Before the End, After the Beginning

by Dagoberto Gilb

  I got back to my house with the burritos faster than I think I should have unless I speeded. I had processed what I actually did see and hear and moved over to what I should have said or done, other than sit there in my car, mute and limp.

  “Here is food,” I said to Carlos and Uriel. “You need to eat lunch.” I was churning about myself. “I got carne asada for you,” I mumbled, meaning not chicken or vegetarian—an Austin-only concern. I brought them both bottles of water, cold out of the refri. I still had some of my own burrito to eat, but I no longer wanted it. I wanted to go back there—to say and do what? I wanted to never go back there. I wanted, I didn’t want.

  They both sat, one against my studio door, the other the jamb, peaceful, eating. They liked the food from there, like I did. I was full of rage and hurried to my living room couch to brood. I wanted to play guitar, but I couldn’t with them here. I couldn’t listen to a book on tape. I dug around for CDs and chose a Bach, the calming, faraway German. I didn’t want to get earphones from my studio. I tried not to play it loud, definitely not as loud as I wanted.

  Fifteen minutes later, Uriel was at the edge of my living room, as though it were darker there. He was keeping a respectful distance, unsure when or if he should speak. I told him to come and then I turned it down and said again to come. Pase, pase. When it seemed he couldn’t hear me, I turned the music way down.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For the food.”

  Carlos shadowed him, saying thank you, too, but without the words. I’d probably made them uncomfortable. They might have thought I was mad at them. I turned off the CD with the remote.

  “You had to eat. I can’t believe you don’t stop for lunch.”

  “He doesn’t want us to until he comes here,” said Uriel.

  “You’re supposed to take lunch.”

  Uriel looked over at his dad. “What I say.”

  “So it’s going all right?”

  “Good, very good,” said Uriel.

  “You’ll be done? Today?”

  Carlos nodded his head emphatically.

  “We have the two rooms is all,” said Uriel, “and the trim.”

  “That goes fast,” Carlos told his son, “if we go.” He meant back to work instead of talking.

  Which Uriel didn’t want yet. “I love this room. Everything you have in it.”

  “I told Luke I wanted to paint it, too. This one, and that dining room, and that one little room over there.”

  Uriel stepped more into the living room and walked to the others. So did Carlos.

  “We could do it,” Uriel said. Carlos nodded.

  “You mean,” I said, “without Luke?”

  “Yes, without the asshole,” said Uriel. Carlos grimaced.

  The middle man cut out. He probably took as much as them combined.

  “We could come Saturday, right?” said Uriel. Carlos nodded his head. “We need the work.”

  “He doesn’t give you that much?” I asked.

  “After this one, I have something else, but not my dad. He pays me weekly, but my dad is only by the day, for this job.”

  “I need to work,” said Carlos.

  “He doesn’t pay you by the hour?”

  Uriel squeezed his teeth and shook his head. “It’s why I am always trying to get another.” He turned bitter. “Es muy pinche, el pendejo.”

  This time Carlos didn’t disapprove of his son’s disrespect calling Luke a pinche—“fucking cheap.” “Muy mezquino,” he corrected. His a more refined version, more “tightwad” in meaning.

  “Un pinche mezquino,” Uriel said. Carlos didn’t smile, but he didn’t frown, either.

  “I can’t believe he doesn’t pay you by the hour,” I repeated. “I sort of told him already I’d give him the job if this other came out well.”

  “We get here Saturday morning,” said Uriel, “and paint it for you.” Less forcefully, he suggested a figure to his dad. Carlos nodded. “We divide the money.”

  It was a lot less than what anyone else bid, including Luke.

  “You have all the things you need? The drop cloths, brushes, rollers?”

  “Of course.”

  He stared at me. I bet that meant he had Luke’s things, but I decided not to ask. “So you don’t say we talked.”

  He nodded his head, agreeing.

  “What about the paint?” I asked.

  That was a little problem since I wanted three different colors, but then Uriel dropped their price even more—my guess was by more than the cost of four gallons of paint—but now I would have to run to Home Depot and buy it.

  “So, I’m going to tell him I want to wait on these rooms when he asks. That I have to do it later.”

  They both nodded, happy for the work and for the opportunity to screw Luke. I took Carlos’s phone number, and they disappeared into my studio. I’d half forgotten about the incident at the burrito place. I turned on the stereo again, but listened to a radio station’s music, and not very loud. The phone rang. I answered and talked.

  Not an hour later, Luke rang the doorbell but walked right in. “Hey!” he yelled. “I made it.” His boots seemed wet. Or maybe it was grease, smeared. They weren’t work boots, they were cowboy boots he worked in. He had on a ragged Western shirt with snap buttons. Big, he seemed bigger than he even was right then. He was carrying a Whataburger bag. He didn’t stop to say anything to me, clomping the hardwood floor, and turned and clomped and turned again into the studio.

  “This is where you’re at?” he said. He wasn’t trying to be loud, his voice just was. Uriel said something. “Well, after you eat I need you to pick it up.” Uriel said something. “I don’t mean that, no! I mean go faster, vámonos faster, get the work done.”

  I was standing away from this, stopped where I did when I’d gotten up to answer the front door. First Luke reappeared, irritated. Behind him was Carlos, then Uriel, both of them eyeing me privately as they passed and went outside.

  “They’re gonna get done today, don’t worry,” Luke told me.

  It hadn’t occurred to me.

  “I have to stay after them. Uriel, anyway. Fired him five times now.” He shook his head.

  Luke followed me into the kitchen. Through the window I could see them seated outside the front door eating the burgers and fries, a cold drink there, too.

  “You’ve hired him back five or six times? He can’t be all bad.”

  “If I watch him,” he said. “Carlos being with him seems better at least.”

  “Maybe put Carlos on full-time, too. I’m sure he’d take it.”

  “Don’t got that much work. I get it both ways. Either I don’t got enough, or when I do, you got the federal government nosing in.”

  Irritated, I took the bait. “You mean the FBI or IRS investigates your violations?” Immigration was the word I was really saying. Called ICE now, before it was just la migra.

  He wasn’t sure what I meant, but, again, he assumed we thought alike. “You know, all this goddamn federal government intervention. . . .”

  “And Mexicans, right?”

  “. . . and socialist takeover.” He was so deep inside his own head, he didn’t let any outside thoughts interfere. His mouth was even slurring worse than usual because the words were coming so fast. “He won’t stay in office. Who’s he think he is? Who’s he think we are?”

  “You mean that nigger?” I snapped.

  There was no missing what I said this time. I was mad and I made him mad back, and he wanted to yell at me or lecture or preach, but he shut up. I hadn’t paid him yet.

  I sat down at my kitchen table, where I could see out the window Uriel and Carlos finishing their burgers. “Look,” I said. “I want the work done in my house.”

  “It’s what I do.”

>   “I’m a musician, and it’s all I ever do. I’ve been real lucky.” I didn’t make speeches but I had to say more “You and me are lucky to be born on the rich side of a border.”

  Luke was standing high over me. What I’d said didn’t throw him off a beat. “You’re not so lucky,” he told me.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What you’re going through.”

  “What?” I stood up like we were about to throw blows —or I was. He seemed unaffected. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You know,” he said. “I read about it.” He used that familiar voice again, like he knew me, I knew him.

  “Read about what?” I was certain he was about to bring up a couple of the stories about me and a crazy stalker who drove me out of L.A., a personal mess so many years ago. I still hated when anyone mentioned any of it, anytime, but with the Internet, it was timeless public domain.

  “The blindness,” he said.

  Stunned. My breath wasn’t interacting with the room’s air.

  “It’s what I read.”

  I sat down.

  “It must be hard. Can you play your guitar without seeing?”

  I didn’t look up.

  “I don’t mean not seeing nothing. You must. You know what I mean. I don’t really know how bad you got it. Seems like you’re okay to me.”

  I mostly didn’t think about any of this. I mostly went on not letting it matter so much to me or alter almost anything I did. Mostly I tried to ignore it. I dwelled on how far I’d made it, my good fortune.

  “Right?” Luke asked. “That you do pretty okay with it? You see good enough, seems.”

  “You read about this?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he told me. “It’s gotta be tough.”

  I wanted to ask him where he read it, but I didn’t want to know. I stood up again. I didn’t want any more conversation.

  “Hey, listen,” Luke said. “There’s a woman at my church. She could help you out. She cleans houses, too. She could do lots of things for you, whatever you need. She’s a very religious lady.”

  “Not necessary,” I said.

  “I don’t mean you’re a handicapped or nothing.”

  “So she’s not Mexican, right?”

  “No. Nothing but English.” It was as though he hadn’t heard me before, or what had happened was so far in the past that he’d already forgotten. “She gets going and she talks your ears off, I warn you. But she needs work.”

  “You worry about her.”

  “We try to take care of each other. Church has been good for me, like I told you.”

  The front door opened—Carlos and Uriel coming back to work—and Luke shifted his attention, clomping toward them. One of them flushed the toilet in the bathroom.

  “Now listen, you both,” he said, loud again. “You gotta get a move on.” Uriel muttered something. “Well, you ate your lonche now, Uriel, so you can’t bitch that that’s holding you back.” He went into the other bedroom and talked from there, raising his voice a little so Uriel could hear him. “You get done in there, this one should go fast.” More boot steps down to my bedroom, then on to the studio, until finally where I was waiting, by the kitchen window.

  “They’re on schedule if they keep at it. I thought those trim colors you picked you’d be sorry about, but you saw good on ’em.” He caught himself using the see verb.

  I nodded.

  “You got nothing to worry about. They’ll have it done today.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  “I’ll be back in a bit. You think you might be interested in that housecleaning, let me know.”

  I didn’t offer one more word.

  I drove to the bank to get cash and to kill time out of the house. It did not cross my mind that Luz would be working the drive-up window. Luz was young, not as much in years, and I was old, not only in years. I’d gone out with her because she was really cute and sexy and she flirted with me—and I was a guy. But then it seemed she liked me too much. Not in that stalker way, but a lot more than a dinner out and fooling around in. She called a lot, was always wanting to come by or for us to go out or stay in but at least talk on the phone (where am I, what am I doing, don’t I want her, don’t I miss her?), and I just had to stop it. It’d become too much for me. I didn’t like that she could see my bank accounts. That seemed wrong. I considered changing banks, but time passed, and it didn’t matter. I thought the inside tellers were never near this car lot full of tubes.

  Miss Garza had to say good afternoon twice to me, the second time with some exaggeration, so I’d catch on. “Oh, it’s the lucky window,” I said to the intercom when I figured it out. Truth was, I was too far away from their glass booth and I couldn’t see her face. I didn’t know if she could see mine.

  “Yes it is.”

  “How are you, Lucita?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Still working here,” she kind of whispered. She always wanted a much better job.

  “I thought they kept all the hot women inside.”

  “At least you still think I’m hot.”

  “Like I or anybody could stop.”

  “Would you like hundreds, sir?” she said more loudly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Back to more a whisper. “So you do still remember me, then.”

  “Let me think.”

  “I’m never like what I was with you,” she said quietly. “I don’t know if I should be embarrassed or pissed at you.”

  “Is it all right to be talking like this here?”

  “Only one of the girls next to me listens, and she’s inside checking on something.”

  I heard the cylinder shooting down the vacuum tube. I opened the bank container. My check card was there, my license, a pen. “Uhh, I think you forgot my money, Miss Garza.”

  “Oh shit!” she said. Then she was laughing and trying to make herself stop. “I said oh shit!” she finally got out. Funny, more fun was to hear her laugh breaking up through the intercom. “You’re gonna get me fired!”

  “You should’ve gotten more hundreds out of me first.”

  “I’m still your cheap date,” she said. “I am sure you remember that, mister!”

  That got me laughing.

  The cylinder shot back again, this time with the cash. “All here this time. I’m painting the house . . . paying somebody else to.”

  Louder. “Will that be all I can help you with today?” Meaning the other teller next to her was back.

  “Thank you very much, Miss Garza,” I said.

  I expected her to say more, and I waited for it. I pushed the talk button. “Hello?”

  “Very nice to see you again, sir. I hope you have a good afternoon.”

  “Oh,” I said. “It was . . .”

  “I can’t talk,” she said fast, close to her mike.

  So I took it out of park, and drove toward a different day. The laughing? Missing her naked? Her? I grinned, I breathed in, I turned up the car radio. Though no doubt she had a boyfriend, I wanted to take Luz to this Ozomatli concert being promoted. I turned left instead of right. I wasn’t going fast or slow, it wasn’t busy or not, and then a postcard invite: Surrounded by blue, the sun was centered above a thick mist of white cloud.

  I pulled over and I got out and started on a caliche horse trail to the creek. At its edges, river-smoothed rocks were beside limestone boulders, their rusty geologic holes making them seem decorative. Next to them were nopal, barrel, yucca, and agave cactus, thorny weeds and cedar shrub, mesquite and oak trees, bushes that I knew bloomed pollen-heavy flowers that were yellow and red and cream. Ants were swarming the carcass of an armadillo—and near that I found a fossil, curled into itself, as
big as my hand! My broken eyes wouldn’t stop panning for more when I reached the creek, green as moss. I took off my shoes and rolled up my jeans, made a seat a few feet in on a boulder the river gave room. So many wild birds singing patterns, the wind and water currents humming backup. I tapped small rocks together to imitate the frogs, and I swore they replied. Hawks coasted above. Not far, over there, turkey vultures circled tighter. The whole cycle.

  They still had half of the last bedroom to do. They both looked tired, but Carlos seemed especially squeezed dry, his chest hair poking through his thin undershirt. He was in the bathroom, at the tub, washing out the rollers, pans, brushes. The radio that was in the bedroom was on loud. A ranchera station.

  “We’ll get this tomorrow,” Uriel said. “And Saturday? Did he say anything?’

  “I didn’t tell him anything yet, and he didn’t ask.”

  “That’s good. We can use the money.”

  I wished they’d finished and weren’t coming back tomorrow. I was having second thoughts about Saturday now, not because I didn’t want the rooms painted, but because I was confused.

  “Listen, what if it wasn’t this Saturday? Maybe a week or two.”

  He looked at me with such disappointment. “Better right now,” he said.

  “What the fuck?” It was Luke turning the corner of the hall. None of us heard him come in the front door. “Uriel, turn off that fuckin’ music, you hear me?” Hard to imagine that we didn’t hear him because his boots now seemed the only sound other than his voice. Noticing Carlos in the bathroom without missing a step, he went by me like I wasn’t there at all. “You’re not done in here? How is it you’re not done in here, Uriel?” Uriel might have answered, but Luke wasn’t interested in an explanation. “Goddamn if you won’t finish this right now! What the hell you doing? You think you should leave when you only got another half hour of shit to do? Not if you wanna work for me!”

  Carlos had come out of the bathroom. Uriel was moving his head, stepping sideways and back, his hands at each side, not making fists, not not making them, either. He told Carlos and Carlos didn’t hesitate to want to jump back in. He got a roller and a paintbrush from the bathroom.

  “Not that, goddamn it,” Luke said, taking the pan but not roller. “Open that new one right there! Can’t use one that’s wet.” He bent, opening paint cans like he was stabbing one of them. “Amount of time you two wasted cleaning up you’d been finished.” Then he stood up, staring at Carlos, who was frozen. “What the fuck you waitin’ for? Get a move on it!”