ignacio aguila-reyes || D6 {done}

[Bella]

IGNACIO AGUILA-REYES



age 24

former peacekeeper. ambulance mechanic. man of the people

[Bella]

My name is Ignacio Aguila-Reyes. Nacho if we’re friends. Nachito, if you’re my mother–unlikely, seeing as the cancer took her ten years back, bless her heart.

I never wanted to be a mechanic. Ever since I can remember, all I wanted to do was play guitar, since the very first time I watched my grandfather play. I loved how precise his fingers sounded, like hammers against the strings, how the notes all fit together like dominoes falling neatly one after the other. How hands that looked so rough could make sounds that wrapped you up like a soft blanket. I wanted that. Working hands that were beautiful too.

But there’s something about being poor that takes a life’s whole to-do list and jumbles it all out of order. Maybe at the top of it, you wanted to be a famous actor or something, and in the middle you wrote about playing gin rummy, smoking some joints, and generally having an easy, good time with friends. And at the end you thought maybe you’d settle down with a nice girl, or whoever, you know, and have a family, retire early.

As it happens, the Big Man in the Sky reached a hand down and shook up the whole etchy-sketch of my plan. And it turned out that everything I had pictured myself doing ended up at the bottom of a whole laundry list of other shit, pardon my language. By the time you get to the second or third item, you start to forget what the dream looked like in the first place. But, being a content kind of person, like many of us are, you look around and think: This isn’t so bad. I can live with this.

So those were the cards they handed me. Being a mechanic, not a musician.

Not that it was so unnatural a place to end up. My dad is a mechanic, just like his dad before him. The Aguilas started their car-fixing “empire” selling Frankenstein cars from whatever scrap could be patched together after the war. Automobiles were in short supply back then, and they earned a reputation for a job well done for an honest price.

I grew up in the garage at the right hand of my dad and grandfather, mostly standing by and handing them things they asked for. Aguila’s Automotive was what they called their castle of cinderblock and grey cement. Even now, the smell of gasoline takes me back right back to that place, its meticulously organized walls lined with more tools than any normal person could name. We communicated our needs in guttural grunts. Tire iron. Creeper. Air compressor. Socket wrench. Beer. Each handed over quickly if you didn’t want a kick in the ass.

When it rains, it pours. Abuelo lived through the Rose Plague, tough as he was, but died from pneumonia shortly after. Then Dad got hurt bad the year of the 90th. A tire overinflated and blew up, almost severing his leg at the knee and damn near blasting his balls off. He has a wooden leg now from the knee down, the best we could afford at the time.

Long story short, with my grandfather gone and my father unable to move like he used to, our shop was hanging by a thread. That was the summer of my 18th year, and I had just escaped the reaping. It felt like one blessing and two curses. All of a sudden they were expecting me, the oldest, to run the tightest ship we’d ever had to sail.

I worked my ass off every day with my father yelling directions over my shoulder, but no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t finish the same amount of jobs that three people used to do. My little brothers were no help, pajeros culiaos.*

We were losing money. Eventually it got so bad we had to start reusing parts when we could, taking them out to dust them off and put them back in. I would take the old oil filters out of cars, soak ‘em in clean oil, then blow out all the old gunk with them pressed up to my lips. Needless to say, folks started noticing when they had to come back sooner than they had before, parts blowing out, and our reputation with it.

It got worse when food prices started going up, with hospital wages not getting any higher. Less people could afford to own cars, and as the hospital itself grew, it built its own shop to handle the ambulances they drove. So our slow trickle of business was quickly turning into a leaky faucet. We were standing there with our mouths open underneath it, just trying to catch a few more drops.

On top of it, all this time, my father is in extreme pain–the kind of pain where you have to wake up every day, look at yourself in the mirror, and figure out your reason to keep living. Because if you can’t think of one, you might just give up. The hospital had put him on morphling to help with the pain, and they weren’t exactly sticklers about weaning him off of it. So the little money we had left was split between paying the mortgage on the garage and keeping my dad from going into withdrawal.

We kept it together for a year and three months. Then, the landlord called us on the money for the garage, and the Aguila Automotive ship had finally sunk.

What else was I supposed to do but join the force? Those guys can smell debt the way sharks smell blood in the water, and we were hemorrhaging money all over the place. The next thing I knew, they were knocking on my door, two action-figure men in grey uniforms, buzz cuts and chew tobacco, scary guns slung across their backs.

Only four years, they told me. Then your family’s debts will be forgiven and you’ll come home a hero.

I was under no illusion about the hero part. But the debt forgiveness part was impossible to refuse, especially with my five siblings’ hungry eyes staring up at me, waiting for me to answer, and my father’s soothing, persuasive voice. Come on Nachito, it’s just four years. Think of what we’ll do when you get back. We’ll get the family business back up and running again, and by then your brothers will be old enough to take over. Maybe they’ll even give you a medal. You always were the sharpest pencil in the box.

Those four years were the longest of my life. Shipped off and shorn like a sheep, they sent me to the lumber yards in Seven. Believe me, you’ve never seen so many people lose fingers. I swear it’s a whole population of grown men and women with less than ten fingers on their hands. They were lucky to keep eight of them–any less and it could put you out of work for life.

The worst were the boys who lied about their age so they could start working early. You have to think, it had been about ten years since Seven had won the Games, and these people were hungry. There was this one named Tamian who looked just like my youngest brother–couldn’t have been older than twelve, but had the height of an eighteen year old. The bosses weren’t stupid, but they would hire who they could get away with hiring, especially when labor numbers were low.

That big little boy lost a finger after two months, lopped off in the log splitter on a day when he was particularly drowsy, overworked and losing sleep. I faked the flu the next day. Couldn’t stop vomiting regardless, thinking about his face contorted in pain, too much like my brother’s.

Mostly, I was supposed to stand there and look threatening to make sure the people were listening to their foreman. Which I did in the least-committed way possible, believe me.

Oh, don’t worry. They’d never shoot anyone, they said. The guns were just for self-defense.

What I learned in four years was: Self-defense can be pretty much anything.

Labor in the lumber yards came in waves. Some seasons, like summer, there were people lining up at 3 am to get on the list for a day’s work. Other times, there weren’t enough to run all the equipment.

The summer of the 94th was so blistering hot that some of the workers were barely dressed, their backs turning pink in the sun. Torian Vice had just won the Games and they were feeling pretty bold, maybe, because eventually a few of them stopped what they were doing and started relaxing under the shade of the trees.

It’s always a numbers game for the foreman–if he doesn’t make that quota by the end of the week, he will be removed and replaced quicker than a worn-out windshield wiper. So when these people started quitting and sitting one-by-one, he turned red in the face and started screaming at them to get back to work. When they ignored him, he called in the peacekeepers to get them moving.

We were too hot ourselves, burning up in our starchy uniforms with too many layers. Some of the guys were all too eager to get moving, poking at the workers with the butts of their rifles, roughing them up a little. I stayed out of it.

Then the workers got pissed and started breaking stuff. Kicking the machines over, breaking the switches off. One threw a hatchet at a peacekeeper’s head, and after that, things got complicated.

In the force, they teach you that hands are a threat. Unless someone’s hands are palms-open, up in the air, there is always a possibility that they’re reaching for something to kill you. That’s the way they think– us or them.

As it turned out, there were a few hundred pairs of hands reaching for something to fight with. I found myself on one side, and they were on the other. What else was I supposed to do? Run, and get a dishonorable discharge? I was two months away from earning back my family’s business.

To this day, those gunshots won’t let me sleep.

Those last two months, I faked being sick a lot. I would do anything to just lie in that cot with a bottle of whiskey on my bedside table, even learning how to put two fingers down my throat to puke anytime I wanted to. People were still so careful about the rose plague that they let me be. If they suspected, they never said anything.

I came back home in September feeling like a kicked dog. It was like the Peacekeepers had dangled a big juicy steak in front of my muzzle, keeping it just out of my reach until I’d barked and bitten as much as they’d ordered me to. Now, bruised and scarred and beaten into obedience, I finally had that steak, and I still felt hungry. There was a new emptiness inside me, a cold concrete space in my heart they’d cleared out and scrubbed with steel wool.

What used to be there, I couldn’t remember.

All I knew was that I was 22 and had nothing to show for it. Dad was waiting for me to fly our family flag again, but I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to lay on the floor, listen to my records, and drink myself to sleep.

But I knew as well as anyone that I had to get back to work. So I ended up in the hospital garage, fixing the ambulances. Ironic, considering that my family used to sell home-built vehicles to the hospital back in the dark days, and now the hospital was signing my paychecks. We needed money, and that was a faster way to make it than waiting for our shop to get up and running again.

I’ve thought about work a lot, and I think what it comes down to is what a person’s hands are doing. Making or breaking, building or tearing down. I wanted my hands to be making music, as I’ve said. But then, there’s a reason they call it tuning an engine. There’s music to be made in the way all these moving pieces fit together, with one person composing their movements. Making the engine sing.

And, being the content person I am, I look around and think: This isn’t so bad. I can live with this.

And I think, at least I am a fixer.

Since coming home, though, there’s still this restless feeling in my bones. It’s like two magnets facing each other with the same poles, both pushing until one flips around and rights itself. A deep sense of something out of balance.

In my quiet (sober) moments, my mind always circles back to their hands. Hands on the guitar’s fretboard, hands passing the socket wrench, hands in the log splitter, hands on the trigger, hands on the liquor bottle. Hands making, hands breaking.

It feels to me like the center of the universe.

When the hands picked up the picket signs, it was like they were calling me. Those pushing magnets flipped right around and pulled me into the crowd, the people shouting about the wrongs they’d been dealt, and the justice they were owed. Hands on the highest floor of the hospital drawing up some raw deals for those of us underneath. It felt like a second chance to do something right. Like I said, I am a fixer.

So from this garage, the dank, smelly underbelly of Blessing Fenwick’s Hospital of Mercy, I’m getting my hands dirty.







*pajeros culiaos = lazy wankers

[Bella]

DONE!!! for the hospital plot ripred_bot_bot

[d7m fraser birk ♚ frankel]