Gringa (21 page)

I called out his name before I could think why I was doing so. He padded over by the pool and squatted on the side of it. “So this is where you are at night,” he said, as if he had been looking for me!

“Oh yes,” I told him. “This is the part of the day I love the most, the dark. I like to listen to the bamboo clacking, and there are creatures that make noises in the bushes. I think this must be Shangri-la!” I heard myself and I thought: Stop being hysterical! Claude looked almost handsome in the faint light from a yellow bulb some way off, and the moon.

“But Shangri-la would not be in the tropics,” he said. I felt embarrassed, and wanted him to leave, but he said, “I was working at the Hilton in Mexico City, and General Velez asked me to come out here and put his hotel in order. He had had it for some time, and it was losing money. He knew it was a matter of thievery and bad management, and I said it might take a year. I did what I came out here to do, but I have been here nearly six years. It is, as you say, the quality of the place. This is the very place where the tropics begin—a change of continents, we are a hundred miles below the Tropic of Cancer. It is a place of wild rich abundance. So I built my little house above the gardens in a nest of ferns and shrubs. When I am there, I am completely away from the silly Americans. I am king of the tropics.”

He laid down his stick and sat on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water. I clung to the ledge, wondering if I were dreaming this strange encounter. He went on, talking about how he liked high places, telling me about the red tiled roofs of Moroccan houses, of how the cats there stretch and sun themselves. I said nothing. I was mesmerized. I had thought him such an ugly man, puffy and yellow and sly.

I asked him to tell me more about North Africa, though it seemed a silly thing to talk about, considering where we were. I sensed that he was fond of the memories he had of the region, and that he would be less friendly if our talk were more personal. He told me he had spent some time in Algeria, too, and he talked about the seacoast, and the long spines of mountains, the resorts where the French came to ski. He talked slowly, as if he were translating from French. I wanted him to talk all night; all he said seemed important to me, knowledge I hadn't known I needed. I was struck with the luck of my landing here, to hell with his distinctions, it was Shangri-la. For the first time since Tonio left, I felt sensual, my pores were open. I was no longer suspended, waiting for his return, but was launched on a legitimate journey of my own into this tropical heart. I thought of Claude taking me around the gardens, teaching me the names of plants, holding my hand—

He was saying something about Berber music. He stopped mid-sentence, and I thought he must have realized how inattentive I was. How could I tell him how wonderful his voice was! How I loved his stories. He reached over and touched my earlobe, and the tiny gold hoop I was wearing. “In so many villages where I have lived or travelled, when girls are young, their mothers put a hot needle through their ears, and then insert little hoops like these.”

I pulled myself up to sit on the ledge. I was wearing only the bottom of my suit. My breasts were so white.

“You're pretty,” he said rather matter-of-factly. “It's so seldom that you see an American who doesn't eat too much.”

I took a deep breath. “Claude, I've seen you going up to your little house on many evenings. I've heard you playing music, faintly, from here. I've hoped you would stop and talk to me. You didn't know I was here, did you?” I was lying; I had always held my breath for fear of discovery, I hadn't had the least interest in Claude. Now, though, I thought it cunning to reveal myself. Seduction came from confession. He came into the water, took a few long strokes to the other side, returned, and heaved himself out. His dripping belly was soft and fleshy. I was suddenly mortified. I felt he had tricked me, to prove what I was like. He had said nothing to make me think he wanted me, and I had acted as if any conversation might end in sex. His soft flab repulsed me. I couldn't look at him anymore. I fell back into the water, into the dark. I heard, rather than saw, as he padded away, up to his retreat. Shortly I heard music, something percussive and unmelodic.

I had learned that Huastecans did not like to go out at night except when it was to see the brujo in secret meetings. Maybe it was their fear of snakes, or of el tigre, which might kill them. (Once they had eaten the flesh of cats, and drunk their blood.) There was something to learn from such people, who stretched back for centuries. It was this simple maxim: Stay home at night.

I began to look forward to the visits of the American rancher Michael Sage. He had come by one day to say he had heard Velez was gone, that I was at the hotel, and he had brought me some magazines his wife no longer wanted. I got fairly drunk with him, in the bar. He stayed a few times and had supper with me, though he complained that the price was much too high. He was a tall, fair man, as I imagined baseball players to look, and he didn't interest me in any special way, but he was company. After the odd little encounter with Claude I welcomed Sage's visits, tried to be enthusiastic, especially if Claude saw us together.

I told Sage one day, “I've just got to get out of here.” I didn't mean forever, I explained. I just thought I ought to go back to Texas, maybe, and see if it was as I recalled. Sage said he flew to San Antonio once or twice a year. The implication was I might go with him some time. “Does your wife like it here?” I asked.

He scowled. “Certainly not the country,” he said. “She stays in Tampico most of the time.”

“I see,” I answered. In a way I probably did. Sage's casual visits were those of a dissatisfied husband. The idea drove me off. “Yes,” I said, a little loudly. “I think I'll go home some time soon.” I'd have to ask Bruni about some money.

Before I had time to think it through, my brother Kermit called. He was thoroughly annoyed; it had taken him a whole day to get through. He supposed I wouldn't be there for the funeral, he said, but Dad was dead.

I had to collect my father in my mind before I could respond; when was the last time I had even thought of him? “How?” I asked.

The connection was terrible. “Off a rig,” I heard Kermit say. He had fallen off a rig.

“I don't believe it,” I said. It was so stupid, nobody could do that.

“Well, they've got him in a box,” Kermit yelled. “Believe it.” Then he hung up.

“OH, I HOPE he really did fall,” Sherry said, startling me. Her face was an open plea not to pursue the implication. She had come along to the airport to meet me. My brother did not put himself out too much for anyone. Sherry told me there hadn't really been a funeral, only the interment, a cortege of three. I could imagine my sister-in-law between Kermit and my mother, holding an elbow on each side, the good-woman wife, long-suffering, sturdy and shy. I couldn't imagine how life with Kermit had been for her. Not good would have been my guess. Yet he had come up in the world marrying Sherry, who came with a widowed mother Ann—a pleasant woman—and her house.

Sherry said there had been a woman at the funeral home; they had seen her against the back wall when they were at the casket. A dark woman with a lot of hair, caught in a loose rope at the neck. “I went back and asked her how she knew Bud. She wouldn't talk to me. She had looked so sad, and in a moment she looked frightened and then very hostile. I touched her and she bolted. God knows who she was.” Sherry seemed uncomfortable. I suspected she had told me the story to get it over with, but what was I supposed to do?

I soon realized they had not thought I would come. They looked at me as if I had grown horns and a tail, that native-Texan look of suspicion. I sat with them, hunched over the kitchen table, looking for something to say.

“Guess it's going to snow.” That was big brother Kermit's contribution. He was thinner than I remembered, hollow-chested. Something wasn't agreeing with him. Supposedly he wanted to be a doctor. I asked him how it was going, and he just looked at me. Stupid question.

My mother seemed beyond it all. Her thinness, unlike Kermit's, had a certain elegance to it. Through her silky green shirt the deep clefts above her collarbone lay like craters on a relief map. Her cheekbones were newly prominent, rouged, a fresh asset on a woman who had always gone around with her head tucked down. She even wore a string of pearls, surely fake. I wished for them to be real, plucked from the ocean, one at a time, by naked boys.

Little Tommy, almost exactly the age of my affair with Tonio, leaned on his knees and banged two fists in front of him. Sherry put a bowl of tapioca in front of him and began sliding plates of cold food onto the table. “Isn't anybody hungry?” she entreated.

“Looks like your dad had himself a woman friend,” my mother said. I squirmed in my chair. Nobody would be happy to learn there had been a Mexican mistress, but what could they say in front of me?

Kermit took me to the grave. It was almost dark. We stood beside the fresh dirt, uncertain of each other in our new half-orphaned state. (So what's any different, I thought.) I stole glances of him. His skin, like mine, showed the tracks of old acne, but I had never noticed before. His hair was long, it fell across his forehead. I slipped my hand into his. His arm hung slack. For a moment I thought he was refusing me, his hand gimpy like a flap off his sleeve. Then he gently closed his hand around mine.

“There was a young man from Boston, he bought himself an Austin—”

He was grinning.

“There was room for his ass, and a gallon of gas,” I added, and together we finished the limerick: “But his balls hung out and he lost ‘em.”

I knelt and took up a handful of the fresh-turned dirt. I had always thought dirt was warm, raw like this, but it was cold and damp.

He had liked limericks. That was what we remembered of him.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“He died on a Monday night. We had just had him over for dinner—Sherry keeps saying that, over and over, as if I need reminding, as if it mattered, it made something okay. He hadn't eaten six bites. He was white-faced, except for his blotchy nose. Once I saw him clutching the edge of the table. I didn't know what to make of it. Sherry was clearing the plates, Ann was up getting coffee, and I blurted out, ‘See a doctor, anybody can see you're in pain.' He said he'd been having trouble pissing—he apologized to Ann for the slip—and that he was tired. Too many night shifts at the well, he said. He went away, I swear, like a tired old dog.” It hadn't been surprising to hear that he was dead. The dispatcher called Kermit from work. Bud had fallen off a rig. Nobody knew what he was doing up there, he wasn't a derrick hand anymore. The hand who had seen it said it looked like Bud was reaching for something, like he had stepped out to take it.

“Everyone said he was sober,” Kermit said. “They decided on an autopsy. There had to be a reason, you know? An autopsy can't explain an accident. He was getting old, his judgment was bad, he was weary. But he did have a kidney stone like a fist in his bladder, and get this, he had a perforated bowel. A swallowed toothpick. Hell, he died of pain to save the wait.”

“What did he do? For something to do? Kermit, I don't remember!”

Kermit understood what I was asking. “He watched TV. He read Louis L'Amour.”

Relief flooded me. “Oh yes.”

“I think he played poker once in a while.”

“I hadn't written him in so long.”

“I gave him the card you sent us from Acapulco last year. He thought it was terrific, like you'd won the lottery.”

“What did you think? What do you think of me?”

“Abby, when I'm out of the house, I don't even think about my wife, my kid. Just whatever it is I'm doing.”

“Is it so hard, school?”

“It's a lot of work, and I've got such a long way to go. It's not that tough. It's—life. Shit, you know.”

“What does Mom say about Bud?”

“Nothing. I think it was a relief. One less thing for her to think about. Which leads me to say I don't think she cares what you're doing. Whatever that is.”

“Getting by. Life, you know.”

“So what is it with this guy?”

“I live on his ranch.”

“Why?”

“It's an easy life. Sometimes it's interesting. I like him a lot.” I thought about the jaguarundi on the chain at the guardhouse. Tonio said they were rare, these cats, yet he'd seemed to take it for granted that one showed up because he wanted it to. The cat clawed anybody who came close, but Tonio could stroke her russet flanks and make her purr.

I wondered if, being young, the cat had forgotten freedom: long jumps, the smell of prey. I missed the ranch already.

“I meant something else, dopehead. Don't take this wrong. Why you?”

“Luck. I knew his cousin, we went to see him fight, he said I could stay.”

“No shit. That doesn't explain anything.”

“It's all I know.”

I wanted Kermit to understand other things, more important. “Once I went to the ranch on the bus. Ten hours from Mexico City. This marvelous thing happened. We stopped high in the Sierras at two or three in the morning. Ten thousand feet above sea level, and I suddenly stared up into the sky so close, so full of stars, they looked like they would rain down on me, and then I looked out on mountains, ridge after ridge like ocean waves—” I stopped for breath, amazed at the words pouring out of me, the vividness of the memory. “Thrown out among the mountains, infinitesimally small, were the twinkles of fires, like fireflies.”

Kermit walked back to the car in front of me. When we were inside, I said, “I missed you when you got married and moved away.”

“Sherry was pregnant, and then had an abortion. I married her anyway. We got right to work on Tommy, to make that up.”

“She's awfully nice, Kermit.”

“Oh, she's better than that. She's the best. I don't know how I lucked out.”

I knew there were oceans of words unsaid. I didn't care to know anything about it.

The next day Kermit got out of bed at noon, came into the kitchen where I was feeding Tommy and visiting with Ann and my mother. He made himself an egg, ate it out of the skillet, and then went back to bed. When Sherry came home from work she looked around; Lenore, my mother, saw and pointed a thumb in the general direction of the hall. Sherry's face fell for a moment and then she started moving around in double time. She made me nervous. There was the undercurrent of ritual in all this, something my brother did that set off certain motions. I didn't like it. We heard Kermit going in to take a bath, doors opening and shutting, water running. He came out at 6:30, with his books. He gave us all, in a general sort of way, a smile, and he went off to class. Sherry sat down at the table and crumpled over chicken-fried cutlets.

“He's just like his dad, secretive and anxious, stuffing everything that bothers him down in his pockets—” We all looked at Lenore, even Tommy, who had finished his milk and had turned his glass upside down on his plate into a pile of mashed potatoes. Lenore was wearing an old familiar face, the family assayer. She started clearing dishes, banging things around. Sherry looked to Ann for advice; Ann raised her mouth in perplexity. Lenore, at the sink, went on muttering for four or five minutes. “Hiding their feelings, taking off when it suits them—” on and on she went, a litany of barbs, she sounded more muddled than angry. Finally she turned around, drying her hands on a towel.

“He doesn't drink?” she said to Sherry. Sherry said no, he never did. “And he doesn't chew toothpicks,” Lenore added, breathing deeply, lifting her rib cage, going back to her newer self. “I have a friend coming up in a day or two to get me.” She said this to no one of us in particular. “Carl Matthews, Matthews Appliances.” We all lurched toward smiles, then held them back, uncertain; she gave us permission with her sudden sunny face. “I went in to buy a television. I said I wanted the best.” Suddenly self-conscious, she sat down. She put her hands over mine, a move that surprised me so much I stiffened. “If your daddy had ever got something going—” She trailed away. I understood. “I don't know if I ever could have divorced him,” she said softly. “I meant to talk to him about it, but I kept putting it off. He jumped off that rig, you know he did—”

I knew no such thing. Ann went to turn on the television. Sherry took Tommy to the bathroom. Lenore sat with her palms on the table, like a woman waiting for a fortune-teller.

“I can't get her out of my mind,” Sherry said to me as we were going through Bud's clothes. We had found his checkbook, with a check written to cash for three hundred dollars, the apparent balance of his account, but the check was still on the pad. He had signed it on the day he died. We found the title to the trailer, also signed.

Sherry's face grew puffy with grief. She had taken it the hardest, I realized guiltily. She had been through this before. “He was doing some sort of accounting, getting ready—” she said.

“Oh Sherry, if he meant to jump, why not finish all this stuff? Don't make too much of it.” We sat side by side on the bed. “Let's ask the neighbors what they know. And I'm going to cash this check.” I had decided to go back to Mexico by bus. What hurry was there?

The neighbors were cool to us. I had the idea they knew a lot about my father and weren't going to tell any of it to us. Vexed, we packed the last of Bud's things in boxes, for a flophouse downtown. I was emptying a drawer in the cramped little hall when it hit me that there had been empty drawers. “Why didn't I notice it before? It isn't like he ran out of things to put in them, he had these others stuffed. But there are empty drawers here, and there were some in the bedroom. Would you put your stuff away like that?”

“You think somebody else was living here?” Sherry pulled out a drawer to see for herself.

In the bathroom we found a tube of Desitin. That was the only thing that didn't seem to belong in a man's bathroom. The rush I had felt earlier faded. I hadn't known I was so romantic. Then, as we left the trailer, I saw, in the dirt at the corner of the step, a baby's pacifier. I felt exhilarated. What I wanted to find out was that my dad had been something besides a weary old man. Ballsy. God, I'd have loved it. His neighbors were old retired people. It wasn't their pacifier.

We went out with my mother's friend Carl Matthews. I could hardly eat, I wanted so much to lie down somewhere and make up scenarios about my father and the mysterious woman. Carl talked all through dinner about the improvements in color televisions. Lenore was flushed, happy. When he ran down, like a battery, and looked at Lenore, she patted him on the chest.

Sunday morning Sherry and I went back to the trailer to sweep and close it up. I was washing at the sink when someone knocked at the rattly door. It was a young woman we hadn't seen the day before.

“I heard you were asking about Mr. Painter,” she said in a Texas twang so pronounced it made me smile. She didn't seem to notice. “There was a woman living with him last year. Real funny name. Ophelia.”

“Mexican? Long hair, plump?” Sherry stood on springs.

“Yeah. Wore ribbons braided in her hair. Funny.” The girl's own hair was teased and anchored into place. She was a thin young thing, in a short skirt, tights, and a pullover. “There was a baby, five, six months old. Getting too big to carry, but not walking yet. I've got a baby that age, and a two-year-old. I came over once to see if she wanted to get the babies together, or trade baby-sitting once in a while. She was real unfriendly.”

“And she lived here?” A baby. I felt funny about that.

“Sometimes she went away for a couple days. But she lived here. They had a little playpen they'd set out by the step. Felia sat on a chair right by it, always touching the baby. Mr. Painter sat on the step. And there was another thing. She always played the radio real loud, Meskin music.” The girl wiped her hands on her skirt as if she had been scrubbing something. “I gotta go. I know nobody said nothing to you, but I figgered you got a right to know. Felia cleared out in a hurry.”

“How? She wasn't here when my brother came over.”

“Her brother came and got her. He came real early in the morning. I was awake with one of my kids. My husband came down to see. They was gone in fifteen minutes, boxes, play pen, everything. Listen, you can't find her. Some people—those people—they all look alike.”