Wild Instinct

15

Daniela Mendez drives her red Corvette past the gate and onto the driveway of Father Timothy Malone’s modest tract home in Orange. The house is fifties ranch style, stucco and rambling, surrounded by a high, dense hedge of white oleander trimmed flat on top. Three navel orange trees, large and potently fragrant, grace the lawn. This nearly hidden, very private property is Father Malone’s pride and joy, relief from the rectory of his earlier clerical life.

His voice on the intercom is deep and smooth as the whiskey he drinks.

They embrace, almost formally, then sit in the little dining room, where Father Malone serves Daniela a Bordeaux blend and himself the Quiet Man bourbon.

Daniela smells the fish and potatoes baking in the kitchen. Rosemary sprigs on the salmon.

“How is Jesse?”

“I’m so worried, Tim. The girl, the gaming. His silence. He carries it around with him. It’s where he hides.”

“Is Lulu a good influence, at times?”

“I suppose. She doesn’t drink or do drugs, apparently.”

“You’ve never really liked her. With him, I mean.”

“No. I hope I’m not a hypercritical mother.”

“I think your judgment is fundamentally sound. It always has been.”

A soft throb of doubt in her mind echoes back through Daniela’s thirty-eight years.

“I know I baby him too much,” she says. “Coddle and protect him. Maybe I turn into a fire-breathing dragon when I see them together.”

Daniela takes a sip of the wine. Good as always. Father Malone has always known his way around wine and liquor and fast cars. Sometimes they get in one of Tim’s cars, or sometimes they take Daniela’s Corvette, and take turns driving high into the local mountains, tearing up the hillsides and blasting through the turns. Adrenaline, fear, joy.

She looks into his eyes, blue and deep-set in a lean, ascetic face. An aquiline nose, a blast of gray-black hair, upright as if windblown. He’s thirty years her senior. Timothy Quinn Malone. She still likes looking at that face. It’s changed since she was seven. Still beautiful to her.

“And the guilt is so big, Tim,” she says. She feels it in her throat right now, a painful lump. “All the lies to give him a father. Leaving him with friends, then daycare when I was young and at work. Or here. Trying to Disneyland mom him on my free weekends. Which I’m going to get less of with this homicide work.”

Tim Malone sips from his glass. His bottle sits just off to his right side. Daniela has always thought the Quiet Man was an odd pick for him. Father Timothy Malone, with the piercing tenor in Mass. All that volume, coursing out from his slender body. Of course, privately, his voice is softer.

“Dani, you’re raising a strong-willed and intelligent young man. All of your sacrifice and hard work will pay off someday. I’m not an idealist about human nature. But I’m optimistic about what a human being can become. With the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And a mother like you.”

When Tim Malone talks like that to Daniela Mendez, she’s twelve again. Overflowing with God. Protected by the Spirit. All through Tim.

“I wish,” she says. “I wish it could be different.”

A long beat then, another sip of wine, another draw of the Quiet Man.

“There have been many years of wishing for both of us, Dani. This is what God has given us three.”

“Less wishing from you than me, Tim. Those years have worn on me. Because I can’t change them. And neither can you.”

“No,” he says.

“Back then, Tim, I thought you could do anything.”

“I? Not quite.”

“Have I apologized enough? Too much?”

“You don’t have to apologize again, Daniela. I won’t apologize to you, either. That is what we decided, a long time ago. I am half responsible for everything that happened. The good and the painful. I am very clear on my sin, far beyond the breaking of my vow. And how I failed you and Jesse.”

“Jesse needs you.”

“He would destroy me.”

Daniela nods but says nothing. This conversation has the same words and the same shape as the hundreds they’ve had over the last eighteen years. Many of them right here in this oleander-walled tract hideaway, which lies far from the Azusa Church of the Holy Martyr, where Daniela Mendez attended her first Mass at age seven, the age of reason, performed by Father Timothy Malone.

Father Tim excuses himself and comes back a few minutes later bearing plates of oven-poached salmon, baked potatoes, and steamed asparagus with butter.

The same first supper they enjoyed together here, nineteen years ago, her last day as a virgin.

As usual, this supper conversation now turns to news, cars, politics, sports, and parish gossip, in which Daniela still takes an interest, having attended her last Mass in Azusa nineteen years ago, before moving to Orange County, Jesse starting to show in her trim, nineteen-year-old body. She misses some of those people. A lot of those parishioners seemed so old then, but here they are, still ticking, as Tim accounts for them in the soft tenor he has when he’s not in the pulpit.

Daniela sees the hint of the whiskey on his lined, ruddy face. He’s sixty-eight years old, she thinks. To her he’s still more than a man and almost a god.

When the conversation thins, Daniela pushes her plate aside and stands — staring at him, heart pounding — another established piece of this long-standing rite.

Father Tim does likewise.

She goes to him and offers him her cheek to kiss, then they take each other in a long embrace during which Daniela’s heart beats even harder and she hugs him with strength and love, all that she has, as she has always done, and will forever.

By the hand she leads him down the hallway and into their room.

Two hours later, Daniela walks into Bowl Me Over in Santa Ana and sees Jesse, bussing tables in the Burgers & More café. He’s got on the red Bowl Me Over apron with the big bowling ball knocking laughing pins into the air. He waves and gives her a rare smile, then swiftly masks it with his standard blank scowl.

She goes to the café bar, orders coffee, and waits.

A moment later he’s across the counter from her.

“Mom. Like, what do you want?”

She studies his slender face, so much like his father’s, his black hair swept back, eyes brown and tender. The nests of pimples in the hollows of his cheeks.

“I’m working tonight,” she says. “Just wanted to see you. I’ll be home late.”

“Any updates on the murder?”

“Sorry.”

“I know you can’t tell me anything. It’s cool.”

Jesse looks past her and smiles.

Daniela turns, and Lulu Vega gives her an unsweetened look as she takes the barstool beside her.

“Hi, Daniela. What are you doing here?”

“Visiting my son.”

“Me, too!”

Daniela’s suspicious eyes lead her to the far side of the café, where four Barrio Dogtown gangsters are settling into a booth. They’re gazing hard back at her, a swarm of shaved heads, white singlets, khakis, and ink.

When she turns back to Jesse, he’s looking at them, too.

Her first thought: Go over and say hi, badge them, shake things up. Maybe warn them off of Jesse and Lulu. Just let them know a cop is watching.

Second thought, though: Is Lulu Vega affiliated with Barrio Dogtown?

Her third: Don’t humiliate Jesse.

“You know them?” she asks Lulu.

“Everybody knows Barrio Dogtown. The fat one is Flaco Benitez. He went to high school with my brother. Came to our house a few times. Mom hated him but Dad thought he was funny.”

“Lulu and me are going out after work,” says Jesse.

“Lulu and I,” says Mendez.

“Not you, Daniela — Jesse and I,” says Lulu.

“Clever, Lulu. I get it.”

Daniela eats a light dinner for appearances, mad-dogging Barrio Dogtown between her house salad and a small sashimi platter.

Watching her son clearing tables, she feels the familiar avalanche of guilt descending on her. Jesse has never shown suspicion of her. Never inquired about her occasional absences. Never questioned her grand lie, that he was fathered out of wedlock by a U.S. Air Force flight mechanic named Javier Lopez who died before Jesse was born. In the few pictures she has shown him, Lopez is a good-looking, big-smiling man. Six months pregnant and thinking ahead, she had scavenged them from an Azusa estate sale scrapbook that she bought for twenty-five cents.

Her mom and dad made a stoic show of believing her tall tale, Papa having forgiven her sin of the flesh with the holy man, Mama not.

All of which makes moments like now — seeing Jesse torn between a bratty manipulator like Lulu and a seducer like herself — borderline unbearable.

She feels the telltale ache of love in her guts, love of Jesse and his father.

She waves to Jesse, loading his bus cart. Pays up and leaves an exorbitant tip that her son will get a part of, then heads for the Bear Cave.

But first veers off to the Barrio Dogtown bangers, swings open her blazer to reveal her Sheriff’s Department shield, and leans over their table.

She rattles off a terse greeting in Spanish, gets four surprised faces, then haughty grins that escalate to laughter.

“You stinking dog fleas leave my son alone,” she hisses.

More laughter.

Then curses, following her out.