Woman Hollering Creek (7 page)

Personally it was no grief or relief to me she escaped so clean.
That’s for sure. But as it happened, she owed me. Bad enough she skips and has the whole school talking. At least
then
I had hope she’d make good on her promise to hook me up with Max Lucas Luna Luna. But just when I could say her name again without spitting, she goes and dies. Some kids playing in a drain ditch find a body, and yeah, it’s her. When the TV cameras arrive at our school, there go all them drama hot shits howling real tears, even the ones that didn’t know her. Sick.

Well, I couldn’t help but feel bad for the dip once she’s dead, right? I mean, after I got over being mad. Until she rose from the dead three days later.

After they’ve featured her ma crying into a wrinkled handkerchief and her dad saying, “She was my little princess,” and the student body using money from our Padre Island field-trip fund to buy a bouquet of white gladiolus with a banner that reads
VIRGENCITA
,
CUÍDALA
, and the whole damn school having to go to a high mass in her honor, my
tocaya
outdoes herself. Shows up at the downtown police station and says, I ain’t dead.

Can you believe it? Her parents had identified the body in the morgue and everything. “I guess we were too upset to examine the body properly.” Ha!

I never did get to meet Max Lucas Luna Luna, and who cares, right? All I’m saying is she couldn’t even die right. But whose famous face is on the front page of the
San Antonio Light
, the
San Antonio Express News
,
and
the
Southside Reporter
? Girl, I’m telling you.

Me estoy muriendo

y tú, como si nada …

—“Puñalada Trapera”

interpretada por
L
OLA
B
ELTRÁN

(T
OMÁS
M
ÉNDEZ
S
OSA
,
autor
)

Woman Hollering Creek
 

The day Don Serafín gave Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez permission to take Cleófilas Enriqueta DeLeón Hernández as his bride, across her father’s threshold, over several miles of dirt road and several miles of paved, over one border and beyond to a town
en el otro lado
—on the other side—already did he divine the morning his daughter would raise her hand over her eyes, look south, and dream of returning to the chores that never ended, six good-for-nothing brothers, and one old man’s complaints.

He had said, after all, in the hubbub of parting: I am your father, I will never abandon you. He
had
said that, hadn’t he, when he hugged and then let her go. But at the moment Cleófilas was busy looking for Chela, her maid of honor, to fulfill their bouquet conspiracy. She would not remember her father’s parting words until later.
I
am your father, I will never abandon you
.

Only now as a mother did she remember. Now, when she and Juan Pedrito sat by the creek’s edge. How when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely.

This is what Cleófilas thought evenings when Juan Pedro did not come home, and she lay on her side of the bed listening to the hollow roar of the interstate, a distant dog barking, the pecan trees rustling like ladies in stiff petticoats—
shh-shh-shh, shh-shh-shh
—soothing her to sleep.

In the town where she grew up, there isn’t very much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers to the house of one or the other to play cards. Or walk to the cinema to see this week’s film again, speckled and with one hair quivering annoyingly on the screen. Or to the center of town to order a milk shake that will appear in a day and a half as a pimple on her backside. Or to the girlfriend’s house to watch the latest
telenovela
episode and try to copy the way the women comb their hair, wear their makeup.

But what Cleófilas has been waiting for, has been whispering and sighing and giggling for, has been anticipating since she was old enough to lean against the window displays of gauze and butterflies and lace, is passion. Not the kind on the cover of the
¡Alarma!
magazines, mind you, where the lover is photographed with the bloody fork she used to salvage her good name. But passion in its purest crystalline essence. The kind the books and songs and
telenovelas
describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life, and does whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost.

Tú o Nadie
. “You or No One.” The title of the current favorite
telenovela
. The beautiful Lucía Méndez having to put up with all kinds of hardships of the heart, separation and betrayal, and loving, always loving no matter what, because
that
is the most important thing, and did you see Lucía Méndez on the Bayer aspirin commercials—wasn’t she lovely? Does she dye her hair do you think? Cleófilas is going to go to the
farmacía
and buy a hair rinse; her girlfriend Chela will apply it—it’s not that difficult at all.

Because you didn’t watch last night’s episode when Lucía confessed she loved him more than anyone in her life. In her life! And she sings the song “You or No One” in the beginning and end of the show.
Tú o Nadie
. Somehow one ought to live one’s life like that, don’t you think? You or no one. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end.

Seguín
. She had liked the sound of it. Far away and lovely. Not like
Monclova. Coahuila
. Ugly.

Seguín, Tejas
. A nice sterling ring to it. The tinkle of money. She would get to wear outfits like the women on the
tele
, like Lucía Méndez. And have a lovely house, and wouldn’t Chela be jealous.

And yes, they will drive all the way to Laredo to get her wedding dress. That’s what they say. Because Juan Pedro wants to get married right away, without a long engagement since he can’t take off too much time from work. He has a very important position in Seguin with, with … a beer company, I think. Or was it tires? Yes, he has to be back. So they will get married in the spring when he can take off work, and then they will drive off in his new pickup—did you see it?—to their new home in Seguin. Well, not exactly new, but they’re going to repaint the house. You know newlyweds. New paint and new furniture. Why not? He can afford it. And later on add maybe a room or two for the children. May they be blessed with many.

Well, you’ll see. Cleófilas has always been so good with her sewing machine. A little
rrrr, rrrr, rrrr
of the machine and
¡zas!
Miracles. She’s always been so clever, that girl. Poor thing. And without even a mama to advise her on things like her wedding night. Well, may God help her. What with a father with a head like a burro, and those six clumsy brothers. Well, what do you think! Yes, I’m going to the wedding. Of course! The dress I want to wear just
needs to be altered a teensy bit to bring it up to date. See, I saw a new style last night that I thought would suit me. Did you watch last night’s episode of
The Rich Also Cry?
Well, did you notice the dress the mother was wearing?

La Gritona. Such a funny name for such a lovely
arroyo
. But that’s what they called the creek that ran behind the house. Though no one could say whether the woman had hollered from anger or pain. The natives only knew the
arroyo
one crossed on the way to San Antonio, and then once again on the way back, was called Woman Hollering, a name no one from these parts questioned, little less understood.
Pues, allá de los indios, quién sabe
—who knows, the townspeople shrugged, because it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name.

“What do you want to know for?” Trini the laundromat attendant asked in the same gruff Spanish she always used whenever she gave Cleófilas change or yelled at her for something. First for putting too much soap in the machines. Later, for sitting on a washer. And still later, after Juan Pedrito was born, for not understanding that in this country you cannot let your baby walk around with no diaper and his pee-pee hanging out, it wasn’t nice,
¿entiendes? Pues
.

How could Cleófilas explain to a woman like this why the name Woman Hollering fascinated her. Well, there was no sense talking to Trini.

On the other hand there were the neighbor ladies, one on either side of the house they rented near the
arroyo
. The woman Soledad on the left, the woman Dolores on the right.

The neighbor lady Soledad liked to call herself a widow, though how she came to be one was a mystery. Her husband had either died, or run away with an ice-house floozie, or simply gone out for cigarettes one afternoon and never came back. It was hard to say which since Soledad, as a rule, didn’t mention him.

In the other house lived
la señora
Dolores, kind and very sweet, but her house smelled too much of incense and candles from the altars that burned continuously in memory of two sons who had died in the last war and one husband who had died shortly after from grief. The neighbor lady Dolores divided her time between the memory of these men and her garden, famous for its sunflowers—so tall they had to be supported with broom handles and old boards; red red cockscombs, fringed and bleeding a thick menstrual color; and, especially, roses whose sad scent reminded Cleófilas of the dead. Each Sunday
la señora
Dolores clipped the most beautiful of these flowers and arranged them on three modest headstones at the Seguin cemetery.