The Boys (6 page)

He thought about Cindy again. Maybe he was falling in love; he really wanted to see her again. And it wasn't even springtime. He had met three fuckable chicks in just one day: Cindy, the widow—with the morbid appeal of that black dress against her milky skin—and that little whore with the ringlets. She wouldn't last long where she was. He'd have to hurry if he wanted a taste of her. Have her come up into the cab, sit her down on top of him, and ask her to glance up at the ceiling while he was screwing her. Why? she would ask. What's there?

“You're giving me the truck but not the shotgun?” Miqui had complained to his father.

“It was a present from my mother. It was my grandfather's.”

“That was so you could defend us. You don't have to do that anymore.”

But he didn't really know what his great-grandfather was doing with a shotgun, or why it had been in his father's room for so many years. He only knew about its existence after his mother died. Every evening, after locking the truck in the lumber warehouse, his father picked him up at his Aunt Marta's house. Aunt Marta would get Miqui from school at
five and give him a snack. His father arrived later and walked him home down streets that smelled of fried food, carrying a basket filled with the dinner his aunt had prepared for them.

One night, his father was late. His aunt sat by the phone, but his father didn't call. He ate dinner with her. Later, on the way home, his father's hand was trembling and sweaty, and when they arrived he asked him to wait in the dining room instead of going to bed. He came out of his bedroom with the wooden case. It was the first time Miqui saw it. His father placed it on the table and had the shotgun assembled in five seconds—it would take him five minutes now, if he could do it at all.

“When you're scared,” he said, “remember this.”

It was he who had been scared that night, more than his father. He was a twelve-year-old boy, and he liked the world better without shotguns. A decade and a half later, when, after the accident, his father gave him the truck, Miqui asked him for the shotgun too. The world was better but more complicated than when he was a child.

Now he put it together, placed the cartridges in his pocket, put the case away again, and took the gun to the dining room. Yesterday's dinner plates were still on the table. He took aim at a bottle. Then he slowly shifted the barrel and aimed at the pile of dirty plates in the sink. The shotgun wasn't loaded. He fired. He took aim, fired, and cocked it again without ammunition. When he got tired of playing, he leaned it against the table with the barrel toward the ceiling. He cleared the table and swept the breadcrumbs up off the floor. A while back they had fired the cleaning lady, a short, stocky Bolivian woman, with the same sort of body
he'd expect to find under Cindy's clothes—South American chicks came in packages with short expiration dates. She'd vanished from town just like Ahmed, and now the house was filled with dirty clothes, they were everywhere. His father just lay about all day. If he hadn't let himself get ripped off, they'd be able to hire someone to clean and cook once in a while, or he could live in a nursing home. But the banks worked together to prey on the weakest, the most helpless, on people who felt they were protected, people who had grown trusting over the course of their lives. And when they had them where they wanted them, they gave them what they deserved. There were about twenty people in town who'd been fleeced; every once in a while they held meetings, but Miqui and his father never went, why bother, when it mortified his father and he already knew there was nothing they could do.

There was a bit of milk left in the carton, but he wasn't sure if it was sour, so he put it in his coffee along with four teaspoons of sugar. He picked up the shotgun again and laid it on the table. The old man was on the other side of the door, awake on the double bed. Every morning he turned on the TV and waited in his room until Miqui cleared out. His son didn't return home until the night or early morning. He spent his days watching the same programs: talk shows and news programs that confirmed it was best not to go out. On the days when Miqui stayed home, he made his father get out of bed. He would shout at him, and soon the man would stick his head out of his room, his pajamas bloated by his diaper. He'd drag himself to the bathroom like the skeleton of a frightened rabbit. The smell of piss wafting through the house. He washed and changed his own diaper,
for the moment, but that was a ticking time bomb.

He never went out. He never saw anyone. He didn't talk to Miqui. Just television. It was his way of complaining, letting himself drop, depressed, upon his son. Old people are selfish, their weakness makes them distrusting, like the old man with the cane in Vidreres the day before, wanting to look pitiful, still milking a war he'd seen from afar as a schoolboy. What more could young people today ask for than a war and at least the hope of winning it? They consoled themselves by massacring soldiers on a PlayStation or Wii. They couldn't prove themselves out in the world, they weren't like him, who had known how to make a life for himself, they were penned in like industrial pigs or hens or cows; today, housing developments were warehouses for young people, buildings to store them in, stalls with the lights on twenty-four hours a day, each with their girl or boy or group of siblings inside, facing a screen like lambs at the trough. He knew a ton of people like that, always connected when he got online, always available on the Internet but only on the Internet, he had friends from high school who ended up settling in to live in the virtual world instead of the physical, gravitational one—exiled to the hidden world, all tangled up together in a mess of circuits, chained by Wi-Fi to their computers, tablets, and cell phones, hypnotized, captured by the spider who lived with them. These millennials, young people who didn't study or work, who couldn't do either. They're born already knowing, the mutation has occurred, the youngest ones have adapted. Sometimes he envied them. He had to struggle with the truck to make ends meet. He was part of a hinge generation between the old people who had
everything and the young who had nothing, but because they had nothing, they were spared from anxiety. There were still girls in the chat rooms who tried to get together with him. They asked to see him. They wanted to meet. They wanted to go out. They wanted to extricate themselves. But how could they survive out there, when there's nothing left for them?

It was the fault of sons of bitches like his father. Who had brand-new Ategos like the one in the poster? When he passed by a restaurant—a date-night restaurant, not like the cheap one on the side of the highway he went to the day before—and looked through the window, he only saw old people inside, big-bellied guys like the banker from Vidreres. How far was that guy, Ernest, from retirement? He could settle into a little house overlooking the sea to live out the rest of his years. But old folks don't retire anymore. They had extended the retirement age. Why should they retire, when everything was hunky-dory? The old folks had good jobs and salaries, they had the dough, they had gotten there first. There are old people who are dirt poor, scum of the earth like his father, and there always will be, but what was over for good was young people with money or the possibility of making any. Everything was taken, starting with the illegal businesses. Sure, chicks could still be whores, being young was a definite advantage there, and the clever ones worked in secret like Marga and Cloe. But the restaurants he used to go to with his father every Sunday before the recession, had suddenly disappeared, the restaurants filled with young couples celebrating the signing of their forty-year mortgages, with tables reserved weeks in advance, the triumph of all that culinary crap, the chefs who were on TV every day, those bastards
that served up mind-boggling dishes, who brought on mass poisoning with their white surgeons' uniforms and Santoku knives, their cleavers and hands soaking wet from rummaging around in the guts of young people, their raw material, the base of their dishes, yes, the chefs were in on it, they were a key piece of the scam, they helped to cook the books. Until, all of a sudden, there were no more enology courses, no more silicone breast and lip implants for teenagers, no more trips to New York and the Caribbean for the kids, no more bricklayers' assistants with 4x4s, no more everyone having a second home. The property that was supposed to ensure your future, in the end turned into a life sentence, the scam of the century. Everything was over for the young, just like that. They were as confident as their parents, but ended up being the butt of the joke—last one's a rotten egg—and now the good cars were for the old, the cruises were for the old, the expensive clothing shops, the jewels, the spas, the massages, the high-class whores were for the old. The old folks had had their youth, but they'd had such a good time they'd come back for seconds, and thirds, and keep coming back for more. They were living their thousandth youth; they were bombproof, they'd aged well but hadn't done anything more, squandering money like the young—they were role models in that—but the properties, the businesses, the companies, the posts, and the banks were theirs. They were living it up right in front of the noses of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Because they could. They'd leave their bones as an inheritance. Farewell and good-bye. You can have this piece-of-shit world, here's your embezzlement, your ruined country, the political system we turned into a
fucking cage, ten thousand Fukushimas, and a hundred thousand warehouses of mortal remains. You can keep it, enjoy! Farewell and screw you! Those two poor kids from the car wreck had gotten out in time. There was that. Old folks who would launch a nuclear holocaust if they knew they had to die tomorrow. Die. Them? No fucking way were they gonna die. They wouldn't die tomorrow. They wouldn't ever die, the kings of the world would survive like roaches and rats, you'd find them everywhere; two kids cash in their chips against a tree on the side of the road, and who do you find there the next day, pondering it, musing over it, philosophizing? A banker. Then who shows up, on foot, brimming with life, getting a little exercise like someone going to the gym, with his cane and his stories from the Pleistocene epoch? Some three-hundred-year-old piece of shit. Every new medicine extends old people's lives, so they have time to find another cure to keep them alive until the next discovery. They run the pharmaceutical industry, they specialize in defeating the cancers of old age, geriatric oncology was making leaps and bounds, eternally healthy prostates, skin, breasts, and colons, replacement parts; soon they'd cure Alzheimer's; soon the old would watch the young pass them by, soon the young would be the old and the old would be the young—thirty-two-year-old old people, like him, trying to survive by rummaging through the dump, wrinkled by unemployment and bad news, gutted, playing dominoes on the Internet while outside hundred-year-old young people sunbathed all day long, and spent their nights leaping and dancing in the discos—when you see someone with tender skin and impeccable teeth, colorful clothes, long, shiny hair, full of health and joie de
vivre, they'll be old. Everything will be the same as ever, but with the young watching from the margins with their hands out. The old get beauty treatments and operate on their faces and breasts, they go to the gym, they take Viagra, they reproduce on their own—sixty-year-old women with kids, ninety-year-old grandmas buying wombs for hire or even giving birth themselves—they haven't renounced anything. And the day they discover an immortality pill they can get rid of the young without regrets. They'll have gotten what they wanted. It's a fact of life, they will say, the planet has to regulate itself, there isn't room for everyone, and our font of experience is essential. Then the young will just be in the way; they should have been prepared. It was only a question of time. They're in charge, and the young are just some poor aliens; they control the governments and they run the system, they would get rid of the young without a second thought.

He picked up the shotgun and aimed it at the bedroom door. His old man was on the other side, lying in bed with his eyes open, waiting for him to finally leave. The music from the television slipped out under the door. His father was slow and silent, every day he walked, shoeless, in pajamas and socks, to the bathroom, before getting dressed. If he opened the door now he'd find a barrel in his face. He would have another heart attack. Would anything really change if he were in a wheelchair? Or would it be worse?

He could play like that with his father and yet didn't abandon him, didn't disappear and let him die alone, peacefully. He had the feeling that he wasn't completely in control of the extremes, that he only had a handle on what was
within certain limits. Both kindness and wickedness lay outside of his jurisdiction. But that didn't mean they weren't there: they had ways of crossing the border on their own, they knew hidden paths, secret tunnels, they entered him illegally, saints disguised as Adolf Hitler, scorpions among the harmless silverware in the kitchen drawer, and he didn't realize until it was too late.

His father's story wouldn't end well. Knowing the end, why continue? He pulled two shells out of his pocket and loaded the shotgun. The cartridge cap was dented; the gun was at least twenty years old.

You made me and raised me; you are responsible for me.

He kept aiming until his arms got tired. Then he lowered the shotgun and put it back down on the table. There was a bit of thick yellowish sludge at the bottom of his mug, a sweet paste that would have to be poured down the drain.

“Papa,” he said, without raising his voice. “I'm off. I'll leave this for you on the table.”

He only meant the shotgun, but animals sense danger. It rains and the snails come out of their holes, to save themselves from the water, they climb up plants, little birds chirp nonstop as they fall from their nest, and even a shitty little ant will spin around like a lunatic when it senses death. His father had heard him, he was old not stupid, and the door opened.