“You are in the United States where we speak English,” said the principal in morning assembly, stepping to the edge of the stage to lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance.
“I don’t got no penny,” Chris whispered to his teacher.
“Ten years old, still in the third grade and you talk like a baby. You must say ‘I do not have a penny,’” said Miss Raider. “So, since you cannot pay the fine your punishment will be to write on the board five hundred times. ‘I will speak English.’”
Baby kept his mouth closed, listened. When he finally said something the American words came out clearly enough.
Everyone had to sit straight up when Miss Raider entered the room and say in dragging unison “Good morning, Miss Raider.” The crimes of whispering, lateness, coughing or sneezing, foot scuffling, sighing, fidgeting, were punished with “jail”—sheets of black paper taped to the floor on which miscreants stood at attention for one, two hours, forbidden to move or speak. A failure to produce homework, a sullen manner, brought smarting whacks with a folded leather strap.
“Hold out your hand,” said Miss Raider before striking.
Crescencio cut his name in the top of his desk, a great curling C and fine flourishes like a bower around the entire name. Mrs. Pervil cried, “under the desk,” her voice a flail of barbwire. She pointed.
Crescencio went slowly to the front of the room and stood near the desk.
“Get in under there!” He crouched, crept into the dark kneehole. At the bottom of the front panel there was a gap of five inches and in that space the class could see the heels of the crouching Crescencio, his torn sneakers.
“The rest of you open your histories to page forty-one and read the selection ‘The Brave Men of the Alamo.’” Mrs. Pervil sat down and drew her chair forward. Her knees filled the space, pressed against Crescencio’s forehead. Her pointed shoes jabbed his knees. Her legs and thighs blocked out the light, invested the kneehole with a horrible intimacy. Suddenly the knees sprang outward, the thighs opened with a faint fleshy sound. The cheesy stench of Mrs. Pervil’s unwashed private parts filled the dark space. Crescencio experienced humiliation, claustrophobia, burning rage, sexual excitement, impotence, feelings of injustice, subservience and powerlessness.
The next day he looked for work, found it in an umbrella factory jamming ferrules onto shafts and never returned to school. On Sunday morning Mrs. Pervil’s husband discovered all the tires on his new Chevrolet sedan stabbed flat. It happened time and again despite a locked garage and a diabolical arrangement of rigged trip wires and bells, happened until the husband had used up his ration stamps and was forced to buy inferior tires at astronomical prices on the black market. Mr. Pervil blamed “the goddamn Bullsheviks.” No one suspected chubby Crescencio, shambling, sadly smiling Chencho with his defeated shoulders. The slashings stopped when he was drafted in 1943 and sent to the Solomon Islands with his squad of Mexican Americans from Texas. One or two of them made it back home. Abelardo ordered and paid for an elaborate stone memorial, but the fateful name “Crescencio” cut in the top of his old desk preserved his memory for Baby and Chris.
Inside the tire
The two younger brothers were so similar in appearance and manner no one outside the family could tell them apart when they were little children. They seemed to be twins, although Baby was a year older. After the accident with the tire, they were so different they did not even resemble brothers. It happened when they were very young, when they still lived at the house of the Relámpagos.
Baby told Chris to climb inside the old truck tire he strained to hold upright. Chris was small and his body curved to fit the hollow inside the tire. Before he had even settled into place Baby pushed the tire down the rubbled hillside with a railroad track at the bottom. He saw the mistake at once. He had expected it to roll smoothly, a wonderful ride, but the tire leaped, sprang into the air every time it hit a rock, Baby running far behind, hands out and arms trying to extend a hundred feet. Beyond the railroad tracks the tire wearied, spun around like a half-dollar on a bar and collapsed.
Baby ran up to the tire, panting, crying. Chris spilled out. He looked dead. With a scream of despair Adina heard at the house Baby picked up a rock and bashed it against his own forehead. And again. So both of them went to the hospital.
Chris had a strange laugh after his recovery, the laugh of a large man enjoying a funny movie, a laugh he had copied from an X-ray technician with a circle of hair like a brown beret. This technician came to see him in the hospital ward on Saturdays bringing a chocolate bar which he broke into small pieces, inserting them into Chris’s mouth with his right hand while his left hand frisked under the covers, plucking and rubbing at flesh not covered by bandages and plaster. When Chris walked again he walked differently, one leg slightly shorter than the other and he disguised it by rising on the balls of his feet with each step, a buoyant, agile walk that seemed to seek shortcut paths.
He was destined for injury. When he was fourteen and leaning against the passenger door of a borrowed car on the way to a dance with his father and four others, all of them singing Valerio Longoria’s ranchera “El Rosalito,” a tremendous song of the time, the wonderful nueva onda sound, rough and exciting, the worn-out door latch gave way and the door opened. He fell out at fifty miles an hour, the flesh scraped away to the bone, suffered a broken shoulder and arm, a concussion, those things. But once again he recovered.
The best thing to come from this accident was the visit of Valerio Longoria himself—the smooth pompadour, the crouching eyebrows—to Chris in the hospital, joking but serious—“since you were singing my song when it happened I feel a responsibility—”
“That Valerio,” said Abelardo admiringly, “he’s the real thing, la gran cosa.”
The polar bear
At the school in Hornet there was a teacher, Miss Wing, from Chicago, who spoke with great precision and smiled at everything. “Many people have hobbies. Tomorrow I want everyone to bring samples of their hobbies to class. Each boy or girl will tell about their hobby, such as stamp collecting or matchbook collecting. My brother collected matchbooks, which is a very, very interesting hobby.”
Most children brought a single matchbook the next day. Angelita brought a lone wooden match, the blue and red tip grimed from her pocket. Even this Miss Wing praised.
The Relámpago brothers brought their accordions. They played the bus song (without singing the words), waited for the teacher to smile. Her white face dipped in disgust.
“The accordion is not a good instrument. It is a rather stupid instrument. Polacks play it. Tomorrow I’ll bring in some good music for you to listen to.”
At recess they whispered, what is a polack? Angelita knew.
“A white bear that lives on the ice.”
Baby imagined white bears in a row playing their silvery accordions. And the mystery deepened when, on the radio one night, he heard “I’m a polack, you pretty little poppy …”
“What is a polack? Is it a white bear?”
“Amapola! Amapola! The name of a beautiful young girl!”
Miss Wing brought a record player in a beige case, set it on her desk, pulled at the black cord that was too short to reach the outlet. The big boys had to push her desk toward the wall, the metal-shod legs shrieking over the floorboards. The felt-covered turntable went around and around. She slid a black lustrous disc from its paper sleeve, held it by the edges, and placed it on the moving turntable. Just watching it go around felt good. She lowered the arm. The room was filled with the Boston Pops Orchestra playing “The Syncopated Clock.”
But this good music had no effect on the Relámpago boys. In the Relámpago house the accordion was everything. In 1942, at fourteen and fifteen, playing matching accordions in the style associated with their father and singing in harmony two of their father’s best-known compositions, the polka “La Enchilada Completa” and the ranchera “Es un Pájaro,” they won a talent contest in McAllen. Already they were playing wi
th Abelardo for dances. They sang searing duets of remarkable feeling. There is no harmony like the matched voices that escape from the throats of those who are blood relatives, the shape and structure of the vocal apparatus similar, like two accordion reeds filed to sound almost the same yet fractionally different. The prize was two hundred dollars and an appearance on a border station beaming its programs as far away as Canada.
Abelardo was elated. “Now you’ll see, they’ll come, the record companies, wanting to record you. It’ll begin for you.” Abelardo’s waiter friend Berto drove them in his fourthhand Ford. They crossed the border and arrived at the station an hour before the scheduled time of noon. The boys sat silent, clutching their instruments while Abelardo buttonholed everyone—the man with a tray of coffee, a technician festooned with odd tools, an engineer on his way down the hall, a cowboy singer, half drunk and with his fly unzipped, coming from the men’s room.
“Look,” the American manager said a little insolently, “we’ve got a little reschedule change here. Go out, get some lunch, come back with the kids at two o’clock this afternoon. We moved the talent program to two o’clock.”
In the room beyond, Baby heard a stuttering male voice say to someone, “wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-what’s the difference between a Mexican and a bucket of shit?”
Outside, the wind gusted hard and the sky was green-black in the south. Papers and tumbleweed rolled in streamers of dust. They went to the car.
“He said come back at two,” Abelardo explained to Berto. “They changed the time.”
“But I have to be at the restaurant at two. My shift starts at two. You know this.”
“All right. Drop us downtown, we’ll swallow something, get a taxi back here and then we will wait in the town until your shift is over.”
“It’s over at eleven, you know this, and an hour to get here, you’ll be sitting around for a long, long time.”
“Ah, we’ll make friends, play some music, have a good time, see a movie.”
“Only one of my headlights work.” A gust of wind swept dust into the car. “All right, get in, get in.”
As Berto backed to turn around in the gravel parking lot, wind rocked the car and the first drops of rain hit the windshield, large and far apart. There was a tremendous crack and a groaning sound. Baby said, the tower’s falling. It was falling, the immense, two-hundred-foot tower was gathering speed as it descended on the station and parking lot. Berto gunned the accelerator and they zigzagged crazily backward, watching the tower hit, the roof of the station buckle, the top twenty feet of the tower smash down on the parked cars and the space they had occupied only seconds earlier. Flying shingles and bits of wood were hitting the ground, the big plywood letter W crashed and bounced.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Berto.
“Go,” said Abelardo. “If we stay they will blame it on us.”
After that, nothing happened for Baby and Chris. Their fame was confined to the Hornet barrio—“los dos hermanos Relámpago who won the contest.” There was nothing to do but keep playing with Abelardo at the weekend dances and fiestas and quinceañeras, their little moons reflecting his brilliant glare. They had no style of their own.
Missionaries
After the move to Hornet, Adina had stopped going to mass and confession. In a year or two she was putting plates of food in front of two Yahweh’s Wonder missionaries, listening to their stories of doom and salvation, their descriptions of the wilderness of the soul, and later rephrasing these accounts for Abelardo and the children. This religious husband and wife, Darren and Clarice Leak, both blond with white lips and transparent eyes, brought their children with them when they visited (Clarice descended from Rudman Snorl, a member of the missionary party sent to wean the Cayuse Indians from their addiction to breeding and racing fine horseflesh, dying there in the antimissionary uprising of the infuriated Cayuse). The children sat obediently in the hot old car parked close to the trailer for the strip of shade, the windows rolled down to give a little air. They were forbidden to get out, talk to or even look at the Relámpago children. Lorraine was the youngest, then Lassie, and Lana the oldest, an albino child who covered her weeping eyes with her hand against the strong light. They sat very still with their faces to the front of the car, yet their eyes devoured every movement of the Relámpagos who moved about in their line of vision, showing how well they could run or wrestle. Chris stood directly in front of the car and moved his arms and legs in humorous positions, rewarded sometimes by rigid smiles.
A hot day, the parents inside praying with Adina, and in the car Lorraine whined and rocked back and forth.
“No sir!” hissed Lana. “You can’t, you have to wait!” But at last they opened the car door a crack on the side away from the trailer, allowed the child to slip out, pull down her ragged underpants and squat. Chris stared at the jetting water, had to pull out his own instrument and piss before them as if to show that the Relámpagos, at least this one, could make a more pronounced display.
Abelardo despised the Leaks, thought them stupid, fanatic and dangerous. He pointed out to Adina that Clarice, listening to the ever-on radio while Darren droned about the Lord this and the Lord that, had written down the name of the station offering “an autographed painting of Jesus Christ, framed in hand-tooled gold-tone finish, for only five dollars.”
Bending twigs
Abelardo wanted his sons to die for the accordion. He played to each of them when they were still babies, choosing the last hour of light for the most impressionable time, for who has not heard music at the end of the day, the quarter-light infused by somber harmonies that say everything that has ever been said? A listening child never forgets the scent of the uprushing darkness, the gleam of a white shirt as someone approaches.
He bought each of his sons two-row diatonic models similar in style to the old green accordion. “I don’t bother with those little ten-button ones,” he said. “Let the kids start out right.” But, rushed and pressed, he was impatient in teaching them, made them sit on the wooden chairs under the signed photographs of his accordionist friends, Narcisco Martínez, Ramón Ayala, Rubén Naranjo, Juan Villareal, Valerio Longoria, in a row on the wall. Crescencio had no interest in the accordion. Abelardo said to his face, very sadly, “Crescencio, you are stupid, truly stupid.” He gave up on him and concentrated on the younger sons. (Yet Chencho was a wonderful dancer—not to this music, but to big-band swing on the radio, a real jitterbug, spinning and twirling the girl and lifting her up above his head.)
“The accordion is an important instrument. It can even save lives. Last spring a man played the accordion to calm the frightened passengers in a shipwreck in the fog in New York. Now listen and see, this is how I play this,” he would say. “Now you try it,” executing a quivering bellows shake, fast arpeggios, tricky dissonances, but he had no time to show them slowly and carefully. He was out of the house again, working or playing for a dance. After a few months the lessons stopped. They would have to find their own way.
At the Blue Dove
One day a man came into the Blue Dove. He returned many times. He always ordered the same thing, the specialty of the restaurant and the reason many came there, attracted by the odor of fat juices dripping on the charcoal fire in the back courtyard, the cabrito al pastor and the plates of machitos, tender pieces of goat liver roasted in lengths of intestine. These delicacies persisted on a pedestrian menu of steak, eggs and burritos.
This man sat always at the tiny corner table, a table also favored by lovers, who failed to notice the sway of the chairs, the unsteady table when the folded matchbook beneath the wall leg was disturbed. Nor did the man notice these things. He placed his folded newspaper on the empty chair and gestured for the waiter.
Standing up he was unpleasantly tall, but in a chair, and his long legs folded beneath it, he faded, distinguished only by a heavy nose and a mustache of excruciating thinness. He had a trick of looking slyly around from under lowered eyelids, never staring
boldly, never letting his eyes flash. His hair was sleek and receding from his caramel-colored forehead. He came from a northern city, one could hear it in his voice. He sat quietly, his hands loosely collapsed, filling the table, as he waited for the platter of meat to come. When he was finished with the meal he placed his knife and fork on the plate in the form of a cross, lit a cigarette, holding it between forefinger and thumb of his left hand, and leaned back in the creaking chair. If he caught Abelardo’s eye he would gesture with the second finger of his right hand as a sign he wished the dirty plates carried away. One evening he made this gesture and as Abelardo grasped the edge of the soiled platter the man spoke to him in a low voice, asked Abelardo to meet him across the street—he named a bar—at six-thirty. Below the cigarette smoke Abelardo could smell a pungent herb oil, a primitive and superstitious odor.
A rosary on the rearview mirror
The man sat at the end of the bar, seemed very cold and dangerous away from the lovers’ table. He crooked his second finger at the barman, the familiar gesture, and a glass of whiskey came to Abelardo.
“I represent another,” said the man softly. His newspaper lay folded on the bar showing a photograph of Mussolini at an accordion festival. He blew smoke from both nostrils like a bull on a cold plateau. “I offer you a certain opportunity.” There was a long silence. At last Abelardo asked, what is this opportunity? He said the word “opportunity” in a light, sneering voice, no longer the busboy clearing away the man’s filth.
“The opportunity is a large one. A very pleasant opportunity for the right one. I think you are that one.” There was another long silence. Abelardo finished the whiskey, the finger moved and a second glass came at once. The man lit a second cigarette, let the smoke drift out of his stretched mouth in quivering rings.