Harry came back before I could get away from the bar. “Know who that was, Bumper?” he said, his eyes glassy and his cheeks pale. He had acne as a young man and now his putty-colored cheeks looked corroded.
“Who was it,” I sighed, “Irma?”
“No, that was the hospital. I spent every cent I had, even with the hospital benefits, and now she’s been put in a big ward with a million other old, dying people. And still I got to pay money for one thing or another. You know, when Flossie finally dies there ain’t going to be nothing left to bury her. I had to cash in the insurance. How’ll I bury old Flossie, Bumper?”
I started to say something to soothe Harry, but I heard sobbing and realized Freddie had started blubbering. Then in a second or two Harry started, so I threw five bucks on the bar for Freddie and Harry to get bombed on, and I got the hell away from those two without even saying good-bye. I’ve never understood how people can work in mental hospitals and old people’s homes and places like that without going nuts. I felt about ready for the squirrel tank right now just being around those two guys for an hour.
EIGHT
TEN MINUTES LATER I was driving my Ford north on the Golden State Freeway and I started getting hungry for Socorro’s enchiladas. I got to Eagle Rock at dusk and parked in front of the big old two-story house with the neat lawn and flower gardens on the sides. I was wondering if Socorro planted vegetables in the back this year, when I saw Cruz in the living room standing by the front window. He opened the door and stepped out on the porch, wearing a brown sport shirt and old brown slacks and his house slippers. Cruz didn’t have to dress up for me, and I was glad to come here and see everyone comfortable, as though I belonged here, and in a way I did. Most bachelor cops have someplace like Cruz’s house to go to once in a while. Naturally, you can get a little ding-a-ling if you live on the beat and don’t ever spend some time with decent people. So you find a friend or a relative with a family and go there to get your supply of faith replenished,
I called Cruz my old roomie because when we first got out of the police academy twenty years ago, I moved into this big house with him and Socorro. Dolores was a baby, and Esteban a toddler. I took a room upstairs for over a year and helped them with their house payments until we were through paying for our uniforms and guns, and were both financially on our feet. That hadn’t been a bad year and I’d never forget Socorro’s cooking. She always said she’d rather cook for a man like me who appreciated her talent than a thin little guy like Cruz who never ate much and didn’t really appreciate good food. Socorro was a slender girl then, twelve years younger than Cruz, nineteen years old, with two kids already, and the heavy Spanish accent of El Paso which is like that of Mexico itself. They’d had a pretty good life I guess, until Esteban insisted on joining the army and was killed two years ago. They weren’t the same after that. They’d never be the same after that.
“How do you feel, oso?” said Cruz, as I climbed the concrete stairs to his porch. I grinned because Socorro had first started calling me “oso” way back in those days, and even now some of the policemen call me “bear” from Socorro’s nickname.
“You hurting, Bumper?” Cruz asked. “I heard those kids gave you some trouble at the demonstration today.”
“I’m okay,” I answered. “What’d you hear?”
“Just that they pushed you around a little bit. Hijo la-. Why does a man your age get involved in that kind of stuff? Why don’t you listen to me and just handle your radio calls and let those young coppers handle the militants and do the hotdog police work?”
“I answered a radio call. That’s how it started. That’s what I get for having that goddamn radio turned on.”
“Come on in, you stubborn old bastard,” Cruz grinned, holding the wood frame screen door open for me. Where could you see a wood frame screen door these days? It was an old house, but preserved. I loved it here. Cruz and I once sanded down all the woodwork in the living room, even the hardwood floor, and refinished it just as it had been when it was new.
“What’re we having?” Cruz asked, brushing back his thick gray-black hair and nodding toward the kitchen.
“Well, let’s see,” I sniffed. I sniffed again a few times, and then took a great huge whiff. Actually I couldn’t tell, because the chile and onion made it hard to differentiate, but I took a guess and pretended I knew.
“Chile relleno, carnitas and cilantro and onion. And… let’s see… some enchiladas, some guacamole.”
“I give up,” Cruz shook his head. “The only thing you left out was rice and beans.”
“Well hell, Cruz, arroz y frijoles, that goes without saying.”
“An animal’s nose.”
“Sukie in the kitchen?”
“Yeah, the kids’re in the backyard, some of them.”
I went through the big formal dining room to the kitchen and saw Socorro, her back to me, ladling out a huge wooden spoonful of rice into two of the bowls that sat on the drainboard. She was naturally a little the worse for wear after twenty years and nine kids, but her hair was as long and black and shiny rich as ever, and though she was twenty pounds heavier, she still was a strong, lively-looking girl with the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. I snuck up behind her and tickled her ribs.
“Ay!” she said, dropping the spoon. “Bumper!”
I gave her a hug from the back while Cruz chuckled and said, “You didn’t surprise him, he smelled from the door and knew just what you fixed for him.”
“He’s not a man, this one,” she smiled, “no man ever had a nose like that.”
“Just what I told him,” said Cruz.
“Sit down, Bumper,” said Socorro, waving to the kitchen table, which, big and old as it was, looked lost in the huge kitchen. I’d seen this kitchen when there wasn’t a pathway to walk through, the day after Christmas when all the kids were young and I’d brought them toys. Kids and toys literally covered every foot of linoleum and you couldn’t even see the floor then.
“Beer, Bumper?” asked Cruz, and opened two cold ones without me answering. We still liked drinking them out of the bottle, both of us, and I almost finished mine without taking it away from my mouth. And Cruz, knowing my M.O. so well, uncapped another one.
“Cruz told me the news, Bumper. I was thrilled to hear it,” said Socorro, slicing an onion, her eyes glistening from the fumes.
“About you retiring right away and going with Cassie when she leaves,” said Cruz.
“That’s good, Bumper,” said Socorro. “There’s no sense hanging around after Cassie leaves. I was worried about that.”
“Sukie was afraid your puta would seduce you away from Cassie if she was up in San Francisco and you were down here.”
“Puta?”
“The beat,” said Cruz taking a gulp of the beer. “Socorro always calls it Bumper’s puta.”
“Cuidao!” said Socorro to Cruz. “The children are right outside the window.” I could hear them laughing, and Nacho yelled something then, and the girls squealed.
“Since you’re leaving, we can talk about her can’t we, Bumper?” Cruz laughed. “That beat is a puta who seduced you all these years.”
Then for the first time I noticed from his grin and his voice that Cruz had had a few before I got there. I looked at Socorro who nodded and said, “Yes, the old borracho’s been drinking since he got home from work. Wants to celebrate Bumper’s last dinner as a bachelor, he says.”
“Don’t be too rough on him,” I grinned. “He doesn’t get drunk very often.”
“Who’s drunk?” said Cruz, indignantly.
“You’re on your way, pendejo,” said Socorro, and Cruz mumbled in Spanish, and I laughed and finished my beer.
“If it hadn’t been for that puta, Bumper would’ve been a captain by now.”
“Oh sure,” I said, going to the refrigerator and drawing two more beers for Cruz and me. “Want one, Sukie?”
“No thanks,” said Socorro, and Cruz burped a couple times.
�
��Think I’ll go outside and see the kids,” I said, and then I remembered the presents in the trunk of my car that I bought Monday after Cruz invited me to dinner.
“Hey, you roughnecks,” I said when I stepped out, and Nacho yelled, “Buuuum-per,” and swung toward me from a rope looped over the limb of a big oak that covered most of the yard.
“You’re getting about big enough to eat hay and pull a wagon, Nacho,” I said. Then four of them ran toward me chattering about something, their eyes all sparkling because they knew damn well I’d never come for dinner without bringing them something.
“Where’s Dolores?” I asked. She was my favorite now, the oldest after Esteban, and was a picture of what her mother had been. She was a college junior majoring in physics and engaged to a classmate of hers.
“Dolores is out with Gordon, where else?” said Ralph, a chubby ten-year-old, the baby of the family who was a terror, always raising some kind of hell and keeping everyone in an uproar.
“Where’s Alice?”
“Over next door playing,” said Ralph again, and the four of them, Nacho, Ralph, María, and Marta were all about to bust, and I was enjoying it even though it was a shame to make them go through this.
“Nacho,” I said nonchalantly, “would you please take my car keys and get some things out of the trunk?”
“I’ll help,” shrieked Marta.
“I will,” said María, jumping up and down, a little eleven-year-old dream in a pink dress and pink socks and black patent leather shoes. She was the prettiest and would be heartbreakingly beautiful someday.
“I’ll go alone,” said Nacho. “I don’t need no help.”
“The hell you will,” said Ralph.
“You watch your language, Rafael,” said María, and I had to turn around to keep from busting up at the way Ralph stuck his chubby little fanny out at her.
“Mama,” said María. “Ralph did something dirty!”
“Snitch,” said Ralph, running to the car with Nacho.
I strolled back into the kitchen still laughing, and Cruz and Socorro both were smiling at me because they knew how much I got a bang out of their kids.
“Take Bumper in the living room, Cruz,” said Socorro. “Dinner won’t be ready for twenty minutes.”
“Come on, Bumper,” said Cruz, taking four cold ones out of the refrigerator, and a beer opener. “I don’t know why Mexican women get to be tyrants in their old age. They’re so nice and obedient when they’re young.”
“Old age. Huh! Listen to the viejo, Bumper,” she said, waving a wooden spoon in his direction, as we went in the living room and I flopped in Cruz’s favorite chair because he insisted. He pushed the ottoman over and made me put my feet up.
“Damn, Cruz.”
“Got to give you extra special treatment tonight, Bumper,” he said, opening another beer for me. “You look dog tired, and this may be the last we have you for a long time.”
“I’ll only be living one hour away by air. You think Cassie and me aren’t gonna come to L.A. once in a while? And you think you and Socorro and the kids aren’t gonna come see us up there?”
“The whole platoon of us?” he laughed.
“We’re gonna see each other plenty, that’s for sure,” I said, and fought against the down feeling that I was getting because I realized we probably would not be seeing each other very often at all.
“Yeah, Bumper,” said Cruz, sitting across from me in the other old chair, almost as worn and comfortable as this one. “I was afraid that jealous bitch would never let you go.”
“You mean my beat?”
“Right.” He took several big gulps on the beer and I thought about how I was going to miss him.
“How come all the philosophizing tonight? Calling my beat a whore and all that?”
“I’m waxing poetic tonight.”
“You also been tipping more than a little cerveza.”
Cruz winked and peeked toward the kitchen where we could hear Socorro banging around. He went to an old mahogany hutch that was just inside the dining room and took a half-empty bottle of mescal out of the bottom cabinet.
“That one have a worm in it?”
“If it did I drank it,” he whispered. “Don’t want Sukie to see me drinking it. I still have a little trouble with my liver and I’m not supposed to.”
“Is that the stuff you bought in San Luis? That time on your vacation?”
“That’s it, the end of it.”
“You won’t need any liver you drink that stuff.”
“It’s good, Bumper. Here, try a throatful or two.”
“Better with salt and lemon.”
“Pour it down. You’re the big macho, damn it. Drink like one.”
I took three fiery gulps and a few seconds after they hit bottom I regretted it, and had to drain my bottle of beer while Cruz chuckled and sipped slowly for his turn.
“Damn,” I wheezed and then the fire fanned out and my guts uncoiled and I felt good. Then in a few minutes I felt better. That was the medicine my body needed.
“They don’t always have salt and lemon lying around down in Mexico,” said Cruz handing me back the mescal. “Real Mexicans just mix it with saliva.”
“No wonder they’re such tough little bastards,” I wheezed, taking another gulp, but only one this time, and handing it back.
“How do you feel now, ’mano?” Cruz giggled, and it made me start laughing, his silly little giggle that always started when he was half swacked.
“I feel about half as good as you,” I said, and splashed some more beer into the burning pit that was my stomach. But it was a different fire entirely than the one made by the stomach acid, this was a friendly fire, and after it smoldered it felt great.
“Are you hungry?” asked Cruz.
“Ain’t I always?”
“You are,” he said, “you’re hungry for almost everything. Always. I’ve often wished I was more like you.”
“Like me?”
“Always feasting, on everything. Too bad it can’t go on forever. But it can’t. I’m damn glad you’re getting out now.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I am. But I know what I’m talking about, ’mano. Cassie was sent to you. I prayed for that.” Then Cruz reached in his pocket for the little leather pouch. In it was the string of black carved wooden beads he carried for luck. He squeezed the soft leather and put it away.
“Did those beads really come from Jerusalem?”
“They did, that’s no baloney. I got them from a missionary priest for placing first in my school in El Paso. ‘First prize in spelling to Cruz Guadalupe Segovia,’ the priest said, as he stood in front of the whole school, and I died of happiness that day. I was thirteen, just barely. He got the beads in the Holy Land and they were blessed by Pius XI.”
“How many kids did you beat out for the prize?”
“About six entered the contest. There were only seventy-five in the school altogether. I don’t think the other five contestants spoke any English. They thought the contest would be in Spanish but it wasn’t, so I won.”
We both laughed at that. “I never won a thing, Cruz. You’re way ahead of me.” It was amazing to think of a real man like Cruz carrying those wooden beads. In this day and age!
Then the front door banged open and the living room was filled with seven yelling kids, only Dolores being absent that night, and Cruz shook his head and sat back quietly drinking his beer and Socorro came into the living room and tried to give me hell for buying all the presents, but you couldn’t hear yourself over the noisy kids.
“Are these real big-league cleats?” asked Nacho as I adjusted the batting helmet for him and fixed the chin strap which I knew he’d throw away as soon as the other kids told him big leaguers don’t wear chin straps.
“Look! Hot pants!” María squealed, holding them up against her adolescent body. They were sporty, blue denim with a bib, and patch pockets.
“Hot pants?” Cruz said. “Oh, no!”
“They even wear them to school, Papa. They do. Ask Bumper!”
“Ask Bumper,” Cruz grumbled and drank some more beer.
The big kids were there then too, Linda, George, and Alice, all high school teenagers, and naturally I bought clothes for them. I got George a box of mod-colored long-sleeved shirts and from the look in his eyes I guess I couldn’t have picked anything better.
After all the kids thanked me a dozen times, Socorro ordered them to put everything away and called us to dinner. We sat close together on different kinds of chairs at the huge rectangular oak table that weighed a ton. I know because I helped Cruz carry it in here twelve years ago when there was no telling how many kids were going to be sitting around it.
The youngest always said the prayers aloud. They crossed themselves and Ralph said grace, and they crossed themselves again and I was drooling because the chiles rellenos were on a huge platter right in front of me. The big chiles were stuffed with cheese and fried in a light fluffy batter, and before I could help myself, Alice was serving me and my plate was filled before any one of those kids took a thing for themselves. Their mother and father never said anything to them, they just did things like that.
“You do have cilantro,” I said, salivating with a vengeance now. I knew I smelled that wonderful spice.
Marta, using her fingers, sprinkled a little extra cilantro over my carnitas when I said that, and I bit into a soft, handmade, flour tortilla crammed with carnitas and Socorro’s own chile sauce.
“Well, Bumper?” said Cruz after I’d finished half a plateful which took about thirty-five seconds.
I moaned and rolled my eyeballs and everybody laughed because they knew that look so well.
“You see, Marta,” said Socorro. “You wouldn’t hate to cook so much if you could cook for somebody like Bumper who appreciates your work.”
I grinned with a hog happy look, washing down some chile relleno and enchilada with three big swigs of cold beer. “Your mother is an artist!”
I finished three helpings of carnitas, the tender little chunks of pork which I covered with Socorro’s chile and cilantro and onion. Then, after everyone was finished and there were nine pairs of brown eyes looking at me in wonder, I heaped the last three chiles rellenos on my plate and rolled one up with the last flour tortilla and the last few bites of carnitas left in the bowl, and nine pairs of brown eyes got wider and rounder.
The Blue Knight Page 12