This morning he told the head cook he needed an assistant for his errands at the market. Have a heart, Bull’s Eye told her, you’re asking for more than one poor sod can carry. His first destination is the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which he calls the A and P, and which sells more than tea. The week’s supply of rice, beef, flour, coffee, and fifty more things for the Potomac Academy go into crates from there onto a horse-truck every Saturday. The week’s changes to the list have to be brought in person, the shop men want a boy to help with the boxing up. Other things are purchased from the rest of the market. The boy for the errand is Bull’s Eye, and now his assistant Pancho Villa.
It took hours to get to the A and P. With so many swell things to look at on the way, dogs to be fed, friends to cuff on the shoulder. Blue-black workmen to be stared at as they pick open a trench as long as Pennsylvania Avenue. Where do they come from?
“Africa acourse,” was Bull’s Eye’s reply.
“From Africa, all that way, just for the job of digging ditches?”
“No, you lob. They were slaves first. Before they all got put free by Abe Lincoln. Didn’t you ever hear of the slaves?”
“Maybe. But not like these. Mexico didn’t have them.”
A lob is a pendejo. But Bull’s Eye will answer questions that can’t be asked of other boys. Those dark men and their wives can’t shop here or ride the trolleys, he said, it’s against the law. Even to get lunch in a restaurant. If one of them needs to make water whilst digging the ditch on Pennsylvania Avenue, or get a drink, he has to walk two miles out Seventh Street to find a restaurant that will let him touch a glass or use the lav.
It’s a strange way. Being a servant, making a bad wage, that is no puzzle. All the richest men in Mexico were once lifted from the cradle by servants. But they all drink from the same water jar that fills the master’s glass, and they use the same chamber pot, still warm from the piss of the patrón. In Mexico nobody ever thought to keep those streams flowing separately.
April 17
School is closing two weeks for Easter holiday. Then comes the end of the term soon, and summer. Most of the boys will go home, but not all. Some have to stay for remedial maths and repeating Virginia history in the sweat of July. Living here in the sock-stinking dormitory, and not with Father. He clearly explained that, in his letter about coming to visit while school is closed for Easter holiday. That will be swell, he says, a visit with old Dad. Swell enough for two weeks, not the whole summer.
Nothing here counts for anything now but Saturdays. Going to the market with Billy Boorzai. The rest is just coasting with half-closed eyes through another week.
May 3
Father’s explanations made no mention of a lady. She must have cleared out of his apartment in a hurry, to make way for the Easter visitor. On the Q.T., Father is putting on the feedbag with a dame. Dust-colored stockings hang like cobwebs on the bathroom radiator, a lipstick winks like gossip on the bureau. Why would he hide her? Does he not know about Mother and her swains? He should listen through her wall some night, if he thinks his son is unacquainted with bedroom jolly-ups and pig fights.
Or he would lose some bargaining score if the Dame is reported back to Mexico. He and Mother are still not divorced because of the Mexican paperwork. “Divorce,” he pronounces like a taste of soup with too much salt. Her name, he says like the Lord’s taken in vain. Sometimes he says “Mexico,” and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.
May 5
A Trip to the Museum with the Father Figure. The weather has gone from freezing to broiling, with some talk of cherry blossoms in between. People on the trolley press against you in a crush, men in white linen suits, girls in sailor dresses and felt turbans. The smell of perspiration is different here. Cortés could write about that also: Most Excellent Empress, the sweat of the Northern People has a redolent stench. Maybe because of so many layers of clothes. Father’s white suit hangs limp from his shoulders, wilting by the minute, like the moonflowers in the garden in Isla Pixol.
Smith Sonian is the name of the museum, a brick castle containing the stuffed, dead skins of every species but our own. Why not a few humans too? Father laughed at that one, like a man in some kind of a show, with an audience. His mood has shifted. Now he seems to take his son as a joke, rather than a serious offense. The museum had rooms of things from Tenochtitlan and other ancient sites of Mexico, fabulous artworks in gold that Cortés did not manage to carry off. Now in Washington, instead.
On the ride back to Father’s apartment the trolley passed a long park, a row of warehouses, and then the most amazing spectacle: a city of tents and shacks roiling with people. Cooking fires, children, laundry hanging on lines, like a Mexican village of the very poorest kind set down in the middle of Washington City, surrounded by office buildings. A hand-lettered sign said: BONUS EXPEDITIONARY ENCAMPMENT. The American flag hung about in multiples over the shacks like laundry, blending in with the laundry really. The flags were as sun-faded as the upside-down trousers on the lines. The size of the camp was astonishing, a whole nation of beggars arrived in the capital. “That lot,” Father spat through his moustache. “They’ve run their hobo jungle all the way down Pennsylvania. I have to pass through all that to get to work every morning.”
A woman in a headscarf held up a naked baby toward our trolley. The baby waved its arms. A hobo jungle is unlike other jungles, where monkeys howl through the leafy air. “What do they all want?”
“What does anybody want? Something for nothing acourse.” In that moment Father sounded like Bull’s Eye.
“But why so many of them? And all the flags?”
“They’re war veterans. Or so they say, because vets are entitled to a soldier’s bonus. They want their bonus.”
Ragged men stood at military attention every few meters, like fence posts all along the edge of the camp facing the street. Veteran soldiers, you could tell it from the placement of feet and shoulders. But their eyes searched the passing trolley with a terrifying hunger. “They’ve been here all week? What do the families live on?”
“Shoe leather soup, I’d say.”
“Those men fought in France, with mustard gas and everything?”
Father nodded.
“We studied the Argonne. In Military Strategy. It was very bad.”
Another nod.