So Long

by Lucia Berlin

  After Sara paid him for washing windows she’d always give him some god-awful old clothes of Eddie’s. He’d say Thank you, ma’am, real polite, but I used to be sure he threw them in the garbage on his way out. Maybe she was a symbol or something. A jump suit with a broken zipper the last straw?

  “Hello, Emory, how are you?”

  “Just fine, and you? I saw that Miss Sara’s son was living here now…wondered if he needed his windows washed.”

  “No. I’m cleaning for him now, and do the windows too. Why don’t you try at his office, on Prince Street?”

  “Good idea. Thanks,” he said. He smiled and left.

  OK, I said to myself. Pull yourself together and cut this suspect business out right now.

  I went in and got some coffee, went back to sit in the garden. Oh. The Japanese iris were in bloom. Sara, if only you could see them.

  She had called me several times that day, telling me about his threats to her. I was impatient with her about Leon by then … why didn’t she just break up with him? I listened to her and I said things like, call the police. Don’t answer your phone.

  When she called why didn’t I say, “Come right on over to my house”? Why didn’t I say, “Sara, pack your bag … Let’s get out of town.”

  I have no alibi for the night of the crime.

  Strays

  Got into Albuquerque from Baton Rouge. It was about two in the morning. Whipping wind. That’s what the wind does in Albuquerque. I hung out at the Greyhound station until a cab driver showed up who had so many prison tattoos I figured I could score & he’d tell me where to stay. He turned me on, took me to a pad, a noria they call it there, in the south valley. I lucked out meeting him, Noodles. I couldn’t have picked a worse place to run to than Albuquerque. Chicanos control the town. Mayates, they can’t score at all, are lucky not to be killed. Some white guys, with enough long joint time to have been tested. White women, forget it, they don’t last. Only way, and Noodles helped me there too, was to get hooked up with a big connection, like I did with Nacho. Then nobody could hurt me. What a pitiful thing I just said. Nacho was a saint, which may seem hard to believe. He did a lot for Brown Berets, for the whole Chicano community, young people, old people. I don’t know where he is now. He skipped bail. I mean a huge bail. He shot a narc, Marquez, five times, in the back. The jury didn’t think he was a saint, but Robin Hood maybe, because they only gave him manslaughter. I wish I knew where he was. I got busted about the same time, for needle marks.

  All this happened many years ago or I couldn’t even be talking about it. In those days you could end up with five or ten years for just a roach or marks.

  It was when the first methadone rehabilitation programs were starting. I got sent to one of the pilot projects. Six months at La Vida instead of years in “la pinta,” the state prison in Santa Fe. Twenty other addicts got the same deal. We all arrived in an old yellow school bus at La Vida. A pack of wild dogs met the bus, snarling and baying at us until finally they loped off into the dust.

  La Vida was thirty miles out of Albuquerque. In the desert. Nothing around, not a tree, not a bush. Route 66 was too far to walk to. La Vida had been a radar site, a military installation during World War II. It had been abandoned since then. I mean abandoned. We were going to restore it.

  We stood around in the wind, in the glare of the sun. Just the gigantic radar disc towering over the whole place, the only shade. Fallen down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pin-ups peeled off the walls. Three or four foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves & patterns like in post cards from the Painted Desert.

  A lot of things were going to contribute to our rehabilitation. Number one was removing us from the street environment. Every time a counselor said that we laughed ourselves silly. We couldn’t see any roads, much less streets, and the streets in the compound were buried in sand. There were tables in the dining rooms and cots in the barracks but they were buried too. Toilets clogged with dead animals and more sand.

  You could only hear the wind and the pack of dogs that kept circling. Sometimes it was nice, the silence, except the radar discs kept turning with a whining petty keening, day and night, day and night. At first it freaked us out, but after awhile it grew comforting, like wind chimes. They said it had been used to intercept Japanese kamikaze pilots, but they said a lot of pretty weird things.

  Of course the major part of our rehab was going to be honest work. The satisfaction of a job well done. Learning to interact. Teamwork. This teamwork started when we lined up for our methadone at six every morning. After breakfast we worked until lunchtime. Group from two until five, more group from seven to ten.

  The purpose of these groups was to break us down. Our main problems were anger, arrogance, defiance. We lied and cheated and stole. There were daily “haircuts” where groups screamed at one person all his faults and weaknesses.

  We were beaten down until we finally cried uncle. Who the fuck was uncle? See, I’m still angry, arrogant. I was ten minutes late to group & they shaved my eyebrows and cut my eyelashes.

  The groups dealt with anger. All day long we dropped slips in a slip box saying who we were angry at and then in group we dealt with it. Mostly we just shouted what losers and fuck-ups everyone else was. But see, we all did lie and cheat. Half the time none of us was even mad, just shucking & jiving up some anger to play the group game, to stay at La Vida and not go to jail. Most of the slips were at Bobby, the cook, for feeding those wild dogs. Or things like Greñas doesn’t weed enough, he just smokes and pushes tumbleweeds around with a rake.

  We were mad at those dogs. Lines of us at six a.m. and at one and six outside the dining room. Whipping sand wind. We’d be tired and hungry. Freezing in the morning and hot in the afternoon. Bobby would wait, finally stroll across his floor like a smug bank official to unlock the door for us. And while we waited, a few feet away, at the kitchen door, the dogs would be waiting too, for him to throw them slops. Mangy, motley, ugly dogs people had abandoned out on the mesa. The dogs liked Bobby all right but they hated us, baring their teeth & snarling, day after day, meal after meal.

  I got moved from the laundry to the kitchen. Helping cook, dishwashing and mopping up. I felt better about Bobby after a while. I even felt better about the dogs. He named them all. Dumb names. Duke, Spot, Blackie, Gimp, Shorty. And Liza, his favorite. An old yellow cur, flat-headed, with huge bat-like ears and amber yellow eyes. After a few months she’d even eat out of his hand. “Sunshine! Liza, my yellow-eyed sun,” he used to croon to her. Finally she let him scratch behind her ugly ears and just above the long ratty tail that hung down between her legs. “My sweet sweet sunshine,” he’d say.

  Government money kept sending in people to do workshops with us. A lady who did a workshop about Families. As if any of us ever had a family. And some guy from Synanon who said our problem was our cool. His favorite expression was “When you think you’re looking good you’re looking bad.” Every day he had us “blow our image.” Which was just acting like fools.

  We got a gym and a pool table, weights and punching bags. Two color televisions. A basketball court, a bowling alley and a tennis court. Framed paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe. Monet’s “Waterlilies.” Soon a Hollywood movie company was coming, to make a science fiction film at the site. We would be able to work as extras and make some money. The movie was going to center around the radar disc & what it did to Angie Dickinson. It fell in love with her and took her soul when she died in a car wreck. It would take over all these other live souls, too, who would be La Vida residents, us. I’ve seen it about twenty times, in the middle of the night, on TV.

  All in all the first three months went pretty well. We were clean and healthy; we worked hard. The site was in great shape. We got pretty close to each other and we did get angry. But for those first three months we were in total isolation. Nobody came in and nobody went out. No phone calls, no newspapers, no mail, no television. Things started falling apart
when that ended. People went on passes and had dirty urines when they got back, or they didn’t come back at all. New residents kept coming in, but they didn’t have the sense of pride we had about the place.

  Every day we had a morning meeting. Part gripe session, part snitch session. We also had to take turns speaking, even if it was just telling a joke or singing a song. But nobody could ever think of anything, so at least twice a week old Lyle Tanner sang “I thought I saw a whip-poor-will.” “El Sapo” gave a talk on how to breed chihuahuas, which was gross. Sexy kept on reciting the 23rd psalm. Only the way she caressed words it sounded lewd and everybody laughed, which hurt her feelings.

  Sexy’s name was a joke. She was an old whore from Mexico. She hadn’t come with the first group of us, but later, after five days in solitary with no food. Bobby made her soup and some bacon and eggs. But all she wanted was bread. She sat there & ate three loaves of Wonder bread, not even chewing it, just swallowing it, famished. Bobby gave the soup and bacon and eggs to Liza.

  Sexy kept on eating until finally I took her to our room and she collapsed. Lydia and Sherry were in bed together in the next room. They had been lovers for years. I could tell by their slow laughs that they were high on something, reds or ludes probably. I went back to the kitchen to help Bobby clean up. Gabe, the counselor, came in to get the knives, to lock them up in the safe. He did that every night.

  “I’m going to town. You’re in charge, Bobby.” There never were any staff members at night anymore.

  Bobby and I went out to drink coffee under the chinaberry tree. The dogs yelped after something on the mesa.

  “I’m glad Sexy came. She’s nice.”

  “She’s ok. She won’t stay.”

  “She reminds me of Liza.”

  “Liza’s not that ugly. Oye, Tina, be still. It’s almost here.”

  The moon. There’s no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow. Moonlight in Liza’s yellow eyes and the chinaberry tree.

  The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. But then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.

  He felt that way too. I heard the catch in his throat. Some people may have said a prayer, knelt down, at a moment like that. Sung a hymn. Maybe cavemen would have done a dance. What we did was make love. “El Sapo” busted us. Later, but we were still naked.

  So it came out at morning meeting and we had to get a punishment. Three weeks, after cleaning the kitchen, to strip and sand all the paint around the dining room windows. Until one in the morning, every single night. That was bad enough but then Bobby, trying to save his ass, got up and said, “I didn’t want to ball Tina. I just want to stay clean, do my time and go home to my wife Debbi and my baby Debbi-Ann.” I could have dropped a slip on those two jive names.

  That hurt bad. He had held me and talked to me. He had gone to a lot more trouble making love than most men do and I had been happy with him when the moon came up.

  We had to work so hard there wasn’t time to talk. I would never have let him know how bad it hurt anyway. We were tired, bone tired every night, all day.

  The main thing we hadn’t talked about was the dogs. They hadn’t shown up for three nights.

  Finally I said it. “Where do you think the dogs are?”

  He shrugged. “A puma. Kids with guns.”

  We went back to sanding. It got too late even to go to bed so we made some fresh coffee and sat down under the tree.

  I missed Sexy. I forgot to say that she had gone to town to the dentist but had managed to score, got busted and taken back to jail.

  “I miss Sexy. Bobby, that was a lie what you said at morning meeting. You did so want to ball me.”

  “Yeah, it was a lie.”

  We went into the meat locker & held each other again, made love again but not for long because it was freezing cold. We went back outside.

  The dogs starting coming. Shorty, Blackie, Spot, Duke.

  They had gotten into porcupines. Must have been days ago because they were all so infected, septic. Their faces swollen like monster rhinoceros, oozing green pus. Their eyes were bloated shut, quilled shut with tiny arrows. That was the scary part, that none of them could see. Or make a real sound since their throats were engorged too.

  Blackie had a seizure. Hurtled up into the air with an eerie gargle. Thrashing, jerking, peeing in the air. High, two, three feet into the air and then he fell wet, dead, into the dust. Liza came in last because she couldn’t walk, just crawled until she got to Bobby’s feet, writhed there, her paw patting at his boot.

  “Get me the goddam knives.”

  “Gabe’s not back yet.” Only counselors could unlock the safe.

  Liza pawed at Bobby’s foot, gentle, like asking to be petted, for him to throw her a ball.

  Bobby went to the locker and brought out a steak. The sky was lavender. It was almost morning.

  He had the dogs smell the meat. He called to them, cooed to them to follow him across the road to the machine shop. I stayed under the tree.

  When he was in there, when he finally got them all in there, he beat them to death with a sledge hammer. I didn’t see it, but I heard it and from where I sat I saw the blood splattering and streaking down the walls. I thought he would say something like “Liza, my sweet sunshine” but he didn’t say a word. When he came out he was covered in blood, didn’t look at me, went to the barracks.

  The nurse drove up with the doses of methadone and everybody started lining up for breakfast. I turned the griddle on and started making batter. Everybody was mad because I took so long with breakfast.

  There still wasn’t any staff around when the movie trailers started pulling in. They began working right away, checking out locations, casting extras. People were running around with megaphones and walkie-talkies. Somehow nobody went into the machine shop.

  They started one scene right away…a take of a stunt man who was supposed to be Angie Dickinson driving down from the gym while a helicopter hovered around the radar disc. The car was supposed to crash into the disc and Angie’s spirit fly up into it but the car crashed into the chinaberry tree.

  Bobby and I made lunch, so tired we were walking in slow motion, just like all the zombie extras were being told to walk. We didn’t talk. Once, making tuna salad I said out loud, to myself, “Pickle relish?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said pickle relish.”

  “Christ. Pickle relish!” We laughed, couldn’t stop laughing. He touched my cheek, lightly, a bird’s wing.

  The movie crew thought the radar site was Fab, far out. Angie Dickinson liked my eye shadow. I told her it was just chalk, the kind you rub on pool cues. “It’s to die for, that blue,” she said to me.

  After lunch, an old gaffer, whatever that is, came up to me and asked where the nearest bar was. There was a place up the road, toward Gallup, but I told him Albuquerque. I told him I would do anything to get a ride into town.

  “Don’t worry about that. Hop in my truck and let’s go.”

  Wham, crash, bang.

  “Good God, what was that?” he asked.

  “A cattle guard.”

  “Jesus, this sure is one godforsaken place.”

  We finally hit the highway. It was great, the sound of tires on the cement, the wind blowing in. Semis, bumper stickers, kids fighting in the back seats. Route 66.

  We got to the rise, with the wide valley and the Rio Grande below us, the Sandia mountains lovely above.

  “Mister, what I need is money for a ticket home to Baton Rouge. Can you spare it, about sixty dollars?”

  “Easy. You need a ticket. I need a drink. It will all work out.”

  Fire

  My sister is dying of cancer. I usually just call her Sally but now I keep saying my sister.

  I wait for the flight to Mexico
City. Maybe she’s exaggerating, as usual. Maybe I won’t get there in time. Maybe she will live a year, and here I’ve just quit my job. The Mexicana flight crew heads toward the entrance. Not like American pilots who just go get on the plane. First the pilot himself, moustache and white scarf, his raincoat dragging like a matador’s cape. Two paces behind, banderillero copilots and then the male flight attendants, in step. Reluctantly follow the sleepy, heavily made-up stewardesses. Glamorous, hating to come back to work. It’s only Americans who smile unnecessarily.

  Sally, you were so little when we first went to Mexico City, by train, when all the volcanoes were vast and visible against the blue sky.

  My sister married in Mexico and never left. We had different lives. Not really. Differently alone. Our parents dead now, husbands gone, children grown.

  She was born just before Daddy went to war and we moved to Texas to Mamie’s. He was gone. Everybody doted on her, the sweet one. I think I must have hated her; I don’t remember her then at all.

  On the train from Spokane to Texas you were a month old, asleep in a drawer Mama took from the bureau of the Davenport hotel. She laughed because it fit you perfectly. The train was wonderful, the noisy vestibules, the upper bunk and a hammock for shoes but I was frightened by Mama taking the drawer. In the bathroom she vomited and vomited. I put a rag on her head. The toilet opened onto the ground. Green grass and dandelions. Railroad ties, ties, ties speeding on and on below her wet head. She sang, to the tune of “Humoresque”: “I wish people would refrain/ from flushing toilets on the train/ while train is in the station/ I love you!” She changed you and gave you a bottle. You slept in the drawer. I was hungry. She drank and then she slept and I couldn’t wake her. The train clanked and hissed, backed up, coupled. Men laughed on the platform. Lanterns arced amber through the frosted glass. We lurched away again, faster and faster. You both slept on, but I was afraid you would wake up and cry. I couldn’t go to sleep. I mean, I had to stay awake.