Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  Mara, who worked in the Community Action office, a university graduate who dressed in a long skirt, a rebozo dangling and catching in doors, her bare feet in sandals, the yellow, unvarnished nails showing, reproached her as well. “You should have had the curandera, Doña Ochoa—I’ve seen her help people who were truly sick that the doctors couldn’t touch. There’s something to it, you know.”

  She called Chris but Lorraine said he was gone, she didn’t know where, maybe he would be gone for another week, she didn’t know. It sounded like she had a sore throat, her voice strained. In the background Adina heard Mrs. Leak’s raw voice say, who is it—is it him?

  That night the convulsions started. Each attack was prefaced with an ominous sensation of something dark and heavy as a locomotive rushing toward him. He sat up, tried to withstand the hurling sensations, sat through the night alone, his wife lying on the bed in a stench of insect-killing spray.

  A tightness began in the lower part of his back. His legs began to tremble, then danced up and down despite his will. His jaw clenched. Fine tremors like a tuning fork’s vibration set him quivering. Stronger and stronger he vibrated, the quake radiating from the clenched back, until he felt his body sounding, a dull, low note. His lower jaw clacked faster than any castanets. He seemed to be in a red darkness and fell to the floor, legs jerking. In a minute it subsided and he got back up, panting, sat again on the couch.

  Again and again the attacks came, each preceded by flutters of dread. His chest tightened, it was difficult to breathe. He was burning up, his stomach clenched down to the size of an apple.

  But on the second morning he was a little better, although his face was the filthy color of old coffee mixed with skim milk. He tottered up from the couch for the little bowl of rice Adina cooked for him. Its cloying odor repulsed him and the nausea seized him again, his body hooped in painful dry heaves.

  “You get in the bed, Abelardo. I’ve sprayed and sprayed in there, all the slats and joints of the bed, and aired it all out. No spider could live through that. If I could sleep in the bed last night you can lie in it now. You need to rest.”

  Staggering, panting, he let himself be steered into the bedroom. The long hairs straggled wildly and he did not notice. She took off his stained bathrobe, sponged him with warm water and scented soap. How grateful his crusted burning body was for the wet cloth. Adina was frightened at the weight he’d lost in two days. A modest man, he held the towel over his inflamed groin, but she glimpsed the red, oozing swelling there and on his neck. She took his nightshirt from the hook behind the door, got him up, drew it over his head. She turned back the covers. He swayed forward and half fell onto the white sheet. His wife left the room.

  The room seemed hot and filled with burning light, then chill and swept by strong wind. His eyes hurt. He moved his trembling legs, half rolled on his side, and the persecuted brown recluse in the sleeve of his nightshirt, squeezed by the taut cloth, bit again.

  “Juan,” he said clearly. “Juan Villareal! I will play ‘Pícame Araña’ as no one has ever played it. You see, it is no joke. It must be played cruelly!” And struggled to get up, to get his accordion. He stood swaying beside the bed. The damaged spider dropped from his nightshirt, limped into a floor crack.

  For a moment he felt very well, full of a young man’s energy and joy. He sang in his mind. “Hoy me siento vivo, me siento importante…” He was not surprised to discover one did not need to have an accordion to play it. The amusing huapango of the dancing spider filled his mind, but he played the notes very, very fast, vicious, mordant stabs of sound. Before he reached the part where the accordion fell silent for the guitar solo, he dropped to the floor and that was more or less the end.

  El Diablo

  There were hundreds at the funeral. It was necessary to rent a black funeral accordion, although Baby had to go to Houston to find it, El Diablo written across it in silver. He played on and on at the graveside, all the songs and tunes his father had made. The afternoon wore on, people became restless, shifting on their feet, thinking, after all, not everyone should die along with the corpse. Still he played on, redovas, rancheras, polkas, waltzes, canciones, displaying the treasures that his father had fashioned from his life. Yet he played with joy, for it was as if a certain heaviness had gone out of his own life.

  After El Diablo was returned to the music store, the clerk (who later invented the slogan The Accordion—A Music Education in a Box) noticed that the buttons appeared scorched.

  (A generation later, an Air Force jet crashed in the cemetery killing the six people aboard and the elderly maintenance man who mowed the plots. The crash demolished more than nine hundred headstones, among them the red granite of Abelardo Relámpago, “Un gran artista,” his hand-tinted photograph broken from its enclosing circle of glass.)

  The capture of a drug criminal

  It was good, Adina said, that Abelardo had died, that he had not lived to see the stories in the paper headed “Conjunto Musician’s Son Seized in Drug Raid,” and the photograph on the front page where Chris resembled a furious tortoise in handcuffs.

  He was arrested in the stupidest way, as he came over the bridge and through the border checkpoint at Weevil at ten in the morning, driving the camper van, Lorraine beside him, the kids in the back. The checkpoint was busy, probably what he’d counted on, thought Baby, the line moving slowly past the landscaped island of bright flowers where a Latino woman watered plants with a green hose.

  The U.S. Customs Service agent, a young Anglo with short red hair, pimple-spatched face and eyes like bottle glass, his white t-shirt showing at the neck of his shirt, walked around the van, looked at Lorraine, at Chris. He spoke to Lorraine.

  “Your relationship to the driver?”

  “My husband.”

  “He’s your husband. Are those your children?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s the father and you’re the mother, right?”

  “Yes.”

  A muscle jumping in Chris’s jaw, but his hands casual, loose on the wheel. The agent walked around the van again, stooped, looked underneath. He rapped his knuckles on the propane tanks at the rear. Again. Turned the valve. Gas hissed as it escaped. He closed the valve again, came up to the driver’s side.

  “You understand English, buddy?”

  “Of course.” Trying not to lose it. It was going to be close.

  “See that inspection bay over there? Just pull over there, I want to take a look in the back, see your luggage.”

  He breathed a little. Maybe it would be all right.

  But agents were all around them, herding them out of the van and toward the door of the inspection station and from the way that pair was going straight for the propane tanks he knew it was finished. It was stupid but he tried to run, leaped over the flowers, his feet sinking into soft soil. The woman with the hose looped it, flung it around him, bringing him down into the plants, a faceful of dirt, lassoed by a garden hose.

  A father’s vengeance

  It was the beginning. Seven months later on the first day of the trial, in the hallway of the courthouse, a bizarre figure rushed from the men’s room and down the corridor, the emaciated and trembling Darren Leak, gripping the .38 that Chris had carried under the seat of his taxi. Bullets whined and ricocheted off marble walls, echoes pounding, multiplying into a deafening barrage.

  A man in a phone booth at the end of the hall shrieked. Chris’s lawyer sprawled on the filthy marble floor, one middle-aged leg moving like that of a dreaming dog, glasses rucked up into his hair, a fan of papers around his head, the edges absorbing blood. A man struggled with the courtroom door as though holding up a great weight. Chris crouched against the wall, one knee up, strained eyes looking at his father-in-law.

  “You dirty Mexican nigger!” Darren Leak screamed. “We took you into our church and our family! You went unto our daughter and Knew her! You mixed your dirty blood with ours! You lied, you concealed your evil drug trafficking behind the name of
Jesus! Your every action was a lie and a curse in the face of god!” He began to bellow wordless words like a rutting bull in spring, guttural roars that shot up into squeals, then he pointed the gun at Chris and shot, the bullet tearing jaw, tongue and spinal column, lacerating the brain with needle fragments of his shattered teeth. Leak said, “Our Father,” pressed the muzzle to his breast and exploded his own heart.

  The burning hand

  Baby Relámpago y su conjunto. Better known as Baby Lightning. His voice was passionate in color, his falsetto as weightless as the ascent of a hawk in an updraft. His face smiled out of posters. He was well known in the southwest, had played in Chicago, Canada, New York. He always said New York although it had been only Albany, with an unresponsive Irish audience. “In Concert,” the posters said. He had played at the Democratic National Convention, had made more than twenty records. “Los Ilegales” was selling strongly in San Diego. He played—what?—seventy, eighty gigs a year, always for sitting audiences (there were no more dances), endured the touring life until he was exhausted and went home to San Antonio where he lived now.

  He wouldn’t fly because of a dream. He had dreamed of himself hurtling naked down the sky toward a field of stones. In this field, workers who were filling baskets with tiny stones straightened up and looked toward the sky at the sound of his voice. An accordion was still in his hands, the little green accordion of his father, the buttons worn and shaped by the old man’s fingers, and the wind pressing powerfully through the torn bellows made an extraordinary sound, vast ropes of discordant music which he could see, writhing through the clouds in black and purple strands like handfuls of glue-covered horsehair. The workers began to run toward the horizon and he understood that they did not wish to be dirtied by the fragments of his body when he hit.

  It was 1955 and they had a date in Minneapolis, a concert for something called Mardi Gras Up North. He had a bad feeling about the venue. The small audience responded only to stupid songs like “La Cucaracha” and “The Mexican Hat Dance.”

  (Forty years later in the same theater a swaying crowd packed the auditorium, shouted and whistled for Sonora Dinamita, the boiling cumbia group from Colombia, Gilberto Gil, Flaco and Santiago Jiménez, Jr., Esteban Jordan, Fred Zimmerle at the Hispanic Cultural Heritage Concert in aid of Latino victims of el SIDA.)

  After the show, in the dirty dressing room, they could hear the audience filing out, a diminishing babble as though a horde fell through a funnel, and somewhere someone whistling “Three Coins in the Fountain,” getting it wrong; they could smell hair spray and moth flakes and hot lights and electrical connections. Isidro and Michael did not say much, packed the instruments. He knew they were hoping they could stay the night, not have to start the thousand-mile drive against blinding truck lights back to Texas, cramped in the car, burning eyes, yawning and stopping for coffee, Isidro saying “two hours and forty minutes, hombre, we’d be on the ground.”

  They were in the dressing room. The promoter, a heavy woman in a blue rayon dress, hadn’t brought them their check. He was ready; both accordions—he used Abelardo’s old green accordion for some of the traditional music—were cased; he’d changed into slacks and a knit golf shirt to be comfortable on the long drive. The bajo sexto drained a Coke. The blue dress was in the doorway and he looked up smiling, happy for the check, to be getting away.

  “Hello, Baby,” she said.

  He was confused. The voice, he knew the voice, but where was the check? It wasn’t the right woman.

  “It’s Betty. Félida. Your sister.” She stretched out her long blue arms.

  He remembered; it was the voice, the impatience of tone like Adina’s voice. His sister. He looked at her, still very young but not beautiful, broad through the hips, the black hair elaborately braided and twisted into a crown, the glasses with plastic frames tinted flesh color, the full-skirted dress, a flashy band of gold down the front, the high heels and big clumsy patent-leather purse.

  She was already fat.

  “Félida?”

  “You didn’t get my message?”

  He shook his head. Did not know whether to embrace her or not. Her arms slowly descended and she folded them across her breasts. They stood awkwardly.

  “I left a message at the box office to say I’d be here. To invite you to dinner, meet my husband. He’s in the music business too. We got a lot to catch up on.”

  He could not refuse. He told Isidro to wait for the woman with the check, get hotel rooms. He gave him some money. They had to stay now.

  His sister sleeps with an Italian

  Their apartment was small, the furniture covered with multicolored throws and fringed covers. There was a crucifix on the living room wall and a blown-up photograph of the Bay of Naples. The husband, Tony, at least fifteen years older than Félida, heaved himself out of a tan recliner and offered a beer. Baby wished for Scotch and water. Tony was a bandleader, on the club-date circuit; he had met Félida at a Polish wedding. He nodded his square flat head, the blue-black hair combed straight back, the heavy eyebrows cresting over deep sockets, and above the eyebrows the arsenic-white forehead. The eyes showed no glint of light, so recessed were they. He held himself stiffly. Baby thought he looked like a criminal destined for the electric chair.

  “She’s a good player, your sister. She can fake anything, she’s very good at the ethnic stuff. We do a lot of ethnic stuff. Weddings, anniversary parties. They don’t want to hear American tunes. Italian dates, heavy Greek stuff, Hasidic jobs we get, polacks, Hungarians, Swedes—they all want something ethnic. You try to give them American they won’t give you the money; I even had a guy throw dinner rolls at me when we played ‘My Blue Heaven.’ No sir, they won’t even take Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’”

  The dinner was lukewarm meat loaf, white fat congealing on the plate, a salad of grated carrots and raisins, bread sticks that cracked in their teeth like rifle shots, and a bottle of red wine that made the interior of his nose swell with the first swallow. They ate at a glass-topped table. Baby could not keep from staring through it at their thighs.

  “Have some more meat loaf, Baby.”

  The husband poured wine, slopped it on the table.

  It was disturbing to hear his sister’s remembered but deepened voice coming from this woman. There was something of their mother’s voice there, a sarcastic edge, the way the sentences ended with despair.

  The husband, Tony, interrupted every sentence she uttered. “So you play the accordion. I know the accordion like I know my mother. I play accordion myself. I got a beautiful Stradella. You want a good accordion, it’s going to be Italian. Best in the world.”

  Baby ate the meat loaf, wondered how soon he could get out of here. But the husband kept on. He had pushed his plate away, was smoking now and dropping the ashes on his plate. He couldn’t tell Félida about Chris or their father, this loudmouth would keep on talking.

  “So what you play? Jazz? I couldn’t make the concert.” The husband.

  “Conjunto. Tex-Mex.”

  “Folk music, eh? Ethnic! I’m telling you, it’s something you gotta know. But if you wanna hear beautiful accordion music, you listen to Italian. The best in the world. Jazz, classical, popular, anything you want to name. It’s the best. OK, now, listen to this.” He went to a cabinet in the living room, threw open the doors of the cheap entertainment center, Sears, thought Baby, and the husband turned on his components, the tuner, the turntable, adjusted the high-fidelity speakers, put on disc after disc introducing the music of Peppino, Beltrani, Marini.

  When he went to the bathroom, leaving the door a little open so he wouldn’t lose a note of the music, Baby looked at Félida.

  “A wop. An old guy, too.” He could be open with his disgust; after all, she was his sister.

  “What do you know! He’s a nice man. He grew up with nothing! He’s proud of the record player.”

  “We had everything, I suppose. You were young, it was better when you were growing up. You don’
t remember the dirt floor … no, you had it better.”

  That started it. He was too connected to her painful childhood, that enemy of her true self. The toilet was flushing. She wanted to refute his condemnation of her husband. She wanted him to leave. She was sorry she’d gone to him. A slab of meat loaf lay on his plate, a small piece gone from the corner, the rest uneaten. Yellow liquid leached from his salad.

  “You haven’t said one word about the family. I suppose that’s a bad sign. You might as well tell me who’s dead. Is it our mother?”

  “I haven’t been able to say anything, your husband there telling me about the ethnic music. No. She’s alive. She’s sick, she’s got something, they don’t know what it is, we’re worried about cancer, but she’s alive. She’s the only one, her and you and me. You should have written to her. A lot of trouble, a lot of pain for her. You know about Chencho? Yes, of course. That was before you ran away.”

  It took only a minute, the way he told of the deaths of the father and brother: a spider, a crazy man with a gun.

  For her it hardly mattered. They had all been dead for her since she was fourteen. What was disturbing was the living brother on the sofa, his mouth moving, the yellowed fingers tapping his knees, the ostentatious wincing at the billowing Italian music. She felt a meanness, a necessity to wound him.

  “You know, your music hasn’t changed. You play what our father played, or at least what you and Chris played years and years ago, just that same stuff, the old conjunto. Don’t you get bored with it? Don’t you want to get into the new stuff? I mean, try something different for a change? Chuck Rio’s doing norteño rock—you must have heard his ‘Corrido Rock’? There’s R and B. Latin jazz? You ever get to L.A.? That’s where the real música is happening. You’re stuck.”