What does your daddy do for work? In those days, it was a question children were used to hearing. He was asked many times—all of us were. But of course for Gabe, answering truthfully wasn't an option, so he was taught to lie.
"Tell them I'm a trapeze artist," his father instructed him when he was in the first grade. "You know what that is?"
Gabe nodded, his eyes big, brown and wondering.
"Tell them I can't talk to your class right now because I'm traveling with the circus, in Europe. You know where that is?"
Gabe shook his head.
"But you can tell them, right?"
"Yes, but what is your real job?"
"I just told you," he said, a strange grin spreading across his face. "I am a trapeze artist."
Gabe delivered the lie whenever he was prompted by teachers, doctors, other children—anyone who wanted to know. He lied without drama, and without fail. Naturally, his childhood peers took great interest in this revelation and pressed him for details. He had little trouble shrugging them off. Adults, upon hearing his answer, tended to leave him alone.
Even when he was very young, he knew his father went to the desert to work. As he got older, he came to understand a little about what Marco did there, managing people and bookkeeping and making deliveries. But there was so much his parents didn't say, wouldn't say, and with no siblings to confer with, he was left to wonder on his own. Gabe couldn't remember when exactly it happened, but the truth came flooding into his psyche during his early teens: The fact that he couldn't know, that his parents wished for him not to ask, was totally abnormal, incredibly bizarre. He knew then that this thing his father did to house them in a decent building (indeed, to place grilled beef atop rice noodles in the fancy variant of ceramic bowls that didn't chip) was surely illegal.
Privately, he fought to overcome the pain and shock this brought to his life. He would later recall the ensuing years as dark and quiet ones. There was nothing truly clean in his world, nothing untouched by the hands of evil, so his eyes instead fell to a more palatable realm: a hundred thousand pages of books and magazines and occasionally literary journals—whatever he could get his hands on. Meanwhile, his grades flatlined, an issue over which his parents showed little concern.
And then, one day when he was almost seventeen, he joined his father for a walk along the beach. They went very early in the day, beating the rush of tourists, stepping out onto a long and narrow pier. Uniform purple and red flags ran its length, flanking them on both sides, flapping urgently in the breeze. When they reached the end, his father folded his arms on the rail and stared out at the open water. Gabe studied him for a second before doing the same.
His father's fist thudded repeatedly against the rail before he spoke. "You read many, many books, my son. Never stop that habit. It will give you tools others do not have. I recognize some of the titles. I know the stories contained within them. Surely by now they have taught you things about the way the world really works."
"Yes."
"Surely you know that the vocations of many in this great city roam outside the bounds of the law."
"I know that."
"Gabriel, my son, I need you to tell me now. Do you know where the money in this family comes from?"
Gabe's suspicion over the nature of his father's work had crystalized over course of his sixteenth year. It took on a recognizable form now, one that he could reach out and (nearly) grab onto at will. He turned to his father with a confidence that had mysteriously mounted inside him as he approached his late-teens and said, "I don't want you to make me say it. I'd rather you were the one to say it."
His father drew in a long breath. "I oversee the manufacture, trade and sale of Sanidoxylone powder."
"Okay."
"Say the name," Marco told him. "The street name, Gabriel. If you cannot say it, you cannot carry it."
Gabe's response squirmed its way through a small, determined opening in his throat. "Snow dox."
He would later look back and wonder why it hit him so hard. After all, he knew the answer that had been coming. But it didn't matter how sure he had been. The words his father, his own lips, now uttered were simply too sharp around the edges, too cutting—especially Marco's initial long-form enunciation, clinical and pure: Sanidoxylone. Gabe began to bleed out. The oiled planks of the pier, dissolving in his blood, dropped from beneath his feet and he hung there, still gushing, suspended in the humid sea air next to his father, the drug lord.
"Gabe."
"Yes?" A large brown gull had landed at the other end of the rail and now stood watching him.
"It's clear by now that traditional school is not the right path for you. Soon enough you'll need to begin pulling your weight another way. There are few places that can afford you opportunities that I can offer."
Though Gabe wouldn't officially begin work for another several months, his life was changed in that moment, diverted down a path leading to that new, strange, limitless existence. He said nothing in response to his father's proposal that would have indicated his choice. And yet, as breaker waves crashed against the lodgepole supports of the pier, they both knew what it was.
;-;
Gabe arrived half an hour early at the encampment Monday night, as he had been instructed. A rail-thin man they all called Whitey came to his window immediately after he shut off the car. The smell of stale cigarettes drifted through.
"What's going on? The load's not ready for you yet."
"Nothing. Boss Man wants me here early tonight."
"Got a meeting with Boss Man, huh?" Whitey looked nervous, but that was an air he always carried. "Is he gonna get you a new car or what?"
"I think so. Eventually."
"Can't happen too soon if you ask me. This one's a piece. It's like a moving target."
A squat man with a dark goatee came around the rear of the car, lighting a cigarette. His name was Dan. The cigarette bobbed on his lips as he spoke. "Evening Gabe. You're here early."
Gabe shrugged. He wasn't about to entertain conversation. Camp workers were not to mingle, and as such, the private lives of these men remained a mystery. But as for Boss Man, that was a different story. Gabe knew a number of things about Eddie Nguyen. His father had taken Eddie under his wing when he was still young, trained him, then later worked alongside him as a partner. Eddie had fled Vietnam in his childhood—that was something else Gabe knew about him. He was more than six feet tall and his wife was a white woman named Lydia. Together they had four young children. His skin was quite dark. Eddie had never been short with Gabe, although he had been so with the other workers on the encampment many times. Perhaps it was because Gabe's mother also came from Vietnam, or to honor the memory of Gabe's father.
The front door of the main trailer squeaked open and Eddie's unmistakeable growl issued through the night. "Fuck off, you two. It's not time yet and you both know it."
The two were constantly pushing Eddie's buttons, a dynamic Gabe never understood. They knew the rules. Ultimately, Eddie would put them in their place. Any shirking of commands was a waste of time and energy.
Eddie came over and they instinctively stepped away. "Please come with me, Gabe. Otero's here, too. He wants to be in on the discussion tonight. You good with that?"
"Yes, sir." The thought of Gabe objecting to Otero's presence was laughable. Even Gabe's father had answered to the man at times.
James Otero's grandfather was one of three founders of the Desert Stream, which had flowed westward out of the barren heat of Arizona for decades. Every single package Gabe delivered was sourced from this endless flow, and he had adopted an almost spiritual reverence for its workings—what little he knew of them, anyway. Theirs was the final encampment along a series of several, and the only one among them that did not manufacture. From what Gabe had picked up, the Headwaters camp lay somewhere across the state line, off the Oatman-Topock Highway, east of Needles. Eddie said it was the most desolate place you've ever seen in your whole life. The Headwaters camp received nothing. Instead they ran the humble beginnings of manufacture, sending out a small package of goods once a week. The next camp fielded the shipment, manufactured their own, then sent a larger combined package down the line. It went on like that all the way across California. By the time it reached Gabe's camp, known as the Delta, there was enough to fill the trunk of a small sedan, five times a week.
Gabe followed Eddie across the dry lawn as a hot breeze slipped between the branches of the sycamore trees. Eddie's massive shoulders rolled; his arms bulked, swinging at his sides. His back muscles delineated themselves through his t-shirt, lit by the dim floodlights in the yard. The small porch shrugged under them as they entered.
A swamp cooler rattled away in the office, keeping the air in the main room cool and thick. Otero was seated at one end of a long white couch, from which he greeted Gabe. Though he was white and of Spanish descent, his appearance reminded Gabe of his father—it had since he first met the man in the early days of his training. They were both short, stocky and strong-looking men. More significantly, each of them commanded a larger-than-life presence. While Eddie's huge stature afforded him the same, these two men, Otero and Gabe's dead father Marco, relied instead on absolute social confidence, charm, and the ability to talk down even as they gazed up.
"Gabe, how is your mother?" Otero motioned for him to sit in an armchair to his right.
"My mother is okay, sir."
Eddie sat down next to Otero, dwarfing the man.
"Eddie tells me you had an incident on the highway last night."
Don't answer any questions you weren't asked, he told himself. "That's right, sir."
"And that the officer saw what you were carrying."
"He did, sir."
"And he let you go?"
"Yessir."
Otero's expression remained neutral. He looked back at Eddie. "One of ours?"
"I'm sure of it," said Eddie. "Why else...?" He let his words hang in the air.
Clearly these two men knew something Gabe didn't. Their faces registered no confusion, no worry.
"Gabe," said Otero, "I'll give it to you straight: Some of the officers out there are on our side. Stick to your route and most of them will be. Can your describe the officer for me?"
"He was pretty young. I don't think he was older than twenty-five or so. He was—well, I guess you could describe him as a handsome guy."
"Was he white?"
"Yessir."
Otero turned back to Eddie. "Figure it was a new guy. Probably saw the one headlight and pulled him over by accident, then had to double back once he saw all the product in the trunk. Bet it scared the shit out of him." At this, Otero unleashed a bellowing laugh.
Eddie cracked a smile. "Gabe," he said, "obviously this doesn't mean all cops are a safe bet. There are many others in the city who are absolutely not our friends. Your route is designed to keep you in the clear, but you may never assume that to be the case."
"Of course."
Otero leaned in. "Gabe, it's important that you maintain vigilance. We demand it. You can't trust anyone, understand? That remains the most important lesson."
"Understood, sir."
Otero sat back, pressed his hands together. "I think we can move on from this incident with confidence. Put it behind us. What do you think, Eddie?"
"I agree," said Eddie.
Gabe looked back and forth between the faces of his boss and his boss's boss. He was bathed in relief as he realized neither man suspected a thing. A new truth had been settled upon. It was over.
;-;