She moves past me, into the house.
“Has someone been hitting you?” I ask, standing in the doorway. Now my cheek begins to flame.
“No. No one,” she answers.
“Julio?”
“You’re very thoughtful, but—”
“Lira, I want to be your friend.”
She sets her bags on a coffee table. The kids are running and screaming in a back room. “Quiet!” she yells. Then, to me: “Julio is happy to tell you his stories. But I never agreed to this.”
It’s true. A year or so ago, I came poking around this neighborhood, risking ridicule, indifference, even violence, looking for people who would talk to me. Most folks turned away. Julio, gregarious, generous, surprised me by welcoming me into his home.
But Lira had never been friendly.
“I don’t mean to impose,” I tell her now, stepping into the house. “But I’ve come to care for your family.”
“What about your own family?” she says. “Don’t they need you?”
I can’t answer her. Not yet. My cheek is pounding now.
“Quiet!” she screams again at her kids, stopping a heavy thumping in the back room. You want to hear a story, is that it?” she asks me.
“Yes. Sure.”
“All right then.” Some kind of moisture is leaking from one of the grocery bags. Flies batter the front screen door. She loosens her bun and grips her hair, as if clinging to the rigging of a ship. “When I was a girl in Jalisco, my mother sent me each day to buy eggs from a neighbor who lived across the highway from our house,” she begins. “It was a very busy highway, leading to big market centers far away to the west. Buses and trucks, lots of noise, keeping us all awake, my brothers and sisters, even at night. Whenever she sent me for the eggs, my mother warned me so hard to be careful—she wanted to impress on me the danger—I always cried, carrying my little basket.”
Dogs bark down the block. I’m wishing I’d jammed my Sony into my pocket, but it’s still in the car. Cicadas creak in the trees.
“One day, I was on my way home—proud of the six or seven large brown eggs I’d chosen—when I saw an old woman, a flower-seller clutching dozens of white roses, start to cross the road ahead of me. I looked down the highway. I heard the rumble of a truck, the shifting of its gears, awful, like a cat’s angry whine … can you guess the rest of my story?”
The sun is setting behind Houston’s huge glass buildings, nearby. The house is getting dark. “I’m afraid I can.”
“I shouted and shouted. I don’t know if perhaps she was deaf … I’ll never forget her skirts, beautiful black and red, in the wind of the truck, the scattered flowers and the scream. I fell to the dirt, dropping my basket, cracking the eggs.”
She stands for a moment, watching light fade through her lace curtains. “I don’t even have words in my own language to describe how this memory makes me feel … how it twists me inside … telling stories to you, in English—”
“You just did a bang-up job,” I say. “Your English is wonderful.”
“Well.…”
“I understand what you feel, Lira. Really.” I hesitate. “I lost my family. Last year. On a highway,” I manage to tell her.
She looks at me as though she’ll offer me the comfort of her hair.
Just then Manuel lurches, giggling, into the room, bumping my legs, and clamps his mother’s calf. “Mama, I’m hungry!”
In a mad race, the other kids swarm her: Angelina, Roberto, Maria. Chatito, the youngest, cries from his crib in the back.
Lira smiles at me, wearily. “Perhaps you should join us next month for the Day of the Dead,” she says. “When people we love have left this world of sorrows, we prepare their favorite dishes for them. You know the custom?”
“Yes. A sort of communion with family ghosts?”
“And with those of us who must go on.”
“Hungry hungry hungry!” Manuel yelps, and I offer to watch her babies while Lira fixes supper. “Yes yes, read to me!” Manuel says. “Spiderman! Spiderman and Dr. Octopus!”
When I turn to pick him up, I see Julio slouched, motionless, in the doorway. He’s holding a white apron, stained with hot mustard, sweet-and-sour sauce. He’s sweating and tired. “George,” he says glumly.
“Julio.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I dropped by to see how things were going.”
“Lira didn’t tell me you were coming.”
She shivers, just slightly, rubbing her arms. “I didn’t know,” she says. Shadows drape the room now. “Excuse me.” She heads for the kitchen. The kids, a noisy gaggle, scramble after her.
Julio stares at me strangely. Exhaustion? Suspicion? I’ve never seen him this quiet. Have I broken a rule, entering his home, meeting his wife while he was gone?
With tornado-like swiftness, he offers me a smile. “You got the transcript?”
“The what?”
“The last interview we did.” He shuffles into the pantry, next to the kitchen.
I confess, “I haven’t typed it up.”
He squeezes his apron and tosses it into the washer. From the dryer he pulls a wad of laundry, still soggy. “Why not?” He loves reading about his family.
“Julio, the press is in arrears.”
“Rears?” He kicks the machine.
“I told you I’m running out of money. I can barely make my house payments right now. The books don’t sell—”
“This fucker. We didn’t hook it up right.”
“The chain stores won’t touch them,” I tell him. “The guy at Cal’s—he’s the only one who’s shown any real interest in the past, and even he won’t take them any more. To tell you the truth, I’m wondering if there’s any point in writing a new one.”
“Fuckin Jamón,” he says.
Me?
Yes, he’s staring at me. The tornado has shifted paths again. A can opener buzzes in the kitchen.
Julio shoves a shirt and pants into the dryer. “I gave you all that information for nothing?”
“No, of course not.”
His voice isn’t loud, but he’s tapping his feet: big, bare, brown on the gritty yellow carpet.
I move away from him. Surely it’s the dryer, the long day at work. “I’m looking for funding,” I say. A lie. No one’ll back me, with no hope of profit. “I’ll let you know.”
“To you, it’s just a project, George. But it’s my goddam life.” He slaps himself on the chest.
In his anguished voice I hear my wife. “It’s my body” she used to tell me, whenever we talked about having kids. “One little spurt and the story’s all over for you, George, but me—assuming my plumbing still works—I’d swell up big as the house. No thanks.” “All right,” I told her. “I understand. Forget it.”
“All right,” I tell Julio now.
“No one cares about my life, right? My troubles. I’ll die an invisible man, like all the other wetbacks.”
“Julio—”
“I have to clean this apron now, George. Excuse me.”
“Okay,” I say. “You’re right. My fault. I’ll be in touch. Julio, your stories are important to me. All right?”
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not. How do I know?” His voice shakes with rage. “Why am I the only one carrying his goddam weight around here? Hm? The only one keeping his word?” Lira drops a glass in the kitchen. Julio’s shoulders sag. “Hijo!” he yells out the dusty pantry window at Roberto, who’s just scampered by with a ball. “Get your little ass in here and pick up your room! I can’t do it all!”
The dryer lurches loudly at the wall.
Quietly, I let myself out, catching Lira’s eye. She’s somber, sadly pretty. A pair of kids hops around her. Food steams from crusty pots on the stove. Her face says, I never agreed to this.
7.
In the men’s room at work, I examine my stinging face. Nothing. Back in the newsroom I tell the guys about Cal. I know he’s a poker player, too.
“Hey, if his
money’s good, and his card savvy’s poor, I have no objection to letting him in,” Ed says. “I mean, the man owns a bookstore, how savvy can he be, right?”
“Yeah,” Tony says, “the game could use fresh blood.”
I shuffle the deck in my hand. Nine of hearts, three of spades, queen, queen—both Jean. There it is again. A wasp on my cheek.
“Hit me with a big one,” Scott says.
“Two for me.”
“One.”
The nip of a slap.
“George, you in this round?”
“No. Deal past me.” My jaw is throbbing now. The radio hums some “dirty mama” blues.
I stand and slouch against the water cooler. Bubbles blast through the bottle, a tiny depth-charge.
My chest heaves.
You want to hear a story, is that it?
The day of the crash, Jean and I fought before we picked up my folks.
There.
It’s something I hadn’t wanted to dwell on, these past dozen months, though late at night, just before falling asleep, Jean hovering quietly above me, I couldn’t forget, of course.
Kids: our standard disagreement. In the city’s vaporous heat, it got out of hand. We were tired that day. All afternoon we’d been paying bills. Cleaning the house.
“Sixes and sevens.”
“Straight.”
“Your deal.”
“Jean—”
“Stop blaming me!”
“Sweetie, I’m not blaming you. You said it yourself once. I’m the caretaker-type—”
She whirled.
Later, on the freeway (her slap still fierce on my cheek), I noticed, just barely, the pickup swerve into my lane. Afterward, an investigator told me, “You didn’t have time to breathe, man, much less brake or change course.”
But I swear, I remember a second or two, an instant of instinct, when I looked into the mirror and found my wife’s chilly anger.
Guilty. And of much more, besides.
Back in my chair. Tony slams the deck in front of me. “Cut ‘em. Okay, low spade in the hole splits the pot. Ante up, boys.”
“Pathetic,” I mumble—to steady my breath.
“What’s that?” Tony asks.
Scott watches me closely. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, “if you’re not going to concentrate, George.” He chomps an Oreo.
“Hey, I’m a survivor” I say. “What about you?” And I cough up the last quarter from my pocket.
Later, at home, I listen to the rustling of apple leaves outside my bedroom window. The day Jean planted the tree, she told me, “When I was little, my mother used to read me all sorts of bedtime stories, but nothing thrilled me more than the tales of Johnny Appleseed. It was the most wonderful thing, imagining him spreading this lovely fruit around the world. I begged her and begged her for an apple tree in our yard. Finally, my father bought one, and for years I watched it grow.”
I rubbed her back. She was sore from shoveling dirt.
“Then, in college, studying physics—Newton’s apple, you know? I was delighted all over again. Gravity, spreading seeds … for me, apples became this solid connection to the earth. I know it sounds silly, George, but right then, I swore I’d plant an apple tree wherever I lived.”
“It’s not silly,” I said. I drew her a bath and washed the dirt from her arms.
Now she’s listing here and there, about three feet from my face. Diffuse as lamplight, she wears the cotton gloves she wore to plant the tree. A faint odor of loam.
“Good-night,” I say. She shimmers like water, then fades.
In the middle of the night, I wake from my first wet dream in—how many years? Since long before my marriage. I was walking along the bayou with Lira, the water like silk. I reached to touch a bruise on her face; she opened her mouth and took my thumb between her lips.
I felt the warmth at my waist.
Now the rain comes hard, stirring mud in beds where Jean used to grow marigolds, roses, lilies, thyme, and dill. The apple tree moves to and fro: a happy child, clapping.
8.
“Heads up, boyo! Pair of first-class obits here. They need to be somber and respectful, mindful of the city’s major loss,” Penrose told me this morning. He handed me a packet of photos. A big-shot lawyer and a real estate developer. Heart attack. Stroke.
“No ‘Good riddance’?” I said. ‘“O happy day’?”
“Save that searing wit for your two-bit card games, son. And on that other matter—it’s good research. But no one wants to read about it.”
I’d taken a chance and shown him Houston’s Latin Refugees, suggested running it in the paper, a two- or-three-part series. Community service? He’d agreed to look it over.
“It’s a downer. People want to feel good about their community.” He tapped the black-and-white lawyer. “Got it?”
“Yeah,” I said. Fucking Jamón. “Thanks for taking the time.”
On my lunch break I run by Sam’s Deli—Ed wanted turkey, Tony a hoagie.
Ash smudges the air, from an aggravated volcano south of the Rio Grande. In front of me, a flatbed pickup is hauling empty Cokes. The bottles fill with powder.
Stopping at Cal’s, I notice the Bookmobile parked by his curb. I haven’t seen it in weeks. A year or so ago, before tumbling oil prices pinched his sales, he bought this custom-made van as an advertising gimmick. Plexiglas, solid, tinted brown. Every time a customer plunked down a hundred dollars or more, he’d give them a ride in the Bookmobile. “Cruising the freeways,” he’d say, “with only a river of sweet air between you and freedom and the road.” For a while it was a popular sales ploy. Now he’s into raffles.
“Thought you’d sold that clunker,” I tease Cal, walking in, testing his mood before pitching him again.
He’s stacking ratty paperbacks: cookbooks, astrology guides, an unauthorized biography of Mamie Eisenhower. “Hm?”
“The Bookmobile.” I offer him some Fritos. Sam’s sells only the big bags, and I can’t ever finish them.
“Oh. Ray’s learning to drive,” Cal says. “So I been lending him my horsepower here—against my better judgment. Boy’s a damn fireball when he scoots behind the wheel.”
“How’s his dad?”
“Goner. Ghost.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear it.”
Just then, Ray himself appears, emerging from a tiny bathroom in the back. “Mr. Palmer! Good to see you,” he says.
“Hey, Ray. You too.” He’s clean-shaven now. “I was just asking about your pa.”
Ray nods. “He’s had some pain, I guess … and, you know, they’re not sure they got it all … I mean, the cancer …” His eyes glisten; his voice crumples.
“Got your car picked out?” I ask. “Classic Mustang? Thunderbird?”
But my little evasion is far too clumsy. “Excuse me,” he says, wiping his nose, and scuffles back to the john.
“Poor kid,” I say. “Cal, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Billy’s a damn fighter, but it looks like this is one ol’ bear he’s not going to bust.”
“Can I help?”
He tosses Mamie onto a fat Jackie O. “Come to think of it, there is something you can do. Your buddy, Ed What’s-His-Name, he dropped in the other day looking for the latest Stephen King. Says you fellows got a card game.”
Good ol’ Ed. He did just as I asked him to. “Yeah, we deal a hand or two.”
Ray’s back now, trying to smile, his nose and eyes raw beets.
“Billy’s the best damn bluffer you ever saw .…’course, he hasn’t been able to play. Two of my other cronies moved out of town … anyways, this shindig of yours.” He slaps a discount tag on M.F.K. Fisher. “Closed shop, or what?”
Before I can answer, Ray chimes in, “Maybe you two should work a deal, Unc. You stock some of Mr. Palmer’s books, he puts a word in for you with his poker pals.”
Glory! I want to kiss the kid. I’d been wondering how to open my bid.
Ray blows his nose
.
“Well now.” I scratch my chin. Delivery trucks scurry past us on the street. Pizzas, furniture, meat. Bless our culture of exchange. “I suppose I could do that.”
Cal rubs his tired barterer’s eyes. He glances at Ray. “We got us some powwowing to do, kid. About car keys.”
“Come on, Une. I just did you a favor.”
“Shit,” Cal says. He looks at me. “When’s your next game?”
“I’ll let you know, when I drop the books off.” I tell Ray I’d be happy to give him a driving lesson some night.
“I’d like that,” he says, reaching for the Fritos.
“Save up your card money, George. You’re going to need a barrelful.”
“Turkey, George. I ordered turkey,” Ed says. “This is Spam. Or aluminum siding, or something.”
On my desk, a scribbled message: “Call Julio Zamora—Urgent.”
A woman speaking rapid Spanish answers the phone.
“I’m sorry, I can’t … can you please slow down?” I say.
Impatiently, she says, “Mr. Zamora cannot talk to anyone right now.”
“Que pasó?” I ask.
In stilted, rolling-r English, the woman explains to me that Mrs. Zamora came home from the employment agency late this morning and, without a word to her husband, picked up her babies and tossed them into Buffalo Bayou.
“‘Tossed’?” I say. “What do you mean, ‘tossed’?”
“Like dolls, sir. Like old newspapers.”
Goosebumps spatter my arms. “Was anyone hurt?”
Chatito, ten weeks old, drowned, she says. Roberto is missing. Manuel and the others are in shock. The police had handcuffed Mrs. Zamora and driven her away.
“What’s up, man?” Tony watches me from his desk.
“Lira Zamora—”
“Trouble in taco land?”
Close your eyes, I think. Count to ten. “Any calls for me, take a message, okay?”
“Hey George, you going out again? Can you bring me back some turkey?”
At the mouth of the garage, pulling out in my car, I wave at Bob, half-asleep in his concrete security booth. He doesn’t see me.
I speed down Main Street, past Indonesian restaurants and a Pizza Inn. Car exhaust hangs in willows along the median. The Astrodome rises like an old, pallid whale to the south.
It Takes a Worried Man Page 3