I stood up and walked around the table and stopped a few yards from him. I took a long drag off my cigarette and then flicked it at his feet. “I have police buddies who know exactly where I am and who your father is, and if I don’t say hi to them next week, they’ll know where to come find me. And they all hate sushi.”
He was glaring at me. Behind him, the stingrays swam languidly around his thin, stiff figure like a flock of vultures.
His eyes looked past me and he nodded his head, and before I could turn around I felt the Mexican’s enormous arms wrap around my chest, hugging me so tightly I could hardly breathe. I soon felt a fumbling at my ankle holster, and then saw Sonny Jr. with my five-shot, which he deposited in his jacket pocket. He said something in Vietnamese, and the Mexican pushed me down to the floor, forcing me flat onto my stomach. With his knee digging into my lower back, he twisted one of my arms behind my back and held my other arm to the floor before my flattened face. I could do nothing but grunt beneath him, a doll in his hands, the tile floor numbing my cheek.
I looked up and Sonny Jr. had taken off his jacket. From his pant pocket, he now pulled out a switchblade, which he opened. The Mexican wrenched my extended forearm so that my wrist was exposed. Sonny Jr. kneeled and planted his shoe on my palm. Then he steadied the blade across my wrist.
“Wait!” I gasped. I struggled but could hardly budge under the Mexican, his boulder of a knee still lodged in my lower back.
Sonny Jr. slowly, gently dragged the blade. I could feel its icy sharpness slice the surface of my skin. The pain was no more than an itch, but waiting for it had made me clench my jaw so tightly that it now ached. Sonny Jr. lifted his shoe. A thread of blood appeared across my wrist.
“You and I,” Junior murmured casually, “now share something.” He wiped the blade with two fingers, closed it, and returned it to his pocket. He stood and I could no longer see his face, but his voice came out bitter and hard, like he was shaking his head at me: “I know exactly who you are, Mr. Robert. The minute you arrived at our door, I knew. You are a man who has nothing to lose. But that does not make you brave, it only makes you naïve. Happy told me you were a silly, stupid man. What were you going to do—kill my father? Break his arm? Yell at him? Everything I have told you is true, and I meant every sentiment. And yet you are too sentimental to listen. You want to come here and be a hero and save your former wife from a bad man. You want to know how he has hurt her, and why. But in the end, the only thing you
really
want is to know why she would leave you for slapping her, and then stay with a man who threw her down a flight of stairs and broke her arm.”
His shoes reappeared before my eyes, a foot from my nose. He was now speaking directly over my head like he was ready to spit on it. “You see, we keep most of these fish separated not because they will eat each other—though that is true—but because they like it this way. Just like
we
like it this way. Why do you think, when you walk into any casino in this city, that nearly every dealer is Asian, and nearly every Asian dealer is Vietnamese? Because we enjoy cards and colorful chips?
No
. Because we flock to each other. We flock to where there are many of us—so that we will belong. It is a very simple reality, Mr. Robert. A primal reality.”
He bent down, speaking closer now to my ear.
“What made you think she ever belonged to you, or more importantly that
you
ever belonged with her? America, Mr. Robert, is not the melting pot you Americans like to say or think it is. Things get stirred, yes, but like oil and vinegar they eventually separate and settle and the like things always go back to each other. They have made new friends, perhaps even fucked them, but in their heart they will always wander back to where they belong. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it.”
He sighed dramatically and stood back up.
“That is enough. I am tired of speeches.” With this, he lifted his shoe and stomped on my hand with the heel.
I screamed out and he let me. The Mexican dismounted me then. After a long writhing moment I forced myself to sit up. I was holding my injured hand like a dead bird. I couldn’t tell if anything was broken, but my knuckles and fingers felt hot with numbing pain, right alongside the ache in my shoulder where the Mexican had twisted and held my arm.
Junior now stood before the tank of piranhas, in his jacket again and with his hands in his pockets. As though he was ordering a child, he said to me, “If I ever see you again, I will do much worse. You will now go with Menendez here, and he will take you back outside. Remember, you have seen nothing here. If necessary, I will hurt my new mother at your expense. I like her, but not that much.”
He handed Menendez my gun and Menendez led me out of the room by the arm, almost gently.
Junior’s voice followed me out: “Go home, Mr. Robert, and try to be happy.”
I let the Mexican drag me to another door, which revealed another staircase, which ascended into another office, which opened out into what looked like the pet store next door to the restaurant. Everything was dark, save for the shifting shadows of birds in their cages, dogs and rodents in their pens. We passed aquariums with goldfish and droning water pumps. Something squawked irritably in the putrid darkness.
I was released outside into a rainy, windy night. It was like stepping into another part of the country, far from the desert, near the ocean perhaps. I must have looked at Menendez with shock, because he said to me, in a gruff but pleasant voice: “Monsoon season.” He handed me my five-shot, closed the door, and I saw his giant shadow fade back into the darkness of the store.
I drove down Highway 15, toward California. My right hand was wrapped tightly in a handkerchief. I could move my fingers, but didn’t want to. It was 10 o’clock, an hour after I had left Fuji West, and the rain had not yet stopped. On my way out of town, I saw three car accidents, one of which appeared fatal—a Toyota on its side, a truck with no front door, no windshield, a body beneath wet tarp. I had worked so many of these scenes in my time, and yet that evening they spooked me—chilled me. Rain must fall like an ice storm upon this town.
I kept thinking of the night I hit Suzy. But soon I was remembering another hot rainy night, many years ago, when I came home from work all drenched and tired and she made me strip down to my underwear and sat me at the dining table with a bowl of hot chicken porridge. As I ate the porridge, she stood close behind my chair and hummed one of her sad Vietnamese ballads and dried my hair with a towel. I remember, between spoonfuls, trying to hum along with her.
Sonny Jr.’s parting words flashed through my mind. What did he know about other people’s happiness?
I took the very next exit and turned around and began driving in the direction of their house. I had wanted all along to avoid this—I knew she might be there. It took me half an hour to find it. By the time I turned into the neighborhood, the street curbs were overflowing with ankle-deep water and I could feel my tires slicing through the currents.
Their house, like many of the others, was a two-story stucco job with a manicured rock garden and several giant palm trees out front. It looked big and warm. All the windows were dark. A red BMW sat in the circular driveway behind the brown Toyota Camry I’d bought Suzy eight years ago. Who knows why she was still driving it with what he could buy her now.
I parked by the neighbor’s curb and approached the side of the house, beneath the palm trees that swayed and thrashed in the wind. The rain was coming down even harder now, blinding sheets of it, and I was drenched within seconds. On their patio, I saw the same kind of potted cacti that stood on our porch years ago, except the pots were much nicer. And also, there in front of me, like I was staring at the front door of our old house, was a silver cross hanging beneath the peephole.
The rain soothed my injured hand. I unwrapped the wet handkerchief and tossed it on the driveway. I tried to make a fist and realized I could, though the ache was still there, and also some of the numbness. I rang the doorbell and stood there waiting, shivering. I didn’t know who I wanted to answer the door, but when the porch light turned on and he finally opened it, I understood what I wanted to do.
He looked exactly as he did on his driver’s license, but was shorter than I expected, shorter than both Suzy and his son. He was wearing a white T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, his arms tan and muscular, his face a mixture of sleepiness, curiosity, and annoyance. “Yes?” he muttered.
I noticed the tattoo of a cross on his neck. I raised my gun at his face. He snapped his head back, but then froze. He was looking at me, not the gun. There was a stubborn quality in his expression, like he’d had a gun in his face before, like he didn’t want to be afraid but couldn’t help it either.
“Open the door and then put up your hands,” I ordered calmly.
He did as I said, slowly, withdrawing into the foyer of the house, then into the edge of the living room as I followed him inside, leaving some distance between us. I kept the front door half open, then turned on a small lamp by the couch and caught the familiar scent of shrimp paste in the air.
Their house was furnished with all the fancy stuff required of a wealthy, middle-aged couple, but what caught my eye was the large aquarium against the wall, the tall wooden crucifix above the fireplace, and the vases everywhere filled with fresh flowers. Daffodils, pink tulips, Oriental lilies, chrysanthemums—I had become used to all of them over the years.
The rain was pummeling the roof above us—a steady, violent drone. I watched him watch me and imagined what I must have looked like to him: a pale bald stranger with a gun, still pointed squarely at his face, standing there in his dark living room in drenched clothes, dripping water onto his wife’s pristine carpet. She used to yell at me for merely walking on the carpet in my shoes.
“You take what you want,” he said in a loud whisper. “I not gonna stop you. My wallet right there.” He nodded at the table beside me where his wallet lay by the telephone and some car keys. Behind the phone stood a photo of him and Suzy on a beach. “Take my car too,” he added. “Just go.”
I picked up the phone, listened for the dial tone, and then placed it face-up on the table.
“Anyone else here in the house?”
“No,” he said immediately.
“No? Your wife—where’s she?”
I could see him about to shake his head, like he was ready to deny having a wife, but then he realized he had all but pointed out the photo.
“She not here. She sleep at her mother house tonight. Just me here.”
“Then why are there two cars in the driveway?”
“What do that matter? I tell you, it just me here tonight.”
He sounded irritated now, but his eyes were still wide and wary.
“So if I make you take me into the bedroom, I won’t find anyone in there?”
He didn’t say anything at first. He glanced toward the dark hallway to my left and then returned his scowl back on me. “I told you,” he growled, but then lowered his voice. He didn’t want to wake her. “Take my car. My wallet. Take anything you want and go.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “I’m gonna let
you
go. Walk out the door. Call for help if you want. You’re free to leave.”
“What?” He lowered his hands a bit.
“Go.”
“What wrong with you?”
“I’m giving you a chance to leave without me shooting your face in. If no one’s here, then you have nothing to worry about.”
He just glowered at me. Then his hands fell. “Who are you?” he said in a thick voice. “What you want?”
I took a step closer to him, and he slowly put up his hands again without adjusting his glare on me.
“Last chance,” I said.
“I not going anywhere.”
I could still see fear in his eyes, but there was an angry calm in his demeanor now, in the flimsy way he held up his hands like I was an annoying child with a toy gun. I decided to believe everything his son had told me, and it filled me with both disappointment and relief, and then suddenly a heavy decisive sadness, like I no longer recognized that shrimp paste smell in the air or any of the outlandish flowers in this strange house—like a stone door had just closed on the last fifteen years of my life.
I edged closer but he did not budge. When my gun was finally within a foot of his face, I said, “Okay then,” and struck him across the cheek with it. He staggered back and threw up a hand to shield himself.
I backed away. With his hand on his cheek, he watched me move toward the front door. I glanced at the hallway, at the doors in the darkness, wondering which room was their bedroom, which room might she be sleeping in, which door might she be standing behind right now, cupping her ear to the wood, holding her breath. I took a last look back at Sonny. His cheek was bleeding, his eyes dark and wide. How many more times would he save her like tonight?
I turned and ran out into the rain, stumbling across the gushing lawn, through the surging water in the street, toward my car. My engine roared to life. As I drove frantically past the house, I glimpsed Sonny standing on their front porch with his arms at his side, watching me speed away. I could have sworn I saw a darker, slimmer figure looming behind him.
I drove like a maniac for a few miles, cars honking at me as I passed them one by one. Then I slowed down. I turned on the radio. I reentered the highway. My body felt cool and the rain was soothing on the roof of the car. I turned off the radio and let the droning rain fill my ears. The night was like a tunnel. I drove a steady clip down the highway, promising myself that I would never again return to this or any desert.
BENNIE ROJAS AND THE ROUGH RIDERS
for Chris Hudgins
T
he morning Bennie Rojas boarded the plane for Las Vegas, he was convinced he’d just gotten a new lease on life. Cuba, that small island rocked by politics and hurricanes, was already beginning to fade into the past and all his troubles were but flickering specks in a distant black sky. In the seat to Bennie’s right was one of the cooks from the Tropicana, the grandest nightclub in the world. To the left was a taciturn man with a scar that ran from his ear to his chin. He’d gotten on board in Miami, where the plane stopped on its way west, and had said nothing for four and a half hours. Naturally, Bennie assumed he did not speak any Spanish. Tough guys, Bennie thought. There’s nothing you can do about them. And so he spent the whole trip talking to the cook, a fellow from Matanzas with a pencil-thin mustache and a head the shape of an eggplant. His name was Orlando Leyva.