Darla was, anyway.
Saturday morning, I get up early and drive to Bear Creek to pay a surprise visit to Alvaro Ruiz and three other workers who have agreed to talk to me today. By making it a point to encourage me to talk to Ruiz, I assume Darla suspects he could know more than he is telling about this
murder and is simply scared he will end up getting deported if he talks too much. If he would be willing to say that Jorge Arrazola had acted suspiciously before he took off, it would help enormously.
Of course, what I would like for him to say is that he suddenly remembers he saw Paul Taylor stuffing hundred-dollar bills into Jorge’s hands the night before he took off, but that is a bit much to expect.
It is at least worth a try.
Somehow, even though I can’t remember where I put down my reading glasses half the time, I remember some Spanish from my Peace Corps days and perhaps can establish a rapport with this guy that will loosen him up a little.
I pull into town and stop for some toast at the Cotton Boll, where Mckenzie greets me with a smile and old Mr. Carpenter comes out of the kitchen to remind me to come by to visit him. He seems lonely and I promise that I will. I then head east through town toward the river, resisting the temptation to drive by Angela’s on the off chance she changed her mind and didn’t go to Atlanta. I go nearly thirty years without seeing her and now she is on my mind every day. As I fumble on the seat for the list of workers Eddie faxed to me, it occurs to me this visit won’t entirely be a surprise to Ruiz, since presumably he was around when Eddie announced that it was okay to talk to me.
In the cold morning light I squint at the address I have for him. All it says is “The Landing,” but I remember enough to get me close.
Lasker Huber, a kid in my sixth-grade class, caught his foot under a
submerged tree limb at the Landing and drowned. For weeks afterward, I had nightmares of being caught by a branch and struggling unsuccessfully to free myself. Even now it is the first thing I think about when anyone mentions the L’Anguille River.
Lasker’s family was basically white trash. River rats, we called them.
I liked Lasker. He hadn’t lived long enough to have a chip on his shoulder like the rest of his family. Unless it has changed, the Landing is a boat dock behind a defunct lumber company. A road the city fathers never bothered to name leads down to it. There were some shacks down by the dock, which I doubt have become mansions since I last saw them thirty years ago.
As I suspected, the Landing hasn’t changed much. Though it has been fixed up, I think I recognize Bobby Don Hyslip’s old shack and wonder what happened to him. One hot summer’s night parked in the gravel outside the Dairy Delite—where our most sophisticated joke was to send a younger sibling to ask for “colored water” and laugh hysterically as the help sent him or her around to the drinking fountain for blacks-Bobby Don had taunted me with the hoary gossip of my paternal grandfather’s own sexual escapades. He had infuriated me by calling me a “nigger lover.” My mother had never allowed me to say “nigger,” not out of some passion for equal rights, but because our family was above that sort of thing. The daughter of a physician, she had no intention of doing anything that would allow her, or anyone under her control, to be equated with the Bobby Don Hyslips of the world. She vehemently denied any allegation of sexual misconduct on the part of her father-in-law. As it turned out, Bobby Don was right.
The L’Anguille River, a tributary of a tributary on the way to the Mississippi, was once said to be good for fishing, and may be still, though I never caught any. As I look into the cold greenish water, a pleasant boyhood memory surfaces of a Sunday afternoon outing with my father. We had borrowed or rented a boat and small outboard motor at the dock, and while we were out a fish literally jumped into the boat with us. It was before he had become delusional, but it was hard not to regard the event as an omen that we would be successful if we took up fishing. We did and never caught a single fish. That summer, bonded by bad luck or simply incompetence, we were closer than we would ever be again. I walk up to the door and am astounded when Bobby Don, now a carbon copy of his own father, answers my knock.
He doesn’t quite know me. Balder than I am, fatter, too, he squints at me as if he should recognize me but doesn’t.
“Yeah, who you lookin’ for?”
I try to look into the room behind him, but he fills the door like a bear protecting his den. I get a whiff of cooking odors, onion and grease, and perhaps fish. Talk about white trash: Bobby Don is still writing the book.
“You know where an Alvaro Ruiz lives around here?” I ask, hoping he won’t recognize me.
“Who are you?” Bobby Don demands, staring hard at my face.
“Gideon Page,” I say and then add, hoping my lying is not ridiculously apparent, “You look real familiar.” I feel a curious mixture of
distaste, superiority, and shame. Somehow, this man, by his resentment and boldness as a teenager, has a hold over me after all these years.
“I’m Bobby Don, Gideon. You remember me,” he says, his upper lip curling in a sneer that is familiar after three decades.
“Hell, yeah,” I say, pretending his face is coming back to me.
“You’ve changed a little,” I throw in, beating him to the punch.
“You look like your father.”
To his credit, Bobby Don doesn’t deny it or make a comment about my own.
“What the shit are you doin’ over here?” he asks, offering his right arm, which is covered by a faded red corduroy shirt that stops short of his wrist by a good inch. His jeans look as old as he is. Of course, he wasn’t expecting company either.
Taken aback by this display of friendliness, I nevertheless extend my hand. His palm, as I expected, is rough and hard. Bobby Don must be the only person in Bear Creek not to know already why I’m here.
“I’m a lawyer in Blackwell County, but I’ve got a case here and I’m interviewing some people who might know something about it.”
“Who is it, Donny?” a female voice calls from somewhere in the back.
Whoever, wife or girlfriend, she sounds slightly hung over, too. I hear no children.
“An old friend of mine from when I was a kid,” he calls over his shoulder without a trace of irony.
Friend. He’s got to be kidding! I feel my cheeks begin to burn, but try to say amiably, “I need to find this Ruiz guy. You know where he lives?”
Bobby Don must see something in my face, for his old expression of disdain returns to his own.
“He lives a couple of houses that way,” he grunts, pointing to my left.
“So you’re a lawyer, huh? I should have figured that.”
I know: a gift for gab, though I suspect I know what word Bobby Don would use.
“So, what are you doing these days, Bobby Don?” I say in my snottiest tone.
“Fishing,” he says, giving his answer as much dignity as possible. He gives me a hard stare and shuts the door in my face.
I walk down off his wooden porch and return to the Blazer and back out of his yard. People don’t change, I decide. Yet if Bobby Don knew that my purpose was to get Paul Taylor, I suspect he would approve.
He’s spent his life envying people like Paul.
Alvaro Ruiz’s shack is on higher ground than Bobby Don’s, but I wonder
whether it has ever been flooded. Maybe it only seems that hundred-year floods come every ten years these days. I know I’m glad I haven’t lived on this bank for the last thirty years. In summer the mosquitoes must be like dive-bombers. From the outside the structure looks about a thousand square feet, but unlike Bobby Don’s it has been painted in the last few years. I wonder why he doesn’t live better, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he sends most of his money back to Mexico.
I knock at the door, and wait a full minute before a gray-haired Hispanic with long sideburns and a mustache cautiously sticks his head out. I introduce myself, and at the mention of Eddie’s name, the door opens wid
e to reveal a short but powerfully built man of about sixty in a red cotton jersey and jeans whose cuffs are folded several times at the bottom, revealing a pair of unpolished Army boots.
“Are you Mr. Ruiz?”
“Yes, I am,” he says, his voice heavily accented.
“You want to come inside?”
“Thanks,” I say and offer my hand to him. His jaws relax into an unforced smile, and he shakes my arm so vigorously I could be a long-lost relative.
I walk past him into a room that shows few signs, if any, of a feminine touch. An ugly green couch, two folding chairs, a scarred unpainted coffee table, and an old 17-inch Motorola TV make up all the furnishings I take in on first glance.
He politely offers me a cup of coffee, and though I already need to piss after two cups at the Cotton Boll, it would seem rude to refuse.
He leaves me alone in the room to take off my jacket and to stare at the blank TV screen and contrast this hospitable beginning with my exchange with Bobby Don. Alvaro may think he has no choice but to appease me. Whatever the differences, I already like this guy more in ten seconds than I ever did Bobby Don. In the moments before he returns I notice on the table a snapshot of a younger woman and four children. His daughter and grandchildren? Wife and kids? Though I spent two years in Colombia, I am basically ignorant about Central America in general and Mexico in particular. I know the African slave trade flourished in South America, but have no idea if it was a part of the Mexican economic system. My host returns with a tea tray, which though not laden with strawberries and cream, contains a carton of milk, a bowl of sugar, a spoon, and a mug of coffee.
Maybe there is a woman in the kitchen after all. This seems oddly elaborate in such spare surroundings, but Alvaro, from outward appearances, appears not at all surprised to be entertaining an uninvited stranger who has shown up at his house unannounced before nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. He seats himself in a folding chair across from me and sips at his own coffee, taken black, while I explain that I just want to ask him a few questions about Jorge Arrazola.
“I’m trying to find out if he did anything while he was here,” I say, “to make you think he might have had something to do with Mr. Ting’s murder.” “No,” Ruiz says, “he is a good boy. A hard worker. He has trouble with the English, but he is learning a little.”
“Are you a citizen of this country, Mr. Ruiz?”
His eyes widen slightly.
“No, but I have papers.
Do you want to see them?”
“Not at all,” I say, hastily.
“What I meant by that question is that you may not realize that you can’t get into trouble if he had told you something that made you suspicious he was involved in Mr. Ting’s death.”
The other man studies the floor.
“So someone tell you I know where he is?” he asks, his fists clenched on his knees.
“I already speak to the sheriff and say I don’t know where Jorge go.
They say it isn’t even his real name.”
“I realize that,” I say, “but my understanding is that you were very helpful to this boy. Maybe he said some things that would help give you an idea of where he went or where he was actually from.
He might have gone back home. His family might know where he is.”
Mr. Ruiz looks past me out the window to the other side of the river.
“I know he say he is born in Juarez, but that isn’t going to help you much. He won’t go there. He breaks the law by having a false ID. But he don’t kill Mr. Ting. I know him. He just need to make some money to help his mother and don’t have no green card. That’s not so bad.”
I can’t help but think this man knows more than he is telling. There is too much emotion in his voice.
“Not at all,” I say, taking another tack.
“The problem is that if he doesn’t come back and clear his name, the Tings might have a problem with hiring any more Hispanics at the plant.
It’s too bad. Eddie said y’all are the best workers they ever had.
Maybe he left behind something that could help find him.”
Ruiz cuts his eyes back at me. Clearly, he feels he is being coerced, however subtle it appears.
“He live with me and sleep on this couch,” he admits.
“But when we find out the next morning Willie is murdered and they think it’s somebody in the plant, he get scared and leave two days later without a word to me. He don’t have nothing here to see.”
I look down at the couch as if I might be looking for an address between the cushions. It’s possible that this kid was Willie’s murderer and Ruiz was in on it. Nobody needs money more than these people. Paul could have
easily made a deal with this man, who was too smart to do it himself.
So Ruiz hired a fellow countryman and showed him how to frame Class.
Why the hell not?
“Did he steal your truck?”
Ruiz shakes his head.
“I give it to Jorge for his birthday last July and he fix it the day after the murder. All it need is a battery and two tires. He take it.”
A murder charge would motivate me to get some transportation, too.
“Mr. Ruiz, how do you know he didn’t kill Mr. Ting?” I ask, making my voice firm.
Ruiz seems more guarded now, but it could just be my imagination. He avoids my eyes and looks out the window again.
“He don’t act no different.
He say he take the boat and go fishing the day Mr. Ting killed. He go fishing a lot.”
“Do you know Paul Taylor?” I ask, sipping my coffee.
Ruiz gives me a quizzical look.
“I see him downtown, but I don’t talk to him.”
I take a sip of my coffee.
“Did Jorge ever mention him or did he ever come out here?” “No,” he says emphatically.
“Mr. Taylor don’t ever come out here to fish.”
Getting nowhere fast, I ask, “Do you think Class Bledsoe killed Mr. Ting?”
Ruiz looks down at his own coffee, which he hasn’t touched.
“I been knowing Class for a long time. I don’t think he kill anybody.”
I look down at the photograph. Despite his defensiveness, I feel a grudging respect for Ruiz.
He has come to a foreign country, learned another language, gotten an honest job, and has helped others.
“Who do you think did?” I ask, certain I won’t get an answer, and I don’t. He shrugs but doesn’t respond, too circumspect to point fingers at anybody.
“My wife was from Colombia,” I tell him.
“The day she became a United States citizen was one of the proudest days of her life. She always said people who are born in this country never
appreciate it enough.” “You have work here,” he says, his voice heartfelt.
“In Mexico, there is never enough. If this plant closes, I can go somewhere else in the state and work in the chicken plants. Here, I send money to my family every month. In Mexico many barely have enough to eat.” He smiles and says in Spanish, “Su esposa es de Colombia, si?”
Embarrassed by my pitifully accented Spanish, I reply in English, “She died seven years ago from cancer, but we had a daughter who looks just like her.” I pull out my wallet and show him Sarah’s picture.
He nods appreciatively.
“Que hermosa!”
I tell him that she is a student at the University of Arkansas and ask about the picture on the table. He picks it up and says in Spanish that his first wife died, too. I make out, or think I do, that three of the children in the picture are by his first wife and the boy is from his second. He is speaking too rapidly for me to follow every word, and I ask him to speak English.
“Comprende bien, no?” he says, but with his typical deference switches back to a language in which he can only express himself in the present tense. He tells me his first wife died in childbirth twenty years ago.
Yet he chose to marry again and b
egin another family. I can’t imagine having that kind of hope in a country that promises its people so little security. Only one of his adult children has a full-time job and that as
a taxi driver in Mexico City.
As I often did in the Peace Corps, I think about how lucky I was to have been born a white male in this country.
We are interrupted by someone at the door, and when Ruiz opens it, I have a partial view of a man in hunting clothes who is carrying a shotgun in his right hand. It looks like a .20 gauge, which was the size my father and I used to hunt rabbits before my mother, in her growing terror of his paranoia, gave away his guns. I stand up to get a better view and see Ruiz’s caller is a wormy, sallow-faced white guy in his early twenties. I wonder if he is one of Bobby Don’s sons. He says irritably, “Where the hell you been?”
Ruiz mutters an apology to him, but I pick up my coat and go to the door with a card in my hand, and say that I will be back in contact with him. With characteristic politeness, he introduces me to his friend, but I do not catch more than his first name of Mickey. Possibly hung over with his red eyes and vacant stare, Mickey eyes me suspiciously and does not offer to shake hands, which is fine with me.
I drive off, wondering how hard Ruiz was questioned by the sheriff.
The rest of the day is one dry hole after another. Though each of the three men I talk to is more or less willing to discuss the case (they don’t want to lose their jobs, I assume), all, despite being encouraged to talk, are understandably suspicious of me. Obviously, if Bledsoe is not Willie’s killer, one of them might be. Still, I have no choice but to begin the process of visiting each one and satisfying myself that not only are their alibis airtight, they don’t have any information that
could point to other suspects. The most irritating of the three is Cy Scoggins, who, away from the plant, has no doubt who killed Willie.
Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement Page 18