Gringa (22 page)

“What kind of car?” I asked.

The girl screwed up her face, thinking hard. “Yellow. With real fancy black doo dads all over it. Sharp. My husband says he runs a night club.”

“Their last name? Do you know that?”

“I gotta go. I told you all I know!” The girl ran the length of two trailers and disappeared around a corner.

“Oh Abby.” Sherry looked ready to cry again. “Does it upset you?”

“The woman? No.”

“The baby? Could it have been his?”

“Heavens. How would I know. Maybe. Or he could have met her when she was pregnant. Anything could be true.”

Sherry sighed. “Let's not talk about this around Kermit yet. I want to find out more first. He would discourage me. That girl was right. It sounds awful, but they do all look alike. There are what, sixty, seventy thousand people in town. A third of them are Mexican. We'll never find her without a name.”

“I don't understand why she ran away.”

“If they weren't married—I don't know. Don't you think he was going to give her the check, the title?”

“So why didn't he!” I sank into silence like a stone.

When we got back to the house we found Carl ready to take Lenore home. Kermit was in bed. It was awkward, pushing Bud aside to recognize this courting. I followed my mother out to Carl's car. The sky had turned to slate, the sun was as dull as a moon in a daytime sky. “It does look like it might snow, or sleet,” Lenore said. Carl revved the engine.

“We'll be home before it starts,” he said.

The window on Lenore's side went up, zip! when Carl pushed a button. Lenore put her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead.

Inside the house, Kermit was up.

“You bum, not saying good-bye,” I said.

Kermit pulled the short curtain aside at the window behind the table. “What'd I tell you?” he said. Huge wet flakes had begun to fall. I took the newspaper to the couch and spread it around me like a moat. So Dad had had a mistress. Peculiar word. It was a surprise, with something bittersweet to it.

Ann had a friend whose daughter was married to a Mexican who ran a restaurant. She made some calls and came up with a name for us.

The friend's son-in-law was expecting us. He came out of the kitchen, dressed in an expensive suit, wiping his hands delicately on a clean white towel. He led Sherry and me past cases of Dos Equis, into his office, where chairs were arranged like still life. He said his name was Renaldo—he didn't give us his last name—and a young man in a white shirt and black creased trousers brought in glasses of beer and a plate of tortilla chips. “This isn't necessary!” Sherry exclaimed. I nudged her with my knee.

“This is generous of you, to take your time for us,” I said. I leaned toward Renaldo. “We want to find my father's friend. All we know is that her name is Ophelia, that she has a baby, and that her brother has a yellow car and maybe runs a night club. What does that tell you?”

He took his time answering. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. “We are good citizens in this community.”

“Por supuesto,” I said, hoping I did not sound condescending. In Mexico, it is always right to attempt Spanish; in Texas, I wasn't so sure. But I wanted him to know I wasn't naive.

“What makes you think there is such a woman? Who gave you her name?”

Sherry told him about the woman at the funeral home, and what the girl in the trailer court had said. Renaldo pulled his arms back and folded his hands calmly.

“I may know this family. I can't yet be certain. I will take your message to them, if you tell me what it is. In this way, they may decide if it is something they wish to know.”

“We want to see her ourselves!” I recognized that Renaldo had control of the conversation, and I knew that it came not just from knowing something we did not, but from his sense of superiority. He was the one who condescended. “We have money for her,” I said sharply, trying to curb my anger, reaching for the formal courtesy that I knew would work best. “We think my father may have intended to give her his home. We are prepared to do as my father wished, but we have to talk to her, we have to know her name. And the child—it may be my father's child.” To my surprise, I was choking up. Sherry took my hand and clasped it tightly. I was grateful.

“I will look into it,” Renaldo said. “I will see if I can find her, if the family I am thinking of is the right one. I will tell her what you have told me. That is all I can do for you.”

“But you have to tell us her last name!” Sherry exclaimed.

Renaldo smiled. “Hernandez, I believe. There is another club owner with the name Garcia.”

I stood up, furious.

“Sir.” The bastard had withheld his formal name, leaving me with nothing to use against him. I was hot with indignation. “I have great respect for the memory of my father. You can understand this.” How was I to appeal to him? He was so cold! “I've lived away from my father for a long time. I need to go back to Mexico. But it is important that I first see to it that my father's friend has what is hers.” I sat back down, now embarrassed. Renaldo had shown not the slightest reaction to my display of temper.

“Is it very much?” he asked.

“It is very little. But it is what my father had, and we are willing to give it away.”

“Miss Painter. If, as you say, there is a child, your father's friend has something already.”

“Perhaps a burden we could ease.” I was promising more than I could ever hope to deliver.

“In our families, a child is never a burden. A child is a great gift.”

“You see! You see!” Sherry wailed in the car. “I knew they'd shut her off from us. We'll never find her!” She drove round and round, down long blocks where the stores advertised in Spanish, past cheap clubs with neon signs. “Watch for the damned yellow car,” she said, biting her lip. She was half-wrapped around the steering wheel in her intensity. It was no use. We didn't know where to look. “Out by the UPS!” Sherry said. “It's all Mexican out there.” She shot out onto one of the frightening arteries of the city, sped on for five miles, and then turned into a neighborhood of cheap frame houses. Some yards had been tidied. In others, pickups sat with their front ends up on blocks. It was getting quite cold, snow was starting to stick, making the streets slick. In the cold dusk, everyone was indoors, all the Hernandez Garcia Santos Rodriguez families—

Sherry turned a corner and skidded. The car swerved into a sharp turn and the front wheels jumped the curb. The car died.

“Damn damn damn,” Sherry murmured. “That bastard had us on a string.” She rearranged herself on the seat, brisk now, and capable. “Maybe I could put a notice in the personals.”

“Oh yeah, she'll read that. Think about it.”

“I'll think of something!” She drove more cautiously. “He thought we wouldn't accept her. He never even mentioned her to us. He could have brought her to our house. Was it that she was Mexican? That they weren't married? Was it us? What was the damned secrecy all about?”

“Maybe it was just an instinct for privacy.” I knew that might be hard for Sherry. She was married to Bud's son.

When we got home Ann looked up from her reading and asked us how it had gone. Sherry burst into tears and ran to her room. I put together some supper and ate it with Tommy and Ann. I was grateful when Ann took the child to bathe, and left me alone.

I was the only one awake when Kermit came home at ten o'clock. I was sitting at the table, working on a list of things I might do other than go back to the ranch. I had written:

1. school

2. find a job.

I'm glad I didn't pay for this advice! I thought. The words didn't mean anything. I was so weary, I was seeing things, quick scraps of pictures: Tonio scratching one of his hounds behind the ears. My mother on the couch with her feet out. My dad cutting cheese with a pocket knife. Men—men and boys, lines of them.

Kermit stood at the refrigerator and drank milk from the carton. He cut off a hunk of cheese with his pocket knife and ate it, still standing with the refrigerator door open.

When he had closed it, he said, “You made it out, you runt. You really did, good for you.” I took a moment to realize that what I saw in his eyes was awe, simple as that. He had bought the picture I had willed his way, of a good life, some kind of love, tender mercies. Things Bud had wanted, and Lenore, still.

“How does he do it, little sister?”

For a moment I didn't know what he meant. My mind skipped around and landed on Tonio. I saw him in his aviary, a foot-long parakeet on his arm.

“He's brave and smart,” I said. It probably didn't answer Kermit's question, but what I said was important, was true.

“Talk to Sherry before you go,” Kermit said. I looked at him carefully, trying to guess what he meant. He had an ugly smile now. “I'd appreciate it a lot,” he said. “You can teach her what you know.”

I had felt such a stranger, coming back. The mystery about the woman had enthralled me; Sherry had taken me in. I had felt like something mattered. Now I saw that Kermit knew me best.

“I can't imagine why they let you stay,” I said.

As I left the room, I heard him say, “It's my potential!”

As I fell toward sleep, I saw the line again, blurry at both ends. There were boys from school, and Tonio, and other men. Michael Sage. I got up, went to the bathroom, rearranged my pillow and slept again. In my uneasy sleep I searched for the faces. I woke before dawn, my gown soaked with perspiration. I had seen my father so clearly.

He had been standing on the very top of that cold iron spire, balanced, humbled—as I had been that star-soaked night high in the mountains—to find what he wanted, held out to him, within easy reach.

I KNEW the instant I heard the plane who it was. Sleepy hounds whined as he circled and buzzed the ranch and then landed. I had been lounging on the cold floor of the library, looking at a book of photographs of insects. I went down the walkway to the office and sat on a low bench across from it, in the tangled shade of climbing vines. Hounds were sprawled like throw rugs, too lazy in the hot afternoon to do more than shuffle their haunches.

I heard him at the gate on the other side of the walls, whistling a tune I knew but could not place, a song from childhood. As he closed the gate, an old gray Mexican hairless sprang from a shadow in the grass and bolted for him, barking like a pup. He took the time to squat and greet the ugly dog, scratching him on the belly and head. When he stood up again he looked down the walk and saw me on the bench, my hands folded in my lap like a schoolgirl. He came toward me in long easy strides, grinning.

I had gone to the ranch to stay for a few days after I got back from Texas. I knew if I stayed at the hotel while I was still feeling so strung out from my trip, I'd do whatever Michael Sage asked me to do. Of course I knew I was only postponing things; he had been vivid in my dream. He was next on some damned list I was writing with my life. Now he was here. He had come after me, gone out of his way. I gave him that as credit.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he said lightly. He patted his breast pocket. “I have some things to give Sofia, things I have to take care of with Antonio when he returns. I won't be long.” I didn't bother to comment on his ruse.

“I haven't had lunch. Would you like to stay?”

“I'm starved. Let me guess. Black beans and dry sopa.”

“What else?”

His voice dropped half an octave and came from some place deep inside him. “You know what I want.”

I rose and stepped away to put some distance between us. “Not that,” I said.

I saw his top lip quiver like a horse's at the gate. “I intend to have what I came for,” he said.

“Not here.” He glared at me. I knew I would go with him to his plane, to fly to Louisiana, where he had grown up, or south to Costa Rica or El Salvador. Distance would have made a difference. “I'm going back to the hotel after lunch. Whatever you say, after that.” I knew he didn't want to come to the hotel. He kidded himself, thinking we were unnoticed at the ranch.

We ate lunch in the kitchen at the counter while a maid washed the pots from the warming table. I saw the maid looking at Sage's back. Square and squat and brown, she must have been awed by his breadth and height. I smiled. The maid saw it and sent me a look full of good wishes. She was a new girl, come since Tonio was away. She turned the deep metal pots upside down along the counter top and hung the rags she had used on the stones of the barbecue pit on the patio just beyond the screen door. I was teasing Sage by then, saying how fascinating he must be to kitchen maids, when the girl stuck her head back inside for one last look. Sage turned to look at her and caught her with her face thrust forward. The maid broke into girlish giggles and ran. We could hear her feet slapping on the outside stairs. I laughed, my hands flat on the counter in front of me. Sage closed his hands over mine and bent toward me for a kiss. After that, he told me what we'd do.

We constructed an affair full of intrigue. I had developed some taste for subterfuge. I suspected that we deceived no one, but Sage insisted on the air of secrecy. It may have been an ethical pose, rather than a strategic one; he would cheat, but he would not do it boldly. He called infrequently. Usually he buzzed the hotel to let me know he was coming. All day then I waited for the night. The guests wouldn't have cared if he had driven straight up to the front door, and Claude couldn't possibly have been fooled, but under cover of darkness, I plunged into the thick perfume of oranges, finding my way down a path among the trees, meeting Sage where the path came to the road a quarter mile or so from the hotel. The dark and the noises spooked me, but they were aphrodisiacs, too. Seeing Sage took all of a day to get ready and all of the next to recover.

At first it was something like I used to think dating ought to be. Sage made meals for me, sometimes quite elaborately, and other times simple omelets or sandwiches. He brought things from Tampico that I wouldn't otherwise have, like pastrami, dill pickles, cans of Texas-style chili. He played records he had brought from the states: Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. We danced. We told one another the stories of our lives.

He had grown up the son of a postal clerk. His father's brother had a small ranch in south Texas, and there, summers, Sage had learned the work of animals and crops. His wife had been his girlfriend in high school and when he was home from his three years away at college. He had come to the Huasteca a spelunker, with friends. They had explored some immense caves north of here, he had seen vampire bats, and had gotten the idea of living here. His girlfriend's father, well-placed in an oil company, knew people in Tampico. Someone knew the General. One thing led to another, and marriage brought the money to lease the land. His wife hated the country on first glance. She led her own life in Tampico with their small sons and spent part of the winter in Houston, where her parents now lived. Sage loved the ranch. He had had an eight-year lease, and now he was more than halfway through another. He couldn't buy the land, so everything he did was for the good of the Velez family as much as for him. “Someday I'll want to renew the lease and Antonio will say no.” I said I thought it was the old man's ranch. “Old is the key word,” Sage said. “His son runs everything. One of these days Antonio will see the writing on the wall and sell the Tecoluca, if he can, and then he'll want this land back with his father's La Palmita.”

“He would never leave the Tecoluca!”

“He will someday. Why do you think he lent his plane to the campaigning president? With each new administration, his life enters a fresh period of risk. It is as if he has his leases, too, six years at a time.”

“But why?” I had never considered such a thing.

“Their revolution wasn't all sham. There are laws about land. They are bent in all ways to help the rich, but each president returns some land to the peasants. Tonio has land registered in the names of cousins and nephews, in his mother's name, and his. He is no fool. He is building an empire out and away from the cattle. The Tecoluca is not his life.”

He moved his hands to distract me. “Antonio will grow up some day and move to the city,” he said. That dismissed Tonio as a topic. Sage wanted to know about me. He was endlessly curious. Little by little I told him everything. He loved the story about my brother and Natty Mooster. He followed my teenage years like he was reading a cheap novel. He cheered me and booed the boys.

“I love your nose,” he said. “Your tiny wrists.” He said he was going to count my freckles. He liked to smell and taste and feel. He was truly with me, he gave me all his attention. Going to bed with him was something different. He was a large man, in all ways lean. I liked to stretch out beside him while we talked. I liked to run my hands over his back and legs. I couldn't believe his attention.

He said his wife was cold now that she had his children. He always kept village girls around—one or two to do his laundry, clean the house, sometimes to cook. He kept them a year or two and then traded them in on sisters and cousins. I said that didn't seem Mexican of them, to be so willing. I didn't want to think of him coercing the girls; I remembered the fascination of the kitchen girl at the Tecoluca. Sage said I was naive. “What I pay one of these girls feeds the whole family, maybe is the reason a brother can go on to a few more years of school. They have chicken now and then, because of me. Because she fucks me.”

It wouldn't be so bad, I thought. I told Sage that Bruni liked the maids. When I started telling about Bruni, I realized that Sage might be insulted to be linked with him, but I went on anyway. When I had been at the ranch a few weeks ago, Bruni had gotten drunk at dinner, and I had locked my bedroom door, afraid he would want to come to my bed. Instead, I heard fumbling in the hall, and muffled giggles. I had opened my door to see the back of Bruni and the youngest laundry maid, maybe thirteen, disappearing into the bedroom by the library. It surprised me that Bruni would bring a girl upstairs, even with Tonio gone. Sage had no problem with the idea. He said the girls were wide-eyed, dull and willing. He had once told one of them to take off her clothes so he could fuck her. She had complied dutifully and bent over, “like a little red-assed baboon,” he said.

Like a dog, I thought.

Sage had a beautiful little parrot, a real loro real, not a macaw like the ones at the Tecoluca. The loro had the run of the house and patios, as well as a perch in the kitchen and another on the patio outside the bedroom door. It loved to screech and laugh, and sometimes sounded like a monkey. Sage had had a monkey too, but the two creatures had quarreled incessantly, and the monkey lost the toss. The parrot had a vocabulary of outrageous English phrases, including, Fuck a duck, Kiss my ass, Eat my grits, and Praise the Lord. Sage explained that the parrot had originally been in the Tampico house and that both he and his wife had become attached to it. It had been much prized by the city maids who were known to ask its opinion on important matters of style (“Shall I cut my hair?”) and love (“Will he marry me?”). Sage wanted to take the bird to the ranch, so he began to teach it vulgar phrases. He won; his wife wanted Birdie out of the house and hearing of their children. Thus it was that I could lie with him in his bed and suddenly hear, “Kiss my ass!” Birdie also whistled. One night as Sage was closing the patio door against its epithets, the bird suddenly began a rousing rendition of “Coming ‘round the mountain,” which I immediately recognized as the song Sage had whistled that day he landed at the Tecoluca to look for me. It became “our song,” a cherished joke.

Sage said he loved the color of my pubic hair. He called it my “strawberry site.” He often kissed and touched me for long stretches of time, insisting that I lie still and enjoy it. “Don't you think you deserve it?” he said.

Then he began to ask me to tell him stories about myself over again, with all the details. He wanted lengthy descriptions, which he said aroused him. It seemed perverse to me that his sex should rise at the memory of other men, but when I protested, he cajoled me, saying fantasy was part of the range of it, part of the fun. Once I had told him about Farin and his “Christmas tree,” Sage sometimes pretended to behave as crudely, and I tried to laugh. He didn't want to hear anything about Mexico. Tonio was never mentioned. After a while I wanted to know more about him, too. I asked him about his wife. This irritated him. A simple fuck, he said, and besides, she was his wife. Only his wife called him Michael. He said he didn't like the name.

We had exhausted what we had in common, and we began to seek continuance in the novel. I realized that I was more experienced than he, and when he realized it too, he seemed angry. I wished I had told him nothing.

He told me his wife wouldn't let him in her bed if he had not just showered. I took this as a hint of some sort, and stopped coming to him freshly bathed. He began to give me small slaps and pinches, not enough to hurt. Then a bruise appeared on one breast, another on my thigh. He wanted to sit on the couch while I undressed in front of him, and when I was naked he began to slap: on the breasts, lightly, harder on the buttocks, arms and legs; hard again, and startling, on the face, and then the buttocks more, until I whimpered. That was when he was excited.

Claude came to me one morning at breakfast and said he wanted to talk to me. He said, “I know you are a foolish and ignorant girl, but now I think maybe you are out of your mind.” I got up and spun on my heels, gave him the table with my cocoa in a china pot. I imagined my waiter at lunch eyed me with rash abandon, and when a guest remarked on the pouches under my eyes, I was offended and acted rudely. Sage was as agitated as I was. He howled one night that his schedule was upside down, his children hadn't been to the ranch in months (hardly my fault!). He stopped cooking for me, stopped his wooing, drove without caution, and hit me until I cried. He picked me up one afternoon, a surprise, an hour before dusk, and took me to see bats swarm out of a cave like a cloud of soot. Away from him, I knew things were getting out of hand. But there were fine lines in sex (and pity, fear, and loss), and I thought we were on the reasonable side. He wasn't really kinky. I had read the whole of Olympia Press from Tonio's library. What Sage and I did was nothing. It passed the time.

He went home for a weekend and didn't reappear until the middle of the week. He called me to set a time. He sounded strange, but I decided he had had a bad time with his wife, and I would set it straight.

I plunged into the blackness of the grove, adrenalin pumping, breath coming short and hard. He wasn't where he said he would be, and I wasn't early. I sat on the edge of the road at a place where gravel spilled toward the trees, able to see nothing, hearing frogs and insects, what I thought was a growl, and far away the lowing of an animal as mournful as a dirge. It was a cool night, and I was underdressed for the wait. I clasped my knees for warmth and leaned my cheek against one's bony rise. If I kept this up, I thought, I would be ruined for Tonio's return. Tonio had become a ghost, never quite out of mind but no longer clear in my mind, either. If Sage asked me to go with him, I knew I would go. With an American, I could understand what was what. I thought. The wife he didn't love could go home again. I could love Sage and the ranch as well. Was that what it was, love? Or English without pauses? Was it just that he was there and I was lonely? I knew this much: when I left Tonio, if I did, I would always wonder what there might have been. I would miss the comfort of his authority, I would sigh for his beauty and long for what had never come, his praise. But I knew I could never have those things, no matter how long I stayed; there could never be a Tonio attained. Sage, blond and broad and less complex, was more my friend than Tonio had ever been. If there weren't the blasted barriers (the children more than her), he could be truly mine.