Amigoland

20

Don Fidencio knocked, then waited a minute and knocked a second time, only harder. It was better than opening the door and finding The One With The Hole In His Back asleep on the pot — again. When he didn’t get a response, he walked in and searched under the sink, around the toilet, and in the space behind the door.
He hobbled back to the closet for another look. With one hand against the wall, he steadied himself as if he were walking down the aisle of a bus pulling away from its last stop. His five shoe boxes, all of them covered up and in order with their appropriate numbers facing outward, sat on the top shelf where they had been earlier. His three shirts and pants hung where the attendant had left them. For all he knew, they had taken his canes to the flea market and sold them to some other old man with a bad leg. He couldn’t believe the lack of respect these women showed him. If they had taken the time to ask, he would have told them that the wooden cane was the one he used when he was out in public. Who knows what else these women would have taken if he hadn’t complained at the nurses’ station? And then to make matters worse, they laughed when he reported that someone had been stealing his chocolates or that he was missing his lighter or one of his government-issue pens. Then a few days later The One With The Flat Face would come knocking on the door and say that the yardman had found his missing lighter on the patio, under one of the stone benches out by the back fence, or that an attendant had recovered his pocketknife from one of the trays coming out of the dishwasher. Always some excuse. Always some reason to blame him and make it seem like he didn’t know where he left things. Look, here comes The One Who Loses Everything.
He set his baseball cap on the nightstand and pushed the chair next to the bed. Once he was sitting, he grabbed hold of the bed railing and with much sacrifice slowly lowered himself so both knees could gently touch the floor. Still holding on to the railing, he bowed all the way down. One of his government-issue pens lay under the center of the bed, for sure tossed there by some careless aide who didn’t have the good manners to return the pen to its proper place after using it. He tried several times to grab hold of it, but his hand came up short each time. If he’d had one of his canes with him, this wouldn’t have been a problem. The pen would have to wait for later so he could find something else to help him reach it. Off in the corner, near the headboard, lay a diaper, still folded up and unused (“Thanks be to God,” he whispered to himself), that must have been meant for the last old man to occupy the bed, because it sure as hell wasn’t his (again, “Thanks be to God”).
No, they were afraid of him, that was what was going on here. They’d seen how much improvement he had made with his therapy and now they were scared that one of these days he would slip out and this time they wouldn’t be able to catch up to him. One good, sturdy cane was all it would take. And soon, not even that. In the evenings he was still sweeping the floors with the dust mop, but now once he was out of sight of the nurses’ station, he would lean the mop against the wall and continue on his own, staying close to the wooden railing, just in case. They probably thought he would never get anywhere without the walker. But that showed how much they knew Fidencio Rosales.
After he was convinced he wasn’t going to find anything under the bed, it took still more effort to pull himself back into the chair. Then he glanced at his wristwatch and realized his brother and the girl would be coming by in twenty minutes to take him out to lunch. He’d resisted giving her a name like he had done with these people in the prison, but this also made it more difficult to now remember the real name that went with her face. Already he had met her five or six times, however many it was, and he couldn’t think of her as more than the girl. It wasn’t like The Turtles, so many to keep track of. There was only one of her, whatever her name was. They had taken him to dinner the other day, and the whole time he hadn’t been able to remember her name until his brother happened to say it in passing.
From the closet he pulled out the #3 and #4 shoe boxes before he thought to open the #2 box. As soon as they had brought him back to his room, he had written her name in one of his old address books. Which one, though? He had two bundles of the little books, each bound with thick rubber bands. He started with a red one and found the name Julio Betancourt, which meant nothing to him, as did Martin Colunga. This last name had been underlined several times, as if it had some particular importance, but still nothing came to him. Under M, he located the name Jimmy Udall, which made sense only because he had MECHANIC written next to it, something he wished he had done with the other names: NEIGHBOR, OLD FRIEND, OLD FRIEND NOT WORTH TALKING TO ANYMORE, WORK FRIEND, NEPHEW WHO DOESN’T CALL ANYMORE, etc. Scattered throughout several of the address books, he found only the initials — DLN or LG or JM or SFL — of women he’d had relations with, or tried to anyway, but he wasn’t about to write down their actual names so Petra could find them. The phone numbers themselves were written in a special inverted code that he’d had trouble deciphering at times.
He stopped turning pages when he saw Chano Gonzalez’s name. They had been good friends for years at work, but more so whenever it was that Petra left the house to live wherever it was she went. He and Chano would get together Saturday nights to watch the boxing matches on television. Then Chano’s eyes started going bad because of his diabetes, which he took care of about as well as Don Fidencio did, only Don Fidencio didn’t have diabetes and could eat and drink whatever the hell he wanted. So he started going for him in the car and bringing him back to the house, but it wasn’t the same anymore because Chano could barely make out the television and Don Fidencio had to spend the whole time telling him who was winning and how. Later Chano had something go wrong with one of his feet and they had to cut his toes. And after that he only got worse: more toes, more parts of his leg, and finally his woman wouldn’t let him out of the house, which was how he stayed until he died a few years later.
DEAD FRIEND, he wrote next to his name. He wrote the same thing next to every name, even ones who might have still been alive.
Under R, he found his brother’s name, the only other Rosales listed in this particular book. He checked the cover to see if there was a date that might indicate when it became just the two of them left behind. In the end, though, he had to settle for finding the girl’s name, written right next to his brother’s name. The problem was, he couldn’t read his own writing, as tiny and chicken-scratched as it had always been, only now also with this constant tremor that made it seem as if he had written it with the pen held upright between his corn-ridden toes. The S he could see, but the rest was a mystery to him. All those years of figuring out mailing addresses, and this is what he had to show for it. Sonia, Sulema, Severa, Sofia, Sylvia, Solidad — none of them sounded right. He could tell now he should’ve written the name in the same large block letters he had just used to write next to his friends’ names. Don Fidencio shut his eyes and concentrated, concentrated, concentrated, the whole time hissing the first letter of her name until it sounded like he was releasing the air from a tire.
When he opened his eyes, he gazed at the letters until he managed to untangle them one by one. There was the o that looked more like a lopsided egg, and the c and the q mixed up with the second o, which looked like a cracked egg because it was too close to the first r, which swallowed up the second r and third r or a p, but then there was still another o that did actually look like an o.S-O-C-Q-O-R-P-O, he wrote at the top of the page. It was one thing to not be able to write and another to not know how to spell. He stared at this for a minute or so before he crossed out the Q, then the P.S-O-C-O-R-O. Now it was so clear to him. Of course, Socorro. That was her name — Socorro. He used both hands to grab ahold of his walker and stand up. “Socorro… Socorro… Socorro,” he said, shuffling out of the room.
They had taken a booth near the back of the little restaurant, where they would still be able to talk if someone put money in the jukebox. Steam billowed out each time the kitchen door swung open and one of the waitresses came out with a plate of food. The place was only half full. A teenage couple in hooded jackets sat in a corner booth where the owner couldn’t see them sneaking kisses while they shared the plate they had ordered. At the next table three men in cowboy hats sipped their coffees while the older one of the group did most of the talking. A pair of Border Patrol agents sat close to the door, one of them keeping an eye on the kitchen workers, the other more interested in the carne guisada he had on his plate in front of him.
The food was already on the table by the time Don Celestino came back from the restroom, where he’d checked his sugar level. He had ordered the enchiladas verdes, Socorro the taquitos, and Don Fidencio the menudo. Once the old man started eating, he barely looked up from his bowl. Now and then he stopped between slurping his soup to take a deep breath and chew a tougher piece of tripe. His few remaining teeth clicked in a staccato manner as he gnawed at the meat until he could swallow it.
“Do you remember the last time you ate menudo?” Socorro asked.
He raised his hand to indicate she had caught him in midchew.
“Sometimes they serve it there,” he answered finally, “but never with enough spices because people would be burping all night.”
“Maybe it’s better that way, so you can sleep.”
“I barely sleep anyway, at least that way I would have a good reason,” Don Fidencio said, and spooned up some hominy. “Last night I spent it lying there, staring at the ceiling. I would sleep for twenty or thirty minutes, then wake up and just be there. It came and went like that until the early morning, when I remembered something more from our grandfather’s story and couldn’t sleep anymore. And finally, after another hour, they served breakfast.”
“You should write it down,” she said, “so it stays with you.”
He looked up at her and then at his brother.
“It was nothing that important, just something about when the Indians were attacking them.” He slurped up another spoonful. “And anyway, nobody wants to know what an old man remembers.”
“Come on and say it,” Don Celestino told him. “We’ve been waiting to hear what you would come up with for the next chapter.”
“So you can make fun? No, I prefer to stay with my mouth shut.”
“Go on, we want to hear what more you remember.”
“I prefer to keep it to myself.” He stirred his soup without looking up.
“And if you forget it later?” she asked.
He hadn’t considered this. The girl had a point: so much had slipped away from him once. What’s to say it wouldn’t happen again? This afternoon he could lie down for his nap and wake up to find his memory had been erased completely or smeared to the point of being indistinguishable, like some of the names in his address book. At least if he told it to the girl — Socorro — she could hold on to it for him and tell him later, if he couldn’t remember it himself.
“He told me a circus had already traveled through most of Mexico when it arrived in the north and stopped in Linares, before they planned to travel over to this side of the river. All of the families from around there went to see this circus. None of them had ever in their lives seen a bear or an elephant or whatever else they had brought in the circus. It wasn’t like those fancy circuses they have today. This one was just a man who came to town with a few wagons full of animals nobody had ever seen. He stopped the wagons in an open field close to a river that passed through one side of town. I think it was in the fall when this took place, but it could’ve also been the spring, or the summer. But maybe not the spring because they would have been busy in the fields.” He stopped to rub the back of his neck, then shook his head. “He told me when it was that it happened, only I forgot that part even before my mind turned to cheese. What I remember was, the circus man had brought out the bear tied to a thick rope, but with so many people crowded around and Papá Grande only seven years old, he could barely see what the animal was doing. His brother was younger and could see even less, but then their father had the good idea to put Papá Grande up on his back so he could be higher. And their uncle did the same with the little brother. Now that he was higher, Papá Grande could see the bear standing on a block of wood and then standing on one paw, then on the other. The bear did more tricks, but by then Papá Grande didn’t see them because something had caught his eye. Off in the distance, past the field and away from the river, he could see some horses. They were still more than half a mile away when he spotted them. At first he thought they were just horses, but when they got closer, he could see men on the horses and that these men were Indians.”
The old man scratched at the crown of his head. “He never said exactly how many of them — but I guess maybe twenty or more, enough that he should have told his father or his uncle. Maybe he thought the Indians and horses were part of the circus, because he only kept watching them get closer and closer without opening his mouth. If he had, maybe it would have turned out different.”
“Maybe he was scared,” Socorro said.
“Not as much as when they grabbed his uncle, the one they scalped — it could have been his uncle they scalped first or maybe it was the circus man — I have trouble remembering which one they got hold of first. But it was with all the confusion that he got separated from his mother and his little brother, since she must have been trying to hide him somewhere. Then Papá Grande saw when the first arrow hit his father. That was the other part I remembered, how they killed him.” The old man stopped to point down to exactly where. “Right to the bladder was where the arrow got him and how he bled to death. This is the man who would be our great-grandfather.”
The waitress refilled Don Fidencio’s coffee cup, and he took his time adding the Sweet’N Low and then the creamer. Though his brother and Socorro had finished with their meals, he was only halfway through his bowl of menudo.
“So then to the bladder?” Don Celestino asked.
“Yes, down there to the bladder.”
“And you are sure he said it was there, nowhere else?”
“That was the way Papá Grande remembered it, to the bladder.” The old man used his butter knife to show him where again.
His brother only halfway nodded.
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
“No, nothing what?”
“It just seems like a curious place for the arrow to hit him, that’s all.”
“And what is so curious about it? The bladder is a part of the body, every man has one. The Indian could have hit him anywhere — in the stomach, in the heart, in the kidneys — but he hit him in the bladder, like I just said.”
“Not the appendix?”
Don Fidencio set the butter knife back on the table. “Already I told you what I remembered, the way he told it to me that last time. When I was there, not you.”
“I think you might be confused with that one part,” Don Celestino said. “How would he know where exactly the arrow got him, that it was exactly in the bladder, if he was only seven years old? At that age, what could he know about a man’s bladder?”
“He knew enough just seeing where the arrow was sticking out of his father.”
“And that was the only arrow that got him?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the only arrow,” Don Fidencio said. “I said an arrow to the bladder killed him — that’s all I said. Who cares how many or where the others went? You think Papá Grande sat there counting the arrows that were sticking out of his father, writing it down, so that later you might believe the story?”
“I was only saying it seemed strange that the arrow would hit him right there.”
“Go talk to the Indians about that — they were the ones who did it.”
“Which Indians?”
“The Indians that attacked the circus,” the old man snapped. “Now who is the one that can’t remember things?”
“He means what kind,” Socorro said.
“Just Indians, the kind that ride horses and shoot arrows, what more do you want me to tell you? All I know is the army had been trying to kill them off or send them to the north, but over here they were also trying to get rid of them. Nobody wanted them around.”
“But which ones? Comanche, Apache…” Don Celestino tried to remember others, but they weren’t coming to him right then. “How can you say, ‘Just Indians’?”
“I can say whatever I want.” He took a sip of his coffee. “The thing is, you’re always against me. Only because I know more about our grandfather and where he came from, more than some people.”
“Yes, Fidencio Rosales, the one who knows everything there is to know, even how much I cared about our grandfather.”
“If for real you cared, you would at least take me to see the ranchito. It wouldn’t matter that you refused to believe what happened, you would still take me.”
“Again with your ideas?” Don Celestino leaned back against the booth.
“You said we could go one of these days, you said it, that I remember.”
“And tell me how you expect to go in your condition?”
“You make more out of it than it is,” he said, and kicked at the walker. “I use this thing only because those women stole my canes. If not, I would be walking fine, same as always, same as I did for forty-two years, and then they couldn’t keep me locked up. Against my wishes, they have me there.”
“And if you get tired?”
“Then I rest, like I do now. Being tired is not going to kill me. Ya, I would’ve been dead for years if that was all it took. And anyway, this is just for a couple of days. We could leave in the morning and be there by the afternoon and start looking for the ranchito. And only for a day if you wanted, coming back the next day or the one after that, if we needed to rest.”
“If you needed to rest, not me,” his brother said.
“What I mean to say is that however it turns out, it wouldn’t take so long. Just for a few days to go there and back, so that way you could get back to your house.”
Don Celestino thought about how he had just flipped the calendar to a new month, March, then reviewed each day, comparing it to February and January, and tried to fill in as many squares as possible — take trash can out to curb, buy groceries, pay utility bill, check air-conditioner filter. He looked at his brother and for just a second he imagined what the calendar might look like with a big X across at least a couple of those days.
“But still, all that way to see a ranchito?”
“I checked and it was only four or five hours by bus,” Socorro said. “If it was me, I would think it was a short trip. And then on the way back maybe you and your brother would have one less thing to argue about.”
Don Celestino turned as if he’d forgotten she was sitting next to him in the booth.
“You wanted to go?”
“Maybe, if somebody invited me.”