Ambassador (2 page)

“I guess so,” said Frankie.

“You'll have fun in California,” said Gabe, trying to put the best spin on it—even though he was still disappointed and grumpy about the whole thing. That rocket-pipe had been a dumb idea all around, but Gabe had gone along, taken the blame for it afterward, and now faced a friendless summer. He shouldn't have let Frankie light that fuse.

“Sure,” said Frankie without enthusiasm. “I'll have fun.”

They argued about Batman and Zorro while they walked home. Lately they had taken to watching old Batman cartoons and older Zorro cartoons online at Frankie's house. Both cartoon heroes were rich gentlemen who wore masks, hid in caves, and named themselves after stealthy animals—but otherwise they were completely different.

“So which one would win in a fight?” Frankie wanted to know.

“They wouldn't ever get into a fight,” said Gabe. He said it quietly, as a known and simple fact.

“But what if they did?” Frankie asked, his voice very much louder.

“They wouldn't fight,” Gabe repeated. “It wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen.”

“What if they fought by mistake?” Frankie pressed him. “Maybe one of them was framed, or hypnotized, or possessed by evil alien ghosts, or something like that?”

“Zorro would still find a way to avoid it,” said Gabe. “Batman would come at him all brooding and serious, and Zorro would just say something charming, or else make him laugh, and then the fight would be over before it even started because you can't crack up laughing and still be Batman. Zorro would make a game out of it.”

“If Batman got possessed by aliens, then the aliens wouldn't care about Zorro's sense of humor,” Frankie pointed out. “None of Zorro's jokes would make sense to aliens.”

“You can't say for sure what would make sense to aliens,” said Gabe. “And Zorro would parry anything Batman threw at him. He'd duck and weave and snap batarangs out of the air with his whip. Also,
batarang
is a dumb word. How could anyone who carries a belt full of batarangs take themselves so seriously?”

Frankie's voice got even louder. “I can't hear you over the sound of how wrong you are. It's deafening. Your wrongness.”

They stopped at a street corner. Gabe needed to turn left to get home. Frankie's place was off to the right.

“Don't burn anything at your dad's,” Gabe told him. “You'll probably start a whole forest fire out there. If I turn on the news and all of California's burning, I'll know it's your fault.”

“Don't have fun without me,” said Frankie. “No fun.”

“I probably won't,” said Gabe.

They did their secret handshake, which was complicated. Then both of them went home.

The Envoy moved low to the ground between hedges and trees, still dripping with pond water. Gabe didn't notice it following him.

Gabe's house was a duplex. His family rented half of it. No one lived in the other half. The landlord planned to fix it up this summer, but Gabe hadn't seen any sign of him lately. The landlord wasn't really one for fixing things.

Gabe climbed the back steps with a twin under each arm. He nudged open their screen door with his toe and went inside.

His father was in the kitchen, making chicken curry tamales—a fusion of Mexican and Indian cooking—with mango chutney and a mole sauce of his own magnificent invention.

Both of Gabe's parents were
tapatíos
—meaning they came from Guadalajara, Mexico—but they met each other in India. His mother Isabelle was a student at the time. His father Octavio wasn't. He couldn't ever stay in
classrooms for long. He spent his time riding a motorcycle named Baghera across the subcontinent, swapping recipes in every town and working as a chef in exchange for rooms to sleep in. Isabelle studied archeology and went to India to dig around in ancient ruins, even though there were excellent opportunities to dig up ancient ruins without having to leave Mexico—or even go far outside Guadalajara. Her parents had pointed this out to her at the time. She just smiled, nodded, and left anyway. She met Gabe's father on the other side of the world, and they were married by the time they got back.

Now Gabe's dad worked in professional kitchens, but he hated the efficiency that restaurant work required of him. At home he was inefficient. He used as many pots and pans as he possibly could, and changed his mind often about what he was actually cooking. His spice rack—which used to be a bookshelf—took up much of the kitchen. He kept each distinct sort of spice in an unlabeled jam jar and needed four jars to hold all the cumin. Somehow he still knew what was what.

Tonight Gabe's father cooked while singing classic Bollywood tunes.

Gabe strapped each twin into a high chair and buckled their seat belts to prevent escape.

“You've got them?” he asked, passing the child-care
torch to his father and making sure that he noticed it was happening.

His father nodded and set two small bowls of tasty glop aside to cool.

“Yeeeeeeeeh dostieeeeeeeee, hum nahieeeeeeeeee todengeeeeeeee,” he sang, stirring the various pots that bubbled over the stove. He tested the curry temperature with his pinky finger, found it suitable for toddlers, and set the two bowls on the two high-chair trays. The twins both sank their hands into the thick glop and stuffed their faces.

Gabe grabbed a Coke from the fridge—a
Mexican
Coke, made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup. All the local supermarkets and grocery stores imported Mexican Coca-Cola in small glass bottles. The newer, American stuff tasted like sweetened battery acid. Superior soda in hand, Gabe fled from his father's singing and headed upstairs.

His bedroom contained a bed, a bookshelf, and all three family pets.

Zora the parrot circled Gabe's head a couple of times before landing on it. Then she walked back and forth as though patrolling the top of a medieval tower. Gabe winced as the small claws pricked his scalp, but he didn't brush her off.

Garuda the iguana sat on the bookshelf and looked
Gabe over with one reptilian eyeball. He'd crushed half the city that Gabe had built on that shelf using little plastic bricks. The bricks were a chaotic mixture of several different toy sets, part moon base and part castle and part jungle, inhabited by little plastic characters who were never meant to mix together.

Dad had wanted to name the bird Garuda instead, but Lupe had thought it suited the lizard better because it kind of sounded like Godzilla. Lupe won. Dad still grumbled about it.

Sir Toby the silver fox curled up at the foot of Gabe's bed, pretending to sleep. Gabe could tell by the fox's ears and the squint of his eyes that this was just an act.

The Envoy crept along a tree branch outside and watched through the window. No one noticed it except Garuda, who watched the Envoy sideways with his other stoic eye.

Gabe closed his bedroom door. “Hello, everybody.”

“Hello!” said Zora from the top of his head. “Meow!” Noemi had taught her to say “meow,” which only reinforced Noemi's belief that “meow” was the proper thing to say to
all
animals—even though there were no cats among the family pets.

Garuda twitched his tail and knocked over more of the plastic city.

Sir Toby made a small yip-snore and kept both eyes closed.

The Envoy said nothing. It curled around the tree branch and listened from outside.

All three pets were refugees, abandoned and given shelter in Gabe's house. They used to belong to various neighbors, but they had stayed when their former families moved away.

“We'll just watch them until we can find better homes for them,” Gabe's father had said each time. No one believed him, and no one in the family had ever tried to find those alternate homes.

Zora flew from Gabe's head to Sir Toby's haunch. The fox swiveled his huge ears and opened one eye, which looked like a little sphere of frozen ink. The bird walked up and down his spine. The fox closed his eyes and stretched, enjoying the bird-foot massage.

Gabe sat on the floor. There wasn't very much floor. His bed took up most of the space.

Sir Toby made a yip-grumble at Zora, no longer enjoying his bird-foot massage. She didn't seem to notice. Gabe reached over, dislodged the bird, and then pretended to sneeze. She sneezed back at him. Fake sneezes were her favorite noise to make.

“Food!” Dad shouted from the bottom of the stairs.

Gabe left his door open, just in case any of the pets wanted to leave, and went back downstairs.

Mom came home just as Dad set the kitchen table. They all talked about nothing much in Spanish, English, and Spanglish.

Lupe, the eldest, came in late with apologies. She wore all black, as befitting a waitress. Her place at the table was already set. She slid smoothly into her chair, and smoothly into the conversation. Her full name was Guadalupe, but she never used it. She never liked it much, even though it sort of meant “River of the Wolf,” which Gabe thought was unspeakably cool. She had been born on their grandmother Guadalupe's birthday, so she couldn't avoid inheriting that name.

The Envoy watched them all from inside a cupboard. It had squeezed through mouse-chewed holes in the walls to get there. It watched, listened, and paid particular attention to Gabe—and it noticed how Gabe paid attention to everyone.

Gabe's mother shifted her posture, suddenly tense. She stared at the food as though trying to scry the future in it.

Lupe looked for the salt. She loved salt. But it always annoyed Dad to add any salt to his already perfectly balanced collage of flavors, so she didn't actually ask for
the salt. Gabe noticed anyway and passed her the saltshaker. It was shaped like an Olmec statue head with a great big helmet. Both the salt-and pepper shakers were cheap gifts from Gabe's grandparents—reminders to his mother that she could just come home to study ancient civilizations if she still wanted to be an archeologist.

Gabe thought the helmeted heads looked like astronauts. Mom said they were probably ancient ballplayers, and she insisted, firmly and often, that they were not astronauts.

Gabe made sure that Dad wasn't looking when he passed the salt to Lupe. Dad and Lupe loved to argue about anything and everything, but Dad took actual offense where his cooking was concerned.

Little Andrés dropped his spoon and started fussing, even though he never actually used the spoon to eat with. He still wanted it back. No one noticed but Gabe, so Gabe picked up the spoon, wiped it off, and gave it back to his little brother.

“I need to run errands tomorrow,” Mom said, still watching her food more than eating it. “You don't have a shift in the morning, do you?” she asked Dad.

“Not until noon,” he said around a mouthful of curry.

“Good,” said Mom. “I'll need your help lifting things. I can drop you off afterward.”

“I could help,” said Lupe.

“No,” said Mom. The word was a high fence tossed up between them. “Summer classes start tomorrow. Remember?”

Lupe started to say something angry and dismissive, stopped, started to say something else, and then stuffed her mouth to keep herself from saying anything.

Gabe wasn't sure why his mother and sister caught fire every single time they spoke. He just wished they would stop. The two of them did
not
love to argue, not with each other, but lately they couldn't seem to help it.

He asked for something that he knew he couldn't have and didn't actually want. “Can you drop me off at Minnehaha Park tomorrow morning? The one with the waterfall? I have to write about it for a summer reading project.”

Lupe gave a snort of disgust. Now she would be annoyed with him for acting like such a perfect little student—which was strange, since she used to be a perfect student herself—but Gabe could live with that. She didn't catch on fire when she was annoyed with Gabe.

Mom shook her head. “No room for all of us in the car, not with both car seats.” She finally started to eat her curry, but she still made grunting, subvocalized noises.

“I told you we should have traded the car in for that minivan,” Dad said.

“That van was embarrassed and embarrassing,” Lupe protested. “It was so rusted out that it would've fallen to pieces in shame just as soon as anybody said something mean to it.”

“I could have fixed it,” said Dad.

“You can't actually fix cars,” said Lupe. “I know you feel like you
should
be able to, but you can't. It never works out.”

“I fixed old Baghera so many times—”

“A motorcycle is not a minivan!”

Gabe sat back, relieved. This was something that Dad and Lupe
enjoyed
arguing about, and the topic wouldn't wound either one of them. They fought without fire.

“Just take the bus to the park,” Mom told Gabe, ignoring the minivan argument. “You can manage that by yourself. You're the most sensible member of this whole family. You're the only one who knows how to keep your head down.”

“Even though he's the only one who doesn't
need
to,” Lupe muttered.

Mom said nothing, loudly.

Gabe wondered what Lupe meant. He decided not to care. Instead he tried to think of a way to distract them
from another argument, but he didn't have to, because the twins started blowing raspberries at each other and that was adorable. Everyone paid attention to the twins and seemed to forget about the ire that crackled between Lupe and Mom.

The Fuentes family finished their meal.

Gabe turned out his light, climbed into bed, and found the flashlight he had stashed behind the mattress. He read a bit of
Hiawatha
for his summer reading project, read of “days that are forgotten, in the unremembered ages,” but the
THUMP thump THUMP thump
beat made him immediately sleepy. He read the lines “Break the red stone from this quarry, Mould and make it into Peace-Pipes,” at least three times, his eyes sliding over them and finding no traction. He wanted to enjoy it, but the book would have to wait for daylight.