The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (49 page)

“All right,” he said. “But please don't overdo it.”

They worked together for the next five weeks. It amazed Antonio how smooth her face had become, eased of the lines of daily frustration. Antonio often lingered around the office, pretending to be busy just so he could look at her. She was in love with her work, and for the first time in their marriage, Antonio felt that he had actually given her something she valued. They still had not resumed making love, in any language, but they had at last reached an easy truce at home. And Antonio was not so foolish as to tamper with that.

Just before Thanksgiving, Pilar showed him the account books for the work they had done over the summer. They had made a profit for two out of three months. “We can probably start paying Miguel a little more,” she said.

“I was planning on it,” Antonio said. “Starting the first of the year.” He moved to give her a kiss. “Really, Pilar, thank you. There's no way I could have come this far without you. We should have a real Thanksgiving this year. We have reason to celebrate.”

“Be sure to invite Miguel,” she said. “We owe a lot to him, too.”

“I wouldn't dream of doing this without him,” Antonio said.

On Thanksgiving Eve, the three of them walked down the grocery store aisles together, Antonio filling the cart with the most expensive items he came across, and Pilar saying over and over, “No, Antonio, that's far too much food for just three people.”

Miguel laughed as the two of them played tug-of-war with a frozen twenty-pound turkey. The apartment started to warm early the next day with the smells of the Thanksgiving meal.

Miguel arrived stuffed into a suit with wide, outdated lapels.

“Be careful you don't bend over,” Antonio said. “That thing looks like it's about to rip down the seam.”

“Don't laugh at me,” Miguel said. “I wanted to add a little class to this gathering. But I think it must have shrunk since I last wore it.”

They started with wine before dinner, the three of them finishing a full bottle while standing in the kitchen. Miguel told one joke after another, each a little dirtier than the last. How long had it been since Antonio had heard
Pilar laugh this way, without restraint? Since he had seen her look happy? Maybe things were becoming good between them once again.

After the long meal, Antonio brought desserts out from the kitchen.

“Let's wait,” Pilar said, crinkling up her nose. “I couldn't stand another mouthful.”

But Antonio insisted that everyone try at least a bite of each kind of pie, since he had helped make them. Pilar tried to get up to start cleaning, but Antonio wouldn't let her. “More wine for everyone,” he said, tearing the lead foil off a new bottle.

Miguel started into another story, this time about how he had once been with a woman when her husband came home, and he had had to step out onto the tenth-floor building ledge outside the bedroom to hide. “The neighbors started pointing. They thought I was trying to kill myself, so they called the police. They brought out a net for me to jump into.”

The three of them laughed, Pilar hardest of all. She put her hand on Miguel's shoulder as if to keep from falling over. Her hand rested there.

Antonio went quiet, as if all the liquor had just drained out of him. He went to the kitchen for a glass of water. From there he could hear Pilar and Miguel's high-spirited chatter, the playful clinking of glasses, hands drumming the table with hilarity. From the doorway he watched them.

A gray light fell over the apartment toward evening. Antonio took the far end of the couch and turned on the football game, but only stared at the set without really watching it. He had never learned the rules of the game, and the scurried movement of the players around the field only stirred his thoughts into greater disorder.

In the kitchen Pilar began putting away plates. From the dining table, Miguel was staring at her, his red eyes traveling up and down the course of her figure as she reached on tiptoes for the higher shelves. Antonio saw her look over her shoulder from the sink and smile at Miguel.

Miguel came over to the couch. “How's the game?” he said.

Antonio stood up and said he wasn't feeling well and went to lie down. He didn't get up again. He could feel himself slipping under the influence of another dark spell of jealousy, and knew better than to trust his own actions when he'd been drinking. Don't start tipping boats, he told himself, forget about it until morning.

Back at the yard on Monday, Antonio could not help noticing how Miguel kept looking at Pilar when he came into the office to check the schedule and drop off invoices. His gaze lingered over the curve of her frame as she talked on the phone or leaned into the open filing cabinet. How stupid Antonio had been to let this happen. Had he been so busy that he could not have seen it
coming? He was dense. How could he have forgotten that Miguel was the biggest abuser of women he had ever known?

Antonio began sticking close to Miguel around the yard, began giving him the pick-ups that were the farthest away and took the longest to get to. Anything that needed to be done in the office, Antonio did himself. He could no longer laugh at Miguel's antics. By the end of the day, Antonio was too brimming with self-disgust to face Pilar.

That night, exhausted from his own thoughts, he lay next to Pilar, desperately wanting to hold her again, to assure himself that she was still his. But it would be a mistake to touch her. Any hint of rejection would balloon in his mind into something he did not want to believe. Throughout the night, jealousy and loneliness alternated their visits to him, keeping him from sleep.

At work the next day, his temper finally flared when Miguel locked his keys in the GMC for the third time that week. “Goddamn you, you idiot, the amount of time we waste because of your stupid mistakes…” Acid rose in his throat, hot and bitter. He walked away without finishing his sentence.

For the rest of the day, he avoided Miguel at every turn. Every joke Miguel told seemed to have a double meaning. Every movement was an advance toward Pilar.

The next day, Miguel stood staring at him, with mouth slightly agape as Antonio rambled off his vague list of reasons for letting him go. Pilar had shown signs of a flu and Antonio had insisted she stay home for the day.

“I don't understand,” Miguel said. “The business is doing so well.”

“That was before we considered taxes,” Antonio mumbled. “Sometimes these things happen. I can only say that it's a decision made with the business in mind. I'll be happy to give you two-weeks pay.”

Miguel looked at him as though he were peering into a dark, deep closet. Antonio hated his idiotic expression, his sloppy, overgrown shrub of a mustache.

“I wish I could explain in more detail,” Antonio said.

“What have I done wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Now I've got some phone calls to make.” He shuffled some papers, but Miguel did not move. Finally, Antonio had to leave the office. He left Miguel standing there, staring blankly at the place where Antonio had been sitting.

When he got home that night, he did not have time to unhook his overalls before Pilar flew at him.

“How could you, Antonio? What were you thinking? Don't you know he has alimony payments to make?”

He started to give her the same excuses he had given Miguel, but her words tore through his, shredding them to nothing. “Didn't you think to talk to me about this? What in the world were you thinking, Antonio?”

“We don't need him,” he said.

“You can barely handle the customers you have.”

“We need to think about saving money.”

“We have plenty of money.”

“It's already done.” He tried to control his tone, but it was already slipping out of his control. Pilar blocked the doorway as he tried to leave the room.

“You're going to answer me. Tell me why you fired him. Something happened between the two of you. What was it?”

“It was a business decision.”

“It wasn't a business decision.”

“Why are you so upset?”

“He was our friend, Antonio.”

“He was a dirty-mouthed abuser of women.”

“He was with us from the beginning.”

“Then maybe you'd like to go to him.”

Why was it, he wondered, that words, when he most wanted them, were nowhere at hand. And why, when silence was his wisest option, did words fly recklessly from his lips with a life of their own?

“So that's it,” said Pilar calmly. “That's what this is all about. You got some stupid notion in your head about the two of us and you went and fired him. Well, I hope you're satisfied.”

“Can't I make a business decision without consulting you? It's
my
business, after all.”

She held him with a hard, colorless gaze. Then she went into the bedroom and slammed the door.

The next day she told him she was going back to Tijuana to stay with her parents. “Until I figure out what I want,” she said. She was in the bedroom packing her suitcases.

“You're not going anywhere,” Antonio said, but his words had no force. It was a half-uttered question, not a statement. “I'm not going to let you divorce me.”

“I didn't say I wanted a divorce.”

“What do you want?”

“I don't know. I want time to think.”

“Just because of this? Pilar, it's nothing we haven't been through before.”

She turned to him, stopping everything she was doing. “Yes, Antonio. And how many times should I be expected to go through it again?”

“Things were good between us again,” he said.

She shook her head sadly and laughed. “Where have you been, Antonio? Things haven't been good between us for a long time. We haven't slept together in months. The only thing we shared was working on the business—excuse me—
your
business.”

Before Pilar was to leave, Antonio went out of the house and started walking again. He did not want to be there when her friend Monica came to pick her up, did not trust his own actions. He walked because walking dispersed his thoughts enough to keep him sane from one moment to the next. He walked because he could think of nothing else to do. How had this happened, he thought. How could he have let it? He was losing her just when he was learning how to love her the way she wanted to be loved. He had been losing her for such a long time, the losing was out of his control, how could he have not seen it? He tried to get angry, if only to feel something different than this cold, spinning hollowness. But fear held him tight, the voice of it hovering close, spitting dark words in his ear. Now is the time to be afraid, it said. Later will be the time for regret.

He decided to go to the yard and work for the rest of the day, even though it was a weekend. It was the only place he could think to go, the only place he might be able to forget for a while. But when he opened up the office to get the keys to start up the crane, Pilar's lingering presence beared down on him.

The room smelled of the flowered air freshener she had brought in. Looking for the keys, he came across the neat stacks of billing statements that Pilar had been preparing on Friday. He sat down and paged through them, but didn't know what needed to be done. A different kind of fear swept over him, wrapped its arms around him. Not the pale, achy fear of losing love, but the sharp, pressing practical fear of losing all he had built. Pilar, the pillar. Pilar, his support. How had he let this happen? How had she become the linch-pin to everything that mattered to him?

He went out into the yard to work the crane. Here, for the last few months at least, he had had some happiness. But because it was Saturday, there was no noise coming from the steel forming company next door, no shouting from the construction site across the street. The silence was a canvas on which his mind could paint terrible pictures, write terrible words. To break the silence he turned on the generator and swung the Ohio magnet out over the scrap iron piles to move them into the containers. The loud crashing of steel against steel helped mash down the panic, broke up the fear.

Toward evening, the flat, gray winter light began slipping from the yard. Antonio climbed down from the crane and switched on the yard lights, flooding the yard in white, bringing up shadows in strange places. The electricity hummed, crackled. He went back to working the crane, the long arm of it sweeping back and forth from pile to container, container to pile. Long into the night the loud crashing went on, the crashing that obliterated thought, that obliterated the words that were going through his head, which was the language of love, which was the language more difficult to learn than any other.

Andrés Montoya

First Prize: Poetry

he is in love.

friday nights before work

he sees his woman.

they are not married

and she doesn't know

that he loves her.

he tells her

her hair is like water

and her skin smells of dew.

and she tells him

it'll still cost the eighty bucks

for the three hours

in the crusty motel

that smells of smoke.

he doesn't know her real name.

he thinks it is sofía.

one day she will tell him the truth,

that her name is alexandra,

that her family calls her alex,

and he will feel a little betrayed.

sometimes they smoke weed or crack,

sometimes they do lines of crank.

always, though, they lie naked

next to each other when they are finished,

sweaty and both feeling a little guilty.

they only do it once. he never asks for a second.

and they are content to listen to each other's breathing.

he likes the way she sounds so alive,