You know, the only place in Corrales that’s not adobe. That three-story white farmhouse, grove of cottonwoods higher than the house. Sits on two acres of land, next to Gus’s field with the herd of Black Angus. She’s been gone for years now but all anybody ever calls it is the Bellamy house. Before Claire Bellamy moved in it was the Sanchez place, no matter who lived in it. He’s the sheep rancher who built it back in 1910.
The whole town was just dying to see what poor fool had bought the place. Couldn’t help but feel sorry for her even though it was only a thousand down. Course she’d be rich now if she’d a kept the place. Anybody coulda told her the pump was about to go, about the termites and the wiring. Nobody figured on the roof caving in. That had been a darn good roof.
Claire was divorced, no more’n thirty, with four children. The oldest was around ten, the baby not even walking. She taught Spanish at the university, did some tutoring too. Took the older boys to school every morning and the little ones over to Lupe Vargas’s. Painted the whole inside of the house herself, fenced in the corral, planted vegetables, built rabbit hutches. Course they didn’t eat the rabbits or ducks, just had them running wild, and a goat and pony too. Two dogs and near to a dozen cats. Come on out back … you can see the house plain as day.
You could see better when she was there. She didn’t have curtains on any of them tall windows. And I have these here binoculars. For the birds. Pileated woodpecker lives down in that old dead cottonwood. She loved birds too, used to go lean on Gus’s fence evenings, when the red-winged blackbirds were all out. Prettiest sight you can ever see, them birds against the green grass, the black cattle.
It was just like a living doll house. Children all over hell and gone, hers and the neighbors’. In trees, in wagons, on trikes and the pony, running in the sprinkler. Cats in every window of the house. Evenings you could see her and the boys at the table, and after she had bathed the little ones she’d put them to bed and read to Ben and Keith. She’d wash up then, feed the animals. Dining room light would go on; she’d be studying for hours. If me or Arnold got up to let the dog out, twelve, one o’clock she’d be up … couple of times she fell asleep right there, her head on the typewriter. She’d be up at six though, feeding the animals and then getting the kids ready for school. She was in PTA; Ben and Keith were in Scouts and 4-H. Ben took violin lessons from Miss Handy. The town had been keeping its eye on her, had just about decided she was a worker and a darn good mother.
Then she up and carries on with that Casey boy. A bad one, Mike Casey. Him and his brother, Pete. Always had been. Dropouts, thieves, dope fiends. Smoked that marijuana right there front of God and everybody, outside Earl’s grocery. Their folks are two old drunks. I’ll tell you it was pitiful. Least Mike helped out at home. Cooked some and cleaned up. Most of the time he just played the guitar or made boats. Models, from scratch, perfect as could be. He was a sight. Long dirty hair and a earring. Motorcycle clothes with a skull on the back, big old knife. I mean to say he was something to see. Just plain scary.
Now we all would have understood if she took up with some nice man, but this was sicko and him barely nineteen, to make things worse. And not that ever she bothered to hide anything. They’d walk to the ditch in broad daylight, her and Casey, the children and dogs and one cat that liked to swim. Weekends they’d load up his pickup truck with bedrolls and a cookstove and take off Lord knows where.
She still studied late as ever only he’d be there writing too or playing his guitar. Then the light in her room would be on, their room I guess. Couple of times in the full moon I saw them out on the roof, in the treetops. A body couldn’t help but see them, plain as day.
One night I saw him carry in something heavy in a gunnysack. Finally made out it was that pink marble angel from the cemetery. Real old, people come special to see it. I had a mind to call Jed, he’s the State Police, but Arnold said wait and see. Sure enough she had a fit, waving her arms and hollering. He took it back that night; only he put it on the grave backwards, facing the mountains. Still sets that way.
Bessie thought somebody ought to give her a talking-to. That boy had been in Nazareth, and in detention hall twice. He was likely to break any minute and murder all them poor children, or worse. She even left that baby with him. When she was gone he let Ben and Keith drive his pickup in the field and shoot tin cans with his BB gun. We was all worried sick, just sick. Didn’t talk to her though but we told Mattie Price and Lupe Vargas not to let their kids play over there.
* * *
We have a movie of the afternoon we met Casey. Nathan had learned to swim in the clear ditch the day before and he wanted it documented. It was the second hot summer day. I lay on the blanket watching the kids, listening to the crows, looking at dragonflies through the zoom lens. Dozens of them, startling neon blue, sunlight paler blue through the tracery of their wings, darting, hovering, lapis lazuli skimming the green water.
Then a Spanish galleon in full sail glided right through them. An exquisitely made boat, about eighteen inches long. It belonged to Casey. I had seen his brother, Pete, just that morning out on North Fourth, in a phone booth with a blowtorch. Casey just seemed to look bad, all decked out and bizarre in leather, with a skull studded on his back. He had always seemed magic to me, like a figure from Black Orpheus. Or a Harlequin, from afar, against the white sand dunes or the pink tamarisk in the woods, against the red wet sand of the riverbed.
He squatted on the bank of the ditch, let the kids play with his boat, told them how he made it. After a while he politely took it away from them, dried it with a T-shirt and wrapped it in his black jacket. He took off his pants and dove into the water, dragonflies scattering. His body was beautiful. He had a Civil War face, sort of hillbilly and gaunt, sunken shifty eyes, a sullen mouth, bad teeth. He came home with us for dinner and then just stayed. That night he showed me a trapdoor that led to the roof, to a ledge right in the tops of the cottonwoods. You could see the whole little town, look down on the sleeping black cattle. Owl in the tree. We became lovers up there on the roof. In the morning when we woke in my bed he was already known to me, familiar. There was no transition. When I went downstairs he and the boys were cooking flapjacks and after breakfast the three older ones went off with him to the ditch.
I try to remember what we ever talked about, but I can’t. And I’m a talker, so are my boys. We did wordless things with Casey. All day on the mesa digging for pot shards, muttering or sighing, letting out a yell whenever we found abalone shell, turquoise, a big piece of pottery. Quiet, our fishing lines in the water. Padding through Canyon de Chelly, climbing Acoma. The baby, Joel, would sit mesmerized, watching his brothers help Casey work on boats. At night when I studied and graded papers Casey drew or played his guitar. When I’d glance up he would glance up too.
We camped out a lot at our cliffs. Not far from town but the road was bad, long hike in. Stark red cliffs, sheer above a valley and looking far to the south, beyond Route 66, beyond Acoma. No sign of Indians ever being there, which was strange; it was such a holy place. Sky all around and in sight of all the sacred places. The Sandias, the Jemez, the Rio Grande. We explored, climbed, watched the hawk against the sunset. Porcupines with the green quills. Nighthawks at dusk and an owl at night. Wild dogs the boys thought were coyotes. We watched the puma kill a deer. That was lovely. Really. No one else ever went to our cliffs except the hunter who killed the puma. We hadn’t seen the man but his picture and the puma’s were in the paper. We looked for tracks then, found deer tracks and puma tracks and then dog tracks and man tracks. By the stream.
Took eight months before I thought. I had ignored glares from old women at Earl’s store and we had all just laughed at Jennie Caldwell watching us with binoculars from her back porch. Casey and I were the town scandal, Betty Boyer told me. Then Keith told me the Price kids weren’t allowed to come to our house. I sat on the back porch. The reason I had moved to Corrales was to start a new life, bring my children up right. In a small peaceful town, part of a community. I planned to get my doctorate and teach, just be a good teacher and a good mother. If I had thought of a man in my future he would have been graying, kindly, with tenure. Now look.
Casey was washing dishes. He called out, asking me what I was doing.
“Thinking.”
“Jesus, Claire, please don’t think.” But I had already.
“You have to go, Casey.”
He got his guitar, said, “See you around,” and was gone. It was as hard on the kids as on me. Worse when we found a Zuni grave without him, and at the deer dance in San Felipe.
Marzie, another graduate student, kept asking me to go out with her. She belonged to the Sierra Club and Swinging Singles, even Parents Without Partners, and she wasn’t even a parent.
Casey sort of eased back into our lives. He didn’t live there and we weren’t lovers, most of the time, but he was there a lot. He and the boys were digging a duck pond. He’d watch the kids while I was at the library. Finals were coming up. Weekends we went swimming in the ditch or out to the cliffs. Joel learned how to walk.
I remember talking to Ben and Keith on the phone, saying it was a red-letter day, whatever that means. My last final and that afternoon I was picking up a new VW camper. I had told Marzie that I would go out with her, to celebrate. To a dance at the German American Club. No intellectuals, no academics. Just swingers, she said.
I drove the new van home. The boys were thrilled with it. It had a built-in bed, a refrigerator, and a stove. Joel got in it right away with his blanket and toys, climbed in and out for hours. Casey took them all for a ride while I cooked dinner and dressed. Miniskirt and long earrings. The kids were so upset about me going out I realized I should have done it long before. I told Casey I’d be at the German American Club. I said I would be home late, would call him later to check in. I remembered to put on perfume, went back upstairs.
The German American Club was pretty bad. Loud disco and then a German polka band wearing lederhosen. Accordions. We danced with jet pilots from Kirtland and technicians from Sandia. Bomb makers. What was I doing there? I called home four or five times but it was busy. Phone must be off the hook. We had one smart cat who used to knock it off so she could hear the voice say your phone is off the hook. After a while I began to have fun, dancing and drinking beer. Anybody can tell you I have no head for liquor. Marzie looked even sillier than I did, in a silver lamé jumpsuit. She disappeared and I ended up with a pilot named Buck. Handsome in a Nazi way, like old black-and-white Richard Widmark.
* * *
I figured that Casey boy had gone berserk for sure, run plumb amok. He was driving that pickup like a bat out of hell up and down the ditch roads, spinning on the bank, dust flying, crows squawking and three of those poor Bellamy children up front in the cab. That settles it, I said, and called the State Police. Jed must have been down to the store talking with Earl; the police car was there in five minutes, lights, sirens, and all. Casey began to speed up and get away but then he stopped and got out of the truck. He looked like a madman. He and Earl climbed up on the bank and looked down in the water, like they was wondering if fish were biting. Earl went and talked on his radio and then Casey and the kids followed him to the Bellamy house. I got my sweater and flashlight and took off across Gus’s field.
She had gone out, in the new van, to the Spanish American Club to celebrate the end of school. That’s what she taught, Spanish. They’d all been eating dinner and then Casey saw Joel was gone. That baby had just started walking. They called him and looked all over the house and then they looked outside and there were his little red tennis shoes. Saddest thing you ever saw, them little red shoes. Couldn’t have gone far barefoot, I said, but Jed said the ditch wasn’t far. He said there weren’t nothing to do but drain them ditches. He called the volunteer fire department and called in for more police.
The men all went to the ditch. Casey and the boys were searching in the woods. Folks from town were arriving so I had Arnold bring over the church coffee urn, go get some Styrofoam cups and cream over to Earl’s. Earl sent a case of Coke, cold. I sent Arnold back home for some tuna-and-macaroni casseroles from the freezer and two berry pies. Bessie never wants to be outdone. She went home and got chicken, a whole ham, and potato salad. Lupe Vargas showed up with a full washtub of tamales. Did your heart good, to see how our town pulls together when folks are in trouble. And those volunteers, the men who were draining the ditches were the very farmers who needed that water for their crops, that time of year more’n any. But not one complaint. Just doing what anybody would of done.
We got to find the mother, I said. I kept thinking about the Casey boy’s face, chalk white, so shook he could hardly talk. He said she was out celebrating. Claire Bellamy hadn’t gone out once, not in a year since they moved in. Casey looked scared and guilty. That’s how he looked, guilty. Where was she? Maybe he had murdered them both and buried their bodies without me seeing, though that wasn’t hardly likely. Maybe they were dead in the attic. I looked in the phone book for the Spanish American Club. No such place. Called the university and got hold of the names of her professors. None of them ever heard of the club either, but were all pretty shook about the baby maybe drowned. They gave me numbers of students and friends of hers, but none of them had heard of any celebration so then I really got to worrying.
* * *
Where was his gun? What if he felt cornered and shot into the crowd? You read about that all the time. I figured I better tell Bessie. We left Mabel Strom to keep on calling people from Claire Bellamy’s phone book while we searched the house with a fine-tooth comb. We went through all the drawers and closets but didn’t find the gun. In her room though, right there in the open were these drawings of her. Stark naked. Not a stitch on. Right there for those poor innocent children to see. And some poems talking about a silk breast and other such trash. Just about broke our hearts, so we ripped all the poems and pictures right up. She keeps a clean house, you must say, Bessie said, and that was the truth.
The helicopter and the bloodhounds came about the same time. Awful racket, clattering and yapping. The Bellamy kids came tearing back from the ditch to watch the helicopter land in their backyard and the dogs sniffing them little red shoes. I told them they should be ashamed, having such a whale of a time, with their baby brother most likely drowned. They got serious for about two minutes, Nathan even cried, and then they took off across the fields after the dogs. There were crowds of people by that time so Bessie and me got busy in the kitchen. Lots of Claire Bellamy’s friends. Mabel must of called every name in Claire’s phone book. Two nuns from a school where she used to teach. About ten students from Rio Grande High came straight from the prom, in formals and tuxedos. Her professors came and her ex-husband came, in what turned out to be a Lotus. All the kids went out to look at the car. He was with a Frenchwoman who spoke French with the nuns. Then still another ex-husband showed up. That could have knocked us over with a feather. He was with his mother, a real battle-axe. Hate to have her snooping in my house. The first ex-husband had just got back from Italy, had never met the second one. But they were real polite, shook hands and one of them said, well, nothing to do but wait. There was plenty they coulda been doing, but I held my tongue. Two mean-looking Mexkins came. Then two nice ladies who knew the first mother-in-law. Then more professors came. They got really upset when bigmouthed Bessie told them it wasn’t just the baby feared drowned, that Claire Bellamy herself may have met foul play.
The men came in tired from the ditch. Casey came back with the children, fed them, and took them upstairs to bed. The men all ate and then went outside to smoke and pass around a bottle, like at a party. Inside folks were eating and chattering away. Jed came up and asked me what was this darn fool talk about foul play. I told him about the romance and the breakup, how Casey had been lurking in the trees. When Casey came downstairs Jed and Wilt, the deputy, took him in the sewing room for about an hour. When they came out Jed said “You got holt of her yet?” and he and Wilt went back to the woods. Casey came at me, furious. I liked to a died. But he just said “You filthy bitch” and went out the back door.
* * *
I went home with Buck, to where he lived, weaving through his exercycle and rowing machine and barbells to his waterbed. Later he said, “Wow, that was good. Was that good for you?” “Yes,” I said, “I have to call home.” The line was still busy. Buck said he was starved. “Aren’t you starved?” Why yes, I was. We went to that truck stop on Lomas, ate steak and eggs and laughed. Pleasant. I was getting to like him. It was almost morning. The Journal truck came; the driver dropped off a stack of papers. Buck went to get a paper and check out the sports page. I was just glancing over the front page when I saw it at the bottom. CORRALES BABY FEARED DROWNED—DITCHES DRAINED. And then right below that it said Joel Bellamy. That was my son.
Buck dropped me at my van and I raced home, through red blinking lights, yellow blinking lights. I didn’t cry, but my chest made a keening sound like wind. Just outside Corrales, at Dead Man’s Curve, I heard a noise and a rustle and then Joel said, “Hi, Mama!” He climbed over the seat and onto my lap. I skidded to a stop. I sat there, holding him, smelling him. Finally I stopped shaking and drove us the rest of the way home.
The rest of that night is like a dream, and I don’t mean dreamy. Distorted and out of sync. People coming in and out of focus, out of context. Our land had turned into a vast nightmare parking lot. A policeman waved me to a spot with his flashlight. Betty Boyer was drunk on the back porch. “Welcome to This Is Your Life!”
First off there was old Jennie Caldwell washing dishes, with Casey drying. He moaned, almost passed out when he saw Joel. Betty and I helped him sit down. He held Joel, rocking him, still moaning. Our house was full of people, strangers. No, they weren’t all strangers. People were running around yelling that the baby had been found, was okay. But after the initial relief and joy a bad reaction seemed to set in. As if everyone had been tricked, and here it was, four in the morning. One of the farmers said that leastways both other times they’d drained the ditches there’d been a body in them. In all fairness, everyone was on edge from exhaustion and worry. Still it did seem the only ones simply glad Joel was safe were Casey and Sister Cecilia and Sister Lourdes. Or who didn’t imply I was to blame for the whole thing. Even my own children felt that way. They had known I shouldn’t be going out anywhere. I don’t want to talk about my ex-husbands, Tony and John, or about my ex-mother-in-law. I ignored their malicious comments. The entire Spanish department was there, even Dr. Duncan, the chairman. He had been suspicious of me ever since that incident on First Street, but that’s another story. I am a very private person. Well at least I had showered at Buck’s and had eaten breakfast. I was refreshed, actually, but even that seemed to annoy people.
The worst was Mr. Oglesby, from the bank. I had never seen him before. He was the person who called me if I had an overdraft. “Say, Claire, this is Oglesby, up to the bank. Better get some money in here, hon.” What was Mr. Oglesby doing in my kitchen? Two women I hadn’t seen since the baby shower for Keith, nine years before.
The police finally got everyone to leave. They didn’t leave, though, sat down with me and Casey at the kitchen table. The goat and the pony put their heads in the window. I’ll go feed them, Casey said. You stay right where you are, the policeman told him. It was as if a crime had been committed. Where had Joel been when I left? Were the van doors open? No, I never did say Spanish American. Where had I been from two until four? Buck who? I told them I had called home, about seven times.
“Now then, little lady,” Jed said, “if you didn’t know there was something mighty wrong down here … how come you kept on trying to call?”
“Just to say hello,” I said.
“Hello. You call up your babysitter at three in the morning just to say hello?”
“Yes.”
Casey smiled. He looked really happy. I smiled back at him.
“Judas Priest,” the policeman said. “Come on, Wilt, let’s git out of this loony bin, git us some grub.”