“But you should have heard him,” Jessie said. “ ‘I’m sorry, lady. I’m sorry, lady.’ God, it was funny.”
Jessie began to laugh again. Her sons stood beside her, looking up into her face. I don’t think they had ever seen their mother look so amused and animated. She was having a good time. We all were.
We stayed at Wet World for most of the afternoon. Jessie and I went down the slide several more times with the boys, then we got out and dried off and sat at a table watching them. The boys swam and played in the water, diving after a piece of tile, and finally they rode the water slide a few more times. Then we got dressed and walked out to the car. We were very hungry.
It was about five-thirty now. We drove across town to West Colfax, to the shopping center where Casa Quintana was. It was a large Mexican restaurant where the food was satisfactory, but the primary attraction—for little boys—was the entertainment and the decor. The rooms had been plastered to give them the appearance of adobe, as in a Mexican village, and sitting in the rooms you were meant to have the feeling of being in a peasant’s house. Most of the rooms looked out at a central square where there was a sunken pool with a clifflike platform above it. Also in one area there was a cave which kids could explore. We walked inside the lobby and stood waiting for half an hour for a table. I gave the hostess our name and told her we wanted a place near the pool, so it took a while for a table to be available. Then there was one and we followed the hostess back through a couple of the rooms to a booth. “Your waitress will be with you in a minute,” she said. From where we were sitting we had a clear view of the pool and adobe cliff.
After the waitress had come and we had ordered, some mariachi singers came through the rooms, singing sad songs in Spanish. They were dressed in Mexican costumes with braid and silver and wore big decorated hats. They stopped at our table and sang to Jessie in high voices.
“Ask them to sing something happier,” she said.
“I don’t know any Spanish songs. Just ‘La Cucaracha.’ ”
“You would,” she said. She smiled at the singers. When they were finished we applauded and they went on.
In a little while the waitress brought us our food. There was a small Mexican flag on a stick on the table and if we wanted anything more we could run the flag up and she would see it and come back. When we had finished eating I said: “Don’t you boys want some sopapillas now?”
“What are they?”
“They’re like pockets. They’re made of dough and deep-fried. You can put honey inside them.”
“Okay.”
“Run the flag up, then.”
They ran the flag up the stick and the waitress came over to the table.
“These boys want a sopapilla,” I said. “So do I.”
“Three of them?”
“Do you want one, Jessie?”
“Of course.”
“Four of them. With honey.”
The waitress cleared our plates and went back to the kitchen to put in the order. While she was gone there was a sudden racket on the cliff above the pool. Two men were arguing with one another, shouting nonsense and pretending to fight; then they each pulled guns and shot tremendously several times, but threw the guns down when they were empty and began to fistfight. They struggled on the lip of the cliff again until one, the bad one, was slugged hard and he fell forward in an arc off the cliff and dove into the pool. Then he climbed out, streaming water, and he and the man above him yelled again at one another while people applauded and whistled. I looked at TJ and Bobby. They were stunned.
“They were just fooling, weren’t they?” Bobby said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”
“There wasn’t any blood.”
“Wasn’t there?”
“I didn’t see any blood,” Bobby said.
“Well. It looked pretty real to me.”
“They were just fooling,” TJ said. “You could tell because of the way he dived.”