Accordion Crimes (18 page)

“A beautiful young girl like you shouldn’t be worrying about a career,” Mr. More said. “But I’d like to hear you play. Maybe I can offer you some suggestions. I once had a dream of playing the classical tuba.” He had patted her arm, two slow pats, the tips of his fingers just grazing the down on her arm and making her shudder.

When he woke from his little nap in the red Saturday evening a few weeks before Félida’s
quinceañera
there was no one in the trailer. Abelardo dashed water on his face, patted himself dry, sprinkled talcum powder into his groin, slapped his face and neck and shoulders and belly with Sea Breeze. Now the careful arrangement and spraying of his hair. The pressed trousers, the new black socks of some smooth silklike fiber, white shirt and a pale blue tie, a pale blue polyester jacket to pick up the color. Last, the gleaming shoes. In the mirror a good-looking man of deep health and intelligence. He went for the green accordion, for he was playing for Bruno tonight, a man who appreciated
the plaintive voice and the hoarse crying of the old instrument. It was not in the closet, not under the bed, not in the living room nor the kitchen. His heart beat with fear. He raged into his sons’ room and for a moment thought he had found it, but it was only the old Italian Luna Nuova that he had given to Baby years before. One of the bastards had his green accordion and he had no time to run around the town looking for the dirty little thieves. In the end he had to take the Majestic, but the tone was wrong for this music and he played so angrily and powerfully on it that he broke a reed tongue and the buttons jammed.

Long after midnight he returned, drunk and still furious, but the green accordion stood on the shelf in the closet again. He opened the instrument, his fingers probed the creases of the bellows. The money was undisturbed. The shreds of fear solidified to fury. He strode to his sons’ room, ready to denounce and tear them. The beds were empty. It was inconceivable, but Adina must have had it.

“Get up!”

“What is it?” Bolting up in fright, wide awake and trying to recognize the danger.

“Why did you take the green accordion? Where did you go?”

“I? The accordion? I took nothing. You’ve gone crazy.” He raised his arm as if to strike her in the face with the flat of his hand, left her weeping on the pillow.
Ah, now it comes out!
she thought.
Brutal man!
While he went to the refrigerator and groped for the ice water. He thought,
Félida!
And rushed to hammer on her door. Shocked by the burst of defiance from the other side.

“YES, I TOOK IT. I was invited to play for a teacher!” It was too late for any kind of truths. For she had not even
opened the case before the teacher was on top of her, grinding her into his dusty carpet where she could see forlorn strings hanging from the underside of the sagging sofa.

“Not even the most criminal son would speak to his father this way! You slap my face with insolent words!” Rage swallowed everything. He felt interior stormy chords as if madmen were pummeling the timpani of his guts. He shouted.

“A woman cannot play the accordion. It is a man’s instrument. A woman cannot get other musicians to play with her, nobody will hire you, your voice is not strong enough. Your character is bad, you are disobedient, you have no future in the musical field.” He was almost crying. “After all the money we intend to spend on your
quinceañera.
” And kept it up until Baby came in, calmed him, until at two in the morning it was silent. Chris was still out under the moon somewhere, driving his taxi, was often out all night taking drunken soldiers back to the base.

In the earliest morning Adina heard the door close. The outside steps creaked. In the window the margin of the moon was dark silver as though tarnished. A deep and ominous silence. Abelardo breathing thickly beside her. She touched the side of her face lightly with her fingertips. Where he might have struck her, where he almost had struck her. In a few minutes she got up and went into the kitchen, felt sand under her bare feet, no, it was sugar. Sugar and salt spilled across the floor. Heard the hissing gas before she smelled it.
Dios,
they could die! She turned off the gas burners that were pouring the noxious stuff into the house, opened the door gagging and coughing at the stink of the gas. She stood on the porch in her nightdress looking down the wet dirt street. Somewhere a rooster was crowing, a maniac of a rooster. The street was entirely empty. Betty/Félida was gone.

Trembling, she stepped back into the kitchen and saw the green accordion on the table. A knife protruded from the bellows. It was a message that the daughter wished to stab her father to the heart.

“Never mention her in this house again,” Abelardo mumbled, weeping. “I have no daughter.” Yet before he spoke he drew the knife out of the instrument and examined the bellows slowly, carefully, for signs of other invasive cuts and slices and he spent the afternoon behind a locked door repairing the damage by gluing a thin piece of pigskin over the tear inside the bellows and working a rich leather preservative into the outside to keep it supple and willing.

After the war the minutes flew by, the hours, the weeks and years and there was no word from the daughter. Adina became very religious (“Lord, I cannot bear these burdens alone”), going out with the Leaks to knock on doors and persuade others to become Yahweh’s Wonders. Chris and Baby continued to play music with Abelardo, but an animosity was growing between them, a dislike of each other’s music. Nor did the weekend playing bring in enough money to live. The traditional music was not so popular now; it was all swing and big bands.

When he was twenty-three, twenty-four, around 1950, Baby got the idea to grow chiles, to do some throwback thing, associated with a regard for the agricultural laborer, passionate rhetoric that flowed from union organizers who came to the region after the war, and his thoughts of his unknown grandfather whom he wished to believe a hero. The idea was vague. He had to lease land, had to learn how to grow chiles
from the agricultural experiment station agent, an Anglo who pressed him to specialize in a thick-bodied cultivar named S-394, developed at the University of Texas, and not the old local chile,
la bisagra,
the hinge, for its crooked shape. The timed application of chemical fertilizers and irrigation were the key procedures. He found this boring, lost interest as soon as the plants started to grow. The chile-growing he had imagined, had heard described by older men, was a complex thing of crossbreeding for drought resistance and special flavors, of virtuoso weather readings, of gauging the soil’s temper, of prayer and fate. He thought he wanted to understand these things, be a part of that life, but only discovered he had no talent for agriculture.

While he had the land, Abelardo was drawn to it, came out as often as he could get away to see how the plants were coming along, talk a little, now increasingly about his life in the past.

His drowned father had played the guitar,
vingi, vingi, vingi.

“So there was a little music in the family,” said Abelardo, squatting on the red soil at the end of a row, smoking his cigarette and watching the irrigation water trickle into the ditch. He said it was a sour, hard music that forced the ears until he, Abelardo, came along and stunned everyone with his fabulous playing.

“I learned to play in the fields, from Narcisco. Narcisco Martínez,
el Huracán del Valle,
started it, started the
conjunto
music. Look, before World War Two there wasn’t truly nothing, just guys playing together, all the old Mexican bullshit stuff, mariachi … Then Narcisco, then I came, and pretty soon, after the war, there were four or five good
conjuntos
—me, Narcisco, Pedro Ayala, José Rodríguez, Santiago Jiménez, Jesús Casiano.
I loved that music. At first it was just a little one-row accordion, maybe another instrument, whatever was there; then we got the two-rows and added the
bajo sexto,
and just those two instruments made a lot of good music for dances. I had a man, we called him Charro because he had this Stetson he always wore, played
bajo sexto
with me before Crescencio, poor Chencho, was born, an older man, very strict in his ways. Well, he couldn’t really feel the music I was trying to play and we broke up because in those days I drank a lot. Then I got a
tololoche—ay Dios,
what a beautiful sound that instrument makes with the accordion.”

“I rather have the electric bass. Makes them dance. Drums, too, get them moving.”

“Yes, now you younger ones make fun of how we played, but you got to think back who this music was for then, where it come from. It come out of poor people, didn’t have money for fancy drums and the electric instruments—even if they were invented then, you got to have electricity to play them. Who had electricity in the thirties? So we played the left hand, played the bass. Narcisco said ‘
conjunto era pa’la gente pobre,
’ and he knew what he was talking about. And he knew about being poor; he drove a truck, worked in the fields most of his life. That’s where it happened, this music, in the fields. And of course you know there were plenty of them that looked down on the
conjunto
—your mother, for one.”

No, he said when Baby asked, he had never cared to take up the piano accordion with its forbidding-looking row of keys like teeth—an instrument that breathed and had teeth, that had a way of showing the human hand as a small trampling animal.

Baby looked up the rows of the chile plants, the curved first small pods curling in under the leaves and the white blossoms enticing the bees. Why did the old man talk so much?

“Now it’s getting popular, this music, our music, and you know why?
Tejanos
carried it through the cotton fields, all over the country, up in the beet fields, Oregon and wherever—
sí,
they danced on Saturday night, maybe just for the chance to stand up straight. I remember those dances very well. We all played the taco circuit. Most of us worked all week in the fields too. You had to tie a bandanna over your mouth and nose the dust was so bad, the dancers jumping around made plenty of dust. Narcisco made a polka, ‘
La Polvareda,
’ about this dust cloud. I got it on the old record; you heard it. The accordion was so natural, a little friend. Easy and small to carry, easy to play, and loud, and can play bass rhythm and melody. Just the accordion and nothing else and you’ve got a dance. It’s the best instrument for dancing in the world, the best for the human voice. This music, this instrument—your mother”—he spat—“your mother wants to make you into imitation
bolillo,
an ass-licking Anglo doughball. You’ll never be one of them. You can’t. Learn a million American words and so what? They’ll still kick you in the face with their big salty feet.” He grabbed Baby’s right hand, stretched his sweaty arm out, the brown skin taut over the muscles. Skin brown as though varnished with strong tea. “But don’t expect to make a living with music, with playing the accordion. It cannot be done, even if you play nothing but American music. That’s the tragedy of my life.” He held out his own hands, fingers splayed.

The son Baby, this lagging chile grower by day, this part-time accordion player at night, drifted along. On the weekends he played for dances with Chris, mostly
rancheras
and polkas; they sang in the classic two-part harmony,
primera y segunda,
Baby’s voice a raspy tenor that could soar to a quivering and incandescent falsetto, Chris’s voice with a thick
nasality that gave the sound substance and richness. Their big days were in October, especially
El Día de la Raza.
They split off from Abelardo because there were too many dances to waste three accordions on one place. The dances were exhausting, the strain of playing and the lights, the sweat and heat and thirst, the noise like pouring rain, and always a table of roughs waiting for Chris, youths opening in
el grito,
“
Ah-jai-JAI!
” when Chris stepped up to sing.

Though so many turned to the big-band sound and the strange hybrid fusion of jazz, rumba and swing, would rather listen to “Marijuana Boogie,” the Los Angeles Latin sound, than “
La Barca de Oro,
” there was an audience that liked their music, who found value in it. These new ones, many of them veterans back from the Korean War, some of them university students, embraced
conjunto
, and this music was not for dancing but for listening. It had a meaning beyond itself.

“They listen,” said Chris, “not because we’re good, though we are good, but because we are theirs. They are not just jumping around in the dirt until they drop.” But the zoot-suiters booed them off the stage, went crazy for the Mexican-Latin stuff,
música tropical,
a kind of hot, tripping swing.

Chris was in small troubles constantly, half hiding behind Baby while they played because someone was looking for him; he was always fooling around with somebody’s woman out in the parking lot and when the break was over he didn’t come in too many times and Baby had to start without him, got used to being the only accordion and started to play one or two of his own songs. “Your Old Truck and My New Car” was well known, and “I Never Knew About the Front Door.”

Chris drank. Got into fights. He was arrested, three, five times. Beaten in jail or on the way there. Stories went around. He had a gun in his pocket. He was mixed up with the
Robelos. Then his friend Veins was found clubbed to death in the folds of a dirty carpet.

With two sons like that, what kind of path could they find through the world? Chris had a job driving a taxi and was out all night, night after night, working or not working. Half the time he didn’t show up on the night they had to play.