“Of course, the king is dead,” Nadal said. “And me, I’m still alive.”
Each stamp had a story like this, and he relished the telling—where it had come from, what agency it represented, how it had been used and abused over the years and to what ends. Though Malena was waiting for me, we spent nearly two hours selecting a stamp, and then we placed the forged document, and the target that I’d removed from my wall that morning, in a manila envelope. This too was sealed with a stamp.
Nadal and I embraced. “There’ll always be a job for you here,” he said.
Malena and I rode home that day on a groaning interprovincial bus. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, and when I saw the city disappear and give way to the rolling plains and gentle contours of the countryside, I was not unhappy. The next morning I presented the documents at the bank in the town just across the bridge from mine. “We’ve been needing a security guard,” the manager said. “You may have heard what happened to our last one.” He blinked a lot as he spoke. “You’re young, but I like the looks of you. I don’t know why, but I like the looks of you.” And then we shook hands; I was home again.
—
MY SON WAS BORN just before Christmas that year, and in March the papers began reporting a string of bank robberies in the provinces. The perpetrators were ex-convicts, or foreigners, or soldiers thrown out of work since the democratic government began downsizing the army. No one knew for certain, but it was worrisome and new, as these were the sorts of crimes that had been largely confined to the city and its poorer suburbs. Everyone was afraid, most of all me. Each report was grislier than the last. A half hour upriver, two clerks had been executed after the contents of the vault had disappointed the band of criminals. They hit two banks that day, shooting their way through a police perimeter at the second one, killing one cop and wounding another in the process. They were said to be traveling the river’s tributaries, hiding in coves along the heavily forested banks. Of course, it was only a matter of time. The bank I worked for received sizable deposits from the cement plant once a week, and many of the workers cashed their checks with us on alternate Friday afternoons.
Malena read the papers, heard the rumors, and catalogued the increasingly violent details of each heist. I heard her tell her friends she wasn’t worried, that I was a sure shot, but in private, she was unequivocal. “Quit,” she said. “We have a son to raise. We can move back to the city.”
But something had changed. The three of us were living together in the same room where I’d grown up. She smothered our son with so much affection that I barely felt he was mine at all. The boy was always hungry, and I woke every predawn when he cried, and watched as he fed with an urgency I could understand and recall perfectly: it was how I’d felt when I left for the city almost exactly a year before. Afterward, I could never get back to sleep, and I wondered how and when I’d become so hopelessly, so irredeemably selfish, and what, if anything, could be done about it. None of my actions belonged to me. I’d been living one kind of life when a strong, implacable hand had pulled me violently into another. I tried to remember my city routines, but I couldn’t.
The rest of the world had never seemed so distant.
By late summer the gang hit most of the towns in our province. It was then my father suggested we go out to the old farm. He would teach me how to use the pistol. I began to tell him I knew, but he wasn’t interested.
“You’ll drive,” he said.
We left town on a Saturday of endless, oppressive heat, the road nothing but a sticky band of tar humming beneath us. We arrived just before noon. There were no shadows. The rutted gravel road led right up to the house, shuttered and old and caving in on itself like a ruined cake. My father got out and leaned against the hood of the car. Behind us, a low cloud of dust snaked back to the main road, and a light breeze brushed over the grassy, overgrown fields, but provided no relief. He took out a bottle of rum, drank a little, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes. The light was fierce. He was seven years old when my grandfather died and my grandmother moved the family from this farm into town. He passed me the bottle; I handed him the weapon. He loaded it with a smile, and without saying much, we took turns firing rounds at the sagging walls of my grandfather’s house.
An hour passed this way, blowing out what remained of the windows, and circling the house clockwise to try our onslaught from another angle. We aimed for the cornices just below the roof, and hit, after a few attempts, the tilting weather vane above so that it spun maniacally in the still afternoon heat. We shot the numbers off the front door and tore the rain gutter from the corner it had clung to for five decades. I spread holes all over the façade of the tired house. My father watched, and I imagined he was proud of me.
“How does it feel?” he asked when we were finished. We sat leaning against the shadowed eastern wall.
The gun was warm in my hand. “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”
He took his cap off, and laid it by his side. “You’re no good with that pistol. You’ve got to shoot like you mean it.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s all right to be scared.”
“I know,” I said. “I am.”
“Your generation isn’t lucky. This never would have happened before. The old government wouldn’t have allowed it.”
I shrugged. I had a postcard of the dead general buried in a bag back home. I could show it to my father anytime, at any moment, just to make him angry or sad or both, and somehow, knowing this felt good.
“Are you enjoying it?” he asked. “Are you enjoying being a father?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“It’s not a kind of question. It is a question. If you’re going to take everything your father says as an insult, your life will be unbearable—”
“I’m sorry.”
He sighed. “If it isn’t already.”
We sat, watching the heat rise from the baking earth. It seemed strange to have to deny this to my father—that my life was unbearable. I mentioned the bridge, its new color, but he hadn’t noticed.
He turned to face me. “You know, your mother and I are still young.”
“Sure you are.”
“Young enough, in good health, and I’ve got years of work left in me.” He flexed his bicep, and held it out for me to see. “Look,” he said. “Touch if you want. Your old man is still strong.”
He was speaking very deliberately now, and I had the feeling that he’d prepared the exact wording of what he said next. “We’re young, but you’re very young. You have an entire life to lead. And you can go, if you want, and look for that life elsewhere. Go do things, go see different places. We can take care of the child. You don’t want to be here, and we understand.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your mother agrees,” he said. “We’ve discussed it. She’ll miss you, but she says she understands.”
I stared at him. “And Malena?”
“She’ll want for nothing.”
I picked up the gun, brushed the dust off it. I checked to make sure it was unloaded and passed it back to him.
“When?” I asked.
“Whenever.”
And then we rode home and spoke only of the weather and the elections. My father didn’t care much for voting, but he supposed if the owner of the plant wanted to be mayor, he could be. It was fine with him. It was all fine with him. The sky had filled with quilted, white clouds, but the heat had not waned. Or maybe it was how I felt. Even with the windows down, I sweated clean through my shirt, my back and thighs sticking fast to the seat. I didn’t add much to the conversation, only drove and stared ahead and thought about what my father had said to me. I was still thinking about it two weeks later when we were robbed.
It was no better or worse than I’d imagined. I was asked to say something at the
manager’s wake, and to my surprise, the words would not come easily. I stood before a room of grieving family and shell-shocked friends, offering a bland remembrance of the dead man and his kindness. I found it impossible to make eye contact with anyone. Malena cradled our son in her arms, and the evening passed in a blur, until the three of us made our way to the corner of the dark parlor where the young widow was receiving condolences. She thanked me for my words; she cooed at our boy. “How old?” she asked, but before Malena or I could respond, her face reddened and the tears came and there was nothing either of us could say. I excused myself, left Malena with a kiss, and escaped through a back door. It was a warm evening, the town shuttered and quiet. I could hardly breathe. I never made it home that night, and of course, this time Malena knew better than to look for me.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAS BEEN SHOT
WE WERE TALKING, Hank and I, about how that which we love is so often destroyed by the very act of our loving it. The bar was dark, but comfortably so, and by the flittering light of the television I could make out the rough texture of his face. He was, in spite of everything, a beautiful man.
We’d lost our jobs at the call center that day, both of us, but Hank didn’t seem to care. All day strangers yelled at us, demanding we make their lost packages reappear. Hank kept a handle of bourbon in the break room, hidden behind the coffee filters, for those days when a snowstorm back East slowed deliveries and we were made to answer for the weather. After we were told the news of the firing, Hank spent the afternoon drinking liquor from a styrofoam cup and wandering the floor, mumbling to himself. For one unpleasant hour he stood on two stacked boxes of paper, peering out the high window at the cars baking in the parking lot. I cleaned out my desk, and then his. Things between us hadn’t been good in many months.
Hank said: “Take, as an example, Abraham Lincoln.”
“Why bring this up?” I asked. “Why tonight?”
“Now, by the time of his death,” he said, ignoring me, “Lincoln was the most beloved man in America.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Or was he the most hated?”
Hank nodded. “People hated him, yeah. Sure they did. But they also loved him. They’d loved him down to a fine sheen. Like a stone polished by the touch of a thousand hands.”
Lincoln was my first love and Hank knew the whole story. He brought it up whenever he wanted to hurt me.
Lincoln and I had met at a party in Chicago, long before he was president, at one of those Wicker Park affairs with fixed-gear bikes locked out front, four deep, to a stop sign. We were young. It was summer. “I’m going to run for president,” he said, and all night he followed me—from the spiked punch bowl to the balcony full of smokers to the dingy bedroom where we groped on a stranger’s bed. The whole night he never stopped repeating it.
Finally, I gave in: “I’ll vote for you.”
Lincoln said he liked the idea: me, alone, behind a curtain, thinking of him.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said to Hank.
“Here you are with me. Together, we’re a mess. And now the wheels have come off, Manuel.”
“Like Lincoln?”
“Everything he did for this nation,” Hank said. “The Americans had no choice but to kill him.”
I felt a flutter in my chest. “Don’t say that,” I managed.
Hank apologized. He was always apologizing. He polished off his drink with a flourish, held it up, and shook it. Suddenly he was a bandleader and it was a maraca: the ice rattled wonderfully. A waitress appeared.
“Gimme what I want, sugar,” Hank said.
She was chewing gum laconically, something in her posture indicating a painful awareness that this night would be a long one. “How do I know what you want?”
Hank covered his eyes with his hands. “Because I’m famous.”
She took his glass and walked away. Hank winked at me and I tried to smile. I wished he could have read my mind. That night it would have made many things between us much simpler.
“The thing is,” Hank said once he had a fresh drink, “there’s a point after which you have finished loving something, after you have extracted everything of beauty from it, and you must—it is law—discard it.”
This was all I could take. “Oh Christ. Just say it.”
There was a blinking neon sign behind the bar, and Hank looked over my shoulder, lost himself in its lights. “Say what?” he asked.
“What you want to say.”
“I don’t know what I want.” He crossed his arms. “I never have. I resent the pressure to decide.”
Lincoln was a good man, a competent lover, a dignified leader with a tender heart. He’d wanted to be a poet, but settled for being a statesman. “It’s just my day job,” he told me once. He was sitting naked in a chair in my room when he said it, smoking a cigarette and cleaning the dust from his top hat with a wooden toothbrush. And he was fragile: his ribs showed even then. We were together almost a year. In the mornings, I would comb out his beard for him, softly, always softly, and Lincoln would purr like a cat.
Hank laid his hands flat on the table and studied them. They were veiny and worn. “I’m sorry,” he said, without looking up. “It wasn’t a good job, was it?”
“No,” I said. “But it was a job.”
He rubbed his eyes. “If I don’t stop drinking, I’m going to be sick. On the other hand, if I stop drinking . . . Oh, this life of ours.”
I raised one of Hank’s hands and kissed it.
I was a southern boy, and of course it was something Lincoln and I talked about. Hank didn’t care where I was from. Geography is an accident, he said. The place you are born is simply the first place you flee. And then: the people you meet, the ones you fall for, and the paths you make together, the entirety of one’s life, a series of mere accidents. And these too are accidents: the creeks you stumble upon in a dense wood, the stones you gather, the number of times each skips across the bright surface of the water, and everything you feel in that moment: the graceless passage of time, the possibility of stillness. Lincoln and I had lived this—skipped rocks and felt our hearts swelling—just before he left Illinois for Washington. We were an hour outside Chicago, in a forest being encroached upon by subdivisions. Everywhere we walked that day there were trees adorned with bright orange flags: trees with death certificates, land marked for clearing, to be crisscrossed by roads and driveways, dotted with the homes of upright American yeomen.
Lincoln told me he loved me.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. I was hopeful. This was years ago.
That morning he’d gone to the asylum to select a wife. The doctors had wheeled her out in a white gown and married them on the spot. Under the right care, they said, she’ll make a great companion. Her name was Mary Todd. “She’s very handsome,” Lincoln said. He showed me a photograph and I admitted that she was.
“Do you love her?” I asked.
Lincoln wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“But you just met her today.”
He answered with a sigh. When he had been quiet long enough, he took my hand. We had come to a place where the underbrush was so overgrown that the construction markers seemed to get lost: mossy, rotting tree trunks were everywhere, gnarled limbs and tangled vines hung over the trail. Lincoln kept hitting his head as we walked.
“This forest is so messy,” he complained.
I said, “You’re too fastidious to be a poet.”
He gave me a sheepish smile.
Back at the bar, Hank was falling apart before my eyes. Or pretending to. “What will we do?” he pleaded. “How will we pay the rent?”
It was a good question. He slumped his shoulders and I smiled at him. “You don’t love me,” I said.
He froze for a moment. “Of course I do. Am I not destroying you, bit by bit?”
“Are you?”
Hank’s face was red. “Wasn’t it me that made you lose your job?”
It was good to hear him say it. Hank had been in the habit of transferring his most troublesome callers to me, but not before thoroughly antagonizing them, not before promising that their lost package was only the beginning, that they could expect far worse, further and more violent attacks on their suburban tranquility. Inevitably they demanded to speak to a manager, and I would be forced to bail out my lover. Or try to. I wasn’t a manager, I never had been, and the playacting was unbearable. The customer barked insults and I gave it all away: shipping, replacements, insurance, credit, anything to get them off the line. Hank would be listening in from his cubicle, breathing a little too heavily into the receiver, and I knew I was disappointing him. Afterward, he would apologize tearfully, and two weeks might pass, maybe three, before it would happen again.
It took Accounting months to pin it on us.
Now Hank sighed. “What would you have done without me anyway? How could you have survived that place?”
I didn’t answer him.
We emptied our pockets, left the bar, and walked into the night. The heat outside was never-ending. It was eleven-thirty or later, and still the desert air was dense. This time of year, those of us who were not native, those whom life had shipwrecked in the great Southwest, began to confront a very real terror: summer was coming. Soon it would be July and there would be no hope. We made our way to the truck. Hank tossed me the keys and I caught them, just barely. It was the first good thing that had happened all day. If they’d hit the ground, we surely would’ve spent hours on hands and knees, palming the warm desert asphalt, looking for them.
The King Is Always Above the People Page 3