Bang Page 18

  Chente’s mouth is open. There’s a little trickle of dried blood on his chin. You can tell the blood poured steady when the wound opened. The trickle is still glossy wet and bright between his bottom teeth. Uli thinks of the burning mare, that barbecued creature. He looks for that big plume of ash in the sky right now. Did I dream that? he wonders, looking up into the sky for that smoke, but there is none. Just blue sky and the sound of dogs.

  Who could have had it in for Chente? he wonders. Who has it in for June?

  Uli kicks at the wall brace he’ll never sell. He thinks about June’s pain. He wonders how much longer she might last, how much longer his money might last.

  Before leaving, Uli looks down on Chente one last time, the photographers snapping all around him. On Chente’s left cheek there’s the remainder of a green bruise, the blood having already drained from his face and pooled elsewhere. His death mask is on. He looks younger maybe, the creases of his wrinkles less defined. There’s a jagged part in his hair that Uli had never noticed before. It starts from the crown of the head and wanders toward the temple. And there’s a little chain and medallion around his neck. St. Christopher. For a second, Uli thinks the man might look like his own father.

  Around the scrapyard, the sky is littered with moths that skitter about the light of every glowing thing, even Chente’s teeth, which glow with a hue all their own in the purple whirl of police lights burning bright against his green skin. The moths do not discriminate between the sources of light. They land, two or three of them, on the curl of Chente’s open lip. They gum their wings up in the blood of his mouth and stay there. They drink it. They die in it.

  It takes the entire walk back to his house for Uli to get the gall to knock on the door of the woman who lives in the house across from his. As he waits there, his neck starts to itch. And then his scalp. And then his legs, crawling with the static that comes with bad circulation—blood making its way through his capillaries that are rerouting around the broken bits of himself.

  He stays anchored there until a woman answers the door. He runs his fingers through his hair.

  “Who are you?” he immediately asks, before she can even say a thing.

  She laughs at this, breaks the tension in the air. “Who are you?” she says back.

  “I live over there,” says Uli.

  “I know,” she says. “I’m Alma.”

  Based on what little June’s said about her, she’s nothing like what Uli had imagined her to be. Her eyes are grey and soft, almond shaped but thinner somehow. Her face is round. She’s heavy for her frame. Baby weight. Her face looks about forty years old, menopausal peach-fuzz on her jaw, but her hands say almost thirty. She’s wearing a faded, blue dress with white polka dots. Uli thinks she could be either a hipster or a church lady. Uli is leaning toward church lady.

  Alma stares at Uli as if waiting for him to speak.

  “My friend is injured,” he explains to her, eager for her to see the urgency of the situation.

  “I need your help.” “Is she still alive?”

  “Yes, but she’s got a broken rib. She can’t breathe.”

  “Well, nothing can be done about a broken rib. There’s food in the kitchen,” she says coolly. “You’re Arnulfo’s son, right?”

  “How do you know my father?”

  “He left a while ago. Good man. You look like him. Come inside and eat,” she says.

  At this, Uli pauses, unsure of what to do. He feels that ticket in his pocket.

  “Everything heals in time,” says Alma. “Come inside. Come.”

  And so Uli goes in, feeling as if he’s already betrayed June. Of course, June would tell him to leave. She’d tell him this woman was no good, but who else should he turn to right now that June is on her death bed? Uli thinks this is what being out of ideas looks like. But he’s also driven by his new fascination for this woman who knows his father. He wonders if she has some answers. He wonders, too, if this isn’t why June wanted to keep him away from her in the first place.

  Her home smells like chicken stock. It’s filled with religious paintings. There’s one of the lamb of God and another with Jesus and a lamb. There’s another one of a lamb in a pasture. There’s another one of Lazarus with open wounds, which isn’t finished yet, and looks more like Judas than Lazarus—not dead enough.

  Her paintings are good but not great. Everywhere, scattered about, are sketches of people. Mostly men.

  She sits Uli at a wooden table in the kitchen that’s blistered with wet, coffee mug rings.

  On the floor there are paint brushes resting in emptied coffee cans, milky residue crusting up the insides where the water has evaporated. Across the floor there are sheets of newspaper and splotches of white paint over an advent calendar in the community pages.

  “Are you a Catholic?” Alma asks.

  “I was raised Catholic,” Uli says.

  Alma places a percolator on the stove and fills it with water and a teaspoon of powdered Nescafé. From her freezer, she produces a large Ziploc bag of pozole frozen flat, which she opens by running a knife down the seam of the plastic. She pours the brick of soup into a nickel-plated saucepan with rivets that wiggle as the steam builds under the lid.

  “Are you Catholic?” he asks her, which is, of course, a stupid question.

  She doesn’t answer. She just stands in silence in front of the stove.

  She places the coffee in front of him in a clay mug. “Drink,” she says. She lights up a cornhusk cigarette.

  The coffee is too hot. Uli lets it rest at his lips for a moment.

  She says, “Drink it,” again, barely moving her own lips.

  Uli does as he’s told. He scalds his tongue.

  When the nickel-plated rivet is dancing violently on the pot lid, she lifts the lid and dips a ladle into the pozole. She pours two boiling ladles into plastic green bowls with tarnished tin spoons. A layer of orange grease sits at the top of the liquid where it separates from the broth in tiny iridescent globules. She throws diced onions into Uli’s bowl, cilantro too. It tastes like heaven.

  “Do you like it?” she asks him. Her smile is like a mother’s smile, brilliant and tense at the same time.

  “Yes—God, yes.”

  She pours more coffee into the cinnamon-laced mug.

  “My mother has one like this,” Uli says. “Made of clay. She only drinks tea out of it.”

  “Is she from the South?”

  “She was born in Aguascalientes. My geography is not too good,” he says.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Who says I’m from somewhere?” he says.

  “Everyone knows where Aguascalientes is,” she says.

  “I’m from across the street.”

  “You’re from Texas,” she says knowingly. She sips easy at her steaming, clay mug. A long silence. She stares quietly into her coffee before she says, “Don’t worry about your friend, Uli. Worry about yourself. Understand? That’s what your father would tell you. Or am I wrong?”

  There’s a knock at her door. Alma cranes her head to the kitchen window by the sink. Parked by a busted Volkswagen in the street is an orange Ford Lobo. She stares off into space as if considering whether or not to answer the door.

  “Should I get that?” he asks, trying to read her face.

  She doesn’t look him in the eye as she says, “You’re a sweet boy. Very much like your father.”

  The knocking comes again, steady and firm. All business. Uli wonders to himself if she might be half deaf. It’s a long time before the knocking stops, and the engine in the Ford turns over.

  Uli sees Alma ease her lips. She sets the cup down before picking it back up.

  “You like to eat? Eat,” she says, picking up his bowl, pouring in another ladle of pozole.

  Her eyes tear up. The morning light pours in through the striations of light, making the greys of her eyes glow. Everything else is bloodshot.

  “What was that?” he asks.

  She igno
res the question.

  “Are you feeling better?” she asks, getting up to grab something from the cabinet above the fridge.

  “Yes,” says Uli.

  “About your friend,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says.

  She pulls down a case of Cokes and a bag of hard Bimbo croissants. “Here,” she says, pushing them in front of Uli. “If you’re hungry, I’ll feed you. I’ll know when you’re coming. The Lord told me you’d be here,” she says.

  “The Lord?”

  “The Lord,” she says.

  At this, Uli wonders, exactly, what her relationship with his father was. Because he hates people who talk like that. Always has hated them.

  Uli nods, sips his coffee.

  Alma takes out a votive candle and some matches and places the candle in front of a picture of Saint Rita of Cascia kneeling before a crucifix with God’s infinite wisdom pouring down onto her. Beneath the picture, a little ribbon is tied around the base. Patron Saint of the Impossible, it says.

  Alma lights the candle and says she’s going to say a prayer.

  Uli doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s last prayed.

  “Eat,” she says to him. “You’re staring at me and I don’t like it.”

  But what else can Uli do but stare? He doesn’t know how to tell her that he wants to pray like her. He wants to thank her somehow, even if it’s only by gawking at her praying.

  The orange Ford Lobo pulls up outside her house again. A frail-looking, pot-bellied man hops from the passenger seat and waddles over to the house, knocks on the door once again. And once again Alma pretends not to hear it.

  Uli parts his lips to speak.

  “I’ll get it,” she says.

  Alma crosses herself, goes to the door and opens it. In walks a man, impossibly tall with purple boots. He kisses Alma on the cheek. Her husband maybe? Her brother?

  Uli doesn’t know why the man reminds him of his own brother. The man moves like Cuauhtémoc. He has that same look in his eye—that thousand yard stare like Cuauhtémoc used to have from looking out the windshield of a plane all day.

  Alma unbuttons the pearl snap on the man’s chest pocket and pulls out a brown baggy.

  “Would you mind?” she asks Uli.

  They whisper back and forth. Uli sees that she’s almost melting under his gaze.

  He grabs her ass. She takes the baggy and shakes off his grip. She brings the baggy over to Uli at the kitchen table.

  “For your friend,” she says and reaches into her painter’s apron hanging by the canvas to produce a syringe. “For the pain. Understand? Do you know how to do this?”

  Kneeling in front of June, Uli does it exactly as Alma told him. First, he lays everything out on the snare drum beside the bed: the heroin, the syringe and needle, the spoon (washed in alcohol), the candle, the cigarette filter, a shoelace, some water. And then he halves the brown lime she gave him. Alma told him brown limes work best. They’re riper. They give more citrus juice, which dissolves the heroin faster, which makes the solution cleaner.

  The heroin is brown and clumpy. Alma said that’s how you know it’s good. Alma calls it brown sugar. The best kind. Straight from the source, which means straight from the man in the purple boots.

  He can hear Alma’s words in his head. Not too much, not too little. Not too hot. She can smoke it if she wants.

  Uli looks at June now, lying in bed, as he squeezes the lime into a ceramic bowl. Her chest moves up and down with impossible little pats of breath. She’s sweating and moaning or trying to moan. It takes breath to moan, and June has nothing left to spare, which is why she doesn’t argue. She can barely complain. She just sits there and watches.

  “You’ll feel good in just a minute,” says Uli, scraping some heroin from the clump with the edge of the spoon and pushing it onto the snare drum beside the bed. He crumbles the dust with a heavy tamping beneath the spoon’s curve. “A pile no larger than his pinky nail,” he remembers the man in purple boots told him. It smells like vinegar.

  He takes his pinky nail and places it beside the clump over the snare drum. He compares the pile two, three, four times. He pinches the clump between his index and his thumb like one might take a pinch of salt and drops it carefully into the hollow of the spoon. The sweat of his fingers causes friction against the drumhead so that it rasps with each pinch of the heroin. There’s a rhythm to it, a steady, working groove. The snare rattles. The spoon gets fuller by the moment.

  Uli lights the candle with a match and runs the needle through it two, three times. He dips the needle in the lime juice and draws, with the plunger, five units. He dips the needle into the water and draws fifteen units. He shakes the solution inside the syringe and then empties it into the hollow of the spoon, where it dissolves the heroin into dark, reddish clumps.

  June hears the spoon sizzle. She feels the pressure of the shoelace cutting into the skin over her bicep. Her pulse starts to thicken. She hears the blood in her ears. The tips of her fingers go numb.

  “Stay very still,” Uli whispers.

  She sees the flame.

  Slowly, the dark burns away from corners of June’s vision. She sees her own arm, from the corner of her eye, outstretched along the mattress. Her veins bulge blue-green beneath her skin. She feels the pinch. And then nothing as warmth washes over her body. June thinks it’s like going back into the womb. Her breathing slows, her pain disappears. She thinks about her sister, her mother. It feels as though she’s kissing them goodnight. It feels like she’s beautiful again, like she’s never been damaged. Like the night before Christmas when she was five. She’s never been this happy. She thinks, This is how I want to feel forever.

  DESERT SPARROW

  AT JIMMY’S RANCH, the Hacienda de San Sebastián, there’s a cur dog that lives inside a burnt-out DC-3 with his friend, a black-throated sparrow. As far as Cuauhtémoc can tell, they’ve been there as long as the land itself. Cuauhtémoc thinks the sparrow is the prettiest bird he’s ever seen. A jet-black beak to match the oval patch of black over its belly. The underside of him is a smoky white. Two gray, parallel streaks just above and below the eye. A tight tuft of blue-black feathers over the crown of his head. That color stretches back all the way to the raw patch just under his right earhole where he scratches too much with just one rapid foot, just like the dog scratches himself when he’s got an itch behind the ear.

  The bird goes everywhere the dog goes, eats everything the dog eats, perches himself right between the dogs ears so that he can see everything the dog sees. Every afternoon they play. The bird tack-tack-tacks about the ground and flits in the air before the dog can lunge at it. The dog grows angry at his impotence, until one day the dog takes a long, swift, unexpected lunge and pulls the bird from the sky. He gives it a fierce shake. Snaps the bird’s neck. Eyes heavy, the dog brings it over to Cuauhtémoc, who has been watching the whole thing. The dog drops it at Cuauhtémoc’s feet as if saying, Fix this, please. The dog lies down and whimpers, waits for Cuauhtémoc to pick it up.

  It’s the first time Cuauhtémoc’s ever held a bird. He strokes its feathers, feels its warmth. Even dead it’s still the prettiest thing he’s ever seen.

  A swift kick of sand meets the dog’s watery eyes. “Get out of here!” shouts Lalo from behind Cuauhtémoc.

  The dog pulls back, bounces around on his paws with his tail between his legs. Lalo shouts again. The dog takes off, his mourning cut short.

  Cuauhtémoc sticks the dead bird in his shirt pocket before turning around to face Lalo, whose eyes are glassy red.

  “Could have rabies, you know,” says Lalo. “Jimmy doesn’t give them their shots. They’re good as strays. Shouldn’t get too close to them. I don’t.”

  “You got the money?” asks Cuauhtémoc.

  “I do, if you’ve got the banking all set up.”

  “It’s set up.”

  “Well, tell me about it,” says Lalo, his red eyes darting between the ranch house and Cuauhtémoc,
scanning for anyone who might overhear them.

  “It’s a Frost Bank.”

  “Is that a good one?” says Lalo

  “It’s a Texas bank. Got a big building in Austin.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” says Lalo. “I mean will the volume set off any alarm bells or anything?”

  “Banker told me that the limit was ten grand to set off a transaction report. We’re only doing eight at a time. I’m depositing hard cash, just like you told me.”

  “And how much have we got in there right now?” asks Lalo.

  “About seventy grand. More than enough to get you started if you want to come along,” says Cuauhtémoc with a smile now, feeling the warmth of the bird against his chest.

  “I could show you the deposit slip if you want,” says Cuauhtémoc, pulling an envelope from his shirt pocket.

  Lalo takes the envelope and immediately puts it in a pocket inside his jacket.

  “You’re not going to look at it?” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “I don’t need to see that,” says Lalo. “I trust you. More than that, I trust that you’ll be in touch when it’s time to withdraw the cash. We’ll split it—fifty-fifty. I won’t forget this, friend.”

  “You should burn that slip,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Nothing but trouble. Worse than trouble, it’s evidence. They’d kill us for it.”

  “Nobody’s going to find it,” says Lalo, patting his pocket. “Even if they catch me, I wouldn’t tell on you,” he says with a wink. “Why would I?”

  “Another load?” asks Cuauhtémoc, his eyes fixed on the DC-3.

  “A small one this time,” says Lalo. He looks over his shoulder, then hands Cuauhtémoc a blue envelope full of cash.

  By the weight of it, Cuauhtémoc guesses it’s about two grand. Not even worth the landing and drive to the bank in El Paso. “A little light,” he says.

  “Dance lessons, violin lesson,” says Lalo with a smile. “Kids don’t come cheap. There’ll be more next time.”