Eddie's Kick-ass Corvette.
When the rhythmic sound of reselling purple-painted cars on the side of the interstate is interrupted by the serenade of Spanish Catholic hymns and a man with a three-foot arm.
To the taste of a hot cigarette on the side of his lips and the squeak of a paint pen streaking down the windshield, the mohawked man left his half-written phone number on his purple Dodge mini-van to turn around and see why the interstate was singing. He lived on the side of a street where the sound of radios and wheels rhythmically swishing by was something he’d gotten used to. It had given him a background to work to in the heat of his garage, restoring old cars he’d bought off of Route 83 in hopes of selling them for more, but as he wrote the “7” on his for-sale car, the rhythm of the road was interrupted by a sort of slow serenade.
He turned around. The normal view of the town’s grain field a few miles from the border was blocked to his eye by hundreds singing and walking down the interstate. Lifting his sport sunglasses to rest above his mohawk to get a better look at what he was not completely sure he was seeing, his eyes slowly moved to the left, then to the right, then to the left again. He’d seen a religious sister on T.V. before, but he’d never considered he’d see them accompanied by a police escort walking past his garage in large-brimmed hats and tennis shoes.
He brought his fingers to his lips to take a deep puff of smoke as he squinted his eyes in intrigue. Lungs filled to the brim, he let out a long, slow blow, trying to decide what to make of this all. In the years he’d lived in Brownsville, he’d picked up on Spanish enough to understand the lyrics the hundreds sung before him.
“Bendito, bendito, bendito sea Dios”
“This for church?!” the man shouted over the lyrics of “Bendito.”
“Yeah!” I shouted back.
He was the size of a lamp from where I could see him. I’d wondered what he had thought of the sight. Our Eucharistic procession in the 105 degree heat of the May Texas sun was quite the stare if you had no context to what was happening. Water bottles in every hand and hats on every head showed that this walk past his garage had no lack of planning from those walking.
“That’s beautiful!” his deep, steady voice matter-of-factly yelled back.
“Los ángeles cantan y alaban a Dios”
His stopping to lean up against his purple Dodge mini-van with the white numbers “956-37,” painted on it showed he really meant it. I wanted him to know what we were doing. He found a beauty in our disruption of his interstate, but I didn’t want to try my fate with the uninterrupted side of the flow of traffic.
It took my teammate, Charlie, 10 seconds to decide that it was worth his risk. I saw him and his grey sunshirt with the hood pulled up dart out of the crowd, 60 feet behind me when the lack of traffic looked right. His jogger-fit hiking cackies ran in long strides to the driveway where the mohawked man and the restored car were found.
“Hey! How’re you doin? I’m Charlie,” he said with his almost three-foot-long arm extended out.
“I’m Eddie,” he said. Charlie could feel the rough calluses that covered Eddie’s hand as they shook. Up close, he could see Eddie’s hard work on his work jeans in oil stains and unsymmetrical rips and burn marks. He also got a good look at the purple Dodge mini-van. Charlie said that up close, you could tell that he had painted it purple.
“Yo creo, Jesús mío, que estás en el altar”
Charlie told him all about what the hundreds of people walking past his garage following a float with a golden thing on it were up to. Eddie spoke back his support and banter with the cigarette in his mouth. It never came out, it just clapped around the whole time as he talked.
“Do you want to come into the garage and see my kick-ass Corvette?” Eddie hoarsely asked out of the side of his mouth.
“I would like nothing more Eddie.”
The next time I saw Charlie, he was a tiny speck running down the thin grass strip on the side of the interstate. While he was looking around Eddie’s garage at his kick-ass Corvette and purple-painted Dodge mini-van, the rest of us kept walking down the road. He would have blended right into the scenery with his full-coverage-grey-sun-shirt’s hood pulled up and blue-green sunglasses on if it weren’t for his neon green and orange tennis shoes that he only wore for four days. Charlie wore Chacos the rest of the summer and never brought the tennis shoes back out, even though he was the only one to get blisters.
“Oculto en la ostia te vengo a adorar”
As I saw Charlie getting closer and more normal in size, I thought, “That’s the Gospel.” Sometimes, living the Gospel is as funny as darting out on the interstate to go see Eddie’s kiss-ass Corvette and then sprinting back even though its 105 degrees out and your whole group is leaving you. Charlie got a kick out of his little side-quest of telling Eddie about Eucharistic Jesus that day.
Later in the van when Eddie wasn’t around, Charlie told me about the cigarette clapping around his lips and the kiss-ass Corvette sat in his garage. He delivered his final line to the story from under his eyebrows, head tilted down, with a slight smile on the left side of his mouth.
“And to tell you the truth,” he said in a way that made me lean in.
“I didn’t think it was that kick-ass.”
But Eddie, if you’re reading this, Charlie had that line planned and added it for comedic effect.
This is Awesome, Issy!