“She loved you,” I said, my words slurring just slightly, not knowing if it were true but hoping it would soften him. “Dewey, she really did.”
“She didn’t know the meaning of love,” he spit out. He tapped the bottle with the pistol. “Now, shut up and keep drinking.”
I gave Gabe a look, trying to send a message telling him, I’m sorry, I love you—somehow, somewhere we’ll see each other again. He encouraged me with a nod, and in his eyes I saw his reply. I tilted the bottle back one last time and felt the warm liquid wash me toward a life without Gabe.
“How can you do this?” I suddenly blurted, the liquor making me brave . . . or foolish. “You’re his friend.”
Dewey took the bottle from me. “Friend? If Gabe were my friend, wouldn’t he just forget all about this? Let justice be done?”
“Justice?” I sputtered, amazed at his total inability to comprehend any feelings but his own. “How is what you did justice?”
He ignored my comment and looked over at Gabe’s calm face. The stoic, proud face I knew he would wear until his last breath. “But my old friend here has too much integrity for that. That was always his problem, you know. Even in Nam. Him and that other little Mexican dude—what was his name—Sal? Him and Gabe were always feeling guilty about the shit that went down. They went to confession every time some old priest wandered into our base. A lot of good confession did him, huh, Gabe? He got shafted anyway. Just forget it, I used to tell them. We kill Charlie, he kills us. That’s war, man. That’s life.”
Behind him, the kitchen door swung open. “Put the gun down, Dewey,” a strangled voice said behind us. We all stared at Belinda, standing there in her dusty boots, holding a small black pistol pointed at her ex-husband’s head.
“Well, shit,” Dewey said. “You know, my greatest wish has always been that you’d stay in the barn where you belong. How much did you hear?”
“Enough,” she said. “Now put the gun down. It’s over.”
For a moment it seemed as if everyone had stopped breathing. I looked over at Gabe. His eyes were moving back and forth between Belinda and Dewey. Dewey’s hand trembled slightly. Gabe tensed. My eyes flew back to Belinda. Her face looked shadowed and old and deathly calm.
“I said put the gun down.” She cocked the pistol. The sound was magnified in the quiet room, and my stomach roiled in another sick wave. Bourbon crept back up my throat, tasting sour.
Dewey sighed. “I can’t, honey. You know that.”
There was an airy pop. Gabe crumpled to the floor. I screamed. Another shot. An explosion this time. Though I don’t remember how, I reached Gabe and pushed my hand down on the blood gushing somewhere out the front of him. It was slick and warm and stained my hand crimson.
“Oh, Jesus, no. Please, please, Jesus. Don’t let him die. Please.” I pressed down harder, watching his shirt become saturated. “Don’t you leave me,” I commanded him, the words catching in my throat. “Friday, don’t you dare leave me. Don’t you dare!” I screamed at Belinda, “Call 911 !”
She just stood there, her face ashen, the pistol dangling at her side. I glanced down at Dewey’s sprawled body. His head lay in a slowly spreading pool of blood. The gun slipped out of Belinda’s hand and fell to the wooden floor with a hollow thump. Her hands came up and covered her face. A moan erupted from deep inside her.
I turned back to Gabe, looking around desperately for something to put over his wound while I called for help.
“Querida,” Gabe said, his voice barely audible. He struggled up to a sitting position and leaned against the chair. “I’m okay. It’s just a flesh wound. More messy than dangerous. Go call the police.” He smiled at me, his features strained sharp with pain. “I’m not going to leave you. Who . . .” He laughed weakly, then coughed. “Who would fight with you if I died?” His eyes fluttered. Flesh wound or not, he was still losing blood, and I knew he needed the paramedics quickly.
I grabbed a crocheted afghan off the sofa and stuck it over the wound. He reached over and held it in place. “Go on now, do what I say,” he said hoarsely.
I stumbled into the kitchen and dialed 911. Because of all the liquor in my system, everything I said and did seemed to be in slow motion. I repeated the address to the dispatcher twice, then screamed the magic words that I knew would get every officer in the area there in no time. “Officer down.”
I dropped the phone, leaving it to dangle, grabbed a couple of clean white dish towels, and staggered back into the living room.
Belinda sat next to Dewey, cradling his bloody head in her lap. As I rushed back to Gabe, she glanced up, an amazed expression on her pale face.
“He’s dead,” she said, her voice thin and high as a young girl’s.
I sank down next to Gabe and replaced the afghan with the dish towels, relieved to see that the flow of blood seemed to have slowed. I pressed down hard, and he covered my hand with his. We watched Belinda rock Dewey’s body back and forth as if she were rocking him to sleep, humming a soft lullaby under her breath. Soon, in the distance, sirens wailed, and she stopped humming and looked up. Her freckles stood out like tiny bright pennies.
“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said calmly. “He was my husband, but I didn’t have a choice, did I?” When we didn’t reply, she answered her own question. “I really didn’t have a choice. I didn’t.” Then she started to cry.
FIFTEEN
“I’M GOING WITH him,” I insisted when the paramedics loaded Gabe onto the gurney. “Don’t anyone try and stop me.” I hung on to the side of the gurney when the liquor still in my system made the earth start to rock under my feet. I found Gabe’s hand and grasped it tightly.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ortiz,” the sheriff’s detective said. “But we need to question you right away. You’ll be able to see your husband as soon as we’re through.”
“That’s Ms. Harper to you,” I snapped. Gabe laughed out loud. Tears welled up in my eyes. I felt as if someone had put all my emotions in a big blender and turned it on High. “Gabe, I want to come with you.” I held his hand up to my cheek.
“Do what they say, querida,” he said. “Don’t forget, they’re the good guys. I’ll be there soon. I promise.”
“Okay,” I said in a cracked voice.
“Get some food in her,” Gabe said to the detective standing next to me. “He made her drink an awful lot of . . .”
I didn’t hear the rest of his words as my stomach suddenly reacted to all that bourbon. I turned away from Gabe and threw up on the driveway. The detective danced out of the spray, a dismayed and disgusted look on his round face.
“Never mind,” Gabe said, laughing again.
They brought Gabe back to the station a couple of hours later. There was a thick bandage under his blood-stained shirt, and his arm was in a sling. I gave it a worried look.
“I told you it was just a flesh wound,” he said. “How are you feeling? Did you eat anything?”
“I’m fine. They got me a hamburger and Coke from McDonald’s.”
We spent almost four more hours answering the questions of the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department and the Derby police. They quizzed us over and over until I was almost sobbing with fatigue. Gabe finally insisted, in his most authoritative manner, that they’d heard it enough times and they could finish questioning us tomorrow. Derby’s chief of police agreed and ordered a patrol officer to drive us home. We could see about Kathryn’s car and the Camaro the next day.
“What’s going to happen to Belinda?” I asked after the officer dropped us off at the house.
“Justifiable homicide, most likely,” Gabe said, slowly walking up the front porch steps. “As far as they were concerned, Dewey was trying to kill me, and that made her action reasonable.”
“He was trying to kill you,” I said fiercely.
Gabe drew in a deep breath. “He was tops in his class in marksmanship, Benni, in both the Marines and the police department. And he had to qualify on a regular basis for his
job. Even with all he’d had to drink, if he’d wanted to kill me, he would have.”
“Oh, Gabe.” It wasn’t quite suicide, but it was close enough.
Word had spread fast, and Gabe’s whole family was waiting inside. We repeated the story until finally I slumped against Gabe in exhaustion, and he insisted we needed to get some sleep. I woke late the next morning in a bed bathed in sunlight and still warm from Gabe’s body. I jolted up, panicked until I saw him sitting across the room in a rocking chair, reading.
“Good morning,” he said, setting his book on the floor. He came over and lay down next to me, groaning slightly as he pulled me to him.
“It doesn’t seem real,” I said, burrowing as close as possible without hurting his shoulder. His warm, gingery scent brought a lump to my throat when I thought about how close we came to losing each other.
“I know,” he said, slipping his hand under my T-shirt and stroking my bare back.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, tears springing up from nowhere.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I mean I’m sorry for you. Sorry this had to happen.”
“Me, too,” he said, his voice sadder than I’d ever heard it.
His mother wisely talked of other things as she made us breakfast. When the newspaper reporters finally made enough nuisance of themselves, Gabe went out and gave them an interview in his mother’s front yard. He wouldn’t allow them to talk to me, for which I was grateful. I was still so shaky that all they probably would have gotten was a blubbering mass of incoherent words. But I was worried about Gabe, too. He was taking all of this so calmly; his main concern was how it was affecting me. That first day we didn’t venture farther than a few inches from each other. Every time the scene of Dewey firing the gun at Gabe flashed through my mind, I’d reach over and touch him, making sure he was really there.
That night, holding me before we went to sleep, he said, “It’ll get better, niña. You won’t be this afraid forever.”
And he was right. By the next day, the horrifying scene in my mind had already started fading a little, and by the day after, even more.
On Thursday I told him there was one last thing I felt I had to do. I wanted to see Hannah.
“We’ll go together,” he said.
The farm was quiet when we walked up the dirt driveway. Eli saw us first and called for Hannah. After introductions were made, Eli offered Gabe a tour of the farm. Hannah and I strolled through her vegetable garden while we talked about Tyler and her baby.
“Thank you,” she said. She stooped down to pull up a fat orange carrot, shook the dirt clods off, and placed it in her basket.
“For what?” I said.
“For finding out the truth. I feel that Ruth can rest now.” She stood up and looked out over the black fields where Gabe and Eli were standing. The plowed earth shined in the bright sun as if flecks of metal were woven through it. Eli spread his arm out and gestured widely, explaining something to Gabe. Gabe tilted his head slightly, listening. “I’ll never understand, though, how she could do that. How she could give away her own child.” She turned to me, her face bewildered. A smattering of freckles dusted her translucent skin. “For the music? She always told me her music was from God. If it was, how could she sacrifice her child? What God would approve of that?”
I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t. And I don’t think she really expected me to. I picked a ripe tomato off a thick vine and touched its smooth, warm skin to my cheek. “Will you try to find her baby?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Eli and I prayed about it and discussed it with our bishop. We will just let it be. I will always think of her, Ruth’s little girl.” Her gray eyes filled with tears. “And I will always pray for her. But I must have faith in this. Faith that God will take care of her since we cannot.”
I nodded and placed the tomato in her basket. She would always wonder, though, as I would. Always wonder about the little girl who was growing up somewhere, hopefully with parents who loved her, who loved each other. A little girl with Tyler’s blond hair and beautiful voice . . . and Dewey’s wry smile. Twenty years from now, would I turn on the radio and hear Tyler’s voice echo out of it? Would music be a blessing to this child or a curse? I said a quick prayer for the innocent little girl whose conception had started this whole chain of events that culminated in two senseless deaths, the deaths of her natural parents.
When we left, Hannah pressed two jars of elderberry jam into my hands. “I’ll send you the quilt when it is finished.”
“Thank you,” I said, wanting to hug her, but holding back. I touched her forearm instead. “In spite of the circumstances, I’m very happy to have met you.”
“And I you,” she replied.
Later that afternoon, something happened that finally made me feel as if life would someday be normal again. Kathryn, knowing we needed to get back to some semblance of normality, sent us up to the Dillon’s grocery store on Rock Road to buy some things she supposedly couldn’t find at Food 4 Less downtown. We were walking out to the car, each of us carrying a grocery bag, when a pure white Peterbilt truck pulled into the parking lot. Painted across the wide expanse of the truck in shiny sky-blue was a Holy Spirit dove and the words “Jesus Is Coming Soon.”
My mouth dropped open. “It . . . it couldn’t be,” I stammered. My last phone call from Daddy had been two days ago, and he’d said the best he could make out from the CB reports was that Dove was somewhere around Oklahoma City. Apparently she was going to make it to our reception in time, just as she promised. I don’t know why I ever worried. Dove has never broken a promise to me in my life.
We shoved the grocery bags in the Camaro and ran over to the idling truck. Dove’s white head poked out the open window, and she smiled a wide, bull-that-broke-out-of-the-pasture smile.
“You’re right,” she called over her shoulder to the driver of the truck. “All it took was prayer. That’s my granddaughter and grandson right there.”
“Abuelita!” Gabe said, laughing. “You made it!”
The passenger door opened, and she handed me her flowered suitcase. “I forgot Kathryn’s address, but Brother Dwaine said all we’d have to do is ask the Lord and He’d lead us to the right place. And He did!”
A laughing, sonorous voice called after her. “Well, the Lord and Rand McNally.”
I just stood there shaking my head as Gabe, with his good arm, helped her down from the truck’s cab.
She waved to the man in the truck, who was wearing a silver-gray pompadour and face-splitting smile. “Thanks for the ride. Remember to drop by the ranch if you ever make it out West. I’ll fry you up a rib-eye that’ll make your taste buds sing ‘Amazing Grace’ backwards.”
A thundering laugh reverberated from the cab. Brother Dwaine gave the truck’s air horn a long, ear-shattering blow and pulled slowly out onto the highway.
She turned to me. “Come over here and hug my neck, honeybun. I’m starved. What’s for supper? Are the boys here yet? And what kind of trouble have you two youngsters gotten into these last couple of weeks?”
We told her part of the story as we drove back to Kathryn’s, where Arnie and Daddy had beat her by half an hour. They, apparently, hadn’t lost Kathryn’s address. We went through the story one more time, then declared it subject non grata.
Arnie, Daddy, and most of all, Dove, kept us amused the rest of the day, each telling their own particular “road story.” Dove had just about decided that people were probably as tired of Charles Kuralt reruns as she was and were ready to see a more mature lady hit the road and give a report on America.
“Anyone in particular you think they should cast?” I teased. Gabe and I relaxed on the floor, he leaning against the wall, me with my head in his lap. Seeing the familiar faces of my family was just the medicine I needed. Even Daphne had gotten into the spirit of things and lay down about two inches from my thigh, her head on her paws. When I reached over to stroke her, a low growl vibrated from he
r throat. I snatched my hand back and joined Gabe in laughing. I guess like most of the Ortiz family, she just couldn’t be rushed.
The next day, Friday, Becky came by and told us to come with her and Angel, that they had a surprise for us. Dove and Kathryn, who to my amazement had taken an instant liking to each other, came along. We ended up at Shepler’s Western Wear in Wichita, where Becky said she and Angel were buying Gabe the proper clothes to wear to our wedding reception the next day. The party, in honor of me and my family, had a Western theme, and no one was getting out of dressing up for this one. According to his sisters, Gabe was getting his first pair of Wranglers and boots whether he liked it or not.
“We’re going to make a cowboy out of you, if just for a day,” Becky said firmly.
“Impossible,” Gabe said just as firmly.
I laughed, and told Becky, “If you can get him into cowboy gear, you’re a better woman than I am.”
With a sister gripping each arm, he was dragged into Shepler’s huge men’s department. “Help,” he called to me and Dove, a comical look of terror on his face. From across the store we watched with amusement as they threw shirts and jeans over the dressing room door to him and argued about boots and belts. I took possession of his American Express card and decided if he got a new outfit, then so would I. I settled on a gauzy white broomstick dress printed with tiny red horseshoes. It was short enough to make Dove tsk under her breath and mumble to Kathryn that sure wasn’t how she’d raised me. I rounded out my outfit with a matching pair of handmade Lucchese boots in a bright crimson. Not ruby slippers, but they’d get me home, anyway.
Kansas Troubles Page 29
