A Handbook to Luck (18 page)

“Will I still get my bath on Sundays?” Frankie teased.

“Of course,
mi amor
! I'll bathe the two of you together!”

It was the middle of the night and Marta wasn't halfway to Nogales yet. She was dizzy from the diesel fumes and the sagas of everyone around her. If this Greyhound bus were the world in miniature and the people on it typical, then Marta could say with some assurance that humanity would never be satisfied. Dreams and frustrations were meted out in equal measure, ensuring that things stayed pretty much the same.

The Mexican dressmaker next to Marta was going to El Paso for her stepfather's funeral. Behind them, two redheaded sisters were returning to Louisiana after failing to become movie stars. The plump one was expecting her therapist's child. The Vietnamese man across the aisle recounted how he'd been forced aboard a Thai pirate ship as a boy and ended up adopted by a family in Mobile, Alabama. His every word stretched and snapped like a rubber band.

Marta had three dozen tamales packed in a duffel bag for her brother. She was hungry and decided to snack on just one. She thought of the foolishness that had landed her brother in prison. He and his girlfriend had been driving around South Central when they were pulled over for running a stop sign. It wasn't enough to get a ticket. The policemen decided to search the car and found a pistol wedged under the driver's seat. Rosita claimed to know nothing about it. No harm was done. Nobody was hurt. But when Evaristo couldn't produce identification, they arrested him.

The lawyer Marta hired for the case wasn't much help. So far it had cost her five thousand dollars in legal fees and her brother was still behind bars. It didn't matter that Evaristo was innocent. Millions of people like him were in El Norte, working and minding their business. Now chances were that he would be shipped back to El Salvador right in the middle of a civil war. After all her sacrifices! Marta blamed that no-good Rosita. The
putita
had found a new boyfriend in record time, too. Marta didn't have the heart to give her brother this news.

The wind blew hard, rattling the bus as it sped along the invisible road. Marta looked out the window at the vast blanket of stars. She'd forgotten what it was like to be away from the lights of the city. It'd been years since she'd seen a real night sky. It was her second time in these borderlands. The first time she'd come over the mountains on foot, with only her pink rosary for company.

Every passenger on the bus was asleep except for her. Marta cracked open her window. A sharp smell of sage seeped into the bus. She longed to see the desert flowers, the little purple ones with petals thick as her thumb. Soon she would arrive in Phoenix and change buses for the one that would take her to Tucson and on to Nogales. Evaristo said that half the men in prison spoke Spanish and would be deported, like him. No wonder so many women were raising children alone.

Few reliable men were left in her own neighborhood, Marta thought. The best of the bunch was Pedro Nieves, who worked as a janitor at the Marquis Hotel. Pedro had two wives and seven children back in Tegucigalpa (he sent them the bulk of his salary every month), but he hadn't seen them since 1975. Marta invited Pedro over for dinner whenever she made tripe stew. He'd helped her paint the kitchen and repair the chicken coop, and he was handy when the plumbing gave out. Frankie suspected that Pedro was in love with Marta, but she pretended it wasn't true.

Marta checked to make sure her zippered money pouch was safe around her waist. When she returned home, she planned to burn a dozen votive candles for her baby's good health. Marta leaned against the headrest and ticked off the ingredients that went into sweet baths: rose petals, honey, cinnamon, spearmint,
contramaldeojo
—what was she missing? Nine straight days of the baths, Dinora said, would jump-start good luck. For extra protection, Marta would wear the shielding yellow necklaces of motherhood.

She thought of naming the baby Evaristo, but quickly rejected the notion. Marta loved her brother but she didn't want her son following the same hopeless path. Suddenly the name of her baby came to her: José Antonio, after her father. Papá had always wanted to come to the States. Now his grandson would take his place.

The bus sped forward and Marta drifted into a light sleep. She dreamed a new dream altogether. In it, she climbed a smooth-trunked tree and settled on a slippery branch. On the branch was a silk nest with a single egg inside. Marta lifted the egg to her ear and was surprised to hear the ocean; not a big crashing sound, just the gentle lapping of waves. Then she pressed the egg to her heart and held it there.

It was daybreak when Marta woke up and looked out at the desolate stretch of desert. The wind made the bus shudder harder. There were burnt red cliffs in the distance, and the cacti looked like preachers with upraised arms. Tumbleweeds did a tangled dance across the road. Marta doubted she could ever adjust to a life here—to this landscape watered by nothing, to the winter sun stripping everything bare.

Evaristo

There's a man here who would make me a woman. I blinded him in one eye, then grew a beard. Now a bird is building a nest on my chin. It's the color of cinnamon with white-striped wings. I tell my sister this on the black stinking phone but I can tell she doesn't believe me. Nobody does.
Rumm-rumm,
the bird sings. Soon it will lay an egg, but it won't be safe. Everything is moving toward darkness. I know this for a fact. I must invent a window, convince it to fly. I will be held accountable. It's time to get going, little birdie. That's what I'll say. One, two, three, listen to me: we must find a place with a more visible blue. Yes, that's what we need, little birdie. Blue, too much more blue.

(1986)

Enrique Florit

T
he moon was still low in the sky, pale and full, hardly visible in the morning light. It sifted through the blinds, grazing Papi's skin. For a moment it illuminated his head, giving him a saintly air. It was difficult to watch him just lying there, a man who woke up bristling with an appetite even for ordinary days. Enrique approached his father in the hospital bed. The scars on his skull looked like railroad tracks except that they twisted and turned and went nowhere.

Enrique took some coconut oil from the nightstand and traced the path of the scars. Then he tapped his father's head, as if this might stir his consciousness. He was convinced that Papi was living deep inside his body, in a place he struggled to escape from. At times he gestured gracefully, reflexively, as if extending an invitation to the air. What could he be feeling?

Since the accident, Enrique had come to the hospital every morning to massage his father with oils and rubbing alcohol. It was important to stimulate Papi's circulation to prevent blood clots. Enrique couldn't count on the overworked nurses doing much, not even the shapely Polish one named Ula, who would've incited Fernando's courtliness. Patiently, he kneaded the withering muscles in his father's arms, his pudgy hands with their bony protrusions, his astonishingly flexible fingers.

Papi's ex-girlfriend Violeta Salas showed up most afternoons with pamphlets about Communist movements in the Third World. She climbed into bed with Fernando, stroking his head and whispering endearments. Now and then she punctuated her reading with a terse
“¡Venceremos!”
No wonder his father had broken up with her. She was gorgeous but it was impossible to ignore her politics. Besides, Papi couldn't stand much of anything that wasn't directly related to him. Violeta, though, proclaimed they were getting along better than ever.

Fernando's legs were atrophying faster than the rest of him. Enrique took extra time massaging his father's calves, which were thickly netted with varicose veins. He bent Papi's knees, rotated his ankles, lifted his legs, then pushed hard against the balls of his feet to stretch his muscles. “Well, you're finally getting some exercise,” Enrique teased. “When you wake up, you'll be in better shape than ever.”

The remains of the Great Court Conjurer's costume were in a cardboard box near the bed, the detritus of his public persona for over a decade: his bald rubber wig and queue, his embroidered pajamas, the silk slippers that curled at the tips, all smelling vaguely of gunpowder. Mixed in with these were his velvet cape and magic wand and the six garish rings he'd taken to wearing in recent months. Enrique laid his head against his father's massive chest. It was barely moving but he could hear the faint ticking of his heart. His brain might be dead, but his heart was too big to ever stop.

The night before last, Enrique had moistened Papi's lips with a few drops of scotch and swore that his father had tried to smile at him. “That's impossible,” Dr. Kleinman said when Enrique reported this to him the following morning. “There's no brain activity whatsoever.” But what did that mean exactly? Wasn't his heart still beating? Couldn't he feel his own son's hands? Enrique knew that Papi wouldn't surrender to death so willingly.

Today, he'd brought along a few music tapes to play for his father: the boleros of Beny Moré, the warbly voiced Olga Guillot, his favorite American singers, Vic Damone and Tony Bennett. Over the years Papi had gotten to know Vic and Tony personally, taking a little steam with one, talking show business or women with the other. As their stages grew smaller and their audiences older, the world beyond Las Vegas seemed increasingly out of their reach.

Enrique couldn't remember when he'd last eaten. He wanted to bring his son to the hospital and have them share a pot of hot chocolate, the way he and Papi used to do. Fernandito looked like a miniature version of his grandfather, so much so that everyone started calling him Papito. Enrique recalled the old days with his father: eating lunch at the Flamingo coffee shop, poring over the newspapers for macabre crimes, Papi's flamboyant recitations of Martí.

It was the twins' fourth birthday. Delia had come with the girls to Las Vegas to celebrate. But what sort of celebration could they have in their grandfather's hotel suite? For starters, the room was devoid of furniture. Papi had replaced the sofa and bed with mountains of pillows and tasseled silk cushions, living in what he imagined to be the style of a nineteenth-century Chinese lord. The children loved the pillows, especially Fernandito, but Enrique's back was killing him from trying to sleep on the floor.

In the television cabinet he'd found an old video of
Black Fear,
the teen horror film Papi had acted in years ago. Enrique watched the movie every night after Delia and the kids went to bed. He replayed the scene of his father as the janitor over and over again, following Papi as he dragged himself past the haunted school lockers (he would soon be dispatched by their contents), trying desperately to look over his shoulder at the camera. This broke Enrique's heart more than anything.

On Monday night, after watching the scene for the hundredth time, Enrique decided to sort through the mountains of papers in his father's closet. He hoped to find more photographs of Mamá but there weren't any he hadn't seen before. What he found was a love letter from her to Papi on his thirty-fifth birthday.
Amor de mi vida,
it began in her close, neat handwriting.
Eres el hombre para mí, ahora y por siempre.
Her love wafted off the page, saturated every word. It pained Enrique to read it. Who had ever loved him like that?

Then he searched for a will or anything else that looked quasi-official. Amid the candy wrappers and bar bills, the piles of IOUs and credit card receipts, Enrique found an unopened letter addressed to him from Leila in Iran. It was dated over two years ago. Why hadn't Papi given it to him?

Enrique slipped the letter in his pocket and reread it every chance he got. Leila wrote that she was curious about his life, that she had regrets about him and wanted to visit. But what was there to tell since they'd parted? He was twenty-seven years old, married, the father of three. Most days he wasn't too unhappy. His work wasn't as exciting as gambling but it was steady and satisfying and people, by and large, respected him. Things weren't terrible with Delia either. She cared for him and she was a decent mother, especially with the help of that saint of a babysitter, Marta. Above all, she was familiar. What other family did he have?

On average, he and Delia made love twice a month. That was twenty-four times a year or, if the pace continued, another nine hundred and six times before he retired. This depressed Enrique more than he cared to admit. To think that he would probably make love less than a thousand more times in his life, to the same woman. Enrique couldn't help wondering what it would be like to see Leila again. Would she still captivate him with her voice, with the intensity of her stare? He decided to write back to her. He wasn't packing his bags yet but he wouldn't refuse to see her either. No, he wouldn't rule anything out.

Enrique walked down the long corridor of the hospital to the lobby. He put a quarter in the vending machine and picked up a copy of the
Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The headline story was about a ghost town that had been discovered deep in the Nevada desert. According to anthropologists studying the site, the town was called Wings Without Feathers and the main occupations of its inhabitants had been drinking and gambling. That sounded like Nevada all right.

Also on the first page was more news on the Wonder Bread truck scandal. The police were reporting that the shiny white truck was now implicated in the theft of seven female bodies from the Las Vegas county morgue (the previous count had been five). Just yesterday, the truck had been sighted at a heist of sapphires from the Mirage Hotel. Papi would have loved this story. He appreciated anything that illustrated the lengths to which human beings went to satisfy their strangest longings.

There was a chapel in the hospital and Enrique stopped by on his way out. He hadn't set foot in a church since his days in Jamaica but it comforted him to believe, even fleetingly, that God might dwell in such a small place. Enrique got on his knees and prayed that his father wouldn't die over some stupid trick. Papi's childhood nemesis, Padre Bonifacio, used to liken evil to a chicken hawk gliding in the wind—
clerk! clerk!
—waiting to prey on those whose vigilance flagged. But there was no evil here, Enrique thought sadly. Nobody to blame. No victim, no enemy. Only bad luck.

The fact was that his father had been shot while performing his bullet-catch trick. It'd happened on the main stage of the Flamingo Hotel before a sold-out holiday crowd. It was supposed to have been Papi's big comeback (yet another one). According to eyewitnesses, after the gun went off the Great Court Conjurer—his face bright with alarm and spattered blood—shouted dramatically: “Close the damn curtains! I'm dying!” It took the audience another minute to realize that Fernando Florit was seriously wounded. Then all hell broke loose.

Enrique got a retired firearms expert to examine the muzzle-loading musket that Papi had used for his trick. It turned out that due to the age and corroded condition of the weapon, grains of gunpowder had been seeping from the barrel into the cylinder. After years of use, the charge in the loaded barrel—which had never been intended to be fired—exploded, along with the charge in the cylinder. This meant that with every performance, his father, unknowingly, was drawing closer to tragedy.

Outside the hospital, a couple of scrub jays were making a racket in a date palm tree. The morning was growing hotter. Enrique got in his car and drove to a toy emporium on the outskirts of Las Vegas. He picked out talking dolls for his daughters, a starter telescope for Fernandito, a Winnie the Pooh piñata, and five pounds' worth of candy to fill it with. Then he passed by the supermarket for a gallon of ice cream and a ready-made cake. They would have the twins' party poolside, invite any children who happened to be there.

Enrique settled the purchases in the trunk of his Buick and maneuvered his way back to the city. The road was deserted. The sky was rapidly turning over with clouds. Tumbleweeds came out of nowhere and bounced off the hood of his car. Enrique slowed down and turned on his headlights. The old-timers liked to recall the windstorm that took off the roof of the Kit-Kat Lodge years ago, exposing the hookers and their johns inside, most notably the visiting mayor of Sacramento.

By the time he returned to the hotel, the winds were dying down and the sun was back in charge. There was an urgent message waiting for him from Dr. Kleinman. Enrique rushed to a pay phone in the lobby, already knowing, but needing to hear the news for himself. Dr. Kleinman told him that with his last breath Fernando Florit had opened his eyes, attempted a bow, and died.

There was an astonishing number of tuberoses at the Desert Rose Chapel in Las Vegas, each tolling their scent like a bell. A Cuban bolero played on the sound system, just like Papi would have wanted. The velvet lining of his coffin matched the flowers' ivory shade precisely. Dozens of burning candles stole most of the air in the place. Enrique studied his father's face before closing the lid. It looked pink and puffy, like a crying baby's. Papi's eyes were sealed shut but his mouth was half-open, as if snapping a last gasp of air. Enrique pictured what his father must have looked like as an infant. Could anyone have guessed that fifty-eight years later, his end would so resemble his beginning?

Enrique sat in the front pew of the chapel and felt the heat rising from the overflow crowd. He recognized a number of faces from the magic world: the Australian dwarf who levitated blocks of concrete; the turbaned Germans who were dominating the magic scene with their Bengal tigers; the New York daredevil who'd once extricated himself from a steel box on a flaming raft as it sped down the Niagara River toward the falls. No mere funeral could dampen their razzle-dazzle.

The Germans were going on about how Las Vegas was one of the navels of the universe (there were supposed to be nine altogether), a holy place where the earth met the heavens and inexplicable occurrences were common. Why else would Schätzi, their baby Bengal, walk on her hind legs nowhere else? Magic refuted the senses, denied logic and convictions about reality. His father's death gave Enrique the same sense of disbelief.

The gang from the Diamond Pin gathered on the far side of the chapel. Next to the magic world's glitterati, the Texans looked ragtag, lost and blinking in the blaze of candles. Enrique felt fortified by their presence. As a boy, their encouragement had meant the world to him: Son, they'd said, just tumble into the world and deal. Last year they'd attended the funeral of Jim Gumbel's wife, who'd suffered from a long mental illness. In her final months, Sissy Gumbel used to appear at the casino dressed as Catwoman, hissing and scratching at the blackjack dealers.