Beyond This Point Are Monsters (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

the exodus
from the courtroom for lunch was faster and more complete than it had been for the morning recess. Devon waited until only the bailiff remained.

He glanced at her curiously. “This room is locked up during the noon hour, ma'am.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“If you're not feeling well, there's a ladies' lounge in the basement where you can get coffee and things like that.”

“I'm all right.”

Agnes Osborne had driven back to her apartment to rest, suffering more from weariness than from hunger. With her out of the way Devon thought Leo might be waiting for her in the corridor and they would have lunch together. But there was no sign of him. The corridor was deserted except for a pair of tourists taking pictures out of one of the barred windows and, in an alcove beyond a row of telephone booths, the ex-policeman, Valenzuela, talking to a short stout Mexican woman who was holding a baby on her left arm. The child was sucking on a pacifier and regarding Valenzuela with mild interest.

Valenzuela, so dapper earlier in the day, had begun to show the effects of the increasing heat and tension. He'd taken off his coat and tie and under each arm of his striped shirt there was a dark semicircle like a stain of secret guilt. When Devon approached he looked at her with disap­proval, as though she were someone from a remote corner of his past and had no right to be popping up in the pres­ent without warning or permission.

As she walked by she nodded but didn't speak. Every­thing had been said between them:
“I've done what I could, Mrs. Osborne. Searched the fields, dragged the reser­voir, walked up and down the riverbed. But there are a hundred more fields, a dozen more reservoirs, miles and miles of riverbed.” “You must try again, try harder.” “It's no use. I think they took him into Mexico.”
The following spring Valenzuela phoned Devon and told her he'd quit his job in the sheriff's office and was now selling insurance. He asked her if she wanted to buy any and she said no, very politely . . . 

A few blocks from the courthouse she found a small hamburger stand. She sat at a table hardly bigger than a handkerchief and ordered a burger with French fries. The odor of stale grease, the ketchup bottle with its darkening dribble, the thin round patty of meat identical to ones she'd eaten in Philadelphia, New Haven, Boston—they were all so normal and familiar, they made her feel like an ordinary girl who ate lunch at hamburger stands and had no business with bailiffs or judges. She ate slowly, prolong­ing her stay in the little place, her role of ordinary girl.

After lunch she began her reluctant return to the court­house, pausing now and then to stare out at the sea.
“I
think they took him into Mexico,”
Valenzuela had said.
“Or maybe dumped him in the sea and a high tide will bring him in.”
A hundred high tides came and went before Dev­on stopped hoping; Mrs. Osborne had never stopped. Devon knew she still carried a tide table in her purse, still walked for miles along the
beaches every week, her eye on specks in the water that turned out to be buoys or harbor seals, pelagic birds or pieces of floating lumber.
“In salt water this cold it would take a week or two for gases to form in the tissues and bring a body to the surface.”
The first week passed, and the second, and fifty more.
“Not everything that goes into the sea comes out again, Mrs. Osborne.”
With each tide things floated into shore and were stranded on the beach—driftwood, jellyfish, shark eggs, oil-soaked grebes and cormorants and scoters, lob­ster traps, plastic bottles, odd shoes and other pieces of clothing. Every scrap of the clothing was collected and taken to a room in the basement of the sheriff's depart­ment to be dried out and examined. None of it belonged to Robert.

Devon turned away from the sea and quickened her pace. It was then that she spotted Estivar. He was sitting alone on a bus-stop bench under a silver dollar tree. At the slightest stirring of air the silver discs of leaves twitched and jumped, eager to be spent. Their quick gay move­ments altered the lights and shadows, so that Estivar's face from a distance appeared very lively. As she drew closer she saw that it was no livelier than the concrete bench. He rose slowly at her approach, as though he was sorry to see her.

She said, “Aren't you having lunch, Estivar?”

“Later. The others wanted a picnic at the zoo, they left me a sandwich and an avocado. Will you sit down, Mrs. Osborne?”

“Yes, thanks.” As she sat down she wondered if the bench had been made of concrete because it was a durable material or because its cold roughness would discourage people from remaining too long. “Don't you like the park?”

“Live things shouldn't be put in cages. I prefer to watch the sea. All that water, think what we could do at the ranch with all that water . . . Where is Mrs. Osborne?”

“She went home to rest for a while.”

“I know she resented some of the things I said on the stand this morning. But I couldn't help it, they were true, I was under oath. What did she expect from me? Probably some of those nice lies she believes herself.”

“You mustn't be too hard on her, Estivar.”

“Why not? She's too hard on me. I heard her at recess this morning talking to the lawyer. I heard her clear across the room speaking my name like a dirty word. What's she got against me? I kept that place going for her when her son was too young to be any help and her husband was too—” He drew in his breath sharply, as though someone had given him a warning poke in the stomach.

“Too what?”

“He's dead, it doesn't matter any more.”

“It does to me.”

“I thought you'd have found out on your own by this time.”

“I only know he died by accident.”

“That was the verdict.”

“Didn't you agree with it?”

“If you go around looking for accidents, asking for them, they can't be called accidents any more. Mr. Os­borne's ‘accident' happened before ten o'clock in the morning, and he'd already drunk enough bourbon to para­lyze an ordinary man.” Estivar spread his hands in a little gesture of despair. “It wasn't a case of bad luck killing him when he was just forty-three years old, it was a case of good luck keeping him alive that long.”

“When did he become an alcoholic?”

“I'm not sure. Between the two of them they managed to keep it secret for years. But eventually it reached a point where a new crew would take one look at him and label him a
borrachín.
”

“Is that why Robert spent so much time with you as he was growing up?”

“Yes. He'd come over to my house when things got too rough. I didn't say any of this on the witness stand, natu­rally, but I told Mr. Ford last week. He was asking me a lot of questions about the Osbornes. I had to tell him the truth. I knew she wouldn't, she never told anyone. She had this game she played. If Mr. Osborne was too drunk to come out and work, she said he had a touch of flu or a migraine or a toothache or a sprained back. Once he had to be carried in from the fields, out cold and reeking of whiskey, but she claimed he must have suffered a heat stroke, though it was a winter day with a pale cool little sun. She couldn't bring herself to admit the truth even while she was hiring my boy, Rufo, to haul away the bottles every week.” He raised his head, frowning up at the round silver leaves as though they represented the dollars and half- dollars Rufo had been paid to dispose of the bottles. “It was silly, the whole cover-up business, but you couldn't help admire how hard she worked at it and what guts it took, especially when he got quarrelsome.”

“How did she handle him then?”

“Oh, she tried lots of things, same as any woman mar­ried to a drunk. But eventually she developed a routine. She'd maneuver him into the living room one way or an­other, close the doors and windows and pull the drapes. Then the arguing would start. If things got too loud she'd sit down at that piano of hers and start playing to cover them up, a piece with good firm chords like ‘March of the Toreadors.' She couldn't admit that they quarreled any more than she could admit that he drank. Everybody caught on, of course. Even the men working around the place, when they heard that piano, they'd look at each other and grin.”

“What about Robert?”

“Lots of the arguing was about him and how he should be brought up, disciplined, educated, trained. But they would have argued even if the boy had never been born. He was just a peg to hang things on. When he got older, ten or eleven, I tried to explain this to him. I told him he hadn't caused the trouble and he couldn't stop it, so he might as well learn to live with it.”

“How could a ten-year-old understand such a thing?”

“I think he did. Anyway, he used to show up at my place when he sensed trouble on the way. Sometimes he didn't make it in time and he'd be caught between the two of them. One day I heard the piano music start in real loud and I waited and waited for Robbie to show up. Finally I went over to the ranch house to find out what was happen­ing. She had forgotten to pull the drapes across a side window and I could see the three of them inside the room. She was at the piano, with Robbie sitting on the bench beside her looking sick and scared. Mr. Osborne was propped up against the mantel, the veins in his neck stick­ing out like ropes. His mouth was moving, so was hers. But all I could hear was the bang bang bang of that piano, loud enough to wake the dead. ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.'”

“What do you mean?”

“That's what she was playing, over and over, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.' It seems funny now, her using a hymn. But it wasn't funny then. That fight was the same as all the others, long and mean and deadly, the kind nobody can win, so everybody loses, especially the innocent. I wanted to get Robbie out of that room and away from that house until things quieted down. I went inside and started pounding on the living-room door as hard as I could. A minute or so later the piano stopped and Mrs. Osborne opened the door. ‘Oh, Estivar,' she said, ‘we were just having a little concert.' I asked her if Robbie could come over and help my son, Cruz, with his homework. She said, ‘Certainly. I don't think Robbie cares much for music any­way . . .' Sometimes when I wake up in the night I swear I can hear the sound of that piano, though it isn't even there any more, I helped the movers take it out of the house myself.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“No one else will, and it's time you knew.”

“I didn't want to know.”

“You wanted to know more than I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Osborne, especially today. But who can be sure? I may not get another chance to talk to you like this.”

“You sound as if something is going to happen.”

“Something always does.”

“The ranch will remain the same,” she said. “And you'll continue on as foreman. I don't plan on changing any­thing.”

“Life is something that happens to you while you're making other plans. I read that somewhere, and it's like the piano music, it keeps running through my mind. Robbie's life was planned—high school, college, a profession. Then his father fell off a tractor and things changed before they had a chance to begin.”

A silence fell between them, emphasized by the noise all around: the roar of freeway traffic and planes landing and taking off from Lindbergh Field and from the Naval Air Station across the bay. At the top of a palm tree nearby a mockingbird had begun to sing. It was October, the wrong time to be singing, but the bird sang anyway, with loud delight, and Estivar's face softened at the sound.

“Sinsonte,”
he said. “Listen.”

“A mockingbird?”

“Yes.”

“Why is he singing now?”

“He wants to—that's reason enough for a bird.”

“Maybe he thinks it's spring.”

“Maybe.”

“Lucky bird.”

A carillon began chiming the first quarter of an hour. Estivar rose quickly. “It's time I went and picked up my family.”

“You didn't eat your sandwich.”

“I'll have a chance in the car.”

She rose too. Her eyes felt hot and dry and tired, as though they'd seen too much too quickly and needed a rest in some quiet sunless place.

“I'm sorry I had to tell you things you didn't want to know,” he said.

“You were right, of course. I need all the information I can get in order to make sensible plans.”

“Yes, Mrs. Osborne.”
Life, Mrs. Osborne, is what hap­pens to you while you are making sensible plans.

She began walking slowly back to the courthouse as if by delaying her return she could delay the proceeding and the verdict. There was no doubt in her mind what the verdict would be. Robert, who had died a dozen times to the strains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “March of the Toreadors,” would die this time to the tuneless hum of strangers and the occasional beat of a gavel.