My Nachos with Andres

          Yet again, my deficient planning skills threaten to bite me in the glutes. But I’m committed to the journey, short as it is. I carefully knee-bump my $2 garage sale chair toward the wedge of shade on my front porch. Even with this minimal effort, sweat blooms across my torso.

The chair’s leading leg snags on a warped deck board mere feet from my destination. I lurch forward, and half of my improvised nachos slide off the platter. Ruffles and Cheez Whiz hit the deck. Fortunately, none of my drink breaches the mug's lip—a minor victory.

I bump and slide the last few feet into the shade, then balance my nacho platter and drink on the top porch rail. My knees creak in harmony with the worn wicker seat as I settle down for my after-shift snack. There must be a better home stretch to retirement than six-hour shifts as a Home Depot associate.

          The syncopated ticking of the rooftop swamp cooler provides a melancholy soundtrack to this smothery evening. Despite its gallant struggle, the old appliance is as effective for its purpose as a narcoleptic nightwatchman is to his.

          I lever off my shoes and give each throbbing foot a cursory massage before reaching for the sweaty A&W mug. There’s nothing like the rejuvenating punch of Everclear and club soda—a requisite jumpstart for the flagging spirit. Let others pollute their palates with bourbon, brandy, gin-adulterated cocktails, or glorified fruit bowls like the old fashioned. Give me the clean, restorative jolt of seltzer and pure grain alcohol. This afternoon’s ratio favors the alcohol.

          This vintage mug has seen better days. Half of the logo has worn off, and its handle fell victim to a kitchen mishap decades ago. I don’t recall when it became the default vessel for my early evening cocktail. But I remember the sharp pang of guilt only minutes after stealing it from Al's A&W in June of ‘72. It wasn’t my only theft of my youth. I substantially reduced the Grand Rapids Kroger’s inventory of Snickers bars during my grammar school years without ever feeling the slightest twinge. But Bud Van Dyke sponsored my Little League team; stealing the mug felt like robbing from family. I buffer the guilt by telling myself that I’ll send it to Al's daughter, Andrea—one of these days.

To the east, beyond the skeletal crown of my neighbor’s dying manzanita, volleys of dry lightning assault the Sandia Crest. Lightning and thunder, without a drop of rain to break this beastly heat. Like the flash and bluster of a politician’s campaign rhetoric. All promise, no follow-through.

I wash down a mouthful of nachos with a dose of distilled fortitude, then pull out the letter that’s resided in my breast pocket since this morning. It's Christine's first contact since the judge’s gavel bludgeoned our marriage into extinction in early March. Before our passion withered, she enhanced her affectionate missives with a misting of Shalimar. A hopeful sniff of the envelope reveals nothing but perhaps a hint of my fabric softener. I run a fingernail under the flap and pull out the note. The flow of her script is calligraphic, except for the flattened bottom of each letter from her habit of using a ruler as a guide. Her message is terse, obliquely damning, and unsigned: Robert: (A colon rather than a comma. Subtle distancing via punctuation.) You exude all the optimism of a latter-day Holden Caulfield. Go back to East Lansing.

          Compared to her parting shot as we left the courthouse, “I can't precisely recall when not hating you became a full-time job," the note is nearly conciliatory.

          In hindsight, I'm not surprised that our relationship, sparked by a few exchanged witticisms on social media and two brief visits to Albuquerque, exhibited the shelf life of an avocado. It certainly didn’t justify my abandoning a tenured teaching position and giving away everything that didn’t fit into a 4x8 U-Haul trailer.

          Honestly, the majority of our marriage's failure falls on my side of the ledger. I never realized how closely linked my disposition is to Michigan's temperate climes until summer descended on Albuquerque. While my tolerance for little irritations plummeted as the mercury skyrocketed, her patience with my bristly existence deteriorated in kind.

          I reach for another drink, but the sweaty mug slips from my grasp. It plunges to the ground and shatters on a concrete block lying alongside the foundation.

          Before I can head inside for another drink, Andres Cantu’s ill-tuned Ford F-150 chugs into view. He wheels into my dirt driveway and executes a half-assed Tokyo drift onto the edge of my yard, throwing up a translucent sheet of dust., Bristling with so many shovel, rake, and hoe handles, the rambling wreck resembles a steampunk hedgehog.

          After the engine dies a dieseling death, I holler, “Get that rolling deathtrap off my lawn!”

          “Lawn? Hell, I seen more grass in Death Valley.” Andres peeks over his shades. “And lay off my truck, pendejo. She’s a future classic.”

          “She’s a future scorpion condo.”

          Andres climbs out of the old pickup and flashes a crooked smile. “You’re one insult away from tasting a can of barrio whup-ass.” He tucks a shopping bag into the crook of his right arm and hobbles toward the house. The little Latino is so bowlegged I could lob a melon between his knees and not contact either inseam of his jeans.

          I herd the mound of fallen nachos into the corner with a shoe, then retrieve my old oak rocker from the sunny side of the porch.

          Andres bends down at the foot of the steps and slaps a coat of grass trimmings from his pants. In doing so, his shirt sleeves ride up, revealing a band of skin the color of a weak latte. The sun-ravaged portions of his lower arms, hands, cheeks, and neck more closely resemble beef jerky.

The old landscaper’s jeans--faded to a pastel blue--are as limp as flannel. The cuffs are fringed from countless washings, and the frayed belt loops border on merely decorative. A dramatic contrast from his forest green shirt with sharply-creased sleeves, CANTÚ embroidered above the breast pocket, and “Lawn Quixote Inc.” in a flamboyant font across the back.

          Andre bows theatrically. “Knutson.”

          I bow in kind. “Cantú.” And we settle into our chairs.

          He looks past me to the porch railing. "You not drinking that watered-down jet fuel today?”

          “I just recently dropped the habit, so to speak.”

          He tosses me a can. “For you, my pinchi hermano.”

          "Budweiser? I thought your people only drank Dos Equis or designer tequila.”

          Andres shrugs off my insult. “Overpriced piss for gringo yuppies.” He nudges the rocker into motion. Its rhythmic squeak, the swamp cooler’s tick-ticking, and the occasional roll of dry thunder make for a unique backing track to our verbal jousting.

          I hand my appetizers to Andres, and he frowns. “What the hell?”

          “Norwegian nachos.”

          "If your Viking grandfathers ate this crap, they couldn’t conquer the trots, much less half of Europe." He balances the plate on his lap and lifts a couple of Ruffles. Strings of Cheez Whiz stretch nearly a foot before snapping. “I haven’t seen nothing like this since the dog stole a bag of Cheetos off the counter and got sick.”

          "Says the guy who ate a burrito his four-year-old made out of Play-Doh."

          “It was her pretend quinceañera,” he says. I couldn’t hurt her feelings,”

          “You were lucky you didn’t wind up in the ER.”

          Andres waves his hand dismissively. "So, I put in a little overtime on the crapper. A small price to pay to witness the miracle of a child's smile." He motions with his chin. “Torbellino.”

          Across the street, a dust devil, clad in caliche talc, whirls around pallets of 4x8 OSB and stud stock on the former site of Amelia Navarro’s home. The baby vortex sucks up sundry trash in its path before finally bashing itself into oblivion against the framing of the new house in progress.

“Amelia was a good woman.” Andres crosses himself. “Gone too soon.” He takes a long pull on his beer. "Now they tear down her pretty casita to throw up that three-story monster.”

          “Gentrification,” I say. “The upwardly mobile displacing the downtrodden. These faux-adobe monstrosities with fake vigas ringed by walls so high they could have repelled Santa Ana’s troops. They're as much a harbinger of a neighborhood’s destruction as the Tree of Heaven.”

          “I don’t follow you, Knutson.”

          “You know, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?”

          “Brooklyn must be a pretty shitty place if it’s only got one tree.”

          I sometimes forget the chasm separating our respective cultural experiences. Cantú is well-versed in Hispanic authors. He can recite impressive passages from Allende, Garcia Márquez, and entire poems by Neruda. But the odds that he could name a single title by Steinbeck, Hemingway, or King are as long as me being able to recite the US Constitution backwards—in Gullah. “Yes, Cantú, it does sound like a shitty place.”

          Andres eases another chip into his mouth. He maneuvers it with his tongue to the left side, where he still has opposing molars, those on the right side lost to a tree-trimming mishap.

          "Considering how disgusting my nachos are, you're certainly wolfing them down."

          He shakes his head. “An act of public service. The more I eat, the less of this toxic waste goes to the landfill."

          A familiar, erratic clicking interrupts our exchange. Moments later, old Miss Armijo dodders into view, tapping the sidewalk with her cane, hot-pink pantsuit hanging off her bony frame like a flag during the doldrums, and jet-black wig cocked at a belligerent angle. A frail, scruffy dog follows, its leash knotted to the old maid’s belt. The little beast stops to sniff and lift a leg until the leash goes taut, jerking him back into motion.

          Andres’ upper lip curls into a sneer that would appear sinister but for the missing teeth. "Keep that rata off my friend’s lawn, vieja. I just mowed it.”

          “Mowed it with what?” She replies without looking in our direction. “A vacuum cleaner?”

          “Better I should use your broom, bruja!” Andres hollers.

          His retort sets the mangy chihuahua to yapping manically. Despite its bravado, the scruffy, off-white rodent looks as intimidating as a frayed Q-tip.

          I've never seen this side of my friend. “Why all the venom?”

          “When that witch was Junior’s fifth-grade teacher, she cuffed him upside the head for no reason.”

          I know Andres Junior. Without the tempering presence of his mother’s DNA, the kid would be a bigger smartass than his old man. “For no reason?”

          “Just for giving her a compliment.”

          “That’s hard to believe.”

          Andres nods. “He told her, 'When I grow up, I hope to have a beautiful, thick mustache like yours señora.’”

          The old woman and her dog resume their hobble down the sidewalk. At the end of my property line, the little beast squats. A few tiny pellets drop from its behind before the pair shamble out of view.

          “Cantú, don’t you roaming Catholics have a saint in charge of making nasty little dogs spontaneously combust?”

          “Saints, they’re unreliable bastards,” he says. “Better I just plant a few jumping chollas by the sidewalk. Let the little rata lift his leg on one of them.”

          We share a few minutes of relative quiet—aside from the creaking rocker, the crunch of Ruffles, the ticking of the swamp cooler, and Andres' periodic critiquing of my Norski nachos. Finally, he shoots me a look. “Something’s going on with you, compadre.”

          He’s more intuitive than I sometimes give him credit for. I toss him Christine’s note. It skips off his palm and lands atop the nachos. He pre-empts my anticipated insult with, “The sun was in my eyes.”

          Andres pulls out a pair of glasses, the nosepiece, and one temple heavily taped. After adjusting them on his face, he squints at the note, lips moving with each word. After a few minutes of grunting, frowning, and mumbling softly in Spanish, he looks up. “This Holden Coldfield, he must be an ex of hers? And he’s a latter-day guy. I cut some of their lawns.”

          “Some of whose lawns?”

          “Latter-day folks. Mormons. Between you and me, I don’t trust them. They’re too happy all the time."

          I refrain from enlightening him on Christine’s reference to Salinger’s tiresome, non-Mormon protagonist. Rather than achieving some relief by sharing this note, a painful lump forms in my throat.

          He hands back the note and expels a long, mournful sigh. “Ah, mi hermano from una otra madre. My people have a saying.”

          Finally, what I’ve been waiting for.

          “’Pull your head out of your ass and move on.’ It’s much prettier in Spanish.”

          Hardly the emotional balm I had hoped for. Before I can cobble together a comeback that conveys the sentiment, "Kiss my ass," Andres lays a hand on my shoulder. “In all honesty, I hurt for you here.” He places his free hand on his chest. "But moving here from Wisconsin—”

          “Michigan.”

          “Michigan, Wisconsin. La misma caca, diferente pala.”

          “In American, bud.”

          “Same guano, different shovel—more or less.” He places a leathery hand on my shoulder. “In our heart of hearts, we both knew a marriage that started with a couple of twits on Tweet book—"

          “Facebook.”

          “A couple of twits on Facebook and what—two short visits to knock boots? That’s a thin plank to walk off the ship of bachelorhood,” he says. “All I can say is that we live through these times.” He raises his can of Bud. “To you, my friend.”

          From the moment I met him the previous autumn, Andres and I seemed to click. But our interactions have always been cordial, joking, and non-intrusively shallow. In this case, I had hoped for more.

          Andres stops rocking. “Years back, I had a friend. His wife was having their first child.” His voice is quiet and bereft of affect. "La partera—the midwife, she did her best.”

          It's evident that this "friend" sits just to my left. A shameful burn rises from my throat and into my face. Divorce is so trivial when stacked against the loss of a child. “I’m so sorry⎯for your friend.”

Andres only shrugs.

          With the thunder over Sandia Crest abating, the swamp cooler’s incessant struggle alone can’t soften the edges of this excruciating silence.

          Finally, Andres pushes the rocker back into motion. “Do me a favor,”

          “Anything.”

          He holds up the last chip. "Sell the recipe for this to the government as a weapon of mass destruction." Subtle laugh lines materialize among the other creases in his face.

          “Fortunately, only one of my Gabriela's tamales will flush the toxins from my body when I get home."

          “I admit her tamales are good, but—”

          “Good?” Andres snorts. “Suckling pigs offer themselves up for the honor of being part of her recipe. The very act of her kneading the masa puts magic into them.” His eyes roll skyward. “Ay, Dios. And she wraps each one in a corn husk and a benedición.”

          My friend Cantú dances back and forth across the border that separates embellishment from bullshit with the virtuosity of Baryshnikov.

          “Two healing miracles are already credited to her tamales—the pork ones, not the pollos. Father, what’s his name at San Felipe de Neri wanted to use them for the Holy Communion. But my wife is too humble and won’t allow it.”

          He should save some of that fertilizer for his clients’ flower beds. But there's no denying that Gabriela Cantú's tamales are peerless.

          He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “I can put you down for the usual dozen this week?”

          “I’d risk life and soul to cancel my standing order, wouldn't I?"

          “One thing, though.” He rakes a few chip crumbs from his salt-and-pepper goatee. "Making these little miracles takes such a toll on her; we need to raise the price by $4 a dozen.” He pauses. “For future doctor bills, you see.”

          “The blood of Pancho Villa runs through your veins.” Andres attempts a sputtering response, but I cut him off with a raised index finger. “Three bucks more.”

          “At that price, I can't guarantee magic in each one.”

          “I’ll take my chances.”

          Our negotiations resolved, Andres sets down his beer can and the empty plate. He presses down on the rocker’s arms and labors to his feet. I slip into my shoes and follow him to his truck.

I hadn’t noticed the new logo on the driver’s door when Andres skidded onto my property:  a gaunt, mounted knight attacking a windmill with a weed whacker. “Alicia, my oldest, came home from art school last weekend and did it.” The pride in his voice borders on three-dimensional.

          Andres hoists himself up behind the wheel. “Hasta luego, patrón!” He stomps on the gas. The pickup bounces over the curb, and its license plate clatters to the pavement.

          Before I can retrieve the renegade plate, his truck squeals to a stop. Andres sticks his head out of the window. "I'm thinking!" he calls out. "That Hallman Canfields guy in your ex-wife’s note. One of these days, let's me and you look him up so you two can compare notes on her.”

          I shoot him a thumbs-up. No sense derailing my great friend’s good intentions with something as inconsequential as facts.

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