“How about this, instead,” I tell Mr. Thuot now. “Could you share with me intimate words for the pleasures you feel with your wife?”
For a moment, as I speak, my mind loops back to Jean, her small, puckered mouth trying desperately to tell me something.
Mr. Thuot trusts me and enjoys our talks, but he seems, this evening, grim. The tape hisses and we avoid each other’s eyes.
Finally, I turn off the recorder and start to leave. Mrs. Thuot, worried that her husband has offended me (her primary domestic duty, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is to sweep unpleasantness out of her home), motions for me to sit back down. She rummages in a battered trunk full of keepsakes, pulling out three small gongs: metal, with upturned rims. Excitedly, she gestures for her husband to explain.
“He is not interested — ”
“Yes,” I say. “I am. Please.” My own English always stiffens around him.
Delicately, he touches each gong. “These we use on several occasions. Funerals, feasts. We had many gongs, but three was all we could pack, fleeing the war. The largest is called Knah. Part of a set of six. When they are stored together, one inside the other, they form concentric circles. The smaller gongs are Ching. They come in sets of three. We use at family dinner.”
Mrs. Thuot mimes the picking of chopsticks. I laugh and join her. Mr. Thuot smiles, raises his glass of tea — “To the children,” he toasts, “to the high sky of their future, yes?”—and, with his long yellow nails, taps the tiny Ching.
Later, as I’m leaving, Mrs. Thuot tells me, “A family, it — they? — vanished last night.” We’re standing in a vacant lot behind her apartment, where I’ve parked my dusty Chrysler. “Right over there. That one.” She points to an unpainted door in the building next to hers. “This is why my husband is distracted for you.” Her eyes mist.
In this part of town, “vanished” could mean anything. Deported. Chased away by crack dealers, Chicano gangs, black gangs, white gangs, Asian gangs. Shot to death.
“It scares me when they vanish,” she says.
“Yes.”
As if to punctuate her thought, a car squeals its tires, in the darkness down by the bayou.
“Do you have everything you need right now?” I ask.
Sadly, she smiles. We squeeze hands. “People need so much,” she says. “Who can tell?”
“I know.” I kiss her lilac-scented cheek. “I know.”
My own family vanished a year ago on the Gulf Coast Freeway. “Freak,” said the first officer on the scene. In my daze, I thought he meant me, for surviving, and I agreed with him. “No, no.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “I meant the accident.”
All I remember is a candy-red pickup veering into our lane: lawn mowers, trash barrels, rakes in its bed. Then, I’m standing by the road, in the hot, sucking wind of cars going past, telling the officer my name.
How do I explain all this — my clumsiness, my white-boy sadness — to Julio Zamora? Or to anyone? Plain, careful English seems inadequate, each word a slap to memory’s pale face.
As a folklorist, someone who’s spent his whole adult life studying the planet’s cultures, I’ve developed a long mental list of useful quotes.
“Six feet of earth make all men of one size,” says an old American proverb.
James Russell Lowell, speaking of President Garfield, said, “The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on … to die for and be buried in.”
But no wise words came to me that day on the freeway. Instead, it was Dickens I recalled. Simple, brutal, direct: “Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”
I couldn’t see my parents or my wife. By the time I understood what was happening, emergency personnel (white coats; muted, efficient expressions) had laid sheets across their bodies. Their contours looked massive, weightier than any of them had been, with their light, lovely laughter, their silly little dance steps whenever they felt happy.
The owner of the truck, an independent yardman, had also died in the crash. No family. Uninsured.
I’d been behind the wheel. My father’s car. Driving us to a new sushi restaurant in Galveston. All his life, Dad had tooled around in behemoths — Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs, impervious to impact. But a negligence suit from an injured employee had wiped out his refinery company and most of his savings; in his forced retirement, he’d bought a Honda hatchback.
I was the only one, that evening, wearing a seatbelt: the reason I walked away, a bald, vague official told me. Later, he assured me I’d done everything possible to avoid the accident. No chance I could have braked in time. A bear of a cop, a kid, patted my arm. “It was just,” he said, “one of those things, eh?”
Blindsided, jolted from my feelings, I stayed busy, quiet, letting other people talk, interviewing the Thuots and the Zamoras. Their stories saw me through those first few awful months. Tell me more about the mountains. What’s Jalisco like in the summer? White folks what? Yes, yes, we’re guilty of that, I suppose and much more, besides.
In our five years together, Jean and I had never huddled with a lawyer. Why draft wills? we thought. What did either of us own that smelled of real money? And though we joked about aging and dying, like most people, we thought we’d live forever.
My parents’ papers didn’t specify where, or how, they wanted to be buried. I’d never heard them discuss it.
I don’t recall, in the bog of last year, how I made up my mind. I do remember worrying that if I waited too long, they’d all mummify, like Norman Bates’s old lady in Psycho. That happened in Houston, despite the humidity. Occasionally, a story made the paper: a cop would find the preserved body of an elderly man or woman in a rocking chair, in a warm, dry house the neighbors never checked.
Also, I knew the folk legends. Saint Francis Xavier had been saved intact since the sixteenth century in the town of Goa, on the Indian subcontinent. Supplicants are no longer allowed to see his corpse; a worshipper bit off his toe one year in a fever of religious ecstasy.
Clearly, I wasn’t thinking rationally when I had to let go of my family.
I settled on the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery on South Ruthven Street, a pretty little place I’d passed many times on my way to work. Predominantly Mexican Catholic, it contains some of the best grutas, or personal shrines, in Texas. Sandstone, granite, reddish-brown lava, all of its graves face east: sunrise, fresh hope.
Tonight, as I swing into the parking garage, the newspaper building blazes blue and orange under the freeway’s sodium lights. The garage smells of oil and old rotting lunch meats (from Sam’s Lone Star Kosher Deli, nearby), stuffed in trash cans.
“Evening, Bob,” I greet the security guard.
He hitches his belt up over his belly. His keys rattle. “Hiya, Mr. Palmer.” He’s lethargic and slow, with the patchy red face of a drinker. Not much good in an emergency, probably, but his presence reassures me. He’s one of the city’s familiar signposts, someone whose location I can always count on.
I take the elevator to the fifth floor, where I type-and-enter my days. As soon as my father lost his savings (he’d been the primary benefactor of my fledgling little press), I found this job at the paper, penning obituaries and occasional fillers.
“Nothing fancy, now. Don’t try to be goddam Balzac,” the managing editor, a pugnacious old gent named Penrose, told me the morning he took me on. “These days, the public’s reading level hovers — last time I checked the gloomy goddam figures — somewhere between second and third grade. You want to be literary, go park yourself on a street corner, shouting lousy poems about the lousy whatever.”