Trouble (13 page)

“Oh right,” she said. “So this is where he hangs out.”

After some negotiation, he got up to dance with the woman, taking her hand. Her body stayed with his as if his other, phantom arm were holding her, guiding her around the dance floor. He looked up and saw us watching him. If he recognized us, he didn’t show it. His expression was stern and blank, the way it had been under his umbrella. The song ended, and he went back to his table without a word to his dance partner.

“Let’s go over and talk to him,” said Raquel.

“What?” She had done this ever since I’d first met her—act on a wild hair and drag me along.

“Let’s go sit at his table,” she said, nudging me. “Come on.”

Raquel picked up her drink, got up, and headed toward the front of the room.

It seemed to me that I had no choice but to follow her, so I got up with my own drink. The one-armed guy looked up as we approached his table.

 
ey,” said Raquel. “Do you mind if we join you?”

Before he could answer, she sat down at one of the chairs at his table.

“Sorry,” I said lamely as I sat down, but what I was sorry for, I didn’t know. Most men drinking alone at a table and paying women to dance with them, it seemed to me, would have welcomed our sudden company as a pleasant diversion, if nothing else. But something about this guy provoked uneasy guilt in me, a sense of obligation.

“I’m Raquel and this is Josie,” said Raquel.

“I’m David,” he said. He pronounced it
Dah-veed
.

“I bought your picture earlier,” I said.

“You sure did,” he said. I saw the barest flick of a smile.

I remembered that he had overheard every word Raquel and I had exchanged about our personal lives.

“So you’re from Chiapas?” Raquel asked.

“San Juan Chamula.”

“Oh, the violent Indian village with the mysterious church,” said Raquel. “I’ve been there. It’s wild. That is the most beautiful church I have ever seen in my life.” She turned to me and added, “They’ve got a huge bare chapel with no pews, and pine boughs all over the floor. They do these rituals on the floor with rows of lit candles lined up and soda pop and bones. The church is all lit up with candles, and there are people everywhere, chanting, pouring Coke and orange pop on the floor. They’re perfectly friendly and happy to explain everything, but if you take pictures or even bring a camera into the church, they take you outside and beat the shit out of you.”

“They sure do,” said David.

“How did you learn such fluent English?” Raquel asked. “Not from the tourists.”

“No,” said David, amused. “Not from the tourists.”

“Okay,” said Raquel. “I’m interested. I want your story. I want to know how you learned to speak English like a
norteamericano
, what happened to your arm, and what you really do besides making those little pictures. Can I buy you a drink?”

David appeared to consider this quite earnestly for a moment, looking off at the dancers, weighing his options. “Okay,” he said finally. “But you’ll be disappointed, I promise you.”

Raquel motioned to the waitress. “What are you drinking?”

“A beer,” he said. “Negra Modelo. And a shot of Herradura, since you’re buying.”

“Okay, but your story had better be good,” said Raquel.

He looked at her as if he were inspecting her, not looking for anything in particular, but searching for any bit of information there was to be gathered through the eyes. “My story,” said David, “is only as good as its listener.”

“You’re on,” said Raquel, hunkering down. “So talk.”

“When I was very little,” said David, “my father left Chiapas and moved to Chicago with me and my brothers and sisters and our mother, and that’s where I grew up until I left home. He worked as a mechanic, and he did okay. We all did well in school because we were smart, and our mother pushed us like a madwoman to succeed, and that is almost the literal truth. I was one of the younger middle kids, so I didn’t have to be a doctor or a lawyer; I was lucky. I went to art school on full scholarship and studied sculpture and painting. Eleven years ago, when I was lifting a piece of cast concrete with a crane to make a sculpture outside a barn, I was living in the middle of nowhere. I stupidly failed to attach it securely enough, and it fell and crushed my arm, and by the time I got to the hospital, it was lost. In other words, I’m not a colorful peasant boy with a tragic history; I’m a college-educated brat who came back to the motherland to pay his debts to his heritage, or whatever, drink a lot of good beer. Go ahead and yawn. I warned you. Where’s my drink?”

“Not so fast,” said Raquel.

“That’s it,” he said. “You’ve got everything. Show’s over.”

“Not so fast,” she said again. “Come on. So your family did well in the States. But it’s not so simple. My own father is Mexican, from D.F., but now he lives in L.A. He got his law degree; he works to help illegals get their citizenship. He always says, ‘You never escape from Mexico if you’re Mexican.’ Why did you really come back?”

“I told you,” he said. “Where’s the waitress? I couldn’t get rid of her before you guys showed up.”

“So you came back with your college degree to sit on the Zócalo and sell landscapes?”

“I didn’t say that.”

The waitress came; David ordered in Spanish. Raquel gestured to our tequila glasses, impatiently overruling my hand, which was waving negatively over the top of mine. I was feeling decidedly peripheral to this conversation, but I didn’t mind. I had had enough of being front and center for a while.

“So what, then?” Raquel was saying. “What are you doing, making those things?”

“I send all the money I make on the Zócalo to my village,” he said.

“For what?”

“A political organization.”

“Aha!” Raquel jabbed my arm with her elbow. “Hear that? We’re getting somewhere now. What organization?”

Our drinks arrived. David lifted his bottle and tipped a little beer into his glass and drank it, then wiped his mouth. “You’ve heard of clear-cutting?”

“Of course I’ve heard of clear-cutting,” said Raquel.

“Well, there are logging companies in Chiapas that are stealing the forests the people need to survive, trees that belong to the Indians. These people are actively opposing the clear-cutting. That means women with babies lying down in front of the bulldozers. The bulldozers will not run over a woman with a baby, not in Mexico. But then the evildoers get their guys to drag them off. Forcibly, in other words. So my uncle and his compadres have to think up other means of stopping them.”

“So you send them money for what?”

“Whatever they need it for. Lawyers, cell phone bills, printings costs, whatever. I send it to my uncle, who’s in charge, and he disperses it as he sees fit.”

“Why aren’t you down there in front of the bulldozers?” Raquel asked.

“Because I’m not a woman with a baby. They’re the most effective. And I have other things to do up here. I help them in other ways.”

“What do you think of Subcomandante Marcos?”

“Marcos? He’s nothing but a pretty boy. Has he ever built roads, or schools, or one hospital? What’s he really doing for the peasants? Nothing. He poses in his outfits and gets media attention and it’s all a big front, him and his cigars and his balaclavas.”

Raquel mulled all this over, turning her tequila glass on the table. I didn’t like the sangrita here at this cantina. It was sweet and thin, a bright, synthetic red, and tasted like cough syrup. But I was drinking it anyway; what the hell. The woman who had danced with David earlier came by the table and leaned down and said something in his ear. He said something back to her, unsmiling. Raquel leaned in very obviously to eavesdrop, but I could tell she couldn’t catch what they were saying. The woman went off to another table, where a middle-aged man with a droopy gray mustache was sitting alone. He got up to dance with her. She jogged along with him, businesslike, professional.

“Is she mad that we’re sitting with you and stealing her tips?” Raquel asked out of the blue.

David looked at her.

Raquel laughed carelessly. “Or maybe she doesn’t care; you’re still fair game for a dance.”

“She’s my sister,” said David without inflection.

“Your sister?” said Raquel. “What’s she doing working here?”

“It’s complicated,” said David.

Raquel and I both waited for him to explain.

“Our mother died when I was eight,” he said after a moment. “Maria was seventeen. She gave up any idea of college, marriage, traveling, anything, to raise me and my little sisters and brothers. Our youngest sister had just been born, and Maria stuck around and mothered her until she went off to college. A while ago, Maria moved down here and got into some trouble, so I came down to help her. She works here because she’s too proud to let her baby brother support her. I drive her home at the end of the night when I can.”

“I’m such an asshole,” said Raquel. “Sorry. Does she live with you?”

“She lives with her boyfriend,” said David. From the way he said it, I guessed that he didn’t think much of this boyfriend, but I couldn’t be sure; David had a way of revealing almost nothing in his face or tone, so his carefully controlled words themselves were the only things that gave any information about him. This, in itself, was telling: It made me think he was a man accustomed to watching people carefully and being constantly on his guard, most likely with good reason.

“Where do you live?” I asked him.

“In Roma,” he said.

“Where’s that?”

“A neighborhood not too far from here.”

“Where a lot of artists live,” said Raquel. “We’ll go there to hear some music, Jo, maybe tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night,” said David, “you can hear Jesus Morales at Pata Negra.”

“Chuy!” said Raquel. “Chuy Morales is here? He’s an old friend of mine.”

“How do you know him?” David asked.

“I sang and played guitar on his last album,” said Raquel. “We’ve known each other for twenty years or so.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “I went to a party at his house in L.A. last time I visited you.” Jesus—nicknamed “Chuy”—Morales was a punk Tex-Mex musician who lived in a ranch house in the Hollywood Hills. The party had taken place around the swimming pool and had featured a live mariachi band, margaritas, shrimp burritos, and about twenty major rock stars, including Raquel. I had loved every minute of it.

“I’ve never met him,” said David. “But he’s friends with Miguel, who lives in my apartment building.”

“Miguel,” said Raquel, puzzled, tapping a tooth with a fingernail.

“What’s your last name?” David asked Raquel suddenly.

“Dominguez,” said Raquel.

“So that’s who you are,” said David. “I never forget a face or a way of talking, and I knew your face but not how you talked. That explains it. I have one of your albums. You’re on vacation down here?”

“You could say that,” said Raquel.

All along, I had been waiting for these two to become attracted to each other. They had been at a sort of standoff since we had sat down. I had felt them deadlocked in a struggle for top-dog status; now, subtly, I felt a shift. Raquel had trumped David, and both of them seemed to know and accept this. David, like a dog in a pack, seemed to accept his place unquestioningly once he knew how things stood. Likewise, Raquel seemed to take her throne without any diminished respect for the lesser dog: One dog had to be first; that was the way of the world. As a firstborn, I well knew the responsibility and weight of expectation that came along with being top dog, so therefore, in adulthood, I was relieved and even happy to be the beta every now and then. I tossed off my tequila, feeling much more at ease, now that this question between David and Raquel had evidently been settled in Raquel’s favor.

“Let me guess,” said Raquel. “The album of mine you own is
Big Bad.”
This album, her one big hit, had gone platinum in 1992; she claimed to hate it.

“No,” said David.
“Habanero.”

“Yeah,” said Raquel, “you and three other people. It came out on September 10, 2001. I have a new one, almost done.”

“That’s good,” said David.

“I hope,” said Raquel. “So Chuy is in town, huh? That’s great. Playing at Pata Negra. I know that place. That’s so great. I am so cheered up to know I’ll get to see him tomorrow.”

Raquel looked as if she had been lit up from within, like a jack-o’-lantern, aglow. She signaled to the waitress for another round.