Free A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia Page A

who’d returned to Minnesota after a year in the desert. That was back in 1963.
    â€œHow’s the Chinee-man?” Mr. Smite asked.
    Enrique waved and pretended not to hear him. He didn’t want to encourage Mr. Smite’s morning lecture on the hidden connections between Communism and the rings of Saturn.
    Enrique happened to like Papi’s Ching Ling Foo tricks: spewing colored streamers that caught fire and exploded; extracting a five-foot-long pole from his mouth; producing plates and cakes from under the cover of an empty cloth. His father was experimenting with fire eating, too—Ching Ling Foo had been a master at this—but the kerosene was aggravating his gastritis and ruining his teeth. Only the bullet-catch trick, spectacular and risky as it was, made Enrique nervous.
    At least, he told himself, this was an improvement over his father’s short-lived attempt to break into the movies. Papi had managed by some convoluted set of negotiations—through a mobster friend of a producer’s friend who took steam with him at the Flamingo’s spa—to land a part in a low-budget Hollywood film. He talked it up for months, calling himself the Cuban Rudolph Valentino (no matter that Valentino had starred in
silent
films), taking potshots at Robert Redford (“A mere puppet of passion!”), picturing his name emblazoned on billboards across America. In the end, Papi was cast as a janitor in a teen horror film called
Black Fear,
in which he forlornly dragged a mop and bucket down a lonely high school corridor. He didn’t have a single line.
    It was a short drive to Anasazi High School in North Las Vegas. Enrique had bought his Maverick, red with a white vinyl roof, with money he’d earned at the meat-processing plant. He kept the chrome fenders gleaming. Enrique had won a scholarship to a local Catholic school run by the Marist brothers, but his father had refused to let him attend. After his run-ins with the Jesuits of Cárdenas, Papi didn’t want his son having anything to do with, as he put it, those sadistic men of the cloth.
    When Enrique got tired of school and work, he drove out to Red Rock Canyon, fifteen miles west of the city. He loved the sandstone cliffs, the thick stands of Joshua trees undisturbed by the wind. When the sun hit them just so they looked incandescent, as if on fire. Once Enrique drove to Red Rock in the middle of the night and saw a meteor shower. It seemed to him a private gift from the universe. Nobody he knew ever visited the Mojave outback. It was hard enough to picture Papi or any of the Texans in natural sunlight, much less the great outdoors.
    These days, he and his father were avoiding the Diamond Pin. No matter that Papi looked and sounded like a crazy Chinese impostor. That wouldn’t have stopped him for a minute. Papi avoided the Diamond Pin because he was ashamed of showing up with no money. Everyone in Las Vegas, down to the two-bit blackjack dealers, understood the golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Nobody wanted to be around losers. It messed up their game, reminded them of bad times, killed the abundance they felt was rightfully theirs.
    It was ferociously hot out. The orange trees on campus were flowering with phony-looking fruit. The cheerleaders practiced their routines in front of the main building, trying to drum up enthusiasm for the Friday-night basketball game against Henderson High. Enrique studied their kicking and shimmying, the sweat dampening their twitching thigh muscles. They aroused the envy of the other girls (even the smart ones on student council and the newspaper) as well as the lust of every boy on campus.
    His taste, though, ran in another direction entirely. At the meat-processing plant, Enrique was fixated on his supervisor; the mother, in fact, of one of these cheerleaders. Her name was Janie Marks and she was in her thirties, divorced, with broad fleshy hips that undulated beneath her