Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  The longing for escape began as a slow burn. Other people’s dissatisfaction had names and they certainly all had cures – Prozac, Botox, Valium. Hey, call my therapist! Join my Pilates class! Listen to my whale music! But I held on to that picture of Temerosa. It stayed stubbornly with me almost as if my head had become a viewfinder for which all other slides had been lost. And over the following months, as emotionally I found myself dropping down to the same latitudinal line as Alaska, the flame of escape stayed lit, warming at low level, like a pilot light in my heart, stopping it from freezing over altogether.

  Like Duval said, I was a fugitive, just like the rest of them.

  Benjamín is walking up the path to the cabin. He walks slowly, turning his head this way and that as though conducting a heated rhetorical debate with himself. In his hands he carries a loaf of bread and a jar of apricot jam.

  ‘¡Hola, Benjamín!’

  He jumps. ‘Ohh, Alice.’ He looks at me, then to the front cab of the truck as though expecting some unseen chauffeur to fire it up and drive off. ‘What’re you doin’, crazy Alice?’ he says with an attempt at levity that seems to have quite the opposite effect on him, for he bites his lip and looks totally wretched as I slide down off the flatbed.

  ‘Oh noh, Alice.’ He fixes his eyes on my leg, then on the ground, looking for all the world like he’s going to burst into tears and then – before I know it – he does. Tears wash out of the corner of his eyes and he puts his hands on my shoulders, still holding the bread and jam, then clasps me roughly to him with a jumble of Spanish until the two of us become one great big teary wet sandwich.

  ‘Perdóname, Alice, lo siento.’

  ‘Benjamín, it’s okay.’ I hold on to him clumsily, comforted by the soapy smell of his shirt. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Why do you say it’s okay?’ His nose drips. ‘Something bad could have happened to you. Real bad, worse than your leg.’

  ‘Yes, but it didn’t,’ I reassure him. For a place with scattered telephone coverage, the grapevine is certainly very efficient round here. ‘I’m fine.’

  But Benjamín is not to be cheered. ‘Everything is bad. Everything is changed.’

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ I lie.

  ‘It’s my fault.’ He’s let go of me now and distractedly blots his nose on the bread instead of his sleeve.

  ‘It’s my fault you don’t let M-E come to house any more, it’s my fault you don’t trust me.’

  ‘I do trust you. I do,’ I protest feebly.

  ‘No, Alice, you send M-E and Jack to the hotel.’

  ‘Benjamín,’ I say, a little exasperated, ‘look, you have to understand, I need to know they’re safe. At all times.’

  ‘I never let something bad happen to the children,’ he says fiercely and makes the sign of the cross. ‘I swear on the soul of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I will die for Jack and M-E.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘Yes, Alice?’ he petitions. ‘It is okay, yes? You let me take them to school again, you let little M-E watch television with me?’

  I look at Benjamín, at those features I’ve come to know so well. The downward eyes, the wayward jaw. The peppershot of grey in his sideburns. Today he is wearing a baseball cap with cheap wrap-around sunglasses clamped above the peak. His pale denim shirt is meticulously pressed and snapped up to the last button and its precision almost makes me want to weep as well.

  ‘Benjamín . . .’ I turn up my hands helplessly.

  ‘And Duval,’ he persists, ‘he is a good man. You can trust him.’

  I shake my head violently. ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry but I can’t. Your countrymen, people who are desperate or in need of work, I can understand, but a man who makes his money exploiting them?’

  This notion elicits an unusually elongated denial from Benjamín. ‘Noh, Alice,’ he repeats emphatically, ‘Duval does not take money!’

  ‘Oh, come on, what does he do it for if not for money?’

  But Benjamín merely shakes his head. ‘Alice, it is not for me. He must tell you.’

  ‘Benjamín, I can’t let him go on doing this here,’ I plead, ‘not in Temerosa. I have to call the Border Patrol. I do.’

  ‘Noh, Alice, no! You must speak to Duval.’

  ‘Well, fine, here I am. I mean if he wants to talk to me, he knows where to find me.’

  ‘Yes, good,’ Benjamín says eagerly. ‘You must talk to him, you must wait for him to come back.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t?’

  ‘He will come, Alice, I swear to you.’

  ‘Well, okay, fine, but when?’ I press, then experience a moment of acute déjà vu as Benjamín rubs his jaw and stares into the middle distance.

  ‘Soon,’ he says, ‘he will come soon.’

  19

  It’s a mere thirty-six hours since I last saw the children, but that’s plenty of time for them to have switched their allegiance to Candy and Sharleen. As soon as they hear my voice there’s a stampede along the upstairs corridor of Prestcott’s Hotel as they make off in the opposite direction. Blood might be thicker than water, but it’s still very much thinner than an evening of television and room service combined and the children have apparently never known joy like it. Sharleen, on the other hand, wears the shell-shocked expression of someone who’s just been presented with an accumulated thirty-year tax bill. She stands outside the swing doors of the hotel’s saloon and waves us down the street with small flipper-like movements of her hand.

  ‘Why are you walking like that?’ Jack asks as I lift Emmy into the truck.

  ‘I hurt my leg.’

  ‘Really? Is it bad? Can I see?’

  I pull up my jeans. The children are duly impressed by the crisp new layers of bandage, administered earlier, along with a vicious anti-tetanus shot, by the cute doctor in the medical centre.

  ‘It looks really bad.’

  ‘Why, this iddy-biddy little thing?’ I say nonchalantly. ‘Shucks, it was nothing.’

  ‘Did it bleed?’

  ‘A bit.’

  They summon forth a vaguely sympathetic grunt.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, piqued to have lost their attention so quickly, ‘it bled a lot, I mean it was pretty deep.’

  In the revisionist version of this incident, exaggeration is already hardening to fact and, as recounted first to the doctor and now to the children, the quantity of blood gets measured in litres rather than pints, the eight-inch nail grows exponentially, and the hole it makes widens to the length and depth of a mine shaft. All mention of fainting and sobbing has been ruthlessly exorcized in favour of a story about courage in the face of adversity. In reality the leg underneath the bandage had been something of a let-down. The flesh had been pleasingly swollen and pink, but without the pulsing blood, without the stained and grimy bandage, it looked curiously dead – a limb that had been allowed to wallow in the bath, or a shank of mutton left to unthaw in the sink. It’s hard to sustain a tale of courage against adversity about sitting in the bath too long, but that doesn’t mean to say I didn’t give it my all.

  ‘Mummy?’ Emmy says from the back seat.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I would hate it if you died.’

  ‘I’d hate it too.’ I sneak a hand through the seat divide and find hers. ‘So don’t worry, I won’t.’

  ‘Imagine if you were in an orphanage and you were the only one there. You were the only one whose mother and father died.’ Tears fill her eyes and her voice cracks. ‘That would be so unfair.’

  ‘Oh, Emmy,’ I say.

  ‘Actually, I love death.’ She stuffs the end of her braid in her mouth and sucks on it thoughtfully.

  ‘Emmy!’

  ‘I’m so evil.’ She sighs, and after a further minute of reflection adds, ‘You know I don’t really care if Jack dies because I don’t really like him but if you died, Mummy, I would keep all your jewellery in a bottle so I wouldn’t forget you.’

  ‘How were people invented?’ Emmy asks later when I put the children to bed.


  ‘Big Bang,’ Jack says, spitting toothpaste into the sink. ‘Some people believe in the Big Bang and some people believe in those naked people.’

  ‘Adam and Eve?’ I offer helpfully.

  ‘Adam and Eve,’ Jack repeats. ‘They had children, then the children had children and the whole world got born.’

  ‘Who invented the naked ones?’ Emmy asks.

  ‘God.’

  ‘So who did the Big Bang invent?’

  ‘Apes.’

  ‘Apes,’ Emmy shrieks. ‘That’s so funny! What’s the point of inventing apes?’

  Night lightens to morning, morning stretches to noon. Shadows lengthen and afternoons linger on as the sun works harder and burns longer. The pain in my leg collects in a solid block between knee and ankle and, for a couple of days, keeping it horizontal seems the best option so I pass the days sitting at the kitchen table, ears like tuning forks, waiting for the vibration of an engine, or languishing on top of my bed, eyes straying from my Plumbing Manual, Volume 11 to check for the headlights of a truck swinging through the turn. I wait for Duval, because I know that he will come and I want him to come because . . . well because he damn well owes me an explanation. While the children are around, I hide this strangely mercurial mood of anger/anticipation but once Benjamín has got them off to school, I find myself unable to focus on anything much and eventually give in to a sort of helpless daydreaming, which though very pleasant is not the slightest bit constructive. Still, all the anxiety and suspicions of the last few weeks have gone and whatever Duval’s so-called reasons turn out to be, it’s as though someone has lifted a great rock off my chest. Instead, I feel more like the child who has set fire to the bathmat out of nothing more than curiosity and my only real fear is how strongly and out of control it will burn.

  20

  The morning kicks off a deep cobalt blue. A clear sun shines down on a landscape of wild flowers. I sit on the ground, back against the cabin wall, and look out over the hills. It seems almost impossible that everything before me, Mexican gold poppies, purple scorpion weed, the tangled lupine and desert marigolds, germinated on their minuscule ration of water from last fall’s rainy season, have now sprung up as potent and lovely as any rain-drenched English rose.

  It’s only early, but already I’m hot and thirsty. Ten minutes ago my hair was wet from the shower and now it’s as brittle as the brush of the broom leaning against the wall beside me. I still can’t get used to it. I spent a whole childhood working out ways to keep things dry. Hanging clothes on a line in the salty wind, laying wet socks on the Aga, stuffing newspapers into gumboots. Nowadays, I’ve taken to not flushing the loo unless it’s absolutely necessary, unable to handle the guilt at five gallons less in my well. In Scotland, where rain and damp are the enemy, ‘wringing every last drop of water out of something’ means actually getting rid of the stuff. Here in Temerosa it means the opposite. Conserve is what nature must do to survive. A cactus needs only a centimetre of water a year to flower. Those little hairy chipmunk-like things that are forever scurrying beneath the wheels of the butterscotch truck live on only a few drops, and every time I see one I have a vision of it holidaying up in the Orkneys, drunk and happy, lying in a bog nursing a bloated belly full of brown peaty water.

  ‘Hello.’

  I’m startled into spilling my coffee.

  Duval is standing above me, shading his eyes from the sun.

  ‘How’s your leg?’

  ‘My leg?’ To my mortification, I feel blood suffusing my cheeks. ‘Fine.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Let me see it.’

  ‘No!’ I’m annoyed to be caught unawares like this, barefoot, dreaming. I had wanted to be prepared, my line of questioning probing and focused, the presiding judge on the Duval case, deliberating whether or not to grant bail.

  ‘Come on. Let me see it.’ He squats down and I’ve no option but to pull up my jeans. He unravels the bandage slowly, while I become more self-conscious by the second. The leg is actually in pretty good shape, the bruising dying down, returning the skin to its unattractive pasty white. Duval turns my heel this way and that as though inspecting a prize parsnip at a country fair.

  ‘Nice scab,’ he says eventually.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t pick it, will you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’ll be another few days before it’s the right consistency. You want it that nice chewy quality which makes it stick to your teeth.’

  I hide a smile. ‘It looks disappointingly small for all that fuss.’

  ‘So do bullet holes.’ He presses the pads of his thumbs gently along the length of the bone. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Well maybe. A little.’

  ‘Can you ride?’

  ‘Ride?’ I look up, thrown by the non sequitur. ‘No.’

  ‘Too painful? Or because you don’t want to?’

  ‘Because I’ve never been on a horse.’

  ‘Never been on a horse,’ he says slowly. ‘Now that’s something you don’t often hear in this part of the world . . . Well, well, well! He looks thoughtful. ‘Want to try?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Riding. Want to try it?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, why not? If you’re up to it.’

  ‘Give me one good reason why I should go anywhere with you.’

  He stretches out his hand. ‘I absolutely intend to.’ And when I still hesitate, he takes my hand anyway and pulls me to my feet. ‘Come with me, Alice, there’s something I want to show you.’

  Two of the boniest horses I’ve ever seen, one a chestnut, the other a pale grey, stand nuzzling at the ground just beyond the cabin deck, their narrow backs covered in blankets and saddles.

  ‘Indian ponies,’ Duval says.

  ‘Are they yours?’

  ‘Winfred’s brother’s. They’ve come up off the reservation.’

  The horses snatch at the new shoots of oily grass poking through the gaps in the deck.

  ‘Poor bastards have been living on dust the whole winter. Talk about pigs in clover.’

  I touch my fingers to the soft muzzle of the chestnut and stroke the hollow cavities on either side of its nose. I’m actually a little nervous of horses.

  ‘Now, you know something about these creatures, right?’ Duval says. ‘The section with the teeth is the front, the tail is the back.’ He steers me round. ‘This middle bit is the seating area.’ He laces his fingers together. ‘Think you can get up there?’

  ‘I think I can manage,’ I say archly. I put my good foot on his hands and he throws me up as if I weighed no more than a pencil.

  ‘This is a Mexican saddle.’ Duval moves my ankle forward and adjusts the straps. ‘Not as comfortable as an American saddle, not as much leather. Pretty, though.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’ I smooth my hand over the rough white stitching.

  ‘It belonged to an old farmhand I used to know. He left it to me when he died.’ He unknots the reins. ‘Hold these loose, through your fingers, like this.’

  ‘Okay.’ I take them from him. ‘Then what?’

  He swings up onto the grey. ‘Then nothing. The horse knows what to do.’

  As instructed, I keep the reins loose in my hands, but I don’t really need them. The chestnut walks sedately along behind Duval, his nose an inch from the grey horse’s swishing tail.

  We walk for an hour or so. Duval says little and so do I. The questions I have for him are piling up, one on top of the other, but I’ve realized I’m not going to extract any information out of him by force, so, holding all curiosity at bay, I concentrate instead on the scenery.

  The horses pick their way over every colour of rock. To the north long thin grass shimmers on the plain. Beyond runs the roller coaster of the Santa Catalinas.

  Duval stops his horse. ‘If I was at all religious, I’d say that God had smiled on this
country.’ He twists in the saddle. ‘Recognize where we are?’

  I steer my pony alongside his and look around.

  ‘The schoolroom is just over that ridge.’ He turns his pony with a slight movement of his wrist. ‘It’s built right into the cleft of the mountain, virtually undetectable unless you know exactly what you’re looking for.’

  ‘How come I saw it then?’

  ‘You came an unusual way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You followed your gut.’ He nudges the horse and we walk on. The sun disappears behind sporadic clouds. Nevertheless I can feel the dry air sucking the moisture from my body. I take surreptitious swigs from the water bottle in my saddlebag. Duval, I notice, leaves his untouched.

  ‘How’s the leg bearing up?’

  ‘Fine,’ I tell him, but when he’s not looking I slip my foot from the stirrup and prop it up on the saddle to alleviate the throbbing. Still, it’s strangely hypnotic riding a horse and as time goes by I begin to zone out and am almost disappointed when the chestnut breaks rhythm and tosses its head. Duval has stopped again.

  ‘Where are we?’ I ask.

  The desert looks different under cloud. Unfinished. As though all associated plant life has been designed specifically to require the sun on its face before revealing its true colours, and without it there’s no shimmer from the garnet crystal in the rock and no spiky shadows to bulk out the cacti. Even the flowers look like they’ve had all their brightness washed out of them. Nevertheless the three crosses in front of us rise stark against the sky like bone-white sentinels. They’re only crude – painted pieces of wood nailed together and jabbed into the earth. Two are unmarked except for a date but the third is inscribed with a single name:

  Estella.

  And beneath it: en paz.

  Estella, in peace.

  Duval leans back in the saddle, the reins slack in one hand. ‘You asked me why I do what I do,’ he says. ‘Well this is why.’

  21

  ‘Why are you having a romantic dinner?’ Jack asks. He scrunches up pages from the National Enquirer into tight balls and builds a teepee of logs around them.