A Stranger in My Grave (25 page)

He wanted suddenly and desperately to take the purse, not for the money or for the car keys which were in it, but for that reflection of his own face, that innocence intact, that youth pre­served in plastic and protected from the sins of time.

He glanced across at the phone booth. Juanita, scowling, was in the act of hanging up. He thought that his opportunity was lost, that she had reached the Velada and been told Mrs. Brewster had gone. Then he saw her pick up the directory chained to the wall, and he knew she must have received a busy signal and decided to recheck the phone number. Luck was giving him another chance.

His eyes returned to the purse, but this time his angle of vision was different and the image that stared back at him was like the images in a fun house. The forehead projected out to the right and the jaw to the left, and in between was a distorted nose and two malevolent slits of eyes. With a little cry of rage he grabbed the purse off the table and dumped its contents on the seat beside him. The car keys were on a small chain separate from Juanita's other keys. He slid them into his pocket, stood up, and walked toward the front door. He didn't hurry. The trick was to appear casual. It was the kind of thing he'd done a hundred times before, the friendly, final good-bye-see-you-later to the landlady or grocer or hotel clerk or liquor dealer whom he had no intention of paying or ever seeing again.

He smiled at the bartender as he passed. “Tell Juanita I'll be back in a few minutes, will you?”

“You didn't pay for the last round of drinks.”

“Oh, didn't I? Terribly sorry.” It was a delay he hadn't antici­pated, but he kept the smile on his face as he fished around in his pocket for a dollar. The only sign of his anxiety was a brief, ner­vous glance in the direction of the phone booth. “Here you are.”

“Thanks,” the bartender said.

“Juanita's talking to Mrs. Brewster. I thought I'd take a little walk to clear my head.”

“You do that.”

“See you later.”

As soon as Fielding was outside, he dropped the pretense of being casual. He hurried along the sidewalk, the cold brisk air slapping his face with a wintry hand.

At this point he had no clear or extensive plan of action. Impulsively and without thought of the consequences, he had rushed into the middle of something he only half understood. Getting the car and going to Daisy's house—this was as far ahead as he could see. At Daisy's house he would almost inevitably run into Ada, and the idea excited him. At this stage he was quite ready to meet her. Sober, he couldn't have faced her; drunk, he would certainly pick a quarrel, perhaps a very violent one. But right now, somewhere in between, he felt able to deal with her, confront her without malice, expose her without cruelty. Right now he could teach her a few lessons in civilization, in manners:
My dear Ada, it grieves me to bring this to your attention but in the interests of justice, I must insist you reveal the truth about your part in this devious little scheme. . . .

It didn't even seem ironic to him that he should be planning remarks about truth and justice when, in fact, his whole life had been a marathon race, with truth a few jumps ahead of him and justice a few jumps behind. He had never caught up with the one, and the other had never caught up with him.

The car was at the end of the block, parked in front of a long frame building with a dimly lit sign announcing its function:
billar
. The sign, printed only in Spanish, made it clear that whites were not welcome. Although the place was jammed, the noise coming out of the open door was subdued, punctuated by the click of balls and score racks. A group of young Negroes and Mexicans were hanging around outside, one of them with a cue in his hand. He was using the cue like a drum major, raising it and lowering it in time to some rhythms he heard in his head or felt in his bones.

As Fielding approached, the boy pointed the cue at him and said, “Rat ta ta ta ta. Man, you're dead.”

Sober, Fielding might have been a little intimidated by the group; drunk, he would certainly have made trouble. But in between, right now—”That's pretty funny, kid. You ought to be on TV”—and he brushed past the boy with a grin and made his way to the car.

There were two keys on the ring he'd taken from Juanita's purse—one for the luggage compartment, the other for the doors and ignition. He tried the wrong key on the door first. It was a bad start, made worse by the fact that the boys were watching him with sober interest, as if they knew perfectly well what he intended to do and were waiting to see how he did it and if he would get caught. Later—if there was a later—they would be able to give a good description of both him and the car. Or perhaps Juanita had already called the police, and they had a description on the radio right now. He had counted on her distrust of officials to prevent such a move, but Juanita was unpredictable.

Once inside her car, he had a moment of panic when he looked at the dashboard. He hadn't driven a car for a long time, and never one like this, with so many buttons and switches that he couldn't tell which was supposed to turn on the lights. Even without lights, though, he knew where to find the most important object in the car—the half-pint of whiskey he'd bought at one of the bars and later hidden on the floorboard under the seat. The bottle had hardly touched his lips before he began feeling the effects of its contents. First there was a fleeting moment of guilt, followed by the transition of guilt to blame, blame to revenge, revenge to power:
By God, I'm going to teach all of them a lesson.

In an ordinary person these changes of emotion would take time to evolve. But Fielding was like a man who's been hypno­tized so often that a snap of the fingers will put him under. A smell of the cork, a tilt of the bottle, and
By God, I'll teach those smug, hypocritical, patronizing bastards.

One of the young Negro men had approached the car and was kicking the right rear tire absently, as if he had no motive other than that the tire was there to kick and he didn't have anything more important to do.

Fielding shouted through the closed window, “Get your black feet off that tire, coon boy!” He knew these were fighting words, but he knew, too, in that corner of his mind which still had access to the real world, that the insult had been muffled by the window glass and scrambled by the wind.

He pressed the starter button. The car gave a couple of for­ward lurches, then the engine died, and he saw that he hadn't released the emergency brake. He released it, started the engine again, and looked in the rearview mirror to make sure the road was clear of traffic behind him. There were no nearby cars, and he was on the point of pulling away from the curb when he saw two Juanitas running down the middle of the road, barefooted, their arms flailing like windmills in a gale, their skirts ballooning around their thighs.

The sight of these two furies coming at him made him panic. He pressed the accelerator right down to the floorboard. The engine flooded and died again, and he knew that he had no choice but to wait.

He turned down the window and looked back at the road, nar­rowing his eyes until the two Juanitas merged into one. He could hear her screaming twenty yards away. A scream in this part of town was interpreted not as a cry for help, but as a sign of impending trouble: the group of young Negroes and Mexicans had disappeared without a trace, and the doors below the sign
billar
had closed as if in response to an electronic ear alert to the decibels of danger. When and if the police arrived, nobody would know anything about a car thief and a screaming woman.

Fielding glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was 6:30. There was still plenty of time. All he had to do was keep his head, and the girl would be handled easily enough. The fact that she was running toward the car indicated that she hadn't called the police. The important thing was to stay calm, play it cool. . . .

But as he watched her approach, rage beat against his temples and exploded behind his eyes with flashes of colored lights. Between flashes Juanita's face appeared, streaked with black tears, red from cold and exertion.

“You—sonna bitch—stole my car.”

“I was coming to pick you up. I told the bartender I'd be right back.”

“Dirty—liar.”

He reached across the seat and unlocked and opened the right front door. “Get in.”

“I'm gonna—calla cops.”

“Get in.”

The repetition of the direct order and the opening of the door had the same effect on her as his putting the dime on the table in the café. The dime was there to be picked up; the door was there to be entered. She went around the front of the car, keeping her eyes fixed steadily on Fielding as if she suspected he might try to run her down.

She got in, still breathing hard from her sprint down the road. “You sonofabitch, what've you got to say?”

“Nothing you'd believe.”

“I wouldn't believe nothing you said, you—”

“Take it easy.” Fielding lit a cigarette. The flare of the match blended with the lights flashing behind his eyes, so that he wasn't quite sure which was real. “I'm going to make a bargain with you.”

“You
make a bargain with
me?
That's a laugh. You've got more guts than a sausage factory.”

“I want to borrow your car for a couple of hours.”

“Oh, you do, eh? And what do I get out of it?”

“Some information.”

“Who says I want information from an old crackpot like you?”

“Watch your language, girl.”

Although he didn't raise his voice, she seemed to sense the force of his anger, and when she spoke again, she sounded almost conciliatory. “What kind of information?”

“About your rich uncle.”

“Why should I want to hear about him for? He's been dead and buried for four years. Besides, how would you know anything about him that my old lady didn't tell me already?”

“There's no similarity between what your old mother told you and what I'm going to tell you. If you cooperate. All you have to do is lend me your car for a couple of hours. I'll drive you home now and bring the car back to your house when I've finished my errand.”

Juanita rubbed her cheeks with the back of her hand, looking surprised to find tears there, as if she'd already forgotten that she had wept and why. “I don't want to go home.”

“You will.”

“Why will I?”

“You're going to be curious to find out why your mother has been lying in her teeth all these years.”

He started the car and pulled away from the curb. Juanita seemed too astonished to object. “Lying? My old lady? You must be crazy. Why, she's so pure she . . .” Juanita used an ancient and earthy figure of speech without embarrassment. “I don't believe you, Foster. I think you're making all this up so you can get the car.”

“You don't have to believe me. Just ask her.”

“Ask her what?”

“Where your rich uncle got his money.”

“He had cattle interests.”

“He was a cowhand.”

“He owned—”

“He owned nothing but the shirt on his back,” Fielding said, “and ten chances to one he'd stolen that.” This was not true, but Fielding couldn't admit it, even to himself. He had to keep himself convinced that Camilla had been a liar, a thief, and a scoundrel.

Juanita said, “Then where did the money come from that he left to me in the trust fund?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you—there is no trust fund.”

“But I get $200 regular every month. Where does it come from?”

“You'd better ask your mother.”

“You talk like she's a crook or something.”

“Or something.”

He turned left at the next corner. He wasn't familiar with the city, but in his years of wandering, he had taught himself to observe landmarks carefully so he could always find his way back to his hotel or rooming house. He did it now automatically, like a blind man counting the number of steps between places.

Juanita was sitting on the edge of the seat, tense and rigid, one hand clutching her plastic purse and the other the snakeskin shoes. “She's no crook.”

“Ask her.”

“I don't have to. Her and me, maybe we don't get along so buddy-buddy, but I swear she's no crook. Unless she was doing something for somebody else.”

“Unless that, yes,” Fielding said blandly.

“How come you pretend to know so much about my uncle and my old lady?”

“Camilla was a friend of mine once.”

“But you never even saw my old lady till this afternoon.” She paused to give this some thought. “Why, you never even saw
me
till that day you got in the fight with Joe.”

“I'd heard about you.”

“Where? How?”

He was tempted, momentarily, to tell her where and how, to show her the letter from Daisy he'd taken out of the old suitcase that morning. It was this letter, dated almost four years previously, that had sent him to the Velada in the first place, in the hope of finding, or getting some information about, a young woman called Juanita Garcia. That she happened to be there at the time was luck, but he still wasn't sure whether it was good luck or bad luck. That her husband happened to drop in and started the quar­rel was pure bad luck: it had put Fielding's timing off, it had tem­porarily dislodged his whole purpose in coming to town, and, what might turn out to be the worst misfortune yet, it had brought Pinata into the affair. Pinata, and then Camilla. One of the most terrible shocks in Fielding's life occurred at the moment he looked across Mrs. Rosario's bedroom and saw the picture of Camilla.