El Güey de San Itario

El Güey de San Felipe
by Mark Plimsoll
       
Dear Mom:

        I took your advice about cheating on my husband.
        He's glad to be back home after Christmas in New Hampshire, back to chasing illegals along the border. Look what he wrote on the fridge in those word-magnets you gave us: "Love will always warm dark blossom moon nature. Wet summer less season star flaked out breeze ice."
        Almost makes me forget the way his little eyes light up when he makes this house the valley of the shadow of death, whispering his Mexican swear words that I used to not understand. I tried to explain that real Americans pull for the underdog; let them all in, I say. Hell, Americans use a third of the world's resources, at least let a third of them in. Until we get as crowded as India, we've got room. He hates that discussion and blames you that I'm so "mal educada" and don't know how to behave. You know, like expecting him to clean up after himself occasionally. He hates my secular humanism. He says, If you can't respect me AND what I do for a living, then we should divorce.
        Maybe he's just not brave enough to leave, like dad. You took it pretty well, back then. But dad never went through Boot Camp, as he says, broken down and built back up again into one of these Semper Fi thoughtless and fearlessly obedient grunts, blind to human suffering, oblivious of the big picture. I should have listened to you about marrying military then, although it seemed Border Patrol was a step in the right direction at first.
        Since the baby died, we hardly talk. He blames me. He never says it, he ignores me, thinks I'm crazy and mad all the time. I want to disappear. My breasts are still swollen and painful. This week, the Prozac kicked in, I noticed people smiled at me in the HEB. Men. I smiled back, sometimes.
        One morning I cooked eggs and onions and when he wouldn't answer the phone for me, nose buried in that stupid newspaper, I threw the whole fry-pan in the sink. A glass shattered and everything roared with sizzle and clouds of misty steam. He jumped up in his underpants and reached for his gun, which he wasn't wearing. Phone rang off the hook, I laughed and laughed at him, so he stomps off all red and sweaty to put on his storm trooper boots and go out to probably kill some invading Mexicans. It's amazing what it takes to wake some people up.
        Damned squirrels rustling that palm tree's grass skirt again, right by the window. Noisy rat-monkeys. Hate 'em.
        One day, REALLY depressed, I ran into this skinny guy, not my type really, scraggly beard and too sincere. We talked after I dropped a jar of hamburger dills in aisle fourteen of HEB and pickled his shoe. I stood there like a zombie. Are you Ok? What's wrong? Speak to me... Are you epileptic? Can I give you a ride someplace?
        I told this guy, let's call him Gary for now, everything. I cried and swore at brutish husbands, abandonment by mothers (Ooops! Sorry mom), fathers who flee the nest, the Aztec God Prozac who robs my authenticity, the weakness of the newborn, and God's ambivalent finger of doom. He said he understood, gave me his phone number and a hug, then left.
        So I call. He invites me to go swimming, in the middle of winter. Says the San Felipe Creek that runs through the center of town comes out of springs in the golf course at seventy-two degrees, year 'round. What should I do?
        I learned a little Spanish from a friend, took notes. My Lone Ranger and his tonto Chicano "cuates" carried the TV into the back yard to watch Mexican broadcast soccer, fajitas, slabs of greasy animal ribs on the fake-charcoal gas grill, slathered with bar-b-cue sauce like congealed blood. Then they crawl under each other's pickup trucks doing important things like installing blacklights. It's a cosmetic thing, ese, mom. You wouldn't understand. Tiene que ver with meeting each other in parking lots at night. Right now, the TV set blares the current super-game, and when their team scores, I hear them all hoot like beer-spraying gorillas and do some tribal dance where they kick their cowboy bootheels together and bounce off each other's chests and shout Ay, Güey, which rhymes with highway and means cuckold. Mexican swear words are terrible. Mothers are worthless: chaotic, a mess, a punch on the jaw. Later tonight he'll hurry us both off to bed, then he'll slobber my neck and ears with stale beer and tobacco kisses, whisper how much he loves me while he gropes for something to excite me. Ándale, ya. ¿Terminaste, papacito?
        I'm gonna dig out my Bikini and snorkel gear, grab the cell phone, and get out of here before they notice I'm gone.
        Did I ever thank you for taking us to Bimini when dad left? I'm so grateful you sacrificed, I know you did, so that we kids would be exposed to more than our little New Hampshire village. I still have the mask, fins, and snorkel, and thanks to that French guy you picked up, we learned how to use them.
        Write more a little later. Au Revoir. Your "Hija de la Chihuahua"
                ==============================
        I'm back.
        We met in the park. I changed in the front seat of the car, hid under a long jacket. When I got out, I reached in to get my snorkel and fins on the passenger seat, and I could feel his eyes, but when I turned and looked at him, he wasn't looking. Made me blush.
        We sat in the sunshine on a little spillway dam between the steep Carrizo cane banks and put our fins on. The water bent like a sheet of clear glass, fell over and shattered into thick curtains of huge droplets that softly thundered on the rocks below and sent up clouds of cool mist. He held my hand, said if we jumped in together and swam side by side, we would see the same things at the same time. So we counted to three, and jumped in. The water slapped me, then hugged me, like a wet kiss all over.
        Schools of minnows swirled in curved clouds like flocks of aluminum birds above banks of water plants, held up by tiny bubbles, that had little white air-bubble filled flowers. Two flying-saucer shaped silouhettes, slightly darker than the background glow of dusty green, became two dinner-plate size painted turtles who Frisbeed off into the weeds after they saw us. We dove down to the original watercourse in the deepest parts of the stream where water once cut through limestone rock, and on the smooth bottom, big schools of twenty or thirty fish, like fleets of resting jets, various sizes. When spooked, they raise their fins and glide off together like teeny sucker-sharks. Gary says they're from South America, and are called Rafael's Barking Catfish, though we never heard a bark.
        Gary pointed out a small fish tucked into the seaweed, reddish-orange and cream with fins like three inch long streaming handkerchiefs. An exotic dumped from an aquarium, wouldn't live long. Out of its element.
        Gary pointed out a foot-long black fish, five feet below us, under poking out of some weeds, motionless. I could hardly see it. We got a good breath of air and descended, with Gary's arm and finger pointing at it. We swam as if waterlogged, to try not to spook it. Its huge mouth and the mottled skin black as an asphalt shadow, its eyes bugged out like white pills. We drifted so close, so slow not to scare it, that just when I thought it was dead Gary's finger touched it right on the forehead. It turned and vanished in a cloud of dust shaken from the plants. Gary and I blew bubbles and rocketed to the surface, burst into the air laughing like idiots. Gary said it was blind. Poor thing.
        The steering wheel made it harder to wriggle back into my street clothes under the long coat. The car had heated up in the sun, and I started to sweat. Then I rejected all of Gary's offers to buy me lunch, you know how cloying men are when they want something, and stopped by HEB for something unnecessary as an excuse. Later on, I smuggled my wet bikini and snorkel gear into the house.
        That night Gary called me at home, and for once my jailer didn't answer the phone. Gary wants to come over someday, become a friend of the family, so we could continue to see each other without feeling like we're hiding something we're not. Says he has no romantic interest in me, thinks I need a friend. Right. Men will be boys. He says that my husband's jealousy might force him to reconsider things, and treat me better. Gary's a relocated Yankee also, but doesn't seem to appreciate Macho Mexican culture. I haven't told him my husband graduated with honors from the Marines as a trained killer, and that in Texas the law tends to look favorably upon an overly zealous husband who kills both his wife and another man at the same time, cuckolded or not.
        One night I forced hubby to go to a Chicano poetry reading, to sensitize him to the traditional female's plight. These two ladies from San Antonio talked about "the Chicano struggle" with poetry that celebrated their precious victimhood, proudly written while drunk and romantically stumbling through the nostalgia of their grandmother's kitchens, redolent with hot oil and cilantro. Needless to say, hubby loved it. I wanted to yell at them to grow up, to become a real artist, those who go beyond the myopia of adolescent self-interest to live the Golden Rule with the Tough Love of an honest education to see things from multiple viewpoints. They blindly blamed Anglos for Chicano problems, and never acknowledged how much they owe to you hated Gringa moms and other secular humanists who stopped buying lettuce and grapes in support. Even though we kids called you crazy, you did it not for your own personal gain, but for principals which Chicanos haven't recognized yet.
        The local workforce, these Chicanos or Americanized Mexicans, whatever, a lot of them practice what I call Ricochet Discrimination- they don't like to go to Mexico yet they cater first to anyone speaking Spanish. My Mexican husband didn't want to believe it at first, until we entered stores separately a couple of times. Now he understands. Its like women who want equality with men, then they take up chewing tobacco and scratching themselves in public, copying the worst behaviors instead of the best.
        Imagine how my sweet Mexican Marine would smear Gary into the ground like a cigarette butt. No contest. To see what would happen, I invited my husband to go snorkeling, just him and me, and of course he said it was too cold, so I dared him. The macho, even though he's not such a good swimmer, he accepted!
        We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, first time in about a year. We got home refreshed, energized and clean, and raced into the bedroom. Afterwards we lay tangled together in the cool breeze coming through the window and laughed at the squirrels playing salsa music in the palm tree skirt. He thanked me for asking him to go along. Said he wanted to date me again, and elope when I believed in him, especially back when I believed it when he said all parents think No one's good enough for my daughter. We laughed and remembered how we lied to you about being married so you'd let us share a bedroom in your house.
        Then he said something that almost makes this secular humanist believe in God. He looked at me and said when we kept going underwater to keep warm, he felt this pressure right between his eyes, at first it felt like the silicone of his mask, then he thought that God's finger had touched him right between the eyes.

Love,
                Your Mexicanized Daughter.