Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  But all he said was — and he sounded so cool, he was proud of himself — “I just wanted to make sure this old shotgun works, that’s all.”

  What was wrong with Blanca? She was holding her ear with her good hand, like she still heard the shotgun blast.

  Well, what did you think, little sister? You wanted to come along so bad — what did you think it was going to be like?

  Bobbie hadn’t seen Blanca having an attack in a long time. He had forgotten what it was like, man — awful.

  Beto had told him to bring one of the wooden chairs from the kitchen here to the bedroom. Blanca sat there sort of stiff with her eyes bulging and her skin sweat-shiny. She was like a pump that had gone bad, wheezing the air in and out real slow with a horrible straining sound. She had a weird bluish color, and there were big dark sweat patches under the arms of her blouse and down the middle of the back.

  She looked as if she was dying. She looked mad, too. She was fighting the asthma, you could tell.

  Beto was setting up the steamer for her, cursing low and steady to himself as he fiddled with the little bottle of stuff you used to keep the minerals in the water from jamming the thing. He had the shotgun right by him on the floor. That damn shotgun, why did Mrs. Howard have to have a thing like that here?

  This was her room. Bobbie smelled talcum and perfume, faint but clear. The door to the closet was open a little, showing some long robes and dresses among the blouses and shirts. He stood by the writing table at the window, about as far as he could get from Blanca, feeling useless, waiting for Beto to tell him he wasn’t needed any more and could go.

  He thought mournfully, if it wasn’t for me asking Beto to come to art class with me, none of this would be happening. I wouldn’t be standing in this strange house with a gun in my hand to keep kids from my own class in line, and Beto wouldn’t have gone and killed somebody’s dog. She loved the dog, too, you could tell by how she was careful to tell us about him so nobody would get worried when they first saw him, him being a Doberman. If it wasn’t for me inviting Roberto along. If it wasn’t — thinking like that made him want to cry. He fiddled with some pencils stuck in a pottery cup. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Beto was supposed to be on the road by now, hitching with some stranger, while I got Blanca on back home.

  Thinking she was going to travel to Canada with Beto! Look at her!

  Blanca began to cough again. She spat into a napkin clutched in her shaking hand.

  Oh God, Bobbie thought, praying with all his heart, oh God, don’t let me ever be sick like that. I’ll be good, I’ll help out at home, I’ll go be a priest if that’s what you want, but don’t let me ever be sick like that. Or sick like that skeleton Englishman, either, the guy in the next room. Bobbie had heard him coughing earlier.

  It was like a hospital around here. People that sick, they shouldn’t be allowed to run around loose. It’s too awful for everybody else.

  He wished he’d told Mrs. Howard how sorry he was about her dog.

  Beto got up and stood holding the shotgun and glowering down at the steamer like he’d like to shoot the thing. When the steam finally started to come, he jerked a blanket off the bed. He put it over Blanca’s shoulders.

  “Shit,” he said. “Well, that’s that, anyhow. We’re not going anywhere tonight.”

  Dorothea, kept out of the studio that evening to answer the phone if it should ring, sat with the two Cantu boys in the living room and watched tv. They looked for news of themselves. She watched a continual replay, inside her mind, of the death of Mars.

  She was overwhelmed by remorse. What was the good of all her confidence now? You thought you could handle it, she thought bitterly. The Wise Woman of the Bookstore, so sure she could bring everybody through unscathed just by being calm, clear-headed, and firm.

  When did I start to get so angry, so foolishly furious? When he forced me to call Mary and tell lies about the safety of other people’s children so that those lies can be passed along to the parents. And poor Ricky! How dare these people add so much as a straw to what he carried already?

  Where the hell is that ghost when I really need it? A quirk of imagination, a flicker in the field of vision, but no damn help. The first shot has been fired, and it was my fault. There could be others.

  So now we’re down to plain, quivering, animal fear, and maybe that’s a good thing. It’s real, at any rate.

  At least the sister, Blanca, had the sensitivity, if that was what it was, to get sick after Mars died. Not like Bobbie, protesting but never really challenging his cousin. And never would. God damn these people, crashing into my life like this!

  “Listen,” Bobbie said tensely.

  The tv announced a special report on “the Pinto Street problem,” as the announcer called it. Roberto, with the pistol on the table beside him and the shotgun across his knees, leaned eagerly forward. Like a child, for god’s sake, an armed, dangerous, bad-tempered child watching tv.

  On the screen, a solemn-faced Chicano announcer intoned a brief speech about real-estate fraud and political rebellion, harking back to the sixties, mentioning the Tierra Amarilla raid and its aftermath. Then a camera-pan of a dirt street, small houses neat or shabby, some trailers, a man in khakis and an undershirt staring into the camera for an instant and then turning away.

  What the announcer said was lost for a moment in Roberto’s remark, “What’s that jerk doing there? That’s Betsy Armijo’s brother. He lives down in the South Valley.”

  A civil servant with pink-tinted eyeglasses made a statement in monotone exonerating his office. There was a shot of a heavy blond man, identified as a prominent local land developer, averting his face from the camera as he climbed hastily into his car.

  “Never saw that guy on Pinto Street,” Roberto said.

  Bobbie said, “No, but I bet he’s the one who sent that ‘inspector’ down there.”

  Then they were looking at two people with bloodied heads slumped in the back seat of a police car, and somebody else knelt over a sprawled figure with its shirt rucked up, taut belly exposed. A riot, the voice-over said. A riot about the YMCA? Could that be? Pictures of two young men, labeled left-wing agitators or something equivalent in news-ese, were flashed. They had been arrested at the riot. Several others were still being sought. The wounding of a policeman and the death of a local man caught in the crossfire.

  “Hear that?” Roberto demanded, turning toward Dorothea. “Well, there was no crossfire. They did all the shooting, the cops did.”

  Dorothea rubbed her eyes. Good Lord, she knew more about the judge’s damned two-hundred-year-old revolution than she did about this story unfolding before her on television. She seldom read beyond the headlines of the papers. She was ignorant.

  No, not ignorant; that was untrue. Uninformed about this particular incident, yes, but basically ignorant, no. You know. You always know, somewhere at the back of your mind.

  One reason for putting aside the paper unread is the repetitiousness of the stories. It is so often the same: if it had been a white kid reaching into his pocket for his money-clip, which the off-duty cop “thought was a gun,” the fatal shots would not have been fired. If Pinto Street had been in another part of town, inhabited by another class of people, there would have been no riot, no police, no death.

  But it’s not my fault, she groaned dismally to herself. I’ve chosen a different kind of life, reclusive, creative. I’m not made for rough currents like these.

  A wizened old man with a stained hat on was saying that the people of Pinto Street had never intended any violence, let alone burning down the Y. They had now formed a householders’ block association, responsible people, no young hotheads mind you, to deal with the city.

  “What hotheads?” Roberto said. “Does Mr. Garduño mean us?”

  He means you, Dorothea thought. You’re the purged “wild element” that nobody has to be scared of any more, nobody has to send cops to control. Pinto Street marches on, away from you, in the time-h
onored tradition of revolt. Ask the judge, he knows. He should come to you, my boy, to educate you — not to me.

  A woman spoke haltingly of her husband, the man who had died; her bewildered, reddened eyes stared out at the camera. Dorothea bit her lip. A person had already been killed in this madness, and on whose head lay that responsibility — Roberto’s? He had shot her dog. She’d watched him shoving that damned shotgun in people’s faces and carrying himself like a hard-bitten desperado. Youth doesn’t mean what it used to. A man is dead, a policeman seriously injured. Keep that in mind.

  The program switched to a city spokesman who announced solemnly that an investigation into the Pinto Street situation had begun. Meanwhile, authorities were still looking for —

  “That’s your house,” Bobbie said.

  The camera lingered on a house with curtains drawn across the windows, a small adobe structure with patched cracks in the stucco and some potted geraniums outside the front door. A police car was parked at the curb. No one came in or out of the house. Fade-out. The smooth young announcer returned. He was as dark as Roberto but the subtle message of his dress and speech was, I am a different kind than those poor people in trouble on Pinto Street. To prove it, he engaged in banter with the sports announcer about a horse that had escaped its pasture and wandered into a bar in the South Valley.

  “Leave it on,” Roberto said. “Let’s see what’s next.”

  Bobbie muttered, “I’m sick of it,” and turned the knob.

  “I said leave it. Turn it back, but put the sound down.”

  When Bobbie turned the sound low, another sound became suddenly audible: a scratching and whining at the back door of the kitchen.

  “It’s Brillo,” Dorothea said. “If you just wait, he’ll figure out that he’s not to sleep in the house tonight and wander off on his own.”

  Bobbie got up. “I’ll go talk to him, sort of calm him down.”

  Screw you, sonny, Dorothea thought bitterly. That’s not good enough.

  Roberto hefted the shotgun in his hands and gave Dorothea a slit-eyed, tough-guy look, making up for the absence of one gun from the room. There was nothing amusing about his over-acting. He said truculently, “They should have showed our side of it more. They should have talked with our Mom, too.”

  Their mother, who must be frantic about them. This thug has a mother.

  “I want something to drink,” Roberto said, looking around the room. “I bet you got some good booze here someplace.”

  Here we go, she thought, her whole body beginning to ache with tension. She said nothing, but he had seen her glance at the liquor cabinet, and he got up and went over to it. But when he flung the door open, no bottles winked within. The shelves were empty.

  Dorothea stared, bewildered by a miracle. A small voice chimed in her heart: without drunkenness, maybe we have a chance.

  “What are you, teetotal or something? Well, you got any dope, grass or like that? I heard where you artists use a lot of that stuff to help you see things in your head to paint.”

  She sighed. “You can tear the place apart if you like, but there’s nothing to find. I’m not that kind of an artist.”

  “How many kinds are there?” He poked half-heartedly at the sofa cushions, as if he were minded to take her suggestion. “So where’s all your friends calling up to see how you are?”

  “Talking to somebody else, I guess.”

  Trailing restlessly about the big room with the shotgun hung over his arm, he seemed very young and at a loss.

  “Roberto,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  “What’s it to you? Anyway, why should I tell you anything? You’d just pass it on to the cops, first chance you got.”

  “You can’t stay here indefinitely. Somebody will put two and two together, and they’ll come here looking for you.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I’m only telling you what I think is going to happen,” she said reasonably. “I have to. You’re all here under my roof. I feel responsible. I worry about people getting hurt.”

  “People already been hurt,” he said. “Didn’t you notice Quita’s arm in a cast? Or maybe that doesn’t count?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure, you mean you don’t want any mess in your nice house. You can’t wait to get me out of here, can you? Well, you’re going to wait anyhow. My sister’s with me, and she’s sick. You think I’m just going to run out on her?”

  Oh Lord she was tired. She drooped in the chair, not answering.

  “What kind of ghost is it?” he said. His eyes were defiant in the lamplight.

  She shook her head, sorry she’d let that slip, about the ghost.

  “Come on, what is it?”

  “Somebody from a long time ago and another country,” she said. “It wouldn’t interest you.”

  “That’s right,” he said nastily, “I wouldn’t know nothing about stuff like that, right? I don’t have to. I’ll tell you about your ghost. You’re crazy, that’s all. An old lady living out here in the middle of noplace with a guy that’s dying — you see ghosts because you’re crazy.”

  “Maybe I am,” she flared, “for trying to talk rationally with you!” Caution gave way. “You’re a wrecker, aren’t you? You scrawl your stupid signs all over every blank surface like a dog pissing on a wall. Throw your damn garbage everywhere, treat the world like your private dumping ground, just for the fun of it!”

  He stared at her. “Who the hell you think you’re talking to? Shut your face, you dried up old bitch, or I’ll blow it off you!”

  “Sure,” she said, “that’s your credo, isn’t it? If it’s beautiful smash it; if it moves, stomp it, spoil it, crush it — you little bastard!”

  He swung the shotgun so that she looked down its barrels. Here it comes, she thought, amazed at herself.

  “I could bust you to pieces, I could blow you away,” he said. He kicked out suddenly, knocking a porcelain lamp to the floor where it shattered. With the butt of the shotgun he slammed through the glass panes of a book cabinet against the wall. She saw his angry eyes as he swung back toward her, standing with his legs braced, the gun hugged tightly under his arm again.

  I know you, she thought. You’re what I’m hiding from.

  “You’re trying to push me into it,” he said ferociously. “You want me to blast you, so you can be a hero and I can be a creepy kid who came and blew away this great old lady artist, some kind of special genius, right? Well, fuck you, lady. I’ll kill you if I feel like it, got that? If I feel like it, when I feel like it, because I feel like it. You old bitch!”

  Someone breathed a word into her ear: “Canaille!”

  She snapped her head aside with a gasp and covered her ears.

  “Hey,” Roberto said.

  “Quiet,” she whispered. “He’s here, somewhere, he spoke to me!”

  Roberto’s eyes widened. Then he laughed angrily. “You don’t quit, do you? You think I’m some dumb péon you can scare to death with a ghost story? Fine, you show me your ghost and I’ll be scared. If you can’t show it, then just shut up about it.”

  “Get out of my house!” she screamed at him.

  “When I’m ready. And when I go, I’ll take somebody with me, right? As a hostage. One of those precious people you don’t want hurt. Maybe you.”

  Ellie sat on the closed lid of the toilet in the little bathroom and squeezed cold water from a sopping wad of paper onto her temples. All right, she thought, you didn’t do so badly, and nobody got killed. Even the dog would not have been hurt, if Ms. Howard had kept her head. After all her advice about staying calm! She was out there alone with them now, but she would be all right. They had kept the sick man, Maulders, out during the afternoon, and no one had hurt him. Were they going to take each of the adults aside this way? My turn next, then.

  She shivered violently and squeezed more water into her hair, cooling her headache. Her brain throbbed with the memory of the shotgun blas
t.

  What’s it like to sleep with a man who’s got cancer? Maybe I’ve already done it. People can have cancer and not know. Anyway, poor Mr. Maulders wasn’t going to be much use, that was obvious. It was up to Ellie and Ms. Howard to figure out how to outwit the desperadoes.

  Sighing, she leaned her back against the cold water tank. The damn bathroom was beginning to stink. Too many people, all of them nervous, were using it too often. The little window wasn’t ventilating well.

  You came out here to write a novel this summer. Well, here’s your chance. Write it on toilet paper, like Gandhi in prison. Or was that Hitler?

  There came a timid knock at the bathroom door.

  “Just coming out,” Ellie said, getting to her feet.

  It was one of the Twinkies, Sarah and Cindy — Ellie couldn’t remember which name went with which girl — rabbit-pale with excitement.

  “Mrs. Howard’s back,” the girl said.

  So she was — apparently unhurt, wearily settling into a corner with her quilt, looking as much like a refugee as the rest of them. Ellie carried her blanket and her shoes over and sat down.

  “How is Mr. Maulders?”

  “I didn’t see him, but they tell me he’s all right. Whatever that means.”

  “Did they say when they’d be leaving?”

  “No.”

  Ellie drew a deep breath. “I keep thinking about — what might happen. These kids, those thugs, that little monster Roberto —” She hitched herself closer to the older woman. “You can make them want to go. Tell them there’s a back way, a secret road that will take them right around all the road blocks and patrols and things. You could make something up, couldn’t you? This country is covered with dirt-tracks going all over the place, I saw them from the plane when I first came. You could promise them a quick, safe escape before the police ever catch on.”