A Stranger in My Grave

by Margaret Millar

  In an ordinary person these changes of emotion would take time to evolve. But Fielding was like a man who’s been hypno­tized so often that a snap of the fingers will put him under. A smell of the cork, a tilt of the bottle, and By God, I’ll teach those smug, hypocritical, patronizing bastards.

  One of the young Negro men had approached the car and was kicking the right rear tire absently, as if he had no motive other than that the tire was there to kick and he didn’t have anything more important to do.

  Fielding shouted through the closed window, “Get your black feet off that tire, coon boy!” He knew these were fighting words, but he knew, too, in that corner of his mind which still had access to the real world, that the insult had been muffled by the window glass and scrambled by the wind.

  He pressed the starter button. The car gave a couple of for­ward lurches, then the engine died, and he saw that he hadn’t released the emergency brake. He released it, started the engine again, and looked in the rearview mirror to make sure the road was clear of traffic behind him. There were no nearby cars, and he was on the point of pulling away from the curb when he saw two Juanitas running down the middle of the road, barefooted, their arms flailing like windmills in a gale, their skirts ballooning around their thighs.

  The sight of these two furies coming at him made him panic. He pressed the accelerator right down to the floorboard. The engine flooded and died again, and he knew that he had no choice but to wait.

  He turned down the window and looked back at the road, nar­rowing his eyes until the two Juanitas merged into one. He could hear her screaming twenty yards away. A scream in this part of town was interpreted not as a cry for help, but as a sign of impending trouble: the group of young Negroes and Mexicans had disappeared without a trace, and the doors below the sign billar had closed as if in response to an electronic ear alert to the decibels of danger. When and if the police arrived, nobody would know anything about a car thief and a screaming woman.

  Fielding glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was 6:30. There was still plenty of time. All he had to do was keep his head, and the girl would be handled easily enough. The fact that she was running toward the car indicated that she hadn’t called the police. The important thing was to stay calm, play it cool. . . .

  But as he watched her approach, rage beat against his temples and exploded behind his eyes with flashes of colored lights. Between flashes Juanita’s face appeared, streaked with black tears, red from cold and exertion.

  “You—sonna bitch—stole my car.”

  “I was coming to pick you up. I told the bartender I’d be right back.”

  “Dirty—liar.”

  He reached across the seat and unlocked and opened the right front door. “Get in.”

  “I’m gonna—calla cops.”

  “Get in.”

  The repetition of the direct order and the opening of the door had the same effect on her as his putting the dime on the table in the café. The dime was there to be picked up; the door was there to be entered. She went around the front of the car, keeping her eyes fixed steadily on Fielding as if she suspected he might try to run her down.

  She got in, still breathing hard from her sprint down the road. “You sonofabitch, what’ve you got to say?”

  “Nothing you’d believe.”

  “I wouldn’t believe nothing you said, you—”

  “Take it easy.” Fielding lit a cigarette. The flare of the match blended with the lights flashing behind his eyes, so that he wasn’t quite sure which was real. “I’m going to make a bargain with you.”

  “You make a bargain with me? That’s a laugh. You’ve got more guts than a sausage factory.”

  “I want to borrow your car for a couple of hours.”

  “Oh, you do, eh? And what do I get out of it?”

  “Some information.”

  “Who says I want information from an old crackpot like you?”

  “Watch your language, girl.”

  Although he didn’t raise his voice, she seemed to sense the force of his anger, and when she spoke again, she sounded almost conciliatory. “What kind of information?”

  “About your rich uncle.”

  “Why should I want to hear about him for? He’s been dead and buried for four years. Besides, how would you know anything about him that my old lady didn’t tell me already?”

  “There’s no similarity between what your old mother told you and what I’m going to tell you. If you cooperate. All you have to do is lend me your car for a couple of hours. I’ll drive you home now and bring the car back to your house when I’ve finished my errand.”

  Juanita rubbed her cheeks with the back of her hand, looking surprised to find tears there, as if she’d already forgotten that she had wept and why. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “You will.”

  “Why will I?”

  “You’re going to be curious to find out why your mother has been lying in her teeth all these years.”

  He started the car and pulled away from the curb. Juanita seemed too astonished to object. “Lying? My old lady? You must be crazy. Why, she’s so pure she . . .” Juanita used an ancient and earthy figure of speech without embarrassment. “I don’t believe you, Foster. I think you’re making all this up so you can get the car.”

  “You don’t have to believe me. Just ask her.”

  “Ask her what?”

  “Where your rich uncle got his money.”

  “He had cattle interests.”

  “He was a cowhand.”

  “He owned—”

  “He owned nothing but the shirt on his back,” Fielding said, “and ten chances to one he’d stolen that.” This was not true, but Fielding couldn’t admit it, even to himself. He had to keep himself convinced that Camilla had been a liar, a thief, and a scoundrel.

  Juanita said, “Then where did the money come from that he left to me in the trust fund?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you—there is no trust fund.”

  “But I get $200 regular every month. Where does it come from?”

  “You’d better ask your mother.”

  “You talk like she’s a crook or something.”

  “Or something.”

  He turned left at the next corner. He wasn’t familiar with the city, but in his years of wandering, he had taught himself to observe landmarks carefully so he could always find his way back to his hotel or rooming house. He did it now automatically, like a blind man counting the number of steps between places.

  Juanita was sitting on the edge of the seat, tense and rigid, one hand clutching her plastic purse and the other the snakeskin shoes. “She’s no crook.”

  “Ask her.”

  “I don’t have to. Her and me, maybe we don’t get along so buddy-buddy, but I swear she’s no crook. Unless she was doing something for somebody else.”

  “Unless that, yes,” Fielding said blandly.

  “How come you pretend to know so much about my uncle and my old lady?”

  “Camilla was a friend of mine once.”

  “But you never even saw my old lady till this afternoon.” She paused to give this some thought. “Why, you never even saw me till that day you got in the fight with Joe.”

  “I’d heard about you.”

  “Where? How?”

  He was tempted, momentarily, to tell her where and how, to show her the letter from Daisy he’d taken out of the old suitcase that morning. It was this letter, dated almost four years previously, that had sent him to the Velada in the first place, in the hope of finding, or getting some information about, a young woman called Juanita Garcia. That she happened to be there at the time was luck, but he still wasn’t sure whether it was good luck or bad luck. That her husband happened to drop in and started
the quar­rel was pure bad luck: it had put Fielding’s timing off, it had tem­porarily dislodged his whole purpose in coming to town, and, what might turn out to be the worst misfortune yet, it had brought Pinata into the affair. Pinata, and then Camilla. One of the most terrible shocks in Fielding’s life occurred at the moment he looked across Mrs. Rosario’s bedroom and saw the picture of Camilla.

  That’s when I should have stopped, he thought. I should have walked away right then.

  Even now he didn’t know why he hadn’t stopped; he was just aware that the gnawing restlessness inside him disappeared when he was playing a game of danger, whether it was a simple matter of cheating at cards or defrauding a landlady, or whether it involved, as it did now, his own life or death.

  “I don’t believe you ever heard of me before,” Juanita said, and it was obvious from her tone that she wanted to believe it, that she was flattered by the notion of being recognized by strangers, like a movie star. “I mean, I’m not famous or anything, so how could you?”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Some other time.”

  The idea of showing her the letter and watching her reactions appealed to his sense of dramatic irony. But the references to her­self were decidedly unflattering, and he was afraid to take a chance on making her angry again. Besides, the letter was, in its way, a very special one. Of all the times that Daisy had written to him, this was the only time she had ever expressed genuine and deep emotions.

  Dear Daddy, I wish you were here tonight so you and I could talk about things the way we used to. Talking to Mother or Jim isn’t the same. It always ends up not as a conversation, but as their telling me.

  Christmas is nearly here. How I’ve always loved it, the gai­ety and the singing and the wrapping of presents. But this year I feel nothing. There is no good cheer in this childless house. I use that word, childless, with bitter irony: I found out a week ago to­day that another woman is giving—or has already given—birth to a baby fathered by Jim. I can almost see you now as you read this, and hear you saying, Now Daisy baby, are you sure you’ve got the facts straight? Yes, I’m sure. Jim has admitted it. And here’s the awful thing about it—whatever I’m suffering, Jim is suffering twice as much, and neither of us seems able to help the other. Poor Jim, how desperately he’s wanted children, but he will never even see this one. The woman has left town, and arrangements for her support have been made through Adam Burnett, Jim’s lawyer.

  After this letter is written, I will do my utmost to forget what has happened and to go on being a good wife to Jim. It’s over and done with. I can’t change anything, so I must forgive and forget. The forgiving is easy; the other might be impossible, but I’ll try. After tonight, I’ll try. Tonight I feel like wallowing in this ugly thing like a pig in a mudhole.

  I’ve seen the woman many times. (How the ironies pile up once they start! It’s as if they’re self-multiplying like amoebae.) She has been a patient at the Clinic for years, off and on. Per­haps this is where Jim first met her while he was waiting for me. I haven’t asked him, and he hasn’t told me. Anyway, her name is Juanita Garcia, and she’s been working as a waitress at the Velada Café, which is owned by a friend of her mother. She is married and has five other children. Jim didn’t tell me this, either; I looked up her file at the Clinic. Also from her file I found out something else, and if you aren’t already choking on ironies, try swallowing this one: Mrs. Garcia was arrested last week on charges of child neglect. I hope to God Jim never finds this out; it would only increase his misery to think of the kind of life his own child will have.

  I haven’t told Mother, but I suspect Jim has. She’s going around with that kind of desperate, determined cheerfulness she puts on in emergencies. Like last year when I found out I was sterile, she drove me crazy counting blessings and pointing out silver linings.

  One question keeps going through my mind: why did Jim have to tell me the truth? His confession hasn’t lessened his own suffering. It has, in fact, added mine to his. Why, if he never intended to see the woman again, and the child, didn’t he keep them both a secret? But I mustn’t dwell on such things. I have promised myself I will forget, and I will. I must. Pray for me, Daddy. And please answer this. Please.

  Your loving daughter, Daisy

  He hadn’t answered it. At the time there were a dozen reasons why not, but as the years passed, he’d forgotten the reasons and only the fact remained: he hadn’t answered this simplest of requests. Every time he opened the old suitcase, that word please flew up out of it and struck him in the face. . . .

  Well, he was answering it now, and at a much greater risk than if he’d done it in the first place. It was a stroke of incredibly bad luck that the sister Camilla had referred to before he died had turned out to be Mrs. Rosario. And yet Fielding realized now that if he’d been thinking logically, he should have made some con­nection between Camilla, on the one hand, and Juanita, on the other. Daisy’s letter was dated December 9. In it she stated she’d first heard about Juanita’s child a week before, which would make it December 2. This was also the day Camilla had died and Juanita had left town. A connection between the two events was inescapable. And the link must be Mrs. Rosario, who, behind her crucifixes, madonnas, and shrines, seemed as devious an operator as Fielding himself.

  “Ask your mother,” he said, “how she wangled that money.”

  Juanita was stubborn. “Maybe someone gave it to her.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s some people that like to give away money.”

  “They do, eh? Well, I hope I meet one before I die.”

  They had reached Granada Street. It was lined on both sides with cars parked for the night; garages were a luxury in this part of town.

  Fielding remembered the house not by number, but by its bright pink paint. As he braked the car, he noticed a new blue and white Cadillac pulling away from the curb with an anxious shriek of rubber.

  “I’ll be back in two hours,” he told Juanita.

  “You better be.”

  “I give you my word.”

  “I don’t want your word. I want my car.”

  “You’ll have it. In two hours.”

  He had no idea whether he’d be back in two hours, two days, or ever. It would all be a matter of luck.

  18

  I came here to see you, but I lack the courage. That is why I am writing, to feel in touch with you for a little, to remind myself that my death will be only partial; you will be left, you will be the proof that I ever lived at all. I leave nothing else. . . .

  The blue and white Cadillac was just as conspicuous on Opal Street as it had been on Granada, but there was no one around to notice. At the first drop of rain the sidewalks had emptied. Jim turned off the windshield wipers and the lights and waited in the cold darkness. Although he didn’t look either at his watch or the clock on the dashboard, he knew it was five minutes to seven. During this week of crisis he seemed to carry around inside him his own clock, and he could hear the seconds ticking off with ominous accuracy. Time had become a living, breath­ing thing, attached to him as inexorably as a remora to a shark’s belly, never sleeping or relaxing its grip, so that even when he awoke in the middle of the night, it would communicate to him the exact hour and minute.

  Across the street the lights were on in Pinata’s office, and a man’s shadow was moving back and forth past the window. An overpowering hatred surged up Jim’s body like a bore tide up a river, roiling his reason, muddying his perceptions. The hatred was divided equally between Pinata and Fielding—Pinata because he had dredged up the business about Carlos Camilla, Fielding because he had, in his impulsive, irresponsible manner, caused the events of the past week. It was his seemingly innocent phone call on Sunday night that had triggered Daisy’s dream. If it hadn’t been for the dream, Camilla would still be
dead, Juanita forgot­ten, Mrs. Rosario unknown.

  He had questioned Ada Fielding thoroughly about the phone call from Fielding, trying to make her remember exactly what she’d said that evening that might have disturbed Daisy and started the train of thought that led to the dream. “What did you say to her, Ada?” “I told her it was a wrong number.” “What else?” “I said it was some drunk. God knows that part of it was true enough.” “There must be something more.” “Well, I wanted to make it sound realistic, so I told her the drunk had called me baby. . . .”

  Baby. The mere word might have caused the dream and led to Daisy’s recollection of the day she’d forced herself to forget, the day Jim had told her about Juanita’s baby. So it was Fielding who had started it, that unpredictable man whose friendship could be more disastrous than his enmity. Questions without answers dan­gled in Jim’s mind like kites without strings. What had brought Fielding to San Félice in the first place? What were his intentions? Where was he now? Was the girl still with him? Mrs. Rosario hadn’t been able to answer any of these questions, but she’d an­swered another before it was asked: Fielding had seen the boy, Paul.

  Jim watched the raindrops zigzagging across the windshield, and he thought of Daisy walking in the rain on Laurel Street try­ing to find her lost day as if it were something that was still there in the old house. Tears came into his eyes, of love, of pity, of help­lessness. He could no longer keep her safe and protect her from knowledge about her father that would cause her pain for the rest of her life. Yet he knew he must keep on trying, right to the end. “We can’t let her find out now, Jim,” Ada Fielding had said, and he had replied, “It’s inevitable.” “No, Jim, don’t talk like that.” “You shouldn’t have lied to her in the first place.” “I did it for her own good, Jim. If she’d had children, they might have been like him. It would have killed her.” “People don’t die so easily.”