Beyond This Point Are Monsters

Chapter Fourteen

On the way home Lum Wing, exhausted by his mental battles with the law and his unexpected victory, fell asleep in the back of the station wagon.

The day had had the opposite effect on Jaime. He felt excited and restless. Splashes of bright red crossed his face, disappeared and came back again like warning lights turning on and off. Around his family and friends he was used to playing it cool, limiting his reactions to blank stares, noncommittal shrugs or barely perceptible movements of the head. Now suddenly he wanted to talk, talk a great deal, to anyone. Only Dulzura was available, massive and quiet in the seat beside him. All the talking was being done in the front seat. It wasn’t loud, it didn’t sound like quarreling, and yet Jaime knew it was and listened to find out why.

“...Judge Gallagher, not Galloper.”

“Very well. Gallagher. How did he get to be a judge if he can’t make up his mind?”

“He can,” Estivar said. “He probably already has.”

“Then why didn’t he announce it?”

“That’s not the way it’s done. He’s supposed to go over all the testimony and study the reports from the police lab before he reaches a decision.”

When Ysobel was angry her speech became very precise. “It seems to me the lawyer was attempting to prove the viseros killed Mr. Osborne. Accusing men who are not present to defend themselves is not American justice.”

“They weren’t present because they couldn’t be found. If they’d been found they would have had a fair trial.”

“Men do not just disappear into the air like smoke.”

“Some do. Some did.”

“Still, it doesn’t seem rightful to read names out loud and in court the way they did. Supposing one of the names had been yours and you weren’t given a chance to say, ‘That’s me, Secundo Estivar, that’s my name, don’t you go accusing—’”

“The names read in court were not real, can’t you understand that?”

“Even so.”

“All right. If you don’t like the way Mr. Ford handled the case, call him up and tell him as soon as we get home. But don’t drag me in.”

“You are in,” Ysobel said. “You gave him the names.”

“I had to, I was ordered to.”

“Even so.”

It was a dangerous subject, this business of the migrants, and Estivar knew his wife wouldn’t give it up until she was offered another to take its place. He said, “You’d have handled the case much better than Ford did, of course.”

“In some ways maybe I could.”

“Well, keep a list and send it to him. Don’t waste time telling me. I’m no—”

“I don’t think he should have brought the girl into it, Carla Lopez.” Ysobel rubbed her eyes as though she were erasing an image. “It was a shock to me seeing her again. I thought she’d left town, and good riddance. Then suddenly up she pops, in court of all places, and no longer a girl. A woman, a woman with a baby. I suppose you saw the baby when she had it with her this morning.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it looked like—”

“It looked like a baby,” Estivar said stonily. “Any baby.”

“What fools we were to hire her that summer.”

“I didn’t hire her. You did.”

“It was your idea to get someone who’d be good with the kids.”

“Well, she was good with the kids, all right, only it was the big kids, not the little ones.”

“How was I to foresee that? She looked so innocent,” Ysobel said. “So pure. I never dreamed she’d dangle herself in front of my sons like a... like a—”

“Lower your voice.”

Jaime leaned toward Dulzura and spoke in a whisper: “What’s that mean, dangled herself?”

Dulzura wasn’t certain but she had no intention of admitting it to a fourteen-year-old boy. “You’re too young to know such things.”

“Bull.”

“You get fresh with me and I’ll tell your father. He’ll knock the bejeez out of you.”

“Oh, come on. What’s it mean, she dangled herself?”

“It means,” Dulzura said carefully, “that she paraded around with her chest stuck out.”

“Like a drum majorette?”

“Yes. Only no music or drums. No costume or baton, either.”

“Then what’s left?”

“The chest.”

“What’s so great about that?”

“I told you, you’re too young.”

Jaime studied the row of warts along the knuckles of his left hand. “Her and Felipe used to meet in the packing shed.”

“Well, don’t you tell nobody. It’s none of their business.”

“There are cracks between the boards where I could watch them through.”

“You oughta be ashamed.”

“She didn’t dangle herself,” Jaime said. “She just took off her clothes.”

The five o’clock race to the suburbs had begun and cars were spilling wildly onto the freeway from every ramp. With the windows open, the way Leo liked to drive, conversation was impossible. Above the din of traffic, only very loud noises could have been audible, shouts of anger, excitement, fear. Devon felt only a kind of gray and quiet grief. The tears that stung her eyes dried in the wind and left a dusting of salt across her lashes. She made no attempt to wipe it away.

Leo took the off-ramp to Boca de Rio and it was then that the first words of the journey were exchanged.

“Would you like to stop for a cup of coffee, Devon?”

“If you would.”

“It’s up to you. You’re a free agent now, remember? You have to start making decisions.”

“All right. I’d like some coffee.”

“See how easy it is?”

“I guess so.” She didn’t tell him that her decision had nothing to do with coffee or with him. She only wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be returning to an empty house, that Dulzura would have plenty of time to get home before she did.

They stopped at a small roadside cantina on the outskirts of Boca de Rio. The proprietor, after a voluble exchange of greetings with Leo in Spanish, led the way to a table beside the window. It was a picture window without much of a picture, a stunted paloverde tree and a patch of weeds half-dead of drought.

She said, as though there’d been no lapse of time since midafternoon and the ride to Mrs. Osborne’s house, “Robert must have had some girl friends.”

“Temporary ones. None of them hung around after a few bouts with Mrs. Osborne.”

“Robert wasn’t a weak or timid man. Why didn’t he stand up to her?”

“She was pretty subtle about it, I guess. Maybe he didn’t realize what was going on. Or maybe he didn’t care.”

“You mean he had no need of anyone besides Ruth.” She stared out at the patch of weeds dying hard like hope. “Leo, listen. There’s no — no reasonable doubt that he and Ruth—”

“No reasonable doubt.”

“All those years, ever since he was a boy?”

“I repeat, seventeen-year-olds aren’t boys. Some fifteen-year-olds aren’t either.”

“What are you hinting at?”

“He was fifteen when she sent him away to school.”

“But that was because his father died.”

“Was it? The usual pattern in such cases is for the mother to lean more heavily on the son, not send him away.”

The proprietor brought mugs of coffee and a dish containing slivers of dark sweet Mexican chocolate to sprinkle on top. The chocolate melted as soon as it touched the hot liquid, leaving tiny fragrant pools of oil which caught the sun and shone iridescent like little round rainbows.

Leo broke up the rainbows with the tip of a spoon. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about those two years he was gone, remembering things, some trivial, some important. Ruth was depressed — I remember that well enough. It colored our lives. She told me that every hour was like a big blob of gray she couldn’t see through or over or underneath.”

“What about Mrs. Osborne?”

“She kept pretty much to herself — normal enough for a woman who’d just lost her husband. The Osbornes had very little social life because of Osborne’s drinking, so Mrs. Osborne’s seclusion wasn’t particularly noticeable. We’d never seen much of her anyway, now we saw less.” The miniature rainbows in his cup had re-formed and he broke them up again. “I recall one occasion when I asked Ruth to go over and visit Mrs. Osborne, thinking it might do them both some good. Ruth surprised me by agreeing right away. In fact, she even baked a cake to take with her. She started out on foot toward the Osborne ranch — she couldn’t drive a car and she turned down my offer of a ride. She stayed away for hours. She was still gone when I finished work for the day, so I went to look for her. I found her sitting on the edge of the dry riverbed. There was a flock of blackbirds beside her and she was feeding the cake to them piece by piece. She looked quite happy. I hadn’t seen her look that happy for a long time. Without saying a word she got in the car and we drove home. She never told me what happened, I never asked. That was nine years ago, yet it’s one of the most vivid pictures I have left of Ruth, her sitting quietly on the riverbank feeding cake to a bunch of blackbirds.”

“She liked to feed things?”

“Yes. Dogs, cats, birds, anything that came along.”

“So did Robert.” She looked out at the falling sun. “Perhaps they were just good friends, just very good friends.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’d like to go home now, Leo.”

“All right.”

THE pungent smell of oregano drifting out of the kitchen windows welcomed her home.

Dulzura was at the work counter shredding cheese for enchiladas. She said, without turning, “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I thought, an early dinner with a little wine— How about that?”

“Fine.”

“Did I do right in court? I was nervous, maybe people couldn’t hear me.”

“They heard you.”

“What kind of wine would you like?”

Devon was on the point of saying “Any kind,” when she remembered Leo’s insisting that she start making decisions on her own. “Port.”

“All we got is sherry. The only reason I asked is because you always say you don’t care what kind.”

So much for decisions, Devon thought, and went upstairs to take a shower.

After dinner Devon walked by herself in the warm still night. The sound of her footsteps, inaudible to a human being, was picked up by a barn owl. He hissed a warning to his mate, who was hunting for rats outside the packing shed and underneath the bleachers where the men ate their lunch. Devon sat on the bottom step of the bleachers. Both owls flew silently over her head and vanished into the tamarisk trees that ringed the reservoir. She had often heard the owls between twilight and dawn, but this was the first time she had more than a glimpse of their faces, and it was a shock to her to discover that they didn’t look like birds at all but like monkeys or ugly children, accidentally winged.

The water, which in the daytime appeared murky and hardly fit even for irrigating, shone in the moonlight as if it were clean enough to drink. She remembered a giant scoop probing the muddy depths for Robert, and bringing up old tires and wine bottles and beer cans, pieces of lumber and rusting machinery, and finally, the baby bones which Valenzuela had carried away in a shoe box. Months later she’d asked Valenzuela about the bones. He said the baby had probably been born to one of the girls who followed the migrants. Staring down at the water Devon thought of the dead child and the long-gone mother, and of Valenzuela simultaneously crossing himself and cursing as he packed the bones into the little shoe-box coffin.

Suddenly a match flared on the opposite side of the reservoir and moments later the smell of cigarette smoke floated across the water. She knew that members of the Estivar household were forbidden to smoke — “The air,” Estivar said, “is already dry and hot and dirty enough” — and she was a little uneasy and more than a little curious. She rose and began moving quietly along the dusty path. She had a flashlight in her hand but there was no need to turn it on.

“Jaime?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In the moonlight Jaime’s face was as ghostly white as the barn owl’s. But he was neither winged nor wild and he made no attempt to escape. Instead, he took another deep drag of the cigarette, letting the smoke curl up out of his mouth and around his head like ectoplasm. Nothing materialized except a voice: “Smoke is supposed to keep the mosquitoes away.”

“And does it?”

“I’ve only been bit twice so far.” He scratched his left ankle with the toe of his right shoe. The wooden crate he was sitting on creaked rheumatically at the joints. “You going to tell my folks on me?”

“No, but they’ll find out some time.”

“Not tonight, anyhow. She went to bed with a headache and he’s gone.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t say. He had a phone call and left the house, looking like he was glad of an excuse to get away.”

“Why would that be, Jaime?”

“Him and Mom were fighting, they’d been at it ever since court.”

“I didn’t know your parents ever fought.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He took another drag on the cigarette and blew smoke, slowly and scientifically, at a mosquito that was buzzing at his forearm. “He gets mean, she gets nervous. Sometimes vice versa.”

“Money,” she said. “That’s what most couples fight about, I suppose.”

“Not them.”

“No?”

“They fight about people. Us kids mostly, only like tonight it was about other people.”

She realized that she shouldn’t be standing in the dark prying information out of a fourteen-year-old boy but she made no move to leave or to alter the course of the conversation. It was the first time she’d ever really heard Jaime talk. He sounded cool and rational, like an elderly man assessing the problems of a pair of youngsters.

She said, “What other people?”

“Everybody whose name came up.”

“Did my name come up?”

“A little bit.”

“How little?”

“It was just about you and Mr. Bishop. Him and my dad don’t groove, and my dad’s afraid Mr. Bishop might get to be boss of the ranch some day. I mean, if he married you—”

“Yes, I see.”

“But my mom says you’d never marry him on account of his mal ojo, evil eye.”

“Do you believe in things like that?”

“I guess not. He’s got funny eyes, though. Sometimes it’s better not to take a chance.”

“Thank you for the advice, Jaime.”

“That’s okay.”

The owls appeared again, flying low and in utter silence over the reservoir. One of them had a rat in its claws. The rat’s tail, bright with blood, swung gently in the moonlight.

“People with mal ojo,” Devon said, “what do they do?”

“They just look at you.”

“Then what?”

“Then you got a jinx.”

“Like Carla Lopez.”

“Yeah, like Carla Lopez.” Jaime hesitated. “She was one of the people my mom and dad were quarreling about tonight. There was a big argument over which of them hired her to work for us summer before last and which of them got the idea of hiring somebody in the first place. Mom said it was my dad’s idea because Carla Lopez had worked for the Bishops the previous summer and my dad couldn’t let Mr. Bishop be ahead of him like that.”

“Did Carla cause any trouble when she was staying at your house?”

“Not for me. But she dangled herself in front of my brothers.”

“She what?”

“Dangled herself. You know, like a drum majorette.”

“I see.”

“My two older brothers, both of them already had steady girl friends, so they didn’t pay so much attention. But Felipe, he really twitched. So did the cop.”

“What cop?”

“Valenzuela. He used to make excuses to come out to the house, things like talking to my dad about the wetback problem, but he came to see her.” Jaime lowered his voice as though he suspected one of the trees might be bugged. “The word got around at school not to tangle with any of the Lopez family because they had protection. Even Felipe stayed away from them.”

“Why do you say, even Felipe?”

“He was a good fighter, he took a mail-order course in karate. Anyway, he left at the end of summer. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life messing with fertilizers and bug sprays, so he went to find a job in the city.”

This was the story Jaime had been given, and it made sense. It was also reinforced by the arrival now and then of letters which Estivar read aloud at the evening meal: “Dear Folks, Here I am in Seattle working at an aircraft factory, making good money and feeling fine...” Whether it was the words themselves or the slow deliberate way Estivar read them, to Jaime the letters didn’t sound natural. That Felipe should write at all wasn’t natural. He was too impatient. The thoughts that skittered across his mind couldn’t be caught by a pen and pinned down to paper. Still, the letters came: “Dear Folks, I won’t be able to fly home for Christmas, so here is ten dollars for Jaime to buy a new sweater...”

He couldn’t see the expression on Devon’s face but he knew she was watching him and he felt vulnerable and guilty. He wished the subject of Felipe hadn’t come up. It was as if he’d been tricked into it by the night, the soft-talking woman, the reservoir catching the moon’s rays like a giant mal ojo.

He rose abruptly, dropping the cigarette on the ground and stamping on it. “Felipe had no connection with the viseros that did the killing. He was gone before they were even hired. Anyway, my mom says maybe the viseros didn’t do it, it’s easy to accuse people when they aren’t around to defend themselves.”

Too easy, she thought. Leo’s accusation that Ruth and Robert were lovers came only after they were both dead. There was no real evidence: Robert was sent away to school... Ruth was depressed and suffered from headaches... Robert didn’t have girl friends... “When I worked for the Bishops,” Carla had said, “everything was quiet. Mr. Bishop used to read a lot and Mrs. Bishop took long walks for her headaches.” What kind of walks had they been, innocent purposeless strolls around the countryside? Or did she head straight for the river, the most direct route to Robert?

“Well, I better be going,” Jaime said, “before somebody comes barging out looking for me.”

“Wait just a minute, Jaime.”

“Sure, but—”

“I want to get in touch with Carla Lopez and I can’t remember the address she gave in court this morning.”

“You could ask her family in Boca de Rio, only they probably wouldn’t tell you. They’d think you were trying to cause trouble for her. They’re that way — you know, suspicious.” After a moment he added, “I bet the cop knows where she’s at — Valenzuela.”

“I’ll try him. Thank you, Jaime.”

“You’re welcome.” He sounded as if he wasn’t quite sure how welcome.

There were several valenzuelas in the telephone directory but only one was listed in the yellow pages under Insurance. The same number was given for both office and home, and Devon had the impression of a shoestring operation, not the kind of thing that would lure a man away from an important job in the sheriff’s department.

The voice that answered the phone was hoarse and unsteady. “Hello.”

“Mr. Valenzuela?”

“Who’s this?”

“Mrs. Osborne. Mrs. Robert Osborne.”

“If you want a policeman you called the wrong place. I’m retired. In fact, I’m tired and retired and maybe a little drunk too. How’s that?”

“Not so good. I was hoping you could help me.”

“I’m not in the helping business any more.”

“I merely want some information,” Devon said. “I thought you might know how I can get in touch with Carla Lopez.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to ask her some questions.”

“She has no phone.”

“Can you tell me where she lives?”

“She’s not home tonight.”

“I see. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you. I can get her address tomorrow morning from the court records or from Mr. Ford.”

There was such a long silence that Devon thought Valenzuela had hung up or perhaps walked away from the phone to pour himself another drink. Then, “Catalpa Street. 431 Catalpa Street, Apartment Nine.”

“Thank you, Mr. Valenzuela.”

“You’re welcome.”

It was the second time within the hour that she’d been welcome but not very.