“Sí, that is my cousin.”
Gloria called to Carl, “We could use a little help here, peekaboo.”
Robert’s tubes pulled so tight that his head sat fixed in a sniffing position against the headrest.
“They’re for his breathing,” Alma said, pointing to the tubes and filling her own lungs deeply to make her point.
Anthony told Carl to take over the controls. They both squatted low to the ground and leaned into the chair from behind. Alma adjusted Robert in his seat. She fought his natural lean to the right and held him in place as the chair crept forward over the bowing plywood. She wiped more spit away. Anthony kept his feet firmly on the ground as Carl did his best to stay light on his. They pushed the chair up the makeshift ramp until it leveled out on the porch. Alma squeezed Anthony’s arm and patted her chest above her heart. “That’s how I imagined it,” she said.
The lighting effects from the disco ball in the middle of the dance floor played tricks on Alma’s eyes as Gloria called her to the counter. “It’s twenty-five dollars each for the cover.” Gloria stabbed a piece of paper on a long spindle and reached for Alma’s hand. She turned over Alma’s wrist and stamped it with purple ink that glowed under the black light.
Alma showed Carl how the stamp caught the light, delighted. “I expected it to cost so much more.”
“Darling, now you pay by the minute,” said Gloria.
The base coming from the large stack of speakers suspended above the dance floor made it difficult for Alma to hear. “Every minute we have to pay you?”
“Every minute you have to pay for. You can buy an hour of dances right now. We finish that, and I will take you to find the perfect little gem for your son.”
Alma kept her billfold in her purse as she counted her money. She looked to Carl. “Did you know about this?”
“Of course I knew about this. You didn’t think it was cheap?”
“How would I know? I don’t go dancing with sucias.”
Anthony searched Robert’s wheelchair, which made Alma visibly uncomfortable.
“We search everyone.” Gloria explained the policy in a way that a mother might understand. She stamped Robert’s wrist. “He’s no different.”
Alma appreciated Gloria’s sense of motherliness. She put fifty dollars in ones and fives on the counter and straightened all the bills to face the same direction. Carl stepped up and pushed her money aside. He slid Gloria a hundred-dollar bill across the counter like it was something he had been practicing all day in the mirror. “When this runs out,” he told her, “you come get me.” He struck his chest and nodded a fierce nod.
Each girl wore a small piece of paper pinned to her shirt with a number written in black marker. Gloria lined up the girls who were not dancing along the snack bar. Two girls huddled by themselves near the hot dog cooker to warm themselves under the orange light. The cooker’s spinning rollers screeched with each rotation. The girls laughed and pointed at a man sitting against the pillar by the DJ booth, which only prompted him to comb his hair and walk over until they turned him away. Gloria snapped her fingers at the DJ to turn down the music this much. She pulled the tallest girl aside. “Yolanda! You are supposed to be training Lola, not being all best friends on my dime.” Yolanda pulled up her skirt to adjust her thigh-high stockings rocking two red bows at the top like cinnamon candy. Fat bulged over the elastic band. Alma shook her head at Carl, who showed an obvious interest. Yolanda leaned back in her red patent heels and gave a hard look to Gloria as she excused herself to use the bathroom.
“I have to pee. Be gone a bit,” Yolanda said.
Lola muttered something under her breath about cripples to the other girls and disappeared behind Yolanda into the room’s pulsing light.
Each dancer inspected her shoes so as not to make eye contact with Alma, tipping their ankles sideways to look at the bottoms of their soles, as though they had stepped in something in the back parking lot during their last smoke break. They brushed confetti from their dresses from some past event.
“Opal. Where’s Opal?” Gloria asked. She yelled to Anthony behind the podium by the entrance. “Find Opal and bring her here. I don’t care if she’s already dancing.”
Before the girls walked away, Alma thanked each one as though she knew them their whole lives. She took their hands into hers and made the sign of the cross over each one. Carl kept a predatory distance. Alma tried twice to get his attention. It wasn’t until the music changed that Carl finally looked over. She turned Robert’s chair around and lined him up against the wall where Gloria said she should wait. The couples on the dance floor were a mismatch of young girls and older Mexican men that reminded Alma of Oscar. They pressed their hips into the girls, and smiled as if they were handing out treats. She knew Carl was one of these men. Some of the girls pulled away or kept a distance until they remembered what they were there to do, and then settled back in. Alma dipped her handkerchief into a glass of ice water to wet Robert’s dry lips. She straightened his shirt over his bloated stomach.
“Mijo, this will be over soon.”
Gloria waited a few feet away with a young girl Alma did not recognize.
“Alma Lopez, this is Opal,” Gloria said, presenting the girl as though she were a new car in the showroom, one hand following the length of her body’s lines. Opal was not the girl Alma had imagined for Robert. Alma thought about the Indians from deep in Oaxaca. Nothing like the Bo Derek she had dreamt into her photo albums. Opal was obviously the girl who danced with the ugly and crippled men. Alma thought about the family of rats that must’ve lived in the nest that was Opal’s hair. She ran her fingers through her own hair before deciding whether or not to say anything to Gloria. The forehead on this girl! Carl winced from across the dance floor. Alma didn’t know the name of the creature that lived under the bridges in Robert’s children’s books, but in her head, it was Opal, catching children for her dinner and leaving the bones for drunk men to tell tales. Alma suddenly wanted Yolanda. She wanted the girls in the pages of Carl’s magazines to come to life and spin across the dance floor in chorus line for her to choose from.
“See, I always have the perfect girl,” Gloria said. “I’ve been doing this a long time.”
Alma didn’t want to be rude to Opal. It wasn’t as if Robert was going to make a family with her. Such feo grandchildren!
“He’s better dressed than most here,” said Opal.
“His name is Robert.”
“Miss Gloria told me ’bout him. Said he’s probably never been with a woman. That true?”
Alma nodded.
“What do you want me to do for him?”
Alma pointed to the girls swirling across the room.
“Those girls don’t do the extra things. They make good money dancing, but . . .” She slid a finger along Robert’s collar and rubbed its corner between her fingertips. “I like your shirt, Robert.” Robert’s eyes followed her hands. This was the first time such an exchange had taken place. Alma stepped back to take it in fully, as one might the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower or the shuttle launch.
“Miss Gloria will only let me dance, but I can do more if you want.”
This confused Alma. “What more would you do?” she asked.
“I can touch him,” said Opal.
Alma needed Carl at that moment to tell her to stop overthinking everything—let that girl do her pinche job for the boy already! But Carl was across the dance floor at the far end of the club with Yolanda now, in a green leather booth that could fit ten people. They sat close and stared straight ahead like they were on on a Ferris wheel first date.
Opal assured Alma, “It’s dark enough in here to do just about anything.”
Alma handed her all the dance tokens and asked if it was enough. Gloria came up behind Opal and put her hands on her waist. They swayed to “El Cantante” playing overhead.
“Don’t you agree that Opal is a good pick?” Gloria asked. “Let those kids go do their thing.” G
loria acted like they were going to a playground across the street. “Alma Lopez, I’m gonna buy you a drink.” Alma explained Robert’s chair to Opal. She appreciated Opal’s concentration and attention to the finer details, asking simple but important questions on how things worked.
“He’ll know what I’m doing then?” asked Opal.
“It’s his body that doesn’t work so good,” Alma explained. She tapped the side of her own head. “But he knows in his head.”
“Well, then, I will blow his mind.” Opal laughed. “How will I know if he’s enjoying it?”
“You’ll be able to tell if he isn’t,” Alma answered.
Gloria and Alma sat side by side on wooden chairs looking out over the dance floor. They didn’t talk right away, only gestured to one another that one song was better than another. Opal wheeled Robert across the floor and sat on his lap. She took her right shoe off and rubbed under his pants leg with her bare foot. Such speed, Alma thought.
“Is there a special place reserved for mothers like me?” Alma asked.
“Like what?”
Alma looked around the room. “For mothers who don’t know how to raise sons.”
“The devil is a busy man,” said Gloria. “If the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives is allow the ugliest girl in my club to dance with your crippled son, I think we’ll go unnoticed. I couldn’t make a real good living this long if all this wasn’t just about the most important thing in the world. Look at them.” She clanked Alma’s glass. “Cheers. From one mom to another.”
The strobe lights made it difficult for Alma to measure the seriousness on Gloria’s face. It sounded scripted, like something she has been trying to convince herself, maybe to help her understand her own son.
“You know that Opal will put her hand down your son’s pants. She does it to everyone.” Gloria moved her chair closer to Alma’s. “He won’t be any different. I just don’t want you to be surprised. We are mothers. You’d be lying if you told me that’s not what you really wanted for him.”
Alma sipped her drink. She sat up straight in her chair and looked to Carl, who just then pushed away from Yolanda toward the middle of the booth. Yolanda pulled up on her bra straps and held her fist out to him. She jerked it several times then handed her purse to the new girl as she jumped Carl. He struggled with the weight of Yolanda’s doughy body as he threw her onto the floor for knocking two drinks across the table into his lap. Her skirt twisted up around her waist, revealing a boyish pair of underwear. She jolted her head back as Carl threw his remaining tokens in her face, as though she’d just been blasted with buckshot at close range.
Anthony had already sprinted the length of the dance floor by the time Gloria realized what was happening.
“Goddamn pig, Yolanda,” Gloria said. Lola crawled on the floor and collected the tokens with the cups of her hands as though she were containing a toxic spill. Anthony reached under the table and grabbed Carl by his ankles, dragging him out from under the booth. The music stopped and all the couples on the dance floor unhinged to catch a glimpse of Carl disappearing under the biggest booth in the club like a drowning man.
So much was happening at once that no one but Alma noticed Opal making her move. Gloria screamed at Yolanda until she could barely breathe, wheezing the words puta and slut and fired. All the excitement stirred up the old confetti on the dance floor. Alma could feel Robert’s heart begin to race from across the room in all the spaces of her own.
“Mind your own damn business!” Carl yelled on his way to the exit. He fought Anthony and Gloria out the front door and down to the curb. Some of the men cheered and threw their white cowboy hats into the air like they were attending a bullfight at the Plaza México.
“That’s right,” Yolanda said, adjusting her skirt. “Treat me like that?”
Gloria walked back inside and told the DJ to turn up the music. Carl stood in the middle of the street and offered to fight anyone who might need a lesson. He called out for Yolanda to meet him at the end of the block.
Opal straddled Robert. His bird legs fit between her thighs, his face long lost in the matted perm that swallowed him whole. This made it impossible for Alma to see the exchange between their bodies. She thought about the time she had become pregnant with Robert, the very moment it was biologically certain that he would be. She recalled that it was the same day Oscar had explained the hyperbaric chamber after they had sex. He had been naked on her bed with his arms and legs splayed out wide like tentacles, using his hands to demonstrate the distortion and balance of gasses in his body. Alma had played with him until she again hardened his whole body. And with her ear to his belly, she listened to the churn of his insides as he described the dangerous pull and displacement of nitrogen, how it would just rip you apart from the inside.
CROP DUSTER PLAY SET
The box reads Crop Duster Play Set. Inside is a banana-yellow plastic plane that resembles a cake topper. A framing nail runs straight through the cockpit and acts as a handle, the plane’s rudder, to keep it in flight between my fingertips. The hangar is blue aluminum with a smiling family of white faces painted on its side—the mother wears a string of pearls and tucks a small black handbag into her chest. The father is in a three-piece suit, wrangling an eager boy on his shoulders, awaiting flight. The two plastic wind socks on the rooftop promise winds that will forever blow from the southwest.
“You always take off into the wind,” I say to Luna. “If you don’t, it’ll somersault you as soon as you pull your nose off the ground.”
The Crop Duster Play Set includes three sections of white picket fencing and six plastic figurines wrapped in a wax paper pouch. I take them out one by one and line them up in the deep shag carpet.
“Describe them to me, David,” Luna says, her milky-white eyes looking skyward. She’s only ever been blind. And they call me the leg-braced cripple from Pico. C’mon.
“They’re wearing the same overalls you have on.”
“Really?” she asks.
“Carbon copy,” I tell her.
Three of the figures hold pitchforks into the air with their mouths wide open, no doubt singing “Aquellos Ojos Verdes” at the tops of their lungs. The other figures are the bean pickers, bent in half at the waist with only the tops of their white cowboy hats showing, lima bean bushels slung over their shoulders like long-haul donkeys.
“Even Mexican toys have broken backs!” I say. And as soon as I finish lining up each figure, Luna reaches out for her half, knocking them all over. She finds one of the bean pickers and traces her finger along its humped back, whispers, What village are you from—Santa Rosalía, Chihuahua? I know you from somewhere.
We don’t say anything out loud, but I know we both imagine our father’s face under each hat brim. I have always wondered what he looks like in Luna’s head, if his moustache sits the same way on his lip, and if she can even picture the birthmark covering his right eye, the one that earned him the nickname El Pirata in our family. Luna mimics his talk in the fields. “Pick the lima beans too big, mija, and they’ll taste like candle wax. You like to eat candle wax, mijita?” She makes her sour face at the plastic figure. Secretly, we’d eat candle wax every meal if we could. “This is the correct size,” she says. “Look it.” Luna moves the pretend lima beans around in her palm like shiny gold coins pulled from the sea. She holds up the largest one, and the sunlight through the bay window casts shadows on its wrinkled make-believe skin.
“Did you hear that?” I ask.
“No, what?” She closes her eyes to hear better.
“Does that help you?” I ask, tapping her clamshelled eyelids. “When you do that?”
“Sometimes,” she says. Her right eye flutters lightly, half-milk-open, measuring the room as whiskers might.
I buzz the yellow plane by her head at an angle she won’t hear, and tangle its propeller into her hair like grasshopper legs in June. “Crop dusters come out of nowhere,” I say. “You can watch the sky all you want, but you
won’t see a damn thing. It’s all sound.” It takes a minute to get the plane free from her black curls that just spring back into place like machined parts made specifically for her head.
“How do you know?” she asks. “You’ve never seen one before.”
“I’ll show you,” I huff.
The orange carpet flattens easily into a square with my forearm. I run my fingers in the opposite direction of the matted shag to make dark rows that resemble mounds of soft dirt—bean dirt. I snap the fence pieces together and place them at ninety degrees at the edge of the make-believe field.
“Let me be the plane,” she says.
“A blind girl can’t be the plane,” I say. “You’d kill everyone in the room.”
The hangar sits at the center so that the painty-smiley family can front-row the action about to take place. I line up the workers—picker-fork-picker-fork-picker-fork—down the longest row, sure to turn their faces away so they don’t see any of it coming. And Luna is right. I close my eyes and can hear their collective work-song hum, all the plastic men and their wet click-clack cuts through bean pods.
“Go ahead, Luna,” I say. “Feel around.”
Luna thrusts forward.
“Your quiet hands,” I say.
She touches each plastic worker by name and moves with precision between the rows of dirt without even knowing where each starts and stops. The plane is tucked away behind my back, and the inside of my palm itches like Christmas morning. “I can’t see a thing,” she says, as the sudden air brakes from a curbside trash truck ratchets down the skin on our drumming hearts.
THE HEALING CAVES OF MARRANO BEACH
Isabel puked violently into a grocery bag. The Saint Jude Hands of Healing Caves brochure clearly stated that vomiting could be a real possibility, and that if it did happen, to consult a physician immediately. Isabel never did anything immediately. That is probably why we are here in the first place. The brochure also warned of redness to the more sensitive skin areas—the armpits and groin, the places where the body absorbs things easily. It warned of headaches and hair loss, but these were the things Isabel had been living with for a year now. Woman Cancer. In small print, the brochure warned of death. Not sudden death, but the possible and eventual kind, which seemed like a calculated risk inside her now-balding head, that patchwork of hair combed flat against her scalp, with a small plastic hibiscus clipped on the left side. When Saint Jude’s Hands of Healing Caves weren’t causing terrible sickness to Isabel, they did something else, something Isabel had described as wholly scientific—they healed.
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul Page 12