Drowning Tucson (19 page)

Everyone was finally calm except the Gutierrezes, who ran to their door, stumbling over toys and slipping on receipts and invoices and
cancelled checks strewn on the floor. They stood at the door searching for their son, clutching their chests until they finally saw him, pobre Alberto, standing in the street, stuck in the boiling asphalt, and the smell was so unbearable, so putrid, they could hardly approach him without gagging, were it not for the simple fact that it was
their
son’s flesh burning.

Alberto stood motionless, his flesh an unearthly purple, looking more like a bruise than a little boy. Rudolfo’s gut response was to run up and tear him from the asphalt, so he reached down to grab him but was stopped by his wife, who had wisely considered the ramifications of such an action, telling him to hold Alberto, my God, just hold onto him, please, I’ll be right back. She ran inside the house, leaving her husband to stare at his son, who could not breathe, whose face was contorted with so much agony that Rudolfo could bearly stand to look at his child’s eyes pleading, failing to understand the pain and the burning and why his dad could not make it stop, just make it stop, Daddy, and Rudolfo could bear it no longer and looked away, and he raised his head toward heaven, fuck, fuck, what do I do? my son, my son, then he closed his eyes and put his fingers over them and pressed down hard while Alberto reached out and grabbed his father’s pant leg and wailed again and finally Gloria returned with a metal spatula and began digging their little boy’s feet out of the asphalt, furiously digging, digging through black mush and gravel until she had freed one tiny foot and then the other and had her baby cradled in her arms, running back to the house with him and leaving her husband in the street with his fingers pressing into his eyes and his son’s wailing echoing through the cul-de-sac.

And the smell.

The smell would never leave, even when Rudolfo called an ambulance while his wife soaked her son’s feet in a tub of cold water and wept and stroked his head and prayed to la virgen y todos los santos to heal her son, please. The smell lingered in Rudolfo’s nose while he waited in front of his home for the ambulance to appear, chain-smoking and pacing and damning the asphalt and his own foolishness for forgetting they had only just pressed a fresh sheet into place three days earlier and the heat was so strong the swamp cooler did nothing but push hot air
around inside so of course the asphalt was still sticky and treacherous. The smell was still clinging to Rudolfo’s nose even after they returned from the hospital where Alberto had been admitted for third-degree burns and severe shock, staying for three days to recover with bandaged feet and doctor’s orders for him to not walk for at least one month, maybe better to wait six or seven weeks. And be sure to change the dressing every two hours, even when he sleeps. Which was fine with Gloria, who spent the next two months lying in bed with her son and kissing him all over, especially on his delicate bandaged feet, and cooing in his ears while praying to the Virgin Mother to please deliver me from the pain of motherhood and save my child from the despair of the cruel, cruel world.

Rudolfo knew she could never forgive herself for her negligence. At least that’s what he believed when she died of cancer two years later—she who had never smoked and who forced her husband to go outside and not smoke around her or the baby—and he found it unsettling that she had passed away in the same hospital where her son had lain in agony, the vicious circle of despair growing wider. He knew the cancer was not from ill health, because he had heard her sobbing every night in her sleep and could practically feel the guilt that stood thick in the air of their home. That was what killed her, he was sure. The cancer of guilt.

But his curse was the smell. He, too, would pay the price for not noticing Alberto walking out the front door, for forgetting that technology and municipal taxes had finally brought asphalt to the desert. For not noticing until it was too late that his son was stuck in the middle of the cul-de-sac, cooking beneath the desert sun.

He smelled his son’s burning flesh, a grotesque mixture of bacon and mayonnaise, every moment thereafter. He smelled it when he dropped his son off at school every morning. He smelled it when he read him bedtime stories and kissed him goodnight. He smelled it when he attended Alberto’s school plays. During holiday masses. At parent-teacher conferences. He smelled it when he helped him knot his bowtie before the senior prom. When Alberto’s orders arrived, Rudolfo smelled burning feet as he drove him to the army recruitment center to board the bus for basic training so he could be turned into a
soldier and deployed to Vietnam. He even smelled it two years and four months later when his son came home from the war in a crude pinewood coffin, after being burnt alive by miscalculation on the part of an unseasoned bomber dispatched on a napalming mission. Standing over his son’s open grave, he imagined his poor Alberto, not even twenty-one years old, screaming and burning and abandoned all alone in the wilds of some foreign country, betrayed yet again, looking for his father’s pant leg to grasp, Alberto turning purple and black, his flesh melting off in greasy clumps, crying out while the flames devoured his body. And Rudolfo Gutierrez wept furiously behind his sunglasses as the men in military uniforms fired their guns into the sky three times and presented him with the Stars and Stripes, once draped over his son’s coffin, now folded into a neat triangle with three warm, spent rifle shells from the twenty-one-gun salute tucked inside. Even then, when they laid him in the ground, the smell never went away. It only got stronger.

Even though he tried to smoke and smoke—chain-smoking filter-less cigarettes, inhaling deeply and holding the smoke trapped in his lungs until he was about to collapse—in an attempt to kill off his olfactory nerves and coat his lungs with so much filth that one smell was indiscernible from the next, it did no good. Now, because of complications from emphysema, he was on oxygen, each gust from his tank issuing a new surge of fresh air tainted with burnt feet. Every breath was like this. All day long. Every single day.

And so he had grown old and suffered the same nightmare, a ghoulish adaptation of that day’s events back when everything in Rudolfo’s life had suddenly and inexplicably altered its course. Back before he’d developed the nervous twitch beneath his left eye that sometimes became so violent it nearly drove him to insanity. Back before he began rubbing Vicks under his nostrils so he could alter the smell, if even a little, and perhaps dream of something else.

But now Rudolfo lay in bed, succumbing to the smell’s inevitability and adjusting himself to the reality of his solitude as the nightmare began to mercifully fade from his mind and was replaced with the warm light of sunrise. And, like every other morning, he sat up in bed and
plucked the oxygen tubes from his nostrils. Then he reached over to the nightstand and tapped a cigarette from his pack of Benson & Hedges. He lit it, taking care to avoid the oxygen tubing with his flame, and lay back on his pillow, relishing the burning in his throat, the sandpapery smoke scratching its way deep inside him, and for the briefest moment, diminishing the smell of burned feet.

When his cigarette was finished, he lit another off the dying ember of the first, then sat up and began the laborious process of getting out of bed and trudging to the restroom. The getting up and moving in the morning was the hardest part of each day. Just lifting himself up from the bed and then putting one foot in front of the other. It was so hard. But he did it because what else could he do? Lie in bed and rot?

When he finally made it out into the hall, Rudolfo stopped occasionally to rest against the wall and take a lengthy pull from his cigarette. Then, after blowing out the smoke and pausing for a brief coughing fit, he took a sip of oxygen from the tubing and gathered his strength for a few more steps.

Eventually, he made it to the restroom, and he carefully lowered himself onto the rim of the bathtub and cranked the faucet handle as far as it would go, basking in the steam and praying this time it might scour the smell from his body. And maybe today would be the day the bath would relax him enough and his eye would stop twitching and throbbing each time he thought of his burning son and his guilt-stricken wife. Rudolfo pressed down on the bag beneath his eye with all his might, ashamed that he had neither the strength nor the courage to gouge the offensive thing from its socket. He wished he could rid himself of his curse. But there was little he could do. This much he knew. How to bring back a dead wife and son? How to forgive himself for having failed both as a husband and father? It had been his job, he knew, to protect his family. It was he who should have died in battle, not his son. It was he who should have died from cancer, not his Gloria. Yet, inexplicably, after nearly forty years of serious smoking—what his doctor called chronic smoking—it was Rudolfo Gutierrez and not his wife or his son who continued to breathe. Even now, sitting on the edge of his bathtub and watching the water rise, he was the one alive to feel the
steam lending its moisture to his tired skin and penetrating his blackened lungs. And he simply could not reconcile this harsh fact with how he believed things should be. For this, he could never forgive himself. To Rudolfo, each day he was alive was an inexcusable crime against his wife and son. Against nature and its order.

Of course, when he was finally in the water, soaking in a hot bath of Epsom salts, Rudolfo considered, as he often did, pulling the oxygen tubing from his nostrils and lowering himself completely beneath the water. But he was scared even that wouldn’t work. His bathtub was neither long enough nor deep enough, and he knew how foolish he would feel when he inevitably burst through the water’s surface gasping for breath. After all, what kind of person could actually stay beneath the water and allow his lungs to give in, allowing himself to die when mere inches above his head was the lifesaving desert air, despite its being tainted with the smell of burning feet? Certainly not me, he thought. I’m not that strong of a man. Still, it was something to think about as he lay in the tub, preparing for another day of trying to keep his small business afloat.

In a meager attempt to cope with his overwhelming sense of guilt and his inability to forgive his failures as a father, five years after his son’s death, Rudolfo Gutierrez decided to sell his plumbing business. Besides, he had tired of laying the clay pipes that carried the city sewage. He had tired of waking to the smell only to spend the remainder of each day working in the none-too-pleasant occupation of human waste. The stink of shit was an affront to his already traumatized sense of smell. And he felt humiliated to be bending over all the time, as if in supplication, yet getting no sense of relief out of the act. There had been a time when he installed expensive bathroom fixtures in the glorious new homes climbing up the foothills, and there had been a time when his many lucrative contracts had even included plumbing the food courts of Tucson’s malls. But when the recession hit, those contracts had dried up, and it was back to the sewers and unclogging toilets and replacing the aging water lines in Tucson’s oldest homes and snaking out industrial-sized drains in the filthy backrooms of the bars on Miracle Mile. Always digging, piping, snaking, burrowing, plunging. It was simply too much.
So, he made up his mind to move to a different part of the city, far away from Siglo Place, that accursed cul-de-sac. Within six months of his decision, Rudolfo had laid off his employees, canceled his contracts, and opened a flower shop, with the hopes that working around the pleasant smell of flowers might make breathing more bearable.

Yes, opening the shop had been a good decision, Rudolfo believed. It made sense even now, as he rose from the steaming bathwater and pulled on his heavy terrycloth robe, to at least take some control of his life all those years ago. No, the flowers didn’t completely mask the smell of burning flesh, but they did take a little bit of the edge off.

As he dressed and groomed himself for work, Rudolfo truly hoped today was one of those days. He decided it might even be a good idea to have a Christmas in July sale to do away with some of the products that weren’t moving quickly enough for his liking. I’ll get to work and draw up a nicely lettered sign and post it in the window. He visualized the layout and the size of the lettering as he pulled on his socks and underwear. He remembered the bright yellow roll of paper in the back of the store above the cleaning supplies. It would work perfectly.

Once he was finally dressed and had tightened his bolo tie around his collar, Rudolfo left through his front door, locked the two deadbolts, bent down to retrieve the
Arizona Daily Star,
and began the fifteen-minute walk to work, pulling his portable oxygen tank behind him. The front page said temperatures were expected to be in the 120s. Of course, Rudolfo knew this was something that certainly happened out here, but it was infrequent enough that when it did, it was newsworthy. To his annoyance, next came the usual gamut of articles about checking on the elderly, upkeep of swamp coolers, maintenance of refrigerators, proper levels of hydration, and so on. He hated how they condescended to readers, as though the people living out here in the desert did not know to drink water when it got extra hot out.

He stopped at Torchy’s for a cup of fresh coffee, and Torchy said the same thing he said every morning, yep, good ol’ Rudy G. A well-oiled machine, a man so punctual I set my clock by his movements. Haha. If Rudolfo Gutierrez aint in my shop buying his brew at exactly three minutes to eight, the birds’d fall from their telephone wires, cars’d screech to a
halt, the sun’d freeze in the sky, not sure if it was actually on schedule. What Torchy didn’t know was how hard it was getting for Rudolfo Gutierrez to pull himself out of the bathwater every morning. Still, he thanked Torchy, as was their custom, tapped the face of his watch, and walked out the door with a minute to spare before it was time to open up shop.

It only took him half an hour to make up a Christmas in July sign, advertising 50% off select items. An hour later, he had dusted and marked and organized all the baskets and teddy bears and vases he was having trouble moving. Then he sat on his stool behind the counter to read the paper while waiting on customers to arrive. The bright colors at Floreria Gutierrez made him smile each morning. The iris and cymbidium orchids and lilies and birds of paradise were like his children. Each time he arranged bouquets for weddings, anniversaries, proms, valentines, or even for funerals, he realized he preferred dealing with things that grew out of the ground, things that bloomed and blossomed and colored. Every day he sat by the front window and gazed at the old three-by-five of his wife that he kept folded in his wallet. The photo was faded, its corners disintegrated by years of being pulled from the wallet and pushed by sweaty fingers back behind old receipts and business cards. Beneath a web of creases his beautiful wife sat in her wedding dress, perched on a wrought-iron bench in front of the San Xavier Mission. He did this every morning until the sun warmed the flowers and brought life into the shop.