The Son of Every Man

Chapter 1.5

In just three days' time, Gabe had endured a jarring interaction with a highway patrolman, the sobering meeting that ensued in the trailer with Eddie and Otero, and now Miguel, haphazardly bearing his soul after a year of silence. Perhaps he shouldn't have been so surprised by it all, given the historical tendency of distressing events in his life to cluster.

The night his father died, for example, had followed the worst argument between his parents he had ever witnessed. As Gabe became acquainted with the family business, he was made aware of his mother's contempt for it, so silent that it was at times deafening. And occasionally, she was not silent. "You are like a black hole," she said to her husband with a sober and sharp tongue one night in the kitchen. "You draw everyone who is close to you closer still, into this evil industry. You capitalize on the destructive vices of so many strangers. And you also put yourself and those close to you in danger."

They probably had thought Gabe was out of earshot, behind the closed door of his bedroom, but instead he had been reading on the living room floor.

"Let it go," his father shot back. "That guy was way upstream, far from us. Besides, he got himself killed. He was mixed up in his own problems. He made his own enemies. I have none."

"Otero fed you that. They were after what he carried."

"Otero fed me nothing. I know the story myself, just like I knew the man. He brought it on himself, Bonnie. He got mixed up in some other stuff that has nothing to do with us. They took the goods he was carrying as an afterthought. They didn't even know what the hell it was until they opened the goddamned packages."

"Otero convinced you. You believe everything he tells you...but you will never see it that way, will you? And now our son is out there, alone at night, carrying all of that..."

"He is safe, Bonnie. He is protected. I promise you."

"He is your own son, Marco. Are you even listening to yourself speak? I was silent when you took Eddie. I didn't know the risks then. Eddie was twenty-two, Marco, remember? He was just a kid. And now, it's my baby, my Gabriel...and at seventeen..."

"The boy is old enough, and it's about time he goes to work."

"He is still a child." Her voice broke as she said the words.

Gabe had turned his head so that his ear was pressed against the wall separating him from the kitchen. The fight escalated from there. At its dramatic peak, Gabe's mother climbed onto the countertop, pulled a wood-framed clock from the wall and smashed it against the linoleum floor. A shard of glass ricocheted through the doorway and fell to rest on the rug, next to his knee.

Maybe something within his mother had, by that point, already begun to seize. Maybe a broader part of her consciousness had been swept up early into the building wave of tragedy that would soon crash over her, even as Marco stood before her then, steaming with frustration, a seeming vision of health. Looking back, it did not seem impossible to Gabe that the universe could operate in this way.

Late that night, the call came through. She was fully trampled then, the irony of the extraneous nature of his death completely lost on her. She lay prostrate at the foot of her white bedroom vanity, her wails bearing a blackened sear as the event she had long-feared finally came to pass.

On the day of the funeral, Eddie approached Gabe's mother as if they knew each other well, though to Gabe's knowledge they did not. He offered his condolences. Gabe stood close by as Eddie said something to her in Vietnamese, but he spoke quietly and the subject was nuanced, so Gabe had not comprehended it. After that day, his mother would fall silent over the idea of his entering the trade, and if she ever did caution him, it took the form of familiar, generic warnings about life's dangers—the warnings of any parent. Gabe would never find out what Eddie had said to his mother; maybe it was something extraordinary, or perhaps just a few healing words lifted from the cooling manger of her native tongue.