The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “Bend over,” he’d said.

  “No, Papá!”

  The belt hung from Don Antonio’s fist.

  “All right, mijo. Defy me. Make it worse.”

  As he lay twenty-five stripes across his boy’s ass and back, he ordered him: “Do. Not. Cry. Cabrón.” One syllable per blow. Don’t. Cry. Ca. Brón. The whistle, and the snap when it hit. The boy’s hands trying to block the blows. “Raise your hands again, pendejo. Raise them to me. That tells me you want to fight me. And I will add twenty-five to this. Yes? It’s what you want. Does that make you happy?”

  And he looked to see, for he knew that when he whipped naked men in the jail they sometimes became hard, rising like small branches as they screamed. His boy covered himself with his hand. Don Antonio suddenly lost his strength. His will drained out. His arm fell, and he stared at the network of red X’s all over Angel’s body as if they had appeared miraculously, like the face of Jesus in a cloud.

  He looked at his son now. Regretting it a little. He gripped Angel’s shoulder and smiled at him.

  “I touch your shoulder,” he said grandly, “for good luck!”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  He rubbed Angel’s head. “Mijo!” he said.

  Honestly, Angel didn’t know what to think. He was pretty sure his father didn’t care for him much. He leaned around Don Antonio and stared at the suspect’s bench. Father turned and looked over there too.

  And there they were: the Castro family, bedraggled in the no-man’s-land between the front lobby and the dreaded cellblocks in back. Nobody had yet handcuffed them to the gouged wood of the bench. A skinny young man, dripping blood in slow, fat, greasy drops from a gashed chin, held his hands together between shivering thighs. He had a black eye. Beside him sat a girl—Perla—with skinny, knobby gray knees and cuts on her face still sparkling with bits of glass. No more than fifteen. She had huge eyes, filled with fear, and she clutched the hand of a smaller girl. This would turn out to be the young Gloriosa, playing with a naked doll, twisting its arms as if trying to dismember it.

  “What is this?” Don Antonio called.

  “Car wreck,” the deskman said.

  “Anybody die?”

  “No.”

  Don Antonio snapped his fingers. “Reporte,” he shouted.

  There was no report.

  “What do you mean there is no report?”

  Shrugs. “It is early, Jefe. This just happened.”

  The kids on the bench stared at the floor.

  A cop stepped up and spoke: “This pendejo,” he said, pointing to the bloodied boy, “ran into a pickup truck full of ranch hands.”

  Una pee-kah.

  “Ah, cabrón,” said Don Antonio, looking down at them.

  Perla started to cry.

  “Sorry,” the boy said.

  “Where are the cowboys?”

  “They ran away.”

  “But you didn’t run.”

  “No, señor. They stopped right in front of me—I didn’t have the chance to stop.”

  “You couldn’t stop.”

  “I couldn’t stop.”

  Even Angel knew that in the matter of car wrecks on the peninsula, everyone was arrested and investigated. Even the injured. Guilty until proven innocent.

  “You didn’t know enough to run away too?” he said.

  “Yes, sir. But I could not leave my father’s truck.”

  Angel watched the skinny girl in the middle weep. She was inconsolate. He was immediately in love. He rose into gallantry as if he knew it was demanded of him, pulling his handkerchief out of his back pocket and stepping over to her. He extended his hand. She stared at the white square and then looked at his eyes. He nodded. She took it.

  A young cop mocked them in almost-English. “Everybody goin’ to jail!” He laughed, saying yail.

  “Ya pues,” Don Antonio said, watching his boy seduce the girl.

  Angel was in a swoon. She was a bit younger than he was—Don Antonio saw that right away. And wanton. She had that look about her. She already knew how it felt to have a man. He might have gone after her himself.

  He glanced again at his son. Angel was thinking with his little pistola, Don Antonio saw. He took an inventory of the girl. Her eyes were as huge as a deer’s. Her wild hair still dropped pebbles of glass. Her nose was big.

  Angel reached over and took some glass out of her short black hair. She stared up at him. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

  Don Antonio thought: He can’t even see the smoke coming out of her.

  “Can I pay a fine?” the wounded boy on the bench said.

  Don Antonio rose in height and inflated his chest. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I—”

  “Shut your hole.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you suggesting that we accept bribes here?” He used the classic term: la mordida.

  “No, sir.”

  “Are we dogs that bite?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is that what you’re calling me? Do I look like a dog to you, pendejo?”

  “No. Never.”

  Angel glanced up at his father. His father stared back. Christ. He was smitten. He was imploring his father with his eyes. Don Antonio chuckled, looked over at the deskman. They both laughed. The girl had taken her big brother’s hand. She was willing to protect him. Don Antonio liked that.

  “Está enamorado,” the other cop at the desk noted. “Tu hijo.”

  “You,” snapped Don Antonio, pointing at the girl. “Cómo te llamas?”

  “Perla Castro Trasviña.”

  “You could go to jail right now.”

  She covered her face with her hands. The others continued to stare at the floor. Portrait of a family trying to discover the gift of invisibility. His idiot son pushed into this bedraggled family group and put his arm over her bony shoulders. As if he could defend her.

  “Perla,” Don Antonio finally said. “What does your family do?”

  “Restaurant, sir.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “La Paloma del Sur.”

  “If we come to see you, I expect good food. You cook it for us.”

  “Yes.”

  She was leaning against Angel! Ah, cabrón!

  Don Antonio put his hands on his hips. “This is your lucky day,” he said. “Take your brother to a doctor.”

  They goggled at him. So did the other cops.

  “Go on,” he said. “Get out.”

  They scrambled away.

  “I like shrimp tacos!” he called as the door slammed shut behind them.

  The police all laughed.

  Don Antonio put his hands into his pockets and jangled his change and keys. “Mijo,” he said, “I am the law. Never forget.”

  “I will remember,” Big Angel promised.

  * * *

  The last time Big Angel saw his father in La Paz was at his own farewell party.

  They had conspired behind his back to be done with him.

  Parents were mysterious creatures, full of plots and plans and secrets. Angel tried to be the guide for Pato and María Luisa through the strange landscapes of their parents’ marriage. But sometimes even his brilliance was bested by their weirdness. All families were strange, Angel already knew. He didn’t like to visit other families, because he was always ill at ease. The Basque family down at the end of their alley put bizarre sauces on their food, for example. And the hallelujah Christian converts kept saying “Gloria a Dios” and “Amén” all the time. They kept trying to give him Bibles. He palled around with El Fuma (for “Fu Manchu” due to his attempted mustache), but he steered clear of Fuma’s family. They said grace before they ate, and he didn’t know the words. Don Antonio would just take his place at the head of the table and await Mamá América’s food with a rolled-up corn tortilla in his left hand and his elbow on the table. Tortilla raised beside his ear like some weapon about to fall.

  After his erotic night on the
beach with Perla, however, Angel saw her and her family every day. Don Antonio could have locked him in one of the rebar-fronted cells at the station and he would have tunneled out. He barely completed his classes every day in high school before he was first out and hustling across five alleys and four main streets and one dusted plazuela to arrive at the front door of La Paloma del Sur. Then he tried to act very casual, as if he had happened to wander by on his way home. Hands in pockets, looking up and down the street. Then turning, looking up at the restaurant’s front window, as if startled that he had ended up before it. Squinting in. Elaborate performances of nonchalance contorting his features. And the whole while, the Castro family inside, watching him and laughing.

  Perla didn’t go to school. La Paloma was her school. Her father had drowned in a fishing boat accident, and her brother had signed on to the big tuna boats and gone into the Pacific. So it was her and her sisters, Lupita and Gloriosa. Watched over and kept busy by their terrifying mother, Chela. She of the relentless flyswatter who could find a leg even as the girls ran to escape. She whose voice sounded like a frog and whose squat body looked like a clenched fist. She of the prematurely white hair and the most exquisite frijoles fried in lard of all La Paz.

  Big Angel would mosey in, blushing like a red electric sign, and the females would ignore him in the elaborate fashion of Mexican women who are watching a man quite carefully. Except for Perla, who fluttered and flushed and rushed to place Pepsis and limes in front of him, and to waste tortilla chips on him. Chela told her and told her and told her: “Make men pay. They come in here to look at you; make them pay for it. Once you give a cabrón anything for free, he’ll be all over you and never think of buying you a ring. Look at him—he’s pole-vaulting across the room every time he sees you.”

  “Ay, Mamá!”

  In back, there was a small courtyard and a shaky metal stairway that led up to one of those improvised concrete-block apartments found everywhere in Mexico. An outside sink with yellow water, and inside, two rooms and a toilet. Angel never got upstairs to see it. Chela would have broken his legs.

  But Chela knew a good thing when she saw it: the policeman’s son. Yes. Mucho dinero, she thought. She could get her girl in that crowd and manage things nicely. It was a terrible fate to have a house full of daughters, she thought, but she had been raised to be a ranchera, and she could trade stock and move breeding heifers around to everyone’s advantage. So she allowed this simpering romance.

  Still, she wasn’t going to smile at the horny little bastard.

  * * *

  Perla wasn’t even there when the world changed for Angel. It would take years to see her again. And it would be in Tijuana.

  His aunt Cuca had married a pirate. Well, that’s what Don Antonio called him. He was half Sinaloan, from the legendary town of Chametla. Chametla! Where Cortez allegedly sat on a rock on a day so hot the stone was melting, and his nalga cheeks had left a permanent impression. And he was half something else, from one of the many Anglo-Celtic incursions into Sinaloa in pursuit of mining jobs. Vicente, or “Chente.” Chente Bent.

  Chente Bent! Skipper of the heinous fishing boat El Guatabampo! It clanged and farted into La Paz’s docks in a miasmic galaxy of stench, attended by hysterias of seabirds engaged in air battles over Chente Bent’s offal. Don Antonio called Chente Bent’s family “los cochinos,” which made the children giggle, while Mamá América scowled; Chente Bent had whisked off her younger sister, and she was not dirty. Her sister was now Cuca Bent. Just like that—the whole name, for Chente Bent announced himself thusly every time he spoke of himself. He made of the name a kind of brand, all run together: Chentebent. He could have been selling nasal sprays or a new model Chevy. The all new Chentebent.

  Cucabent, as much as she suffered under the toxic attentions of the pirate, deserved more respect than to be called dirty by Don Antonio. And their daughter was Tikibent. They had a German shepherd named Capitán Bent. Capibent.

  More than a name, the Bent surname was a pronouncement.

  “Los Pinches Bent,” Don Antonio complained.

  * * *

  El Guatabampo sailed across the Sea of Cortez twice a year, in search of sweet La Paz abalone and little rock lobsters. It was a regular celebration when the boat arrived at the La Paz docks. Chentebent brought flounder and shrimp and sea urchins (whose orange meat made Angel vomit) and octopi and long steaks of oily marlin. Don Antonio would send off for a goat to be shot, and he roasted it in a bed of coals under the ground. They ate and drank beer and belched and gossiped for several days.

  Tía Cucabent and the frizzy-haired cousin, Tikibent, sometimes hitched rides on the old boat, and they came into the family’s little courtyard smelling of spoiled fish and perfume. It wasn’t especially agreeable to Angel, though Tikibent showed an alarming interest in him on that last visit, and whenever the adults weren’t watching, she snuck him beers and pressed against him. She had a black eye.

  “Son, you have real impact on your cousin,” Don Antonio whispered.

  “She smells like Chentebent.”

  “Ah, cabrón!” Don Antonio pulled him aside. “Put Vicks in your nose.”

  It worked.

  They danced.

  * * *

  That day, Cucabent and Tikibent joined Mamá América in cornering Angel. They herded him into his parents’ bedroom like a recalcitrant yearling bull. He didn’t like all the women closing in on him. “Your eyebrows!” Tikibent cried. “You look like a crow is stuck to your face.”

  The torture began: tweezers wielded mercilessly, the women clearing the scrub off his brows and pinching him or insulting him when he squirmed or cried out. They harried his poor face until they had sculpted this extravagant hedge into two surprised-looking Rita Hayworth arches. Forever after, he would make this ritual part of his secret life with Perla. No one would ever know.

  * * *

  Don Antonio and Mamá América sat him down after his Spanish Inquisition eyebrow experience and informed him that he was going to Mazatlán on El Guatabampo. He cried out in outrage tinged with delight. He didn’t want to leave Perla! Yet he didn’t mind missing school. And he had never taken a long boat ride. Or seen far Mazatlán. The big city! Where all the sophisticates lived.

  They thought he was stupid, as parents often do. Well, he was stupid, as children often are. He had no idea he was being moved aside to facilitate the dissolution of their marriage.

  Don Antonio had for years engaged in mysterious visits to the northern border on “police work.” Mamá América knew he was visiting a cousin—a “secret” lover of his in Tijuana. But he really had his eye on the other side. In those days, Mexican men wanted two things: American cars and American women.

  He had told her that very week he was leaving her for the other woman. But she knew what the other woman didn’t know: Antonio would leave that woman too.

  She never let out one word of this betrayal to the kids. She was not about to beg him to stay or to let her horror show. She knew, however, that she could not deal with Angel’s stormy emotions once the betrayal hit. The little ones would be hard enough. She and Don Antonio would have to move Angel out of the house before the world collapsed around them. Hence the idea for him to leave with Chentebent.

  Sometimes she imagined poisoning Don Antonio. A little rat poison in his coffee…

  The plan was for Don Antonio to board the long-haul bus as soon as Angel the Sailor set out to sea. By the time their son found out, the damage would already be done and time would have passed. Letters were slow. Don Antonio demanded only one thing of his wife and her sister: that his son never be known as Angelbent.

  Mamá América thought of Don Antonio’s old gray upright piano, which sat in a corner of the house. He had bought it from a rotten cantina on the outskirts of town, where desert rats slumped in the dark, drinking pulque and mezcal. The owner had sold it to him for a hundred U.S. dollars. It was covered in cigarette burns and stains. But he loved it. He played it for the
family every day. He played a few Agustín Lara tunes now, for the party. After he was gone, América decided, she would chop it up for firewood.

  All through that smoky last supper with the Bents crowding the small table under the plum tree, América never dropped her faint smile. The Harley was parked beside the back wall of the garden, exuding malevolent energies from beneath its shroud. She was smiling because she planned to roll it into the sea as soon as her bastard of a husband was settled in his bus seat.

  Chentebent was telling appalling jokes that made Mamá América send the smaller children to their beds. Angel was hypnotized by these nights, when his father drank liquor—Chentebent was a notorious carouser, along with his many other attributes, and he caused Don Antonio to drink tequila. An astonishment. And Don Antonio transformed from a carved pillar of righteous strength to a fluid, dancing creature of many voices and filthy uproars. For the rest of his life, Angel would long to reduce a house full of people to a choking, bellowing mess like these men did.

  “Ay, Chente!” the women would cry. “Ay, Tonio!” Whether red-faced from laughing or embarrassment, Angel could never tell.

  “And then,” Chentebent shouted, “the elephant stuck the peanut up Pancho’s ass!”

  Guffawing, Cucabent fell out of her chair, and Don Antonio jumped up and goose-stepped around the courtyard, holding his stomach and trying to breathe through laughing. The parrot screamed in its cage, as if it understood the joke as well.

  “Listen, listen!” his father said when he caught his breath.

  Their hilarity died down. The meat still crackled in its red-hot pit. Shrimp heads lay all over the table, staring with their black pencil-tip eyes. And Tikibent grinned ferally at Angel with a shiny wet mouth he knew would taste of lime and salt and fish oil. Beer cans and tequila bottles and several glasses covered the table and the ground beneath it. Mamá América thinking all the while of sharp knives and testicles.

  “Listen,” Don Antonio repeated, unsteady in the middle of his wobbling shadow, pushed jaggedly across the flagstones by lamps hung in the tree. “I have a joke for you! So. Little Pepe was playing in the garden.”