A Handbook to Luck (12 page)

It was a clear day. The clouds were piled high and spaced far apart. Nearby a train trundled by on its way to Salt Lake City, past a dusty clump of prickly pear. Dogs barked against the barbed-wire fence of a fallen-down house, all emptiness and neglect. Now and then tumbleweeds crossed their path. Enrique drove in the right lane, as slowly as he could without arousing suspicion. He wanted to make the trip last as long as possible.

Leila fiddled with the radio, trying to find a news station. She was curious about where the Shah and his wife would end up. She'd lost track of the countries that had rejected them since they'd fled Iran. Many of her relatives were leaving the country, too, unsure if they would ever return. Leila said that her father had been tortured by the Shah's secret police, that patches of his back were hideously scarred.

She said that her Iranian friends in Los Angeles wasted time endlessly comparing the two countries, in pointless debates fueled by cigarettes and tea. It got to the point that she could barely stand listening to their Persian classical music tapes. Too much nostalgia was like eating too many sweets, she said. It left you sick to your stomach.

Enrique drove past a diner with a huge American flag hanging limply on its pole. Several trucks idled in the parking lot, their tire flaps sporting the same chrome silhouette of a naked woman. A pile of gravel took up most of the lot's north end. Everyone talked about living the American dream, but what about its ravages? Wasn't that the more common story?

“Green card, green card. It's all anyone talks about here. But even if they hate it, they don't want to go home.”

“Are they hard to get?” Enrique asked.

“The best way is to marry an American citizen.” Leila lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. Her mouth made a perfect pink O as she blew. “But that costs money.”

“How much?”

“Two thousand dollars. Easier than falling in love, no?”

Leila turned the radio knob again, switching rapidly from station to station, singing along to random songs, moving to the music in her beige cashmere top. It was all Enrique could do to keep his eyes on the road. Remarkably, Leila knew many of the lyrics. Her voice wasn't worth a damn but her accent made the words sound elegant somehow.

Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer

The future's uncertain, and the end is always near…

Enrique felt himself falling hard. Hadn't his own parents gotten engaged in a day? Maybe brief courtships were a genetic thing. In 1956 Papi had been in Panama City for a week of performances at the Teatro Darío when he'd noticed Mamá at the Hindu bazaar downtown. It was unclear what happened next but that very evening, Sirena Carranza took Fernando Florit home and introduced him to her parents as her fiancé. When they protested, Sirena threatened to burn herself alive on a pyre like the widows in India.

“I want to show you something,” Leila said, taking a pair of worn brown socks from her purse. She said they were her dead brother's, that she wore them when taking her college exams. “I guess they didn't work too well yesterday.”

Enrique was curious about her brother but he was afraid to stir up any grief. He knew how impossible it was to make the dead seem like they were ever alive. Time wore everything down. He wanted to tell Leila about his mother, about the look she'd given him before she died. But even that had faded to a vague memory.

This past year, Papi had tried contacting Mamá through clairvoyants and mediums of various ethnic persuasions, the latest a Croatian sorcerer with offices behind Caesars Palace. (The sorcerer claimed that Houdini had regularly contacted his beloved dead wife in this manner.) Nothing worked. Last Valentine's Day, Papi started writing baroque love letters to Mamá. He kept the letters chronologically ordered in manila folders should anyone—namely, Enrique—ever question his devotion. But Enrique suspected that the letters were like everything else about Papi, mostly for show.

“Do you want to go scuba diving?” he asked suddenly.

Leila rolled down her window to a blast of desert air. She popped open a beer and took a long swallow, making sure the paper bag camouflaged the can. Then she lit another cigarette. “Sure.”

Enrique passed a pickup truck going forty miles an hour. He felt his blood moving at least twice that fast. He wanted to say something, anything, but he couldn't form the words. The radio turned to static then reemerged as a country station.

I walk for miles

along the highway

Well, that's just my way

of saying “I love you.”

I'm always walkin'

after midnight

searchin' for you…

“It's pretty here,” Leila said, dark strands of her hair lifting in the wind.

Enrique had driven this stretch of I-15 before with people who'd thought it a wasteland. They couldn't appreciate the subtle shifts of landscape, the way the light claimed the faintest shadow. They didn't notice the cactus wrens or the creosote or the quartz glinting off the cliffs. They didn't know that cloudbursts could drop an inch of rain in an hour, inciting flash floods, or that the desert bloomed gloriously in spring.

This woman was too good to be true. What would happen if he pulled to the side of the road and begged her to run away with him?

Leila fell asleep for the next hour. Enrique savored the simple luxury of staring at her. Twice he started to touch her throat, the gentle slopes of her shoulders, but he made himself stop. What would she think if she woke up? Leila stirred and looked at him, momentarily disoriented. Enrique told her stories about the ghost lakes in the region. Coyote Lake and Ivan-pah Lake, to name only two. He liked the fact that mapmakers bothered to mention what was already long gone.

“How old were you when your mother died?” Leila asked tentatively.

“Six.”

“What happened?”

“It was my father's fault.” He was surprised at the vehemence in his voice.

“He killed her?”

“Not exactly.”

Overhead, a pair of red-tailed hawks circled. They could have made ribbons of the sky, sent down curling blue strips of it onto the white vinyl roof of his car. Enrique loved these hawks, the way their claws seemed to smoke with triumph whenever they got their prey. Unlike people, birds were uncomplicated. Everything they did was for a reason. Their survival depended on it.

In the split second that it took Enrique to point out the hawks to Leila, he heard the frantic honking. He spotted the eighteen-wheeler in his rearview mirror, barreling down on them with all its crude power, its brakes gone. The mirror seemed to frame the moment for later recollection. Enrique flashed on something his father had told him: Every beat of your heart has two possibilities, stop or go.

He stepped on the accelerator and twisted the steering wheel. The truck nipped the back of his Maverick—he felt the thick sleeve of air as it passed—sending them into an endless tailspin before spitting the car off the narrow road into the desert dust. Miraculously, they landed on four wheels. Around them was nothing but light and a ringing silence.

Leila was slumped against the passenger window. Her nose was bleeding and there was a cut along her cheek like a pink seam. She kept touching her nose with her fingertips.

“Are you okay?” Enrique took her hand and kissed it, tasting the blood.

Leila closed her eyes. Her face was pale and damp all over. It took every ounce of restraint Enrique had not to kiss her. He peered through the cracked windshield. The truck was toppled two hundred yards ahead of them. At that distance it looked like a toy, except there were flames and smoke billowing from its sides. Maybe the driver had died that instant.

Just then the truck's back doors blew open and dozens of monkeys clambered out, screeching and scurrying into the desert like a pack of deranged jackrabbits. One monkey, a little brown one, had a broken arm crazily angled at the elbow. Enrique kept staring at the monkey as it scuttled toward the car, screeching and chattering to itself. Then it jumped on the hood of his Maverick, baring its teeth, before joining the other monkeys in the desert. But where could they go? There were no trees for them to hide in, only the Joshua trees, which were impossible to hide in.

Enrique thought of how random energies approached a common point before exploding. Chance intersecting with history and logic and reasonable expectations. Forbidden knowledge made visible, effaced and divine, as the gods busily issued disclaimers. In the end, everything was measured against mystery. One hundred and twelve rhesus monkeys that should have been swinging in the jungles of India but were, instead, destined for research labs in southern California had been set free in the Mojave Desert. What were the fucking odds of that?

PART TWO

A white star fell into the garden, Unexpected, unsought. Luck, arrow, flower, fire…

—LUCIAN BLAGA

(1981)

Marta Claros

I
t was dark when Marta woke up and headed to her backyard chicken coop. The first hints of light stirred the sky, as if the day were coming from far away. Marta walked past her arbor of bougainvillea and the rosebushes she'd planted last summer. She'd dug an herb garden, too, as Dinora Luna suggested, to have fresh remedies on hand against others' ill intentions: rosemary, lemongrass, chili peppers, spearmint. Their mingled scents made Marta feel safe.

It was against city ordinances to keep chickens in Los Angeles, but Marta wasn't the only one in her neighborhood raising them. Those who didn't have chickens were bought off with fresh eggs, so there was little danger of getting caught. Marta cracked open the door to her coop and stooped inside to the soft clucking of hens.

Buenos días, señoras. ¿Cómo amanecieron?
She breathed in the acrid scent of the hay and shed feathers. If only she could settle in among them, know the sweet ache of laying an egg. Her body seemed so stingy in comparison.

Marta went from nest to dusty nest, gently checking under the hens for eggs. Nothing from Carmen or Elsa. Nothing from Malva, Hortensia, or Pura. Nothing from the usually prolific Verónica. Only Daisy was left.
No te asustes. Así, así.
Marta hated to disturb Daisy, but she didn't want her thinking she could forgo an inspection altogether. As Marta reached toward her, the hen pecked her hard on the knuckle. It didn't hurt but a speck of blood oozed forth, as if her skin had sprung a slow leak.

¿Tienes algo para mí, preciosa?
Marta slid her hand beneath the reddish hen and felt the contours of one perfect egg. She picked it up, still warm from Daisy's body, and brought it to her lips. Carefully, Marta passed the egg along her face and neck, down her bosom and belly and between her legs. She prayed that some of Daisy's fertility might rub off on her.

Frankie complained to Marta about the number of eggs she collected. It wasn't normal, he said, to leave them on plump pillows around the house. Nobody he knew sewed clothes for them either. Eggs, he said, were for eating. Marta defended herself. At least she didn't sleep with the chickens, the way her mother used to do. What did it matter that she'd bought them a crib and a baby blanket?

“Crazy woman, what are you doing?” Frankie demanded when he saw the egg-filled crib. Marta refused to answer. Did she need to explain to him that the highest form of love was obligation?

In the prosperous neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the parks were filled with babies handed over to nannies to raise. Marta heard of one pregnant mother in Santa Monica who spoke openly of maybe aborting her child, her second. After her daughter was born, she went unnamed for six months. According to Celestina Pulayo, who worked two doors down from the family, the mother referred to her child simply as “the nanny baby.”

Recently, several of Frankie's workers had quit to take babysitting jobs on the Westside. The hours were long, but the jobs were easy. It wasn't difficult to watch a child or two. Depending on the family, there was a lot of money to be made—three hundred dollars a week, or more, especially if you had a driver's license and spoke good English. Stories spread of families fighting over the best babysitters, bribing them with Christmas bonuses and vacations in Hawaii.

Sometimes unexpected problems arose. One woman Marta knew grew so enamored of her divorced boss that she stole his underwear and danced with his empty suits in the master bedroom. Silvia Camacho had bought a hat just like the one her
patrón
wore, and made her husband wear it when they made love. Marta couldn't imagine this happening to her. She wasn't nearly so romantic. In fact, she wasn't even sure she'd ever been in love. Only this much was certain: she longed to hold a baby in her arms.

“
Mamacita,
take it easy,” Frankie said, discouraging her. “You've been working since you were five.”

But Marta didn't want to stay home without a child of her own. Only Evaristo understood her. He asked her about her chickens and marveled at the size and sturdiness of their eggs. Thanks to Frankie's generosity, Evaristo had made it safely across the border. He was eating heartily and putting on weight, too. All cleaned up, he was a handsome man. At dusk he liked to climb the eucalyptus tree in their backyard. He stayed there for hours, quietly surveying the neighborhood.

From the time he was a child, people had said that Evaristo wasn't right in the head. But just because he didn't say much didn't mean he was stupid. Evaristo carried everything inside him. He'd told Marta about the fresh bodies littering San Salvador's parks and garbage dumps every morning, their faces slashed to pulp or burned with battery acid, their spinal cords exposed. Once Evaristo had come upon a pile of corpses, mutilated women stacked neatly behind a seafood restaurant, all wearing American jeans.

The first day Marta brought her brother to work at the factory, there was a near riot among the women. “You didn't tell us he looked like a movie star!” “He's just like that actor on
Today! Tomorrow! Never!
” Not a decent stitch of work got done for a week and Frankie had to let him go. Evaristo was oblivious to the chaos. Mostly, his gaze drifted toward the factory's one paned window, where the fronds of a palm tree beckoned more persuasively than the women around him.

Evaristo then tried cleaning offices at night, like poor Tío Víctor; “poor” because their uncle had fallen down an empty elevator shaft and been killed. The building's insurance company gave his Mexican wife two thousand dollars for his life.
¡Qué desgraciados!
Marta accompanied Evaristo on his rounds—emptying ashtrays, wiping down dusty desks, scrubbing toilets with disinfectants that stung their hands. Every night, he recounted more of the atrocities he'd seen.

Soon Evaristo grew depressed with this existence, eating little and sleeping all day.
Necesito estar afuera, bajo un cielo azul.
So Marta set him up with boxes of wholesale oranges and man-goes to sell on freeway off-ramps. She got him a Sunday job, too, handing out flyers for a fried chicken drive-through wearing a clown outfit and stilts. But Evaristo wasn't aggressive enough and he was fired. Finally, with Marta's encouragement, he began peddling crucifixes.

It was hard to tell how the day would turn out. The sky was overcast and the spring winds were quiet. Only a sliver of blue shone through the upholstering clouds. Marta carried Daisy's egg in one hand and walked toward the house, a metallic taste on her tongue. She stopped to admire her sunflowers, which were nearly six feet tall. How optimistic they seemed, as if there would be no end of water and sunshine just for them.

Across the street, a bum was digging in the garbage bins for soda cans to recycle. Scrub jays screeched and fought in the laurel tree; another pecked apart a plastic bag in the gutter. The German shepherd next door chased the same stray cat. Today, Mr. Haley was painting his porch a bright orange. Marta waved at him and he swung his roller brush back at her, spattering paint. She picked up the newspapers—a Korean one for Frankie, the Spanish one for her.
El Diario
reported that three hundred people had been massacred near the Río Sapo in the province of Morazán. One nine-year-old boy had survived by hiding in a poinciana tree. There was a picture of him in the paper, looking small and scared. He reminded Marta of her brother as a boy.

The light in their bedroom was on. No doubt Frankie was doing his morning rituals: inspecting his gums, exercising his face muscles—to prevent their collapse, he said. Marta was convinced that he was a hypochondriac. Frankie swore he would die of a brain hemorrhage or a heart attack (his cholesterol
was
very high) or, worse still, some illness he couldn't pronounce. He revised his will regularly, spelling out his concerns:
Mr. Soon is to be ensured of a quiet death, not one with paroxysms of pain.
Frankie took to obsessively swatting flies, believing they carried lethal diseases. But Marta drew the line at his using insecticides in the house.

“You'll kill us both!” she protested.

For his last birthday—Frankie maintained it was his forty-fifth; Marta suspected it was his sixty-fifth—she bought him a baby Chihuahua to distract him. The six-pound Pablo turned out to be a big hit at the factory, where the women fed him lunch scraps and adopted him as Back-to-Heaven's unofficial mascot. Marta wished that Frankie would take the dog and leave for work early so that she could go shopping in peace. Instead he intercepted her in the kitchen in his underwear and socks.

“Another egg?” Frankie asked warily. He'd been drinking and playing poker in Gardena the night before, and he looked unsteady.

Marta could always tell when Frankie lost money, although he didn't comment on his winnings or losses.

“Sí, mi amor.”

“Will you cook it for me?”

“You have your oatmeal.” Marta was touched by Frankie's hairless, sagging chest. She could almost pretend he was her baby. “What did Dr. Meyerstein say?”

“I hate oatmeal.”

“Remember your heart,
mi vida.
”

“Hijo de la gran puta,”
Frankie growled.

Marta pretended to ignore him, smiling to herself. Her
chinito
certainly cursed beautifully in Spanish. She sat down to breakfast: corn tortillas, last night's beans, a helping of cream. After Frankie left for work, she climbed into the brand-new van he'd given her for Valentine's Day. It was light blue and had air-conditioning and bucket seats. Marta turned on the radio, switching to her favorite station. She drove in the slow lane of the freeway, the better to pay attention to the morning edition of
Pregunta a la psicóloga.

It was a scandalous show. Ninety-nine percent of the callers were women lamenting their unfaithful husbands. Marta frequently argued out loud with Dr. Dolores Fuertes de Barriga, the on-air psychologist, who was a broken record on one subject: how secrets destroyed relationships. What nonsense! If Marta knew anything, it was how to keep a secret. To let a man know everything inside you was pure foolishness. Why give away your power for nothing?

When Marta got frustrated with the psychologist, she turned the dial to
¡Salvado!
on the AM Christian station. The show's host, a Colombian nun from the Sisters of Mercy, interviewed people whose lives had been turned around by the Lord. This morning Gonzalo Echevarría, a womanizing drunk and discount furniture clerk, testified how he'd gotten the heavenly knock last Easter morning. Gonzalo vowed that he was sober now, a good husband, and had been promoted to assistant manager of the furniture store, which, by the way, was having a big sale on leather recliners this weekend.

Marta headed downtown to the wholesale shopping district, to the alley that sold religious articles. She needed to stock up for all the weddings and First Communions in the spring. Evaristo peddled rosaries, crucifixes, evil eye pins, and dashboard saints (the bobbling Saint Anthony was especially popular) outside the churches of South Central. Marta bought things for him by the dozen, vigorously bargaining with the mostly Chinese vendors. She knew they respected her for not settling on too high a price. Come work for us, they joked.

The crucifixes in Sid Wong's display case were twenty percent off. Marta didn't care for the depictions of Christ with glow-in-the-dark blood but Evaristo insisted that these sold best, particularly after High Mass at Saint Regina's. (The pastor there was known for his gruesome depictions of hell.) Marta lamented that Frankie was an atheist and her brother hadn't set foot in a church since her wedding. The church in her neighborhood was especially pretty, with lilies at Easter-time, and the priests worked extra hard on their sermons. Maybe she could convince Evaristo to go again. It might help him heal. She could help him pick one saint to concentrate on, someone who would protect him.

Marta lived in fear that the police would arrest her brother. It happened on street corners every day. When Evaristo disappeared for two days last winter, she was convinced that he was dead or in jail. It turned out that a woman, now his girlfriend, had picked him up on Crenshaw Boulevard and taken him home. Marta suspected that despite his good looks, Evaristo had been a virgin. The woman, Rosita Cueva, was from Juchitán and most likely a
bruja.
How else could she have so bewitched him?

There was a stall downtown that sold the best trinkets against the evil eye. Enameled medallions of the Virgin Mary were also on display and Marta decided to buy one for herself. If she wore it day and night, maybe La Virgen would take pity on her and bless her with a baby. No matter that Frankie claimed that he couldn't have children. Miracles happened every day. Look at that woman who'd gotten pregnant by her sterile husband an hour before he was killed in a drive-by shooting.

Frankie wanted a baby, too, but Marta knew that it was mostly for her sake. His only condition was that any child of his would have to attend Korean school.