The Woman from Juarez
by Ashley Slupski
Forest Dixion was a man not too old but no longer young and what he wanted most in the world, when he sat outside his trailer home in El Paso in a wicker lawn chair to smoke his cigarettes, was to die. He'd been giving it more thought lately, ever since the incident with Juanita and the milk at the gas station down the street. Every time he stopped in to buy his mints or a newspaper on the way to the diner, he knew people were looking at him and thinking about it, just as he was.
He saw her face in every woman with dark hair and almond eyes. He heard her voice every time someone said "Tabasco" or "nutmeg." He found himself making new routes that would take him past the children's school on his way home, hoping they wouldn't see him because he wasn't ready to say they weren't his. He hoped they would see him because he wasn't ready for them not to be. He even bought a red Dodge Ram on credit because it reminded him of the stories she told about growing up in Juarez, her mother working in the factory and her father slipping across the border because he dreamed of being a postal worker.
No one asked about her anymore because it would be a matter of time before they read in the paper, "Reclusive author commits suicide because of love gone wrong." That was the only thing preventing him from doing it. He couldn't stand everyone sitting around with smirks on their faces, reading pretentious eulogies, trying to put his body in the ground even though he always said he wanted to be cremated. He didn't want his publisher in his not blue, not black suit, hair all slicked back, calculating how much sales would increase when the news of his death hit his fans in Germany and Thailand. He didn't want his little Jewish mother sitting so straight in those wooden chairs, humming the nursery songs he wanted to hum to his children. He didn't want to think of Juanita reading about him in the paper, seeing the pictures of his corpse and not knowing what to tell the kids. He didn't want to be their mother's "good friend" in five years instead of the man who taught them English or bought them beer.
He understood that he would probably never see Naomi after last Sunday. She accidentally invited him to her senior picnic and he spontaneously came with homemade potato salad and a large pitcher of sweet tea with just the smallest bit of vodka. They made sure to move their blanket away so all the other parents wouldn't talk about how they hadn't seen him since eighth grade's Peter Pan.
She was prettier that day with her hair was done up like one of those 1960s horror film movie queens whose name ends with -ine. He wanted to from whose gene pool all that blonde hair came from. Instead, he asked her if all the girls in California wore their housedresses outside in the middle of the summer or if it was just the ones who had only recently learned of the planets and the stars.
She told him she wouldn't be sticking around this summer, or any summers after. She was moving into those cave homes in Albuquerque with that boy she rode with around on her motorcycle. He tried to give her a check for whatever he had left in his bank account but she said she didn't need it, that she had taken care of herself for a while.
A few days later, she stopped by his place, asking if he wanted to see the dog before they took off. He always hated the dog. He bought it for her when she was six because the man at the shelter said it wouldn't get much bigger since it was already the size of a horse. He figured it was better than paying for those damn riding lessons every middle school girl wanted before they discovered boys or girls or both.
The dog was too fluffy and was always shitting on the rug, especially when there was company over. People would stare at him, as if he was the one who shit on the rug instead of the goddamn dog. When he'd laugh it off, they'd just go back to sipping their drinks, and stroking their beards and fussing with their clothes. After those dinners, he and Juanita would wash dishes and help Joaquin draw caricatures of the guests and Naomi on her sewing machine. He'd tell her he hoped one of them stepped in the dog shit on their way out just so they would think about them all the way home and realize they were not as happy as Forest and Juanita and that dog.
So when Naomi came over, they sat on the swing in the backyard, smoking their cigarettes and drinking their beers, with the beast in between so whenever they wanted to make eye contact they had to strain their necks to see over all that useless fluff. They didn't say anything important. He knew there was nothing left to say. There didn't need to be words in these kinds of moments. Everyone was always trying to fill things with words.
He spent the rest of his week in the library of the university. He needed to populate his life with books now that there was no one left to take him on bike rides to the mountains or sleep with him in the desert and talk about environmental destruction and climate change. He read about nomadic tribes in North Africa who have no concept of home or family or time. They just lived off what the land chose to give them and dedicated their lives to making small crafts. He wrote a proposal to go to those countries and wander around with the people. He said he'd collect their stories for a translated anthology of Arabic literature for some class he would never teach. He wanted to get out of El Paso. He wanted to get away from the emptiness of things.
On the bike ride home, he listened to Billie Holiday and Buddy Holly wondering if he too could become a heroin addict or die in a plane crash to regain whatever love he lost along the years. At the red light, he smoked his cigarettes and made vulgar gestures towards the liberal English and Political Science professors who drove SUVs and some who drove hybrid cars. He tried to sneak past a quickly changing yellow light and almost was hit by that little asshole journalist who caused all the trouble in the first place. He thought about how flushed the journalist's cheeks got when he slammed on the brakes and how different they were from the pink almost adolescent cheeks of the man who stopped Juanita in the gas station. He ruined whatever hope Forest had that all the people who read his urban novels weren't just sadomaschocist intellectuals or immigrants selling them on street corners.
The journalist almost knocked into Forest during their first encounter. When the fresh faced political analyst didn't realize he could only carry so many cases of lite beer that had been sitting in the cooler at the gas station since the 80s. As Forest helped picked up the roaming cans of Red Dog, he notice the academic Spanish of the journalist became littered with "tu," indicating a sort of reunion with Juanita.
After returning the alcohol, Forest said, "I'm getting some soy milk for that cake."
"He doesn't mean anything," Juanita replied taking the newspaper out from under his arm and opening it to an article about the local school board elections. "He was just some high school love who took me to the big city and wouldn't let me get away."
Forest nodded scanning the back of the paper for obituaries. He hoped someone he wanted to know died so he could spend the next few days creating that person's history. Maybe he would even have something for his publisher. Something to keep people quiet for a while.
"It shouldn't really matter that I didn't end the relationship until after you and I met." Juanita stopped to slide her foot back into her shoe. When it was warm, her ankles would swell and her moccasins became inhospitable.
Forest lifted a milk carton out of the freezer, checked the expiration date and put it under his arm, bending down to tie his shoe.
"When I learned Joaquin was coming I just moved in with you." She noticed the milk slipping from Forest's arm and tried to grab it before it fell. "It didn't think he really needed to know where I was going. He knew you already had Naomi. I just couldn't handle another abortion."
"But you're ok with allowing someone to love something that they might have not have a right to?" He tried to reach the milk before Juanita got to it but both sets of hands were too small and it crashed to the ground.
For a while they stared at it then Forest took Juanita's keys and left.
In her messages, she promised she didn't think about the journalist anymore. She didn't even read his paper. She switched subscriptions all together. She assured him that the journalist didn't know anything about seahorses or systemic collapse. He didn't even recycle. He ate meat.
To Forest, the dead romance between Juanita and the journalist didn't matter. He thought three years of romantic overlap were a handful of weeks with a few holidays thrown in to jazz things up, so people could bring more into their lives. He signed the birth certificates, the same way he signed every permission slip and report card. He showed up to those parent conferences with Vassar and Wellesley graduates who somehow never managed to meet someone who spoke Spanish and lectured him about choosing gender roles for his Naomi and Joaquin so they could become well-adjusted leftists like the rest of the PhD children, maybe even take them to a modern art museum or two. He punched the dentist when he said Naomi needed braces if she ever wanted to make it out of sixth grade with dignity and finally apologized when Juanita gave a stunning performance at his hearing that made all the white lady jurors cry. He slept with Joaquin's fourth grade piano teacher so he wouldn't have to learn Chopsticks and could switch into Jazz Basics.
It mattered to him that all the report cards and court dates might have belonged to someone else. That all the late nights he and Juanita roasted soy-mallows while one of the kids was probably having sex and decided they would gladly raise the baby, were not meant for him. It made him sick to think that for the past twenty or so years, some skinny journalist with acne and bad reflexes might have needed to be the one sharing Juanita's bed. It made him sick to think that he was buying soymilk in a small city with a woman who didn't even care about blood. It made him sick to think that he was making a dinosaur cake for a young man who soon enough would drop the hyphen that was the only thing keeping Juanita and Forest together.
But he made the dinosaur cake anyway. He made the cake and took Joaquin for a drive. He needed something more official to end it than just buying a trailer and not making any extra keys.
Joaquin slid into the passenger seat of the truck, throwing his backpack onto the ground then rolling himself a cigarette. His eyes and hair were as dark as his mothers, but the freckles that dusted his cheeks like fools gold in a popular tourist cave so closely matched Forest's that he couldn't imagine any other reason they had gotten onto that dark skin.
"I bought some nice soy slices from that grocery store you like down in Las Crucese," Forest said turning past the strip joint that sat in between the day care center and the women's health clinic. "I thought maybe tonight we could make grilled cheese and have a beer or two. Talk about life and all that flowery shit."
Joaquin shrugged as if the idea disinterested him, slipped his "Essential Rockabilly Rebels" tape into the deck and turned the dial until it reached Chuck Berry.
"This documentary about Guttenberg is coming on tonight. We could watch it, maybe, give Naomi a call and see if she wants to come down." Forest wasn't watching the road anymore. All of this was too familiar. He banged his hands against the steering wheel and imagined smoking a nice joint when he got home.
"Can we cut the bullshit?" Joaquin said hanging out of the window so he could spit some of the desert out of him. His face held a roughness most boys his age would develop when high school ended and they had no small liberal arts college to prolong their childhood. "Can you stop pretending you haven't known me for the past seventeen god damn years and nine months? Can you stop pretending we aren't friends?"
"It's a tricky situation Cub," He replied searching the cup holder for his papers, knowing he could no longer wait until he got home. "I just want to make sure you know everything before you make any type of decision."
"Pop," Joaquin said, rolling a joint and handing it to Forest. "Fatherhood is more than just sperm. It's more than just a last name. I'm not planning to go run into the life of the man who Mama slept with but doesn't care about anymore. I'm not going to call up this journalist guy and say 'hey Daddy-o teach me everything I didn't learn from Forest for the past seventeen years because he might not be my real dad'. I'm just going to live like I always have."
"Doesn't blood matter to you." Forest wanted to shout this but he wasn't the shouting type. He didn't think shouting made people understand things better. It just made them hear it.
"I don't want to know," Joaquin was looking out the window again. He might have been trying to hide his tears but Forest and Juanita always taught him not to be ashamed to cry. Men who hide their tears are right-wing sexists and if he didn't want to be a Christian, he shouldn't be afraid to cry.
"Neither does Naomi," He continued. "We don't want to hear about it anymore."
So they turned down the dirt road to the trailer, sat on the swing smoking their cigarettes, drinking beer and crying. They didn't need to say anything. They didn't need to fill the moment with words.