Uriel took the brush from his father and explained in Spanish. Luke stood over them, silent, like he was watching from a high mountain, as the two grown men scurried.
Front row to the drama, I thought one of them would attack Luke any minute, or should, though it was also true I was relieved that they were going to finish. Then my phone rang. I ran into my office, hoping it was Luz. Of course it wasn’t. It was business, which I didn’t want to talk, but no stopping it once I answered. When I finally got off, I started to dig around for Luz’s phone number, the one not on my new cell phone. Should I give her the fossil I found? Tell her how I was, what was happening? Tell her: Such beauty in the world, and I miss it until the ants catch my attention. I laughed at myself. She would have no idea what I was talking about, if it made sense! But she would love the fossil —who wouldn’t?—and, really, that was the gift.
Right then I noticed what a good job Uriel and Carlos had done in the studio, not just painting, but putting everything back where it was. It was like they’d copied a photograph—didn’t misplace a book, a sheet of music, or an envelope that I’d aimed at the trash can and missed. It was the same in my bedroom, which I hadn’t looked at since the morning. I’d almost believe they changed the sheets before they made the bed.
“I want to apologize,” Luke told me in the kitchen.
“Hey,” I said, drinking some water, “it’s one of those days.” It was close to six in the evening.
“I feel bad for using the Lord’s name in vain. Trying to stop that.”
“And I thought you were apologizing about how you were around those men.”
“I do. But they should be finished in a minute, I can promise you that. I was plenty mad. I am about to be making this the last time with Uriel. No more.”
He misunderstood, like someone who was still learning a new language. “They’ve done a great job,” I told him.
“I don’t know what we gonna do, I don’t.”
It was his big we again. I wanted him to go.
“What I gotta live in, what’s breathing down my neck, is where there’s nothing for people like me, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“You need some water?” I said.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said.
I got a glass out of a cabinet and filled it from the tap, and he drank it steadily. I completely forgot about the cold water I had in the refrigerator.
“We finish, Luke.” Uriel was at the kitchen’s threshold.
Luke shook his head. He put down the glass, shook his head.
Uriel angled to let Luke pass by. When he had, Uriel looked at me, made eyes, shook his head. Then he turned and followed, as brave as he was humiliated. I could hear Luke in there, and he was not yelling. The boots clomped back toward me.
“It’s all I got now,” he said, coming back into the kitchen, leaning onto the counter, tired. Uriel and Carlos were already behind him, moving tarps and things out.
I’d gotten my wallet out.
“Did you want a receipt?”
“Won’t be necessary, no.”
“Way I like it, too. Keep them monkeys in suits out of it.”
I forgot my count. He saw, held my gaze for a few seconds, then his eyes aimed down. I had to count the bills again.
“Still interested in those other rooms? So much trouble I’ll give you a deal.”
“I think I’m fine for now.”
Luke walked to the arch between the kitchen and living room. Then he gave a price even lower than the one that Uriel and Carlos gave. “Can get it first thing next week.”
“I thought you were firing them.”
“I’d probably keep Carlos. If he wants.”
I didn’t say.
“Well, think on it. I appreciate the business.” He reached out his hand and we shook. Walking away, he stopped. “Don’t forget that I got that housekeeper from the church. Help you out cheap.”
WHY KIKI WAS
LATE FOR LUNCH
I had to stop at the Shamrock on the corner of Las Americas and this woman comes up to me while I’m putting in gas and says can I give her a ride to pick up her check. I say no, no I can’t. What does it mean if she’s telling me she wants to pick up a check? Who would care, who should? A check isn’t an appointment with a hospital or court or picking up a daughter or son at school, not even a lost doggie. She’s kind of pacing nervous around there, and I can’t tell if she’s waiting for someone or a cab, though not a bus, because there’s no bus stop here. Then I thought I should take her, because I realized I’d been too mean to somebody too fast. So I call her over and say where do you have to go. Only to Copia, she tells me, and I tell her to go ahead and come on. I’m thinking I will drop her off at the exit and I even tell her I’m going to have to drop you off right there on Copia so I can get right back onto I-10 because I’m in a hurry to get over to the westside. Her name is Iris. I don’t think she really cared what I said but like it or not it was all I was going to do. I’m not sure how comfortable I will be with her in my car but she is the one quickly talking about what a beautiful day it is—I guess it was and with the windows down, the air feels fresh and cool—and she’s saying how her family never noticed anything like this, they are so selfish and care about themselves and not really even about each other enough. She gave an example of a cook-out on Saturday and the fight that her brother-in-law got in with their cousin because he is dating some ex-girlfriend, which got her sister mad, too. She is living in Odessa now and was here just for a few days because of their dad having cancer and also because she’s so homesick, especially for some tamales from Rosie’s. I told her that, yeah, of course I’d eaten tamales from there, everybody loves those. Iris liked them best during Christmas and she tells me her mom and her aunts, when they make them, they think theirs are so much better. When she asks I say, yeah, I do go to Kiki’s across the street, too, a lot, to be honest. I like to go there and not only because that’s my nickname, too. She really went on like I maybe owned the restaurant and wasn’t telling her. I tell her would I be driving this if I owned it? She thought I was funny but when could I be if she hadn’t stopped talking?
I don’t know why I expected her to be walking south on Copia after I dropped her off, so that could have erased my thinking while I was driving north, where she told me she needed to find Angel to get her check. As we were driving she was looking for him with her head and arms and hands and neck and her whole body and a couple of times she was telling me to slow down more. It didn’t seem like she knew the place where she was picking up her check and so I asked the name of it so that I could try to find it, too. She says she’s looking for Angel and he should be around here because he usually is and she says turn left, try this way, and we aren’t even on Copia anymore. I don’t understand why she doesn’t know where they are meeting but since I’ve gone this far with her I don’t know what I am supposed to do otherwise now and then she says she sees him, there he is, and he’s that mailman in the blue-gray uniform with shorts and the leather bag and I pull over and before I can say anything, she says she’ll be right back and rushes across the street to the sidewalk where he was walking but stops once he sees her. I can’t really do anything but wait. You know how I don’t even have a radio either, and so with the windows down I try to listen but I can’t make out anything, only see that Angel isn’t making her happy, isn’t giving her a check. It’s that he thinks it’s probably with Flaco and she has to find Flaco because she doesn’t want him to put it in Mario’s box first, which would really mess her up, and now we are looking for Flaco, who is also a mailman. I don’t really know what else to say as we are driving around looking for this Flaco. I don’t want to be ungenerous to her and because she is so sure he is just a few blocks over there I don’t say anything. She’s squirming around and is almost with her head out the window. She’s sniffing and not f
or a second talking to me now until she sits back and looks over at me and disappointed says what a crazy day, you’d think it wouldn’t be this hard. I feel a little sad for her and can’t think of what to say to stop, so I just take the turns as she says, thinking we won’t find him and then I will just take her back to Copia, when she sees him, there he is there he is. And it is Flaco in a uniform, too, though he also has a hat, and we pull up alongside him walking and she gets out and gets to talking to him when I lean across the seat and interrupt and say I’m going on now, okay, Iris? She leans into the passenger’s window, weeping, Flaco staring at me as though I were causing this. I think she is happy. I think so. Bye, she lets out, nodding. I do a U-turn as she is walking and talking with him, wiping tears, and she waves at me as I pass them.
BLESSING
It was Angie’s baby sister who got me to want to play it out again. Little sister was dating my cousin and he told me about Angie’s big expensive house and the new dude—an old guy—she married. I got his last name and I made the drive up to Albuquerque and I found the address in the phone book and I got a street map and picked up a six of classy Mexican beer and cruised the west side of the river—which never seems like the same Rio Grande that we see at home—and when I got there, I had to drive the neighborhood slow to find the address but also because my brain kept comparing it all to where she grew up. Which was a two-bedroom house on Alta that was her grandparents’. Her guelita still stayed in one of the bedrooms, and her mom—her dad died when she was too young—used the other. Angie and her sister slept in beds on a remodeled back porch, which leaked from above and sagged onto the desert backyard. After they hung up all their pretty dresses on a lead pipe that fit across one wall and the other, there was no other space except for the dresser she had to share with her baby sister and the vinegaroons and scorpions and sometimes red ants that crawled up, ignoring the carpet remnant, through the cracks in the squeaky floors. Her older brother got to fix up a section of the garage. She thought of me as the rich boy because my mom’s new man wore a suit and tie. I thought so, too. We’d moved into a big house on Wheeling with the greenest grass on one of the only streets in El Paso where almost all the people on it watered their lawn. I’d been driving, thinking and thinking about us, me and Angie, how time was passing, how we’re all supposed to change—you know how that goes. I never saw El Paso as so poor, and maybe that wasn’t the word, but you’d have to think something like it driving in this Albuquerque neighborhood, even if I didn’t like tract housing and really hated these adobe stuccos. I worked this kind of housing project a lot, though only when I had to. You got shit pay for the work, lots of mexicanos working because they’d work for un kilo de tortillas, or it’d be with white boys who listened to Van Halen too loud and too much.
The colored strobe lights from behind seemed to hit at the same time as the bump of the siren. I’d been like bear hugging the steering wheel, chugging along almost first-gear slow, even though I was in second, deep into my own head, almost dreaming. I got woked up. I pulled over but did not get out and in the side mirror watched a uniform walk up tight along my side of the truck, his hand near his pistola. He asked me for the usual documents. He had the usual shades off.
“So what’s going on, Officer?” I asked him.
Another cruiser had come up behind his and its patrolman had taken a position on the other side of my pickup. This one faced my window now, first eyeing my possessions inside, then digging through some. I hadn’t opened a bottle, but there were a couple of empty cans and a lot of paper and nails and a few screwdrivers, a pair of snips and some fast-food napkins, and a few rolls of toilet paper I’d forgotten to take into my apartment. Seemed to me like that’s what he stared at the longest.
“It’s the plates, right?” I asked. “You guys don’t like us Texas drivers, right?”
“So what’s your business here?” He handed me a roll of TP.
“I’m looking for my girl,” I said. “High school sweetheart, you know?”
“A girlfriend?” He didn’t believe me.
“Yes, sir, that’s it.” I almost corrected him.
He was staring at me still, like I was lying.
“Maybe I look gay. I’m not though.”
He didn’t break into any smile. “Aren’t you driving a little slow?”
“I’m kind of looking for her address. Hard to see them, kind of.”
“Because you don’t know where your girlfriend lives?”
“Yes and no,” I said. I was willing to explain if he’d let me.
“There are numbers painted on the curbs.”
“Well, yeah.”
“What’s her address?”
I showed him. I’d ripped the page out of the phone book. It was circled and underlined.
“That’s real nice,” he told me, “especially for the next person who can’t find this page.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“You don’t know where your girlfriend lives?”
“It’s an old girlfriend, Officer,” I started. He cut me off again.
“This isn’t even the street you’re on.”
“If I got it right, it’s another two streets and then to the left.”
He took a few seconds to study me and the toilet paper in the back. “You say she lives at the address you have here?”
“What else would I be doing with it?” I was shaking my head this time, which I shouldn’t have.
He did the opposite of shake his head. He put the shades back on and stood there so the sun was in both lenses. “Let’s find out if this girlfriend wants to see you.”
“Ex,” I mumbled, though he didn’t give a shit.
We all rolled forward until I stopped, up alongside the curb in front of an adobe style stucco, one cruiser behind me, the other parking in the wide, clean driveway. My officer took off his dark glasses again as he got out, his window down, the police radio up loud. I got out, forgetting the six-pack.
“Stay by your truck,” he barked.
I leaned against the door.
An older man in shorts and loafers and a way-too-colorful Hawaiian shirt came through a side gate before either of us took too many steps forward or backward. “Yes?” he asked.
“Do you know that man?” the officer asked him about me.
“I don’t know him.” I spoke first to be heard.
“No, I do not,” he said. “Never seen him before.”
“He says his girlfriend lives here,” the officer told him.
“I said an ex-girlfriend,” I told them both.
“Shut up!” the officer said to me.
“My wife and I live here,” he said.
“I came to see Angie González,” I said, taking a chance.
That got the old guy’s attention and stopped the cop. “What is it you want?” he asked me.
“I grew up with Angie,” I said. “In El Paso.”
Her husband seemed pissed off by this, but he knew I wasn’t lying and the police officer saw that, too, and nodded at the other one still sitting in his vehicle. “We’ve had some robberies around here,” he told her husband.
“I just got in town,” I said, not directly to either of them.
Her husband already didn’t like me.
That’s when Angie came through the front door and through a patio tunneled with vines of bougainvillea. She was all legs in her shorts and all . . . well, it was an especially pretty white blouse on her. La morenita Angie was grown up, a full-out woman now. She didn’t recognize me. Her husband gave her a kind of look that was between them. The officer waited for one from her, too.
“Hey Angie,” I said. “I got cold ones in this truck.”
It took her three seconds. “Oh my God!” she said like she used to in high school.
In his head, her hu
sband was no doubt using the same words as she did. He turned and was back through the side gate, not saying nothing else to her or me, the sockless tennies he wore squeaking behind him like they were scary.
“Sorry,” I told her.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Not the best impression, huh? The SWAT team has to come and surround el rancho because some dirty Mexican is sniffing around the man’s ruca.”
She smelled good. I knew I could use a shower.
“It’s not you.”
“So he’s, like, an asshole? Or just seems that way?”
I swear she wanted to smile, but she wouldn’t. She still had an accent like she hardly knew English, when in fact she hardly knew Spanish. Made me happy to hear it.
I handed her a roll of the toilet paper like it was a prom corsage.
Inside the house it was about as real as one in a TV show. Unmushed sofa pillows poofed up in each of their corners, carpet so vacuumed it had those grass lines you see on football fields, windows still chirping they were so clean, kitchen tiles wet from a skylight. Suddenly I was conscious of me—the hair a little too untrimmed, the old T-shirt a little faded, the black pants a little too gray in the knees and butt, and I even had cowboy boots on. Didn’t seem like boots were right. And I brought beer. She used to drink beer. I took off my cheap green gorra. It said Garcia. I found out it was a fishing reel company, but I liked it for having Garcia on it.
We sat on stools, quiet.
“Beer’s okay?”
“Of course!”
I handed her one after I twisted the cap. “Not bad,” I said. “Nice house, really really nice.”
She drank beer to prove something to me, I swear.
Before the End, After the Beginning Page 10
