“Newspaperman.”
“True crime? Scandal and divorce? I love that stuff.”
“More like community service. Local history — ”
“I got some history for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Pancho Villa raped my grandmother.”
I don’t know how to respond to this.
“When he crossed the border?”
“Yeah?”
“Granny cut his pecker off with a bowie knife.”
“You’re sure about that?” I say.
“Sure I’m sure. Still got the little feller, in a pickle jar down in Harlingen.” She smiles wistfully. “I used to play with it when I was a girl.”
Horsey hands me some Flonase and Albuterol. “These are samples. They should last him a month or so. If his breathing’s still labored then, I’ll write you a prescription for more.”
Pedro’s sucking on a tube, as if gasping after the city’s last sweet breath.
“He’ll never get better,” the doctor says to me softly. “But maybe we can keep him from getting worse for a while.”
I glance around the waiting room. Sneezing and snores. “Right,” I say.
About a month after my last encounter with Mr. Ho, another fire broke out in the shirt factory. I heard the news on the street. Three women, all in their teens, collapsed of smoke inhalation on the floor because the door was locked and they couldn’t get out fast enough.
From the supermarket parking lot, one morning, I called to Mr. Ho. He was standing at the top of his stairs. “You!” he said, pointing at me. “Interloper! Bad man!”
“You have a statement, Mr. Ho?”
“Door never had a lock till you come snooping around, asking fancy question! Now city shut us down. Your fault!”
Standing there, I felt only relief that the women hadn’t died. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” I said.
“Whatsa matter, you? You don’t like nice clean shirt? What the world be without a nice clean shirt?”
At my editor’s insistence, I stopped working late, stopped scrambling so hard after stories. “No one reads anything these days but the damn headlines anyway,” he grumbled. “And those they don’t understand.” I settled back in to a dull routine.
At home, in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep, and I’d tired of flipping through family photos, I’d watch the local cable access channel. Turns out, Guzman produced its highest-rated show, “Naked Sports with April Blow.” April sat topless behind a flimsy desk talking baseball, hockey, squash. I loved to hear her say “squash.” Next morning, I could never remember last night’s scores. I kept seeing 0–0.
Once a week now I bring Pedro some fresh Ozarka water. I’ve made him a chart, so he’ll know when he’s taken his pills. He marks it with a pencil.
This evening I bring him some beer to go with his supper: a stick of jerky, lightly salted, two lemons, and an orange. I sit and drink with him.
“They just closed down a bunch of refineries east of town,” he says. “I’m tellin’ you, city’s going through some panty-twisting money shit. But it makes the air cleaner. Ain’t used my inhaler all week.”
“Good,” I say. I glance in the direction of my family’s graves. It’s been a year since they died, and I’m blue.
A Mickey Mouse mask, a gold ceramic owl, and a laminated poster of a unicorn line Pedro’s dusty gruta. He points to a muddy pool, choked with garbage, near the war veterans’ plots. Plastic U.S. flags rain-beaten to the ground. “Lots of new stuff floatin’ down the bayou this week. Socks. Broken toys.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Gonna do some rearrangin’. Fella cain’t let hisself get bored.”
We decide to watch a movie on his tombstone television: Dancing in the Dark, about a down-and-out actor, starring William Powell. Every now and then, Pedro wipes dust off the screen.
After a while I say, “I think you’ve got the right idea, Pedro.”
“How’s that?”
I sip my beer. “Tending your own grave.”
“Ah, hell.”
“It’s what we all do one way or another, isn’t it?”
“What the fuck you talkin’ about, George?”
“Losing our families, working lousy jobs.”
“Aw man, you’re a sad drunk,” he says. He watches me good. “You need to get laid.”
“No. Well, yes. But that’s not what’s creeping me out.”
“What’s creepin’ you out is you own mopey self. You probably the type of guy stays mopey, even after he’s been laid, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“Mr. Ace Reporter, sees Evil ever’where he turns. Wants to right the world’s wrongs, that it?”
“Sure. You said it yourself. The neighborhood’s gone.”
“Shit. If it’s anything I cain’t stand, it’s a sad drunk,” Pedro tells me.
I shrug.
He opens me another beer. Downtown Houston twinkles in the distance. “Watch the damn movie,” he says.
First Star
One day I didn’t see her any more. But for almost a year, the year I was in fourth grade, she came into our neighborhood every evening pedaling a white Schwinn bike. She wore a tomato-red sweater, always, and a stiff petticoat beneath a checkered brown dress that nearly reached her scuffed and bulky Buster Brown shoes. From a distance, her head looked bigger than normal, too big to fit beneath her short black hair. Up close, I noticed black fuzz, like the start of a sloppy pencil sketch, marking her upper lip.
A girl with a mustache? my son Jesse asks me now, nearly twenty years later. Jesse’s nine. His brother, Seth, a year younger, listens closely but doesn’t say anything.
That’s right. A girl with a mustache.
You were too little to have hair on your face, Jesse says.
Yes. I was nine, maybe, or ten? It took me weeks to realize a woman always followed the girl back then, on a white bike of her own, also wearing a sweater and dark clothes. At first I don’t think I even saw this woman; I was too busy each day in my family’s driveway taking advantage of the evening’s last light, pogoing, skateboarding, or wishing on the first star in the sunset’s dusty red streaks. When I did see the woman, I didn’t connect her at first to the girl … until one night, bored with my games, paying more attention than usual to my neighborhood (the Jenkinses’ poodle, next door, barking for its supper; the eldest Clark kid yelling down the street, “Ready or not, here I come,” prompting crazy screams from deep inside the bushes), I thought how odd it was that this woman appeared each night a few paces behind the girl on a similar bike. I figured, then, they were mother and daughter.
Duh, Dad, Jesse says.
Yeah, duh. But see, I hadn’t watched them closely till then, or thought much about them. I hadn’t taken an interest.
How big was her head?
Pretty big.
I’d have been inster-sted right away, then.
Well, I was, sort of. But only half-caring, you know, the way it is when you’re doing something fun and don’t want to stop.
What was her name?
The girl’s? Suzanne, but I didn’t learn that for a while.
Suzanne. It’s pretty, Seth says in a tiny, frightened voice. He’s been frightened since his mother and I first broke the news, which is why, I suppose, I’m telling the boys this story. I don’t know if it’ll help them. Or me. Jesse’s frightened too, I think, but he covers better than his brother, or he’s jazzed as well by genuine curiosity.