Tula waited for so long in silence that she had resumed praying before the man spoke to her, “It’s what I have to do. I don’t have a damn choice, and it’s your own fault. You’ll tell the police what you saw and they’ll arrest me. Even though I didn’t kill that girl, they’ll charge me with murder. Do you understand?”
His voice wasn’t so empty of emotion now. It gave the girl hope, but she was inexplicably disappointed, too. She had felt so peaceful and free kneeling there, waiting for it to end.
Tula considered turning to look at the man but decided against it. Looking into the barrel of the silver gun might bring her fear back, and she didn’t want that to happen. She didn’t want to risk crying or losing control of her bladder again.
“I understand,” she said to Squires. “I’m sorry I saw what I saw. I didn’t mean to be in the tree watching you, but I was.”
Tula glanced at the water’s mirror surface and saw that Squires was leaning toward her now. Then she felt the barrel of the gun bump the back of her head as the man said, “You told me yourself you don’t lie. Even if you promised me you wouldn’t tell the cops, I wouldn’t believe you. Do you understand now why I have to do this? Unless you promise me-I mean, really promise me-and mean it.”
The man’s voice was shaking, and Tula knew he was going to pull the trigger. She closed her eyes, pressing her chin to her fingers, as she replied, “I can’t promise you, I’m sorry. If the police ask me, I will have to tell them the truth. I won’t lie to you and I won’t lie to them. It’s because of another promise I have made.”
In Tula’s ear, she heard a metallic Click-Click and she knew that the man had pulled back the revolver’s hammer. On her cheeks, she felt tears streaming, but she wasn’t afraid. She was ready for what happened next.
What happened next was, in the high cypress limbs above them, there was a squawking, cracking sound. Then the fluttering of wings as a bird tumbled from the tree canopy and thudded hard on the ground nearby. Tula looked up, surprised. Then she was on her feet and running toward it without even thinking, tucking the jade amulet and silver medallion into her T-shirt as she sprinted.
“It’s a baby egret!” she cried, kneeling over a thrashing bird that looked naked because its feathers hadn’t come in yet. “I think it broke its wing.”
Carefully, the girl cupped the fledgling in her hands, using her thumb to try to steady the bird’s weak neck. And she stood, saying over her shoulder to Squires, “That must be her mother up there. See her?”
Tula motioned to a snowy egret that was hovering overhead, its yellow feet extended as if to land, excited by the peeping noises the baby bird was making.
“Yes,” Tula said, “its wing is broken. At the convent, we took care of many sick animals. We can help this bird, I think.” Then she looked at Squires, adding, “I can’t stand it anymore. I have to go to the bathroom now.”
Then she stopped because of what she saw.
Harris Squires was sitting on the ground. He was rocking and crying, his hands locked around his knees, making a soft moaning sound in his misery. If the gun was somewhere on the ground nearby, Tula didn’t see it.
The scene was even stranger to Tula because, the way the man was sitting, slope-shouldered and huge, reminded her of a bear she had seen begging for peanuts at the zoo in Guatemala City.
The bear had struck the girl as being very sad, an animal as repulsed with itself as it was humiliated by its captivity. The scene was even stronger in Tula’s mind because her father had taken her to the zoo the day before he was murdered.
Slowly, the girl walked toward Squires. She was embarrassed for him and sad in the same way that she had felt sad for the bear. She placed the little bird a safe distance away, in case the big man moved, and then hesitated before touching her fingers to Squires’s shoulder.
Tula patted the man gently as she might have patted the bear, given a chance. And then said to him kindly, “I must go behind a tree and use the bathroom. I can’t stand it anymore. Please. But promise me something. It’s important. Promise me you won’t look. I know that you have seen me without clothes. But I don’t want a man ever to see me that way again. Do you promise?”
Rocking and sobbing, the giant nodded his head.
Tula said to Squires, “My mother had a little doll like this. She wore it pinned to her blouse. Even the same color, bright orange and green, instead of blue like most of them. They’re called worry dolls in English. At night, you tell your worries to the doll and put it under your pillow. The next morning, all your worries are gone.”
The girl sniffed the doll, knowing it couldn’t be her mother’s-not way out here, so far from where a woman could get work cleaning houses or mopping floors in a restaurant-but, then, Tula had to wonder, because the odor of raw cotton was so familiar.
Maybe it seemed familiar because everything else inside this man’s trailer was so foreign.
Squires had started the generator, and they were inside the RV that smelled sour and stale like the ashes of a cold cooking fire. Tula had found the doll, only an inch tall, mounted on a brooch pin in a strange room where there was a camera, lights on tripods and a bed with a strange black leather contraption hanging from the ceiling.
The doll was on a table piled with photos of naked women. The women were frozen in poses so obscene that Tula had looked away, preferring to focus on the miniature Guatemalan doll in traditional Mayan dress.
The photos were of Mexican women, judging from their features, but a few Guatemalan women, too. Tula didn’t linger over details and closed the door to the room behind her, feeling as if the ugliness of that space might follow her.
Squires was sitting in a recliner, looking dazed, eyes staring straight ahead as he drank from a pint bottle of tequila. He had found the revolver, which was now lying in his lap, and Tula sensed that he was rethinking what had happened out there in the cypress grove. She had witnessed his breakdown and he would begin hating her for it soon, the girl feared, if she didn’t get his mind on something else.
After pinning the worry doll to her T-shirt, Tula went to the kitchen, where she found cans of beans and salsa and meat but no tortillas. There was a can opener, too, and plates, and a cheap little paring knife with a bent blade, but sharp.
“You need food, that’s why you feel so tired. I’ll cook something,” Tula said to Squires as she carried a pan to the stove. A moment later, she said, “We have a gas stove at the convent, but I can’t get this one to light. Unless I’m doing it wrong.”
Squires blinked his eyes, seeming to hear her for the first time. It took a while, but he finally said, “You’re a nun?”
“Someday, when I’m older,” Tula replied. “I am going to dedicate my life to God and to helping people. My patron saint is Joan of Arc. Have you heard of her?”
After a few beats of silence, Tula added, “I am modeling my life after the Maiden. That’s what the people of France called her, the Maiden. But to her friends, she was called Jehanne.”
“The gas isn’t on,” Squires said to the girl but didn’t get up from the chair. His indifference suggested he didn’t care about food. But he did appear interested in the convent Tula had mentioned because, after several seconds of silence, he said, “You live with nuns? No men around at all, huh? That’s got to be weird. Not even to fix shit?”
“The convent is where I live and go to school. I work in the kitchen, and the garden, too. That’s how I learned to speak English and to cook using a stove.”
Tula had been twisting the dials for the burners without success. Now she was searching the walls, looking under the stove, hoping the man would take the hint and make the gas work. He needed food, not tequila, and Tula wondered-not for the first time-why so many men preferred to be drunk and stupid rather than to eat hot food.
The giant took a sip from the bottle and told her, “I was raised Catholic. I used to be, anyway. But then all that stuff about priests cornholing little boys-and the goddamn Pope knew about i
t ’cause he was probably screwing boys himself before he got old. Little boys are in big demand in the Catholic religion. That’s probably the problem with you. You’ve been brainwashed by all that sick Catholic bullshit. Why else would you pretend to be a boy?”
Tula wondered if Squires was trying to upset her, give himself a reason to get angry again and shoot her. So she changed the subject by saying, “I’ve been thinking of a way to solve your problem. I don’t want you to go to jail. There’s another way, I think, to keep the police from arresting you.”
That surprised the man, Tula could see it, so she added, “I believe you when you say you’re not a murderer. Just looking into your face, you couldn’t do something like that-not by yourself, you couldn’t. I don’t want to tell the police what I saw. That’s why I’ve been thinking about this problem.”
“My guardian angel,” Squires said in his flat voice, not bothering to attempt sarcasm. “I forgot. You were sent by God in case I get into trouble. Lucky me.”
He took another drink, and Tula could feel the anger building in the man.
Getting irritated herself, the girl turned away from the counter where she had the salsa open and had used the sharp paring knife to cut the meat into slices. “Listen to me!” she said, frowning at the giant. “I want to find my mother and brother. That’s all I care about. I want to go home to the mountains. If I’m home in the mountains, your policemen can’t ask me questions. That’s why I’ve been thinking of a way to help you.”
That made Squires snort, a sound close to laughter. “What do you want me to do, buy you a plane ticket?” he asked. “Drive you to the airport and wave good-bye? That easy, huh? I don’t think so, chula.”
Tula felt the Maiden flow into her head, giving instructions, which is why she calmed herself before crossing the room, where she placed her hand on the giant’s curly blond head. “You may not believe it, but it’s true,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here unless God wanted me to help you. He loves you. He wants you to come back to Him. You can believe me or not believe me, but you can’t deny the goodness that’s in your heart.”
The girl didn’t say it, but her recent words came into Harris Squires’s mind. Do you remember the goodness that was in you as a child?
The girl patted the man’s head as he stared down into the tequila bottle. Tula could feel Squires’s brain fighting her, but she continued, “The Maiden has told me how to help you. We must go to Immokalee and ask the people there about my mother and my brother. I have two aunts and an uncle somewhere, too. When we find them, I want you to come home with us to the mountains. In your truck, you can drive us.”
Tula looked around the room, seeing the stained walls, the carpet, a peanut can filled with cigarette butts, sensing in the next room the obscene photos staring up at the ceiling tiles.
She said, “This place has sin and ugliness all around. It’s no wonder you’re unhappy. You should leave this dirty life behind while you still can. You would like the mountains. We live closer to God in the mountains. It is cool there, even in summer, and the rains will begin soon. You can stay a week or a month. Maybe you will like it and want to build a home. The police won’t find you if we leave Florida. They can’t ask me questions.”
“Drive you clear to Mexico?” Squires said like it was a stupid idea. But at least he was thinking about it. Tula could see that his mind was working it through.
“Guatemala, not Mexico,” Tula corrected him. “It’s much more beautiful than Mexico. And the villages aren’t so dirty. Most of them, anyway.”
Yes, Squires was giving the idea some consideration because he asked, “Where’s Guatemala? Is it farther than Mexico? Mexico’s a hell of a long way.”
“I’m not sure of the exact distance,” Tula said, coming as close to lying as she could allow herself.
“But it’s farther than Mexico, that’s what you’re telling me.”
Tula replied, “What does distance matter when there are roads and you own a truck? You can drive the whole way. Or take a train, once we’re across the border. I hear the coaches are nice. I’ve never been inside a train, but I rode on the top of boxcars from Chiapas to San Luis Potosi. Three different train lines, I had to board.”
“You’re shitting me. You climbed up and rode on the top of a train when it was moving? Christ, what do those things do, fifty, sixty miles an hour?”
Tula replied, “One night, an old man told me we were traveling almost three hundred miles an hour, but I think he was drunk. It’s the way even adults travel if they want to come north. Sometimes, riding on top of the train was nice. We could pick green mangoes if the trees were close enough, and it only rained once.
“In Chiapas, though, it was dangerous. There are a lot of Mexican gangs there that wear bandannas and tattoos. At three stops, they robbed some of the men. And I think they attacked two girls who were on one of the cars behind me.”
Tula started to add that she hadn’t seen it happen, but she had heard the girls screaming. Her voice caught, and she couldn’t continue with the story.
Mentioning gangs and tattoos reminded Squires that the police weren’t the only ones looking for him. Laziro Victorino would be cruising Red Citrus the moment he heard about the alligator with a dead girl’s bones in its belly. Victorino was a little guy, but he was all muscle and attitude, a scary little shit who enjoyed killing people. Cutting them up with that box cutter of his or shooting them behind the ear and feeding them to his dogs.
Squires had heard the stories and he had seen a couple of the V-man’s snuff films. The teardrop tattoo beneath the dude’s eye was so weird it was scary.
What Squires hoped was that Victorino would run into Frankie, who might well kick the shit out of that vicious little wetback. Or vice versa. Either way, it was okay with Squires. He hoped he never saw either one of them again in his life. He was sick of the whole goddamn business.
A question formed in Squires’s head as he reviewed his predicament: Why the hell did he have to stay in Florida?
The answer was simple: He couldn’t think of a single goddamn reason.
Not the way things were now. Almost everyone he knew was an asshole or a drug dealer or a crackhead killer like the V-man. The girl, Tula, was a weirdo Jesus freak, but she had hit the nail on the head when it came to the life he was living. It was a dirty life. It made him feel dirty-Squires could admit that to himself now that he was on the run from a murder rap. So why not make a change before it was too late? Maybe going to Mexico wasn’t such a bad idea.
He said to the girl, “I drove to New Orleans once and it took me twelve hours. How much farther is the border? I think you have to drive clear across Texas, too.”
Squires placed the tequila bottle, then the revolver, on a magazine stand, and sat up a little as he tried to picture the geography of the southern United States. In his mind, everything south of Texas was just a hazy design, with curves and bulges bordered on both sides by oceans.
“First,” Tula reminded him, “we must go to Immokalee and ask about my mother. I’m not going home without my family. People call her Mary. Mary Choimha. Or Maria sometimes, too. She lived at your trailer park for a while, that’s why I went there first.”
“Every chula in Florida is named Mary or Maria,” Squires said. “I can’t keep track of everyone who rents at my place. You Mexicans are always coming and going.”
Tula said, “Then you lied to me. You said you had met her, that you could take me to her. You told me that at the trailer park last night.”
Squires shrugged. “So what? We’re not all perfect like you.”
“You would remember my mother,” the girl insisted. “She’s very beautiful-much prettier than me. Carlson said, last year, he saw your wife talking to my mother. That she gave my mother a cell phone… or maybe you gave it to her, Carlson wasn’t sure. But the phone stopped working two months ago, which is why I came here. My mother would have called me if her phone was working.”
Squires told
the girl, “I don’t have a wife, especially not the bitch you mean,” as he leaned back to think about what he’d just heard.
The information was disturbing. All kids thought their mothers were pretty-Squires all too aware that he was a rare exception, because his mother was a chain-smoking witch. But why would Frankie give Tula’s mother a cell phone unless Frankie had something to gain?
Squires had given dozens of cheap phones to Mexicans, the cell phones that charged a flat fee with a limited number of minutes. Usually, he gave them to men who were good workers-and it was always for selfish reasons: It was a way of controlling the guy, make him indebted, and a little scared, too, that the phone would be taken away or the service canceled.
Christ, Frankie had run so many Mexican girls through the hunting camp and their double-wide at Red Citrus, he would have needed a calculator to keep track.
Was it possible that this kid’s mother was one of the chulas Frankie had used? Squires considered the girl’s age, which would put the mother in her mid- to late twenties, Mexican girls being prone to marrying young.
The possibility was too upsetting, though, and Squires decided that it wasn’t something he wanted to think about. He stared at the girl intensely for a moment, then looked away, suddenly aware there was something eerily familiar about the girl’s eyes and high cheekbones.
“Why would you listen to that crazy old drunk, Carlson?” Squires said to the girl. “I don’t want to hear any more about your mother. Understand?”
Aware of the man’s sudden mood change, Tula said, “Let me fix you some food while we talk. You need to eat for strength if we’re going to drive to Immokalee.”
The man laced his fingers together-Tula had never seen hands so huge-and sat up in the recliner. He was trying to remember how many Marys and Marias he or Frankie had screwed or used one way or another. But then felt a withering guilt descending, so he stopped himself. Instead, he let his mind shift back to the girl’s idea about leaving Florida.
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