Accordion Crimes (17 page)

Abelardo wanted his sons to die for the accordion. He played to each of them when they were still babies, choosing the last hour of light for the most impressionable time, for who has not heard music at the end of the day, the quarter-light infused by somber harmonies that say everything that has ever been said? A listening child never forgets the scent of the uprushing darkness, the gleam of a white shirt as someone approaches.

He bought each of his sons two-row diatonic models similar in style to the old green accordion. “I don’t bother with those little ten-button ones,” he said. “Let the kids start out right.” But, rushed and pressed, he was impatient in teaching them, made them sit on the wooden chairs under the signed photographs of his accordionist friends, Narcisco Martínez, Ramón Ayala, Rubén Naranjo, Juan Villareal, Valerio Longoria, in a row on the wall. Crescencio had no interest in the accordion. Abelardo said to his face, very sadly, “Crescencio, you are stupid, truly stupid.” He gave up on him and concentrated on the younger sons. (Yet Chencho was a wonderful dancer—not to this music, but to big-band swing on the radio, a real jitterbug, spinning and twirling the girl and lifting her up above his head.)

“The accordion is an important instrument. It can even save lives. Last spring a man played the accordion to calm the frightened passengers in a shipwreck in the fog in New York. Now listen and see, this is how I play this,” he would say. “Now you try it,” executing a quivering bellows shake, fast arpeggios, tricky dissonances, but he had no time to show them slowly and carefully. He was out of the house again, working or playing for a dance. After a few months the lessons stopped. They would have to find their own way.

One day a man came into the Blue Dove. He returned many times. He always ordered the same thing, the specialty of the restaurant and the reason many came there, attracted by the odor of fat juices dripping on the charcoal fire in the back courtyard, the
cabrito al pastor
and the plates of
machitos,
tender pieces of goat liver roasted in lengths of intestine. These delicacies persisted on a pedestrian menu of steak, eggs and burritos.

This man sat always at the tiny corner table, a table also favored by lovers, who failed to notice the sway of the chairs, the unsteady table when the folded matchbook beneath the wall leg was disturbed. Nor did the man notice these things. He placed his folded newspaper on the empty chair and gestured for the waiter.

Standing up he was unpleasantly tall, but in a chair, and his long legs folded beneath it, he faded, distinguished only by a heavy nose and a mustache of excruciating thinness. He had a trick of looking slyly around from under lowered eyelids, never staring boldly, never letting his eyes flash. His hair was sleek and receding from his caramel-colored forehead. He came from a northern city, one could hear it in his voice. He sat quietly, his hands loosely collapsed, filling the table, as he waited for the platter of meat to come. When he was finished with the meal he placed his knife and fork on the plate in the form of a cross, lit a cigarette, holding it between forefinger and thumb of his left hand, and leaned back in the creaking chair. If he caught Abelardo’s eye he would gesture with the second finger of his right hand as a sign he wished the dirty plates carried away. One evening he made this gesture and as Abelardo grasped the edge of the soiled platter the man spoke
to him in a low voice, asked Abelardo to meet him across the street—he named a bar—at six-thirty. Below the cigarette smoke Abelardo could smell a pungent herb oil, a primitive and superstitious odor.

The man sat at the end of the bar, seemed very cold and dangerous away from the lovers’ table. He crooked his second finger at the barman, the familiar gesture, and a glass of whiskey came to Abelardo.

“I represent another,” said the man softly. His newspaper lay folded on the bar showing a photograph of Mussolini at an accordion festival. He blew smoke from both nostrils like a bull on a cold plateau. “I offer you a certain opportunity.” There was a long silence. At last Abelardo asked, what is this opportunity? He said the word “opportunity” in a light, sneering voice, no longer the busboy clearing away the man’s filth.

“The opportunity is a large one. A very pleasant opportunity for the right one. I think you are that one.” There was another long silence. Abelardo finished the whiskey, the finger moved and a second glass came at once. The man lit a second cigarette, let the smoke drift out of his stretched mouth in quivering rings.

“This opportunity,” he said, “involves one or two simple actions. From time to time I will bring a package into the Blue Dove and place it on the empty chair, behind the tablecloth. I say to you as you are clearing away the dishes a few words, such as ‘white Buick with a rosary on the rearview.’ You slip the package under a dirty dish in your tub and go toward the kitchen. I have noticed the side door that goes outside to the
garbage cans where the waiters smoke. It is easy to go around the corner to the parking lot.” The word “smoke” sent the man’s fingers to his shirt pocket.

“In the passageway you take the package from the tub and go out the side door. You say you are going out for a smoke if anyone notices you. But this all happens very quickly; no one will even look. In the parking lot you glance at the cars and put the package on the back seat of the white Buick with the rosary. Or whatever car I have described to you. The Buick may be a Chevrolet or a De Soto. There may not be a rosary. There may be ten packages in a year or a hundred. On the first day of every month, I will leave one of these for you under my plate.”

The man opened his left hand a little and in the dim light Abelardo saw a folded bill. He thought at first it was a ten, then a hundred, but finally saw clearly that it was a thousand. A thousand-dollar bill. A steaming flush rose up his right side, the side closest to the money.

The first package appeared four days later. It was, as the man had said, all very simple. It was the money that was difficult. So large a bill could not be real money. It was abstract, a thing of ferocious value, not to be showed and not to be spent. He got a can of shellac and a small brush, creased the first bill lengthwise, shellacked it lightly on one side, removed the bass end of the green accordion and glued the bill into an interior fold of the bellows. It was entirely invisible, could not be discovered except by knowing fingers, could not be seen, even if someone removed the ends and looked into the bellows. The man came into the Blue Dove with his secret packages and secret thousand-dollar bills for one year and two months. Then he stopped coming.

Abelardo went to the bar across the street several times but the man was never there. He asked the bartender if he knew when the man was coming back. That one whispered it was better not to inquire. He himself knew nothing but had heard that a fine new suit had been delivered to someone, a beautiful grey sharkskin suit in a white box, but when that person put it on, the heat from his body activated volatile chemicals secreted in the seams and the suit had exploded and the man with it.

In the bellows of the green accordion were fourteen bills of the thousand denomination.

In 1945 they had the news of Crescencio’s death and a letter from some lieutenant that began: “I only met Crisco, as everyone called him, a few days before he was killed …” For the first time they learned that his death was not from bullets but from a cinder-block wall which had collapsed and fallen on him when he kicked it. He had been jitterbugging with another soldier and in a wild breakaway had spun around and made a flying kick at the wall, which yielded. Adina put a gold star in the window.

The two sons Chris and Baby, nearly grown and becoming insolent and willful, played every weekend with Abelardo.

Abelardo would play the first set, then often go off to drink Bulldog beer in the clubs and bars, listen to the Padilla sisters’ voices coming out of the
sinfonola,
leaving the rest of the night
to the sons. (Adina always had
menudo,
the fiery tripe soup, on hand for his hangovers.) From those intervals when he left the music to them, changes began to develop in the sons’ playing; they made a shorter, staccato music, like a knife stabbing. The older dancers complained they couldn’t dance properly to the sons’ music, with its choppier, faster beat and a kind of sprung rhythm that disturbed, but the younger ones loved them, screaming and cheering, especially at Chris, “
¡Viva tu música!
” when he stepped up in his red jacket, Baby in the black jacket with white piping on the lapels. Then, to Adina’s heartbreak—she blamed Abelardo and the easy Saturday night money—both of them dropped out of school.

What was the point? All paths went nowhere.
¡Ándale!

Acne scarred Chris’s face, a hardening face as he tried for jobs and did not get them. Weekend music wouldn’t keep a chicken alive. He had a taste for stylish shirts and wristwatches, gold chains. His ambition was to own
un carro nuevo.
He grew a mustache as soon as he could, to draw attention from the acne and to make himself look older. This black mustache curved down. He wore a pair of dark glasses and began to run with a bunch of
cholos,
especially with a rough called “
Venas,
” a black mole on his left nostril, someone who poured money into his white Buick with the crushed velvet upholstery, whose father, Paco Robelo, the whole Robelo family, were rumored to be connected with
narcotraficantes.

In a year or two Chris had his own car, a secondhand Chevrolet repainted silver, with painted flames licking along the sides and on the hood a portrait of himself playing the accordion in a fiery circle that made the old women say it prefigured a trip to hell.

Baby seemed to suffer. Everything affected him—the smell of burned food, thunder and hail, girls whispering, the shine
of the stellate scar on his forehead. The old women said he had a steel plate in his head. Abelardo shouted, “snap out of it—we got a dance to play tonight. You sit up there, look like your best friend just died. You see how Chris always got a smile? The audience wanna see you having a good time.”

Adina would put her hand against his forehead, worry that his heated blood might somehow be cooking his brains. But he was composing his first songs, struggling with words and music. It was all coming out in American.

Mr. More’s voice in the remedial mathematics class droned on and on about topological vertices, but Félida kept her head down, feeling him looking at her. He was walking up and down the rows and talking about it.

“Call the front of the room line AB, call the back of the room CD, if I walk BD, if I then cut across to A, do we have odd or even vertices where I stop? Hands?” There were no answers. Now he was walking up her row, slowing, standing beside her desk. She could smell the wool and chalk smell, see, from the corners of her eyes, the dusty brown shoes.

“Félida.”

She didn’t know. “Even?”

“As a matter of fact it is, but I think you guessed at it. Would you like to come up and draw the diagram on the board?”

The bell wouldn’t ring! She went up to the blackboard, took the chalk. What had he said, where had he walked? Across the front of the room. She drew a horizontal line. Down the row. Then up her row.

He laughed. “What I said was,
if
I cut across to A. I didn’t
actually cut across to A because I can’t walk through desks. Look.” Beside her again, taking the chalk from her, his cold chalky fingers touching hers. He spoke very softly, not a whisper, but a low voice. “Come back here after school for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.” He raised his voice, raised his hand with the eraser, rubbing out her lines and replacing them with his own. She went back to her desk feeling nothing. Nothing at all.

When she came to the room after three o’clock he was standing by the window watching the school buses pull out.

“You know how many years I’ve been doing this? Nineteen; fourteen of them here in Hornet. I came down here from Massachusetts. I had some dream about living in the southwest. I just thought it would be different than it is. You have to eat. Teaching, and in Texas, for Christ sake. After a few years you’re in too far to get out. So here I am. And there you are. Come here.” Moving to the side of the window.

And it was the same thing, the chalky cold fingers going up her neck and into her hair, pushing it up against the grain, which she hated, and then he pulled her up against him and the bony hands came up to her breasts and felt them, down her ribs to her waist, her hips, then up under her skirt and the cold chalky finger digging under the elastic of her panties and into her as he ground against her thigh. Hopping adroitly back when someone in the hall laughed and the clack of heels, some woman teacher, rattled past. She thought maybe it was his wife, Mrs. More, who taught typing and business math.

“Listen,” he mumbled. “She’s going to a meeting in Austin. I want you to come to the house. Tomorrow around five o’clock. I’ve got this.” He pulled something from his pocket, paper, unfolding it, showing it. A five-dollar bill. “For you. You can play your accordion for me.” He smiled faintly.

The accordion had started it. She had gone to his office the year before because he was the school guidance counselor on Wednesday afternoons, told him she wanted to be a musician but the problem was her father, well known, a famous accordion player, and her brothers who also played the accordion and were admired and demanded all through the valley, while she was invisible even within the house. Her father had a strong prejudice, she said, against women in music unless they sang; it was all right if they sang. But she had been singing all her life and he had never noticed. She had taught herself to play the accordion but had no confidence. She already knew thirty
rancheras.
What should she do?