by Manuel Munoz
It was February and dark by six o’clock. There, on the south side of Fresno, on the fringe of downtown that emptied after dark, there wasn’t much except vacant parking lots and very dark spaces. Cecilia was frightened of Fresno these days, how Fresno had gotten to be like this, all big-city trouble and worry. Every day in the break room at work, Cecilia read the newspaper, and there was always some terrible story coming out of the city. Clerks being shot in gas station holdups; teenage boys getting guns from who knows where. She knew danger, the difference between accidental and deliberate harm, the difference between the trouble in the city and the tragedies of everyday life in towns as small as hers. At the insurance office, Cecilia filed all the initial slips for the month’s claims and witnessed the peril in everything. A house fire in Selma; an old man who slipped in the tub, now on his way to a rest home in Parlier; a school beating more brutal than usual in Visalia; car wrecks all along the too-thin roads dissecting the county; farm machinery accidents she wished she had never read about. A despondent farmer who had come in to tell about a group of kids with matches sending his barn up in flames and his having to race down and shoot one of his badly burned hogs to put it out of its misery.
“I really have to get out of here,” Sergio had said, and Cecilia heard what sounded like desperation. “I’m going whether you help me or not, Cecilia, so come get me. Please.”
Sergio lived with her tía Sara in Bakersfield, and this was what bad blood meant: Cecilia was now twenty-three years old, and she had been raised by Tío Nico and Tía Sara after her own parents were killed in a train accident in Mexico. Bad blood meant that when Tío Nico and Tía Sara divorced, Tía Sara took Sergio to Bakersfield to raise their son under strict religion. Tío Nico kept Cecilia because she was his brother’s daughter, and blood meant something to him. Both sides had done their best to turn the two cousins against each other, but Cecilia had always known better. To help Sergio, she would have to lie to Tío Nico, but that was fine — the problems he had with Tía Sara were between the two of them.
How bad it had to be for Sergio to leave, Cecilia didn’t know, even though he should have moved out and gotten a job when he graduated from high school, two years ago. How bad it had to be for his voice to shake with worry when he called her, Cecilia couldn’t say. She had heard his voice catching over the phone. She had never heard him sound like that before, and it was enough to bring her here.
Cecilia could hear Highway 99 off in the distance, even with the windows sealed up. Its presence was all around downtown Fresno: on-ramps and off-ramps, the road signs that glared bright with reflection, the stark stretch of overpasses and the starker worlds underneath them. The six o’clock bus, empty now, departed along a side street. Three taxis lined up to take away the few standing passengers. The station stood quiet once again. Cecilia could see the clerk behind the long desk, dressed in his blue uniform and hat, reading the paper, and she watched him for a little bit, hoping he would reach for the phone or the radio to hear about another bus coming late. But he was as still as the empty streets around the station.
Nearby were the new county offices where Tío Nico cleaned. He told Cecilia that he left promptly at five o’clock during winter because the downtown area was so dangerous. He would be dismayed if he knew that she was here, waiting for Sergio. Bueno pa’ nada, she could hear Tío Nico say about his own son. Not worth a damn thing, and he’s a drain on you. He knows you’ve got a job and that’s all he cares about. It was difficult sometimes for Cecilia to reconcile that Tío Nico was talking about his own child — though they were cousins, she could not think of Sergio as anything but a brother. But then again, Sergio was difficult: he called his own father Tío Nico. Cecilia could never refuse her cousin. She wasn’t at all like her aunt or uncle, before or after they separated.
She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, impatient. The station clerk nodded off behind the glass. Evening was just beginning, but in this part of Fresno, with its quiet streets, the hour seemed deep into the night, the buildings around her glimmering half-heartedly. A taxi prowled by but, seeing no one on the sidewalk, sped off in the direction of the train station, which was newer and better lit.
In the old days, before the new train station, the buses brought everyone in. Cecilia remembered clearly the amount of traffic around the bus station on the nights they went to the Crest. All those years past, the adults so careful in spite of the brightness of the neon, the packed parking lot and the families milling about, the long line snaking away from the ticket booth. The buses delivered wave after wave of workers from Los Angeles and San Diego. Barbershops and shoe stores waited over in the Fulton Mall with doors open and inviting, just walking distance away. There the men, if they had the money, suited up in cowboy hats and new Wrangler jeans, and in the theater, the smell of their new haircuts gently wafted down the dark aisles. Back then, things were grander. Cecilia didn’t know how those men made a living, how they managed to find a place to stay; she knew only that they showed up in nicely pressed shirts and held open the doors for the ladies every chance they had. Now, only danger surrounded the parking lots with their cracked asphalt, potholes, muddy patches, and sagging fences, all the lights gone dark.
A car was coming down the street, rolling slowly, and Cecilia could see the driver scanning the sidewalk. It was a black car, something from the late eighties, a Cutlass maybe, if she remembered correctly from filing so many insurance claims. The car was coming in her direction, slowing down even more, and she did her best not to look at the driver. But she couldn’t help herself, the driver having rolled down his window to the cold February night air, and when the car passed, Cecilia looked over and the man behind the wheel stared back.
Her heart raced. Those forms she filed, those stories she read. You give the teenage boys the money they want. You don’t ever go to a service station after nine o’clock. You don’t let the kid ride with you on the jumpy seat of a tractor, no matter how slow it’s going. You look in every direction before you enter the intersection, and you let the rain and fog slow you down. Yet here was the car turning around and pulling up right behind her, the headlights on and the man’s silhouette rigid in the driver’s seat.
He idled the engine for only a moment before he turned it off, and his headlights went out as well, making the inside of Cecilia’s car seem a deeper dark than it had been before.
She put her hand on the ignition and waited. Over in that bus station, she could see the clerk still nodding in sleep. Her heart raced, raced as it had in the days of the Crest cine, just over there, where the woman with the long black hair had stood at the window, her hands lovingly stroking the curtain, when a knock at the door made her turn around. The woman had walked over, the sound of high heels amplified — yes, only panties and high heels. The hoots started from the men in the back row. The woman had opened the door, and two men immediately forced their way into the room, demanding to know where her lover had gone. The whistles from the back row grew fiercer still, Tía Sara’s tsk-tsk ever sharper as her thick hand tried to shield Cecilia’s eyes. But Tía Sara had been just as engrossed in the story as the men in the back row, and she had been concerned for this woman in the face of menace. Her aunt’s thick hand had loosened, and Cecilia saw the two thugs begin to rough up the woman. The men had whistled louder as the woman screamed her denials. Cecilia remembered her gigantic, round breasts, the deep swollen purple of the nipples, the way the thugs brushed their hands against them. Cecilia had wanted love to come back into the room, for the woman’s man to return and save her. Her heart had raced and raced, set in its own belief that any moment the man would come back.
Cecilia heard the car door open and saw the man step out. She watched as he nonchalantly began his walk to the station, his footsteps echoing against the sidewalk. Cecilia leaned in, ready to press the horn full force just in case. As he passed her car, he leaned down a bit to look inside and caught her glance.
“Hey,” he shouted so he could be heard
through the window, “you his sister?”
She turned the ignition.
“Hey!” the man shouted. “Hey!” He jumped in front of her car and tapped hard on the hood. “You his sister? Are you Sergio’s sister?”
Cecilia had not turned on the headlights, so she could not see his face clearly. Through his winter coat, his shoulders stretched powerfully and explained his fearlessness, his hands still on the hood and him standing right in front of her car.
“You don’t need to be scared of me,” he said, shaking his head. “I came for your brother.” He lifted his hands from the hood, as if in surrender, and pointed to the bus station. “In there? You want to come in there?”
He began walking toward the station, where the clerk was still asleep. He walked toward it but still faced her, waving her in his direction, encouraging. The sound of his footsteps receded, a fainter clicking against the sidewalk, and it reminded her of the woman in the movie and her high heels, how the sound wasn’t matching exactly with the precision of her steps. Cecilia lost herself watching the man get closer and closer to the door — he was wearing boots, some kind of dark shoes with a heel, and his winter coat reached past his waist. The lobby gleamed in its fluorescent light, promising safety: she could rattle on the clerk’s window if she had to.
She turned off the ignition and gathered herself. Her keys in a tight fist, purse crooked in her elbow, Cecilia stepped out of the car. She crossed her arms against the cold and half ran to the door, keeping her eyes fixed on the clerk behind the glass. The lonely drone of Highway 99, off in the distance, filtered through the empty parking lots and into the streets, the wire fences slouched and creaking. She rushed even faster as she got closer to the door, almost running inside, the doors banging heavily back into place, the sound echoing in the empty lobby. The clerk, though, made no motion. He still slept, his face obscured behind the cloudy partition to his booth, the thick pane scratched with large gashes.
The man was sitting on one of the orange plastic benches. He had taken off his coat, and Cecilia could see now that he was powerful, his shoulders massive and round. He was older than her, older than Sergio, maybe in his late twenties but she couldn’t tell for sure. He sat leaning forward, elbows on his knees and arms extended, legs spread wide, claiming space. She caught the glimmer of a thin gold chain around his neck, his hands clean of rings, hair cropped so short the scalp showed, a goatee busy around his chin. She hadn’t noticed that in the dark.
“So you’re his sister,” he said.
She didn’t move. “I’m his cousin, not his sister.”
“Well, that’s what he told me,” the man said.
The clerk finally stirred in the booth and, seeing someone standing in front of the partition, sighed heavily and sat up straight.
“Cecilia, right?” he asked, but when she wouldn’t answer, he rolled his eyes. “What? Are you a Bible-thumper like your mom? That woman rags on me something hard. Do I look like a bad guy to you?”
“Yeah, I’m Cecilia,” she said. She felt caught, having to admit this. He was talking about Tía Sara; he had somehow been at the house in Bakersfield. She turned slowly to the station doors as if to check for the next bus, but it was embarrassment and nerves and shame that made her want to turn away from this man. She didn’t know how to ask him who he was.
He seemed to know. “Sergio ever mention me?” He waited for her to speak. “Huh? Sergio ever mention me?”
Through the doors, her car seemed farther away than she thought. On one of the opposite corners, Cecilia glimpsed a woman waiting to cross the street, hand on her hip. The woman was wearing a short skirt and heels, impervious to the cold, heading in the direction of the old Chinatown a few blocks over, where all the prostitutes congregated. Cecilia scanned the horizon, looked over at the Crest, its dark arch barely visible.
“He has something of mine,” the man said.
With that, she turned to look at him. “Who are you?” she finally demanded. “Sergio called me to come pick him up, not you.”
“You don’t know me?” His voice pitched higher, edging toward frustration, maybe anger. “You don’t know who I am?”
“No,” she finally said. “I don’t.”
“He’s got my heart,” the man said, melodramatically holding his hands across his chest, but he sneered a bit when he said it. “He’s got a lot of things I want back.”
Cecilia stared at him, his goatee, a way of sitting that had grown into an arrogant posture, the size of his shoulders, and his shorn head. She could picture this man laughing at Tía Sara. She wanted to speak sharply to him, but she knew she would have Tía Sara’s voice — powerless, no matter what the anger and vehemence. Tía Sara’s voice, back when they were children, fell up against Tío Nico’s louder, more vociferous yelling and drowned in his heaviness. Tío Nico’s voice was like the men who had catcalled in the darkness of the Crest cine, right over there, all of the men in the back row with their newly shined shoes and slicked-back hair, their voices rising to a slur of cheer and whistle, so loud it was impossible to hear what the woman with long black hair had wanted to say in protest. The woman had wanted the two thugs at the door to go away, to stop harassing her, but the men in the theater somehow urged them on.
“You look just like him, Cecilia,” the man said to her, and she remembered then how Sergio’s voice had shaken with worry on the phone. “He’s a pretty little bitch.”
“Jesus . . . ,” she muttered. Because of the empty street, she knocked on the clerk’s booth, rapped her knuckles on the scratched partition as if he were still sleeping. “When’s the next bus?” she demanded.
The clerk was about Sergio’s age, dark skinned and gangly, with a head of thick, uncombed hair. When he stood up, she could see that his uniform shirt was too big for him and that he wasn’t wearing a belt. His pants drooped down past his hips. He reached over impatiently for a clipboard, eyeing Cecilia.
“The seven o’clock,” he told her. He had a little speaker vent in the partition like the one in the booth at the Crest. “It stops in Goshen and Tulare before this.”
“Is it going to be late?”
“Schedule says seven o’clock.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” Cecilia told him gruffly. “Is it going to be late?”
“They’re on time.”
“Can you radio or something?”
“Nah, I can’t.” She could tell he was lying, but it wasn’t worth the trouble to argue with him. The clerk deserved none of her nervous anger, none of her confusion as she struggled to come up with the reason behind Sergio’s phone call, his fleeing, and now this man sitting in the bus lobby waiting for him.
“You want to follow me to Goshen?” the man asked her. She heard him stand up, his boots sounding against the lobby floor, the footfalls slow and patient and coming toward her.
Cecilia didn’t want to answer him anymore. She didn’t want to speak another word to him, but she could do nothing but wait and stare outside again, standing by the doors of the bus station. The man’s footsteps came closer and closer, and when they stopped, she didn’t have to turn around to know that he was there, behind her. She folded her arms against herself, against the anticipation of having him touch her.
“Suit yourself, then,” the man said, and he brushed past her, pushed himself through the lobby doors and into the night air. He stood on the sidewalk, facing the street and not turning around.
By the station clock, the next bus would be arriving shortly. There would be no time to race down to Goshen, a little town with nothing but a bus station closed after dark, a little town darker and quieter than this part of Fresno. Sergio would not think to get off in Goshen. If he had seen her car there, he might have gotten off, glad to see his cousin, and Cecilia cursed herself for not having thought of it sooner. But there had been no way of knowing. There had been only Sergio’s voice and the passing, fleeting sigh she had made on the phone, her resignation at his supposed despair. There might ha
ve been worry in his voice, but Cecilia’s imagination had led her no further than Tía Sara’s open Bible, her old hands steadying on a choice line. There had been no way of knowing, of preparing for possibilities, of finding a way to prevent consequences. If only Sergio had mentioned this man waiting out on the sidewalk, then maybe she could have gone home and pleaded with Tío Nico to come to Fresno with her, because strange men were always dangerous.
Over along the wall was a bank of telephones, and Cecilia searched in her coat for coins. She shook her purse, hoping to hear the tiny scatter of loose change, but there was nothing or not enough, so she dialed the operator and gave the woman the number to Tía Sara’s house in Bakersfield.
“Tía, it’s me, Celi,” she said loudly, as if the operator were deliberately taking her time, and then her aunt’s voice came over the line, timid in its confusion.
“Celi? Celi?”
“Tía, I’m at the bus station in Fresno. Sergio told me to come get him.” She turned to look outside, where the man was still standing on the sidewalk, his large hands jammed impatiently in his coat pockets.
“Ay, Dios mio, Sergio,” her aunt said. “Celi, bring my son back here to me.”
“Tía, there’s a man here waiting for him.”
“Ay,” she said again, but this time it came as a near sob, as something said with her hand on her forehead, the anguish overcoming her so much that she couldn’t say any more.
“Tía, please. Who is he?”
“He’s been running with a bad crowd, m’ija. I don’t know what Sergio has gotten himself into these days, why he’s like this. That man is terrible. He’s the devil . . .”
Cecilia had to pull the receiver away from her ear, laying it close to the top of her shoulder and closing her eyes, wishing it could be simple: Who was this man, and how did Sergio know him? Why was Sergio running? And why hadn’t Tía Sara overcome her lifelong rage and simply called Tío Nico’s house, admitted that there was trouble and that she could not handle it herself? Her aunt’s voice flowed, incessant, onto her shoulder, but she knew her aunt could tell her nothing.
