UC Davis Web Journal #2

What Lived in My Car After Efraín

Leticia Del Toro

A plastic bag under the passenger’s seat with Oakley ski glasses, their colored interchangeable lenses, and a 1980’s cassette walkman. These I will never use. An electronic organizer that he actually did use. I checked the address book and noted the names of people I didn’t know. It listed their phone numbers and some dates, probably not their birthdays. On days I’m feeling curious and masochistic I want to call every number and find out who I’m reaching on the other end of the line. I never call. I think I knew all the important people.

These objects have ended up in my car because when my brother, Efraín, died, we moved the contents of his desk—curios and rental contracts, mortgage papers, love letters, journeyman certificates, pay stubs, we moved the whole mess into my room. I felt I was the custodian of an archive I had no right to touch. Yet everywhere I looked, his stuff overwhelmed my life.

We cleared out his house in small chunks of hours, however long we could stay before one of us (sisters and mother) came across a motorcross jersey or a picture of an old girlfriend and then we’d crumble. He lived nextdoor to my parents so we were over there often. The little things were heaviest and we could never truly carry them all the way out. I carried what I thought meaningful out to my car, but then I would put the objects somewhere forgettable, like under the seat or in a box in my trunk.

What lived in my car was a homemade cassette tape, the Supremes, Smokey, Roy Orbison, Golden Earring. There’s a demolished wristwatch with a huge digital face. The watch looks as if it’s been run over. The battery must be near dying, but once it crowed from the glove compartment. It revealed itself, an electronic rooster alarm, frightening me at five in the morning with a factory perfect cock-a-doodle-do. It told the time in a digital voice, “Son las cinco de la mañana en punto.” No joke. It crowed the hour in Spanish. I liked to think Eff was magnetically inside the watch, that he gave the battery life to scare the shit out of me, his way of asking, why you up so early?

I wished that stupid watch had been there before he died, years before when I was doing stupid shit, when I needed some kind of a wake-up call at all hours of the morning, when I was falling asleep at the wheel discovering the right front-end of my Nissan Sentra slightly accordioned in a ditch just outside of Gilroy. This only happened once, but in my dreams it may as well happen every night. It was the worse night of my life, worse only to the night I heard the news about Eff. It was the night that ended the long distance relationship that kept me up and down highway 101 and 156 like a loca.

There are two stains in my car from that night, the first one a cloudy white splash that faded the black vinyl trim around the gear shift. Here I spilled acetone trying to frantically remove my chipped nail polish in the car. I’d forgotten to take it off before the trip down to meet the boyfriend. I didn’t want him to see the proof that I’d been going out with my girls, that the nails were well…candy apple red, and what the hell did that mean? A mere glimpse away from him over dinner meant I was cheating. He saw the signs in everything.

So I went down there to tell him the truth, that I’d gotten restless, yes lonely, tired of burning through miles going up and down that damn highway and why was I the only one to make the drive? So I told him, I’d been with someone else. I had to. My body made me and when I told the truth we both screamed and we cried, and I retched in the toilet, and I rolled into a ball on the floor and we held each other and I wanted to die. I left at four the next morning to be at my warehouse job at eight, but I didn’t make it... I woke up wrecked in the ditch, fainted in a wet, crampy mess of blood and loss in the driver’s seat. My body had expelled the truth it couldn’t contain. I drove straight to a clinic before a CHP ever found me. The damn stain on the seat I could never remove. So the acetone on the gearshift reminds me of red, fucking reckless.

That one drive home made me stay home and the life I was supposed to live with the boyfriend down in Pacific Grove never happened. Reckless turned to responsible when I focused on just getting a paycheck, being a good daughter, a dependable sister, helping out with Efrain’s baby because they, too, stayed close to home. Sometimes I think all that happened for a reason, that I was meant to stay on the home front to watch Efraín live through the years no one suspected to be his last, to be there when Korina said her first words or when she cried out for me, for me, when we stayed up with her through nights of colic and fever.

So in the glove compartment live the guardianship papers, with my name and each one of my siblings names shown as having been served with such papers. It proved my mother was legal guardian for Korina, Efraín’s only daughter, two years old when he died. We each kept these papers with us when Korina was in our care—in case her mother suddenly appeared in person to reclaim her. Or if the police were after us for some false claim on her part. We believed that both of these scenarios were likely to happen at every minute.

There were more little items that belonged to Efraín. A photo keychain of his Akita, Aimless. A wallet sized photo of myself and my other nieces taken the summer before I started college. He owned two of these, one in his wallet, one held with magnets on the refrigerator. I don’t remember giving him two.

A Zuni fetish. A letter from a woman named Lisa T. He met her at a museum in Chicago. She was from New Jersey. There were many letters from Lisa T, perhaps most were cordial and sweet like this one. This was the only one I took with me and I really should’ve put it someplace safer. I probably should’ve written her. I don’t know when they last wrote to each other, but I had broken the news to so many people, I couldn’t bear to break it again to some girl in Jersey I’d never meet.

What I treasure most is his heavy rusted iron pipewrench, its long handle flecked with peeling orange paint. At first I couldn’t lift it. I keep this under the driver’s seat and every once in a while practice swinging it.

This may seem like a lot of stuff that belonged to Efraín, but I also have everyday junk of my own. A commuter mug for coffee. Spanish homeworks I need to correct, a package of emery boards, bills I need to pay. Stray earrings missing a post, changed quickly. Scraps of paper with phone numbers. An emergency change of underwear and jeans.

This year I bought a new car. It’s been eight years since my brother has passed and I had to empty the old car before I sold it. I finally put away all his personal items at home in boxes because one day Korina might be curious. I put all this away, all except the custody papers and yes, the pipewrench. It rests immovable under the driver’s seat. My new car is red. Some days this is all I see.

Leticia Del Toro was born and raised in Northern California, in the sweet waterfront town of Crockett, near La Boca del Puerto Dulce. She is a language teacher and arts activist, serving on the Board of Directors for Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center in Richmond, CA. Before her adventures in fiction, Leticia published poetry and translations of Latin American song lyrics. Her work can be read in Konch, Drumvoices Revue and in the liner notes of many releases from the historic roots music label, Arhoolie Records.

She was recently awarded a fellowship from the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College and the 2005 Elliot Gilbert Award in Fiction. She is working on a collection of short stories called Devocionario. Leticia also bakes delectable honey orange madeleines.

Contact Leticia at letydt@yahoo.com