“Mom—” said Enrique, then stopped himself from pointing out that it was warm in here, lest she turn it back down.
Lina looked up from her task, her lips pursed. She nodded toward the living room. “Say hello,” she said.
Of course. Cigarette smell.
The old man—his old man—had been so still, bent in places like a rolled-up rug propped in the corner of the sofa, that Enrique hadn’t noticed him. The man leaned forward to park his cigarette in the ashtray (the one Lina kept in the top of the cupboard only for him) and beckoned Enrique by lifting his chin, which bristled with white and black slivers.
Enrique shot a glance at his mother, but she had returned to her dicing and didn’t look up.
“Hi,” Enrique said.
The old man’s long, leathery arms lifted like those of a marionette. Enrique sat down on the couch at a couple feet’s distance, and the man draped his arms around his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. “You been good?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
The man picked up his cigarette. “I been in Nevada, countin’ cattle. They got me countin’ and drivin’ the truck as they throw out hay. And overseein’ the migrants. And I do some of the things they used to have a vet out to do. Hornin’ calves.” The man’s eyes, set like chips of coal deep in his head, turned from Enrique back to the television as he spoke. They were like Jay’s eyes. “One day they had me in the house answerin’ the phone, ’cause their daughter had to drive to Winnemucca to help her aunt or somethin’. Felt weird gittin’ paid for sittin’, but I s’pose that’s what some folks do all their lives. Sit and move papers from one pile to another and git paid for it.”
Enrique was stunned. This was the longest string of words he had ever heard his father speak. Something had shaken loose in him.
And he wasn’t done. “Fella named Warren, he’s the owner, sits on the county commission. You start to see how things work. He gits to own the land and make the rules that he’ll have to follow. He ran for the legislature a few years ago, and probably will again. Then his son’ll run the ranch, and run it by the rules his father and the other owners make. Be able to divert the water and graze the cows wherever they want. Been good to me, though. I don’t fault them for makin’ the rules, just wish I coulda known how things worked earlier, so I coulda had a part, given more to you all.”
As far as Enrique knew, his father had never sent them a dime. “Um, I’m gonna help my mom,” he said.
The lines in the man’s face all tilted up into an inquisitive, perhaps hurt, expression, but he didn’t stop Enrique from leaving.
“He’s talking,” Lina said simply.
“How long is he going to stay?”
“Not long, I’m sure.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“You used to like it when he came.”
“Yeah, back when I was a kid and he brought presents.”
From the firm set of her jaw, Enrique could tell Lina was going to give him nothing, say nothing against her husband.
But inside, Lina had buffered herself with memories of Chuck. The only way to endure the presence of that ghost sitting in her living room was to pick up the love she had been denying herself in the past weeks and pull it around her shoulders like a blanket.
Over dinner the man told about the different ways of horning cattle. He spoke without lifting his eyes, almost as if he were speaking into a microphone hidden in his collar, recording everything he knew and remembered so it would survive him, a condemned man determined to leave a record. In the past, he told them, they swabbed the calves’ heads with acid, which burned into the bone and prevented horns from growing. But it was hard to keep the acid from dripping into the calves’ eyes, blinding them. Now they waited until nubs appeared on the calves’ heads and gouged them out with specially designed clippers. Jorge had learned to use them. His eyes flicked up in pride with this revelation: they no longer had to call out a vet to horn the calves—he could do it.
Enrique had been determined not to ask his father any questions. But now the sweet young calf he had conjured blinked his Bambi-eyes in fright as he was zapped with a cattle prod into the chute with the other calves. Up the ramp he was driven, toward Enrique’s father, who worked handles that led, through madly scissoring machinery, to chomping stainless-steel jaws. “Why do you have to horn them at all?” Enrique asked. “Why don’t you just leave them alone?”
“Imagine you’re one of three hunnerd head of cattle in a field, all jabbin’ each other. You ain’t even fightin’, just stabbin’ your neighbor in the flank when you lift your head. We’d have to patch up a cow every day.”
Enrique’s father talked like any cowboy, not a trace of Spanish in his mouth pushing vowels up into his nose and consonants toward his teeth. Why was it that his mother had her faint accent when she, like his father, had been raised in the United States? Because they spoke Spanish at the Hacienda. But also, Enrique now suspected, she chose her accent, just as she chose to speak Spanish to him when he was growing up. She had instilled it in him as his language of comfort and happy bedtime thoughts, the language he loved in. She had hobbled him with it. Only now was he ridding himself of this version of baby-talk by pushing words back on his tongue. No wonder he had felt so lonely since he had stopped speaking Spanish. It was her fault. She should have been speaking English to him from the start.
After dinner, Enrique’s father called him from the kitchen back to the sofa. “Do you know who you’re named after?” he asked.
“Your brother.”
Enrique’s father nodded. Nothing in the man’s face prepared Enrique for what followed. The voice of another man came out of him, a man speaking from the back of a church—singing, even, in vibrato: “He’s dead.” His face froze again, then he opened his mouth and inhaled.
He’s crying, Enrique realized. The dried-up old man didn’t make tears. A flash of pity in Enrique was quickly overwhelmed by embarrassment. He wanted to get up and leave. And why shouldn’t he? He didn’t owe this man anything. Enrique boldly rose and went to his room.
Tomorrow, the last school day before Christmas break, there would be cookies and gift exchanges. Teachers hadn’t bothered to assign any homework, so Enrique had nothing to do once confined in his room. He took the trees and houses off the bookshelf and arranged them into a little village on the bed. Then he rearranged them into a ring, so the villagers shared a circular park. Downtown, which consisted of the church and the school, stood apart, atop the knoll of his pillow. He noticed the long, late-afternoon shadows his reading lamp cast across his bedspread. He unclipped the lamp and moved it in an arc over his bed, changing the shadows from morning to noon to night. How’s that, Mrs. Cuddlebone?
Try again, Enrique. He clipped the lamp to a drawer, to be suspended at sunset, shoved some clothes under the bedspread, and reerected the village so it now occupied the slope of a valley.
Lina, too, went to her room early and sat in bed with a Reader’s Digest. Then, when she was just about to turn out the light, the door handle turned, and the door opened to reveal Jorge’s long frame. He bowed his head—was it a gesture of polite submission or one of a man used to running into door frames?
“No,” Lina said, sitting up in bed.
“No?”
“You’re sleeping in the other bedroom, Jorge. Go on.”
“Man should sleep with his wife.”
She shook her head. “You had your chance.”
Jorge stepped in and sat at the edge of the bed. He lay one long hand on the ridge at Lina’s ankle. “I’m sorry about that, Lina. It’s one of the things I been wanting to tell you, that I’m sorry.”
Lina pulled her leg away, swiveled in bed, and stood. She took Jorge by the shoulders and steered him out. “Tomorrow,” she said as she closed the door. He stood there a long time—she could feel him through the door, radiating like heat—before he moved away and she heard the flick-flick-flick of the lighter. Not so long ago, she had dreamed
of an apology from Jorge, and wished for him to share her bed every night. How far she had come!
The next afternoon Enrique again shut himself in his room with his little village, attempting to make it feel more like a model and less like a toy, more like homework and less like playtime. He was missing his favorite shows because the old man was out there. He and his little village had fallen under siege by an evil troll outside the city wall. How had this come to pass? The answer he came up with followed the loosened logic of the make-believe village: Enrique had unintentionally brought on the arrival not only of his father but of Penny, by opening his borders, by calling a truce with Miriam. The lone wolf must balance the cost of loneliness against the threat of encroachment.
There was a knock on his door.
Enrique threw a blanket over the village. “Yeah?” he said.
The old man’s head entered. “Come with me,” he said.
“I really have a lot to do for school,” Enrique said.
Again, all the lines of the face tilted up, and it withdrew.
The last time he was here, three years ago, Enrique’s father had said, “Come with me,” and Enrique had gone. It had been a few days after Christmas, and there was some old snow on the ground. They had parked by Lake Overlook, and the man had gone to the trunk of the car, taken a few shells out of a small paper bag, and dropped them into his pocket. He took out a shotgun and slammed the trunk closed.
They walked across an empty field toward a grove of maples whose trunks were a jumble of black bars imprisoning the white lake. The snow on the field had frozen hard on the surface, then settled underneath, creating a glazed crust that crunched when you stepped through it, then banged your ankle when you went to move on. The only way you could walk across it was to lift your leg high between steps, like a cat crossing a puddle. At least that was how Enrique crossed the field. Unaware of their destination, he had worn sneakers. His father trudged along, invulnerable in big boots.
They stopped when they reached the trees. Enrique’s father flipped a switch and bent the gun like an arm at the elbow. “Shells in here.” He plugged the two holes with shells. Then he dropped the limbs back together so they again made a shotgun. Without a word, he cocked the gun, then positioned the butt against Enrique’s shoulder. He put his hand on Enrique’s to steady the barrel, and put his finger around Enrique’s on the trigger. He squeezed. The gun jumped and popped and sprayed tiny holes across the tree trunk. Some birds, black beads studding the naked lacework of a nearby tree, rose and scattered.
“Ow,” said Enrique.
“Hurts, don’t it?”
Was that the lesson? That guns hurt? Back then, Enrique still wanted a father so badly that he reconfigured the three grammatically misgrouped words into something like wisdom. Shooting a gun hurt you, the shooter.
But it didn’t hurt, really, not the recoil, which was what his father had meant. It would ache later, and the hollow of Enrique’s collarbone cultured a yellow, marbleized bruise, but it didn’t hurt then, out in the cold. Enrique had said “Ow” because his father had pinched the flesh of his finger against the trigger.
Enrique hadn’t thought of that pointless trip to Lake Overlook once since it had taken place. That’s how far back he had filed his father away in the past three years.
Now it was Lina’s voice at the door: “Enrique?”
“Come in.”
She entered and pressed her back against the door. Relief at having a wall between her and the man for a moment passed across her face. Then she opened her eyes, looked with pity on Enrique, and steeled herself. “Go with him,” she said.
“Ma!”
“Go with him, and I’ll tell him he has to leave tomorrow.”
So Enrique went. His father stopped at the Circle-K for two cans of beer, then drove him, again, to Lake Overlook. There was a gray haze along the horizon that dissipated halfway up the sky. Above it, the moon was faintly visible, like a floury print left by a baker’s finger on the steel of the sky. They pulled into the park that, according to Miriam, had given the lake its name. The evidence of hooky-bobbers, shiny figure-eights on the matte surface of the lake, shone like Scotch tape on paper.
“Your Uncle Enrique and me used to sneak beer outta the cooler at picnics, go hide in a dry ditch and drink ’em. He always had some trick he wanted to pull. Mean kid. He’d pull a sock over the cat’s head just to see it run around crazy. Put a frog in the breadbox to scare our ma. Got beat up good for that one.” With his thick, black-bordered fingernail he lifted the tab on his beer, twisted it off, and dropped it back into the hole. Then he traded cans with Enrique, did the same again, and took a long drink, which caused his Adam’s apple, prickled as a bud on a cactus, to bob. “Grew outta that, though. He worked for our daddy most his life. Wish I’da done the same.”
Stories of Uncle Enrique marched steadily out of the man’s mouth like exhausted troops. He wanted to memorialize his brother to his brother’s namesake. He wanted a warm body next to him to absorb some of his grief. But Enrique had never met his uncle and didn’t care. In the past his father’s silence had seemed evidence of hard experience, or secret wisdom, or manliness. Now Enrique saw that it had been evidence only of emptiness.
Why don’t you just keep quiet? Enrique said in his mind.
Why don’t you die?
He immediately recoiled from the words in horror, but then dared himself to face them, the way boys dared each other to hold their eyelids open with their fingertips and look at the sun—a thrill only in that it so directly disobeyed their parents and teachers. Enrique became fascinated. Why don’t you die? Maybe then we’ll get some money.
His father paused and raised the car lighter’s glowing coil to the tip of a cigarette. He opened the window a crack, sent out a stream of smoke, and tapped the lighter against the rim. A couple of ashes fell off, and he plugged the lighter back into its hole. He tipped back his head and finished his beer, ashed into the can, then grunted and exhaled through his nose—a belch. “Like it?”
Enrique shook his head and offered the can. His father took it with the three fingers that were not occupied by the cigarette. “It tastes like pee,” Enrique said.
Success—that pathetic expression again. If he had to endure the old man’s presence, he could at least play with him a little.
Lina didn’t keep her word. Jorge stayed. On Christmas Eve he gave Enrique a present, a plastic boat. “Thanks,” Enrique said, as flatly as possible. Where would he play with such a thing, even if he wanted to? They had a shower, not a bathtub, and the lake was frozen.
Lina went to church Christmas afternoon. Enrique, tired of being confined to his room, came and sat at the far end of the sofa to watch TV.
“Your mother’s got herself a nice place here,” the old man said, nodding and looking up, as if to check the ceiling for holes. “I think it might be time.”
Having barely sat down, Enrique rose, put on his hat and jacket, and took off on the bike Jay had given him.
IT SEEMED TO Jay that hours had passed since they finished Christmas dinner and sent the children to play with their new toys in the den, but still the adult Van Bekes sat around the table, talking. “I fell out of love with Reagan the moment he gave control of the Interior Department to a businessman!” Emily Van Beke said. “Reagan let snowmobilers into Yellowstone and loggers into the Boise National Forest, and you, Mom, still defend him.”
Janet’s eyes sparkled with delight at being so challenged. “So, are you saying, Emily, that you voted for Mondale?”
“I voted for Bergland.”
“So you’re a Libertarian,” Emily’s brother said.
“No, independent.”
Janet shook her head and beamed at her husband. “Are you listening to your children? Next they’ll be telling us they’re Socialists!”
“Can’t believe my ears,” said Carl.
“Marx had some good ideas,” Emily’s husband said.
“Tell me,” Janet said
, leaning forward on her elbows, suddenly free of irony.
This was how it had been for days—endless talk. Radiation was spreading from Chernobyl; Idaho was selling water to California; Jim Bakker was making a mockery of Christianity. Every so often, someone remembered Jay and tossed him a question about the basketball season. The grandchildren, as bored as Jay, climbed their fathers like jungle gyms. Why didn’t anyone propose a game of touch football or a caravan to the movie theater? Even after all his years at the Van Bekes’, Jay was too shy and out of place to speak up. He would go play with the Walkman they had bought him, but he had left all his tapes at Lina’s and was stuck with the faggy Bon Jovi one he had borrowed from a Van Beke grandchild.
After a lengthy discussion of Marxism, one of the sons began to complain of a neighbor down the road: “The Cransons’ place is an eyesore, Dad, worse than last year. They use car engines as lawn ornaments. You should sue them.”
“For what?” Carl asked.
“Anything. Inbreeding. Cruelty to guinea hens.”
“That’s quite enough of that talk,” Janet said with a wide-eyed laugh.
It seemed that Janet and Carl had had children expressly to be given cause to widen their eyes, again and again. So why had they taken Jay? Over the years, Mrs. Van Beke sat with Jay at the kitchen table night after night, bargaining with him. “You can go outside once we’ve finished your times tables.” Only now did he see that he was supposed to take it from there, become interested in things, and bring ideas home to Janet, the way some children brought home money. How could he ever have thought he belonged in this world when he didn’t understand its most basic rules?
The doorbell rang.
Janet looked to Carl quizzically. “On Christmas?”
Carl rose and disappeared into the hallway. Everyone was quiet. Then he returned and said, “Jay, it’s your brother.”
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