Iris was born in New England and lived there until she was in her teens, one of the two daughters of a woman who developed late in life a distaste for lengthy marriages, and. a fascination with skiers. The mother followed one to Colorado where she found her philosophy of life quite apt amid a smorgasbord of downhill racers. But the gypsy life and its seasonal abruptions left little time to mold two young girls in any other way but the wrong one. The youngest went back to New England to live with her father, but he wouldn’t take both.
Iris was pretty much on her own at fifteen, and without question at eighteen, when her mother left (with a surfer) for California. She was already a seasoned waitress, but she’d do just about anything to survive during those months when it wasn’t winter. That is how she found herself working in a sugar factory one September in the Colorado outlands, and she met her first husband.
Galdo Hernandez and his brother Plácido used to come up from Texas every autumn to haul sugar beets to the plant in their trucks. Iris and Galdo were an unlikely match. She was the prototypical WASP with an almost redundant shock of flaming red hair; he was Mexican, tall and hulking, and ugly. Those drivers going day and night racing against time with little sleep and bad food sometimes seemed like a romantic lot—and Galdo offered her something that no one had ever offered her before: marriage. One thing that Iris didn’t learn from her mother was that you can’t account for taste.
Galdo took her to Texas where in the short course of a year he made her pregnant with twin girls, gave her the clap that he caught in a whorehouse across the border (because outside of Iris who was immensely knocked up for a long time, Galdo couldn’t get sex for free anywhere else), took physical custody of the girls, and threw her (literally) out the door, blaming her to clear himself, some say. In that year, Iris went from being known as a girl with a progressive life style around the ski resorts of Colorado to being known as the town tramp in a dump of a small town in southern Texas where the highest point is maybe a foot below sea level.
On the timeline that takes us from early Bangor to late Aspen, the Mexican-American border in 1969 is just a decade or two to the left of the last ox-cart out from the gates of Babylon. Enter Jimbo.
Jáime Lúna was a twin, and in a time when they were taking just about anyone and everyone who didn’t talk with a lisp, Jimbo was the one who got drafted in ’63 and finished his tour in of all places Viet Nam. It was just like Jimbo’s luck to have his share of conjoined fate be the thinner slice. Jimbo was the kind of guy whose pants were always bunched up around his shoes because they’d be at least three inches too long. His shirts would balloon out at the waist where he tried to tuck them in. His hair was unmanageably long and greasy and would never sit still for a ducktail (the rage then), and the military’s only real contribution to Jimbo’s sense of self was to cut it all off. Even the sleeves of his Class A’s went down almost to his fingernails. But Jimbo did two hitches. During the first tour of Nam, he fell in love with a party girl from one of the bars in Saigon, and he didn’t have enough time in one tour to convince her to go back to the States with him, so he re-upped and went back. He came back from Viet Nam with maybe a little fruit salad, but neither scratch nor scar to add to his resumé. They don’t give purple medals out for broken hearts.
Jimbo met Iris during furlough after he got back and it was again just luck that he did. He was wearing his uniform, and she picked him for being the cleaner of the two who were trying to get friendly with her, for being the only one in the bar who didn’t know that she was already past the point of being able to afford to be choosy. After he was released, he went out looking for her. He wooed her as a soldier, and a good thing at that, because after they got married, you couldn’t have told that he had ever left the Valley or ever seen the inside of a barracks. Jimbo had just spent seven years of his life at the risk of losing it so that he could have a suit to wear to his wedding: a wedding that not everyone necessarily approved of, nor believed was socially or morally acceptable. There did exist those times.
But in one year, Iris went from being the town whore to being a happily married red-haired mother of twin boys. Jimbo never stopped treating her like the girl of his dreams. He got a job driving truck for a lumber yard, and stopped drinking and smoking. Iris stayed at home and blossomed! She kept his hair cropped short and his pants hemmed.
What can the world possibly have against two losers finally winning one? Connect the dots if you can. At least two of the tires on Jimbo’s car were slashed once a week no matter where it was parked. Their house windows kept getting rocks thrown through them. Their garage mysteriously caught on fire one night. One day when Iris drove the car to the store, she came out with her groceries to find the front seat totally smeared with human feces. Most of us call it shit. Iris and Jimbo called it enough.
They moved a few miles up river when the twins were six months old. Laredo wasn’t then the abbatoir that it became later when the trade in illegal drugs came to crisis level. But there was a market for other things. And murder was at respectable numbers on both sides of the border when Iris and Jimbo became the day’s statistics—given one standard deviation a little to the left—when they were discovered shotgunned to death together at close range inside their rented house. The twins were never found.
The soul sometimes stands as mute before a plague of humans as a cowskull being swept through by a river of sand.
Noe.
