The Infinite Plan (10 page)

The Reeves children survived on their own, in their individual ways. Judy found a job in a bakery, where she worked four hours every day after school; by night she baby-sat or cleaned offices. She was an excellent student; she learned to imitate any handwriting and for a reasonable sum would do homework for her classmates. She maintained her clandestine trade without ever being caught, all the while enjoying her reputation as a model young girl, always smiling and docile, never revealing the demons in her soul until the first symptoms of puberty transformed her personality. When two firm cherries budded on her breasts, her waistline slimmed, and her baby features became more modeled, everything changed. In that barrio of dark-skinned, rather short people, her golden color and Valkyrie-like stature made it impossible for her to pass unnoticed. She had always been pretty; once she emerged from girlhood, however, and males of all ages and conditions began to hound her, the once sweet child became a raging animal. She felt violated by men's lustful glances and often came home shouting curses and slamming doors; she sometimes wept impotently because someone had whistled at her in the street or made lewd gestures. She acquired a sailor's vocabulary to rebuff these advances, and for anyone who tried to touch her she kept a long hatpin at hand, which she would bury like a dagger, without compunction, in her admirer's most vulnerable parts. In school she got into fights with boys over the look in their eye and with girls over racial differences and the jealousy she inevitably provoked. More than once Gregory saw his sister engaged in the strange wrestling matches females indulge in, rolling, scratching, hair-pulling, insults—so different from the way boys do battle, which is generally brief, silent, and conclusive. Girls look for a way to humiliate their enemy, while boys seem prepared to kill or be killed. Judy did not need any help in defending herself; with practice she became a true champion. While other girls her age were trying out their first makeup, practicing French kisses, and counting the days until they could wear high heels, she cut her hair like a jail-bird, dressed in men's clothes, and compulsively ate leftover bread and rolls in the bakery. Her face broke out in pimples, and by the time she entered high school she had gained so much weight that no trace remained of the delicate porcelain doll she had been as a child; she looked like a sea lion, a description she used when she wanted to denigrate herself.

When he was seven, Gregory turned to the streets. He was not bound to his mother by any emotion; between them there were only a few shared routines and a tradition of honor drawn from didactic stories about self-sacrificing sons who were rewarded and ungrateful ones who ended up in the witch's oven. He felt sorry for his mother; he was sure that without Judy and him, Nora would die of attrition, sitting in her wicker chair staring into empty air. Both children thought of their mother's indolence not as a vice but, rather, as a sickness of the spirit; perhaps her Mental Body had gone in search of their father and had wandered astray in the labyrinth of some cosmic plane, or had fallen behind in one of those vast spaces filled with weird machines or baffled souls. Gregory's closeness with Judy had vanished, and when he tired of trying to reestablish contact with her, he replaced his sister with Carmen Morales, with whom he shared the unceremonious affection, the spats, and the loyalty of best friends. Gregory was mischievous and restless; he was a problem in school and spent half his time serving out various punishments—whether wearing donkey's ears and standing with his face to the wall or suffering the principal's spankings. He lived like a boarder in his own home, staying out as late as possible, coming home only to sleep—he much preferred visiting the Moraleses, or Olga. Most of his time he was to be found in the jungle of the barrio, learning its most secret secrets. Everyone called him El Gringo, and despite racial animosity, many people liked him, because he was cheerful and obliging. He had several friends: the cook at the taco stand, who always had some tasty dish to offer him; the lady at the grocery store, who let him read comic books without buying them; and the usher at the movies, who from time to time let him in the side door to watch the film. Even Purple Pecker, who never suspected Gregory's role in tagging him with that name, used to treat him to soda pop in Los Tres Amigos bar. Trying to learn Spanish, he lost much of his English and ended up speaking both languages poorly. For a while he stuttered badly, and the principal called Nora Reeves to recommend that she place her son in the nuns' school for retarded children, but his teacher, Miss June, intervened, promising she would help him with his homework. He was not much interested in school; his world was the streets—where, incidentally, he learned considerably more. The barrio was a citadel within the city, a rough, impoverished ghetto born of spontaneous growth around an industrial zone where illegal immigrants could be employed without anyone's asking questions. The air was tainted with the stench of the tire factory; added to that on weekdays was smoke from exhausts and streetside grills, which formed thick clouds like a heavy mantle above the houses. On Fridays and Saturdays it was dangerous to venture out after nightfall, when the barrio was crawling with drunks and drug addicts, ready to explode into homicidal combat. At night you could hear couples arguing, women screaming, children crying, men brawling, and sometimes gunshots and police sirens. During the day, the streets boiled with activity, while unemployed men with time on their hands loafed on the street corners, drinking, hassling women, shooting craps, and wishing away the hours with the fatalism of five centuries of Indian forebears. Shops displayed the same low-priced goods seen in any Mexican town, restaurants served typical dishes, the bars tequila and beer, and in the dance hall they played Latin music; during celebrations there was never a shortage of mariachis dressed in enormous sombreros and matador suits and singing of honor and despair. Gregory, who knew them all and never missed a fiesta, became a kind of mascot to the musicians; he would sing along with them, yelling the obligatory
ay, ay, ay
of Mexican
rancheras
like a pro, stirring the enthusiasm of the crowd that had never known a gringo with such talent. He called half the barrio by name and had such an angelic expression that he won the confidence of most who knew him. More comfortable in the labyrinth of alleys and passageways, empty lots and abandoned buildings than at home, he played with the Morales brothers and a half-dozen other boys his age, always avoiding confrontation with older gangs. Just as with young blacks, Asians, or poor whites in other parts of the city, for young Hispanics the barrio was more important than family; it was their inviolable territory. Each gang was identified by its language of signs, colors, and wall graffiti. From a distance the gangs all seemed the same, formed of ragged, belligerent boys unable to articulate a thought; seen more closely, they were distinctive, each with individual rites and intricate symbolic language. For Gregory, learning the codes was a prime necessity; he could distinguish members of the different gangs by the jacket or cap they wore or the hand signs they used to flash messages or to challenge a fight; he had only to see the color of a single slogan on the wall to know who had put it there and what it meant. Graffiti marked boundaries, and anyone who ventured into alien territory, whether through ignorance or daring, paid dearly; that is why every time he went out, he had to take long detours. The Martínez boys had the only gang in grade school; they were training to become members of Los Carniceros, who lived up to their name as “Butchers” and were the most feared in the barrio. They could be identified by the color purple and the letter
C;
their drink was tequila and grape juice—because of the color—and their sign a hand hooked in a
C
covering mouth and nose. In constant warfare with other groups and the police, they existed solely to provide a sense of identity to the youths, most of whom had dropped out of school, had no job, and lived in the street or in communal pads. The gang members had records—numerous arrests for robbery, dealing marijuana, drunkenness, assault, and car theft. A few were armed with homemade pistols fashioned from a piece of pipe, a wood grip, and a detonator, but more generally they carried knives, chains, razors, and clubs, which did not preclude serious injury: the ambulance carried away two or three after every street battle. The gangs were the greatest threat Gregory faced; he could never join one—that, too, was a matter of race—and to confront them would be an act of madness. He did not attempt to build a reputation for bravery, all he wanted was to survive; neither, however, did he want to be thought of as a coward, because his weakness would be exploited. It took only one or two beatings to demonstrate that lone heroes triumph only in the movies, that he must learn to negotiate with his wits, not attract attention, know his enemies in order to profit from their weaknesses, and avoid fights, because as that pragmatist Padre Larraguibel had told him, God helps the good guys when they outnumber the bad guys.

The Morales house became Gregory's true home, a place where he was always welcomed as a son. In that family confusion he was merely one child more, and Inmaculada herself used to wonder absently how she could have had a blond son. In the Morales tribe no one complained of loneliness or boredom, everything was shared, from existential anguish to the only bathroom; inconsequential matters were discussed at top pitch, but important problems were held in strict familial secrecy, in accordance with an age-old code of honor. The father's authority was never questioned: I wear the pants here, Pedro Morales roared whenever anyone trod too near his toes, but in fact Inmaculada was the true head of the family. No one approached the father directly, preferring to be processed through the maternal bureaucracy. Inmaculada never contradicted her husband before witnesses but always managed somehow to get her way. The first time their eldest son came to the house dressed like a zoot-suited
pachuco,
Pedro Morales thrashed him with a leather strap and threw him out of the house. The boy was fed up with working twice as much as any American for half the pay and was hanging out in pool halls and bars most of the day with his buddies, with no money in his pockets but what he won from bets or what his mother quietly slipped him. To avoid an argument with his wife, Pedro Morales had played blind as long as he could, but when his son appeared gussied up like a pimp and with a tear tattooed on one cheek, he had beat him to a pulp. That night, when everyone else was in bed, the murmur of Inmaculada's voice could be heard for hours, wearing down her husband's resistance. The next day Pedro went out to look for his son; when he found him standing on a corner throwing verbal bouquets to every woman who passed by, he took him by the collar and marched him to their garage; he ripped off his son's outlandish
pachuco
garb, gave him greasy overalls to put on, and for several years worked him from sunup to sunset, until he became the best mechanic in the entire area, set up in his own shop at his father's expense. On Pedro Morales's fiftieth birthday, his married son, now with three children and a house in the suburbs, had the tear removed from his cheek as a birthday present for his father; the scar was all that remained of his fling with rebellion. Inmaculada spent her life slaving for the men of her family. As a girl she had been trained to serve her father and brothers, and now she did the same for her husband and sons. She rose at dawn to cook a huge breakfast for Pedro, who opened his repair shop early in the morning, and she never served leftover tortillas at her table; that would have been an affront to her dignity. The rest of the day went by in a thousand unsung chores, including preparation of three complete meals, as she was convinced that her men had to be nourished with large amounts of constantly varied dishes. It never entered her mind to ask her sons, four young giants of men, to help her sweep the floors, shake out the bedclothes, or wash the rough work clothes, stiff with motor oil—garments she scrubbed by hand. She expected her two girls, on the other hand, to serve the males, because she considered it their duty. It was God's will—and our misfortune—that we were born women; our fate is hard work and suffering, she used to say in a resigned tone, without a hint of self-pity.

In those years Carmen Morales was already a balm for Gregory Reeves's hard knocks and a light in his moments of darkness, a role she would always play in his life. The girl scurried around busily, untiring and competent, and she had a strong practical sense that allowed her to escape rigid family traditions without confrontation with her father, who had his own very clear ideas about a woman's place—silent, and in the home—and who never thought twice about physically punishing an insurgent, including his two daughters. Carmen was his favorite, but his expectations for her were no different from those for the meek young girls from his village in Zacatecas. In contrast, Morales worked unstintingly to educate his four male children, on whom he pinned disproportionate hopes; he wanted to see them rise higher than their humble grandfathers and than himself. With inexhaustible tenacity, through preaching, punishment, and good example, he held his family together, saving his children from alcohol and delinquency, forcing them to finish high school, and guiding them into various trades. With the exception of Juan José, who died in Vietnam, each attained a measure of success. At the end of his days, Pedro Morales, surrounded by grandchildren who spoke no word of Spanish, congratulated himself on his descendants, proud of being the trunk of that family tree, although he would joke that none had made millions or become famous. Carmen very nearly achieved that, but her father never publicly acknowledged her worth; that would have been a surrender of his macho principles. He sent his two daughters to school because that was the law, and although it was not his intention to keep them in ignorance, neither did he expect them to take their studies seriously; instead, they were to learn domestic skills, help their mother, and guard their virginity until the day they were married—the only ambition for a decent girl.