Carry Me Like Water (69 page)

She traveled to Juárez to watch the people buy flowers for their dead. Hundreds and hundreds of people buying hundreds of bouquets of cempasúchil, the orange flowers as bright as summer desert sunsets. The burning copal filled her with something that almost resembled faith. She remembered the first time she’d smelled that incense—in a dream—in a dream she had once had, a dream where she had not had a body. She laughed into the air, and it did not matter that there was no sound. It was a laugh, a laugh that made her feel as bright as the flowers the people were bringing for their dead.
The next time I come here, it will be on foot.
She crossed back over the border—slowly, slowly—wanting to remember every single sight of the early November day. She found herself in front of her
favorite tree—a tree where sparrows gathered for some unknown reason, hundreds and hundreds of them, sparrows who, having gathered, did nothing other than sing. They sing and sing, out of joy or sorrow, the reason not mattering since the beauty of the song was the same. There is so much to sing about, Lizzie thought. She entered the tree, the singing of the sparrows all around her. It was the music of the desert, she thought, a music she would miss. Lizzie had found this place when she had arrived, and it had given her comfort to be around the language of these birds. It had never mattered to her that she understood very little of what the birds were singing. The hearing of the song had been enough. She would miss coming here. In the distance she could see the statue of Mount Cristo Rey. Maria Elena had said it was a place of miracles, and so it was. She followed the path of the river for a while until she came to the place where some workers were at the beginning stages of building a stone wall. She stared at the working bodies of the men as they labored on the wall. She wondered why they were allowing themselves to be used like this, but she knew the answer. They needed to eat, needed to eat because their bodies demanded it of them. For the longest time Lizzie had not known whether she wanted to have a body or not. But now, a body was all she wanted. Her mother had been right: her body
was
her friend.

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

M
ARIA 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

J
AKE 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?”