Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  They’d have to stop for gas eventually and when they did, if they both got out, she’d have time to run. Maybe they wouldn’t see her. But who would pick up a hitchhiker as young as she was, and if she made it to a bus terminal, where could she afford to go? She had five one-dollar bills and two fifty-cent pieces in the pocket of her jeans, her entire holdings, accumulated from Johanna’s purse over great duration.

  After maybe another half hour on the road she felt the wheels go back onto rocky dirt and her chest tightened again. A right-hand turn and more dirt and this stretch lasted a good while before she finally felt the car begin to slow and pull off onto some kind of shallow incline that tilted her feet higher than her head and then the back of the car started to bounce violently, telling her that they had left the roadway altogether. She clutched the hunting coat to her body and pushed at sharp angles with the sides of her feet to keep herself up against the seatback, before feeling the car stop again.

  Neither man got out immediately. The second one, with the deeper voice, spoke first: “You remember this place? That time?”

  “The last time I ever hunted,” the other one said.

  They didn’t talk again for a while and just sat. But then they turned off the motor and Martha froze and opened her mouth wide to breathe as quietly as she could. Her heart didn’t race as fiercely this time, maybe only because her body had become too tired to respond. The doors opened, one by one, and then a back door opened, inches above her head. They were getting their bags out and then they shut the doors and one of the front ones opened.

  “I had a good new tarp in the back of the pickup but I guess you didn’t think to take that when you were packing us up.”

  “I didn’t exactly have time to make an inventory, Harlan. I believe you’ve been acquainted with scrub-grass before.”

  The door slammed shut again, hushing everything. She could hear them shuffling away from the car but the wind had finally died down and their voices remained clear amid the short scraping calls of killdeer, the only other sound on the stretch of plain. “Nobody can see the car down here. We’ll get ourselves up on the flat, against that lip there, where we can see out over the road but we still have a view of the car. If we have to hightail it, it’ll be a straight shot back down, thirty seconds.”

  “Thirty seconds hell.”

  “You’d be surprised how fast you can move when you need to, Harlan. You just haven’t needed to in a long time.”

  “What do you propose we’re going to find to eat out here?”

  The answer, if there was one—and Martha suddenly realized her own stomach felt hollowed-out and hard—was lost to the sky as the two men walked further from the car and she was left alone for the first time since it had all started. She listened hard for several minutes for their voices, holding her breath to be able to hear better. She counted to sixty in her head ten times, to make sure she wasn’t misjudging time, and then, keeping the hunting coat draped most of the way over her head, she raised herself slowly on her stiff arms and looked through the back window closest to her head, on the passenger side. She could tell she was looking west because the sun sat almost directly in her line of vision, low in the sky but not low enough to keep from blinding her as she tried to pick out the men’s forms on a rise that swept upward just past the car, covered with sand sage and salt cedar shrubs. She squinted and after her eyes adjusted she was able to see their silhouettes against the sky at the crest of the ridge. She froze, momentarily terrified that they might be looking back toward the car, watching something moving inside it. Their parallel shadows stretched out forty feet on the dirt toward her, reaching halfway to the car. She closed her eyes and a blazing orange disc filled her field of vision and the tiny outlines of the men flashed like a broken filmstrip behind her eyelids.

  On the backs of her hands and her calves sticking out from the coat she could feel the fresh air that had come into the car, and every part of her body told her to jump up now and run, open the back door, go as silently and as quickly as she could. But she had no idea which way to go to get to the road. From their high vantage point they would see her as her feet raised dust against the prairie, and they would catch her even if she made it to the road, because the chances of finding a car to flag down were next to nothing. She pushed herself up an inch more and twisted her torso to look up the length of the car toward the steering column, hoping to see keys hanging there, for whatever that would be worth—she’d never driven a car; she had no idea if she could reach the pedals in one this big. But the men knew better than to leave a set of keys in an open car, even one in the middle of nowhere. She listened to the lonely ticking of the car roof as the heat of the day dissipated and then she eased herself down again and drew her feet up under the coat as far as she could manage. She told herself that as long as she remained motionless, all but invisible under the coat, her mind scoured of thought, she would be protected and able to figure something out later. As she lay there, she tried to make herself believe that if she exerted enough effort pretending she wasn’t there then the two men would become powerless to find her. She thought of a disembodied feeling that came upon her sometimes as she grew older: the sudden conviction of the utter strangeness of being inside her skin, of looking the way she looked, of the sound of her voice when she spoke, of her limbs moving when she willed them to, of living at this particular time in the history of the world, in this particular place in the universe—how not a single part of it seemed to be the result of necessity, and the thought that the mere act of changing her mind might unmoor her instantly from it all. Sometimes the possibility seemed so real it terrified her and the fear was followed by a rushing sensation of leaving her body. Sometimes this feeling made her consider that there might be such a thing as a soul after all, except that the she she felt herself to be—the her of herself, the self that went past words—felt like something different than a soul. She lay under the coat concentrating all her thoughts on the infinitesimal point of that self, picturing herself vanishing physically inside it.

  Unmoving, she watched the night come in the reflection on the window to the east. The hard, colorless afternoon light that had been exploding in began to soften to a distinct yellow as the sun bent itself over the lip of the land. Within the space of ten minutes it dropped several registers, from bright orange-yellow to purest orange to blood red and down to purple, followed by a long descent into a barely perceptible blue before the dark consumed it completely. She tried to match the colors in her mind to the names of color-wheel hues she had had to learn at school in Tahoka, the first real school she had ever attended: red, scarlet red, scarlet, crimson, magenta (she liked the sound of that one, though she always picked the wrong shade when the teacher asked her to identify it), purple magenta, purple, purple violet, violet, blue violet, blue, bluish cyan, cyan blue. Dropping there into black instead of making its clockwise ascent into the greens and back up to yellow again. She thought of all the individual colors that had to exist between the ones she had learned—thousands, millions?—and she wondered if each of them had names, too.

  She had never understood why people spoke of the loveliness of sunsets—weren’t they just forerunners of darkness, ushering away the light that was the symbol of God and all we were supposed to glory in? She found herself thinking that this particular sunset was beautiful even so. She thought maybe she felt that way because she had seen only its reflection, and reflected light—the sun on a pond, the light of a lamp in a mirror, the light of the moon—always seemed more beautiful than when it was shining right at you.

  FOUR

  Sept. 26, 1972

  For the sake of convenience I’ll try to keep the legally relevant information together, so here is most of it:

  This was all about a sum of twenty-five thousand dollars. Minus maybe a thousand that Bill Ray spent before he died and that Harlan spent before it disappeared.

  Bill Ray came into the money the old-fashioned American way—through sheer dumb luck, on t
he second pull of a nickel slot machine at the Ruidoso Downs racetrack in Ruidoso, New Mexico. The best part was that Bill Ray never played the slots—hated slots, in fact. He bet only the quarter horses and he lost more than he ever won.

  He died three months later. I learned about it by accident, at a motel in Clovis, the closest I had been to home in a while. Calling Harlan was something I risked from time to time, to let him know I was alive; it had been six months since I had made the last call. But the voice that answered on the other end of the phone wasn’t his, it was the voice of an older man, measured, practiced. He said, “Hello. Falconer residence.” I didn’t say a thing, put my hand over the phone. “Hello? May I help you? Is anyone there?” I had heard the voice somewhere before, like a family voice, but it wasn’t family, and then I knew. It was the retired pastor of the First Baptist Church, a voice from my youth. I had liked him well enough, but he’d had my number from early on and I stayed clear of him, to the degree you could in a small town. There was only one reason he would be there answering the phone, a phone only Harlan answered, in a house nobody visited.

  I put the phone in the cradle and looked out the window past the railing into the motel parking lot. He hadn’t been sick as far as I knew. But Harlan had told me he was drinking more. For almost two years he had been all but gone from town and the house, living with a woman he had met, in a trailer home outside of Hobbs. I had reached him there only once. The woman picked up. At first she pretended she didn’t know who I was talking about, then she stopped and put him on the phone.

  I sat in the room in Clovis for a long time thinking about what to do. Sometime after midnight I called the house again and listened to it ring. I kept calling and on the third try, Harlan finally picked up. He said they’d found the pickup beside the road outside of Bronco. It didn’t seem to have run into anything but just eased off the road alongside the barbed wire fence and rolled gingerly to a stop up against a telephone pole. He was at the wheel. His head was resting back against the gun rack. His hat had pushed down over his brow. The farmhand who found him said he thought maybe he had just fallen asleep. He said that when he raised his hat Bill Ray’s eyes were wide open and he was smiling. He didn’t even look dead. He looked absolutely fine, the way he always had.

  There was no will. But sometime after Bill Ray came into the money he wrote a letter that was ruled dispositive by the county judge. The letter said that if anything happened to him Harlan should have the money and the house. Harlan felt the need to tell me this, but he didn’t broach the idea of giving me any of the money. If he had at that moment, I wouldn’t have taken a dime. If he’d handed it to me in new bills lined up inside a suitcase, I would have waited until he left and hauled the suitcase right out to the motel dumpster.

  But over the next few months I started to think about the money in a different way. At first it was only the conviction that some of it was rightfully mine, but I knew this was nothing more than jealousy and hurt and I couldn’t let myself go on like that. Then it started working on me for another reason—as a way out, maybe the only way. It occurred to me that the money didn’t belong to Harlan any more than it had belonged to Bill Ray. He’d gotten it the way someone finds money lying on the street. What would I do if I robbed a motel room and came across that kind of cash in a man’s luggage? A couple hundred dollars was the biggest score I’d ever made but what if I came across a bundle? What would it mean (besides the fear about how badly someone would want that kind of money back)? What would it be possible to do with it? I don’t speak of things in terms of rules, but in this case: What would be permitted? Could I spend it? Could I allow myself to keep the things I bought with it? Would they feel like someone else’s? I began to think they might. I thought about using my half of the money to rent a little furnished place somewhere, a trailer outside of a town where no one knew me. If people got too nosy I could make up an awful story about the war so they’d stop asking questions. I’d get a used car—legit, for the first time in years—and a change of clothes. I’d stop turning over rooms and suitcases and give myself some time not to be looked for, maybe long enough for it to blow over, as unlikely as I knew that would be. It was a dream of a little vacation, as funny as that must sound to you.

  I wrote a postcard to Harlan asking for my half. The words were so painful to write I almost couldn’t go through with it. It put me back in a place of wanting, of laying something on the line, a place I never wanted to be in again.

  He answered the way I knew he would: “Bill Ray said it would just go to bad use. Can you tell me honestly that it wouldn’t?” I hung up on him.

  After Bill Ray moved out, Harlan hadn’t ended up living alone. Companionship had come to him probably the only way it was ever going to. He told me that he tore a small advertisement, half in English, half Spanish, out of the Lubbock newspaper and sent off for a package. It arrived a month later with a Nuevo León, Mexico, postmark, containing a sheaf of mimeographed papers and half a dozen Polaroid pictures of the faces of reasonably attractive women who appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties. Harlan filled out the forms and mailed a check. A week later he received a call from a man who spoke perfect English and invited him to bring a bigger check to Del Rio to meet a woman who had agreed to become his bride. She wasn’t the woman in the picture he had chosen; she wasn’t any of the women in any of the pictures he had seen, but Harlan hadn’t been naive enough to expect this. They told him her name was Inés and that she was twenty-two, which might have been low by as much as a decade but she was pretty, with high Indian cheekbones and long glossy black hair in a braid down the middle of her back. She was short, coming only halfway up Harlan’s chest, but she had a dignified, straight-backed way of walking and wide shapely hips that made her seem taller. He told me that the man who drove her to the meeting place in a parking lot behind a fast-food restaurant seemed to be waiting for him to haggle, but Harlan didn’t have any intention of doing something so vulgar. He wrote out a check for five hundred dollars on the hood of the pickup, most of the money he had to his name at the time.

  She knew almost no English except for basic greetings and a handful of ridiculous phrases—“I find you very attractive.”—“Allow me to make your house a home.”—“Do you like steak? I sure do.”—that some other non-English speaker had probably taught her to keep things from going bad too quickly, which might lead to a demand for a refund.

  They stayed in Del Rio for a week, until the marriage license could be arranged. An ancient-looking man with decaying teeth married them in a hallway of the hotel where they were staying, with two hotel maids as witnesses.

  She moved into the house and stayed for six months. He told me he loved her almost from the beginning and she seemed happy, cooking for him, watching television during the day, sitting with him in the backyard in the evenings. I’m sure she never saw or spoke to anyone except Harlan. She had never been away from home this long and she was probably homesick. Or maybe she just wanted the green card and gave him more time than most women would have. Either way, one morning when he was on a welding job the neighbors saw an ancient Studebaker driven by a young Mexican man no one knew pull up in front of the house and she ran out with her suitcase. Harlan never heard from her again. He had to divorce her ex parte by placing a notice in the newspaper.

  The idea that Bettie take her place was Bettie’s alone. If you don’t believe this I don’t know how to convince you except by pointing out its simple brilliance, the kind you know right away because it’s so hard to tell from insanity.

  She said: “You want your money? I’ll get you your goddamned money. I’ll marry your brother and get it back for you.”

  This was later, in another motel, in Dalhart. I was washing my face in the bathroom. I walked out and looked at her.

  “I’ll be her cousin. Distant—like second, third. Or her friend, you know, from la escuela, from a long time ago. I’m the one she tells about it—how good he was to her, how it broke her heart
to leave him, but she just couldn’t live away from her mama and her papa, her país, for so long, et cetera, et cetera. You can take some snapshots of me. Not too sexy. Enough to whet his appetite. And I’ll write a letter, very formal, to ask if he can find it in his heart to accept me in her place, to give me the happy life Inés should have had, if only it had been God’s will. Gracias a Dios.”

  She laughed. I didn’t laugh or even smile. I had known her all of—what?—a month, but I knew her well enough to know she didn’t really have a sense of humor. If she was saying she would go through with something like that, she would: She’d meet him at the border with a suitcase; she’d marry him legally; she’d go back to live with him; she would probably even sleep with him, I had no doubt, until she figured out how to get the money. She was better at the long game than anybody I’d ever known.

  How I ever believed she’d leave Harlan his half or bring me mine is another matter. After working for so long to live a life with my eyes open, I let myself fall into the kind of delusion where you don’t just get a few things wrong. You flip and lose the ability to judge anything. Of course, it’s possible I knew what would happen all along and decided to allow it, so that if I couldn’t have any of the money Harlan wouldn’t, either. But when I found out, it didn’t make me want to kill her any less.

  Harlan called the number she sent the day he got her letter. She drove down to Del Rio and met him by herself, in an embroidered puebla dress she picked out at a Salvation Army that morning. She pretended to struggle with English, though her Spanish was so bad she worried he might figure it out.

  He wouldn’t have figured it out if she had started to speak Russian, Chinese, Esperanto. He was out of his mind with happiness. After he married her and took her back, he even ventured into town to show her off—to high school games, the café at lunchtime, where people stopped eating to look at them. She nearly blew it when a family across the street invited her to a children’s birthday and she accepted, to appear sociable. She offered to bring a piñata and bought one at the Gibson’s variety store in Denver City. But she didn’t know anything about piñatas—her mother had shunned everything Mexican like it was the plague—so she didn’t realize you had to fill it with candy yourself. The party ended with a dozen six-year-olds hacking a paper mule to pieces on the ground, wailing in anguish when they realized there was nothing inside.