The Wetback and Other Stories

by Ron Arias

  Today, in passing the messy, giant oleander, he let fly with an angry wad of phlegmy saliva meant for the unruly bush. But the tail end of the spittle caught on his jacket sleeve and his wrist. He shrugged, accepting such a self-inflicted slight as some kind of cosmic punishment just for waking up today.

  At the rear porch he rang the doorbell and waited. He was feeling his clothing for a dry patch on which to wipe his glasses, when the screen door opened a peek. He waited.

  “It’s me, Chávez,” he said.

  The crack in the doorway closed.

  “It’s me, goddammit!”

  Chávez felt the scrutiny. Something moved on the floor behind the door. “All right,” he said and yanked it open.

  A shiny-faced figure in curlers and an oversized sweatshirt stood with her legs flexed and arms raised, poised for flight.

  “Put your hands down,” he ordered. “I fell in the mud.”

  The young woman stepped backward and fled through the kitchen door.

  “Jesus,” Chávez muttered, “you’d think I was a rapist.”

  He slipped out of his jacket and threw it against the wall where coats, ponchos and umbrellas hung from hooks. Grabbing a towel from a clothes pile next to a washing machine, he wiped his face, neck and hair. The towel reeked of soap and stale sweat. He leaned against the washer and breathed deeply, hoping to relax and calm himself. His soppy clothes stuck to his legs, chest and back. His skin was clammy and he mumbled to himself. His cigarettes were wet. Stooped and tired, he pictured himself as spindly, underfed, minuscule. Finally he took his comb and pulled back his long black hair in brief, ferocious strokes. A meek line of whiteness glistened at the hair roots above his broad, brown face. As best as he could he wiped the mud from his trousers, then stamped his feet. The polish on the puckered leather of his shoes was gone.

  He removed four large plastic bags from a carton dispenser and moved toward the kitchen door. He turned the doorknob and pushed. Billows of steam rolled past his face. He stood focusing. Weapon in hand, Charlie the Filipino was walloping the potatoes into mush.

  “Kill ’em, Charlie, kill ’em!”

  Charlie sneered and said nothing. In the corner of the cook’s eye, Chávez the Mexican was moving on tiptoes toward the stove. An evil-doer. The janitor student lifted the cover of a large fry pan and sniffed.

  Charlie flung the masher into the steel sink and hopped over to the stove. “What the heel you doing, boy?” he screamed.

  “Just seeing what’s in the pan,” Chávez replied, annoyed that the question should come up for the hundredth time.

  Charlie was shaking his finger. Evidently Chávez did not know his place. He was a trash collector, a gardener. “Git your ess upstairs and pick up the tresh!”

  Chávez wished he could push the fierce little face into the mashed potatoes. Instead he patted the cook’s bald head and walked away, stopping to poke a tray of chicken breasts neatly arranged in rows.

  “You . . . you smard ess,” Charlie stammered. “You be fired.”

  “That would be a pleasure, Charlie. Go on, get me fired. I want to be fired.”

  Confused, the cook wiped his hands nervously on his apron and yelled, “Madmin! You crazy madmin!”

  Dragging his plastic bags, the student stumbled into the dining room. His ears seemed to quiver and he felt as if his brain had been pierced. A tall blonde was making a small, high-pitched whistling sound as she set the silver on the table. Chávez winced. He pushed his eyeglasses onto the bridge of his nose and asked her to stop. “It grates.”

  The young woman whistled louder, moving from place-setting to place-setting.

  “Like scratching a chalkboard,” Chávez said. “Please stop.”

  The tall blonde continued, her lips pulled back in a tight smile revealing a neat wall of white teeth.

  “Bitch,” Chávez said, barely audible under his breath.

  Suddenly, six feet of Bermuda shorts and swinging ponytail stomped across the dining room, blocking his way.

  “Move,” he said.

  She whistled in his face. Chávez tried to step around but she cut him off. It was an awkward moment for him. At a six-inch disadvantage in height, he was slightly built and hardly an intimidating figure.

  “Look, Miss Ponderosa Pine, that’s a good act. Now please move.”

  She studied the puny person before her. “Is the flea angry?”

  “Move.”

  “I don’t move for fleas.”

  Chávez tried to step around her again.

  “Where are you going, flea?”

  “Move aside,” Chávez said, “or do I have to . . . ”

  Before he could think to dodge, the blonde shoved him hard in the chest. Chávez broke his fall with his hands and lay on the floor. The chandelier glistened above and the whistling resumed. Standing up, he saw that his tormentor was now distributing porcelain dishes at place settings around the long, oval table. She carried a stack of the plates in one arm and deposited each dish with the ease of a Frisbee toss.

  She glanced up. “Did the flea say something . . . ? No? I thought not.”

  Chávez walked to the bottom of the stairway. “You jocks are all alike,” he said loudly. “No finesse.”

  “Oh, widdow fwee has his feewings hurt.”

  Chávez ignored the remark and climbed the carpeted stairs. When he reached the first landing, the housemother emerged from a doorway. A middle-aged woman with a stern expression, as soon as she saw him she shrieked, “Man on the floor!”

  “It’s just me, Mrs. Grovner.”

  “I know,” she said, passing him to get to the stairs, “but you’re still a male.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I notice these things.”

  At the top of the stairway he surveyed the long, crooked rows of wastebaskets, cardboard boxes and clumps of paper lining the hallway on both sides. Ahead, someone darted from the bathroom, her head and shoulders covered by a towel, a blur of flesh and white panties below that. As the girl ducked into her room, she knocked over one of the metal cylinders and a folded pizza box spilled onto the floor.

  “Knock some more over, why don’t you?” Chávez shouted.

  Most of the doors were open. It was the usual rush before dinner and the Saturday night party exodus, a confusion he tried to ignore by focusing on the collection routine. He tucked three of the large plastic bags under his belt and began stuffing the fourth one with refuse. He worked his way methodically down one side of the wide hallway, dragging the bag while gathering whatever he could to empty into it. Once, he kneeled and crouched down to gather up scattered used tissues and cotton balls strewn on the floor. The cloying smell of perfumes, soaps and deodorants twice made him sneeze.

  At the end of his first trip up and down the hallway, he wrapped a long twisty around the neck of the bag and leaned it against the wall.

  On the second landing he clicked the hall lights off and on and shouted, “Trash!” As he proceeded down the hall, moving aside now and then as the young women stepped around him, Chávez sneezed. Shrill voices mixed with a din of music coming, it seemed, from everywhere. He was sweating, his head throbbed, and he was thinking he might pass out, asphyxiated by the onslaught of soaps, perfumes, deodorants, hair sprays and other chemical and human odors. Halfway down the hallway, feeling nauseous, he hung his head over a wastebasket and waited for the something to come up. The fumes of an entire floor of cosmetics attacked and he became limp.

  “You okay?” a voice asked.

  Panic seized him. He felt the eyes of a thousand plastic curlers watching him.

  “Chávez, you don’t look too good.”

  “I’m okay,” he said, lifting his head and flipping the wastebasket contents into the open bag. “I’m good.”

  He stood and rushed to the end of the hallway and back along the other side, head down, trying to be as efficient as possible.

  Chávez struggled up the stairway to the third floor. He breathed deeply, pulled out
another bag from under his belt, and charged ahead, scooping, stamping and enveloping all trash and litter before him. Those in the way stood back or quickly retreated into their rooms until the hunched-over beast had passed.

  Trash became his enemy. He attacked the paper and plastic waste with a desperate ferocity. Once, he jumped on an empty cardboard box, ripping and pounding it flat. Then he jammed it into the black plastic bag he dragged behind. Then it was on to the next triumphs over more cartons, newspapers, wrappers, magazines, bottles and cans, which he set against the wall to retrieve later.

  His back ached and his leg muscles quivered and threatened to cramp. He stopped to wipe the drip from his nose. A shout from below announced five minutes to dinner. The sorority sisters hurried about, dressing, combing, borrowing clothes, brushing hair, checking mirrors, plucking eyebrows. “Out of the way, Chávez!” someone shouted. He obliged, drained of all fight.

  Normally he would have teased them. But today he was a charmless, grumbling calamity. He would not speak, would not lift his head. At the end of his third-floor run, he tied the top of the bulging bag and slumped to the floor, back against the wall. With glazed eyes he watched the girls rush by for the stairway. Chávez felt like snarling but settled for a long moan with his eyes shut.

  After a while he opened his eyes and could see his face mirrored in a pair of patent-leather pumps. He raised his head. He thought her thighs were too thin, her waist too high, her breasts too large. Margie was frowning.

  “What’s wrong, Chávez?”

  “Go away.”

  “What is it?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “What’s bugging you?”

  “You. You all bug me.”

  Margie ordered him to wait and briskly walked off down the now empty hallway. She returned with a wet paper towel, which she used to take the grime off his face. Then she felt his forehead, left again and returned with two aspirins and a glass of water.

  Chávez looked up. “Miss Efficiency.”

  “Take these,” she said, thrusting the pills into his hand. “Come on, all down.”

  He coughed, finally gulping the water. The aspirins, stubborn to the last, dissolved in his mouth.

  She bent down and helped him to his feet. Then she kissed him on the lips. “I’m late. I’ll see you after dinner.”

  Chávez watched her hurry to the stairs and quickly descend. After a moment, he lifted the trash bag and followed her down. His trousers, crusted with mud, cracked at the knees. At the second-floor landing, he collected another bulging bag and now began the slow descent to the next floor of residents. There he grabbed the third bag, this time dragging all three, bumping down each carpeted stair, pulling them down by their necks, risking a rip, which he knew would be disastrous.

  Slowly, he pulled the last taut and shiny bag off the final stair. He embraced one bag and lifted the other two with his hands and moved forward through the house lobby into the dining room. Normally he would have exited by the front entrance but he’d chosen the shortest distance between himself and the dumpster outside, thinking to hell with the housemother’s previous warnings about coming through at dinner time.

  Chávez stepped into one end of the big dining room, now filled with the young diners eating, talking, seemingly unaware of his presence. He staggered to the kitchen door, followed by the din of voices, laughter and the clinking of silverware on porcelain.

  Charlie and his wife, who was helping him empty the last of the mashed potatoes from a big pot to a small container, sneered at the forlorn figure moving toward the porch door.

  Outside, at the top of the steps, Chávez heaved his three fat children onto the lawn below. One of the bags exploded into a rainbow of litter. He looked up at the darkening sky, sighed and descended to the mess.

  On his knees amid the scattered trash, he tugged out another bag from under his belt, opened it with a snap and began to gather the refuse: tissue paper, Q-tips, cotton balls, crumpled cartons, cigarette butts, cellophane wrappers, a ripped T-shirt, used tampons wrapped in toilet paper. Instead of his latex gloves, which he’d forgotten, he wore an empty bag of corn chips on one hand and on the other a Ziploc bag he discovered was smeared with peanut butter on the inside.

  After he completed this chore, he wiped his hands on the grass, then hauled the trash bags to a cinderblock storage area where he flipped them into the dumpster. Afterward, he slammed down the lid with a bang. Then he climbed up the three floors of stairs, collected the bottles and cans he’d left behind and returned outside to dump his cargo in the recyclable bin.

  Work done and wearing his damp jacket, Chávez headed around to the front of the big house. At the bottom of the sloping front lawn he uttered a loud groan and sank into the wetness.

  “What’s the matter?” Margie asked, approaching from the front steps.

  “I must be crazy,” Chávez said, shaking his head.

  Margie coaxed him up with both hands. “You want me around?” she said.

  “No, I mean yes. I mean it has nothing to do with you.” “Did you take those aspirins?”

  “Yes! You saw me. I chewed them.”

  “Why don’t you go eat? Come on, I’ll ask Charlie to give you something.”

  “Charlie can go fuck himself.”

  “That serious, huh?”

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “So tell me.”

  “All right. I got out of bed this morning, got dressed, drank some coffee, but before I’m really awake, somebody’s knocking at the door. It’s the lady who owns the house. She says I’ve got to move out or she’ll call the police. She says I’m smoking pot. She smells it every night. It comes out of my room, she says, under the door, out my window. It’s suffocating. So I show her that insect stuff I burn to keep the mosquitoes away at night. I even burn a little so she can smell it. Nothing. Did I take her for an idiot? I explained that all kinds of people smoke pot like cigarettes, people walking by on the street. Maybe that’s what she was smelling. But she wouldn’t listen.”

  “So now what?

  “Wait, that’s not all. I went to Michener’s office to get my paper back. He tells me I don’t have enough footnotes and I’ll have to do it over again. You could see it really hurt him to tell me. ‘Sometimes footnotes are more important than the text,’ he says. So I leave his office and go over to check on my loan and they tell me my application was rejected, which means I’ll have to drop out for a semester.”

  “Can I help?” Margie leaned forward and caressed his neck with her right hand. “I can lend you something. I’ll tell my dad I need a little extra this month.” Margie took his hands in hers and pulled him toward the driveway. “Everyone wondered why you were so sour today. You looked pretty dirty, too.”

  “I fell in the rain.”

  The two held hands and walked around to the backyard in silence. Slowly they counted the thirteen steps up to the screen door. Margie reached for the handle but before pulling it back she squeezed his hand and faced him. “Listen, can you come up after you eat? Mrs. Grovner’s going out tonight.”

  Chávez looked surprised, paused, then nodded. “You sure? I probably stink.”

  “That’s why the Gods invented showers.”

  “Oh, wait, I can’t.”

  Margie opened the door. “What now?”

  “I got this thing, this infection.”

  “What?”

  “An infected sweat gland.”

  “So?”

  “It’s on my penis.”

  “Oh.”

  “I went to a doctor and I’m taking a drug that’ll clear it up in a few days. He said just not to irritate it.”

  Margie gave him a consoling look. “We’ll think of something,” she said. “Maybe you can use a condom. Maybe that’ll work. Come on, you better get some food in your stomach or you’re going to faint from hunger.”

  As he followed her across the porch, Chávez fished into his back pocket and frantically s
earched his wallet. For the first time that day he smiled.

  Canine Cool

  That evening the artist gathered his friends to eat, drink and talk about his works, which filled the big living room. Paintings and sketches of German Shepherds adorned the walls and easels or hung from wires and sticks as mobiles made of stiff tortillas emblazoned with images of canine heads. In the center of the room stood a large, painted terracotta figure, looking relaxed in khaki slacks with razor creases, white tank top and black suspenders loose on the hips. Surrounded by a group of smaller statues, the big Shepherd looked magnificent with its upright ears, attentive eyes, closed jaw and a black nose with a crackle surface that looked moist.

  At first everyone praised the paintings, especially the variety of scenes: leaping high to snatch a Frisbee, behind the wheel of a low-slung, vintage car, eating at McDonald’s, sleeping in a hammock, smoking in noir settings with a trench coat collar pulled up, even one pooch with a captain’s cap piloting an airplane.

  “Cool stuff,” one friend said.

  “Way cool.”

  “Órale, check the dude in the lowrider.”

  “Almost looks like . . . a bear?”

  “A dog, man.”

  “Yeah? Maybe a wolf.”

  “Yo, dog, it’s a dog!”

  “It’s art, man,” another friend said. “It’s whatever you think it is.”

  The artist entered from the kitchen with a big tray of cold, opened beer bottles and two bowls of mixed nuts. A young woman dressed in a black top and torn jeans turned away from a painting, grabbed a bottle, stepped around the little dogs and stood next to the big statue. The snout was level with her eyes.

  “What’s it made of?” she asked.

  “Clay,” the artist said.

  “Everything?” she said, stroking the head.

  “Everything.”

  “He looks so real.”

  “Suppose to.”

  Another friend, a thin, older man popping a walnut into his mouth, suggested the big figure resembled a homey of his.