by Ron Arias
“Hey, man, I thought it was over.”
“Almost. Just do as I say.”
Mario struggled with the body, lifting it over one shoulder.
“Follow me,” Fausto said.
Carmela opened the picket-fence gate for her uncle and a burdened Mario. “Tío, where are you taking him?” she asked as they slowly crossed the street under a broken street lamp.
“Further down the river,” came Fausto’s faint reply, “where others can find him.”
Eddie
I don’t think Eddie Vera had ever been in a fight he hadn’t won. Badass wouldn’t even apply. Maybe killer, or monster, or Godzilla. If you were smart, you made friends with him and he might have become your protector, which is what happened to me. That was back in seventh grade.
Eddie was a new kid too but the eighth- and ninth-graders already knew about him and left him alone. Only the pachucas went after undersized guys like me.
Initiation was something you just tried to forget was going to happen. All summer long you tried to push it away but you knew it was coming. The possibility sat in the back of your brain like a mud ball with a rock inside, hidden, ready to do you in the first day of classes. What the gangs and clicas didn’t know was that Eddie’s grandmother and my grandmother were comadres, and my abuela told his that he should watch out for me.
Also, Eddie and I had one thing in common that would bond us for life: we’d both lost our parents, his in a head-on car crash when he was six and mine at birth in Mexico when I was adopted by my “grandmother.” I didn’t hear about him protecting me until much later; Eddie himself would never have told me. If he did, he’d probably say it was no big deal, just one of his duties to even the odds.
So the first day after school these four pachuquitas came after me with switchblades, can openers and hairpins. I ran but they cornered me under the track bleachers, held me on the ground and pulled my pants off. Then a girl with her eyes made up like a cat’s told me to take my shorts off. I was thinking, “I’d never do that.” But she poked me in the butt with a hairpin and yelled, “Do it or I’ll stick it all the way in.”
I took off my shorts and covered myself with my hands. The girls laughed, and one of them told me I’d have to run around the track before they’d give me back my pants. But the girls weren’t going to give me back my shorts, which they said they’d run up the school flagpole.
That’s when Eddie showed up. He started kicking and swinging, knocking down Cat Girl before she could pull out her knife. He kicked another girl, knocking her to the ground. With this low growl, baring his teeth, he chomped down on another girl’s arm, got her by her big hairdo and spun her around until she started screaming and begging for him to let her go. Then he went after Cat Girl. In those days pachucas wore everything tight, especially skirts, so they really couldn’t run, which is what the Cat tried to do.
Eddie got to her right away, pushed her down again, and then made her crawl back to where I was by the bleachers.
“Say you’re sorry,” he said, “and I’ll never bother you again.”
She apologized, and they gave me back all my clothes. Then Eddie told them to leave so I could dress.
“Get outta here! And don’t say nothin’ about this. Understand? Or I’ll get you, all of you, one by one.”
After he rescued me, I never again had a problem. Same thing in high school. I saw plenty of fights but I never felt threatened, even after Eddie dropped out in his sophomore year.
We called him Super Cabrón, also Loco, Crazy and Trouble. He did time everywhere, even Soledad, for drugs, for dealing, for stealing cars, for armed robbery. When he got out of Soledad the last time, he looked skinnier than I’d ever seen him, hiding his tattoos with long-sleeve shirts and cutting his hair military style, not slicked-back anymore.
He got a job sanding cars in an auto body shop. For a few years he lived so straight and out of trouble that his parole officer became his best friend. I had moved away from the neighborhood but I still visited my grandmother’s place on Blake. She told me she started seeing him in church, which surprised me. Then she told me Eddie had become a Republican, which surprised me even more.
Somebody must have convinced him it was the way to power, real power, not just street power. So when the campaign started, there was Eddie in a suit and tie going door-to-door, giving little speeches about his candidate and handing out campaign stuff. When he came around to my grandmother’s house, I was sitting on the sofa watching the Spanish news about an assassination in El Salvador. Through the screen door I saw him open the little gate of the white picket fence and approach the house.
I got up and opened the door as he was coming up to the porch steps. “Hey, Eddie, that really you?”
“It’s me.”
“Man, what happened to you?”
“Whaddaya mean?” He looked surprised.
“I mean . . . well, you know . . . ”
He cut me off, not with words but with that scary, hard look of his. “Read this,” he said and held out a pamphlet with some guy’s picture on the front. “He’s a good man.”
I took the pamphlet. Above the handsome, smiling face were the words GET GOING WITH AL GOMEZ. Under the photo were the equally large words ADELANTE CON AL GOMEZ. Eddie, a big man, looked down at me as I looked at the pamphlet. I didn’t really read the inside but for a few moments pretended to check it out.
“Vote for him,” Eddie said, almost commanding me.
“Yeah, man.”
“Say hi to your grandma.”
“I will. She’s at the eye doctor’s.”
“How’re you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“College?”
“Yeah, I made it through.”
“Good,” he said, nodding and turning to head down the steps. “Gotta move.”
“Take care,” I said. “Cuídate.”
“Always do.”
He never turned around, just pointed a finger into the air, saying something about always taking care of Number One. And that was the last time we spoke.
A few months later, after Eddie’s candidate lost by a lot, I heard that he had joined the Army. He wasn’t drafted like a lot of guys back then. He joined up after he heard some senator call for more volunteers to join the military, especially Spanish speakers. They were needed in Central America and other places.
Eddie would have liked that because Doña Mercedes, his grandmother, said he had come out at the top of his paratrooper class and was now off leading a patrol somewhere. Later, she told my grandmother she got postcards from Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia. He said he was in charge of troops from California, Tucson, New Jersey, San Antonio, Puerto Rico and other places. He said he wasn’t supposed to write her this, but he was so proud of what his guys were doing that he couldn’t keep it bottled up.
Mercedes had seen a lot of the men in her family go off to different wars. Their pictures were propped up on top of the television set in the living room. I was just relieved that I was married, had two kids and was beyond draft age.
Every day there was news about the fighting in Central America. It was as if a big pit bull was toying with this runty little Chihuahua, waiting for the moment to really clamp down and finish it off. In my mind I could see Sergeant Eddie, weapons and gear hanging all over him, itching to protect the helpless, find the bullies and blow them away.
I think Eddie believed all that noise about revolution was just a smoke screen for a few guys to take power. It was king-of-the-mountain all over again, just like when we played war up in the hills or at the river. Good guys, bad guys, and whoever won called themselves the good guys. If you lost, you went back at it again the next day. But Eddie knew better. He never played war with us because he knew he’d never lose, he’d never have a next day.
I think he believed that people against the war were just being taken in. They weren’t born fighters like him. They were just people like me and my wife, people who needed protectio
n. So when American troops began to die, I was glad Godzilla was down there kicking butt.
I’m an accountant for the county. I like to see the world through numbers— easier to understand that way. Maybe that’s a weakness because I’m always trying to reduce everything to figures, though a lot of times I can’t. “Math doesn’t lie,” my favorite teacher Mrs. Cooper used to say. If you were smart enough and had all the numbers, you could figure out anything. Debts, credits, population, GNP—everything would fit into a balance sheet. She’d work out an equation showing how in X place, trouble would break out in a certain year.
At first, I liked the formulas but I couldn’t relate the numbers to actual people, people like my grandmother or me and my family. I couldn’t connect us or Eddie to figures on a chalkboard.
One day in mid-summer I came home, depressed by smog, heat and traffic, thinking I just wanted to sit by the fan and not talk to anyone. A cold beer and a thoughtless, numberless mind is all I wanted. But when I got to the house and walked in the front door, there was my wife in front of the television shrieking.
“Look, it’s Eddie! Eddie!”
And there he was, filling up the screen being interviewed by some lady with a microphone. He looked tired and grimy but his eyes were alert. He kept looking away from the camera, nodding or saying something quick to somebody you couldn’t see. Then he’d turn back to the interviewer to answer her questions.
“We’re here and we’ll stay here,” he was saying.
“Sergeant Vera,” the woman said, “your commanding officer has ordered you and your men to release the president, yet you refuse . . . ”
Just then the screen turned fuzzy gray, then black, and we waited. After two or three minutes, the news anchor appeared and apologized for the interruption. He promised further news of the commando raid later in the broadcast or later on the 7 o’clock news. My wife said Eddie and his men had overrun the presidential palace. This was earlier in the day. Now, Eddie’s commander apparently had accused him of insubordination. Eddie was in a fix. But I had to laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” my wife said. “They could shoot him for that.”
“They won’t shoot him.”
“That’s probably what happened, that’s why they went off the air. You think the Army’s going to let him get away with that stuff?”
Just then my son came in the front door with his friend from down the block. Both of them had sticks and were pretending to be soldiers, still shooting at the bad guys behind them in the street. My wife took away the sticks and scolded them.
“What did I say? No guns!”
“Mom, they’re just sticks.”
“You know what I mean.”
“All right, guys,” I said, switching channels and hoping for more news about Eddie. “Go play something else.”
“What is it with you boys and men?” my wife said. “You guys got to have guns, got to hurt people.”
“Hey, this is Eddie,” I said, “not you guys! It’s Eddie. He finally did it.”
“What, get himself killed?”
“There’s no way. I know Eddie and he just climbed a mountain.”
My wife shook her head and walked into the kitchen. The boys had gone out the front door and I could hear them making shooting noises around the side of the house.
I thought about Eddie and his commandos. The guy who saved me in seventh grade was some kind of hero. It didn’t matter that later they’d say he was deranged or had a criminal record the Army somehow missed.
So when the 7 o’clock news came on, all they could do was give opinions. They showed the presidential palace from across the street. Over the high wall you could just make out the top floor of the mansion. An officer told reporters that hostages were being held and the situation was “unclear.”
In the end, what Eddie did surprised everyone, even me.
As I saw it, he had gone down there and in three months got right into the middle of things. As a commando leader he excelled and finally was put in charge of the group that first dropped from the chopper onto the palace grounds. They blasted their way into the main structure, fighting the militants who were holding the president hostage. Quick and brutal but it worked—they got their prize.
“He escaped,” I said.
My wife Jackie laughed and pointed out that they were all killed. “I mean,” she said, “you saw the whole building go up, right there on the screen. The president got out but no one else did.”
I didn’t answer her, thinking about Eddie, knowing he must have figured something out, found a tunnel, some secret exit.
“They never found his body,” I said.
“But the bomb destroyed everything.”
“Whatever,” I said, certain Eddie and maybe some of his men had given the world the slip—before the rebels could blow up the building.
Months later, long after a new president took office, I started hearing about Eddie being talked about as some kind of Che Guevara. But they got him all wrong—he was no Che. For one thing, he wasn’t political, wasn’t right or left, wasn’t even a good Republican. Just a fighter, a Frog Town loco from LA. The president might have been a bully but so were the thugs who captured him. They blew up the palace, killed a lot of people, innocent people . . . secretaries, janitors, cooks.
The other day when my son asked me about Eddie, I patted my chest.
“You mean he died?”
“No,” I said, “I mean he had heart.”
“But he died,” my wife said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know he was your friend and all, but he died.”
“You don’t know that. I think he got out of there.”
“If he didn’t die, where is he?”
Our son looked at his mother and smiled.
About a year later, I dropped by to check on my grandmother. She said Mercedes told her a secret no one else knew. But she had to tell someone just to get it off her chest. She’d received an envelope in the mail with a picture of Eddie in it. No note, just a picture. He was standing in what looked like an Indian ruin in jeans and a T-shirt; he was smiling. My grandmother said she examined the envelope. It had no return address and was postmarked from Mérida, Yucatán.
Before leaving her house, as usual she gave me a quick blessing and made a tiny sign of the cross with her thumb on my forehead.
“Cuídate,” she said. Then she added in carefully pronounced English, “You take care.”
As I pushed open the front screen door, I raised a finger over my head. “Always do,” I said, picturing Number One, at ease in a hammock by the sea, feeling a warm breeze, maybe a cool drink just within reach.
Bedbugs
It had rained for three days and Graciela sensed she would never leave. Even if she did, the brown, muggy town would follow her home.
She lay on the thin, lumpy mattress and listened to the mad dog howl above the sound of rain hitting the metal roof. Earlier she had watched the animal chase itself, snapping at its own shadow. Someone in a plastic poncho finally collared the dog with a rope and hung the twisting, rabid body on a pole jammed into an adobe crevice.
Before the storm, Gabriela had fallen off the bed, pursued by what she thought were fleas. She complained to the hotel owner and right away he offered to share his own bed with her.
She detested the man. Not his intentions but the thick, slug like fingers, the grime around the nails, the sails of sweat running from his armpits to his waist. And there was the coarse tone of his voice.
“It’s this, isn’t it?” he said, pointing to the pink wriggle of a harelip scar.
“Yes,” she said, hoping for an exit.
“Come here, I’m not that bad.”
Gabriela shrank from the hand on the counter, almost laughing from fear. “Just do something about the fleas. If you don’t, I’ll move to another hotel.”
“They’re all the same . . . and the men will all ask you to sleep with them.”
“Th
en I’ll sleep with the fleas.”
Gabriela moved stiffly toward the stairway door leading down to the street. “I’ll be gone for a while,” she said without turning. “And I really would love it if you did something about the fleas.”
“Bedbugs, not fleas,” he corrected. “They’re everywhere.”
“So kill them.” She opened the door, then closed it behind her.
“All right!” he shouted. “But I’m telling you it never works. You can’t get rid of them.”
Gabriela picked a direction and stepped quickly along the high, sidewalk curb. She swung her bare arms easily, palms out. Her hands were large, feet slightly toed in, yet she carried herself with a tall gracefulness, a certain pride to her neck, her breasts and the curve in the small of her back. Even when tired, she never slouched.
As she crossed over the cobblestones in front of the small church, the man’s offer echoed in her mind. A filthy man, but most likely he told the truth: it would be the same at the town’s other two hotels.
Gabriela hurried into the shade of the station house and approached the clerk’s window. “I’d like a ticket for tomorrow’s train, please.”
The large woman behind the counter looked up. “What was that?”
“Tomorrow morning’s train to Sal . . . ”
“Speak up, I don’t hear too well.” The woman peered at Gabriela above the rims of her reading glasses.
“I said I’d like to buy a ticket for tomorrow’s train.”
“Can’t you read? The sign says trains run Monday and Thursday. Today’s Tuesday. Come back tomorrow and I’ll sell you a ticket.” The woman daintily shifted her bulk, blew her nose into a tissue and then straightened her blouse with a tug. “I’m only here to take in the mail,” she added, apologizing for her congestion and pointing outside to the small signs, one for the post office and the other for the train tickets.
Gabriela stared at the pinched, sour face for a moment. The woman began to file a fingernail. More than the humidity and heat, Gabriela concluded, the isolation here must produce that languid, witless expression in the woman’s eyes, a droop in her lips.