Luis Alberto Urrea - The House of Broken Angels

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright 2018 by Luis Alberto Urrea
Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover illustration by Alsou Shakurova / Shutterstock
Author photograph by Joe Mazza, Brave Lux
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First Edition: March 2018

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ISBN 978-0-316-51625-9

E3-20180220-PC-DA

Jim Harrison told me to write this book.

Cinderella told me first.

You were both right.

This is for her.

* * *

My niece Emilia Urrea was a shining example through times that inspired events in this novel.

And for Chayo, who danced at the funeral.

* * *

Juan Francisco and the Urrea family showed me how this story was possible.

B ig Angel was late to his own mothers funeral.

He tossed in his bed, the sheets catching his feet in a tangle. Sweat tickled his sides as he realized what was happening. The sun was upit was bright through his eyelids. The burning pink world. Everybody else would be there before him. No. Not this. Not today. He struggled to rise.

Mexicans dont make these kinds of mistakes, he told himself.

Every morning since his diagnosis, he had the same thoughts. They were his alarm clock. How could a man out of time repair all that was broken? And on this morning, as he was awakening to these worries, cursed by the light, cursed in every way by time, betrayed by his exhausted body while his mind raged, he was startled to find his fathers ghost sitting beside him on the bed.

The old man was smoking one of his Pall Malls. Thats a lot of weight to carry around, his father said. Time to wake up and let it go.

He was speaking English. His accent had gotten smoother, though he still pronounced weight as gweitt.

Es mierda.

The old man became smoke and rose in curls to vanish against the ceiling. Watch your language, Big Angel said.

He blinked his eyes. He was the familys human clock. If he was still asleep, they were all still asleep. They could sleep till noon. His son could sleep till three. Big Angel was too weak to leap up and start shouting. He poked his wife in the back until she started, looked over her shoulder at him, and sat up.

Were late, Flaca, he said.

No! she cried. Ay Dios.

S, he said, deeply satisfied somehow to be the one to lay down a rebuke.

She sprang from the bed and raised the alarm. Their daughter, Minnie, was asleep on the living room couch, visiting for the night so shed be on time. His wife shouted, and his daughter crashed into the coffee table. Ma, she complained. Ma!

He put his fists to his eyes.

The women came into the room without a word and levitated him out of bed, then helped him to the bathroom to brush his teeth. His wife took a comb to his bristly, stand-up hair. He had to sit to pee. They looked away. They wrestled him into slacks and a white shirt and planted him on the edge of the bed.

I am going to miss Mams funeral, he told the universe. I never cry, he announced, his eyes bright with hard light.

They ignored him.

Daddys always watching everything, his daughter said.

Es tremendo, her mother replied.

No measure of psychic strain could budge the world or his body into faster motion. His family? Why should today be any different? Chaos. In his house, they were suddenly all awake and moving around like crashing doves in a cage. Raucous flutter and no progress. Time, time, time. Like bars across the door.

He was never late. Until now. He, who endlessly combated his familys reliance on Mexican time. They drove him crazy. If a dinner gathering was announced for six oclock, he could be sure it wouldnt start until nine. Theyd walk in as if they were early. Or worse, theyd say What? as if he were the one with a problem. You know youre Mexican when lunch doesnt show up till ten at night.

Qu cabrn. The morning had crept downhill like brown sludge. Muffled. Yet sounds were violently silver in his ears, all reverberations. Noise shocked him. His bones wailed deep in the midnight of his flesh, as white and hot as lightning.

Please, he prayed.

Daddy, his daughter said, tuck your shirt in.

It was loose in the backit kept coming out of his trousers. But his arms couldnt reach it. He sat on the bed glaring.

My arms dont work, he said. They used to work. Now they dont work. You do it.

She was trying to get into the bathroom to spray her hair. Her mother had laid waste in there, scattering brushes and girdles and makeup everywhere. Combs lay across the counter like fallen leaves from a plastic tree. Minnie was already sick of this whole funeral thing. She was almost forty, and her parents made her feel sixteen.

Yes, Father, she said.

Was that a tone? Did she have a tone just then? Big Angel glanced at the clock. His enemy.

Mother, you were not supposed to die. Not now. Its hard enough already, you know. But she wasnt answering. Just like her, he thought. The silent treatment. She had never forgiven him for her suspicions about his past, about his part in the fire. And the death. He wasnt telling anyone, ever.

Yes, I did it, he thought. I heard his skull crack. He turned his face, lest anyone discover his guilt. I knew exactly what I was doing. I was happy to do it.

His mind kept playing a cartoon of a traffic jam made entirely of coffins. Really? Not funny, God. Hed show them allhed be early for his own pinche funeral.

Vmonos, he shouted.

There was a time he could make the walls crack with his voice.

Across the bedroom, above his mirror, hung a crooked gallery of pictures of his ancestors. Grandfather Don Segundo, in a vast Mexican revolutionary sombrero: I feared you. Behind him in the picture, Grandmother, faded brown. To Segundos right, Big Angels mom and dad. Father Antonio: I mourn you. Mam Amrica: I bury you.

His daughter stopped trying to get past her mom and bent to Big Angels shirttail to take care of him.

Dont touch my nalgas, he said.

I know, right? she said. Grabbing my daddys stringy butt. Too exciting.