by Laura Newman
They were the best of friends. “Chuy, would you like a beer?” Gómez would ask, offering up a now warm Del Sol.
“I do not drink, my friend, but thank you.”
“No? I did not know that or I would have brought Coca-Cola.” This is how they started the conversation most days, unless Gómez had lost all his beers on the journey over. Then Chuy would say, “Gómez, my friend, you look hot and thirsty. May I offer you a beer?”
“Why yes! Why did I not think to bring some with me?” And Chuy would go to the garage refrigerator and get Gómez a beer.
“Will you not join me?” would always be Gómez’s response at this time, and Chuy would say, “I do not drink, but thank you.” And the two men would smile small smiles, for they enjoyed this exchange. Anticipated greetings resolved, they would get on with the day.
Chuy’s garage opened to a small alley. A high fence opposite clipped the harsh summer sun and a golden light filtered in. Rather the color of the Del Sol in Gómez’s hand. Gómez took his regular seat, opened up the resident chessboard, and began to set up a solitary game. He had to push wood chips out of the way. Chuy was well into his project; the wood chips were everywhere. Chuy’s short-haired Chihuahua, Queenie, sleeping in the corner on her red blanket, looked like a curly poodle. Queenie sneezed, and for a moment Gómez thought she’d exploded. Curls of wood floated up into the air and settled into drifts and eddies.
Gómez had a soft spot for Queenie because the dog was responsible for his friendship with Chuy. In Queenie’s much younger days, she was a feisty beast. If she was in the open garage with Chuy, the little dog would charge anyone who came down the back alley. It must be more than seven years past that Gómez chanced down the alley on his morning constitutional and was attacked by what he took to be an outsized Mexican jumping bean. He sustained quite a spill, mostly to the detriment of his beers. Two cans burst open, and when Gómez came to, he was surprised to see the jumping bean drinking the foamy puddles. Chuy was aghast that his dog had felled what looked like an apple doll on a girl’s bike, and brought the old man into his garage to get him out of the sun and into a chair. Queenie immediately jumped into Gómez’s lap and started licking his bristly face, which both men chose to interpret as an apology. Gómez looked around the cozy shop. It had the atmosphere of a barber shop or cigar store, someplace rather nice to be. Gómez noticed the chessboard and the first thing he said to Chuy was, “Do you play?” Thus began an unexpected, if not quite May-December, at least a July-December relationship.
Even with the door open the garage smelled like a Pacific Northwest forest, although there was always an undercurrent of beans. But Gómez had to admit that just might be him.
“How do you find Jesus in that block of wood, anyway,” asked Gómez?
Chuy stopped his hammer from hitting his chisel and looked to Gómez. “I say He is in there. I say it. Then I go looking for His big toe. If I can grab that, I can wrestle out the rest.” On this day, Jesus had in fact fully emerged. Some three feet tall, with His knees bent but closed together (so as not to see up His loincloth), arms outstretched, head slumped. Oiled black walnut body. Chuy was just finishing the matching cross.
On the table lay the already completed crown of thorns, symbol of suffering. Gómez ran his fingers lightly over the carved thorns, points sharp as wit. Through the years Chuy had come to understand that it was really the crown that made the sale. A briar ouroboros, a prickly scrambling thing of beauty. Instinctively Chuy knew that people would want to put the crown on their own heads for penitence, prurience, or Halloween. But his Jesus was only three feet tall. So he created a way to hinge the crown with extra pieces that would slide and lock into place, expanding the circle to human size. Who would dare to wear Jesus’s crown? Many, it would seem. He knew that he could sell the crowns alone and ease his back. Indeed, one woman donated her purchased Jesus on the cross to a church she didn’t even belong to and put the crown on a marble pedestal in her library as a piece of art. And it was a piece of art. But for Chuy, carving just the crown would be a shortcut that would miss the point of the journey through the wood.
Chuy always carved the crown and the nails from purpleheart wood, a color a mother would wish for her daughter’s eyes. Startling.
While Chuy nailed Jesus to the cross (figuratively, as he actually used glue), Gómez went into the kitchen and made lunch. The damned mariachi band clock was going off again, little ensemble coming out of tiny saloon doors, playing “La Cucaracha” and then popping back in. The clock drove Gómez cuckoo, but at least Chuy was over his Swiss clock stage. There was a time when several clocks in the garage would go off all at once and Gómez would have no choice but to drink more.
Gómez had earned his living as a cook at Caesar’s; he knew his way around la cocina. He made bean burritos with cilantro, salsa, and avocado and carried them out to the garage on paper plates, only dropping one of the burritos. That was Queenie’s. Well, it was now. Gómez saw that the crown was placed on Jesus’s head and Chuy was polishing the purple nails in Jesus’s hands and feet. The buttons of wood glowed from the inside like a good glass of Spanish sangria.
“You’ll be heading out with this one soon, then,” said Gómez with a nod toward the cross.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll watch after Queenie.” The dog had just finished a burrito half her own size and now looked like a Beanie Baby. Plus, an almost translucent, curling wood chip had landed just above her right eye, transforming her into a long-lashed drag queen.
“She’ll watch after you.”
“Okay, but just so you know, I’m slaughtering the mariachi band while you’re away and I’m going to blame it on an earthquake.” Gómez was fond of charcoal pills to aid in his digestion and this statement ended with a burp and a puff of black ash.
“Gómez! You’re like an ancient Xiuhtecuhtli. Fire in your soul.” Chuy really loved the charcoal burps.
“On his deathbed,” agreed Gómez.
“Someday I’m going to paint you draped in turquoise with ash clouds coming out of your mouth.”
Gómez liked the idea of being depicted as the Aztec fire god, and nodded his approval. “But paint me young.” The two gentlemen finished their lunch; Gómez returned to the velvet parrot couch for a siesta before he pedaled the long way home. Chuy set about cleaning the garage, as his Jesus was complete.
Today, when Gómez got home, he was surprised to find a roll of toilet paper and a rubber spatula in his basket. They both looked new. God is good.
When Chuy first saw Silvia, of course he did not know her name. She was several rows over and he thought he was looking at a Pablo Picasso painting, one of those deconstructed, cubist portraits. Which in itself would be an odd sale item for the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing line. But there was no frame around Silvia, beyond the shimmering halo of the pale sun. She was a face of triangles. Chuy would not be surprised if she had one brown eye and one blue. He had to get closer. He cut across several rows, no easy feat carrying Jesus. He smacked the end of the cross into a windshield and kept on going. While it is hard to be discreet while carrying Jesus, he stayed a few rows away from Silvia and watched her. As her face dipped in and out of windows, he came to realize that one of her eyes was set closer to her nose than the other. Her symmetry was askew. Neither side of her face was particularly remarkable, but if you looked at her straight on, it was disconcerting. She obviously knew this and always shifted her face, angling her good side into the car windows. While Chuy could guess nothing about this woman, Silvia of course was no illusion. She had a past.
In some centuries Silvia would have been burned for a witch, or revered as a seer of sights. In other cultures, she may have been drowned at birth for the double whammy of her eye and her vagina. But Silvia was born in Mexico, where the days are hot and the wind thin. Too much trouble to work up a case against a little girl with an odd eyeball. An od
dball.
Silvia and her sister Ana grew up on the Nayarit coast near the main road traveling between Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán. Their cinderblock home was built on a cliff overlooking the Pacific and fronted with an open-air palapa kitchen and scratch-dirt yard. The chickens were free range, skinny and boastful. As were Silvia and Ana. Their father worked construction in Puerto Vallarta and only came home on weekends, pockets full of tamarindo candy and necklaces of plastic beads. The girls had no idea they were poor. They didn’t know they didn’t go to school because they did. Right in the front yard on the tables with the benches, Mamá taught them. About the Bear Prince and the Gypsy Queen. All the stories. Silvia’s favorite book was not Mexican faerie tales, but those of Hans Christian Andersen. The Little Match Girl.
At night Silvia most often slept outside in a hammock surrounded by the ficus and busera trees. Wild orchids reflected moonlight like monkey faces, high up in the trees. The night wind was full of the smell of the ocean, of things alive and things dead. When the wind jostled the dried palm fronds of the palapa it sounded like the whispered arguments of parents behind closed doors. The white-nosed coati raccoons sometimes played with the pots and pans in the kitchen, causing the chickens to roost for protection round Silvia in her hammock, leaving their feathers in her hair and, once, a brown egg in her lap.
One very early morning Silvia walked out to the steep point that overlooked the ocean. It was that time of day when a green light illuminated the depths. She saw a trolling great white shark, dark oblong in the sea, the shape and danger of an unexploded missile left over from a war before her time. The shark slowly moved its danger elsewhere as the rising sun threw glitter across the waves, obscuring the depths, colluding with the ocean to keep its secrets. Silvia could hear her chickens calling her home, demanding breakfast, potato peels please! Gallo doodle doo.
Silvia’s mother posted a wooden sign out on the main road printed in both English and Spanish: Lobsters by the Sea. Home Cooked. This Way, with an arrow through the jungle to their cinderblock house. Mostly gringos came. Her mother served up whole red-faced lobsters, rice and beans, fried plantains, and remarkably iced beer for a price she did not know she could triple. Ana’s job was to serve the guests and shoo the chickens. Silvia’s job was to wash the dishes and not look directly at anybody. Ever.
Between customers their mother taught them long division and how to read the stars. They learned how to pull their dark hair into Spanish braids, and that if the jungle ever falls into silence you better run uphill, fast. Their mother told them of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, assassinated heroes of Mexico. Silvia pictured screaming horses and the released souls of great men mistaken for gunsmoke rising from a mortal wound. Silvia knew the names of all the trees and four different words for rain.
There came a night when Silvia was sleeping in her hammock and awoke to the sounds of the palapa whispering sweet nothings. No. It was her parents. It is delicious to eavesdrop, like a lime tart. She knew her mother was uncomfortable and hoping for a boy. She knew her father was worried about money. She believed this to be the way of parents. It was not alarming. But her father kept using the word maquiladora, which she did not recognize, and talking about moving to their tia’s house. Did her mother’s sister Juana have a new baby, Maquiladora? Silvia would call her Dora. But would they move to Tia’s house up where the rosewood grew and there was no ocean? No lobster or great white? Her parents’ voices drifted over her and out into the jungle, where the words were overcome by the chirp of a single night bug. Silvia was asleep.
In the spring the baby boy was born! Dominico, but they called him Pepe because he was so cute. And before summer they had left their cliff above the ocean not for Tia Juana’s house but for the great city by the wall, Tijuana.
“You know you are like syphilis,” said Gómez as Chuy hoisted his newest Jesus onto his shoulder and headed out for the border crossing. “You finish one and start another. Endless Jesuses.”
Chuy looked at his friend, nonplussed. He often did not understand what Gómez was talking about. “Sisyphus,” he said at last, “You mean Sisyphus, rolling the rock up the hill of eternity.”
“That’s what I said, syphilis,” confirmed Gómez as he picked up Queenie and got on his bike. Chuy closed the car door and rolled down the window. “What are you doing with her?”
“Taking her to the hypermarket so she can pick out treats. Vienna sausages from the imports aisle, I think. I took the money out of your coconut monkey jar.” Gómez was referring to the carved coconut that collected change on the dresser in Chuy’s bedroom. Gómez arranged Queenie’s red blanket in his basket and then placed Queenie inside. She was used to this. The blanket helped to stabilize her for the wobbly ride, but she knew enough to stay awake in case she had to jump out or was forcibly ejected.
“Okay. Stick to the small roads. I don’t want her to get run over.”
“What about me?”
“You, my friend, will dent the car with your bony knees and survive unscathed,” said Chuy as he drove away, Jesus staring out the back window. This was Chuy’s third day on the border crossing without the sale of this particular Jesus, which was a record for a nonsale. The purpleheart crown usually secured a sale on the first day. Gómez did not comment on Chuy’s lack of sale, as he did not want to be rude, but Gómez wondered if Jesus was losing popularity with the gringos in America. He thought since Trump won the election that Jesus would be through the roof. The truth was that Chuy could have sold his Jesus five times over at five times his regular price. But he didn’t want to sell. He wanted to have a reasonable reason to watch the girl with the Picasso eyes.
Gómez headed out to the Soriana Super. As he had had his morning nap, but not as yet drunk his midmorning beer, Gómez’s trajectory was tolerably straight for the little dog and she dared to raise her head and enjoy the view. Arriving at the hypermarket, Gómez tucked Queenie into his always-present sweater of questionable heritage. She snuggled into the pocket of the shirt beneath the sweater and had no problem breathing through the fabric. She liked Gómez and his old-man smell, like flour tortillas that had been in the garbage for, say, two days. Plus, it was cozy. She felt like a taquito inside the food warmer at OXXO.
In his youth Gómez played baseball like he belonged on a box of American Wheaties. Now he could barely reach any shelf above eye level. This meant that he was usually stuck buying sugar cereal like Choco Zucaritas with that silly tiger on the box because the stores stocked the kids’ cereal on the lower shelves so the children could point and howl at their parents. Gómez reached for the box and changed his mind. He didn’t want sugary cereal. He wanted panqueques. Pancakes. With that Aunt Jemima syrup.
Gómez headed over to the syrup aisle, stopping to grab a few dusty cans of Vienna sausages that had probably been on the shelf since the war on drugs started because no self-respecting Mexican is going to eat Vienna sausages. Queenie loved them. He didn’t show her the cans, because No dogs allowed in the store, but he did give her a little pat through his sweater. She knew not to come out. When he reached the syrup aisle it perturbed him to see that the Aunt Jemima syrup in her Negro lady bottle was on the top shelf. Gómez was determined. He climbed up onto the edge of the second-lowest shelf and reached as high as he could, feeling the joints in his shoulders snap-crackle-pop with the movement. He ignored the pain, climbed one more shelf, and reached higher. At this point a young woman rounded the aisle and moved to help the old abuelo, but Gómez did not see her because of his diminished peripheral vision.
Gómez’s left foot dragged across a lower shelf as he climbed, dislodging several glass bottles of syrup, the cheap Mexican brand, all of which broke upon landing. Gómez turned to look at the mess on the speckled concrete floor, green and pink, which he noticed for the first time and felt was rather festive before this thought was lost as his heart mimicked a dramatic contortionist’s twist. Gómez felt a POP in his heart the
likes of which he had never previously experienced. All the blood in his heart squeezed out, the last note of a sad accordion. Gómez fell. He remained aware of Queenie and managed to land on his back. The syrup spread slowly around Gómez, looking just like the rusted color of blood one might expect to come from such an old person, sort of an anemic, age-spotted shade of blood. There was also a good-sized piece of glass in his butt, but due to the tonnage of pain coming from his heart, his butt declined to comment.
“Great,” said Gómez, but only in his head. “I’m lying in a puddle of syrup and it isn’t even the Tia Jemima kind.” But it smelled fantastic.
The young woman moved in close to Gómez, stepping into the syrup and bending down. At this moment Queenie, intoxicated by the sugary smell, burst out of Gómez’s old sweater. The woman, bending over Gómez’s chest had not expected a very small, virtually hairless creature with rather large eyes to jack-in-the-box out of the old man’s chest. Her first thought was that an alien (outer space, not illegal) had just exploded from the carcass of the abuelo and that the syrup really was blood. She screamed and lurched back, which caused her to slip on the syrup and join Gómez on the floor. The alien began to lick up the syrup, inducing the woman to faint. Gómez had fallen unconscious some moments before, listening only for his heartbeat, Where is my heartbeat, have I lost it?
At the end of the long aisle, a checker could see that some kind of mess was going on at the back of the store. He calmly picked up his speaker and said, “Limpiar en el passillo siete.” Clean up on aisle seven.
Everyone in Mexico knows about the great white street sharks, the trolling Mercury Grand Marquis. Steel and guns and drugs and girls in stilettos in the back seat, cocaine snort that shit right off the skin of the prettiest girl. Sinaloa cartel, Tijuana cartel. And those American-grown boys from Logan Heights in San Diego, paid assassins, cross the border and shoot-em-up gangster style, think they are cowboys, think they are Pancho Villa, think the Wild Wild West still lives in Mexico just because it’s dusty. Nothing but a bunch of Mexican jumping beans. The Chiclet girls sell gum to the tourists and watch the drugged-up girls get out of the Marquis, thighs and long black hair, and why would you be a schoolteacher if you could ride around all day in a car like that? If you could curl your hair and ride around in the sleek leather belly of the shark?
