Rudy finally takes a bite out of the taco. “That big dude ever find you?” he asks with his mouth full.
“What big dude?”
“You know.” He lowers his voice and tries to do a German accent. “Talks like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Sarah Jane shudders. “He was here?”
“Yup.”
“When was this, Rudy?”
“Yesterday. No, the day before that. I dunno. I lose track.”
“What did he want?”
“Don’t know.” Rudy swallows. His neck is so thin Sarah Jane can see the lump travel down it. “Squint’ll know, but he ain’t here now. They talked a spell. Then Squint akst me where you was hanging and I tole him down by the creek behind the Grill. Di’n’t he find you?”
Sarah Jane can’t believe how dense she’s been; it must be the fever. “What did the guy look like?” she asks, just to confirm what she already knows.
He shrugs his narrow shoulders. “White dudes. Mike and Ike, all alike.”
“But you said he was big and talked like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Rudy takes another bite and nods. “Big old bear, short gray hair.”
She feels her body heat rising but she fights down the fear and turns it to anger. “Rudy, why did you tell him where to find me?”
His eyes shift away from hers. “It was Squint told him, not me. I just give a answer when Squint ast me a question.”
“He might of been a cop.”
“No. You could see he wasn’t no cop. No way, José.” Rudy keeps his eyes averted, chewing much longer than necessary.
Sarah Jane has a flash of insight. “He paid you,” she says.
He keeps on chewing and doesn’t deny it.
“And Squint?” she says. “He got paid too?”
Rudy meets her gaze. “Squint’s the chief, he got the beef. If I got twenty, you know he got plenty.”
It takes her a few minutes in her woozy and overheated state, but Sarah Jane forces herself to think it out, step by step: Billy Goat came here handing out money and looking for the bag lady in the cow coat. With Rudy’s help, Squint sent him to the creek behind the Grill. Billy Goat found Tin Can there wearing the coat and he killed her. After Sarah Jane ran into Squint and Roylee yesterday, they must’ve gotten hold of Billy Goat and told him about the coat mix-up and that the real Cow Lady might be found at the library. They sold her out. And they’ll do it again if they get the chance.
She tries to stand up, but her legs are so rubbery she can’t do it. “I’ve got to go,” she mumbles, deciding to sit for a minute, then try again.
“You just come.” Rudy holds out to her a bottle with some deadly looking amber liquid in it.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Rye whiskey.” He pushes the bottle against her chest. “Not too risky. Make you frisky.”
Sarah Jane’s head is already spinning. “Better not. I got to go. I really do.”
Suddenly the dogs jump up and start barking. It may be too late now. If this is Squint, she’s a goner. She watches the entrance and lets out a breath of relief when she sees Lufkin walk in. But she can tell from all the way across the camp that he has not been successful. It is amazing that a face so covered in hair can be so expressive.
Lufkin spots Sarah Jane and heads her way, dumping his backpack next to hers. She knows what he is going to say before he says it: “Fair lady. No luck.” He lowers himself to the ground. “Hey, man,” he says to Rudy.
Sarah Jane moves closer to him and tells him what happened at the library and what Rudy has told her and how she’s sure now that Billy Goat killed Tin Can and that he will kill her, too, if he finds her here.
“Woo-ee. Like some movie,” Lufkin says, shaking his head. “You think nothing more can go wrong and then it does.”
“Yeah, but this is real.”
“Cow Lady,” he says with surprise on his face, “you’re scared.”
“No.” She will never admit to that. Sarah Jane Hurley is no scaredy-cat, not since age eight anyway, when she discovered that the way to tame fear was to get mad and kick butt. Then she became the toughest kid on the playground. She prides herself now on being free and fearless, on walking the world alone and unafraid, going anywhere and everywhere.
“Yes, you are,” Lufkin insists. “You’re scared. Anyone would be.”
“I’m sick,” she says. “But I got to move on.”
“Me too.” Lufkin leans over to his pack and pulls out a newspaper. “Listen to this,” he says. “Today’s paper.” He begins to read, his voice almost a whisper: “‘Two ninth graders collecting water samples for a school science project yesterday found the body of a woman inside a drainage pipe near Waller Creek. The woman has been identified as Emily Bickerstaff, 43, originally of Phoenix, Arizona. Her local address was the Salvation Army. APD Sgt. Peter Ramirez says police are seeking for questioning several other homeless people who were friends of the dead woman, who was known on the street as Tin Can. Police did not comment on the cause of death, but they suspect foul play.’ “
Sarah Jane’s head spins faster. “I didn’t know she was from Arizona, did you?”
“There’s more news.” Lufkin folds the paper to a different page. He pauses and studies her face. “You up to it?”
“Shoot.”
“It says here the Senate is gonna vote on that bill on Monday.” He taps his finger on the article and holds the paper out to Sarah Jane. “See here.”
She pushes it away without looking at it. “I really got to go. I can’t be here when Squint comes back. I got to find someplace I can lie down.”
“Maybe the hospital, the ER,” he says. “You look real sick.”
“No. The cops’d get me right away. And I’d be all closed in.” She rests her head on her knee and thinks about just giving up. “There’s no place to go,” she says softly.
Lufkin rubs his beard, a nervous gesture Sarah Jane knows so well. “I don’t know,” he says, “maybe that Mother Teresa.”
“Oh, shit,” Sarah Jane says, “this is serious.”
“No, really,” he says. “That’s what she calls herself—that tall black woman. Looks like the Queen of Sheba or something. Wears a turban and all them clothes.”
Sarah Jane knows who he means; she has seen the woman around the Plasma Center. “She’s bonkers.”
“Yeah, but she’s got a shack and she talks about how God sent her to take care of sick folks. Says she used to be a nurse, in a hospital.”
“Bullshit.”
“Shack’s near here. I just about tripped over it one day.”
“How far?”
“You walk south a bit, you come to this old cracked road, ain’t been used in years. Just past it, there’s this wood boxlike thing she lives in.”
It’s crazy, but Sarah Jane has no other ideas. Maybe it’s fate. If she doesn’t get up now, she never will. She manages to stand up by bracing herself on Lufkin. Then she picks up her bag. “I’ll try it,” she says.
“I’m gonna talk with Squint about finding me some day job,” Lufkin says. “I’ll get some money tomorrow and then I’ll come find you.”
“Sure,” she says, knowing she will never see him again. They have come to that hard place where everyone bails out; she knows this because it’s always happened like that in the past. “Sure.”
Sarah Jane shuffles off, without looking back at the camp, heading south. She understands now why old people shuffle; it’s easier to keep yourself from falling if you keep both feet on the earth at all times, and what she wants right now is simply not to fall.
She leaves the Patchwork Pit behind and makes her way through the woods, her ears buzzing, head whirling, eyes blinking against the light. The woods, the sky, the ground appear to her in sharp little flashes, as if a flash bulb just went off in her face. She keeps shuffling on, but after what seems like a very long time she still hasn’t come to the crumbling road Lufkin talked about and nothing is familiar.
; She is lost.
Mother Teresa—what a laugh. There is no point in walking anymore, she’ll just get more lost. She comes to a stop and sways back and forth.
To steady herself, she puts her bag down and reaches her arms out. One hand finds a tree trunk; it is there for her as if by magic. This is where she’s been heading, she realizes. This is her stopping place. She shuffles closer to the tree and stretches her arm around it. Oh, what a tree! So strong, so steady. She leans into it and rests her cheek against the rough, fragrant bark. She looks up into the spinning branches. The sun lights the leaves from above, and they glow green, the greenest green she’s ever seen—new green, electric green, neon green, green-bean green, spring green, gardener green, Galveston green, Gramma green. These magic leaves whirl and glow, they shimmer, they dazzle, they break the sky into pinpoints of light that flash and flame like tiny sky-stars twinkling in the mess of spinning green. All of it moving, whirling, reeling. Alive. She is dizzy with the wonder of it. Her head hangs back and she gazes up and up, dazed, adoring. Never, never has she seen such a tree.
A thought pops to her lips and forces her to speak out: “I am just beginning.” She laughs when she hears the words. Just beginning? Someone else must have spoken this with her lips. She is, after all, at the end. She is the dead-end girl, the old drunk, the crazy bag lady people are embarrassed to look at, the throwaway woman who has no place to go. But she is much worse than that. Whirling free like this, she can confess it all to the tree: She is the drunken mother who didn’t take care of her children; she nearly burned them up once. Harold was right to take them away. She is the unfaithful and bitter wife, the old woman who lived in a shoe and wanted out. She is also a wanted criminal who stabbed another human being in the chest. The woman was stealing from her, but Sarah Jane was drunk and she stabbed her in anger, meant to kill her. The woman didn’t die—it said so in the paper—but Sarah Jane meant to kill her. And she has run away, run away from it all. She has shirked responsibility and failed at everything worth doing in life.
Yes, she did all those things, was all those things, but they are all past—water under the bridge, blood under the bridge. They are done, and she is done with them now.
“I am just beginning.” She says it again, and smiles; it feels as good as it did the first time.
She wraps her other arm around the tree and embraces it, a friend, a confessor, a lover, a comforter, a fellow beginner putting out new leaves. She continues to embrace it as she slides slowly down, loving the way the bark rasps her cheek and her lips and the palms of her hands. She comes to rest at the roots, still embracing it, finally home. Oh, what a tree!
WHAT ARE THESE,
SO WITHERED, AND SO WILD IN THEIR ATTIRE,
THAT LOOK NOT LIKE TH’INHABITANTS O’TH’EARTH
AND YET ARE ON’T?—
—MACBETH
Molly Cates left her rental car in the parking lot of the Paso del Norte Hotel for safekeeping and walked through downtown El Paso, heading south toward the border and the bridge of the Americas. The sidewalk still retained the heat of the desert sun, but the air was cooling rapidly as evening came on. She was ravenous because she’d missed lunch. Figuring there was at least an hour until dark, she decided to take time for a serious meal.
She stopped at a Mexican restaurant that seemed to be doing a thriving, noisy Friday night business, with several large tables of revelers and a mariachi band playing on the deck. She asked to sit outside and then threw caution to the wind by ordering the enchilada platter and a Dos Equis. Listening to the music, she ate with abandon. It was the kind of soft, comforting, greasy Tex-Mex food she’d grown up on and she devoured it all, right down to the last grain of rice, the last refried bean, then used a tortilla to soak up what was left on the plate. It infused her with a sense of well-being, but it was not just the food lulling her; it was being close to the border and being surrounded by people who were having an unrestrained good time. It occurred to her that she hadn’t had a vacation in years, not because anything was keeping her from it, just because the idea never occurred to her. Maybe she’d try to get Grady to leave his work and his dog and take a long weekend with her here at the Paso del Norte. The rooms were huge, she’d heard, with marble baths, and the bar had a glorious stained-glass dome and a piano player on duty at all hours.
When it started to get dark, she checked her map and headed west. A block away from the intersection of Cebeda and Duranzo she stood in the shadows to watch the street life coming awake as the sun set. Under a flashing green neon sign that said LAS BRUJAS several groups had gathered to talk and smoke. A bunch of men, drinking from beer bottles, kept up a raucous conversation in Spanish with a nearby group of women who were wearing very high heels and very tight skirts. Whenever the bar door opened, guitar music blasted out into the street. Friday night was well under way at the corner of Cebeda and Duranzo—five blocks from the Rio Grande.
Outside the well-lighted area around the bar, women lined Cebeda Street, each one standing alone, separated from the next by about twenty yards, as though they knew the environment could support that density and no more. Molly never saw these women arrive. As the sun set they just seemed to appear, to rise up out of the earth—women dressed in form-hugging, garishly colored clothes that barely covered their breasts and hips. They arranged their bodies in provocative poses and called out to cars cruising by. If they slowed down, the women approached the open windows to negotiate. Occasionally a car door opened and one of the women sashayed over and got in. The women all looked Hispanic and, from where Molly was standing, they all looked far too young to be Sylvia Ramos, who, at forty-three, could be the mother—or grandmother—of any of them. In this ancient and ubiquitous business of women renting their bodies to men, Molly wondered, was there a niche market for mature flesh?
More people joined the groups in front of Las Brujas and the noise level boomed. Lazy swirls of cigarette smoke rose and formed a cloud overhead, which the neon illuminated into a green miasma, flashing on and off, on and off.
After watching for several minutes, Molly decided to bite the bullet. She walked to the intersection and approached a tiny woman standing alone under a streetlight. She was wearing black short shorts and a shiny red tank top. “Hi,” Molly said, chagrined as always that she’d lived forty-four years in Texas and never learned Spanish. “I’m looking for La Risa. Do you know her?”
Even though the woman wore stiletto heels that must have been five inches high, her head barely reached Molly’s chin. Molly looked down into the heavily made-up face and saw beneath the clownlike layers of pancake and rouge and mascara the small, undeveloped features of a child. The girl looked Molly over, with a smirk of amusement on her bright red mouth. Then she pointed across the street to one of the groups gathered in front of the bar.
“Which one?” Molly asked.
The girl looked at her as if she were an idiot. “La monja,” she said, giggling.
“What?”
“La religiosa.”
Molly looked back at the cluster of women the girl was pointing to. Three of them wore short skirts, one wore skintight flowered pants, and the fifth wore an ankle-length black skirt and tennis shoes. On her head was the short coif of a modern nun. Molly hadn’t even noticed her before.
“The nun?” she asked in disbelief.
“Sí. La monja.”
Molly was nonplused. “That’s La Risa?”
The girl nodded and looked anxiously toward the cars passing in the street. Molly was interfering with business.
“Gracias,” Molly told her.
The girl sauntered away, swinging her tiny hips.
Molly studied the group across the street. One of the women, a plump teenager in fuchsia skirt and turquoise jog bra, talked in loud, angry, animated Spanish, using her hands to emphasize her points. When she finished, the nun spoke to her in a low voice and the other girls leaned forward to listen, nodding in agreement as she talked. Molly wanted to know what she wa
s saying to them. Her journalistic instincts were aroused by the possibilities of a story about a nun befriending prostitutes on the border. And, oh, the magic Henry Iglesias’s camera could work with these women!
She crossed the street and approached the group slowly. The minute they saw her, they fell silent. “Sylvia Ramos?” she said.
The woman with the long skirt stepped away from the group. Her dark eyes, looking Molly over, were wary. “Yes?” She had a perfect oval face with smooth unlined tan skin, full lips, and upswept black eyebrows like a raven’s wing. She was much younger than the woman Molly was looking for. She’d found the wrong Sylvia Ramos.
“I’m looking for the Sylvia Ramos who was living in Austin twenty-five years ago.”
The young woman’s enormous brown eyes reflected the flashing green neon. “You mean the Sylvia Ramos with a police record in Austin? The puta? That Sylvia Ramos?”
Molly didn’t know how to respond. This was so different from what she’d expected that she was thrown. Finally she found some words: “The Sylvia Ramos who was acquainted with Sheriff Olin Crocker.”
The woman crossed her arms over her chest and frowned.
The four girls in the group who’d been watching them immediately sensed the change in climate. One of them walked over, rested a protective hand on La Risa’s shoulder, and asked her something in rapid Spanish.
La Risa shook her head and answered in Spanish. The girls drifted several yards away. “Are you that Sylvia Ramos?” Molly asked the nun.
“Yes.”
“You don’t look nearly old enough.”
“That’s because you can’t see my knees.” Molly smiled. “I’m Molly Cates. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
La Risa shook her head. “What can I do for you?”
“Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Olin Crocker.”
The beautiful mouth made a Hispanic version of a Bronx cheer. “Waste of breath.”
All the Dead Lie Down Page 21
