Butterfly (37 page)

removed from the car so that he could stand and wave as he rode by. His wife, Jacqueline,

is accompanying him on the tour, which will terminate in Dallas at the end of the week.”

The landscape changed. The desert grew into mountains, farmland appeared. San

Antonio, just up ahead.

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157

Beverly sat for a long time in front of Hazel’s house.

She hadn’t driven directly here. She had first gone down the street where Bonner

Purvis’s house had stood and had found children playing in the yard, a dog barking on the

front porch. What had become of them, Danny’s strange angel-faced friend and his poor

toiling mother? Then Beverly had gone down the street where a certain dismal brick build-

ing had once stood, where she had been forced to surrender her unborn baby nine years

ago. But there was a new apartment building standing in its place, green stucco with flow-

erpots in the windows. Nonetheless, the memory remained alive. Bonner and his mother

might be long gone, but the smell of dirty laundry and the creak of the iron bed where

Danny used her every night were still alive in her mind. And the abortionist might no

longer be here, but the flight of stairs with the light bulb at the end—it was all still here.

Beverly started up the motor. San Antonio was not the terminus of her long drive;

Carmelita no longer lived here. The desperate letter had come from Dallas. Beverly was

only passing through this town full of memories. She knew she would never need to pass

this way again.

There were 270 miles between San Antonio and Dallas, so Beverly found an inexpen-

sive motel along the highway and spent the night trying to figure out just how she was

going to go about looking for Carmelita.

There had been no return address on the envelope. Out of fear, or perhaps having

written the note in haste, Carmelita had failed to say where she was living. On a slim

hope, Beverly looked her up in the telephone directory. She found one Carmelita Sanchez

listed. Beverly dialed the phone but found she had the wrong woman. All that was left to

do was get to Dallas and try to find her friend somehow. Nine years ago they had made a

promise to each other, and Beverly never forgot a promise.

She arrived in Dallas on a Wednesday evening with two fervent hopes: that she had

come in time to save Carmelita, and that she could persuade her friend to go back to

Hollywood with her.

After driving around for a while, and deciding on the most likely locations where she

would find her old friend—if, as she suspected, Carmelita was still a prostitute—Beverly

checked into the Bar-None Hotel in one of the older sections of town, not far from the

red-light district. She wasted no time. As soon as her suitcase was safely locked in her

dingy room, she struck out in search of Carmelita.

There was only one way, she had decided, to go about looking for her. Beverly had to

put the word out and hope that some sort of grapevine would reach her old friend. Many

of the women in the streets looked upon the young blonde with suspicion. Was she a cop?

some of them asked. Others wanted to know why she was looking for Carmelita. The

majority said simply that they had never heard of Carmelita Sanchez and turned away.

But Beverly persisted. She told each one of them that she was staying at the Bar-None,

and that she would wait there for Carmelita. For the first time in nine years, Beverly gave

out her real name: “Please tell her Rachel Dwyer is looking for her.”

It was a long and uncertain wait. Early on Thursday morning Beverly took a seat in

the dark, shabby lobby of the Bar-None, in an easy chair that faced the main entrance.

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Kathryn Harvey

She didn’t move except to go to the bathroom and to fetch a ham sandwich from the cof-

fee shop next door. People came and went—drifters, elderly residents on pensions, young

people on their own, a newlywed couple having a fight, two spinster ladies in old-fash-

ioned dresses. None paid much attention to the quiet girl who sat with her feet firmly

together, her hands in her lap, her face set toward the door. The Bar-None was a place

where you paid your bill and minded your own business.

She set out again that night, walking streets that other clean-cut middle-class girls

avoided, but which held no terror for Rachel Dwyer. The hookers and their boyfriends

stared at the girl as she walked past, wondered what she was doing there, asked themselves

if she was looking for trouble. The way she walked up to them as if they were ordinary

people on an ordinary street, and just spoke up asking about a whore as if she were asking

for the time of day, surprised them. They didn’t know that the soft-spoken girl was actu-

ally a sister, from long ago.

Still no cooperation, no information. She returned to the Bar-None tired and hungry.

But undefeated. Beverly was determined; she was also patient. She would find Carmelita.

She was back in the easy chair on Friday morning, nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee

and listening to the news broadcast on the radio behind the registration desk. “President

Kennedy gave a speech this morning,” the announcer said, “to the Chamber of

Commerce of Fort Worth. He and Mrs. Kennedy are now aboard Air Force One and are

scheduled to land at Dallas’s Love Field at eleven-forty. From there, the President and the

First Lady will take a ten-mile ride in a motorcade through Dallas, where already crowds

are lining the streets to greet them.”

Beverly sat up. Someone was standing uncertainly in the doorway, looking around the

lobby. A young woman.

Carmelita.

Their eyes met across the dim room. Then Beverly rose to her feet while Carmelita

came slowly forward, a frown on her pretty face. As she drew near, Beverly felt a lump

gather in her throat. The memories that rushed back!

Carmelita stopped a few feet away. “You the one been asking around for me?” she said.

Beverly nodded.

“My friends said you told them Rachel was here. Where is she?”

“She’s right here, Carmelita,” Beverly said softly. “Don’t you recognize me?
I’m

Rachel.”

Carmelita tilted her head. A look of puzzlement swept across her face. “You’re not

Rachel.”

“Oh yes. I’m Rachel,” Beverly said. “From Hazel’s house in San Antonio. We last saw

each other nine years ago, when you put me on the train for California. And we made a

promise to send out a call if we ever needed help. You remember.”

Carmelita narrowed her eyes. “You funnin’ me? You ain’t Rachel!”

“I am. I taught you to read. And you used to invent number puzzles. You and Belle

and I, we were a threesome.”

“Rachel?” Carmelita whispered, still uncertain.

“I have a tattoo on the inside of my thigh. A butterfly.”

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159

Carmelita’s dark brown eyes flew open. “The butterfly!” she cried. “Holy mother of

God! Rachel!”

She threw her arms around Beverly, laughing and crying at the same time, and the two

embraced.

“I don’t believe it,” Carmelita said, wiping her eyes. “Rachel, you came. Just like you

said you would. But…you’re so beautiful now! What happened?”

“I want to tell you all about it. But first, Carmelita, are you all right? How badly did

Manuel hurt you? Your letter—”

Carmelita looked around the lobby and said quietly, “Can we go somewhere for coffee?”

They went to a small roadside restaurant where the drivers of petroleum and cattle rigs

devoured crunchy fried chicken and biscuits with honey. Carmelita polished off a plate of

barbecued ribs and hot corn on the cob while Beverly picked at a salad and a cup of black

coffee. Carmelita was reluctant to talk about Manuel, so Beverly told her old friend every-

thing that had happened to her in the time that had passed since they stopped exchang-

ing letters. When Beverly spoke about her plastic surgery, Carmelita studied her face with

undisguised curiosity.

When she was done, Beverly said, “But what about you? Why did you leave Hazel’s?”

“Oh, Manuel, you know, he got into trouble with the cops. We left real quick-like. In

the middle of the night, you know. I called Hazel when we got to Dallas, told her where I

was. I told her to forward my mail. She didn’t. And I had some checks coming from puz-

zle magazines! The bitch.”

“Why did you stop answering my letters?”

Carmelita washed off her fingers in her water glass and wiped them with a paper nap-

kin. “It was like this,
amiga.
You and I, we wrote letters to each other for a couple of years.

It was okay then, at first. We were still friends. But then, I started seein’ how our worlds

were drifting apart. There you were, living respectable with a job and everything, and me,

I was still a hooker. It didn’t seem right anymore—me still writing to you.”

“But we still are friends, Carmelita,” Beverly said softly. “Tell me what happened.”

Carmelita twisted the paper napkin in her hands. She spoke quietly, from behind the

curtain of long black hair that fell down the sides of her face. “He really scared me this

time. We had a fight. Manuel’s got this other girl. He says he can’t be a one-woman man.

I caught him with her and I got jealous. I hit him. He pulled out a knife—”

Carmelita raised deep brown eyes, eyes that Beverly remembered from years ago, full

of the same pain and confusion, and shame. “You wouldn’t believe it, it was his girlfriend

who saved me. She jumped in and stopped him. He was aiming for my heart, but the

knife went in here,” she put her hand below her rib cage. “I spent a week in the hospital.

The police came and talked to me. They scared me. They made me think he was going to

come after me and kill me. So I asked a nurse for some paper and I wrote you that letter.”

“I came the instant I got it.”

Carmelita averted her gaze. “I wasn’t even sure you would get it. I didn’t know you

were still working at that diner. I wish now I hadn’t sent it.”

“Why?”

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Kathryn Harvey

Carmelita was beginning to feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. In the past hour

she had come to realize that Rachel had changed in too many ways. She was respectable

now, and clean. Rachel was quality now, Carmelita realized as she watched customers start

to leave the restaurant in a hurry, while she herself was still trash. Even Rachel’s name was-

n’t the same anymore. She was Beverly Highland. New name and new face. This was not

a woman she had anything in common with. Carmelita suddenly realized she was sitting

with a stranger.

“Hey, where’s everyone going?” Carmelita said. She looked at her watch. It was nearly

one o’clock. Then she remembered: The president’s motorcade was due to pass by soon.

“Carmelita,” Beverly said, “come back with me.”

“Where?”

“To California. Come back with me and start a new life.”

Carmelita gave her an astonished look. “You mean leave Texas?”

“Yes.”

“Oh no.”

Beverly’s voice grew soft. “Carmelita, are you happy?”

The girl shrugged. “Who is?”

“You can be, if you come back with me. I can give you a good job. You can go to

school. You would like California.”

Carmelita shook her head.

Beverly laid a hand on her friend’s arm and said, “Remember how we used to dream

together? You wanted to go to school and then get a job in an office somewhere, with a

typewriter and a telephone. You can do that if you come with me. Carmelita, in

California fantasies can come true!”

Something rose up behind Carmelita’s Spanish eyes, something Beverly had seen long

ago on rare occasions. It was the look of someone seeing a vision, or a dream, or trying to

imagine something. What Carmelita was experiencing was a brief hope, or the brief
possi-

bility
of hope. And it
had
happened before, when she had learned to read her first words,

when she had sold her first number puzzle to a magazine. There had been a split-second

taste of hope, of dreaming for a better life, and it had shone in her dark eyes. But then it

had quickly faded, just as it did now, because Carmelita was unused to hoping and

dreaming, she was too long habituated to accepting the terrible lot that was her life. Hope

was simply a skill she had never perfected.

“It’s too late for me,
amiga,”
she said, looking down at the shredded napkin in her

hands. “I could never leave.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too old. I’m twenty-five. And there’s Manuel…”

“But you can’t love him!”

Love? Manuel? Maybe once, years ago. Now he was just the man who protected her,

who took her money and told her what to do. He was good to her when he felt like it,

and he punished her when she deserved it. She couldn’t leave Manuel. He made all her

decisions for her, he even told her what to wear. She had been with him since she was

thirteen years old. He was the other part of herself.

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161

Carmelita rarely examined her life, she rarely thought about her own existence at all.

She lived day by day, taking men up to her tiny room and selling her body in a kind of

future-less void. After all, what was there to think about? Manuel did all the thinking for