It Takes a Worried Man

Comfort Me with Apples

The Zamoras came to Houston from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1988 and settled first on Hickory Street by a dried-up spit of Buffalo Bayou. Julio Zamora has never applied for a green card; he works as a fast-food cook. His oldest son, Manuel, loves the comic books I bring him every week. “Who’s this?” he’ll say.

“Spiderman. Tough hombre. He can eat fourteen burritos in eight minutes while hanging, half-asleep, on the wall.”

“I can eat fifteen upside down!”

I think of him as my own little boy, sometimes.

My other family, the Thuots, fled the Annamese Cordillera in what’s now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. They live with their six children in an efficiency apartment with no running water, near Allen Parkway. I bring them food and job applications from convenience stores; they teach me their customs.

The Thuots and the Zamoras are precisely the kind of people no one — repeat, no one, zero, zip — wants to read about, Cal of Cal’s Books is telling me now, planting his hands on his dusty front counter. Next to the cash register, a chipped fishbowl is gorged with slips of paper — a promotional gimmick. Cal’s always got one going. Trips. Bonus prizes. At the end of the month he’ll hold a raffle. Four free books.

“George, my customers want a peek at the secret lives of celebrities. Money, scandal, divorce …” he says. “They’re after books that’ll teach them better love techniques.”

Indian myths, black oral histories, Cajun culture guides, Mexico, Asia — these subjects are Death, he says. Pure Death. Business is slow for my Texas Republic Press.

“At least take a look at what I’ve done,” I say. I’m the founder, publisher, editor (my late wife, Jean, suggested the logo, of which I’m very proud — an amiable armadillo branded with a big Lone Star). Today, I’m the sales rep.

Cal takes my sample copy of Houston’s Latin Refugees, a one-hundred-page cultural study of families like the Zamoras. I’m also the writer.

“Sorry, George. I wouldn’t be able to sell it. If you could get me something sexy …”

“Be serious, Cal.”

“Never more.”

Shaking my head, “All right, forget it,” I glimpse an exterminator’s truck, backfiring as it rattly-clacks down the street. A giant foam-rubber bug is belly-up on its hood. X’s for eyes. It’s followed by a pizza-delivery van, pepperonis painted like measles on its dark purple doors.

Successful commerce: in the fast lane, way ahead of me.

I scribble my phone number and the names of the Thuots and the Zamoras on uneven ribbons of paper, then press them into the fishbowl. Cal’s got a picture of his teenage nephew, Ray, taped to the register as an ad for his “Family Novels” sale (“20 % Off!”). The boy looks just like his uncle but neater, with a slender goatee. I met him last summer when he worked part-time for Cal, and took to him right away. He was trying to save for his first car and help with the family expenses.

His dad, Cal’s brother Billy, was recovering from prostate surgery, something Ray couldn’t talk about without choking up, and I felt for the kid.

“Mr. Palmer, good to see you again,” he greeted me whenever I came in. Helpful. Polite. He always took the time to glance through my pamphlets and books, said he’d talk them up to his uncle. He loved showing me, and anyone else, the latest issues of Consumer Reports, dog-earing pages of jazzy red sports cars he longed to get his mitts on.

A boy to make a daddy proud.

If I were speaking to him now, or to any humane person, I think, I might be making progress.

Well. Cal and I are used to each other.

“These people you talk to, George, they have, you know what I mean, kinky love practices, don’t they? Fertility rites? Stuff like that?” he asks. His beard’s about to wilt in the heat. “That I could use.”

“Thanks for your time, Cal.” I snatch back the book.

The Zamoras live now near a black college in the projects. Most families here are too poor to buy new shoes, or to repair their old ones, and they have no sidewalks to use — only narrow dirt paths under splintered telephone poles near the street. The power lines between the poles are loosely strung over gardens and lawns, within easy reach of a child swinging a stick, say, or a rusty baton, or an old Louisville Slugger — something I’d fix right away, pronto, ándale, if I had kids here. The fire hydrants, busted, are dry.

The Zamoras’ house is pink with dark-green eaves. Spike cactus blooms on either side of the porch. A stiff plastic hose curls on a peg by the door.

When I arrive — it’s a ten-minute drive from Cal’s — Julio’s trying to figure out the plumbing in his kitchen. He tells me he’s just spent $780 on a new washer and dryer.

I say, “Can I give you a hand?”

“Sure. Grab that wrench for me.”

Some afternoons he cooks hamburgers at a Prince’s Drive-In; two nights a week he fries shrimp at a Chinese take-out on Wheeler. Eight months ago, he and his wife, Lira, and their five children lived in a small apartment in the Fourth Ward, behind a Southern Pacific Railroad crossing. Now, with two jobs, he can afford to rent this place.

“Lira downtown today?” I ask.

“Yeah. Pounding those fucking doors.”

“No luck?”

“Naw. I tell her, she’s gonna have to try a little harder. Small businesses, banks.” She’s been looking for work for a year. “Earn her keep around here.” He laughs, but the ripple in his throat is shallow and sad.

Twice in the last year, I’ve noticed bruises on Lira’s cheeks. Once, she had a black eye. She won’t talk about herself. “Every morning at eight, she catches a Metro bus downtown and interviews all day,” Julio explained to me once. “Then she comes home at seven to fix dinner for the children.”

Last week, on a whim, I stopped by while Julio was still at work, hoping to get her to chat. The timing was bad; she was exhausted from the bus, the kids were hungry, hanging all over her — “Off!” she howled, like someone in near-fatal distress — while she pulled knives and spoons, pots and pans, from cupboards, cabinets, drawers. I asked her how she was doing.

She just smiled.

Fidgeting, wishing I could vanish through the floorboards, I told her I’d recently seen up-to-date employment guides in my friend Cal’s bookstore.

She said she’d check them out. Then, politely, “Excuse me.”

“Sure,” I said, and left as quickly as I could.

Now, as Julio and I hammer beneath the sink, Manuel, his eight-year-old — my favorite kid, always happy, active as a beetle — sings into my portable tape recorder:

Julio laughs. “What a morbid little song. ‘No Llores,”’ he says, “is a funeral dirge.”

I pull a pencil from my pocket and jot that down.

Years ago, in an informal study when I started the press, I discovered that white Houston stereotypes Mexicans according to their food behavior (“greaser,” “pepper-belly,” “frijoles-guzzler”). Now, I want to know what Latins whisper about norteños.

After the washer’s hooked up in the pantry, Julio opens a plastic tub of salsa and a bag of tortilla chips and sets them on his rickety kitchen table. Manuel listens to the Astros on the radio.

The house is packed to its peeling pine rafters with keepsakes, toys, pages of jubilant scribbles by the kids, the sweet-and-sour smells of brimming life — gifts I expected to gather someday myself, I think, glancing at Julio’s boy before we settle down to work.

“Okay, how do we start?” Julio asks.

“Well,” I say, switching on the recorder. Shaky — over what? what the hell? what might have been! — I fumble it onto the table. “Do you have certain names — derogatory terms — for Anglos?”

“Let me see. Yes. Sometimes we call you Jamónes.”

“What does it mean?”

“Ham-Eaters. You know, you’re big eaters of pork.”

“What else?”

“Bolillo, Rolling Pin. Because of the way you move, I guess, straight-ahead, arrogant. I never really knew, it’s just something I heard from my father. He used to tell us stories at night — big hombre, dark like an African. He taught me nothing is more important than Family.”

I nod.

“Niño, Family, it’s the solid rock of life, he used to say.” He laughs, then gestures at the blinking red light on my machine. “So. This will be another book?”

“Maybe part of one,” I say. “I don’t know. I’m running out of money.”

He grasps my knee, surprising me. He’s always surprising me, switching gears — happy to sad, wistful to tough. In all our talks, I’ve yet to learn how to read him. “Whatever happens, you mustn’t quit, George. It’s a good thing you’re doing, telling our stories to the Anglos.”

I rub my eyes; before my zero, my zip, with Cal today, I logged eight and a half hours at the newspaper.

“I swear, George, you work like a damn Mexican.” Julio chuckles. “We should quit this, eh? You need to go home, I think, and let your lady make you a spicy dinner. Some beans, maybe, smothered in butter? A beer.”

Children shout, playing catch down the street. “If I had a lady,” I say, and here it is, gasping fatally out in the open: my salty, slippery grief, spoken aloud for the first time in months.

Shit, I think, flushing hot.

“A nice-lookin’ fellow like you — no lady?” Julio’s mood is still light. He thinks we’re kidding, as usual.

My hands are trembling now. I almost tell him: The freeway ate her up, man. Swallowed her whole. But he doesn’t need to know this. His world’s overstuffed already — washers, dryers, big black eyes.

“Anglos.” He tsks. “Always too busy for love. You don’t know how to appreciate a good woman.”

“You’re right,” I say.

“Sometimes, when I see white folks dance?”

“Yeah?”

“I think to myself, ‘How can they be so clumsy with their bodies, and still make babies?’”

I try to laugh.

“No, really,” Julio says. He touches my shoulder, man to man. “It makes me very sad.”

Leaving, a few minutes later, I see Lira at the end of the block, stepping from a steaming silver bus, gripping a grocery bag. I wave through the windshield of my car, but she doesn’t see me. Her eyes are on her own front door — a wide, cautious stare, like keeping sight of a possibly rabid animal. She’s lovely, a deep, rich brown, her bare arms slightly muscled, her blouse and green skirt neat despite what I imagine to be the hardships of her day (“Looks to me, lady, like you’ve got no real experience. Sorry.”) and the indignity of pressing bus crowds. Proofreader? Editorial assistant? I can’t afford to hire anyone.

I wave again. She still hasn’t noticed my car’s slow turning. Julio’s waiting, now, in the open doorway. Her stride quickens. She grasps the bag and it tears a bit at the bottom.

Nearby, children laugh and scream, playfully.

My weekly visits with the Thuots are usually tenser than my sessions with Julio Zamora. A year ago, when I met them, they stood with their arms folded and gave me a wide berth. Later, a teacher friend told me that in most Asian cultures, folding one’s arms is a gesture of honor; distance signals respect. In time, the Thuots sang into my tape recorder, shared stories and jokes. They showed me bracelets they’d made from American artillery scraps.

Mr. Thuot is stooped, wrinkled, and dark. His wife is tall, with slender, peach-colored ears. They have four boys and two girls, none of them getting an education at the moment, though three of the boys are old enough for high school. Their apartment overlooks a deep part of the bayou; beyond it, the rice mills of American Grain, gleaming, white, tall as rockets.

The family bathes in water from the stream. Mr. Thuot and the boys haul it in buckets to a giant steel tub in the center of their living room. I’ve told them the bayou’s polluted — I’ve seen car doors, portable freezers, bicycle mirrors rusting in the mud. The Thuots always drink the fresh Ozarka water I bring them, shear the plastic bottles in half, and use them to carry dirty bathwater up the banks.

Tonight the streets are muggy and hot. A steamy film clings to the bayou’s surface.

I hand Mr. Thuot a stack of applications for employment — gas stations, grocery stores — saving some for Lira Zamora. My nerves have leveled out since leaving Julio’s place, but I’m eager to finish my business, deal poker with my office mates, and get my mind off myself tonight.

“Thank you,” Mr. Thuot says. No smile.

He sits on the couch, back straight, waiting for me to turn on my Sony. His wife sits beside him. “We don’t have to do this,” I say, noting his mood.

Curtly, he nods, waves his hand. His English is good. I love his family stories. I’m the bearer, now, of other families’ stories.

“More about my birthplace?” he asks. “My — how do you put it — my ‘origin’?”

“What haven’t we covered so far?”

“Grandfather. Distant cousins. Yes?” He hands me a blue dish with slices of orange, offers me green tea.

Last August, on my first visit, I learned that his home village, Kontum, a series of bamboo huts in the Annam Cordillera highlands, was a lush, fertile place, brimming with kids. Mr. Thuot had been a farmer and a fisherman. The streams were treacherous, full of crocodiles, so for luck he’d tattooed a green snake on his chest (a folk practice I’ve traced to the fourteenth century).

On that same visit, Mrs. Thuot told me that in the mountains, married couples often whispered sibling terms — “Yes, my brother, yes, yes!”—while making love: a practice common also in Thailand.

“How about this, instead,” I tell Mr. Thuot now. “Could you share with me intimate words for the pleasures you feel with your wife?”

For a moment, as I speak, my mind loops back to Jean, her small, puckered mouth trying desperately to tell me something.

Mr. Thuot trusts me and enjoys our talks, but he seems, this evening, grim. The tape hisses and we avoid each other’s eyes.

Finally, I turn off the recorder and start to leave. Mrs. Thuot, worried that her husband has offended me (her primary domestic duty, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is to sweep unpleasantness out of her home), motions for me to sit back down. She rummages in a battered trunk full of keepsakes, pulling out three small gongs: metal, with upturned rims. Excitedly, she gestures for her husband to explain.

“He is not interested — ”

“Yes,” I say. “I am. Please.” My own English always stiffens around him.

Delicately, he touches each gong. “These we use on several occasions. Funerals, feasts. We had many gongs, but three was all we could pack, fleeing the war. The largest is called Knah. Part of a set of six. When they are stored together, one inside the other, they form concentric circles. The smaller gongs are Ching. They come in sets of three. We use at family dinner.”

Mrs. Thuot mimes the picking of chopsticks. I laugh and join her. Mr. Thuot smiles, raises his glass of tea — “To the children,” he toasts, “to the high sky of their future, yes?”—and, with his long yellow nails, taps the tiny Ching.

Later, as I’m leaving, Mrs. Thuot tells me, “A family, it — they? — vanished last night.” We’re standing in a vacant lot behind her apartment, where I’ve parked my dusty Chrysler. “Right over there. That one.” She points to an unpainted door in the building next to hers. “This is why my husband is distracted for you.” Her eyes mist.

In this part of town, “vanished” could mean anything. Deported. Chased away by crack dealers, Chicano gangs, black gangs, white gangs, Asian gangs. Shot to death.

“It scares me when they vanish,” she says.

“Yes.”

As if to punctuate her thought, a car squeals its tires, in the darkness down by the bayou.

“Do you have everything you need right now?” I ask.

Sadly, she smiles. We squeeze hands. “People need so much,” she says. “Who can tell?”

“I know.” I kiss her lilac-scented cheek. “I know.”

My own family vanished a year ago on the Gulf Coast Freeway. “Freak,” said the first officer on the scene. In my daze, I thought he meant me, for surviving, and I agreed with him. “No, no.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “I meant the accident.”

All I remember is a candy-red pickup veering into our lane: lawn mowers, trash barrels, rakes in its bed. Then, I’m standing by the road, in the hot, sucking wind of cars going past, telling the officer my name.

How do I explain all this — my clumsiness, my white-boy sadness — to Julio Zamora? Or to anyone? Plain, careful English seems inadequate, each word a slap to memory’s pale face.

As a folklorist, someone who’s spent his whole adult life studying the planet’s cultures, I’ve developed a long mental list of useful quotes.

“Six feet of earth make all men of one size,” says an old American proverb.

James Russell Lowell, speaking of President Garfield, said, “The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on … to die for and be buried in.”

But no wise words came to me that day on the freeway. Instead, it was Dickens I recalled. Simple, brutal, direct: “Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

I couldn’t see my parents or my wife. By the time I understood what was happening, emergency personnel (white coats; muted, efficient expressions) had laid sheets across their bodies. Their contours looked massive, weightier than any of them had been, with their light, lovely laughter, their silly little dance steps whenever they felt happy.

The owner of the truck, an independent yardman, had also died in the crash. No family. Uninsured.

I’d been behind the wheel. My father’s car. Driving us to a new sushi restaurant in Galveston. All his life, Dad had tooled around in behemoths — Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs, impervious to impact. But a negligence suit from an injured employee had wiped out his refinery company and most of his savings; in his forced retirement, he’d bought a Honda hatchback.

I was the only one, that evening, wearing a seatbelt: the reason I walked away, a bald, vague official told me. Later, he assured me I’d done everything possible to avoid the accident. No chance I could have braked in time. A bear of a cop, a kid, patted my arm. “It was just,” he said, “one of those things, eh?”

Blindsided, jolted from my feelings, I stayed busy, quiet, letting other people talk, interviewing the Thuots and the Zamoras. Their stories saw me through those first few awful months. Tell me more about the mountains. What’s Jalisco like in the summer? White folks what? Yes, yes, we’re guilty of that, I suppose and much more, besides.

In our five years together, Jean and I had never huddled with a lawyer. Why draft wills? we thought. What did either of us own that smelled of real money? And though we joked about aging and dying, like most people, we thought we’d live forever.

My parents’ papers didn’t specify where, or how, they wanted to be buried. I’d never heard them discuss it.

I don’t recall, in the bog of last year, how I made up my mind. I do remember worrying that if I waited too long, they’d all mummify, like Norman Bates’s old lady in Psycho. That happened in Houston, despite the humidity. Occasionally, a story made the paper: a cop would find the preserved body of an elderly man or woman in a rocking chair, in a warm, dry house the neighbors never checked.

Also, I knew the folk legends. Saint Francis Xavier had been saved intact since the sixteenth century in the town of Goa, on the Indian subcontinent. Supplicants are no longer allowed to see his corpse; a worshipper bit off his toe one year in a fever of religious ecstasy.

Clearly, I wasn’t thinking rationally when I had to let go of my family.

I settled on the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery on South Ruthven Street, a pretty little place I’d passed many times on my way to work. Predominantly Mexican Catholic, it contains some of the best grutas, or personal shrines, in Texas. Sandstone, granite, reddish-brown lava, all of its graves face east: sunrise, fresh hope.

Tonight, as I swing into the parking garage, the newspaper building blazes blue and orange under the freeway’s sodium lights. The garage smells of oil and old rotting lunch meats (from Sam’s Lone Star Kosher Deli, nearby), stuffed in trash cans.

“Evening, Bob,” I greet the security guard.

He hitches his belt up over his belly. His keys rattle. “Hiya, Mr. Palmer.” He’s lethargic and slow, with the patchy red face of a drinker. Not much good in an emergency, probably, but his presence reassures me. He’s one of the city’s familiar signposts, someone whose location I can always count on.

I take the elevator to the fifth floor, where I type-and-enter my days. As soon as my father lost his savings (he’d been the primary benefactor of my fledgling little press), I found this job at the paper, penning obituaries and occasional fillers.

“Nothing fancy, now. Don’t try to be goddam Balzac,” the managing editor, a pugnacious old gent named Penrose, told me the morning he took me on. “These days, the public’s reading level hovers — last time I checked the gloomy goddam figures — somewhere between second and third grade. You want to be literary, go park yourself on a street corner, shouting lousy poems about the lousy whatever.”

“What about news?” I asked. “What about generating my own stories? What about — ”

“Whoa, son. Forget the news. I hand you a simple format, you fill it in. Got it?”

Ode to the Status Quo. “Got it,” I said.

Most of my colleagues at the paper are quick and efficient, in and out of the office each day with barely a grumble or flourish, but a small group of us — Tony, from the church beat (the most profane man I’ve ever met), Ed Branigan, a typesetter, Scott Lehman, who covers the cops, and me — we meet late nightly for cards. None of us have family waiting at home. Tony’s separated from his wife; Ed and Scott are both divorced. We’re all insomniacs — which is what you say, when you’re grown, instead of admitting you’re afraid of the dark.

When I bustle in tonight, the boys are dealing their first round of Texas Hold’em on Tony’s metal desk. Cigarette smoke swarms the snicking yellow lights. The radio’s tuned to the blues: My man’s a busted tire on a muddy old road in Alabam.

“George! God, man, am I glad to see you,” Tony says. “This game sucks with only three.”

“Just like love.”

“You in?”

“I’m in.” I stow my recordings of Julio Zamora and Mr. Thuot in my gray steel desk.

“Tony, man, you shuffle these cards?” Ed asks.

“He never shuffles the cards,” Scott says. “Watch him. He just messes them up a little.”

I pull up a chair. “‘Shuffle’ is not in his vocabulary. ‘Shuffle’ is a sacred, ancient wisdom he’s somehow failed to grasp.”

“Yakking with your fer’ners?” Tony kids me.

“Yep.”

“Fuckin’ rice-eaters.” I count quietly to ten. He runs a hand across his bald spot. It’s shaped a little like Australia. “See you and raise you,” he says.

“Cold, brother.”

“Call.”

“Boat.”

“Damn. You didn’t shuffle.” Ed grabs his paunch as though he’s had a pain.

Tony reels off golfing jokes involving Protestant ministers, rabbis, priests. They all end with some form of indecent exposure. Scott and Ed are clawing into their wallets, inflicting on each other the latest snapshots of their kids, tamping back tears.

I don’t know what I’d do without these guys, but tonight — lately — I’m not sure why I’m with them, either.

“You’re drifting, George,” Tony warns me. “Cut ‘em.”

“Sorry.” I tap the tattered deck. “They’re good.”

Scott’s pale and thin from eating mostly Oreos — half-Oreos. He plucks them apart, chucks the creamy side, a nod to health. Ed’s a sure-fire heart attack: tomorrow, the day after. You can almost hear him ticking.

Pathetic.

And here I am.

“How many?”

“What?”

“Cards, George. How many cards?”

“Oh. Two.”

“I know about you,” Scott said to me one afternoon in the hall, near the men’s room with its river-water smell and its big red door. He’s short and aggressive and never finished his psychology degree. In the middle of a call or a raise, he’ll claim he can read our faces, sniff out our bluffs. But he always winds up losing.

“What is it you think you know, Scott?”

He swallowed the last of the ham sandwich he’d been nibbling all day, along with his cookies, and crumpled his yellow napkin. “The reason you’re so quiet. Why you’d rather just listen to others. Tape them and stuff.”

“And why is that?”

“The accident.” He can’t hide his pride, whenever he launches these little insight bombs. He’s lucky we still let him play with us. “You think you should have died.”

I stood limp against the bathroom door, like a well-thumbed poster for a long-past event. “Scott, listen — ”

“Survivor guilt. Why me, right? The miracle of your continuance.” He wrapped his fingers in his napkin and poked me in the chest. “Naturally, you’re anguished about it, George, so you imagine yourself gone.”

“You’re full of shit,” I told him, and he grinned.

Tonight, as the fellows joke and laugh — Scott watching, gleefully, anticipating my every bluff — I fold and fold and fold.

Driving home, late, I smell the city’s labors: dirt and sweat, the soft tar of the roads, the balanced tension of girders, rust, and air. Lights pulse. Jean loved these nights, stark and steamy.

Magnolia trees cluster around paint-peeled wooden homes on the edge of the First Ward. Moonlight glints off the glass of the downtown towers, blue and brown, green and gold, and makes glowing whips of phone lines webbed above hot streets.

The no-zoned neighborhoods make Houston a constant surprise: a palm reader next to a Republican campaign headquarters, a hot-tub dealer next to a strict-bricked Baptist church. One minute, the city’s a wise old matriarch — calm, cheerful, cautious — next thing you know, she’s ripped off her mask to reveal a snide, sneaky kid.

Tonight, my part of town — run-down, poor, slammed hard by AIDS — is dark and quiet. If I’d had the money, I might have moved. But I still live in the cheap little house I shared with Jean — a two-bedroom, musty with dust and too many memories in the old Montrose neighborhood, behind a small outfit, Sno King, that manufactures ice-makers. Sometimes, deep into the night, an out-of-whack ice-maker flings watery cubes at the walls. Jean and I used to laugh about it, lying in bed. Or we’d argue about having kids, after making love to a series of frozen thumps — the only time we ever fought.

Turns out, I wanted babies, she didn’t.

“Too settled, too tired,” she always said, like a long-standing threat, and I wondered, hearing the thrust of her voice, if she was capable of physical violence.

With the house, it was money. Mortgage insurance. Escrow. The usual worries. But the baby-talk — that riled her beyond reason.

“Julio’s little boy, Manuel, he’s so pretty, Jean, and lively,” I told her the night I met the Zamoras. I played her a tape of his voice. “I wish you could see him — ”

“George, please. I told you before we were married, I wasn’t interested in the diaper-mill. I’m an old lady.” (In her late forties, she was just a few years older than I.)

I was a “professional fuck-up,” she told me once — “I don’t think people really want to read this stuff, do they?”—but she loved me, she said, for my “empathy skills.” The first night I spent at her place, I offered to draw her a bath. She sat on her bed and cried. “No one’s ever done that for me before,” she said. “It’s so sweet.” She reached for my hand. I dried her face with a towel. “You’re a caretaker-type, aren’t you?”

I’d never thought of myself that way, but I liked who I was in her eyes. She was a physics professor at Rice, and gave me stability, maturity, calm.

We made — as folks like to say here in pigskin-crazy Texas — a pretty good team.

Now each ice ping recalls her face. “Tony was the big winner tonight,” I tell her. Gauzy as frost, she’s wafting in front of my pillow. Every night she visits, in a pale-white dress and blouse. Perfect hair. “I dropped forty bucks. Pathetic.”

She circles my head. I curse my imagination. With a punch of my pillow (aiming straight for its cottony heart), Jean disappears, replaced by the vibrant spirits of my current life: Mrs. Thuot sipping tea, Manuel shouting joyfully in the street, Lira hiding a puffy red welt on her face.

Fuck.

I shut my eyes and try to ease my breathing.

Two years ago — three? — Jean planted a skinny apple tree in our front yard. Now it whispers in a flat southerly breeze.

Shhh. Shhh.

On Saturdays and Sundays I hate to impose myself on the Thuots and the Zamoras. After looking for work, scrambling for food, they’ve earned a rest from the great white world.

So I drive over to the Shamrock Six, a multiplex cinema catering mostly to blacks. What I like about the place is its family feel — generations merge here, at the early-bird show, to squeal or shout at the murder mysteries, the love stories, and so confirm their fellowship, their superiority to the fools onscreen. It’s the most Southern place in town, like a holy-roller country church. “Yeah! You got it, slick!” the audience screams at actors moving stiffly toward a shoot-out or a teary embrace.

“Brother dead!”

“No he ain’t, he gonna rip that sucker’s drawers!”

“Fine-lookin’ mama!”

Meanwhile, the rest of Houston, belonging to the wide-open West, whips about in its cars — one person, two at the most, per set of wheels — pursuing happiness, Manifest Destiny, today’s equivalent of gold: a makeover, a microwave oven, a seat behind home plate.

Today, Blood Orgy is showing at the Shamrock, and I’m mighty content with my popcorn and my spot in the back row, with a wide-angle view of the theater and the families laughing, quibbling, jostling for a view of the screen. An old woman wipes a baby’s face. Two boys wrestle over a Milky Way bar. A middle-aged couple sneaks a kiss. Then we’re drenched in humming blue light, and an actress seems to be swallowed by an alien werewolf, or a radioactive schnauzer, I can’t tell.

I sit through two showings.

Outside, as I’m leaving, after four and a half hours in the dark, I see a big, oak-colored man, beneath the marquee, grasping a woman’s chin. “You look at me when I’m talking to you!” he says. “That compute wit you, bitch?” They’re standing in a sweaty crowd of kids. When he drops his hand, the woman closes her eyes and rubs her face, slowly.

I try to adjust my eyes.

I’m reminded of Lira Zamora. Too messy, none of my business, troubles of my own.. In the presence of actual violence, I realize how flimsy my little evasions are.

I’ve been an asshole. For months. Doing nothing.

Talking to ghosts. Dreaming of jackpots.

Move! I think, but I stand and watch the couple. Eventually, they shuffle away, his hand a fat clamp on her arm.

The sun on my head feels cold.

Monday evening, I swing by the Zamoras’ at seven just as I figure Lira is stepping off the bus (and Julio’s still got half an hour at the take-out). For an icebreaker — thwack! — I’ve brought a couple of new Spidermans for Manuel and a copy of Job Opportunities: Houston and Environs for Lira. Cal let me have it half-price — it’s a year out of date.

She’s not happy to see me. As she walks from the bus at the corner, Manuel runs past me on the porch. “The Kryptonite’s in my shorts!” he shouts, grabbing his jeans.

“Oh no! I’m … I’m losing my strength!” I wither onto the lawn.

“Ha ha! The world is mine!” He rushes into the house.

“Hello,” I say softly to Lira, brushing dried grass from my pants. “Can I help you with those?”

She frowns, and tightens her grip on three small grocery bags. “No, thank you.” She’s got Frida Kahlo eyebrows: black and wiry, a single little rope.

“I’ve been meaning to bring you a copy of this.” I pick the job book off the porch step.

I’d spent the weekend planning my visit, what I might say. It hadn’t gone well the first time I’d tried to talk to her alone. Who did I think I was? Her rescuer? Her hero? Spiderman, for chrissakes?

“Very kind,” she says. She’s gathered her hair into a bun the size of a tennis ball. On her cheek, a dark green bruise, big as an oak leaf.

“The kids? They’re okay?” I say. “Manuel seems — ”

“Yes. Fine,” she says. In her pink-and-yellow dress, she’s not much bigger than a kid herself.

I reach to touch the swelling on her face. She startles, and I pull back. My fingers haven’t felt a woman’s skin since Jean’s. “I’m sorry, Lira. It’s none of my business, but I’ve been worried about you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while, but — ” I’m aware that my words are too intimate. I don’t know her well enough to say these things. “Can you tell me?”

She moves past me, into the house.

“Has someone been hitting you?” I ask, standing in the doorway. Now my cheek begins to flame.

“No. No one,” she answers.

“Julio?”

“You’re very thoughtful, but — ”

“Lira, I want to be your friend.”

She sets her bags on a coffee table. The kids are running and screaming in a back room. “Quiet!” she yells. Then, to me: “Julio is happy to tell you his stories. But I never agreed to this.”

It’s true. A year or so ago, I came poking around this neighborhood, risking ridicule, indifference, even violence, looking for people who would talk to me. Most folks turned away. Julio, gregarious, generous, surprised me by welcoming me into his home.

But Lira had never been friendly.

“I don’t mean to impose,” I tell her now, stepping into the house. “But I’ve come to care for your family.”

“What about your own family?” she says. “Don’t they need you?”

I can’t answer her. Not yet. My cheek is pounding now.

“Quiet!” she screams again at her kids, stopping a heavy thumping in the back room. You want to hear a story, is that it?” she asks me.

“Yes. Sure.”

“All right then.” Some kind of moisture is leaking from one of the grocery bags. Flies batter the front screen door. She loosens her bun and grips her hair, as if clinging to the rigging of a ship. “When I was a girl in Jalisco, my mother sent me each day to buy eggs from a neighbor who lived across the highway from our house,” she begins. “It was a very busy highway, leading to big market centers far away to the west. Buses and trucks, lots of noise, keeping us all awake, my brothers and sisters, even at night. Whenever she sent me for the eggs, my mother warned me so hard to be careful — she wanted to impress on me the danger — I always cried, carrying my little basket.”

Dogs bark down the block. I’m wishing I’d jammed my Sony into my pocket, but it’s still in the car. Cicadas creak in the trees.

“One day, I was on my way home — proud of the six or seven large brown eggs I’d chosen — when I saw an old woman, a flower-seller clutching dozens of white roses, start to cross the road ahead of me. I looked down the highway. I heard the rumble of a truck, the shifting of its gears, awful, like a cat’s angry whine … can you guess the rest of my story?”

The sun is setting behind Houston’s huge glass buildings, nearby. The house is getting dark. “I’m afraid I can.”

“I shouted and shouted. I don’t know if perhaps she was deaf … I’ll never forget her skirts, beautiful black and red, in the wind of the truck, the scattered flowers and the scream. I fell to the dirt, dropping my basket, cracking the eggs.”

She stands for a moment, watching light fade through her lace curtains. “I don’t even have words in my own language to describe how this memory makes me feel … how it twists me inside … telling stories to you, in English — ”

“You just did a bang-up job,” I say. “Your English is wonderful.”

“Well.…”

“I understand what you feel, Lira. Really.” I hesitate. “I lost my family. Last year. On a highway,” I manage to tell her.

She looks at me as though she’ll offer me the comfort of her hair.

Just then Manuel lurches, giggling, into the room, bumping my legs, and clamps his mother’s calf. “Mama, I’m hungry!”

In a mad race, the other kids swarm her: Angelina, Roberto, Maria. Chatito, the youngest, cries from his crib in the back.

Lira smiles at me, wearily. “Perhaps you should join us next month for the Day of the Dead,” she says. “When people we love have left this world of sorrows, we prepare their favorite dishes for them. You know the custom?”

“Yes. A sort of communion with family ghosts?”

“And with those of us who must go on.”

“Hungry hungry hungry!” Manuel yelps, and I offer to watch her babies while Lira fixes supper. “Yes yes, read to me!” Manuel says. “Spiderman! Spiderman and Dr. Octopus!”

When I turn to pick him up, I see Julio slouched, motionless, in the doorway. He’s holding a white apron, stained with hot mustard, sweet-and-sour sauce. He’s sweating and tired. “George,” he says glumly.

“Julio.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I dropped by to see how things were going.”

“Lira didn’t tell me you were coming.”

She shivers, just slightly, rubbing her arms. “I didn’t know,” she says. Shadows drape the room now. “Excuse me.” She heads for the kitchen. The kids, a noisy gaggle, scramble after her.

Julio stares at me strangely. Exhaustion? Suspicion? I’ve never seen him this quiet. Have I broken a rule, entering his home, meeting his wife while he was gone?

With tornado-like swiftness, he offers me a smile. “You got the transcript?”

“The what?”

“The last interview we did.” He shuffles into the pantry, next to the kitchen.

I confess, “I haven’t typed it up.”

He squeezes his apron and tosses it into the washer. From the dryer he pulls a wad of laundry, still soggy. “Why not?” He loves reading about his family.

“Julio, the press is in arrears.”

“Rears?” He kicks the machine.

“I told you I’m running out of money. I can barely make my house payments right now. The books don’t sell — ”

“This fucker. We didn’t hook it up right.”

“The chain stores won’t touch them,” I tell him. “The guy at Cal’s — he’s the only one who’s shown any real interest in the past, and even he won’t take them any more. To tell you the truth, I’m wondering if there’s any point in writing a new one.”

“Fuckin Jamón,” he says.

Me?

Yes, he’s staring at me. The tornado has shifted paths again. A can opener buzzes in the kitchen.

Julio shoves a shirt and pants into the dryer. “I gave you all that information for nothing?”

“No, of course not.”

His voice isn’t loud, but he’s tapping his feet: big, bare, brown on the gritty yellow carpet.

I move away from him. Surely it’s the dryer, the long day at work. “I’m looking for funding,” I say. A lie. No one’ll back me, with no hope of profit. “I’ll let you know.”

“To you, it’s just a project, George. But it’s my goddam life.” He slaps himself on the chest.

In his anguished voice I hear my wife. “It’s my body” she used to tell me, whenever we talked about having kids. “One little spurt and the story’s all over for you, George, but me — assuming my plumbing still works — I’d swell up big as the house. No thanks.” “All right,” I told her. “I understand. Forget it.”

“All right,” I tell Julio now.

“No one cares about my life, right? My troubles. I’ll die an invisible man, like all the other wetbacks.”

“Julio — ”

“I have to clean this apron now, George. Excuse me.”

“Okay,” I say. “You’re right. My fault. I’ll be in touch. Julio, your stories are important to me. All right?”

“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not. How do I know?” His voice shakes with rage. “Why am I the only one carrying his goddam weight around here? Hm? The only one keeping his word?” Lira drops a glass in the kitchen. Julio’s shoulders sag. “Hijo!” he yells out the dusty pantry window at Roberto, who’s just scampered by with a ball. “Get your little ass in here and pick up your room! I can’t do it all!”

The dryer lurches loudly at the wall.

Quietly, I let myself out, catching Lira’s eye. She’s somber, sadly pretty. A pair of kids hops around her. Food steams from crusty pots on the stove. Her face says, I never agreed to this.

In the men’s room at work, I examine my stinging face. Nothing. Back in the newsroom I tell the guys about Cal. I know he’s a poker player, too.

“Hey, if his money’s good, and his card savvy’s poor, I have no objection to letting him in,” Ed says. “I mean, the man owns a bookstore, how savvy can he be, right?”

“Yeah,” Tony says, “the game could use fresh blood.”

I shuffle the deck in my hand. Nine of hearts, three of spades, queen, queen — both Jean. There it is again. A wasp on my cheek.

“Hit me with a big one,” Scott says.

“Two for me.”

“One.”

The nip of a slap.

“George, you in this round?”

“No. Deal past me.” My jaw is throbbing now. The radio hums some “dirty mama” blues.

I stand and slouch against the water cooler. Bubbles blast through the bottle, a tiny depth-charge.

My chest heaves.

You want to hear a story, is that it?

The day of the crash, Jean and I fought before we picked up my folks.

There.

It’s something I hadn’t wanted to dwell on, these past dozen months, though late at night, just before falling asleep, Jean hovering quietly above me, I couldn’t forget, of course.

Kids: our standard disagreement. In the city’s vaporous heat, it got out of hand. We were tired that day. All afternoon we’d been paying bills. Cleaning the house.

“Sixes and sevens.”

“Straight.”

“Your deal.”

“Jean — ”

“Stop blaming me!”

“Sweetie, I’m not blaming you. You said it yourself once. I’m the caretaker-type — ”

She whirled.

Later, on the freeway (her slap still fierce on my cheek), I noticed, just barely, the pickup swerve into my lane. Afterward, an investigator told me, “You didn’t have time to breathe, man, much less brake or change course.”

But I swear, I remember a second or two, an instant of instinct, when I looked into the mirror and found my wife’s chilly anger.

Guilty. And of much more, besides.

Back in my chair. Tony slams the deck in front of me. “Cut ‘em. Okay, low spade in the hole splits the pot. Ante up, boys.”

“Pathetic,” I mumble — to steady my breath.

“What’s that?” Tony asks.

Scott watches me closely. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, “if you’re not going to concentrate, George.” He chomps an Oreo.

“Hey, I’m a survivor” I say. “What about you?” And I cough up the last quarter from my pocket.

Later, at home, I listen to the rustling of apple leaves outside my bedroom window. The day Jean planted the tree, she told me, “When I was little, my mother used to read me all sorts of bedtime stories, but nothing thrilled me more than the tales of Johnny Appleseed. It was the most wonderful thing, imagining him spreading this lovely fruit around the world. I begged her and begged her for an apple tree in our yard. Finally, my father bought one, and for years I watched it grow.”

I rubbed her back. She was sore from shoveling dirt.

“Then, in college, studying physics — Newton’s apple, you know? I was delighted all over again. Gravity, spreading seeds … for me, apples became this solid connection to the earth. I know it sounds silly, George, but right then, I swore I’d plant an apple tree wherever I lived.”

“It’s not silly,” I said. I drew her a bath and washed the dirt from her arms.

Now she’s listing here and there, about three feet from my face. Diffuse as lamplight, she wears the cotton gloves she wore to plant the tree. A faint odor of loam.

“Good-night,” I say. She shimmers like water, then fades.

In the middle of the night, I wake from my first wet dream in — how many years? Since long before my marriage. I was walking along the bayou with Lira, the water like silk. I reached to touch a bruise on her face; she opened her mouth and took my thumb between her lips.

I felt the warmth at my waist.

Now the rain comes hard, stirring mud in beds where Jean used to grow marigolds, roses, lilies, thyme, and dill. The apple tree moves to and fro: a happy child, clapping.

“Heads up, boyo! Pair of first-class obits here. They need to be somber and respectful, mindful of the city’s major loss,” Penrose told me this morning. He handed me a packet of photos. A big-shot lawyer and a real estate developer. Heart attack. Stroke.

“No ‘Good riddance’?” I said. ‘“O happy day’?”

“Save that searing wit for your two-bit card games, son. And on that other matter — it’s good research. But no one wants to read about it.”

I’d taken a chance and shown him Houston’s Latin Refugees, suggested running it in the paper, a two- or-three-part series. Community service? He’d agreed to look it over.

“It’s a downer. People want to feel good about their community.” He tapped the black-and-white lawyer. “Got it?”

“Yeah,” I said. Fucking Jamón. “Thanks for taking the time.”

On my lunch break I run by Sam’s Deli — Ed wanted turkey, Tony a hoagie.

Ash smudges the air, from an aggravated volcano south of the Rio Grande. In front of me, a flatbed pickup is hauling empty Cokes. The bottles fill with powder.

Stopping at Cal’s, I notice the Bookmobile parked by his curb. I haven’t seen it in weeks. A year or so ago, before tumbling oil prices pinched his sales, he bought this custom-made van as an advertising gimmick. Plexiglas, solid, tinted brown. Every time a customer plunked down a hundred dollars or more, he’d give them a ride in the Bookmobile. “Cruising the freeways,” he’d say, “with only a river of sweet air between you and freedom and the road.” For a while it was a popular sales ploy. Now he’s into raffles.

“Thought you’d sold that clunker,” I tease Cal, walking in, testing his mood before pitching him again.

He’s stacking ratty paperbacks: cookbooks, astrology guides, an unauthorized biography of Mamie Eisenhower. “Hm?”

“The Bookmobile.” I offer him some Fritos. Sam’s sells only the big bags, and I can’t ever finish them.

“Oh. Ray’s learning to drive,” Cal says. “So I been lending him my horsepower here — against my better judgment. Boy’s a damn fireball when he scoots behind the wheel.”

“How’s his dad?”

“Goner. Ghost.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear it.”

Just then, Ray himself appears, emerging from a tiny bathroom in the back. “Mr. Palmer! Good to see you,” he says.

“Hey, Ray. You too.” He’s clean-shaven now. “I was just asking about your pa.”

Ray nods. “He’s had some pain, I guess … and, you know, they’re not sure they got it all … I mean, the cancer …” His eyes glisten; his voice crumples.

“Got your car picked out?” I ask. “Classic Mustang? Thunderbird?”

But my little evasion is far too clumsy. “Excuse me,” he says, wiping his nose, and scuffles back to the john.

“Poor kid,” I say. “Cal, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Billy’s a damn fighter, but it looks like this is one ol’ bear he’s not going to bust.”

“Can I help?”

He tosses Mamie onto a fat Jackie O. “Come to think of it, there is something you can do. Your buddy, Ed What’s-His-Name, he dropped in the other day looking for the latest Stephen King. Says you fellows got a card game.”

Good ol’ Ed. He did just as I asked him to. “Yeah, we deal a hand or two.”

Ray’s back now, trying to smile, his nose and eyes raw beets.

“Billy’s the best damn bluffer you ever saw.…’course, he hasn’t been able to play. Two of my other cronies moved out of town … anyways, this shindig of yours.” He slaps a discount tag on M.F.K. Fisher. “Closed shop, or what?”

Before I can answer, Ray chimes in, “Maybe you two should work a deal, Unc. You stock some of Mr. Palmer’s books, he puts a word in for you with his poker pals.”

Glory! I want to kiss the kid. I’d been wondering how to open my bid.

Ray blows his nose.

“Well now.” I scratch my chin. Delivery trucks scurry past us on the street. Pizzas, furniture, meat. Bless our culture of exchange. “I suppose I could do that.”

Cal rubs his tired barterer’s eyes. He glances at Ray. “We got us some powwowing to do, kid. About car keys.”

“Come on, Une. I just did you a favor.”

“Shit,” Cal says. He looks at me. “When’s your next game?”

“I’ll let you know, when I drop the books off.” I tell Ray I’d be happy to give him a driving lesson some night.

“I’d like that,” he says, reaching for the Fritos.

“Save up your card money, George. You’re going to need a barrelful.”

“Turkey, George. I ordered turkey,” Ed says. “This is Spam. Or aluminum siding, or something.”

On my desk, a scribbled message: “Call Julio Zamora — Urgent.”

A woman speaking rapid Spanish answers the phone.

“I’m sorry, I can’t … can you please slow down?” I say.

Impatiently, she says, “Mr. Zamora cannot talk to anyone right now.”

“Que pasó?” I ask.

In stilted, rolling-r English, the woman explains to me that Mrs. Zamora came home from the employment agency late this morning and, without a word to her husband, picked up her babies and tossed them into Buffalo Bayou.

“‘Tossed’?” I say. “What do you mean, ‘tossed’?”

“Like dolls, sir. Like old newspapers.”

Goosebumps spatter my arms. “Was anyone hurt?”

Chatito, ten weeks old, drowned, she says. Roberto is missing. Manuel and the others are in shock. The police had handcuffed Mrs. Zamora and driven her away.

“What’s up, man?” Tony watches me from his desk.

“Lira Zamora — ”

“Trouble in taco land?”

Close your eyes, I think. Count to ten. “Any calls for me, take a message, okay?”

“Hey George, you going out again? Can you bring me back some turkey?”

At the mouth of the garage, pulling out in my car, I wave at Bob, half-asleep in his concrete security booth. He doesn’t see me.

I speed down Main Street, past Indonesian restaurants and a Pizza Inn. Car exhaust hangs in willows along the median. The Astrodome rises like an old, pallid whale to the south.

Julio’s neighbors are talking in tight circles on their lawns: men with long shirt-tails, sipping canned beer. Children play near the curb. On the horizon, at the end of the street, Houston’s glassed-in banks tower together like slats in a cyclone fence. The bayou boils around fallen oak limbs, curled like big arthritic hands. Five or six cops unroll a strip of yellow tape. “Back. Get back, please.” One of them shouts into a walkie-talkie, “No floater here. Water’s moving pretty fast. We’re gonna need boats and divers downstream …”

Julio’s lying on his gray-checkered couch, drunk and in tears. Behind him, two whispering young policemen. I tell them I’m a friend. They check my driver’s license, phone in my name. Finally, they let me sit down.

“Julio.” I touch his shoulder. His shirt is limp with sweat. “Julio, what happened?”

Bleary face. “No se…

“Is Lira all right?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, George.”

“Was she angry? Was Lira angry about something? How could this —?”

“She was worn out looking for work. Taking care of the kids.” He spreads his hands. “I don’t know what I could’ve done …”

“It’s all right. Take your time.”

Sunlight bastes the room through the door.

“For a while this morning, after she came home, I wanted to sleep with her, you know. But she said no, that was the problem, we couldn’t afford more kids. I got mad and …” He kicks the table in front of us. I jump. I remember his cloudy face, the night he came home and found me talking to Lira. The cops turn, still whispering. “Then she grabbed Chatito and went out the door with him before I knew what was happening. Clutching a rosary in her hand. When she came back without him, and picked up Angelina, I knew something was wrong, but she was so strong, man, I couldn’t believe the power in her arms. I’d had too many beers.”

I notice a tiny wooden crucifix on the wall, above the television set, a black Christ nailed to its arms. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. The color of the balsam wood, in Jesus’ hands and face, matches Julio’s dark-brown complexion.

Lira had become “religious” in the last few days, he tells me — by which he means “sullen and withdrawn”—as the Day of the Dead approached.

On the television, next to a candle, four tiny clay tablets. Tierras del Santos: pieces of earth, each stamped with a saint’s grave face. Among certain Latin peoples, I’ve learned, these cakes are eaten or dissolved in water as a drink to ease menstrual pain.

Jesus. “Is Lira pregnant again?” I ask Julio now.

He looks at me.

“It’s none of my business, man, but there are ways to prevent that.”

“We watch the moon. Lira says — ” He shakes his head.

“What about the other kids?”

“The man in the ambulance thinks they’ll be okay.”

“Roberto?”

“No se.” He grips my hand. “I don’t know what happened, George. We were a happy family. Lira loved Chatito. She was a good mother to those babies …”

A ripped Spiderman lies at our feet. Manuel’s laughter pops in my head. My throat aches — like I’ve thrown back a double shot of whiskey.

I glance behind us, at the cops. “Julio, have the police checked your immigration status?”

He stares at me, startled. “I’m not sure.”

“If they ask you about it, don’t tell them anything. You’re entitled to a lawyer. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Zamora?” One of the policemen asks Julio to follow him onto the porch.

“You have my work number, right?” I say. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know. Julio?”

“Yes. Okay,” he says.

I squeeze his arm.

He turns. “George?”

“Right here.”

“Tell them.”

“Sure. Anything.”

“Tell the Anglos our story.”

Air-conditioners hum in the city. The freeway shakes. Through my car speakers, Lightnin’ Hopkins croaks:

He strokes the strings like a drum, beats them hard with his hand, up down up down, I turn the tape player up that’s right and then you’re down some more son better watch your updown and then you’re turned around.

Swirls of ash from the Mexican volcano. Too much: this wild-assed city of ours, it’s too fucking much.

No sane person could raise a family here. Pure Death. On the freeway, in dirty, twisting water. Fights and ashes and slaps.

Through my open window, I squint at it all: a muffler the size of a boat my baby she left me this mornin’ a thirty-foot roach (“24-hour exterminators”) kidney-shaped swimming pool propped on a pole. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (“Join the Voyage at 6!”) “Pregnant? Emergency Call …” burgers and doughnuts and dogs and maybe she doin’ me wrong say yes she doin’ me wrong say baby I been acryin’ I been drunker’n a skunk since June. Eyebrows and rheumatism, arthritis and armadillos, low-tar smokes, The Wall Street Journal say yes she is say baby “Let’s All Be There!” Sugar’s and Spinners and Cooters. Fizz, Biff’s, Bill’s. Tires thrumming on the concrete. Dependency City: Alcoholism? Child Abuse? Drugs? Want to Talk? Any Time of Night Just Pick Up A.

Quick exit onto Montrose Street.

A teenage girl with a slim gold purse and red high heels strolls the edge of a park. A radio tune tumbles out of an open apartment window.

My, my, my.

Southern folk wisdom says a man whose drink is laced with a lady’s menstrual blood will be, like a child, forever hers.

She waves. I zip through the light. A McDonald’s wrapper kicks up over my hood and dithers away down the street.

I slow, then circle back toward Main.

No matter what, for me, there’s no getting out of this place, even if it is too fucking much. I’ve buried my family here. My keepsakes. My only history.

And why leave? Life’s brimming in the big, bad Bayou City.

Much later, after work, after cards, after losing a stack of money (our last game before letting Cal join), I end up at the Shamrock. The Midnight Show.

Danger, Incorporated — black gangsters waging an L.A. coke war.

“Fly threads, brother!”

“Make that fairy eat it!”

“Motherfucker’s toast!”

The crowd is cheerful and warm, but I scan the seats, wondering if the woman I’d seen last time is somewhere in the theater, if she has any more bruises on her face.

Then the lights are up, a smoky, spooky blue, and folks are filing out.

“Wake up, white boy,” somebody sings. “Yoo-hoo.” Laughter. “Say, man. Party just startin’!”

The next afternoon, through late-season leaves on the bayou’s banks, I watch police boats putt around puckered brown whirlpools, looking for Roberto. Young men in wetsuits slog through shallows and mud. Onlookers come and go, eating bag lunches, reading paperbacks and newspapers, gossiping.

I follow the bend for about two miles, past the campsite of street people, busted up earlier this month. I’d checked it out, once, for the paper. For nearly six years, laid-off oil workers had pitched tents or tarps here or slept in blown-gasket cars. Their neighbors, poor families like the Thuots and the Zamoras in run-down rental homes, didn’t complain, but folks in outlying areas did. “It’s a transient population, drug-addicted and mentally retarded. We’re talking heroin and cheap booze,” said a woman who lived about a mile from the spot. Penrose had asked me to research the story, since several of the obits I’d written were of men from the camp who’d died during winter freezes or whose bodies had been found in the bayou. “They break into houses like mine looking for pawnable items,” the woman said. I couldn’t confirm that, and Penrose eventually decided against stories on the homeless. “There’s not one positive angle here,” he’d said. “If we had a case of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps and getting out of poverty, we might consider running a piece. As it is …” Weeks later, police ordered the men off the land. All that’s left are pads of burned grass from their cooking fires.

The river is placid here, not far from where the Thuots get their bathwater. Two black boys straddle pine logs on the bank, pitching fishing lines into the current. “Catch anything?” I ask, brushing aside brambles.

“Naw, ain’t nothing worth catching,” says one of the boys. His companion spits into the water.

Farther down, ivy snags my feet. In my first few months at the paper, I scribbled dozens of obits for folks who had drowned in the stream, and the pace hasn’t let up.

“Police divers Monday recovered the bodies of two men whose Toyota truck collided with a car on the Eastex Freeway and plummeted sixty feet into Buffalo Bayou. The southbound lanes of the freeway were temporarily closed.”

“Police authorities surmise that an arm discovered in the bayou near the Jensen Street Bridge belongs to a man seen yesterday clinging to an oak limb in a torrent following flash flooding this weekend.”

One beautiful spring afternoon last year, a mounted police officer’s horse — a ten-year-old gelding named Einstein — got spooked, apparently by several feet of bright-orange mesh in the grass, slipped into the water, and sank beneath the Capitol Street Bridge. An hour later, the horse’s body surfaced and was removed by a heavy-duty dump truck.

The city’s most infamous drowning happened twenty years ago. Cops beat Joe Campos Torres so badly, the booking sergeant refused to accept him into any city jail. The officers dragged Torres to a site near the bayou and whaled on him some more. Then he either jumped or was pushed into the water. None of the cops involved spent more than a year in prison.

I recite these incidents to myself now to take my mind off of Lira and to fit her behavior into some kind of fathomable context. But I’m failing.

Folklore doesn’t help me either.

Local historians say the bayou was named for the buffalo gar that navigate its waters. But anecdotes I’ve gathered over the years suggest that eighteenth-century Spanish explorers’ maps still exist that denote the ‘Arroyo de Cibilo” or “Ditch of Bison.” These stories say early Indians drove the mammoth animals over the bayou’s banks to cripple them and make them easy targets for the Indians’ spears.

There’s supposed to be a Confederate schooner in the water here somewhere. I’ve got recorded testimony from an ex-slave’s son who claims to have danced on the ship’s ruined deck during a low-water summer in 1908.

I emerge from the underbrush, amazed at the amount of debris in my head.

Cal’s right, and so is Penrose. What we need are positive tales! Johnny Appleseed.

“Water Under the Bridge: Exotic Seafood Since 1907,” says a metal sign on a dark-green building near the bank. “Drum, sheepshead, croaker. Mahi from Hawaii.”

Through a window, I see the shadow of a man, moving among jars of tentacles in clear, pickled brine, among fishing nets filled with crusty clam shells, swaying from the ceiling. Lemon and oysters, I smell.

Another man steps outside in a slick rubber apron covered with pink and yellow fish guts. He’s wiping his hands on a newspaper. Our paper. The Community Section.

Through willow trees, trailing their tips in the water, sketching thin, dirty ripples — concentric rings — come the muted spasms of boat motors circling, circling, circling upstream.

Three days, and no word from Julio Zamora. His house appears to be empty. No one answers his phone.

I’ve asked Scott, whose beat it is, to find out what he can from the cops, which isn’t much: Lira has been arraigned on capital murder charges. “A recent law in Texas makes multiple killings a capital offense,” Scott explained to me. “Tough luck for your friend. This assumes the other kid — Roberto? — is dead.” For now, her location is a well-guarded secret. Her Mexican citizenship makes the paperwork messy, so the D.A.’s office wants her kept under wraps. “All I can tell you is, she’s not in the Criminal Courts Building. I’ve checked the new facility over on San Jacinto and Baker Streets — they don’t call it a jail, they call it an ‘Adult Detention Zone,’” Scott said, “but for all its high-tech alarms, it’s still the same old bars and walls. Anyways, the pugs who run the place won’t talk to me.”

He looked at me. “People just keep vanishing on you, don’t they?”

“Not the right people,” I said.

At Prince’s Drive-In, a teenage girl grilling burgers tells me Julio’s apron has been “hanging from that meathook in the kitchen since Sat’day, late, when the son-of-a-bitch was supposed to relieve my draggin’ ass.” Her braces flash. “We ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since.”

At the Chinese take-out, the assistant manager, a Taiwanese national, shrugs when I mention Julio’s name. Six or seven women, black and Asian, sit at a table in the kitchen peeling shrimp, sweeping the shells onto scattered newspapers on the floor.

“Lavonda say she gettin’ the house and the car,” chirps one, a tall woman with short hair in tangled sprouts, tossing wedges of orange meat into a boiling pot on a stove.

“Girl, Lavonda blind and deaf. Frankie gon’ take her to the cleaners.”

“Hell, to the bank,” says another. “Fuckin’ Accounts Closed.”

In the corner, a quiet woman snaps the shrimp shells at the sharp hook in their tails and hums off-key to herself with her big, dark eyes half-closed. Her fingers are raw. An odor of Lysol and peppers swarms the room.

I order Kung Pao Chicken.

On the way home, I stop at the Kroger’s on Montrose for a six-pack of beer. At the pharmacy, in the rear of the store, next to the frozen fish, two pale, thin men wait in line, thumbing through This Week in Texas. “William tells me AZT is cheaper now over at Walgreen’s,” one says softly.

“Sweet William. How are his platelets?”

“Pathetic.”

Clouds ripple like flesh above the city’s streets. For Sale. Apartment for Rent. Must Liquidate.

I realize that for a year now, while I’ve walked in the fog of my grief, a whole community has dwindled around me.

I see a young man pull a yellowed shade in a cracked apartment window.

Tonight, Sno King clatters like a riot. I take a beer and my chicken to the far end of my garage, where sometimes it’s quieter than it is in the house. I discovered this once after a late-night fight with Jean. Simmering, I grabbed a sleeping bag and a pillow and marched outside. I hung a mirror on a nail and filled a large tin tub with water so I could shave the following morning. A cricket, limp as a flaccid penis, wound up floating there, on an island of Foamy. Spiders rapelled up rolls of insulation next to a greasy workbench; roaches skittered over wrenches, screwdrivers, drills. But I slept better than Jean did that night. Somehow — an acoustical quirk — Sno King’s turmoil was muffled by the garage’s thin walls.

I don’t recall the details of the fight, though it could have been about only one thing. We never tussled over anything else.

Thwack!

Thwack!

“Sweetheart.” I raise my bottle in the dark. “You win.”

I’d been thinking about it, and I’d decided Freedmen’s Town was the place to take Ray for his driving lesson: a mostly black neighborhood northeast of Montrose, not far from the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery. The streets are narrow, but traffic is light.

Like the Shamrock, Freedmen’s Town offers me a vicarious sense of home, though my white skin draws curious — sometimes hostile — stares from the porch-sitters. I never worry, though — maybe because so many cheerful mothers live in the area. I see them watching their kids in the yards, laughing with each other, big, solid anchors of safety.

The Town — an area of a few blocks — was founded by ex-slaves shortly after the Civil War. It used to have filling stations, dry-goods stores, and nightclubs, but now it’s a cluster of dilapidated rent houses threatened by bulldozers and high-flying redevelopment. Here and there, its old brick streets bleed through the asphalt, and I feel connected to the past in a way I don’t anywhere else in the city. Sort of like Jean and her apple trees.

Except the comfort, for me, comes from hanging around ghosts and misfits.

“Take a left here,” I tell Ray. “Watch this corner. It’s a sharp one. Okay, when you hit the brake, don’t stomp, pump it a little, gently, that’s it.”

We pass a dusty brick building in a field of weeds, the old city-county hospital named for Jefferson Davis. It’s been closed for years. Jagged glass teeth are all that remain of its windows.

Past an Asian grocery, and rows of wooden houses. A hand-lettered sign droops on a dead yellow lawn: “Big Bad Dog.” Hip-hop shouts from open windows. Someone shatters a porch light with a rock; thick laughter cartwheels down the block.

In the near distance, downtown Houston glimmers, peach and amber. A sumpy sulfur smell rises from tall, moist grass and from froggy mudholes exposed to the sky.

“Stay off the shoulder. There’s broken glass up here. That’s it, you’re doing fine.”

“It runs real smooth,” Ray says. “Unc’s Bookmobile is a little hard to handle. No power steering.”

“Guess you’ll have to get a sleek sports car, then, if you’re going to impress the girls.”

He grins.

“You want to try parking?”

“Sure.”

“Pull in over there, where it says Mount Carmel Baptist Church.”

I catch a whiff of pork chops in the air, and fried okra. Ray whips the car into a wide slot between faded yellow lines, and jerks us to a stop.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Remember, pump the brakes.”

We sit with the windows down. In vacant lots west of the church, crickets creak like old wooden doors.

“Where are we?” Ray asks.

“The Fourth Ward. Freedmen’s Town.”

“Looks like it’s seen better days.”

“Yeah. It used to be the heart and soul of black Houston,” I say. “Then the city ran a freeway through here and chopped it all up.”

Ray wipes his eyes.

“Hey. What is it, Ray?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Palmer, I’m just — ”

“You did great. Really. Don’t worry about the brakes — ”

“No,” he says. “It’s not that. It’s … looking around here, at all this …”

“Tell me.”

He sighs. “For six months, my mom and me, we’ve been anxious about my dad, you know? It’s the first time someone close to me has been real sick, the first time I’ve had to think about someone I love maybe dying. It scares the hell out of me.”

“I know.”

“But it’s more than just my dad. I mean, sometimes lately, I feel sorry for myself because I’m going to kick off someday, too. I knew that, of course, but …”

“It’s real for you now in ways it wasn’t before?”

“Yeah. And now I see … parts of whole cities can die too, can’t they?”

Horns blare down the street. Squealing tires. I smile at the boy. “You’ve got to cruise with the changes, Ray. That’s all you can do.”

He’s nodding. His foot taps the floor, by the brake.

“Hell, you know this.” What would a good father tell him? “I haven’t figured it out, myself.”

He looks at me, poised, handsome — too young to feel this bad.

Watching his leg, I feel for a moment my own foot, again, slamming down hard — the sickening slide, the smoke of rubber, the glance into the rearview, and Jean’s anxious eyes — “Well. What do you say? Another spin around the block?”

“No thanks, Mr. Palmer.” He rubs his cheeks. “That’s enough for tonight.”

“All right. You’re going to be a fine driver, Ray.”

“Thanks. Thanks for your help.”

We change places. I take the wheel and head us out.

I still meet the Thuots once a week. Their oldest son, Kim — sixteen, and with a good command of English — turned in one of the job applications I’d brought and got a cashiering spot at a Circle K convenience store. Last Wednesday, the Thuots spent his first check on roast duck and rice, and invited me to dinner.

I toasted them with a bottle of cheap Italian wine I’d bought. In Tuscan folklore, I told them, water’s linked to filth (pissing) while alcohol, fa buon sange, makes for good blood. They liked that.

I brought them some shrimp from Water Under the Bridge. “And,” I said, “you won the raffle at Cal’s Bookstore.”

“The what?” asked Mrs. Thuot.

“The raffle. Free gifts.”

“My goodness. How?”

“I filled out the entry form for you. Here.” I handed Mr. Thuot the books Cal had given me to deliver. Cal was furious. He’d hoped a regular customer would be hooked into spending hundreds of dollars in the store. Worried about his competition — the encroaching chain stores — he wasn’t in the mood to let the Thuots come in and choose their own prizes. “What do they care? Do they even read? Just give them these.”

Now Mr. Thuot stared, confused, at a deck-repair manual, a shipbuilder’s guide, The Bra Book, and Mamie Eisenhower.

The family unpacked its gongs. We rang them several times, to celebrate Kim’s good fortune. I gave him six free passes to the Shamrock.

“The children,” said Mr. Thuot. “May their skies be high, yes?”

We filled our cups to the brim.

Tonight, birthday candles in paper lantern shells float down the bayou at dusk: a Festival of Lights — “The Bayou Beckons,” the city calls it, a celebration, in part, of Fiestas Patrias, Mexico’s Independence Day, and a remembrance of families who died in Hiroshima (each flickering flame in the mist a token of loss).

Flowers and wooden crosses mark Chatito’s drowning, Roberto’s disappearance.

Mariachi music echoes in the trees. Fireworks break like eggs against the sky. Gritos — shouts of independence — carry on the hot breeze. Elsewhere, Asian priests ask children to send their thoughts to Heaven, to those who once wore cloaks of fire.

A young Japanese couple cuddles in the grass. The woman is pregnant. Watching them, I remember an old Ashanti folktale. In the beginning women bore no children. One day a python asked a man and woman who came to bathe in his river if they had any offspring. “No,” they replied unhappily. “Bring your friends to my woods,” the python instructed them. “I’ll make the women conceive.” The couple did as they were told. When the people had gathered, the snake said, “Each couple must stand toe to toe.” He slithered into the river and drew a mouthful of water. Then he sprayed the water on the bellies of all the men and women and told them to lie together that night in warm leaf-beds on the ground. In nine months the women conceived. The world knew birth and desire.

I scramble down a steep, dusty bank. Coors cans rust in the mud. Condoms. Cigarette butts. The lapping and sucking of water meeting land. Separate worlds. I toss a stone into the river. It makes a sound like a voice almost decipherable to me, from a realm beyond my own.

Another stone, another voice. Then another and another. I’ve started a whole conversation. A boisterous family.

I confess: hauntings are a weakness of mine.

Jean. Now Lira. Chatito and Roberto.

“Where are you?” I whisper. Reeds rattle like maracas.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Julio told me last year, in one of our earliest interviews, “but I pray to God each night they’ll leave us the hell alone.”

A lump of moss, dark green and blue, as long as a woman’s gown, wraps a broken limb in the stream. Every American city claims some version of the “disappearing woman.” It’s a common folktale.

A beautiful hitchhiker in a satin dress, pacing the shore of a lake.

A disheveled young girl near a river, needing help.

Wet dreams.

Pick her up, and she’ll give you her address. On the way home, she fades, leaving only a trace of moisture in your car. When you reach her street, you find the ruins of a stately mansion where people died long ago. Or you find nothing at all.

South Ruthven Street is deserted this late at night. Quiet. Pretty, lined with elms. I used to come here every evening, regular as a rhyme. Then I joined Little Vegas after work, dealing cards, hoping to starve my grief.

“One of my families is in trouble,” I tell my father’s chiseled name. His headstone is chilly, gray. The cemetery smells of mint and wild onion. Frogs chirp in the bayou by the road. “I don’t know what to do about it. I just … needed to tell you.”

Some flying creature — a misguided bird, a bat — flitters in the trees.

Greasy paper plates have been blown against the stones. Napkins, cups. The Day of the Dead. I’ve missed it. Families must have been here, sharing meals with their lost ones. A candle in a cracked glass container, painted with the Virgin of Guadalupe, tilts on a circle of fresh dirt next to three or four paper-wrapped roses and a handful of yellow marigolds.

I say hello to my mother, stored neatly here like a small, brittle ornament.

Twigs litter Jean’s mound. I whisper her name. Touch my cheek. “People need so much, don’t they?” I kneel in the dirt.

Given the chance, later, we would have kissed and made up. I know it. We always did.

“Isn’t that right?” I say.

Just a simple family matter.

One of those things.

“I’m sorry, Jean.” Dried apple leaves crackle in the grass, from my last visit when I left them for her. “I’m so sorry.”

For the first time since the funerals, I weep.

“Draw. Nothing wild.” I’m dealing a fresh pack.

“See you, raise a dollar.”

“I’ll take three.”

“One.”

“Dealer needs two.”

Ray circles Loop 610. We’re in Cal’s Bookmobile, gliding on the freeway in a glass-bottomed boat.

“Cal, man, I’m so happy we let you in,” Tony says. “This is the way to play!”

Cal grins. “Glad I could add a little zest. Keep moving, Ray. You’re doing just fine.”

“Which way, Unc?”

“Any way. Just drive.”

Houston, perched precariously on a gumbo of cracked soil and dry red clay, erupts in blue and green, tan and white. L-shapes, quarried stone (granite, marble, basalt), recessed windows, enclosed crosswalks, circles, triangles, squares — fissures into which people wedge their sighing bodies, moving up and down or deep underground, whispering, laughing, lying.

“Low spade splits the pot.”

“Six and ten, no help …”

Eighty bucks in the hole, I fold early and slide up front, with Ray. “Cal paying you for this gig?”

“Naw. I need the practice.”

He’s a pretty good driver, though he still takes his curves too fast. “How’s your dad?”

“Home now, where my mom can look after him. That makes them both happy, but he’s still pretty sick.”

One thing about families: beyond a certain point, I’ve learned, there’s nothing you can do for them.

Kim Thuot, counting nickels in his store.

Julio Zamora, waiting to be deported. Scott found out he was apprehended yesterday along with a family named Muñoz, with whom he’d been hiding in a house somewhere in the Fifth Ward. The cops caught him trying to break into his old place and cart off the washer and dryer.

I haven’t been able to speak to him or the kids — I miss, most, my little web-slinger — and may not get a chance to see them before they leave.

Lira has been transferred to solitary confinement in a women’s unit up near Huntsville.

In the bayou, I’ve read, divers have discovered a female manatee, a dolphin, a red-bellied pacu — a native of South America, related to piranhas — an octopus, an armored catfish, a school of mullet, a Rio Grande perch.

No Roberto.

Take me home, please. But I’m frightened I’ll disappear before we get there.

“Got it!” Tony waves his cards. “Full house!”

Startled, Ray turns to look. He nearly swerves off the road. “Whoa,” I say, reaching over and steadying the wheel for him.

The men razz him.

He blushes. “Where should I go?” he says. “I’m running out of ideas.”

“Try a left,” I say.

Tony’s still laughing.

“Here?”

I nod. “You’re doing just fine.” The city looks splendid. We’re heading east now. With any luck, we’ll see the sun rise.