Accordion Crimes (13 page)

He caught the afternoon train to Topeka. Two days later, in mid-August, he lay on a table in an operating room while Dr. Squam made an incision in his scrotum and skillfully implanted sections of goat gland in his testicles. During the procedure a radio played a selection of waltzes and polkas
broadcast from the doctor’s radio station behind the hospital. When he heard that Beutle played the accordion, Dr. Squam reduced the charge for the operation to a flat seven hundred dollars.

The train back to Prank was intensely hot, plowing through a prairie scorcher, a stifling blanket of heat, the hazed air as thick as glue, the corn shriveling before his eyes and a pall of dust coating the margins of every road. The scratchy plush seat in the coach heated up. His swollen testicles began to throb and inside an hour the pressure of the straining cloth of his trousers on his privates was unbearable. He tried to walk up and down the aisle, but spraddled so obscenely the eyes of every passenger fastened on him. By the time the train reached Prank he had collapsed, nearly insensible, his ears ringing. When he looked through his fevered eyes the sky was upside down, birds skittering across it like insects on a glass floor. The conductor dragged him off at Prank and turned him over to Percy Claude who waited, dumb and stolid, in the shade of the station overhang, red arms dangling.

“There’s something wrong with the old boy, Percy Claude. Walks like he’s got a corncob up his ass. I was you, I’d get the doctor to him.”

Dr. Diltard Cude, a spindle-shanked man who held a nice packet of American Telephone and Telegraph stock, came out to the house, took a look at the testicular stitchery, the arrgry streaks shooting up from the old man’s groin and down into his black thigh, said infection, gangrene, nothing to do but take him home, make him as comfortable as possible in this goldarned heat, set a block of ice in a tray and set a fan so’s it
blows over the ice onto him, then nothing to do but wait for the end. Percy Claude didn’t bother to say they couldn’t run a fan without the electric.

For thirty hours Beutle lay on the sofa, unable to open his eyes. He felt someone come into the room. There was a great tingling all over his body, a burning and buzzing. He tried to move but could not. He wanted to cry out “
der Teufel!
” but his throat stifled his voice. Yet he was not afraid, but intensely interested, for he heard the wheezing notes of “
Deutschland, Deutschland
” and thought that at least there was German accordion music where he was going.

His name was misspelled on his tombstone as Hans Buttel. That’s how everyone spelled it and Percy Claude let it stay that way.

On the third of September, Radio, split and split again, went for an adjusted price of 505; Beutle’s remaining hundred shares were worth more than fifty thousand dollars. Percy Claude straightened up, walked around outside for an hour, then came in and sat down next to Greenie and told her how it was.

“You know
Vater
Hans left some stock. He’d got in on some stock through Charlie, Charlie Sharp. It’s quite a bit.”

“How much is it?” She lit one of the cigarettes she’d started smoking and blew a plume of smoke from her powdered nostrils.

“Oh, quite a bit.” He didn’t like to see a woman smoke but said nothing. She’d had her hair bobbed—butchered, he thought—big wads of straight hair chopped off at the earlobes. And she must be doing something to her chest; she was flatter somehow.

“Enough so’s we could leave this damn farm and move to Des Moines? There’s no reason to stay out here. I thought about living in Des Moines so bad.”

“Now, don’t sound like some crazy Flaming Mame. You’re not thinking about
Mutti.
”

“Oh, she’ll be happy in town—there’s other old ladies around, there’s stuff to do, go to the movies, learn to play mah-jongg. She can get a nice Colorinse, primp up a little. Oh god, tell me, Percy Claude, tell me we can move to Des Moines. I’m sick of washing clothes in that damn old boiler and cleaning out them stinking kerosene lamps. We’re the only ones in Prank don’t have electricity.”

“I don’t say yes and I don’t say no. There’s plenty got to be done.” But he called up Charlie on the feed store phone and told him he wanted to sell the stock.

“Jesus, Percy Claude!
Not now! Not now!
She’s climbing! That stock splits again, you’ll double your money. If I was you I wouldn’t sell at all, I’d buy more stock, diversify a little. I had my eye on this here Rotary Oil.”

“No, I guess I want to sell it. Thinking of putting the farm on the market, too, and moving to Des Moines.”

“Listen, if you’re going to move, move to Chicago. You can’t believe this here city. It’s a pretty important city; pretty big men here who pretty damn near run the country right from this here heartland. It’s not the millionaires back east who make the world go around. Hey, can you get
Roxy’s Gang
down there on the radio? Al Jolson was on the other night. I’m telling you, he’s a hot number.”

“No. We don’t get it. I guess I’ll sell.”

“Percy Claude, it’s your funeral. Just remember what I told you when it goes through the roof.”

“I made up my mind.”

“Check and double check, Percy Claude.”

By the end of the month the market was crashing and sliding, but Percy Claude smiled to himself. He went out to the mailbox every day to see if the check from Charlie was there. Finally he called Charlie up on the feed store phone to ask if he’d sent the check registered mail, but there wasn’t any answer on the other end, just the burring ring again and again until the operator came on the line and told him to hang up. They heard the news the hard way, the second week in October, from Loats’s daughter who had had a letter from the Sharps down in Texas. Charlie Sharp up in Chicago had lost everything in the crash, including Percy Claude’s inherited and unsold Radio stock, and had shot himself in the face. He wasn’t dead but his nose and mouth and teeth and lower jaw were blown away, just two crazy little blue eyes staring out of the raw, scabbing flesh. He was a horror to see and they had him down in Texas in a dim back room. Couldn’t speak and had to be fed with a funnel.

“You know what, Percy Claude,” said Rona Sharp on the phone after she told him that was correct, it was a sad thing, tragic, but there was maybe a bright side because Charlie had found Jesus, and wasn’t this a clear connection? “They give you a big box of free tomatoes down here when you fill up your car with gasoline. You ought to move down here.”

In a private deal Percy Claude sold the farm to a couple from Ohio, but their bank failed before he could cash the check. They had the deed and he had a no-good check. He had less than Beutle had started with forty years earlier.

“I’m going down to Texas and kill Charlie Sharp,” he said to Greenie. But instead they went to Des Moines, where, after three weeks of looking, Greenie got a job working in the five-and-ten and he was assigned to a CCC work gang building roads.

(But wasn’t it their son Rawley, born a few years later in the back of a car at a drive-in, who pieced together his grandfather’s farm and more, ended up with three thousand acres in production, owned a golf course, a farm machinery dealership, a tile and culvert business and an interest in a cheese factory while receiving twenty thousand dollars a year in government farm subsidies? Wasn’t it Rawley who gave money to start the Prank Farm Pioneer Museum and who moved heaven and earth, hired private investigators, to find the old green accordion his grandfather played? Weren’t they still searching in 1985 when Rawley and his wife, Evelyn, celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with an autumn trip to Yellowstone Park where Rawley, in the West Thumb Geyser Basin, dropped a roll of film, trod on it, lost his balance and fell headlong into a seething hot spring, and despite eyes parboiled blind and the knowledge of impending death, clambered out—leaving the skin of his hands like red gloves on the stony edge—only to fall into another, hotter pool? You bet.)

That great accordion player who was also a busboy, Abelardo Relámpago Salazar, rolled over in bed one May morning in 1946 shortly after sunrise in Hornet, Texas, and sensed that he was dying, perhaps even dead. (A few years later when he was truly dying and in this same bed, he felt violently alive.) The sensation was not unpleasant, though mixed with regret. Through his eyelashes he saw bedposts of solid gold, a diaphanous wing quivering at the window. Celestial music washed over him, a voice of a melting quality he had never heard while he was alive.

Listening, he returned to life and recognized the sun as the source of the gilded bedposts, knew the seraphic wing was a wavering curtain. The music was coming from his accordion, not the four-stop, three-row button Majestic in white pearl with his initials,
AR,
set out in tiny cut-glass gems, but the special one, the little nineteen-button green accordion with its rare voice. Not to be touched by anyone but him! Still, he listened, despite the disagreeable sensation of a swollen bladder, the stoking oven of the coming day. It was the voice of his overgrown, lanky daughter, a voice that he never heard, except thick humming as she drizzled and drabbed around the house. He had not even known she could play the accordion beyond a few strung-together chords, although she had been his child for fourteen years, although he had seen her a hundred times fooling with her brothers’ small Lido model. When was he ever home long enough to know his children? It was the sons who were the musicians. His anger burned because perhaps it was the daughter who was exceptional. That wonderful voice coming from the high part of the nose, plaintive and quavering, all the ache of life in it. And he thought of his oldest son, Crescencio, poor dead
Chencho, without wit or musical sense, like a timid dog that was afraid to come forward. What a total waste! It must have been the devil, not God, who sent that music into his dream. The same devil who deceived men over the age of the earth by concealing fossils in perverse places. He was furious as well because she was mauling the treasure of his life.

He shouted from the bed, “Félida. Come in here!” Put the pillow over the top of his head so she might not see his hair undone. Heard the scrabbling and the huff of the accordion. She came into the room with her head turned away. Her hands empty.

“Where is the green accordion now?”

“In the case. In the front room.”

“Never touch it again. Never open that case. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.” She turned her sullen face away, slouched to the kitchen.

“I don’t like your look!” he shouted.

He considered his daughter’s music. How well she sang! He had heard her but he had not heard her. Well, and how had she learned the accordion? No doubt from watching, from listening to him, from admiration of her father. It might be a novelty to let her come with him to one of his engagements, introduce his daughter, let them see how the whole Relámpago family—except Chencho, of course—had been richly gifted by God. But even as he imagined the handsome picture it would make, himself in his dark pants and jacket, the white shirt and white shoes, and Félida in the beautiful lace-edged pink dress Adina was sewing for the girl’s
quinceañera—ay,
how much that would cost!—and how he would let Félida step forward and release her astonishingly beautiful voice, move over Lydia Mendoza, here comes
another
gloria de Tejas,
the future was crouching at a dark side road on the path of events.

A bus went by and filled the room with a roar like a bomb blast echoing in a sewer. He got up, lit a cigarette, felt a pain in his right thigh, held his hair up with his right hand, squinting. How could he run back and forth all day at work and then stand half the night playing music? And the usual business with his
agringada
wife. It seemed to him that few people had to bear what he did. Or could bear it as bravely.

But he was up now, and, as always, the music started in his mind, a kind of bitter, lopsided polka that resembled “
La Bella Italiana
” the way Bruno Villareal played it. All his life he had enjoyed this private music, sometimes sad little phrases that belonged to no known
ranchera
or waltz, sometimes note-for-note repetitions of
huapangos
or polkas he himself played or had heard another play. Sometimes fresh inventions, new music never heard before, an inner musician working all night as he slept.

His little dressing table behind the door held the apparatus for the elaborate arrangement of the long hanks of hair to disguise the bald top. The back and sides were very long, and now, in the mirror of the early morning, he looked like an ancient prophet with the mange. He swept up the long locks with a wooden comb, placing each strand artfully, secured them with bobby pins. Working on his hair quieted his nerves and he sang, “
Can this be you, my little moon, who walks past my door …
” He achieved a hirsute look but a stranger glancing at the upsweep sometimes—for a moment—took him for a woman. And strangers did see him, for he worked in a restaurant, the Blue Dove—never a waiter, always the one who carried the dishes. The Blue Dove was in Boogie, the town to the south where they once had lived in the ancient house of the Relámpagos. In his
own kitchen he heard the clink of the pan as Félida heated the milk for his
café con leche,
from the radio the last chorus of “Route 66,” Bobby Troup, and the newscaster saying something about the coal mine strike and federal troops, something about Communists, the same old song, and he was glad when Félida shut it off. He had to hurry now.

He was short, with a full-jawed, fleshy face. Small eyes sunk deep in the sockets, sooty eyebrows arched (he smoothed them with a little spit on his finger), and above them like a panel, the broad forehead the color of fruitwood. The shortness of his neck destroyed any hope of elegance. His arms were muscular and thick, the better, he said, to clasp his accordion close; his hands ended in powerful but tapering fingers that moved swiftly. His trunk was not slender, the legs short and heavy, thickly furred, as was his broad chest.
Weight
came to Adina’s mind at the sight of his naked thighs.

A restless man, emphatic, his face changing with every sentence, ideas and thoughts bursting from him. Because he had no past he invented one. He made the most common events into stories, minor incidents swelling with drama as his voice pumped them up.
Dios,
said the waiters and his embarrassed children, he talks too much, they must have vaccinated him with a Victrola needle when he was a baby.

Yet he had never been able to describe certain moments in his life: the feeling when two voices paired like a set of birds twisting in close flight and the listener shuddered with pleasure. Or when music jetted from the instruments as blood from an arterial wound, blood in which the dancers stamped while grasping partners’ slippery hands, shouting from raw throats.

His own voice pitched excitedly from highs to lows with strong pauses for effects, sound effects. He sang when he wasn’t talking, making up music and words on the spot: “
My
beautiful Adina sleeping, black hair on the white pillow, the moon’s silver cords binding you to my bed.
” Although his feet were not small, he liked smart shoes and bought them whenever he could, but always the cheap ones that hardly lasted a month before the leather cracked and the heels fell off. When he drank he felt hopeless, he was cast with his music into caves of bat guano and bones gnawed by wild animals.

Abandoned at birth,

Alone in this world without mother or father,

I labored to live.

I wished for beauty

but found only ugliness and scorn—

His job was a stupid job and for that reason he liked it, took a morbid pleasure in unobtrusively sliding the white plates smeared with sauces and cheese off the tablecloth and into the Bakelite tub, bearing away bowls of stained lettuce leaves floating in juices, cigarette butts crushed into fat.

At night he entered his other world and, accordion against his breast and his powerful voice controlling the movements and thoughts of two hundred people, he was invincible; at the restaurant he was subservient, not only to the demands of the occupation but to some cringing inner self. His day began at seven in the morning with empty coffee cups and the crumbs of sweet cakes and ended at six after the first wave of dinner plates. He knew all the day waiters; there were seven. All but one of them respected his dual nature, perhaps cursing him in the passageway to the kitchen where he shoved the tubs of dirty dishes through a window to the sinks, mocking his slowness, clumsiness, stupidity; but in the evenings and on the weekends the same men screamed with joy as they stood in
the cascade of his music, touched his sleeve and spoke his name as if he were a saint. They would kiss his feet if they knew what made his music so vigorous, if they knew the green accordion’s secret—or perhaps would shove him into the great hot oven in envy.

Before the war, before they moved to Hornet in 1936, the family had lived in a certain adobe house near the river. There were a dozen straggling houses, poor and isolated. The train tracks curved in from the west and disappeared. The sons spent their first years playing with tires, dirt, sticks, crushed cans, bottles. Relámpagos had been in this place centuries before there was Texas. They had been American citizens since 1848 and still the Anglo Texans said “Mexicans.”

“Blood is thicker than river water,” said Abelardo.

In the generation before, Abelardo’s mother—not really his mother for he had been an abandoned child, a naked baby wrapped in a soiled shirt and left on the church floor in 1906—was a wordless bent woman of children and tortillas and soil, weeding her chickpeas and squash, tomatillos, chiles, beans and corn.

The old man—not really his father—was a field-worker, always far away, in the Rio Grande valley, in Colorado, Indiana, California, Oregon, and in the Texas cotton. An invisible man (as Abelardo himself became invisible to his children), working, working, away in the north, sending small amounts of money home, sometimes returning for a few months, a crooked-backed man with great scarred hands and a drawn, toothless mouth. That poor man a machine for working, the bruised hands crooked for seizing and pulling, for lifting boxes and baskets, for grasping.
The arms hung uncomfortably when work stopped. He was made for work, eyes squinted shut, the face empty of the luxury of reflection, mouth a hole, stubbled cheeks, a filthy baseball cap, wearing a cast-off shirt until it rotted away. If he had beauty in his life, no one knew it.

One day this secondhand father disappeared. The woman heard a long time later that he had drowned in a town to the north, swept away with others in a wall of water that filled streets nine feet deep with yellow liquid, a flood that would have frightened Noah, the cataclysmic result of the most ferocious cascade of rain ever known to fall—thirty-six inches in a single thunderous night.

Abelardo’s early life was bound by the music he made with sticks, dried chickpeas in a can, a bit of sheet metal and his own reedy voice; and by the small river that flowed, when it held water, away to the Rio Grande, deep and full with distant runoff, or nothing more than a silty film on the gravel, bordered by cottonwoods and willows thick with spring-loaded birds, huge flights of white-winged doves jamming and fanning the air in September and the guns going off all around,
POUM, poum;
and in the spring, going north, going to the shuddering north, the upwelling broad-winged hawks. He dimly remembered standing beside someone, a man, not his father, in the tangled fragrance of guajillo, black mimosa, huisache, in the cedar elms and the ebonies, watching a dark blue snake twine among the tiny leaves. He had almost seen the dappled ocelot the man was pointing at, as though a piece of earth cast with spots of light had pulled itself up and flowed into the thicket. In the damp soil of the riverbank he once found the imprint of an entire bird but for the head, the wings pressed down and out, the individual feathers of the flattened tail distinct, an impression as clear as the cast of an archaeopteryx in ancient mud. Some larger bird had
stood on this bird’s back, gripping the head with secateur beak, and at last had carried it away.

He was not a Relámpago by birth or heritage or blood but by informal adoption, yet he became heir to all the Relámpagos had owned, for the eleven other children died early or disappeared. Water was their fate. He saw Elena drown. They were getting water from the river, three or four of the true Relámpagos striving and pushing on the crumbling bank, then a splash and a cry. He saw her flailing hands, her streaming head rise above the muddy current for a moment and then truly disappear. He ran home behind the others, the water sloshing out of the can against his bare leg, the wire bail cutting into his hand.

Victor was the last of the true Relámpagos, and he died at age nineteen in an irrigation ditch, the water rosy with his blood. And the brutal joke was repeated: yes, it is well known that all-Texas Rangers have Mexican blood. On their boots.

The inheritance was more or less nothing, a crumbling adobe house of three rooms and a patch of yard the size of a blanket. Yet they lived in it until somehow it was proved the property of a big cotton grower, an American who felt compassion for Abelardo and gave him fifty dollars to erase any notions that he might own the fingernail of land.

Pairs of bulldozers arrived, dragging chains between them, plunging into the branchy maze, macerating the tiny leaves and the white wood of cracked limbs, scraping the thicket into mounds for the burning, life burned, sending up smoke for days. Afterward long, flat fields of cotton, the only relieving color the hooped backs of laborers and the overseer’s yellow truck, the air saturated with the smell of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. Yet for the rest of his life he woke in the morning expecting the smell of the river, and from beyond it the imagined perfume of
that beautiful and tragic country where perhaps he had been born.