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  “Who is Zachary Taylor?” the old man shouted. “Who’s General Zachary Taylor?!”

  Don Celestino focused on moving his legs at the pace of the machine; by now he was used to Cooder yelling while he watched television. He had more trouble with just the idea of being here with these old men and women. He knew he wasn’t old like some of them. Other than his plume of white hair, there really wasn’t anything that showed his age.

  “Who is Pershing?! Black Jack Pershing!”

  And it wasn’t just his appearance and physical strength, because he knew his mind was sharper than those of much younger men. You wouldn’t find him repeating the same story over and over. He could still describe how the dagger-shaped icicles hung off the truck’s bumper that night in 1949 when he had to go for the doctor and how Dora was already holding the baby in her arms by the time they arrived back at the house. And before that, he could remember attending barber school for almost three years because he kept having to leave with his brothers to follow the crops up north to Ohio, to Minnesota, to Iowa, to Michigan, and then by the time he did get his license, the army was ready for him. The foggy morning of June 24, 1945, he and eighty-seven other young men headed to Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training. He remembered sitting directly behind the bus driver, and when the sun was barely rising over the King Ranch, he pulled out a small notebook and began writing what he imagined might be his last letter to Dora. And when the war ended before he had actually made it overseas, the army shipped him back home, and in Houston he boarded a commercial bus that eventually stopped at a roadside diner near Corpus, and while the rest of the passengers were free to enter the restaurant, because of the times he was forced to sit on the back steps of the kitchen and eat a cheeseburger so greasy it stained his uniform. All these stories and more still came to mind as though he had experienced them only yesterday, no different than they would for a much younger man.

  “Who’s Johnson?! Who’s…”

  Cooder’s fanny pack had slid around to the front and he had to step off the machine to adjust it. Inside the pouch he kept several ballpoint pens and a tiny spiral notepad, where he recorded the distance and time of his walk. He’d shown it once to Don Celestino and later turned to the section where he logged the miles he and his wife traveled in their motor home between here and Belton, Missouri, where they lived during the summer months. Cooder claimed he didn’t mind the cold, but his wife’s arthritis did better when they traveled south for the winter. They were about to celebrate fifty-six years of marriage, only two years more than Don Celestino had been married to Dora. He had thought they would still be together. He felt so alone in those days after she left him behind. It seemed like he would stay this way, but his life took an unexpected turn and suddenly he went from being married to the same woman for more than fifty years to being with a young woman who herself was still a long way from fifty. It troubled him that Socorro didn’t seem to appreciate what this meant for him and instead pretended they were like any other couple that had fallen in love. Their situation was more complicated than that, at least for him it was. And now this business with his brother. If she only knew what she was asking of him.

  According to the control panel on the treadmill, he had walked only a little more than a mile, though it felt as if he had already reached his goal of two miles. At this pace he would be here all day. It was Wednesday, his day to wash the car, and if he didn’t hurry it was going to get dark on him. He needed to spend some time vacuuming the inside, especially the space between the driver and passenger sides. He increased the speed to 3.0 and began taking longer, more purposeful strides.

  Before he retired and learned his diabetes had grown worse, he figured he was getting enough exercise just being on his feet at the barbershop. That was where he had spent most of his days and where he had last spoken to his brother. If it hadn’t been for the barbershop, he might not have seen him at all. He referred to him as his brother, but because of the years that stood between them, he had thought of him as an uncle or cousin who came around to the house more often. Don Fidencio was in his early eighties and by this point living alone. Even after retiring from the post office, he had continued to show up early in the morning on the first Saturday of the month.

  The last time Don Fidencio had come by, Don Celestino had pulled up to the barbershop at twenty minutes after eight, which was unusual for him since he was in the habit of turning on the lights and the pole a few minutes before the hour. Don Fidencio was waiting inside his car, staring straight ahead as if he were stuck in a long line of traffic.

  “I didn’t know if you were still in business,” he said, then glanced at his watch as he got out of the car.

  “We went for coffee,” his brother said.

  Don Fidencio looked surprised when another man parked his car behind his brother’s car and walked up to where they were standing. The man was short and he squinted through one eye as though he couldn’t see so well.

  “This is my neighbor. Sometimes we go for coffee.” Don Celestino turned back toward the man. “This is my older brother.”

  “Your brother?” He squinted a little more. “Bill Harwell. Good to meet you.”

  Don Fidencio looked at him a second before finally switching his cane to the other side and putting out his own hand. The two men stood at the entrance of the barbershop, neither one speaking as they waited for Don Celestino to unlock the door. When they were inside, he flicked on the pole and then the lights in the room.

  “Did the Astros play yesterday?” he asked, thinking baseball was something the two men might have in common.

  “Going to, but they got rained out,” Harwell said.

  Don Fidencio only nodded.

  “They said it was going to rain here today,” Don Celestino said, pulling up the blinds. “But I don’t see any sign of it.”

  “I went ahead and cut the grass yesterday,” Harwell said, “just to be on the safe side.”

  “If it’s not too much trouble, you think I can get my trim now?” Don Fidencio asked in Spanish.

  His brother turned around to find him sitting in the barber’s chair, the wooden cane hanging off the armrest.

  “I already told this man I would take care of him first.”

  “And me?”

  “It won’t take long, then you can go next.”

  “I was the one who showed up first, not him.”

  “Yeah, but he called me last night.” He tugged on his brother’s arm, hoping to nudge him out of the chair, but the old man pulled his arm back and stayed where he was.

  “Now you take appointments, like a beauty parlor?”

  “That’s fine, if you want to start with him.” Harwell had sat down in one of the chairs against the wall.

  “You see?” Don Fidencio said. “The gavacho agrees with me, even if he doesn’t know Spanish. He knows I was here first.”

  Don Celestino looked at his neighbor, realizing the man had lived here long enough to know when he was being talked about.

  “I can come back a while later,” Harwell offered, then actually stood up.

  “So, how is it going to be?” Don Fidencio said. “For him to go before me, like you don’t have a family?”

  “Just let me take care of the man.”

  “You forget, that’s the problem.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “You act like one of them. And to hell with your brother, he doesn’t matter. ‘Just let me take care of the man,’” he mocked. “‘I have to take care of the poor man.’ Because how can you think to make him wait a few minutes, like I waited half the morning out there in the car, like some dummy? But how?”

  “Ya, Fidencio.”

  “I got here before him, that’s all I know,” his brother said, placing his hands on his knees and standing up on the footrest. “It should count for something, being the first one here.”

  “I promised him.”

  Don Fidencio glanced over at the other man and then back at his brother ju
st before he grabbed his cane.

  “Then both of you go to hell,” he said, this time in English.

  He must have found somewhere else to cut his hair because he stopped coming around. Then several years later Don Celestino read in the paper that Don Fidencio’s wife had died. Though she had moved out years earlier, she had never actually divorced his brother. Don Celestino debated whether to go to the services; Dora argued with him that they should at least attend the Rosary. Wouldn’t he want his family to show up if something happened to his wife? And then a year later something did happen. By that time he figured his brother would have let go whatever bad feelings there were between them. But when he failed to show up for Dora’s services, this slight, from his one remaining brother, only stirred his sorrow. He knew it was the old man paying him back for his own lapse. But he reasoned that Don Fidencio hadn’t been living with his woman when she died. She had left him years ago, wouldn’t even talk to him, practically divorced him. How could that be the same as a husband and wife — under the same roof, in the same bed — for more than fifty years? It didn’t compare back then, and it didn’t compare now.

  Don Celestino glanced back down at the control panel and saw he had half a mile to go on the treadmill. If he trusted the machine a little more, he might have raised his arm to see what time it was on his wristwatch. He pressed the speed button until it reached 3.5. Thinking about some old man wasn’t helping him any. He still had lots of work to do at home before tomorrow came around.

  11

  She curled over onto her side, toward the wall, tossing the covers away from her. Just beyond the bedroom door, she heard him flush the toilet. The curtains were drawn and, except for a bit of light slipping in beneath the sheet of aluminum foil that covered the windowpane, the bedroom seemed dark enough for it to be the middle of the night and not the middle of the afternoon.

  Socorro used to think his queen-size mattress was so big. Growing up, she had spent years sleeping on the sofa so her four brothers could have the bedroom. Her first real bed had been the one she shared with Rogelio. But this was only a full-size mattress and it was impossible to move without entangling herself with his body, which on most nights she wanted to avoid, especially after she suspected he was lying down in another bed. When she started cleaning houses and saw her first king-size mattress, she assumed it was two beds pushed together. She couldn’t imagine why a husband and wife would need such an enormous bed. It seemed a couple could lie there and never touch each other the whole night, as if they had been arguing about something just before falling asleep and had each grabbed his own blanket and rolled over on his side with his back to the other. And if that was the case, then what was the point of sleeping in the same bed with your husband?

  Though she had been married before, she felt as if she knew very little about how to be with a man. A few years earlier, while cleaning a lawyer’s house, she found a stack of magazines with men and women together in bed and other places where she’d never imagined people would want to be together in that way. She didn’t want to look at first, but she couldn’t help herself, no more than she could turn away when she saw a newspaper photo of a dead person found somewhere in Matamoros. She would close the magazine, feel some shame for what she had just done, swear she wouldn’t open it again, but then open the one right beneath it. Almost all the men in these photos were americanos, but the women were all different, some americanas, some negras, others chinas, and others mexicanas. They had them on the carpet, in the shower, on the kitchen table, on the hood of a car, in the swimming pool, in a stable. She finally forced herself to put the magazines away, but now she knew people had other ways of being together. The few years she’d been married to Rogelio, she had done what he told her to do, and that was to lie down with him in a normal bed, where married people lie down. But even this way she could remember only one time when she had ever actually enjoyed being with him.

  They had gone to church at noon — something he rarely did, but he had agreed to this one day to make her happy — and later spent the afternoon in the plaza. It was a beautiful day, with all the families sitting on the benches and children chasing one another around the bandstand. A group of musicians, older men with brass instruments and a woman singer, were getting ready to perform. She and Rogelio sat on one of the benches under the trees and shared a fruit cup. After they sat there a few minutes, a pretty little girl came up to Rogelio and handed him a white balloon. She couldn’t have been more than two, and she was playing with him in the way little girls do when they want attention from little boys. He accepted the balloon and then offered it back to her. She accepted it, then a few seconds later offered it back to him. Rogelio asked her who’d given her such a big balloon. But when she opened her mouth, they couldn’t understand her garbled words. After a while Rogelio said the little girl looked like her. Socorro couldn’t see how, but he insisted that she must have looked like her when she was that age. Maybe so, she said. No maybe, he said. He became very serious and said this was how their baby would look. Socorro smiled. The little girl was pretty. And then he said he wanted to go back to the house and make a little baby, a beautiful one just like her. He threw away the rest of the fruit cup and they left for the house.

  But it was as if she couldn’t walk fast enough. Everything had to be right away with him. Already more than a year had gone by and still there was no sign of a baby. She’d heard his mother asking him why it was taking so long. They were lucky that when they got to the house his family was still away, buying groceries. He had his pants down below his knees before she could pull the green shower curtain that covered the entrance to his bedroom. But after this he slowed down, slower than she could remember him ever going. She started feeling something funny that she hadn’t experienced before. At first she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to feel this way and she wanted him to stop, but the more she let him, the more she didn’t want him to stop. She imagined they were creating their baby, their little girl, and she was being made from their love. It was as if they were swimming just above the bed, the baby floating between them and the whole time she and Rogelio feeling the same exact thing. They breathed together, they moved together, they made the same sounds. But somehow through all this she heard the front door. She whispered to him that his family was home, in the next room. This had been a problem, living in the same small house, but usually they waited until late at night or early in the morning, before anyone else woke up. She could hear their voices, their shoes on the floor. Stop, she told him. She wanted to get up, except he was holding her down. He was her man and she wanted to be with him, but not this way, with his family right there. She couldn’t stop breathing so rapidly, but now she felt nothing. She just wanted to stop what they were doing. They could stay lying there, as long as he stopped making his sounds and pushing the bed against the back wall. Por favor, Socorro begged him. Por favor, Rogelio. But he put his hand over her mouth. She felt as if she were suffocating. She was trying to get up, but he pushed harder. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw something move, and later when she looked again one side of the curtain was pulled open and his father was watching them. He smiled back at her because he knew there wasn’t anything she could do. Rogelio kept pushing.

  Sometimes she wondered if not always enjoying her time with him had made her a bad wife or made it so that they never had a baby, but she also knew that, aside from that one time, she had never told him no whenever he’d wanted to be together — as she did now with Don Celestino. At least she could say he made her feel something again and that she simply wanted to be closer to him, though now after almost three months she wanted to know if he felt anything similar or if she was still only the girl who cleaned his house and then stayed around after her work was done. Somehow she had imagined a man his age would be proud, maybe a little boastful, to have a young woman and to want to present her to his family and friends. Wasn’t this part of what all men were looking for?

  She could hear him
brushing his teeth now. At first she found it difficult to stay interested when they were only starting and Don Celestino would suddenly stop and say he needed to go to the bathroom. A couple of times she had fallen asleep waiting. Then one morning she was cleaning around the medicine chest when she found some pills inside a plastic sandwich bag tucked behind a bottle of talcum powder. It seemed strange to her because he kept his medicines in a daily dispenser that stayed on the kitchen table next to the salt- and pepper shakers. When she asked him about them, he told her that they were vitamins, if she had to know, but that he wasn’t asking her about everything she carried in her purse. Socorro apologized and said she was just curious. Another week went by and she found the same plastic bag in the bathroom cabinet, this time wedged behind the hot-water bottle. He must have thought he had hidden it well enough, but he forgot that she’d been cleaning houses long before they had become intimate and there were few places a cleaning woman didn’t look. All this time she had assumed his trips to the bathroom had to do with a sudden urge to relieve himself, as a man his age might need to do. But now she noticed how he came back more eager than before he left and somehow he seemed to have as much or more energy than a man half his age. And then she remembered the little blue pills — his vitamins.

  Socorro was facing the wall when he opened the bedroom door.

  “Still awake?”

  She stayed in the same position and adjusted the pillow. While she was still wearing her skirt and blouse, he’d come back from the bathroom in only his briefs.

  “Sometimes it can be hard to fall asleep alone,” he said.