The Water Museum by Luis Alberto Urrea
He knew he could cut through the Buena Vista apartment complex and be safe for most of five blocks, cutting in and out of the buildings, scrambling across alleys like a cat. He was home free. Those losers were gone. He put in his buds.
Shawn Phillips. Tom Rush. Chet Baker. Biff Rose.
He watched the traffic on the main drag, not happy about all the lights. But there was no Big Black in sight either way, not hiding behind the bowling alley, not down the hill in the big parking lot of Vons market. Clear. He ran across, slapping his high-tops loud and sharp and the bell over the door in the donut shop pinged and Sherri came out from the back room and smiled at him.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How you?”
“Good. You?”
“Slow, hon. Slow night.”
He stared at her.
She busied herself with rearranging the bear claws. She glanced up at him, leaning on the glass case. She had this way of looking up from under her brows. She said, “What?”
“Nothin’.”
She gave him that woman-smile and said, “You don’t look like it’s nothing.”
“Sherri,” he said. “Do you pray?”
“I prayed you’d come in tonight,” she said.
She laughed when his mouth opened and nothing came out.
“Cutie,” she said.
Light. Everything is made of light. Me. Sherri. Light.
“Can I touch your cheek?” he blurted. He was in uncharted territory now. He was flying into a cloud.
Real slow, she leaned forward. She moved her hair away from her face. She closed her eyes. He swallowed. He reached across the counter and laid his hand on her cheek. She had three piercings in her ear. Her skin was so soft. He rubbed it with his thumb. She opened her eyes. He took his hand away.
Hazel eyes.
“What was that, Joey?” she asked.
“I…” Light. “I don’t know.”
They laughed a little. Faces red. She breathed deep and shook her head and knitted her brow a little and stared.
A car pulled up. Cut its lights. He went to a table in the far end of the shop and listened to her sell a sailor a dozen donut holes. When she’d rung him up and he’d banged back out, she unlocked the white door to the back room and peeked out.
“You want to come keep me company while I cook donuts?” she said.
“Can I?”
She shrugged one shoulder.
“Who’ll know?”
She was grinning real wicked now. And he was feeling his pulse inside his jeans. From a touch? It was her look. Her smile. It was the smile. He was feeling fire and fluid deep down inside himself.
He got up. He shambled toward her. Light. Light. Light. He went in the back room. She closed the door and locked it. Bags everywhere of flour. Bags of sugar. Plastic jugs full of chocolate. It smelled like sugar and grease. Sherri smelled like sugar. His jaws hurt. His heart raced. She stood too close to him.
Her body was hot in her white donut shop uniform. He could feel her. He stared at her face. He stared at her breasts. She had powdered sugar on her hands. His hands were shaking again. She breathed into his face.
“Joey,” she said, softly.
He closed his eyes.
“Do you want to touch my breasts?”
“Yes.”
“You can.”
“Okay.”
He looked, and she had turned toward him. He put his hand out—only one finger at first. He touched her breast where he thought her nipple was. Her bra was dense and thick. He pressed softly, but didn’t feel anything but layers of cotton.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said.
He cupped her breast and held her. He put his other hand on her other breast. She moved the zipper of her frock down. He put his face to her cleavage. He smelled her. He breathed her all in. All the sugar and her sweat and her perfume and he could smell her lotion and her shampoo and her laundry soap and he pressed his mouth to her and said, “Could you call me Willie?” And she sighed and pulled the material aside. He took her nipple in his mouth.
“Willie,” she said.
He had just begun to weep when the bell dinged and Butchie came into the shop.
Ten
Chametla
The last shot fired in the Battle of Chametla hit Private Arnulfo Guerrero in the back of the head. It took out the lower-right quadrant, knocking free a hunk of bone roughly the size and shape of a broken teacup. This shot was fired by a federal trooper, who then shouldered his weapon and walked to a cantina on the outskirts of town, where he ate a fine pork stew with seven corn tortillas and a cup of pulque. The shot was witnessed by Guerrero’s best friend, Corporal Ángel García, and by Guerrero’s dog, Casan. Casan was a floppy-eared Alsatian he’d stolen from a federales base the year before.
“Por Dios, Arnulfo,” García muttered as he stuffed straw and a long strip of his tunic into the gaping head wound. “What have they done to you?”
Guerrero writhed on the ground, his teeth clenched in a silent rage, froth collecting on his lips.
García stanched the bleeding and wrapped a dirty field dressing around and around his friend’s head.
Casan stood to the side, whining and fretting.
Troops were everywhere, and though the Battle of Chametla was over, García didn’t know it. So he pulled his comrade onto his shoulders in a straining carry—for Guerrero was at least a foot taller and many pounds heavier—and struggled to a copse of cottonwoods beside a muddy creek. He put his friend down gently on a bed of leaves and cottonwood fluff, and he tied Casan’s rope leash to the trunk. Then he snuck down to the creek and filled his hat with water. He tried to wet his friend’s lips, but the dying man was already too far gone to drink.
They’d come out of the mining lands of Rosario, Sinaloa, full of revolution and fun. Men were raised to fight and enjoy fighting. None dared admit they were weary of it, weary of fear, and each had learned to dream, and dreamed at all hours—dreamed while sleeping, while awake and marching, while fighting. Only dreaming carried them through the unending battles.
They’d drunk their fill, slept with country girls in every village, ridden trains to battle. Both Guerrero and García were excited by the trains—their first train rides. Then they were sickened by the rocking of the freight cars and choked by the smoke boiling back over the roof, where they fought for space and tried not to be forced off. They coughed black cinders at night.
Casan was just one of their treasures, one of the fruits of their exploits. They’d stolen guitars, rifles, horses. Guerrero had stolen underwear from haciendas, and García himself had stolen a cigar from the pocket of a sleeping federal captain. They’d seen men hang and watched villages burn.
“Don’t die now, you bastard,” García grunted as he peeked out through the bushes to see if their enemies had fled. “We have so much to do!”
But Guerrero only moaned and kicked his feet.
As night fell, Ángel García gathered wood. He peeled back the sullied bandages to let air and moonlight in. The ugly black cavern blown out of Guerrero’s head leaked slow and watery blood. His face was pale. His skin was cold. And still he drew breath and occasionally stirred and mumbled.
García lit a small fire and moved Guerrero nearer to the flames. He tore long strips from his friend’s shirt and rewrapped his head. Why waste a swallow of tequila on him? There was a bottle in his bedroll. He lifted it in a silent toast and drank.
He must have drifted off to sleep, for it was Casan’s whimpering that awoke him. The big dog had worked himself free from the rope, and he stood over the prone body of Guerrero and whined.
“What is it, boy?” García whispered.
Casan tilted his head and stared down at Guerrero. The dog yelped. Then he backed away.
García crawled over to Guerrero and said, “Arnulfo? Are you awake?”
The wounded man didn’t stir.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” García chide
Then he heard it too. The faint whistling. He inclined his head. There was a plaintive hooting coming from under Guerrero’s bandage. Were poor Guerrero’s sinuses blowing air out of his skull? Christ. What next? García pulled open the wrapping and was startled to see a small puff of smoke rising from out of his friend’s head. He crossed himself.
“Ah, cabrón!” he said.
The whistle again, then another puff of smoke. Casan barked. García sat beside the dog and stared. Then, was it? It couldn’t be! But—a light—a small light was coming out of the ragged hole in Guerrero’s head.
García bent down, but then had to leap back because a tiny locomotive rushed out of Guerrero’s wound. It fell out of the wound, pulling a coal car and several small cattle cars as if it were falling off a minuscule bridge in some rail disaster. The soft train fell upon the ground and glistened, puffing like a fish. Casan pounced on it and took it in his mouth, shaking it once and gulping it down.
“Bad dog!” said García.
But by then, Guerrero’s childhood home had squeezed out of his head. It was quite remarkable. The walls were soft and pink, and the furniture was veiny and tender. Casan ate the back porch. García, starving after the battle, skewered the couch, the bed, and the oven on a wire and roasted them over the fire. They tasted like pork.
Guerrero grunted once and a pile of schoolbooks plopped out.
Soon, García was appalled to see Guerrero’s parents and boyhood friends. Their cries were puny and heartrending when Casan ate them. And naked women! Good God! He didn’t know Guerrero had mounted so many naked women! He looked carefully—they came out in a parade of breasts and asses, small legs waving. He couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear his own lust and his own hunger, and he couldn’t bear Casan’s insatiable mouth, and he couldn’t bear his own loneliness. If he had tried to make love to them, he would have torn them apart.
All these small beings mewled and quickly expired.
It was the worst night of his life. He found himself praying that Guerrero would die. But he didn’t die. And García decided, finally, irrevocably, that he had to leave his friend to his fate. The damage to his own soul would be too great if he sat there any longer watching children, priests, grandmothers, goats, wagons, and toys ooze out of Guerrero’s bloody head and die on the ground. So he put the rope through Casan’s collar, and he tucked Guerrero’s pistol in his own belt, and he put Guerrero’s boots on his own feet, and he made his friend as comfortable as possible.
Birds gathered. First, crows. Then magpies and robins. Finally, gulls came from the coast. They seemed to be praying to Guerrero, for they bowed to him repeatedly. They stayed there and fed on his dreams until they were too heavy to fly.
Eleven
The Sous Chefs of Iogüa
For Trinity Ray
Saturday. Lunch. Dexter Bower couldn’t find his red baseball cap anywhere and had to make do with the tan cap with a fish stitched to the front. That irked the crap out of him, but maybe that’s just what happens when you get old. Everything’s so damned irksome. Like the Mexican farmhands. They couldn’t say the name of the state if you paid them.
Dexter grunted. Of course, he was paying them. Those boys worked hard, worked as his momma used to say till their finger bones were poppin’. But they couldn’t say “Iowa” in schoolyard English and it came out like this: “Eee-uh-güey.”
Plenty of people, of course, still said “Ioway” and that didn’t bother him at all. That was traditional. That was English, for Godsakes.
He liked how they called him “Jefe,” though. He pronounced it “Heffy.” He hadn’t enjoyed school all that much, but they could have warned him that language would prove overtaxing.
“Iowa. See?”
He’d worked on it with a pencil stub and a sheet of notebook paper with his foreman, Juan. Juan was from someplace near Guadalajara. Tlaquepaque. How were you supposed to say that?
Juan smiled and shook his head and stared. Mexicans said lots of things with their smiles and head shakes. Mostly, Dex believed, they were saying, Don’t fire me, Jefe.
He’d finally compromised on the phonetics. He wrote the word out like this: IOGUA. Felt like a United Nations ambassador.
That was when Juan still worked for him. Bunked out in the workers’ shed. Now Juan had moved into town and opened a restaurant, and that’s where Dexter was headed. To see if Juan had taken any steps to heal the various damages done to Ioway by all this upheaval and displacement.
“Ee-uh-guey,” he muttered to himself, as he dragged himself into the F-150.
That lower back wasn’t doing nobody any good. He chuffed out a laugh. Who was he kidding? Ol’ Pedro, running the restaurant across the street from Juan’s—why, hell, everybody called that poor guy “Pee-dro.” It was all a new language around here now.
Like that clown on NPR said: The paradigm has shifted. Every American town is a border town now.
“Jesus.”
* * *
Dexter farmed 1,500 acres and leased another hundred-acre share to the east. Like everybody else, he had it divided between corn and soy. He ran a few handsome spotted cows on ten acres, selling off calves every year. And he was experimenting with sorghum and hay and things like that. Getting some nitrogen back into the soil.
So far he had managed to avoid using all that Monsanto demon seed—that bioengineered stuff that was half moray eel on the genetic level, or had spider blood in it instead of sap, or glowed with firefly juice in the kernels. Shit was what that was. Killing off all the goddamned bees. He could spit. He rolled down the window, took a breath, and went ahead and let fly.
“Bastards,” he said.
He kept his truck clean and his house tidy. She had always kept it neat, and he saw no reason to sully her memory with clutter or fuss. The porches were swept and the rockers sat there, jaunty in the sun, as if expecting herself to reappear at any moment and sit there reading one of her book club books. But she was gone now more than two years.
She had planted them a nice vegetable and herb garden, and when Juan still worked for him, he’d tended to the edibles—Juan was a wizard, all right. Dexter didn’t really care for kale or cabbage or cauliflower, which was too bad because Ol’ Juan brought it in by the gunnysack. Tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, cukes, squash, pumpkins. It was nice. Nice herbs, too—though Juan had snuck in all this Mexican stuff and Dexter was half-convinced there was marijuana in there somewhere. Cilantro? No thanks—tasted like soap.
Dexter drove his half-mile track out to the state road. Every winter he’d be out here plowing with the big red blade mounted on the Ford, and when he was done opening up his drive, he’d by God get cracking on the neighbors’ spreads down the road. Arnie and Ina, good Vikings from Minnesota. The Rays over to the east—they had a kid. Couldn’t be trapped out here in snow. That’s how America worked. Used to work. That was what made things function. It was all obvious come winter. Some folks wouldn’t pitch in with a snow shovel if they saw a naked one-hundred-year-old lady out there struggling with a drift. Of course, there had been no winter to speak of this year. His damn crab apple tree was already blooming. Dex fretted about the day he could no longer steer the plow. Who would help the neighbors then?
Ina the Viking was out in her potato patch waving at him like some idiot. Some people thought life was just the spiffiest thing that ever happened. Dexter raised one finger off the top of the wheel in greeting and roared down the blacktop toward West Linden, sun flashing like emergency flares off all the corners of his rig.
* * *
Juan Reyes sat in his dark restaurant on 5th Street with his head resting on one hand. The bowl of menudo before him blew steam into his face. The cloud was scented with the delicious essence of tripe and lime juice and cilantro and Cholula sauce and diced red onions. Fat hominy lurked in the murky red soup like a hundred eyes watching him eat. He took a wide spoon and delivered a shot of lava to his mouth and slurped it like a gr
Americans! What barbarians. He couldn’t get an American to sit down to a bowl of menudo if he were paying them. They didn’t like Mexican food unless it was smothered in sour cream and melted yellow cheese. They didn’t care if the cheese was squirted from a can—as long as it was hot and yellow and copious. On their flour tortillas. Texas food, not Mexican food. Juan had never tasted sour cream until he was ten years old. He thought cheese was white and came from a goat. And he ate his first flour tortilla in Juárez.
Ah, menudo. His customers didn’t know what they were missing. He sipped his cinnamon coffee. It wasn’t just menudo—they didn’t come in anymore for anything. He was certain the recent vogue in fish tacos would enliven his business, but the Iowans had lost their interest in Taquería Los Reyes. His brother Hugo had gone off to Chicago, where he could make fancy Asian fusion banana and green tea leaf enchiladas in West Pilsen for the hipster Yuppies and Chuppies there.
Occasionally, college kids from Iowa City came down to West Linden and stopped by. Nerdy glasses and earrings and hilarity. They had come for ironic meals. Mexican food in the midwestern heartland. Jajajajaja.
It was his old El Jefe, Señor Dexter, who pointed out the problem. He’d been the only client, again. Eating carnitas of pork in red sauce, again. Juan had sat with him and let slip that business was so far down that he might have to close the taquería and return to the farm.