“Go where?”
“El Salvador.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Why-”
“I have to go down and make sure the money we send gets into the right hands, make sure Tío Faustino doesn’t get screwed by the mareros.”
“The who?”
“Gang members. They’re the ones who can get him through Guatemala and Mexico. The borders have tightened up down there. It’s not as easy as it used to be to come north. Money’s not enough, you’ll just get ripped off. Or worse. And Tío Faustino’s no spring chicken.”
“And you’ll be doing what in all this?”
“We get close to the border, the mareros take Tío, hike him overland, I drive through the checkpoint. I’ve got an American passport, it’s like magic down there. I pick up Tío on the other side, some designated spot. Guatemala, then Mexico, then the U.S.”
“That’s insane. How can you trust these people?”
“Like we’ve got a choice? The drug cartels took over the smuggling routes. You can’t just go it alone, too easy to get killed or betrayed. Happy already has some angle worked, he hooked up with these people when he came across this last time. All we need’s the money.”
“I can’t believe you’re even thinking-”
“I can’t let the family down.”
“Your family shouldn’t ask you to do something so stupid.”
“Please, don’t talk about my family like that.”
“You’ve got too much promise.”
“It’s not about me.”
“You’re just trying to prove yourself. To this cousin.”
His hand ventured across the table, searching for hers. “It’s nice, by the way, to hear you say I’ve got promise.”
“I’ve always said that. When does all this happen?”
“Happy’s got a line on a job for me, some moving company, guys he knows.” He drew back the neglected hand. “Like I said, we need money, more so now. It’ll take anywhere from six weeks to six months for them to deport Tío Faustino. They’ve got laws on the books, from the civil war, making it harder to send Salvadorans back home. It creates a lot of red tape. But he’s got no case, no lawyer can help him, he’s screwed. So it’s just a matter of time.”
She rose from the table, walked to the sink, staring out past the muslin curtains. “I’m not going to save you from yourself, Roque, if that’s what you came here for.”
He felt stunned. “That’s what you think?”
She opened the spigot, ending finally the thudding drip, and rinsed her cup. “I care about you. What you’re thinking of doing, I wish I could stop you, talk you out of it. But I also get the feeling that’s precisely what you want me to do. It feels manipulative. It feels wrong.”
“It is wrong. Everything you just said.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” He glanced again at the bodhisattva Jizo, guardian of travelers. What she meant was goodbye, she’d been saying it all along. Maybe it was time he listened.
Part II
Nine
“HAVE I TOLD YOU LATELY THAT I HATE THIS?”
Roque sat slumped back in his seat, watch cap and work gloves in his lap, as he studied the images in the mirror outside his window: Puchi and Chato standing at the back of the truck, shaking down the couple whose furniture the crew had just hauled to their new home in Pinole. The man taught high-school history. His wife, flamboyantly pregnant, worked for a florist.
Happy sat behind the wheel. He was smoking, waiting for the word: Unload or take off. In time, he said, “You got some better idea how to pay for Godo’s meds, cover the nut on getting my old man back here, I’m all ears.” Cocked head, reflective smile. “Into each life, mi mosca muerta”-my little innocent, literally my dead fly-“some fucking rain must fall.”
Roque turned his gaze toward the sky. The winter sun hovered beyond a filmy mass of noonday cloud. “Thanks for the update.”
“Life’s full of things you gotta do, not wanna do.”
“No shit? Try practicing scales six hours a day.”
Happy stubbed out his smoke. “Scales, yeah. I bet it’s a bitch.”
Let it go, Roque told himself. He regarded Happy differently now, admiration too lofty, respect too blasé, but that was the emotional territory.
He’d asked Roque’s help writing a letter to his father, asking forgiveness for being such a crap son, explaining what the last two years had been like since being deported. Roque could hardly believe some of the things Happy told him to write down: the cops with dogs at the airport in Comalapa, who led him to a dank basement room, called him a faggot, told him to strip, just to check for gang tats; the hunchback priest who played harmonica and let him stay at his shelter for three days in the capital, then kicked him loose; old Tripudo the truck driver, a friend of the humpback priest, who took him on, teaching him how to handle a rig, only to betray him, turn him over to some rogue cops who handcuffed him, hooded him, drove him to the prison in Mariona, the one they call La Esperanza: Hope; the marero inmates who rat-packed him, beat him, raped him, almost drowned him in a cistern stewing with unspeakable filth, mocking him as he lay there on the floor, hands bound, gasping for breath, gazing up at the towers of mayonnaise jars in the disgusting cell-that was how they smuggled in cell phones, knives, drugs, inside jars of mayo; the plump balding warden who saw him the next morning, dressed in his pristine uniform, a parrot perched on his chair back, explaining how it would be: Happy was given a cellphone number, he’d be driven into San Salvador, he was to call the number, tell whoever answered he was sent by Falcón, then do as directed; the restaurant in San Salvador with more than a hundred restless men waiting in line outside, ex-soldiers, ex-guerrillas, answering an ad for contractors in Iraq; the call from a nearby phone booth to a raspy voice that told him to come around the back of the restaurant; the beefy guanaco at the table in the empty dining room, with his dyed hair and crisp white guayabera, brandishing an unlit cigar, telling Happy he’d been hired as a driver hauling freight between Abu Ghraib and Najaf-the coalition liked Salvadorans, the man said, they didn’t crap their pants when a bomb went off-for which he’d be paid $2,500 a week, all but $250 of which he’d kick back to a numbered account. That was the deal, go to Iraq and get shaken down or go back to that cell with the mareros and get punked to death, which was how Happy wound up in the same hell as Godo, except fate denied them the privilege of knowing that or ever getting in touch.
Roque didn’t know how he’d survived it, not that Happy had come back unscathed. The sullen moods he’d always been known for now seemed not just more severe but even a little sinister-but who could fault him for that? And yet he never complained, not about what happened in El Salvador or Iraq or anything else. Roque sometimes marveled at that, how Happy stared life down, standing there at the edge of every moment, unrushed, unworried, as though, by expecting nothing anymore, not from life, not from people, he’d somehow been set free.
At the same time, within the family, he was kind. He spoke to Godo like an equal, not a rival, not that they didn’t get into it now and then. Like a pair of dogs in a pit sometimes, those two, but not near as bad as before he went away. And he showed Tía Lucha a level of deference even she found unsettling. The only person he treated the same as before was Roque. He was the one person Happy still expected something from.
Meanwhile, at the back of the truck, Puchi was explaining to the parents-to-be how it would go. The couple could pay an extra three grand to get their stuff unloaded or everything stayed in the truck, the crew would drive away and put everything they owned in storage until they came up with the money. It was their own fault, he’d tell them, not quite those words, their failure to realize that the initial low bid was just an estimate (a lie-the lowball quote was presented as final), and that only once their belongings were loaded could a full and fair price for the move be calculated (another lie-the setup was in play from the start).