Amigoland (17 page)

“So you do want to marry him?”

“You two were the ones who brought it up.”

“Then he hasn’t?”

“No, already he was married for more than fifty years, and he has his own family.”

“And you, what do you say?” her mother asked.

“I spent six years married, that was enough.”

“Hmm,” her aunt let out. “She wants us to believe she hasn’t thought about it.”

“Believe what you want.” Socorro pulled more of the blanket up to her chest.

Her mother rolled backward in a half circle. “Later you will see that we were telling you the truth.”

“You worry because you think I would go away.”

“Bah, now she thinks we cannot live without her.” Her aunt laughed.

“You act that way.”

The wheelchair squeaked as her mother adjusted herself. “You think your poor tía hasn’t sacrificed to be here with us?”

“And where else was she going to go?” Socorro said. “If before this she was living with her mother?”

“Taking care of her.” Her aunt stepped off the bed and went to stand behind the wheelchair. “Until God needed her.”

“Very nice,” her mother said. “Talking that way to your poor tía.”

“Sorry.”

“We just want to help you, right?”

Her aunt only nodded from behind the chair.

“It would be better if you stopped seeing him,” her mother said, “found yourself another house to clean, just so you can get
away from him.”

“You say it like I was a young girl and I need for my mother to tell me who I can spend time with.”

“A mother knows.”

“You tell me the same answer for everything, that you know better than I do.”

“When you get to fifty, he will already be at eighty-five,” her aunt said. “When you are sixty, he will be ninety-five.”

Her mother laughed. “As if the man is really going to reach that age.”

Socorro clutched her pillow a little tighter and curled up on her side until they left the room, then she shut the door and
crawled back into bed. Since when had the differences in people’s ages become so important? Her tío Felix had married a girl
who was half his age when he was in his sixties, and nobody said anything. No, they congratulated him like he’d won a color
television in a raffle at the church.

She lifted the pillow and turned from the wall. Why was she wasting her time arguing with them? Rogelio hadn’t wanted her.
He’d shown her with his body what he couldn’t say to her face. He could’ve had babies with half the women in Matamoros, and
her mother still would have thought they needed to stay married. Maybe in some way, all of it — the ugly woman he found, the
baby he left her with, even the drowning — had been a blessing. By now she would have suffered so many years with him. But
then maybe she had also given up too soon, before God might have fixed her body. What if her body hadn’t changed simply because
she had lost faith that it ever would? Maybe this was her biggest mistake.

The first light of day was peeking through the window. A chattering newscaster had replaced the voices in the other room.
She could hear her aunt moving around the kitchen, the sound of the kettle on the stove. After a while the scent of cinnamon
wafted throughout the house. She knew she hadn’t heard the last from her mother and aunt. If this was the only sincere man
she had found after all these years of believing she would be alone, who were they to protest? And then it occurred to her
that she still hadn’t reached the age when her body was supposed to have started changing. How, after giving up on Rogelio
and then her own body, could she give up on this new man? Maybe Celestino was the type she should have met years earlier,
maybe from the very start. A man who already had his children and didn’t care to have any more. A man who simply wanted her
for her.

D
on Fidencio knocked, then waited a minute and knocked a second time, only harder. It was better than opening the door and
finding The One With The Hole In His Back asleep on the pot — again. When he didn’t get a response, he walked in and searched
under the sink, around the toilet, and in the space behind the door.

He hobbled back to the closet for another look. With one hand against the wall, he steadied himself as if he were walking
down the aisle of a bus pulling away from its last stop. His five shoe boxes, all of them covered up and in order with their
appropriate numbers facing outward, sat on the top shelf where they had been earlier. His three shirts and pants hung where
the attendant had left them. For all he knew, they had taken his canes to the flea market and sold them to some other old
man with a bad leg. He couldn’t believe the lack of respect these women showed him. If they had taken the time to ask, he
would have told them that the wooden cane was the one he used when he was out in public. Who knows what else these women would
have taken if he hadn’t complained at the nurses’ station? And then to make matters worse, they laughed when he reported that
someone had been stealing his chocolates or that he was missing his lighter or one of his government-issue pens. Then a few
days later The One With The Flat Face would come knocking on the door and say that the yardman had found his missing lighter
on the patio, under one of the stone benches out by the back fence, or that an attendant had recovered his pocketknife from
one of the trays coming out of the dishwasher. Always some excuse. Always some reason to blame him and make it seem like he
didn’t know where he left things. Look, here comes The One Who Loses Everything.

He set his baseball cap on the nightstand and pushed the chair next to the bed. Once he was sitting, he grabbed hold of the
bed railing and with much sacrifice slowly lowered himself so both knees could gently touch the floor. Still holding on to
the railing, he bowed all the way down. One of his government-issue pens lay under the center of the bed, for sure tossed
there by some careless aide who didn’t have the good manners to return the pen to its proper place after using it. He tried
several times to grab hold of it, but his hand came up short each time. If he’d had one of his canes with him, this wouldn’t
have been a problem. The pen would have to wait for later so he could find something else to help him reach it. Off in the
corner, near the headboard, lay a diaper, still folded up and unused (“Thanks be to God,” he whispered to himself), that must
have been meant for the last old man to occupy the bed, because it sure as hell wasn’t his (again, “Thanks be to God”).

No, they were afraid of him, that was what was going on here. They’d seen how much improvement he had made with his therapy
and now they were scared that one of these days he would slip out and this time they wouldn’t be able to catch up to him.
One good, sturdy cane was all it would take. And soon, not even that. In the evenings he was still sweeping the floors with
the dust mop, but now once he was out of sight of the nurses’ station, he would lean the mop against the wall and continue
on his own, staying close to the wooden railing, just in case. They probably thought he would never get anywhere without the
walker. But that showed how much they knew Fidencio Rosales.

After he was convinced he wasn’t going to find anything under the bed, it took still more effort to pull himself back into
the chair. Then he glanced at his wristwatch and realized his brother and the girl would be coming by in twenty minutes to
take him out to lunch. He’d resisted giving her a name like he had done with these people in the prison, but this also made
it more difficult to now remember the real name that went with her face. Already he had met her five or six times, however
many it was, and he couldn’t think of her as more than the girl. It wasn’t like The Turtles, so many to keep track of. There
was only one of her, whatever her name was. They had taken him to dinner the other day, and the whole time he hadn’t been
able to remember her name until his brother happened to say it in passing.

From the closet he pulled out the #3 and #4 shoe boxes before he thought to open the #2 box. As soon as they had brought him
back to his room, he had written her name in one of his old address books. Which one, though? He had two bundles of the little
books, each bound with thick rubber bands. He started with a red one and found the name Julio Betancourt, which meant nothing
to him, as did Martin Colunga. This last name had been underlined several times, as if it had some particular importance,
but still nothing came to him. Under
M,
he located the name Jimmy Udall, which made sense only because he had
MECHANIC
written next to it, something he wished he had done with the other names:
NEIGHBOR, OLD FRIEND, OLD FRIEND NOT WORTH TALKING TO ANYMORE, WORK FRIEND, NEPHEW WHO DOESN’T CALL ANYMORE,
etc. Scattered throughout several of the address books, he found only the initials —
DLN
or
LG
or
JM
or
SFL
— of women he’d had relations with, or tried to anyway, but he wasn’t about to write down their actual names so Petra could
find them. The phone numbers themselves were written in a special inverted code that he’d had trouble deciphering at times.

He stopped turning pages when he saw Chano Gonzalez’s name. They had been good friends for years at work, but more so whenever
it was that Petra left the house to live wherever it was she went. He and Chano would get together Saturday nights to watch
the boxing matches on television. Then Chano’s eyes started going bad because of his diabetes, which he took care of about
as well as Don Fidencio did, only Don Fidencio didn’t have diabetes and could eat and drink whatever the hell he wanted. So
he started going for him in the car and bringing him back to the house, but it wasn’t the same anymore because Chano could
barely make out the television and Don Fidencio had to spend the whole time telling him who was winning and how. Later Chano
had something go wrong with one of his feet and they had to cut his toes. And after that he only got worse: more toes, more
parts of his leg, and finally his woman wouldn’t let him out of the house, which was how he stayed until he died a few years
later.

DEAD FRIEND
, he wrote next to his name. He wrote the same thing next to every name, even ones who might have still been alive.

Under
R,
he found his brother’s name, the only other Rosales listed in this particular book. He checked the cover to see if there
was a date that might indicate when it became just the two of them left behind. In the end, though, he had to settle for finding
the girl’s name, written right next to his brother’s name. The problem was, he couldn’t read his own writing, as tiny and
chicken-scratched as it had always been, only now also with this constant tremor that made it seem as if he had written it
with the pen held upright between his corn-ridden toes. The
S
he could see, but the rest was a mystery to him. All those years of figuring out mailing addresses, and this is what he had
to show for it. Sonia, Sulema, Severa, Sofia, Sylvia, Solidad — none of them sounded right. He could tell now he should’ve
written the name in the same large block letters he had just used to write next to his friends’ names. Don Fidencio shut his
eyes and concentrated, concentrated, concentrated, the whole time hissing the first letter of her name until it sounded like
he was releasing the air from a tire.

When he opened his eyes, he gazed at the letters until he managed to untangle them one by one. There was the
o
that looked more like a lopsided egg, and the
c
and the
q
mixed up with the second
o,
which looked like a cracked egg because it was too close to the first
r,
which swallowed up the second
r
and third
r
or a
p,
but then there was still another
o
that did actually look like an
o.
S-O-C-Q-O-R-P-O
, he wrote at the top of the page. It was one thing to not be able to write and another to not know how to spell. He stared
at this for a minute or so before he crossed out the
Q,
then the
P.
S-O-C-O-R-O
. Now it was so clear to him. Of course, Socorro. That was her name — Socorro. He used both hands to grab ahold of his walker
and stand up. “Socorro… Socorro… Socorro,” he said, shuffling out of the room.

They had taken a booth near the back of the little restaurant, where they would still be able to talk if someone put money
in the jukebox. Steam billowed out each time the kitchen door swung open and one of the waitresses came out with a plate of
food. The place was only half full. A teenage couple in hooded jackets sat in a corner booth where the owner couldn’t see
them sneaking kisses while they shared the plate they had ordered. At the next table three men in cowboy hats sipped their
coffees while the older one of the group did most of the talking. A pair of Border Patrol agents sat close to the door, one
of them keeping an eye on the kitchen workers, the other more interested in the carne guisada he had on his plate in front
of him.

The food was already on the table by the time Don Celestino came back from the restroom, where he’d checked his sugar level.
He had ordered the enchiladas verdes, Socorro the taquitos, and Don Fidencio the menudo. Once the old man started eating,
he barely looked up from his bowl. Now and then he stopped between slurping his soup to take a deep breath and chew a tougher
piece of tripe. His few remaining teeth clicked in a staccato manner as he gnawed at the meat until he could swallow it.

“Do you remember the last time you ate menudo?” Socorro asked.

He raised his hand to indicate she had caught him in midchew.

“Sometimes they serve it there,” he answered finally, “but never with enough spices because people would be burping all night.”

“Maybe it’s better that way, so you can sleep.”

“I barely sleep anyway, at least that way I would have a good reason,” Don Fidencio said, and spooned up some hominy. “Last
night I spent it lying there, staring at the ceiling. I would sleep for twenty or thirty minutes, then wake up and just be
there. It came and went like that until the early morning, when I remembered something more from our grandfather’s story and
couldn’t sleep anymore. And finally, after another hour, they served breakfast.”