A Handbook to Luck (13 page)

“Who will help him with his homework?” Marta demanded.

“I will,” he promised, and she believed him.

Since her first dinner with Frankie, he'd shown her nothing but kindness. He was far from perfect—an overgrown baby, if truth be told—but there was nothing malicious about him. Frankie was like the sugarcane he was cultivating out back: brittle on the outside but pure sweetness inside.

The women at the factory—except for Dinora, who defended Marta—jealously gossiped about their union. He couldn't marry Marta because he had a wife in Korea and a divorce was impossible. Well, she wasn't officially divorced from her husband either. (She'd heard that Fabián had remarried some country girl, which made him a bigamist on top of a
pendejo.
) Marta promised herself that she would send for the paperwork for a proper church annulment.

Last March she and Frankie had moved into their house. It was an old Craftsman, built in the 1920s, and falling apart. There was a hole in the roof and half the floorboards were rotting but Frankie had bargained it down to a good price. They decided to fix it up little by little. He'd put her name on the deed, too, though they weren't officially married. The official part didn't bother Marta. As far as she was concerned, Frankie was her husband. When he went off gambling and drinking with two condoms in his wallet, she didn't mind so much. Most of the time, the condoms stayed right where he put them.

Marta stopped at a luncheonette for a bite to eat. The mix of offerings on the chalkboard tempted her—cheeseburgers and
chilaquiles,
ramen soup,
pupusas,
chow mein, goat stew. “I'll have the chow mein and an
horchata,
” she ordered. In Los Angeles, it was possible to become someone other than who you started out to be. You could go from poor to rich and back again, learn to speak another language, accustom your tongue to different spices. You could buy steak for eighty-nine cents a pound. This couldn't have happened back home. Who dreamed of going beyond what they knew? In El Salvador, each generation repeated the patterns of the one before. Even her brother had a chance at a new life here. If he could make it, she thought, anybody could.

Marta finished her chow mein and ordered a piece of apple pie à la mode. She was tempted to call the radio psychologist and ask about Frankie's dream. On Sunday, he'd woken up again with tears in his eyes. He'd dreamt that his mother was pounding barley in their backyard, her breasts swaying, her thinning hair white. The sun was setting like a rotten pumpkin, and her mud-walled hut had four doors. She offered Frankie a ball of salted rice. “You must leave now,” she told him, but Frankie didn't know where he was supposed to go.

Frankie always dreamed of his mother on the nights he and Marta made love. He talked in his sleep, too, so loud and plaintively that Marta thought he might run outside and get himself killed. Frankie was a gentle lover, more of a boy than a man. He smelled of Philippine talcum powder. He had one acorn-sized testicle and his penis was scarred all over, like a once-shattered bone.
Mamacita,
he murmured to Marta, his eyes damp with emotion, nestling his face in her hair.
Mamacita mía.
But Marta felt more peaceful than aroused in his arms.

Usually a drop or two of blood and urine dribbled from the tip of Frankie's penis. Marta consulted herbalists on Washington Boulevard for her husband's
maldeorín,
but nothing helped. When she listened to the radio and heard some hot-in-the-pants woman rhapsodizing about sex, Marta grew confused and resentful. Why didn't she feel those things? All she felt was a loneliness in her body that never went away. If only she could be more like Dinora. Her friend couldn't go long without sex—five days was her limit—and she managed to snag men who adored her and paid for her new kitchen cabinets. She juggled a couple of them at a time, keeping track of their comings and goings in a little notebook. When Dinora tired of them, she dismissed them without heartbreak or rancor.

Dinora had tried giving Marta sex lessons. “Do you ever take a man in your mouth?” she asked casually. Marta blanched at the suggestion. (Her aunt had told her only prostitutes did that.) “Does Frankie ever lick your pussy?” Was Dinora crazy? Marta would die of the shame. “Well,
mi hijita,
do you ever touch yourself then?”
Por favor.
If this was what good sex was about, then Marta would never have any.

On Maple Avenue, a warm wind tangled her hair and stirred a pile of newspapers tied with string. Two men walked by with bundles of long-stemmed roses from the wholesale flower market. A pair of fallen palm fronds scuttled along the street like oversized claws. Marta walked to the parking lot and stored her purchases in the back of the van. No more riding the buses for her. In Los Angeles, she knew, the buses separated the poor from everyone else.

It was true that Frankie wasn't as wealthy as the women in the factory said. There was no big house in Long Beach, no goose-down mattress, no gold-trimmed Cadillac, just an old Buick with electric windows. But their house on Forty-fifth Street was comfortable, and everything they planted in their yard happily took root. Marta settled behind the steering wheel and started toward home,
her
home. What more could she ask for?

Evaristo

It's hard to breathe here. The air is thick with smoke. The scars on my chest still burn. Nothing's familiar. Only the gray in the morning, the blue in the afternoon. I go north thinking it's south, west when I'm going east. Traffic speeds up the hours. Oranges taste of lemons from one minute to the next. The billboards torture me with their secret messages. How they shine with pretty lies. There's too much to tell, too much counting to do. This one dead, and that one, and that one. But where are the corpses? I find peace, at last, in the bed of a woman who smells of new leaves. Maybe she, maybe she alone will save me. In the folded-up wing of the night.

Enrique Florit

E
nrique felt glazed and thick-eyed from the afternoon heat as he sat for another beer at the dockside bar in Kingston. The Xaymaca had bamboo walls, strings of anemic lights, and reggae so loud it seemed to shrink the place even more. A plastic skull decorated one end of the counter, which was glued with a thousand shells. The bartender, Tacky Watson, supplied his best customers with homegrown ganja. To Enrique's astonishment, Tacky told him that Ching Ling Foo was famous in Jamaica. Apparently, everyone had seen the Great Court Conjurer on television performing on the Johnny Carson show.

“Mon, how he catch dat bullet 'tween he teet?” Tacky asked. He insisted that Papi was Johnny's guest on the same night as Bob Marley, which was why the whole island had tuned in. To Enrique's knowledge, his father had never been on the Johnny Carson show, much less on the same night as Bob Marley. But Tacky continued reminiscing as if it were
the
highlight of recent Jamaican history.

The discovery that his father was a celebrity here depressed Enrique, and he took to smoking a good amount of Tacky's dope. After his first cigar-sized spliff, Enrique grew convinced of his own visionary sight, his Far-Eye, and adopted the Rasta patois. “Yes, man, I-n-I move ina mystic, ina cosmic” was his response to Papi's long-distance question “
Hijo,
are you all right?” Enrique had called his father after being stranded in Kingston two weeks ago. He'd been thrown off a casino cruise ship and was biding his time, or at least trying to find a convincing disguise, before attempting to board another.

Meanwhile Papi had suffered his own debacle in Mexico. At the annual convention of the International Brotherhood of Magicians in Guadalajara, he'd been arrested for possessing the pelt of some kind of endangered guinea pig. Mexican authorities released him only after eighty-six magicians had protested in the Plaza de Armas, holding hostage the deputy mayor and his press secretary, whom they'd ceremoniously sawed in half.

Undeterred, his father was traveling to a magicians' conference in Buenos Aires next. After trying out a disastrous new act in which he'd impersonated a Prussian officer, Papi had decided to resuscitate his Ching Ling Foo routine and go international. No matter his worsening health and his widening girth. Armed with a battery of painkillers and digestive aids, he'd persuaded the best tailor in Las Vegas—Mario Buccellato catered to the city's top mobsters—to stitch in stretchy gold side panels to his Chinese tunics and take out the waist of his pantaloons. Thus prepared, Fernando Florit had hit the road.

So far, he was enjoying moderate success performing his bullet-catch trick in the rural theaters of Central America (except in Panama, where the Carranza clan made certain he couldn't perform) and planned to try his luck in Venezuela later this year. Papi had hung up on Enrique with an encouraging flourish of Martí: “‘Times of gorge and rush are these: voices fly like light: lightning, like a ship hurled upon dread quicksand, plunges down the high rod, and in delicate craft man, as if winged, cleaves the air.'”

At the Xaymaca, Tacky was trying to balance an egg on his forehead. He said the egg helped him remember his dreams. Enrique nodded sympathetically. One part of his brain was listening to Tacky; the other was trying to figure out a way back onto a casino ship now that he'd been blacklisted. The captains didn't appreciate having professional gamblers on board and were spreading the word about him. It bothered Enrique that they thought him a card sharp. He won his poker legitimately. There was no question that he was highly skilled—hadn't he apprenticed with the best players in Las Vegas?—but he benefited most from being underestimated.

For the past fourteen months, Enrique had hopped from one casino cruise ship to another (a flotilla of them plowed the Caribbean, mostly in winter), playing poker with some fairly deep-pocketed tourists. He'd demolished his share of high rollers in Santo Domingo, San Juan, and Martinique, too. He'd never made easier money. To him, the Caribbean was a lot like Las Vegas: a sea in which everyone was adrift, anchored by gaming tables.

On the casino ships, strange floating worlds all their own, Enrique's opponents were mostly retired midwesterners: pink, doughy men dragged aboard by their excitable wives. He'd cleaned out so many passengers on his last cruise—especially one ophthalmologist from St. Louis, who'd complained about him to the captain—that he had been given the boot at the nearest port of call, which happened to be Kingston. Kingston wasn't much of a tourist destination anymore; there was too much crime and hostility for that. Mostly the tourists went to Montego Bay, if they bothered with Jamaica at all.

Enrique was lying low in the one halfway decent hotel near the waterfront before hitting the poker circuit again. He would take a break and wait for the next cruise ship to come through. Tacky had told him that one was scheduled to dock late tonight, stopping only briefly. Enrique was in no hurry to go anywhere. The last thing he wanted was to return to Las Vegas. He was sick and tired of working so hard only to see his savings vacuumed up by his father's debts.

Papi could still make money opening for B-list singers, but it was more usual for him to go a year or more earning nothing (or next to nothing in Central America). Even when he did earn a few bucks, he couldn't hang on to it for long. Papi blew it on poker, or women, or another one of his get-rich-quick schemes. His latest: developing wigs for every ethnicity. Worst of all, Papi forgave himself too readily.
Ay, hijo, it was just a little misjudgment on my part.
It was amazing how goddamned enamored he was with himself.

If it weren't for Papi, Enrique thought miserably, he would've graduated from MIT by now, landed some big consulting job, been set up in a nice apartment in Boston or New York. Why couldn't he disavow his father long enough to get away for good? But thinking this only made him feel guilty. The fact was that he felt like a fugitive in his own life. A man in depressed self-storage. Only he couldn't figure out what he was saving himself for. Not even Tacky, who had an opinion on everything, could tell him.
Every day you goad donkey, 'im will kick you one day.
That didn't sound very hopeful.

On the morning of Leila's wedding, Enrique had gone and gotten his left biceps tattooed with a pair of dice intertwined with her name in Persian lettering. How pathetic was that? After their accident in the Mojave, they'd driven straight to Baja. Enrique was permitted to scuba dive after just one fly-by-night lesson and he eagerly accompanied Leila underwater. Giant squid were spawning in the area and clots of their white pulsating eggs were everywhere. Without warning, bat rays with huge wingspans swept in and started feeding on the eggs. This infuriated Enrique beyond reason. If he'd had a harpoon gun, he would've shot the bat rays one by one.

In the middle of the commotion, his oxygen got cut off somehow. He tried to catch Leila's eye—his puckered hands waved at her frantically—but she seemed in a kind of trance. Enrique panicked and started to surface too quickly, feeling a terrible pressure in his chest. His legs felt like lead weights. Then Leila appeared before him, hooked their utility belts together, and pulled him more slowly to the surface. The last thing he felt was the brilliant weight of the sun hitting his face.

That night, they strayed far from their hotel and stumbled upon eleven giant sea turtles laying eggs on a deserted stretch of beach. Others seemed to be mating offshore. The females dug their holes with enormous flippers, then crouched and swayed as they laid their eggs. Without a word, Leila took Enrique's hand and coaxed him onto the sand. With the soft scraping sounds of the giant turtles around them, they made love for the first time. Leila stared at him so intently that it hurt to look at her.

On their fifth and last day together, Enrique slipped his mother's silver bracelet onto Leila's wrist. For good luck, he said,
y por siempre.
Then he asked her to marry him. But she refused him. Leila offered him the only reason Enrique understood: she couldn't bear to disappoint her family.
But do you love me?
He'd cupped her face with both hands and demanded an answer. Leila cast her eyes down and whispered,
Bale.
For months afterward, Enrique racked his brain, trying to figure out ways they might have stayed together. In the end, all he did was suffer and sulk. Five days with Leila and his life was ruined forever.

Enrique didn't want to think about what his Texan friends would have done in his place. It only made him feel worse. For their mutual birthday six months later, Enrique sent Leila a present at her old address in Los Angeles: a wet suit, sleek and beautiful, with a pair of matching flippers. He enclosed a brief note:
Please swim back to me.
He didn't know what Leila thought of his gift because he never heard from her again.

After leaving the Xaymaca, Enrique walked through the steaming streets of downtown Kingston. Jalopies careened around corners, barely missing pedestrians. A clump of deformed trees dominated William Grant Park. Enrique wandered into an old, octagonally shaped church girded with ornate columns. One of its stained-glass windows shone with a blue cross. Enrique took off his canvas hat and went inside, cooling himself with a splash of holy water. Then he sat down in a pew.

Enrique wanted to pray for something simple, like a nice woman to pass the time with in Kingston. Somebody he didn't have to pay. Shit, he was lonelier than an angel here. It'd been two months since he'd had sex with that plump roulette spinner in Santo Domingo. Margarita was older, in her forties, and her thighs had gone soft but Enrique reveled in her flesh just the same. When she asked him for fifty dollars the morning after, he was crestfallen. He paid her without saying a word.

He remembered the Flamingo bartender's abysmal luck with women. Jorge de Reyes was always falling for showgirls twice his size who abandoned him after cleaning out his bank account. Later he would admit that it didn't pay to be sentimental; then he would go and fall in love all over again. When Enrique stood up from the pew, his knees were sore and his hair sweaty. He lit a candle, jammed a hundred-dollar bill in the offerings box, and left the church.

On his last casino ship, they'd been traveling through the Windward Passage when the eastern end of Cuba came into view. For the better part of the afternoon the island hovered temptingly on the horizon. Enrique sensed its colors and smells drifting toward him, like an incoming tide. He stayed motionless on the deck, hungry, his mouth open and swallowing air. He'd never felt more lost.

It bothered him the way bits and pieces of his past surrounded him when he was sad. The little bell by his bedside in Cárdenas. His grandfather's '47 Chevy, belching smoke. His Abuela Carmen's deteriorating foam breast, which replaced the one she'd lost to cancer at thirty-five. The scarlet birthmark on Tía Adela's inner thigh that she occasionally let him touch. Once his aunt had taken him on a trip to the Colón Cemetery in Havana to petition La Milagrosa to shrink her uterine cyst. (It'd worked.)

Enrique thought of going to Panama and looking up his mother's family there. So many of the Carranzas had come to Mamá's funeral that their limousines had caused a traffic jam in Cárdenas. Enrique wasn't able to keep their names straight. He counted dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins, a ready-made family should he ever decide to find them. His worst fear was that they would blame him for Mamá's death. “You were there? You saw her die?” Enrique imagined them asking him again and again. And each time, burning with shame, he would say “yes.”

If he ever got the chance, Enrique decided, he would tell them everything. How the snare drum had rolled as Papi escorted Mamá up the three wooden steps to the rim of the aquarium. How he'd carefully lowered her into the water. How her hair had floated above her as she struggled against the ropes. How she'd been nearly free of her bindings when the electrical cable struck. How he'd watched her drift lifelessly to the back of the tank.