Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  Duval looks amused. He takes the plates I hand him. ‘Well certainly this is a lot more elegant than we’re used to – isn’t it, Taco?’ He nudges the dog affectionately with the toe of his boot. ‘I usually eat straight out of a frying pan, and Taco, whose manners aren’t nearly as refined as mine, prefers to eat off the floor.’ At the mention of his name, Taco settles himself under the table with a wheezy yawn. ‘Although last night, as it happens, we ate like kings.’ Duval takes the matches from my hand and relights the spluttering wick of one of the candles. ‘We built a fire outside and grilled fresh fish.’

  ‘Fresh fish?’ Having lived on nothing but red meat since January I feel quite giddy at the thought. ‘There are nights I dream of fresh fish.’

  ‘Well, stick around long enough,’ Duval says casually, ‘and I’ll make sure you get some.’

  He catches my eye and, self-conscious suddenly, I turn and busy myself with oven gloves, then hoist the skillet on to the table.

  ‘So how did you end up in Temerosa, you and Benjamín?’

  ‘Benjamín stumbled across it on one of his crossings. It was owned by an old man up in Bisbee.’

  ‘And he didn’t mind?’

  ‘He never bothered us. No one bothered us until those Toronto sharks of yours bullied him into selling.’

  ‘How inconvenient for you.’

  ‘On the contrary, it was wonderful. It was a miserable little cabin before they paid us to put in electricity and water.’

  ‘You fleeced them, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course, but don’t think they didn’t deserve it. They didn’t have the first idea what they were doing.’

  Like me, I think. I spoon the pork onto plates. The meat is soft and falls apart to the touch. ‘So you squatted in a town that didn’t belong to you, you used other people’s money to make yourself more comfortable, then, as thanks, you bankrupted them.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t claim all the credit myself,’ Duval replies cheerfully. ‘There were other like-minded people fleecing them all over the States. They owned dozens of towns like Temerosa. Bought them up with the idea of renovating them and selling them to – and I quote – “The New Pioneers of the West”, for which read a bunch of white bigots living in exclusionary gated communities.’

  ‘And then we came along.’

  ‘Yes.’ He pauses. ‘Then you came along.’

  I look down at my plate, feeling awkward, a little angry. No wonder Duval had always seemed so scornful of the plans for the town.

  ‘I used to think about you, you know,’ Duval says quietly. ‘I’d lie upstairs, stare at the moon through that rotten little square of a window and wonder what you were doing on the other side of it.’

  I look up to see him smiling and remember his resistance to widening the window.

  ‘And what was I doing?’

  ‘Well, to be sure, I fell asleep before I got that far.’

  I laugh.

  ‘I had it all worked out you know – you, your husband, your London life.’

  ‘My London life,’ I repeat and the words sound far away and unfamiliar coming out of my mouth.

  ‘I imagined you ruthlessly efficient by day, juggling children, housekeepers, shopping, lunches . . .’

  ‘Ah . . . that sort of woman.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘At night you would get ready to go out in front of a long mirror, frowning at invisible worry lines. Then you would stop in to kiss the children good night before stepping out to meet your friends to discuss over expensive bottles of wine which part of the world you would next choose to turn into your playground.’

  ‘So a spoilt, shallow socialite then,’ I say lightly. ‘What a contrast to your Zorro; Duval, the quixotic smuggler of men, selflessly sacrificing your creature comforts for a life helping the poor and the desperate.’

  He laughs at the pique in my voice. ‘First of all, very little I have ever done is selfless; secondly, I now had all the comforts in the world thanks to your timely UPS shipment.’

  I pick at a shard of pork on the side of the pan. ‘And she was happy? This pampered soulless creature?’

  ‘She was bored, lonely.’

  I look away. ‘Not the world’s most flattering picture.’

  ‘Ah, but I didn’t need to flatter you. You were merely a figment of my imagination.’

  ‘And now you’re faced with the disappointment of flesh and blood.’

  Duval knocks a cigarette out of his pack. ‘All those months I imagined you dissolute, perhaps snobbish, certainly a little spoilt, but at no time did I ever picture you guzzling pork with your fingers at the kitchen table, barefoot, in some torn gypsy dress, with a great big dirty Band-aid on your calf.’

  I feel the heat in my cheeks. The dress is dark green, fitted around the bust, with a skirt flared to just below the knee. I could never bear to throw it out because it was my favourite. I always thought the tear wasn’t noticeable.

  ‘Why did you come back, Alice?’

  I push away from the table and gather the plates. I don’t know how to answer him. I’ve not been able to explain it, either to Robert, to my children, or even to myself. God knows, I wish I had something tangible to run away from. An abusive husband, a crime I’d committed or a court order to defy, but there had been nothing like that. How can I explain that I left London because I felt numb, because I couldn’t breathe there any more?

  It’s hard to admit you’re not happy. Surrounded by so many ‘good things’ – nice house, healthy children, a decent father for them – it seems almost churlish to be discontented. You’re not supposed to complain so not only are you dissatisfied but you find yourself feeling guilty about being dissatisfied. It’s a bad thing to have feelings you’re not allowed.

  ‘Perhaps there should be a witness protection programme for people on the run from bad marriages,’ Duval says. ‘Leave your life behind, change your name, slip into anonymity.’

  I nod. Anonymity. A clean slate. How tempting. Mrs R. Coleman could once again become Alice Porter, all baggage emptied and gone. I have a sudden flashback to the day I met Robert. He’d been laughing, at the top of the world, literally, 10,000 feet up a mountain in Switzerland, ready to launch himself down a lethal black run. I’d married him for that energy. A sporty daredevil, there was nothing in the world he seemed afraid of, and it took a long time before it occurred to me that this bravery was arrogance and that what I’d taken as intelligence turned out to be an almost biblical conviction about his own ideas. Age lent his boyish enthusiasm a faintly boorish edge and, with it, he became louder, more emphatic. He wanted everything bigger, better, and he became obsessed with getting it.

  ‘I think women sign on for some ideal when they get married, and when they realize they haven’t got anything close to what they want, they bury their disappointment. Discontented women are like pressure cookers. The steam rises and one day they just reach boiling point.’

  ‘Have you ever been married?’

  ‘Yes.’ He uses the word deliberately. As full stop, and obediently I change the subject.

  ‘So how did it begin . . . the schoolroom, the workers? How do people find you?’

  ‘I keep a radio on, I get tip-offs from the Border Patrol.’

  ‘From Winfred?’

  He nods. ‘In the beginning I just wanted to understand. Estella, all the others, how it could have happened, why it still happens so often. I began to stumble across people and I realized they had no idea what they’d let themselves in for. Men who’d never before left their home town. Women crossing in high-heeled shoes. Children. Not enough water for even half the journey they were undertaking.’ He shrugs. ‘I took to keeping supplies in the schoolhouse and after a while Temerosa became an open secret, a place people could head for if they got into trouble.’ He collects his cigarettes off the table. ‘The problem was I started to see the same faces, over and over again. So many of them got caught and sent back. The greener they
were, the more they stood out. Out of frustration more than anything, I taught them a few words of English. I got rid of their Mexican clothes and dressed them in more invisible American ones. I gave them a background, a home town in the US, a sports team they could root for. They earned a little money working on the town and sometimes that was all it took for them to stay under the radar.’

  ‘So, a one-man rescue team—’

  ‘One man? No.’ He shakes his head. ‘For every law-abiding American citizen who believes the most constructive use of their firearms is to shoot a Hispanic, there are others who know they can’t get by without their Mexican workers. There are ranchers who cook up pig roasts to welcome them back and help them fill out applications for US citizenship. There are people dotted all along the border who build water towers and worry themselves sick about doing the right thing.’

  ‘Nora?’

  ‘Nora, yes.’ He hesitates.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Border politics comes in murky shades of grey. The good, the bad and the ugly can all end up on the same side at different times. Nora’s well meaning, but she’s a wild card. There’s something not quite right.’ He shakes his head again. ‘I tend give her a wide berth.’

  ‘Not the most fortunate choice of words.’

  He chuckles. ‘They say she used to be a great beauty.’

  I picture the mottled flesh of Nora’s backside spilling over her trousers, the tobacco-streaked teeth.

  ‘They say unrequited love put paid to Nora. Someone broke her heart and it never got put back together again.’

  ‘Not you, I hope.’

  He laughs. ‘That’s one sin I don’t need laid at my door.’ He reaches for his hat and I realize with a start how late it is. He stands up and we face each other a little awkwardly. ‘Well, thank you for dinner, it’s always nice to have a fellow fugitive to break bread with.’

  ‘Maybe, but the trouble with fugitives is that they get caught eventually.’

  ‘Ah no.’ He smiles. ‘Some die a bloody death in the desert and have their bones picked clean by buzzards.’

  ‘I owe you an apology, Duval.’

  ‘No. You don’t.’

  ‘I thought pretty bad things of you.’

  He puts on his hat. ‘Don’t be fooled, I’m here only until I find what I’m looking for. The same will be true for you.’

  ‘And what if I never find what I’m looking for?’

  ‘Then you’ll stay lost,’ he says lightly.

  ‘Sounds lonely.’

  ‘Can be.’ He rests his hand on the doorknob, a quick flash of a smile behind his eyes. ‘Goodnight then, Alice Coleman,’ he says and, touching the brim of his hat, steps out into the black night.

  part two

  22

  ‘Now this one is my favourite,’ Helen Hogan confides, hands fluttering along the wingspan of a large bronzecoloured eagle. ‘But of course each piece is so special, so absolutely unique’ She turns and glances mistily back at a stallion on another side table and then to a more recently admired wall plaque, which appears to depict a horse’s head dissolving into cloud. ‘They all come from the same gallery in Austin. The artist in question specializes in the wilderness. Look at the detail! The beak! Those eyes! So realistic, don’t you think?’ She angles the sculptured head towards me. ‘Go ahead, touch it! It won’t bite!’

  Obediently, I turn the bird by its beak. It moves surprisingly easily over the polished surface. ‘Whoa there!’ Helen chuckles, and I get the feeling that this is a party trick she has played often before.

  ‘So light!’ I exclaim dutifully.

  ‘Well, see, that’s the beauty of them!’ she says excitedly. ‘They look like they’re made out of bronze, but in fact they’re made out of composite! Isn’t that clever? We’re travelled people, as you can see, bin all over the Midwest, but I can tell you, I’ve never found this artist’s equal anywhere.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Of course you can.’ She lays a hand on my arm. ‘Coming from London an’ all, but out here it’s real hard to find people who appreciate good taste.’ She glances across the room to where the other wives are sitting and drops her voice even lower. ‘They do their best, ‘course, but I guess they just lack the . . .’ she gropes for the right word, ‘well you know . . . the sophistication.’

  The sculptures are ugly and pretentious and in keeping with the rest of the house, through which I’ve just been led on a painfully intimate tour, encouraged at every opportunity to be touchy-feely with a variety of objects from the scalloped bound edges of the apricot towels to the gold taps on the matching Jacuzzi. Worse, the entire thing had been punctuated by a loud roaring as the Hogan teenagers circled the house on quad bikes like latter-day Indian braves rousting a covered wagon.

  ‘Tucker and Cody,’ Helen had mused, ‘why, if it’s not the quads, it’s the snowmobiles. Jeff bought ’em horses, but the boys took one look and said, “Ma, if those things ain’t got an engine, we don’t want to ride ’em.” Teenagers, huh? But then I guess you got all that still to come.’

  I’d clucked something empathetic, cursing myself for caving in to Robert’s pressure and accepting a tea date with the Texas Family Hogan.

  Back in the main room we join the wives of Jeff’s two business partners, who are crouching underneath a massive chandelier constructed from intertwined antlers and hooves and suspended from the ceiling by a thick brass chain. Everything in this house is equally super-sized. The chocolate chip cookies which Helen is now pressing upon the women are too big for the plate, the studded red-leather sofa on which they’re sitting is too big for the room, and the room itself, too big for the house.

  Jeff Hogan’s ‘ranch’ is 10,000 feet of new-build vertical log home. ‘Finished only this summer, and quite our dream project,’ Hogan had said, although one might imagine a little less dreamy for the two building companies he boasted of putting out of business during its construction.

  ‘The landscape artist comes from California,’ Helen is still puffing up to the wives, ‘so she has that “big picture” mentality but then Ague is still such a small town, isn’t it?’ She points through the window at some cabbagy-looking shrubs. ‘She landscaped the whole of our garden with native desert vegetation. They attract these big ol’ colourful butterflies in the spring.’

  ‘God sure has blessed Arizona with extremely di-verse landscapes and creatures,’ one of the wives whispers and I look through the window, wondering how on earth to escape.

  April has turned into May and spring is giving way to summer. Today is another big blue. Outside the air is hot and dry. Through the swagged curtains the sun winks and beckons. Inside the air-conditioning is on full blast. I pull my fleece around me and gnaw away at the biscuit, my mind drifting to Temerosa. I hear the familiar echo of the hammer, the distant whine of the drill. The first phase of work on the town is nearing completion: the boarding house and even some of the smaller cabins awaiting only their doors to be finished. I picture Duval planing them flat on the worktable, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Now when I walk down to the town each morning, I watch for the smile in his eyes.

  I’ve found there is another Arizona to be seen apart from the border. Duval takes me riding through hills covered in morning glory, up narrow mountain passes where long thin Douglas firs look like forests of unopened umbrellas. He weaves his pickup round serpentine roads, climbing to a vertiginous 9,000 feet in the Santa Catalina Mountains from where the world looks like it’s been created by some God playing whimsical balancing games with stalagmites and boulders. In the high desert, he lowers me down into the narrow confines of slot canyons whose towering stone walls are indented with the fossils of strange prehistoric sea monsters. And here is the West I have dreamed of exploring, one of such bewildering scenery changes and harsh beauty that sometimes I feel that to surrender to it completely, to one day curl up and die here, might not be such a bad thing after all.

  ‘Go on, take another one.’ Helen is again bear
ing down upon us with the plate of biscuits. ‘They’re fresh out of the box, arrived FedEx only yesterday from the Gourmet Bake Company. They do bread, pies, glazed hams, even meatloaf, all home-made.’ She whips a catalogue off the table. ‘Jeff’s an investor; he always saw a big future in mail-order food and he was right!’

  ‘He sure is a fine man,’ the wives echo dutifully.

  ‘Hell, yes he is,’ Helen says gaily. ‘Sometimes you have to kiss every frog in the world to find your prince!’ And I have to bite down on my lip not to laugh.

  ‘Say! Talk of the devil!’ Helen brushes the clinging crumbs off her velour tracksuit and springs nimbly to her feet as Jeff, rival tour completed, enters the room flanked by his investors. Neither are local. Lane, a stocky man from Albuquerque, seems terminally ill at ease with himself and had earlier mumbled an introduction from the corner of his mouth. The second man, Selby, is all bone and sinew and nerves. He stares at me curiously as Hogan advances towards us mid-anecdote.

  ‘. . . so I’d been meaning to get the number off Mrs Coleman for an age.’ He bestows a genial wink on me. ‘Then last week I found myself at the realtor’s office and Cathy just happened to mention she had a contact number for Mr Coleman in her documentation, so I said to myself, “Jeff! Seize the moment! Give this man a call!”’ He breaks into a snowy-capped smile. ‘And real glad I am, too, cos if you don’t mind my saying, Mrs Coleman, your husband sounds like a fine fellow.’