Malas, p.6
Malas, page 6
Pilar brushed his apology aside. “Where is my daughter? What were these arrangements?”
“I won’t discuss it in front of Joselito,” he said, withdrawing his hand.
Oh, his familiar implacability. Her rage was immediate, beating inside her like a wild animal. It was unbearable to be this angry and this exhausted at the same time. She leaned her head against the cool glass of the truck window. “Fine.”
It was bright outside, nearly noon. They didn’t speak on the rest of the drive, nor at home. José Alfredo spent the day in the yard, cleaning his riding tack with an oily sheepskin. She lay in their darkened bedroom, weak with body aches, lulled by the low incessant coo of mourning doves and Joselito, humming and playing with his little plastic soldiers in his bedroom. She slept and slept.
When she woke it was night. Joselito was asleep. José Alfredo was sitting on the porch steps, smoking. She went to him, asked again what had happened to her daughter.
“She died inside,” José Alfredo said. “That’s what happened. You already know.”
“How can that happen?” she demanded. “I felt her inside. Moving. Even yesterday. How can she suddenly die?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not the doctor.”
“You’re not the doctor,” she snapped. “Nobody talks to me! What have they done with her?”
He flushed. “I don’t know. They didn’t say.”
“You didn’t ask them what they did with your own daughter?”
“The baby is dead, Pili. They did what they have to do with the stillborn ones.”
“I held her!” cried Pilar. “She must be somewhere! We have to go back for her!”
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” José Alfredo said. “Please calm down.”
“We have to go back. We have to get our baby.”
“No, Pili,” said José Alfredo. His lip trembled, but his voice was firm. “No, we can’t.”
“What did they do?” Pilar demanded, looking at him steadily. “You know.”
“I had to pay them a hundred dollars,” he said, finally. “They cremate the stillborn ones. It costs a hundred dollars.”
“They burned her,” Pilar whispered in horror. “You didn’t even want to see her, but you paid them to burn her.”
“I had to.” He would not look at her.
“She won’t have a burial. She doesn’t even have a name. Don’t you care about that?”
“Pili,” he said, in a low voice. He stared out into the darkness. “She couldn’t have a name on the birth certificate because she wasn’t born alive. That is the law with every stillborn baby. To name her, we would have to apply to change the certificate after it is filed. To apply to change the name, we would have to go to the notary. We have to pay the notary. We have to pay to change the certificate. We have to wait two weeks for the new certificate to arrive.”
He knuckled his hand in his hair. “We can’t get the funeral home to bury her with a name until the certificate is changed. We have to pay for them to hold the body until that happens, for two weeks, to hold the body. This is what they told me. What could I do?”
Good God, how many times would everyone call her daughter the body? Was her baby nothing but this bit of cast-off mortal flesh? Pilar wanted to scream.
Under the dingy yellow porch light his hands pulled and pulled at his hair, the rest of him a shadow. She knew even as she had fought for life, for her baby’s life, in the birth, he had had to face the white hospital workers and their paperwork. José Alfredo, who was not strongly literate. But still. He had done this and she hated him. She hated him.
“How do you even know that?” Pilar sneered. “Did you read that somewhere, all by yourself?”
“No,” he said, not even shamed by her insult. “Chuy helped me read everything. That’s why I couldn’t see her,” he admitted. “Oh God, I couldn’t see her.”
She had never seen her husband like this, so defeated. Undone. But there was no pity for him inside her, only an awful clarity. “It was the price of the two weeks in the funeral home. Wasn’t it?”
He was silent.
“We don’t have the money,” she said. “Because you spent it on this house. That’s why.”
He still refused to answer her. She knew she was right.
“You had to have your house. You just had to.”
“Leave me alone,” he said, muffled. “Leave me alone.”
“You burned our daughter!”
José Alfredo ran from her. Bolted off the porch and jumped in his truck. She watched him go, bone-weary, aching with grief and the misery of milk surging in her breasts. She didn’t have the energy or the desire to call after him. Worst of all he woke Joselito. She heard his anxious little voice in the dark, his padding feet as he ran to her.
Joselito’s small hands clutched her nightgown, his head butting against her thigh. “Where is Papi going?”
“To the store,” Pilar said, smoothing back his curls. “He’ll be right back. You need to go to sleep.”
“I’m thirsty.”
She lifted him into her arms. He was heavy, but she held him, went into the kitchen and filled a cup with water. He drank only a few sips and then drowsed against her. Pilar carried Joselito to her bedroom, curled up next to him. He fell asleep immediately.
They are not like us, Romi had said. How right she was, Pilar thought. One night after losing her daughter and she was alone, just she and her sleeping firstborn. Husband fled, only God knew to where.
José Alfredo did not come home that night. She lay her hand lightly on Joselito’s side, feeling the miraculous soft rise and fall, every sweet breath. The coyotes sent up their thin night wails. Owls whistled and chuckled in the trees. For the first time, Pilar did not fear the darkness outside her door.
Pilar lay awake, filled with a calm that was not serenity. A watchful silence, waiting for him to return. A dull anger that would abide and abide and abide inside her, more fearsome than whatever roamed the brush on Loma Negra.
my name
LULU MUÑOZ, 1994
Mexican dads are stupid about picking names for their daughters. They’re old-fashioned. They want something religious like Maria Guadalupe, or super romantic like Isabela. Every other Mexican girl is named Maria Guadalupe and Isabela, but Mexican dads never stop to think about that. Why should they? They’re Mexican dads. Whatever they say goes, period.
The worst is if you’re a girl and your dad was a Mexican teenager in the late sixties, in the cosmic grip of the Chicano movement. Even if he didn’t care about school walkouts or protesting in front of the courthouse, even if all he did for the cause was listen to the Royal Jesters while he hot-boxed in his Nova, he turned Chicano forever.
Bad luck. Because instead of religious and romantic, he went political and named his baby girl Crystal for Crystal City, Texas, birthplace of the Raza Unida Party. Or else something idealistic like Esperanza, or he took it back to the roots Aztec-style with Xochitl. He didn’t care that you were going to go through life as one of five hundred Crystals. He didn’t care that some dumbass was going to call you Esperanto or the fucking worst ever, Xoch-Panoch. He’s sentimental.
Bad luck. Because you’re a girl and he’s a same old same old Mexican, even if he blares Cream and Deep Purple and the Hollies over the stereo while he works in the yard. He won’t let you wear Doc Martens, because they’re for men and lesbianas. He won’t let you go to concerts. What, you think he’s a big pendejo? His daughter isn’t hanging around with a bunch of devil-worshipping marijuanos who just want to screw her. And let’s be clear—those are just the heavy metal Satanists. Every guy is out to screw his daughter.
It sucks being his daughter. Especially if you sort of have a rock band, like me. My bandmates are guys, and if I ever set foot in one of their houses my dad would kill them. I don’t tell them that, but they know. He’s so Mexican he’s Mexicano.
My dad is Don’t Tell Me about His Panic, Viva Aztlán, Brown Power militant. That’s why I’m the only Lucha in my high school. Lucha, noun and verb. Lucha, the battle cry. Lucha is what my dad named me, fight.
Grandma Romi says she never met anybody that liked to get crossways with people as much as my dad does. Except you, Lulu, she tells me lately.
I don’t mean to. It’s just my dad. What he wants. What he says. All the time.
Like this quinceañera. We’ve been in a deadlock since last summer. He’s going to have his quinceañera in February. That’s right, it’s his party. I don’t care if I’m turning fifteen; I don’t want to prance around in a frilly dress. I’m not a fucking debutante. Besides, it’s all bullshit—they say it’s a coming out party for becoming a woman, like getting your Confirmation at church, but really it’s just my dad dropping big cash on a circus so he can trot me around like a trained poodle. And afterward, the same curfew, the same rules, but there’s a giant glamour portrait of me in a tiara hanging in the living room.
Science says I became a woman when I was eleven. That was three years ago, but do you think I can buy a box of tampons without him flipping out? Nope. It’s gross bulky pads for me because plastic applicators scare the shit out of him. Every little thing in the whole world enrages and terrifies him. If he’s not watching out, I might become a mala. And for a Mexican man, a mala is the worst. Once his daughter’s gone bad, she’s bad forever. So it’s his job to make sure she never gets that chance. That’s my dad’s idea of me becoming a woman.
But I can’t explain any of this to Grandma because she is old, old, old. If she sits too long, she falls asleep.
It’s very sad what’s happening, she says. She means my dad and me, our fights. Lately that’s all we do, but it wasn’t always that way. After my mother died, I couldn’t stand to be away from him. I was five years old and, outside of work, my dad took me with him everywhere. I was the whiny kid in the back of the movie theater. I stretched out in restaurant booths and slept beneath his leather jacket. I had to be where I could put out my hand and find him.
I want to tell Grandma that one night I curled up in the back of the Blazer when he and his friend Jesse took a trio of musicians to serenade a girl Jesse liked. That girl, she never even turned on the light to let Jesse know she was listening. Fuck that bitch, my dad said, and to cheer Jesse up he drove around for two hours with the musicians crammed in the middle seat. There was a violinist, a guitarist, and a man with an acoustic bass so large he had to roll down the window to play it. My dad wouldn’t let them out until he’d gotten the time Jesse’d paid for, plus my requests—Whatcha wanna hear, Lulu? Y’all better play something for my baby. They cursed my dad, but they did it.
The guitarist sang in a high sweet voice that warbled when the Blazer hit potholes. My dad sang along too and it was a marvel to me that he knew the words to all those songs. I lay on the floorboard and listened to them sing. The cold breeze snatched their voices out the open window and outside the streetlights loomed and faded, loomed and faded, until I fell asleep.
These days my dad bellows, Lucha! And I am readysetgo. I am trapped like those musicians, just holding out for the car ride to be over. Only I won’t play for him.
Chapter Three
Witch Luck
My grandma Romi died the first week of October. The night she died, my dad was in his recliner, watching The Johnny Canales Show and working his way through a case of Coors Light while I did my Physics homework at the dinner table.
“This chavo’s pretty good,” he said, all fake casual, like he didn’t know I wasn’t speaking to him. “That’s real conjunto right there.”
It was a live performance: a young guy in a cowboy hat and a rhinestone black western shirt crooned mournfully onstage, punctuating his lyrics with sad accordion flourishes. The bottom of the screen said the guy’s name, Michael Salgado.
“Uh huh,” I said, noncommittal. I didn’t want to talk to him. I hadn’t forgiven him. No way.
“Who do you think his influences are?” my dad asked. He loved to quiz me on music. His music. “Can you tell?”
He reached into the Igloo cooler he kept beside his recliner and popped the top on a fresh beer. Probably his eighth since he’d parked himself in the recliner. His buzz was making him chatty. I stared at my homework. Drinking makes him touchy too. He’d take it personal if I went to my room right away.
“I don’t know.” I doodled on the paper. Since Gonzy died, I said the least I could get away with. But the silence got too uncomfortable. “I guess he sounds like…Cornelio Reyna?”
Because of my dad I know about conjunto music. Conjunto is what happened when German immigrants and rural northern Mexicans, norteños, grooved together starting in the late eighteen hundreds. Polkas, waltzes, and cumbias, the signature sound is button accordion. It doesn’t matter. I don’t like the guessing game anymore.
“That’s right, mija. Old Corny.” He flashed a grin at me. My best friend Marina says he doesn’t seem like a real dad. Maybe not. He’s kind of muscly with thick, perfectly straight black hair that he wears a little long. Also, he’s the only Mexican dad around who is in his forties and doesn’t sport a big Tony Orlando mustache. Tonight, though, he looked haggard. I could tell he hadn’t slept for a couple of days. But still, when he twinkles, it’s hard not to smile back.
Old Corny was a joke of ours. He loved Cornelio Reyna, a Mexican singer from the sixties. He’d call him Old Corny, and I’d say, Dad, all that music’s corny. Now, I refused to answer, just tilted my face back at my notebook. Too bad for him.
“Anyway, that’s why I like this guy,” my dad said, a little surly, gesturing at the TV with his beer hand. “Toca más norteño que tejano.”
“Michael Salgado’s American,” I pointed out, just to disagree. “He’s Tejano.”
“He is, but the music isn’t. I told you, it doesn’t matter what side it comes from.” This is one of my dad’s regular rants: Americans stole Texas, but conjunto was born on both sides of the border! On the other side of the river, conjunto is called norteño. On this side, it’s Tejano.
“Obviously, it does matter,” I snipped. The difference between norteño and Tejano music is just like being Mexican or Mexican American. No, we’re not the same. “That’s why Tejano sounds more modern.”
“Agringado, you mean.” Another of his gripes: Tejano music isn’t Mexican enough. These days, tejano is full of synthesizer, electric guitar, jazz, blues, pop, and other American stylizing. A lot less accordion. Some groups dress vaquero, but just as many go for flashy sequin outfits and El DeBarge mullets. This is personally offensive to my dad. He thinks stuff that’s Mexican should stay Mexican.
I considered baiting him even more by telling him he isn’t technically Mexican since he was born here, but the phone rang. I grabbed the cordless, figuring it was Marina. It was a good chance to get away to my bedroom.
“Tell your amiguita it’s late to be calling and get off the phone,” my dad said. I’d gotten on his nerves.
It was a lady asking for Jules. Not for your dad, or Mr. Muñoz or even Julio. She asked for Jules. I almost couldn’t breathe.
“It’s for you,” I said, giving him a death glare. It was the same lady; I just knew it.
He must have known it too. He snatched the cordless and walked out to the back patio, shutting the glass sliding door behind him. I went back to the dining room table, but I didn’t even try to finish my homework. I strained to hear what he was saying. All I caught was the deep tone of his voice.
“I need to get back to the body shop,” he said when he came in. “Have to finish a Suburban by tomorrow morning. Get ready to go to Grandma’s.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. Unbelievable. Bam, just like that. Lulu, pack a bag, you’re spending the night at Grandma’s. He’s always dumping me at her house. That wasn’t the thing, though. It was that fucking lady.
“Hey,” he said as I was putting up my Physics book. “Go feed the puppy.”
“He’s your dog, you do it.”
He pulled on one of his black engineer boots. “Lulu, come on. I have to get ready.”
“No way!” I ran to my bedroom and slammed the door. Like some new puppy could make up for what happened to my poor old Gonzy.
I heard my dad cussing in the living room, but he didn’t follow me. Probably he just wanted to hurry up—it was almost eight o’clock. I dug my black cotton Mary Janes out of the closet, rolled them up with a T-shirt in a pair of clean jeans, and stuffed the whole thing in my backpack.
“You’re gonna have to start taking care of him,” my dad said when I came back to the living room. “He’s your dog too.”
I glared at him. “My dog’s dead. Somebody murdered him.”
My dad was such a jerk he couldn’t even look me in the eye. He knew. He just didn’t care.
“Hurry up,” he said, and stomped outside to his truck.
We didn’t speak on the drive. It was a long one because he won’t go by the river road if he’s with me. We took the La Cienega Avenue Expressway. Six lanes running west of San Antonio all the way to the international bridge at Ciudad Bravo. The river road is faster from our house, but that’s where the motorcycle accident happened eight years ago, when my mom got killed.
My dad’s totally superstitious. He thinks he’s cursed with double-sided luck, witch luck. He’s the bad luck charm for everybody else. The accident that killed my mom only broke his wrist. Instead of blaming my mom’s death on the drunk driver that hit them, my dad decided it was “the curse.” This is why I have no social life.
