He looked at me equally strangely. “Where do you think you’re going to end up, man? I’m just saving a little time.”
This afternoon he’s sitting on his mound, watching Wheel of Fortune.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey. You look beat, bud.” He wears thin black jeans, an old pair of sneakers, and a white cotton shirt, sparsely buttoned.
“Fending off creditors,” I admit. “How ‘bout you? What’s up?”
“Got me some angel hair and some Christmas lights.” He shows me a box. “River Oaks bitch tossed ’em in the trash. Don’t know if the lights’ll work. Thought I’d string ’em up around the TV”
“You getting enough to eat?”
“Tell you what I need, man’s, a can opener.” He lifts a can of pork and beans out of a soft paper sack. “Shit don’t do me no good like this. Snapped my knife on one the other day.”
“All right, I’ll fix you up next time. Do you have enough blankets?”
“Yeah. This chick kills me.” He points to the screen.
“Pretty,” I say.
Pedro looks at me slyly. “You gettin’ any, George? You lookin’ mighty antsy to me.”
He thinks women are the only worries a “youngster” like me could possibly carry (I’m forty-three).
Once, I asked him if he’d ever had a family of his own. “Oh well. Yeah. Guess I did,” he admitted finally, scratching his ear. “Couple of kids.”
“Where are they?”
“All I know is, they ain’t here no more, and neither is their mother.”
Now, he coughs into his hands.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Refinery smoke,” he wheezes, sniffing the air. “Pisser today. It’ll pass.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right, man.” I slap his knee. “I’ll bring you a can opener soon.”
On the television, a housewife from Gainesville, Florida, wins ten thousand dollars and a car.
“Watch yourself,” I say.
“Hey, ain’t no harm come to a man what’s already dead.”
For three years now I’ve worked at a local newspaper, moving up from obits and fillers to small features, community service items, neighborhood histories, other invisible stuff. I’m still paying off my family’s funeral expenses, falling farther and farther behind on my bills.
It just so happens, the day I went to buy Pedro a can opener, a small fire broke out in a shirt factory behind the supermarket. I stood in the parking lot with the other happy shoppers watching firemen scurry up ladders (I’ve noticed disaster makes people pretty happy, if they’re not directly involved in it). I hadn’t known a shirt factory existed at that spot, and I began to ask around. Were there other sweatshops in the area around the cemetery?
The manager of a nearby noodle factory, a middle-aged Chinese man who’d once worked at a button plant on a side street just off West Gray, said, “Sure. All around us. What you look for, you look for steamed-up windows, especially on hot days when the windows should be open. Boarded-up places with a little steam spitting through their cracks — yessiree. Dead give-away.”
After that, I saw the nailed boards and the tell-tale plumes everywhere I looked: above icehouses, shoe stores, auto parts suppliers. Next to the Bluebird Circle Shop and St. Vincent de Paul. I made notes and developed contacts on the street, like a real investigative reporter. I wanted to slip, like a spy, inside the scene of a crime, win a Pulitzer, the love of a good woman, and pull a whole new family around me.
“Pedro, you ever work in a sweatshop?”
On his television, a jumpy young weatherman says, “Cooler.”
“Sure, me and all my friends did. Back in the thirties — ”
“You were a kid in the thirties.”
“A workin’ kid, jack. Folks’d kill you for a dime, those days. I ‘member these cardboard signs in the shop, all over the walls, ‘No Home Work.’ Meant we couldn’t take the cloth home and sew on it there. Ever’thing had to be done in the shop. It’s a big joke ‘cause none of us, not even the adults, could afford to have a sewin’ machine at home.” He laughs.
“I get the impression nothing much has changed here, over the years.”
From where we’re sitting, in the northeast corner of the graveyard, we can see the Texas Commerce Bank building downtown, seventy-five stories, a correlated diamond pattern of rose and Barre granite. Its streaky windows blaze like tungsten bulbs.
“Poor folks still gotta work they asses off. That much hasn’t changed,” Pedro agrees. “But a whole lot else is differ’nt. Don’t kid yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I ‘member ‘Whites Only’ signs in the Weingarten’s store over on Almeda Street. Dig? I ‘member black folks comin’ to Messkins like me in the sweatshops, real polite-like, and askin’ us to join ‘em in the sit-ins at the lunch counters. ‘You ain’t white, neither,’ they’d tell us, and they was right.”
“Did you do a lunch counter?”
“Oh sure. The Texas Southern students, smart little whips from the law school over there, they led the charge. Brave fellas. But it was baseball finally broke the color line in Houston.”
I hadn’t heard this before. “How?”
“They wasn’t any Major League teams in the South, see, till long about 1960 or so,” Pedro says. “When the Buffs started up here — later they’s the Colt 45s and finally the Astros, that’s when they’d forgot how to hit the damn ball — anyways, when other teams come down to play ‘em, what was the city gonna do? You couldn’t put a made guy like Willie Mays up in a segregated hotel, now could you? Make Houston look bad, ’specially to all them fancy-pantsed Northerners.”
Busted shoes, cigarette lighters, condoms, and pantyhose float down the bayou, past Pedro’s grave.
“I’ll tell you another way the city’s changed.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s going to hell.”
“How?”
“I know it, watchin’ the funerals here. Gettin’ cheaper. Shabby damn boxes, no handles to carry ‘em with. Might as well be wrappin’ these poor motherfuckers in tinfoil. You know. Birds Eye.” He coughs.
“Man, I don’t like the sound of that,” I say.
“It’ll pass.”
“You got to keep breathing for me, Pedro. You have too many stories to tell.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m gone, the history of this poor ol’ neighborhood’s gone.”
One of my street contacts pointed out to me a Mr. Ho, the manager of the shirt factory. I caught him one morning on the wooden steps leading to the only entrance I could see into the building, a door the size of an NFL linebacker covered with steel sheeting. Mr. Ho wouldn’t speak to me at first. But I cracked him, finally, with my repeated use of the word “sweatshop.”
“Is not a sweatshop,” he insisted.
“What do you call it, then?”
“Garment factory. Is a garment factory.” He scratched his pale nose. His eyes flicked back and forth with the speed of two hummingbirds.
“On the street I’ve heard rumors that half your employees are underage,” I said. “Is that true?”
“Is not true.”
“Can you prove that? Will you give me a tour?”
“No tour.”
“What’s your pay scale?”
“Very good. Very competitive.”
“Not what I heard.”
“What you heard?”
“You pay less than minimum wage.”
“Hear that where?”
“On the street.”
He leaned over the wooden railing and dropped a gob of spit on the parking lot below us. “Street is filthy. Filthy dirty words on the street.”