Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

“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 traffic, 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.

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.

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.