Stuart Watson

A Thing of Beauty

Even in bed, Lira wore her hood, custom-cut to reveal the undefiled half of her face. She and Berto lay eye to eye. Berto reached beneath the hood, caressed the tough, mottled scar tissue that flowed into the lid of her right eye. He touched it as if it were still fragile, still burning from the fryer oil. 

“If not for this, you wouldn’t be here,” Berto said. “Nor would I. Can tragedy be a blessing?”

“Shh.”

In the throes of lust, Berto rarely left himself. Touching her, as he did, took him away. What was this creature lying next to him? Walking down the street not long ago, they had passed a theater supply store. He glanced into the display at the masks. Glee and grief, comedy and tragedy. It was as if Lira wore both, halved down the middle. The beauty that remained was as compelling as the larger beauty lost. Such a force, this quality.

In the beginning, Lira had little but beauty. Then half of that. 

Half of beauty is still beauty, Berto thought.

They had met in southern Mexico. He was on a medical mission, nursing in a clinic that served refugees from El Salvador. She arrived with a fat bandage on her face. She told Berto about the deal gone bad, the scars as a parting slap.

Berto couldn’t fix her, but he helped the doctors do what they could. 

“You will have scars,” he said. “It could have been worse.”

She had seen worse. Her mother was Mayan and Garifuna, her father of Castillian lineage but little skill. He worked on cars in their village on the south coast of what was then British Honduras. Sometimes the cars worked when he was done. The family left, when she was a child, for something better. It was much worse where they stopped. By the grace of God, they survived the Salvador civil war down on the coast, sweeping rooms and laundering sheets for gringo tourists. After her father left for reasons known only to him, she and her mother opened a fruit stand like everyone else on their street. Who needed that much fruit? Not very many people, as it turned out. 

The gang boys wanted favors in exchange for a discount on their “insurance.” Lira knew there was not enough to pay for protection and food. Instead, she agreed to take a “nap” with the tattooed teenage thug called Dia. When he was done, he stopped near the door, looked back at her, stepped on her panties and ground them into the dirt. 

After that, she refused any “naps.” 

After that, she got a face full of fryer oil. 

“You were so beautiful,” Dia said before he stepped into the street. “No one will have you now.” 

Her neighbor stuffed ice cubes in a torn tee-shirt and taped the package to her face. Lira bundled some clothes into a pair of jeans, tied the ankles together, and slung it over her shoulder. She crossed the border two days later and learned of the clinic from others swimming up the same stream. 

Berto’s parents had come to the states during World War II. Braceros. Steady work in the fields, strikes and battles for the pay they were promised. His parents insisted Berto go to school, before they stepped from their humble cabin into the campo for a day bent at the waist beneath the central California sun. The farm grew tomatoes and chiles and lettuce and cucumbers. They bought bags of beans and rice and cans of Argentine beef at the store in the village on weekends. They shared a refrigerator with the other residents, a place for milk and queso and Jaritos. 

A high school teacher urged Berto to try community college. Study nursing. Just two years. Get a good job. 

Berto was reluctant. Boys weren’t nurses. He could work harvest. He already did, when not in school.

“Sit down,” Mr. Reyes said. 

Berto did. 

“You got a better plan?”

“No. Not yet.”

“When? You’re gonna pick chiles, or set pipe. You’ll never leave this place if you don’t plan to leave it now. Your padre ain’t gonna tell you this. He’s just happy you not starvin’. You ain’t got that memory.”

“What’s wrong with not starvin’?”

“You can have better.”

As Berto was finishing nursing school, a recruiter came to campus. Hiring for the relief camps down south. Looking for nurses with language skills. Berto fit. He liked the work with the doctor group. People showed up in a bad state. Cut. Beaten. Some with holes where bullets went in and out the other side. He liked talking with them while they healed. The main thing he learned was that he didn’t want to go south of that border. Salvador was a hell hole. Guatemala and Honduras too. Poor people killing poorer people. 

Then Lira showed up. She had left her mother and her siblings with a promise to return once she got help at the relief camp. 

Berto’s eyes took up residence in her face, never mind the damaged skin. Most people are born with their flaws. Lira was born perfect and got her flaws later. After Lira had healed enough, she started helping in the camp kitchen. So many hungry people. So much gratitude. As they passed through the line, she would turn her head to the right to hide her scars. She developed a stiff neck. Late one evening, she fashioned a brown pillowcase into a hood with a cutout for her undefiled half. 

Over plates of pupusa and pollo encebollado, she and Berto spoke of life before they met. When it came to the war, she grew quiet. 

“I was lucky,” she said. “I am alive.”

She crept like a ghost to his cot in the dark after midnight. Everything they did seemed painful in its restraint: slow, quiet, all the more intense for the lack of abandon. 

Six months on, Berto dreamed of going home. He had heard good things about Albuquerque. After he helped her get a passport and join him, she got a job in the first restaurant she approached. Their cook had been arrested, deported. She learned later that he, too, was from El Salvador. She relaxed into the job. She had papers.

Berto quickly found work. It was never hard. The hospital needed someone in the E.R. Coming from the violence of central America, he thought he would be ready, but the violence of North America gnawed at his soul. 

Lira spoke the language of the restaurant staff, and they hers. They paid her in cash, to keep her off the books. When the law changed, she applied for temporary protected status. They married. 

Compared to all the ugliness Berto had seen, Lira’s face struck him as proof that God had a sense of humor. Give her a sacramental beauty. Take half of it away. 

One day, behind La Cholla, Lira found a white dog digging through the garbage. She helped open a bag so the dog could snack on the chicken skins and masa inside. It was enough to form a bond. She took him home to their single-wide trailer near I-40. When he saw the dog walk in before Lira, Berto laughed with joy. He named it Cadejo, after Salvador’s mythical canine protector. They fell in love again, not with each other, but with Cadejo.

“He is so beautiful,” she said.

“Like you,” Berto said. “He’s so skinny. He needs more food.”

“I think he will love us,” she said. “I think God sent him to us. As a guide.”

They started to take walks around the trailer park with Cadejo. Berto grateful for the quiet normality. Lira ashamed that she wasn’t where people needed her most. As they passed people watering their meager gardens or watching the kids play in the street, some  would stop to admire their dog. 

“Now I have two beauties in my life,” Berto would say to them, boastful of his blessings. 

Lira felt unworthy of such admiration. In Salvador, with her family, every day was a reminder of how precarious their life was. Astride a knife’s edge, they guarded their words, hoped not to hear of someone missing in the night, or bodies found. 

She had trouble sleeping in the quiet of her American home. In the dark, after making love, she would listen to the trucks on the freeway and think of her promise to her mother. She had gone the other way. She should have gone back. She felt like a traitor, but the pull of her unmet promise faded in the light of the horror she knew she would find there. 

Her happiness exerted a stout counterweight to any lingering sense of obligation to attempt a rescue of her family. She was happy that Berto found her beautiful, yes, and happy to be here with him. He provided proof that at least one person on earth found her  pleasing to look at. 

In the idle darkness after making love one night, she thought of her ancestors and their ritual sacrifice of captive enemies. Did any of them look on the face of the person from whom they were to lift the still beating heart, and fall in love? Is this where people learned to speak of stealing another’s heart?

“Why me?” she asked him late one night, sweat cooling on their skins. “Surely, you can find a woman without scars. Without a hood.”

“What scars?”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Don’t wear that hood when you’re fucking me. Then I won’t lie.”

He turned his eyes away, tilted his head so she wouldn’t see his tears. It pained him to see her injury and her beauty, side by side, and to know the pain it caused the person inside.

Later, after Berto fell asleep, Lira sat in the living room, thumbing through a magazine left by a customer. There was a feature on “the new beauties.” Lira looked at the faces. They all had the same features: eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks. All looked quite different from each other. She tried to isolate on what it was that made one different from another. Her eyes started to blur. She blinked to clear them. Somehow, despite the differences, they all were what some editor deemed beautiful. Lira couldn’t disagree. Try as she may, she could not figure out why they weren’t considered ugly? How did society come to agree that this was what constituted beauty? How had the people that society labeled “ugly” not emerged as the more desirable? They had the same anatomical elements, slightly different from one to another. And yet, in aggregate, their features added up to a look that would never get a photo in a magazine. 

She went to the vanity, staring at herself in the mirror. She was unsure she recognized the person staring back at her.

When she arrived at work the next morning, she was wearing a hood the reverse of what she had worn for the last few years. 

Rico had his head down, slicing onions. He looked at her and stopped. 

“What happened to you?”

“This is my ugly day.”

The owners asked if she was okay. She said she was fine. Nobody had seen this side of her face before. After the shock wore off, she flipped the hood around to hide her scars and got to work. 

Leslie, the owner’s wife, unlocked the doors. Two couples came through and took booths at the far end. Two guys in jeans, tees and reflective vests were next. Wade, balding and thick, and Bret, dark beard, pipestem thin.

“Leaves me shaking my head,” said Wade after they settled in.

He had been quiet for a bit, so his comment surprised Bret. He tugged at his beard, trying to think what Wade meant.

“Okay, I give,” he said. “What’s got you … shaking?”

“That couple,” he said, nodding toward the other end of the dining room. “At the table, sipping espressos.”

“What about them?”

“The mismatch. Guy is pretty good looking. But the woman?”

Wade went silent. Bret looked at him. 

“A little horsey, don’t you think?”

Bret leaned out of the booth to get a better view.

“Harsh, buddy,” he said. 

“Not sayin’ she’s a trough feeder, but close,” Wade said.

“So what?” Bret said. “Not your cup, but maybe she’s one of those mystery women. Ugly on the streets, a knockout on the sheets. Why don’t you go ask her guy? Does she fuck better than she looks?”

Wade paused, then started again. “Don’t you think it’s one of those curious human things, the good-looking man or woman with the kinda not-so-hot woman or man? It’s always a shock when I see that. It’s so jarring. A misfit. Like a violation of the laws of nature.”

“Which law of nature would that be?”

“Beauty equilibrium?”

“I didn’t know there was such a law. Like…” and Bret  mentioned a long-ago singer-songwriter who somehow married a stunning fashion model type. He looked a little like a frog, but he had great talent.

“Now you get it,” Wade said. “Like the Kmart couple. Oversize woman. Tiny guy. Leaves me shaking my head.”

Bret leaned across the table and twitched his head toward the pass window, between the kitchen and backbar.

“Here’s one for you. What’s with the mystery woman? Only showing half her face? Gorgeous but… what’s up with the whole hood thing?”

After they had finished, Lira leaned into the pass and caught the bearded guy’s eye.

“Everything good?”

He nodded. “Best chimi in town,” he said and spun away, slapping his hardhat on as he followed Wade outside.

At Ricardo’s Pasta ‘n Pizza that night, Bret told his wife about Wade’s theory of differential beauty. She sipped her wine and thought about it. 

“Don’t take this wrong,” Denise finally said, “but… one of my friends, when you and I first started going out, she told me He’s not your type. About you. And when I asked what my type was, she said cute.”

“Which friend?”

“Not telling.”

Bret wasn’t sure he cared if he was cute to one of her friends. 

“What do you think I am?”

“Attractive?” she said.

“You don’t know? What does that mean, anyway? Nails are attractive to a magnet. A well-used hydrant is attractive to a dog. Some people even think harvest gold shag carpeting is attractive… with a hide-a-bed.”

She smiled. “More than lukewarm?” she said. “Kinda hot?”

“But not… hot? Thanks a lot.”

“There are other things. The way you cover your lower lip with your upper teeth and roll your eyes back when you cum.”

“Cute. But you didn’t know that when we met. It was something else.”

“Nice smile, I guess.”

“Everybody says that. No ‘rugged good looks,’ or ‘grizzled features,’ or ‘continental jaw’?”

“What is a continental jaw?” she asked. “Besides, I can’t even see if you have a jaw.”

She bit into a slice and began to chew, her lips moist with olive oil. Bret watched her. She met his eye. She smiled. The way she smiled when… they later got naked and did the things that made her smile while he was biting his lip. 

Afterward, she said Wade was applying his own standard of beauty to a woman who clearly represented something enticing to another guy but maybe not so much to Wade. 

“What if you got past your revulsion and found yourself in bed with her, and it turned into the most insane, gymnastic, electric experience of your life?” Denise said. “You came so hard, you actually thought you might have a heart attack. She had to wipe it off her ears afterward.”

“Her ears? What about your ears?”

“You should be so lucky, right?”

Across town, Lira was jotting notes on a lined pad. Ingredients, combinations, names. People in el Norte were crazy about food. Tex-Mex. Mexican. Sonoran. Oaxacan. It seemed that anything she could dream up would create a line around the block. 

But not too spicy. No unusual animal parts. Tasty, but safe. One day, she had wrapped a chicken thigh in masa and grilled nopalito and cebollas with a Hatch salsa on top. It sent her local food rep through the roof. Americans, Lira came to believe, would eat a sofa cushion if it were deep fried.

More guys in hard hats showed up the next day. And the next. Pretty soon, they were hanging in the parking lot, texting and scrolling and waiting for the line to move.

As luck would have it, Jordan Weiss popped by. He was out doing research for a weekend column rounding up the best burgers when he saw the commotion outside La Cholla.

He hit the brakes and got in line.

Jordan waited his turn. Asked regulars for suggestions. 

“Definitely the Roto Rooster, Dude,” one Latino-looking gringo said.

“Fuck that,” a guy in greasy overalls said. “You gotta get the Crucifix. Ear of grilled corn, wrapped in bacon, battered and fried. Salsa roja.”

“Gangsta good,” another said. “Put you away for a dime.”

Jordan ordered one of everything, ate two bites of each, and wrote a review that turned the joint into a rocket. Before he left, he asked to take a picture of the chef. Lira smiled. The photo showed half a smile. As she smiled, she thought of her mother, how much she had taught Lira, how proud she would be now. If she knew.

A tourism magazine named the restaurant Best in the West. 

A TV show called and wanted to follow her around, watch her making what she made. The host had spikey white hair, and kept eating, and after every bite, he said, “Cal-ee-yente!”

No matter how good the food, though, the reporters all had questions about Lira’s hood. She didn’t plan it that way, but it was working.

“They love the mystery look,” she told Berto one night. “Anybody else, they wouldn’t care about the food.”

“That is so wrong,” Berto said. “Your food is fantastic. They don’t know much about Salvador, and you bring that into it like nobody else around.”

“But the mystery woman,” she said, “that is the secret sauce.”

“You know what American men say about the woman they love? She is a dish. You are my dish.”

Lira couldn’t keep up with the crush of new business. She had to hire assistants. One day, the manager came to Lira and asked her if it would be okay if all the staff wore hoods. 

“Are they ugly, like me?” 

The manager spiked the hood plan. Her restraint didn’t stop every other joint in town from grabbing the fashion trend, as if it were the hood and not the food.

The lines grew longer outside La Cholla. The owner took Lira aside one night after shift and offered to double her wages. When she told Berto, he smiled and said, “Mi reina.” 

Berto came down to La Cholla the next night. He liked to hang out at the bar, eat pupusas, watch her move behind the pass. Killing time until he could take her home. A good man. He couldn’t see into the deepest corner of Lira’s heart, to the divided loyalties, to the love of what they had created competing with the call of the unfulfilled promise to her mother.

As Berto sat at the bar, Lira cooked with little thought to what she was doing. She had decided she needed to go south. Check on her mother—her brother and sisters. She wasn’t sure how to tell Berto, or when. She knew it would frighten him. Because of what was still there, what had sent her to him in the first place. And because of the slight chance, no matter how much she swore her love and denied the possibility, that she would find a reason to stay, that old family would trump new. 

That was when the guy came in.

“Everybody freeze!”

He was waving an automatic. He had seen too many movies. It was late. Most everybody had gone. He had seen the lines outside, figured that lines meant money. 

“This is a robbery,” he yelled.

“Thought so,” Berto said. 

Lira had emerged calmly from the kitchen, carrying a cleaver. She stood behind the long counter with the vinyl-backed stools on the other side. 

Berto swiveled slowly on his stool near the register. He just watched.

“Where’s the money?” the bandito yelled.

Berto jerked his thumb at the register. 

“Why you rob taco stand?” Lira asked. “Bank next door.”

“Not open,” bandito said and started waving the gun around like punctuation. 

It went off. Shot a hole in the skylight. Glass tinkled down everywhere. Some of it landed on Berto. 

“This your first robbery?” he asked.

“Shut up or you’ll get one, too.”

“Here’s thinking that’s a yes.”

“You,” the robber yelled at Lira. “Open the safe.”

“No safe. You want cash drawer? Hold on.”

She started toward the register and, casual as could be, she set the cleaver on the counter near Berto.

“Keep calm,” she said, and slid the drawer open.

The bandito leaned across the counter between Berto and the register, supporting himself on his gun hand while he reached toward the drawer with his other hand.

Then he stopped, looking at Lira.

“What’re you ‘posed to be?” he said to Lira. “That get-up? Some kinda sheikh? Gonna blow us up?”

He laughed at his own wit. Then he reached up and grabbed her hood and pulled it off. The reveal paused everything for just long enough.

That’s when Berto swept the cleaver off the counter and looped it up and down onto the wrist of bandito’s gun hand. The hand and gun came unglued from bandito’s arm and fell behind the counter. Blood spurted everywhere.

The gunman looked at Berto as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

Berto grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the bandito’s spurting stump. “You shoulda got the taco instead,” he said.

Then he guided him to a stool before shock set in. The dishwasher rushed out and swept the severed hand and gun into an apron and hauled it out back.

When Berto turned to look for Lira, she was gone. He searched the diner. Gone. Not a word to anyone. 

After the cops came and hauled the bandito off, Berto walked outside. He stood in the parking lot alone, the light of a billion stars sprinkling down on his shoulders. He thought of Lira. He did not expect to find her at home. He did not.

For thirty years, Stuart Watson worked as a newspaper journalist. He loves the writing of Joy Williams—and others. Watson’s work is in The Maine Review, Yolk, Two Hawks Quarterly, Revolution John, Montana Mouthful, Wretched Creations, Flash Boulevard, Bending Genres, Flash Fiction Magazine, Hippocampus (books), Brilliant Flash Fiction (anthology), Danse Macabre, Red Planet Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, MysteryTribune, 365 Tomorrows, Fewer Than 500, Erozine and Wanderlust Journal. He lives in Oregon with his lovely wife and their awesome dog.