She said I didn’t have to worry about the cops, they never came to Niggertown unless a white person called them in. I wasn’t worried about cops—but if the gorilla had pals close by I didn’t want to fight them bare-assed too. She pressed a towel to her cheek with one hand and held her dress with the other and stepped into it and clumsily tugged it up over her hips.
The guy had quit puking but he wasn’t about to stand up on that knee, not for a long time. He was holding his balls and glaring at me in a painful rage. “Kill you, mothafucker. Come back in Niggertown, man, I
It wasn’t a good time to talk to me that way—the knot he’d raised over my eye was starting to ache. I fetched him a bootkick to the ear that shut him up except for the moaning.
As I went out the door she was cursing him and stamping on his head with her bare foot, still only half- dressed, her pretty tits jiggling as she let him have it.
I returned to the Toot Sweet Club a few nights later. I didn’t see the girl or the gorilla anywhere, but hadn’t expected to, considering their condition. Some of the spades gave me pretty hard looks, and I supposed the story had got around. One girl finally sidled up to me and said if I was looking for Corella—I hadn’t even known her name, it had all been “baby” and “sugar” between us—she’d gone home to Lake Charles where she had a childhood sweetie who’d probably take her back, cut face and all. As for Zachary, the fella who cut her, his leg was in a cast and his hand looked like a boxing glove and all he could do was stay home drunk. I bought her a drink, but before she could take the first sip some guy in dark glasses and with a gold front tooth came over and whispered in her ear. She gave me an “I’m sorry” look and moved off with the guy, leaving the drink on the bar. I hung around long enough to let any of them who wanted to try me have the chance, but nobody made a move.
Over the next few weeks I went to some of the other Negro clubs, but it was obvious the word was out. The guys never took their eyes off me, and for all their looking, the women kept their distance. No fun in that, so I quit going.
Rough as it was, the Negro quarter wasn’t any rougher than the streets and alleys between Post Office and the railroad tracks. The area’s rundown tenements were home to Galveston’s poorest and most troublesome whites, and the town’s meanest coloreds lived in its alleyway shacks. On a section of Market Street called Little China, a Chinese family with a dozen or so members lived in the single back room of a laundry, and another Chinese bunch lived in a tiny restaurant down the street. Rumor had it that the two families had belonged to different tongs in China and brought their ancient feud with them to America. Which probably explained why every now and then somebody’d find a dead Chinaman stuffed in an alley garbage can with his throat cut, or floating in the channel with a wire garrote still around his neck. But they were only Chinamen, so you never read about them in the papers except now and then as a little filler on a back page, saying something like FOREIGNER FOUND DROWNED IN BAY.
In this part of town too was an isolated street of a half-dozen houses and some three dozen residents, all of them Mexican. Though the residents called it La Colonia, the street had no sign and did not appear on the city maps. It was too small of an enclave to qualify as a quarter, but there weren’t all that many Mexes on the island to begin with, and this was one of the few neighborhoods of them.
I’d been in Galveston about three months when I stumbled onto it. I was wandering the streets north of the redlight district one humid night and caught the peppery scent of Mexican cooking. I followed the smell to a dirt lane branching from Mechanic Street near a hazy amber streetlamp. The lane cut through a scrubby vacant lot before passing through a dark hollow of mossy oaks and magnolias to dead-end at the railtracks. In the shadows of the overhanging trees the little frame houses stood in a ragged row along the left side of the lane. Their porchlights were on and their windows were brightly yellow. Light also showed against the underbranches of the trees in a backyard about midway down the street and I heard music coming from behind the house. Accordion and fiddle and guitar playing “Tu, Solo Tu.” I’d heard the tune a hundred times but now it reminded me of a moment less than three years past that seemed like ancient history, reminded me of a packed-dirt dance floor under a desert night- sky blasting with stars, of dancing close with a pretty Mexican girl to this same song as my cousin Reuben and my friend Chente danced with a pair of blond sisters….
The roast-pepper aroma had grown stronger, and mingling into it were the smells of maize tortillas and refried beans. I went around to the lit-up backyard and found a small party going on.
Couples were dancing on a wide patch of bare dirt, kicking and swirling and spinning each other around in the cast of light from lanterns hung on tree branches. A kid spotted me and told the people gathered at a long picnic table loaded with bowls of food, and they looked over at me. One of the men approached me, removing his hat, and I took mine off too.
The lantern light was full on my face and I could tell by his look that he could see the color of my eyes. I’d seen such inquisitive stares more times than I could count.
“Buenas noches,” he said, and added, “Good evening,” in deference to the possibility that I spoke only English.
In Spanish I apologized for intruding and told him I’d smelled the food and heard the music and wanted to see what was going on.
His face brightened and he beckoned me to join them, saying, “Pase, caballero, por favor. Nuestra casa es su casa.”
His name was Arturo Alcanzas and he was host of the party. The others also welcomed me warmly, everyone speaking in Spanish. They introduced themselves all around and made room for me at the table bench. They admired my suit and boots, the briefcase I kept at my side. They tried not to stare too obviously at my eyes. The musicians finished the number and came over to the table and Arturo introduced them too, three brothers named Gutierrez. They called themselves Los Tres Payasos, and though they modestly professed not to be very good, Alcanzas said they were good enough to get hired to play at small fiestas and quinceaneras from Port Arthur to Bay City.
Someone fetched me a bottle of Carta Blanca from a tub packed with ice. A bowl of fried jalapenos was set close to me on one side and a platter of chicharrones on the other. While I munched on the chiles and pork rinds some of the women passed around a plate for me, filling it with red rice, beans, spiced shredded pork. A young girl placed a wicker basket of corn tortillas within my reach.
I told them my name and their faces showed curiosity about it, but their natural politeness restrained them from asking how I had come by it. One who spoke English told the others that James meant Santiago, and everyone was pleased by this and addressed me by that name from then on. When one of the men remarked that I spoke with the accent of the western frontera, some of the others made faces of reprimand for his breach of manners with such familiarity. He looked chastened and assured me he’d meant no disrespect. I assured him I’d perceived none. I told them I’d grown up along the Chihuahua and Texas border, and they said “Ah, pues,” and nodded at each other around the table as though I had clarified a great deal.
They told me all about themselves. The first of them to settle here had named the little street La Colonia Tamaulipas, in honor of their home state, but over time it simply became La Colonia. Many of them were related by blood or marriage and were from Matamoros, just the other side of the Rio Grande. Others were from Victoria, Monterrey, Tampico. “Pero todos venimos con espaldas mojadas,” one of them said with a smile, joking about the wetback fashion in which they’d all crossed the river. Some of the men had found work on the docks, some in the railyard, some on the shrimp boats. A pair of brothers named Lopez talked excitedly of their plan to own their own shrimper one day.
In the group was a whitehaired old man named Gregorio who owned a small boardinghouse. I asked if he had a vacancy, and he did, and after we were done eating and had another beer, he took me over there to see it. The building was the only two-story on the street, a rundown clapboard at the end of the lane, its front yard bordered by a weathered picket fence. He called the house the Casa Verde because of its moldy-green roof shingles and the thick growth of vines on the outer walls and around the porch columns.
Inside, the place smelled old but the parlor and hallway and kitchen were neatly kept. Gregorio himself occupied the only bedroom on the ground floor and rented out the three bedrooms upstairs. The vacancy was on a front corner, with one window overlooking the lane and another facing the traintracks. A light bulb dangling from the ceiling illuminated a battered wardrobe, a narrow bed, a small wooden table and a straightback chair. Columns of numbers had been scratched into the tabletop. The old man saw me fingering them and said the previous tenant had been a gambler. I asked what had become of him, and Gregorio turned up his hands. One day the man had been there, he said, and one day he had not, as had always been the case with men and would be the case with us
