Hard Language

by Mike Padilla

Overview

Mike Padilla’s debut collection of short stories, Hard Language, sketches the experiences of a diverse selection of Hispanic Americans struggling to live their lives in the U.S. The stories absorb the reader into their prose, with startling maturity and depth, making the book anything but hard to read. The Hispanic Americans run the gamut of personalities and abilities, each confronted by their environment, which forces them to come to terms with themselves in the greater outside culture.

In the title story, a Mexican-American construction worker’s jealousy and controlling behavior become entwined with a dark resentment of his wife’s English-speaking abilities. Among the writer’s other startling snapshots, Padilla captures the day the family brought out a pickaxe to tear apart old Aunt Eufrasia’s house (“It is like the christening of a ship,” my mother said as the pickaxe swung, but no one looked at her); the uneasy relationship holding together two elderly women who were once best friends but are now only housemates; the odd kinship felt between a wealthy and attractive, but emotionally remote, Stanford student and her studious, cocaine-dealing classmate, who decides the best way to a girl’s heart is through her nose; that special love shared only among family members (“Wait until you’re fat and have a lot of pimples,” she told her cousin. “The girls will all run away from you screaming their heads off, and you’ll want to kill yourself.”); and a nervous romance between a fourteen-year-old Mexican tom-boy and her new neighbor, a clumsy young Russian emigré who falls all too hard for her.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611927245
Publisher:	Arte Publico Press
Publication date:	03/30/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	201 KB

About the Author

MIKE PADILLA is the author of Hard Language (Arte Público Press, 2000), which won the University of California at Irvine’s Chicano/Latino Literary Prize and the San Francisco Foundation Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. His stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including The Indiana Review, Puerto del Sol, Sequoia, and The Madison Review. A California native, Padilla lives in Los Angeles and works at UCLA.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

PAPEL

The big joke Tío Henry always told my tías was that old Eufrasia's house would go up in flames just like her burnt chicharrones. All that frayed electrical wiring that hung from the ceiling was too expensive to replace, she'd told them, though the government had offered to fix all the electricity in her village in 1958. I was careful never to laugh too hard, and a look from my mother always told me when to stop. When Eufrasia's heart gave out for the fourth and last time, my Tío Uncle Henry and my tías drove south of the border as if a gun had gone off in a race. They came from Anaheim, from Glendale, from wherever they'd been waiting that late September morning.

    On the bus from La Jolla my mother fidgeted with crochet needles, knitting a flowered pattern, unraveling it, knitting it again more tightly. She'd taken me out of school right when the first bio test was being passed out—the same test she'd locked me indoors to study for all week.

    "When can I go back to school?" I stretched my legs and pressed my tennis shoes flat against the seat in front of me, flexing the calves that biking had begun to develop.

    "Soon enough." She poked my leg with one of the hooks. She'd exploded into the classroom without asking the attendance office, had rushed past the biology teacher without looking at him, past the transparent anatomy model. "Toma tus cosas, muchacho," she'd said. Some of the boys in back had snickered when she took my hand. "Ándale,tu futuro te espera." If the words about the "future waiting for me" had been in English, the world might not have felt like it was slipping from under my feet as I ran after her down the waxed hallway.

    Three days earlier, I'd met Jeremy and his friends at the reservoir on my bike. For the first time they hadn't spun off without me. They'd met me with a challenge, gripping their handlebars to intimidate me, but I out-biked every one of them, except Jeremy. For the rest of the week I'd spent lunch with them instead of eating alone. I'd started food fights, cornered girls in the hallway so they'd be late for classes, and gotten dragged into the principal's office twice. Even fat Charlie couldn't get into their group, and he was a fat white boy who got new rims and bearings when it wasn't even his birthday or Christmas. Tío Henry had been right: it's physical strength that gets people's respect.

    "When we buy the new house, we'll have a swimming pool," I said, as if there were no question about it.

    She pulled some yarn from her bag and nodded.

    "And a pool table. Then I can invite the guys over on weekends."

    "Tell me again what you will say if Señora Johnson asks."

    "That my father called," I said. "That he invited us over for the weekend."

    "Where?"

    "Newport Beach. Wherever that is. What am I going to tell the guys in class?"

    "Say nothing. And don't let them influence you, mu-cha-cho," she said, pointing the hook at me with each syllable. "You're much too young for their bad ways. Keep to your school work so you...."

    "So I can make something of myself." I'd heard it all before—the education, the money, the better life. What good was it if I had to live it alone, like my mother did, with only her knitting baskets and Bullocks catalogs for company?

    "Can I call Jeremy tonight? If he thinks I've blown him off, I won't stand a chance with the group." Being one of only three non-whites in school left my odds at about ten to one, I figured.

    She leaned over me, face to the glass. The bus had stopped at the border, and outside two patrollers in brown uniforms talked to each other. One of them came inside the bus, surveying us from behind mirrored glasses. My mother's hands flitted from her lap to her hair to the collar of her dress.

    "What are you so afraid of?" I said.

    "It's hard to put the past behind you," she said. She meant before she could afford to live on the outskirts of La Jolla, before she was a legal citizen.

    I slumped in my seat and watched the next ten minutes tick by on my watch. My mother had promised that now the past wouldn't matter, that we'd begin a whole new life. No more shopping out of town, or saving bottles for their deposits, or secondhand space heaters to pay the La Jolla rent. But other things she told me about made her work her dress collar even harder: electrolysis for her legs, new designer clothes, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a silver tea service to entertain her guests. I had no idea where they'd come from. As for me, I'd have a new dirt bike, and when I was old enough, my own car. A new La Jolla house seemed far in the future, but she promised it within a few months.

    But for now my mind was on Tijuana. My mother said it was barren of opportunity, but this time it would yield something for me. On the streets they sold firecrackers, the kind any boy in school would pay fifty cents a pack for.

    Driving into the village, I pressed my face against the glass. There were the same squat, box-like houses, the same bulky, twisted fig trees up and down the road. My fingers gripped the vinyl armrest.

    "God," I said. "No telephone poles. No phones!"

* * *

    During the funeral the priest spoke too quickly for me to follow the Spanish. When it was over I took my feet down from the bench in front of me. My mother and I never went to the Presbyterian church she'd joined, but I knew it wouldn't have felt like this Tijuana chapel, with its burning incense and cold cement floor. The people moved slowly out the door.

    "Quickly, quickly," she said, but only I could hear her.

    The women on the porches of the low, flat-roofed houses stopped washing and chatting to give us sad looks. I tried to imagine my mother crouched over a washboard in one of her designer dresses that she had bought at the clearinghouse. But the picture wasn't even funny.

    I stopped along the way to stamp the dust out of my shoes, but raised more, turning my ankles orange up to the knee. This road would be perfect for my dirt bike. I could see myself on my Bridgestone, head down, barreling into the wind, feet whipping around the crank, a long, thick stream of dust jetting out from beneath the back tire. Up the road, dry hills rose and dropped behind houses, showing off hollows, terraces, grooves, and steep inclines perfect for nose-diving and skidding. Even the rocky, pitted streets that never ran parallel invited good biking. If I could bring this home with me, I thought, instead of just firecrackers.

    "It is like Tijuana not to have straight paths between places," Tío Henry said. I'd spotted him ducking through the chapel door five minutes before the service was over. "And look at their chickens on public display. An eyesore."

    Short-haired mongrel dogs roamed the streets just as they had a year and a half ago, when old Eufrasia had fallen backwards in a chair just after my twelfth birthday. There had been fever, vomiting, and heart palpitations. The doctors had said she wouldn't live, but she pulled through with us at her bedside. She wasn't even my grandmother, but my mother's grandmother. She was deaf, distant, and very wrinkled, and she talked of things that seemed to have happened hundreds of years ago.

    "Don't let the old woman upset you," my mother had told me when we were out of her room. "Hers is not a sharp mind like yours." She had proudly smoothed my black hair out of my eyes.

    Still, though Eufrasia was deaf, no one ever said a disrespectful word in front of her, and not even the doctors touched her. And I can't remember, on any of our visits, that she ever put food to her lips or stirred a cup of coffee. She was like a spirit of the past that had chosen to remain in the world.

    I walked a few paces ahead of my mother, Tío Henry, and Tía Margarita, so they'd know I was in a hurry to get this whole business over with. If I could get to a phone, I could call Jeremy. I'd tell him that the woman who'd yanked me from class was a maid, that she'd come to take me to the hospital because my mother had fallen down a flight of stairs. Maybe I could still go biking Sunday night at the reservoir.

    "You'll have to tell these people to go away," Tío Henry said. "They're ignorant and must be told what to do."

    "What difference will it make if Alicia is not there?" Tía Margarita said. She spoke in Spanish, as did all my aunts. "She is the only one who knows where to look." Margarita, the tallest and oldest of the sisters, walked with powerful, masculine steps, her head steady under the tall black hive of hair pierced with a metal comb. The matching beads looped around her neck chinked loudly with each step.

    "Alicia is a strange one," Tío Henry said. "But she knows what will happen if she doesn't come. Now think of what you will say to these people."

    A bus without windows came rattling around a blind corner as in a movie chase scene, lifting its left wheels a foot in the air. I dodged the cloud of orange dust it made.

    "My clothes" Tío Henry said. "Damn this afflicted place." When I looked back, he was shaking a pebble from his shoe.

    My mother slapped him hard across the back of the neck. "It's just a little farther, hombre."

    "Speak to me in English, woman," he said. He was a dark, short man with tight muscles that twitched in his neck when he spoke. "How can I find an American wife with everyone always speaking Spanish?"

    "Look around you, viejo estúpido. Do you see any American brides blushing in these streets?" She tried to slap him again, but he was too quick for her. He grabbed her wrist so that she shrieked.

    "Hijo," my mother said. I looked back, but kept walking.

    Margarita stepped in front of them, threatening Tío Henry with the iron heel of her shoe. "Stop this nonsense." Because the street was too rocky for heels, she went barefoot, one pump clutched in each hand.

    "Maybe soon I can buy an American wife," he said, laughing.

    "Yes" my mother said, turning her wrist slowly in her hand. "Soon we will all have what we want."

* * *

    When we reached the porch of Eufrasia's three-room house, Margarita punched one foot in each pump and mounted the sloping steps. Even if she hadn't stood at the top step, everyone in the crowd would have seen her high broad shoulders, her glossy mound of hair. She turned towards them, looking over them with her copper-green eyes. My mother, Tío Henry, and I went up the steps after her.

    I recognized some relatives from across the border by their American clothes, but most of the people looked very poor. One man with a clean shave and neatly pressed pants smiled at me. I tried to eye him down, but he kept smiling, until I had to look away. I moved close behind Tío Henry.

    Margarita folded her heavy arms, and for the first time I saw how her upper body resembled Tío Henry's. She looked as powerful as him, with similar deltoids and upper back size. No sport I could think of could have given them both that kind of form.

    At last she said, "Go home and work, or pray for your souls. You have no business here." They walked away, their feet crunching in the dirt.

    "What do they want?" I said.

    "They don't want anything. They only adored her." Tía Alicia stood in the doorway behind me. She led us into the bare front room of the house and lit the gas lantern. The yellow light flickered faintly against the wall.

    She gathered her hair into a slick cord that fell almost to her waist. She was much shorter than her sisters, and so frail in the arms that she wouldn't have been good even at badminton. Just throwing her hair back seemed to require a lot of effort.

    "You don't know anything," Tío Henry said. "If you did, you wouldn't still be living on this side of the border."

    "You think like an American tourist," she said.

    "I think like an American because I am one."

    "Stop this," Margarita said, ducking into the bedroom.

    "Give your Tía Alicia a kiss, muchacho," my mother said, nudging me toward my aunt with her bony fingers. I kissed her cheek.

    She said, "People have been stopping since three this morning. They come to the foot of the steps, but they do not knock. They try to peer in the windows, they loiter by the chicken coup. I keep the lights off and the blinds down."

    Margarita emerged from the bedroom in a glittery, bright green dress. It looked cheap and fit tightly over her bulk.

    "Qué vestido tan hermosísimo," my mother said. "Where did you buy it?"

    Margarita gave her a long stare, then said to me, "There is a pickax in the tool shack." When I came back, everyone had gathered in a half circle facing the far wall. They looked like they might be posing for a portrait, only no one smiled.

    Alicia pointed to the center of the wall and said, "There." She knew all the places to tap, for she had visited the woman weekly, bringing her groceries, clothes, and other things from the Zona Norte. Eufrasia would only have food from the open markets, and wouldn't accept anything that came from the stores downtown—"los supermercados americanos."

    I handed Margarita the heavy pickax, and she told me to stand back. No one moved. She spread her legs as wide as she could in her dress. She practiced swinging the pickax with ease, swinging it up and out from the wall. My mother clapped her hands together and said, "It is like the launching of a ship," but no one looked at her.

    The end of the pickax slid smoothly into the soft plaster. A piece gave way, crumbling white and powdery to the cement floor. She swung again and again; the mound of plaster grew as she cleared the opening. She leaned the pickax against the wall and pushed her hand through the hole. I stopped breathing, almost expecting it to come out deformed. When she withdrew her white, chalky hand, her large fingers clasped a roll of tightly wound bills. With her straight, white teeth she broke the string that held the roll together and let the bills unwind and peel away, falling to the floor in dull green curls. Tens, twenties, and fifties in American currency. She pulled out another roll. Then another, and another, like magic, reaching deeper into the wall each time.

    "We are wasting time," she said, and we began to work. She handed me the pickax and I started to tear away the rest of the wall, stopping only now and then to catch my breath. Some of the rolls had come untied, leaving money in hard-to-reach places. My mother examined the junctures of the house's frame, while Tío Henry held the lantern up to the crevices where loose bills might have fallen. They worked together, taking turns holding the lantern. Once, when my mother found a bill that had tried to escape her, she snatched it out of the wall and said, "This will be your making, muchacho."

    Margarita watched from the doorway, legs astride, hefty arms folded over her bosom. I wondered why I was working and she wasn't. Her face remained rigid, deeply carved with lines that were black in the lantern light.

    After nearly an hour Tío Henry took the pickax out of my hands. "Don't kill yourself," he said, and began to swing at what was left of the plaster.

    The cabinets in the kitchen were nailed shut. Tío Henry pried them open with the chisel end of the pickax, swearing all the while. The nails shrieked with resistance, then popped loose. Preserve jars lined the shelves in neat rows. They were so tightly packed with money we had to pry the bills out with sewing scissors.

    There was no thought of sleep now, with morning bringing the dull green bills to light. I gathered them up and started to count. My hands had turned gray, and I tried to wipe the dirt on my shorts. At first, I was slow at counting, but found that it was faster to separate the different denominations, then group them into stacks of five hundred each. I wrote on the floor with a piece of plaster to keep tally on the total.

    With the scissors, my mother cut open the mattress along the seam that had been opened and resewn with black thread. She brought armfuls of bills out and piled them in front of me. As I smoothed out the twenties, I found some personal checks that had been written to Eufrasia and signed with X's.

    Tío Henry patted my head and said, "You're doing well, you're good at mathematics. Physical strength gets you respect, but no one wants to marry an idiot." I turned the checks facedown on the floor.

    "Yes, he is the best in his school," my mother said, though it wasn't true. "He has many friends because he is so smart."

    Tío Henry laid his big hand on my shoulder and smiled down at me. "What would you like your uncle to buy you?"

    "Firecrackers," I said, "for my friends at school."

    He turned his face toward my mother. "Have you been sending this boy to Sunday school? This Christian generosity sends people like us to the poorhouse." He looked back at me. "Think of yourself for once."

    "I want them for myself," I said.

    "Ah, modesty is a weakness! Think of something else, Christian boy."

    "Firecrackers," I said.

    "Firecrackers are dangerous," my mother said.

    "Think harder," Tío Henry said, holding up a fistful of green.

    I felt the odds slipping. Twelve to one. Fifteen to one. "I want to call somebody."

    "Harder," he said. His face began to wrinkle with laughter.

    The blood was in my cheeks again. Margarita was watching me from the doorway. I saw myself eating lunch alone at the end of a cafeteria table. I could taste the cold lunchmeat going down my throat. "I just want to get to a phone," I said, as calmly as I could.

    "The Christian boy has a weak imagination." He took up another handful of dollars. "This stuff is power, but you have to know how to use it." He put his hand on my shoulder again and squeezed gently. "You'll learn, you'll learn."

    He went back to swinging the pickax. My mother stripped open the sofa and started pulling out the stuffing. Margarita was still watching me with her copper-green eyes, as if she were waiting to see me cry. I held it back as hard as I could.

    Margarita said, "The boy should eat something. I will take him to the store for milk and pan dulce." She took my hand as if I were a child and led me outside.

    "Tu madre y tu tío, they don't understand you. Pobrecito." Her hand felt cold and dry, rock-hard with muscle. It was good to hold on to. "Forget about them, they are both idiots. Soon you will see how foolish they are."

    "What are you talking about?" I said.

    "Your mother is nothing, but she thinks she is something. Your uncle is nothing, but he thinks something of himself, now that he had his citizenship papers. Someday you will find that you are nothing. Maybe your children or your grandchildren will be something." We stopped outside the store. Without looking at me, she bent down and gave me a hard kiss on the cheek.

    "What about you?" I said. "What makes you think you're something instead of nothing?"

    "Did I say I was not nothing?"

    "Then you're nothing just like the rest."

    "No importa, muchacho. You want firecrackers, am I right? I can get them for you." I looked up at her, but the sun blinded me. "Leave the back door open this afternoon when no one is in the house. I will put them in the wall behind the sofa. Make sure your mother doesn't see them."

    She pulled me into the store and bought me milk and pan dulce. Then she pressed a fifty-dollar bill into my hand and said, "Say nothing."

* * *

    Alicia dragged a suitcase out of the bedroom. In it were some tarnished picture frames, old china, and some dresses. She held one of them up. "An unsightly thing, isn't it? Still, it can be restored."

    "You can keep the artifact," my mother said. "The neighbors would think I was a maid come to do the cleaning."

    "Use your imagination," Tío Henry said. He sprinkled a handful of twenties over Alicia's head.

    "I think the diary is in the closet," Tía Alicia said. "But I can't find the key."

    "What do you want with the old woman's scribblings?"

    "She has many things written about the old ranching days."

    "I'm not interested in her historias."

    "No one said you had to be. Maybe the boy will find it interesting."

    "Don't go filling his head with ancient nonsense. He's an American. He has the future to look to, not the past."

    "It is time," Margarita said. I knew what she meant.

    My mother said, "I have a child, remember." She pulled me close to her side of the couch and wrapped her thin arms around my waist. "I know I can't demand anything, but ..."

    "Your husband sends you alimony. That's why you divorced him," Tío Henry said. "You're not so special."

    "I only meant ..."

    "Don't forget what happens if the authorities find out. You won't get half of what you're getting now."

    My mother's eyes filled with tears, which she tried to wipe away before they spilled over. I tried to ignore her, but she pressed her face against my arm. I felt the moisture seep through my sleeve and couldn't move away.

    "You should have been an actress," Tío Henry said. "Your tears might have profited you better."

    She wiped her nose on my sleeve like a baby. "I want what is best for my son, not to have to live like this." She looked around her to indicate the room.

    "You are far from this," he said.

    "I want him to be someone."

    Still in English, Tío Henry sang, "Somewhere, in the sometime, with that someone, I'll be someone at last ..." He sang as if he were the only one in the room to hear it.

    "See how your uncle treats his own flesh and ..." A roll of money hit her sharply in the side of the face. Green paper exploded everywhere. The blood pulsed in my arms. She loosened her hold on me. I sat down and started counting again. Tío Henry leaned back on the sofa as if he were on a cruise to Acapulco.

    "You must be sure never to grow up to be like your tío," my mother said calmly. "You must get a good education, make money so you can be somebody."

    Tío Henry jerked himself forward. "And I'm not somebody?"

    "An old fool."

    "Do you see me begging like a dog?"

    I counted the money very loudly in my head. I saw him throw something at her. Two-fifty, two seventy-five. Someone screamed. I counted. My mother ran to the bedroom. More shouting. Three-fifty, four hundred. Louder. Louder.

    I ran out of the room and into the kitchen, took my books and went out. The screen door slammed behind me.

    On the back steps I opened the book, but could barely see through the tears. Pictures of brains and hearts were blurred into odd shapes. As I thumbed through the pages of the later chapters, not reading them, hardly glancing at the pictures, the grayness of my hands came off on the pages. My hands were gray down to the pores, under the nails, in the creases of my palms, in the ridges of my fingerprints.

* * *

    Alicia was stroking my hair. "Go back to sleep, niño. You need your rest." I sat up abruptly and she stopped. Her fingers were cold, but her firm voice soothed me.

    "What are you reading?" she said. "Ah, biology. Show me."

    The book fell open to the plastic anatomy pages. I pointed to the first page, a drawing of a skeleton with a wide grin and white, ghostly ribs. I wondered how long before old Eufrasia would look that way in her grave. I flipped the next page over. Now the skeleton had veins, now arteries. I kept turning the pages, adding muscles, organs, tissue, pink skin and hair, until the picture became that of a complete person, shining pink and naked. I wondered what such a man would call himself. I wondered where he came from.

    "You study too hard for a boy," she said. "Your mamá pushes you too hard."

    "No," I said. "I don't care about school anymore." I closed the soiled pages of the book tightly and dropped it with the other books on the bottom step. "I need to call somebody back home."

    "If that will make you feel better, pobrecito, I will take you." She started to run her fingers through my hair again, but brushed the hair out of my eyes instead. "We will go this afternoon."

* * *

    When Tío Henry asked me to fetch some water, I went out and filled two buckets to the rim. I carried them in, trying to make it look easy. He set them to heat on the stove. Most of the houses had running water, but Eufrasia had refused to allow them to tamper with her house.

    "Crazy old woman," Tío Henry said as he washed his face in the water.

    At noon a short woman in pants knocked at the screen door. Margarita filled the doorframe. The woman spoke in the kind of slow, distinct Spanish I could understand. "I'm Señora López from next door," she said. "I wanted to offer whatever condolences I could." Margarita didn't invite her in. Finally, the woman said, "It's my daughter's birthday. You're welcome to come by for coffee and cake, if you have the time."

    "Thank you," Margarita said. "We will be by for a visit."

    Alicia was in the kitchen. "It would be nice if we brought a gift for the girl," she said.

    "Remember our birthdays as children?" Tío Henry said to my mother.

    She turned away and said nothing. The roll of money had left a blue mark by her eye.

    "Don't be angry with me," he said.

    "A decent meal and a good bath is how we celebrated," she said, without turning. "And if one of us got a gift, we always broke it fighting over it. Why must you mention it?"

    "I don't know," he said. "There's no reason to fight now, is there?"

    She sat down and massaged her forehead. "I know. A better life."

    He went out to the back yard and came back a few minutes later with two handfuls of eggs. "The birthday girl, her family is poor. She'll appreciate anything we can give them."

    She straightened her back slowly, then looked at him. "It's a lovely gesture. Be sure they are the freshest ones."

    Alicia turned away from them. "I will go to the Zona Norte and see what I can find." My mother and Tío Henry said nothing. Alicia looked at me. "Would you like to escort me on the bus?"

    "Don't go depressing him with stories about the Old Town," Tío Henry said.

    "Make sure he doesn't buy any cuetes," my mother said. "He'll blow his fingers off and not be able to hold a pencil."

    "Keep your hands on your wallet," Tío Henry said.

* * *

    In all the commotion of the mercado, I couldn't find anyone selling firecrackers. I had to be sure they would be here when Margarita came to buy them. I would tell her to bargain for six bricks and try to get some free bottle rockets in the deal. The people in the streets and produce stands shouted above the music of the mariachis—conversing, bargaining, advertising their goods to passersby. But nowhere did I hear the shouts of "¡Cuetes!" as I had last time.

    Cars blew their horns to clear the streets of people. I walked fast in front of Alicia.

    She grabbed me by the shoulder. "How do you expect me to keep up with you, muchacho?"

    I saw a man waving a red package over his head walking toward us.

    "Now what would a girl like for her birthday?" she said.

    He got closer, but I lost him in the crowd.

    "I always loved candy when I was a girl."

    I spotted him again. He shouted in English, "Firecrackers! Firecrackers, cheap!"

    "Don't get any funny ideas," she said. "Your mother will only take them away from you."

    I looked over my shoulder as we walked past. He disappeared into the bright colors of the market. I checked the corner street sign. Madero and Seventh.

    "Do you know who once stayed in that hotel over there? El Palacio, the pink one."

    "Tío said not to tell me about the old days."

    "Ay, do you think I care one way or the other what your tío estúpido thinks? That's where the American fighter Dempsey stayed."

    "Jack Dempsey," I said, straining to be heard over the market noise.

    "He fought your Abuelo Lupe in the twenties. All the men in the family went to see your grandfather almost lose the fight in the first round, but come back with a knockout punch in the third. Not many men have done that."

    "I don't believe it," I said. But Jeremy would if I could make him. "My mother would have told me that."

    "Your abuela's diary has the pictures of the fight in it."

    "Did they have cameras back in the twenties?"

    "You are making fun of me," she said. She walked ahead of me, but I caught up with her.

    I couldn't hear the man with the firecrackers anymore. I tried to figure my odds again—somewhere between twenty to one and fifty to one, if Margarita got me the firecrackers. The noise in the market made it hard to think.

    At the bus stop we couldn't sit down. There were too many people with souvenirs on the benches.

    "What will the diary tell us?" I said.

    "Everything."

    Everything. How much longer was I going to have to wait for this slow bus?

    "I'm going to buy firecrackers," I said. "I don't care what my mother says." I turned to run back into the crowd, but Alicia grabbed my arm.

    "Your mother will cut my throat, niño!"

    "Then, can I make my call now?"

    She hesitated, then took out a handful of coins from her pocketbook.

    Under an awning, a man in a print shirt was dialing a number over and over again. I clutched the change, jangled it loudly, kicked at the dirt. "No one's answering," I said to him.

    "Muchacho malcriado," he said, hanging up.

    I dialed the operator. "Person to person. La Jolla, Estados Unidos."

    "Momento ... diga."

    I gave her Jeremy's name, then the number, half in Spanish, half in English. She said something too fast for me to understand.

    "The bus is here!" Alicia was waving her arms at me.

    I shoved more coins into the slot until the operator stopped talking. I'm at the hospital, I thought. My mother has fractured her collarbone in two places. If these operators talked slower, I could understand them.

    One ring.

    "Está sonando."

    A second ring.

    I hung up before it could ring a third time.

    On the bus I leaned my head against the window. My faint reflection disappeared in the sun, reappeared in the shade.

    "Is it true that we're nothing?" I said.

    "Ah." She nudged me in the ribs with her elbow. "Those are questions for the educated. Don't ask me about philosophy."

    I watched the Old Town fall behind in the orange haze. "The diary will tell about the fight?"

    "With pictures signed by both fighters."

    "Can I keep them? My friends won't believe me. I was supposed to bring firecrackers, but this would be better."

    She put her hand on my knee. I was glad Tío Henry was not there to see it. He would have called it a spectacle.

    When we got back to Eufrasia's house, Margarita had put the money in the suitcase. I tried to lift it, but couldn't even slide it across the floor. I believed we'd never get it out the door, and the thought of a new life became just as unlikely. Margarita told me to close the back door. I stepped through the kitchen and slammed the door shut. Then I opened it quickly, just a crack.

* * *

We found Señora López helping the children play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. When she saw us, she gestured for us to join her by the fire.

    "Who is the birthday girl?" my mother asked

    "Imelda, la bonita in the yellow dress," she said

    "Yes, she is very pretty."

    Tío Henry slumped in his chair, large fingers clasped around the mug between his legs. He stared into the fire. My mother stretched her legs under the table and kicked him. He sloshed beer into his lap, looked at Alicia, and sat up straight. Margarita sat a few feet away from the table, her arms folded.

    Señora López brought out coffee and cookies on a tray. Only my mother took coffee.

    "Have you lived here long?" she asked.

    "Yes, I knew Eufrasia well. And were you close?"

    My mother stirred her coffee briskly. "We tried to keep in touch. We were out for a visit a year and a half ago."

    The shouts of the children filled the next few minutes. I'd thought that knowing Eufrasia would have been enough to start us talking. I hoped Señora López would tell about Abuelo Lupe, but no one mentioned him.

    "It is a shame we didn't know her well," my mother said.

    "She wasn't an easy woman to get to know."

    "I must go," Margarita said. We watched her take long, pounding steps toward the street, her green dress glimmering in the last of the sunlight.

    "She fought hard to save the school so the children wouldn't have to bus to town. Not even the government crossed her."

    "She was important to the district," Alicia said. "She knew it and wasn't modest about it."

    My mother sipped her coffee and Tío Henry said nothing.

    "Why was she important?" I said. My mother tried to pinch me under the table, but I squirmed out of her reach. My heart beat faster. I thought, let's see what else you've kept from me.

    "You see how the houses sit in bunches throughout the town?" Señora López said. "That is where the ranch hands lived. When ranching died, many of those people needed help to keep from starving."

    "And Abuela gave them money?" I watched my mother's hands.

    "She helped with food and laundry and children. The children hated her because she was so strict."

    "Why did the tourists start coming?" I said.

    "You have such a pretty girl," my mother said. "Such lovely hair."

    "Because of the San Diego Exposition in 1915. They came by steam dummy."

    "Steam dummy?"

    "Hijo," my mother said. "Do not bother the señora. It is his schooling. They teach him to ask too many questions."

    "A kind of boat?" I said.

    My mother grabbed me, digging her fingers into my arm. I decided not to ask anything else. Señora López looked at her with wide eyes, and Alicia blushed.

    "Thank you for everything," Alicia said, "but I'm afraid I must go."

    Señora López got up to refill my mother's cup. Tío Henry said he would take some tequila if she had any. My mother watched her go into the house, then turned to the fire. Her face flickered with red light and shadows.

    "She has many tales, doesn't she? She seems quite happy."

    "She is too ignorant to see her condition clearly," Tío Henry said.

    My mother smoothed out her collar. "We were lucky?"

    "Lucky our parents escaped Tijuana before they died."

    She folded her arms against the cold and gave him a long stare. "I was only thinking of the lies I tell the neighbors." She looked at him as if he were the cause of every bad thing that had ever happened to her.

    An older child blindfolded the birthday girl and put a sawed-off broom handle in her hands. Tío drank the last drops of beer from the mug and placed it firmly on the table.

    Señora López set a bottle and a glass in front of Tío Henry. The children had gathered around the piñata. One child bobbed it by yanking on the clothesline it was hanging from. The girl swung at the air, grazing the burro. Tío Henry drank shots quickly, refilling the glass every few minutes.

    The piñata broke with a crack, and the children scrambled in the gravel. I remembered the dulces de leche Alicia had left for the girl and handed them to Señora López.

    "We must go," Tío Henry said. He stumbled as he got up, tucking his shirt in at the back of his pants. His drooping eyelids shot open as he heard one of the children scream. Two girls were fighting for one of the prizes. His skin flushed in the firelight. "Margarita." He ran out of the yard, falling once, scrambling, rising again. Señora López went over to the children.

    "The old fool," my mother said. "Too much tequila. Go after him."

    I found him in the front room of Eufrasia's house, standing among the dust and chunks of plaster.

    "El dinero," he said softly.

    That was all he said for a long time. Through the window I could see that the hills in the distance had turned from orange to red.

    I went into the bedroom after Tío Henry. Alicia sat on the bed, smoothing the pages of the diary. She looked up.

    "Margarita is the strongest of us. She always gets her way. You should remember that from our childhood." She handed me the diary and I paged through it.

    "How?" he said. "How could she cheat us?"

    "I caught her just about to leave. She threatened me with her shoe."

    I flipped through the pictures in the diary. A wedding ceremony. Some children posing on the sidewalks of Tijuana. And photos of the fight, with signatures on the backs. The actual knockout. Everything I needed.

    Alicia brushed her hair back. "Niño, how was the girl's party?"

    "All right." I was looking at one of the pictures. Abuelo Lupe sending a blow to Dempsey's head.

    "I had better go before your tio loses control." She lifted her hand to my hair, but then stopped. "I see you've found what you wanted."

    I thumbed through the pages to find more pictures. Three of the actual knockout. I could probably give one to Jeremy. And one of Dempsey with his arm around Abuelo Lupe. Probably before the fight. And some others that weren't as clear.

    When I looked up, Alicia had gone. I tried to read some of the Spanish in the book, but didn't understand most of it. I saw the checks where I had left them. They were all that Margarita had left. I put them in the cover of the book.

    I found Tío Henry at the señora's table again. My mother clenched his arm as he poured another drink. "What is wrong with you? Why must you be so rude?"

    When he put the glass to his lips, the rim clicked against his teeth. "We have lost everything," he said. He swirled the drops of liquid at the bottom of the glass.

    "No," she said. Her voice was almost cheerful. "You were right. It will be worth it in the end."

    "No, hermanita."

    A few seconds passed. She watched him with a very small smile on her face. Tears came to her eyes. "Everything?" she whispered.

    He leaned into his hands. The muscles in his arms never seemed bigger.

    I stood between them, put the book on the table. "We can still cash these." I opened it. "About a thousand dollars."

    Tío Henry took the checks. He laughed very quietly. "Worthless, muchacho. Just like the old woman's scribblings." He closed the book and tossed it to the fire with the checks in it. I jumped up and reached into the flames. I pulled my arm back, waved my empty hand in the air. Tío poured another drink and watched the book burn. My mother stared at him, her smile nearly gone. The book went black in the flames, and out of the pages a black smoke rose like a ghost escaping.

    We sat without saying anything, watching the fire burn low. The torn piñata twisted back and forth on the clothesline. When the sting had left my hand, I felt my pocket for the fifty-dollar bill. It was there—safe, crisp, and neatly folded.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Papel	1
The Reason for Angels	19
Hard Language	33
Carrying Sergei	55
Restoration	79
Who in the Modern World Can Keep Up With Julia Juárez?	99
Flora in Shadows	115
The King of Snow	135
About the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize	165

Editorial Reviews

A stubborn drive to better their lot motivates the Mexican and Mexican-American protagonists of the eight stories in Padilla's strong debut collection. Zeroing in on unexpected, illuminating situations and relationships, Padilla examines issues of language, progress, assimilation and family, setting his narratives in Tijuana and communities in California. In "Flora in Shadows," as in several of the tales, loyalty to friends and family competes with the desire to get ahead. Flora and Alicia, middle-aged former best friends, grow close again when Flora's husband dies and she moves in with Alicia. But Flora, who drinks too much and won't get a job, threatens to destroy the life Alicia has built for herself, and Alicia must decide just what their rocky friendship means to her. In "The King of Snow," Jorge Morales is a freshman at Stanford, the one member of his family to make good. He is fiercely loyal to his brother, Mart n, a drug dealer who made sure Jorge wouldn't have to follow in his footsteps. When a beautiful girl with a coke habit asks Jorge to do her a favor, however, Jorge loses sight of his goals, only to be rescued one last time by Mart n. One of the most moving stories in the collection, "Carrying Sergei," tells of the unusual friendship between tomboyish 14-year-old Margarita and Sergei, a scrawny Russian immigrant boy and gifted pianist. Margarita bullies Sergei at first, but after she is welcomed into his unorthodox home, she grows to love him and makes a supreme sacrifice for his sake. Love turns sour in the title story, when a young married immigrant cannot curb his jealousy. Antonio encourages his wife to learn English with him and help out in his new business, but in the end sabotages his own best-laid plans. Padilla's writing is straightforward and full of engaging images and metaphors. Fresh and free of clich , his stories shed a warm light on Latino lives in the U.S. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

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