Drowning Tucson (18 page)

His father read the card and immediately grabbed Jaime and held him down while he pulled off his belt and whipped his son with the brass buckle that had Jesus with outstretched arms engraved on the front. With each lash his father hit him harder, and Jaime smelled the
whoosh of leather swinging toward his head and heard his dad yelling MY ONLY SON, A FAGGOT and WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE FAMILY NAME? and another lash and he heard, a goddam QUEER, and another lash, which left a distinct ringing in his ears as the buckle connected, a pinche maricón, a goddam puta, a disgrace to the family. None of this crossed Jaime’s mind when he stood up from his lunch and began walking toward Tucson again, happy that he’d be there tomorrow, excited about finding work and people like him.

What Jaime did remember was the day he’d realized Sammy knew he was gay, when he caught him peeking during PE class as they dressed in their gym shorts. Every PE class after that one, as an act of kindness and flirtatiousness—a little testing of the waters—one or the other spread his legs a little too wide when tying his shoes, or bent over a little too far when reaching down to pull on his red shorts, allowing the other to have a quick look. Jaime looked forward to taking showers, but he also worried he’d get caught staring at another classmate and immediately be called a faggot and get knocked around or thrown up against a locker. Or worse.

He remembered how weird it was that no one thought the school’s three toughest kids were gay when they danced around the shower with their dicks flopping, chanting yeah, yeah, check out my daddy longleg, bitch, which made the other boys do everything imaginable not only to avert their attention but also to cover up their own dicks, which didn’t flop around but instead had shriveled up like uncooked biscuits. Jaime and Sammy showered at opposite ends of the room. Better not to be noticed, even though the longlegs offered a diversion with their taunting of the other boys, who in return went behind the gym after their showers and smoked cigarettes while concocting elaborate schemes to kill them fuckin pricks. Except they didn’t have the courage to approach even one of them, so they contented themselves with talk of killing them and, as long as they all agreed those longleg boys were fuckin assholes, they were happy enough.

Jaime and Sammy ignored the talk of the other boys, standing far from the group and shyly making small talk. Eventually they decided they should get together sometime and do something, kicking rocks and saying
yeah, that would be nice, maybe some night after school you could come over before my dad gets home. And Sammy did. He came over one afternoon when school got out and walked in and the smell of freshly baked cookies—how Jaime had managed that in the time between the final bell and Sammy coming over was something Sammy would always marvel at fondly—led him to the kitchen where Jaime had coffee steaming in a pot on the stove, and they sat down and talked for two hours about music and school and their favorite actors, until Jaime looked up and realized how late it was and said sorry, but I have to get dinner ready for my father, with enough conviction in his voice for Sammy to understand the importance of Jaime’s task. Jaime walked him to the door and they brushed hands as they reached for the knob at the same time. After he watched Sammy walk through the gate, Jaime went back to the kitchen, humming, and seasoned chicken breasts with lemon pepper and put water on to boil for the rice and turned on the oven to heat some rolls.

Their afternoons became a routine. So, in addition to his daily chores, Jaime had to clean up that evidence before his father returned. He took advantage of his father’s smoking habit by lighting a cigarette and walking around with it to mask the smell of cookies and gourmet coffee. He had so much to do that once he didn’t notice his father had returned and stood in the entrance of the kitchen watching his son sing songs, using a ladle for a microphone, while his oven-mitted hands flailed about, gesturing like an exaggerated vaudeville performer. His father snuck up behind him, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged him through the house until he found something out of place that he could punish Jaime for neglecting—an unchanged toilet paper roll or a sock wadded up under his bed. This memory would have bothered Jaime, except it helped him remember his times with Sammy.

The day dragged on, and Jaime noticed creatures like the horny toad and wondered if they were miniature descendants of the stegosaurus. Even though he knew he was foolishly crossing the desert on a very hot day, he felt comfortable and was even amazed when he realized that seven hours had passed since he’d last taken a drink of water and he wasn’t even thirsty, which reminded him of cartoons he had seen growing up where people were trapped in the desert with no water, dragging themselves
over sand dunes and leaving trails behind them in search of an oasis. He looked around to see if such a thing existed, but saw nothing except for cactus and mountains and a roadrunner. He thought about finding a place to sleep. By the time nightfall came, that place ended up being between two boulders with his navy blue flannel shirt serving as a blanket and his backpack beneath his head.

As Jaime slept, he dreamed he was the kid again who had hidden in the laundry room taping ninety-nine pennies inside an envelope accompanied by an ad from a music club—twelve cassettes for ninety-nine cents. He wept with the sadness he’d felt three years later when he was suddenly and inexplicably reminded that he’d sent away for the cassettes all those years before and had never received them. He’d forgotten what he had ordered. But it didn’t matter now because he was lying down beneath his coat in the desert, sleeping comfortably.

When he woke up, he made his way back to the interstate, so close to the city now he was passing billboards for Old Tucson and Breakers and the Lazy 8 Motel, and the billboards got hazier and hazier as the day got hotter and signs of life in the desert began to show. For the first time since he ran away two days earlier, Jaime felt exhausted and knew he needed to get out of the sun and get a real meal, so he stopped at the first roadside diner he found and walked inside, where the air was thick with the smell of grease. The sign inside told him to sit wherever he pleased, and he did, in the far corner, where he wasn’t visible to anyone unless they made a trip to the salad bar. The muggy mom-and-pop establishment had been built in the early 1900s, a newspaper article pinned to the wall informed him, by a Mexican gold smuggler named Francisco Arroyo, who, according to legend, had buried gold in the restaurant’s walls and foundation. Several years after his death, people came from all over the Southwest to pry the boards from the walls in the middle of the night, searching feverishly for a glint of precious metal while the new proprietors slept upstairs. Eventually a sheriff was deputized whose sole purpose was to watch over the building at night and keep would-be looters away, and he remained there until he retired in 1976, but by then most thieves had stopped believing in the myth of Arroyo’s gold, so no other men were sent to protect the restaurant.

Jaime was fascinated by the history of the building and wondered if it was true, even asking his waitress whether or not Arroyo’s gold had ever been found. She told him no one had mentioned it in a long time, but she knew for a fact that once or twice a year they would have to call the coroner in from Tucson to salvage the remains of a person who had gotten trapped under the building while searching for treasure. And she told him, when she brought his eggs and bacon, that every now and then the owners had the building repainted and the painters sometimes quit the job before it was completed because they were deeply disturbed by the teeth and fingernails they had to extract from the walls of the building before they could put on the first coat of paint. Sometimes, she said, in the middle of the night they heard clawing and scraping in the walls, but they didn’t bother getting up to look because they knew no one would be there. She left the check overturned in front of Jaime and walked away.

When Jaime finished his meal, he paid his check and counted his remaining money—thirteen dollars and fifty cents—and as he walked out the door, the newspaper rack taunted him with images of what he’d left behind in Sierra Vista. He looked around to be sure no one was watching, then quickly grabbed a newspaper and left. Startled by Sammy’s picture on the front page, Jaime couldn’t resist glancing at the story, recollecting the events that made him leave home in the first place. He feared for his life. But more importantly, he wanted revenge.

He wanted to make his father pay for coming home later than usual, almost too drunk to speak but coherent enough to tell Jaime that a couple of fellas from Buena nailed themselves a fag, got him real good, beat him with a chain till he couldn’t move and one of em even ran him over, and then his father went to the bathroom and passed out on the toilet. Jaime sat in silence until he was sure his father wasn’t coming out of the bathroom and then quietly picked up the phone and dialed Sammy’s number but it only rang and rang—thirty-six rings—and then he hung up and knew. That was when he decided he had to leave, because if they knew about Sammy then they had to know about him. He wasn’t safe, and it was just him, alone, against everyone who knew his secret.

The paper said the police had labeled it an unfortunate accident.

Jaime, finally piecing the whole story together from what his father had said and from what he read in the newspaper, hardly noticed that he’d reached his destination a little ahead of schedule. He collapsed in the back of a Sun-Tran bus and fell asleep, trusting in the fortune of the bus’s route to lead him somewhere safe. The bus took him downtown to the depot, where he awoke, amazed at the amount of homeless people milling about, asking for change. He’d heard that Tucson was overrun with homeless vets, but he’d never expected to actually see so many. Despite their weathered skin and sun-bleached clothes, he felt a kinship with them. They too were lost, wandering from place to place with nowhere to sleep, little food to eat. God, Jaime thought, I can’t believe it’s come down to this—me and these men sharing the same streets together. The bustle of downtown traffic and all the vets made Jaime anxious, so he hopped another bus at the depot, tossing the driver his transfer, and headed east, nodding off to the rhythm of the bus’s motor. It was almost noon when the driver finally brought the bus to a halt in front of Reid Park and walked to the back and shook him awake and asked you ever getting off, kid? while motioning to the door. I’ve got to take my lunch. Jaime grunted and left the bus and squinted his eyes in the fierce light of the sun until he could focus on something. The desire to get out of the sun and into someplace cool led him from the bus stop to a flower shop across the street from the park. Unsure whether or not the shop, Floreria Gutierrez, was open, he pulled on the door anyway and was relieved when it swung open and blew a gust of cool air in his face.

Rudolfo Gutierrez awoke to the smell of burning feet. It was a common occurrence dating back almost forty years to a time when his wife and son were still living. He had been having the same nightmare and waking to this godforsaken smell all these years, though there were occasional nights when he dreamed nothing at all.

Unfortunately, the nightmare was the most vivid memory he had of his son, and it often caused him to wake with tears in his eyes and a feeling of solitude so intense he almost welcomed the scent of burning flesh, because at least it was something. But he knew he was alone
in his home—his wife and son both long dead—and he listened to the whoosh-click of his oxygen tank, trying to exorcise the image of his son walking out of the house one day when it was one hundred and twenty degrees outside, while his wife, Gloria, balanced the checkbook for their plumbing business and Rudolfo wrote up bids for commercial contracts.

Back when his little Alberto was still a toddler, three days after asphalt had been introduced to their neighborhood in Tucson, his son walked barefoot through the front yard, past the lonely palm tree they had planted the year Alberto was born, and out onto the freshly lain asphalt of their cul-de-sac, bubbling under the burning sun, where, as soon as he stepped onto it, his feet planted themselves firmly in the black, lumpy, licorice-smelling goop, and the boy stood, unable to move or breathe or cry out, until finally, in a burst of immense pain, he released a scream so terrible and tortured it sent every mother and father within two miles to the window, their parental instincts forcing them to drop everything—cooking meals, reading to their children, sewing Halloween costumes, watching television, making love, relieving themselves in restrooms—and each parent looked outside, holding their breath, expecting the worst, praying it was not their child whose awful scream reached into the depths of their hearts, even though some of them had thrown their only child from their laps, or ran past their children watching television or working on puzzles, seeing their kids were safe but unable to think anything except maybe there was a kid they had momentarily forgotten who was now outside, wailing so horribly that panic sent them to their doors, thrusting their heads out hurriedly, looking around, under cars, up in trees, in neighbors’ yards, until eventually they were satisfied it was not their child, so they wiped the sweat from their foreheads and went inside and hugged their children, crossing themselves and thanking the good Lord it was not their child who had experienced such overwhelming pain. Then they returned to their meals or their televisions or their newspapers or their waiting beds to finish what they had started.