Novel Treatments / Crazy Street (2008) (Analysis)
1
Marianne walked into the shade of the hackberry trees edging La Mesa Creek and down into the drought-hardened mud of the stream bed. When she caught sight of the legendary snapping turtle, his enormous shell poking out of the last remaining pool of water, she stopped moving to watch him and tried not to sweat any more than was necessary. She was alert to the fact that nomadic crack heads could be lurking nearby among the white winged doves and feral cats. Since moving here from a more tasteful part of Austin, Marianne had to learn how to live with the plentitude— herds of Chihuahuas, continuous barbeques, the fuzzy syncopation of Norteño music from various radios. She was into the laissez-faire friendliness of her neighbors, but still couldn’t quite grasp the underlying resentment of everything new, including the yang urbanity of an exploding downtown two miles away.
Mrs. Hinojosa’s welcome started with “Everybody’s glad to see a nice young lady moving in here insteada bunch of bikers like the ones use to rent your house with the scary dogs and loud parties and cops coming all the time.” Next door, neighbor Emma had explained Hector, the resident schizophrenic, reassuring Marianne that his penchant for fire-building during a drought wasn’t as bad as it seemed—“we have a really good fire department right up the street”—and agreeing that his ever-changing array of plastic toys, painted pizza cartons, flags, boards, candles and shiny objects were something else. Last week, they had a laugh when Hector installed a battered doghouse up on his roof, as if announcing to all who had not heard: here is the house of Crazy Hector.
Early this morning, before the sun topped the trees to sear the street, Marianne carried four reddish-gold Hill Country rocks out to the curb. She dug out some of the heavy clay soil and replaced it with a mixture of sand and compost, and then planted bits of sedum. She was arranging the rocks around the succulents when she noticed smoke pouring out of Hector’s house. She grabbed her phone and dialed 911 as she galloped toward his house, converging with the white-haired plumber from across the street. They pounded on the door and yelled, “Hector, goddamnit, get up, you’re on fire” until Marianne said, “Well, he might be unconscious,” and jerked open the door and charged inside, followed by Gottleib. It only took a moment to see that he wasn’t home, and they both ran back out again, coughing and matching each other’s curses. Roaring fire trucks brought in the firefighters who ran around, dragging hoses and yelling commands as neighbors from Short Part Street strung out along the curb like the cast of a documentary about diversity in urban America. Mrs. Hinojosa’s quacky voice nearly drowned out Gottleib’s complaints about flaws in the firemen’s technique, and Emma’s little boy tripped over a hose and fell down howling so Marianne moved over to the quieter side of the street where the new couple stood next to their BMW, prepared to fend off any wandering sparks. Two men she knew only as the gay couple offered her some of their cappuccino as they gave each other these ai-ee Chihuahua looks each time a sharp-looking firemen went by. Emma was the first to see Hector turn the corner and come clumping down the street toward his house.
Large and brown-skinned, Hector had on his peaked hat and keeping his eyes trained downward until his sandal kicked a fire hose and he looked up. Then he started running, yelling: “What ya doing knocking holes in my house?” Gottleib coaxed him over into his yard and Emma brought him a soda and the captain came over to speak to him, but stopped after only a few words, staring across the street, saying, What the hell? A gray-bearded man wearing a camo bill cap stood just outside the industrial sized gate at the dead-end. He held a rifle in the crook of his arm. The captain walked over to him, stiff-legged as a marshal at the not-okay corral. The two of them began to talk. Hector stood and pointed a long yellow nail in their direction.
“Hey, there'ss the son of a bitch started this fire—how come you try to burn me out, man?”
A row of startled faces swung from Hector to rifleman.
“You got no right to say that. We don’t start fires,” said the man, glaring.
The fire captain looked back and forth, and then held a cell phone up to his ear and pointed to the gun with the other hand. Rifleman handed off the gun to a thin, anxious-looking woman who ran it back into the house just as investigator’s truck arrived and a black man got out, fumbling with a laptop. The captain began a discussion with him and then both consulted with Hector. The smoke and tensions dissipated. Rifleman walked back behind his gate and into the grove of trees around his house, his large Rottweiler staying by the gate, in case anyone had further questions.
After the fire trucks left, the neighbors drifted off in the usual let down after a catastrophe. Music began to blare from an unseen loudspeaker at the end of the street. Emma answered Marianne’s questioning look by saluting and singing along:
“Texas, our Texas, all hail the Lone Star state
Texas our Texas, blah blah blah blahdee blah.”
Hector, who was on his front steps holding a small suitcase, stood up and shook his fist at the music, but he seemed too tired to do much else. He was waiting for his daughter who had been called by Mrs. Hinojosa, but after nobody ever showed up, Emma took some food to him and loaned him a tent. At dusk, smoke from his campfire billowed and everybody on the street began to pray that the sparks would not fly.
Marianne, August 1st, 2004, High temp: 103
Is this a heat wave or global warming?
Will we die of boredom before or after the water runs out?
That last question has to do with the fact that I can no longer do my thing: plant, dig up weeds, mulch or my favorite, arrange rocks in interesting ways. What I consider essential parts of life. Another missing essential: Danny. To compensate, I drink iced coffee and Kahlua in the mornings, Dos Equis and tequila in the evenings. At night, it’s just me and the lonely bed.
The sound of a particular engine draws me toward the street and I drift through a tangle of vines under the live oak to spy on the Red Pickup, driven by the mysterious couple that lives behind the big gate at the end of the block. Neither mountain man or his Appalachian wife ever look around, but the cat sitting on the woman’s lap sticks his large, striped head out the window, staring at each yard with the intensity of a real estate agent. Once a week, the cat receives this stately tour and if you wave, all three look uncomfortable, so I stay quiet, a hidden witness.
But today, Touring Cat turns to look through the curtain of leaves into my eyes, and his small black mouth moves, leaving an almost inaudible meow floating in the air. I am cheered by the idea of a bond between mysterious cat of the pickup and me, confused woman of the live oak.
Emma, 8/8/04
The woman who moved next door has a lot of questions about Crazy Hector, having already passed through the first freaked out stage when she is scared of him & the way he walks around all bent over with his arms hanging down and shit, like our own chulo Frankenstein but harmless more or less except I don’t talk about the less since she seems like a nervous type. She moved in a couple a years ago when he was deep into his street fire thing, burning cardboard in the middle of the block to get rid of the demons—don’t ask me—so she calls the cops and they come out and talk to him for a while, then they get back in their cars and pull up beside each other, you know, like facing opposite directions so they can be in their power spot away from the citizens and listen to their radios and still talk to each other, but when they get another call, take off so fast they gave us all heart attacks & Hector gets busy building another fire in the street.
Now Marianne’s into the stage where she just watches and waits till he stops whatever he’s doing or else he goes off on a trip to the Valley or disappears into the state hospital, giving us some peace until we all start worrying about how he’s doing in there.
Back when I was little, Crazy Hector was just plain old Mr. Lopez, papa of Linda and Ricky, the guy giving out candy canes on Halloween because he said we should be thinking about the Baby Jesus not ghosts and witches. Instead of going to one of the Catholic churches like everybody else, he and his wife took their kids way cross town to some Mexican mess called El Voz, the loudest preacher you ever heard & I know because Linda invited me along with them one time and it was louder than a football game on Friday night.
After Hector went crazy, Mrs. Hinojosa went around saying that he probably caught that schizophrenia from being yelled at so much by El Voz, but truth is there’s enough religion around here to make us all crazy what with San Juan to the west of us and St. Louis to the north of us and St. Edward’s University to the east of us—one square mile so crammed with Catholics you’re practically deaf from all those rosary beads—plus the Protestant praise the Lord bunch at Abundant Love Temple and Church of the Living Waters not to mention plain old First Street Baptists. One van around the corner has a bumper sticker that says Jesus is Lord of Austin, which gets Christianity into kind of a regional groove and should mean we are swimming in a sea of brotherly love, right? But I don’t see much of that love thy neighbors stuff or even give a rats ass about thy neighbors like when we got the AIDS-SIDA program going at the clinic, trying to educate their sons and daughters to protect themselves from the virus, and them seeing us as recruiters for the devil and some not even wanting to talk to somebody like me whose daughter got sick with it although a few did tell me they were sorry when she died and a couple were sincere but then there was the guy at the church store who said I was sure was lucky to work at the clinic where I could get all the meds she needed for free. No point even trying to tell him how I didn’t get them for free and besides Marta had the special AIDS the meds didn’t touch and she went downhill faster than the doctors had seen before.
Marianne, August 9th: High 102, Low 80
Don’t tell me there is no such thing as global warming. I was here last August 9th, the day of the all-time record high: 111, the day that lives in climatological infamy. In honor of the anniversary, I proclaim this Hell Day and hustle into the kitchen to make up a pitcher of mimosas. Without thinking, I call out Danny’s name to see if he’d like to toast the new holiday. He doesn’t answer from wherever he is, out there on the open road in his pickup, getting his head together, as he put it on the one phone message he left me. “Don’t worry about me,” and “I’ll keep in touch” were some of his other lines.
My neighbor Emma is standing in her yard, halfheartedly spraying water on various sticks that are actually roses whose leaves were commandeered by leaf-cutter ants. Emma Mendoza is a tough, barrel-shaped woman of about 40, but her eyes are old-lady wise. She takes me up on an offer of a Hell Day mimosa and we drink them at the fence, in the shade of an old hackberry. We start out joking about the Death Valley look being the latest in landscaping, but eventually our conversation spirals down to the latest horror story at the day care on Manchaca Road. They did not see a toddler asleep in the back of the van when they unloaded the kids. By the time she was found, the temperature inside the van was more than 150 degrees and she was long dead. We both try not to look over at Little G playing with his trucks in the brown grass.
Emma casually inquires as to the whereabouts of Danny, but I don’t know her well enough to tell her my troubles. When we finish our mimosas, she finds a reason to pat my shoulder. I don’t know which helps more, the pats or the mimosas, but I feel better and, back inside, I look into the mirror and tell myself not to get so down in the mouth. Things will work out. Sad-eyed lady of the mirror tries to agree.
Several drinks into the evening, I realize that I am pacing under the pecan trees, generally pissed off. A falling leaf brushes my face and I look up to see one leaf after another falling. Green leaves falling at night means that the pecans are angry too, but that is more about the lack of rain. I blow off the rationing rules and set out two small sprinklers at the drip line of the trees, running the water all night. Deep watering for deep roots.
Gardening Tip #1: In a drought, don’t forget the trees because everybody needs water, no matter how big and strong they look.
Emma 8/15/04
My sister was bringing her bratty kid over to visit Little G, but soon as I heard her coming up the sidewalk, tripping about Declan fighting with his cousin because Little G didn’t have his advantages like a real Mama not to mention he was born sick—my blood started to boil. I ran to the door to catch the other lies she’d tell Declan before I opened up, and Nilda kept running her mouth while she stood there knocking, not realizing that every thing she was saying could be heard clear as a bell but especially not realizing how all her ugly-assed ideas would sink into Declan’s mushy little brain and take root and make him feel superior to mijo and everybody else.
I jerked open the door and stared at her until she got all pink in the face, but she was saved when Little G ran up.
G: Hey Declan, wanna see my new stegosaurus?
Declan jerked loose of his mother’s hand and charged after G trying to outrun the dark cloud that’s hovered over Nilda and me ever since she was like 12 years old and started spying on me and reporting me to mami and papi the second I got a little bit outside the lines. Today I waved her on inside without saying a word and got her a cup of coffee fast so we could get this over with.
Nilda’s new haircut is short enough for a nun and with mama’s light skin and pretty face instead of good old papa’s dark tan and moon face, she looks about as different from me as anybody could, frowning out my kitchen window until I have to ask: So why you getting so mad at my backyard?
Her: Who do those cats belong to?
Me: The rock and roll kids in that rent house but the kids are always on the road so Marianne and I put out a little cat food and water for mama and her babies.
Her: You should take all of them down to the pound because they’re going to multiply like rabbits, well, looks like they already are.
Me: Yeah, well, Marianne got the mother fixed and we’re going to split the babies, get them all fixed, soon as they’re old enough.
I wanted to suck those words back in because that will get Nilda going about single moms needing to stick to a budget and maybe I should think about my situation more since poor G doesn’t have a father to help out with support and both our parents died so no grandparents to turn to and she and Eddie have to struggle for their own kids, so it is all on my shoulders.
Her mouth opened to say all that, but instead she rubbed her eyes and looked like she’d forgotten what she was going to say, such a big break for me that I grabbed half the cookies I’d baked for a party at work and put them in a bag for her to take home and walked her out to the car. Naturally that was the moment our local nuts show up and prove to Nilda just how smart she was to get the hell away from here: Hector pushing a grocery cart full of plastic junk and the gay guy passing out the neighborhood newsletter. When he handed me my copy, Nilda looked him up and down like he wasn’t up to her Queen of Texas standards, but Charles tossed his hair back and gave her a look like she wasn’t up to his either and prissed his way back down the street.
Nilda: You better make a will saying Little G should come to us if anything happens to you because you never know what the state will do, maybe put him in foster care with one of them.
I was all yeah, yeah, yeah, just to get rid of her and went in check on the boys, who were hypnotized by a cartoon and I sat down on the front porch, fanning myself. After Hector disappeared around the corner, it wasn’t five minutes later that a City of Austin car parked at his house and some dude started poking around, looking at the blue tarp over the hole in his roof, making notes on a clipboard, putting something on his door. I went over to Marianne’s corner where she was pulling weeds and told her about Hector getting one of those tags and we both started worrying about him getting condemned out of there.
Hector finally came home and when I went down to talk, I saw that notice still there on the door and took it around back to the where I knew he’d be. A big old tomcat was standing on his hind legs licking out the frying pan on the metal grate over the fire which tells me Hector must be cooking on out here which means his utilities are cut off again. I yelled some more and some invisible character in the tent under the tree started coughing like he had TB, but the back door finally opened and here came Hector rubbing his eyes.
Hector: Sorry, Emma, I was taking a nap cuz I was up all last night playing at Dee & Jim’s.
Hector plays pool tournaments at the dive bars and he must be doing okay because he pulled out cash and paid me back for a loan from last month. I showed him the city notice but it was uphill work convincing him he had to clean up the place because he doesn’t see the mess as a problem and then he grumbled that his leg hurt too much for that kind of work; the new guy would have to do it, pay his rent that way. Hector yelled: Captain, hey Captain
A thin man in his 30s crawled out of the tent and gave me the conman grin while Hector told him what to do. I barely had time to get home before Captain was on my porch, asking for some trash bags and peering into my house, checking out everything with his pirate eyes as I handed him the bags, furious with Hector for bringing him to our street.
Captain: Anyways, thanks very much, poor old Hector needs all the help he can get, don’t he? Maybe Hector needs somebody to stick around, even though ya’ll try to help him out some, he needs a guardian angel with all the lights on like me.
He tapped his head and gave me a big wink that creeped me out before trotting back down there to work on the yard, but it turned out Captain had a court date in Bastrop so he wasn’t much of a guardian angel, more of a disappearing act. And so was Hector who called me from somewhere outside San Antonio where he’d gotten stuck on a money-borrowing mission. I told him Gottleib and Marianne and the Hinojosas would help me fix his place before the inspectors came back, and he thanked me and promised to throw a barbeque for the block later on, setting up a whole new problem of how to out of having to eat over at Hector’s.
2
In Emma’s tucked away corner of South Austin, rising land values had always been viewed with conflicting emotions. Those with neighbors like the gaunt and testy couple in the trailer over on Jinx Lane tended to be happy for change, since It might get rid of them and their badass customers as well as the loud fights that often concluded with dangerous skidding exits down El Paso Street. On the other hand, Emma looked at all the gentrifying newcomers with some concern, knowing they would be prone to report free-range roosters and cars parked on lawns to the city. Mrs. H was the first to say it was probably the new Beamer family who called the health department on Hector since the rest of the block took some pride in resisting the urge to call police or any officialdom down on Hector. Then Gottleib checked up on the criteria for condemnation and discovered there was a real possibility of Hector losing his home and Emma winced, remembering her mother’s admonitions to her and sister Nilda, that they should always look after Crazy Hector as one of God’s lost sheep.
Which is how Emma founder herself sitting stiffly in a folding chair at the monthly meeting of the neighborhood association, holding out a vague hope of alliances or information that would help her help him. She witnessed an hour of contentious discussion over height restrictions, punctuated by bitter accusations and “out-of-orders,” before easing out of her chair toward the exit. A bug-eyed woman with curly hair followed and tried to enlist her in a rebellion against the current president. Emma kept moving, smiling politely.
“I am not up on all this business, and I can’t come regularly as I have to get a babysitter for my little boy, excuse me, thanks, bye now.”
The woman nodded and said she would bring one of her flyers by the clinic, keep her in the loop. Emma nodded and hustled to Mrs. Hinojosa’s to pick up Little G, laughing at the idea of wanting to be in that loop. She could organize a clean up for Hector and if necessary, go the old friend route, the old friend being an aide to the mayor. Curly Lady would probably forget to come by the clinic anyway. Only then did Emma wonder at how that woman knew where she worked.
Gottleib was surprisingly helpful and even loaned Hector an advance on his social security check so he could ride down to San Antonio, making it possible for them to work on his house without his complicating presence. Before he left, Hector walked Emma around the place, pointing out the main attributes such as the foil wrapped rocks and the cross carved into the white bark of the sycamore, outlined in red glitter, and she promised to protect all such special decorations. The next morning, she and Marianne began moving the rocks, Tiki torches, statues, hats, shoes, dolls, radios, fan blades and other flotsam up onto the porch, so that Gottleib could wield his weed eater. Mr. Hinojosa hammered a patch over a broken window and replaced the screen in the front door. Gottleib scratched his head over the hole in the roof, but managed to frame it out and attach a removable tin panel. Emma and Marianne filled trash bags with everything they could classify as simple garbage.
The temperature had reached 96 by 11 a.m., so Charles’s jug of iced tea was a godsend although he embarrassed the hell out of everybody by calling them all saints. As soon as he left, Gottleib told a queer joke. Marianne carried her tea to the backyard to avoid hearing more and Emma followed. As they fanned themselves, Marianne told Emma how encouraged she was that a racist, sexist pig like Gottleib was still willing to do the right thing and help out Hector. Emma frowned.
“Don’t give him so much credit. Gottleib’s got more mean than nice in him—I don’t know why he’s doing all this.”
Marianne smiled peacefully, like she had some special transcendent insights, and Emma thought just you wait, girlfriend. Then felt ashamed of herself.
By 1 p.m., the cleanup of Hector’s place was complete and Gottleib went off for lunch at Fran’s Hamburgers and Mr. H went home for something home-cooked. Nobody had remembered to restore the statue of Virgin Mary to her place at the base of the sycamore, so Emma and Marianne tried to drag her, but she was so heavy that they had to roll her, end over end, Emma singing about the BVM doing cartwheels. Marianne was tickled to learn of a humorous abbreviation for the Blessed Virgin Mary, until the sight of the Rifleman observing them through his binoculars froze her in mid-laugh. Emma advised ignoring him, but it did open up the subject and Marianne seized the opportunity to ask about the touring cat.
“I don’t know, they just started giving Mouser these rides, with him hanging out the window years ago. Don’t ask me, we don’t talk much—I’m a Mex-can, enemy of the Republic of Texas.
“You can’t be serious. They are part of that group with all the guns?
“Not really. Myra and Kenneth are just freelancers, but we like to call them that, what with their big-assed Texas flag and all those “Private Property, Protected by Smith and Wesson” signs and that dog the size of a tank. And they are into that survivalist stuff, being off the grid.”
Marianne wiped the sweat off her face with a bandana and stood up.
“You know what, I’m going over, introduce myself.”
Ignoring Emma’s warning hiss, Marianne strolled over and put out her hand over the gate, saying, “I’m Marianne, live in the house on the corner, don’t think I’ve met you all.” The Rifleman dropped the binoculars and commanded the terrifying Rottweiler to stop lunging and barking.
“Kenneth Powers. Myra is my wife. What’s the deal at Hector’s?”
She told him that that the city inspectors had come and that with all the damage and the rats, they might condemn it.
He narrowed his already narrow eyes.
“That’s the man’s property. He ain’t had TIME to fix the fire damage. Of course, he probably WON’T, knowing Hector, but that’s beside the point. The City has no right.”
He hissed the words “the city,” and before Marianne could reply, he stepped up the paranoia.
“Gives them the excuse to start surveillance—now we’ll have those helicopters with infra-red night vision cameras over here at night.”
Marianne ignored that to go off on her own tangent.
“He could end up homeless. The fact is, about 50 percent of the men on the street are mentally ill. Or else veterans with PTSD or alcoholics. Or all three. So we don’t need to see Hector evicted—he’ll end up on the street.”
Kenneth frowned.
"Just remember, when you hear everybody blaming us, we had nothing to do with it. Don’t like Mexcans but don’t believe in turning people into the city. Those idiots from the fire department probably reported him.”
Marianne said she was glad to meet him even though she really wasn’t, by then, and when she walked back, Emma had gone home, and so she went on home herself and opened a Shiner Bock to drink by the pond. She looked for Emma over the fence, but things were back to normal and Marianne was alone with her fish. She could have called somebody, but she didn’t have the heart. Maybe somebody would call her.
For several evenings, Gottleib baited rat traps and each morning, he went over to collect the bodies. He had the satisfaction of helping save a neighbor from eviction and even better, a feeling of superiority that he was doing a dirty job that none of the others could stomach.
On the last morning, Gottleib found empty traps. Relieved to be done with rats, he walked through the yard to the creek and saw a doofus with a camera. They exchanged good mornings. Gottleib figured he was just some student with a project, but on second glance, he was well over thirty, and he whipped on his aviator shades a little too fast. As he took off down the creek, Hector called after him.
“What the Sam Hill you up to, anyway?”
The guy slowed and glanced back.
“Documenting environmental conditions in the watershed,” he said, officiously. Then was gone before Gottleib could ask who sent him.
Marianne, August 13: High 103, Low 80
This morning I learned about the dangers of one-handed gardening. I was spreading hay around the Cubanelles with my foot and admiring the contrast of chartreuse peppers against pale hay when I tripped and fell, spilling my screwdriver. When I remembered that there was no more vodka, my heart fluttered but not in a good way. The morale-boosting aspect of vodka in cold fruit juice is crucial if your life has been reduced to a never-ending cycle of sweating, showering and remembering. However much I try to remember, though, I can’t recall what I said to Danny to make made him think he’d be better off by himself, driving the back roads in his Ford pickup.
Like every couple, Danny and I have our differences. He likes classic detective films while I’m more into the quirky independents and foreign films. He prefers beer and grass and saves his money for a big trip to Costa Rica, while I’m drinking tequila and proposing short getaways to Rockport. There are more serious disagreements, of course, such as our contrasting views of privacy, or as I call it, secrecy. Danny won’t tell me anything about his growing up, about where he lived or what he liked or most of all, about his family. He only says they are trash and it was bad and that he lives in the present. I say that the past shapes our present selves and ask how it’s impossible to have real intimacy with someone who won’t share his whole life. It is about then that Danny stops talking and goes over to Half-Price Books for a few hours. Maybe we had one of those conversations recently, but that still doesn’t explain why he disappeared into the fucking sunset instead of into the bookstore.
The Cubanelles look just as lovely in an omelet as they are on the plant and I eat them slowly, reading the paper, trying not to think about Danny. Then I see the numbers from my address in the YOUR DAY TO WATER box at the top of the page. Mandatory rationing only allows one day a week for each household to use sprinklers and wash cars so I put on the sunscreen and hook up soaker hoses in the back and the whirling sprinklers in front.
When I walk back into my yard, I notice a bed of forgotten river fern that has begun to stunt and curl. I add another sprinkler, mumbling my apologies. I began talking to plants years ago. Not that they listen. The smart aleck tomatoes, for example, haven’t set any fruit since it went over a hundred degrees, so a month ago, I told them to put up or shut up, but they smirked and kept on sending out suckers with no flowers. The Better Boys were the worst—the JDs around here. I gave them the lecture.
“You make a lot of leaves but where are the tomatoes? And you’re the ones who are supposed to PRODUCE in hot weather.”
But later I caved. Mulched them again and watered the hell out of them. In return, those smart asses shot up another foot without putting on one tomato. Time for tough love. Tomatoes will supposedly bear more fruit if stressed, or, put more bluntly, beaten up. A physical attack stimulates a reproductive response—flowers and seeds to perpetuate the species. I cut a stiff frond from the windmill palm and spanked all the tomatoes, even breaking some branches.
“Okay, you jerks, see what you made me do?”
Hurt, they refused to answer, but a few days later, they burst forth with yellow flowers, soon to be tomatoes. The old ways work.My timing wasn’t good though. I think Emma saw me beating them when she was taking out the garbage. Not that she would make a big deal out of it. She seems to have a lot of perspective. When I start moaning about the heat, for example, she says good thing we’ve got AC and Dos Equis and besides, sweating is good for you. She is very busy between the job at the health clinic and raising the grandson left by her daughter who died of AIDS. Emma makes me feel young although she is not that much older than me.
Gardening Tip #2: Always beat your plants after dark in case the neighbors are watching.
EMMA, 8/22/08
Hector caught some luck this week being gone when the city guys came back to re-inspect so I could get with them and talk the talk about all the rats he trapped and the new screen door and trimmed grass. His house passed, but it still bothers me that someone around here would report him, and I tell Mrs. H: This didn’t used to be that kind of place.
Mrs. H: Well, it’s not the same place anymore with all these new ones like Marianne and the Beamer family coming in, no telling what they’ll do.
Me: Marianne wouldn’t ever do that and the Beamers don’t pay any attention.
Mrs. H: But the Beamer woman has those eyes, you ever see eyes that funny color like a cat?
Before she can start crossing herself and mumbling about the Devil, I head her off with a story about my mother and her mother and some of the other dead people we know between us. It must be one of those days because at work everyone is going on about the little dead girl in the daycare center van and some of them are saying they should charge the woman with murder because there’s no way anybody can forget a kid for two hours which means she did it on purpose which means she is some kind of child-hating monster, although they really don’t know a thing about this woman. It’s all so hateful and depressing that I finally explode and say, why don’t we all go down to the courthouse and stone her to death? Shuts them up but then I get all these damn looks & I can tell that I spoiled their game which is just their way of dealing with the fear of fucking up so bad that a kid gets killed.
Then there’s my sister who keeps getting more and more into the prayer circle and halleluiah chorus they started up over at San Juan Church which seem more like the Baptists every day with all that testifying crap that I can’t stand. Me and Nilda never got along, being oil and water types from day one, but it’s getting worse now that she’s know it all about religion and souls like when she tells me this morning, Emma, your prayers could make a real difference for poor Marta in purgatory.
I was just about to tell her she’ll be missing a front tooth if she puts the word poor in front of Marta one more time, but I remember her daughter’s 13th birthday is coming up and I want to go over before the party, help Jennifer with her hair and buy her some earrings and makeup because she’s getting all depressed about not being skinny or blond enough same as me at that age, something impossible to forget even after all this time.
Marianne, August 14: High 104, Low 77
When I began working in archives, I actually thought I would like helping the patrons and researchers, but by the end of the first month, I had my doubts. Now the sight of a member of the public spawns dark and bloody thoughts. Your average patron seems a repulsive blend of diva and precocious child—self-centered, knowledgeable in a narrow way and certain that the quest they are on is the most important thing in the world. They also know that the archives contain exactly what they need if you will only tell them where the hell it is. They take it personally when you don’t. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m lacking in the area of interpersonal skills. I blame that on a mother who sought a solution to emotional crisis in the exhaust from our 1966 Impala. Suicide may have solved her problems, but it gave me more than a few to work on.
Obsessing about Danny’s disappearance makes it even harder to deal with the patrons and I find that I have a semi-permanent headache. Finally, a radical thought comes to me: count up my sick time and ask for a medical leave from the director. Hal is a bearded neat freak whose chief mission is to instill in each of us an awareness of our place in the hierarchy, but this is the slow time of the year and he can’t think of a reason to say no, so he grants me permission without even asking for a doctor’s note. I thank him over and over because he likes that sort of thing and besides, I am well and truly grateful. I need to get the hell out of here. After I clean up my desk, I write a memo notifying everyone and drive home singing along with an old Frank Zappa song on the radio. Manically happy woman takes off work.
Marianne, August 20; High 102, Low, 81
The fact that Central Texas has just broken all records for high temperatures doesn’t even register with the college students on their air mattresses at Barton Springs or the large, unhealthy population of drug users. The rest of us have been pissed off ever since it hit 95 back on May 16th. Did I mention we are on our 22nd day of temperatures over a 100?
I decide to check out the survivors of this torrid summer and walk down the once-upon-a-time creek where the salvia, sea oats and daisies are all brown, or in laymen’s terms, dead. Only the tiny-leafed frog fruit is still green. A flash of pink turns out to be the tag of tattered panties, caught on a thorn bush. Beyond that, a pair of hypodermics nestles next to the remains of a campfire. I look at the sky, hoping to see a rain cloud. Instead, there is a turkey buzzard flying its regular beat down La Mesa Creek before heading west to the affluent canyons, seeking a better class of remains. The reality of life around here may not be nearly as elegant, but this is a city and not a rose garden. I decide that it feels good to be part of the urban stew of the good, the bad and funky.
Trying a short meditation, I breathe in, breathe out, in, out. The fourth inhalation brings a whiff of something dead. So much for sweet peace.
I tromp back up the creek, looking up into neighbors’ yards. Charles and Oliver’s is still colorful with its border of loud and lush crape myrtles, the Las Vegas act of the tree world—a good choice for the kings, or in this case, queens, of flash. Charles is the one with a mane of silver hair that has to be premature because he can’t be much over 30. He likes to hold forth in a presidential manner, while Oliver, thin and dancerly, is his First Lady—a bit whiny but friendly. They must be cheating on the water because their yard looks perfect and green. Charles raises a glass of iced tea in my direction.
“Buenos dias, Marianne. Have you recovered from your Hector project? Yuck.”
“Well, it wasn’t that bad and I think I lost some weight, working in that heat. Can you believe it was 104 again yesterday? And there is no more water in the creek.”
Charles put down his tea to clasp his hands over his heart dramatically.
“We may never see La Mesa Falls again!”
I sometimes wonder if the dramatic irony represents anything other than a performer’s craving for attention. Probably not, but he is a true comedian: only Charles would think to name the five inch drop water over one small ledge a waterfall.
Charles told me the creek used to run year round, even during droughts, before all the development finished off the natural springs and left the creek mostly dependent on runoff. He can tell a good story of what the neigborhood was like back when he was growing up here 20 years ago, a skinny, macho-less boy in what was then a tough ‘hood, but I tell him straight out that I’m wasted from the heat and have to get home. I slip past the Hinojosas so quickly that the Chihuahuas don’t wake up from their comas under the porch. Stella Hinojosa is fun to talk to, but it’s never brief. When I first moved here, she welcomed me with homemade cookies and questions mixed into commentary,
“Hope you don’t mind a little barking from our four Chihuahuas and your nice friend with the pickup, I guess that’s your boyfriend, huh.”
I just managed to say “yeah” before she went into a confusing monologue about gang grafitti, webworms, and how this street got its name. It seems that the Austin electric department built a power substation several decades back, and in so doing, cut off and isolated one block of Mesquite Road. To get to it, you had to take a confusing detour down Ben Howell, right on Jinx, and right again onto El Paso Street. The result was that people had so much trouble finding houses on this one part of Mesquite that the residents began attaching addendums to their addresses, like “Don’t forget, it’s over on-the-other-side-of-that-damned-electric-plant-on-the-short-part-of-Mesquite Road.” That soon morphed into Short Part, which was eventually certified and made official by a street sign that occupies the corner of my lot, next to the battered stop sign.
The rest of the corner is taken up by two large horizontal chunks of limestone, my first purchase when I moved here and the first thing to establish me as a weirdo with more money than sense.
3
By the end of August, Marianne had settled on a routine: after waking, she cursed Danny’s side of the bed for being empty and quickly took an early therapeutic run before the sun got too high. This Saturday, she was putting on her running shoes when she heard what sounded like a bird pecking on the front door. The female half of the Republic was standing on the porch with wide eyes and a shaky mouth.
“Have you seen a striped cat? We’ve been looking everywhere. He’s been gone since yesterday.”
Marianne led the forlorn Myra on a tour of the yard to look for him and promised to watch out on her jog around the neighborhood. As Myra walked away, Marianne called after her, “Don’t worry, he’ll turn up. My kitty Julio disappeared for 8 days once and then we found him.” Trying to sound cheerful.
Myra looked back and pointed at Hector’s, jabbing her finger angrily as she said, “Did you live next to a mentally ill Mexican who hates you?”
Well, no, Marianne mumbled, realizing for the first time that Myra thought somebody had taken the cat. She went inside to find a message blinking. It was Danny at a truck stop in Montana, telling her not to give up on him and that eventually, if she would have him, he’d drive home again. Miserable woman misses important call.
At the other end of the block, behind the manicured grove of banana trees at Charles and Oliver’s, another message reached its target. Charles was trying to remain calm after he read the letter he found on the porch. He carried his iced tea with its leaves of freshly cut mint out to the spot overlooking the creek and sat quietly, staring into the leaves. Charles knew that he couldn’t freak out as Oliver’s emotional radar would pick up on it as soon as he got home, but the words kept scrolling across his mind like a neon sign on the Las Vegas strip. He picked up the letter and read it again.
“God is trying to get rid of all your Fags with AIDS but you and your boyfriend are still getting away with it: Paying underage boys for sex and not telling them you have AIDS. I am writing a letter about you to the APD and even if they don’t take you to jail, I will get the word out so everybody will know and hate you dirty Fags.
A burst of loud Tejano music made Charles jump. He folded the letter into a tiny square and put it deep inside his wallet. The music probably meant Hector was having one of his parties for street people, another way he was reclaiming his place after their yard work. Charles strolled down his driveway far enough to look. Sure enough, Hector was burning some meat on giant flames while he talked to a pair of battered men and a thin girl in a wheelchair who were all drinking his beer. Gottleib was standing in his driveway, staring at them too. Parties were a cause for anxiety since it was always possible this bunch would move in after the party. When he got too broke or too lonely, Hector liked to rent out rooms and the renters were often not your quality types. Of course Hector always grew tired of them eventually and kicked them out, or he would run out of money and they would leave on their own. It didn’t pay to get too excited about it.
Except that this time, the moment it hit 10 p.m., the cops rolled up. Noise complaint, said the patrolman to Gottlieb who came out to watch over Hector as he argued his way into trouble. The bums melted away down the creek, but Hector got mad at having to turn down his music—“Ruinin’ my party, man!”—and dumped out the cooker full of blazing charcoal very close to a cop’s foot. Emma and Marianne and the rock and roll renters came outside just as Hector was bundled inside the cop car and taken downtown. Emma said, shit, now he’ll be in there with God knows who and he could get hurt. And then abruptly asked Marianne if she was the one who called 9-1-1. Marianne gave her a look and said no, of course not.
Later that day, Emma saw the water still running in his yard. She worried that whoever was calling the cops so easily wasn’t around to report him for breaking the water ban. After a while, she snuck into the yard and turned off the water.
The next day saw dirt flying in all directions down by the bridge: Hector, digging a hole. Marianne walked by, determined to avoid conversation. Perversely, she felt disappointed when he didn’t look up. Hector didn’t want to talk with her anymore than she wanted to talk with him.
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