Falling Down (20 page)

“Uhh, well,” I said. “I thought they were lit to remember somebody.”

“In keeping the flame of memory alive, sure. At differ
ent times, I light a candle for my husband, or Ana Luisa, or for her dead brother. For Mother Teresa. For Jesus. It's the everlasting flame of love and life and remembrance.”

Dogs wandered around the courtyard, peering at us through closed wrought-iron gates. The courtyard itself peaceful and serene.

“And who was your candle for?” Mary said.

“I just did it. Because you did it.”

She pinched out the flame on my candle, handed me a match.

“Light it again,” she said. “But for a purpose of your own.”

I thought of Nathan and lit the candle.

Inside the church, I sat in a wooden bench at the back and watched Mary dip her fingers in a stone basin hung along the right wall. While she touched her forehead and signed the cross, Ana Luisa stood on tiptoes and repeated the gestures. They walked together, hand in hand, down the center aisle to a wooden altar beneath paintings and frescos, they knelt at a railing for a moment and then came to sit with me during the ritual mass.

Outside, walking to our cars, Mary smiled, lifted her face to the sun.

“This beautiful old mission just radiates peace,” Mary said. “It's like our park, places of serenity.”

“I'm not feeling too serene,” I said.

“But you've had peaceful times? In your life?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me about one.”

I remembered Nathan, naked, playing one of his wooden flutes. I remembered his face, lying sideways on the pillow, eyes shut, lips open and relaxed as he breathed. It was the first time I'd seen him so relaxed. No vertical furrows on his forehead between the eyes, sleep even softening the lines which runneled down from the sides of his nose to the corners of his lips. I realized he was the kind of person who had to compose a business face, probably a
Law face, tighten things down, form a skin barrier against showing emotions, eyes narrowed with a private, encoded life force and lips that would never reveal it.

A face so guarded it reminded me of mine.

“What?” Mary said. “Was it a good time?”

“Yes,” I said finally.

“So why are you crying?”

“It ended badly.”

Mary sat awhile, nodding to herself, humming a tune I didn't know.

“I remember a time,” she said. “My husband, Jim, he was stationed for a time in Kentucky. I used to drive the back roads, up into the hollows where strangers didn't much roam. One day, I pulled off the road to read a map and saw a waterfall beside me. I got out of the car, went down close to the creek so my eyes were level with the lip of the waterfall, just before everything dropped about twenty feet. It was October, the leaves were changing, leaves were falling, floating down the creek and rushing over the lip of the waterfall. Everything was blurred, the water moved so fast, and I was looking upstream, fixing my eyes on a leaf, and I followed that leaf with my eyes right to the edge of the waterfall and in that moment everything slowed down a hundred times, it seemed, I could see every splashed drop, every twig and leaf, see them crystal clear. Jim told me later that's what athletes feel when they're in the zone. Like a baseball hitter, who sees the ball coming toward him at ninety-five miles an hour, but because the hitter's in the zone, the ball just floats in slow motion and he can see every seam on the ball and know if it's a fastball or a curve and he knows exactly where to swing his bat to meet the ball.”

“I know that feeling,” I said. “Sometimes when I'm swimming, I get beyond everything, I don't think of fatigue or control or what's troubling me. I stroke and stroke, my hands reach out, I almost see my hands parting drops of water.”

“That is so,” she said.

“But my past…some of what I remember from those times isn't something I really
want
to remember. Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“How much did you love your husband?”

“My, my,” she said. “My, my my, talk about love. Well, for nine years, no love could ever be better. But he had this, I never understood it well, he had this sense of a calling. During the first Iraq war, we were so young, we'd set aside having a child until the war was over. But in the next ten years, he was gone most of the time. Afghanistan, all the 'stans, all kinds of countries. It's very hard to hold love in your heart when the person is alive but not in your house, when your man is not in your kitchen, in your bed, inside your very body and soul.”

She stood up, brushing sand and small twigs from her dress.

“Come to my house,” she said. “We'll make blueberry pancakes.”

P
omelo Road lies just north of Orange Grove, between Oracle and La Canada, the whole area the site of many old ranch estates built in the twenties. At that time, Pomelo lay far north of Tucson's boundaries, and the ranches were owned by a single families and covered twenty acres or more.

Now most of these estate owners had succumbed to the exploding real estate market in northeast Tucson, the estates parceled into one-acre properties with very new houses that sold for half or three quarters of a million dollars.

No streetlights in this older section of Tucson. The other houses barely five years old, but Mary's place had a peaked roof to accommodate the swamp coolers in the attic crawl space. None of the yards fenced, although most houses were secluded by heavy shrubs and saguaro-ribbed borders. Shadows not so stark, the moon barely half full, but shadows, yes. Stepping out of my car, I twisted my left foot slightly, my sandal fell off, and as I rested the foot momentarily to locate the sandal the day's heat came up from the rough paving. Mesquite seedpods everywhere, an inch long, black and bumped from the seeds bulging against the hard skin.

Two young men came down the other side of the street. Hand in hand, the shorter man leaning his dreadlocks on the heavyset man's shoulder. Talking and
laughing, but soft and quiet. They saw me fumbling my sandal on. They nodded, went on, I could hear one of them jingling keys in his pocket. Four houses down a woman shouted,
Harry! Rosie! Get in here!
and a border mongrel lunged across the street, followed by a larger dog with a thick coat, the mongrel saw me and looped around me, tail wagging. No threat, just a romp.

Mary's rented house sat in the middle of one of these estates. Still the original property, but on a smaller lot, with most of the acreage long since sold off, so that the original hacienda sat in the middle of three acres, separated from the modern homes by thick hedges of mesquite bushes and trees and rows of eight-foot-tall saguaro ribs linked vertically in fencing that kept the coyotes out. The original hacienda gate-arch remained, although the late nineteenth-century wrought-iron gates, imported from Chihuahua, had long been discarded or stolen.

 

While Mary made pancakes, I wandered through the old house. The kitchen was placed between two wings, one with a large bedroom and two bathrooms, the other with two more bedrooms and a living room. All of this surrounded a partially tiled garden and courtyard, separated from the road by a six-foot-high brick wall.

In the back bedroom, I found a photograph out of my past.

“This is the rez at Pine Ridge,” I said.

“Yeah. Mom gave that to me. I was about six or seven. We were there.”

“During the firefight?”

“Yes. I just hid, my mom helped load rifles.”

“So did I.”

“You were at Pine Ridge?”

“In 1975. Yes.”

“I don't remember you,” she said. “But I mostly just remember being terrified, and all the guns banging, and once in a while a bullet would come through the walls of the bedroom where I was hiding.”

“How about that,” I said. “We were in the same place, at the same time.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen. I think. But I don't know when I was born.”

“You don't…what? You don't know your birth year? Your birthday?”

“No.”

“Are your parents alive?”

“No. My mother, I never knew her. All my dad said to me was that Mother was a bar girl, on the rodeo circuit. Dad, his name was George Loma, he was Hopi, my mother was white. I guess. Dad rode broncs, bulls, all rough stock on the circuit. I ran away from home, he died some time after.”

“And you went to Pine Ridge.”

“My husband at that time, he was a member of AIM. I was pregnant, I think, at Pine Ridge.”

“You think? You don't know, Laura, are you saying you're not sure when your daughter was born? When
you
were born?”

“It happens that way,” I said finally.

“Does that bother you?”

“Never used to,” I said. “Lately, it's really a puzzle.”

“But you know how to solve puzzles.”

“I find people,” I said. “Given a client with unlimited money to spend, unlimited time, I almost always find whoever I'm looking for. But with all my expertise in looking through databases, no way can I find myself.”

Mary left for a moment, brought back the Pine Ridge photo.

“I wonder,” she said finally. “I know other people who were there. Maybe they've got pictures. Would that help, if we found you in a picture?”

“It'd be a novelty,” I said. “I have only one picture from when I was young.”

“Pine Ridge,” Mary said. “That was a long way from Kansas, but my father and mother said we had to go. Our pickup would never make it, I think it was a '59
Chevy vee-eight stepside, great for migrant picking work, but we'd never make it all the way to Pine Ridge. One of my uncles, a Chippewa from Michigan, Ralph Pinto Three Mares, he came through Kansas with this borrowed Land Cruiser, a totally new aluminum-cocoon RV, I think it must have been over thirty feet long, it was huge. Had four beds, one was a king, two queens, a regular double bed, then the dinette cushions came out to be single beds on the floor, so the whole RV could sleep four families with room left over for the three dogs, I think there were two cats in there somewhere. He said it was borrowed, he might have stolen it, or traded all his fishing gear and special Wisconsin fishing holes for it.”

“I can't follow this,” I said. “My whole memory of Pine Ridge was guns, gunpowder, my ears shattered one night by this idiot who brought in a ten-gauge shotgun and fired that goddamn thing for half an hour straight, I couldn't hear anything for hours.”

“I guess some people saw it like a happening?” Mary said. “But I don't understand how they could. People died.”

She reached out to hug me. I didn't know what to do, I turned a bit sideways, leaned into her, hugged her like that.

“Hugs,” Mary said. “You don't seem too, uh, well, you don't hug too many people, right?”

“No,” I said. Shrugged, with a smile.

“There's all kinds of hugs,” she said. “You ever watch people, say, at an airport? People saying goodbye? Hello? Canoodling while they wait for their flight?”

“No,” I said. “I don't watch things like that.”

“Huh. But, you've said this to me more than once, you
do
watch people. Right? You look for, what do you call it?”

“Tells,” I said.

“Tells. Right. You could say, nonverbal things, but no matter how subtle, they tell you something basic about the person.”

“Not basic,” I said. “It's more, I don't know, I guess I'd say there are a lot of things people do that really don't mean anything. Like, say, somebody who just scratches the top of his head because it's a habit. Okay, maybe that person is nervous, maybe his mother scratched his head, his mother's died, he likes the feeling, and he doesn't have a wife. But a real tell…here's what it means to me. A person does something unconsciously that reveals a weakness.”

“Why couldn't it reveal a strength?”

“Then you know you're up against a wall, and to go down some other road of communication. But weakness, when you spot that kind of tell, you can use it. You can leverage what you've seen against that person.”

“Sounds kinda…negative,” Mary said.

“Exactly.”

“Why would you mainly be interested in somebody's weakness?”

“That's life,” I said. Not too happy anymore with this discussion. “That's survival. You use it to survive.”

“So,” Mary said. “So…” I could see this was a shock to her, as though she'd not ever considered life as more of a struggle than a celebration. “Your voice just dropped a few notes, when you said that word.
Survive
. Your mouth…changed, I guess your lips tightened. And so, if I live by your ‘tells' and your ‘rules,' I'd now have an advantage?”

“Yes.” Really angry that she'd picked up on my irritation, trying to mask that I'd moved from irritation to anger, but her eyes widened and I knew, I
knew
she'd sensed my anger.

“Okay,” she said shortly. “Okay. So let's just rewind here, okay? Let me go back to hugs. If you were going to hug me right now, you'd do it how?”

“I wouldn't.”

“Ah.”

Mary's face flickered with every emotion in her body, nothing held in reserve, she felt something, her face dis
played it. Right now I expected her to take a step back from me, to distance herself from my anger. But she astonished me,
Jesus,
this woman astonishes me. She stepped right up and wrapped her arms around me. I didn't know what to do, I held my arms to my side, I couldn't move them anyway even if I wanted to, she pinned my arms to my body, she molded herself against me, and I thought immediately of Nathan and how he'd hold me like that. Unconditional love. I relaxed without even thinking about it and laid my head on Mary's shoulder and sobbed and sobbed, people walking near us made detours to keep their personal zones clear of my loud, fierce release of anger.

Mary held me and held me. Gradually, she rocked from side to side, I knew, I just
knew
from a long time ago that's what mothers did with their children and I laughed, my face drenched with tears, Mary's white blouse soaking where I'd laid my head on the shoulder.

“Hey, girl,” she said.

“Hey, girl,” I said.

We stood apart, just a foot or so, arms still touching each other.

“Whoa,” I said. “What kind of hug was that?”

“Full-body hug. If you were my husband, I'd call it a full-genital hug. It doesn't mean what it sounds like. I don't want to have sex with you, but I want to touch as much of your body as I can, so you feel my love for you.”

“That is so clichéd,” I said.

“So get googoo. Sometimes I love getting googoo. So what do you want?'

“More coffee.”

We sat at her breakfast table, sipped the hot coffee.

“Thanks,” I said. “I guess, okay, I really learned something there.”

“Me, too. I never thought of different kinds of hugs as, what do you call it? A tell? Okay. You want my full tell-all catalogue of hugs?

“Snotty women. Bitches. They don't want to hug you, you sure as hell don't want to hug them, but say it's a party, it's a formal affair, women hug at those things. So a bitch hug is like this. They turn sideways, they lean forward from the waist, so if they touch you at all it's from their side. They touch your back and immediately pull away from you.”

“Hey,” I said. “I've got a variation of that. Let's call it, uh, shy guy, no, don't-really-know-how-to-hug guy. Turns his whole body sideways, not all the way, forty-five degrees, and steps into you. Pats you on the back. Three, four pats at most.”

“Not a genital hug at all, that's for sure.”

We finished the coffee and poured two more cups, but in the process we lost track of any need to talk about hugs. I've never,
ever
felt so close to another woman.

“God, you're something,” I said.

“Well, God has a lot to do with it.” We clinked coffee mugs, and simultaneously said the exact same thing. “Hey, I just got a new girlfriend.”

She giggled, held a finger to her mouth, lips pressed together, held out her right hand, extended the pinkie, waved the hand at me to do the same until I linked my pinkie with hers. “What did you wish?” she said.

But my wishes were far too complex to even describe.

 

She walked me out to my car. We fiddled with the sense of not wanting to say goodbye, but having to do it anyway. Leaning on the mailbox, we both heard a rustling inside and without thinking she grabbed and pulled down the lid and jumped back in fright as a huge diamondback rattlesnake uncoiled and dropped to the ground to slither away.

“My God,” Mary said. “My God, my God, my God.”

“Let it go,” I said. Reaching inside the mailbox, a postcard inside. I handed it to her and she blanched and dropped the card. I picked it up, recognized the card
from the online casino website. The movie promo postcard for
La Bruja
.

Bold, red handwritten words across the card.

No me jodas
.

The death card.

I called Alex for help.

“Alex!” I shouted. “Alex, whoever we use for personal security. Get a team out to my house. Right now. I'll explain. Just do it.

“You've got to come with me,” I said to Mary.

“Where, what do you mean, I can't leave.”

“Get Ana Luisa.” Pulling the Beretta from my back, waving Mary back to her house. “Just get her, now.”

“What should I, I can't just leave.”

“Don't bring anything. Get Ana Luisa, come back to the car.”

I racked the Beretta's slide, the
clickclack
reverberating. She ran into the house and returned immediately with Ana Luisa and I drove like a drunk, weaving in and out of lanes, up to River and down to Campbell, south of Campbell, eyes always on my mirrors, until I cut in front of a silver Hummer and dropped over the hill down to my driveway, where two cars sat, doors open, and five men with weapons pointed at us.