Twice Buried

17

I had to admit to a little impatience. When two cops get together, it’s easy for them to jump in a patrol car and blast off in a cloud of exhaust and tire smoke. But not so when the entire family is involved.

Estelle took her time making sure the tiny, slumbering Francis Carlos Guzman was securely belted into his form-fitting, high-tech, plastic/Velcro/fiberglass infant car seat. The kid sure didn’t care. He’d obviously inherited his father’s easygoing pace.

Dr. Guzman took the wheel with me riding shotgun and Estelle in back with the baby. I twisted around in my seat and grinned at my sleeping godson. He had a round, fat face framed with fine, black hair. “A good-lookin’ kid,” I said again. Estelle smiled her inscrutable smile and let the sleeping child grip her little finger in his miniature fist.

Outside, the day was glowering, the sky still leaden and the wind raw and piercing. Snow in southwestern New Mexico was a rarity. When it came, it seldom lasted more than a few hours. But when I looked out of the Trooper, Minnesota would have been a good guess…or even Cleveland, where my youngest daughter lived.

New Mexico was supposed to be blank blue skies, so achingly clear that five minutes outside would start the skin cancer blooms for sure. The sun on a December high noon should be frying the retinas. But no. It was bleak and gray. The front was settling in with no significant weather predicted. Just mush. Depressing, gray mush.

“Have you talked with Reuben since they found the body?” Francis asked.

“Yes,” I said. “As I told Estelle, the old man says he heard a couple of shots, but didn’t go investigate.”

“Then he’s sure not feeling up to snuff,” the physician said. He glanced at Estelle in the rearview mirror. “Ten years ago, he would have been out the door, shooting.”

“He’s not that bad,” Estelle said.

“And no ideas who might have done it?”

I shook my head and Francis sighed. “This is going to be hard on him.”

We rode in silence the rest of the way. During the jouncing ride up Reuben’s two-track, the baby released his grip on Estelle’s finger, turned his head toward the window, sighed deeply, and continued blowing Z’s. He was as calm as they come. Hell, if all babies could be like that, I might not have settled for just four.

Francis parked the Isuzu within a dozen feet of the cabin. “Why don’t I stay out here with the baby. Holler if you need me,” he said. Estelle hesitated, then nodded.

I followed her toward the front door of Reuben Fuentes’s dismal shack, one shoulder hunched against the wind.

The old man didn’t answer the first knock, or the second.

“Is it locked?” I asked, and Estelle tried the latch. The door swung in with a protest.

“Reuben?” Estelle called. Her voice was musical, a wonderful contralto that could charm even old men who didn’t care any more.

A small voice responded from somewhere inside. Estelle pushed the door fully open and I followed her in. Reuben Fuentes was sitting in his rocking chair in the corner, the same tiny bulb in the table lamp trying its best. He didn’t rise.

Estelle crossed through the hodgepodge of litter in a couple of long-legged steps and knelt beside her granduncle. I closed the door against the wind and waited. I understood basic Mexican, words like si and gracias and de nada, when they were spoken slowly and clearly by gringos. What passed between Estelle and her uncle, most of it spoken in low, urgent tones, reminded me of what butterfly wing beats might sound like if our ears were sharp enough to hear.

My eyes adjusted to the light and I saw that Estelle was holding the old man’s hands in hers, but that the index and middle fingers of her right hand were touching the inside of his wrist.

She asked him a brief question with the word medico buried in it, and he shook his head wearily. That prompted her to lift a hand and run her fingers lightly down his wrinkled, leathery cheek. I heard the name Francisco, but that brought no response. I doubted if the old man knew who her husband was-maybe he didn’t even remember that she was married.

She tried every argument there was, but the old man was adamant. Whatever was bothering him, he wanted no part of medico, Posadas, or enfermedad anywhere but in his own diggings.

Eventually they reached a quiet impasse. Reuben Fuentes sat hunched like a small, withered gnome, his head turned slightly away and his face in the shadows. Estelle sat on the floor at his feet, her hands and his in Reuben’s lap.

I had no hint of how long this silent dialogue might continue but I had no intention of interrupting. My knees were beginning to protest standing so long. I pushed the old cat off one of the straight chairs and sat down. I could wait. I tried to survey the contents of the room, but the light was too dim.

The heat was almost oppressive as a great, gnarled piece of pinon smoldered in the fireplace. I unbuttoned my jacket, thinking that a blast of cold air through the door might feel good. After a few minutes of the warm silence, my eyes began to grow heavy-lidded, and I found myself wishing that Estelle would make up the old man’s mind just a tad faster.

As if he’d heard my thoughts, Reuben Fuentes straightened a little, sighed, and patted the back of Estelle’s hand. He said distinctly, “Lo que paso, paso, Estelita.”

“No es necesario tio de mi abuela. Estoy aqui ahora.” Her tone was tinged with impatience.

“Esta mejor…dejarme en paz, nina.”

She placed a hand on his knee and used him as leverage to push herself to her feet. I thought I heard a joint crack and couldn’t imagine this girl old enough for such things. Maybe she’d pushed too hard on Reuben’s frail, razor-thin knee.

“Bobo, bobo,” she said softly, and she again took his hands in hers. I could see she was pulling him out of the chair, much the way a child, eager for play time, would tug at a recalcitrant adult. He gave in finally and pushed himself out of the chair.

It was as if ten years had passed since my last visit. The old man who hours before had been almost steady if not spry on his feet now stood wavering before his next step.

I got up, unsure of what either Estelle or Reuben intended.

“He’ll go into town to see a doctor if we’ll take him to the field first,” Estelle said.

“You’re ill, Reuben?” I asked. The answer was obvious, but I wanted the old man to talk to me, to recognize my presence.

“No, not so much,” the old man replied. His voice was husky and forced. “But my niece, here-” He shook his head. “Can’t leave an old man in peace.”

“Yes, he is ill, sir.” She tapped the center of her own chest with an index finger and shook her head.

“You want an ambulance to meet us at the county road?”

“No. He won’t do that. I think he’ll be all right if we just take it real slow. Francis has his medical bag in the car if we need it.”

She ushered Reuben toward the door, stopping for a moment to wrap his sheepskin coat tightly around him. He looked at me, the ghost of a smile wrinkling the corners of his eyes.

“Are you finished with my field?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Good. You know-” he drifted off for a second, then said, “my wife is buried down there, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.” In fact I did know that his wife had been laid to rest in All Saints’ Cemetery in Posadas a decade before, but who knew what ghosts had played in the old man’s mind since then.

“She is. She told me not to go down there. That’s why I didn’t come to answer your questions.”

“My questions?”

He lifted his bony shoulders in that slight, characteristic Mexican shrug of dismissal. “You and the others-”

“We need to get him out to the car,” Estelle said, and the two of us all but carried the fragile old man to the Isuzu.

“I’ll get in first, sir,” Estelle said, and climbed in so she was sitting between the sleeping baby and Reuben. Francis reached back and touched Reuben’s hand as the old man settled into the seat and I closed the door.

“Don Reuben,” he said. Reuben Fuentes looked at him as he might a friendly stranger and said nothing.

“He wants to see the field first,” I said. “There’s a turnoff just down the path a bit. It takes us right out to the pasture without having to walk in from the road.”

Francis didn’t argue or press the moment with Reuben. He turned around with a quick glance at me and a raised eyebrow, then started the truck. In a moment we were jouncing back out the two-track.

Just beyond the first wash a faint path bore off to the left. Following Reuben’s whispered directions, we turned off the worn path and nosed through brush and scrub.

Occasionally an oak twig would etch its way along the truck’s paint, and I glanced back at Estelle.

She and the old man were deep in another of their private, silent conversations.

In less than fifty yards the brush fell away and we entered the northeast corner of the big pasture, a field that sloped down to the county road almost a quarter of a mile distant.

I pointed toward the west. “We want to head right for that outcropping down there, Francis. Right where the grove of oaks is the thickest.” He threaded the truck between rocks and cactus, making way toward the west side of the pasture where the oak grove formed a necklace around the bottom of the limestone outcropping.

The jouncing finally awakened young Francis Carlos. He blinked awake, yawned mightily, said, “Ummmm,” and settled in again.

“This is the spot,” I said and Francis pulled to a stop a dozen paces from the gravesite. I glanced down toward the county road and saw that Eddie Mitchell’s county car was still parked in Reuben’s two-track. Since we had approached from the rear, the deputy obviously hadn’t seen us…he wouldn’t have recognized the Guzmans’ truck, and would certainly have been prompted to action by the sight of someone driving through the field of evidence.

“Yes,” Reuben said behind me. “I remember this spot.” As well he should, I thought, since he had buried his three dogs in this hole not a week before. “I want to get out.”

“You shouldn’t, Tio. Just tell us about it.”

“This is where I buried my dogs,” he said.

“I know, Tio.”

“They were poisoned.”

“Yes.”

“The man who did that…he was…cobarde. The dogs never hurt anybody.”

He leaned forward and I saw that he was looking through the windshield at the disturbed earth. The grave was still open, the mound of dirt just visible.

“We took the bodies for tests, Reuben,” I said. “We wanted to know what kind of poison killed the dogs. Maybe that way we can find who did it.”

“Cobarde,” he repeated.

I turned to Estelle. “Does he know who did it? Did he say?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why don’t you talk to me,” Reuben said. His voice was stronger, fueled with indignation that I considered him so infirm that I would speak as if he weren’t present.

“All right,” I said. “Who killed your dogs, Reuben?”

He mumbled something and looked off toward the east. I watched him, finding it difficult to believe that a week ago this frail old man had dug a hole nearly eighteen inches deep and a yard square.

“I buried them myself,” he said and I knew then that that would be the extent of his story. “I want to get out of the car.”

This time, Estelle didn’t protest, and Reuben moved as if he were tapping some last reserve of energy. He walked around the open door, putting a hand on the truck’s fender for support with Estelle at his other elbow. I knew we were humoring him, probably pointlessly so. But in his mental wanderings, some small kernel of information might surface, might be of use.

He stood in the wind and the cold at the edge of that sorry hole in the ground and looked down at the fresh earth.

“This is it,” he said.

“I don’t want you catching cold, Tio.” Estelle reached over and pulled his collar up higher.

“This is where I buried my dogs,” he repeated. “Right here.” He turned to look at me. “You could have just asked me.”

“I did ask, Reuben,” I said gently.

“If you had asked me, I would have told you the dogs were here.” I let that pass without comment. I trusted Estelle’s instinct about how much to push the old man’s memory.

“Why did you dig so deep?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

He gestured with considerable irritation. “So deep. Por Dios. It took me two hours to scratch the earth, and mira. You dig this caverna. What did you think you would find?”

I shrugged. “We removed the animals, that’s all. When the lab is finished, we’ll…we’ll put them back. We’ll rebury them.”

“Good.” His single word came out flat and final. He turned toward the truck. “Tomame a casa, Estelita. Me canso del viento.”

We did leave then, but it wasn’t to take Reuben home. Instead, we drove him to Posadas General Hospital. He spent the rest of the day with an oxygen tube in his nose and strange chemicals dripping into the blue vein of his left arm. Francis slipped into his world of medicine as effortlessly as if he were a resident.

We hadn’t been at the hospital for more than twenty minutes before Sheriff Martin Holman tracked us down and had me paged to the telephone. He kept his ranting to a minimum. It took me only five minutes to convince him that the drip tubes stuck in Reuben’s arm weren’t long enough to allow the old man to reach Mexico.