by Bob Bickford
A sound came from outside, and her eyes opened slowly.
The barn door slid back, noisy on its rollers, and the interior flooded with silver light. The desert was gone. A fresh wind blew, and it gusted in with a mist of rain. Junie saw a jungle outside, green and gray and dripping. She saw hills rising behind the tree line. They weren't like the dry, rocky arroyos she was used to. They were soft and alive and full of secrets.
Another small noise came from the doorway. Junie looked toward it from behind her swollen lids and struggled to focus.
A baby elephant looked back at her from around the corner of the doorframe. Shy at first, it only showed one eye. The very top of its head was sparsely covered with the dark hair that it would lose as it grew up. The trunk switched back and forth; it hadn't quite mastered the use of it. It watched her, curious. After a moment it took a step into the barn, and then another. It was pale and about the size of a small pony.
Junie smiled with cracked lips. “Are you a boy or a girl?”
Her voice croaked. The elephant didn't answer. She could hear the sound of its feet as it crossed the barn and came toward her. It made a sound like bedroom slippers shuffling on a wood floor. There was movement in the doorway behind it. Another baby elephant followed the first, and then another. Junie counted five of them, and then seven, and finally eight. They moved close and formed a half-circle around where she sat slumped.
“You've all been playing in the water, haven't you?” she whispered. “You're all wet.”
Eight baby elephants stood quietly. Eight sets of dark eyes watched her. They had enormous ears that were strangely beautiful, rippling like sea fans moved by unseen currents. The water dripped from their hides and pooled in the dust beneath them. Junie wondered how old they were; not more than a few days or weeks, she thought. Just babies. They smelled of the river, green and rich and muddy.
More noise floated in from outside. Junie couldn't quite make it out. It was some kind of music, but nothing she had ever heard before. Not loud, not soft, it seemed be everywhere. Warm and sweet, it slid from the jungle and echoed in the hills. Cymbals and strings and drums mixed with the sound of thunder and of rain on wet leaves. The beat of a waterfall thrummed under all of it, torrent rushing over an edge and falling down, down, down to a river pool far below.
The music had colors mixed up in it, too. They swirled, danced, and told a story. The little girl could see it all just as well as she could hear it, and it made perfect sense to her.
She felt very tired, and she rested her head back against the wall behind her and closed her eyes. All at once she became frightened, and she opened them again. The baby elephants were still there, though, and the barn door still framed the dripping jungle behind them. The rain still fell, and the colored music still played. She shut her eyes again, reassured.
The elephants waited patiently while she slept. Eventually, she woke up and smiled at them.
“I had the strangest dream,” she said. “Is it time to go?”
The girl got to her feet and smoothed the pink dress over her knees, brushing the dust and grit from the fabric as best she could. She rested a small hand on the back of the first elephant as it began to move off. She felt she belonged to it, and it belonged to her. They somehow belonged to each other. When they left the barn, the other babies fell in behind them. One of them nudged June playfully with its trunk, and she looked over her shoulder and laughed.
She didn't notice the small body crumpled in the corner, a rag doll in a pink dress just like hers. It would have meant nothing at all to her if she had seen it.
The procession moved slowly toward the jungle. After only a few moments they were lost to sight, gone into the rain and the green and the music, leaving behind only the echoes of a small girl in a parade of baby elephants. When they were gone, the door rolled closed again, and the barn lapsed back into dry heat and silence. No one else would come inside it for another twenty-five years, but it didn't matter.
Junie was ended, and June had begun.
Just like so, and just like that.
-Thirteen-
We stood quietly, far out on the pier. A sea breeze came in; it flapped and rattled the small colored flags on top of the ice cream place. It cooled the sweat on my skin and blew away the oily odors of fish and hot creosote. I slouched against the splintered gray railing and watched the waves. The sun was so bright that the Channel Islands were gone in the glare.
I took off my necktie and put it in my pocket. I wanted to take off my coat, too, but I didn't know if Cleveland's clowns had followed us here. I might need the gun in the pocket in a hurry, so I left it on.
“Did you see that?” Annie asked.
She stared at the water beneath us. I followed her look down to where the sun turned the translucence green and warm. I tried to see the bottom and I couldn’t; I only saw moving shadows in the deep wash.
“What is it?”
She didn’t answer. The air played with her hair, but she didn’t seem to feel it.
“They made me look at her,” Annie said. “My sister.”
I looked at her. I decided not to let on I already knew that.
“Look at her? What for?”
“They said I had to identify her. How can anyone identify a skeleton? She was some bones in a dirty old pink dress. How could I identify that?”
She tilted her face to me and started to laugh. It was musical, lovely, a silver screen cascade that chilled me. The lenses of her dark glasses caught at the sun and the sky.
“I told them what they wanted to hear,” she said. “I told them it was my little sister, dressed for a party.”
She laughed harder. She leaned against the railing, hugged herself, and began to rock back and forth. “She was ten years old,” she gasped. “A baby.”
Her shoulders were shaking. I reached out and gently turned her away from the rail. She took off the glasses and looked at me defiantly. “It was different, do you understand?”
Her tone was harsh, gassy, and I started to worry.
“In the barn, she was still there,” she said. “It was different. I could see her and talk to her. It wasn't like this. This was a pile of bones on a metal table and they said they want me to identify her. How could I identify bones?”
“You weren't, Annie,” I soothed. “No one expected you to. It's a formality, that's all. They know who it is. They just had to ask you the question.”
“When I got home, I looked in the bathroom mirror and I thought about taking out my own eyes,” she said. “I’d rather be blind than see anything else like that. I’d rather be blind.”
“It will fade, Annie. Give it time.”
“Everything gets erased?” She glared at me. “Is that what you’re saying? If I just wait long enough, everything gets erased?”
I brought her close. Even in the sun, I could feel the heat of her through my clothes. She felt as hot and light as an injured bird.
“Not everything,” I said. “Not the good things.”
A man and a woman came toward us, walking a dog. They had ice cream. I had a feeling I knew them, but I didn’t know from where. The woman looked at Annie crying, and I thought she might say something, but she didn’t. They walked on past.
“Fifty years from now, a hundred…” I said, “All of this will still be here, and even if it seems like we’re gone, we won’t be. It will all be the same. Someone will stand here and they’ll look at the same water, the same sun, and they’ll feel us, still here. The good things don’t get erased.”
She looked at my face, and then my eyes. She tried a smile. “We’re good?”
“We’re something good.” I nodded. “We won’t ever get erased.”
“The ice cream will be different in fifty years,” she said.
I thought about it. “The ice cream might be different,” I allowed. “We’ll see.”
We stood still for a long time. The wind picked up, just a little, and the ocean sparkled more, but nothing el
se changed. When she spoke again, her voice was very soft.
“We’re something good,” she echoed. “So I guess we’ll see.”
I lounged behind my desk, with nothing much to do. The Krazy Kat clock said it was too early for lunch. I decided to look out the window for a little while. When the telephone on the desk rang, it surprised me.
“Crowe Investigations,” I answered.
“When you see your girlfriend,” Rex Raines said, “tell her that the coroner's office has released her sister's bones. She can call a funeral parlor to pick them up.”
“What was the coroner's verdict?”
I could almost hear his shrug over the wire. “What else could it be?” he asked. “Death by misadventure. Cause unknown. June Kahlo was declared dead in a house fire in 1922. Her body wasn't found, and they figured she had been burned up. Now her body is found, and they know she didn't die in the fire. She's still dead, and her bones aren't saying anything else.”
I was playing with a yellow pencil. I put it down and lit a cigarette.
“She got into that barn some way,” I said. “Someone put her body there, or else she went in there herself and died.”
“No one's ever going to know. It was all too long ago to matter.”
“Annie Kahlo says Sal Cleveland killed her father in the fire,” I reminded him. “She says he was responsible for her sister's death, too. Charlene Cleveland makes three of his victims all in the same place. Seems to me someone ought to do something.”
“Just tell Annie Kahlo to claim her sister's body,” he said. “Tell her to give the girl a proper burial. Tell her to leave Sal Cleveland to us. Maybe if the amateurs stay out of this, it will all work out, and nobody else has to end up dead.”
“Amateurs?” I asked.
“Civilians. You like that better?”
He hung up, and I decided to have a short drink before lunch. I toasted Krazy Kat.
“To amateurs,” I said.
We put June Kahlo in the ground on a Saturday morning in the middle of 1947, more than twenty years after she had died. She wore a new pink dress that her sister had picked out and bought for her.
I liked the idea of it; the holding of an early morning funeral. It seemed like a starting out, not an ending. The sky gleamed an impossible crystal blue, the air so mild I couldn’t feel it on my skin until it moved.
It was an applejack day, an ice cream day, exactly the right kind to send a little girl on her way.
Annie Kahlo stood beside me, wearing something light and floral. I had left the house dressed for a funeral, in the one black suit that I owned. She had shaken her head and sent me back inside to change. I was resplendent in pale seersucker, ready for a garden party if one started.
The Gardiners attended, and stood with Annie and me. The doctor looked somber and slightly bewildered. Behind her black veil, tears ran down Mrs. Gardiner's face. At one point she sobbed, and Annie took her into her arms for several minutes. It struck me odd she was so emotional. June Kahlo had been dead for twenty-five years, and there was only Annie here to even remember her. I figured maybe some people just didn't do well at funerals, and sometimes strong personalities like Mrs. Gardiner's hid a naturally soft center.
There was no one else there, really. A cemetery worker leaned on his shovel, not quite out of sight. The rented minister said a few words and the funeral home people waited at a discreet distance for the check in my breast pocket. A couple of homicide dicks were there. They looked at me over the small coffin, big men in suits that were a little too small. They’d passed the hat at the station for flowers, and I appreciated it.
“She's here, you know,” Annie said. “She knows you. She told me what you are. Do you believe me?”
I looked across the cemetery. A couple of automatic sprinklers started ratcheting and sending up long sprays of water. The sun glinted off marble angels and caught at the white wings of a couple of squabbling gulls. I didn't see any small girls in dressed in pink.
“She never met me.”
Annie shook her head and didn't say anything else. She looked straight ahead, invisible behind her dark glasses.
I didn't know. Maybe the little girl moved invisibly among the long morning shadows that fell off the headstones, dancing between the granite monuments. Maybe she saw me, even if I didn't see her. I didn't know a lot of things, if it came right down to it.
“I believe you,” I finally said. “I believe in you, is more like it. Don't ask me that anymore.”
I touched the brim of my hat and hoped Junie Kahlo saw it.
“That was a lovely service,” Mrs. Gardiner said, looking like she might cry again.
A large cat appeared on the lowest branch of a jacaranda tree in the corner of the yard. One minute it wasn't there and the next, it was. It crouched in the shade, lashing its tail and watching us.
“Here we are, dear,” Mrs. Gardiner said. “Put it right here.”
She tapped the glass tabletop, and Annie set down a large tray with a crystal pitcher and four glasses. When the two women were seated, Mrs. Gardiner nodded to her husband. He had a cane resting across his lap, and he leaned it carefully against the wall and got slowly to his feet. He poured out four glasses of something pink and fizzy and handed them around. I leaned back against the padded bench and tasted mine. It had gin in it, but I didn't want to guess what made it so sweet.
The wind was warm and nearly constant, even in the enclosed yard, and the striped awning over our heads rattled softly. The grass was very green and littered with flower petals.
“I love it this time of year,” Mrs. Gardiner said. “The breeze off the water makes all the difference. I can sit out here all day. Which way is the ocean from here, my darling?”
Dr. Gardiner considered things for a moment, and then pointed a finger. Since he was pointing more or less straight up, I didn’t know what he meant.
“That way,” he said. “South is always to the left.”
I nodded agreeably, and tried some more of my drink.
“I leave those things to him,” Mrs. Gardiner explained. “He does all the driving, so he knows where things are, usually.”
There was motion across the yard. The cat had jumped down from the tree. It watched us for a moment and then moved smoothly into the bright sunlight. It was gold-colored, and covered in dark spots that undulated when it moved. It crossed the grass to the table where we sat, and Mrs. Gardiner trailed her fingertips across its back as it passed her and jumped up to share Annie's chair. She had to move a little bit to give it room; it looked as though it might weigh twenty pounds.
It lifted a front paw and began to wash with its tongue, never taking its yellow eyes from mine. Annie held her drink with one hand, and scratched its head gently with the other.
“That's the biggest cat I've ever seen,” I remarked.
Annie gave me a sidelong look over the rim of her glass, and then put it back down. I didn't think she had tasted it.
“It isn't a cat,” she said. “Not in the way you mean, anyway. It's an ocelot.”
She stroked it gently.
“A real ocelot?” I asked. “I didn't know you could keep them as pets.”
“Of course you can,” Annie said. “If they're real, you can.”
“It isn't a pet,” Dr. Gardiner said.
“Of course it is,” Mrs. Gardiner said. “It's my pet . . . and Annie's, when she's here.”
The wind stirred again, and the leaves overhead dappled my arms and legs with moving shadows. I closed my eyes, felt the warm air moving across my face, and heard the rustle of fabric above me. I listened to the murmur of voices and drifted.
“I don't think it's tangible,” Annie was saying to the Gardiners. “It's more like an experience. I've been there before.”
I wondered idly if the spots of shade made me look like an ocelot, but I didn't want to open my eyes to look. I decided that they probably did.
“It's such a beautiful day,” Mrs. Gardiner sighed. “Can
you stay?”
“We're staying right here,” Annie said. “There is no other place. It's all play. There’s no place we'd rather be.”
On Chapala Street, a block up from the beach, a drive-in restaurant served a pretty good hot dog and an even better bowl of Mexican chili beans, if you knew enough to ask for them. Danny Lopez had been serving lunches out of the same cement-and-stucco building since before any of his employees were born. He had seen a lot of Santa Teresa come and go.
He had a gardening business that catered to the wealthy in Santa Teresa and Montelindo, and he employed a lot of the people who were newly arrived in the country. He had men to run it for him, so he was here most days, making lunches and watching Chapala Street. There were other legitimate businesses under his control, but I didn't know what they were, and didn't care.
I knew enough to understand that not all of his business was in the open. Danny Lopez knew and worked the dark arteries that ran beneath the city. That's why I was here.
I backed the car into a spot where it wouldn't get blocked in and patted the gun in my pocket. I didn't know what Cleveland's goons were up to, and old survival habits were kicking in; better to act as though they were always close by.
The counter was open to the street, but shaded from the elements by a wide metal overhang of roof. Danny turned hot dogs on the grill, his back to me. The young woman at the cash register took my order with the particular kind of frost that pretty Latinas save for the middle-aged men who wander into their neighborhoods. I took my change from her and turned to watch the street.
“Taking a break, Nina,” he said from behind me. “Be in the back.”
She nodded and looked out the corner of her eye, speculating. Danny handed my food to me and jerked his chin at a group of picnic tables set under a fig tree at the rear of the building. I followed him over to sit.
