by Luis Urrea
“So?”
“So you’re going to look at it.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are. You’re going to look at it.”
“No.”
Hugo has a habit of always speaking English to me. For some reason, I insist on speaking Spanish to him. I’m not sure what it is we’re trying to convince each other of.
“It’s up to you,” he says. “He’s all banged up. You’ve got to decide if it’s an open casket or not. That’s what he’d want. Come on.”
His grip is bony as a talon as he pulls me into the little room. The casket is on a stone bench, about three feet off the ground. Mexican floral arrangements have begun to surround the coffin: horseshoes on stands, wreaths, all of them draped in faux-satin sashes with family names and condolences written across them in glue and glitter. They look like entrants in a retirement-home flower-arranging contest, or good luck displays at a high school reunion.
Hugo uses his pocketknife to unscrew the lid. The screw rises, rises, interminably coming up until it wiggles loose and he says, “Look,” and I put my hands on the lid and wait. “Go on,” he says. I resent his manliness more than anything on earth at that instant, then I lift the lid. For some reason, I hold my breath, like my father is going to smell. But he’s encased in glass. In fact, he probably does smell—he’s been dead now for two days with no embalming. Many Mexican funeral homes just clamp a sheet of glass over the body to prevent any problems, and you look down at them as though you were in a glass-bottomed boat, drifting across the shoals of Hell. It’s alarming. You think, He can’t breathe in there.
I look in. He’s small as a ten-year-old boy in a faded brown photograph. He’s unimaginably sad, his lips turned a little around his injured mouth, looking as though he’s about to say a word that begins with m. I stare down at my father, my only father, and my breath fogs the glass and steals his face.
Open wounds turn black after death.
“Close it,” I say.
Hugo shuts the lid gently.
“Don’t screw it down,” I say. “He wouldn’t want people to see him like that, but I think they have a right to say good-bye, if they want to. So they can lift the lid for themselves.”
It is my first decision as a grown man.
“Good,” Hugo says. “That’s the right choice.”
Upstairs, my brother Juan is waiting for me. The others stand behind him.
“There’s a problem,” he says.
“What problem?”
“We owe some money,” he says, “for the body.”
“We what?”
A pleasant short man steps up. He has a tan police uniform, but no badge or gun. He’s a lackey for the San Luis Río Colorado cops.
“I brought the body,” he says.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
“They said to tell you,” he glances away, “that the body is still in custody.”
We all look at each other, eyes clicking in steady sweeps of all the faces.
“You’re kidding,” I say.
“No, señor,” he says. “The police department still has possession of your father. I have been instructed to ask you for the fee to release him to you.”
“You want me to pay bail for a corpse?”
The man is uncomfortable. He says nothing.
“How did my father come here?”
“In my station wagon.”
“I see.”
This whole scene is so bizarre that I don’t know how to respond. There’s no one to ask what to do. My brothers just stand there. Hugo is as inscrutable as a stone carving. I reach into my pocket.
“How much?”
“Seven hundred and fifty dollars, American.”
I pull out the wet bills and count out eight hundred dollars. He hands me fifty back in change. He smiles. Everybody’s relieved. He shakes all our hands. He tells me it’s sad, what happened, and how hard it is for all of us when these things befall us.
The funeral director steps up. He’s unctuous, in a suit and hair oil and cologne. His workers are short Indian men in tan work clothes. It’s like an optical illusion: the police toady steps away and three reflections of him appear in his absence.
I still have the change in my hand. He starts in—tragic losses, at rest now, gone to glory, deepest sympathies—but there is the small matter of the funeral costs.
“How much?” I say.
“Five hundred and fifty dollars,” he says. “Unfortunately.”
I hand him my change.
“We’ll come up with the rest,” one of my brothers says.
“We’ll take up a collection,” says another.
On our way back downstairs, Hugo says, “So much for your present.”
I am so confused, I want to cry. I cannot. For years afterward, I will try to cry and be unable to. On some nights, I will take spit on the tips of my fingers and draw tears down my cheeks, trying to find relief.
———
We Mexicans wake the dead. We give wakes to the dead. Hugo and I agree that my shift will be at around two in the morning. He leads me to my father’s room and goes off to bed. My aunt still shares a room with her mother. I can hear the women in there, snoring. The sounds of Tijuana carry up the hills, somehow different from the sounds of the United States. The dogs, the car horns, the traffic rumble, the whistles, the trumpets are all in a different language. Their pitch and timbre are as distinctive as is Chinese, or Russian. Or Spanish.
I sit in my father’s room, listening. All that noise, and the whole world dead. His pillow is still streaked with his hair pomade—he wore it trim, short, combed straight back off his forehead, always as slick as Jerry Lewis’. I can’t sleep in his bed. Everything smells like him. I am naked. I am unbelievably aroused. All I can think about is sex. I keep hoping the family’s cleaning woman will wake up and come to my room. I want to eat, make love, climb a mountain, have a fìstfìght. I talk to Jesus. I sit in the middle of the floor and sift through layers of paper: report cards, citations, letters from women in Sinaloa, divorce papers, poems, tax forms, INS papers, bowling certificates, sheets with numbers on them, military records, a letter from the president of Mexico. Silverfish and roaches come forth from my father’s pages, where they have lived safely, eating his past.
I pull the string attached to the bare bulb above my head. The dark claps shut around me. Years later, it seems, Hugo speaks from the greater darkness of the doorway.
“It’s time.”
I get dressed.
We go to his truck.
Everything’s quiet. You can even hear crickets. He starts up, puts it in gear. We drive down the dark hill. Everybody’s lights are out as we descend.
“God damn it,” Hugo finally says. “It’s not fair.”
He drops me off at the door.
“See you in the afternoon,” he says. “All right.”
“Somebody will be by in a few hours,” he says.
“All right.”
He drives away. I step inside. It’s bright, pleasant. Old carpets have loops tugged loose. Inexplicably, there is an electric clock with a soft-drink logo on it. Chapel A has a forgotten casket in it. My father waits in Chapel B.
It’s a dull little room with dull little drapes at the end. There are about eight rows of pews. A plywood lectern stands before the raised coffin. And there are all those flowers. Their colors are basically white and carmine beneath the fluorescent lights; the greens look like rubber.
I try sitting in a pew, looking at the coffin. It looks like a gigantic throat lozenge. I prowl the building. Periodically, the Indian men come downstairs. They apparently sleep up there, because their hair is in disarray and their eyes are red and puffy. “Do you want some coffee?” they ask.
“No thank you.”
“Coke? Water?”
“No, I’m fine.”
They nod, go back up. Occasionally, one will pat my elbow.
I lift the curtains from the wall and look be
hind them. There is a door near the head of the coffin. I open it. I step into a small parking area behind the funeral home. A dark station wagon is crunching in on the gravel, backing up to a wooden chute that runs down at an angle from the second floor. One of the workers steps out. He and the driver exchange murmurs. They open the back and pull a figure out by its feet. A motor begins to whirr. They wrestle the drooping corpse in its shroud into the chute. Apparently, there is a conveyer belt inside. The body rises and seems to float, going up to the sky, feet-first.
I step back inside and close the door.
I lift the lid on my father. I can count the tiny white whiskers growing in the blackness of his chin and throat. Stains smaller than dimes dot the front of his shirt—stains he would have never allowed in life. One of my sisters wants him dressed in a jacket. A funeral-parlor worker tells me they’ll have to go at my father’s arms with a mallet to get them loose enough to put the coat on him. Nobody else knows. He wants to make sure I understand. I do. “What does it matter now?” is what I say.
I go to my pew again.
I wait.
A woman who is notorious as a “bad girl” in our family comes in silently. It is nearly four A.M. She is with a florid American. Her hair is as huge as Tina Turner’s, her eyes surrounded by hedges of lashes. She seems startled to see me, caught.
“Come in,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
It turns out she didn’t want to make any scandal, just to pay her respects privately.
The American hangs around at the back of the room. When I nod at him, he says, “ ‘Zit goin’?”
Inanely, I say, “Pretty good.”
She sits with me. She says, “He was always kind to me.”
“He loved you,” I say.
I am in love with her. I look at the tiniest of wrinkles beside her mouth, I smell her musky perfume and look at her dangerous nails and tight skirt, and I think I will marry her on the spot. She is the only person in the world who is alive with me at that moment. I smell her, sit close to her. We hold hands.
“I’m not what they think,” she says.
She kisses me. Gets up to leave. Says, “Can I see him?”
I let her go up there alone. She opens the box, looks down at him. The muscles in her legs clench tight as fists. She speaks softly. She lowers the lid. When she comes back, she is crying.
“Good-bye,” she says.
I nod. The American says, “Take it easy.” They walk out the door. I can smell her all over the room.
My father was a big stud. Though he was five seven, you thought he was six feet tall. My mother chased him out of the house when I was about twelve. He was probably the first Mexican to ever rub shoulders with the neighbors on our suburban San Diego street. They weren’t that crazy about it. Neither was he.
One day, the lady from across the street came over and told my mother that he was seeing a string of women while she was at work. The neighbor wanted to know if they were prostitutes, or what. That was it for my mother. He left in disgrace, and they never spoke to each other again. When he came by the house to see me, she hid in her room, wanting him to think she was gone.
Every Friday night, we went to the Tu-Vu drive-in to watch movies and eat hot dogs.
———
All these memories come at me, and I wait. I try to sleep—on the pew, on the floor. I can’t. I wait all morning. Finally, around two or three in the afternoon, people start to show up at the funeral home. I’ve been waiting with my father for twelve hours. I’m eager to get it over with.
People shuffle in, avert their eyes. Half-hearted embraces happen all over the room, everybody avoiding the embarrassment of the coffin. My sisters go up and look. A Mexican Pentecostal evangelist takes the podium and begins to harangue us. It’s a pattern I have begun to notice at funerals lately: the preacher takes countless cheap shots at the crowd, which is presumably softened up by the recent death and is busy hoping it won’t be next. I feel disinterested. Lack of sleep and hunger has made the insides of my ears feel swollen.
We drag my father off to a dismal little hillside cemetery. He takes his last car ride nestled in pointless plushness; satin pillows cradle him inside the darkness of the box. The hearse is muted and stately. We are led by my uncle, Carlos Urrea, heroic motorcycle cop in the stunning Tijuana uniform. Cars stop and wait for us to drive by. Inside, people are watching the procession, saying There goes the dead guy through the glass.
On the hill, his box descends. I back away, then turn around. I watch clouds, heavy as trucks, driving across Tijuana.
When the death certificate comes, it says my father died of a stroke. The insurance company will not pay us a cent, since auto coverage is for car wrecks. They insist on proof.
Hugo goes back to San Luis Río Colorado. He enters the police compound and finds my father’s car. It’s beat to hell—the tires are twisted, the roof collapsed. He shoots a roll of film, then comes home unscathed.
“Somebody killed Papa,” he says. “I know it.”
I look at the pictures.
“One side of the car’s all bashed in,” he says. “There’s black and white paint on the door.”
“So?”
“Cops. They chased him and ran him off the road. Where would he get black and white paint on a red car that crashed out in the desert?”
I don’t know—it sounds far-fetched, then it doesn’t. Mexican relatives tell me I’m crazy. They tell me to deal with reality. My uncle tells me the authorities wouldn’t behave in such a manner.
Since we buried my father, his mother has died. Hugo called me one morning and said, “You know Grandma? She’s dead.”
My own mother is trapped in a financial catastrophe that continues to deepen. Within three years of my father’s death, she is living in a house without heat, without plumbing in the kitchen, with broken plumbing in the bathroom, and without a stove or oven. She cooks on a hot plate.
Months later, Hugo shuffles through his pictures. The car looks red as blood. It looks, at turns, vast and minuscule. I stare at the crooked seats and see my own ghosts and memories, my own hundreds of miles sitting right there.
I can’t get my eyes off the roof of the car. It’s bent down. All the windows are broken. Hugo is right. There’s black and white paint smashed into the passenger door. Or are they simply scrapes?
We send the photographs to the insurance company, and we contact the American consulate for help in investigating the accident. The insurer returns the photos and refuses to pay us a settlement, suggesting the pictures could have been taken after my father died from his stroke. Besides, they tell us, there’s no proof that it’s even his car.
We are again denied the settlement.
The consul contacts me a few days later. After a full investigation into the death of my father, the facts seem to indicate that there can be no investigation of the death of my father. In the months subsequent to his death, the entire police force of San Luis Rio Colorado has apparently retired. No officer can be found who was on active duty at the time of the accident, and since the ones who were on duty have retired and left San Luis to enjoy their leisure time, there is no one to talk to. The case is closed. Official cause of death: stroke.
In a final act of desperation, I write to the chief of police of the town. Hugo, when he hears about it, says, “Hey. You’d better not go to San Luis. Ever.” He laughs.
An answer comes: the chief calls me on the phone. Or he claims to be the police chief. I realize now, he could have been anyone. In response to my inquiry, he says, he has only one thing to say. And I should remember this thing, I should take it to heart. “It is over, Sr. Urrea,” he tells me. “It is better for all of us that you forget it and move on with your life. It is better for all of us,” he says, “if there was no accident. Am I clear? There was no accident.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “You are extremely, perfectly, clear.”
“Good,” he says. Then “Good” again.
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He hangs up the phone so quietly, there isn’t even a click.
Within a month of my final conversation with the police, I receive an envelope in the mail. It is from the head office of the chief of municipal police of San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora. The information is printed on the envelope with various official swirls of ink and a seal of some sort. I expect it’s a letter, but it’s not.
I find instead a bill on flimsy paper. The bill is requesting the immediate payment of twelve hundred dollars in American currency. This sum will cover, in full, the damages my father caused to city property on the date of January 10, 1977. There is no mention of how these damages came about. When people ask me, I make a joke out of it. I tell them, I don’t know—maybe he fell out of bed really hard. Nobody laughs but me.
EPILOGUE:
CHRISTMAS STORY
Years later, I returned to duty. I thought I had escaped Tijuana for good, but I should have known. Tijuana is the place from which you never get away.
I’d been away. I escaped the Borderlands in 1982, called to teach in the Expository Writing program at Harvard. There, I met and married my wife. Back in San Diego, however, my mother died. We were left with a decision about what to do with the home I’d grown up in. Ultimately, I couldn’t bear to see it sold, so we packed up and moved west in the summer of 1990.
Still, I was not going back to Tijuana. I gave Von a wide berth, leaving him messages on his office door but not daring to show my face. Things worked out well that way: the poor stayed in Tijuana, and I stayed in San Diego. But then Christmas came, full of strange and wonderful events. I was lucky enough to watch the unlikely series of occurrences take place, to see San Diego and Tijuana join hands for the slightest instant. Things moved like a river, and they carried many of us to places we never imagined we’d reach. This is a chronicle of those events.
When we arrived in California, we were out of money. I had written a few things, hoping to earn some. Among them were several pieces about the border. Fortunately for us, the first place I submitted them was San Diego’s alternative weekly, the Reader. I thought nobody would care. The Reader had a surprise in store for me.
