Santos and Cochocho and Jaime and Erick left us soon after the kiss, and it was just me and my father, still feeling amused by what had happened, what we’d been a part of. We maybe felt a little shame too, but we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t know how. Grown men with hurt feelings are transparent creatures; grown men who feel dimly they have done something wrong are positively opaque. It would’ve been much simpler if we’d all just come to blows. Santos and Cochocho wandered off, a bit dazed, as if they’d been swindled. My father and I did a quick circle around the plaza and begged off for the evening. We never ate. Our hunger had vanished. I tried and failed to sleep, spent hours listening to my father’s snores echoing through the house. Now I punched in the numbers from the phone card, and let the phone ring for a very long time. I wasn’t drunk anymore. I liked the sound because it had no point of origin; I could imagine it ringing in the city, in that apartment I shared with Rocío (where she was asleep and could not hear, or was perhaps out with friends on this weekend night), but this was pure fantasy. I was not hearing that ring at all, of course. The ringing I heard came from inside the line, from somewhere within the wires, within the phone, an echo of something mysterious emerging from an unfixed and floating territory.
I waited for a while, listening, comforted; but in the end, there was no answer.
We left the next morning; locked the house, dropped the key in the neighbor’s mail slot, and fled quickly, almost furtively, hoping to escape without having to say goodbye to anyone. I had a pounding headache, and I’d barely slept at all. We made it to the filling station at the top of the hill without attracting notice, and then paused. My father was at the wheel, and I could see this debate flaring up within him—whether to stop and fill the tank or head north, away from this place and what it represented. Even the engine had doubt; it would not settle on an idling speed. We stopped. We had to. There might not be another station for many hours.
It was Cochocho’s son tending the pumps. He was a miniature version of his father: the same frown, the same fussy irritation with the world. Everyone believes they deserve better, I suppose, and in this respect, he was no different from me. Still, I disliked him intensely. He had fat adolescent hands and wore clothes that could have been handed down from Celia’s mother.
“So you’re off, then?” the boy said to my father through the open window.
The words were spoken without a hint of friendliness. His shoulders tensed, his jaw set in an expression of cold distrust. There was so much disdain seeping toward us, so determined and intentional, I almost found it funny. I felt like laughing, though I knew this would only make matters worse. Part of me—a large part—didn’t care: my chest was full of that big-city arrogance, false, pretentious, and utterly satisfying. The boy narrowed his eyes at us, but I was thinking to myself:
Goodbye, sucker!
“Long drive,” said Cochocho’s son.
And I heard my father say, “A full day, more or less.”
Then Cochocho’s son, to me: “Back to California?”
I paused. Remembered. Felt annoyed. Nodded. A moment prior I’d decided to forget the boy, had dismissed him, disappeared him. I’d cast my eyes instead down the hill, at the town and its homes obscured by a layer of fog.
“That’s right,” I said, though California felt quite far away—as a theory, as a concept, to say nothing of an actual place where real human beings might live.
“I used to work here, you know,” my old man offered.
The boy nodded with sublime disinterest. “I’ve heard that,” he said.
The tank was filled, and an hour later we were emptying our pockets for the bored, greedy soldiers. They were the age of Cochocho’s son, and just as friendly. Three hours after that, we were passing through Joselito’s hometown, in time to see a funeral procession; his, we supposed. It moved slowly alongside the highway, a somber cloud of gray and black, anchored by the doleful sounds of an out-of-tune brass band. The two men who’d fought over the moto-taxi now stood side by side, holding one end of the casket and quite obviously heartbroken. Whether or not they were acting now, I wouldn’t dare to speculate. But I did ease the car almost to a stop; and I did roll my window down and ask my old man to roll down his. And we listened to the band’s song, with its impossibly slow melody, like time stretched thin. We stayed there a minute, as they marched away from us, toward the cemetery. It felt like a day. Then we were at the edge of the city; and then we were home, as if nothing had happened at all.
CHARLES BAXTER
Bravery
AS A TEENAGER, her junior year, her favorite trick involved riding in cars with at least two other girls. You needed a female cluster in there, and you needed to have the plainest one driving. They’d cruise University Avenue in Palo Alto until they spotted some boys together near a street corner. Boys were always ganged up at high-visibility intersections, marking territory and giving off cigarette smoke and musk. At the red light, she’d roll down the window and shout, “Hey, you guys!” The boys would turn toward the car slowly—very slowly—trying for cool. Smoke emerged from their faces, from the nose or mouth. “Hey! Do you think we’re pretty?” she’d shout. “Do you think we’re cute?”
Except for the plain one behind the wheel, the girls she consorted with were cute, so the question wasn’t really a test. The light would turn green, and they’d speed away before the boys could answer. The pleasure was in seeing them flummoxed. Usually one of the guys, probably the sweetest, or the most eager, would nod and raise his hand to wave. Susan would spy him, the sweet one, through the back window, and she’d smile so that he’d have that smile to hold on to all night. The not-so-sweet good-looking guys just stood there. They were accustomed to being teased, and they always liked it. As for the other boys—well, no one ever cared about them.
Despite what other girls said, all boys were not all alike: you had to make your way through their variables blindly, guessing at hidden qualities, the ones you could live with.
Years later, in college, her roommate said to her, “You always go for the kind ones, the considerate ones, those types. I mean, where’s the fun? I hate those guys. They’re so humane, and shit like that. Give me a troublemaker any day.”
“Yeah, but a troublemaker will give you trouble.” She was painting her toenails, even though the guys she dated never noticed her toenails. “Trouble comes home. It moves in. It’s contagious.”
“I can take it. I’m an old-fashioned girl,” her roommate said, with her complicated irony.
Susan married one of the sweet ones, the kind of man who waved at you. At a San Francisco art gallery on Van Ness, gazing at a painting of a giant pointed index finger with icicles hanging from it, she had felt her concentration jarred when a guy standing next to her said, “Do you smell something?”
He sniffed and glanced up at the ceiling. Metaphor, irony, a come-on? In fact, she had smelled a slightly rotten egg scent, so she nodded. “We should get out of here,” he said, gesturing toward the door, past the table with the wineglasses and the sign-in book. “It’s a gas leak. Before the explosion.”
“But maybe it’s the paintings,” she said.
“The paintings? Giving off explosive gas? That’s an odd theory.”