Houston Noir Page 3

  But there was none of that with Victoria, of course. Lisa’s attachment to her drew from some well that had previously been unknown to her. She wondered, when Victoria was tiny, more a collection of scents and sounds than a human, if all parents, all mothers, felt this way. It didn’t seem possible.

  Victoria asked Lisa about her own mother once, when she was a child: “Did she love you like you love me?”

  The pronouns confused Lisa for a moment. “Yes,” she’d said, but not because she believed it.

  * * *

  They were leaving tomorrow, and it felt too easy. Victoria had come over that morning and talked about what she’d packed. Swimsuits. Sundresses, for dinner. She described a new one so vividly—striped, off the shoulder—Lisa could almost see it. And then she could almost see Victoria in their house on the beach, standing ankle-deep in the water. And a surge of something—happiness, excitement, some combination thereof—threaded itself through her brain.

  Victoria seemed worried. Lisa thought she understood why. Her daughter had found herself trapped. She didn’t know how to escape. Lisa would help her.

  Lance didn’t suspect a thing. Lisa had rented a storage unit and put clothes into it and a few small pieces of furniture Lance wouldn’t miss. Things she didn’t want him to have.

  Her jewelry and important papers went into a deposit box at the bank. One last trip to the lawyer’s office.

  She went into what had once been Victoria’s room and lay on the bed. But no, that didn’t feel like enough and, though she wasn’t a woman given to melodramatic gestures, she took off her shirt and pants and lay on the floor. The wood was old heart pine. It bore many years of tiny, almost invisible scratches. A map of scratches.

  She could feel her bones through the floor. The wood was cool, solid.

  She would miss this house.

  * * *

  Lance was at the hospital. Victoria was at the gym. She was of the younger generation, which considered working out, beating the body into submission, as natural as brushing one’s teeth.

  Lisa went to the stone turtle, then let herself in Victoria’s front door. David wasn’t home. He worked insane hours, but she could feel his presence as she walked quietly through his home. It still felt like his, even though Victoria had added her own touches: paintings, antique furniture. But still, David’s masculine leather furniture dominated.

  She took the Polaroids without looking at them. And yet, the feel of them in her hand was a comfort. Thick and sturdy like an object, not a stack of flimsy photographs.

  The pictures gave her hope. The past would be the past. The future, theirs for the taking.

  She felt excited, despite the circumstances.

  As she passed the guest room door, she heard a knock within. Then another. Some part of her thought it was David beating Victoria, though she knew that was impossible. David was at work. Victoria was at the gym.

  She opened the door out of some sort of maternal instinct, her other hand clutching the square of pictures.

  Lance looked at her first. For all his indiscretions, she had never seen him with another woman. Certainly not on top of one, as he was now, a look of pleasure slowly morphing into pain upon his face.

  “Mama,” a voice said from underneath Lance. The pictures slid from Lisa’s hand.

  Victoria had not called her Mama in so long.

  ONE IN THE FAMILY

  by Adrienne Perry

  Museum District

  “You have some experience with food prep?” asked Angus, the owner of Taco Heaven. He wore snakeskin boots and his jingle-jolly gut stretched a Clutch City T-shirt. Dad’s age or a little older. For this informal interview, we sat outside Black Hole, next to the laundromat, so that Angus could smoke. Rancheras played on the laundry’s radio, and I knew enough Spanish to get depressed by what those sisters were singing. Through the open door, the floral, pastel perfumes from detergents and dryer sheets mixed with Angus’s smoke. Toxic, but when was the last time I’d done laundry in actual machines, not secretly in the Y’s showers? Finals week. Now it was full-on June.

  I said, “I washed dishes in the dining hall.”

  Angus watched me attack the iced coffee and Southwest quiche he’d offered at the interview’s start. Raggedy, but dignified. Hungry. I knew how I looked. Trying to figure me out, Angus’s wide forehead wrinkled. It looked like kind confusion.

  “I had an uncle who taught history at your school.”

  “For real?”

  “He’s retired now. It’s a good school.”

  I nodded without smirking. “For most people.”

  “What makes you special?”

  No comment. I pushed my finger onto the crumbs and eggy bits on my plate. I’d eat whatever wasn’t strapped down.

  “Would you say you’re any good with people?”

  “I’m great with people.”

  “Re’s an interesting name. Where’s it come from?”

  I knew what Angus was getting at and I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. I showed him the backs of my hands. R (right hand) e: (left hand). “A nickname. Pronounced rey.”

  “Like a ray of light? Like shafts through clouds? Like the Virgin Mary?”

  “Like a king. I have to send money home each month. Can you remind me how much the pay is?”

  Angus hired me because he felt sorry for me.

  That was fine.

  * * *

  Summer in Houston is like the dead of winter in Easthampton, Massachusetts, only hot instead of cold. In both places, weather traps the lucky people inside. I tried to explain this to our dad, but he’s from Mississippi, so he already knew. End of my sophomore year and I talked about the heat because I didn’t want to talk about why I wasn’t going back. Not to school and not home. Macy had just returned from Afghanistan. When I say just, I mean a year. Staying in Houston was my way of pretending that everything would work itself out—for all of us.

  The fusion-taco food truck was pitched to Dad as a paid internship. Small business administration, hospitality, team building, and sustainable food. Workday’s end, I would wring sweat from my Taco Heaven T-shirt and pocket fifteen wet dollar bills in tips. End of the month, I had saved enough to send home four hundred.

  Dad said inquiring minds want to know: Were my supervisors nice? What was I learning about bookkeeping and advertising, about how to run my own business? I’d look at Wikipedia and memorize the difference between budgets and actuals in small business accounting. Make shit up—factoids about the history of tacos. Or Angus. I’d tell a story about my boss, say he was a felon who’d miraculously turned a corner in his life of crime, was mentoring me, showing me how to transform an idea into three edible dimensions. That was the summer I started telling grown-up lies. When your father launches a Kickstarter campaign to finance his oldest daughter’s Sip-N-Puff, he doesn’t want to hear that his other kid pays for a student membership at the downtown YMCA just to take showers and use the free Wi-Fi. He doesn’t want to hear they’ve been stalking their ex–financial aid officer, or that they’re sleeping on the street. No father wants to hear that. So I spared him.

  * * *

  Angus and I worked together five days a week. Taco Heaven employed no one else. Lemons and limes, edible flowers, and fruit dominated my workstation. Grilling and marinating meats, heating tortillas—Angus handled all that and chopped cilantro, whipped together salsas and fresh chutneys from mangos and allspice. I took orders and ran the register, cranked out a green-and-white awning, and, underneath it, set up an outdoor Ikea table plus two chairs for ambiance. Both of us cleaned. A winged hot-pink taco flew on the truck’s black side.

  Every Tuesday, Taco Heaven camped out at the Museum of Fine Arts, between the parking lot and the sculpture garden. A small man-made hill sloped up to a mini plateau behind the truck, where a magnolia and ponderosa pine threw shade. On the grass beneath the tree branches, during my breaks, I would stare out at the sculptures, watching the guards on their breaks. We ech
oed each other.

  A bronze man made of rectangles ran down a slope near a sick-looking naked boy riding a horse. The horse had a tiny head on a wrestler’s neck. The Pilgrim, the artist named the horse and boy, and I thought, That’s just like white folks. Not the sculpture, but the value of things and how they’re just for certain people. Gardens are green prisons and if I could steal that horse and sick boy and sell them to solve our money problems, I would. Without regret. If that’s racist or wrong or something, right about now I just don’t care.

  * * *

  A Tuesday was my first official day on the job, though I worked with Angus Mondays through Saturdays. The cicadas in the sculpture garden sounded like sirens for the buses and cars barreling down Bissonnet. A museum security guard sweating through his uniform leaned on the parking lot sign. The atmosphere inside the truck—how can I describe it? Stainless steel can hold onto heat with a death grip. A fluorescent light beat down like a tin hammer on the top of my head.

  “Feels like a grown man tap dancing on your chest, doesn’t it?”

  “Something like that,” I said, studying Angus’s map. Every food item or utensil had a home. Angus had systems and, within the first hour, I fucked those systems up. I’d read the map upside down.

  “If you weren’t a girl . . .” Angus shut himself up. I’ll give him that. He knew when to quit about that aspect. That first day, Angus didn’t know what to make of me. But by early July, he was talking about his favorite butch cousin from Chicago, full-sleeve tattoos on her arms, big diamonds in her ears, girls practically throwing their panties in front of her. He said, “If you weren’t a girl, you’d be toast.”

  Before Macy came back from Kabul, this would have gotten to me. I would have licked the counter to apologize. But Macy put the world to scale.

  “Good thing I’m not really a girl.”

  “All right,” Angus chuckled, “have it your way. I’m just saying: awareness. So nobody gets hurt.”

  I thought: That is my fucking way. I said, “I’ll be more aware.”

  Angus cocked his head, searched my face, and waved a hand in front of his nose. “You’ve got what my nephew calls an ice grill, you know?”

  “I have a decent sense of what my face is doing.”

  “You ever been in?” Angus pointed to the museum. A fat line of schoolchildren snaked through the doors. “It’s an ugly building from the outside, but don’t judge a book. Am I right?”

  * * *

  Museums don’t intimidate me. Entering the MFAH lobby for the first time, I saw a Warhol self-portrait and a negative of myself, in the same moment. Against a black background, Warhol was pink, his hair stuck up like feathers in an Easter Sunday hat. A death mask expression on his face, like Macy’s when we picked her up at the Hartford airport. How much would a Warhol like that go for? What gave Warhol value? If I could figure that out, I’d start throwing paint on canvases.

  These were not observations to share with Dad and Macy on our video calls on Thursday nights, when the museum was free and stayed open until nine p.m. Pessimism would only confirm that I was in a bad way. They wanted to know what I had seen: Greek vases, gold leaf–topped linguist sticks, Mary with the Christ child, silver, photographs, capes made of Technicolor bird feathers. As their tour guide, I led them through the corridors and into the galleries, narrating what I saw, and I felt close to them. Like last summer.

  Each Thursday, we ended the call with three or four passes through the Turrell tunnel. Dark platform above and, below, the hot-pink and red and violet and blue changing walls. The thin, lighter outline that passed to other dimensions. Macy would moan so loudly through the passage, I learned to put the phone on mute.

  The ends of these calls were often awkward. Dad might ask, “You headed back to the dorm?”

  One lie required another: “Yeah. I’ll take my time walking back.”

  “What classes did you register for, again?”

  “I don’t think I said. I have neurobiology and art history. Still figuring out the other two.”

  “Financial aid is all straightened out, then? We haven’t got anything in the mail.”

  “I’ll double-check.”

  I’d stopped going to school since the spiritual nut-kicking of trying my fob on doors to my dorm, to the gym. Instead, I decided to walk down Graustark to Mr. Larson’s house and stare at his condo from across the street. He didn’t live far from the MFAH, and even closer to the Menil. Lights on timers, the pool’s motor circulating lazily. No mail delivery as far as I could tell. On Mondays, a cleaning woman might come by. Polished concrete, a window like an icicle going from the first to the third floor. I was waiting for them to come back.

  Near the Rothko, I sprayed heavy-duty insect repellent all over and lay beside a fence, out of view, using my backpack for a pillow. Same routine every night. At first, I couldn’t sleep. The A pitch of mosquitoes. The fear of frightening someone. Kids who looked like me were treated savagely. Routinely. I wanted to trust the people who lived this close to Rothkos, but that was too generous. In the early morning, when it was cooler, I calmed down and slept. I dreamed that Angus had installed a grill inside the Turrell tunnel and I had shrunk to fit the grill. The kitchen setup didn’t bother the guards. Angus seared my back, browned my front. Poked my thighs with a spatula to make sure I was done. Then he chopped me up, slid me into a corn tortilla, and handed me over to Larson with a wedge of lime.

  * * *

  Ninety-nine degrees and 100 percent humidity. A gray haze all around and pollen and ozone advisory warnings. Droning on Montrose and Bissonnet and Main. I have never been in a desert, and I know Pakistan is not the desert, but I saw a photograph of Pakistan in a Washington Post left at the Y. There were cypress trees shaped like wizard hats. Distant mountains. A small gray swimming pool with, I’m estimating, a few hundred men. Pants on in the water. Hottest day on record in Pakistan. A scientist quoted in the article said these heat waves pushed people to the limits of their thermal comfort. Absolutely. Brains cook at that temperature, just like the brain of a customer standing in the Taco Heaven line in Houston in July. Just like our brains inside the truck. The men in the picture looked shocked, as if standing in front of a body that had just collapsed in the street. But I was probably projecting. They might have been having a great time.

  Tuesdays were usually slow, but the week of July 4 meant family time at the museum. Angus hustled on four orders of Indonesian tacos and three fried chicken tacos with waffle casings. I wiped down the counters and refrigerator, then hopped out front to double-check the customer experience. “Order up!” I delivered the tacos to a couple with their in-laws. The mother handed me ten dollars to bring more Topo Chicos. How did she know handing people cold drinks was my favorite? I loved to hold bottlenecks covered in condensation, to feel the glass slip through my fingers. I’m the Red Cross, I thought. I’m saving people. I was bettering the lives of people who hate. In Houston, people were friendly on the surface, happy on the surface. But they hated their lives, themselves, each other, same as back home. Same as everywhere.

  I went behind the truck and put cold fingers on my face.

  “Do you know how to cook?” Angus asked.

  “I can boil water.”

  He was being nice, making conversation, but I didn’t want to talk in that metal animal mouth reeking of onions and garlic and meat.

  “You could learn to do a little more than that. Based on what I’ve seen, you could do short order most places and some besides.” That was nice to hear. “Not that you’ll want to, when you get back to school.”

  I got up and went inside the truck, paired plastic forks with plastic knives, wrapped them in their paper napkin blankets, and put them to sleep in a plastic tub. Angus kept talking and I saw it coming—a sermon—whether I wanted it or not.

  “Food was waiting for me. My uncle Ross married this woman Cecilia. There’s this picture of her from the seventies wearing a tight Astros T-shirt, and I always think, That w
oman changed our diapers and spanked our butts! She was sweet, Cecilia, but she had a temper.”

  “Are you following me, Re?”

  Where had I been? Thinking money, thinking Macy. “Why are you telling me this?” Angus looked hurt. I laughed, to play it off. “I’m never going to eat your food again.”

  “If I didn’t feed you, you’d fly away.” Angus wiped his face with a rag and threw it in the day’s laundry. He handed me two limes. “Work. It’ll make you feel better.”

  I destroyed the lime’s skin on the mandolin, making zest and a citrus smell I loved to hold to my nose. Finished that and started with the inventory. Angus took a pencil from behind his ear and checked the inventory sheet. “You mean to tell me you don’t have an Aunt Cecilia in your family? Come on, you know you do.”

  What he meant by that, I don’t know.

  * * *

  March of sophomore year, I made an appointment to discuss my financial aid package. A day of cold rain hushed campus, the raindrops pressing down tender leaves, new flowers. I walked through puddles just to hear the swish-glub, to remind myself of walking through puddles with Macy when we were small and both mobile.

  On my floor, a sister-girl from Kentucky described Brandon Larson as a fat, bitchy Mark Twain. She said I should see if I could meet with someone else. As gray light came through his office window, I could see the resemblance to Twain, mostly in the hair and mustache.

  “What are we here to discuss?”

  “Did you get my father’s letter?”

  Larson turned to his computer. “Give me your student ID number. Ah, René Garraway.”

  “I go by Re.”

  Click. No eye contact. “Yes, I see the letter here.” Click.

  “Like my dad said in the letter, we can’t afford to pay that amount.” I pointed to the aid award letter. “The amount listed here.”

  “Now that your sister is so ill.”

  “Yes. My father had to leave his job to take care of her.”