“Pendejo,” Juanito said and stood up, shoving the phone back in his pocket.
The house was vacant, a rental property between occupants. He began to pace back and forth underneath the eave, reaching his hand out and letting his fingertips graze the waterfall coming from the half-finished roof. Sticking close to the side of the house, he rounded the corner into the back of the house and looked down the sloped walkway that led to the laundry room. Juanito had found one of the other roofers taking a nap between the washing machine and the dryer on the first day at the site, curled up on the floor like a cat. He was going to wake him up but Robert laughed and said to leave him there. It was getting dark and the men were packing up to leave. Robert taped a note to the kid’s boot that said “You are fired Sleeping Beauty” and they left him there.
The door to the laundry room was cracked and water was running inside from the saturated ground. Juanito sprinted across the yard, his boots kicking up water in front of him on the concrete walkway. He stuck his head inside and saw that the water was pooling in the back of the room and the yellow linoleum floor was already beginning to curl up at the edges. The owner was going to be pissed. Juanito stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a limp cigarette. It was damp but he was still able to light it. The air in the laundry room was thick and the smoke from his cigarette clung to his skin and hung in a cloud around his head. Juanito climbed up on the washing machine and opened the window behind it. Kneeling on the lid of the washing machine, he pressed his forehead against the screen and breathed in deeply.
The water ran off of the roof of the laundry room and gathered in a trench that ran the 6-foot length of the yard, forming a river that disappeared underneath the fence. Juanito squinted his eyes and watched the river. The sound of the rain left so gradually that he did not realize the rain had stopped until the flow of the river slowed and then stopped altogether. Juanito sat back on his heels and lit another cigarette, his eyes fixed on the now stagnant water.
Beyond the river, beyond the fence, beyond the ditch that separated the houses, in another house up on a hill, another world, a teenage girl stepped out onto the back porch that faced Juanito and looked up at the sky. She smiled and leapt forward, clearing the porch steps and landing squarely in the mud underneath. She laughed as the mud splattered up her rain boots and the legs of her jeans. Juanito froze, afraid that any movement would draw her attention over the fence.
She looked down at her own feet as they forged a path through the mud and disappeared from Juanito’s line of vision. Seconds later, he heard the sloshing sound of her boots on the other side of the laundry room. He ducked beneath the window and slid off of the washing machine. He eased up onto the dryer and leaned against the other window. The girl was standing with her back to the door to a laundry room identical to his hideout. She pulled off her boots and wiped her muddy hands on the seat of her jeans before laying her hand on the doorknob of the laundry room. Her hand froze as she looked over her shoulder towards Juanito. He ducked his head before she spotted him, pressing his face against the top of the dryer. When he heard a door open beyond the fence, he slowly raised his head again. Of course she hadn’t seen him, Juanito thought, how could she have? It felt like thousands of miles separating them. She left the door open. Waiting until she had her back turned, he opened the window over the dryer.
The girl stood staring at the back wall of the tiny building, her head cocked to the side for several minutes. The room looked empty- no washer, no dryer. Juanito wondered what she saw in the blank wall. The girl suddenly came to life, seeming to do several things at once. She pulled her long blonde hair back in a ponytail, turned on a radio that he could not see, shed her gray sweatshirt and started dancing all at once. Juanito sat back on his heels on the edge of the dryer, adding to the distance between him and the girl. He sensed something strange about her, she was moving to quickly, like she was stuck on fast forward. She turned to what must have been a table on the side of the room and began moving things around with her unnatural speed, humming along with the radio to a song that Juanito had never heard before. Her work began to slow and then she stepped away from the table and stood directly in front of the doorway. The sky was still gray with clouds and the light behind her seemed to be projecting her like a movie. Juanito watched as she held her arms over her head and arched her back, stretching before turning her back to him again.
Grabbing something from the table, she slashed the wall in front of her, leaving a trail of bright blue paint. The wall came alive underneath her hands. The shape of her torso underneath the thin tank top, the swell of her hips, the way her ponytail swayed from side to side as she painted- they all disappeared as Juanito watched the images appear on the wall. She painted for hours without stopping until finally she threw her paintbrush on the floor beneath her and spun on her heels to the door. She walked out of the laundry room and grabbed her boots, running through the muddy yard in her socked feet.
Juanito waited for an hour for her to return before leaving the laundry room and crossing the yard to the fence that separated the houses. He paced back and forth along the fence, waiting for a sign from the family in the other house. He walked over the corner of the yard and climbed up on an overturned wheelbarrow to peer at the girl’s house. It was dark; everyone had left or was sleeping. He pulled himself over the fence and easily jumped over the water in the ditch that separated the properties. He climbed to the top of the girl’s fence and landed in a squat, perched close to the ground. No lights came on inside the house. With his eyes on the house, he ran across the yard to the laundry room and jumped inside. Inside, he leaned against the wall and gently pulled the door shut. The light from the bare bulb dangling overhead seemed to penetrate Juanito’s eyelids as he pinched them shut. Unaccustomed to the light, he opened one eye and reached out for the light switch on the wall. He was going to turn off the light when he noticed the painting over the switch. A woman sat at a table, leaning on her elbows. Her long black hair hung loose down her back as she stared ahead of her. Underneath the table was a young boy, his head resting on her barefeet.
Juanito reached out and traced the outline of the woman on the wall. Her sharp profile, the single tear that ran down her cheek. He sucked in air and stepped closer, his nose pressing against the wall.
“Mamma?” he whispered. He looked beneath the table at the shape of the sleeping boy in the blue pajamas. Tucked in the crook of the sleeping boy’s arm was a red blanket that spilled out onto the floor around him. It was the night that his father did not come home from work. His mother sat at the table all night waiting for him. He slept on the floor waiting for his mother.
Juanito closed his eyes and stepped into the middle of the room. He was afraid to open them. The wind picked up outside of the room and he sensed the light flickering. After several deep breaths, he opened his eyes and looked down at the floor. Slowly, carefully, he raised his eyes to the wall directly in front of him- first at the wall in its entirety and then at each image alone. The vibrant colors painted Juanito’s childhood, but not in chronological order. Directly above the lonely image of his mother, was his sister’s wedding just before he moved to the U.S. Most of the guests’ faces were too undefined to identify, but he could pinpoint his mother and sister, holding hands and laughing. Juanito laughed out loud when he saw his uncle bent over behind the gift table vomiting. Tio never could hold his liquor.
That girl, Juanito thought, must be an angel. He took his time, pouring over each painted scene, struggling to remember all of the details, to fill in the wholes left by the artist. He paused to say a prayer of thanks when he reached a scene of several shirtless youths fishing in a spring. Warmth spread over every inch of his skin as he recalled the heat of the sun hitting his bare back when he went fishing with his brothers.
Juanito took small shuffling steps as he studied the mural of his life. When he reached the back wall, the wall that he watched the angel paint from over the fence, he became disoriented. Initially, he believed the river to be the Rio Conchos. If he followed the spring where they fished as children, it would lead him all the way to the Rio Conchos. Stepping back, he realized that it was the Rio Grande. The wide river cut down the wall, separating his life in Mexico from his life in the U.S. Standing at the edge of the river was a young woman. Unlike the other painted figures, who were all painted in profile, she was facing Juanito. She seemed to be staring right at Juanito. Her hair was pulled into a thick braid that fell over her shoulder. Her coffee-colored eyes were half-closed and one corner of her mouth was raised slightly in a smile. He raised his hand to her image, but pulled it back before touching the wet paint. His hand balled into a fist and he punched the wall just above the girl on the wall.
“Camila!” He gasped and fell to his knees. He began to hyperventilate and held tightly to his waist as if speaking her name sucked all of the air from his lungs.
She stood at the edge of their village the night he left. He was worried that she was going to cry but she didn’t. Her eyes seemed focused on something above his head as he spoke to her. He was going for her, he said. He could do more away than he could if he stayed. He could earn enough to start a life together. He would be home before the spring. He leaned in to kiss her and only then did she meet his eyes. She smiled and said “I will not wait forever Juanito.” Not forever, he assured her- six months at the most.
Juanito stood and forced himself to follow his life across the river. Two years in this country. The colors dulled, losing the vibrant shades of his youth until finally they all seemed to be shades of grays- the gray women that he met in bars and took back to his gray apartment that he shared with 8 other men. The days spent working for Robert from dawn to dusk. Even standing on the roof with the sun high in the sky, his skin was always gray.
No, Juanito said to himself, this artist is not an angel. She must be a demon, conjured from hell. He turned to the table behind him and picked up a tube of black paint. Taking off the cap, he squeezed the thick black paint onto his palm and smeared it on the gray images, blocking them out. When the tube of paint was empty, he stood back and looked at the room. Better this way, he thought, better that I died when I crossed that river than turned into gray. He looked down at his blackened palms and began to cry.
He sat in the floor, leaning against the black wall and fell asleep staring at the mural of his youth. He dreamed of Camila.
He woke to the sun reaching in through the window and the sound of the roofing crew setting up in the house behind him. He decided not to look up at the mural again before he left. He could not take her work with him, the artist, the angel, the demon, so he was going to have to leave it here. Robert’s voice carried over the fence. “Where in the hell is Juanito? I swear that cousin of mine has his head up his ass!”
He knew that he couldn’t stay. He could run all the way back to Mexico if he had to, but he could not walk around with his head up his ass anymore. Camila said that she would not wait forever, but maybe he still had time. He stood at the edge of the Angel/Demon’s driveway, turned south and began to run.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
