Vandal Love (33 page)

Her father had called her a pagan for her love of the bayou and for what she’d named the Burn Season, when the junkyard men heaped trash and car parts—a fifth season like the Chinese New Year, she’d told him, and one that always coincided with her birthday. She saw her father as a good man, simple and unambitious, who lived for her and hid his love in quiet manias, cooking or historical novels or gangster movies. He was heavy-set, with a knobbed chin and a bulbous nose. She’d admired his big smudged hands, had believed there was nothing stronger in the world. When developers on the rise began building closed neighbourhoods with manors and clearing the forest along the bayou, he became an outspoken member of a local conservation group. All that fell within the limits of his little world he cherished. He remodelled frequently, tearing out divisions and letting in sunlight and jacking up the foundation so that doors no longer closed and faults appeared in the drywall, all of which he happily set right. He studied modern architecture and painted one outside wall sky blue and bottom-lit it. He took a course in making furniture and redesigned the interior for their proportions. On a chill February night, he drove her north while she slept and woke her in
the mountains of Tennessee so that she could walk in the snow for the first time.

When she’d fallen in love, he’d started exercising, going to a local boxing gym as a last means of fending off madness. He recalled lost vitality, and in the prolonged pauses when he leaned against the punching bag like an old friend, gasping, he thought more than he might otherwise have. His life, he could see, was fabulous: for more than a decade he’d been famous in his daughter’s eyes, and nothing, not poverty or the silences and gawking stares at their size when they entered a room, had so much as fazed them. Work and raising her had left little time for his regrets or guilt, and he’d learned to let the dead live, to breathe and come to him when they wished, sudden, violent with anger, or forgiving and filled with love. It was a shared space and none questioned the other. Years of being a father had taught him the true imperatives of love, and when he recalled Isa, so much fell away to this one clear impulse, absolute enough for him. The least sure of all roads, he now knew, was that which took you towards God, and only when he thought of his daughter, her beauty despite the violence of her birth—that she was one of the loved ones—did he look to the stars.

Late one afternoon he came home. He went to the bayou. The forest was as quiet as a guest bedroom but for the distant, low throttle of the interstate. Bright, nameless winter flowers grew from the mud, vivid even in the bluing light. A little gator nosed sadly through the murk. A mullet jumped three times, flashing its pale sides in
alarm. Across the marsh indolent men in red shirts and overalls were lighting up tires and seats, slashed ragtops and crushed plastic bumpers on the watery grass. Then he knew. The nearest path to the highway was through the pasture to the new housing development. He caught her there, his gym hours paying off. She had her backpack but had paused with sadness on the rise.

He tried to tell her why she couldn’t, the dangers, the impossibility, but he met the gaze of that girl who’d overcome fear in oratory contests and spell-outs and lead roles, who’d won her class in wrestling and had thrown firecrackers under the feet of an enemy mascot. Who’d done pull-ups on the bar and measured her biceps daily with a ribbon and told Bart that love could never last because no one had a heart big enough for a girl her size. In whose eyes he’d seen room for the light of it all, the supernova, the crushed beer bottles in gravel, the candle flames in the shards of wineglasses. He’d once warned that her children would be walruses like himself, that the good luck couldn’t last forever. The gods would be jealous.

The wind carried to them a sulphurous reek. Oh, they’re burning, she said with a voice of breathless regret, one he was familiar with and which had always flabbergasted him. Nearby, at the housing development, young men worked late, unloading sod rolled up like carpets and peeling it over the raked earth. The asphalt leading to the houses was fresh, the bulky structures set in barren spaces, their windows not yet installed so that they looked haunted, plastic flapping in doorways.

Listen, he said, and she, who’d loved him with tenacity and who’d always thought him understated, too good and calm, listened. Far off the wind was carrying away clouds, and at his words she was struck by the brightness of the sky, like the blue of a television screen when the DVD clicks on. Smoke muscled up. They stood and she listened until the fires flickered in the dead grass, until the sunset was a golden mist over swamps, the trees a single brambly presence.

I can’t imagine, she said. She thought of everything she could want, hardly able to breathe, of all that she might have and leave, the full fragrance of sweet winter mud, the cool nights reading together, the smell of burning in the wind, sudden and gone.

Wait, he said. Just a little longer. Wait.

Every letter brought home an answer, a mystery, a lost piece of history.

Harvey had been living in St. Louis under the name Juan Elhuésped. He meticulously coloured his moustache and eyebrows with permanent marker, and his home was in a sub-basement apartment in a dilapidated building built at the low end of an old canal and under the overhanging lower levels of an eight-storey parking garage. Only he and his Mexican allies could live comfortably under such low roofs, and with time they developed the large eyes and earthy stoutness of dwarves. He learned to eat tortillas slopped with canned beans, to drink cheap watery beer, to cross himself at the sight of misfortune and
to keep his silence while manicuring the lawns of wealthy citizens. He’d picked up a fair Spanish despite the laconic disposition of his friends. Together after work they went downtown and made laser photocopies of his passport.

Those months he’d kept the money belt hidden, wearing it always. He became savvy, tough, learned to spit long distances and to lie on the spur of the moment so that the few times the nylon belt was noticed, he said it was for intestinal problems and forced himself to pass gas. He contemplated the uses of his wealth, wondering how he could get out of the country, to Central America, where he was told the women were small and that he might live in sunny courtyards with banana trees of his own. He imagined that he could have himself deported to Mexico easily enough but was worried about having the money taken away by a mean Norteño border guard. The letter he’d received at Brendan Howard’s he’d kept only out of consideration that this might provide a possibility, that distant relations might be willing to help repatriate him. But at the moment he saw no reason to change. Being a fugitive had given him a practical edge, a keen sense of appreciation. He liked to pause and stretch and take deep breaths. The fragrances of life finally reached him, cut grass and turned earth, the ripe emanations of his own body. He liked the smell of deserted streets, the music at dusk and the way the black families on their porches paid him no mind. This was the true sadhu, he one day realized, on a neglected sidewalk, eating salty blackberries grown up around a fire hydrant.

One afternoon, when the police raided, he hid himself
in an old tire outside. After nightfall he slunk out, gave his limbs a shake, performed a few yogic stretches, then headed south. By now he knew the Mexican underground. In bread, laundry or delivery vans or sitting in compartments with rattling bottles of beer that he drank after popping the caps with his teeth, he made it to Louisiana. A dirt-brown blue-eyed Mexican of indigenous descent, he affected an overbite and a flatfooted step that hugged the earth, and, with his growing belly, looked like an upright squirrel. It was evening when he arrived.

Something was burning. Petals of ash descended over the yard and leaden billows that didn’t rise or dissipate drifted, dark clouds in the grass like sleeping hoboes. The house had one blue wall and high windows. The steps required that he lift on his knee in order for his foot to reach. He knocked. No one answered, and after he’d waited a while, the sky almost dark, he pulled on the door. He went inside. A few tall lamps were on. A pair of running shoes were big enough to be flowerpots, and the couch looked as if it were cut from living trees and had mattresses for cushions. Doorways were flush with the ceiling. From where he stood a kitchen stool had a strong soaring quality like that of the Eiffel Tower. With both hands he pulled out a chair and, using the rungs like those of a ladder, he climbed on. He kicked his feet a little, feeling this was a new world, unexpected and good. The final rays of sunset shone golden in the windows. He whistled a sad melody about a crying woman. Then he settled back, tired from his journey, closing his eyes and ready to wait.