The Bone Polisher

17 ~ Hesperia

Bird’s flight down the freeway, actually free for once, eight lanes of blank concrete like a long sentence punctuated by blue-white lights and green-and-white signs; here and there the dependent clause of an offramp. Left on the Ventura Freeway, premature morning traffic streaming south on the other side of the chain-link fence with its desiccated, hallucinogenic laurels, and then off on Reseda Boulevard, gliding between looming old pepper trees and dark houses and the deathly glare of all-night markets.

My eyes burned like someone had put Tabasco in my eyedrops, and there was an empty, fluttery feeling in my gut. Drive-time disk jockeys, preternaturally alert guys who couldn’t have passed for wits in a gathering of battery-powered appliances, made smutty jokes and played twenty-year-old music to ease the world into the gray disappointment of another day.

I’d driven this route only a few hours earlier, but it felt as distant as childhood.

By now some hustler or screenwriter, righteously steamed by the rhythms of Kool and the Gang, would have called the sheriffs. I hoped some alert deputy had awakened Spurrier from his dreams of shiny badges and broken jaws. Why should he get all the sleep?

The dawn was breaking pale and wet-looking, two fingers of vodka in the eastern sky, as I parked Alice around the corner and hiked the thorny lawns of Hesperia Street to Elena Aguirre’s house. The nine-millimeter pressed against my thigh like twenty dollars in change, but my feet barely seemed to brush the ground and my head was anchored to my shoulders by the thinnest of strings. The world slid by like a baggage belt in an airport, and I was hardly moving at all. I ticked off the symptoms of exhaustion with an almost medical disinterest.

A light was on in the front window: The poor get up early. I drifted past Elena’s dented car and went around to the back and sat on one of the big rocks. I was transparent, a cloud of gnats, something you could have read an eye chart through. The rock had a nice, regular, liquid motion. It was a cork, and we were afloat on an ocean of gelatin, and the ocean was thickening as the waves grew gentler and farther apart. We’d never get there at this rate. What we needed was a sail, or maybe a Mixmaster. I could hang it over the side and use it like an outboard.

I opened my eyes to a blare of light, a full brass section triple-tonguing brilliant baroque figures against my retina. The sun was a hand’s breadth above the house across the street, and Elena’s car was gone.

All the old aches punched the time clock, organized for action, as I stood up. Some of them went for my arms and others assailed my legs, but the really smart ones, the ones that had learned to use tools, picked up their Louisville Sluggers and took batting practice against my lower back. Trying to remember whether any of Joseph Campbell’s heroes had back problems, I limped to the back door and tried the knob.

No go. The window at the side of the house was closed and locked, and the front door made it a matched set. Expecting nothing, I knocked and got what I’d expected. This was a situation that called for cunning and discretion. I went around to the back, picked up one of the smaller rocks, one about the size of my head, lugged it around to the side of the house, and lobbed it, shot-put style, through the window.

It sounded like the entire morning had been shattered. The noise sliced through my fatigue, galvanized me, maybe even frightened me. Eschewing Henry’s highly personal head-first style, I found a place where I could put my hands without cutting them to ribbons and hoisted myself inside.

I had both feet on the carpet of a cramped little dining room when I realized that I was hearing a woman’s voice. She babbled on, cheerful, confident-sounding, apparently unperturbed that an asteroid had just ventilated her dining room.

Television, I thought, and turned from the window to find myself looking down at a miniature human being, no more than twenty-four inches tall, with a large head and very small, white-clad feet. In my addled state it took me a good five seconds to summon up and discard three or four mutant possibilities and identify it as a child.

“Arounnaworld in thirty miniss,” the child said loudly. “I’m Lyn Vaughn.”

“ Shhhhh,” I said, forgetting that I’d essentially entered the house by coming directly through the wall. “For God’s sake, be quiet.”

“Awholeday’s news-” the child began.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “We’re playing a game. Look, look-” I picked up a saltshaker from the table and pointed it at the child. Salt poured out onto the floor. “This is the remote.”

“Headlinnnnnnnne SPORSSS!” the child shrilled, raising both arms in a good approximation of a distance runner breaking the tape. It seemed to be a girl, but the evidence at that age is scant, and I’m no judge.

“And when I push the remote like this,” I said frantically, salting the floor some more, “the sound goes off and you can’t talk. Okay, now, off.”

Both of the child’s hands went over her mouth. Her hands looked like she spent the entire day licking them and then running them over the dirtiest, stickiest surfaces that the planet Dirty Sticky could offer her. She stood there, the discreet monkey, eyes wide and snapping with impatience, shifting from foot to foot in her eagerness to spread the latest word about Michael Jackson or the intifada.

“Okay, now,” I said, lifting the saltshaker and bringing it partway down with every word. “What’s-your-name?” I pointed it at her and punched its side with my thumb.

“Boutros Boutros-Ghali,” she said. And opened her mouth wider, but I pushed my imaginary mute button and the hands went up again.

“Are you alone here, Boutros?” Push the button.

“Tee Wee,” she said. “Da da DAHT-DA-” The Headline News theme was cut off by the magic saltshaker. Her grubby palm smacked into her lips.

“Only the TV? Nobody else?”

She pulled the hands away.

“Ah-aah,” I said. “I didn’t push the remote.” I added salt to the rug. “Go.”

“ No entiendo.”

Uh-oh, I thought. Espanol. Another of the many languages I don’t speak. “Well, me, too. Mute’s on.” I gave her a couple cc’s of salt. “Stay close,” I said. “I mean, vamanos. And silencio, okay?”

“Hollywood minnit,” she said before gluing her hands in place.

The dining room barely provided space enough for me, Boutros, a small formica table, and four chrome and vinyl chairs. A rickety wicker bookcase, hip-high, housed a collection of paperbacks with Spanish titles and no fewer than three Spanish-English dictionaries. In a plain wooden frame above the bookcase a lachrymose Jesus, bleeding profusely from the head, opened his chest to reveal a remarkably red and improbably symmetrical heart.

I followed Boutros into a kitchen with an old Gaffers amp; Sattler gas four-burner, the kind Eleanor wanted to find, and a refrigerator that would barely have held my average week’s worth of beer. Ropes of chiles hung from the walls, pinned in place with big flat thumbtacks. Jesus was in here, too, his chest intact this time, with rays of light streaming out from his white-clad form. The floor was worn linoleum, the corners of the tiles curling up here and there, clean enough to give birth on. Beyond the kitchen was an infinitesimal laundry room. The man’s clothes Elena had been washing the previous night were neatly folded on top of the dryer. There was no dust or lint anywhere.

What in the world, I wondered, had the child gotten her hands into?

Lyn Vaughn, ensconced on the blue CNN set in Atlanta, smiled at me in a newsy, discreetly foxy fashion from the screen of the hulking television set in the living room. The television set has replaced the piano in modern homes as a surface on which to display pictures, and the space above Lyn Vaughn’s talking head was cluttered with framed snapshots, uniformly self-possessed faces that presented variations on a genetic theme: the echo of an uptilted eye here, a broad Indio nose there. A family. Three sober-faced boys-teenagers-decked out in stiffly starched shirts, one girl of eight or ten wearing a white communion dress, Elena herself in a puritanically simple dark dress, and a woman with a short thatch of steel-gray hair who had to be Marta. Marta, the troll-aunt, tiny and bent, with something simmering, insistent, and compressed, in her eyes.

I picked the picture up and showed it to Boutros, whose hands had found their way into her mouth. She tore her eyes away from Lyn Vaughn and looked at it. “ Tia Marta,” she said around nine grimy fingers.

Another picture, the largest of all, showed Elena, the boys, and the girl, considerably younger, standing in front of a greener, lusher, muddier world that had to be El Salvador. They were all looking past the camera, laughing at something. The boy in the center had thrown his arms comfortably over his brothers’ shoulders.

No picture of the baby. No man to take it since she was born? There wasn’t much of anything to suggest a man’s presence. There wasn’t, in fact, much of anything at all: a couch, two chairs, a low table. A closed door.

Through the door, a hallway, parallel to the street. Three bedrooms, one with three beds-the boys? — one with two-Elena and her older daughter? — and one, the tiniest of all, a penitential nun’s cell with a bare brown linoleum floor, an iron-framed single bed, and a four-drawer dresser of unpainted, unfinished wood, the kind people buy cheap, meaning to paint it, and never do. Surrounded by a pink plastic frame on top of the dresser, Marta’s face squinted apprehensively out at me, waiting for the next blow.

The mystery of the child’s hands was solved. Aunt Marta’s room apparently served as a trap for all the dirt that entered the house. There were dust rats under the bed, grit on the linoleum. It may be sexist stereotyping, but it seems to me that when a woman lets her space get seriously dirty, she’s usually depressed.

In the top drawer, rolled up into a sock, I found eleven hundred dollars in twenties and fifties. A lot of money for a maid. The child gazed up at me solemnly as I unrolled the sock’s mate and heard something jingle. Marta’s cache: a ring, another, a gold chain, a-

Somebody moaned, a constricted little vocal shiver with no force behind it. I looked at Boutros, but she’d dropped to her fanny on the floor, where she was rolling dirt ropes on the linoleum.

My spine went stiff, and the pain in my back wrapped itself around my middle, saddled me, and dug in the spurs. I closed my fingers around the sock and replaced it silently. For insurance, I picked up the saltshaker, which I’d been toting around with me, and zapped the child. A dirt rope went into her mouth, but she kept quiet. Easing the salt-shaker into my left hand, I pulled my gun out of my pocket, trying to keep my body between it and the child, and slid my feet toward the door. My shoes squealed on the linoleum. Boutros got up and slid along behind me. Her shoes squealed on the linoleum.

Okay, skip stealth. I sprang across the hall and into the boys’ room, gun extended, and kicked the door back against the wall. The child squealed happily at the noise. No one behind the door, no one in the room, no one in the closet, no one in the little bathroom.

I kicked the door again as I hurtled back into the hallway and slammed my back against the wall. Pulling both hands from her mouth, the child clapped them together. She was having a great time. I took three long steps sideways, hugging the wall, and then whirled and kicked the open door of the largest room, the room I’d taken to be Elena’s.

It banged against the wall and bounced shut behind me, but by then I was raking the clothes in the closet with my free hand, keeping the gun back, at waist level, pointed into the closet. The clothes swayed back and forth, hangers rattling. No one.

There were two beds, a queen-size one with a cerise coverlet in the center of the room and a smaller one, a child’s bed, up against the wall to the right. Boutros squatted Asian-style, bottom touching the floor, next to the larger bed and put a dark brown handprint on something white protruding from beneath the bedspread. A shoe.

It was a small shoe, a white canvas sneaker. It had a foot in it. It was perfectly still, as still as the foot of a corpse.

I put the gun in my left, reached down, and took hold of the corpse’s foot. Boutros scuttled backward, and the corpse said, “ Yaiiii.”

“Mr. Max give me,” Marta Aguirre said sullenly. She was even smaller than I’d expected, a shrunken, malformed woman who seemed to have been compressed unevenly by external pressure, collapsed inward like a tin can at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

She was sitting on her hands on the queen-size bed, and I was perched on the smaller one, the child’s bed, feeling oversize and overtired and stretched far too thin for any of this. Boutros, whose name turned out to be Tina, was in the living room, glued to the latest carnage from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’ve already admitted you took the rings and the gold chain. Why would Max give you more than a thousand bucks?”

“For gold,” she said.

It was what she’d said before. I put a hand behind me and rubbed at the small of my back. Peter Pain immediately whammed me a good one. “Gold for what?”

“Surprise.”

“Well, you’re going to have to spoil it,” I said. She glowered at me, and I tried the direct approach. “What kind of a surprise? For whom?”

Her mouth shrunk at the corners like a poison kiss, giving her an expression of surpassing bitterness, the expression of something little and bent that lived in the dark under a bridge and frightened dogs. “ Maricon,” she said venomously. “Fancy boy.”

“You don’t mean Christy,” I ventured.

“New boy,” she said. Her right shoulder was a good two inches higher than her left. It made her look like a beast of burden.

“Marta,” I said, “did you ever see this new boy?”

She squinted darkly at me, assessing me and finding me wanting on some private scale. “No.” The word dropped like a stone.

“So let’s say you’re telling the truth, just for fun. You were supposed to buy gold for Max’s new boy?”

“ Make,” she said, packing a surprising amount of contempt into such a short word. “ Make gold.”

I closed my eyes and thought briefly about lying down. The bed was too short. “You were going to take Max’s money,” I said slowly, “and make gold for his new boy.”

“Stupid,” Marta Aguirre said. I was beginning to share Christy’s feelings about her. “Uncle make. Uncle make gold.”

“Your uncle,” I said, picking my way through the sparsest of verbal thickets, “is a goldsmith?”

“Wha?” Marta Aguirre said.

Maybe the bed wasn’t too short. “A jeweler.”

“ Si. Jeweler.” She nodded vigorously, in case si was beyond my powers.

“What was he supposed to make?”

“Stupid,” she said again. “Gimme.” She reached out a stunted hand, and I gave her the sock that had held the rings and the necklace. She fished around in it and pulled something out: a pack of military dog tags. “Make gold,” she said, explaining the obvious to an idiot. “Uncle make gold. For fancy boy.”

Steel dog tags. The steel chain taken from around Max’s neck. I got up, feeling stronger and more energetic than I had in days, and pulled Max’s wad from my pocket. I dangled a fifty in front of her, and when she reached for it I relieved her of the dog tags and read them. They said:

McCARVEY, JD SGT

AR5144597082

TYPE AB

ROMAN CATHOLIC

I hung the chain around my neck. Then I gave Marta Aguirre the fifty.

“Fix the window,” I said.