Carlos poured a portion of the water into a large mixing bowl Shannon used to clean the dishes with. After Shannon got the water she needed, Calvin showed Carlos to the bathroom and explained how the sewer was still working as long as they had water to dump into the toilet. Calvin told the man they used the toilet throughout the day and only flushed it if it were in danger of being clogged with too much toilet tissue or human waste. Otherwise after everyone had washed up, the dirty water from the bucket was used to flush the day’s refuse down the sewer.
Finished explaining how the bathroom operated, Calvin left the bucket of water next to the sink and returned to the kitchen, where he and Carlos took a seat. Shannon completed her tasks in the kitchen, then ushered the two children towards the bathroom, asking Carlos if it was okay to clean the boy up along with Essie. Carlos nodded his agreement, and away Shannon and the children went. Carlos and Salvador brought no belongings; therefore, the boy possessed only the filthy clothes he was wearing, which troubled Shannon.
While Shannon helped the children wash, Calvin raised his glass to the other man and took a satisfied draw. He grimaced as the whiskey burned its way through his taste buds and then down his throat, warming his insides. He hadn’t drunk much lately, especially since the time Bart passed, so now it felt good and conjured a few good memories of a man he’d only known briefly, but had formed a great deal of respect for. Carlos sipped the whiskey gingerly at first before taking in a mouthful. Calvin could immediately tell the man was not a heavy or even casual drinker by the way he fought the liquor.
Calvin finished with his first mouthful and leaned back, rubbing his bearded chin. Before Shannon finished washing the kids and putting them both down in separate beds, Calvin began telling his story to Carlos in hopes this action would ease any reluctance on Carlos’s part to share his tale of woe. Calvin drank and talked for fifteen minutes, only just finishing as Shannon appeared at the table, a soft smile creasing her pretty face.
“They’re both asleep,” she said in a soft voice as she took a seat next to Calvin.
“I have to, ah, check my son,” Carlos said hesitantly.
“Sure,” Calvin said, gesturing to the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
“He’s in the second bedroom on the left. He was asleep when I left him,” Shannon added as Carlos stood from the table, nodding his head incessantly as he backed away, as if leaving some royal’s chambers.
When Carlos had gone, Calvin frowned. “What was that all about?”
Shannon breathed in and cocked her head to one side, thinking about the man and his peculiar behavior. “We should hear his story, and then maybe we can understand him better,” she offered.
Carlos slipped into the room Shannon said his son was in, and found Salvador wrapped in a giant comforter atop a queen-size bed. The boy was fast asleep, his breathing coming in long even breaths as the blankets rose and fell in rhythm with his intake and exhalation of air. Carlos felt his eyes began to well with tears as he thought about how close his son had been to dying before these people took them in. He reached out and laid a callused hand across the boy’s face and head and just felt his son’s body heat for a full thirty seconds. Salvador didn’t so much as stir during the thirty seconds.
When Carlos was finished saying his wordless goodnight to Salvador, he returned to where Calvin and Shannon sat expectantly waiting to hear his story.
“I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but we feel it’s important to know your story so we know a little about you, where you came from, who you were before all this, and what you’ve been through since,” Calvin coaxed.
Carlos didn’t want to talk about his life with these people, but they had taken him and Salvador in without so much as a shot fired or a terse word, so he guessed he owed it to them. Carlos started from the time he was a young teen living in Michoacán, Mexico. As a teen, Carlos had been recruited by the drug cartels to run errands and watch for the Federales, as had many of the poverty-stricken boys in his village of El Limon.
It soon became apparent to Carlos that the men he ran errands for would soon be expecting much more from him and his friends. The men would be expecting Carlos’s services in access, and Carlos knew he wouldn’t have the stomach to deliver, and this frightened him. The cartel men did not like being told no, and those who opposed them usually found their way into a ditch somewhere alongside a lonely road.
Carlos was not a killer, nor was he a bad person. His mother had been fiercely religious, and his father was to date the hardest working man Carlos ever knew. When Carlos was twenty-one, he married a woman named Rosa from his hometown. The two lived with Carlos’s parents and soon after the wedding had a baby girl. Rosa was adamant about naming the baby after her grandmother Maria, so Carlos had a daughter named Maria by the time he was twenty-two years of age.
Soon after the birth of Maria, one of Carlos’s friends turned up one day at a cantina the boys frequented, sporting a wad of pesos larger than Carlos had ever seen before. The others asked where he’d gotten the money, and he just smiled and told them their time was coming. The rest of the boys were eager for their time, while Carlos had a bad feeling about what his time would demand of him. He heard rumors of the need for young men
