Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  He shoves the man hard. Taken by surprise, the guard loses his balance and drops to his knee, somehow managing to keep one arm pressed into the neck of the squirming child. His other hand scrabbles for his gun. ‘Fuck you . . . who the fuck?’ he splutters, but Duval doesn’t hesitate. He grabs the man’s arm and yanks it behind his back with such force that the gun flies out of his hand and slithers along the road towards me. Unexpectedly freed, the boy hightails it back to his friends, still jeering and screaming encouragement from the sidelines.

  ‘Beat it,’ Duval shouts, ‘all of you. ¡Lárguense! ¡Que se pierdan!’ And they scatter. I stare at the gun lying in front of me on the cobbled stones and feel scared, unsure whether to pick it up or kick it into the gutter. The border guard gets to his feet shakily and I think that’s the end of it, but it’s not. In his hand is a knife. He thrusts it towards Duval in a series of short chopping movements.

  ‘Back down,’ Duval says. In answer, the guard lunges once more, drawing his arm back and striking with a trajectory that for one terrible moment looks like it will end with the knife plunged into Duval’s neck, but Duval moves like a fighter. Quick, light, he sidesteps the blow effortlessly, and bringing his fist up to his shoulder he strikes the man once with the point of his elbow, and this time the guard goes down for good. For a frozen second no one moves. Not the guard, slumped on his belly, nor Duval bent over him. Then I sense something, some movement out of the corner of my eye, and I turn in time to see a car, headlights off, rolling slowly back-wards down the side street until it disappears from view.

  ‘You okay?’ Duval takes hold of my wrist and gently removes the gun from my hand, which is just as well as I am barely aware of having picked it up.

  ‘Duval . . .’ My heart pounds uneasily.

  ‘What?’

  I glance again at the side street. ‘I think someone’s watching us.’

  Duval narrows his eyes, but the road is empty, quiet. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘What about him?’ I look back at the unconscious guard.

  ‘He’ll be waking up soon.’ He slips the gun into his pocket. Come on, I want you out of here.’

  He grips my elbow and we hurry towards the border like Reuben’s disciples, hugging walls and looking over our shoulders until we merge with the hustle of the main strip and beyond that the reassuring exodus flowing unremittingly into the US.

  The only sound in the truck is the death rattle of the aircon unit and the dry panting of Taco, who crouches precariously on the worn upholstery of the back seat like an only child starved too long of attention.

  ‘Alice,’ Duval says and I turn to him.

  ‘Don’t go home. Stay with me tonight.’ He touches his hand to my face and I feel hopelessly torn in two. I think of the children asleep in their beds and I think of Benjamín, loyal Benjamín, dozing upright in a chair outside their rooms, and part of me wants to go home, to crawl into Jack’s bed, to curl up beside the inert form of my son and hold him close for all life’s worth; but a bigger part of me wants to stay, and I know that it will be Benjamín who will take little M-E onto his lap when she stumbles from her room with a bad dream, Benjamín who will stroke away her fears, and Benjamín into whose neck she will whisper, ‘I love you, I love you with the guts of my heart,’ because I’m looking at Duval’s face in the blackness of the truck and I want to feel the heat of his skin against mine, I want to feel him inside me again before it’s too late, because tonight an invisible hand has flipped the hourglass on our time together and the sand is fast running through.

  27

  My heart feels enormous and swollen in my chest, like someone has put a bicycle pump to its main valves and blown it up out of all proportion with the rest of my body. I move torpidly through the cabin, a conscious sleepwalker, a dreamer, only partially following the progress of Emmy’s drawings and Jack’s cardboard box fossil dig, all the while thinking that if I pinch myself hard enough I might wake again to the sun rising and Duval kneeling on the hard ground by the fire, the smell of ashes and coffee pungent in the morning air. So when the telephone rings the noise barely penetrates my brain. Nevertheless I pick up on automatic pilot and it’s only when I hear my name for the third time that the real world comes sharply and sickeningly back into focus.

  ‘Alice! Alice, can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, I can hear you.’

  ‘Where have you been! I rang all last night, earlier this morning even!’

  It’s the words ‘this morning’ that jar. ‘What time is it with you?’ I feel around for my watch in my trouser pocket.

  ‘Same time as you,’ Robert says. ‘I’m in Ague, Alice. Ague!’ he repeats and a cold hand squeezes my heart back down to size, smaller and smaller it shrinks until it’s no bigger than a tiny unyielding pip.

  ‘I flew into Tucson last night, I’ve been calling ever since. Where the hell have you all been?’

  I picture the phone ringing to an empty cabin, the children in a messy jumble of legs and cracker crumbs on Benjamín’s sofa. ‘In the end I thought I’d better jump in a taxi. Ridiculously expensive,’ I can hear Robert saying, ‘and then of course I couldn’t remember exactly where the turn-off was so I came here and by the time I checked in, well ... it was late and I didn’t want to wake you.’ He carries on talking. About the hotel, something about the room. I manage to ask him where he is and he confirms Prestcott’s and instructs me to come and pick him up and all the time there is this lump forming in my throat.

  It’s not tears, though. It’s more like a cat’s hair ball, or undigested pig’s fat.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ Emmy and Jack hurl themselves into their father’s arms. The children jabber at him excitedly. There’s a lot of delight and disbelief, a lot of kissing. I watch them giving him all the unconditional love and affection that I don’t feel and it’s so painful that I have to look away. Afterwards it’s my turn. We embrace each other with stiff robot arms, then veer clunkily away from a kiss on the lips. Robert smells of aeroplanes and London pavements and a life I thought I’d left far behind.

  In the truck he leans his head against the window with an epic sigh.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine. Tired. Long flight, long drive, you know . . .’

  ‘You should have told me you were coming.’

  ‘It was all a bit spur of the moment. I called you as soon as I landed. Where were you last night?’

  ‘In Mexico!’ Emmy pipes up from the back.

  ‘Mexico?’ Robert looks confused.

  Mindful of the children’s Spock-like ears, I come up with something vague. Pots and pans for the cabin, late-night shopping in Nogales—

  ‘So who was looking after the children?’

  ‘Benjamín.’

  ‘The Mexican? On his own?’

  ‘Of course on his own.’

  ‘Alice . . .’ he starts uncomfortably.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Daddy, I want you to come and see my bedroom,’ Emmy butts in. ‘I painted it all by myself. Daddy, I painted the whole house by myself!’

  ‘Did you, darling?’ Robert presses a handkerchief to the sheen of sweat on his neck. ‘Well done you!’

  ‘I helped too,’ Jack says. ‘We all did, even Benjamín.’

  ‘Benjamín, eh?’ Robert says with forced heartiness. ‘Benjamín seems quite a favourite round here.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy, I love him most outside anyone in my family. He’s my best friend.’

  ‘That’s great, Emmy,’ he replies hollowly. ‘I want to talk to this Benjamín.’ He turns back to me. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Picking up building materials,’ I lie effortlessly. ‘He’ll be back later.’ Benjamín had taken Dolores to the safety of the schoolroom, to Duval. ‘Tell him my husband’s here, tell him . . .’ I’d faltered under Benjamín’s expression and suddenly pictured him shouting bitter words at his own faithless wife as he stood on the doorstep of her lover’s house.

  ‘I’m sorry, Benjamín,’ I sa
id quietly. ‘You must think I’m a terrible person.’

  ‘Noh, Alice, noh. I will take Dolores.’ He took my hand and briefly held it to his ruined jaw as though it were a comforting ice pack. ‘Be careful, Alice,’ he’d said.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of him alone with the children,’ Robert says and there’s a throb of aggression in his voice. ‘I don’t trust him, I never have, right from the word go. Hogan says—’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I have no interest in anything Hogan says.’

  ‘Well he’s been my only means of finding out what’s going on here,’ Robert says robustly. ‘In fact I get to speak to him more than I get to speak to my wife these days.

  ‘Hogan’s a dentist from Houston. He has no clue what’s going on anywhere.’

  ‘He says Temerosa is being used as a smuggling route, that somebody local is helping bring Mexicans, drugs and God only knows what else across. He says unless we act now it’s going to wreck the value of the property.’

  ‘Well, he’s wrong.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to trust this builder of yours, Duval, or whatever his name is. Says he’s dishonest, says he’s been ripping you off—’

  ‘Robert . . . enough, please!’

  ‘Alice, don’t you understand? I’ve been worried sick! You and the children here on your own. That’s not unreasonable, is it? Surely that’s not unreasonable. Anyone would be worried. It would have been thoroughly irresponsible not to have come.’ He looks at me beseechingly now. ‘I didn’t warn you, because I knew you’d just put me off. I’m sorry.’ He stretches out a tentative hand.

  I take a deep breath. Of course it’s not unreasonable. Not only is everything he says perfectly reasonable, it’s also true. But it changes nothing. I take his hand in mine. His palm is soft, clammy. I close my eyes, try to find some thread of decency to hang on to, but it’s no good. It’s Duval’s hand I’m holding. Duval’s rough, dry fingers intertwined with mine.

  ‘Look, Daddy!’ The children point out landmarks as the butterscotch truck winds its familiar way along the mountain road. The mess of fallen rock. A deadly looking bayonet plant. The small khaki-coloured shrubs on the roadside, their leaves made brittle by the sun. ‘Nearly there, nearly there,’ Emmy crows with excitement as the cattle grids rumble beneath us.

  ‘What if he’s right, Alice?’ Robert asks.

  I ease my hand free. ‘Why don’t you just wait and see for yourself? And for a glimmer of a moment, I try to imagine a way for this all to work out: Robert will come, Robert will be reassured, Robert will quickly have his fill of the children and return home. There will be other nights to follow and other fires to build.

  Outside the cabin three Border Patrol trucks are parked in front of the deck.

  ‘What the—?’ Robert squints through the cloudy windscreen. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Winfred!’ Emmy shouts.

  ‘Who’s Winfred? Who are all these people?’ Robert strains against his seatbelt and I begin to feel sick. None of these cars belongs to Winfred. I slow the truck down. Dolores, I think irrationally. They’ve come for Dolores.

  ‘Who are they? Why are they here?’ Robert knuckles his eyes as though the strangers might disappear with a blink.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know. I cut the engine and help the children out of the car. If the Border Patrol had found out about Dolores, they surely wouldn’t have sent three cars with a posse of six, no . . . seven armed border guards. I count them, two on the deck, three tramping along the path from the boarding house and two more approaching us from the side of the cabin, and it’s only now that I picture the guard lying prostrate on the cobblestones of a Nogales street and suddenly remember the weight of his gun in my hand.

  ‘Mrs Coleman?’ The nearest man approaches.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll handle this.’ Robert steps in front of me and holds out his hand. ‘I’m Robert Coleman,’ he says, ‘owner of this place.’

  Inside the cabin they ask questions. Do I know where he is? Do I know where he lives? ‘He’s been supervising building operations on the town for over four months but you don’t know where he lives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have a number for him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do I get in touch with him then?’

  I tell them I’ve never really needed to, that he shows up when he says he will, that he’s very reliable.

  ‘Then why isn’t he in the town now? And why isn’t there any work going on in the town?’

  ‘Because there’s a break in the schedule,’ I say charily. ‘Look, what’s going on?’

  ‘Did you see him yesterday, ma’am?’

  I try to think straight. Had anyone seen us together apart from Reuben? Esteban?

  ‘No,’ I say and my mouth feels as dry as the desert.

  ‘What about this morning? Did you see him this morning?’

  ‘This morning?’ I repeat the words as though they were a century ago, another lifetime. My fingers touch the edge of the flint, still in my pocket. I shut out the faces of the men in front of me and instead see Duval’s.

  ‘Look.’ He’d put the piece of flint in my hand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘An arrowhead.’

  ‘It’s broken,’ I’d said, disappointed.

  ‘They’re so fragile they’d break while the Indian kids were carving them.’ He had run his finger along its sharpened edge. ‘This one was probably thrown away in disgust by some neophyte teenager.’

  ‘How long did it take to make one?’

  ‘A real goody-two-shoes Indian, one who practised and listened to his elders, would probably be able to knock one out in about fifteen minutes.’ He’d closed my hand around it. ‘Keep it safe. It’ll make a handy weapon one day . . .’

  I open my eyes to the expectant faces of the Border Patrol.

  ‘Look, please just tell me what’s this is all about.’

  ‘Yes, what’s this Duval character done?’ Robert says loudly.

  Agent Butterfield and Agent McArthy look at each other.

  ‘Henry Duval is wanted for murder, sir.’

  ‘Murder!’ Robert paces the kitchen floor. ‘Wanted for murder! And all this time he’s been here, in the town, with my children! It’s fucking irresponsible of you, Alice. This is exactly what I was afraid of, exactly what Hogan’s been warning you about, but would you listen? No. You had to have your own way. You always have to have your own way.’ He smashes his fist on the counter but it’s all white noise in my head and I block it out while I rake through the possibilities.

  What could have happened? The guard had not been badly hurt. It had been a punch, no more. Had somebody taken advantage of him being down? Had the street kids returned to lay into him? If so, could Duval still be held responsible? I look over at the telephone. ‘Promise me,’ Chavez had said. ‘If there’s trouble of any kind, you’ll call.’ Why hadn’t he come himself? Did he even know? I want to call and tell him there’d been a mistake, tell him I’d been with Duval, but it’s not the thought of Robert that stops me, nor the questions which would inevitably follow, but something else. A fleeting uneasiness that leaves traces of acid in my stomach every time I picture it – the image of the car on the side street, silently rolling back out of sight . . .

  ‘Alice, tell me you haven’t become so removed from reality that you fail to understand the seriousness of this? You’ve been employing this man for five months. This could rub off on all of us. Make any potential investor run a mile.’

  ‘Robert, please, stop being so melodramatic.’

  ‘Am I, though, am I? Where is he then?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This cowboy builder of yours.’ His voice rises with exasperation. ‘I mean he’s supposed to be your foreman, running your project. So why isn’t he at work? It’s not like today is bank holiday Monday – or is it bank holiday Monday? Is it, Alice, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is. I told yo
u already. He comes and goes.’

  ‘And that doesn’t seem a little suspicious to you? Oh, dear God!’ he explodes.

  Emmy materializes in the doorway. ‘Mummy, why are you fighting with Daddy?’ Her face puckers. ‘He’s only just gotten here today.’

  ‘Emmy’s right.’ Robert knuckles his eyes again then stretches out his hand to me and when I don’t go to him, he comes to me and determinedly gives me a hug under the raptor eye of our daughter. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he mumbles to the top of my head, ‘this isn’t your fault, you weren’t to know. Of course you weren’t to know.’ His skin smells oddly sweet and I hold my breath. ‘How in your wildest dreams could you have imagined such a thing?’

  After lunch, without asking first, Robert drags his suitcase up the stairs to my bedroom. ‘Maybe I’ll take a quick shower.’ He yawns. ‘Might wake me up.’

  I try to think it’s not his fault. He doesn’t know who I am any more.

  Robert has put on weight. When he takes off his clothes, I look away.

  ‘What are these?’ He peers at one of Emmy’s ticker-tape labels on the light. ‘La lámpara.’ He peels it off. ‘You know the glue will stain it, don’t you?’

  ‘Leave it,’ I tell him. ‘Emmy likes them, she’s learning Spanish.’

  ‘As if she’ll remember one word in a month’s time.’ Robert snorts.

  He wanders round the room picking up objects, fingering the books in the shelves, and I’m overcome with an intense wave of possessiveness. I’d forgotten what it feels like. The welling depression – when you hate the way their hair sits over their ears, when you hate the way they walk and talk. When the sound of their footsteps makes you want to curl up in the most hidden corner of the house. When finally even the smell of their skin repels you. That’s when you know love is dead.

  ‘I mean, thank God for Hogan,’ Robert is saying. ‘If he hadn’t been so bullish, I wouldn’t be here right now, and how would you have handled this mess then? I mean his instincts turned out to be completely right, you’ve got to give him that.’

  ‘Robert, please . . .’