Seeing Off the Johns

by Rene S Perez II

  The Pachanga was busier than normal. Tryouts and team drafts were being held at the Little League field. Chon’s parents were there with Pito, who was excited in a way that seemed strange to Chon. He was fired up about baseball—the game, the sport—not about going out and playing grabass with his friends and picking flowers in left field. He wasn’t a tee-baller anymore. When did the kid get old enough to be passionate about something?

  There was a steady stream of kids coming into the store and buying Gatorades (the boys in their gray polyester pants and baseball caps) and sodas (their little brothers and sisters). When Ana came to work at two-thirty, the cooler shelves had holes. Chon gave the floors a quick sweep-up, then grabbed his jacket and headed into the cooler.

  After a while, the bell above the cooler door rang. Ana needed help in front. Chon looked out at the store between the drinks. There didn’t seem to be too many people for Ana to handle. Maybe she had gotten a phone call she needed to take. He stuck his head, red-faced and burning earlobes, out of the cooler door and looked at Ana inquisitively.

  “I think you’ve got a visitor, Chones.” Ana nodded in the direction of the Suburban parked in front of the store.

  There she was, hair pulled back and sunglasses sitting on top of her head. She was putting on lipstick in the visor-back mirror in front of her. Watching her like that, without her knowing, without her having to act interested or keep at a safe distance, Chon felt good. Ana rang up the only customer she had, an old man buying some chicarrones and a topo chico. He had looked over at Araceli in the parking lot when Chon came out.

  “You’re a lucky guy,” he said in Spanish. “She’s putting on makeup.” Then he said something else, fast and singsong, like an old saying or joke. He left, laughing to himself.

  Chon thought about asking Ana what the guy had said, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted it repeated, least of all by her. Chon looked at the clock: five more minutes.

  “Just go,” Ana told him. “I’ll punch you out.” She was smiling, proud almost. He didn’t know what that smile meant, only that it didn’t look cruel. It looked generous, caring, like she was giving Chon the only thing she had worth offering.

  “He’s right,” she said as he took off his jacket and hung it on the hook next to the cooler door. “She’s putting on that makeup for you. Who else does she have to look good for here?”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “Yeah, that and some other stuff.” She laughed and walked out from behind the register to empty the coffee pots and brew fresh ones.

  Chon signaled to Araceli to wait a second when he came out. He ran to the Dodge-nasty. When he came back, he climbed onto the passenger seat of the Suburban, closed the door, and put on his seat belt.

  “Hey,” Araceli said.

  “Hey. You want to go for a ride?” he asked, the box in his pocket too small to be seen in the bagginess of his pants but making him feel exposed nonetheless.

  She threw the truck into gear. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “How was Corpus?” Chon asked.

  “Good. Really good. I’m glad I went. They’re really good people, the Velas. I got to do a little shopping and even went with my family to a show at the place I told you about.”

  “The place with the surfboards?”

  “Yes! We just went, we didn’t even know who was playing. And, guess what?” She paused here, actually wanting him to guess.

  “It was closed?”

  “No, stupid. Bob Schneider was playing. Can you believe that? He was down from Austin, playing to promote a new album. It was amazing.”

  “So you took you parents to show them this place where this thing happened this summer” —Araceli had pulled out of the Pachanga heading for the ‘Y.’ She took the turnaround and had already driven across town. She pulled onto the shoulder of the highway to let cars pass by so she could make a U-turn and drive across town again—“and the same guy is playing when you get back? That’s pretty crazy.”

  “I know,” Araceli said. “When I saw the marquee, I gave this scream-shout thing. I couldn’t believe it. We had dinner there and stayed for the show. I was so happy.”

  “Araceli, that’s perfect.”

  “After the show,” she said. “We stuck around, and I bought his new album. It’s really good.”

  “Put it on,” Chon said.

  They rode for a while just listening to the music. She turned around at the ‘Y’ again, but when she reached the north end of town, she just kept going. Chon wanted her to keep going, to let Highway 16 turn to Freer and then to San Antonio and then to forever.

  “Isn’t it good?” she asked. “Isn’t it just perfect?”

  “Yes,” Chon said. But he was lost, trying to feel every bit of right then.

  Araceli looked over at him.

  “Yes,” he said again. “This is perfect.”

  “Perfect,” she repeated. They rode on.

  Araceli turned the music down a bit.

  “Open the glove box there.”

  Chon did and found a CD still wrapped in cellophane.

  “I thought you might like it, so I bought you a copy. So, you know, happy Valentine’s Day.”

  Chon looked at the CD in his hands. The album cover was a black and white cubist portrait. On the back was a track listing and a picture of the band.

  Chon looked over at Araceli, beautiful behind her sunglasses. “I got you something too,” he told her.

  She lifted her sunglasses over her forehead. “Shut up,” she said.

  “Really, I did,” Chon said, reaching in his pocket for the box.

  Araceli pulled the Suburban onto the side of the road, a smile on her face.

  He produced the box, a small one—obviously holding jewelry. She stopped smiling. Chon tried not to notice. He held it out to her, but she didn’t take it.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Open it,” he told her, but he quickly realized she wasn’t going to.

  He opened it for her, revealing a teardrop-shaped blue marble glass pendant. She looked at it and at Chon. She didn’t seem angry or even upset. Just blank. She looked out of the window next to her and then put her head on the steering wheel. Chon closed the box and laid it on the dashboard between his side of the cab and hers.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said, like he had meant to but feeling stupid for it.

  He sank down in his chair and looked away from Araceli. She put the car in gear and turned around to head home.

  “Why?” she asked. Before he could answer—as he had prepared to do in case she ask that very question—she continued. “Why does it always have to be something? Why does it have to go somewhere? I like you, Chon,” she said. She waited for him to turn. “I like you a lot. But isn’t it just easier to not make it something?”

  “So you want me to just pretend—” Chon said loudly, sitting up like he was getting ready for a battle.

  “Yes.” She cut him off. “I want you to just pretend. I want you to pretend like you don’t feel what you feel and I don’t feel what I feel. I want you to pretend I never kissed you, like you don’t look at me the way you do. If I can pretend, then why can’t you?”

  “Because it’s bullshit. Why should I lie to myself? Why should we lie? Because it’s easier? That’s bullshit. I have wanted to be with you for a really long time. And I knew I was probably never going to have a chance with you under normal circumstances, but I got the chance. I got to spend time with you, and I learned how much I really do like you—you, not what you look like or how popular you are. And, even crazier than anything else, you like me. So why not try? Why not get you a cheap piece of jewelry and give it to you, praying that you want it, that you’ll want what it means?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Araceli said, her voice breaking. “Because it would just totally fuck up my whole world for the next three months, maybe? Everybody will talk.”

  “They already talk,” Chon said.

  �
�You don’t understand what it’s like,” she said.

  “We’ve been hanging out all year,” he told her. “You don’t understand. You’re so used to everyone staring at you and paying attention to you that you don’t notice it anymore. I’m used to being invisible, but I’ve gotten used to being seen. It wasn’t easy and I don’t like it, but I got used to it.”

  They caught a red at the stoplight as they pulled into town. There was a car next to them, full of kids who were classmates of Chon and Araceli. Every single head in the car was turned toward them. Araceli Monsevais was crying and that guy she’d been hanging out with lately seemed to have made it happen. They stared, their mouths dropped open

  “Well, then, you don’t know what it’ll be like for me,” she said. “You can’t say you know what it’ll be like for me.”

  The light turned green. Araceli peeled out, leaving the kids to cross through the intersection at a lazy, day-off-from-school pace, talking about what they’d seen, guessing what it could have meant, making up a handful of stories and arguing about which one was most likely to be true as they drove up and down Main until dinner time. Araceli pulled into the Pachanga parking lot. She parked the Suburban behind the store, catty-corner to the drive up window.

  “I guess I just figured that however hard it would be on you, it would be easier because we would be together,” Chon told her.

  He got out of the Suburban. In an attempt to not slam the passenger door in anger, he hadn’t closed it properly. He opened it and shut it again. It was hot out. It reminded him that he was corporeal, not just a walking ball of feelings. His body, now with him again, felt weak. He wanted to drive home where he could get into bed to rest his hurting bones. He had left the necklace on the dashboard.

  Araceli opened her door and stepped out.

  “Your CD,” she said. “You forgot your CD.”

  She climbed down from her seat and met him where he stood. She held out the gift. When he grabbed it from her with both hands, she kissed him. He looked down at her, searching her eyes for some indication of what it meant. Was she going to cry again? Was this the kind of kiss that signals the end of something that never was. Or was it the other, better, harder to define kind?

  In her eyes, he found his answer. He wrapped his arms around her, and she held onto him—looking up at him, trying to register all of the information that was being relayed and process all of the changes that would result from the look that they were sharing. It meant not only that they were together. It meant she was not alone. It was her fear—when she had considered being with Chon—that he would confuse the two, that he might feel that she was with him just to be with someone so she wasn’t alone. But he showed her then that he knew the difference, he understood she wanted to be with him and that made whatever they would come to face in town small and manageable, almost even negligible. Almost.

  “Wait,” she said.

  She went to the Suburban, turned up the music, and grabbed his gift.

  “Help me put this on,” she said. She handed him the box. He took the necklace out and unclasped it. She held up her hair and he fastened the thin gold chain behind her neck.

  “It’s beautiful,” she told him and took hold of him again.

  He held her close and they danced, eyes closed, to Bob Schneider singing about the world exploding into love all around him. When the song ended, they kissed again, and then opened their eyes. There they were, back on Earth. In Greenton, in the Pachanga’s makeshift employee parking lot. Of all the places to end up after coming back from a dream, they were there. But it felt better. It felt bearable. They would make it past the next three months and into whatever future lay beyond it.

  Some of the houses in the southwest corner of Greenton were among the town’s oldest structures, holdovers from earlier days. Their proximity to the railroad tracks was no coincidence. The town was built around those tracks, a station town where people from all over the southwest looking for a better life or for work cowboying or prospecting or roughnecking could get off to stretch their legs and maybe buy a pint of mash and maybe even look at the cactus and mesquite and scrub brush around them and then, for some reason unknown to their ancestors, decide to set up camp and make a go of the American dream.

  As word got around about Greenton, about what it did and didn’t have to offer, about how hard what little work there was would be, and about the rest of Southwest Texas, less and less people got off of the trains to stay. Less lines stopped over and Greenton had to move on to a new mode of economy. Shops and a town would no longer be sustained by rail station money. So the focus shifted to catering to the ranchers and oil men working the ranches and wells all around town. Feed shops and a general market popped up over on what is now Main Street. Those first shops and houses near the tracks, less than half a century after being created, began their course of running down.

  As the bigger stores on Main drew people, a courthouse was built, then a school and a church. Greenton became the town that ranch folk, along with the people they hired to tend to their land and their stock, went to for schooling and doctoring and worshiping. They bought feed and supplies there.

  But more than utilitarian needs were met by a town-proper popping up from what had once been just a train station and desert brush before that. Greenton’s southwest side served the ranch people with an escape. It was a place to go that wasn’t fenced-in by wooden posts and, later, by barbed wire. It was a place for blowing off steam. Houses turned into beer joints and brothels, meant to serve thirsty and horny workers who hadn’t seen hide nor hair of anything besides cattle and pigs and goats and other men they had come to hate passionately and irrationally just for co-existing in the same part of the world, for stinking up their bunkhouses, and for not being the people they had planned on spending their lives with.

  Prohibition brought townspeople—who had previously stayed away from these dens of sin—for a drink and a dance and a cheap, discrete fuck. Then repeal made the district (a few streets, really) obsolete. Piety and hypocrisy’s foggy hindsight made the Greentonites look at those streets in scorn and contempt. The highways Roosevelt paid the men in the area to build that would connect the country and fix the economy were the southwest side’s death knell—highways that led to San Antonio and Laredo, to drive-in theaters and to affordable Ford cars, to Chevy pickups, and to rock’n’roll. Viggie Street headed out of town to Laredo on Highway 359. It was paved and striped and, by the end of the construction, cut Greenton in half. North of it were the schools and newer homes and, later, the car dealership and grocery store. South of it at Main was ‘downtown,’ and the ‘Y.’ But just west of there, where town had started at the railroad tracks, south of 359, was the bad side of a poor town. It was one- and two-room clapboard shotgun houses, a few of which still did not have indoor plumbing. It looked like the death of something, but there was nothing to be mourned. It was just another victim of progress toward what Greenton became, which was not much. And so it was not anything worth missing.

  On the Saturday after Valentine’s Day, Chon woke up early and drove out to the last street in town. It was just up Viggie, the street where Chon lived, to Sigrid. He took a left on Sigrid, went over a set of railroad tracks to an unpaved red dirt road that led to the southwest side of town.

  He drove slowly, barely putting his foot on the accelerator. Passing by the houses and trailer homes—parked, wheels flattened, on cement slabs in the middle of tiny, cheap, barren plots of land—Chon felt like he was in a different world. It was his world, or part of his world at least, but he did not see himself in the cracked paint and sagging frames of the houses in a neighborhood that sat, literally, around the block from his house.

  He continued on the dirt road until it ended. When he got to the lot he was looking for, he was glad to see a certain Chevy conspicuously missing from its driveway. He pulled up to a garage, new and modern-looking compared to the buildings around it.

  The roll-up doors were open, so he walked in. An
old Pontiac rested, comatose if not cold dead, on the slick concrete floor of the garage. It was waiting to be cured, to be fixed and resurrected and given its wings back. There were big Craftsman chests full of tools that would be used in the Pontiac’s operation. Chon looked up at the hoses that fed air from a compressor at the back of the workshop to the tools that now do the jobs that only muscle and sweat used to do. On the walls of the shop, there were posters advertising parts and tools, all shiny chrome, and some with short-shorted, car brand tank-topped women on them.

  There was a small room in the corner of the shop. The thin wood door with the cheap plastic plate that read OFFICE on it was closed. Chon knocked. From the other side of the door, he heard loud, almost unhealthy-sounding snoring. It continued, uninterrupted by his knock. Chon knocked again, harder. The chainsaw buzz breathing continued. Chon considered leaving and coming back later, but then he ran the risk of Andres Mejia being in. He could only imagine what Andres would do if Chon came and asked him to risk his certification, his business, and a steep fine by breaking the law.

  He gave the door a hard, open-palmed slam. There was a gasping sound—someone waking up and the shuffling of papers and the squeaks of an old desk chair. Goyo Mejia pulled the door open so fast that Post-it notes that had been stuck onto the wall behind him blew off.

  “What the fuck, man?” he shouted. “Jesus Christ. You trying to give me a goddamn heart attack? What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty,” Chon said calmly, too quietly to be heard over Goyo’s panting.

  “What? What fucking time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty,” Chon said louder.

  “Eight-thirty? What the fuck are you doing in my shop at eight-thirty?” Goyo had stopped moving around frantically. He put his palm over his eyes. He rubbed them slowly and tenderly.