The Water Museum (10 page)

“You going to like this,” Arnie said. “It's a surprise.”

There was Big Poppa Popo, the old man himself. He was standing with his hands on his hips. With a tall American. Those dark gray lenses turned toward us. We parked. We got out.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Shut up,” said Arnie.

“Where's the rancho?” I asked.

The American burst out laughing.

“Jesus, kid!” he shouted. He turned to the old man. “He really is a dumb shit.”

The American walked away without introducing himself and got in a white SUV. He slammed the door and drove into the desert, back the way we had come. We stood there watching him go. I'm not going to lie—I was getting scared.

“You gonna marry Amapola?” the old man asked me.

“One day. Look, I don't know what you guys are doing here, but—”

He turned from me and gestured toward a helicopter sitting on the field.

“Look at that,” he said. “Huey. Old stuff, from your Vietnam. Now the Mexican air force use it to fight las drogas.” He turned to me. “You use las drogas?”

“No! Never.”

They laughed.

“Sure, sure,” the old man said.

“Ask Amapola!” I cried. “She'll tell you!”

“She already tell me everything,” he said.

Arnie put his arm around my shoulders.

“Come,” he said, and started walking toward the helicopter. I resisted for a moment, but the various Mexican soldiers standing around were suddenly really focused and not slouching and were walking along all around us.

“What is this?” I said.

“You know what I do?” the old man asked.

“Business?” I said. My mind was blanking out, I was so scared.

“Business.” He nodded. “Good answer.”

We came under the blades of the big helicopter. I'd never been near one in my life. It scared the crap out of me. The Mexican pilots looked out their side windows at me. The old man patted the side of the machine.

“President Bush!” he said. “DEA!”

I looked at Arnie. He smiled, nodded at me. “Fight the drogas,” he said.

The engines whined and chuffed and the rotor started to turn.

“Is very secret what we do,” said the old man. “But you take a ride and see. Is my special treat. You go with Arnulfo.”

“Come with me,” Arnie said.

“You go up and see, then we talk about love.”

The old man hurried away, and it was just me and Arnie and the soldiers with their black M16s.

“After you,” Arnie said.

He pulled on a helmet. Then we took off. It was rough as hell. I felt like I was being punched in the ass and lower back when the engines really kicked in. And when we rose, my guts dropped out through my feet. I closed my eyes and gripped the webbing Arnie had fastened around my waist. “Holy God!” I shouted. It was worse when we banked—the side doors were wide open, and I screamed like a girl, sure I was falling out. The Mexicans laughed and shook their heads, but I didn't care.

Arnie was standing in the door. He unhooked a big gun from where it had been strapped with its barrel pointed up. He dangled it in the door on cords. He leaned toward me and shouted, “Sixty caliber! Hung on double bungees!” He slammed a magazine into the thing and pulled levers and snapped snappers. He leaned down to me again and shouted, “Feel the vibration? You lay on the floor, it makes you come!”

I thought I heard him wrong.

We were beating out of the desert and into low hills. I could see our shadow below us, fluttering like a giant bug on the rises and over the bushes. The seat kicked up and we were rising.

Arnulfo took a pistol from his belt and pointed down.

“Amapola,” he said.

I looked around for her, stupidly. But then I saw what was below us, in a watered valley. Orange flowers. Amapola. Poppies.

“This is what we do,” Arnulfo said.

He raised his pistol and shot three rounds out the door and laughed. I put my hands over my ears.

“You're DEA?” I cried.

He popped off another round.

“Is competition,” he said. “We do business.”

Oh my God.

He fell against me and was shouting in my ear and there was nowhere I could go. “You want Amapola? You want to marry my sobrina? Just like that? Really? Pendejo.” He grabbed my shirt. “Can you fly, gringo? Can you fly?” I was shaking. I was trying to shrink away from him, but I could not. I was trapped in my seat. His breath stank, and his lips were at my ear like hers might have been and he was screaming, “Can you fly, chingado? Because you got a choice! You fly, or you do what we do.”

I kept shouting, “What? What?” It was like one of those dreams where nothing makes sense. “What?”

“You do what we do, I let you live, cabrón.”

“What?” I was screaming too.

“I let you live. Or you fly. Decide.”

“I don't want to die!” I yelled. I was close to wetting my pants. The Huey was nose-down and sweeping in a circle. I could see people below us, running. A few small huts. Horses or mules. A pickup started to speed out of the big poppy field. Arnulfo talked into his mike and the helicopter hove after it. He took up the .60 caliber and braced himself. I put my fingers in my ears. And he ripped a long stream of bullets out the door. It was the loudest thing I'd ever heard. Louder than the loudest thing you can imagine. So loud your insides jump, but it all becomes an endless rip of noise, like thunder is inside your bladder and your teeth hurt from gritting against it.

The truck just tattered, if metal can tatter. The roof of the cab blew apart and the smoking ruin of the truck spun away below us and vanished in dust and smoke and steam.

I was crying.

“Be a man!” Arnulfo yelled.

We were hovering. The crew members were all turned toward me, staring.

Arnie unsnapped my seat webbing.

“Choose,” he said.

“I want to live.”

“Choose.”

You know how it goes in the movies. How the hero kicks the bad guy out the door and sprays the Mexican crew with the .60 and survives a crash landing. But that's not real life. That doesn't even cross your mind. Not even close. No, you get up on terribly shaky legs, so shaky you might pitch out the open door all by yourself and discover that you cannot, in fact, fly. You say, “What do I do?” And the door gunner grabs you and shoves you up to the hot gun. The ground is wobbling far below you, and you can see the Indian workers down there. Six men and a woman. And they're running. You're praying and begging God to get you out of this somehow and you're thinking of your beautiful lover and you tell yourself you don't know how you got here and the door gunner comes up behind you now, he slams himself against your ass, and he says, “Hold it, lean into it. It's gonna kick, okay? Finger on the trigger. I got you.” And you brace the .60 and you try to close your eyes and you pray you miss them and you're saying
Amapola, Amapola
over and over in your mind, and the gunner is hard against you, he's erect and pressing it into your buttocks and he shouts, “For love!” and you squeeze the trigger.

W
hen I remember my village, I remember the color green. A green that is rich, perhaps too rich, and almost bubbling with humidity and the smell of mangos. I remember heat, the sweet sweat of young girls that collected on my upper lip as we kissed behind the dance stand in the town square. I remember days of nothing and rainstorms, dreaming of making love while walking around the plazuela, admiring Mr. Mendoza's portraits of the mayor and the police chief, and saying dashing things to the girls. They, of course, walked in the opposite direction, followed closely by their unsympathetic aunts, which was only decent. Looking back, I wonder if perhaps saying those dashing things was better than making love.

Mr. Mendoza wielded his paintbrush there for thirty years. I can still remember the old women muttering bad things about him on their way to market. This was nothing extraordinary. The old women muttered bad things about most of us at one time or another, especially when they were on their way to market at dawn, double file, dark shawls pulled tight around their faces, to buy pots of warm milk with the cows' hairs still floating in them. Not until later in the day, after their cups of coffee with a bit of this hairy milk (strained through an old cloth) and many spoonfuls of sugar, would they finally begin to concede the better points of the populace. Except for Mr. Mendoza.

Mr. Mendoza had taken the controversial position that he was the Graffiti King of All Mexico. But we didn't want a graffiti king.

My village is named El Rosario. Perhaps being named after a rosary was what gave us our sense of importance, a sense that we from Rosario were blessed among people, allowed certain dispensations. The name itself came from a Spanish monk—or was it a Spanish soldier—named Bonifacio Rojas, who broke his rosary. The beads cascaded over the ground. Kneeling to pick them up, he said a brief prayer asking the Good Lord to direct him to the beads. Like all good Catholics, he offered the Lord a deal: If you give me my beads back, I will give you a cathedral on the spot. The Good Lord sent down St. Elmo's fire, and directly beneath that, the beads. Bonifacio got a taste of the Lord's wit, however, when he found an endless river of silver directly beneath the beads. It happened in 1655, the third of August. A Saturday.

The church was built, obliterating the ruins of an Indian settlement, and Rosario became the center of Chametla province. For some reason, the monks who followed Bonifacio took to burying each other in the cathedral's thick adobe walls. Some mysterious element in our soil mummifies monks, and they stood in the walls for five hundred years. Now that the walls are crumbling, though, monks pop out with dry grins about once a year.

When I was young, there was a two-year lull in the gradual revelation of monks. We were certain that the hidden fathers had all been expelled from the walls. A thunderclap proved us wrong.

Our rainy season begins on the sixth of June, without fail. That year, however, the rain was a day late, and the resulting thunderclap that announced the storm was so explosive, windows cracked on our street. Burros on the outskirts burst open their stalls and charged through town throwing kicks right and left. People near the river swore their chickens laid square eggs. The immense frightfulness of this celestial apocalypse was blamed years afterward for gout, diarrhea, birthmarks, drunkenness, and those mysterious female aches nobody could define but everyone called
dolencias.
There was one other victim of the thunderclap—the remaining church tower split apart and dropped a fat slab of clay into the road. In the morning, my cousin Jaime and I were thrilled to find a mummified hand rising from the rubble, one saffron finger aimed at the sky.

“An evangelist,” I said.

“Even in death,” he said.

We moved around the pile to see the rest of him. We were startled to find a message painted on the monk's chest:

“Mr. Mendoza,” I said.

“He's everywhere,” Jaime said.

On the road that runs north from Escuinapa to my village, there is a sign that says:

Below that, in Mr. Mendoza's meticulous scrawl:

There is a very tall bridge at the edge of town that spans the Baluarte River. My cousin Jaime told me that once a young man sat on the railing trading friendly insults with his friends. His sweetheart was a gentle girl from a nice family. She was wearing a white blouse that day. She ran up to him to give him a hug, but instead she knocked him from his perch, and he fell, arms and legs thrown open to the wind. They had to hold her back, or she would have joined him. He called her name all the way down, like a lost love letter spinning in the wind. No one ever found the body. They say she left town and married. She had seven sons, and each one was named after her dead lover. Her husband left her. Near this fatal spot on the bridge, Mr. Mendoza suggested that we

Across town from the bridge, there is a gray whorehouse next to the cemetery. This allows the good citizens of the village to avoid the subjects of death and sex at the same time. On the wall facing the street, the message:

On the stone wall that grows out of the cobble street in front of the cemetery, a new announcement appeared:

What the hell did he mean by that? There was much debate in our bars over that one. Did Mr. Mendoza mean this literally, that he had never napped between the crumbling stones? Well, so what? Who would?

No, others argued. He meant it philosophically—that Mr. Mendoza was claiming he'd never die. This was most infuriating. Police Chief Reyes wanted to know, “Who does Mr. Mendoza think he is?”

Mr. Mendoza, skulking outside the door, called in, “I'll tell you! I'm Mendoza, that's who! But who—or what—are you!”

His feet could be heard trotting away in the dark.

Mr. Mendoza never wrote obscenities. He was far too moral for that. In fact, he had been known to graffito malefactors as though they were road signs. Once, Mr. Mendoza's epochal paintbrush fell on me.

It was in the summer, in the month of August, Bonifacio's month. August is hot in Rosario, so hot that snapping turtles have been cooked by sitting in shallow water. Their green flesh turns gray and peels away to float down the eternal Baluarte. I always intended to follow the Baluarte downstream, for it carried hundreds of interesting items during flood times, and I was certain that somewhere farther down there was a resting place for it all. The river seemed, at times, to be on a mad shopping spree, taking from the land anything it fancied. Mundane things such as trees, chickens, cows shot past regularly. But marvelous things floated there too: a green DeSoto with its lights on, a washing machine with a religious statue in it as though the saint were piloting a circular boat, a blond wig that looked like a giant squid, a mysterious star-shaped object barely visible under the surface.

The Baluarte held me in its sway. I swam in it, fished and caught turtles in it. I dreamed of the distant bend in the river where I could find all these floating things collected in neat stacks, and perhaps a galleon full of rubies, and perhaps a damp yet lovely fifteen-year-old girl in a red dress to rescue, and all of it speckled with little gray flecks of turtle skin.

Sadly for me, I found out that the river only led to swamps that oozed out to the sea. All those treasures were lost forever and I had to seek a new kind of magic from my river. Which is precisely where Mr. Mendoza found me, on the banks of the post-magical Baluarte, lying in the mud with Jaime, gazing through a stand of reeds at some new magic.

Girls. We had discovered girls. And a group of these recently discovered creatures was going from the preparatory school's sweltering rooms to the river for a bath. They had their spot, a shielded kink in the river that had a natural screen of trees and reeds and a sloping sandy bank. Jaime and I knew that we were about to make one of the greatest discoveries in recent history, and we'd be able to report to the men what we'd found out.

“Wait until they hear about this,” I whispered.

“It's a new world,” he replied.

We inserted ourselves in the reeds, ignoring the mud soaking our knees. We could barely contain our longing and emotion. When the girls began to strip off their uniforms, revealing slips, then bright white bras and big cotton underpants, I thought I would sob.

“I can't,” I said, “believe it.”

“History in the making,” he said.

The bras came off. They dove in.

“Before us is everything we've always wanted,” I said.

“Life itself,” he said.

“Oh you beautiful girls!” I whispered.

“Oh you girls of my dreams!” said he, and Mr. Mendoza's claws sank into our shoulders.

We were dragged a hundred meters upriver, all the while being berated without mercy. “Tartars!” he shouted. “Peeping Toms! Flesh chasers! Disrespecters of privacy!”

I would have laughed if I had not seen Mr. Mendoza's awful paintbrush standing in a freshly opened can of black paint.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“We're finished,” said Jaime.

Mr. Mendoza threw me down and sat on me. The man was skinny. He was bony, yet I could not buck him off. I bounced like one of those thunderstruck burros, and he rode me with aplomb.

He attacked Jaime's face, painting:

He then peeled off Jaime's shirt and adorned his chest with:

He then yanked off Jaime's pants and decorated his rump with:

I was next.

On my face:

On my chest:

On my rump:

I suddenly realized that the girls from the river had quickly dressed themselves and were giggling at me as I jumped around naked. It was unfair! Then, to make matters worse, Mr. Mendoza proceeded to chase us through town while people laughed at us and called out embarrassing weights and measures.

We plotted our revenge for two weeks, then forgot about it. In fact, Jaime's
I LIVE FOR SEX
made him somewhat of a celebrity, that phrase being very macho. He was often known after that day as “El Sexi.” In fact, years later, he would marry one of the very girls we had been spying on.

There was only one satisfaction for me in the whole sad affair: the utter disappearance of the street of my naked humiliation.

Years after Bonifacio built his church in Rosario, and after he had died and was safely tucked away in the church walls (until 1958, when he fell out on my uncle Jorge), the mines got established as a going concern. Each vein of silver seemed to lead to another. The whole area was a network of ore-bearing arteries.

Tunnels were dug and forgotten as each vein played out and forked off. Often, miners would break through a wall of rock only to find themselves in an abandoned mineshaft going in the other direction. Sometimes they'd find skeletons. Once they swore they'd encountered a giant spider that caught bats in its vast web. Many of these mine shafts filled with seepage from the river, forming underground lagoons that had fat white frogs in them and an albino alligator that floated in the dark water waiting for helpless miners to stumble and fall in.

Some of these tunnels snaked under the village. At times, with a
whump,
sections of Rosario vanished. Happily, I watched the street Mr. Mendoza had chased me down drop from sight after a quick shudder. A store and six houses dropped as one. I was particularly glad to see Antonia Barrego vanish with a startled look while sitting on her porch yelling insults at me. Her voice rose to a horrified screech that echoed loudly underground as she went down. When she was finally pulled out (by block and tackle, the sow), she was all wrinkled from the smelly water, and her hair was alive with squirming white pollywogs.

After the street vanished, my view of El Yauco was clear and unobstructed. El Yauco is the mountain that stands across the Baluarte from Rosario. The top of it looks like the profile of John F. Kennedy in repose. The only flaw in this geographic wonder is that the nose is upside down.

Once, when Jaime and I had painfully struggled to the summit to investigate the nose, we found this message:

Nothing, though, could prepare us for the furor over his next series of messages. It began with a piglet running through town one Sunday. On its flanks, in perfect cursive script:

On a fence:

On my father's car:

Rumors flew. For some reason, the arguments were fierce, impassioned, and there were any number of fistfights over Mr. Mendoza's latest. Was he going to kill himself? Was he dying? Was he to be abducted by flying saucers or carried aloft by angels? The people who were convinced the old
MENDOZA NEVER SLEPT HERE
was a strictly philosophical text were convinced he was indeed going to commit suicide. There was a secret that showed in their faces—they were actually hoping he'd kill himself, just to maintain the status quo, just to ensure that everyone died.

Rumors about Mendoza's health washed through town: cancer, madness (well, we all knew that), demonic possession, the evil eye, a black magic curse that included love potions and slow-acting poisons, and the dreaded syphilis. Some of the local smart alecks called the whorehouse “Heaven,” but Mr. Mendoza was far too moral to even go in there, much less advertise it all over town.