a chair and hold her up.

“Ay Dios! Flaco! Ay Dios!”

It didn’t take long for Yndio to spend more time away with “friends.”

Then Gloriosa and Joker moved in with them. And Lalo began to learn what Snickers and Joker were really like. First they had tattoos. Then they had money. Then they hid guns in the bedroom. They liked to catch him and stuff him in the cabinet under the sink and stick a broom handle through the door pulls to leave him trapped. They filled socks with glue and breathed the vapors.

All the boys were skinny except for Yndio. He was born with that body. But he never missed a chance to build strength. He had arms that anyone would kill for. He did two hundred sit-ups a day. Push-ups when he came for weekend visits, with Minnie kneeling on his back.

The house started to feel impossible. There were so many bodies crammed in there, they could hardly breathe. There didn’t seem to be any air. They had no idea how busy the little house would always be. When Big Angel came home from his jobs, he sat on the slumpy couch with Lalo and Braulio. Minnie sat on the floor between his bare feet, rubbing Quinsana powder between his toes. Gloriosa sat in the used easy chair. The only place left was in the corner, on the floor with the dog that Snickers had rescued in the rail yards. So Yndio sat there and just stared at the TV, never looking at Big Angel. Joker tended to hang in the back room, reading comic books. Perla stood in the kitchen, leaning against a counter. Drinking instant coffee. Fretting and smoking. They all smoked, except Minnie. But she would learn fast.

Big Angel grew dark, brooding, as he worked extra hours. He worked now in a bakery up in National City, so he was able to bring home stale donuts. The kids thought donuts made them rich. Snickers and Joker had never tasted jelly donuts before. As soon as he had changed his bakery uniform, Angel was out the door to clean business buildings in downtown San Diego. He came home and studied to sell term life insurance. And then came night classes in computer programming. He crawled into bed after midnight, to the sound of his wife and daughter snoring, then was up again before 6:00 a.m. to make more donuts.

But he bought the house for $18,000 through the real estate brokers he used to work for.

And that’s when Grandpa Antonio moved in, thrown out of his own house by Little Angel’s mother, Betty. Big Angel never thought he would end up making peace with his father and certainly never thought he would give him shelter. But once Gramps was installed, Yndio never came back. Perla and Minnie had to meet him at the Pancake House when they wanted to see him. His hair! He had an earring.

One day Perla took his hands in hers across the table and said, “My son. Are you a queer?”

He and Minnie stared at each other and fell over laughing.

*  *  *

Angel and Don Antonio spent many tense hours at the kitchen table, elaborately ignoring each other and sipping black coffee. In Don Antonio’s view, coffee with cream and sugar was dessert, not a drink for men. Angel felt superior at last to his father. He knew the old man had been thrown out for sleeping with American women in his wife’s bed.

“I loved your mother,” Don Antonio said, though whenever América came over, he hid in the back room.

“Why did you leave us, then?”

“I don’t know.”

Another cigarette lit. Perla keeping out of it. Fearing the old man. Fearing he’d come for her one night, and she would be afraid to fight him off because she didn’t want her Flaco to suffer another heartbreak. She kept Minnie out of his reach.

“Son, the more I learn, the less I know.”

“Oh?”

“I thought getting old made you wise. You only find out how pendejo you are. But when I get too pendejo to drive, put me in my grave.”

“Padre, it isn’t that bad.”

“Well, mijo, I can still get upstairs to a lady’s apartment. But my pecker won’t stand up to do anything about it.”

“I see,” Angel replied.

But he would not really see until he was dying, and he’d replay this chat in his bed when he couldn’t sleep. I am just learning how stupid I am.

*  *  *

Easing back into his body.

She snored beside him. Flung across the mattress as if she were running downhill, arms and legs akimbo. He patted her rump. He liked the edge of the sheet over his lips. All tucked in. Tight. Safe.

Early morning before dawn was best, when he didn’t remember he was dying. For a moment, he thought he had a future. And he savored his past.

Today, it tasted of butterscotch.