It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  In this part of town, “vanished” could mean anything. Deported. Chased away by crack dealers, Chicano gangs, black gangs, white gangs, Asian gangs. Shot to death.

  “It scares me when they vanish,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  As if to punctuate her thought, a car squeals its tires, in the darkness down by the bayou.

  “Do you have everything you need right now?” I ask.

  Sadly, she smiles. We squeeze hands. “People need so much,” she says. “Who can tell?”

  “I know.” I kiss her lilac-scented cheek. “I know.”

  3.

  My own family vanished a year ago on the Gulf Coast Freeway. “Freak,” said the first officer on the scene. In my daze, I thought he meant me, for surviving, and I agreed with him. “No, no.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “I meant the accident.”

  All I remember is a candy-red pickup veering into our lane: lawn mowers, trash barrels, rakes in its bed. Then, I’m standing by the road, in the hot, sucking wind of cars going past, telling the officer my name.

  How do I explain all this—my clumsiness, my white-boy sadness—to Julio Zamora? Or to anyone? Plain, careful English seems inadequate, each word a slap to memory’s pale face.

  As a folklorist, someone who’s spent his whole adult life studying the planet’s cultures, I’ve developed a long mental list of useful quotes.

  “Six feet of earth make all men of one size,” says an old American proverb.

  James Russell Lowell, speaking of President Garfield, said, “The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on … to die for and be buried in.”

  But no wise words came to me that day on the freeway. Instead, it was Dickens I recalled. Simple, brutal, direct: “Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

  I couldn’t see my parents or my wife. By the time I understood what was happening, emergency personnel (white coats; muted, efficient expressions) had laid sheets across their bodies. Their contours looked massive, weightier than any of them had been, with their light, lovely laughter, their silly little dance steps whenever they felt happy.

  The owner of the truck, an independent yardman, had also died in the crash. No family. Uninsured.

  I’d been behind the wheel. My father’s car. Driving us to a new sushi restaurant in Galveston. All his life, Dad had tooled around in behemoths—Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs, impervious to impact. But a negligence suit from an injured employee had wiped out his refinery company and most of his savings; in his forced retirement, he’d bought a Honda hatchback.

  I was the only one, that evening, wearing a seatbelt: the reason I walked away, a bald, vague official told me. Later, he assured me I’d done everything possible to avoid the accident. No chance I could have braked in time. A bear of a cop, a kid, patted my arm. “It was just,” he said, “one of those things, eh?”

  Blindsided, jolted from my feelings, I stayed busy, quiet, letting other people talk, interviewing the Thuots and the Zamoras. Their stories saw me through those first few awful months. Tell me more about the mountains. What’s Jalisco like in the summer? White folks what? Yes, yes, we’re guilty of that, I suppose and much more, besides.

  In our five years together, Jean and I had never huddled with a lawyer. Why draft wills?, we thought. What did either of us own that smelled of real money? And though we joked about aging and dying, like most people, we thought we’d live forever.

  My parents’ papers didn’t specify where, or how, they wanted to be buried. I’d never heard them discuss it.

  I don’t recall, in the bog of last year, how I made up my mind. I do remember worrying that if I waited too long, they’d all mummify, like Norman Bates’s old lady in Psycho. That happened in Houston, despite the humidity. Occasionally, a story made the paper: a cop would find the preserved body of an elderly man or woman in a rocking chair, in a warm, dry house the neighbors never checked.

  Also, I knew the folk legends. Saint Francis Xavier had been saved intact since the sixteenth century in the town of Goa, on the Indian subcontinent. Supplicants are no longer allowed to see his corpse; a worshipper bit off his toe one year in a fever of religious ecstasy.

  Clearly, I wasn’t thinking rationally when I had to let go of my family.

  I settled on the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery on South Ruthven Street, a pretty little place I’d passed many times on my way to work. Predominantly Mexican Catholic, it contains some of the best grutas, or personal shrines, in Texas. Sandstone, granite, reddish-brown lava, all of its graves face east: sunrise, fresh hope.

  4.

  Tonight, as I swing into the parking garage, the newspaper building blazes blue and orange under the freeway’s sodium lights. The garage smells of oil and old rotting lunch meats (from Sam’s Lone Star Kosher Deli, nearby), stuffed in trash cans.

  “Evening, Bob,” I greet the security guard.

  He hitches his belt up over his belly. His keys rattle. “Hiya, Mr. Palmer.” He’s lethargic and slow, with the patchy red face of a drinker. Not much good in an emergency, probably, but his presence reassures me. He’s one of the city’s familiar signposts, someone whose location I can always count on.

  I take the elevator to the fifth floor, where I type-and-enter my days. As soon as my father lost his savings (he’d been the primary benefactor of my fledgling little press), I found this job at the paper, penning obituaries and occasional fillers.

  “Nothing fancy, now. Don’t try to be goddam Balzac,” the managing editor, a pugnacious old gent named Penrose, told me the morning he took me on. “These days, the public’s reading level hovers—last time I checked the gloomy goddam figures—somewhere between second and third grade. You want to be literary, go park yourself on a street corner, shouting lousy poems about the lousy whatever.”

  “What about news?” I asked. “What about generating my own stories? What about—”

  “Whoa, son. Forget the news. I hand you a simple format, you fill it in. Got it?”

  Ode to the Status Quo. “Got it,” I said.

  Most of my colleagues at the paper are quick and efficient, in and out of the office each day with barely a grumble or flourish, but a small group of us—Tony, from the church beat (the most profane man I’ve ever met), Ed Branigan, a typesetter, Scott Lehman, who covers the cops, and me—we meet late nightly for cards. None of us have family waiting at home. Tony’s separated from his wife; Ed and Scott are both divorced. We’re all insomniacs—which is what you say, when you’re grown, instead of admitting you’re afraid of the dark.

  When I bustle in tonight, the boys are dealing their first round of Texas Hold’em on Tony’s metal desk. Cigarette smoke swarms the snicking yellow lights. The radio’s tuned to the blues: My man’s a busted tire on a muddy old road in Alabam.

  “George! God, man, am I glad to see you,” Tony says. “This game sucks with only three.”

  “Just like love.”

  “You in?”

  “I’m in.” I stow my recordings of Julio Zamora and Mr. Thuot in my gray steel desk.

  “Tony, man, you shuffle these cards?” Ed asks.

  “He never shuffles the cards,” Scott says. “Watch him. He just messes them up a little.”

  I pull up a chair. “‘Shuffle’ is not in his vocabulary. ‘Shuffle’ is a sacred, ancient wisdom he’s somehow failed to grasp.”

  “Yakking with your fer’ners?” Tony kids me.

  “Yep.”

  “Fuckin’ rice-eaters.” I count quietly to ten. He runs a hand across his bald spot. It’s shaped a little like Australia. “See you and raise you,” he says.

  “Cold, brother.”

  “Call.”

  “Boat.”

  “Damn. You didn’t shuffle.” Ed grabs his paunch as though he’s had a pain.

  Tony reels off golfing jokes involving Protestant ministers, rabbis, priests. They all end with some form of indecent exposure. Scott and Ed are clawing into their wallets, inflicting on each other the lates
t snapshots of their kids, tamping back tears.

  I don’t know what I’d do without these guys, but tonight—lately—I’m not sure why I’m with them, either.

  “You’re drifting, George,” Tony warns me. “Cut ‘em.”

  “Sorry.” I tap the tattered deck. “They’re good.”

  Scott’s pale and thin from eating mostly Oreos—half-Oreos. He plucks them apart, chucks the creamy side, a nod to health. Ed’s a sure-fire heart attack: tomorrow, the day after. You can almost hear him ticking.

  Pathetic.

  And here I am.

  “How many?”

  “What?”

  “Cards, George. How many cards?”

  “Oh. Two.”

  “I know about you,” Scott said to me one afternoon in the hall, near the men’s room with its river-water smell and its big red door. He’s short and aggressive and never finished his psychology degree. In the middle of a call or a raise, he’ll claim he can read our faces, sniff out our bluffs. But he always winds up losing.

  “What is it you think you know, Scott?”

  He swallowed the last of the ham sandwich he’d been nibbling all day, along with his cookies, and crumpled his yellow napkin. “The reason you’re so quiet. Why you’d rather just listen to others. Tape them and stuff.”

  “And why is that?”

  “The accident.” He can’t hide his pride, whenever he launches these little insight bombs. He’s lucky we still let him play with us. “You think you should have died.”

  I stood limp against the bathroom door, like a well-thumbed poster for a long-past event. “Scott, listen—”

  “Survivor guilt. Why me, right? The miracle of your continuance.” He wrapped his fingers in his napkin and poked me in the chest. “Naturally, you’re anguished about it, George, so you imagine yourself gone.”

  “You’re full of shit,” I told him, and he grinned.

  Tonight, as the fellows joke and laugh—Scott watching, gleefully, anticipating my every bluff—I fold and fold and fold.

  5.

  Driving home, late, I smell the city’s labors: dirt and sweat, the soft tar of the roads, the balanced tension of girders, rust, and air. Lights pulse. Jean loved these nights, stark and steamy.

  Magnolia trees cluster around paint-peeled wooden homes on the edge of the First Ward. Moonlight glints off the glass of the downtown towers, blue and brown, green and gold, and makes glowing whips of phone lines webbed above hot streets.

  The no-zoned neighborhoods make Houston a constant surprise: a palm reader next to a Republican campaign headquarters, a hot-tub dealer next to a strict-bricked Baptist church. One minute, the city’s a wise old matriarch—calm, cheerful, cautious—next thing you know, she’s ripped off her mask to reveal a snide, sneaky kid.

  Tonight, my part of town—run-down, poor, slammed hard by AIDS—is dark and quiet. If I’d had the money, I might have moved. But I still live in the cheap little house I shared with Jean—a two-bedroom, musty with dust and too many memories in the old Montrose neighborhood, behind a small outfit, Sno King, that manufactures ice-makers. Sometimes, deep into the night, an out-of-whack ice-maker flings watery cubes at the walls. Jean and I used to laugh about it, lying in bed. Or we’d argue about having kids, after making love to a series of frozen thumps—the only time we ever fought.

  Turns out, I wanted babies, she didn’t.

  “Too settled, too tired,” she always said, like a long-standing threat, and I wondered, hearing the thrust of her voice, if she was capable of physical violence.

  With the house, it was money. Mortgage insurance. Escrow. The usual worries. But the baby-talk—that riled her beyond reason.

  “Julio’s little boy, Manuel, he’s so pretty, Jean, and lively,” I told her the night I met the Zamoras. I played her a tape of his voice. “I wish you could see him—”

  “George, please. I told you before we were married, I wasn’t interested in the diaper-mill. I’m an old lady.” (In her late forties, she was just a few years older than I.)

  I was a “professional fuck-up,” she told me once—“I don’t think people really want to read this stuff, do they?”—but she loved me, she said, for my “empathy skills.” The first night I spent at her place, I offered to draw her a bath. She sat on her bed and cried. “No one’s ever done that for me before,” she said. “It’s so sweet.” She reached for my hand. I dried her face with a towel. “You’re a caretaker-type, aren’t you?”

  I’d never thought of myself that way, but I liked who I was in her eyes. She was a physics professor at Rice, and gave me stability, maturity, calm.

  We made—as folks like to say here in pigskin-crazy Texas—a pretty good team.

  Now each ice ping recalls her face. “Tony was the big winner tonight,” I tell her. Gauzy as frost, she’s wafting in front of my pillow. Every night she visits, in a pale-white dress and blouse. Perfect hair. “I dropped forty bucks. Pathetic.”

  She circles my head. I curse my imagination. With a punch of my pillow (aiming straight for its cottony heart), Jean disappears, replaced by the vibrant spirits of my current life: Mrs. Thuot sipping tea, Manuel shouting joyfully in the street, Lira hiding a puffy red welt on her face .

  Fuck.

  I shut my eyes and try to ease my breathing.

  Two years ago—three?—Jean planted a skinny apple tree in our front yard. Now it whispers in a flat southerly breeze.

  Shhh. Shhh.

  6.

  On Saturdays and Sundays I hate to impose myself on the Thuots and the Zamoras. After looking for work, scrambling for food, they’ve earned a rest from the great white world.

  So I drive over to the Shamrock Six, a multiplex cinema catering mostly to blacks. What I like about the place is its family feel—generations merge here, at the early-bird show, to squeal or shout at the murder mysteries, the love stories, and so confirm their fellowship, their superiority to the fools onscreen. It’s the most Southern place in town, like a holy-roller country church. “Yeah! You got it, slick!” the audience screams at actors moving stiffly toward a shoot-out or a teary embrace.

  “Brother dead!”

  “No he ain’t, he gonna rip that sucker’s drawers!”

  “Fine-lookin’ mama!”

  Meanwhile, the rest of Houston, belonging to the wide-open West, whips about in its cars—one person, two at the most, per set of wheels—pursuing happiness, Manifest Destiny, today’s equivalent of gold: a makeover, a microwave oven, a seat behind home plate.

  Today, Blood Orgy is showing at the Shamrock, and I’m mighty content with my popcorn and my spot in the back row, with a wide-angle view of the theater and the families laughing, quibbling, jostling for a view of the screen. An old woman wipes a baby’s face. Two boys wrestle over a Milky Way bar. A middle-aged couple sneaks a kiss. Then we’re drenched in humming blue light, and an actress seems to be swallowed by an alien werewolf, or a radioactive schnauzer, I can’t tell.

  I sit through two showings.

  Outside, as I’m leaving, after four and a half hours in the dark, I see a big, oak-colored man, beneath the marquee, grasping a woman’s chin. “You look at me when I’m talking to you!” he says. “That compute wit you, bitch?” They’re standing in a sweaty crowd of kids. When he drops his hand, the woman closes her eyes and rubs her face, slowly.

  I try to adjust my eyes.

  I’m reminded of Lira Zamora. Too messy, none of my business, troubles of my own .. In the presence of actual violence, I realize how flimsy my little evasions are.

  I’ve been an asshole. For months. Doing nothing.

  Talking to ghosts. Dreaming of jackpots.

  Move! I think, but I stand and watch the couple. Eventually, they shuffle away, his hand a fat clamp on her arm.

  The sun on my head feels cold.

  Monday evening, I swing by the Zamoras’ at seven just as I figure Lira is stepping off the bus (and Julio’s still got half an hour at the take-out). For an icebreaker—thwack!�
��I’ve brought a couple of new Spidermans for Manuel and a copy of Job Opportunities: Houston and Environs for Lira. Cal let me have it half-price—it’s a year out of date.

  She’s not happy to see me. As she walks from the bus at the corner, Manuel runs past me on the porch. “The Kryptonite’s in my shorts!” he shouts, grabbing his jeans.

  “Oh no! I’m … I’m losing my strength!” I wither onto the lawn.

  “Ha ha! The world is mine!” He rushes into the house.

  “Hello,” I say softly to Lira, brushing dried grass from my pants. “Can I help you with those?”

  She frowns, and tightens her grip on three small grocery bags. “No, thank you.” She’s got Frida Kahlo eyebrows: black and wiry, a single little rope.

  “I’ve been meaning to bring you a copy of this.” I pick the job book off the porch step.

  I’d spent the weekend planning my visit, what I might say. It hadn’t gone well the first time I’d tried to talk to her alone. Who did I think I was? Her rescuer? Her hero? Spiderman, for chrissakes?

  “Very kind,” she says. She’s gathered her hair into a bun the size of a tennis ball. On her cheek, a dark green bruise, big as an oak leaf.

  “The kids? They’re okay?” I say. “Manuel seems—”

  “Yes. Fine,” she says. In her pink-and-yellow dress, she’s not much bigger than a kid herself.

  I reach to touch the swelling on her face. She startles, and I pull back. My fingers haven’t felt a woman’s skin since Jean’s. “I’m sorry, Lira. It’s none of my business, but I’ve been worried about you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while, but—” I’m aware that my words are too intimate. I don’t know her well enough to say these things. “Can you tell me?”