It’s hubris, said Avery, one day, apropos of nothing. They’d been waiting on a drop for an hour and a half, after the girl swore she’d left the rest of the cash back at her place. She’d been dressed in Peanuts pajamas, clicking through her phone. Avery smiled, told her to take as long as she needed, and the moment she peeled off in her jeep he let out a groan.
Raúl didn’t know hubris. He hadn’t heard of that word. He’d been practicing his English with Avery whenever business was slow, stuttering through chitchat until it tasted less like rocks. He asked Avery what it meant.
Don’t worry about it, said Avery. We’ll never have the pleasure.
* * *
• • •
When business was slow, Avery had stories.
Avery had stories like no one had stories. Stories about coming up in the Ward. Stories about Frankfurt and Rome from when he was in the Army. Stories about how they booted him for fucking some guy’s wife. Stories about heroin and the story about his first sale and some stories about his kid, college boy now, Christ bless his mother. Raúl never learned Avery’s son’s name, he wasn’t privy to that information, but he learned a lot of other things about him.
Avery’s son was an Eagle Scout. Avery’s son was so tall that he could fit in his father’s clothes. The year he turned twelve, Avery’s son came up with a plan to end homelessness, and he shared it with Avery and his mother in the kitchen. The year he turned eighteen, Avery’s son crashed his ride, but only because he was worried about the drivers in the next lane. Avery’s son lived less than a couple blocks away, and Avery never saw him, he had no idea what he was up to.
Should be at Texas Southern still, said Avery. ’Bout your age, but cleaner. Less smelly.
Mother’s still in the Ward, said Avery. Just didn’t work with us. You know how that is. Her new thing’s a mechanic.
I told her she had her a street man, said Avery. Told her she’s moving down the chain now, and she just clicks her tongue at me like, Duh.
White women, said Avery, they love that shit. A street man. The Arabs, too. Prettiest dish I ever saw was Lebanese, and it really makes sense, the Bible was full of them. Saw her walking through the mall, stepping out the bathroom. Had the sheet on her head and everything, but it didn’t matter, she glowed right through it.
Glowed, said Avery. Almost didn’t sell to her, because I’m like, fuck. If you can’t kick it, what about the rest of us?
No hope, said Avery. No hope.
Kid doesn’t call, said Avery. But I know he looks after himself.
I know how it is, said Avery. People got to make their own choices.
But, he said.
I ever saw him out here? Buying from us?
Don’t know what I’d do, said Avery.
Actually, said Avery, I’d break his neck. I’d break his motherfucking neck with my own two hands.
They were waiting for another drop on McKinney, to a house party of swingers huddled up in an attic, when Avery asked Raúl for the first time, was this what he saw himself doing his whole life?
Young thing like you, said Avery, I’d choke a toddler for the time. Doesn’t matter if you’re a spic. You’re basically taking over the country.
Raúl sunk into the headrest. In the few months they’d been working together, his future had come up once or twice. What he planned on doing. Was he looking for anything else. The money’d been more than enough for him to stay, to say nothing of his aunt, who’d stopped asking where it came from. And the one thing he could never call the man was unfair: Avery had taken him in and showed him the score. He gave him a fair cut and sometimes more than that.
It’d be one thing if you weren’t smart, said Avery. If you were a fucking idiot, I’d say live fast, live fast. But you’re not a fucking idiot. You’re not smart, but you’re not that.
These evenings were one thing Raúl knew he’d remember: reclining with an old black man, inching along the avenue, listening to him talk.
And what if you find yourself a little señorita, said Avery. Or a Pablito. Whatever. I don’t care. Can’t take six steps in this city without kicking a brown baby. And then what’ll they do when you get locked up? Twelve years for a backpack of dealer’s special? You hear what I’m saying? You fucking listening?
Then, one day later, they were making their rounds.
Raúl knew the roads like he’d paved them by then. Their buyers knew his name, and sometimes he asked how they were doing. Avery would bitch at him about getting too familiar—be kind, sure, but keep it in your pants—but Raúl knew it wouldn’t hurt, and anyways, he needed the practice.
He’d started smiling at their regulars. They’d started saying they’d see him later.
But he and Avery were just driving, making their stops between Shepherd and the bars, when they saw the young man on the corner, loitering but looking.
They usually let the junkies go. They were a bad deal. They were the ones who’d pull a gun on you, the addict weeks out of a kick. But Raúl had already pulled onto Waugh when Avery told him to stop, to turn right the fuck around.
Raúl looked at the straggler. Then he looked at Avery.
The young man was haggard. Scrawny in a tattered Hawaiian button-down.
Raúl pulled into reverse, and the two of them sat, watching, until the man saw them park, and he shuffled over, hands chunked in his pockets. He was clearly, clearly strung out. Clearly, clearly in a bad way.
Avery didn’t say much about it. He just opened the car door. He opened the door, got out, and walked right up to him. Raúl watched the two of them talk, and he tried reading their lips, and then he realized he didn’t have to do that. All he needed was their faces.
Avery’s was expressionless and the young man’s was too. But different. Sadder. And then Raúl had an understanding that socked him in the rib of his nose.
Avery slapped the young man.
Raúl watched from the window as Avery fell on top of him. Whaling on his face. He hit the young man and he hit the young man and he hit the young man and he hit him. He closed his fists, and hit him again. He put his shoulders into it, really grinding down. He didn’t cuss or grunt or grimace, and if Raúl had thought about getting out of the car, to break the thing up, dragging Avery away from the kid—who wasn’t even crying, who didn’t look like he had any feelings about it at all—then it was a brief, fleeting idea that whooshed right out of his head.
Because Raúl knew he was watching something sacred. A story as old as the earth.
When it was finally over, Avery stood.
He looked at the young man who spit blood on the ground. Then he limped back to the car. The kid looked like a broken fortune cookie.
Before Raúl could even open his mouth, Avery asked what the fuck he was looking at.
He told Raúl to drive already.
He told Raúl they had places to be.
* * *
• • •
The next evening, Raúl showed up at the meeting place, South Congress and Washington, just north of Discovery, a little south of Montrose, and, lo and behold, no Corolla, no Avery.
He was not entirely surprised.
He stood around in the dark, just soaking into the background. The vendors had started packing their wares, and he watched them slip trinkets and pirated discs into bags. He couldn’t see the sky for the buildings, but he looked toward it anyways.
After another hour passed, Raúl rubbed his shoulders, chilly all of a sudden, and started the long walk to Damo’s condo off of Elgin.
He reached the gravel pathway with the plants up in front. He didn’t know their names, but he’d seen them all before: their purples and their yellows and their light greens and their blues. Standing on the doorstep, he peered through the window, at a man eating dinner with a woman and a child. Raúl knocked four times, and Damo answered on the fifth.
His mouth was full of something. He nodded Raúl off of the porch, shutting the door behind him.
Avery’s done, said Damo, chewing.
His lips were greasy. Raúl glanced through the drapes, at the sliver of the lady at the table, the little girl reaching for bread. He opened his mouth, and he closed it, and Damo didn’t try to fill it with words.
Done, said Raúl. Or done-done?
Damo stared at Raúl for a very long second.
Done-done, he said. He nodded toward the road. The bushes on the porch had started to shudder, shaking their fronds all over the pavement.
I might have a little work though, said Damo. If you want it.
Raúl looked back into the window.
Small-time, said Damo. Nothing big. Same circuit though. Won’t have to learn any new names.
The little girl had gotten her piece of bread. She bit off a glob, letting the rest fall to the floor. Her mother said something about it, something Raúl couldn’t understand, but it made the girl laugh and then her mother was laughing beside her, wrapping her arms around the kid, shielding her from the porch. Damo turned around to watch his family through the window, and Raúl hugged himself, too, because it really had gotten cold.
NAVIGATION
1.
It started how you’d think, with this whiteboy throwing up in an alley. I’d pulled a job at a taqueria dumping pig guts out back. The cooks gave me grunt work, the way they do when you’re starting out, like when my father had Javi and me pinching the shells off shrimp back in the restaurant as kids. It didn’t matter that I’d been fixing mole in Ma’s kitchen for years; I was short on money.
My managers looked like gauchos. Porno mustaches, bloated frames. They read my name and they saw my face and they pointed to the dishes. One of them told me I looked like a pinche negrito, y probablemente ni siquiera hablaba español, and I wanted to snatch his ears off but then I’d be out of a check.
So I should’ve left the whiteboy outside alone. I had enough on my plate.
But I stayed. Watched him heave. When he finished I came back with a glass of water.
He took me home. Dude had these little hairs climbing his belly. His eyes got wide at how furry my legs are. When we finished he gulped at the air in the room, he asked for my name as we were sliding down the futon, and when he couldn’t pronounce it the whiteboy gave me a new one.
He lived in a condo on Navigation. Said he stayed there because this was the real Houston. This Houston came with needles in the grass, but he said I was lucky, lucky to have it all in front of me. I told him if somebody gave me an out, they wouldn’t have time to finish their sentence.
His bedroom was nice and the building was nicer. Wood flooring. Green walls. Like the inside of an avocado. I remembered when the lot had been cleared for the building’s construction, when it was just a busted Mattress Center I went to once with Ma, but then the whiteboy started asking me what was wrong, and I said it was nothing, I was gassed, he should be proud of himself.
I grabbed my kicks and left is what should’ve happened next. That was my thing. And I did dip out, eventually.
But the whiteboy told me he had a job; he needed help with his Spanish because he was gunning for some promotion. He temped at some nonprofit over on Pease, a house for battered refugees. One of those places where everyone’s lived through everything. They needed help getting papers, with reaching their people back home, but if he couldn’t understand them then he couldn’t do much about it. What he really wanted was this position upstate, way out in Dallas, but they’d stuck him in the Second Ward.
The whiteboy told me I could expedite the process. Give him some lessons. Help him help the rest of the world.
I gave him this look like maybe I’d just beat his ass instead. Case his place for fun. It would be so easy.
He asked how much I made dumping napkins. He said he could double it. We’d keep it up as long as we had to. I asked why he didn’t just find someone else, someone official, and he said I was already in his bed.
It’s one of those moments where I could’ve done the good thing. Apropos of nothing. Hooked him up, just for the sake of doing it.
I told him for fifty a session I’d think on it.
2.
Meanwhile the taqueria was eating me alive. It was an ultra-retro dive, the kind with barbacoa roasting at dawn. A line of construction types looped the building every morning just to walk like twelve plates home to their kids. We had a guy whose job was sweeping people off of the sidewalk, waving them onto Leeland when the crowd shot through the doors. But somehow the gabachos knew about us too, and by midafternoon we looked a lot less like el D.F. and more like the U.N.
One day nobody was manning the counter, and some blondie yelled to the back for chilaquiles, and when no one else looked up I told the guy we didn’t do that. He was a snake in a suit. Glasses tucked in his pocket and everything. He gave this slow nod, like, Well, okay, we’ll see.
I was sweeping under the fryers when one of the managers asked for a minute. Something’d come up. Could we touch on it outside. I thought that he’d ask me some bunk about my hours, but when we made it to the back he grabbed me by the throat.
Next time a customer asks for something, he said, you find it. Claro?
I felt like a bobblehead.
I needed the money.
I picked up the phone at Ma’s that night, told the whiteboy I was free after ten.
3.
Long story short, this guy was hopeless. Doomed. It took four, five days to stuff the o into his hola.
We started with greetings. He had so many questions. He wanted to know why he couldn’t use usted with everyone. He wanted to know why the x had to be silent. He wanted to know why every morning had to be bueno.
Some days are just bad, he said. Some people live their whole lives and not a single good thing happens to them.
I told him those were just the rules. He should follow them unless he had something new to say.
I thought he’d bow out, because it really wasn’t worth it, but what he did was take notes. He wrote it all down.
Vámonos, I said.
Bamanos, said the whiteboy.
Vámonos. V. Think volcano.
Bamanos.
No. Vulcan. Velociraptor.
Right. Bamanos.
That’s how we did it. Had us a full-stop barrier.
And the people at his shelter—on the trains from Tapachula? San Pedro Sula?
Forget about it. They wouldn’t be talking to him anytime soon.
I told him this. I told him not to get his hopes up. He rubbed my earlobe with his fingers, said that was where I came in.
Hey, I said, don’t get too comfortable.
Cómodo, said the whiteboy. Cómodo?
Correcto.
So we kept it up.
And the whiteboy always paid me afterwards.
And we’d always, always, always, always end up in bed.
Lo siento.
Las siento.
Negative. Lo. Lo.
Las siento.
Weeks passed, then months. We moved from greetings to goodbyes. We brushed by commands. We jumped back to directions. I told him about my father living who the fuck knew where. About my brother in the ground. About Ma and I, stuck in East End, scrambling to keep everything together in a home we no longer owned. The whiteboy told me about his sisters, about his parents in Alamo Heights, and when I asked how many guys he’d been with before me he told me about an ex, some genius over at Rice.
He asked if I was out. I told him I didn’t know what that meant. He asked if I’d thought about abandoning Houston, and I said if I had I’d have done it by now.
I kept my head down at the job. Did what I was asked to do. The kitchen was sloppy, utterly inefficient, but every now and again one of the cooks asked fo
r a hand—with temping the oil, with keeping the cow heads intact, or some other no-brainer thing they should’ve known how to do.
They’d laugh afterwards, pat me with their gloves. Smear all that grease on the back of my tee.
Mostly I wiped benches. My bosses spat on the tile I mopped, asked how my day was going.
I kept my mouth shut about it, kept my eyes on the ground. Because if someone else put their hands on me, I didn’t know what I’d do.
Creo que sí.
Creole.
Creo, creo.
Creole, creole.
I started spending my nights with the whiteboy. Dropped whatever scraps I stole from the job over at Ma’s. Then took the sidewalk lining Milby on the way to his condo, just before the neighborhood dips into the bayou, and most nights the whiteboy met me at the door; he’d reheat a bowl of whatever he’d ordered for dinner.
We continued our education.
At some point I stopped jumping when he touched me.
At some point the whiteboy started rolling his r’s.
At some point I decided I’d make him fluent, however long that took. We would see that through.
4.
Then one night, after a long day, we were rehashing phrases. Things he’d been hearing on his day-to-day. He’d started having piecemeal conversations at work, putting names and addresses together.
The whiteboy told me about the woman who came to Texas in the trunk of a Chrysler, who worked off her debt by dancing in the Galleria.
He told me about the man who’d sold his oldest daughter to traffickers to get his youngest into Brownsville, and how, months later, he still hadn’t found either of them.
He told me about the little girl who hadn’t said anything, just touched his cheek, rubbing the skin between her fingers, and how after she’d done that he knew no matter how much money he brought in or where he put her family up or how much relief they signed off for, he couldn’t do anything to help her at all.
Lot Page 10
