Magnolia City

by Duncan W. Alderson

  “Your mother and me.”

  “Her knees are showing here,” Hetty murmured as if talking to herself.

  “¿Perdóneme?”

  “I just realized lately that I’ve never seen my mother’s knees.”

  “And you never will. She always keeps them covered.”

  “Why, Tiíta?”

  Cora didn’t answer. She gazed at the photograph of the young girls, their hair pulled back in knots, and said, “Don’t ever ask her about it.” She turned and flashed Hetty a smile, saying, “Just go meet Miguel.” Then she roared out so the men would hear, “Let me show you my studio!”

  She escorted the whole group into a long narrow room overlooking the river. Her recent works in progress startled Hetty: The quaint scenes of life in the Quarter that Hetty remembered had metamorphosed into something surreal—dreamscapes of haunting intensity.

  “Your work has changed.”

  Cora just laughed. “I can’t paint the Mexican market anymore. Not since Freud. And here’s my latest work. . . .” Cora said with a wave.

  The huge painting on the easel, almost finished, had already caught Hetty’s eye: A girl hovered in the crucifixion pose, trying to hold heavy books in her outstretched hands. She stood inside a high wall, a prison overlooking the river, or maybe it was a convent because above it nuns swooped from a scarlet sky and only one window in the building blazed with hot light like someone couldn’t sleep. The nuns were not pious, Hetty noted. Their black habits flared like the wings of avenging angels.

  “I call this one Sisters,” Cora said.

  Just as they turned off North Flores and crossed over the bridge into the Quarter, the Angelus tolled. Shadows fell off things like black smoke and the last of the sun burned for a bright instant in the retama trees along San Pedro Creek. They parked the car on Milam Square and set out on foot. The men unbuttoned their collars and rolled up their sleeves, welcoming the cool breeze that was beginning to stir the hot, dry air.

  With it came the sound of singing, sweet and melodious, somewhere ahead of them, so they wandered down San Saba Street and along Produce Row. The buildings were low and flat, but their insides spilled out onto the walkways from all sides. Color vibrated in the evening light. Strips of paper in orange and blue advertised grandes ventas—big sales—in every shop. Storefronts were a jumble of huge paper flowers, clay animals, striped serapes, and racks of papier-mâché Judas figures leering at Hetty out of the shadows. The scent of chili floated in the air from little hole-in-the-wall restaurants.

  A dark woman standing in the doorway of a bookstore asked, “¿Amorosas, señorita?” When Hetty objected that it wasn’t Valentine’s Day, the woman explained in rapid-fire Spanish that these cards were imported from Spain to inspire romance on any night of the year. Garret bought two.

  Hetty led them back toward the Haymarket, passing rows of chili stands crackling with mesquite wood fires and furnished with long tables lit by tin lanterns, then headed across the crowded plaza toward a sign crudely painted with the words MIGUEL’S IZE HOUSE—AGUA FRÍO. It held a busy corner of the Quarter, its folding garage doors flung open on both streets to let in the night air and the thirsty customers.

  “Let me do the talking,” Odell told them. “I’m used to dealing with Mexicans. We had some illegals working for us at Weems Moving and Storage. You have to use a lot of flattery with these people. . . .”

  A jovial Mexican man joked behind a big red Coca-Cola cooler swimming with sodas and the Mexican soft drinks called refrescos. His handlebar mustache drooped under a black bowler hat, and he’d thrown an apron on over his white shirt and black vest. Hetty could see that Miguel’s was more than a retail ice outlet: It was a local meeting place, an open-air refreshment stand, and—if Cora was right—the closest thing the Quarter had to a speakeasy.

  “Buenas noches,” he hailed them as they walked in. “¿A sus ór-denes?”

  “Are you Mr. Delgado?” Odell asked.

  He nodded cautiously, immediately suspicious of Anglos asking questions.

  “We were sent by Mrs. Groos.”

  His smile jumped back with the name. “Cora? Ay, entonces es un placer conocerlos.”

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Hetty spoke up. So this odd fellow is the man my aunt wanted me to meet?

  Hetty ordered a Tamarindo, but the two men pointed to green-tinted bottles of Coca-Cola floating in the melting ice. Miguel flipped a couple into the air and cracked them open on the side of the cooler so that foam came running down the side. He spiked the sodas with a bottle hidden in his vest.

  Whatever it was hit Hetty hard and, after her second spiked Tamarindo, she realized that she’d better eat something soon. They had sat down at one of the tables. Voices around her began to echo, and the vapors that would pour out of the ice vault when the door was open began to look more and more like Judas dolls dancing by with fiendish grins.

  When Miguel had finished slicing some watermelon for a large family, Hetty approached him. “Cora told me you would know where they have the best food around here.”

  “¡Sí! You must have chili con carne. This you will only find in San Antonio. And in San Antonio, the best chili con carne is made by Señora Delgado. You come with Miguel—bring your drinks, sí.” He signaled to an old man dozing on a wooden cane, then led them out onto the street and down to a small wooden house with a door open to the night. Once inside, Hetty looked in vain for clues as to why Cora had sent them here. It was like many of the restaurants they’d passed earlier: a small, simple room crammed with rough wooden tables and benches and an altar to the Virgin glistening with votive candles against the wall. The other diners had finished eating and were sipping coffee. Miguel pulled out a bench for his guests to squeeze in. He shouted directions in Spanish through the serape hung over the door, removing his apron.

  Shy and quiet as an animal, a woman slipped through. Her skin was darker than Miguel’s, and she kept her eyes averted as she brought them bowls of a steaming red stew, followed shortly by a platter of smoking tortillas freshly baked from corn masa. As she left, Hetty caught a glimpse of bare feet under her long black skirt. Miguel watched them taste the concoction, his smile exploding as they tried to cool their mouths with swigs of Coca-Cola. “¡Jejeje!” he laughed.

  “¡Ay, que picoso!” Hetty gasped.

  Once she got used to the piquancy of the stew, she found it delicious, a burning mouthful of chile ancho and beef hash, delicately spiced with cumin seeds, garlic, and the leaves of wild marjoram. She finally set aside the wooden spoon and ate it like Miguel did, using the warm tortillas to scoop just the right amount of stew into her mouth. He fetched his guitar to serenade them, singing old ballads about cinnamon flowers, blue doves, and a silver boat.

  Once the other customers had left and the candles had begun to dim, Miguel set his instrument aside and confided, “You came for something more than ice, amigos?”

  “We’re looking for mescal,” Garret said.

  “¿Vino mezcal? Sí—I can sell you some. How many bottles?”

  “Señor Delgado,” Odell spoke up, “I don’t think you understand. We’re not wanting to buy a few bottles from you. We are looking for the source.”

  “¿Cómo?”

  “La fuente,” Hetty said. The spring.

  “Ah, la fuente.” He nodded, then shrugged. “¿Quién sabe?” He spread his palms. “Mexico.”

  Hetty knew he was holding back. She told him their story, all about the stream of goods flowing through The Hammocks that had been dammed up once and for all by the Maceos.

  “Of course, we are willing to pay you well for whatever information you have.” Odell reached for his wallet and drew out one of the freshly minted hundred dollar bills he’d brought for just such a purpose.

  “¿Quién sabe?” Miguel shrugged and left the room.

  Odell whispered to Hetty fiercely, “Tell him you’re Cora’s niece.”

  “All right!” Hetty whispered. She watched the serape. Afte
r a few minutes, it lifted and Miguel peered at them from the gloom on the other side. “Soy la sobrina de Cora,” she called to him.

  His eyes flashed at her out of the darkness, like black pearls. “You are Esther Ardra Allen . . . ?”

  “De MacBride,” she said, tipping her head toward Garret.

  He rushed back into the room and came over to kiss her hand. “I am honored to meet the niece of Cora Ardra Groos and the daughter of Nella Ardra Allen. Why didn’t you tell Miguel?”

  “Has my aunt told you about me and my mother?”

  “Sí. Mucho.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Odell spoke up. “Now perhaps you would be kind enough to . . .”

  Miguel began speaking passionately in Spanish, his eyes burning into Hetty as he spoke. His words were for her ears only. He told her how much he loved his friend Cora and that he had waited for years to meet her niece, the lovely young mestiza from Houston. Now that she was before him, his heart was full, half filled with light, half with blackness. Cora’s niece brought him joy, he said, because of her great beauty and her pale complexion. Already, he loved her in his heart. So he would send her to the one free state left in Texas—he pointed at himself and at Hetty—“that belongs to us. There we have our patrón—and there he is for the people.”

  Hetty lowered her eyes to break the intensity of his gaze. “There is a patrón.”

  “Oh really? What’s his name?” Odell asked.

  “Señor Archer Parr. He is the Duke of Duval.”

  Odell’s eyebrows shot up again. “An Anglo?”

  “Sí—” Miguel pulled the bench out and straddled it. “But I tell you—he is for the people. He has helped us take our land back.”

  “Indeed? ¿Dónde?”

  “In the free state of Duval. That is where you must go if you want mescal.”

  “I knew it!” Odell slapped the wooden table. “I knew there had to be a pipeline flowing with cactus juice.” He kissed the one hundred dollar bill and slid it across to Miguel. “Muchas gracias, amigo. I take it you mean Duval County?”

  Miguel nodded, folding the bill into his vest pocket.

  “Where in hell is Duval County?” Garret asked.

  “Just there. In hell. The brush country south of here. Any particular town, amigo?”

  “Sí, San Diego afamado.”

  “Famous San Diego,” Hetty translated.

  “San Diego? We have to drive all the way over there?” Garret asked.

  Odell chuckled. “The one in Texas, not California.”

  “San Diego afamado . . .” Miguel repeated the phrase, this time singing it. “You see, it is a line from one of our ballads. Here—” He clutched his guitar. “I sing it for you. It tells all about los tequileros—the tequila trains.”

  “It comes in by rail?”

  “No, no, señor.” Miguel smiled, strumming chords. “Mule trains. One mule can carry eighty bottles.”

  “And how many mules travel in a train?”

  “Quién sabe—twenty, thirty.”

  Hetty could almost hear the mechanism inside Odell’s head, counting bottles, as notes came spilling out of Miguel’s guitar, launching him into the wailing rhymes of a border corrido: “Ya la siembra no da nada.” “The crops are not productive; there is nothing more to say.” He sang the whole song through in a lisping Spanish, then intoned an English translation for them. It was all about the “proud sons of Guerrero”—who import the only crop that is profitable anymore, la mejor cosecha, the one that is la que dan los barriles, “given by the barrels.”

  The last verse, Pobrecita de mi madre, he sang over two or three times, like a refrain, a lament. “Down the bars of this dark prison/ Flow her tears, so sad, so sad.” His sweet tenor voice hovered over the word for tears, lágrimas, and his eyes glistened in the candlelight.

  Hetty loved the song and made him repeat it several times so she could write the words down. The melody was simple, and the lyrics were easy to remember because of their frequent rhymes.

  He stopped singing. Everyone fell quiet for a few moments as another candle sputtered out. It was almost dark in the room. “Remember,” Miguel told them in a low voice, “we Mexicans believe anything south of the Nueces River is still our land. So be careful. And never go into the brush alone. Find your way to the ranch they call Las Ánimas. . . .”

  “The spirits,” Hetty translated.

  When they left the Delgado Cafe, there was only a single votive still burning on the shelf underneath the Madonna. It flickered across her face, and Hetty noticed for the first time that she had dark skin, like an Indian. There was also enough light to see the golden stars glistening on the deep blue mantle that cascaded from her head to her shoulders, eddying around the arms lifted in prayer. Hetty was about to ask Miguel about the Madonna of the Stars when he blew out the candle and whispered adiós. Then she felt him clutch her arm in the darkness and murmur in Spanish, “Come back to see Miguel soon—alone. I have more to tell you.”

  Hetty pulled her arm out of his grasp and stepped into the street. She wondered what he meant. The sidewalk was so narrow she had to walk behind Garret and Odell. She looked up and caught a glimpse of the Milky Way streaming over San Antonio and thought about the celestial beauty of Mary’s mantle. It was like someone had taken the sky just before dawn, when it’s starting to turn blue but stars are still twinkling, and pulled it rippling down to earth, like a circus tent collapsing. She almost saw it floating above her head, settling down around her as the air escaped from under it. Then she realized that Garret and Odell were talking about her.

  “Odell, no!” Garret’s voice was raised. “You’re not taking my wife into the brush country. She’s staying here with Aunt Cora.”

  “But you heard what he said, Mac. Anything south of the Nueces is still Mexico. We need someone along who speaks Spanish.”

  They were just on the edge of Milam Plaza, waiting to cross.

  “Don’t make me do it, Mac,” Hetty shouted after him. “Don’t make me call you a flat tire.”

  Garret kept going, dodging Model As.

  She ran after him, shouting, “Flat tire! Flat tire!”

  He was standing at the car. She came up beside him and looked into his face. His jaw was set.

  “You’re not going. That’s all there is to it.”

  Garret asked Odell to drop them off at one of the stairways leading down to the water. They strolled along in silence, following the flow of the river that washed through the town like a canal imported from Venice. Garret tried to hold her hand, but she pulled it away, hugging herself with her arms. Stone bridges arched overhead, and trees crowded the lush banks: fig and banana, cypresses spreading ancient roots, and weeping willows trailing their endless leaves into the rippling water. They could hear accordion music from a beer garden up above, its yellow bulbs leaving a long wake of shimmering light.

  The riverbank became too overgrown for them to continue, so they had to climb back up to street level and follow Saint Mary’s south to the King William district. Hetty led Garret up a crumbling staircase, through a gate, and into the back of Cora’s stone cottage.

  Garret stripped in the dark, and she heard the bedsprings squeak. She lit a candle, then undressed and wrapped herself in a kimono.

  She slid into bed and turned her back to him. He moved his body against hers, and she heard something crinkle. He had unfurled the valentine he’d bought her. Its ribbons were tickling her arm.

  “Are you my—what was the word? Amorosa?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t feel like it at the moment.”

  He kissed the back of her neck. He let the long valentine stream across her shoulder.

  “I thought this was guaranteed to inspire romance. I want my money back.” He pulled her kimono up over her hips and wrapped his legs around hers. She usually found that very sensual, but it wasn’t doing a thing for her tonight.

  “It’s not the card. It’s you. You’re being such a bore.”
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  He kissed her neck again and started that sexy whispering in her ear that he liked to do. Whispering so no one can hear me. “I can’t take you into the brush, baby,” he breathed. “Everything’s got thorns. They’ve got scorpions thick as ants.”

  She turned and gave him a long kiss with her tongue. He tried to climb on top of her, but she kept holding him down. “Remember the time you took me out to the sandbar and I was so scared?”

  “Mm-hmmm.” He kept trying to kiss her again.

  “I felt safe as long as I was sitting on your lap. As long as I didn’t have to touch the bottom. That’s what this is like for me, Garret.” It was true. She pictured them driving across the prairie until they came to the shore of the brush. Everything would crackle and hiss around them. An ocean without water, dry and fossilized. The chaparral was the coral; the scorpions were the crabs. But none of it would wound her as long as he lifted her up. She’d be like the picture she’d glimpsed today of Mary standing on the crescent moon, above it all. She would wrap herself in an ultramarine mantle glittering with golden stars, and nothing would harm her because she would have the protection of the sky. The sky was male—Nella had told her that once, long ago. It was the earth that was a woman.

  He was trying to get his arms around her. She knew if he succeeded she was lost. She pinned them to the bed, straddling him. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, yes. Okay,” he whispered, grinding his hips.

  “So you’ll take me? Promise?”

  “Yes, I mean it.” He rose on his elbows. “We’ll drink and fornicate our way to hell and back. Now let me up.”

  “Oh no, you don’t.” She shoved him back down. “Just lie back, señor,” she said, peeling the kimono away from her hardening nipples. “Mamacita’s got chile in her veins tonight.”

  Chapter 8

  As they headed south down Route 281 the next day, the river gardens of San Antonio gave way to gray-green hills of brush. Hetty looked through the dusty windows and watched the terrain whipping by: Everything looked as if it had been sprinkled with ashes. Stretching out luxuriously on the soft leather seats, she lowered the window to get a little air. She was not only hungover, but her body was still languorous from all the lovemaking last night. Cora had been right, that back bedroom was the most romantic. She fell into a trance of happiness until the pavement ran out, then every rut Garret rattled over made her head throb a little more. Odell drowsed beside her. To distance herself from his snoring, she hummed the corrido Miguel had taught her.