Perdido

by Rick Collignon

  “What, you think flies get grouchy? They get chilly, so it’s time to chew on something?”

  “You ever see flies on a dog’s ear? One day they’re just sitting there and the next the ear’s all bloody. What do you call that?”

  “All right. All right, flies bite. But they’re still not as bad as yellow jackets. I don’t believe we’re talking about this.”

  Felipe took an orange out of his lunchbox. He peeled it carefully and tossed half to Will. There were dark smudges on it from his fingers. Will stuck a section in his mouth. “So,” he said, “what do you think I should do?”

  “You ask me this now? Why didn’t you ask a few days ago when you thought it was such a good idea to go visit Ray?” Felipe spit out an orange seed. “Maybe you should leave for a little while.” Like twenty years, Felipe thought, though he didn’t say it.

  “Leave? Where am I going to go?”

  Felipe shrugged. “Then stay and see what happens. Someone’s going to mess with you, though. Don’t think it won’t happen. Tonight, tomorrow, sometime.”

  Will ate the rest of the orange and slumped down lower against the tree. He took out a cigarette and lit it. “The funny thing,” he said, “is I got to like Ray since he’s been dead.” Between the branches of the tree, Will could see two hawks gliding high up.

  “You got to like the girl, too,” Felipe said, “and she’s been dead for twenty-five years. Maybe you just like dead people, Will.”

  By late afternoon, when they had finished digging, Will could feel a nagging ache in the small of his back and blisters beneath the calluses on his palms. It seemed hotter than ever. The sun was still high, and although Will had thought his arms were as dark as they could get, he could feel a burn under his skin.

  They tossed the shovels into Felipe’s truck and went over to the shady side of the house. Will turned on the spigot and let the water run through the hose until it cooled. There was a faint taste of plastic to it, but he drank until he could feel the water sloshing around in his stomach. Felipe took the hose and ran water over the back of his neck and then let the nozzle rest on the inside of each wrist. “It cools the blood this way,” he had once told Will, “so your heart doesn’t go into shock.” When he finished, Will took the hose back and washed off his arms and drank a little more.

  “You drink too much, you’ll get sick.”

  “You think I’m one of your kids, don’t you?” Will threw the end of the hose onto some sad-looking sod and let the water run. “We could stay late,” he said. “Get a little more done.”

  “I can’t stay late,” Felipe said, wiping water and some of the day’s dirt from his face with his shirt. “There’s a rosary for Ray tonight. At seven. Elena warned me to be home on time.”

  Will didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked at Felipe until Felipe moved his eyes away. A rosary for Ray, Will thought. “You’re going?” he asked.

  “I’ve known Ray all my life, Will. His wife is first cousins with Elena’s mother. Yes, I’m going. Maybe instead of hiding in your house, you should come along.”

  Will pictured himself kneeling in church while the priest led the rosary. After that, he would stand in line with everyone while they circled the aisles and gave their condolences to the family. He saw himself patting Jimmy on the shoulder. Will took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “I should probably go see Lisa, anyway.”

  “She’ll be at the church.”

  “Lisa?”

  Felipe shrugged. “Maybe not,” he said. “She and Lalo were classmates, though. This could be a big rosary. Ray knew a lot of people. And even if they didn’t like him, they’ll still come to say good-bye and give their best to his wife. If you come, maybe no one will even notice you.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  “You can sit with us, jodido. Elena won’t let anyone hurt you. You can wait outside when everyone goes up to the family. Maybe if you don’t make this into a big deal, no one else will either.”

  “You think so?”

  Felipe went over to the spigot and shut it off. The sod still looked brown and dried out. “No,” he said. “You’d stick out like a sore thumb,” which was exactly how Will felt, but it didn’t make him feel any better to hear it said out loud.

  Twelve

  WILL’S HOUSE WAS STILL standing when he got home. No one had come over while he was at work with a can of gasoline and a match. He switched off the engine and smoked a cigarette. The sun was falling gently in the west; the rosary for Ray would be beginning soon. It would be hot and crowded in the church with the heavy scent of sweat and perfume. Ray would be laid out in a casket before the altar, dressed in a suit, his face powdered and rouged but still ashen and dead. Kneeling somewhere in the aisles would be Lisa and Felipe. Will flicked his cigarette away and heard the phone begin to ring inside the house. He swung the truck door open and jumped out. He picked up the receiver just in time to hear someone say staccato, “You’re dead, jodido. You’re dead. You’re dead. You’re dead.” Will hung up. He thought not everyone was heading for church.

  He got two more of the same calls in the next thirty minutes. One of them was a kid, his voice still high and smooth. He got excited and began babbling when Will answered. Will let him go on for a few seconds and then cut in, saying he knew who this was and was going to tell his father. That shut the kid up for a moment, and when he said, “You don’t know,” Will broke the connection. Instead of hanging up, he left the receiver off the hook.

  Will took the Lady from the wall along with the two photographs and sat down at the table. He stretched out his legs and leaned back in the chair. Through the open door, he could see the cottonwoods along the creek and the junipers that grew in the shadows of the larger trees. The santo’s eyes were open and turned toward him. He could see wood beneath the flaked paint on her gown. Her hands, which were clasped at her chest, had small cracks along the line of each finger. Will thought that although this Lady was very old, there was only youth on her mouth and in her eyes.

  Out loud, Will said, “I’m not doing so well.”

  He lowered his eyes to the photograph of a dead girl who had once been a child and who had slept soundlessly at night and been out of breath when she ran. It seemed that this girl had been in his life for a long time, but it had been just days since he had heard of her, and all he knew was that her life had ended. And that would be all he would ever know. “There’s no place for us to go with this,” he said. “It has to end here.”

  He closed his eyes, feeling as though his house was full of women. Although they did not mind his presence, Will knew they would be perfectly happy in only each other’s company.

  Will dozed until it grew dark. When he finally opened his eyes, he got up from the chair slowly. He went to the phone and dialed Lisa’s number. It rang for a long time before Mrs. Segura finally picked it up.

  “Could I talk to Lisa?” Will asked.

  “She’s at the church, don’t you know,” Mrs. Segura said and hung up. Will knew that the rosary must have ended by now, and he wondered where Lisa had gone. Leaving the phone off the hook again, he put the Lady and the photographs back in the wall and went into his bedroom.

  He got the rifle from under the bed and jammed a couple of shells in the magazine. He snapped on the safety and leaned it against the front of the bed, near his pillow. He looked at it leaning there precariously and then laid it down flat on the floor, worried that he might knock it over in his sleep, and then who knew what would happen.

  Some part of him heard the vehicle drive up, the soft sound of gravel beneath tires. He heard the door open and then close gently with a click, and he thought it was good that whoever had driven up had the decency to be quiet. He heard footsteps scuffing the ground and then the sharp creak of the kitchen door as it was pushed open. His heart began jumping in his chest. He jerked his head to the side and watched someone walk into the bedroom and then up to
the bed. There was the sound of a foot kicking the rifle on the floor and then a grunt that sounded familiar.

  “Lisa.”

  “So now you sleep with guns,” she said.

  “Turn on the light.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m not staying.” She was wearing something white that fell from her shoulders to just below her hips. The only thing Will thought he could see from there down was skin. He couldn’t see her features, but from the angle of her head, he knew she was looking down at him. “I dreamed about you,” she said.

  “In one dream,” she went on, “we were by the creek. Not too far from your house. You were smoking a cigarette and giving me a bad time about how even cows were smarter than my brother. Then, like a dream is, I’m far from you, out in the middle of the field, and I see these three men come out of the cottonwoods with knives. Big knives. One of them stabs you hard, here,” Lisa poked Will’s stomach, “while the other two stand in front trying to hide from me what they are doing to you. The one who stabs you stays bent over you for a long time, and when he gets up, I know in my heart you are dead. That’s when I wake up and go to the phone and try to call you, and all I get is a busy signal over and over again. So I go back to bed, and I have a worse dream.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. She put her hands on the edge of the bed and brought her face down closer to Will.

  “In this dream,” she said, “you are in a strange room fucking a gringa. The two of you are having a lot of fun together, and when I walk into this room, you don’t even have the good manners to stop.” Lisa put her hand on Will’s face and moved her fingers around as if she were reading braille. She found his lower lip and pinched it with two fingers, right where she’d bashed him with the ashtray. Then she pulled up slowly until Will’s head came off the pillow.

  “If you ever do that again,” she said; then she gave his lip a last squeeze and let it go. They were silent in the dark. “Don’t you forget,” she said finally. Then she bent over him so he could feel her hair on his face and kissed the corner of his mouth. “There,” she said. “And maybe you should brush your teeth at night, también,” and she whirled and walked away.

  Will walked around the outside of his house in a still, pale dawn that held enough heat to warn him the day was going to be hot. He moved slowly, sipping coffee and looking at the place as though he’d never seen it before. He saw how the plaster that he’d sworn to redo for the past five years was now so cracked that when he pushed on it with the flat of his hand he could feel it give. Wasp nests, paper and mud, coated the eaves thickly, as if someone had messed up the surface of the wood with a trowel. Birds had worked themselves into the area where wall met roof, and as Will walked by one squeezed itself out and swooped by him, arching high and back over the roof. The whole place was sagging, as though it had given up a long time ago and decided that it would, inch by inch, slide back into the earth.

  He went around to the north side of the house to the pile of debris he’d collected over the past eighteen years. Warped lumber, old crates of spikes that had split open, the nails corroded with rust. Ax heads, broken shovels, old handsaws, gallons of linseed oil, busted cinder blocks, a burnt-out tractor engine he’d traded for, although, for the life of him, he couldn’t recall why. Box springs, an old oak bureau that the weather had twisted and crippled, bald tires with the wire treads poking through. Cedar posts, coils of barbed wire, a refrigerator that had burned out and only kept things warm. It was an impressive pile, and Will thought that none of it was worth a damn.

  He walked back to the front of the house and out into the field. From there, if he blinked his eyes over and over, the house didn’t look so bad. But when he stopped blinking, it changed into something as sad and neglected as an old dog kept chained up for too long. He drank the rest of his coffee.

  Mañana, he thought. Mañana.

  As Will was about to leave the house, the phone rang. Someone named Andrew Martínez was calling from the medical examiner’s office in Las Sombras. He apologized for disturbing Will so early but said that he had tried to reach him a number of times the day before with no luck. He was calling to say that the matter of Ray Pacheco’s death appeared to be straightforward and that Will would not need to come in and sign a deposition.

  Will asked if he was aware of Ray’s medical status, and Martínez told him yes, he had received a copy of Ray’s medical records from the VA hospital. “These are sad things,” Martínez went on. “Especially for the family. I know that what you went through could not have been easy, but maybe it’ll be a comfort for Ray’s relatives knowing someone was with him when he died.”

  Thirteen

  FELIPE DROVE UP TO the job site at just past six o’clock in the morning. He was two hours earlier than usual, and he knew that Will more than likely wasn’t even out of bed yet. He sat in his pickup with the window open, the sun still not above the mountains. He looked at the house and thought that at least there was no homeowner around to pester him, which was about the only good thing he could think of in his life right now. He climbed slowly out of his truck. He was tired, and the muscles in his back were sore from digging the day before. He walked over to the wheelbarrow and looked at it. Felipe was thirty-seven years old. If he felt this bad now, he wondered how he would feel in twenty years.

  “I’ll be dead,” he said out loud, which made him feel a little better. “Somebody else can mix cement and spend their stupid life worrying.” As he pushed the wheelbarrow, he kept talking to himself, but he was no longer listening.

  The rosary had been a disaster for Felipe. The church had been crowded with people and the air inside, even with the doors left open, was hot and smelled of perfume and sweat and manure from Manuel Gallegos’s corral, which was not far away. To Felipe, who sat in the middle of all this, the air was like something that had to be chewed and then swallowed. Halfway through the service, Philistina Hernandez, who had been kneeling quietly beside Felipe and who was a large woman and no longer young, rested her hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Hijo, tell Ray to stop singing and waving his hands like that.” Felipe saw that her face was like chalk and her eyelids were fluttering. Then she fell heavily against him in a faint. Trying not to fall in turn, Felipe found himself wrestling awkwardly with this woman as if she had attacked him.

  Felipe and three other men carried Philistina from the church. Philistina’s daughter, Andelma, walked alongside them holding onto the hem of her mother’s dress so that it would not rise above her knees, a thing, Andelma knew, that would concern her mother the most when she woke. They laid Philistina in the grass beneath the juniper tree just outside the church doors. As Felipe stood there with the others, looking down at Philistina and breathing air that did not taste like mud, Philistina opened her eyes briefly and moved her lips as if to speak. Andelma stroked her mother’s forehead, and Felipe, suddenly afraid of what words might come out of the old woman’s mouth, turned and hurried back inside. When he knelt once again beside Elena, she gave him a look that said, “This, too, was your fault.”

  After Father Roberto, a young priest new to Guadalupe, finished leading the rosary, Felipe rose and, along with everyone else, waited in line to give his condolences to the family of Ray Pacheco. As he shuffled along behind Elena, he glanced at the open coffin that sat before the altar. Ray’s eyes were closed and his face looked as if it had been made out of clay. Felipe thought that not long ago, Ray had been eating chile and tortillas and drinking beer and irrigating his alfalfa with a shovel. It also occurred to him that there was little of Ray left now and that what was left did not look like someone who would be waving his arms and singing. Felipe wondered what had gone through Philistina Hernandez’s mind just before she fainted. Will would enjoy this story, he thought, and then he chased the idea away. If he was smart, he would never tell Will anything else, ever again.

  Bella, Ray’s wife, did not look at Felipe when he took her hand and bent low and told her how sorry he was and that if there
was anything he could do. She nodded her head and said nothing. Beside her sat her nephew Jimmy, whom Felipe had known all his life. When he took Felipe’s hand, he grabbed it tightly and pulled it to his chest, saying only, “When we get him, jodido, you better not be anywhere around.”

  Felipe and Elena drove home together in silence. As soon as Felipe walked into his house, he went straight to bed. He lay there, staring at nothing and hearing the voices of his children in the next room. He wondered how his life, which he had always thought of as simple and containing only small problems such as tomato plants that did not grow and three children who seemed to enjoy hitting each other continually with sticks, had suddenly become so confusing and humorless. He thought that all this could be blamed on Will, but he knew he had played a part, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what it was. It was as if he had kicked a rock down a slope and then watched open mouthed as it flattened chickens and flew through windows and bounced off the head of Ray Pacheco.

  Felipe finally fell asleep long after Elena had come to bed. And then, as if things could only become worse, he dreamed. He didn’t dream one dream, but hundreds of dreams, and when he woke before dawn, he felt as though he had spent the night running from one thing to another. He lay still in bed and listened to the soft sounds his wife made in her sleep. Outside the open window, he could hear the chirping of a single bird that was probably eating something in his garden. Felipe closed his eyes tight and thought this might be a good day to have nothing to do with.

  When Will left the house, he thought he was going to work, but just a little way down the highway, he made a quick right and took the road that led to Lisa’s house. He thought he had time for a cup of coffee with her and could still beat Felipe to the job site.

  Lisa’s car was parked in front of her trailer. Will pulled in next to it and got out. A sprinkler set up in the middle of the corn was overshooting the plants. The water was splashing against the side of the trailer, washing off some of the flakes of brown paint. The plants close to where the water was hitting leaned toward the moisture as though they wished they had feet. Mrs. Segura’s truck was parked off to the side of her house, and there was no sign of Mundo’s vehicle. The place looked quiet, the curtains pulled close together, not a sound from the dog Will knew was chained up behind the house. Maybe Mundo and his mother had gone out for breakfast together or driven to Las Sombras for groceries. But a better bet, Will thought, was that Mundo was still asleep somewhere and Mrs. Segura was staring out at him from behind the curtains and praying to all the saints that her daughter would come to her senses.