Hot Sur (27 page)

“Beer in wineglasses, Greg? What gives?”

“Why do we have those glasses then if we are never going to use them?”

Beer in wineglasses, Cantimpalos chorizo, smoked sausage, or his mother’s ass, it was all the same to me. And if you want me to tell you the truth, Mr. Rose, I preferred it without any chorizo, or any roasted goat, or cabbage, or pork ribs, or onions, or garlic; but, of course, that’s not what I told Greg that night. Fortunately, I didn’t tell him and he died convinced that I appreciated his culinary efforts.

“Is Sleepy Joe coming?” I asked. “Should I set a plate for him?”

“Just two settings,” Greg responded. “One for you and one for me, and Hero’s dish.”

“Don’t you dare give kapustnica to Hero, you know how it gives him the runs,” I warned him as I arranged the roses in a vase.

“I’ll give him just a little bit so he can try it. Don’t set a plate for Sleepy Joe. He always says he’s coming and then stands us up,” he told me as he washed his hands, wiping them on the painted tits of the apron.

That was the last image of Greg alive that I remember.

I gave a chunk of cheese to Hero and took him to the roof so he’d take his last pee of the day. I unhitched him from his cart, went back down the stairs carrying him, and dropped him on his favorite bed, which was of course our bed. I then went into the dining room/living room and was taking out the wineglasses from their boxes, a wedding gift from Socorro, my mother’s best friend, when I heard the phone ring and then Greg taking the call in the kitchen. A few minutes later, I heard him putting his jacket on behind me and opening the front door.

“Where are you going?” I asked, without turning around to look at him.

“Sleepy Joe just called.”

“Should I set a plate for him then?”

“No, he just wants me to come down for a moment.”

I imagined that Sleepy Joe wanted to give him a birthday present, or at least a hug. It didn’t seem odd that he didn’t want to come up. Lately, things were a little tense between them, and although usually they didn’t argue inside the house, not to do it in front of me, I knew that outside they’d get into arguments more frequently. Well, sometimes they’d do it inside the house also, but in Slovak, so don’t ask what it was about, because I couldn’t understand a thing. Greg would always end up annoyed and agitated after those squabbles, but I couldn’t get him to talk about them, so I never knew the reasons.

“Why were you fighting?” I’d asked him, half-fearing I was the reason.

“Don’t worry about it,” he’d tell me, “it’s an old fight, something about an inheritance in Slovakia. One day I’ll have to go to claim it and you’ll come with me, it’ll be our second honeymoon.”

I had no desire to go to Slovakia. I imagined it frozen and desolate and lost in the past. In any case, it was probably best if I stayed out of those types of brawls. These are passing things between brothers, I thought. In the end, they loved each other, they couldn’t live without each other, and they even prayed together often, also in Slovak, or maybe in a language even more ancient, because they sang what seemed to be ancient hymns from far away, more, how should I put it, more warlike than religious, or at least that’s how they sounded to me. They’d do it every morning at six sharp. The Angelus, as the devotion is called, commemorates the Incarnation. A hell of a mystery, terrifying to me, according to which God, regretful of the errors he committed in the Creation, is incarnated and becomes man, descends to earth to suffer like any other man, to come to know in the flesh the suffering that he had imposed on humans, and to be humiliated and whipped and tortured on a cross in the most atrocious manner, to bear a suffering worse than any human, and in the end God is God and his pains are infinite because he is divine. What a mystery. But why, if he is almighty, doesn’t God return to his creatures, sparing the whole world from suffering and sparing himself as well? That’s what I asked Greg, and he said to stop talking nonsense, girl, that without suffering there’s no religion and no religion without suffering. That’s it. A mystery is a mystery and it’s not meant to be solved. In any case the two brothers prayed on the roof, never inside the apartment, which was small with low ceilings, cozy but tight, and according to Greg, the roof was a cathedral with the sky as the dome. That’s how my Greg put it. Sometimes he came up with the prettiest expressions. I don’t know where he got them. A cathedral with the sky as the dome. And he was right. When you’re up there, on the roof of our building, it seems as if the wind blowing in your face comes from some other place. It’s as if you left this devastated neighborhood, looked at it from above, and although it is only five floors high, you could see everything really small, way down there, because you’re in some other world up here, and you dream of escaping to strange and distant cities, and you dream you see the stars although you don’t, and then you’re hit with the smell of the country and the noise of the sea, I mean, although it’s not real you can dream it, that your life becomes wide and free, without a roof to crush you or walls to constrict you. I think that it was Violeta’s favorite place because it was the only one that calmed her down and where Greg and Joe prayed their so-called Angelus each morning and then all the days of Holy Week, Greg leading with the singing part because of his rights as older brother and Joe responding. I was the only one not so sure about the whole thing. The neighbors are going to think Muslims live here and are going to become suspicious of us, I warned the brothers, because aside from their chants and prayers they rang a little bell like in school, and I thought it would wake up the whole neighborhood, and then the icing on the cake was the lighting of candles and incense. But they didn’t listen to me; my warnings went in one ear and out the other. They just kept doing their thing, loyal to their traditions above all, rain or shine, because they put a lot of passion into their prayers and rituals. Sleepy Joe was more committed than Greg, who had been somewhat tamed by the years, while Joe was a fanatic, or as they say in the news, a fundamentalist. When he argues a point, he seems ready to kill or die for what he believes, and when he prays . . . when he prays it’s even worse. I have always been suspicious of the pious who pray all the time, those who adore God above all things. I get chills watching those that kneel and kiss the ground, those that self-flagellate, those who drag and sacrifice themselves for the Lord and revere his saints and angels. Sleepy Joe is one of those, and when the mood strikes him, he metamorphoses, the fever chills spread through his body and he becomes another person. That’s what he is, a violent and mystical man who knows how to combine those two elements without straining; either one of them flows through him spontaneously, sometimes at once. Greg wasn’t like that. He shared his brother’s religious fanaticism, that’s for sure, and they made plans to visit the Virgin of Medjugorje together. I mean they were those types of old-time fanatics, but at least Greg didn’t make that face of a transfigured lunatic when he prayed. Joe does, and I know, because as I told you I’ve seen him do both things, fuck and pray, and sleep and start a fight, that too, because there’s no doubt that the man has some bipolar issues, but above all, he likes to sleep, from dawn till nightfall. The truth is that I don’t think he does much else with his life. I got scared when he was overcome by one of his mystical fits, I swear to you, Mr. Rose. Imagine some Russian-looking guy, with his crazy tattoos and T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, legs like pillars of stone, tough-looking from top to bottom, like Viggo Mortensen in
Eastern Promises
, that sturdy and good-looking, as some would say frighteningly masculine, too much perhaps, and also too white, aggressively Caucasian. I’m not sure if you understand what I’m saying, but now imagine him in concentrated form, ecstatic, reciting rosaries in Slovak to the one he calls the Most Holy Virgin Mary, mother and lady, queen of heaven and earth, like his own mother but to the millionth power, even more frightening and powerful than his mother and huge like the universe. If she only saw Sleepy Joe in one of his trances, the veins in his neck bulging and his eyes going back in his head as if he were an epileptic. Maybe not so much, but something like it. Veins bulging, the whitened eyes, and a shuddering throughout his body—such was the strength of his faith. I’m telling you, that’s the face Joe makes when he fucks, when he argues, and when he prays, and it’s frightening to look at him when he is doing any of those three things, as if eternally on the border of somewhere else, a step away from a psychotic episode.

Greg loved him like a father, in the good sense and in the bad. He spoiled Joe and put up with too much of his crap. At the same time he was always preaching to him wherever they’d happen to be as if he were a kid. I remember the craziness that came over Greg as we returned from Mass one Sunday and found Sleepy Joe seated at the kitchen table and playing with the meat knife, holding it with his right hand and stabbing the spaces between the fingers of his left hand, faster, faster, pricking holes in the table, and right when Greg said to stop the fucking game, Joe misjudged a move and stabbed one of his fingers. Not badly, but enough so that blood splattered on the table. And Greg screamed out, “You idiot, you moron.” What didn’t he call Joe? “You’ve ruined my kitchen table, you asshole,” he said. “Look what you’ve done, it’s full of marks.” But Joe took it and remained silent, sucking on the wound between his ring finger and pinkie.

They fought a lot because they’re a lot alike, I used to think and still think; I imagine that Greg became a cop just as simply as he could have become a criminal. And that Joe became a good-for-nothing just as simply as he could have become a cop. But perhaps I’m not being fair to Greg, who was a peaceful sort of guy, whereas Sleepy Joe had a rage inside him that was eating him alive and making steam come out of his ears. I have always thought that he never became a serial killer simply because he was too lazy. He told us he was a truck driver, and although I had never seen a truck, there was no reason to doubt his word, except for the sleepiness. If it were true that he was a truck driver, he’d have long before wrecked a vehicle by falling asleep at the steering wheel. After we were married and Greg moved into my place, Sleepy Joe began to visit us frequently, dining with us and sleeping on the sofa in the living room. He usually slept straight through the day. He had his beers, burped loudly and resoundingly, like a sated baby, lay spread-eagled on the sofa to watch TV, and fell asleep so deeply and for so long that it seemed he had died. An amazing corpse, if the truth be told. I took advantage of this to watch him, his face half-hidden by his folded arm and his powerful body on display, barely stirred by a breath. A young lion in docile rest. Greg, of course, saw it differently. He thought that since childhood Joe was in a rage and cursing the world, fast asleep, or silently hatching some malicious plan. Deep down, I knew the truth about Sleepy Joe. It would be a lie to say I didn’t, but I never put it in words, and if I had, Greg would have jumped to his brother’s defense.

“Let him be, he’s young,” he’d have argued, “he can take life calmly.”

After the prayers at six, Sleepy Joe slept the entire morning. He’d wake up briefly to devour whatever was in the refrigerator, sleep again till midafternoon, and then he’d remain awake until the morning light, because, as he put it, a cautious man doesn’t sleep in the dark. I always thought it was something physical. In the darkness, his heart froze and he’d not dare close his eyes to confront whatever phantoms haunted him. I told him once, “Joe, you kill the nighttime hours with the sound of the television so you don’t feel lonely.” More than likely he responded with one of the filthy obscenities that came out of his purple mouth. I’m not making that up. His gums and his lips were of a purplish hue, identical to Greg’s. The brothers were those types of people with visible gums and thick purplish lips, or I should say with too much mouth in the paleness of the face, mouths that insist you look at them against your will. I can see the two of them as children back in Colorado, sharing a bed with the other siblings like sardines in a can, Greg sleeping like an angel, but Joe wickedly awake, a little Slovak punk with his eyes wide open under the coarse scratchy bedsheets, counting the thousands of minutes and millions of seconds that must remain till morning, not daring, in his need, to scream for his mother, that woman who never bathed them and who, as soon as morning came, sent them out to play in the backyard, whether it was winter or summer, and whether they were still dressed or in their underwear, so that they accompanied her in reciting the Angelus. Or maybe she was the source of the panic, the mother, it could be. I, for one, am glad we never met, and I’m heartbroken that I had to use her wedding band.

When Sleepy Joe was in my house he’d prepare for this nighttime sleeplessness by stocking up on Coors, Marlboro Lights, and the spicy Mexican candies he ate all the time, according to him so he could stop smoking. They were called Pica Limón and they were packaged in red-and-green wrappers; when I returned from work, it wasn’t hard to see if Sleepy Joe had come by, all I had to do is look for the ashtrays full of cigarette butts and the Pica Limón wrappers scattered on the floor.

“You eat hundreds of those to stop smoking,” I told him, “but you still smoke like a demon.”

“I eat the candy to stop smoking, and smoke to stop eating the candy,” he responded sarcastically, giving one of those looks he used to give me, one of those slow, pasty looks that would stick to my body.

From midafternoon till dawn, Sleepy Joe abandoned the sofa, which according to him he was keeping warm the rest of the time, to settle down in the best chair in the apartment, one of those Reclinomatics with faux leather that gave massages. He turned on the television and never took off his boots when he set his big old feet on the little glass coffee table I had bought for the living room.

“You’re going to break that, you pig,” Greg scolded him. “At least take off your boots, and throw them out while you’re at it. Crocodile-skin boots are for mafiosos.”