“There were extenuating circumstances in that instance,” he said, and this warning sound had crept into his tone, one that I hadn’t heard before. “I’m just saying that we need to be fairly circumspect now about whatever we do. Any misstep might put us in front of a real judge, and it won’t be a laughing matter, I can guarantee you that.” He turned to face me. “Louise,” he said, again that way he does. “I love you, Louise, but sometimes . . . well, little girl, sometimes you just don’t seem to be thinking ahead.”
It was the little girl that got me, or maybe the extenuating or the circumspect, or maybe just him implying that I was being stupid, or maybe all of it, the whole day.
“Del,” I said through clenched teeth, putting some bite into his name, same as he always did me. “I love you, and when I say that, I mean it. But sometimes, Del, sometimes, I could just kill you.”
He nodded. “You’d go to jail for that too,” he said, slow and even as always, but still with that edge of warning to it. He handed the room key across to me. “You go on in. I want to check that things haven’t shifted back in the trailer.”
“Fine,” I said, toughening the word up to let him hear how I felt. He stared at me for a second, then went back to get our bags. In the rearview, I watched him bending open the tarp covering the trailer, but still I just sat there.
I don’t know how to describe what I was feeling. Anger? Sadness? I don’t know what was running through my head, either. What to do next, maybe. Whether to go up to the room and carry on like we’d planned, like he seemed to expect I’d do, or to step out of all this, literally just step out of the car and start walking in another direction.
But then I knew if I really did leave, he’d come after me. Not dramatic, not begging, but I knew he wouldn’t let me go. Can’t live without you, that’s what he’d said, and like Mama said, sometimes that kind of love could turn ugly fast. I’d seen it before.
“You just gonna sit there?” Del called out.
He’d opened the trunk now, blocking my view, just a voice behind me. More rearranging.
“No. I’m going up,” I called back. Then just before I stepped out of the car, I opened up the glove compartment and slipped the gun into my purse.
In the motel room, I locked the door to the bathroom, set down my purse, and turned the water on real hot before climbing in. I stood there in the steam and rubbed that little bitty bar of soap over me, washing like I had layers of dust from those two-lane roads and that truck we’d followed for so long.
I thought about what would happen after I got out. “Sometimes people are too far apart in their wants,” I could say. “I do love you, Del, but sometimes a person needs to move on.” It was just a matter of saying it. It would be easy to do, I knew. I’d done it before, back with Win all those years ago, and I hadn’t needed a gun then. But the gun showed I was serious in a different way. More than that, it was protection. “I’m not taking all the money, Del,” I might say. “That’s not what’s going on here. That’s not the point.” As if he had ever got the point.
I took both towels when I got out of the shower. The steam swirled around me while I stood there drying myself off—one towel wrapped around me and one towel for my hair, leaving him none.
Would he try to talk me out of it? Would he try to take the gun away? Would I have to tie him up the way he’d left that gallery owner back in Taos? Even thinking about it made me sad.
He was sitting there when I came out of the bathroom, sitting on the one chair in the room, staring at the blank television, the screen of it covered in a light layer of dust. I hadn’t taken the gun out but just held my purse in my hand, feeling the weight of it. Thinking that I might have to use it. I suddenly wished I’d gotten dressed first. I mean, picture it: me wrapped in two towels and holding a gun? Hardly a smooth getaway.
Del’s face was . . . well, pensive was the word that came to mind. He taught me that word, I thought. I wouldn’t have known it without him. And that kept me from saying immediately what I needed to say. I just stood there, feeling a single drip of water sneak past the towel around my head, race down my back.
“You never talked much about your daddy,” he said, breaking the silence. “He really leave you when you were six?”
“Yes,” I said, and I realized then that I felt like I was owed something for that.
Del stared at the blank television. I turned my own head that way, toward the gray curve of the screen. I could see his face there, reflected toward me, kind of distorted, distant.
“He really give you a sock monkey when he left?”
I thought about that, but I was thinking now about what I owed Del.
“No,” I told him, and I could hear the steel in my own voice. “But what Mama said, she did say that.”
I stared hard at the dusty TV screen, at his reflection there. I saw then that his fists were clenched, and that he clenched them even tighter at my answer. I could feel myself tighten. I knew then that he knew the pistol was gone. I didn’t take my eyes off that reflection as I pulled up the strap of my pocketbook, just in case he stood up quick and rushed me. But he dropped his head down a little, and I saw his profile in the reflection, which meant he’d turned to see me straight on.
“You lied to me, then?” He was clenching his hand hard, so much that if I’d been closer, I might have backed away. But there was a bed between us. And the pocketbook was open now.
“If that’s what you want to take from it.”
His eyes watched me hard. Those green eyes. First thing I’d really noticed about him up close.
“Do you believe Cora was right?”—meaning Mama. That’s her name.
“I don’t know. Do you?
Those eyes narrowed. Thinking again. And it struck me that I could just about list every little thing he did when he was pondering over something: how he sometimes stared hard at the wall or other times stared off into space with this faraway gaze, running his fingers through his hair or through the tip of his beard, biting at his bottom lip or chewing on that beard or just shifting his jaw one way or the other. Usually left, I corrected myself. Always to the left. And sure enough, just as I thought it, he shifted his jaw just that way, setting it in place.
I almost laughed despite myself. Men always let you down, Mama had said, but Del had come through with his jaw jut exactly like expected. At least you could count on him for that. And all of a sudden I felt embarrassed for having taken that gun from the glove compartment, just wanted to run out in my towel and put it back.
“Do you want a surprise?” he asked, and I almost laughed again.
“It’s a long drive back to Our Place.”
“A new surprise.”
“Sure,” I said.
“The story we told back at the mobile home park, about me having a sister out in Victorville,” he said then. “I really do. Haven’t talked to her in a while. We were estranged.” He stretched out the word. “She’s in real estate. Got us a deal she worked out on a foreclosure. A house. Said she’d let me do some work for her, at her company, now that I have a degree. It’s all worked out. I needed to get the down payment on it, so I figured, one more job. One big one and that’d be it.” He tapped his hand on the side of the chair, like you would tap your fingers, but his whole hand because it was still clenched. I think it was the most words he’d ever said in one breath. “That’s my surprise.”
Part of me wanted to go over to him, but I didn’t. Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting, I heard Mama saying. I stood right in the doorway, still dripping all over the floor, all over myself.
“I stole that painting you wanted too,” he said, as if he was embarrassed to admit it. “We can’t hang it in the house, at least not the living room, not yet, not where anyone might see, but you can take it out and look at it sometimes, maybe, if you want. It’s out in the trunk now if you want me to get it.” He gave a big sigh, the kind he might give late at night when he was done with talking to me, done with the day. But som
ething else in his face this time, some kind of struggle, like he wanted to go quiet but still had more to tell. “But I was serious about that being the last one,” he said finally. “This is a fresh start and I want to do it right. That’s why I paid for this.”
He opened his fist then. The sock-monkey key chain was in it. Crushed a little in his grip, but there it was.
“I knew that story wasn’t true, about your daddy,” he said. “I knew it while you were telling it. But it being true or not, that wasn’t the point, was it?”
I smiled and shook my head. No no no, that wasn’t the point. And yes yes yes too, of course.
Needless to say, I didn’t kill him. And I didn’t take my half and hit the highway.
When we got in the car the next day, I almost didn’t see the rust along the wheel well, and I closed the door so soft that I almost didn’t hear that loose metal rolling around inside. While Delwood packed the trunk and rearranged stuff one more time under that tarp, I slipped that pistol into the glove compartment, just like it had been in the first place. I didn’t touch it again.
As Delwood drove us along 66 and out of town, I rolled down the window and kicked up my heels, leaned over against him.
You might imagine that I was stuck on that three-thousand-dollar painting in the trunk and that house ahead, and partly I was, but again you’d be missing the point. It was the sock monkey that meant the most to me. Light as a trinket but with a different kind of weight to it. When I hung it from the rearview mirror, the rattle there died down almost to a whisper, and it all seemed like a smoother ride ahead for a while.
SUSAN THORNTON
Border Crossing
FROM The Literary Review
A YOUNG GIRL stood in a desert canyon just north of the border between the United States and Mexico. She was wearing a short, tight black skirt and a low-cut red blouse of soft, clingy material. On her feet were high-heeled shoes.
She was thirsty.
It was just before dawn on a Wednesday in mid-March.
To the south was Mexico. The girl stood on U.S. territory. The canyon was in Imperial County, California. The nearest city was Imperial Beach, only a few miles to the west.
A fence separates the United States from Mexico. It runs from Imperial Beach for fourteen miles into Tecate. The fence ends at Colonia Nida de las Águilas, a riverbed, now dry, which crosses the border. The girl was standing well east of that point.
The land to the north of the border is four hundred square miles of dry and barren hillsides.
The girl had regular features and smooth, unmarked brown skin. Her eyebrows had been plucked into a careful, artful line. As she looked at her surroundings she bit her lips gently together, then opened them and lightly ran the tip of her tongue along the back of her upper teeth, in a reflexive, thoughtful gesture.
Her eyes were brown and her long dark hair was held back from her face with a red ribbon.
She stood at the bottom of the dry riverbed. Along the riverbed stood or sat other young girls, dressed like herself, in short skirts and high-heeled shoes. There were perhaps fifteen girls altogether. At the head of the canyon stood a man with a rifle. He was looking away from the girls, to the north. With him was another young man. The men wore blue jeans and sturdy leather boots. The man with the rifle wore a white T-shirt and an open tan jacket. The two men were talking to each other. A third man stood some distance away. He cradled his rifle, an expensive American make, loosely with one arm as he smoked a cigarette.
The girls were being marched through the canyon. They had started two hours before, in the dark, and had walked seven miles in the desert to get to this point, just north of the border. They had crossed the border without incident, as the area was not well patrolled. It was cool in the canyon, and the sky over its eastern rim was beginning to turn pink. Soon the real heat of the day would begin.
The girl was thinking. She stood apart from the other girls. If the guards were looking away, she could run. She looked down the canyon, the way they had come. The dry riverbank had taken a sharp curve as the water that formed it had found softer rock to carve through. That created a natural wall, and a limit to the sightline of the men holding the guns. If she ran back the way they had come, south, she would have a chance. Once she was behind the wall, she could climb up to the top of the ridge and escape down the other side.
She was only one girl. They had other girls to watch, and they were hurrying to meet someone, someone with a truck, further north. If there was a diversion, a moment in which to run, she could get behind the wall. She tensed her calf muscle. Her feet were still callused and hard. Once she discarded the crippling shoes, she could run. She knew she could.
II
Altagracia Guzman was fourteen years old. Until nine weeks ago she had lived in a suburb of Delicias, a city south of Chihuahua, Mexico. She had been a student in middle school and had won the school prize in geometry the previous quarter. She was studying English and could count to one hundred and exchange simple greetings. Her father and mother were preparing for her Quince-añera, the party to mark her fifteenth birthday. Her mother ran a sewing and tailoring business out of their home, and Altagracia could sew a straight seam by hand if she had to but preferred the sewing machine. Her mother depended on her for simple tasks—shortening trousers, letting out a waistband—and was teaching her how to make a satin evening jacket for a high-paying customer.
Altagracia could also make perfect tortillas that never tore in her hands and never burned. She made arroz con pollo and corn tamales. When her mother was occupied with her little twin brothers, Altagracia did the cooking and had supper ready when her father came home from his maintenance job at the factory.
All this had changed when two men grabbed her on her way home from school on a Friday. By habit she walked with her friend Edelmera, but that day Edelmera’s mother had called for her early at school; her grandmother had become ill and the girl was needed at home.
Altagracia had been alone on the two blocks that skirted the edge of the industrial park in the southern part of the city. When the white panel van pulled up to block her path, she thought the driver meant to ask her directions. Then she saw the look on his face, but it was already too late. Someone grabbed her elbows from behind, and the first man put a cloth with a strong-smelling chemical to her face. She was aware of being lifted off her feet and she heard the opening of a metallic door.
She came to in the back of the van, hearing the engine and smelling the diesel fumes. There were seven other girls in the van.
The first part of her journey ended in Calle Santo Tomás in the La Merced section of Mexico City.
This neighborhood has been a home to low-end prostitution since the 1700s. She fought and was beaten, resisted and was starved. When she decided to quit eating and starve herself to death, she was force-fed. At last she submitted. She was forced to parade in the square in front of them, display herself in her skimpy garments. Allow them to view her, to select before purchase, to walk with them back through the warren of rooms to the space allotted her. It was a mockery designed to make her feel complicit, to provide a pretense of agency where there was none. Each man bought fifteen minutes. Four men in an hour. Eight men in two hours. The nights began at ten p.m. and ended at three in the morning. Twenty encounters in each night’s work.
Altagracia kept track of the nights by ballpoint-pen marks on the edge of her mat. When she was alone in the early hours of the morning, she closed her eyes and counted to one hundred in English, recited the conjugations of the English verbs she had been taught: to have, to be, to be called, to play, to eat, to love. She remembered garments she had sewn for her mother; she recited the prayers she had been taught in church. She whispered her street address and pictured the white tablecloth with the blue embroidered edge she had made when she was nine as a gift for her mother. She remembered the silver chocolate pot her father had purchased for her mother and recalled how her mother stirred the chocolate for the family.
The nights had followed one another for sixty-one nights. Then another panel van and another journey in the jolting darkness with the smell of diesel. They were being driven north this time—she was being taken into the United States. The forty-eight states were big. She knew that from her geography lessons. Once she was in that big place she would be lost forever. She wanted to go home.
III
The sun had not yet come up and the light had an obscuring quality that she hoped would be to her advantage.
The two men at the head of the ravine were still talking. The third man put down his cigarette and turned behind a rock to relieve himself.
Then, a scream. And another. “Culebra! Culebra!” A girl had seen a snake. They were all terrified of rattlesnakes. A knot of confusion, more screams, a scuffle; the men were looking away. She saw her chance, she ducked, she ran. South, as they would not expect. East toward the sheltering wall. One shoe fell off as she pelted forward, then she stepped out of the other just as easily. Her feet felt sure on the hot flat rocks of the stream bed. Overhead she felt the air cool as the shadow of the rock wall came over her. In a moment she would be underneath it and then she would have a chance.
Behind her she knew the guard was raising his rifle, but she could not spare him a thought. Her entire being was focused on forward motion. She pumped her arms, reaching for the next foothold with her long legs. Her lungs were burning and there was a sharp pain in her side. She ignored it and breathed hard, in through her nostrils, out through her open mouth, keeping her lungs full so that she could continue running.
Now she was behind the outcropping of rock and she began to climb. Another stream had come down to join the main canyon where they had been. She found easy footing suddenly in softer, moister soil that was clustered with smaller pebbles. She climbed rapidly upward into the heat of the sun, then turned south again with the rising sun on her left-hand side, along the top of the ridge. She kept running, looking forward, never back, the canyon now behind and below her. The land sloped rapidly downward to a road. They were this close to a road! She could hardly believe it. She feared the road because she would be exposed, but she could run so much faster. The road was blacktop, with clear white lines painted at the margins and a double yellow line down the middle. She didn’t know this, but the road was California State Route 94, which parallels the northern border of Mexico.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 Page 34
