Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  “This opportunity,” he said, “involves one or two simple actions. From time to time I will bring a package into the Blue Dove and place it on the empty chair, behind the tablecloth. I say to you as you are clearing away the dishes a few words, such as ‘white Buick with a rosary on the rearview.’ You slip the package under a dirty dish in your tub and go toward the kitchen. I have noticed the side door that goes outside to the garbage cans where the waiters smoke. It is easy to go around the corner to the parking lot.” The word “smoke” sent the man’s fingers to his shirt pocket.

  “In the passageway you take the package from the tub and go out the side door. You say you are going out for a smoke if anyone notices you. But this all happens very quickly; no one will even look. In the parking lot you glance at the cars and put the package on the back seat of the white Buick with the rosary. Or whatever car I have described to you. The Buick may be a Chevrolet or a De Soto. There may not be a rosary. There may be ten packages in a year or a hundred. On the first day of every month, I will leave one of these for you under my plate.”

  The man opened his left hand a little and in the dim light Abelardo saw a folded bill. He thought at first it was a ten, then a hundred, but finally saw clearly that it was a thousand. A thousand-dollar bill. A steaming flush rose up his right side, the side closest to the money.

  The first package appeared four days later. It was, as the man had said, all very simple. It was the money that was difficult. So large a bill could not be real money. It was abstract, a thing of ferocious value, not to be showed and not to be spent. He got a can of shellac and a small brush, creased the first bill lengthwise, shellacked it lightly on one side, removed the bass end of the green accordion and glued the bill into an interior fold of the bellows. It was entirely invisible, could not be discovered except by knowing fingers, could not be seen, even if someone removed the ends and looked into the bellows. The man came into the Blue Dove with his secret packages and secret thousand-dollar bills for one year and two months. Then he stopped coming.

  The exploding suit

  Abelardo went to the bar across the street several times but the man was never there. He asked the bartender if he knew when the man was coming back. That one whispered it was better not to inquire. He himself knew nothing but had heard that a fine new suit had been delivered to someone, a beautiful grey sharkskin suit in a white box, but when that person put it on, the heat from his body activated volatile chemicals secreted in the seams and the suit had exploded and the man with it.

  In the bellows of the green accordion were fourteen bills of the thousand denomination.

  The oldest son

  In 1945 they had the news of Crescencio’s death and a letter from some lieutenant that began: “I only met Crisco, as everyone called him, a few days before he was killed …” For the first time they learned that his death was not from bullets but from a cinder-block wall which had collapsed and fallen on him when he kicked it. He had been jitterbugging with another soldier and in a wild breakaway had spun around and made a flying kick at the wall, which yielded. Adina put a gold star in the window.

  Smile

  The two sons Chris and Baby, nearly grown and becoming insolent and willful, played every weekend with Abelardo.

  Abelardo would play the first set, then often go off to drink Bulldog beer in the clubs and bars, listen to the Padilla sisters’ voices coming out of the sinfonola, leaving the rest of the night to the sons. (Adina always had menudo, the fiery tripe soup, on hand for his hangovers.) From those intervals when he left the music to them, changes began to develop in the sons’ playing; they made a shorter, staccato music, like a knife stabbing. The older dancers complained they couldn’t dance properly to the sons’ music, with its choppier, faster beat and a kind of sprung rhythm that disturbed, but the younger ones loved them, screaming and cheering, especially at Chris, “¡Viva tu música!” when he stepped up in his red jacket, Baby in the black jacket with white piping on the lapels. Then, to Adina’s heartbreak—she blamed Abelardo and the easy Saturday night money—both of them dropped out of school.

  What was the point? All paths went nowhere. ¡Ándale!

  Acne scarred Chris’s face, a hardening face as he tried for jobs and did not get them. Weekend music wouldn’t keep a chicken alive. He had a taste for stylish shirts and wristwatches, gold chains. His ambition was to own un carro nuevo. He grew a mustache as soon as he could, to draw attention from the acne and to make himself look older. This black mustache curved down. He wore a pair of dark glasses and began to run with a bunch of cholos, especially with a rough called “Venas,” a black mole on his left nostril, someone who poured money into his white Buick with the crushed velvet upholstery, whose father, Paco Robelo, the whole Robelo family, were rumored to be connected with narcotraficantes.

  In a year or two Chris had his own car, a secondhand Chevrolet repainted silver, with painted flames licking along the sides and on the hood a portrait of himself playing the accordion in a fiery circle that made the old women say it prefigured a trip to hell.

  Baby seemed to suffer. Everything affected him—the smell of burned food, thunder and hail, girls whispering, the shine of the stellate scar on his forehead. The old women said he had a steel plate in his head. Abelardo shouted, “snap out of it—we got a dance to play tonight. You sit up there, look like your best friend just died. You see how Chris always got a smile? The audience wanna see you having a good time.”

  Adina would put her hand against his forehead, worry that his heated blood might somehow be cooking his brains. But he was composing his first songs, struggling with words and music. It was all coming out in American.

  Félida’s helpful teacher

  Mr. More’s voice in the remedial mathematics class droned on and on about topological vertices, but Félida kept her head down, feeling him looking at her. He was walking up and down the rows and talking about it.

  “Call the front of the room line AB, call the back of the room CD, if I walk BD, if I then cut across to A, do we have odd or even vertices where I stop? Hands?” There were no answers. Now he was walking up her row, slowing, standing beside her desk. She could smell the wool and chalk smell, see, from the corners of her eyes, the dusty brown shoes.

  “Félida.”

  She didn’t know. “Even?”

  “As a matter of fact it is, but I think you guessed at it. Would you like to come up and draw the diagram on the board?”

  The bell wouldn’t ring! She went up to the blackboard, took the chalk. What had he said, where had he walked? Across the front of the room. She drew a horizontal line. Down the row. Then up her row.

  He laughed. “What I said was, if I cut across to A. I didn’t actually cut across to A because I can’t walk through desks. Look.” Beside her again, taking the chalk from her, his cold chalky fingers touching hers. He spoke very softly, not a whisper, but a low voice. “Come back here after school for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.” He raised his voice, raised his hand with the eraser, rubbing out her lines and replacing them with his own. She went back to her desk feeling nothing. Nothing at all.

  When she came to the room after three o’clock he was standing by the window watching the school buses pull out.

  “You know how many years I’ve been doing this? Nineteen; fourteen of them here in Hornet. I came down here from Massachusetts. I had some dream about living in the southwest. I just thought it would be different than it is. You have to eat. Teaching, and in Texas, for Christ sake. After a few years you’re in too far to get out. So here I am. And there you are. Come here.” Moving to the side of the window.

  And it was the same thing, the chalky cold fingers going up her neck and into her hair, pushing it up against the grain, which she hated, and then he pulled her up against him and the bony hands came up to her breasts and felt them, down her ribs to her waist, her hips, then up under her skirt and the cold chalky finger digging under the elastic of her panties and into her as he ground a
gainst her thigh. Hopping adroitly back when someone in the hall laughed and the clack of heels, some woman teacher, rattled past. She thought maybe it was his wife, Mrs. More, who taught typing and business math.

  “Listen,” he mumbled. “She’s going to a meeting in Austin. I want you to come to the house. Tomorrow around five o’clock. I’ve got this.” He pulled something from his pocket, paper, unfolding it, showing it. A five-dollar bill. “For you. You can play your accordion for me.” He smiled faintly.

  The accordion had started it. She had gone to his office the year before because he was the school guidance counselor on Wednesday afternoons, told him she wanted to be a musician but the problem was her father, well known, a famous accordion player, and her brothers who also played the accordion and were admired and demanded all through the valley, while she was invisible even within the house. Her father had a strong prejudice, she said, against women in music unless they sang; it was all right if they sang. But she had been singing all her life and he had never noticed. She had taught herself to play the accordion but had no confidence. She already knew thirty rancheras. What should she do?

  “A beautiful young girl like you shouldn’t be worrying about a career,” Mr. More said. “But I’d like to hear you play. Maybe I can offer you some suggestions. I once had a dream of playing the classical tuba.” He had patted her arm, two slow pats, the tips of his fingers just grazing the down on her arm and making her shudder.

  The criminal daughter escapes

  When he woke from his little nap in the red Saturday evening a few weeks before Félida’s quinceañera there was no one in the trailer. Abelardo dashed water on his face, patted himself dry, sprinkled talcum powder into his groin, slapped his face and neck and shoulders and belly with Sea Breeze. Now the careful arrangement and spraying of his hair. The pressed trousers, the new black socks of some smooth silklike fiber, white shirt and a pale blue tie, a pale blue polyester jacket to pick up the color. Last, the gleaming shoes. In the mirror a good-looking man of deep health and intelligence. He went for the green accordion, for he was playing for Bruno tonight, a man who appreciated the plaintive voice and the hoarse crying of the old instrument. It was not in the closet, not under the bed, not in the living room nor the kitchen. His heart beat with fear. He raged into his sons’ room and for a moment thought he had found it, but it was only the old Italian Luna Nuova that he had given to Baby years before. One of the bastards had his green accordion and he had no time to run around the town looking for the dirty little thieves. In the end he had to take the Majestic, but the tone was wrong for this music and he played so angrily and powerfully on it that he broke a reed tongue and the buttons jammed.

  Long after midnight he returned, drunk and still furious, but the green accordion stood on the shelf in the closet again. He opened the instrument, his fingers probed the creases of the bellows. The money was undisturbed. The shreds of fear solidified to fury. He strode to his sons’ room, ready to denounce and tear them. The beds were empty. It was inconceivable, but Adina must have had it.

  “Get up!”

  “What is it?” Bolting up in fright, wide awake and trying to recognize the danger.

  “Why did you take the green accordion? Where did you go?”

  “I? The accordion? I took nothing. You’ve gone crazy.” He raised his arm as if to strike her in the face with the flat of his hand, left her weeping on the pillow. Ah, now it comes out! she thought. Brutal man! While he went to the refrigerator and groped for the ice water. He thought, Félida! And rushed to hammer on her door. Shocked by the burst of defiance from the other side.

  “YES, I TOOK IT. I was invited to play for a teacher!” It was too late for any kind of truths. For she had not even opened the case before the teacher was on top of her, grinding her into his dusty carpet where she could see forlorn strings hanging from the underside of the sagging sofa.

  “Not even the most criminal son would speak to his father this way! You slap my face with insolent words!” Rage swallowed everything. He felt interior stormy chords as if madmen were pummeling the timpani of his guts. He shouted.

  “A woman cannot play the accordion. It is a man’s instrument. A woman cannot get other musicians to play with her, nobody will hire you, your voice is not strong enough. Your character is bad, you are disobedient, you have no future in the musical field.” He was almost crying. “After all the money we intend to spend on your quinceañera.” And kept it up until Baby came in, calmed him, until at two in the morning it was silent. Chris was still out under the moon somewhere, driving his taxi, was often out all night taking drunken soldiers back to the base.

  In the earliest morning Adina heard the door close. The outside steps creaked. In the window the margin of the moon was dark silver as though tarnished. A deep and ominous silence. Abelardo breathing thickly beside her. She touched the side of her face lightly with her fingertips. Where he might have struck her, where he almost had struck her. In a few minutes she got up and went into the kitchen, felt sand under her bare feet, no, it was sugar. Sugar and salt spilled across the floor. Heard the hissing gas before she smelled it. Dios, they could die! She turned off the gas burners that were pouring the noxious stuff into the house, opened the door gagging and coughing at the stink of the gas. She stood on the porch in her nightdress looking down the wet dirt street. Somewhere a rooster was crowing, a maniac of a rooster. The street was entirely empty. Betty/Félida was gone.

  Trembling, she stepped back into the kitchen and saw the green accordion on the table. A knife protruded from the bellows. It was a message that the daughter wished to stab her father to the heart.

  “Never mention her in this house again,” Abelardo mumbled, weeping. “I have no daughter.” Yet before he spoke he drew the knife out of the instrument and examined the bellows slowly, carefully, for signs of other invasive cuts and slices and he spent the afternoon behind a locked door repairing the damage by gluing a thin piece of pigskin over the tear inside the bellows and working a rich leather preservative into the outside to keep it supple and willing.

  The remaining sons

  After the war the minutes flew by, the hours, the weeks and years and there was no word from the daughter. Adina became very religious (“Lord, I cannot bear these burdens alone”), going out with the Leaks to knock on doors and persuade others to become Yahweh’s Wonders. Chris and Baby continued to play music with Abelardo, but an animosity was growing between them, a dislike of each other’s music. Nor did the weekend playing bring in enough money to live. The traditional music was not so popular now; it was all swing and big bands.

  When he was twenty-three, twenty-four, around 1950, Baby got the idea to grow chiles, to do some throwback thing, associated with a regard for the agricultural laborer, passionate rhetoric that flowed from union organizers who came to the region after the war, and his thoughts of his unknown grandfather whom he wished to believe a hero. The idea was vague. He had to lease land, had to learn how to grow chiles from the agricultural experiment station agent, an Anglo who pressed him to specialize in a thick-bodied cultivar named S-394, developed at the University of Texas, and not the old local chile, la bisagra, the hinge, for its crooked shape. The timed application of chemical fertilizers and irrigation were the key procedures. He found this boring, lost interest as soon as the plants started to grow. The chile-growing he had imagined, had heard described by older men, was a complex thing of crossbreeding for drought resistance and special flavors, of virtuoso weather readings, of gauging the soil’s temper, of prayer and fate. He thought he wanted to understand these things, be a part of that life, but only discovered he had no talent for agriculture.

  While he had the land, Abelardo was drawn to it, came out as often as he could get away to see how the plants were coming along, talk a little, now increasingly about his life in the past.

  His drowned father had played the guitar, vingi, vingi, vingi.

  “So there was a little music in the family,” said Abelar
do, squatting on the red soil at the end of a row, smoking his cigarette and watching the irrigation water trickle into the ditch. He said it was a sour, hard music that forced the ears until he, Abelardo, came along and stunned everyone with his fabulous playing.

  “I learned to play in the fields, from Narcisco. Narcisco Martínez, el Huracán del Valle, started it, started the conjunto music. Look, before World War Two there wasn’t truly nothing, just guys playing together, all the old Mexican bullshit stuff, mariachi … Then Narcisco, then I came, and pretty soon, after the war, there were four or five good conjuntos—me, Narcisco, Pedro Ayala, José Rodríguez, Santiago Jiménez, Jesús Casiano. I loved that music. At first it was just a little one-row accordion, maybe another instrument, whatever was there; then we got the two-rows and added the bajo sexto, and just those two instruments made a lot of good music for dances. I had a man, we called him Charro because he had this Stetson he always wore, played bajo sexto with me before Crescencio, poor Chencho, was born, an older man, very strict in his ways. Well, he couldn’t really feel the music I was trying to play and we broke up because in those days I drank a lot. Then I got a tololoche—ay Dios, what a beautiful sound that instrument makes with the accordion.”

  “I rather have the electric bass. Makes them dance. Drums, too, get them moving.”

  “Yes, now you younger ones make fun of how we played, but you got to think back who this music was for then, where it come from. It come out of poor people, didn’t have money for fancy drums and the electric instruments—even if they were invented then, you got to have electricity to play them. Who had electricity in the thirties? So we played the left hand, played the bass. Narcisco said ‘conjunto era pa’la gente pobre,’ and he knew what he was talking about. And he knew about being poor; he drove a truck, worked in the fields most of his life. That’s where it happened, this music, in the fields. And of course you know there were plenty of them that looked down on the conjunto—your mother, for one.”