Bloodline Read online

  “My father?”

  “Yes. You have to go three minutes with this guy. Three minutes. You can dance circles ’round this pussy. Seems like a long time, but it ain’t nothing, Papo. A hundred and eighty seconds. Three minutes. You got this. I know you got this. You just gotta stay moving for three minutes. Do you understand? Do you understand me, Abraham? Three minutes. Do that, and we get paid. Win this. I believe in you, Abraham. Do it for your dad.”

  Your uncle holds up three fingers. The fingers jut into the sky like crosses or light poles.

  It’s the beginning, and it is the end.

  23

  He was a bigger guy. Simple arithmetic. The mathematics of brawn. A man versus an almost-not-yet man. Built like a truck and without mercies. The last thing you remember: your teeth tasting dirt, the iron taste of wooziness and imbalance, and your uncle pushing you forward after two tremendous blows—your jaw like it had grown horrid wings and flown off your face—bringing you up to your knees, your uncle’s fast fists telling you, “Go! Go! Go!” And so you see stars. You do. Just like you told Ophelia. Only the stars are nothing at all like the ones that cling to the Montezuma cypresses hanging down over the River Walk or the extrasolar ones, far away in the sky, those stars sending parts of themselves from across the universe, looking down on you with pity and love and apologies, calling you, whispering your name, lulling you with their little lilts of light, and as you shut your eyes, you remember this is your name. Your name. But at this point, at this hour, you won’t know for certain if the stars are pulling you up or falling down into you, becoming you, or you becoming one of them. The rest, as they say, is silence.

  24

  It is amazing. That’s what I can tell you about death. This silence. The most beautiful noise in the history of anyone’s life. The brightest noise. For me, it is one moment, one that I’d forgotten, because that’s what happens once all your days amass like a heap of hours and then a mountain of them, forming years and decades, maybe more. All the while, the brain is an organ as marvelous as the heart. We live and we forget and we learn and we see, and sometimes, we remember.

  I died on a Thursday night in the middle of December.

  I was seventeen.

  I fell in love with a girl named Ophelia with the most marvelous red hair, a laugh like a sky full of birds, and a mother who’d lose her life in Afghanistan. On a ranch outside of San Antonio, I was beaten in a fight for two thousand dollars, because I couldn’t move faster and couldn’t strike any blows of my own and my eyes shut faster than my knuckles could strike out.

  When my uncle drove me to the hospital, I still had a handful of minutes in my heart. Those minutes with their little patter and their rosebush of hopes. He balled up my shirt and used it to soak up the blood that made lines like a sloppy grid across the parts of my face that once kept my eyes and my nose and my mouth in their places. I heard him talking as he drove, and I listened as he sobbed a litany of apologies to me and to my father and to my mother, to my grandmother, to his own children, whom he’d abandoned somewhere along the way, to this car ride, in which I was not surviving the pummeling he’d arranged. Like this, I learned that my father had died because my Uncle Claudio sold him out to a heroin dealer to whom my crooked uncle owed a hive of money. My uncle told me this because he knew I was dying, because sometimes in life these are the only times the truth happens, when it’s life and death and we can go either way. Perhaps this was his way of liberating himself of the heavy guilt he’d carried all of his life. He admitted that he’d led my father to an abandoned house by the southmost part of the river and watched my father get shot in the head. Perhaps my uncle needed to hear himself confess. Perhaps he absolved himself of all duty to truth and asked only for forgiveness in the seconds he believed he’d wronged me like he’d wronged my father like he’d wronged their mother so many times. Perhaps these were simply a muddle of lies, a feeble attempt meant to keep me holding on. Who knows?

  What I know is he left me at the emergency room of Santa Rosa Hospital, stuttering to the nurse on duty that this was all gang shit and that I was his brother’s one son, a lost boy who was breaking everyone’s hearts, that I’d made it home barely, collapsing on his porch after some guys had jumped me—that he hoped they could save me, please, please. He offered my name and my grandmother’s name, along with a too-vague description of these imaginary boys, and he left.

  The doctors tried, and the nurses said my liver had lost its place in my body, that my lung had collapsed, that it had been punctured because my ribs were fractured and two of the ribs had punched through the wall of the lung. There was also damage to my spine and brain. They suspected I would die, and I did.

  As I lay in the little room made of curtains, full of people who were realizing I was over, my grandmother laced her hand into my hand and called Ophelia, and Becky held my grandmother’s hand, and my grandmother cried harder than all of the seas in all of the storms God ever made. Becky held her, and they prayed for me.

  Sometimes I can still hear the curtains swaying, sometimes I can still hear Becky and my grandmother praying. It’s a nice sound. Music, almost.

  Did they know who’d done this? an officer asked my family.

  No, said my grandmother.

  No, repeated Becky. Not for sure, but maybe Claudio knew something, she told him as my grandmother fell into her palms, full of sobs and a sadness too many people in the world already know.

  Ophelia sat with my grandmother and fanned her with a magazine.

  But maybe is never a good enough answer.

  But if something was going on, then Abram would have written it down in his journal, Ophelia thought as she climbed the pecan tree behind my grandmother’s house and the wind beat on her face, her red, red hair clinging to her cheeks like a starfish asking the body to give it some life. Furtively she climbed, and the tree scraped the house, making itself heard. Inside, my uncle, immersed in hating himself, heard her climbing, and he decided it was nothing, as Ophelia survived the great tree and entered the house through the imperfect window of the attic.

  He would have killed her, I now think, had he found her.

  But she tiptoed through the house as he sat on the sofa with a gun to his head and the television screaming an old show about cowboys overtaking the West. Cowboys and Indians. Over the havoc inside himself, my uncle could not hear Ophelia gathering my backpack and collecting the pup, and before he could decide whether to commit to the trigger, Ophelia was gone.

  It is amazing. That’s what I can tell you about death. This silence. The most beautiful noise in the history of living. As bright as the lives of stars. For me, it is one moment, one that I’d forgotten, and in this moment, I am two, maybe three, and my father is driving, and I am sitting in my mother’s lap in the front seat of his black Monte Carlo. He loved that car. It is New Year’s, and my mother is smiling with every one of her white teeth as she counts down to midnight. She starts at ten and then nine . . . and my family is a family, and I sit in my mom’s lap as my father drives us around the loop of four tight freeways that etch the perimeter of downtown in my city. There is no place like San Antonio. As the new year approaches, my father rolls down the windows, and the cold wind is in my face, too, opening every part of my eyes, and my mother is laughing her sweet laughter, counting down to four and to three. And it happens, slowly at first, and ardently, a few new stars popping up here and there, shrieking reds and chili-pepper yellows, blues as meaningful as the wholeness of the moon, striking emeralds running the sky’s gamut in streaks, and soon, soon, the entire world around us is saturated with stars, because every neighborhood around me—the east, the west, the north, the south—is sending its fireworks high into the sky, the children shooting their laughter and their awe to soar above skyscrapers and freeways and above the Tower, and there are so many people in their yards and in the streets, loving, enjoying, seeing the magic of the sky, and this way, in my mother’s lap, with my father reaching over to kiss her before
she can say one, with their arms around me, my father says, “Happy New Year, baby. I love you,” and he kisses us both, my mother and my father breathing happiness as if it were air, and the world is perfect, and the world is mine, the moon is watching, and the world is made of light.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to the Macondo Writers’ Workshop for offering support, opportunity and inspiration. In addition, thank you, Reyna Grande, Natalia Treviño, Richard Villegas, Jr., Rafa Esparza and Vicki Grise, for feedback and guidance.