It was a simple house, part adobe, part thatch, just like you see in the movies about Mexico. There were scrubby trees in the yard and an old white Ford without tires or wheels sitting out to the side of the house. Prickly pear had grown up all around it and the moon was out from behind the clouds again and I could see the car was stuffed with all manner of junk.
Beatrice helped me wake Leonard and get him into the house. I held Leonard up while she lit lamps. I didn’t see an electric light or refrigerator. The house was very small. Three rooms. Two of the rooms were bedrooms, the other was a kitchen of sorts with an old wooden stove. After we got Leonard stretched out on a bed in one of the bedrooms, slipped off his shoes, she took me outside and showed me where the outdoor convenience was. It was a leaning rectangle of graying slats with a tin roof and it smelled just like what was under it. Beatrice seemed a little embarrassed by it all.
We went back inside and she got a large jar of pills and brought them out. “Antibiotics,” she said.
“Jesus, that’s certainly the economy version,” I said.
“You can buy them like that here. Not like in the States.”
“Do you go to the States often?”
“Not anymore,” she said. “I lived there once. I studied archaeology at the University of Texas. Austin.”
“I’ve always been interested in archaeology.”
She gave me a curious eyeballing.
“Seriously,” I said, and told her about having done some digs here and there when I was young, Caddo Indian stuff in East Texas mostly. I had been the shovel boy for a nice amateur archaeologist named Sam Whiteside. She talked about going to the University of Texas, then the University of Mexico, and how she had graduated with a degree in anthropology and archaeology.
She got some water and the pills and took them to Leonard. He was sweating slightly and had a fever. He was only partially awake.
“These,” she said, shaking the jar of pills, “should get the infection down. He has not lost much blood. Tomorrow, he rests some, eats, then you go.”
“Okay,” I said, trying not to think too far ahead.
“We’ll give him the pills now,” she said.
“But not all of them?”
She smiled. “Not all of them. Just a few.”
“Leonard,” I said, waking him. “Time to take your medicine.”
I supported his head on my arm while Beatrice gave him the pills and held the glass so he could sip water. When that was finished, I lowered Leonard back onto the bed and he went to sleep immediately. Beatrice blew out the light and we went out of there.
In the kitchen she lit the lamps and poured some water from a pitcher into a basin, gave me a bar of lye soap. I used it to wash my face and hands. When I was finished, she handed me a towel.
“We do not have many conveniences,” she said. “I had nice things in the States, but here my father is very poor and he lives as he has always lived.”
“That’s quite all right,” I said. “I thank you for helping us.”
She opened a metal box on a shelf and took out a loaf of long, brown, home-baked bread. She split it down the middle, made slices from that. She removed a big cake of flaking cheese from the storage box, cut slabs from it, put them on the bread. She poured wine from a bottle into two fruit jars and gave me one of the jars. I don’t really like wine, but I wasn’t about to be rude. Not after all she and her father had done for us.
We sat in some old but comfortable chairs at a cheap table supported by wobbly aluminum legs and ate our bread and cheese and drank our wine.
The bread was full of flavor, and the cheese was sharp. I even found I liked the wine. At that point, however, having not eaten in some hours, I think I might have enjoyed a steaming slice of dog shit on a roof shingle.
As we ate, we talked. “I earned my degree,” she said, “but I never used it. I came back here when my mother died to take care of my father. I have been here ever since.”
“Your father looks like a capable man to me,” I said.
“In many ways he is, but he cannot take care of himself at home.”
“Maybe he can,” I said.
She smiled at me. It was a lovely smile. “You don’t understand what’s expected of me.”
“By your father?”
“By my past. I have been raised to do the woman’s work.”
“You went to the university. That’s certainly a modern enough approach. Does your father expect it of you? Staying home, I mean?”
“No. But I expect it. I feel I’m failing if I do not do it. I know I do not have to, yet I do.”
“Maybe you should change your thinking.”
“My thinking is changed, but my doing is the same.”
I smiled at her. “That’s one way to put it. Do you work on the fishing boat?”
She nodded. “And do other things. I go on the boat to keep from staying here. No one lives near here. There is nothing to do. I do not like the boat, but I have my father there, and I can keep busy with the baiting, the cleaning of the fish.”
“I assume you sell the fish.”
“Yes. What do you do? Are you on vacation?”
“I’m a security guard at a chicken plant.”
She grinned wide, and she looked very beautiful when she did that. It gave her deep dimples. Her eyes were bright in the lamplight. I loved the way she spoke English, the way her accent curled around the words and made them sexy.
We talked for a long time. She poured more wine. I meant not to drink it, but I was geared up and nervous. By the time I finished the second jar of wine, I was beginning to feel a little sleepy.
She told me about her life and her disappointments, and they were all tied to tradition and how her mother had lived and how she had tried to break away from it, but couldn’t. It had stayed with her like a disease. She loved her mother and what she had done, but didn’t feel it was for her – and yet, here she was, in many ways taking her mother’s place. A woman over thirty and not getting younger and feeling she was missing out on the world.
“There is never any money,” she said. “My father cares little for money. He works. He makes enough to feed us, to get oil for his lamps, a few items here and there. He wants nothing else. He sells his fish too cheap. He does not have money, he does without. It does not bother him.”
“But it bothers you.”
“I do not ask to be rich, but I would like to have nice clothes. Some things. Is that so bad?”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Fact is, I haven’t had all that much myself. It’s my fault. You can want too much, but you can want too little as well. I think I’ve wanted too little. Your father, he seems content, and that’s fine. But it’s all right you want something more. I think he could do without you, he had to. He seems independent.”
She smiled at me, reached to take my glass, touched my hand. She leaned forward, stared at me. “Would you kiss me?”
It didn’t seem like a chore. “Yes I would,” I said, and did. I liked it so much, I did it again. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but the next moment she was out of her chair and in my lap, and we were kissing deeply. She smelled good, her hair was soft, and her lips were sweet.
Still, part of me felt bad about the whole thing. Sort of like I was cheating on Brett. But Brett had gone her own way. I had no reason to feel guilt. No reason at all.
Another part of me felt as if I were taking advantage of a lonely woman who had had too much wine, but that part wasn’t speaking too loudly. Hell, I had had too much wine.
I kissed her deeply. She ran her hand between my legs and took hold of me and squeezed, and soon I had her in my arms and was carrying her to the empty bedroom. I laid her on the bed and helped her undress, pulling her shoes off, her jeans, her sweatshirt over her head, unfastening her bra and removing her panties.
I stood by the bed and removed my clothes and removed my wallet and took out a prophylactic and gave it to her. She laid it beside her. I climbed onto the bed. She stroked me and finally took the rubber from the package and slipped it over me, then she spread her legs and took hold of her knees and pulled them up so that they were damn near touching her ears.
