The Water Museum

Eleven. The Sous Chefs of Iogüa

Saturday. Lunch. Dexter Bower couldn’t find his red baseball cap anywhere and had to make do with the tan cap with a fish stitched to the front. That irked the crap out of him, but maybe that’s just what happens when you get old. Everything’s so damned irksome. Like the Mexican farmhands. They couldn’t say the name of the state if you paid them.

Dexter grunted. Of course, he was paying them. Those boys worked hard, worked as his momma used to say till their finger bones were poppin’. But they couldn’t say “Iowa” in schoolyard English and it came out like this: “Eee-uh-güey.”

Plenty of people, of course, still said “Ioway” and that didn’t bother him at all. That was traditional. That was English, for Godsakes.

He liked how they called him “Jefe,” though. He pronounced it “Heffy.” He hadn’t enjoyed school all that much, but they could have warned him that language would prove overtaxing.

“Iowa. See?”

He’d worked on it with a pencil stub and a sheet of notebook paper with his foreman, Juan. Juan was from someplace near Guadalajara. Tlaquepaque. How were you supposed to say that?

Juan smiled and shook his head and stared. Mexicans said lots of things with their smiles and head shakes. Mostly, Dex believed, they were saying, Don’t fire me, Jefe.

He’d finally compromised on the phonetics. He wrote the word out like this: IOGUA. Felt like a United Nations ambassador.

That was when Juan still worked for him. Bunked out in the workers’ shed. Now Juan had moved into town and opened a restaurant, and that’s where Dexter was headed. To see if Juan had taken any steps to heal the various damages done to Ioway by all this upheaval and displacement.

“Ee-uh-guey,” he muttered to himself, as he dragged himself into the F-150.

That lower back wasn’t doing nobody any good. He chuffed out a laugh. Who was he kidding? Ol’ Pedro, running the restaurant across the street from Juan’s — why, hell, everybody called that poor guy “Pee-dro.” It was all a new language around here now.

Like that clown on NPR said: The paradigm has shifted. Every American town is a border town now.

“Jesus.”

* * *

Dexter farmed 1,500 acres and leased another hundred-acre share to the east. Like everybody else, he had it divided between corn and soy. He ran a few handsome spotted cows on ten acres, selling off calves every year. And he was experimenting with sorghum and hay and things like that. Getting some nitrogen back into the soil.

So far he had managed to avoid using all that Monsanto demon seed — that bioengineered stuff that was half moray eel on the genetic level, or had spider blood in it instead of sap, or glowed with firefly juice in the kernels. Shit was what that was. Killing off all the goddamned bees. He could spit. He rolled down the window, took a breath, and went ahead and let fly.

“Bastards,” he said.

He kept his truck clean and his house tidy. She had always kept it neat, and he saw no reason to sully her memory with clutter or fuss. The porches were swept and the rockers sat there, jaunty in the sun, as if expecting herself to reappear at any moment and sit there reading one of her book club books. But she was gone now more than two years.

She had planted them a nice vegetable and herb garden, and when Juan still worked for him, he’d tended to the edibles — Juan was a wizard, all right. Dexter didn’t really care for kale or cabbage or cauliflower, which was too bad because Ol’ Juan brought it in by the gunnysack. Tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, cukes, squash, pumpkins. It was nice. Nice herbs, too — though Juan had snuck in all this Mexican stuff and Dexter was half-convinced there was marijuana in there somewhere. Cilantro? No thanks — tasted like soap.

Dexter drove his half-mile track out to the state road. Every winter he’d be out here plowing with the big red blade mounted on the Ford, and when he was done opening up his drive, he’d by God get cracking on the neighbors’ spreads down the road. Arnie and Ina, good Vikings from Minnesota. The Rays over to the east — they had a kid. Couldn’t be trapped out here in snow. That’s how America worked. Used to work. That was what made things function. It was all obvious come winter. Some folks wouldn’t pitch in with a snow shovel if they saw a naked one-hundred-year-old lady out there struggling with a drift. Of course, there had been no winter to speak of this year. His damn crab apple tree was already blooming. Dex fretted about the day he could no longer steer the plow. Who would help the neighbors then?

Ina the Viking was out in her potato patch waving at him like some idiot. Some people thought life was just the spiffiest thing that ever happened. Dexter raised one finger off the top of the wheel in greeting and roared down the blacktop toward West Linden, sun flashing like emergency flares off all the corners of his rig.

* * *

Juan Reyes sat in his dark restaurant on 5th Street with his head resting on one hand. The bowl of menudo before him blew steam into his face. The cloud was scented with the delicious essence of tripe and lime juice and cilantro and Cholula sauce and diced red onions. Fat hominy lurked in the murky red soup like a hundred eyes watching him eat. He took a wide spoon and delivered a shot of lava to his mouth and slurped it like a great mule at a water trough. He loved the way the tripe fought his teeth. Oh, but he was hungover. La cruda. Ta’ cabrona. His head crunched rhythmically in his skull. Everybody except gringos knew the only way to cure hangovers was with menudo and enough Cholula to make you weep blood.

Americans! What barbarians. He couldn’t get an American to sit down to a bowl of menudo if he were paying them. They didn’t like Mexican food unless it was smothered in sour cream and melted yellow cheese. They didn’t care if the cheese was squirted from a can — as long as it was hot and yellow and copious. On their flour tortillas. Texas food, not Mexican food. Juan had never tasted sour cream until he was ten years old. He thought cheese was white and came from a goat. And he ate his first flour tortilla in Juárez.

Ah, menudo. His customers didn’t know what they were missing. He sipped his cinnamon coffee. It wasn’t just menudo — they didn’t come in anymore for anything. He was certain the recent vogue in fish tacos would enliven his business, but the Iowans had lost their interest in Taquería Los Reyes. His brother Hugo had gone off to Chicago, where he could make fancy Asian fusion banana and green tea leaf enchiladas in West Pilsen for the hipster Yuppies and Chuppies there.

Occasionally, college kids from Iowa City came down to West Linden and stopped by. Nerdy glasses and earrings and hilarity. They had come for ironic meals. Mexican food in the midwestern heartland. Jajajajaja.

It was his old El Jefe, Señor Dexter, who pointed out the problem. He’d been the only client, again. Eating carnitas of pork in red sauce, again. Juan had sat with him and let slip that business was so far down that he might have to close the taquería and return to the farm.

“Do you think,” he had asked his old boss, “is an anti-immigrant thing?”

Dexter Bower had glared at him with that hawkeye of his.

“You’re asking me if they’re racists?” he demanded.

Juan shrugged.

Dexter scooted his chair back and said, “C’mere.”

They stepped out the door onto 5th Street.

“Main Street,” Dexter said. “USA.”

“Sí.”

“Two trucks and a Cadillac.”

Juan, nodding.

“This isn’t New York City, Juan. This is West Linden.”

“Yes.”

“You boys came in here and picked our crops. Then you knew a good thing when you saw it and started to settle. The migrant workers left guys and gals here like seeds. Am I right?”

“You right, Jefe.”

“And you made restaurants.”

“We did. Good ones!”

“Not arguing that, Juan,” Dexter said. “But we didn’t have but three restaurants in town. Now look.”

He pointed all around him.

Taquería Los Reyes. Across the street, Pedro’s Así Es Mi Tierra. Down the block, Araceli’s Cantina La Buena.

“There’s nothin’ but tacos on this goddamn street, Juan! Pee-dro over there was the last one to move in and that just about tore it. Man, how many tacos do you expect a fellow to eat? The mayor has been begging McDonald’s to open a place here for a year just to eat a cheeseburger!”

“Caray,” said Juan. “What do I do?”

Dexter Bower, the sun on the sidewalk, offered wisdom:

“Diversify.”

* * *

Dexter drove past the cemetery and turned his head away. He still couldn’t bear to look in there. Didn’t like catching himself counting the stones till he found hers. Didn’t like feeling guilty that he hadn’t left flowers lately. All flowers did was wilt and turn brown.

A thousand miles of bright land swam around the road.

He didn’t know what the hell people were talking about when they called Iowa dull. The fields were the deepest green and brightest gold on earth. The sky blew high with piles of electric clouds. And grackles and crows flew between cottonwoods and fence posts. He loved it, loved it like a girlfriend. From the bluffs on the Mississippi to the flat acres of tilled crops. He loved the barns and the silos and the old trucks and the horses drooping under shade trees and the watering holes. Sunflowers.

He loved the road and the turtles sneaking across it from pond to pond and the boys riding their bikes down dirt lanes. And he loved West Linden — looked for the barbershop where his dad had had his hair cut and his son did too, looked at the green square with its old cannon, looked to see if the flag was at half-mast, looked to see if the bookstore was open. He was a little sweet on the widow McGinnis, but he was shy, didn’t know how long was long enough before he could go courting. But he bought lots of used detective paperbacks from her. He even tried one of her mocha lattes from time to time. Dessert in a cup. She always tried to put whipped cream on it. He guffawed and rattled over frost heaves slathered with tar stripes. Dexter went so far as to like the ridiculous cell tower somebody had built to look like an incongruous giant pine tree. He liked it that a tornado had never hit them yet.

Well, the Mexicans had hit, that was true. But without them, he could not have afforded to keep farming. Now that most of them were gone — except for Juan and his busboys and wife — the Bower farm was in serious trouble. There were no kids around anymore to take up the slack, and even if there were, he couldn’t get them to bend to a hoe if he paid them three times what he paid the Mexies. When he gave away free pumpkins in October, the lazy sons of bitches didn’t even come out to pick their own. He had to pile them in the F-150 and give them away on the square.

“Hell in a handbasket,” he muttered, as he parked in the diagonal slot in front of Juan’s Italian Cuisine — We Cook American.

He stared at the window and shook his head.

It said: ESPECIAL TODAY — ESPAGETI!

Well, at least Juan was trying.

* * *

“What the hell is this?” Dexter said.

“Jefe! Is espageti!”

Dex looked at the generous pile of pasta and the thick red sauce. Mushrooms. That was good. Garlic bread (even though it was a Mexican bolillo). What baffled Dexter was the sliced hard-boiled eggs.

He pointed at the plate and glared at Juan.

“What?” said Juan.

It sounded like Guah?

“Eggs? In spaghetti?” Dexter demanded.

“Claro!”

“Who the hell eats eggs in spaghetti, is what I’m asking you.”

Juan looked stricken.

“Nosotros. Is my father’s recipe, pues.”

He said receipt. The “p” was not silent.

“Juan! The idea was to make real American Eye-talian food. This is… this is …Mexican spaghetti.”

Juan sat.

“This is very hard, Jefe.”

Dexter tasted the food. It was weird. But, he had to admit, tasty. Eggs. ’Bout made him barf. He ate some more.

Beto the busboy was watching soccer on a small TV near the register. Carmela, Juan’s vastly pregnant wife, sat sideways in a booth with her feet up, snoring softly. Across the room, Preacher Visser was digging into a plate. A good Presbyterian — he had done the funeral for the Bowers. His hat sat on the table.

“Rev,” Dexter said.

Visser waved with one hand and kept eating.

“What are you having?” Dexter asked.

“Chicken parm, with a glass of Chianti. Delicious.”

“Early for wine,” Dex couldn’t help noting.

“Good enough for Jesus,” the reverend replied.

Juan grinned at Beto and said, “Mira este cabrón.” They laughed.

Juan leaned across the table. “Jefe?” he whispered. “It’s Hungry Man. Microwave.” He raised his hands. “They don’ know the difference.”

Dex was rankled.

“Look here,” Dexter said. “I told you — you want Americans in here, make pizzas. And not like that tostada you made last time. Not—” he hissed so the pastor wouldn’t hear—“television dinners!”

Juan sighed.

“Pizzas,” he said, as if someone had just suggested something deeply heretical to a priest. He called them peeksas. “I would have to get an oven.”

Beto ambled over and refilled the pastor’s glass.

“Peeksas,” Juan continued. “I know, I know, Jefe. Peeksas and calzones.”

“Meatball torpedo would be nice,” the rev said.

“Submarine,” Dexter corrected.

“Guah?” said Juan.

“In Boston,” the rev announced, “we called them grinders.”

“Qué?”

Dexter made a what have I been sayin’ gesture.

“Pizzas. Calzones. Get the oven. Take orders by phone. Make Beto deliver.”

“I ain’t driving no delivery car,” Beto said and went back to his game.

Calzones. He smirked. Gringos didn’t know that meant underpants.

“If you won’t do it, Juan can give that fine job to a deserving white man!”

“Now, Dex,” the rev chided him.

Juan shook his head. “No like. You hurtin’ me now.”

Dexter had just about had it with this happy horseshit and was thinking about driving back to his house and cracking a beer and to hell with it. There was a Deadliest Catch marathon on the dish. Not a Mexican in sight!

“All right. I am sorry.”

“Have beer,” Juan said.

“Sí, sí.” Dex rubbed his forehead. “Cómo no?”

* * *

The three of them stood out on the sidewalk. Juan, Dexter Bower, and Preacher Visser — who had a plastic glass of wine in his mitt. Across the street, Pedro’s Velvet Dragon Chinese Restaurant seemed to be doing fair business. Better than Juan’s Italian.

Dexter looked down at Araceli’s Mom’s Cantina. He had scolded her—“cantina” was not American in any way, and didn’t go with “Mom’s” no matter what language you were speaking. Christ on a waffle — these people were like children.

Pinches gringos, Juan was thinking. Sangrones.

Dex had told Araceli to call it Mom’s Café, damn it! He had bellowed, “I am just trying to help!” and all the staff at Mom’s had hidden in the kitchen and wondered why gringos shouted their heads off all the time. They thought that if you had an accent, you were deaf. If they just screamed their idiotic announcements at you, real-slow-too-just-to-get-the-p-o-i-n-t-across, you’d somehow understand them better.

Just then, Arnie and Ina pulled up to the Velvet Dragon in their Buick Regal. Arnie waved across at Dexter and shouted, “Last month it was Mexican. Now it’s Chinese. Ain’t had Chinese in ages!”

Dexter nodded expansively, so it could be seen from across the street. He was acting mayor and president of the Chamber of Commerce for the moment.

“Ina,” he called.

Ina steadied herself with one hand on the hood and proclaimed “Spring rolls” before they vanished inside.

And now Dexter almost fell off the curb. He was looking down the block at Araceli’s joint. She had changed the sign, all right. It said MOM’S COFFEE.

“What the hell is that?” Dexter cried.

“A sign,” Juan explained mildly.

“That’s wrong.”

“No, Jefe. Is correct. A sign.”

“The wording, man. The wording. It’s wrong.”

“No. Is one hundred percent correct. We put in apostrophe and everything.”

Visser patter Juan on the shoulder.

Dexter shook his head.

Juan said, “You tell us to never write in Spanish. But you made the mistake, Jefe. You said put ‘café.’ Pues ya sabes—‘café’ es espanish.”

“No, no! ‘Café’ is not Spanish.”

“It is.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Is too,” said Visser. “Everybody knows that.”

“Oye, no mames,” Juan snapped, patience about evaporated. “Is coffee.”

“No,” said Dexter. “Not in this context.”

“Con qué?” said Juan.

“Lookit—‘café’ means restaurant.”

“Guah? Are you joking me right now?”

Yoking.

“A café is a fancy li’l restaurant,” Dexter explained. He huffed. He spit. “It’s French or something.”

Juan cursed: “Cheezits krize! French is American now?”

“Wel-l-l,” sputtered Dexter, forging ahead in a manly fashion, “it’s more American than Mexican.”

Juan sighed.

“You people, Jefe. You no make sense.” He shrugged. “We must go tell Araceli,” he said.

They headed that way.

Juan noted, “You language is for locos.”

“You’re welcome to go back to Tollackee-packee and speak Mexican all damned day.”

“Now, boys,” said the rev, sipping his wine.

* * *

Araceli was unfazed by the whole crisis.

She had just heard that her sister, uncle, and nephew had made it safely to El Paso and were catching a Greyhound north. She was considering opening a liquor store. Maybe a bar, which is where her heart was. El Farolito, she was thinking. Or El Bar No Seas Burro. Araceli was always happy. But she was done with signs.

“I can sell coffee,” she said. “The sign? No big deal.”

“We need food. American food. Not coffee.” Dexter grabbed Visser’s glass and swallowed the dregs of the wine. “Grilled cheese. Chili dogs. What I wouldn’t give for a chili dog. Hell, there hasn’t been a decent hot dog in this town for months.”

Araceli turned her huge eyes upon him and stroked his arm.

“Pobrecito,” she cooed.

She had plans for the Bower spread. As soon as she landed Old Man Dex, El Jefe. She could just imagine her new American kitchen at his place with some molcajetes and jarritos and a nice bright red ceramic crowing rooster statue and a tortilla press.

“Pobre Deysterr. Estás tan cute!”

She pinched his cheek and cracked him a cold Corona. He blushed. This is how she knew she had him hooked. She would make him fat and happy and would rub his feet.

Dexter watched her bottom work the bright blue skirt like a couple of tractor motors under a tarp. Holy smokes, that was fine, right there. He drank.

They were seated at a table. Dexter was thinking of them as The Three Amigos now — he, Juan, and Visser. Getting into the swing of things. Trying to apply the therapeutic concepts of the rev, who had given him some good sessions of the talking cure after the funeral. Bend like a reed in the wind, Visser had advised. The rigid break in strong wind, Dexter. Bend like the reeds. Bend like the grasses. Weather every storm.

Dexter was bending his ass off — like a reed, he told himself. Evergreen. Forever spring. Shit.

Araceli had created her first traditional turkey dinner. She was dying for them to sample this miraculous creation. Dexter didn’t think he could eat anything at this point. He was thinking chips and nacho cheese in front of the tube in his easy chair with the fat dog snoring and farting at his feet. He eyed Visser; the pastor seemed ready to eat any number of meals in a row. Juan simply looked miserable, rubbing his head.

“Ay, mi cabeza,” he said.

Visser dug around in his pocket and dropped a stone on the table. It clattered in front of Dexter. Dexter glanced down. “Arrowhead,” said Visser. “Found it in my garden.”

“Yeah,” said Dexter. “Found a million of ’em on the farm. Used to plow ’em up all the time. Gave ’em to the boy.” He sipped his beer. “He glued ’em on a board. Got it…somewhere.”

Juan fingered the arrowhead.

“Wow,” he said. Somehow, he turned it into Spanish. Guau.

Araceli delivered placemats and silverware and water to them. Then, with a flourish and a sly little wink at Dexter, she produced three plates piled with steaming turkey and deep purple beets and globs of cranberries and wads of orange sweet potatoes.

“Ah,” said Dexter.

“Ajua!” said Juan.

Visser was already eating.

But Araceli wasn’t done yet. She came from the kitchen bearing a Talavera pitcher that featured a primary color sun face smiling into the sad blue visage of a quarter moon. She came around the table and managed a deeply suggestive hip bump into Dexter’s shoulder with her good right hip.

“Don’t forget the bes’ part!” she enthused.

She bent over the table and proceeded to tip the pitcher over each plate and spill a thick white goo over everything. It covered the turkey and the yams and puddled all over each plate. Roughly the texture of heavy whipping cream. Dexter couldn’t, by God, tell what that was supposed to be.

“What is that?” he asked. “Gravy?”

Stung, Araceli backed away from the table and clutched the pitcher to her heart.

“Is los mash potatoes!” she cried and ran to the kitchen in humiliation. They could hear her crying in there.

Dexter rose.

“God. Damn. It,” he announced. “Look here. This is my country. This is my country. We been here, working this land, forever. We made our lives here. We planted crops here. We had our children and — and we buried our loved ones here. Right here! Is it too goddamned much to ask that somebody pay the slightest fucking attention to our traditions and history and stop wrecking everything? Could you learn the language? Could you cook a simple meal that anybody from here would recognize as real food? Am I asking too much?”

He was red in the face and shaking. He was embarrassed about the whole thing — ashamed of his comment to Araceli, ashamed to have shown his emotions, ashamed that he had tears in the corners of his eyes. Outbursts were simply not the West Linden way.

Reverend Visser just stared at his own hands with his head bowed. Juan fingered the arrowhead, spun it around and around with one finger. He didn’t want to eat the goopy mash potatoes either. “Yeah, Jefe. That’s what Geronimo said.”

Dexter stared at him. They heard Araceli blow her nose. Visser cleared his throat as if to speak, but apparently thought better of it. Juan spun the arrowhead, and Dexter wondered what tribe it had come from.

He sat back down.

He put his napkin in his lap.

He took up his fork and his knife and he bent like a reed in the wind.

“I expect you two,” he said, “to eat every bite.”

The rest was silence.