Carry Me Like Water (51 page)

“The rest of these guys just came along for the ride.” Mundo pointed to three guys leaning on the El Camino. “I thought you’d want to meet the pallbearers—I picked the most experienced guys. We’ve all done this before—last year I did it twice, but like I say, El Guante’s the best, but all of us are good. I got the best for La Mary.”

Diego smiled and shook Mundo’s hand. “You guys got some weird hobbies,” Diego wrote. El Güero stretched his neck out to read the note Mundo was reading. He tried to keep from laughing, but couldn’t control himself.

As they were getting into the cars, Mundo took him over to the side. “They like you, I mean it. El Güero doesn’t laugh at too many things.” Diego stuck out one of his thumbs in the air and cocked his head. As soon as Diego got in the front seat of the car that Mundo was driving, the engines roared and the cars drove slowly toward the funeral home.

The man in the dark suit stared at them in a controlled manner. He eyed Mundo carefully. Diego handed him a note. “We’re here to accompany Mary Ramirez’s body to the church. We’d like to view the body.” Mundo looked over his shoulder as he wrote.

“Hey,” Mundo whispered to Diego, “you got a real smooth way of saying things. You could be a writer.”

The man in the dark suit stared at them.

“He’s deaf,” Mundo said.

The man’s expression remained the same. “Are you next of kin?”

Diego nodded.

Mundo pointed to his friends. “And these guys here are all the pallbearers.” He looked at them in a professional manner and smiled courteously. He handed a box of carnation boutonnieres to Mundo. “You may put these on, please.”

Mundo took the box and lined up the T-Birds like soldiers and pinned a flower on each guy as if he were giving out medals.

The man showed them to a small room with faded carpeting. Mary lay in a cheap, cardboard casket.

He looked at Mundo. “You have fifteen minutes before we’re scheduled to leave for the church.”

Diego knelt before the casket, took off his hat and made the sign of the cross. Behind him, Mundo nudged the T-Birds, and they all took off their hats, knelt on the floor and bowed their heads. Diego stared at Mary’s powdered face and wished he could see her eyes. Watching her face, he tried to pray, but he could do nothing, could not even remember his childhood prayers. He did not feel the tears falling down his face. Mundo stared at him, and watched him watch Mary.

The man came in and motioned to Mundo that it was time to go. He placed his hand on Diego’s shoulder, but Diego did not seem to notice his touch. He shook him gently until Diego looked up at him. “It’s time to go.”

El Guante, El Kermit, El Romeo, Indio, Mundo, and El Güero took the casket to the limousine. They followed the black shiny car in their bright yellow, blue, and red cars; the chrome wheels filling the streets with reflections of light.

The priest met them at the entrance to the church and sprayed the casket with holy water. “Baptized into Christ’s death,” he said. The T-Birds moved the casket up to the front of the church, moving slowly as if they were hearing music. Tencha and one of her friends
were standing at the front of the church. Carolyn and Crazy Eddie were there, too. That was all. It was the best I could do for you, Mary, Diego thought, the best.

He stared at the flame of the Easter candle. The colors in the stained glass reminded him of the T-Birds’ cars. He watched the priest like he had watched other priests a thousand times before. He had their actions memorized.

Concordia Cemetery was full of weeds and trash delivered there by the El Paso wind. It looked more like a dump than a cemetery. It was only cleaned once a year when the prisoners from the county jail were let out to clean it, but that wasn’t until the summer, and it had been almost a year since its last cleaning—a year’s worth of old newspapers lying up against the gravestones. Diego watched the priest read the final prayers: “May the angels carry you to paradise; the saints rise up to greet you …” He handed Diego the crucifix. Diego clasped it in his hands, squeezed it so tight that it dug into his skin. Mundo and the T-Birds placed their carnations on top of Mary’s cardboard casket. Carolyn brought a rose.

Mundo helped Diego to the car and held him up. He would have fallen without him. On the way back to Diego’s house, they stopped and picked up two cases of beer. They went inside Diego’s room, and there they all drank. Carolyn brought in a basket of fruit, but she didn’t stay long. “Call me if you need anything,” she said.

Mundo pulled out a bottle of cognac and handed it to Diego.

“Just don’t ask me where I got it. Drink.”

Diego poured himself a glass and drank as he watched the T-Birds drink their beer. He made no real attempt to watch their lips. They’re like their cars, he thought. Mundo watched him out of the corner of his eyes as he laughed with his friends. When the beer was gone, they each shook his hand and left, “I’ll come by tomorrow,” Mundo said.

Diego was glad they had left. He was tired and fell asleep on the floor. He woke up in the afternoon and went to the store. He bought a can of spray paint and when he got home he opened the window and spray-painted his suicide letter so it couldn’t be read by anybody.
He sat in his room and waited for the sun to set. When night came, he sat in the darkness and didn’t turn on the lights. Around midnight he walked over to the barrio and found a space on a wall. He sat in front of the space for a long time and howled into the empty streets. When he was too tired to cry anymore, he spray-painted a new sign:
THE VIRGIN IS DEAD.

Mundo watched him as he wrote the words on the wall. He could read what Diego had written clearly—the streetlight burning right above them like a worn out, dying sun. He watched this strange, innocent, unreachable man howl in the street like an animal, like a wounded coyote separated from his pack. Diego’s voice was strong in its sorrow, as strong as any wind Mundo had ever felt. He was not so speechless after all, Mundo thought.
Every man has to have his say.
He followed his friend back home to make sure no one would harm him, followed him like a protecting angel. When Diego was back in his apartment, Mundo saw a light appear through the window. He walked back to the place where Diego had written his words. He traced the letters with his finger. “The Virgin is dead,” he said out loud. And then he screamed it.

18

T
WO CARS AND
A van are driving along the southern New Mexico desert. Two women, two brothers, an old woman and a baby—they are traveling away from the westering sun as if they are being beckoned by something they cannot resist. The gravity pulls them and they are tired of fighting. They drive free into that something they’ve never known. That unknown something does not frighten them.

The dark-haired brother is thinking about how his wife will look in the desert, how her dark eyes will look like coal against the endless sky, how she will grow more beautiful than the yucca in bloom, how her hair will turn the color of the earth, how her face will mirror the blinding sun and burn itself into his eyes. He wonders if she will love him less in this desert. He is looking across the great expanse—and knows he is even smaller than he ever thought. He is beginning to feel a kind of thirst he was never known. And the dark-haired man’s brother is thinking: ‘T have found my brother, but I have lost my Joaquin. And now I am moving toward a strange doorway, but I do not know that place.” But as he looks at the clouds, dark as anything he has ever known, he thinks: “I have lived in a doorway all my life. Perhaps I am going home.” He drives one of the cars alone, and yet he does not feel as if he is alone anymore. He takes out a cigarette from his pocket and smokes it.
He thinks of his dead lover, and how he once walked up to him in a bar, took a cigarette out of his mouth, kissed him, then placed it back in his mouth and said, “Promise me you’ll quit, gringo.” He smiles at the memory. “I’ll quit when I get to the promised land.” He laughs to himself, and wonders at the large sky in front of him. He has never seen anything as large, as forbidding. It is startling and vast and as deep as the death he feels inside himself. He can see the storm across the desert and knows he is driving toward it. He wants it to swallow him. He lets out a puff of smoke through his nose. He sees lightning in the distance, then hears the thunder. It is like the sound of an earthquake, he thinks.
I have lived through earthquakes.
And the dark-haired woman holding her child in her arms is thinking: “I can smell it already—home—I can smell it, my mother, my brother, my skin.” “Do you see?” she whispers to her deaf son. “This is what you are made of.” And the other woman whose hair is much older than her skin is thinking: “This is the place I saw in my dream. Now it is more than a dream.” And the old woman is dreaming as she sleeps: “Yes, this will be a good place to die.”

The old woman continues to sleep as her daughter drives them into the storm. The daughter breathes in the smell of the desert, pungent and sweet. It makes her want to lick the earth, kiss it, take it into herself, take her clothes off and make love to it, the sand warmer and softer than any man’s hands. She thinks: “The clouds are as dark as Joaquin’s eyes in his final days.” She is startled by the sound of the thunder. She remembers a storm in Chicago when she was five. She had been playing outside, not noticing the gathering clouds. When the thunder and lightning began, her mother rushed outside and carried her indoors as the rain poured down around them, carried her as if she were the rain itself. She remembers the smell of her mother’s neck. She places her right hand on her mother’s lap for a few seconds then places it back on the wheel. Soon, they will be driving into the torrent. She thinks she has heard this thunder in the last breaths of her patients who died too young, too alone, too angry. She knows she has heard this thunder. Soon, she thinks, we will be surrounded by the rain.

The caravan slowly reaches the center of the storm, the darkness
enfolding them like a hungry lover who has been celibate for too many years. Slowly, they stop by the side of the road and wait for the downpour to cease before they continue traveling. The lightning strikes and strikes, the thunder surrounds them. And the man with the cigarette thinks: “Joaquin said the earth was animate and holy and now I know it is true.” And then he thinks: “I have struck and struck—I have been the thunder,” and the old woman—now more awake than she had ever been—thinks: “I have felt the thunder all my life and I am not broken,” and her daughter, whose hair is as old as her mother’s, looks out into the great storm and thinks: “I have dreamed of being the thunder, and will become it,” and the dark-haired man looks in awe of the rain and thinks: “I have hidden from the thunder all my life, and now I must stop hiding,” and then he thinks of the time he trembled in his wife’s arms and told her about a cruel father whose thunder almost broke him as a boy; and the woman holding the child wants to yell for joy at the sound of the crackling sky: “I have come back to the thunder.” She feels the rain pulling her to itself. Unable to contain herself any longer, she places the child in her husband’s arms and runs out of the van into the arms of the rain. She begins dancing in the mud by the side of the road. The other young woman runs out of her car and begins to dance with her. They take each other’s hands and swing each other in a circle. The dark-haired man watches his wife and her friend dancing in the mud, unafraid of the thunder, unafraid of the rain, unafraid of the anger of the skies. Through the sheets of pouring rain, he sees and hears them laugh. He sees them imperfectly, but knows he is seeing the perfect image of freedom.

CARRY ME LIKE WATER

1

I
T WAS DARK
and cool in the desert, the night air scented with the sharp smell of the rain bush. Maria Elena looked over at her husband as they were nearing the city of her birth. “It smells like God,” she said. It was hard to see his tired smile in the darkness of the van. The lights of the instrument panel allowed her to vaguely make out some of his features. She tried to picture him in the daylight, all the shadows of his past that had covered him like a shroud, banished, exiled from his face.