“It’s not a piece of shit,” Russell said and wiped his eyes.
“So what are you doing today?” Eddie asked.
Russell shook his head.
“I just got a job doing a remodel on a house near the river. I don’t start for a month but they just gutted the whole first floor and there’s an old claw-foot tub they’re throwing out. The head contractor said I could have it. I was thinking we pick it up and then I gotta do a bid in the hills and then we’ll eat some lunch. After that we’ll pick up a new toilet and sink. A friend of mine is coming tomorrow to tile the bathroom. I have to get the shower out and gut the bathroom tonight so he has room.”
“You’re redoing the bathroom?”
Eddie nodded.
“Does that mean Monica’s coming back?”
“No,” Eddie said and laughed. “I’m just getting old and my back hurts. I think sitting in the bath might help. Are you too beat up to help?”
Russell shook his head. “I can help,” he said. “My face hurts but nothing else does. I told Curtis that he didn’t have the guts to hit me in the face. I knew he’d hit me in the face then and when the cops and my mom saw how bad I looked, I knew they wouldn’t let him come back.”
“That’s pretty smart thinking,” Eddie said. “And just so you know, I’m pressing charges against Curtis for stealing the car. With all that and hitting the cop and his priors, he’ll be in some shit for a while. But sooner or later, eventually, he’ll be back.”
“I know,” Russell said. “But I’m going to start growing soon. I know I will.”
THE PLEASURE OF GOD
by Luis Alberto Urrea
THE OLD MAN lurched over the pass under the brutal Mexican sun. Behind him, the ocean was dull and heavy as indigo felt, heaving slowly toward a shore hidden by cliffs. He didn’t waste time staring at the sea. The sea was of interest to him only when his neighbors brought up abalones or langostinos. Tortillas and butter and beans. Not the fried shit from cans, either—beans, boiled and soupy with a chunk of fatty pork for flavor.
He was angry at the sun. It hammered so hard that he was bent under its blows, and his hair had stiffened with old sweat into a sculpture. He smiled once, in spite of the rotten molar in his mouth. He was as old as that useless sea, and his hair was still black. Even the hair on his balls. He had never been broken, and he intended to live forever. He was cursed with vitality.
He spit. He normally would save it in this heat, would suck a rock as he walked to make himself salivate. But he had two Pepsi bottles full of water strung across his shoulders on a rope. It was only twenty kilometers. He should have worn shoes for this hike, though. But he didn’t have any good walking shoes. He wore his huaraches—and they made him furious. Leather straps and soles made of old tires. A cactus thorn had worked its way deep into his left foot, and he couldn’t carve it out with his knife. He stomped harder with that foot, rubbing the pain into his flesh so the infection would swell and force the thorn out. He wasn’t afraid of infections—the bad molar was leaking black-tasting poison into his mouth and swelling his cheek. When he got to town, he’d find some pliers. He’d show God and everyone else what he was made of.
He walked on. Not far now. He had walked out of Sal Si Puedes, his little blister of a fishing town hugging the cliffs, with one thing on his mind: revenge. Especially now—man, he was going to ride, but thanks to those cabrones, he had to walk. That he had to walk to Ensenada made him madder than he usually was. Life was generous: it gave a man a thousand things to be pissed off about. He was old, after all. Old men had the right to be mad all day. Just a kilometer to go till he reached Guadalupe, a small community on the outskirts of the city. There was a guy there with a wrecking yard. He could get pliers there. And the guy had a mule. The old man had a deal in mind. He was going to trade for that mule. And he was going to collect what he wanted.
“I get what I want,” he said to the air. “When I want it.”
He would have ridden his old moped up the highway, but those narco assholes had backed into it and broken the back wheel and fork. Well, he could have walked up the frontage road, nice and level, except they had hung naked bodies off the bridge after they crunched his moto. The policías had shut the whole road down. God damn them. Made him walk over the mountains and get thorns in his feet, and him with this rotten tooth leaking pus into his mouth.
He smiled again.
“We will see what we see,” he said.