Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Okay.’ Duval plucks a toothpick from the holder and chews on it. ‘Camouflage hat, worn high on head, matching trousers, bunch of keys attached to belt loops. On his face, a look of bovine stupidity. IQ guaranteed slightly lower than room temperature and a propensity to spit. He’s got a knife at his waist modelled on his favourite action-movie star, which only now he’s discovering doesn’t actually do the job. Boots are splattered with blood. Too bad a shot to kill the animal outright, so he’s had to stomp it to death after a minor flesh wound to the leg. How am I doing?’

  ‘I think he looks charming.’ Over his shoulder I watch as Barb hands the huntsman a pile of cardboard take-out containers. As he heads towards the door, she takes a tortoiseshell comb from her apron pocket and draws her thin hair up into a bun. ‘I mean, don’t you think that for a man of such dubiously elastic morality, you’re being a little judgemental?’

  Duval just looks at me, the smile back behind his eyes, and begins counting. ‘Five, four, three, two . . .’

  Outside the hunter looks up at the sky then spits on the ground twice.

  Duval grins and forks the bacon off my plate. ‘So what was your answer to Hogan’s little business proposition?’

  ‘I said I’d consider it.’ Through the window I watch Winfred’s car pull in. It’s his civilian ride, a stylish rezmobile, crouched low to the ground, with flaking green paint and a speaker wired to the top. The first time I’d seen him drive it, he told me it had won competitions. I never dared ask for what.

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You’ll have Hogan on your back till you do.’

  ‘Do you have to use “on my back” and Hogan in the same sentence?’

  Duval laughs but I think of Robert, on the phone now almost every day.

  ‘Hogan’s offering us a stake in a business that’s already up and running. How can this not make sense, Alice? Tell me how this can not be a good idea.’ And I wonder just how much longer I can hold them both off.

  ‘Hogan’s a fool,’ Duval says again.

  ‘Maybe, but he’s a fool with an army, and he’s suspicious of you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says quietly. ‘I know he is.’

  ‘Duval, sooner or later they’ll come looking for you, and if I can find the schoolroom, anyone can.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You’re not worried?’

  ‘I’m counting on not everyone having your combination of luck, perseverance and blind disregard for personal safety.’ He signals for more coffee.

  ‘What if they catch you?’

  ‘Who they? Border Patrol or Hogan?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Well, Hogan is your average “shoot on sight, string ’em up from the tallest tree” kind of a guy.’

  ‘Well that’s okay then – and the Border Patrol?’

  ‘Oh, you know the kind of thing. Jail. An orange jumpsuit, a long-term contract with one of those chain gangs you’re so intrigued by.’

  Riding through the desert one morning, I’d been profoundly shocked to come across a chain gang of women, digging graves in the county cemetery, not far off the road. They’d been padlocked together at the ankles and were wearing striped uniforms, in a scene more resonant of the deep south at the turn of the century than of contemporary America.

  ‘Who are they?’ I’d asked Duval. ‘Serial killers or something?’

  He’d shaken his head. ‘Most of them are in there for minor infractions, cheque forgery or violating their probation. Some of them probably just couldn’t make bail.’

  I couldn’t believe you get put on a chain gang for forging a cheque. But then Arizona is not exactly the most liberal state in the union. According to Duval it only got a Martin Luther King day after tourists threatened to boycott the golf courses.

  Duval peels another toothpick from its plastic casing. ‘If you like I’ll apply for litter clean-up on the rez and you can wave at me next time you drive by.’

  ‘What makes you think I won’t be hammering rocks on the other side of the road?’

  Duval’s face turns serious. ‘Alice . . .’

  But we’re both distracted by the sight of Winfred rumbling through the restaurant towards us. He’s out of uniform, and looking a little unkempt in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. ‘Hey, Winfred!’ I say, expecting his broad grin in response, but he gives only a perfunctory smile before easing his bulk along the bench.

  ‘Duval, listen to me, man,’ he starts. ‘I got some news.’

  Duval puts up his hand and Winfred stops questioningly.

  ‘You can trust me, you know,’ I say, unable to keep from bridling.

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Alice,’ he says, his voice low, ‘it’s one thing drawing a line in the sand but it’s another thing to cross it. I won’t risk turning you into a real fugitive.’

  I look at him and I think maybe he doesn’t realize it, or maybe he wants no part of it, but whatever that line is, I have already crossed it. Whatever normal life used to be, I have lost all sense of it. I am an English woman living in Arizona in a ghost town, allowing Mexicans to slip in and out of the shadow of the law while I pull the wool over my children’s eyes and keep my husband at bay with secrets and lies, and who for? Who for, if not for him?

  24

  Through the open window of Emilio Chavez’s patrol truck, a rush of hot air picks up the flyer from the top of the dashboard. Small feet kick the back of my seat as the children scrabble to catch it.

  ‘Ro-do,’ Emmy spells out.

  ‘Rod-e-o, dummy,’ Jack says.

  ‘What is a rodee-o anyway?’ Emmy asks, signalling the end to her morning’s sulk.

  I twist round. ‘You know, lassos, bucking broncos, fun stuff like that.’ In the back seats, the children are strapped neatly into their seatbelts. They’re not exactly appropriately kitted out for the day’s outing. Jack is clad entirely in faux army gear from Wal-Mart. Emmy is wearing the pair of lizard-skin cowboy boots that she’d found in the thrift shop, and subsequently barely removed from her feet. These are teamed with her tartan kilt and a machine-shrunken woolly thing, far too hot for the weather but which I’ve nevertheless sanctioned as thanks for her having graciously agreed to forsake her new orange Mexican embroidered dress – the one Dolores had given her.

  ‘But why can’t I wear it?’ she had wailed. ‘Whywhywhy? It’s so unfair! You get to wear what you want so why can’t I . . . oh, God, I hate being a child,’ she roared. ‘I want to die DIE do you hear then I won’t have to be a child any more.’

  ‘Exactly, you’ll be a dead child,’ Jack pointed out placidly. ‘You still won’t be a grown-up, so what’s the point?’

  ‘I don’t care if I’m a dead child.’ She punched him in the arm. I’d rather be a dead child than be bossed around all day long. Bossed around my WHOLE LIFE.’

  I tried to explain, but what to say? Please, Emmy, try to understand. Your mother is harbouring an undocumented worker in the cabin and a dozen or so more down the road – oh, and also, pretty much on a daily basis, she’s aiding and abetting a habitual felon so, you know, your cooperation in this matter would really be greatly appreciated. Sure, I could claim that Duval, his comings and goings, his sympathies and morality had nothing to do with me. Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. But my blind eye was all-seeing, and, poor little thing, how could she help but give the game away? Emmy, who’s passionate about all things Mexican. Emmy, who has taken to printing off little white ticker tapes of Spanish translations and sticking them onto random household items . . . lamps, blinds, tables, even the orange slab of Monterey Jack cheese in the fridge, so she, too, can learn the language. Emmy, who on some days follows Benjamín around so closely you’d think she’d grown out of one of his legs.

  She’d cried for a full hour about the dress. I gave it to her straight. ‘We don’t want anyone asking us questions about where it came from. We’re not allowed
to talk about Dolores. Dolores is not really allowed to cook for us. She’s not really allowed to be in America. If she got caught, it would be really bad. She’d get into trouble. She’d have to go back home!’

  ‘That’s not bad!’ Emmy howled. ‘Why is that bad? I want to go back home too. I want to go home all the time. ALL THE TIME, do you hear?’

  ‘Do you, Emmy?’ I looked searchingly into her face. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, not really.’ She scratched a spot on her arm distractedly. ‘Not all the time, just when I’m tired. And when Jack hurts me.’

  ‘So don’t tell anyone about Dolores, okay? Promise me?’ I knelt down and held her shoulders. ‘And I know you can keep a secret because . . . well because . . .’ I wondered what to say which would adequately impress upon her the gravity of the situation, and then it came to me, ‘because you kept the secret about Granny, didn’t you?’

  It couldn’t have been a more direct hit.

  ‘Mummy,’ she whispered awfully, ‘I said I was sorry.’ Then she looked up at me with an expression of such remorse that my heart contracted with guilt. Making Emmy cry, making Emmy lie. ‘I won’t tell anyone about Dolores.’ She drew a zipper over her lips with one grimy finger. ‘Jinx personal padlock, I swear.’

  There was a reason we’d gone through all this. Dolores had only just arrived for work when the familiar white patrol vehicle had driven up the track to the cabin. I stopped at the window, relieved Winfred would have news of Duval. It was three days since breakfast in the M&M and there had been no word from either Duval or Benjamín since. But it hadn’t been Winfred adjusting his shades and hat in the wing mirror of the patrol truck, but Emilio Chavez. For a short moment I stared at him in surprise, then I bolted down the stairs to the kitchen.

  Dolores was dreaming at the stove, her head in a cloud of cinnamon and chillies. The whole cabin was steamy with the visceral smell of frying meat.

  ‘Quick!’ I’d whispered and she turned in alarm. ‘Go upstairs. Hide! ¡Escóndete!’ But she merely shrank against the counter and it wasn’t until I’d uttered the magic word ‘migra’ that she straightened up and her limpid brown eyes began to churn with fear.

  A few minutes later Emilio Chavez was sitting at the table and I was wondering whether this was a social call, or something more sinister. I bustled round the kitchen as noisily as possible, crushing coffee beans, clanking mugs in and out of cupboards, worried that at any moment Dolores’s not inconsiderable body mass might induce a telltale crack in the ceiling boards, and knowing that with both children at school any noise coming from upstairs might be construed as suspicious.

  Chavez had been meaning to come for some time. He wanted to be sure we were okay.

  ‘Yes, of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?’

  ‘Alice, there has been an incident on the border.’

  My heart started beating a little faster.

  ‘Yesterday we received a tip-off. A truck, abandoned in the desert. We quickly dispatched officers with water and medical supplies.’ Chavez shrugged wearily. ‘It’s always this time of year, with the temperatures rising, that these “trucks of death” are found.’

  I nodded. I’d read about this in the papers. Mexicans abandoned by their smugglers. A dozen, fifteen people left to die of heat exhaustion and suffocation. ‘In this case, though, there were only two individuals locked inside,’ Chavez said.

  I started to feel sick. ‘Who were they?’

  ‘Smugglers. A coyote and his driver.’

  Benjamín and Duval. I stared fixedly at a knot of wood on the table’s surface. Why else would Chavez have come?

  ‘Were they . . . dead?’ I could hardly bring myself to say it.

  ‘Dead?’ He sounded surprised by my concern. ‘No. In need of water? Certainly.’

  I raised my head to find him looking at me keenly.

  ‘Are you okay? You’re very pale.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, it’s just a little hot today. So what happened?’ My heart was still beating at 78 rpm instead of 33.

  ‘We interrogated the coyotes. When the truck broke down they were worried that with so many people the heat sensors would be tripped and the Border Patrol alerted, so they locked them inside, hijos de puta . . .’

  His mouth twisted, and I thought no, thank God, not Duval, not Benjamín . . .

  ‘The last thing the coyotes remember before waking up in the truck themselves was heading back across the border on foot. They never saw who attacked them.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What happened to the people they deserted?’

  ‘Gone.’ He blew on his fingers. ‘Vanished. There were seventeen people inside that truck. My men have searched the area, but not a single one has been found.’

  ‘I see . . .’ I waited for him to go on.

  ‘It’s a twelve-mile walk to the nearest town. They had women with them. Two elders. It’s impossible that they could just disappear.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, ‘I still don’t understand what this has to do with me.’

  He leant his elbows on the table. ‘Temerosa is the nearest town, Alice.’

  I permitted myself an inward smile. Duval had them safe then. They’d be at the schoolroom or already on their way north.

  ‘Folks who live on the border are essentially decent, well-meaning people.’ Chavez was still watching me closely. ‘They understand that Mexicans who try to cross the desert do so in their ignorance and sadness. They understand that the border exacts an agonizing toll on human life, but Alice, harbouring these individuals is against the law.’

  ‘I understand.’ I met his gaze directly. ‘But I’ve seen no one.’

  Chavez nodded as if this was the answer he was expecting. ‘I must talk with your foreman now.’ He glanced at his paperwork then back to me. ‘Duval, isn’t it?’

  I wiped my expression carefully blank. Duval wasn’t around, I told him, Benjamín neither. I offered up something about lumber yards and supply stores, but in truth I can’t remember the exact excuse.

  ‘In that case,’ Chavez plucked his hat off the table, ‘we will go and talk directly to his men.’

  He waited by the cabin door. I held back, fussed over the whereabouts of shoes, sunglasses, trying to quell the nerves building up in my stomach. I liked Chavez, his quiet seriousness, his old-fashioned manners, such an entirely different thing to Hogan’s gauche, vulgar hospitality, but as head of the local Border Patrol, he was the natural-born enemy of Duval and thus mine by proxy. It was one thing fooling the self-righteous Hogan with forms, but I imagined Chavez had a far beadier eye for a forgery.

  Outside, light struck like a camera flash. It was that time of day when the sun has total control, when it establishes itself so fierce and high in the sky that it’s inconceivable to imagine it ever being defeated by a weak curve of moon. I walked as slowly as I dared. The leaves of the cottonwood threw spots of dappled shade across the path. I was barely able to field Chavez’s questions – How were the children? Were they enjoying Arizona? Not too hot for them? – trying instead to think of a way to put off the inevitable moment when the workers would glance up and see me approaching with this stranger in his hated uniform of the Migra. I could picture it clearly. The indecision in their eyes. Both Duval and Benjamín gone and far longer than they should have been. Their trust of me, a white woman, tentative at best. What if they didn’t hold their nerve? What if they dropped their tools and bolted for cover? The noise of hammering and sawing echoed closer and closer, and out of sheer desperation I bent down to tie my shoelace, and that’s when I saw it – somewhere in my peripheral vision – the waxy yellow flower of the whipple cholla. ‘Watch out for it,’ I heard Duval’s warning. ‘Ask Benjamín about his various spats with the cholla.’

  Chavez stopped beside me. ‘Those shoes are no good in the desert. You must buy boots. I will take you to a good place in Nogales.’ I mumbled something and made to stand up, then executed what must have looked like the most pantomime of stumbles: avoiding C
havez’s hastily outstretched hand, I squeezed my eyes shut and threw myself into the barbed embrace of one of Benjamín’s so-called annoying small-town gangsters.

  ‘Mummy,’ Emmy moans from the back seat of the truck, ‘I’m bored.’

  I open my eyes. My arm had been a pincushion. Several of the cactus spikes had also impaled themselves through the soft half moon of flesh between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Don’t touch them!’ Chavez said at once. ‘You mustn’t leave the tips in.’ And taking me by the elbow, he helped me to my feet. ‘We must get you to the doctor.’ But as he’d said it, he’d directed a long hard look at the town over my shoulder.

  ‘How’s your arm?’ Chavez asks now, as if on cue.

  ‘My arm?’ I pull up my shirt sleeve. ‘Oh, it’s fine.’ The cactus spikes show up as a smattering of red dots, like a minor outbreak of chicken pox.

  In the medical centre, the cute doctor had pulled out the sturdiest barbs with a pair of tweezers then reached into the cupboard behind him for a bottle of Elmer’s glue.

  ‘And what are we making today?’ I asked facetiously. Emmy had several half-dried bottles of the stuff in the cabin, which she used for constructing origami paper animals.

  ‘We’re making you better,’ the doctor said severely. ‘I’ve never seen a more accident-prone family.’ He squeezed the thick white glue onto my arm, waited for it to dry, then peeled it off again like a face mask, and the rest of the tiny spikes had come out with it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Chavez apologizes again.

  ‘Hey, I can hardly blame you for tripping over my own shoelaces.’

  ‘Even so,’ he says stiffly, ‘I feel responsible.’

  ‘Ah, so this is your penance? Taking us to the rodeo?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Finally, there’s a glimmer of a smile. ‘It’s my pleasure.’

  ‘Why do we have to go to a rodee-o anyway?’ Jack grouses.

  I want to tell him that partly it’s because it’s prudent to keep your enemies close, however friendly they might be, and partly it’s because poor Chavez had insisted, and I couldn’t really come up with a plausible excuse not to.