Tropic of Orange

Emi, following the NewsNow van, is stuck in traffic caused by the collision between the big rig and the Porsche. She frequently follows the news van to the scenes of breaking news. Gabriel’s car, an old, beat-up Jaguar, is stalled out in the same traffic jam. He was on the way to follow up on a lead from Buzzworm, someone flying in from Mexico. He is close to missing the person’s arrival. He calls Emi from a gas station on Silver Lake Boulevard to come rescue him. Emi loses interest in seeing the wreckage, maneuvers her way off the freeway, and picks up Gabriel.  

Emi tells Gabriel she recently spoke to his mother: She is angry that they missed Gabriel’s grandmother’s 108th birthday. Gabriel’s grandmother is old enough to have known Pancho Villa. Gabriel shrugs it off, fuming. They make it to the airport with two minutes to spare. Gabriel thanks her and rushes from the car. She calls him back to tell him that she picked up Angel Beach from Blockbuster like he wanted her to do.

Rodriguez, the handyman employed by Gabriel and managed by Rafaela, is worried about something. Rafaela tries to discover what, but his thoughts seem disorganized. He says that he is too young to retire and mentions finding crabs in his house—highly unusual given Mazatlán’s distance from the ocean. Rodriguez leaves. The handyman’s usual pride in his work reminds Rafaela of her husband, Bobby.

Doña Maria comes over to chat. She does not approve of Rodriguez leaving early. She does not understand Gabriel’s choice of decorations in the house: rustic, antique furniture and reproductions of paintings by Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh. she worries about Gabriel as a mother would. She stays long enough to greet Sol when he wakes up and invites them to come to her house sometime to watch television via the satellite dish that her son recently installed. Before she leaves, she tells Rafaela that there is a package for Gabriel waiting at the hotel.

Rafaela takes Sol and sets out along the highway toward the hotel. Something seems off about the day. When she speaks with the hotel manager, she finds it strange that it is not yet noon. To satisfy the hotel manager’s curiosity, Rafaela opens the package and discovers it contains a set of brass taps. On their way back to Gabriel’s house, Rafaela and Sol are caught in a sudden, intense downpour. As they run, Rafaela notices that the ground is covered in crabs, “Just like the crabs she swept from the house daily, but hundreds of them, large and small, crawling frantically sideways in every direction” (63).

Though she is familiar with the area, the usual landmarks do not look the same: Gabriel’s fence, for example, seems oddly curved. They manage to get back to the house. As Rafaela dries Sol with a towel, she looks out the window and notices that the single orange is gone from the tree. The downpour ends, and the sun begins to come out.

Arcangel stands in the torrential rain, washing himself with a bar of coconut soap and masturbating. He shaves his face, thinking about his recurring dream. In the dream (summarized in verse form), a woman pushes a cart full of cactus leaves toward a city, stopping where an out-of-season orange lies on the Tropic of Cancer—which in the dream is a natural border made visible by “that horizontal line / where the sun sliced the tropics” (64). The woman pauses to pick up the orange, throws it in her cart, and shrugs. The rain stops, Arcangel dries off, clothes himself, and heads to the marketplace.

In the marketplace, a man’s stalled truck is holding up traffic, causing an angry crowd to form. Arcangel offers to move the truck himself; despite the crowd’s evident amusement at the suggestion of the skinny old man moving a large truck, he insists he has done it before. He asks the crowd what they will pay to see such a feat. He is offered various food items, and one merchant offers him his day’s profits.

Arcangel takes out a cable on two hooks, securing them together. He removes his shirt and draws “the hooks through the very skin of his body, through the strangely scarred lobes at the sides of his torso” (66). to the crowd’s amazement, Arcangel strains until it seems that his body will burst from his skin. By the time he has moved the truck 50 meters, “women and children had run forward to spread flowers in his path, to cup their hands to catch the blood and sweat from his torn stigmata” (67).

Arcangel collects what he wants from the crowd’s gifts and redistributes the rest. He sees the woman from his dream sitting with her cart of cactus leaves; the orange, too, is sitting in the discarded shavings of cactus skin. The woman offers him a bag of nopales, which he accepts, and he also asks for the orange, telling her, “I have a need for the taste of an orange” (67). When she asks where he is going, he smiles and tells her that he is heading north.

Bobby receives a letter from a cousin he has never met but who knows enough about Bobby to convince him that they are relatives. He needs $5,000 to pay smugglers to get him from Tijuana to Chinatown, and $5,000 more to release him from their custody. Bobby still has not heard from Rafaela. He met her 10 years ago through her brother, Pepe. Pepe crossed the Rio Grande River by himself. Rafaela wanted to follow him, but he told her to wait in Tijuana. Pepe asked Bobby for help, even asking if he would marry her. Instead Bobby took money and a letter to Rafaela in Tijuana.

Bobby found his way to the address that Pepe indicated, only to find that Rafaela moved somewhere else. He found Rafaela selling shirts in a T-shirt shop, and “Pretty soon, Bobby was in Tijuana every weekend” (69). Without knowing how it happened, he fell for her. When she ran away, Rafaela left Bobby with her red Camaro, which he still owed payments on. Pepe will not tell Bobby where Rafaela is. His neighbor, Celia Oh, asks him about where Rafaela is. Celia has worked in the garment district since her father’s business burned down. Her brother was shot in the head in April 1992; Bobby found the body.

Bobby wants to smoke, but he is keeping his promise. The phone rings. The caller is someone inquiring about a job, in Spanish. Bobby gets these types of calls every day. He thinks of the way that Rafaela abruptly left. He realizes that she wanted something more than the materialism that his successful business provided her.

Buzzworm looks at a map from 1972, showing the territories of the Bloods and the Crips, given to him by Gabriel. It is not very helpful to him. He thinks of his own house, which he owns; his grandmother saved for years for a down payment, bought the house, dutifully made payments, and left it to Buzzworm, who paid off the remainder of the loan when she died. Buzzworm thinks of eminent domain laws that allowed bureaucrats to make life unlivable in working-class communities of color within the city, until the original inhabitants were forced to move, and the city built over their former homes.

Today, Buzzworm works with the city’s undocumented street peddlers. He tries to help them get business licenses so they can sell their wares legally. He visits Margarita, a refugee from Salvadoran death squads. He buys bananas, a bag of peanuts, and an orange from her. Buzzworm runs into the same kid from Monday. He is distressed. He was shot at, but the bullets curved away rather than hitting him. Buzzworm likens it to a religious experience and gives him an orange he bought from Margarita and the calculator watch that he was wearing.

Gabriel scans the busy airport for the man he is looking for. The only signs he can use to identify the man are a name, C. Juárez, and the fact that he will be disembarking from a flight from Mexico. Gabe has an airport attendant call for C. Juárez over the intercom. A Mexican woman with a baby answers from the courtesy phone across the terminal. Gabe tricks her, claiming he was looking for Charles Juárez, whom she obviously is not. 

The woman leaves the airport, with Gabriel in hot pursuit. Emi, who was circling while Gabriel was inside the airport, pulls up. Gabriel jumps in her car as the Mexican woman jumps into a taxi. Gabriel tells Emi to follow the taxi. after a tense pursuit, the taxi leads them to a hospital. They find it strange that a woman with a baby would get off a plane from Mexico and go straight to a hospital.

Gabriel and Emi follow the woman into the hospital, Gabriel feigning illness for cover. They watch her give a small ice chest to a waiting hospital aide. Gabriel manages to get into the elevator with the aide, and discovers, after talking to the nurse at the nurses’ station, that the floor of the hospital where the aide went specializes in infant heart and kidney medicine.

Back on the ground floor, Gabriel finds Emi speaking with a police officer, who leaves shortly after. Through the officer, Emi learned more information about the crash between the Porsche and the tanker truck. The driver of the Porsche was at fault: He cut across two lanes of traffic and crashed into the truck. The driver died, but the passenger walked away. According to the passenger, the driver was peeling and sharing an orange with him, but the driver blacked out as soon as he ate a piece. The truck, which was carrying propane, exploded, taking out an entire overpass.

Gabriel is not interested in the accident. He asks Emi about the woman with the baby. Emi talked to her while Gabe was following the hospital aide. The woman speaks perfect English. She told Emi, “[S]he pumps her breast milk and brings it here every day” (80). Gabe is suspicious. The woman left in another taxi.

When they attempt to recover Gabriel’s car from the side of the freeway, Gabriel discovers that it is gone, likely impounded. Emi drops Gabe off at his office downtown. Gabriel contacts Buzzworm, who does not know anything else about the woman with the baby. Gabriel asks Buzzworm if he can find out anything more about the woman from his source, but Buzzworm wants him to focus on the prospective article about Manzanar Murakami.