Shhh. Shhh.
On Saturdays and Sundays I hate to impose myself on the Thuots and the Zamoras. After looking for work, scrambling for food, they’ve earned a rest from the great white world.
So I drive over to the Shamrock Six, a multiplex cinema catering mostly to blacks. What I like about the place is its family feel — generations merge here, at the early-bird show, to squeal or shout at the murder mysteries, the love stories, and so confirm their fellowship, their superiority to the fools onscreen. It’s the most Southern place in town, like a holy-roller country church. “Yeah! You got it, slick!” the audience screams at actors moving stiffly toward a shoot-out or a teary embrace.
“Brother dead!”
“No he ain’t, he gonna rip that sucker’s drawers!”
“Fine-lookin’ mama!”
Meanwhile, the rest of Houston, belonging to the wide-open West, whips about in its cars — one person, two at the most, per set of wheels — pursuing happiness, Manifest Destiny, today’s equivalent of gold: a makeover, a microwave oven, a seat behind home plate.
Today, Blood Orgy is showing at the Shamrock, and I’m mighty content with my popcorn and my spot in the back row, with a wide-angle view of the theater and the families laughing, quibbling, jostling for a view of the screen. An old woman wipes a baby’s face. Two boys wrestle over a Milky Way bar. A middle-aged couple sneaks a kiss. Then we’re drenched in humming blue light, and an actress seems to be swallowed by an alien werewolf, or a radioactive schnauzer, I can’t tell.
I sit through two showings.
Outside, as I’m leaving, after four and a half hours in the dark, I see a big, oak-colored man, beneath the marquee, grasping a woman’s chin. “You look at me when I’m talking to you!” he says. “That compute wit you, bitch?” They’re standing in a sweaty crowd of kids. When he drops his hand, the woman closes her eyes and rubs her face, slowly.
I try to adjust my eyes.
I’m reminded of Lira Zamora. Too messy, none of my business, troubles of my own.. In the presence of actual violence, I realize how flimsy my little evasions are.
I’ve been an asshole. For months. Doing nothing.
Talking to ghosts. Dreaming of jackpots.
Move! I think, but I stand and watch the couple. Eventually, they shuffle away, his hand a fat clamp on her arm.
The sun on my head feels cold.
Monday evening, I swing by the Zamoras’ at seven just as I figure Lira is stepping off the bus (and Julio’s still got half an hour at the take-out). For an icebreaker — thwack! — I’ve brought a couple of new Spidermans for Manuel and a copy of Job Opportunities: Houston and Environs for Lira. Cal let me have it half-price — it’s a year out of date.
She’s not happy to see me. As she walks from the bus at the corner, Manuel runs past me on the porch. “The Kryptonite’s in my shorts!” he shouts, grabbing his jeans.
“Oh no! I’m … I’m losing my strength!” I wither onto the lawn.
“Ha ha! The world is mine!” He rushes into the house.
“Hello,” I say softly to Lira, brushing dried grass from my pants. “Can I help you with those?”
She frowns, and tightens her grip on three small grocery bags. “No, thank you.” She’s got Frida Kahlo eyebrows: black and wiry, a single little rope.
“I’ve been meaning to bring you a copy of this.” I pick the job book off the porch step.
I’d spent the weekend planning my visit, what I might say. It hadn’t gone well the first time I’d tried to talk to her alone. Who did I think I was? Her rescuer? Her hero? Spiderman, for chrissakes?
“Very kind,” she says. She’s gathered her hair into a bun the size of a tennis ball. On her cheek, a dark green bruise, big as an oak leaf.
“The kids? They’re okay?” I say. “Manuel seems — ”
“Yes. Fine,” she says. In her pink-and-yellow dress, she’s not much bigger than a kid herself.
I reach to touch the swelling on her face. She startles, and I pull back. My fingers haven’t felt a woman’s skin since Jean’s. “I’m sorry, Lira. It’s none of my business, but I’ve been worried about you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while, but — ” I’m aware that my words are too intimate. I don’t know her well enough to say these things. “Can you tell me?”
She moves past me, into the house.
“Has someone been hitting you?” I ask, standing in the doorway. Now my cheek begins to flame.
“No. No one,” she answers.
“Julio?”
“You’re very thoughtful, but — ”
“Lira, I want to be your friend.”
She sets her bags on a coffee table. The kids are running and screaming in a back room. “Quiet!” she yells. Then, to me: “Julio is happy to tell you his stories. But I never agreed to this.”
It’s true. A year or so ago, I came poking around this neighborhood, risking ridicule, indifference, even violence, looking for people who would talk to me. Most folks turned away. Julio, gregarious, generous, surprised me by welcoming me into his home.
But Lira had never been friendly.
“I don’t mean to impose,” I tell her now, stepping into the house. “But I’ve come to care for your family.”
“What about your own family?” she says. “Don’t they need you?”
I can’t answer her. Not yet. My cheek is pounding now.
“Quiet!” she screams again at her kids, stopping a heavy thumping in the back room. You want to hear a story, is that it?” she asks me.
“Yes. Sure.”
“All right then.” Some kind of moisture is leaking from one of the grocery bags. Flies batter the front screen door. She loosens her bun and grips her hair, as if clinging to the rigging of a ship. “When I was a girl in Jalisco, my mother sent me each day to buy eggs from a neighbor who lived across the highway from our house,” she begins. “It was a very busy highway, leading to big market centers far away to the west. Buses and trucks, lots of noise, keeping us all awake, my brothers and sisters, even at night. Whenever she sent me for the eggs, my mother warned me so hard to be careful — she wanted to impress on me the danger — I always cried, carrying my little basket.”
Dogs bark down the block. I’m wishing I’d jammed my Sony into my pocket, but it’s still in the car. Cicadas creak in the trees.
“One day, I was on my way home — proud of the six or seven large brown eggs I’d chosen — when I saw an old woman, a flower-seller clutching dozens of white roses, start to cross the road ahead of me. I looked down the highway. I heard the rumble of a truck, the shifting of its gears, awful, like a cat’s angry whine … can you guess the rest of my story?”
The sun is setting behind Houston’s huge glass buildings, nearby. The house is getting dark. “I’m afraid I can.”
“I shouted and shouted. I don’t know if perhaps she was deaf … I’ll never forget her skirts, beautiful black and red, in the wind of the truck, the scattered flowers and the scream. I fell to the dirt, dropping my basket, cracking the eggs.”
She stands for a moment, watching light fade through her lace curtains. “I don’t even have words in my own language to describe how this memory makes me feel … how it twists me inside … telling stories to you, in English — ”
“You just did a bang-up job,” I say. “Your English is wonderful.”
“Well.…”
“I understand what you feel, Lira. Really.” I hesitate. “I lost my family. Last year. On a highway,” I manage to tell her.