Dallas Noir Page 8

  The woman put the glass against her lips and took a sip. Then she put it against her cheek. She looked like she didn’t know what to do with the napkin. She crumpled it up and set it on the arm of the chair.

  “Over there.” She pointed to the corner next to the television. “Over there is where they were stacked. Stacks and stacks of paperback books. Clarry’s favorite was about the Civil War. Well, it wasn’t about the war exactly, it was about a man who was supposed to fight in the Civil War but he didn’t want to go because he had a wild Indian woman for a lover. He wanted to stay with her. She was supposed to be real pretty. She had long black hair that went down to her waist. She would wind it up in different ways. They met one day when he was hunting. He saw her through the trees. She was scared of him at first, I remember that. She was scared of him but then they found a place in the woods where they could carry on together. She wasn’t like the other girls he met and he liked her ways. He liked the way they were together in the woods.”

  The old lady took a sip of her water.

  “I remember all of this because I read that book to Clarry. Guess how many times.” She looked at me and my mom and her son. Her son had his hand on his back and was stooping forward. She looked at me again. “Well, guess!”

  “One hundred times!” I said.

  The old lady stared at me like she couldn’t figure out where to put me. Like she wanted to place me somewhere else with her eyes.

  “One hundred?” she said. “No. Five times. I read that book to him five times. I remember the man’s name, in the book. His name was Colonel Legford. He left the army because he was in love with his wild Indian woman. She wasn’t tamed. She had smooth skin. And her hair would come undone when they were together.”

  I looked at the old lady’s skin. The more I looked at it, the more cracks and crevices I could see. I felt like if I poured water on it, I could straighten it out with my hands.

  “I remember the clearing,” she said. She was touching her chin. “I remember the clearing where they would carry on together. It was in the woods. Fifty steps away from an old tree stump next to a creek. And then the trees would part and it was like a room. The walls were made of leaves and the sun would come down and make it warm. The colonel and the wild Indian woman would wait for each other there. Then, when they were together the first thing he would do would be to take out her hair. It was always woven up.”

  The old lady was touching her own hair now.

  “Her hair would come down like a dark waterfall. That’s what it said in the book! A dark waterfall. Then they would start. The Indian woman took off her red leather things and the colonel took off his heavy boots and pants and they were jaybird naked together just like that, there in the woods.”

  I looked at my mom. Her eyes were searching around the room and her face was red. The man was looking back and forth between us.

  “They would go to each other. The Indian woman made all sorts of wild forest sounds. They rolled around, panting on top of each other. Sometimes they would be sitting up. The colonel would always put his hand on the back of her neck. He had big hands. He sometimes felt like he was sculpting her, that’s what the book said, sculpting her as they went along. And she would lean back and fling herself around.”

  The old lady’s son coughed and she looked at him quickly.

  “Then when they were finished, they would lie there and pick the leaves off of each other’s skin. They were so wet they got leaves stuck all over them and so they would pick them off with the sun still coming down and making it warm.”

  Everyone was quiet for a second. The old lady was staring off into the distance. Her son was looking down at his shoes. My mom was red in the face and making short little breaths. I was hoping that the old lady would keep telling more of the story. But I knew she wasn’t going to.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Leave it!” said the son, taking a step forward.

  My mom slung her head to the side.

  “Leave it,” he said again.

  I knew who it was. It was my mom’s friend Henrietta from down the street who would come and visit at this time almost every day. She was pushy and always calling me “Johnny Morning” even though that’s not my name. We all waited in silence for a few seconds and then heard her walk away. The old lady’s son went up to the front door and moved the little curtain away from the window next to it and looked outside. Then he came back and give his mom a little nod.

  The old lady slumped in her chair. She seemed really tired. “You ever have anything like that?” she said to my mom. She seemed to be shrinking under her gray suit, which now looked like it had way too much material for her.

  My mom slowly turned her head to her. “What?” she whispered.

  I pictured the old lady getting smaller and smaller and then disappearing under her suit, which would then be deserted and spilled out over the couch with all of its layers and panels.

  “Like what I was saying before, with the colonel and the Indian woman. In the woods. You ever have anything like that?”

  My mom continued to stare at the lady in silence, her eyes open wide.

  “You think the colonel did something wrong by being with that Indian woman?”

  The son kept glancing at his watch and then back toward the door. I wondered if the sprinklers were still going on in the Lees’ front yard.

  The old lady sat forward again. “Do you?”

  My mom bit her lip and shook her head like she was trying to get water out of it.

  What happened next is that the son said, “Ma, I think it’s time to go now.” A cloud must have passed over the sun because it suddenly became really dim in the room. The old lady tried to get up a few times but she couldn’t. Then he helped her and propped her up on her cane and they started walking toward the front door. They didn’t look at us or say anything as they went by. Before they left the old woman looked back at the living room one more time. Her eyes got all squinty, like the way you would look at an ocean. Then they walked out and we never saw them again.

  My mom hugged me and started crying and rocking back and forth. We were like that for a while.

  * * *

  I think about that day all the time. My mom is really old now. About fifteen years ago she moved away from Dalgreen Court and into a nursing home in Denton, the next county over. It has square shrubs in front of it and you have to swipe a card to get in. I heard there was a bad fire, and our old house was torn down along with a few others. I heard they built it up again. They poured concrete driveways and put potted yucca plants and gates on top of that.

  Me, I had a wife and I have three kids. Some of the way I look spilled into them. But they’re all out there now.

  EN LA CALLE DOCE (FLACO’S BLUES)

  BY OSCAR C. PEÑA

  Oak Cliff

  It was nine fifteen Friday night when Estanislado Escobedo stepped off the Greyhound bus at the South Polk Street station, walked through the sliding doors of the terminal, and hailed a cowboy cab. The bus should have arrived at eight fifty, but had run into traffic leaving Houston. No time to catch a city bus. The taxi driver looked to be from the Middle East or India or Pakistan; like one of the hundreds of students he had seen at Texas A&I University in Kingsville, back in the late 1960s. Stan asked the man if he knew where the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff was.

  “Southwest—other side of the Trinity River.”

  “Good, take me there and drop me off in front of the Taco Bell at 505 West Illinois Avenue.”

  I

  Dubose Williams is a freelance writer working on an exposé of fundamentalist churches for Texas Monthly. He’s writing about some of the smaller evangelical churches within the Texas Bible Triangle: an area anchored by Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. Williams is interviewing Plutarco “El Martillo” Paniagua, pastor of The Bread and the Water, a church in San Antonio. Hermano Plutarco is in Oak Cliff to attend a tent revival and has brought some members of his congregation up to Dallas
to protest the planned opening of a topless club, the Prickly Pear.

  “I read that you’re from San Anto . . . Excuse me, Pastor Plutarco, I thought you were from San Antonio. How come it reads ‘San Anto’ here in your bio? Is that a typo?”

  “Please. . . call me Hammer. Yes, I live in San Antonio. My bio was written by my good friend and cousin Jesus Chapa. Chuy was a pachuco before he was saved. That’s the way he talks and he writes like he talks.”

  “Okay, fair enough. So what brings you up to Dallas? And why is your nickname El Martillo?”

  “The answer to your first question is long and complicated. The quick answer is that we came for a tent revival and since we’re going to be here we may as well join with other churches in protesting that topless club. But before I forget, can you write in your magazine that I want to thank all the church ladies who made taquitos and tamales for our Church Ladies Auxiliary fundraiser? Our travel ministry made enough money to buy a spare tire, the gas, and thirteen quarts of Pennzoil for the church van for our trip to Dallas.”

  “Okay, I guess . . . yeah . . . sure, I’ll put something in the article.”

  “The answer to your second question is simple. I was born and raised in South Texas, down in Kingsville. My grandfather and father were carpenters and my old pops nicknamed me El Martillo because I was always banging on something. He thought I’d grow up to be a carpenter too, but as it turned out I liked to bang on the drums more than on two-by-fours, so I played music for years. Started in ’67. I played with Chavez and the Chevelles, the Velmonts, Beto Leal y su Orquesta. Man, we’d play sock hops, KC Halls, VFWs, nightclubs, weddings, quinceañeras, bar mitzvahs. Well—maybe not those cause there weren’t too many bar mitzvahs in Kingsville. I guess you never heard of the Velmonts, huh?

  “But that’s not really why you’re talking to me, is it, Mr. Williams? Is it because you think I’m a fire-and-brimstone kinda guy? Do you think El Martillo means that I’m claiming to be the Hammer of God? Well, I’m not a Jonathan Edwards ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’ type of preacher. Or do you just think that I’m selling God and religion to poor folks who don’t know any better? Which is it, Mr. Dubose Williams?

  “You wanna write a story for Texas Monthly? There’s another reason why I’m here in Dallas; in this particular area of Oak Cliff. I’m meeting someone from my old band for breakfast tomorrow morning. I’ve asked him to come up from South Texas; we have another old friend staying in Oak Cliff who might be in trouble. You can join us if you want.”

  II

  The old vato glides through the door of the Taco Bell, heels tapping spit-shined tangerine-orange Stacys, his khaki pants and snap-buttoned country western shirt creased and medium starched. The man’s name is tooled across a belt cinched around his twenty-eight-inch waist. A bluesman, a poet, un blusero, Flaco orders supper—

  “Señorita, un taco y una soda, por favor.”

  Then he starts to talk to someone who ain’t there, kinda like he’s singing—

  I miss my wife and Lone Star Beer

  And making love on Saturday nights.

  Wish I could smoke just one more cigarette,

  But I’m getting old

  And I got sugar in my blood.

  She died.

  Who died?

  My woman, pendejo,

  A long time ago.

  The only one I can cheat on now is my doctor,

  so I sneak a bowl of menudo

  On Sunday mornings as I make my way to church.

  Ain’t nobody gonna know but me and God

  And He’s got me talking to myself.

  The girl behind the counter hands the bluesman a white paper sack. Salsa in his pocket, Coca-Cola in his hand, his supper wrapped in paper, Flaco slips into the night.

  * * *

  Stan had been sitting at a table along the back wall of the Taco Bell when he saw the old man walk in. He was just like all those guys Stan remembered from when he was going to Memorial Junior High back in Kingsville. They were all the same: skinny, wearing khaki pants, Stacy Adams shoes, and back then they wore those 3/8" belts. A thin strip of leather that satisfied the gotta-wear-a-belt rule the football coaches always enforced. His dad had called them pachucos and said the word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. Una bola de cabrones.

  I guess these guys never changed, Stan thought. I know Flaco didn’t; he still looks the same forty years later. Too bad his mind is going south. But he’s here just like Plutarco said he’d be. It’s been years since we were on the road together, playing beer joints during the week and weddings and quinceañeras on the weekends. Flaco was a good musician, playing accordion, sax, singing; hell, we were all good musicians, just never could get a recording contract. I just wish I knew what Hammer was talking about. Visions! Visions?

  His old pal had changed big time since he’d been “saved”; it drove Stan nuts.

  Why can’t things be like they used to be? All of us playing music, drinking beer, and dancing with pretty women.

  Stan followed Flaco into the night, wondering where the old musico was taking him. Oak Cliff wasn’t a bad town; no different than other Mexican neighborhoods in cities like San Antonio or Houston. People walking around on a Friday night; families headed somewhere for a burger or one of those buffets where you could feed your old lady and kids for about forty bucks if everyone drank ice water with extra lemons. You could still tell who was a Mexican national and who had been raised in the US. The Mexicans were dressed up: men wearing cowboy hats and fancy, pointed boots they’d bought at La Pulga, the local flea market; the women dressed like they were going to Sunday Mass, they were even wearing heels. One thing probably hadn’t changed—it was the end of the month and each one of those men would have twenties folded in his wallet, maybe a few fifties. Life was good here in Texas.

  III

  Stan met Plutarco for breakfast around seven Saturday morning at El Rincon Tapatio, a restaurant on West Jefferson Boulevard. He embraced his old childhood friend, then Plutarco introduced Dubose.

  “Estanislado Escobedo, meet Dubose Williams. Mr. Williams is a writer for Texas Monthly magazine and he’s doing a story on some of us preachers.”

  The two men shook hands. Dubose said, “I’m actually a freelance writer hoping to be able to sell a story to Texas Monthly. How do you say your name again?”

  “It’s easier if you just call me Stan.” He turned to Plutarco. “He’s staying at a rent-by-the-week motel, La Somnambula—which is about right for him because he sure seems to be sleepwalking. This, come to think of it, also describes me. I was up all night watching the entrance to that hotel like I was on a stakeout or something. Hammer! What the hell is going on, man? You had me drop everything, take a freaking Greyhound, and show up here to keep my eye on Flaco? Man, that’s crazy. You said that you’d had a vision, like maybe you saw or dreamed something. I hope that vision don’t include me cause I just wanna go home. I gotta get back to work on Monday and my old lady is pissed because I wouldn’t tell her anything about why I was going to Dallas except just to meet you and she knows that I ain’t no saint. But how was I gonna tell her that I was coming up so I could watch Flaco Huerta buy his supper at a Taco Bell?”

  “Tanis, I did have a dream . . . more like a nightmare. I think Flaco’s gonna kill somebody.”

  “Nobody’s called me Tanis since my dad died. It’s like everything is going back to when we were kids and playing music. What the hell do you mean? Kill somebody? Who’s he gonna kill? He ain’t never hurt nobody. All he ever wanted to do was play music, drink beer, and smoke cigarettes.”

  “A few months ago Flaco came by the church; he wanted to see me, wanted to confess. I told him, Hey, esse, I ain’t no priest, that’s the Catholics. He said he had found out that El Guero Poncho was living in Dallas, in a place called Oak Cliff. Said he was going to kill him. Had to kill him.”

  Stan was drawing a blank. “Who’s Poncho?”

  “You remember—the stories tha
t Flaco’s dad would tell us about his father being murdered? This guy Poncho used his blade because the old man was making fun of him in front of a woman. Man, everybody knows you don’t ridicule Mejicanos, or treat them with disrespect; especially back then. It gets you killed. Anyway, Poncho had a stutter and Flaco’s abuelo mocked him. Before anyone knew it, Poncho’s left hand flicked out like un pinche rattlesnake and Abuelito was lying in a pool of blood. Dead. Muerto. El Guero Poncho left that little town, Doctor Cos, down in Mexico and took off, headed north across the border. People said, Que se fue a Pensilvania. But man, that happened like almost a hundred years ago, ninety at least. Flaco thinks Poncho fled to Dallas. Somehow or other he thinks he’s tracked him down—I know some people from a church here in Dallas, one of the members of the congregation is a cop. I talked to him and asked him to look into it, but I already knew that whoever Flaco thought he had was the wrong guy. Flaco’s almost seventy years old, so whoever killed his grandfather died a long time ago. That cop didn’t have much information except for the nickname so he never discovered anything. If he kills someone, it’ll be an innocent man. We gotta stop him.”

  “But you don’t know this victim’s name, or if there is a victim; you don’t know what he looks like or how old he is. I think Flaco is demented. Why did you call me?”

  “Dementia. You think he has dementia and I agree. I called you because we’ve got a friend who needs our help and I can’t do this alone. I have to be at that revival because I’m preaching. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Flaco isn’t going to kill anyone. But what’s it going to hurt if you follow him for a couple of nights?”

  “Why this weekend?”

  “That’s the crazy part. I had that dream two weeks ago on a Monday night. It’s going to happen tonight. I know because in my dream I was preaching this tent revival on Saturday night. Me and some people from our church were also going to be protesting a topless club later on today. It’s called the Prickly Pear. Everything’s just like in my dream. Tanis, I think I’ve received a sign, a premonition. I saw a man’s body, but he had no face.”