Amigoland (7 page)

“My grandfather came here sometime around eighteen fifty.”

“Only yesterday, eh?” The man laughed to himself.

“He used to tell us a funny story about how he was kidnapped by the Indians and brought here, over to this side.”

“One of my uncles used to tell stories like that,” his neighbor said. “But you know how people like to talk, share stories
about their families. One never knows whether to believe them, if they’re not just stories made up to pass the time.”

“It always seemed made up to me, but my grandfather liked to say it was true about the Indians.”

“And now all your family is from over here?”

“From here, only that my daughters and my son moved away a long time ago.”

“But you must have some other people that live close by?”

For a second he considered mentioning his one remaining brother, but they hadn’t spoken in years. “I used to,” he said finally.
“One of my daughters lives in Chicago and I have two more in San Antonio, and my son is close to Dallas, all with their own
families.”

“And they came to visit you here?”

“I didn’t want to bother them — the doctor said he would let me go home soon, maybe tomorrow.”

Salinas cleared his throat as if he were looking for something to say or maybe just the best way to say it.

“When they were bringing me in this afternoon, I saw a young lady leaving the room.”

“That was a friend of mine,” Don Celestino responded, hoping he wouldn’t have to say much more.

“My wife would never let me have a friend like that,” he said, and shook his head.

“For now that’s all she is.”

“And someday,” Salinas said, “you think she might be more than your friend?”

“There are some people who would think she was too young for a man like me.”

“She looks young, but not too young. The better question is not whether she’s too young, but more whether you are too old.”

Don Celestino gazed at the silhouette across the partitioning curtain. “That sounds like the same problem.”

“Not really. If she’s too young, it means she is not mature enough and ready to give herself to you. But if you’re too old,
it means you have nothing left to give her in return.”

“And if we’re not living together, how am I supposed to know if I still have enough to give her?”

His neighbor sat up a little more, tucking the pillow behind him. “Are you asking me how you find out if it will last, but
without taking any risk?”

“Something like that.”

Salinas laughed to himself again. “Then what you really want to know is how to fry an egg when it is still inside the shell.”

When Don Celestino didn’t answer, the man continued.

“There’s nothing strange about wanting to avoid the risk,” Salinas said. “It only means you are human.”

They quieted when a young nurse walked into the room. She smiled at Salinas and then pressed a series of buttons on his monitor;
afterward she walked over and did the same to the machine near Don Celestino’s bed. He lay silently as the woman did her work.
On the other side of the curtain, Salinas readjusted his bed to the horizontal position and a short while later fell asleep.

Don Celestino stared out his window for some time after the nurse had left. He wondered if he shouldn’t have told the man
more about his time with Socorro. Why should he be afraid to tell people? At least here he had a person who was willing to
listen to him. Maybe Salinas would understand. Don Celestino had his children to consider, not that they were going to tell
him how to live his life, but still he wanted their feelings for him not to be strained because he had found another woman,
and a much younger one at that. And this wasn’t taking into account how soon it had all happened. Their mother in the ground
only a few months and here he was with another woman in their same bed. And yet this other woman was the one who had come
to visit him and the only one who would have known if anything more serious had happened to him. He wondered if he shouldn’t
have let someone else know about his condition. It reminded him again of his brother, not that he and Fidencio had ever been
so close, especially with how disagreeable the old man could be. A few months ago he’d heard that he was living in a nursing
home. It had been more than ten years since they had talked, though, and as things turned out, this was probably for the best.

The traffic lights flashed red against the condensation that had gathered on the windowpane. No one else knew about him, that
was the point, no one except someone who he probably shouldn’t be thinking about so much. Maybe there was a reason that he
had gotten sick, to remind him that he was old and she was not. He could have gotten sick any other day of the week, but it
had happened the morning she would be at his house to witness them taking him away in the ambulance — half dressed and with
his hair a mess — to see with her own eyes that he was old and she was not. To prove to her, and to him, that they had no
business together, a young one with such an old one.

He had lived a complete life, and somehow that life and the world he had lived in seemed so distant. There was a time when
the boulevard just outside his window used to be a dirt road. People rode into Brownsville, some still in their wagons, and
shopped at the Jimmy Pace Store. And even later there was Don José, who sold fresh bread from the back of his horse and buggy.
This is the world he had come from. Now the four-lane thoroughfare was lined with businesses he had never stepped into: large
grocery stores, gas stations, nightclubs, car lots, motels, restaurants, drive-through hamburger places, video stores, immigration
offices. What not so long ago had been a gentleman’s club now announced on its marquee that Saturday was
APOLLO MALE DANCER NIGHT.
Never did he imagine seeing so many changes in his little town. His grandfather coming from a ranchito in Mexico couldn’t
have experienced such a difference in his lifetime. What could there have been before a dirt road and one or two stores? How
different could it really have been for him? He probably never so much as entered a hospital. Don Celestino could remember
being five or six years old and the family gathering the evening when he passed away at the house. There must have been some
connection, however tenuous, between the world he had arrived in and the one he saw before finally passing away. Lying there
in the hospital bed, Don Celestino found it hard not to feel as if he were cut off from all that had come before him and,
in some ways, all that still remained of his life.

S
ocorro stopped just as she reached the halfway mark on the bridge. After rifling through her purse, she uncovered the tollbooth
receipt and read the day to make sure it said jueves, her usual day to clean his house. She was putting away the slip of paper
when she noticed something move out from under the opposite side of the bridge. A Border Patrol agent in a green-and-white
jeep cruised along the bank of the river and stopped alongside another agent in a jeep headed in the opposite direction. The
two men rolled down their windows and talked in their idling vehicles. After a while one of them handed the other a cigarette,
then a lighter. Farther down the levee an old negro, wearing camouflage fatigues but no shirt, pushed a loaded shopping cart.
The basket leaned to the right with all the crushed aluminum cans and piled blankets and pillows and empty milk jugs that
dangled from that side. The negro used a crutch to help him with his bad leg, but the cart’s wheels kept getting stuck in
the soft dirt and he had to jiggle the entire frame back and forth, side to side, until he freed it.

She stayed gazing down at the water through the chain-link fence. The current eddied in a couple of places, then continued
forward, indifferent to people on the bank or the bridge that stood in its way. The sun reflected off the river in a way that
made the water appear to be not quite as green and putrid as she remembered it.

A gust of cold air washed over her as soon as she opened the glass door. A dozen or more men and women waited in the two lines.
An older female officer stood behind a computer station, scanning each card. She had dark pockmarked skin and grayish hair
cropped as short as the male officers’. The men and women in line looked forward, some with their heads bent and their eyes
cast at the floor, as if awaiting Communion. The first woman in line wore a pink blouse, a gray cardigan frayed along the
bottom, a plain black skirt, and black cushioned shoes. She carried a plastic woven bag that held her purse and her work apron,
which was tucked away to one side. How long do you plan to stay? the female officer asked. Just for the day, to shop, she
answered. The officer waved her on and motioned for the next person, a young woman holding an infant with tiny studded earrings,
to step forward. The officer asked if the child was hers. The woman said yes, that she didn’t have anywhere to leave her while
she did her shopping. But the baby was born on this side, the mother assured her. From her purse she pulled out a plastic
sandwich bag that held the folded birth certificate. The officer looked at the document, then at the mother, then over at
the baby, as if the child might be able to corroborate the story. The officer halfway smiled and gestured for the mother and
child to continue on. By the time Socorro reached the station, a new group of women had lined up behind her. The male officer
only glanced at her card before motioning for her to continue on her way, even adding, “Tenga buen día.”

She felt a stitch of worry when she walked outside and didn’t see his car. They had kept Don Celestino in the hospital a few
extra days to run their tests, and this would be her first time to see him since then. She calmed herself a few minutes later
when he pulled up, then rushed around the car to open the door for her. For a second there on the curb she had thought he
might kiss her on the cheek, as she had done in front of the nurse, but it was something that would maybe happen only once.

“But you feel all right?” she asked when they were back on the main boulevard.

“Yes, yes, one of my girls called as I was leaving the house. I shouldn’t have answered it, that was the problem. She likes
to talk. This was the youngest one, Sonia.”

“She must be worried about you.”

“Even when I told her all the results came out fine,” Don Celestino said, craning his neck to get a better look at the exchange
rate outside one of the casas de cambio. “You see why I didn’t want to tell them? And now she wants to check on me every morning.
Finally I told her that I had to go, that someone was waiting for me.”

“Someone.”

“Eh?” An 18-wheeler had pulled alongside them.

“Someone?” she repeated a little louder.

“She knows that you come do the cleaning on Thursdays.”

“Then you told her my name?”

“Maybe when you first started. I can’t remember now, after all this time, five or six months. But they know you used to clean
the house for my neighbor and that was how you came to clean here at my house.”

“Seven,” she clarified, after they had passed the 18-wheeler.

“Okay then, seven months, so you can see it has been a long time.”

“But already more than two months since the time we got together.”

He neither acknowledged nor denied her last statement and instead let it linger along with the gas fumes that had seeped in
through the crack in the window.

They had been sitting in the car at least five minutes, maybe ten. He wanted to glance over at the console, but she might
ask if he was in a hurry. Fiberglass siding covered the walls on either side of the carport, starting about waist high and
leaving some space for a man to walk under, if he wanted to get out that way. Parked inside the carport, he could easily make
out the ceiling through the exposed rafters. The carpenters had used longer nails on the roof than necessary, and now hundreds
of rusty tips pricked through the ceiling and formed what looked like a bed of nails.

“I told my mother,” she said finally.

“All of it?”

“Enough, what she needed to know — how we met and how long ago, about your business, how you are, the things you say. She
was only going to protest if I told her more.”

“Then you can imagine how it would be with these girls.”

“Girls.”

“To me they will always be my girls, no matter the age.”

“I even told my brother Marcos when he called,” Socorro said. “And now he wants to meet you when he can come to visit.”

“If we still talked, I could go tell my brother.”

He glanced at the side mirror and spotted his neighbor Mrs. Harwell across the street behind her locked gate. The old lady
held up the hem of her dress as if she were wading through a flood, then looked up to see how much farther she had to go.

“You never told me you had a brother.”

“You never asked.”

“Because you made it like you were the only one left, that the rest had already died. Why would I ask if I thought you had
no brothers?”

She could feel the feverish sweat forming on her neck and chest again, and she tried to find some relief by pulling away from
the seat back. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he had turned off the air conditioner.

“With this one, it’s almost like that. He doesn’t call me and I don’t call him, that’s how it is. How could I go tell him
about us if me and him haven’t talked in years?” He glanced into the mirror, and the old lady was now staring this way as
if she had witnessed a crime and was trying to commit his license plate to memory.

“Even if you didn’t tell him, you could have told me you had a brother. What would it hurt to tell me that one little thing?
Why keep it from me?”

“You say it like I did it to deceive you. But there was nothing to tell you. What could I say?
I have a brother, but it’s like I don’t have a brother. I have a brother, but he is like a stranger to me? I have a brother,
but he would never care to know about my life or who I spend my time with?
”