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illustration: A.J. Garcesother wants me to go into the mortuary business like her boyfriend, Sheriff Ramirez, who moonlights part-time as the town undertaker. She figures she'll marry him soon and I can become a partner in the family's business.
"You already have experience, mijito," my mother reminds me. "And you have a good personality compared to that Hilario."
Hilario is the Sheriff's son. I've heard the ladies say he's good-looking but they're afraid to go out with him. They never say why exactly, but I figure it has to do with his work.
"It can't be natural to make a living out of handling dead people, Ama. It's hard enough to get dates these days, as it is."
She doesn't listen. She thinks I'm still the most popular guy in town because they voted me that my senior year. The same year I got the "experience" she is talking about.
Hilario had hired me to help transport a huge, old Anglo lady that had died in Corpus Christi but willed to get buried in Freer, our hometown. Unfortunately, I didn't ask Hilario enough questions. I figured we would pick up a sealed casket. How hard could that be? What he failed to tell me, however, was that bodies in these types of situations are usually naked, under a sheet. It's not like I wanted to look, but the sheet rolled off when we lifted and pushed her marble body onto the stretcher, exposing the old woman in an undignified manner.
I have never been able to forget the way that woman's skin looked. She was the color of white, melted candle wax and her breasts were oblong like the squash my grandmother grows in her backyard. She was cold, hard and heavy like a refrigerator, reminding me of the rubber-bellied frogs we used to split open in Mr. Freisenhaunt's biology class. To make things worse, I had never seen a woman's you know what (in the flesh) and unfortunately, my first one turned out to be dead like a frozen, Arctic opossum, if there is even such an animal. I threw the sheet back over her, accidentally covering her sagging face in the process.
"No, man, you wanna flatten her nose like a pancake?" I had never heard Hilario scream so violently.
Apparently it's a cosmetic nightmare to place the sheet on a dead person's nose.
An old mortician's trick is to bend a clothes hanger and put the deceased's head on top of it so that the hook part of the contraption sticks up behind the nose, holding the sheet up like a tent.
"They don't pay us enough to be plastic surgeons, vato. Don't be such an amateur."
I was sorry I ever came on this run. Not only was I hot and exhausted, I was starving and nauseated, all at the same time.
"This is nothing, man," Hilario gleamed, when I told him I was quitting and why. "You haven't lived till you've heard the `whoosh.'"
"What whoosh?" I asked, not really wanting an answer.
Apparently the dead rasp and whoop at the moment of their death and that is known to the professionals as the "death rattle."
"It's like the dogs from hell barking, man." Hilario's face suddenly went from matter-of-fact to mystified. "Sometimes, though, it sounds like a woman coming."
I had never experienced anything like that myself but it gave me a certain uneasiness, all the way home, to imagine it.
We arrived in Freer after lunch, surprised to find ourselves stuck in traffic. We had forgotten it was the first day of the annual "Rattlesnake Round-Up." As we pulled into the Sonic, we watched hundreds of people in their rusty campers, from nearby ranches and towns jamming the narrow streets, wanting a parking space close to the big tent where they milk the rattlesnake's venom. Right as we parked, the high school band finished marching in the three-float parade. They were disassembling in front of the Town Hall, across from the Sonic when I spotted Carmen, the head twirler, at the exact moment that Hilario did.
"That girl could charm the rattles off any snake, vato. If I was only 20 years younger," Hilario mused.
I liked Carmen so much myself, I couldn't bear to even mention it.
I kept my eye on her while Hilario dealt with Ninfa, the cute waitress that looked like Ellie May Clampett, but brown.
"What would you like?" Ninfa asked, all innocent and doe-eyed, flashing her buck teeth at both of us.
"What are you doing later?"
The poor girl rolled her eyes.
"Why?" she asked, almost flattered.
"Victor, here, is lonely."
She looked inside the wagon, past Hilario to check me out, her breasts full and inviting like a grab bag.
"You're Johnny Salinas' little brother, right?" Girls usually ask that with the oddest expression of pleasure on their faces. Apparently Johnny got around before he got stationed in Germany.
"She likes you," Hilario insisted.
"Get out of here."
Although I denied it, I was hoping to God that because Hilario was older, he knew how to read women better than I. Not that I was really interested in Ninfa, but I had heard she'll go all the way with you under the football bleachers if you ask real nice. That's why her name got painted on the water tower in big, bold letters.
Down the street, I could see Carmen walking away from the Town Hall towards the Round-Up. I wanted to follow and carry her baton for her if she'd let me but I waited for our food, instead.
When it finally arrived, Hilario took the root beer from Ninfa's tray and turned around flamboyantly to offer it to the corpse behind us with a "Here you go, Lucy." Ninfa, thinking she might have forgotten to take somebody's else's order, followed his lead innocently in the direction of the backseat. Her puppy eyes turned pale and hard when she saw a body cocooned on a stretcher like an Egyptian mummy. Not missing a beat, Hilario looked at me and said, "I guess she's not thirsty. You take it." The poor girl screamed like we pulled a knife on her and ran terrified into the restaurant. Hilario enjoyed scaring her so much, I understood what the ladies were talking about when they called him strange.
Finally, I got the courage to excuse myself, telling Hilario I wanted to buy a rattlesnake belt before they ran out.
"Hey man, it's cool, I'm not your mother, okay?" He paid me cash, more cash than I had ever made in my life, for what turned out to be four hours work.
Inside the tent, I was attracted to the booth where the rattlers were slaughtered and cooked to look like fried chicken. I hadn't noticed the crowd behind me until one of the snake's heads was torn off so viciously, it drizzled red rain everywhere. As fate would have it, the worst of it landed on Carmen's metallic twirling uniform, as she stood nearby, watching. With super-hero reflexes, I ran to the snack bar and grabbed some napkins to wipe the reptile blood off her. It had gotten all over her pantyhose and hip-hugging twirler uniform. When it finally sunk in that I was on my knees wiping Carmen's legs with my hands, I froze."Don't stop," she said, smiling at me with her Charlie's Angel face.
"I'm gonna have to take these clothes off."
I swallowed hard to imagine for a moment what that might look like.
"But if I go home, my mother will make me baby-sit."
I had an extra T-shirt and a pair of jogging shorts in my backpack which I offered, thinking she would pass. To my surprise she took them and asked me to wait for her. When she finally came out of the Porta-Potty with my clothes on, it was like looking at myself, but with her underneath.
"My mother's gonna come looking for me, can we go somewhere?" I must have looked concerned because she took my hand and squeezed it. "I just want to talk, that's all."
We headed outside towards the unpaved dusty caliche parking lot looking for the first unlocked truck we could find. It didn't occur to us that we were breaking and entering since we were not intent on stealing anything. We just wanted a quiet place to sit for a while. The first truck we saw, a maroon 1968 Chevy pick-up was perfect, we thought. We climbed in but before we knew it, I ended up on my back with Carmen on top of me, swaying like a snake does when it comes out of the basket and dances for the charmer with the flute. Within moments, we were breathing hard like we had just run the 50-yard dash against the other. She, of course, won the race. The way she moved over me, back and forth and round and round, made me feel like the horse ride you put a quarter in at the grocery store. She started to whoop and rasp, like she was choking on something. Her eyes rolled slightly behind her head, I worried that she was having a seizure. My brother is epileptic and for a moment, she looked just like that. I now know she experienced the "death rattle" with me. I have heard several ladies experience it since, but none as sweet or as effortlessly as Carmen's. The beauty was, she did it all on her own. I was just there. It has flattered me a thousand times, since, to remember it. I would give anything to hear her "death rattle" again; this time, from inside her, somehow.
I had just decided to boldly run my finger like a letter opener underneath the jogging shorts that fit her snug, when somebody opened the truck door, making us feel like a couple of hunted, cornered animals. All I could see of our captor was a pair of chalky, Mexican sandals with stocky, dry feet and pink toenails.
"Get out of there right now before I call your parents."
We had chosen Mercedes Diaz's truck, the nosy, righteous school cafeteria worker who was an unbearable, faithful Jehovah's Witness. With every Watchtower she delivered after that, she told the town about the shameless teenagers that broke into her truck to fornicate, making us the perfect examples for what is going wrong in these last days of our devil, possessed world.
Surprisingly, I was suddenly very popular with the girls at school after that. I think it was the free press Mercedes gave me. Carmen's reputation however, suffered terribly as a result. I guess she figured it was a lost cause after that to regain her former status because she ended up getting pregnant soon after. Everybody assumed it was mine, but of course, I never touched her... that way. My heart broke and my hair turned prematurely gray, like a tombstone, the day her parents put her on a Greyhound to Rio Grande City where she lives with relatives till this day.
My mother is crying and pounding on her heart with her fist like she does when she gets mad at me. She's afraid I'll stay unemployed forever if I pass on the mortuary job."I'll join the Army, Ama , before I have to mess with dead people ever again."
As I drive myself to Corpus Christi to meet with the recruiter, I see "Carmen" spray painted on the water tower, over the snake coiled under the "Rattlesnake Capitol of the World" logo. I would have gladly married her and pretended to be the real father, anything -- to have kept her name off that rusty water tank, where any stranger can read it on their way out of town.
