It Takes a Worried Man Read online

  It Takes a Worried Man

  Tracy Daugherty

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2002 Tracy Daugherty

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  “Comfort Me with Apple” first appeared in The Southern Review; “A Worried Song after Work” in Sundog: The Southeast Review; “Bliss” in Chelsea, “First Star” in Open Spaces; and “The Leavings of Panic” in The Southwest Review. I’m grateful to the editors for permission to reprint.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-68-3

  eBook Cover designed by Steven Seighman

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For Kathie, Keith, and Freddie Jane

  For their love and advice—and their efforts in our shared struggle to write as well as we can—I’m grateful to Marjorie Sandor and Ehud Havazelet. Thanks also to Glenn Blake, Michelle Boisseau, Jerry and Joyce Bryan, Betty Campbell, Kris and Rich Daniels, Ted Leeson, Martha Low, George Manner, and Jeff and Pam Mull.

  CONTENTS

  Comfort Me with Apples

  A Worried Song after Work

  Bliss

  Henry’s Women

  Tombstone Television

  First Star

  The Leavings of Panic

  Burying the Blues

  The town of Houston, situated at the head of navigation, on the west bank of Buffalo Bayou, is now for the first time brought to public notice because until now the proprietors were not ready to offer it to the public … [but] when the rich lands of this country shall be settled, a trade will flow to it, making it, beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas.—Advertisement in U.S. and European newspapers, 1836

  The intercourse which [the citizens] have had with the world and with each other has had the tendency to [banish] bigotry and obliterate prejudices and most of them are able to estimate with little partiality the pretensions of all, according to their merits.—Silas Dinsmore, early Houston settler

  Comfort Me with Apples

  1.

  The Zamoras came to Houston from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1988 and settled first on Hickory Street by a dried-up spit of Buffalo Bayou. Julio Zamora has never applied for a green card; he works as a fast-food cook. His oldest son, Manuel, loves the comic books I bring him every week. “Who’s this?” he’ll say.

  “Spiderman. Tough hombre. He can eat fourteen burritos in eight minutes while hanging, half-asleep, on the wall.”

  “I can eat fifteen upside down!”

  I think of him as my own little boy, sometimes.

  My other family, the Thuots, fled the Annamese Cordillera in what’s now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. They live with their six children in an efficiency apartment with no running water, near Allen Parkway. I bring them food and job applications from convenience stores; they teach me their customs.

  The Thuots and the Zamoras are precisely the kind of people no one—repeat, no one, zero, zip—wants to read about, Cal of Cal’s Books is telling me now, planting his hands on his dusty front counter. Next to the cash register, a chipped fishbowl is gorged with slips of paper—a promotional gimmick. Cal’s always got one going. Trips. Bonus prizes. At the end of the month he’ll hold a raffle. Four free books.

  “George, my customers want a peek at the secret lives of celebrities. Money, scandal, divorce …” he says. “They’re after books that’ll teach them better love techniques.”

  Indian myths, black oral histories, Cajun culture guides, Mexico, Asia—these subjects are Death, he says. Pure Death. Business is slow for my Texas Republic Press.

  “At least take a look at what I’ve done,” I say. I’m the founder, publisher, editor (my late wife, Jean, suggested the logo, of which I’m very proud—an amiable armadillo branded with a big Lone Star). Today, I’m the sales rep.

  Cal takes my sample copy of Houston’s Latin Refugees, a one-hundred-page cultural study of families like the Zamoras. I’m also the writer.

  “Sorry, George. I wouldn’t be able to sell it. If you could get me something sexy …”

  “Be serious, Cal.”

  “Never more.”

  Shaking my head, “All right, forget it,” I glimpse an exterminator’s truck, backfiring as it rattly-clacks down the street. A giant foam-rubber bug is belly-up on its hood. X’s for eyes. It’s followed by a pizza-delivery van, pepperonis painted like measles on its dark purple doors.

  Successful commerce: in the fast lane, way ahead of me.

  I scribble my phone number and the names of the Thuots and the Zamoras on uneven ribbons of paper, then press them into the fishbowl. Cal’s got a picture of his teenage nephew, Ray, taped to the register as an ad for his “Family Novels” sale (“20% Off!”). The boy looks just like his uncle but neater, with a slender goatee. I met him last summer when he worked part-time for Cal, and took to him right away. He was trying to save for his first car and help with the family expenses.

  His dad, Cal’s brother Billy, was recovering from prostate surgery, something Ray couldn’t talk about without choking up, and I felt for the kid.

  “Mr. Palmer, good to see you again,” he greeted me whenever I came in. Helpful. Polite. He always took the time to glance through my pamphlets and books, said he’d talk them up to his uncle. He loved showing me, and anyone else, the latest issues of Consumer Reports, dog-earing pages of jazzy red sports cars he longed to get his mitts on.

  A boy to make a daddy proud.

  If I were speaking to him now, or to any humane person, I think, I might be making progress.

  Well. Cal and I are used to each other.

  “These people you talk to, George, they have, you know what I mean, kinky love practices, don’t they? Fertility rites? Stuff like that?” he asks. His beard’s about to wilt in the heat. “That I could use.”

  “Thanks for your time, Cal.” I snatch back the book.

  The Zamoras live now near a black college in the projects. Most families here are too poor to buy new shoes, or to repair their old ones, and they have no sidewalks to use—only narrow dirt paths under splintered telephone poles near the street. The power lines between the poles are loosely strung over gardens and lawns, within easy reach of a child swinging a stick, say, or a rusty baton, or an old Louisville Slugger—something I’d fix right away, pronto, ándale, if I had kids here. The fire hydrants, busted, are dry.

  The Zamoras’ house is pink with dark-green eaves. Spike cactus blooms on either side of the porch. A stiff plastic hose curls on a peg by the door.

  When I arrive—it’s a ten-minute drive from Cal’s—Julio’s trying to figure out the plumbing in his kitchen. He tells me he’s just spent $780 on a new washer and dryer.

  I say, “Can I give you a hand?”

  “Sure. Grab that wrench for me.”

  Some afternoons he cooks hamburgers at a Prince’s Drive-In; two nights a week he fries shrimp at a Chinese take-out on Wheeler. Eight months ago, he and his wife, Lira, and their five children lived in a small apartment in the Fourth Ward, behind a Southern Pacific Railroad crossing. Now, with two jobs, he can afford to rent this place.

  “Lira downtown today?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Pounding those fucking doors.”

  “No luck?”

  “Naw. I tell her, she’s gonna
have to try a little harder. Small businesses, banks.” She’s been looking for work for a year. “Earn her keep around here.” He laughs, but the ripple in his throat is shallow and sad.

  Twice in the last year, I’ve noticed bruises on Lira’s cheeks. Once, she had a black eye. She won’t talk about herself. “Every morning at eight, she catches a Metro bus downtown and interviews all day,” Julio explained to me once. “Then she comes home at seven to fix dinner for the children.”

  Last week, on a whim, I stopped by while Julio was still at work, hoping to get her to chat. The timing was bad; she was exhausted from the bus, the kids were hungry, hanging all over her—“Off!” she howled, like someone in near-fatal distress—while she pulled knives and spoons, pots and pans, from cupboards, cabinets, drawers. I asked her how she was doing.

  She just smiled.

  Fidgeting, wishing I could vanish through the floorboards, I told her I’d recently seen up-to-date employment guides in my friend Cal’s bookstore.

  She said she’d check them out. Then, politely, “Excuse me.”

  “Sure,” I said, and left as quickly as I could.

  Now, as Julio and I hammer beneath the sink, Manuel, his eight-year-old—my favorite kid, always happy, active as a beetle—sings into my portable tape recorder:

  No llores, Jesus, no llores

  Que nos vos a hacer llorar.

  Pues los niños de este pueblo

  Te queremos consolar.

  Julio laughs. “What a morbid little song. ‘No Llores,”’ he says, “is a funeral dirge.”

  I pull a pencil from my pocket and jot that down.

  Years ago, in an informal study when I started the press, I discovered that white Houston stereotypes Mexicans according to their food behavior (“greaser,” “pepper-belly,” “frijoles-guzzler”). Now, I want to know what Latins whisper about norteños.

  After the washer’s hooked up in the pantry, Julio opens a plastic tub of salsa and a bag of tortilla chips and sets them on his rickety kitchen table. Manuel listens to the Astros on the radio.

  The house is packed to its peeling pine rafters with keepsakes, toys, pages of jubilant scribbles by the kids, the sweet-and-sour smells of brimming life—gifts I expected to gather someday myself, I think, glancing at Julio’s boy before we settle down to work.

  “Okay, how do we start?” Julio asks.

  “Well,” I say, switching on the recorder. Shaky—over what? what the hell? what might have been!—I fumble it onto the table. “Do you have certain names—derogatory terms—for Anglos?”

  “Let me see. Yes. Sometimes we call you Jamónes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Ham-Eaters. You know, you’re big eaters of pork.”

  “What else?”

  “Bolillo, Rolling Pin. Because of the way you move, I guess, straight-ahead, arrogant. I never really knew, it’s just something I heard from my father. He used to tell us stories at night—big hombre, dark like an African. He taught me nothing is more important than Family.”

  I nod.

  “Niño, Family, it’s the solid rock of life, he used to say.” He laughs, then gestures at the blinking red light on my machine. “So. This will be another book?”

  “Maybe part of one,” I say. “I don’t know. I’m running out of money.”

  He grasps my knee, surprising me. He’s always surprising me, switching gears—happy to sad, wistful to tough. In all our talks, I’ve yet to learn how to read him. “Whatever happens, you mustn’t quit, George. It’s a good thing you’re doing, telling our stories to the Anglos.”

  I rub my eyes; before my zero, my zip, with Cal today, I logged eight and a half hours at the newspaper.

  “I swear, George, you work like a damn Mexican.” Julio chuckles. “We should quit this, eh? You need to go home, I think, and let your lady make you a spicy dinner. Some beans, maybe, smothered in butter? A beer.”

  Children shout, playing catch down the street. “If I had a lady,” I say, and here it is, gasping fatally out in the open: my salty, slippery grief, spoken aloud for the first time in months.

  Shit, I think, flushing hot.

  “A nice-lookin’ fellow like you—no lady?” Julio’s mood is still light. He thinks we’re kidding, as usual.

  My hands are trembling now. I almost tell him: The freeway ate her up, man. Swallowed her whole. But he doesn’t need to know this. His world’s overstuffed already—washers, dryers, big black eyes.

  “Anglos.” He tsks. “Always too busy for love. You don’t know how to appreciate a good woman.”

  “You’re right,” I say.

  “Sometimes, when I see white folks dance?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think to myself, ‘How can they be so clumsy with their bodies, and still make babies?’”

  I try to laugh.

  “No, really,” Julio says. He touches my shoulder, man to man. “It makes me very sad.”

  Leaving, a few minutes later, I see Lira at the end of the block, stepping from a steaming silver bus, gripping a grocery bag. I wave through the windshield of my car, but she doesn’t see me. Her eyes are on her own front door—a wide, cautious stare, like keeping sight of a possibly rabid animal. She’s lovely, a deep, rich brown, her bare arms slightly muscled, her blouse and green skirt neat despite what I imagine to be the hardships of her day (“Looks to me, lady, like you’ve got no real experience. Sorry.”) and the indignity of pressing bus crowds. Proofreader? Editorial assistant? I can’t afford to hire anyone.

  I wave again. She still hasn’t noticed my car’s slow turning. Julio’s waiting, now, in the open doorway. Her stride quickens. She grasps the bag and it tears a bit at the bottom.

  Nearby, children laugh and scream, playfully.

  2.

  My weekly visits with the Thuots are usually tenser than my sessions with Julio Zamora. A year ago, when I met them, they stood with their arms folded and gave me a wide berth. Later, a teacher friend told me that in most Asian cultures, folding one’s arms is a gesture of honor; distance signals respect. In time, the Thuots sang into my tape recorder, shared stories and jokes. They showed me bracelets they’d made from American artillery scraps.

  Mr. Thuot is stooped, wrinkled, and dark. His wife is tall, with slender, peach-colored ears. They have four boys and two girls, none of them getting an education at the moment, though three of the boys are old enough for high school. Their apartment overlooks a deep part of the bayou; beyond it, the rice mills of American Grain, gleaming, white, tall as rockets.

  The family bathes in water from the stream. Mr. Thuot and the boys haul it in buckets to a giant steel tub in the center of their living room. I’ve told them the bayou’s polluted—I’ve seen car doors, portable freezers, bicycle mirrors rusting in the mud. The Thuots always drink the fresh Ozarka water I bring them, shear the plastic bottles in half, and use them to carry dirty bathwater up the banks.

  Tonight the streets are muggy and hot. A steamy film clings to the bayou’s surface.

  I hand Mr. Thuot a stack of applications for employment—gas stations, grocery stores—saving some for Lira Zamora. My nerves have leveled out since leaving Julio’s place, but I’m eager to finish my business, deal poker with my office mates, and get my mind off myself tonight.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Thuot says. No smile.

  He sits on the couch, back straight, waiting for me to turn on my Sony. His wife sits beside him. “We don’t have to do this,” I say, noting his mood.

  Curtly, he nods, waves his hand. His English is good. I love his family stories. I’m the bearer, now, of other families’ stories.

  “More about my birthplace?” he asks. “My—how do you put it—my ‘origin’?”

  “What haven’t we covered so far?”

  “Grandfather. Distant cousins. Yes?” He hands me a blue dish with slices of orange, offers me green tea.

  Last August, on my first visit, I learned that his home village, Kontum, a series of bamboo huts i
n the Annam Cordillera highlands, was a lush, fertile place, brimming with kids. Mr. Thuot had been a farmer and a fisherman. The streams were treacherous, full of crocodiles, so for luck he’d tattooed a green snake on his chest (a folk practice I’ve traced to the fourteenth century).

  On that same visit, Mrs. Thuot told me that in the mountains, married couples often whispered sibling terms—“Yes, my brother, yes, yes!”—while making love: a practice common also in Thailand.

  “How about this, instead,” I tell Mr. Thuot now. “Could you share with me intimate words for the pleasures you feel with your wife?”

  For a moment, as I speak, my mind loops back to Jean, her small, puckered mouth trying desperately to tell me something.

  Mr. Thuot trusts me and enjoys our talks, but he seems, this evening, grim. The tape hisses and we avoid each other’s eyes.

  Finally, I turn off the recorder and start to leave. Mrs. Thuot, worried that her husband has offended me (her primary domestic duty, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is to sweep unpleasantness out of her home), motions for me to sit back down. She rummages in a battered trunk full of keepsakes, pulling out three small gongs: metal, with upturned rims. Excitedly, she gestures for her husband to explain.

  “He is not interested—”

  “Yes,” I say. “I am. Please.” My own English always stiffens around him.

  Delicately, he touches each gong. “These we use on several occasions. Funerals, feasts. We had many gongs, but three was all we could pack, fleeing the war. The largest is called Knah. Part of a set of six. When they are stored together, one inside the other, they form concentric circles. The smaller gongs are Ching. They come in sets of three. We use at family dinner.”

  Mrs. Thuot mimes the picking of chopsticks. I laugh and join her. Mr. Thuot smiles, raises his glass of tea—“To the children,” he toasts, “to the high sky of their future, yes?”—and, with his long yellow nails, taps the tiny Ching.

  Later, as I’m leaving, Mrs. Thuot tells me, “A family, it—they?—vanished last night.” We’re standing in a vacant lot behind her apartment, where I’ve parked my dusty Chrysler. “Right over there. That one.” She points to an unpainted door in the building next to hers. “This is why my husband is distracted for you.” Her eyes mist.