Valleyesque Read online

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  For the RGV exiles, and exiles living in the RGV

  The Valley is a place where the new anti-life force is breaking through. Death hangs over the Valley like an invisible smog. The place exerts a curious magnetism on the moribund. The dying cell gravitates to the Valley … The Valley was desert, and it will be desert again.

  —WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

  Shut up—get the fuck away from me!

  —MARC HARDCORE

  QUESO

  Watching the news on television, Marcos yelled, “That anchor’s face ain’t real,” and hurled an empty glass. The glass bounced off the TV screen and, curiously, neither shattered. Pissed as hell, he walked to the kitchen and brushed his teeth over the sink.

  It rained as he got on the bus and Marcos scanned his found student ID that let him ride for free.

  At the job interview the general manager asked him to describe his talents and ambitions in the most creative, non-misogynist way, and explain why she should give him the job.

  Marcos said to her, “Willie was the only other Mexican in east Kingsville, and one day he held a ripe red orange to a butcher’s nose and made him describe the smell of the motherland on his fingers. The butcher was also Mexican, of no relation.”

  “Very good,” said the general manager, marking off a box in her notes. “Now, here at this job we are a tightly knit community. On a scale of one to ten, how would you describe your collaboration with others upon encountering a tough situation?”

  “Well, first you wring the neck of the big turkey till it flops. Then you make a soup from the rest and feed it to the others, slowly watching them eat, greedily offering them more water and more bread. Wait until afterward to bring up their sisters and the war.”

  “Excellent, Mr. Marcos. And, using the same scale of one to ten, tell me something you think you could improve, either in your work ethic or personal integrity.”

  “There’s nothing safer than a shark to ride. Tape notes under the table, I’ll learn the ropes, the insides and outsides of this trade. Just give me the chance and I’ll have a mind for the books and how to make money disappear. Piles will wheelbarrow out the back or from the bottle and you’ll never even know. Then I’ll bring the horses in and forget about it. Gimme the pies, give ’em.”

  “All right, Mr. Marcos. Looks like we got what we need. Thank you so much for the opportunity to interview you. We’ll get back to you by the end of the day.”

  * * *

  When the boss read the application he thought out loud to himself, “All I want is to have a place where anybody can just walk right in and order a bowl of melted cheese. And we’ll throw in some spices for flavor. They’ll be served with hardened, broken tortillas. Chips, we’ll call them. And people can dip the hardened tortilla chips into this melted cheese when they’re having a good time. We’ll call the cheese queso. Not pronounced Mexican, but ‘kay-so.’ The trick, I’ve learned from the best, is that you gotta co-opt their culture. Hijack it, and sell them back a cheaper version. An authentic experience that’s better, faster than the real thing. We’ll also make our version of what they call breakfast tacos, and serve them round the clock. To save time, the tortillas will be pre-made. Possibly purchased in bulk and at a discount from a provider. The eggs, they’ll have to be already cracked in a container, and poured on the grill upon getting ordered. This touch is important. It is what will let us advertise them as ‘fresh.’ Every taco will also come sprinkled with cheese. Unless otherwise specified, the standard is that every taco will be topped off with this cheese. American. And just shredded over, but pre-shredded, also. The American cheese will have to be pre-shredded. Yes. That goes without saying. And this young man, he’s going to be the one grilling them. We’ll start him on the graveyard shift and take it from there.”

  THE SCIENCE FAIR PROTEST

  When the new gangsters got elected and took control, atoms could no longer be said to be the smallest form of matter. So anytime you sawed off a hunk of wood and chopped it to its smallest possible point, it could no longer be said that you’d made an atom out of wood, but instead, Wow, that hunk of wood is now beyond microscopic.

  Now, I’m no science teacher, but one of my neighbors at the time was, and the second night of the Science Fair Protest he came knocking on my screen door with a case of beer from across the border, which I found odd because I’d never known him to be a drinker.

  “Efe,” he said, “I have to ask for a huge favor. I’m meeting someone who’s bringing me a document I need. We’re making a trade for this case of beer. I’m thinking it’s too risky at my place. Can they come over here, you think?”

  I didn’t see the harm in it, but first asked what kind of document he was expecting.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  My neighbor’s name was Ram. He taught biology to eighth graders at Bexar Middle School and was around my age. I’ll never get used to anybody my age being a teacher; we always seem to have a lot more growing up to do ourselves.

  The clamor and hooting crackled from the streets as if from a distant forest fire—for all we knew something really could’ve caught fire. Then, as if reading my mind, Ram said, “I’m glad these protests have been for the most part peaceful.”

  Twenty-five minutes or so later a young man in a backward cap and baggy clothes knocked on my screen door. He was with a woman—the tallest woman I’d ever seen. Taller than me, and I’m over six feet. She was stylish and made-up like she was going clubbing, but maybe she dressed this way always, in a gray miniskirt and shiny black shoes. Under her partner’s arm was a very conspicuous brown bag, and, standing below the seventy-five-watt light bulb hanging from my clicking ceiling fan, he pulled out a shrink-wrapped vinyl record. It was an original pressing of an album by seventies music sensation Xavier Felipe, known in certain circles of jukebox pop as the Mexican Neil Diamond. The record was his fourth release, titled after its hit single, “Volver a Vivir.”

  I pulled out all the milk crates and chairs for my guests, before dusting off the record player and fiddling with the wonky stylus. Ram started getting jumpy when I couldn’t figure out how to tighten it, so he requested to give it a try.

  “Your screwdriver is too big,” he said. Ram was getting nervous and sweaty, as Charlie, the young man, cracked open a beer for himself and Verona, the extremely tall woman.

  When Verona saw we were having a hard time, she asked what the problem was, and, using a tiny screwdriver from a wooden case in her handbag, she tightened the stylus, started up the machine, and slid the record onto it. The opening chords of the first track were a glorious moment, and Ram and I expressed our gratitude to her.

  The four of us sat in my tiny living room drinking and listening to Xavier Felipe like he’d suddenly become our religion. As the beers continued popping, we kept turning over the record. Though I was the only one who really spoke Spanish, the four of us learned all the songs as we got drunker, an
d they gradually became very personal to us.

  Ram’s energy began to dim, and as we got another suitcase of beer going he was the first to get political when he said, “These new gangsters, I don’t know about them, Efe. They want to change the way everyone thinks.”

  This is true, I remember saying to myself. It was easy for me to forget, being wrapped up in my own life, but now that the new gangsters had come into power, Ram had a lot to lose, with him being an instructor of science—biology, no less, which had recently become a very open target in the discourse with the new gangsters. I tried to think of something intelligent I could say, and like a fool asked how this would affect his curriculum.

  “Get this,” he said. “Instead of having regular lab hours once a week, we are going to have class outside on a field and play this game called Stick and Ball. Are you familiar? It’s when you have a stick, and not really a ball, but a big rock. And with one hand you throw the rock in the air, and with the one holding the stick you try to whack it. As far as you can.”

  I don’t know why, but hearing this, I was rather impressed that biology—a class I’d had to take at least twice in my limited academic life—was being replaced with this Stick and Ball game.

  Once Ram finally got the politics talk out of his system, we all kept getting drunker while the Mexican Neil Diamond lived up to his name—that rugged voice, hinting at a working-class background; his catchy hooks and backing wall of session musicians, who probably doubled as hired killers. The four of us sang out loud, then took turns standing in the middle of the living room, each of us doing our best impression and lip-synching to Xavier Felipe.

  I took advantage of the fact that we were at my place and got smashed and somewhere along the way blacked out. When I came to, everything was silent, my screen door was wide open, and on my floor were the young man and Verona dry humping and making out. I crept into my room, shut the door, and before passing out again imagined myself throwing a rock into the air, and with a stick trying to hit it.

  * * *

  Walking home after stocking cans overnight, I ran into a couple of youngsters by an alley, pointing, throwing rocks, and in a strange way mocking a nest of squawking grackles. I’d been on edge during that walk because, originally, I had been hired to stock produce at the market, not cans. The feeling of touching only cold aluminum cans for hours and hours had left me uneasy. I’d told my supervisors I had this particular problem, but there was nothing they could do, because our shipments of produce had been reduced by 75 percent since the takeover by the new gangsters. Prices of everything had gone up; regularly scheduled shipments had a coin toss’s chance of even arriving. Nobody was happy. The canned-goods shipments, however, were always on time, and I helped my coworkers unload and shelve them until things got closer to normal.

  The rim of the sky was like wet clay slowly hardening into ceramic.

  One of the youngsters was yelling at the grackles, “Avispas, avispas,” the Spanish word for “bees.” The youngster was blond, and his two friends were as brown as me. A grackle, the one that resembled a football the most, flew down, and in a flash—like it was a heist they’d rehearsed many times—the blond kid threw a rock up into the air, and, using a stick, one of the brown kids whacked it. The rock projectiled into the path of the football grackle and knocked it down.

  The youngsters laughed and celebrated as they ran toward the motionless grackle on the ground. The blond kid picked it up, then all three of them went running down Reynolds Street. I quickened my pace and followed them as people walked around us and asked me questions I half heard. After a couple of blocks I thought I’d lost them, but then spotted them knocking at the door of an old blue house. An elderly man answered the door and eyed the youngsters very suspiciously. It was obvious he didn’t quite trust them. The man inspected the grackle skeptically, then out of his pocket gave each of them a rust-colored coin.

  I projected my frustrations onto this man, and waited until the youngsters turned the corner and disappeared into the cityscape before I walked toward that same door and knocked three times, like the youngsters had.

  The elderly man answered the door. He had a sniveling look, like he was ready to bite my neck, when I said to him, “Hey, you got these boys running grackles for you?”

  “What?” he said.

  “I saw what just happened here,” I told him, “and I don’t like the influence you’re having on these youngsters.”

  “That’s because you’ve never had grackle soup,” he said. “See?”

  He invited me inside, and I didn’t see a reason to decline. In his kitchen there was a basket of plucked grackle feathers with bloody tips and a filmy smell of boiling raw meat in the air.

  “I’m gonna send you home with a little container of soup. No need to bring the container back to me. Just keep the soup in your refrigerator and heat it up in a pot normally. It keeps well, so you can also freeze it and save it for another season.”

  Taking the plastic receptacle with grackle soup from the man, I said, “Okay.”

  I walked out of his house, down the streets that would take me home. I felt somewhat irresponsible for having taken soup from this complete stranger, especially one who had kids running grackles. Instead of flushing the soup down the toilet, which is what I had been prepared to do, I stored it in my empty freezer.

  In a way, I concluded, these kids were more advanced than my generation had been at their age. What they’d done to get that grackle to hit the ground took some serious skills. It’d been a very coordinated and impressive operation.

  * * *

  Ram, who had once been just a casual, neighborly acquaintance, became something of a friend of mine. I got to know him pretty well, and, in turn, I told him a couple of things about myself I hadn’t told anyone, like the fact that I was still waiting to become a naturalized citizen. Ram was one of those types who cared a lot about his career, and had a passion for wanting to teach biology to teenagers that was admirable even to me.

  “I guess I take it for granted,” I said to him once, “that as kids we were taught the parts of plant and animal cells, and that there is a solar system, and such.”

  He told me the outer space curriculum was unaffected by the learning policies the new gangsters had implemented—it was only teaching about the way life on this planet grew that had been changed.

  * * *

  I’d lost count of which day of the Science Fair Protest we were in, but on my walk home from work one morning the streets were packed with protesters—the sidewalks were so congested that when I got to Rodgers Street, I had to step aside and figure out a game plan for getting home.

  Across the flow of people somebody was waving their arm comically in the air, and I recognized this person as Sheila, a former coworker at the market who one day had just stopped showing up for her shifts. At first I was amazed anybody would recognize me in this stream of people. Then Sheila started signaling in a way I interpreted to mean that we were to meet in the middle of the street and march along with the protesters. Mechanically, I put out my cigarette and joined her.

  We didn’t even say hello to each other. People had different chants I couldn’t make out, while kettle drums blasted from many hollows within the crowd of protesters.

  “Do you know what is going on here?” I yelled.

  She shook her head and, looking right at me, yelled, “No. I stopped watching the news and keeping up a while back.”

  “Me as well!”

  We marched along together for a bit, then got sucked through different pockets of the crowd and I never saw Sheila again.

  * * *

  I regretted making it a habit to have drinks with Ram and finally had to tell him the truth—my body just couldn’t take a beating like the ones I gave it throughout my twenties.

  He got the hint and stopped dropping by. We were still on good terms, however, and always had a short conversation when we met in the courtyard of our complex. One evening, on a walk after an enco
unter with Ram like this, I turned down Daffodil Avenue, where a small crowd had gathered in front of Al’s Smoke Shop. They had formed a half-moon between the street and the door of the shop, and, amazed and silent, the throng looked upon two grown men in a fistfight. The men were agitated with anger and spitting insults at each other.

  When it was apparent that nobody would intervene, my heart raced, and as I watched I noticed the men weren’t really trying to hurt each other, or, if they were, they had never been in a fistfight in their lives. They both looked awkward and out of shape. One of them wore a T-shirt and slacks, while the other man was dressed as if he worked in a fancy office building.

  As one of the spectators standing in the half-moon, I looked around to see if the cops were coming, or if anybody found this brawl as humorous as I did. When it got boring and I was thinking about leaving, I asked a woman carrying a grocery bag, who had been standing there before me, why these two were fighting.

  She responded, “They disagree about the Dreyfus Affair.”

  The man in the T-shirt slugged the office man on his ear, and he screamed like something in there had ruptured.

  “Which one do you think will win?” I asked her, and as I walked away she said, “Hard to tell at the moment.”

  * * *

  Since I’d cut back on the drinking, walking city block after city block with no direction was how I spent most of my free time. As dusk crawled out that evening, I couldn’t get this incident out of my head—I mean, I knew the new gangsters and the Science Fair Protest had stirred up many feelings in everybody, but getting into a fistfight about the Dreyfus Affair, more than a hundred years later and here, far away from France, seemed ridiculous. What came to mind for me most was the work of Marcel Proust titled À la recherche du temps perdu. Though I’d never read the book, I knew the Dreyfus Affair played an important peripheral role in the narrative.