Bang Page 4

“Do you have family?” says the man. His voice hurts Uli’s ears. Both high and loud.

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “One family,” he tells the siren before jumping back into the waves. What a stupid question, he thinks. How many families—everybody knows you only have one family.

  He feels his lips part. He panics, tries to breathe. The acidic burn of orange juice lights up every hole in his head. He wants to spit it out but his thirst is insatiable. After a while, even those pains dull too.

  Uli counts the pains in his mouth by the tip of his tongue: one, two, three, four, five teeth gone. He saves the sticky pain for last. He wonders how his smile looks.

  Hey, good lookin’. Hank Williams’ voice again.

  How many days have passed? How many bones have healed? Uli knows the answer to neither. He only knows time has passed. A long sleep.

  Uli opens his eyes after the burn has passed.

  A man with emerald green eyes and a white coat appears beside Uli’s bed.

  “How old are you?” he says. The man’s mouth doesn’t seem to move.

  Uli’s mouth is dry, so he tries to show the numbers with his hands. He lifts his wrists. A little surge of adrenaline cuts the morphine.

  He blinks his eyes once, twice. A woman behind the man is wearing a skirt that fits too snug. She writes something down. Her face is a blur.

  “How old?” the doctor asks again.

  The woman repeats it in English to Uli, which is peculiar, he thinks, if he’s in Texas. He thinks about his immigration status, about his papers. I’ll say my mother has them, he thinks. That’ll buy some time.

  “Sixteen,” says Uli in his best English. He thinks if he speaks English, they’ll believe him when he says he’s American.

  “Where is my brother?’ he asks, but the woman speaks over him.

  “What is your name? It’s very important, this question. Who are you?” the woman asks in English again. Her mouth moves but her eyes are static.

  “Uli,” he manages to say with his mouth swollen. His tongue feels clumsy, numb inside his head. “Brother?” he tries to say. “Brother? My brother?”

  Uli’s bones hurt. The bright pain of healing. Uli balls his fist with his index finger slightly extended to show them the motion of handwriting. The woman looks at the man.

  “That’s enough,” says the man.

  The warm feeling floods Uli’s veins again. He fights so hard to stay awake. And then he hears the ocean again.

  That night, Uli reaches for a glass of water but only finds a bottle of Peñafiel beside his bed. He looks at the bottle briefly before unscrewing the cap and throwing it across the room. He instantly regrets it. He’ll have to retrieve the cap eventually to keep the water fizzy.

  Three glugs and he’s not sure if he can finish the whole thing, but fifteen later he’s pushing for the bottom. He stops himself just short of killing the bottle. His body craves what’s left. The plastic is miraculously cool to the touch. The room is hot. Uli is hot too, full of the kind of heat that rests right under the chin and smells like sulfur. There are other smells too—the antiseptic of the hospital, the reek of bleach, the tang of urine. Why is it that all hospitals smell like urine?

  Uli puts the bottle down on the nightstand beside his bed. He clangs the hard cast on his arm against the metal rail keeping him from falling out of the bed. He feels a tug in the crick of his arm. He looks for an IV. There isn’t one.

  When he lifts the cover from his lower body, he’s surprised to find no casts on his legs, no splints either. Just a mess of swirled bruises, more like burns than anything else. The only way Uli can tell that they’re not burns is by the absence of bandages, even on his feet and his toes that look more broken than bruised.

  He swings his body around so that he’s sitting at the edge of the bed, his feet dangling over. He closes his eyes before pressing his feet to the ground. A jolt of white hot pain. He lets out a breath, steadies himself by throwing out one hand to the nightstand. He rocks his weight back onto his heels. He waits for his nerves to stop jangling. With his hand still on the night-stand, he searches for a light but can’t find one. Three feet ahead there’s a window with a single pane of frosted glass. He thinks if he can open it, there might be a sliver of light that can help him find the bottle cap. He wonders if it’s even worth it. Fuck it—it’s worth it. He’s craving a Coke, but the seltzer will do. Nothing worse than tasting bad seltzer. Maybe the only thing worse in Uli’s mind is A Prairie Home Companion—fuck that show. His mind dwells on that, rests there for a while to distract him from the pain. The thought makes him laugh, but laughing hurts too.

  He gingerly transfers the weight of his body back to his feet again, his right arm on the table and his left arm thrown out in front of him for balance. He moves slowly, carefully to the window’s latch on the side opposite the hinges. The closer he gets he can hear the noises bleeding in from the other side. Behind the glass everything is a blurry collage of lights and shapes and shadows. He breathes heavy through his nose, trying to get the tang of urine out of his nostrils.

  When Uli gets to the window, he unlatches it and throws it open. He’s hit with a cacophony of car horns, a running faucet, the too-dry squeal of a fan belt turning over inside an engine compartment, a crack of thunder; the clap-clap-clap of a toddler playing with some trebly toy that cuts through all the racket of the night, dogs barking, a man scraping ice, a woman fighting with her husband in Spanish, the crunching transmission of a car in the far distance.

  Uli pokes his head out the window to confirm the sounds. Mexico. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. He needs a phone, an internet connection, a nurse. He looks for those buttons you see on the TV shows. Nurse! Nothing. Are you supposed to yell around here? He tries to think of the Spanish word for nurse. He’s never had to use that word before. Fuck fuck fuck. He looks back out into the street. Outside of his hospital window a man with scars covering his body. He’s got a sign that reads CAMINO SOBRE VIDRIO 5 PESOS VER PARA CREER.

  The glass walker steps into the intersection just outside the window, his belly swelling so that the scars dance in the gleaming traffic light as if they were slugs crawling over his skin.

  He pulls his ropy muscles taut, stretching as the traffic light turns from green to yellow to red. He’s flexible at the legs but bulky in the arms and chest. He unfurls his oil-soaked towel, filled with shards, on the oil-streaked pavement by his feet. The whole mess—broken beer bottles, jars and coins—glimmers in the streetlight.

  As the onlookers watch, he takes a deep breath and dives into the glass shards with his hands outstretched as if he were diving into a pool. The man rolls the length of the towel with his back, planting his feet over a blood-spattered Victoria beer bottle at the end of the rag before letting his momentum pull him backwards into the glass, all of those shards eating up the soft flesh on his back so that they bleed this ungodly bright shade of red that glows neon in the streetlight. The man does a handstand after he’s rolled out. He comes down on his head in the same spot. Bits of glass in his head. He walks across the shards with his feet, eager to continue the schtick. He pulls out all the stops to keep his audience’s attention. He kneel-hops across the mat on his knees. And then he leaps on one leg, kicks into a backflip, and then comes down hard on his shoulder into the pavement. The grand finale. The light turns green and the cars drive by. Some people throw coins, some people don’t.

  Uli looks at the bleeding man, framed in his little hospital window, and tries to pull from memory what it was like to be Mexican at one time.

  The man silently collects his earnings, bending ever so gingerly to reach down with his hands at the corners of the towel to peel it up off the street, blood sluicing down his back to his waist and then onto the pavement below.

  The man is careful not to spill a shard or coin as he lifts his towel up from the ground. Uli watches as he puts the towel aside before pulling out a little brush from his back pocket to sweep away the stray bi
ts of glass underfoot. Uli feels his own pain, like needles, in his feet as he observes the man, fascinated as much by his efficiency as by his concern for everyone else’s well-being—anyone else who might step on a shard of glass passing by after him.

  Who is this man with so little regard for his own body but with so much respect for everyone else’s? Uli wonders if this isn’t the first thing he must learn about his new home—this self-abnegation, this disregard for his own body amidst this larger machine. Who am I here? Am I anybody? Am I nobody?

  He looks at his wrist for answers. Looks for a hospital bracelet, looks for a pulse. Nothing—no tag. Not even the sound of blood beating in his ears.

  He listens hard, hears the street outside funneled in through that little hospital window. The scrape of an engine, the jangle of glass shards, the blare of a food-hawker’s megaphone selling midnight meals. He feels like a blank slate, all of this new world projected onto him. He checks his wrists again and again. No tag, no pulse. It’s then that his reality starts to sink in: if no one checked him into the hospital, then no one is waiting for him on this side of the border. It occurs to him that his mother is coming though. Of course, she’s coming to find him, and he already knows where to meet her.

  Where do I go now? he thinks. The quick answer is, Back to bed. He thinks he’ll guzzle the last of the water and wait for another bottle in the morning. He wonders who is going to pay for all of this?

  He thinks he’ll find his clothes tomorrow. There’s some money in his bloody tracksuit—birthday money. He looks about the room for it. No luck.

  He limps back to the bed and slides himself under the covers. He stares at the ceiling and feels a swelling in his chest. Something like guilt over the idea that he’s ruined his body. Guilt over the idea, too, that he’s undone his family’s life work. Of course, they’re going to come look for him.

  TRAITORS

  LALO ONLY NEEDS ONE MORE SOUL. One more body from the streets of Matamoros to fill his quota. But it’s June 4, Mule’s Day, the feast of Corpus Christi, and nobody is out in the streets. Anyone will do by now, thinks Lalo. Then he remembers what his boss, El Jimmy, told him this morning: A kidnapped engineer or doctor would suffice, or someone who could fly a plane, with drugs, money, people. In short, someone who could speed up their departure. El Jimmy to his house in California, Lalo to anywhere in Texas where there are good schools for his daughter—the Woodlands maybe. He wonders if all of this isn’t a pipe dream by now. Driving the streets of Matamoros, he’s no longer looking for the body anymore, but rather any body. Any soul to fill his quota, to get Jimmy off his back.

  Lalo steers his white painter’s van just off downtown and smells the Tres Flores brilliantine on his upper lip from where El Jimmy grabbed him by the face with both hands as if to kiss him and said, “I know the end is tough. I know this is tough. We all want what’s best for our families.” More threat than comfort in his soft voice.

  It reminded Lalo of his uncle who would always speak like that right before he would kiss him. He’d keep speaking in that way, soft like heather, as Lalo would pull his pants sagging around his ankles. Lalo remembers that one day he punched his uncle in the throat and the comic-tragedy of it all was that his uncle spoke that way for the rest of his life, his voice stuck in that wispy register so common among viejos and smokers and throat cancer survivors. Driving, Lalo smells the Tres Flores and remembers what that anger felt like. Remembers it felt good. But more than anything, he remembers the feel of his uncle’s hands all over his body.

  Lalo idles at an intersection and stares at his painted purple finger tips splayed over the top of the steering wheel, his hands unsure of which way to turn, left or right. He looks into the lacquered, glittery purple as if to consult them like one might consult a crystal ball. His daughter picked out the color. She said it went with his outfit, which was only partially true. It matched the purple boots that he bought after the divorce, which came like a lightning bolt into his life, splitting him into countless pieces, every piece a different version of himself. He thinks about that—how inside us there are nesting dolls of who we were five years ago, who we were five years before that. And coming undone, he thinks, is just confronting every self you’ve ever inhabited—father, husband, son, puto, killer. Emptying yourself like a shaggy piñata.

  Idling at the intersection, he looks at his reflection in the rearview mirror. He thinks about how poorly he’s aged now that he’s nearing forty. He thinks about Darwin. Survival of the fittest. So, this is the version of me that’s won out?

  Every day he gets that feeling, like looking into the bathroom mirror on a bad morning. In his earlier days he looked like a dark Matthew McConaughey, his black curls greased back with pineapple-scented Moco de Gorila gel. High cheekbones. A long, lanky frame. Black eyes that smoldered like coals.

  But now, looking in the mirror, his fat has rounded out his features. His hollow cheeks have filled. His skin is shiny, thinnere. The corners of his hairline have crept back so that his widow’s peak grows more pronounced by the year. Below his chin, he’s conscious that his chest has grown flabbier in recent months too. He tries to hide his breasts with brightly colored button-downs that distract from the shape of his body—fuchsias, bright reds, purples, yellows, greens. He always wears jeans and a button-up and, of course, those purple boots.

  With no one in sight, he parks the van two blocks from Plaza Miguel Hidalgo and gets out on foot in search of candy to satisfy his sweet tooth. Even with no one out in the streets to see him, he feels uncomfortable in his own skin. He smells the Tres Flores as the breeze lets up. He thinks of his uncle. Anything for my daughter. One more body, he thinks, desperately trying to remember how to turn his self-hatred outward onto the world.

  Lalo finds Cuauhtémoc collapsed on a bench in Plaza Miguel Hidalgo. A flat, black curly head of hair. A lean and lanky frame. Cuauhtémoc’s shirt is sliced from the collar to right under the armpit of his sleeve. His hands are a mangled mess of blood, though the rest of him seems intact if only by shape. As far as Lalo is concerned, Cuauhtémoc’s legs look like legs, his feet look like feet. But upon closer inspection, Lalo can see the bruises up and down the back of Cuauhtémoc’s neck. They disappear into his shirt collar before emerging as road rash—or something resembling it—on his forearms. Lalo looks Cuauhtémoc in the face. Some burn marks where Cuauhtémoc’s hairline meets his forehead. The reek of gasoline all over him.

  Lalo figures that Cuauhtémoc could pass for his own brother if he were twenty years older or, perhaps, if Lalo was twenty years younger—what he wouldn’t give to be that young again.

  Lalo thinks the boy could be American, but he’d have to open his mouth to see for sure. Lalo knows, like everyone knows, that American teeth are instantly recognizable—healthy, straight, everything in place. An American would be good, Lalo thinks. An American family would pay out good ransom at least.

  Lalo notices blood from Cuauhtémoc’s pant leg dribbling onto the concrete. It’s only when Cuauhtémoc adjusts himself that Lalo sees that the toes on his left foot have been crushed to a purple mess, his boot lost somewhere.

  Could be a beat-up homeless person, Lalo thinks. One of those kids who have ridden up from Guatemala and bottlenecked here once they found they couldn’t cross into Texas. Or maybe one of those recently deported teenagers, the ones who always get jumped, the ones who file out of those gray buses in Brownsville and march across the international bridge, chain-gang style, until they’re released halfway over, ghosts wandering into the streets of Matamoros.

  Lalo has taken his fair share of the latter. Teenagers are easy prey. They all want to belong to something bigger than themselves. They all have this cartoonish idea of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a chingón. That’s what he wanted, anyway, when he was that age, eighteen, when his father lost everything after the floodgates of NAFTA opened and put their little farm out of business.

  That little parcel of land just east of Torreón was
his family’s pride, but also their undoing. Lalo’s grandfather obtained it after joining Villa’s División del Norte as a teenage soldier in 1912, during the Mexican Revolution. Lalo remembers how his grandfather had said it was the silver of their spurs that made him want to join more than anything. He wanted to be a chingón. He wanted to belong to something outside of what he knew. But more than anything, he wanted boots like those, spurs like those.

  It was only after his first battle in Celaya that his grandfather got those boots. Stole them off a soldier who died next to him. Lalo remembers how even as an old man his grandfather would still wear them in the fields, polished so bright that they stood apart from the dirt that put a patina over everything, even the cows that grazed on dirt but still produced milk, if only by the grace of God.

  His grandfather was proud of those boots, but even prouder of his parcel of land that he got by petition along with a dozen other burnouts from the División del Norte. They made up an ejido after the war, a system of sharecroppers that repossessed the land east of Torreón that the rich abandoned for greener pastures in Texas, California, New Mexico—away from the battlefields of the Revolution, away from the land that had given them so much.

  Maybe it was because Lalo’s grandfather had fought, or maybe it was because he couldn’t stand the idea of waste, or maybe it was because he couldn’t stand the idea of cutting and running that he came to resent those people who owned the land before him, who had enough money to leave forever. It was in this way that he came to teach his sons (and by extension, Lalo) that only the weak left the land. Every Mexican who went north, who left Mexico for a better life, was a traitor. Because the land gave you everything—food, water, shelter, dignity. It was the great irony of Lalo’s grandfather’s life that the day after he died, the farm stopped giving.

  NAFTA happened. And it wasn’t long before subsidized American milk flooded the Mexican market to undercut what little their cows could produce. The land around them got bought up. The milk spoiled in the containers. And still Lalo and his father refused to leave the land. Lalo came to hate everyone who went north. More than that, though, he came to hate the Mexicans who somehow made it, against all odds, en el Norte.