She willed herself to go back to her room, back to the house where she had found a place, a home. She rose from her bed, and walked out into the backyard. The ground beneath her feet was firm and solid and good. Lizzie sensed the cooling of the wind on her face. It was a lovely thing to have a face. The coolness was good. Winter was coming. Let it come, she thought. Winters were not so harsh in the desert, and she welcomed a change of seasons.
18
MARIA ELENA WATCHED as her son picked himself off the floor and walked awkwardly toward her brother. He fell into Diego’s arms, both of them laughing, neither of them able to hear the sounds they were capable of making. She kept herself from interfering in their games. Jacob Diego Marsh had instinctively been drawn to Diego from the first time she placed him in his arms. Her son would not grow up isolated and lost. He would never know the cruelty of his grandfathers, but she would speak of it to him to remind him that love—even among families—was something as rare as rain in the desert.
As Maria Elena watched her brother and her son explore each other’s faces, she felt her husband’s breath on her neck. He had been in the kitchen making dinner and his hands smelled of onions. “I’ll set the table,” he said. She nodded: “Be there in a minute.” He kissed her cheek and walked back into the kitchen. She remembered the first time her little brother had reached out to touch her face. She had kissed his small hand, just as Diego was now kissing her son’s little fingers. She felt the new life inside her. Lizzie and Luz had both agreed it would be a girl and she had decided on a name: Elizabeth Rose Ramirez Marsh. I will teach her Spanish. Eddie will teach her English, and Diego will teach her to sign—and she will have no respect for borders. Jacob Diego broke away from his uncle and made his way toward his mother. He grabbed her leg to keep himself standing up, then clutched it as if it were life itself.
19
JAKE WALKED toward downtown in the early evening. He liked his roommates but he felt restless and impatient. As he walked down Yandell, he thought about Luz and how she was already making her mark on the house. That morning she had successfully convinced them to hire a maid. “It’s honest work,” she had argued, “and if you have money you can pay a good woman a decent salary. What the hell would I have done if no one had ever hired me? I would have starved to death—I would have been forced to work the maquilas—and they pay shit.” Eddie had the good sense not to argue with her, “You hire her, then,” he said. She’d clapped her hands and laughed. He liked the fight in her, understood her intelligent rage, knew instinctively how to read her moods. And Diego, Diego was kind and curious and had infinite patience. He looked a lot like Maria Elena and when he smiled he looked fragile and innocent, looked as though no one could ever touch or scar him. He had watched him the previous night as he held Jacob Diego in his arms. “I’m going to be his teacher,” Diego had written on his pad. But he was becoming teacher to all of them, teaching all of them to speak his language—and sometimes the dining room was full of flying hands. Everyone but Luz was learning to sign because she claimed to be too old to be learning to make words with her hands. “And anyway, when I use my hands, you’ll know exactly what I’m saying,” she had said flatly. The house was happy and full and busy. Lizzie spent her evenings studying to take her state boards. Jake had noticed that her hair was returning to its natural color. He had mentioned it to her. She had smiled and said, “So it has.” Maria Elena had started to show, and Eddie was writing down ideas on how best to spend their parents’ money. Eddie had decided to open a good bookstore. He laughed as he remembered Maria Elena’s response: “A bookstore? That’s what you’re going to do with thirty-eight million dollars? Keep working on the list, amor.” Jake liked watching his brother and his wife. Their conversations kept him entertained. It was a good house, but tonight as he walked and thought of the people he lived with, he wished he could find a place for himself. It felt too much that he was just waiting to die. He wanted to stop waiting.
As Jake walked the streets of downtown he remembered the streets of another city. In San Francisco, he would go out just to walk—to look, to see, to watch the city breathe. As he walked down San Antonio Street, Jake realized he wasn’t paying attention to anything but his own thoughts, I’ve lived a strange life, he thought, and still there is more. El Paso was beginning to fit like a favorite shirt; he liked the way it looked on him, wanted to wear it every day. He wanted desperately to find the thing in him that was killing him and rip it from his body with his bare hands. He wasn’t sad, not tonight. All he wanted to do was live. He had never let himself belong to anything or anyone except Joaquin. But now he had a family. He belonged—and he wanted to belong. He was done with the business of separating himself from the world. He could feel himself smiling as he walked the warm pavements of the city. It was an ugly city, he thought—poor and ugly and polluted. Decay was everywhere on these streets. Jake thought of the ruins in Casas Grandes. That place, like his one, had been a city in the desert—and the desert had reclaimed it. He wondered if this city, too, was already turning to powder, to dust, to ash. This city could not erase desert, not the air-conditioned towers, not the layers of highway and concrete and asphalt, nothing could erase the fact of the desert. The desert would come back to reclaim what belonged to it, and El Paso would then and only then gain the knowledge of the walls at Casas Grandes. But for now, the city kept the desert at bay like a cracked dam holding back the threatening water. For now, it was still a city. And what was a city, anyway, any city? It was just a cacophonous place he shared with a thousand other people, a thousand other people who fought with everyone else over the meanings of every word uttered in the meandering streets. Maybe the fight was all there was. Maybe that was why he instinctively liked Luz, because she enjoyed the hell out of the fight. Joaquin had been that way, too. Tom, too. He pulled out a cigarette and looked at his watch. It was early, the late afternoon sun making its way toward another place.
“Can I have one?”
He heard a tired voice and looked around the street. In the entry way to an abandoned building he had just passed, an unshaven figure sat wrapped in a dirty blanket.
“A cigarette,” the voice said, “you got an extra one?”
“Sure,” Jake said. He walked toward the figure and handed him a cigarette and a book of matches. He could see that the man was not very old—certainly no more than thirty. The man trembled as he lit a cigarette.
“It’s good,” the man said, “real good.” His thin hands shook. He looked unhealthy and as worn out as an old dirt road. “So cold today,” he said.
Jake nodded, though he was sweating even in his thin cotton T-shirt. “Are you OK?” Jake asked. “Can’t you read?” the man asked pointing at the sign at his feet. Jake stared at the sign: SICK WITH AIDS, AIN’T NO QUEER—JUST AN ORDINARY JUNKIE. SPARE CHANGE WELCOME.
He was surprised the sign did not offend him. There was a time he would have hated that man—disease or no disease. There was a time when an anger would have swept over him, an anger so uncontrollable that it knew nothing but destruction. But today the sign did not make him angry. Jake simply read it as if the words had lost their power over him. “So did you make any money today?” He asked.
“Not much. Five bucks maybe. Don’t matter. Today, I just can’t make myself care ‘bout nothin’.”
“Where do you sleep?”
He pointed at the empty building. “Back door,” he said.
Jake nodded. He placed a ten-dollar bill in the man’s cigar box.
The man nodded. “You rich or somethin’?”
“Yeah—I’m rich.”
“Never cared none for rich folk.”
“Me neither,” Jake said flatly. He tried to make out the color of the man’s eyes—somewhere between blue and green. “How come you tell people you got that disease?” he asked.
“It’s in, man. People like to give to things that are in—get it?”
“You’re not really sick with it, then?”
 
; “Wish I wasn’t. People don’t touch me anyways—what’s the difference?”
“Yeah. What’s the difference?” Jake lit another cigarette and kept walking down the street. He tried not to think of what the man had written on his sign, I AIN’T NO QUEER … To their dying day they’ll hate us, he thought. He took a deep drag from his cigarette. He walked the streets for an hour, the shadows getting longer and longer. He tried not to think of Rose and the hurt look on Lizzie’s face as they buried her at the cemetery, tried not to think of Joaquin. Jake tried to think of something good. He thought of his nephew. He thought of Maria Elena and the baby she was carrying. He thought of Tom. He’d started a letter to him, but somehow had not managed to finish it because he did not know what to say to him.
Jake walked toward the Santa Fe Bridge. He gave the woman a quarter at the small station. It was like paying to see a movie, he thought—but here the price of admission was cheap. He slowly walked across into Mexico. At the top of the bridge he stared at the river below—the water hemmed in by the cement. It was a chained animal, an animal that had been kept tied up for so long that it had forgotten how to be itself—all it knew was this captivity. “Goddamn us all,” he said. He looked back at El Paso, behind him now. From here, the tenements, the poverty of the barrio was invisible. From here, it looked almost pretty, but he had just been walking on some of those streets and he refused to think of it as pretty. He watched the vendors selling their goods to the cars making their way back to El Paso. They were children—most of them—children. Some of them no more than six years old. They ran and laughed and held up candy and crucifixes and colored cloths. He remembered that Joaquin had once told him that he would never know what it was like to be poor. His remark had made him angry, but as he watched the children, dirty and skinny from spending too much time trying to sell items that were not worthy of them, he realized the truth of what Joaquin had said. Jake had been without many things in his life—but he had never known what these children knew—and they did not even know they knew anything at all. He watched them play hide-and-seek between the cars, watched them playfully tag each other. Their games did nothing to comfort him. “The poor but happy children,” he said to himself, then laughed. “Goddamn us to hell.” Perhaps the death he carried within him was making him soft, but now, he didn’t mind the softness. He didn’t want to be hard anymore—it was too much work, a kind of work that he could no longer continue because, like the items the children sold, it was not worthy of him. There, at the bridge, Jake nodded. He remembered how Joaquin had died cursing the idea of borders. It was dementia, he had thought at the time, a man speaking nonsense, a man losing his mind. But there, at the bridge, he understood what borders were for: They were there to keep these children out. He remembered how he had once lectured Joaquin, “We can’t feed everybody.” And he remembered his stubborn answer: “Why the hell not, gringo? The Incas did it—what the hell’s wrong with us that we can’t?” Jake felt tears running down his face. He knew why the tears were there: He had lived so many years with a good man, and he had not fully understood the meaning of that good man’s life.
Jake walked slowly into Juarez, turned around and walked back into the United States. Today, he did not have the stomach to play tourist. When he declared his citizenship to the gatekeeper, he was ashamed, but he knew it was not a bad thing to feel the shame. He headed back to Sunset Heights. He found himself back on San Antonio Street in front of the queer-hating junkie. They will hale me with their dying breaths—but I—I do not have to hate them. I do not have to hate. The man was now lying on the ground. “Hey,” he said, “are you OK?”
“No, man, I ain’t never gonna be OK again.” His voice was distant and he trembled as he spoke.
“Are you cold?” Jake asked.
The man nodded, his head too heavy now for his body.
“You need some help getting inside this building?”
“I’m tired, man. I just want to sleep. I just want to fall asleep.”
“I’ll carry you,” he said. He remembered the night when he’d carried Joaquin to the hospital and he remembered what he’d said. “Like water.” He picked up the man who was small and frail and weighed no more than a hundred pounds. It was not a difficult thing to carry him. The-man remained completely passive in Jake’s arms, but he hung on to the sign he had made, clutched it in his hands as if it were life itself. Jake made his way slowly up the hill toward Sunset Heights from downtown, the man who smelled of old sweat and urine in his arms. People stared at them as he walked. Jake just smiled. When he reached the house, he rang the doorbell. Lizzie answered the door. “He’s sick,” he said.
Lizzie stared at his sign. “We can put him upstairs,” she said, “In the ballroom.” She took the sign out of his hand. “He’ll need a bath first. I’ll run the water. You want to help me bathe him?” she asked.
“Why not?” he answered.
Jake stared at the piece of paper on his desk. He didn’t know how to begin the letter. The only thing he’d ever written was a diary addressed to his brother, and that had been easy to write because it had been only for himself. He had not even let Joaquin read it. But now he wanted to write a letter to Tom, wanted to tell him about his new life. He wanted someone who had known him when he was someone else, wanted someone to know that rage had not had the final say. Jake took a drink from his glass of wine. He placed the pen on the white stationery his brother had given him:
Dear Tom,
Today, I committed an act of kindness …
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Teachers come in all forms and I have had many teachers who have taught me to accept my sorrows when they came my way and to look for ways to articulate hope whenever possible. This book could not have been written without my association with people who taught me that despair is absolutely unacceptable: Karen Fiser, Larry Schmidt, Denise Levertov, the late Arturo Islas (who saw me through the genesis of this book, but did not live to see it to completion), Barbara DuMond and Virginia Navarro (who always believed), Ricardo Aguilar, Teresa Melendez, The Lannan Foundation, Scott Michaelson, Bobby and Lee Byrd, The Before Columbus Foundation, Mary Helen Clarke, Denise Chávez, and Daniel Murphy.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Alison Deming, a gifted writer and friend, who urged me to send my manuscript to her agent. Jennie McDonald is one of the finest professionals I have ever had the pleasure of working with. A fine editor in her own right; she is literate, intelligent, and possesses a relentless sense of humor.
Yvonne Murphy at Hyperion was an astute and enthusiastic editor. Her faith in this book made its publication possible. At every step she was supportive and respectful of my work without losing her critical acumen.
And to Patricia Macias—the woman with whom I share my home, my life, my body, my mind, and my heart—I give my deepest thanks. She saw me through this book, and still she is smiling. Amor, te adoro. Eres un milagro.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, my brothers and sisters, and the people of El Paso/Juárez—my people.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BENJAMIN ALIRE SÁENZ is the author of In Perfect Light and The House of Forgetting, as well as several children’s books. He won the American Book Award for his collection of poems Calendar of Dust. A former priest, Sáenz teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise for
CARRY ME LIKE WATER
“Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and render, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern…. Sáenz is a writer with greatness in him.”
—LUIS URREA, San Diego Union-Tribune
“Sáenz is wonderful, at times magnificent.”
—Baltimore Sun
“A powerful and poetic novel…. Demonstrates a perceptive novelist’s knowledge of those deeper, interior rhythms that somehow propel us, at times in beauty and at times in tortured patterns, acro
ss the surface of the earth.”
—Albuquerque Journal
“Carry Me like Water is indeed a lovely first novel, rich in its sense of place and people. Benjamin Alire Sáenz has a fine talent.”
—LARRY MCMURTRY, author of Terms of Endearment
“Carry Me Like Water is full of love, loathing, and a cacophony of characters which people the spiritual airwaves from El Paso to California. Certainly a new perspective in the Chicano novel.”
—RUDOLFO ANAYA, author of Bless Me, Ultima
“Benjamin Sáenz has created, with his first novel, a work of unique and endearing quality. The characters and conflicts appear as in no other book I’ve read. There is a well-wrought and compelling ferment of pain and pathos, the familiar with the supernatural, the poetic with plot.”
—LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ,
author of Always Running and Music of the Mill
Also by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
FICTION
In Perfect Light
Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood
The House of Forgetting
Flowers for the Broken
POETRY
Elegies in Blue
Dark and Perfect Angels
Calendar of Dust
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
A Gift from Papá Diego
Grandma Fina and Her Wonderful Umbrellas
Copyright
Quotations from Karen Fiser’s poetry are from Words Like Fate and Pain. Copyright © 1992 by Karen Fiser. Reprinted with permission of Zoland Books, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This book was originally published in 1995 by Hyperion Books.
CARRY ME LIKE WATER. Copyright © 1995 by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.