Perdido

by Rick Collignon

  “Why is your face like that?”

  “Because I fell on it,” Will said. He looked past her into the house. A small boy sat in front of a television set against the far wall. There was carpet on the floor and wood paneling on the walls, and the curtains were drawn so that the room was shadowed. Will looked back down at the girl, who was still staring up at him. “Is that your brother in there?” he asked.

  She nodded. “He falls on his face too,” she said. “All the time. But not in bed. But sometimes he falls out of the bed. He forgets to watch his feet.” Will suddenly felt that coming here was a bad idea and that he would spend forever on weak legs talking about feet and faces.

  “If you watch your feet,” he said, “then you can’t see where you’re going.”

  “My brother never knows where he’s going,” she said, and it occurred to Will that if Lisa were to have a sister she would be like this. “Did you fall on a rock?” she asked.

  “No,” Will said. “I fell on somebody’s foot.” Probably your father’s, he thought. “So, is your tía here?”

  “My Tía Josepha is, but Tía Bella went to the church.” She looked down at the paper bag Will had carried with him from the truck. “Have you brought food?”

  “No,” Will said.

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Will followed the girl through the house, and even before he reached the kitchen, he could smell the heavy aroma of food. Chile and cilantro and honey. The kitchen counters were jammed with flat pans of enchiladas and chile rellenos. There were pots of beans and menudo and plates stacked high with tortillas and sopapillas. On the windowsill above the sink were vases of flowers, and in the middle of them was a large photograph of Ray. He was wearing a suit and not smiling, and he seemed out of place on the windowsill among so many flowers.

  At a small table in the room sat a woman so old that Will wondered if she were breathing. Her back was curved so much that although her chair was pushed a few feet from the table, her head rested just above the table-top. Her hair was white and thin with age, but her face was smooth and pale. To Will, she seemed like someone who had stepped past life, and he felt that if she were to speak, it would be in words he would not understand. On the table before her was a plate of food that had gone untouched.

  The young girl stood in front of Will and said loudly, “This man came to see you, Tia Josepha.”

  The old woman raised only her eyes and looked at Will. “Sientate,” she said with just her breath, and Will could see that her head was trembling slightly.

  “I came to see Ray’s wife,” Will said.

  “She’s at the church, I told you,” the girl said. “Tia, his face is like that because he fell.”

  “Va a su hermano,” the woman said in a voice that was stronger, and the girl walked around Will and out of the room. “Sientate,” she said again.

  Will stood in the doorway. The sun shone through the window, and the light was full of the odor of garlic and flowers. After a moment, he walked to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

  “Mi hijo es muerte,” Josepha said. Sitting this close to her, Will could see that her face was woven with fine wrinkles and that her eyebrows were no more than a white shadow. She brought her hand from her lap and placed it on Will’s. Her fingers were swollen and knotted at the knuckles. “Mi hijo es muerte … at the river.” She spoke the words slowly and just above a whisper, and her eyes were clear, as though trapped in her body.

  “Yes,” Will said. “I know.” He thought that he was sitting in Ray’s kitchen with his mother and that of all the things that had happened, this might be the strangest. This would be something he would remember for a long time.

  “Mi hijo was a good boy,” Josepha said.

  “Yes,” Will said again.

  “And did you see how young he looked in his death? Like a young man, my son looked.”

  “I saw.”

  “Pero,” she said and looked down at the table. “Pero,” she said again, and Will knew that she had become lost somewhere. Her head bobbed quickly up and down. She moved her hand to the plate of food before her and slid it a few inches toward Will. “Come,” she said.

  “No,” Will said. “No thank you.”

  “Quiere agua?”

  “No. I’m fine.” He reached for the bag on the floor and said, “I’ve brought you …”

  “When mi hijo was young,” Josepha said, “he would not wear clothes.” She raised her head ever so slightly and looked at Will. “Did you know this about my son?”

  Will, who did not know what to say, said nothing. Not only couldn’t he see Ray as a young boy, but he found it impossible to see Ray as a young boy without clothes.

  “It’s true,” she went on, “he liked to wear nothing. And if it hadn’t been for the hailstorm God sent, I think he would be doing it to this day. Every morning, but not in winter, mi hijo would go outside and take off his clothes and bury them in a hole. I would look from the window and see my son running through our fields naked with a large stick in his hands, as if chasing something. Sometimes he would run across the neighbor’s field and the fields beyond that. This was not a thing his father, who always wore his clothes, even in bed, was proud of. And his sisters would cry in embarrassment and throw rocks at him. Every night I would pray to God that my son would come to his senses, and finally God sent a hailstorm one summer afternoon in which even chickens were struck dead where they stood.”

  “What happened to him in the hailstorm?” Will asked.

  “What do you think happened to him?” Josepha replied. “My son wore clothes from that day on. Sometimes too many clothes. And for years, after a heavy rain, one of mi hijo’s shirts or a pair of his pants or a stocking would wash out from below the ground.”

  Josepha stopped talking and dropped her eyes. Will could see how thin her bare arms were. There seemed to be little left of her inside her dress. He could see how badly her head trembled, and he wondered that she was able to talk for so long in a voice that had been so clear and steady.

  “Mi hijo was sick,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  “Yes,” Will said. “I knew.”

  “And like an animal, that sickness caught my son at the river.”

  Will saw the birds lift slowly off Ray’s body. They settled in the sagebrush and stood there waiting. He thought that an animal had caught them both at the river.

  “I can see my son in my eyes. And he is little and he is a man. I see him running to me when he would fall and be hurt and crying. I see him through his whole life.”

  Will could not stay in this room any longer. There was not a thing he could say, and he found it unbearable to listen anymore. He picked up the bag and put it on his lap. Then he reached inside and took out the santo of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He stood her in the center of the table. “I’ve brought you this,” he said.

  Josepha raised her eyes and gave out a small gasp. She stretched her hands out slowly and drew the Lady to her. “Mi hijo es muerte,” she said in a whisper. She didn’t say it to Will but to the Lady, and then she began to weep without tears.

  When Will stood and turned he saw Ray’s wife, Bella, standing just inside the kitchen. She was motionless and staring at him. “Why are you in my house?” she said.

  “My name’s Will Sawyer.”

  “I know who you are,” she said. “Get out of my house.”

  Will walked by her. He could hear her footsteps as she followed him. The television was still on in the living room, and the two children sat before it.

  “Be careful of your feet,” the young girl said to him.

  “I will,” Will answered.

  “Tía, his face is like that because …”

  “Hush, hija,” Bella said.

  Will walked out the door and onto the porch. The sun had set below the hills, and the clouds and the mountains to the east were burnt red. The alfalfa in the fields was dark green and thick, and for a sec
ond, Will thought he could actually smell it.

  Bella stood behind him, inside the door, and to his back she asked, “What have you done with the photographs?”

  As he looked out at the fields, Will could see the photographs of the girl in the wall of his kitchen. “I burned them,” he said and took a step away from the house.

  “My husband never knew what happened to that girl.”

  Will turned around. Through the screen he could see only her shadow.

  “Do you know what I’m saying?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m saying that whatever you came here for, you could never find. And that all of this has been for nothing. Now go.”

  When Will drove past the baseball field and swung into his drive, he saw Felipe’s truck coming toward him from his own house. They stopped alongside each other.

  “Hey,” Will said.

  “Hey yourself.”

  Neither of them spoke for a few seconds and then Will said, “Come on back. We’ll drink a beer.”

  Felipe looked at him. He had just been inside Will’s house, and what he had seen there, he didn’t want to see again. He especially didn’t want to see it again with Will beside him. He knew that Will would not be drinking any beer this evening.

  “No,” he said. “I just came by to make sure you were still alive.”

  “I’m still breathing,” Will said.

  “You don’t look so bad.”

  “That’s because it’s almost dark.”

  Felipe nodded. He pushed the shift into gear and left his foot on the clutch. “I answered the phone when I was in your house,” he said. “It was Monica. She said tomorrow it was going to rain, and if her baby drowns, it will be your fault.”

  “Her roof leaks,” Will said.

  “I’ll come by in the morning. We’ll go fix it.” Felipe let the truck roll a little, and Will could see him grinning inside the cab. “Good luck, jodido,” he said and drove off.

  When Will walked up to his house, the door swung open, and standing there was Lisa. She was wearing her great-grandmother’s wedding dress and it was tight, tight on her body. The lace collar around her neck was buttoned, and the hem of the dress came far above her knees. Will could smell the odor of mothballs. He thought she looked like a deranged ballerina. He also thought that Lisa’s great-grandmother must have been a dwarf.

  “I knew you would come back,” she said, moving her hands over the front of her dress. “You know what this means?”

  “It means you want to marry me.”

  “Or maybe I just got married to someone else. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not what I did.” They stood for a few seconds looking at each other. Finally, she said, “If you walk through this door, you can’t leave again. Do you understand?”

  “This is my house,” he said.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “Yes,” Will said. “I understand.”

  “That’s what makes me mad with you. You say yes, but you don’t think. Listen to me one more time, and I will say it again. If you walk through this door, you will stay here forever, and if things go bad, and they will because of what you are, I’ll have to shoot you.”

  “You’ll kill me if we have problems?”

  She nodded slowly. Her mouth was open slightly, and Will could see the tip of her tongue. “Or maybe I’ll just wound you,” she said.

  “Does this mean that if we have children, Mundo will be their uncle?”

  Lisa smiled and looked away. “Tio Mundo,” she said. “He’ll be so proud.”

  Will looked past her into his house. He could see that standing on his kitchen table and crowded together on the floor was an army of Saint Francises. Some of them were smiling and some weren’t, and they all looked a little uneasy in his house. Will thought that each one of them was looking straight at him, waiting to see what he would do.