Julio’s neighbors are talking in tight circles on their lawns: men with long shirt-tails, sipping canned beer. Children play near the curb. On the horizon, at the end of the street, Houston’s glassed-in banks tower together like slats in a cyclone fence. The bayou boils around fallen oak limbs, curled like big arthritic hands. Five or six cops unroll a strip of yellow tape. “Back. Get back, please.” One of them shouts into a walkie-talkie, “No floater here. Water’s moving pretty fast. We’re gonna need boats and divers downstream …”
Julio’s lying on his gray-checkered couch, drunk and in tears. Behind him, two whispering young policemen. I tell them I’m a friend. They check my driver’s license, phone in my name. Finally, they let me sit down.
“Julio.” I touch his shoulder. His shirt is limp with sweat. “Julio, what happened?”
Bleary face. “No se…
“Is Lira all right?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, George.”
“Was she angry? Was Lira angry about something? How could this—?”
“She was worn out looking for work. Taking care of the kids.” He spreads his hands. “I don’t know what I could’ve done …”
“It’s all right. Take your time.”
Sunlight bastes the room through the door.
“For a while this morning, after she came home, I wanted to sleep with her, you know. But she said no, that was the problem, we couldn’t afford more kids. I got mad and …” He kicks the table in front of us. I jump. I remember his cloudy face, the night he came home and found me talking to Lira. The cops turn, still whispering. “Then she grabbed Chatito and went out the door with him before I knew what was happening. Clutching a rosary in her hand. When she came back without him, and picked up Angelina, I knew something was wrong, but she was so strong, man, I couldn’t believe the power in her arms. I’d had too many beers.”
I notice a tiny wooden crucifix on the wall, above the television set, a black Christ nailed to its arms. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. The color of the balsam wood, in Jesus’ hands and face, matches Julio’s dark-brown complexion.
Lira had become “religious” in the last few days, he tells me—by which he means “sullen and withdrawn”—as the Day of the Dead approached.
On the television, next to a candle, four tiny clay tablets. Tierras del Santos: pieces of earth, each stamped with a saint’s grave face. Among certain Latin peoples, I’ve learned, these cakes are eaten or dissolved in water as a drink to ease menstrual pain.
Jesus. “Is Lira pregnant again?” I ask Julio now.
He looks at me.
“It’s none of my business, man, but there are ways to prevent that.”
“We watch the moon. Lira says—” He shakes his head.
“What about the other kids?”
“The man in the ambulance thinks they’ll be okay.”
“Roberto?”
“No se.” He grips my hand. “I don’t know what happened, George. We were a happy family. Lira loved Chatito. She was a good mother to those babies …”
A ripped Spiderman lies at our feet. Manuel’s laughter pops in my head. My throat aches—like I’ve thrown back a double shot of whiskey.
I glance behind us, at the cops. “Julio, have the police checked your immigration status?”
He stares at me, startled. “I’m not sure.”
“If they ask you about it, don’t tell them anything. You’re entitled to a lawyer. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Zamora?” One of the policemen asks Julio to follow him onto the porch.
“You have my work number, right?” I say. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know. Julio?”
“Yes. Okay,” he says.
I squeeze his arm.
He turns. “George?”
“Right here.”
“Tell them.”
“Sure. Anything.”
“Tell the Anglos our story.”
Air-conditioners hum in the city. The freeway shakes. Through my car speakers, Lightnin’ Hopkins croaks:
You know, I drink wine for this reason
And this is the reason why
It give me a good feelin’ in the mornin’
It make me feel like tellin’ real good—
I ain’t talk’m bout a lie
But you know.
He strokes the strings like a drum, beats them hard with his hand, up down up down, I turn the tape player up that’s right and then you’re down some more son better watch your updown and then you’re turned around.
Swirls of ash from the Mexican volcano. Too much: this wild-assed city of ours, it’s too fucking much.
No sane person could raise a family here. Pure Death. On the freeway, in dirty, twisting water. Fights and ashes and slaps.
Through my open window, I squint at it all: a muffler the size of a boat my baby she left me this mornin’ a thirty-foot roach (“24-hour exterminators”) kidney-shaped swimming pool propped on a pole. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (“Join the Voyage at 6!”) “Pregnant? Emergency Call …” burgers and doughnuts and dogs and maybe she doin’ me wrong say yes she doin’ me wrong say baby I been acryin’ I been drunker’n a skunk since June. Eyebrows and rheumatism, arthritis and armadillos, low-tar smokes, The Wall Street Journal say yes she is say baby “Let’s All Be There!” Sugar’s and Spinners and Cooters. Fizz, Biff’s, Bill’s. Tires thrumming on the concrete. Dependency City: Alcoholism? Child Abuse? Drugs? Want to Talk? Any Time of Night Just Pick Up A.
Quick exit onto Montrose Street.
A teenage girl with a slim gold purse and red high heels strolls the edge of a park. A radio tune tumbles out of an open apartment window.
My, my, my.
Southern folk wisdom says a man whose drink is laced with a lady’s menstrual blood will be, like a child, forever hers.
She waves. I zip through the light. A McDonald’s wrapper kicks up over my hood and dithers away down the street.
I slow, then circle back toward Main.
No matter what, for me, there’s no getting out of this place, even if it is too fucking much. I’ve buried my family here. My keepsakes. My only history.
And why leave? Life’s brimming in the big, bad Bayou City.
Much later, after work, after cards, after losing a stack of money (our last game before letting Cal join), I end up at the Shamrock. The Midnight Show.
Danger, Incorporated—black gangsters waging an L.A. coke war.
“Fly threads, brother!”
“Make that fairy eat it!”
“Motherfucker’s toast!”
The crowd is cheerful and warm, but I scan the seats, wondering if the woman I’d seen last time is somewhere in the theater, if she has any more bruises on her face.
Then the lights are up, a smoky, spooky blue, and folks are filing out.
“Wake up, white boy,” somebody sings. “Yoo-hoo.” Laughter. “Say, man. Party just startin’!”
9.
The next afternoon, through late-season leaves on the bayou’s banks, I watch police boats putt around puckered brown whirlpools, looking for Roberto. Young men in wetsuits slog through shallows and mud. Onlookers come and go, eating bag lunches, reading paperbacks and newspapers, gossiping.
I follow the bend for about two miles, past the campsite of street people, busted up earlier this month. I’d checked it out, once, for the paper. For nearly six years, laid-off oil workers had pitched tents or tarps here or slept in blown-gasket cars. Their neighbors, poor families like the Thuots and the Zamoras in run-down rental homes, didn’t complain, but folks in outlying areas did. “It’s a transient population, drug-addicted and mentally retarded. We’re talking heroin and cheap booze,” said a woman who lived about a mile from the spot. Penrose had asked me to research the story, since several of the obits I’d written were of men from the camp who’d died during winter freezes or whose bodies had been found in the bayou. “They break into houses like mine looking for
pawnable items,” the woman said. I couldn’t confirm that, and Penrose eventually decided against stories on the homeless. “There’s not one positive angle here,” he’d said. “If we had a case of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps and getting out of poverty, we might consider running a piece. As it is …” Weeks later, police ordered the men off the land. All that’s left are pads of burned grass from their cooking fires.
The river is placid here, not far from where the Thuots get their bathwater. Two black boys straddle pine logs on the bank, pitching fishing lines into the current. “Catch anything?” I ask, brushing aside brambles.
“Naw, ain’t nothing worth catching,” says one of the boys. His companion spits into the water.
Farther down, ivy snags my feet. In my first few months at the paper, I scribbled dozens of obits for folks who had drowned in the stream, and the pace hasn’t let up.
“Police divers Monday recovered the bodies of two men whose Toyota truck collided with a car on the Eastex Freeway and plummeted sixty feet into Buffalo Bayou. The southbound lanes of the freeway were temporarily closed.”
“Police authorities surmise that an arm discovered in the bayou near the Jensen Street Bridge belongs to a man seen yesterday clinging to an oak limb in a torrent following flash flooding this weekend.”
One beautiful spring afternoon last year, a mounted police officer’s horse—a ten-year-old gelding named Einstein—got spooked, apparently by several feet of bright-orange mesh in the grass, slipped into the water, and sank beneath the Capitol Street Bridge. An hour later, the horse’s body surfaced and was removed by a heavy-duty dump truck.
The city’s most infamous drowning happened twenty years ago. Cops beat Joe Campos Torres so badly, the booking sergeant refused to accept him into any city jail. The officers dragged Torres to a site near the bayou and whaled on him some more. Then he either jumped or was pushed into the water. None of the cops involved spent more than a year in prison.
I recite these incidents to myself now to take my mind off of Lira and to fit her behavior into some kind of fathomable context. But I’m failing.
Folklore doesn’t help me either.
Local historians say the bayou was named for the buffalo gar that navigate its waters. But anecdotes I’ve gathered over the years suggest that eighteenth-century Spanish explorers’ maps still exist that denote the ‘Arroyo de Cibilo” or “Ditch of Bison.” These stories say early Indians drove the mammoth animals over the bayou’s banks to cripple them and make them easy targets for the Indians’ spears.
There’s supposed to be a Confederate schooner in the water here somewhere. I’ve got recorded testimony from an ex-slave’s son who claims to have danced on the ship’s ruined deck during a low-water summer in 1908.
I emerge from the underbrush, amazed at the amount of debris in my head.
Cal’s right, and so is Penrose. What we need are positive tales! Johnny Appleseed.
“Water Under the Bridge: Exotic Seafood Since 1907,” says a metal sign on a dark-green building near the bank. “Drum, sheepshead, croaker. Mahi from Hawaii.”
Through a window, I see the shadow of a man, moving among jars of tentacles in clear, pickled brine, among fishing nets filled with crusty clam shells, swaying from the ceiling. Lemon and oysters, I smell.
Another man steps outside in a slick rubber apron covered with pink and yellow fish guts. He’s wiping his hands on a newspaper. Our paper. The Community Section.
Through willow trees, trailing their tips in the water, sketching thin, dirty ripples—concentric rings—come the muted spasms of boat motors circling, circling, circling upstream.
10.
Three days, and no word from Julio Zamora. His house appears to be empty. No one answers his phone.
I’ve asked Scott, whose beat it is, to find out what he can from the cops, which isn’t much: Lira has been arraigned on capital murder charges. “A recent law in Texas makes multiple killings a capital offense,” Scott explained to me. “Tough luck for your friend. This assumes the other kid—Roberto?—is dead.” For now, her location is a well-guarded secret. Her Mexican citizenship makes the paperwork messy, so the D.A.’s office wants her kept under wraps. “All I can tell you is, she’s not in the Criminal Courts Building. I’ve checked the new facility over on San Jacinto and Baker Streets—they don’t call it a jail, they call it an ‘Adult Detention Zone,’” Scott said, “but for all its high-tech alarms, it’s still the same old bars and walls. Anyways, the pugs who run the place won’t talk to me.”
He looked at me. “People just keep vanishing on you, don’t they?”
“Not the right people,” I said.
At Prince’s Drive-In, a teenage girl grilling burgers tells me Julio’s apron has been “hanging from that meathook in the kitchen since Sat’day, late, when the son-of-a-bitch was supposed to relieve my draggin’ ass.” Her braces flash. “We ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since.”
At the Chinese take-out, the assistant manager, a Taiwanese national, shrugs when I mention Julio’s name. Six or seven women, black and Asian, sit at a table in the kitchen peeling shrimp, sweeping the shells onto scattered newspapers on the floor.
“Lavonda say she gettin’ the house and the car,” chirps one, a tall woman with short hair in tangled sprouts, tossing wedges of orange meat into a boiling pot on a stove.
“Girl, Lavonda blind and deaf. Frankie gon’ take her to the cleaners.”
“Hell, to the bank,” says another. “Fuckin’ Accounts Closed.”
In the corner, a quiet woman snaps the shrimp shells at the sharp hook in their tails and hums off-key to herself with her big, dark eyes half-closed. Her fingers are raw. An odor of Lysol and peppers swarms the room.
I order Kung Pao Chicken.
On the way home, I stop at the Kroger’s on Montrose for a six-pack of beer. At the pharmacy, in the rear of the store, next to the frozen fish, two pale, thin men wait in line, thumbing through This Week in Texas. “William tells me AZT is cheaper now over at Walgreen’s,” one says softly.
“Sweet William. How are his platelets?”
“Pathetic.”
Clouds ripple like flesh above the city’s streets. For Sale. Apartment for Rent. Must Liquidate.
I realize that for a year now, while I’ve walked in the fog of my grief, a whole community has dwindled around me.
I see a young man pull a yellowed shade in a cracked apartment window.
Tonight, Sno King clatters like a riot. I take a beer and my chicken to the far end of my garage, where sometimes it’s quieter than it is in the house. I discovered this once after a late-night fight with Jean. Simmering, I grabbed a sleeping bag and a pillow and marched outside. I hung a mirror on a nail and filled a large tin tub with water so I could shave the following morning. A cricket, limp as a flaccid penis, wound up floating there, on an island of Foamy. Spiders rapelled up rolls of insulation next to a greasy workbench; roaches skittered over wrenches, screwdrivers, drills. But I slept better than Jean did that night. Somehow—an acoustical quirk—Sno King’s turmoil was muffled by the garage’s thin walls.
I don’t recall the details of the fight, though it could have been about only one thing. We never tussled over anything else.
Thwack!
Thwack!
“Sweetheart.” I raise my bottle in the dark. “You win.”
11.
I’d been thinking about it, and I’d decided Freedmen’s Town was the place to take Ray for his driving lesson: a mostly black neighborhood northeast of Montrose, not far from the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery. The streets are narrow, but traffic is light.
Like the Shamrock, Freedmen’s Town offers me a vicarious sense of home, though my white skin draws curious—sometimes hostile—stares from the porch-sitters. I never worry, though—maybe because so many cheerful mothers live in the area. I see them watching their kids in the yards, laughing with each other, big, solid anchors of safety.
The Town—an area o
f a few blocks—was founded by ex-slaves shortly after the Civil War. It used to have filling stations, dry-goods stores, and nightclubs, but now it’s a cluster of dilapidated rent houses threatened by bulldozers and high-flying redevelopment. Here and there, its old brick streets bleed through the asphalt, and I feel connected to the past in a way I don’t anywhere else in the city. Sort of like Jean and her apple trees.
Except the comfort, for me, comes from hanging around ghosts and misfits.
“Take a left here,” I tell Ray. “Watch this corner. It’s a sharp one. Okay, when you hit the brake, don’t stomp, pump it a little, gently, that’s it.”
We pass a dusty brick building in a field of weeds, the old city-county hospital named for Jefferson Davis. It’s been closed for years. Jagged glass teeth are all that remain of its windows.
Past an Asian grocery, and rows of wooden houses. A hand-lettered sign droops on a dead yellow lawn: “Big Bad Dog.” Hip-hop shouts from open windows. Someone shatters a porch light with a rock; thick laughter cartwheels down the block.
In the near distance, downtown Houston glimmers, peach and amber. A sumpy sulfur smell rises from tall, moist grass and from froggy mudholes exposed to the sky.
“Stay off the shoulder. There’s broken glass up here. That’s it, you’re doing fine.”
“It runs real smooth,” Ray says. “Unc’s Bookmobile is a little hard to handle. No power steering.”
“Guess you’ll have to get a sleek sports car, then, if you’re going to impress the girls.”
He grins.
“You want to try parking?”
“Sure.”
“Pull in over there, where it says Mount Carmel Baptist Church.”
I catch a whiff of pork chops in the air, and fried okra. Ray whips the car into a wide slot between faded yellow lines, and jerks us to a stop.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Remember, pump the brakes.”
We sit with the windows down. In vacant lots west of the church, crickets creak like old wooden doors.
It Takes a Worried Man Page 4
