Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Goddammit, Mum!’ comes the stifled echo. Jack is still struggling. Duval releases him. Poor Jack finally gets to grips with his hat. He lifts it off his forehead and rakes his sweaty hair up into a peak. I look back to Duval but he’s ducking under the wooden stalls and vanishes into the blinding sunlight. Jack screws the hat back on his head, then notices I’m laughing. He fixes me with a suspicious look and demands crossly, ‘What’s so funny, girl? I’m still bursting to pee.’

  25

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Starving!’

  Duval catches my eye and smiles.

  Behind us the sun is dipping. Filaments of orange and pink shoot across the sky then gradually dissolve like streamers of smoke. Back in the cabin the children would be still high on the day’s quota of lemonade and even now chewing their way through a packet of strawberry twizzles under the benevolent eye of Benjamín. I lean out of the open window feeling almost giddy with freedom.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Oh, little place I know.’

  ‘Round here?’ I look at him with suspicion. ‘A restaurant?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far.’ He continues whistling tunelessly until we eventually draw up to a ranch heralded by two soaring vertical logs carved into a wishbone shape with a horizontal log jammed across the middle. Landowners round here seem to favour these OK Corral gateways even when the property behind them consists of no more than a single acre. This one is more pretentious than most. The logs are stained a lurid orange colour and an intricately carved name sign has been suspended from its centre. It’s also curiously familiar. ‘Wait a minute.’ I scrutinize the writing. ‘This is Hogan’s Ranch!’

  ‘Good Lord,’ Duval affects surprise, ‘so it is.’ He noses the truck down the drive.

  ‘Duval, what are you doing? He’ll be back any minute.’

  ‘He’ll be drinking his own health at the rodeo shindig until long after we’re gone.’

  ‘But he’s got people watching the property. He told me.’

  ‘Better keep your voice down then.’ He takes the left-hand fork away from the house and pulls up on a low wooden bridge built over an ornamental lake. He climbs out of the truck and peers over the edge.

  ‘What are we doing here exactly?’ I follow him onto the bridge, keeping an uncertain eye on the house.

  ‘You said you wanted fresh fish.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ I lean over the stone ledge and peer down at the flat greasy water below. ‘Is anything actually alive in there?’

  Duval takes a crust of bread from his pocket and tosses it in the water. Instantly there’s a frenzied thrashing.

  ‘Yikes!’ I pull back involuntarily. ‘Frankenfish.’

  ‘Hogan’s pride and joy. He far prefers them to his children. Feeds them by hand so they’re practically tame and very fat.’ Duval fetches a net out of the back of the truck then stops when he sees the look on my face. ‘You’re not going to make much of a fugitive if you baulk at a little poaching. Besides . . .’ he hands it to me, ‘it’s one of the few crimes in this country that doesn’t carry the death penalty.’

  ‘Tell that to the fish.’ I lean over the bridge and swipe the net towards the water. It barely ripples the surface.

  ‘What a shame.’ I hand it back with a grin. ‘Handle’s too short.’

  ‘You’re too far away. I’ll lower you down.’

  ‘I’m sorry? Lower me down?’

  ‘Well you can’t possibly expect me to do it,’ he says indignantly. ‘I’m no good with heights.’

  ‘Let me get this straight. You want to dangle me head first off the bridge?’

  ‘Not if you’re scared.’

  ‘Are you trying to goad me?’

  ‘I’m trying to feed you.’

  ‘Well can’t you rope a steer or cook beans like a proper cowboy?’ I hoist myself onto the stone surface.

  Duval lays another piece of bread on the ledge beside me. ‘You’ll need to be quick with the net.’ He puts his hands on either side of my legs. ‘Ready?’

  He’s smiling down at me and I’m smiling too. ‘This is silly, Duval.’

  ‘I thought you were hungry.’

  ‘Really silly.’

  ‘Push away from the bridge with your arms.’

  ‘And if someone comes?’

  ‘I’ll shoot them.’

  ‘You’d better,’ I say with feeling.

  He lowers me slowly until my head is a foot clear of the water. The bread comes sailing down past my face and lands with a plop. Again the water froths and boils. I take a great swipe and feel the net almost jerked out of my hands. Through the pounding in my ears, I can dimly hear him shouting.

  ‘Keep the net up!’

  ‘Easy for you!’

  I grip the handle, blinded by splashing water. My head feels swollen fit to explode. Inexplicably, I get the giggles. ‘Pull me up,’ I shout. I can see the fish in the net now, three of them, flip-flopping over each other in oxygen-deprived desperation.

  ‘Pull, for God’s sake.’ I’m laughing so hard that choking threatens.

  Duval gives a bark of laughter too, as hand over hand he hauls me up. My elbows graze against the stone of the bridge but finally the inside of my knee connects with the ledge and I wrap my legs around it. Duval shifts one hand to my waist and with the other grabs my arm and yanks me over the edge. I collapse onto the ground at his feet, soaked, hysterical with laughter and clutching, for dear life, the net with its wriggling contents.

  Duval rests his boot against a rock and scrapes at the flesh of the trout with his knife.

  I sit close to him on the sandy ground and feed the fire. A ball of brush catches alight and shoots sparks into the sky like fireflies on a mission to space. We’re far from Hogan’s ranch now, high up in the mountains, camped out on a wide flat ridge overlooking the desert below. The panorama from up here is so enormous that each slice of the sky has its own competing weather. To the east, grey clouds close over a remaining patch of blue, to the west a solitary needle of lightning flickers. Above us, the first stars wink anaemically.

  ‘My father used to take me sea fishing.’ I position the metal grille over the flame. ‘It’s just like netting, you know, requires no skill at all. When you go sea-fishing you catch monsters, quickly, any number of them.’

  Duval looks up and smiles. He lays the gutted trout on the rock and takes a second from the net. ‘There’s a pack of Dolores’s tortillas in there if you want to get them out.’

  I reach into the canvas bag. The tortillas are freshly made and wrapped in cloth. There are two limes and a bag of finely chopped chillies to go with them. ‘We went with Roddy, the local fisherman. He had a rowing boat with a tiny outboard motor and I was always terrified it was going to run out of juice and leave us stranded in the middle of the ocean.’

  The flames of the fire dance in the blade of his knife and I fall silent, remembering the hours spent in that boat. The sea was so black and deep and the wind so cold you’d wish yourself back home, but suddenly there’d be a tug on the line, then another, and you’d pull it up eagerly, one hand over the other, until you saw them – four or five, sometimes more, their silver backs glinting like swirls of mercury. Then my father would heave them over the side and rip out the hooks because I was too squeamish, and out the lines would go again.

  ‘What were you fishing for?’ Duval asks.

  ‘Mackerel, mostly, but lythe and saithe as well. Sometimes, though, you’d be out there and catch nothing. It was like someone had stolen all the fish in the ocean and you’d just sit there, hauling the line up and down till your fingers blistered and your face was raw from the saltwater spray. Then the weather would turn nasty and these huge waves would swell and roll towards you and the boat would rock madly.’

  ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘Not really. I sort of loved it.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’ He holds out his hand for the third trout.

  As a ch
ild I was scared of touching the fish once they were dead and, knowing this, my father would look into the baleful eyes of each and give it a personality. ‘This one is a bully who has learned the error of his ways. This one is too shy to speak to girls. This is Macbeth after killing Duncan.’ Afterwards he would take me home and comb the mackerel scales out of my hair. He tried to be gentle, but he always pulled the knots too hard.

  ‘You’re looking very pensive all of a sudden. What are you thinking?’

  I glance up to see Duval smiling quizzically.

  ‘Oh . . . nothing really.’ Actually I’d been thinking that it was a mother’s job to pick mackerel scales out of her daughter’s hair but it only sounds self-pitying when I voice it out loud.

  ‘Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don’t get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.’

  I prod the fire with a stick. The wood has burnt down and the embers glow red.

  ‘I just think that if someone really has to leave, if they really feel they have no choice, then why does it have to be forever? Why does it have to be all or nothing?’

  Duval lays the filleted trout in the pan. ‘Sometimes extreme choices are the ones you get faced with. All or nothing. Life or death.’

  ‘You think like an outlaw.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he agrees.

  Or maybe, I think privately, it’s mutually exclusive to have a great passion for a man and give unconditional love to your children. Maybe every woman secretly wonders whether – if it ever came down to it – she’d be capable of walking away, leaving everything she loves behind, but dismisses the idea because she knows she will never be tested. An enduring passion is rare, like a shark bite or a plane crash – and pretty much just as devastating.

  The trout spit in the pan, their skin shrinking and curling, releasing a skein of greasy smoke. Duval flips two of the tortillas on to the metal grille.

  ‘In the world I live in,’ I watch as the surface of the tortillas blackens and bubbles up, ‘people aren’t often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you.’

  Duval touches the tip of the knife to my arm. ‘You, however, bled for every man in Temerosa.’

  ‘That’s different.’ I fiddle self-consciously with my sleeve. ‘That was hardly life or death. If it had been a rattlesnake, believe me, I wouldn’t have stroked it.’

  ‘If the stakes had been high enough you might have.’ Duval lifts the pan off the fire, then opens two bottles of Dos Equis and hands me one.

  I lean back against the rock. ‘Can you remember when it was,’ I ask him curiously, ‘the moment you first decided to run?’

  He looks into the fire and for a long moment I think he’s not going to answer.

  ‘I was sitting in the INS building in Los Angeles,’ he says eventually, ‘and on the other side of the table was this stranger, Benjamín, and he was wearing one of those shirts he likes so much, you know, the ones that are too tight for him? And it was covered in dust and stains from whatever fruit he’d been picking and Benjamín himself was a mess – his hands torn up and ingrained with pesticide but in them he held this letter, my letter, which he’d been carrying around for thirteen years and yet it was in perfect condition . . .’ He shovels some of the cooked fish into a tortilla and squeezes on some lime before handing it to me. ‘He sat there, at rock bottom, no money, about to be deported, and yet there was something about him, God only knows what, that represented freedom to me.’

  ‘That makes no sense.’ I sprinkle the chillies into my tortilla and take a bite.

  ‘I know. It made no sense to me either.’ He wipes grease from his chin and grins. The smile leaves faint lines in his jaw like crevices in a rock, and aware suddenly of how close he is, I’m overcome with a desire to touch them. Then I feel the heat in my face and am thankful for the half light.

  ‘The INS dumped him over the border and I waited on the other side. Four, five hours I sat in that car and then finally there he was, scrambling underneath some straggly piece of barbed wire with this surprised look on his face when he saw I was there.’ He breaks off with a laugh. “Toribio Romo!” he shouted.’

  ‘Toribio what?’

  ‘Santo Toribio Romo!’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Ah well, since you ask, he’s the patron saint of migrants.’

  ‘Benjamín called you a saint?’

  ‘Ironic, I agree, considering I’d never had even a vaguely altruistic notion in my life . . . But apparently the man was astonishingly handsome, so you can see how there might be confusion. Anyway, Santo Toribio Romo, or Holy Illegal Alien Smuggler, as Benjamín likes to call him, is quite a legend round here.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Well, he was a cleric murdered during the Cristano war in the late twenties. He lay low on his saintly duties for a while but popped up about thirty years ago and has been helping people ever since.’

  ‘Ghostly apparition, white wings sort of a thing?’

  ‘Not at all, he shows up in flesh and blood, dispensing water, food, dollars and even job information. People think he’s a bona fide nice guy.’

  ‘Until . . .’

  ‘Until in return for whatever help he’s given, he asks them to go to Jalostotitlán, his home town, to pray for him – and Mexicans, being obedient, religious people, do exactly that. When they get to the town, they’re directed to a little church and there, lo and behold, they find his picture above the altar and his bones lying in a casket.’

  ‘Great story.’

  ‘It is a very good story,’ he agrees.

  ‘So Benjamín canonized you and you decided to lay your bones in Temerosa.’

  ‘Well as we apologists are so fond of saying . . . seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘What about your old life, your real life?’

  ‘My real life?’ he repeats.

  ‘You know, family, friends, a weekly pay cheque.’ I toss it out lightly enough, but I know nothing about Duval’s former life except that when Benjamín found him he’d been teaching Latin American studies back in his old university where he believed that with enough passion and energy he could put the world to rights.

  ‘And you?’ He kicks a piece of wood back into the fire. ‘What precipitated your flight from London?’

  I shake my head. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too random. Too prosaic.’

  He takes a swig of beer. ‘Tell me anyway.’

  It had been the maraschino cherry. For some reason I wanted to put it on top of my ice cream in the cinema but it had cost ninety-five pence and I didn’t have enough change. It had been the last one and it glared at me out of the confines of its perspex box like a bloodshot eyeball.

  ‘You’re really asking me to pay you the full ninety-five pence for that thing?’

  The man behind the Baskin-Robbins counter was loosely oriental. His English was none too good but he got the gist of my irritation.

  ‘Yes, please, ninety-five pence,’ he repeated nervously.

  ‘Come on, how long has it even been in there?’

  He shrugged miserably, a sheen of sweat on his jaundiced forehead, and for no good reason I saw red.

  Of course it really wasn’t his fault. Someone in Baskin-Robbins Sales and Pricing had sat down at a table with someone in Odeon Cinema Marketing and come up with the price for fruit addendum on top of a double scoop. It wasn’t his fault either that I had finally got to the point where I found myself enraged by small and unimportant things. He couldn’t have known that I was using all these small unimportant things as buffers against the big significant things I hadn’t the courage to put a name to. It was just bad luck his snail’s thread crossed mine on the night when I reached an advanced stage of life fury. The one when if anybody had dared look sideways at me, I would have killed them.

  �
�The city can do that to you, Duval says. ‘Ten million angry people all with their own grievances and those grievances all with problems and frustrations of their own.’

  ‘Do you think you could ever live in one again?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Say you had to, though, what would it take?’ I lick my fingers greedily.

  ‘Too much.’ Duval passes me the last of the tortillas.

  ‘Okay, say you had to, but you could have three wishes,’ I amend. ‘Three things which would make it bearable – what would they be?’

  Duval lies on his back and puts his hands behind his head. ‘Let’s see, I suppose ... a woman I couldn’t stay away from, a half-blind dog and maybe a lucrative commission to pen a tome on the shattered heart of America. Oh, and obviously the ability to write it.’

  ‘That’s four.’

  ‘So it is.’ Duval nudges Taco fondly with the toe of his boot. ‘Sorry, fella, but all good things must come to an end.’

  I laugh.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Live in a city?’

  ‘In Temerosa.’

  ‘I’m already here, aren’t I?’ Smoke from the fire rises upwards in fine wisps.

  ‘For now, sure. You’ll stay a few months, maybe a year, but eventually you’ll get bored with this place, it’ll lose its romance for you and you’ll go back to the safety of your husband and your life in London.’

  I stare into the fire. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because you can’t make your escape your reality.’

  ‘You can’t make your escape your reality,’ I repeat.

  ‘No.’

  I turn to look at him. ‘But this is reality. This is real, isn’t it? Right here, right now?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘This is a dream,’ and a hard edge creeps into his voice. ‘And one day you’ll wake up and find you crave the smell of tarmac and throngs of people, in the same way you once sought space and solitude.’

  ‘No.’ I stare into the fire, upset.

  ‘These few months here, tonight even, will become a memory, an amusing story to tell at dinner parties. Your year out in the Wild West.’

  ‘That’s unfair.’