Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Barbie’s a lesbian,’ he mutters sleepily and Emmy chuckles.

  ‘Shut up,’ she says amiably and, mollified, sinks back against the pillows.

  Last week Benjamín took Jack down to the puddle of the river where the Temerosa miners used to pan for gold. I watched as he bent down and scooped gravel and silt off the bottom before handing the sieve to Jack. After a tentative bout of shaking, Jack was left staring at nothing more exciting than obsidian, volcanic-looking sand.

  ‘If I ever find gold,’ Jack said bitterly, ‘I’m going to buy a rocket and fly away from here.’

  There are nights, too, when even I feel strange and displaced, when I fall prey to sudden bouts of cabin fever and find myself standing at the window, staring out at the nothingness beyond as if my missing social life might suddenly drive into the town in the form of friends scrunched together in the back of the butterscotch truck, bearing videos of movies, theatre reviews, and prints of photographic exhibitions I’d missed. But there is nothing out there, just stars and darkness and silence. I open the window and breathe it all in, go on breathing until I think my insides might freeze. Then I go upstairs and sit on the children’s beds and watch them sleeping, put my hand on their chests, because there are times when you need absolutes, things you can count on, like their innocence and sweetness. As for loneliness – well, for all the exoticness of sleeping by myself, there are nights when I miss a man in my bed.

  So as the barking continues outside and I look at the longing on their faces I’m overcome with a crippling sense of guilt and, against all better judgement, open the door to the stormy night. The creature stalks in and sniffs the air, clearly offended at the amount of time it’s been kept waiting. It turns and stares right at Emmy as though sizing up how much of her face to take off with the first lunge.

  Emmy presses herself against my legs. ‘Mummy,’ she breathes, ‘it is a wolf!’ and she’s not far off the mark. A strange-looking animal, half cattle dog, half Hound of the Baskervilles with a meaty stub of a docked tail and different colour eyes.

  ‘Here, boy, here.’ Jack holds out his hand. The dog growls and bares a set of thin frighteningly sharp teeth.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ I snap. Herding the children behind me, I swing the door back open.

  ‘Here, boy, come on, out you go. Go on now. Out!’

  ‘No,’ the children shriek in unison.

  The dog pays absolutely no attention to any one of us. It sniffs its way round the kitchen, eats two of Emmy’s cheese doodles with their accompanying bugs and dust off the floorboards, then, folding its shaggy legs beneath its body, flops down under the table, throwing a quick challenging look in our direction.

  And there it stays.

  6

  The children are starting at Devil’s Slide, a small local school just outside Ague. We leave the house on the dot of eight a.m. Jack and Emmy trudging down the hill behind me towards the butterscotch truck. The ground is still covered by snow, the surface crisp and frozen into a layer of ice as delicate as the sugar crust on top of a crème brûlée. The morning is quiet and still. Lumps of snow balance precariously on the ends of boughs like dumb-bells in the hands of a man on a tightrope. Occasionally one falls and hits the ground with a soft plop. The sun is only halfway up the mountain and the town is in shadow. It’s cold and the children complain. I daresay Jack is dreaming of his overheated-car run to Wormley House, maybe Emmy is suddenly feeling nostalgic for her happy clappy morning assembly at the local nursery – or maybe they just want to dispense with the notion of school attendance altogether.

  I get the door of the truck open before noticing that Emmy has turned tail and deserted. Her tartan skirt flaps up to show pink pants as she legs it back to the cabin, kicking up puffs of snow in her wake. When I catch up with her she shrieks and drops limply to the ground.

  ‘Oh, please come on Emmy.’

  I try to hook my hands under her armpits but she cunningly changes tack from 1960s college student to paraplegic.

  ‘I can’t walk,’ she announces.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My neck hurts.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Broken,’ she mutters.

  ‘Oh, that’s not good. How did that happen?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Was it broken when you woke up this morning?’

  Five years spent with Jack have made her understandably wary of the fourth degree and she quickly spots the potential ambush in this one. ‘No,’ she says carefully, ‘it broke just now.’

  ‘Do you think it will be broke for long?’

  ‘Yes, forever,’ she says, voice cracking bleakly. She turns her head away and I take her shaking body in my arms.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy.’ Tears leak down her face, ‘I can’t go to school today because my neck is broken and you can’t go to school with a broken neck and that’s not just it I’ve got nits in my stomach and nits are catching and so I can’t go to school with nits in my stomach and a broken neck.’

  ‘Oh, Emmy.’ I look at her blotchy face. Her eyes are wet, her thick lashes clumped together like black spikes of a garden rake. Oh, God.

  ‘Children have to go school and that’s that,’ I lecture as I clip her into her seat.

  ‘Why?’ says Jack.

  ‘Because they have to.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because it’s the law. Everyone has to go to school.’

  ‘What would happen if we don’t? What would actually happen if we broke the law? It’s not like we’d die or anything, is it?’

  ‘No, you probably wouldn’t die, Jack, but you’d certainly have to go to prison.’

  ‘They can’t put us in prison.’ Emmy looks outraged. ‘We’re very very small children.’

  ‘Of course we wouldn’t have to go to prison, Emmy. Mum’s just saying that.’

  ‘Okay, well maybe you wouldn’t have to, but I would.’

  ‘You should go to prison,’ Emmy scowls, ‘for making us go to school.’

  ‘Anyway you wouldn’t even have to go to prison, you’d probably just have to pay them money or something,’ Jack points out.

  Indeed. Under clause 1 of US educational law 7668, as my son, the District Attorney, correctly identifies, they would probably just fine me.

  ‘Okay, Jack, I’m sure you’re right, because, you know, why wouldn’t you be right? After all, you’re all of eight and I’m, like, thirty-four, so clearly you’ve been around the block a few more times than I have, but you’ll see, I won’t send you to school and then, one day, we’ll all be having a nice time, eating cottage pie and minding our own business, when the sheriff will burst through the front door and haul me away and I’ll have to spend the rest of my life doing hard labour, wearing an unflattering orange boiler suit and all because you wouldn’t take my word for it, you know, just for once.’

  ‘You don’t have to be mean,’ he says, sulkily.

  ‘Jesus, Jack,’ I say just as sulkily.

  I manoeuvre the truck roughly down the road, nearly slamming into a deer on the first bend. At this hour of the morning you can smell the sulphur rising from the deserted mine shafts in the hills. The court of Jack is in temporary recess. He sits silently on the front bench and sneaks tropical-flavoured Skittles into his mouth one by one.

  ‘So do they know I’m coming?’ he says eventually. ‘Will they like me?’

  ‘Yes, they do know you’re coming and yes, they will like you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I like you,’ I say lamely. I know little about the school except that it is the only one within an hour’s radius and that the children’s teacher-to-be, Sue, very much likes to sleep in caves.

  ‘Come on, Mum, everybody likes their children.’

  Not wishing to commit perjury, I refrain from answering. Jack proceeds to entertain himself the rest of the journey by perfecting his introduction.

  ‘Hello, I’m Jack and I’m from another country.’<
br />
  ‘Hi, I’m Jack. I come from England.’

  Devil’s Slide school turns out to be a collection of three mural-painted shacks, each smaller than the next, like an Ikea nest of tables which has been allen-keyed into the desert floor at the foot of a cliff. There is a parking area in front, and to the side a field of Indian grasses with the cadavers of six or seven mutilated cars nestled picturesquely amongst them. Behind the shacks gigantic tractor tyres have been imaginatively arranged for traditional playground games. ‘The Swing’ is a tyre suspended by three chains from a wooden construction. ‘The Climbing Frame’ – a bunch of tyres piled one on top of the other; and yet more have been placed at even intervals on the ground to make ‘Stepping Stones’.

  We’re the last to arrive. As the door bangs behind us, faces turn. I count roughly twenty-five kids, ranging from Emmy’s age up to around twelve years old. Apart from a couple of wildly beautiful Indian girls, the numbers are about 30 per cent Mexican to 70 per cent white. On the whole the younger children are neatly turned out, with combed hair and pressed jeans. Some of the older kids, though, are a rough-looking lot whose flinty eyes suggest they’ve seen the back of their daddy’s hand more than once.

  ‘Stetson, Wyatt, Carson, Jesus,’ the teacher reels off names. Until this moment my biggest worry has been that the children are not going to like their school lunch. I’d warned them it could be bean-related, and in anticipation of such a crisis have armed them with baggies full of peanut-butter sandwiches. Now, as the inmates of Devil’s Slide turn their old men faces towards us and fix us with curious if not downright hostile stares, I wonder what on earth I’ve got them into.

  In the back row of the class, a pale boy with very blond hair, pellucid blue eyes and a nose plug of crusty snot taps Jack on the arm with the end of a chewed pencil.

  ‘Hey, you.’ He eyeballs him up and down. ‘How old are ya?’

  ‘Eight,’ Jack says.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ The boy looks sceptical. ‘You’re pretty short for an eight-year-old. What class you in?’

  ‘I’m in PP2W,’ Jack says politely, quoting his London classroom.

  ‘Listen, pal,’ the kid drawls, ‘if you’re eight years old, you’ll be in third grade like me – you got that straight?’

  Jack nods and squares his shoulders. There’s not even the slightest question of me giving him a hug before I leave.

  I drive back along the road and pull into the next gas station where, although not in the least hungry, I find myself buying something very nasty called a break-fast burrito – a cling-filmed refrigerated tortilla filled with scrambled egg, beans and onions – which, despite its fifteen-second sojourn in the microwave, is not adequately heated through.

  Ten minutes later I stop the truck and throw up the wretched thing into the fishscale grass by the side of the road. For a briefly heroic moment I wonder about racing back to rescue the children, striding into the classroom and scooping them into my arms amidst wistful cheers from their fellow students and possibly an uplifting soundtrack, but I do not do this. I cannot do this. I’ve toyed with the home schooling option, of course I have. There have been moments in the Walton Household, when the lights are switched out one by one, when I allow myself to picture Jack and Emmy at the table, dressed in cotton smocks, clutching samplers and reciting the three Rs while I colour our winter butter with carrots and drink sarsaparilla, but this is not an option. The flat truth is we’re broke, Robert and I, at least close to it. In the restaurant, Robert had pushed a piece of steak round his plate and tried not to cry. He was good at keeping balls in the air, he’d admitted, but all he’d really been doing for the past five years was juggling debt, and I knew then that I couldn’t leave him. It’s one thing kicking a man when he’s down, it’s another altogether to nail him to the floor. I might have had to settle for a more temporary escape but there is still only a finite amount of time, a finite amount of goodwill, and a very finite amount of money for this project. Credit a year of house rent while we’re here and Robert’s in Switzerland, credit school fees, credit not living in the most expensive city in the world, debit the living expenses in Temerosa and the loss of my meagre salary, still equals actual hard cash to renovate the town, to sell it on and justify my being here, giving it another name apart from self-indulgence or, scarier, trial separation. So yes, home schooling is out of the question and no, I’m not feeling good about it, but the changes in the children’s lives are incontrovertible, and when I’m feeling more rational and marginally less sick, I will attempt to reassure myself that this is no bad thing.

  In the sky above, a huge bird soars. I screen the sun with a hand. Its wingspan is enormous. A condor? A vulture? Definitely some kind of hawk anyway, and – from the flashes of a white tail and head – I’d say an eagle. Two ravens are swooping it repeatedly. The eagle cuts and swerves, at one point narrowly avoiding death by power line, but eventually surrenders and speeds off at full tilt to the high rocks behind the school, its tormentors in hot pursuit. I’m about to get back in the truck when, from out of the blue, really quite literally, a feather spirals slowly down from the heavens and comes to rest briefly on the hood of the truck before fluttering to my feet. I pick it up.

  It’s golden brown and about eighteen inches long. I smooth the velvety tendrils against my cheek. It smells musty, of bird, and it brings back a rush of nostalgia for Scotland, the dank mud of the bog and the nesting peewits in the marsh. Feeling tentatively pleased at what must be a good omen I climb back into the truck and lay the golden feather carefully on top of the dashboard.

  Back in Temerosa, a long grey pickup has been parked across the path to the cabin. I stare at it, weighing up whether I can steer round without running into the twin culverts of the drainage ditch, but the space is just too narrow. At first I’m annoyed then it occurs to me the truck’s been left there on purpose and I begin to suspect rather belatedly that I’m being robbed. Killing the engine, I climb out and sneak round the hill towards the cabin, keeping low, out of sight of the windows, eventually dropping down behind a boulder near the back porch where I crouch and catch my breath like an out-of-condition cat burglar.

  ‘Morning.’

  I peer over the stone ledge. Halfway up a ladder and fiddling with the pipe by the bathroom window is a man in a black cowboy hat. I stand up, hastily brushing down my jeans to cover my embarrassment. ‘What are you doing?’

  He continues fiddling.

  ‘Excuse me.’ I stomp indignantly to the foot of his ladder.

  He glances down.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Your ventilator pipe is blocked.’

  ‘My what?’

  He holds up a piece of grey plastic piping. ‘Ventilator pipe . . . maybe you noticed the smell?’

  ‘The smell? The sulphur, you mean?’

  ‘No, ma’am, I mean the shit.’ He resumes fiddling, leaving me staring once again at his back.

  ‘Look, who are you? Do you mind coming down, please.’

  A pair of scuffed cowboy boots descends, then a pair of the filthiest trousers I have ever seen.

  ‘This’ll need replacing.’ He puts the pipe in my hand. ‘I’ll bring you one later in the week, meantime don’t use the toilet.’

  ‘I’ll be sure not to,’ I say caustically, only too aware of the curdle of bad egg still in my stomach. ‘And you are . . .?’

  ‘Duval,’ he says.

  He is not what I am expecting. For some reason, I had Duval pictured as one of the guys who worked in the hardware store in Ague; a skinny, dungareed, mountain-biking type with fuzzy orange facial hair measured in yards and a cloth pouch of tools round his hips. Duval is not particularly skinny, neither is he young. Late forties at a guess. Unusually for Arizona, where it is de rigueur to sport one of three moustache types – the ‘walrus’, a droopy style popular with those on the road to baldness and generally accompanied by a ponytail; the ‘mariachi’, a neat cube which bristles proudly on the upper lip of many local Mexi
cans; or the ‘rodent’, so named for its resemblance to some large piece of marsupial road kill which has been peeled off the tarmac and reattached to the face with no particular attention to form, hygiene or aesthetics – Duval is clean-shaven. In fact he looks more like a cowboy than a builder.

  A cowboy builder then.

  ‘Do you want some coffee?’ I open the door into the cabin.

  Duval shakes his head no, but I go to make some anyway in an attempt to buy a little time. Outside the kitchen window icicles drip and melt, shadows fall across the rounded contours of snow-covered boulders. Duval lays his hat on the table. Underneath it, his hair is dark and flattened down with sweat. ‘These the plans?’ He pulls the scrolls towards him and smoothes them across the kitchen table with a dusty forearm. He studies them briefly, then, taking a pencil from his shirt pocket, crosses out the entire back section of the boarding house.

  ‘Feel free to write on those,’ I say dryly.

  He continues without comment.

  ‘So you’re the Duval who did all the original renovations on this cabin?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You were contracted by the Toronto owners?’

  He circles another section. ‘You’ll want to minimize grading here.’

  If I knew what grading was, I might well want to minimize it, but I’m unwilling to yield the interview stage to design quite so quickly. I feel at a distinct disadvantage, caught on the hop by his unexpected appearance. Three weeks have passed since Benjamín gave up his name and promised to get in touch with him, and in the interim, I’d begun to get twitchy. I badly didn’t want to blind contract a building company out of the sprawling air-conditioned horror of Phoenix or Tucson – the sheer travel alone would have made it inefficient and expensive. Besides, what work has been done on Temerosa seems to have been done well and, God knows, I didn’t want a new lot of builders scratching their heads and gazing in mock horror at somebody else’s work with the predictable, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, call this a finished job?’

  The problem was I had no way of getting in touch with Duval and Benjamín had been exasperatingly vague when questioned, pulling down on his mariachi and looking into the middle distance as though his errant foreman might appear over the horizon at any given moment, singing, ‘If I had a hammer – I’d a-hammer in the mornings . . .’ But still – I had wanted to know – where did this Duval live? Was he away on another job? And what kind of a name was Duval anyway?