By the time Bennie got back from the dumpster, his mother would have settled down to her sole hobby, her raison d’être, her white whale: tracking down Bennie’s father.
All the boy ever knew about his father was his profession, which his mother wryly described as “traveling car salesman.” Apparently his father would work at a dealership for three or four months, until the child support agency or Bennie’s mother caught up to him and paperwork was put in place to garnish his wages—then he would vanish and the hunt would begin again.
Once, when Bennie was around fourteen, he made the mistake of proposing a solution. What if, the next time she found him, she asked him to come home? Wouldn’t it be easier to keep an eye on him if he was here?
She looked up from the stack of phone books she had liberated from the library. “I don’t want him,” she said, like it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. “I want what I’m owed.”
That was the last time Bennie tried to help with her hobby. In the years to come, he would just sweep the table, run the bags for Rooster, stay in school, and dream of a sleepy patch of warm land where no one would talk down to him again.
* * *
Every Sunday night Rooster gave him his pay in a lunch sack. Most of it went to household expenses—Bennie didn’t want to be a burden to his mother, financially or otherwise—but he put aside as much as he could in an old accordion case.
By the time he was twenty-three, he’d saved up enough money for a one-way bus ticket to Mexico City with enough left over to get to Todos Santos and live comfortably for a year (according to Rooster’s calculation, anyway), which seemed like enough time to come up with a plan to stay under that tree.
“Be serious,” said Kate, but when he told her he’d saved up enough money for her, too, she stopped scoffing. Even though she knew she would never, ever go—she was a senior in high school, for God’s sake; she wasn’t going to drop out and move a million miles away from her family to Mexico—when Bennie opened that accordion case full of cash and looked at her with love and escape in his eyes, she thought it was the most damn romantic thing she had ever seen.
They didn’t get to Todos Santos, but that was the night they went a little too far.
* * *
Nine weeks later, with morning sickness in full storm, Kate decided it was better to confess than to be caught. She knew her parents wouldn’t take it well, but she didn’t expect them to go full-tilt fairy tale. For starters, they locked her in the house before she began showing. After consulting with the priest, they made plans to ship her off to her aunt in Dayton, where she could deliver the baby and give it up for adoption. Then Kate could return to Baltimore with a cover story about boarding school, which had been okay, though she’d gotten homesick, and that’s why she came back.
Past buried. Reputation intact. Baby’s identity hidden forever, maybe even from itself.
The plan might have worked if Bennie hadn’t kept coming around. Kate’s parents shooed him away, but if he wasn’t calling on the phone, he was knocking on the door or mooning under her window. They turned up the TV and tried to ignore him, but on the night he shouted a marriage proposal at her window through cupped hands, Kate’s father opened the door before the rest of the street figured out their situation. “Hold on,” said the old man. “Stay right there.”
Bennie thought he was going to fetch Kate, but the old man returned with a rifle leveled at the boy’s chest.
Bennie spread his arms like heavy wings. “Do it,” he said. “If you keep me from her, you’ll be killing me, anyway.”
“Idiot,” said the old man, his voice soft with disgust. He lowered the gun a few inches—he couldn’t bring himself to kill this kid, but he might feel better if he peppered his balls—but his wife stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Boys?” she said. “Come into the house.”
After installing Bennie on the couch, she pulled her husband aside and told him if they kept going down this road, they were headed for Romeo and Juliet territory. “Your daughter is tearing out her hair upstairs,” she said. “We need a new plan.”
The old man gathered everybody in the living room, boys on one side, girls on the other. “Here’s the deal,” he said to Bennie. “You can propose to my daughter if you show that you can take care of a family. Understand?”
Bennie looked at Kate. She nodded, so he nodded, too.
Young love, thought the old man. So stupid. “I’m a fair man,” he continued, “so I’m going to give you three months to prove yourself.” He gave the boy a warning glance. “I’m talking about bona fide prospects, not no minimum wage delivery boy bullshit.”
Bennie thought for a minute. “You work at the railroad, right?”
The old man nodded slowly.
“Are they hiring?”
The old man stopped nodding. Sure, kid. Thanks for derailing my daughter’s life. You know what would be great? Working next to you so I could be reminded of this mess every single minute of my life.
“I’ll give you this,” the old man started. “You’ve got a real pair of—”
“Three months,” said his wife. “If you come through, fine. If you don’t, we never see each other again. Deal?”
Bennie nodded. Then he reached for Kate, but the old man made a sound in his throat, so he pulled back his arm. After he left, Kate walked up the stairs quietly, but slammed her bedroom door so hard a single flake of paint fell from the living room ceiling.
“What now?” said the old man.
“Now we wait,” said his wife.
For her, that was the crux of the plan. A delay would cool everyone down. After a few weeks, those kids would start thinking about how hard it would be to raise a child; to be tied down while their friends ran around on weekends; to say goodbye to sleep, seemingly forever—and how easy, on the other hand, it would be to get out of this mess. Three months was plenty of time for Bennie to fail, or just fade away.
* * *
“I’ll help you out,” said Rooster. He turned in his booth, pulled some levers, and came back to Bennie with a single ticket in hand. “One way to Ensenada. Closest I can get you to Todos. This one’s on me. You keep your money, figure out how to live down there.”
Bennie didn’t move. The ticket fluttered in the breeze.
“Here’s a joke,” said Rooster. “Guy goes into the outhouse. When he pulls down his pants, some change spills out of his pocket, goes right down the hole. Guy looks down there, sees a couple quarters gleaming in the shit. No way am I reaching down there for just fifty cents, he thinks. So he throws in his wallet.”
No laugh. Rooster takes this as a bad sign.
“All I’m asking for is a chance to step up around here,” said Bennie. “Haven’t I earned that chance?”
“Leave,” said Rooster. “It’ll be better for everyone. The baby will be adopted by a nice, sad lady. Your girlfriend will get back to her life. You won’t have to worry about child support. Trust me: Catholics know how to handle this shit.”
Bennie scowled at the ground.
“What’s the problem?” said Rooster. “You love this girl?”
“I asked