Before the End, After the Beginning

by Dagoberto Gilb

  im not sure what else anyone would have done, i say.

  she doesnt speak. she is listening, waiting for what i offer.

  well, you know, i dont think . . . no. okay. youre a good person. i know youre an honest worker, just like you say. i know it. its not your fault where you were born, what language you speak. people like that woman, ignorance like that . . . you have to ignore those stupids. do your best, what you can, the best you can. what more is there? you cant help it if someone like that is in your line at walmart. wherever. stupid, mean people, theyre just that. theyre not most people. just like people who dont bathe. its not everybody, its not all the time.

  thank you, mr sanchez.

  you dont have to thank me. it shouldnt have happened.

  my family was upset. i was. my husband is still.

  mad, for you. of course.

  we are so happy. we had such a nice day shopping.

  beautiful.

  i dont want my husband to think more about it. i am so sorry. i am never like that.

  he cant help it.

  but i didnt tell him what she said. i was crying.

  well, okay.

  he doesnt speak any english.

  lots who do dont make any sense.

  i shouldnt tell him?

  you dont have to. tell him you just want to forget it.

  thank you, mr sanchez.

  please, no reason to say that.

  its not the worst that has happened. im not sure why that made me so angry.

  you were having a nice day.

  exactly.

  at walmart.

  and my girls were so happy.

  theyre still happy, im sure. theyll be proud of you. look what you do for them.

  thank you, mr sanchez.

  no, no. how old is your daughter now?

  she turned three. the other is five.

  so lucky.

  see you tomorrow.

  yes.

  maybe make a special meal. tell your daughters you guys are having an extra birthday dinner.

  she nods and smiles.

  you just . . . move forward. why dwell on that ugliness? youre fine now.

  ill see you tomorrow, mr sanchez.

  i clear out in an hour. my daughter and my son are coming for me and i cant wait to see them and leave. im not good at goodbye, and not here either. im in the wheelchair i take home with me. it moves on its own. i didnt know how rickety my old one was. nobodys here to say goodbye to anyway, to thank, except stephanie. she works all the strangest, longest shifts.

  i bet you cant wait to leave, she says.

  i bet you cant wait to go home either.

  i am so sleepy.

  you do it all the time.

  i only work these three days, but i have to sleep four days to recover.

  shes still so little i feel like i have to hold the fired-up wheelchair so it doesnt accidentally take off and roll her down.

  you need anything? she asks.

  alls good.

  see you tomorrow, she says.

  yeah.

  i like sleepy stephanie. ill miss her too.

  i want to say thank you to all of them, even though theyd forget in sixty seconds. were all moving onward. tomorrow someone else here.

  THE LAST TIME

  I SAW JUNIOR

  For years and years I hated him. I thought of ugly words instead of his name. I imagined what I’d like to do to him, and everything I imagined I’d do made blood. I mean red blood. I’d made blood happen in the past. Not gun blood, not bullets, not knife wounds. I wasn’t a killer. But broken teeth, yes, absolutely. I imagined the bones of his nose being shifted to the side by my knuckles and saw blood running into and around his bleeding mouth. I imagined kicking the fucker in his fat gut once I dropped him too, a couple times bruising his ass as he was curling up like a pill bug, hiding the more precious, softer parts of his body. I never imagined kicking him in the face. I only wanted to fuck him up physically like he’d done me financially. We’d had one of those transactions that didn’t turn out as good as he promised and which left me talking nice and making good to dudes from Juaritos, while he walked away expecting me to be as easy on him as his rich family was. I hated that nothing would keep him from owning up to it, because that was typical of him, too. He knew I was pissed and just how much and he knew why I’d never got back to him when he’d tried contacting me over those years.

  Years and years. Lots of years that had almost erased the years of friendship before, when it was kicks. He had taught me shit back when we were friends, taken me where I wouldn’t have looked and couldn’t have gotten in. I hadn’t forgotten that. He was such a puto, could mess so much up so easy, except he would do the same to himself. Aquel pinche Junior meant to do good, he just didn’t always. I was old enough to have chavalitos in school and he was old enough for his to be out of it. But my bad life was past and my good life had me on a flight to Austin, a city I hadn’t been back to since I’d left all those years earlier. And so one day I got over the hating. One morning I woke up and I didn’t see blood anymore. Just like that.

  I’d been put up in a suite in the hotel, and that night I’d opened the curtains to see the pink capitol below. I loved the view as if I’d made it myself. I opened a bottle of the complimentary wine, which, no expert, tasted nice to me. That’s where I was—admiring the view, drinking the wine, when Junior showed up.

  “How long’s it been?” he said.

  He seemed to have gotten taller and bigger, which made him taller and bigger than most men, but his paunch was paunchier, and his hair, combed maybe the day before, was getting gray, and his skin was chapped from too much drinking, and his teeth were yellowing. I saw them because he was so happy to see me.

  “Years and years,” I answered. “A long time.” I dragged over another stuffed chair to face the view. He sat down as if the windows weren’t there. Maybe I wanted him to admire the view like a girlfriend, a little envious. He just didn’t care. “You want some of this wine?”

  “What kind is it?”

  “Free,” I said.

  “I meant was it red or white,” he said.

  “Freakin’ Junior, you gotta be kidding.” I poured the red wine.

  “I don’t like white wine,” he explained.

  “What, a bad childhood experience?” I said, regretting my meanness the second I said it. He was not looking rich. It’s just that I’d never been put up in a hotel suite in Austin before. So I changed the subject before anything sank in. “How’s your little brother these days?” His stepbrother, who I’d always been compared to positively, was already a state senator. Their dad had been a United States congressman forever.

  Junior was a pro. Nothing startled him. “His head is so deep up it, he thinks the air he’s sniffing is sweet.”

  Seeing Junior told me enough about him.

  “So, look at you here in Austin! Looking badder than ever,” he said.

  “Things are the best ever for me,” I admitted.

  “Healthy, too.”

  “I get to the gym whenever I can.”

  “You still a Mexican?”

  “I probably gotta carry them papeles for people like you, don’t I?”

  “You got papers?” He was laughing. “Do you?”

  I was laughing.

  “I use a pipe,” he said.

  I shook my head and we drank the wine and talked about his ex-wife I’d never even asked about before—a ­lawyer!—and a grown son who was living in Bolivia and our good days in Chuco, Los, Juárez, Burque, but never about what had happened, and we smoked until he was right, the view was no big deal.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “You hungry? I’m hungry.”


  Once we were out the hotel room door, I’d become the me of back then—both suspicious and feeling watched, even though we were the only people in the hallway, and far away from my old neighborhood. I hadn’t had this reaction in so long. Back then it was Junior who cleared me in, and now, going down an elevator with him, being next to him made me think twice about whether I was holding, where I stashed it.

  I could breathe outside. A part of the moon was up, the sky darker above it than below. It wasn’t hot like it usually was in Austin, and it wasn’t cold either. It was a night to be driving a convertible and loving Texas. “Damn!” I yelled. “This is lots better than I’d been expecting!”

  We were heading to his wheels. “I was telling you I wanted you to come with me on an errand,” he said. “You good with that?”

  “Sure. Let’s ride for a while.”

  “I need to pick up some money.”

  “You don’t gotta worry about it,” I said. “It’s all on me, like I told you.”

  “I just wanna pick up this money while he’s got it and expecting me.”

  His coupe wasn’t close to new but it was worse than that. Trash had taken over the backseat area completely. And if it wasn’t trash, it was well-disguised as it—fast-food bags and wrappers and cups, and beer cans, and a couple of broken mechanisms of some kind, in their gutted and skinned state, even clothes that, at first glance, seemed like shop rag material. And that was what I could identify.

  “So what’s up with you, man? You undercover, pretending to be homeless?” It was then I noticed that his T-shirt even had a hole in an unstylish place.

  He didn’t laugh. He ignored me. Or maybe his head was somewhere else. He still drove with a too-heavy foot, and even the car held on as he took it out of the parking lot and toward the highway. Both front windows were down, blowing around the shit pile behind us, but he didn’t blink even when a sheet of paper exited and took flight. It was a car old enough to have wind wings, but only the one on my side had glass. It was open, maybe permanently, because it seemed as though it could not be adjusted. I was trying to move it because the wind was coming too hard at my face.

  “Shit,” I said to it.

  “You break it, you pay for it,” Junior said, almost yelling. “Air conditioning ain’t cheap, even if it’s only a Mexican AC unit.”

  I moved my face. “You are still a funny mother.”

  It was probably too windy for him to hear me say that. And so we didn’t talk a lot but it was that good kind of not talking. We were on a dark country road, going I didn’t even know where—east or west or north or south, but it was ranch and farmland, barbecue joints and taquerías and a Dairy Queen glowing brighter than any full moon. It was nighttime and beautiful stars twinkled.

  “Look, so here’s what it is,” he said, slowing down to a coast. “This guy owes me and he hasn’t been paying me any, and I want to get it from him.”

  “Whadaya saying, ‘Get it from him’?” I knew.

  “I sold him some ounces of crank.” He waited for me to say something. “He paid me a little when I fronted him, and I been telling him he needs to pay up. I told him I was coming over to get it today.”

  “Junior, what the fuck.”

  “Come on, hermano.”

  “Don’t be calling me that shit. I hate when you people throw in some Spanish.”

  “It’ll just be a minute. I’ll get at least a payment, you know?”

  “Damn, man, I told you I’d buy you dinner, that it was on me. Not this.”

  He was slowing down, and then he made a left into a caliche driveway close to a bar named Gar’s Bar. You could see it only when you were close enough, because the sign had no light illuminating its painted words. The bar’s only light seemed to be coming from a couple of small neon beer signs in the window, Tecate and Bud Light. Other than that, it looked closed.

  “It won’t take but a minute or two. Just a minute.” He stopped in the dirt lot and got out fast. I was sitting there, fuming. “Come on out.” He turned back and leaned down at his open window to me. “Be hospitable to him, you know? Friendly. Have a beer.” He was smiling at me. “Then we’re outta here.”

  I was pissed off, but I got out if for no other reason than to move. I didn’t believe it would take only a couple of minutes, and I didn’t want a beer, but I finally followed him through the bar’s screen door on the side. It was dark inside, the only light in the front provided by the beer neons. Already at a back door, Junior’d found a chain that lit a bulb in a hall. “Hey García!” he was yelling. “García!” Dogs got to barking, at least two big ones and a little yapping one.

  “It’s fuckin’ closed,” I told him when he clunked back. The wood flooring seemed to be the exact same material as the siding outside, with the same warped weathering. “Maybe even abandoned.” The same brown outside was the brown inside, good for plants either way with a little water.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve been here when it’s hopping.”

  Somebody came through the back door. It was an ugly dude wearing a blue jean shirt with dumb patches all over it, sleeves torn off. He looked surly until he recognized Junior. “I’ll go tell Gar. You guys help yourself to a brew. They’re right over there.” He clomped out the way he’d come in and Junior got both of us bottles and opened them.

  I didn’t want one.

  “You gotta take it. Take it!”

  Shaking my head, I took it. “You know how stupid this is? I don’t wanna be doing this shit anymore. It never even crossed my mind I ever would again.”

  He wasn’t listening to me. He was ignoring me. Or his head was somewhere else. “Now look,” he said. “I’ll be doing the talking.”

  I drank at least half of the bottle. I was so mad there weren’t any words. I started thinking about my babies, my wife. How I’d explain it to her if something went wrong. I wouldn’t believe me if I were her either.

  The sleeveless shirt came back, that screen door behind him slapping closed. He came in the big room with his eyes more on me this time. I was leaning hard against the pool table. He switched on the light over it. I felt his eyes on me while he and Junior talked to each other. I wasn’t looking at either of them. I took the second beer Junior brought me and started drinking. I was thinking about it going bad. How we’d be in the newspapers, on the front page. It’d be a good story, especially because we were here in the state capital. Last time Junior was popped, near Sierra Blanca, where there were no newspapers, a bust that big would’ve been a few years of time for anyone else. It wasn’t meth, though. I hated meth too. I hated people who made it, used it, were around it. And that other was a younger Junior. This Junior now, well, nobody’d have any sympathy, connects or not. And whatever it meant for him, it’d be tough to impossible for me to explain my being here, and sure to cost and damage me. I wanted to leave.

  “Let’s get the ball rolling,” I said finally. “What’s this wait?”

  Junior was probably finishing his fourth beer. Dark as it was, the white in his eyes highlighted the red veins. “Where’s García now?” he asked.

  “I’m sure he’s still in the house,” said sleeveless. “He said he’d be right out.”

  Junior brought me a new beer. I glared at him. “Let’s get this done,” I said.

  Junior went for another for himself and, nervous, circled to the back door. “Hey, García! García!” The dogs barked crazy. He came back toward the main room. “I’m going over there,” he said right in my eyes. “I’ll be right in that house right over there,” he told me. “I’ll speed things up.” He went out the back.

  I was alone with sleeveless dude. I didn’t want to talk and I didn’t want to talk to him. I could tell he was still watching me. First I was rolling the cue ball against the cushions, then I picked up a stick and banked it around. Suddenly a pickup crackled alon
g the driveway and parked in the lot and a couple of dudes came in. One wore a cap from a parts house, the other a welder’s cap. They ordered beer. One took a stool, the other leaned by the bar, and the three of them conversed. I still couldn’t believe anybody would think the place was open. I was trying to be a little patient. Then I didn’t want to be anymore.

  I took off out the side door and walked alongside the bar, making the dogs bark once I reached the back of the building. They were behind a short chain link fence, leaping and spinning. Their yard was next to a white house with a yellow back porch light on. It was probably where Junior had gone, but I wasn’t sure. I turned and followed a dark but groomed path to the front door and I rang the door bell and waited. I rang it again and waited again in the dark. I rang it a third time, and then a fourth and then a fifth, with not nearly as much space between those. I had no intention of stopping, when an overhead light came on. The door opened.

  It was Junior. Smiling. High.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Just get in here,” he said.

  I followed him into a living room. There was a strangeness to it that took me some seconds to locate. It was that most every­thing in it was creamy white. The couch, the cushions on it, the lampshades, the legs of the glass-topped coffee table, the walls. But mostly it was the rug. A creamy white rug. And it was very clean, not a streak anywhere, as though it were still new, maybe vacuumed a couple of times a day, too. There was a little boy, six or seven, sprawled out on it, on his stomach, watching cartoons on the TV. He didn’t even look up at me or Junior as we stepped around him toward the kitchen area. But stranger still was the man on the phone in the corner of the new creamy couch—except for a long-sleeved white shirt, he was all in black. He was wearing a black hat, a black vest, black pants, silver studs on the seam. He had a black mustache and goatee. Only his polished brown boots defied the color scheme. He didn’t even look up as we’d stepped over what I figured was his son. His head was bent into the telephone.