Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  I don’t know why everyone’s so unfriendly towards me. Maybe they’re being relentlessly exploited by Duval, and hold me accountable, maybe they’re just naturally suspicious because I’m a foolish gringa, but if I didn’t think it fantastically unlikely, I’d say the real problem is that they’re scared of me.

  10

  Duval is harder to fathom.

  True, he’s professional. He does what he says, when he says, and the job gets done – but that’s about the sum of it. Meetings between us are strained. Usually when people are devoid of edge, when they don’t employ the tools of sarcasm or have wit or irony at their disposal, you’re left with a ponderous bore. Duval isn’t dull, he’s just pathologically unresponsive, and being one of those sorry people who tend to compensate by twittering into other people’s awkward silences, the more taciturn he is, the more garrulous I become until I’m left with the humiliating feeling that it is I who have bored him and not the other way round.

  When not discussing plans with me, or checking the Mexican’s work, pencilling notes and measurements onto the walls of whichever cabin they’ve been assigned, Duval stations himself on the porch of the boarding house and works large blocks of wood, whistling softly under his breath.

  I watch him from a distance as he runs long fingers over their surfaces, feeling for gnarls and splinters, and I wonder – is he without a sense of humour? Uninteresting? A little slow? – but every time I’m prepared to throw in my lot with one of these theories, some warning blips red on my radar. Some discrepancy or irregularity I can’t put my finger on. Whenever we meet, I feel like I’m watching a faulty video on which the soundtrack has been badly dubbed and I just can’t rid myself of the instinct that something about Duval is a little off.

  And then the dog incident happens.

  Since its arrival in our lives, the dog has taken to coming and going as it pleases. During school hours, it makes itself scarce, padding out of the door behind the children as though commuting to some smart job. In the evening, before darkness falls, it reappears. It no longer whines and scratches questioningly outside the door. Now it merely barks an order in full expectation of being obeyed. For the most part it lives under the kitchen table, its two-tone eyes fastened upon us in a myopic squint. During the night, however, it creeps stealthily up the wooden stairs and curls up to sleep at the foot of my bed. Despite such show of affection, which secretly I find endearing, it remains an aloof creature, summoning up a deep-throated snarl should anyone make the mistake of venturing too close.

  On the day of the incident the dog had been unwell, coughing up, earlier in the morning, some disgusting fur ball of recent kill. Subsequently, I can only assume it called in sick to its day job because it remained under the kitchen table all day, feeling sorry for itself and ignoring my every attempt to force it outside until eventually, bored of trying, I forgot it was even there.

  Later in the afternoon I’m sitting across from Duval at the kitchen table, going over pump-size requirements for the boarding house, when Benjamín opens the door and the children burst in from school. Seeing the dog in residence, Jack drops to his knees and propels himself across the floor.

  ‘Taco,’ he croons. ‘Taco, Taco, Taco.’

  Under the table, the dog pricks up his ears. Sure enough, as Jack completes his Torvill and Dean slide, it snaps viciously. Jack snatches at his hand and starts crying. For all his tough talk, Jack is a bit of an old woman. Last week, for instance, when I tried to remove a splinter from his foot, the operation took nearly two hours. Nevertheless, having reassured myself that his hand is still attached to his wrist, I turn my attention to Taco, determined to give the beast a good slap when I notice that Duval has dropped his fingers onto Taco’s head and is absent-mindedly scratching the fur between his ears. Taco, in turn, pushes his snout upwards into the palm of Duval’s hand in a gesture of total acquiescence, and suddenly the penny drops.

  ‘This is your dog, isn’t it?’

  ‘This dog?’ he repeats vaguely, as though somewhere in the room, an entire police line-up of chiens méchants awaits identification. ‘Yes, he’s mine.’

  ‘His name is Taco,’ Emmy says, appearing at Duval’s elbow.

  ‘It’s a good name,’ Duval says simply. ‘I never got round to giving him one myself.’

  I cross my arms in the manner of a fishwife and wait for an explanation. ‘The dog needed a good home.’ ‘The dog got used to being here when I was working on this cabin.’ ‘The dog loves women and children, can’t keep away from them.’ Frankly, anything would have been fine, but Duval just carries on pencilling notes on the drawings and his silence makes me peevish.

  ‘You know he’s been sleeping here for nearly a month?’

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve been inconvenienced, ma’am.’

  ‘I haven’t been inconvenienced, it’s just – why is he here? Why have you never said anything before about him being your dog?’

  ‘The dog comes and goes as he pleases. He’s half wild.’

  ‘You can say that again, he could have taken Jack’s hand off!’

  Jack helpfully ups the tenor of his wails a notch. Duval raises his voice over the noise.

  ‘He’s not used to children, is all. Doesn’t mean any harm.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll try to remember that when his teeth are embedded in their skulls.’ Then, because I feel the need to justify the dreadful fuss Jack is making, add rather testily, ‘You really should have him neutered.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Duval flashes back, ‘surely one of us needs to have a little fun!’

  I open my mouth, then shut it again. My first instinct is that he’s made a mistake and with a shock I see that Duval is thinking the same. It’s right there in his face. His eyes cross with mine and behind the dead-end stare there’s something else, like a door opening briefly onto a hidden passageway. A look of acknowledgement passes between us, then his eyes blank over again. He stands up and screws on his hat.

  Pause. ‘I’d better be going.’

  ‘Yes, and your little dog too,’ I say evilly.

  ‘No!’ the children shriek.

  Duval clicks his fingers and heads for the door. Taco pads across the floor and obediently falls in behind him.

  For the rest of the evening, the phrase ‘out of character’ keeps coming back to me but it’s not until I’m groggy with sleep that I finally pinpoint why. If Duval’s quip was out of character, then it implies that for the rest of the time Duval is in character and if he is in character, then by definition he’s pretending to be somebody he is not. And once again the penny drops and this time it lands with a loud clanging noise. I shoot up in bed and feel for the light switch – then fumble in the bedside table for the little wooden box. Sure enough, it’s gone. Of course it’s gone. How could I have been so obtuse? Taco sleeping at my feet, Duval instructing the crew in Spanish. Duval who, in supervising the widening of the window, had plenty of opportunity to take back what was his. It’s Duval who had kicked off his boots and lain on top of the shrunken wool blanket while the coyotes bayed outside the window. It’s Duval who has been sleeping in my bed.

  I say nothing.

  Maybe it had been only the one night. Maybe his truck had broken down. Maybe he lives in a trailer home and simply wanted to take advantage of hot and cold running water while he could? While it’s not an alarming thought, it is a puzzling one. Speaking both Spanish and English might not be significant here on the apex of two countries, but the letter was headed ‘The University of California’ – and if Duval reads and writes fluently in two languages and has a university education then certainly he’s not the monosyllabic hick he pretends to be – and if he’s not? Well ... I don’t know. I try to work through the other possibilities but, instead, other thoughts begin to creep into my head. What was he thinking as he lay in my bed? Did he wake early, as I do, and wait for the outlines of trees to appear in the dawn light? Had he ever wondered about me? Tried to put a face to my name? Imagined a life for me?


  February turns into March. The sun rises noticeably hotter now. In the hills, one or two rogue cacti sprout early flowers. Work progresses on the town. Duval splits the crew into two groups. Half remain on the boarding house, the other half begin to strip out the rest of the smaller cabins. Duval is out of town much of the time, collecting supplies and returning at the end of the day, his pickup weighed down with sheets of drywall, slabs of stone, endless lengths of wood and rusted tin for the roofs.

  When he’s not around, the atmosphere in the town is noticeably less strained and whilst I’d be hard pushed to describe the relationship between myself and the workers as close, they’ve got used to my pottering around the building site. In an effort to keep one step ahead of what’s going on, I spend many an illuminating evening boning up on Infestation, Insulation and Ventilation from You Can Do It! The Complete B&Q Step-by-step Book of Home Improvement. Then there are the eight-inch-thick catalogues of fixtures and fittings picked up from the hardware store. For every wall plate, for every switch, for every plug or cupboard handle, there is a multitude of choices. You can buy any of them apricot with antebellum roses, you can buy them with intricately carved eagle heads, you can buy them in patriotic red, white and blue or with dramatic Arizona landscapes glazed over their concave surfaces, but the one thing you cannot do is buy them plain bloody white.

  I’ve invested in a small camera from Wal-Mart and everywhere I go, I photograph stable doors, the shape of a window, the roof of an old barn so I can copy the details. More and more frequently, though, like a third-rate spy doing reconnaissance on a newly discovered military base, I find myself levelling the Olympus’s powerful zoom at the town from behind the trunk of an oak tree or a strategic boulder – not because I want to catch the workers sneaking an extra break, but because the Mexicans are camera shy and it’s only through subterfuge of this kind that I can keep some kind of record of progress. Every week I pin up ‘before and after’ photos and occasionally I get a sickening feeling in my stomach that if buildings really are women, then renovating the whole of Temerosa is going to be as tough as taking a group of abused and battered housewives and restoring them to their prom-night innocence.

  It’s late one morning, with Duval up in Phoenix, when I come across the worker I’ve christened ‘Red Baseball Cap’ kneeling on the ground by the cottonwood, trying to clean his hand in the murky water of the wash. He’s cut himself badly; a deep incision running from the base of his thumb right through to the centre of his palm, and from the way his thumb is hanging backwards, it looks to me like he’s severed the nerve. He’s terrified to see me and scrambles to his feet as I approach.

  ‘Escuse, please, sorry,’ he stutters, backing away, all but brandishing the silver cross he’s wearing in front of my face. Undaunted, I take hold of his arm, and in reciprocal stumbling Spanish, compel him to accompany me back up to the cabin where I hold his hand under the kitchen tap then find him one of Emmy’s Blue Parrot plasters and a bandage to go on top. Throughout my Florence Nightingale routine, the boy refuses to look at me, instead staring intently at his hand as if willing a map of escape to materialize in its creases and curves. He’s really young, no more than seventeen or eighteen, with baby-soft skin which looks like it has yet to meet the blade of a razor. The plasters and bandage are barely adequate and almost immediately the blood begins seeping through. I suggest driving him to the medical centre in Ague. ‘Te llevaré al médico,’ I say, pleased to have an unexpected chance to practise the future tense of llevar.

  He shakes his head violently.

  ‘No, really, I’ll take you.’

  ‘¡No! ¡No al médico!’ he says so vehemently that I let him go, whereupon he hotfoots it from the cabin like a teenager released early from school detention.

  I think no more of it until a couple of days later when I’m walking through the town with Duval. The men are working on the roof, bending lengths of pale new wood like whale ribs across the top of the cabin’s structure. Bank of Texas T-shirt is perched vertiginously on top, legs astride a cross beam, a nail gun in his hand. Duval’s gesturing some instruction at him and he is nodding and pantomiming something back when Red Baseball Cap walks out of the door carrying the front end of a piece of plywood.

  ‘Hola,’ I call at him. A drill is reverberating in the background and the boy doesn’t turn.

  ‘¿Cómo está su mano?’ I ask when he gets closer, and touch him gently on the shoulder. His head snaps round as though my fingers have burnt a hole in his T-shirt and I see with a shock that he is a different boy, equally young, equally mortified to find himself accosted by the English gringa, but a different boy nonetheless. At that moment Duval notices us. He shouts something and the boy hunches his shoulders around his ears and disappears back into the cabin.

  ‘What happened to the other boy?’ I ask Duval. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Other boy?’

  ‘The one who cut his hand?’

  Duval looks blank.

  ‘The one who normally wears that red hat?’ I persist, despite realizing how silly the question sounds. There is surely no dearth of red baseball caps in this part of the world.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Duval says, ‘I’ve told the workers not to bother you.’

  ‘He wasn’t bothering me. I was talking to him,’ I say levelly.

  ‘If you have any complaints, ma’am, you should really talk to me.’

  ‘I don’t have any complaints,’ I say, frustrated. ‘I was just trying to—’

  ‘Then if you have no complaints,’ he cuts in with maddening composure, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could let the men get on with their work.’

  11

  The confrontation leaves me oddly uneasy for the next few days and I’m still puzzling as to why exactly when I notice Jack wandering around the cabin clutching his homework, looking like he’s carrying the weight of the entire US national debt on his shoulders. In truth it’s taken a little longer for Jack to turn native. The Devil’s Slide boys are a tough bunch. Most learned to ride at the age of two and by eight were sitting on a horse fully armed and running cattle. Stetson, the snivelly albino-esque boy who’d rattled Jack’s nerve that first morning at school, has become his main enemy. One of four sons of the local jail guard, he’s an accomplished bully. ‘Maybe he pushes me round a bit,’ Jack finally admitted, ‘after school, in the playground, but I can handle it.’

  ‘Did you tell the teacher?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She told me not to give away my power. She’s an idiot.’

  I had every sympathy with this. Sue’s head is a bottomless well of new-age mysticism. When I told her I knew no one in Arizona, she replied, ‘There are no strangers out here, Alice, only friends you haven’t met yet.’

  ‘Do you want me to talk to her, Jack?’ I’d asked.

  ‘No,’ he’d said furiously. ‘I’m dealing with it, okay? I’m not scared. I’m not scared of nuthin’.’

  ‘So what’s up now Jack?’ I ask him.

  No response.

  ‘Come on, what is it?’ Detecting a bulge in his trousers, I pat him down like a murder suspect. ‘Why have you got an onion in your pocket?’

  ‘So I don’t get smallpox.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to get smallpox,’ he says in a very thin little voice. ‘I don’t want to get sick and die.’ He rounds on me, fists clenched, and pummels my stomach. ‘I want to go home. I want to see my friends.’ Then he starts crying; big fat tears which splash onto the fleece and are quickly absorbed despite a label on the back professing the garment to be water repellent.

  ‘Let me see that.’ I prise the damp worksheet from him. ‘Settlers’ Ailments,’ I read out loud. ‘For rheumatism, soak half a bucket of rusty nails in vinegar. For teething pains, warm the brains of a freshly killed rabbit then apply to child’s gums.’

  Dear God. I close my eyes for a moment then open them to Jack’s pitiful face. ‘Go get your coat.’
I tell him.

  We sit in the M&M and look at the menus. The place is empty except for an old cowboy, alone in a booth, tobacco tin and packet of papers neatly laid in front of him, elbows leaning on the scratched surface of the table as he painstakingly rolls a cigarette.

  ‘Okay,’ I tell the children, ‘no chilli ‘n’ beans tonight, no sheep’s eyeballs. Have anything you want. Eat till you feel sick. My treat.’

  ‘Why?’ they ask guardedly.

  ‘Because I’m adorable, that’s why.’

  ‘No, why really?’ Jack demands.

  ‘Because everyone’s grumpy and sad and I dragged you both out here and it’s all really different for you and you miss Daddy, and because there is stuff happening to you that shouldn’t happen to you and I’m sorry.’

  Jack stares at me suspiciously for quite a long time then drops his eyes to the menu. ‘I’ll have pancakes with syrup and bacon and a chocolate milkshake.’

  Emmy lays her hand on top of mine. ‘Don’t cry, Mummy,’ she says softly. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  I blow my nose discreetly and spot Winfred Tennyson standing in the corner by the ice-cream chest, eating an Eskimo Pie. Reverently, he pushes the dark slab of biscuit and vanilla ice into his mouth using all eight of his fingers before his eyes roll back into focus and he sees me watching him.

  ‘Hey, Mrs Coleman!’ He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his uniform.

  ‘Hi, Winfred.’

  ‘You having your dinner?’ he says in his clipped accent.

  ‘Pancakes, we just ordered them. Want some?’

  ‘Sure.’ He slides his robust frame in next to the children and orders a chilliburger from Barb, the waitress.

  ‘How ya do-in’, kids?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Emmy pips.

  ‘Fine,’ Jack echoes eyeing up Winfred’s holster.