10,000 SOULS

 

by

Annette Sandoval

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"They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds."

—Mexican Proverb



 

Chapter 1

 

MR. ZAMORA HAS BREAST CANCER

Mission District, San Francisco, 1979

 

     Mr. Zamora had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer that morning, and the prognosis was not good. He first felt a lump under his left nipple ten years ago. The doctor told him it was a calcium buildup, so he ignored it. During his most recent routine checkup, he mentioned it to his new doctor, who ran some tests. Mr. Zamora was blindsided by the diagnosis. The doctor said that this type of cancer was rare in men, but it did occur.

     Fighting the urge to finger the tumor was like trying not to touch a loose tooth with your tongue. His wife was his deterrent. She was sitting next to him on the plastic slip-covered couch. Their two teenage daughters were sprawled on the living room carpet, the backs of their heads shadowed by screen glow. One or the other would occasionally get up to adjust the reception by rotating the coat hanger antenna.

     Now that the shock was wearing off, he was not sure what scared him more, the cancer itself or the thought of telling his family. If he told his girls he had less than three years to live, the terrible news would instantly age them. Roxy would start a countdown. Every day, he would see the calendar page turn in her eyes. But keeping the illness a secret for too long would be difficult as his health declined. No. Death by his own hand was the best way to go.

     He tuned back into the show. It was the episode where Lucy placed a bet with Ricky. She would keep from buying a hat for longer than he could keep from losing his temper. Mr. Zamora thought, why a hat? A box of Cohiba cigars I could understand, but a pinche hat?

     As if picking up the vibrations of the unspoken question through her jaw, Mrs. Zamora nodded once. "I hate Lucy." Her tone was so full of loathing, Mr. Zamora had to resist the urge to gape at his wife. Their daughters knew better than to look back at their mother. In the wilderness they called home, eye contact was an act of aggression.

     Mrs. Zamora spoke again. In his peripheral vision, she looked like a floral print sack of onions with a russet potato for a head. "Lucy is so spoiled. She can’t cook and never bothers to clean their apartment. She’s always spending her husband’s money and doing things she shouldn't be doing behind his back. Now, what kind of a wife is that?"

     Mr. Zamora was thinking about how familiar that sounded when the potato spoke again. "And what kind of a name is Ricky Ricardo anyway? Did his parents really give him the same first and last name? You see! That’s what happens when los otros write about us. They always get it all wrong!"

     Roxy cautiously spoke to the chancla dangling from her mother’s big toe, aware that she could wield the house sandal with the precision of a ninja throwing star. "Enrique. His name is Enrique Ricardo. Not Ricardo Ricardo."

     "Oh." Annoyed by the correction, Mrs. Zamora folded her arms over her heavy bosom. She sank deeper into the cushions, causing the slipcovers to sigh. "Poor Ricky. If he had just married a good Mexican woman instead of that...he would have been much better off."

     "He’s Cuban, mother," Roxy said through clenched teeth. She braced for the chancla.

     "I know that," Mrs. Zamora said, offended. “He’s Catholic, and he speaks Spanish. If that’s good enough for God, it’s good enough for me."

     “How do you know he’s Catholic?” Roxy said, pushing it.

     “Everyone born speaking Spanish is Catholic,” Mrs. Zamora said, the answer so obvious.

     “In religion class, we learned that over a third of the people in Uruguay aren’t Catholic. It’s the most secular country in the Americas,” Roxy said, instantly regretting it.

     “Well, Ricky isn’t a pagan from Uruguay, now, is he?” Mrs. Zamora said, her tone heavy with sarcasm.

     With the decision made, he tuned her out and took in his girls. Roxy, at seventeen, was the spitting image of the woman now threatening her with the chancla. When she was a baby, he had hoped she would grow out of it. She never did. But God had blessed his firstborn with a greater gift than beauty—a sharp mind. Roxy could do math without the aid of a calculator and not just add and subtract; she could multiply, divide, and do fractions.

     Sixteen-year-old Leah favored him. Two skinny, brown whippets in the rain. Unlike her extrovert sister, Leah was painfully shy and shrank away from attention. Sometimes, when he stared at her, she looked blurry at the edges. He thought she would vanish if he blinked. He worried that she felt things so deeply but took comfort in knowing that her big sister would always be there to watch out for her in ways he never could do.

     Mr. Zamora could not bring himself to think of how much his death would hurt his girls, so he focused his attention on making sure that they were well provided for. The first thing he would do is write a will. Second, get as much life insurance as he could. He remembered hearing something about it taking a year for the death benefits to kick in but was not sure. He would have to look into that.

     As the show faded out, Enrique bent Lucy over his knee and started spanking her. Mrs. Zamora perked up. "Harder! Hit her harder!"

     Mr. Zamora watched as his wife cheered on the domestic abuser. He wondered how many members of the audience were dead. He turned his attention back to his demise. How am I going to do it, and when? I have to do it before I get too sick. It has to happen when the girls are in school. It has to look like an accident and not leave much of a mess. Mr. Zamora became serene. I own a restaurant. Accidents are always happening there. 

 

 

Chapter 2

MR. ZAMORA IS DEAD

 

     Mr. Zamora's fatal freak accident occurred in the restaurant’s kitchen one year and one day after his terminal illness diagnosis. He was electrocuted while trying to unplug a faulty electric bean masher. It was actually an industrial electric potato masher; only they used it for beans. To this day, no one can explain why he was mashing the beans in the first place. That was Pedro’s job.

     Mr. Zamora was laid to rest in Colma, a quiet necropolis city south of San Francisco, where the dead outnumber the living by 1,000 to one. The closed-casket funeral service was well attended and a blur for the sisters. Throughout the ceremony, Mrs. Zamora, heavily medicated on barbiturates purchased without a prescription in Chihuahua, leaned heavily on Roxy and Leah. As they lowered the casket into the ground, she made an unconvincing attempt to throw herself onto the coffin. The widow was half-carried and half-dragged away by the gentle hands of her daughters and the pallbearers.

     Tacos de Sesos Restaurante, or Sesos for short, had been open for business for over forty years. After Mr. Zamora's tragic death, some of the regular customers stopped patronizing the restaurant. Everyone felt bad for the Zamora women. The food was excellent, comida auténtica de Jalisco, but everyone knew his widow was running the restaurant. And no one wanted to spend good money in bad company.

     One week after the funeral, Mrs. Zamora buttoned the top button of the lightweight black suéter she wore over a black polyester blend dress. She sprayed a generous amount of Aqua Net around a perm that was so tight it looked like she was wearing rollers. She paused to stare at herself in the mirror. Her lifelong fear of living without the security of a man, first her father and now her husband, had come true. Sighing, she picked up her husband’s hefty ring of keys, having no idea what most of them unlocked. 

     In the kitchen, Chucha, the cook, conveyed his deepest sympathies. He was a slight, effeminate man with teased black hair and sad Indian eyes. He liked to think of his work aprons as wrap-around skirts. He was wearing his mourning apron, which he had embroidered with flowers of the dead: chrysanthemum, Comstock, gladiolus, and marigolds. For centuries, the bright orange and yellow flowers have guided the souls of loved ones from their graves back to their family homes.

     While selecting baked goods from the pink box that Chucha had brought from the panadería, Mrs. Zamora lamented the loss of her husband. “He was a great businessman, a proud father, and a devoted husband who truly, truly loved me,” she said, as she served herself a niño envuelto with tongs, then a second one. On the ceramic plate, the jelly roll slices looked like Princess Leia’s hair buns.

     She lingered in the kitchen until she received condolences and hugs from her arriving staff. No matter where the waitresses looked, their eyes were pulled back to the burnt floor tiles where their real boss had met God. Pedro was six minutes late. His bowl haircut and small stature always reminded her of one of those little Amazonian tribesmen.

     The lunch staff listened silently as she berated the dishwasher, who worked three jobs, on punctuality before moving on to other complaints. “Not only are you coming in late, but you’re also not clearing the tables right away, and you’re forgetting to refill the water glasses.”

     Chucha walked in carrying a case of hominy grits from the storeroom. He stared at his boss like she was meat that had gone bad in the refrigerator. “Pedro’s not the busboy. He’s the dishwasher,” he said with disdain.

     Mrs. Zamora left the kitchen in a huff. Busboy, dishwasher, what's the difference? If you can’t earn your employees’ respect, take it. 

     She stopped fast in front of her husband’s office. His usually meticulous desk was covered with sloppy stacks of unopened invoices, restaurant catalogs, and scattered phone messages. A wall calendar filled with her husband’s cramped, cursive writing caught her attention. Two of the dates were lassoed in red ink. "Payroll" was written in both. The second payroll date was in four days. 

 

 

Chapter 3

COUNTDOWN TO PAYDAY

 

     For days after the funeral, Roxy and Leah were in a grief fog so heavy and dense they had barely moved from the couch. The drawn curtains and nearly closed blinds dimmed the living room to moody shades of gray. A game show was on the TV, but neither was watching. Leah was thinking about how different the house smelled without him—less of dried berries and nutmeg and more of stale bread. 

     Roxy was trying to remember the dreams she had been having since he died. Last night, all of her teeth fell out. A couple of nights ago, she was driving a car when the steering wheel and brakes suddenly stopped working. She was trying to remember the dream from the night before that, when the loud crash of the front door made them jump. Their mother trudged into the living room crying hoarse, wracking sobs. As she momentarily blocked Bob Barker on TV, something passed between the sisters in a flickering glance. 

     Mrs. Zamora warded off thoughts of working on payroll by retreating to her bedroom, where she escaped into television and food. She only got up to go to the bathroom or switch channels between the novelas on UHF and the soap operas on ABC. Her employees brought her meals on trays and took the dirty dishes away. When she did not feel like real food, someone stopped by the Chinese restaurant on Market Street and picked up a number two combo for her—with extra fortune cookies.

***

     On the morning of the dreaded payday, Mrs. Zamora hunkered down in the apartment’s bathroom. Still dressed in her yellow quilted house smock with purple flowers, she counted down the final minutes on her wristwatch. She wiped her sweaty face with the lacy guest towel no one was allowed to use, with the exception of visiting royalty. Chucha and Pedro prepared for the inevitable uprising in the restaurant’s kitchen by performing Last Rites on each other while splashing tap water.

     The riot began at 10:08 a.m. Dressed in their puffy, off-the-shoulder uniforms inspired by the Mexican Revolution, the ordinarily benign group of waitresses clamored for their paychecks. When La Jefa failed to show her "ugly face," they raided the walk-in refrigerator and freezer. They took part of their due earnings with meat and seafood wrapped in butcher’s paper, huge blocks of cheese, and butter.

     Las Adelitas stormed the storeroom, where they claimed the rest of their paychecks, unpaid sick days, and vacation time owed to them with cases of beer, liquor, and wine. Bottles of DeKuyper Schnapps were left in their wake. As they departed the restaurant, the new mothers snatched up the baby booster seats stacked near the kitchen door.

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~: To be continued :~

 

 

​Copyright © 2024 Annette Sandoval  

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