Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  When he opened the bathroom door his line of sight ran directly behind the lunch counter and he saw the woman—the waitress, or possibly the owner—squatted down on her big thighs in her pink uniform dress, the way someone would squat to look for something. But she didn’t look like she was looking for anything. The way her head was inclined he thought maybe she was getting sick. She suddenly noticed Troy standing there, just a few feet away, and she stared at him and made a motion with her hand that he was unable to interpret. Did she need his help to get up? Had she lost something? The expression on her face was one of distress, but a distress she might have experienced before, a problem she had some practice in. He stepped forward toward her but before he could take a second step, the expression on her face turned to one of actual terror and she went all the way to her knees and put her head near the ground.

  It was only then that Troy felt a draft of cold air on his face and realized too late that someone had come through the front door of the café and the woman had been telling him to remain out of view, to go back into the bathroom. But he was already almost past the corner of the corridor and whoever had come in would have been able to see him or his shadow by now. The old man hadn’t moved from his chair and still stared at the television, as if the woman hadn’t disappeared beneath the counter. Troy took a half step forward and saw Harlan midway inside the dining room, facing the door, standing very still, his hat on one of the tables, his hands held slightly away from his body with his palms facing the floor as if he was practicing a dance step. He didn’t seem to see Troy behind him. The girl was sitting, with her chair turned so that she faced sideways from a table, half toward the door and half toward him. Her mouth was moving and she was saying words in a high, agitated, barely audible whisper that sounded like neither English nor Spanish, and Troy knew that if he took another step he would be able to see the person she was addressing.

  He held his breath and tried to remember if he had seen a window in the bathroom or an exit door down the hallway. As he stepped backward, the old man slowly turned his head in his direction and put one of his gnarled fingers up to his grinning face, underneath his right eye, and pointed the finger toward the television and said something that sounded like “Buffalo!” Then another voice, raspy, from the front of the café, said loudly, “¡No te muevas!” and a rail-thin man appeared in Troy’s vision, walking sideways toward the left side of the café, holding a pistol straight-armed in front of him, swinging its aim rapidly from Harlan to Troy.

  Troy knew the instant he saw the man. Not just from the resemblance—a narrow face with high cheekbones and pale eyes set just too widely apart—but from the childlike way Martha held her body and the expression he could see on her half-turned face. The man was so ragged it was impossible to tell how old he was. He looked like someone who hadn’t slept in months and hadn’t been outside for longer than that. His short-chopped blond hair was darker than his skin and his whiskers were like ash spread aimlessly over his cheeks and chin. He was dressed in what looked like pajamas but was probably some type of Mexican field garb, a loose white jacket and tunic that hung down over baggy pants of the same thin material. The pants, stained brownish yellow at the crotch and knees, were far too short and didn’t seem to belong to him, and on his feet were the kind of huaraches with car-tire soles, above which the leather weavework was busted, barely covering his bony feet. Troy had never seen anyone outside of a hospital look so deathly sick and broken down. Trembling, the man shone with a strange dignity, the dignity of the thoroughly defeated.

  The pistol in his right hand was small and decorative-looking, with a snub barrel covered in scroll engraving like a woman’s purse gun. But as small as it was, it seemed to require a great deal of effort for him to hold it at the end of his straightened arm, and the tight way he gripped it suggested he had never handled a pistol before. Troy looked at Harlan, who was still holding out his hands but no longer looking at the man. He was looking down instead at Martha, who was crying, quietly, saying something over and over again in German. The man held out his left hand sternly toward the girl and she obeyed him, not budging from the chair where she sat, looking much younger than Troy had seen her to be.

  Troy took a slow sideways step into the room while raising his hands, too, not above his head but in front of him with palms out in a calming gesture. From the corner of his vision, he could still just see the old man of the café, who had not turned to witness any of what was happening but had fallen silent and sat very still in his chair, breathing heavily and audibly. The waitress was nowhere to be seen, concealed fully behind the counter.

  Troy tried to look Martha’s father directly in the eyes, the way he had heard you should in a situation like this, but the man’s eyes seemed to stare right through him, through the cinder-block wall behind him, out into the alley. Troy thought that if he didn’t start talking soon he would never get the chance.

  “I know who you are,” he said, speaking slowly. “I know you. You’re Martha’s daddy. Do you speak any English?”

  The man’s face didn’t show any awareness that he had heard Troy’s voice and he moved the gun off Troy back to Harlan and looked hard at Harlan and then down at Martha.

  Troy raised his hands higher, trying to draw the man’s attention back to him.

  “Listen, this is all just a big misunderstanding! There’s no need for a gun in here. No one’s going to hurt your little girl and no one’s going to hurt you. She’s been looking all over Texas for you and here you are! She can go with you now and my brother and I can go on our way. Your girl is just fine. Everything’s fine. Todo está bien. Do you understand me?”

  The man looked back at Troy as if the sound coming from his mouth wasn’t language but just a noise that made it difficult for him to concentrate. He kept the gun on Harlan, leveled at his chest, and then he turned his eyes back down to his daughter. He opened his mouth and made a horrible noise like a cry and a retching cough at the same time and he spoke again, this time in English that seemed comprised of the few words he knew.

  “What did you do?” he said.

  He looked at Harlan and his eyes were wide and flashing now and he trembled so that the gun moved in circles at the end of his arm.

  “What did you do?” he said again.

  Harlan looked up from the girl and stared at Aron and Martha’s voice rose in a howl from below.

  “He did nothing, they did nothing!” she screamed in English. “I told you. They just drove me, Papa. I was in the car and they drove me here because I made them take me to you. They did nothing! Don’t hurt anybody! I don’t want you to hurt anybody!”

  His eyes seemed to register only a partial understanding of what she had said and whatever he comprehended changed nothing in his bearing. He shifted his eyes quickly to Troy and then back to Harlan and tears began to roll down his cheeks as he said again, his voice rising:

  “What did you do?”

  Troy took a full step forward now and said: “Tell him in Spanish, Martha. Tell him in Dutch, that you’re okay. If we don’t leave here right now somebody’s going to walk through that door and it’s all going to be over. Tell him I know he doesn’t want to go back to jail. Tell him they’ll take you back to Tahoka and you and your daddy will never see each other again. Do you know how many people are looking for you right now? Your picture’s probably going to come up on that TV screen any minute.”

  Martha turned her head toward the picture on the small set, which showed a close-up of a man’s face inside a football helmet and heavy snow coming down in front of him, though it was hard to tell whether it was snow or static in the reception. A picture of herself appearing on the same screen seemed inconceivable, something that could not happen in the world as she knew it. She tried to remember the last picture taken of her and how old she would have been but she was too scared to think.

  Her father was still pointing the pistol at Harlan, shaking badly now in his knees and shoulders. But he took in a deep breath a
nd steadied himself and said the words in English again—“What did you do!” This time it didn’t sound like a question but like a statement, made in the high keening voice of a child. Then he clamped his eyes shut and leaned his head back at an odd angle.

  Troy propelled himself through the open space between two tables, across a stretch of dirty linoleum floor that seemed to go on for eternity. The walls gave a hollow-sounding clap too weak for a real gun to have made. But in the quarter second before the sound echoed, Troy’s outstretched right hand burst into a bright-red flare that splattered onto the plastic covering of the café tables nearby. And time, which had been compressed to the density of a diamond, suddenly opened up, making what happened next seem to happen inside an enormous space where everything could be seen clearly but nothing could be changed.

  Troy’s body spun through a revolution and slapped into the cinder-block wall on the other side of the café and Harlan reached out for the pistol, which made its small clap a second time, and Martha screamed and the old man at the back of the café, his eyes still fixed on the TV, put his hands over his ears and began to howl like a dog. Troy slumped against the wall and grabbed at its shiny painted surface with his left hand and looked down at his suit jacket. His head came up and he looked surprised and his legs gave way underneath him, sliding out along the floor and knocking over a chair. He sank all the way to the linoleum with his back to the wall, and blood streamed from his right hand as he placed his left palm carefully over the gabardine of his jacket near the top button.

  Aron staggered back out of Harlan’s reach and raised his other hand to the pistol to hold it in both, making the gun tremble even more violently. Martha crawled toward her father on the floor, screaming. Aron swung the gun in Harlan’s direction but he was no longer looking where it was aimed. He was looking in horror at his hands, at the tiny thing in them and the film of smoke that hung around it, and he suddenly let the pistol go and it bounced on its grip and landed near the threshold to the front door. He looked down and seemed to see his daughter for the first time below him. Thinking she had been hit, he fell to his knees and lifted her up by the shoulders and struggled to get them both to their feet and looked wildly into her eyes and up and down her body to see if there was any blood on her. Martha made a sound just short of a scream, and grabbed at him violently but he held her away and then seized her in both of his arms and held her tightly against him until she stopped struggling. He looked wild-eyed over the top of Martha’s head at Harlan and began to inch himself and his daughter slowly backward toward the inside glass door to the café. Still facing Harlan, he pushed the door open with his body and reached into the vestibule and opened the front door and pulled Martha with him out into the rain, and a cold damp air rolled into the dining room before the glass doors gradually closed themselves. The sound of Martha’s cries fell away, and the old man grew quieter until he, too, no longer made any noise. The inside of the café was suddenly silent and completely still except for the images flickering on the television and the haze from the gun gathering into a membrane between the floor and ceiling.

  Harlan turned and straddled Troy with his body. He bent over him and brought his face close to his brother’s.

  “Jesus God, Troy. Oh, Jesus God in heaven. How bad are you hit?”

  Troy looked down and tried to unbutton his jacket with his good hand but couldn’t manage it. “I can’t feel it,” he said. “I can see it but I can’t feel it. It couldn’t have been much.” Harlan opened the jacket and saw the small, clean hole—no more than a .22—through the white shirt just below the ribs. And he saw the pool of darkness beginning to form around Troy’s legs on the floor.

  “Help me! Help me up, Harl! We’ve got to get out of here!”

  The voice of the woman called out sharply from behind the counter: “¡Hector! Hector! ¿Estás herido? Hector!” But Hector, sitting in the same position with his back to the front door, was watching the television set again and didn’t answer her.

  Harlan leaned his right shoulder down and hooked his arm under Troy’s and slowly hoisted him off the floor. Troy cried out in pain and his body went slack and Harlan slung Troy’s limp right arm all the way over his shoulder and steadied him against his hip to keep him from falling. He looked toward the back of the café and caught sight of the black-haired woman almost against the floor, peeking around the edge of the counter to figure out whether she was still in danger and what kind of damage had been done to her business. “Hector! Hector! No puedo verte! ¡Háblame, Hector!”

  She inched forward until she could see Hector sitting untroubled in his chair, then she scooted back behind the counter and her head disappeared entirely again.

  “Do you want me to call the police?” she called out.

  Harlan struggled backward along the floor holding Troy’s weight and slowly bent his knees and picked up the pistol near the door and kept it in his hand.

  “Not unless you think you have to.”

  He dragged Troy into the vestibule and looked through the side windows into the heavy gray of the parking lot to see if Martha and her father were out there. Then he pushed through the open door into the rain, leaving two thick boot trails of blood along the narrow sidewalk that led around the café to the parking lot. He had no thought about whether anyone was outside to see him, but no one was and no one drove by as he wrestled to get the passenger door of the Valiant open and his brother into the seat. He dug in Troy’s pants pockets for the keys and Troy grabbed his arm and looked in his eyes as if he wanted to tell him something but nothing came out of his open mouth. Harlan closed the passenger door and ran around the front of the car and got in. The front of his khaki shirt was soaked in blood. Troy had slumped over onto the driver’s seat and Harlan lifted him up and pushed him over and used both hands to lay Troy’s head carefully against the window on the passenger side.

  Harlan started the engine and put on the wipers and was about to pull the stick down into reverse but then he didn’t. He sat staring into the rain, listening to the low sound of the motor and the thump of the wipers and then he turned the key and killed it and the wipers stopped in the middle of the windshield.

  He took off his hat and set it on the dash and leaned his big body against Troy’s and laid his right ear against his chest, on the damp white shirt where the jacket had fallen away. He stayed this way for a long time, his head resting on his brother’s body, the inside of the car silent except for the falling rain. Finally, he sat up and took his hat and put it on his lap. The windshield had filled with water again and the rain streaked down the side windows and when the cars finally pulled up he could see nothing of them but their lights splintered into a million red and blue pieces.

  Nov. 18, 1972

  I write this sitting at the kitchen table at home, at what used to be my home, the only place I ever really thought of as such. I don’t remember much about the first house anymore, other than what it looked like on that cold February day after the fire when Bill Ray took me to see it, when the burnt walls and roof beams were glittering with ice formed by the water the firefighters had poured on them.

  This house is so much smaller than I remembered it. It’s hard to understand how we all lived here together for so many years in a collection of such little boxes. But we did okay, at least when Harlan and I were young. More or less my whole conception of the world and of myself was formed right here, at this table, in this kitchen, back down that little hallway into that bedroom that’s no more than thirty feet away, inside these thin painted sheetrock walls that you could hear through and that let in so much of the cold in winter.

  Breaking into your own home—a home that’s not yours anymore but in some ways always will be—is a funny thing. You feel like a stranger to yourself, as if you’re somebody else paying a visit to your life. But it helps you get perspective you might not otherwise be able to get on what some small things and places mean, even if you don’t always want them to.

  Sitting here brings b
ack a dream I used to have when I was young, a dream that seemed very real even though almost nothing happened in it.

  It was nighttime and I was driving up and down the main street like we all did on weekend nights when we were young, waiting for somebody to come along and relieve the boredom, waiting for something to happen that never did. Up and back and up and back again, past the courthouse, past the school and the grocery to the blinking yellow light and down again to the west side, past the motel to the old grain elevator parking lot where we made the loop. But when I got to that end of town for the hundredth time I decided not to make the loop. I decided to keep driving past the streetlights into the darkness on the other side of the grain silos, and I found a part of town there that I’d never seen before, a part that I’d never even known about.

  There wasn’t anything special about this other part of town. It wasn’t a dream about something better. It was just a street that was new to me out west of the motel, with a little coffee shop and a couple of glass-fronted stores.

  I couldn’t understand how I’d never known about it, living here my whole life, but I was so happy to find it. I drove past the lighted window of the café and even at that late hour I saw a few people sitting in the booths, drinking coffee. It looked nice. I thought: Now, sometimes, I can come out here.