Evening in Paradise

by Lucia Berlin

  “And my mama?”

  “She’s running around telling folks Jesus is our blessit redeemer.”

  I didn’t have to ask her about Bella Lynn, who was on the back porch swing with old Jed Ralston. His wife, mongoose Martha, we call her, probably too loaded down with diamonds to walk, find out what he’s up to. Then Lou comes out with Orel, Willa’s boy, an overgrown mutant who plays tight end for the Texas Aggies. The four of them start strolling around the garden, giggling and squealing, ice cubes rattling. Strolling? Those girls were half-lit, their skirts so tight and their spike heels so high they could barely walk. I yelled down at them,

  “Tar-paper floozies! White trash!”

  “What’s that?” Jed asks.

  “It’s just Mama. Up on the roof.”

  “Tiny’s on the roof?”

  So I lay me back down, went back to looking up at the stars. Turned my Christmas music high to drown out the party. I sang, too, to myself. It came upon a midnight clear. Fog came from my mouth and I sounded like a child, singing. I just lay there and sang and sang.

  It was around ten when Tyler and Rex and the two girls came sneaking out, whispering and stumbling in the dark. They loaded our Lincoln with two big sacks, drove in two cars down the back pasture to the field by the ditch where Rex lands the Piper Cub. The four of them tied the bags onto the outside of the plane and then Tyler and Rex climbed in. Bella Lynn and Lou turned on the car’s headlights to light Rex up a runway. Although seems like it was such a clear night he could have seen by stars.

  The plane was so loaded down it barely got off the ground. When it finally did it took a god-awful time to get any altitude. Just missed the wires and then the cottonwoods at the river. The wings dipped a few times, and he wasn’t showing off. At last he was headed for Juarez and the tiny red taillight disappeared. I breathed and said thank God and drank.

  I lay back down, shaking. I couldn’t bear it if Tyler were to crash. Just then the radio played “Silent Night,” which always gets me. I cried, just plain bawled my eyes out. It’s not true, what I said about him and Kate. I mind it a lot.

  The girls were waiting in the dark by the tamarisk bushes. Fifteen, twenty minutes, seemed like hours. I didn’t see the plane, but they must have, because they turned the car lights on and it landed.

  I couldn’t hear a word because of the racket from the party and they had the shop door and windows shut, but I could see the four of them in front of the fireplace. It looked so sweet just like A Christmas Carol with them toasting champagne, their faces all glowing and happy.

  That’s about when the news came on my radio. “A short while ago a mystery Santa dropped toys and much needed food onto Juarez shantytown. But marring this Christmas surprise is the tragic news that an elderly shepherd has been killed, allegedly struck by a falling can of ham. More details at midnight.”

  “Tyler! Tyler!” I hollered.

  Rex opened the shop door and came out.

  “What is it? Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Tiny.”

  “Tiny? Tiny’s still on the roof!”

  “Get Tyler, dick-face.”

  Tyler came out and I told him about the bulletin, said how Rex better hightail it on out to Silver City.

  They drove back down to light him out. By the time they got back the house was quiet, except for Esther, cleaning up. The girls went inside. Tyler came over, underneath where I was. I held my breath, listening to him whisper Tiny? Tiny? for a while and then I leaned over the ledge.

  “What do you want?”

  “Come down off that roof now, Tiny. Please.”

  THE ADOBE HOUSE WITH A TIN ROOF

  The house was a hundred years old, rounded and wind-softened, the same rich brown as the hard earth around it. There were other buildings on the land, a corral, an outhouse, a chicken pen. A small adobe squatted near the south wall of the main house. It didn’t have a tin roof like the big house. Smooth and symmetrical, it seemed to have sprung up like a dusty mushroom out of the dirt.

  There were four acres of run-down land. Twenty apple trees about to bloom. Dried corn stalks, a rusted hand plow. A thrasher with a curved beak sat under a bare cottonwood by the red pump. Water gushed from the pump when Paul tried it.

  Most of the windows were broken, the doors ajar. Inside it was cool and dark and smelled of piñon, cedar. Another pungent scent came from a curtain made of eucalyptus berries and red beads.

  Echoes. A faded envelope on the dusty pine floor. Goldenrod FOR COLIC in a yellow glass jar. Paul held Max, the baby, and sat in one of the deep windowsills.

  “These walls are three feet thick! This is a great house. I could play the piano as loud as I wanted. The kids could play outside with no worry about cars. Great view! Look at the Sandias from here!”

  “It is beautiful,” Maya said, “but there’s no running water, no electricity.”

  “We could get plumbing put in … easy. We never had electricity at our cabin in Truro when I was a kid.”

  “But I’d cook on that old woodstove?”

  That was the extent of Maya’s objections. Gratitude was still a big part of her feeling toward Paul. Her first husband had left her when Sammy was nine months old and she was pregnant with Max. It had seemed like a miracle when Paul came along and loved Sammy and Max as well as her. She was determined to have a good marriage, to be a good wife. Still only nineteen, she had no idea what being a good wife meant. She did things like hold the hot part of the cup when she passed him coffee, offering him the handle.

  Paul had just gotten a job in an Albuquerque nightclub. He was a jazz musician, a piano player. They were looking for a place where he could practice and sleep during the day, where the children could play outside.

  “Listen!” Maya said. “What’s that sound, mourning doves?” They were walking now in the apple orchard.

  “Quail. Look, over there.” Sammy had spotted them. He ran, chasing them into tamarisk bushes. Way off in the field a roadrunner streaked by and disappeared. They laughed, it was just like the cartoon, only he was black and white, startling against the dull brown dirt.

  * * *

  They drove down to Corrales Road to their friends’ house, Betty and Bob Fowler, the only people they knew yet. Bob was a poet, taught English in a private school. He and Paul had gone to Harvard together, were old friends. Betty and Maya got along okay. Maya thought Betty was bossy and officious; Betty found Maya insufferably passive and naïve. Betty and Bob had four daughters, all under five.

  The Fowlers were one of the few Anglo families that lived out here, in Alameda. It was farmland and orchards for miles and miles with cottonwoods and Russian olive trees lining the fields. Alfalfa, corn, beans, chili. Holsteins and quarter horses in dusty pastures. Alameda itself consisted of a church, a feed store, a grocery store, and Dela’s Bella Della Beauty Parlor.

  They all got in the Fowlers’ van and went back to look at the house. The Fowlers’ four little girls played outside with Sammy and Max while the adults looked around. Bob and Paul talked about putting in plumbing, where to get wood. Betty and Maya talked about the practicalities of washing and cooking. Betty said it would be impossible to live there with two children in diapers. No electricity? A woodstove, no running water, no bathroom? Flatly impossible. Partly as a reaction, Maya insisted that it would be no trouble at all, that women had done it for centuries. It would be fun, in fact.

  Betty always knew everything, so she knew that Dela Ramirez had inherited the house from her father. She even knew that the town thought the place should have gone to Pete or Frances García, Dela’s brother and sister. Even though they were good-for-nothings, they were older, and besides Dela and her husband had a house.

  * * *

  Dela, at the Bella Della Salon, talked to Betty over a woman’s wet head, opening metal clamps with her teeth. Betty had dropped her acting-school voice for a drawl. She chatted on with Dela about the Tafoya brothers, about leasing the alfalfa field, about Head Start and
about Head and Shoulders. Maya didn’t say anything, read National Enquirers, combed her hair. She was new to the local social rituals. Now the two women were talking about dividing canna lilies and painting the bottoms of fruit trees.

  “Oye, Dela,” Betty finally said. “You know of a house for rent around here?”

  Dela shook her head. “Nobody rents houses out here.” She put paper cones over the woman’s ears, wound a net over the pins and clamps. “No, can’t think of a thing.”

  “My friends are looking for a place with some land. Some place with low rent, or no rent maybe in exchange for painting, putting in plumbing, things like that. Clearing the land, fixing the windows. You know … improving the property.”

  “How much rent?” Dela asked, her back to them. She pulled a dryer down over the woman’s head, flicked the switch to low, medium, hot, very hot.

  “Fifty at the most, I figure … since they’ll be fixing it up. Can you think of anything?”

  “Well, there’s my folks’ place. Back down off Corrales Road. My brother Pete goes there sometimes. To the little house, not the big one. But it’s all my property now.”

  “Might be good to have somebody taking care of it.”

  Dela was silent, snapped the switch to hot, medium, low. The woman let the magazine fall on her lap so that she could hear.

  “They could rent my folks’. Seventy, though. That’s a big place.”

  “Seventy!” Betty scoffed. Maya leaned forward then and said to Dela, “We’ll pay that. But for the whole place, not with your brother there.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t come, somebody living there. He’s a good-for-nothing.”

  “When can we move in?”

  Dela shrugged. Anytime.

  “We’ll start cleaning it up, putting in windows. When we move in, I’ll come pay the rent.”

  “No,” Betty said. “A lease. They’ll need a lease if they’re going to be doing all those improvements.”

  * * *

  Paul and Maya worked hard for the next few weeks, putting in windowpanes, sanding floors, plastering, and painting. The Fowlers helped too, and the two families had picnics outside as the sun set on the Sandias.

  The last thing they did was paint the trim on the windows. Santa Fe blue. They made up a song. “Got the Santa Fe Blues.” Dipping their brushes in the paint can Paul and Maya would stop and kiss each other, happy about their new house. Sammy and Max ran in the fields, played with trucks and blocks, in the mud by the pump.

  The last day they came to paint there were three dogs curled up on the back stone steps. An old bulldog with pink testicles, a mangy bitch with a black tongue, and a furry black puppy. Their owner wasn’t in sight. Although the dogs barked at first, they settled back down. The puppy was gentle and let Max carry him upside down around the yard.

  Maya made coffee. She and Paul sat in the kitchen. She hadn’t tried cooking on the woodstove yet, had used a Coleman stove to make tea and coffee so far.

  “You’ve got paint in your hair,” she said. “I wish you didn’t have to go back to work.” Paul had had Willie Tate sub on piano for five days at the club.

  “Me too … except that we’ve really got the group together. Ernie Jones is the best bass player I ever played with. I’m sure Prince Bobby Jack will renew our contract. The club is packed for both sets every night.”

  * * *

  “Godawmighty what a pretty pretty house!” The woman had walked right in the kitchen door. In her fifties, grotesquely fat, wearing overalls and men’s boots. Long matted hair grew out from under a cowboy hat.

  “Pretty house! Used to be my house. I got my own house, see, over there cross Corrales Road.” She pointed, grinning, toothless, to a shack in the woods beyond the road. “Somebody burnt it up. Jealous. I got a boyfriend, Romulo. You seen him? It was on the TV with the fire engines, you seen it?”

  She was quiet for a minute. A stain and then drops on the floor as she wet her pants. “You seen Pete? You see him, you tell him, here’s his dogs. Too many dogs. I got my own dogs. Pete was born right where you’re sitting. I watched it.”

  “We live here now,” Paul said. “You go home now, to your own house.”

  “I got my own house. Over there, cross the road. Bottles!”

  She had spotted some empty Orange Crush bottles in a pile of trash, went outside and began putting them and other things into a grocery cart. She left, clattering down the rocky road with her cart, throwing rocks back at the dogs when they tried to follow her.

  “Take the dogs with you!” Paul called.

  “Pete’s dogs. They live here. I got my own dogs! My name is Frances.”

  * * *

  The Fowlers helped them move into the house. They drank champagne in front of a piñon fire and Maya cooked fried chicken and corn on the cob on the woodstove. The cornbread was burnt on the bottom, but it wouldn’t take long to figure out the oven.

  Washing dishes was a pain, carrying in the water, heating it up. No, maybe that night it was fun, after that it became a pain.

  Maya and Paul couldn’t sleep the first night they moved in. They made love on the Navajo rug in front of the fire, drank cocoa, sat in the windowsills and looked at the moonlight in the apple trees. The next morning the trees had begun to bloom! Overnight! They sat outside with their backs against the warm wall in the sun while the boys played nearby with the dogs. Smells of apple blossoms and coffee and piñon smoke.

  The door to the little house next to theirs banged open. Paul and Maya jumped, startled; they hadn’t heard anyone drive in the night before. Coffee with cream splattered through the torn screen door. The door slammed shut.

  Pete came out of the house. A massive swarthy man with long black hair, gold front teeth, green eyes. He was about forty-five, but he walked with the insolent beat of a teenage Chicano. He grinned at them, ducked his head under the spout of the pump, jerked up and down on the handle. Water gushed over his hair and face; his huge back shuddered. He blew and snorted, rinsed out his mouth and spat. He stood up, grinning at them, water streaming from his hair down his dirty undershirt. He spat again and wiped his mouth with the bottom of his shirt.

  “I’m Pete Garcia. I was born here.”

  “I’m Paul Newton, this is my wife, Maya. We live here now. We’ve leased all the buildings.”

  “Dela said you wouldn’t be coming here now,” Maya said.

  “Dela! I mind my own business. You mind your own business. I got my own house in town. Sometimes I come here to get a rest from my wife.” The dogs were leaping around him to be petted. “This old dog is Bolo. The dumb bitch is Lady, and the baby is Sebache, that means ‘very black rock’ in Spanish.” He grinned.

  Paul and Maya were silent as he introduced himself and the dogs to the kids. He went back into the house. When he came back out, he was wearing an army jacket and a cowboy hat. He was carrying a jug of Garden DeLuxe Tokay and a pan of cornmeal mush he put down for the dogs.

  He backed his car around the house to where they were sitting. It was an old Hudson with no back doors or windows. He sat there, revving the engine, drinking from his jug. Then he lit a cigarette, gave them a gold grin and a wave, and tore off down the road. The dogs followed the car to Corrales Road, then returned, panting, to settle themselves down in the middle of where the children were playing.

  “You’d better go talk to Dela,” Paul said.

  “Why me? Why not you just talk with him?”

  “It might not be so bad, Maya. I’m actually glad about the dogs. You are stranded out here when I’m at work. No car and no phone. I mean, if something happened to one of the boys … at least he could give you a ride somewhere.”

  “Terrific. Stranded out here with Pete. But it’s a blessing, really.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Maya.”

  * * *

  They didn’t discuss it any more. Paul left early to rehearse with the band. Maya and the boys walked in the orchard and by the ditch before she put them down for
their naps. She sat on the back step, reading, gazing up at the mountains.

  Pete drove up about five o’clock. He parked right beside her and took a bare-root rosebush out of his backseat.

  “It’s called Angel Face. Pretty, pretty pink rose. Plant it here, north side, so it don’t get too hot. I work at Yamamoto’s nursery. They ain’t gonna miss one rose. This soil is just bad old caliche, so you have to dig a deep deep hole and then put in good dirt and peat moss.”

  He unloaded sacks of soil and peat moss from his car, got in the car, and drove over to his little house. Maya looked around, finally found a shovel, started to dig a hole. She couldn’t even dent the clay earth. She was muttering to herself when he came around the corner with a pick. He let her do the work though, as he sat on the steps drinking beer. He told her how to drape the roots over the cone of good dirt, filling in dirt and watering, then more dirt and peat, packing it gently down, leaving the knob just above the ground. He watched while she carried four buckets of water from the pump.

  “Pete! ¡Órale, mano!” Romulo and Frances were coming up the road. Frances was pushing her grocery cart filled with beer and bags of groceries. Romulo was a tiny wizened man, wearing paratrooper leggings and boots and an aviator hat with its fur flaps down over his ears. He circled round and round Frances, riding a tiny child’s bicycle. Frances’s four hound dogs and Bolo, Lady, and Sebache barked and cavorted around them. The three of them went into Pete’s house. They drank and argued and laughed. They played gin rummy and drank. When they finished a quart of beer, often, they would bang open the door and toss the empty bottles into Frances’s shopping cart. When they had to pee, they just peed outside the door, then banged it shut again. Frances squatted outside and splashed, singing, “Pretty little fellow, everybody knows … Don’t know what to call him but he’s mighty lak a rose!” There was nowhere in the house Maya could go and not hear them.

  Paul didn’t understand when she said they were driving her crazy. That the plants were driving her crazy. Paul thought it was just great, how Pete kept bringing plants, almost every day.