Leaving Allison

by Sedgwick, Grady

  “I don’t know about that,” Pablo says.

  “Or maybe he was gored and lost all his brave blood. That’s what happens when you get gored; you lose your confidence. Some people think getting wounded makes you stronger—makes you a tough sonuvabitch—but really, in the long run, it makes you weak.”

  Pablo turns to me, “You got gored?”

  “No, I’ve never been gored.”

  “Then you need to be quiet because you don’t know what you say.”

  “I know what I say.”

  . . .

  A week into my Mexico quest, when I ask Pablo what he expects me to do with all this crap in my room, he turns up the volume on his radio. My arms loaded with junk, I stop in the hallway and ask if he wants to help toss this shit. “What about this old broken guitar? Chunk in or not?” He ignores me.

  A dirt road, the only road in the village, passes in front of the hacienda. Across the road is a concrete box about the size of a small car, where everyone in town burns their trash, so I haul everything from my room to the concrete box.

  After the sun goes down, Pablo crosses the road with a can of gasoline and a bottle of tequila. A full moon illuminates our village of a hundred people or so, one of many small towns clustered in a long valley.

  “Like an Ansel Adams photograph,” Ms. Kianna says when she joins us.

  Pablo gets the fire going and uncorks the tequila, offering the first sip to the doctor’s wife. The three of us have a drink, and Ms. Kianna jokes about her husband dumping her across the border to save Mexico while he spends all his time in LA.

  “Listen to this,” she says. “No, on second thought, I better not tell that story.”

  We pass the bottle around and I say, “Tell the story, Ms. Kianna, whatever it is. Then we’ll each tell one.”

  “I’ll tell part of it,” she says, “and you can draw your own conclusions.”

  Ms. Kianna wears khaki pants and denim shirts, like she’s on an extended camping trip. She’s being a good trooper though, supporting her husband’s philanthropic dreams. Last year she was probably living in Los Angeles, driving a new Mercedes and spending her mornings at private tennis clubs, her afternoons at trendy health spas.

  “When my husband became a doctor, we were young and hot for each other— Guys, believe it or not, I was young once and stayed high the entire Summer of Love. Can you believe I actually wore flowers in my hair like the San Francisco song? Oh well, back to the story. My husband’s first patient was a Mexican with erectile dysfunction.”

  Pablo appears to take this comment personally, pacing on the concrete slab. “I think he was not a Mexican.”

  Ms. Kianna says, “No, certainly not, Pablo. Los Mexicanos son como toros.”

  Pablo agrees, taking a long swig from the tequila bottle before passing it to Ms. Kianna. She has a swallow, hands it to me and continues. “So my husband went through this long list of personal questions. I suppose mostly health related questions, although maybe not. The man only stumbled through the answers, and in typical fashion, blamed the ultimate problem on his wife.”

  “I’m curious. What did the guy look like? Was he butt ugly like Pablo?”

  Ms. Kianna is shocked by my question and unsure how to respond. Then she realizes I’m joking and offers a knowing grin. “No, not at all, Mitch. He was very handsome like you.”

  Pablo calls me a comico and chases me around the concrete slab.

  “Hey, slow down you guys. Pablo, you know we’re only kidding. Actually, I don’t have a clue what the man looked like. That’s not the point.”

  “This is true,” Pablo says. “The point is, did his wife have beauty?”

  “That’s not the issue either,” I tell Pablo. “The man had something wrong with him, health wise. His wife could have been Ms. California—”

  “Not necessarily,” Kianna says. She digs in her pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Are you two finished speculating? If so, I’ll get back to the story.” She lights a cigarette. “To sum it up, without going too far into it, the couple divorced.”

  Pablo’s eating raw almonds from his pocket, washing them down with tequila. “What about your husband, the good doctor?” he asks. “Was he able to decide what caused the problem?”

  Ms. Kianna points to Pablo and taps the tip of her nose. “You, Señor Pablo, have just asked the key question— What caused the problem? Or, to put it another way, who caused the problem? Here’s how the whole thing played out. When the Hispanic couple split up, my husband came home and poured us each a glass of wine. He said his patient canceled the appointment and may have something seriously wrong with him. I asked if erectile dysfunction is something he studied in medical school. He said yes, everyone studies it. Then he said his best guess is prostate cancer.”

  “Did the man die?” I ask.

  “I think not,” Kianna says.

  We stand there watching the newspapers burn, the guitar twist in the heat. None of us are talking. In this small village, everything is quiet at night, not much going on except an occasional rooster or barking dog. I ask, “Was that it? The end of the story?”

  Kianna places the tequila bottle on the ground and says, “Like I said, there’s more to it, as there always is, but the good doctor had given his expert opinion. So yeah, that was it.”

  Pablo steps away to piss behind a bush. “I’ve heard stories better,” he calls out.

  “Let’s hear one!” I say. “What’s your story, Señor Pablo?”

  He picks up the tequila bottle and holds it in the air like a salute to heaven. “My legacy is one of tradition, long and tragic. A story of success, glory, and great loss.”

  “I can tell you about success and loss, in that exact order,” Kianna says. “Listen to this. This is the part I left out. A few months ago, long after the fact, we were having a relaxed meal at Morton’s in LA. The good doctor ordered another bottle of wine then told me, ‘The problem was the wife, I’ve decided, not cancer.’ ‘Excuse me,’ I said to him. That’s when he told me, ‘My first patient, I suspect, was no longer attracted to his wife.’”

  Pablo pokes at the fire. “Doctors, they do not always know.”

  Kianna sits on a smooth spot of dirt at the foot of a pecan tree, lights a cigarette and says mostly to herself, “After sixteen years of marriage, he changed his opinion.”

  She has a drink and hands it to me. I hold on to it, thinking about what she just told us.

  “Have a drink or pass it on,” Pablo says.

  “Sorry, man. Didn’t know you had to have it right this second.” I lean back, tilt the bottle into my mouth and guzzle tequila determined to prove that I’m not some weak American, that I can handle liquor like a real Mexican. It doesn’t go well though. The alcohol burns my throat, causing me to bound forward coughing and choking. I bend over and spit on the ground. “Shit that hurt!” I cough some more, spit again and announce, “I could have been a professional baseball player.”

  Kianna and Pablo are laughing. “Are you all right?” Kianna asks.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I say, trying to catch my breath. “It scorched my damn windpipe.”

  Pablo grins, clearly pleased with my defeat. “Maybe you could have been a professional tequila drinker,” he says.

  I give him the bottle and start searching the ground for anything I can throw. “I’ll prove it. We’ll have a pitching contest. You and me.”

  “And I’ll be the referee,” Kianna says. She’s sitting against the tree, acting like a pitcher winding up with a baseball. “Throw something, Mitch!” she shouts.

  When I can’t find anything to throw I tell them, “Let’s forget about baseball. Do you guys realize the three of us, right this very moment, are making history?” I pace around the cement trash box for emphasis, gesturing my arms like a southern preacher. “Thanks to the good doctor and his words of encouragement, we have all gathered here tonight to take part in a once in a lifetime meeting of genius, a flowering of ideas at the inception of— Th
e Mexican Peace Corps!”

  Kianna starts laughing and says, “You got it, Mitch. The three of us will save Mexico, and then, the world!”

  Pablo pushes the guitar into the flames. “Mexico does not need saving.”

  Kianna stands up, brushes dust off her khaki pants, and crosses the road. “Amen to that, brother. Maybe WE need saving?” she calls out from the other side.

  Pablo turns to me. “She’s the doctor’s wife,” he says, “but what happened, it’s not so much her fault.”

  “What’s not her fault?” I ask.

  “It’s not business for you.”

  A car goes by kicking up a rolling cloud of dust. I breathe through my shirt until it settles. Pablo rinses the grit from his mouth with tequila, spitting in the dirt. He stands on top of a flat stump, pours a shot of tequila on the fire and announces, “Un bebida fina. Para Usted, mi padre.” A small puff of gray smoke rises from the fire and circles above us. We hang out for a while and he asks me, “Why are you here?” The bottle hangs at his side, one finger curled around the lip.

  “Why am I here? Because I volunteered . . . You don’t want me here?”

  “You can be here,” he says. “You can be anywhere, but you won’t be sleeping inside the hacienda tonight.”

  . . .

  In the morning Pablo knocks on my car window to wake me up. He invites me to have breakfast at an outdoor restaurant a few blocks down the road. The place has a four posts, a canvas roof, and a pot of menudo cooking over an open fire. A friendly women rolls masa on a wooden table. She serves us huevos rancheros with side bowls of chopped peppers, cilantro and onions.

  We spend the day digging shallow canals in the orchard trying to connect the scraggly avocado trees. I’ll lose weight working like this and I’m already too skinny. In high school, I lost four pounds in three days. It began in the cafeteria lunch line. Connie and I had just stopped dating, and my father was talking crazy. For some reason my appetite vanished. Food no longer had any flavor and I couldn’t swallow. Standing in the cafeteria lunch line, people waiting behind me, I couldn’t make a decision about what to order, so I made one about eating. I decided to quit. The entire process had become too much trouble.

  . . .

  We’re headed to Ensenada in Pablo’s car with seven-year-old Marco sitting between us. He has a corncob pipe with a string and ball. He offers it to me. I keep swinging it but can’t get the spastic ball to land in the pipe. I make excuses, telling Marco it won’t fit. “The ball is too large. Demasiado grande.”

  Marco hangs the ball over the pipe, pausing to make sure I’m watching, then drops it in the hole. I pretend to toss his silly toy out the window.

  Straw brown mountains line the left side of the valley, and up ahead of us, thousands of monarch butterflies are on their southern migration. Marco scrambles over my lap, leans out the window, and tries to catch one. Pablo slows the car, “They migrate from California to die in Mexico.”

  “Who dies?” Marco asks.

  “The butterflies,” Pablo tells him. “They don’t live so long.”

  I hold on to Marco’s belt as he wiggles further out the window grabbing at butterflies with both hands. After a few kilometers we pull off the road to drop him off at a fruit stand.

  Pablo and I cruise along the highway as it curves south around the slope of a large hill, Ensenada below us on the left, the endless Pacific Ocean on the right. The ocean is the same beryl blue as the sky. There’s a lookout station where people park on the edge of a cliff and take pictures. At the bottom of the road, we enter the city. On the right, a line of vendors walk along wide sidewalk that curves around the harbor. They have rainbow serapes, paper-maché parrots and giant sparklers. A fire-eater swigs a mouthful of kerosene from a jug, strikes a match and blows flames into the air. At the stoplight, the fire-eater pauses at my window and holds out his charred hand. His eyebrows have been singed off. He doesn’t have lips or teeth, just a black hole below his nose. I quickly give him some pesos and roll up my window.

  “Shit, man. Did you see that guy?”

  “He is nothing,” Pablo says.

  At a Pemex station, a squeegee boy washes our windshield from a bucket of muddy water. Pablo gives the boy a few coins. We drive through downtown Ensenada passing food stands on street corners. One has a sailfish painted on the front. The vendor is wearing a dirty apron, grilling seafood tacos under a blue and white umbrella. He and his friends are laughing, maybe telling jokes. They smile and seem happy, unless they’re faking it. I fake it sometimes. If you don’t, people think something’s wrong with you.

  We roll the windows down and let the aroma of grilled fish, onions and lime linger through Pablo’s car. “Pablo, this may sound crazy, I know it does, but I wouldn’t mind being an Ensenada food vendor.”

  We ramble down Avenida Lopez Mateos in Pablo’s Plymouth watching teenagers cruise the strip in large customized cars from the ‘50s. Their cars are heavy on exhaust and have mixed parts like pipe fenders and Cadillac grills. A leather store has bullwhips hanging from an awning. The city buses are the old style, painted in bright colors with curved tops and rounded wheel wells. One has a red hood with a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Pablo says the Guadalupe bus is blessed. “It never breaks down, never kills anyone.”

  The telephone poles are stapled with advertisements for the Rosarito to Ensenada Bicycle Ride. “Mostly a bunch of drunk Americans from California,” Pablo says. “A good place for trouble. You shouldn’t go there.”

  “I think I might go.”

  After touring the city, we’re driving up the coastal road that curves past the lookout station. Pablo admits he drank too much tequila last night. I tell him it’s no big deal, that sleeping in my car only makes me stronger. ‘Mexicanos somos como toros,’ right?

  “Very true,” he says. “But you are not Mexican.”

  On the left, goats graze on clumps of dry weeds beside a junkyard of abandoned cars. “What does it say exactly? I mean, what does it mean?”

  He hesitates trying to think of a way to explain it. “Como un toro means like much of a man, a bull in the bedroom. You know John Wayne?”

  “Sure.”

  “Like him,” Pablo says.

  Marco had waited at the fruit stand all afternoon. When we stop for him, he’s sitting beside the road chewing a cut of sugarcane. I can’t get my mind around his level of patience.

  Marco places his bag of fruit on the seat between Pablo and me and climbs into the back. On the way home, we drive past a Catholic orphanage with a large wooden cross at the entrance, kids playing soccer in the dirt. Marco challenges me to a tangerine peeling contest. When he wins I proclaim him “Victorioso,” reaching back to raise his arm. His face spreads into a wide grin, as he stuffs several tangerine wedges into his mouth, juice dripping down his chin. A few minutes later he taps my shoulder. I turn around and he’s still smiling. “Viva yo!” he says. Hooray for me.

  . . .

  Two weeks ago I was living in a kick-ass San Diego apartment with my two best friends Trapper and Grady Myers. We partied with older women, ate free at happy hour buffets, and when there were no cops around, we jumped off The Clam into the Pacific Ocean. SAN DIEGO! Yes, we’re talkin’ perfection! But perfection didn’t work. Sure, Kim brushed me off. So what, that happens to everyone. It’s not like we had a long, intimate relationship. It was one lousy date, one hour at her apartment. The bottom line: There was no logical reason why someone living in paradise should be so dammed depressed all the time. What really got me down though, to be brutally honest, is the fact that I was too weak to snap out of it. I’m still too weak.

  . . .

  Tonight is one of those no-sleepers. I’m shifting positions on my plywood bed using a flashlight to read You Can’t Go Home Again. I keep thinking Thomas Wolfe will have something brilliant to say, some new perspective that’ll change my life. I want to be like seven-year-old Marco and announce to the world Viva Yo, but instead, I’m disgusted with
who I am.

  Reading Wolfe is a waste of time. I close the book and shine my flashlight around the empty room wishing I hadn’t thrown everything away. The adobe walls are turning to dust. The wood floor, mostly rotten, has boards missing. I turn on my side and stare at the road through a broken window, where a car passes by and brown dust rises in a swirl to the hanging streetlight.

  . . .

  Today I’m working with Pablo in the orchard. We finish digging irrigation trenches, and take turns on the water pump, heaving the handle up and down until our arms give out. The water finally trickles through shallow canals from one tree to the next. Wiping sweat from my face, I tell Pablo that I now understand why so many farmers, sweating their asses off in the hot sun, hear the call of the Lord to go preach in the shade.

  “That’s good, Mitch. Maybe He’s calling on you?”

  “Hey, man, what have we done? I mean, all this work, what have we accomplished for Mexico?”

  “Nothing,” he says, then smiles, amused that it took me so long to figure it out.

  I gather the shovels together. “Nothing, huh? Well then tell me this, is anyone being helped here?”

  Pablo offers a slight shrug. “Not so much.”

  . . .

  We haven’t heard anything from the good doctor. Without a new, grand project, there isn’t much to do around here. Pablo’s tinkering with the battery in his Plymouth, so I walk down the road to the outdoor food stand and sit at the plywood counter beside a grandpa and his grandson. The grandpa is eating menudo with a large spoon, waving his hand above his bowl to keep swarming flies out. I’m eating carne asada tacos.

  “What do you know about Cabo San Lucas?” I ask. The grandpa only nods his head. “What about peyote buttons? Or peyote tea?” The man is polite, nodding his head in agreement, although I’m not sure he understands.

  Later that afternoon, Pablo and I are having dinner in Kianna’s trailer, the three of us squeezed in tight around a small formica table. They’re surprised about my new idea and ask several questions. When I finish explaining, Pablo says it doesn’t sound like much of a plan to him. He stands up and opens the narrow screen door, tilting the trailer on his way out.