Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  Troy edged further toward the lip of the ridge, keeping his head so low that he could smell the alkaline funk of wet clay beneath his face. He felt exposed now but the bottom of the rise was still hidden from view. He could see only that the wagon was not where they had left it but T-boned halfway across the road at the end of a scrawl of tire tracks cut deep into the dirt.

  Harlan continued staring in his direction. “I can see you moving in the goddamned grass up there, unless that’s a javelina ate you in your sleep. Come on down now. We ain’t got time for no outlaw shit.”

  None of what seemed to have happened down the hill made sense to Troy yet. He kept his crouch, watching his brother’s body language. He saw Harlan lumber heavily down from the bumper and pace slowly and deliberately in front of the wagon, then bend down and pick up something from the dirt. Suddenly he wheeled and threw it in Troy’s direction and Troy knew it was a rock before it sang in the air and snapped at the grass a foot from his head. Harlan looked hard where he had thrown and then spat and bent down and came up throwing again, landing a second shot further afield. But the next one didn’t miss—it came right at Troy’s camouflaged face and he ducked and felt it skip off the small of his back. He wriggled backward in the grass, looking around for a rock of his own but finding only wet caliche clods that would crumble in his hands. When he was far enough from the incline he raised himself on his haunches and stood bolt upright in a fit of fury, preparing to run but glaring first over the slope at the top half of his brother, who stood as motionless as a prairie dog. Fighting an overwhelming urge to run, Troy advanced three exploratory steps down the hill, to see what he had been unable to see between himself and where the grass expired into colorless dirt at the bottom of the ridge. But there was nothing—no pickup, no cruiser, no man or men. He edged back up the incline out of the grass and looked hard down the dirt road into the cotton fields, then toward the paved road, seeing nothing driving toward him or away, no dust raised by anything having done so recently.

  Harlan had hoisted himself onto the hood to sit, turning his sweat-stained back toward his brother. Troy remained in place on the ridge for a long time, racking his mind. Against his better judgment he descended the slope halfway and waited again, listening, keeping an eye on the road. When he finally came all the way onto the flat, inspecting the station wagon warily, Harlan didn’t acknowledge him.

  “Did you see anybody run?” Troy asked him.

  The wagon’s back bumper sat almost flush to the ground, half covered in silt above tires that had been sucked into the bar ditch.

  “Not a soul. But there was still dust in the air when I got down here. I don’t know how in hell somebody got away so fast on foot. We’re gonna have to use a couple of fence posts to get her out—she’s high-centered.”

  Harlan climbed off the hood and Troy approached the car slowly, like an animal testing a trap. The sun had reached the ridge where they’d slept and the hard light sat on everything so plainly that Troy suddenly felt the extent of their exposure.

  He squatted down to look at the back tires and went around to unlock the driver’s-side door, putting in the key and turning it and pushing the latch button. But just as the door came open, a deafening sound, a scream—more like a kettle whistle in the purity of its pitch and violence to the ear—split the morning from inside the car. The shock of the sound propelled Troy backward so forcefully that he fell on his ass and Harlan spun and ran half a dozen bewildered steps into the middle of the dirt road.

  The two stared at the station wagon as if a pack of rabid coyotes had materialized on the hardpan in front of them. And as they looked, the big driver’s-side door that Troy had tried to open swung out slightly, slowly, and then slammed shut under unseen powers. The clap of steel and rubber at its closing was echoed by the thump of the electric locks battening themselves down again.

  Troy scrambled to his feet and ducked. Scanning the ground for cover and realizing that the only place offering any was the car itself, he scuttled up against the faux-wood side of the body, hunching under the window line so that whoever sat inside would be unable to get a bead on him without getting out or shooting through the heavy doors. Harlan remained heedlessly in the middle of the road several dozen feet away, uncertain, crouched on his hams with an outstretched hand, like a football player in a three-point stance.

  Nothing manifested itself as they waited. Everything, even the morning breeze, seemed to have stopped moving, anticipating a new revelation.

  It was Harlan, through the gleam shooting off the luggage rack, who first saw something rising slowly above the window line: the shape of a head like that of a ghost—a sheath of milky white around a small oval face the same shade. Harlan couldn’t make out whether the head was looking back at him. He glanced down at Troy, crouched in the car’s shadow, staring up into his brother’s face to see what he was seeing.

  More quickly than it had appeared, the head sank from view. Harlan advanced a few steps toward the car, careful to keep a margin of road between him and it, wondering if what he had seen was some kind of optical illusion. But then there it was again, ascending gradually, higher this time, staring at him directly and unmistakably, and he realized with more shock than if it had been a ghost that he was looking into the face of a child—a girl, probably no more than ten years old. Her features were partially obscured by the reflection of sky on the windshield but he could see her mouth and eyes clearly. Her face was void of any expression, as if she was indeed only an apparition of a child assuming form inside the car.

  He found himself walking almost involuntarily up to the long expanse of hood, keeping his eyes fixed on the girl. As he did, she never moved, never blinked. She seemed more distant than she actually was because of the thick sound barrier of the windshield and the windows surrounding her.

  Harlan was close enough to the car now that he lost sight of Troy down beside the flank and he thought his brother had managed to cut and run without being seen. But then a hoarse whisper rose from below. He ignored it and walked slowly from the front to the driver’s side of the car, looking more closely in the improving light at the narrow-faced blond-haired girl sitting on her legs, stock still against the steering wheel, staring east across the road. He stopped next to the door and studied the side of her head, the small, oddly too-round ear between parted strands of fine hair. The sun was starting to come straight through the windshield and he squinted around inside the car looking for other occupants, finding none. He refocused his eyes toward the southern horizon and up the road and thought hard before he extended his big right hand and knocked three times on the window.

  From below him came the whisper again, sharpened, an adder’s rasp.

  “What in the fuck, Harlan? What’s happening?”

  “Stand up and see for yourself.”

  “Who’s in there?”

  “I can’t say for sure . . . But I don’t think she’ll shoot you.”

  The girl didn’t turn, didn’t move. Harlan leaned forward and brought his face close to the plane of the window and knocked on it again.

  “Hello . . . Hello? Little girl? What are you doing in there? Where did you come from?”

  Troy scooted out of the shadow toward the back of the car before rising from his crouch, so confounded he had lost a sense of what to do. He looked past Harlan’s shoulder through the window and saw what Harlan had seen, the form of a sallow prepubescent girl who gave the impression not only of being miles distant from where she sat but of inhabiting a dimension different from the one Troy thought he inhabited, where the presence of such a girl inside the car was inconceivable.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “I can’t make sense of it. Maybe she’s from some farm ’round here.”

  “What would a little girl be doing out in a cow pasture before dawn?”

  “You tell me. Maybe she’s lost. Maybe there’s something the matter with her.”

  Troy looked southeast toward the picked cotton fields t
o see if he could spot a farmhouse, knowing the closest one was easily a dozen miles away. He walked up beside Harlan and stooped toward the window and studied the girl’s strange pellucid hair and her hands folded in her lap as if she was waiting for someone. He could see the key in the ignition and the glove box door hanging open.

  He addressed her through the window, more sternly than Harlan had, enunciating his words in a way that felt instantly absurd. “Hey! Can you hear me? What are you doing in there?”

  “I think she can hear us all right,” Harlan said. “She just don’t want to.”

  Troy repeated his question and walked to the corner of the windshield, looking through it to try to catch the girl’s eyes, which admitted not in the least his presence. He realized that the keys were still dangling from the door and he walked back to it and leaned down and spoke loudly this time.

  “I’m going to open up the door now so we can talk, all right?”

  He reached for the key but before he was able to turn it fully the inanimate girl sprang to life and leapt with astonishing speed toward the door side and hammered down the electric locks. Troy tried again, working the key, grabbing hold with both hands. But the girl parried him at each turn, pumping the switch rhythmically on the other side of the door until Troy yanked the key from the handle with an exaggerated sweep of his arm and smashed a boot into the bottom of the door.

  “Hey, you open up the goddamned door right now! Who are you? Open that door this second and get out of our car!”

  Martha’s head was bowed toward the floorboard and they couldn’t see her face, so when she finally spoke it seemed to come from nowhere. It was a high, raspy, strangely accented voice that sounded remote through the glass, like a radio broadcast:

  “This isn’t your car, ladrón! This car belongs to my aunt Johanna and you robbed it from her in broad daylight. Ladrones sucios! You left her to walk. And you didn’t just take her car, you stupid dirty pendejo robbers—you took me! So now you’re gonna pay. Because I know your pendejo names and I know all about the both of you. Pendejos! I know where you live and what you do and I know the police are already looking out for you. So you better run right now before they get here to lock you up for the rest of your lives.”

  Troy and Harlan stood dumbfounded. Harlan failed to grasp the significance of what the girl had just said but Troy understood immediately. He stood back and looked at her as if seeing her for the first time.

  “I’ll be goddamned.” He turned toward Harlan. “She was in the back of the car. The whole goddamned time.”

  Harlan continued to stare at the girl, playing her speech over in his head. “What time?”

  “All the time. All night. We never looked.”

  “When did she get in?”

  “She never got in, Harlan. She was in. She belonged to that woman in Tahoka. She was lying in the back there when we drove off and we’ve had her with us since yesterday and we never thought to look. She didn’t make a sound.”

  Harlan looked at Troy. “There wasn’t nobody else in that car with us yesterday. We drove forty miles.”

  “Did you ever think to check behind the backseat? Of course you didn’t. Neither did I because you don’t think about a thing like that, looking behind the seat of a car for a child asleep when you’re stealing the car. She probably woke up and thought we were going to kill her. She’s Mennonite I bet. Just like those two boys who got out. The woman, too, probably.”

  The crown of Martha’s head was the only part of her visible above the window line. Troy ran his hand over the damp of his face and looked down at the colorless dirt caked on the knees of his suit pants and the toes of his boots, the ones that belonged to the livestock judge in Fort Sumner.

  “She’s been gone more than twelve hours. By now half the state of Texas is out looking for her—we’re a couple of dead men, Harlan. They’re looking for kidnappers.”

  Harlan made a guttural sound protesting the lunacy of such an idea. He started to say something to Troy but nothing came out. He fixed again on the girl, whose wan half-oval of a forehead had sunk lower behind the glass, as if she was in prayer or becoming sick. A look of disgust spread over Harlan’s face, then one of stupefied denial—not at the facts, which were too plain to dispute, but at how rapidly everything he had once thought about his life was becoming untrue.

  From somewhere a diesel pump on a timer rattled to life, marking the divide between daybreak and day. Trying to think through the situation as it stood now, Troy turned and sprinted up the rise to get the bags, taking a long look from the crest over the road. On the hood of the car, he opened his suitcase and spread out the contents and held up a shiny leather wallet and counted the bills inside. He repacked everything except the wallet and went to where Harlan had taken up a position a few yards down the road, looking back at the car and its occupant.

  “We can’t leave her out here.”

  “That’s what we’re going to do,” Troy said. He put some of the money into his coat pocket and bent to tuck the rest into the shaft of his right boot. “She can ID us, Harlan. She can give them a rendering—she’s been looking right at us. The only shot we have is to get down the road while it’s still early, make it south maybe an hour, get another car before she gets to the road and somebody picks her up. Even then it’s a shot in hell—that station wagon is one thousand percent radioactive.”

  Troy looked at the car without turning his head and saw the girl facing them now, her hair reflecting the sunlight and her large eyes skimming the door top like an exotic mammal peering from a terrarium in a zoo. It was almost too much to take in—stranded at daybreak on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, looking at a strange child locked inside a car, locking you out of a car you needed worse than any you’d ever needed before. Troy wondered how long it would take her to make it back to the main road and how long before a pickup came down this one.

  “If we drive straight through and we’re lucky, we can make Presidio before dark and get over into Ojinaga.”

  Harlan squinted into the sun and pulled his hat down on his brow. “Ojinaga? In Old Mexico? For how long?”

  “I don’t know. We might have to stay for a while. Or we might need to keep on the move. It depends on what kind of case they make after she turns up.”

  Harlan looked past Troy into the nothingness of pastureland. “I can’t believe this. I truly can’t.”

  “You better get started.”

  “I don’t want to go down into Mexico.”

  “Then you can stay here by yourself and see what happens.”

  “I’ve spent my whole life here, Troy. Inside of a ten-mile radius. I don’t know how to live no place else.”

  “And look at what it’s gotten you.”

  Harlan walked to the far lip of the road and spat into the bar ditch and turned back and yelled: “As compared to what the life you’re leading has gotten you? Look at the truckload of shit you’ve brought down on both our heads in under a day’s time! It has to be some kinda record . . . all in the name of coming here to help me!”

  Troy walked back to the car, keeping a deferential distance. The girl’s face remained at the side window in his direction but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  He enunciated clearly, like a grade school teacher: “Hello. If you know my name, why don’t you tell me yours? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Why don’t you turn the key and roll down the window a little so we can have a talk. Word of honor I won’t get any closer.”

  Harlan watched from the road. Troy might as well have been addressing the automobile.

  “It’s not going to do anybody any good sitting out here in a cow pasture. If you let us get back in the car, we’ll drive you to the city limits in Seagraves and drop you off and your mama can come get you. I promise you, we’re not going to hurt you.”

  The girl turned—only slightly, to look in Harlan’s direction, though any movement seemed consequential. She turned again to Troy, showing no signs of willingness to crack the
window, much less open any doors. He took a couple of exploratory steps toward the wagon and she pulled back and he stopped.

  She looked in his direction for a long time, as if she had lapsed into a trance, but then he heard her voice again, barely audible.

  “I want you to take me to El Paso.”

  Her speaking was so unexpected he wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. “You want what?”

  “To go to El Paso.”

  Troy shot a glance at Harlan and then at the girl.

  “El Paso?”

  “Yes.”

  Troy turned back to Harlan, who was watching from his removed position as if the exchange no longer involved him.

  “Now”—Troy tried to smile at the girl—“El Paso’s not where we’re headed. We can’t take you anywhere. You don’t belong to us. We never knew we had you in the first place or things wouldn’t have turned out like this. We’re going to take you to a pay phone so you can call your mama and she can come get you.”

  The girl didn’t move or change expression. “That’s not my mama. That’s my aunt Johanna. I’m not going to go back to her. I want you to take me to El Paso to my papa.” Her voice was growing louder now, clearer, with the curious loping Germanic accent Troy knew to be Mennonite.

  “Listen, why don’t you roll down that window a tad, so we can have a real conversation?”

  The girl looked at him for a while, seeming to review the pros and cons of cooperating, then moved carefully to her right, keeping her eyes on Troy as she reached toward the steering column with her right hand. Suddenly the wipers jumped and banged noisily back and forth across the dusty windshield and the girl turned and fumbled with the levers branching off the column, trying to find the one to stop them. Her head sank from view again, while a worrisome hissing sound issued from beneath the car. In a few seconds the driver’s window descended several inches before quickly reversing course and heading back up, stopping to leave only a tiny breach, no more than two inches. The girl lifted herself up to this fissure and stuck the fingers of one hand through and tilted her head to bring her mouth closer to the opening. When she spoke this time, it was with new assurance in her voice.