Sweet Nothing (21 page)

Mr. Brewer pushes the money aside. “I'm staying,” he says.

“Take it,” Papá says in English. “Please.”

“Let's get to work.”

They go back and forth, but Mr. Brewer won't be swayed. Papá finally relents and puts the bill away. He picks up the bag containing the burritos and passes it to Miguel. “Share with him,” he says, nodding at Mr. Brewer, then walks to a spot near the bones, kneels, and begins scooping a hole in the sand.

There are two burritos left. Miguel unwraps one and offers the other to Mr. Brewer.

“You go ahead,” the man says. “I had a hell of a lunch.” He carries a bottle of water to Papá and makes him drink before crouching to help dig.

Miguel thinks maybe he shouldn't eat either, that it's some custom the older men know and he doesn't, but his legs are shaking, and he feels like he'll pass out if he doesn't get at least a little food in his stomach. He eats only half of his burrito, barely anything, and wraps up the rest and puts it back in the bag.

The men are knee-deep in the grave when he finishes. Papá waves him off when he offers to help, but Mr. Brewer says he could use a break. Miguel replaces him in the hole and begins digging alongside his father.

Papá chuckles and says he can't believe it. He jokes about how Miguel has always hated having dirt on his hands, how even as a baby he'd run to Mamá when he got the littlest bit of mud on himself and cry and cry until she lifted him to the faucet and scrubbed his fingers clean. It's not funny to Miguel.
Why don't you look at me now, old man?
he thinks.

Papá refuses to take any breaks, but Miguel and Mr. Brewer switch off every few minutes. The ground beneath the sand is rock hard, so they pull the rubber tips off the crutches and use the crutches like jackhammers to bust up the soil. They work silently except for an occasional grunt or exhaled curse. Sweat runs down Miguel's face, and he licks his lips to taste it. Neither Papá nor Mr. Brewer admits to noticing when night falls, so Miguel doesn't comment either. The three of them continue digging in the dark.

Miguel is resting, lying on his back on a pile of freshly excavated dirt with his eyes closed, when Papá declares that they're finished. The hole is five feet deep. They chopped a step halfway up, which the old man and Mr. Brewer use now, Miguel pulling them the rest of the way out.

Papá sits for a while and drinks some water. He's covered from head to toe in dirt that's turned to mud wherever he sweats. He rinses his mouth and spits.

“I need you to bring the bones to me in the hole,” he says to Miguel.

Miguel's heart stops.

“I can't,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I can't touch them.”

“It's your family.”

Miguel doesn't respond; he's crying too hard. Deep, deep sobs, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. He's ashamed, but also angry. It's not normal, what the old man is asking. This isn't Mexico.

Mr. Brewer pats him on the back. “It's okay,” he says, then walks over to the pile.

Mr. Brewer passes the remains to Papá, who stands in the grave and carefully lays them at his feet. Five minutes, and they've finished. Papá climbs out of the grave, and he and Mr. Brewer sit down to rest. Miguel feels like crying again. He and the old man will never be the same with each other, he knows. This day will forever stand between them.

Swallowing his grief, he walks over and begins shoveling dirt onto the bones with his hands.

“Wait,
mijo,
I'll help you,” Papá says.

“I'm fine,” Miguel replies, his voice too loud in the nighttime silence of the canyon. And then there's only the reassuring hymn of his breath and the grateful sigh of earth returning in darkness to where it belongs.

IT'S CLOSE TO
midnight when they finish refilling the grave and stand over it with bowed heads. Brewer realizes he's forgotten all the prayers he ever knew except the childish ones, “Now I lay me down to sleep” and such, and decides he's fine with that.

Miguel is ready to walk out tonight, says he'll carry his dad if he has to. He's got school tomorrow, a track meet. Brewer argues the other side, pointing out how tricky the switchbacks will be for Armando on crutches, especially with no flashlight. Better to hunker down here until dawn, when it'll take half as long to make the climb and be a lot less dangerous. Miguel's face falls when Armando decides to wait. Brewer hates to see him disappointed. He's a good kid.

“A few more hours,” he says to him.

The boy turns away, doesn't want to hear it.

The night is plenty warm, and there's food and enough water if they go easy on it. The three of them sit on the ground with their backs to the canyon wall, and Brewer smokes a cigarette. Lights twinkle in the distance. A ranch in Mexico, on the other side of the fence. The silence is so profound—everything that might make a noise having fled or been burned—that the distant roar of a jet passing high overhead makes them all look up.

Armando and Miguel stretch out on their backs, fingers laced behind their heads. Their breathing slows and deepens. Brewer won't be able to sleep without whiskey—that's the way it is these days—but he's content to sit and watch over the man and boy and wishes them peaceful dreams.

The stars do their dance for him, wheeling around a bright sliver of moon, and after making sure that all the constellations he knew as a boy are still there, he divides the sky into quadrants with an eye toward counting. Choosing a section, he begins: one star, two stars, three. He hopes Cassius made it home, pictures the dog waiting for him when he returns to the trailer.

After an hour he dozes off and finds Charlie Wiggins fishing in a river he knows but can't name. His old friend draws his rod back, then snaps it forward, sending his lure into a dappled pool in the middle of the stream. Brewer is ecstatic watching him.
If this is forever,
he thinks,
I'm fine with it.
Suddenly, though, the light changes. The sun on the water burns brighter and brighter until Charlie is nothing but a silhouette against it, and Brewer is no longer able to distinguish his features. He reaches out to pull his friend into the shade with him, but no go. He wakes with a handful of sand and a too-familiar ache in his chest.

Armando has removed his jacket and covered Miguel with it and is sleeping with his arm wrapped protectively around the boy. Brewer is long past pondering how his life would have been different if certain things had happened or hadn't, but seeing father and son like this, he can't help but wonder about all that he missed that might have eased his way.

False dawn comes and goes, and the night seems somehow darker, colder, longer. Brewer is restless. He stands and walks, joints popping, to the edge of the flat, looks down canyon, then up toward the switchbacks they'll climb in the morning. A pale blue glow limns the east wall of the canyon, and the mound of sand marking the grave slowly becomes visible. The boy was seventeen, the girl sixteen. They died in each other's arms.

Alack, he was but one hour mine,
Brewer thinks.

“You and your poems,” Charlie Wiggins once said, lying beside him on a steamy summer evening in a room they shared.

Me and my poems,
Brewer thinks now, and somewhere, way off in the unburned distance, a bird wakes and sings.

Thanks again to my agent, Henry Dunow; my editor, Asya Muchnick; and everybody at Little, Brown/Mulholland Books. Thanks to the publications in which some of these stories were originally published. And thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and ECLA Aquitaine for financial support during the writing of this book.

 

Richard Lange is the author of the story collection
Dead Boys
and the novels
This Wicked World
and
Angel Baby,
which won the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Los Angeles.

 

richlange.com

@richardlange

“Richard Lange dives into his characters' lives in order to reveal ever deeper, ever darker wants....You know you're in the hands of an expert....Most striking in these stories is Lange's efficient use of language. The author creates poetry from the simplest of words and moments.... This is the kind of book you'll want to savor.”

—Lisa L. Kirchner,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Richard Lange's stories are a revelation. He writes of the disaffections and bewilderments of ordinary lives with as keen an anger and searing lyricism as anybody out there today. He is Raymond Carver reborn in a hard cityscape. Read him and be amazed.”

—T. C. Boyle, author of
The Harder They Come

“Beautifully crafted....Samuel Beckett is Lange's major writing influence, but judging from the casual eloquence of his stories, Lange has already earned a place close to Beckett's elevated company.”

—Jack Batten,
Toronto Star

“Wonderful.… Swift, gut-wrenching, and sometimes cleverly disarming fiction by a master.”

—Joe R. Lansdale, author of
Paradise Sky

“Lange has a terrific knack for plotting and a penchant for populating his tales with characters who live within or at the edge of a violent, lawless world....Denis Johnson's influence is apparent in the terse lyricism of Lange's prose....The stories are imbued with a sense of searing honesty about our common potential for failure and an empathy for human weakness that make the characters hard not to love, and their author impossible not to admire.”

—Ed Tarkington,
Memphis Commercial Appeal

“Highly recommended....Lange knows how to inhabit the skin of his protagonists and breathe life and vitality into them with his minimalist prose....These citizens of L.A. are Lange's bread and butter, and he drafts them with so much care and precision that they become just as real as your next-door neighbor....
Sweet Nothing
is dark and gritty, but there's a spark of life and light and a deadpan sense of humor that stops the stories from going full dark.”

—Keith Rawson,
LitReactor

“With his lyrical yet matter-of-fact prose, Lange drills straight to the center of society's fringe. We might not find his characters' lives desirable, but we do relate to their basic humanity, occasionally in spite of ourselves.”

—Angela Lutz,
Kansas City Star

“The syncopated rhythm of Lange's dialogue and the laconic grace of his descriptions can still capture a life in a single episode.”

—Anna Mundow,
Barnes and Noble Review

“For me the best stories are rabbit holes. You read the first lines, maybe a page, and you're down there. Somewhere else. Another life. Richard Lange is one cwazy wabbit.”

—James Sallis, author of
Drive

“Skillfully constructed....Lange portrays the lives of people struggling to survive, with the focus on families, both blood-related and chance-made....These stories will have broad appeal because of Lange's accessible style and fine characterization.”

—Ellen Loughran,
Booklist

“For all the darkness that runs through the stories, Lange maintains a disarmingly light touch....These tales are not far removed from the classic stories of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Utterly believable postcards from the edge; for those who like their realism not so magical but right there at street level.”

—Robert E. Brown,
Library Journal

“Richard Lange piercingly depicts the grittier side of Los Angeles in his new short story collection.”

—David Gutowski,
Largehearted Boy

Dead Boys

 

 

This Wicked World

 

 

Angel Baby