Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  Benjamín takes it from me and fiddles with the knobs.

  ‘Dead,’ he says.

  In the spartan shadow of the water tank we wait for Duval, for Toribio Romo, for someone to come. One hour, two. After that I stop counting. Benjamín’s shoulder looks no worse, but I wonder how much more quickly the body dehydrates when wounded. How much further he will be able to go because today there is to be no miracle.

  ‘How long to Temerosa?’ I say eventually.

  Benjamín doesn’t reply. Very slowly he pushes back onto his feet.

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Not far.’ He lies and smiles his broken smile.

  Foot after foot. Step after step. I start to think about Estella and the baby and how it ended for both of them. For a surreal and muddled moment I think I must surely be the reincarnation of this girl. How else can the two of us be in love with the same man, be led over the border by the same man, be raped by the same man, and I wonder why fate has sunk her teeth into my ankle with such an obdurate bite . . . Then I pull myself together. I am not Estella and I will not lie down and I will not die here in the desert.

  Things unseen tear at my legs: burrs, seeds, thorns.

  I barely notice them any more. With every step, I walk closer to my children. There are tricks you can invent to keep your feet going. I find rhythms, random beats of songs. I mark the ground from one desiccated clump of mesquite to the next and start counting them, twenty clumps to the mile. I cross-reference footsteps with miles with mesquite bushes, looking for some neat algebraic answer which might lead to survival but the only thought that keeps coming to me is how vast the world is, and I feel lonelier than I ever thought it possible to feel.

  My mind begins to wander. It tortures me with watery images. A dripping tap. The mellifluous trickle of a brook. Above a choppy sea a gannet folds in its wings and dives into the waves. My hand dips into a rock pool for an orange sea shell. When I take it out, it’s cold from the water, then I realize that it’s not cold, but hot, burning hot, and stow it once more inside my shirt. I hear the cry of a greater black-backed gull and look up, hoping to find shade under its majestic wingspan, but there’s nothing up there, nothing except that sun, white, merciless and lethal. Dear God, if I come out of this alive, I will be a good mother.

  My sweet Emmy, Jack – I promise I will never leave you again.

  ‘Alice,’ Benjamín says urgently. ‘Alice.’ His voice is barely a voice at all. ‘Are you okay?’

  I look at him like he’s bonkers. Of course I’m okay. I’m actually doing pretty well. Considering.

  ‘You’ve stopped.’

  I shake my head. My body is on fire.

  Suddenly, he’s very close to me, his worried eyes looking into mine. I reach out towards his face. His skin is blistered. How drawn he looks, how ill. Oh, God, how much blood has he lost?

  ‘We must rest,’ he says.

  I blink at him. Yes, of course we must rest, then I discover that I am resting already, leaning against a rock and Benjamín has come back for me. Rest. I pretend to consider the idea. Should we or shouldn’t we? After all, it’s important to put up a good show. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because there’s a small stubborn part of me that wants Benjamín to tell Duval I was brave. That I tried. Big comfort that will be to Jack and Emmy.

  ‘Rest, Alice. Okay?’ Benjamín urges quietly. I nod my head at him. The sun is low on the horizon, but the heat is still overpowering. The four walls of the desert close in on us like a clay oven. My throat feels like someone has reached in and ripped a Band-aid off it. Every breath drawn is like swallowing dust, then the dust grows to sand, after that to the size of pebbles. I experiment with shallower and shallower breathing until I find a small space to suck the oxygen through where it hurts the least. There’s a funny sour taste in my mouth when I do this. I think I identify it as hope dying.

  The next time I look at the sun it’s as though someone has placed a sheet of tracing paper over it. The sky is drained of colour as day diffuses into night. I close my eyes. I long for blackness. I long for oblivion. I long for everything. I want to go home. Not Temerosa home, not London even, but the nostalgia and safety of childhood, before the mistakes are made and the dreams are shattered.

  ‘Benjamín?’ I hear myself croak, and my voice is a tiny person’s voice.

  ‘Sí, querida’, he answers, and his use of the endearment makes me want to cry again.

  ‘What are your children called?’

  ‘Clarita,’ he says. ‘Clarita, Jaime and Rosalita.’

  The next time I open my eyes I’m leaning against Benjamín, sort of propped up against his good shoulder. The time after that my head is resting on his legs and his hand is heavy on my hair.

  ‘M-E and Jack,’ I murmur. Will they ever forgive me? And my cowboy builder? Would he ever know what had happened? Would he understand?

  ‘That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The blind step in the dark and the freedom to take it.’ I close my eyes and see his face illuminated in the glow of the fire. He lies on his back and watches silently as I undress for him.

  Later I stir to find him still watching me.

  ‘Why aren’t you sleeping?’

  ‘I was thinking there was a cactus I never showed you,’ he says. ‘And I wanted to show you because it’s absolutely my number one cactus of them all. It’s the Night Flowering Cirrus, or the Midnight Cactus as some people call it, and most of the time it’s just an ordinary unremarkable little plant, but one night a year it blooms and nobody knows why and nobody knows when, but when it does it’s the most heart-stoppingly beautiful thing you ever saw.’

  ‘What happens to it after that?’

  ‘It dies.’

  ‘Bummer.’ I kiss him. ‘So which one of us here is the ordinary unremarkable little plant?’

  ‘Ah well, maybe both of us.’ He draws his arms around me. ‘Maybe one night like tonight, one extraordinary midnight moment, is the best you can ever hope for.’

  ‘What if I want more?’

  ‘Then you have to pay the price.’ He sees my expression and laughs. ‘Hey, didn’t you know,’ he says softly, ‘the only kind of love you can have as a fugitive is a stolen one.’

  ‘Alice.’ He’s calling my name from very far away. ‘Alice,’ he whispers, closer now.

  Water stings my lips and trickles into my mouth. I choke. A hand tightens underneath my shoulders. I struggle against the lead weights of my eyelids and open them to a sky no longer white, but navy and strewn with sapphires. Duval kneels beside me, holding the bottle of water. Behind him Benjamín hovers.

  ‘Santo Toribio,’ I whisper. I try to smile and my lip splits in two. ‘You heard us.’

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  ‘You heard us.’

  ‘Yes.’ He takes the weight of my head against his shoulder. ‘I heard you.’

  ‘On the radio?’

  ‘Shh.’

  ‘What happened to Hogan?’

  ‘Alice . . .’

  ‘You found us. I can’t believe you found us.’

  ‘Hush now,’ he says, but I hear the catch in his voice.

  The horses stand a little way off, snickering at a half moon. Duval has lit a fire. He cleans and bandages Benjamín’s shoulder. The sight of the gash, blackened and crusted takes my breath away. Afterwards he washes the cut on my head.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Winfred... I—‘

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I should never have trusted Chavez.’

  ‘How could you have known? No one knew.’

  ‘If I’d gone with the children, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘But you stayed.’ He strokes my hair. ‘With all the reasons in the world to run, you stayed.’

  31

  Benjamín dozes fitfully. The fire burns and I feel safe in Duval’s arms. He holds me and tells me to sleep but I’m afraid to. There aren’t ma
ny hours left for us. He touches his finger to the cut on my forehead.

  ‘How bad did he hurt you?’

  I hear the edge in his voice. I’m not sure which question he’s asking. I’m not even sure Benjamín has told him but it doesn’t make any difference, the answer is the same.

  ‘Not in any way that mattered.’

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he says flatly. ‘When I found the truck I thought you were dead. Then I found the body. I saw his face. I’ve never known Benjamín raise his voice, let alone his hand .. . I guessed then who it must be but I couldn’t be sure. All these years I never knew what he looked like. Turrón was just another ghost I was chasing.’ He stops abruptly, turns his head away. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive. You changed everything for me. You gave me my escape.’

  ‘But not your reality.’

  I press my face into his neck, wondering how I can ever give up this man.

  ‘I watched you that first day you came, Alice Coleman, looking out over the mountains, shading your eyes from the sun and you stood so still and you stared so intently – as though you wanted to take something from this place back home with you, only you couldn’t work out what, and I think you must have cast some kind of spell on me, because all those months I kept thinking about you until one day there you were, standing at the foot of my ladder, so angry, so haughty.’

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘Then sitting at the kitchen table, your plans spread everywhere, all those terrible building manuals you were trying to keep one step ahead with.’

  ‘You were outrageously patronizing.’

  He kisses my hair. ‘That day Winfred carried you unconscious into the schoolroom, your leg spouting blood like a Texas oil strike – and he put you in my arms and I said your name and you opened your eyes and replied “bastard” before promptly passing out again.’

  ‘Certainly did not.’

  He chuckles. ‘Yes you did and I knew then you were mine.’

  ‘I nearly turned you in.’

  ‘Well thanks to you and Benjamín, it seems I’m out of a day job anyway.’

  I fall silent. ‘What will happen to Dolores?’

  ‘They’ll put her on a bus. Send her back home. I can try to help her there.’

  ‘And then? What will you do?’

  ‘Ah you know,’ he says lightly, ‘retire. Open a little espresso bar in Ague, or perhaps an arts and crafts shop.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘No never, of course never.’ He kisses me. ‘Maybe I’ll go home . . .’

  ‘You have a home? I thought you were a hobo.’

  ‘A ranch in New Mexico. My father left it to me when he died. It’s near the Rio Grande. In the fall, Arctic geese and Sandhill cranes come to roost in the marshes and stay through the winter. I think you’d like it.’

  I touch my fingers to the creases in his jaw. How would it feel, I wonder – to be able to have something you’ve wanted so badly and for so long, to answer a desire that you’ve hidden away in the deepest part of yourself .. . ‘I have to go home, Duval.’

  ‘I know,’ he says simply, ‘I’ve always known.’

  I turn away. I don’t want him to see me cry.

  ‘There’s a window at the top of the house faces north’, he says, eventually. You can see for miles. When I was a boy I used to watch for my father out of that window.’ He turns my face back to him and smooths the hair out of my eyes. ‘Now, perhaps, I will watch for you.’

  I have the distinct sensation of the ground shifting beneath me. ‘The only kind of love you can have as a fugitive is a stolen one.’ Duval had said. In the sky a pale blue light tints the horizon. It begins to blur in front of my eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Watch for me.’

  I dream I am high up, alone in an eagle’s nest, and the straw lining it scratches my face. When the eagle returns, graceful, munificent, it allows me to cling to its back while it swoops low into the deep canyons and through the dry washes. Above us the sky is white, all colour bleached out by the sun. We fly high over El Turrón’s body, his face bloody no longer, but a blank mask of dust, and I pluck a feather from the eagle’s tail and watch it spiral slowly down towards him.

  The shouting breaks into my dream from somewhere far away. ‘¡Tenemos comida! ‘¡Tenemos agua!’ We have food! We have water! ‘¡Tenemos comida! ¡Tenemos agua!’ Louder now and constantly repeated, like a church bell tolling for late worshippers. Then an exclamation from somewhere close by. ‘Hikers! Can you credit it!’ Next thing I know, there’s a smell of piss and tobacco breath, and I’m being gathered up in a pair of enormous fleshy arms as though I’m no heavier than a pile of dirty washing.

  ‘This one looks pretty cooked!’

  I’m being leant upright against something hard but I’m still paralysed with sleep, every bone in my body aching and resistant.

  Duval’s voice now. ‘What the . . .’

  More shouting. ‘Over here, ‘nother one! A Mexcin!’

  A hand grips my wrist. ‘This one’s got a pulse!’

  Finally, I get my eyes open and, thoroughly disorientated, blink into the sweating, puce-red face of Nora.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Duval has his gun out.

  ‘Checking for dehydration.’ She steps back from me, stethoscope swinging round her neck, and places a meaty hand in the centre of his chest.

  ‘Now lay still, you’re confused.’

  ‘Good God, Nora! Get your hands off me.’

  ‘Nora?’ she echoes. ‘And just who the hell are you?’ Her eyes narrow then widen again with recognition. ‘Duval? What in God and sinners’ names . . .?’ She turns from him back to me. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’ she exclaims, her suspicion turning to something approaching glee. ‘Oh no, don’t tell me.’ A gargle of laughter bubbles up in her throat as her companion looks on in confusion.

  He is in his early fifties, with an unnaturally small face. His eyes dart fretfully between us as he helps Benjamín to his feet. ‘Temperature yesterday was up in three figures.’ He twists the flesh on his chin like a worry bead. ‘We saw the water tank all shot up and we figured . . . well, we figured we’d have a lot to do this morning.’

  ‘We caught you with the binoculars.’ Nora wipes her running nose on her sleeve. ‘Spotted the horses too. I told Milt I ain’t never seen no migrant on horseback, but we reckoned we’d better check it out anyways, and here y’all were, looking ‘bout as dead as dead can be.’

  ‘A few degrees hotter and you would have bin.’ Milt twists his chin a little more painfully. ‘But folks, I’m sorry if, well . . .’ Embarrassed, he looks up at Duval.

  ‘Sorry!’ Nora snorts. ‘Who’s sorry! We wasn’t to know Romeo and Juliet here decided to camp out and get sweet under the damn stars.’

  ‘And what with your friend bleeding and torn up . . .’ Milt turns to Benjamín, his face serious. ‘Say, do you mind telling us what’s been going on here?’

  Nora moves between fridge and stove, stripping piece after piece of rough-cut bacon from its greaseproof paper and laying them on the smoking griddle. Through the window of the bar, I watch Duval tying up the horses.

  ‘Wife’s on the way.’ Milt lays a hand on Benjamín’s arm. ‘She works part-time up at the rabbit clinic in Patagonia, she’ll have you stitched up in no time.’

  ‘And this one?’ Nora stands at the small table beside us, pointing a pair of blackened tongs in my direction. ‘Gonna stitch up that head as well?’

  I demur politely, quite happy not to be sewn together by a part-time bunny veterinarian, however well meaning.

  ‘Suit yourself, but we need to do something with you.’ She plucks at my arm. ‘How ‘bout a shower then?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Duval says, walking in.

  Nora tosses him a scathing look. ‘Don’t get excited. I ain’t wasting precious hot water on no man.’

  ‘Always the good Samaritan, Nora.’ He puts his hand on the back of my head
and rubs it gently.

  ‘Hey, leave her be, can’t you see it’s a woman’s touch she needs now?’ Nora thrusts the tongs at him. ‘Make yourself useful, cowboy, and cook the damn breakfast.’

  Reluctantly, I follow Nora up the narrow stairs, trying to navigate between the blisters on my feet. I hadn’t wanted to move from the table. I just wanted to stay close to Duval and Benjamín and feel safe. Nora disappears into the shower and bangs around a bit before reversing out, wiping her hands on her thighs. ‘Takes a while to crank up, it’ll be hot in about ten.’ She tosses me a towel. ‘Meantime, better fix you up with some clean duds.’

  I look down at my torn clothes, feeling curiously attached to them.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, these are fine.’

  Nora looks at me shrewdly.

  ‘Worried about wearing a fat woman’s clothes, huh?’ She seizes me by the shoulders and turns me to the wall mirror.

  ‘It ain’t like you can look a whole lot worse than you do now, girl.’

  In the mirror, a stranger looks back at me. My face is burnt and scratched. My lips dark. I put my hand up and touch the gash in my head. Around it, my hair is a witch’s wig of dust and dried blood.

  ‘Still ain’t willing to say who did it to ya?’ Through the glass of the mirror, Nora’s eyes shine fierce.

  Duval had told Milt and Nora very little. I figured he was right. Too many questions, too many implications. I shake my head, feeling suddenly very weak. It can wait, it can all wait. Wordlessly, I begin smoothing out the sepia news cuttings stuck into the frieze of the mirror. They’re all disaster headlines. Bhopal, Chernobyl, a mass grave in Serbia. ‘Shitty little world, ain’t it?’ Nora says, looking over my shoulder.

  I muster a response, wanting to be left alone, but unwilling to hurt her feelings. There’s a squeak of springs as she slumps down on the bed behind me. ‘Top shelf of the closet, there’s a tote. You’ll have to reach it down yourself, I ain’t a giraffe like you, but don’t worry, the clothes’ll fit. They’re from a long time back.’

  I have to stand on tiptoes to reach the container. I try to lever it out but inevitably the box tips and falls, spilling its contents onto the cupboard floor. I gather everything up and carry it to the bed. It’s the usual jumble, items kept for no good reason other than nostalgia, and all representing some regret or washed-out memory: T-shirts, bits of broken jewellery, jeans, snapshots, a checked summer dress. There’s even some kids’ stuff. A toy bear, limp and chewed, a heavily stained baby-gro.