Drowning Tucson (30 page)

The day Junior was born, Rebecca’s girlfriend Vivica drove her to Tucson Medical Center because Rogelio was working downtown at the auto shop where he was swamped and wouldn’t be able to get home in time to take Rebecca to the hospital. It had rained all afternoon and the city
looked dismal from the window of Rebecca’s maternity room, gray and solemn, although she normally loved a good rain shower, loved to run outside and twirl around and smell the freshly washed air. It rained all that day and the next because it was monsoon season finally. But, to Rebecca, something seemed different about it, like it was a rain of mourning instead of rebirth. Her husband had arrived before Junior was born, and the day after she had delivered a healthy nine-pound baby, Rogelio was sleeping on the couch a few feet from her bed. He had been there for the birth but he hadn’t watched. He’d stood by her head while Rebecca tried to figure out whether he was disgusted or bored. Will he be able to touch me again after watching me stretch and gush blood from the only place on my body that was sacred, now that another man has passed through me, even if it was his own son? These fuckin pachucos. They can have as many women as they want, but god forbid I sleep with another man—I might as well have fucked the whole world. She lay in bed and watched her husband wake up and rub his eyes and look around in confusion. He could just as well have woken up in a jail in Mexico from the look on his face. He realized where he was when he spotted Rebecca in bed, and he walked over to her.

We named him Junior, Rogelio smiled and rubbed his wife’s hair. He’s Rogelio Eduardo Nuñez the Second and he looks just like me. So, what do you think? Do you feel better? Did the drugs help the pain? He looked like he actually wanted to know, not the usual way he looked when he asked a question and didn’t expect, didn’t want, an answer. Most questions were usually accusations or threats. Things like, just what
do
you do while I’m slaving away downtown? So Rebecca was surprised the kind Rogelio was resurfacing and, although she didn’t trust him, she answered anyway.

Yes, they helped a lot, but I had the worst dreams. She struggled to remember visions that would not come or could not be explained. She had been at the Rodeo Day parade, next to the statue of Pancho Villa where she’d first met Rogelio, and he drove up in a car, even though the road was closed for the parade, and beckoned toward the backseat, come over and help me unload these pigs, and then the back door flew open and pigs came pouring out of it like popcorn overflowing from a pan,
some covered in mud and others with beautiful long hair, and the whole time Rebecca was trying to explain to him how she didn’t want to help with the pigs, how she was having fun sitting next to the statue of Pancho Villa and watching the marching band members step in the shit from the horses that had come before them in the parade because everyone knew the musicians had been specifically instructed not to step out of line, even if it meant stepping in shit, but she could not explain it to him because her mouth was muffled and filled with cotton and the pigs came running at her squealing and squealing like babies, like her baby when it burst from between her legs and took its first breath, and then the pigs had the face of her baby—all of them—and they circled her and beat their snouts against her legs and she ran out into the street while Rogelio laughed and everywhere she stepped was shit and it splattered all over her pants and splashed up onto her arms and face and she was covered in shit, running and crying and the parade was gone and the band was gone and the pigs were gone and she was left there alone, covered in shit with grass and oats and hay in it, and the only thing that was left was the statue of Pancho Villa looking down at her from his horse reared back on its hind legs, and beneath the horse’s front legs, right where they were going to land if the horse ever came back down with all of his eleven hundred pounds, was her baby.

Rogelio asked her what kind of dreams, Rebecca? But she could not articulate them. She could not begin to tell him because he would only laugh and he would not understand why it had been so terrifying to her.

Do you remember the statue of Pancho Villa?

You mean where we sit when we watch the Rodeo Day parade?

Yeah, that’s the spot. Well, I just had some weird dream about the statue and you and pigs. But, I don’t remember any of it now. It’s all washed away.

And it was. Sort of. But the feeling lingered with her for the rest of the day, and so when it didn’t stop raining by the time Rogelio went home, she wondered if the dreams would return or if she could stay awake until he came to pick her and Junior up in the morning.

When she first came home, Rogelio treated her with kindness. He woke up and changed the baby’s diapers in the middle of the night. No
complaints. Just got up and did it. He started singing boleros to his son and whispering excitedly in his ear how he was going to take him to see his first bullfight down in Nogales when he was old enough to appreciate it. Sometimes, when he saw Rebecca was listening, he winked at her and announced, when Junior’s tall enough to see over the counter of a cantina I’ll buy him his first beer. And he promised to teach his son to play baseball and work on cars. If the weather was nice after work, he pushed his son in the stroller, pointing out passing cars. That’s the new Celica. Pretty sharp, even for a rice-burner. The new Mustang though, that’s where it’s at. And his son gurgled and squealed with delight and Rogelio straightened his back and waved at passing cars when the people inside smiled and pointed at him for being such a good father.

But when their financial situation didn’t change and the newness of the baby had worn off, he became frustrated again. He started hiding money from Rebecca and spending it on beer, coming home drunk and trying to kiss his wife but missing her mouth and struggling to pull down her panties while she groaned in her sleep, tomorrow, Rogelio, wait until morning, but he kept trying, climbing on top of her and pulling his cock out and pushing it into her but it kept flopping out, limp, and she tried to help him, kissed him back, played with his joint, but it didn’t help, and after a few more minutes he gave up and rolled over, cursing his wife and his beer-soaked dick, and passed out while Rebecca tried to block out his snoring and fall back to sleep before the baby woke up to feed. She lay in bed waiting for sleep and imagined the conversation she wanted to have with him. But they never had the conversation.

Then one evening the radio said flashfloods were coming. Rebecca said it over and over. Flashfloods. Don’t drive near washes or on roads prone to flooding. Cover your swamp cooler with a tarp unless you want water dripping into your house. She knew the rules. If you have a leak in the roof, you set out the pots and pans, Tupperware bowls, whatever. You can sit under the drip with your mouth open and taste the rain mixed with your house. You call the kids in from playing and tell them it will only be a few minutes and then they can go back out into the street and play soccer or steal the neighbors’ mail or sneak cigarettes in
the alley. You close windows and shut doors, bring in pets, run and hide and watch as nature reminds you how insignificant you really are.

So when the radio said flashfloods were coming, she decided to make her husband take notice. She whispered flashfloods, and plucked Junior out of his crib, put him in her favorite outfit, the one with red and blue dinosaurs—T-rexes and triceratops—which reminded her of the boys in elementary school who found horny toads and pushed them up into girls’ faces, because she’d always thought that horny toads proved dinosaurs weren’t extinct, they’d only gotten smaller. It was the outfit he wore for his two-month pictures. She never bought any of the portraits, instead she scraped together the three-dollar sitting fee at Sears and when the notice came in the mail saying your child’s portraits are waiting for you in the Sears photo lab! she went to the store and looked at her son in all the different poses and smiled and handed them back to the woman at the counter, shaking her head so the woman knew she wouldn’t be buying any of them, and she walked out cursing her poverty with Junior in her arms slobbering down the back of her left shoulder.

When she finished dressing him, she put on the dress she had worked on during the final month of her pregnancy in anticipation of being skinny again. She loved the spaghetti straps and the low-cut back. How it showed just enough skin but was still classy. She had earned the money for every scrap of its fabric, a task that had taken the better part of her pregnancy. A dollar here, a dollar there. She had handmade little Easter purses in the shapes of rabbits’ heads or stuffed miniature skeleton dolls for Día de Los Muertos or little Mexican flag pillows for Cinco de Mayo and sold them door-to-door in her neighborhood while the husbands were at work and the women who stayed home cleaning and cooking and feeding their children were susceptible to her sales pitch. She knew how to get them to buy, if they could truly spare the money. She had even traded two Easter purses for tamales with the old woman down the road and set the table with pride that night—a votive candle; two matching plates; full glasses of whole milk, Rogelio’s favorite—and when her husband came in from work and sat down, he scooped up the tamales and beans without even asking where they’d
come from. Rebecca was sure the dress made her look like a queen, or at least a princess, and she turned around several times in front of the bathroom mirror before pinning her hair up like she had seen girls do for their proms, leaving a few strands on the sides.

Tonight Rogelio had to work late and wouldn’t be home until around eleven. She thought about writing him a note, explaining how she needed to drive out in the rain, to see the desert momentarily become an ocean. She wondered if he’d even worry. She wanted to tell him how she felt when she went grocery shopping, to ask him do you have any idea the evil eyes shooting at me in the grocery store when I take my food stamps or my WIC vouchers and buy milk, bread, ground beef—not the fancy reduced-fat ground chuck—and people, you can see what they’re thinking, that worthless woman milking the system and buying steaks and Coke and candy with our hard-earned tax dollars. And they don’t even know what it’s like to come home and turn on the lights and find roaches in our cereal and to pick them out of the box, wondering if they’ve lain eggs—what do they say? for every roach you see, there are ten thousand scurrying around in the walls—and to have to eat the food and serve it to you and Junior and wonder if the eggs will make the baby sick or if they’ll hatch in your stomach and you’ll wake up with night sweats, your body infested with insects chewing their way out?

She picked up her purse and her son. Junior, we’re going to break the rules. We’re going to drive during a flashflood and be brave. She buckled him into his seat in the back of the car, taking care not to wrinkle his outfit with the tight straps. He didn’t wake up, but instead nuzzled his face into the receiving blanket Vivica brought to the hospital on the day he was born. She took care to keep her dress from wrinkling beneath her, stretching it out before she sat down on it, buckling her seatbelt and placing the strap behind her back. She was pulling out of the driveway when the first drops of rain began to fall. She passed through her neighborhood, her home for the last four years, and noticed her neighbors looking from their windows, watching for the downpour.

The roads were mostly empty, and the few cars that remained began to pull to the shoulder of the road or beneath the canopies of gas stations for safety. But Rebecca drove on, undeterred by the rain that now
fell so hard the windshield wipers had no effect, and she sang to Junior the songs her mother had sung to her during storms, Si Tú Te Vas, Dos Gardenias, wondering if he would wake and notice the rain hammering on the roof of the car, happy that he was quiet but sad that he was not awake to notice how clean the desert smells when it rains, which was one of her favorite smells.

Now he’s going to see, she said to her son in her bravest voice, minutes after bringing her car to a stop in the Santa Cruz River, the arroyo that runs crookedly along the west side of Tucson, longer than the whole city and deep enough to remind Rebecca of the huge ditches they used for mass graves in old war footage on TV, an invisible river as dry as the rest of the landscape, with only the ghosts of fish swimming past and specters of ancient tribes washing their animal-skin clothing in the river that no longer existed, that wound into the desert past the city, past the lighted buildings of the downtown and the missions, fleeing the businesses and the roads creeping closer every year, a moat between the mountains and civilization, whose smoke-coughing cars and asphalt streets branded and gridded and crisscrossed the once pure land, and knowing the flood water was coming—she wanted to get out of the car and place her ear to the ground to gauge the approaching swell—she was determined to let nature decide her fate, trusting in the decision, watching the city lights in her rearview mirror and thinking how pathetic that she had lived her whole life in Tucson and only known the smallest portion of it and had never seen where Geronimo lived or where Dillinger was arrested or the ranches Mexican bandits looted at night for supplies, because she had been too caught up in her own life, brushing hair, learning how to do makeup, wishing she could meet Prince, and sneaking behind Q Mart for kisses with boys, which she had never mentioned so no one would think she was a slut or a chingada and beat her for trying to steal their boyfriends, and even now she felt like a fallen woman, especially now, sitting in her idling car gazing at the walls of the arroyo lined like the rings of a bathtub, rising above her like the walls of an ancient city, the vessel that carried the flood water, which was the gift for the rain dancers who collapsed with exhaustion when the first drops fell while their fellow tribesmen rushed to collect as much of it as possible in clay
containers before the thirsty desert drank it up, and Rebecca thought she had fallen asleep at her windowsill and dreamed the flashflood, of course, so convinced it was a dream that she wanted to wake her son sleeping in the backseat and say to him, come with me out into the wash and we’ll walk and pick the buried hairs of our ancestors from the dry walls of this river, and Rebecca wanted to pick up the arrowheads of fallen warriors while she pointed out the stars to Junior, but she let him sleep, allowed him to dream while her hands trembled and her breath went cold, and she wondered if the other people who had drowned in this very arroyo, or other arroyos—Santa Rita, Rillito River—had done so by accident, or had they purposely gone there so they could fling themselves, their women, and their children, into the water, sacrifices to the desert spirits, carried away to wherever the river deposited its spoils, the place where the bones of lost children and tired parents sank into the earth and scraped against one another until they were ground to a fine powder like the blush a much younger Rebecca used to brush onto her cheeks as she sat in her room waiting on boys to come pick her up and take her out for a meal or to the zoo, the same color she brushed onto her cheeks minutes before she buckled her son into the backseat and kissed him on his forehead and then went back into the house to put Rogelio’s dinner in the oven so it would be warm when he got home, except that he would probably not find his dinner without her help, without her carrying it to him and setting it on the table in front of him the same way she had set her heart before him a few years earlier and he had stabbed it with his fork, slicing into it and chewing tiny pieces covered in gravy, consuming it slowly until she could no longer feel anything but shame and sadness, even though she’d had a son, which was supposed to be life’s most beautiful gift, yet she was ashamed to be his mother and ashamed to give him the name of a man who was capable of looking through her as if she were no different from the windowpane she rested her head on every afternoon, the same man who hadn’t held his own son in two months and had once come home so drunk he stumbled to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer and pissed all over her stockings and her panties, despite her attempts to stop him by shouting and shaking his arm, and he never did apologize but instead ignored the stench of piss that filled the entire
house for two weeks and lingered in Rebecca’s nose for three more, and although she scrubbed her undergarments repeatedly the fumes were impossible to remove, so she wore them to bed thinking maybe the smell would remind her husband of that night, because it was a night she would never forget, the first time she realized that she could hate the man she had taken vows to love, and since she had learned to hate him, she took advantage of the energy it gave her, shrieking at the walls while he was away and damning them to the same fate as her own—I HOPE RATS BURROW INTO YOU AND CHEW OUT YOUR HEART THE SAME WAY MY HUSBAND DOES TO ME AND TERMITES SLOWLY EAT YOUR FOUNDATIONS AND TURN THEM TO DUST WHILE YOU SLEEP—and she pulled out her hair and tore the sleeves from her shirts and the pockets from her pants and then sewed them back together while she sat naked in her sewing chair, seething with fury, hurling curses, words she had never dared to utter before, a la madre chingada and everything damnable she could dredge up from the recesses of her soul, a soul so utterly crushed by decayed love she wished she had never been given a soul and that she had never met her husband, dios mío, why didn’t you just stay in your neighborhood with your cholos and your vatos and your rucas, the women you fucked without even looking at their faces so you wouldn’t have to speak to them if you ever saw them on the streets afterwards with hickeys on their necks and babies in their bellies, vile women scratching at their asses and digging in their crotches riddled with warts and crawling with lice, you could have made a better life for yourself dealing weed or angel dust to your friends so you could roll around the south side in your lowrider and your chain-linked steering wheel instead of dragging me into your twisted world where I’m an afterthought and your baby might as well be a hamster for all the attention you show him, and the rain fell harder and the rushing water finally came, seeping under the doors of the car, rising to her ankles, and she fought her reflexes, forcing her feet to stay on the floor—this is the part where I’m supposed to bash out the windows and pull us out to safety—but she did not bother to kick out the window, did not try to roll the window down or undo her seatbelt, instead she sat completely still, feeling the cold muddy water bathing her feet like one of Jesus’ disciples, and she thought of her last supper, the
leftover menudo with the tripe still floating in the middle, solidified grease clinging to it even after she had reheated the soup on the stove and split it between herself and her son, spooning it into his mouth while her own bowl grew cold, and the water lapped at her calves and rose faster and higher until it was in her lap, tickling her and freezing her and taunting her until she lost control of her bladder and felt the warmth of her urine spreading between her legs, and her son stirred in the backseat because the water had begun to soak through his shoes and socks, and she could hear the frightened tremble in his voice crying out for her in confusion, and he kept crying while she sang him bedtime songs and all the soothing melodies she could call to mind, which became more difficult as her car lifted off the ground and was carried away by the rushing water, and the lights of the city circled around her and became blurry above the surface of the water, but she sang on even while she wondered why the car was underwater but not yet full, clenching her teeth when her son’s crying suddenly ceased as the water rose above his head and crept up toward her neck, but refusing to turn and look at him because this wasn’t what was supposed to happen, her chest heaving with the terror inside her, and when the water reached her chin she let out her breath and bowed her head, feeling the splashing in her ears, letting her lungs fill with water, relieved when the car became full and she was left with her thoughts, now he’s going to see how hopeless our situation really is, and momentarily confused by the purple dinosaur sock floating slowly past the steering wheel.