Before the End, After the Beginning

by Dagoberto Gilb

  We stopped in the kitchen by a glass dinner table, which was next to the living room. Below us was white tile. Junior opened the refrigerator. He brought me a beer. I wouldn’t take it.

  “What’s the story?” I said. “I wanna get outta here.”

  As he plopped down, he nodded over at the dude on the phone. I already didn’t like that man. But right then I didn’t like anybody, and especially not Junior. “As soon as he gets off,” he said. He put my beer close to me anyway and sipped his. “That’s García.”

  “Gar?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “For short.”

  I shook my head. “What an asshole.” I was mad.

  Junior stopped smiling at this and he walked over to García, interrupting him, making García lower the phone. I couldn’t hear what they were saying because of the TV. García stood up and they went on talking and the little boy paddled his feet and rolled some, happy with what was on. García looked at me. It was a little longer than a glance and he probably saw me shake my head. I was not interested in sitting patiently. I was pacing without moving my feet much. They talked close to each other’s face and hands moved and García went into his wallet. Junior came back.

  “Five minutes, five more minutes,” he said. “Look, you want some of this?”

  He actually seemed pleased with himself for getting an eight ball of coke, and he was unwrapping it like it was a real thoughtful gift.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I wanted to scream and make a scene now but there was the little boy. I forced a whisper. “You fuckin’ gotta know you’ve lost your brains!”

  “It’s not shit, it’s not cut,” he said.

  “Junior,” I said. “There’s a little boy right there! Don’t you even see that little boy right there?”

  The little boy didn’t look at us. The TV was there and we weren’t.

  “He doesn’t see us,” Junior explained.

  I lost it, and I lost it completely. “NO!”

  Everything changed. I probably was still screaming at Junior but I only saw him scrambling away as the glass of the table shattered after I slammed the thick bottom of the beer bottle through it and the shards scattered on the white tile. I didn’t focus on what else was happening for a short space of time, and when I came back around the little boy was not in the room and García was hurrying to take his distant position at the corner by the phone and the TV was off. Suddenly Junior was there talking to him, both of them afraid to even look at me, their bodies squirming when they sensed I was too close once I started really pacing, hard, on the creamy white rug.

  “We’re leaving now, right?” I screamed. “No more! Now!”

  Huddled, they were mumbling to each other, or so it seemed to my ears.

  “I’m not waiting one more minute,” I said. “It’s now, I’m fucking DONE! You understand?” I headed to the front door but before I went out I turned. “You hear me, right? I am so fucking serious! I do not want to come back here!”

  I left the door open behind me when I swung it open, the square light of the room projecting a path toward the parking lot. There were two more pickups now, and another car next to Junior’s heap. I went over and thought I’d kick it, kick anything, when I saw that light go out as the door was closed. I told myself this was losing it but I had to—I had to go back there because it really did make me even madder that the door was shut. I kicked it hard. That door didn’t open and instead pushed me back, making me almost fall, which infuriated me even more. I balanced myself and kicked, kicked, then really laid into it, and the wood from the jamb ripped away and the front door blew open. I saw them both standing where I’d left them. A quiet descended into me. I felt calmer. “Leave this open,” I told them.

  I don’t know how long the sleeveless punk and a bunch of the others had been out of the bar, hovering by the side screen door. I was meditating, leaning against the coupe, looking up through branches of an oak tree at the stars—it was a pretty night on the outskirts of Austin, Texas—and it was only then that I saw them. I was feeling so much better that I didn’t want to move yet, even though I’d finally figured what I didn’t want to have to do next, which was to get Junior’s car keys and get out of this place. I didn’t uncross my arms when sleeveless took a long route to the front door. I watched him, and as he got halfway into the tunnel of doorlight, the big silhouette of Junior started coming through the other way.

  He arrived smiling slyly.

  I moved away from the coupe. “Can you drive? Maybe I better take it.”

  It was as though he didn’t hear me. Pondering, he finally took a few steps back, into the line of light from the doorway, very close to a shiny new pickup. With his back to me, he fiddled with his pants until I heard the spigot splash of a urinating horse. As Junior arched his back a little, there even seemed to be a shadow of a horse’s unit. It was ridiculous, and despite my renewed dislike for this man, I giggled when I heard one of Gar’s patrons hollering about it—from a distance, not willing to approach.

  Junior jumped into the front seat as if I were in the car already. I hurried in. It was almost like he was fishtailing in reverse, and the tires spit rocks and dirt, but neither the tail- nor headlights nudged anything and then we were on the road, windows still down.

  “He came through,” he yelled over the wind, “and I’m feeling lots better.”

  Maybe he expected me to say something, or maybe he didn’t. Now we were driving and not talking and it was that bad kind of not talking. If I was a little drunk still, I didn’t want to imagine what he was while he was pushing a speed impossible for me to check on. Not feeling like rolling up my window, keeping it and the wind-wing blast between us because I didn’t want to feel as though I was sitting that close to him, I tried to keep my eyes skyward, at the stars above the staccato of ranch fences or crop lines. When I looked straight ahead, I tightened up with the thought of the force of a sudden mangling wreck. Looking upward I could make it more about space and time’s slow passage, death peaceful and inevitable.

  He had to slow down when we got nearer the city. Though I thought he might jerk to the left of the two-lane traffic going in, he only tailgated and changed lanes. But all of this slowed him down, and then we were back on the interstate, the pink capitol aglow on the skyline.

  “Hungry?” he said.

  I looked over at him even though I’d sworn I wouldn’t until I got out of this car. He was smiling. It was his sincere kind of smile, too. “Let me buy. I want to.” This was Junior grateful, generous.

  “You remember where the hotel I’m staying is?”

  “You don’t want to eat? I couldn’t have gotten it done without you, I know it.”

  “I’ll get out at the hotel.”

  “Come on,” Junior said. “Don’t be that way.”

  A couple of turns and the hotel was a stoplight ahead.

  “You scared the shit out of him,” Junior said. “He didn’t know what you were gonna do to him. Before you went outta control, I kept telling him you only wanted your end and I had to pay. After, I said I wanted it all to be done with it.”

  Green light.

  “He had the money, too. Had it and wasn’t giving it to me.”

  He stopped in the parking lot and he even turned to find a space.

  “No, I’ll just get out in the front,” I said.

  “Don’t be this way,” he said. “You were great! You were one scary Mexican.”

  I didn’t slam the door, anything. I was so glad to be back in the hotel, hearing the live piano music. Elated when I first checked in, now I was self-conscious and embarrassed, and I crept over to the elevator doors, hoping nobody’d make me explain what I was doing there.

  WILLOWS VILLAGE

  I needed the favor because I wasn’t doing well and I’d run out of places to stay and mostly money. I did
n’t really like it that my Aunt Maggy would know about my life, unless it was how great I was doing. I’m not sure where my embarrassment comes from, or if it’s only a man thing. Could also be my mom and the years of gossip, and since my mom was my favorite mom, I always want to side with her no matter what. Maggy was an all-spoiled this and did-all-bad that but got away with everything because of her looks—men lined up to do whatever she whined for. Even now, she was supposed to be close to fifty, and she did not look fifty. I don’t think many women look much better than her after thirty. Could be my mom didn’t want to tell the truth about Maggy’s age because, well, if my mom wasn’t as pretty, she was probably a better cook. Maybe Maggy was a lot younger. It was possible, if you ask me. I was here looking at her.

  I wouldn’t have recognized her if I weren’t at her kitchen table. Last time I saw her I was at most fifteen. She’d visited our house in El Paso a few times but you know how that is. I didn’t stick around for the family things once I was older, and even when I kissed her hello and goodbye, I didn’t see or hear her. I was a teenager then. Now I was a man with a wife and a baby and another one coming, too. I was a man, and I realized my aunt was a woman who, well, was hard not to look at.

  “I’m trying for everything,” I told her. “I only want a job that I can count on.” I’d told her about the three I’d already had. Two were in construction, which I didn’t really want and didn’t last more than a week, and the last, in a restaurant, which I only took to have anything, but it went from early morning to early evening, and I couldn’t look for one better.

  “You listen to Jim’s advice when he gets back, Guillermo. He won’t be away that long.” Jim was her husband. He was in Chicago and on his way to Brazil and he’d be gone for a couple or even a few weeks. I didn’t ask her what he did. He had a last name that I couldn’t pronounce. My mom would get mad at my dad for saying this, but he would call him a rich gabacho son of a Zabludovsky—that chilango newscaster—living it up inside Mexico. My mom didn’t like him making sexual remarks about Maggy, even if everybody did. I think Maggy’d had at least two other last names since she’d been married at least two other times. Her family name was Santamaria, which also made my father wink sarcastically.

  “Billy,” I told her. “Everybody always calls me Billy.”

  “Guillermo is much better,” she insisted. “It’s more mature, and it’s a manly name.” The jewelry on her arms and ears tingled like in a breeze that also swayed her long black hair.

  I preferred Billy. I didn’t like to be formal. I didn’t want to sound like I just crossed. I liked people to know I was American, born and raised. I had an uncle who was more tattooed cholo, who called himself Memo, and I didn’t want that. Besides, wasn’t she a Maggy? A grateful guest, I didn’t say more.

  She was drinking wine. It was from a big jug, not that there weren’t plenty of those other kind you usually saw in restaurants—a rack of them and some more sitting on the table and counter. I’d already said no thank you. I didn’t really know how to drink wine. It wasn’t just the wine, but the entire kitchen was loaded up like a mall gourmet store. She had the complete set of copper pots and pans, and a lot that weren’t copper, hanging from above the stove, she had another rack of wineglasses, and she had so many utensils that it was more like a tool shop to me. There were appliances, too. Not one blender but two. A food processor and an industrial toaster. A bread maker. A pasta machine. New, new, new. She had knives in several wooden blocks, towels, and the counters were weighted with so many plastic and glass bottles of this and that that you wondered what could be in the cabinets. On the space above them, Mexican pottery, Mexican dishware. On the table where I was sitting, a floral bouquet, a setting. It was beautiful and it looked real but it wasn’t—I smelled them and she told me. On the table and on the floor near it, a pile of unread beauty magazines, half in Spanish, a couple that were the same, but one was American and the other from Mexico—or Spain, or wherever, I didn’t know.

  “A beer then?”

  “Sure.”

  She opened a side of the silver refrigerator. It seemed like things would fall out it was so stuffed. She dug around—I felt like I should get up and help her take stuff and hold things—until she found a green bottle and somehow seemed to know right where an opener was. She gave it to me and I probably shouldn’t have stared at it first and then so long. It had foil around its top and I don’t think I could read the language it was in.

  “Jim loves it, thinks it’s the best.”

  I stopped what I was doing and drank. It had a strange taste to me. “Wow, yeah, really good. Thank you.”

  “I have to tell you about Lorena.”

  I nodded and I sipped the strange beer.

  “She’s been staying here, too. Downstairs. It’s where I’d have you stay if she wasn’t here already. She’s been having trouble. We’re very good friends.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m really thankful for your help.”

  “We’re family. You’re my sister’s son, so you’re my son, too.”

  I had a room up the carpeted stairs. It was a girl’s room, teenager, or like that. It was confusing-looking. She said it was her playroom and she was sorry it was a mess. I told her to not be sorry, that I didn’t care. I didn’t either, even though it was a girl’s room. There were two big containers of little boxes of dolls—not all in their store boxes—and a few facedown and sideways on shelves, and knitting boxes and an antique sewing machine and makeup jars and compacts and brushes and lipsticks—all in shoeboxes piled and stacked—and photos everywhere, all in more shoeboxes but also in a pile on the floor. It was hard to know where to put my suitcase except in the middle of the room. And the walls were wallpapered. That was more old-ladyish to me, a pink color, with red velvet roses. The kind of bed had a name that meant it wasn’t just the bed. It was also considered a couch, she told me. To me it was a bed and only a bed and it had lots of pillows, girl pillows, and a frilly cover. It was fine. I was happy. I needed a place to sleep. And the TV on the floor—like it didn’t work and wasn’t really supposed to be in there—it worked. I think there was another bedroom next to this one, but that door was closed and I didn’t look. There was a bathroom and then there were double doors, right across from where I was, that opened to the master bedroom. One of those doors was open. It was a huge room, as beautiful as any hotel, a king-size bed that didn’t even take up too much space. There was still plenty between it and all the dressers and mirrors. It was a lot better than a hotel.

  I was up in the morning, early. I decided to dress as nice as I could. I wore a white shirt and put on a tie. I didn’t have a sports coat. Besides, though it wasn’t hot, it wasn’t cold enough. And I didn’t own one. Aunt Maggy’s was in a tract development and it was called Willows Village. I don’t know why I thought about it so much even before I drove in, when it was only part of the directions. I did. And then the actual image of the sign on the block wall entrance to the village practically burned my eyes. It was trapped in my head and when I would think of Aunt Maggy, I’d see a droopy green tree and those words. Her house was right next to the freeway, which was a good thing if you were driving to work and had to get on the freeway, which maybe most everybody else did. We had highways in El Paso but nothing like this one right next to the village. Even in the morning, or maybe especially, it was loud. I couldn’t really believe how loud it was. It almost made me stop. But there was nothing to look at, to see. The freeway was just above and on the other side of the houses across the street. You couldn’t see the cars or trucks or motorcycles. Their sounds, though, they made, like, shadows my eyes wanted to see but couldn’t. So I got in and rolled down the windows and joined the noise, too, the looking-for-the-job driving noise, and I drove past the Willows Village sign and into the job world.

  There were lots of jobs in Santa Ana and around it when you looked in the paper. There were lots of construc
tion sites, but I saw so many car dealerships that I finally decided, I really made made up my mind. I wanted to be a car salesman. I had a high school friend from El Paso, up a couple of streets and right near Fort Boulevard, who told me that when he moved out here, that he started at car sales and the next thing he knew, he was making a really great living and he loved it. I tried to find his new address before I left El Paso. He’d grown up with his grandma, and when I went over, she didn’t live there. The people who did said they bought the house after she died, and they had no idea where he was. I just thought what he did was original and smart. Not that it was. Everybody had heard of car salesmen. What was original was to be one. And after the other jobs, it was even more original. So I started stopping at dealers on Harbor Boulevard and I went right in, shaking hands, saying I was looking for a job as a car salesman. I filled out applications, and I talked to a couple of managers, too. I think that I spoke Spanish was a definite asset. Definitely at two places. One used, one new. The new car dealer manager asked if I had a coat, a couple, even. I said I did. I think he didn’t like my white shirt or my tie—something in his eyes—so I decided that if he called back, I’d get something. I’d borrow the money. I thought I had a really good shot.

  I wasn’t sure if I should get back to Aunt Maggy’s so early in the afternoon or not. I wasn’t sure if she would like it if I didn’t, say, look for a job until the evening. I also didn’t know where else to go besides there. When I stayed with an old friend and his wife for a couple of weeks, those days I didn’t work, they were working. I could watch TV. I didn’t know if Maggy had a routine or not. I had a key but the door was a little open. I mean, it wasn’t closed. Still, I rang the doorbell.

  “Hello!” Aunt Maggy yelled.