listened to the beating of his heart in his chest. What a fragile thing a heart was. So easy to fool. To break. To stop on impact in a darkened intersection. “There has to be a why,” I said.
“Not necessarily.” He’d been raised Catholic, he said, and was taught that sin was punished and virtue rewarded. Good things happened to good people, bad things to bad people. Even when his mother died, he’d continued to believe this because another thing he’d been taught was that adversity was a test. But then he went to war, and lost all belief. One minute this guy Sanger was telling him about the kind of roof shingles he wanted for his house back in Jackson Hole and the next he had no hands to wave in the air anymore. “I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t figure out why he’d been maimed and I still had my hands, even though I was standing right next to him. That’s when I started to realize that some things couldn’t be explained. It was just chance. It couldn’t be argued with. There’s no reason or order to it.”
This wasn’t enough for me. To believe that my father’s death was just an unfortunate accident meant that I would have to forget everything else I knew about my hometown. Discount the arson, erase the small insults, untether the hit-and-run from the time and place in which it happened. I couldn’t.
Outside, a mockingbird trilled. “It’s getting late,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”
But I couldn’t sleep, and he held me until the curtain grayed with dawn and the roosters in the neighbor’s yard began calling to one another. Then he got up and got dressed and came to say goodbye to me, kneeling by the side of the bed like a man at prayer.
Efraín
I was leaving Kasa Market the following week, my arms weighed down by groceries and my thoughts on the game I wanted to watch once I got home, when Guerrero stuck his foot out and made me trip. I landed in front of the notice board, limes and lemons rolling all around me, chips crumbling to pieces in their bag. I pushed myself up, and there was his picture, on a poster. We stood together, he and I, staring at his likeness and at the number beneath it, so big I didn’t need my glasses to read it. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Imagine what you could do with that much money. All you have to do is call. “I’m not going to call,” I said, bending down to pick up two limes from beneath the candy rack. By some miracle, the carton of eggs looked undisturbed, but when I opened it to check, I found that one was broken. “See what you made me do?” I asked.
This is nothing, he said with a laugh.
I didn’t know if he meant that an egg was nothing or that he could do a lot more to me than make me trip and fall at the grocery store. I thought of asking him bluntly whether he was threatening me, but I was afraid of what he might say in return. I wasn’t prepared for a fight. In the end, I ignored him, and continued picking up my groceries from the floor. I had to pull myself together. This was all in my head anyway. I needed to get home to my wife and children, try to go to bed early, get some rest for a change.
Look. This is the detective’s name. Write it down.
There was an uneasy stillness in the air. Somewhere in the store, a baby began to wail and could not be comforted by its mother. I gathered all my items and stood up, rubbing soreness from my knees. I was trying to decide if I should go back and tell the cashier that I needed a new carton, or just go home and have Marisela ask me why I couldn’t be trusted to bring home six unbroken eggs, when a teenage girl walked past me, giving me a wary look as she stepped out of the store. I had seen that look before, cast on misfits, maniacs, and madmen, warning them to stay away, as if what troubled them was a leprosy, contagious and incurable. Listen, I wanted to tell the