Evan Smoak - Orphan X aka The Nowhere Man – is back at break-neck speed in a thrilling new adventure from Gregg Hurwitz.
1. A World That Contained Men Like Him
Some men speak of angels and devils.
Some talk about their emotions or unbidden urges.
Aragón Urrea knew it as a battle between two parts of
himself in the dead center of his soul.
Standing now at the edge of the spit-polished dance floor
watching his daughter pinball between clusters of friends in
her burnt-orange quinceañera dress, he understood that he
could not be as bad as his reputation suggested because she
came from him. Anjelina’s hair fell across one eye. Her skin,
smooth as satin. Tejano cheeks like her mother’s, broad and
defined. The impossible sweetness of her gaze.
A pair of rhinestone-studded high heels swung at her side,
looped around her index finger, her head swaying to the
band’s cover of the Stones. Wild, wild horses couldn’t drag me
awaaay. He’d offered Mick Jagger ten million dollars to fly
down here to no-fuck-where South Texas and sing it himself,
but Mick Jagger didn’t need ten million dollars or the reputational
damage.
Aragón watched his girl glide across the maple hardwood,
her hips and shoulders moving separately and yet in sync, an
orbit of muscle and grace. As if music was a language that
spoke through her body when she danced.
He turned his gaze to the boys and men watching her.
As they sensed his stare, they quickly moved their focus
elsewhere.
Anjelina’s purity – her inner light – brought a familiar ache
to his chest. That the world did not deserve her. That it would
hurt her as it was designed to hurt all beautiful young women.
And that even if he summoned the whole of the power and
menace at his disposal to preserve her innocence, he would
eventually fail, because innocence was destined for spoiling.
The one perfect thing he’d ever had a hand in creating,
and now he was haunted by her very existence – her vulnerability
in a world that contained men like him. The curse of
every father who loved beyond logic, beyond reason.
Tonight was her eighteenth birthday. And yet she’d recut
and altered her quinceañera dress, not wanting to waste money
on something new, on something that would put her even
more fully in the spotlight. She didn’t want to appear garish
in front of the other girls from Eden, this expanse of unincorporated
land upstream from Brownsville on the north bank of the yellow-
brown sludge of the Rio Grande.
Aragón had refrigerator-size blocks of shrink-wrapped
cash stacked in various structures around his compound, so
many that he had to pay teams of men to rotate them so they
wouldn’t rot or wind up chewed to a pulp by rats. And yet
Anjelina preferred to alter a three-year-old gown so as not to
show anyone up, even wearing a shawl draped over her shoulders
and hanging down her front side to dress down further.
He’d offered her Mexico City, New York, or Paris for the
venue, and she’d chosen the community center right here at
home. Tissue-paper decorations and a buffet served up by
Arnulfo and Hortensia, the rickety couple who owned the
local taquería and needed the business.
Aragón sat at the most prominent table with his aunt,
who’d been both mother and father to him since poverty had
killed his parents shortly after his birth in a Hidalgo County
regional hospital – Mamá from an undiagnosed bladder infection,
Papá from a knife in the kidney when he’d tried to stop
a fight behind a Whataburger in Corpus Christi.
The band was in inadvertent uniform – alligator-belly
boots, sapphire cowboy shirts, bedazzled vests, true-blue
jeans and, of course, giant oval belt buckles featuring buckin’
broncos or Indian-chief heads or bullshit family crests
cranked out at the mall gift shop in McAllen.
With the faintest flare of a hand, Aragón conveyed his
wishes across the dance floor. At the tiny movement, the
lead singer stopped in mid-chorus, the music severed with
guillotine finality. The singer mopped his forehead with a
hanky, nodded to his compatriots, and the band struck up a
Norteño number. The notes of the wheezing accordion
nourished Aragón’s very genes.
At the musical detour, Anjelina stopped dancing with her
friends to set her arms akimbo and frown at her father with
mock frustration. Then she broke into that life-affirming
smile, impossibly symmetrical, impossibly wide, the smile of
her mother, Belicia, who should be here at Aragón’s side
rather than languishing in her bedroom.
Anjelina flipped her high heels aside, and the men clapped
and cheered and the women trilled and she was twirling and
gliding, her lush brown curls washing across her eyes, gold
locket bouncing just beneath her sparkle-dusted collarbones.
A number of boys surrounded her and clapped, but none
dared ask her to dance, not with Aragón under the same roof
overseeing the festivities with stern paternalism and an aquiline
profile worthy of a coin. And certainly not with his men
stationed around the perimeter, hands crossed at their belt
buckles, jackets bulging at the hips. The young men held
their ground respectfully, waiting in hope for her to choose
her partner for the waltz.
Slumped bonelessly in a chair at the periphery, the Esposito
boy watched from beneath his mother’s wing. Twelve
years old with ankle-foot orthotics bowing out his sneakers
on either side. His arms, wrapped in elbow-prophylactic
braces, were splayed wide as if anticipating a hug. Last year
Aragón had had him flown to the Cerebral Palsy Clinic at
Cook Children’s in Fort Worth so he could be neuroimaged
and fitted with carbon-fiber prosthetics.
Anjelina slowed, calves fluttering in place, hips swaying,
her movements tasteful if not chaste. Her focus swiveled to
take in her options. The young men encircling her were peacocking,
showing off their best moves, their best faces, their
eyes shiny and eager.
“There was heartbreak in every rite of passage, in every living moment if careful attention were paid.”
But she looked right through them all to Nico Esposito.
Then she drifted to the boy’s table, the crowd parting. When
she crouched in front of him, his distorted face lit up with
joy. She took his hands and helped him to his feet.
Walking backward gingerly, she encouraged him onto the
dance floor. He waddled nervously on his orthotics. She was
six years older and a head taller, and yet Nico found a solidity
to his ruined spine, rising to the moment because her attention
demanded it. The braces held his arms aloft, a natural
strong frame for the box step, the Velcro straps rasping
against Anjelina’s dress until she adjusted for even that.
She held him firmly to aid his balance, creating the illusion
that he was leading, and all of a sudden he was moving in her
arms and she in his and he was beaming, freed for the
moment from the prison of his body. The other young men
overcame their envy and clapped along, whooping and patting
Nico on the back as Anjelina swept him within the
throng of bodies. He was sweating, a sheen across his face,
and yet his sloppy grin was unencumbered. They moved
faster, faster, courting disaster right through the crescendo,
and yet impossibly they finished the waltz, eliciting a hailstorm
of cheers.
Leading Nico back to his mother, Anjelina eased him
down into his chair and crouched before him. Even across
the dance floor, Aragón could read her lips: Thank you for the
dance, guapo.
Nico’s dark eyes glowed, his face flushed from the miracle
he’d just played a part in.
Aragón realized that his own cheeks were wet. And yet
he was unashamed. Like them all, he was blessed to breathe
the same air as his daughter, to admire her and know that
some part of her was his and some part of him hers.
La Tía reached across the table and took Aragón’s hand.
Her palm was dry, the skin papery. Arthritis gnarled her
knuckles, but still she wore big turquoise rings on all her fingers.
Over prominent wrinkles she’d applied foundation,
blush, eye shadow, lipstick. Neither age nor ailment could
dampen the spirit of a Mexican matriarch.
‘My boy,’ she said. ‘Now you give your toast. Speak to your
daughter.’
Aragón stepped forward, and the hundred-plus bodies in
the community center took note. The boys in their cheap
church clothes and the men in their polyester two-tone
suits and the women flashing shawls of primary colors. All that
beautiful brown skin and the scent of cologne in the air and
everyone hanging on his next movement.
Facing his daughter across the dance floor, Aragón held
out a hand, and his body man, Eduardo Gómez, materialized
out of thin air to place a flute of Cristal in his palm.
Aragón began his toast. ‘Today you turn eighteen.’ He
paused, caught off guard by the emotion graveling his deep
voice. ‘You become an adult in the eyes of the law. For me
and your mama – who wishes with all her heart that she could
be here – this is wondrous. And yet also bittersweet.’
‘I’m sorry, Papá.’ Anjelina’s eyes were moist, her slender
fingers at her gold locket.
‘You apologize too much,’ he said. ‘You must unlearn this
now to be a woman.’ He turned to the crowd, catching a
glimpse of himself in the big window’s reflection. Broad
shoulders, undiminished by age. Big, bold features. Ugly-handsome
and virile, like Carlos Fuentes or Charles Bronson.
‘Our children grow up and our hearts hurt for it, but they
must grow up.’ He swung the flute back toward his daughter,
the perfumed liquid catching the light, fizzing and straw-colored.
‘They tell us it goes by so swiftly. Blink and they’re
grown. But the thing is . . .’
He felt the gravel gathering in his voice and paused once
more to compose himself.
‘It didn’t go by fast for me. I didn’t miss a single moment.
Not when you were one breath old and I held you to my
chest. Those first steps on the front lawn of the church, how
you wobbled and fell and got back up again. Three years old
in panties and sandals and not a stitch more, clanging pots
and pans on the floor of the kitchen. Your first tooth falling
out. I remember listening at the door of your piano lesson
while you tortured yourself over the fingering for “Here
Comes the Sun.” Picking you up from cross-country practice
when you were all braces and a messy ponytail and that
awful music you’d sing into your deodorant stick on the
drive – who was it?’
Anjelina was hugging herself around her stomach, crying
and smiling. ‘Ed Sheeran.’
‘Yes. Yes. Sheeran. And that bad haircut you got before
your confirmation. Your first dance. That time you crashed
your car–’ He crossed himself. ‘Our trip to Zihuatanejo during
Semana Santa and the fight we had over that string bikini–’
‘It wasn’t a string bikini, Papá!’
‘You’re right. More like dental floss.’
Laughter washed through the room.
‘Feeding you ice chips when your wisdom teeth came out.
How you cried yourself to sleep the night we had to put Lulu
down. And now your eighteenth–’ He stopped, his eyes
moistening. Cleared his throat. And again. The room waited
for him. He lifted his gaze to her once more. ‘I didn’t miss a
second of you.’
Heat in his chest. His throat. There was heartbreak in
every rite of passage, in every living moment if careful attention
were paid. Not a shattering or crumbling of the heart
but a cracking open to accommodate more. More feeling,
more understanding, more room for the cruelty of time
without which there could be no beauty, no meaning. It was
so much greater than anything he could convey here amid
the cheap birthday decorations and fake wood paneling and
the scent of cilantro and table wine. She had saved him. She
had breathed life into him. She had civilized him, turned him
into a human.
Extracted from Dark Horse by Gregg Hurwitz, out now.
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