Wonderful Room (6 page)

Hector loved American movies. About once a month I gave him my passes to the Plaza, the big downtown picture palace. He could simply have bought tickets, of course, but entering the Plaza on a free pass was special to him. In return, he gave me shady-side tickets to the bullfights. He used his connections to get me membership in the rooftop swim club at Hotel Monte Carlo, near the big new
bullring, Plaza Monumental. My friends and I would go there and have a drink after the bullfights, waiting for the traffic to thin.

Through a cousin who worked somewhere in the Mexican government bureaucracy, Hector even got me a Chihuahua fishing license.

Giving me this gift made him especially happy. But I never went fishing.

T
he union
at the copper smelter down by the river went on an illegal strike. Union leaders called the walkout because of some internal political rivalry, and the rank-and-file workers had nothing to gain by its outcome. They were just out of work.

Many workers lived in the adobe slum between the smelter and the river, called Smeltertown. They were poor. They had wives and children. When some workers defied the union leaders and tried to go to work, picketers attacked their cars with rocks and clubs.

The following Sunday, a heavy rain was falling, a rare sight in El Paso. When I arrived for work, Engledow was standing at an open window, watching the rain, smelling it. He said, “Come here, son.”

I joined him at the window.

“Grab your camera and go see what‧s happening on the picket line,” he said.

“In this?” I whined. “I‧ll get soaked! Nobody‧s going to picket in this!”

Engledow said, “Get your ass out there and don‧t come back till you‧ve got the story.”

I had my own car now, a two-tone-green 1955 Ford Fairlane with white-sidewall tires. I loved it. I wasn‧t about to risk it among a mob of club-swinging strikers. I called a taxi.

The driver stopped in front of the smelter gate. A single picketer stood there, holding a sign. He wore a soggy serape and a big straw sombrero like the ones that tourists bought in Juárez. The rain
had destroyed its shape, and its wide brim drooped around the man‧s thin face.

On the other side of the road, a dozen cars were parked in a row, facing the gate. Each car held three or four strikers.

“Wait for me,” I told the cabdriver.

“No,” he said. “Pay me.”

He made a quick U-turn and was gone. I was in the middle of the road, holding my Speed Graphic, my notebook and an Army-surplus bag of flashbulbs and film holders. Quickly, I was wet as the picketer.

I shot a picture of him. “What‧s this strike about?” I asked him, trying to sound casual.

He said nothing. He stared past my face.

“How long have you been standing in this rain?

No reply.

I had no way to get back to the
Times
, no way to call Engledow. So I stood in the road, trying to protect my camera with my drenched sports coat.

The driver in one of the cars across the road opened his door, got halfway out and waved. He was motioning me toward him. He was burly and had a big mustache and wore a brown felt hat. He looked like Pancho Villa. Tree men were in the car with him. I was scared, but I went to the car.

“Get out of the rain,” the man said. He told the man in the front passenger seat to move to the back. I climbed in beside the driver. “What you doing out here?” he asked.

“I‧m a reporter. From the
Times.
”

“Yeah, I figured. Because of the camera.”

“My name is Bryan Woolley.” I stuck out my hand. The driver shook it. “Rudy Gonzales,” he said. He introduced the other three men. I shook hands with them all.

They started talking about the strike. They didn‧t like it. They couldn‧t feed their families. Their union bosses were no good. Slowly, I relaxed. These weren‧t thugs. No clubs were hidden under their seats. They were getting a raw deal, and it was hurting them. I wanted to take notes, but was afraid they would stop talking if I opened my notebook. I just listened. We had been sitting maybe half an hour, quietly talking, gazing through the rain-streaked windshield at the miserable picketer across the road, when Rudy told me about Rosa.

She was his daughter. She was 9 years old, a beautiful girl. She was a victim of polio and wore steel braces on her legs. She had outgrown the braces and needed new ones, but Rudy didn‧t have the money to buy them. If the strike didn‧t end soon, who knew when he could save enough? His voice was full of love and sorrow.

I cleared my throat. “Rudy,” I said quietly, “may I take a picture of Rosa?”

Rudy didn‧t answer. He started the car and steered it through the rain to Smeltertown, to one of the adobe shacks. We all got out. A face, Rudy‧s wife‧s, appeared behind the screen door. She opened it and invited us in.

Rosa was sitting in the sparsely furnished living room. She smiled big when she saw her father. She
seemed to light up the room and the whole gloomy afternoon. Rudy lifted her from the chair, sat down and set her on his lap. Rudy‧s wife made us coffee. We talked.

Finally I asked, “May I take the picture?”

Rudy told his wife what I wanted. She didn‧t want to be in a picture, she said. She didn‧t like the way she was dressed.

I shot a picture of Rudy kneeling, buckling the braces on Rosa‧s legs. Rosa was smiling shyly into my lens.

Rudy and his companions gave me a ride to the
Times.
I wrote the story and developed the picture. Engledow put them in the middle of Page One.

Next afternoon, an anonymous caller told Engledow that if I returned to the picket line, something bad would happen to me. It didn‧t matter. Two days after the story ran, the smelter workers refused to picket anymore. In defiance of the union politicos, they went to work.

I end this little collection of memories with Rudy and Rosa because theirs was the best story I ever did for the
Times.
And it taught me the power of the word. It taught me that telling the truth in a newspaper can do more good than you expect.

Meanwhile, I was engaged to my high school sweetheart. She told me that a reporter wasn‧t a respectable thing to be and she wouldn‧t marry me unless I entered another vocation. This, I later learned, was really her mother speaking, but I agreed to it. In August 1958 I turned 21, she turned 18, I
graduated from Texas Western College, I quit my job and we married.

Engledow was deeply hurt, I think. He had given me the big break that I was throwing away. I was full of grief.

Over nine years, I taught high school English, worked as a bank teller, did manual labor on a seismograph crew, spent six years in two graduate schools and edited a church magazine for teenagers.

Then the marriage ended and I got a job as night correspondent in the Tulsa Bureau of The Associated Press. At last I was back where I had always belonged. For nearly half a century, the wonderful room has been my home.