Accordion Crimes (14 page)

He met Adina Rojas in 1924 at a dance. He was eighteen, ragged, his single possession the little green accordion he had bought a month earlier in a Texas cotton town after staring at it for weeks through a barbershop window seeing how the color of the bellows was fading in the strong sun and the broken thumb strap curled. It needed many repairs. He bought it for five dollars without hearing a note from it. Something about the instrument appealed to him through the fly-spotted glass and even then he was impetuous. A button stuck, the corner blocks under the bass grille had fallen off, the wax was cracked so that the reed plates rattled, the leather check valves were dry and curled, the gaskets had shrunk. He took the instrument apart carefully, learned to repair it by observation and by asking others. So he discovered the correct mixture of beeswax and rosin, where to purchase fine kidskin for new valves, and worked on it until it was sound and he could join his voice to its distinctive, bitter music.

Adina was five years older than he and dark, strong and willful, still unmarried. In later life he had only to draw out the first chord of “
Mi Querida Reynosa
” to evoke again the evening of that dance, although it was not at Reynosa but in Crash Creek. Adina’s face was powdered white, the white dots of her navy rayon dress shifting giddily as she moved with him, and he for once not playing; he had put his accordion in Beltrán Dinger’s hands, for Beltrán played well, and he came straight to Adina and danced a polka in the new style, with his weight back on his heels, stiff-legged, each step as if it were
necessary to free the foot from the floor, strong and manly movement—none of that Czech hopping, that exhausting
de brinquito
jump step—and the room of dancers circling counterclockwise, circling the rough floor, the smell of perfume and hair oil, Adina’s wet hands glued to his. After that one dance he returned to the musicians but watched the polka-dot dress jealously. He sang the wrenching “
Destino, Destino
” directly to her, his fingers flying over the buttons, carrying the dancers through the intricate music, making them shout “
ye-ye-ye-JAI!
” Even two drunks fighting outside the door came in to listen.

Adina remembered the dance well enough but regarded it as the beginning of her troubles. Later she preferred to tell her daughter lugubrious stories of how she had made her own soap and washed clothes in an outdoor kettle when they lived in the house of the Relámpagos. Because they could not afford a clothesline, she hung the clothes on the barbwire fence, old barbwire, oxidized deep red, a tangle of mends and wrappings and metal thorns, so their garments were marked with bars of rust though Abelardo always had enough money for cigarette papers and tobacco.

“In the Depression it was a dangerous time,” she told her daughter. “The Americans deported thousands of people to Mexico, not only
los mojados
but many born here, American citizens, yet they were arrested and forced to go, no matter how they protested, no matter what documents they waved. So we held our breaths. We could listen in that time to Pedro González, very early in the morning, what wonderful music,
Los Madrugadores,
from Los Angeles. I was half in love with him—what a wonderful voice that man had. And he fought injustice. He would speak out through a
corrido
of his own composition when Mexican Americans were treated in an evil manner by the
americanos.
And they arrested him one day on some false excuse that he had raped a woman singer. He sat in the courtroom smoking a cigar and smiling and that was his downfall, that smile, which they saw as insolent. They sent him to prison, to San Quentin, for many years and never was his voice heard again.”

“Not true,” said Abelardo from the other room. “They deported him when the war started. He broadcasts to this day from Mexico. He lives in Tijuana. If you were not so passionately addicted to American soap operas you could hear him any day you wished.”

She paid no attention. “And during the war we heard
La Hora de Victoria
and
La Hora del Soldado,
two very patriotic programs.”

“I played on both many times. ‘Anchors Aweigh,’ everything like that. Doing the taco circuit. And there was that crazy German used to hang around the studios; he was everywhere we went, trying to get on the air to sing ‘God Bless America’ in German.”

“Yes,” she said. “I remember you wanted to be a fingerprint man then, not an accordion player. You cut a coupon in a magazine and sent away for a kit, you studied strange facts, the number of hairs on a brunette woman’s head, you’d say some big figure.”

“Correct. One hundred and ten thousand. Blond ones got one hundred fifty thousand hairs. That’s counting the whole body, even on the arms and face. That old German! ‘
Herr scheutz Amerika! Land
something-something.’ How’s that for a memory?”

During those years in the Relámpago house she had cooked on an outdoor fire, stumbling over hundreds of broken clay pigeons, she told Félida in a ferocious voice. Nearby lived a crazy
Anglo with six fingers on each hand who practiced shooting his .22 pistol every day, his targets old roller-skating trophies—suggestively formed couples whose nakedness showed through their chrome garments. The heads and arms were the first parts shot away. Every day she had the fear of being wounded or her children killed by this crazy man’s bullets. It was she, she said, who had smoothed the mud each year when they replastered the adobe house, the side of her bare, callused hand sweeping the roughness to a fine matte finish, and on one memorable occasion a bullet had struck the wall a fraction of an inch from the tip of her longest finger.

“We were very scared. But what could we do? Somehow we lived, but it was a miracle none of us was killed. Or wounded. When the war started he went and we never saw him again. And for a year I saved up pennies and nickels to buy a nice aluminum teakettle with a whistle, for four dollars and something, but at the store they told me there was no more aluminum left to make kettles, all went to airplanes. All we had was a radio, and how we listened to it!”

“
You
listened to it,” Abelardo said. “I would not listen to that junk, those fortune-tellers, Abra and Dad Rango, and that Texas tap dancer you thought was so good, somebody went to the station one time, they wanted to see how he could do those things, those fancy steps, and all it was was a drummer tapping on the rim of his drum with the sticks.”

She whispered to her daughter that she did not much care for Abelardo’s music, preferred the more elegant sounds of the
orquesta
if she had a choice. Always she presented herself as struggling along a churned road carrying an enormous sack of problems like steel boxes that cut into her back while Abelardo capered ahead playing his accordion.

The finest thing about her was the thick, glossy hair,
luxuriant and rich, and her mouth, very full and beautifully cut. She kept from her face every expression except fatigue and bitterness. When she was miserable she had a habit of grasping her hair in both hands and pulling, the raven waves shifting, releasing her warm woman’s scent. She was humorless; to her, life was difficult and demanding. The great dark eyes were often remote. She was tall, taller than Abelardo, her ankles and feet slender. All of the children had small feet except poor Crescencio who might have been born from a knot of bloody feathers instead of her flesh. After the birth of Félida her body expanded, great sheets of fat thickened her thighs and belly. The bed sagged on her side, and Abelardo rolled helplessly into the trough. Both his arms could not encircle her enormous waist. She wore dresses without sleeves, loose rayon tents manufactured of orange, electric blue or pink cloth sewn with such weak thread the seams opened in the first washing.

And what of the old house of the Relámpagos? She had hated that house and all it stood for, longed to leave it for San Antonio and the famous opportunities. In later years Félida asked many times, ‘tell about the
casa
of the Relámpagos,’ for Adina made it like a story of a dangerous place from which they had barely escaped.

There had been, she said in her serrated voice, a living room with brown walls, and the floor covered with an old manure-colored rug. There was the outhouse, which smelled very bad. Of course, a shrine in the corner with statues and pictures of lesser saints—Santa Escolástica who protects children from convulsions, San Peregrino who looks after those with cancer. On a table with turned legs the color of dried blood, a lace cloth worked by some dead Relámpago whose delirious fancies took the form of triangles, a photograph of an unknown wearing dark pants and vest, and
an improbable pair of cowboy boots. The frame of this picture was decorated with glued-on toothpicks. There was a box of kitchen matches, a tall bottle of medicinal elixir and two brass ashtrays. On the wall, a net bag for letters and postcards, a calendar showing a Swiss village in the snow. There was a chromo of blood-dappled Jesus in a stamped metal frame that formed a cross at every corner.

Félida wanted to go find the old adobe house, to see the place everyone but she remembered. Abelardo shook his head, said sternly that the house was gone, swallowed up by the valley irrigation project, the whittled plot of land absorbed into Anglo cotton fields. In short, nothing of the Relámpagos remained except their name, carried by people not of their blood.

Two of the three sons, Chris and Baby, were as close as fingernails and flesh. Chris rushed at life, greedy for food and opportunity. Baby’s blood ran hot, his body temperature, his hands, hotter than anyone’s, as if he ran a perpetual fever. To touch him was to sweat. The oldest son, Chencho, was amiable but withdrawn, as if he were measuring the distances between the planets. Félida, that little something, was the youngest. Looking at her only living daughter, Adina said, “you poor little thing, without a sister for a friend. I will have to be your friend.” She tried to make the child her special confidante, warned her against the traps of life and the fate of women.

Hornet was never her goal. After the house of the Relámpagos was bulldozed, they started out for San Antonio where Adina believed there were better chances. The borrowed truck traveled six dusty miles north through mesquite, which
showed through the dirty windshield like scratches on the landscape, and into the outskirts of Hornet where it broke down. Abelardo and the boys—Crescencio who was eleven then and almost as strong as a man, and Baby and Chris—all pushed it to the garage, Adina carrying Félida in her arms and walking alongside. Inside the garage were two musicians Abelardo knew, a guitar and a
bajo sexto,
standing near the pay phone, swearing a little, telling him they had been waiting for the accordion player, had just learned that
hijo de la chingada,
that fool had fallen from the rail of the bridge and broken his pelvis on the dry stones of the riverbed. No one knew why he had been walking on the rail.

“
Borracho,
” said the
bajo sexto.

“
Loco,
” added the guitar, already working out a line or two of a
corrido
about the idiot.

As soon as Abelardo dug his accordion out from the boxes of cooking pots and sheets—it was not the Majestic that he played in those days, but the little green two-row—as soon as Adina found his good shoes and rubbed them to a gloss, as soon as he changed into his blue gabardine trousers and a white shirt, they left for the engagement, an anniversary barbecue to the north of Hornet. At noon the next day when Abelardo reentered the garage, hung over and filthy from sleeping under a bush, he discovered that his wife had moved into an old trailer on the edge of the barrio. The trip to San Antonio was canceled.

“How is it you make this enormous decision without consulting your husband? Have you grown a set of balls overnight, is that it? Let me see,” reaching for the hem of her dress.

“Get away! Who makes the decisions when you’re away at work, gone for months and months, or nights in a row? You
think I hold my breath? When the boy was hurt in the tire you were in Michigan, there was no one but me to take the responsibility. You leave me sitting in a broken car while you go to a fiesta, what should I do, hold my breath and die?”

He tried to get his job back at the Blue Dove (though it would mean traveling six miles back and forth) but the wife of the Anglo manager told him to get his ass out of there. No job for somebody who quits one day and comes back two days later. And so, because he had children who had to eat, and because there were no jobs, he went into the fields again for the next two years, up to the Lubbock onion fields, his red eyes tearing constantly, the reek of onions fixed in his clothes and skin, and across his knuckles ingrained lines of dirt like a map of starbursts; his mind, like a man turning a coin in his pocket, never stopped working over the injustice of a musician ruining his hands with field labor.

“Look around,” said Adina harshly, “it’s all women raising the families. The men are far away playing the accordion.”

What a relief and pleasure when the Blue Dove changed hands in 1938 and the new owner personally requested his services again.

That trailer Adina had found in Hornet was at the southwest edge of the barrio on a dirt street. To the east the barrio thickened into a maze, to the south lay an immense pasture containing seventy paint horses in powerful colors, to the west, the dirty copper smelter and, beyond, low, gullied hills, ash-colored sagebrush alive with ticks, a vague long sky like a cloth, and, all around, billions of small stones. Although the trailer was at the end of the street, it was connected to the
sewer line, not like the oozing and stinking
colonia
to the east where people lived in packing crates and scrap-metal lean-tos.