by Lucia Berlin
“Ever think that maybe you’re prejudiced against Mexicans?” Paul asked.
“Prejudiced? Oh, for Christ’s sake. Well, I’m sick of these particular greasers.”
“Maya! That’s foul. Truly beneath you.” He was deeply shocked and left early for work without saying good-bye.
* * *
She built two trellises for the climbing American Beauties. Two lilac bushes, a forsythia next to the pump. A trumpet vine against the outhouse. Honeysuckle climbed up the clothesline pole. A Peace rose, a Joseph’s Coat, a Just Joey. Abe Lincoln.
Maya planted every bush. Every day she carried bucket after bucket of water. Pete leaned against the wall, drinking beer, watching her. “More fertilizer!” he said. He had dumped a pickup load of horse manure for her to spread.
Bathing the kids was fun, now that it was warmer, in the washtub by the pump. Paul showered and changed into his tuxedo every night at work. At first Maya took baths in the washtub on the kitchen floor, but it made too big a mess, took too many buckets. She showered at the Fowlers’ and after her shower watched Betty’s kids while Betty went grocery shopping. Twice a week the two women went to Angel’s Laundromat on North Fourth Street. The couples had dinner together a few times a month. Over dinner and later over coffee or wine it was the two men who talked about poetry, jazz, painting. The women cleared the table, washed dishes, got the kids to sleep, listened to their husbands.
* * *
Spring windstorms began, whipping sand against the windows, whipping the blossoms off the trees. Maya and the children stayed inside. The children were cranky, whiney. She wished they had a radio or a television set. She got tired of squatting for hours on the floor, playing games, reading, singing songs. Paul slept late, practiced long hours every day. Scales, never ending.
The wind howled, the heat from the woodstove blasted into the kitchen. Her hair stuck damp to her forehead. It was horrible to pump water with sand pelting her face. The water got full of sand. Coffee had sand in it, beans had sand in them. Butter crunched with sand. Sand beat against the outhouse and filled her hair and eyes as she ran back to the house.
“When in God’s name are we going to get the plumbing put in?” she asked.
“Look, get off my back. I’m working on new tunes. We’re working out new arrangements. The band is really coming together. You know how important this is to me.”
Paul went to work. She spent the afternoon making a devil’s food cake. She was taking it out of the oven when Pete banged on her door.
“You got to water more. Those plants are crying for water.”
“It’s too hard in these windstorms, Pete.”
“Well, they need more water. Here, I brought you a lantana bush and a flat of zinnias. Don’t wet the zinnia leaves when you water. They’ll get rot.”
“Oh … Thanks, Pete.”
The wind wasn’t blowing so hard after all. She went outside. Sammy and Max helped her plant the lantana and zinnias beside the steps. She watered the new plants, hauled buckets of water to all the rosebushes, the tomatoes. She’d do the rest tomorrow.
That night Maya and Paul had cake and milk in front of the fireplace. Outside the wind blew sand against the windows. Paul had bad news, he said. He had talked to a plumber in town before he went to work. It would cost a fortune to have a bathroom and kitchen put in by a licensed plumber.
“Maybe there’s someone out there who can do it. Why don’t you go ask one of the Romeros?”
The next day, after he went to work, she and the children crossed the alfalfa field to Eleuterio Romero’s. Eleuterio met her at the fence. “Yes?” he said.
“I’m Maya Newton,” she said, offering her hand. He didn’t take it, just stared insolently at her with his brown eyes.
“We wanted to have some plumbing put in,” she said. “Do you know of anyone around here who could do it?”
“Why didn’t you live in town if you wanted plumbing?”
“We like it out here.”
“Why don’t your husband put it in?”
“He doesn’t have time. He’s a musician.”
“I know him. Plays with Prince Bobby Jack? Out at the Skyline Club? He’s a good piano player.”
“Isn’t he?” She smiled, pleased. “Anyway, he works hard, and sleeps days and we really need some plumbing.”
“Ask my brother Tony. He lives in the last house.”
Romero land began with Eleuterio’s, at the edge of their road, ran all the way down Corrales Road to North Fourth Street. The land was divided into four three-acre tracts, one for each brother. The next two farms were Ignacio’s and Eliseo’s, much like Eleuterio’s. Flat adobe houses in the center of corn and chili and alfalfa fields. Children, pickup trucks, wrecked rusted cars in the back fields. Horses, cows, chickens, dogs. Red chili hung in ristras outside the kitchen doors in the sun. There was always a huge cauldron in the yard, for making chicharrónes out of pig skin, menudo, posole. The last farm was Tony’s, on the other side of the irrigation ditch. He was the youngest brother. He only raised alfalfa for his horses; during the day he worked as a butcher. He had a big stucco house, painted green, with a fiberglass awning. Tony and Eliseo were building a filling station between their houses. Concrete block, with plate glass windows. On Sundays all the brothers would park their cars in Eleuterio’s field. Their children would play with the other small children in the pasture. Eleuterio’s older children would sit on the front porch: boys with comb-wet pompadours, girls with crinolines, self-conscious lipstick. They would sit and drink Cokes, watching their cars cruise on Corrales Road. The women stayed inside, sometimes coming out to check on the black pot, filled with posole. Smoke poured from the kitchen chimney. The Romero brothers sat drinking beer on benches against the wall of the house, facing the mountains, in the shade if it was hot, against the south wall in the sun if it was cold.
* * *
The next morning, while Paul slept, Maya drove to Tony’s house. Tony wasn’t home. Rosie, his wife, asked Maya to come into the kitchen, to sit down, please. She sat down too, smiling. She was sure Tony could do their plumbing, she said. Proudly, she showed Maya the kitchen sink and the washing machine, the bathroom. She turned on the water in the tub and flushed the toilet. Sammy and Max were fascinated. “It’s wonderful,” Maya sighed. She and Rosie drank coffee, chatted, talked about their children, their husbands. Rosie invited her to watch Ryan’s Hope with her, but Maya said they’d better be going; it was about time for Paul to wake up.
* * *
Tony came the next afternoon. He and Paul sat in the orchard on a bench, smoking, drinking beer. Tony drew figures in the dirt with a stick; Paul nodded. They shook hands and Tony drove off in his pickup with half the money for the job, all the money Paul and Maya had saved. But still, Paul said, it was less than a third what a licensed plumber would cost.
The next day Tony came with a truckload of pipe. He and Eleuterio unloaded it by the pump. That afternoon he drilled holes in the kitchen wall and floor and in the room where the bathroom was going to go. The next day the two brothers spent hours digging a cesspool near the Russian olive trees. A wide deep hole. Max and Sammy jumped down into it. They climbed and made roads for trucks in the mounds of clay.
Tony didn’t come back. They saw him at the store. It was time to plow, he said. In the mornings Paul and Maya watched the brothers in the fields, burning weeds, fixing fences, taking turns behind a horse-drawn plow. Several weeks passed, and then it was time for them to plant. But by then it was warm and the wind had gone. It was nice to wash outside. Maya and the boys were brown and strong. They helped her weed and water. The tomato and corn plants were growing, the lilac and forsythia bushes in bloom!
Paul bought a Mexican hammock that he hung between two apple trees. Before he left for work the four of them would lie in it, swaying softly, watching meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds, a white-breasted shrike. Beyond them, above them, were the Sandia Mountains and the blue sky. All day long the c
olor of the mountains changed and shifted. Browns and greens and deep blues until at sunset they blazed pink, then magenta, melting into velvety purple under a mauve sky.
Before she put the boys to sleep inside, she would lie with them in the hammock and read stories. That’s where they were the night Pete moved in, pulling a blue trailer behind the Hudson. There was a bed and table and woodstove, boxes of dishes and food. The dogs, who had been riding in the trailer, leapt out to come greet the boys.
“Pete, we leased all these buildings. You have no right to move in here.”
“No right? I was fuckin’ born here! Dela has her own house. I’ll live where I feel like.”
“Pete. We have a lease. We live here now.”
“You mind your own business. I mind my own business.”
Ordinarily, after the boys were asleep, Maya would water the plants, then drink coffee and read in the hammock until it grew too dark to see. But she couldn’t read with him just a few yards away, banging the door, singing, chopping wood, hollering at the dogs. Fuming, she went inside and lit a lantern by the red chair in the living room. She tried to read Middlemarch and to ignore the rattle of Frances’s cart, the howling of all the dogs, Romulo’s laughter. Anywhere she went in the house and even in the outhouse she could hear their drunken arguments and taunts and joking. Fuckin’ A, mano! Or: Chees, ¡a la morí, ese pendejo! Pinche jodido, this chili’s too salty, compadre. Yelps as one of them would kick a dog. ¡Vayase, pinche perra!
* * *
Maya woke when Paul got home. She lit the candle by the bed. Even by candlelight he looked pale and tired. He smelled of cigarette smoke, stale beer, nightclub. He took off his tuxedo and bow tie, the ruby studs from his shirt.
“God, I’m bushed. Saturday night. Every drunk and redneck in town was at the club.” He got into bed and put on the black mask that helped him sleep in the morning. Before he could put in his earplugs, she said, quickly, “Pete moved in. Really moved in, a stove, all his furniture.”
“For crissake. I’m sick of hearing about Pete. You and Dela will have to straighten it out. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I’m exhausted.” He put his earplugs in.
* * *
In the morning she realized she had forgotten to fill the water jug. When she went to get a bucketful from the pump, it wouldn’t work. It had lost its prime. She went and banged on Pete’s door. He had been asleep, was in stained jockey shorts.
“Morning, sunshine!” He grinned.
“Hi, Pete. Do you have any water? I’m completely out and the pump’s lost its prime.”
“How come you don’t have no water? My mama, she always had a big olla of water. Ooh that water tasted so cold, and so sweet. Maya, is our water the best water you ever tasted or no?”
She laughed. “You know, it is pretty good water. Pete, do you have any? To prime the pump?”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
She waited. Sammy and Max came outside, hungry for breakfast. Pete returned, barefoot, in Levi’s and no shirt. He had a jug of water. He poured it slowly into the back of the pump.
“Pinche, no good, and that’s all the water I had.”
“I’ll go see if I have a pitcher or something with some water in it.” Maya went inside. When she came back out, empty-handed, Pete was slowly pouring a quart of Hamm’s beer into the pump. It caught; water gushed into the tub.
“Hamm’s will fix just about any problem you got,” he said.
“Yeah. Well, thanks.”
After she fed and dressed the kids, she put them and the laundry in the car. On her way to the Fowlers’ she passed Tony’s. He and his brother were installing the new gasoline pumps. She pulled into the gravel in front of them.
“Hi, Tony. How are things looking, you know, about our plumbing?”
“Lookin’ good! Me and Eliseo, we want to get the concrete laid here before the rains start. Another coupla weeks I’ll be by and you’ll be in business!”
* * *
After Paul left for work, she bathed the boys in water that had been warming in the sun and put them to bed. She took the tub inside, heated water on the stove, hauled in more buckets, and took a bath herself. She put on clean clothes and went out to read in the hammock, balancing her book and a cup of coffee. It was early evening and smelled of apple trees and alfalfa and horse manure. Nighthawks circled above the orchard.
Pete drove up and lurched to a stop outside his door. A woman was with him, a henna-haired sleazy tart. Both of them staggered into the little house. Sounds of fighting, bottles breaking, angry sex came from the house. Maya tried to read. ¡Puta desgraciada! Pete hit the woman then, again and again. She was screaming, sobbing. A chair broke a window. Max woke up, crying and frightened, and then Sammy woke up. She took them into the big bed and sang to them for a while until they went back to sleep.
In the morning the woman was gone. Pete was washing at the pump, hungover and puffy-eyed. Maya went out in her bathrobe.
“Pete, don’t ever do that again. You terrified my kids. It was disgusting. I’ll go for the police next time.”
“You mind your business; I’ll mind my business. I’m late for work.”
The dogs barked as usual while he revved the engine. He put the car in reverse, backed up, by mistake, and ran over Sebache. The dog screeched. Sammy and Max screamed from the bedroom window. Blood oozed from under the tire.
The dog was dead.
“Fuckin’ A. Poor little puppy. I’m late for work. Maya, you bury him for me?”
Maya sat in the hammock with the boys, comforting them. They had never seen death, were upset, fascinated. She dug a grave by the cesspool hole, wrapped the puppy in an old towel, let Sammy and Max cover it with dirt.
“Now do we water it?” Sammy asked. She laughed, was laughing and crying. That really confused them. They had never seen her cry before. The three of them sat in the hammock and cried. Then they ate breakfast.
Pete drove up, not in his car, but a Yamamoto’s truck. He dropped a weeping willow in the dirt by the kitchen door. For Sebache.
Paul got up later and they had lunch. She was about to bring up Pete when Ernie Jones came in the door carrying his bass.
“Ernie and I are going to jam out here before we go to work. Buzz Cohen might come sit in. He’s a sax player I used to play with in college, hasn’t played in a long time. He used to be great.”
“It’ll be good to hear you. Shall I make some coffee?”
“I brought some sodas,” Ernie said.
The boys were thrilled. Sebache was forgotten as they listened to the music. Maya listened too, humming. Then she planted the willow tree and carried water to the plants. She was stumbling along with two full buckets to the trumpet vine when Buzz Cohen pulled up in a red Porsche.
“Quick, let me take you away from all this!” He smiled. He was dark, handsome, sexy. Undoubtedly a cad, she thought, but she smiled back.
“You Buzz? I’m Maya, Paul’s wife. Go on in.”
They played every afternoon. Buzz found excuses to come into the kitchen, for a beer or a drink of water, or outside, to ask about staking tomato plants. She enjoyed it, the attention. She was sorry when the music stopped and the men left. Then Pete would get home, and then Romulo and Frances and the dogs.
It was July and hot. Field mice came into the house through all the holes Tony had drilled for the plumbing. Brazen mice, running all over the house all day. At night there were scurryings and rattlings and even crashes and bangs as they knocked over brooms, pots and pans. She put mousetraps down, behind the stove and the piano. What was horrible was that they worked right away. A few minutes after she’d put them down there would be a snap and a tiny wailing and a dead mouse. Crack crack crack. So she stopped doing it.
One night a mouse ran across her face when she was in bed. The next day she put poison in safe places in the kitchen and bedroom.
That night some noise woke her up. She lit a candle and went into the kitchen for a drink of water. Doze
ns of dying mice were reeling around the kitchen floor, crying in little voices. She screamed, terrified. The children woke up. They were scared too by all the mice staggering around the kitchen, like drunken windup toys. She was trying to sweep them out the door when Pete showed up.
“¡Hijola! What’s the matter with the mice?”
“They’re dying. I put poison down today.” Pete lit another candle and sat down at the kitchen table. She put the boys to bed. When she came back to the kitchen, Pete was gathering the mice into a bag. It was the first time he had been inside her house.
“Poison. Maya, you crazy or something? Those meeses go outside, Bolo and Lady’ll eat them and die. Your kids will find them and get sick and die. What did they do to you, them meeses? They don’t hurt nobody. Besides they’ll go back out when it rains. All they want is water.”
“Water!”
“That was bad, Maya. They don’t hurt you none.”
“They’re driving me crazy. And so are you guys, hollering and arguing every night, and the dogs barking. Crazy.”
“We’re driving you crazy? We’re your friends. Your neighbors. I’m your best neighbor. You come here! Come on, come here!” He stepped out on the back porch.
“Smell our American Beauties! Just smell them!”
In the cool night air the perfume of the roses was sweet and strong. Just underneath their heavy scent was sultry summer honeysuckle.
Paul drove up, got hurriedly out of the car.
“What’s wrong?” He glared at Pete, who stood there in jockey shorts.
“She put rat poison down. I was telling her she could up and kill her own kids, putting poison down. Am I right or no?”
“Right. Good Lord, Maya, that was stupid.”
I’m losing my mind, she thought. She left them both and went in to bed.
* * *
One evening it was so hot Pete and Romulo moved their table out under the trees. They played dominoes and drank beer. Frances was cleaning Pete’s kitchen. All of the furniture was outside and she was pouring buckets of water onto the floor, sweeping it out, singing “Mighty lak a rose.” Sammy and Max were in the tub by the pump. Maya sat by the tub, holding her book in one hand, trailing the other in the water. Nighthawks sailed above the orchard. Eleuterio had irrigated; there was a wet sweet smell of alfalfa.