“Ah.” I nodded thoughtfully, trying to keep my expression serious.
I liked their myths and stories, and I liked their names—Luisa, Isael, Eva Posidas, Marisela, Jose—they tasted like liquid chocolate on my tongue. I liked the easy way they accepted me into the neighborhood, never asking questions about who I was or where I’d come from. Everyone seemed remarkably accepting and friendly, nodding or raising a hand when I passed by, and I soon came to recognize their figures and faces. Half the town was related in some way. Mostly it was a quiet place with people living simple lives—no tragedies, no crime—although dirt bikes and off-road vehicles sometimes raced along the trails behind my house, and music boomed from radios in cars driven by teenagers late on a Friday or Saturday night. Occasionally there was a fight, but mostly with words. Isael told me I needed to watch out for snakes and bears when I went out walking in the evening.
Across the street, under a stand of tall, toothpick pine trees, lived an elderly man, who, as far as I could tell, rarely left the worn bench on the front lawn, and a woman of uncertain age who was either wife or daughter, perhaps a sister. She too brought me food—cornbread and some kind of tasteless, overcooked beans with tomatoes. She hadn’t said much after handing me the food with a quick, hesitant smile. “Let me know if he bothers you.” She gestured vaguely back across the street. “He can get noisy at times.”
I couldn’t imagine how the old man would bother me. He simply sat. His bald head was covered with copper freckles, some the size of pennies. Light blue eyes hid beneath great bushy eyebrows that seemed more like caricatures than features. The only part of him that moved occasionally was his head or his hands readjusting themselves on the cane he clasped firmly in front of him. Frequently he stared at me. At first it was unnerving when I sat out on the porch, until I decided he wasn’t really seeing me. I took to waving at him when I left in the morning and when I came back at night. I never got a response: perhaps I imagined his eyes widening or a look of puzzlement crossing his face, but his stoicism became a challenge. Luisa and Isael said he talked to angels.
“Do you believe in angels?” Isael asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Luisa frowned and tapped me on the knee. “You need to believe more.”
“I’ll work on it,” I whispered to her, if only to wipe the lines of concern from her brow.
I saw the man in the pickup truck several times around town, and we always nodded in acknowledgment. His truck was parked in front of Eva Posidas’s house frequently. Luisa and Isael told me he was their mother’s cousin, Enrique, and that he caught coyotes, mule deer, squirrels, and bears.
“Sometimes,” Luisa said in a breathy whisper, her sticky body sprawled across my knee, “even rats!”
“Once, a cougar,” Isael said proudly.
“For eating?” I asked, which they thought was very funny.
“For the government,” Isael said.
It was several weeks before I learned from Marisela that he worked for the county as an animal control officer. When I asked her how he got into that kind of work, she grew unusually solemn and said, “We all have a gift; that is his.”
“Animals?”
“Lost things,” she said.
“Cougars and rats and bears get lost?” I asked.
“Everything gets lost sooner or later,” she said, and changed the subject.
When I started thinking about his hands, or the easy way he’d chuckled, or the fine, sugar lines around his eyes that begged to be touched, I drank more beer or chased Luisa and Isael around the yard with a stream of water from the hose.
Mostly there was little energy for thinking, and I was content to let each day unfold.
I had quickly taken to sleeping with the windows open, enjoying the soft, barely cool, night breezes that lulled me to a deep sleep, only to waken frequently at two or three in the morning with that same heart-stopping abruptness that had sent me fleeing weeks ago. Each time I reached forward for the voice, longing yet fearing the timbre of the whisper, but here the room was silent and empty, save for the rustle of the trees and the sense that something had just left.
Unable to fall back asleep, I’d get in the car, glide out the driveway and down the street with my lights off, then hit the gas and lights simultaneously, roaming back roads at high speeds, the green glow of the dashboard comforting, letting the wind and the hum of the tires drown out any vestige of where I’d come from—of other nights of cruising, of guns and terse commands, the squeal of tires, feet pounding the pavement; a man falling backward into water, hands outstretched; dried, burning eyes and the stink of exhaust and stale cigarettes; flies on a door; the refineries burning late at night, coughing up cloudy belches of orange flames; coffee-and adrenaline-fed highs; black roads snaking past buildings looming like great metal beasts; pink halogen lights promising a false dawn for hours.
Some nights, I screamed, letting my voice and the wind and the tearing pain in my throat obliterate vision, smell, thought. Some nights I played with the seduction of letting the tires take me off the road into warm blackness, just letting go and succumbing to whatever was chasing me.
Once, just as daylight broke, I crested a hill and slammed my brakes on at the sight of a city laid out in front of me like an enormous turtle of lights. The ungodly power of all I’d done swept over me in a cold, shuddering rush, and I pressed my head hard against the steering wheel. When I looked up, hands were descending, the same translucent hands I’d dreamed my first night in this land—five, eight of them, floating and dancing down around my car with a fan of light growing from behind.
I don’t remember getting home. My next conscious moment was standing in the doorway of the house, the ash gray cat staring at me unblinkingly as the sun crested the trees, with the sense that once again, something had just left.
If I’d known where to go, I would have fled again.
Early one evening, two months after I’d arrived, when the sun was still visible and bright in the sky, and Penny Face, as I’d come to call the old man across the street, and I were having our nightly staring match, a light brown unit cruised slowly down the street and stopped in front of my house. The ash gray cat stopped cleaning herself, frozen in a twisted, one-leg-in-the-air pose. I was jolted but not surprised. Sooner or later, I knew, this was bound to happen. I’d been hoping for later. But wary anticipation is never preparation for the actuality. A chunk of my old life had found me, and the rush of anger was tremendous. Until that moment, I hadn’t allowed myself to admit I was truly hiding.
The sheriff’s deputy unfolded himself from the car, put on his hat, rechecked the slip of paper in his hand, then started toward the porch. I could feel the eyes of the neighborhood follow me as I stubbed out my cigarette and went down the steps to meet him.
I knew what he’d do before he did it, so I let him maneuver me so that he stood facing the street but with a view of my front door. I told him yes, my name was Sarah Jeffries.
“Anyone else live here?”
“The cat.” I gestured toward the damn cat, back in her crouch, tail flicking. He didn’t find this amusing.
“Some folks are worried about you. Asked me to give you this number to call,” he said. He looked like a typical cop. From the hash marks on his sleeve, I knew he’d been doing this awhile.
“Some folks,” I said.
“Well, this person here.” He handed me the slip of paper with Gwen Stewart’s name on it. I could see the outline of his bulletproof vest under his shirt, bulking out his chest into an unnatural rectangle.
“And what will you tell her?”
“Ma’am?”
“I’m assuming you’ll be contacting her,” I said. I matched his lack of expression with one of my own.
“We’ll send an acknowledgment that we found you, that you were contacted.”
“I see.” I looked down at the ground, then back up at him. “Social Security number?”
“Excuse me?”
I
recognized his attitude, slightly withdrawn, slightly disdainful, that by-product of power and authority. I wouldn’t have been happy with this sort of assignment either. Crap calls, we used to call them.
“How she tracked me. Social Security number? I haven’t been using my credit cards. Or through the reference check?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, ma’am. I was just asked to give you the message.” His hands moved to rest lightly on his gun belt. I recognized that maneuver too.
“I doubt that. The po-lice,” I drawled carefully, “don’t deliver messages to average citizens, except in case of death or emergency.” I handed the slip of paper back to him. “And that’s what I am, Corporal. An average citizen. And this is no emergency. Tell her I received the message. Tell her I’m fine and I’m sorry. But she’s not to contact me again. Tell her that. I know there must be a harassment law here. Cop or not, I’ll file. Tell her I said that, too.”
The deputy looked at me, his lips tight, eyes invisible behind sunglasses. I knew what he was thinking—or close to it. Troublesome woman was one possibility. Pain in the ass was another; bitch the most likely. Maybe even lesbian. It was an easy classification for the job; any number of variations could be plugged in. He’d go back out there, tell his buddies about this fucking uptight ex-cop he’d talked to; they’d all shake their heads, exchange stories about other troublesome women they’d known, and chalk it up to someone who couldn’t take the heat. I could read it all in an instant.
I had to give him credit though; he did just what I would have done. He turned around, laid the note on the bottom step, and put a rock on top of it. Then he walked past me without a word, back to his unit. I stood facing the house as I heard him drive away.
The neighborhood was quiet except for a few dogs barking, the trees rustling in that same strange hesitant breeze that always crept up with the first gesture of night. I continued facing the house until a small shadow reached out and met mine. I knelt down and smiled at Luisa.
“Sarita, you are in trouble?” she whispered, little lines deep in her forehead.
“Hardly,” I said.
“The police came one time and took Henry away after Veronica and the baby died.” She twirled her hair against her lips, her voice so low I had to lean closer.
“Who’s Henry?” I asked gently. I reached out a hand to stop the twirling motion.
“Enrique,” she said, as though it were obvious, and pointed back across the street.
Isael appeared at Luisa’s shoulder. “You are in trouble?” His round face was smooth with a grown-up seriousness.
I sighed. “No, he was mistaken, that’s all. It’s okay.”
“Police are trouble,” Isael insisted.
“Sometimes,” I said.
I stood, half pivoting toward the street, and looked up. Everyone was watching me, including the man in the pickup truck.
“Henry?” I asked Luisa, and she nodded.
Henry leaned against the bed of his truck, arms dangling down over the side. When our eyes met, he straightened up, looked as though he might walk across the street, and so I did the only thing I could think to do—I waved, a big sweeping wave, walked through the house and out the back door, where I sat watching the rocks until even they blended into the blanket of night.
The envelope came two weeks later. No return address and no signature on the folded spiral notebook paper, but I recognized the handwriting; I’d seen enough of it over the years. It was printed in the sloping all caps style that was Gwen’s trademark. She didn’t start with a salutation—just short and to the point. “HAND AND FOREARM FOUND 17 MILES DOWN PEARL RIVER. CORONER SAYS ALLIGATORS. NO OTHER EVIDENCE. CASE CLOSED ON ALL OF THEM. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? COME HOME.”
Home. I stared at that word for a long time.
Three days later I went to Esai’s Hardware Store one town over and bought a shovel, some duct tape and a large brown tarp. I pulled out of the driveway a little after 2:00 A.M., the street folded up and silent, and drove south for thirty minutes, until I came to an old dirt road I knew from my route. A few unpaved driveways branched off from it early on. I cut my headlights and continued on for several miles, the sense of a road growing fainter, until it dead-ended at the base of a hill that wanted to be a mountain. I got out, put the tarp on the ground, moving slowly, deliberately. The Ithaca pump shotgun first, then the four-inch .38 Smith and Wesson, then the three-inch .357 Magnum. Each unloaded and placed on the tarp. Then the five-cell flashlight, bulletproof vest, precinct pins, and name plate. I studied my badge for a long time, holding it in the palm of my hand, before I placed it carefully on the tarp as well. The bullets I dropped into a separate plastic bag, which I tucked into the back pocket of my jeans. I secured the tarp many times over with the duct tape.
The trees seemed more silver and black than green; pine needles shifted restlessly. An owl hooted off in the distance. The scars and puckers of the moon, high in the night sky, were visible and distinct. It smelled clean here, just a slight husky scent of leaves and earth. My eyes adjusted quickly to the dark, and I walked easily into the woods about five hundred yards, carrying the shovel and tarp. It was awkward to rest both against my left shoulder as I wove and ducked between tree limbs.
The ground was a bit harder than I’d expected, but I dug steadily. A film of perspiration soon covered my body, and my breathing came deep from my lungs. It felt good to move my muscles this way, to work in the dark, to excavate the hole and watch the pile of dirt grow. Once I stopped and listened for a long time to a rustling nearby, remembering Isael’s comments about bears at night, about Henry catching a cougar. When the rustling moved away, I stood there a bit longer, waiting for my heart to slow to a normal rhythm, pushing all thoughts of choices, fate, and the allure of what-ifs from my mind.
I dug two holes, a small one for the bullets, about fifty feet away from the larger and much deeper one where I placed the tarp. I sat on the lip of the hole, smoking a cigarette, and watched the shadow patterns from the trees dance across the ground until there was nothing left of my cigarette. Then I refilled the holes quickly, tapping down the dirt with my hiking boots, spreading the compost of pine needles and leaves back over the broken ground. I found several large rocks and placed them on top of the larger hole, worked them down into the dirt a bit.
When I was done, my hands throbbed. A blister had popped up on the thumb of my right hand and two more on my palm. Red dirt clung to my boots, jeans, arms, shirt. I stood there for a minute, staring at the ground, then looked up to the sky, through the trees and said, “There.”
No response but the slight whistle of the wind and my own thudding heart.
Fall approached timidly. The nights got cooler and the breeze shifted somewhat; there was a different smell in the air that I couldn’t quite pin down. Laughter and music in the neighborhood was louder, dirt bikes raced more frequently up behind my house, and dogs wandered freely, no longer panting except from joy or exuberance. Penny Face wore a tattered green sweatshirt after the sun disappeared; his wife-mother-sister brought it out and tugged it none too gently over his head. The damn cat was gone for long stretches at night; I’d wake to see her eyes glinting at me in the darkness from the far corner of my bed. She’d started sleeping there, never curled up or sprawled out, but hunched over, ready to flee at my first movement.
Isael and Luisa still visited every night. Isael had some respect for personal space, but Luisa loved to drape parts of her body, or all of her body, on me. She reminded me of a dog I’d been fond of, a massive Rhodesian Ridgeback named Peacock, except Luisa wasn’t as big and she didn’t have a propensity for licking. She did, however, like to put her lips as close to my face as possible and whisper, sometimes questions, sometimes comments, sometimes simply nonsense babbling.
“Por qué, Sarita,” she asked one evening, “¿estas tan triste?” Her fingers traveled across my arm like tiny lizards. The sun had just dipped below the trees, and Isael sat near us, rolling marbles
against my front door, watching the damn cat watch the marbles.
“Triste?” I could tell from her expression that I’d mangled the word only slightly.
“Sad.”
“Good heavens, what gave you that idea?” I poked her in the ribs, which usually instigated a wild tickling game. But she veered the middle part of her body away like a wayward river and stuck a finger, caked with dirt and damn cat hair I noted, into my cheek, hard enough for me to say, “Ow!” in mock pain.
“From here.” And then she poked a finger in my other cheek. “And here.” My forehead. “Here.” And then my lips. “Here too, the upside-down smile.”
I gave her a big, exaggerated smile. “I’m happy. See? Right-side-up smile.” I sank into a real grin, enjoying the stretch of my face muscles.
The damn cat finally pounced on a marble, and it went flying off the porch, the cat tumbling after it.
“That’s not what the trees say.” She rested her arms and upper body on my thighs.
“Trees shmees. I don’t know what tree you’ve been talking to, but he’s off his bark.” I poked her again in the ribs.
She gave a short yelp and screwed her face up in mock disgust. “Trees don’t bark!”
“Guelita says the trees know everything, and that you are sad.” Isael spoke each word as though it was a perfectly round pebble he was handing me. “That is why you have the guns, to keep away the sadness.”
I sighed and rolled my neck to the left then the right. Hocus pocus and the trees again. But Isael was the opposite from his sister in many ways, more contained, more serious, more watchful; I’d learned it was best to answer him directly. “I’m not sad,” I said. “And guns make sadness, more often than not. They don’t keep it away.”
“You were la policía?”
I nodded. “I used to be, in a place a long, long way from here.”
“What was it called?” Luisa asked.
“Lousyana.”
“Lousyana?!” She sputtered with laugher. “What kind of name is that?”
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 24
