As a Thief in the Night (25 page)

Ezra felt them all staring at him as he made his way to Ruiz. When Ruiz saw his guest he smiled broadly, revealing his missing teeth. He put his guitar down, walked over quickly, and put his arm around his new friend. The other musicians seamlessly picked up the slack.

"Ha! So you came after all," Ruiz said above the music and gave Ezra a squeeze.

"Yeah," Ezra smiled back at him, "I said I was going to come, right?"

"Of course! Of course!" Ruiz said. "I will get you a drink."

"Ruiz," Ezra said from behind him, "why is everyone staring at me like that?"

"They probably think you are an
espia
."

"An
espia
?"

"Yes. What is your word for it?" He shifted his eyes to the ceiling as if looking for the answer there. "Ah, a spy!
  They probably think you are a spy for your grandfather. Here, perhaps, to see if we drink too much..."

"Really?"

"Never mind.  Have some drinks, many drinks, and listen to the music, and they will see that you are a good man." It was the first time anyone had ever called him that.

"Ruiz," he said, motioning to the boy standing on the ball, "who is that kid and how is he doing that?"

"That is my son, Pablo. He is always playing around on that. He wants to be a circus artist perhaps..."

"Your son?"

"Yes. This is the first year he has been here with me. He usually stays in Chiapas with his mother."

"Chiapas?"

"That is the part of Mexico that we are from."

"So this is where you all stay?" Ezra took a sip from his wine. It was in a red plastic cup.

"Yes, my bunk and my son's bunk are over there," he pointed to a pair of beds near the men throwing knives.

"Isn't it sort of crowded?"

"No. Your grandfather is very good to us. We are much luckier than most of our brothers and sisters that work in America. Many of them are not given any place to stay. They live like the homeless when they go to California to work."

"Really?"

"Yes, it is very sad. But I don't want to be sad now. Come, I will introduce you."

Ruiz took Ezra around the tables to meet everyone. After a while, he felt welcome and at ease with them. Many of them joked with him and offered him cigarettes and a place at their table. Ruiz went back to playing his guitar and Ezra sat with a group of workers and played cards with them. He drank and enjoyed the music and laughed. For the first time in what seemed like a very long while he forgot himself and all the circumstances that oppressed him. A strange and unfamiliar joy came over him as he realized he was becoming drunk. Ezra liked how it felt and opened himself up to the place the wine was taking him. A woman came and sat on his lap and told him her name was Maria. He knew it was the woman Ruiz had warned him about but she felt good against him and he didn't care about warnings anymore. She drank with him and helped him play his cards and laughed loudly at the things he said to her. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and pointed over to Ruiz who was still playing his guitar with the other musicians.
  Ruiz looked at him with a half comical, half panicked expression on his face and shook his head insistently. Ezra laughed at him and went back to his card game, and to Maria. Soon a group of them were up and dancing, and he danced with them. In the growing splendor of his stupor he hopped around with Maria and the other men and women and laughed at himself. Each time he made eye contact with Ruiz, Ruiz mouthed the name "Maria," made a cutting motion across his throat with his hand, and smiled at him disapprovingly. Ezra let his body move around blindly to the music, stopping now and then to catch his breath and to take a drink. Oblivion he had not experienced before slowly spread out underneath him, and he willingly plunged into it.

In the minutes just after midnight, the music now silent, he stumbled across the rows of vines between the living quarters and his grandfather's back yard. Only the porch light was still on. At the edge of the vineyard he tripped over some stray wire and fell onto the lawn. Drunk, he rolled over playfully on the freshly cut grass and set off the motion light. It shone down on him and lit the backyard. "Come on, leave me alone," he said and then waved his hand dismissively at it. "Do
I
bother
you
? Do
I
bother
you
?" he slurred. He laid his head on the ground and laughed at his words and at the stars in the black expanse above.

The roof spun above his bed when he looked up at it. He sank into the mattress, which was too soft, and allowed things to be as they were. His body felt wonderful to him. Underneath him he felt the bed giving way, and he sank deeper and deeper into it.
  Some hymn of gravity, one that should have frightened him but did not, was calling to him. The bed opened up, as did the floor beneath it, and Ezra Mignon disappeared into the mysteries of the forsaken god.

Throughout the next day his body ached as he tried to work. He stopped pruning several times and tried to find refuge from the sun, and from his headache, in the thin shadows the vines provided. He shut his eyes and turned off his Walkman so he might hear someone approaching. There would be a scene, he was sure, if his grandfather caught him resting. But he was tired, and he felt ill, so he had a hard time staying awake. Suddenly, just as he was nodding off, someone grabbed him from behind by the shoulders and yelled loudly. Ezra spun round, ready for action.
  But it was only Nectario, the young man who had been playing guitar with Ruiz the night before.  Looking at the odd posture that Ezra had assumed, he broke into hysterical laughter. He hopped around happily, taking pleasure in his prank.

Ezra dropped his hands to his sides.

"Dreaming in the vineyard, eh? Your grandfather will have your ass in a sling for that," Nectario scolded. His English was much better than Ruiz's.

"You scared the shit out of me."

"I know, I know," Nectario laughed. "You never heard me?"

"I never heard a thing." Ezra threw the weeds he had been holding onto the ground. "What are you, a ninja or something?"

"I came to find you. Tonight, after work, I'm going to visit the library. Would you like to come with me?"

"There's a library on the island?"

"Of course. I'm leaving right after work though."

"You're walking?"

"No, I'll tell Ruiz and take the pickup truck."

"But I thought Ruiz was the only one with a licence."

"He is."

"Okay, let me know when you're ready."

"No more sleeping on the job," Nectario said as he walked away. "Wine is bottled poetry, and poetry is the devil's wine, and it's best not to miss out on either."

At five-thirty, Ruiz met them at the end of the driveway with the truck. He hopped out of the cab, leaving the truck running, and Ezra jumped inside. The two men spoke in Spanish in front of the truck for a moment, and then, as if they had realized Ezra might be close enough to hear what they were talking about, and as if it were something they did not wish for him to hear, they stepped further away and continued for a few minutes while he waited in the passenger seat.
  When they were finished, Nectario got behind the wheel and put the truck into gear. Ruiz made eye contact with Ezra through the dirty windshield, zipped his mouth shut, and threw away the key.  He wasn't to tell his grandfather about Nectario driving. 

The Pelee Island Library's collection of books was humble, but as soon as Nectario went inside he was completely occupied by its contents. He greeted the librarian by name and returned the handful of books he had previously checked out. Ezra stayed on his hip as he began exploring the shelves.

"Now, what do you read, Ezra?" Nectario asked.

"Not much, I suppose. Whatever they give me at school, but I fake that most of the time. I used to read a lot of comics. I started to read the Bible once."

"You don't enjoy it?"

"I guess not. Nothing's ever really caught my interest. I guess I like music more."

"Well music is a beautiful thing of course, but there's no real difference between music and literature."

"Huh?"

"Is it possible you've been reading the wrong books?"

"I suppose."

"Well, have a look around. If you can't find anything on your own, then I'll help you."

More to appease Nectario than out of any genuine desire to find a book Ezra began to wander the aisles. The division between fiction and nonfiction was still murky for him; though he had heard both words over and over again, he could not have defined either. He read the titles to himself and occasionally pulled volumes off of the shelf to look at the covers. At the end of one row he saw a thick hardcover copy of
The Chronicles of Narnia
and suddenly remembered the books he had once read, as a boy, with such relish. He pulled it off the shelf. On the cover was a large picture of Asylan, the lion, his mane burning around his face like the rays of the sun. Ezra ran his hands across it and remembered staying up late at night, sitting on the floor beside the small night light that plugged directly into the wall, and reaching the point in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
where he knew he would not be able to go to sleep until he finished, until the question the story had awakened in him had been answered. He looked through the pages and found it again.

Little else that he found among the books there did anything for him. Pictures painted by old painters covered books that all seemed to take place in old, boring, Victorian England. There were images of Dukes and Ladies lying on lawns by unfocused trees and ponds. Some of them were on horses. He had seen books like this among the ones that Nectario had returned. What could someone like Nectario have found interesting in anything like that? He gave up and sat down at one of the tables to wait for his new friend, who was nowhere to be seen. While he sat there, reading the swear words, proclamations of love, and phone numbers that were scratched into the table, he noticed a poster stuck to the end of one of the bookshelves. It was a picture of Robert Redford dressed in an old leather pilot's jacket and reading a book called
Demian
. Ezra knew Robert Redford from Elsie's favorite movie,
Out of Africa
, which she watched over and over again. But it was the cover of the book Redford was holding that interested him. It looked half on fire, and on it, standing on the edge of some precipice that he was about to plunge into, was a winged figure that looked into the chasm before him, the posture of his body revealing that his descent would be both a tragedy and a victorious flight. Ezra read the title of the book again:
Demian
.  The word evoked a response in him he did not recognize. He asked the librarian if they had a copy. A little annoyed at being pulled away from whatever was on the computer screen, she led him to a nearby shelf. Ezra looked at the picture of the author, Hermann Hesse, on the back cover. He was a thin, older man, who wore small glasses with circular frames. Well, Ezra thought, it couldn't hurt.

He gave the book to Nectario, who had selected another four or five, and they checked them out.

"You're going to start reading those as soon as we get back?" Ezra asked once they were in the truck again.

"Nah," Nectario answered, turning onto the road. "After dinner I'm boxing with your grandfather."

"What?"

"Boxing."

"I heard you. With him?"

"Yeah. You didn't know he boxed?"

"No," Ezra said, amazed by what seemed like an impossibility.

"He's pretty good, too. I guess he picked it up in the army when he was younger."

"Where do you guys do it?"

"Down in one of the empty cellars we cleared out. We hung a heavy bag up there too."

"Does anyone come and watch?"

"No. I don't think anyone's really interested one way or the other."

"Would you guys care if I came to see?"

"I don't mind," Nectario said, "but you'll have to ask him. He can be pretty weird about some things, things you wouldn't expect someone to care about."

When they got home Ezra hid the book in his pocket, put it away in his room, and then went to find his grandfather. He was in the showroom complaining to one of the wine sellers, a female student, about a display. "That will be fine," he told Ezra when he asked about watching the boxing. "But you'll have to stay quiet and out of the way. Boxing is a mental sport, you know."

"I will."

"You can keep time for us; that way we won't have to check it."

He waited on the stairs inside the house while his grandfather went up to his room to get changed. When he heard the wooden steps behind him creak under the old man's weight, he turned around to see Harold Mignon wearing track pants that were pulled up too high, a fresh blue work t-shirt that was tucked into the joggers, and white, Stan Smith tennis shoes. Fresh Brylcreem shone in his slicked back silver hair, and the tightness of his clothing revealed his belly. His gym bag was ancient and had the Canadian Military shield on it. Ezra looked the bag over with interest and noticed the strength of the arm that held it. The tapered sleeve of the old man's t-shirt strained against his bicep. The skin around the muscle had loosened a bit, but it was still thick and powerful looking.