by Johnny Shaw
I unloaded the shotgun and put it back in the closet.
When I returned to the shed with my arms full of goodies, they were gone. They must have assumed that I went inside to call La Migra. I left the bottle of water in the shed for the next squatter, dumped the ice in the grass, and ate a Ding Dong.
I woke up to the sound of gunfire. An ominous sound in the city, but in the country just another piece of machinery running too damn early. Among the range of noises that one could rise to, the faint thud of a shotgun from a quarter mile away was far less abrupt than most alarm clocks.
A couple of shotgun reports popped again in the distance. Dove season was a month and a half away, but many of the locals appeared to view the legally defined season as more of a guideline than a rule. Dove season was the calendar event of the Imperial Valley, always starting on September first. It made the Imperial Valley Mid-Winter Fair look like—well, a county fair, which was what it was. I could remember Pop handing me a shotgun when I was ten. Not to hunt, but to patrol the fields. To keep any unwanted bwanas from trampling the crops. Even a prepubescent can be intimidating with a loaded shotgun.
There was a time when people like Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper would come down for dove season. Hunt in the day, then drink and gamble down in Mexicali at night. It was still just shooting birds, but something convinced me that it was different back then. The days of Papa and Coop had long passed. If I followed the sounds of the shotgun, I would find a group of drunk-by-noon ’necks sitting in folding chairs on a ditch bank in hundred-degree heat shooting at the bird of peace. The kind of thing that makes frog gigging look majestic.
The house hadn’t gotten any cooler overnight. I sat up on the couch, still dressed from the night before. The stink from my sweat-soaked clothes offended even me. I let my mind catch up to my eyes and looked at the clock on the mantel. If it still worked, it was eight thirty. A solid three hours of sleep.
I lit a smoke, cracked my back, and walked to the window overlooking the front yard. The trees and lawn had lost the battle and the war. The grass was shades of brown and yellow, the hedge was spider-infested, and the scattered trees were dying of thirst. One tree had surrendered. It stretched across the lawn on its side, dead roots ripped from the ground. With the cloudless sky and bright, shining sun, it looked like a beautiful day. Looks can be deceiving. It was sure to top one hundred. Egg-frying on the sidewalk was a regular summer segment on the local news. They reserved cats without tails and water-skiing squirrels for the winter.
I grabbed one of my bags, went into the bathroom, stripped down, and jumped in the shower. The water pressure was weak, and there was no hot water. Not that I would have used it. I made a mental note to start a to-do list of things to fix around the house, starting with the air-conditioner and the water. I knew my home maintenance chores would be infinite, but I had the time. The house was broken, almost overwhelmingly nonfunctional. What had once been a beautiful house was now closer to an enormous lean-to.
A dozen years ago, when it was just me and Pop, this place was never going to make the cover of Architectural Digest. Two men living together, contented pigs in our own mud. However, I had my chores, and they kept the house from getting past a certain point. It was apparent that after I left, Pop had no reason to keep the place up even to that minimum degree. The house would be laughed at by Mediocre Housekeeping magazine. If something hadn’t bothered Pop, he hadn’t bothered fixing it.
The air-conditioning was busted, the water pressure was weak, the hot water heater didn’t work, the basement was flooded, the flooded basement was plagued with frogs, the paint and stucco were chipping, some kind of animal was living in the crawl space, some other kind of animal was dead in the air ducts, the electrical system was spotty, the roof leaked, and I was pretty sure there was a beehive in one of the walls because I could feel the humming vibrations with my hand. All that under stacks of magazines, catalogs, books, and ten-year-old mail that was covered in a quarter-inch of dust.
It couldn’t hurt to keep busy. Might as well clean, organize, and repair. I liked to believe that I was doing it so that when Pop got better and came home, he would have this great house to return to. But that kind of rationalization only reminded me of the truth. It was better if it was just a hobby and a way to pass the time.
I got out of the shower and toweled off. Looking into the mirror, I decided not to shave my four-day growth. I’d shave it when it started to itch. With dark hair to my shoulders and a stubbly not-quite-a-beard, I wasn’t winning any beauty contests. But what I lacked in looks, I more than made up for with a complete absence of style. I got dressed in jeans, a frayed T-shirt, and my beat-up steel toes.
I made a pass through the house. I wasn’t looking for anything, but convincing myself that I was back. Every piece of furniture and every book on the shelf was the same as it was twelve years ago. I could remember when Pop brought home the couch, brand-new and seventies orange. It was ugly, but comfortable. Now the stuffing was poking out and every edge was tattered. The objects were the same, but worn and dusty. It was like I had woken up in a museum dedicated to my childhood. Not a good museum, more like a back-of-a-gas-station roadside attraction dedicated to Spam or yarn.
I decided to grab a bite to eat in Holtville before heading into El Centro. Driving down what used to be Orchard Road, but was now a four-lane NAFTA truck route, I let the fields of lettuce, alfalfa, and wheat blur past me. It’s about seven miles into town, a familiar straight line.
Counting the rows, I was reminded that I had to check in with Mike about the farm. The moment Pop got sick, my cousin Mike had stepped up and took over the day-to-day of Pop’s crops. A helluva thing to do, considering he was my cousin on my mother’s side and my mother died when I was born. We weren’t close. We barely knew each other. But down here, family is family.
I decided to put off seeing him until the next day. It’s not like farming held any urgency. And I wasn’t sure what I was going to do anyway. I hadn’t worked the fields since high school, and I wasn’t particularly a good farmer then. My friends in different cities found it charming, even romantic, that I grew up on a farm. It was neither. Ask a farmer.
In my youth, Holtville had fought off the decay and erosion of the desert better than its neighboring towns. With only four thousand people, it had been able to maintain its all-American appearance. A big white gazebo shared space with large cedars in the two-block park that made up the center of town. Despite the box stores in El Centro and Calexico, the locals had still shopped at the small independent stores that circled the park. The older generation had been willing to spend a few extra bucks in an effort to keep their town from losing its personality.
Not anymore. Times were tougher. Sammy’s Hardware, Walker’s Barbershop, Good Health Pharmacy, and the five-and-dime, all important parts of my childhood, were gone. Driving down Holt Road, there wasn’t much that I remembered. There weren’t many businesses still open, except the bars and churches.
Luckily, one mainstay persevered. The J&M Café. From the outside, it looked like just another grease pit truck stop. And in the interest of full disclosure, that’s what it looked like on the inside, too. Because that’s exactly what it was. But to the truckers and locals, it was a social center. I had never been inside J&M without seeing someone I knew. Which isn’t saying much, as I knew all the waitresses. And these were waitresses that I would happily chat with, more like family, like great-aunts.
The waitress with the big red wig seated me. She had been working there since I was a kid, and I’d never known her name. I called her “Ma’am.” I always imagined that her name was in the Gertie or Flossie family. I could have easily asked, but I didn’t care that much and Ma’am was a good nickname. Flirtatious and sassy with the truckers even into her seventies, Ma’am was the heart and soul of J&M. She poured me a cup of coffee without asking. It was morning. I was a man. What else was I going to drink? I wondered if she would recognize me.
It didn
’t take long to get my answer.
“You’re Big Jack’s boy. I heard about the cancer. Sad. How’s he doing?” she asked. Not chatty, but sincerely interested. I realized how removed I had been, the last one to learn of Pop’s condition. It made me feel like shit.
“I’m going to see him. After breakfast,” I said, not really answering her question.
“I’ll bet he’s giving them nurses hell. Big Jack, always with a joke and a smile.”
“That’s my Pop, Ma’am.” I smiled.
“Well, you tell him I said hey there. You tell him I’m keeping the coffee hot.” As if she knew I didn’t know her name and didn’t want to reveal it now after all these years. I was onto her sick game.
I ordered a short stack of pancakes and a side of bacon, and then I grabbed a copy of the Holtville Tribune from the rack in the front. The Tribune, Holtville’s weekly newspaper, was always worth a look. In the summer with school out and no high school sports to report, the paper was stretching to fill its voluminous twenty pages. Digging through the padded and boring city council news, I found two of my favorite newspaper columns on the planet: the Finley Elementary School Lunch Menu (Friday—Pancho Villa Salad?) and more importantly, the Police Briefs.
The Police Briefs were a roundup of everyone who had called the Holtville Police Department during the preceding week. From petty theft to locking your keys in your car, it was a glorious page of embarrassment and amusement.
July 17–4:12 pm–Gladys Wells of Walnut Street reported two strangers walking through her neighborhood. A patrol car was sent to the scene, and after a brief interview, it was determined that the two men were visiting relatives in the area.
July 19–11:07 pm–Pinky’s Bar and Grill reported that an altercation between two women had broken out in the parking lot. Officers were sent to the scene. No arrests were made. Officers instructed the management to clean up the broken glass.
“Here you go, sugar.” Ma’am set my food in front of me. I dug in, saving the bacon for last. Some people “accidentally” let their syrup touch their bacon, ashamed of the combination’s deliciousness. I pour the syrup right on top of the bacon. That’s the kind of rebel I am.
As I took a bite, a hand came down hard on my shoulder. “We ain’t partial to no longhairs ’round these here parts.”
It wasn’t the first time I had heard this kind of statement. But it was unusually early for shit-kicking and so shockingly cliché that I was more amused than threatened.
I looked up at the smiling face of Bobby Maves. “You ain’t from around here, are you, boy?” He affected his best redneck accent on top of his normal redneck accent.
“Holy shit” was the only comeback that came to mind, so that’s what I said with a laugh and a smile. Bobby Maves. Mexican on the outside, hillbilly on the inside.
I half-stood in my seat and shook Bobby’s hand. With a nod I offered him the booth across from me. Bobby sat, his eyes on me the whole time. He had to lean his head back to see through the slits under his sagging lids. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or tired. Maybe both.
Bobby was maybe five-eight, wiry, and looked like he didn’t have an ounce of body fat on him. The most striking aspect of Bobby was his hair. It was already completely gray, almost white, styled in a high pompadour. It contrasted sharply against his brown skin. He could easily be mistaken for a Mexican Elvis impersonator.
His father was German Swiss and his mother Mexican. But despite his dark skin, Bobby didn’t consider himself Mexican. As he had told me once, “Down here, if your parents speak Mexican in the house, then you’re Mexican. If your parents speak American, then you’re white.” It wasn’t important to me, but to Bobby there was a distinction. It was a way to separate the fifth-generation California Mexicans from the recent arrivals.
Bobby had the familiar look of a night of irrigating: bloodshot eyes, spatters of mud on his shirt and shorts, and his feet only in socks. He had left his boots outside. By the time he was done with his breakfast, the heat would cake the mud and he could just knock it off.
“How you been, Bobby?” I said, genuinely interested, but coming out a little generic.
“I still live in Holtville—how good could I be?”
“Yeah, but it’s a dry heat” was the best I could come up with. It was still early for me.
Bobby gave my mediocre joke more of a laugh than it deserved. Not because he was humoring me, but because Bobby thought I was hilarious. He always had. Growing up, I was the funny kid and Bobby was the bully with the giggles. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. I could run off at the mouth and Bobby was always there to pull me out of the fire and enjoy doing it. I had never seen anyone more at peace with violence than Bobby Maves. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He just liked to fight. And he was good at it.
“Heard about your old man,” Bobby said, his laughter dying down and his face doing its best to display sobriety. “I was thinking about going to see him, but I didn’t know if they’d let me or if I should bring flowers or shit like that. I don’t even know what I’d say or if he wants to see people.” Bobby was definitely drunk, swaying a little in his seat, grasping pauses between sentences.
“Pop’d get a kick out of seeing you. Anytime you want to go.”
“I like your dad. Big Jack never treats me like a fuckup. Never tells me I drink too much or I got to be more responsible, not like the other old-timers. Always makes me feel smarter than I am ’cause he talks at me like I’m smart.”
It was nice to hear Bobby talk about Pop in the present tense. People could get in the habit of talking about the dying in the past tense, as if they were already gone. It’s easy to see someone as a dying person, not as a living person facing death.
Bobby turned back to me. “Cancer, right?”
“No, I’m an Aries,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. I still had the whole day and didn’t want the conversation to get too serious. Ten o’clock was too early for maudlin.
The corners of Bobby’s mouth rose, but he couldn’t muster a laugh. The topic was serious to him, and he couldn’t make the turn that quickly. I kept it short. “Yeah. In his gut. Nothing left to do, from what I’m told. Another surgery would kill him.”
“Sucks.” Bobby stared ahead, summarizing the situation perfectly. We bobbed our heads, nodding like idiots at nothing.
“Weird being back?” Bobby asked.
“I’d say yeah, but I still haven’t got my head around it. Nothing’s changed and everything’s changed.”
“How long has it been? Since we seen each other?”
I thought about it for a minute. “At least five years. When you got married?”
“Yeah. That didn’t take, did it? Fun wedding, though.”
“The parts I remember.”
“Why haven’t we kept in touch?” Bobby didn’t sound hurt, just interested.
“Sorry, man. I don’t know. You get absorbed in your own shit, you know. Hard enough keeping your present-tense shit in order. But you’re right, I should’ve called more.”
“Should? No. Shit, I know how to work a phone. On me too. Just saying, you know, would’ve been nice to catch up or what-not. A fucking laugh, right? You’re in the city with shit to do, having fun. I live here. I’m bored as shit. I missed you, fucker.”
“Yeah. Same here,” I said, wondering why I hadn’t called.
I didn’t have many friends like Bobby. Even if I hadn’t seen him in years and didn’t really know who he was as an adult, I knew that some things didn’t change. I knew that Bobby was someone I trusted without reservation. I knew that face time wasn’t a necessity of our friendship. And I knew that the trust between us ran deep, the product of teenage violence and secrets.
“You want anything, Bobby?” Ma’am shouted from near the register.
“Just a night on the town with you, beautiful,” Bobby hollered back.
“Soon as my husband kicks, I’ll take you up on that,” she laughed.
�
�Well, in the meantime, I’ll settle for some coffee and a Denver ommy. Thanks, hon.” Bobby blew Ma’am a kiss.
Bobby turned to me. “Hey, man. What’s that waitress’s name? I can’t never remember. Always just call her beautiful or honey or sexy or some such.”
“I don’t think she has a name.”
Bobby raised an eyebrow, but didn’t bother to ask. “When you heading back to—I don’t even know where you live. When you heading back?”
“I ain’t. I’m here. At the house. For a while. Until…for a while. For as long as need be. I’m back.”
Bobby slammed both hands on the table, startling me and splashing my coffee onto the tabletop. “Jimmy fucking Veeder is back,” Bobby shouted, turning most of the heads in the J&M.
Bobby and I shot the shit for another half hour. I had kept up with Bobby through Pop, my conduit for all Imperial Valley news. I had heard about his divorce, but I didn’t know if it was a good one or a bad one, so I didn’t bring it up. We kept it light. We talked movies. Our tastes were the same. Music—our tastes had a little overlap. And books, which was a new topic. Bobby hadn’t been much of a reader in the past, but in his words, “I was so bored one day, I picked up a book. Kept picking them up. I’m still that bored.”
When Bobby started to fade from too little sleep and too much drink, we pledged to continue our conversation another time. We exchanged cell phone numbers and agreed to meet up and grab a beer or ten. I could use a bender, and some of my best drunks had been with Bobby, at least six of my top ten.
I paid, gave Ma’am a wave from across the room, and walked out into the heat of the morning. The steering wheel and gearshift on my truck burned my hands as I made the drive into El Centro to see Pop.
The twelve-mile stretch between Holtville and El Centro was mostly fields and power lines until the El Centro city limits. For a mile stretch east of town, truck yards and packing sheds lined the road. Even though the road was paved, a continual cloud of dust hazed the air from the tractors returning from the fields.