So Special in Dayville Read online

  Today, of course, he’s learned the proper English names for the constellations—the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion, zodiac constellations such as Cancer and Aquarius, the Hydra, and finally Venus instead of La Madre Ojo. Only grudgingly, though, has he learned to call them by these names. Venus is especially hard to utter since, for so long, he’d associated its brightness with that of his mother, Gabriella. But he was at least able to console himself with the association of Venus with love. So, symbolically, it still spoke to him of his mama’s heart.

  His eyes, called to settle on this burning dot in the night sky, harden abruptly. When he first discovered how the pressure of Venus could crush steel like tissue paper and that it stank of sulfuric acid, it was almost as disillusioning as riding on a plane. Having his last illusion stripped from him felt something like dying. His jaw now popping beneath his skin, he lowers his gaze. Yes, the truth was difficult but instructive. Appearances mean nothing, and life is brutal.

  Ruiz’s feet take him in the direction of his day job. It’s at Mom’s Diner on Tenth. Actually, the business has only pretensions to a diner, its oily stove and flypaper barely redeeming its stink of burned onions. But it attains the very height of nostalgia with a floor showing, in spotty vortexes of dirt, three layers of vinyl, and walls textured by fifteen years of water stains.

  Back by the grill, the newly-hired Ajeno is attempting to put on a grease-stained apron only to run out of cloth. He shrugs and, whistling, stuffs the cloth behind a can of insecticide next to the lard bucket.

  The manager, a lanky white man with acne scars, is refilling ketchup bottles when the eatery’s well-dressed, middle-aged owner elbows his way up to the counter.

  “Hey, Jones, you got a minute?”

  “Sure, Mr. Wilson. Here, just let me . . .” With a quick breath, the manager tips the last diluted trickle of tomato paste into a plastic bottle. His finger whips across an escaping stream that’s headed south toward the countertop. Smacking his lips, he licks it clean, leaving a smear of red on his chin. “What can I do for ya? You wanna go over the totals so far? It’s gonna be good tonight.”

  A casual glance proves his words. The traffic’s better than most Mondays as factory workers feed the cash till. A defeated army, they troop inside one by one, randomly dropping into chairs at whatever table’s the nearest. Too tired to cook, they’ve been lured by the storefront’s promise of quick food and cheap prices. Despite their numbers, a hush hangs over the filled tables.

  Wilson, a muscular, frog-like man of repressed energy, casts a quick glance over the sea of bent heads. “No, actually, I wanted to see you . . .” He frowns, glancing over Jones’s shoulder. “Hey, who’s that back on the grill?”

  The manager nods without having to look. “New guy. Garcia’s his name.”

  “Garcia, huh?” Wilson squints his eyes through the gloom. “Don’t look Mexican to me.” He barely lifts his voice to call to the tall man handling the register. “Ruiz, give me a minute.” The other man, his handsome face instantly shuttering, approaches. “That fat guy on the grill.” Wilson jerks his head back at the whale merrily flipping hamburger patties. “You talk to ’im?”

  “No.” Ruiz sounds definite, his words overenunciated. “No, I haven’t talked to him.”

  “But you met him, right?” With a small shrug, the tall man appears to concede this. “His name’s Garcia,” continues the owner. “He seem Mexican to you?”

  “Mexican?” Ruiz looks constipated as if unable to express himself. “I don’t know him.”

  “Huh, well, keep an eye on ’im, will ya?”

  The tall man moves with visible relief back to the cash register. “Yes, sir.”

  “You think there’s a problem?” Jones turns to stare just as Ajeno stuffs a handful of hamburger pickles into his mouth.

  “A problem?” Wilson sounds annoyed, “How do I know if there’s a problem? You hired him.”

  Jones comes perilously close to whining. “We were a man short, Mr. Wilson.” He rubs his forehead to aid cogitation. “And anyway, he had all the right forms of ID. I’m sorry, Mr. Wilson. Does it really matter if he’s not Mexican?”

  “Hell yes, it matters!” The reptilian man positively vibrates in his expensive shoes. “A fake identity can get us into a lot of trouble, can’t it? What if he’s a crook hiding out? Or some sort of survivalist using my money to stockpile weapons—you don’t think that’s gonna get us into hot water with the Feds?! Or, hell, maybe even an international terrorist.”

  “Huh!” Jones looks back at Ajeno with new respect. The fat man now has a long tail of sliced onion hanging carelessly from between his swollen, sausage lips. He looks like a cat having swallowed a mouse. “You think?”

  Wilson lifts his chin belligerently, calling back toward the grill. “Hey, you there!”

  Ajeno slurps in the tail of sliced onion. “Who, me?”

  Wilson nods, crooking a finger to indicate that Ajeno should approach. “You Mexican?”

  The fat man, wiping his hands on a dishrag stuck in his belt, comes nearer; his eyes are big and staring. Then, as if repeating a bedtime story, he starts rattling off how his parents are Mexican, as is his whole family: “Oh, yeah, my brother—Alejandro—is Mexican. My sisters—Marisol, Agraciana, and Esmeralda—are Mexican. My cousins—Benito, Cezar, Paco, Lucia, Emilio, Manuel Jose, Jose Luis, Maria Elena, Rosa Maria, Jorge, and Javier—are Mexican.” He takes a deep breath. “And my grandparents—Eduardo and Yolanda on Mama’s side, and Rafael and Maria Luisa on Papa’s—are Mexican. But we Mexicans, here in this country,” he points to the ground, “are now, of course, Americans.” His eyes shine brightly as he thumps his chest. “I’m American. ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’ The Constitution. The IRS. The FBI. The—”

  Wilson’s eyes glaze over before, with an impatient shake, he throws his hands up in the air. “Enough!”

  “Okeydokey.” Ducking his head, Ajeno, frustrated, goes back to the grill. He had wanted to talk of his family more . . . much more. So he is now disappointed. Talking brings back childhood memories of living in the trailer park on the outskirts of Dayville. The park is so close to the edge of Broke Mule Canyon that one more foot to the north and the trailers, lining its periphery, would be airborne above two hundred feet of nothingness.

  Neighbors had considered his family middle class because their trailer sat within the middle ring of this park. They were neither pummeled by traffic noise nor threatened with dying in their sleep from sudden impact with the canyon floor. Only the barking of dogs, chained to various trailers, had disturbed the peace of La Vivienda Temporal Trailer Park.

  His clearest memory of the park is that of his eighteenth-birthday party, shared with his twin brother, Alejandro. The Garcias had scraped enough money together to rent the park’s party trailer. Preparations were then feverishly made for an elaborate party right on the edge of the canyon. Paper lanterns lit with tiny candles had given the dead trees that surrounded the designated party trailer a festive look. The dirt was swept for a dance floor, and dogs, protecting partygoers from the canyon snakes, had stood on the periphery, their feral eyes glinting in the light thrown by the two bare bulbs hung from tree branches.

  Ajeno remembers that night as being unusually clear. Stars twinkled above the canyon rim like diamonds on a greedy woman’s hand. Maria, his mama, even cooked all his favorite foods. But at midnight exactly, the mariachi band had abruptly stopped and the partygoers ceased, as if on cue, any laughter or dancing. They’d turned then, as one body, to stare at Ajeno; the only sound to be heard was his father’s hacking cough. Ajeno, feeling especially jolly, fully expected some magnificent cake to appear. Instead, his parents came to stand in front of him. Fernando, his father, dropped a garbage bag stuffed with the boy’s clothes at his feet.

  “Now, you must leave now,” Maria began. “It has been eighteen years to the day that someone made this terrible mistake that has ruined us.” She held out the family hamper, handmade with straw by her
own mother before Maria had left Mexico. Ajeno can see it, even now, stuffed with food. She was still speaking, “But now, praise God, no more. Take this and go.” Thunderstruck, he’d looked between her and Fernando, who would not look at him, even as Maria hesitated. “I wanted. . . .” she stopped.

  Ajeno, sensing her resolution softening, stepped forward, his grandmother’s hamper clutched to his chest. “Yes, Mama?”

  “It is hard to let go of something precious,” she said simply. “Something so full of memories, of hopes, of everything good in this family . . .”

  “Yes, Mama?”

  She shrugged with a quick nod. “But, fine, you may keep the hamper. Now, off with you before your cousin, Paco, signals the dogs.”

  “I don’t understand,” he wailed. “What did I do?”

  “What did you do? What did you do?!” Her hands, wrinkled like an old woman’s from eighteen years of washing acres of clothing and cooking Ajeno’s seven daily meals, flapped in the direction of the trailer. “We come to this country to build something. To buy a house somewhere safe. To save a little money so my husband would not have to work so hard. But you . . . ! You steal our money with every bite you chew. We must live in a tin can because of you!”

  “But Mama,” Ajeno’s beefy arm reached out to collar the neck of Alejandro, who was standing nearby, “you had us, no? We are your bambinos.”

  Maria reached out to grab the smaller boy from Ajeno’s grip. “No! I had him!” She pointed to a disinterested Alejandro, who was less than a fifth of Ajeno’s size. “Mi poor bebe. Look at him, he has no meat on his bones. His brain is dulled from starvation because you . . . you steal the food from his very lips!” She reared back as if to spit in Ajeno’s face. “You are not one of us. You are not a Garcia.”

  The large pale face had looked searchingly into the dark faces now shuttered from his gaze. “But you are my familia...”

  “The dogs, Paco, the dogs!”

  ***

  In a concrete annex next to the police station, The Weatherman gravely stashes his knitting bag beside a chair before standing. His gaze takes in the faces of those nearby as he points to a map of the city that’s unfolded on a cheap card table. “Here!”

  He motions to black squiggles showing how the town’s clearly defined by its geography. Hemmed in on the south by the gaping, near-bottomless hole of Broke Mule Canyon. To the west by Mount Inselberg, a blasted-away mountainside sticking up like a gawky teenager. And then, to the east, by a flat stretch of gumbo mud so porous that in rain showers, stray dogs have been seen to drown in less than sixty seconds.

  Dayville has only one real access point. That is the high suspension bridge to the north. A fragile webbing of concrete and steel, the bridge passes over Byhalia Falls—a spinning, sucking, spitting cataract of water released by a massive dam spanning two mountains above the town. The Falls’s outflow of water, comparatively speaking, makes Niagara look like a bathroom tap with a slow drip.

  A tattered billboard, long ago erected by the chamber of commerce, greets visitors to the town upon exiting the bridge. Colors bleached like driftwood, its paper peeling, the large print proclaims, Dayville—Civilization’s Future!

  “Here!” Repeating himself, Doe stabs the map with the pointy end of a knitting needle, “This is where we start—the corner of Tenth and Hoskins.”

  Beneath a hanging bare bulb, the room’s only illumination, one of The Weatherman’s federal agents enquires grimly, “We got solid intel about the area?”

  “You might say that.” His mouth open, Doe runs his tongue round his lips with a thoroughness that verges on obscene. “We’ve received multiple reports of an FRC-running op being conducted with this,” he lifts the map by the knitting needle, skewering it, “at its epicenter.”

  Flicking a glance at the multiple shoulder harnesses worn by his agents, he arches a campy eyebrow at them, both singly and as a group. “We have multiple targets on the ground, agents! All I’ll say ’bout that is: don’t leave extra ammo at home. No telling when you might need it for extermination purposes.” He gives them a slow wink. “But, for the benefit of any covert listening devices, I’m on the record as abhorring violence. Unless, of course, suspected terrorists are involved.”

  Smirking at his own wit, he holds up a hand as they turn as a group, heels clicking, to file from the room. “Hey . . . HEY! Where’s the damn fire?!” He waves a sheaf of envelopes at them. “Now, just slow down and make sure each of you takes a team packet for review. It contains Dayville’s crime stats; prospective informants; specific info on criminal leaders; meal vouchers at local restaurants; and, good news, your parking’s been validated!”

  ***

  Near the corner of Third and Hoskins, Ruiz pushes aside a textbook on astronomy. An hour before, he’d returned to Elite Sleep, one of Dayville’s many boarding houses for transient workers, flopping down among the dirty sheets of his bed; their grime is well matched to the gray of the walls, floor, ceiling, sheets, towels, bathroom tile, toilet water, and . . .

  “Bada boom, bada boom, bada boom, boom, boom!” rings his cell phone.

  “Hola,” he answers gravely. “Yes, I will meet you then. Do not be late.” Eyes still fixed on the textbook discussing quasars, he drops back onto the sheets.

  The Elite Sleep is perfect for his cover as a transient employee of a greasy spoon. Do not attract attention, the cartel told him. “You will be one Latino among many,” they told him. “Act like everyone else, live like everyone else, shit like everyone else, and you will get a big bonus.”

  Ruiz knows his target by its code name: REFLECT. He’s here in the factory town of Dayville to acquire as many FRCs as possible from its many global clothing manufacturers. FRCs, or fabric reflectivity codes, are resonances digitally embedded in clothing and accessories worn by law enforcement agencies. FRCs, picked up by radars or thermo-imaging devices, prevent friendly-fire incidents by identifying authorized personnel. Obviously, in a firefight situation, those targets not reflecting an FRC would be automatically neutralized by military drones, army snipers, or police SWAT teams.

  Acquiring the FRCs utilizes a variety of Ruiz’s skills—everything, so far, from simple physical coercion, blackmail, kidnapping, and murder to, last week, promising one FRC technician that his wife’s lover would be stewed alive in an industrial vat of prune juice.

  “Get it done” was his mandate from the cartel, and he prides himself on his efficiency. Not that he’s acted without limits. Ruiz imposes his own strict standards to an operation. No children or pets harmed, and no woman killed, unless she’s an active agent of an opposing cartel.

  Global street prices on FRCs keep climbing as police forces in Europe, Asia, Russia, and the western hemisphere are forced to bump up countertactics to deadlier military standards. But with stolen FRCs, using handheld radar guns, criminal gangs can both identify plain-clothes law enforcement and manufacture their own FRC-embedded clothing to jam the opponent’s surveillance.

  Ruiz, his eyes now dully fixed on the ceiling, contemplates his day. It went much as expected. Except there had been something that hadn’t seemed to fit. . . . Ah, yes, the fat cook. A frown furrows his brow. The fat cook. Who is he, really? Ruiz wonders. All he knows for sure, based on what he’s seen so far, is that Ajeno Garcia isn’t Mexican.

  ***

  Coincidently, this view has long been shared by one Maria Garcia, who, during Ajeno’s childhood, had sat patiently beside at least a dozen desks belonging to at least a dozen social workers. To each, she’d tried explaining how the big, pink baby that was growing into a big, pink boy was not her biological child.

  “But,” chorused the social workers, waving about a birth certificate, “it says right here that he’s the twin brother of the baby you claim as your own! Did you have an ultrasound that showed just one baby?”

  “No, we could not afford an ultrasound,” explained Maria. “But I should know, should I not, whether I gave birth to one babe or two?”


  A dozen pairs of raised eyebrows showed doubt. “But if you did not give birth to two babies, then the certificate would reflect that. If the form says you had two babies, then you had two babies.” A dozen torsos leaned in confidentially. “Motherhood can have strange effects on the brain. Perhaps you’d like to see our postpartum therapy coordinator?”

  Maria would fumble in her bag. Retrieving a photograph—different each time as the boys aged—she slapped it down on multiple desks. “Here, look for yourself. Do these children look of one blood?”

  Twelve singers assumed operatic tonal pitch. “Oh, well, who are we to explain DNA?” They’d eye the photos dismissively. “Possibly both you and your husband carry recessive genes for obesity and a pale complexion. That would explain everything now, wouldn’t it?”

  Finally, Maria and Fernando found themselves sitting in front of the desk belonging to the supervisor of children’s services. Fernando, clearing his throat nervously, managed to get out, “We wish to give up custody of our child—”

  “No!” Maria, her hands clutched in her lap, half-raised them as if in supplication. “No, we wish to give up custody of a child. You understand, yes?”

  ***

  “I just don’t understand,” whispers Crystal to herself.

  She is sitting, late this night, on the front steps of the Eden Palace. She really should be upstairs, asleep. But something has upset her. She wants—no, needs to talk, but she has few women friends at the Eden Palace. There’s Beth Phillips, but she is undoubtedly asleep. Then there’s Rosie Newman, who lives on the other side of Beth’s unit. She’s not only the same age as Crystal, but also dated Ajeno before he met and wooed Crystal. Ajeno had a bit of a reputation in those days, attracting young ladies to lease units around his one-bedroom apartment like moths to a corpulent flame.

  He also had a fling with the young woman who lives one more unit down the mildewed hall from Rosie. A Chinese-American girl whose parents immigrated to the States in the eighties, Smu Chen is the bully of the floor. Rumor has it she’s the one who broke the ice machine while wielding a baseball bat.