as well.
“Casero y filosofo tambien,” I said, and he showed a yellow grin and said all men became philosophers if they lived long enough.
The bath was at the end of the hallway. An old telephone—the only phone in the colonia, Gregorio said—was mounted on the wall at the foot of the stairs. I asked for its number and wrote it on a piece of paper to give to Rose. I moved in the next day and had been living there ever since.
LQ and Brando had thought it was a smart move on my part because wetback neighbors weren’t the nosy sort. Among the few things LQ and Ray agreed on was that a guy—especially one in our business—shouldn’t own anything more than he could carry in a single suitcase and should never live anyplace where the neighbors didn’t mind their own business.
Sam couldn’t understand why I’d leave a beachside apartment with new furnishings and appliances to move into a ramshackle place in one of the worst sections of town. I didn’t even try to explain, and he finally just shook his head and quit ragging me about it.
Rose didn’t say anything about the move. Except maybe he did, a few days later, in a sort of roundabout way. I was driving him back from some Houston business, and as we went over the causeway he said the look of the water in the afternoon sunlight always reminded him of a little lagoon in Palermo where his father had taught him to swim.
“It’s funny,” he said, staring out at the bay and the island on the other side. “This place is so different, but there’s things about it that remind me of Palermo when I was a boy. I tell you, if there was some part of town called Little Sicily—Little Italy, even—I’d move in there in a minute. I wouldn’t give a shit how beat-up it was. It’d be nice hearing the language, you know, people talking to each other in it. And the music. And smelling the food. I’d like…Ah hell.”
He made a dismissive gesture and changed the subject.
It was after two in the morning. Clouds were bunching over the gulf, blocking out the stars. The slight wind had kicked up and was gently stirring the treetops. The evening’s earlier warmth was giving way to a rising chill. It smelled like it might rain.
Other than the Casa Verde at the far end of the lane, only the Avila house showed light—a dim yellow glow against the pulled shade of a front window. The Morales family had hosted a neighborhood party earlier in the evening and I could make out the dark shapes of several cars parked in the deeper shadows between the Morales and the Avila houses. Overnight visitors, I figured.
A cloud of bugs was swarming around the Casa Verde porchlight. I didn’t need a key because Gregorio had stopped locking the door shortly after I’d moved in. I’d never told him or anyone else in La Colonia what I did for a living, but before I’d been there a month everybody on the block seemed to know who I worked for. I was pouring a cup of coffee in the kitchen one morning when I heard Senora Ortega, the next-door neighbor, talking to Gregorio in the sideyard, telling him how her daughter had warned a coworker at the oystersheds that if he didn’t stop pestering her she would complain to her neighbor, Don Santiago, who was a bodyguard for Rosario Maceo. The man, the senora told Gregorio, had not bothered her girl since.
Gregorio had mounted a small slateboard with a chalk holder next to the hallway telephone, but the only messages I’d ever seen on it were rare ones for me to call the Club. I’d never seen either of the other two tenants use the phone or known them to receive a call. One of them, Moises, was older than Gregorio and almost deaf. Even though he had one of those old-time ear horns, you still had to shout into it. The other resident was Sergio, a nervous little man who worked as the night clerk for a motor hotel on the beach. He kept to his room all day and was said to have no friends at all.
Tonight the slateboard was blank, as usual. At the far end of the hall the kitchen door shone brightly. I wasn’t surprised to find Gregorio in there, sitting at the table, sipping a bottle of beer and reading a movie magazine, his wire-rim glasses low on his nose. It was his habit to stay up all night and go to bed at dawn and sleep till noon. He said he had not been able to sleep at night for the past thirty-two years. He’d never said why and I’d never asked.
The kitchen was big and high-ceilinged and a large heavy dining table stood in its center. I helped myself to a beer from the icebox and pried off the cap with an opener hung on the door handle by a wire hook and sat across the table from him. I took a pack of Camels from my coat and shook one out for myself and then slid the pack across the table to him and we both lit up. He looked tired and a little glass-eyed. There had probably been plenty to drink at the Morales party.
He tapped a hand on the article he’d been reading. He could speak and read English much better than the rest of the residents of La Colonia, not counting the kids. “Do you know what those Hollywood assholes said after they gave Fred Astaire his screen test?”
Fred Astaire was Gregorio’s favorite movie star. The old man had seen
He looked down at the article. “They said he couldn’t act very good and the women wouldn’t like him because he was ‘slightly bald.’ But they said he could at least ‘dance a little.’”
He peered at me over the rim of his glasses. “That’s like saying Jack Dempsey could punch a little, no?” He shook his head. “Assholes.”
I drank my beer and leafed through a magazine from the stack on the table. Gregorio said I’d missed a good party. They roasted a kid on a spit in Morales’ backyard and there were platters of every kind of dish and enough beer and tequila for everybody to get as drunk as he wanted. He’d never seen so many visitors to a Colonia party as this time. Morales’ brother had come down from Beaumont. Ortega’s brother and sister-in-law up from Lake Jackson. Avila’s uncle and cousin and the uncle’s goddaughter, who was pretty but didn’t talk much, had come all the way from Brownsville. And a cousin of the Gutierrez brothers, a car mechanic from Victoria, had come too. Turned out he was a hell of a singer and guitar player and he’d been the hit of the party.
“Sorry I missed it,” I said. The wind was blowing a little harder now, and tree branches scraped the side of the building. I finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the garbage can.
“Happy new year, viejo,” I said, and headed for the stairs.
“Feliz ano nuevo, kid,” the old man said.
My room was chilly, so I took the extra blanket out of the wardrobe and spread it over the one already on the bed. I got undressed, then opened the briefcase and took out the guns. I put the .380 on the bedside stand. The Mexican revolver went under the pillow. I turned off the light and got in bed and listened to the wind and rasping branches for a while before I fell asleep.
A Model T.
I swung out of bed and went to the window, released the shade to go fluttering up on its spindle, raised the window sash and pushed open the screen frame and stuck my head out into a chilly drizzle.
In the light of the streetlamp, a lettuce-green Model T sedan without a left front fender was turning onto Mechanic Street. I saw the dark form of the driver but I couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in the car. The T rattled down the street and then its single taillight went out of sight.
I stood at the open window a moment longer before I pictured what I must look like—gawking out at an empty street, shivering in my underwear, getting my head wet. I cursed and let the screen frame down and closed the window. My wristwatch was on the table and I struck a match to read the time. Almost six. From the time I was old enough to do chores on the ranch until the day I left there in the hurry I did, I had always been up well before this hour.
But I wasn’t on the ranch now, and what I wanted was more sleep. I ran a towel through my hair and got back in bed.
And couldn’t get the green Ford out of my mind.
