The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 9

“Tierra sagrado . . .”

—For Sale sign in Highlandtown  

In the second week of June 1988, Nieves began stealing clothes from unlocked cars and selling them at vintage stores downtown.

On Macon Street, Basilio stood sentry in the early evening with a sketchbook at the bedroom window in the back of the house; dusk, about a half-hour after dinner, Grandpop asleep with his head across the afternoon paper open to the police blotter on the kitchen table.

Standing at the window with a new question, Basilio never drew a line.

“What does Nieves have that I don’t?”

He knew his cousin and the girl across the alley were together; it didn’t matter what they were doing, though he could guess. They were together in a way that he had not been with anyone for a long time. He knew it as sure as he knew that color has a numerology all its own.

This evening, he had a glimpse of Elisabeth he hadn’t seen before—sitting at her kitchen table across the alley, her kids playing in with an old shovel in the almost-dark of the yard below, a 20-year-old mommy scribbling in a notebook.

“Dear Diary...”

Nieves was up on the Avenue, waiting for a bus to take her downtown to see a band called Lungfish, that virtually no one had heard of but the Spaniard—having landed in town just a few weeks before—befriended.

Before the bus arrived, a car pulled over.

“Yes. Hello, downtown, yes,” she said, accepting a ride with a perfect stranger.

---

“Dear Diary...

“I’ve never felt this way ... maybe when Robin was born, but that was different. Not like this. Maybe I felt like this at Sacred Heart when we made First Communion but it sounds gross to compare that to this.

“I can’t stop thinking of her. Yesterday we baked a pie.

“Kevin—if you’re reading this, I don’t care. I’m not going to counseling and I’m not going to a priest. This my last confession. I have nothing to confess. You make me sick.”

Down in the yard, Elisabeth’s daughter hit her brother with the shovel—not hard enough to really hurt him but hard enough. As he cried she stood on her head to convince him that it had been an accident.

---

After being clean for six weeks, sick is what Nieves was headed for in the bathroom of Marble Bar as Daniel Higgs and Lungfish opened their first set with “Nothing is Easy.”

Junk, said Burroughs, “hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water.

“... I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.”

Nieves was a veteran; she craved images others recoiled from, had studied Goya nose-to-canvas in the Prado the summer she started shooting dope a few years before. She left the stall with bits of toilet paper near the crook of her arm, little pieces of paper like the one’s Elisabeth’s husband employed when he cut himself shaving on a work day.

She moved happy into the crowd jamming the dance floor, her paints drying to clay beneath an unfinished portrait of Grandpop on Macon Street, nowhere in the world she’d rather be.