A Handbook to Luck (6 page)

“Do you know him?” Marta asked.

“Of course not,” the
guardia
snapped. “It's just more of the garbage we have to put up with every day.”

Marta wasn't sure what he was talking about.

“Don't you read the newspaper?”

“Not so much.” Who had twenty centavos leftover in a day? The newspapers didn't print anything that concerned the poor either. Expensive toilet paper was what those newspapers were, but Marta didn't dare say this aloud.

“They're our worst enemy, Communists every last one.” He spat when he said this, launching into a one-sided argument that meant nothing to her.

Finally, the
guardia
pulled a mirror from his shirt pocket and brought it close to his upper lip. Then he trimmed his mustache with a tiny scissors. It was the neatest mustache Marta had ever seen, an impeccable rectangle.

“My name's Fabián Ramírez,” he said.

“Yes, I remember.”

“I've been keeping my eye on you.”

“I haven't done anything,” Marta shot back. Who did he think she was?

“
Tranquila.
I don't mean under surveillance. I meant that I've been trying to find out what kind of girl you are.”

“I've done nothing wrong!” Marta felt the fear energizing her.

“Listen to me. I've seen how hard you work. I want to make life easier for you. I hate to see you wasting your beauty like this.” Fabián had small white teeth, neat and even, like his mustache. Marta noticed that his eyebrows were identical and his nostrils precisely the same size. There was something unnatural about him, like the flawless dummies in department store windows.

“You're not from around here?” Marta asked.

“I'm from Apastepeque, north of the lagoon. My father plants annatto trees and beans on a parcel there.”

“And your mother?”

“Her family made grinding stones. But the stones lasted forever and after a while everybody had one. So they took up making
conserva de leche
instead.” Fabián's voice dropped. “May I invite you to dinner?”

If she said no, would he shoot her? “There's no point in going out with me,” Marta said. “I mainly eat tortillas with salt.”

“That doesn't mean we can't have a steak now and then.”

“Steak?” Marta felt a stream of cool air tickling the back of her neck.
Bueno,
maybe she could go out with this Fabián just once, slip a nice piece of meat into her purse for her brother. When would Evaristo ever taste steak? Marta thought of the paper flowers her mother kept in a rusty can, how much nicer real roses would be. Yes, the possibility of steak definitely appealed to her. Perhaps the
guardia
might even invite her to see Little Flea.

“Let me think about it,” she said, nervously twirling a pinwheel.

“I'll take them all,” Fabián said.

“¿Qué mande?”
Marta heard a
clarinero
in the tamarind tree, noisy and insistent. What was it doing up at this time of night?

“Your toys.” Fabián pointed at Marta's basket. “I'll buy them all.”

(1976)

Enrique Florit

E
nrique looked across the kitchen table at his father, who was scraping the last bit of pulp from his half grapefruit. Papi was dressed as the reincarnation of Ching Ling Foo, the Great Court Conjurer to the Empress of China. He wore a bald wig and pigtail, embroidered pajamas with a Mandarin collar, and silk slippers that curled at the tips. A month ago Papi had set their clocks to Shanghai time, switching day and night, and begun sleeping with an enormous Chinese dictionary on his chest. He hoped that the characters would seep into him and gradually change his identity.

Enrique poured himself a bowl of cornflakes with milk. He wasn't sure when the idea of impersonating the famous nineteenth-century magician had occurred to his father, but he suspected that it had something to do with all the kung fu movies they'd been watching since their eviction from the Flamingo Hotel. Younger magicians with fancy laser shows and foreigners with exotic acts (most notably a pair of Germans with Bengal tigers) were replacing the traditional performers like his father. At forty-eight years old, Papi was washed up.

At the height of his success, he'd earned ten thousand dollars a month—far from top billing but a decent living nonetheless, especially with the free penthouse thrown in. Now he was lucky to earn that in a year, working odd jobs and substituting for sick magicians on the Strip. Papi was aging badly, too, and suffered from a garish array of health problems: phlebitis, gastritis (no more fried pork rinds for him), prostatitis, gingivitis, and a desperate thirst he feared might be the onset of diabetes; not to mention his high blood pressure and irritable colon. His flesh, Papi complained melodramatically, was becoming a burden to his bones.

The two of them lived in a small apartment on the scruffy end of Paradise Road. Their building, flamboyantly named The Mermaid, had a nautical motif and dried starfish glued to the walls of the grungy vestibule. Their second-story rooms looked out on an abandoned gas station and a baby-furniture store that to Enrique's knowledge, was never open for business. After school, Enrique worked part-time at a meat-processing plant to help pay the bills. He ran probability theories in his head to stay sane. Only his and Papi's first year in the States had been more dismal.

A few of the high-rolling Texans still called Enrique, trying to coax him to play some more poker. Opportunity knocks but it doesn't nag, Johnny Langston scolded him. But Enrique didn't trust his playing the way he used to, not even with his mother's silver bracelet in his pocket. He didn't like living just to beat the odds anymore. He didn't want to believe, like their gambler friends, that anything legitimate was strictly for losers. Poker, at least the way it was played down at the Diamond Pin, was a ruthless business. After Enrique had won that big pot on his thirteenth birthday, the same men who'd lost the money had surrounded him in subsequent games like a pod of alligators and devoured his winnings.

Papi pulled a jar of maraschino cherries from the kitchen cabinet. There were a dozen identical jars behind it, lined up like a battery of soldiers. He twisted off the cap, plunged a finger into the crimson juice, and extracted a fat, dripping cherry.

“Have one,” he said, offering it to Enrique. “It's good for you.”

“I had a banana already.”

Papi dangled the cherry over his mouth. “Did you know that Chinese women call their period ‘the old ghost'?”

“Uh, no.”

“I dreamt it. I'm telling you,
hijo,
that dictionary is working. How else would I know this?” Papi ate four more cherries in quick succession, then attacked the other half of the grapefruit. “Everything tends toward circumference. Things circle back, the good with the bad. The cycle is shifting for the better, I can feel it. Grapefruit?”

“No, thanks.”

Enrique didn't particularly mind his father's rubber wig, or the pajamas that had replaced the tuxedos in their closet, or even his phony Chinese accent. (He was tempted to hang a warning sign around his father's neck:
NEW PERSONALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION
.) This was show business, after all. What he couldn't stand was his father's obsessive dieting. The original Court Conjurer had been tall and thin and famous enough from old photographs that Papi had no choice but to conform to his image. He slavishly followed one weight-loss regimen after another, including the dreadful Riviera diet, which had him eating nothing but mussels for lunch.

Now, instead of reminiscing about his triumphant tours of the Caribbean, Papi rhapsodized about fine cuts of aged sirloin, platters of
chicharrones,
the marvels of crème fraiche and tiramisu. Should Enrique be insensitive enough to order dessert in his presence, his father would accuse him of outright sabotage. Papi even started smoking to curb his hunger. Really, he was becoming an unreasonable man.

“
Coño carajo,
look at this,” Papi said, pointing to an article on page 26 of the
Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“Cuba's new constitution enacted. Ha!”

“Could you pass me the sugar bowl?” Enrique watched his father's anger spike perilously.

“¡Qué desgracia!”
Papi looked as if he would split in two. Anything even mildly supportive of the Cuban Revolution had this effect on him. “Another hoax in the name of patriotism!”

“Remember your blood pressure.” Enrique handed his father a glass of water and waited for the paroxysm to pass. “Besides, you need to stay calm. Ching Ling Foo never lost his temper.”

Fernando's grand plan—beyond the fading dream of a democratic Cuba—was to unveil his Chinese persona and svelte new physique this summer at the outdoor arena reserved for rock concerts. The climax of his act would be the recreation of Ching Ling Foo's notorious bullet-catch trick, a feat so dangerous that it had killed fourteen magicians in the hundred years since its debut. The publicity from its revival, Papi hoped, would jump-start his career and put him back in the limelight, where he belonged.

“Can you help me rehearse later?”

“I'm meeting Professor Smedsted at four.” Enrique was being tutored by the math chair at the University of Nevada, who'd taken him under his wing. He finished buttoning his flannel shirt and gathered his books.

Next fall he would be applying to colleges. He was on the honor roll but he had no real extracurricular activities to offer admissions committees. Enrique suspected that they would be less than impressed by his poker skills or a recommendation, however effusive, from the owner of the Diamond Pin Casino. Between school, his job, and watching out for his father, he didn't have time for much else. Not even a girlfriend.

Enrique dreamed of going east, to New York or Boston, somewhere far from the Las Vegas heat. He'd received brochures from MIT after he'd scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT. Enrique had taken the exam a year early, at Smedsted's insistence, just to see how he would do. The casinos were also courting him. They knew they could get him cheap. They dangled a few hundred dollars here and there for consulting jobs: fine-tuning the odds in their slot machines, figuring out the systems of gamblers winning too consistently against the house.

“Most of the Great Court Conjurer's tricks are simple, deceptively simple, but nobody has seen them for many years,” Papi said, growing more animated. “Forget the empty pyrotechnics onstage nowadays. Audiences are so bewitched by second-rate magicians that they've forgotten the joys of simple wonder.”

“I have to go now.”

“Okay, give me a kiss.”

Enrique hesitated.

“
¿Qué?
You're too old to give your father a kiss?”

“Bye, Dad.”

The building manager, Mr. Smite, was outside watering the patch of dead grass that passed for a lawn. A crow fussed in a stumpy palm tree. The Mermaid was no better or worse than most of the buildings around it, eyesores with peeling paint and gashes of rust, their every blemish illuminated by the sun. Mr. Smite had been married to a former showgirl, a bronzed angel of a woman (he kept a photograph of her in his pocket) who'd returned to Minnesota after a year in the desert. That was back in 1963.

“How's the Chinee-man?” Mr. Smite asked.

Enrique waved and pretended not to hear him. He didn't want to encourage Mr. Smite's morning lecture on the hidden connections between Communism and the rings of Saturn.

Enrique happened to like Papi's Ching Ling Foo tricks: spewing colored streamers that caught fire and exploded; extracting a five-foot-long pole from his mouth; producing plates and cakes from under the cover of an empty cloth. His father was experimenting with fire eating, too—Ching Ling Foo had been a master at this—but the kerosene was aggravating his gastritis and ruining his teeth. Only the bullet-catch trick, spectacular and risky as it was, made Enrique nervous.

At least, he told himself, this was an improvement over his father's short-lived attempt to break into the movies. Papi had managed by some convoluted set of negotiations—through a mobster friend of a producer's friend who took steam with him at the Flamingo's spa—to land a part in a low-budget Hollywood film. He talked it up for months, calling himself the Cuban Rudolph Valentino (no matter that Valentino had starred in
silent
films), taking potshots at Robert Redford (“A mere puppet of passion!”), picturing his name emblazoned on billboards across America. In the end, Papi was cast as a janitor in a teen horror film called
Black Fear,
in which he forlornly dragged a mop and bucket down a lonely high school corridor. He didn't have a single line.

It was a short drive to Anasazi High School in North Las Vegas. Enrique had bought his Maverick, red with a white vinyl roof, with money he'd earned at the meat-processing plant. He kept the chrome fenders gleaming. Enrique had won a scholarship to a local Catholic school run by the Marist brothers, but his father had refused to let him attend. After his run-ins with the Jesuits of Cárdenas, Papi didn't want his son having anything to do with, as he put it, those sadistic men of the cloth.

When Enrique got tired of school and work, he drove out to Red Rock Canyon, fifteen miles west of the city. He loved the sandstone cliffs, the thick stands of Joshua trees undisturbed by the wind. When the sun hit them just so they looked incandescent, as if on fire. Once Enrique drove to Red Rock in the middle of the night and saw a meteor shower. It seemed to him a private gift from the universe. Nobody he knew ever visited the Mojave outback. It was hard enough to picture Papi or any of the Texans in natural sunlight, much less the great outdoors.

These days, he and his father were avoiding the Diamond Pin. No matter that Papi looked and sounded like a crazy Chinese impostor. That wouldn't have stopped him for a minute. Papi avoided the Diamond Pin because he was ashamed of showing up with no money. Everyone in Las Vegas, down to the two-bit blackjack dealers, understood the golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Nobody wanted to be around losers. It messed up their game, reminded them of bad times, killed the abundance they felt was rightfully theirs.

It was ferociously hot out. The orange trees on campus were flowering with phony-looking fruit. The cheerleaders practiced their routines in front of the main building, trying to drum up enthusiasm for the Friday-night basketball game against Henderson High. Enrique studied their kicking and shimmying, the sweat dampening their twitching thigh muscles. They aroused the envy of the other girls (even the smart ones on student council and the newspaper) as well as the lust of every boy on campus.

His taste, though, ran in another direction entirely. At the meat-processing plant, Enrique was fixated on his supervisor; the mother, in fact, of one of these cheerleaders. Her name was Janie Marks and she was in her thirties, divorced, with broad fleshy hips that undulated beneath her regulation jumpsuit. Her voice was a gravelly drawl that softened whenever she called his attention to an inadequately trimmed slab of beef.
Rico, honey, leave some fat on the sides or there won't be anything left to barbecue.
Enrique was usually up to his elbows in bloody chunks of meat. The sound of her voice combined with the smell of animal blood and all that raw meat got him so crazily hard that he could have made it right then and there with a hunk of rump roast.

Enrique remembered how in Cárdenas, every boy in the neighborhood had been in love with his mother. Not only was she beautiful—Mamá had lightly freckled skin and a tight little waist—but nobody else's mother could do a triple somersault or hypnotize a snake. The men on the corner spoke admiringly of Mamá. They celebrated her curves, her charming Panamanian accent, her petite hands and feet. Enrique didn't like it when they spoke of her like that but he couldn't have said why. Now he understood.

All day trudging from class to class, Enrique was reminded of the Stations of the Cross: stop, suffer, stop, suffer some more. The campaigns of Charlemagne. Irregular French verbs. Poems he couldn't make heads or tails of, expunged of punctuation. In the middle of a calculus test, he was called to the principal's office. Papi was in the hospital, seriously hurt, Mr. Hunter told him. Enrique didn't wait to hear the details. He ran to his car and raced off, accelerating through every red light in Las Vegas. At least his father was alive, he kept telling himself. Nobody could lose both parents before eighteen, could they?