The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Big Angel looked a little harder through the mist, and there he was: the Old Man. Don Antonio’s ghost, looking dapper. It was lounging behind the tree, waiting for Mamá América to get done with this gala so they could go dancing on Saturn. Big Angel nodded at his father. His father grinned and moved back behind the tree with his finger over his lips.

  “Lalo,” Big Angel said, turning back to his son. “Death is not the end.”

  “Yeah? Huh. I’ll study up on that.” Looks pretty final to me, Pops.

  Usually, Lalo spent the day in gym shorts and an old Van Halen tee. But there were times, like today, when the world needed to remember what kind of man he was. Big day demanded big props, and he liked good clothes to demonstrate those props. Props to Pops, he said to himself.

  But this “There ain’t no death” bullshit? Yeah. No.

  Death sure was the end for his brother. Death sure was the big mother-effer that took out half his boys in that Allahu-Akbar alley. Death sure as shit should have taken him instead of them and one of his balls. It just unzipped his leg, used his ball sack like a zipper pull and opened it on up from thigh to knee, around the knee and into his boot. Just to get a look. Like steak inside there. Yndio called him One Ball when he got home. Lalo didn’t know why that was so funny, but he’d laughed so hard he cried, telling his brother, “That ain’t funny, asshole!”

  Death?

  It took two hands to count the homies he’d lost right here in town. At McDonald’s, at the park, under the off-ramp to 805. And that cop Braulio and Joker had beaten down with chains. That dude wasn’t getting up again. He wasn’t gonna dance no more if he ever woke up.

  That right there was for real.

  Yeah—not a peep from any one of ’em. None of them players ever came back. That mystical Pops brujo stuff was just some cosmic old Mexican bullshit. Death not the end? Maybe so, if you counted nightmares. There were lots of chatty dead dudes in nightmares. Pops knew things, sure, but he hadn’t seen no brains on no sidewalk. Like all vatos, Hungry Man was a philosopher. Damn, his leg ached; he was hoping to get a little taste of something to ease it.

  And Big Angel was thinking: These children are so stupid; they think they are the first to discover the world.

  * * *

  Lalo knew he was a sharp-dressed man in that new pinstriped suit. He was taking the raindrop hits on his semi-shaved head like a boss. It was bare to the elements since he’d taken off his beret. He imagined his face looked carved from dark wood. All Chichimeca warrior, cabrones. Firme.

  His ’stache drooped a little, and the soul patch under his lower lip looked bandido as hell. His black shades revealed nothing. Though he was always glancing back and forth—watching for knuckleheads from La Mara or El Hoyo Maravilla. Them gangbangers was always looking for trouble. You couldn’t be from the wrong neighborhood.

  He was furthermore engaged in watching for the damn Border Patrol. And government drones. Peeping the brown man, count on that.

  Migra! For some reason his TJ homies called the Border Patrol the “Little Star of the Sea.” WTF, Lalo wanted to know. But he couldn’t go back to TJ to ask nobody. Not right now.

  The Border Patrol had been sneaky lately—he heard peeps talking about BP agents staking out PTA meetings and grabbing brown parents on their way out. Later with that! He wasn’t about to have some migra em-effer grab a tío or tía. Not today.

  Or himself, for that matter.

  No cops. Which he called “chota,” or “placa,” in the language his father did not understand. Braulio and Yndio had taught him. Though Yndio was scarier than the other boys. So tall, so dark, and, man—those muscles. He wasn’t really what he seemed. That boy was the best of all of them. Braulio had them fooled. He was hilarious. He could pour honey on Moms and Pops. Nobody had any idea but Minnie. Wasn’t Yndio who ever got arrested. It was Lalo.

  He’d already been in jail a couple of times. It was bad, the last time—feds and everything. But the worst part was making Pops look bad. Pops had warned him over and over. If he kept getting in trouble, not only would it make the family look bad but the cops would figure out he was illegal and kick his ass out of the USA. “Don’t worry, Pops. I’m a wounded veteran.” Yeah.

  And he had never asked them to carry him as a baby across the Tijuana River. But there it was. Lalo just born, in 1975, and Pops decided it was time to drag them across the border to San Diego, where he’d been hiding out and working, illegal as hell. Camping out at Grandpa’s house. “Building a better life for them,” as he liked to say on weekends when he came creeping back to Mexico. Lalo was feeling sorry for himself—Dude grows up in Dago, thinking he’s a Viva La Raza American vato, and finds out all of a sudden he has to hide from the Border Patrol. Ain’t that the shits.

  “Why is it always me?” he said.

  “What?” Big Angel replied.

  Lalo was glad he’d said something, because the way Pops was slumped in his chair, Lalo was starting to think he was asleep or dead. Better not be dead, Pops. Not on my watch.

  * * *

  Lalo forced himself to look across the wet grass at Braulio’s stone. So painful. It was all he could do at the moment. “Hey, bro,” he whispered. It would have to be enough.

  It was Braulio who thought he’d figured out the immigration thing. Minnie didn’t have to worry about it. What a gringa. Homegirl was all borned up in National City, like a real American. She didn’t have to deal with these things. She could vote.

  Maybe Braulio had even wanted to be good. Do good. Who knows? Get some meaning into his life along with his papers. Lalo had learned anything was possible.

  Braulio, when he got kicked out of school for fighting, had stayed away from the house more and more to avoid Big Angel and Perla’s disappointment. Until 1991—when he was twenty years old. On one of those prowling days, he ran into some army recruiters. They had a small booth at the mall, like those earnest characters who hawked “magic-vision” 3-D posters and small plastic helicopters that zoomed around like alarming insects.

  Braulio liked to take Lalo to the mall with him, cruise the chicks, hit up the cookies at Mrs. Fields. They usually mall-crawled with Joker, Braulio’s junior gangsta homeslice, but this day they were flying solo, just the two of them. Braulio was looking for some skinny jeans, and Joker, being a traditional vato, didn’t go for that emo shit. He would have mocked Braulio all day long for going all gabacho and trying to look like some white boy.

  So they had just exited The Gap, with Security keeping a cyborg-sharp eye on them. They were snickering and trying to say dashing things to the Filipina girlies in their tiny shorts. “Damn!” was about the best they could come up with. But what mattered was how you said it. “Dayum!” Like it was made out of caramel and would stick to their lips. “Dayum, gurrrl,” with a little corner-of-the-mouth chk! and a slight shake of the head. “For reals.” Maybe a hand briefly upon the dick. Poor Lalo—he thought this was slick business.

  Then Braulio saw the tank.

  The Army booth had a plastic M14 mounted to the back wall and a tank on its seven-foot-tall poster, rampant in mid-launch off some distant and foreign sand dune. A young blond soldier was greatly in evidence in the foreground of this action shot, lit up like the Pet of the Month. He was giving the world a giddy thumbs-up. The blocky-headed sarge at the desk had a pen made out of a .50-caliber bullet. His teeth were as brilliant as white plastic. There was a small crowd of boys milling around the booth. From behind these boys, Braulio and Lalo heard such utterances of awe as the following popped from the boys’ lips: “Dude”; “Firme, vato”; and (for hodads too lax to say “bro”) “Brah.”

  Drawn in as if by a tractor beam, Braulio rolled right out of the ’80s and into some tech future of metal and engines. Lalo felt his brother slip out of the family in the fifty steps it took to be drawn into the U.S. Army. He never understood the alchemy of that transition.

  By the time Lalo caught up to him—that walk for him was a mile—Braulio had pu
shed through the bros and football players and was sitting at the desk, already spooling his line of barrio bullshit to the sarge.

  “Like, I ain’t gonna lie, sir.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I work for a living.”

  Braulio didn’t know it was a cliché, and he found it profoundly badass.

  “I got some beefs,” he said.

  “By ‘beef,’ I don’t assume you mean prime rib!” Ha-ha-ha-hah, he very precisely broadcast. “By ‘beef,’ I am gonna assume you’re telling me you have some gang-related issues, what with you being Hispanic and all.” Ha-ha-ha-hah. “Lookit.” He aimed his bullet pen at Braulio’s skinny face. “Best boys I ever served with were goddamned taco benders, Son. No offense.”

  “Well, I got some immig—”

  “Say no more.” A massive palm formed a miniature border fence in Braulio’s face. “Don’t even say the word. I don’t give a shit if you’re wet or dry, if you get my meaning. Wet or dry don’t matter shit to me. And it don’t matter to Uncle Sam.”

  “For reals?”

  Lalo watched the sarge grimace—he wasn’t deeply into vato English, apparently.

  “If you are willing to fight for your nation,” Sarge lied, “your nation is ready to fight for you. No greater gift, and all that. Fighting for the USA. Son, you join up, we handle your papers. Hell, when you muster out, bingo, you’re American. Automatic-o.”

  Braulio looked up at Lalo with real emotion in his face.

  “Least we can do,” Sarge said and shook Braulio’s hand.

  Braulio put in two years, most of it in Germany, never saw combat, and came back with heroin in his veins.

  Papers. Right. That was some major b.s. right there, but Lalo didn’t know it, and Braulio didn’t live long enough to find out. Lots of homeboys fell for it, and later they were all squatting in veteran bunkers in Tijuana, wondering how they got kicked out of the country.

  Lalo remembered the sarge when he got in trouble years later. It wasn’t no thing—just some minor “gang-related” shenanigans—but he wanted to stop it before things got any worse. At twenty-six, he felt too old to be a soldier, but the government was desperate and they were taking almost anybody. He knew, too, that a dude almost thirty would face much more trouble for petty crimes than a stupid kid. A little weed, a knife in the pocket, a street fight. He wanted to be as good as Pops. He could never be that, but he could at least be as good as his bro. The army would make him a man, something he seemed to be struggling to do for himself. So he went looking for the booth. He didn’t think there’d actually be a war. In some place he’d never even heard of.

  And he didn’t expect to get blown up on his first tour in that alley smelling of burned meat. But once Pops came for him at the VA—he was walking with a cane for a while—he felt large and in charge. He was a citizen. They told him his military ID was all he needed. They were right, he believed, until he really stepped in it and was suddenly in serious trouble. And found out he’d been lied to. The recruiters, the army—everybody had said what they needed to say to get one more body on the firing line.

  Even though he considered himself an American now, he still went down to Tijuana to hang with some of his friends. In 2012, he was all bold, talking himself up to his Tijuana boys. There was a dude in Colonia Independencia who wanted to get to San Diego—he had a promise of work at the Del Mar racetrack, hot-walking the race horses. He said he’d cut Lalo in, get him some cabbage if he helped him. Maybe a full-time job, depending on what the boss said. Firme! Lalo was down with that.

  He became an instant expert in schooling the undocumented immigrant.

  “You’re a Chicano, from Barrio Logan,” he instructed his pupil. “None of that Mexican shit. Just say that, homie. Let me do the talking.” He gave the kid a Padres cap and a pair of Vuarnet surfer shades. “When they ask you where you were born, say Detroit, Michigan.”

  “Porqué?”

  “It’s like, American, güey. Like, real far from TJ. ”

  “Órale. I got it.”

  “Say it!”

  “Chicano! Logan! Detroit, Michigan. I got it! USA all de way!”

  “Say ‘Detroit, man.’ Like that. Sound American.”

  “Detroit, meng.”

  “Not ‘meng’! Man!”

  “Mang.”

  “Forget it! Stick to saying ‘Chicano.’ And ‘Detroit.’ A’ight?”

  “A’ight.”

  “I got the rest. I’m American as hell.”

  In those ancient days, they didn’t need passports to return to the U.S. Lalo drove his ’67 Impala convertible. Dropped to floor level, low ’n’ slow, in custom Candy Apple blue with white trim. He still owed Big Angel for that. He would get a job, he told himself. Any day now.

  He chose the longest line of cars, figuring the border agent would be tired and easy to get by. He had his Raiders cap on his head, his Mountain Dew in his lap, had the radio tuned to oldies, had a little American flag on his antenna. When they pulled up to the booth, the guy turned out to be a woman, and she was giving Lalo the gas face before he even smiled at her.

  “Citizenship?” she said.

  “U.S., ma’am.” Flashed his army ID. “Purple Heart.”

  “Uh-huh.” She curled one lip to warn him to mind his p’s and q’s. “What was your business in Méjico?”

  “Tacos el Paisano. And, you know, shopping.”

  She leaned down and stared at his homie, sucked her teeth. “You, sir? Citizenship?”

  “Chicano, meng.”

  “I see.”

  “USA. All the güey!”

  She nodded and fingered her radio.

  Lalo was getting nervous. “We good?” he said, smiling like Pops to disarm her.

  “Sir?” she said to his homie. “Where were you born?”

  “Detroit!” he said.

  She nodded and withdrew. Lalo was about to drop it into gear and book out of there when the menso beside him decided to add to it.

  “Detroit,” he called. “Michoacán!”

  Daaang.

  They were accompanied to the secondary inspection area and cuffed forthwith. He didn’t see Moms and Pops until his trial for alien smuggling. He was as surprised as everyone else to find that, well, he was not actually a U.S. citizen. In spite of his best efforts, he brought more shame to the family when he was summarily deported.

  And now he was living in his father’s garage after creeping and running across the Tijuana River in the dark like some friggin’ wetback. Things were okay in TJ, but he needed to get back to take care of Pops. As soon as Yndio came down to tell him Big Angel was sick, Lalo headed north. Getting it together. Saving a little money. He had, like, kids now. Shit to take care of. Couldn’t take another fall.

  “Chále!” he said out loud.

  “What?” said Big Angel.

  “Nothin’, Pops.”

  “Are you talking like a gangster again?”

  “I was saying ‘No way.’ That’s chále. It’s, like, no.”

  “No to what?”

  “To death.”

  “Then why don’t you speak Spanish? Why don’t you say no, like a human being?”

  “Don’t be no racist now.”

  “A Mexican can’t be racist to a Mexican.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Lalo was looking around to see if his kids were there. “I’m a Chicano. I’m talkin’ Chicano.”

  “Didn’t I tell you that the word ‘Chicano’ came from ‘chicanery’?”

  Bullshit, Lalo thought. “Here we are, Pops,” he said, parking his father. Freakin’ culture clash up in here.

  * * *

  Lalo smiled as they beheld the tent top, erected to keep rain off the mourners: the rule was that everybody see Big Angel was the captain and his soldiers were hopping to. Why the hell not? Life was good. He was proud to wheel his father across the lawn.

  “The eagle has landed,” he said.

  He hit the little brake lever with his foot so Pop
s wouldn’t roll around.

  Big Angel craned around and looked at his son’s nice slacks. His jacket. It was too bad about the tattoos. That damned cholo cross thing on his hand.

  He had thought this about his son’s new suit: I want the boy to look good at my funeral. I want Lalo to look at the pictures and feel proud that he was dressed to the nines. Know he dressed like a Mexicano, not a vato. And know that his old man picked that suit out, that the old man had set the dress code for his own burial. And he will feel awe.

  That was all Big Angel ever wanted—to inspire awe.

  The grave was a small open shaft among flat headstones laid out like a mosaic in the lawn. Big Angel’s siblings gathered, along with those others who had stuck around to pay their respects to the familia. MaryLú, César, Little Angel.

  Various feuds and internecine scandals were held in abeyance for the day. It kept them busy, otherwise, shaking their heads over one another’s minor atrocities. Gathering in clandestine kitchen meetings to scissor their victims in absentia. Their victims were as tattered as abused coats when they were done. Allegiances shifted like the seasons. Rhetorical weapons ever at the ready.

  Minerva was standing over her brother’s stone, wiping the rain and the leaves off it. As if she could protect him now. In emerald light, beneath the melancholy leaves of the maple. Her hair gleamed with a thousand small diamonds of rain.

  Little Angel stood next to her and bent his head.

  “Minnie,” he said.

  “My big bro, Tío.”

  The stone said: BRAULIO DE LA CRUZ, 1971–2006.

  “It’s almost ten years, Tío.”

  She sniffled. He handed her MaryLú’s Kleenex from the funeral.

  “I come over here sometimes to talk to him. He was such a brat.” She wiped her nose. “I used to eat standing up, right? Breakfast. When I was still going to school. He’d sneak in and scream in my ear and make me throw Cheerios all over the kitchen.” She laughed. “Fool,” she told the stone.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here,” Little Angel said.