Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  I called one morning and she answered. Harlan was out on a job. She said, “¿Hola?” in a weak tentative voice and then said, “Oh,” and laughed and I could hear her lighting up a cigarette. I pictured her sitting there in the kitchen I knew so well and I wondered what she was wearing. She sounded happier than I thought she would, but now I know that was just her perverse pleasure in talking to me while she was getting ready to do what she was going to do.

  He kept the money in cash, in a fireproof box beneath the floorboards of the work shed in the backyard. He was as careful as he should have been, but he never really mistrusted her; she said she watched him one night through the window of the extra bedroom when he thought she was sleeping. He opened the shed door and turned on a flashlight and set the light upright on the floor and got down on his knees and extracted the box from its hole. The beam shone up at his face, making it look as if a treasure chest was gleaming into his eyes the way it does in children’s books. For a minute, she said, she felt sorry for him. And maybe she did. She might even have felt sorry for me when she disappeared. I don’t deny the possibility. But if she had such feelings she never confused them with work.

  *

  As the dark came on Martha fell asleep and had a short, powerfully realistic dream in which she was back in Cuauhtémoc, riding in a city bus. The rattle inside the bus was deafening and the air smelled like gasoline fumes, as it always did inside the municipal buses. She was sitting a few rows from the back. The interior metal curving above the windows on either side of her had been painted, as such buses often are, this one in pinks and greens, depicting a beach scene of waves rolling ashore on a moonlit night, flanked by palm trees that leaned inward from the sides to frame the composition. The ceiling of the bus was dominated by its own painting, a bright red sacred heart of Jesus, encircled by three strands of thorn and pierced by seven arrows atop a field of flame, against which the blood seeping from the bottom of the heart looked real enough to drip down onto Martha’s lap.

  The bus seemed to be moving aimlessly through the city at night, somewhere on the outskirts, where she could make out only the occasional light coming from a store sign or shining weakly through the lace curtains in the windows of houses. At first, she thought she was completely alone but then she looked over and saw her mother sitting in the seat across the aisle from her, staring out the opposite window. Martha looked ahead to see who was at the wheel but the interior of the bus was so dim she couldn’t make out a face in the wide convex rearview mirror above the driver’s seat. She looked back toward her mother, understanding implicitly that she would not be allowed to talk to her. When the bus came to a halt at an intersection in the bluish glare of a streetlight, she could see that her mother was wearing one of her best Sunday dresses, one that Martha herself had helped sew: dark plum cotton drill with a sprigged rose pattern and crisp pleats falling from the waist. Her braids had been plaited up elaborately beneath her scarf. She had on her heavy stockings and her Sunday shoes and the kind of pressed black apron that Mennonite women wear on formal occasions, which conceals almost all of the beautiful pleats on the fronts of their dresses. Martha looked down at her mother’s hands to see if she was carrying her Bible, though she knew it wouldn’t be there because it was clear that her mother was on her way to a funeral, not a worship service.

  When the bus stopped, Martha expected to see a church or a funeral home but instead she saw the empty parking lot of the mirador, a place she had never been at night. Bare bulbs hanging from sawed-off telephone poles lighted the entry to the swept dirt path that switched back and forth in diminishing Zs to the top of the rise and the big viewing platform, constructed from cedar plank and heavy pipe painted municipal Mexican green. The construction of the platform reminded her of playground equipment, a playground built for adults, though whenever she’d visited the mirador during the day it was usually full of teenagers who had cut school and went there to smoke and grope at each other’s bodies while they stared out despondently toward the horizon.

  She wondered whether her mother would get out here. But when she turned back to look she saw that her seat was already empty. Martha stood and wrapped her arms around herself and walked through the empty aisle out into the cold night, looking up the rise for her mother and the bus driver but seeing no one ahead of her. She had no memory of going up the path but suddenly found herself at the end of it where the viewing platform should have been. It was completely gone now, after so many years, and on top of the hill there was only a ragged field of dark teosinte grass that smelled like corn and came up as high as her waist. She had to push it out of the way with her hands to get through to the edge of the rise. Near the edge the grass gave way to rocky soil and when she finally emerged to get a look out over the land, she was terrified by what she saw. The entire valley stretching below her northward to the horizon seemed to be on fire. A sea of orange undulated beyond the range of her vision as if a volcano had erupted and the lava had flowed all the way to the city. But as she waited to feel the heat of the fire on her face she realized it was not flame. It was the lights of an immense city that had overtaken the fields and orchards and spread to cover every square mile of Chihuahua. As the realization took hold, the blazing light briefly seemed beautiful to her and her breath was taken away by the thought of a city so immense. But just as quickly the thought became more terrifying than fire. The colonias and the campos and the crops and the trees and the barns and the queserías and all the people who had lived apart from the world down there must be gone now, forced to root up and move again as they had had to move from the Old Country to Russia, then to Canada, then down through the United States to Chihuahua. Where were they all now and why did they leave her behind?

  In the dream she heard someone start to cry and then wail into the night over the endless city and she realized it was herself. She woke up in the back of the car whimpering and saw that it was still night.

  *

  After his release, Aron was taken in by a Baptist benevolence society that found temporary lodging in Juárez for ex-prisoners who professed religious convictions. Interviewed by the minister who came to the visiting room, Aron would say nothing beyond confirming his name, age, and birthplace, but because he was the only Mennonite coming from the jail, he was automatically given a bed. He was placed in a shabby adobe-and-cinder-block boardinghouse in Felipe Ángeles, a poor neighborhood near the river. The winding dirt street where the house sat ran end-on toward a berm that hid the river, beyond which lay El Paso and the United States, marked at that point by two towering concrete smokestacks of a copper-smelting plant, taller than anything on either side of the river, painted with red and white stripes that gave them the appearance of having something to do with candy or Christmas or some other kind of American abundance.

  Aron served only fourteen months of his sentence, after Martha’s mother and her family refused to cooperate fully in court during the course of the case against him. He had been sent to the municipal jail in Juárez rather than the state prison; the old file clerk who served as his legal representative argued that sending him to the prison would mean signing his death warrant. But the municipal jail was hardly better. He shared his first cell—dirt-floored, windowless—with ten other men, several of them teenagers. Like Aron, they wore the clothes they had been booked in because the jail couldn’t afford uniforms. Aron kept to himself in the one corner of the cell that hadn’t been claimed, nearest the putrid toilet bucket. The other prisoners were afraid of him at first, partly because he was tall and looked strong but also because they knew he was Mennonite and they wondered whether hurting him would get them into some special kind of trouble. But over time they noticed that the guards extended no more regard toward him than they did toward anyone else, and one afternoon, when the plastic bowls of refried beans and masa mush were passed into the cell for dinner, one prisoner, a wiry, head-shaved American in a green Army jacket, with homemade tattoos of teardrops on his cheek, ripped Aron’s bowl from hi
s hands. He poured the contents into his own bowl and put Aron’s on top of his head like a helmet. Then he leaned over on his stool, farted deafeningly, and yelled: “Order in the court! Order in the court! The judge is eating beans! His wife’s in the bathtub sucking off marines!” and the prisoners who understood a little English howled with laughter.

  Aron went three days without food. When the bowls came around on the morning of the fourth day he sprang up and seized the American with the shaved head from behind and yelled in Spanish to the guards that he would break his neck unless he was given his morning bowl and every ounce of food he was owed up to that point. The American didn’t resist and began to weep openly, begging for his life. The other prisoners backed up against the walls in unison, as if they had participated in this ceremony before. Five big guards entered the cell, circling Aron and his captive slowly in opposite directions with their batons in their hands, switching directions every so often until one guard was able to get far enough behind Aron to clip him cleanly behind the ear.

  For the rest of his time in jail, he was kept in solitary confinement in a small concrete-lined hole topped with a round iron grate, near the guards’ headquarters. He stopped speaking Spanish when the guards addressed him, answering only in Low German. After a month in the hole, he asked for a Bible and as a joke one of the guards found him a King James version, which Aron couldn’t read, though he tried diligently during the couple of hours each day when there was enough light at the bottom of the hole to see the pages.

  He began to pray in German, calling out loudly in the middle of the night:

  In Jesu schlaf ich ruhig ein,

  Gott, mein Gott will bei mir sein

  Gottes Allmacht will mich decken,

  Mich soll keine Nacht erschrecken

  Gottes Macht kann vor gefahren

  Und vor Ungluek mich bewahren.

  The guards caught the God and Jesus parts and understood that the man must be saying something religious, so they let him alone for a while, intrigued by the glottal foreign sound echoing through the halls like the chorales in a monastery. But the voice finally began to grate on them and interfere with their naps, so the head guard went out one night and told him to shut up.

  “I know you understand me—I know you speak Spanish as well as I do,” the guard said in Spanish, bending over and peering down into the darkness of the hole. “Go to sleep or I’m going to come down there and put you to sleep myself.” The guard went back to his chair but Aron started up the prayer again, so the guard filled a large plastic bucket with cold water from the hose in the yard and dumped it through the grate. He stared down through the metal gridwork. “Pray in secret—you know?—and your Father will reward you in secret. The Bible says so. Pipe down, pendejo, or next time I’m going to get the hose and drown your white ass.”

  Twice every day a bucket was lowered into the hole with an insufficient amount of pinto bean mush and a plastic container of metallic-tasting water; most mornings, a rope with a hook was lowered to take out his waste bucket. Once, a guard allowed the bucket to tip at the edge of the hole and Aron’s own shit and piss rained down on his head. The stench was unbearable for an entire day but he gradually stopped smelling it, and he thought about people he had seen who lived in their own filth and were probably no longer able to smell themselves, either—it was like a consolation prize given by God to the most wretched.

  Once a week, an iron pole with rungs welded across it was lowered into the hole so he could climb out and be taken to a secluded yard with no chair or table, nothing except hard dirt and dead grass enclosed by a cinder-block wall, a place where he was allowed to stay by himself for an hour to get sunshine and exercise if he wanted. He had never experienced the sun as such a brutal physical thing, even during the hottest days in the fields in Chihuahua. It wasn’t just that the light hurt his eyes after being in the dark for so long; it hurt wherever it shone on his neck or hands and he would try to crowd himself into the shade to escape what they were legally mandated to give him.

  What the guards didn’t understand was that as cramped and filthy as solitary was, Aron vastly preferred it to being with other men. Being alone was like a thing he had somehow gotten away with, like beating the system, especially because the system thought it was beating him every day it kept him there. The hole, about twenty feet deep, seemed to have been some kind of cistern or storage tank, repurposed into a cell. It was shaped like a bottle with a short neck and a wide bottom and had a bricked-in patch on the floor where a drain had probably been. Because the curved concrete surface had no openings, there were no mice or rats and the roaches and centipedes that got in from the top were easily spotted and killed. Aron began to use the Bible as a pad to sit on, to relieve the throbbing pain the concrete caused his legs and back. He didn’t feel right using the Bible this way but he did it anyway, reasoning that if God gave him a Bible he couldn’t read He must have intended it to be put to some other use. During one of his lowest moments, gnawed at by hunger, he tried to eat a page of it, but it tasted horrible and the act made him feel physically ill and he prayed for forgiveness.

  In the mornings, when a tiny amount of light filtered through the grate, he tried to keep up a regimen of exercise, squatting and running in place to stay healthy. But in the afternoons when the light faded until he could no longer see anything, he lost the will to get up from the floor and fell into waking dreams about the colonia and his campo and the farmland that had been taken from him. He rarely thought about Anna or their other children anymore, but he never stopped thinking about Martha and wondering if he would ever see her again and whether she would still look like a girl or already like a woman. He wondered if they had been able to poison her mind against him. He was sure she was too strong for that, but he told himself that if she wasn’t, he would forgive her, and his forgiveness would be enough to win her back to his side.

  Oct. 2, 1972

  I’m afraid of heights, have been ever since I can remember. I’ve often thought it must have something to do with growing up in a place as flat as this, where the sweep of the sky is so big that, lying on your back looking into it, you sometimes experience the sensation that you will come loose from the earth and fly up with nothing to prevent your ascent.

  One summer night when I was eight or nine Bill Ray tried to cure my fear by carrying me up to the roof. He put a ladder against the storm gutter on the western side of the house and hoisted me astride his back with my legs hanging over his hard forearms and my arms cinched around his neck. He had a fresh cigarette in his mouth and he labored up the rungs with the orange coal on the end flaring and darkening as he breathed. I knew he’d been drinking but it didn’t occur to me to be any more afraid than I already was. When we got onto the lip of the roof he turned and let me down and kept a hand on me. The moon was almost full. I’d never been up on the roof of a house before and the expanse of bright white asphalt shingles looked fantastical in the night, lit up like the surface of the moon itself. The roof rose gently to the peak and sank to the left in a shallow valley where the main roof intersected with the smaller gable of the garage. Plumbing vents and attic vents stuck up at random like small dead plants, and the skeletal television antenna lorded over them on a wind-bent aluminum rod.

  Bill Ray took my arm and walked me slowly over to where the western face intersected with the southern one. He squatted on his haunches and pulled me down alongside him. I could see out to the far corner of the backyard where we had tomato bushes and black-eyed peas and a stand of overgrown okra already too tall for me and Harlan to pick. The green of the garden looked pale gray in the flat moonlight, like a picture of a forest or a jungle printed on a newspaper page. To the west across the road I could see the evenly parceled posts of the barbed wire fence but the wire itself was invisible in the darkness. On the other side was the pastureland where we hunted Comanche arrowheads that still lay almost unburied where they had fallen wide of a buffalo or some other target maybe not a century before. For
twenty miles to the state-line road the pasture ran interrupted only by oilfield tracks and small herds of cattle that wandered looking for tufts of buffalo grass amid caliche and prickly pear. A couple hundred yards out, a pumpjack stood dormant for the night, its big horse head bowed down to the ground. A mile or so beyond flickered the orange of a natural gas flare, a flame that Bill Ray said burned for the sole purpose of reminding him daily of the ocean of wealth lying beneath his property to which he held no mineral rights.

  He took another cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it. I always liked that first smell—the clean phosphorus of the match and the woodsiness of the just-lit tobacco before it turned stale. It was warm enough but a breeze was blowing and I started to shake a little. Bill Ray didn’t say anything for a while. It was cloudless and the stars were so thick they looked like clouds floating just behind the sky. Finally he said, “It’s fine up here, above God and people, ain’t it? You can see everything, and nobody can see you.”

  I sat holding my knees, tensing my thigh muscles against the slope. Bill Ray stretched out one leg and pulled a thin metal flask from his front pants pocket and took a drink. He offered it to me, as he always did, and grinned and pushed it back in his pocket. The pearl snaps on his shirt glinted in the moonlight. It was one of his good shirts, and it was pressed, so I knew he was heading somewhere for the night, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He seemed willing to stay up there as long as necessary for me to see what it felt like not to be afraid, though I still was. We sat listening to the breeze come and go, carrying the bawl of a dog from a distant backyard.