Three days after her birth, her mother’s death, and the inaugural snowflake of Winter Storm Uri, Paloma Vega opened her eyes.
The neighborhood bunkered in the hospital’s chapel, waiting it out and defrosting. Ruby, the housekeeper with the emerald eyelids and celadon scrubs, had ushered them in single file. Jelly slinked against the stained glass and watched the saints’ lascivious eyes follow her around the room. Like fire ants, kids crawled over the pews. A rosary in one hand and both hands in the air, Nivea was a crucified Saguaro located ten feet away from everyone. She had triple-masked her face and her cane slashed the air at greetings and farewells. Betsy, the projects’ curandera, folded over the pulpit as she tried to decipher the King James Holy Bible.
“This story has no magic,” she muttered, while her husband, Tony, hunted through the cupboards for communion wine.
From diametrically opposed corners, Griselda and Chela mad-dogged each other. Afflicted with a bad resaca, Johnny snored like train tracks until . . .
Fósforo flew through the hospital doors with a proclamation: “She’s awake.”
They received the news the same way they received the sputtering blackouts. Today, they said, was the day their world began ending. It would be a gradual process, with hiccups, fits, and rattles like death was in general. Paloma had lain dormant in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. Now, she fixed her lupine gaze on the world. The next day she died, and the hospital nuns and cleaning staff of San Medardo Hospital applauded.
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The city bus did not come to a full stop until it reached the intersection of Brazos and Guadalupe, a half a block after it pancaked the body of a woman lying supine on the asphalt and only after a man selling thornless roses on the street flapped his hands and screamed that two feet were sticking out from under the bus and that as this was not the Wizard of Oz, how could this be. In the man’s defense, the woman was wearing high heels red like lipstick in the movies.
The driver sagged in his chair. He was a moon-sized man with a MoonPie face flecked with craters. His long, dirty fingernails released the wheel. The whole bus hissed. He was a neighborhood Cucuy notorious for his game of Terrorize the Passenger.
Normally, riders would pay the fare and secure a yellow slip of paper good for a transfer to the next bus. But he’d claim passengers didn’t drop enough nickels into the farebox when they did, call them ladrones, and threaten them with eviction from his bus if they didn’t pay up a quarter or a dime more. He’d never offer a paper transfer, and if a passenger went to sit down and then ran up and asked for one, he would say he already gave them one and that everyone had to pay their own way and there were no free rides in this country and that if you didn’t like it, swim back across the river. He made old men weep, left them to fry in the sun. Other times he’d hole punch the wrong date and time and then they’d have to get into it with the next driver. He’d deliberately run five minutes late, and everyone would miss their connectors and have to wait for the next one. He’d blow past some stops, especially if he saw a woman with child.
On many days, feathers and fur decorated the bottom of his bus. His reaper of a vehicle had razed a number of stray dogs and cats. When he saw a lump in the road, he’d fail to change lanes. If the lump moved, he’d fully depress the gas pedal. This time he accelerated by instinct, barely registering that his chariot was about to crush yet another crumpled mass, another pile of roadkill clinging to life. Plus, as he would later explain, it was sleeting hard, and he could barely see through the shivering wipers. When he heard and felt the thud, he knew it was something large like a chow chow or maybe even a deer. That would be a first, he thought. His mouth may have salivated. His tongue may have surveyed the roof of his mouth in a greedy swipe. By the arrival of the fourth police car, his mind had completed the figure eight of regret, and shortly thereafter, he fainted.
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Griselda was on that bus. She saw what happened. She was the woman with hair wrapped in a red bonnet and eyes covered by a tasteful pair of aqua sunglasses. They helped her see the world. So, people wouldn’t know she was spying on them during secret moments like when they gave someone side-evil-eye or picked their nose. The bus was a tin of sardines. Griselda sat in the back stairwell and had to wrap herself around a pole when it lurched to a stop. The crowd hollered and disembarked into the falling snow. Masks came off like chones, and the crowd gasped for air, exhaling smoke signals.
A young man, a construction worker probably, sunbaked bronze and sinewy with one arm in a cast, tugged at the woman’s right shoe with his good arm. She wouldn’t budge. The crowd murmured. The woman in the bus’s undercarriage was Chela Vargas they said, pointing out the tattoo on her left ankle, now dangling in mid-air, with her first name in filigree. She was exactly the type of woman to get a tattoo of her own name. Even in death Chela did not impress Griselda. She focused on the possibility of news cameras. She was glad she was returning from church and dressed to the nines, color-coordinated umbrella in tow. She rifled through her purse for a compact. “Always look your best” was her motto.
She rehearsed a speech: “My name is Griselda Torres of 1015 San Fernando, and I am sixty-four years old,” she would say, and the newscaster would joke about how she didn’t look it, and Griselda would coquettishly smile and pretend she was hard of hearing so that he would have to repeat himself. She would say she was an innocent bystander and personally shook up, that Chela was a friend, lingering too long on the vowels to signal to the audience at home that she was being facetious, as well as an across-the-street neighbor in Desire Homes, the most infamous housing project in the city of Lloró, and they’d been friends wink wink a long time, maybe twenty years; when they first met, she went by the last name Bermudez and wore eyes feral and sepia-toned like a bruja alley cat and hustling legs which she brought to America after days navigating chicken buses and an underground tunnel below the stank Rio Grande; before she married Griselda’s ex-husband Guillermo Vargas and won her green card and took up residence in Griselda’s old home, and Griselda moved across the street to keep an eye on the two of them, and she saw a whole lot, but Guillermo died five years ago, and after that Chela kept herself holed up in her apartment unless she had to make a quick run to the Texaco or the Family Dollar, and she always made sure to show her legs, but that’s just how sluts are.
Griselda would tell the cameras all of this, smiling again a shark smile. She’d end with a cliffhanger: “This was the second time in a week that Chela was struck by a moving vehicle and the second time she died.”
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The cameras never showed up, too busy covering bodies popsicling in their homes and dry drowning in their virus-ridden bodies and the compounding death toll. Always Something Wrecker Service towed the bus with Chela under it. No one even bothered with the jaws of life. The San Antonio Express-News covered the story in five lines two days later. They got the intersection wrong and missed the story’s obvious newsworthiness. The driver was put on administrative leave. The neighborhood waited for autopsy results. The police were investigating, adding her to the heap of unsolved mysteries.
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The skin on Sparkles’s face glittered, especially in the creases. Every morning, she woke up to the wild rooster’s crow and tottered out of her home armed with a plastic blue broom and matching plastic blue dustpan. Carefully, she swept the fractured sidewalk and then the section of pavement and potholes in front of her apartment, and she collected the debris in the pan and went inside.
No one gossiped about her because there was nothing to say. She was a fixture of the projects like the house sparrows and the absence of things. No one knew her real name or age. They assumed that the folds on her face were like rings in a tree trunk. She never spoke. She never hosted visitors. She never went anywhere. It was unclear how she paid the rent or if she paid for anything at all. When caseworkers and Internet salesmen and Meals on Wheels arrived to offer their services and shill their wares, she met them at the door with a scowl and her broom upside down. The world left her alone.
She only rose from her bed of blankets on the floor for an hour a day. Once back inside, she sifted through the dustpan, fishing out the pennies and the clothespins and the cigarette butts until all that was left was dirt, which she swallowed. A long time ago, a doctor lectured her about the importance of minerals, so she fed on cosmic stardust, which in turn, she suspected, kept the neighborhood alive.
Days passed, and she stopped appearing, and the cold snapped, and people coughed, and snow fell, and ice laminated, and the lights extinguished, and the pipes burst, and the faucets thirsted. Silt mountained where she no longer swept, and eventually, the city bulldozers arrived. As they parted the mound, her body dropped out. It wore bitemarks. Rumors blazed a trail. A small girl who no one knew said she saw Sparkles walking to the dying creek with a pail maybe to flush her toilet, and she slipped on the ice, and her body turtled and vanished in the tall grass. Before she died, Chela said she saw vultures walking like hoodlums for a week. Johnny, her next-door neighbor, was convinced it was COVID-19.
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Orange is the color of jail clothes, a high risk of terrorist attacks, and hazmat suits. Streaks of it blazed across the early-morning sky. Johnny Gamez was the first to stare at the tangerine sun, which was fat at the sides, a solar body with love handles. “This is an unhealthy sunrise,” he muttered to himself. He would light San Judas candles when he got home. For now, he rotated the car radio’s volume up a notch. Union Underground’s “Turn Me On, Mr. Deadman” played.
He’d clocked out from his night shift at the airport cleaning up after people rushing away like reverse zombies and then spent the night boozing at Noche Caliente, an icehouse on the Southside, and cruising down Military Drive. His hydraulicized car humped the street as he went. He’d been out of sorts since his knocked-up side chick, Jelly, had left him forever at the Malthouse on Zarzamora over a dinner of cheeseburgers and taquitos. Jelly, who even with child was all leg, tore into him with her flint arrowhead eyes. Her merciless Aztec ancestors laughed at him, and her thin, penciled-in eyebrows slanted.
“I am leaving you,” she said.
“Why?” he replied.
But she had already walked out of his Impala. The pregnant crane swayed to one side, pausing on the question. The car door of a Camaro idling two parking spots over opened wide, and with less than two flicks of those long legs that just never quit, she got in and took off.
Now, the road was a fever dream of ice, and tears fell down his face and obscured his already impaired vision. Later, cops confirmed a blood alcohol limit of .25 as he died in a hospital bed at San Medardo. Before he went, he whimpered for Jelly. An attendant brought him packets of Knott’s Berry Farm strawberry jam while nuns in gray habits prayed for him like mourning doves cooing.
The accident was not all his fault. Johnny had swerved his Impala so as not to hit Chela. The light pole with the fussing fuse box sliced his automobile right down the middle like a split banana. The cavitated body of Chela Vargas laid flat, arepa-style, on Guadalupe as if it wanted to merge, disappear, shapeshift into the pocked pavement. A halo of rocks and cement and charcoal and glass and metal traced the outlines of her body.
Chela was a constellation now.
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Somebody should have put the dog down when the German shepherd first began nosing around Desire Homes, its Lego red roofs like blood over the tenants’ heads. The shepherd was a stray or so he would have them believe with his tattered green collar. All the neighborhood strays were known quantities. Every living thing was a mixed breed here. Now, here was some Anglo police dog sniffing around. The drug dealers with the shiny cars parked out front were on DEFCON 4 as were the cats. He dashed across the snow-covered dirt lawns and parking lots with purpose, head to the ground, tracking a scent. Rumor said he was a cannibal. The chow-mix that ate the scraps tossed by the Vietnamese laundromat owner had gone missing like our quarters in the man’s machines.
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“Don’t satanic ritual me!”
Nivea banged open her apartment’s screen door, her fingers pointing at no one and at everyone. At the trio of dwarves who lived a few doors down, at the alley cats, especially the tomcats, at the workers going off to work like lemmings off a cliff, at the vagrants on bikes, at the woman who jumped, sometimes almost headfirst, into the orange dumpsters and hoarded away aluminum cans and Coke bottles in trash bags, at the juvenile delinquents who threw homemade Molotov cocktails and set the orange dumpsters ablaze for entertainment on the weekends, and especially at the children. These children with their bald feet and tribal faces, billboards for counterfeit smiles. Privately, she knew, their masks were wooden, their eyes, emptied. They played in the crabgrass and during downpours, in the black water by the sewer drain that didn’t drain.
She had seen children like this once before. When she was young, her family vacationed on a beach near a pueblo of indígenas. One day, a boy offered her a conch shell. They didn’t speak the same language, but she knew what that meant. Before she could decline, a roar of joy sliced the salt air. The boy beckoned her a few steps away to a rotating circle of children. In the center was a flamingo the color of a calamine cloud. One wing wilted halfway to the ground. Fishing wire was fastened to one of its limbs. The flamingo stood stock-still except when someone reached out to pet it. Then it would swing its body and snap its bill. The children marveled. The circle pulsed. Minutes passed like this until, without warning, the boy macheted the flamingo’s head. The flamingo’s neck bloomed an unholy red, and its feet danced. The circle produced another roar of joy. Chela’s feet wanted to dance too, but instead, they ran back to her family. She told her parents what those children would do if an angel had landed in their village.
They had claimed Paloma’s mother, a nameless, mute woman, and Chela, her neighbor and comadre. That morning, they had dumped Chela’s body in the street in front of where they both lived. Nivea was certain she was next. She kept trying to count the Four Horsemen, but she also kept losing count. She gasped, seeing the shepherd see her and wagging his tail, and she finished her pointing.
“The Mark of the Beast is upon us!” she yelled, and the door slammed shut.
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After Johnny hit and stayed, the dog feasted. As he gnashed at her ear, Fósforo pummeled him with a mop. But you can’t mop away bad news. One of the drug dealers shot the dog twice from a nearby window. Vibices decorated Chela’s body like vitiligo. Her hands degloved. With only one remaining ear, Chela was dead. Long Live La Van Gogh became a neighborhood salute and slogan, something to put on a screen-printed T-shirt.
On the day of her death, hundreds of bullets fired at the sky. Nivea banshee wailed for a week. As if in celebration, Fósforo incinerated the mophead and carried his torch until the Las Palmas Winn Dixie, where the cops cornered him, and he waved his torch at them, and they waved tasers and then cuffs, and he received ten years for assault on a public servant.
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Chunks of cinderblock and sidewalk stacked around Chela’s first corpse like a slum Stonehenge, which the Law replaced with a chalk outline. A month later, a coroner examined the two corpses of Chela Vargas side by side, marveled at the symmetry of their features and indentations, and diagnosed them both as deaths by stoning.
And finally, the Nightly Eyewitness News at 11 seized on the scandal, elongating the most lurid details: the extramarital affair, the executed dog, the lapidation, the dog whistles of “thugs and drugs” and “gang violence.”
Griselda Torres barked the same soundbite on two different news channels: “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” she declared. “We’ve been throwing stones and bullets at each other for far too long.”
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When the power came back on for everyone but those who hadn’t paid their power bills, when life slumped onward, when COVID-19 consumed the lives of Griselda and Nivea and Fósforo in the county jail smelling of sulfur and sauna and Betsy and her spells and Tecate-smelling Tony and the remaining neighborhood elders, when the death toll was insurmountable, when toiling day and night for a minimal wage distracted the adults, when drugs, sex, and rearing infants diverted the teenagers, when childhood devoured the children, no one remained to bear witness to an extinction event.
And with no opposition, developers descended, bulldozers returned and bulldozed, the city cited arcane code sections and condemned properties and people, property taxes swelled, real-estate speculators swindled now-jobless families out of their only prized possessions. Paid pennies on the dollar and discarded like pennies on the pavement, the change demanded change. Rallies and protests blossomed like fire and died quick like cactus flowers.
It was too late. White blight like black mold is tough to exterminate. Those conquistadors conquered (again), and when homes vanished to be replaced by other homes for other people, the neighborhood and its people vanished too. Years later, news stories discussed the community’s reverse diaspora to Mexico City and Medellín and Maracaibo, even though most were raised on the backs of eight, nine, ten generations of American-born strivers bending, always bending, to the dream. These stories were also false.
Depleted by a virus and by poverty, We the People evaporated. The survivors stepped into the murals painted on the sides of our shops and restaurants. They rejoined Frida Kahlo and Manuel Marulanda and Simón Bolívar and Bugs and Lola Bunny and El Gato Raval. Crested Caracaras and Andean Condors roosted on their shoulders. They Sharpied in unibrows and donned Carnival costumes and aimed submachine guns at the yuppies eating at the trendiest eateries, which had been plastered with Desire Homes memorabilia. They could repurpose the iconography, but they could not repurpose the icons.
Like their ancestors in the burial mounds and burial trees and potter’s fields, the dispossessed knew the end was no end. Sure, their mouths would be asphyxiated under the weight of strip malls and big-box stores, their bodies desecrated by natural-gas pipelines always spilling. La gente always demolished, immolated, torturado, brutalizado. The violator violates. But the people endure, trading in the stuffy, groaning Victorians and projects and ramshackle trailers for McMansions and cookie-cutter condominiums and little boxes that look the same.
Because even ghosts need homes to haunt.
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