Carlos laughed and slapped his back. “That’s what we like to hear! Another beer?”
“Thanks.” Soon, a trip to the Navasota River, Hugh thought. Maybe he could even talk Spider into accompanying him, showing him the house where the bluesman was born, the backwoods juke joints Spider had played as a kid.
The Cajuns rose and paid their tab. The taller of the pair wore a yellow sport coat and bright red socks. His companion, a stubby man in a dark pullover sweater, plucked a toothpick from a plastic dispenser next to the cash register. On his way out, he accidentally bumped a table near the front door, spilling a pitcher of slushy margaritas. The trio at the table, two men and a woman, shouted in surprise, and jumped up to avoid getting wet. The stubby man apologized; Carlos wiped the puddle with a rag. By now, the trio was laughing, ordering more drinks.
Hugh warmed; he loved this place, its homeliness, its ease, its laid-back patrons. It was the kind of place Paula called “dirty.” He couldn’t picture Alice sitting here either.
“Take it easy, Professor,” Carlos said when Hugh paid the bill. On the wall behind him, the Aztec god shook a golden spear at the skies. Hugh had parked out back, by the shed. As he unlocked his door, he saw curtains rustle in the shed’s grimy window. Briefly, a child’s dark forehead was visible, and eyes just above the sill — a swift, frightened glance. Then nothing.
Outside his apartment building, in the parking lot, he saw the bag lady angling, headfirst, into the Dumpster. He stepped out of his car and locked it. “Hey!” he shouted.
The old woman continued to dig.
“Hey! I put a dead animal in there! It’s not healthy! Come out.”
“Animal?” She turned. A napkin, limp with catsup, stuck to the arm of her loosely threaded sweater.
“What did you do with the money I gave you?”
She plucked the paper from her sleeve, and licked the catsup.
Hugh pulled another dollar from his wallet. “Go eat. Please. They have burritos and popovers at the 7-Eleven down the street. Cold sandwiches.”
She snatched the bill.
As he watched her tow her sacks to the curb, he wondered who she was, what had happened that she’d wound up here. In which feverish crease of Mama Houston’s lap would she spend the night?
Hugh spent Saturday afternoon on a driving range near Hermann Park, hoping to exhaust his nervous energy swinging a club before his date with Alice. Should he make a move tonight, ask her to stay over? He’d gone out with several women since his divorce but hadn’t slept with any of them and felt out of practice, both the asking and the doing. And he wasn’t sure he and Alice were right for each other.
At the 270-yard marker, a man without a shirt steered a tiny John Deere, snatching balls with a long metal pole and dropping them into a barrel on a cart attached to the tractor’s rear. For protection, he wore over his head a wire basket, the kind that held a dozen balls, which you paid for at the range’s entrance.
At a nearby tee box, an old black man cursed his driver. He sent a polka-dotted ball past a dog in the field, well short of the tractor. “I hope you die,” he threatened his club.
The man on the tractor shooed the dog with his pole.
“About 40 percent of the money I spend in any given week,” said a woman on a radio call-in show, blaring from the clubhouse, “I spend unhappily.” The angry golfer snapped his driver on his knee. Hugh felt more keyed-up than ever.
That night, he took Alice to a little Chinese place on Richmond Street — nothing fancy, but slightly more elegant than Chimichanga. Mr. Chen, the restaurant owner, knew only a few phrases in English. “Hello. How are you? I think it is going to rain.”
“We’ll start with some egg rolls and a pot of hot tea,” Hugh said.
“Very good. Thank you. Nice to see you.”
Alice wore vanilla-colored slacks and a yellow blouse with red buttons. She’d pulled her hair back and tied it with a white ribbon. Simple. Gorgeous. She smiled.
Mr. Chen arrived with two tumblers of iced tea sprigged with mint leaves.
“Excuse me, we asked for hot tea.”
“Very good. It is certain to rain.”
Alice wanted sweet-and-sour soup, Kung Pao chicken, stir-fried shrimp.
“Today we have only pork,” said Mr. Chen. “Nice to see you. Enjoy your table forever.”
Hugh unfolded his napkin and plunged in, asking Alice why an attractive woman like her was unattached. On their first couple of dates — she’d seemed so aloof! — they’d talked about the college, the city, avoiding personal topics.
“I was with a man for five years — it ended just last summer,” she said after a pause. “He decided — discovered — he was gay.” She laughed unconvincingly, flashing pretty teeth. “Ironic, right? Me, an Affirmative Action advocate, fighting sexual discrimination on all fronts … when he told me, I wanted to kill him and every gay man I could think of. For weeks, I had Elton John nightmares. Shotguns and bloody knives, and all to the tune of ‘Rocket Man.’”
Mr. Chen set a steaming bowl of pork and bamboo shoots on their table. “Nice to see you,” he said. Goldfish swam in a big blue tank by the door. The fish looked like wontons floating in meager soup. A group of fine-suited men — Hugh took them for lawyers — arrived and requested the best table, by a window.
The pork smelled like peppermint.
“So now you’re pissed at all men, right?” Hugh said, trying to make a joke, to rescue the evening from its shaky start.
“No, I don’t hate men,” Alice said. “I just don’t like them very much.” She didn’t smile or laugh. Getting close to her would be as tough, Hugh worried, spearing a bamboo finger, as communicating smoothly with Mr. Chen.
They spent the rest of the dinner in near-silence. Then Hugh drove them downtown. A plastic Budweiser bottle, tall as a grain silo, fastened by guy wires to the ground, towered over Emancipation Park near the corner of Wheeler and Dowling. Radio stations gave away T-shirts, posters, cassette tapes.
Hugh bought two cups of cold beer. “Did you know Dowling Street was named for an Irish barkeep — Dick Dowling — who helped the Confederate Army win the battle of Sabine Pass?” He was fidgety, talking too much, relying on his “stuffy” old history to get him through the evening. So far, Alice didn’t seem bored. She’d even said she liked Mr. Chen’s. “He lured a bunch of Yankee boats into a nasty port, knowing they’d run aground on an oyster reef.”
Alice came from Eugene, Oregon, and had lived in Texas only two years. “I’m having a little trouble with this ‘Juneteenth’ thing. Explain it to me again,” she said.
Hugh handed her a napkin. “Okay. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But it wasn’t until June 19, two years later, when a Union general defeated Rebel holdouts in Galveston, that slaves here — about 300,000 of them — learned the truth.”
“All that time? They were free and didn’t know it?”
“Yep. For over a hundred years after that, families celebrated the day informally. In ’79, it became an official Texas holiday.”
“Hm.”
“Something wrong? You haven’t even touched your beer.”
A man bumped them, sucking a flask of MD 20/20. The back of his T-shirt said, “Black By Popular Demand.” He raised the flask in the air, shouted, “Hallelujah!” and stumbled into a crowd that was beginning to flank the music stage. A pretty young woman with twin baby girls in her arms danced to the beat of her Walkman. The girls’ smiles sent a pang through Hugh’s tight chest.
“It’s awful to admit this, because it’s part of my job to protect civil rights and stuff” Alice whispered, “but I’ve never been around this many black people. In Oregon, there just aren’t that many — ”