Woman Hollering Creek (22 page)

“
TEX
-as!
What
are you going to do
there
?” Beatriz Soliz asked this, a criminal defense lawyer by day, an Aztec dance instructor by night, and my closet
comadre
in the world. Beatriz and I go back a long way. Back to the grape-boycott demonstrations in front of the Berkeley Safeway. And I mean the
first
grape strike.

“I thought I’d give Texas a year maybe. At least that. It can’t be
that
bad.”

“A year!!! Lupe, are you crazy? They still lynch Meskins down
there. Everybody’s got chain saws and gun racks and pickups and Confederate flags.
Aren’t
you
scared
?”

“Girlfriend, you watch too many John Wayne movies.”

To tell the truth, Texas
did
scare the hell out of me. All I knew about Texas was it was
big
. It was
hot
. And it was
bad
. Added to this was my mama’s term
teja-NO-te
for
tejano
, which is sort of like “Texcessive,” in a redneck kind of way. “It was one of those
teja-NO-tes
that started it,” Mama would say. “You know how they are. Always looking for a fight.”

I’d said yes to an art director’s job at a community cultural center in San Antonio. Eduardo and I had split. For good.
C’est finis
. End of the road, buddy.
Adiós y suerte
. San Francisco is too small a town to go around dragging your three-legged heart. Café Pícaro was off limits because it was Eddie’s favorite. I stopped frequenting the Café Bohème too. Missed several good openings at La Galería. Not because I was afraid of running into Eddie, but because I was terrified of confronting
“la otra.”
My nemesis, in other words. A financial consultant for Merrill Lynch. A blonde.

Eddie, who I’d supported with waitress jobs that summer we were both struggling to pay our college loans
and
the rent on that tiny apartment on Balmy—big enough when we were in love, but too small when love was scarce. Eddie, who I met the year before I started teaching at the community college, the year after he gave up community organizing and worked part-time as a paralegal. Eddie, who taught me how to salsa, who lectured me night and day about human rights in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, but never said a word about the rights of Blacks in Oakland, the kids of the Tenderloin, the women who shared his bed. Eduardo. My Eddie.
That
Eddie. With a blonde. He didn’t even have the decency to pick a woman of color.

A month hadn’t passed since I unpacked the van, but I’d already convinced myself San Antonio was a mistake. I couldn’t understand how any Spanish priest in his right mind decided to sit right down in the middle of nowhere and build a mission with no large body of water for miles. I’d always lived near the ocean. I felt landlocked and dusty. Light so white it left me dizzy, sun bleached as an onion.

In the Bay, whenever I got depressed, I always drove out to Ocean Beach. Just to sit. And, I don’t know, something about looking at water, how it just goes and goes and goes, something about that I found very soothing. As if somehow I were connected to every ripple that was sending itself out and out until it reached another shore.

But I hadn’t found anything to replace it in San Antonio. I wondered what San Antonians did.

I was putting in sixty-hour work weeks at the arts center. No time left to create art when I came home. I’d made a bad habit of crumpling into the couch after work, drinking half a Corona and eating a bag of Hawaiian potato chips for dinner. All the lights in the house blazing when I woke in the middle of the night, hair crooked as a broom, face creased into a mean origami, clothes wrinkled as the citizens of bus stations.

The day the pink circulars appeared, I woke up from one of these naps to find a bug crunching away on Hawaiian chips and another pickled inside my beer bottle. I called La Cucaracha Apachurrada the next morning.

So while you are spraying baseboards, the hose hissing, the gold pump clicking, bending into cupboards, reaching under sinks, the leather utility belt slung loose around your hips, I’m thinking. Thinking you might be the perfect Prince Popo for a painting I’ve had kicking around in my brain.

I’d always wanted to do an updated version of the Prince Popocatépetl/Princess Ixtaccíhuatl volcano myth, that tragic love story metamorphosized from classic to kitsch calendar art, like the ones you get at Carnicería Ximénez or Tortillería la Guadalupanita. Prince Popo, half-naked Indian warrior built like Johnny Weissmuller, crouched in grief beside his sleeping princess Ixtaccíhuatl, buxom as an Indian Jayne Mansfield. And behind them, echoing their silhouettes, their namesake volcanoes.

Hell, I could do better than that. It’d be fun. And you might be just the Prince Popo I’ve been waiting for with that face of a sleeping Olmec, the heavy Oriental eyes, the thick lips and wide nose, that profile carved from onyx. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.

“Would you like to work for me as a model?”

“Excuse?”

“I mean I’m an artist. I need models. Sometimes. To model, you know. For a painting. I thought. You would be good. Because you have such a wonderful. Face.”

Flavio laughed. I laughed too. We both laughed. We laughed and then we laughed some more. And when we were through with our laughing, he packed up his ant traps, spray tank, steel wool, clicked and latched and locked trays, toolboxes, slammed van doors shut. Laughed and drove away.

There is everything
but
a washer and dryer at the house on East Guenther. So every Sunday morning, I stuff all my dirty clothes into pillowcases and haul them out to the van, then drive over to the Kwik Wash on South Presa. I don’t mind it, really. I almost like it, because across the street is Torres Taco Haven, “This Is Taco Country.” I can load up five washers at a time if I get up early enough, go have a coffee and a Haven Taco—potatoes, chile,
and cheese. Then a little later, throw everything in the dryer, and go back for a second cup of coffee and a Torres Special—bean, cheese, guacamole, and bacon, flour tortilla, please.

But one morning, in between the wash and dry cycles, while I ran out to reload the machines, someone had bogarted my table, the window booth next to the jukebox. I was about to get mad and say so, until I realized it was the Prince.

“Remember me? Six eighteen on Guenther.”

He looked as if he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to remember—then laughed that laugh, like blackbirds startled from the corn.

“Still a good joke, but I was serious. I really am a painter.”

“And in reality I am a poet,” he said. “
De poeta y loco todos tenemos un poco, ¿no?
But if you asked my mother she would say I’m more
loco
than
poeta
. Unfortunately, poetry only nourishes the heart and not the belly, so I work with my uncle as a bug assassin.”

“Can I sit?”

“Please, please.”

I ordered my second coffee and a Torres Special. A wide silence.

“What’s your favorite course?”

“Art History.”

“Nono nono nono nono NO,” he said the way they do in Mexico—all the no’s overflowing quickly quickly quickly like a fountain of champagne glasses. “
Horse
, not
course
,” and whinnied.

“Oh—horse. I don’t know. Mr. Ed?” Stupid. I didn’t know any horses. But Flavio smiled anyway the way he always would when I talked, as if admiring my teeth. “So. What. Will you model? Yes? I’d pay you, of course.”

“Do I have to take off my clothes?”

“No, no. You just sit. Or stand there, or do whatever. Just pose. I have a studio in the garage. You’ll get paid just for looking like you do.”

“Well, what kind of story will I have to tell if I say no?” He wrote his name for me on a paper napkin in a tight tangle of curly black letters. “This is my uncle and aunt’s number I’m giving you. I live with them.”

“What’s your name anyway?” I said, twisting the napkin right side up.

“Flavio. Flavio Munguía Galindo,” he said, “to serve you.”

Flavio’s family was so poor, the best they hoped for their son was a job where he would keep his hands clean. How were they to know destiny would lead Flavio north to Corpus Christi as a dishwasher at a Luby’s Cafeteria.

At least it was better than the month he’d worked as a shrimper with his cousin in Port Isabel. He still couldn’t look at shrimp after that. You come home with your skin and clothes stinking of shrimp, you even start to sweat shrimp, you know. Your hands a mess from the nicks and cuts that never get a chance to heal—the salt water gets in your gloves, stinging and blistering them raw. And how working in the shrimp-processing factory is even worse—snapping those damn shrimp heads all day and the conveyor belt never ending. Your hands as soggy and swollen as ever, and your head about to split with the racket of the machinery.

Field work, he’d done that too. Cabbage, potatoes, onion. Potatoes is better than cabbage, and cabbage is better than onions. Potatoes is clean work. He liked potatoes. The fields in the spring, cool and pretty in the morning, you could think of lines of poetry as you worked, think and think and think, because they’re just paying for this, right?, showing me his stubby hands, not this, touching his heart.

But onions belong to dogs and the Devil. The sacks balloon behind you in the row you’re working, snipping and trimming whiskers
and greens, and you gotta work fast to make any money, you use very sharp shears, see, and your fingers get nicked time and time again, and how dirty it all makes you feel—the taste of onions and dust in your mouth, your eyes stinging, and the click, click, clicking of the shears in the fields and in your head long after you come home and have had two beers.

That’s when Flavio remembered his mother’s parting wish—A job where your fingernails are clean,
mi’jo
. At least that. And he headed to Corpus and the Luby’s.

So when Flavio’s Uncle Roland asked him to come to San Antonio and help him out with his exterminating business—You can learn a trade, a skill for life. Always gonna be bugs—Flavio accepted. Even if the poisons and insecticides gave him headaches, even if he had to crawl under houses and occasionally rinse his hair with a garden hose after accidentally discovering a cat’s favorite litter spot, even if now and again he saw things he didn’t want to see—a possum, a rat, a snake—at least that was better than scraping chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes from plates, better than having to keep your hands all day in soapy water like a woman, only he used the word
vieja
, which is worse.