Couples were dancing on a wide patch of bare dirt, kicking and swirling and spinning each other around in the cast of light from lanterns hung on tree branches. A kid spotted me and told the people gathered at a long picnic table loaded with bowls of food, and they looked over at me. One of the men approached me, removing his hat, and I took mine off too.
The lantern light was full on my face and I could tell by his look that he could see the color of my eyes. I’d seen such inquisitive stares more times than I could count.
“Buenas noches,” he said, and added, “Good evening,” in deference to the possibility that I spoke only English.
In Spanish I apologized for intruding and told him I’d smelled the food and heard the music and wanted to see what was going on.
His face brightened and he beckoned me to join them, saying, “Pase, caballero, por favor. Nuestra casa es su casa.”
His name was Arturo Alcanzas and he was host of the party. The others also welcomed me warmly, everyone speaking in Spanish. They introduced themselves all around and made room for me at the table bench. They admired my suit and boots, the briefcase I kept at my side. They tried not to stare too obviously at my eyes. The musicians finished the number and came over to the table and Arturo introduced them too, three brothers named Gutierrez. They called themselves Los Tres Payasos, and though they modestly professed not to be very good, Alcanzas said they were good enough to get hired to play at small fiestas and quinceañeras from Port Arthur to Bay City.
Someone fetched me a bottle of Carta Blanca from a tub packed with ice. A bowl of fried jalapeños was set close to me on one side and a platter of chicharrones on the other. While I munched on the chiles and pork rinds some of the women passed around a plate for me, filling it with red rice, beans, spiced shredded pork. A young girl placed a wicker basket of corn tortillas within my reach.
I told them my name and their faces showed curiosity about it, but their natural politeness restrained them from asking how I had come by it. One who spoke English told the others that James meant Santiago, and everyone was pleased by this and addressed me by that name from then on. When one of the men remarked that I spoke with the accent of the western frontera, some of the others made faces of reprimand for his breach of manners with such familiarity. He looked chastened and assured me he’d meant no disrespect. I assured him I’d perceived none. I told them I’d grown up along the Chihuahua and Texas border, and they said “Ah, pues,” and nodded at each other around the table as though I had clarified a great deal.
They told me all about themselves. The first of them to settle here had named the little street La Colonia Tamaulipas, in honor of their home state, but over time it simply became La Colonia. Many of them were related by blood or marriage and were from Matamoros, just the other side of the Rio Grande. Others were from Victoria, Monterrey, Tampico. “Pero todos venimos con espaldas mojadas,” one of them said with a smile, joking about the wetback fashion in which they’d all crossed the river. Some of the men had found work on the docks, some in the railyard, some on the shrimp boats. A pair of brothers named Lopez talked excitedly of their plan to own their own shrimper one day.
In the group was a whitehaired old man named Gregorio who owned a small boardinghouse. I asked if he had a vacancy, and he did, and after we were done eating and had another beer, he took me over there to see it. The building was the only two-story on the street, a rundown clapboard at the end of the lane, its front yard bordered by a weathered picket fence. He called the house the Casa Verde because of its moldy-green roof shingles and the thick growth of vines on the outer walls and around the porch columns.
Inside, the place smelled old but the parlor and hallway and kitchen were neatly kept. Gregorio himself occupied the only bedroom on the ground floor and rented out the three bedrooms upstairs. The vacancy was on a front corner, with one window overlooking the lane and another facing the traintracks. A light bulb dangling from the ceiling illuminated a battered wardrobe, a narrow bed, a small wooden table and a straightback chair. Columns of numbers had been scratched into the tabletop. The old man saw me fingering them and said the previous tenant had been a gambler. I asked what had become of him, and Gregorio turned up his hands. One day the man had been there, he said, and one day he had not, as had always been the case with men and would be the case with us as well.
“Casero y filósofo tambien,” I said, and he showed a yellow grin and said all men became philosophers if they lived long enough.
The bath was at the end of the hallway. An old telephone—the only phone in the colonia, Gregorio said—was mounted on the wall at the foot of the stairs. I asked for its number and wrote it on a piece of paper to give to Rose. I moved in the next day and had been living there ever since.
LQ and Brando had thought it was a smart move on my part because wetback neighbors weren’t the nosy sort. Among the few things LQ and Ray agreed on was that a guy—especially one in our business—shouldn’t own anything more than he could carry in a single suitcase and should never live anyplace where the neighbors didn’t mind their own business.
Sam couldn’t understand why I’d leave a beachside apartment with new furnishings and appliances to move into a ramshackle place in one of the worst sections of town. I didn’t even try to explain, and he finally just shook his head and quit ragging me about it.
Rose didn’t say anything about the move. Except maybe he did, a few days later, in a sort of roundabout way. I was driving him back from some Houston business, and as we went over the causeway he said the look of the water in the afternoon sunlight always reminded him of a little lagoon in Palermo where his father had taught him to swim.
“It’s funny,” he said, staring out at the bay and the island on the other side. “This place is so different, but there’s things about it that remind me of Palermo when I was a boy. I tell you, if there was some part of town called Little Sicily—Little Italy, even—I’d move in there in a minute. I wouldn’t give a shit how beat-up it was. It’d be nice hearing the language, you know, people talking to each other in it. And the music. And smelling the food. I’d like…Ah hell.”
He made a dismissive gesture and changed the subject.
The fight at Mrs. Lang’s had boosted my spirits more than Felicia had. I stopped in a place on Market Street and drank a beer and then had another in a joint on Mechanic. But by the time I got to La Colonia, I was feeling the same undefinable irritation that had been nagging me earlier in the evening.
It was after two in the morning. Clouds were bunching over the gulf, blocking out the stars. The slight wind had kicked up and was gently stirring the treetops. The evening’s earlier warmth was giving way to a rising chill. It smelled like it might rain.
T
Other than the Casa Verde at the far end of the lane, only the Avila house showed light—a dim yellow glow against the pulled shade of a front window. The Morales family had hosted a neighborhood party earlier in the evening and I could make out the dark shapes of several cars parked in the deeper shadows between the Morales and the Avila houses. Overnight visitors, I figured.
A cloud of bugs was swarming around the Casa Verde porchlight. I didn’t need a key because Gregorio had stopped locking the door shortly after I’d moved in. I’d never told him or anyone else in La Colonia what I did for a living, but before I’d been there a month everybody on the block seemed to know who I worked for. I was pouring a cup of coffee in the kitchen one morning when I heard Señora Ortega, the next-door neighbor, talking to Gregorio in the sideyard, telling him how her daughter had warned a coworker at the oystersheds that if he didn’t stop pestering her she would complain to her neighbor, Don Santiago, who was a bodyguard for Rosario Maceo. The man, the señora told Gregorio, had not bothered her girl since.