Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

Brewer smiles to himself. She’s actually not bad for a cop. Big old bull dyke looks like she might even be able to hold her own in a fight.

The wind has come up, and ash swirls in the air like a light snow, dusting the hood of Brewer’s pickup, the leaves of the rosebush, the surface of the water in the dog’s bowl. Brewer can see flames now, for the first time, bright orange banners fluttering through the smoke.

He walks into the trailer and retrieves The Complete Works of William Shakespeare from the table in the dining nook, the same battered copy he’s hauled around most of his life, ever since he realized there was more truth in one of those plays than in the entire Holy Bible. Most of his days still start with a cup of coffee and the book, him opening it at random in search of some bit of wisdom to chew on, so it’ll be the only thing he takes with him if he winds up running.

He carries the book out to the truck, then ties a bandanna around his nose and mouth, pulls on a pair of ski goggles, and picks up a hoe. Cassius follows him to the firebreak, a ten-foot-wide strip Brewer has scraped down to dirt, a kind of moat surrounding the trailer. The dog lolls in a patch of shade while Brewer attacks a manzanita bush, widening the break even more. His hands are already covered with blisters from the work he’s done over the past twenty-four hours, and his back is killing him, but he can’t just sit and wait for the fire to get here. He’s let too many things run him over like that in the past.

When he pauses to empty the sweat pooled inside his goggles, he notices that the flames have moved closer and that the smoke has gone from black to pink as the sun has risen. A fire department plane on its way to drop the load of water it has in its belly onto the blaze roars low overhead, and Cassius sends up a pitiful howl.

“What are you bawling about?” Brewer yells at the dog, then blows his nose into his bandanna. The snot comes out black, and when he spits, that’s black too.

MIGUEL WATCHES MAMÁ while he eats his Froot Loops. She’s making bacon-and-egg burritos for him and Papá to take with them. Papá sits across the table, sipping a cup of milky coffee. The old man shook Miguel awake half an hour ago and told him to get dressed, they were going to look for Alberto and Maria.

“What about school?” Miguel asked, but all Papá said was “Don’t wake your brother.”

The old man is bringing him along to translate. After all these years, he understands English pretty well but still can’t speak it. Hearing him try embarrasses Miguel. At Home Depot or the DMV or on parent-teacher night Miguel bites his tongue when the old man struggles to put together a few awkward sentences, then steps in and talks over him at the first sign of confusion on the face of whomever he’s addressing.

“You have to let him try,” Mamá always says afterward. “How else will he learn?”

“It’s easier if I do it,” Miguel replies. “People don’t have all day.”

Mamá wraps the burritos in aluminum foil and slides them into a plastic grocery bag. Papá looks up from his coffee and smiles at her.

“Don’t worry,” he says.

She shakes her head in reply, tight-lipped, her eyes puffy. Miguel realizes she’s been crying.

“I’ll take good care of your baby,” Papá continues. “I promise.”

A bit worried himself, Miguel asks Papá how he plans to find Alberto and Maria.

“You just do as I say,” the old man snaps.

When Papá comes to a decision, he sticks to it no matter what, putting all his pride behind it, and this stubbornness makes Miguel uneasy. He remembers the time the old man took him and Francisco fishing in a friend’s boat. They motored far out into the ocean, and the weather suddenly turned bad. Dark clouds crashed into one another overhead, and the tiny boat was rocked by wind-whipped waves. The frightened boys began to cry and begged Papá to turn back.

“Don’t you trust your father?” he shouted. “I know what I’m doing.”

He didn’t, not at all, and they ended up running out of fuel and nearly capsizing before another boat picked them up. To this day the old man won’t admit they were in any danger. When he tells the story, it’s only to joke about how scared the boys were. But he was scared too. Miguel saw it in his eyes when the engine stopped and when the lightning flashed, and he heard it in his voice as he recited a prayer under his breath.

When Miguel walks out the front door of the house a few minutes later, Papá is checking the oil in his truck in preparation for the trip. “Did you bring a coat?” the old man says.

Miguel holds up his letterman’s jacket. He’s doing varsity track this year and is close to breaking the school record in long jump. A couple more inches, one good trip off the board, and he’ll have it. Mosco, the family’s Chihuahua, barks at him and bounces around his legs.

“Don’t let him out,” Mamá calls through the bars covering the living-room window. The yellow stucco on the house is crisscrossed with gray patches where Papá has repaired cracks. He keeps saying he’s going to repaint but never finds the time. Mamá has had enough of his promises and calls the house the Pride of El Monte just to piss him off.

Miguel holds the dog back with his foot while he steps through the gate in the waist-high chain-link fence, then quickly yanks his shoe away and slams the gate shut. He walks to the truck and climbs in on the passenger side. The burritos on the seat beside him give off a greasy smell that fills the cab.

He’s going to miss a history quiz and track practice today, but what’s most fucked is that he was supposed to cut sixth period and sneak with Michelle to her cousin’s apartment, where she swore she’d finally give it up after a whole month of dry-humping and hand jobs. It’d be his first time getting laid, something he’s been thinking about since he was, like, twelve. And Michelle is fine, too, not like Lydia, that beast his homey Rigo got with last year and still brags about. Fucking Papá is going to ruin everything.

The old man slides behind the wheel and starts the truck. He raises his hand to Mamá, and she raises hers to him. Miguel puts in his earbuds and turns on his music. As soon as they graduate, he and Rigo are moving to Tucson to work as trainers at Rigo’s uncle’s gym. Michelle might come too. He can’t wait.

He sleeps most of the way down to Tijuana and even when he’s awake pretends he isn’t so that he doesn’t have to talk to the old man. They park on the American side of the border in a dirt lot next to a currency-exchange place. Papá hands him one of the burritos and unwraps another for himself, and they eat sitting on the tailgate of the truck. A battered train rolls past, its boxcars covered with graffiti, both Spanish and English: El Solitario, Led Zeppelin, Kim is the shit.

The walk to the crossing is a short one, past the McDonald’s and the trolley stop, up and over a bridge spanning the freeway. Soon Miguel is pushing through the turnstile in the tall iron fence separating the two countries, and, just like that, the cars are dustier, the pigeons rattier, the music louder.

Papá goes to a taxi stand and negotiates with a driver, a fat dude in a cowboy hat. Miguel has trouble keeping up with what’s being said. His Spanish has never been very good, and he forgets a little more each year. The driver leads them to an empty cab, and the old man sits in front and tells Miguel to get in back. The fat dude climbs in and taps his horn twice at the other drivers lounging at the stand before squeezing into the traffic headed into town.

THE FIRE REACHES Brewer’s place around nine. It barrels down the hill fronted by a twenty-foot wall of flame. The dry grass hisses as it burns, and the oily shrubs explode, sending up showers of flaming shrapnel. The willows and cottonwoods lining the creek that runs along the western edge of the property wither and go from green to orange to black.