The Realm of Last Chances (30 page)

“Kristin,” the provost said, “I see you spoke to Professor Conley. Did you talk to Dr. Dilson-Alvarez?”

“No.”

“May I ask why?”

She’d anticipated this question but not that she would answer it honestly. The words just came to her, like the notes Cal played in his solos. The difference was that she didn’t have to close her eyes to make them flow. “Because,” she said, “Robert Dilson-Alvarez is the kind of man who can explain almost anything away if you give him the chance, and I refuse to cooperate. He plagiarized a book and used it to get hired here. It’s listed on the vita he included with his tenure application. He plagiarized parts of an article that he published in a respected journal, which is about to print a retraction that will hardly cast a positive light on this institution. Those are the facts. They’re irrefutable. What happened in the writing of Gwen Conley’s article is open to conjecture, I suppose, though it’s clear enough to me that he hoodwinked her just as he’d hoodwinked the university. If you or the dean would like to question Dilson-Alvarez, that’s up to you. My job is finished. I’ve done what I was supposed to.”

She stood and lifted her coat and scarf off the back of the chair, picked up her briefcase and left without saying good-bye.

cal sat in a rocker
on the front porch, drinking Booker’s from a coffee cup and watching the snow pile up. The wind was blowing it in all over him now, salting his hair and sugaring his eyebrows, the flakes on his pants and sweater beginning to melt from his body heat. Whenever anybody drove down the street, they invariably slowed and stared. The guy driving the snowplow actually stopped and shook his head.

Matt Drinnan had left for work maybe half an hour earlier in his rental car. Before climbing into it, he’d looked down the street and seen Cal sitting there. For a second or two they stared at each other, and Cal raised his cup as if proposing a toast. His neighbor wasted no time driving off.

Cal had been thinking that in a little while, he’d grab a crowbar, go on down the street and bust into Drinnan’s house through the back door. He had no idea what he’d discover. He thought maybe he’d check out his computer, if it was turned on, and see if he’d cleared the history or had any digital photos stored there. Maybe his landline, too, assuming he had one, in case anything interesting showed up on his message machine or caller ID. Prowl through his dresser, go through the clothes hamper.

Despite being covered in snow, he was warm and not just from the whiskey. The heat had been building inside him for days. He was seeing stuff he didn’t need to see. The other night he saw Ernesto crumple to the hardpan, his body afire. And his father dead on the floor of his cell, the concrete washed red. Then a man stretched out in a dry creek bed with blood seeping from a wound in his head.

He had another slug of Booker’s, set the cup in the snow
and rose from the rocker. He walked over, pulled open the storm door and grasped the knob on the wooden door, but it had locked behind him. “Goddamn it to fuck,” he said, and reached down to move the sliding washer on the little bar to prop the storm door open. Then he backed up a couple of feet and threw his shoulder against the front door, the lock splintering through the jamb. The door swept inward and knocked over the coat rack. Suzy came running, barking and panting. When she saw it was him, she looked confused.

“Easy girl,” he said, patting her head. “You know I’d never hurt you. When I leave here, I’m taking you with me.” He knelt to give her a hug and let her slobber on his face, then she lumbered back into the kitchen and lay down on her pillow as if nothing had ever gone wrong. Dogs have it made.

He opened the basement door and flipped on the wall switch, went down the narrow stairs and, stepping over to his workbench, grabbed the crowbar, the tempered steel gleaming in the fluorescent light. Strictly speaking, he guessed he didn’t really need it, since he’d just broken into his own house with no tools. But he wanted to use it. Certain kinds of damage only steel can do.

He was halfway up the stairs when he heard sounds from the front porch, someone stamping boots on the mat, a tentative tapping. He wouldn’t have cared, but given the fucking door, any fool would’ve assumed somebody had broken into his house. If he stayed where he was, whoever it was—most likely Vico, the worrywart—might go call the cops. And cops were the last people he wanted to see right now.

He stepped into the hallway, forgetting he was brandishing a crowbar, covered in rapidly melting snow, reeking of whiskey and probably looking like a madman.

Dave’s wife stood at the door, snowflakes speckling her red woolen cap and the shoulders of her dark down coat. Gloria
looked from his face to the crowbar and the gouged door jamb. Cal watched her trying to add it all up and make it come out even.

“I didn’t know your phone number,” she said.

He was still standing about halfway down the hall, and she was outside on the porch. The storm door rocked in the wind, slamming against the clapboard, and snow was blowing in behind her, starting to accumulate on the floor. It occurred to him that he needed to invite her inside, so he did.

She stepped over the threshold. “I just had a doctor’s appointment,” she told him.

“I hope you’re all right.”

“It was routine. But my doctor’s in Montvale, and since I was nearby I wanted to ask you a question.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Maybe we ought to close the door, though? At least one of them?”

“I’ll close ’em both.” He propped the crowbar against the wall and then, when he passed by, saw her glance into the living room, where the walls were still unpainted and the furniture in disarray. He slipped the washer over and pulled the storm door closed, then shut the other one.

She was standing there with her back to him, looking down the hallway into the kitchen, where Suzy was stretched out watching her. “I’d like to buy Dave a better mandolin,” she said, turning toward him. “So I wanted to check with you and see if … Cal? Are you okay? Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

He towered over her, at least a foot taller and wreathed in whiskey fumes, and any woman in her position would’ve had a right to be afraid. After all, she’d met him only the other day and must have learned from her husband or the Cedar Park paper, if not both, that back in October he’d beaten a guy to within an inch of his life. Yet he knew, as surely as he’d ever
known anything, that if he didn’t put some distance between them in the next few seconds, she would pull off her hat and gloves and drape her coat over the pineapple post and then, without any sign from him that he needed or welcomed closer contact, wrap her arms around him and invite him to tell her what was wrong. So he held his breath and waited.

“her name,”
Gloria told Dave that night in the alcove off their bedroom, “was Jacinta.”

They were sitting on the love seat, and a candle was lit on the small wicker table in front of them. The storm had knocked the power out in their section of Cedar Park. Inside, the temperature was only about fifty degrees, but they’d wrapped themselves in wool blankets. Dave, who was sipping Irish whiskey laced with sugar and lemon juice, wore wool socks. His feet were almost always freezing, and she worried about his circulation. So far his blood pressure was no worse than borderline, but both of his brothers had already suffered strokes.

“He had a class with her his senior year in high school,” she said. “It was a big school in Bakersfield, a couple thousand students. He told me that these days the student body’s probably about fifty percent Hispanic, but back then it was more like twenty-five or thirty. The Latinas were excluded from student government, and they never got elected cheerleader or class favorite or most likely to succeed. He explained all of this to me patiently, as though he thought I might be disinclined to believe it. ‘Imagine that,’ I finally said, hoping to make him lighten up, ‘Latinas being discriminated against.’ He thought I was serious. ‘It happened,’ he tells me. ‘It really did.’

“Her family had bought a house that his father’s company built. He didn’t know this when he first got interested in her, and she didn’t know whose son he was, and by the time they figured it out neither one of them cared. When they started going together he kept it from his father, who he said was the worst man he ever knew, and he never told him anything that mattered. And she kept it from her whole family.”

“Why’d she do that?” Dave asked, pulling her closer until her head rested on his left shoulder.

“Because they were having problems with their house, and it was ruining their lives. Her people were second generation. Both her parents had decent jobs that kept them out of the fields, and they’d sunk everything they’d saved into the place. I don’t know what all the problems were—bad plumbing or ventilation or something like that, and the foundation was shifting and the walls were cracking. Her dad was angry all the time, and her mother was too, and apparently she blamed her husband for buying the house. They were fighting a lot, almost always about the same thing.

“Finally the girl’s father went to see a lawyer, and it turned out lots of people had been filing lawsuits but nobody ever won because the company had all the judges in their pocket. So that just made her dad even angrier. And along about this time, some friend of his spotted Cal with his daughter at a pizza place and realized whose son he was.

“So after hearing this, Jacinta’s father went home and confronted her, calling her a
puta
, and then his wife got into it, telling him that since he’d given away everything they had to Cal’s father, maybe their daughter thought she had no choice but to try to get it back. So he slapped his wife, which he’d never done before, and then his daughter came after him with a steam iron, and when he tried to wrestle it away, the iron hit her in the face and broke her nose. The next time Cal saw her, she looked like she’d gone a couple rounds with Teofilo Stevenson.”

She stopped then and asked if she could have a drop of Dave’s whiskey. He expressed surprise, because she’d always claimed that even the smell of it turned her stomach, but he handed the glass to her anyway, and she took a sip. It tasted about as bad as she’d expected, maybe a little worse, but at least it warmed her up. She could see why someone might drink it, especially if he’d been sitting outside in the snow like Cal had
before she came over. He’d confessed that to her, along with so much else, and then he got choked up and asked if she would hold him again, just for a moment or two. According to the digital display on the DVR, she’d held him nearly ten minutes, occasionally patting his back, and the whole time she’d felt as if she had a giant child in her arms. That was one part she’d never tell Dave. Another part was that Cal said she reminded him of Jacinta. The third thing she hoped she wouldn’t have to tell him was that Cal had discovered Kristin was having an affair with a neighbor and he was afraid—that was the word he used—he might go down the street to the guy’s house and do what he’d already done twice in his life, and that this time the result might be even worse.

“The girl’s father managed a truck stop out on the edge of Bakersfield, not far from the new subdivision where they’d bought the house. He used to drive his pickup to work, but lately, according to the girl, he often walked. She didn’t know why, and Cal didn’t tell her that all the land between the subdivision and the truck stop belonged to his father and had no
TRESPASSING
signs everywhere.

“Her father usually went in around seven in the morning and worked until lunch, came back home and took a nap, then went back in around four in the afternoon and stayed until nine or ten. The truck stop never closed, and his hours weren’t always that regular, but he had to have his siesta and, when he got back up, immediately headed for work. That was one thing you could count on.

“This tract of land was bisected by a creek. For most of the year it was bone-dry, but in the spring runoff from the Sierras sometimes turned it into a river. Cal’s father was planning to build luxury homes on either side of it, thinking people would pay premium prices for the pleasure of saying they lived on a riverbank for a few weeks of the year. You couldn’t get from Jacinta’s subdivision to the truck stop without crossing
the creek bed. It was deep enough that until you were in it you couldn’t see the bottom, which was littered with refuse. Old tires, paint cans, anything that washed down from the foothills and got stranded there when the water ran out.

“Cal said he didn’t tell Jacinta what he intended to do because he knew she’d tell him not to, and he didn’t really know what his intentions were anyway. Looking back, he thinks he just hoped to tell her father who he was, explain that he knew better than anybody that his father was a ruthless asshole and that the one thing he’d always promised himself was that he’d die before he turned into that kind of man himself. Then he’d ask her father not to lay a hand on his wife or daughter anymore. He’d make the request in a completely reasonable fashion, because he knew his girlfriend’s father was a decent man who worked hard for his family and deserved respect. He was actually thinking he might one day be his father-in-law and the grandfather of his children.

“He said he doesn’t even think he was angry when he stepped down into the creek bed to wait. He had on a pair of shorts and some hiking boots and a T-shirt, and he’d brought a canteen with him, because this was midsummer and it was over a hundred that afternoon. He got there about three and sat down near the bottom of the bank, where he spotted a couple of huge rats scurrying around looking for something to eat.

“He said he waited and waited, just sitting there in that baking heat. He was about to give up when her father appeared, a little guy in his late thirties who wore khaki workclothes and a Peterbilt cap. He had his head down, so he didn’t see Cal until he stood up and said, ‘Excuse me,
Señor
Garza.’

“He said he’d thought a lot about how to address him. He’d taken Spanish in junior high, but he wasn’t certain about degrees of formality. He was pretty sure
Hola, Señor Garza
would be unduly informal, and he thought
Disculpame, por favor, Señor Garza
might be the wrong idiom altogether, so
he decided to split the difference, using English
and
Spanish, and he’s always thought that was what enraged the man—the notion that Cal might see him as half one thing, half another.