Last summer I was flying back to Texas from California. I had driven out west on a road trip with an old friend, and he popped for my return passage. It was the first time I had flown since 9/11 and the increased airport security. After a series of tedious indignities I discovered, at the boarding kiosk, that the plane had been overbooked. But before I could voice my disapproval, I was informed that the airline would happily upgrade me to the first class section.

There is something wonderfully nostalgic about the Burbank Airport, which I believe is officially the Bob Hope Airport. The deco charm is still fresh about the concourse and boarding areas. As for the final boarding, passengers cross the tarmac like in a Humphrey Bogart movie. I moved with a knot of passengers up the impromptu staircase which had been rolled alongside my plane.

They had apparently already seated the first class passengers, because when I entered through the flank of the DC10, the stewardess, upon glancing at my ticket, flashed me a genuine smile and cut me from the herd. I was gently escorted through a curtain into the front portion of the plane. She sat me down beside a tanned and bearded man in his late fifties. He looked up at me with a pleasant nod, used his boarding pass as a bookmark, and placed his Peter Hathaway Capstick Reader into the little pouch on the back of the seat in front of him. He introduced himself as Gerald Westdale, but I should call him Gerry. His grip let me know I wasn’t sitting next to just some other old man.

“So, what line are you in?” Gerry asked, stroking his beard.

I made some vague mention of independent film.

“Oh, I’ve heard all about you Texas movie boys!” he responded with a grin. “My nephew works over at Lions Gate. He says no one fucks with the Texans. Uncle Gerry, the boy will tell me, you don’t cross the likes of Tommy Lee Jones, Bill Wittliff, even Robert Rodriguez, ’cause they’ll fuck you back harder’n a heifer.”

I tried my best to convey a noncommittal smile.

“Boy don’t know much about the cattle business,” he added. “But he’s passionate.”

I asked what Gerry did for a living.

“Ought to be retired,” he said. “Least that’s what the ex-wife keeps telling me. But I can’t just sit around playing cards or teaching myself golf. Nope. I broker large equipment for small outfits. The oil business, you know. Used to be wide open territory here and abroad, especially back in my daddy’s day. Now I’m mainly working for smaller concerns drilling Texas, New Mexico, and some in the Gulf.”

Once in flight, with the “fasten seatbelts” sign off, Gerry made sure we were both well taken care of with champagne. “The only time I drink champagne,” he told me with a declarative simplicity as the stewardess filled our crystal flutes, “if when I’m airborne.” The two of us clinked our glasses and took a sip. Gerry looked out his window and then turned back to me. “What else would you drink above the clouds? A beer or bourbon? Naw. It’s got to be French, bubbly and, if possible, drier than a dust devil.”

Throughout the flight I don’t think there was ever a moment when we didn’t have a drink in hand, and it was refreshed constantly, as if by magic. He did most of the talking, which was okay. As a raconteur, he delivered the goods.

We both ordered the poached salmon. And when our lunch arrived we fell silent as we ate. I discovered that one of the reasons to fly first class is that the aisles are wider, so that flight attendants can always come to your aid with more liquid refreshments, even during that time when meals are being distributed.

“I have a little hobby,” Gerry said solemnly. And then he smiled, his cheeks now bright red from the wine. “Not so little, really. It has become a damn expensive hobby. It’s what I’ve heard, at times, referred to as adventurous gastronomy.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Like eating those poisonous puffer fish. Or drinking coffee from civet cat scat.” And I started to giggle because of the way those last three words so gracelessly tripped off my tongue, and, well, because of the wine.

“That amateur shit’s for kids and tourists,” Gerry replied dismissively. “Condor egg omelets, or maybe skirt steak from a giant panda — that’s what I’m talking about. Rarities. Don’t let anyone steer your otherwise — endangered meat is the sweetest.” He twisted around in his seat and looked straight at me. “There’s a pygmy sea tortoise that comes ashore on Tiburón Island — that’s in the Sea of Cortez — and the inhabitants of the island, the Seri tribe, make this incredible stew from the little endangered tortoises.” He smiled and looked off into space. “Yes, I played the game. All above board. The local government agreed to provided me, as a gringo, with a license to harvest one, and eat it. Let me tell you, it put a dent in the wallet. But if heaven serves lunch ….” And then he sighed. “But it’s unlikely I will ever have it again, what with the new laws in Mexico concerning endangered species.”

Gerry turned away and watched the clouds go by out his window for a while.

“My next such meal,” he suddenly said, turning back to me, “was a pure guerrilla operation. Completely under the radar of those goddamn government agencies. I headed out to Grand Comore, an island in the Indian Ocean. Just me and an adventurous cordon bleu trained chef. We put out the word what we were looking for and we waited.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “The Comoros, that’s coelacanth territory.”

“And that salmon me and you just ate — as dry and soulless as airplane food tends to be — would get four stars from Zagat compared to the goddamn coelacanth, if you’ll pardon the French. And speaking of the French, that’s where my chef was from. And he tried everything in his repertoire. I mean, the fish was pretty damn big. We tried it fried, baked, poached, sauteed with shallots and fresh basil — and fresh basil isn’t so hard to come by on Grand Comore, just so you’ll know …. Um, where was I?”

“Not so savory,” I said, smiling up at the stewardess as she refilled my glass.

“The only thing that came close to acceptable was with it boiled and ground up, you know, like gefilte fish. And why not? The gefilte carp is also pretty much a boney prehistoric fish.”

“But you don’t crave the coelacanth like the Mexican turtle soup?”

“Oh, sweat lord! We spent 12 weeks in the slums of Tsudjini just waiting for a fisherman to find one of those fossil fish. The anticipation was extraordinary. And the reality … oh, dear me.”

“Hey,” I said, with a giddy slur. “I have a fossil fish story. It’s not a living fossil. And, well, it isn’t really a fish.”

Gerry nodded with an indulgent and encouraging smile.

“Maybe twenty years ago,” I said, “the second time I dropped out of college, I went out to spend a month with a friend on his cousin’s ranch in West Texas. The cousin had to deal with some legal issues or something. And it was really just me and this guy house-sitting. Not a working ranch. No animals.”

I tore open a packet of peanuts and let them slide into my mouth. While chewing, I continued.

“I was clearing some brush off of a flat level of ground half a mile from the ranch house. And I realized I’d found a fossil. At first I thought it was a fish, but as I kept digging, it was turning into a pretty big fish. Dinosaur? I was getting excited. My friend had left for a few days to attend his sister’s wedding back in Austin, so it was just me and a shovel. When I finally uncovered the fossil, I realized it was a trilobite. A monster of a trilobite.”

“Oh?” Gerry leaned forward. “How big?”

“Volkswagen,” I said.

“You’re saying it was eight feet from nose to tip of the pygidium?”

“The what?”

“Its behind.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I measured it to eleven feet by six feet.”

“This is incredible. It’d be the fucking Loch Ness monster of the Ordovician!”

“Well, hold on there. The Loch Ness monster is, well, it’s like a monster. I’m talking about just a little … well, you said it — Volkswagen.”

Gerry leaned forward and pulled a bag from under his seat. “This is very exciting. The largest trilobite known — and I can’t recall it’s name — well, it wasn’t even close to three feet long.”

As Gerry dug through his bag, I tried to recall that summer out at the ranch. It was twenty years ago. And one of the things I didn’t share with Gerry was that this friend of mine often drove his rickety Subaru down to Terlingua to buy peyote from a Mexican rancher. The stuff tasted awful, but it was very interesting.

Gerry unfolded a geological map of Texas, and then he refolded it so it was only showing the trans-Pecos area of the state.

I was about to place my finger on the region, a little dot between the Chinati and Bofecillos mountain ranges which is called Casa Piedra, when I noticed that the whole area of the Big Bend region on Gerry’s map was colored orange.

Now I didn’t have to look at the map key to know that orange represented depositional material. In this case, lava flows and ash fall. The whole region suffered cataclysmic volcanism — and this happened well after the reign of the dinosaurs, and certainly the trilobite. Any such fossils would be well buried under the volcanic material. In fact, that’s why my friend had to drive so far to get peyote. The stuff prefers limestone rich soil.

Having studied a bit of Texas geology I knew all this stuff. But somehow I never let science fact and my dim memories of a summer lost years ago to surface in my mind at the same time. They were simply not compatible pieces of information. And then the whole thing about this gigantic trilobite. I know how big a trilobite is supposed to be. True, back then I only knew their basic shape. But, over the years, with reading and nature films and such, I added pieces here and there, filling in the picture of natural history. But this particular memory was never allowed to be reanalyzed in the light of reason.

Gerry was waiting. With his knowledge of geology, I knew he’d think me foolish were I to point to Casa Piedra, so I let my finger drift over to an empty region to the east, near the little town of Sanderson, where I knew there were plenty of exposed limestone beds of the ancient Permian seas which would be logical trilobite territory.

He made a mark with a stubby pencil, and mentioned something about alerting his wildcatter friends who scouted for oil fields in the region to keep their eyes open for weird fossils.

As Gerry dropped off into a doze somewhere over the Painted Desert, I began trying to untangle fact and fantasy, those spurious knotted tendrils of memories. After half an hour I accepted a plump pillow from a flight attendant and decided to give up, and so I allowed the uncertain past to fall away as quickly as Burbank Airport was receding from behind us in a billowing contrail.

Maybe two weeks back I’d encountered my former neighbor, Alex. I’d been strolling along the riverwalk, dodging the tourists and idly snapping pictures with my little digital camera. As I was about to walk under the Augusta Street bridge near the downtown library, I heard someone call my name. It was Alex. He was sitting up on a little region of tier benches halfway up to the street level. He and an old black man were eating hot dogs and drinking sodas. I headed up. Alex introduced me to Mr. Wilkins. I shook the man’s hand. He wore worn and cracked army surplus boots, a moth-eaten pea coat, and an orange knit cap.

“He’s staying over at the SAMM shelter until he gets on his feet,” Alex told me. The man finished the final bite of his hot dog and wiped his fingers and mouth with a napkin which he then placed in his coat pocket. It was mid-January, but, as is often in San Antonio in the winter, quite warm when the sun is out. I thought he must be roasting in that coat.

“Mr. Wilkins played drums for Lightnin’ Hopkins,” Alex said softly, turning to Wilkins with a deferent smile of respect.

“Weren’t nothing more than three months at best,” Wilkins said with a slow and easy East Texas draw. “Back in 1953. Know the year, ’cause that’s when I joined up with the Army.”

Wilkin’s pulled a half-smoked plastic-tipped cigarillo from a shirt pocket and fired it up with a butane lighter.

Alex asked what I had been up to.

I began my current patter of unemployment and poverty, but quickly cut myself off when I looked up to see Mr. Wilkins screw the cap back on his bottle of soda and slip it in his coat pocket to be enjoyed later.

I faltered mid-sentence and changed the subject.

But I guess Alex must have registered my unfortunate financial state, because it wasn’t too long before I got call from him asking if I’d like to help him tear down a barn on his brother’s land out in the country. “It pays a hundred dollars a day. We’re thinking it’s a three day job.” That sounded like two days more than I was capable of putting up with Alex’s manic moods, and I could tell from his voice that he was running turbo-charged at the moment. “Hey,” he added, “we get free room and board.” When he paused for breath, I said, yes, I would do it. He laughed as though that last bit of sweetening the pot had put me over — but the fact was, I had no other idea of how to get enough cash to make my landlady happy, and the end of the month was coming up fast.

The next day Alex stopped by my house early in the morning. He looked hungover as hell, which was fine by me. It kept him subdued. And I like subdued in the morning. He muttered something about how his thirty year old Volvo might not be the best choice of vehicle, so we took my pickup truck. I’d already prepared a thermos of sweet black coffee.

“We’re going to Uvalde,” Alex said. “Take the highway to Castroville, and keep going.”

As I got onto highway 90 and headed west, Alex made his way gratefully through two cups of my coffee. It put life back into him. In fact, it chiseled off enough of the rough edges of hangover so that he could get some shut eye. He curled up like a baby, clutching the pillow he had brought along. He had ducked his head under the shoulder strap of his seat belt so that it brushed his ear, but he seemed not to notice it. I found his soft snores soothing as I sipped coffee and headed into the scrub brush barrens of the lowest reaches of the Texas Hill Country.

Alex’s brother, Francisco, is a doctor, but I have never talked to him long enough to find out what sort of medicine he practices. He’d bought a little ranch along the Nueces River, about thirty miles north of Uvalde. The property fronted the river and moved back maybe a mile and a half into the low hills up from the river valley. It was lovely and lonely. Prickly pear cactus, low mesquite tress, and a little clump of squat cedar trees surrounded by a field of prairie grass.

When me and Alex turned off highway 55 and rolled over the cattle guard at the entrance to the property we saw a doublewide trailer at the end of a caliche road. There was a gleaming SUV parked out front. When I rolled up beside the trailer, the door opened, Francisco, his Italian wife, and their five year old daughter, Martina, came out smiling.

Alex had told me that his brother brought the property a year ago. He wanted to build a proper house as a vacation home. “All they’ve got is a trailer right now, and he’s too embarrassed to invite his friends to come out and stay in a fucking trailer. Can you beat that?”

Francisco, Lena, and Martina invited us inside for lunch. We all had pasta salad and some sort of seafood bisque. I could see that Francisco and his wife were playfully dismissive of Alex — he being one of the black sheep of the family — but Martina absolutely loved him. In fact, the little girl was crushed when her parents announced that they all were going to head out to Lost Maples State Park, a few miles north. But we, Francisco asked in the form of a statement, we would know what we were supposed to do? Right?

Alex nodded, of course. He told them not to worry. Enjoy their afternoon.

As the family went about loading picnic items into their SUV, I followed Alex down a path and over a hill and came upon a humble shack. Not a barn, nor a cabin. Something in between. It possessed a rustic beauty and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to destroy this building.

“Well,” Alex explained, “they say it’s infested with black widows, rattlesnakes, and rusty nails infected with tetanus. They worry about Martina. You know how it is.” He led me to a pile of tools and handed me a twenty-pound sledgehammer and he took the largest crowbar I had ever seen. “Where do you think we should begin?”

“What?” I asked. “But you’ve done this before, right?”

“No experience necessary, man,” he said with a grin. “We’re tearing down, not building up.”

I entered to see what we were up against. There was no foundation, and that was good. A dirt floor. One entrance. Inside there were three rooms. The pitched a-frame roof was visible, as there was no proper ceiling. The walls that divided the rooms were more like horse stalls with very high sides. Rooms as cubicles. Two wooden pillars helped to support the roof beam. They were fixed into the ground with concrete, as were the four wooden corner posts.

Alex seemed under the impression that we’d hook up my truck to these center posts and pull the whole place down and then smash the boards into small pieces with the sledgehammer.

“That’d stretch it out to three days, right?” he asked.

“What don’t we just douse it with gas and torch it?” I mused.

“No fucking way,” he hissed, looking around like someone had heard me. “That’s the obvious, of course. But we’d be out of here tomorrow. It’s a hundred dollars a day, man. A day!”

I told him we’d need to remove every board from the outer and inner walls, and every board in the roof. At the end of each day, we could make a bonfire of the pulled boards. “‘Cause if your brother’s afraid of spiders and snakes, a big pile of lumber is just as bad — probably worse.” And then, and only then, we could drag down the supports.

Alex was nodding excitedly.

“That’s why I brought you along. You see the big picture. This is exactly what we need to do. And now you’re making it into a four day job. Maybe five! Brilliant!”

Alex was wrong. It was a three day job. Well, three and a half, if you count our first day.

It was quite an ordeal. And, indeed, we found a few rattlesnakes (one buried his fangs into the toe-leather of my left boot, and I dispatched the poor critter with a small ball-peen hammer). However, that little piece of Uvalde County history — that humble cedar board abode — was, as agreed by all parties, stripped down and burned, and even the rusty nails, doubtlessly pre-dating the Coolidge administration, had been yanked free, gathered, and placed in a plastic trash barrel for Francisco and his family to use in any manner they desired.

On the last night at the ranch me and Alex were tending the bonfire of the roof slats. We were both exhausted and drinking beer that we had managed to sneak past Francisco, who was strangely puritanical in these matters (or, perhaps he knew his brother too well).

I turned to Alex.

“Remember that guy, Mr. Wilkins?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Lightnin’ Hopkins.”

“Oh, right. A righteous guy. Ends up homeless. Fucked over by the American dream.”

“His one claim to fame,” I said. “Playing with Lightnin’ Hopkins. I can’t stop but to wonder if maybe there was more to his life–?”

“He was in the military. Must have killed some Japs.”

“Joined in the fifties, so he said.”

“Maybe saw action in Korea,” Alex said. And then he lowered his beer and looked to me. “What you getting at?”

“What is your Lightnin’ Hopkins story?”

“Um, I guess that’s it. That Mr. Wilkins guy.”

“No,” I said shaking my head until I could feel just how drunk I had become. “What makes your life important. You know, your mark on the world.”

“Hey, screw you,” Alex said forcing a smile, but I could see his lip trembling on the edge of irritation. “That old fuck — Wilkins was it? — was probably lying. And what do I care? I fucking hate the blues!”

The next day we drove back to San Antonio. And much like the drive out, Alex kept silent. He was dozing because of two quarts of Carta Blanca he picked up at the Shell station in Uvalde where we gassed up for the ride home. It was the one time I wished Alex was awake and chattering and full of his own brand of excitable giddy bullshit, because all I was left with was the chatter of my own mind, asking again and again, what have I done with my life … after four decades? I’m not even a bit player in the successful life of another.

As we passed Lackland Air Force Base, Alex roused himself.

“You know, I might not be Lightnin’ Hopkins’ drummer, but in February me and Billy Martin are going to do a guerilla performance art piece at the Alamo.” Alex turned to me. “You want in on the action?”

“Is any one gonna get hurt?”

“Naw,” he said, and he fluffed his pillow and twisted around to get comfy again. “But we’ll probably get arrested. Fuck. It is the Alamo. Goddamn Daughters of the Republic of Texas!”

“Sounds fun,” I said. And I smiled at Alex, but he was turned away from me. “Count me in.” I’m not sure, but I thought I could hear his soft snoring.

THE CUCUY CLUB
by Erik Bosse

CHAPTER 1

Jaime jumped out of my truck before I even had time to set the parking brake. We’d spent the last hour on a rutted dirt road and I never managed to get above second gear. A grinning man in his forties — a contemporary of both myself and Jaime — walked out of a large stone building. This must be Carlos, the caretaker of the ruined city of Guerrero. As I walked up, Jaime was shaking Carlos’ hand. I offered mine, and Carlos shook in the manner of la gente, with a soft and gentle touch. Jaime had been in communication with some sort of cultural administrator in this region, and we were expected.

Antigua Guerrero, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, lies on the border with the US. Established in 1750, it once boasted a population of 25,000 people. The was before the Falcon Dam was built. But by the 1950s, as the Falcon Reservoir began to fill and swallow up the towns and farms on both sides of the Rio Grande, Guerrero had to be abandoned. And with the great flood of 1954, almost all of the city slipped beneath the waves. Today, the sunken city is only partially submerged. The area now dry is a ruined depopulated colonial city of hundreds of crumbling sandstone block buildings overgrown with cactus, mesquite, and palo verde.

Carlos introduced us to his five lively and devoted dogs. He then took us inside a solidly built cube of sandstone brick with twelve foot high ceilings. It was part museum, part his home. Slipping between Spanish and fractured English, he explained that the local government was working to make the ruined town into a historical park. I gathered he thought we were journalists. And I suppose, in a sense, we were.

There were photos on the walls of the city from the first half of the 20th century. Crowded streets with bustle and commerce. And then Carlos proudly turned to a wooden plank with a rattle snake skin nailed to it. It must have been five feet long.

“He’s a boy,” Carlos said, tapping at a withered piece of reptilian anatomy. I took his word for it.

We followed him back outside. He tossed several items in the back of my truck. A plastic gas tank of diesel fuel, a scorched tin can with a loop of bailing wire through it, and an old single-shot 22 rifle, “for snakes,” he added enthusiastically. We piled into my truck. It was a tight fit. Jaime in the middle and Carlos in the passenger seat, pointing ahead.

As we drove through the ordered grid of stone-paved streets overgrown with spindly weeds, we marveled at the endless flat-roofed stone buildings built from the native sandstone. Carlos’ dogs trotted along in our wake. The buildings were impressive. Fifteen foot structures, mostly, though there were a few with second stories. Some were intact. Others had lost their roofs. Some had even lost the integrity of their walls, and had spilled their great stone blocks, effectively closing off some side streets from any access from vehicles.

“This is fucking amazing,” Jaime said with a big smile.

Carlos flashed us with a grin. Suddenly we were his kind of people.

And from that moment on it was “pinche” this, “pendejo” that, and all conjugations of “chingar.” Jaime had dropped an instant bond on us all.

He has a way of doing that.

Soon we pulled into the old plaza. Carlos pointed to the ground and said something in Spanish I didn’t get. I quickly realized that this is where I was to park — because he was opening the door and stepping out.

I hit the breaks and shut off the engine. Jaime followed Carlos over to the church. It was the only restored building in the whole town. It had a Franciscan-style facade, the exterior had been plastered and painted, and, as I drew near, I could see that the roof had been rebuilt.

The plaza over-looked the waters of the Falcon Reservoir. There was still much of the old city beneath the waves. I walked to the center of the plaza. What had at one time been a fountain was now built to have a circular platform with a little curving staircase leading up. I walked up to look around. The surrounding plaza was just a grassy square with half a dozen stone sidewalks radiating out in measured spokes. I leaned my elbows on the heavy concrete balustrade surrounding the platform.

True to his word, Jaime had dragged me to a weird and wonderful place. His endless quest for the elusive cucuy had us in an extraordinary environment, which was claimed to be haunted. “Though,” Jaime had told me on the drive down, “at the risk of defaming my people, all the places we inhabit are purported to be haunted.”

The plan was to stay overnight and interview the caretaker about the local folklore. It was the tale-end of October and should not get too cold at night. We’d brought along bedrolls, and I supposed we’d just sleep in the bed of my truck, up above the ants and the scorpions.

Carlos and Jaime climbed up to join me. Jaime handed me a can of Modelo cold from the cooler we had picked up in a drive-through shop in Guerrero — the new town of Guerrero. We all cracked open the cans and touched them — “Salud!” — and watched the sun move towards the water of the reservoir.

“I see you’ve found the perfect camp site.” Jaime slapped me on the back. “Up above even the mosquitos. And it’s a full moon tonight!”

We had maybe an hour before sunset. Jaime sat down and began scribbling notes into a composition book with his mechanical pencil. Carlos busied himself building a bonfire out on the edge of the plaza. And I unpacked my digital SLR and hiked around snapping pictures of the ruins. The place possessed a beautiful stillness. A low flung chunk of shadow placed me in cool darkness on a fantastically decayed road with the stone walls of empty buildings pressed close on each side, their foundations bristling with cactus and squat shrubs which had more las espinas than leaves or flowers. In an oak tree at the next intersection a lone cicada pulsed its mechanical song tirelessly as had its kin been doing for millions of years. A swarm of bees were dipping in and out of the white blossoms of a stunted oleander. It’s a non-native ornamental, and must have survived the exodus of gardeners as well as the inundation of the flood waters.

I pushed at a huge warped wooden door and entered one of the homes. The plaster on the walls was white — a bit dusty, but otherwise unblemished. The lone decoration was a photo of Pope Pius XII the size of an LP cover which had been varnished to the wall. All the color of the image had been washed out into various shades of pale blue. Light came in through open double doors that led out to a large walled courtyard. An earthy, ammonia smell made me look to the floor. There was a low mound guano back toward the side wall. I stood still, and then I heard it. A high-pitched clatter like a dozen grocery carts with squeaky wheels. I looked up and saw in the spaces between the wooden roof beams and the plaster ceiling maybe 25 Mexican freetail bats roosting, awaiting the setting sun. That reminded me that I should get back and begin unloading our meager camp gear while we could still see what we were doing.

By the time I reached the plaza, it was deep into twilight. I saw that Jaime had already rolled out the sleeping bags up on the platform above the defunct fountain. He pulled the cooler over to where Carlos was dousing the bonfire with the diesel fuel. I could see from the empties that the two of them had been busy hitting the vast stores of Modelo we had transported in. I had some catching up to do. As I fished a beer from the cooler, Carlos walked up to me. He handed me the scorched tin can and motioned me to follow. He was lugging the can of desiel. We walked to the lone tree in the plaza — a dead skeleton — which was halfway between the bonfire pit and the central fountain.

At the tree Carlos put down the diesel. He took the can from my hands and filled it about a quarter full with dirt. He handed it back to me. I took it and watched as he picked up a thick flat chunk of the local sandstone. He raised it over his heads and threw it down onto the one of the paved paths of the plaza. It shattered into half a dozen pieces. He took hold of the largest, about the size of a plum. He put it into the tin can I was holding. With the dirt beneath, it poked up above the rim. Carlos told me, in English, to keep still. He opened the desiel can and lifted it up and poured the stuff over the rock and into the can. Maybe about half a cup of diesel. Carlos pointed to the can I held and he pointed to the tree. He said a word in Spanish I didn’t recognize. But I understood. Using the baling wire attached to the can, I walked over and hung it from a branch on the tree.

Over at the bonfire I heard Jaime open a beer. And then he shouted something about was it really up to him to get this fucking party started? And he tossed a match into the stack of diesel-soaked branches. At that point it was almost full-bore night. The violent rise of flames was wonderfully spectacular. A white-tailed deer, startled from her hide-away too near the bonfire, bolted, running across the plaza. Her shadow, cast by the fire, proceeded her for the entire gallop, and when she rounded to the safety hidden behind the church, everything suddenly became ominously silent. Until, two beats later, the buoyant laughter of three drunken pyromaniacs warmed the night. And then Carlos lit a match and touched it to the tip of the sandstone plum in the soup can hanging from the tree. It flashed alive with a jittery tongue of flame playing up, quite bright.

Carlos called it a Mexican candle. I asked how long does it last. He shrugged, and said he guessed three hours. Something he learned, he said, in the army.

We had brought along a couple of folding camp chairs. I took my seat on the stout plastic cooler. And the three of us roasted hot dogs on green mesquite branches, and we placed them in flour tortillas and smeared them with ketchup.

Carlos told us that he’d been the caretaker of this amazing ghost town for two years. He said that there was a treasure hidden under the property of the ruins of the old hotel, and this was obvious because of the flickering blue lights you could often see over the ruins at night. He explained that when you saw a rattlesnake you whipped off your hat and you tossed it on the creature. He went ahead and did this for us as an example with his baseball cap. The idea was that the snake would strike at the hat, thereby discharging all its venom. At that point you could safely kill the snake. Carlos retrieved the hat and let us examine it for all the holes from previous snake deployments. I confess I could discern nothing resembling fang marks. He made a few comments about the little anglo boy who haunted the church. And then he pointed out three stars in the heavens. They point to the north, he told us, and when you learn these stars, you can never get lost on a clear night.

I understand we’d been drinking, and Carlos more than I, but I was pretty certain that there is no way that one can use the three stars that comprise Orion’s belt to navigate to the north.

Jaime seemed to find all this talk delightful. But eventually he gave me a nod. I pulled out my video camera. As Carlos and Jaime each fished beers from the cooler I was no longer sitting on, I set up my tripod and then attached the camera on to it. I have a small but powerful LED light that perches atop my camera, drawing power from a battery belt which I slung over the tripod arm. I framed Carlos so that the bonfire was just over his left shoulder. I moved Jaime’s chair around so that the camera would get a bit of his shoulder in frame, slightly lit by the Mexican candle. I clipped a wireless lavaliere onto the lapel of Carlos’ denim jacket.

When I hit record, I nodded to Jaime. He began the interview process, seemingly suddenly sober … sort of. The two of them were speaking exclusively in Spanish. And I know I should damn well learn the language. Hell, I live in Texas, where the language is increasingly dominate. But as they moved deeper into the information we’d come to collect — the ghost stories, the weird folktales — I began to tune it out and turn to the beer in the cooler. Actually, I was waiting for the moon to come up. It wasn’t truly a full moon. A bit late for that. But when it pushed up over the horizon (washing out that beautiful swath of the Milky Way), I was so beguiled by the beauty of the night here in this forgotten place, that I gave up on even the pretext of trying to follow the interview. The audio feed was strong, and the video frame was wide. I was tempted to walk away and tour the ruins in the light from the moon. But before I could fully contextualize my place in this project, I saw Jaime stand, brush back his hair and offer Carlos his hand.

Carlos shook both our hands. And he walked away into the night with his dogs. I had no doubt he could find his way back. Jaime nodded to me with a serious air. In his book, it had all gone fine. I watched him walk to the center of the plaza and climb to the raised platform. It was bedtime. I dismantled and packed away the camcorder, tripod, and audio equipment.

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I caught up with Jaime a couple of nights later at the Cucuy Club. It’s his hangout, no more than a leisurely walk from his apartment. The place is an ice house on Roosevelt where you can buy beer to go, or, as do most of the habitués, grab one of the mismatched chairs and enjoy a cold one while watching the traffic go by. The Cucuy Club is run by a corpulent woman named Norma who rarely talks but is always quick to respond to her longwinded beery clientele with a deep laugh sure to display her few remaining teeth. At least three nights a week one of her sons would cook up a mess of barbacoa or tripas in the firepit out through the back door.
Jaime sat bent over at one of the picnic tables, his face aglow from the screen of his laptop. I took a seat across from him, and he didn’t look up until Norma sat a Lone Star tallboy in front of me and cracked the top. She gave me a little cursory hug and ambled off to sit with her gaggle of regulars who held court in a line of rusty folding chairs that faced the Whataburger across the street.

“See what you think,” Jaime said, turning the computer around so I could read what was on the screen. And he headed off, I presume to see what Norma’s boy might be cooking up.

The essay was titled, “El Niño de Antigua Guerrero Viejo.”

This would be going into Jaime’s blog, also called The Cucuy Club. It’s his current obsession, which he’s been working on for almost two years now. He’s been chronicling the folktales of San Antonio and south Texas. The ghost stories, the cucuys.

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El Niño de Antigua Guerrero Viejo

This isn’t the first variant of La Llorona mentioned in this blog, and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s one of the top five creepy folktales from my boyhood. If you were to take the downward pointing isosceles confined by Zarzamora, Nogalitos, and Guadalupe Streets, you would be hard pressed to find a family that does not have their own twist on this Latina Medea tragedy. And whether the roots extend all the way back to La Malinche or just a generation back to the sister of the neighbor of your great uncle Silverio, the legend is used the same by parents all over: “Shss, children. Did you hear that? It sounded like La Llorona. You’d better be quiet. She might hear you and take you away with her.”

Last week I decided to go further afield then I normally do in search of these cucuys. A friend had alerted me to an incident that happened not so long ago where a little boy had died because of the influence of La Llorona. And so I decided to take to the road, as a rather aggressive collection agency was wearing me ragged. So, I with my lap top, and my research assistant, Rico, armed with his video camera, headed down to the Rio Grande Valley.

At the river road, we headed north, just passed the town of Roma. And we crossed over into Mexico across the dam of the Falcon Reservoir. The Mexican town of Nueva Ciudad Guerrero was a powerful indication we were on the right trail. We were in search of the ruins of the old city of Guerrero — Antigua Guerrero. When the dam was built back in the 1950s, that city was sacrificed, and much of the citizens and commerce was relocated downriver where the dam spanned the two countries.

It took us two hours in Rico’s truck from the new Guerrero to the old Guerrero. Most of the time was over a rutted dirt road through desolate ranch land where we never saw another human being, and only, at most, five cows.

Finally, we arrived. The caretaker of the place instructed us on where we could set up camp. The original church, in the heart of a maze of ruined buildings, was the only structure which had been restored. We settled down there, and as the sun set we enjoyed a little a barbecue, and then Rico wired our host up for sound and rolled camera.

We were told the story of El Niño de Antigua Guerrero.

First he gave us the old town’s particular take on La Llorona. She was a poor girl named Marta who lived “long ago.” And when a rich rancher from Durango who was in town buying cattle began to lavish attention on the girl, her father, a baker, was overjoyed. The couple were soon married. They lived in a large house in the middle of town. And throughout the spring, the rancher visited all the farms in the area buying the best cattle. Finally, he hired some men from town to help him drive the cattle back to his hacienda far to the south, explaining to Marta that he would send for her.

Weeks passed and finally the men the rancher hired for the cattle drive returned. They told of the enormous wealth and huge holdings of the rancher’s hacienda. They also mentioned his wife, a beautiful and grand woman reported to be connected to the Spanish aristocracy.

Marta refused to believe these rumors. But as she waited, she never heard from her husband. It soon became apparent she was pregnant. The landlord of the large house the rancher had rented eventually had to ask her to leave when the rent money ran out. Marta’s father could not refuse to take her back in, but the family clearly felt the weight of shame. When Marta gave birth to twins, the local priest declined to baptize the children until he could confer with the Bishop. Despondent, Marta drowned the children in the river. She returned to her father’s house without her children. The town was scandalized. She was asked over and over where they were, and finally, three days later, she took her own life.

The story takes a bit of license when we find her ascended to heaven. God asks her where the children are. She still refuses to answer. He banishes her soul back to Earth, instructing her to gather up her children before she can return to Heaven.

And so her ghost roams the river, calling for her children; and actually, any children’s bodies will do, so she’s also trying to coax living kids into the waters.

And that is a fairly typical La Llorona telling, made so wonderfully authentic in that we were gathered around a campfire. Well, most of it was lost on Rico, as he doesn’t really understand Spanish.

And then our host launched into the historic part of the tale.

Back in the mid ’50s, most of the city was under water, including the church — only the curved vault of the roof poked up, as if gasping for air. And for the next couple of years the waters subsided. There was a time, before the church completely emerged. A motor boat of rich Americans on a fishing holiday came into the drowned town. They were two brothers from Houston, and one of them had his little boy. Just the three of them. They tied the boat to the side of the church and climbed up to the roof. Half of the roof had collapsed and they looked down and saw a school of catfish lazily nosing through the muck around the sunken alter.

They assembled their fishing poles and dropped their lines into the waters inside the church. They were very successful and spent two days on top of the church. On the second night, the father of the little boy awoke because he heard a woman crying loud and sorrowfully. Suddenly he heard what sounded like a boulder dropped into the waters of the church. Then, silence. The woman cried no more. The bedroll next to him was empty. His son. They found the boy at first light floating above the alter.

And when the waters finally pulled back for good, the ghost stories began. People would hear a little boy weeping. And when they saw his spirit, the little anglo boy was barefoot in jeans and no shirt. No one ever heard La Llorona crying in anguish in that region. Just the little boy.

Our host, when asked if he had ever seen the boy, answered without hesitation. Of course. And all the workers, throughout the years, who had been involved in the reconstruction of the church, they, too, had their stories to tell.

I went to bed that night sleeping beneath the stars on the old plaza, and I wondered how I would go about trying to verify the name of the little boy. If, indeed, he existed. But isn’t the story enough? Sometimes I wonder.
I should add here that at 2:37 (I know this, because I looked at the time on my cell phone), I awoke because of some sound. Remembering the story of the boy, I strained for the sound of crying. But it was this great rush of a massive wind. But that couldn’t be. I looked to the trees on the edges of the plaza. They were all brightly lit by the moon, and they were motionless. The sound of wind was at hurricane force, but I felt nothing on my face. I turned to peer at the church, solid and silver under the moonlight, and I noticed a flickering blue light issuing from the opened doors and the upper windows of the front facade. It was like there was some powerful chemical fire in there with that beautiful unnatural light one expects from the dials of a car stereo. And, like a light switch turned off, the sound vanished. The blue light flickered low, it flickered lower, and it was gone. Nothing. Just the soft snoring of Rico, bundled in his bedroll beside me. I waited, watching and listening intently, and eventually, I guess, I fell back asleep.

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“Rico” would be me. That’s how I appear in all of the blog entries. I don’t know why. And, thankfully, Jaime never calls me by that nickname.

I looked up and realized that Jaime had placed a plate of carnitas in front of me. There were four store bought corn tortillas draped over the meat. I could tell they had been heated over hot coals. I blew the ash off the one on the top and I made myself a taco. Jaime pushed a plate of chopped onions, cilantro, and limes cut in half across the table.

“Well?” he asked, pulling his laptop back to his side of the table.

“It’s good. But, um, did you really hear all that shit?”

“Artistic license. Wouldn’t you?”

“Good. ‘Cause I know I don’t snore.”

“Okay,” he said with a smile.

One of the reasons Jaime frequented the Cucuy Club was because he was able to clandestinely highjack the wifi signal belonging Marco Ruiz, a wildly successful local chicano artist who enjoyed slumming in his southside apartment on the second floor of the pool hall just across the railroad tracks from the Cucuy Club. “You know, he sends his kid to a private school,” Jaime will often grumble, thus justifying his wireless poachery.

I watched as he opened a browser window on the computer, uploaded the text to his blog, and then, with a flourish, he clicked on the “publish” button.

If I leaned far enough back on the railing of my neighbor’s front porch, I could just catch a glimpse of the Tower of the Americas and a couple of the tall buildings of the San Antonio skyline. The impromptu get-together I had been invited to was just Dina and Bradley, who owned the house, and Jerry and Becky from across the street. You might think I’d have something in common with these people, we were all pretty much the same age; however, both these couples had children, they owned their homes, and, well, they had professions, and the list could go on. So as the conversation drifted from lending rates, school-board elections, and retirement plans, I enjoyed the gin and tonics which were already mixed in a pitcher, and the vanilla ice-cream which Dina had made earlier that afternoon in her grandmother’s old crank-handled device.

“We’re so glad she bought the house on the corner,” Dina said placing her hand on her husband’s knee. She was speaking of the famous woman who lived at the end of our block, the sole undisputed celebrity on the street — undisputed as well by the MacArthur Foundation who conferred upon her one of their “genius awards” for her literary successes.

Jerry speculated it was for investment purposes, but his wife Becky shook her head.

“The girl who moved into the house last week is writing her biography,” she said, meaning the celebrity genius.

Bradley snorted. “Hell if I’d want my biographer living across the street from me,” he said, draining his glass.

“You just cross that bridge when you get to it, dear,” Dina replied drily.

“At least that freak’s gone for good,” Jerry said. He fiddled with his long grey ponytail.

“You never met him,” Becky admonished. “You can’t call him a freak.”

“He’d been locked up in that house twenty years, maybe more,” Dina said. “Margaret remembers the family — she told me the guy’s mom was a sweet woman. And the son was okay. A bit squirrely — and that would be Margaret’s choice of words — but once his mom died, he never left the house again.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said, running his finger across the bottom of his bowl. He licked off the last of the ice cream. “Until the guys in the white suits came to drag him away.”

“I heard it was the constable’s office,” Bradley added. “Defaulting on property taxes.”

“Whatever,” Jerry said. “But I’m pretty sure mental health workers were involved”

“And a mystery it will remain,” Becky said.

“His name was Blake,” I said. “I met him about a year ago.”

They all stared at me.

Finally Jerry asked, “What, did you invite yourself over for tea?”

“No. It was coffee.” I looked down at the empty glass in my hand. Bradley got up and filled it. “And he invited me.”

When I found the note card in my mailbox, it took me a while to recognize it for what it was. A personal communication. Handwritten address, first class stamp. For so many years now mailboxes seem to harbor little more than second class junk mail and bills. What had me most curious was that the return address was for a house on my block.

The note was floridly written with an unnecessary amount of semicolons. The writer, Blake being his name, mentioned “an excellent academic paper of yours I have recently read,” and he suggested a day and time I might come for a visit and talk about my studies. “I’d drop by and introduce myself in person, but I must confess I am somewhat housebound, and as such unable to make it even the short distance to your home.”

Becky cleared her throat. I looked up.

“Academic paper?” she asked.

I explained that a decade back I had a piece published in a multidisciplinary annual journal, On Time, which was, as the title indicated, all about the concept of time. I’d done an essay about time in modernist literature. The obvious stuff, Proust and Woolf. Very dry and something I don’t make a point to broadcast. But it struck a chord with Blake. Somehow he had managed to track me down. And, thrilled that I was just down the street, he wanted to have a chat, over coffee, about his favorite topic. Time.

I never gave much thought to the house on the corner. The lawn was kept neat, with little flower beds of marigolds circling two stunted magnolia trees. The sides of the house were thickly covered by climbing ivy. Blake answered the door. I took his hand which was cool and dry. We shook. He closed the door behind me.

Blake was in his forties, a bit older than myself. He had that brittle look of an aging punk rocker who refused to let go of his anti-establishment rebelliousness: spiky tousled hair thickened by black dye, straight-legged black jeans, black t-shirt under an unbuttoned and untucked white dress shirt worn like a jacket, and I’m pretty sure he wore just a bit of eye liner which made his pale, bloodless skin just that more cadaverous.

The living room had been appointed like a Victorian parlor. Persian rug, William Morris wallpaper, wingback chairs — in fact the only discernable artifact of modernity was the air conditioning window unit blasting away, which was quite welcome on a summer day in Texas. Blake motioned me to sit in a maroon chair. He walked through a dinning room and then through a swinging door into the kitchen. Seconds later he returned carrying a tray with two mugs of coffee and two plates of scones already buttered.

He leaned back in his chair and placed his slippered feet atop the coffee table. He blew across the surface of his coffee.

We chatted about books. Literature at first. And then things moved toward science. I was able to hold my own on digressions concerning the work of Marconi, Einstein, and Heisenberg. But Blake became quite excited when he brought up the names of two Russian physicists who wrote a paper about how electromagnetic oscillations can impacted the movement of time.

“If it was winter,” Blake continued, after taking a moment to catch his breath, ” you might be able to see under all those vines outside. This house is wrapped in 16-gauge copper wire. Seven hundred and forty-three loops of wire. Sure, they have to meander around the doors and the windows, but it’s all out there. The ivy really seems to love it. Damned if I know why. There is a constant low voltage, fed by a slow spinning electromagnet inside an old water heater in the backyard. A 4.3 cycle AC generator. This is all, of course, privileged information.”

I gave him an indulgent smile and then pantomimed zipping my lips.

“What we have here,” Blake tossed up his hand, indicating his home, “it a time machine. Not like HG Wells. I’m not able to move back and forth. But the special wiring here is shielding me from time. Time is a substance. A thing. A force which can be hampered by a specific electromagnetic field. The wires girding this house.”

Blake looked at an old ’80s style digital watch on his wrist — it had the red LED readout. He laughed.

“I’m a prisoner of my own experiments. Time, it’s a bitch.”

I’d finished my last bite of scone and was patting at my lips with a paper napkin. I was tempted to surreptitiously check my own watch, but all I had to mark time was my cell phone. It was in my pocket.

“I see. Very clever. Very, um, shrewd.”

“It might surprise you to learn, my friend,” Blake said with a smug grin, “that I’m 45 years old. That’s right, I was born in 1962!”

Well, I had no trouble believing that.

“I’m going to find my passport so you will know I’m being truthful. The world will really sit up when after this experiment ends in 75 more years I emerge looking just as I do now — a youthful 20 years old!”

Blake put down his mug, brushed the crumbs from his shirt, and leaped up. I watched him disappear into the back of the house.

I was trying to figure out the best plan of escape, when I heard a loud knock at the front door. I waited, thinking Blake might have heard over the air conditioning. But, no. The knocking repeated. I got up and opened the door.

The delivery man seemed startled to see me. I explained that Blake was busy and took the two bags of groceries and placed them on the floor just inside the door.

“I believe that would be for me,” the man said quietly, indicating an envelope on a low table beside me. His payment I assumed and handed it over.

As I stood there watching the delivery man return to his van and drive off, my gaze drifted down and I noticed a wire running along the threshold of the front door. Until then I had never heard of 16-gage copper wire, let alone knowingly seen any. It was skinnier than I’d have assumed, and the bit I saw had collected a dull green patina with age. I leaned down and ran my finger underneath it and am pretty sure I felt a tingly vibration.

I crossed over onto the porch and the world where time’s arrow was unshielded and thus allowed to continue with its slow ravages. As softly as possible, I shut the door behind me and walked home. I never received another letter from Blake.

Jerry looked down into his glass when I finished my story and said that “maybe if you’d waited around you’d have seen that crazy bastard return wearing a silver jumpsuit and waving a plastic laser gun.”

The others laughed. Bradley suggested that we sneak over to the house and give those wires a feel, but then someone brought up the subject of homeowners’ insurance, and I soon said my goodnights.

About two months later I heard that the celebrity author’s biographer fell into a catatonic state from which she couldn’t be roused. Her parents had to come down from Rhode Island and collected her. There was some attempt to place the blame on black mold or perhaps some exotic reaction to a spider bite. But I suspect the real culprit was a 4.3 cycle AC generator hidden in plain sight in the backyard.

I might be the only person I know that puts his laundry out on the line to dry. There’s a dryer on the back porch beside the communal washing machine, but I never use it. I like how I can hang it up, and forget about it. Hours later, when I remember, there it is, dry and waiting.

We have no alley on my street. The back fence I share with the neighbor on the next street over is a simple wire hurricane fence, but in their yard is a dense stand of bamboo, so thick that I can’t see their house. All I know about them is their dog. Peachy. He’s a spry but quiet little dachshund who always comes pushing through the bamboo to watch me string up my wet clothes. He sits there patiently, studiously. On those occasions when I hear some guy on the otherside of the bamboo call Peachy by name, the little guy begins wagging his tail, and it is only with forced deliberation that he manages to break away from the show (meaning me) and push his way back home, toward the voice.

Today, I was unpinning from the line a black dress shirt that I needed for tomorrow’s job interview. It was a windy autumn day, and when a strong gust rolled into my back yard, I found myself looking toward Peachy to see if he might be entertained by the pecan and cottonwood leaves I could feel playing around my ankles. But, no, he kept his eyes fixed on me. Well, on my hands. And as I notice his head shift, I also saw a black form move past my ear. It was my shirt, billowing up into Peachy’s bamboo. It cleared the fence and tangled up there just long enough for Peachy to catch his breath in amazement, jaws agape; I could hear the shallow intake of breath. And then the shirt fell down beside the dog. The silence was broken by the clatter of a pecan falling on to my tin roof. Peachy snapped up the shirt, and they were both gone. And it was silent. Not even the leaves stirred.

I called, softy. “Peachy! Here, boy!” Just the way his master called. I tried louder. And even louder. But nothing.

I was wearing shorts and slip-on Vans without socks. I cautiously got up on the fence, trying to keep my legs from the wire metal prongs on top. I made the mistake of reaching out to steady myself on a sprig of bamboo. I went down fast. But the ground was soft. I made sure no one had seen, and I pushed my way carefully through the bamboo.

Coming into the open of my neighbor’s yard was like an H. Rider Haggard novel, where the hero pushes back some jungle plant and sees the inexplicable Lost City of Whatever. I marveled at the beautiful thick grass. A lush stand of ferns beneath the shade of a grapevine arbor. A line of manicured loquat trees. And most amazing or all, a swimming pool. I had no idea this Shangri-La was here. My backyard had little more than nettles, dandelions, and a rusted Webber grill.

I spied Peachy sitting on an Adirondack chair with a cushioned seat. He had my shirt up there with him, draped across this forepaws. I moved slowly, so as not to cause him to think it was a game.

When I was about ten feet away, I had this trifecta of sensory input. They all happened pretty much at the same time. I smelled burning clove. I heard the reverb guitar from Donavan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” buzzing from tiny speakers. And I saw a slim young man barefoot in jeans and a t-shirt reclined in his own Adirondack chair, wearing blue-tinted glasses, headphones, and smoking a black clove cigarette. He had his eyes closed and was nodding his head to the music.

I suddenly realized I was crouched down, practically on all fours on the grass, coaxing a dog with kissing noises, while in someone else’s backyard.

I quickly stood up.

The man in the blue glasses must have had his eyes opened enough to see my movement. He slid off the headphones, pushed his glasses up on his head, and smiled at me.

“I’m so sorry. Didn’t hear you come in.”

“Um, well….” I pointed back to the bamboo. “I came over the fence.”

He kept smiling. And he waited.

“Your dog got my laundry. Well, a shirt of mine got up in your bamboo….”

The man pivoted in his chair. He remained sitting but placed his feet on the grass. He looked to his dog. “Peachy!” he said severely. “Bring it here!”

The dog leaped down, his tail thrumming. He carried the shirt to the man and laid it at his feet.

“I’m so sorry about this. My name’s Warren.”

I gave my name. We shook.

Peachy wandered over to the pool. I looked over and watched him pace along the edge near where an inflatable mattress was floating. He studied the situation for no more than five seconds, and he gave a little hop, landing on the mattress. He shot a look of satisfaction towards us, and he curled up and went to sleep.

“Is he safe on that thing?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” asked Warren.

“I mean, you know, if he falls off….”

“Oh. Then he’ll do the dog paddle.” Warren was looking closely at my shirt. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but it looks like my little sweetie has torn it.”

“I’m sure I can fix it.”

Warren waved me off. He got up and walked to his back door. “I’ll get you fixed up in a jiff. Come with me.”

Inside the kitchen Warren introduced me to Scott, a talk gawky man with shoulder length blond hair pulled back behind his ears; and Babs, a puffy middle-aged woman wearing a chartreuse apron over a conservative pantsuit. Babs had a bouffant of airy lacquered apricot hair, and a pair of turquoise earrings large enough to be strapped around a championship wrestler’s midsection.

Scott and Babs were assembling a salad. She was brushing mushrooms, and he was slicing them with a chef’s knife.

I was announced as “the nice guy from beyond the bamboo.”

Warren leaned in to kiss Babs on the cheek. “She’s my mother,” he said sheepishly.

Scott gasped with pretend chagrin. “Make that mother-in-law!” He looked at me. “She’s my mother.” He reached out and gave a sharp slap at Warren’s ass. “And she’s the biggest fag hag in the city. But,” he said turning to me, “I’ll let you in on a little secret–”

Babs cracked a open a ginger ale can directly under Scott’s nose. He recoiled from the spume, and sneezed and cursed.

“Hey, you don’t even know what I was going to say,” he said with a soft whine.

Babs laid a hand lightly on my cheek, and as quick as it was there it was removed.

“I have so many secrets. And this son of a bitch of mine knows I treasure each and every one of them.” She shot a nasty glance to her son that wasn’t nasty at all. “And speaking a secret makes it something else. Something mundane. Gossip. Simple, tawdry gossip.”

Warren left in search of his sewing kit, and I was steered to a seat at the kitchen table with a ginger-ale and bourbon as Scott and Babs continued with their salad and entertained me with stories, mostly those concerning what a “queen” Scott’s father was.

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The first time I had bourbon and ginger ale, I was eighteen and living in Worcester, Massachusetts. I’d found an apartment in an old house that had been turned into an Orthodox Jewish temple. At that time I only had the vaguest concept of the history of the sabbath goy, but it hardly mattered. My little apartment no longer had a job assigned to it. The duties once carried out by the goy tenant were now all automated, and thus I became simply the kid who rented the apartment.

There was a little patio beside the front porch with a hammock and some chairs. I used to sit out there reading and writing. The man who lived next door was with the congregation. He was quite well off, and his house was massive. Most everyone called him the Commodore. He had been in the military — the navy, I assumed. Also, he had been mayor for a decade or so in one of the outlying towns. Now, he lived a comfortable retired life. Just him and his daughter in a large house.

The Commodore’s daughter, Millie, never once spoke to me. And I believe she never had spoken to anyone. I had overheard someone from the neighborhood, a professor from over at the Polytechnic, refer to her as profoundly retarded. I took exception with that “profound” remark.

Millie lived in the coach-house behind the Commodore’s home. She seemed to be able to take care of herself well enough. She had no nurse or care-giver, and she was always clean and well dressed. Millie was maybe thirty-five. She often came over to my patio while I was reading. Sometimes she sat in one of the chairs, stiff and staring into space. But, as often, she’d just be there with me, standing, pensive, as if waiting for something. She’d only look at me if I moved or said something. But when I spoke to her she’d do nothing more than look over, acknowledging that I spoke, and drift back off to some unfocused spot.

The Commodore never came to collect his daughter. She never moved beyond the property of her house or the temple. She had no interest in the busy street out front. She made me think of a tame deer, poised to flee, but no longer needing to. When I’d go inside, she never made to follow me. She’d either wait outside, or wander back home. The Commodore never brought her to the services.

One day the Commodore invited me over to his place for dinner.

It was nothing special. He had a pizza delivered. It came from Franks, a place down the block where I often ate — also, Frank kept me supplied with pot and valiums. We sat at the table in the Commodore’s huge kitchen. He kept my glass filled with what he simply called a “highball.” It was bourbon and ginger ale, mixed perfectly to his measurements. He waited, pensively for me to finish, so he could build me another one from the ground up. None of this bullshit of “let me freshen your drink.” It was one part Old Crow whisky, three parts White Rock ginger ale. No substitutes. No deviations. And it was perfection. Like a slightly tart and earthy cotton candy that eventually bludgeons you down so that you’d twitch a bit, but you’d still marginally be human … more or less.

He had this mustache that was full and thick and I knew that were I to live to be a thousand I could never cultivate a crop like his. He made a great presentation about wiping that upper lip with the back of his hand after every deep drink from his highball glass.

The Commodore never looked at Millie, who, during my visits, was always in the doorway or seated at the kitchen table. Millie never looked at her father.

That first night when we were clinking glasses and sharing pizza, the Commodore lifted a finger solemnly — we were in the vicinity of drink number seven — and drew my attention to Millie. She was standing in the doorway to the utility room watching me.

“Millie is like a dog. Obedient, and asking so little.”

I wanted to tell him that I thought Millie was more like a cautious deer, but I wasn’t quick enough.

“Ten years ago,” he continued, “I had the foundation of the north wing jacked up to make it level again. The contractor stayed for the entire week in the coach house. Millie didn’t live out there at the time. But I soon learned that the two of them were …. How can I put this delicately?”

I looked from the Commodore to Millie, standing in the doorway.

“I understand.”

“Do you?” the Commodore asked, tracing with a fingernail patterns on the condensation of his highball glass. “I let him stay until he finished the job. You know, the foundation.”

In my dim recollection, the conversation took a turn towards some other, miscellaneous, topic.

When the Commodore hung himself in his stairwell that winter I was a bit peeved that the cops never came next door to interview me.

Millie, I learned later, went to live in a group home outside Rutland.

@@@@@@@@@@

Babs and Scott were asking my opinion of some reality television show I’d only vaguely heard about.

“Is that the one where they all live in the same house?”

Babs laughed and shook her head.

Scott told me: “That defines so many of them. But, yes. Yes, they live together.” He lifted up my empty glass and made to fix me another drink. I shook my head. He shrugged and continued. “Anyway, that’s where this Ice Queen, Mona, comes in.”

“What a bitch,” Babs said, hissing the final word through her teeth with terrible seriousness. “USDA whore.”

“Oh, yeah! And she’s got this poor little nebbish guy–”

“He’s a fucking postman!” said Babs with sudden enthusiasm.

“She’s got him wrapped around her pinky.”

I noticed Warren enter the kitchen with my shirt. He tilted his head, and I followed him into the front of the house. Babs and Scott kept up their banter, apparently oblivious to my absence.

“I see you survived the assault of the stereotypes,” Warren said with a smile as he looked down at the shirt in his hands. “That boy does love his mother,” he added softly, letting me see a bit of eye-rolling.

“Okay,” Warren said, turning the folded shirt toward me. “I’ve stitched it up pretty nicely. Also, your collar button was about to fall off, so I sewed it tight.”

“It looks great. Thank you so much. The only nice shirt I have.”

“Well, take a deep breath as we head back through the Babs and Scotty Show–”

“Actually, I think I’m safer not climbing that fence again. I’ll go around the block.”

He walked out the front door, and I noticed that the fence surrounding the backyard came up to the side of the house. Peachy was looking at us, wagging his tail. He completely ignored a large chow with matted hair sitting in the yard on the other side of the fence from her. I’d seen this quiet, slow-moving old dog wandering the neighborhood for at least two years.

“We call her Brownie,” Warren said of the chow. “She absolutely adores Peachy. He pretty much ignores her.”

“Life can treat you cruel,” I said. Warren lifted his hand. We shook. And I walked around the block to my house.

Warren had invited me to drop by, whenever. I’ve never took him up on it. But when I do my laundry, I still have Peachy to keep me company. And, it’s strange, but after my visit to Warren and Scott’s backyard, I hear sounds from the pool all the time. And I never did before.

My friend Kat makes an appearance in my life maybe three or four times a year. It all starts with a phone call, which leads to lunch over sushi or a couple of drinks at the Cobalt Club or some other downtown dive. Then some follow-up phone calls over the next two days. And that’s that, until three or four months later. And the cycle repeats. Halloween is a constant. I can always count on her touching down into my life during the tail end of October.

It’s my neighborhood. She’s attracted to it much like the kids. The homes are old and spooky looking. Many of the people living in them are rich. They can afford the good candies. And so children from all over the city come down my street to load up.

Last year Kat sat out on my front porch with me and we handed out treats to hundreds of kids. She was a mermaid, in a black vinyl outfit, complete with tail. I was, well, just me.

This year I’m in on the game. We’re back on my porch. I’m in medical scrubs and a surgeon’s mask. Kat’s in a very revealing nurse’s outfit. white stockings and garter belt with a mini skirt and stethoscope. We stand at a medical examining table, looking down at a dummy stretched out. As the timid kids creep up the steps, I use a pair of forceps to pull back the sheet, revealing an opened abdominal cavity filled with entrails and bags of candy corn.

Earlier in the year I picked up the exam table from Kat. She was moving to Shreveport to be near the man of her dreams, who was fifteen years younger than her, very rich, and just a hair less possessive than the last love of her life, who I believe is still stalking her, restraining order be damned. I haven’t the heart to ask if she’s still with the rich kid. I haven’t even asked if she’s still living in Shreveport. I’ve learned not to ask questions. She prefers to keep a low profile. In fact, when I helped her move, it was the first time I had visited her house. She wanted my assistance because I have a truck, and also because she knows me to be discreet and nonjudgmental. You see, Kat’s a dominatrix. And she needed someone to help her empty her dungeon so that she could then get her father to help her clear out the rest of her house. Daddy doesn’t know what she does to pay the rent. I took her cages, racks, and restraint tables to a storage facility on the south side. The examining table was something she didn’t want to keep. “I hate that naughty nurse bullshit!” I told her I’d take it. And so I did.

“Come on, sweetie,” Kat says to a cautious girl in a ballerina outfit who is looking up at us on the porch. There are candles in red glass burning all around us. “We have candy.” That last doesn’t seem encouraging enough. The father laughs. He scoops up his little ballet dancer and holds the giggling girl over the body with the gaping belly wound. She grabs candy and they are gone.

“Wasn’t she the cutest thing?” Kat gushes.

There was a Halloween, it must have been twenty years ago. I was living in San Francisco, working in the warehouse of Rough Trade Records. After work me and three of the women who worked the phones, placing and receiving orders, were tossing back a few drinks at the Metro Bar before heading to the I-Beam for some punk show. Jill had the whole dark goth look to the hilt, which wasn’t really her scene. But it was Halloween. Alex was super butch, like Brando in “The Wild One.” Actually, this was pretty much how she dressed every day. And Erin had on this pink tutu with matching ballet shoes. She started out the night with a tiara, but a drunken drag queen had bought it off her with a bag of mushrooms.

The four of us took turns heading off to the restrooms at the Metro to choke down the mushrooms. They were dusty, leathery, and tasted like dirt.

Erin held back some for her boyfriend, Derrick. But when he showed up, he was so cranked up on meth that he didn’t care about much of anything … except that we should finish up our drinks and grab a cab because the club was going to fill up fast. He glanced at the mushrooms with impatient disdain.

The mushrooms were starting to hit me, ever so gently. And Derrick looked like some evil robot, fixated on a single, pointless task.

Erin seemed of the same mind as me. She leaned back from her boyfriend (she was on a bar stool, he was standing, tugging at his watchband). She helped herself to my beer, and began, indiscreetly, to eat up all of Derrick’s share of the mushrooms, washing them down with my cheap draft beer.

The bartender, Donny, clutched at his throat melodramatically. “Girl, put that in a Denver omelet and it’ll sure go down a lot easier.” I liked Donny. He always managed to comp at least every third drink of mine.

Erin threw a ten on the bar top.

“Okay,” she said, turning to Derrick. “Let’s go find your fucking cab.”

Jill and Alex laughed and followed Derrick outside. I grabbed Erin and she stiffened like she could stab me if she had a knife.

“Be like that Denver omelet,” I whispered into her ear. “Warm and savory.”

She relaxed and leaned back her head. She looked up at me with a playful smile. “You want me to be all hammy and sweet peas?”

“You get locked into some shit with Derrick, it’ll be a long long night for us all.”

“I’ll be like a soufflé,” she squealed.

I turned to Donny. “She’s a soufflé!” And I fluffed up Erin’s tutu.

Outside, Derrick was hustling Jill and Alex into the back of a cab. I jumped in after them. Derrick pushed Erin in after me. She slid in, laying across all our laps. We all started laughing. Derrick took the passenger seat up front. We were off. The girls were singing a Woodentops song. I was gauging the strength of the mushrooms by looking at the fabric of the seat in front of me, and seeing how busy were the shifting of patterns. And then I heard Erin shout.

“Stop the car!”

At first I thought it was a Woodentops reference. But Erin was sitting up in my lap, with the door half open. The cab driver pulled to the curb. We were on Haight Street at Buena Vista Park. Erin took off at a run up the hill. The street lights made her pink outfit all orange. And I noticed that sequins had been sewn into her tutu — they spashed light like a puppy shaking off water. Halfway up the hill she stopped running. She gave us a little hop. She began dancing in a slow serpentine manner. Soon she was totally lost in herself. Not dancing for anyone.

“Christ,” Derrick muttered. “Who’s going to go get her?”

He actually looked at me.

“Hey!” I said. “She’s a soufflé, fully risen and clearly off the leash.” That made me laugh, and I turned to Jill. “I think I mixed my metaphors.” Jill ignored me. She was staring raptly at the lighted radio in the dashboard.

“It’s like Jesus.” She turned to me. “A light … you know, in the darkness.” And she grabbed my arm, grinning. “I’m so fucked up.”

Alex was trudging up the hill. When she got to Erin, she sat down and just watched her dance.

I squeezed Jill’s knee. She focused on my face, with a questioning smile. I pointed up the hill.

“There’s a show up there.”

Jill looked up and saw Erin and Alex. She got out of the cab. I followed. Soon we were seated on the grass watching Erin dance slow and lost and happy. The cab driver sat next to me with a grin and he lit up a cigarette. Derrick stood over us, glowering.

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

The cab driver looked up, puzzled. “Well, she sure is a pretty thing, isn’t she?”

Derrick zipped up his jacket. “I’ll go ahead, right?”

We nodded. And we waved to him.

“Okay,” he muttered. And finally, he left.

We never did make it to the I-Beam. In fact, I never saw Derrick again. But what I do remember is that a couple of white guys in dreadlocks were out walking their Dachshund. For some reason they both had drums — one with bongos, the other with a djembe. They joined us. They provided a beat, and soon it wasn’t just Erin dancing.

Tonight, however, the strongest drug I’ve got going is the sugar rush off the candy corn. Kat’s working her way through a bottle of Boon’s Farm. But it all seems so innocent.

I want edgy. I want Dionysian. And here I am on a porch in a proper, polite neighborhood with candy for kids.

“It’s Harry Potter!” Kat says, pulling on my sleeve. “Isn’t he adorable?”

I agree, and I smile behind my mask. And I reveal the candy for the kid with my forceps.

When I moved into the King William neighborhood of San Antonio, I quickly had it explained to me that I had missed, by but a scant five years, the bohemian era. It had been described to me as a rollicking milieu of decayed old-money, like the French Quarter as envisioned by Hollywood. And sometimes, if I squint just right, I can get a glimpse. The aging hippy holdouts living in the mansion on Adams Street which is broken up into eight apartments, one just a single room, seven by forty-five feet. Or the Vietnam Vet over on Madison with the electronic larynx who plays his theremin late into the night. But, for the most part, it’s become a haven of upstanding citizenry. Such is the price of gentrification. Sure there are still artists here, but mostly of the well-heeled retirees. My duplex, with the apartment out back, is the last rental property on my block. All the rest? Yuppie homeowners.

Last year I met a filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. Erik was in attendance at a DVD release party for a local psychobilly band at the Wiggle Room. I overheard him talking to one of the guys in the band, and by his reference to cameras and lighting, I had assumed he was the director. But then I saw him plunk down 15 dollars for a copy of the DVD. I went up and asked him what kind of movies he made. We went out to the patio and had a few beers. We mainly talked about books.

Yesterday he called me up to ask if I was available to help him shoot a short documentary. I had nothing planned, so I said sure. We were to interview some old guy who lives one street over from me.

Today I met him at the man’s house. On the porch I asked Erik what he wanted me to do. “Be the interviewer.” He rang the bell. Several small yappy dogs took up their defense cries. “I don’t know this guy,” I sputtered. “Me neither. But he sounds like a grade A kook. Just ask him about saucerians or the hollow earth. He’s bound to launch into some sweet tirade.”

Suddenly the dogs fell silent. The door opened slow with a creak straight from a Boris Karloff movie. Herbert Farnsworth revealed himself, the shadow of the door wiping aside as he leaned forward to take our hands, as gentlemanly as Karloff himself would have. I placed him in his mid eighties, but very fit. He wore white linen trousers and an immaculate white oxford shirt. He had on cheap black house slippers, the kind they sell at the Dollar General Store.

We followed him inside to a parlor done up in high Victorian, sans doilies. I never did see (nor hear) those dogs. Weird.

Erik deftly placed his equipment in a corner. And he continued a stream of small talk patter as he unpacked and set up. Mr. Farnsworth smiled and nodded politely, keeping to his feet. I decided to take some initiative. I sat and motioned Farnsworth to do the same. I was in a maroon winged back chair. Farnsworth sat and leaned back in a matching William IV settee.

When the camera was on the tripod, and the wireless microphone was clipped to Farnsworth’s shirtfront, Erik started rolling video. He nodded to me.

I began asking general questions about his life, his family, his work, the neighborhood. Nothing exciting. He’d remained a bachelor, worked for the Southwest Research Institute as an engineer most of his life, and he had lived in this Georgian Colonial revival-style house since his mother died and left it to him in the ’70s. It was all so prosaic. I could think of no legitimate segue into kookery. Some sweet old man’s nattering on about his mother’s volunteer work for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and I’m supposed to jump in with a question about extraterrestrials?

Erik came to my rescue.

“Mr. Farnsworth, if you’ll pardon me, I was wondering if you could tell us about the time you discovered the tunnels.”

Farnsworth gave us a shy smile, and he turned to me and began an elaborate explication of the day back in 1967 — it was August — that Farnsworth was under contract to design the subterranean concrete support piers for the Tower of the Americas for the Hemisfair project.

“O’Neail Ford had already weaseled out of his contract for the over-all design. The newspapers were supporting him, saying that he wanted to save dozens of historical buildings on the site from demolition. But the truth was that he had been in lengthy talks with Tom Slick (my boss at the Institute) and T. Boone Pickens, both rich Texas oil men with a fascination for the paranormal. They cautioned Ford. The site in question was over an ancient energy vortex, and clearly there was something down there that wasn’t supposed to be disturbed.”

I cleared my throat politely.

“Pardon me, sir. But didn’t Tom Slick pass away in the early 1960s. How could there have been lengthy talks?”

Erik nodded to me energetically, holding his thumb up. Let him have it, he seemed to be suggesting.

“You’ve a good sense of history, young man,” Farnsworth said. “Tom Slick was dead. But he could speak more clearly through a Ouija Board than any disembodied spirit I have encountered.”

He continued his story. When he was on the construction site, it wasn’t just him, but everyone seemed to feel this great dread.

“And sixty-five feet down they hit this metallic bulkhead. Some fellows from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology came out with their mobile lab. Now you can’t carbon-date metal, but they were using a device similar to Harry Hess’ magnetometers which were used to prove continental drift. They showed that the metal was forged at some time when the Earth’s magnetic field was flipped. The last time this happened, the Brunhes-Matuyama Reversal, was three-quarters of a million years ago. That’s a pretty old artifact. President Johnson sent in some hard-noses from military intelligence to chase off everyone who wasn’t crucial to the construction. And even many of those who were, found themselves replaced by the Army Corps of Engineers. But because of my connections with the Institute, I was allowed to stay on.”

I looked over at Erik. He was enraptured by the story.

“We didn’t have to go any deeper for the foundation, so we concentrated on how to cut through the metal. It was a very strange alloy, tough as hell, but it finally opened up to our oxyacetylene torches. We continued to build the Tower, but we had established a subterranean chamber atop the metal bulkhead. And we worked through the day and through the night. When we finally cut through two and a half feet of metal, we found a tunnel, eight feet in diameter. It took six weeks for us to cut the hole wide enough to send in an investigating team.”

Mr. Farnsworth paused. He looked at me and then at Erik.

“I have a pitcher of ice tea in the refrigerator. I know I’m getting rather parched. I’ll just be a moment. Make yourselves comfortable.”

Farnsworth rose to his feet and padded out of the room. Erik turned to me with a smile.

“You’re doing great. I knew you would.”

“This is it?” I asked. “He’s senile. It’s pure exploitation.” I wasn’t sure if the obvious had sunk in with the guy. Or maybe I had the whole thing screwed up. “Right?”

“Look, he’s not senile. Crazy, maybe. But what he’s talking about is the same sort of stuff he told a writer with Fate Magazine in 1973. He’s been interviewed several times. But never on video.”

Farnsworth entered with a tray containing a pitcher of tea and three glasses with ice. I got up and took the tray and placed in to the sideboard at the windows. I poured out three glasses and distributed them.

“Where was I,” asked Farnsworth.

“Investigators were sent into the tunnel,” I prompted.

“So, in July of ’69, while the Hemisfair was going on up on the surface, and as, much further above, Apollo 11 was touching down in the Sea of Tranquility, we had, at one time, seventeen teams mapping out the labyrinth of tunnels. We even had jeeps down there, and they were heading so far out, that they were running out of gas. Eventually when we began finding some of the tunnels which led up to the surface, here and there scattered over the planet, we were able to distribute fuel and food depots for the crews working down there. As artifacts and technology of this lost ancient culture was lifted up to the surface, we were on a tear to make sense of it all. There were linguists, archeologists, sociologists, psychologists, and on and on. When Nixon came into office, the whole concern was restructured. I, for one, was sent packing.”

I made a show of appearing sad.

“But there is still access to the tunnels through the elevators at the Tower of the Americas. Everyone who works there has security clearence. And they all know how to make the elevators go down. It’s really simple. Just a combination of buttons. You press UP, STOP, ALARM–”

At the moment, there was a rush of noise and activity at the front door. Three elderly women came walking in, chattering to one another. When they passed the parlor, they fell silent, gaping at us.

“What the hell’s going on?” demanded the tallest one.

“Bertie, where are the doggies?” the shortest one asked Farnsworth, all perplexed.

The third woman just stood in the hallway, her hand at her throat.

“My sisters, gentlemen,” Farnsworth told us with a wane smile. “I thought they’d not be back until the late afternoon.”

The short woman explained that the wine tour had been cancelled.

The tall woman was holding up her cell phone.

“I will soon be dialing 911 unless the media departs!”

Farnsworth signed and shrugged. “They are so protective. What can I do?”

I helped Erik pack his equipment. The tall sister stayed in the doorway holding up the phone. The other two drifted off. Farnsworth sheepishly sipped his tea and seemed to have nothing to say.

When we were ready to leave, we shook hands with Farnsworth, squeezed past the sister, and walked outside.

Erik grinned at me. He held up a scrap of paper.

“Look what the old man passed to me. It’s the elevator code. You know, to the tunnels!”

I don’t know if he really believed it. I was pretty sure he just saw it as a misguided narrative, that he wanted to see played out, even if he had no where to go.

“Come on,” he said with a disarming intensity. “Lets go distract an elevator operator.”

The Tower of the Americas was just a 15 minute walk away. I could hardly say no. So off we went.

Allison, the girl who lives in the garage apartment behind the duplex I rent, had brought her own tool box. She sprawled her stuff out on my hardwood floor, sitting there cross-legged. I sat on my sofa watching her rewire my table lamp. She was barefoot in worn jeans. She wore an aqua sleeveless t-shirt and had her hair pulled back with what I swear was one of those thick blue rubber-bands they put around a clump of broccoli. She stripped the insulation off a length of wire with a special tool, and she did it with one deft motion. This is the sort of woman I’d normally be drooling over, but with Allison, there had never been any sort of connection between us. Even on those rare occasions when I’d see her with her boyfriend — whose name I could never remember — she seemed removed from him, like a gourmand tucking into a three-bean salad, dispassionately, methodically.

“So, you really fucked this up,” she said without looking up.

“I just tripped over the cord.”

I don’t think she was buying my excuse. It was almost true. I had been chasing a cockroach along the wainscoting, stomping and missing and stomping and missing, and when it darted behind the desk, I made on last lunge. Never did get the bastard.

The lamp is hideous. Allison made it for me as a gift, and I love it.
She’s an artist who works in that slippery world of mixed media. Sometimes two dimensional, sometimes three dimensional. But never call anything of hers a painting or a sculpture. Three weeks after I moved in, I attended her first opening — first for me, that is. The show was held in a gallery co-op over on South Flores. Her stuff was by far the best of about a dozen artists. My favorite piece was a bas-relief of Ross Perot done in joint compound and 73 garlic presses. I made myself a promise. I would keep an eye out for outrageous items (or, normal items in outrageous amounts) to pass her way. And so, a couple months later, while working a temp gig cleaning out a warehouse on the West Side, not far from Our Lady of the Lake University, I came across a room with about 200 mannequin heads. Male and female. Just the heads. They were all the resined plaster style of the fifties. The owner of the building just shrugged when I asked if I could have them. And that’s what I dumped on Allison. She almost gave me a grin. Two days later she knocked at my door with an unwieldy table lamp, looking like a totem pole from a Jack Benny skit. A wooden platter base, with four mid-century heads stacked. Boy, girl, boy, girl. And the top girl wore the lamp shade that came down to the bridge of her nose. “Isn’t it incredibly disturbing?” Allison wanted to know. I agreed, and I accepted the gift. I gave her an awkward hug.

And here she was now, trouble-shooting. Dispassionately, methodically.

I got up and went into the kitchen. I pulled a pitcher of hibiscus tea from the refrigerator. It was strong and super-sweet. I like to mix it half-and-half with Topo Chico, a brand of Mexican mineral water. Taking two large glass tumblers down from the cupboard, I mixed up the fizzing concoctions.

Allison didn’t look up when I placed the glass on the floor beside her. I sat down and watched her work. When she finally reached out for the glass and took a sip, she paused. She looked closer. Frowned. Sniffed. She took a deep swig, about half the glass, and returned to work.

Gina turned me onto hibiscus tea. It was last year. We were chosen (and I’m still not exactly sure why) to represent our graduate department for a symposium on bicultural media in Monterey. That’s Mexico. Four days. All expenses paid, with a per diem stipend.

Gina was fluent in Spanish and had been published in several journals. Why they added me, makes no sense. And to compound confusion, the family who hosted our lodging either assumed that we were a couple, or that we should become one. We were given the guest house, which was one huge room with a double bed, sofa, dining table, kitchenette, and bathroom. I played the gentleman to the hilt. Took the sofa. And maybe even went overboard with the professional relationship stuff. Gina and I had never spent much time together before. We were pursuing different interests. She was concerned with the tightly focused realm of early 20th century Mexican land reform, and I was dicking around with border fiction. Mainly, my own.

I was old. A returning student, being the euphemism. She seemed pretty bright, and I liked that about her. But Gina was just a kid. Giddy, and oh so serious. As I recall, she was cute. I found her moderately attractive. But there’s something that exhausts me about twenty-something intellectuals. What they have to say is usually just so obvious.

The only thing that stuck in my mind during the symposium is that Gina made me, every afternoon before siesta (which we decided to observe), a cup of hibiscus tea; what, in Mexico, is called Jamaica tea. I really liked it.

The following semester Gina transferred to a doctoral program in Nevada. She sent me a long letter (not email, it came in the post) explaining her feelings for me. It ran three pages, as protracted and sententious as her essays about the agrarian reforms of the Madero regime. Other than Gina’s missive, I have never received a letter from a woman professing her great love for me. It went into detail about my cold aloofness. She ended on some upbeat note, maladroitly dropping in a Ricardo Flores Magón quote; which I’m fairly certain wasn’t Flores Magón, but William Godwin. In short, she found me dispassionate and methodical.

Allison snapped the lamp on and off and on again. The light bulb was a-glowing! She placed it on the table next to where I was sitting on the sofa. I was transfixed with the way she swept up the shards of plastic insulation with her hands and dumped them into the rubber plant pot on the floor next to her. She tossed back the last of the hibiscus tea, and with a move from the younger Michael Jackson, she rose to her feet without using her hands, simply by shifting forward and scissoring her legs together.

“Wow,” I said, trying something out. “I really like the way you move.”

It was almost flirty. And I said it with a genuine smile. And, dammit, I’d given the woman 200 mannequin heads!

I took her to the door and decisively laid a hand on her shouldler as I said, “Thank you.” She flashed me half a smile and took the initiative: she gave me an awkward hug.

I closed the door behind her and sat on my sofa in the circle of light. I opened a book, but I didn’t feel like reading.