“Chucho will talk to you. I will leave you now.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“I will pray for you both.”
“And what will you pray for me?”
“That you find the peace I now see missing from your eyes.”
“I don’t think God can give me that, Father. I think that can only come from within.”
For the first time, the old man smiled. “Where do you think God is, up in heaven?”
*
Señora Pernales offered me coffee, which I gratefully accepted. She made it from bottled water, which she boiled on a small, four-burner gas stove before pouring it into a deep cup and stirring in a spoonful of Nescafé, then turning it into
café con leche
with ample additions of sugar and milk. No cup of coffee had ever tasted better.
Her daughter disappeared into the other room, and she showed me to a short, low couch, where I sat facing her and Chucho, who took hard-backed wooden chairs. The room was typical working-class Mexican: clean, simply furnished, with religious icons and photographs of children on the walls, brightly colored wax flowers, a collection of ceramic animals on glass shelves, a small television set with rabbit ears. I knew from the message Chucho had left on my machine that his English was good, but I quickly realized that his mother’s was marginal at best, so I apologized to her before directing my conversation to her son.
“Thank you for seeing me, Chucho. Thank you for trusting me.”
“Do not think I trust you, mister. I trust no American guy.”
“Why is that?”
“Every gringo, he care about one thing, what he can get from you. Every gringo, he look at a Mexican guy, he see another bargain, what way he can find to use you.”
“If we make a deal, I’ll try my best to be fair.”
“You want what I think, you got to pay good.”
He was wearing the same clothes I’d seen him in at the bar in Zona Norte and they looked slept in. His face was bruised but he’d washed it and brushed back his hair while his mother made my coffee. He was a good-looking kid, but there was a pallid quality to his bronze coloring and a lethargy that hung over him like a bad mood. He had beautiful brown eyes, wide and dark, but as they watched me, I could see contempt etched in them so deeply that it masked all the warmth.
“I need you to tell me about Los Angeles, Chucho. About the other boys you were with, what happened to you, what happened to the other boys, who was involved. Do you understand?”
He glanced at his mother, then back toward me.
“I understand. So if I tell you, what do I get?”
“What do you want?”
“Money. Things for my mother, my sisters.”
“What about you?”
“Everything I get now is for them.”
“No future for yourself?”
“They are my future. They are what I have.”
He erupted suddenly into a coughing fit, riveting his mother’s attention until he’d gotten through it. She reached across, placed the back of her hand to his forehead, then stroked his head with a hand he quickly pushed away.
“Like I say, mister, you got to pay good.”
“How much money are we talking about, Chucho?”
“How much you got?”
“Nothing at the moment. The cops took everything.”
“Then I got nothing to say to you.”
“I can get more. But I need you to come back with me, talk to a reporter from a big newspaper in Los Angeles. Her name is Alexandra. You’ll like her.”
He thrust out his fuzzy chin, shaking his head.
“No! I never go back there, never.”
“What is it you’re afraid of?”
“They kill me for what I know. Sometimes I am afraid they come here to get me, because of what I see, what I can tell somebody like you.”
“What did you see, Chucho?”
“You think I am stupid? That I tell you for nothing?”
“If you go back with me, I can get you the medicine you need, the treatment.”
“I do not care about that. I only want for
mi familia.
My destiny is to help them get a better life. Me, I have no life now.”
“That’s not true.”
“I have the sickness, the SIDA. Before, at least they pay me for my body, these gringos. Now, with the HIV, I am not even useful to them for the sex. So what can I do? I might as well be dead.”
“No, Chucho, you can live, have a full life.”
The contempt in his eyes took over his whole face now, shaping his lips into a sneer.
“What do you know about my disease? Who are you to tell me about this?”
The question hung there between us like a gaping chasm, yet the bridge across took only a few words.
“I have the illness, too, Chucho. I’m HIV-positive, just like you.”
I’d finally said the words out loud. Chucho’s eyes flickered, but the suspicion remained.
“You lie, just to get what you want.”
“No, Chucho, it’s true. I’ve been sick, I need treatment. I know where to go, how to get it.”
He studied me as if he were seeing a different person, a stranger who had taken the place of the last one. “You?
Eres maricon?
”
“Yes, Chucho, I’m gay. Gay with HIV. I know what you’re going through, believe me.”
My words—maybe the conviction he heard—seemed to sweep away most of his resentment and doubt. Yet I also sensed that the truth left him shaken and confused, maybe angry in a new way; I could see the transformation in his eyes, in the set of his jaw. It had happened to plenty of others with HIV and AIDS, men and women who had finally come to terms with death and abandoned their plans before the new drugs came along, thrusting them unexpectedly back among the living, where they had to face a future they’d worked so painfully to give up.
Chucho shot a brief glance at his mother, then spoke quietly to me.
“I think maybe it is better that I die here, where I belong.”
“If you’re gone, who takes care of your mother, your sisters?”
I saw the flicker in his eyes again. The doubt now seemed directed inward.
“Tell me, Chucho—which one of your sisters do you want out on the street?”
He lowered his eyes toward the sharp points of his boots.
“You can be healthy again, Chucho. There are programs I can get you into, medicine so you can feel good, so you can be strong.”
“If I go back.”
“If you go back and tell the truth, under oath, about what happened.”
He kept his eyes down, shaking his head.
“No, I never go back to Los Angeles. I hate that place.”
Then we heard his mother’s soft voice.
“Chucho?”
She leaned from her chair, touching him.
“Medicina? Para el virus?”
So she understood more English than she spoke. Chucho seemed to wither under her inquiring gaze, becoming a little boy before my eyes. In the best Spanish I could muster, I told her that if Chucho returned with me to the United States, he could get treatment that might save his life. She leaned closer to him, finding his eyes.
“Chucha, es verdad?”
“Es posible, mamá.”
She asked me how this might be. I told her there were health organizations whose policy was to turn no one away, regardless of their ability to pay. Their sole mandate was to save lives, to keep people out of the hospital, regardless of borders or nationalities, poverty or the lack of medical insurance. She seemed stunned by this information, and turned back to her son.
“Chucho, tienes que ir.”
Chucho, you must go.
“Por la medicina, mijo.”
He stared at his boots a long time, saying nothing. When he looked up again, his eyes were no longer those of a chastised child but of a mature man, who understood how to survive in a world that was far more challenging than most of us would ever know.
“I have no papers, Mr. Justice. It is not so easy now getting across the border.”
“I’ve thought of that. I have a plan.”
“If I go with you, I say nothing about what you want before I see the doctor and I have the medicine I need.”
I started to speak, but he put up a hand to silence me.
“And
mi madre,
she get a new house and a little store, like before. Not in this place. In a place where the streets are good, where the floods do not come.”
I thought for a moment, of how much of Charlotte Preston’s money was left in my bank account, and how much a house and little store like that might cost in a Tijuana neighborhood with curbing and storm drains. Then I remembered Vivian Grant, and the wealth she’d be inheriting from her deceased daughter, more than she would ever need.
“Tell me one thing, Chucho. Were you ever with an older man named Rod Preston?”
Chucho turned to his mother, asked her in Spanish to go into the other room. She left us, closing the door behind her.
“Rod Preston, this man you ask me, he is the movie star, right?”
“Yes, the movie star.”
“Sure, I know him. They take me up to his place plenty times. I like it there, the horses, the swimming pool. He treat me good, Mr. Preston. He like boys who look like me.”
“You had sex with him?”
Chucho snorted bitterly.
“What else would he want with me?”
I thought of Vivian Grant again, her sense of decency and propriety.
“Your mother will get her house and store, Chucho. We’ll find a way.”
“How do I know you speak the truth, when so many gringos lie to me so many times before?”
“I’ll get some money—two thousand dollars, sort of a down payment.”
“When?”
“Today, as soon as I can go and get it.”
“Two thousand American?”
I nodded.
“Cash,
sí
?”
“Cash.”
Chucho slumped back in his chair, stretching out his skinny legs, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans.
“I see the money, then I go with you.”
*
By noon, wearing a pair of shoes that had belonged to Chucho’s father, I’d made my way along the winding roads from Colonia Libertad into downtown Tijuana, and back to Armando Ornellas’s paint-and-body shop. I was told he was at church with his family but was expected at the shop within the hour. I borrowed some cash from his foreman, then used the time to find a decent restaurant along Avenida Revolución, where I ordered some food and a Bloody Mary to stop the shakes left over from the tequila of the night before. When I’d gotten the food and alcohol down, I started to feel half alive again.
Armando was at the shop when I returned, and I got back all my money except for the two grand I owed him for the work he was doing on the Mustang. At my request, he disappeared for a minute into the glazing room and came back with my packed bag from the trunk of the car. Then I stepped into the street, raised my hand, and a moment later was in a taxi, riding into the hills and up to the Pernales place, where I peeled off twenty hundred-dollar bills into Senora Pernales’s hand while Chucho counted every one with his eyes.
He’d already showered, changed his clothes, and packed a bag, and I told him we had to get going, that there was a lot to do before tomorrow morning. I waited outside while he said good-bye to his mother and sisters, and when he stepped down from the door, he was wiping tears from his face. In the taxi, he didn’t look back.
*
Because of the Sunday checkouts, I was able to get a room at my old motel near the Jai Alai Palace, although they only had a single, king-sized bed, no doubles. I took it, we checked in, then caught another taxi for the fancy stores in the big outdoor mall in Zona Rio. I outfitted Chucho in a fine-looking European jacket and a pair of pleated slacks, a white dress shirt by Calvin Klein, and a pair of Italian loafers that I told him he’d be wearing without socks, like rich American college boys. I bought myself a new pair of shoes while I was at it, sharp-looking Florsheims that cost me half what I would have paid in the States. Before we left, we stopped in an optical fashion boutique, where I purchased a pair of stylish Polo frames with nonprescription lenses, which helped enhance Chucho’s new preppy look. After that, it was into another taxi, where I directed the driver to the luxurious Camino Real Hotel.
Chucho was done in, and wanted to go back to the motel and sleep.
“First, a haircut and a shave.”
He stroked his sparse mustache.
“I do not want no shave.”
“Tomorrow morning, when we cross the border, you’ll need a different look.”
“My grandmother, she told me that when she see me next time, I should have a mustache, like a man. Even if it just a little one.”
“Trust me, Chucho, it’ll grow back.”
Minutes later, Chucho was in a barber chair in the salon at the Camino Real, getting his first shave and a classy new cut from the owner, a distinguished older gentleman named Reynaldo who had honed his skills as a young man in some of the most exclusive styling shops in Beverly Hills. Every trip I’d ever made to Tijuana, I’d gotten a shave and a trim from Reynaldo, but this time it was Chucho’s turn.