Evening in Paradise Read online

  He gave us seventeen dollars … more than fifty-fifty. We didn’t even take a bus, just ran downtown to Penney’s. Far. We bought skates and skate keys, charm bracelets at Kress and a bag of red salted pistachio nuts. We sat by the alligators in the Plaza … Soldiers, Mexicans, winos.

  Hope looked around … “We could sell here.”

  “No, nobody’s got money here.”

  “But us!”

  “Worst part will be delivering the Musical Vanity Boxes.”

  “No, because now we have skates.”

  “Tomorrow let’s learn to skate … hey we can even skate down the viaduct and watch the slag at the smelter.”

  “If the people aren’t home we can just leave them inside the screen door.”

  “Hotel lobbies would be a good place to sell.”

  We bought drippy Coney Islands and root beer floats to go. That was the end of the money. We waited to eat until we got to the vacant lot at the beginning of Upson.

  The lot was on top of a walled hill, high above the sidewalk, overgrown with fuzzy gray plants that had purple blossoms. Between the plants all over the lot was broken glass dyed to different shades of lavender by the sun. At that time of day, late afternoon, the sun hit the lot at an angle so that the light seemed to come from beneath, from inside the blossoms, the amethyst stones.

  * * *

  Sammy and Jake were washing a car. A blue jalopy with no roof and no doors. We ran the last block, the skates thumping inside the boxes.

  “Whose is it?”

  “Ours, want a ride?”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  They were washing the tires. “From a guy we know,” Jake said. “Want a ride?”

  “Sammy!”

  Hope was standing up on the seat. She looked like she was crazy. I didn’t understand yet.

  “Sammy—where’d you get the money for this car?”

  “Oh, here and there…” Sammy grinned at her, drank from the hose and wiped his chin with his shirt.

  “Where did you get the money?”

  Hope looked like an ancient old pale yellow witch. “You cheating motherfucker!” she screamed.

  Then I understood. I followed her over the fence and under the porch.

  “Lucha!” Sammy, my first hero, called, but I followed her to where she squatted by the breadbox.

  She handed me the stack of filled cards. “Count them.” It took a long time.

  Over five hundred people. We looked over the ones we had put Xs by, hoping that they would win.

  “We could buy Musical Vanity Boxes for some of them…”

  She sneered. “With what money? There is no such thing as a Musical Vanity Box anyway. You ever hear of a Musical Vanity Box before?”

  She opened the breadbox and took out the ten unsold cards. She was crazy, groveling in the dust under the porch like a dying chicken.

  “What are you doing, Hope?”

  Panting, she crouched in the honeysuckle opening to the yard. She held up the cards, like the fan of a mad queen.

  “They’re mine now. You can come. Fifty-fifty. Or you can stay. If you come it means you are my partner and you can’t ever talk to Sammy again the rest of your life or I’ll murder you with a knife.”

  She left. I lay down in the damp dirt. I was tired. I just wanted to lie there, forever, and never do anything at all.

  I lay there a long time and then I climbed over the wooden fence to the alley. Hope was sitting on the curb at the corner, her hair like a black bucket over her head. Bent, like a Pietà.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We walked up the hill toward Prospect. It was evening … all the families were outside watering the grass, murmuring from porch swings that creaked as rhythmically as the cicadas.

  Hope banged a gate behind us. We walked up the wet concrete path toward the family. Iced tea, sitting on the steps, the stoop. She held out a card.

  “Pick a name. Ten cents a chance.”

  * * *

  We started out early the next morning with the rest of the cards. We said nothing about the new price, about the six we had sold the night before. Most of all we said nothing about our skates … for two years we’d been hoping for skates. We hadn’t even tried them on yet.

  When we got off the bus at the Plaza, Hope repeated that she’d kill me if I ever spoke to Sammy again.

  “Never. Want blood?” We were always cutting our wrists and sealing promises.

  “No.”

  I was relieved. I knew I would talk to him someday and without blood it wouldn’t be so bad.

  The Gateway Hotel, like a jungle movie. Spittoons, clicking punkahs, palm trees, even a man in a white suit, fanning himself like Sydney Greenstreet. They all waved us away, rattled their faces back behind their papers as if they knew about us. People like the anonymity of hotels.

  Outside, across the heat-sinking tar of the street to catch a trolley for Juarez. Mexicans in rebozos—smelling like American paper bags and Kress candy corn, yellow-orange.

  Unfamiliar territory … Juarez. I knew only the fountained mirrored bars, the “Cielito Lindo” guitar players of my mother’s war-widow nights out with the “Parker girls.” Hope only knew the dirty-donkey movies. Mrs. Haddad always sent her along on Darlene’s dates with soldiers, so everything would be okay.

  We stayed at the Juarez end of the bridge, leaning like the taxi drivers, the wooden snake sellers against the shade of the Follies Bar, padding forward as they did when the clusters of tourists, bobbing boy-soldiers came off the bridge.

  Some smiled at us, anxious to be charmed, to be charming. Too hurried and awkward to look at our cards, shoving us pennies, nickels, dimes. “Here!” We hated them, as if we had been Mexicans.

  By late afternoon the soldiers and tourists squirted off the ramp, clattering onto the sidewalk into the slow hot wind of black tobacco and Carta Blanca beer, flushed, hopeful … what will I see? They gushed past us, pushing pennies nickels into our fists without ever looking at the upheld cards or into our eyes.

  We were reeling, giddy from the nervous laughter, from the lurching out, darting out of the way. We laughed, bold now, like the wooden snake and clay pig sellers. Insolent, we stood in their way, tugging at them. “Come on, only a dime … Buy a name, ten cents … Hey rich lady, a lousy dime!”

  Dusk. Tired and sweaty. We leaned against the wall to count the money. The shoeshine boys watched us, mocking, even though we had made six dollars.

  “Hope, let’s throw the cards into the river.”

  “What, and just beg like these sick bums?” She was furious. “No, we’re going to sell every name.”

  “We’ve got to eat sometime.”

  “Right.” She called to one of the street boys … “Oye, where can we eat?”

  “Eat mierda, gringa.”

  We got off the main street of Juarez. You could look back at it, hear it, smell it, like a huge polluted river.

  We began to run. Hope was crying. I had never seen her cry.

  We ran like goats, like colts, heads lowered clopping clopping over the mud sidewalks, loping then, muffled. Sidewalks hard red dirt.

  Down some adobe steps into the Gavilán Café.

  * * *

  In El Paso, those days, 1943, you heard a lot about war. My grandfather pasted Ernie Pyle into scrapbooks all day, Mamie prayed. My mother was a Gray Lady at the hospital, played bridge with the wounded. She brought blind or one-armed soldiers home to dinner. Mamie read to me from Isaiah about how someday everybody would beat their swords into plowshares. But I hadn’t thought about it. I had simply missed and glorified my father, who was a lieutenant somewhere overseas … Okinawa. A little girl, I first thought about the war when we went into the Gavilán Café. I don’t know why, I just remember thinking then about the war.

  It seemed everyone in the Gavilán Café was a brother, or a cousin, a relative, even though they sat apart at tables or at the bar. A man and a woman, arguing and touching. Two sisters flirting ov
er their mother’s back. Three lean brothers in denim work clothes, stooped with the same falling brother lock of hair over their tequilas.

  It was dark cool and quiet although everyone was talking and someone was singing. The laughter was unstrained, private, intimate.

  We sat on stools at the bar. A waitress came over, carrying a tray with a blue-and-purple peacock on it. Her black-rooted hennaed hair was piled into wavy mounds, caught with combs of gold and carved silver and broken mirrors. Fuchsia enlarged mouth. Green eyelids … a crucifix of blue-and-green butterfly wings sparkled between her conic yellow satin breasts. “¡Hola!” She smiled. Brilliance of gold-capped teeth, red gums. Dazzling Bird of Paradise!

  “¿Qué quieren, lindas?”

  “Tortillas,” Hope said.

  The lady-bird waitress leaned forward, dusting crumbs away with blood-red nails, murmuring to us still in her green Spanish.

  Hope shook her head … “No sé.”

  “¿Son gringas?”

  “No.” Hope pointed to herself. Syrian. She spoke then in Syrian and the waitress listened, her fuchsia mouth moving with the words. “Eh!”

  “She’s a gringa,” Hope said about me. They laughed. I envied their dark languages, their dark eyes.

  “¡Son gringas!” the waitress told the people in the café.

  An old man came over to us, carrying his glass and a Corona beer bottle. Straight … standing, walking straight and Spanish in a white suit. His son followed in a black zoot suit, dark glasses, watch chain. This was bebop time, pachuco time … The son’s shoulders were stooped, in fashion, head lowered to the level of his father’s pride.

  “What’s your name?”

  Hope gave him her Syrian name … Sha-a-hala. I gave him the name the Syrians called me … Luchaha. Not Lucía or Lucha but Lu-cha-a. He told everybody our names.

  The waitress was named Chata, because her nose turned up like a rain pipe. Literally, it means “squat.” Or “bedpan.” The old man was Fernando Velasquez and he shook hands with us.

  Having greeted us, the people in the café ignored us as before, accepting us with their easy indifference. We could have leaned against any of them and fallen asleep.

  Velasquez took our bowls of green chili over to a table. Chata brought us lime sodas.

  He had learned English in El Paso where he worked. His son worked there too in construction.

  “Oye, Raúl … diles algo … He speaks good English.”

  The son remained standing, elegant behind his father. His cheekbones shone amber above a bebop beard.

  “What are you kids doing over here?” the father asked.

  “Selling.”

  Hope held up the stack of cards. Fernando looked at them, turned each of them over. Hope went into her sales pitch about the Vanity Boxes … “The name that wins gets a Musical Vanity Box.”

  “Válgame Dios…” He took the card over to the next table, explained it, gesturing, banging on the table. They all looked at the card and at us, uncertainly.

  A woman in a bandana turban beckoned to me. “Oye, somebody wins the boxes, no?”

  “Sí.”

  Raúl had moved over, silent, to pick up one of the cards, looked down at me. His eyes were white through his dark glasses.

  “Where are the boxes?”

  I looked at Hope.

  “Raúl…” I said. “Of course there are no Musical Vanity Boxes. The person that wins the name wins all of the money.”

  He bowed to me, with the grace of a matador. Hope bowed her wet head and cussed in Syrian. In English she said, “Why did we never think of that?” She smiled at me.

  “Okay, chulita … give me two names.”

  Velasquez was explaining the game to people at the tables, Chata to a group of men at the bar with strong wet backs. They shoved two tables into ours. Hope and I sat at each end. Raúl stood in back of me. Chata poured beer for everyone seated around the table, like at a banquet.

  “¿Cuánto es?”

  “Un quarter.”

  “No tengo … ¿un peso?”

  “Okay.”

  Hope stacked the money in a pile in front of her. “Hey … we still get our quarter cut.” Raúl said that was fair. Her eyes glittered under eyeshade bangs. Raúl and I wrote down the names.

  The names themselves were more fun in Spanish, nobody could say them right and kept laughing. BOB. Spilt beer. It took only three minutes to fill one card. Raúl opened the seal. Ignacio Sanchez won with TED. Bravo! Raúl said he’d made just about the same amount working all day. With a flourish, Ignacio scattered the coins and crumpled bills onto Chata’s peacock tray. ¡Cerveza!

  “Wait a minute…” Hope took out our quarter cut.

  Two peddlers had come in, pulled chairs up to the table.

  “¿Qué pasa?”

  They sat with straw baskets in their laps. “¿Cuánto es?”

  “Un peso … un quarter.”

  “Let’s make it two,” Raúl said. “Dos pesos, fifty cents.” The new men with the baskets couldn’t afford it, so everyone decided they could go for one this time since they were new. They each put in a peso on the pile. Raúl won. The men got up and left without even having a beer.

  By the time we had sold out four cards everyone was drunk. None of the winners had kept their money, just bought more chances, more food, tequila now.

  Most of the losers left. We all ate tamales. Chata carried the tamales in a washtub, a casserole of beans we dipped into with hot tortillas.

  Hope and I went to the outhouse behind the café. Stumbling, shielding the candle Chata had lent us.

  Yawn … it makes you pensive, reflexive, to pee, like New Year’s.

  “Hey, what time is it?”

  “Oh.”

  It was almost midnight. Everyone in the Gavilán Café kissed us good-bye. Raúl took us to the bridge, holding each of our tiny hands. Gentle, like the pull of a dowser’s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.

  Under the bridge, on the El Paso side, were the shoeshine hustlers we had seen that afternoon, standing in the muddy Rio Grande, holding up cones to catch money in, digging in the mud for it if it fell. Soldiers were throwing pennies, gum wrappers. Hope went over to the rail. “¡Hola, pendejos!” she hollered and threw them all our quarters. Fingers back. Laughter.

  Raúl put us in a taxi and paid the driver. We waved to him out the back window, watched him walk, swinging toward the bridge. Spring onto the ramp like a deer.

  * * *

  Hope’s father started beating her the minute she got out of the taxi, whipped her up the stairs with a belt, screaming in Syrian.

  No one was home but Mamie, kneeling for my safe return. The taxi upset her more than Juarez. She never went anywhere in a taxi without a bag of black pepper in case of attack.

  In bed. Pillows behind me. She brought me custard and cocoa, the food she served to the sick or the damned. Custard melted like a communion wafer in my mouth. The blood of her forgiving love I drank while she stood there, praying in a pink angel gown, at the foot of my bed. Matthew and Mark, Luke and John.

  SOMETIMES IN SUMMER

  Hope and I were both seven. I don’t think we knew what month it was or even what day it was unless it was Sunday. Summer had already been so hot and long with every day just like the other that we didn’t remember that it had rained the year before. We asked Uncle John to fry an egg on the sidewalk again, so at least we remembered that.

  Hope’s family had come over from Syria. It wasn’t likely that they would sit around and talk about weather in Texas in the summertime. Or explain how the days are longer in summer, but then they start getting shorter. My family didn’t talk to each other at all. Uncle John and I ate together sometimes. My grandma Mamie ate in the kitchen with my little sister Sally. My mother and Grandpa, if they ever ate, ate in their own rooms, or out somewhere.

  Sometimes everybody would be in the living room. To listen to Jack Benny or Bob Hope or F
ibber McGee and Molly. But even then nobody talked. Each laughed alone and stared at the green eye on the radio the way people stare at the television now.

  What I mean is there was no way Hope or I would have heard about summer solstice, or how it always rained in El Paso in the summer. No one at my house ever talked about stars, probably didn’t even know that in summer there were sometimes meteor showers in the northern sky.

  Heavy rains overflowed the arroyos and the drainage ditches, destroyed houses in Smeltertown and carried away chickens and cars.

  When the lightning and thunder came we reacted in primitive terror. Crouched on Hope’s front porch, covered in blankets, listening to the cracks and rumbles with awe and fatalism. We couldn’t not watch, though, huddled shivering, and made each other look when the arrows lit up all along the Rio Grande and cracked into the cross of Mount Cristo Rey, zigzagged into the smelter smokestack crack crack. Boom. At the same time the trolley on Mundy Street shorted out in a cascade of sparks and all the passengers came running out just as it began to rain.

  It rained and rained. It rained all night. The phones went out and the lights went out. My mother didn’t come home and Uncle John didn’t come home. Mamie started a fire in the woodstove and when Grandpa got home he called her an idiot. The electricity is out, fool, not the gas, but she shook her head. We understood perfectly. Nothing was to be trusted.

  We slept on cots on Hope’s porch. We did sleep although we both swore we were up all night watching the sheets of rain come down like a big glass-brick window.

  We had breakfast in both houses. Mamie made biscuits and gravy; at Hope’s house we had kibbe and Syrian bread. Her grandma braided our hair into tight French braids so that the rest of the morning our eyes slanted back as if we were Asian. We spent the morning spinning around in the rain and then shivering drying off and going back out. Both of our grandmothers came to watch as their gardens washed completely away, down the walls, out into the street. Red caliche clay water quickly rose above the sidewalks and up to the fifth step of the concrete stairways of our houses. We jumped into the water, which was warm and thick like cocoa and carried us along for blocks, fast, our pigtails floating. We’d get out, run back in the cold rain, back past our houses all the way up the block and then jump back into the river of the street and become swept away some more, over and over.