Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories Read online

  Patricia Benavídez. The “son” half of Father & Son’s Taco Palace No. 2 even before the son quit. That’s how this Trish inherited the paper hat and white apron after school and every weekend, bored, a little sad, behind the high counters where customers ate standing up like horses.

  That wasn’t enough to make me feel sorry for her, though, even if her father was mean. But who could blame him? A girl who wore rhinestone earrings and glitter high heels to school was destined for trouble that nobody—not God or correctional institutions—could mend.

  I think she got double promoted somewhere and that’s how come she wound up in high school before she had any business being here. Yeah, kids like that always try too hard to fit in. Take this tocaya—same name as me, right? But does she call herself la Patee, or Patty, or something normal? No, she’s gotta be different. Says her name’s “Tri-ish.” Invented herself a phony English accent too, all breathless and sexy like a British Marilyn Monroe. Real goofy. I mean, whoever heard of a Mexican with a British accent? Know what I mean? The girl had problems.

  But if you caught her alone, and said, Pa-trrri-see-ah—I always made sure I said it in Spanish—Pa-trrri-see-ah, cut the bull crap and be for real. If you caught her without an audience, I guess she was all right.

  That’s how I managed to put up with her when I knew her, just before she ran away. Disappeared from a life sentence at that taco house. Got tired of coming home stinking of crispy tacos. Well, no wonder she left. I wouldn’t want to stink of crispy tacos neither.

  Who knows what she had to put up with. Maybe her father beat her. He beat the brother, I know that. Or at least they beat each other. It was one of those fist fights that finally did it—drove the boy off forever, though probably he was sick of stinking of tacos too. That’s what I’m thinking.

  Then a few weeks after the brother was gone, this tocaya of mine had her picture in all the papers, just like the kids on milk cartons:

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

  Patricia Bernadette Benavídez, 13, has been missing since Tuesday, Nov. 11, and her family is extremely worried. The girl, who is a student at Our Lady of Sorrows High School, is believed to be a runaway and was last seen on her way to school in the vicinity of Dolorosa and Soledad. Patricia is 5′, 115 lbs., and was wearing a jean jacket, blue plaid uniform skirt, white blouse, and high heels [glitter probably] when she disappeared. Her mother, Delfina Benavídez, has this message: “Honey, call Mommy y te quiero mucho.”

  Some people.

  What did I care Benavídez disappeared? Wouldn’t’ve. If it wasn’t for Max Lucas Luna Luna, senior, Holy Cross, our brother school. They sometimes did exchanges with us. Teasers is what they were. Sex Rap Crap is what we called it, only the sisters called them different—Youth Exchanges. Like where they’d invite some of the guys from Holy Cross over here for Theology, and some of us girls from Sorrows would go over there. And we’d pretend like we were real interested in the issue “The Blessed Virgin: Role Model for Today’s Young Woman,” “Petting: Too Far, Too Fast, Too Late,” “Heavy Metal and the Devil.” Shit like that.

  Not every day. Just once in a while as kind of an experiment. Catholic school was afraid of putting us all together too much, on account of hormones. That’s what Sister Virginella said. If you can’t conduct yourselves like proper young ladies when our guests arrive, we’ll have to suspend our Youth Exchanges indefinitely. No whistling, grabbing, or stomping in the future, is that clear?!!!

  Alls I know is he’s got these little hips like the same size since he was twelve probably. Little waist and little ass wrapped up neat and sweet like a Hershey bar. Damn! That’s what I remember.

  Turns out Max Lucas Luna Luna lives next door to the freak. I mean, I never even bothered talking to Patricia Benavídez before, even though we were in the same section of General Business. But she comes up to me one day in the cafeteria when I’m waiting for my french fries and goes:

  “Hey, tocaya, I know someone who’s got the hots for you.”

  “Yeah, right,” I says, trying to blow her off. I don’t want to be seen talking to no flake.

  “You know a guy named Luna from Holy Cross, the one who came over for that Theology exchange, the cute one with the ponytail?”

  “So’s?”

  “Well, he and my brother Ralphie are tight, and he told Ralphie not to tell nobody but he thinks Patricia Chávez is real fine.”

  “You lie, girl.”

  “Swear to God. If you don’t believe me, call my brother Ralphie.”

  Shit! That was enough to make me Trish Benavídez’s best girlfriend for life, I swear. After that, I always made sure I got to General Business class early. Usually she’d have something to tell me, and if she didn’t, I made sure to give her something to pass on to Max Lucas Luna Luna. But it was painful slow on account of this girl worked so much and didn’t have no social life to speak of.

  That’s how this Patricia Bernadette got to be our messenger of luh-uv for a while, even though me and Max Lucas Luna Luna hadn’t gotten beyond the I-like-you/Do-you-like-me stage. Hadn’t so much as seen each other since the rap crap, but I was working on it.

  I knew they lived somewhere in the Monte Vista area. So I’d ride my bike up and down streets—Magnolia, Mulberry, Huisache, Mistletoe—wondering if I was hot or cold. Just knowing Max Lucas Luna Luna might appear was enough to make my blood laugh.

  The week I start dropping in at Father & Son’s Taco Palace No. 2, is when she decides to skip. First we get an announcement over the intercom from Sister Virginella. I am sorry to have to announce one of our youngest and dearest students has strayed from home. Let us keep her in our hearts and in our prayers until her safe return. That’s when she first got her picture in the paper with her ma’s weepy message.

  Personally it was no grief or relief to me she escaped so clean. That’s for sure. But as it happened, she owed me. Bad enough she skips and has the whole school talking. At least then I had hope she’d make good on her promise to hook me up with Max Lucas Luna Luna. But just when I could say her name again without spitting, she goes and dies. Some kids playing in a drain ditch find a body, and yeah, it’s her. When the TV cameras arrive at our school, there go all them drama hot shits howling real tears, even the ones that didn’t know her. Sick.

  Well, I couldn’t help but feel bad for the dip once she’s dead, right? I mean, after I got over being mad. Until she rose from the dead three days later.

  After they’ve featured her ma crying into a wrinkled handkerchief and her dad saying, “She was my little princess,” and the student body using money from our Padre Island field-trip fund to buy a bouquet of white gladiolus with a banner that reads VIRGENCITA, CUÍDALA, and the whole damn school having to go to a high mass in her honor, my tocaya outdoes herself. Shows up at the downtown police station and says, I ain’t dead.

  Can you believe it? Her parents had identified the body in the morgue and everything. “I guess we were too upset to examine the body properly.” Ha!

  I never did get to meet Max Lucas Luna Luna, and who cares, right? All I’m saying is she couldn’t even die right. But whose famous face is on the front page of the San Antonio Light, the San Antonio Express News, and the Southside Reporter? Girl, I’m telling you.

  Me estoy muriendo

  y tú, como si nada …

  —“Puñalada Trapera”

  interpretada por LOLA BELTRÁN

  (TOMÁS MÉNDEZ SOSA, autor)

  Woman Hollering Creek

  The day Don Serafín gave Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez permission to take Cleófilas Enriqueta DeLeón Hernández as his bride, across her father’s threshold, over several miles of dirt road and several miles of paved, over one border and beyond to a town en el otro lado—on the other side—already did he divine the morning his daughter would raise her hand over her eyes, look south, and dream of returning to the chores that never ended, six good-for-nothing brothers, and one old man’s complaints.

  He had said
, after all, in the hubbub of parting: I am your father, I will never abandon you. He had said that, hadn’t he, when he hugged and then let her go. But at the moment Cleófilas was busy looking for Chela, her maid of honor, to fulfill their bouquet conspiracy. She would not remember her father’s parting words until later. I am your father, I will never abandon you.

  Only now as a mother did she remember. Now, when she and Juan Pedrito sat by the creek’s edge. How when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely.

  This is what Cleófilas thought evenings when Juan Pedro did not come home, and she lay on her side of the bed listening to the hollow roar of the interstate, a distant dog barking, the pecan trees rustling like ladies in stiff petticoats—shh-shh-shh, shh-shh-shh—soothing her to sleep.

  In the town where she grew up, there isn’t very much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers to the house of one or the other to play cards. Or walk to the cinema to see this week’s film again, speckled and with one hair quivering annoyingly on the screen. Or to the center of town to order a milk shake that will appear in a day and a half as a pimple on her backside. Or to the girlfriend’s house to watch the latest telenovela episode and try to copy the way the women comb their hair, wear their makeup.

  But what Cleófilas has been waiting for, has been whispering and sighing and giggling for, has been anticipating since she was old enough to lean against the window displays of gauze and butterflies and lace, is passion. Not the kind on the cover of the ¡Alarma! magazines, mind you, where the lover is photographed with the bloody fork she used to salvage her good name. But passion in its purest crystalline essence. The kind the books and songs and telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life, and does whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost.

  Tú o Nadie. “You or No One.” The title of the current favorite telenovela. The beautiful Lucía Méndez having to put up with all kinds of hardships of the heart, separation and betrayal, and loving, always loving no matter what, because that is the most important thing, and did you see Lucía Méndez on the Bayer aspirin commercials—wasn’t she lovely? Does she dye her hair do you think? Cleófilas is going to go to the farmacía and buy a hair rinse; her girlfriend Chela will apply it—it’s not that difficult at all.

  Because you didn’t watch last night’s episode when Lucía confessed she loved him more than anyone in her life. In her life! And she sings the song “You or No One” in the beginning and end of the show. Tú o Nadie. Somehow one ought to live one’s life like that, don’t you think? You or no one. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end.

  Seguín. She had liked the sound of it. Far away and lovely. Not like Monclova. Coahuila. Ugly.

  Seguín, Tejas. A nice sterling ring to it. The tinkle of money. She would get to wear outfits like the women on the tele, like Lucía Méndez. And have a lovely house, and wouldn’t Chela be jealous.

  And yes, they will drive all the way to Laredo to get her wedding dress. That’s what they say. Because Juan Pedro wants to get married right away, without a long engagement since he can’t take off too much time from work. He has a very important position in Seguin with, with … a beer company, I think. Or was it tires? Yes, he has to be back. So they will get married in the spring when he can take off work, and then they will drive off in his new pickup—did you see it?—to their new home in Seguin. Well, not exactly new, but they’re going to repaint the house. You know newlyweds. New paint and new furniture. Why not? He can afford it. And later on add maybe a room or two for the children. May they be blessed with many.

  Well, you’ll see. Cleófilas has always been so good with her sewing machine. A little rrrr, rrrr, rrrr of the machine and ¡zas! Miracles. She’s always been so clever, that girl. Poor thing. And without even a mama to advise her on things like her wedding night. Well, may God help her. What with a father with a head like a burro, and those six clumsy brothers. Well, what do you think! Yes, I’m going to the wedding. Of course! The dress I want to wear just needs to be altered a teensy bit to bring it up to date. See, I saw a new style last night that I thought would suit me. Did you watch last night’s episode of The Rich Also Cry? Well, did you notice the dress the mother was wearing?

  La Gritona. Such a funny name for such a lovely arroyo. But that’s what they called the creek that ran behind the house. Though no one could say whether the woman had hollered from anger or pain. The natives only knew the arroyo one crossed on the way to San Antonio, and then once again on the way back, was called Woman Hollering, a name no one from these parts questioned, little less understood. Pues, allá de los indios, quién sabe—who knows, the townspeople shrugged, because it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name.

  “What do you want to know for?” Trini the laundromat attendant asked in the same gruff Spanish she always used whenever she gave Cleófilas change or yelled at her for something. First for putting too much soap in the machines. Later, for sitting on a washer. And still later, after Juan Pedrito was born, for not understanding that in this country you cannot let your baby walk around with no diaper and his pee-pee hanging out, it wasn’t nice, ¿entiendes? Pues.

  How could Cleófilas explain to a woman like this why the name Woman Hollering fascinated her. Well, there was no sense talking to Trini.

  On the other hand there were the neighbor ladies, one on either side of the house they rented near the arroyo. The woman Soledad on the left, the woman Dolores on the right.

  The neighbor lady Soledad liked to call herself a widow, though how she came to be one was a mystery. Her husband had either died, or run away with an ice-house floozie, or simply gone out for cigarettes one afternoon and never came back. It was hard to say which since Soledad, as a rule, didn’t mention him.

  In the other house lived la señora Dolores, kind and very sweet, but her house smelled too much of incense and candles from the altars that burned continuously in memory of two sons who had died in the last war and one husband who had died shortly after from grief. The neighbor lady Dolores divided her time between the memory of these men and her garden, famous for its sunflowers—so tall they had to be supported with broom handles and old boards; red red cockscombs, fringed and bleeding a thick menstrual color; and, especially, roses whose sad scent reminded Cleófilas of the dead. Each Sunday la señora Dolores clipped the most beautiful of these flowers and arranged them on three modest headstones at the Seguin cemetery.

  The neighbor ladies, Soledad, Dolores, they might’ve known once the name of the arroyo before it turned English but they did not know now. They were too busy remembering the men who had left through either choice or circumstance and would never come back.

  Pain or rage, Cleófilas wondered when she drove over the bridge the first time as a newlywed and Juan Pedro had pointed it out. La Gritona, he had said, and she had laughed. Such a funny name for a creek so pretty and full of happily ever after.

  The first time she had been so surprised she didn’t cry out or try to defend herself. She had always said she would strike back if a man, any man, were to strike her.

  But when the moment came, and he slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood, she didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas.

  In her own home her parents had never raised a hand to each other or to their children. Although she admitted she may have been brought up a little leniently as an only daughter—la consentida, the princess—there were some things she would never tolerate. Ever.

  Instead, when it happened the first time, when they were barely man and wife, she had been so stunned, it left her speechless, motionless, numb. She had done nothing but reach up to the heat on her mouth and stare at the blood on her hand as if even then she didn’t
understand.

  She could think of nothing to say, said nothing. Just stroked the dark curls of the man who wept and would weep like a child, his tears of repentance and shame, this time and each.

  The men at the ice house. From what she can tell, from the times during her first year when still a newlywed she is invited and accompanies her husband, sits mute beside their conversation, waits and sips a beer until it grows warm, twists a paper napkin into a knot, then another into a fan, one into a rose, nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve, tugs at his elbow, and finally becomes good at predicting where the talk will lead, from this Cleófilas concludes each is nightly trying to find the truth lying at the bottom of the bottle like a gold doubloon on the sea floor.

  They want to tell each other what they want to tell themselves. But what is bumping like a helium balloon at the ceiling of the brain never finds its way out. It bubbles and rises, it gurgles in the throat, it rolls across the surface of the tongue, and erupts from the lips—a belch.

  If they are lucky, there are tears at the end of the long night. At any given moment, the fists try to speak. They are dogs chasing their own tails before lying down to sleep, trying to find a way, a route, an out, and—finally—get some peace.

  In the morning sometimes before he opens his eyes. Or after they have finished loving. Or at times when he is simply across from her at the table putting pieces of food into his mouth and chewing. Cleófilas thinks, This is the man I have waited my whole life for.

  Not that he isn’t a good man. She has to remind herself why she loves him when she changes the baby’s Pampers, or when she mops the bathroom floor, or tries to make the curtains for the doorways without doors, or whiten the linen. Or wonder a little when he kicks the refrigerator and says he hates this shitty house and is going out where he won’t be bothered with the baby’s howling and her suspicious questions, and her requests to fix this and this and this because if she had any brains in her head she’d realize he’s been up before the rooster earning his living to pay for the food in her belly and the roof over her head and would have to wake up again early the next day so why can’t you just leave me in peace, woman.