Big Maria (7 page)

“What if you want Manta later?” Ricky said, taking the small piece of blanket, but keeping it within reach to give her the chance to take it back.

“You need him, Daddy. Don’t be scared.”

He gave her one last squeeze and whispered, “I love you,” in her ear. She climbed in the backseat. The click of the car door sounded like a cell door clanging shut. Rosie’s sad and confused face through the glass crushed whatever hope Ricky had left.

Flavia watched from the driver’s seat, her expression sad in its neutrality. They had said their good-byes the night before. There
was nothing more to say between them. Words would only tear off the scabs.

Ricky rubbed Manta’s worn fabric between his fingers as he watched the car disappear in a cloud of dust. He stared into the vacant space for a moment and then turned to his trailer. It looked different. Dingier, rustier, more broken. He wanted to burn the damn thing to the ground.

Flavia and Rosie had to leave. He knew it. The only way to protect them was through distance. It hadn’t been easy to get them to go. Flavia initially refused, but he took it on himself to push her out the door. He had made leaving her only choice. Over the last three months, Flavia had done everything she could to try to help. But with Ricky recuperating and out of work, she was forced to work doubles at the restaurant, and that gave her only enough time at home to watch his accelerated decline. His apathy, self-pity, and eventual drinking all contributed to driving her away. However misguided, in Ricky’s mind, the only way he could save his family was through his own self-destruction.

At first they had prayed together, hoping Ricky would find something—anything—that would give him hope. A shred of good news that would show him that he could move forward. Flavia hadn’t been able to do it. His daughter couldn’t either, and he loved her more than anything. He had lost his faith. And without faith, all that was left was hopelessness.

In the real world, love wasn’t a good enough reason to do anything. It was a romantic excuse to make horrible mistakes. The right decision usually hurt. Flavia was willing to sacrifice herself and her happiness, but neither Ricky nor she was willing to sacrifice Rosie’s future. When Anna had agreed to take them both with her to El Centro, Flavia finally conceded that it was the best choice.

In El Centro, Rosie would be able to go to a better school, and Anna and Mario could give his daughter a chance. She would no longer be around her crippled deadbeat of an edging-toward-alcoholic
father. It had all been discussed with the false truth that as soon as all the legal business was done and Ricky was sober and back on his feet, he would join them. The lawyers had been ruthless, and they were only getting started. The cops weren’t any better. There had even been talk of a manslaughter charge. Ricky had dug the hole deep, and this was the last chance for his girls to climb out.

G
rowing up, Ricky had never had much. Not much that was positive, that is. He had more than his share of foster homes, bullies, and beatings in his past. And he had always risen above it. For all the pain, the future had offered something better, but optimism came at a price. Hope hurt. Every disappointment chipped away at his belief in the future. After too many punches, no matter how much heart a fighter had, there was a point the poor bastard could no longer stand.

Up to that point, Ricky had absorbed his share of heartache and had never lost hope. His faith in himself and God had kept him going. But the moment he learned that he had killed those people, he no longer felt anything. His faith had been destroyed with his bus and those old people’s lives. There wasn’t a God that could justify that much hurt.

Three months later, the guilt held strong. The death toll had settled at six. Six fatalities. Six dead human beings. Ricky didn’t know the exact number of injured or maimed. The deaths were enough.

R
icky sat on the floor of the empty trailer, gutted except for a few empty boxes and stacks of papers and envelopes, mostly unread subpoenas and summonses. Beyond the built-ins, no furnishings remained.

The trailer had been robbed while Ricky had been in the hospital, but luckily there hadn’t been much and they hadn’t found the cash in the refrigerator. He had given Flavia all the money and
sold everything else to give her and Rosie as much as he could. There was nothing that he needed, and he knew that the less Flavia had to rely on Anna, the happier she would be.

The emptiness of the trailer felt fitting to Ricky. A shell of the home it once was.

His eyes found one of Rosie’s drawings on the wall. A house and a family. The family in the drawing had a dog. The dog she wanted but never got. It was such a small dream, and yet Ricky hadn’t fulfilled one that simple. Ricky cried until his throat burned and his stomach cramped.

He had nothing. His past had destroyed him, his present was bleak, and his future was empty. He didn’t even have enough money to get drunk enough to forget.

F
rank’s daughter, Mercedes, scared the bejesus out of her father. And not just him. She scared the bejesus out of everyone. The fact that she was his daughter didn’t allay his fear in the least bit. And now that he was living with her, the dread of her presence kept him in a constant state of anxiousness.

It wasn’t anything specific. She had a presence. A refrigerator of a woman, her physical appearance mirrored her immovable stubbornness. Against an unstoppable force of nature like Mercedes, you just did your best to stay out of her way. You run from a tornado, you don’t try to stop it from spinning.

It wasn’t that she was abusive. Just the opposite. She was attentive and did everything she could to take care of Frank. The problem was that she took care of him with violent fervor. She took care of him whether he liked it or not.

It was one of the bad days. Mercedes wouldn’t leave him alone. Ever since he had started his most recent round of chemo and radiation, she had treated him like he was a retarded toddler. He would have called it doting, but it was closer to a prisoner/guard relationship. She never let him alone. No more trips to Los Algodones. Not even a walk in the brown-grass
park three blocks away. With her and the scattered neighborhood kids she took care of in the small house, he was constantly surrounded. Yet the more people around him, the more alone he felt. Loneliness wasn’t about lack of proximity, but lack of connection.

“Eat your soup,” she said, holding the spoon for him. If she said the train was going into the tunnel, she was going to wear Campbell’s Chunky.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You have to eat. It keeps your strength up.” Those were the words she said, but to Frank’s ears, he inferred, “Eat or die.” Could you effectively stab someone with a spoon?

“Maybe a little bit,” Frank said, opening his mouth. He didn’t want to get mad or yell. After a dozen spoonfuls, he got up and tried to find an empty room in the small house.

No such luck. Around every corner was a kid or a grandkid or a relative that was there to cadge off Mercedes. The only actual assistance that he appreciated from the other members of his family was the copious amount of
mota
that Mercedes’s boys, his grandsons Ramón and Bernardo, supplied him. Mercedes’s world lost its edges when Frank could find a quiet corner and smoke his weed.

He put on his cowboy hat and went into the backyard. Caliber, a coyote-shepherd mix, ran up to him and sniffed at his shoes. Frank reached down and patted the dog’s head. The dog had gotten big in the five years since Frank had found him. Some bastard had dumped a sack of puppies in the desert to die. Caliber had chewed his way out and lived off his dead siblings until Frank had nearly tripped over him on a hunting trip.

“Good boy,” Frank said. Caliber licked his hand and then returned to whatever dog business he had been conducting.

Frank walked toward the giant sawgrass that lined the edge of the yard. Out of sight, Frank dug a joint from under his hatband and lit it. He took a deep drag, held it in, and coughed a little on the exhale.

He was proud of his grandsons. They grew good shit.

Half was enough. He wet his fingers and put out the end before he shoved the roach in his hatband. He had bought the hat when his hair had fallen out. He had always worn ball caps, but they didn’t feel right on his bald head. The cowboy hat made him look a little like Eli Wallach in
The Magnificent Seven
. A badass with a big nose.

Walking out from behind the sawgrass, he ran straight into Mercedes. She looked like she had just eaten a raw onion. Frank’s knees shook a little. She sniffed the air.

“I’m going to talk to Bernardo and Ramón,” she said.

“They’re helping how they can.”

“They’re drug dealers. Their no-good father’s fault. I forbid you to see them.”

“You forbid me?” But Frank was talking to her back.

She walked back to the house. He had never been forbidden to do something before. He smiled at how ridiculous it sounded, but wondered how idle her threat was. There was one good thing about the cancer. Dying was going to be easier than living with his daughter.

Over her shoulder, Mercedes said, “You have a phone call. Some guy named Harry Shit-something.”

H
arry had missed his calling. Even the thought of having a calling had never occurred to him. Turns out he should have been a researcher of some kind. A historian or maybe an archaeologist. Who knew that he had any hidden talents beyond bilking the state out of disability checks and spitting for distance? Even if his newfound aptitude for digging up information was driven purely by greed, it still affected a positive change.

The first time he stepped into the library, he got lost. Too shy or proud or dumb to ask for assistance, he fumbled his way through the small building. It took him an hour to find the right section. And even longer to find any helpful texts.

It wasn’t that Harry was illiterate. He read. Working at the prison, he’d often knocked out a Lawrence Block or an Elmore Leonard during a hard day of pretending to work. But those books didn’t count. They passed the time. They were fun. They weren’t
book
books. Anyone could write them. This research stuff—real books—was more like homework. Or a puzzle. After the first day, he almost said to hell with it. All that reading was dangerously close to having a job.

But he stuck with it, and in a couple months, Harry and the Dewey Decimal System became simpatico. He learned the value of a good bibliography, interlibrary lending, and private collections. One day, he had been so engaged in the history of the All-American Canal that he had failed to take a single drink from the flask he had sneaked into the building. His thirst for knowledge had temporarily replaced his thirst for alcohol.

The work had become important enough to establish new personal rules. No drinking until after six. No women at all. A card-carrying member of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. He even accidentally got in better shape, as the only place to eat near the library was The Juice Shack, a vegetarian meth front. He hated the things they called sandwiches with alfalfa sprouts and tofu “cheese” between two slices of damp cardboard, but the Jack in the Crack was ten blocks away.

After three months of research and careful comparison of modern and hundred-year-old maps from eight different area libraries, Harry determined that Frank’s gold mine story, while mostly fabrication, had enough merit for further inquiry. The big news was that he was ninety percent sure he had located the exact coordinates of the town of Picacho. Latitude and longitude to the minute and second.

He found old photos and etchings of the town. Town registries. Censuses. He drew maps and floor plans of buildings from interior photos and descriptions. Oral histories. Written histories. If he closed his eyes he could walk down the dusty main drag of 1901 Picacho, California. He could see the businesses, the wagons, and the people. He could smell the horses and the dust. And the gold.

He knew gold had no odor, but in his mind it smelled the way honey tasted.

The town was well documented, but Abraham Constance was another story. That took some creativity and real digging. First, Harry had to establish that the man had actually existed. A quick scan of birth records verified the fact. Then he had to establish that he had run the Big Maria Mine. Since the claim was under a different name, he had to scour old newspapers. He eventually found three separate articles, including a second-place win in a watermelon seed spitting contest, that listed Constance as a mining foreman.

Finally, Harry narrowed down the home and final resting place of Abraham Constance to four possible structures in
Picacho. It was extremely doubtful that the buildings still stood under the water of the Imperial Reservoir, but anything buried underground might still be under the soil, provided it was deep enough. No reason to believe different. Even if he enjoyed the puzzle, it didn’t mean he was doing it for fun. He still needed faith.

H
e closed the giant, bound volume of
Imperial Valley Press
newspapers from the early part of the twentieth century. Aside from a few obscure scholarly journals he had on back order, there was nowhere else to look. No more research to do. All the books and maps could be returned to their shelves. The next step would be to take the information and actually do something.

Do something? What did that mean? Scuba diving into the Imperial Reservoir and searching the underwater ghost town of Picacho? He wasn’t exactly Clive Cussler. What would he need? A boat? Scuba gear? A shovel. A flashlight, definitely. Was waterproof or water resistant the better one?

The sunlight blinded him the moment he walked out of the relative darkness of the library. Realization hit him simultaneously. He didn’t know what he was doing. He had never even been on a boat. And scuba diving—that sounded not only hard, but dangerous. He would have to rope in someone to do that part for him.

He hated to share, but he needed other people. It couldn’t be done alone. The research, that was a solo deal, but the actual operation was going to be a team effort.