“Where are we?” Ray asks.
“The Fourth Ward. Freedmen’s Town.”
“Looks like it’s seen better days.”
“Yeah. It used to be the heart and soul of black Houston,” I say. “Then the city ran a freeway through here and chopped it all up.”
Ray wipes his eyes.
“Hey. What is it, Ray?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Palmer, I’m just—”
“You did great. Really. Don’t worry about the brakes—”
“No,” he says. “It’s not that. It’s … looking around here, at all this …”
“Tell me.”
He sighs. “For six months, my mom and me, we’ve been anxious about my dad, you know? It’s the first time someone close to me has been real sick, the first time I’ve had to think about someone I love maybe dying. It scares the hell out of me.”
“I know.”
“But it’s more than just my dad. I mean, sometimes lately, I feel sorry for myself because I’m going to kick off someday, too. I knew that, of course, but …”
“It’s real for you now in ways it wasn’t before?”
“Yeah. And now I see … parts of whole cities can die too, can’t they?”
Horns blare down the street. Squealing tires. I smile at the boy. “You’ve got to cruise with the changes, Ray. That’s all you can do.”
He’s nodding. His foot taps the floor, by the brake.
“Hell, you know this.” What would a good father tell him? “I haven’t figured it out, myself.”
He looks at me, poised, handsome—too young to feel this bad.
Watching his leg, I feel for a moment my own foot, again, slamming down hard—the sickening slide, the smoke of rubber, the glance into the rearview, and Jean’s anxious eyes—“Well. What do you say? Another spin around the block?”
“No thanks, Mr. Palmer.” He rubs his cheeks. “That’s enough for tonight.”
“All right. You’re going to be a fine driver, Ray.”
“Thanks. Thanks for your help.”
We change places. I take the wheel and head us out.
12.
I still meet the Thuots once a week. Their oldest son, Kim—sixteen, and with a good command of English—turned in one of the job applications I’d brought and got a cashiering spot at a Circle K convenience store. Last Wednesday, the Thuots spent his first check on roast duck and rice, and invited me to dinner.
I toasted them with a bottle of cheap Italian wine I’d bought. In Tuscan folklore, I told them, water’s linked to filth (pissing) while alcohol, fa buon sange, makes for good blood. They liked that.
I brought them some shrimp from Water Under the Bridge. “And,” I said, “you won the raffle at Cal’s Bookstore.”
“The what?” asked Mrs. Thuot.
“The raffle. Free gifts.”
“My goodness. How?”
“I filled out the entry form for you. Here.” I handed Mr. Thuot the books Cal had given me to deliver. Cal was furious. He’d hoped a regular customer would be hooked into spending hundreds of dollars in the store. Worried about his competition—the encroaching chain stores—he wasn’t in the mood to let the Thuots come in and choose their own prizes. “What do they care? Do they even read? Just give them these.”
Now Mr. Thuot stared, confused, at a deck-repair manual, a shipbuilder’s guide, The Bra Book, and Mamie Eisenhower.
The family unpacked its gongs. We rang them several times, to celebrate Kim’s good fortune. I gave him six free passes to the Shamrock.
“The children,” said Mr. Thuot. “May their skies be high, yes?”
We filled our cups to the brim.
Tonight, birthday candles in paper lantern shells float down the bayou at dusk: a Festival of Lights—“The Bayou Beckons,” the city calls it, a celebration, in part, of Fiestas Patrias, Mexico’s Independence Day, and a remembrance of families who died in Hiroshima (each flickering flame in the mist a token of loss).
Flowers and wooden crosses mark Chatito’s drowning, Roberto’s disappearance.
Mariachi music echoes in the trees. Fireworks break like eggs against the sky. Gritos—shouts of independence—carry on the hot breeze. Elsewhere, Asian priests ask children to send their thoughts to Heaven, to those who once wore cloaks of fire.
A young Japanese couple cuddles in the grass. The woman is pregnant. Watching them, I remember an old Ashanti folktale. In the beginning women bore no children. One day a python asked a man and woman who came to bathe in his river if they had any offspring. “No,” they replied unhappily. “Bring your friends to my woods,” the python instructed them. “I’ll make the women conceive.” The couple did as they were told. When the people had gathered, the snake said, “Each couple must stand toe to toe.” He slithered into the river and drew a mouthful of water. Then he sprayed the water on the bellies of all the men and women and told them to lie together that night in warm leaf-beds on the ground. In nine months the women conceived. The world knew birth and desire.
I scramble down a steep, dusty bank. Coors cans rust in the mud. Condoms. Cigarette butts. The lapping and sucking of water meeting land. Separate worlds. I toss a stone into the river. It makes a sound like a voice almost decipherable to me, from a realm beyond my own.
Another stone, another voice. Then another and another. I’ve started a whole conversation. A boisterous family.
I confess: hauntings are a weakness of mine.
Jean. Now Lira. Chatito and Roberto.
“Where are you?” I whisper. Reeds rattle like maracas.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Julio told me last year, in one of our earliest interviews, “but I pray to God each night they’ll leave us the hell alone.”
A lump of moss, dark green and blue, as long as a woman’s gown, wraps a broken limb in the stream. Every American city claims some version of the “disappearing woman.” It’s a common folktale.
A beautiful hitchhiker in a satin dress, pacing the shore of a lake.
A disheveled young girl near a river, needing help.
Wet dreams.
Pick her up, and she’ll give you her address. On the way home, she fades, leaving only a trace of moisture in your car. When you reach her street, you find the ruins of a stately mansion where people died long ago. Or you find nothing at all.
South Ruthven Street is deserted this late at night. Quiet. Pretty, lined with elms. I used to come here every evening, regular as a rhyme. Then I joined Little Vegas after work, dealing cards, hoping to starve my grief.
“One of my families is in trouble,” I tell my father’s chiseled name. His headstone is chilly, gray. The cemetery smells of mint and wild onion. Frogs chirp in the bayou by the road. “I don’t know what to do about it. I just … needed to tell you.”
Some flying creature—a misguided bird, a bat—flitters in the trees.
Greasy paper plates have been blown against the stones. Napkins, cups. The Day of the Dead. I’ve missed it. Families must have been here, sharing meals with their lost ones. A candle in a cracked glass container, painted with the Virgin of Guadalupe, tilts on a circle of fresh dirt next to three or four paper-wrapped roses and a handful of yellow marigolds.
I say hello to my mother, stored neatly here like a small, brittle ornament.
Twigs litter Jean’s mound. I whisper her name. Touch my cheek. “People need so much, don’t they?” I kneel in the dirt.
Given the chance, later, we would have kissed and made up. I know it. We always did.
“Isn’t that right?” I say.
Just a simple family matter.
One of those things.
“I’m sorry, Jean.” Dried apple leaves crackle in the grass, from my last visit when I left them for her. “I’m so sorry.”
For the first time since the funerals, I weep.
13.
“Draw. Nothing wild.” I’m dealing a fresh pack.
“See you, raise a dollar.”
“I’ll take th
ree.”
“One.”
“Dealer needs two.”
Ray circles Loop 610. We’re in Cal’s Bookmobile, gliding on the freeway in a glass-bottomed boat.
“Cal, man, I’m so happy we let you in,” Tony says. “This is the way to play!”
Cal grins. “Glad I could add a little zest. Keep moving, Ray. You’re doing just fine.”
“Which way, Unc?”
“Any way. Just drive.”
Houston, perched precariously on a gumbo of cracked soil and dry red clay, erupts in blue and green, tan and white. L-shapes, quarried stone (granite, marble, basalt), recessed windows, enclosed crosswalks, circles, triangles, squares—fissures into which people wedge their sighing bodies, moving up and down or deep underground, whispering, laughing, lying.
“Low spade splits the pot.”
“Six and ten, no help …”
Eighty bucks in the hole, I fold early and slide up front, with Ray. “Cal paying you for this gig?”
“Naw. I need the practice.”
He’s a pretty good driver, though he still takes his curves too fast. “How’s your dad?”
“Home now, where my mom can look after him. That makes them both happy, but he’s still pretty sick.”
One thing about families: beyond a certain point, I’ve learned, there’s nothing you can do for them.
Kim Thuot, counting nickels in his store.
Julio Zamora, waiting to be deported. Scott found out he was apprehended yesterday along with a family named Muñoz, with whom he’d been hiding in a house somewhere in the Fifth Ward. The cops caught him trying to break into his old place and cart off the washer and dryer.
I haven’t been able to speak to him or the kids—I miss, most, my little web-slinger—and may not get a chance to see them before they leave.
Lira has been transferred to solitary confinement in a women’s unit up near Huntsville.
In the bayou, I’ve read, divers have discovered a female manatee, a dolphin, a red-bellied pacu—a native of South America, related to piranhas—an octopus, an armored catfish, a school of mullet, a Rio Grande perch .
No Roberto.
Take me home, please. But I’m frightened I’ll disappear before we get there.
“Got it!” Tony waves his cards. “Full house!”
Startled, Ray turns to look. He nearly swerves off the road. “Whoa,” I say, reaching over and steadying the wheel for him.
The men razz him.
He blushes. “Where should I go?” he says. “I’m running out of ideas.”
“Try a left,” I say.
Tony’s still laughing.
“Here?”
I nod. “You’re doing just fine.” The city looks splendid. We’re heading east now. With any luck, we’ll see the sun rise.
A Worried Song after Work
The first wrong thing was my Merle Haggard tape. I knew it the minute Missy slid into my pickup. The pickup itself might have been wrong. I mean, in her neighborhood, most trucks were as welcome, probably, as killer bees, but she seemed to find my Ranger cute, if not exactly sexy. It’s clean and black and polished up so it grabs you like the glare of an eagle—even the stuffed bald eagle in the American Legion Hall, where the timber workers’ local used to hold its meetings.
Her thighs hissed across the seat in my cab; her skirt was as dark as my truck and shorter than a Teamster’s patience. She flickered a smile, then scowled when Merle burst through the speakers, telling his bosses they could shove their retirement and so-called social security.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Merle.”
She nodded. Wrong Thing Number Two: I’d missed the tone of her voice. Her question (I figured later) was really a way of saying Turn the damn thing off.
Strike Three: “Listen, I got an urgent call about half an hour ago. I have to make a quick stop before we go to dinner. Is that okay with you?”
She fingered one of her amber earrings in a serious and concentrated way that meant she was annoyed. Even I could see that. She was getting less subtle, and we’d only been together two minutes. “Stop for what?” she said.
“Some guys are having a meeting. They need me to say a few words to them. It won’t take long.”
“Will we have time to eat and still make the movie?”
“Oh sure, sure.” I glanced, a little worried, at my watch.
Now she started jerking a curl of her hair behind her tiny left ear, hair that looked like a wig, it was so satiny and blonde and bigger-than-life, but you could smell the summer dampness of her all the way through it.
“Maisie said you were a lawyer.” I was beginning to catch on. She meant: What the hell are you doing listening to these bozo tunes and going to meetings after work!
“A labor lawyer, right.”
A sprinkle of sweat dribbled across her forehead and dissolved in her perky right eyebrow. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to know any more about me. The date was over already.
I had her figured like this: she thought she’d lost the Friendly Skies and entered the Hick Zone, instead, the minute her first-class cabin hit Texas air space.
I knew she worked as a programming director for some Hot Rock radio station in Minneapolis. When she got two weeks off, she decided to visit her cousin Maisie, whom she hadn’t seen since they were little. Maisie’s an old pal of mine from law school; I was desperate enough to accept when she suggested fixing me up with her cuz.
As we passed through the rusty warehouse district on the outskirts of the Ship Channel, with its acrid fish and petroleum smells, Missy’s eyebrows jumped even higher. Merle slurred songs about pot smokers, big cities, prison wardens.
I love Merle. The man knows his stuff.
The whole time, Missy’s lips stayed Ziplocked. I could only guess the vile things she thought about my taste. I wasn’t like Maisie. I hadn’t gone the glamorous route, with rich divorce cases and property settlements. I didn’t make the kind of money that got me into restaurants called maisons or poissons or whatever the hell they are. Clearly, Missy had expected someone else. Her pissiness unsettled me, but in the meantime I was happy with her hair.
The meeting has already started by the time we arrive at the storage house, near the docks. From several yards away, the building smells of bananas and other old fruit, maybe of some kind of pesticide, tart and acidic. Joe France, a big man with skinny legs (he wears a pair of tattered, cutoff Levi’s stiff with grease), stands watch at the door. He winks at me, tugging on the frayed orange bill of his Astros cap, and Missy and I slip inside.
“—too high, they’re just too damn high!” Glenn Golding is yelling at Hughie Clark, who is standing on a strawberry crate in a dark corner of the room.
“Glenn, goddammit, I’ve told you, it’s not about the dues,” Hughie shoots back. “It’s the voting rights we gotta concentrate on. You get it? Priorities.”
“Yeah, well, my priority is eggs and bacon for my wife and kids in the morning,” Glenn says. A few men mutter agreement behind him. “If I’m paying out my ass each month to the union—”
“If you get your voting rights back, you can vote to slash the cockamamie dues!” Hughie says. His hair is a pale, indistinct color, like gum that’s been chewed too long.
Maybe fifty men are scattered throughout the building, a mix of old and young: thick, thready-armed guys, the weekend-hunter types in red-checked shirts, smelling of Old Spice and Skoal; then the hippies with their tie-dyes, their ponytails swinging out from under oily Peterbilt caps.
The heat is enough to knock you flat. Missy sort of folds in on herself against the corrugated steel of the wall, like a notebook slamming shut. I catch Hughie’s eye and give him a nod.
“Good. Hal’s here,” he says. “He can straighten this out.” He steps to the floor and offers me his crate.
When I went to law school in ‘82—I was twenty-eight, full of pluck the brisk spring morning I enrolled at the University of Housto
n—I dreamed of addressing large crowds on matters of justice and fairness and hope. What I spend my time doing, instead, is showing up at sweltering old buildings like this, trying to persuade defeated men not to take their losses so hard. Of course, I never put it that way. I use the words “hope” and “justice,” but then so does the President, and these fellows were savvy enough to tune him out a long time ago.
In ‘82, bad as things were, none of us figured American labor would end up this flat on its ass.
When I take the crate, turn and see Missy, wilted and angry next to the door, I feel, even more than usual, the tin cup full of ashes I call my career swirling around in my belly.
I want to tell the men, “Go out, get drunk, and laugh, boys. That’s all you’ve got. I’m all out of answers.” But I don’t. I stand up straight, smooth the sleeves of my T-shirt. Wrinkled blue numbers tumble down the front. “You want results?” I ask.
The men all nod. Either that, or they’re shaking the sweat from their hair. One old fellow waves his arms, thin and wan.
“We’re going to get results! This is a fine local, and the union leadership ought to be proud of it. This little glitch—it’s nothing, it’s piss water. Don’t worry about it.”
“But what are you going to do?” someone says.
Leap at the raggedy moon. Stop a speeding bullet with my teeth. Raise old Lazarus from the dead, treat him to a Happy Meal at the nearest Mickey D’s. And all on minimum wage.
“I’m going to meet with the leadership on Monday.”
Hughie’s shaking his head.
Missy looks like she might throw up on her shoes. Her hair has fallen at least an inch.
“I’ll get your dues lowered,” I promise.
“It’s not about the money!“ Hughie erupts.
“I know,” I say. “But Hughie, man, one step at a time. Slow and easy. Play it smart.” Even I’m starting to tune me out. “If we limit the amount of cash the leadership gets each month, the rest of what you’re after will follow.”
“We’ve tried that!” a young man yells from the back. He’s standing next to a bright-yellow forklift with an empty box in its arms. His hip is cocked, his hands loose and meaty by his pockets: a rough, don’t-fuck-with-me stance, volatile, precise. “Didn’t do doodley-squat!”
It Takes a Worried Man Page 5
