Down the way I found Beatriz making carnitas in a large iron skillet over one of the fires, pouring over the frying cubes of pork a sauce made from Coca-Cola, ketchup, and chili vinegar. Her green parrot Paco was perched on the deck nearby, happily cackling the only two phrases it knew: hijole chingao and todos los marinos son putos. There was meat everywhere, the carnage of carnival and purple carcass majesty, ribs in pans, heaps of brains and tripe, snout and feet, head and back meat, side meat already frying and headed for frijoles charros, chops and hams and scraps galore for Sweets and his pals.
By noon, a full-fledged fiesta was underway. A guitarrista and an accordion player named Poka had started up on the podium. A pickup truck with about nine men in its bed and more hanging off the running boards sputtered up the hill. The whooping passengers leapt off and began to unload cases of Tecate and Pacifico. All the parillas blazed with bright red coals, their mesquite and hickory smoke lifting to the clearing sky, and the best parts of the dressed pork, the chuletas and lomo, laid on the flames with whole chilies and onions and nopales still with their spines. Women kept appearing from the casitas with more food, bolillos, stacks of warm tortillas, cans of chipotles and bowls of chopped cilantro and onions and jars of salsa. Great galvanized tubs full of ice were stuffed with orange and lime Jarritos for the kiddies.
A guy with a trumpet appeared and for laughs blew the “Call to Post,” then he and the guitarrista and Poka segued into mariachi. Beatriz now finished with the carnitas had soaked corn husks and with the freshly rendered pork fat was kneading a pile of masa for tamales. She waved me in. I did not cook, I told her. Ahora si, she said, and showed me how to spread the masa into the wet hojas and fill them with adobada and roll them. We laid them thirty at a time in a big steamer. As more revelers arrived, the music outside grew louder. A freshly caught shark was thrown onto the grill. Someone handed me a cold can of Tecate and I heard Sweets laughing and then saw his smartass face in the door.
I thought you didn’t cook, he scoffed. You lazy bastard. Look how happy you are.
And it was true. I didn’t know why. Memories and Del Mar opening and these sweet familial people, many as illegal as me. I finished another beer, followed by two shots of tequila with a hot walker named Salvador who traveled with the circuit and knew my father well and even remembered me. This Salvador, he insisted I get drunk, and he talked about the days when he cooled the horses in the sea, but I did roll and steam about a hundred tamales, some with mangos and pineapples, before I slipped out of the grasp of Beatriz, and then I briefly played goalie in a soccer game and was scored on umpteen times by children and adults half my size, then I lost all my money in a dice game, followed by a violent discussion about thoroughbreds in which it was denied by several that I could possibly be the inventor of the Plum Variable, giving the credit instead to my father.
I had never danced and always refused to dance, but now I was dancing in circles with some chiquita with a face like intervention. It was only on Sabado de Gloria, the fiesta before Easter, when an effigy of a U. S. president was burned or blown up on general principles, but someone had an extra George W. Bush hanging around and to rousing cheers up in flames he went.
Late afternoon the wind shifted and the air grew lazy and warm. A boy like a maypole spun a lasso around himself. Now here came Shelly’s pickup jostling up the trail, Donny on the passenger side waving from the open window. I gestured them up the hill as if I were flagging in an airship. Donny was nearly out of the truck before it stopped and let out a crazy yeehaw through the mouth of his rubber Ronald Reagan mask.
Shelly, looking a year older each time I saw him, climbed wearily out shaking his head. He looked all around. “Can’t believe it’s opening day at Del Mar tomorrow. First time I’ll miss it in more than twenty years.”
“Oh, well,” I said, and steered him to the beer.
Shelly and I stood off to the side, he wearing a wry smile and holding a pulled pork torta in his left hand, a can of Tecate in his right. Donny in the meantime had joined the festivities. Considering that the effigy of a U. S. president had just been burned, and figuring in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Ronald Reagan, I thought, fared rather well. Donny danced with the same woman I had, a very generous soul, the kind I should’ve married instead of Fang-Hua. Maybe my life would’ve turned out differently if I had, or if Sofia hadn’t jumped from that window, but it was too late for all that.
Donny limped over to us after a while panting, the collar of his shirt wet from perspiration. “I want a beer, too,” he said.
Shelly rolled his eyes. “You can’t, babe. You’re not old enough.”
“How old am I, anyway, Chuck?”
“You’re forty-one.”
Donny clapped his hands together and scrubbed them around. The paralyzed hand was as pliant as the handle of a wooden walking cane. “Too young to drink,” he crowed.
“How about just a paper cup?” I said. “Come on, it’s a party. They’ll be breaking up soon. They all have to get up at four.”
Shelly gave me a glance.
“Can he drink?” I pressed. “I mean, are we saving him for some occasion?”
“He’s got brain damage.”
“So
