by James Hynes
“So you were never out walking the streets of Laredo,” he says.
“Excuse me?” She looks at him as sharply as she did when he implied she was a nurse. Now she’s gripping the wheel with both hands. Oh hell, thinks Kevin, now she thinks I just called her a streetwalker. Maybe she noticed him checking her out and has decided she doesn’t like it. Keep Your Mouth Shut, he reminds himself. I should just get out and walk. But instead he starts singing.
“ ‘As I walked out on the streets of Laredo,’ ”—thank God for Grampa Quinn and his Sons of the Pioneers LPs—“ ‘as I walked out in Laredo one day…’ ” Kevin’s quavering rendition has none of his grandfather’s confident tenor—like his dad, Kevin’s more of a baritone, and he’s reaching for the high notes—and the padded upholstery of the truck muffles the music. But even so, it seems to have soothed Dr. Barrientos’s savage breast.
“Ah,” she says.
Kevin takes another gulp of water. With this woman, it’s always two steps forward, one step back. At the top of the hill ahead, a crowded strip-mall sign rises against the whitish sky. HEART OF TEXAS MUSIC says the top of the sign, with an electric guitar outlined in red neon. Phone and power lines cross and recross above the street like laces, slung between wooden telephone poles silhouetted against the glare. A haze blurs the signs and power lines and telephone poles ever so slightly, but it’s not humidity, it’s the light ricocheting off itself, glittering, fracturing. Even behind his sunglasses, even through the twilight tint of the doctor’s windows, it makes him squint. No wonder everybody here’s so testy.
“ ‘Beat the drum slowly,’ right?” she says, not quite smiling. She lifts her other hand to the headrest and starts squeezing and flexing. Kevin glimpses the blued shadow of stubble under her arm. He’s pierced with desire for her; he’d like to bury his nose in that armpit.
“My grandfather used to sing it.” He smiles at her. “Back where I come from, it’s all anyone knows of Texas.”
“ ‘The Streets of Laredo’? Really?” Her fingers press so deep into the leather of the headrest Kevin’s sure she’s going to puncture it. Her biceps throbs like a heart. He’s thinking that in bed she could clamp a man between her powerful thighs like a predator, and he’s wondering—in the vernacular of his old-school Polish uncle and his VFW buddies—if he’s even man enough for a woman like Dr. Barrientos.
“Well, you know. Cowboys. Cattle. Oil.” Lawless border towns, he nearly says. The Alamo, The Searchers. Docile, flat-faced Mexican peasants. Mariachi bands. Fiery, finger-snapping, hat-dancing señoritas.
“Chips and salsa,” he says instead.
“Chips and salsa.” She gives her little snorting laugh again and drapes both hands loosely over the wheel, just like his dad used to. That cools his ardor a bit. He can live with the idea that he might fall for a woman like his mother, but would he really fall for one like his dad?
“And Dubya,” Kevin says. “We blame Texans for that.”
Of course he shouldn’t have said that—what if she’s a Republican? A lot of them are, he knows—Bush-voting Hispanics, conservative Catholic Chicanos, who voted for Obama only because the rest of the Republican Party got so squirrelly about immigration. But to his relief, she gives him a heartfelt laugh, if a little grudging and melancholy. They sail under another yellow light, weaving between slower cars to the top of the hill, out from under the trees and into the glare again. Ahead is a little foreshortened forest of plainspoken signs—COLOR COPIES 69¢, SELF-STORAGE, SAXON PUB—punctuated by telephone poles.
“You can’t blame us for that,” she says. “He’s from Connecticut.”
“Ah, a Yankee. So it’s our fault.”
“A Norte Americano.” She lifts one finger off the wheel. “You don’t get more norte than Connecticut.”
“Hey, I’m from Michigan, remember?” says Kevin. “I’m practically a Canadian.”
She smiles, still attractively melancholy. “Oh, Canadians are all right.” Her eyes seem distracted again.
Now they’re passing the slightly scruffy sort of local businesses that he’d find on the down-market end of Stadium Boulevard back home, out toward Ypsilanti: a Mexican restaurant in bright orange stucco; a Goodwill shop; another Mexican restaurant; a gas station and convenience store where unleaded regular is twenty cents cheaper than in Ann Arbor. The very pavement of Lamar looks scruffy, as leached of color as a faded pair of jeans. Behind these roadside establishments rise masses of trees, their leaves glittering in the nearly vertical sunlight, deep green in the mutually reinforcing tints of Kevin’s glasses and the windows of the truck. Who knew Austin was so leafy? But even at a distance the treetops still look strange, more like the bristling feathers of some prehistoric bird than leaves, and all this archaeopteryx foliage unsettles him even more. Strange trees; strange car; strange, distracted woman—Kevin feels the mild but distinct queasiness of being a passenger in a stranger’s vehicle. And not just a strange vehicle, but a fastidiously antiseptic one—even the cab he caught at the airport had more character than Dr. Barrientos’s truck. There’s no yin-yang medallion spinning from her rearview, no CDs in the pockets between the seats, no crumbs in the upholstery, not even any dust on the padded dash. Apart from her sweat, it doesn’t even have a smell apart from the clammy chill of the AC. But then she’s a surgeon. Perhaps she maintains a sterile environment even in her car.
“You get used to it,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“The heat.”
A silence descends, like an awkward pause on a first date. There’s something about the furrowing of her forehead, about her headrest-squeezing and her gunning of the accelerator, that tells him her mind’s on something other than her passenger and his tolerance for the Texas climate. He recognizes distraction, because Stella is always carrying on a conversation with herself in her head. Sometimes in the car, when they’re riding without talking, she gestures suddenly; sometimes her lips move silently. Or she’ll say quietly to herself, “Uh huh” or “That’s right,” with a sharp little nod. Times like this Kevin thinks of her as wandering in the Stella Continuum, and early on he learned not to disturb her, because when he has, she’s started with a wild look in her eye, as frightened, and frightening, as a sleepwalker jolted awake. (Actually waking her up at night, in fact, from one of her feverish nightmares, is even scarier.) So he knows better than to say anything to this intense woman he’s only just met. Instead, instinctively, he does what he usually does when Stella’s lost in the Stella Continuum.
“Cartridge World,” he says absently, reading the first sign he sees, a big, square yellow one.
“Sorry?”
“That sign.” Kevin gestures, Claudia glances. Cartridge World glides by, a narrow storefront with tinted windows.
“I think I’m having a Texas moment,” he says.
“Right.” She nods slowly. “Everybody in Texas drives a pickup and carries a gun.”
Kevin gestures palms up to encompass the cab of the truck. “Pickup,” he says. Tips his head back toward the shop, dwindling in the rear window. “Cartridge World.”
“They sell toner,” she says. “Printer cartridges.”
“Ah.” Repeat after me: KYMS, KYMS, KYMS.
“You’ll pardon my saying so,” says Claudia, “but you seem to be a man who jumps to conclusions.”
“Actually,” he says, “I’m not. I mean, I don’t. Jump to conclusions. Not usually. It’s just…”
He’s not even sure what he means to say. Lamar winds through a series of slow curves, still climbing slightly. Trees with bristling little leaves crowd close to the road again, and now there are actual houses along the street, little one-story bungalows, decades old. Most of them are small, funky businesses now: a hair and nail salon, a chiropractor, a pawnshop that advertises PAYDAY LOANS. A colorfully hip vintage shop, an immigration lawyer named Gonzalez. A psychic palm reader—as opposed to what, Kevin wonders, a nonpsychic palm reader?—whose hand-painted sign declares that she c
an HABLA ESPAÑOL. Just beyond that he sees a billboard in Español—La nueva AT&T—and an exterminator’s sign that features a giant, brown, neon cockroach, all legs and antennae, unlit and unwriggling at midday. And then he sees another Mexican restaurant, an unlit neon sign with a stepped Mayan pyramid and the name MEXICO LINDO in red tubing. The phrase rings in his head in Dolby surround sound—it’s a line from The Wild Bunch, but he can’t remember who says it. Not William Holden or Ernest Borgnine, certainly not Warren Oates or Ben Johnson. No, it was the fifth guy, the Mexican member of the gang. The first time Kevin saw the film, he watched a bootleg print of the director’s cut on the Michigan campus during his Big Star days. Saw it with McNulty, in fact, who slumped in his seat next to Kevin in the back row and laughed quietly to himself all the way through the orgy of carnage at the end. Kevin’s seen it half a dozen times since on VHS and DVD, but he still remembers that raucous, grainy, badly focused first viewing, a film co-op screening attended mainly by whooping, drunken engineering students, who cheered at the end when Holden shot the beautiful señorita who’d just shot him, and called her, “Bitch.” What was that character’s name, the Mexican guy? The one whose cut throat was the incitement for all that subsequent bloodshed, the wholesale slaughter of peasants, little boys, and women? The whole situation made him uncomfortable at the time, and makes him uncomfortable still, and the best he can do in defense of it is to put it in the context of when he saw it and who he saw it with. And where he saw it: Auditorium A, Angell Hall. That’s it! That was the guy’s name! Angel! The Mexican in the bunch, the guy they went back to rescue from the bandit warlord at the end. Angel says “Mexico lindo” near the beginning of the film, as they leave Texas and cross the Rio Grande. The Rrrio Grrran-day. “Meh-hee-co leen-do,” Angel says. Lovely Mexico.
But Kevin can’t point that out, because he doesn’t want to be seen jumping to conclusions again, doesn’t want to tell this touchy Latina who grew up on the border that everything he knows about Mexican culture comes from the films of Sam Peckinpah. He might as well invoke Speedy Gonzales or the Taco Bell Chihuahua, might as well tell her, “We don’ need no steenking badges.” His default liberal guilt and his native midwestern decency jerk him short like a leash. But he can’t help what he’s thinking, and right now he feels like he’s riding into another country—a hot, dusty, sun-blanched place with immigration lawyers and bilingual palm readers and corporate billboards in Spanish and leaves that bristle like blades and giant neon cockroaches and palm trees. Sweaty, dehydrated, and enervated, his torn trousers flapping wide over his bandaged knee, Kevin feels like Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in either the first twenty minutes or the last twenty minutes of The Treasure of Sierra Madre; all he needs is two days of stubble and the shakes. But he can’t tell Claudia any of this, either. Oh Christ, thinks Kevin, his liberal guilt cinching tighter, she’s right. I do jump to conclusions.
“It’s just what?” says Claudia.
“You know how it is when you’re in a strange city?” His voice shoots up an octave, which he hates, but he can’t stop himself. “It’s like you’re fourteen years old again, big and gawky and clueless. You know? Everything you normally take for granted, in fact everything that everybody around you is taking for granted, you have to stop and think about. You know what I mean?”
“Hm,” she says.
Of course, Claudia—Dr. Barrientos, that is—has probably never felt defenseless or clueless in her entire life. Or if she has, she’d never admit to it.
“It’s just that here I am, in Texas, where I never thought I’d be, and I’m seeing all this stuff I just don’t see at home—Cartridge World and palm trees and that neon cockroach we just passed and all these Mexican restaurants…”
Shouldn’t have said that, of course, but just then he points excitedly through the windshield at yet another Mexican restaurant, this one with a line of fraying palms around the edge of its parking lot.
“And Mexican restaurants with palm trees!” He’s laughing now, he knows he sounds like an idiot, but she’s laughing, too, at his excitement, if nothing else. “And I try to link it all with what I bring with me from Michigan, and what little I know about Texas. Which is, of course, mostly clichés and stereotypes.” He’s gesturing with both hands now, which makes him even more self-conscious. “So of course I get everything wrong, and not only that, I get it wrong in front of a native Texan. Who’s been very kind to me. Which only makes me feel more like a fish out of water. Like I’m fourteen years old all over again.”
Breathlessly he stops and lets his hands drop. At least he didn’t mention The Wild Bunch. He’s almost afraid to look at her, but when he does, he sees that she’s still smiling.
“Good thing we didn’t drive up South Congress,” she says. “There’s a store there called Just Guns.”
Kevin’s laughter doesn’t lessen the ache of his alienation. Moving here would mean that he’d feel fourteen years old for months, maybe even years, before he became acclimated to Texas. All along the street for the last few minutes, between the bungalows and under the trees, he’s seen several one- and two-bay specialty garages of cinderblock, where, repair by repair, you can remake your aging auto until it’s been rebuilt from the treads up—replace your muffler, rebuild your transmission, reline your brakes, rotate your tires. Change the oil in fifteen minutes, precision tune the engine in thirty, tint the windows, customize the audio. A collision shop, a paint-and-body shop, reconditioned auto parts. And the funky little businesses in the bungalows in between offer to rebuild and customize Kevin himself: he could get his hair and nails done; he could be tanned, tattooed, and pierced; he could lose weight under the supervision of a physician. He could bulk up or slim down; he could have his teeth whitened and his vision laser-sharpened; he could have his bones chiropractically manipulated; he could have his aura read and his fortune told in two languages. He and his Honda Accord could start at one end of Lamar, and shop by shop, repair by repair, treatment by treatment, they could weave helically past each other from one side of the street to the other, until, at the far end—wherever and whenever that was—they would be remade as Texans, like the ship of Theseus, plank by plank and oar by oar, until the question becomes, is it the same ship any longer? Remade as a Texan, would Kevin be the same man any more? Does he even want to be? And is it even possible to remake a fifty-year-old man? Or has he been remade once too often already?
Kevin’s still laughing, though.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Is ranting a sign of heatstroke?”
“Not usually,” says Dr. Barrientos. “Fear of palm trees, though…” She wobbles her hand in the air between them. “And Mexican restaurants,” she adds. “What have you got against Mexicans?”
She says “Mexican” now with the hard X like a Norte Americano. He can’t tell if she’s being polite or condescending or both.
“Tell you what,” Kevin says, full of surprises, “you pick the place and I’ll buy you lunch.” He peeks at his watch; there’s two and a half hours yet until his interview.
Another silence, but not so awkward. Or at least awkward in a different way. Watching her sidelong he’s pretty sure she’s thinking it over.
“I’m not really dressed for it,” she says. “And I need a shower.”
“Look at me.” Kevin plucks at his wilted shirt, the knee of his torn trousers. “I look like I just survived a terrorist attack.”
Their gazes cross obliquely across the cab of the truck, neither quite looking at the other. Even here, light years from Glasgow, there’s a little Buchanan Street frisson between them.
“I appeal to your Hippocratic oath, Doctor,” Kevin says. “I’m still kinda wobbly. I may need a medicinal burrito.”
For the first time since Kevin got into the truck Dr. Barrientos has been stopped by a traffic light. It’s as if she’s been brought up short by his question, and the sudden lack of forward momentum seems to heighten the padded quiet of the cab. Her eyes look distracted again, a
nd watching her past the edge of his sunglasses, Kevin’s not sure that what’s distracting her is his invitation, or even his presence. The silence stretches on as the vehicles waiting for the light on the far side of the intersection glitter and sizzle in the heat. Beyond them Lamar curves up and to the left, where he sees more colorful signs, more bilingual billboards, more power lines against the whitish sky. The cross street of the intersection cuts into Lamar at a bias, and on the arrowhead corner sits a scruffy little used car lot packed with five- and ten-year-old automobiles, mostly compacts and subcompacts, all a little the worse for wear. The dealer’s office is an old, flat-roofed, whitewashed, cinderblock service station with a sign in bright red letters that reads (with wholly unnecessary quotation marks and heavy-handed punctuation, thinks Kevin the professional editor), “IF YOU HAVE A CAR YOU CAN GET A JOB!!!”
I have a car, thinks Kevin. I have a job. I have a house, a mortgage, job security, a retirement plan, friends, a history, a life, all in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have a girlfriend, even, more or less—a live-in lover, at any rate, who, from the outside, from the point of view of his middle-aged, married male friends with children, looks like an improbable piece of guilt-free midlife arm candy, wholly undeserved, and the incitement for a fair amount of jealousy and disbelief, thinly disguised as salacious joshing. They slap his arm and say, “You lucky bastard,” or they laugh harshly and say, “What does she see in you?” Sometimes their rage is even undisguised, as when his friend Dale, at a Labor Day cookout in his suburban backyard, only half an hour after Kevin had introduced him to Stella, had shoved Kevin in the chest with both hands and said, “You motherfucker.” Of course, none of them have seen Stella when she wakes up sweating and shaking at three in the morning, recoiling from Kevin’s touch, no recognition of him in her wild eyes; none of them have seen the faint white scars along the insides of her forearms and her thighs, which she covers with makeup and will not talk about, will not even acknowledge the existence of. And none of them (at least not recently, at least not in the last month) has discovered the used plastic wand of a pregnancy test stuffed at the bottom of the kitchen trash, under coffee grounds and eggshells and rusty apple cores, wrapped in three layers of paper towels.