The Son of Every Man

Chapter 1.2

Sometimes I can feel all seven years, can remember the events separating each summer as it has come and gone since then, but most of the time I cannot. A phrase came to me as I began taking inventory, scraping at the surface, turning completely away at times: mental exhumation. I even wrote it down. As no single phrase can, it does not cover all of the feelings I associate with the process, but so far, it comes closest to doing so.

I asked them many times if they were ready. They kept telling me enough time had passed for them to reflect in peace. They offered up sad looks and shrugs and said it was completely up to me. That's how I came to know I was the one holding things up, not them. Once I realized it, I gave myself a good hard slap across the face, after which the process set itself in motion, became a force all its own, one I could not stop.

It is an endless delight to ask them about their lives, but especially Gabe, because his immediate reaction to my questioning is reward enough—the way his backstairs smile appears from nowhere, how he shifts his eyes around the room and pretends like he is going to keep something from me, which never ends up being the case. Gabe is incredibly trustful given what he has endured, and for all of the shyness he projects, he is not afraid to share his experiences with me. I am thankful for that.

His full name is Gabriel Marcos Villanueva. Back then, he was just eighteen. He lived with his mother in a southern borough of Las Sombras, overlooking the markets, not far from the ocean. His building was old and concrete crumbled at the edges of the balconies. A wall of white stone towers nearer the coastline sparkled at night in dots of yellow and white, and a thin strip of water peeked through an unlikely gap between them. On hot nights when he got home from work, he would enter his mother's room, remove a layer of blanket and wipe her face with a damp rag, then sleep above the street on nothing but an unfurled foam scroll. In order to fall asleep, he would focus on that naked scrap of ocean and bring himself to it. He says it cooled him down. In the morning, the traffic and commerce spooled up four floors below, revving, bleating, reeking of exhaust.

His runs took place in the late evening. They went like this: First he would go underground and take the Emerald Line downtown in time to catch the last Orange Line east, toward the desert. His car waited at the end of the line in a park-and-ride, an endless gravel sea, where it was (in his words) fucked up with dust.

He would drive ten more miles east out of the city on a narrow, winding highway and then turn north onto an unmarked, unpaved road, the guts of his car tilling the earth as he steered through dried-out ruts. Five miles in, the checkpoint: private property. He was waved through by a man whose face he couldn't ever get a good look at, wheels still rolling; stars sprang up over a natural granite monument to the left. The road dipped and wound through brush for another mile before circling down into an encampment no bigger than a baseball diamond, half-buried under a lonely ring of sycamore trees.

There were cicadas here the size of your fist, he tells me, and loud enough to drown out the smaller sounds of the night. He liked to shut off his lights first and then the car, easing to a stop in the crunching gravel between two mobile homes. A third lay straight ahead, beyond a sharp right curve in the lane. He would pull the trunk release by his left foot and wait.

His father once worked in the trade. In a world such as Gabe's, it was common to find oneself grabbing hold of a passed torch. But Gabe retrieved his from the ground, where it had fallen and lay still next to his father's unmarked body. (Marco Villanueva was found dead on a Tuesday evening in May of 1998, slumped over his desk in the cramped encampment office, victim to a massive stroke.)

Early in the process, I suggested we start with his father's death, but Gabe shook his head and told me, "That's too early. It's not a good place to start."