The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  He looked out the door at all of them. The incessant music thrummed in his ears. He almost couldn’t hear what Ookie was muttering.

  Christmas. Sure. They were jealous of Christmas. And the ’rents had knocked themselves out for him. He had to admit it: they had gone without to make sure he had his James Bond super-pistol, his Man from U.N.C.L.E. spy briefcase, his slot car track, his Thingmaker, his electric train. The best, of course, the baddest gift any boy could get, was a sparkling metal-flake blue Schwinn Stingray bike. They all saw that bike and thought: Rich gringo pampered while Father left us to starve.

  What they didn’t see was Don Antonio’s tutorial for the soft little white boy. The fine art of learning to ride a bike. Como un hombre! Little Angel had never seen the Harley. He had no idea that his father rode such a thing. Even when they went to the Tu-Vu Drive-In and watched Adam Roarke biker movies, his father never told him. Don Antonio saw the bicycle as a way to toughen the boy. Everything was a tool toward making him a man. The belt had worked on Don Antonio’s other boys, and it worked on Gabriel.

  The white boy’s fear of the bike, of falling—of pain, for God’s sake—shamed Don Antonio. He was damned if it would have training wheels. He balanced Gabriel on it and ran down the main street, holding him until he was going fast, then let go and watched the panicked wobbling until he crashed and lay on the curb, crying. Don Antonio walked to the kid and put out his hand. It was just like the beach. Angel Gabriel thought his father was saving him. But Don Antonio took his hand to get him back up and force him onto the bike in spite of his begging and crying. And they ran and crashed. And again. Torn pants at the knees. Blood from his left knee and his nose. And he kept crashing until he could ride.

  There was no choice, so there was no problem.

  After Little Angel’s mother threw his father out, Don Antonio went to live with Big Angel. Little Angel was already away at college. Then his mother died unexpectedly in her sleep. She had a picture of Little Angel in bed with her. And a Junior League cookbook.

  It was a simple thing, really, scattering her ashes in the ocean. Just Little Angel and his mother’s friends from work—grocery checkers from Vons supermarket. There were no relatives, after all. Though Pato, loyal as ever, showed up at the boat dock and somberly climbed aboard.

  Little Angel wore her name tag pinned to his shirt. The company that ferried them out into the ocean provided them with roses and a glass of champagne each. San Diego, in the distance, looked parched and crumbling to him. Dolphins appeared around the boat, and the grocery ladies took that as a sign. His mother caught a ray of sunlight as she spread out under the water, and for just an instant, she gleamed and sparkled like glitter.

  * * *

  5:00 p.m.

  “I was so bored before you came over to say hello,” she said. “Our family is afraid of anybody who’s different.”

  The Cookie Monster’s hair had fallen. He rested his chin on his fist at the table and stared at her pale face. Her name was Liliana.

  “I’m different too,” he said.

  She patted him like a good doggie. “Of course you are.”

  “Dude.”

  “You can call me Lily,” she said.

  “For sure.” Lily—how freakin’ awesome was that?

  She was his third cousin on his dad’s side, daughter of a dentist in Mazatlán. Safe enough for kissin’ cousins, like Lalo said. Studying at UCSD. Blind since birth. His exact age. She had been to Paris. She had confused him by saying it was beautiful. How did she know? Did it smell beautiful? Probably not. His dad had been to Paris and said it smelled like pee.

  “I can’t wait to hear your band,” she said.

  “Well,” he boasted, “it’s pretty dark.”

  “I love dark music!” she said. “I have a new stage name for you. Nice and dark.”

  He had thought about stage names before; she got closer to perfect every second. “Hit me,” he said.

  “Nihil Jung.”

  “Neil Young?”

  “No, silly! Nihil. Right? Jung? Carl Jung? Oh, never mind. It’s college humor.”

  Ow.

  “Are you fat?” she said.

  “Yeah. Totally fat,” he said.

  She laughed. “Say it in your devil voice.”

  “Aw, man.”

  “For me, Carlo. Shred it. Shred the fatness.”

  “Marco. People are listening.”

  “Exactly. Isn’t that the point?” She patted the table with her palm. “Sacrifice yourself for me.”

  “I AM FAT!!!” the extreme demon roared.

  They fell across the table, giggling like four-year-old twins sharing a bubble bath. Several people craned about to stare at them. Marco waved. He was very happy.

  “Are people looking?” she said.

  “Everybody’s looking.”

  “Kiss me quick.” She scrabbled her fingers across the table and found his hand. “While they’re watching.”

  He gave her a peck.

  “Ravishing,” she said and squeezed his fingers. “So I had this dream last night,” she said. “Listen, listen—this is crazy. I hate it when people tell me their dreams, but this one is really weird. I was in this field. It was a summer day, okay? Like, all sunny. Birds singing—just a perfect day. And the fields were all golden, and the sky was blue. And there were big green trees. Little pretty puffy white clouds.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Like, how do I see it, right? I don’t know how! I just see it in my dreams! Anyway, but then this thing happened. There were people in the sky. People hanging above the field on cables. Like ornaments. Surreal.”

  “The Rapture,” he suggested.

  “Hardly, you asswipe,” she replied.

  “Screw you.”

  “You wish.”

  He stared at her face. It was animated, full of joy. Yeah, she made expressions that seemed otherworldly, but he understood she had never seen another face to know what tics were “normal.” Her lips were pink and shiny, and he was dying to see her eyes, even if they couldn’t see him.

  “How did I see those things, Carlo?” she asked.

  “Marco. I don’t know.” He bent down and smelled her hand.

  “Stop sniffing me, you freak!” she said. But she didn’t take her hand away.

  He kissed her knuckles.

  “Oh my,” she said.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Explain it.”

  “Me neither. But I would give anything to be inside your head for a minute,” she said. “I would give anything to see if what I saw was real or not.”

  “Like if what you think is blue is really red.”

  “Or some color you never saw.”

  “Or not a color at all.”

  “Blue, boy! Blue—it’s the color of wind blowing through flowers. Right?”

  He kissed her hand again. “Absolutely.”

  “You’re crazy about me, yes?” she said.

  “For real.”

  He stood. As they left the party, they were holding hands and still laughing.

  They swiped Pato’s car and didn’t come back.

  * * *

  At first, Little Angel was unsure about what he beheld, but the magnitude of it slowly came to him. Perhaps it was the colors that threw him, for Ookie had built this with no regard for matching hues. It was all a rainbow.

  “Ookie made it,” Ookie said.

  Little Angel stood there, holding his hand, breathing. “How long did it take, Ookie?”

  “Couple years. Yeah. Couple.”

  Forms made of plastic rainbows.

  There was a worktable in the shed. Beyond it, an open space that would have held rakes and wheelbarrows, even a car, but Big Angel and Ookie had cleared all that out when Big Angel could still walk. Big Angel had cut out pictures from newspapers and magazines, and he had tacked up a street map on one wall.

  “Are you experienced?’” Ookie said.

  There were sheaves of notes and drawings stacked up on
the table. Loose sheets all penciled in and colored with crayons.

  “Ookie’s blueprint,” Ookie said.

  It was huge. The expanse of the Coronado Bridge swooped away to the right. Around its nearer base, Ookie had meticulously built a model of San Diego. He had made Lego skyscrapers, hotels, even the embarcadero with a model of the Star of India docked at the pier. Little streets and avenues. Some of it sketchy—blocks barely begun. Some of it insanely detailed. Broadway was alive before him. The old Woolworth’s building was exactly as he remembered it. And down the blank riverbed that was the I-5 highway there stood a small wire model of the Eiffel Tower. Little Angel was befuddled for a moment, until he saw Ookie had affixed paper letters to it: KSON. He laughed. Yes—it was the country music station’s broadcast tower. South of the big bridge. And it all came rushing back to him—he too had thought, when he was a child, that it was the Eiffel Tower.

  “Ookie!” he said.

  “Yeah.” Ookie laughed and clapped his hands.

  “Ookie!” he said.

  “Purple haze!”

  Against the left wall was a model of this neighborhood. Lomas Doradas. Ookie scuttled over there. He pointed. “Big Angel’s house.” Little Angel nodded. “Ookie’s house,” pointing to the next block.

  They sat on the floor and stared at the plastic city. Ookie pointed out his best towers.

  “That’s El Cortez hotel,” he said. “That’s the Gaslamp Quarter, Ookie’s favorite.”

  The new Horton Plaza shopping mall was not part of Ookie’s city. It was the old Horton Plaza. With a fountain and little benches and plastic palm trees. It had been gone for decades. But Little Angel saw that it was better than the fancy stores there now. With its string of tumbledown movie theaters and its sailors and bums. Buses on the sides. Little cars lined up on Broadway.

  “Ookie steals Hot Wheels,” Ookie confessed.

  They laughed.

  “Ookie needs buses.”

  “Matchbox,” Little Angel said.

  “Buses?”

  “I think so. Trucks, cabs, everything. I’ll look it up.”

  They shopped for Matchbox buses for a few minutes on his iPhone.

  “Look, Ookie! Delivery trucks. Fire trucks. A mail truck.”

  “Buy.”

  “Hey—a VW hippie van.”

  “Buy all for Ookie.”

  They high-fived when they found little groupings of pigeons made to scale for model train setups. Cops. Businessmen in 1950s hats. Little Angel ordered and ordered and entered Big Angel’s address. He had no idea how long he sat in that room with Ookie. It was one of the best days he’d ever had, though. He hugged Ookie, but Ookie shoved him away.

  “Airplanes!” he cried, holding up a little metal 747.

  They rigged it up on a wire and hung it from a crossbeam to look like it was coming in for a landing.

  “Look,” Ookie said and held up a little Dodge Charger. “Crosstown traffic,” he said. He handed it to Little Angel and nodded at his city. “Go on.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Put.”

  Angel got up on his knees and placed the car on Seventh. Ookie squinted and shook his head. Angel moved it to Broadway, close to the water and the almost completed Union Station. Ookie nodded.

  “My brother helped you do this,” he said.

  “Big Angel. Yeah. He told me the secret.”

  “What secret?”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “What secret, Ookie?”

  Ookie tapped his noggin. “Ookie,” he said, “is a genius.”

  “You should always listen to Big Angel. He’s always right.”

  “Scuse me while I kiss the sky!”

  They held hands and studied paradise in reverent silence.

  * * *

  today

  The Confessions

  Ookie left the padlock unlatched so Little Angel could go back in and look at it again later. Little Angel was in a hurry to tell his big brother he had seen the secret city. What he’d seen was more astounding than that. He’d seen his brother for the first time. His brother, knowing his life was running out, had locked himself in a garage with a crazy boy to help him realize a dream no one would ever see. If there had ever been any doubt, Little Angel was now firmly in line with the Big Angel worshippers. Fully aboard. Big Angel: bodhisattva.

  It was dark.

  Little Angel paused at his sister’s table. MaryLú was sadly drinking a glass of red wine. She was lit semi-romantically by a burning anti-mosquito torch. She was sighing. She couldn’t understand why these party people didn’t stop to think for a minute. She didn’t know why they had all forgotten about her mother and forgotten why they were there now. Everybody was dying and nobody cared.

  “Where’s the patriarch?” he asked.

  She put her hands together beside her cheek and closed her eyes, doing a variation of the family monkey face; this apparently also represented napping.

  “Where else?” she said. “My poor brother.”

  He moved on; he’d sit in the room till Big Angel woke up. It was about time to say good night. He imagined his nice quiet hotel room. He felt like a weakling, but enough was enough. He could not imagine how his family could carry on in all this activity. They exhausted him.

  For a moment, he imagined La Gloriosa asleep beside him, her head on his chest, her hair across his face.

  The thought that this circus went on day after day stunned him. When he was a kid, alone with Dad and Mom, he had wished there was this kind of family tumult in his house. But, no. In Seattle, he had a quiet white-and-blue condo looking out to Vashon Island. He watched the Bainbridge ferries cut across Puget Sound. He put out bread on his porch railing for the gulls and the crows. He once saw a fox pop out of the woods beside his complex and mince onto the beach. Barring Seahawks games, his life was quiet. He didn’t even really like his girlfriend staying over.

  He noticed Paz glaring around at the partiers.

  Perla was slumped a bit, crushed by sorrow she knew she could not bear. She was going to die right after her man, she was sure of it. Though she would end up living on for many lonely years, guiding the family. But seldom cooking. A glass of bubbly tipped in her hand. Beside her, two old ladies played cards. He hugged her and kissed the top of her head.

  La Minnie stood with her arms crossed, looking at nothing. He went and put his arm around her.

  “You did good,” he said.

  “Think so, Tío?”

  Poor El Tigre had had to go to work. No boyfriend for her. She was flying solo.

  “You liked the mariachis?”

  “Genius.”

  She smiled at the ground.

  “Where’s Lalo at?” she said.

  “Left with his son. Said something about a dude and a thing.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  They watched Pazuzu stick her finger in MaryLú’s face and lecture her.

  “Gotta go,” Sheriff Minnie said, hurrying to them.

  Little Angel wondered where Pato was until he discovered him in the living room, asleep on the couch.

  Down the hall and into Big Angel’s room.

  * * *

  There he was, the Mexican Buddha, in his blue pajama bottoms and gym socks. He was wearing a white undershirt. Not asleep after all. Dave the American coffee bandit sat on the end of the bed.

  He rose.

  “Gabe,” he said. “Hi.” He held out his hand.

  “Dave, right?”

  They shook.

  “They call me Little Angel.”

  “So I hear. I just found out about you.”

  They looked reproachfully at Big Angel.

  “I’m their best-kept secret, Dave.”

  “Not fair,” said Big Angel. “We have a life, you know.”

  “Me too,” said Little Angel, a little alarmed that this moment had already gone a tad sour.

  Dave watched the brothers. He said, “Maybe you’re their precious jew
el.”

  Big Angel’s voice cracked. “Good one, Dave.”

  He studied the two of them, standing there, his focus intense, sucking every second of life out of the air.

  I’m not even tired, he told his dead mother.

  “Look,” said Big Angel. He had a small stack of books by his foot. “Dave thinks I can read these.”

  Dave ignored him. “We’re just hearing confession here,” he said to Little Angel.

  “Confession?” said Little Angel.

  “Got to speed read,” Big Angel said.

  Little Angel picked up the books. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain. Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel and Ruthless Trust. Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey.

  “Light reading,” he said.

  “If we had more time,” Dave said, tipping his head at Big Angel, “I’d have given him some Buddhist texts too.”

  “Dave wants me to learn to trust,” Big Angel said.

  “It’s late, I admit,” said Dave. “But a worthy pursuit, even at the last minute.”

  “Trust what?” said Little Angel.

  Dave sat back down and smiled at Big Angel.

  “God,” said Big Angel.

  “Partly,” said Dave.

  “Cancer?” said Little Angel, just a tad sharply.

  Dave said, “You should bequeath these books to your little brother.”

  Clock ticked.

  “Right?” Big Angel said. He looked at Little Angel. “I told this cabrón. I don’t have time to read these. All my life is just three words over and over: today I die.”

  “You’re being morbid, Carnal.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling him,” said Dave.

  Big Angel’s left hand was starting to shudder. He hid it under his butt.

  La Gloriosa came into the room with a glass of murky orange-brown fluid. “I brought agua de tamarindo for you,” she said as she put the glass on Big Angel’s bedside table.

  “My favorite,” he said.

  She patted his head.

  “Not cold?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Cold feels like I swallowed a knife,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Since chemo.”

  “Sí. Take your pills.”

  “Hurts my teeth. Hurts everything.”