Forty-Seven on the Roof

The corrugated tin under my belly is hot enough that I can smell my jumpsuit cooking through, a slow chemical char like burning crayons, and somewhere below me a tortillería owner is watching his masa go sour in a walk-in that hasn't pulled cold air in two hours. I don't look down at him. I look at the autopsy in front of me — a Copeland scroll compressor splayed open, its capacitor blown like a popped soda can, the sweet chemical breath of leaking R-410A rising in invisible curls into a sky that has gone the color of an old bruise.

One forty-seven in the afternoon. Forty-seven degrees on the thermometer clipped to my toolbag. Some people would call that a coincidence. In Mexicali we call that Tuesday.

My soldering iron is in my right hand, my left forearm pressed flat against the metal because if I lift it, I have to put it back down, and putting it back down is worse than keeping it there. Sweat doesn't bead at this temperature. It evaporates straight off your skin in tiny curls of steam, like you're a pan somebody left on the burner. The orange electrolyte powder I dumped into my water bottle this morning has crusted at the corners of my mouth. I lick at it. It tastes like a battery and a tangerine had a fistfight.

En Mexicali no hay primavera. Hay infierno y luego diciembre. I say that to tourists. I say that to myself. Mostly I say it to my father, who laughs every time like he hasn't heard it nine hundred times, because he is a kind man and he knows I have a small list of jokes.

My phone buzzes inside the toolbag. Third call in ninety seconds. I don't answer. Whoever it is, the compressor doesn't care.

*Steady,* I tell my hand. *Steady, cabrona.*

I lay the bead of solder down clean — a little silver river finding its bed — and for one second the world is just the smell of flux and the soft hiss of the iron, and I am twelve years old again under the workbench at Refrigeración Beltrán, my father's boots in front of my face, his voice above me saying *mira, hija, look how the metal wants to be one piece again, you just have to invite it.*

The phone buzzes a fourth time. I ignore it a fourth time.

From up here, Mexicali looks like a city someone poured out of a kettle. The horizon over Calzada Independencia ripples like spilled gasoline. The awnings on the nieves stand at the corner — the one that sells the mango con chile that Diego and I used to fight over — droop like wet laundry. A municipal bus crawls past, and even from three stories up I can see the heat blur coming off its roof. Somewhere a norteño song on someone's radio is begging a woman not to leave, and the woman, presumably, is leaving anyway.

Forty-seven grados, y el calor está cabrón hoy. He got into the house. He got into Papi's lungs.

I don't want to think about that. I think about the compressor instead.

This morning at the shop my father stood in the doorway in his faded blue jumpsuit — the one my mother has patched at the elbow three times, the one he refuses to retire because it 'still has work in it' — and he watched me load the truck. He didn't help. He didn't help, and that was the thing. For twenty-four years that man has helped. He has lifted things he should not have lifted and climbed ladders he should not have climbed and worked Sundays for a fifty-peso tip from an abuelita whose evaporator was older than I am. This morning he leaned on the doorframe and watched.

Then he walked over and kissed my forehead. His lips were dry. He smelled like Vicks and like the inside of his jumpsuit, which is a smell that does not exist anywhere else in the world.

*Tú puedes con esto, hija.*

*Órale, Papi,* I said, like it was nothing. Like he sent me up alone every day. Like my whole chest hadn't gone tight at the way his hand shook a little when he reached up to my forehead, the way he's been holding the doorframe lately when he thinks I'm not looking, the way last Tuesday he sat down on the curb outside the shop and didn't get up for ten minutes and told my mother it was the heat.

It's always the heat. Until it isn't.

I shake the thought off the way you shake a wasp off your wrist. Compressor. Compressor. Compressor.

I reseat the capacitor. I check the contacts, twice, because Papi taught me to check them twice and then a third time when I'm tired, and I am tired, I am three-hours-of-sleep tired, I am half-a-torta-from-yesterday tired. I close the housing. I crawl backward across the tin to the disconnect, and I hold my breath, and I throw the switch.

The compressor coughs.

The compressor catches.

The compressor *hums.*

There is a click inside me when a thing is fixed. A small private click, the size of a thumb. Nobody else in the world hears it. My father hears it. He told me once that's how he knew I was his — when I was six, and I'd just bullied a window unit back to life with a screwdriver and pure stubbornness, and I came out from under it with my face smeared in dust, and I didn't say *I fixed it,* I said *escucha,* listen, because the click was the proof and the words were just decoration.

I sit up. The world tilts a little — heat, dehydration, the orange powder doing its thing — and rights itself. I salute the sun, my middle finger discreet against my temple, the way Tonio taught me. *Te ganamos otra vez, pendejo.*

I fish the warm Tecate out of my toolbag. I crack it. I take exactly one swallow, because two is unprofessional and zero is unkind to oneself, and the beer goes down hot and bitter and perfect.

The phone buzzes again. Thirteenth time, if I'm counting, and I am, because counting is what I do when I'm pretending I'm not worried.

I wipe my hands on my jumpsuit and pull it out, already mouth-open to chew Tonio's ass for whatever supply order he forgot — *no manches, güey, I told you to grab the 35 microfarad, not the 45* — and the screen says *jefa.*

Twelve missed calls from jefa.

My stomach does a thing it does not usually do.

I answer. I keep my voice flat, because flat is armor. *Ma, ando trabajando, ¿qué pasó?*

The sound on the other end is not my mother's kitchen. It is not the radio she keeps tuned to the AM station that plays only Vicente Fernández and ads for funeral homes. It is a hallway. I can hear it before I can hear her — the squeak of a wheel on linoleum, a metal cart rattling past, a PA system paging a doctor whose name I don't catch, and underneath all of it my mother breathing the way you breathe when you have been breathing wrong for an hour and are trying to remember how.

*¿Lucía?*

Her voice is a wire. High, thin, the kind of thin a wire gets right before it goes.

*Jefa, ¿dónde estás?*

*El techo —* she says, and stops. *El techo de la casa, m'ija, estaba cambiando un foco —*

*¿Quién?*

*Tu papá.*

The rooftop I am sitting on, which thirty seconds ago was a battlefield I was winning, becomes the rooftop my father fell off of. I am not on the rooftop in Colonia Nueva anymore. I am three stories above my father.

*No respiraba bien — la ambulancia —* The words are coming in the wrong order, like she dumped them out of a drawer. *Le dije, Cuco, no subas, le dije —*

*Ma. Ma. ¿Está vivo?*

A pause. The pause is the longest thing that has ever happened to me. Inside the pause I hear a stretcher. I hear someone crying in a language that isn't Spanish. I hear my mother swallow.

*Papi se cayó,* she says. *Ven.*

My hearing tunnels. There is a sound in my left ear like a refrigerator dying — that low metallic complaint a compressor makes in its last hour, the one Papi taught me to recognize before I could ride a bike. *Esa máquina ya se nos va, hija. Escucha.* I am listening. I am listening to my own head.

*Voy,* I say. *Ma, voy. ¿Hospital General?*

*Ven,* she says again, like the word is the only one she has left. *Ven, ven, ven.*

I stand up too fast.

The roof bucks. The sun swings. My soldering iron clatters off the tin and bounces once, twice, and lies there hissing. I have a wrench in my left hand — a heavy crescent, the one Papi gave me on my fifteenth birthday with a ribbon tied around it because my mother insisted on a ribbon — and somewhere in the standing up, somewhere between *ven* and *ven,* my fingers forget what they are for.

The wrench slips.

I watch it the way you watch something in a dream. It hits the gutter — *ting* — bounces out into open air, and falls. Three stories. Past a hand-painted Coca-Cola mural where the *C* has been touched up so many times it's a different red than the rest. Past a clothesline with a child's pink T-shirt pinned to it. Down into the alley, where I hear it land — a flat, ringing *clang* — and a stray dog yelps and scatters, claws on concrete.

I don't look. I am already moving.

I leave the toolbelt. I leave the open Tecate sweating into the tin. I leave the soldering iron, still on, a small hot tongue against the metal. The tortillería owner is yelling something up at me from the sidewalk — *señorita, ¿y mi factura, y mi factura?* — and I wave at him without looking, a gesture that means *later* or *sorry* or *my father* depending on which part of my body you ask.

The ladder rails are scorching. I don't care. I half-slide down them, palms hissing, and my boots hit the alley and I am running.

The truck is parked in the shade of a jacaranda that lost the argument with summer two months ago. The metal of the door handle bites my hand like it's mad at me. I yank it open and throw myself in and the cab is a hundred and twenty degrees, easy, the steering wheel is a branding iron, the seat belt buckle has gone the color of a stove coil.

I jam the key in the ignition. The engine catches. The AC blows on my face and the AC is hot — of course it's hot, the compressor in this truck has been on its last legs for six months, I keep telling myself I'll fix it tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow — and the hot air hits my wet eyelashes and dries them before the tears can finish forming.

My mother's voice is still in my ear. *Papi se cayó.* Three words. They are looping. They are looping the way a song loops when the needle skips. *Papi se cayó. Papi se cayó. Papi se cayó.*

Somewhere behind me, in the alley I have already left, my crescent wrench is still ringing against the concrete. I can hear it. I know I can't, I know sound doesn't work that way, but I can hear it, a small bright metal note that won't stop.

I put my hands on the steering wheel.

They leave sweat prints I can't wipe off.

I pull out into Calzada Independencia. The horizon ripples. The light is the color of a fever. I do not yet know if my father is alive, and Mexicali is forty-seven degrees, and I am driving toward the answer.