It had rained a lot in August, warm wet air pouring up from the Pacific, across Mexico, into New Mexico, on north into Colorado and Wyoming. Another year of it coming, said the lady-with-the-graceful-hands, posturing in front of her weather map, bowing to the highs and lows, tracing the lines of cold and hot with balletic gestures. So simple, on the map. So simple on the TV. Not so simple when the rain came down two inches in half an hour and the arroyos filled up with roaring brown water, washing away chicken coops and parked cars, filling up the culverts and running over the road to deposit unknown depths of gooey brown.
Benita Alvarez-Shipton had negotiated two such mud flows in a fine frenzy, just not giving a damn, determined to make it up the canyon, but by the time she reached the third one, her fury had cooled, as usual. Her daughter Angelica told her that was her trouble—she couldn’t stay mad. Angelica, now, she stayed mad. Something inherited from her grandma on one side or grandpa on the other, no doubt, and probably far healthier for her than Benita’s continual doubts. Benita herself was plagued by voices, mostly Mami’s, counseling prudence, counseling patience.
You made your bed, Bennie, now lie in it. God gives us strength to bear, Bennie. The stallion prances, but it’s the mare that nurses the colt. You’ve wasted so much, daughter. You can’t afford to waste another bit.
So, caution. The goo covering the road was suspiciously smooth and untouched. Things that were untouched might be so for a reason. If it looks too good to be true, Bennie, it probably is. If it was possible, Bennie, somebody would have done it already. Mami hadn’t always been right, thank heaven, but she scored high, nonetheless. In this case she would have asked, What if you get stuck, Bennie? What if somebody comes along, someone, you know, not a nice person?
Not long after Angelica was born, Benita had begun to realize she’d made a major mistake. By the time the kids were in school, she was seeking hiding places from the ghosts in her head, learning ways to cope without money, without help. Solitude was easier to live with than people. Books were less threatening than relatives. The fewer things she said to them, the fewer things she did with them, the fewer mistakes she would make, the fewer hurtful memories there would be.
When the children were little, she’d taken them into the mountains, put up the tent borrowed from her father, and camped for a week at a time without any bad memories. In the mountains you walked, admired birds, smelled flowers, threw rocks in the river and picked up pretty stones. Nothing happened to come back and haunt you in the night. Sleeping on the ground wasn’t Bert’s kind of thing, especially not in the mountains, miles from the nearest bar. Back then, as now, the predator she feared most was the one she lived with. Other risks paled in comparison.
At the side of the road a slightly higher stretch of ground offered itself. She drove atop it and killed the engine. Even if another flash flood came down the arroyo, it wouldn’t come as high as the wheels. She rolled up all the windows and locked the doors—not that it would stop anyone stealing the car if they were of a mind to, but no use wishing somebody would! The old wreck was beginning to cost more than it was worth, just to keep it going. Unlike Bert, who could cheerfully rob Peter to pay Paul, and then rob Paul to bet on football, Benita’s ghosts wouldn’t let her risk it. In her life there were no discretionary expenditures. Every penny was committed.
She studied the clouds massing in the west, readying themselves for a full-scale downpour, checking to be sure she had both a hooded rain poncho and a sweater in her pack. She didn’t plan to go more than a half hour away from the car. Gingerly, she placed one foot on the mud flow, which turned out to be a false alarm: only half an inch of clayey goo spread over silt that had settled into a bricklike mass.
Just ahead of her the road turned up the canyon between two groves of ponderosa pine. This world was empty, no people, no sounds of people talk or people machines. Saturdays people slept in, read the papers, did yard work, maybe had a barbecue or went to visit family. Since Mami died, she hadn’t had any local family except Dad. Since she’d become a recluse outside of working hours, she hadn’t had any real friends. Anyhow, she wouldn’t want to see anyone, not for a few days.
Half a mile up the road the pines gave way to aspen and fir around grassy glades, and within a hundred yards she saw the first mushrooms gleaming from the dappled shade. She knew what they were. Mami had taught her what to avoid as well as what to pick, but she walked over to them anyhow, admiring the picture they made, like something out of a child’s fairy tale. Funga demonio, Mami had said. Amanita muscaria, said the mushroom guide. Red with wooly white spots on the cap. Also amanita phailloides, white as a dove’s wing, graceful and pure. She stood looking at them for a long time, pretending not to think what she was thinking.
With a heaving sigh, she left the death caps behind and wandered among the trees parallel to the road. One winy, plate-sized bolete crouched in a hollow among some aspens, a triple frill of tan pleurotus fringed a half-rotted cottonwood stump, half a dozen white domes of agaricus poked through dried pine needles in a clump, gills as pink as flamingo feathers. There wasn’t a single wormhole in any of them. That was enough. She had learned a long time ago not to take more than she could eat in one day, unless she was drying them for winter.
Lately she hadn’t been in the mood to do anything for winter, or for any future time. No more planning. No more preparation. No more dedication. Getting through each day was enough. No use drying mushrooms when she’d be the only one to eat them. Bert had never cared for mushrooms, not even on pizza, and the kids weren’t here to eat them. Benita had always imagined the summers between college terms as a time of homecoming, but it had been only imagination, not thought. Thought would have told her that once they were gone, they would stay. Angelica had a job she couldn’t leave. Carlos said he was getting a job. Cross your fingers and pray. He needed to work, at something, not to go on doing…whatever it was he did. Angelica begged her to come visit them, but somehow…it hadn’t seemed to be the right time.
She glanced at her watch and went on upward, strolling now, relaxed by the quiet, the soft air, the bird murmur in the trees, keeping an eye on the shadows. When they said near enough to noon, she sat down on a flat rock and unpacked her lunch. Diet soda. Turkey sandwich. Two white peaches from the orchard behind the house—apricot trees, peach trees, plus plums, pear, apple, cherry. This year the peach trees bloomed even earlier than usual, but instead of the blossoms being killed by the April frost, they’d managed to set fruit before it happened. Pears, apples and cherries bloomed later. July was for pitting cherries, night after night, to freeze for pies. August and September were for making applesauce, apple jelly, and putting up pears.
That was then. Other years had been other years, and now was now.
She dallied with her food, small bites, little swallows, not wanting to think about going home, reluctantly packing away the scraps and the empty can in the pack with the mushroom bag on top. The clouds had moved swiftly from the west to make a dark layer almost overhead, and it was time to head back to town, go to the market, pick up some groceries. Maybe she’d stop at the bookstore for a couple of books. One nice thing about working there was borrowing new books freebies. Or, she had a free pass to the movies. Something light and fun with no chance it would make her cry. Lately, if she got started, it was hard to stop.
She left the trees behind and stepped out onto one of the parallel tracks in the grass that passed for a road, looked up at the sky once more, lowered her eyes and was confronted by the aliens.
Thinking it over later, she blamed the TV and movies for her immediate reaction. The media gobbled everything that happened or could happen, then spit it out, over and over, every idea regurgitated, every concept so mushed up that when anything remarkable actually occurred it was already a cliché. Like cloning or surrogate mothers or extraterrestrials and UFOs. The whole world had heard about it and seen movies about it, and had become bored with the subject before it even happened!
So, when the aliens walked out of the trees across the rutted road and asked her what her personal label was, her first thought was that she’d stepped into the middle of TV movie set. She looked around for cameras. Then she thought, no, she’d seen ET arrivals done better, far more believably, and certainly with better actors playing the abductee than herself, so it was a joke. A moment’s consideration of the creatures before her, however, told her they couldn’t be humans in costume. Entirely the wrong shape and the wrong size.
Her final reaction was that she’d wanted to get away from home, sure, but an alien abduction was ridiculous.
The lead alien, the slightly taller one, cocked its head and repeated in the same dry, uninflected tone it had used the first time, “Please, what is your identity description?” Then, as though recognizing her uncertainty, “My designation is mrfleblobr’r’cxzuckand, an athyco, of the Pistach people.”
Benita had to clear her throat before she could speak. “I’m sorry, but I can’t possibly pronounce your name. I am Benita, that is Benita Alvarez-Shipton of the…Hispanic people.”
A rather lengthy silence while the alien who had spoken turned to the other alien and the two of them focused their attention on a mechanism the first one was holding in one of its pincers. Claws? No, pincers. Very neat, small, rather like a jeweler’s tools, capable of deft manipulation.
The first alien turned to ask, “Are we mistaken in thinking this is America area? We are now in Hispanic area?”
She fought down an urge to giggle and almost choked instead. “This is the southwest part of North America, yes, but there are many Hispanic people in this area as well as Caucasian people and Indian people. This country also has Afro-American people, ah, Hawaiian people, Chinese people…” She caught herself babbling, and her voice trailed off as the two went back into their huddle. Could two huddle? She sucked in her cheeks and bit down hard, trying to convince herself she was awake. Half hidden in a grove of firs beyond the two aliens a gleaming shape hovered about two feet above the ground. The alien ship: a triangular gunmetal blue thing, flat on the bottom, rounded like a teardrop above. It looked barely big enough to hold the two beings, who were about her height, five foot six, though much lighter in build, each with four yellow arms and four green legs, and what seemed to be a scarlet exoskeleton covering the thorax and extending in a kind of kangaroo tail in back, like a prop. Or maybe wing covers, like a beetle. So, maybe they were bugs. Giant bugs. And maybe they weren’t. The exoskeleton could be armor of some kind, and they had huge, really huge multifaceted eyes, plus several smaller ones that looked almost human. The mouths didn’t look like insect mouths, though there were small squidgy bits around the sides. She couldn’t see any teeth. Just horny ridges. They couldn’t make words with inflexible mouths like that, so evidently they talked through the little boxes they had hanging around their…middles.
“Are you receptor person?” the taller one asked. “That is, provider of sequential life with or without DNA introduced by another individual or individuals?”
She thought about this, sorting it out, flushing a little as she thought, Oh, Lord, are they going to ask me about sex? She swallowed. “I’m a woman, female, yes, and I have two children.” With DNA introduced by another individual. Which explained a lot, if one was looking for explanations.
“Are you recently injured?” the other, slightly shorter alien asked, reaching out with a pincer foot to stroke the swollen purple skin around her left eye.
It felt rather like being touched with a pencil eraser: not hard, but not soft, either. Possibly very sensitive, she supposed, and the gesture was delicately nonintrusive. “A small accident,” she murmured, putting her hand protectively over the bruise. “It’ll heal up very soon.”
“Ah. You have our sympathy for being marred,” this one said.
“Are you person of good reputation?” asked the taller one, with an admonitory glance toward its companion. “You have done no foolish or evil thing that would make others consider your words false or unbelievable?”
“All of us do foolish things,” she said. “None of us are perfect. I’ve never done any purposeful evil…”
You didn’t mean to, Benita, but you hung your life out on the line like an old towel, to get faded and ragged. I wish you could go back, daughter, but we can’t do that.
“…I don’t think I’ve done anything too ridiculous.” She sighed, and looked at her shoes.
“Will you help us make contact with your people, so we may do so peacefully, without injury to anyone?”
This was real! The idea went off like a roman candle, pfoosh, whap! Honest to goodness real! Good Lord, of course she would help avoid injury, though what could she do? “I will if I can,” she equivocated, trying to wet her mouth and lips. They were dry, achingly dry.
“We ask only what you can,” the tall one said. “We will first give you names you can pronounce. We will simplify our own names from our youth, our undifferentiated time. You may call me Chiddy, and my companion is Vess.” Chiddy held out a bright red cube about six inches square. “This is our declaration. Our investigation shows that this America section is the section most interested in search for extraplanetary intelligence, so you will go to your authorities of this America section, and you will give them this. When it is in the hands of authority, it will automatically do all necessary convincing, advising, and preparing.” It nodded, well satisfied with this exposition.
The other one, the smaller, softer-voiced one, held out a folder. “Here is money for your trouble, legal money, licitly obtained, not a replication, which we understand to be improper, plus we will do you a welcome reversal.” The aliens stepped back, bowing, with their four hands or tweezers or whatever together, upper right to lower left, upper left to lower right, so their yellow sleeves (shells?) made a neat little X across their scarlet bellies.
Then the two of them, Chiddy and Vess, turned and went back to their ship, quad-a-lump, quad-a-lump, like a team of trotters. The ship liquified to let them in, then solidified again, which was fine because everyone knew about morphing ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger did one of those movies about time travel, only it was the other guy who morphed…
Benita stayed where she was, holding the cube and the folder, while she tried to find words to tell them they had the wrong messenger, that she didn’t do things like this, that she didn’t know how, couldn’t possibly…
By the time her mouth was ready to say “Wait,” the ship was well off the ground. It rose until it cleared the tops of the trees then soundlessly disappeared. The treetops moved as though hit by a strong gust of wind from the east. She stood stupidly staring from the empty spot in the sky to the enigmatic thing in her hands. It was warm. It hummed a little on her palms and she could feel the vibration. It also changed color, from bright red to deep wine, and finally to dark blue. She set it on the ground, where it turned red again and started to make an agitated noise, rather like a fussy baby. She looked in the folder they had given her, counted for a rather long time, took a deep breath and counted again. There were two hundred five-hundred-dollar bills. She put the money back in the folder and dropped it on the ground, staring at it, as though it was a snake.
We’re often tempted to be foolish, Bennie. Often tempted to do wrong.
Mami had never said anything about being tempted to do right! So, if she was tempted by this money, did that mean it had to be wrong? Heavens, even children and puppy dogs received rewards for doing right!
The cube was now squealing for attention, but it quieted and began to change color when she picked it up and patted it, as she had done with her babies. After a moment’s more confusion, she picked up the folder as well. Though her brain seemed to be having a fit, her feet started moving, carrying her body down the hill while her brain skipped here and there like a dud kernel of popcorn, badly overexcited but unable to explode. The best her legs could manage was a wavering stroll, but at least they kept going until she reached the car. The familiarity of it, the dents, the rust spots, the smell of the inside of it—fast food and dog, mostly—settled her a little.
She leaned on the open door, still trying to think. Lord. She couldn’t just get in the car and drive off with no plan, nothing decided. And she couldn’t just go home, either. Though it was remotely possible that Bert had crawled out of his boar’s wallow of a bed and found someone to give him a ride to work, it was far likelier he’d stayed in bed, watching baseball and making his way through the rest of the case of beer he’d talked Larry Cinch into bringing him last night. Larry was an open-hearted man whose kindness used up all the room in his head, leaving no space for either evil intentions or good sense. One would think that since Bert had been convicted of DUI five times, his friends would begin to catch on that he’d be better off without beer!
And one would think when he did it five times, the last time killing somebody, they’d put him in jail! Other places, maybe. Not in New Mexico, where at least a third of the male population considered getting drunk a recreation and driving drunk an exercise of manly skill, something like bull fighting. The judge had put Bert on house arrest, sentenced him to an electronic anklet that set off an alarm at the station house if he wasn’t within fifty feet of the monitor at home or at his so-called job in the Alvarez salvage yard. He was supposed to call the station before he went from one to the other and they gave him thirty minutes to arrive. Most of the time, Bert figured it wasn’t worth a phone call to get to work, especially on weekends when Benita was home and he could get some fun out of bedeviling her.
The rest of the week was bearable. Ten to nine, Monday through Friday, she was at The Written Word, doing more than a bit of everything. Marsh and Goose, the owners, were casual about their own work hours and pretty much left it to her. She’d been there part time for two years, starting when Carlos was three and Angelica was one, then full time for fourteen. The first two years were mostly learning the job, stocking shelves, unpacking, doing scut work. Gradually she progressed, and after they put her on full time she read reviews and ordered books and paid the bills and sent back the unsold paperback covers and did the accounts. She took adult education literature courses so she could talk to customers about books, and computer courses so she could use bookkeeping systems and inventory systems. When she ran out of anything else to do, she read books. Considering the correspondence courses, the books and the Internet, PBS, Bravo and the History channel, she’d soaked up a good bit of education, maybe even a hint of culture, occasionally comforting herself with the thought she was probably as well read as some people who came into the store, people who had obviously not hung their lives out on the line like an old, ragged dish towel.
Sometimes it was hard to remember how she’d felt more than twenty years before, a kid, a high school senior madly in love with an older man. Among her friends, there’d been a little cachet in that, his being older. She’d been too naive to wonder why an older man, a self-described artist, would be interested in someone just turned seventeen. She was pretty, everyone said so, and artists were romantic, everyone knew that, and the label wasn’t an actual lie. Bert had never claimed to make a living as an artist, and he had won a few third prize ribbons or honorable mentions at regional shows.
A man of minor talents and major resentments. The marriage counselor had said that, quietly, to Benita. It had been a revelation, not the fact that Bert had major resentments, she couldn’t have missed knowing that after all these years. But the bit about the minor talent, yes, that was a revelation. Somehow, Benita had come to think of him as being too lazy to live up to his potential. After that, she’d fretted over it, wondering if he thought he had no potential, and if he drank rather than admit it. She felt sad for him and wanted to comfort him, and that coincided with a few days when Bert wasn’t drinking so they had a weeklong second honeymoon, not that she’d ever had a first one. It made her feel better until the next time he got drunk and knocked her down.
It was really hard to be understanding or sympathetic with Bert. When he was sober, he would sit at the table listening as she begged him to talk to her. He would grunt or utter a monosyllable, or he’d grin, that infuriating grin that told her he was teasing her, goading her. She never got close! Oh, he had good points. He was always good to his mother. He wouldn’t work to help her out with money, but he was always ready to help her out with advice or carrying stuff or taking her somewhere. He never once laid a hand on the children. If he was sober, he was delightful with them: he’d tell the tall stories about places he’d been, things he’d done. He’d take them to the zoo or the playground or the movies. Of course, if he was drunk, he could tongue-lash them raw, so she kept them out of his way when he was that way. But even sober, he never talked with her, and she tried to figure out why that was, what she could do differently. She bought books and tried everything they suggested. After that one try at counseling at the county mental health clinic, there didn’t seem to be any point in trying again.
Even with his drinking cronies, he didn’t talk much, and what little she overheard going on among them was totally predictable. Same stories. Same angers. Same jokes directed at the same targets: women, fags, foreigners, any racial or religious group except their own. Not that they were religious, but they had a common acceptance of what they’d honor and what they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t spit on a cross or the flag or a Bible, but they’d kick a small dog or hit a sassy woman without blinking.
At seventeen, she’d taken him at his own estimation, at his own word. He was an artist. He would have a great career. Besides he had brooding good looks, simmering glances, a line of compliments, used often enough with enough other women to sound sincere, though she didn’t know that then. Benita had had no defenses, and she’d very quickly become pregnant with Carlos and defiantly happy about it. Papa said she would be married before the baby was born, or else. He and Mami had a furious argument about it, one of the few Benita could remember. Mami said no, let the baby come, they’d take care of it in the family, Bert wouldn’t be a good husband. Papa said no, Benita had to learn that actions have consequences, good husband or not, she would not have a bastard.
Surprisingly enough Bert wanted to marry her, and she thought marrying him was all she wanted. He even had a place for them to live, with his widowed mother. In fact, as it turned out, Mrs. Shipton had suggested to Bert that he get married so she’d have some company and help in the house, which was something else Benita didn’t know at the time. Benita’s giddy delirium carried her through Carlos’s birth and Angelica’s birth two years later, and partway through the year after that, by which time she had begun to perceive, though still dimly, just what it was she had done.
“You must go to work, Benita.” Mami had said it calmly, as she said most things. “This is the fourth time you have come to me to borrow money for groceries.”
“Mother Shipton…she’s been paying for groceries, Mami, but her social security only goes so far…”
“If you have no money to feed your children, you must work. You have no choice.”
“Mami, Bert’s looking for work…”
“He quit his last job, Benita.”
“He said they fired him for no reason…”
“He quit, Benita. The people gave him that job as a favor to your father, so he asked them why Bert left. He left because they expected him to work, actually do things. Bert prefers not to work. If he will not work, you must.”
“But, the babies, and Mother Shipton…”
“I will care for the babies daytimes. Soon they can go to nursery school, and you must also pay for that. Bert’s mother is Bert’s concern, and her own. She is not an invalid, Bennie.”
“I’m not qualified for anything…”
“You are a woman. Hombres son duro, pero mujeres son durable. I have found you a job.”
After that, Benita had been so busy she had never had time to think, except about one thing.
“The mistake you made must stop with you,” said Mami. “Your children must go to school! To college.”
That was the start of the secret bank account. That was the start of Mami’s little lectures to Carlos and Angelica. By the time Angelica was five, she was saying, “When I go to college, Mama.”
Bert had a different idea. He played with Angelica and called her his cutie-pie, but since the time Carlos first grabbed a crayon and made marks on the bedroom wall, Bert decided that when Carlos graduated from high school, the two of them would start a gallery. Bert talked about it all the time, as though it were real. Carlos would bring his scribbles home from school for Bert to critique. Bert would put on his pontifical voice and explain art techniques. The two of them would huddle over the table while Angelica, Benita, and Mother Shipton fixed meals or washed dishes. Bert was an artist. Carlos would be an artist.
Before long he was saying, “Granny says I will be a great artist, Mama.” Benita didn’t contradict him or his granny. So long as he expected to succeed, she would help him. It was something to think about, to plan for, to work for.
Bert kept the idea alive, hugging his son. “ ’At’s my boy, we’re gonna show ’em, huh, Carlos, when we open the gallery.”
Carlos agreeing, “Right, Dad. When we open it.”
The years were all the same, with only the sizes of their needs changing: extra large instead of medium for Carlos, size twelve instead of eight for Angelica, an old wreck of a car instead of a bike for Carlos, a computer instead of a TV for Angelica. Mother Shipton died when Carlos was eight; Bert inherited the house. The years accumulated in Benita’s routine of buying books, supervising homework, making Carlos do better than he cared to, helping Angelica do as well as she wanted to. The years accumulated with the drinking bouts happening oftener, then very often, then every day or two. Benita couldn’t figure out where he got the money! He never had any money for groceries or the gas payment. When the children were little, Benita had occasionally fled with them to the shelter when things got violent. When Carlos was as big as his father and at no risk of his father’s temper, Benita and Angelica found a refuge in Benita’s office, after the store was closed, sleeping on the floor on a spread sleeping bag, with no one knowing where they were.
Then, suddenly Carlos was out of school (low C average) and neither Bert’s plans nor Benita’s turned out to have been sure things. Carlos approached his father about the gallery idea.
“Well, we’ll need a few thou, Carlos. Got to get together a few thou first. For rent, you know. Rent and making contacts with artists, all that.”
“Where are we going to get that?” Carlos demanded. Carlos might not have done well in school, but he could add two and two.
“Mortgage the house,” said Bert suddenly, out of nowhere. “We’ll mortgage the house.”
But he didn’t mortgage the house. Not for a while.
Benita said, “Carlito, while you and your dad are figuring out the gallery business, why don’t you enroll at UNM? I know your test scores and grades weren’t great, but you can get student aid, and it’s right here in town, and you can study art…” Benita, trying to move him but not telling him about the secret bank account, not until he, himself, was committed to going on. That had been Mami at her most succinct.
The bait only works if the fish is hungry.
Carlos was unresponsive. “Aw, Mom. Leave me alone. I need a break from school. I’m not ready for college. I need to, you know, give this gallery thing a chance! Have a time of self discovery!”
Three separate times Goose or Marsh or Benita herself found jobs for Carlos, but Carlos didn’t want a steady job. He preferred to sleep until noon, to take long, long showers, eat like a lion and go out with friends most nights. He worked for his grandfather at the salvage yard every now and then, just long enough to earn money for his car, or when he needed money for gas or repairs. Now and then he’d get some odd job with his friends, moving furniture or bussing tables. The rest of the time he ate, watched television, slept, and drove around all night with several other young men who were doing pretty much the same thing.
The bait only works if the fish is hungry, Benita would say to herself, wiping her eyes, remembering Mami’s face when she said it. You couldn’t make a fish hungry. You just had to wait.
So long as Benita let Carlos alone, he seemed contented enough. If she tried to push him, he retreated into gloom. The sulks, her father said, who had no patience with the boy. Melancholia, Benita read in nineteenth-century books. Depression, Marsh said, but then Marsh had a family that reveled in despondency. The doctor prescribed antidepressants, but Carlos refused to take them.
“There’s nothing wrong with me. Leave me alone.”
Two years like that. He was nineteen going on twenty when Angelica graduated, proudly presenting her mother not only with her diploma but also a letter from a California university granting her a scholarship! One of her teachers had applied for her, and she had saved the news for a surprise.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up, Mama. Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve always wanted to go to California. The scholarship won’t be enough, all by itself, but I’ll get a job, and maybe a student loan…”
That was when Benita held her close, crying happily, and told her about the secret bank account. Don’t tell Daddy, dear. You know why. But shortly thereafter, Angelica, all unthinking innocence, told Carlos.
He was waiting for Benita when she came home from work, his nose pinched, his face haughty. “Angelica told me you’d been saving money for us. I think I deserve half of it!”
“I saved it for my children’s education,” she said, her own cheeks pink with resentment at his tone. “And if you’re in college, you’ll get half of it.”
“I prefer to take it in cash, now. Dad and I can use it to help start the gallery.” Haughty, that I prefer. Arrogant.
She swallowed deeply, hating his tone, his resentments, his pomposity, hating the fact she could not meet any of it without tears and pain. She hated the way he resented anything she did for Angelica, as though his sister were negligible, not worth the investment. He got that from his father. Bert was big on the worthlessness of women. The books said sibling rivalry was normal, that confrontation was an ordinary thing, a difference of opinion, it should not hurt like this!
“The gallery plans are between you and your father, Carlito. I was never part of them, so it’s up to you and him to make those plans come true. My plan has always been for your education. The money will be used for that only, for one or both of my children. If you don’t want to go on to school, if you aren’t ready to do so, then Angelica can use the money.”
He hadn’t accepted this. Carlos never accepted no. He had done what he always did: badgered her, harassed her, talked her down, kept after her, but this time it didn’t work as it always had before. There were too many years of hard work in that bank account. Too many years of doing without and making do and, more important, Angelica deserved the help and would damned well get it. And something else happened she hadn’t counted on ever, hadn’t even conceived of. She went inside herself looking for the love she’d always felt for both the children and wasn’t able to find it for her son. He had done something to it, or she had, or it had dried up, all on its own.
Strangely enough, throughout it all, Carlos never told Bert about the money. He was smart enough to know that would have killed it for all of them. A month later, all his harassment unavailing, he had said he would go to college as well, but not to the state university. He wanted to attend the school in California, the one Angelica planned to attend. They should, he said, be treated equally.
Benita had cried, “I’ve always treated you equally, Carlos.”
“No, you haven’t. When Angelica needed help with reading, you had her read to you while you fixed supper. When I needed help, you had somebody at school do it!”
She stared at him, unbelieving. “Angelica was in the second grade, you were in fourth. All she needed was practice. You had a problem with dyslexia. I can listen while someone practices, but I don’t know anything about helping dyslexia. The school had a specialist who knew all about it. Equal doesn’t mean identical! It’s impossible to treat different people as though they were identical.”
Again the sulks, the depression, the endless hating silences.
Goose asked what was the matter, and she told him. “He’s digging up old, silly resentments from when he was seven or eight years old, Goose. And it’s been two months. It’s like breathing poison gas, being around him. He’s perfectly capable of keeping it up for months, even years, and I can’t take it.”
“Well, I can’t stand to see you this upset,” Goose drawled in his lofty, patrician voice. “It’s extremely enervating. I’ve got some family contacts in California. Let me see what I can do.”
He came up with the name of a Latino foundation that provided loans, tutoring, and counseling for less-than-perfect Hispanic candidates for college. Carlos hyphenated his last name, charmed the committee—like his dad at that age, he could charm anyone when he tried—and was accepted. Since he was twenty, he chose to share a house with several other foundation beneficiaries, while Angelica, only eighteen, lived in a dormitory.
For Benita, it was the tape at the end of her race. She had a day or two of exhilaration, then she deflated slowly and inexorably, like a soufflé taken out of the oven. She had never considered what she would do when it was over, never planned for afterward when the thing was done. Mami hadn’t ever mentioned what she would do then. The worst was the unforeseen fact that with Angelica gone, not just to college but away to college, Benita had no one to celebrate with or sympathize with or mourn with. With both of them gone, she couldn’t stay busy enough not to think, and over all those mostly solitary years at the bookstore, she had learned to think.
It seemed to her that up until then, she had been two people, one at work, one at home. The work Benita was decisive, crisp, intelligent, capable. She spoke to people directly, simply, without strain and without later self-recriminations over wrong words, wrong emphases, wrong ideas. The home Benita, on the other hand, was tentative, common, an ignorant woman who used a small vocabulary and bad grammar, who ventured comments on nothing more complicated than the dinner menu, a sort of wife-mother-sponge to soak up Bert’s rages and Carlito’s sulks.
When the kids went away, however, there was no need for a mother-sponge anymore, no reason for that person to take up space. Perhaps it was time to let bovine Benita go. The planning that had kept her going all these years was over, so maybe it was now time to make another plan.
She joined a women’s support group. She signed up for an aerobics class at the Y. She began going to work even earlier and—if it wasn’t group night—staying even later. Half a dozen fast food places were within a few blocks of the store; her little office was quiet and private; she had a comfortable old recliner chair and a little TV back there. She continued putting money away, for her own use this time, for sometime three or four years from now, when she couldn’t stick it anymore. She knew she would leave Bert eventually, the time just hadn’t come yet. She managed to encounter him only over occasional breakfasts or sometimes very late at night when he staggered in and fell on the couch. She kept food in the refrigerator for him. She did his laundry. Up until the house arrest, they’d managed to get along without real damage.
And that was the story of her life, which had now taken this totally unexpected and ridiculous turn, leaving her miles from home with a screaming cube in her hands and nobody to ask for help. Though, sensibly, asking for help would be exactly the wrong thing to do! She turned to Mami’s litany, instead. Help yourself, Benita. You can if you will. Think for yourself, Benita. Make a life for yourself. Take a deep breath and figure out what needs to be done.
She closed her eyes, trying to clear the fog in her head, then leaned forward, gripped by a sudden cramp in her middle, or in her chest, or somewhere she couldn’t locate, all of her at once totally occupied by a spasm of pain that seemed to pull her apart, arms off in different directions, legs gone swimming away, head only vaguely attached, all the world going gray and hazy. She gasped, opened her mouth to scream, but was unable to make a sound, felt the gray go to black…
And then it all went away, all at once, the pain, the grayness, all of it, and she stood up, breathing deeply, wondering what in the hell had happened to her? Was that a faint? A swoon? How remarkable.
She climbed into the car and turned on the blower to air it out. The pain had filled her entire being, but now she could find no lingering evidence of it. Not the tiniest ache. Everything around her shone with an almost crystal clarity. She had never seen things so clearly. So. Figure out what came next.
First thing: hide the cube and the money. Bert must not get his hands on either the cube or the money. Just counting it had dried her mouth again. She had never had any money except what she’d earned, and she’d always cashed her regular paycheck and paid the bills in cash so there wouldn’t be anything left for Bert to drink up. The other check, the secret check that included all her overtime and hourly wages above minimum wage, had gone into the secret bank account.
She took the remnants of her lunch out of the pack, put the cube and money on the bottom and covered them with the sweater, the poncho, the leftover wrappers, peels and crusts from lunch, plus the empty soda can along with a couple more she’d found lying near the road. The mushroom bag went on top. She turned the car and started back down the road, the way she’d come, reaching out every few moments to touch the backpack, just to be sure it was there. A hundred thousand dollars! Oh, what she could do with a hundred thousand!
Though maybe it wasn’t right to take money for doing one’s duty, which this thing probably was. It felt complicated and troublesome enough to be duty. If she was going to do what the aliens had asked her to do—well, actually hired her to do—then she would need some of the money to get to the right people, whoever they were. Not her senator, Byron Morse, with his new, sort-of-Hispanic wife and his far-right friends. Goose had worked for Morse’s opponent during the last election, and he’d talked about the unethical stuff Morse had pulled. Her congressman, though he was also a hyphenated-Hispanic, would be a better bet.
The trip that had seemed a long one on the way out was all too short getting home. She saw immediately that she was not in luck. The studio-cum-garage door was open and Bert was perched on his so-called workbench drumming his heels against the paint cans on the shelf below. Neither they nor the dusty canvases against the end wall had been moved in years, but the beer cans scattered around him were new.
“Where the hell you been?” he demanded, leaning in the open car window, the smell of him filling her breathing space with a rank, sweaty, beeriness.
She tried not to breathe and kept her voice steady. “I felt like some exercise and fresh air, so I drove up to the mountains to hunt mushrooms and have a picnic lunch.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” he sneered.
She opened the pack and displayed the contents of the mushroom sack. “Mushroom hunting, Bert. You used to go with me and the kids sometimes. I left you a note.”
“Your note said you were going shopping.”
“I plan to. I thought I’d do it on my way home, but I got rained on in the hills, so I decided to come home and change before I did the shopping.”
“It’ll have to wait. Give me the keys.”
She became very still inside. Something clicked, like a relay switch. She said softly, “Bert, you know what the judge said. Now’s not the time to get him down on you…”
He jerked the car door open. “Give me the goddamn keys. The judge won’t do a damned thing, and you know it. I’m not drunk, I’m not going to drink, it’s Saturday, and nobody’s gonna be watching the goddam monitor on Saturday! I’m going over to Larry’s place to watch the game with him and Bill. Now come on!”
He wore an expression she had learned to heed, one that was a half-step from violence, one that begged her to cross him and give him an excuse to go over the edge. Normally at this point she dissolved into sludge; tears and whines, attempts to dissuade him. Today, amid this new clarity, she did a much simpler thing. Leaving the keys in the ignition, she edged away from him, across the passenger side and out, taking the pack with her.
“They impounded your car, Bert. If you get picked up in my car, they’ll impound my car too.” Without difficulty, she kept her voice perfectly level, normally an achievement in itself. “I won’t have any way to get to work.”
He jeered, “Moo, moo. Bossie-Benita the human cow! You worried your hubby’ll let you starve?” He climbed in behind the wheel and backed out into the street, wheels screaming.
She stood where she was, not moving. The car was stopped, half into the street, while he waited for her to do something. Come after him, maybe. Make a face. Stamp her foot. It wouldn’t take much. Any little thing. She turned to the trash barrel and took the empty cans from the pack, one at a time throwing them away, paying no attention to the beer cans, which ordinarily she would have gathered up immediately. Today she realized he would consider her throwing them away a comment on his morning’s activities, so she let them lie. Bert was always able to establish that she had done something wrong, no matter what she did, and ordinarily she kept a wary eye on him. Today she ignored him as she fiddled with the trash until the car went away too fast, squealing before it got to the stop sign, only half stopping before screeching around the corner and away.
Six months ago there had been two injured, one dead. A trial date months in the future. And a judge with no more sense than to accept that “don’t lock him up, he’s a working man” argument. She had explained the situation to his lawyer. Benita’s father paid Bert when and if he showed up at the salvage yard. Since he didn’t often show up, he wasn’t really a working man. The public defender said his first duty was to his client, and it would go easier on him if he were a man with a job and a family to support.
“But he’s not,” she said.
The lawyer gave her a mulish stare. “Well, he must contribute something. The house…”
“Right. His mother left him the house when she died. Bert sold his last piece of art thirteen years ago. For the last ten years, I’ve paid the property taxes and maintenance, because that’s the last time Bert worked for money. Last year Bert took out a mortgage on the house so he could pay cash for a new car, which he said he needed for a new delivery job he was taking. I don’t know what happened to the job, but he borrowed on the car for drinking and gambling money. When he was picked up for drunk driving, they impounded the car and the finance agency repossessed it. I haven’t made any of the mortgage payments and the house is about to be foreclosed. That’s Bert’s contribution to the family welfare.”
“You didn’t make the mortgage payments?” the lawyer had asked, as though she had done something unfamilial.
She had stared at him, making him shift uncomfortably. “It isn’t my house, as Bert often reminds me. I didn’t borrow on it. Foreclosure is sixty days away.”
“And when they foreclose?”
“Bert won’t have anywhere to live.”
“Neither will you,” he challenged.
“I’m moving in with my father,” she said. “Alone. My father doesn’t like Bert.”
Actually, she planned to rent a small apartment when the time came, but that was no one’s business but hers. As it turned out, nothing she had said made any difference, for the lawyer totally ignored it, as did la raza judge. Typical. As time passed, more and more of the elected magistrates were women, but they were still too few and far between.
She shut the garage door and went into the house, rubbing her forehead. If Bert followed his usual pattern, he’d spend the afternoon with his drinking buddies, maybe Larry, but just as likely that had been misdirection on his part. The police would show up sooner or later, and he wouldn’t want her to know where he really was. During the afternoon he’d go through stage one, which was boisterous conviviality, and stage two, slightly morose nostalgia, and when they ran out of beer, he’d move on to stage three, which might bring him home to tear the house apart, looking for liquor or money he thought he might have hidden sometime in the past. He was always sure one of his old caches was still there and if he didn’t find one, it was because Benita had stolen his money or thrown out his liquor. That’s usually when he hit her, if she was around. Stage four involved belligerence and violence, and she had this cube-thing to protect. Bert had the car, however, and she had no way to go except, maybe, call a cab, and they were so expensive…
An audible click. Like that little relay switch. There was money. There, beneath her hand, was money. Quite a lot of money. She had planned to leave after the foreclosure, because that would focus Bert’s belligerence on the bank rather than on herself. But here under her hand was the opportunity to do it now. So call a cab. Pack a bag. Take Sasquatch to a kennel so Bert couldn’t take out his temper on the dog. The money was right there, and even though she hadn’t earned it yet, she planned to earn it, she could start earning it!
Right away, here came the marching ghosts. Mami and Papa wouldn’t approve. It wasn’t fair to Goose and Marsh. The children might not like the idea…
She felt a flash of that same pain she’d felt up in the hills, momentary, fleeting, like a splinter being pulled out, a moment’s pang, but then the ache went away, and so did the ghosts, leaving her mind even clearer than before. How very strange. Almost as though she were…emptied out. Like a garbage can, all emptied out and washed with hot water and soap. She’d never been able to banish the ghosts before!
Unbidden, a picture of the aliens came into her mind. They would do her a welcome reversal. A good turn. Yes. They would banish her ghosts. They would go down all her nerves and synapses and exorcise her. They would leave her in clarity. Delicately, as though handling fine crystal, she set the thought aside, knowing it to be true. Obviously, they didn’t want a hag-ridden envoy. They wanted someone with her wits about her!
She had almost a month accumulated leave coming. As she went up the stairs, she planned what to do next: first, call Marsh or Goose at home, tell them there was an emergency. She’d take her new suit she’d saved up for. Several pairs of slacks, the neat ones she wore to work, with clean shirts, underwear, the two new sleep tee’s that Angelica had sent for her birthday. Her hands worked almost by themselves, opening drawers, taking down hangers, stuff from the medicine cabinet: hair dryer, curling iron, toothbrush, vitamins, allergy medicine. She always stuffed up in places with high humidity.
High humidity? Where?
Not here, stupid, a voice told her. Washington, D.C. Where else would she find people in authority?
Everything went into one suitcase plus a small carry-on bag. She’d get her ticket at the airport, the airline or route didn’t matter. She’d learned to drive when she was sixteen and had never changed the name on her driver’s license, so she could buy the ticket under her maiden name. There were X-ray machines. How would the cube react to an X-ray machine? And what about the money? She didn’t dare carry that much money in her purse! Or her carry-on bag. What if she got mugged?
She got the sewing kit out of the linen closet along with a strip torn from the end of a worn bedsheet, spread the cloth neatly on the bed, arranged layers of money down the center of the strip, then folded it over twice and basted the cloth into a thick, flexible belt, finishing it off with two ribbon ties. The belt went around her waist to be double-tied in front, like a child’s shoelaces. She had kept ten of the five-hundred-dollar bills separate, two in the bill compartment of her wallet and eight of them in the secret compartment of her purse, where they wouldn’t show when she paid for anything.
She’d have to leave a note, though it didn’t matter what it said. Any attempt at communicating with Bert in writing always made him furious. He liked to disagree or hit out if something annoyed him, and hitting a letter wasn’t rewarding for him. In the end, she wrote, “Bert, I’ve decided to take some vacation time on my own. I’m taking the dog with me.” She thought a moment. If he was drunk, he would look for her at her father’s. Well, nothing she could say would keep him from doing that, but she’d better let her father know she’d left.
The note to her father was brief. “Have to get away, have to do some thinking, I’ll be in touch.”
Mami had died years ago. No way to tell her anything. Not that she would have needed telling. Benita made two calls, one to the kennel, one to Goose.
“Goose, sorry to bother you at work, but this is Benita, and I have to tell you an emergency has come up and…No, the kids are fine. This is something else…. No, it isn’t. Goose, just listen! I’ve got to take my accumulated vacation now…. No, I don’t need checks in advance, but would you mind depositing them to my personal account until I get back? That’s right, the one at First Bank. Thank you, Goose. Tell Marsh, okay?”
When the cab came, she was ready, everything counted six times and everything in the house locked up, put away, turned off. There was a house key on her car key ring, so if Bert came home, he could get in. Sasquatch was on the leash, eager to go anywhere.
As she went out the front door with her suitcase, a police car pulled to the curb. Officer Cain. She knew him all too well.
“Benita, sorry, but Bert’s monitor went off…”
“He took my car,” she said, without expression or apology. “He said he was going to Larry’s, but I’m not sure he did.”
“You try to stop him?” he asked, looking at her face.
“No. The bruise is a couple of days old.”
“Sorry, Benita, but we have to look for him.”
“I do hope you find him before he kills someone,” she said sweetly, smiling briefly as she got into the cab.
“Head out toward the airport,” she said, settling back in the seat with a slightly queasy feeling. “We’ll make one stop, but it’s on the way. I’m leaving the dog at a kennel.”
Sasquatch put his front feet on the seat and looked out the window, while Benita ruffled the fur of his neck, taking a certain comfort from the solidity of him. She and the kids had named him Sasquatch. He’d never been away from home, anymore than she had. Except for the few times she had run to the shelter when the children were little, she had never in her whole life taken off like this. Even when Angelica had begged her to come visit them in California last winter, Bert hadn’t wanted to go, and she hadn’t wanted to go for fear…for fear of what?
Simple, really. If she’d gone to visit the kids last winter, she wouldn’t have come back. At that time, she hadn’t been ready to do anything final. Donkey-like, she’d been waiting for the stick to hit her. Well, the house arrest and the foreclosure had been two good whacks, one right after the other. The extraterrestrials and the money were more in the nature of a carrot. Take a bite. Go on, it’s delicious!
Stick behind, carrot before, there was no point in waiting for anything. Besides, she’d given her word. She’d claimed to be a person of respect, and she’d given her word. It sounded stupid as all get-out, even to her, but it would just have to do.