She looked up at him. “What do you mean?” He wasn’t sure what he meant, but found himself speaking on instinct, planning as the words came out. “We can make this work,” he said. “We have somewhere to live that we can afford, you’ve got steady work with Lucia, and I can take over your job while you recover.” He took her hand, didn’t let go this time. “We’re in a good place,” he said, and the more he talked, the more he knew it was true. His own birth had been a catastrophe—born on a plane, whisked off to a hospital upon landing, accruing a bill so large that Joker had to beg his brother Bingo to pay it. But he and Sab were set and, in their own way, even lucky. They didn’t have much, but they had enough, and in Hello City, enough was just that. They could raise a kid, be a family, live a life. Be at home.
“I don’t know,” Sab said. She looked around the bus like she meant to escape it, overwhelmed by everything Excel had said, the future he’d suddenly mapped out. “Maybe I should’ve waited to tell you. Tried to figure it out first.”
“No,” he said, “I’m glad you told me,” and he was: life, he knew, was about to change; knowing this filled him with the unexpected need to change it more. “I have something to tell you, too.” He leaned close, and told her as gently as Maxima tried telling him, nine years before, when they stood at the rail overlooking the water. “I’m not really here,” he said.
25
On the freeway, Roxy sings along with Gloria Estefan on the radio, trying to keep things upbeat. But from the backseat, Excel can see Maxima’s face in the rearview mirror, the crinkle between her brows and her rapid blinking. He doesn’t know the damage done by all he said at Mama Chix, if it’s irreparable, if he even cares.
Roxy pulls up to the gate of La Villa Aurelia. Maxima and Excel tell her good-bye and thanks, say nothing to each other as they walk through the complex and into the apartment. Once inside, they retreat to their rooms.
Excel is in bed by ten p.m., an early hour for him, but he hopes to get good sleep before their five a.m. call with Jerry. He doesn’t get any, not one second.
Ten minutes before five, Excel and Maxima are side by side in front of the webcam. Neither speaks, not until Jerry’s online call rings through. “Look happy,” Maxima tells Excel, then clicks to begin the conversation.
“Good morning!” Jerry says.
“Hello, mahal!” Maxima says.
“Hello, Sir Jerry.” Excel waves with both hands. “How are you, sir?”
“I’m great. But remember what we said about the ‘sir’ thing?”
“Sorry, sir! I mean, sorry, Jerry!”
“You’ll get the hang of it,” he says, laughing. Excel makes sure to laugh, too.
“Jerry, thank you so much for sending us the money,” he says, “it’s a big help. A big, big help.” Though quitting his job gutting fish means a loss of steady wages, the three hundred dollars means he can buy books for school, and enough rice, canned meat, and bottled water to last them several weeks. “And if I can save some of it, I will buy new shoes for church.”
“It’s really nothing,” Jerry says. He sounds sincere. Maybe three hundred dollars really is nothing to him.
Excel thanks him again, leaning into the camera to ensure his gratitude is visible and clear, because gratitude, Maxima had told him, is key to this kind of business. “These men,” she’d said, “they like to be thanked. They like to know they can change your life, just like that.”
Maxima nudges Excel to the side, centering herself in front of the webcam. “Jerry honey. By now, you know I am many, many things. I am a Catholic, a cook, a sandals seller, a woman with an infinite amount of love to give to others. But most of all, I am a mother.” She puts her arm around Excel’s shoulder, pulls him close. “And as a mother, I only want what is best for my son. But sometimes, I cannot always provide.” She lets out a slow and quivering breath, dabs away a tear. “So thank you, Jerry. Maraming, maraming salamat.” She kisses her finger and presses it against the screen.
Jerry says he should sign off, that his workday starts soon. “A bridge inspection and a retrofit,” he says. “Oh boy!” and Excel can’t tell if he’s being serious or not. He thanks Jerry once more, then leaves to give him a few minutes with Maxima.
He goes to the kitchen and makes instant coffee, drinks it by the living room window. It’s still dark outside, and down below, a few cars drive by slowly toward the front gate, early commuters off to work. He remembers that early morning, all those months before, when he and Sab were the ones leaving in the dark, bound for the freeway.
Maxima comes out of her room. Excel yawns, sips his coffee. “That went pretty good, right?” he says.
“Perfect,” she says. She goes to the front door and puts on her shoes, slings her purse over her shoulder. She doesn’t say where she’s going, when she might be back. Maxima just leaves.
DESPITE OVER TWENTY-FOUR HOURS WITHOUT SLEEP, EXCEL IS WIDE awake. Talking online to Jerry, pretending to live in one time zone when he’s really in another, has inverted his days and nights. He feels like two separate people living in two different times and places: if Excel is awake at four in the morning, Perfecto is studying at seven in the evening; if Excel is asleep by midnight, Perfecto’s school day is coming to its end. Maybe this is what jet lag means—you fly into a time zone ahead or a time zone behind, but your body remains where it’s always been, so that you’ve been split in two, separated from yourself somehow.
Excel’s shift doesn’t start until ten a.m., but he’s out the door by eight. He walks down Junipero Serra Boulevard, past the Dodge dealership, where a morning cleaning crew is waxing and polishing all the floor models, their arms moving in fast, nonstop circles. Maxima worked on one of those crews once, and she’d tell him and Joker how she’d spend an entire shift on her knees, cleaning hubcaps. “That’s it,” she said, rubbing the ache in her wrists. “My arm in a circle. The whole day. That’s my job.”
Excel walks to Meadow of Life Memorial. Walking through to Joker’s grave, he wonders if Maxima might be there, too—she was still gone when he left this morning—but there’s nobody around when he arrives.
He crouches down and brushes away dead leaves and dried-up grass from Joker’s tombstone, digs out a tiny pebble lodged into the engraved J in Joker’s name. Then he shuts his eyes, not to pray, but to imagine apologizing, not for throwing the spelling bee and letting himself lose, but for the disappointment it caused after. And he thinks about what happened at Mama Chix. Had Joker been there, had he seen Excel speak to Maxima like that, he might’ve smacked him in the back of his head, not spoken to him for days. Excel apologizes for that, too.
He opens his eyes, gets up, and walks up and down the nearby rows of graves, checking for still-good flowers from dying bouquets that he might give to Joker. He finds nothing. But he has packets of pepper in his pocket, so he tears them open, sprinkles the pepper over the grass around Joker’s tombstone, on the letters of his name—these things, at least, might be safe from deer. Excel checks the ground—it’s dry enough—then sits with Joker until he has to leave for work, promises that no matter what, he will always return.
HIS SHIFT AT THE PIE IS SPLIT INTO DIFFERENT MISERIES. BATHROOMS first, then greeting, then ball pit. No tips at all. At the end of the day, he finds an envelope of cash in his locker: $1,000 exactly, four weeks of shifts, minus the day he fainted. Even less than he thought. This, plus the $300 from Jerry and the $120 from Roxy means he’s earned roughly $1,500 since coming back.
He steps out of the break room, hears Gunter yelling at someone in his office.
He imagines it’s a kitchen guy on the receiving end, or a new hire Excel hasn’t met and probably never will, not after today. The door flings open and Gunter storms out, walks past Excel like he’s not even there. Excel waits until Gunter is back out on the floor then walks by the office to see who’s inside.
He finds Z is on a metal folding chair, hunched forward, arms dropped at his side. Excel steps in, crouches down to meet his
face. “What happened?”
He stares at the floor, doesn’t speak.
“You can tell me,” Excel says. “What happened?”
“I take money.”
“What money?”
“The money. I need the money. So I take it.”
“Take it? From where?”
Z points at the safe on the floor by Gunter’s desk.
“You took money from Gunter?”
“Steal,” he whispers. “I try to steal it.” He blinks, like he’s confused, unsure of what he’s done. “But he sees me.”
“You got caught.” Excel pokes his head out the door to make sure Gunter is nearby, goes back to Z. “Why did you steal it?”
“Home,” he says. “I like to go home. I want to go home.” He clenches his jaw but it trembles, and he’s on the verge of weeping. Excel puts his hands on Z’s shoulders, rubs them gently—he doesn’t know why, but it seems like the thing to do—and the motion tugs at the collar of Z’s shirt, revealing the pale, loose skin of his neck and, just above his collarbone, a brush of bluish-purple with shades of yellow, the color Gunter’s hands can leave behind.
Z says it again: “Home, home.”
“You will,” Excel says, “you will.”
“HOW MUCH CAN WE MAKE AND HOW FAST CAN WE MAKE IT?”
Excel’s question throws off Maxima, who’s taking inventory of a small balikbayan box for Auntie Queenie. Inside the box are cans of corned beef, ham, and Spam, tubes of Bengay, rolls of bandages, a family-size bottle of Tylenol. “You screwed up my count,” she says. “What did you say?”
Excel closes the door behind him, locks the knob and the dead bolt. “If I needed more than ten thousand, let’s say fifteen, how long until we could get it?”
“There’s not just one answer. It depends on the man, siempre. Sometimes, it’s a little here, a little there. Sometimes, he might—”
“What about from Jerry?”
“Excel. What’s going on?”
Walking home from The Pie, he’d thought of telling Maxima the truth—that Gunter is abusing Z, probably has been for some time, and that Z’s safest option is a flight to Serbia, where he can live with his daughter until his dying day. We need to help an old man get home, he’d planned to say. But he knows how she’d respond. That it’s none of their business. That they can barely take care of their own needs. Family first, always.
Instead, he tells Maxima what he’d rehearsed: the professor got hold of him (he had the nerve to call him at The Pie), letting him know that the damages from the fire exceeded ten thousand dollars, were closer to fifteen. And with his research now lagging, the lab needs repairs ASAP. “He even threatened me,” Excel says, “he told me that he didn’t want to get the university president involved, but I think he’ll really do it.” And that, he tells Maxima, could lead to lawyers, a trial, the police. “It’s a huge mess,” he says, “and it’s my fault, I know.”
She looks at him and shakes her head, like she’s close to writing Excel off as a lost cause. “This is a lot of trouble,” she says. She goes back through the box, tallying the price of each item, figuring out the box’s total worth. She picks up a roll of packing tape, tears a strip off with her teeth, seals two flaps shut, then the other two, then all around. Nothing, not even air, could get in or out of it. She lifts the box, checking its heft and weight, then hands it to Excel. “First thing in the morning,” she says, “go to the post office, mail this off. Run my errand. I’ll clean up your mess.”
26
The first Tagalog Excel taught Sab was “tago ng tago.”
“TNT,” she said. “‘Hiding and hiding’?”
He nodded. “My whole life.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“I’d meant to, a couple times. Before we left, when we visited Joker. On my birthday. There might’ve been others.”
Sab’s mother’s picture was still on the table between them. She laid it flat, photo side down, then took a shirt—Excel’s—from a pile of laundry on the floor. She’d been working so much they hadn’t had a chance to drive to the laundromat in Whyling; for days they’d been in dirty clothes. “Did you only tell me because I’m pregnant?”
“It’s not like that. I was just waiting for the right time. And this was the time. And what does it matter anyway? I’m telling you now.”
“It matters because it’s June. June. I met you a year ago and this whole time you’ve said nothing. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a lot of people in my life, so when the person I do have keeps something like this from me, I start wondering what else I don’t know.” Excel thought of other things he couldn’t say—Maxima and all those online men, Joker dying alone while they sat in the apartment, waiting.
“There’s nothing else to know,” he said, “I swear.” He joined her on the floor. “Our job is to focus on the future, on this baby. Right?”
She looked at him, confused, as though what he’d said made no sense. “I never said anything about a baby. I said I was pregnant. I haven’t decided anything. I haven’t even started thinking about deciding.”
He sat back. Baby. Pregnant. In the moment, they’d meant the same thing to him, and the future—life—for once, almost seemed clear. “Right,” he said. “I just—sorry. This is big news. I’m a little thrown off.”
“Join the club,” she said, folding the shirt. “I mean, let’s say I do have the baby. What does that mean? Is it American? Would we get a lawyer? And what if you get caught, and end up deported? What happens to me and this baby?”
He took her wrist, held it tight. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Or to the baby.”
“But what about you? Being tago tago, or whatever the phrase is, is that forever? And if I’m with you, does this mean we’re always going to be watching our backs? How do we live like that? Where do we go?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “We go nowhere. We’re already in the place we need to be. The best place. And if we just keep doing what we’re doing, then we’ll be okay.”
She pulled her wrist free.
He leaned closer. “Don’t you want to be here?”
“Does it matter? Where else would I go.” She picked up another shirt—hers—smoothed it against the floor. “No real family. No job. No college. Might as well live in a bus forever.”
Her words stung. He wondered if he’d misread the past nine months in Hello City, if his version of their life matched hers. “We have a good thing here,” he said.
“You do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” She unfolded the shirt, started refolding it. “I don’t know what I meant.”
“I do. You’re saying that because I’m TNT, I’m lucky to be here. But for you, Hello City isn’t good enough. Isn’t that what you meant?”
She looked at him, anger breaking, tears starting. “I never said that.”
He got up, put on jeans and shoes, grabbed a flashlight.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Where?”
He almost said nowhere, but that only confirmed what she thought of Hello City. “I’m gonna look at the stars,” he said. “And those clothes, by the way, are still dirty, so you’re wasting your time.” Then he walked out of the bus without saying good-bye, which felt like the right way to leave.
HE LAY ON THE HELIPAD, RIGHT OVER THE H, THINKING OF WHAT it meant. Helipad. Here. Home.
An hour passed, another, still awake. He got up, saw the lights were off in the bus. At least Sab was able to sleep.
He made his way to the Square, found it completely empty. Sweeping through with the flashlight, the place looked as though a party had just ended or was about to begin—there were streamers all around, crisscrossing with the strings of lights above, swooping down and connecting with the food carts, Beans!, even the cage of the Oracle, who paced back and forth across her branch. Piñatas and bright paper flowers dangled everywhere, and on the stage, Un
aired Television Pilot still had the giant red bow and ribbon hanging over it, Red’s gift to Hello City. That party happened almost two weeks earlier, and no one had thought to throw the decorations away.
Standing in the dark, he remembered himself onstage that first night in the Square. He’d told the people who he was and why he’d come—I’m Excel and I was hiding. The truth, for once.
You owe us a gift, Rosie had said, but he’d botched the powdered nondairy creamer trick three times, barely gotten it right on the fourth, the flame so weak he could hardly see it himself.
The canister of nondairy creamer was on the Beans! counter, a book of matches on the arm of a lawn chair nearby. He grabbed them and stepped onstage, stood the flashlight on its end, its beam shining to the sky.
Timing was key and had been the problem before. That night, on his first three attempts, he’d waited for the powder to fall before flicking the match. He was faster the fourth time, but barely. Now, he knew to throw the match sooner.
He removed the lid from the canister, tossed powder into the air, threw a lit match.
Nothing.
He tried again. This time, fire.
Once more. Fire again, a long wave of flame.
He kept going, struck match after struck match, getting it right each time, the split-second burn of the air so bright it seemed to illuminate the Square. He was pleased with himself, even proud, that he was mastering the trick, and decided he’d perform it again at a future town council meeting. He finished the book of matches and was about to get another when he noticed that the Square stayed bright, flickering, and a flash of heat came from above. The streamers were burning, flames traveling the crisscrossing grid, igniting the strings of lights.
He jumped off the stage and stepped back. He ran to the food carts, thinking a fire extinguisher would be nearby but found nothing, no source of water either, and soon Red’s wall of television sets was burning, the plastic sheet screens popping open, shrinking into flames. He cried out “Fire,” he cried out “Help,” over and over, so loudly he could feel the back of his throat sting from the strain. But there was no one nearby to hear.
The Son of Good Fortune Page 19