“What do you mean?” I had said. “Because I wear these safari shirts? Most of them are really fishing shirts. I just like all the pockets.”
“Yes, but you get them all in khaki.”
“That’s not true. I have an orange one and a green one. I even have a white one.”
Estelle could not stop laughing.
I did not call my sponsor before I went to New Mexico, and I did not call her now.
18
The morning Ruby finally confessed everything to me, I returned to my hotel room and ordered a pot of coffee and a chocolate milkshake from room service. I still couldn’t absorb what she had said. My breathing was starting to go out of whack, and I was afraid I’d hyperventilate, a frightening experience that had occurred twice in my early sobriety, so I spent a few hours consuming caffeine and sugar in my hotel room and picturing the slow surf of the beach in South Carolina, fighting the urge to get on a plane and go home.
When I had calmed down enough, or thought I had, I drove back to Albuquerque because I had agreed to meet Santane and Ed Blake for a meal at Giang’s restaurant, and I couldn’t think clearly enough to figure out how to get out of it. In a daze, I found myself walking beside Santane in the dry afternoon heat toward her husband’s restaurant. She wore jeans and a T-shirt that said GIANG’S PLACE. I had not imagined Santane dressed like this. I asked, “Have you ever read The Turner Diaries?”
She didn’t reply or even glance my way. I wondered if Ruby had told her the truth now too.
“I’ve read it twice,” I said, “and I think it’s one of the scariest books ever written.”
Santane still didn’t look at me, and I had trouble keeping up with her gait. “Of course I’ve read The Turner Diaries,” she finally said. “But it’s no stupider than a lot of other things.”
“The author was Royce’s first mentor. And Pierce’s other novel, Hunter, is a how-to manual for murdering interracial couples. Did you read that one?”
She stopped mid-stride and turned to face me. “Listen, Ellen, I cut hair. That’s all. My husband is a chef.”
When she resumed walking, I had to jog to keep up her. “And I write about redneck junk food and go to AA meetings, but what we’re doing can’t be enough. It just can’t be.”
She did not speak or even look at me.
“Is it racist to say you’re inscrutable?”
She stopped walking and pointed across the street to a Chinese place with a taco stand beside it. “That’s our restaurant.” Instead of crossing, she sat down on a low brick wall, and her face again took on its carved quality. “After Ruby received the rattles, it was clear to us that she and the children were in grave danger. But I will admit that I was not prepared to lose them by Ruby’s own hand.”
“So she’s told you too?”
“Yes, but I already knew without knowing. I understand that you aren’t able to discern much about my personal responses, Ellen, but this situation is extraordinarily difficult for me.”
I wanted to say something sympathetic, but all I managed was, “Do you have any more of Royce’s papers?”
“He burned what he didn’t take with him. He made a fire in the backyard.”
“Who took care of Ruby the day he left and you got hurt?”
“I had a white friend who wasn’t scared of Royce. She kept Ruby with her own children. I was only in the hospital overnight. The emergency room doctor was worried about my cheekbone, but an X-ray showed it wasn’t fractured. He set my arm and gave me painkillers and sent me on my way. Royce must have come back to the house later that night and put the letter I gave you on his desk. The printed letter. Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it earlier. I stayed out of his office, mostly, and he usually kept it locked.”
“Where was Ruby when he was beating you?”
“To be fair, Ellen, he only hit me once. Ruby was hiding inside the hall closet. After he left, I kept telling her it would be okay, but she had slipped into a stupor.”
“And after you got out of the hospital, you went back to the house?”
“I had to get our clothes and some money I’d hidden. Also, a ring of my mother’s. I insisted that Ruby come inside with me because I wanted her to see that I wasn’t afraid, but the truth is, I was very afraid. I thought Royce might be in there with Joe Magnus and Magnus might try to kill us. Ruby wanted to keep one of Royce’s undershirts, so I let her do that. We didn’t stay inside the house more than ten minutes. My friend took us to a women’s shelter in Boise.”
She tried to smile but stopped herself. “Here is what he was shouting at Ruby through the closet door: ‘You are the biggest mistake of my life!’ He shouted it twice. I can still hear it in my mind, and I’m sure Ruby does too. Of course, I already knew that was what he believed because he had taken her to that unspeakable camp, and she had heard some of the hideous things Magnus would say about us. But when Royce shouted at her through the closet door, it was as if he had thrust a spike into her heart. She was never the same again. Then he jerked the closet door open and saw her cowering in the corner like a dog, and I think he couldn’t stand the sight of it, so he turned and hit me with his fist. My arm broke when I fell. Then he was gone, and I never saw him again. So now you know all of it.”
I glanced up and down the street, the anonymous cars, the anonymous pedestrians. The ordinariness seemed so strange. “And now you think we are going to be able to walk over there and eat a friendly meal at your husband’s restaurant?”
“Exactly,” she said. “That is exactly what I think.”
19
Because Giang had been so sophisticated about American clichés, the Chinese-American decor of his restaurant disappointed me. A cloudy fish tank with slow-moving inhabitants hulked near the cashier’s desk, and Ed Blake and Giang sat at a back table covered with a red-checked plastic tablecloth. Blake wore a black police uniform, which made him look less familiar and more like an ordinary cop. Giang still seemed small and nondescript, but at least he wasn’t wearing a chef’s hat. They were drinking bottled Asian beer. A partially finished plate of spring rolls lay on the table before them.
Both men stood up. I shook hands with Giang but avoided eye contact with Blake. “So, Giang, I had assumed your restaurant would look more original.”
“If it works, don’t fix it.”
“And I see you’re feeling quite official.” I reached across the table to shake Blake’s hand. My glance at his gray eyes revealed his deep concern.
“So, what is this amazing food you want to introduce me to?” I said to Giang.
“Would you like a drink first?”
“I don’t suppose you have a chocolate milkshake?”
“How about a beer? Or a glass of wine? Also, we have a full bar.”
“A regular Coke,” I said. “Two of them, please.”
As I sat down the first gasp escaped me, and I began to take long, slow breaths, trying to imagine the sound of the rolling surf at the Isle of Palms. If I have trouble handling myself in public situations, this often helps: I concentrate on recalling the sound of the ocean as it pulls back from the shore on my inhalation, and, as the waves flow over the beach, I exhale. I try to pause at the top of each breath.
Blake touched my arm. “Are you all right?”
I kept my gaze on my empty plate, and when I looked up at him I knew my eyes had gone wild. “My mother said that I have a tender heart but that I would get over it.” I suppressed a gasp. “Maybe she was right, because I care more about my family than I care about strangers. I’m just trying to look out for my own, but I don’t know who my own are.”
After a silence, Giang said, “This was a cruel thing for your mother to say. And also it is untrue.”
The gasping stopped, but I still breathed shallowly, almost panting. “I thought wars were about territory and natural resources.”
“Wars,” Giang said, “can also be about tribes and religion.”
Santane touched my arm, and I felt a kindness that
had been absent from all of our previous interactions. “It has taken me a long time to accept this, Ellen, but Royce believed that what he was doing was right. Ruby may believe it too.”
“It’s just so unthinkable. It’s unbelievably horrific.”
“And you have turned thoroughly against your brother and his beliefs, have you not? You made this choice long ago, and you have lived by it.”
“Then why do I want to find him? What good will it do me or anyone else? Maybe I just want to kill him.” The two Cokes arrived, and I drank one straight down. Then I stood up and knocked my chair over behind me. “I’ve got to get out of here. Raincheck, please. Raincheck.”
“Sorry, fish,” I said, hurrying through the tables past the aquarium and finding myself outside on the hot street. Ed Blake had managed to stay right behind me. “Go away, Blake.”
“I’ve really got to talk to you, Ellen,” he said. “Something important has happened.”
“I don’t care what it is right now. Go away.”
“Please. I need to talk to you.”
I turned around and looked up into his face. “Listen, goddamn it, I am a temperamental, high-strung alcoholic, and my fucking sobriety is hanging by a thread. Don’t you hear me? If I tell you to back off now, you have to back off.”
The 4:00 P.M. meeting was almost half over when I got there. I sat in a straight-back chair in the corner of the last row, trying to stop my eyes from leaking. If I hyperventilated, I knew I would end up passing out and being carried to an emergency room, and I hadn’t been through that drill in a long time. Think of the ocean, the waves, the blue-gray sand, breathe in, breathe out. I leaned over, head in my hands, eyes squeezed shut.
As the meeting proceeded, two women moved to sit in the chairs alongside me. They did not try to intrude, but one of them tapped my shoulder and gave me a tissue. The other handed me an empty paper bag that smelled like tuna fish. I didn’t need the paper bag, and by the end of the meeting my panic had run itself out.
Daylight was fading and the air cooling off as I drove back to Gallup. I tried to ground myself more by focusing on details of my mother’s care, but when I pulled up in front of the El Rancho Hotel, Ed Blake’s car, a genuine police car this time, stood out front. I pulled in behind him and walked to the passenger-side window, which was open. “What?” I said.
“Ellen, I know how upset you are, but I think you should see the cave where this all happened. This is the only chance I’m going to get to show it to you.”
I stared into his bloodshot eyes. “You’re dogging me like this because you want me to see inside the damn cave where she did it?”
Then it was as if we were talking without words.
I handed my key to the valet and climbed into his police car. A shotgun was attached to a large radio that protruded between us, emitting static. Metal grillwork separated the front and back seats. “Just like in a fucking movie.”
As we pulled away he turned on the blinking lights and let the siren howl. “For your movie,” he said. Once we were out of Gallup, he shut off the fireworks display and turned off the crackling radio.
“Listen, Ed,” I said in the sudden quiet. “I might be breaking now. I’ve broken pretty badly in my life before, and it’s crucial that I not do it again, because then I might drink, which is the same as suicide for me. I just want to go home. I want to go back to Charleston and take off my mother’s crazy makeup and eat boiled peanuts and sit in the dark and talk to my friend Estelle. Don’t you ever feel like that? That you’ve fucking had enough? Really enough? That you just want to go home?”
“I’ve been wondering what was holding you together.”
“My best friend Estelle is black and I’m white, and we don’t even talk about it.”
“Maybe your relationship isn’t about that.”
“This is my brother’s mess, not mine. I’ve got to go back to South Carolina and try to get my bearings. Try to forget Ruby for a while. Walk on the beach. Stuff like that.”
“Will that work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you can go back to Charleston, Ellen, but first I want you to see where the children’s deaths occurred, if you think you can stand it. Also, I have something else to tell you.”
Beyond the tunnel of blacktop lit by our headlights lay the red and green hills preceding El Morro State Monument, but those hills seemed like a dream now, something I had conjured, and only this tunnel through the darkness held true. When we finally pulled off the highway onto a dirt road, I said, “This is the other way in?”
“You know about the two roads?”
“Ruby’s told me a few things.”
The dirt track was narrow and pocked, difficult to navigate. Thick brush scratched along my window. The darkness was too close; the cruiser was not made for this terrain. Once we nearly got high-centered by ruts as we crawled forward into our puny lights. Where we stopped, there was barely room to turn the car around. Blake shut off the motor and handed me a big black flashlight.
“More bad movie?”
“Could that be your sense of humor trying to peek through?”
“Can you tell me the other news now? I’m assuming it’s bad. I know you’d tell me immediately if they’ve found my brother.”
He walked ahead without answering. By the time we got to what I assumed was the barn, he had pushed aside three boundaries of yellow police tape. We entered through an open side door. The ovals of light from our flashlights revealed a dirt floor scattered with wood chips and straw. Sitting in the middle was a rickety two-seat linoleum-topped table and two chairs, faded green and rusty. An electric lantern rested on the table.
Blake picked the lantern up and flicked the switch. The dim light accentuated the room’s bleakness. A mound of filthy blankets lay bunched against one wall. “This doesn’t look like a place where kids did eighties-type drugs,” I said. “It looks more like a place for shooting dope. Where’s the refrigerator? Aren’t we messing up evidence? Aren’t we doing something we shouldn’t?”
“This isn’t the right room.” He shone his light toward the far right, where a bureau had been shoved aside to reveal a much smaller opening. “It’s back in there.”
We stooped to get inside. Blake’s flashlight revealed a small propane generator, and he flicked it on, but the light was blinding, the rumble alarming. “Jesus, they’re not patrolling this place?”
When he shut it off, the silence seemed worse. “That was a crazy thing to do.”
The flash of propane illumination and our lantern revealed the refrigerator with its open door, the metal shelves leaning against a dirt wall. To the left, I glimpsed cots with blankets, and in the room’s center another table, this one made of raw pine. Four wooden chairs surrounded it. Big containers of water had been stacked to my right, along with crates of canned food. Twenty-pound sacks of dried beans and corn and rice and another propane stove were stored in the corner, where there were two more large propane tanks. “There weren’t any weapons in here? Is this just a safe house, or was it a bomb shelter?”
“It’s a safe house. A bomb shelter would have to be concrete, fortified, and airtight. No weapons, but we think they were taken out the day before.”
“Any chance we’re going to be caught?”
“Not tonight.”
“I’m not as spooked as I thought I would be. Or maybe I’m so spooked I can’t even tell anymore. Why did you want me to see this, Blake? Those are the beds over there. Ruby claims she put the kids on the cots side by side, right in their car seats.” I sat down at the table. “And she sat right here. She says she stayed here for maybe a half hour the first time, while the children were asleep from the Benadryl.”
“She’s told you what really happened, hasn’t she,” Blake said. “I thought so, and that’s why you fell apart in the restaurant?”
“She’s told me.” I focused on the yellow gleam of the lantern. “She says that when no one showed up she lugged each of the
m back out separately, still in their car seats, one at a time, sticking them through that narrow entryway. She said it was harder getting them out than bringing them in.”
Blake said nothing, sitting in the chair next to me, his hand resting near the lamp.
“Then she fastened the seats into the car and strapped each one back into the belts correctly. She had to take each sleeping child out of the seats in order to install them into the car because kid seats are tricky. Then for a while she sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, thinking about what to do next.”
The line between magic and horror had thinned, and the light from the lamp made Blake seem eerily handsome.
“After a while, she says, she started the car and drove back out to the highway. I can’t even glimpse her state of mind. She believed that Royce was still alive and that he was reclaiming her, but whoever was supposed to meet her here did not come. She began to think that something had gone wrong or it had been a cruel joke. So she drove back toward the reservation, but a few miles down the road she turned around, and this time, when she came back, she went through the front entrance, not even bothering with the secret way.”
“Thank you for trying to tell me,” Blake said.
“First, she unstrapped both children from their car seats and carried them together, one in each arm, while they were still unconscious. She says they felt weightless. Did I say that the generator was running when she first got here? That the room was all lit up? And the fridge was cold inside. She got the lamp from the other room just like we did, and she turned off the generator so she could hear better. She was worried Lightman might get home from work early. He didn’t get back until four thirty, but what if he returned sooner? And she had told his mother she was taking the children shopping for clothes, but they were already unconscious in the car because she had put the Benadryl in their milk at lunch. She wasn’t sure how long it would last. Without the lamp, this room would have been pitch-dark, even in daytime. She laid the children on the cots, and she says she sat here for so long that she thought that Lightman must have gotten back home, so she went outside and was amazed to find it was still afternoon. Next, she came back in here and picked up River and sat with him in one of these chairs. She says he was warm but very limp, and she’s not sure what happened next, but she does remember picking up Lucia and sitting awhile with her too. And she also remembers going out to the car and pulling those blank deposit slips from the checkbook they kept in the glove box and writing on the backs of two of them GOD LOVES THE CHILDREN OF NOD. Deposit slips, for God’s sake. It was the only paper she could find.”
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 8