A Manual for Cleaning Women (22 page)

*   *   *

I sat between Evers and Bella Lynn in the big black Lincoln. The windows rolled up and down when he pushed a button, even the back ones. There was a cigarette lighter, and he would brush my leg as he pushed it in, and my breasts again as he reached across to light her Pell Mells.

We pulled up in the driveway.

“How about a good-night kiss, Little Lou?” he asked. Bella Lynn laughed. “Why, she’s not even sweet sixteen.” While she was getting out he bit my neck.

Bella Lynn went in with me to get her wrap and her atomizer of Tabu.

“See what I told you, Lou, about Sex Appeal? Easy as pie!” I went in to listen to
Inner Sanctum
with Uncle Tyler and Aunt Tiny. They were pleased as punch that Bella Lynn was going out with the ex-husband of the most beautiful movie star in the world.

“How did she ever manage that?” Uncle Tyler wondered.

“Why, Tyler … you know our Bella Lynn is the prettiest thing west of the Mississippi!”

“No. It was Sex Appeal,” I told them.

They glared at me.

“Child, don’t you
ever
let me hear you use that word again!” Aunt Tiny said, real mean. She looked just like Mildred Pierce.

Teenage Punk

In the sixties, Jesse used to come over to see Ben. They were young kids then, long hair, strobe lights, weed and acid. Jesse had already dropped out of school, already had a probation officer. The Rolling Stones came to New Mexico. The Doors. Ben and Jesse had wept when Jimi Hendrix died, when Janis Joplin died. That was another year for weather. Snow. Frozen pipes. Everybody cried that year.

We lived in an old farmhouse, down by the river. Marty and I had just divorced, I was in my first year of teaching, my first job. The house was hard to take care of alone. Leaky roof, burned-out pump, but it was big, a beautiful house.

Ben and Jesse played music loud, burned violet incense that smelled of cat pee. My other sons Keith and Nathan couldn’t stand Jesse—hippie burnout—but Joel, the baby, adored him, his boots, his guitar, his pellet gun. Beer-can practice in the backyard. Ping.

It was March and cold for sure. The next morning the cranes would be at the clear ditch at dawn. I had learned about them from the new pediatrician. He’s a good doctor, and single, but I still miss old Dr. Bass. When Ben was a baby I called him to ask how many diapers I should wash at a time. One, he told me.

None of the kids had wanted to go. I dressed, shivering. Built a piñon fire, poured coffee into a thermos. Fixed batter for pancakes, fed the dogs and cats and Rosie the goat. Did we have a horse then? If so, I forgot to feed him. Jesse came up behind me in the dark, at the barbed wire by the frost-white road.

“I want to see the cranes.”

I gave him the flashlight, think I gave him the thermos too. He shined the light everywhere but the road and I kept bugging him about it. Come on. Cut it out.

“You can see. You’re walking along. You obviously know the road.”

True. The dizzy arcs of light swept into birds’ nests in pale winter cottonwoods, pumpkins in Gus’s field, prehistoric silhouettes of his Brahmin bulls. Their agate eyes opened to reflect a pinpoint of dazzle, closed again.

We crossed the log above the slow dark irrigation ditch, over to the clear ditch where we lay on our stomachs, silent as guerrillas. I know, I romanticize everything. It is true though that we lay there freezing for a long time in the fog. It wasn’t fog. Must have been mist from the ditch or maybe just the steam from our mouths.

After a long time the cranes did come. Hundreds, just as the sky turned blue-gray. They landed in slow motion on brittle legs. Washing, preening on the bank. Everything was suddenly black and white and gray, a movie after the credits, churning.

As the cranes drank upstream the silver water beneath them was shot into dozens of thin streamers. Then very quickly the birds left, in whiteness, with the sound of shuffling cards.

We lay there, drinking coffee, until it was light and the crows came. Gawky raucous crows, defying the cranes’ grace. Their blackness zigzagged in the water, cottonwood branches bounced like trampolines. You could feel the sun.

It was light on the road back but he left the flashlight on. Turn it off, will you? He ignored me so I took it from him. We walked in his long strides in the tractor tracks.

“Fuck,” he said. “That was scary.”

“Really. As terrible as an army with banners. That’s from the Bible.”

“Oh yeah, teacher?” He already had an attitude, then.

Step

The West Oakland detox used to be a warehouse. It is dark inside and echoes like an underground parking lot. Bedrooms, a kitchen, and the office open off a vast room. In the middle of the room is a pool table and the TV pit. They call it the pit because the walls around it are only five feet high, so the counselors can look down into it.

Most of the residents were in the pit, in blue pajamas, watching
Leave It to Beaver
. Bobo held a cup of tea for Carlotta to drink. The other men were laughing about her running around the train yard, trying to go under the engine. The Amtrak from L.A. had stopped. Carlotta laughed too. All of them running around in pajamas. Not that she didn’t care about what she had done. She didn’t remember, didn’t own the deed at all.

Milton, a counselor, came to the rim of the pit.

“When’s the fight?”

“Two hours.” Benitez and Sugar Ray Leonard for the welterweight title.

“Sugar Ray will take it, easy.” Milton grinned at Carlotta and the men made comments, jokes. She knew most of the men from other times here, from detoxes in Hayward, Richmond, San Francisco. Bobo she knew from Highland psych ward too.

All twenty of the residents were in the pit now, with pillows and blankets, huddled together like preschool kids at nap time, Henry Moore drawings of people in bomb shelters. On the TV Orson Welles said, “We will sell no wine before its time.” Bobo laughed, “It’s time, brother, it’s time!”

“Stop your shakin’, woman, messes the TV.”

A man with dreadlocks sat down beside Carlotta, put his hand inside her thigh. Bobo grabbed the man’s wrist. “Move it or I’ll break it.” Old Sam came in wrapped in a blanket. There was no heat and it was bitterly cold.

“Sit there on her feets. You can hold them still.”

Cheaper by the Dozen
was almost over. Clifton Webb died and Myrna Loy went to college. Willie said he had liked it in Europe because white people were ugly there. Carlotta didn’t know what he meant, then realized that the only people solitary drunks ever see are on television. At three in the morning she would wait to see Jack the Ripper for Used Datsuns. Slashin’ them prices. Jest a hackin’ and a hewin’.

The television was the only light in the detox. It was as if the pit were their own smoky ring, with the boxing ring inside it in color. The announcer’s voice was shrill. Tonight’s purse is one million dollars! All the men had their money on Sugar Ray, would have had. Bobo told Carlotta some of the men there weren’t even alcoholics, had just faked needing detox so they could watch the fight.

Carlotta was for Benitez. You likes them pretty boys, Mama? Benitez was pretty, with fine bones, a dapper mustache. He weighed 144 pounds, had won his first championship at seventeen. Sugar Ray Leonard was scarcely heavier but he seemed to tower, not moving. The men met in the center of the ring. There was no sound. The crowd on TV, the residents in the pit held their breath as the boxers faced each other, circling, sinuous, their eyes locked.

In the third round Leonard’s quick hook knocked Benitez to the ground. He was up in a second, with a childlike smile. Embarrassed. I didn’t mean for that to happen to me. At that moment the men in the pit began to want him to win.

No one moved, not even during the commercials. Sam rolled cigarettes all through the fight, passed them. Milton came up to the ledge of the pit during the sixth round, just as Benitez took a blow to the forehead, his only mark in the fight. Milton saw the blood reflected in everyone’s eyes, in their sweat.

“Figures … you’d all be backing a loser,” he said.

“Quiet! Round eight.”

“Come on, baby, don’t you go down.”

They weren’t asking Benitez to win, just to stay in the fight. He did, he stayed in. He retreated in the ninth behind a jab, then a left hook drove him into the ropes and a right knocked out his mouthpiece.

Round ten, round eleven, round twelve, round thirteen, round fourteen. He stayed in. No one in the pit spoke. Sam had fallen asleep.

The bell rang for the last round. The arena was so quiet you could hear Sugar Ray Leonard whisper. “Oh, my God. He is still standing.”

But Benitez’s right knee touched the canvas. Briefly, like a Catholic leaving a pew. The slightest deference that meant the fight was over; he had lost. Carlotta whispered,

“God, please help me.”

Strays

Got into Albuquerque from Baton Rouge. It was about two in the morning. Whipping wind. That’s what the wind does in Albuquerque. I hung out at the Greyhound station until a cabdriver showed up who had so many prison tattoos I figured I could score and he’d tell me where to stay. He turned me on, took me to a pad, a
noria
they call it there, in the south valley. I lucked out meeting him, Noodles. I couldn’t have picked a worse place to run to than Albuquerque. Chicanos control the town.
Mayates
, they can’t score at all, are lucky not to be killed. Some white guys, with enough long joint time to have been tested. White women, forget it, they don’t last. Only way, and Noodles helped me there too, was to get hooked up with a big connection, like I did with Nacho. Then nobody could hurt me. What a pitiful thing I just said. Nacho was a saint, which may seem hard to believe. He did a lot for Brown Berets, for the whole Chicano community, young people, old people. I don’t know where he is now. He skipped bail. I mean a huge bail. He shot a narc, Marquez, five times, in the back. The jury didn’t think he was a saint, but Robin Hood maybe, because they only gave him manslaughter. I wish I knew where he was. I got busted about the same time, for needle marks.

All this happened many years ago or I couldn’t even be talking about it. In those days you could end up with five or ten years for just a roach or marks.

It was when the first methadone rehabilitation programs were starting. I got sent to one of the pilot projects. Six months at La Vida instead of years in “
la pinta
,” the state prison in Santa Fe. Twenty other addicts got the same deal. We all arrived in an old yellow school bus at La Vida. A pack of wild dogs met the bus, snarling and baying at us until finally they loped off into the dust.

La Vida was thirty miles out of Albuquerque. In the desert. Nothing around, not a tree, not a bush. Route 66 was too far to walk to. La Vida had been a radar site, a military installation during World War II. It had been abandoned since then. I mean abandoned. We were going to restore it.

We stood around in the wind, in the glare of the sun. Just the gigantic radar disc towering over the whole place, the only shade. Fallen-down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pinups peeled off the walls. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.

A lot of things were going to contribute to our rehabilitation. Number one was removing us from the street environment. Every time a counselor said that we laughed ourselves silly. We couldn’t see any roads, much less streets, and the streets in the compound were buried in sand. There were tables in the dining rooms and cots in the barracks but they were buried too. Toilets clogged with dead animals and more sand.

You could only hear the wind and the pack of dogs that kept circling. Sometimes it was nice, the silence, except the radar discs kept turning with a whining petty keening, day and night, day and night. At first it freaked us out, but after a while it grew comforting, like wind chimes. They said it had been used to intercept Japanese kamikaze pilots, but they said a lot of pretty weird things.

Of course, the major part of our rehab was going to be honest work. The satisfaction of a job well done. Learning to interact. Teamwork. This teamwork started when we lined up for our methadone at six every morning. After breakfast we worked until lunchtime. Group from two until five, more group from seven to ten.

The purpose of these groups was to break us down. Our main problems were anger, arrogance, defiance. We lied and cheated and stole. There were daily “haircuts” where groups screamed at one person all his faults and weaknesses.

We were beaten down until we finally cried uncle. Who the fuck was uncle? See, I’m still angry, arrogant. I was ten minutes late to group and they shaved my eyebrows and cut my eyelashes.

The groups dealt with anger. All day long we dropped slips in a slip box saying who we were angry at and then in group we dealt with it. Mostly we just shouted what losers and fuckups everyone else was. But see, we all did lie and cheat. Half the time none of us was even mad, just shucking and jiving up some anger to play the group game, to stay at La Vida and not go to jail. Most of the slips were at Bobby, the cook, for feeding those wild dogs. Or things like Grenas doesn’t weed enough, he just smokes and pushes tumbleweeds around with a rake.

We were mad at those dogs. Lines of us at six a.m. and at one and six outside the dining room. Whipping sand wind. We’d be tired and hungry. Freezing in the morning and hot in the afternoon. Bobby would wait, finally stroll across his floor like a smug bank official to unlock the door for us. And while we waited, a few feet away, at the kitchen door, the dogs would be waiting too, for him to throw them slops. Mangy, motley, ugly dogs people had abandoned out on the mesa. The dogs liked Bobby all right but they hated us, baring their teeth and snarling, day after day, meal after meal.

I got moved from the laundry to the kitchen. Helping cook, dishwashing and mopping up. I felt better about Bobby after a while. I even felt better about the dogs. He named them all. Dumb names. Duke, Spot, Blackie, Gimp, Shorty. And Liza, his favorite. An old yellow cur, flat-headed, with huge batlike ears and amber-yellow eyes. After a few months she’d even eat out of his hand. “Sunshine! Liza, my yellow-eyed sun,” he used to croon to her. Finally she let him scratch behind her ugly ears and just above the long ratty tail that hung down between her legs. “My sweet sweet sunshine,” he’d say.