“—slightly numb. Breathe out. No, keep yourself loose, that’s it.”
“What’s happening?” Henry had asked. “What’s the matter?” Meg hadn’t answered.
How to Decorate Your Kitchen. Ten Ways to Rekindle Your Marriage. Savings Tips.
The black women laughed together.
Henry’s spine went cold.
“Big stretch. You may cramp a little. Okay.”
A low, metallic hum. Suction.
Then Kate was in the room, fishing a Blue Cross card from her purse. She handed it to the receptionist past the glass partition, turned and smiled at Henry. Down the hall, the sucking stopped.
“Kate!” A man had rushed into the clinic. He fast-walked past the couch. Henry tensed. He thought it was Turtleneck. Before he could rise from his chair, the man had grasped Kate’s arm. “Why didn’t you return my calls?”
Kate blushed. “Jesus, Ben—”
Henry, mid-motion, somewhere between sitting and standing, didn’t move.
“What are you doing here?” Kate said.
“What am I—? What do you think? The other night, when you told me you had an appointment, I figured you’d want—” He followed Kate’s eyes to Henry, crouched by the coffeemaker. “Who’s he?” Ben asked.
He was tall, slightly balding, ruddy and athletic. He wore a black, V-necked sweater. The Bastard, Henry thought.
Kate was arguing with him now in raspy, urgent whispers. She looked angry and embarrassed. The black women pointed and laughed. Ben just seemed confused. “But is the baby all right?” he kept saying, and, “Who the hell is he?”
Kate broke away from him, toward the examining rooms. Ben lanced Henry with a glance, then followed. “—is this bullshit?” he yelled.
The receptionist appeared to have vanished. The boy still rocked on the couch. Henry pushed by him. “Kate?” he called. The hallway was deserted.
He poked his head into a room—a cubicle, really. Empty, except for a paper-covered table with stirrups. Henry caught his breath, backed away quickly.
Someone called after him. “Sir? Excuse me, sir—?”
“Kate?” Another empty room. “Kate, are you—” In this one, next to the waiting room, the young woman, Laura, sat on a table staring at a stainless steel tray on a cabinet. She didn’t seem to notice him. Her cotton blouse was wrinkled, her hair pulled back. The overhead light hummed, harsh. Henry stared at the tray. In it, a white fluid membrane, bright with blood.
He felt a hand on his arm. “Sir, please, you have to wait out front.”
A foot floated in the tray, no bigger than an eyelash.
“Sir. Please.”
Laura looked up at him, pale and ill.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The receptionist led him away.
Meg lived now on Swarthmore Street, on a weedy block in an otherwise fashionable area. Soon after kicking Henry out of their apartment, she’d moved. She’d cut her hours at the ad agency to take a part-time media consulting job.
She’d bobbed her hair, lost a little weight, seemed, to Henry, a bit more bosomy now.
Her house was small but decorous. Glass swans on the kitchen table. Cut flowers. A David Hockney photograph.
Henry had a couple of clients considering investing in art. Hockney, he thought. The bastard’s everywhere.
“Cream and sugar?”
He felt a little pang. She’d forgotten already. “Just black,” Henry said.
“The thing is, The Los Angeles Times earns more money in a year than any of the Central American countries it covers. How can you get balanced reporting out of that? I mean, there’s something wrong there, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said.
“I’m telling you, Henry, since taking this new position, I’m learning so much more than I ever dreamed about the media. I’m meeting publishers and editors and TV anchors from both coasts—they all seem to pass through Houston. What about you?”
“I live here, remember?” he said.
“No, I mean what about now? What are you up to?” She sat in the green recliner.
In their recent conversations, her voice had been flattened by the phone. Thank you for choosing American Telegraph and Monotone, Henry thought. She sounded rich now, robust and full of promise.
“I’m in love with a pregnant lady,” he said. His stomach curled. Why had he told her this?
“Yours?”
“No.”
“What is she, then, a charity case?”
He sipped his coffee, with sugar and cream.
“I swear, Henry.” She laughed. “You’re amazing. Always let the other fellow do it, right?”
He tried to laugh with her, to show her there were no hard feelings.
His hand shook, spilling coffee. He felt his face go hot. His feelings were hard. “Damn it, Meg. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
He stood. On his way over, he’d thought of several ways to free the subject, like prying a stone from a dam, but none of them would work. He couldn’t even remember them now. He was too tense. He’d had no practice taking the initiative. “It was my baby too,” he said. “I should’ve had a say.”
Meg blushed. She set her cup down. “Henry …”
“Can you tell me now?”
She looked at him, astonished, for a couple of minutes or more. Her eyes misted. “I did,” she said finally. “I tried to tell you.” The richness in her voice had vanished.
“Only after the fact.” But was that really true? Would a keener man, a man more used to women’s spaces, have discerned more than he had? “God, Meg. I could’ve helped.”
She laughed softly. “You? You, Henry? The kid would’ve been in college before you decided to keep it.”
Henry rubbed his face. “The truth is, Meg, for all your talk about wanting me to do more, you couldn’t step back.” His eyes stung. “It was my baby too.”
She nodded. “Yes. It was.” She started to pour herself more coffee, then set the pot back down. “It wasn’t like me, to be so careless. I was exhausted, that spring, every night after work … what made you realize—?”
He pictured Laura’s face in the clinic. Heard, again, the humming of the ceiling lights: a drizzle of bees. “Was it awful?” he said.
“It’s what I had to do.”
He jammed his hands in his pockets, not knowing what to say.
“For both of us,” she said.
“I understand.” Though he didn’t. Not really. He turned to go.
“Henry? Henry, what about the chair?” She tried to smile. Her face had fallen, like a dark, failed cake. “Aren’t we even going to haggle?”
He stared at the swans on her table. Their necks intertwined. “Take care of yourself, Meg.” He closed the door behind him.
The leaves on the trees outside, in the glare of the streetlamp, made gentling shapes on the walls. Just below the sill, the liquor sign pulsed, purple and green. Kate kissed him. “Happy birthday,” she whispered. She pointed at a dozen pink shoe boxes, stacked together loosely. “Except I’m the one who got gifts. You’re too good to me, Henry.”
“They were a bargain. I had inside info.”
He pulled her to him, in bed. The arc of her belly reminded him of his mother’s old cedar trunk in the back of her closet. As a boy, he’d always wondered what was in it. “You know,” he said softly, “you have to decide.”
Purple. Green. Purple.
She frowned. “I can’t, Henry. Not now. Let’s not talk about it.”
“I want to buy you pumps, more sneakers, high heels, boots—”
She stroked his chin with her thumb. “Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? One step at a time, okay? I swear, I’ve never met a man so certain—”
“I’ve never been so certain,” he said, and he was pretty sure this was true.
“Why now?”
He touched her mouth. “I don’t know. Birthdays. I’m aware of getting old.”
>
“Oh, right.”
He dropped his voice: a gruff John Wayne. “Or maybe, pilgrim, I have the sense that time’s a-wastin’.”
She laughed.
He reached over and put her hand on him.
“God …”
“What?”
“It’s so strange when men get hard. It never ceases to astonish me.”
The leaf-forms on her walls squirmed like little fists. Tomorrow he’d take her to the movie—The Magnificent Seven, her first Western. He’d hold hands with her in the cool, flickering dark. On Saturday, she was meeting Ben for lunch.
Shortly, then, in the baking light of day, she’d have to decide about The Bastard.
Tonight, all he could do was continue to astonish.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
He grasped her shoulders. “I’m thinking, I don’t know how you can resist me.
“I don’t know.” She smiled, smoothed his hair, his brows, his lips. “I really don’t know.”
Tombstone Television
Pedro Alcala died of influenza in November 1922, at the age of three-and-a-half—or so said an overworked general practitioner in the Houston barrio where Pedro’s mother had given birth to him. Two hours after the informal funeral service, Pedro awoke in his coffin. A gravedigger—probably overworked, paid hourly, no doubt, by the city—heard him crying.
He dropped out of school in the eighth grade. He told me this the day I first listened to his story, about a year ago. “Cain’t teach nothing to a dead man,” he said. As a dropout, he hung around movie houses. “The movies was still pretty new back then. Innocent. Flashy lights, sexy ladies. I figgered, whatever problems in the world, the movies can fix ‘em.”
After a tour of duty in Belgium during the Second World War, he returned to Houston and devoted his life to erecting a monument in the boneyard where he’d nearly been buried.
Kewpie dolls, deer figurines, tapestries adorn his dusty grave. He’s even hooked up a portable television in a gruta in the middle of the stone, running a triple-ply cord to an outlet in a nearby mausoleum.
I met him shortly after interring my family in the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery. Car wreck. The groundskeeper had warned me about Pedro (“He’s a little spooky, unnerves our older visitors, but you’ll get used to him”).
After we’d introduced ourselves, and I’d told Pedro what I was doing there (I was standing in the rain that day, clutching a dozen roses), he asked about my “people.” “Was it their time to go?”
“Is it ever time to go?” I answered. “I mean, really?” And that’s the last we’ve spoken of my family.
“So you live here?” I asked him, incredulously.
He looked at me equally strangely. “Where do you think you’re going to end up, man? I’m just saving a little time.”
This afternoon he’s sitting on his mound, watching Wheel of Fortune.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey. You look beat, bud.” He wears thin black jeans, an old pair of sneakers, and a white cotton shirt, sparsely buttoned.
“Fending off creditors,” I admit. “How ‘bout you? What’s up?”
“Got me some angel hair and some Christmas lights.” He shows me a box. “River Oaks bitch tossed ’em in the trash. Don’t know if the lights’ll work. Thought I’d string ’em up around the TV”
“You getting enough to eat?”
“Tell you what I need, man’s, a can opener.” He lifts a can of pork and beans out of a soft paper sack. “Shit don’t do me no good like this. Snapped my knife on one the other day.”
“All right, I’ll fix you up next time. Do you have enough blankets?”
“Yeah. This chick kills me.” He points to the screen.
“Pretty,” I say.
Pedro looks at me slyly. “You gettin’ any, George? You lookin’ mighty antsy to me.”
He thinks women are the only worries a “youngster” like me could possibly carry (I’m forty-three).
Once, I asked him if he’d ever had a family of his own. “Oh well. Yeah. Guess I did,” he admitted finally, scratching his ear. “Couple of kids.”
“Where are they?”
“All I know is, they ain’t here no more, and neither is their mother.”
Now, he coughs into his hands.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Refinery smoke,” he wheezes, sniffing the air. “Pisser today. It’ll pass.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right, man.” I slap his knee. “I’ll bring you a can opener soon.”
On the television, a housewife from Gainesville, Florida, wins ten thousand dollars and a car.
“Watch yourself,” I say.
“Hey, ain’t no harm come to a man what’s already dead.”
For three years now I’ve worked at a local newspaper, moving up from obits and fillers to small features, community service items, neighborhood histories, other invisible stuff. I’m still paying off my family’s funeral expenses, falling farther and farther behind on my bills.
It just so happens, the day I went to buy Pedro a can opener, a small fire broke out in a shirt factory behind the supermarket. I stood in the parking lot with the other happy shoppers watching firemen scurry up ladders (I’ve noticed disaster makes people pretty happy, if they’re not directly involved in it). I hadn’t known a shirt factory existed at that spot, and I began to ask around. Were there other sweatshops in the area around the cemetery?
The manager of a nearby noodle factory, a middle-aged Chinese man who’d once worked at a button plant on a side street just off West Gray, said, “Sure. All around us. What you look for, you look for steamed-up windows, especially on hot days when the windows should be open. Boarded-up places with a little steam spitting through their cracks—yessiree. Dead give-away.”
After that, I saw the nailed boards and the tell-tale plumes everywhere I looked: above icehouses, shoe stores, auto parts suppliers. Next to the Bluebird Circle Shop and St. Vincent de Paul. I made notes and developed contacts on the street, like a real investigative reporter. I wanted to slip, like a spy, inside the scene of a crime, win a Pulitzer, the love of a good woman, and pull a whole new family around me.
“Pedro, you ever work in a sweatshop?”
On his television, a jumpy young weatherman says, “Cooler.”
“Sure, me and all my friends did. Back in the thirties—”
“You were a kid in the thirties.”
“A workin’ kid, jack. Folks’d kill you for a dime, those days. I ‘member these cardboard signs in the shop, all over the walls, ‘No Home Work.’ Meant we couldn’t take the cloth home and sew on it there. Ever’thing had to be done in the shop. It’s a big joke ‘cause none of us, not even the adults, could afford to have a sewin’ machine at home.” He laughs.
“I get the impression nothing much has changed here, over the years.”
From where we’re sitting, in the northeast corner of the graveyard, we can see the Texas Commerce Bank building downtown, seventy-five stories, a correlated diamond pattern of rose and Barre granite. Its streaky windows blaze like tungsten bulbs.
“Poor folks still gotta work they asses off. That much hasn’t changed,” Pedro agrees. “But a whole lot else is differ’nt. Don’t kid yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I ‘member ‘Whites Only’ signs in the Weingarten’s store over on Almeda Street. Dig? I ‘member black folks comin’ to Messkins like me in the sweatshops, real polite-like, and askin’ us to join ‘em in the sit-ins at the lunch counters. ‘You ain’t white, neither,’ they’d tell us, and they was right.”
“Did you do a lunch counter?”
“Oh sure. The Texas Southern students, smart little whips from the law school over there, they led the charge. Brave fellas. But it was baseball finally broke the color line in Houston.”
I hadn’t heard this before. “How?”
“They wasn’t any Maj
or League teams in the South, see, till long about 1960 or so,” Pedro says. “When the Buffs started up here—later they’s the Colt 45s and finally the Astros, that’s when they’d forgot how to hit the damn ball—anyways, when other teams come down to play ‘em, what was the city gonna do? You couldn’t put a made guy like Willie Mays up in a segregated hotel, now could you? Make Houston look bad, ’specially to all them fancy-pantsed Northerners.”
Busted shoes, cigarette lighters, condoms, and pantyhose float down the bayou, past Pedro’s grave.
“I’ll tell you another way the city’s changed.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s going to hell.”
“How?”
“I know it, watchin’ the funerals here. Gettin’ cheaper. Shabby damn boxes, no handles to carry ‘em with. Might as well be wrappin’ these poor motherfuckers in tinfoil. You know. Birds Eye.” He coughs.
“Man, I don’t like the sound of that,” I say.
“It’ll pass.”
“You got to keep breathing for me, Pedro. You have too many stories to tell.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m gone, the history of this poor ol’ neighborhood’s gone.”
One of my street contacts pointed out to me a Mr. Ho, the manager of the shirt factory. I caught him one morning on the wooden steps leading to the only entrance I could see into the building, a door the size of an NFL linebacker covered with steel sheeting. Mr. Ho wouldn’t speak to me at first. But I cracked him, finally, with my repeated use of the word “sweatshop.”
“Is not a sweatshop,” he insisted.
“What do you call it, then?”
“Garment factory. Is a garment factory.” He scratched his pale nose. His eyes flicked back and forth with the speed of two hummingbirds.
“On the street I’ve heard rumors that half your employees are underage,” I said. “Is that true?”
“Is not true.”
“Can you prove that? Will you give me a tour?”
“No tour.”
“What’s your pay scale?”
“Very good. Very competitive.”
“Not what I heard.”
“What you heard?”
It Takes a Worried Man Page 11
