Angel Baby: A Novel (4 page)

Colonia Libertad lies right on the border. It’s a crowded, noisy slum with clear views of the new Mediterranean-style subdivisions spreading across the hillsides in California. Residents heave their household trash over the border fence into the U.S., and the Border Patrol launches tear gas canisters into the neighborhood to drive off the rock-throwing kids the smugglers hire to create diversions for their crossings. The Border Patrol agents and the residents know one another by name. They exchange taunts at night and waves and hellos in the morning.

Luz’s driver pulls into a gas station and asks the other drivers gathered there about the body shop. One of them has heard of the place, gives him directions. Goyo himself turns out to be a sweaty
gordo
who plays stupid until Luz throws some money around. A hundred dollars gets him on the phone to his boss.

“Freddy’s on his way,” he says when he finishes the call. “You want to wait in the office?”

The office contains a cot, a hot plate, and a pile of porno magazines. It smells like the monkey cage at the zoo.

“I’m fine here,” Luz says.

She sits on a stack of tires and keeps a tight hold on the backpack. Goyo goes to work with a rubber mallet on a dented fender. Every blow makes Luz jump.

Freddy shows up half an hour later, a wiry little crook with a busted nose who talks too fast and constantly shifts his weight from one foot to the other, making him look like a snake about to strike.

“Who sent you?” is the first thing he asks.

“Who cares?” Luz replies.

“Obviously I do,” Freddy says.

Luz hands him a bundle of hundreds from the backpack. She realizes it’s dangerous to reveal that she’s carrying so much money, but she needs to let him know she’s serious about doing business with him. Freddy thumbs the bills and purses his lips.

“Whose is this?” he says.

“Mine,” Luz says.

“Whose before?”

Luz reaches out to take the bundle back, but Freddy, he’s quick, pulls it away.

“You seem like trouble,” he says. “Are you trouble?”

“If you can’t help me, say so,” Luz says.

“What else is in there?” Freddy asks, gesturing at the backpack.

Luz hauls out the pistol and gives him a good look at the business end. His eyes widen, but he recovers quickly and shows his teeth.
The smiles these men have,
Luz thinks.
Never a bit of truth in them.

The gun goes back into the bag, and Freddy flips through the money again. The racket of a passing truck drowns out most of what he says next. All Luz hears is “…lady, right?”

She shrugs.

“So I think you want to go first class,” he continues.

What she wants right now is to get so high that the world falls away and leaves her floating in that place where nothing hurts and nobody can touch her. What she wants is to be done with all this walking and talking and trying, to lie still in a dark room, her only sensation the crisp coolness of clean sheets against her skin.

“Don’t fuck around,” she snaps. “Say what you mean.”

“I mean I can stick you in the trunk of a car and send you out like some Indian from Oaxaca, but that’s always a gamble,” Freddy says. “You might make it, you might not. Or, for more money, I can pull some strings and guarantee you get across.”

Luz pictures Rolando drawing nearer every minute, creeping up on her.

“Look, I know you’re fucking me over,” she says, “but I’ll pay whatever it takes to be sure I get to the U.S. The only condition is, I need to go today.”

Freddy frowns and fingers his mustache. “That I don’t know about,” he says. “A guaranteed crossing takes time to arrange.”

“Today or nothing,” Luz says.

Freddy taps his palm with the stack of cash she gave him, considering this demand. After a few seconds, he shrugs and says, “I’ll do my best. Maybe this evening.”

“So get to work,” Luz says.

Freddy motions her to a filthy couch sitting in the shade, tells her she’ll be more comfortable there. She says she’s fine where she is. He offers her cookies, a soda, and she refuses both. She tries to listen in when he gets on his phone, but he ducks inside the shop and keeps his voice low.

A fly buzzes round, sent by the devil to drive her crazy. She swats at it once, twice, then gives up and watches it land and skitter over her sweaty forearm. It pauses and taps at a freckle of dried blood on her wrist, Maria’s or El Toro’s. She scrapes the spot off with her fingernail, and a bigger one on the back of her hand.

T
HE WAVES ROLL IN PALE GREEN, VEINED WITH WHITE FOAM LIKE
liquid marble, bellies full of sunlight. They rise only waist-high before flopping with barely enough energy left to make their runs up the sand. Malone sits cross-legged above the high-tide line south of the Imperial Beach pier and watches a flock of plovers work the swash zone. The skittish little birds chase the retreating waves, pausing now and then to peck the wet sand in search of mole crabs.

No alcohol is allowed on the beach, but the cops and lifeguards recognize Malone as a local, another sunstruck idler who’s dead-ended in this last-stop surf town, so they ignore the Tecate in his hand. He hides the can anyway, leaving it wrapped in the paper bag the clerk at the liquor store slid it into when he bought it. He has a thing about keeping up appearances, a conceit his parents beat into him, and one that he likes to think sets him apart from other drunks. Deep down he knows it’s a ridiculous distinction, but so what, a man needs his signifiers.

Not many people are out on this warm Thursday afternoon. A family of what might be Germans, pale going quickly to pink; a couple of Mexican kids giggling under a blanket; two jarheads tossing a football. Malone finishes his beer and could use another. It’s been an exciting day, with the crossing and the drop-off, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and his nerves have taken a pounding. He stands and brushes the sand off his ass, wonders if Pablo Honey is drinking.

The pier is a rickety mess of planks and pilings. Malone can see the ocean below, through the gaps between the boards, and feel the entire structure rise and settle with the swell as he walks out on it. To the north, the view is all the way up the coast to downtown San Diego, to the south, Tijuana, the bullring rising like Rome’s Colosseum out of the clutter.

A few surfers are riding the breaks at Boca Rio and the Sloughs, where the Tijuana River empties into the sea. It’s one of the most polluted stretches of beach in California, but this doesn’t scare the hard-cores. Raw sewage, floating garbage, and the occasional dismembered
narco
do nothing to discourage them from paddling out to catch the world-class waves. The county has given up trying to stop them, offering free hepatitis vaccines instead.

Pablo Honey is fishing in his usual spot halfway down the pier, his line just back of where the waves are breaking twenty feet below. Elbows on the rail, he reels in some slack:
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
He’s using a live anchovy on a number four hook, hopes for halibut. Nothing in his bucket yet. Malone doesn’t mean to startle him, but his “What’s up?” sends the kid tripping over his shoelaces.

“Easy, dude,” Malone says. “It’s just me.”

Pablo laughs and nods and fiddles with his Padres cap for a while, pulling himself together. “Got a new girlfriend,” he barks when he finally calms down. Words tend to explode out of him, everything an exclamation.

“Another one?” Malone replies.

“White chick, big ol’ titties.”

“Come on.”

“No shit. We’re getting married.”

“So let’s celebrate. You got a bottle on you?”

It’s a crapshoot. Some days Pablo likes a nip while he fishes, other days he feels the Lord all around him and packs a New Testament instead. Malone gets lucky: The kid reaches into the pocket of his camo cargo shorts, pulls out a pint of Popov, and hands it over.

Pablo Honey is half Chinese, half Mexican, and his real last name is Estrada. He and Malone lived in the same building in L.A. a few years back, a hundred-buck-a-week flophouse in Hollywood, Little Armenia. Pablo washed dishes to pay his rent while Malone pissed away a nice chunk of change his grandfather had left him.

Malone was generous with his money, treating his down-and-out pals to drinks and steak dinners at Sizzler, and Pablo was the only guy who tried to pay him back. He was also the only guy who never asked what the hell someone like him was doing in a dump like that. Malone appreciated the kid’s uncomplicated acceptance of his and others’ circumstances, found wisdom in it even, and the two of them helped each other along as best they could, like friends Malone had only read about in books.

He was heartbroken when Pablo announced one day that he’d inherited a little house in Imperial Beach from an aunt and would soon be moving down there.

“Good for you,” he said. “But I’ll be awful lonely.”

“Huh?” Pablo said.

“I’m going to miss you, man. You’re my bud.”

Pablo frowned, deep in thought for a few seconds, then smiled and said, “So come with me, then.”

Malone had moved up to L.A. and settled into the flop when his life in Orange County ended, and he figured he’d be there until he drank himself into an early grave. But Pablo’s offer got him thinking. After five years of slipping in vomit on the way to the liquor store and passing out at night to the sound of men in other rooms wrestling with their nightmares, he hated the constant madness of Hollywood. Whatever misery he’d been seeking, he’d experienced; whatever point he’d been trying to make to himself, he’d made it. So, after throwing one last party for all of his Tinseltown cronies, he packed his stuff in the Louis Vuitton bag he’d ended up with after the divorce and followed Pablo to the beach, crashing on the kid’s couch until he found his own place. It’s been two years now, and he’s still here and still alive—quite an achievement, he’s decided, for someone who so often wants to die.

He guzzles some vodka and passes the bottle back to Pablo, who reams the neck with a T-shirted finger and has a drink himself. A gull touches down on the railing, looking for something to steal. Finding nothing, it takes off again and glides toward the beach on stiffly arched wings.

“What’s your girl’s name?” Malone asks Pablo.

“What?” he replies.

“Your new girlfriend.”

“I met her on the Internet,” Pablo says. “She lives in Dallas. Come over tonight, and I’ll show you naked pictures.”

They stand silently then, the sun warming their backs, the breeze ruffling their hair. They often go an hour or more without speaking, and Malone is always grateful for the quiet. He’s had talk enough to last him a lifetime.

He heads for home a while later, to kill the rest of the afternoon there. His place is a couple of blocks inland, a guesthouse in the backyard of a slightly larger house. The guesthouse was a toolshed until someone drywalled and added a bathroom, and there’s barely enough space in it for a futon and a television, but Malone is okay with that. The beach is there when he wants to stretch out.

The yard of the house is an overgrown jungle prowled by feral cats as wild as tigers. On his way back to the shed, Malone rousts the big gray one he calls Smoke, interrupting the cat’s snooze in a patch of sunlight. The cat crouches and hisses at him before diving into the bushes.

Inside his room, Malone kicks off his flip-flops and snags a beer from the mini-fridge. That and a microwave are the extent of the kitchen facilities. After opening the windows to get the air moving, he stretches out on the futon and turns on the TV. He runs through the channels until he happens upon
Jaws,
a film he knows by heart but still watches whenever he comes across it.

Quint is in the middle of his story about the USS
Indianapolis
when Gail calls Malone’s name. She presses her face to the screen of his side window in order to peer inside.

“You decent?” she says.

“No,” he says. “But come on in.”

Gail rents the front house with her teenage son Seth. She’s forty, a skinny blonde who’s starting to wrinkle from too much sun but still has a nice smile and kind blue eyes. She’s been divorced for years but isn’t bitter, doesn’t blame all men for her troubles with one of them. She opens the door and pokes her head inside.

“You gonna be around later?” she says.

“Could be,” Malone says.

“Seth’s going to his dad’s.”

“Yeah?”

“So…?”

“I’ll be around.”

Once or twice a month she sneaks back to Malone’s place with a joint and a bottle of wine, and they make each other feel good for a night. It’s straight-up sex, and both of them know that’s all it’ll ever be. She wants someone more stable than him, and he doesn’t want anyone at all. He gave everything he had the first time around, emptied himself out.

“Care for a beer?” he says.

“Come on,” she says. “How are we ever gonna get to Maui if you keep spending all your money on booze?”

It’s their running joke—sad in a way—sneaking off together to Hawaii, starting over.

“I’m gonna hit the Mega Millions this week,” he says. “Jackpot’s up to what?”

“One hundred seven million.”

“The numbers came to me in a dream. You watch.”

“You’re fucking nuts,” Gail says. “You hear about Jordan and Nikki?”

“No.”

“They finally split for Alaska last night.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah, and then Nikki called me this morning and said the apartment was unlocked and whatever they’d left behind was up for grabs. I went over a couple hours ago, and it looked like everything they owned was still there. Furniture, clothes, everything. I scored a blender and a set of knives. You should go see what’s left.”

Probably nothing but junk, but you never know. When the next commercial comes on, Malone hauls himself up off the futon, grabs another beer, and strolls over to the gray stucco apartment building across the street. Jordan and Nikki’s place is on the second floor. Two guys he’s never seen before are struggling to carry a sofa out of the apartment, and after a few rounds of “You lift your end,” “No, you lift
yours,
” they finally manage to slide it through the front door.

Malone steps inside. The place has been pretty well picked over by now. A couple of surf rats are looking through the kitchen cupboards, and a homeless woman Malone knows as Daisy has piled a bunch of blankets and sheets on the bedroom floor. The only furniture left is a homemade bookcase and an ugly nightstand.

Mike the Hippie comes out of the bathroom carrying five rolls of toilet paper.

“Dude,” he says. “What a trip, huh?”

Malone kneels next to a stack of magazines and flips through them to see if there’s anything worth taking. It’s mostly old
People
s and
Enquirer
s. They were a nice couple, Jordan and Nikki. She was a waitress somewhere, and he was always talking about applying at the post office, had it in his head that delivering mail would be the perfect job for him. “You get to wear shorts” was his reason.

“Check it out,” one of the surfers says. He draws back his fist and punches a hole in the living room wall.

“Aww shit, it’s on!” his buddy yells, then jumps into the air and puts both feet through the wall before falling to the floor.

A bewildered Jordan walks into the apartment.

“What the hell’s going on?” he says.

Everyone is silent until Mike the Hippie says, “We thought you moved out.”

“What?”

“Nikki called Gail and said—”

“That fucking bitch!”

Mike drops the toilet paper and slips out the front door. Malone follows him. He hears Jordan screaming at everyone else to get the fuck out as he and Mike hurry down the stairs.

“What a trip,” Mike says again.

Malone is walking back across the street when his phone rings. It’s Freddy.

“I got something for you tonight,” he says.

“Tonight?” Malone says. “I just got back.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Freddy says. “But this is something special.”

“So special that I’m gonna want to come all the way down there again?”

“And you’ll have to use your own car, too. I can’t get another one so soon.”

“No way, man, no way.”

“Hold on now,” Freddy says. “I’m talking big money.”

“Big money,” Malone says. “What’s that in dollars?”

“How’s ten grand sound?” Freddy says.

It sounds pretty damn good to Malone. It sounds like he’d be able to hang up on Freddy the next couple of times he calls, take a little break.

“What are you trying to pull?” he says as he watches the evening fog creep in, the sun a dead red dot behind it. “If you’re giving me ten, that means there’s a lot more in it for you.”

“See, that’s what I like about you,” Freddy says. “You don’t let me get away with nothing.”