El Nino, page 22
Then she sees the footprints. She crouches down, her fingers following the textured lines of the long tread with the wide toe left by Marianne’s sturdy lace-ups. For years and years her mother has worn the same sensible brand. She looks up at the boy. How can her neck feel such ice? In English she tells him she is afraid. She doesn’t want her mom to die, not like this.
“Why, niño? Why she come out here, Las tierras vacías?”
“You go to her,” the boy says. Then he hands Honey the length of rope he stole from Marty’s. He is close. She reaches out and touches his arm like Johnny-for-Jesus had. This boy has strength in him she cannot imagine. But she can feel it, so she keeps her hand on him until he tells her again to go. “It is almost over, vieja. Soon you will be home.”
She grips the rope in her good hand. Until the dog is leashed, the boy will stay where he is and keep watch.
Marianne’s remaining prints are sporadic; Baez’s, which run parallel, are also irregular. She wants to scream for Marianne to come out. And she just wants to scream. The animal continues looking north, away from her. Her hand grips the rope, sweats. The loop is taut, held in such a way she can throw it over the animal’s head and pull it into a leash. Back-and-forth-back-and-forth her eyes scan the arroyo for Marianne, any piece of her, then shift to the animal: its twitching tail, mottled coat, broad ears folded like the page of a book: dog-eared.
And then the ears stiffen to attention.
“Baez.” She says it softly.
The animal springs to its feet, turns. Its yellow eyes watch her come in.
“Baez! Ba-ez. Here I am, good girl.” She allows her voice to lilt, like adults talking to babies, to old people, to kittens. Does the animal really smile back? With three quick barks she comes bounding towards her. Honey’s neck disappears into her shoulders. She has to plead with her muscles to relax, to not be afraid, for that will only make things worse. When Baez is but a few paces away she can already smell what is now that familiar hormonal reek. She closes her eyes.
Paws press heavy into Honey’s legs then climb, settling on her abdomen. Those plaque-coated teeth match its eyes. From the smile, or something like it, on the animals’ face, she knows the barking is in glory, relief. Its neck is bald where the collar had been while its left shoulder bears a long, nasty pink scar that she does not remember from before. Baez jumps back, runs circles around her, then paws her again, licking any bit of flesh she can access: a hand, a wrist, a bare knee through Marianne’s torn jeans, which she takes in with wild sniffs. These are still Marianne’s clothes.
Honey is on her knees. Baez tenses, allowing Honey to, one-handed, pass the rope over her head. With teeth and fingers she knots it, turning it into a leash. She holds the animal into her, restraining it but also hugging it close.
“Where is she, girl? Where’s Marianne?”
“¿Vieja?” The boy calls. He has cut in from the side and is now standing under the tree where Baez had been.
Panting with happy calm, Baez turns towards the boy. Her wiry muscles harden in Honey’s arms. The vibration building beneath fur and flesh erupts into machine-gun barking. As Honey grips the rope, the animal’s teeth snap to get free.
“Go!” She screams for the boy to get the hell away from that tree and he does, dashing across a narrow arroyo and up into the outcrop from which it flows.
She frees herself of the sling so both arms can hug tight to the animal’s thick neck. Her face presses into its bristled spine, breaking its pull. The barking cuts out. She opens her eyes. The boy is crouching in the distance. Some new form of pain sears in her injured arm. Baez has nipped her.
“Fuck!”
The animal growls at her now, licking its lips. Then growls turn to panting. Its eyes are held to the boy in the distance.
Baez pulls Honey to the toilet-paper tree. The rope burns her palms. She stumbles.
An empty jug of water lies slumped in the shade. Footsteps and paw prints trample the ground. A few animal carcasses — rodents, a rabbit — rot in the distance, and a wide patch of disturbed earth forms a mound near where she stands. Around the tree’s base someone has formed a ring of small rocks, glass shards, and old nails. Honey picks up a triangle of rock that might be an ancient arrowhead. It goes in her pocket. She shades her eyes and finds the boy.
“Come,” she calls.
He concedes a few feet, twenty or thirty, before the animal is on its feet again, barking.
“Bad girl!” Honey winces as, with both hands, she double-knots the rope to the tree, leaving Baez three feet of leeway. “Look what you did,” she says rolling up her shirt sleeve.
Two berries of blood ooze from the punctures on the back of her bad, right forearm. But Baez’s eyes are on the mound of earth. She strains to get at it. Honey bends, running her fingers over the long, loose-packed bump. The animal barks and dashes at her, lunging against the rope, the tree bending. Pain and anger compete in that tight mongrel face, two halves of a whole writhing against a vast, swelling sorrow.
Honey understands. She is standing on Marianne’s grave.
“Hey!” The boy is shouting at her. “Hey, hey, hey!”
Echoes pop all around her, particles of voice falling through the static air. She blinks at the world, the red and blue and rock, swimming as it is. The sun is burning the back of her neck. So hot the flesh might go opaque, like steak in a frying pan. How long has she been just standing, Baez staring up?
Marianne is in the oven of the earth. Baez put her there, like a bone, a dead bunny: a sack of impossible love. Honey is in the earth too, for an alive, beating part of her has leaked down from her belly and out the bottom of her shoes.
Honey takes the arrowhead from her pocket — from Marianne’s pocket — and, her eyes holding the animal’s, touches her lips to it , and sets it on the grave, upright.
Moments pass. Her feet continue to leak: rooting her, gutting her, both.
“Hey!” The boy is still there, he is still alive.
When Honey believes the animal understands she unties Baez, drops the rope to the ground. She holds out her fingers. Baez bows her head. There is that scar behind her ear, the size of a boot tip. Honey touches it, soothing it.
“Goodbye, girl. Take care of her.”
Then she walks towards the rocks where the boy is perched. When she reaches the outcrop she turns. Baez is sitting on Marianne’s grave, just like Honey said.
Chávez
Buzzard City is written on everything from his bus ticket stub to the front of the station to the flags hanging from the streetlights alongside the flower baskets: pink, blue, wedding white.
Is there a festival on?
The bird on the flags is indeed a zopilote, its wings drawn back, talons sharp, going in for the strike.
“What does a hospital look like?” But Ishmael has never seen one either. They crane their necks. None of the buildings here have crosses on top like he’d thought, or a bearded saint like the one in the corner of the vieja’s business card. Of the glass — sheets and walls and towers of it — none is the kind you can see through. It is more like mirrors — tinted pink, gold, silver, green, purple, blue — and it’s stacked so high as to block the moon.
There’s no one to ask about Moses Hospital — everyone’s in their cars — and, it’s weird, but nothing is open and it’s only ten o’clock at night. The glass cube that is the bus station is still visible down the block. There were some black policemen — one was even a lady with her hair looped up in shiny braids — walking around there. The police went really slow in their big shoes, with one hand on a gun the other on a stick, so they left. Now they share a square of light cast down from a Pepsi sign throbbing above a café too full of pink men to go into, though the smell of cooked food weakens him. Ishmael has the business card. He stares at it, trying to find some new information in the faded lettering.
“When you seen her last?” he asks Chávez again.
Chávez shifts his backpack, glancing up and down the block. “Don’t know. Two years ago now, I guess.”
“Don’t worry,” Ishmael says. “We’re going to find her. You got through the desert, through the picking. This city’s nothing.”
“Yup, okay,” he says. Were it not for Ishmael he’d still be picking berries and dreaming about this place. He can’t believe how wide the roads are, how the pavement isn’t all broken up with holes — and where are all the bicycles, the open plazas, the drunks who stagger through them? Some army of grannies must get paid to keep the sidewalks scrubbed and swept.
Ishmael says if they walk around they will find life. Maybe they will find the hospital without having to ask. “We can’t just stand here, right?”
The men in the Pepsi restaurant are all alone. They sit with fallen shoulders and face out like they are students in a class; the blank night reflected in the window glass must be their teacher. A lady behind a counter at the back does the cooking. She is dark-skinned, her black hair piled up under a net, and when she waddles out from behind the counter, he sees she is wearing bright pink rubbers. Chávez thinks if there is a God that lady will be his mom. In one hand she’s got a giant glass of soda and in the other a plate heaped with food — red-yellow-brown — which she sets down along with a bill in front of the man closest to the window. The man gets his hands around some kind of sandwich and opens his mouth so wide he might crack his jaw; biting down, juice and bits of onion come shooting out the end.
Ishmael tugs his sleeve. A police car passes on the other side of the street. “It’s twice now,” he says.
They go north, away from the bus station, leaving the zone of the big glass towers. The streets get narrow and dark. They stick close to the walls, following shadows and going single file, Ishmael in front. The cars that pass have music pumping and the buses are all lit up blue; the heads inside are all dark-skinned, even that of the driver. It is otherwise quiet. Then a green car stops. It’s so low to the ground it almost has no wheels.
The music cuts out and the man inside, just a mouth and a hat and a hand on the wheel, leans out the window: “Hey, need a ride?”
Chávez stops. He reaches for the card. This guy might know about hospitals.
Ishmael shouts “No!” then runs up the street between two brick buildings. Chávez almost doesn’t find him. “You crazy?” Ishmael hisses. “You know what that guy wants?”
No.
Ishmael says he is pretty stupid. “He wants to fuck your ass.”
“My ass?”
Ishmael says, hard and angry, “People here’ll eat you alive, man.” He says, “I thought you were smart.”
They go on. Lights are on above the shut stores and from the windows come voices and TVs and smells of home cooking. He feels all the time like someone’s following, and he starts at every damn cat or rat or fluttering bit of garbage. Though there’s no one to see them, they obey the traffic lights.
Ishmael says of the walk signals, “Look, even the flashing men are white!” — and Chávez thinks the red hands telling them to stop are an Indian’s hand — “’Cause they say Indians are red but really they are brownish.”
“So maybe it’s an Indian wearing a rubber glove?”
Chávez says, “Maybe.” He agrees that if the flashing man was brown or black no one would see him. He’d be an invisible man, like them. No one would pay attention and people might get hit by a car.
“What people?” Ishmael says. “There’s no one.”
After ten more blocks — the street goes on straight and forever — they pass beneath a train bridge and come up in a place even darker and instead of stores there’s just metal screens that stretch on and on like a wall or a fence. Then there’s a window someone forgot to bar. It’s filled with boots — rubber boots, silver-toed construction boots, boots for any kind of cowboy — and beside it a shadowed doorway. He sits there. Then Ishmael slides down beside him. He feels sick. Hungry sick. There’s no food left so they each get a piece of Trident.
And he is tired, even though he slept the entire way on the bus. But he gets so he could sleep forever sometimes and it occurs to him that if things ever got bad, he could kill himself. How? He has no weapons — just his hands and his own ideas. So it would have to be jumping, like in front of a fast-moving car. But, really, he doesn’t want to die. Okay, so does he want to live?
If they stay far enough back in the doorway no one can see them. He leans on his pack, draws in his knees, and closes his eyes against thirst and hunger, the shooting pain in his knee where another chicken chaser banged it so hard with a shovel. The cars in this part of Buzzard drive slow. One or two go swerving around, drunk. A muscled bulldog trots right down the middle of the street, its nails clicking, and then a few minutes later two guys in white sneakers come by, also right in the street, whistling and yelling a name he can’t make out though he understands their “Come home!” They have sweatshirts on with hoods pulled up and maybe it’s because the hands dangling at their sides are dark-skinned that Ishmael says “Hey” and steps out onto the street. The guys don’t seem surprised. They are glad to see Ishmael. They just want to know where their dog went. Ishmael points up the road where the bulldog disappeared and then shows them the Saint Moses card. Where is this place? One guy pulls back his hood. His face is about as dark as Chávez’s and his hair is cut very short. Were his face leaner, he could be a picker.
Ishmael comes back with a lit cigarette and he says the hospital is near the bus station, but on the other side. They share the cigarette, and go back. Just like in the desert, it’s better to move at night. He thinks, is that why God made them so dark? Like they are meant to keep to shadows? But then he tells his brain to fuck right off and follows Ishmael on.
There’s a puffy brown man lying in the gutter on the other side of the bridge. He’s not dead but drunk. His shirt is wet with alcohol and sweat and something sticky is smeared on his pants. Chávez gets the guy’s feet and Ishmael takes him under the arms and they sort of slide him onto the sidewalk. There’s a squashed pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and the leather wallet in his pants pocket is full of bills. In the wallet there’s also a rubber ring in a clear plastic wrapper that might be some kind of bandage.
“Trojan,” he pronounces, remembering the English “j” is hard, not like the “hoh-tah” of Spanish.
“I’m no thief,” says Ishmael, when Chávez slides a few bills from the wallet.
“But this guy has so much.”
“Doesn’t matter. In the eyes of God that’s a sin.” Ishmael’s eyes are steady and strong.
“But we saved him from maybe getting driven on.”
So Ishmael straddles the guy, grabs his collar, and shakes him going, “Hey, hey, wake up.”
Finally the hoods of the guy’s eyes crack open. Ishmael says, “Hey, hey, can we have some money?”
The guy snorts, “What the fuck, what the fuck” and then says, “Yes.”
Chávez peels off two wrinkled twenties and then jams the wallet into the guy’s front pocket.
“That’s okay with God?” he says to Ishmael.
Ishmael thinks so.
The Pepsi restaurant is still open. They agree that Ishmael should go in alone because he looks older and his English is good. “Just act really normal.” They go over the menu board through the window and practice the order: “Two Cokes, two hamburgers, two French fries.”
Chávez pictures two single fries in a big carton. He asks Ishmael, “Shouldn’t you make a plural of a plural? “‘Fries-es’?”
No. “Just ‘fries.’”
Only a few of the men look up when Ishmael goes in. The lady behind the counter frowns when she turns around and sees him but she gets used to him fast. Ishmael looks so dark inside the place with this fake lighting and the whitish walls and checkered floor. He stands ruler-straight, hat off, hair puffed up into an Afro. One of the chasers at Jelinek’s had some clippers and for two bucks gave cuts. He gave Chávez a real shearing last week, but when Ishmael held out his money the chaser just looked at Ishmael’s hair and shook his head no.
There’s a kind of concrete park with a water fountain; they lean against a planter of bitter-smelling pink flowers and eat from the greasy bag. The food is some of the best he has ever tasted. It even takes away the ache in his knee. Then they wash their feet in the pool; the bottom sparkles with coins.
“Better?” says Ishmael.
He nods and says he is grateful to that drunk.
The sky is muddy. The water in the fountain flows and spits. He knows he should be astounded by that water but it is just as he expected from Buzzard City: that free water, plus the coins in the pool, could keep him alive in this city for his whole life, maybe — if he was careful, if he lived only at night. He will have to learn how to navigate this place where the stars don’t mean much.
He wakes to the sound of an engine’s steady rumble and grind. There’s a little car coming towards them right on the sidewalk. Along with wheels it has whirling scrubber brushes and a tube at the front that the driver uses to suck up cigarette butts. He elbows Ishmael. Though the windows of the little car are dusty, they can see the driver’s orange headphones, blue coveralls, and dark skin. Instead of hiding they just stay where they are. The driver jolts a bit when he catches them in his eyes but goes around like they are not there.
“Let’s follow him,” Ishmael says. “Let’s make that man see us.”
There are more cars on the street now — the sky is that dark blue before dawn comes spilling. They get their backpacks on and walk behind the street sweeper, then Ishmael goes running up ahead of the vehicle, circling the guy while Chávez stands right in his way with his hands out like the flashing Indian hands. The driver stops. His yells are muffled. He backs up and goes the other way, faster. He follows — Ishmael is out of sight — then stops to watch some kids skateboarding. Railings, steps, and flower planters are their obstacle course. They push hard with their feet as they, by magic almost, clear a planter or slide along a railing like it’s a wave. The scrape of their wheels followed by the hollow thud as they hit the pavement is smooth and soothing. One kid skates over and says, man, does he have a cigarette? Chávez turns and runs.
