I scramble down a steep, dusty bank. Coors cans rust in the mud. Condoms. Cigarette butts. The lapping and sucking of water meeting land. Separate worlds. I toss a stone into the river. It makes a sound like a voice almost decipherable to me, from a realm beyond my own.
Another stone, another voice. Then another and another. I’ve started a whole conversation. A boisterous family.
I confess: hauntings are a weakness of mine.
Jean. Now Lira. Chatito and Roberto.
“Where are you?” I whisper. Reeds rattle like maracas.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Julio told me last year, in one of our earliest interviews, “but I pray to God each night they’ll leave us the hell alone.”
A lump of moss, dark green and blue, as long as a woman’s gown, wraps a broken limb in the stream. Every American city claims some version of the “disappearing woman.” It’s a common folktale.
A beautiful hitchhiker in a satin dress, pacing the shore of a lake.
A disheveled young girl near a river, needing help.
Wet dreams.
Pick her up, and she’ll give you her address. On the way home, she fades, leaving only a trace of moisture in your car. When you reach her street, you find the ruins of a stately mansion where people died long ago. Or you find nothing at all.
South Ruthven Street is deserted this late at night. Quiet. Pretty, lined with elms. I used to come here every evening, regular as a rhyme. Then I joined Little Vegas after work, dealing cards, hoping to starve my grief.
“One of my families is in trouble,” I tell my father’s chiseled name. His headstone is chilly, gray. The cemetery smells of mint and wild onion. Frogs chirp in the bayou by the road. “I don’t know what to do about it. I just … needed to tell you.”
Some flying creature — a misguided bird, a bat — flitters in the trees.
Greasy paper plates have been blown against the stones. Napkins, cups. The Day of the Dead. I’ve missed it. Families must have been here, sharing meals with their lost ones. A candle in a cracked glass container, painted with the Virgin of Guadalupe, tilts on a circle of fresh dirt next to three or four paper-wrapped roses and a handful of yellow marigolds.
I say hello to my mother, stored neatly here like a small, brittle ornament.
Twigs litter Jean’s mound. I whisper her name. Touch my cheek. “People need so much, don’t they?” I kneel in the dirt.
Given the chance, later, we would have kissed and made up. I know it. We always did.
“Isn’t that right?” I say.
Just a simple family matter.
One of those things.
“I’m sorry, Jean.” Dried apple leaves crackle in the grass, from my last visit when I left them for her. “I’m so sorry.”
For the first time since the funerals, I weep.
“Draw. Nothing wild.” I’m dealing a fresh pack.
“See you, raise a dollar.”
“I’ll take three.”
“One.”
“Dealer needs two.”
Ray circles Loop 610. We’re in Cal’s Bookmobile, gliding on the freeway in a glass-bottomed boat.
“Cal, man, I’m so happy we let you in,” Tony says. “This is the way to play!”
Cal grins. “Glad I could add a little zest. Keep moving, Ray. You’re doing just fine.”
“Which way, Unc?”
“Any way. Just drive.”
Houston, perched precariously on a gumbo of cracked soil and dry red clay, erupts in blue and green, tan and white. L-shapes, quarried stone (granite, marble, basalt), recessed windows, enclosed crosswalks, circles, triangles, squares — fissures into which people wedge their sighing bodies, moving up and down or deep underground, whispering, laughing, lying.
“Low spade splits the pot.”
“Six and ten, no help …”
Eighty bucks in the hole, I fold early and slide up front, with Ray. “Cal paying you for this gig?”
“Naw. I need the practice.”
He’s a pretty good driver, though he still takes his curves too fast. “How’s your dad?”
“Home now, where my mom can look after him. That makes them both happy, but he’s still pretty sick.”
One thing about families: beyond a certain point, I’ve learned, there’s nothing you can do for them.
Kim Thuot, counting nickels in his store.
Julio Zamora, waiting to be deported. Scott found out he was apprehended yesterday along with a family named Muñoz, with whom he’d been hiding in a house somewhere in the Fifth Ward. The cops caught him trying to break into his old place and cart off the washer and dryer.
I haven’t been able to speak to him or the kids — I miss, most, my little web-slinger — and may not get a chance to see them before they leave.
Lira has been transferred to solitary confinement in a women’s unit up near Huntsville.
In the bayou, I’ve read, divers have discovered a female manatee, a dolphin, a red-bellied pacu — a native of South America, related to piranhas — an octopus, an armored catfish, a school of mullet, a Rio Grande perch.
No Roberto.
Take me home, please. But I’m frightened I’ll disappear before we get there.
“Got it!” Tony waves his cards. “Full house!”
Startled, Ray turns to look. He nearly swerves off the road. “Whoa,” I say, reaching over and steadying the wheel for him.
The men razz him.
He blushes. “Where should I go?” he says. “I’m running out of ideas.”
“Try a left,” I say.
Tony’s still laughing.
“Here?”
I nod. “You’re doing just fine.” The city looks splendid. We’re heading east now. With any luck, we’ll see the sun rise.
A Worried Song after Work
The first wrong thing was my Merle Haggard tape. I knew it the minute Missy slid into my pickup. The pickup itself might have been wrong. I mean, in her neighborhood, most trucks were as welcome, probably, as killer bees, but she seemed to find my Ranger cute, if not exactly sexy. It’s clean and black and polished up so it grabs you like the glare of an eagle — even the stuffed bald eagle in the American Legion Hall, where the timber workers’ local used to hold its meetings.
Her thighs hissed across the seat in my cab; her skirt was as dark as my truck and shorter than a Teamster’s patience. She flickered a smile, then scowled when Merle burst through the speakers, telling his bosses they could shove their retirement and so-called social security.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Merle.”
She nodded. Wrong Thing Number Two: I’d missed the tone of her voice. Her question (I figured later) was really a way of saying Turn the damn thing off.
Strike Three: “Listen, I got an urgent call about half an hour ago. I have to make a quick stop before we go to dinner. Is that okay with you?”
She fingered one of her amber earrings in a serious and concentrated way that meant she was annoyed. Even I could see that. She was getting less subtle, and we’d only been together two minutes. “Stop for what?” she said.
“Some guys are having a meeting. They need me to say a few words to them. It won’t take long.”
“Will we have time to eat and still make the movie?”
“Oh sure, sure.” I glanced, a little worried, at my watch.
Now she started jerking a curl of her hair behind her tiny left ear, hair that looked like a wig, it was so satiny and blonde and bigger-than-life, but you could smell the summer dampness of her all the way through it.
“Maisie said you were a lawyer.” I was beginning to catch on. She meant: What the hell are you doing listening to these bozo tunes and going to meetings after work!