Oscar Casares (4 page)

I will say that after the first year—when it was clear to me that he wasn't bringing back the hammer—there were fewer and fewer reasons to be friendly. He'd wave and I would nod back, just enough to let him know that I'd seen him. After mowing the yard, I used to sweep the curb and then walk over and sweep his side—I figured the street belonged to the both of us and if his side looked good, my side looked good—but I put an end to that. Christmas Eve we have a tradition of inviting our family and a few neighbors over to the house for tamales. My wife and I were going to sleep after one of these parties and she asked me if I knew why the Bannerts hadn't come. “I guess I forgot to invite them,” I said.

I think he got the idea, because he stopped coming around. He stopped being so quick to wave. He stopped bringing fruitcakes around the holidays, which was fine with me because I never touched them anyway. When he threw a big New Year's party and cars were parked up and down the street, we were somehow not on the invitation list. But as far as I was concerned, he could keep his fruitcakes and his invitations, the same way he'd kept my hammer.

It's not like I stopped hammering altogether. If I needed to replace some shingles on the house or fix the leg on a table, I used my other hammer. It was an older one that had belonged to my father. The handle was wooden and the head was rusty. I had to wrap duct tape on the handle because the wood was splitting. The head rattled when I used it, and I knew it wouldn't be long before it broke off. My other hammer, the one across the street, was all steel with a black rubber grip. It fit in my palm like a firm handshake. I bought it at Sears.

Maybe I should've written my name on it, my initials: RG. But you wouldn't think you'd have to do that with your own hammer. I wasn't working on some construction job where your tools can get lost. It wasn't a suitcase that somebody might pick up by mistake and walk off with. Your hammer should be your hammer, your property. You never know when you're going to need it.

August 5, 1980—Finished painting the outside trim on the house, cleaned brushes and tray, watched news—weatherman says hurricane headed to the Valley.

We don't get hurricanes every year, but if you lived through Beulah in
’67,
you know what they can do. It did most of its damage right here and in Matamoros. Trees were ripped out of the ground, phone lines got knocked over, just about every part of the city flooded, the electricity was out for almost a week. All the food and milk in the refrigerator went bad. Forget about clean water. I lost two trees in the backyard. The wind had that poor grapefruit tree twisting around like a pair of underwear hanging on the clothesline. The mesquite split right down the middle. We heard the wood cracking all the way inside the house and I felt a part of me was also being ripped up. The biggest branch fell on the fence and made it into an accordion. And what happened here is nothing compared to what those poor people went through on the other side of the river. Nobody wanted to have that experience again.

There wasn't anything to do but wait. Wait and pray that it died down or turned some other direction. I watched the news every chance I had. Some people were in the habit of leaving the area, driving north, whenever they heard news like this. I can't say I blame them, but it wasn't something we ever did.

August 9, 1980—Hurricane Allen expected to hit Brownsville-Matamoros tonight, weatherman says winds over 170 mph (his words: “could be stronger than Beulah”), took day off from work, bought boards at De Luna Lumber, boarded up windows, Bannert finally gave me back my hammer.

There's more that I didn't write down in the notebook—there always is.

First of all, let me say that we lived through the hurricane and we're still here today. Me writing in my notebooks, Bannert eating ice cream cones at the mall. The hurricane ended up hitting the coast about forty miles north of here, where there weren't as many people. It still did its damage. It just wasn't as bad as it could have been. A few trees were knocked down on our street and we were without electricity and water for a day, but we survived. Bannert stayed around for a year and then moved to a new subdivision on the north side of town. Four months later another family moved in across from us.

But what sticks out in my mind about the hurricane happened the afternoon before it actually hit. I was waiting in line for almost an hour at De Luna. It looked like half of Brownsville was there buying lumber. Bannert was towards the back of the line, but neither of us made an effort to say hello. The other men were talking about what they'd been through with the last big hurricane. An older man with a cane told everybody how he'd lost a sister in Matamoros when she drowned in her front yard. He said the two boys with him were her children but that he had raised them as if they were his own.

As I stood in line, I could see a policeman directing traffic on International because the lights had gone out. People tried to get in and out of the Lopez Supermarket on that side of the street. My wife was inside there buying all the food and candles she could fit into a shopping cart. The parking lot was full of women loading their cars with enough groceries to wait out the worst of the storm.

I was sliding the last board onto the bed of my truck when I noticed Bannert and one of the De Luna workers unloading a cart stacked with boards. Anybody could tell they weren't going to be able to fit all that lumber in the trunk of Bannert's car, and if they did, he was going to cause an accident. Some other day they might have delivered the boards to his house, but there was a line of men still waiting to buy lumber.

“Looks like you could use some help getting that back to the house, Bannert,” I said.

“You have room in your truck?” he asked.

“I think I can fit a few more boards.”

We each grabbed an end of the first board and started loading, one by one, neither one of us saying a word. We hadn't talked in almost four years—why start now? He drove out of the parking lot first, and I followed him back to the neighborhood. On the way there, I saw him keeping an eye on me in the rearview mirror like I might forget where he lived. When we were at his house, I backed my truck into the driveway. Again, we grabbed the boards one by one until we had them all leaning against the carport.

“Now I just have to get them up there,” he said and laughed.

“Maybe one of your boys can help you.”

“Nah, they're still too young. They'd only get in the way.”

I thought about his situation and what I should do. He was right about his boys getting in the way. Mine wouldn't be any help, either, but at least I knew I could board up my house without any help. I remember looking at Bannert's overalls, a little faded now, but still with the creases.

“Two can work faster than one,” I finally said. “Why don't I help you get started with some of these windows?”

I had my old hammer in the toolbox in my truck. Bannert brought out a stepladder so I could reach the top of the windows. He held the boards against the house and I hammered the nails in. I could hear the sound of banging hammers and the grinding of electric saws coming from every direction. I stopped a couple of times just to listen. I wanted to believe the hammers were somehow sending messages all over the neighborhood. Messages saying what we didn't have words to say ourselves. Regardless of what had happened between us, I didn't mind helping Bannert this one afternoon. His family lived in this neighborhood, just like mine. If I could lend a hand, why not give it? And I had the sense that if he had been in a position to help me with something that he wouldn't have hesitated. That's what I believed. But I also knew we would've never talked if the situation hadn't turned out the way it did. And after this work was done, we would stop talking again. We'd go back to ignoring each other, and that's just the way life would be around here. I knew it even back then.

I ended up doing most of the work that afternoon, but when we were at the last window I thought he might want to do one.

“You want to knock a few in?”

“You bet,” he said.

We switched places. I held the board against the window, and Bannert climbed the stepladder. He took a couple of practice swings with the hammer and then hit his first nail. He had two good swings before he hit to the left and the nail bent sideways. It took a couple of taps to straighten it out and start again. The next few nails went the same way.

“Be sure you hit the center of the head and put some more weight behind your swing.”

He nodded okay and banged the nail a couple of times. On the next swing he missed the nail altogether and the hammer pounded the side of the house. That was what finally made the head crack off the wooden handle. The head flopped over like a chicken with a broken neck.

“Sorry.” He stayed looking at the broken hammer.

What could I say? He'd borrowed my good hammer and never returned it, and now he'd broken my old one.

“It's my fault,” he said.

I didn't argue with him. He climbed down from the stepladder and turned towards me.

“I'm going to give you my hammer,” he said.

Then he reached into a brown shoe box he had in the carport and pulled out my hammer. There it was, after four years. It didn't look any different from the day he had borrowed it. I held the hammer again and it felt like a missing finger that had been reattached to my hand. So, yes, maybe he really had forgotten that it was my hammer. That didn't excuse the past four years, but at least it explained to me how a mistake could've happened.

“Go ahead, it's yours now,” he said. “I owe you one, hombre.”

I guess he thought I might refuse his offer to take the hammer. He looked me in the eye, and I wanted to believe that the man was telling me the truth about having forgotten. I mean, there were things I forgot now and then. Sometimes I had to look in my notebook just to remember what I was doing two days earlier. It was possible that his memory could've failed him. Anything's possible.

“Thanks, Bannert.”

It felt strange to be thanking him for giving me something that was really mine, but those were the only words that came to me. I wanted to say more and set things straight with him, explain the misunderstanding, and see if maybe there was some way to put this behind us. It was just a hammer that had caused this. Maybe we could even laugh about the whole thing. I would've said something right then, but I could feel the temperature had already dropped a couple of degrees and the wind was beginning to shift. I only had a few hours left to board up my own house.

Chango

B
ony was walking back from the Jiffy-Mart when he found the monkey's head. There it was, under the small palm tree in the front yard, just staring up at him like an old friend who couldn't remember his name. It freaked him out bad. The dude had to check around to make sure nobody had seen him jump back and almost drop his beer in the dirt. It was still lunchtime and cars were parked up and down the street. For a second, it looked like the head might be growing out of the ground. Maybe somebody had buried the monkey up to its neck the way people did to other people at the beach when they ran out of things to do. Maybe it was still alive. Bony grabbed a broom off the porch and swung hard. He stopped an inch away from the monkey's little black eyes, and it didn't blink. He poked the head with the straw end of the broom and it tipped back and forth. The short black hairs on its head were pointed straight up at the cloudy sky. The nose was flat and wrinkled around the edges like it'd been a normal nose and then God decided to push it in with His big thumb. The ears were old man's ears with whiskers growing on them and in them. And it kept smiling. It smiled from one monkey ear to the other.

Bony's mother said it was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. ¡Qué feo! She wanted it out of her yard. What were the neighbors going to think? What were her customers going to say? Who would want to buy perfume from a woman who lived with such an ugly thing in her front yard? She wouldn't.

His father said it was a dead chango. He didn't care how it died or where it came from. All he knew was that Bony needed to stop lying around in his calzoncillos every morning and go out and find a job, earn some money. He was tired of coming home for lunch and seeing him sleeping on the sofa. He didn't know how a police sergeant's son could be so damn lazy. Brownsville wasn't that big a town. People talked. Bony was thirty-one years old. Ya, it was time to go do something with his life. His older brothers had good jobs. What was wrong with him? That chango wasn't going to get him anywhere. It was dead.

“I want to keep him,” Bony said.

“Keep him?” his father said. “¿Estás loco o qué? You want to live with monkeys, I'll drive you to the zoo. Come on, get in the car, I'll take you right now. Marta, por favor, help your son put some clothes in a bag. He wants to live at the zoo.”

“You're making your father mad, Bony.”

“I didn't do anything,” Bony said.

“No,” his father said. “All you want to do is drink beer with your new best friend, your compadre, instead of going out to make a living.”

Bony should have known his parents would say something like that. So what if he didn't have a job? Everybody had his own life.

His father drove away in the patrol car. His mother walked back inside the house. And Bony stayed in the yard with the monkey. It wasn't so bad. It's not like the head had been chopped off right there in front of the house. Except for it not having a body, the monkey was in perfect condition. The head must have come from the alley that was next to the house. People were always walking by and throwing things in the yard. It was Bony's job to keep the yard clean. His father said it was the least he could do. Every few days Bony found something new: candy wrappers, empty beer bottles, used fireworks, a dollar bill ripped in half, a fishing knife with dried blood. A few weeks earlier he'd found a busted pocket watch in the grass. Another time he found a bunch of letters from a man named Joaquín to a woman named Verónica. The letters were in Spanish, and as best as Bony could tell, Joaquín loved Verónica and things would've worked out if he hadn't had a wife and five kids.