Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (27 page)

I don't remember getting home. My next conscious moment was standing in the doorway of the house, the ash gray cat staring at me unblinkingly as the sun crested the trees, with the sense that once again, something had just left.

If I'd known where to go, I would have fled again.

 

Early one evening, two months after I'd arrived, when the sun was still visible and bright in the sky, and Penny Face, as I'd come to call the old man across the street, and I were having our nightly staring match, a light brown unit cruised slowly down the street and stopped in front of my house. The ash gray cat stopped cleaning herself, frozen in a twisted, one-leg-in-the-air pose. I was jolted but not surprised. Sooner or later, I knew, this was bound to happen. I'd been hoping for later. But wary anticipation is never preparation for the actuality. A chunk of my old life had found me, and the rush of anger was tremendous. Until that moment, I hadn't allowed myself to admit I was truly hiding.

The sheriff's deputy unfolded himself from the car, put on his hat, rechecked the slip of paper in his hand, then started toward the porch. I could feel the eyes of the neighborhood follow me as I stubbed out my cigarette and went down the steps to meet him.

I knew what he'd do before he did it, so I let him maneuver me so that he stood facing the street but with a view of my front door. I told him yes, my name was Sarah Jeffries.

“Anyone else live here?”

“The cat.” I gestured toward the damn cat, back in her crouch, tail flicking. He didn't find this amusing.

“Some folks are worried about you. Asked me to give you this number to call,” he said. He looked like a typical cop. From the hash marks on his sleeve, I knew he'd been doing this awhile.

“Some folks,” I said.

“Well, this person here.” He handed me the slip of paper with Gwen Stewart's name on it. I could see the outline of his bulletproof vest under his shirt, bulking out his chest into an unnatural rectangle.

“And what will you tell her?”

“Ma'am?”

“I'm assuming you'll be contacting her,” I said. I matched his lack of expression with one of my own.

“We'll send an acknowledgment that we found you, that you were contacted.”

“I see.” I looked down at the ground, then back up at him. “Social Security number?”

“Excuse me?”

I recognized his attitude, slightly withdrawn, slightly disdainful, that by-product of power and authority. I wouldn't have been happy with this sort of assignment either. Crap calls, we used to call them.

“How she tracked me. Social Security number? I haven't been using my credit cards. Or through the reference check?”

“I wouldn't know about that, ma'am. I was just asked to give you the message.” His hands moved to rest lightly on his gun belt. I recognized that maneuver too.

“I doubt that. The po-lice,” I drawled carefully, “don't deliver messages to average citizens, except in case of death or emergency.” I handed the slip of paper back to him. “And that's what I am, Corporal. An average citizen. And this is no emergency. Tell her I received the message. Tell her I'm fine and I'm sorry. But she's not to contact me again. Tell her that. I know there must be a harassment law here. Cop or not, I'll file. Tell her I said that, too.”

The deputy looked at me, his lips tight, eyes invisible behind sunglasses. I knew what he was thinking—or close to it. Troublesome woman was one possibility. Pain in the ass was another; bitch the
most likely. Maybe even lesbian. It was an easy classification for the job; any number of variations could be plugged in. He'd go back out there, tell his buddies about this fucking uptight ex-cop he'd talked to; they'd all shake their heads, exchange stories about other troublesome women they'd known, and chalk it up to someone who couldn't take the heat. I could read it all in an instant.

I had to give him credit though; he did just what I would have done. He turned around, laid the note on the bottom step, and put a rock on top of it. Then he walked past me without a word, back to his unit. I stood facing the house as I heard him drive away.

The neighborhood was quiet except for a few dogs barking, the trees rustling in that same strange hesitant breeze that always crept up with the first gesture of night. I continued facing the house until a small shadow reached out and met mine. I knelt down and smiled at Luisa.

“Sarita, you are in trouble?” she whispered, little lines deep in her forehead.

“Hardly,” I said.

“The police came one time and took Henry away after Veronica and the baby died.” She twirled her hair against her lips, her voice so low I had to lean closer.

“Who's Henry?” I asked gently. I reached out a hand to stop the twirling motion.

“
Enrique
,” she said, as though it were obvious, and pointed back across the street.

Isael appeared at Luisa's shoulder. “You are in trouble?” His round face was smooth with a grown-up seriousness.

I sighed. “No, he was mistaken, that's all. It's okay.”

“Police are trouble,” Isael insisted.

“Sometimes,” I said.

I stood, half pivoting toward the street, and looked up. Everyone was watching me, including the man in the pickup truck.

“Henry?” I asked Luisa, and she nodded.

Henry leaned against the bed of his truck, arms dangling down over the side. When our eyes met, he straightened up, looked as though he might walk across the street, and so I did the only thing I could think to do—I waved, a big sweeping wave, walked through
the house and out the back door, where I sat watching the rocks until even they blended into the blanket of night.

The envelope came two weeks later. No return address and no signature on the folded spiral notebook paper, but I recognized the handwriting; I'd seen enough of it over the years. It was printed in the sloping all caps style that was Gwen's trademark. She didn't start with a salutation—just short and to the point. “
HAND AND FOREARM FOUND
17
MILES DOWN PEARL RIVER. CORONER SAYS ALLIGATORS. NO OTHER EVIDENCE. CASE CLOSED ON ALL OF THEM. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING
?
COME HOME
.”

Home. I stared at that word for a long time.

 

Three days later I went to Esai's Hardware Store one town over and bought a shovel, some duct tape and a large brown tarp. I pulled out of the driveway a little after 2:00
A.M
., the street folded up and silent, and drove south for thirty minutes, until I came to an old dirt road I knew from my route. A few unpaved driveways branched off from it early on. I cut my headlights and continued on for several miles, the sense of a road growing fainter, until it dead-ended at the base of a hill that wanted to be a mountain. I got out, put the tarp on the ground, moving slowly, deliberately. The Ithaca pump shotgun first, then the four-inch .38 Smith and Wesson, then the three-inch .357 Magnum. Each unloaded and placed on the tarp. Then the five-cell flashlight, bulletproof vest, precinct pins, and name plate. I studied my badge for a long time, holding it in the palm of my hand, before I placed it carefully on the tarp as well. The bullets I dropped into a separate plastic bag, which I tucked into the back pocket of my jeans. I secured the tarp many times over with the duct tape.

The trees seemed more silver and black than green; pine needles shifted restlessly. An owl hooted off in the distance. The scars and puckers of the moon, high in the night sky, were visible and distinct. It smelled clean here, just a slight husky scent of leaves and earth. My eyes adjusted quickly to the dark, and I walked easily into the woods about five hundred yards, carrying the shovel and tarp. It was awkward to rest both against my left shoulder as I wove and ducked between tree limbs.

The ground was a bit harder than I'd expected, but I dug steadily. A film of perspiration soon covered my body, and my breathing came deep from my lungs. It felt good to move my muscles this way, to work in the dark, to excavate the hole and watch the pile of dirt grow. Once I stopped and listened for a long time to a rustling nearby, remembering Isael's comments about bears at night, about Henry catching a cougar. When the rustling moved away, I stood there a bit longer, waiting for my heart to slow to a normal rhythm, pushing all thoughts of choices, fate, and the allure of what-ifs from my mind.

I dug two holes, a small one for the bullets, about fifty feet away from the larger and much deeper one where I placed the tarp. I sat on the lip of the hole, smoking a cigarette, and watched the shadow patterns from the trees dance across the ground until there was nothing left of my cigarette. Then I refilled the holes quickly, tapping down the dirt with my hiking boots, spreading the compost of pine needles and leaves back over the broken ground. I found several large rocks and placed them on top of the larger hole, worked them down into the dirt a bit.

When I was done, my hands throbbed. A blister had popped up on the thumb of my right hand and two more on my palm. Red dirt clung to my boots, jeans, arms, shirt. I stood there for a minute, staring at the ground, then looked up to the sky, through the trees and said, “There.”

No response but the slight whistle of the wind and my own thudding heart.

 

Fall approached timidly. The nights got cooler and the breeze shifted somewhat; there was a different smell in the air that I couldn't quite pin down. Laughter and music in the neighborhood was louder, dirt bikes raced more frequently up behind my house, and dogs wandered freely, no longer panting except from joy or exuberance. Penny Face wore a tattered green sweatshirt after the sun disappeared; his wife-mother-sister brought it out and tugged it none too gently over his head. The damn cat was gone for long stretches at night; I'd wake to see her eyes glinting at me in the darkness from the far corner of my
bed. She'd started sleeping there, never curled up or sprawled out, but hunched over, ready to flee at my first movement.

Isael and Luisa still visited every night. Isael had some respect for personal space, but Luisa loved to drape parts of her body, or all of her body, on me. She reminded me of a dog I'd been fond of, a massive Rhodesian Ridgeback named Peacock, except Luisa wasn't as big and she didn't have a propensity for licking. She did, however, like to put her lips as close to my face as possible and whisper, sometimes questions, sometimes comments, sometimes simply nonsense babbling.

“
Por qué
, Sarita,” she asked one evening, “¿
estas tan triste
?” Her fingers traveled across my arm like tiny lizards. The sun had just dipped below the trees, and Isael sat near us, rolling marbles against my front door, watching the damn cat watch the marbles.

“
Triste
?” I could tell from her expression that I'd mangled the word only slightly.

“Sad.”

“Good heavens, what gave you that idea?” I poked her in the ribs, which usually instigated a wild tickling game. But she veered the middle part of her body away like a wayward river and stuck a finger, caked with dirt and damn cat hair I noted, into my cheek, hard enough for me to say, “Ow!” in mock pain.

“From here.” And then she poked a finger in my other cheek. “And here.” My forehead. “Here.” And then my lips. “Here too, the upside-down smile.”

I gave her a big, exaggerated smile. “I'm happy. See? Right-side-up smile.” I sank into a real grin, enjoying the stretch of my face muscles.

The damn cat finally pounced on a marble, and it went flying off the porch, the cat tumbling after it.

“That's not what the trees say.” She rested her arms and upper body on my thighs.

“Trees shmees. I don't know what tree you've been talking to, but he's off his bark.” I poked her again in the ribs.

She gave a short yelp and screwed her face up in mock disgust. “Trees don't bark!”

“
Guelita
says the trees know everything, and that you are sad.”
Isael spoke each word as though it was a perfectly round pebble he was handing me. “That is why you have the guns, to keep away the sadness.”

I sighed and rolled my neck to the left then the right. Hocus pocus and the trees again. But Isael was the opposite from his sister in many ways, more contained, more serious, more watchful; I'd learned it was best to answer him directly. “I'm not sad,” I said. “And guns make sadness, more often than not. They don't keep it away.”

“You were
la policía
?”

I nodded. “I used to be, in a place a long, long way from here.”

“What was it called?” Luisa asked.

“Lousyana.”

“Lousyana?!” She sputtered with laugher. “What kind of name is that?”

“And the guns made you sad?” Isael watched me carefully.

“Sometimes.”

“Poppa uses his gun to kill deer.”

“That's different,” I said. “It's so you can eat, yes?”

“Were you scared?” Luisa's voice was hushed and tiny. “When you carried the guns and were
un policía
?”

I looked at them, their two hard bodies smooth and dirty and unscarred, their eyes big and steady with interest. “No,” I lied.

That night, the hands visited me again in my dreams. This time there were more of them floating and swooping through the trees, a giddy dance of celebration among golden leaves. Pale blue ribbons wove through the fingers and palms, twirling gently over and over. And hovering over them were several pairs of eyes, deep brown eyes with just the faintest hints of white around the edges. The eyes seemed kind, patient. A low-pitched moan started, then rose up in octave and strength; the sound was a cross between keening and singing, and it seemed to follow the movement of the hands, growing louder and louder until I was conscious and realized the sound was external to my dream.

I opened my eyes, sat up in bed, and for a moment thought I saw movement high in the far corner by the back door. I blinked, and the shuffling spots disappeared, a trick of the moonlight and dark, but
the wail continued to rise and fall. It came from outside. And it was real.