by Dan Darling
I’d never questioned it. In fact, I’d never thought of my father by any name, whatsoever. He was my father. We hadn’t, as a pair, done a whole lot of identity probing since my mother died. We didn’t think of ourselves as part of anything. We weren’t The Sticks, a family that sent out a mass Christmas card every year or invited people over for cocktails. We didn’t think of ourselves as part of a race, a class, or even an extended family. I’d heard other people proclaim their Irish decent, Northern New Mexicans talk with pride about their Spanish heritage, First Nation folk talk about how their pueblos were older than any American city. I came from one man and one woman. Our names and their significance had never mattered.
“So I’m wondering,” Tanis said, “did your father love his wife so much that he let her do anything she wanted? Did she ‘wear the pants,’ as they say? Or was he hiding something? Was he worried that if he passed on a stolen name, his son might suffer? Or did he simply not have enough attachment to the name to care? Did he feel more attached to his wife than to this stolen name?” She paced the floor and threw her hands around as she spoke. “My mind has been running non-stop. These are the questions you should have been asking yourself all these years. That you haven’t is”―she rolled her eyes into the corners of her sockets and gazed up at the ceiling, as if searching for the right word―“perplexing.”
My brain wanted to hibernate for a year and then emerge into a world where all of the recent tumult had expired. I inhaled a deep breath and spoke. It took effort. “So, you’re saying that my father stole a name. What is he, a criminal? Did he forget to pay his parking tickets? Because that’s the worst thing he’s capable of.”
Tanis whacked the seat of the empty chair with her hand. The dust billowed directly into my face. I choked on it a little despite my best efforts. She sat and crossed her legs. She wiggled a foot up and down. “Your father is guilty of a much larger crime. He’s an illegal immigrant.”
I blinked. The room did a couple of twirls. My arms and legs throbbed, as if a surge of blood were trying to bring them back to life. My mind felt like it was floating in ether somewhere high above any connection to reality.
She nodded at me. “Yes. It is surprising.” She opened a folder that she had tucked under her arm. “From what we could gather, your father paid a coyote―that’s the modern word for it―to smuggle him across the border of Mexico and get him an identity in the States. Back in the seventies when he did it, coyotes were more honorable. They kept their end of the deal. These days, an illegal alien’s coyote is as likely to steal their money, rape them, or abandon them to die in the desert as they are to get them across.”
“The preferred term,” I rasped, “is undocumented person.”
Tanis smiled. She was pure sunshine. Nothing got to her. “Words. How meaningless they are.”
I didn’t disagree with her.
“In any case, your father stole Tomás Ramón García’s identity and became a good American, working his fingers to the bone for very little money. Now that we’ve caught him, we’ve thrown him in a detainment facility, and the American government gets to keep all of the taxes he’s paid into the system. It’s a good deal for us. We’ll use it to buy some fun stuff like smart bombs or hip replacements for senior citizens. As one of us, you should be happy.”
I showed her my happy face. It had been known to scare the wigs off old ladies.
Tanis didn’t even blink. “Would you like to know your father’s real name?”
I sighed. I took my time with it, burying the air as deep in my torso as it would go. My lungs floated like two balloons in my chest. When they couldn’t handle it anymore, they let loose and my breath gusted out to mingle with the stale warehouse air. Once my chest was empty, my body felt like an old snakeskin shed from the being that had given it life.
“Your goons already told me down in T or C.” My voice sounded like it belonged to an old man.
“They ruined my coup de grace.” She clenched her fist. “They will be punished.”
“Do two things for me,” I said in my new voice.
She snapped the folder shut. “I can’t promise you anything.”
“First, take these handcuffs off. My hands haven’t felt their own calluses for five hours.”
She shook her head. “Second?”
“Tell me what you’ve done with Marchette.”
Her eyes glimmered. “The turncoat? Something poetic. If you had security clearance, I’d tell you so we could share an evil snicker.” She stood and whacked me good-heartedly on the chest with my father’s rap sheet.
Tanis left me in the dark. The warehouse was quiet at first, but as the night seeped into the seams of the place, mice started to scuttle behind the walls. The old wood clicked and squeaked as gravity slowly crushed the building into the earth. Periodically, a car cruised by on the street below, the subwoofers of its stereo system beating at the trunk like an animal trying to escape. The entire building convulsed to the rhythm. It was anybody’s guess whether forces of man or nature would eventually deliver the last blow to the building’s old, rickety body. The warehouse was dying, like all things in our world.
The two goons came for me some number of hours after dawn. I heard their car doors slam and their stomping feet from a mile away. It was something I did: sit in the dark and listen to approaching footsteps. I excelled at it. The men blundered in through one of the doors still on its hinges and shined flashlights in my fragile pupils. Steel Eyes went around behind me and released my handcuffs from the chair, but not from my wrists.
“Get up,” Purple Lips commanded.
I closed my eyes against his flashlight. “Show me your badge first.”
He kicked me in the foot.
“Easy on the shoes. Each one cost a month’s salary.”
He kicked my other foot. “Up.”
I didn’t open my eyes. “Give me another five minutes, Dad.”
He kicked me in the ankle. “I can keep moving up the chain, pal.”
“I’m wearing a cup,” I said.
He kicked me in the shin. A red flower bloomed in my shin bone and pain radiated up and down my leg. “I’m up, I’m up,” I said through my teeth. It took me a few tries. I felt like the Tin Man after a few seasons without oil. Once I was up, I got a push in the back for my trouble.
They took me downstairs and put me in a white van, like the one Tanis had shown up in at my house a million years ago. This one had a decal that said “Ivory’s Chimney Sweeping.” The interior had a couple of benches with steel rings attached at intervals. Once I’d made myself at home, Purple Lips attached my manacles to one of the rings and sat across from me.
I flashed him a great big smile. “This van smells funny.”
He sat with his hands folded in his lap, feet set far apart, knees splayed wide, and chest stuck out as far as he could get it. He was too busy trying to eradicate all trace of humanity from his face to answer me.
I took a deep sniff. The air smelled like a wet dog had been dipped in ancient molten iron and then let run around a while. It reminded me of a smell I’d recently come across, but my head was too loopy to do simple math. I loosed the air through my nose and did it all again. “You must use some special soap to wash up after you work a guy over.”
“No talking.” He tried not to move his face as he said it. He was probably training to be a ventriloquist in his free time.
They deposited me on Central Avenue. They pried the shackles off and gave me a spirited shove in the lumbar. I staggered onto the asphalt and fell to one knee. By the time I’d pushed myself upright, the van had sped away. My arms were weightless, and I was dried up like the shell of a cicada. My truck was God knew where. My body felt like it had aged ten years overnight. An armada of clouds advanced from the west to cover half the sky. Electric current ran through the air, and every human felt it. Bums hunched their bodies over their grocery carts. Hipsters with their big sunglasses and tote bags squinted up at the overcast sky. Shop
keepers hauled their sidewalk displays beneath the shelter of their storefront awnings, and waiters bustled around opening umbrellas over the sidewalk cafes. Everyone was readying for the first spring monsoon to unleash hell across the desert.
I bought an umbrella from a souvenir shop that sold made-in-China bric-a-brac and naughty greeting cards. The cashier, a blond girl with braces and baby fat on her cheeks, gave me too much change, and I didn’t correct her. She moved her mouth at me like a fish trying to learn vowels. Back on the sidewalk, a shapeless man in a motorized wheelchair rammed into my shins. The dozen plastic bags hanging from the handles and affixed to the undercarriage jolted, spilling clanging cascades of plastic and aluminum treasures. I cursed and dropped my coins. They jingled amidst the fat raindrops plopping dark on the sidewalk. The man sprawled forward onto his hands and knees. He scraped the coppers and silvers into a pile and covered them with his palms and cackled as if the city had taken possession of him and spilled its manic fever through his old, sick lungs. This was Albuquerque, this mad scramble for pocket change beneath the shadow of a deluge.
I moved on. The sky opened its throat and screamed at the earth. A wrath of water hammered down on humanity’s petty works. I unfurled my new umbrella and tangled its spokes in the cords of an awning. I yanked it free, ripping a hole in the cheap canvas. A triangle of rain gnawed at my shoulder as I stalked west. The downpour escalated until it eclipsed the visible world. I stood in a collapsing cylinder of shelter amidst the furious gray sheets. People fled the streets. Cars pulled to the curb and drivers gaped up through their windshields at the heavens. Lightning stabbed the earth in blue lances and shockwaves of thunder undulated across the city.
I kept moving. The storm wouldn’t last long, but the floods would clog the streets for hours. Already, the gutters brimmed and water stood on the blacktop. Low pockets in the asphalt cupped dark pools shimmering with oil. The cuffs of my trousers were sodden. My shoes sloshed with every step. The right side of my body was soaked and the water quickly bled through to the left.
After a few minutes, the rain eased. The drops struck feet apart. But the world still sat in darkness. A shiver convulsed the air. I knew what was in store for me even before the first crystalline globe skittered to a stop atop a newspaper machine. The next popped against my umbrella. I ran against a stoplight and found sanctuary beneath the drive-through of a bank just as a battalion of mad angels opened up with Gatling guns upon the mortal world. Salvos of ivory bullets pelted the sidewalks, streets, buildings, and cars. The clatter occluded all sound. It lasted only moments and when it was done, the sun burned through the diminished clouds and cast a golden net over the drifts of alabaster hail.
I closed my umbrella and dropped it into a trashcan. I continued west on Central toward a double rainbow that stood akimbo over the volcanoes. Everything’s beautiful, the rainbow told us, a cheap lie dressed in six colors. I arrived at Melodía’s building as people began to poke their heads outside again. Once within the quiet halls of the university’s basement, I wrung out my sleeves and pant legs. I stamped the water from my shoes. The air was chilly. The florescent lights blinked, buzzed, and shed their ghoulish luminance.
I could have called Rex or Flowers for a ride. I could have hailed a cab. Instead, without thinking, I’d walked straight to Melodía’s lab. It must have meant I missed her. I was numb from a night without sleep and hours upon hours chained to a chair. I was numb from Marchette’s betrayal, allegations my father was not the man I’d always thought he was, and racist militias recruiting my childhood friends. I was numb from Tasmanian vampire bats and blood sucking tarantula hawk wasps. My world had gone mad. I wanted to see my friend with her copious curly dark hair and her willowy frame and her familiar face, beautiful and stricken. I wanted to quip about scientific jargon and I wanted to laugh at small, harmless jokes.
So I knocked on her door. A kid opened it. He had acne, glasses, and ears. He wore a white coat with blue ink stains on the sleeve.
I checked the room number. It claimed to be the right one.
“C-can I help you?” The kid had one of those voices that hovered just between adolescence and adulthood. It sounded like a badly played violin.
I didn’t know if anyone could help me. Maybe my life was beyond help. “I’m looking for my friend. What have they done with her?”
The kid blinked brown eyes magnified by his glasses. “Who’s your friend?”
“I lost my truck. It’s hailing out there. The whole city’s underwater.”
The kid took my elbow, guiding me into the lab―Melodía’s lab. All of her instruments stood arrayed as they always had been. The air reeked of formaldehyde underscored with the subtle lavender shampoo she’d been using for twenty years. The kid sat me on a stool. He got me a paper cup of water. I sat there and held it, a vessel as fragile and tiny as anything in life had ever been.
“Sir, can I make you some tea?” The kid poised a kettle above a Bunsen burner. He had a motherly quality despite his tragic adolescence.
Tea. It was too much. I couldn’t handle the choices involved in drinking tea. It came in infinite varieties and one could take it in at least three different ways. I shook my head.
He settled himself on a stool opposite me. “You’re shaken up.”
I nodded, clinging to my water.
“You’re looking for your friend. Who’s your friend?”
He was attacking this problem like a scientist. I liked his style. “My friend is Melodía.”
“Dr. Hernandez?”
I nodded again.
He sat with his feet on a rung of the stool, arms crossed over his narrow chest, bobbing a knee. “She’s taken a leave of absence. I shouldn’t have told you that, but―” He shrugged. “If she’s your friend, it seems like you have a right to know.”
“Absence?” I said. “Why?”
“Medical reasons. I’m a graduate student. It’s my job to watch over her lab while she’s gone. Easy job. Nothing to do really except my own experiments.”
“What medical reasons?” My mind was beginning to wake up. If Melodía was in trouble, I should have been the first person to know.
He shrugged. “I’d tell you if I knew. I can tell you that she planned it in advance. It wasn’t an emergency or anything. She gave the Biology Department notice. She’ll be back for fall term, from what I hear.”
Fall was months away. I didn’t go months without seeing Melodía. I rarely went more than a few days without talking to her, seeing her, or smelling her hair. These past two weeks had caught up to me. A pocket of air was stuck high in my chest. I couldn’t exhale or swallow. It cramped my lungs and oppressed my heart.
“You’re turning white,” the kid said. “You want me to call someone?”
There was no one to call. I handed the kid my cup of untouched water. I patted him on the head and left.
I hailed a cab across the street from the university in front of the Frontier Cafe, a popular spot for cinnamon rolls and early morning knifings. I gave the cabbie my father’s address and endured his eyes in the rearview mirror. He must have been driving by braille because he stared at me the whole way. I tipped him in pennies and his cab snarled as it sped off toward richer neighborhoods. My father’s street was quiet, as always. Smoldering hailstones clogged the gutters. The windows of the houses watched me. My skin crawled beneath the invisible gazes of a community used to witnessing atrocities and hiding from them. In the poor neighborhoods of Albuquerque, people were as afraid of the police as they were of criminals. Police entered neighborhoods with battering rams and riot gear. They hit hard and left quickly.
Police tape hung across my father’s bashed-in front door. I broke through it. I walked just far enough in to see the boot prints on the living room carpet, the cold plate of half-eaten beans and rice on the table, the dirty pan on the stovetop. They’d taken him during dinner, the bastards. They’d dragged my tiny father from the home he’d been living in for forty years, the home wher
e his boy had grown too much and his wife had died too early.
I tore the police tape from the doorframe and closed the front door. It swung open again. The muzzle of a battering ram had scarred the wood beside the doorknob. The frame around the latch and deadbolt hung in splinters. I tied the police tape around the knob, pulled the door shut, and secured the other end to the little fence that enclosed the flowerbed my father planted every April. I walked out into the middle of Spring Street. I looked up and down the block and knew a dozen cowards were watching. I cursed them. I let the deepest voice in the state of New Mexico bellow out thirty-eight years of bitterness. I started with my early life and moved forward. I gave them a dose of what I’d been getting from them for nearly four decades. I told every one of them about the ugly heart of the human race and related in detail how they’d succumbed to it. I lifted my arm high in the air, extended my finger toward heaven, and preached. My reach was higher than the rooftops. I was a mighty being from another world and I was passing judgment. When my voice was hoarse and my arm sore, I sank to one knee and clutched a handful of hail from the gutter. I held the ball of ice high aloft and let it trickle through my fingers.
I vowed never to set foot on the street where I grew up again.
o cabs trolled my old neighborhood. I had to walk a mile north into downtown Albuquerque. I strode along crumbling streets with no sidewalks that ran between old shacks that had been on the verge of collapse for decades. I cut through dirt alleys and more than once had to shoo a chicken out of my path. Once past the rail yard, I emerged into a downtown district of public utility buildings, courthouses, and law firms during the day, and thumping nightclubs after sundown. I towered over every living thing. I could have plucked birds from the air and crushed them in my fists. Traffic halted in tribute to my passing. I stood taller than the cops on horseback who danced their steeds in circles to gawk at me. Upon reaching Central Avenue, I looked up and down the street for a cab. Instead, I found a small man in a trench coat and a fedora sat on a bench reading a computerized tablet. It was Tony, the Good Friend gumshoe.