Angel Baby: A Novel (3 page)

Goyo moves to the gate to check the street and signals Freddy that it’s all clear.

“
Ándale, ándale,
” Freddy says to the
pollos.
He practically has to kick them in the ass to get them moving toward the car. One by one they climb into the trunk, lying on their sides so they all fit. Freddy gives them last-minute instructions: Don’t panic, there’s plenty of air. Stay quiet, and in an hour you’ll be in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“Tiene agua?”
he asks them as he prepares to close the trunk.

“Sí,”
they reply in unison, one man holding up a bottle of water.

“Buena suerte,”
Freddy says, and slams shut the lid.

Freddy’s mechanic did a good job modifying the Vic’s suspension. The rear end doesn’t sag a bit, even with all that weight in the trunk. Malone slides into the driver’s seat and starts the engine, and Freddy bends down to talk to him through the open window.

“You cool?” he says.

“Coolissimo,” Malone says.

“Then get the fuck out of here.”

Goyo opens the gate and Malone backs out. He takes it nice and slow, trying not to jostle the load too much, but it’s difficult with all the potholes.

A few minutes later he’s in line to cross the border with a thousand other cars, twenty-four lanes in all. This far back he figures it’ll be at least half an hour. He waves over one of the vendors working the creeping traffic and buys some water. Other entrepreneurs hawk churros and ice cream, sombreros, and plaster statues of Bart Simpson. A juggler tosses oranges, and a kid blows fire for tips. Last chance to score that good American green before it disappears back into the U.S.

Malone clenches and unclenches his jaw in time to the music playing in the truck beside him. He used to dive in high school and got the jitters like this before every meet, felt like he wanted to rip his skin off. But the anxiety went away as soon as he launched himself off the platform and was replaced by the peacefulness that came with the inevitability of falling.

The Vic wobbles a little, someone moving around in back. Malone turns the air conditioner on high and hopes the cool air reaches the trunk. He had a kid freak on him once, start screaming and trying to kick his way out when the car was less than fifty yards from the crossing. The guy’s panic spread to the other
pollos,
and pretty soon they all lost it.

Hemmed in by other vehicles, Malone did the only thing he could think of: He got out, opened the trunk, and took off running back to TJ, abandoning the car. The other drivers sat there open-mouthed as, one by one, six Mexicans scrambled out of the trunk and fled the same way.

This time they settle quickly. Someone’s arm must have fallen asleep or something. The Vic continues to crawl toward the border, and Malone removes his sunglasses and cleans them on his shirt. His pulse is racing when he’s three cars away from the inspector. Two cars away, it’s even worse. But then, as always, perfect calm as he pulls up to the booth.

The inspector is a heavyset Latina, almost busting out of her uniform. Her hair is dyed blond, and she’s wearing too much makeup. Malone hands her his passport, and she gives the car a quick once-over.

“How long were you in Mexico?” she asks as she punches his info into her terminal.

“Two days,” Malone replies.

“Where’d you go?”

“Rosarito. My folks have a condo there.”

“How much dope you bringing in today?”

A funny one. You got them sometimes. “Come on,” Malone says.

The woman shoots him a quick smile and waves him through, already focused on the next car in line. Malone keeps checking the freeway behind him until he’s a couple of miles down the road. Even after twenty-two runs, he still can’t believe it’s so easy. Rolling down the window, he pushes all the old scared air out of his lungs and fills them with fresh stuff.

Per the plan, he exits the 5 in National City and pulls into a gas station. Freddy is all business when Malone calls for directions to the drop-off. No girlfriend talk now, just left here, right there, left here.

The house is a rundown stucco ranch in a neighborhood of rundown stucco ranches. Someone’s dream home thirty years ago. Now you’ve got
cholos
on the corner, pit bulls in the yards, and a ten-foot-tall gang
placa
painted in the middle of the street. Everything goes to shit.

Malone turns into the driveway of 1520 and honks once. A big bald gangster jogs out of the house and opens the garage door. Malone pulls inside, and the door goes down behind him. Two more thugs come into the garage from the house.

“Whassup?” one of them, the one with
13
inked on his throat, says to Malone. It sounds more like a challenge than a greeting. Malone gets out of the car and unlocks the trunk. The first
pollo
climbs out on his own, then helps the others. They’re red-faced and sweaty in the harsh light from the bare bulb overhead, and their eyes widen in fear when they get a look at their hosts. Malone doesn’t blame them. These goons scare him too.

“Get in the house,” 13 barks at them in Spanish, and they shuffle off, heads down, looking more like prisoners than men about to start new lives. The one who helped the others out of the trunk shakes Malone’s hand.

“Gracias, señor,”
he says.

“De nada,”
Malone says.
“Buena suerte.”

13 hands Malone an envelope with $2,500 inside. Malone climbs into the car, and someone lifts the garage door so that he can back out. Five minutes later he’s on the freeway again, headed to the trolley station where he parked his own car. He’ll drop the Vic there, stash the keys under the bumper for whoever Freddy sends to get it, then drive home. Everything went fine today except for that fucker thanking him. Now Malone is going to remember him, wonder about him, hope for him, and, man, that’s not cool at all.

I
T’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE
L
UZ HAS WALKED IN
T
IJUANA.
S
HE
grew up roaming the city’s hectic streets but went north at thirteen and stayed away for six years. When she returned, it was as the mistress of Cesar Reyes, El Samurai, who put her in a beachfront condo in Playas. She didn’t walk then because Cesar was a jealous man and worried about her straying. He assigned a driver to take her where she wanted to go and to keep an eye on her. After that she was with Rolando, and he did the same. Pampered in this way, she began to think that only the poor and crazy relied on their feet to get around.

She heads downhill now toward a busy thoroughfare and scuffs along beside it, following two uniformed schoolgirls. The noise is overwhelming, the stench of burning rubber, the heat rising from the concrete. A gritty blast of wind spun off by a passing truck almost knocks her over. She knew her first few hours back in the world would be difficult—she’s been away for a long time—but this, it’s as if her hometown has suddenly turned against her. She looks around for a taxi, but there are none in sight.

She veers onto the next quiet street she comes to and follows it past brightly painted little houses lined up one beside the other with barely any breathing room between them. A woman sweeping the sidewalk nods and smiles, and a curious dog falls in behind her for a couple of blocks before flopping onto the porch of a blood-red storefront church. She stumbles upon a park—a sad patch of dirt with a few benches and a knot of rusty playground equipment—and stops there to pull herself together.

Sitting on a bench, she places the backpack containing the money and the gun between her feet and fans herself with her hand. Five minutes and she’ll be ready to go. The hardest part is over, getting away from the house. Now all she has to do is keep moving north, toward Isabel, her lodestar. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the look of disbelief on Maria’s face when she shot her, so she keeps them open, watches a balloon vendor push his cart, watches two children, a boy and a girl, climb the ladder of the slide and slide down, then run screaming to the swings.

A little girl appears beside her and stares up at her, fingers twisting the neck of her Minnie Mouse T-shirt.

“What are you doing?” the girl asks.

“Resting,” Luz replies. “What are you doing?”

The girl frowns like this is a trick question, doesn’t answer.

“Conchita!”

A woman runs up, out of breath, and kneels in front of the girl. She grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. “One more time, and that’s it,” she says. “When I say stop, you stop. Understand?”

The girl nods but is now watching the children on the swings.

“I’m serious,” the woman continues. “Look at me.”

“I understand,” the girl says.

“Good. Now go. You have ten minutes.”

The girl dashes off to the playground.

“She’s pretty,” Luz says to the woman, who sits beside her on the bench.

“My granddaughter,” the woman says. “Her mother works at the Sony factory, so I take care of her during the day. And here I thought I was done raising kids when my own moved out.”

The woman sighs and straightens her dress over her legs. “What about you?” she says. “Any children?”

“A girl,” Luz says. “About the same age as your granddaughter.”

“How nice!” the woman says. “They’re cutest right now, aren’t they? Learning so fast, but not too smart yet, where they think they know everything.”

The chaos of the city and the weight of all the years she’s missed with Isabel combine to knock the wind out of Luz. A tear gets away from her and races down her cheek. Now isn’t the time for regret, she tells herself, now is the time to be strong, but it’s no good, the tears keep coming.

“Is everything all right?” the woman says. She digs through her purse and comes up with a packet of tissues.

“Problems with my husband,” Luz says.

“I kicked my bastard out years ago,” the woman says. “Never been happier.”

Luz takes a tissue and blows her nose, tries to smile.

A man standing near a shoeshine kiosk draws her attention. He’s staring at her and talking into a cell phone. How stupid she was to stop so soon, with Rolando always bragging about having eyes everywhere. She stands suddenly and picks up the backpack.

“What’s the matter?” the woman asks.

Luz hurries away without answering. Rolando could be watching her right now, toying with her before finishing her off, like a cat with a mouse. At the edge of the park she comes upon a taxi parked in the shade of a dead tree and hops into the backseat. The driver awakens, startled from a nap, and begins to protest.

“I’m off duty.”

Luz opens the backpack and slides a hundred-dollar bill off one of the stacks of money inside. She shows it to the driver and says, “This is yours if we leave right now.”

The driver hesitates, ducking his head to see if Luz is being followed. After weighing the risks, he starts the car and pulls away from the curb with a loud screech. They’re soon lost in traffic, one taxi among hundreds.

“And so?” the driver says, sizing up Luz in the rearview mirror.

Luz drops the bill onto the passenger seat.

“Take me to Lomas Taurinas,” she says.

The
colonia
looks the same as it did when Luz left it. A maze of tin-roofed shacks clogging a dry, dusty canyon next to the airport. A slum cobbled together out of plywood, old garage doors scavenged from the U.S., cinderblocks, and blue plastic tarps. A
barrio
where fear rules, and anger flares quickly into violence.

When Luz was three, Luis Colosio was shot in the plaza down the street from the hovel she shared with her mother and two brothers. The presidential candidate had come to campaign in the neighborhood, and it was like a party, with music and cheering and vendors selling tacos and
raspados.
Luz thought he was a movie star, the way everyone called out his name and pushed in to listen when he climbed onto a truck to give a speech. She whined and whined until her Uncle Serafin lifted her onto his shoulders so she could see.

Colosio waded into the crowd after he spoke, shaking hands and hugging supporters. That’s when a man sidled up to him, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. Luz didn’t understand what was happening but was frightened by the screams of those who did. The gunman was apprehended on the spot, a deranged factory worker. There were rumors, however, that others were involved, policemen and rival politicians.

Luz directs the driver through the maze of narrow streets, past the little store where she used to buy chips and sodas with quarters begged from tourists down on Revolución, past the school with its broken windows and cracked basketball court, past the corner where the neighborhood girls taunted her because of her ratty clothes and bare feet. She shivers to see it all again, everything she ran away from. Stupid, ugly, filthy Taurinas. Her hatred for the place hasn’t cooled.

They finally reach her mother’s house, a two-room concrete bunker with tattered lace curtains hanging in the barred windows and gang graffiti sprayed across the front door. Luz tells the driver that if he waits for her, there’s another hundred in it for him.

“Only if you hurry,” he says. “This place is a den of thieves.”

The welter of electrical lines overhead casts a spider-web shadow onto the house. Two men up to their elbows in the engine of a pickup watch suspiciously from across the street as Luz climbs the crumbling steps to the porch. She smells sewage and burning trash, and her whole childhood returns to her at once. She wants to vomit, to leave immediately, but it’s finally come to this: Her mother is the only person who can help her.

She knocks once, and the door, unlatched, swings open with a creak. It looks as if someone has emptied a Dumpster in the front room. Beer cans and wine bottles everywhere, dirty clothes, boxes of greasy car parts, a giant stuffed pink elephant, four or five TVs. The only furniture is a worn-out couch. Luz recognizes it as the same one her brothers took turns sleeping on when they were kids. Flies buzz around plastic bags filled with empty cans of beans and fast food wrappers, and someone is snoring in the bedroom.

“Mamá,” Luz calls from the doorway.

The snoring turns to coughs.

“Wake up,” a man grunts. “Someone’s here.”

“Who?” Luz’s mother asks.

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Who is it?” Luz’s mother yells into the front room.

“It’s me, Mamá, Luz,” Luz says.

“Luz?”

“I need to talk to you.”

Silence, then urgent whispers. A few seconds later her mother, Theresa, staggers in from the bedroom. She’s wearing an oversized Iron Maiden concert T-shirt as a nightgown. The bright red dye job on her hair is growing out, her roots showing black and gray, and yesterday’s mascara is smeared around her eyes. She squints at Luz and says, “Yeah, it’s you,” then walks to the couch and digs out a pack of cigarettes from between the cushions, lights one.

“I’ve forgotten how many years it’s been,” she says.

“Nine,” Luz says, clutching the backpack to her chest.

“Seriously?”

“Add it up.”

Theresa sits on the couch, legs curled beneath her. She’s gotten fat. Her face is swollen, her belly. She used to be so beautiful, the most beautiful whore in the
colonia,
people said. It gives Luz satisfaction to see her looking this bad but also breaks her heart.

“Carmen wrote to tell me you were living with her in L.A., but I never heard from you,” Theresa says.

“I didn’t think you cared,” Luz says.

“I knew how you felt about me. It was stupid to keep pretending.”

She’s right,
Luz thinks. At least the bitch gave her that, the gift of truth. She made sure that Luz and her brothers knew the score from the start: Assume that everyone you meet is a liar, a cheat, a rapist, a murderer. A wolf waiting to rip your guts out. And if anyone claims not to be, trust him even less than those who have their crimes tattooed across their foreheads.

“Carmen was good to me,” Luz says. “I stayed with her and her family and went to school. I did okay, you know, even got A’s in math and in science, but I had to drop out when I got pregnant. The baby was a girl. Isabel. Her daddy died right after she was born.”

Theresa focuses on a patch of sunlight on the couch, moves her fingers through it. “I don’t need to hear this,” she says.

But Luz thinks she does, so she continues. “I went to work at Taco Bell after that,” she says. “It was fine. Not fun or anything, but fine. One day I was at the register and this guy, this sweet-talking
pendejo,
came in and told me I could be doing a lot better, that I was too pretty to be making burritos. He got me a job at a club, a place where gangsters went,
narcos.
I started out waitressing, then did some dancing.”

Then did the other thing. Luz doesn’t say this, though, won’t give Theresa the satisfaction.

Theresa blows out a cloud of smoke, her foot jiggling impatiently. “And? And? And?” she says. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

“I’m here for her, for my baby,” Luz says. “I met a man at the club. He asked me to move back here to be with him, offered me an allowance. I was only thinking of Isabel when I said yes, that she should have a future. I left her with Carmen and said I’d send money. Things were good for a while, until another man decided he wanted me, that I should be his woman instead. He and my old man fought, and the other man won. El Príncipe.”

Theresa’s eyes widen in recognition of the name. “My God,” she gasps, and springs to her feet as if Rolando were about to storm in and shoot her dead.

“Calm down,” Luz says. “I’ve left him, and I’m going back to Isabel. But I need your help.”

“I can’t help you,” Theresa says. “I don’t have anything.”

“I need someone to take me across the border. Give me a name.”

“No, get out now.”

“You owe me, Mamá.”

“I don’t owe you shit.”

Luz thrusts out a hundred-dollar bill pulled from the backpack. Theresa looks at the money, looks at Luz, then drops her cigarette into a beer can sitting on the arm of the couch.

“Your little brother, Beto, was killed last year,” she says. “They cut off his head and left his body in a ditch. And Raúl’s in prison in Texas. He’ll never get out. They were idiots who took after their fathers.” She snatches the bill from Luz’s fingers. “I thought you were smarter.”

A voice comes from the bedroom: “Who the fuck are you talking to?”

“Shut up, you fucking dog,” Theresa yells back.

Luz feels like she’ll never get away if she doesn’t go this instant. The old witch will put a spell on her, steal her breath, and feed her to the monster in the other room.

“A
pollero,
” she says.

“Go to Goyo’s Body Shop in Libertad,” Theresa says. “But don’t you dare tell him who sent you.”

Luz turns to leave without a good-bye, riding the runaway horse of her fear and revulsion down the stairs and out to the waiting cab. Theresa appears in the doorway, a mocking sneer twisting her face.

“Tell Isabel Grandma loves her,” she calls after Luz. “Give her kisses for me.”

A jet roars low over the house on its way to a landing at the nearby airport. The noise drowns out Theresa’s cackle and rousts a flock of ravens that had been commiserating on the sagging electrical lines, sends them flapping into the dirty brown sky.

Luz tells the driver where they’re headed. He holds out his hand and watches in the rearview as she takes another hundred from the backpack and passes it to him. Sensing his hunger, Luz reaches into the pack and grabs the .45. It flashes like a mirror when she pulls it and points it.

“Don’t be stupid,” she says.

The driver lowers his eyes and shoves the money into his shirt pocket. It takes two twists of the key to get the car started, and then he heads down the hill. Luz slides low in back and returns the gun to the pack but keeps her finger on the trigger. She breathes easier with every turn that takes her farther from her mother’s house. Now if only it were possible to set fire to the past and everyone in it.