Desert Noir (9781615952236) (29 page)

A cold snake wrapped itself around my spine. “After
what
woman shot me?” 

Brown hands began to load the table with bottles of Corona, Cokes, glasses of iced tea, baskets heaped with tortilla chips, bowls of pungent salsa. I reached for the tea. It was excellent, flavored with mint and some other mysterious spice, but I could hardly swallow. The snake had slithered to my throat, and it was squeezing, squeezing.

“The woman with the yellow hair shot you,” Agnezia said. “Then she screamed, ‘Tina!' It was a horrible sound, a sound I still can hear. Then she shoved you out the door with her foot—I saw this with my own eyes!—and you fell on the ground. I picked you up and I ran and ran.” 

The woman with the yellow hair
. I grabbed Agnezia's wrist. “Where was this? Did it happen at the house where you worked?” But I didn't see how that could be possible. Mrs. Albundo told me Agnezia had worked for some ‘rich people' up on one of the mountains. There were no mountains within running distance of St. Joseph's Hospital.

“No, no. Not where I worked. This happened near my apartment on the west side of Phoenix, on the street named Thomas, only a few blocks from the hospital. It was dark and I had just gotten off the bus, coming home from my job on the mountain. I was walking along the street when I saw this other bus, a strange bus, very plain. It was not a city bus like the one I had been riding.” 

I held very still, waiting. The snake didn't move. It was waiting, too.

“The bus passed me. It was going slow along the street and it was all lit up inside. The people inside were making a lot of noise. Some were singing. But someone was also screaming, a woman. A child was screaming, too, crying, ‘No, Mommy! No!' Then the back door to the bus, the one people are supposed to leave from, it flew open and I could see the yellow-haired woman holding you with one hand. In the other hand she had a big gun. She was pointing it at you. Above all the singing voices, I could hear her screaming, ‘I'll kill her! I'll kill her! Get away from me and let me do it!'

“Then some man, I could not see him well but he was darker than her, he reached down to grab the gun. But it was too late. The yellow-haired woman, she fired the gun. You stopped screaming and fell into the street. You fell right at my feet, where the good God had planned for you to fall.” 

The snake squeezed tighter. “You say the man tried to take the gun?” 

She nodded. “He had his hands around the gun. He must not have wanted her to shoot you.” 

“You are certain that the woman who shot me had yellow hair? Hair like mine?” 

The low buzz from the family surrounding us quieted. Agnezia picked up a Corona and took several hesitant sips. She didn't drink like a drinker. She set her beer down slowly, wiped her mouth, and gave me another sorrowful look.

“I am sorry, Tina. The light from the bus was very bright on her and I will always remember her face. She looked much as you do today, very beautiful. Except she had no scar.” 

No, of course she didn't. Just as my face was free of blemish until my mother shot me. 

I couldn't stand to hear any more. I stood up, brushing away patting hands, arms that offered clumsy embraces. “I'm going for a walk.” 

Dusty jumped up and reached for me. I brushed his hands away, too. “Leave me alone.” 

I left them all staring at me, staring at the odd, scarred, yellow-haired woman who had wanted to know so much and who now wanted to know so little. With my back straight, my eyes wide against the glaring sun, I walked back along the tumbled-rock beach towards the hotel, away from the noisy cantinas, the music, the laughter. The only things I wanted to hear were surf and gulls. I wanted to think nothing, to feel nothing, to be nothing.

I don't know how long I walked but when I finally stopped, I could no longer see Agnezia's Cantina and the Hotel Vina Del Mar was little more than an angular shape on the cliff. Volcanic boulders cast long shadows on the beach. At some point, the gulls had ceased their raucous cries. The roar of the surf had descended to a murmur. Suddenly exhausted, I sat down on a volcanic rock and stared out to sea.

Part of me, I realized, had always known. The nightmare I'd had right after Clarice's murder had not been about her, it had been about my mother. The gun was my mother's gun. The voice was my mother's voice. The promise to kill, my mother's promise. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, the memory of that night lurked to ambush me again and again in my dreams. No wonder, then, that all my life I had been plagued with insomnia, that I always went to bed terrified of sleep, surrendering to it only when sheer exhaustion lowered my defenses and the book I'd taken to keep me awake slipped from my hands. Wherever she might really be right now, my mother remained a constant fixture in that twilight life, waiting for me with a gun.

What had my mother found so unlovable about me that she had tried to take my life? I was four years old, a child. What were my sins? What acts could a child of that age perform to earn so much hatred, so much rage? I remembered the beatings I had endured from some of my foster homes, the rapes, the thousands of humiliations, the betrayals. What had all those people, in total agreement with my mother, seen in me that I couldn't see?

What was wrong with me, had always been wrong with me?

The knowledge the afternoon had thrust at me hammered home a hard lesson. Almost everyone I had ever known, even Malik Toshumbe, had taken their right to live for granted. But that wasn't true of me. I'd always felt like a cheat, as if by simply breathing in the earth's air, I was stealing precious resources away from the rest of humanity. I felt like a nothing, a creature with no right to live. Something precious, something that all other human beings owned in abundance, had been left out of the biological stew as it formed in my mother's womb.

And that's why I'd always felt that I had to
earn
my right to life, the real reason I became a cop. To protect all the others, the lucky stiffs who had a right to be here. I wasn't really human. I was just a tool to be used in defense of the others, little more than a human gun.

Now that I knew that, really understood it, I didn't want to go on. It was just too hard.

Crimson and violet streaked the sky as the sun slipped towards the ocean. Two pelicans waddled up the beach towards me, their mouths open, hissing dark threats. Twilight would fall soon, bringing the evening's chill. It occurred to me that if I was going to kill myself, I might as well do it now while the water was still warm.

But I sat there a little longer, imagining how it would be to start swimming towards that fiery sun, to swim and swim until my arms grew too tired to swim any more. Then I thought about how it would feel to slip beneath the surface, to sink towards the ocean floor, to lie dreamless among the seaweed.

I thought about it until I realized that although I did not really want to live, I wasn't yet ready to do anything about it.

After that realization, there was nothing else to do but turn around, go back to the cantina.

To hear the rest.

The others had gone, but Agnezia and Dusty still sat at the table I had abandoned earlier. Agnezia's face was taut with strain, but Dusty's looked no different than usual. He was used to my ways.

“Tina, I am so sorry.” Tentatively, she put her hand on mine, expecting me to brush it away again.

But I didn't. Grasping her hand firmly, I told the biggest lie I'd ever told in my worthless life. “Thank you for saving me.” 

She began to weep again. “The good God, he put me there for you.” 

If the good God was so protective of me, I wondered bitterly, why did the bastard let me get shot in the first place? And then shot two more times? How about that drug dealer who knifed me back in '92, and who left me with a six-inch scar on my left breast? Or the batterer who had almost choked me to death before he could be subdued? These God-worshippers were always so blind to the truth. I wanted to stand up and scream that there was no God, but if there was, He was a serial killer with a sadistic sense of humor.

But I didn't. Agnezia had saved my life and deserved respect.

“Yes, God sent you to be my guardian angel,” I lied again.

I heard a choking noise and looked around to see Dusty sitting there with a half-smile on his face. He'd heard my diatribes about religion, knew what I thought about the fools who packed the pews every Sunday. He shook his head slightly at me, warning me not to lay it on too thick.

Agnezia was oblivious to my dishonesty. “You must come with me to my house where my family has prepared a great meal in your honor. You must tell us all about your life, about what you have done, where you have been. We all want to know. You have grown into a beautiful, strong woman, my Tina, and we want to know what glories you have accomplished.” 

Glories?

I'd disappoint them, just as I had disappointed everyone else.

My mother had just been the first of a very long list. But I smiled and agreed. I was hungry.

And acting halfway normal was always easier during a meal.

Agnezia had married as soon as she returned to Mexico. She had seven children, ten grandchildren, and a handsome husband named Umberto who was the chef at her cantina. She had done well for herself. Her house was neither large nor luxurious according to American standards, but it placed her squarely in Mexico's middle class. The rooms were freshly whitewashed, with bright sombreros and serapes covering the walls. Above the tiled fireplace in the living room hung a picture of a laughing Jesus, one of the first I had ever seen of him with dark eyes and hair—which if he really existed, he probably had.

Gaily painted wooden chairs completed a conversational grouping made up of gold-crushed velvet, and on the floor, hand-woven rugs used all the colors of the rainbow. Oddly, the overall effect was not gaudy, just cheerful. Madeline, my artist foster mother, would probably have told me that was probably because all the colors used were colors that existed together in nature. Blue for the sea, gold for the sun, red for the bougainvillea that cascaded over the town, green for the palms lining the seafront. The colors might be bright, but when used in the same proportions found in nature, they worked.

Near the door leading into the kitchen was an altar surrounded by fresh flowers, the Madonna guarding this one as she had Mrs. Albundo's. The pictures included every person sitting at the dining room table, and even a few people I didn't recognize. But one picture stood out, a picture cut from a Phoenix newspaper of a blond-haired child with a bandage over her eye. Underneath was the caption, “Do you know this little girl?” 

Mine was the only picture with a silver frame.

“My family, it is still growing,” Agnezia said, as she finished introducing all her family members. “Angelina, my youngest, she is pregnant again. We think it will be twins.” 

Angelina, who was sitting next to a startlingly handsome young man, blushed and ducked her head. He nudged her in the side with his elbow and said something in Spanish I didn't understand. It made her giggle and cover her mouth.

“Angelina, Stephan, I have told you not to be dirty at the table,” Umberto, Agnezia's husband, admonished even though his eyes were laughing. He and the grandchildren were loading the long dining table with serving platters heaped with shrimp, oysters, chicken-and beef-stuffed enchiladas, chili rellenos, rice, beans, and piles and piles of hot tortillas.

I started to reach for a tortilla, then stopped when I saw everyone's hands assume the prayer position. Agnezia began saying Grace, and out of consideration for her Anglo guests, she said it in English. She thanked God for the table's bounty, the success of her cantina, and called down blessings upon family, friends and neighbors. Then, in that sing-song voice common to those who have committed a long list to memory, began petitioning her deity to help the troubled members of the family. She prayed for someone name Olivera who lived in Nogales and suffered from some sort of secret trouble. She prayed for Carlos, jailed in Los Angeles. At the very end, Agnezia prayed, “And may the good God keep our Tina safe and protect her always, wherever she is.”