by Annie Proulx
No, he said when Baby asked, he had never cared to take up the piano accordion with its forbidding-looking row of keys like teeth—an instrument that breathed and had teeth, that had a way of showing the human hand as a small trampling animal.
Baby looked up the rows of the chile plants, the curved first small pods curling in under the leaves and the white blossoms enticing the bees. Why did the old man talk so much?
“Now it’s getting popular, this music, our music, and you know why? Tejanos carried it through the cotton fields, all over the country, up in the beet fields, Oregon and wherever—sí, they danced on Saturday night, maybe just for the chance to stand up straight. I remember those dances very well. We all played the taco circuit. Most of us worked all week in the fields too. You had to tie a bandanna over your mouth and nose the dust was so bad, the dancers jumping around made plenty of dust. Narcisco made a polka, ‘La Polvareda,’ about this dust cloud. I got it on the old record; you heard it. The accordion was so natural, a little friend. Easy and small to carry, easy to play, and loud, and can play bass rhythm and melody. Just the accordion and nothing else and you’ve got a dance. It’s the best instrument for dancing in the world, the best for the human voice. This music, this instrument—your mother”—he spat—“your mother wants to make you into imitation bolillo, an ass-licking Anglo doughball. You’ll never be one of them. You can’t. Learn a million American words and so what? They’ll still kick you in the face with their big salty feet.” He grabbed Baby’s right hand, stretched his sweaty arm out, the brown skin taut over the muscles. Skin brown as though varnished with strong tea. “But don’t expect to make a living with music, with playing the accordion. It cannot be done, even if you play nothing but American music. That’s the tragedy of my life.” He held out his own hands, fingers splayed.
The son Baby, this lagging chile grower by day, this part-time accordion player at night, drifted along. On the weekends he played for dances with Chris, mostly rancheras and polkas; they sang in the classic two-part harmony, primera y segunda, Baby’s voice a raspy tenor that could soar to a quivering and incandescent falsetto, Chris’s voice with a thick nasality that gave the sound substance and richness. Their big days were in October, especially El Día de la Raza. They split off from Abelardo because there were too many dances to waste three accordions on one place. The dances were exhausting, the strain of playing and the lights, the sweat and heat and thirst, the noise like pouring rain, and always a table of roughs waiting for Chris, youths opening in el grito, “Ah-jai-JAI!” when Chris stepped up to sing.
Though so many turned to the big-band sound and the strange hybrid fusion of jazz, rumba and swing, would rather listen to “Marijuana Boogie,” the Los Angeles Latin sound, than “La Barca de Oro,” there was an audience that liked their music, who found value in it. These new ones, many of them veterans back from the Korean War, some of them university students, embraced conjunto, and this music was not for dancing but for listening. It had a meaning beyond itself.
“They listen,” said Chris, “not because we’re good, though we are good, but because we are theirs. They are not just jumping around in the dirt until they drop.” But the zoot-suiters booed them off the stage, went crazy for the Mexican-Latin stuff, música tropical, a kind of hot, tripping swing.
Chris was in small troubles constantly, half hiding behind Baby while they played because someone was looking for him; he was always fooling around with somebody’s woman out in the parking lot and when the break was over he didn’t come in too many times and Baby had to start without him, got used to being the only accordion and started to play one or two of his own songs. “Your Old Truck and My New Car” was well known, and “I Never Knew About the Front Door.”
Chris drank. Got into fights. He was arrested, three, five times. Beaten in jail or on the way there. Stories went around. He had a gun in his pocket. He was mixed up with the Robelos. Then his friend Veins was found clubbed to death in the folds of a dirty carpet.
With two sons like that, what kind of path could they find through the world? Chris had a job driving a taxi and was out all night, night after night, working or not working. Half the time he didn’t show up on the night they had to play.
Conversion
The change was sudden. In 1952 Chris accepted the contorted religion of Yahweh’s Wonder in order to marry Lorraine Leak, the daughter of the missionary couple who had come for many years to the Relámpagos, spooling out “and the Lord said” and “Jesus tells us.” Chris was twenty-four. The missionary daughter, Lorraine, a pious washed-out blond with a thick face, spoke in tiny, inaudible words. Her parents, grizzled and unhappy, but caught in the trap of their own preaching about brotherhood (never dreamed it could boomerang like this), stood silently during the ceremony and did not come to the fiesta Abelardo and Adina arranged. It was just as well because Abelardo drank enough to make a public speech to Adina.
“You see, you joined their religion long ago, now Chris does the same thing, so you are of the same religion as Señor Leak, no? But he holds himself above you, him and his wife and their rabbit-eyed daughters. What can come of this marriage?”
Chris shaved off his mustache, ordered his hair cut short, dropped his old friends. He quit drinking and smoking, and was often seen to clasp his hands, bow his head and let his lips move silently.
The thing that did not change was his great hollow laugh. Chris and Lorraine came to visit on Sunday afternoons, Lorraine sitting dumbly on the sofa watching the Sears Roebuck television with its skinny rabbit ears and suckling the child. What a stick, thought Adina.
Chris sat on the porch railing, one leg swinging, the other foot touching the porch floor. Looked over at Baby, who still lived at home, in the sly way he had when he was getting ready to duck out of something.
Baby said,. “what? Something on your mind. You got a girlfriend on the side and you want me to tell Lorraine you got to go out of town?”
Chris was fatter now, his shaven face ballooned up, and because he always felt the urge, he said, for a cigarette, he ate fast food when he could get it, burritos, tacos, hamburgers, Pepsis. Driving a cab made you hungry but you didn’t get any exercise. The front seat crackled with his paper bags and candy bar wrappers.
“You don’t change, still got a dirty mouth on you. No, no girlfriend. It’s I can’t play at the clubs and dances no more. It’s against my religion, now, and it’s making hard feelings with my in-laws. So, I’m like switching over to the organ, play at services, you know, hymns? Religious music. I mean, I know Jesus now, and that’s where I’m aiming my music. I used to be wild, but I’m tryin to do better. Guess you and the old man got to keep it going for the Relámpagos.” They could hear the baby crying inside.
“You not going to do the recording deal with me and him? That’s set up for months. He won’t like it. We’ll prob’ly lose the contract—suppose to do the two Bernal songs with three-part.”
“He’ll have to accept that my life has changed.”
“Well, you do what you have to do. Still driving the fucking taxi?”
Yes, Chris answered, he was still driving the taxi.
“Must be a good job, you got that new camper van.” Nodding at the street where the beige van gleamed.
“What you trying to say? You saying something?” He drew his face into a turtle’s expression.
“No, man, nothing. Just a fucking idle question, y’know?”
“Nothing is right. So fuck off.”
So he knew Chris was lying about Jesus and that something was as crooked as the river.
A prodigal son
The chile-growing fiasco was behind Baby. He’d come out of it with no idea of what to do next except junk jobs, pick up a little money on the weekends, playing anything, mambo, cha-cha-cha, Tex-Mex, polkas, Cuban danzones, yeah, swing. He applied for a job as a bus driver. Sometimes it looked like a great job, that big bus, the nice uniform, fresh air when you wanted it, the chance to look over hundreds of gir
ls. Bus drivers were famous for wolfing around. But there wasn’t a chance. The company hired only Anglos. He’d never go back to school, and he hated the ones who came home from college looking around like they smelled something bad, making it a short visit because they couldn’t wait to get back to the world they were trying so hard to enter, putting up with the little jokes behind their backs. He remembered private thoughts when he was a kid about being an architect, wondering how to begin, how did you become someone whose ideas turned into buildings? He didn’t regret leaving school.
He painted a kind of mural on the front wall of the trailer, trying to get all the great old accordion players into it, painting from his father’s photographs, with Abelardo in the central position, Narcisco Martínez smiling over his shoulder. The disconnected heads with fixed mouths and glaring eyes floated in the air, some high like gas-filled balloons, some near the ground.
He seemed immune to the lasting power of love, specialized in brief infatuations, a day or two, then he lost interest. After these little breakups he played like a demon, speeded up the music as if he was trying to outdistance the other players. At these times he was attracted to angry dissonances. The women were always after him, whispered among themselves that he had certain powers, that his body was like a heated iron drawn from the coals. “Ay, Dios, my mouth was burned, he left a scar down my whole front, breast and arm, belly and leg!” Smothered laughing and questions about more intimate regions. He could have anyone he wanted and he didn’t want any particular one. Although he never lost his temper he was feared. It was remembered that as a child his hands were always hot, his touch feverish. It was said that if he slapped someone in anger the skin of the abused adhered to his fingers.
The right thing
Then, like a traveler who suddenly notices the sun moving down the west, the daylight condensing into an hour or two of dimming light, he decided to marry, quickly chose one of the first women to come near him, Rita Sánchez, a graduate of the university up at Austin, a teacher, busy with community actions and the new politics, already known as a strong woman who fought to get sewer lines into the colonia southeast of Hornet, a nightmare place where the residents were mostly poor mojados who had crossed the river in danger and now suffered bizarre diseases—leprosy, bubonic plague, tuberculosis—and were reputed to live on roadkills the women picked up on the highway, darting into traffic for the crushed flesh.
He made her pregnant on their wedding night, and his life slipped into the ancient human groove of procreation, work, cooking, children’s sicknesses and their little talents and possibilities. For the first time he saw he was no different than anyone else. Their daughter was born with birthmarks like red arrowheads in her groin and armpit and on her neck. The next year, a boy was born the day after Stalin died (the newspapers all read in thick inky letters “José Stalin ha muerto”), whom they named Narcisco in honor of the friend of Abelardo’s youth. Rita began to put aside her community work, resigned from the committees one by one. Her children ate her up.
For some reason, after his marriage Baby’s musical abilities increased tremendously.
“Ah, that’s because you don’t waste your energy wondering where you’re going to get it,” said Abelardo. He came often to Baby’s house, at all hours, enjoyed his morning cup of coffee under clouds the color of salmon eggs, walking around and criticizing Rita’s basil, full of little beetles, the smell of yesterday’s heat still in the dead air. In the back they had made a tiny patio. Rita planted a tree, watered it, and already it was large enough to cast a little shade. Its roots were pushing up the adobe tiles and the children fell often when they ran there.
“You could be very good, you know. Famous. You have the stuff.”
“Yeah? And change my name, like Andrés Rábago to Andy Russell? And Danny Flores to Chuck Rio? Like Richard Valenzuela to Ritchie Valens? Na, na, na.”
Now Baby understood his father’s greatness without jealousy or envy. Saw his inventiveness, his place in the history of the music. When they sang together now, he felt his voice embrace that of his father, a kind of sexless marrying like two streams of water coming together. Together they were in a closeness not even lovers could know, as the shadows of two birds at different altitudes cross the ground touching.
The accordion, too, he truly embraced, holding it against his breast so that its breathing commanded his own, its resonance made his flesh vibrate. He had many accordions; they seemed to come to his hand like lost dogs. In a strange city someone would come backstage, hold out an old instrument and offer it for sale, sometimes give it to him. Going back to Texas, there was always a strange accordion with them. And at home he’d take it up, play it, discover its little secrets, hold it near the sensitive skin under his chin to discover air leaks, learn its voice and individual ways, retune it to his taste. Abelardo never allowed him to play the old green accordion.
“Two eyes in one head,” they called the father and son. Now came audiences smothering them in admiration, rolling them over and over, the waves of applause breaking and subsiding only when they stepped forward together, their breasts glittering with the instruments, only when they opened their mouths and sang “Yo soy dueño de mi corazón…”
Spider, bite me
Abelardo felt nothing in his sleep. The spider had bitten him and he slept on, his swollen feet enjoying the ease. But woke in the morning in the shallow silver light that precedes the coming day, with a sense of doom. Beside him, his wife breathed and her heat drew him to her as a shuddering wave swept down his spine. There was a tickling scurry in his groin and his hand went down. The spider bit again. Now he leaped up and threw down the covers, exposing his wife’s body in her faded pink gown, her jackknifed legs and folded arms. He saw the brown recluse rush over the sheet, over his wife’s leg and down into the darkness beneath the bed.
His heart was hammering. His neck itched, his groin. He wanted badly to be asleep, to be comfortable against his warm wife in the silver morning, tingling now with blue.
“What,” murmured Adina.
“Araña. Spider. Spider bit me. Went under the bed.”
She was up and in the doorway, her hair pressed down on one side, roached up wildly on the other.
“The brown spider?”
“I think so.” He turned away, peered into his groin, his foolish long hair trailing onto his shoulders. He felt his neck.
“It got me twice, I think. I don’t know how you’re going to find it, but it’s down there under the bed.”
She went to the kitchen, down under the sink for the poison spray.
“Don’t do that now,” he commanded. “Get me some coffee. ¡Ai, ai! That this should happen.” Pulling on his clothes, shaking them first in case of other spiders.
Sat on the kitchen chair drinking the coffee. The nausea began, very strong.
All day he vomited, all day diarrhea poured from him in a green burning stream, a consuming fever came on mixed with the scent of insect spray, his teeth crashed together, he was freezing. He wanted badly to lie down on his bed and sleep but feared the spider. Anyway it was better to lie on the couch to be near the bathroom. Thank god there was a bathroom and not like at the old Relámpago place or in the stinking colonias where the ground festered. He was glad he did not have to run through the mud to the little house, with griping bowels and heaving stomach. The buses roared.
At noon his wife called for a taxi to take them to the clinic.
“They will give you something,” she murmured. He was too wretched to argue. In that place they sat side by side on torn plastic chairs. Adina filled out the complicated forms. The room was crowded with people, wailing, coughing children, an old woman who kept passing her hand across her brow as though to stroke away some pain that lay near the surface, an emaciated boy. More people pressed in, leaning against the wall, squatting or sitting on the floor.
“We’re lucky we got chairs,” said Adina. Abelardo said nothing, leaned his head against the wall, but twice ha
d to stagger into the toilet with the plywood door. In the waiting room they could hear him retching. When he came out his hair straggled down, and even in his sickness he tried to push it into place.
They waited two hours. Although more people came, no one seemed to leave. Finally Adina made her way to the smeared glass partition and rapped on it until the Anglo receptionist looked up, her eyes pale and furious.
“Will it be much longer? My husband is very sick.”
“Yes, it could be a long time. The doctor is at the hospital for a meeting. If you people would make appointments instead of just crowding in like this, instead of just coming in without an appointment.”
She went back to Abelardo. A dull-eyed woman with a limp child was sitting in her chair. Adina leaned over and whispered to him.
“The doctor isn’t here yet. She says it could be a long time.”
“Get me home.”
He lay ill on the sofa, eyes closed against the droning television. He could swallow nothing. Adina talked with a neighbor or two, to old María bent and deeply wrinkled but still strong, who said, “I’m disgusted. You should have taken him over the river to the Mexican doctors. They are very good over there, their courteous manner makes one feel better. You don’t have to sit waiting until you are a thousand years old. And the best is that they charge you only twenty dollars for a visit. At the clinic it is eighty. The drugs, the same drugs you buy on this side, the same packages, everything, over there you pay only five or six dollars for what costs a hundred here. My son’s wife taught me all this. We all go across the river when we are ill, and I advise you to take him there at once.”
