Oscar Casares Read Online Free PDF Page A

the street belonged to the both of us and if his side looked good, my side looked good—but I put an end to that. Christmas Eve we have a tradition of inviting our family and a few neighbors over to the house for tamales. My wife and I were going to sleep after one of these parties and she asked me if I knew why the Bannerts hadn't come. “I guess I forgot to invite them,” I said.
    I think he got the idea, because he stopped coming around. He stopped being so quick to wave. He stopped bringing fruitcakes around the holidays, which was fine with me because I never touched them anyway. When he threw a big New Year's party and cars were parked up and down the street, we were somehow not on the invitation list. But as far as I was concerned, he could keep his fruitcakes and his invitations, the same way he'd kept my hammer.
    It's not like I stopped hammering altogether. If I needed to replace some shingles on the house or fix the leg on a table, I used my other hammer. It was an older one that had belonged to my father. The handle was wooden and the head was rusty. I had to wrap duct tape on the handle because the wood was splitting. The head rattled when I used it, and I knew it wouldn't be long before it broke off. My other hammer, the one across the street, was all steel with a black rubber grip. It fit in my palm like a firm handshake. I bought it at Sears.
    Maybe I should've written my name on it, my initials: RG. But you wouldn't think you'd have to do that with your own hammer. I wasn't working on some construction job where your tools can get lost. It wasn't a suitcase that somebody might pick up by mistake and walk off with. Your hammer should be your hammer, your property. You never know when you're going to need it.
    August 5, 1980—Finished painting the outside trim on the house, cleaned brushes and tray, watched news—weatherman says hurricane headed to the Valley.
    We don't get hurricanes every year, but if you lived through Beulah in
’67,
you know what they can do. It did most of its damage right here and in Matamoros. Trees were ripped out of the ground, phone lines got knocked over, just about every part of the city flooded, the electricity was out for almost a week. All the food and milk in the refrigerator went bad. Forget about clean water. I lost two trees in the backyard. The wind had that poor grapefruit tree twisting around like a pair of underwear hanging on the clothesline. The mesquite split right down the middle. We heard the wood cracking all the way inside the house and I felt a part of me was also being ripped up. The biggest branch fell on the fence and made it into an accordion. And what happened here is nothing compared to what those poor people went through on the other side of the river. Nobody wanted to have that experience again.
    There wasn't anything to do but wait. Wait and pray that it died down or turned some other direction. I watched the news every chance I had. Some people were in the habit of leaving the area, driving north, whenever they heard news like this. I can't say I blame them, but it wasn't something we ever did.
    August 9, 1980—Hurricane Allen expected to hit Brownsville-Matamoros tonight, weatherman says winds over 170 mph (his words: “could be stronger than Beulah”), took day off from work, bought boards at De Luna Lumber, boarded up windows, Bannert finally gave me back my hammer.
    There's more that I didn't write down in the notebook—there always is.
    First of all, let me say that we lived through the hurricane and we're still here today. Me writing in my notebooks, Bannert eating ice cream cones at the mall. The hurricane ended up hitting the coast about forty miles north of here, where there weren't as many people. It still did its damage. It just wasn't as bad as it could have been. A few trees were knocked down on our street and we were without electricity and water for a day, but we survived. Bannert stayed around for a year and then moved to a new