Perdido

by Rick Collignon

  They showed up when Will was asleep. Later, he guessed the scenario. They were probably some of the guys he had seen earlier outside of Tito’s killing the night, or maybe inside, stalking around the pool table with a cue. When the bar closed, they bought a couple of six-packs and took a slow cruise. Maybe they parked at the river and sat in their vehicles drinking with the headlights off. Maybe they just drove up the highway and back, over and over, keeping the speed down so the Guadalupe cops wouldn’t bother with them. Finally, they ended up at Will’s place. Will jerked awake, almost in a panic, as if he’d forgotten how to breathe while asleep. He could hear a parked engine screeching, revved up high. Headlights cut through the small, dusty window by his bed, igniting the entire bedroom, and he realized that whoever was outside could see him sitting up, framed in the window. They had seen him startled awake like a frightened animal. He could hear voices and then the sound of someone laughing. Something hit the roof, and by the metallic clanging as it bounced down the tin roofing, Will knew it was a beer can.

  He moaned and swore softly. The voices outside grew louder. He swung out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. He threw on a work shirt, not bothering to button it up, and went outside barefoot.

  There were two vehicles. One was a long, beat-up car sitting low to the ground. Its headlights were on high, splashing across the south side of his house like a spotlight. Will could see where the mud plaster had worn away from the wall and in some places had fallen off altogether, exposing the adobe bricks. The window frame leaned with the slope of the ground, paint flaking away from the wood. For a brief second, he was embarrassed at the sight of his house. The ground was cool beneath his feet, stones pushing up hard against the skin. He walked into the headlights. This isn’t going to go smoothly, he thought.

  The car engine rumbled too loudly for there to be a muffler. Behind the car, parked under a large juniper, was a small pickup that looked familiar, but it was back in the shadows and Will wasn’t sure where he’d seen it before.

  Two young men leaned against the car, talking low now, one of them laughing softly. Will stepped on something jagged and cursed. The voices quieted, and they watched him walk past the headlights, stopping a few feet from them. He was close enough now to see them clearly. He knew both of them, but he didn’t know from where. He’d lived long enough in Guadalupe to have seen nearly everyone, but many of the faces had no landmarks to go with them. Maybe he’d waved at them a hundred times on the road. Maybe he’d run into them at the lumberyard. He didn’t know. They were both young and drunk, and Will knew they hadn’t ended up at his house because of a wrong turn.

  “Hey,” Will said, “it’s late.”

  Neither of them moved, and for a second Will thought that if he just backed away and went inside his house, they’d drink their beer and leave. One of them was built thick and solid, not like he’d worked at it but like he’d been born that way. He looked at Will lazily, smiling a little, and Will realized this one wasn’t as drunk as he had thought. The other one was thin, a glazed look in his eyes that spread to his face and made his features look slack and empty. Will could see that he was doing all he could just to lean against the car and not fall over.

  “It’s not late, jodido,” the heavyset one said, and he stood up straight. “It’s early. You’re the one who’s late.”

  “You’re an ugly fucker, you know that?” the other guy said, and the words came out of his mouth slurred.

  “Eee, don’t insult him. We’re his guests.” He reached in the side window of the car and dragged out a six-pack of beer. He pulled one loose and held the rest out to Will. “You look like you need one of these,” he said.

  Will stared at him until he lowered his arm. The guy looked down at the beer in his hands and shook his head slowly. “We’re just trying to be friendly. You got some problem with that?” He popped open the can and took a long drink. “It tastes all right to me.”

  “How come you’re so ugly, anyway?” his friend said. “Break him down, Lalo. I’ll piss on his face.”

  “What do you guys want?” Will said. He didn’t look at the drunk but at the one named Lalo.

  “Why do you think we want anything?” Lalo said. “We came to drink a beer with you. Get to know one of you people moving in here.”

  Will looked back at the house. He could see the inside of his bedroom. He thought that this might go on forever and wondered if there were words to turn it another way. “I’m going back in the house,” he said, turning back to Lalo. “Leave when you want to.”

  Lalo came a step closer, and Will could smell beer and sweat. “You think it’s that easy? You think we came here by accident?” He spoke calmly, but there was a grating feel to his words, and Will could tell the guy was beginning to get into this. “How’d you get here, anyway? What sick old man did you give a few dollars to for this place? I get tired of you people coming here with your money thinking you can buy anything you want.”

  “Get out of here,” Will said. He tried to keep his words level, but he could feel his heart speeding up, his lungs moving faster like there wasn’t enough air.

  “I’m not going anywhere, jodido. This is my home. Not yours.” He moved closer and jabbed at Will’s chest with his fist. Will stumbled back and stepped on something that cut into the sole of his foot.

  “I don’t even know who you guys are,” Will said.

  “And then I hear,” Lalo went on, “that you’re fucking Lisa Segura. Since she spreads her legs for everybody else in this town, I don’t know why this should bother me. But it does. You’re in a place you don’t belong, and I’m sick of it. And now you want to stick your nose in things.” Will slapped his hand away as it came at him again. “That’s all I needed,” Lalo said. “I’m going to knock the shit out of you.”

  From off to the side of them, back in the shadows by the pickup, somebody said softly, but loud enough to be heard over the car engine, “That’s enough, Lalo.”

  Whoever it was moved away from the truck and walked toward them. He stopped next to Lalo. “Hello, Will,” he said.

  Will nodded. “Jimmy.” Although Will didn’t know him very well, they’d run into each other over the years. Will knew that he had a couple of kids and worked at the mine and that he was a friend of Mundo’s. Seeing him next to Lalo, how they had the same build, Jimmy a little heavier, a little taller, and quite a bit older, Will could see the resemblance and knew they were brothers.

  “I came over here to make sure they didn’t mess with you,” Jimmy said.

  “What do you call this?” Will said.

  “I call this good advice.” Jimmy looked at his brother. “Isn’t that what you were doing, Lalo, helping Will out?”

  Lalo looked at Jimmy and spoke in Spanish. Will didn’t catch it all, but enough to know that Lalo was telling Jimmy to keep out of this. That he knew how to take care of these things.

  Jimmy snorted. “Oh, si,” he said, “I saw how you take care of things.” Jimmy looked back at Will. “You’re still in one piece, Will. Maybe you hurt your foot.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

  “What’s going on here, Jimmy?” Will asked.

  “I always thought you were good people, Will. So maybe you made a stupid mistake. That can happen. Some people get shot when they make a mistake. Others get advice. Good advice.” He smiled.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me and Lalo’s tio is Ray Pacheco,” Jimmy said. “You get it now?”

  Will didn’t say anything for a second. He wondered just what it was that he had said to Ray that would bring his nephews to his house. “This has gotten out of hand,” Will said. “I asked Ray some questions. I didn’t mean to upset him.”

  “He’s not upset, asshole,” Lalo said. “We are.”

  “It’s the truth, Jimmy,” Will said. “I didn’t mean for this to be a big deal.”

  Jimmy stared at him for a moment. Finally, he said, “That’s what I thought. So go back to bed, Will. It’s good we h
ad this little talk.”

  Will watched them drive off, Lalo driving the car with his buddy nodding out on the seat beside him. Jimmy took his time leaving, driving slowly as if that, too, were something he wanted to say.

  Will limped back into the house. He went into the bedroom, switched on the light, and looked at the clock. It was nearly four. It would be getting light in an hour. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the inch-long cut on the bottom of his foot. It didn’t seem to be too deep and it had bled clean. He washed it out in the bathroom, put on a pair of thick socks and went into the kitchen. He lit one of the burners on the stove and put on a pot of coffee. Smoking a cigarette, he watched the water boil up into the coffee grinds and drain back down black.

  When the coffee was ready he poured a cup, grabbed a blanket off the bed and went back outside. He set up a folding chair against the side of the house and eased into it. The sky to the east was still dark, but along the rim of the mountains he could see a thin, pale line. A slight breeze carried with it the faint odor of exhaust from Lalo’s car. Will covered himself with the blanket and sipped the coffee. He watched a jet blink its way slowly across the sky. He thought that people he knew had come to his house in the night and threatened him.

  For him, at that moment, it was no longer about a girl on a bridge.

  The first spring Will lived in Guadalupe, a storm came to the mountains, and in three days four feet of snow fell. The day before the storm, the sky had been streaked with white. It had been so warm that Will had worked outside his house in only a light shirt. By the next morning, eight inches of snow lay on the ground. The wind blew cold through the cracks in the door and around the frame of the window, and not even the mountains could be seen.

  By midafternoon, twenty inches had fallen, and Will began to wonder whether the seasons in this place were going backward. Just before evening, he heard pounding on his door. When he opened it, the snow that had drifted there spilled in, and standing in the wind and dark was Telesfor Ruiz. He was dressed in overalls and a wool cap that didn’t quite cover his ears. His face, which was usually gray, was a dark red. Ice was frozen in the hair beneath Telesfor’s nostrils and at the corners of his mouth. The old man held a burlap bag.

  It was the only time Telesfor had ever come to Will’s house, and even then he merely stood for a few moments just inside the doorway. He said that the storm would be here for days and that he had brought some things for his neighbor. When Will offered to walk back with him, Telesfor said that he could walk the way blind and did not need the worry of Will becoming lost in returning.

  Will watched Telesfor leave, walking slowly through snow that came far above his knees. In the burlap bag, Will found six donuts as hard as rocks, a large sack of beans, a shrunken clove of garlic, and the skinned heads of two sheep.

  The sun had just cleared the mountains when Will woke. He felt hot and sweaty beneath the blanket. The metal rod of the chair was digging into his back, and he thought this was what had awakened him. Then he heard a vehicle thumping through the holes in his drive. A beat-up flatbed swung around the cottonwoods, empty drums bouncing in the back. Will threw off the blanket and sat up. He groaned, ran a hand through his hair, and then rubbed his face. The truck pulled to a stop a few yards away. The driver’s door swung open, and Henry Pearson climbed out of the cab.

  Either he had on the same clothes he had worn the day before or he had a supply of new blue jeans and white T-shirts a size too small. His hair was flattened down but still looked unruly, as if he’d tried to brush it and after a few swipes through had given up. His beard was as knotted and twisted as ever. He took a long look at the house and then stared down at the beer cans lying on the ground. He kicked at a can.

  “You’re turning into a Mexican, aren’t you, Will?” he said.

  “I had a tough night,” Will said. “How’d you find my house?”

  “I asked at the café.” Henry’s hand went to his face, and he began threading his fingers through his beard. “Anyway,” he went on, “I’m going to Las Sombras for groceries. After you left yesterday I thought of something. Maybe you’re interested?”

  Will stared at him for a few seconds and then said, “Let me put on some coffee.”

  They brought their cups outside and sat against the side of the house in the sun. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and whatever humidity had been in the air had already burned off.

  “It’s going to be hot,” Henry said.

  “It has been. Except for that rain the other day.”

  “It rains all day, and then you turn around and it’s dry again. What’s wrong with this country, anyway? Nothing works right.”

  Will looked at the ground between his legs. A black ant was tugging at something that didn’t look like much to him.

  Pearson took a sip of coffee. “It’s nice here,” he said. “Quiet. No one to mess with you.”

  “Once a week,” Will said, “fifty people show up to play baseball just the other side of the creek.”

  “Where? On that field over there? Tell them to get the hell out.”

  “That’s an idea,” Will said. He pictured himself standing on the pitcher’s mound telling twenty softball players, all drinking beer, to get out and take their noisy kids with them.

  “All this,” Henry said, waving his free hand, “used to belong to the Indians. All of it. And then the Spanish came in and butchered and stole. I’ve read about this stuff. That Cortez guy, or maybe it was Onate. I forget. It doesn’t matter, though. It was one of them. And now they give you this crap that they’ve been here forever. The land is their blood. Gringos, get the hell out, and all they really are is a bunch of thieves like everyone else.”

  Will wondered why Pearson lived here. He was used to hearing people bitch about everything, from their wives to the weather to how their damn truck wouldn’t start. But most of them did it with some underlying sense of humor. Henry talked about things as if his life had taken a wrong turn a long time ago. Will looked sideways at him over the rim of his coffee cup. Henry was stooped down, staring straight ahead. His T-shirt stretched tight against his torso. His arms were long and bony and whiter than Will would have thought possible for early July. It made him look slightly indecent, a part of him that should have been covered.

  Henry stroked his beard with his fingers. “The thing I thought about,” he said, “is you might want to find out who the Guadalupe cop was back then.”

  Will snorted. He put his cup on the ground and stood up. The sun was climbing higher. He could smell a stale odor coming from his clothes. He needed a shower. He needed some more sleep. “I know who the cop was,” he said.

  “Well, he knew everything that was happening out in Canto Rodado,” Henry said, looking at Will. “Everybody in Guadalupe did. This cop would come up there every few weeks and raise hell with the kids from town who were hanging out with us. Like it was okay for their nifios to get drunk here in Guadalupe, but let them just think about smoking a joint with us and see what happens.”

  “What would he do?”

  “Make noise. He’d drive up those old roads with his lights flashing and chase anybody from town back home. He left us pretty much alone, though. I’ll say that much for him. But if this girl of yours was from Canto Rodado, he might know something.”

  “You remember any of the kids from Guadalupe?”

  Pearson shrugged. “No,” he said. “I didn’t even know who the hell they were back then. I know this isn’t much, but since I was passing by, I thought I’d tell you.” He pushed himself away from the wall and stood up stiffly. “I got to go, before Las Sombras gets too hot.” He walked to his truck, opened the door, and folded himself into the driver’s seat. He looked at Will.

  “Who was that girl you were with yesterday?” he asked.

  “A friend.”

  “Nice friend. She doesn’t have a sister, does she?”

  Will didn’t even try to picture Henry with a sister of Lisa’s, even if she�
�d had one. “No,” he said finally. “She’s got a brother, though.”

  Seven

  WILL STOOD UNDER THE shower until the water ran from hot to warm to cold. He stayed under the steady run of water and washed away two days of sweat and dirt. His heel began to throb, and he could see that the skin was puffed up and red around the cut. He splashed some hydrogen peroxide on it, wondering why he hadn’t done so before, then shaved in front of the small mirror over the bathroom sink. His face slowly became more presentable, but he could see a haggard look around his eyes that the razor didn’t do much to clear up. He dressed and went into the kitchen. He heated up a pot of beans from two days earlier and fried a couple of eggs, putting it all together on a plate and covering it with red chile. He got a tortilla out of the refrigerator and poured out what was left of the coffee.

  He ate trying not to think. But he remembered a winter years ago when his truck had blown a radiator hose and left him stuck on the side of the highway about six miles south of town. He had waited a long time in the cold for someone to stop. When a vehicle finally pulled up, an old pickup with a couple of guys in the cab drinking beer, the driver had leaned lazily toward him and said that if he was still there when they cruised back, they’d kill him. A wet snow was falling and it was nearly dark. Will didn’t say a word. The driver smiled at him, pushed the truck into gear, and drove off. The walk back to Will’s house took three hours. He remembered, even now, how he had kept his eyes down at his feet whenever he saw headlights coming at him through the snow. That was the last time Will had felt the way he did now.

  He shoved his plate away and went to the open door and leaned against the frame. He stared at the empty beer cans Lalo had left lying on the ground. He knew what he was going to do. He also knew that his reasons didn’t make much sense, but if he didn’t think about that, then he could be truly surprised when Lisa called him stupid.