Woman Hollering Creek (21 page)

There was a man and there was a woman. Every payday, every other Friday, the man went to the Friendly Spot Bar to drink and spend his money. Every payday, every other Friday, the woman went to the Friendly Spot Bar to drink and spend her money. The man was paid on the second and fourth Friday of the month. The woman was paid on the first and third Friday. Because of this the man and the woman did not know each other.

The man drank and drank with his friends and believed if he drank and drank, the words for what he was feeling would slip out more readily, but usually he simply drank and said nothing. The woman drank and drank with her friends and believed if she drank and drank, the words for what she was feeling would slip out more readily, but usually she simply drank and said nothing. Every other Friday the man drank his beer and laughed loudly. Every Friday in between the woman drank her beer and laughed loudly.

At home when the night came down and the moon appeared, the woman raised her pale eyes to the moon and cried. The man in his bed contemplated the same moon, and thought about the millions
who had looked at the moon before him, those who had worshiped or loved or died before that same moon, mute and lovely. Now blue light streamed inside his window and tangled itself with the glow of the sheets. The moon, the same round
O
. The man looked and swallowed.

Tin Tan Tan
 

L
ittle thorn in my soul, pebble in my shoe, jewel of my life, the passionate doll who has torn my heart in two, tell me, cruel beauty that I adore, why you torment me. I have the misfortune of being both poor and without your affection. When the hope of your caresses flowered in my soul, happiness blossomed in my tomorrows. But now that you have yanked my golden dreams from me, I shiver from this chalice of pain like a tender white flower tossed in rain. Return my life to me, and end this absurd pain. If not, Rogelio Velasco will have loved in vain.

U
ntil death do us part, said your eyes, but not your heart. All, all illusion. A caprice of your flirtatious woman’s soul. I confess I am
lost between anguish and forgetting. And now if I dissolve my tears in dissipation, know, my queen, only you are to blame. My fragile heart will never be the same.

P
rovidence knew what was in store, the day I arrived innocently at your door. Dressed in my uniform and carrying the tools of my trade, without knowing destiny waited for me, I knocked. You opened your arms, my heaven, but kept your precious heart locked.

I
f God wills it, perhaps these words of sentiment will convince you. Perhaps I can exterminate the pests of doubt that infest your house. Perhaps the pure love I had to offer wasn’t enough, and another now is savoring your honeyed nectar. But none will love you so honorably and true as the way Rogelio Velasco loved you.

T
hey say of the poet and madman we all have a little. Even my life I would give for your exquisite treasures. But poor me. Though others may lure you with jewels and riches, all I can offer is this humble measure.

A
lone, all alone in the world, sad and small like a nightingale serenading the infinite. How could a love so tender and sweet become the cross of my pain? No, no, I can’t conceive I won’t receive your precious lips again. My eyes are tired of weeping, my heart of beating. If perhaps some crystal moment before dawn or twilight you remember me, bring only a bouquet of tears to lay upon my thirsty grave.

Tan TAN

Bien
Pretty
 

He wasn’t pretty unless you were in love with him. Then any time you met anyone with those same monkey eyes, that burnt-sugar skin, the face wider than it was long, well, you were in for it.

His family came from Michoacán. All
chaparritos
, every one of them—short even by Mexican standards—but to me he was perfect.

I’m to blame. Flavio Munguía was just ordinary Flavio until he met me. I filled up his head with a million and one
cariñitos
. Then he was ruined forever. Walked different. Looked people in the eye when he talked. Ran his eyes across every pair of
nalgas
and
chichis
he saw. I am sorry.

Once you tell a man he’s pretty, there’s no taking it back. They think they’re pretty all the time, and I suppose, in a way, they are. It’s got to do with believing it. Just the way I used to believe I was pretty. Before Flavio Munguía wore all my prettiness away.

Don’t think I haven’t noticed my girlfriends back home who got the good-lookers. They all look twice their age now, old from all the
corajes
exploding inside their hearts and bellies.

Because a pretty man is like a too-fancy car or a real good stereo or a microwave oven. Late or early, sooner or later, you’re just asking for it. Know what I mean?

Flavio. He wrote poems and signed them “Rogelio Velasco.” And maybe I would still be in love with him if he wasn’t already married to two women, one in Tampico and the other in Matamoros. Well, that’s what they say.

Who knows why the universe singled me out. Lupe Arredondo, stupid art thou amongst all women. Once I was as solid as a sailor on her sea legs, the days rolling steadily beneath me, and then—Flavio Munguía arrived.

Flavio entered my life via a pink circular rolled into a tube and wedged in the front gate curlicue:

A dead cockroach lying on its back followed as illustration.

It’s because of the river and the palm and pecan trees and the
humidity and all that we have so many palmetto bugs, roaches so big they look Pleistocene. I’d never seen anything like them before. We don’t have bugs like that in California, at least not in the Bay. But like they say, everything’s bigger and better in Texas, and that holds especially true for bugs.

So I live near the river in one of those houses with wood floors varnished the color of Coca-Cola. It isn’t mine. It belongs to Irasema Izaura Coronado, a famous Texas poet who carries herself as if she is directly descended from Ixtaccíhuatl or something. Her husband is an honest-to-God Huichol
curandero
, and she’s no slouch either, with a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne.

A Fulbright whisked them to Nayarit for a year, and that’s how I got to live here in the turquoise house on East Guenther, not exactly in the heart of the historic King William district—it’s on the wrong side of South Alamo to qualify, the side where the peasantry lives—but close enough to the royal mansions that attract every hour on the hour the Pepto Bismol–pink tourist buses wearing sombreros.

I called La Cucaracha Apachurrada Pest Control the first month I house-sat Her Highness’s home. I was sharing residence with:

Beneath this veneer of Southwest funk, of lace and silk and porcelain, beyond the embroidered pillows that said
DUERME
,
MI AMOR
, the Egyptian cotton sheets and eyelet bedspread, the sigh of air that barely set the gauze bedroom curtains trembling, the blue garden, the pink hydrangea, the gilt-edged tea set, the abalone-handled silver, the obsidian hair combs, the sticky, cough-medicine-and-powdered-sugar scent of magnolia blossoms, there were, as well, the roaches.

I was afraid to open drawers. I never went into the kitchen after dark. They were the same Coca-Cola color as the floors, hard to spot unless they gave themselves away in panic.

The worst thing about them wasn’t their size, nor the crunch they gave under a shoe, nor the yellow grease that oozed from their guts, nor the thin shells they shed translucent as popcorn hulls, nor the possibility they might be winged and fly into your hair, no.

What made them unbearable was this. The scuttling in the middle of the night. An ugly clubfoot grate like a dead thing being dragged across the floor, a louder-than-life munching during their cannibal rites, a nervous pitter, and then patter when they scurried across the Irish-linen table runners, leaving a trail of black droppings like coffee grounds, sticky feet rustling across the clean stack
of typewriter paper in the desk drawer, my primed canvasses, the set of Wedgewood rose teacups, the lace Victorian wedding dress hanging on the bedroom wall, the dried baby’s breath, the white wicker vanity, the cutwork pillowcases, your blue raven hair scented with Tres Flores brilliantine.

Flavio, it’s true. The house charms me now as it did then. The folk art, the tangerine-colored walls, the
urracas
at sunset. But what would you have done if you were me? I’d driven all the way from northern California to central Texas with my past pared down to what could fit inside a van. A futon. A stainless-steel wok. My grandmother’s
molcajete
. A pair of flamenco shoes with crooked heels. Eleven
huipiles
. Two
rebozos—de bolita y de seda
. My Tae Kwon Do uniform. My crystals and copal. A portable boom box and all my Latin tapes—Rubén Blades, Astor Piazzolla, Gipsy Kings, Inti Illimani, Violeta Parra, Mercedes Sosa, Agustín Lara, Trio Los Panchos, Pedro Infante, Lydia Mendoza, Paco de Lucía, Lola Beltrán, Silvio Rodríguez, Celia Cruz, Juan Peña “El Lebrijano,” Los Lobos, Lucha Villa, Dr. Loco and his Original Corrido Boogie Band.

Sure, I knew I was heading for trouble the day I agreed to come to Texas. But not even the
I Ching
warned me what I was in for when Flavio Munguía drove up in the pest-control van.