it’s nothing.” I briefly glanced at him and quickly shifted my gaze to the mirror. In retrospect, I think it would have been good for me to unburden my self. I wanted to tell him; I really did. I wanted to come clean about how I was thinking of leaving the circus; to report about Gargantua and the rube; and about how I almost jumped out of a twelfth-story window the night before; I wanted to tell him about everything but I just couldn’t.
“By the way, I have a message for you from the boss,” Harry said, interrupting my thoughts. “Ingalls wants to see you before the show today. Is it about the rube? What got into you?”
I realized that Harry wasn’t going to back off. When he was curious about something he was like a bulldog that smells meat.
“I gotta go now, Harry. There’s no time. We’ll catch up later,” I said, too anxious to stay there a second longer.
“Whatever you like, Jake,” Harry said with resignation.
I just didn’t want to get into things with Harry or anyone else, for that matter. As a kid, I learned “La ropa sucia se lava en casa.” It’s an old Spanish saying: “Dirty laundry should be washed at home.”
I learned that proverb from Kika, the maid who helped Mama with our house. That old woman had been around for as long as I can remember. The last time I saw her I was fifteen. She was smiling with her toothless grin, standing at the threshold to my room, holding a breakfast tray she made up especially for me.
Kika was born and raised on a ranchito in the hardscrabble mountains outside Chihuahua City. She walked with a limp, dragging her left foot behind her. Her lifeless leg was the result of some childhood fever that had gone untreated for lack of a doctor and the funds to pay one if he’d miraculously materialized. As I recall, Kika’s gray hair was drawn back tightly in a bow, which accentuated both her round face—an artifact of her mestizo heritage—and the quarter-sized mole on her left check.
“Señora, tal vez le hicieron mal de ojo,” Kika had said to my mother some years before at the outset of my horrendous growth.
I remember how Mama listened intensely to her, nodded and responded: “Yes! Yes! Perhaps it was a Kina Hora (evil eye),” she said, referring to an identical Jewish version of that Mexican belief.
Mama and Kika subscribed to the same superstition. One originated with white and blue gauze-covered Bedouins huddled in an ancient date palm oasis, the other among Mayans clad in scarlet macaw feathers crouched in an emerald jungle. Both Mayans and Bedouins, like Mama and Kika, had strained to explain the inexplicable. My father, the rational one, called these explanations buba misas: a grandmother’s foolishness. At first, so did I. But I felt so bad in those days that I wondered if there was something to that “evil eye” business. Perhaps someone had put a spell on me.
I recalled the tray that Kika balanced on her belly that morning when I was fifteen. It was a loving attempt to get me to eat. The azafata was laden with a special breakfast I normally loved: steaming Mexican hot chocolate that smelled of cinnamon, almonds, and cocoa and handmade flour tortillas so fresh they melted the marigold butter she had slathered onto them into shiny riverlets.
When I turned my head away in disgust, Kika looked hurt. She was doing her best to make sense of the mean mask I wore over my adolescent sadness: “Ay mijo, tal vez tu tristeza nació de un susto (Oh, sweetheart, maybe your melancholy was born from a great fright you suffered),” she said.
“Tal vez,” I replied, my anger only slightly diminished by guilt. When she put the tray down on my dresser, I angrily motioned for her to take it away. She stepped closer to hug me but I moved back, afraid that if I let Kika get close I would start to weep and never stop. My tears would wash her, my parents, our meager belongings, and every house in Sunset Heights away in a flash flood of pent-up sorrow. Kika looked at me once again. Slowly, like in my dream, she stretched her right palm up to caress my cheek but she couldn’t reach it.
“Ay, Dios mío,” she called out, shaking her head with a smile that was equal parts grief and wonder. Then Kika picked up the tray with my uneaten breakfast, slowly turned around, and walked out of my room. I watched her limp away. The sound of her dragging foot echoed in my mind as I climbed back into bed to hide from the day.
Most people, besides my family, have no idea that I spent a lot of my life hiding. I was feeling down then, too. So down I was barely eating. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t eaten much since that whole awful incident down by the river. I mentioned the river before; this is as good a time as any to tell you what happened.
It was 1921. I was just fifteen years old, already seven and a half feet tall and still growing. Summer’s blast furnace had really begun to scorch El Paso and business was slow, so Papa gave Ben and me time off from working at the store. Mama had taken Myer, who was seven, with her to the synagogue where she and some other ladies from the Sisterhood were cooking a community meal to welcome Philip Roth, our new rabbi. She left Ben in charge. It didn’t take him long to realize that was a perfect opportunity to get a break from the monotony and heat.
“Come on, don’t be a pill. I’m so bored,” Ben pleaded.
“Mom and Dad told us it’s too dangerous,” I resisted.
“If you don’t come along I can’t go. I promised I’d keep an eye on you.”
“I don’t wanna go,” I insisted.
“Are you becoming a hermit like one of those weirdoes who live in caves in the Sierra Madres?” Ben taunted me.
“We swore we wouldn’t go. Don’t you remember?”
As I saw things, I wasn’t a goody-two-shoes; more than anything, I just wanted to stay home and avoid people. It seemed that everywhere I went in those days, kids and adults teased me. Sometimes their taunts were downright cruel and insulting. They’d play mean tricks; even trip me. So whenever possible I preferred to stay home and keep to myself.
“I know. I know,” Ben replied. “But what Mama and Papa don’t know won’t hurt them. Come on, Jake, you know how much fun it is and how pretty it is down there. Please, I beg you.”
I looked up to my “big” brother. I liked his company and wanted to please him, so reluctantly, I let him talk me into it. If I knew what would soon transpire, I never would have gone.
Within the hour, Ben and I had made our way through the neighborhood. We walked by Vilas Elementary School, passed the Schroeder’s corner grocery and the Chaldean’s barber shop, and descended two flights of rickety wooden steps that led to a rocky mesa. After we hiked down it, we hurried passed the railroad siding next to the icehouse and found ourselves on the well-worn path to the Rio Grande.
The desert foliage dramatically changed as we approached the river. As if by magic, stands of Desert Willows, Salt Cedars, and Russian Olive trees appeared. Ben and I scrambled through the reeds, red flowers, and honeysuckle. We saw multicolored hawks, falcons, and cranes, not ordinarily spotted in town. As we got closer to the water, I could smell the river and the scarce moisture it gifted to the dry desert air. Just the fragrance had a cooling effect.
When we got to the water’s edge, we both peeled down to our rough, cotton summer underwear. Ben didn’t hesitate. He jumped from the saw grass on the edge into the stream, laughing and splashing as he landed in the brown water. Then he stood up and plodded downstream, almost knocked over by the current. Fifty yards down river, he joined two boys he recognized from school. Growing up, I often wished I had as many friends as my brother.
I
