The river is placid here, not far from where the Thuots get their bathwater. Two black boys straddle pine logs on the bank, pitching fishing lines into the current. “Catch anything?” I ask, brushing aside brambles.
“Naw, ain’t nothing worth catching,” says one of the boys. His companion spits into the water.
Farther down, ivy snags my feet. In my first few months at the paper, I scribbled dozens of obits for folks who had drowned in the stream, and the pace hasn’t let up.
“Police divers Monday recovered the bodies of two men whose Toyota truck collided with a car on the Eastex Freeway and plummeted sixty feet into Buffalo Bayou. The southbound lanes of the freeway were temporarily closed.”
“Police authorities surmise that an arm discovered in the bayou near the Jensen Street Bridge belongs to a man seen yesterday clinging to an oak limb in a torrent following flash flooding this weekend.”
One beautiful spring afternoon last year, a mounted police officer’s horse — a ten-year-old gelding named Einstein — got spooked, apparently by several feet of bright-orange mesh in the grass, slipped into the water, and sank beneath the Capitol Street Bridge. An hour later, the horse’s body surfaced and was removed by a heavy-duty dump truck.
The city’s most infamous drowning happened twenty years ago. Cops beat Joe Campos Torres so badly, the booking sergeant refused to accept him into any city jail. The officers dragged Torres to a site near the bayou and whaled on him some more. Then he either jumped or was pushed into the water. None of the cops involved spent more than a year in prison.
I recite these incidents to myself now to take my mind off of Lira and to fit her behavior into some kind of fathomable context. But I’m failing.
Folklore doesn’t help me either.
Local historians say the bayou was named for the buffalo gar that navigate its waters. But anecdotes I’ve gathered over the years suggest that eighteenth-century Spanish explorers’ maps still exist that denote the ‘Arroyo de Cibilo” or “Ditch of Bison.” These stories say early Indians drove the mammoth animals over the bayou’s banks to cripple them and make them easy targets for the Indians’ spears.
There’s supposed to be a Confederate schooner in the water here somewhere. I’ve got recorded testimony from an ex-slave’s son who claims to have danced on the ship’s ruined deck during a low-water summer in 1908.
I emerge from the underbrush, amazed at the amount of debris in my head.
Cal’s right, and so is Penrose. What we need are positive tales! Johnny Appleseed.
“Water Under the Bridge: Exotic Seafood Since 1907,” says a metal sign on a dark-green building near the bank. “Drum, sheepshead, croaker. Mahi from Hawaii.”
Through a window, I see the shadow of a man, moving among jars of tentacles in clear, pickled brine, among fishing nets filled with crusty clam shells, swaying from the ceiling. Lemon and oysters, I smell.
Another man steps outside in a slick rubber apron covered with pink and yellow fish guts. He’s wiping his hands on a newspaper. Our paper. The Community Section.
Through willow trees, trailing their tips in the water, sketching thin, dirty ripples — concentric rings — come the muted spasms of boat motors circling, circling, circling upstream.
Three days, and no word from Julio Zamora. His house appears to be empty. No one answers his phone.
I’ve asked Scott, whose beat it is, to find out what he can from the cops, which isn’t much: Lira has been arraigned on capital murder charges. “A recent law in Texas makes multiple killings a capital offense,” Scott explained to me. “Tough luck for your friend. This assumes the other kid — Roberto? — is dead.” For now, her location is a well-guarded secret. Her Mexican citizenship makes the paperwork messy, so the D.A.’s office wants her kept under wraps. “All I can tell you is, she’s not in the Criminal Courts Building. I’ve checked the new facility over on San Jacinto and Baker Streets — they don’t call it a jail, they call it an ‘Adult Detention Zone,’” Scott said, “but for all its high-tech alarms, it’s still the same old bars and walls. Anyways, the pugs who run the place won’t talk to me.”
He looked at me. “People just keep vanishing on you, don’t they?”
“Not the right people,” I said.
At Prince’s Drive-In, a teenage girl grilling burgers tells me Julio’s apron has been “hanging from that meathook in the kitchen since Sat’day, late, when the son-of-a-bitch was supposed to relieve my draggin’ ass.” Her braces flash. “We ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since.”
At the Chinese take-out, the assistant manager, a Taiwanese national, shrugs when I mention Julio’s name. Six or seven women, black and Asian, sit at a table in the kitchen peeling shrimp, sweeping the shells onto scattered newspapers on the floor.
“Lavonda say she gettin’ the house and the car,” chirps one, a tall woman with short hair in tangled sprouts, tossing wedges of orange meat into a boiling pot on a stove.
“Girl, Lavonda blind and deaf. Frankie gon’ take her to the cleaners.”
“Hell, to the bank,” says another. “Fuckin’ Accounts Closed.”
In the corner, a quiet woman snaps the shrimp shells at the sharp hook in their tails and hums off-key to herself with her big, dark eyes half-closed. Her fingers are raw. An odor of Lysol and peppers swarms the room.
I order Kung Pao Chicken.
On the way home, I stop at the Kroger’s on Montrose for a six-pack of beer. At the pharmacy, in the rear of the store, next to the frozen fish, two pale, thin men wait in line, thumbing through This Week in Texas. “William tells me AZT is cheaper now over at Walgreen’s,” one says softly.
“Sweet William. How are his platelets?”
“Pathetic.”
Clouds ripple like flesh above the city’s streets. For Sale. Apartment for Rent. Must Liquidate.
I realize that for a year now, while I’ve walked in the fog of my grief, a whole community has dwindled around me.
I see a young man pull a yellowed shade in a cracked apartment window.
Tonight, Sno King clatters like a riot. I take a beer and my chicken to the far end of my garage, where sometimes it’s quieter than it is in the house. I discovered this once after a late-night fight with Jean. Simmering, I grabbed a sleeping bag and a pillow and marched outside. I hung a mirror on a nail and filled a large tin tub with water so I could shave the following morning. A cricket, limp as a flaccid penis, wound up floating there, on an island of Foamy. Spiders rapelled up rolls of insulation next to a greasy workbench; roaches skittered over wrenches, screwdrivers, drills. But I slept better than Jean did that night. Somehow — an acoustical quirk — Sno King’s turmoil was muffled by the garage’s thin walls.
I don’t recall the details of the fight, though it could have been about only one thing. We never tussled over anything else.
Thwack!
Thwack!
“Sweetheart.” I raise my bottle in the dark. “You win.”