Thomas H. McNeely

No Más Blanca Que Usted

The boy was fair-skinned and red-haired, and when he pulled a knife on her, calling her, in Spanish, a white bitch, una puta blanca, telling her to get out of her car, there in broad daylight, in the parking lot of the Kroger’s where she had shopped for forty-odd years, Margot’s first thought, in the slow-motion calm of mortal peril (and she had known, from the bitter set of his mouth and the muddiness in his beautiful almond-shaped eyes, that he was terrified, or high, or both, and therefore truly dangerous)—her first instinct was to reply, “No soy más blanca que usted.” I’m no whiter than you.

“But you no say that, right, mami?” Feliz asked.

“Of course not,” Margot said.

She didn’t have to add, as she might with someone who didn’t live in the neighborhood, like the sincere but rather naïve Quakers her husband, Sam, had known, that saying such a thing would very likely have gotten her stabbed, if for no other reason than it would have pierced the veil of anonymity between the boy and her, the pretense that they did not probably live five blocks from each other, that her son, Buddy, had not at one time probably bought drugs from the boy’s older brother, that the boy’s mother and she had not passed each other dozens of times in that very Kroger’s, week after week, for forty-odd years. If Sam had been alive, she might have risked it. She knew what her mother would have said, the word her mother had used, the summer of 1964, when someone had slit their window screen and snatched her purse, the word that she, Margot, still recalled with shame, that she had spent all her life trying to outpace. But instead, she did as she was told; she got out of the car, and the boy got in.

“Y entonces?” Feliz said.

Then, Margot had talked to the boy. But she wasn’t ready to tell Feliz that just yet. She had known Feliz for a quarter of a century, had helped Feliz’s daughter-in-law and son get their green cards when such a thing wouldn’t have bankrupted her, before the days of Trump and ICE—and to be fair, Obama. She knew what Feliz would say about her conversation with the boy. They had long since passed from housekeeper and employer into something more fraught and complex, something like family—though Margot still paid her, of course, to do the housekeeping. She had always been careful to keep what was business, business.

Now, Feliz sat cattycornered across from her at the dining room table, holding her hand. That afternoon, Feliz had gotten the locks changed and Margot cancelled her credit cards. They had met this crisis efficiently, as they had trips to doctors’ offices or repairs to the house—the last years of Sam’s life had been an unceasing round of doctors’ visits before a mercifully short last few days at Memorial Hospital. Margot could see herself headed in the same direction—the slow, humiliating winding down of life. Feliz had been with her through all of it.

Then, she said, the boy backed out the dingy white Prius Sam had insisted upon but which she, Margot, never really liked, and glided silently through the parking lot, stopping to let a young Indian woman pass, one baby in a shopping cart and the other on her hip. Only when the Prius turned onto Telephone Road did Margot, suddenly lightheaded, allow herself to sit on the filthy gum-specked curb. The boy had her wallet, her credit cards, the keys to her house. But Feliz already knew all of this.

“Why you no call police?” Feliz asked.

A light uninsistent pressure from Feliz’s hand, a slight hardening of her voice, let Margot know they had stepped onto shaky ground. She hadn’t called the police because she was afraid, because Feliz had a set of keys, because she wanted to hear Feliz’s voice and know everything would be okay. Because she hadn’t wanted to get the boy in any more trouble than he already was.

“They won’t do anything,” she said. “You know that.”

As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake. Feliz loosened her grip, her blunt face, in the dusk gathering inside the house, turning hard and impassive—ugly, Margot thought.

“We have to do it proper,” Feliz said.

“I don’t want to mess with them,” Margot said. “I don’t like them. I don’t want them in my house.”

“Don’t be a baby.” Feliz leaned toward her across the table again, joking in a way that meant, Margot knew, she wasn’t joking at all. “Why you think no one try to help you at the Kroger?” Feliz said. “Why you think no one say call police? They don’t care about you. They just care about the ICE.”

Here it was, Margot thought: the discussion she’d wanted to avoid. The older Feliz had gotten, the further she’d burrowed into a story Margot could almost recite. “I come here the right way,” Feliz said, now, as always. “The honest way. Not like them. Indocumentado. I bet that boy que take your car is one of them.”

Half the neighborhood was, Margot thought. While she’d stood where her car had been, the young mothers and wolfish men at Kroger’s at that time of day watched her warily across the parking lot. A stocky, handsome man with a thick mustache, wearing a spotless Eastwood Country Club golf shirt, approached—the manager at the Kroger’s, she saw, from his nametag—and asked, too loudly, in the way that younger people did, as if she were deaf or mentally slow, whether she wanted to call the police. She had known he didn’t want his parking lot swarming with cops. She’d wanted to tell him she understood, but she’d felt too tired to explain herself.

It was darker inside the house than out—the hour of gloaming. It was the hour Sam had read to her, and before that, the hour she’d anxiously imagined where Buddy would spend the coming night, and before that, the hour when she and Buddy had eaten together after Jimmy, Buddy’s father, decamped. It had been many years since Buddy had come home in the middle of the night, or disappeared for days, or weeks, only to be brought home by the police. Now, he said, he was in recovery, a term that sounded pathetic to Margot, a childlike belief that what had been lost could always be regained. He had some sort of job teaching high school English in Alief. She tried not to be judgmental. She talked to him every few days on the phone, and he sounded sober, but she had learned to never be sure of her son.

Shadows from burglar bars Jimmy had installed cast shadows on the half-blinds, another of Sam’s expensive contraptions. When Sam moved in, he’d wanted to remove the bars, arguing it would show the neighborhood trust and respect. Margot knew it had as much to do with Jimmy’s putting them in. But it was her house, which she’d bought before either of them arrived. And there were limits, she thought, to trust and respect.

It was time to switch on lamps, raise blinds, warm up the dinner she would eat alone at the dining room table. Some nights Feliz stayed for dinner, or even to sleep in Buddy’s old room. Margot hoped Feliz would stay with her that night.

“Call them, mami,” Feliz said, touching her hand again. “And I’ll stay.”

*

Ramirez, short, compact, his blue uniform uncreased, greeted Feliz in Spanish. His dark eyes were probing, intelligent, mean as a snake’s. It had been fifteen years since Margot had seen him. Except for crow’s feet and a touch of gray at his temples, he hadn’t aged a day. Gallagher, a white cop, towered over him, buzz-cut, scowling, irrelevant. It was Ramirez, Margot knew, who really ran the show.

Ramirez addressed her by Jimmy’s last name, Turner—a subtle reference, Margot thought, to the times, too many for her to count, or, if she were honest, to remember, that he had picked up Buddy, drunk or high. He didn’t ask about Buddy. She couldn’t help but think that his silence was tactical—keeping the past in reserve, she thought, as a threat.

On her dining room table, Ramirez opened a thick binder of photographs, like the binders Margot had used for lesson plans at the lab. Feliz stood next to her, making no move to clear the plates. She was there to watch her. To keep her honest, Margot thought—at least, she thought, Feliz’s version of honesty.

Feliz and she had eaten in silence, watching the news on the giant TV Sam had bought. Every night, it was the same: the howling madness Trump unleashed, which Sam had tried to defeat in the sixties. Feliz absorbed it all impassively; Margot wasn’t even sure how she had voted. She tried not to be cynical. But the story of Sam’s victories—going to Mississippi to register Black voters during the Freedom Summer, securing funding for his university’s first Black Studies department—now seemed to her fairy tales, bromides for children and old fools like herself. The madness—Father Coughlin and Roy Cohn, and the word her mother had used when her purse was snatched, the madness, therefore, inside her—was the real country, she thought.

And yet, there were little rebellions, little subversions. Little acts of grace. It was why she’d spoken to the boy, and why she wouldn’t identify him—why should she, so ICE could beat him up, deport his family, or worse, throw them into a detention center where they kept children in cages? Her silence was the right thing, the only thing to do; it was what Sam would have done.

Page after page, row after row, young men, most Black or brown, stared back at her, seething with resentment or dead-eyed with despair. Sometimes she’d had a lab tech student with the same dead look—in the sixties, Black students from the Third Ward; in the seventies, young men and women from Egypt and Iran. Usually, they didn’t last long in the program. But sometimes they did, and she watched their faces change, become more human—that, not training them how to read pH tests or run the Coulter counter, had been her real achievement, she thought.

She kept expecting to see Buddy’s face, though she knew this was only a trick she was playing on herself. Even at his worst, he had never become so lean and hardened. Thank God, she thought, she’d always been there to help him.

When she saw the boy—the same fair skin and almond-shaped eyes, though his mouth, rather than sneering, as it had been at the Kroger’s, was tilted in an ironic, quizzical grin—as if, she thought, he had been waiting for her to see him—she felt, again, as she had in the parking lot, as if the boy recognized her. As if they recognized each other. But she knew that this was only a foolish thought.

She held herself perfectly still, so they wouldn’t see that she had recognized him.

“See someone you know?” Ramirez said.

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

She remembered the first time Ramirez had brought Buddy home, when Buddy was very young, only twelve or thirteen. The cops picked him up trying to buy beer at the 7-11 down the street. When Ramirez said Buddy was lucky they hadn’t arrested him, Sam, who’d just started living with them, cut in. There was no reason to threaten him, Sam said, glowering at Ramirez over the rims of his reading glasses, frowning through his beard—the very picture, to Ramirez, Margot knew, of privileged pedantry. Ramirez had grinned, cocked his head to one side, as if he’d been waiting for just that moment to show Sam up; then he’d taken an unlabeled amber bottle from his pocket, rattled the pills inside it, and asked if it was Margot’s.

Her first instinct had been to tell the truth and say no. She hated lying—she’d lived enough lies with Jimmy, Buddy’s father, to last a lifetime. Sam had glanced at her, then, too, with his beautiful, clear mathematician’s eyes. Sam never lied; it was one of the reasons she loved him. He couldn’t square what he believed about the cops and Buddy’s innocence, she thought, with what he saw in Ramirez’s hand.

Buddy had stared at her, bitter and frightened, as if she owed him a debt—a childish expression that, as he’d gotten older, had only hardened—that filled her, when she thought of it, with shame and contempt. Ramirez had watched her, then, knowing she would lie, even before she did.

“How’s your son?” he said, now.

If Sam had been there, she thought, Ramirez wouldn’t have treated her this way. But even Sam, as the cops kept bringing Buddy home, and the calls had started, first every few months, then every few weeks, from jails and detox wards, so that if the phone rang too late at night, the ringing flooded her with dread—even Sam had fallen silent.

“He’s fine,” Margot said. “He doesn’t live here anymore. I don’t see what he has to do with this.”

“You’re right.” Ramirez raised his hands in mock surrender. “I’m glad he got out. Not everyone has that choice, you know, to get out.”

Ramirez turned, still grinning, and asked Feliz in Spanish why she hadn’t told Margot to call them earlier. Feliz, head bowed, hands folded at her waist—a posture of submission, Margot thought—said that she had tried.

“Sure you don’t recognize anyone?” Ramirez said, tapping the boy’s photo. When Margot didn’t answer, he said, “How long have you lived here, Mrs. Turner?”

As long as you have, she thought. She’d bought into the neighborhood in the late sixties, just as it was turning from white to brown—a decision both practical and political. But she knew Ramirez didn’t really want to hear her answer.

“You’re not helping anyone,” Ramirez said. “You want to help the neighborhood? Why don’t you help us make it safer?”

Gallagher, ever dutiful, scowled at her. Ramirez grinned. She didn’t care what they thought. All she wanted was for them to leave. It was Feliz, watching her, stricken, enraged, who cut her to the quick.

*

Feliz insisted on carrying their plates to the kitchen, scraping them clean, then washing them by hand. Margot offered to help, but Feliz reminded her, in a light, bantering tone intended to let Margot know just how angry she was, that Margot still paid her for housekeeping. Margot stood at the kitchen table, watching Feliz’s image in the window above the sink. She still hoped that Feliz would stay—a desperate, clawing hope.

“Why you no tell the truth?” Feliz said. “You lie to the police about seeing that boy in the pictures. Why you no say the truth?”

“I didn’t lie,” Margot said.

Feliz harrumphed and shook her head. “Now you lie to me, Maggie. Why you do that?”

She had hoped Feliz would understand; she lowered herself into a straight-backed chair next to the kitchen table, a little dizzy, as she had been after the boy took the car. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“I know why,” Feliz said. “You no like Mr. Ramirez. But he a good police. He keep the neighborhood safe. Why you lie to him?”

Margot remembered what Sam had always said—police keep neighborhoods safe for the police—but his words now seemed glib, fatuous.

“I was trying to help,” she said.

“No,” Feliz said, scrubbing, shaking her head. “I know why. You no like what he did to Buddy. You think I no see, pero I do. But is not the same.”

She could imagine Feliz’s face, her mouth stitched tight; she had never liked Buddy, Margot knew, even when he was a child.

“That’s not true,” she said—it had nothing to do with Buddy, she thought.

Feliz squeaked off the faucet, then turned to her, drying her hands on a towel. “Is not the same. No es lo mismo. Your boy not like that boy. You here in your nice brick house. That boy no gonna touch you. He gonna come down the street and get me. You no think,” Feliz said, tapping the side of her head. “You have no respect. That why you act like this. Cause you have no respect.”

The bright yellow kitchen wavered and blurred. She covered her face with her hands, a dramatic gesture, she knew—one Buddy would have used.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You so sorry,” Feliz said, “we call police.”

She uncovered her eyes. Feliz watched her with an expression Margot had never seen before—a kind of wariness, Margot thought. But she would not sacrifice the boy, even if it meant losing Feliz that night. She knew she would never really lose Feliz, she thought.

“Bueno.” Feliz folded the towel she’d used to dry her hands and laid it on the drainboard. “I’m sorry, mami,” she said. “I got to go home.”

*

“You don’t have to do this,” she’d said to the boy, in Spanish. “If you want money, I’ll give you money.”

She’d gotten out of the car but kept her hand on the door, over the rolled-down window, still hoping to stop him. He’d lurched into the driver’s seat, rubber-limbed, half-asleep. Glue, she thought. Or pills. If it was reefer or beer, she would have smelled them.

“No tiene que hacer esto,” she’d said, more sharply.

The boy glanced at her hand. “The fuck you know?” he sneered, waving the knife, which she now saw was a box cutter, at her hand, trying to make her disappear. “Muévete, abuela,” he said.

She kept her hand on the door. She would not let him talk to her that way; she would not be ignored. She wasn’t concerned about the knife. If he’d wanted to slice her fingers off, he would’ve already done it.

“At least give me my purse,” she said, in Spanish. “You can take the money. I’m going to change my credit cards and the locks on my house. They aren’t any use to you.”

The boy toggled the gear shift, trying to figure out how to work the car. Sometimes her Spanish wasn’t as good as she thought it was, but she was sure he’d understood.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said, in English. “Don’t waste your life.”

He smiled at her defiantly, stupidly. She knew he’d understood. He was going to take the purse, she saw, because he knew that he could. He didn’t care about the leather tag Buddy had made her in camp, attached to her key ring for twenty years, that had held a card with her name and address behind a piece of clear plastic, the card and plastic and paint all long gone; he didn’t care about the letter in her wallet from Sam telling her he would leave his wife and come to her—and he had, true to his word. And why should the boy care, she thought, even if he had known? Why should he care about her first-world problems, as Buddy called them?

“Fuck you,” the boy said, backing the car carefully away from her.

*

That night, she practiced the rituals she had practiced all her adult life—brushing and flossing her teeth, washing her face, rubbing moisturizer into her hands and arms. She’d snapped the new deadbolt locks shut on the front and back doors, disgusted with herself for how much it had cost to replace them.

She knelt, as she did each night, flares of pain shooting from her knees, and prayed for Buddy. It had been many years since he’d snuck into the house to steal food or money. Sometimes she woke in the night and listened, remembering him creeping into the living room, banging into furniture, high, or furtive, riffling her purse and drawers for money. He’d thought he was so clever; but he’d behaved like an imbecile, she told him. Sometimes he’d stood outside, trying key after key in the lock, and she had listened, gauging how high he was by how long he took to find the right key, always creaking the same floorboard when he came through the front door. She imagined him, helpless as a toddler, and had to stop herself from getting up and opening the door. In the mornings, she found him in the bed, in the room down the hallway where he had slept as a boy, silent, savage with rage, before he vanished again.

She didn’t like to think about such things. She did not like to think about her contempt, or her sorrow for him, her lost son.

She hoisted herself up and sank into the too-soft bed. She was very tired. Her limbs felt as if they were held together by string. Each night, she read just a little, like brushing her teeth, to keep her brain from altogether unraveling. She was on the last volume of Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ, which she had vowed to finish before dying. The previous night, she had been thrilled to read Johnson’s speech when he’d signed the Civil Rights Act. She could still remember his stentorian voice, his sleek manly face—its purpose is not to divide, but end divisions.

Now, his words seemed disingenuous, almost sinister. She remembered what was really happening, then; the day that summer the thief cut through a window screen in their apartment and snatched her mother’s purse, the word her mother had spoken, what she, Margot, had felt, despite herself, hearing that word, a feeling that had shamed her ever since—an advantage, a feeling of power. How could she concede that power? For it wasn’t hatred she’d felt, but power, knowing she was safe from being called that word, from living as that thief did. She wished she could call Feliz, to tell her that she understood, but it was too soon to call, the wound too fresh. She remembered the expression on Feliz’s face and the tone of her voice in the kitchen and registered again the distance between them. She knew this argument was different. Now, the distance frightened her. She prayed that she would find some way past it, or through it. She prayed that she would find a chance to redeem herself.

*

When she woke, her reading lamp was still burning. Rose-tinted light edged her blinds. It was very early. She touched her breastbone, as she did each morning, to make sure she was awake, not dead. She knew that someone was on the front porch. She had woken like this before, when Buddy first left for college, and imagined he was there. But she knew, now, that someone was there.

She started to call out down the hallway to Feliz, where she slept in Buddy’s bed. Then she remembered Feliz wasn’t there. A sharp hollow pain pierced her chest. She shouldn’t call out anyway; if she called out, she knew she would scare the boy—for she knew it was the boy who was there.

She levered herself quietly out of bed, pulled on Sam’s bathrobe, crept through the dining room and living room. The burglar bars cast shadows on the blinds like hieroglyphs, messages whose meaning was about to be revealed.

Taking care not to step on the creaky floorboard, she pinched the hasp of the deadbolt lock between her thumb and forefinger and put her eye to the peephole.

The boy peered back at her, his head huge, his body foreshortened, like a cartoon of a boy. But his beautiful brown eyes were clear and probing, as if he could see her through the peephole, as if he could see into her soul.

She startled away from the door. The floorboard creaked. Cursing her own clumsiness, her own fear, she looked again through the peephole. The boy’s face, further away now, had become wary and shadowed. From one arm hung a dark shape—her purse. He backed away slowly, still watching the door. She almost called out, warning him not to trip backwards down the steps behind him. But the boy, still watching the door, found the first step, half-knelt, placing the bag on the porch, then pivoted down the cement walk across the front yard. The white car was nowhere to be seen. How thin and sharp his shoulder blades were beneath his dirty T-shirt, how thin his girlish, pale neck, how thin his hips in dirty blue jeans above his cloddish dirty sneakers. Feliz was wrong—Margot couldn’t wait to tell her so. She gripped the hasp of the lock, ready to turn it. In a moment, he would be gone, carried away from her like a scrap of paper on the wind.

Thomas H. McNeely’s new book, Pictures of the Shark: Stories, will be published in June 2022 by Texas Review Press; his first book, Ghost Horse, was winner of the Gival Press Novel Award.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wallace Stegner Program for his fiction.  Please visit his website: https://thomashmcneelywriter.com/