ENRIQUE WORKED THE irrigation on the Valencia grove until midnight. Gustave got tired around eleven, and Enrique drove him home. Then he took the truck back to the grove to check the gopher traps. 109 yesterday. The gophers were chewing through PVC pipe like it was hollow peppermint stick. In August, the trees would wither in a few days without water.
He stood in the kitchen drinking one last cup of coffee when he heard his son’s truck. The tools bouncing loose in the metal bed like always on the gravel road.
He went to the front window. Lafayette was carrying a woman up the lawn.
A thin woman. Her head lolling back like an actress in some movie, but then Lafayette moved his arm up and the head nestled back against his chest. Her hair fell over his arm like a black waterfall.
Glorette.
Enrique saw her only a few times a year, when Gustave had him drive to whatever apartment she’d landed in—each place a dim cave where her son would look up from his bed on the floor. What they called it—some Japanese word. They went if the boy was sick or needed money.
Her hair was always in a twist on top of her head. Chignon, the women used to call it back in Louisiana. So high it was a complicated structure. But tonight the hair was loose over Lafayette’s arm, swaying against his leg.
Dead.
They came up the slope, Reynaldo just behind. Like they were killers. Her feet in high heels, dangling.
THEY PUT HER on Marie-Claire’s couch. Pale green. Enrique never sat on her couch. He was always dirty from the groves. He sat on the porch to drink his coffee, and left his boots in the wooden orange crate she put on the side of the house for him. Then he went straight to the bedroom to change.
Glorette lay with her feet splayed, her mouth open. The first thing he thought—Marie-Claire come out here, she see a body on that couch.
“Quo faire?” he said to his sons.
Lafayette held out his hands, palms up, like he didn’t know whether he should wash them, like he didn’t know how his hands had done that.
Done what?
Reynaldo kept rubbing his thick eyebrows like he always did when he was confused, when he was waiting for his older brother to talk first, to see if there was anything he needed to refute or deny or explain.
“Man, I ain’t never touched a dead body before,” Lafayette said, quiet.
Reynaldo said, “Me neither,” which he didn’t need to say, because he did nothing without his brother.
Then Enrique smelled urine. Like when he’d killed the German. His heart felt a hot bloom—a dried plum fattening up in hot water.
He looked down at her face. The most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, even more beautiful than her mother, who’d been famous in Louisiana when they were young. Her mother Anjolie was Marie-Claire’s distant cousin. Gustave had gone back to Louisiana to get her, taken her from the house where she’d been locked up in an armoire to protect her until Enrique killed—
His sons looked up.
SHE’D BEEN JUST one of the children running in and out of the house, where Marie-Claire always had food. His daughter Fantine, and Glorette—racing the boys in the groves, the soles of their bare feet like pink shrimp. Then Fantine refusing to hoe the weeds out of the irrigation ditches, hiding in trees and behind hedges to read, always reading, grown paler and thin and narrow-eyed and hateful. Glorette’s face suddenly shaped like a pansy, with that same symmetrical shape but her cheekbones gleaming. Skin gold as a mothwing. Men following her everywhere.
One day, when he was a boy and he’d been taken to New Orleans to help an old man deliver sacks of oysters, they’d walked out of the restaurant on Royal Street. Djokic, the old man, had told him to wait outside a doorway. Niggers couldn’t shop in the French Quarter. But a boy could wait near the window, if he was on an errand with a white man. The sun shone on the glittering stones inside. One made into a dragonfly. Emerald wings, ruby eyes, gold thorax. And a dragonfly lighted on the wooden ledge of the window, facing its twin. Dragonflies were everywhere that spring, hovering while his aunt washed clothes in her yard. But this one didn’t move for a long time, waiting for the other, until Djokic came out slamming the door.
Glorette’s forehead was darker gold now. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. She had dust on her elbows.
He felt the hotness and blood moving velvet soft because his brain was already considering the pieces. Place to place like roof corner to low tree branch—the first strand of a spiderweb—random threads at first. The complicated puzzle and planning. The smell was already deepening in the heat.
He lifted up her hand—thin and small as a child, but with long fingers held curved and graceful even in death. Fantine had always been jealous of Glorette’s effortless beauty, the way she moved. No blood under her arm, near her ribs. She wore a black bra like runners on TV, and tight pants, and her stomach was unmarked. Her feet dirty. Her high heels worn down—miles of walking—and brown with dust. A pink scar—perfect circle—that must have been a cigarette burn on one ankle. He moved her head just for a moment, to see her neck, but he didn’t want to touch her hair. No blood. She hadn’t been shot. Not even with a small-caliber bullet. She hadn’t been cut.
He looked outside. Gustave’s house was just down the gravel road. Gustave was walking slowly up the lawn with Lafayette and Reynaldo. And now he saw a man sitting in the truckbed, head in his hands. Shirtless, dark-skinned, looking away from the house.
If he was the one, he wouldn’t be sitting in the truck. Because even though no one knew how many men Enrique had killed, everyone knew about Mr. McQuine.
Glorette worked the alleys. She was probably found there or in some dirty apartment. And now it was the terrible exhilaration of the puzzle that made him wide awake, already seeing the apartment stairs and wrought-iron railings, the place where he would watch. He felt as if he were thirty again. The complicated pieces of tracking, and how he’d find the man, or figure out if it was the young man in the truck.
He turned to see his wife in the doorway. He was ashamed of the quickening inside his chest and throat and behind his eyes. He hadn’t even thought of her. Just of Gustave and how his face would look coming into the room, seeing his only child. And he’d forgotten the grandson.
“YOU BRING ME a body? Like we in Louisiana?” she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself like she was cold, even though the heat hadn’t broken yet for the night. “That Glorette?”
She moved toward the couch and touched the loose hair on the forehead. “You bring her here?”
Enrique said, “Them two.” What he always called his sons. The shorthand of being married.
She bent over the couch, her spine like a rope of tiny boudin sausage showing through the nightdress. She was shaking.
But when Gustave came inside, Enrique couldn’t look at his face. The face he had seen more than any other his whole life. Not mother. Not wife. Not children. Only Gustave, since he was four and Gustave seven. Every single day except when Enrique was in Germany, and when he’d first come here to California after the war, alone.
Gustave touched her shoulder, and her forehead. Like he and Marie-Claire were baptizing her. The sweat under his white t-shirt made darker maps at his back. When he raised up, his face was like a mask. Enrique was relieved. They had both learned how to keep their faces that way since they were small, since they were orphelin on the riverbank and they knew the rest of their lives, people would use crying—even the stretched-out mouth of wanting to cry, of considering tears—as weakness. Reason to beat them with a stick.
’Tite mulee, Gustave used to whisper to him, in whatever shack or camp they lay, shivering in their clothes. We just baby mule. Mule don’t cry. Mule kick. Or bite.
HE WENT TO the kitchen to wash his hands.
Two new boxes of cereal on the counter. That meant his grandsons were asleep in the back bedroom. Lafayette’s wife always brought two boxes because it was expensive and the boys ate it dry out of bowls, like little dogs. An old man pirate cartoon. Cap’n Crunch.
That damn cartoon his grandson had drawn. The box with the knife and dripping blood.
His granddaughter staring at the man on the TV, saying, “Serial means a row?”
Enrique didn’t see the face of the German he’d killed until he turned him over. The helmet covered the face—ice crystals on the eyebrows. But he smelled it, sometimes, the smell of sweat that froze and then melted and froze again. The smell of shit from the woods, and cheese. The German had cheese in his pocket, probably stolen from a farmhouse nearby.
It was the forest outside a village in France. Why couldn’t he remember the name? The Germans were as scattered as the Americans after the firefight. For each farmhouse, Enrique didn’t know who was watching—for a lone man moving through the trees. So he’d taken days to circle back. The snow piled like soapsuds on the pine branches. Sodden gray under his boots.
Even though Enrique hadn’t eaten in almost two days, he didn’t touch the cheese. Milky and ripe from the pocket, from the body. White. White. The snow and the cheese and the eyebrows and the teeth, when the lips curled back after the body lay in the snow and he turned it over. The blood on his knife already freezing.
Would killed me, him. Called me nigger first. That’s what he told Gustave, when he got back. Gustave nodded.
But he knew that wasn’t true. Maybe the German would have pretended not to see him. Let him walk past, in the forest, to keep trying to find his company. Maybe the German would never call someone nigger. Maybe he would have thought Enrique was Mexican, like some of the other soldiers thought.
He was the only man Enrique regretted killing, sixty years later.
He heard his wife walk down the hallway. Was she looking for a winding sheet? This was 2000. No one used a winding sheet. You took a body to the mortuary. But he and Gustave would bury Glorette here, on his land. The orange groves, the small chapel, the cemetery between his land and Ramon Archuleta’s grove.
His land because he’d killed Atwater. Who said he’d never sell to a nigger.
He had shot at countless others in France, but their bodies lay tangled in the distance, and no one knew whose bullets had killed them, or whose grenades. But four men he had killed with his hands. The only one that sent a wash of guilt along his back—like a hand passed along his shoulderblades—was the German. Because his teeth were so small, his gums so pink and new, and his throat unshaven—Enrique knew he was a boy. He might have scared the boy off, and gone past him.
The other three men had to die. The boy from New Orleans would have shot him. Enrique knew he had a gun inside the shirt. Mr. McQuine would have murdered Marie-Claire or another girl.
Atwater never threatened him. Not his body.
Every time he saw the nights he’d killed them—dark blue of past midnight, and trees black each time—he remembered that there was no other way. Different birds but night sounds.
Now he was seventy-six years old, and he would have to take care of whoever had killed Glorette.
A row. No other way to put it, because he was planning every detail.
“WHAT THE HELL are you drawing?” his daughter-in-law Clarette said to Reynaldo Jr. last week. Enrique was watching TV with his grandsons. He liked to see the backs of the boys’ heads, the small skulls through hair. He tried to imagine which one might work the groves.
Reynaldo Jr. said, “This band Green Jelly—they got a song called ‘Cereal Killer.’ Everybody’s drawing what they think it looks like.” He’d sketched a long knife through the blue coat of the old man pirate, and red blood dripping from the cereal box.
Danae said, “Like that man—he picked up boys and killed them and threw them on the freeway.” On the television was a white man with glasses and fat cheeks like uncooked biscuit.
His daughter-in-law said, “I told you not to listen to that. Serial means in a row. Like a series,” she said. “A guy who kills several people in the same way. Nobody evil like that coming all the way out here. Now stop being in grown folks’ business.”
“But Cap’n Crunch could be a good cereal killer name,” the boy said softly. “Like, a dude that crunches the bones after they’re dead. That would be funny.”
“Don’t joke about that,” she said. She was in her uniform. She was a guard at the youth prison in Chino. “Not funny.” She put a bag with other clothes on the table. She had to work Saturdays, and the kids stayed with Marie-Claire. He always got dirty in the groves, and Marie-Claire made him change.
“Alfonso said when he was in Chino he knew a serial killer.”
“He met a lot of people he didn’t like.”
“Alfonso didn’t say he didn’t like him. He just said he was a serial killer. He calls Chino, like, the Club. He always says, When I was in the Club…”
“Alfonso’s an idiot,” Clarette said.
Rey Jr. said, “There’s a boy from Ireland in my class. He says eejit instead of idiot.”
“You need to close that mouth before you get in trouble.”
“I can’t chew with my mouth closed.”
“You better try.”
HE HAD KILLED the first two quickly, without thought. Water and knife. He had planned the other two. Fire and poison.
That was not a row.
Gustave came into the kitchen and said, “She ain’t had none to steal. Why they kill her?” He washed his face at the sink and then said, “They taken Chabert son to the barn.”
They drove down the dirt road. At the wooden tables near the open barn door, his sons waited. The shirtless man was Sidney Chabert. Same age as Lafayette. His arms gone soft, his navel a deep darker hole in his belly when he squatted in front of Gustave to apologize, to say he hadn’t done it. Then he walked away.
Maybe he had. He had the look of love, and years of sadness around his eyebrows. One of those downturn-mouth, down-slant-eyes young men.
Could be him. He’d never had her.
You act like God before, his wife had said. Maybe Chabert’s son had acted like God.
Enrique had the .45 in the dash drawer. He had the rifle in the truckbed, in the toolbox.
But they picked Chabert up on the road outside the gate, because Gustave needed him to point out the apartment. He wanted his grandson.
THE ALLEY WAS a narrow dusty lane, almost like a tunnel in places from the pepper trees and bushes. Enrique drove past slowly. This wasn’t like hunting McQuine, where he’d known every place the man drank. It wasn’t like Atwater, where he had months to think while Atwater taunted him.
No shopping cart. No one walking. Glorette’s tall friend—with the ruined face—was nowhere. He’d have to find her, too. Unless whoever had killed Glorette had come back for her.
The apartment was Jacaranda Gardens, but only three palm trees stood dusty in the courtyard. No garden. Gustave brought her son down the apartment stairs. The boy with hair in those little twists. Sticking up from his head like when Lafayette’s boy drew pictures of the sun with rays coming out.
Victor. He climbed into the truckbed and sat with his back against the cab. A bag at his feet. Gustave had told him nothing yet. Enrique could tell. Enrique said to him, “You know Sidney?”
“Some dude work at the video store?”
“He ever with your maman?”
Victor frowned. “No. Why? She at the hospital again?”
Gustave said, “She get sick, and he call us. We take her home.”
Victor said, “How sick?”
“She bad off. She okay when she leave you tonight?”
“I wasn’t home. I was checking out registration for city college.”
Enrique said, “Where Alfonso?”
Victor squinted up at him and said, “How would I know?”
Enrique knew he couldn’t press the boy, that they needed to get back to Sarrat, but the alley was only two blocks away, and men still walking, and Alfonso had to have seen something. He rode with the boy who sold drugs at the Launderland on the corner.
“He your cousin,” Enrique said.
Victor leaned his head back against the cab’s window and looked up at the sky. “Sorry, Uncle Enrique. Even in the complicated arcane way we identify family, he’s not really my cousin. Alfonso’s pops and Clarette are brother and sister, so that makes them related to Lafayette and Reynaldo. But my moms? Nope. And whoever the motherfucker was responsible for my genetics—he definitely isn’t hanging around here for Alfonso to identify as someone who might want to buy rock. So let’s just go.”
He spoke like a professor, someone just visiting with them. Getting a ride to a dinner.
“I’ma find that knucklehead,” Reynaldo said, getting in the truckbed.
Victor shrugged and closed his eyes against the streetlight above him.
VICTOR DIDN’T CRY. He didn’t kneel down and hug his mother, or touch her. He slid down onto the floor and sat with his back to the couch, her ribs just behind his head, and with his forearms on his knees, rested there with his eyes closed.
Marie-Claire must have washed the smell from Glorette. Somehow Glorette smelled like his wife. She was lying stiff, half on her side, her legs covered with a blanket.
“You hungry?” Marie-Claire said to Victor. He didn’t open his eyes or his mouth.
Enrique looked at Victor’s shoes, the fat white ladder of the laces. It was as if the boy had sat there a hundred times, while his mother slept oblivious on a couch just behind him, maybe in the morning before school, just after he’d tied his shoes.
He was orphelin now. No mother, never a father. Mo tou soule, Enrique wanted to say to him. You seventeen. I was orphelin when I turn four, me. Gustave seven. We tou soule. No one. Seventeen—that year I kill the first one.
Victor’s hands and arms were unmarked. No cane scars. No fingers missing. But when he turned his wrist, Enrique saw words written in ink all over his palm.
Gustave whispered to Victor, “She okay when we go. She must just get tire. Her heart.”
Enrique stood up, and Gustave moved, too. But Victor said without opening his eyes, “Can you just chill for a minute, Grandpère?”
Gustave sat in the wing chair facing the couch. Marie-Claire met Enrique’s eyes. The kitchen.
When he stood at the sink to pour one more cup of coffee, she put her hand on his and pushed it to the old white-enameled drainboard. She kept her voice down. “You can’t leave her here.”
“Can’t take her nowhere else. They find her in a basket.”
She looked at his face. He glanced out the window at the eight small grove houses he’d cleaned and painted all those years ago, before he went to get her and the other girls. “You think we gon bury her here? Up there by her maman? We can’t just bury her. We all get arrested. Probably ten law we break. Move a body, don’t call police. You move a car after you hit somebody, they take you in.”
He said, “All that done now. The first one move the body, him, and they bring her here. Can’t put her back, no.” He looked at his wife’s bare heels, the edge of dry skin, in her slippers.
He said, “You call police, they find something in the barn. They find Bettina house full of dirt, take her boys away. They find Alfonso, he have a gun, sure.”
Marie-Claire washed her hands at the sink and put water on her neck and her shoulders, wetting the edge of her nightdress. Then she said, “You ain’t God.”
“Non. C’est vrai I ain’t God.” And I ain’t the other, he thought. Mo tou soule. What he’d chanted to himself when he walked miles through the snow and trees in France. When he walked miles along the Mississippi after he’d pushed the New Orleans man into the river. Mo tou soule. Me, I’m all alone.
Except when he was with Gustave. Gustave didn’t go to war; Gustave worked the sugarcane and orange groves back in Louisiana. Something with his heart. Something they heard.
“You act like God before,” she said. Her nostrils widened, the only sign she was angry. Her lips always curved the same—she didn’t even know how much breath she needed when she wanted to fight, but it had always been easy for him to see. “Back then.”
She meant back when he killed McQuine. She didn’t know about the others.
McQuine had raped three girls. He said Marie-Claire was next—told Enrique that, smiling, his fat straining at the white shirt under his tie, scalp pink where his hair was combed back in furrows.
“God say eye for eye. He don’t do that, but they say he say it. I ain’t God. I do what Gustave want.”
She looked down the hallway, and then Gustave came to the kitchen. Marie-Claire poured him a small white cup of coffee. He held it for a moment and then said in French, “All they do, cut her up. He ain’t need to see that. His maman cut up.”
Enrique waited. He felt in his pocket for the pack of Swisher Sweets, but it was empty.
Gustave drank the rest of the coffee. He said, “I take the boy home.”
Back in the front room, Victor’s head had sunk onto his knees, and his arms covered the back of his neck. Gustave whispered to him, lifted him up by the elbow, and took him across the street. He would sleep in the bed that used to be his mother’s.
Then Marie-Claire knelt beside the couch and said, “You go get Archuleta.”
“Ramon?”
She shook her head. “The other one.”
“You think Archuleta do this?” Enrique looked at the two tiny half-moon cuts on Glorette’s collarbone.
She twisted her neck and frowned up at him, her face lifted like a sunflower planted in the wrong place. “The uncle. The priest.”
He nodded. “I get him in the morning.”
“You find him now,” she said, voice low and vicious. “She die without a blessing. In this heat—we have to make the vigil tomorrow, and bury after that.” She faced him, her arms folded in that shelf below her breasts. “You ain’t God. Just sometime you think so.”
“The priest retire now.” Then he said, “Mais oui, you right. I get him.”
HIS SONS HAD gone down to the barn to drink beer and wait. He didn’t want them to ride back to Palm Avenue. If they found out one of the men in the alley had killed her, Reynaldo would try and beat him to death right there. If it was over drugs, if one of the Navigator boys was angry with Glorette, Alfonso was the one with the gun. He had to know who’d done it.
They’d turned on the floodlights that hung from the ramada. Beto had helped him build the ramada—wooden structure like a scaffold, and every year a new palm-frond roof. He’d been born up the river, in the Cahuilla village along the bluffs of the river north of here. His father and uncles had dug most of the canals that brought the water to the groves. After they died or were chased off the land and ended up back in the desert, Beto worked day labor in the groves or trimmed trees in the winter. He slept in camps he made along the river, in places he’d known since he was a child.
Under the ramada, they worked on the trucks and tractors in the summer, cleaned guns and sharpened tools on the wooden tables.
The fringes of palm fronds glowed silver. “We need the coffin,” Enrique told Lafayette. “Bury tomorrow night.”
“What? You crazy?” Reynaldo said. “You can’t be buryin people without—”
Lafayette interrupted him. “Without what? Sidney’s right, man. You gon call Law & Order Rio Seco? Find out how many fools done been with her tonight?”
But Reynaldo didn’t back down. He paced in the dirt, his boots lifting dust that hung in the light. “Cause if they find out she died from smokin some bad rock, ain’t nobody killed her. Then ain’t no need for us to hunt no hardhead.”
Enrique said, “She don’t put herself in a basket, no.”
“Why not?” Reynaldo said. “How you know she ain’t tired and climbed in there to take a nap?”
Lafayette shook his head. “In them heels? You can’t get in no basket. Sidney said look like somebody put her in there.”
“Sidney might be the fool need to get got himself.” Reynaldo still pacing.
Enrique reached into his shirt pocket for Swisher Sweets. But he’d smoked the last cigarillo while walking the irrigation. He said, “You measure the wood, and I go get the priest.”
“Oh, cause you want to do it yourself, right?” Lafayette fixed him with a stare like his mother’s.
“Your maman tell me get the priest.”
“That’s all—just bury her, and it’s all cool. Nothin else.”
“Can’t bury with no coffin. You and Reynaldo know how to cut the wood, make it nice. You work on all them house.”
“Build a damn coffin in the barn,” Reynaldo grumbled. “Like Twilight Zone”
But then Lafayette said, “You remember we watched that thing on TV where they were up in the mountains, and they just put the body up on a shelf? Vultures and shit, man. And the Indians used to leave bodies up in trees, cause the ground was frozen. They couldn’t bury nobody til it thawed.”
Reynaldo said, “Ain’t frozen here. So damn hot and dry the ground like a brick. You can’t dig no hole tomorrow.”
Enrique said without thinking, “I done it before.”
Reynaldo cocked his head.
Enrique threw the empty cigar packet into the barrel by the door. “Bury a dog, me, before you was born. Up on that hill. In August.”
“A dog.”
“Oui. A dog.”
He’d buried Atwater in August. Near the stone houses.
Lafayette looked at his father. “You ain’t never let us have a dog. Cause of coyotes.” He ran his tongue over his teeth and sat at the wooden table. “You tryin to find out who did it. And we up here with the body.”
“You bring her here,” Enrique said to his son.
Lafayette shook his head. “Bettina was right. You act like this a kingdom.”
Act like he a king and this his damn kingdom, she shouted when Enrique told her she had to move out of her grove house. Ain’t no fuckin king.
Lafayette stared right into Enrique’s eyes. Near forty. His cheeks heavier than Enrique’s would ever be, because he ate meat all the time. Chicken and pig. Hamburgers after his football games, when he was young. Meat and football and beer. His arms still muscled, twice the size of his father’s. “What if the cops show up out here?”
Enrique kept his voice the same as always. He felt like he was talking to Beto, all those years ago. A body. “Who tell where we put her? She need to be bury up there by her maman. Police don’t care. They call her—”
She was a whore. They would say a different word. They wouldn’t know Fantine had confessed to Marie-Claire one night that Glorette had fallen in love, and the love was like pure rum lit up—purple flames when you threw it into a campfire down by the river. Marie-Claire had told him in the dark of their bedroom, “Fantine say she never feel like that. She cry and cry, they been drinkin down there with them boy, and no one ever love her like that. Cause Glorette look like she do. And this musician—play the flute and the drum—he a grown man. Twenty-two. He done left her behind. And Glorette havin a baby.”
“I guess you right,” Reynaldo said, finally. He walked over to the far end of the barn, past the old harrows and a few smudge pots. Wood was stacked on shelves against the wall. Douglas fir and pine, from when they’d had to saw boards to replace the wood floors in two of the grove houses and lay a new floor for Marie-Claire’s kitchen ten years ago.
Reynaldo turned and said, “No human involved. I heard some cops say it. We were at Sundown and they talked about some Mexican guy got run over. No papers. They called it NHI. No big deal.”
LA REINA AVENUE ran along Archuleta’s grove, then his, and then crossed the arroyo and headed into the city. The only way to get out to his place. A thousand times he’d driven this road.
He turned onto Palm Avenue, the four-lane that cut through Rio Seco, and worked his way back toward the alley. Two Mexican women sat hunched at a bus stop and stood when they saw the truck. Their hair was dyed the dark red of pomegranate husk, and one was missing teeth on the left side. They wore sports bras, like Glorette, and tiny skirts.
He drove very slowly past the Launderland. The blue Navigator was parked in one of the five spaces before the front door. A Mexican woman carried out two baskets of laundry—clean and folded, one piled atop the other like a tower that reached above her face. She put them in the back seat of a little Corolla and drove away.
When he circled around again, Jazen was standing, arms folded, leaning agains the door, staring at Enrique stone-faced. He was going to fat, his huge white t-shirt with a dark shadow at the waist where his belly touched the cloth; he had always been loud, bully voice constant when Enrique saw him with Alfonso at the liquor store or anywhere else, the kind of boy who never worried his loudness would scare away his food or bring someone to where he hid. Because he always had Alfonso to watch, from the passenger seat.
But not now. Jazen was alone. He kept his eyes cool, chin high, and Enrique knew he must have called for a replacement. Alfonso was hiding somewhere. After a few more minutes, a slight dark boy, maybe sixteen, slid out from the other side of the parking lot and got into the Navigator. Jazen tilted his head at Enrique, and they drove away.
He didn’t follow them. Jazen wouldn’t have killed Glorette—she bought drugs from him. Alfonso wouldn’t have shot his cousin. But he must be hiding because he knew who’d touched her.
The women probably walked the same route every night, but who knew where the men took them if they got into a car. He could have killed her in a car and then put her in the shopping cart. The alley was still empty. The man could be cruising around, still looking for another one, or wondering where the body went.
His watch said 1:16. Archuleta.
There were three cars in the parking lot at Sundown Liquor. Two old Japanese cars—Corolla and a Honda—with rough-looking men in their fifties drinking paper-bag beer. They were talking to each other out the open windows. They both glanced up at him and then went back to saying something about the Raiders. The other vehicle was a brown van parked in the far corner, with a woman sitting in the passenger seat, looking out the window so he could see only the back of her head. She wore a red scarf with tails hanging soft on her wide square neck.
Archuleta sat in his special chair at the counter. He’d bought Sundown Liquor twenty years ago; he lost his left leg to diabetes about ten years ago, and the stump ended halfway up a thigh massive as sewer pipe. He was about fifty now, with his belly and chest huge behind the Cuban-style white shirt, his beard going gray. Enrique knew he had a shotgun under the counter.
“You out late,” he said to Enrique. But his eyes were on the man over at the cold cases.
“Water all them tree,” Enrique said, knowing Archuleta knew he was lying. “See I’m out them cigar.”
Archuleta reached into the case before him and got out a pack of Swisher Sweets. He glanced at the other man again, and Enrique moved his own eyes. Dark skin, square black goatee like a new paintbrush on his chin, and slanted eyes. He brought two cold bottles of malt liquor to the counter and lifted his chin at Enrique. “You done, Pops?”
Archuleta swept the cigars to the side and rang up the bottles. He didn’t speak. The man gave him a twenty, and Archuleta put the change on the scarred black Formica counter. “Hot like fuckin Vegas out here,” the man said, holding a bottle in each hand like bowling pins. “But no lights and no goddamn money.”
Archuleta said, “Three hour drive get you back to Vegas.”
The man said, “What, you don’t want my money? Come on, now. This New York money.”
“California sweat on it now,” Archuleta said, and rang up the cigars for Enrique.
The woman appeared just outside the glass door. The headscarf, her arms folded. The man held both bottles up and she snatched the door open. “We goin back to Vegas tonight or next year? Tired a this country-ass place. Country-ass bitches. I rather head back to New York.”
The man said, “You don’t pick the place.” He went sideways out the door and it closed. Her mouth moved with no sound and he prodded her in the back with the butt of one bottle, toward the van.
Archuleta said, “You’re never here this late.”
Lafayette and Reynaldo usually got him the cigars before they came home. He looked out into the parking lot, where the van was pulling out fast, tires slipping for a second on the sand tracked in from the alley. His sons usually sat under the pepper tree at the side of the lot, toward the back. The battered folding chairs were empty.
“Sidney Chabert come in here tonight?” Enrique took the penny nail from his pocket and slit the plastic on the Swisher Sweets.
Archuleta frowned and said, “You makin a joke?”
“Why?”
“He don’t like to come in if I’m workin. Cause of the leg.”
“What?” Enrique put the cigarillo in his mouth, tasted the paper.
“He burnt up my leg. Workin at the hospital. They all give him a hard time about it. But he came in here about half an hour ago and bought a Corona. Looked me in the eye and told me get him a lime out the case.”
So Chabert was feeling good. Enrique nodded. “Your uncle retire now. The priest.”
Archuleta nodded. “Him and my dad go fishing down at Ensenada once a month.”
“Where he live?”
Archuleta raised his brows. “My uncle? In one of those senior apartments where they clean and cook. But he always wants my mom to bring him enchiladas and shrimp. He’s eighty-four.”
Enrique looked out the window again, at the entrance to the alley. “You got his address?”
“What the hell, Mr. Antoine? He’s asleep. Late to be knockin on an old man’s door.”
“You call him in the morning? Tell him come to Sarrat soon as he can.”
“Everyone okay?”
“My wife. She need to see him. She got some with her heart.”
Archuleta wrote something on a piece of paper. Blue letters. He handed it to Enrique.
Archuleta shrugged and said, “I’ll call him in the morning.”
Enrique said, “You see Alfonso?”
Archuleta shook his head. “Happy not to see those little fools,” he said. Suddenly Enrique remembered his grandson saying eejit. The way the Irish boy said idiot. “Happy when they don’t play that music in the parking lot for an hour.” He bit his big pink lips and said, “You know what? The drums hurt my leg. So damn loud it bumps up against my bone and hurts.” He patted his thigh.
THE NARROW STREETS were crowded with apartment buildings where she’d lived, each one set longways like boxcars with black railings along the sides. He parked across the street from this last one and smoked one cigarillo. No one came in or out of the cement courtyard—the windows were all closed tight and the swamp coolers humming hard. But someone lit a cigarette, and then another. Two embers like animal eyes. Spaced on the balcony.
It was nearly 2 am. He couldn’t knock on the door of a senior retirement complex now. Marie-Claire knew that.
What did she want?
He moved the truck to the space under a pepper tree near the mouth of the alley. The brown van drove slowly down the dirt path, the top nearly scraping the low-hanging branches of the wild tobacco tree that arched over the fence. The woman’s arm hung out the window. But she was arguing with the driver—her face turned away.
The dust twisted and settled, and he lit one more cigarillo. Then Enrique heard the rattle of a shopping cart. Two blocks away? The wheels grated across asphalt, and then the rattle changed in the dirt of the alley.
Sidney. He pushed the cart toward the wild tobacco tree and stood there. Shoulders shaking. Crying. Then he scraped leaves and dirt into a pile near the fence. Trying to cover something near the wild tobacco tree.
Beto had told him the first night, “We can smoke this.” The leaves bitter and harsh.
Enrique pulled the .45 from the dash drawer. He aimed it out the open window.
Drive-by. That’s what Lafayette called it. Alfonso and Jazen riding past shooting at people they didn’t even have to look in the eye.
He got out and put the .45 in the waistband of his workpants. He crossed the street. Sidney had one hand on the cart handle and one holding the balled-up shirt like a blue cabbage.
“That the cart?”
Sidney’s face was smeared with wet. One drop on his bare chest. “Yeah. I left it behind the Sundown dumpster but that seemed wrong. Nowhere to put it. I can’t leave it here because it probably has my DNA or something.” He held up the shirt. “And this, too. I put it on a dead person.” He looked up at the sky like he was trying to hold in the water from his eyes.
“What you bury?”
“Vomit.”
Enrique looked at the pile of dirt. “Why you sick?”
“Cause she was dead!”
“You sick cause you kill her.” Enrique saw a glitter on the last knuckle of the smallest finger of Sidney’s left hand. A tiny flower ring. Glorette’s. “You the one.”
Sidney threw the shirt in the cart. “You know what? Just fuckin pop me! Yeah. Go head. My life ain’t worth shit right now anyway. Insurance for my kid if you pop me.”
“How you know I got a gun?”
“What—you gonna strangle me? Shit.” He threw out his arms so his chest gleamed. “Go head. Cap me. Pop me. Whatever.”
Enrique felt the 45 handle hard against his skin. He couldn’t have her so he killed her. Crying. The one burnt them bodies in the hospital.
Sidney walked toward him. “Do it.”
Enrique turned away from the eyes blurred and huge with tears. The name in green letters on his chest. A daughter. Sidney wasn’t going anywhere. He must not have a car. The shopping cart glinted in the streetlight. He had to live close by.
Maybe he’d feel so guilty he’d go home and kill himself. Then Enrique wouldn’t have to do it.
When he turned, a pepper branch stroked his face like hair and he flung it out of the way. He got back into the cab without looking to see where Sidney went, or whether he stayed there by the cart.
EVERY TIME HE left the Westside, and the city behind, the freeway underpasses and exhaust and trash in the vacant lots, every time he steered the truck onto La Reina Road, he paused to smell the water.
The scent of warm silver running down the canal. His water and Archuleta’s.
He drove slowly through the Washington navels through his gate. His daughter-in-law’s car parked in the yard now. He unscrewed the hose and lay it silently in the truckbed. He didn’t want to see his wife, or Glorette, or anyone else.
He needed to look for Alfonso at the box houses. And there would be an extra hose at the shed. Enrique had to soak the ground at the cemetery. It had been over a hundred for ten days. It would be 112 tomorrow.
The brilliant white sheets wrapped around her body. The two dirty flowered sheets he and Beto had wound around Atwater, once he was dead. Before they buried him and built the rock-walled shed in a square above his body and then poured a cement floor.
Enrique had kept tools and spare engine parts and orange crates there for years, just beside the stone houses where the Italians used to make boxes with the labels of La Reina, a beautiful olive-skinned woman with a crown of black braids, holding an orange in her hand as if it were that round thing a queen held when she sat on her throne.
It was where Bettina had been living for the past six months, ever since Enrique told her she had to move from the house next door to Gustave. She kept trash in the yard, and Enrique had seen raccoons, ants, and two coyotes in her yard. Her house was filthy, her boys sleeping all day and not going to school, and truant officers or social workers would come onto his place. Just like they had in the seventies when her mother Claudine started drinking. He couldn’t have police come down that gravel road again. Never.
Bettina had shouted, “Like this a fuckin kingdom and you the king.”
The three boxmakers’ houses had been built back in 1900, at the eastern edge of the navel acreage. He parked in the clearing. On the cement slab of the open shed, someone had parked a white golf cart with the name Webster painted on the side.
It was 3 am now, and the blue-green light of the TV filled the small window like swaying ocean water. One trashcan by the front door had a white plastic bag spilling out chicken bones scattered by animals, and the other was full of crushed beer cans. Her two young boys recycled—they brought him the cans, and he gave them ten or fifteen dollars, because she never bought them shoes.
He banged on the door. He could see her sleeping on the couch. She rose slowly, her shoulders huge and pink as hams in the black tank top. “What?” she said, her voice thick.
“Alfonso here?” he said.
“No. I ain’t seen him for two, three days. What he do?”
“That for you to know,” Enrique said, peering past her. No man on the couch with her. Only one other room in the house, where the boys slept. “You the maman.”
“He grown,” she said, half-closing the door.
He put his hand against it and pushed. “You golf now?”
She peered out at the golf cart on the cement slab. “I ain’t seen that, neither.” She shrugged. “Maybe Alfonso hang out with Tiger Woods.”
He let her close the door. He walked over to the shed. The faucet dry.
The four walls built from hundreds of stones Enrique and Beto had pulled from alongside the Santa Ana River for nearly a year. They had piled up the stones in the eucalyptus windbreak while they decided how to kill Atwater.
He uncoiled the dusty black hose. Bettina never watered anything. He and Beto had walked back and forth from the river to the trees, and then, when the body was wrapped in two sheets—that’s all Atwater deserved, two old sheets with faded flowers—they had to soak the ground. It was August back then, too. August 8, 1959. No hose. Just them filling buckets of water from the irrigation pumps and walking back and forth to pour it slowly into the shallow hole they’d scratched. Wet the soil and dig some more, all night.
Beto was Indian. He’d been born up the river, in the Cahuilla village along the bluffs of the river north of here. His father and uncles had dug most of the canals that brought the water to the groves. After they died or were chased off the land and ended up back in the desert, Beto worked day labor in the groves or sharpened tools in the late summer. He slept in camps he made along the river, in places he’d known since he was a child.
After they poured this cement slab, Beto left for a year. When he came back, it was different. He said, “You know he was wrong, but you’re wrong, too.”
Enrique bent to look inside the golf cart. It was parked over Atwater’s body, which would be bones now, five feet down. In the ignition was a tiny key.
THE CEMETERY AND old adobe chapel were up on the rise between his grove and Archuleta’s. Enrique took the coiled hoses from the truckbed and attached them to the one at the faucet near the chapel. Back when the land was divided and the trees planted, the chapel was built and blessed by Archuletas, the only ones who lived along the river until Northcutt.
But no one had come for a Mass here since Anjolie died five years ago. Then the last priest retired, and Archuleta’s uncle had been sent to tell them he could visit the chapel and cemetery only if they requested at the diocese, because there weren’t enough priests to go around.
“No young men want to give up everything,” Father Archuleta said, cheerfully, his round brown face smooth as a loquat seed, his soft hands like grubs when he took Enrique’s fingers in his. “Not anymore.”
When the four hoses were attached, he chose the rectangle of earth five feet from Anjolie’s grave. The headstone read Anjolie Marie Picard. Beloved Wife & Mother.
Enrique remembered her hiding in the wooden armoire from Mr. McQuine.
He laid the trickle of water in the center of where they would bury Glorette. The drops slid out and remained whole on the hard ground for long moments. Like mercury. Then they disappeared. The drip had to be perfect or the water would run away.
All those years in Louisiana, on the oyster boats, hauling in the load scraped up from the bottom with the tongs, sorting through with the cudgel and cracking the oysters apart, he had to keep throwing water from the deck.
When he worked the canefields for Mr. McQuine, storms filled every ditch. He and Gustave had to open gates to Bayou Sarrat to keep the young cane from drowning.
But here—he paid for the water, moved it around carefully like molten money, and even in winter, the rain was hardly ever enough.
He needed picks and shovels.
THE TOOLSHED WAS in the eucalyptus windbreak near the river. A narrow dirt road ran from the chapel to the acreage along the Santa Ana River. A mockingbird called from the trees, just like years ago. There was always one male here, and one in the pecan trees behind Gustave’s house. They always started after midnight.
Back when he and Beto were digging, two mockingbirds fought over their territory by singing, each song more elaborate and frenzied than the next. When he stopped to rest, his hands bloody from carrying the rocks, Enrique could hear the patterns in the songs. The same sounds over and over.
AFTER THEY LET him out, when the war was over, he’d walked from Camp Anza to the river, and then spent his two leave days studying the orange groves that grew on the east side. The other soldiers had gone to Los Angeles. He’d told them to drop him off at the edge of Rio Seco.
The Santa Ana was so shallow and clear that he waded across it, kept on through the sandy earth past the river, the willows that smelled medicinal, and came to the eucalyptus windbreak all along the citrus. The oranges were bigger than the satsumas he’d worked in Louisiana. There was no fence. He wandered, then slept in a camp by a hollow downed cottonwood.
Beto came in the morning, holding a knife by his leg. Enrique put up his hands.
They talked all day, in the heat. Beto worked during harvest in Northcutt’s groves. When Northcutt hired Enrique, he commented on his name, asked if he was born in Mexico, and Enrique shook his head. “America,” he said.
He learned to eat burritos for breakfast with the other grove workers in the small shotgun houses. After five years, Northcutt decided to retire back in Massachusetts, and he hired Atwater, who’d come to him for a job after they fought together in Italy. Atwater would manage the place until he could sell it.
Atwater emptied the grove houses and said he had to clean out the Mexican dirt.
“The barn. You boys can sleep there til I decide what to do with this place. I might paint them grove houses and call some people I know in El Dorado. Arkansas got good workers. Not like Mexicans. And niggers—not so many niggers here. That’s why I like it. I think I’m gonna stay here so I ain’t gotta see so many niggers. We got pine lumber in El Dorado. I like these here trees you ain’t gotta fell.”
It was winter. Every night Atwater sat up on the porch of Northcutt’s white house and drank beer. He’d call Beto and Enrique up to work on his truck, and words spooled out of his mouth with steam.
“Yeah, I’d sell to a Mexican before I’d sell to a nigger. Maybe the right Mexican. Cause a Mexican, maybe he used to live here before all them wars. Least he got some kinda claim on the place even if he’s so lazy he’d barely grow enough oranges to feed all his relatives. But that’s better than a nigger. A nigger got no claim at all. Shoulda sent ever last one of them back to Africa soon’s it was done. They got no claim here. Rather run a place into the ground than work it. Seen it happen over and over in Arkansas—let a nigger work a place and they run it down so nobody ever want to live there again. Wouldn’t be enough to clean it. Have to burn the damn house down.”
He threw another beer can into the barrel he kept off the porch.
“Beto, you claim you’re a Indian. Then you wouldn’t want no place like this, right? Cause a Indian like to move around. Go from pow-wow to pow-wow.”
In the riverbed, Beto had shown Enrique the straight stems of arrow-root where his father had taught him to make arrow shafts. Wild tobacco. Gourd for making soap. Jimsonweed—that made men crazy.
“We could get him to drink it—make him see visions and maybe knock him out, but he might shoot us. He got that 45. He might think we’re ghosts.”
IT WAS 4 am. For the first time in seventy-two years—since the moments after the soldiers shot his mother and Gustave caught him by the face, fingers hooked behind Enrique’s ears, and pulled him down to hide—he didn’t want to sit with Gustave.
His mother’s body floating down the swollen Mississippi River, her back to the sky, her blouse rising with air inside like a blister. The baby tucked inside her front, drowning underneath her.
She was buried nowhere. She could have ended on a snag in the river’s edge, with all the wood and broken houses and other dead animals—horses and cows and pigs. He hadn’t been able to think of that for years. Not until he was in a forest in France, sitting next to the body of the German, which would freeze and then disappear under snow. How quickly would the German rot in spring before someone found him?
Had his mother decomposed with the other animals, until their flesh was soft enough to be eaten by the fish and birds?
Had she and the baby floated down the center of the river for miles, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and sunk to the bottom where pirates and treasure lay? The treasure and bones his aunt told him about, from Lafitte?
The birds were finished. Enrique smelled the damp earth from where he’d irrigated earlier. Not a love song, his own daughter Fantine had told Glorette, when they were small, sitting in this truck cab with him one night when they’d come out to get tools. He’s not telling the other birds he loves them. He’s telling them this is his territory and they better not come in. That’s what my science teacher said. You should have come to class.
I couldn’t, Glorette said softly. I couldn’t go in there. And his daughter cocked her head and frowned at Glorette.
What does that mean? You couldn’t? You couldn’t walk into class and sit next to me like you were supposed to? Because you think you’re too fine?
Glorette got out of the truck then, in the dark, and ran into the trees. He knew immediately that someone was bothering Glorette in the science class.
When Fantine said she was going away to the east for college, and Marie-Claire cried, Fantine said, Resistance is futile, maman. Enrique could barely understand what his own daughter said half the time, but she said that clearly, and explained it, and it was close enough to French that Enrique knew it meant there was no need to fight.
The eucalyptus trunks glowed in the faint moonlight. They shed bark all year, smooth and white. The trees from Australia. Not here. This was his forest now. He came here alone to sleep in the truck, think about the cypress swamp back in Louisiana, the plash of water when animals leapt from the trees into the bayou ahead of his boat.
The frozen forest in France, where he’d walked for five days trying to find his company. Each step on the ice like a gunshot, and he was afraid the German snipers would hear him. Crawling instead so it would be quieter. The branches heavy with snow that muted all sound. The birds gone away after the firefight? Dead from the cold? Flown to Louisiana like all the birds he’d shot in the ricefields and roasted over winter fires with Gustave?
He put his head back on the seat. The air was still warm—maybe 70—and the wind that never stopped here in California moved the leaves like he was underwater.
Animal feet in the dried foxtails. He didn’t want to see his wife’s face. He’d left her a body. He slept sitting up here. Like his mother’s aunt said the slave woman who was his ancestor slept—sitting up in a chair, near the fire, watching to make sure no one stole her daughter in the night.
Glorette was dead. Fantine would be here in the morning.
Fantine had yelled at him once when she was in high school, thought she was the smartest human ever born, and he made her hoe the milkweed from the irrigation furrows to keep them clear. “This is a fiefdom! We’re all peasants and serfs and you’re some lord, right?”
Enrique said, “Me—just a farmer. Don’t nobody fief, oui?”
THE HEAT WOKE him, sun burning the side of his face and the sound of saws snarling from the barn.
But he’d heard the snapping of dry bark—someone was walking in the eucalyptus grove toward the truck. He got out the .45. Never. He’d killed them all by hand. His head was filled with syrupy light and heat. The smell of menthol all around.
Someone coming. The same path Beto had always come, up from the river. Beto walking toward him every day back then, after he’d gone to wash in the river he’d known as a child. Beto telling him they could have just made Atwater sick with the oleander branches, trimmed to skewers threaded through two rabbits. Roasted them in a fire here, brought the meat to Atwater, and he ate it for two days. Jimsonweed boiled into a liquid added to his beer.
Beto wanted him sick. A joke. But Enrique wanted him dead, after he signed over the land.
Two scorpions he’d caught under a rock. Kept in a jelly jar.
They like to get down in the foot of the bed where it’s warm. That’s what you said. We ain’t had no scorpion in Louisiana. Have moccasin snake. But you can see snake come. You can’t see this when you get in the sheets.
The sound approached so slowly. Hesitant. A ghost. A hunter.
The shade was swarming with heat. Near eleven.
How the hell had he slept that long? Marie-Claire must think he’d gone out to find Archuleta and got killed.
He was an old man.
He pointed the gun toward the sound. Wheels snapping the bark.
Alfonso sitting in the golf cart. Grinning young fool. Tattoos on his collarbone and his skull. He’d killed Glorette. He worked for the other boy. His job was to ride. He’d killed Glorette because the fat boy had told him to.
“I ain’t wakin up like that no more, Uncle Enrique. I left my gun in JZ’s ride. I ain’t up for that now. I’m tired. I’m ready to be out. So if you gon get me, go on. Then you have another body. However many you got.”
His grandmother, Claudine—the first one raped by Mr. McQuine. She must have told him what Enrique did.
The boy wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t. His eyes were light green as mulberry leaves. Suddenly the clearing was filled with color. Eucalyptus trunks gleaming fresh new skin, like washed bone. The heat bore down on the leaves, and the reflection of the golf-cart taillights was like cherry Kool-Aid splashed across them. His own daughter said that was Glorette’s favorite—the dark red drink she poured into the old jam jars.
Alfonso kept his hand on the gearshift of the cart. “I went by the barn. Lafayette puttin a cross on the coffin. He nailed decorations on the cross. Like metal flowers. Reynaldo went up there start on the—”
He paused. “Start diggin. So you ain’t gotta do it.”
The sound of the saw—growling through the trees—had stopped. A pickaxe in the barn?
“Gustave waitin for you. He sittin on the porch. He look bad. Axed me did you show up by Glorette’s place last night and get hurt.”
Enrique swallowed the little saliva left in his mouth. His teeth dry and huge behind his lips.
“And that old man up there at the house. The priest.”
“He bless the body?”
“I seen his car parked at your yard. You can’t miss that old Buick Regal. I ain’t went inside. I see Glorette almost every night. I don’t want to see her now. Like that.”
Enrique slid the gun off the windowframe. The dash drawer hung open like a jaw. He put the gun inside. He found the bandanna and wiped his face. “How she get like that?”
Alfonso didn’t answer. Then he said, “You know, I slept out here a couple times. In the trees.”
“You?”
Alfonso nodded. “I seen you come out here sometimes. I used to sit out here at night. When I first got out the club. It was so much damn noise all the time in there. And my moms don’t never shut up. Jazen always got the sounds on in the Navigator. So I came out here just to chill. I had me a Mexican blanket I got at the swap meet. I used to sleep right there.”
“I find that blanket, me. I throw it away.”
“Yeah. You thought some homeless dude broke in, huh? But I was out here about two weeks before you saw it. You used to park right here and chill, too. I heard you snorin.”
There was no need to pretend he’d been watching the fences, like he used to, when homeless men might steal oranges to sell on the street.
“Make you tired, huh?”
“What?”
“They always think you the one.”
“The one.”
“The one gotta take care the problem.”
Enrique looked into the sickle-shaped leaves. “No problem out here.”
“No problem back there neither.”
“What you mean. Back there?”
“In the alley. What happened in the alley. Ain’t no need to take care of it. Problem gone.” Alfonso got out of the cart and picked up a few rocks in the dried wild oats.
When his grandsons sat at the kitchen table doing their math homework they said, “Problem solved!”
“Problem solve?” Enrique said, looking at the boy’s tattooed skull. Green letters.
Alfonso was quiet. “No.” He threw a rock over the fence into the riverbed. He’d been able to throw a football or baseball farther than anyone at the high school. Then he started riding with that boy near the Launderland.
“Problem took off. Ain’t solved for nobody else,” he said. “But I ain’t solved it, if that’s what you mean. I ain’t you.”
What was he supposed to say? Only one and not four? Alfonso had shot someone in the alley, when he got sent to prison. Shot him in the leg.
“I ain’t killed nobody close up and shit,” Alfonso said softly. “I liked to shoot them rats when Lafayette showed me. But I ain’t up for aimin at nobody like I had to. And I ain’t up for touchin nobody neither.”
Claudine must have told Bettina, or Alfonso, that he’d bashed in McQuine’s skull with the piece of wood before he lit the car on fire. That he’d looked into McQuine’s face.
Enrique found the packet of Swisher Sweets on the seat beside him. He waited to hear if there was more. If he knew more.
“What you think you up for?” he said.
Alfonso threw another rock. Then he walked back to the cart and leaned against it. “I just wanted to play football. I just wanted to hit people and have em get up and then I hit em again. All day. I like to hit em in the chest and knock em all the way back. I like to hit em sideways. But I needed that cash. If my moms wasn’t so crazy—”
Enrique got out of the truck, his legs stiff. The eucalyptus seed pods were brown buttons underfoot. He touched the roof of the cart.
“They got ghost, man. The problems. You ain’t gotta do nothin.”
“Ghost.”
“They gone.”
“Mean you make em ghost.”
Alfonso shook his head. “I ain’t you.”
“How you know they gone?”
“I seen em go.”
Then he said, “I got this for you.” He nodded at the cart. “Rich white kid gave it to me. He owed somebody. His dad got it for the mail. Their house is up in Hillcrest, man, so high up the fuckin driveway is half a mile. Webster used to ride the cart down the hill for the mail.”
He patted the steering wheel. “So you can ride down here real quiet and don’t have to raise dust or use up much gas. If you just checkin shit out. By yourself. Or if you just forgot one little thing—like a shovel or something. You ain’t gotta take the truck. You and Gustave, man. You can style.”
Then he turned and walked into the trees, the back of his head shining in the light, the stubble of his hair glistening with sweat, and underneath the letters Enrique couldn’t read.