'I was pissed at being used. I wanted to stick it to Rigney.'
'Smart. Really smart.'
'Just let me go to Mexico. When I come back, with or without Garcia's scalp, I'll turn myself in.'
'Your problems are here. Nothing you can do will bring Adam back.'
'Maybe there's something I can do that will bring me back.'
'Not something evil. Not killing Garcia.'
'Who's Garcia?' Tino demanded, between gulps of food. 'And why do you want to kill him?'
'None of your business,' Payne said.
'I am not afraid to kill a man,' Tino claimed. 'Some cabron hurts my mother, I'll slice his neck like a goat.'
'That's the spirit,' Payne said.
'Stop it, both of you.' Sharon turned to the boy. 'Tino, tell me about your mother.'
Wordlessly, the boy reached inside his shirt. Hanging from a cord around his neck was a plastic envelope. He handed it to Sharon. It held a photo, apparently taken at some formal event, a wedding or a quince party. Tino's mother wore a frilly turquoise dress. She had almond-shaped eyes the color of obsidian rocks in a mountain stream. She was not quite smiling, her full lips betraying no emotion. Her hair, which cascaded over bare shoulders, was as dark and lustrous as a river shimmering under a full moon. Her jawline was carved from granite, a Salma Hayek look.
'Your mother's beautiful,' Sharon said. 'What's her name?'
'Marisol.' Tino's voice wobbled.
He tried to be tough, Sharon thought, but he was still a little boy.
'What's really bad,' he said, his eyes watery, 'it's all my fault.'
'What is?'
'That we had to cross over. That Mami 's missing.' Tears tracked down his cheeks. 'I'm the one who ruined everything.'
TWENTY-SIX
Even after blurting out his guilt, Tino still didn't know whether he should tell them what really happened back home.
If he told the lawyer and the lady cop, they might turn him over to La Migra. He would be sent home and put in jail. Or worse. Rafael Obeso would kill him.
As he ate, Tino sized up the two Americans. He liked the woman. She could cut it in the street, a real pachuca. Strong, like his own mother. He was not yet sure about the lawyer. Unfriendly at first. But he had kept his word. Picked him up when the police were chasing. Handed over the promised money, too.
'Judge people by whether they tell you the truth.'
That is what his mother taught him. But could he trust them with his truth?
'What do you mean you ruined everything?' the lady cop asked, tenderness in her voice.
'I did something that made a man want to kill me.
He said he would cut out my heart and deliver it to Mami. Then hurt her, too.'
The cop and the lawyer looked toward each other, as if asking whether they should believe him. Funny thing about grown-ups, Tino thought. They will swallow your lies, but the truth is so much harder for them to take.
After thinking it over, Tino told the lawyer and the pretty cop exactly how it happened. What he had seen and what he had done. And why his mother was forced to grab him and run like hell, all the way to El Norte.
Three days earlier, Tino had watched his mother scramble up the scaffolding of the big house under construction on a hill above their village. A petite woman, only a few centimeters taller than him. But strong and with womanly curves. Her long thick hair, dark as the desert night, swished across her shoulders as she climbed the scaffold. Workmen stopped. Whistled. Hooted. Mumbled filthy words.
Pigs.
'It is a curse to be a pretty woman,' she had told Tino many times.
Warning him not to be like those men. Smelly and foul-mouthed. Beer-swilling and lazy. Working as slowly and as little as possible. Gambling away their money. Brutalizing their women and ignoring their children.
'Men are a plague.'
'Was my father that way?'
Her smile was both sweet and sad. She never criticized the man who fled as soon as her belly swelled. She was not angry with him. With his mestizaje blood of Spanish ancestors, Gustavo had bequeathed his bright green eyes to Tino. At the time Tino was conceived, Gustavo was barely more than a boy himself.
'Your father sang 'Besame Mucho' in a voice that made my knees go soft. But he could not hold a job or make a plan past the next weekend.' She let out a long sigh. 'At least your father bathed. He did not stink.'
To Tino, it seemed like his mother deserved more than that.
As she climbed the scaffold the day the trouble started, Xavier, a carpenter with a tattooed neck, squeezed her ass through her jeans. Marisol swatted away the pendejo 's hand. Another two rungs, another worker, Jesus, tried to grab her breasts. She dangled there, one hand looped on the rung above. With her other hand, she pulled the air-powered nail gun from her tool belt.
'Jesus,' she said to the tit grabber, 'do you want me to nail your hands and feet to the framing? Should I crucify you like your namesake?'
'Put one through his pinga, ' another worker called out, laughing.
'Won't need the gun,' Marisol replied. 'A half-inch staple will do the job.'
The other men coughed and belched and hawked up tobacco. Jesus unleashed a torrent of puta sand cono s and cachapera s as Marisol climbed to the roof.
Tino watched all this with a mixture of fear and pride. His mother could take care of herself, but wasn't he the man of the household? When he delivered lunch to the men, shouldn't he order them to stay away from his mother? Or should he just punch Jesus in his stupid mouth? Before he could decide, Rafael Obeso, in his knee-high leather boots, strode through the mud to the foot of the scaffold.
'Leave her alone,' Obeso ordered the men. 'She's a better carpenter than any of you turds.'
'Si, jefe.'
'Si, patron.'
The men got back to work, picking up their pace.
Worms, Tino thought. Spineless men. Half-day workers, half-day drinkers. Lacking pride and motivation.
Tino had learned a phrase from his mother. 'Amor propio.' Self-esteem.
He admired American men. The ones he had seen on television. Well dressed and handsome, with good teeth and fast cars. He did not read the Spanish subtitles on the screen in order to learn English. The same with his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers. Although he could listen to Jaime Jarrin broadcast the game in Spanish, he preferred Vin Scully.
'Pull up a chair and stick around a while. We've got some baseball for you.'
A relaxed, musical voice, smooth as velvet. Sentences that sounded like songs. Someday, he would like to see the Dodgers play in the place Vin Scully called 'Chavez Ravine.'
Tino got back to his job, delivering tacos and tortillas and cold drinks to the workers. They were building a new house, three stories tall. A grand home for Rafael Obeso, the richest man in the village.
Marisol had told Tino that the roof would have a satellite dish six meters across, even though much smaller ones were just as good, maybe even better.
'Senor Obeso wears boots too big for his feet,' she said. 'He is very conscious of show. Such men are stupid, no matter how much money they have.'
His mother was right about so much, Tino thought, watching stonemasons build the fountain in the courtyard, complete with pissing cherubs.
Obeso was a short, stout man made taller by his boots. He wore a black-fringed shirt, and a bolo tie with a slide shaped like a bull and made of solid gold. His brushy mustache was streaked with gray. He told people he
