Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  Mundo took the box and lined up the T-Birds like soldiers and pinned a flower on each guy as if he were giving out medals.

  The man showed them to a small room with faded carpeting. Mary lay in a cheap, cardboard casket.

  He looked at Mundo. “You have fifteen minutes before we’re scheduled to leave for the church.”

  Diego knelt before the casket, took off his hat and made the sign of the cross. Behind him, Mundo nudged the T-Birds, and they all took off their hats, knelt on the floor and bowed their heads. Diego stared at Mary’s powdered face and wished he could see her eyes. Watching her face, he tried to pray, but he could do nothing, could not even remember his childhood prayers. He did not feel the tears falling down his face. Mundo stared at him, and watched him watch Mary.

  The man came in and motioned to Mundo that it was time to go. He placed his hand on Diego’s shoulder, but Diego did not seem to notice his touch. He shook him gently until Diego looked up at him. “It’s time to go.”

  El Guante, El Kermit, El Romeo, Indio, Mundo, and El Güero took the casket to the limousine. They followed the black shiny car in their bright yellow, blue, and red cars; the chrome wheels filling the streets with reflections of light.

  The priest met them at the entrance to the church and sprayed the casket with holy water. “Baptized into Christ’s death,” he said. The T-Birds moved the casket up to the front of the church, moving slowly as if they were hearing music. Tencha and one of her friends were standing at the front of the church. Carolyn and Crazy Eddie were there, too. That was all. It was the best I could do for you, Mary, Diego thought, the best.

  He stared at the flame of the Easter candle. The colors in the stained glass reminded him of the T-Birds’ cars. He watched the priest like he had watched other priests a thousand times before. He had their actions memorized.

  Concordia Cemetery was full of weeds and trash delivered there by the El Paso wind. It looked more like a dump than a cemetery. It was only cleaned once a year when the prisoners from the county jail were let out to clean it, but that wasn’t until the summer, and it had been almost a year since its last cleaning—a year’s worth of old newspapers lying up against the gravestones. Diego watched the priest read the final prayers: “May the angels carry you to paradise; the saints rise up to greet you …” He handed Diego the crucifix. Diego clasped it in his hands, squeezed it so tight that it dug into his skin. Mundo and the T-Birds placed their carnations on top of Mary’s cardboard casket. Carolyn brought a rose.

  Mundo helped Diego to the car and held him up. He would have fallen without him. On the way back to Diego’s house, they stopped and picked up two cases of beer. They went inside Diego’s room, and there they all drank. Carolyn brought in a basket of fruit, but she didn’t stay long. “Call me if you need anything,” she said.

  Mundo pulled out a bottle of cognac and handed it to Diego.

  “Just don’t ask me where I got it. Drink.”

  Diego poured himself a glass and drank as he watched the T-Birds drink their beer. He made no real attempt to watch their lips. They’re like their cars, he thought. Mundo watched him out of the corner of his eyes as he laughed with his friends. When the beer was gone, they each shook his hand and left, “I’ll come by tomorrow,” Mundo said.

  Diego was glad they had left. He was tired and fell asleep on the floor. He woke up in the afternoon and went to the store. He bought a can of spray paint and when he got home he opened the window and spray-painted his suicide letter so it couldn’t be read by anybody. He sat in his room and waited for the sun to set. When night came, he sat in the darkness and didn’t turn on the lights. Around midnight he walked over to the barrio and found a space on a wall. He sat in front of the space for a long time and howled into the empty streets. When he was too tired to cry anymore, he spray-painted a new sign: THE VIRGIN IS DEAD.

  Mundo watched him as he wrote the words on the wall. He could read what Diego had written clearly—the streetlight burning right above them like a worn out, dying sun. He watched this strange, innocent, unreachable man howl in the street like an animal, like a wounded coyote separated from his pack. Diego’s voice was strong in its sorrow, as strong as any wind Mundo had ever felt. He was not so speechless after all, Mundo thought. Every man has to have his say. He followed his friend back home to make sure no one would harm him, followed him like a protecting angel. When Diego was back in his apartment, Mundo saw a light appear through the window. He walked back to the place where Diego had written his words. He traced the letters with his finger. “The Virgin is dead,” he said out loud. And then he screamed it.

  18

  TWO CARS AND A van are driving along the southern New Mexico desert. Two women, two brothers, an old woman and a baby—they are traveling away from the westering sun as if they are being beckoned by something they cannot resist. The gravity pulls them and they are tired of fighting. They drive free into that something they’ve never known. That unknown something does not frighten them.

  The dark-haired brother is thinking about how his wife will look in the desert, how her dark eyes will look like coal against the endless sky, how she will grow more beautiful than the yucca in bloom, how her hair will turn the color of the earth, how her face will mirror the blinding sun and burn itself into his eyes. He wonders if she will love him less in this desert. He is looking across the great expanse—and knows he is even smaller than he ever thought. He is beginning to feel a kind of thirst he was never known. And the dark-haired man’s brother is thinking: ‘T have found my brother, but I have lost my Joaquin. And now I am moving toward a strange doorway, but I do not know that place.” But as he looks at the clouds, dark as anything he has ever known, he thinks: “I have lived in a doorway all my life. Perhaps I am going home.” He drives one of the cars alone, and yet he does not feel as if he is alone anymore. He takes out a cigarette from his pocket and smokes it. He thinks of his dead lover, and how he once walked up to him in a bar, took a cigarette out of his mouth, kissed him, then placed it back in his mouth and said, “Promise me you’ll quit, gringo.” He smiles at the memory. “I’ll quit when I get to the promised land.” He laughs to himself, and wonders at the large sky in front of him. He has never seen anything as large, as forbidding. It is startling and vast and as deep as the death he feels inside himself. He can see the storm across the desert and knows he is driving toward it. He wants it to swallow him. He lets out a puff of smoke through his nose. He sees lightning in the distance, then hears the thunder. It is like the sound of an earthquake, he thinks. I have lived through earthquakes. And the dark-haired woman holding her child in her arms is thinking: “I can smell it already—home—I can smell it, my mother, my brother, my skin.” “Do you see?” she whispers to her deaf son. “This is what you are made of.” And the other woman whose hair is much older than her skin is thinking: “This is the place I saw in my dream. Now it is more than a dream.” And the old woman is dreaming as she sleeps: “Yes, this will be a good place to die.”

  The old woman continues to sleep as her daughter drives them into the storm. The daughter breathes in the smell of the desert, pungent and sweet. It makes her want to lick the earth, kiss it, take it into herself, take her clothes off and make love to it, the sand warmer and softer than any man’s hands. She thinks: “The clouds are as dark as Joaquin’s eyes in his final days.” She is startled by the sound of the thunder. She remembers a storm in Chicago when she was five. She had been playing outside, not noticing the gathering clouds. When the thunder and lightning began, her mother rushed outside and carried her indoors as the rain poured down around them, carried her as if she were the rain itself. She remembers the smell of her mother’s neck. She places her right hand on her mother’s lap for a few seconds then places it back on the wheel. Soon, they will be driving into the torrent. She thinks she has heard this thunder in the last breaths of her patients who died too young, too alone, too angry. She knows she has heard this thunder. Soon, she thinks, we will be surrou
nded by the rain.

  The caravan slowly reaches the center of the storm, the darkness enfolding them like a hungry lover who has been celibate for too many years. Slowly, they stop by the side of the road and wait for the downpour to cease before they continue traveling. The lightning strikes and strikes, the thunder surrounds them. And the man with the cigarette thinks: “Joaquin said the earth was animate and holy and now I know it is true.” And then he thinks: “I have struck and struck—I have been the thunder,” and the old woman—now more awake than she had ever been—thinks: “I have felt the thunder all my life and I am not broken,” and her daughter, whose hair is as old as her mother’s, looks out into the great storm and thinks: “I have dreamed of being the thunder, and will become it,” and the dark-haired man looks in awe of the rain and thinks: “I have hidden from the thunder all my life, and now I must stop hiding,” and then he thinks of the time he trembled in his wife’s arms and told her about a cruel father whose thunder almost broke him as a boy; and the woman holding the child wants to yell for joy at the sound of the crackling sky: “I have come back to the thunder.” She feels the rain pulling her to itself. Unable to contain herself any longer, she places the child in her husband’s arms and runs out of the van into the arms of the rain. She begins dancing in the mud by the side of the road. The other young woman runs out of her car and begins to dance with her. They take each other’s hands and swing each other in a circle. The dark-haired man watches his wife and her friend dancing in the mud, unafraid of the thunder, unafraid of the rain, unafraid of the anger of the skies. Through the sheets of pouring rain, he sees and hears them laugh. He sees them imperfectly, but knows he is seeing the perfect image of freedom.

  CARRY ME LIKE WATER

  1

  IT WAS DARK and cool in the desert, the night air scented with the sharp smell of the rain bush. Maria Elena looked over at her husband as they were nearing the city of her birth. “It smells like God,” she said. It was hard to see his tired smile in the darkness of the van. The lights of the instrument panel allowed her to vaguely make out some of his features. She tried to picture him in the daylight, all the shadows of his past that had covered him like a shroud, banished, exiled from his face.

  He took his time acknowledging her statement as if he had to think very hard about what she had said. “What is it that makes the air smell like that?”

  “Chamizos,” she said. “Gringos call it the rain bush. There’s another name, too, creosote, I think.”

  “Say it again,” he said.

  “Chamizos,” she repeated.

  “Chamizos,” he said slowly. “It feels good in the mouth.” He laughed. “And it smells like God, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what it really smells like?”

  “What?”

  “It smells like—like when you gave birth to little Jake. It smells just like that.”

  “Really?”

  “It came from somewhere inside you, that smell. Fresh and sharp like an undiscovered spice.”

  Maria Elena squeezed his arm. “You’re a funny man, Eddie.”

  “A tired man,” he said almost inaudibly.

  “We’re almost there.”

  “I wonder how Lizzie and Jake are holding up?”

  Maria Elena ignored her husband’s question. He had asked it in a distant voice—he neither needed nor wanted an answer. His question was just taking up space in that tired kind of tone that most questions have at the end of a long journey, the voice as numb as the traveler’s feet.

  “EL PASO CITY LIMITS,” he said, reading the sign. “Nena, you’re home.”

  “You, too,” she said.

  Home, he thought. The desert felt strange and uncomfortable—a shirt that fit too tight around the neck. “It’s dry,” he said. “Even after a rain—it’s dry.”

  They said nothing else as they reached the lights of the city. He saw a hotel off the freeway. “That one OK?” he asked her.

  “Your call,” she said.

  “It’s your town.”

  “Yeah, but they’re not my hotels.” she said.

  He nodded and smiled as he pulled the van off the exit ramp.

  “Sunland Park Drive. What the hell kind of name is that? It sounds like a retirement village for veterans of foreign wars.”

  “It’s a racetrack,” she said. “My father used to gamble there.”

  “I thought you didn’t know your father?”

  “Well, my mother used to say he threw all his money away at the track—there and at the cockfights.”

  “Cockfights?”

  “You never heard of cockfights?”

  “Yeah—I just thought they were a thing of the past—also illegal.”

  “They’re not a thing of the past, Eddie. And since when has illegal stopped anyone from gambling?”

  Already it was a strange world, and he felt like an alien. Whatever he had been in California, at least he had not felt foreign. This didn’t feel like anyplace he knew or had ever been. He chastised himself for his thoughts. All he had seen was a sign that read: EL PASO CITY LIMITS. But the lights, he thought, the lights of this city in the desert seemed unearthly to him, and he felt he had left the world completely behind. He felt almost dead. Maybe I’m just tired, he thought. Eddie wondered if this place would ever feel like home. It will be enough to see her happy, he thought. She will make it habitable.

  Maria Elena stared at him as he drove. She decided she liked his outline in the darkness of the van. “When I moved to California, Eddie, it didn’t feel as if it would ever be real again.”

  “You read my mind.”

  “But what if this place never makes you feel real, amor?”

  “One place is as good as another,” he said—then laughed. “I’m with you and that counts for something. And I have a son—and I have my brother back. That’s real enough, yes? To want more than that is just greed.” It will be fine, he thought. Eddie listened to the words he had just spoken. Yes, they were good words. They were the right words. All he had to do was believe them. He wondered why he felt so uneasy when he had been ecstatic to leave California. Just believe the words. He pulled the van into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. See, they have Holiday Inns. Jake and Lizzie pulled up behind them. “All here?” he yelled as he got out of the van and placed his feet on the firm pavement of the parking lot.

  “All here,” Jake yelled as he stepped out of the car.

  “All here,” Lizzie yelled slamming her door.

  “Not quite,” Rose said quietly in the dark, “I’m too old to be all here. But the air here after a rain”—she paused—”you know it’s been years since I’ve lived in a place where it rained in August.” Lizzie could see her smile in the dimly lit parking lot. Her mother would like it here, she thought. It was enough of a reason to have come.

  All of them seemed content to stay in the parking lot, stretching and talking, none of them caring to move toward the lobby of the hotel.

  “Has anybody thought of where we’re going to live?” Jake lit a cigarette as he asked the question.

  “Oh Jake, I wish you wouldn’t smoke—you’re going to make me start again,” Lizzie said sniffing at his smoke. “It smells like a banquet. I’ve never been this hungry.”

  “You always used to say that when you were a little girl. I’ve never been this hungry.”

  “I mean it this time. Mama.”

  Rose laughed in the darkness.

  “I repeat—has anybody thought of where we’re going to live?”

  “Jake, you think I dragged you to El Paso without thinking of where we were going to live?” Maria Elena asked.

  “Actually, yes,” Lizzie said.

  “Wrong, I called a realtor—and we’re looking at a house in the morning.”

  “Actually, I called a realtor,” Eddie corrected.

  “You—me—what’s the difference,” Maria Elena said.

  “There’s a difference,” Eddie said.

&nbs
p; “I hope the house is big,” Lizzie said.

  “Eddie told her ‘big’—didn’t you Eddie?” Maria Elena leaned against Jake’s car.

  “That’s what I told her. I told her, ‘We want old, we want wood floors, and we want big.’ ‘I have just the house,’ she said. Well, we’ll see. It’s in a place called Sunset Heights.”

  “Nice name,” Lizzie said.

  Jake laughed. “Sunset Heights? It sounds like a soap opera.”

  “Don’t be mean, Jake—it’s nice.”

  “Ahh, a hometown partisan.”

  “Oh, Jake, go to hell,” Maria Elena said. “Are we going to check into this hotel or we just gonna pull out some beer and have a Texas tailgate?”

  “I vote for a bed and cup of hot tea,” Rose said.

  “Mama’s tired,” Lizzie said. “Let’s go in.”

  “Welcome to El Paso,” Maria Elena said.

  “Are you happy?” Eddie asked.

  “I don’t know. I feel like we’ve been wandering around in the desert for a lifetime.”

  “It’s only been three days, Maria Elena.”

  “It was a lifetime,” Maria Elena repeated.

  “Uh—huh,” Eddie yawned. “OK, a lifetime.”

  Lizzie carried the baby in her arms as they walked toward the hotel lobby. He was getting heavy, already learning to walk and Lizzie felt his growing weight. Was it already over a year that this child had come into the world? My God, what a year. The world had ended and begun again, and here she was in El Paso. El Paso—what a strange name for paradise. She laughed. She was tired. They were all tired, all of them exhausted and hungry, looking for rest.

  Maria Elena smiled as she stepped out of the van, the baby in her arms. She thought of her childhood. She remembered the rundown apartment house in this same neighborhood—the last place she’d lived before leaving for California. “Oh, Eddie, it’s a wonderful house.”