Insinuated but left unsaid was a hint of accusation. The couple had been greedy, hoping to score off a bunch of wetbacks, rather than pay the going rate. Well, they deserved what they got and it would only get worse if they didn’t play smart. American Amigos Moving wasn’t licensed, so the couple had no real recourse. There was no agency to complain to, no cops to call; this was a civil matter, the officers would say, not a criminal one. That was the mind-bending irony at the heart of the scam, your only shot at justice was with a company that was straight to begin with. Basically, the lovely couple could cough up or get screwed. Puchi was explaining all this with Chato sulking nearby in his hairnet and hoodie and work gloves, chewing on a toothpick, smirking at the lady, eye-fucking the man.
“When I was in Iraq,” Happy said, “sometimes the foreman would tell us to drive the route even if there was nothing to carry. Several times a week we did this, one direction or both. This one time, I hauled a single bag of mail, nothing else, on a fucking flatbed. Know why? Because the company was getting paid by the trip, not the load.” He glanced at Roque, smiling as though the things he knew could cripple the mind. “This is a war zone I’m talking about. You never knew what was out there. But hey, shut up, it’s money. You die, tough luck. It was insane, the arrogant dumbfucks you had to deal with, the I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude, the rip-offs, but the geniuses who run things, they’re all, Hey, don’t ask questions, you’re fucking with the war. So you think this couple here’s getting screwed by us? Trust me, they’ve already been fucked so bad by Uncle Sam we’re practically the good guys.”
Even given all Happy had been through, there were limits to what Roque would swallow. “That’s messed-up thinking.”
Happy nodded and said, “Maybe so.” Lighting another smoke-he’d developed an incredible habit during his years away-he added, “I was just trying to make you feel better.”
Roque glanced toward his mirror again, just in time to see the history teacher shove Puchi in the chest. “Ah nuts,” he said, reaching for the door handle.
“What?”
“We got a scrapper.”
Roque hustled to the back of the truck and was shortly joined by Happy. The history teacher, who was lanky but muscular, had Puchi in a headlock now, the two of them thrashing around on the ground. Puchi wasn’t fighting back very hard. In fact, unless Roque was mistaken, Puchi was laughing.
Meanwhile Chato hovered nearby, the same nervy smile on his face he wore no matter what was happening. In the driveway, the woman with the basketball belly stood there aghast, hands in the air, watching her husband try to claim back some manhood. She was dressed in a shapeless smock, a stretched-out cardigan, kneesocks with worn heels, scuffed clogs. Roque wondered what they intended to name the baby.
The neighborhood was one of those forgettable developments shooting up everywhere now, the houses all basically the same, neat but slapdash, too close together, bottom rung on the American dream. No one was looking out their windows at the wrestling match. Why bother? The new neighbors would be gone, or you would, before any favor could be returned.
Finally Puchi broke free, stood up, brushed himself off. Sure enough, he was chuckling. The teacher scrambled to his feet, scavenged around for his glasses. “You’re not getting away with this!” Tufts of hair stood out from his head, his face shiny and red.
Puchi signaled to the crew: Back in the truck. “Let’s go,” he said.
The teacher found his glasses. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“I have to call the office,” Puchi said. “You attacked me.”
“You’re cheating us!”
“May be an extra thousand on top of the three you already owe. Have to call, find out.”
That was when the woman spoke up. “For God’s sake just pay them, Peter.” Her eyes were dull with disappointment but her voice had an odd allure. Throaty, an alto, it reminded Roque of a young Celia Cruz. The man’s head snapped toward her. Something between them suggested a bitter history and Roque guessed the baby played a part in that. He sensed as well that the woman had reached a truce with her life in a way the man resented.
“How am I supposed to-”
“Peter, please,” she cut him off. “Don’t make things worse than they already are.”
Listen to her, Roque thought, but the guy just seemed more pissed. Turning back, he said, “This is why people want to send you all back where you came from. For Christ’s sake, we’re on your side.”
Of course you are, Roque thought. Who else would be chump enough to hire a company with a name like American Amigos Moving? But that was when the guy did the strangest thing. Spinning toward Chato, he lashed out with a wayward backhand. “What the hell are you grinning at-eh, pendejo?”
The guy wants to get pounded, Roque thought, so he can hold it against his wife, but then Happy stepped in. With one arm outstretched to keep Chato at bay, he met the man’s eye, not threatening, almost sad. “Let us unload your things,” he said quietly. “We’ll get you into your new home, then we’ll be gone.”
“Listen to him, Peter.”
“Whose side are you on, Belinda?”
“Let me help you,” Happy said. “Let’s get this thing done.”
Smooth, Roque thought, like he was daring the guy: Raise your game. Trust me. Strange coming from Happy, who expected nothing from people anymore. Stranger still, it worked.
Happy and Puchi and the history teacher drove off to wire an extra three grand through Western Union. Roque and Chato waited on the sidewalk while the pregnant wife locked herself inside the house, nothing but her and the bare rooms and all that fresh paint. Roque chased chord progressions around in his head, visualizing the various fingerings for the inversions, wishing he were someplace else. Chato patted his hairnet, murmured insults, did a couple dozen push-ups, shadowboxed, cracked his knuckles, the whole time wearing that same wiggy smile.
When Happy and Puchi came back in the truck, the teacher parked across the street, slammed his car door and told the crew to unload everything on the driveway, he didn’t want them inside his house. That seemed to work for all concerned. The guy could either lug it all in himself in a pique of sucker’s pride or call whatever old friends wouldn’t hold his cheap tacaño stupidity against him.
“Don’t think this is the end of things,” the guy said when Puchi and Chato climbed up into the back of the now empty truck. “I’m calling the Better Business Bureau. I’ll post notice on the Web. I’ll make it my daily business to see nobody gets screwed by you fuckers again.”
Too late, Roque thought as he slammed the door to the cab. They had jobs lined up through next month, same scam as for these two birds, if not through American Amigos Moving then Nuevo California Shipping and Transport or Marko’s Movers or half a dozen other names, each with its own ad on the Internet, each with its own sham address. It was part and parcel of the American way of life, cheap Latino labor. Who with his head on straight could act surprised if once in a while the tables got turned?
And yet, Roque told himself, that was just another kind of messed-up thinking, like tigueraje, the peculiarly Latino answer to conscience. If something was there for the taking, only a fool wouldn’t grab it. It explained a lot of things south of the border, like how a subcontinent filled with basically decent, generous, hardworking people, millions upon millions of them, could be enslaved for generations by a handful of smug, prissy, sadistic thieves. Sooner or later, you bought in. You learned: Gotta go along to get along, every man has his price, greed is the grease on the wheel. You recognized the tigueraje in your own soul.