Tag: short stories

Remember Barbara (Section 1 of 5)

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for Barbara Struncova
1979-2010

This story was first published in December 2014, before Barbara’s disappearance was being spoken of publicly, before Bill Ulmer had been arrested for or charged with identity/passport fraud, and before Costa Rica and the USA disclosed their belief that Barbara was assassinated in her bedroom.
All of the names of places and people were changed.
All of the names except Barbara’s.

Chapter One

I said goodbye to Barbara.  I said goodbye to everyone because we were leaving forever.  In my mind’s eye I see her standing there with Jim outside our gate in the hot morning shade.  They came to say goodbye to us, to wish us well on our adventure and in our new life.  Our house was sold and our bags were packed.  The long chapter of our lives as expatriates in Costa Rica folded closed around us, with a new one about to begin far to the north.  She had only two weeks left to live and none of us knew.  Maybe Jim knew in his dark heart, but I doubt it.

Should I have known?  Was there a clue?  I stare at them now, trying to see their faces through the deepening water of time, but it ripples and shifts, blurring the details.  I watch from outside my body as the four of us stand there outside the gate.  I search for some sign of what is coming.  I see nothing.  You can think a couple might not be a match made in heaven, and never imagine that one of them will disappear.

If only somehow I had been able to know.  I would have warned her.  I would have begged her.  I would have clutched her hands and hugged her until she couldn’t breathe.  I would not have waved, as they turned to go, and returned to washing the dishes.

*****
Where are you, Barbara?

Where have you gone?

You are in the sky now.
You are in the sun and the salt of the sea.
You are the warm wind.

But where are your teeth, Barbara?
Where are your bones?

*****

I’d gone down to the surf shop to ask if I could hang a poster in the window advertising my services as a Spanish tutor.  I needed students to fill open spots in my schedule, so I biked around town bumming free advertising wherever possible.  The guy cleaning old wax off the boards in front of the shop told me that the owner was out, so I didn’t get an answer about the poster.  But I still got what I was looking for.  The guy said his name was Jim, shook my hand, and called me “ma’am.”  He told me his girlfriend Barbara was looking for a Spanish tutor and that, truthfully, he could use one too.  He had the most beautifully unusual grayish eyes in his weather-beaten face, and a way of looking at you when he talked with you that made him seem kind.  He gave me her phone number and said I should set up lessons for both of them.

…

By the time Jim and Barbara’s Spanish lesson ended at five, my husband was always working on dinner, so one evening, we invited them to stay.  Over a big bottle of wine and homemade lasagna, what should have been a life-long friendship was born.

A few weeks later they returned the dinner invitation.  In his past life in Texas, Jim told us, he owned a small chain of barbecue restaurants and he could cook up some mean ribs in his own secret sauce.  They invited two other couples—Jim’s friends from the surf shop—to join us, and the eight of us clicked like pieces in a puzzle.  From then on, until they rented the beach house, a Saturday night dinner party rotated between our kitchens.  We talked surfing, told jokes, ate, drank, watched movies, and played games. The eight of us represented five countries, spoke four languages and never ran out of dinner ideas.  My Italian husband prepared pizza and fresh pasta.  Marco made us Peruvian potatoes, while his girlfriend Rebecca concocted Greek delicacies that we couldn’t pronounce and introduced me to Ouzo.  Jake and Paige from Canada made chili to die for and chocolate cake.  Jim barbecued, and baked homemade mac and cheese.  Barbara giggled and covered her face, swearing that she couldn’t fry an egg.  We started meeting on the beach on Sunday mornings, too, to play volleyball with whoever wanted to join.

We were all at the wedding when Marco and Rebecca got married.  I have a picture of the eight of us at the party, happy together, captured in a jumbled line of embracing arms.  There is also a picture of just Jim and Barbara.  She is smiling widely at the camera with her sun-browned skin, gypsy hair and gray eyes like the ocean on a cloudy morning.  Jim is glancing into the distance, stroking his small goatee.

Jim was twelve years older than Barbara and his oldest daughters could easily have passed for her sisters. She was thirty one and wanted babies. Not right now.  Someday. After they’d settled down and gotten married. Jim said no more getting married for him and no more babies. She laughed at him like she didn’t believe him but I could see that his words stung her. Barbara loved him.

…

Barbara came from Czech Republic and, being as it was her fourth language, she absorbed Spanish like a sponge.  She sailed through the lessons far ahead of Jim, who struggled with the basics of renaming everything.  After a month, we all agreed that individual classes would be better, so I took them each on separately for several hours a week.

The more time Barbara and I spent together, the better friends we became. Sometimes we became so sidetracked in conversation, that we forgot the about lessons entirely.  We could start with irregular verbs and end up collapsed in giggles about how we and our sisters used to dress our cats in doll clothes.  Half a world and a decade apart, we discovered a delightful synchronicity.

She loved language study and approached it with mathematical precision.  She was always on time for lessons and never missed a class unless she had to watch the surf shop for Jim who was out surfing.  Her homework was always done, she always paid without complaining, and she never asked the same question twice.  She kept a meticulous vocabulary notebook, of her own volition.

She held an accounting degree from Czech Republic, she said, and had clients in Europe.  She explained that she worked on line, and loved it for the freedom it gave her.  Midday in Europe is early morning in the Americas, and she was up each day with the early sun, fond of the solitude and cooler hours.  It was a perfect time for her to meet online with her clients, and as Jim was usually out surfing, she had their quiet apartment to herself.

Her family had old money, she said, but none of it was hers—maybe someday if Europe’s economy holds together.  She’d been supporting herself since she was 23, since she graduated and left Europe for America where she met Jim and fell in love.

 

Barbora Struncova

Read the next section of this story 

Barbara Struncova disappeared on December 5, 2010 and is still one of Costa Rica’s cold case missing persons. This is her story according to me, as close to the truth as I am able to tell it.
I call it fiction in a fading hope that it is.
Make no mistake: I will never stop hoping that everything I have supposed is wrong.
Everyone in this story is a friend I have lost.

First Soup

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From The Riotous Walls, work in progress

I do not know how to eat the soup.

There is an enormous bowl on the table in front of me with fist-sized potatoes, gristly chunks of meat, yucca, whole carrots, halved ears of corn. And a spoon. My mamá named Hilda smiles at me because she is pleased to have made me something special and “Coma,” she says. “No le gusta la sopa?”

I like soup and I am hungry but I don’t know what to do. The soups I know have small-cut meat and vegetables, not these ingredients boiled whole. I look again but she has not given me a knife. She stands there smiling at me in confused expectation as I look helplessly at my plate.

I must look for words in this language and I have so few.

“No entiendo,” I say. “Como?”

“Ai mamita,” she says through an accidental giggle and asks me if I’ve never eaten soup before. “Asi,” she says, and taking my spoon, she slices off a piece of potato and offers it to me as if I were a giant 20-year-old baby.

“Ah,” I say. “Gracias.” I take the spoon.

Mama Hilda disappears into the kitchen and then joins me with a steaming bowl for herself. The delicious broth is scalding hot and I spill it onto the table as I chop clumsily at the carrot and then at the corn.

“No no,” she interrupts me. “El maiz, no. Ai mamita. No sabe tomar la sopa,” and she giggles again. “Mire,” she commands. She dips her fingers into the boiling broth, fishes out the ear of corn and bites the kernels from it in the way of every summer.

“Ya?” she asks me, meaning do I need more help or do I finally get it.

“Si,” I say. “Ya.”

“Provecho.”

“Gracias. Igual.”

I know nothing, not how to eat, not now to speak. All my life I have heard people talk of being born again and although this is not what they meant I see that this is its truer meaning.

When we are finished our faces shine with sweat and soup.

The Dumb Broom Man (from “When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder”)

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(from When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder, a memoir.  Release date:  August 19, 2014, eLectio Publishing.)

Outside on the porch is the milk box. It’s gray metal with a lid that opens and shuts. It has to stay shut so kitties don’t get trapped in there. The Milk Man comes and puts full milks in the milk box. Mommy puts the empty ones in there at night and then she gets the full ones back out in the morning. I don’t even know what The Milk Man looks like because he comes so early in the morning the sun isn’t up and I’m not awake yet.

Who I do see is The Broom Man. The Broom Man sells brooms. If you don’t know The Broom Man, you have to go to the store when you want a broom but The Broom Man knows us, so he brings them to our house. The Broom Man’s deaf and dumb.

It isn’t nice to call people dumb but this is a different kind of dumb that means you can’t talk. I like The Broom Man because he’s nice and he always gives me a yellow butterscotch sucking-candy. I feel sorry for him because he can’t hear and he can’t talk and everyone says he’s dumb. It isn’t that kind of dumb, but still, everyone says it and he can’t even hear them. I wonder if he knows people say that. Anyway, it would be hard to be smart if you can’t hear anything.

How To Catch An Armadillo And Cook It For Dinner

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Part I:   How To Catch It

Women don’t hunt for armadillos.  Armadillo hunting is a man’s job involving dogs, shovels and being out in the hills and fields after dark when women are inside.  But if you are a foreigner, you have by nature thrown the rules into question anyway.  And if you are married, and if you pester your husband with your ceaseless curiosity, maybe he will invite you.

If he invites you to come along with him and Renan and Santos and Grevin:

  • Wear shoes that tie and long pants, no matter how hot it is.  You won’t be able to see where you step in the dark fields and there will only be one flashlight between the five of you.  There will be sticks on the ground and you won’t be able to see stones or little cornizuelos.  You won’t be able to see snakes or the spiders called picacaballos that can make horses’ hooves fall off, and the hills of fire ants will look like harmless mounds of earth.  Wear a long sleeved shirt to keep off the mosquitoes.
  • Ride your bicycle through the soft black night with the laughing men.  They are all your friends.  They will bring a flashlight, the shovel and the dog.
  • After you park your bikes, follow them through the field, trying not to trip.  Listen as Renan sics the dog and she whines, wheels on her hind legs and begins to dash madly in an opening spiral, snuffling the dry ground.
  • Stand with the men listening to them tease Renan, telling him his dog is no good.  Look up at the glowing carpet of stars overhead.  The Milky Way looks close enough to be the cloud of your own breath on a cold night long go and far away.
  • Run with them when the dog starts to yelp and growl, clawing at the earth.  Follow them to the hole where she dances, desperate.
  • Stare in fascination as Grevin digs carefully around the mouth of the hole, opening it wider, and Santos peers into it with his flashlight.
  • Ask your husband if it will turn and try to run out.  He will snort, and tell you they are shy, frightened animals that can only try to hide.
  • When the men ask you if you would like the honor of pulling the armadillo out, say yes.  Ask how.
  • Kneel by the hole in the ground under a million stars.  Ask the men if they are sure you will not be bitten by an angry snake. Feel emboldened by their laughter.
  • Reach your hands gingerly into the hole that gapes in the flashlight beam.  Reach in past your elbows, almost up to your shoulders.
  • Squeal when you feel something stiff and snakelike move in the dark hole. It is the armadillo’s tail.
  • Grab ahold of the armadillo tail with both hands and pull.
  • Pull harder. Pull as hard as you can.  Feel the desperation of the creature as it resists you with all its might, digging into the earth with its terrified claws.
  • Listen to your cheering, chanting friends.  Do not let go.
  • Pull with your legs.  Lean all of your weight into the pulling, and feel the armadillo begin to come loose.  Feel its panic.
  • Do not think about your hands.  They will heal.  You have salve at home.
  • Inch backwards.  Curl into a squat.  Do not let go.
  • Pull this breech child of the dinosaurs out of its hole with your bare hands, your legs and your back.  When your husband lunges forward to take it from you, let him.
  • Stumble backward.  Do not watch while Grevin beats it to death with his shovel.  Do not listen.
  • Catch your breath and remember that you and the armadillo are both children of the earth and stars, that someday you will lay within the earth you have pulled it out of.
  • Peddle home with the men, through the star-peppered night. Laugh when they praise your valor, which they which had not expected.

 

Part II:  How To Cook It

Your husband will peel the armadillo from its shell, skin it and gut it.  This is also a man’s job, one that does not interest you because it involves blood and a very sharp knife.

  • Place the newborn-rat-like carcass in a pot of boiling water with lemon and several cloves of garlic.  Try not to breathe the foul-smelling vapors.
  • After it is cooked and cooled, refrigerate it overnight and then boil it again the next day in a new pot of water with lemon and garlic.
  • Pour away the smelly water, remove the meat from the bones, and throw the armadillo skeleton to the delighted dog.
  • Mince the rubbery meat with a large knife, bathe in fresh lemon juice and refrigerate overnight.
  • On the third day, sauté onions, red peppers, garlic and cilantro in a large frying pan.  When the vegetables are soft, add several scoops of armadillo meat. Sprinkle with chicken bouillon and black pepper.
  • Cook until the meat begins to toast.
  • Serve with rice, beans and a generous bottle of tabasco.
  • Note with relief that the meat tastes quite a bit like chicken.
  • Ask your husband how he feels about raising chickens.

A Home for Socrates (from “The Riotous Walls”)

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(From The Riotous Walls, unpublished short novel)

Socrates the goldfish needed a new home.  He had been living in an ice cream bucket for the last year and it was high time for him to have a nice home that he could see out of like other goldfish.  But what?  The glass fish aquariums at Wal-Mart cost $10.99 on which I could eat for a week and, in fact, unless I came up with a better idea, he wasn’t going to get a look at the wide world until Christmas.

Suddenly I spied the wine jug we emptied  on Saturday night.  It was perfect:  big enough, transparent and it was free.  The bottleneck presented the only problem and it would have to be removed by what means I wasn’t sure, but where there’s a will there’s a way.   I scoured the house and came up with a Neanderthal  repertoire of tools:  sticks, rocks, a hammer.

I was trying to knock just the top part of it off with a hammer when Troy came out of the downstairs apartment to see what the hell all the noise was about.  I didn’t think it seemed like such a bad idea until I started trying to explain it.  I mean, maybe I would be lucky enough to break just the top of it off without bashing the thing to shards and slitting my wrists. You don’t know until you try.

I have something you could use, he offered.
Really?
Yeah. It used to be my hamster cage, but he died.  So you could have it.  It’s plastic, but it’d hold water.
Oh. Cool.
What was I thinking, anyway?
That way you won’t cut yourself, he added and went inside to get it.

Talk about nice neighbors.  Troy wasn’t the world’s smartest guy; after all, he works at the rubber factory.  But he had me and my half-baked college degree on that one.

Short Hair Like Boys (from “When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder”)

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(from When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder, release date: August 19, 2014 by eLectio Publsihing.)

*****

Mommy washes our hair on Saturdays so it will be clean for church.  Me and Wanda have long hair and Mommy has to wash it because we can’t.

I don’t like it when Mommy washes my hair.  Sometimes I cry.  She washes me with pink soap in the bathtub and then I have to turn around so the water is coming out behind me.  The water is coming out and she pushes me over backwards until my hair is under the spigot and my hair gets heavy and my head feels like it’s going to fall off.  Then I can sit up and Mommy puts shampoo on my head.  She scratches it all around with her fingers.  She does it hard and it hurts.  I ask Mommy does she have to do it with her fingernails? She says Oh Honey I’m Not Using My Fingernails, I Just Use My Fingers.  Then she doesn’t scratch quite as hard anymore until next time.

When it’s time to rinse the shampoo out she makes me put my head back under the water again.  I get to put a washcloth over my eyes so shampoo doesn’t get in them.  Water is splashing all over my face and my nose tickles and I can’t see and I can’t breathe.  Mommy rubs out the shampoo and I have to hold my head up and I can’t hold it up anymore.  But if I sit up I get in trouble and if I put my head back the whole way all the water goes in my nose and mouth.  I wish we could have short hair like boys but the Bible says we can’t. It’s not fair but we have to obey it.

After bath, Daddy combs us.  Daddy always says our hair is pretty and it smells good like shampoo.  He says I Smell ‘Poo for shampoo and we laugh because we aren’t allowed to say that word.  Daddy can say it though when he means shampoo.  If Mommy hears him say it she says Lamar and looks at him out of the top of her eyes.

In the summer Daddy takes the blue comb and sits on the porch and combs out the tangles.  I wear my Noah’s Ark jammies.  We listen to the peepers and Daddy tells me about animals like peepers that are really little frogs and about fish that live in the pond and bumblebees that live in nests and worms that live in the dirt.  He tells me stories about when he was a little boy.  In the winter we can’t sit outside, we have to sit inside and me and Daddy watch Hee Haw on tv while he combs me.  People on that program talk funny and they walk around in the cornfield and Miss Minnie forgot to take the tag off her hat.  Mommy doesn’t like Hee Haw and she doesn’t like Daddy to watch it, or us.  She says it’s too dumb and she tries to wash our hair during it so we can’t watch.

Furniture (from “The Riotous Walls”)

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(From The Riotous Walls, unpublished short novel)

Furniture, it turns out, is a luxury. You don’t need it to survive. Of course rooms look better with things in them, but our economic problems out-shouted the aesthetic ones. Between the four of us, we owned a mountain of cardboard boxes, one fan, four lamps, two clocks and a total of six single mattresses, all stolen from the college dorm. I don’t know how we got too many. Beth and I took two, threw them on our floor and pushed them together to make one big bed. Nina and Sheila too two, threw them on their floor and pushed them to opposite sides of the room. They were friends, but not best friends like Beth and me. The two leftovers went into the Passion Pit. We would have had to wear our clothes of out of the cardboard boxes if the rooms hadn’t included closets with shelves.

The only piece of furniture that came with the apartment was The Desk. The living room boasted a Desk so immense and so Heavy that it could only have been assembled in that very room. No human being could have gotten it up the precarious stairs and even God couldn’t have gotten it through the door. We could have used it as a table had we owned a chair. As it were, we put Sheila’s ancient stereo on it and stashed things in its drawers. I guess we could have painted furniture on the walls. In the end, it’s probably the only thing we didn’t paint on them.

. . .

Beth rode the couch, lounging like Queen Bathsheba, the day Mark and Curtis carried it to us. Tony Royal, or friend the cafeteria thief, said we could have it when he graduated he left town forever. It’s not the kind of thing you would take with you. You would, in fact, feel fortunate if you were able to give it away. It was a furry stained nursing-home pink and had offensive sprung springs but you could lay, sit or stand on it. You could lose things in it or under it. But it was our only piece of furniture which made it as hard to hate as it was to love.

I can’t believe Beth had the nerve to lie on it all the way home. I would never do that. But then again, I weigh a lot more than she does. That’s the effect Beth has on men; they happily carry her a mile in the summer sun while she lies on a couch. Me; not exactly.

When the day finally came to remove it, we didn’t carry it down the precarious stairway to the street as carefully as we carried it up. We hauled it to the door and threw it off the porch. It crashed to the ground and then we set it on fire. The neighbor man who hates us called the police so we had to say it was an accident.

That was a great idea. It was much easier to throw away after it was all burned up.

Suitcases

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You are sitting there in the living room with your shoes on and your hat.
And the tv is off which is impossible.
And there are suitcases beside you.

You say you are leaving. That much I can see for myself.

You say you shouldn’t have come here in the first place.
You say I don’t love you.
You say you read that in my diary.

I don’t say anything.
Clearly, you have helped yourself to my words.

You say the driver will be here for you any minute and he is.
I say goodbye.

The first time you left me you snuck away like coward and I nearly died of grief and rage.
But you begged to come back.
Maybe I wanted to see you walk away like a man; watch you walk out the door with your shoes on and your hat.
Maybe I wanted to remember you as the back of a hat and two sets of white knuckles clutching your suitcases.

Penance

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(From A Map Of The River, an unpublished short novel/prose poem)

…..

Washing clothes by hand in the pila is nothing new for me.
In Los Rios I have left behind a small white washer, but before I had it I washed in the way of our Grandmothers.
I know how to do this.
It is an important thing a woman must know.
The little girls on the block come to stare.
They have never seen a white woman wash.
They don’t suppose we know how.
They ask me “Sabe usted lavar?”
I answer them,”Sí” and still they stand in disbelief to watch.

Consuelo wet the clothes in the stone sink, sprinkled them with soap and scrubbed, deftly rolling and unrolling them against the rough surface. I watched her rinse them with scoops of fresh water from a gourd dish, then a hard wring with her muscled brown arms. She came to our house every morning to wash for Guadalupe, her four grown sons and her young boy. With her came Nanci, her five year old animal-child who grunted and screamed, scratched and stole, who learned the unintelligible speech of her mother. She is the one on whom the poor take pity because her poverty is complete.

Consuelo and her animal-daughter Nanci came to wash and I learned to understand their grunted language. The payment for Consuelo’s work were the plates of rice and beans which she and Nanci ate at midday. I watched them. They watched me. Consuelo offered to wash my clothes for small fee and I said no. She had no way of understanding my desire to learn so she thought I was stingy and mean. She watched me without pretending not to as I struggled to wash my own clothes, a clumsy imitation of her efficiency. Guadalupe’s sons watched me wash. Neighbors who stopped by watched me wash.  All of my life, people have stopped to watch me wash.  A gringa washing clothes by hand: who knew it was possible?

Later, in our rented house in Santa Cruz, before we had money to buy the small plastic washer, I washed everything by hand on Saturday mornings. Towels, bedding, the clay-encrusted work clothes of a potter went into the sink on the porch. I sweated out the penance for my sins one by one. Penance for selfishness were the shirts, penance for untruths were the stained socks to be whitened but not stretched. Penance for leaving my home and my traditions were jeans ground in the mud. Bed sheets were the penance for the iniquities of the unwed. Towels were the penance for having been born rich enough never to have hand-washed towels. When I finished, I was spent; drenched in suds and sweat, knuckles raw, wrists limp, back splitting, dizzy with exhaustion and the relief that comes only from cleaning your conscience along with your clothes.

…..

White Buckets

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 I

María Pablo is sitting round on her bed with Carlitos when I enter.  Carlitos is eating a tortilla and cheese with both grubby hands, and María is petting his hair.  It’s another boy, due in May.  I don’t take my coat off because the room is that cold.

“No puedo dormir,” she tells me.  Her back hurts, the baby moves.  Carlitos wants to sleep with her, and Vicente and even Adolfo who is almost 11, when it is cold.  There is another bed in the room piled with clothes and broken toys.

 

 II

 “Cuántos años tienes?”

“No sé.  Como veinticuatro.”

“En qué año naciste?”

“En ochenta y cuatro.”

“En cuál mes?”

“Diciembre.”

“Diciembre?  Entonces tienes veintisiete – casi veintiocho.”

“Veintiocho!  Sí, sí!  Veintiocho!”  She laughs.

 

 III

She brings me the letter typed in little black letters with the green logo of the county courthouse.  She is dusty and her back hurts from bending between the rows of the onion fields.

“Qué dice?” she asks me.

They want the name of baby Alejandro’s daddy if she’s to continue receiving government cash to pay the rent.  I know the answer to the question.  She has told me before.

Now she drops her eyes and isn’t looking at me when she repeats it: “Es que no sé.”

This time I have to press her.  The blanks on the paper are staring at us.  “No sabes su nombre o no sabes cuál es?”  I ask in the politest way I can think of.

“Yo sé quien es,” she says looking up, “Pero no sé donde está.”

“Y no sabes su nombre.”

“No,” she agrees.

 

 IV

She comes to me with another green and black letter.  Baby Alejandro nurses hungrily.  Carlitos stands guard, beside.

“Qué dice?” she asks me, and I tell her.   She has to go to the courthouse on Thursday at 2:00 to answer some questions about baby Alejandro’s daddy.

“Es que no sé,” she insists.

I know, I tell her, but you’re going to have to tell them that in person.

“Es que tengo verguenza,” she pleads.

“María,” I ask her slowly, “Te violaron?  O fue una cosa entre los dos?”

“No,” she says, looking at the floor.  “Fue una cosa entre los dos.”

Did you love him?, I want to ask her.  Cuénteme.  But I don’t.

 

 V

I meet them at the courthouse:  María, baby Alejandro, Carlitos and this time Vicente, too.  School is out for the summer.  The courthouse clerk speaks Spanish so she doesn’t need an interpreter, but I’m already there.  I make myself useful holding baby Alejandro.

“Dónde está el papá de su bebé?” the clerk asks her.

“No sé,” María tells her.

“Cómo se llama?” asks the clerk.

“No sé,” María answers.

Then she does something that I cannot believe.  María Pablo opens her purse.  She pulls out the remains of a mysteriously masculine-looking wallet stuffed with pieces of paper.  And from the wallet, she produces a Washington State ID card with a man’s name and picture.  She hands it to the courthouse clerk.

“Es él?” the clerk asks.

“Sí,” replies María.

I all but drop baby Alejandro on the floor.  I am stupefied.  She doesn’t know his name but she has his ID?  I know she can’t read.  But?  She could have shown me the ID.  María is not laying all her cards on the table.

I am somehow delighted.  I knew she wasn’t stupid.

Did he leave without his ID?  Hardly.  His wallet?  And never come back?  María, did you steal it?!

The clerk writes the name of baby Alejandro’s daddy and gives the ID back to María.  María says she thinks he’s in Oregon.

We walk out the door, baby Alejandro safe in his mother’s arms, Carlitos and Vicente in tow.  Something stops me from pointing out that she hasn’t been exactly straight with me.  For some reason, I have to leave her that little bit of dignity when way say goodbye.

I laugh out loud all the way back to my office–shocked, amazed, imagining a hundred possible scenarios.  I am laughing at myself.

 

 VI

Sandra walks over to my desk and says, “I have bad news for you.

“What?”

“Carmen was here filling out housing applications.  She said that María Pablo got beat up last night by her husband.”

The f-word flies out of my mouth like a startled bird, and then, “María Pablo doesn’t have a husband.”

“I know,” Sandra says. “But Carmen, who lives with her, was just here, and she said she does.  She said last night he was beating her up.  Carmen’s husband got involved and María’s husband threatened him, so now they have to move out.”

“Fucking María Pablo,” I say, while I turn off the computer and get the keys.  I have to go see her.

I drive to her house in dread.  But María doesn’t have a husband.  I know she doesn’t.  A lover maybe, that, out of politeness Carmen called an esposo?

Now I am going to get to the bottom of this.  Seriously.

 

 VII

María is sitting on her bed nursing baby Alejandro.  Carlitos is in a corner playing with empty cereal boxes.  She smiles widely when she sees me.

Where are the bruises?  The eyes swollen from crying?  She has nothing.  Her round brown face and white shining eyes glow humid in the July heat.  Her sleeveless top exposes two plump brown arms, unmarked.  Alejandro feeds from a perfect left breast.

“Siéntate,” she says, and I sit on the bed beside her.

This time I register every object in the room.  Women’s shoes, and shoes for little boys.  Baby clothes.  A few broken toys.  Her purse.  Adolfo’s school books, abandoned.  Winter blankets, piled.  If María has an esposo, in this world he owns nothing but the clothes on his back.  No hat, no shirt, no belt or pair of jeans, no razor, no cologne, no pair of shoes.  Or she hides him so completely I cannot find him, even unannounced.

“Cómo está?” I ask her.  “Todo está bien?” searching questions without saying Carmen came and told us what happened.

“Muy bien,” she says.  “Cansada, porque todo el tiempo este bebé quiere comer.”

“Se siente bien? Necesita algo?”

“No,” María says sweetly.  “Aquí estamos bien.”

I walk out the door more confused than I walked in.  Relieved not to see bruises, perplexed by her peace.  Somebody is selling me bullshit and I am buying it all.

 

 VIII

She comes to see me in the fall, but I am out.  Beside my desk, she leaves two white buckets overflowing with onions.

It isn’t fair.  I don’t deserve a gift.  She is my job, and everything I do for her is paid by the hour.  I would like to give a gift to her, but I may not.  When I took her the clothes that I bought for baby Alejandro that at Goodwill, I told her
they were something someone dropped off at the clinic.

 

 IX

“Nos vamos con mi hermano a California,” she tells me, as the leaves begin to curl yellow.  “Aquí es muy frío y no hay trabajo.”

The last time I see them, somber-eyed Adolfo is bouncing baby Alejandro on his knees, making him cough up bursts of hilarious baby giggles.  María, somewhere, has found the money to color her hair a curious shade of red.  And that’s it.  She’s gone.  Adolfo, Vicente, Carlitos and baby Alejandro.  Just gone.

I look for her everywhere.  Maybe someday she will come back.  Maybe in the summer when California gets too hot.  I hope she finds a clinic, there, that will give her a shot in three months.  If she doesn’t, there will be more babies for Adolfo to play with.

 

 X

María Pablo, with her Nahuatl dialect, her broken Spanish, her sunshine smile and her fearless heart.  We’re even.  We told some truth, told some lies, everything scripted by the state.  Everything but the generous white buckets of onions.

I stand in my kitchen slicing, and giggle at my silly onion tears.  She’s somewhere in the world this morning making quesadillas for her boys, working in the fields, telling nosey social workers with bleeding hearts just enough of the truth to get what she needs: help making a phone call, free second-hand baby clothes, a feeling of friendship.