Julio’s lying on his gray-checkered couch, drunk and in tears. Behind him, two whispering young policemen. I tell them I’m a friend. They check my driver’s license, phone in my name. Finally, they let me sit down.
“Julio.” I touch his shoulder. His shirt is limp with sweat. “Julio, what happened?”
Bleary face. “No se…
“Is Lira all right?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, George.”
“Was she angry? Was Lira angry about something? How could this —?”
“She was worn out looking for work. Taking care of the kids.” He spreads his hands. “I don’t know what I could’ve done …”
“It’s all right. Take your time.”
Sunlight bastes the room through the door.
“For a while this morning, after she came home, I wanted to sleep with her, you know. But she said no, that was the problem, we couldn’t afford more kids. I got mad and …” He kicks the table in front of us. I jump. I remember his cloudy face, the night he came home and found me talking to Lira. The cops turn, still whispering. “Then she grabbed Chatito and went out the door with him before I knew what was happening. Clutching a rosary in her hand. When she came back without him, and picked up Angelina, I knew something was wrong, but she was so strong, man, I couldn’t believe the power in her arms. I’d had too many beers.”
I notice a tiny wooden crucifix on the wall, above the television set, a black Christ nailed to its arms. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. The color of the balsam wood, in Jesus’ hands and face, matches Julio’s dark-brown complexion.
Lira had become “religious” in the last few days, he tells me — by which he means “sullen and withdrawn”—as the Day of the Dead approached.
On the television, next to a candle, four tiny clay tablets. Tierras del Santos: pieces of earth, each stamped with a saint’s grave face. Among certain Latin peoples, I’ve learned, these cakes are eaten or dissolved in water as a drink to ease menstrual pain.
Jesus. “Is Lira pregnant again?” I ask Julio now.
He looks at me.
“It’s none of my business, man, but there are ways to prevent that.”
“We watch the moon. Lira says — ” He shakes his head.
“What about the other kids?”
“The man in the ambulance thinks they’ll be okay.”
“Roberto?”
“No se.” He grips my hand. “I don’t know what happened, George. We were a happy family. Lira loved Chatito. She was a good mother to those babies …”
A ripped Spiderman lies at our feet. Manuel’s laughter pops in my head. My throat aches — like I’ve thrown back a double shot of whiskey.
I glance behind us, at the cops. “Julio, have the police checked your immigration status?”
He stares at me, startled. “I’m not sure.”
“If they ask you about it, don’t tell them anything. You’re entitled to a lawyer. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Zamora?” One of the policemen asks Julio to follow him onto the porch.
“You have my work number, right?” I say. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know. Julio?”
“Yes. Okay,” he says.
I squeeze his arm.
He turns. “George?”
“Right here.”
“Tell them.”
“Sure. Anything.”
“Tell the Anglos our story.”
Air-conditioners hum in the city. The freeway shakes. Through my car speakers, Lightnin’ Hopkins croaks:
He strokes the strings like a drum, beats them hard with his hand, up down up down, I turn the tape player up that’s right and then you’re down some more son better watch your updown and then you’re turned around.
Swirls of ash from the Mexican volcano. Too much: this wild-assed city of ours, it’s too fucking much.
No sane person could raise a family here. Pure Death. On the freeway, in dirty, twisting water. Fights and ashes and slaps.
Through my open window, I squint at it alclass="underline" a muffler the size of a boat my baby she left me this mornin’ a thirty-foot roach (“24-hour exterminators”) kidney-shaped swimming pool propped on a pole. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (“Join the Voyage at 6!”) “Pregnant? Emergency Call …” burgers and doughnuts and dogs and maybe she doin’ me wrong say yes she doin’ me wrong say baby I been acryin’ I been drunker’n a skunk since June. Eyebrows and rheumatism, arthritis and armadillos, low-tar smokes, The Wall Street Journal say yes she is say baby “Let’s All Be There!” Sugar’s and Spinners and Cooters. Fizz, Biff’s, Bill’s. Tires thrumming on the concrete. Dependency City: Alcoholism? Child Abuse? Drugs? Want to Talk? Any Time of Night Just Pick Up A.
Quick exit onto Montrose Street.
A teenage girl with a slim gold purse and red high heels strolls the edge of a park. A radio tune tumbles out of an open apartment window.
My, my, my.
Southern folk wisdom says a man whose drink is laced with a lady’s menstrual blood will be, like a child, forever hers.
She waves. I zip through the light. A McDonald’s wrapper kicks up over my hood and dithers away down the street.
I slow, then circle back toward Main.
No matter what, for me, there’s no getting out of this place, even if it is too fucking much. I’ve buried my family here. My keepsakes. My only history.
And why leave? Life’s brimming in the big, bad Bayou City.
Much later, after work, after cards, after losing a stack of money (our last game before letting Cal join), I end up at the Shamrock. The Midnight Show.
Danger, Incorporated — black gangsters waging an L.A. coke war.
“Fly threads, brother!”
“Make that fairy eat it!”
“Motherfucker’s toast!”
The crowd is cheerful and warm, but I scan the seats, wondering if the woman I’d seen last time is somewhere in the theater, if she has any more bruises on her face.
Then the lights are up, a smoky, spooky blue, and folks are filing out.
“Wake up, white boy,” somebody sings. “Yoo-hoo.” Laughter. “Say, man. Party just startin’!”
The next afternoon, through late-season leaves on the bayou’s banks, I watch police boats putt around puckered brown whirlpools, looking for Roberto. Young men in wetsuits slog through shallows and mud. Onlookers come and go, eating bag lunches, reading paperbacks and newspapers, gossiping.
I follow the bend for about two miles, past the campsite of street people, busted up earlier this month. I’d checked it out, once, for the paper. For nearly six years, laid-off oil workers had pitched tents or tarps here or slept in blown-gasket cars. Their neighbors, poor families like the Thuots and the Zamoras in run-down rental homes, didn’t complain, but folks in outlying areas did. “It’s a transient population, drug-addicted and mentally retarded. We’re talking heroin and cheap booze,” said a woman who lived about a mile from the spot. Penrose had asked me to research the story, since several of the obits I’d written were of men from the camp who’d died during winter freezes or whose bodies had been found in the bayou. “They break into houses like mine looking for pawnable items,” the woman said. I couldn’t confirm that, and Penrose eventually decided against stories on the homeless. “There’s not one positive angle here,” he’d said. “If we had a case of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps and getting out of poverty, we might consider running a piece. As it is …” Weeks later, police ordered the men off the land. All that’s left are pads of burned grass from their cooking fires.