She said she’d check them out. Then, politely, “Excuse me.”
“Sure,” I said, and left as quickly as I could.
Now, as Julio and I hammer beneath the sink, Manuel, his eight-year-old — my favorite kid, always happy, active as a beetle — sings into my portable tape recorder:
Julio laughs. “What a morbid little song. ‘No Llores,”’ he says, “is a funeral dirge.”
I pull a pencil from my pocket and jot that down.
Years ago, in an informal study when I started the press, I discovered that white Houston stereotypes Mexicans according to their food behavior (“greaser,” “pepper-belly,” “frijoles-guzzler”). Now, I want to know what Latins whisper about norteños.
After the washer’s hooked up in the pantry, Julio opens a plastic tub of salsa and a bag of tortilla chips and sets them on his rickety kitchen table. Manuel listens to the Astros on the radio.
The house is packed to its peeling pine rafters with keepsakes, toys, pages of jubilant scribbles by the kids, the sweet-and-sour smells of brimming life — gifts I expected to gather someday myself, I think, glancing at Julio’s boy before we settle down to work.
“Okay, how do we start?” Julio asks.
“Well,” I say, switching on the recorder. Shaky — over what? what the hell? what might have been! — I fumble it onto the table. “Do you have certain names — derogatory terms — for Anglos?”
“Let me see. Yes. Sometimes we call you Jamónes.”
“What does it mean?”
“Ham-Eaters. You know, you’re big eaters of pork.”
“What else?”
“Bolillo, Rolling Pin. Because of the way you move, I guess, straight-ahead, arrogant. I never really knew, it’s just something I heard from my father. He used to tell us stories at night — big hombre, dark like an African. He taught me nothing is more important than Family.”
I nod.
“Niño, Family, it’s the solid rock of life, he used to say.” He laughs, then gestures at the blinking red light on my machine. “So. This will be another book?”
“Maybe part of one,” I say. “I don’t know. I’m running out of money.”
He grasps my knee, surprising me. He’s always surprising me, switching gears — happy to sad, wistful to tough. In all our talks, I’ve yet to learn how to read him. “Whatever happens, you mustn’t quit, George. It’s a good thing you’re doing, telling our stories to the Anglos.”
I rub my eyes; before my zero, my zip, with Cal today, I logged eight and a half hours at the newspaper.
“I swear, George, you work like a damn Mexican.” Julio chuckles. “We should quit this, eh? You need to go home, I think, and let your lady make you a spicy dinner. Some beans, maybe, smothered in butter? A beer.”
Children shout, playing catch down the street. “If I had a lady,” I say, and here it is, gasping fatally out in the open: my salty, slippery grief, spoken aloud for the first time in months.
Shit, I think, flushing hot.
“A nice-lookin’ fellow like you — no lady?” Julio’s mood is still light. He thinks we’re kidding, as usual.
My hands are trembling now. I almost tell him: The freeway ate her up, man. Swallowed her whole. But he doesn’t need to know this. His world’s overstuffed already — washers, dryers, big black eyes.
“Anglos.” He tsks. “Always too busy for love. You don’t know how to appreciate a good woman.”
“You’re right,” I say.
“Sometimes, when I see white folks dance?”
“Yeah?”
“I think to myself, ‘How can they be so clumsy with their bodies, and still make babies?’”
I try to laugh.
“No, really,” Julio says. He touches my shoulder, man to man. “It makes me very sad.”
Leaving, a few minutes later, I see Lira at the end of the block, stepping from a steaming silver bus, gripping a grocery bag. I wave through the windshield of my car, but she doesn’t see me. Her eyes are on her own front door — a wide, cautious stare, like keeping sight of a possibly rabid animal. She’s lovely, a deep, rich brown, her bare arms slightly muscled, her blouse and green skirt neat despite what I imagine to be the hardships of her day (“Looks to me, lady, like you’ve got no real experience. Sorry.”) and the indignity of pressing bus crowds. Proofreader? Editorial assistant? I can’t afford to hire anyone.
I wave again. She still hasn’t noticed my car’s slow turning. Julio’s waiting, now, in the open doorway. Her stride quickens. She grasps the bag and it tears a bit at the bottom.
Nearby, children laugh and scream, playfully.
My weekly visits with the Thuots are usually tenser than my sessions with Julio Zamora. A year ago, when I met them, they stood with their arms folded and gave me a wide berth. Later, a teacher friend told me that in most Asian cultures, folding one’s arms is a gesture of honor; distance signals respect. In time, the Thuots sang into my tape recorder, shared stories and jokes. They showed me bracelets they’d made from American artillery scraps.
Mr. Thuot is stooped, wrinkled, and dark. His wife is tall, with slender, peach-colored ears. They have four boys and two girls, none of them getting an education at the moment, though three of the boys are old enough for high school. Their apartment overlooks a deep part of the bayou; beyond it, the rice mills of American Grain, gleaming, white, tall as rockets.
The family bathes in water from the stream. Mr. Thuot and the boys haul it in buckets to a giant steel tub in the center of their living room. I’ve told them the bayou’s polluted — I’ve seen car doors, portable freezers, bicycle mirrors rusting in the mud. The Thuots always drink the fresh Ozarka water I bring them, shear the plastic bottles in half, and use them to carry dirty bathwater up the banks.
Tonight the streets are muggy and hot. A steamy film clings to the bayou’s surface.
I hand Mr. Thuot a stack of applications for employment — gas stations, grocery stores — saving some for Lira Zamora. My nerves have leveled out since leaving Julio’s place, but I’m eager to finish my business, deal poker with my office mates, and get my mind off myself tonight.
“Thank you,” Mr. Thuot says. No smile.
He sits on the couch, back straight, waiting for me to turn on my Sony. His wife sits beside him. “We don’t have to do this,” I say, noting his mood.
Curtly, he nods, waves his hand. His English is good. I love his family stories. I’m the bearer, now, of other families’ stories.
“More about my birthplace?” he asks. “My — how do you put it — my ‘origin’?”
“What haven’t we covered so far?”
“Grandfather. Distant cousins. Yes?” He hands me a blue dish with slices of orange, offers me green tea.
Last August, on my first visit, I learned that his home village, Kontum, a series of bamboo huts in the Annam Cordillera highlands, was a lush, fertile place, brimming with kids. Mr. Thuot had been a farmer and a fisherman. The streams were treacherous, full of crocodiles, so for luck he’d tattooed a green snake on his chest (a folk practice I’ve traced to the fourteenth century).
On that same visit, Mrs. Thuot told me that in the mountains, married couples often whispered sibling terms — “Yes, my brother, yes, yes!”—while making love: a practice common also in Thailand.