Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Let me tell the story; I can tell it all.

He was out of luck, , paths, options. Scorned by his neighbors and classmates, in a marriage of necessity and a factory job he found stifling, he essentially quit everything. Wanted to run away to Mexico but was stopped short by reality after a night at a roadside park South Austin. Quit going to his National Guard drills, and the activation notice followed. Showed up at Fort Polk one month late after a mad dash with his brother and three others to California, then clean up to the Canadian border, where they were denied entry, then back home, giving up, then to Ft Polk, from when he left after one night. 

Lived in a trailer near his old home town, went to work as a janitor in Sherman. Went home at times, to his wife and two children. His wife didn't really want him there. She especially didn't want his trouble.

Was a very diffident individual, the wife. Scared of authority. Was afraid of the cable company. The cable company. He was in a dispute with them over a setup fee be didn't figure he owed. So we don't have cable, so what?

She contemplated sneaking down to the cable office to pay the fee, but they agreed to wipe it off the books. She was surprised and relieved. You'd think it was the FBI. 

That was coming up. 

They were looking for him. 

Went to his family home. Two agents. He should leave. Go where? They said that about Billy the Kid. Kills two deputies in a daring escape and doesn't leave Lincoln County. Maybe he just didn't know where to go. 

One night he and his brother left the house where his wife and children lived. They went to Denison, possibly, and were returning on Highway 82. Passed a sheriff cruiser going the other way. The brother said, "They're turning around."

They knew the auto they were in, including the license number. They didn't know which of the two was the suspect. "... said he had a mustache ..." one of the deputies had a clue. He had a mustache. His brother didn't. Instead of waiting for the detective work, he announced himself. Neither deputy thought to ask for ID. 

In the jail HQ. Nobody seemed to know what the charge was. "Ray knows sumpin' about it ..." 

Ray was the liquor control agent. His wife worked with the wife of the accused. 

Outstanding police work. They knew the license number of the auto they were using, even though it was not owned by or registered to either brother. They knew the suspect was mustachioed. But they didn't know which of two choices was their man, nor why they should be after him. 

No matter. It put the whole depressing business behind him eventually. It was no fun, and it might've gone on for a long while had his wife not ratted him out. .

He had an easy time in the army.  Sitting in the orderly room of the unit he would spend his 17 months sentence with, the clerk handed him a note from his 201 file. It was hand written, from his wife to the FBI, telling them she was not living with the Desperado nor was she responsible for anything be may've done. 

"You divorced?" asked the clerk. 

No, but he would be soon. 




--

Why does Eloy Cavazos look so young?

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Parable of the Particle Pair


Guanajuato is known for its  momias, corpses exhumed and evicted from their crypts because the family was not able to keep up the payments. The proprietors of death were able to make them pay eventually by charging tourists to see them. 



The city has attempted to overcome its grisly character with an annual music festival which featured classical personalities of world renown, including Lola Violeta Ana-Maria Bobesco, a Belgian gypsey known to enchant the very animals in the forest with her violin. She is leaving the concert hall after another triumph. 

The narrow undulating brick street. A light from an all-night market. Crying. Wailing as she moves closer. 

Through an open window Lola Violeta  observes a scene of agonizing pain. Desperate adults around the bed with a still child. 

The maestra sets her violin case on the street and removes the instrument. A sound unlike any she has produced so far in the night. She expresses with her constant response to pain and suffering, of which she knows well. 

When she lowers her bow there is silence. She turns. 

The child is in the window. Staring. Transfixed. 

---

The little girl's name is Sonoras, and Lola Viva Bobesco takes her in hand. She will have the greatest teachers, the finest progression into the upper realm of music, will Sonoras. You perhaps have heard her at the Met, or La Scala, or any of the majestic venues known for elite and fabulous presentation. 

---
There is a quantum feature by which two particles, say infrared photons, when separated, remain in contact, though they be cast to the far corners of the universe, if indeed the universe has corners, so that altering the path of one affects the transit of the other at the same instant. If the spin of one is oriented vertically, then the other is horizontal, and altering one means the other adjusts to remain opposite. Siblings are like that.  No one knows how this happens! Besides, by Newtonian physics and Special Relativity, it doesn't. Yet it does, somehow. . 

This movie is Unbreakable. Here are some folk walking. The one to our left is a cartoonist. He is very brittle. Bones snap like plastic. He knows by simple logic this must mean somewhere there is an Unbreakable superhero. The guy to his left is a candidate. 

---
Prudencio Rodriguez intuits the paired particles. He understands without knowing that if his daughter, the lovely and extremely talented Sonoras, is to succeed, he must fail. 

So he sets off on a pilgrimage to accomplish just that. 

Prudencio appeared in our former fishing village one year. He walked in a controlled trundle and wore the same shabby brown coat and he would set his violin case down on the street and produce from its contents the most unpleasant screeches you could imagine. He was genuinely and noteably awful, and this in a region where awful was not unknown. I called him the World's Worst Violinist

For years he went on like that. He stared down into his case. A dollar might appear without notice. Nor did he notice pedestrians. Hardly anyone but me paid him any attention whatever, and he did not seem to notice that either. 

Until one day we stopped. We all noticed. The music he played was of an instant most gratifyingly and inexplicably lovely, beautiful even. I have not heard the like since, and I have heard Reloj play his Viva Tequila. 

Prudencio Rodrigue dropped his bow in his case, his violin on the street and trundledd away. Some say he was crying, but I was behind him at the time. 

They say the City gathered his instrument and case and the few dollars he had won that day and took them to Lost and Found. It was expected he would certainly come for his instrument. He never did. 

The next word any of us had of Prudencio Rodriguez was in our local Sentinel some weeks later.