Las Cruces

The Chevy ran fine, but father was broken down in the motel room. In the café next door, I ate dinner with my mother and sister. I pushed quarters into the juke box, played the theme from Bonanza over and over. In two days we’d be in Tucson. My father was dying. He would not eat dinner with us.


My mother was nervous. She picked at her food with her thin hands and eyed the man in the dirty white shirt sitting on the stool at the counter. We stayed at the Wagon Wheel Inn and ate at the Chuck Wagon Café. I cleaned my plate and asked to be excused. It seemed strange to say that in a restaurant, but I couldn’t sit still any longer. I couldn’t go back to the motel room either. I asked my mother if I could walk around for awhile, and she let me go.

Trucks loaded with vegetables, pickups filled with men with straw hats and shovels, and shining silver campers pulled by station wagons droned by on the highway outside of the café. The air felt hot and light, not thick and heavy like back home. Everything seemed so bright: the chrome metal bumper on the green sedan in the parking lot, the whitewashed walls of the motel, the clouds drifting in the blue sky. I walked around the cluster of adobe buildings.

Behind the kitchen through an open screen door, I heard men speaking in a language I didn’t recognize or understand. Out back in between low shrubs, a boy—twelve, ¬my age—as dark as the men in the kitchen, squatted down and moved his hands in the sand.

I walked up behind him. He stood and showed me an animal that he held in his hands.

“¡Sapo!” he said.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“It’s a horny toad,” he said. And then, under his breath, “Pendejo.”

I reached my hand out to the lizard. The boy didn’t move. “I can make it spit blood from its eyes,” he said.

I stared at him, and blood splattered my yellow shirt. I turned away and walked by myself, out into the scrub desert behind the hotel that sat along the New Mexico highway. I wanted to catch a lizard of my own, but I moved too slowly, too clumsily to get close to any of the blue-tailed creatures that darted away from my feet into the clumps of greasewood.

For ten days I sat in the backseat, behind the driver, as my family rode in our grey ’55 Chevy from New York to some place dry so that my father could breathe. My mother drove most of the way. My father wouldn’t let her drive more than 50 miles an hour or more than 250 miles a day. I sat next to my sister and her dolls and stuffed animals. Somewhere in Nebraska, Barbie and Yogi the Bear got married. I was the best man. I dropped a cheap pair of plastic sunglasses out my window in Texas, hoping the car would stop, but my mother pressed down on the gas pedal in response, and the whole car shook for awhile until she calmed down.

For ten nights I slept with my father. I knew he was dying. I could hear him groan in the darkness of the motel rooms. My sister slept with my mother. I couldn’t see over his mountain of a body to the other bed where my sister and mother slept. I felt cut off. I expected my father to die in his sleep, like my Uncle Bill had, for doctors and nurses with stretchers to rush into our room and carry him away. But I always woke first and lay in this foreign darkness and thought.

***
I went into the gift shop and bought a two-dollar silver and turquoise bracelet for Ruthie, my girlfriend back in New York. The woman behind the counter offered to send it to her in a long, thin box. I wrote the address I kept in my wallet on the label. I wrote postcards to my two best friends, David and Zookie, but I didn’t mail them. I didn’t know what I was waiting for. I’d told them that we were going to stop at the Alamo. I wanted to see where Davy Crockett, Georgie Russell, Jim Bowie and the others had died. But my father felt too ill, and we couldn’t go there. I carried my lucky Davy Crockett card that my father had given me and 16 others bound with a rubber band in my back pocket. Some of them were pictures of the battle for the Alamo.

I had two jobs. The first was to be good and not bother my sister when my mother drove. My sister and I made a pact. We drew an imaginary line down the middle of the backseat. If we strayed over that line, the person trespassing got slugged. I watched the cars pass us on the left. I stared at them for as long as possible. Sometimes there were other kids in the backseat, and they’d stare back at me. I carried a small metal Roy Rogers cap gun with me. Sometimes I’d shoot the people in the cars as they passed. When I finished, I’d blow the smoke off the barrel and put the gun back into the holster that had my name written on it.

My second job was better. Every morning I arranged and loaded the bags, suitcases, food, and cooler into the trunk of our car. This was a job that I did very well. I took a great deal of pride in getting everything and anything into the small space. Every change in contents, new bag, or new purchase that was thrown at me, I handled with skill. My parents couldn’t believe how well I did. They praised me over and over again. I couldn’t explain how I did it. I just looked at each container, and as if guided by some special power, I made the right choices. Large suitcases slid along small ones, with no wasted space. I fit boxes of shoes into spaces that shouldn’t hold them. Blankets cushioned small boxes. An umbrella disappeared in a crack. The ice box was always accessible. The top always opened with room to clear. This was my job. Sometimes I changed the order just to see if I could make it work, to test my power. Still, it worked like magic.

***

That night, we stayed in Las Cruces, New Mexico. On the map it seemed a long way away from New York, but I still half expected David or Angelo or Vinnie to come riding by on their bikes. The small swimming pool that my father said looked like a kidney bean had a light on the bottom, beneath the water. I asked my mother if my sister and I could go swimming after dinner. She said she would see, which meant that we probably wouldn’t. I walked around the motel until I’d seen everything twice.

As I walked in front of our room, my mother and my sister came out.

“Oh, good, there you are,” Mom said. “I have to run and find a drug store. I have to get something for your father. He’s feeling a little better. He said he’s going to come out and watch you swim. Be a good boy. And remember he’s not feeling well. This is a big change for all of us. See you in a little while.”

I sat down on the pink metal chairs in front of our window. I watched my mother and sister drive away, heard my father cough inside the room. It was a deep, dark cough that began with a rumble and a panic. My father couldn’t control it. He coughed so hard it sounded like he’d throw up. Once he coughed so hard he cracked his ribs. My sister and I learned to imitate his cough, and sometimes we’d do it just to make each other laugh.

In a short time later, he came out, wearing a green bathing suit and a dress shirt and brown loafers without any socks. He looked funny, but he was dying, so I didn’t say anything. I ran inside the motel room and jumped into my bathing suit. The room smelled of cigarettes and mildew like our basement after a rain. I moved outside quickly, trying not to breathe so I wouldn’t catch what my father had.

When I got back outside, the sun had flattened out into reds, pinks, and yellows in the west. Everything glowed strangely. The red neon Wagon Wheel Inn sign flickered, followed by the yellow Chuck Wagon Café. I sat at the edge of the shallow end of the little pool and stuck my feet into the warm blue water. I stood up and took a step down.

“Watch me swim, Dad,” I called out as I jumped into the water. I could swim. I tried to show him the best form that I could, like he taught me. Hands cupped. Head tilted just enough to draw breath. Legs straight and constant. I swam back and forth in the shallow end of the pool. I looked at my father, and he waved at me.

“Be careful,” he called.

The dark boy who had the horny toad and a man who looked like his father came inside the fenced area around the pool. The man, dressed in black pants and a white shirt and tie, said something to my father, then sat down next to him. The boy ran and dove into the pool. He swam underwater for the length of the pool and rose to the surface silently. He got out of the pool, dove in, and swam the pool again many times. I swam back and forth in the shallow end and tried to keep out of his way.

The sky turned black. The pool rippled with neon on the waves the boy made. The dark boy’s father left and returned wearing a red bathing suit. He walked to the edge of the pool, then stepped up on the diving board. He walked the white board on tip toes, jumped straight up, then arched above the water. His trunks glistened in the pool light. He jackknifed in mid-air, his fingertips touched his pointed toes, and he slipped back into the pool with hardly any splash. I shot a glance at my father. He looked at me, then pulled away into the grey smoke of his cigarette.

The boy yelled at his father, “Great dive, Dad.”

“You try one, son,” the man said.

The boy climbed up on the diving board and threw himself into the air. He tried to imitate his father in every detail: the pointed toes, the tight shoulders, the arched back. He hit the water at an angle and water splashed all the way back to me.

“Good form,” yelled the man. “Your entry was a little off. You better work on your balance.”

The man pulled himself out of the water in one fluid movement, walked across the deck, his back straight like when he was diving, and sat down next to my father. He spoke, but I was too far away to hear what passed between them. My father handed him a cigarette and lit it; the dark boy’s father leaned back and inhaled.

I pulled myself out of the pool, away from the steps, and approached my father.

“Tucson,” I heard my father say.

“Really?” exclaimed the man. He had a thin mustache that I hadn’t seen until now. “My brother and his family live there. He owns a restaurant—El Minuto. They have great tamales.”

My father looked at me, annoyed, waiting for me to get on with it and then leave him alone. I’ve seen this look before. I tried to whisper in my father’s ear, but he acted irritated.

“What do you want?” he asked brusquely.

He seemed so impatient that I regretted making the move toward him.

“May I swim, just once, across the deep end?” I asked.

He nodded that I could, and I walked toward the dark boy. He watched me approach and dove in. He swam the length of the pool and then returned, pulling himself to the edge, and sat and watched me. I dove, brushing his arm with my left foot. I swam. Pulling in with my cupped hands, kicking as hard as I could. I glided across the water. I didn’t look up. I just swam. I didn’t stop. I knew I’d make it. But I miscalculated. When I pulled my face up out of the water, expecting the edge, I was still a yard from the side of the pool. I could see the blue tile of the poolside, but I couldn’t reach it with my hand. I couldn’t get my body turned around so that I could swim back to shallow water. My feet kicked frantically for the bottom. I couldn’t hit anything solid. Fear seized me. My brain told me that I was going to drown. I felt completely helpless. Part of me wanted to slip quietly into the pool’s darkness and die rather than face the embarrassment of calling out. Another part believed that if I stroked, kicked, and splashed hard and fast enough, I’d move the distance I needed to be able to grab the pool’s side. I thrashed, tried to grab the side, but I went under.

Water filled my lungs. My eyes burned. I called out, my mouth full of water, “Help.” And then, “HELP!”

I couldn’t move. The neon lights whirled around me. Then I saw my father, standing above me. Furious. He had a look on his face I’ve never seen before.

“Here,” he snarled.

He thrust his hand down at me and pulled me out of the water. He lifted me up out of the pool in a single movement. He pulled me so hard I felt my bathing trunks slip halfway down my butt. He scraped me along the rough pool edge and pulled me up to my feet. I saw the towel that I left on the green chair. He grabbed me tightly around the back of my neck and marched me away from the pool. I saw the dark boy’s face, expressionless, as I moved past him.

My father pushed me through the iron pool gate, across the parking lot, and into our motel room. He slammed the door. He said nothing to me. I went into the bathroom and into the shower. I let the hot water pelt my face, my neck, my shoulders. When I couldn’t cry anymore, I shut off the water.

When I got out, my mother and my sister still had not returned home. The light flickered dimly in the motel room on my father asleep in bed. I crawled in next to him and hugged my edge of the bed, terrified that I’d touch him.

Nothing was ever spoken about my near drowning by my father.

***

I packed the trunk full the next morning. I thought I did a great job, especially since most of my sister’s stuffed animals had to ride in the trunk that day. But no one said anything about it to me. When we drove out, I saw the boy who had the horny toad. He sat on a chair in front of one of the rooms. He stroked the back of a black and white cat. I looked at him, but again, his face gave me nothing. He just looked past me like I wasn’t there.

I stayed quiet as we headed west to a town called Tucson. I slugged my sister once hard when she strayed into my territory. Somebody left the butter out of the cooler after lunch, and it melted and ruined one of the water wings. My father threw the mess into a barrel at a gas station when we stopped for gas. The attendant showed me a dead rattlesnake in a wooden box.

The Chevy was running fine, but my father coughed a lot. Cars still passed us on the left. I kept my six-shooter holstered. As the cars sped by us, I spat blood out of my eyes at the people inside.