EXCEL WAITS IN THE KITCHEN FOR MAXIMA TO FINISH. WHEN SHE finally enters, it’s almost daylight.
“Did I do okay?” Excel asks.
“You did fine. A little nervous at first, but that’s understandable.”
“I got caught up in remembering his file, then the accent, the time difference. It’s a lot to keep track of.” Hearing himself, he’s suddenly impressed with how Maxima manages to keep everything straight.
“Next time, you’ll be more relaxed.”
“Next time? I thought I just had to say hello, that was all. And then we could, you know, ask for money.”
“You think it’s that easy, that you get what you need”—she snaps her fingers twice—“just like that? Once you start, you keep going.”
He has no choice but to follow her plan. “Okay. Just tell me when we talk again.” He goes to the freezer to get ice for his face—it always hurts in the morning—drops a few cubes into a plastic bag. “It’s strange,” he says, “the whole time we talked, Jerry never asked about my face.”
“Actually, he did. After you left, he asked what happened.” She goes to the sink, fills a glass with water. “I told him you had a job with a bastard boss who hit you.”
“I didn’t think we were supposed to tell the truth,” he says.
“If we can use the truth, why not?” She grabs Excel’s bag of ice, takes two melting cubes and drops it into her glass, returns to her room. Outside the kitchen window, the day in Colma begins.
THEY MEET AGAIN TWO DAYS LATER, FIVE A.M. MAXIMA TALKS FOR twenty minutes, then invites Excel to say hello. The plan is for Excel to be brief—it’s too soon for a meaningful conversation—but to make a strong connection, too. The day before, Excel found an article online about a blind man in Australia who builds ships in a bottle, and it’s the first thing he mentions to Jerry. “It’s quite interesting, sir,” he says. “He does it all from memory and a sensitivity to touch.”
“Fascinating,” Jerry says, taking notes as Excel talks. Then he tells Excel about a terrific ship in a bottle article in Popular Mechanics. “Historically comprehensive, but written in a really hip tone. Give me your e-mail address and I’ll send a PDF.”
“My e-mail address?” He pauses for a moment, remembers the fake e-mail account Maxima created for him, in case Jerry wanted to correspond with Excel directly. “Yes, sir. I will say it slowly so that you may write it down. Perfecto. Is. A. Good. Boy. At. Hotmail. Dot. Com.”
“‘Perfecto is a good boy.’ I like that,” Jerry says. “Maybe I should create a new address. Jerry. The. Average. White. Guy. At. AOL. Dot. Com.” He laughs, and Excel knows to laugh along with him, then Maxima laughs, too. Jerry makes up more gag e-mail addresses for the next five minutes (“ThisIsJerry’[email protected]” is Jerry’s favorite), then Excel excuses himself to finish his homework, fakes a brief coughing fit (Maxima had left a tiny Post-it note on the keyboard with the word COUGH! written on it), and says he looks forward to receiving Jerry’s e-mail soon.
Later that day, Excel gets on Maxima’s computer and checks the e-mail account. His inbox is already receiving junk mail—someone named Irina, apparently, is waiting to be “SPECIAL XXX FRIENDS”—but at the top he sees a message with the subject heading “From Jerry.” He opens the e-mail.
Dear Perfecto:
Thank you again for telling me about the blind Australian fellow who builds ships. It’s amazing what the human spirit can accomplish. I feel inspired!
Also, I hope I’m not out of line for saying this, but your mother let me know about the abusive situation at your job gutting fish at the local market. I know the income is important, but remember you have rights as well, and shouldn’t have to tolerate that kind of abuse. Does the market have an HR (“Human Resources”) office? Or a higher-ranking supervisor of some sort? If not, I hope you’ll find other work, or if at all possible, try to focus on your studies. One of my mottoes has always been “Education is the key!” and as I know you are a bright young man, school will be the key to your success, too. It saddens me (and your mother) to think you may be suffering at a job that only detracts from your studies.
If you’d like to talk about it more, I hope you’ll let me know.
Yours,
Jerry
PS. Per our conversation, I’m attaching the article I mentioned. Enjoy!
Unlike the e-mails he’d received from Maxima in Hello City, Excel can actually hear Jerry’s voice when he reads the message, like a true voice-over from the movies—clear and calm, a little too cheerful. If this had been sent by one of Maxima’s other men, he might almost laugh at its earnestness (who says “fellow”?), delete the e-mail and the attachments with it. But this is important business; he and Maxima have worked hard to get to this point, and he knows there’s more ahead.
He clicks Reply and types.
Dear Sir Jerry,
Salamat (“thank you” in Tagalog) for your e-mail and for sharing your wise motto. I agree that “education is the key!” so I will follow your advice and quit my job gutting fish at the market. I will do my best not to find more part-time jobs, so that I can focus on my studies. If I can do that, then I know I can SUCCEED and EXCEL in life, just like you.
I hope we may talk again soon, Sir Jerry.
Respectfully,
Perfecto
PS. Salamat for the article. I will read it after I study.
Looking over the e-mail, Excel can’t hear his voice, but he’s starting to hear Perfecto’s. Still, he’s pleased with himself, how he managed to slip his real name into the message. A bit of truth to use, just like Maxima said.
He clicks Send.
22
In Hello City, Excel forgot how old he was.
He was sitting at Beans!, killing time until Sab was off work. Heddy and Ned, in matching tracksuits again, were sitting nearby, reading a copy of the Los Angeles Times, when Excel noticed the date on the front page, May 17. His birthday. “Is that today’s paper?” he asked.
Heddy looked at him and laughed. “It’s old news, sweetie,” she said. “Today’s the twenty-seventh.”
Excel had turned nineteen ten days before.
Birthdays didn’t mean much to Excel, not since his tenth, when Maxima told him everything at Pier 39. In recent years, they had barely celebrated, which was fine by him. But now, he was fixated on this idea that, for ten days, he’d believed he was younger than he actually was. Maxima, he knew, didn’t know her exact birthday; her parents had drowned when she was a child, left no documents behind. She could be younger than she believed, too, with more life ahead than she’d imagined.
That evening, drinking beer on their lawn chairs outside the bus, he told Sab that his birthday had passed ten days before. He shrugged, tried sounding casual about it. “Birthdays aren’t really my thing,” he said.
She rubbed her eyes, tired from the day. “Oh geez. Sorry about that.”
“No big deal.” He reached over, put his hand on hers. “I forget birthdays all the time.”
“I didn’t forget. I actually don’t know when your birthday is.”
Excel noticed Sab was staring at his hand on top of hers, couldn’t tell if she wanted it there or not. He gave it one more squeeze and let go. “No big deal,” he repeated.
“We should celebrate. What if we drive to El Centro, look for a Mexican restaurant or something. We’ll splurge on extra guacamole, my treat.”
He hadn’t been to El Centro since picking up the television sets with Red. It seemed even farther now, and the thought of being on the freeway, after they’d each had a beer, seemed reckless. He imagined Sab accidentally speeding, just a few miles over the limit, and the glow of red and blue police lights in the side mirror, moving closer.
“Let’s just go to the Square,” he said.
“The Square? For your birthday?”
“Why not? We shouldn’t waste money or gas driving so far. Besides, it’s curry night at Hot Food.”
“If that’s what
you want,” she said with a shrug, “sure.”
They sat, silent, looked out into the field. Above, the sky was darkening, turning into a sky almost similar to one they’d seen long before, the night they arrived in Hello City.
SAB’S LAST-MINUTE GIFT TO EXCEL WAS A DOLLAR’S WORTH OF QUESTIONS for the Oracle. “I’ll get you something else, too,” she said, pinching his rear, “promise.” She gave him four quarters and a kiss on the cheek, then went to stand in the Hot Food line.
Excel walked up to the Oracle, bent down to say hello. The owl was motionless, perched at the end of the branch, right against the side of the cage.
He dropped a quarter into the jar and asked his first question. “Will this be a good year?” He leaned in, heard a low, guttural chirp, took that as a yes.
He dropped another quarter. “Will I find a steady job?” The owl stayed silent. Excel reminded himself to post another flyer, looking for work.
He wanted to ask about Sab. She’d been working long days, was always tired, and sometimes seemed frustrated and bored, weighted down with a low-energy restlessness. He feared he was the cause, or at least part of it. Though he’d told her that his birthday meant nothing, he’d hoped she might be a little happier tonight.
He dropped the quarter into the jar, unsure what to ask, how to formulate the right yes or no question to help him understand what might be troubling her.
But he asked a different question. “Will I always be TNT?” he whispered.
If she hoots, it’s a YES. If not, it’s a NO.
A minute passed, then another. The Oracle remained perfectly still, bright yellow eyes frozen, completely silent.
“Thank you,” he said.
He walked to Sab, who sat on a bench near the stage. “Did you get good answers?” she asked.
Excel nodded.
“What were your questions?”
He shook his head. “They’re like birthday wishes,” he said, dipping a spoon into the lentil curry. “A secret.”
A Hello City Town Council meeting was about to start, and Lucia arrived with bottles of beer in a metal pail. “Cerulean Spark!” she said. Excel and Sab each took a beer, decided to stay. Rosie stepped onstage and began with a list of announcements—Hot Food was still taking canned goods donations, the supplies store in Whyling would be closed for a week while the owners were on their Key West vacation, and there still was no decision about the stop sign controversy, though people, as always, were welcome to share their concerns. Rosie continued, and Excel looked at Sab, and thought, Now. If he told her he was TNT, he would, in essence, no longer be one, at least not to her. Maybe that was his first step to no longer hiding, to proving the Oracle right.
He would tell Sab tonight. In the bus. Or maybe on the helipad as they looked at the stars.
Then Rosie said, “Where’s Excel?”
He looked up. Rosie picked up her fiddle, played the first notes of “Happy Birthday.”
“You told them,” Excel said to Sab.
She shrugged. “Why not?”
Rosie played and everyone—around thirty people—sang. Excel knew most of the crowd, if not by name, then by face, which likely meant that they all knew him, too. He hadn’t lied to Sab; this kind of attention really did make him self-conscious. But tonight, if he didn’t exactly welcome it, he was grateful, and their singing made up for what he suddenly realized was missing—a birthday message from Maxima. She hadn’t sent an e-mail, had made no attempt to call. Not that he blamed her. He was the one out of touch, the one who was gone. And all she would’ve done for his birthday was recount the story of it, which she’d done every year since he turned ten. That story was nineteen years old now, too.
MAXIMA WOULD TELL THE STORY LIKE THIS:
She’s eight months pregnant when she boards a Philippine Airlines flight bound from Manila to San Francisco. It’s her first time on a plane, in a window seat, no less.
Takeoff makes her nervous, but once the plane is steady in the sky she relaxes, thinks she might even enjoy the feeling of being in the air. She won’t pay for headphones, but she watches Moonstruck (she likes Cher’s movies, not her music) on the video screen up front, manages to follow the plot even if she can’t hear the characters speak. The in-flight dinner is so-so—chop suey, salad, a buttered roll—but what she loves is eating them out of small trays with their own compartments. In America, she thinks, she’ll eat all her meals like this.
It’s a seventeen-hour flight; by the fifth hour, she can feel how pregnant she really is. Her seat is like a fist squeezing her body, her back aches and feet swell, and the passenger to her left, a nun who looks like she’s fifteen, hogs the entire armrest. But America is the only choice, Maxima tells herself, her only hope. What’s left for her back home? She has no job, no income, no family. The movies don’t want her anymore. She’s finally rid of the eye patch–wearing son of a bitch (better to raise her baby on her own anyway), and her sister Queenie, her only real family, is trapped in Saudi Arabia forever; she’ll be a live-in maid until the day she dies.
Thank god for Joker. Still loyal, after all these years. He’s promised her a good place to live, will help arrange whatever paperwork she and the baby need to stay in California. Had she known it would be this easy, maybe she would have come a long time ago.
But then the plane shakes, hard as an earthquake, despite no solid ground beneath. The captain requests all passengers take their seats and fasten their seat belts, but Maxima feels too miserably pregnant to buckle up, so she just grips her armrest (the one against the wall, since the nun still won’t share) and whispers an orasyon to herself and her baby: “Let us fly through the air safely, let us land on the ground, softly.”
The plane suddenly dips—Maxima lets out a muffled shriek—then rises again, and the turbulence continues, though most of the passengers are accustomed to it by now, as though all are expert travelers. But the side-to-side shaking, Maxima fears, will somehow hurt the baby, and she wonders if leaving home is her all-time number one mistake, if the smartest thing a person can do is to stay in the place where you were born.
The turbulence ends; the plane cruises again. Maxima closes her eyes just to rest them, then falls into a sleep so deep she dreams she’s already in America, lying in a clean, comfortable bed with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, until the room tilts one way, then the other, then forward and back, and the dream becomes an earthquake, one so real she’s jolted awake, but instead of the plane’s violent shaking or sudden plunge, her body seems to pop. She inhales sharply, feels a warmth gushing over her seat, down her thighs and legs, then everywhere.
Maxima has been punched, kicked, judo flipped, has even rolled out of a moving jeep. But her body was trained; she always knew how to get back up. Now, squeezed in her window seat, she’s helpless against the pain. She looks at the snoring nun beside her, taps her shoulder several times. “Excuse me, sister,” she says. “Excuse me.” But the nun just sleeps so Maxima pounds her fist like a hammer on the nun’s thigh, and the nun shrieks awake. “Help me,” Maxima says.
In minutes, three flight attendants walk Maxima to the front of the plane, where they’ve cleared the final two rows in first class. With great luck, the plane is full of nurses, Filipinos hoping for work in US hospitals, and four of them tend to Maxima. They give her water, dab her face and neck with cold towels, time her contractions. They come and go in shifts except for one, a male nurse named Rocky, who has been close by from the beginning and will be there to the end. “Huwag kang mag-alala,” he says, “don’t worry honey, you’re in good hands.” He fans her with what Maxima realizes is her own plane ticket, so that she sees, flitting back and forth just above her face, her name and confirmation number—XL0426. “XL,” she whispers to herself, “XL, XL, XL,” the rhythm of the letters like an incantation, a one-word orasyon. Rocky leans closer, not quite hearing her. “Excel,” she says. “So whenever I say my baby’s name, it also means, ‘be good, be the best.’” She takes a deep breath, nods t
o herself. “Excel. Di ba?”
More turbulence, a jolt, and Excel is born, his arrival the end of Maxima’s story.
THEY FINISHED SINGING “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” AND EVERYBODY clapped. For the first time since arriving in Hello City, Excel thought he missed home just enough that he could imagine tearing up. “You okay?” Sab asked.
“Sure. I’m fine. It’s just really nice of everybody to sing for me.” He looked up at the crowd, gave a wave of thanks.
Rosie took the stage again and went through final announcements. There was the possibility of a community chicken coop, so people needed to prepare their pros and cons for the next meeting. The Hello City Kite Club’s bake sale was canceled, and there was a reminder for people not to leave food out, in case of coyotes. Finally, Rosie let everyone know that she’d gotten word that the border patrol would be doing a sweep of Hello City, likely tomorrow, given that there were illegals—her word—in the area, setting up camp. That last bit of news received mostly silence, but someone—several people actually—applauded, loud enough for Excel to hear.
Without realizing it, he stood up, tried to find the ones who’d clapped. Everyone looked at him, all their faces blank. It could have been any one of them.
23
Eight days after Excel mailed off the care package, Sab calls and says, “I can’t believe you.”
He doesn’t speak, doesn’t say hello.
“Baby clothes?” she says. “Are you kidding me?”
Excel is at Meadow of Life Memorial, on his way to Joker’s grave. He doesn’t remember rain earlier in the day or the day before, but the grass is damp, muddy splotches everywhere.
“Why would you send this, Excel?”
He shuts his eyes, tries to think. “It matched my shirt. The one I bought at the Square. I have the adult version, thought I’d pick up the baby version.”
The Son of Good Fortune Page 17