by Nan Cuba
We waited, expecting him to tell what came next.
My mother came to Baylor, unable to tell me over the phone. I knew the news was bad when I received a note that said to meet her at my dorm. We sat on my bunk; she held my shoulders and described what Sam had done.
“I was afraid to tell you,” my mother confessed, shuddering. Her puffy eyes remained surprisingly dry. “From the time you were born, he stayed close. He always took care of you.”
My tears were more for her than for Sam. Those would come later. For now, my mind was a sewer clogged with images: Sam saying, “I need your help,” then later sitting naked on his apartment floor; his description of the movie, when the inmate said, “There’s nothing I feel like I missed”; and worst, his final moments. Had he said anything to himself, to anyone? Had he prayed?
“He left instructions,” she said, “not much though, really.”
“What? He left a letter?”
“Terezie found it in his motel room. He wanted her to have his things; that’s all.”
“You mean he left a will? He took time to write something?”
“Oh, he’d written it before then.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that prostitute had signed it as a witness, that’s why. Poor Terezie.”
“You mean the high school girlfriend who came to see him?”
“The very one.”
“She signed his will?” I pictured her kissing him, whispering, “For old times.”
“Your father refuses to talk about him,” my mother said. “Not a word. The only thing he’s said is that with four children, the odds were we’d lose one.”
Sam, already a statistic. Had our father been waiting to see which one of us would go? Or had he suspected early that the odds-on favorite would be Sam?
My mother described a visit she’d had from Sam two days before. “He asked if he could have lunch, so, of course, I dropped everything.” She inspected the veins on the backs of her hands, traced one, straightened her ring. “I’m so glad I did. Now I think that, without knowing it, I suspected something.” She brushed her skirt. “When he called, he said getting dressed took so much out of him, he didn’t think he could go anywhere. So I made us Ruebens, and we ate right there in the car.” She pressed her lip. “He loved Ruebens.”
I nodded, picturing him the Sunday before, gorging.
“After he called, I went straight to the meat market.” Her fingers sliced air. “Without a doubt, I found the best corned beef I’ve ever tasted. Sam even said so. Lettuce straight out of my garden. I used my homemade mayonnaise, too. Sam noticed. He ate a garlic pickle from the batch I’d put up.” She gazed, picturing him. “He called me an artist.” She chuckled, shrugging. “It really was a good sandwich.”
“He ate two helpings last Sunday.”
“Wasn’t that something?”
“I didn’t know anybody could hold that much.”
“That was one of his favorites, no question.” We sat, the silence filled with all we couldn’t say. “We stayed a whole hour in his car. He’s never done anything like that before.”
“Sounds like you had a good talk.”
“We did. Yes,” she nodded, “we said a lot. He knew more than I thought.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, that he was born while Daddy was away.”
“But we all knew that.”
“Well, you didn’t know how hard it was. And it was—hard, I mean. Sam understood.”
“Good, I’m glad.” But did he encourage her feistiness? Did she tell him she’d read The Feminine Mystique? Probably not, but that’s what I imagined.
“Sam and I were just alike,” she said, not for the first time. “He knew what he was in for.” She stood, picking up her purse. “Frankly, I would’ve done the same thing.”
That evening, Hugh shared details about the suicide. Sam had driven to the Oasis Motel on IH 35 in the secondhand Studebaker that my mother had rigged with hand controls. He phoned Hugh that afternoon and said to come over. He explained that Terezie was still at the private school where she’d begun teaching.
“Did he tell you why he was there?” I asked. We sat in our parents’ backyard, at the same wrought iron table where Otis had described his master’s spirit, lifting.
“He said the air conditioner was broken in their apartment.” Hugh cried, as though I’d accused him. “So they were spending the night while it was being fixed.”
I nodded. “Sam could make us believe anything.”
“I didn’t know,” Hugh sobbed, cupping his face, dropping to the table.
“Of course you didn’t.” I hugged him, his shoulders taut, knobby. “No one blames you. We all feel guilty.”
“You do?” He peeked, rubbing his eyes.
“I need to know what he was like when you saw him. You understand?”
Hugh sat back, exhausted. A breeze bounced the pecan tree’s limbs. A grackle cawed. “I smoked a cigar,” he muttered, trance-like. “He had a box on the table, and when I got there, he gave me one.” He wiped his cheeks with his sleeve. “It was terrible.” He turned, laughing, then hiccupped.
“Really?” and I joined him, teetering toward hysteria. “Leave it to Sam,” I said.
“We got pretty drunk, too.”
“When you left, he was drunk?”
“Yeah.” He frowned, his chin tightening.
“What did you talk about?”
“Music, mostly. He helped me write a song.” He cocked his head, remembering. “Can you believe that?”
“He thought you had talent.”
“You know what it’s called?” I shook my head. “Come in the Back Door, ’Cause No Bleedin’s Allowed on the Living Room Floor.”
Our laughter was tender relief. When he sang, he transported us to childhood. Sam, who’d been playing softball with Hugh in the side yard, dove to catch a wild pitch. Sliding, he hit a rock that shaved his elbow. The line had come from our mother as he burst through the front door.
“After you wrote the song, what happened?”
Hugh wandered to the other side of the patio. He picked up a twig, snapped it. “We phoned Josef and Albina.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“I don’t know. For something to do, I guess.” He shrugged. “Sam’d been calling a lot of people. He just asked me to think of somebody else.”
“What did they say?”
“Nothing.”
“What did Sam say?”
“Nothing, really.” He threw the twigs into a hedge.
“He had to say something, Hugh.”
“Just that sometimes he drank their farm cream out of a glass.” He sat again. “He told them about me selling some to my friends.” He shook his head. “The jerk.”
“Did you call anybody else?”
“No. We went outside after that.” He scratched his ear, leaned back. “We drank a bottle of wine by the pool.”
The last word floated between us, shimmery, ominous. “Didn’t y’all talk?”
“A little.”
I didn’t move, my waiting a reluctant gift.
“He said girls’d always been his best friends.” He tapped his propped foot, bouncing his leg. “We talked about me becoming a doctor.” Of course, Sam would get around to that. “I told him I didn’t think I was smart enough.”
“Oh, Hugh.”
“I’m not!” he snapped, thumping his foot on the patio stones.
“What did Sam say to that?”
“He said sometimes courage is as simple as thinking I could be somebody else.”
I had to walk, swallowing hard, hiding my face. I wouldn’t be the one to explain that Sam had been talking about himself. Unlike the mouse lying limp inside the creek bass, Sam had escaped his trap. “Is that all?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
I didn’t have to ask where Sam was when Hugh drove off. He would’ve waved, still sitting by the water. Maybe he watched a cat squeeze through
a nearby fence; there’s always a fence at a motel pool. Perhaps a dog barked; cars would flit like wasps down the freeway. Clouds, twists of bakery dough. When he rolled to the edge, chlorinated moisture rose. As he hit the break release, he closed his eyes, remembering a line not from Sartre, not from Homer, but from Mae West: “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
Three hours later, Terezie phoned, asking frantically if Hugh knew where Sam was. During a room search, she and the motel manager discovered his scrawled instructions taped to the TV. When they found him, his belt wrapped his body to the chair, on the bottom, next to the drain, in the deep end.
Terezie was inconsolable. But mostly, she was angry, screaming selfish, as though Sam would repent and appear. “You bastard,” she railed. Sitting on the boxy sofa in her parents’ house, she explained why she thought his death had been her fault.
Sam, Terezie swore, had been happy during the therapy session the week before our family’s lunch. “For a crip,” he’d teased a guy trying to keep from flipping facedown, “you’re not too bad.” I remembered him saying it paid to be friendly.
But during the exercises, Sam’s mood had changed. Terezie performed the bending and unbending, the curling and straightening as usual. Sam, though, had something else in mind. “This turns me on,” he’d said, serious, reaching for her breast. “Let’s do it in the water.” Terezie had simply told him to behave, whirled him around, caught his waist from behind. The next week, he’d refused to go.
When Terezie finished her story, I think I said the right things—consolations, reassurances, whatever—I can’t remember. I didn’t mention that I had taken Sam to therapy instead. I picture her blotched face, makeshift shelves of books above, a pillow and folded bed sheet beside her on the sofa, her long fingers scratching air.
I didn’t drive home immediately. I parked at the picnic table beside the creek. I sat on the bench and watched mayfly duns skip the water’s surface, heard the buzz of cicadas, the grumble of spring croakers, the cranky barks of blue jays. Twice, a black bass leaped, so I walked to the bank.
Flathead minnows swam in the shallows, pools slapping puny waves against limestone rocks. When I reached a hand toward the surface, the colony of fish jerked sideways, underwater pilots in synchronized maneuvers: flip, jag, hover. I waved again, my arm a flag, and they darted back.
They disappeared as I waded in, the silt just as I remembered: silk and feathers. My skirt floated, a snarl of paisley air pockets. The sun reflected off banks onto creek patches, migraines of white. Honeysuckle choked Georgia cane and hackberry limbs, while watercress and onions stood thick in the mud.
As I stepped off the creek bottom—air warm as sleep, animal clatter a nuisance, light flashes a litany—a nibbling started at my ankles. Bream? Hawksbill turtle? Water snake? My dress, now saturated, tugged at my waist, shoulders. My kicks slowed, the water a second skin, my boundary of self shifting: present merging with primordial. Underneath, hydrophytes and pond moss flapped their tentacles. Crawdads crawled along the bottom; bluegills and pumpkinseed sunfish fed on hellgrammites, freshwater clams, cadis fly larvae. Was I hominid? Plankton? Finally, my true self?
A nutria’s nest perched at the creek’s bend, its gnawed limbs trashy. Somewhere below, the rodent ploughed ahead, webbed feet paddling. A kingfisher, its spiked crest a headdress, coasted downstream, searching for river suckers. A green heron hunched on a cane stalk in the shallows. When its head darted forward, the neck uncoiled, stretching the beak toward a target. A croaker was flipped headfirst, and swallowed. Devoured, like the mouse inside Sam’s fish. Possessed, like Sam’s toes in my palm. Like his swollen part I’d purposely cushioned against my belly. Unthinkable. But I’d pushed him away. Unforgivable. I’d pushed even when he asked for help.
The water wrestled, pinning my arms, and I let it. As the surface crept up to my chin, I leaned back. Clouds muscled across blue. Then, again, came the nibbling, back of my knee, my thigh, my neck. A universe, like the one inside a fish, teemed below—deep, where I now longed to go. I wanted a place without color. Without clatter, or weight. No smell of soap or baking bread. No sermons. Only food for rain.
Until the locomotive came rumbling, its soldered face an omen. Over here, it chattered. Beat your breath.
I don’t remember running toward the tracks. Train cars clicked by as I scrambled up the trestle, pebbles sliding, useless. Hinges whined. Currents of hot air pressed then sucked as each compartment whipped past. I raised my arms, swaying with the gusts, knowing one or two steps meant silence. Letters and colors lurched into vision, then converged, streaks blurring. My dress clung as vibrations rattled up my back, through my chest, my jaw. When suction from the last car pulled me onto the tracks, the metal hummed in my feet. I straddled a rail, and the music throbbed inside my legs. As the train’s snaky tail looped at a bend, twisting into clouds, my body stiffened. I could breathe but was safely numb.
I made two pledges during my drive home. Like Josef Cervenka had for his father, I gave Sam a promise: “I’ll live for both of us.” Then I emulated my mother, tossing the family’s reins. Five months later I was gone.
CHAPTER 20
1972
MOST OF MY DAYS at the Ciudad Universitaria were spent at the Central Library. Walking across its volcanic rock pathway, past its iconic walls of O’Gorman murals, I was happy. When the librarian set out the accordion-folded pages of the Codex Fejérváry Mayer, I knew I’d become what Sam intended: a truth scavenger. The farm midden and Nugent’s 1915 lynching had been my introductions, but my life’s work would be the study of cultures that first appeared in 20,000 BC in the Valley of Mexico.
As a professional collecting and analyzing data, I accepted my role as an outsider. The pitfalls were obvious, especially since this scientist was a middle-class, Anglo-American female. I attempted to move beyond my high school fetishism toward a psychological connection to these ancients in two ways. First, I learned Nahuatl, then I interpreted documents like the Mexihca codices, their illustrated scenes alongside pictographic systems of glyphs. Although the people did not recognize an interior life, and their rituals were grisly and well documented, the ceremonies were ideologically complex. Costumes and movements joined opposites—warriors with fertility, female and male, sky and earth—disrupting the familiar; attempts to impose order were futile. The sacred energy that managed these shifts united with its statue or human vessel, rebalancing and regenerating the universe.
Six months before I arrived, a heavy rain had unearthed a major discovery thirty-three miles northeast of Mexico City, in Teotíhuacan. At its peak in AD 500, this metropolis had covered eight square miles with a population of 200,000, making it larger than its contemporary, imperial Rome. Sometime between the birth of Christ and AD 150, the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon had been built, and the city’s main axis, the Avenue of the Dead, had been extended to three miles. The 1971 discovery occurred at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun, a structure 738 feet square and twenty stories high.
My anthropology professor, who’d been part of the original team, later invited me along with two other students to crawl through the man-made entrance they’d uncovered. Standing at the foot of that truncated monument, I remembered the hobo’s pyramid of stones at my family’s farm and the one I left the same day by the tracks, all three, ours and the Teotihuacanos’, expressions of gratitude meant to honor.
Just inside, the cramped enclosure required light from our spelunking helmets. We crawled down an ancient stairway as though rappelling a mountain, the steep stone steps cut into the walls of a shaft twenty-three feet deep. Although each ledge held, my foot barely had space to balance; every dusty surface felt on the verge of disintegration. Our professor, his helmet’s light probing, his voice soaking into rock and mud, led us to a tunnel at the bottom that turned out to be 112 yards long.
I stayed as close to him as possible while we crawled through the damp darkness, my knees throbbing, picturi
ng Long-tailed shrews, albino salamanders. The air thinned—we could’ve been, instead, on a mountaintop—and I grew dizzy, gulping, my lungs filling but not getting enough oxygen. I curled against the tunnel wall, refusing to move. Patiently, the professor, his ray of light aimed at my feet, guided me through a regulation of my breathing. We crawled for another fifteen minutes, his light beam roving crags ahead. When he finally stood, his head disappearing as he rose, my heart lurched; then we joined him.
The cavern, he said, his voice echoing, had been formed by an enormous bubble of gas in lava that streamed from deep within the earth. Dark as a blank and humid, it was huge, our lights illuminating its regions. Attached to the floor were ceramic pieces surrounding a flagstone, situated directly beneath the pyramid’s center. When light from the monument’s narrow entrance had flickered across the stone, shamans, perhaps the city’s founding fathers, had held elaborate rituals. I wondered how their ceremonies compared to the ones at the White Shaman site in the Lower Pecos. An amorphous shape had appeared there, and now I hoped it would reappear here. Our voices ricocheted; our lights streaked across walls slick as obsidian and a ceiling covered in what looked like fossilized toucan tongues.
The cave ended in a four-petal flower shape, the chambers like those mentioned in Tōlēteca-Chīchīmeca history. Inside, skull carvings and jaguar sculptures, symbols of death, had waited centuries to be found. A greenstone figurine with inlaid pyrite eyes had also lain undisturbed, alongside basalt blades and a conch shell.
The Teotihuacah believed that the cave was the womb from which the sun and moon first arose. When the pyramid was built over this holy place, the structure became an āltepētl or “water-hill,” around which the community then settled. In other words, the pyramid was the center of the universe. Now, we stood in the footprints of its shamans, Christ’s contemporaries.
As we squatted inside a chamber, the professor described an archeologist’s first attempts in the early 1900s to excavate the pyramid. “At its highest level,” he said, “skulls of children, none older than eight, were found at each corner.” The victims’ tears had been shed for Tlāloc, the god of water.
