North of Montana ag-1

by April Smith

I miss her then, I want those freckled arms around me, I want our bond, broken not only by her death but by a mysterious invisibility during my young childhood, to be healed. But how? Instead of coming close, I feel her fading away from me again, eclipsed as always by Poppy.

  What was her shadowy life compared to the scary, exciting visits to police headquarters in the bold blue glass building on Broadway? Poppy would steer me through busy offices where everyone thought I was cute, then, if there were no prisoners, through the actual jail with its terrifying steel toilets. Waiting outside for him, I’d call out to his buddies by name as they climbed into their squad cars, running my fingers over a big brass plaque near the lobby, a bas-relief of a policeman sheltering a boy and girl, “Lest We Forget”—Long Beach Police Officers Association, with a kind of preadolescent sexual thrill.

  Poppy took me trick-or-treating, Mother stayed home. He took me body surfing in the breakers off Shoreline Drive, bullying me to get up and do it again no matter how many times the waves sent me sprawling — where was she? Timid, passive, afraid, self-effacing until dissolving into a ninety-pound cadaver before my eyes. In the end her skin was actually green and she didn’t have the strength to roll over in the hospital bed, lying on her side facing away from me, one arm struggling to rise above the collapsed curve of her hip, one word, my name, spoken as I entwined those dry brittle fingers in mine at age fourteen.

  And yet she is not completely gone and yet … perhaps I really did mean something to her. Who else would have saved the document I now hold in my hand, and for what purpose other than someday her daughter might find it, shoved way in the back of a safe-deposit box inside an unused birthday card inside an envelope? It is her marriage certificate, stamped by the City of Las Vegas, August 3, 1964. It states that on this day, Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey, my father and mother, were married.

  I stare at it with only one wish: that the black woman with the ponytail will dig her blue heels into the beige carpeting and push that steel door closed and give the big brass wheel a good strong spin, sealing me and what I now know into a dark airless crypt, where secrets are buried precisely so nothing will change, forever.

  • • •

  When Poppy doesn’t answer my ring at the door I use my key. I find him sitting out on the balcony with eyes closed, face to the late afternoon sun. He looks the same. He is wearing his usual tan slacks and yellow polo shirt open at the neck, bare feet in flip-flops crossed up on a small plastic table. His square rugged hands — reddish and hairy with age — are clasped on his chest. His chin is sunk forward and he is snoring.

  Even now another ancient admonition stops me from waking him up, “Grandfather needs his sleep.” I turn back into the condominium and start picking up coffee cups and glasses and carrying them into the kitchen. A few yellowish curds have collected on the brown Rubbermaid mat in the bottom of the sink near the wooden dishwashing stick with the soft cotton head Poppy has been using for years. I see those red soapy hands rinsing bacon and scrambled eggs off green melamine plates and a wave of revulsion as powerful as the Long Beach surf almost doubles me over. The cups chatter as I place them on the counter and walk back into the sun.

  “Poppy. I’m here. Wake up.”

  He opens his eyes and smiles. “The woman of the hour.”

  I am cold. “Why do you say that?”

  “You busted that sleazy doctor who was harassing Jayne Mason.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Hell, it’s all over the news. I’ve got it right here.”

  He swings his feet off the small table and stands. Steadily, I notice.

  I follow him through the sliding glass doors into the cool darkness of the living room. Sun spots are still swimming in my vision as he picks up a sheaf of newspapers and magazines from the top of the television.

  “You’re a celebrity.”

  But there is nothing congratulatory in the flat tone of his voice. He holds my eyes before handing me the papers and behind the handsome mask of strong nose and weathered cheeks is a baby-faced pout of envy.

  Of course I am nowhere near a celebrity. I receive no personal mention in Poppy’s collection of articles from the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the local Palm Springs rag. The FBI is said to be only peripherally involved. The big story is the million-dollar malpractice lawsuit being brought against “the sports injury doctor to the stars” by “movie queen” Jayne Mason with plenty of spicy comments from “superpower personal manager” Magda Stockman. The big graphic that has played in all the media is a split-screen image of Mason on one side and Eberhardt on the other. She looks beautiful and vulnerable, he looks hunched over and guilty.

  “You don’t usually show much interest in my cases.”

  “This one is different, it’s my gal, Jayne. That doc deserves to hang. What can I get you?”

  ‘Water.”

  “Good idea. Dry today.”

  He goes into the kitchen, I remain standing. When he returns with two glasses I drop the manila envelope I have been holding onto the coffee table.

  “I got the documents from the safe-deposit box.”

  “You didn’t have to make a trip. The U.S. mail would have been more than adequate.”

  Is he deliberately undercutting me today, not thanking me for my effort, not acknowledging my accomplishments, or have these subtle put-downs and manipulations been going on for years? I can feel the tendrils of rage coiling around my throat, threatening to choke me off. I have to reach up and forcibly pry them apart to keep breathing.

  “I made the trip to show my concern for you, Poppy.” I let the angry sarcasm hang there but he doesn’t hear it.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you?”

  “Well, the radiation makes me drowsy and chemotherapy ain’t no day at the beach, but we’ll take that on when it comes.”

  “What exactly is the diagnosis?”

  “They call it a lymphoma.”

  “What’s your doctor’s name, I’d like to speak to him or her.”

  “No need for it.”

  “You can’t go through this alone.”

  “I’ve got friends in the complex. Lots of ladies want to look in on me.”

  “Don’t screw with me, Poppy.” My finger is jabbing into the space that separates us across the living room. “I need to know your doctor’s name.”

  “All right.”

  Having won that bout, I spit a breath out between my teeth. I am still standing. He is sitting on the sofa with his legs crossed and eyes unfocused, a bleak inward repose as if I weren’t there.

  I sit down in an armchair but it is too deep to get my feet firmly on the floor and too far from Poppy to force him to look at me. I try to drag it closer but the legs get tangled in the matted shag of the rug.

  For a moment I am frozen like a diver at the edge of the board. As a child I would clutch, looking down at the water so far away. Once, when a line of kids behind me started hooting because I couldn’t jump off and I couldn’t step back, a lifeguard had to walk out, pick me up under the arms, and drop me into the pool like a slab of stone. She’s there now, the healthy well-muscled self taking firm hold of the shivering frightened self at last.

  “When I was going through the safe-deposit box I found some things. Some jewelry, which I kept, and a marriage certificate between my father and Mom. You never told me they were married.”

  “Who was married?”

  “Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey. Do the names sound familiar?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for the last two and a half hours, driving out from L.A. I’ve had a lot of time to go over it again and again and again. And I’ve come to the conclusion that you and Mom have lied to me about my father and my heritage and who I am and where I come from my entire life.”

  At the end of it my voice betrays me by going weak.

  “I told you to forget about that son of a bitch,” Poppy snaps. His eyes look black
in the triangular shadow that cuts across the room. “He left you and your mother, can’t you get that through your head?”

  “Apparently he didn’t leave because they ran away and got married. Maybe you didn’t know about it.”

  Bitterly, “I knew about it.”

  “Why did they wait until four years after I was born?”

  We are facing each other squarely now. Poppy is alert and still as a snake.

  “Let me take a wild guess.” I am feeling an enormous pressure in my chest, a miserable kind of total body ache. “You threatened my father and behaved like a raving bigot until finally you chased him away.”

  “I’m the one who raised you!” Poppy shouts, causing me to flinch. “Damn you to hell.”

  I say it again in a stronger voice, matching his: “My father left because you chased him away.”

  “He was a lowlife beaner who knocked up my daughter, then this guy”—he pauses to shake his head and almost laugh—“keeps coming back and coming back … for five fucking years. Then he marries her against my wishes and that was the last fucking straw.”

  “Maybe,” I suggest, “he fucking loved her.”

  “You watch your tongue or I’ll give you the back of my hand.”

  “And maybe … she fucking loved him.”

  We stare at each other. I do not apologize and I do not back off.

  “Let’s get it clear now, Poppy, because the sun is going down. Who was Miguel Sanchez?”

  Glaring silence.

  “Was he from El Salvador?”

  “That was the story.”

  “So he wasn’t Mexican.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “How could Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey have possibly met in 1958?”

  “She was stupid enough to let him sweet-talk her over at Patton’s pharmacy on Montana.”

  “What was an itinerant worker doing in a drugstore on Montana Avenue? Buying hand cream?”

  “His line to Gwen was that he was taking night courses in management at the high school.”

  “So now he’s not a migrant laborer, he’s a Ph.D.”

  “I’m the one who raised you.” His fist comes down on the padded arm of the sofa and bounces up.

  “You stole me from my parents.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Have you been smoking crack?”

  I stand up with disgust.

  “Your mother was a naïve silly girl and your father was trash. You think I wanted a little spic baby in the house—”

  “Stop.”

  “But you turned out to be more white than brown.”

  “So you kept the half-breed bastard.”

  “It was your grandmother’s idea, then she passed away. Now I was stuck with the two of you. You think your mother could have managed on her own?”

  “She would have gone with my father and had a life, and I would have had my parents.”

  “All you needed was me.”

  I can only stare at him incredulously.

  “You’re as naïve as your mother,” he explodes suddenly. “I had to send him away. He would have ruined your lives.”

  “So you forced him to leave and made sure he’d never come back.”

  “That part was out of my hands. The dumb son of a bitch got himself killed.”

  I am silent. “How was he killed?”

  “I told you he was a migrant worker. He talked back to the foreman one time too many, got into a fight, and got the shit beat out of him, that’s all.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Your mother was devastated,” he continues in a tight voice. “She never wanted you to know. She just couldn’t see that side of him, that he was a hotheaded arrogant bastard.”

  “Where was he buried?”

  Poppy scowls. “Who knows, probably in some bean field somewhere. They sure didn’t send him home with military honors.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because I’m sick and tired of taking the blame.”

  A chill passes through me, then something adjusts in my body like a joint that’s been out of whack for a few decades and subtly shifts back into place. I realize that I had always known my father was dead and that he had been killed violently. I have carried an image of him dying with blood on his face — I’ve dreamed it several times — so somebody must have told me or I must have overheard.

  “Nobody’s blaming you.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Look,” I say softly, trying to be conciliatory, “give me the name of your doctor.”

  “Next to the bed, but what’s the big deal?”

  He picks up a magazine and lies down on the sofa. The shadow cuts across his body like a guillotine. He puts a pillow behind his neck to prop up his head and the sunset light, that amber light of nightmares, catches the worn blue eyes, which are looking at me now over the top of the page with uncensored hate.

  I have nowhere to go so I go into the bedroom. The brown curtains are drawn, the maroon cover on the bed pulled tight. On the bedside table there are several new prescription bottles, a shoehorn, keys, and a bill with the name and address of an oncologist in Palm Springs. When I pick it up, I understand why my grandfather doesn’t want me to talk to the doctor. It means acknowledging that the famous omnipotent powerful Everett Morgan Grey, patrol officer, rescuer of children, protector of the superior race, is mortal.

  Under “diagnosis” the doctor wrote, “Aggressive B-cell lymphoma.” Special Agent Charles Gonzalez, a nice man who worked the White Collar Crime Squad, was diagnosed with the same thing. I will be granted the shameful wish that came hurtling out of my subconscious as I lay beneath Randall Eberhardt’s hand: Poppy will be dead in a year.

  TWENTY

  SINCE WORKING the Mason case I have not been in touch with the guys on the Bank Robbery Squad, stranded out here in no-man’s-land waiting for my transfer, and now that I need someone to talk to, nobody is around. I wander through the bullpen like a lost soul, stopping at everybody’s empty desk, until realizing it is the last Friday of the month and they must be having their potluck lunch. I purge the vending machine of all its vanilla creme sandwiches to have something to contribute, but nobody is in the lunchroom, either. I figure they must have gone out to a restaurant until I notice a bunch of people are crowded into the small conference room with the lights out.

  Peeking through the blinds I see it’s them all right, Kyle, Frank, Barbara, Rosalind, Donnato, and Duane sitting around the table with piles of goodies on paper plates. But instead of jokes and lively conversation everyone is turned intently toward the television where a videotape is playing of Ana Grey striding up the steps of the Dana Orthopedic Clinic followed by a half dozen federal marshals in orange raid vests. I had lent Barbara a cassette of the Eberhardt arrest given to me by one of the TV stations, not expecting her to make it the afternoon’s feature presentation.

  When I open the door, they are surprised to see me in person.

  “Take notes, guys. This is how it’s done.”

  I unload my handfuls of vanilla creme cookies, then sit beside Barbara and pick a strawberry off her plate.

  “Have some lunch,” offers Rosalind.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind,” Barbara says of the tape.

  “Hell no, I just hope you charged admission.”

  We watch a close-up of Randall Eberhardt’s distraught face as I brush past him and the camera follows us down the hall. You’d think my buddies would cheer me on like they did the morning after I made that California First bust, but instead there is an uncomfortable tension in the viewing room, the way I guess it has to be when someone leaves a group and the group goes on without her.

  “This will be very good for you, Ana. You look like a leader,” Barbara observes.

  “Not like I’m about to wig out?” I turn in Donnato’s direction but he is back in the shadows sipping coffee. His silence is nagging. It seems like a long
time since the potluck when he was fooling around, calling me Annie Oakley in black lace.

  “No,” says Barbara, “it looks like you’re in control of a tight situation.”

  “Pardon me,” chuckles Duane. “But this is not the invasion of Normandy, they’re enterin’ a doctor’s office, what’s he gonna do, zap ’em with his X-ray machine?”

  Frank and Kyle give a couple of halfhearted guffaws.

  “The media was there and Galloway made her point person,” Barbara answers crisply. “That’s significant.”

  “Why so?”

  “People around here are finally realizing that women can do the job.”

  Another silence. Nobody wants to get into that.

  “Duane thinks it’s a dog case,” I explain.

  “There is no case,” says Duane. “Galloway and the Director are jerking each other off.”

  “You’re jealous,” Barbara fairly purrs, fingering the pearl around her neck.

  “Show me a case. What evidence was recovered from the search and seizure?”

  Although I am pleased to see Duane irritated, I have to admit to everyone that we found nothing in the office to implicate the doctor and, in fact, the Assistant U.S. Attorney is scrambling to figure out if there’s anything to charge him with at all.

  “See what I mean? Another pathetic dog-and-pony show.”

  “In today’s world of media events and photo opportunities everything’s for show,” Kyle says slowly and reasonably. “Ana did what was required for the six o’clock news. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.”

  The tape is over. Rosalind gets up and turns on the lights.

  Duane Carter spreads his scrawny knees and leans his chair way back on its rear legs.

  “I’d be scared shitless if I were you. The case is still open and you’ve got nada—”

  Luckily I’m already there. I’d been thinking about Mason’s behavior when she came to our office and that night over dinner. The dilated pupils, the shaky hands, the discordant energy when she returned from the rest room had been working the back of my mind.

  “We know Mason’s an abuser,” I cut in sharply, trying not to look at the aggressive display of crotch. “I’m running criminal checks on everyone on her staff. She’s doing drugs again and she’s getting them from somewhere.”