Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

He turned off the light in the kitchen and watched out the window. Freddie had already retired to the blue glow of American Pickers on cable. The police cruiser came down the street, creeping. They hit Butchie with a spotlight. Oh yes — panic inside Big Black. Butchie fired up the engine and pulled out and glared at the house. Joey stuck his hand in the window and shot him the finger as Big Black moved out with the white cop car tagging behind.

Joey was dead meat now. Freddie had started to snore. His bad hearing aid wailed in his ear. Joey took a crocheted caftan and put it over the old man’s legs and sat there wondering how you started a prayer without sounding like an asshole.

* * *

Mrs. Filgate had given him his $30 and a $10 bonus for doing such a good job on her roses. Joey was jogging in the dark, pausing at every corner to make sure Butchie and Salvador weren’t waiting to set the hounds on him. He was going to see Sherri, man, especially tonight. He just knew if he was near Sherri something good was going to happen. He’d be all right with her. It was coming on him in one big rush: Sherri, Sherri, Sherri.

He knew he could cut through the Buena Vista apartment complex and be safe for most of five blocks, cutting in and out of the buildings, scrambling across alleys like a cat. He was home free. Those losers were gone. He put in his buds.

Shawn Phillips. Tom Rush. Chet Baker. Biff Rose.

He watched the traffic on the main drag, not happy about all the lights. But there was no Big Black in sight either way, not hiding behind the bowling alley, not down the hill in the big parking lot of Vons market. Clear. He ran across, slapping his high-tops loud and sharp and the bell over the door in the donut shop pinged and Sherri came out from the back room and smiled at him.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How you?”

“Good. You?”

“Slow, hon. Slow night.”

He stared at her.

She busied herself with rearranging the bear claws. She glanced up at him, leaning on the glass case. She had this way of looking up from under her brows. She said, “What?”

“Nothin’.”

She gave him that woman-smile and said, “You don’t look like it’s nothing.”

“Sherri,” he said. “Do you pray?”

“I prayed you’d come in tonight,” she said.

She laughed when his mouth opened and nothing came out.

“Cutie,” she said.

Light. Everything is made of light. Me. Sherri. Light.

“Can I touch your cheek?” he blurted. He was in uncharted territory now. He was flying into a cloud.

Real slow, she leaned forward. She moved her hair away from her face. She closed her eyes. He swallowed. He reached across the counter and laid his hand on her cheek. She had three piercings in her ear. Her skin was so soft. He rubbed it with his thumb. She opened her eyes. He took his hand away.

Hazel eyes.

“What was that, Joey?” she asked.

“I…” Light. “I don’t know.”

They laughed a little. Faces red. She breathed deep and shook her head and knitted her brow a little and stared.

A car pulled up. Cut its lights. He went to a table in the far end of the shop and listened to her sell a sailor a dozen donut holes. When she’d rung him up and he’d banged back out, she unlocked the white door to the back room and peeked out.

“You want to come keep me company while I cook donuts?” she said.

“Can I?”

She shrugged one shoulder.

“Who’ll know?”

She was grinning real wicked now. And he was feeling his pulse inside his jeans. From a touch? It was her look. Her smile. It was the smile. He was feeling fire and fluid deep down inside himself.

He got up. He shambled toward her. Light. Light. Light. He went in the back room. She closed the door and locked it. Bags everywhere of flour. Bags of sugar. Plastic jugs full of chocolate. It smelled like sugar and grease. Sherri smelled like sugar. His jaws hurt. His heart raced. She stood too close to him.

Her body was hot in her white donut shop uniform. He could feel her. He stared at her face. He stared at her breasts. She had powdered sugar on her hands. His hands were shaking again. She breathed into his face.

“Joey,” she said, softly.

He closed his eyes.

“Do you want to touch my breasts?”

“Yes.”

“You can.”

“Okay.”

He looked, and she had turned toward him. He put his hand out — only one finger at first. He touched her breast where he thought her nipple was. Her bra was dense and thick. He pressed softly, but didn’t feel anything but layers of cotton.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said.

He cupped her breast and held her. He put his other hand on her other breast. She moved the zipper of her frock down. He put his face to her cleavage. He smelled her. He breathed her all in. All the sugar and her sweat and her perfume and he could smell her lotion and her shampoo and her laundry soap and he pressed his mouth to her and said, “Could you call me Willie?” And she sighed and pulled the material aside. He took her nipple in his mouth.

“Willie,” she said.

He had just begun to weep when the bell dinged and Butchie came into the shop.

The last shot fired in the Battle of Chametla hit Private Arnulfo Guerrero in the back of the head. It took out the lower-right quadrant, knocking free a hunk of bone roughly the size and shape of a broken teacup. This shot was fired by a federal trooper, who then shouldered his weapon and walked to a cantina on the outskirts of town, where he ate a fine pork stew with seven corn tortillas and a cup of pulque. The shot was witnessed by Guerrero’s best friend, Corporal Ángel García, and by Guerrero’s dog, Casan. Casan was a floppy-eared Alsatian he’d stolen from a federales base the year before.

“Por Dios, Arnulfo,” García muttered as he stuffed straw and a long strip of his tunic into the gaping head wound. “What have they done to you?”

Guerrero writhed on the ground, his teeth clenched in a silent rage, froth collecting on his lips.

García stanched the bleeding and wrapped a dirty field dressing around and around his friend’s head.

Casan stood to the side, whining and fretting.

Troops were everywhere, and though the Battle of Chametla was over, García didn’t know it. So he pulled his comrade onto his shoulders in a straining carry — for Guerrero was at least a foot taller and many pounds heavier — and struggled to a copse of cottonwoods beside a muddy creek. He put his friend down gently on a bed of leaves and cottonwood fluff, and he tied Casan’s rope leash to the trunk. Then he snuck down to the creek and filled his hat with water. He tried to wet his friend’s lips, but the dying man was already too far gone to drink.

They’d come out of the mining lands of Rosario, Sinaloa, full of revolution and fun. Men were raised to fight and enjoy fighting. None dared admit they were weary of it, weary of fear, and each had learned to dream, and dreamed at all hours — dreamed while sleeping, while awake and marching, while fighting. Only dreaming carried them through the unending battles.

They’d drunk their fill, slept with country girls in every village, ridden trains to battle. Both Guerrero and García were excited by the trains — their first train rides. Then they were sickened by the rocking of the freight cars and choked by the smoke boiling back over the roof, where they fought for space and tried not to be forced off. They coughed black cinders at night.

Casan was just one of their treasures, one of the fruits of their exploits. They’d stolen guitars, rifles, horses. Guerrero had stolen underwear from haciendas, and García himself had stolen a cigar from the pocket of a sleeping federal captain. They’d seen men hang and watched villages burn.