BONES. DIEGO SAT at his desk tracing the word, letter by letter, with his finger. He pretended his fist was full of sand—he emptied it out onto the desk. He blew it away with a breath. He thought the statue of Christ the King had a sick sense of humor.
Luz and Mundo had tried to comfort him all week long, but he refused to hear anything at all on the subject of the treasure. “At least we found something,” Luz said, “and we placed a cross to mark the grave—those things are very important, mi amor.”
Diego nodded, but was unable to hide his disgust. He wondered why the treasure had been so important.
He had begun to dream of his mother, and his dreams had brought back the memory he had hid from himself. He remembered clearly now that his mother had jumped out in front of a car to save his life because he had not heard it coming, because he had not been paying attention. He had been taught to be careful, to always look because he could not hear. But he had stepped out into the street because he had been thinking about a story he had read—a story, a stupid story. The next thing he felt was a hand pushing him out of the way. Then his mother lying there crushed. He found it odd that he had forgotten how she had died. He had not been a child when it happened. He suspected now that his sister had left because she blamed him for her death. Her blame was not exactly misplaced, he thought. He began to despair, to hate himself, and he no longer felt anything except the full force of the dullness of his life. Diego was caught in a body that could neither speak nor hear, and he hated it, hated his life as he had never hated it before.
Bones. He traced the word on his desk again. He decided that he would start a new suicide letter. This time, he would carry it out. This time, he would end the nonsense. Mundo had come by every day and taken him out into the country to teach him to drive. It had been easier than he had thought. To keep his mind off the coffin and the skeleton and the deceiving Christ, he studied the driver’s manual late into the nighl. On the fourth day of his driving lessons, Mundo had taught him to parallel park. Mundo tried to make him laugh, but Diego refused to let himself be amused by anything. Since he had nothing else, he let the act of driving become everything. He learned to drive in six days. He had never found anything difficult to learn—except for speaking. He had refused to learn to speak at school because he did not want others to hear his voice. Why should they hear what he could not? But driving a car—that was easy. On Monday morning, Mundo took him to get his driver’s license. He got a perfect score on the written. Mundo explained to the uniformed official that Diego was deaf. The DMV officer pointed when he wanted him to turn in a particular direction. He look his picture and was given a temporary license. There was only one restriction placed on his license: All vehicles he was to drive had to have outside mirrors. Diego looked at his temporary license. “That’s all?” Diego wrote. “That’s all,’ Mundo nodded. Diego shrugged.
“Look, ese,” Mundo said, shaking him, “you got to get yourself together. You got to stop thinking about that coffin. No one cares, man. Did you really think we were gonna get rich, ese? This is America, Diego, and most people don’t get rich in America—got that? You been listening to the wrong people.”
“It’s not about being rich,” Diego wrote. He didn’t even want to try to explain his disappointment, couldn’t even begin to write the words that said what it had felt like to hear that voice speak to him. To have waited so long to hear and then discover that the voice had been a lie. “You’re right,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter.”
Mundo tossed him the keys. “You drive,” he said, “you’re legal now—and now you can apply for that job delivering flowers. I talked to the guy about you—told him all about you, ese,” Mundo didn’t tell Diego that he’d turned down the job offer himself because the guy was a do-gooder—the kind that was always trying to help fix other people’s lives. “No,” he told him, “I got a job—it’s my friend that needs the job.” He looked straight at Diego as he sat in the driver’s seat. “The guy says to go in and make your application.”
I won’t get the job, Diego thought as he looked away from Mundo and turned the ignition, and if I do get it, it’ll be because he feels sorry for me. I’m sick of people feeling sorry for me. Mundo directed him to the flower shop. They parked around the comer. “Just go in there,” he said. “Put in your application, got it?”
“I don’t want the job,” Diego wrote.
“You gotta work, ese. You and Doha Luz, gotta make the rent. That tough old lady ain’t gonna last forever—you need to work.”
“You don’t work,” he said.
“I get by,” he said. “I got some skills, bro.”
“Teach them to me.” he wrote.
“No, ese. I taught you how to drive—that’s the only skill I wanna pass on to a guy like you.”
“I’m not going in.”
“I’ll kick your ass all the way to the door,” Mundo said. He grabbed Diego’s pad away from him. “Just try it,” he wrote. “If you hate it—then quit. Just try it.”
Diego threw the keys on Mundo’s lap, stole back his pad and pen, and slammed the car door. He stomped toward the flower shop hating the power Mundo and Luz had over him. He stared at the door to the flower shop. He read the sign: IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY, THEN SAY IT WITH FLOWERS. He pushed open the door and walked inside.
Mundo stood at the door smoking a cigarette and watched Luz as she stood over the kitchen table rolling out tortillas, each one as perfect and round as the one before. One at a time she cooked them on a comál she had inherited from her mother, the smell of them filling the warm September air. She reminded him of his mother—except his mother had been more frail and had not been strong enough to keep fighting. Diego sat at the table patiently cleaning beans. His mind was on his letter and on his sister. He thought his final letter would be one in which he would ask her for forgiveness. It was his fault they were orphans. If he killed himself and left the letter to her, the authorities would be forced to look for her. As he fingered each pinto bean, he tried to imagine her face.
Mundo flicked his cigarette into the backyard.
“We have ashtrays,” Luz said, “act like a person.”
“It don’t hurt the ground. Doña Luz.”
“It does hurt the ground—and who the hell do you think cleans them up? The maid?” She cackled at her own joke.
He liked her laugh. “Don’t take a clean backyard so serious.”
“That’s what’s wrong with you,” she said as she handed him a tortilla right off the comál, “you don’t take your life seriously. What do you do? You hang out with gang members, you drink beer, you get into fights, you take up space—you call that living?”
“You clean other people’s houses—you call that living?”
She shot him a look. “I work,” she said. She spread out her hands and pointed to each corner of the kitchen, “and because I work we have this house. You? What have you got—you haven’t got a damn thing. You sleep at your mother’s house?”
“Mostly,” he said, his mouth full of her fresh tortilla.
“Well, what happens when she dies? How come you don’t get a job?”
“I don’t want no fuckin’ job, I just want to take up space—I wanna take up lots of goddamned space.”
She stared at the cut above his eye and shook her head. “One of these days you’re gonna mess with the wrong guy, Mundo. You think you’re a real badass gang member, but I see you. I know what you are. You’re a lot of things I don’t like, but you’re not a killer, Mundo. But one day they’re going to find your brown ass out on the street and it’s going to be dead. Dios te bendiga.” She buttered up another fresh tortilla and walked over to Diego and handed it to him. He looked up and took it. “Come out of that world of yours,” she told him firmly.
He took a bite out of the tortilla and nodded.
“Ahhh, only gringos with money get depressed—they’re the only ones who can afford to.”
Mundo laughed. “No, Doña Luz, you got that wrong. See, when a woman dumps me—man I get real depressed—it ain’t no gringo thing. I mean, I get so depressed I have to hit someone.”
“That’s not depression, menso. Depressed people don’t go around hitting other people.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” she said emphatically, “but I know one thing—if you’d keep your cosita in your pants, women wouldn’t go around throwing you out on your cholo ass.”
He polished off his tortilla. “Marriage ain’t natural—”
“Don’t give me that natural stuff—what the hell do you know about natural? People like you, you think streets and concrete and barrios are natural. A mesquite—now, that’s natural.”
Diego moved his clean pile of pinto beans with one swift movement of his arm; they fell into a pot he held like a pocket in a pool table. The sound of the beans in the empty pot made Luz lose her train of thought.
Diego looked up at her.
“What are you thinking about?” She asked.
He took out his note pad from his pocket. “When are you going to learn sign language?” he asked.
“I’ve learned all the languages I’m going to learn,” she said. “We talk just fine.”
“Did you ever stop to think that my hands get tired?” he wrote. He underlined tired.
“You still in a bad mood?” Mundo asked.
Diego shook his head. He looked down at his pad. “Did you know I’ve never made love to a woman?”
“Yeah,” Mundo said, “I figured that one out long time ago.”
“Is that it?” Luz asked. “Hell, Dieguito, sex—it’s not important.”
Diego stared at her as if his eyes were stone. “How many lovers have you had?”
Luz shook her head. “What difference does it make?”
“Ten?” he wrote, held it up and tossed the paper in the air. “Twelve?” he wrote, and again he flipped the page in the air. “Twenty?” He stared at both of them. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. My body’s just like yours.”
“OK, amor,” she said. “It was a stupid thing to say. Of course it matters.”
“Look, ese, I know where you can get some action.”
“Shut up, Mundo, don’t be such an asshole,” Luz said. “Diego’s talking about something else. ¿Que no entiendes?”
“He’s got to start somewhere.” Mundo looked at Diego. “Look, ese, you gotta stop feeling bad. Feeling bad gets you where, ese? They’re always makin’ us feel bad. Feel bad cuz you ain’t got a job, feel bad cuz you ain’t no gringo, feel bad cuz your cars are too goddamned flashy, feel bad cuz you don’t got no fuckin’ flowers in your front yard or cuz you talk the way you talk.”
“At least you can talk,” Diego wrote.
“Yeah, ese, it’s really taken me places, ese—gone real far.” He moved his hand in the air as if it were a plane. “Look, ese, none of it matters. Everybody’s gonna shit on you. The only thing you gotta remember is not to shit on yourself.”
“Go to hell,” Diego wrote.
“OK, don’t listen,” he said, “I’m outa here. I try to help a guy out by tellin’ ‘em what I know—and what the hell do I get?” He shoved open the door.
“Don’t go,” Luz said grabbing his arm. “You haven’t eaten dinner. I made dinner.”
He nodded and sat at the table. She was too much like his mother. He stared at the empty plate Luz put in front of him.
“Don’t go to hell,” Diego wrote. He placed the note on the plate.
Mundo took the note, wadded it up and threw it at Diego.
Diego blinked as it hit him in the face. They both blurted out laughing.
They’re like brothers, Luz thought. She thought of her sons who had abandoned her. These two would do; she thought. She served them albóndigas and fideos. They all ate as if they were eating something rare, as if they were tasting this common, ordinary, peasant food for the first time. Diego and Mundo had three servings, and between them they ate nine tortillas. Even Luz kept up with them.
As Diego ate, the heaviness and disappointment of the coffin seemed to grow lighter. He had food. He was no longer alone. He had someone. They were good people, he thought, and they had a kind of fight he envied. They knew how to survive. He wanted to have what they had. If only he could get and hold the part of them that was tough enough to fight back. Maybe Mundo was right—maybe you needed some kind of fist to get you through life. He had always felt too fragile, as though he were about to come apart like a very thin piece of paper in a relentless wind. Maybe he would put off starting his suicide note. Maybe he would get the job at the flower shop. The man had been nice. Maybe, if he looked hard enough, he would find his sister and maybe she would look into his eyes and say, “I forgive you.” Maybe was his new word for hope.
As Mundo pulled away from Luz and Diego’s house that evening, he was happy. He liked coming over to visit them. Going to their house was like going home. Maybe Luz was right. Maybe he could change, maybe he could get a job and then Rosario would see that he was worth loving. Maybe there was a place for him in the world where he could be happy like he felt right now. But as he drove toward downtown, Mundo forgot about a job, about settling down, forgot about everything except the familiar pull of the bar. He hadn’t been out to The Hollywood Cafe in over a week. But tonight the thought of a beer and a bar that smelled of a hundred years of cigarette smoke made his throat throb as if it were his heart. He loved the smell of bars, the sound of a cue stick against the ball, the voices of the people who knew there was nothing better in the world than a good place to have a drink. He pictured the cold bottle of beer against his lips, the taste of the cigarette in his mouth awash with beer. He stepped on the gas pedal—maybe tonight something would happen, something new, something that had never happened. That was the good thing about a bar—something new might always happen. He loved the thought of that something. Maybe he would run into El Guante who was grace at the pool table or maybe Rosario who was grace in bed—maybe she had forgiven him. Maybe she would take him back. Maybe, after a few beers and a few games of pool, she would take him in, take him to that place only she could take him. He thought of the way she smelled after they had made love. Maybe tonight, he would be making love again.
When he walked into the bar, the jukebox was playing “Volver, Volver.” It was his mother’s favorite song and he had always hated it. He thought it was a bad sign. It was quiet, just a quiet night, and he was disappointed that there were so few people in the bar—just a couple of guys standing around, most of whom he’d seen before.
Antonio, the bartender gave him a cool greeting. “Hey pájaro—no trouble, OK?”
Mundo shrugged. “I don’t like trouble, gringo.”
The bartender shook his finger and placed a bottle of Mundo’s favorite beer on the counter. “Just no fights,” he said, “that’s all I’m sayin’. And I ain’t no pinche gringo.”
Mundo lifted up his glass and toasted him without saying a word. He looked around the room trying to see if he recognized anybody. An older man was selecting tunes at the jukebox. He was eyeing a woman young enough to be his daughter. Nothing special, he thought. The two guys shooting pool were younger than he was. Old enough to drink, but not old enough to know how to do much else. At a small table near the corner, a man in a pressed white shirt was lighting a cigarette for his girlfriend. Those two were always in here, he thought. His eyes moved slowly around the room. He finished his beer in four gulps. “Another,” he said. Antonio placed another bottle in front of him. He stared at the two guys shooting pool. One of them missed his shot and the other one laughed. There was something familiar about the laugh. He looked closer at the young man, studied his face. He laughed again. Mundo ran the laughter through his memory trying to remember where he’d heard it. I’m gonna cut you up—clean as a surgeon. Mundo nodded. It was him. This was the something he loved about bars. He walked up to the man with the laugh, stared him straight in the face. “Remember me, ese?” he said.
The man stared at him. “Don’t know you,” he said.
“Yeah, you know me. One night you were gonna cut me up clean as a surgeon—remember that? Threw me in a fuckin’ trash can, remember that? Thought I was dead, thought it was funny, huh, ese?” He grabbed the poolstick away from him and threw it on the floor. He looked at him, then fast as a gust of wind, he swung his fist. The man fell back on the pool table. From across the room he heard a voice yell, “Hey, T-Bird.” He looked up, did not even see the face of the man who had called him not by his name but by the name of his gang. No face, just the gun. He heard the sharp sound almost as if it were the crack of a whip or the sound of his boyhood on the fourth of July. He felt the pain in his gut, then another pain. His heart. There was no time to think of the life he had lived, no time to curse it or be grateful for it, no time to ask forgiveness, to say good-bye, to understand any of the pieces, to thank Diego for taking him out of the trash, to make love just one more time to a woman, any woman, to finish a beer, no time. There was only the fact of a bullet and the fact of a body that was not made to withstand it. A bullet, simple in design, simple in the way it entered the body, broke the skin, the bone, the simplest of things. In the instant Mundo felt the dance of the simple bullet in his heart, he did not wear a look of terror, but of surprise. It was the look of a man who never believed he would die this way—in a bar—a bullet. Everything in his life had prepared him for this moment from the time he smoked his first cigarette, from the time he had taken his first drink at the age of ten, from the time that he had embraced the streets not as a place where cars drive but as a home, from the time his father had abandoned them, everything, everything he had ever done had led him to a bullet that had found a home in his heart, a bullet that killed faster, if less elegantly, than any conceivable virus. Everything, everything had prepared him for this, and yet he was not prepared.