Juan and Willy

The next day, Willy woke up early because the phone kept ringing beside his ear.

  “Hello?” he said, finally picking it up.

  “Willy, is that you?” asked a voice.

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “It’s Jipson. I need you to come in early,” he said. “The restaurant is busy. Everyone is stopping their car and coming in. They love the ugly taco sitting on my roof! It’s terrible! Terrible! I don’t have the staff. The people won’t get served and they won’t ever come back again! I’ll be ruined! I’m barely covering my ass as it is.”

  Willy got dressed in a hurry in the warm rectangle of sunlight that flowed through the curtains near his bed. The desert sun had bleached them of color, though ghosts of leaves could still be seen. He stopped by the backdoor of his brother and sister-in-law’s converted garage, which was in front of the converted garage where he was living. When he knocked and his sister-in-law opened the door, he told her he had been called into work early so she would know where he went and she said, “Ain’t you lucky! I wish I would get more hours. They won’t give me no more hours and I’m the only one who wants them. I keep asking and they turn me down.” His sister-in-law worked at the cemetery, and they were always cutting her hours. Willy’s brother Tim was his only relative; his parents had left town years ago and forgotten him. He waved at the old lady, Mrs. Grijalva, who owned the house in front of the two converted garages. Willy liked his landlady. She owned an old Hudson car that was in the new garage at the back of the two converted garages behind her house and she said some day, when he got his license back, she would let him drive her to the cathedral.

  Willy took the bus down to Bess Tacos. On the way he noticed that the city was nothing but big brown puddles everywhere, puddles that the bus splashed through. When he got off the bus and walked down Ocotillo Highway toward Bess Tacos he had to step over lots of palm tree fronds that had come down in the big winds the night before. As he got closer to work, he saw lots of cars in the dirt parking lot of Bess Tacos, more than he’d ever seen even on a Sunday morning and this was a Thursday! There were people pointing and jabbering. All of them were looking at the sign, at that ugly taco which was slumping on the roof there. Who knew anybody would take an interest in an ugly taco or that they would crowd Jipson’s restaurant just to be near it? You can’t predict nothing about people, he thought.

  Crossing the parking lot, he saw two attractive women smoking hash and leaning against a car. One of the women jiggled a baby in its stroller in front of her and as he walked by them, Willy heard her say, “That’s so awesome that they have a baggy vomit taco on top of the restaurant.”

  “Isn’t it? Isn’t it so fucking cool,” said the other lady. “And it’s in a snow globe.”

  “Oye, mamacita, que buena estas,” said Willy, repeating the pat phrase he had heard Juan use before, directing it at the one without a baby. He came back to them and stood in front of the stroller. “Nice babicita,” he said to the other.

  “A poco crees que yoy a salir contigo?” The girl without the baby had asked him if he really thought she would go out with him.

  Willy thought she had said something good to him. “I work in there,” Willy said. “My boss bought that thing a few days ago. Yeah, isn't it awesome? Everybody thought it was gonna drive people away but I knew it was kickass. That was easy to see. Sure is somethin’, though.”

  “Oh yeah,” said the one with the baby looking him up and down and smiling a little. “Kickass?”

  “Yeah, and if you come around at closing, I can probably get you a free beer,” Willy said proudly.

  “A free beer, huh?” said the other, passing the pipe to her friend.

  “Get lost, loser,” said the other one, giggling maliciously. Then they both starting cackling. Chuckles were just bubbling out of them at the sight of him, but he did not see what they had to laugh at.

  “Okay, you don’t have to be insulting,” Willy said. In Willy’s experience, women were pretty sensitive to physical defects in a man and didn’t like them no matter what other good things there are about him such as he was ready to settle down and lived in his own nice, converted garage at the back of his brother and sister-in-law’s home which happens to be a nice converted garage behind a nice converted garage behind a little house.

  It turned out that the people coming by to look at the ugly taco balloon resulted into about a 300% increase in business for Bess Tacos for breakfast and 500% increase for lunch. By dinner, those damn crazy people were everywhere crowding around staring at the balloon and laughing. Willy guessed that was the best use of their time, but afterwards they were eating at the restaurant to Jipson’s delight.

  “Boys,” he said to Juan and Willy that afternoon, “I’m getting rich by the minute. This could work out to be something big. Real big!”

  Juan Verdugo had a strange feeling that the work part of the equation was mostly going to be for Willy and him to do on their own, and Jipson would do all the gettin rich.