by Grant Farley
“Don’t suppose it’s all that old,” I say.
“Antique,” she says.
“Well, then it’s too old.”
“Depends on how you look at it.”
“So how much?”
“A funny thing about that clock.”
Here comes the family tale. I’m in no mood for a story, but it’ll drive up the price if I look rushed. And her stories are pretty good, the way she mixes the for real and make-believe until even she can’t tell them apart.
“A sad story.” Her neck wobbles against the lace as she closes her eyes and shakes her head. This is laying it on pretty thick, even for her. “Do you know the young lady . . . she must be about your age . . . no, a little older . . . thick dark hair . . . her grandfather was a Martin from over in Gonzaga. They all have that kind of hair. Mission Indian. Anyways, you must know the child. Mrs. Elston says the girl’s mother used to lock her up in the house. Everyone was afraid to say anything because of her mother’s boyfriend, who works at that new uppity winery they built near Santa Maria . . .”
“You mean Roxanne?” So this isn’t a family story after all.
“Yes, Roxanne is her name.”
“Well, what about her?”
“Oh. Well, it seems she has disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Just like that. Vanished into thin air. A regular mystery. Of course, everyone assumes she ran away. But if you ask me, something is not right. It was just terrible the way her mother and that boyfriend treated the girl. Why, they could have done something bad to her. Or she could have done something to herself, the poor child.”
I just want to be confirmed . . .
“Are you sick, RJ?”
“I’m . . . I’m okay.” It’s only a day less than a week since she slipped out of that chapel. Man, news flies fast around this valley, like there’s no time at all. “But what does she got to do with this clock?”
“I bought it from her. That must’ve been right before she disappeared. You know, I suspect it may be stolen.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I knew that poor white-trash mother of hers didn’t have anything fine like this. So I asked the girl. I said, ‘Where did you get such a lovely timepiece?’ ‘Oh, it’s not mine,’ the girl said. ‘It belongs to that old man living at the Miller farm.’”
“Mr. Leguin,” I say.
“Yes, I believe that’s the man. Do you suppose he is really moving in there permanently? Who would do that? Well, she said she was selling it on his behalf.”
What does Leguin have to do with this? Why would he even need more money? Could he somehow be responsible for her disappearance? Had he given her the clock, or had she stolen it? What was it she’d said down by the river . . . Don’t go back to that cellar. Ever. Maybe she hadn’t been a figment after all. Maybe she had been on her way to do what I couldn’t.
“RJ, please, sit down. You look ill.”
“No, I’m okay.” If it really did come from Leguin’s, then it would be all the easier to pass off. Hell, it wouldn’t even be passing it off. “So how much for the clock?”
“Forty-five dollars.” She don’t look straight at me ’cause we both know it’s worth a lot more than that and she’s trying to do some kind of charity act, which if she is I won’t go for it. Still, I should lowball her offer just out of principle.
“Okay, I’ll take it.”
“Sold, then.”
You’d think my face was a mound of zits the ways she’s checking it out, wondering why the hell I want this clock. I can just see her adding me to the mystery of Roxanne and the clock. She’ll be telling the next prospect about the little trailer-trash boy living with all those brothers and sisters—all from different fathers, you know—and how can he afford that clock and what is he going to do with it?
She picks up the clock and walks out to the kitchen to close the deal. Charley has finished a whole tin of cookies. Mrs. Elliot bends over and pulls a pencil stub out of her white sock. She wears high-toppers with thick athletic socks, which don’t exactly go with the skirts. But she has corns. She squishes her nose up against the wall as she scribbles 45 on my tab, added right on the wallpaper next to the back door.
“No, I’m paying cash.”
“My goodness.”
I count the bills into her hand. “You have something I can cover the clock with?”
She grabs a large towel off the refrigerator door handle and hands it to me.
“Thanks.” I wrap the clock in the towel and go out the back door.
Charley walks on account of I’m lugging the clock. He can keep up with me at this speed since we’re going by way of the alleys and I’m creeping along so as not to mess up the mechanics in the clock. What kind of chump prospect am I that I buy something with cold cash and then pretend I stole it?
“RJ, why are you laughing? You’re scaring me.”
“Buying time, Charley. That’s all I’m doing, buying time.”
He don’t even ask what that means, which if he did I wouldn’t tell him anyway. He just stares at me the whole time I laugh.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Muumuu
I’m lying with my head against the arm of the sofa, staring at a June bug bumbling against the screen. It’s so typical of this place that the June bugs don’t bother to show until July. The clock lurks inside the backpack under the sofa, waiting for tomorrow’s delivery. This used to be my all-time most favorite time, the long afternoons with the sun taking forever to drop below the hills. The Garcias three trailers over are talking softly, but I hear each word. Someone is firing up a barbecue, and I inhale the scent.
I smell the warm cloth from my mom ironing inside the trailer and hear that ku-swuussh from the iron. That sound used to make me feel warm inside, but now that I’ve grown away from her, it just makes me feel lonely. Her big plastic beads click like a rosary as she presses other people’s clothes.
“Hey, kiddo!” she calls.
I don’t answer.
The ku-swuussh turns into a hiss, and I know she’s put down the iron. The door opens and she steps down to the porch. She’s wearing her lime-green muumuu covered by strands of brightly colored beads.
“Hey, kiddo, this is your mother speaking.”
She fills the whole room when she walks across to my couch bed. Everything about her is big and bright and cheerful. Sometimes I hate her for not giving me none of her bigness.
“What is it, Mom?” I just keep staring out the screen.
“‘What is it’? Well, for starters you could come down to planet Earth.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean the way you been behaving this summer. You got a little girlfriend, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Yeah, that’s it. The way you’re moping around and disappearing at all hours. You got yourself a little girlfriend.” She laughs with that deep chuckle, sending the beads all clicking at once. It used to be she’d start that laugh and I couldn’t help but laugh with her. That’s how she always got me out of funks, as she calls them. Laughing is the best medicine, she’d say. But this time I’m not laughing. “Hey, Earth to kiddo. So what’s her name? Anyone I know? I’ll bet it’s that little Martinez girl, Theresa.”
She sits on the couch and it sags and I wonder if she’ll squish the clock.
Sometimes she just nails me dead-on, like about how I like Theresa, and it makes me so mad. I got no secrets, not even way deep inside. Well, she might think she knows everything, but I won’t ever let her know about the Blackjacks, no matter what. Serves her right. And then the words just come out. One of those just-for-the-hell-of-it lies a guy says when he’s all POed: “It’s Roxanne. We got a thing going.”
Just as fast as my words, her hand flashes out and slaps me, the healing bruise
s burning deep into my cheek. It’s only the second time she’s ever hit me.
There’s a long quiet with just the bumble of that stupid June bug.
“Don’t you ever say that. You can’t have nothing to do with her. Nothing. Tell me you were joking.”
“Okay, so I was kidding.” I don’t give her the satisfaction of seeing me rub my cheek. “You don’t got to worry about Roxanne, anyway. She’s gone. At least, that’s what Mrs. Elliot told me.”
“Mrs. Elliot told you that? She may be a busybody, but she’s usually right. It don’t surprise me, the way that girl was treated at home.”
“Why do you hate them so much? I hardly ever heard you say bad against anyone except Roxanne’s mom.”
“Well, it’s past time you heard this, I suppose.” She clicks the beads one at a time through her thick fingers. “Your father had been engaged to Roxanne’s mother . . . Helen, you know . . . when he went into the army and then disappeared overseas. Then she took up with another man while he was gone. We were both waitresses at Dan’s. Lord, what a scene that was when your father stomped in, Helen’s new boyfriend sipping coffee at the counter and flirting with her. The war in Vietnam hadn’t started yet. At least not that one we were to know about. But your father, he was over there in Southeast Asia. He came back changed. Not the gentle boy we all remembered. He beat into that guy . . . You could hardly even call it a fight. Helen lost her job over it. Your father spent time in jail. I visited him and we sort of fell in love during that first long talk. Helen’s boyfriend was gone before your father even made bail. After that, she thought she could get her clutches back into your father.” Mom snorts like that was the craziest idea anyone ever had. “Well, there you have it. The short version, anyway.”
Man, never trust a short version of a tale.
She pats my knee, lifts herself from the cushions, and steps back into the trailer.
I picture Roxanne standing in that riverbed, maybe just a figment . . . I see her walking out of that chapel into the heat . . . and my brain says, Sure she ran away. But deep down in my heart I feel that she hasn’t left. Something about that girl with the red stitches, who wanted to be confirmed, tells me she wasn’t ready to run away. But if she hasn’t run away, where could she be? Mrs. Elliot thought maybe her mom or that boyfriend could have done something to her. But her mom was more into the deep-down-inside kind of hurt, not the physical.
Maybe she’s hiding out with some boy, or shacked up with some older guy. But if she’s doing that, she wouldn’t hide it. More like she’d flaunt it, rub it in her mother’s face. What if she done something to herself? The more I think on it, the more likely that sounds . . . But she wouldn’t do that in secret, either.
Then again, what did she have to do with Leguin? Don’t you go back there, she warned me. Maybe she’s trapped in that root cellar and that’s why it’s locked. Or maybe even he’s killed her and her body is locked in there. He wouldn’t do that . . . would he?
Well, why should I care? She’s nothing to me. Worse than nothing the way she picked on me all these years. I got my own problems to think about. Tomorrow morning I’ll haul this old clock clear to Camp Roberts and hope it’s enough to buy off the Blackjacks.
Why should I care about her?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Killing Tree
Manny is sitting at the big table waiting for me when I come up the back steps onto the porch. The summer sun has made his skin almost as dark as our faded black tees.
“This sucker is heavy.” I don’t bother with a saber-swoosh as I drop the backpack, the clock clunk-gonging, and grab the styrofoam coffee cup Manny holds out to me. Everything is throwaway at Manny’s house. Abuelita stares at me from the kitchen, shakes her head, and turns away.
“That sounds like a clock . . . You delivering an old clock?” His voice edges up into fear. “What if it breaks?”
“Yeah, it’s an antique clock,” I whisper. “You think the Blackjacks would settle for less? It’s gonna be a hell of a walk to Camp Roberts. You don’t have to come, you know.”
Manny’s answer is to stand, cross his arms across his chest, and stare at the bruises yellowing under my freckles.
“Nino-’n-Smitty are taking some workers out past King City.” His voice is low and quiet again. “They’ll be driving right by it.”
“Will they take us?”
Manny shrugs. Pickers wander out of the garage, their faces shadowed by cowboy or baseball hats, bandanas around their necks, joking to each other. I catch a lot of their words, but not enough to understand their stories. A wrinkled old guy is helped up onto the truck bed by a kid young enough that he could be hanging out with Manny and me.
“Hurry!” Manny says.
I grab the backpack. By the time I reach the truck, Nino-’n-Smitty are already loading the last of the workers in the back.
“Can you drop us by Camp Roberts?” Manny calls.
“You thinking of enlisting?” Smitty laughs.
Nino holds my chin with his thick hands and checks out the bruises on my face.
“Been in a fight, mijo?”
“Can we go?” I ask.
Even though I’m waiting for them to say okay, I’m hoping they’ll ask why. If they just say that one word . . . “why” . . . then this whole creepy mess will spill out of me and it will be in the hands of grown-ups I trust, and so I won’t have to carry the worry no more. Nino lets go my face and tugs on the ends of his mustache and Smitty combs his fingers through that stringy beard, just thinking it over.
“Okay, hombres. You can sit on the tailgate.” Nino grins. “If you can hang on.”
Nino-’n-Smitty walk around to the cab.
Well, who am I, thinking some grown-ups can fix my problem? I’m RJ and I’m fifteen and I can do this. Then, just maybe, the Blackjacks will leave me alone and I will have done it myself, with some help from Manny.
Those pickers just stare at us as I lift the bag onto the edge of the truck bed. The truck edges forward, and we run after it and jump, grabbing the side gates so we don’t fall out, our feet dangling over the edge.
The truck grinds down the driveway as I get a last peek of the killing tree and that empty tub. Of course the Dead blasts from the 8-track: Trouble ahead, trouble behind, and you know that notion just crossed my mind. There’s no shocks left on this thing, so every time we hit a bump, I clutch the clock and almost bounce off the back. We head out onto the frontage road. There’s not a cloud in that white-blue sky. Nowhere for a heaven to hide in a sky like that. It hits me for the first time ever that someday I won’t be around to see any more skies. I hope that someday is a long way off, but who really knows?
“Manny, do you believe like in heaven and all that?”
He looks at me funny. “Go to Mass, don’t I?”
“That proves nothing.” I hold on to the bag as we hit a bump and there’s a gong-clunk. “I mean, it’s like the guys Mrs. Harper called the Immortals that she had hanging in class.”
“Shakespeare and them guys,” Manny says.
“Yeah. And they weren’t even saints or nothing. Just regular guys that got to live forever on account of other guys are still reading their books.”
“So?”
“So that ain’t right,” I say.
“So?” Manny just stares at me with a scowl on his face. He don’t like guys to mess with his religion.
“So, I’ll give you ten to one that if you went and found that Shakespeare’s coffin and you ripped the lid or whatever off, you’d just find a pile of bones with this skull to one side sort of grinning up at you and a couple pieces of hair maybe still hanging on and maybe a part of his coat wrapped around the bones.”
“Immortal has to do with your soul, like you didn’t know.”
The truck crawls uphill. The tailpipes are right below us and we’re sucking up black
exhaust. Then we’re going downhill and the black exhaust is gone and the road is racing under our feet.
“Okay, then suppose Shakespeare’s soul is like up on a cloud somewhere watching people read his books. Makes you wanna make sure a writer is still alive before you flip his pages, so you don’t got some ghost reading over your shoulder.”
Manny don’t answer, just turns away. It’s my fault for bringing up this immortal stuff. He feels bad about his mom, but that’s just water under a bridge. What if my dad is on a cloud watching me? I’ve never done him proud. Maybe never will.
The truck shudders to a stop at the edge of Camp Roberts, and we hop out. Since the war ended, chunks of the base have been abandoned. I grab the bag and Manny pounds the side of the truck and it grinds down the road. The migrants stare back at us like we’re the ones hanging from that killing tree.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bixby
We cross the frontage road to the chain-link fence with the slanted barbed wire across the top. Camp Roberts runs along next to the road for as far north as we can see, but we don’t walk that way. We walk along the western side, where the fence climbs up into the hills that some people call golden but which are really just dead-weed brown.
Birds shriek far off in the scrawny oaks. Something feels wrong inside the backpack. Reminds me of when Manny’s dog went on the freeway and we found the body and scraped it into a bag and the two of us carried it off into the hills and we buried the pieces of bone and fur.
“I suppose I should open the bag and check for damage,” I say.
“Suppose.” Manny swallows.
“Yeah . . .” Instead, we just keep walking. “Nothing we could do, anyway.”
Near the back corner, there’s a space where someone ripped up the chain link. I crawl under. Manny pushes the bag through to me.
“You can wait out there,” I say.
“I know,” he says, crawling under. His shoulders and fat ass barely make it through, but I don’t laugh at him. He stands, not bothering to brush off the dirt.
