Laurel turned the key and started down the double track, the growl of the Jaguar reassuring. She wouldn’t stop this time but would follow the little road to its end if need be.
She had to make herself scan the roadsides for clues and drive slowly around the unexpected and unnecessary twists in the track. Even here the sun would pick out the shiny metallic surface of an occasional beer can.
A long drive, the tires throwing up swirls of dust behind her, the mountains drawing slowly nearer ahead. It was warm but not warm enough to explain the dampness of her body, the stickiness of her legs against the leather seat. Pain tingled up the back of her neck to her head and stayed there, growing stronger with every mile.
The road ended where the mountains began their rise off the desert floor, as she knew it would.
And there in those sagging buildings the first Paul Elliot Devereaux had met and married Paul II’s mother so long ago. They did not look as if they could have helped his rise to fortune.
How could the rough stone ranch house with the caved-in porch have been large enough for Harley’s family later? A scruffy big-boned dog barked from the hole that had been a doorway. The squawking chicken jumped to the ground from a glassless window frame. Part of the roof had disappeared, exposing bare rafters. A head with a bright red bandanna peeked around the door of a teetering outhouse on the other side of the rusty pump that sat on a concrete platform. A limp artificial flower hung upside down from the pump handle. Wind creaked the ancient useless windmill to face another direction and blew the smell of the outhouse to her as she sat in the open car.
Two corrals with gateless fences faced the house across the farmyard and a silver metal shed that didn’t look as if it belonged. The dog stopped its barking and came down off the porch toward her. A child cried in one of the tents set up next to the weathered picket fence.
Laurel ignored the dog and the people coming out of the tents as she stepped from the car and walked hesitatingly toward the picket fence. Assorted clothes were thrown over it to dry. The fence enclosed a small rectangle of desert separated from the house only by a well-tended vegetable garden.
That small rectangle was a graveyard. The graves were old but the white wooden crosses at their heads were new.
Those graves didn’t surprise her, nor the crosses. But something was wrong. Laurel put her hand on a slivered board of the fence, the windmill creaking and grating above her, and counted. There was one too many. There should have been five but there were six mounds in the enclosure, the one on the end newer than the others in the row.
“Sunny?” The young black stood at her side, a floppy hat over his bush of hair.
“There should be five graves.”
“You come to see Sid?”
“Sid?”
“Come on.” He took her arm and guided her back around the Jaguar toward the corrals. She couldn’t look into the faces around her. Quite a few people had gathered in the yard while she stood at the picket fence.
“I thought you were in jail,” she said.
“I had bail. They let a lot go anyway ’cause they ran out of jail.”
Four or five old cars, a bus, and a motorcycle sat in the sun behind the corral, facing its open side. Two men squatted Indian-style on the dirt floor of the corral and smoked. At first she could see just their shapes in the relative darkness.
“Sid? Look who’s out slumming and in a red Jag yet,” her companion said as he released her elbow. He turned to leave and motioned one of the others to come with him. The one who remained raised a hand as if in blessing and said, “God be with you” to them as they left. This elicited a deep guffaw from the black.
“Have a chair.” Sid motioned to the dirt around him. He wore cowboy boots and Levi’s and no shirt. His ribs and the bones of his shoulders protruded from under his skin, accentuating his long thinness. Bristly puffs of hair in his armpits matched the black of his untrimmed beard. He studied her from behind oversized wire-rimmed glasses. Sid was the John the Baptist she’d seen on TV … and something more.…
“Well,” he said, stubbing out the cigarette in the dirt. And then he repeated it, “Well,” and sat silently waiting for her to speak.
Laurel wished she hadn’t come, made marks in the dirt with her fingernail, wondered where to begin. “You know me?”
“’Bout as well as I know anybody. What do you want, Sunny?”
“One day last April I found myself down by the highway. I didn’t know why. Had I been here?”
“Yes.”
“With you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me … about everything? How you met me? What I was doing here?”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t remember.”
“Sunny, Sunny. Hey, don’t cry. It’s all right.” He reached out a hand to cover hers. “It’s all right.” But there was something sad in the way he said it.
“Well, tell me please. Even if you don’t believe I don’t know.” She took her hand away and searched in her purse for a Kleenex.
“If you say so, I believe it.” He unfolded his long legs and took a rolled-up sleeping bag from a corner, spreading it out for her to sit on. “You’ll get your pretty dress all dirty.” Then he walked out to one of the cars parked in the sun and came back with two cans of very warm beer.
Next he did a strange thing; he lay out on the sleeping bag and put his head on her lap. And then he began talking as if he often found himself in weird situations, had grown to expect it. “A couple of years ago, I was passing through Denver and saw some kids demonstrating in front of the capitol building. Can’t remember why, but I thought I’d help them out so I grabbed a sign nobody was using and joined them.” He had a compelling voice, rich yet soft. “We ended up in a park and there you were, looking all sweet and sad. And you said ‘Help me.’ You looked like a good thing, so I said, ‘Okay.’”
There was a shy sadness in his smile and in the eyes behind the orange-tinted glasses that reminded her of Paul Devereaux, as if Sid too shared that sad secret of life.… Ridiculous—Paul and Sid were so different, poles apart. He made gentle fun of both of them as he continued the story, holding the beer can on his chest. Once he lifted a dirty finger to touch her cheek.
Occasionally someone would come around the end of the corral and smile and then leave without disturbing them. Flies droned across the streaks of dusty sunlight filtering through the holes in the roof.
His head lay heavy on her legs, but she didn’t want to shift her weight and break his line of thought. Laurel had left reality behind when she turned off the highway, and she’d never felt further from it than now, sitting in the lazy warmness, drinking tepid beer and looking down at the strange hair-shrouded face on her lap.
He’d taken her with him to Boulder, a town thirty miles north of Denver, and then west into the mountains where a sort of communal colony of young people had been set up for the summer. (Laurel thought again how strange it was that in a way she’d told the truth at the hearing.) Whenever anyone had asked her name or where she came from she would tell them she didn’t know. So they named her Sunny for her smile and accepted her without question.
“It was a kind of slow, soft warm smile that cheers people up, like when the sun comes out after a week of rain,” Sid said.
When winter came to the mountains of Colorado, they left for San Francisco and then returned the following summer. He talked of wading in cold rocky streams and walking through thick pine forest and picking wildflowers for her hair. He described an idyllic existence where big children romped in the sun, unharried by responsibility, like the Garden of Eden before the apple.
Sid skimmed over the winter in San Francisco. They hadn’t liked it—too crowded—too many tourists gawking at them. So the second winter they’d moved to Southern California. But again they weren’t satisfied, so in March they had come to Arizona. In April he’d gone on a pot run to Nogales and when he returned she was gone.
“And
that’s it, little Sunny.” He pulled her head down over his and kissed her gently. He smelled of beer and sweat. “So now where to?” And then he stood and moved to a window hole that faced the farmyard.
Laurel felt too weak to stand. The forgotten headache returned. “Why did I leave?”
“Who knows? You weren’t too happy about my John the Baptist thing. We looked around for you, thought you might have gotten lost on the desert. When I couldn’t find you, I figured you’d decided to move on.”
“Why do you do this John the Baptist thing?”
“To stir up the sleeping flowers before they get trampled by Army boots.”
“That Negro who came in with me.…”
“Who, Rollo? Oh, he’s all right, but his propaganda is geared to the peasant mentality. We’re not too long on peasants. His stuff turns people off. You never liked him.” Sid sat beside her and began rolling a cigarette. He offered it to her, and when she refused, he shrugged and lit it.
“Did I take drugs?”
“No. You smoked some, but I can’t remember you being interested in the other stuff.”
“Those graves out there … that last one is new.…”
“That was bad. We didn’t know what else to do. It’s better for you, you don’t know about that, Sunny.”
“Sid, I have to know everything or I’ll go crazy. I did remember that graveyard … it kept coming back to haunt me. But I remembered five graves.”
“Yeah.…” He finally let go of the smoke. “… Okay. We found a dead guy just a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know how long he’d been out there. The animals’d been at him … and the birds. So … we buried him … it seemed like the right thing to do …”
“You didn’t report it to the police?”
“We can’t have the police out here, you know that. They’re just waiting to get something on us. People come and go around here all the time without saying anything. We wouldn’t know if anyone was missing.”
“Sid.…” Laurel looked away and made designs on the dirt with her finger. “Did we … get married? Or anything?”
“We didn’t get married.” He gave a strange high-pitched giggle. “But … mmmmm, baby … that or anything!”
She knew what his answer would be. She’d known it when she entered the corral, but it took some time to digest it. Laurel covered her face with her hands. Maybe Dr. Gilcrest was right, maybe she wasn’t ready.
“Hey,” he whispered, taking her hands from her face and holding them. “What we had was nothing to be ashamed of. It was good, Sunny.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder about my past?”
“I thought it was something you wanted to forget. And anyway, I never question gifts from heaven.”
They sat holding hands in silence for long minutes. She felt the appeal of this soft-spoken skinny boy, sensed something beautiful in his very ugliness. And then she told him about Laurel Jean Devereaux, tears rushing to her eyes when she mentioned Jimmy. He listened calmly, showed no surprise at her strange story.
“How’d you find him—your husband?” Sid asked her when she’d finished.
“I had written his name on a piece of paper and stuck it in the waistband of my slacks. Do you have any idea of how I got that name?”
“No. Sometimes an old paper turns up out here. Maybe you got it there. I still want to know what you want here, Sunny.”
“I want to know why I left my baby in the hospital.”
A look of disappointment passed over his face and was gone. She sensed his withdrawal. “Maybe you forgot then, too.”
Laurel sighed and stood up, brushing the dirt from her skirt. “I wonder if I’ll ever know. I have to get back now. Thank you.”
“Sunny?”
She turned; she was out in the sun now and it seemed so dask under the roof of the corral she could barely see him.
“Any chance you’ll come back?”
“I’m sorry, Sid.”
“Don’t be. Never be sorry for love, Sunny. I have some of yours stored up inside.” His voice came out of the darkness in a whisper. “Some cold night it’ll keep me warm.”
She left him as she’d found him, squatting on the dirt floor of the corral. And a heaviness tightened around her chest and caught the breath in her throat.
22
Tears filled her eyes as she rounded the end of the corral. She had to blink them away to be sure she saw the blue pickup truck parked beside the Jaguar. Rollo stood with his feet apart, his hands on his hips, facing Harley McBride. Harley wasn’t grinning.
A girl with a baby on her hip watched from the sagging porch of the ranch house. Two boys held the barking dog by the neck and several others waited near the pump.
Laurel started running just as Harley took a step toward Rollo. “No, Harley.”
Harley stopped and blinked as if he wasn’t sure he saw her.
“He’s just here to cause trouble, Sunny,” Rollo said.
“I’ll take care of this, Rollo. Sid wants you now,” she lied and took Harley’s arm as Rollo backed toward the corrals.
“You know these creeps?” Harley let her lead him over to the picket fence.
“I used to live here.”
“So did I,” Harley said, still looking over his shoulder at the retreating Rollo, his arm trembling under her hand. “You turn up at the goddamnedest times.”
They stood side by side, looking at the mounds beyond the fence. Behind them the dog quieted finally.
“They got no right here.” His breathing came hard between his teeth.
“Harley, no one’s using this place, and you don’t own it anyway.”
“No, you do, Mrs. Devereaux. Were you livin’ here with them when I picked you up down on the highway last spring?”
“Yes. Or so they tell me. Harley, why did you come here today?”
“This morning my sister let it slip that they were squattin’ here last winter. She didn’t tell me then because she thought I’d make trouble. I knew they were around … but not right here. I came up to see if they’d come back.”
Harley relaxed a little and leaned his elbows on the fence. “This is the first time I been here since they put my old man in that hole. That’s my ma next to him and my brother Elvie next to her. Had two brothers in the big war; they never made it back here. First two are the Milners, the folks that homesteaded the place before old Devereaux moved in and married their daughter.”
Laurel caught herself nodding at the mention of the Milners, Paul II’s grandparents, as if they weren’t just mounds in the desert. She wondered what they’d make of the present occupants of the Milner Homestead.
And then Harley noticed the sixth grave. “Hey, what the … they been diggin’ in there?”
“Harley, that’s a grave, too.”
“They got no right.…”
She grabbed his arm again, for fear he’d start off toward the tents. “Your family buried its dead here and they didn’t own it.”
“Well, that ain’t the same thing.” But his guard was down and the grin crept back into his eyes. “How is it when I’m around you the real world just goes away?”
“I don’t know. Take me on a walk and show me the old homestead.” And let’s get you away from trouble until you’ve cooled off.
“There ain’t much to look at.” But he led her past the garden and behind the stone house. There had been a back porch, too, but it was now a heap of weathered wood and shingles with a flap of rusty screening for the wind to whistle through. A white enamel dishpan, chipped through to the blue in places and partially filled with earth, lay up against a young saguaro.
“What do you do, Harley? I mean for work. You don’t seem to have any hours.”
“Most anything that comes up at the right time. If it comes up at the wrong time, I don’t do it. I been in the Navy a couple of times.” He walked along with his hands in his pockets, kicking a rusty can with his boot. “Been around the rodeo circuit some. Used to gamble a lot. Made a fortu
ne once on the market and lost it the same year.”
“The stock market?”
“No, greens … produce. Buy up a field or two of cauliflower or somthing and then try to sell at the right time. Paid off Ray’s mortgage on the motel and bought my sister a café in Florence. Can’t really do it no more. They got fancy regulations and such. Now only the big boys can make it in greens.”
“How’d you lose it?”
“Reinvested in a fall lettuce deal. It turned hot when it wasn’t supposed to, and I became sole owner of whole fields of green slime.” He spread his arms as if to conjure fields of wilted mushy lettuce out of cacti and scrubby trees.
They walked up a mountain path where a large jagged boulder provided some shade and sat on the ground behind it.
“What are you doing now?”
“Living off my investments.”
“Your brother’s motel and your sister’s café?”
“Right.” Harley picked up a pebble and threw it at another boulder a few feet away. “You are looking at one of the last of a dying breed of good-for-nothing loafers. Poor but proud.”
“Like those kids we just left?”
“I keep telling ya, they’re different. Let’s talk about you for a change. Only woman I ever met who had to be asked.”
“Most of what I know about myself is hearsay.” But she told him of her month in the hospital, the demonstration, and her short sojourn in jail, a sketchy outline of what she’d learned from Sid. They sat close together, Harley alternately smoking and pitching stones at lizards. The tiny reptiles were so much the pinkish brown color of the earth and rocks that she didn’t see them until Harley startled them into movement.
“Once was I thought I knew what this old world was all about. But somewheres I lost track of it,” he said when she’d finished. “What’s your big deal husband going to think of this John the Baptist guy?”
“I don’t think he’ll like the idea much. But don’t you think he’ll just be glad to know where I was?”
“Might be kind of hard to live with a woman who could just take it into her head to walk out of the house and be somebody else. And even forget how to get back.”
Michael’s Wife Page 21
