Beyond This Point Are Monsters

by Margaret Millar

  “I guess so.” She didn’t tell him that her decision had nothing to do with coffee or with him. She only wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be returning to an empty house, that Dulzura would have plenty of time to get home before she did.

  They stopped at a small roadside cantina on the out­skirts of Boca de Rio. The proprietor, after a voluble ex­change of greetings with Leo in Spanish, led the way to a table beside the window. It was a picture window without much of a picture, a stunted paloverde tree and a patch of weeds half-dead of drought.

  She said, as though there’d been no lapse of time since midafternoon and the ride to Mrs. Osborne’s house, “Rob­ert must have had some girl friends.”

  “Temporary ones. None of them hung around after a few bouts with Mrs. Osborne.”

  “Robert wasn’t a weak or timid man. Why didn’t he stand up to her?”

  “She was pretty subtle about it, I guess. Maybe he didn’t realize what was going on. Or maybe he didn’t care.”

  “You mean he had no need of anyone besides Ruth.” She stared out at the patch of weeds dying hard like hope. “Leo, listen. There’s no—no reasonable doubt that he and Ruth—”

  “No reasonable doubt.”

  “All those years, ever since he was a boy?”

  “I repeat, seventeen-year-olds aren’t boys. Some fifteen-year-olds aren’t either.”

  “What are you hinting at?”

  “He was fifteen when she sent him away to school.”

  “But that was because his father died.”

  “Was it? The usual pattern in such cases is for the mother to lean more heavily on the son, not send him away.”

  The proprietor brought mugs of coffee and a dish con­taining slivers of dark sweet Mexican chocolate to sprinkle on top. The chocolate melted as soon as it touched the hot liquid, leaving tiny fragrant pools of oil which caught the sun and shone iridescent like little round rainbows.

  Leo broke up the rainbows with the tip of a spoon. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about those two years he was gone, remembering things, some trivial, some impor­tant. Ruth was depressed—I remember that well enough. It colored our lives. She told me that every hour was like a big blob of gray she couldn’t see through or over or underneath.”

  “What about Mrs. Osborne?”

  “She kept pretty much to herself—normal enough for a woman who’d just lost her husband. The Osbornes had very little social life because of Osborne’s drinking, so Mrs. Osborne’s seclusion wasn’t particularly noticeable. We’d never seen much of her anyway, now we saw less.” The miniature rainbows in his cup had re-formed and he broke them up again. “I recall one occasion when I asked Ruth to go over and visit Mrs. Osborne, thinking it might do them both some good. Ruth surprised me by agreeing right away. In fact, she even baked a cake to take with her. She started out on foot toward the Osborne ranch—she couldn’t drive a car and she turned down my offer of a ride. She stayed away for hours. She was still gone when I finished work for the day, so I went to look for her. I found her sitting on the edge of the dry riverbed. There was a flock of blackbirds beside her and she was feeding the cake to them piece by piece. She looked quite happy. I hadn’t seen her look that happy for a long time. Without saying a word she got in the car and we drove home. She never told me what happened, I never asked. That was nine years ago, yet it’s one of the most vivid pictures I have left of Ruth, her sitting quietly on the riverbank feeding cake to a bunch of blackbirds.”

  “She liked to feed things?”

  “Yes. Dogs, cats, birds, anything that came along.”

  “So did Robert.” She looked out at the falling sun. “Per­haps they were just good friends, just very good friends.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’d like to go home now, Leo.”

  “All right.”

  the pungent smell of oregano drifting out of the kitchen windows welcomed her home.

  Dulzura was at the work counter shredding cheese for enchiladas. She said, without turning, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I thought, an early dinner with a little wine—How about that?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did I do right in court? I was nervous, maybe people couldn’t hear me.”

  “They heard you.”

  “What kind of wine would you like?”

  Devon was on the point of saying “Any kind,” when she remembered Leo’s insisting that she start making deci­sions on her own. “Port.”

  “All we got is sherry. The only reason I asked is because you always say you don’t care what kind.”

  So much for decisions, Devon thought, and went up­stairs to take a shower.

  After dinner Devon walked by herself in the warm still night. The sound of her footsteps, inaudible to a human being, was picked up by a barn owl. He hissed a warning to his mate, who was hunting for rats outside the packing shed and underneath the bleachers where the men ate their lunch. Devon sat on the bottom step of the bleachers. Both owls flew silently over her head and vanished into the tamarisk trees that ringed the reservoir. She had often heard the owls between twilight and dawn, but this was the first time she had more than a glimpse of their faces, and it was a shock to her to discover that they didn’t look like birds at all but like monkeys or ugly children, acciden­tally winged.

  The water, which in the daytime appeared murky and hardly fit even for irrigating, shone in the moonlight as if it were clean enough to drink. She remembered a giant scoop probing the muddy depths for Robert, and bringing up old tires and wine bottles and beer cans, pieces of lumber and rusting machinery, and finally, the baby bones which Valenzuela had carried away in a shoe box. Months later she’d asked Valenzuela about the bones. He said the baby had probably been born to one of the girls who fol­lowed the migrants. Staring down at the water Devon thought of the dead child and the long-gone mother, and of Valenzuela simultaneously crossing himself and cursing as he packed the bones into the little shoe-box coffin.

  Suddenly a match flared on the opposite side of the reservoir and moments later the smell of cigarette smoke floated across the water. She knew that members of the Estivar household were forbidden to smoke—“The air,” Estivar said, “is already dry and hot and dirty enough”—and she was a little uneasy and more than a little curious. She rose and began moving quietly along the dusty path. She had a flashlight in her hand but there was no need to turn it on.

  “Jaime?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  In the moonlight Jaime’s face was as ghostly white as the barn owl’s. But he was neither winged nor wild and he made no attempt to escape. Instead, he took another deep drag of the cigarette, letting the smoke curl up out of his mouth and around his head like ectoplasm. Nothing materialized except a voice: “Smoke is supposed to keep the mosquitoes away.”

  “And does it?”

  “I’ve only been bit twice so far.” He scratched his left ankle with the toe of his right shoe. The wooden crate he was sitting on creaked rheumatically at the joints. “You going to tell my folks on me?”

  “No, but they’ll find out some time.”

  “Not tonight, anyhow. She went to bed with a head­ache and he’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “He didn’t say. He had a phone call and left the house, looking like he was glad of an excuse to get away.”

  “Why would that be, Jaime?”

  “Him and Mom were fighting, they’d been at it ever since court.”

  “I didn’t know your parents ever fought.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He took another drag on the cigarette and blew smoke, slowly and scientifically, at a mosquito that was buzzing at his forearm. “He gets mean, she gets nervous. Sometimes vice versa.”

  “Money,” she said. “That’s what
most couples fight about, I suppose.”

  “Not them.”

  “No?”

  “They fight about people. Us kids mostly, only like to­night it was about other people.”

  She realized that she shouldn’t be standing in the dark prying information out of a fourteen-year-old boy but she made no move to leave or to alter the course of the conver­sation. It was the first time she’d ever really heard Jaime talk. He sounded cool and rational, like an elderly man assessing the problems of a pair of youngsters.

  She said, “What other people?”

  “Everybody whose name came up.”

  “Did my name come up?”

  “A little bit.”

  “How little?”

  “It was just about you and Mr. Bishop. Him and my dad don’t groove, and my dad’s afraid Mr. Bishop might get to be boss of the ranch some day. I mean, if he married you—”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “But my mom says you’d never marry him on account of his mal ojo, evil eye.”

  “Do you believe in things like that?”

  “I guess not. He’s got funny eyes, though. Sometimes it’s better not to take a chance.”

  “Thank you for the advice, Jaime.”

  “That’s okay.”

  The owls appeared again, flying low and in utter si­lence over the reservoir. One of them had a rat in its claws. The rat’s tail, bright with blood, swung gently in the moon­light.

  “People with mal ojo,” Devon said, “what do they do?”

  “They just look at you.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you got a jinx.”

  “Like Carla Lopez.”

  “Yeah, like Carla Lopez.” Jaime hesitated. “She was one of the people my mom and dad were quarreling about tonight. There was a big argument over which of them hired her to work for us summer before last and which of them got the idea of hiring somebody in the first place. Mom said it was my dad’s idea because Carla Lopez had worked for the Bishops the previous summer and my dad couldn’t let Mr. Bishop be ahead of him like that.”

  “Did Carla cause any trouble when she was staying at your house?”

  “Not for me. But she dangled herself in front of my brothers.”

  “She what?”

  “Dangled herself. You know, like a drum majorette.”

  “I see.”

  “My two older brothers, both of them already had steady girl friends, so they didn’t pay so much attention. But Felipe, he really twitched. So did the cop.”

  “What cop?”

  “Valenzuela. He used to make excuses to come out to the house, things like talking to my dad about the wetback problem, but he came to see her.” Jaime lowered his voice as though he suspected one of the trees might be bugged. “The word got around at school not to tangle with any of the Lopez family because they had protection. Even Felipe stayed away from them.”

  “Why do you say, even Felipe?”

  “He was a good fighter, he took a mail-order course in karate. Anyway, he left at the end of summer. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life messing with fertilizers and bug sprays, so he went to find a job in the city.”

  This was the story Jaime had been given, and it made sense. It was also reinforced by the arrival now and then of letters which Estivar read aloud at the evening meal: “Dear Folks, Here I am in Seattle working at an aircraft factory, making good money and feeling fine . . .” Whether it was the words themselves or the slow deliberate way Estivar read them, to Jaime the letters didn’t sound natu­ral. That Felipe should write at all wasn’t natural. He was too impatient. The thoughts that skittered across his mind couldn’t be caught by a pen and pinned down to paper. Still, the letters came: “Dear Folks, I won’t be able to fly home for Christmas, so here is ten dollars for Jaime to buy a new sweater . . .”

  He couldn’t see the expression on Devon’s face but he knew she was watching him and he felt vulnerable and guilty. He wished the subject of Felipe hadn’t come up. It was as if he’d been tricked into it by the night, the soft-talking woman, the reservoir catching the moon’s rays like a giant mal ojo.

  He rose abruptly, dropping the cigarette on the ground and stamping on it. “Felipe had no connection with the viseros that did the killing. He was gone before they were even hired. Anyway, my mom says maybe the viseros didn’t do it, it’s easy to accuse people when they aren’t around to defend themselves.”

  Too easy, she thought. Leo’s accusation that Ruth and Robert were lovers came only after they were both dead. There was no real evidence: Robert was sent away to school . . . Ruth was depressed and suffered from head­aches . . . Robert didn’t have girl friends . . . “When I worked for the Bishops,” Carla had said, “everything was quiet. Mr. Bishop used to read a lot and Mrs. Bishop took long walks for her headaches.” What kind of walks had they been, innocent purposeless strolls around the countryside? Or did she head straight for the river, the most direct route to Robert?

  “Well, I better be going,” Jaime said, “before some­body comes barging out looking for me.”

  “Wait just a minute, Jaime.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “I want to get in touch with Carla Lopez and I can’t remember the address she gave in court this morning.”

  “You could ask her family in Boca de Rio, only they probably wouldn’t tell you. They’d think you were trying to cause trouble for her. They’re that way—you know, suspicious.” After a moment he added, “I bet the cop knows where she’s at—Valenzuela.”

  “I’ll try him. Thank you, Jaime.”

  “You’re welcome.” He sounded as if he wasn’t quite sure how welcome.

  there were several valenzuelas in the telephone directory but only one was listed in the yellow pages under Insurance. The same number was given for both office and home, and Devon had the impression of a shoe­string operation, not the kind of thing that would lure a man away from an important job in the sheriff’s depart­ment.

  The voice that answered the phone was hoarse and unsteady. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Valenzuela?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Mrs. Osborne. Mrs. Robert Osborne.”

  “If you want a policeman you called the wrong place. I’m retired. In fact, I’m tired and retired and maybe a little drunk too. How’s that?”

  “Not so good. I was hoping you could help me.”

  “I’m not in the helping business any more.”

  “I merely want some information,” Devon said. “I thought you might know how I can get in touch with Carla Lopez.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to ask her some questions.”

  “She has no phone.”

  “Can you tell me where she lives?”

  “She’s not home tonight.”

  “I see. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you. I can get her address tomorrow morning from the court records or from Mr. Ford.”

  There was such a long silence that Devon thought Valenzuela had hung up or perhaps walked away from the phone to pour himself another drink. Then, “Catalpa Street. 431 Catalpa Street, Apartment Nine.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Valenzuela.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  It was the second time within the hour that she’d been welcome but not very.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  as soon as Estivar stopped the station wagon, lights went on around the outside of the house as though Mrs. Osborne had been waiting for him in the dark with the relentless patience of a predator. Fog had rolled in from the sea and the merry-go-round wind chime above the courtyard door was still. The brass horses who’d pranced and galloped all afternoon to the sound of their own music stood silent now except for the moisture dripping off their hoofs o
nto the flagstones below.

  “You came,” Mrs. Osborne said, sounding a little sur­prised that he’d kept his word.

  “I usually obey orders, ma’am.”

  “It wasn’t an order. Dear me, you’ve completely misun­derstood the situation.”

  In her blond wig and cherry-red velvet robe she looked as though she were going to a party or expecting one to come to her. Estivar didn’t feel like a party, either coming or going. The fog made him uneasy. It seemed to cut off the rest of the world and leave him alone in a small cold gray room with this woman he feared.

  He said, “You sent for me.”

  “Of course. I thought it was time you and I had a nice friendly chat. It might be our last . . . Now, don’t go imagin­ing that I’m depressed or anything like that. I’m simply being realistic. Things do happen, you know. People go away, they die, they even become other people sometimes. Things happen,” she repeated. “Come in the house, won’t you?”

  “All right.” He was glad to get out of the fog. At least the house was warm, the lamps were lit and there was a fire glowing gold and coral in the grate.

  She sat down in one of the wing chairs flanking the fireplace, motioning him to take the other. There was a backgammon table between them. The dice were thrown and the black and white pieces arranged as if someone had walked out in the middle of a game. She and Robbie used to play backgammon, Estivar thought. She always let him win even if she had to cheat to do it, so that when he lost to Rufo or Cruz he was bewildered, he couldn’t under­stand the sudden failure of luck and skill together.

  “You look nervous, Estivar,” she said. “And guilty. Do you have anything to feel guilty about?”

  “Nothing that would be of interest to you, ma’am.”

  “In your testimony this morning you made some unflat­tering references to my family. I don’t mind for myself. But you gave people the wrong impression of my son.”

  “I didn’t mean to do that. I meant to give them the right impression.”

  She either missed the irony or pretended to. “What­ever your intentions, the effect was the same—that my son was prejudiced, that he didn’t get along with his own foreman, let alone the migrant workers. It’s all on the re­cord now and there’s only one way it can be removed.”