I had a new life and good friends. In the days that followed, there were moments of genuine intense emotion. After getting the house in order, with a door to walk through, I carried Lonnie over the threshold as if she were my bride. I was brimming over, not only with a sense of accomplishment but with a warm feeling that I had my first real home. One night, lying on the floor on blankets, Lonnie asked why I couldn’t say the word love. I whispered to her, “It’s like a secret wish, supposed to keep it secret. Like a birthday wish: Never let anyone know what you wished for and it’ll come true.”
She was intuitive. “You ever have a birthday cake or birthday party?” I didn’t say anything back, but I lay in the dark remembering how my brother Mieyo stole a candle from the altar at the orphanage, and for my birthday we hid under his bunk with the candle lit and he sang a happy birthday song to me. He gave me a handful of hard candy he’d stolen from the living quarters of Father Gallagher, the priest.
I wished Mieyo were with me, that we could be together like this, the way we always said we would as kids. Every other place I’d had, in Albuquerque or Santa Fe, was to party in, hide from the world, or just crash. This was different. I didn’t feel the emptiness or despair that I normally felt in those other places. I turned over and hugged Lonnie. From the living room, Marcos gave a choked cough from the bong he was smoking before snuggling into his sleeping bag. In the dark, Lonnie whispered, as if she knew what I’d been thinking, “Welcome home, sweetheart, I love you. Tomorrow I’ll clean the yard and plant some roses for you.” It was usually difficult for me to feel good about anything I did, but I did feel certain about Lonnie. Hoping it would last, I fell asleep, a part of me still yearning to call Theresa to tell her I was doing well.
A couple of weeks later we got our phone hooked up and left Xeroxed flyers with our number at the Laundromat, the gas station, and the hardware store. While we were leaving them in mailboxes on the white side of town with their extravagant lawns and shrubs, a police cruiser rolled up. The officer said there’d been a rash of burglaries and folks in the area were suspicious. “If you’re looking for work,” he advised, “Mexicans and hippies gather at dawn on Main Street.” But later that afternoon, canvassing the motel strip, we landed our first job at the Cactus Rose Motel, fixing rooms trashed by army guys partying from the nearby base. The proprietor, a bony guy from India, kept us as regular groundskeepers. Three bucks an hour for each of us paid for groceries. Better still, he referred us to other innkeepers, and within weeks we were changing swamp-cooler pads, painting motel rooms, and landscaping. Marcos and I traded work for a junked truck rusting in the weeds behind one of the motels. We got it running and painted our company name and phone number on the doors—HANDYMAN EXPRESS—with a guy with a hammer in one hand and a tool box in the other dashing off to a call. Lonnie brought hot lunches to the job site; after working in the hundred-degree heat, we’d return at sunset exhausted and sit before the air conditioner, shower, eat a meal, and kick back in the living room drinking beer until the late news, after which we hit the sack. The straight life wasn’t as hard as it was boring, but it gave a regularity to my life.
Everything was going great until one morning we were trimming out a house—tacking floorboards, screwing in cabinet doors, doorknobs, and light fixtures—when this guy appeared in the doorway. He was from the state. He said we needed a contractor’s license and, until we applied for one in Phoenix, at the State Labor Board, we had to “cease operations.”
I had no idea what the idiot was talking about, as I told Lonnie later, sitting on the back doorstep of our house. Marcos and I had our shirts off; we were as dark as the Mexicans living around us in shacks separated by fields of weeds and cactus. Marcos was on a crate, drinking his beer, saying, “We were getting all the work, so the competition sicced the law on us. In the meantime, we should probably pick up that tile in San Luis for the landlord. Kill some time.”
Marcos went for another beer. I told him to grab beers for us and then turned to Lonnie, saying, “You look sad.” She had told me earlier in the week how she missed her parents and the piano and dance lessons she’d taken twice a week for years. On weekends, she and her father flew his plane. She had said it wasn’t their fault she wasn’t happy, they’d tried. I wanted to say something but I got up and hugged her as Marcos came with our beers.
“Yeah, lovebirds, I got a suggestion. What say we have a party after we come back from San Luis?” Lonnie and I both agreed, and Marcos went into one of his fishing stories.
Half listening, I scanned the fields shimmering with heat from the sun-baked soil. After a truck or car went by on the dirt road, dust clouds hung on the air. Mexican music floated faintly across the quiet parched fields, triggering memories of Estancia: Grandpa in his hard-backed chair by the back door, rolling a cigarette and smoking meditatively, reading his Bible and looking up to think about the words; me at his work boots playing with his bootlaces, inventing games in the dirt with sticks, pebbles, and insects. Marcos was still telling his story. “The fish couldn’t even fit in the bathtub. I weighed it at the county store—a state record. I’d snuck in behind Lambley’s house and caught it in his pond! And Lambley hated me after that; he’d been trying to catch that fish since he was a kid, and here I go, snagging it with nothing more than a black rubber worm. Nothing to it.”
The whole time Marcos was telling his story, I watched Mexicans butchering a pig in the distance. They didn’t pay much attention to a half-starved mongrel sniffing the air spiced with skillet scents of pig’s feet, fried intestines, tortillas, beans, and rice. And they didn’t have time to stop it before it snatched a pig’s foot and dashed off as they cursed and threw rocks at it. I was happy it got away. Above us, a hawk scanned the prickly desert weeds, checking out the dog. Marcos gulped his beer and ended his story. “Bet them bass are biting now.”
“Why’d you leave?” Lonnie asked.
“My daddy used to tell me stories about the world, from books, and I guess I took them to heart and wanted to see for myself. Up there was God’s country, but God didn’t stop me and my dad from fighting—he wanted me to go to school, join the service, get married, settle down. We didn’t get along much at the end.” His eyes had a soft remembering, and to break the pain he asked, “Hey, Jimmy? What you’all do back home?”
“Not much,” I said. “I can tell you one thing, Marcos, you should talk to your dad, make up with him.”
Marcos had hurt in his voice. “Why? He started it.”
I said, “The last time I saw my dad, he was drunk and beating me. I kept telling him to stop, but he wouldn’t. So I hit him. That was the last time I saw him. I regret that; I wish I could tell him I’m sorry. When I left I wasn’t going to someplace, I was running away from all the shit in my life.”
We were quiet.
“Here’s to the best friends I ever had.” Marcos toasted, then scratched at the dirt, tossing a little of it, and said, “I do miss hunting with him, though. I could smell a buck a mile away, better than that mongrel dog. I could survive off the land too. I know about plants, which to eat and stuff like that.”
Some of the Mexican kids were chasing the dog and I realized they had my family’s faces, my own among them, shooing chickens and throwing pebbles at sparrows on telephone lines; tired grandparents, resting in chairs on porches, talked about the chile plants and corn in their small garden plots. I got up and walked in the field. I broke a flowery weed and came back and gave it to Lonnie. She was brushing red nail polish on her toenails.
She took my gift and said, “I fell in love with you, Jimmy, that’s why I left home. And I have no regrets.”
In San Luis, Mexico, ten minutes south of the border, they sold bathroom tile cheap, but we didn’t know where. The border checkpoint was a small cubicle with a guard who didn’t bother to come out, sleepily waving a finger for us to proceed.
We drove around. It was a decrepit, chalky town, dust and silence its main features. Dirt yards surrounded bric
ked-up dismantled car hulls. Chickens clawed the crusty dirt, and children scraped the hard ground to play games. Now and then noises rattled in the silence, loose tin slapped, and stray pack dogs emitted pained yelps. The town seemed weary of itself, every trace of life drained as it clung to the scantiest survival. Burros and roosters dozed in the shade of abandoned adobes beside cinder-block walls and stick houses buried in stickers and weeds. I wondered what supported its existence. I was thirsty and told Marcos to find a place to have a beer. He asked if I remembered the guy’s name that we had met in the county jail. Tecolote, I told him, and he asked, “Wasn’t this the town he was talking about, about this big dealer here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think the guy’s name was Galvan.”
We parked behind a few battered cars in front of a weathered adobe building, the lettering on the facade faded but readable, EL TIGRE cantina. We went inside, eyeing the rough-looking Mexicans brooding over their beers at other tables, and took a seat at one of the rickety round tables set up haphazardly around the room under a slow-turning ceiling fan. On the earthen walls hung peeling paintings depicting bullfighters, famous cowboys, and revolutionaries. I ordered two beers and wondered where we could find floor tiles.
Marcos pointed to the bartender, gulping and putting his bottle down. “I’ll tell you, this place reminds me of those old Western movies I used to watch as a kid.” He looked around. “Wish I knew Spanish. How d’you say beer?”
“Cerveza”
Marcos got up. “I’ll get two more.” He came back with beers in hand and asked, “What does pelao mean?”
“Country bumpkin, or foolish kid.”
Marcos stared at the bartender, who grinned at him. “Country bumpkin, huh?” Marcos said, and went over to the bartender.
By the bartender’s expression, whatever Marcos told him, he didn’t like it. He glared at Marcos all the way back to our table. When Marcos told me he had said Metalo, which was slang for “Up yours,” I warned him to be careful about what he said to people. “They take it personal here.”
“I just wanted to show him a thing or two,” Marcos countered. “See that look on his face when I mentioned Galvan’s name?”
I drained my beer, a little nervous, and said, “Let’s find that tile and get home.” The bartender was slowly pacing behind the counter as if padlocked to a chain attached to an iron collar around his thick neck. When we rose to leave he nodded us over to the counter and poured us each a free shot of tequila and a beer. I didn’t want to stay, but Marcos had already downed his shot.
“Mexico ain’t such a bad place.” He smacked his lips, pleased.
The bartender pointed to my shot, indicating with his finger for me to drink. I sensed something was off. The bartender returned to washing glasses and drying them on his apron. As we were sipping our beers, a man dressed in cheap nightclub rayon entered and sat at the counter next to us.
“You looking for Galvan?” he asked. I wondered how he knew.
“Yeah.” Marcos added, before I could stop him, “Recommended by a friend.”
The stranger motioned us to follow him to the end of the bar, where he knuckle-rapped the countertop and shot three fingers up. The bartender slid three tequila shots down the counter, his disregard indicating no payment necessary. We slugged them down in a swallow. Feeling the tequila, we got in our car and followed the guy in his to a motel at the edge of town. He opened a door to a room, said, “I’ll be back,” and left.
I was worried and tried to tell Marcos we should leave. “People get killed like this. We could be robbed, left for dead. You ever think they might be setting us up? Did the bartender see you pull that wad of money out for the tile?” I was uneasy about the whole thing, but Marcos was nonchalant, savoring the dope-buyer role.
“Chill, Jimmy. You remember that boat we seen docked in Marina del Sol in San Diego, its name was ONE TIME? Remember? You said, Yeah, that would be nice, a one-time score that would put us over the top. This is Tecolote’s main connect! This is the man!”
Before I could tell him that was before I met Lonnie and things changed, I heard a car outside. I stared at the door anxiously. It opened, and the same slick guy came in the room and closed the door. I gave Marcos a tense look that conveyed I didn’t like what was going down. “We wait,” the stranger said. I wanted to get the hell out of there. I was feeling trapped. Just as I was going to say, Forget the meeting, forget we ever asked, I heard another car drive in and three doors slam shut.
Three men came in. One asked our escort who was the lead man, and he pointed to me, mostly because I spoke Spanish. “You, come with us.” We’d already gone too far. The last thing I wanted to do with these gangsters was play head games. If I backed out now, they’d think we were narcs and kill us.
Outside, one of them opened the passenger door in front and I slid in. We drove in a cloud of dust away from town into the desert, out far enough that the town disappeared. The driver parked under a dead mesquite tree and killed the engine. I stared at the dead bugs on the windshield. No sight of another human being, nothing except the haunting whoo of the breeze and the two menacing henchmen in the backseat. The driver ordered me to step out. One of the men patted me down for weapons, and then I got back in.
“What do you want with Galvan?” the driver asked, his brown eyes icy. He was short and plump with rounded shoulders, hair combed into a ponytail. He wore a tight-fitting black silk shirt and designer jeans. His face was gouged with smallpox pits.
The seriousness of my situation hit me. This was the real deal. These guys were heavy hitters, and if my answers were not right they’d put a bullet in the back of my head.
“A friend of a friend, you said. Who’s the friend?” He repeated my words with grim calm, hissing the sibilants.
“In the county jail, a guy—we were in jail together—he said Galvan could get some good weed.”
The driver smiled. “How much?”
“A hundred pounds—but we don’t have the money now.”
“I shit a hundred pounds!” he laughed. “How about a ton?”
“A ton?”
“Otherwise it is not worth my time.”
I didn’t know what to say. I looked out the windshield, chilled with dread. “I can sell it,” I heard myself say, “but you have to front it to us, give us a week or two.”
“This friend in jail with you . . . his name?”
I was still stunned by my answer.
“His name?” he asked again.
“His name? Tecolote.” Was Tecolote his friend or his enemy?
The driver sighed. “Ahh?”
I exhaled, wanting to get through this ordeal. “They slammed him down for distribution.” The presence of the two men in the backseat was unnerving. A sinking feeling came over me, making my mouth sticky and dry. “He told me Galvan could give me quantity and price, quality weed. And that Galvan was a man of his word.”
“He told you that? The sonofabitch owes me money. But it’s true, not only price and quality but doorstep service. Yuma? No problem. I will front it to you, but how much time?”
“A week or two?”
“We’ll give you a trial run—a sample, okay, fifty pounds tomorrow. Diego will see where you live. You pay in a week.”
I nodded and gave a weak smile, relieved.
“Seven days . . . or you’re buzzard shit.” He hunched forward, reached under the seat, and took out a chrome-plated nine millimeter. He threw it on the seat between us, felt under the seat again, and brought out a thick object wrapped in newspaper. He handed it to me and I carefully unwrapped the porno tabloid pages. It was a marijuana stalk with resinous, crystalline ocher buds. It represented money, easy money.
FOUR
There was a point in that car out on the desert when I quit thinking—my mental circuits closed down, and I was compelled to do whatever the circumstances required. It was as if there were something beyond my will driving me on. I was hoping the chance to deal dope again
would never come but wishing it would, dreading and wanting it simultaneously. My bluff had been called. No matter how I wanted to back out, I had to go through with it. Drugs were the way, providing the only opportunity at hand to make money quickly. I knew I didn’t have the patience to work for years at landscaping; it was too repetitive and, most importantly, did not meet my dream of living an exciting life. I feared getting stuck with doing landscaping the rest of my life. I’d have to work years to save enough for a house. That life was only a temporary solution to making enough money to get by. I wanted more than going to work at dawn, busting my ass all day, and getting home so tired I fell right to sleep. So I was going to make the best of dealing drugs: get in and get out as fast as possible. Part of me rejected the whole idea of dealing as a stupid mistake; another part was already calculating how to take advantage of it. I didn’t want to jeopardize what Lonnie and I had going, a normal life and a secure eight-to-five job, but, with the IRS shutting us down, this deal gave me an opportunity to turn some fast cash. We’d have the money to get a license and jump-start our business again on firmer financial footing. We could even expand it: buy new trucks and hire other workers to do the menial labor while Lonnie and I traveled.
Yet Galvan was no ordinary street dealer. Fueled by tequilas and beer chasers, buzzed on the adrenaline of the deal, I’d gotten myself into a serious situation. Despite the obvious hazards of working with a man who killed people when things didn’t go his way, the electric jolt of the deal counteracted the dulling anesthetic effects of normal life. The sun shone brighter, the day felt more adventurous, and I sensed a multitude of exciting possibilities. Dealing was hard to get out of the blood, and I stepped right back into it as if I’d never left.
When we’d had our repair business, we’d gotten so busy that we had hired Carey as a part-time helper. He was an army serviceman living off-base in a trailer with another military roommate. Carey turned out to be perfect for delivering weed—a Kentucky country boy, blond hair, large blue eyes, with a farm-boy innocence and disarming simpleness. After tasting a sample of the weed, he said he could definitely sell quite a bit on-base. He’d need a couple of days to put the word out and collect the money. To our surprise, Carey sold all fifty pounds.
A Place to Stand Page 8
