The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  He had so much to prove to her. He had failed her a hundred times. He couldn’t bear confirming her suspicions about him: incapable. Not even close to what his father had been. And of course she had never granted him a pardon for marrying Perla. “That señora,” she called her. Implying that Perla was used goods. Experienced.

  “You’re doing your best, Daddy,” Minnie said.

  “If this is my best, kill me right here, right now.”

  “Ay Dios,” his wife prayed.

  A Prayer Before the Rain

  Where did all this traffic come from?

  Mother had died the week before, but his birthday party had been announced a long while before that. Long at least in terms of Big Angel’s diminished prospects. A week was a long time when you were racing the Lupah.

  People were coming from everywhere: Bakersfield, L.A., Vegas. Little Angel, his youngest brother, was coming all the way from Seattle. People had made reservations. Taken time off from work. High rollers and college students, prison veteranos and welfare mothers, happy kids and sad old-timers and pinches gringos and all available relatives.

  It would be tight.

  So he courted outrage by having Mama cremated. There was no time left for a big Catholic funeral in a big Catholic church. What church would they have picked? Half the family had briefly become Mormons, and some of them were in a UFO-worshipping group awaiting the return of the Anunnaki when Planet X came back into Earth’s orbit. Some of them were evangelicals. Or nothing. Lalo was probably an atheist. Or a sun worshipper. The eldest son of Big Angel’s brother César seemed to think he was a Viking. Big Angel truly had no time for these details.

  He had made the even more daring move of arranging for her funeral to take place a week later than expected so his birthday party would be the day after. Ashes could last forever. No worries.

  Nobody seemed to care—they were happy he was handling everything. That’s what he did. They didn’t want to be responsible, because the Great Mother would have found fault with any funeral they conspired to offer. And Big Angel was reliable. It was simple to get orders from him and follow them. So they had adjusted to the funereal addendum to the birthday party agenda without a fuss. Most of them were relieved because they didn’t have enough vacation days available to make two trips. They certainly didn’t have the funds. One weekend worked for everybody.

  More traffic? Where is everybody going?

  Big Angel put his hands over his eyes, if only to avoid looking at the blackness seeping up the backs of his wrists. His hands had black splotches on them too. He never looked at his legs, afraid of what he’d see.

  Outside, the afternoon sun burned apertures in the clouds, charring the floating crevasses red along their edges and shooting hauntings of yellow light across the city. Like curtains of golden mesh, blowing in a cool breeze. Big Angel calculated in his mind how far toward Hawaii the sun must be; he saw angles and degrees etched into the blue above the flaming clouds. Heaven was a blueprint.

  Mother had never been close to him after La Paz. She had coddled his siblings, including his half brother, Little Angel, who wasn’t even her son. She had seen some charm in him that Big Angel had never managed to fully accept.

  He watched the sky. He was amassing evidence of any kind of signal sent from Beyond. Anything at all. Braulio? Mother? Anybody? Rain was good. He could work with rain. Many messages in rain. Rainbows were even better.

  When he was a boy, Mother had taught him that a rainbow was a bridge where angels walked down from heaven. In Spanish, it was an arco iris. This was so much more lovely than English, like the name of a butterfly or hummingbird or daisy. He felt smug about this: go, Spanish! Sunflower: girasol, he thought.

  girasol

  mariposa

  colibrí

  margarita

  But no rainbows were visible.

  “It was good of Mother,” he said, “to die first.”

  “Ay, Flaco,” his wife said in Spanish. “You know. She could not stand to see her son die before she did.”

  “Who’s going to die, Perla?” he said. “I’m too busy to die.”

  He said that a lot. But he also said “I am ready to die,” and as often.

  He had confessed it to his priest. Almost as soon as Doctor Nagel told him the gushes of fresh blood returning to his urine signaled the collapse coming. That moment, oddly, made him feel calm: he had stared at the doctor and thought, Her name is Mercedes Joy Nagel, and I wish I had bought a Mercedes because I would have felt joy. The x-rays had shown grape clusters of death all inside his abdomen and two dark knots in his lungs. He sat small and alone in that office, putting his most stoic warrior face forward, staring the doctor down. “How long?” A shrug, a pat. “Not long. Weeks.” “Can I have a lollipop?” he said. She opened her glass jar. He liked cherry.

  He called his priest and confessed over the phone, then told Perla he had been talking about baseball with a friend.

  “Pops,” said his son. “I ain’t gonna lie. Grams done it on purpose. Took care of business. For reals.”

  “She was like that,” Big Angel said.

  “Rainbow, Daddy!” his daughter cried.

  Big Angel looked where Minnie was pointing and finally smiled. Good work, God.

  * * *

  Little Angel had landed.

  Baby Brother, he announced to himself, in the house!

  Big Angel’s half brother had thought he’d be late. As old as he was, they all thought of him as the baby, including himself. The oldest twenty-eight-year-old on Earth, an age he had managed to remain for an extra twenty years.

  You couldn’t miss the matriarch’s funeral. There was no way he was going to be late. She wasn’t his mom—he was often reminded of this in small, pointed ways. He was the footnote to the family, that detail everybody had to deal with when he deigned to appear. Son of an American woman who had been branded in the family legends as the gringa hussy who had taken away their Great Father, Don Antonio. Somehow they even resented his mother’s death. She had managed to join Father in the afterlife before Mamá América could go over to wrestle him back from the American’s clutches.

  Little Angel didn’t want to be in California, land of sorrows. And he didn’t like breaching the thousand-mile buffer zone between himself and his origins. But the fear of Big Angel’s displeasure drove him forward harder than his reluctance held him back. He’d forced the plane from Seattle to fly faster by the sheer strength of his will. The overwhelming mural of sunlight ricocheting off coastal peaks and spilling over them to the ocean—going from burning red to blue, then green, then purple—hypnotized him. Then the harrowing plunge toward San Diego, the feeling that his plane was passing between the buildings on its way to the runway…and he was home.

  He realized he was at the car rental office before eight in the morning, and he felt silly. Yet relieved. No missing the funeral. No smoldering, wounded stares of reproach from Big Brother. He was on Big Angel’s schedule—always early.

  When they were in their cups, Big Angel called their brotherhood “the Alpha and the Omega.” Little Angel thought the tequila really suited him. Let him out of his self-imposed sanctity. The first and the last, eh? Little Angel had parsed the meta-messages in that text enough to earn a PhD in cross-border gnostic sibling ontologies. He smiled, more or less.

  Big Angel seemed to think, when he was loaded, that they were some sort of wrestling tag team. He’d announce: “Coming into the ring, weighing two hundred pounds, from parts unknown—the Omega!” Baffled women and kids would clap as Little Angel raised his hands.

  Little Angel, somewhere inside himself, felt good when he heard this. He felt witnessed. None of the rest of them had ever paid attention to his boyhood. Hell, they hadn’t even seen it. Their father had made sure they were kept far apart.

  But Big Angel saw. He was the eldest, and by then had his own car and job. He came to visit their drab Clairemont house, to the consternation of Little Angel’s American mom.
But she made him chicken potpies and tried hard to be a good sport anyway. By then she had learned that Don Antonio would come to their San Diego home with lingerie tucked in his jacket pockets. She was done with him but had nowhere to go. She smiled at the boys even though she was exhausted and always nervous. Even though Big Angel frightened her with his black-eyed glare. She knew he hated her.

  Big Angel knew what his baby brother’s Saturdays were like: morning cartoons, Three Stooges reruns, followed by some fat boy lunch of cold spaghetti or frijoles sandwiches on white bread, and chocolate milk and comic books. Or Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Monsters were his mania. And nobody in his version of the family approved. Don Antonio would begrudgingly buy him a copy at the liquor store, even though he berated the kid afterward. Little Angel didn’t care; his mind was crowded with King Kong and Reptilicus, the Wolf Man and King Ghidorah. The monster magazines made his mother despair even worse than Superman comics or MAD magazine.

  And after lunch, it was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Followed by wrestling. Big Angel had taken part in this ritual perhaps three times, but he never forgot it. His little brother’s fervid insistence on these things, in order, without interruption. The ridiculous wrestlers falling around the ring in gray-scale black and white: Classy Freddie Blassie, Pedro Morales, The Destroyer, Bobo Brazil. Little Angel seemed to think he was friends with them all.

  At 3:00, Moona Lisa appeared on channel 10—Science Fiction Theater. She lounged around a cheap set that looked like the moon, dressed in Morticia Addams skintight dresses. Big Angel thought she was hot. But Little Angel didn’t seem to notice. He was holding his breath for Them and The Brain from Planet Arous.

  Big Angel made Little Angel his research project. He had never seen his own isolation mirrored in the world. Little Angel finally understood this, years later, when his brother shouted his faux ring announcements.

  They even shared an English slang exclamation they picked up from Dick Lane on KTLA, brought in fuzzy and snowy on the rabbit ears. “Whoa, Nelly!” Lane called whenever The Destroyer made Blassie kneel in the corner of the ring, begging for mercy.

  So when Big Angel ring-announced him, sometimes Little Angel would shout back, “Whoa, Nelly!”

  The fam had just stared.

  * * *

  The Dollar car-rental office had only a Crown Victoria available. Black. In his fantasies, Little Angel had imagined snagging something more dramatic. A Mustang GT500 convertible, perhaps. Or a Challenger Hellcat. Something with a horsepower of 700. Kid brother makes good. Bad to the bone.

  He initially balked at this fossilized cop car, a car for granddads taking their golf friends to a tasty brunch in La Jolla. But in the end it amused him, and he took it. He could have put ten bags in the trunk. He tossed his overnighter in there—it looked huddled and unloved. His shoulder messenger bag went on the couch-like back seat, and he settled in the front. Professor Little Angel, with a satchel full of notebooks and William Stafford poetry. He would ignore the ten papers that needed grading.

  Time to boogie on down there to the south side. Time to think, make up his strategies. Doctor Think Too Much, back in town.

  Sometimes, when Big Angel was in one of his moods, he called Little Angel things other than his name. “The American.” What the hell. How was that an insult? But it had some inexplicable sting. Especially coming from a Republican. Or at least he thought Big Angel was a Republican. Why didn’t he just say “The Liberal”? They’d had their only fistfight over it. Just once. Blood on their lips.

  Did it have bearing on this day?

  The car was vast and pillowy. Little Angel felt like he was driving a square acre of 1979. It smelled like cigarette smoke—reminded him of his dad. He took the turns wide and hit I-5 like a cloud being pushed by a sea storm. Being in no hurry, he decided to go on a slight expedition to the north. He hadn’t been back in years, but you never forget the hometown. Even though it seemed he came home only for funerals.

  He could have gone left and rolled up Clairemont Drive to his old neighborhood. Stared at his sunburned house on the Indian-themed streets above Mission Bay. Mohican Ave. He knew his mom’s jungle of succulents and bamboo, geraniums and jade trees, was gone now. It had been dust long before the drought. He knew the front and back yards were bare San Diego dirt, and a dirty Japanese pickup slouched in her driveway, a Ski-Doo beside it. A crooked basketball hoop screwed in above the garage door. People he had never met.

  His old Goth sweetheart, Lycia, still lived on Apache. A grandmother now. He could almost smell the scent of sandalwood that came from her thighs.

  * * *

  Before the family had even gotten Big Angel dressed, Little Angel was speeding off the freeway at Midway to hit Tower Records. He wanted to hear some Bowie. Ziggy Stardust always made it better. The Crown Vic had a CD slot. Keep your electric eye on me, babe. He and Lycia had cried every time that song played, and then they’d made love. And now Bowie was gone.

  Even if Tower wasn’t open yet, he was willing to hang out in the parking lot and wait. But he couldn’t find the record store anywhere.

  He drove past the Sports Arena. When they were kids, they’d called it “The Sports Aroma.” He pulled a U and rolled back. He never saw Tower. He drove down the long block slowly. People honked, but he didn’t care. Tower was gone. That was some happy horseshit right there.

  Back on the freeway, but he wasn’t going to be bested by this disappointing turn of events. He couldn’t seem to find 91X on the radio. He headed south to Washington Street and sped up the slope toward Hillcrest. Off the Record would ease his itch. Damn right—best CD bins in town.

  But that was gone too.

  Someone had come into his memories and erased whole blocks with an invisible bulldozer. He rolled on to the empty parking lot where The Rip Van Winkle Room used to stand. Alberto’s Tacos was there now.

  He pulled in and just stared. His dad had once played piano in there for tips. Rip’s Room, the hipsters had called it. The piano lounge was up a half set of carpeted stairs, in red light. The whole place smelling of cigarettes and liquor and perfume and Aqua Velva. Little Angel’s memory was echoing and ripe: candied cherries, vanilla Cokes, Patsy Cline on the juke when his dad was not tinkling “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” Cocktail waitresses with lips the same color as the cherries, wafting clouds of White Shoulders and musk oil, tracing Dad’s back with their fingernails as they passed. He was there most Friday and Saturday nights.

  Walkin’ After Midnight

  I Fall to Pieces

  Crazy

  Little Angel never understood what those songs were about. But he sure understood what those red nails on Dad’s back meant. Don Antonio, with his carefully pomaded hair and his dapper little Pedro Infante mustache, used Little Angel’s charm to help him reel in waitresses and bowling wives and bored retirees looking for a night of passion. He trained Little Angel in the art of making women feel visible. “If you teach a woman to feel like a work of art, you will make love to her every night.” Uh-huh, Dad. Right. Got it.

  Dad gifted him with porno cocktail napkins featuring cartoons of busty and idiotic farm girls romping in barns with salesmen. Why were these guys in barns wearing suits and little hats, he wondered. And tricky books of matches with naughty zingers built in. Like the Rip Room’s legendary Baby Bobby matchbook. Wherein Baby Bobby could be observed on the cover fiddling between his legs with chubby fingers. And when Little Angel opened the cover, a single red-headed match in a little pink plastic tube popped out at him, a delighted Baby Bobby with arms outstretched in rapturous erect joy.

  Little Angel was in fifth grade.

  Love Is Blue

  Perfidia

  The Girl from Ipanema

  The painted ladies loved him. He was like a little darling dog to them. They hugged him as he sat upon his stool, looking at Batman comics, their stout, encased breasts rolling across his cheeks, and he could smell the hot spaces beneath their arms. He tried to hide
his personal Baby Bobby situation from them.

  A brandy snifter full of ones and fivers glistened on the piano. Swingers sent a steady stream of cocktails to the piano man, but by agreement with the barkeep, they were all ginger ale on the rocks. Who could play a lick after fifteen manhattans? Let alone drive home. Dad split the overage the drinkers paid with the bartender.

  Nobody there knew it was his night job. That he spent all day cleaning up after bowlers. Putting sanitary cakes in urinals. Clearing the white tin bins in the ladies’ room. At night, in a dapper cream smoking jacket, he did his Ricky Ricardo routine for drunk Americans. Slicked back hair, no wedding ring, and cigarettes.

  This was how Little Angel remembered his father.

  He sat there staring at the taco shop and wished he had learned how to smoke. Memories. Game for losers. He had places to be. Too much time travel before 10 a.m.

  “To hell with this,” he said, and pulled out of the lot. He drove south again and blissed out on the glittering blue of the sea on one side, the epic sweep of the Coronado Bridge ahead, the dry hills across the freeway with huge jets dropping toward the airport like some invasion of gargantuan moths. And in the southern distance, always there, the mother of them all, the hills of Tijuana.

  Nobody went back there now. Not even to visit their father’s grave.

  * * *

  The American, Big Angel called Little Angel. The Assimilator. Little Angel has an American mother—not as classy as the women in the bar. Laughter. All eyes on him. Little Angel’s job was to take it and smile.

  When Little Angel got as far south as National City, he still had hours to kill. His hotel was right off Mile of Cars, where the funeral home awaited. He shook his head. It was tawdry, in a way that only the gnomes of his English department in Seattle would appreciate. How California, they’d say. How San Diego, though a couple of ironic-eyeglasses and small-brim-hat types would call it “Dago.” How Latino, though nobody in his family had ever spoken Latin.