The Water Museum Read online

  He had a cot in the corner of Chango’s gas station. It was a little too close to Chango for comfort, and he had to put in his iPod buds to cancel out the old crow’s snoring. But it was free, and the snacks and booze were good.

  The Mustang sat out on the street. Junior kept telling Chango it would get him busted, that it was too visible. But Chango was invincible. Chango told him, “Live, peewee. Ya gotta live!” There was a tin shower rigged up in one of the restrooms. Junior’s stolen iPod port was blasting “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”

  “Stones suck,” said Chango, swallowing tequila. “Except for Keith. Keith’s ba-a-ad.”

  Junior was thinking about the old times, how, when they’d gather at the bowling alley to play pinball, Chango would smoke those pestilential Dominos and force Junior to lose by putting the burning cherry on his knuckle every time he had to hit the bumpers.

  “Fucker,” he said.

  “You got that right, homes.”

  “So, Chango—what’s next?”

  “We, um, steal a lot more shit.”

  “Shouldn’t we cool it for a while? Let the heat die down?”

  “Heat,” Chango shrieked. “Did you actually say ‘heat’? Haw! ‘Heat,’ he says. God DAMN.” And then: “What heat?” He laughed out loud. “You seen cop one? We is invisible, homie. We just the trashman.”

  “I’m just being cautious,” Junior said.

  “I got it covered, peewee,” Chango boasted. “Chango’s got it all covered.”

  “Covered how?”

  “Next stop,” Chango announced, “Arizona! Don’t nobody know us over there in ’Zoney!”

  * * *

  They should have never crossed the border. That’s what Junior thought as he escaped. They didn’t know anything about Arizona. Someone had seen them, he was pretty sure. It was probably at the motel outside of Phoenix. They’d probably been made there.

  Whatever. It went bad right away. They drove around looking for abandoned houses, but in Arizona, how could you tell? All the yards were dirt, and the nice yards looked to them exactly like the bad yards. What was a weed and what was that xeriscaping desert shit?

  In Casa Grande they felt like they were getting to it. A whole cul-de-sac had collected trash and a few tumbleweeds. Junior couldn’t believe there were actual tumbleweeds out there. John Wayne–type stuff. They pulled in and actually rang the doorbells and got nothing. So Chango did his thing and went in the back and they were disappointed to find the first house completely vacant except for an abandoned Power Ranger action figure in the back bedroom and a melted bar of Dial in the bathroom.

  The second house was full of fleas and sad, broken-ass welfare crap. Chango found a bag of lime and chili tortilla chips, and he munched these as he made his way to the third, and last, house. He went in. Score!

  “I love the recession!” he shouted.

  They drained the waterbed with a hose through the bathroom window. Hey—a TV. These debt monsters really liked their giant screens. Massaging recliners. Mahogany tables and a big fiberglass saguaro cactus. “Arty,” Chango said. Mirrors, clothes, a desktop computer and printer, a new microwave, two nice Dyson floor fans, a sectional couch in cowhide with brown and white color splotches. They even found a sewing machine.

  It had taken too long, what with the long search and the three penetrations. After they loaded, pouring sweat except for “Mr. Petrucci,” who sat in his a.c. so he’d look good in case any rubberneckers came along, it was four in the afternoon, and they were hitting rush hour on I-10.

  The truck was a mile ahead. Junior liked to hang back and make believe he was driving on holiday. No crime. He was heading cross-country, doing a Kerouac. He was going back down to National City to find La Minnie, his sweet li’l ruca from the Bay Theater days. He should have never let her go. He hadn’t gone to a single high school reunion, but his homeboy El Rubio told him La Minnie had asked about him. Divorced, of course. Who in America was not divorced? But still slim and cute and fine as hell. Junior knew his life would have been different if he’d done the right thing and stayed on W. 20th and courted that gal like she deserved, but he was hungry. Trapped like a wildcat in somebody’s garage, and when the door cracked the slightest bit, he was gone.

  These things were on his mind when the police lights and sirens went off behind him.

  * * *

  He had to give it to Chango—he played his string out right to the end.

  The cops blasted past Junior’s Buick and dogged the white U-Haul. Two cars. Llaves knew better than to try to run—the truck had a governor on the engine that kept it to a maximum speed of fifty-five. He puttered along, Junior back there shouting, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Then he hit his blinker and slowly pulled over to the shoulder, the police cars insanely flashing and yowling. The associates were climbing out when Junior went by. He could see Chango’s mouth already working.

  He didn’t know what to do. Should he keep going? Book and not look back?

  He hit the next overpass and crossed over the freeway and sped back and crossed over again and rolled up behind the cop cars. He set his tie and pulled on his jacket with its name tag and even picked up his clipboard.

  There were two cops—one Anglo and one Hispanic.

  The associates stood in a loose group against the side of the truck. The cops turned and stared at Junior.

  “Officers,” he called. “I am Mr. Petrucci, from Bowden Federal in Detroit. Is there a problem?”

  “Petrucci,” said the Hispanic. “Is that Italian?”

  “It is,” said Junior.

  “This dude,” Chango announced, pointing at the cop, “is some kinda Tío Taco!”

  “Shut it,” the cop replied.

  A Border Patrol truck pulled up behind the Buick.

  “Sir?” said the cop. “I need to ask you to leave. You need to call your bank and have another team sent out to deliver these goods.”

  “Fuck!” shouted Chango.

  “Is there a problem with…the load?” Junior asked.

  “No, sir. This is strictly a ten-seventy stop.”

  “Ten-seventy?”

  “SB ten-seventy. Immigration. We have reason to believe these gennermen are illegals.”

  The BP agent was eyeballing Chango.

  Junior almost laughed.

  “Why, I never!” he said.

  Chango called, “He don’t know shit. Fuckin’ Petrucci. He’s just a bean counter. Never did a good day’s work in his life! That asshole don’t even know us.” He was playing to the crowd. “I worked every day! I paid my taxes! I-I-I served in Iraq!” he lied.

  The cop held up two licenses in his fingers, as if he were making a tight peace sign or was about to smoke a cigarette. Llaves and Chango—Hugo didn’t have a license.

  “Do you have citizenship papers?” the BP man asked.

  “I don’t need no stinkin’ papers! This is America!”

  “Have they been searched?” BP asked.

  “What are you, the Gestapo?” Chango smiled a little. He felt he had scored a major point. “I’m down and brown!” he hooted. “Racial profiling!” Etc.

  “Not yet.”

  “I ain’t being searched by nobody,” Chango announced.

  The BP man wagged his finger in Chango’s face.

  “I’ll break that shit off and jam it up your ass,” Chango said. “You think some wetback would say that?”

  “We ran your license,” the cop said. “Your address seems to be an abandoned gas station in San Diego.”

  The cops and the BP agent smirked at each other.

  “Goddamned right I live in a gas station!” Chango bellowed. “My dad owned it!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The cop turned to Junior.

  “I have to insist, Mr. Petrucci—you need to leave the scene. Now.”

  Junior stared at Chango and got into his Buick as the cops tossed the guys against the side of the panel truck and he saw, or thought he saw, just as he pulled into traff
ic, the Glock fall out of Chango’s pocket and the cops draw and squat, shouting, and he hit the gas and was shaking with adrenaline or fear or both and didn’t know what happened but he never slowed until he was in front of the old Esso station. He was stiff and sore and scared out of his mind. He ran into Chango’s bedroom and tore open his Dopp kit and took his roll of cash. He thought for a minute and went out, locked the door, and slipped into the GT. The wires sparked when he touched them and the big engine gave a deep growl and shout, the glasspacks sounding sweet. He was going to go. Going to go. Just get out. Break the ties once and for all. Never look back. He was in the wind. Junior rubbed his face three or four times. He revved the big engine and put his foot on the pedal and stared. Night. Streetlights shining through the palm trees made octopus shadows in the street. Junior rolled down the window. He could smell Burger King. Two old women walked arm in arm, speaking Spanish. He could hear a sitcom through the open window of a bungalow above Chango’s station. Junior knew if he headed down toward the old Ducommun warehouse, he could find La Minnie’s mom’s house. It was funky twenty years ago. With its geraniums. Minnie could be there. Or her family could tell him where she was. She used to like a sweet ride like this. Maybe she’d like to feel the wind in her hair. They could drive anywhere. He thought he could talk her into it, if he could find her. The way things had changed around town, the old house might not be there at all. Probably not. Probably gone with all the things he remembered and loved. But…he asked himself…what if it wasn’t?

  He shifted and moved steadily into the deeper dark.

  Four

  Carnations

  They wore their best clothes and waited for the Old Man. Billy didn’t own a suit, but he’d found a tie somewhere. He stood at the window, watching the Old Man water the garden.

  His sister said, “What’s he doing now?”

  “Wait.”

  “We’re going to be late.”

  “Just…wait.”

  She looked at her husband in the living room and shook her head. The Old Man, Mr. Iron Fist, loved drunken Billy the most. She sighed. Well, at least Billy’d cut his hair.

  “He’s getting dirty,” she said.

  Billy watched Pops shuffle in the dirt, mud on his brogans and dirt on his cuffs. That brown suit had to be fifty years old. But the fedora was stylin’. He smiled.

  “I need a smoke,” he said. His sister didn’t smoke. “Start the car. I’ll fetch him.”

  He stepped out of the gloom into a bright cube of light and leaves and butterflies. Good stink of fresh mud. He lit up. Pops watered his apple tree.

  “Getting late, Pops,” he said.

  The Old Man turned off the spigot.

  “Sonny,” he said. “We planted this tree the day you were born.” He’d told this to Billy a thousand times.

  Billy pulled out his handkerchief.

  “You got mud on your shoes.”

  Pops braced himself on his kneeling son’s shoulder as Billy cleaned his feet.

  “Is it terrible, Billy?” he asked.

  Billy led him around to the front. Pops paused and bent to the raised carnation beds. He plucked one and sniffed it.

  “Mother’s favorite,” he said.

  Billy tossed his smoke.

  “It’s not bad, Pops. Not too bad. She looks like she’s asleep.”

  The car was waiting.

  “Is it okay?” the Old Man asked. “I drop this flower in with her?”

  Billy took his elbow. His arm felt like little sticks. The sidewalk was broken up out here. Uneven.

  “It’s okay, Pops. I promise.”

  Sis opened the door.

  Pops tipped his hat to her and climbed in.

  Five

  Taped to the Sky

  1. Keep Honking

  Hey, boo,” the waitress said. “What you know good?”

  She was being folkloric. Hubbard was supposed to be charmed. But since the demise of The Previous Marriage, about five and a half days ago, he’d been sulky. He once read about a Sioux warrior named Cranky Man, and now he thought: That’s me.

  Lafayette, Louisiana, was as hot as the inside of your mouth.

  “I don’t know a damn thing,” he replied.

  “I don’t know me too,” she said, not taking to his Yankee-ass tone one bit. “But hey,” she said. “What do I know. I’m just trailer trash from Butte La Rose.”

  “Is that bad?” Hubbard asked.

  A little dark guy in a red gimme cap watched this, snorted, and nodded his head at her.

  “She proud,” he said. “She smacked you good.”

  She tossed him a smile and threw a hip in his direction.

  Hubbard leaned an elbow on his little round table. It had gold foil ashtrays, with the corners sort of bent down to hold the smokes. Apparently, you could still smoke in bars in Acadiana. Hubbard didn’t smoke.

  The waitress raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Beer,” he said.

  She let her gum answer as she turned away: Pop! Pop! Pop!

  The guy in the cap said, “She just tryin’ to be friendly.” He was sipping chicory coffee—Hubbard could smell it across the gap between tables.

  A stuffed gator stood on a platform in the middle of the restaurant, jaws agape, dust on its marble eyes.

  Hubbard ignored Mr. Coffee and nodded when the waitress put his Abita beer down on a napkin and turned her back. It was so cold, some of the foam was ice slush. Oh yes. Oh yes. He took a long pull off the bottle. His eyes watered. She was a handsome woman, no doubt. Boo. He always thought southern women called you “sugar.” He’d seen “boo” in James Lee Burke books, but this was the first time anybody had called him that.

  Red Cap called him something different when he sidled his chair closer.

  “Hey, asshole,” he said.

  Hubbard chewed another mouthful of slushy beer.

  “You ain’t from around here,” Red Cap said.

  “Passing through,” Hubbard said.

  “They teach you manners where you come from?”

  “Nope. You?”

  The dude sipped his coffee and chuckled.

  “You funny, son,” he said. He tipped his cap back and set his eyes in slits and regarded Hubbard some more.

  Hubbard had spent his morning staring at bull gators and nutria rats in Lake Martin, between Lafayette and Breaux Bridge. It made him feel badass. This whole chunk of the map was written in poems and liquor bottle labels: Whiskey Bay, Catahoula, Atchafalaya. He’d bought a long gator fang from a Chittimacha Indian craftsman at the Festival Acadien and then danced a two-step with a blues singer named Lana. The fang hung on a black leather thong, nice and solid against his chest, making him feel wild and at large on the land. Not to be fucked with: Hubbard, Unbound.

  He had the alligator hoodoo.

  “You must be a comedian, yeah?” said the li’l dude.

  Hubbard drained his beer, belched softly, and looked at him.

  “Must be,” he replied.

  Red Cap turned in his chair. “See that sign out there?” he said. Hubbard squinted out the window. “What it say?”

  “Poo-Yee,” said Hubbard.

  “No sir, it do not. It says Poo-Yi. ‘Yi’ as in ‘eye,’ see? An’ you know what that means?”

  Hubbard shook his head, thinking: More beer.

  “That there is Cajun for ‘North American ass-kicking establishment.’ And y’all about to get a free lesson on how that works.”

  “Lately,” said Hubbard, “I have been considering language to be the enemy.”

  Red Cap put down his cup.

  “Is that right?”

  The waitress dropped a coin in the juke: Beau Jocque and the Zydeco Hi-Rollers came on. “Can you really make it stink?” Beau Jocque demanded.

  “My wife left me,” Hubbard said. “I never understood a single thing she said.”

  Red Cap nodded sagely.

  “Podnah,” he said. “No wonder you in such a bad mood.”
>
  * * *

  Hubbard watched two Klansmen duke it out in Vidor, Texas. He could tell at least one of them was in the Klan because he had a purple KKK tattoo on his neck. The other fellow wore a stars’n’bars Confederate flag on his cap. Hubbard was deeply gratified to see he had a lightning bolt SS on his left bicep. He wanted these assholes to destroy each other.

  He crunched Corn Nuts and watched the two trade blows and bear hug each other to carom off pickups and panel trucks in the parking lot. He held a banana Slurpee and was finally moved away by a scooting crowd of teens making a break for it when two new trucks sped into the lot. He pulled out and took a last glance at the mullet haircuts of the strangers flinging blood.

  * * *

  America! Motel 8! Motel 6! The World’s Largest Cross! The Lion’s Den 24 Hour Adult Super Store—Buses Welcome!

  He piloted his wife’s Volvo west on I-10. Texas lasted for ten thousand miles till he found the San Antonio cutoff. He took a hotel room right at the split in the freeways. Fort Something. The vapor lamps in the parking lot turned his skin a vague shade of purple.

  Huge stinkbugs swarmed the lot. They clanked out of the dark in black ranks and mounted each other everywhere around him. He was careful not to step on them because the many he’d already run over were wafting a bitter stench that went nicely with the toxic lights. A car passed by and the stinkbugs crackled like pecan shells. Hubbard held his breath.

  He wrestled with the key card. Ground-floor room. He moved ecstatic stinkbug ménages aside with his foot. The door of the next unit opened, and a woman with a long T-shirt and shadowy eyes smiled out at him. He passed seven seconds daydreaming that she was a hooker and he’d spend $50 to show his ex something then pushed open his door and went inside and kicked it shut.

  He tossed his duffel on one cardboard bed and threw his own carcass on the other. He thumbed through the channels on the TV—lots of Mexican telenovelas. On the bedside table, a Xeroxed menu from the Fort Something Pizza Palace. We Deliver to YOUR Room! What the hell. He called and ordered spaghetti and beer. When it came, the Styrofoam box had a mound of mashed potatoes and gravy tucked in with the spaghetti.