“Thank you, Señora Zaragoza. Gracias, gracias, gracias,” Petra cries.
“Claro, señora. Bueno, let’s all get in a circle.” The family gathers and Xitlali has them clasp hands. Do they know any of this? Is it better for the little ones to not know? Perhaps if you don’t believe in these things, they have less power over you. Maybe it’s best if my kind die out. Ay, mija . . . maybe you were right.
Xitlali recites the prayer: “May God bless this house, la Virgen ayúdanos, porfa, forever and always, con safos, safos, safos.” She tells Señora Ruiz how to purify the trailer with sage, hierba santa, and rosemary, every day, for as long as they have to live there.
Señora Ruiz signs the standard form for purification services and pays the bill in cash. “Gracias, gracias, curandera. If it weren’t so late, I’d invite you in for café.”
“’Sta bien. Take care of your hijas. Their fear only provides more dark energy for evil spirits. Love them. Dales todo.”
“Claro que sí.”
In her car, Xitlali watches the Ruiz family walk back into the trailer, one by one. She wonders if they will be safe.
Her gente, spreading into spaces where they weren’t allowed before. Opening new traumas and wounds that will take years and lifetimes and generations to even diagnose. New manifestations of spirits, dark energy, and evil entering into our reality, evolving within these transitions. Then comes the work of accepting past truths. Reconciliation. She will always have work. There will always be a need for her services.
I’m so tired.
Xitlali drives back into the city on the great spine of the freeway that connects the suburbs, where people like her work and clean, to the skyscrapers, where people like her work and clean. The drive feels like a dream, the passing billboards and landscapes acting as newsreels for the imagination. Over yonder, the light from the sleepless metropolis fights with the darkness of the cosmos above.
Xitlali will drive these freeways many times over the coming years. She will take her daughter’s picture from the glove box and tape it, again, to her dashboard. It would behoove her to come to peace with herself, her past, with what she’s done. That’s another story. For now, Xitlali Zaragoza, curandera, will rest as much as she can until her next assignment.
PHOTO ALBUM
by Sarah Cortez
Downtown
There’s a place I remember perfectly without a photo. A hotel lobby, with its shabby wingbacks and dirty octagonal floor tiles just inside the wide doors. Dust motes circling in hot afternoon air. The smell of chlorine on my skin as I walked from the car through the broiling downtown sidewalks’ reflected heat. The stolen keys in my pocket. Hot metal grazing my thigh at each step. I was crazy with longing, crazy to feel his quick rise. He wasn’t there anymore. That’s what the old clerk at the front desk said, his eyes going too bright, going down to where they shouldn’t. Okay, I said. Okay. I wasn’t going to die.
* * *
This picture is the new house Dad bought us, close to the airport, near his work. A bare yard with no trees, scattered grass; a neighborhood with almost no people. My small tan-and-white dog dead of a broken heart. Old English. A clean pad of concrete for a circular patio in the back. A built-in vanity for Mom with two shades of brown tiles shaped like leaves. Daddy also bought Mom a new car. For her long commute—too long to ride the bus anymore, as she’d always done. She didn’t even try to plant flowers in the flowerbeds this time.
* * *
He wouldn’t let me take a photograph of him. Once I even brought my Instamatic upstairs to his room. Late-afternoon sun across the short golden hairs of his belly. Sparks of the sun’s fire in each lower curlicue. His blue eyes blazing with a light I couldn’t define and didn’t need to. Sheets pushed off the foot of the bed, onto a dismal braided rug. Strong, tanned fingers girding my pelvis. Wordless time spent with a man who didn’t need words to convince me to be with him. I remembered him from before, when he’d worked for my dad doing yardwork, then at the airport hangar. You gotta give people a chance, Dad liked to say. Everybody deserves a chance.
* * *
Oh, that’s Frankie Petras, the boy I had such a crush on back in grade school. We were both so shy. He had blue eyes too. He never would’ve asked me to steal. I think the only conversation we had in twelve years of grade school was the day Kennedy was shot. We talked by the bike racks after school, where we’d prayed for hours for a miracle. We prayed until they pronounced him dead—the man we’d seen the day before at Rice. Frankie started crying—a thirteen-year-old boy crying in public—as we stood holding our bikes. I stood mute, watching fat tears squeeze from under eyelids he tried to shutter with a thumb and crooked index finger. A few moments later, he turned without a word, undid his bike lock, and pedaled away without once looking back. His body, a slender torch burning, consumed by grief and betrayal. At home that night, none of us could speak of it. And what would’ve been the point? There were no answers to the whys. Nothing beyond our sadness and loss.
* * *
Our confirmation class between the front pillars of the church. After Mass, the men talked in groups, without their wives and kids. Clean-jawed, still-athletic World War II vets like my dad. Grim and silent, they returned to walk us to the cars. Every Sunday became a litany of defeats—more families driven out by the blacks as they block-busted South MacGregor, someone’s watch dog murdered, the Sakowitz mansion sold for pennies. You see, even the Jewish families moved out, fled to Braeswood. Mom would try to talk about something cheerful as we drove home. Beneath her summertime straw hats, I’d see her forced smiles in Charles of the Ritz’s reddest lipstick. Only grunts from Dad’s side of the car, if that much. We started going out for breakfast after church, instead of cooking at home like we’d always done. The smell of pancakes and bacon frying in cast iron no longer felt safe. Anything could happen, at any moment.
* * *
I wish I had just one photograph of our old neighborhood before all this started: The enormous white antebellums along Braes Bayou, with acres of undulating beauty beneath long-armed oaks. The large yards, restful. Every spring, I waited to glimpse the azaleas—a six-foot-tall solid wall of vibrant pink next to the long white porches. We lived several blocks south of there, in the middle-class section where all the streets were named after the South’s beauty: Charleston, Tampa, Shenandoah, Allegheny, Ozark.
* * *
Near the end, I couldn’t walk half a block down our street to my friend Miriam’s. Mom still hadn’t learned to drive and refused to go to the neighborhood grocery without Dad. Her lips were pursed and eyes serious all the time, especially when she thought I wasn’t watching. When Dad got home from work, he wouldn’t drink his highball. I have to be ready, he’d say. I don’t know when they’ll come. The voices who called us at night had promised rocks, firebombs, bullets. The voices of people we’d never met. Did we pass them at the grocery store on Saturdays? Did we sit with them on the downtown bus? Were these the husbands and sons of the black ladies who called me honey chile and smiled in radiant friendship while patting my cheeks?
* * *
I don’t have an outside photo of the place he lived. A run-down three-story hotel downtown on Caroline. Painted-over yellow-brown brick. Squares of glass windows on the first floor as if it had a diner inside. Red neon on the outside advertising Pecan Waffles in block letters—food that didn’t exist. That wasn’t why I stopped. His room was on the second floor.
His strong, sinewy arms were perfectly tanned. Nails split from the yardwork, the lawn mowers and the tools. But always clean khakis with a crease when I was there. A thin belt around a trim waist. An ease of movement that, even back then, I would’ve described as graceful. Calm. Purposeful. Never rushed. A strong tongue. The barbed wedge called loss cutting into my sternum from underneath, where no one could touch its excruciating facets—not even him. Besides, we didn’t talk much. That’s part of why I remember so clearly when he told me to get a copy of Mom’s car keys—both o
f them, ignition and trunk. We could drive to his folks’ farm—farther south, near Victoria. He’d introduce me to his mom. I’d just have to make up a reason to get away for a Saturday. I did sports—it’d be easy. Piece of cake.
* * *
Those damn high school photographs. Crooked grins and a patchwork of colorful optimism and plans for bright futures, full of achievement. The hidden truths of hatred and fear I’d learned during that last year in our old home. All of it swallowed but stuck partway down your gullet. Terror that what you retched up would be your heart. The one thing you wanted: to be truly dead so you’d forget all those childhood things you loved that had been taken away by people you didn’t even know well enough to hate. Your heart, the only thing you’d convinced yourself you could kill with no one noticing.
* * *
See how straight my mother is standing? That strained smile. In every photo. That ugly wood paneling we thought was so modern. I showed him that photo once—our little family in the new den. Behind us, the gilt-edged rows of the World Book Encyclopedia stand at attention. He kissed me up the side of my face while extracting the photograph from my fingers. I’m your whole family now. Then he pushed me back on his bed and raised my skirt, lowering his lips to where they always went the second I was inside his room. I’m your everything, remember?
Yes, yes. I always said yes.
* * *
Oh, that was our dog at the new house—a hunting Lab for dad. He was a sweet dog—born during a norther in February at the first house. Four of the litter froze to death before we could get a heater into the garage for them. I got home first and could’ve saved them, but I was scared of the mewling puppies and couldn’t face the blood leaking everywhere in heavy clumps. So I didn’t go closer—just shut the wooden door and walked back to the house. I sat in the empty house listening to the sleet hit the windows. Too old for dolls, uninterested in reading books, I just sat in the kitchen watching the grayness outside. I didn’t call anyone for help.
One of the pups who survived became Dad’s. They spent a lot of time together on weekends—gone to the hunting lease. In the evenings, after work, Dad would toss a burlap dummy for the dog to retrieve in the narrow backyard of the new house. The dog always eager, no matter how many throws or how much slobber trailed down his glossy black fur. Dad was silent in the evenings, always silent by then.
* * *
This photo is back at our first house—the one we had to leave. Those flowerbeds were wrested from Houston’s famous black gumbo. Bright-headed hydrangeas, lavender and light blue, coaxed into bloom. Mom and I on our knees weeding every Saturday afternoon. There’s no photograph of Mom pulling weeds and crabgrass in her sweat-soaked pin curls. We only took pictures on Sundays, after church. That one day full of photogenic smiles and homemade pancakes, hot syrup and leisure. Even that one day ultimately wrecked, like all the others, by the cruising cars of men with two-by-fours and baseball bats.
* * *
The last Easter in our little house, in the front yard by the big picture window. Remember Jackie Kennedy and her color-coordinated pillboxes? Mom let me pick out a white one with a short veil. I still have it. The dress was also white. A square neckline showing my tanned collarbone. At thirteen, I had a collarbone like the First Lady’s—elegant, bones showing nicely. That’s what Mom said. She also said I was beautiful, but I knew it was the lie of a fond mother. Hopeful too. Above all else, hopeful. Boys your age are intimidated by your looks—that’s all. I was surprised when she said this. No one ever asked me out on a date, so she couldn’t be right.
* * *
I don’t remember posing for that Polaroid. It must’ve been taken by Pat, the girl who lived next door. She was a few years older than me. She loved to come over in the evenings with that camera while Mom fixed dinner. But this one was taken during the day. See, I’m holding a beach towel and leaning on the gray tiles of the kitchen bar. I tanned like it was a religion. Oiled and glistening, I became a long stretch of sweaty muscle. I remember being proud of my flat brown stomach. Green beans for dinner—that’s how I did it. Metrecal cookies at lunch—nine of them in a packet of crisp cellophane. For days on end.
* * *
Here’s another one of the front yard, from farther away. That other picture window was the dining room where I did homework every night in grade school, until Dad said I had to sit in the kitchen, farther back in the house. The phone calls were bad then. The blacks wanted us out. Threats in a deep bass voice: We gonna burn you out. We coming tonight. Mom didn’t cry, not that I saw. But every meal was ushered in by her urgent questions: Had any For Sale signs appeared on our block? Had I been threatened walking to or from school? What were the next door neighbors doing? Hard-eyed, Dad promised we wouldn’t sell. He promised. I kept quiet at dinner and lingered in other rooms whenever the telephone rang. The one time I heard a man’s voice full of hatred was enough—his voice reverberating inside my bones, permeating the marrow. It was a thick voice, full of intention and spite. I put the phone into its heavy black cradle slowly, so he wouldn’t know I was scared. No point to crying. No one had answers to the questions I could barely think clearly enough to ask, but that always hung in the air: Why do you hate us? What have we done wrong?
* * *
That one is out of order. Me, a fat baby. I look like my dad’s father—bald, same shape of head. See how I’m straining toward the edge, off the gray countertop? I knew what I was doing; I wanted to step off. Bright air would hold me—I was sure of it.
* * *
In the background of this photo, you can see a large picture window, off-center to the left. My first bedroom to myself. A reward for turning thirteen. It hurt to grow breasts, remember? That embarrassing growth of new hair that felt every breath of breeze, every sashay of fabric across its light-brown fineness.
From the front yard, you can’t see the gardenia bush, tall as a man on the side of our little house, just beyond my screen windows. At night, in early summer, the scent as heavy as a wrestler on my chest. White waxy flowers fragrant enough to eat, whispering all their secrets into humid air. The night’s friendships between creatures of earth and grass, air, and bayous were heard in a long murmur of comforting sounds. I missed that in the new house—the sound of night. A/C shut off everything.
* * *
Mother’s mahogany vanity in our little house. The curved front and large round mirror. I’d wait for impenetrable darkness in my still bedroom, decorated in my favorite colors—a splurge after turning thirteen. June bugs crawling on the screens, gardenias outside spreading their white lips. My hands on my breasts and nipples eventually became his hands. I’d raise my baby dolls and throw off the sheets. Dream his lips, recall his blue eyes. Shame, the greatest catalyst; and the forbidden geometry of a grown man, the most irresistible attraction on earth.
* * *
That’s Mom’s brand-new Olds in the driveway. My dad only bought Oldsmobiles, and he only bought green ones. I stopped by a hardware store on Telephone Road to get the keys copied. Then I hid them in the piano bench. Every time we ate dinner, I waited for my mom to ask me why I had an extra set of her car keys. After all, she handed me her only set to drive to school when I needed them. I couldn’t figure out a good lie. The only truth I knew was his mouth on the mess of fine hair he loved. A ceaseless tongue.
* * *
Yeah, that’s my new school, after we moved. A tedious commute through Houston’s small Downtown, then west, out 59 South. We’d just left our little house. Found a newly built one farther out. Cute freshman beanie, huh? For those days, twenty-three miles each way to high school was long. I did okay at first, but then I started failing. Me, the honor roll kid, failing: algebra I, world history, and British lit. Mandatory tutoring after school—I couldn’t see him on the way home anymore. Mom arranged carpools with older girls, so I could stay late at school. Pecan Waffles winked at me in red neon along Caroline every afternoon as I sailed past in some preoccupied upper classman�
�s car. I dug fingernails into my palms so I couldn’t feel what I was feeling. His window was always open, one panel of limp curtain hanging out into Downtown’s exhaust fumes. Those seniors were all in love with serious boyfriends they only saw on the weekends—we were an all-girls school. We sang along with the Beach Boys on the radio, and I pretended my ideal boyfriend would be a surfer like them—blond, cute, plenty of freckles, and tiki-god cool.
* * *
End-of-year swim party in May. Country club pool. Our two-pieces, so daring. We’re all holding in our breaths trying to look thinner. Guess I liked bright colors—look at the hot pink against neon green and white stripes.
That day, alone, I stopped by his hotel. The damp swimsuit kept me sweating and on edge. The stolen keys were in the left front pocket of a seersucker cover-up. My hair, still wet from the pool’s shallow end.
I’d been planning what to say, what to do, but I hadn’t planned for the old clerk’s drooping shoulders and brutal, hungry eyes. I hadn’t planned for a turning away of all my precious treasure.
He done gone, and be glad of it, girlie.
He had to be upstairs. I was sure of it. How could he not be? It had only been three and a half months. The cracked linoleum on the stairs beckoned. The loud horns of outside traffic scraped at my skin. Flies buzzing against the sunny front windows worked at breaking through their dirty glass prison. But I was impaled by the fierceness of the old man’s voice, the insult of his frank stare at my damp crotch. All this told me what I already knew—my time here was over. No need for the lie already in place, about the softball training camp this weekend. No drive south, my legs sprawled across the front seat and his right hand laced in the hair between my legs.
* * *
I walked back to the sea-green Olds parked at the curb. I looked up at the disgusting pink curtains one last time. The keys clinked in my flimsy pocket. Before I cranked the ignition, I sat up straighter. Mom’s words floated through my head: Smile, honey. Don’t scowl. Through thick and thin, keep smiling. I punched the radio buttons and kept the music loud all the way home. Piece of cake, little rake.
Houston Noir Page 10
