“You pay less than minimum wage.”
“Hear that where?”
“On the street.”
He leaned over the wooden railing and dropped a gob of spit on the parking lot below us. “Street is filthy. Filthy dirty words on the street.”
“If you have nothing to hide, sir, I don’t see why I can’t—”
“Work to do. Excuse me.” He tapped seven times on the door. Three big men let him in and kept me out. A blast of hot air. Scalding steam.
An hour later I came back, tapped seven times on the door. The big men nearly threw me off the stairs. Mr. Ho stood over me, at the bottom. “Whatsa matter, you? Go home. Take care your family. Let me do my work, so you have nice clean shirt to wear, okay?”
I don’t know, even now, if my editor wanted the story. He liked the anecdotes I brought back to him from Pedro, and even let me develop a couple as short features. “Good local color,” he said. But on the sweatshop thing all he said was, “Careful.” And one night, “Why the hell are you always working so late, George? We don’t have a wide-enough circulation to justify your efforts. Go home. Take care of your family.”
Today I find Pedro hunched above his grave, coughing so hard he can barely breathe. I drop the blanket I’ve brought him and walk him to my car. “No, George, I cain’t leave my TV settin’ here,” he wheezes. “I’ve never left my TV.”
“I’ll unplug it for you and put it in my trunk. It’ll be okay.”
“Dopeheads’d swipe it in no time. They sneak in here at night to do they deals, you know. Fuck they johns, pass out. I’m tellin’ you, city’s going to hell.”
“Easy, now.” I help him into the car.
The neighborhood clinic, on Dallas Street, sits across an alley from a chipped brick building with a hand-lettered sign in an upper window: “Bombay Films.”
Teenagers fill the waiting room. Tattooed and pierced. One’s eating Fritos. He keeps dropping the bag. He looks like he’s asleep, except every now and then when he nibbles a chip.
An orange-haired boy is sharing a can of RC Cola with a girl whose lips are purple. “It was the real deal, man,” he tells her. “We could actually taste the meth on each other’s tongues.” At his feet, a duffel bag with a chewed-on pipe and several bags of Ramen.
I flash my Blue Cross card; the receptionist hands me some forms to fill out for Pedro. They feel damp in the small, humid room.
Pedro’s huffing beside me. “Is gone,” he says. “Poof.”
“What’s gone?”
“The neighborhood. Look at this shit.”
He means the kids around us.
One boy says to a nervous friend of his (leg like a jackhammer, bouncing up and down), “No bullshit, he’ll help me off the streets.”
“He’s a dealer, man, how’s he gonna help you off the streets?”
“Brother connected. Not like them preachers at the soup kitchens. They just like us, man.”
“How you mean?”
“They got nowhere to go, either.”
Forty-five minutes later, a young doctor helps me guide Pedro to a leather table in a little room. “Undo your shirt, please,” he says. He’s blond and horsey-looking. Pedro’s stopped coughing. His buttons are dusty.
After a brief examination, the doctor motions me into the hall. The place smells of Mercurochrome, wet tennis shoes. “You’re this fellow’s guardian?”
“Not legally. I look after him, some.”
“Where’s he live?”
“In the graveyard.”
“Homeless, then?”
“I guess … yes, you could say that.” Though it seems to me he knows exactly where he belongs.
“He’s not getting enough liquids. The dry throat, the coughing, and so on. Is there some way you can make sure he gets several glasses of fresh water daily?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a bigger problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Asthma. Pretty severe, I’m afraid. God knows what he’s exposed to, living outdoors all the time. Probably has several allergies. I’d like to put him on a breather for half an hour, open up his lungs. Can you wait?”
“I’ll wait.”
“I’ll set it up, then.”
The light’s too bright in Pedro’s room, and he’s blinking like a broken stoplight. “I’m missing Jeopardy,” he says.
“I’ll get you back soon.”
“It’s half over! George, what if someone steals my Christmas bulbs?”
“We’ve got to get you well, man.”
The kids’ talk in the waiting room depresses me, so I wait outside, in the alley behind the clinic. It smells of urine. The door to the building abutting the clinic is open, showing a steep wooden stairway, crooked, cracked, water-damaged. I look for steam, but don’t see any. At the top of the stairs there’s another sign for “Bombay Films” by a frosted-glass door. Next to it, a torn black-and-white poster. Marlon Brando kissing Maria Schneider.
The economic life of the city, pumping away. Whatever problems in the world, the movies can fix ’em.
Back in the clinic, Pedro is huffing into a cardboard tube on a machine that looks like a carpet cleaner. I give him a thumbs-up and he scowls. In the waiting room, the girl with purple lips slowly licks Madonna’s face, on the cover of Vogue.
Back in the alley, a woman approaches “Bombay Films” wearing a yellow mini-skirt and spiked heels. A Walkman rides her waist. She flicks a cigarette into an open trash bin and starts up the stairs. Halfway up, her left heel catches an exposed nail and she stumbles. “Goddammit!” she says, spotting me, grabbing her ankle. “These your stairs? I’ll sue you bastards!” She whips off her shoe.
The door at the top of the landing groans open. A paunchy, bald man in cowboy boots. He’s wearing thick glasses. “Are you the dancer from Haughty Bitch Showgirls?” he calls down the stairs. “April?”
She pulls a pack of Marlboro Lights from her right jeans pocket. “Guzman?”
“Yeah. Call me Goose. They told me you had tits, April.”
“Fuck you.” She climbs the stairs and shoves past him into his office.
He studies me, adjusting his glasses. “You’re the new guy, right? From the distributors downtown? Barney? Beatty?”
“Not me.”
“Come on up. Cup of Flesh is ready to go.”
“I’m not the guy.”
He twists his glasses again.
“I’m just waiting for a friend at the clinic.”
He perks back up. “Blood test? Your buddy getting married? Need some stag films?”
“No thanks.”
“All right, then.” He wags his head sadly. “Change your mind, I got some stills here that’ll dilate your fuckin’ pupils.”
I reconnect Pedro’s television. He settles down for The Price Is Right. “I tol’ you I’s gonna miss Jeopardy. Mr. Ace Reporter.” His voice is high and scared. “You’d think he’da figgered that out.” The doctor had given me an inhaler for him, and I plug it into his mouth.
The doc had also handed me a packet of Accolate tablets. “Twice a day with lots of liquids. Can you bring him back, end of the week? I’d like to check on him.”
“Sure.”
“You can keep an eye on him, right? In case something goes wrong with the medications?”
“Absolutely,” I say, realizing the truth of my words as I speak them. “He’s pretty much family now.”
On Friday, as I’m waiting in the alley while Pedro puffs for Doctor Horsey, April appears in Guzman’s stairwell, wearing only a bra and panties. Grape lipstick. Small, powdered breasts. “I’m auditioning for Goose’s latest Western epic,” she says. “Saloon Sluts. He’s up there now, setting up the cactus.”
I smile.
“If I get the part, I get to die. Got a light?”
“Sorry, no.”
“You work at the clinic, or what?”
“Newspaperman.”
“True crime? Scandal and divorce? I love that stuf
f.”
“More like community service. Local history—”
“I got some history for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Pancho Villa raped my grandmother.”
I don’t know how to respond to this.
“When he crossed the border?”
“Yeah?”
“Granny cut his pecker off with a bowie knife.”
“You’re sure about that?” I say.
“Sure I’m sure. Still got the little feller, in a pickle jar down in Harlingen.” She smiles wistfully. “I used to play with it when I was a girl.”
Horsey hands me some Flonase and Albuterol. “These are samples. They should last him a month or so. If his breathing’s still labored then, I’ll write you a prescription for more.”
Pedro’s sucking on a tube, as if gasping after the city’s last sweet breath.
“He’ll never get better,” the doctor says to me softly. “But maybe we can keep him from getting worse for a while.”
I glance around the waiting room. Sneezing and snores. “Right,” I say.
About a month after my last encounter with Mr. Ho, another fire broke out in the shirt factory. I heard the news on the street. Three women, all in their teens, collapsed of smoke inhalation on the floor because the door was locked and they couldn’t get out fast enough.
From the supermarket parking lot, one morning, I called to Mr. Ho. He was standing at the top of his stairs. “You!” he said, pointing at me. “Interloper! Bad man!”
“You have a statement, Mr. Ho?”
“Door never had a lock till you come snooping around, asking fancy question! Now city shut us down. Your fault!”
Standing there, I felt only relief that the women hadn’t died. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” I said.
“Whatsa matter, you? You don’t like nice clean shirt? What the world be without a nice clean shirt?”
At my editor’s insistence, I stopped working late, stopped scrambling so hard after stories. “No one reads anything these days but the damn headlines anyway,” he grumbled. “And those they don’t understand.” I settled back in to a dull routine.
At home, in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep, and I’d tired of flipping through family photos, I’d watch the local cable access channel. Turns out, Guzman produced its highest-rated show, “Naked Sports with April Blow.” April sat topless behind a flimsy desk talking baseball, hockey, squash. I loved to hear her say “squash.” Next morning, I could never remember last night’s scores. I kept seeing 0-0.
Once a week now I bring Pedro some fresh Ozarka water. I’ve made him a chart, so he’ll know when he’s taken his pills. He marks it with a pencil.
This evening I bring him some beer to go with his supper: a stick of jerky, lightly salted, two lemons, and an orange. I sit and drink with him.
“They just closed down a bunch of refineries east of town,” he says. “I’m tellin’ you, city’s going through some panty-twisting money shit. But it makes the air cleaner. Ain’t used my inhaler all week.”
“Good,” I say. I glance in the direction of my family’s graves. It’s been a year since they died, and I’m blue.
A Mickey Mouse mask, a gold ceramic owl, and a laminated poster of a unicorn line Pedro’s dusty gruta. He points to a muddy pool, choked with garbage, near the war veterans’ plots. Plastic U.S. flags rain-beaten to the ground. “Lots of new stuff floatin’ down the bayou this week. Socks. Broken toys.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Gonna do some rearrangin’. Fella cain’t let hisself get bored.”
We decide to watch a movie on his tombstone television: Dancing in the Dark, about a down-and-out actor, starring William Powell. Every now and then, Pedro wipes dust off the screen.
After a while I say, “I think you’ve got the right idea, Pedro.”
“How’s that?”
I sip my beer. “Tending your own grave.”
“Ah, hell.”
“It’s what we all do one way or another, isn’t it?”
“What the fuck you talkin’ about, George?”
“Losing our families, working lousy jobs.”
“Aw man, you’re a sad drunk,” he says. He watches me good. “You need to get laid.”
“No. Well, yes. But that’s not what’s creeping me out.”
“What’s creepin’ you out is you own mopey self. You probably the type of guy stays mopey, even after he’s been laid, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“Mr. Ace Reporter, sees Evil ever’where he turns. Wants to right the world’s wrongs, that it?”
“Sure. You said it yourself. The neighborhood’s gone.”
“Shit. If it’s anything I cain’t stand, it’s a sad drunk,” Pedro tells me.
I shrug.
He opens me another beer. Downtown Houston twinkles in the distance. “Watch the damn movie,” he says.
First Star
One day I didn’t see her any more. But for almost a year, the year I was in fourth grade, she came into our neighborhood every evening pedaling a white Schwinn bike. She wore a tomato-red sweater, always, and a stiff petticoat beneath a checkered brown dress that nearly reached her scuffed and bulky Buster Brown shoes. From a distance, her head looked bigger than normal, too big to fit beneath her short black hair. Up close, I noticed black fuzz, like the start of a sloppy pencil sketch, marking her upper lip.
A girl with a mustache? my son Jesse asks me now, nearly twenty years later. Jesse’s nine. His brother, Seth, a year younger, listens closely but doesn’t say anything.
That’s right. A girl with a mustache.
You were too little to have hair on your face, Jesse says.
Yes. I was nine, maybe, or ten? It took me weeks to realize a woman always followed the girl back then, on a white bike of her own, also wearing a sweater and dark clothes. At first I don’t think I even saw this woman; I was too busy each day in my family’s driveway taking advantage of the evening’s last light, pogoing, skateboarding, or wishing on the first star in the sunset’s dusty red streaks. When I did see the woman, I didn’t connect her at first to the girl … until one night, bored with my games, paying more attention than usual to my neighborhood (the Jenkinses’ poodle, next door, barking for its supper; the eldest Clark kid yelling down the street, “Ready or not, here I come,” prompting crazy screams from deep inside the bushes), I thought how odd it was that this woman appeared each night a few paces behind the girl on a similar bike. I figured, then, they were mother and daughter.
Duh, Dad, Jesse says.
Yeah, duh. But see, I hadn’t watched them closely till then, or thought much about them. I hadn’t taken an interest.
How big was her head?
Pretty big.
I’d have been inster-sted right away, then.
Well, I was, sort of. But only half-caring, you know, the way it is when you’re doing something fun and don’t want to stop.
What was her name?
The girl’s? Suzanne, but I didn’t learn that for a while.
Suzanne. It’s pretty, Seth says in a tiny, frightened voice. He’s been frightened since his mother and I first broke the news, which is why, I suppose, I’m telling the boys this story. I don’t know if it’ll help them. Or me. Jesse’s frightened too, I think, but he covers better than his brother, or he’s jazzed as well by genuine curiosity.
The woman looked mad, I say. Never failed. Night after night after night, her scary arrival: wormy old scowl on her face. Wrinkled brow. Like the bicycle seat was giving her a real pain in the rear.
Jesse laughs. Seth smiles, tentatively.
One night the girl stopped near our driveway. Just up and stopped. I hadn’t said anything to her or made a gesture of any kind. I think I was bouncing a basketball that night and my mother had called me in to do my homework. Maybe I was standing there, cooling off, getting ready to go inside. Maybe that’s why she stopped.
Like she thought
you were waiting for her or something?
Maybe so. I don’t know. But she squeezed her handlebar brakes—those little wing-like things?—and settled like a sparrow at the edge of our drive. I said Hi. She smiled. I saw the fuzz then.
Was it creepy, her smile? Jesse asks. I’ll bet it was creepy.
No, not really, it was, it was sort of—
Pretty? Seth chirps. Hopeful, quiet.
Yes, Seth. Sort of pretty. Like staring at something underwater, where everything’s a little off, you know, but still beautiful.
My fish tank!
There you go.
I don’t get it, Jesse says.
It doesn’t matter, Jess. Her smile wasn’t creepy. That’s all I’m saying. Right away, her mother pulled up behind her, spokes flashing, turned a scowl on me, and said, Let’s go, honey. The girl stiffened to get her balance on the pedals and they headed down the block.
A few nights later she stopped again. Her mother hadn’t come around the corner yet. I remember, this time, exactly what I was doing. I was wishing on the evening star:
Star light, star bright,
first star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might
have the wish I make tonight.
My father had gone into the hospital that morning with chest pains and I wished he’d be okay.
Like Mom’ll go to the ‘spital soon? Seth asks. Like that?
Yes.
Can we go outside later and wish on the star?
It’s not a star. It’s a planet, Jesse says. It’s the planet Venus.
Seth glares at his brother, confused.
You know, Seth, your mother’s not sick, don’t you? I say. Women have babies all the time. She’s going to be fine.
Still, I want to make a wish.
We will. Of course we will.
For Mama. And for our haby sister.
Will she have a mustache? Jesse asks.
I don’t think so.
But her head’ll be big, right? You said.
I don’t know, Jess. The doctors think … yes, her features will probably look a little funny to us at first.
Now that the real subject has breached our talk, the boys, I see, are getting restless. Do you want to hear the rest about Suzanne? I ask. They squirm.
It Takes a Worried Man Page 12