Red Weather

16. The Courtyard of the Yellow House

105 16 The Courtyard of the Yellow House Neva left the market with a broad-brimmed straw hat, a bag of limes, and a round mirror framed by a ring of painted wooden dancers. She headed for the row of shops on Boulevard Calderón, hoping to find a metal hook for the back of her bedroom door, where she could hang the blue embroidered robe she’d inherited from the never-seen Cristina. She lived in Cristina’s room, wore Cristina’s clothes, kept a small, tightly woven basket on top of the chest, a basket she knew must’ve been Cristina’s. On hot days, she thought she could smell a faint scent different from her own, a scent that had to be Cristina. Cristina should’ve been a ghost hovering in her room, at the kitchen table, but she wasn’t. Pale yellow flowers ran up the arms of the robe, every stitch tiny and exact. Neva could not imagine the person who would leave it behind. She could no longer imagine the person who left her luggage on a dusty road just north of the border. The room could’ve been so full of ghosts there was no room to breathe. But it wasn’t. It was clean, like a body pared almost down to bone, and in it there was plenty of room for Neva. More room than she had ever had. She hadn’t known it was possible to have so much room. The shops were busy. They were a little like the shops in Butler City. Most people did their big shopping at the central market, the way everyone in Butler City went to the Piggly Wiggly in Springville. But if you had to pick up a few things or wanted to be sure to find something, you went to a shop. It was the same here. Neva needed a towel, and the only ones she found in the market were beach towels, thin with ugly scenes in orange and blue, one that looked like a giant coke can. There was a row of shops halfway between their house and the school where she sometimes stopped for pencils or paper clips—they never had enough of them at school. 106 In Butler City, the shops were small, tiny even, and the customers and owners knew each other, knew what you might buy, knew your habits. Her grandmother never went to the Springville Piggly Wiggly. On Saturday mornings, the first Saturday of each month, after her social security had come, she and Neva went into town where they bought thread or yarn or candles at Jemison’s, salt, flour, eggs at Sisemore’s. Once, buying wire tie-ups at the hardware store, Neva saw two women look at her grandmother; then one whispered something to the other. “Mrs. Clare,” her grandmother said, nodding to the whisperer, who nodded back and left the store. Her grandmother sighed. Mr. Dowdy, who ran the hardware store, came over to them and said, “Now Lila, you shouldn’t be putting in these tie-ups yourself. One of the Crocker boys can do it, won’t charge you much.” Her grandmother nodded but said nothing. “You don’t need to pay any attention to Lessie Clare,” Mr. Dowdy said. “Nobody around here ever thought of Martin as an Indian, and if we had, we wouldn’t have cared no way.” He tied the stakes together in a bundle. “Lord,” he said, shaking his head. “It weren’t like he was colored.” Red, Neva thought, not colored. She shook her head at the memory, shifted her shopping bag to the other hand, ignoring the growing clamor behind her until the whip caught her on the left shoulder, stinging a little. She turned to a mad face, bearded and filthy, a mouth open and shouting at her in garbled Spanish, lips crusted with white and working over the words: “Gringa,” “Puta,” “Chingada.” She ran. She ran, and the people around her scattered, some of them touched by the whip, too, but only women and a girl of about eleven or twelve holding her mother’s hand. She backed into a doorway, a shop that sold cloth. “Venga!” she heard, and turned to see two girls crouched behind the counter. She scrambled to join them. El Loco loomed in the doorway, shouting, whip still in his hand. One of the girls giggled, but Neva’s palms soaked through her skirt to the...