The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Big Angel was aware of it all. He wasn’t interested in affirmative action. He hadn’t asked for help. His family had never accepted government checks or cheese or those big silver cans of federal peanut butter. He had never seen a food stamp. He wasn’t some peasant holding his straw hat in worried hands, bowing to some master. He was Emiliano Zapata. He wasn’t living on his knees. In his mind, he was showing his long-dead father his own worth as a son. His name tag said HOLA! instead of HELLO!

  He shook his head, hard. Rubbed his face. Had he been napping? Chingado!

  “Move,” he said. “All of you!”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Now!”

  * * *

  Out in his room in the garage, Lance Corporal Hungry Man got his beret neatly positioned on his head. He had moved back in with them when Pops got so sick.

  Favorite son, he told himself. He glanced at the plastic trophy Pops had given him. It said: LALO #1 SON! He looked at it all the time. He cocked the beret a little, down over his eye. Bruce Lee glowered from a poster behind him. And a bumper sticker from one of his attempts at a recovery program was above his bed: ONE DAY AT A TIME.

  His former sponsor had made him a little placard with this motto wood-burned into it: SHORT FORM OF THE SERENITY PRAYER—FUCK IT.

  He had done stuff. Bad stuff. He was working on it. Pops was always saying this was not West Side Story. Whatever that was. He got it—wasn’t about no gangbangers. It wasn’t about fights and creepy shit. Lalo knew this much: he was doing his best.

  His high-and-tight haircut made him look like he was still in the service. It had been a good while. He tugged down the hem of his tunic. Squared away. Head of De La Cruz Security.

  Days like today called for a uniform. Moms made sure it was always pressed and sharp. He maintained his dress tunic and trousers, his dress blouse and hats—all clean, crisp. Black shoes shined like dark mirrors. His little rows of fruit salad ribbons and medals neat, a gap where he had removed his Purple Heart and pinned it on his father. He still limped a little, but the leg wasn’t too bad. He had some magic pills. He didn’t think about it, if he could help it. Got a Chinese dragon tattooed all along the scar. Tail wrapped around his ankle, which still crunched like cereal when he walked. Didn’t talk about it. Ain’t no thing. Every homie had his secrets. Too bad those old-timers didn’t have no secrets. Or maybe they did. He had kids himself—Gio and Mayra. He wasn’t planning to tell them shit.

  Lalo knew he had tragic eyes. Dark, like his father’s. He looked like someone who had lost a lover. Or one who had tried to stop what sick sadness he was doing and could not, and was exhausted by acting like life was a sunny Fourth of July picnic.

  His great-grandpa had been a soldier. And Gramps Antonio had been some kind of a badass cop. Grandma América—she had been a trip. She had managed to be sweet as she kicked everybody’s ass. She had been badder than Abuelo Antonio. Sorry to be burying her today, for reals. He wasn’t about to even begin considering burying Pops.

  Pops. Hungry Man didn’t know what his dad had done in the real world aside from raising the fam with Moms. Life, man—did Pops have a life? That was its own little war, being a dad. Lalo knew that. He laughed once, making a skitch sound with the side of his mouth. It was war for sure with him and his brothers and sister. And Moms.

  Freakin’ Moms, laying down the law and order with her slipper. La chancla. Every vato feared the chancla. A million bug-eyed, pissed-off Mexican mamas whacking the bejesus out of their kids, holding one arm and flailing ass with the free hand, the whole time dancing in a circle as the homie tried to run away but couldn’t get out of her grip. And Moms getting all formal as she lectured, every word coming down with the whacks on the ass: Usted-va-a-aprender-quién-es-la-jefa-aquí! It was all “thee” and “thou” when the Old Ladies started smacking you. And once the poor criminal escaped, Moms launched that chancla like a guided missile and beaned him in the back of the head.

  “Worse than a drill instructor,” he told his reflection.

  Outside, all the shorties and peewees were laying siege to the yard and the house. Squabbling and screaming and passing a half-flat soccer ball from foot to foot as they ran. The girlies were as loud as the fat boys. It was a freakin’ chicken coop out there, but Pops liked all his grandkids and grandnieces and neighbor kids and waifs eating all the food and breaking stuff. Above their incessant caterwaul, he heard his dad shouting: “Lalo!”

  “Coming, Pops!” he called.

  “Hurry, mijo!”

  “On my way!”

  It seemed to Lalo that some days everyone shouted at everybody else, like they were all deaf or didn’t understand English. Well, Moms—that was arguable. But she probably understood more than she let on.

  “Lalo!”

  “Coming!” Hungry Man snapped a salute in Big Angel’s general direction. He looked in the mirror again, tugged the hem of his jacket down one last time, trying to hide that civilian gut. He had a little silver .22 automatic strapped to his ankle like some narco. You do what you got to do, no lie. “Good to go,” he said to himself and stepped out to find his sister smoking in the backyard. “Minnie,” he said. “Check it.” He posed. “I got my hair did.”

  “You look sharp,” she said. “Bubble butt.”

  “You’re too funny, Orange Is the New Black. Look who’s talking.”

  “Hey,” she said, tossing her smoke into the geraniums, “I never got arrested or nothing.”

  “Yeah? You’re the only one.”

  She lit up a fresh one, smoked, studied the end of her cigarette, elegantly tipped off some ash with her ring finger, looked sideways at him. “You know what? Most people don’t get arrested.”

  “What planet you from?”

  She blew smoke at him.

  “You smoke too much,” he said.

  “Said the junkie.”

  “Say what?” he said. “Keep flapping your big ol’ duck lips, girl. See what happens.”

  She sneered.

  “I hate it when you look at me like that, Mouse,” he said.

  “Really.”

  “I’m okay, okay?”

  “Right.” She blew smoke rings.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m clean. No lie.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I don’t got a problem. Just takin’ the edge off. I got reasons.” He tapped his thigh, but sympathy moves no longer worked on his sister.

  She held the cigarette away from herself and nodded. “Yeah, who doesn’t?” Then, “And you stole my car last week.”

  “At least I ain’t Braulio,” he said.

  “We don’t talk about Braulio.”

  “I know, I know.” But Lalo also knew, if he wanted a conversation to change, all he had to do was mention his dead brother.

  They stood there, out of insults and accusations. Out of anything else to say. They looked at their feet.

  “We have to get going,” Lalo said.

  “Pops,” she replied.

  “Yeah. Good ol’ Pops. Got needs.”

  “It’s what we do.”

  “Fuck it.”

  They went inside the house.

  * * *

  “I was never sick. I was never late. I banked my vacation time.”

  “How nice, Flaco,” his wife said, patting his shoulder.

  “And for what.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wasn’t asking, Flaca. I was saying.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe asking myself.”

  “Eres muy filosófico,” she said.

  Minnie was back in their bathroom, ratting and spraying. Why did she drink so much last night? Her head was pounding. Big Angel knew. He could see it in her eyes.

  “I don’t care about my job,” he said. “It was foolish, Flaca. I wish we’d gone to the Grand Canyon.”

  “How nice.”

  Perla was trying to hook her girdle snaps to the tops of her stockings. He watched her. Did anyone
wear girdles anymore? Snap them to nylons? It had been his erotic fantasy to see the skirt rise and the fingers pull the sheer stockings up those dimpled thighs.

  In his youth, he’d knelt at the feet of older women sitting in chairs as they pulled the nylon high. Opening their legs. “Don’t touch! Look.” Their gift to him. Their warm scents of baby powder and secrets. Him glancing at the shadowed white latex mounds between their thighs. And their dexterous fingers hooking the girdles to the nylon. “Just watch,” those women ordered, knowing from his blush the power they were unleashing.

  Nobody did that anymore except for his Flaca.

  “I like your legs,” he said.

  She stared at him. “We do not have time for that,” she scolded.

  “Says who?”

  “You do,” she said.

  As if he could anyway. “All right. Time to go,” he replied. “But I still like to look. I like your thighs.”

  “Sí, mi amor.”

  “Delicious.”

  “Travieso,” she said, that delightful old Mexican word for “bad boy.” She pulled up her skirt and showed him herself.

  “Your beehive is full of honey,” he said.

  “Cochino!” she said. But she didn’t drop her skirt.

  “Mom!” Minnie cried from the bathroom. “Stop that!”

  Mother and father smiled at each other.

  “How do you think we made you?” he called to Minnie.

  “TMI!” she said and hurried from the bathroom and through the bedroom with her fingers in her ears. “La-la-la-la-la!”

  The parents laughed in her wake. He gestured for his wife to collect herself. He was temporarily out of words. He, who had taught himself English by memorizing the dictionary. Competing with his estranged father to see who learned newer, stranger, more American words. His father, once a monument of a man, later small and gray and watery-eyed, charming and brutal as ever, but whittled down. Sleeping in Big Angel’s back bedroom for a season—Big Angel ascending to patriarch. Nobody could imagine such things. No Mexicano or gringo.

  No way of knowing how language re-created a family. His own children didn’t want to learn Spanish, when he had given everything to learn English. The two men at the kitchen table with cigarettes and coffee and used dictionaries. They captured new words and pinned them like butterflies of every hue. “Aardvark,” “bramble,” “challenge,” “defiance.” One called out a word: “Incompatible.” The other had to define it in less than three minutes. Five points per word. Scores tallied on three-by-five-inch index cards. At the end of each month, a carton of Pall Malls was at stake. If the caller’s accent was too hard to understand, he lost three points. And so, with verbs and nouns, they built their bridge to California.

  English exams, followed by paperbacks bought at the liquor store. His favorite gringo phrase at work, which he seldom used at home, was “By golly.” He learned that a mighty lover, in James Bond books, was known as a “swordsman.” He learned from a John Whitlatch action novel that a man with a prostitute for a wife was an “easy rider.” Americans in the ’60s said “easy ice” to bartenders when ordering a cocktail, thus sounding very current and ensuring a bit more liquor in the glass. Big Angel maintained a mental data bank of American secret spells and incantations. Hard-on. Johnny Law. What can I do you for?

  Why was he thinking about work? About the past? It was over. It was all over. He was never going to work again. “This second,” his father liked to tell him, “just became the past. As soon as you noticed it, it was already gone. Too bad for you, Son. It’s lost forever.”

  (Muy filosófico.)

  * * *

  Minnie stood in the shadowed living room, listening to Lalo chase the kids around the patio. Mom and Daddy were so dirty. It made her laugh a little, then grimace at how gross it was. Beehive. Honey. It was filthy. He was going all Prince in his old age. But he made it sound pretty. She rubbed her eyes and tried not to smear her makeup. Nobody said anything that sexy to her. Nobody said pretty things about her parts anymore.

  Maybe when you’ve had three boys, those days are over.

  She yelled at the kids: “Be quiet!”

  She had the worst hangover. All this death. All this responsibility. On her. She was carrying this whole weekend. Lalo? Useless. Moms? Too broken up. Her friends had come over to her house last night to cheer her on. They were all like “Mija, this weekend’s a bitch!” And they were making fireballs and micheladas. She had never laughed so much. She half remembered texting her uncle, Little Angel.

  Why did she do that? They had some connection she couldn’t figure out. She rubbed her forehead. How badly had she embarrassed herself? She grabbed her phone to check her texts from the night before.

  At 2:00 a.m., she had written: “OMG, Tío, I am so buzzed right now!”

  She thought he’d be asleep or something. But he had texted her back. “Me too,” he said. “Funerals.”

  She had gotten here, somehow, late last night. She hoped she hadn’t driven drunk. She thought one of the guys from work had brought her. She felt like everything was slipping out of her hands.

  She wore her laciest purple underwear, in case her man came around for a look. It was a kind of prayer.

  * * *

  Big Angel and Perla were just staring at each other, so many things still to be said, when Minnie suddenly appeared back in their room and fell to her knees and wrestled his shoes onto his feet. He patted her head. The shoes were tight. They hurt him, goddamn it. Sorry, Lord.

  “Watch it, Minnie!” he said. “If Braulio was alive, he’d know how to do it right!” He kicked at her.

  Braulio. Her big brother. Dead and in his grave for almost ten years now. The son inflated by his absence into the position of family saint. Poor Pops. His two big boys—his greatest failure. Nobody was invited to mention either of them. And here he had Lalo to fool himself with. The good boy, supposedly. Damn, her head was banging.

  Minnie just looked up at Big Angel. “Love you anyway, Daddy,” she said.

  Lance Corporal Hungry Man stepped into the room. “Y’all ain’t ready yet? Yo, Pops. What’s the holdup?”

  * * *

  Lalo had arranged the peewees all over the house. Surveillance teams. He announced: “Maggots! Listen up!” They knew to fall in and stand at attention. “Big Papa Actual on the move! Say again: Big Papa Actual, rolling! Over.”

  “Roger!” a chubster in the kitchen cried.

  “Man your positions.”

  They scattered and created faux checkpoints all through the house. Uncle Lalo, #1 Babysitter.

  A girl in the living room shouted, “All clear!”

  “Be advised: snipers have been spotted—watch your six and niner!”

  “Roger!”

  Big Angel slumped in his wheelchair and hung his head. “Yeesus, Lalo,” he muttered, fingering his son’s Purple Heart pinned to his own tiny chest.

  “Just playin’, Pops.”

  “There’s nothing funny, mijo.”

  “Always something funny, Pops,” said Hungry Man. “Coming through, maggots!” he yelled.

  Minnie and Perla followed, carrying handbags and the folded walker. Out the door and down the yellow scrap of lawn. They shoveled Big Angel into the minivan. They didn’t let the All-Father drive anymore—his feet couldn’t reach the pedals anyway. He sat in the middle-back seat, rocking in place, swinging pendulum strokes of his desecrated body, as if his anxiety could force the vehicle through traffic. The inertia of will, striving to overwhelm all tides and hit that far shore.

  Big Angel’s best friend, Dave, had told him, “There is a far shore. We are all like these little lakes. And when there’s a splash in the middle, ripples flow out from the center in perfect circles.” “Dave,” he’d replied, “what the hell are you talking about?” “A life, pendejo—you. The ripple starts out strong and gets slighter till it hits the shore. Then it comes back. Almost invisible. But it’s there, changing things, and you’re in the middle wond
ering if you accomplished anything.” Big Angel shook his head. That damned Dave.

  “Dale gas, pues!” he said.

  “On it, Pops.”

  Once, Big Angel would have roared it, but now he thought he sounded like some mewling cat urging somebody to fill its saucer with cream.

  A little American flag fluttered on the antenna. Lalo driving, his Perla in the navigator’s seat, fretting in Old Mexican Woman fashion: “Ay Dios. Dios mío. Por Dios.” God, being worn down by faithful repetition. There was some evidence that he might be deaf.

  Maybe, Perla thought, God didn’t speak Spanish. Then she crossed herself in penance. “Diosito lindo.” It was always smart to compliment God. He liked to hear how handsome he was.

  La Minnie was in the third row, rubbing Big Angel’s shoulders from behind. And the wheelchair sat folded up in the way back, clattering against the walker to announce every infuriating application of the brakes in this unmovable traffic.

  He punched the seat. “Today, of all days,” he said.

  His two great messages to his kids, without fail, were: be on time; don’t make excuses. And here he was, late and thinking up alibis by the dozen. Burying his mother on the day before his own birthday party. His last birthday, but nobody else knew it. He was collecting his scattered family by decree. It was going to be a puro party that nobody would forget.

  “You’re a good girl,” he said as an afterthought. He patted Minnie’s hand.

  He looked at his giant watch. He had to squint. His eyes going now. Wonderful. He had always been proud of his eyesight. He resolved to abandon time and let it go. But he was not about to get glasses. Enough was enough.

  “Turn the radio down!” he snapped.

  “Radio ain’t on, Pops,” his son said.

  “Then turn it on!”

  Lalo did so.

  “Turn it down!”

  Everyone in the van bent to his whim, but the sky and the clock and the pinche traffic seemed to ignore his dictates. A guy on the overpass held up a BUILD THE WALL sign, facing south.

  “My mother,” Big Angel said, “would expect more from me than this.”