Losing Clementine

by Ashley Ream

  I picked up a crumbled piece of bacon with my fingers and ate it.

  “I have some medicine to buy.”

  “Where are we going to get it?”

  The orange juice had bits of pulp bigger than normal. It gave me the odd feeling of needing to chew what I sucked up through the straw.

  “I’d rather go alone.”

  He put his hand on my knee under the table. I’d put on shorts that morning, and his hand was hot on my bare skin. I wondered for a moment if he had a fever.

  “Would you stop trying to do everything by yourself?”

  My heartbeat started to pick up, and my skin felt cold and damp. What would I say? Yes, Richard, just step around that dog food while I ask about some large animal tranquilizers?

  “Just this part,” I said. And the part where I jam a needle into my vein while lying in the bathtub, you know, in case of fluids.

  “I want to come with you.”

  “You are here with me.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Let’s have carnitas for lunch.”

  “We’re eating breakfast right now.”

  “It’s never too early to plan.”

  After we paid the bill, we made our way out to the street to flag down a cab, which was turning out to be easier to do here than in New York, and offered another five-dollar bill to be taken across town to Avenida Revolucion.

  The heart of Tijuana sits in a bowl surrounded by hillside neighborhoods packed so tight there is not one bit of ground to be spotted between the houses. At sea level, we zipped around the traffic circles, which replaced every major intersection, and past billboard after billboard mostly advertising mobile phones.

  The air felt twenty degrees hotter than when we left the hotel. Even the sky looked bleached and faded from too much UV exposure. I scooted away from the window, a futile exercise trapped in the front seat. There was no air-conditioning, and I felt my spleen start to melt. There wasn’t enough sunscreen in all of Mexico. I put a thumb against my delicate forearm skin and pulled away, inspecting how quickly the white spot turned back to pink. Was I burning or just getting heat stroke?

  We passed a sushi restaurant, a disco shaped like a cave, and a BMW dealership. When we stopped at a light, street vendors walked between the cars with armloads of candy, flowers, newspapers, bottled water, and sunshades. School-aged kids braved the intersection to break-dance for coins. I was considering purchasing a sunshade when the light turned green again. We turned, and the neighborhood got less affluent. An auto repair shop made out of corrugated metal had a mural of a bikini-clad woman painted on the side. It was surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire and, every so many yards, a cross. Lust, self-protection, and, when all else failed, prayer. I could appreciate that.

  The taxi pulled over on the south end of Revolucion. “This okay?” our driver asked in English.

  It was. We climbed out and started down.

  The veterinary shop I’d read about was two blocks off the avenue on the northern end. Somewhere between where we were and where I needed to go, I had to find someplace to stash Richard.

  The avenue was nothing like what we’d enjoyed the night before. Quickly the stores on either side of the street became nothing but trinket shops, strip clubs, and tequila pushers. On every block stood a donkey painted in black-and-white zebra stripes. Its owner stood ready to hoist a tourist onto the beast’s back and plop a sombrero adorned with the word Tijuana! and pom-pom fringe on his or her head. Now and again, the keeper would toss a corncob onto the ground for the animal to chew and would try to wave us over.

  Store clerks ran out to us as we passed. “Come inside,” they demanded in English, “just for the hell of it.”

  We shook our heads and kept going.

  Old men with nut-brown skin approached us with silver necklaces that would turn your neck green. They pushed them toward our chests.

  No, no, no.

  A few feet later another man holding the same necklaces.

  No again.

  The strip club bouncers took their turn. The barmaids. Hostesses at restaurants. “Mexican food!” one of the women in a waitress uniform shouted at us, trying to shove menus into our hands.

  I stopped looking at faces or scanning the storefronts for fear of attracting more attention. I heard myself saying no, no, no, no, thank you, no, on a loop. I was developing tunnel vision.

  At the end of the avenue, mariachi bands in full dress stood on the corner, perhaps half a dozen of them, waiting to be picked up by a passing car to play a party. On the opposite street corner, women in high heels and skirts not made for the hour waited for passing cars and parties, too. To the left and down a couple of blocks was the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Its spires stood tall over the city, watching. The hookers paid it no mind. To the right, somewhere down there, was the store I needed.

  I nudged Richard and pointed at the church. “I’ll meet you in there.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m not doing this again.”

  “Clementine.”

  I had been pushed passed sympathy already.

  “You can wait for me at the church or you can go back to the hotel, but you’re not coming with me.”

  “That is ridiculous.”

  “If you try,” I said, “I will scream bloody fucking murder, and everyone will look, and it will be a scene, because we’re white.”

  “Are you actually trying to use racism to your advantage?”

  “If I have to.”

  The muscles in his neck and face were tight, but he shook his head and turned his back on me, headed to the left. I turned, too, and went right. I had gotten the directions from a newspaper article, which had been none too discreet about describing just how scofflaws were obtaining and smuggling deadly poisons across our precious border.

  I crossed the avenue without looking back at the hawkers and pushers and strippers and zebra-painted donkeys. Within a block, I was out of the tourist zone, back in the rest of the city. I passed a gas station, a two-story shop selling terra-cotta, and a street that seemed to house nothing but dental offices, most with signs in English offering oral surgeries for a fraction of the northern price. There were cheap clothing stores and botanicas, just like in L.A., selling their mixture of Catholicism and voodoo.

  The farther away from the avenue I got, the more normal and poorer the neighborhood got. I went one block, two blocks, three blocks farther than I’d expected. I stopped and swiveled my neck. Something close by smelled like a sewer. This couldn’t be right. Maybe I had passed it. Maybe it had closed. Maybe the newspaper had obfuscated more than I thought. I kept going like a gambler throwing dollars on the table to win back those already beyond his reach.

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

  Yes.

  To my right, just one shop up, was a sign across a small storefront. Most of it was beyond my meager Spanish, but I recognized veterinaria, and in case I didn’t, above it were painted two large fighting cocks in a face-off. My relief at seeing those two birds—an abomination to PETA supporters everywhere—was like three martinis on an empty stomach.

  I stepped under the fighting cocks and into the store. Sunlight penetrated only the first six feet, and beyond that no artificial light illuminated the merchandise, what little of it there was. Advertisements for pet food were pasted in the window and had been for some time. The red inks had faded, leaving nothing but the blues and yellows, which made the human and golden retriever look a washed-out green.

  A woman sat in the back of the shop on a plastic chair with a young boy. I smiled at them, and they stared at me. I had planned to subtly browse the wares undetected before getting up my nerve and approaching the register to inquire about things kept “in back.” So much for subtle, but still I went through the motions.

  As in all the shops I’d passed, goods on the shelves were slim. No twenty-seven kinds of toothpaste to choose from. No six varieties of food to suit the aging smal
l dog, the aging large dog, the aging large dog with a weight control problem. There was one doghouse of questionable quality and a wall displaying a sprinkling of leashes and collars, a few sizes, a few colors. If those were too fancy for you, there were three spools of metal chain—small, medium, and attack-dog size—that you could buy by the meter. Above that was a lone, empty birdcage. Either it was for sale or its occupant had died. It wasn’t clear. The rest of the small space was taken up by an L-shaped counter with a glass front. Behind it were old-fashioned wooden shelves that reminded me of a small-town candy shop or perhaps an apothecary.

  I feigned interest in a small blue collar. It was a difficult ruse to keep up. Everything was dusty, and I didn’t see anything to bring home to Chuckles. I gave up and walked toward the register. Inside the glass display case were two bright orange castles for decorating a tropical fish tank. No fish or fish flakes or aquariums or plastic plants or turquoise tank gravel to go with them. They looked sad in their forced frivolity.

  The woman left the young boy to play with his toy car and joined me on the other side of the counter. “Can I help you?” she asked in English.

  I had written down what I needed and pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket. I unfolded and smoothed it out. The paper felt thinner from the heat and sweat of my body. I was lucky the ink had not smudged.

  “Do you have this?” I asked and pushed it toward her.

  She turned it around, squinted at it, and nodded.

  The shelves behind her had the same barren, postholiday-rush look. She walked the length, reading labels, and when she got to the end, I began to worry she had run out.

  She had not. She bent down and picked a clear glass bottle off the bottom shelf, double-checked it against the paper, and brought it to me for my inspection. I, too, double-checked the name and the dosage against the paper. The label matched. I nodded, and she moved over to the register to ring it up.

  Forty-five dollars.

  I paid in cash, and she put my purchase in a purple plastic shopping sack.

  When I stepped out of the shop, I was blinded by the sunlight and a case of nerves. No problem to buy it here. Contraband back home. I clutched the bag in my hand and hurried back the way I had come.

  Richard was standing outside the church with his arms crossed over his chest. His nose had turned pink from the sun, and his mouth was drawn tight across his face. Behind him the doors of the church were open, but yellow tape blocked them off. I looked over his shoulder to the inside. Construction men were knelt down over the terrazzo floor working. At the end of the nave watching over them was Our Lady of Guadalupe herself, aglow in her rainbow aura. I liked seeing her there. Women were so rarely in charge in these sorts of places.

  “So you didn’t get to go in, huh?”

  It wasn’t so much a question as a statement of the obvious, and Richard ignored it.

  “Did you get what you came for?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine.”

  Half an hour of silence later, we found a restaurant with a sign that featured a cartoony pig eating a less cartoony pig. Inside they served us carnitas by the pound with freshly made tortillas and salsa. We ate and ordered tequila. The food and the booze thawed Richard. He looked at the purple plastic bag I carried but didn’t ask about it.

  When we left the restaurant, he took my hand, and we walked that way until we found a market. It was permanent but not much more than a series of lean-tos. There were moles and red and green chili powders mounded up in clay bowls, bins of every dried and fresh pepper known to Mexico, pinole, tamarind pods, tomatillos, plantains, brown cane sugar dried into cones, tubs of rock salt, and all kinds of nuts, both plain and covered with chili powder. Cheese was displayed in boxes with mesh sides for air circulation, and dried fruits of all colors filled glass bins like candy at a five-and-dime. Men stood in the aisles cleaning the spines off cactus pads, and above them hung piñatas in the shape of Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob SquarePants.

  I bought chili powder and coffee, pretending I wanted them to eat and to drink. What I really wanted was to slide my glass bottle down inside them when we crossed the border. There could be sniffer dogs. You never knew.

  That night Richard and I had sex again, just once, and then fell asleep.

  25 Days

  “Do I look okay?” Richard flipped down the visor and opened the mirror. The two lights on either side illuminated two inches worth of darkness. He smoothed his hair and checked his teeth, perhaps for pubic hair.

  I could’ve said something, but I didn’t. He looked vulnerable with his nose up against six square inches of low-grade reflecting glass, trying to see if adulterer was written across his forehead in invisible ink.

  Our trip north had been uneventful. There had been no dogs. We simply walked through the processing building and stood in line with our blameless white skin and showed our passports to the agent. It was air-conditioned, which dried my nervous sweat. I tried to think boring thoughts. The agent asked no questions. Our bags were x-rayed and set off no alarms. My stomach relaxed. That was that. It was easy, really. Uneventful. I suppose smuggling always was until it wasn’t, and it was my lucky day.

  Now we were home. I had a pound of coffee and red chili powder for no reason, and Richard would go inside, and his girlfriend would be there. He would be unusually cheerful one minute and disparaging of me the next. He’d say I was miserable company, as all sick people are, except, in my case, much worse. He’d lay out a list of my annoyances and end it with “She’s not like you.” He might even suggest that I smell funny, like bologna gone off. Then, when he was secure in her gullibility, he would excuse himself to shower. He would take an extra long time and be thorough, and I didn’t begrudge him any of this. It was what he needed to do, and he’d earned a pass or two over the years.

  “You look completely normal,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  He looked up his nostrils.

  “Yep.”

  “Okay then.” He flipped up the visor. “Right.” He climbed out and opened the back door to fish around for his duffel bag. “I’ll bring Chuckles out.”

  I watched him walk toward our house. Dusk was hanging on by its toenails, nothing but a sliver of salmon-colored light on the edge of the world. His white T-shirt glowed in the near dark, and there were a dozen little lamps shoved into the ground along the pathway to the door, illuminating Richard’s sneakers. The lights were new. That was something I never would’ve done.

  When he unlocked the door with his key, I could see it was dark inside. I wondered what that meant. Maybe Sheila had gone to her own house. Maybe she was out back in the small shed that had been my studio for a year. That was as long as I could take the tiny space. It wasn’t big enough to organize my supplies and store my work before sale. It was either too hot or too cold. It had terrible ventilation, and it made me feel claustrophobic. On my birthday at the end of that first year, I’d gone out and rented myself a work space, different from the one I have now. There was no kitchen, and it was smaller and zoned commercial. I didn’t have Jenny then. My shelves were a mess, and no one made me sandwiches. There had been a fast-food restaurant around the corner. I walked there covered in paint and ate a lot of french fries and gained five pounds.

  I found Chuckles on my way back one afternoon. I’d had a paper sack forming a whole Rorschach test worth of grease spots and saw him dart under an old blue pickup truck that had been parked seemingly unmoved next to the building for as long as I had been renting there. He was emaciated and not more than a couple of months old. Persian kittens look like dandelions gone to seed, and I was lonely in my studio all by myself all day. I got down on my hands and knees in my stained jeans and T-shirt and tore a piece off my chicken sandwich to lure him out. Half an hour later, I had him, and it wasn’t until I gave him a bath and cut the mats out that I realized his fur wasn’t supposed to be gray. I kept him and never bothered looking for an owner, even though Persians aren’t kno
wn for their street cred.

  Ten minutes later, Richard came out with Chuckles in his carrier. Chuckles was not going easy into the good night. Richard opened the back door and put the carrier on the seat, and I rolled down my window. He put one hand on the roof of the car and the other in his back pocket and stared off toward the neighbor’s house and then down at his shoes, which was never a posture that foretold good things.

  “I’m sorry, you know, about us. I just didn’t know how to handle it. You were sad all the time, and I couldn’t make it better.”

  At first I thought he was talking about Mexico, and then I realized he wasn’t.

  “I know,” I told him. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “You seem better now. I mean, you know, mentally.” He blew out a puff of air. “I guess it’s not really fair, the timing, with the cancer and everything.”

  I smiled through the windshield.

  “Give Sheila my best.”

  When I got home, Jenny was sitting on the floor in front of my door. Her hair was falling out of her ponytail, and there was a hole in the knee of her jeans. Chuckles yowled with joy and started to cough something up.

  “How long have you been sitting here?”

  I set the carrier down, and Jenny leaned over to open it and scoop Chuckles into her arms, which is not something other humans are allowed to do to him.

  “Too long. Where have you been? Have you been to the Taylor?”

  “Mexico. And no, why?”

  I leaned over her to unlock the front door, and she followed me inside carrying the cat and my bag. She put both next to the unmade bed and started straightening the covers. What I really wanted was for her to make me dinner. I pulled one of the blue painted stools up to the counter that floats in the middle of the floor, marking the kitchen’s boundary, and tried to look hungry. If she didn’t mention her firing, neither would I.

  “Elaine’s stuff is up. She got the show before yours.”

  “I’m not having a show. You want pancakes?”

  “You don’t know how to make pancakes.”