“Better to have fuckin’ nothing.”
“Something is better than nothing,” Diego wrote.
“That’s bullshit, man.”
Diego said nothing. They sat in an uncomfortable silence for a while. Finally Mundo said, “Hey, you read lips pretty good. It’s a nice trick, man. Not bad for a deaf guy.”
Diego smiled. “I got a good brain. It works real good.”
“That’s cool,” Mundo nodded. He looked around the dark room. “How long have I been here? What’s your name, man?”
“My name’s Diego,” he wrote.
“No shit? My old man’s name was Diego. That sonofabitch took off—haven’t seen him for a while. He just took off from the house one day. Just split.” He kept moving his feet in circles. “So what day is it?”
“Sunday night.”
He stared at the note. “Ah shit! Sunday night? I been steepin’ all that time?”
“You lost some blood.”
Mundo laughed. “No shit. But I kept enough to stay alive, right? I got more blood than those pinches figured I had. So how come I wound up here with you?”
“The nurse from La Fe Clinic helped bring you here. It was that or call the cops.”
“Which nurse?”
“The gringa with the green eyes.”
“Yeah, I know which one. She’s all right. She’s a little tight sometimes, you know? But most of the time she’s OK.”
Diego nodded in agreement. “I like her—she’s a good person.” “How’d I get to the clinic?”
“Tencha, who sells fruit in front of the clinic, saw you in one of the dumpsters. You almost gave her a nervous breakdown.”
“What the fuck’s a dumpster?”
Diego looked at him. He thought a minute and wrote, “You know, one of those big things where everybody throws the trash.”
“Those fuckin’ bastards!”
“If you get too excited, I won’t be able to read your lips.” He held up the paper.
“I can’t fuckin’ help it,” he yelled. He clenched his teeth and mumbled something.
“When you clench your teeth, I can’t make out what you’re trying to say.”
Mundo nodded. “Hijos de sus chingadas madres. When I find those motherfuckers, I’m gonna castrate each one of them. Those sons of bitches threw me in a trash can!” He coughed and winced from the pain in his side.
“Got any booze? Algo fuerte.”
Diego nodded, got up, and walked toward the closet. He took out a bottle and two glasses and poured them both a drink. He handed Mundo one of the glasses.
Mundo took a big gulp. “What is this shit?”
Diego stared at the gold in his glass. “Cognac,” he wrote.
Mundo looked at the unfamiliar word, “Cog-nac,” he said.
Diego laughed when he saw him pronounce the “g.” “You don’t say the ‘g.’ The ‘g’ is muda—silent—like me. You pronounce it coñac.” He wrote a tilde over the “n.” “It’s a French word.”
Mundo read the page and repeated slowly, “Cogñac. So what the hell are you, a fuckin’ professor? You can’t even talk and you’re fuckin’ correcting me.”
“Don’t get mad. And why do you say ‘fuckin” all the time?”
“Because it’s a good word. If you don’t like it, then look away.” He took another drink. He looked down at his feet and looked at Diego. “How the hell do you know what the word sounds like? You’ve never even heard it.”
“I read a lot. I go to the library. I had a good teacher—I learned a lot of things. I read all sons of things, and I read the dictionary. It tells you what words mean and it tells you how to pronounce them—even though I can’t pronounce them all. I try to imagine it. I know a lot about the hearing world.”
“So you read—OK—so what? Why do it when you can’t talk?”
“Because when I know how a word is pronounced it helps me to read lips better. Like I told you, I had a good lip-reading teacher. She taught me a few tricks.”
Mundo nodded. “You think you’re pretty fuckin’ smart, don’t you?” He laughed. “So you read French words, right? What the fuck’s wrong with Spanish? You think you have to know a fancy foreign language or something to show everyone you’re smart?”
Diego shook his head. “I’m deaf. All languages are foreign.”
Mundo laughed. “You’re weird, man, you know?”
Diego nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I know. You know I read how they make cognac in a book about wines. I wanted to try the stuff, so I did. And I liked it. It cost me more than a shirt. I hardly ever drink it. Way too expensive.”
“Don’t you get bored at the library?”
“Sometimes, but I’ve never been stabbed in one.”
Mundo laughed. “A que cabrón. You’re a real smart mouth—even on paper. It’s a good thing you can’t talk—otherwise you would have been stabbed by now.”
Diego laughed.
“You make noises, man, did you know that?”
“Yeah,” Diego wrote, “deaf people can make a lot of noise.”
Mundo nodded. “See, it’s like the old lady says, we’re all the same.”
Nodding, Diego took a sip of cognac.
“I can’t believe those goddamned pinche bastards threw me in the garbage. Man, to die in the streets is one thing, man, the streets, that’s all right. But to die in a fuckin’ trash can? Someone’s gonna pay for this. I’m gonna get even.”
Diego watched him as he emptied his glass.
“This stuff ain’t so bad, man. I could get into this French shit. But I don’t like their fuckin’ language, got it? They sound like a bunch of pinche jotos—queers, you know? I got a sister who took French in school. Thought she was hot shit. La cabrona wouldn’t speak no Spanish. She thought she was too good. But she learned French, the bitch. Pendeja. She married a gringo and lives on the west side and votes on election day—the whole nine yards. Probably, she’s gonna teach her half-breed coyote kids to speak French.”
“I got a sister who’s a pendeja, too,” Diego wrote, “not too smart.”
They both laughed, Diego sipped his cognac. He drank it slowly and let the warm liquid sit on his tongue. It made his mouth taste good. Diego poured Mundo another glass and offered him a cigarette. He smoked it in silence. Diego could tell he was in pain.
Diego watched him for a long time. Finally he wrote, “I got to go to work early in the morning. You can stay as long as you want. Doesn’t bother me. I have some crackers and stuff if you get hungry. I’ll bring some food home from Vicky’s when I come home tomorrow. If you’re hungry right now, I could go out and get something,” He handed the note to Mundo who took his time reading it.
“No, man, I ain’t hungry. Maybe tomorrow.” He looked at Diego and nodded. “That’s where I seen you. I knew that I’d seen you before, somewhere. That pinche that runs your place is the biggest asshole I ever met. Everyone calls him a sonofabitch. We’re fuckin’ boycotting his place.”
Diego nodded. “Get some rest,” he wrote. “I’ll probably be gone by the time you wake up. Make yourself at home. I’ll leave a note for Mr. Arteago—he’s the landlord—and tell him I got a cousin visiting me. That way he won’t say anything. You know, I think Mr. Arteago and my boss are related.”
Mundo laughed and put out his cigarette, falling back into bed. He lifted his head and looked at Diego. “Now even my eyes hurt. I haven’t read this much since I quit school.” He laughed. Diego watched him as he mumbled himself to sleep.
In the dark, Mundo wondered about his life. He was getting too old to belong to the gang. Things were getting rougher and rougher. Maybe it was time to get out. He had held on to the idea of hand-to-hand combat with competing gangs, but he was losing the battle. Everybody wanted guns now and he didn’t have the stomach for shooting people down—even those he hated. The knife was still his weapon of choice—the knife and his fists. Lately, he had been thinking he was getting too tired—too tired or old for all this shit. Bu
t it was all he had ever known. Maybe he would ask Rosie to marry him, but she would say no. He had asked her once already.
“Come on, you know you’ll always be my baby.”
She pushed him away. “I can’t, Mundo, I just can’t.”
“Don’t you love me?”
She kissed him on the cheek. “I love you. Eres mi vida. But I’m not going to marry anyone I can’t grow old with.”
“I’ll grow old with you, baby.”
She shook her head. “You’ll be dead before you’re thirty.”
“But I’m alive, Rosie,” he whispered in the dark. “Baby, I’m alive.”
He slept most of the week; he didn’t seem to be getting any better, though he didn’t get any worse. Diego brought some food home from Vicky’s every day, and although Mundo ate it all, he didn’t seem to enjoy it very much. He didn’t do anything all day as far as Diego could tell, except lie in bed. Diego brought magazines home for him to read, and it seemed that Mundo liked them pretty well, but he didn’t say too much except that he liked the pictures. On Wednesday, Diego asked him if he was feeling all right.
“Just tired,” Mundo said. “I just need to get some rest.” Mundo wondered why this man cared, why this man wanted to bring him back into the world of the living. He thought it strange that the presence of this man made him want to be strong again. Maybe he had died, maybe this man was a spirit, a holy ghost. Maybe, he was being prepared for something. “And maybe I’m just going fuckin’ nuts.”
As he lay in bed, Mundo wondered why he had not died. He was getting tired of his life, and yet he felt powerless to change the way he lived. His gang and Rosario, that was all he loved. What else is there? He noticed that this deaf man had books in the room—they were nothing to him, they did not call him. He thought of his father, whom he had not seen since he was seven. He did not remember anything about him anymore except that he had once told him that the gringo would always hate him, and people like him. He remembered no words of love. He thought of his mother, who rarely smiled, the stoic resignation in her face. Only Rosario knew how to talk to him, and yet he felt she was leaving him. “Rosie, tell me you love me.” “It doesn’t do any good, Mundo.” “It does, it does do good.” “What does it change? You stay the same.”
He pictured her dark eyes, her shaking head. He looked around the room. He hated when he thought too much. Thinking made him feel bad. “I’m going fuckin’ nuts.”
By Thursday Mundo looked stronger to Diego. Friday evening, when Diego came home from work, he found Mundo had taken a bath and changed into some of his clothes. “Hey, man,” he smiled, “where’d you get this coat? It’s wild, man. You dress like those old geezers that hang around Sacred Heart Church, you know that? You gotta do something about this, you got that? How do you expect to get yourself a good jaiñada?”
Diego looked at him. “What’s that?” he wrote.
“What’s what?”
“That last word—I don’t understand that word.”
Mundo looked at him and laughed. “A babe, man, a mamacita. An overnight special, know what I mean?”
Diego nodded. “How do you spell it?”
“Oh man, how the fuck do I know? It’s not a school word, Diego. A jaiñada isn’t something you spell—it’s something you get. And I’m telling you, man, that you’re not gonna get it wearing these clothes.” He grabbed the pen and pad from Diego and wrote in large letters: jaiñada. He looked at the letters. “Something like that, man. Don’t matter, anyway, how you spell it. Either way you got to get new clothes.”
“I like my clothes.”
“No, man, you gotta change your image. You gotta change your attitude, got it? That’s what la teacha at La Jeff used to say to me all the fuckin’ time. ‘You gotta change your attitude, Edmundo.’”
“You got too much attitude,” Diego wrote, “the wrong kind.
“And what’s La Jeff?”
Diego motioned him to stop. “What’s La Jeff?”
“La Jeffs a high school. Only went there one year. Bunch of marranos teach there, Marrano City—pigs—that’s what they are. Nobody has a name. And when la teacha remembered my name, she’d say it all wrong. Anyway, man, you gotta change your attitude.” He walked over to Diego’s desk and waved his suicide note in the air. “I read this, Diego. I’m not a good reader, you know? But I know what this fuckin’ says, and I’m tellin’ you, man, that you got the wrong idea. Shit, man. You thinking about killin’ yourself is a pendejada—it’s bullshit, got it?”
Diego stared at him, and pressed words on his pad angrily, “You shouldn’t have read that. You shouldn’t go around reading other people’s letters.” Diego ripped the sheet off his pad and threw it at Mundo.
Mundo picked it up off the floor and read it. “Relax, don’t get all worked up. Easy, I’m on your side. You helped me out. I figure I can help you out, too, got it? It works that way, you know? And I say that it’s a helluva lot better to start killing other people than killing yourself. Know what I’m sayin’? No te dejes. If you let yourself be pushed around, it’s your own fuckin’ fault—that’s what my old man used to say. That’s the smartest thing he ever said even though he is a goddamned liar. No te dejes, Diego. Your mom and your sister, they’re gone, man. So what? Fuck it. You’re not fuckin’ dead, man. You think the fuckin’ world cares if you kill yourself? You think they’re gonna feel bad when they find your body smellin’ up your apartment? That’s bullshit. They’re not gonna give a rat’s ass. When I quit school, la teacha didn’t cry. They don’t give a pinche peso. Man, they don’t know your name—and they don’t wanna fuckin’ know. They’re gonna care when you fuckin’ make ‘em care. And that’s the way it is.”
Diego stood motionless. He shook his head. “So far, your philosophy has gotten you into a trash can. They left you for dead. Isn’t the way you live suicide?”
Mundo crumpled up his note. “No. That ain’t suicide. Suicide is when you wear these clothes, man. Suicide is when you take a knife and cut yourself until you fuckin’ bleed yourself to death. I don’t work like that, you know? When someone stabs my ass in the streets, it’s because I’ve pissed them off so bad they want my pinche ass in the ground. But the motherfuckers know my goddamned name. I make sure they know, got it?”
“Pissing people off doesn’t seem to be much of an ambition.”
“Oh man!” Mundo shook his head. “You go to that goddamned library to learn things, but shit…” He stopped. He grabbed Diego’s letter and waved it around. “Just think about it.” He threw himself on the bed. Diego looked at him. He was young. He didn’t seem to be over twenty. Apart from the stitches on his brow, he looked like he’d never been stabbed.
Diego looked at him and shook his head. “Some day, somebody’s gonna kill you.”
Mundo laughed. “Yeah, man, just go to the fuckin’ funeral.”
Diego nodded and half-smiled.
“I’ll be around, Diego. I know where to find you.” He got up from the bed and headed for the door. He turned around and looked at Diego. He walked back toward the bed and picked up Diego’s letter. “Tear it up.” He handed it to Diego. Diego put it on his desk. “I’ll see you around.”
Diego nodded. “Yeah,” he wrote, “see you. Come around to Vicky’s sometimes, and I’ll buy you a beer.”
Mundo stared at the note and nodded. He untucked his shirt and strutted out of Diego’s apartment.
As he walked back toward El Segundo barrio, Mundo fluctuated between exhilaration and revenge. “I want to find that sonofabitch—I’ll find him and make him wish he never saw a trash can in his life.” He understood being stabbed, but being thrown away? “One more fuckin’ person throwing me away.” Mundo wondered why the first thing he ever felt was anger. He pushed the face of the man who stabbed him away. He thought about Diego and nodded. He wondered at people like him—not that he knew many—not like him. He wondered why some people were kind and others were not. The strange, deaf man’s kindness had helped
bring him back to life, and he was suddenly happy to be alive. He wanted a beer, could almost taste it. He wanted to shoot a game of pool. He liked the feeling of the streets under his feet. As he walked, a cool breeze kicked up, and he promised himself he would pay the deaf man back. Somehow he would pay him back. He stared at the tatoo on his arm. How long could Rosie love a man like him? What could he do to make her stay? He wondered if life would ever be any different for him. Could he get rid of his fist and save his hand? He hated when he thought about things too much. It made him feel small and lost and hopeless.
7
HIS BREATHING WAS labored through the oxygen mask and it seemed to Jacob a sad and painful thing when sleep was something the body had to work for. He wanted to look away, and yet his dark lover was still beautiful to look at, too beautiful to be dying. He followed each breath, saw his chest rise up and down slowly like a calm wave on a quiet summer ocean. He rubbed his hand on Joaquin’s arm, up and down to the beat of his breathing. It wouldn’t be so bad if we could stay this way forever, he thought. Just like this. It would be good. He stared at his lover’s body. Already it was going away, already he could see the bones through his perfect flesh more clearly than he had ever seen them. It was as if they were rising out of him like the morning sun rose out of a dark earth. Soon they would reach the surface.
He felt a touch on his shoulder. His body straightened, his back stiffened. His hand jerked up, and he abruptly turned around as if to strike the person who had just disturbed his world. The nurse took a step back—she was as startled as he had been. She stared into his impenetrable blue eyes. He relaxed and his arm dropped to his side. She smiled at him. “Sorry, she whispered. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I shouldn’t go around touching people. It’s a vocational hazard.”
He laughed nervously. “Guess I’m a little jumpy.”
“Actually, you’re a lot jumpy. You’re entitled.” Her voice was strong, friendly, disarming. She tried not to stare at him—something about him was disturbingly familiar. “You just missed the doctor.”