Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  “Sí,” I said.

  “Más importante. Don’t tell la escuela you stay with my nephew, okay, or they will not give me the rest of the money, yes? He is good kid, but only nineteen years old.”

  “Sí,” I repeated, but I wasn’t so sure. The whole setup bummed me out. The school had told me I was staying with the head of the city council, which I had assumed meant somewhat modern living conditions. I had never seen anything like that shower situation, and while I was aware that there were people in the world living eight to a room, I had never experienced it, nor did I want to.

  As I took in the view from the roof, it appeared that this was the biggest house on the block, and the only one with anything resembling the contraption Oscar was operating.

  “My nephew’s house mucho better.”

  WE WERE STILL on the roof when a police car skidded to a stop with the sirens blaring right in front of the house.

  “Vámonos,” Oscar said, darting for the ladder.

  As I climbed down after him I felt a surge of adrenaline, an involuntary reaction I had to sirens and cop cars. Even as a kid, I felt guilty of wrongdoing every time I saw a police officer, or any authority figure for that matter. We were required to watch Midnight Express before going to Mexico, so my fear of authority had become absolute terror. I should have cut my hair, I was thinking when I was close enough to the ground to jump off the ladder.

  Instead of running away, though, Oscar ran straight for the car. A huge policeman got out wearing aviator glasses, and Oscar introduced me to his nephew, Raul. Raul nearly broke my fingers when he excitedly shook my hand. He seemed too smiley for someone who had to share his room for three weeks with an American kid he’d never met, but it gave me a good view of his one silver and one gold front teeth. It was hard to understand why Oscar had made such a mad dash from the roof when Raul had showed up, until his wife came outside yelling at an incomprehensible speed, holding up their naked daughter, who was covered in soap and crying because she got shampoo in her eyes while waiting for the rinse cycle.

  “Ay, chinga,” he said under his breath. He ran back to work the shower, yelling hasta mañana to us.

  I carried my bags to the car, and got in, before getting another surge of adrenaline when Raul turned on the siren and peeled out, sending up a huge cloud of dirt. A few seconds later, he slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop on the next block. Was he responding to a call? Did he forget to do something at Oscar’s house? What the fuck was going on?

  “Mi casa,” he said, turning off the siren. I looked out the back window through the dust cloud that was still hovering in front of Oscar’s house, less than two hundred feet back. I could even see Oscar waving at us from the roof as I unloaded my bags. These people were crazy, but there was no way out. Nowhere to go and no one to call. There wasn’t even a phone to call anyone with. The best I could hope for was to get through the next ten days until my Spanish teacher, Carmen, came to check in on me, at which point I would start crying and tell her that I was living with a crazy nineteen-year-old cop, and that the city council guy—if in fact this town even had a council—was only in it for the money. She would scold them, apologize to me, and place me with a nicer family. Raul spoke zero English, and I had absolutely nothing to say to him. At least he did have a TV and a bathroom with a shower you could control all by yourself. We watched Mexican soap operas and ate quesadillas until he went to work. Raul worked nights, so I hoped that, like my night nurse roommate at The Farm, I wouldn’t ever see him. He freaked me out with his gold teeth, aviator glasses, and creepy grin.

  OSCAR HAD NOT mentioned that hasta mañana meant he would be shaking me awake before the sun was even up.

  “What the fuck?” I mumbled, totally disoriented and blinded by the single twenty-five-watt bulb in the room. When my eyes adjusted, I found myself looking up at Oscar. I could hear a few roosters calling out in the distance, but no humans should have been awake at this hour.

  “¿Café?” he said, holding out a thermos to me. I took the thermos as he continued, “Goot mordning, señor. Arriba. We have mucho work to do.” I took a few sips of coffee, which was surprisingly good, and got dressed while he waited for me on the porch.

  No one had told me about any work, but then again, nobody really told me anything.

  “What kind of work do you do?” I asked Oscar while we walked through the silent town to wherever it was we were walking to. “Carmen told me you were on the city council.”

  “Ah…Carmen,” he said in a faraway voice. “I want to sex her.”

  “What?” I couldn’t help but start laughing. She was around fifty years old and married to the headmaster.

  “She’s too old for me,” I said.

  “No too old. Esperienced,” he said with a sigh. “Professor Carmen. She know many things.”

  I was still laughing, but I really didn’t want to think about it.

  “¿Carmen es de España, no?”

  “Sí, pero, she told me you were on the city council.”

  “Yes. That is what I say to her so I can sex her. I always want to sex with an Espanish señora.”

  “So, you made that up so you could have sex with her?” I said, stressing the word he had previously left out. Something about “sexing” her made the idea of sleeping with Carmen way worse than if he had simply said he wanted to fuck her. I thought about correcting him, but I figured there would be plenty of time for that.

  “No, no, no…” He got slightly defensive. “Es la verdad. I am on the council, but look around you. Where is the city? We only meet a few hours in the month. We have nothing to talk of.”

  I looked around at the dirt roads, the little huts, and the chickens and goats running around the yards. Oscar had a point. What could they possibly talk about, other than maybe telling Raul he didn’t always have to speed around with the siren on? It was probably very similar to our monthly student council meetings, which rarely lasted more than fifteen minutes.

  Unlike Oscar, though, I wasn’t under the illusion that being on the council was going to get me laid. Pretending I was a “good kid” might have made an impression on the administration, but it seemed to inspire a fair amount of mistrust and awkwardness in the other students, none of whom seemed to hold “good kids” in very high regard. That probably had something to do with my decision to grow dreadlocks and listen to Bob Marley, who along with Jimi Hendrix, were the only two black musicians I could listen to without those assholes coming in to my room and taking my records.

  “Oh, mi esposa, she ask me what is wrong with you hair.”

  “I have a disease with my hair.” I came up with this excuse before the trip. The school had made a big deal about telling all the vegetarians to use this technique when declining meat, and I decided to use it for my hair as well. There had been more than a few incidents of families kicking students out of their houses for being vegetarians, but not since they had come up with the disease explanation.

  “Ah. I am very sorry.” He led me into an empty dirt lot. “Aquí. This is where we build casa for my mother.” The dawn sky provided just enough light to see a wheelbarrow and a pallet stacked with fifty-pound bags of cement.

  “We?” I asked.

  “Sí. You and me.” The prospect of Oscar, a short roundish middle-aged guy, and me, a scrawny hundred-and-fifteen-pound thirteen-year-old, building a house was comical, but he seemed serious.

  “Don’t worry. No es problema. Vámonos, hijo. Let’s start. Three weeks, we make big house.”

  We got to work with only a wheelbarrow and a shovel. We emptied three bags of cement into a five-foot pit we had dug into the lot, and, using the wheelbarrow and two five-gallon buckets, got water from a spigot down the street. My job was to mix cement, while Oscar ran around with a tape measure, marking off spots with the endless amounts of litter that had been strewn about the lot. Every once in a while he would step back and gaze at this mess, remeasure something, and move a candy wrapper or a beer can a few i
nches here or there.

  “Ven aquí,” he called to me while intently studying the trash he had rearranged.

  “Mira. See the Negro Modelo, that is the southwest corner, that plastic bag is the northwest one…”

  “The green one or the white one?” I asked.

  “The white one. The green is for la puerta y, that Tecate es por la otra corner, and this Tecate is the front door. See it? What do you think?”

  “Bien,” I said, lacking the language skills to ask him what the hell he was thinking. This outline of beer cans and candy wrappers was at least six times the size of his other house.

  “So you’ve built a house before?” I asked, because it really didn’t seem as if he knew what he was doing.

  “Es muy facil,” he said. “Like your game Legos. After this you can go build a house in America no problema.” I initially attributed his inability to answer questions as a language barrier, but I was becoming less sure about that.

  “But you have built one before. Yes?”

  “You will see. Very easy.”

  I took his answer as a no.

  “Vámonos. The cement is ready.”

  We filled the wheelbarrow with cement and rolled it over to what I had thought was a ladder lying on top of a tarp. On closer inspection it looked more like a twelve-foot-tall bookshelf made out of two-by-six-foot pieces of wood. He started shoveling cement on top of it till the wheelbarrow was empty, and I went back to get more. By now it was afternoon and the sun was beating down hard on us. We filled the bookcase with cement and Oscar said, “We go now for siesta.” The best thing I had heard all day.

  We walked back to his house, where his wife had lunch ready for us. I had been planning on making the switch from being a vegetarian to a meat eater until I saw whatever it was she was serving.

  “Lo siento, I cannot eat meat. It’s my disease. Meat makes me sick,” I had to tell them.

  “Ah. Same as your hair?” he asked.

  “Sí. Es muy terrible,” I said. I wasn’t sure if terrible was a real word or one of the English words I often added an extra syllable to in order to make it sound Spanish. It sounded right, but I rubbed my stomach and made a sick face to make sure.

  He explained this to his wife, who muttered pobrecito. Her expression even changed for a fraction of a second from her severely stern look to something resembling pity. She fed me some quesadillas, and I was sent to Raul’s house to take a much-needed nap.

  When we got back to the lot, Oscar grabbed two pieces of the crumbling sidewalk and started banging on the cement that had hardened in the “bookcase.” He directed me to do the same, and I followed his example, moving up and down the twelve-foot thing, banging on the concrete until he directed me to lift the bookcase while he continued pounding on it. After lifting, shaking, and a lot more banging, we had twenty cinder blocks, which Oscar started arranging in a straight line next to the sidewalk. He only made it a third of the distance between the Negro Modelo can and the Tecate can before running out of bricks. It didn’t take a high level of math skill to realize that building a house this way wasn’t going to happen in three weeks. Oscar looked slightly dejected, staring at the paltry beginnings of his new home, but he recovered quickly, exclaiming, “Está bien. I will return,” before leaving me to mix three more bags of cement.

  I had already filled the mold when he came back with more two-by-sixes, a saw, and a hammer. I mixed more cement while he built two more molds. By the end of the day, we had almost a hundred blocks.

  THE IDEA THAT I was somehow being taken advantage of was not lost on me. Even in Mexico I figured Oscar was probably violating child-labor laws. Not only was I not getting paid for my work, Oscar was actually making money off me from the school.

  I didn’t dwell on it because Oscar was actually a fun guy to hang out with, and he bought me unlimited bottles of Coca-Cola, which for some reason tasted a zillion times better in Mexico than back home. His comments about Carmen were getting more and more graphic, and I took a guilty pleasure in listening to his fantasies involving my fifty-year-old Spanish teacher. I couldn’t stand his broken English, however, when it came to telling me what he wanted to do to her.

  “You want to fuck her,” I explained to him.

  “¿Qué?”

  “En inglés, you say ‘I want to fuck her,’ not ‘I want to sex her.’”

  “Ah, yes. I want to fuck Carmen en her panocha.”

  “Oh, man. That sounds terrible. ¿Que significa panocha?” I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

  “I don’t know how you say en inglés. You know, panocha?” he said, pointing at his crotch. “You and I…muchachos, we have verga. Carmen y las muchachas has panocha. ¿Comprendes? How you say panocha en inglés?”

  I didn’t know what to tell him. While I could stare at pictures of them for hours, I was repulsed by every English word there was for them. Vagina just sounded terrible to me as a word. Pussy sounded okay but went against my feminist upbringing because it was also used to describe men as weak sissy boys. I had been called a pussy many times. And the C word was so bad I don’t think I’d ever used it, and I wasn’t about to start now. Lately, I had taken to using the word pudendum, which I had seen used in a performance by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. I thought it was a funny word, and it didn’t have any negative connotations that I knew of. But aside from me, I’d only ever heard it used that one time. Because Oscar wanted to learn English, I settled on “vagina.”

  “Vahina?”

  “VA-GI-NA,” I said slowly.

  “Bueno. I ask Carmen to show me her vahina when she visits?”

  “No, no, no. Try ‘pussy.’” The whole conversation was making me feel very uncomfortable.

  “Pushy?”

  “Oh, man. Just use panocha. Carmen will understand.”

  THE FIRST WEEK went by like a blur. I was not used to physical labor and was exhausted all the time. Exhaustion was nothing new, but this was different. At school I was always tired because I tossed and turned all night, rehashing every conversation and situation I had encountered during the day, often beating myself up about some stupid shit I had said or trying to come up with clever comebacks. After working on the house though, it was actually nice to lie down and feel as though I were sinking into a pool of cement. There was no internal dialogue or resentments to keep me awake. By the end of the week, we had four walls standing about three feet high.

  SITTING ON RAUL’S porch on Friday night, I could hear the town start to come alive. Conversations, arguments, the smell of food, and that fucking siren were all drifting through the air. I was reading a collection of short stories by Paul Bowles that centered around various tourists traveling to strange lands and finding themselves in the most unlikely situations. The story I was reading was about a guy who was in Morocco for his honeymoon. He left the hotel one day in a simple quest to buy some milk, and by the end, was wandering around the desert wearing a full body suit made out of the bottoms of tin cans, the sharp sides facing in. I could hear the police siren getting closer and was interrupted from the book by Raul skidding to a stop in front of the house.

  I looked up to wave hello and saw two other guys in the car with him. Raul turned off the siren to tell me to get in the car.

  “¿Por que?” I asked, not wanting to have anything to do with these guys. He said something to the guy in the passenger seat, who translated for him.

  “Raul, he asks if you want to be policeman for one night.”

  Maybe I was wrong, but I had always been under the impression that a lot of cops out there thought us regular people looked up to them. I figured that since they had always wanted to be policemen, they assumed everyone else did, too. People who didn’t like cops were clearly jealous of them. We just didn’t have what it took.

  I had nowhere to be and nothing to do and was unable to come up with an excuse not to get in the car. I got in the backseat and was introduced to Chino, who was either Chinese or just happened to have high ch
eekbones—I couldn’t understand their explanation of his name, or why they laughed so hard about it—and Charlie, the guy who spoke a little English. Before I could even close the door, Raul was peeling out and had turned the siren back on. He fishtailed into a left turn, speeding into the center of town, where he did a few donuts at the roundabout before shooting on to another road and skidding to a stop in front of a liquor store.

  I wanted out of that car immediately. Maybe there was something wrong with me, but I just never got a thrill from that kind of thing like other people seemed to get. Roller coasters, fireworks, horror movies, driving fast in police cars…I had more than enough anxiety just sitting alone in my room. I sure as hell didn’t need to go out and look for it.

  Raul handed me some money and Charlie told me to go into the store and buy four botellas grandes.

  “You have to go. I’m only thirteen,” I said.

  “Está bien. They do not care. Four of the big ones, in the brown bottle.”

  I didn’t ask him why he wanted four. I didn’t even think about it. When I got back to the car, Raul opened one of the bottles and passed it back to me.

  I couldn’t help but think about the book I had been reading before these guys had shown up. It dawned on me that each one of those stories started to get ugly after the main character started drinking, smoked some kif (whatever that was), or followed a twelve-year-old boy somewhere he shouldn’t have. I drank the beer anyway. I needed something to calm my nerves so I drank it fast. Raul was driving slowly for the first time so that Chino, who was in the back next to me, could focus on the task of peeling the tinfoil off a chewing gum wrapper. I didn’t know why he was doing it, but there must have been a good reason if it got Raul to slow down.

  “How come you no drink the cerveza?” Charlie asked me. I held up the bottle and turned it over to show him I was done. “Ay chinga. ¡Raul! Vámonos al mercado cabrón. Ordan nececita más cerveza.” Instantly the lights and siren went on as Raul slammed on the brakes, skidding into a U-turn. Chino started yelling up a storm.