The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “Pepe who?” said Chentebent.

  “Pepe, pues. Any Pepe!”

  Chentebent crossed his arms. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about Pepe! Oye, cabrón! It’s a joke! There is no Pepe!”

  “If there is no Pepe, why are you talking about him?”

  “Damn you, pinche Chente!”

  “You are imagining things,” Chentebent said, draining his beer and belching softly with a luxuriousness that only a liter of shrimp gas could create.

  “Listen, you bastard!” cried Don Antonio.

  This exchange lived on for Angel as the most deeply amusing moment of the night. It was better than the jokes. He discovered at that moment that he was an absurdist—it came to him as a Zen enlightenment. He fell back in his chair. Tikibent ruined the spell by widening her legs for an instant and allowing him full view of her bloomers.

  “Little Pepe,” Don Antonio resumed, “was playing in his yard.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “Go to hell, pendejo. And his grandfather came along and sat on a bench and watched him playing. He called Pepe over and said, ‘Look at this earthworm on the ground. He just came out of a hole.’”

  Chentebent raised a finger. “Excuse me,” he said. “What was the grandfather’s name?”

  “Who cares! It’s a goddamned joke! Stop interrupting!”

  Angel and the women were snickering.

  Wounded, Chentebent said, “It seemed important to you that everybody had a name in this story.” He expressed his sense of futility with his lower lip and the shrug of one shoulder.

  Don Antonio released a cry of cosmic protest to the heavens and said, “Carlos! Grandpa is named Carlos! All right? Is everybody happy now?”

  “I am happy, Father,” Angel said.

  Chentebent yawned.

  “Grandpa Carlos showed Pepe there was a damned worm on the ground, wiggling around beside its hole. And he said to the boy, ‘Pepe, I will pay you a peso if you can put that worm back in its hole.’”

  “Cheapskate,” Chentebent noted, using the infuriating Mexican term “codo duro”—he of the hard elbow—which Angel never quite understood.

  Wisely, Don Antonio ignored Chentebent, which silenced him. “So Pepe thought about it,” Don Antonio continued, “and ran inside. He came out with his mother’s hair spray. He picked up the worm and sprayed it until it was stiff, then he slipped it down the hole. His grandfather gave him his peso and hurried away. The next day, Pepe was outside playing again. His grandfather came out of the house and gave him a peso. ‘But, Abuelito,’ Pepe said. ‘You already paid me yesterday!’ Grandfather Carlos said, ‘No, Pepe. That peso is from your grandmother!’”

  Don Antonio stood there with his arms raised.

  Suddenly the women burst into cackles, even Mamá América.

  “Ay, Tonio!” Cucabent shouted.

  After a pause, Chentebent said, “I don’t understand a word you said.”

  This exact moment was when hell came through their gate, and Don Antonio showed Angel that he was a madman and a Pancho Villa. As they all laughed, the gate flew open, and a drunk fisherman staggered into the courtyard with a huge knife, one meant for gutting sharks and tunas, clutched in his fist.

  “Chentebent!” he shouted.

  One of the myriad enemies of the odiferous Bent corporation, come to call.

  “I slice you open like a pinche fish, cabrón!”

  The knife swung back and forth, held low like a real knife fighter would hold it.

  “You slept with my wife!”

  The women cried out.

  Tikibent jumped behind Angel and wailed like a police siren.

  Don Antonio still stood with his arms stretched wide. He wasn’t in uniform, so he didn’t have his pistola on his hip. He was sorely disappointed when he reached for it to blow this asshole back out of the gate.

  For his part, Chentebent downed a tequila shot and turned his watery red eyes on his assailant. He didn’t seem inclined to rise to his own defense. He didn’t know this pendejo, nor could he imagine which of his various paramours might be attached to him.

  “She wasn’t any good anyway,” he said. Then belched.

  Mamá América rushed to shield Angel with her body. And Tikibent moved her aside so she could see the fight. The green parrot in his cage began trying to fly, shaking the cage so badly that seeds rained out on them.

  Don Antonio turned to the deadly sailor.

  “You shit,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You vermin. You pig.”

  “Watch yourself.”

  “You son of a whore. You come into my home and threaten my guests? You dare wave a knife at me? I will kill you and your entire family. I will kill your children, and I will kill your grandchildren. And I will dig up your ancestors and shit in their mouths.”

  “Hey.”

  Don Antonio tore his own shirt open. “Stab me, chingado. If you think you can kill me, stab me now. Right in my heart. But be sure I’m dead. Because I am about to unleash all of my wrath on you, you fucking dog.”

  The sailor stared at him with true terror on his face. He had no idea who this maniac was, but he was clearly the one man in La Paz the sailor did not want to fight. The sailor didn’t even pause to muster his dignity. He spun around, ran into the street, and charged as fast as he could toward the sea, upending trash cans as he fled.

  For the rest of his life, no matter what he thought of his father, no matter what hardships or sorrows, what humiliations or horrors befell him, Big Angel remembered that moment as the single most heroic thing he would ever witness. He thought he would never be able to be a man like his father.

  Even Chentebent clapped his hands, albeit softly.

  * * *

  The next day, Angel boarded El Guatabampo and sailed into the hazy blue. He had no chance to bid farewell to his Perla. And her family did not have the technological miracle of a telephone. He tore himself away from the land, choking back tears. Chentebent hooted the steam whistle incessantly, in spite of his own hangover. Life was pain, after all. Leaving Perla, Angel was sure, would be the worst of it for him.

  The last thing his father said to him was “We need to know—did you sleep with Tikibent?”

  “Qué?”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “Father! No! She is my cousin!”

  “Idiot,” his father replied. “You could have done anything you wanted with her!”

  As soon as the boat was out of sight, Don Antonio and his little family walked home. He collected his two bags, gave the two children formal hugs, and—oddly, it seemed to everyone—shook Mamá América’s hand.

  “If you could have produced more sons,” he said, “I would not be forced to leave you.”

  She had a completely still face, thinking: You vermin.

  “Take care of my motorcycle until I send for it” was the last thing he said. He trudged away toward the center of town. Whistling.

  América had been planning to murder that damned motorcycle, but she wasn’t stupid. She strode over to the machine and ripped the drop cloth off it. “Play,” she told the children, who had no idea their world had just ended. And later that day, while her older son vomited operatically into the Sea of Cortez, she sold the motorcycle to a doctor from Cabo San Lucas, for she knew she would have to feed the household. But even that money would eventually run out. She and these two would go hungry. They would even eat the doves in the patio cages, and regret that they couldn’t bring themselves to kill and cook the parrot.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, far across the sea, Angel worked every day and saved his centavos for when he could escape the hell he had unwittingly entered. Chentebent barely paid him. Cucabent did his laundry and cooked for him, and, by God, that was generous enough in their opinion. Where Angel had imagined nightly gatherings and uproar as he had known during the Bents’ invasions of his home, he instead found himsel
f in the outer dark. Alone. Miserable. Hungry. Under siege.

  At first, he slept in a little lean-to in the family’s small huerta—tucked in among bananas and two mango trees. A date palm full of iguanas. Giant spiders that terrified him. And the washhouse-toilet, where he showered in cold water. Mazatlán was almost always warm enough for a cold shower, and so it wasn’t the water that bothered him as much as the huge roaches that flew out of the drain.

  One of his duties was to mop out the evil little toilet room—he had to empty out the tin toilet paper can since the pipes would not swallow soiled paper. It disgusted him. He held his breath. Chentebent wadded up giant knots of awful paper while allowing Big Angel five sheets a day. “Scrub your culo with a sponge!” his uncle said.

  Angel started to sense something was wrong when he learned that the neighbors did not like the Bent clan and tended to shun them. Chentebent’s behavior was unacceptable to good Mazatlecos. People on the street were even wary of saying “Good morning” or “Good afternoon,” which was rare in Sinaloa. Rudeness was a real sin to them. He told himself the beatings weren’t so bad—Don Antonio could hit harder than Bent could. At least they weren’t every day. And Tikibent got hit more than he did.

  He did toilet duty every morning and night, and he raked the huerta, and he swept the house, and he scraped and painted and mopped and hauled nets on the boat. He was hungry all the time. His growling stomach wouldn’t let him sleep at night. Cucabent and Tikibent filled the little toilet bucket with “los secretos”—things that were best kept secret, in his opinion. And then he realized that Tikibent left him other things: underpants draped casually over the edge of the sink. Or the door left half open as she showered. He missed his mother and father, and he wept at night thinking of Perla.

  He didn’t know why it took him so long to write to her. Perhaps it was shyness. Or shame. He could not find the words for her. And it was suddenly six months later, and he borrowed some paper and an envelope from Tía Cucabent. And he bent to it like some monkey transcribing scripture, agonizing over each line and crumpling drafts until he was down to his last sheet and had to let the letter go.

  “Mi Dulce Perlita,” he wrote, then tried a fresh opening added to this one:

  Perla of Great Price—

  I miss you like a caged bird misses the sky. I am in a cage. But I will be free. And I will come for you because I know you miss me as much as I miss you. And we will make a new world!

  He went on in this vein for a few more lines and ended with tears and great kisses and exhalations of fervor. He trembled when he took the letter to the mailbox by the docks. In those days, of course, there was only the somnambulistic Mexican postal service to deliver messages. And his ten-centavo letter took almost two weeks to arrive in La Paz. And his response was tardy in the writing, followed by its glacial delivery. So he didn’t hear from her for over a month. A month spent fretting and waiting. It was the epitome of romance in his mind—somehow noble. He felt elevated every day by his suffering for her—a suffering of greater depth and quality than these squalid days as Chentebent’s scut boy. But like many lovers before him, awaiting some imagined billet-doux full of brace, he received the letter all dreamers fear most.

  Esteemed Angel.

  Oh hell no, he thought. He knew already. Say no more. Life had already ended with those two anemic words of greeting. It could have just as easily said, “Hello, Loser.”

  He scanned the bad handwriting for the three lines it took for her to confess: “But you never wrote to me, and I have found another.” Angel immediately burned Perla’s letter. And he crept to Tiki, against his will—he sinned. It was like his little pole dragged him, the most powerful magnet on Earth. Just the sight of Tiki made it start to bounce. Like some band conductor’s baton, counting out the beats of his broken heart. He thought if Tikibent saw this bouncing, she would flee from him. So he wore his shirts untucked. When she saw his shirttails, Tikibent thought he was flying a battle flag to announce his intentions. She took that jumpy twig in hand and strangled it until it relaxed.

  He was embarrassed to be alive. His hands shook. And he was sure that God would strike him down. His life was shame. Betrayed and abandoned by everything and everyone.

  But before God could be stirred to wrath, Chentebent struck first.

  He crept out to Angel’s hut, reeking of spoiled shrimp and rum. He fell on top of him. Breathed in his face. “Are you hard?” he kept saying. “Are you hard? Do you beat it? Do you?” He scrabbled for the front of Angel’s pants. “Let’s see that meat. Let’s see what you’re giving to my girl.” Chentebent, laughing and blowing reek in his face, fat and crushing, no matter how Angel kicked.

  Angel kept thinking: I thought you were a good man. I thought you were funny.

  Chentebent collapsed into thunderous snores atop him.

  * * *

  He took his first revenge on the pirate the next day.

  When no one was looking, he scooped huge globs of lard out of Cucabent’s red cans. Lard being saved for frying beans. And he smeared it inside the legs of Chentebent’s favorite canvas pants. When the outraged howling began, Chentebent coming at him with his legs splayed, waddling, red in the face and squishing with every step, Angel stood up to the blows and smiled at Tikibent, who watched from her window, ripping at her hair and laughing. He lost a tooth that day.

  Chentebent dragged him roughly to El Guatabampo, his great callused fingers leaving livid purple imprints on Angel’s arms, as if he had tattooed dark lilies upon them.

  “Earn your keep, you goddamn freeloader,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”

  Angel had blood on his face, in his mouth.

  “Oh, you’ll learn your lesson. You little prick.”

  All Angel had to do was wait. He could outlast anything. He outlasted Chentebent’s beatings. He outlasted his uncle’s grunting visits at night.

  Only when he was alone did Angel weep, snot all over his face. He slept on a pallet of old blankets in the poxy galley, tucked under the sink. And he scraped and painted and scrubbed and gutted, fished and crabbed and mended nets and served as insomniac watchdog all night, alone. He sometimes had to take gaff in hand and beat back bandits and drunken sailors from foreign ships, who crept to the foul boat along the docks. He listened to the drinking and fighting on other boats, the music coming from the shore, the laughter of whores and lovers, and the barking of dogs. When the church bells rang, he felt that the world he knew was in some other land. Was too far away to ever be found again. He would show Perla the depth of her mistake. “I am worthy, I am worthy,” he recited as if in prayer.

  He was cut across the chest by a skinny old sailor, who took the gaff to the face and vanished overboard among the oil slicks and dead fish. He bled, watching the old man drag himself up a ladder at the next berth, slimy and wobbly as he stumbled into the night. Fat blood drops splashed at his feet. Angel never said a word, but he remembered the moment. Kept it inside him.

  He wrapped his chest in rags and taped it over, and the fever turned his front red and made him shiver as if snow were falling, but he never told. He stole rum from the galley and dripped it screaming hot into the pus-drooling wound. He bit his lips and cried and kicked his feet.

  He carried on in shock and terror for days out there, waiting for God’s wrath or the sailor’s comrades—neither of which came. He suspected this entire life was a turn of God’s displeasure. He hid his meager pay in a coffee can behind the galley sink, and he found Chentebent’s chest of oily pesos—his operating budget for their fishing expeditions—locked in a cabinet in the wheelhouse. Chentebent began to charge him for beans and tortillas.

  He preferred to go hungry. He ate only what was in the boat, even raw bait sardines. He saved every centavo he could. Those nights when he ate, and his guts twisted and groaned inside him, and Perla was so far away, and he feared his mother and brother and sister might be hungry and abandoned across the sea, were the darkest of all.

  The next
time Chentebent came for him, he had the gaff ready. The pirate had come aboard and already opened his filthy dungarees, and Angel swung the gaff with his eyes closed. Blind, flailing. He never really thought he’d connect with the side of Chentebent’s head. The hideous crunch of the club hitting the skull. The startled grunt, and the immediate scent of feces. The crippling spike of pain up his own arm when he hit the big man. And the splash.

  By the time he opened his eyes—for he had kept them clenched for just a moment, in the hopes that what he had just done had not really happened—the big man was sinking into the oily water, his undone pants around his knees.

  Angel waited for him to surface. But he did not.

  * * *

  The rest of that night came in a panic. His memory was never clear. For he was still just a boy, and although he was terrified of what he’d done, he was even more afraid of getting in trouble for it. A thousand lies pulsed through his head. Some part of him believed the fisherman would climb a ladder over at the next mooring and curse at him. He ran back and forth, but there was no magical portal on the Guatabampo that opened to some fresh new world where things were beautiful again.

  The coffee can of pesos went into his mochila with his two extra pairs of dungarees, his shorts and socks, and his three shirts. He got the box of fishing money out from the main cabin. The boat’s extra fuel cans were difficult to lift, but he was strong in his panic. It was all he could imagine now: a fraudulent accident. He saw himself being interviewed by police—perhaps his own father. No, no! He was drunk. He threw me off the boat and told me to never come back. I took my severance pay and bought a bus ticket. I don’t know what happened after I left. I saw nothing. I wanted to join my father.

  Mamá América had finally confided to him in a terse letter that his father had gone north. And that she and his siblings would probably follow. He would confront his father for abandoning his family if it was the last thing he did.