Carry Me Like Water (10 page)

Diego nodded, though he had no idea who Miss Kitty was.

She broke out laughing and suddenly grew serious. She wrinkled her nose and fought back the tears that seemed to come from nowhere. “Juan, oh, Juan honey, just makes me so sad. You know, Johnny, there just ain’t figurin’ people out. Some bastard man just
told me I was an awful, wicked woman. Not in so many words, but I saw it,
I
saw it in his face. He treated me so bad like I was some cheap tramp. If I was a weak woman I’d have cried—I’d have burst into tears and bawled my eyes out—I’d have burst into tears like the second flood. But not me, honey, I ain’t weak; I didn’t cry. That bastard man, I tried to tell him, Juan, but he ain’t like you, no sir, he weren’t sweet and kind, and he weren’t no believer. I tried to tell him about me, about how I was the Virgin Mary and how Gabriel came to me and all, and I described his halo as bright as the sun on the water and his wings as strong as twenty eagles. But some people, sugar, they just don’t want to hear the truth—too hard to hear, I guess—just don’t want to. That awful man, may God strike him, that awful, awful, man. He looked at me like I was vile and evil and crazy. I could see it all in his eyes—you can see everything in people’s eyes, Johnny, I swear you can. And I could see in his eyes that he felt I was an abomination. Scared me so, those lies I saw in his eyes. I told him it was all there in the Bible, description of me and all.” Taking a deep breath, she put her scarred hands on her chest.

Diego stared at her hands and looked back at her pale, quivering lips. Her lips were easy to read. Some lips were almost impossible, but Mary’s were easy. Luz said it was because she was a goddamned actress. “She knows damn well you’d sit and listen to everything she has to say. She’s crazy, but she’s not stupid.”

Mary took her hands off her chest and touched Diego on the shoulder. “Do you know what that damned man did? He threw me a quarter—that’s right—a quarter! And I says to him, ‘You gonna toss the Virgin Mary a quarter? A quarter? You’d think a well-dressed Christian man like yourself would give the Virgin at least a dollar—maybe two.’ So he picked up his quarter and put it back in his pocket, and before I let that man get away I told him I knew for sure my son didn’t die for his sins, no way, no how. I picked myself up and walked away—yes, Juan, that’s just what I did.” Diego tried not to laugh and looked at her sympathetically, but despite himself he smiled crookedly.

“Oh that smile, Johnny! Takes my breath away.”

Diego wrote on his pad: “I’m sorry about how that man treated
you, Mary, I really am, but what did you expect? He’s a man, isn’t he?”

Mary read what Diego had written and went into a fit of laughter. “If more men were like you and my son, my Johnny, I might enjoy this damn fool world, yes sir, I would. Look, honey, if you see that man, you kick his ass for Mary. But ain’t it a nice day? Ain’t it though?” She kissed him on the cheek and straightened out her clothes. “But really got to run, honey.” She looked at her watch admiring it. “See my new watch?” She put her wrist in Diego’s face. “Ain’t it nice?” Diego took a good look at it and nodded even though he wouldn’t know a good watch from a cheap one. “Sometime I’ll tell you all about this watch, Johnny, it’s got a story. It was a present, a gift—from a man—can you believe that, honey, a gift from a real man! A real good looker, too. He thought I was gonna give up being a virgin for a watch. No sir, not Mary, no way. The Virgin ain’t lookin’ for no suitors. I just took the watch and marched myself down the street, and I didn’t look back neither.” She picked up her bag and walked away swiftly as if she had somewhere very important to go. Diego watched her. In the sun with all those clothes, she looked like a flag. Even her walk made her clothes seem as if they were being blown by a soft wind that made Diego think she had wings.

As Mary walked down the street, a woman threw a dirty look her way almost as though she was tossing a penny in her path. It might as well have been a bullet, she thought. “Mary, why does it hurt? Why does it still hurt?” For no reason at all, she thought of the way her mother-in-law had always looked at her—always throwing her out of her house with her eyes, her exiling stares. She wondered why the past still haunted her. Her husband had left her years ago, had taken her children with him. It was no good to think of them. It was better when she had no memory, and she cursed this day for her temporary sanity. She chased away the memory of her husband like she would chase a cockroach out of a clean kitchen. She thought, instead, of Diego. “The kindest man I know.” She detested days like these, abhorred them, hated being so lucid, hated
remembering she had a history on the earth, hated these moments when she appeared ridiculous even to herself. She touched her face with her thin bony fingers. “I am the Virgin. I am the Virgin. I am … Mary just don’t cry—don’t—this will pass, will pass. Memories are of the devil. God, take it away, take it, take it. This moment will pass. You won’t remember a thing, Mary, you won’t remember…”

The thought crossed Diego’s mind that Mary was one of the only gringas he knew—her and the nurse at La Fe Clinic. He thought for a minute, and it entered his mind that maybe Mary might be just the right person to receive his suicide letter. He thought about it again and decided it wasn’t such a good idea since Mary might not be right on the day he killed himself. Maybe the nurse or maybe Luz would be better choices, but Luz was his editor. He would have to give it more thought. He liked the idea of addressing his letter to the nurse, since she wasn’t as crazy as Mary and she seemed to be very understanding. She touched people, and Diego knew that her voice had to be as soft as her hands. She would read his letter and understand. Diego thought about the nurse; he pictured her and imagined her smell. She smelled like the inside of a church. He laughed at himself, and his thoughts returned to Mary. He wondered where she lived, where she slept, where she ate. His boss had kicked her out of Vicky’s more than once. He said she wasn’t very different from most gringas: all of them were crazy, and all of them claimed to be virgins.

He walked toward La Fe Clinic to see if Tencha was selling fruit. She had set up shop in front of the clinic since it was situated right in the middle of the Alamito projects. It had been a shrewd business move on her part, and a profitable one. Everyone who came in and out of the clinic stopped to buy fruit from her.

As Diego approached the clinic, he could see Tencha talking to some of her customers. He let them talk as he reached into Tencha’s shopping cart that she had stolen from a nearby grocery store. He picked up a mango to see if it was ripe. Tencha watched him and shook her head as if to say that he had not picked a very good one. She picked up a better one and handed it to him. “Mira, m’ijo,
compra ésta, te aseguro que está madura.” He nodded and handed her twenty cents. He had no idea what she’d said though she appeared to be yelling. People did that. She smiled at him and continued her conversation with her friends. He smiled back.

He walked toward the Bowie Bakery, which was a fifteen-minute walk. He took the shortest route through the barrio, the projects, and the pink and lavender houses. It was a good time to walk through this neighborhood—mornings and early afternoons were safe. The night wasn’t so good—the gangs were out then, and there were lots of them. He only knew the gangs’ names through the graffiti on the walls. Mostly, the gangs were unknown presences to him: He knew they existed, but his life was so separate from theirs that they did not seem real to him. He knew a couple of the guys from the T-Birds whom he had met once at La Fe Clinic when they were waiting to be patched up after one of their fights. One of them had a finger cut off, and Diego remembered that he had not appeared to be in very much pain. They hid their pain well, Diego thought, and who knows, maybe it hadn’t hurt as much as he imagined. He knew the gang members didn’t like him, but a kid in the barrio had once handed him a note telling him not to worry because he had heard the big guys say it was bad luck to beat up on a deaf guy. They left him alone. As long as he walked the streets during the day, he wasn’t afraid of running into any trouble with the gangs; their lives were lived by night.

The line at the bakery was long—it was always long. The Bowie Bakery, named after the high school in El Segundo barrio, was one of the most famous places in the barrio, and even people who lived in other parts of the city came here to buy their baked goods. It wasn’t unusual to see many gringos standing in line alongside the people who lived here. He saw the people speak to one another as they waited in line. A lady was telling a young woman that her mother was at the county hospital. He couldn’t read her lips well, so he missed out on the name of her illness, but he knew by the expression on her face that it was serious. Probably cancer, he thought. Cancer seemed to be everywhere, and Diego had a theory that people were getting cancer simply from being alive, from breathing in everybody else’s anger.

He waited for his turn in line, and unlike most people, Diego enjoyed the wait. He was happy to be a part of the line and he liked imagining the sounds of the people’s voices. Their voices, he thought, must be the same color as their skins: they speak in brown. He pointed to two apple empanadas, two fingers for two of them. The guy behind the counter knew him; he was a regular at Vicky’s. “¿Dos empanadas de manzana? Si, señor. Thirty-five cents!” Diego could see he was yelling, the veins popping out from his neck as he shouted. The man yelled again, repeating what he had just said, and then wrote “35¢” on a pad and showed it to Diego. He yelled again: “¡Treinta y cinco centavos!” Diego wanted to yell back: “I can’t hear you any better because you’re yelling, you idiot!” He smiled at the man and gave him thirty-five cents. “Thank you,” he yelled, “y vuelva.” Diego nodded. When he walked out he flipped him one of Mary’s fingers. No one noticed.

He walked down to the Mexican Consulate on San Antonio Street and began eating one of his empanadas. He sat on the steps and watched the traffic moving at a Saturday pace—slow and steady—cars with drivers who seemed almost not to be aware they were actually driving. He noticed the Border Patrol vans moving up and down the street, the men in the front seats noticing everyone on foot, staring at them, watching for signs of foreignness like scientists looking for that virus that did not belong in the healthy body. Some of the vans were half-full; some were almost empty. The passengers stared at him or the sky, stared out at everything outside of the van, their eyes like hands ready to grab at anything. Every time Diego saw those men staring out at him from the inside of a green van, he wanted to do something, hit someone, set them free—and yet, it was all so useless, and even his own feelings seemed useless to him—not worth anything at all. Maybe, he thought,
I
’ve been having too many conversations with Luz.

Another van passed him slowly, looking him over. He waved at the uniformed man behind the wheel and whispered quietly to himself: “Hello, you bastards.” He smiled, and cursed them, and it made him feel happy that they did not know why he was smiling. The green uniforms smiled back at him. He wasn’t afraid of them anymore. For the longest time he had lived in fear of them, always
wanting to run when he saw them approach him, and then one day it happened: They picked him up. It had happened at San Jacinto Plaza, and after the whole incident had passed he’d wondered why he had ever been afraid. They were nothing, Diego thought, nothing. Luz was right about them. They were even stupider than his sister: They couldn’t even figure out he was deaf. They thought he was just another Mexican who couldn’t speak English. He had even signed things to them, and had tried to pull his pad out from his coat, but they grabbed him as if he was reaching for a gun or something. He toured the city with them, and when they’d filled the van with people who looked just like him, they’d driven them all to the bridge. At the time, he had enjoyed the ride since it was slower and cheaper than the city buses. He had had a good time driving around the streets of El Paso.

They asked him questions at the immigration office at the border, and finally he convinced them to let him write something down: “My name is Juan Diego Ramirez. You know, like the guy who discovered Our Lady of Guadalupe, and I want to see a lawyer.” The two officers had looked at each other with questions all over their faces. One of them asked him if he was a U.S. citizen. Diego had nodded and written: “Why didn’t you ask me that before you decided to give me a free ride around the town?” One of the guys laughed and told him to beat it. “And try and stay off the streets.” What did he mean? Why the hell should he stay off the streets? “No,” he had written to Luz, “the streets are mine.” Luz had agreed. “Damn right,” she’d said, “they think everyone can afford a car.”