Oscar Casares (15 page)

“I think George is a little nervous about the contract,” she said. Her hair was pulled into a bun and it made her look older. She looked like somebody's mother.

“Primo
,
you know what I'm going to do?” He clicked his ballpoint pen and put it back in his sports coat. “I'm not going to cash this first check or hand in the paperwork. I'll give you until tomorrow to think about it. And if you're still not sure, I'll tear everything up and give you back your check. How about that?”

I knew this was another one of Jerry's salesman techniques, and if I agreed to it, I'd probably end up buying another casket somehow in the deal. But I went and took him up on his offer, just to make him sweat it out an extra day.

That night when I left work, I did something I hadn't done in years. I stopped by the Jiffy-Mart and bought a six-pack of Budweiser. Then I got back in the car and drove around for the next few hours. The way I saw it, there were decisions you made over a hot cup of coffee and there were decisions you made over a cold beer. This was the cold-beer kind of decision.

The first place I drove by was Lincoln Park. Some kids were hanging out by the entrance, smoking cigarettes. I thought about being that old and sneaking out of the house to do the same exact thing. It felt good to be older now and have nothing to do but drink a few beers. I didn't need to ask anybody's permission, either. It was my car, and I was drinking the beer I bought with my own money. I even slid a Van Halen cassette into the tape player. By the time I was back on International, I'd finished my first beer and thrown it in the backseat. I popped open another one and held it between my legs, just cruising.

I was driving on Boca Chica when I saw Jerry's red Firebird going the other way. I made a U-turn. I wanted to stop him and ask what the hell he thought he was doing pulling a fast one on Anna and me. We now owed over $13,000 in pre-arrangements I never wanted and neither would've Anna if he hadn't kept bugging us. I still couldn't believe she had made me sign those papers. The Firebird pulled over into a parking lot. Through his back window, I could see a girl in the passenger seat. They were kissing, and Jerry was running his hands through her hair. Then he kissed her on the neck, and his head kept going lower and lower, until I couldn't see him anymore. I wondered if she was the same girl with the lips and the gold cross hanging so far down into her shirt, Monica. As I drove away, I imagined him kissing the cross. I felt like going by Jerry's house and throwing the empties in his yard.

I had one beer left when I drove by Buena Vista. The moon was full and I could see far into the cemetery. It looked like a city park without any swings or slides. I left the car in an empty lot across the street. The chain-link fence around Buena Vista was six feet high, but it looked taller at 1:30 in the morning. I was carrying my last beer in the plastic ring holder it came in. I hung the beer can on the fence and climbed over as soon as there were no cars passing by.

I walked around, drinking, looking at all the names on the tombstones. Garcia, Paredes, Ramirez, Martinez, Saldaña, Lucio, Zuniga. When I found my grandmother's grave, I got down on my knees and prayed a Hail Mary and told her that I knew she was in heaven and I missed her. Then I looked for my grandfather's grave and ended up walking around for over an hour and still not finding it. I'll admit I was a little drunk, but I wasn't so pedo that I couldn't read a tombstone. I must have looked at three hundred of them. I finally rested in a clear space on the grass. The air was still warm, but the grass felt cool. It was peaceful lying there. I looked up at the moon and watched the clouds pass by. I wanted to figure out what to do about Jerry, but all I kept thinking about was my grandfather. I could see him stepping on the accelerator, unbuckling himself from the seat belt, heading for a palm tree that was getting closer every second, wanting nothing more than to be with my grandmother. And at least there in the cemetery, he never even got near her. What was so wrong with being alone? I wanted to tell him that it wasn't that bad. I liked spending my days at the house. I liked it when tax season rolled around and Anna worked weekends. I liked driving home alone at night after work, sometimes taking the long way. And if I had the chance, I'd probably go out drinking more often, maybe even start smoking again. Then I thought about when we were getting married and I said, “I do,” when the priest asked, “Until death do you part?” I thought about how I had always been willing to live up to that and more. And I probably would have kept doing so happily if it hadn't been for my cousin.

It was 2:50 in the morning by the time I made it home. Anna was sound asleep. The flush of the toilet or me kicking off my shoes didn't bother her any. She just grabbed more blanket and rolled over on her side. There was a note sitting next to the alarm clock. It said, Jerry called and he wants you to call him back. Love, Anna. I crawled into bed and tried to fall asleep. I looked over at Anna and she was lying on her back now. I was on my back, too. There we were, side by side. She was facing the ceiling and her body was very still. I kept looking at her, just to make sure she was breathing.

Yolanda

W
hen I can't sleep at night I think of Yolanda Castro. She was a woman who lived next door to us one summer when I was growing up. I've never told Maggie about her because it's not something she'd appreciate knowing. Trust me. Tonight, like most nights, she fell asleep before I was even done brushing my teeth. And now all I can hear are little snores. Sometimes she even talks to herself, shouts out other people's names, and then in the morning says she can't remember any of it. Either way, I let her go on sleeping. She's over on her side of the bed. It's right where she ought to be. This thing with Yolanda doesn't really concern her.

I was only twelve years old when Frank and Yolanda Castro moved into the beige house with green trim. Frank pulled up on our street in a U-Haul he'd driven all the way from California to Texas. I remember it being a different neighborhood back then. Everybody knew everybody, and people left their doors unlocked at night. You didn't worry about people stealing shit you didn't lock up. I'm talking about more than twenty years ago now. I'm talking about before some drunk spent all afternoon in one of the cantinas on Fourteenth Street, then drove his car straight into the Rivas front yard and ran over the Baby Jesus that was still lying in the manger because Lonny Rivas was too flojo to put it away a month after Christmas, and then the guy tried to run, but fell down, asleep, in our yard, and when the cops were handcuffing him all he could say was
ma-ri-juan-a,
which even then, at the age of fifteen, I knew wasn't a good thing to say when you were being arrested. This was before Pete Zuniga was riding his brand-new ten-speed from Western Auto and, next to the Friendship Garden, saw a white dude who'd been knifed a couple of dozen times and was floating in the green water of the resaca. Before some crazy woman hired a curandera to put a spell on her daughter's ex-boyfriend, which really meant hiring a couple of hit men from Matamoros to do a drive-by. Before the cops ever had to show up at El Disco de Oro Tortillería. Like holding up a 7-Eleven was getting old, right? You know, when you could sit at the Brownsville Coffee Shop #1 and not worry about getting it in the back while you ate your menudo. When you didn't have to put an alarm
and
the Club on your car so it wouldn't end up in Reynosa. Before my father had to put iron bars on the windows and doors because some future convict from the junior high was always breaking into the house. And before my father had to put a fence in the front because, in his words, I'm sick and tired of all those damn dogs making poo in my yard. I guess what I'm trying to say is, things were different back then.

Frank Castro was an older man, in his fifties by that point, and Yolanda couldn't have been more than thirty, if that. My mother got along with Yolanda okay and even helped her get a job at the HEB store where she had worked since before I was born. You could say that was where the problems started, because Frank Castro didn't want his wife working at HEB, or any other place for that matter. You have no business being in that grocery store, I heard him yell one night when I was trying to fall asleep. I could hear almost everything Frank yelled that summer. Our houses were only a few yards apart, and my window was the closest to the action. My father's bougainvilleas were the dividing line between the two properties. I heard Yolanda beg Frank to please let her take the job. I heard Frank yell something in Spanish about how no woman in his family had ever worked behind a cosmetics counter, selling lipstick. I heard her promise she'd only work part-time, and she'd quit if they ever scheduled her on nights or weekends. I heard her tell him how much she loved him and how she'd never take a job that would keep them apart. Francisco, tú eres mi vida, she said to him. I heard him get real quiet. Then I heard Frank and Yolanda Castro making love. I didn't know what making love sounded like back then, but I can tell you now that's what it was.

If you saw what Yolanda looked like, you might not have blamed Frank for not wanting her to leave the house. It also wouldn't have been a big mystery to you how she went into the store applying for a job in the meat department and ended up getting one in cosmetics. The only girl I'd ever seen that even came close to being as beautiful as Yolanda was in a
Playboy
I found under my parents' bed the summer before. The girl in the magazine had the same long black hair, light brown skin, and green eyes that Yolanda did, only she was sitting bareback on an Appaloosa.

The thing I remember most about Frank was his huge forearms. They were like Popeye's, except with a lot more black and gray hair mixed in. But the hair on his arms was just the beginning. There wasn't a time I saw the guy that he didn't look like he could've used a good shave. And it didn't help that his thick eyebrows were connected into one long eyebrow that stretched across the bottom of his forehead like a piece of electrical tape. He was average size, but he looked short and squatty when he stood next to Yolanda. Frank was a mechanic at the airport and, according to my father, probably made good money. I was with my father the first time he met Frank. He always made it a point to meet any new neighbors and then come back to the house and give a full report to my mother, who would later meet the neighbors herself and say he was exaggerating about how shifty so-and-so's eyes were or how rich he thought another neighbor might be because he had one of those new foreign cars in the driveway, un carro extranjero, a Toyota or a Honda. Frank was beginning to mow his front yard when we walked up. My father introduced me as his boy, and I shook our neighbor's sweaty hand. I've lived thirty-six years on this earth and never shaken hands with a bear, but I have a good idea that it wouldn't be much different from shaking Frank Castro's hand. Even his fingers needed a haircut. Frank stood there answering a couple of my father's questions about whether he liked the neighborhood (he liked it) and how long he had lived in California before moving back to Texas (ten years—he held up both hands to show us exactly how many). Suddenly, my father nodded and said we had to go. He turned around and walked off, then looked over his shoulder and yelled at me to hurry up. This whole time, Frank had not shut off his mower. My father was forced to stand there and shout over the sound of the engine. The report on Frank wasn't pretty when we got back to the house. From that point on, my father would only refer to him as El Burro.

It wasn't just my father. Nobody liked Frank. He had this thing about his yard where he didn't want anybody getting near it. We found this out one day when Lonny and I were throwing the football around in the street. Lonny was showing off and he threw the ball over my head, way over, and it landed in Frank's yard. When I was getting the ball, Frank opened the front door and yelled something about it being private property. Then he went over, turned on the hose, and started watering his yard and half the street in front of his yard. He did this every afternoon from that day on. The hose with a spray gun in his right hand, and a Schlitz tallboy in his left. Lonny thought we should steal the hose when Frank wasn't home, or maybe poke a few holes in it, just to teach the fucker a lesson. One Saturday morning we even saw him turn the hose on some Jehovahs who were walking up the street towards his house. A skinny man wearing a tie and short-sleeve shirt kept trying to give him a pamphlet, but Frank wasn't listening.

My mother gave Yolanda a ride to work every day. In the afternoons, Yolanda got off work early enough to be waiting for Frank to pull up in his car and drive her back to the house. My mother told us at home that Yolanda had asked Frank to teach her how to drive when they first got married but that Frank had said she was his princesa now and any place she needed to go, he'd take her. One morning, when both my mother and Yolanda had the day off, my mother asked her if she wanted to learn how to drive. They drove out by the port, and my mother pulled over so Yolanda could take the wheel. I was hanging out at the Jiffy-Mart, down the street, when I saw Yolanda driving my mother's car. Yolanda honked the horn, and they both waved at me as they turned the corner.

That night—like a lot of nights that summer—I listened to Frank and Yolanda Castro. What they said went something like this:

“I can show you.”

“I don't wanna see.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have
no
business driving a car around town.”

“But this way you don't have to pick me up every day. You can come straight home, and I'll be here already, waiting.”

“I don't care. I'm talking about you learning to drive.”

“Frank, it's nothing.”

“You don't even have a car. What do you want with a license?”

“I can buy one.”

“With what?”

“I've been getting bonuses. The companies give us a little extra if we sell more of their makeup.”

“Is that right?”

“It isn't that much, Frank.”

“And then?”