"I hope to God she uddered an apology," Tim says. He leans hard on the word, but Natalie doesn't bite, doesn't seem to notice at all.
"Not even close. She just kinda shrugs it off and says, 'He gets so greedy when he's hungry.' That's what I'm talking about, Tim. That's what I want."
Pulling into the parking lot, without looking down, the Ramirez twins stab their cigarettes out in the overflowing ashtray. Raul steers slowly up the side drive toward the front doors, scanning the parking lot.
Fucking midnight, he thinks, and look at this. Too busy. Too many cars. People.
"Just relax," Jesus says. "Just drive."
It's always been like this. Jesus was born first, ten minutes, and their mother says he came out breech, his arms thrown over his head like he was reaching up for Raul. Ever since, it's as if he's decided never to let go again. When it comes to his twin, Jesus refuses to miss out on anything, even a thought. He hears them all.
Strange as it is, Raul doesn't mention Jesus' hold on him, not to his younger brother, Eduardo. Not to the gringos he sweats with six days a week, hunched beneath the sun tying iron, lacing and weaving rebar up on that half-finished bridge so the mixers can pour the concrete. His day job. The one that pays rent, buys groceries. The rest—the stereo and the new blue paint for the LeMans, the two-tone roach-killer shoes like the old Pachucos used to wear—it's all from these rides with Jesus. Jesus who knows everything. Everything. What he's thinking, man.
About this, he tells only Monica. Because she licks her lips when she listens. Because she shines, brown like new pennies. Because she keeps her fingernails long and red and runs them together like a rake through his pubic hair when he's finished. For her, he'll tell, and one night he does. He gives her ear a little bite, leans in close to whisper it. "He hears what's between my ears, baby. Motherfucker always knows. Always."
"When you think about me?" she says. "Even then?"
He runs his tongue down the outer ridge of her ear. "And when would that be, baby?"
Now Jesus points, says, "Quit thinking 'bout your little split-tail, man. Business before putas, vato. Look here, what we got."
And there they are, easy pickings, coming up on Raul's side of the car. It's luck of the draw, he knows, but twice this month they've been on his side, no time to circle around, so he has to snatch and drive.
He takes his foot off the gas, lets the Pontiac ride the idle. "You crazy? They got a baby, man."
"She don't. All she gots is a purse."
Years later, Tim Tilden will teach his boy to drive. He'll rush home from a hot day spent cooped up in his mail Jeep and watch his son's fluid fadeaway move beneath the basketball hoop he'd mounted on the garage for the kid's twelfth birthday, when Timmy insisted he be called Tim, just Tim, like his father who now, fifteen years after Natalie's death, will stand there in the driveway jingling his truck keys in his hand, wondering how many times she would have confused them both by calling their shared name, how many times they both would have answered from the living room when she piped up from the kitchen, "Tim, could you give me a hand in here?"
After the boy shoots his final jump shot, rimming it in, he'll turn to his father, wink, and grab his shirt from beside the old metal garbage cans where he'd thrown it an hour before. Tim will look at his son, at the man he's become, at the hard muscles of his shoulders and the confidence of his long strides. He'll smile at the idea that, way back when, he'd questioned a newborn's masculinity.
Father and son, they'll carry the cans out to the street, pace off ten steps and set the cans next to the curb, thirty feet apart. In the truck, Tim Tilden will show the boy the basics of parallel parking. He'll explain that this is where the SOBs get you, that this is the part of the driving test where most people lose their cool, that it's all confidence and finesse, and that any man worth his weight can do it with his eyes closed. The boy will line the truck up, stretch his arm across the seat top as he looks back, angling between the cans, and when he begins to straighten up, he'll wink once more at his father. He'll be in, first try, no problem, but when he moves his foot for the brake, something will go wrong. He'll miss. He'll catch the corner of the accelerator with his foot, and the lightest tap on the gas will push the truck back into the can. When it crashes onto its side, the boy will sit there in disbelief, amazed by the noise the damn thing makes, puzzled at the sight of his father, who will have closed his eyes against the sharp sound of impact, and who will keep them closed while the trash can lid rolls across the street, throwing sunlight from its surface while it whirls, in a clanging, oblong spin, to a stop.
"Grab hold with both hands," Jesus says, "and punch it. I'll take the wheel." Raul nods, but his head, Jesus knows, isn't in the game. It's the same every time. He's worried about witnesses, imagining handcuffs and some HPD jail cell, eyeing a group of teenagers who are flirting and smoking just outside the Walmart doors. He's thinking, They've got us pegged. They're watching.
"Don't worry about them," Jesus says. "Just kids, vato."
Still, Raul isn't moving, so Jesus gives him a knuckle thump hard on the side of his head. "I said don't worry about it. I got us covered."
An hour before, Jesus had swapped the plates on Raul's LeMans with a pair he'd stolen a year ago from a late-model Nissan. He'd been on his way to the beach in Surfside when he noticed the car abandoned on the side of Highway 288, not far from the lockdown in Rosharon. It had been a solitary thrill, one full of senseless risk, a slap in the face of those HPD shit kickers who so often put him and his boys against cars or walls and kicked their feet apart and frisked them in their east-side streets. In a way, it felt like the first time he'd snatched the belt from his mother's hand when he was twelve, and told Raul to get outside, and looked the old woman square in the face and told her she wouldn't do that—not to Raul, she wouldn't—not anymore, because it could suck the life out of the boy and because there was something sick about it, swinging leather at your own flesh and blood, and because, from now on, if Raul got out of line, Jesus and no one but Jesus would handle it.
Yes, it seemed the same somehow, to pull up behind that car, to step down from his truck with his tool kit and feel the swirl in his stomach from his three-beer breakfast, to turn the screws and yank the plates while tanker trucks blew by on their way to the coast and while, less than half a mile away, prisoners worked the fields as armed guards on horseback spit tobacco into the broken soil.
They are safe, no plates to trace, but still, Raul doesn't look convinced. He wears worry up high on the ridge of his eyebrows, and Jesus thinks maybe he'll blow their chance, but at the last minute Raul turns the wheel to the left, veering toward the couple as they approach the store. Raul looks his brother hard in the eye, then turns and slings his arm casually out the window as they rumble nearer, and Jesus hears his brother mapping it out in his head. Easy now. Come up on them slowly. Just like before. Reel her in. Grab the purse and go.
What the hell is this, Tim thinks. The car, it's coming up on them, shining and blue and so close that in a second or two the driver, a Mexican with his eyes locked on Natalie, will be able to reach out and touch her if he wants, maybe cop a feel before speeding away. Perverts, Tim thinks. Perverts at the goddamn Walmart.
But something's not right. Tim knows it by the way Natalie's fingers clench in the back pocket of his Wranglers, by the way the guy in the passenger seat leans into view with a tight smile on his face, by the sudden, cool slicks of sweat in his armpits. Then the outstretched arm, the driver reaching for her, and there's not a thing in the world Tim can do. He's holding the baby. He's holding the baby and he can't let go and the engine revs so loud that when Natalie's hand wrenches back in his pocket Tim thinks at first it's the noise itself, the goddamn sound of the thing, that's spinning him around.
And then—Jesus Christ, she's sliding. She's sliding alongside the car.
Before Raul sees the fear on her face, before he braces himself and puts his foot down hard on the gas, what he notes is th
e purse strap in his hands, the thin band of leather that links him to this woman who only now, when he kicks the accelerator and tightens his grasp, seems to recognize what's happening, her eyes frozen somewhere between surprise and panic. Raul feels the air, hot and solid and rushing in the windows, pushing him back in his seat. He keeps on the gas while Jesus leans in close, taking the wheel, and Raul knows that something's gone wrong. Too much weight on the other end, too much pull, and outside the window, where there should be nothing but asphalt and parked cars and a purse flapping wild in the night, she's there instead—the woman, one shoulder jammed tight against the door of his car, just inches from his hands, hung up in the strap of her purse, her eyes fixed hard on him. He hears it, the sound of her, the hiss of fabric and skin giving way to asphalt.
She's struggling to get free, but what Raul sees is a woman fighting him, the pinche gringa, and he tightens his hold as the car gains speed and the leather bites into the palms of his hands and he thinks for sure he's bleeding. He looks up and Jesus nods, smiling, yes, but only from the corners of his mouth, and then Raul sees the car parked crooked in its space ahead, the way it's jutting out into his path, its bumper crumpled and sharp and coming up fast. And the woman is still there, eyeballing him, begging him with a blank-eyed stare to stop. It's you, he thinks. It's you, puta. Let. Fucking. Go.
"No," Jesus says, because he hears everything. What's between his ears, vato, but this time he's misunderstood. "Hold on, Raul," he says, and Raul hangs on.
They all do.
They have taken his wife. They have taken her and he's standing here motionless watching them, holding on to his son. Not doing a goddamn thing. He's seen the scowls of their faces and the hint of a smile from the one who reached over to grab the wheel. He's felt her hand clench tight in his back pocket when they took her, heard the denim rip at the seam when it gave and she went sliding away. And now—oh Lord, now as her head is cracked wide by the bumper of that junkyard car, Tim can only imagine what might have been. Not the future and the years they might have had together—impossible now, he knows—but the way he had seen them and the things he should have done. He imagines himself stepping between Natalie and the car, lunging down hard on the driver's arm just as he reaches out for her purse. He imagines hearing the sound of it, not his wife's head hammering hard against steel, but the echo of the driver's arm snapping at the elbow under his weight.
Raul feels the shock of her impact in the socket of his shoulder, a single jolt of resistance that pulls him out the window up to his waist, and then they're free. He's held on. He's got the purse, and when he pulls himself back into the driver's seat and squeals the tires onto the feeder road, Raul's pulse is louder in his ears than the engine. His fingers are tingling and he can't feel the steering wheel and there's this emptiness opening wide inside, hollowing him out, a kind of hunger he knows he'll never keep fed. "They gonna bring us down, Jesus. Holy shit, man, this is it. They gonna find us. They ain't ever gonna stop looking."
Jesus lights a cigarette, tilts the rearview so he can look his brother in the eyes. He takes hold of Raul's leg, squeezing him hard above the knee. "They ain't gonna find shit," he says. "Ain't gonna be nothing to find. Swap the plates, ditch the purse, keep our mouths shut. What they gonna find?"
Then they're on the highway, swerving through traffic on their way back toward I-10 east and their neighborhood just inside the loop, where there are still bodegas instead of Stop-N-Gos, where the smell of fried masa means you're only blocks or feet from where you sleep. Raul imagines that he's already in bed, the smells swirling in through the open windows, and he's holding on to Monica, trying to tell her lies about the night and what he's done. But his blood—oh, man, it's still thrumming something ugly inside, and he can't do it, so he sits up in bed and comes clean with it, tells her about the six dollars they got from the gringa's purse, shares a cigarette he bought with her Texaco card, whispers what it looked like in the rearview mirror. The woman, deflated and out cold on her back and so still, everything still but the steam coming up from the asphalt.
"You ain't gonna tell her nothing," Jesus says, still gripping his leg. "You gonna keep it all to yourself."
There is half a week's worth of her milk in the refrigerator. Three or four times each night, and a half dozen times each day, Tim Tilden will pour it from the canning jars, warm the bottle in a hot water bath on the stove, and rock the kid in the living room while he feeds him. On the last night, when there's one jar left, he'll buy formula at the corner store and drop his son at his parents' house for a few hours. He'll shake off their questions, say he's fine, just needs to be alone for a while. He'll drive to the Gypsum and down a few beers, and later, when he's sitting at the stoplight on Canal, he'll notice how quiet it is, and he'll turn the radio up—KIKK, country and western and loud. He'll sit there imagining Natalie beside him, will see her leaning out the window and flipping the bird at the light, screaming, Turn me loose.
He'll remember the night she died, because he can't not remember it, because it clings to him the way the smell of her jasmine perfume clings to the sheets of their bed, but what he'll recall is not the way she damn near ripped the pocket off his Wranglers, or the way it took fifteen minutes for the cops to arrive—not even the way those bastards smoked their tires getting onto the feeder road. No, what Tim will see that night, sitting alone in his truck at a long red light, is his boy latched onto his pinkie finger, sucking until it turns numb and pruned and Tim has to pluck it from his mouth, sending the kid into a fit of wailing.
Greedy, Tim will think, remembering Natalie's voice. He'll pull the last jar of her milk from beneath the seat and unscrew the cap and tilt it back. He gets so greedy when he's hungry.
Something for the Poker Table
YOU'RE IMPATIENT, SOMETIMES thoughtless—a little cheap, too—so when you snag your worn and weather-checked water hose on the jagged bumper of your fifteen-year-old truck, you don't think a thing about it. You pull. You throw yourself into it, two hundred some odd pounds of man versus a single-braid hose—SBR cover, SBR tube, cheap rubber atop cheap fabric atop cheap rubber, the whole thing made by mandrels and little Korean men whose older brothers your older brother chased through jungles wet and green and alive enough to outlive them all. You curse and pull, but the sharp steel of the bent bumper digs in, won't let go. Your bum knee is giving you hell these days, you'd rather not walk the fifty paces back to the truck to free the damn thing, so you plant your good leg and lean into it. You heave and the hose squeaks and pops, tears clean in two, and when you look up again you're square on your ass between squat rows of July cotton.
Be got-damned, you think, if I'm buying a new hose, so you don't drive into town and call Jerry Curlee, the balding Bohemian salesman who puts forty percent into hose and baler belting and roller chain before he sells it to you. No, you go into the truck bed toolbox and fish out just what you need—a hose mender. A quick fix, by damn, so you can run this hose tonight, so you can get the creek water from the pump house to the irrigation lines, so the plants will come up green and thick despite this south Texas heat.
A hose mender, a marvel of the modern world, you think. One seven-inch length of tubing, galvanized steel or, like this one, cast brass, barbed on the ends like a tomcat's pecker. What goes in must not come out—not till the job's done, anyway. Ram one shank into each end of your ripped-in-half hose, screw some Dixon worm-gear clamps down tight on each side so it holds, and off you go. Couple it to the pump line, open the gate valve and you've got a working hose, holding pressure the way the doctors up in Houston say your anterior arteries will now that they've mended you with stents, their handiwork holding you open from the inside out, your blood slurping past that surgical steel the way now this water's starting to sluice through that brass mender.
And that deserves a cigarette. You bend yourself over one slow time, checking a plant for the tiny pearls of weevil eggs, and then you head back to lean on the truck while you light one up. You take
the smoke in deep and work your tongue over your teeth while the hose holds its own and the sun leans west to kindle the horizon. When a duster buzzes in from the south, crows launch themselves from telephone lines. The plane banks hard just the other side of the farm-to-market road, dives, and you can see the pilot in there, a young guy in a baseball cap, glancing back at his wake of Malathion spray. He'll dust today for the weevils, come back in September to defoliate before the pickers move in.
It strikes you, as he cuts his spray and throttles up into his steep ascent, that we've got a reliable fix for damn near everything these days, and before you know it you're adding up all your success stories. The weekend you spent with grease to your elbows, replacing the cam bearings and hand clutch on the old Allis-Chalmers tractor you've had since you bought your first hundred acres. The barn roof you rebuilt and shingled alongside your father in a single scorching day after Hurricane Carla sucked the old one off and delivered it half a mile west to the banks of the Navidad. The calf you saved one humid night when the moon forgot to rise and Doc Vacek didn't answer his phone, the way it took you half an hour just to scare that damn heifer into the light of the barn; the way, when you saw the blood coming hard from her and the single hoof showing, you cursed yourself for cursing her. And then your boots kept sliding in the warm slop of shit and hay on the floor, sliding until you called your wife out there to help you tie the heifer off and hold her head, until you wedged yourself between the poor girl and the loft ladder and found enough purchase to work your hand and forearm up inside her. And this, this was something for the poker table, something for the feed store loading docks, something for your pal Grady Derrich to shake his head at. This was one made to be told. The real thing. You know it now and you knew it then, knew it as you worked your arm around and felt the insides of her, the slick and squeezing heat of it, knew it while you followed the soft leather of the shoulder down to the hoof and worked it out alongside the other one. Knew it as you got the calf puller rigged up, with every turn of the ratchet that set the young mother to moaning, with every quiver of her hide. And then the calf came, wide-eyed and alive, and with her more work.
Men in the Making Page 5