Arcadio by William Goyen

Sonoma County in the Valley of the Moon in California, I don know what town. Maybe Vallejo I don know even if it is in the Valley of the Moon or even if tis a town may be a valley, Vallejo is all she told me, Vallejo. My mother was afraid to try to use the one-hundred-dollar bill for fear of being suspicioned and so she kept it in her bosom. The forty dollars got her started with clean clothes and off on her own—to where? Where was she to go, where was my mother to go, so alone? With another man, of course. Who popped right up before the day was over. By nightfall he’d had his hand in her bosom and fingering the hundred-dollar bill. Senseless because a man had his fingers on the nipples of her breast, poor fool of lonesomeness and sex that my mother was, she lost the hundred-dollar bill in that manner, in the fashion that I have just told you.
    Coming back to her senses she spied through the hotel window the man hurrying away on the street, and within a flash she was down after him and saw him enter a bar and run in and caught him as he lifted a premium beer to his red lips that recently put her momentarily into a blackout with their kisses. Why don we spend the hundred-dollar bill together, Señor , my mother said to him. Or I’ll call the cops to throw your butt into the jail of this town you cheap swindler. Her eyes flashed fire at him, I’m quite sure. Baby, said the man, whose name was Joe Schwartzman, what greater pleasure. I was just going to the phone to phone your room and invite you down for a drink at my courtesy. I’ll show you courtesy, my mother said, and made as if to go for his throat. And in this way Joe Schwartzman and my mother joined up together. They had each other’s number right from the start. A gentle blond robber whose piece of head was blown off the size of a Yarmulke, whose piece of head was dropped like a Yarmulke into my mother’s lap, provided Chupa with the means—a hundred-dollar bill—to discover a dark Jewish lover. Life is truly an unusual journey, verdad? Un viaje maravilloso. A crazy trip that ofttimes knows not its own name and we forget we are in the hands of God.
    Joe Schwartzman was a hot young Jew with good lips who knew how to blackout a woman with lip sucks and tongue lickings. My mother Chupa said never before or after had she ever known such a sex and heat as resided in Joe Schwartzman’s fingers lips and sexual member—not to mention his horned tongue, said Joe Schwartzman had a little horn on the end of his tongue. My God, revolting, I cried. You try it you’ll see, my mother said. Well it’s a dead man’s tongue now, so why argue, I told her. And said that Joe Schwartzman had the combination wordflow of a brilliant college professor and a door-to-door salve salesman—a man of such persuasion could convince you that Jesucristo was a redheaded woman. He was on the road with Lorco Products, a drummer from town to town of pretty kitchen things. He would give demonstrations in women’s homes and, in a kind of a show, sell these women Lorco Products. My mother said she didn’t have to mention what she imagined Joe Schwartzman offered—and awarded when he could—as fringed benefits to the women. God knows, she said, women in small towns. Not to mention Joe Schwartzman in a house full of women in a small—or big, for that matter—town. But she had the one hundred dollars on him and it was his debt of this big bill to her that—she honestly said she believed—kept his horned tongue back of his teeth most of the time, kept him from any monkey business and true to her— most of the time, she said.
    Talk about a talker, my mother Chupa talking could charm a rattlesnake to rattle La Paloma . Wait a minute I sometimes had to say, Chupita, could we have a moment’s silence? Que tienes, muchachito? she’d ask. You sick? Chico chiquito! And she’d grab me to her and clutch me. Que