Retablos

by Octavio Solis

  This was where you almost died, says Mom.

  You mean, in that fall?

  No, your father caught you before you fell. I mean the time you drank all that turpentine.

  When Dad was painting the living room.

  And he fell asleep and you drank it down like it was leche. He ran with you in his arms all the way to Hotel Dieu Hospital. The doctors pumped your stomach and saved you. Estabas azul.

  I picture him sprinting through traffic, weaving in and around people in his sweaty shirt all the way up to Hotel Dieu at the base of the mountain, chasing down the last meager breaths in a body gone blue. Mom’s told that story so often, with new details thrown in each time, that it seems more like a silent movie than something true now. Everything about this place seems unreal to me.

  We pass the fire station where she used to take me as a toddler to stand on the sideboards of the gleaming red fire truck. I’ve seen some old Kodak snapshots with me and these hearty men in their suspenders posing atop the truck.

  There’s the old mercado where she used to get her groceries, which meant whatever she could cook on that old twin-burner hot plate. And there are the various low-end department stores where she shopped for our clothes, the pawn shops and outdoor market stalls where the lowest-income gente of both sides of the río come to pick through garments and shoes and cheap jewelry. Then turning off the main drag, we catch sight of the men with the dusty red flags standing in the street cajoling us into their parking lots. We must be near the footbridge to Juárez. In fact, I see the wall. We’re a scant five blocks from the Franklin Canal and the dry riverbed border with Mexico.

  Another turn and we’re in the oldest, poorest section of El Paso, where people still live in those tiny one-story block houses with the chipped paint and exposed adobe. I see old ladies walking arm in arm with their long hair braided down their backs like steel cables. Children standing at the gate of their house, barefoot, in their soiled bibs and Dallas Cowboy tee-shirts, age-old resentments set deep in their black eyes. A few wiry homeboys in their wife-beaters and khakis hanging out at a corner park, sentries for the two girls frolicking on the swings and seesaw. It was once a kill zone of gang warfare, the toughest ward in the west, a place where stabbings and beatings were so routine, they weren’t even making the news. Today the edge is off these raw-boned streets. I see a young Anglo couple standing at a street corner querying their cell phones for directions.

  Now a large mural on the walls of the Sacred Heart Tortillería looms before us and we stop to take note of the various figures depicted. Pancho Villa sitting at a table with an order of Chico’s Tacos. The beloved Father Rahm on his bicycle, a giant flaming heart suspended over him. A pair of border crossers wading across el Río, their path blazed by the flashlight held in the capable hands of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Even one of the alligators from San Jacinto Plaza stands guard at the base of Mexican Jesus on the cross. It’s the sentimental history of our city with all our icons and heroes crowded into a single canvas of pale sky and grey earth with the mountain pinned against the background. Unreal as memory. Soon we coast past the red brick structure of Sacred Heart Catholic Church and my mom tells me she came there a few times when we were little. Once, she says, after Ernesto died of pneumonia, and again when she came in desperation to make a plea. She told the presiding Father Gafford that my brothers and sister and I were starving and that she had no money for milk. She thought he’d pray for us, but instead, he took some dollars from his own pocket and handed them to her. He gave her money every week until my parents could stand on their own earnings. It was their secret. He was a very decent man who asked nothing in return, she says and falls silent as the memory of her need and his generosity penetrates some deeper layer of her being. Her eyes track the old church as it slips behind us in our motion forward. Then out of nowhere she bursts into sobs, untethered sobs from down in her soul, covers her face and collapses into the console between us, her whole body caught in this belated, unfinished grief. I’m shocked by the violence of her weeping. She can’t even speak. The sobs rattle inside her like stones. Her face contorted and streaked with black tears. I want to comfort her, I want to tell her we’re fine and she did fine and look at how fine we are now, but all that comes out of my mouth is the word Mom. Feeble and whispered and dry.

  We had nothing. You were so hungry. Crying for leche. No one would help us. But he did. He was good to us. Thank Jesus for Father Gafford. Without him, I don’t know. I don’t know . . .

  Now it is real. The memory of my mother with Father Gafford and my hunger and my drinking the turpentine and Dad racing to the hospital and my baby brother dying in a rathole tenement with the monster in the black suit, it’s all real in the car. Sitting between us like a cloud of light. It’s real and alive in her mascara tears and in her hands still holding back more sobs and in her look, which captures all the terror, hope and gratitude that her life in El Segundo taught her. Not a mural. Not a second-floor walkway. Not a memory. But real.

  We cruise back onto Paisano Street and head home. She wipes her eyes with her sleeve and stares blankly out the window. I keep my eyes fixed on the road. Neither of us can muster any more words. It’s silence we crave. We don’t know why we need this, but we do.

  THE WANT

  FIRST CHRISTMAS BACK FROM COLLEGE and El Paso is a stark and lonely place. My dad’s asleep in his easy chair. Mom’s got the caldo de pollo simmering on the stove for me. But something else simmers in my private heart. A carnal wanting that grinds me down. An unquiet urge slowly reaming me out.

  I’m locked in my room, poring over my high school yearbook, studying the florid signatures of all my pretty classmates beseeching me to call whenever I’m in town. Hearts for punctuation. Smiley faces dotting the i’s. 2 Sweet 2 B 4 Got 10 . . . What can they possibly mean except U R 4 Got 10 already?

  Dad knocks on the door and asks if I’m okay. I tell him I’m going to see a friend. But it’s late, he says. Not late for me. It’s 10:30, he says. That’s early, I tell him. When they’re in bed, I take the keys and go.

  The roads are quiet. The sky is overcast. Bing Crosby on the radio wants to make me cry. I follow the city lodestar, there on the Franklin Mountains, the giant five-pointed pentagram of bright electric bulbs that light up every Christmas. I pull into a bar to drink but it’s strange sitting by myself with all these older blinder boozers who can hardly finish a sentence, so I leave. I almost hit another bar but the lone drunk with his pecker out is pissing the word “NO” on the wall outside. I don’t want a drink. I don’t need a drink. I need a girl, some girl to lie to, hold, feel against me, someone to give me a little nighttime CPR, for god’s sake. Just one time. One night. That’s all.

  The loneliness is hurting really bad now. It’s not in the heart but in the head like a migraine shooting icicles into the back of my eyes. It’s in my throat too, sore with the whispers that keep hissing out of my mouth like bile. All around me, the streets are barren and shiny in the night. All mortals hidden, out of reach. This is what my born-again high school teacher said would happen. You abandon the Lord and you’ll feel the desolation of that choice. You’ll be more alone than you could ever imagine. Painful and paralyzing is the sinner’s harrowing.

  It’s about two in the morning. A purgatory of empty streets, at every intersection a population of one. What am I looking for? Who do I hope to see? Maybe this girl, coming down Chelsea Street by the railroads tracks. She’s all alone, walking in a coat with a fur collar over a pale dress. We exchange looks as I pass her and I can see that she is a little scared. Not only that. She’s pregnant. In spite of how it looks, I have to stop.

  I lower the passenger window and wait for her. Are you okay? Do you need a lift home? She replies in her broken English that yes, she wants to go home, but it’s a little far. I tell her it’s okay, I’m not in any hurry and I have plenty of gas. And with apprehension in her eyes, she steps into my car.

  We don’t say a word as I pull away and
head down Paisano Street. At last, in a tremulous voice, I tell her she shouldn’t be out this late. Dangerous for a girl in her condition. She says she was coming from a party but her ride left without her. I hope you didn’t drink much, I say. She turns to me with a smile.

  Why, you got some?

  I don’t know what to say. What can I do except shake my head and ask her where she lives so I can take her home? She says we’re heading in that direction already. She says something about how pretty the star looks tonight, throwing that glow up into the clouds, and how every Christmas she’s always surprised when it’s there. Un milagro, she calls it. Then she asks me, How come you are out so late también?

  I want to tell her so much. I want to tell her how something dropped out of me at school one day, some essential cog of faith, and now God means nothing to me, and my night is devoid of people, like they’ve all gone to some other more rapturous place and left me behind and even my heart has deserted me for being such a traitor to myself and all I have is my body craving something it can’t put words to. But all I say is I can’t sleep and driving relaxes me. There’s a long pause after that and I can feel her smiling again.

  Lucky for me, she says.

  I tell her that I draw strength from her company and I take it as a propitious sign that she appeared like a mirage after seeing almost nobody for hours.

  A sign of what?

  I can’t answer that. I shrug and ask her how long before her baby comes.

  Two months. Maybe sooner.

  Wow. That’s incredible.

  She nods and turns up the Johnny Mathis “Silver Bells.”

  Are we close, I ask.

  She says, Yes. Real close.

  Tell me when to stop.

  Here.

  But there’s nothing there. Just a crumbling old sidewalk leading to a small park near the zoo. I pull over anyhow and tell her goodnight and that I hope she . . . but before I finish my words she sidles up to my side and lays her hand right on my crotch and presses down.

  What are you doing?

  Ándale, papacito. You don’t fool me. This is what you want.

  Please don’t do that.

  She moves her face close to mine as she strokes me. You like this, no? You drive all night looking for me. And here I am.

  Please don’t.

  What? I’m not doing nothin’.

  But your baby . . .

  She snorts. He won’t get in the way, she says. No manches, papacito. How much do you have?

  I’m horrified that this is all my abject misery, my loneliness, has convened for my sake. This pregnant girl. This lewd moment. Held fast in her hand like a gift.

  I don’t have anything. I don’t want this. Please take your hand off.

  She does. I shut off the radio and stare at the ridges on the steering wheel.

  I didn’t know you were . . . I had no idea—

  Don’t fool yourself. You knew. You knew the whole time. Why did you pick me up?

  I don’t get it. How can you do this? You’re so young and nice-looking and you got a baby on the way.

  I got another one at home. Give me twenty dollars y me voy.

  Twenty dollars?

  For my Christmas, papacito.

  I take out my wallet and give her thirty. When she opens the car door, the overhead light comes on and I see her. She doesn’t look sexy or salacious, only poor. Poor and tired and done with cowards like me. With the sort of pride that seems somehow fitting to the moment, she holds up the bills and says, You knew. Then she gets out and walks back in the direction I found her.

  Driving back to my house in the hush of the town, I deal with my confusion and my hard-on and the wrenching fires in my heart and come to a realization. Want is not the same as need. I want the girl but she needs the money. Want is her hand on my crotch, need is the baby. The want may be a craving so profound that unfulfilled it can hurt like death, but the need is life itself. The want made me roam all over like a rutting animal but the need will take me home. And how fucking Catholic of me, to pick up Mother Mary on a Christmas night and wind up with a prostitute in her third trimester. What a fucking cliché. But maybe it takes a cliché to slap me across the face with the ironies that make El Paso the raw-boned place it is. God doesn’t have to live here, but people do. We try, anyway. The hard-bitten wants and needs of our lives blur into something wondrous and terrible, beyond reality, beyond reproach, our own dirty human miracle like the electric star of Bethlehem blinking off in the gauzy haze of dawn.

  THE RUNNER II

  I ARRIVE WITH MY GIRLFRIEND to introduce her to my parents because I intend to marry her within a year or so. But the sight of my old town shames me. So washed-out, ragged and sere. Smelling of that refinery funk. And worse, our old house. Small and simple and the yard pocked with large patches of dead ryegrass and my parents are humble and uncomplicated in their way, and I’m afraid she’ll find them perhaps somewhat below the educational level of the people she and I mingle with. But once they get to know her and she them, there is instant rapport, the laughter between them easy and warm. They’re darling, she says. They’re smart and wise, she says. So there it is.

  I am sent out to buy refreshments for the dinner to come. I drive along Alameda Street toward the mercado. The sun still searing in its mountain cradle. There I see him, running on a narrow strip of desert earth along the road, right beside the car. He’s a local fixture by now, which is ironic because there’s nothing fixed about him. His clothes are threadbare and dirty like a mendicant’s and his scaly bare arms flail in the air as he runs. His hair is a tangled mane of long strands of matted filth running down his back. I slow down to get a closer look. On a stubbled face scalded by sun and wind, his eyes, unfocused and milky, seem to regard nothing but the ground in front. There is sweat streaming down his neck, dried snot on his cheek. He’s a little older than I am, maybe older than that. What terrors keep him on this crazy treadmill? What scared him so badly that he’s still running for cover? Who left this poor straggler behind, abandoned him to this perpetual marathon, this race without a tape? I remember the Tarahumara Indians and their almost superhuman proclivity for running long distances, who repulsed the Spanish church and colonists for generations, and I wonder if this runner is searching for his tribe. I steady the car even with him, but he quickens his pace. He’s clearly running from something now. He wants none of my scrutiny. I think he’s done with all that. Outran our judgments many miles ago.

  Without turning his head, I feel his eyes blur in my direction for an instant. This is my city, they seem to say. I run and run but here I am. Where are you? What are you running from? Who left you behind? The prodigal bitch is you. It is then I see that pride and shame are the same sin. One diminishes my family and the life they gave me, the other diminishes me. The last harsh rays of day gather on the glass as I let him dash between moving cars across the intersection. A blur sidestepping all my lame suppositions. Running. Running. Indio como yo.

  NETO

  I HAVE A BROTHER WHO died before he reached his first birthday. I think I ran into him at the airport. I’m waiting this one afternoon for a flight at El Paso International that keeps getting delayed every hour. I sit and put on my earbuds and listen to a random selection of electronica, jazz, maybe something ambient. There’s a point where the sounds in your head synchronize with eye focus and everything drops into a general blur. I zone out like that for a minute when gradually I sense him sitting across from me. My brother. I know it’s him because he looks like me, only a year younger. Less grey in his hair, fewer wrinkles around the mouth. Sleepy self-assured eyes. A face that don’t give a shit. I never really liked the phrase “comfortable in his skin” because I’ve never been comfortable in mine. But he is: the way he sits, the way his work boots sprawl toward me. I have my sunglasses on, which is how I size him up without him knowing.

  I notice a silver cross around his neck, the kind that is both tribal and religious. There are four or five tiny black
tats on his hands, and though I can’t see it under his clothes, I suspect he wears the Guadalupe Virgin over his heart. I can tell by the gentle curl of his lips that they’re more accustomed to speaking Spanish than English. He has his own inaudible music playing in his head and judging by the cadence in his nod, I guess it’s the boleros of my mom’s old records. He is all the Mexican I have tried to be but can’t.

  Then in that languorous haze I see into his heavy-lidded eyes and his essential nature lays itself bare. I’m a Sunday man, he says inside, I kneel when the Father says to. I love my women. I sin against them and never apologize for it, except by loving them more. I know all the ways of loneliness, and all the ways to nurse it. I’m a nightbird, my eyes attuned to the nuances of dark, and it’s in that place I hide my saddest dreams, my delirious vices. Pain is grace. I don’t know how not to do something, only that not doing it brings more regret than I can bear. Trouble’s bitten me so many times, it’s left black marks on my hands, marks that commemorate loss and love and maybe an unborn child or two. I’ve seen death more than most, so count on me to be present at your last rites. That’s how our blood must have it. I am lived-in, a lived-in man. Your carnal. Your bro.