Carry Me Like Water Read Free

doors, he could smell all of the building’s former lives mixed with cigarette smoke, pine cleaner, and stale beer. The smells were thick and rancid, and they only served to darken the already dull lighting.
    He was the cook, janitor, waiter—the only full-time worker. He got paid three dollars an hour—cash—and he was happy to make that much since the money paid for his one-room apartment, and the food was free. But he had never liked crossing the downtown area at five in the morning. It was no more than a thirty-minute walk, but the journey frightened him, and not even the rosary in his pocket, which he fingered as he walked, could lift the fear that fell over him. Walking through El Paso at that hour was like walking through an ancient, empty church, a church he often dreamed about. The church was so large that the more he walked towardthe altar, the farther away it got—and in the dream he never reached the front of the church, but he could not turn back because the entrance had disappeared behind him. He woke from the dream knowing he had been swallowed up by a God who was not good. He knew there was a good God somewhere—but that God was not in his dream; that God did not visit the place where he worked; that God did not comfort him in the night. At five o’clock in the morning the streets of El Paso were like the endless rows of pews in that church. As he walked through the streets, he tried to shut out the dream because he knew the dream was real and he was living it in those awful sunless moments. But even when he was successful in chasing the dream away, it was only replaced by the feeling that he was being followed by shadows who were as noiseless as he was. It was an odd feeling—almost evil—and he had come to the conclusion that dark, empty streets were paths that the spirits reserved for themselves, and who reluctantly gave up their territories to the living—the living who were too arrogant to believe in anything but themselves.
    He arrived at his job around five-thirty and prepared all the food for the coming day. He cooked the beans, the meat for the tacos, the red chile, the rice, and the soup. The special of the day was always the same: red enchiladas with rice and beans. Nothing ever happened at work. He didn’t like to think about his job very much because he knew his thoughts would change nothing.
    Some of the people who came in to eat seemed nice enough. Others weren’t nice at all and he read their lips as they complained about the food and the prices, the weather and their wives, their jobs and this city. There were days when he wanted to throw all the plates of food at every person who walked in. Other days he felt as though he might break in half or cry, and the floor beneath him did not feel hard but soft, so soft that it seemed unable to support his thoughts, his steps, his weight. On those days he walked carefully as if he were walking on leaves he was afraid of crushing. On those days his boss would stare at him and shake his head. Diego would smile at him, and his boss would walk away.
    He needed more sun, he thought. Once, he considered asking his boss to install a window in the kitchen, but he knew the answerwould be “no,” so sometimes he pretended there were rays of light where he worked. In his mind he worked on a painting. He pictured his hands with a brush in them, and colors as deep as the Juárez mountains in the evening. The canvas was as big as a wall, and the canvas was full of nothing but soft green grass, full of the dawn, full of a light that emanated from a sun that would not burn his skin.

5
    H ELEN SOFTLY SQUEEZED an avocado marked with an ORGANIC label at the Whole Foods Market. An older woman stared at her and smiled. “You know my daughter’s pregnant, too,” she said. “After three miscarriages, she finally had a boy. And now, she’s about to have her second.” Helen had heard a hundred little confessions everywhere she went since the day she started