The Practical Navigator (16 page)

“Why?”

“Because I love”—Michael pauses for effect—“your
cooking
.”

“Indeed,” Fari says, pleasure in her voice.

Two blocks later and driving, Michael realizes any disquiet he was feeling is gone and that he's humming to himself. It's a song by the Beatles. He remembers seeing the video once. John, Paul, George, and Ringo, young, bearded, and long haired, wandering around the English countryside with their lady loves. Lennon, or maybe it's Harrison, singing about whether love will grow or not. He doesn't know. But the song's melody makes it seem likely.

 

29

“What a' you got today?” asks Leo.

It is past noon and the crew has broken for a well-earned lunch. Jose and Bobby have set a board on two sawhorses and, between bites of takeout burritos, are discussing the two things they share in common—internal combustion engines and women. Bobby likes motorcycles and strippers, Jose pines for souped-up Toyota Corollas and tattooed virgins. Too old to be interested in either one, Luis and Leo eat lunch on the dropped tailgate of Leo's truck.

“Tortilla soup,” says Luis, opening his thermos. “Ham san-wiches and flan.”

Leo peers into his brown paper bag. Podagra in his big toe, more commonly called gout or rich man's disease—which is unfair because he is anything but rich—has Leo on the third day in the latest of innumerable diets limiting the meat, fish, butter, and red wine that Leo dotes on. To pretend he's actually eating he has brought beautifully cut, fresh crudités for lunch—crudités at least being
French
for raw vegetables—cucumbers, radishes, broccoli florets, celery and carrot sticks. With the smell of tortilla soup wafting, a different name doesn't make them taste any better.

“You're gonna get fat, Luis, you keep eatin' like that.”

“Then I look like you.”

Leo scowls. He takes a bite of carrot. He has nothing against vegetables, even raw, sauceless ones that taste like kindling, still, the least Luis could do is share his soup.

“The problem is you're ignorant, Luis.”

“
I
am?”

“You don't even
know
what makes you fat. Read a newspaper sometime. Turn the radio dial to something other than mariachi music. Learn what's going on in the world.”

“You know what's goin' on in the world, Leo?” Bobby calls out, having heard the tail end of the diatribe. Today, Bobby has gone for the
carne asada
, which also has the potential to put him on Leo's shit list.

“Damn right I do. CBS evening news, every night.”

“Yeah, well, from what I hear it's the Bunny Ranch and sports center.”

“Fuck you,” says Leo, laughing. Truth be told, he likes an occasional tour of the Bunny Ranch, which is a silly documentary show about a Nevada whorehouse. The girls are all giggly airheads, apparently untroubled and unscarred by their profession, and the owner of the bordello, whom they all seem to adore, is overweight like him. Leo isn't sure but he thinks the show is on the Fantasy Channel. The broccoli florets are suddenly tasting pretty good. Laughter does that to food.

*   *   *

It's not fair, thinks Luis as he digs into his
sandwich de jamón
. Bobby and Jose can laugh at Leo. Maybe it's because they haven't worked with him for ten years and still think he's funny. They probably don't read papers and listen to the news any more than he, Luis, does but Leo doesn't give them
mierda
about it. The truth is, the few times Luis has tried to look at a newspaper it has seemed obvious that the news is all about poor people getting shot, bombed, arrested, imprisoned, deported, and generally given the short end of the stick. What's new about that? And as for
el mundo,
from what Luis can tell, the rest of the world makes America seem like
una dulcería
—a sweet shop. Is it any wonder why people come?

“Ignorant, Luis. Ignorant.”

There are days when Luis would like to ship Leo off to a foreign country and throw away the return ticket. Maybe he
is
ignorant. Maybe all poor people are. Luis has never quite understood how rich people make money. As a laborer, you do a service and you get paid for it. Or you make something somebody wants and they buy it. And yet it seems sometimes as if the people who do nothing and make nothing own everything. From what Luis understands, they buy and sell paper to do this. Not only that, they pay people to buy and sell this paper for them. Luis would love to know what the paper is or at least what's written on it. He's never seen it. He's not sure he'd trust it if he did. Regardless, if most of the news is about poor people getting fucked over, the rest of the news is about rich people exasperated that there are poor people in the world.

*   *   *

They all stop eating and quietly and collectively groan as Michael drives his truck onto the worksite.

“Aw, shit,” says Jose. “Don' he got better things to do?”

“
Coma
your
almuerzo,
” says Leo. “Eat your lunch.” Like Jose, Leo knows what's coming when Michael doesn't park on the street. He too wishes his boss could find better things to do with his free time, play tennis maybe or go to a movie. He just doesn't want to hear it coming out of the mouth of a kid enamored with souped-up Toyotas. He tosses his carrots aside, rises, and starts forward as Michael gets out of his pickup and starts stripping off his shirt.

“You're workin' with us this afternoon, huh?” Leo sounds somewhere between skeptical and resigned.

Michael reaches into the pickup for a leather tool belt. “Thought I would,” he says, smiling, obviously a man, thinks Leo, who's had a good lunch. “You mind?”

“Just don't expect us to keep up,” says Leo. “We're pros, we pace ourselves.”

Michael reaches back into the pickup. “Here,” he says, “consider it a bribe,” and he tosses Leo a bag from Jack in the Box, the king of fast food. Oil from the fries has already begun to stain the paper and Leo, suddenly feeling faint with hunger, reaches in and pulls out something warm and wrapped. He knows, having been long intimate with its comrades, that it is an ultimate cheeseburger, two quarter-pound patties, three kinds of cheese, and a special sauce that should be outlawed as an instant heart attack.

“Workin' food!” crows Leo, and he bites into the burger, wrapper and all.

*   *   *

An hour and a half later, Leo is burping something that tastes of wax paper, ground beef, and ketchup into his mouth. As feared, Michael is setting the pace, working like a man happily possessed. He carts two-by-fours onto the deck, four at a time. The table saw screams, covering his bare torso with sawdust. The pneumatic nail gun fires like an automatic pistol in his hand as he nails a panel to a stud. The others, not to be outdone, pick up their pace. Michael's enthusiasm is contagious and at the end of the day they are builders and builders build. This is their craft and their art and Michael has them in the zone where an hour of hard labor goes by in a minute.

Even Leo.

He complains bitterly and groans piteously—“You're killin' me, Mike!”—but he matches them all nail for nail, header for header, stud for stud. His cuts are straight. His corners are flush and square. His top lines are true. Hawking and spitting specks of onion and ground beef, he helps Michael lift a ten-foot section of wall into place. He stares at it, panting with satisfaction.

“Hey, Leo!” Bobby calls, with a grin. “I thought all you did was doughnut runs!” Normally Leo would sentence the kid to cleanup for such impertinence, but not today. “I am the franchise!” he bellows, and he raises his arms and flexes his meaty biceps for all to see. An hour later, his big toe throbbing, he trips over some boards and falls off the platform. Bruised and tired, he is out for the rest of the day and Michael sends him on a 7-Eleven beer and Slurpee run. All are pleased with him. They know in their hearts that for once, he didn't fuck up on purpose so as to get some rest.

*   *   *

“Ey, boss.
¿Puedo hablar con usted?
Can I talk to you?”

Michael is nailing plywood sheathing to an exterior wall as Luis approaches, He is surprised. Luis rarely stops work and it's even rarer for him to initiate a conversation. The first two years they worked together, Michael wasn't sure Luis spoke at all. It took three years to realize he spoke passable English.

“Sure.
Por supuesto
. What's up?”

Luis stares off into space for a moment, both his jaw and mind seemingly chewing on something tough and gristly. A measure-twice, cut-once kind of guy, thinks Michael, if ever there was one.

“I'm not a man who asks favors,” Luis finally rumbles, his voice a monotone.

This is an understatement. Michael was on the job one day when Luis cut his hand on a circular saw. He watched as the big man silently wrapped the bloody hand in a cloth. “Maybe we ought to get that checked out,” Michael finally said, as the cloth turned crimson.

“'Eez nothing,” Luis had replied.

“Luis,” Michael had said. “I insist.”

A shrug. “You the boss.” The cut had taken twenty stitches to close, several yards of gauze and tape to bandage, and even though Michael had offered him the rest of the day with pay, Luis had insisted on returning to work.

“You're a man people ask favors of,” Michael now says.

A small tired sigh. This is true. “I always say no.”

“You say no but you do the favor.”

The tiniest of you-got-me smiles touches Luis's lips. “My wife. She likes to brag about my good deeds, not my good looks.” Luis, the driest of comedians.
“¿Qué
es un hombre que hacer?”

“Exactly,” says Michael, trying to be equally straight-faced. “What's a man to do? So what can I do for you?”

Pulling the sixteen-ounce hammer from his tool belt and ten pennies from his nail pouch, Luis sets and bangs a nail into the plywood—tap, bam, done—one blow, the old-fashioned way. Michael can't remember if he has ever seen Luis bend a nail. “My sister, Carmen. Her boy, Eduardo. He's smart, you know? Graduating top of his class from the high school.” Tap, bam. “His mother? Dumb as a soda can. But the boy?” Tap, bam. “
Muy inteligente.
And now he wants to go to college.”

“That's impressive, good for him,” says Michael, wondering how far Luis ever got in school. He'll have to ask Leo about it.

“Not any school. He wants to go to the Stanford. You heard of it?”

“In passing,” Michael says.

“It's a tough place?”

“Yeah. But it's a good place, the best.”

“Mmm.”

Tap, bam. Tap, bam. Plywood secure. The nice thing about having a conversation with Luis, however minimal, is that things get done.

“So what's he need, your nephew? Money?”

“Recomendaciones.”

“You mean letters?”

“He got some from teachers, one from his priest. My sister, she say he needs some from white people.”

“I don't think my recommendation is going to do much for him, Luis.”

“Not you. Someone
importante
.”

It shouldn't wound but it does. It shouldn't make him wince inside but it does. Why? There are movers, there are shakers, there are people with connections, and it's abundantly clear of late, he's not one of them. He is a banger of nails and he doesn't even do it as well as the man standing across from him.

“You mean someone who might actually make a difference,” Michael says, grinning to take the hurt away.

“Not my idea, my sister's.”

“I'm a little short on those kind of people right now, Luis. But if I think of anyone.”

“You do what you can.”

“Sí.”

“Bueno. Esto era el favor que preguntaba. Gracias.”

“De nada.”

Meaning you're welcome. Meaning it's nothing. As Luis, in his torn jeans and dusty, worn work boots, lumbers away, Michael remembers that three or four weeks after Anita left him, the man showed up on his doorstep with a bottle of tequila, a six-pack of Bud Light, and a large bag of
chicharrónes
—Mexican pork rinds.
“Es béisbol en televisión,”
he said. The baseball is on television. With Jamie asleep, they sat, they drank, they watched the Padres. The house was a calumnious mess and at the seventh-inning stretch, Luis rose from his chair and began casually picking up. Chagrined, Michael joined him. They swept and vacuumed, drank some more, and changed the soiled sheets on the bed. Michael showered and shaved, the first time in days. They drank, ate pork rinds, did dishes, and washed clothes. Jamie woke, crying, and Luis watched as Michael bottle-fed him and rocked him back to sleep in his arms, at one point murmuring,
“Se necesita un hombre fuerte para hacer trabajo de la madre.”

It takes a strong man to do a mother's work.

Michael remembers the night as the first step on the road back to reclaiming himself.

Gracias, Luis.

De nada.

*   *   *

At the end of the day when the others leave, Michael and Leo stay, and as they drink beer, spirits revived, Michael tells him all about the woman he's been seeing, about Anita who has returned, and about the new doctor in Jamie's corner. Leo, in turn, listens intently, feigns surprise and disbelief when necessary, and offers encouragement when needed. They toast Luis who they both agree is the best of men. They toast each other. It's so simple really. Life is. A cold beer. Some guy talk. A woman who cares about you. Atlas, a working man, held the sky on his shoulders. He endured.

“I need a sitter Saturday night, Leo. You available?”