And it was after supper, well after supper, after ten that night, the Consortium aghast with dread and frustration, when she appeared in the lobby of the Planter House on Pine Street and ignored them except to note, “It is a big pile of bricks, is it not?” They worked on that translation among themselves. She strolled to the desk to collect her key to the suite where she would reside—it was in her contract, this new living in comfort.
Suffering did not, in spite of what she had once believed, improve holiness. Suffering did not increase sacredness; it only distracted from it. God did not deliver grace any quicker to a peon in mud than He did to a millionaire in a penthouse—it was simply that the millionaire, though greatly more in need than the peon, did not notice grace when it came. Why would he? Cigars, whiskey, grand beds, and gold wallpaper were all more visible than God. You could put your arms around a bawdy woman, but you had to intuit the Holy Spirit. No. It was all mud. Some mud was more glittery, that was all.
She was through with hunger and discomfort. If she was going to live in the constant fire of the shrieking, jostling, hungry, desperate public, she would sleep well. She would eat well and bathe well.
The deskman handed her the key. And he handed her a folded telegraph slip. She opened it and smiled. Laughed. Crumpled it and tossed it on the counter and ran up the stairs. She actually hiked up her skirts and ran.
Forty-Three
AND SHE WENT TO great Union Station alone.
She had never seen a castle, but Union Station looked like what she imagined a castle should look like. It loomed over Market Street in towers and minarets, its great doors showing a vast space within. The fountains outside were full of water-spouting Greek gods, or were they Romans? Perhaps they were some sort of angels. Whatever they were, they were muscular and seemed alive in the spray. She was in love with them. She took a seat on a bench and meditated on the rainbowed waters as they formed arches in the air.
Everything was brighter that day. The scent of the river was as fresh as summer. Little birds in swirling chubascos attacked the streets and dove upon the dry horse droppings to liberate oats and flakes of straw. Butterflies swept in from the hills beyond the city and the prairies beyond the river. She stood and spun in the street, forgetting she was the Saint of Cabora. Just Teresita. Just a happy young woman. Just for an instant.
She planned furiously in her mind. She made mental lists and crossed out everything on them as soon as she imagined them. She worried over her hair and her dress. Plans upon plans flitted like these butterflies.
She could no longer think of what a friend was. She had lost so many friends, so much family, that she had put aside such absurd things as companionship. She exiled Huila, her sister Anita, from her mind. She exiled Aguirre, Chulo and Gabriela and her old friends from Cabora. In her mind, she sent Tomás out into the hills to walk alone; in dreams, he called her name under storming skies.
Now. She brushed her front for the tenth time. Patted her hair. Licked her fingertips and smoothed her brows.
She wore a tight jacket of a shiny deep gold hue over a cream blouse with a throat ruffle. Her brown skirts flared out from her hips and swept the floor, but the flare was modest. Teresita did not flounce. She wore laced brown boots that added an inch to her height, and she had her hair pinned back and boxed in a smart little hat she had found in the oddly named Misfit Clothing Parlor on Olive.
She walked inside the station and caught her breath for a moment. It could have been a cathedral. The arc of the high roof was gilt, full of detail up to its white cap—so much detail she didn’t think she could make it all out. Electric lamps with three white globes of light each rose from the floor on black iron posts. And the great face of the clock at the far end was held up by either two ferns or two great feathers. She remembered Gabriel’s feather. Perhaps it was a cathedral.
Teresita saw stained glass. If she had seen it in San Francisco, she had not paid attention. She had not seen such a play of light and color before. Three nymphs, sitting before a low wall, lounging in some kind of ethereal sunlight, hills visible beyond. The sparrows that had invaded the vault of the station just added to the illusion. It was as if their chirps were coming from the magical glass, birdsongs made entirely of light.
A man bumped into her and broke her reverie.
“Hello,” he said.
She moved away from him, cross that he had disturbed her.
He hit his leg with his newspaper and moved away.
On the street, and in the green streetcars, men collided with her. People seemed to recognize her, and smiled at her or whispered and gestured with their chins and eyes. But with these lone men, she felt as if she were being hunted. Often, handsome gringos presented themselves to her, blocking her passage so she had to step around them. She closed herself to the world and moved along.
A blind man asked for coins, but she was distracted and went by without even noticing him.
The train was an hour late. She ate boiled peanuts and drank hot coffee. She puzzled over the Republic newspaper. The announcements echoed and she didn’t really understand them anyway.
She craned her neck and peered at the grand clock face. It was pale and fat as the full moon. And its hands went slowly around and around, passing her hour. She fidgeted. She worried. She pulled on white gloves, stared at her hands, and decided they looked foolish. She pulled the gloves off by taking the middle fingertip of each in her teeth and pulling. The etiquette of Cabora would not have allowed that! It made her happy. She threw the gloves in a black waste can.
She stepped outside to the platforms. It was her habit to take the sun when she could. No one out there even glanced at her save the porters, who might have ushered her back inside but were busy laughing and poking one another in the ribs. Great hilarity. She closed her eyes and sat on a bench and listened to the music of their play.
Then, great swoops of pigeons, a distant whistle, a clanging bell, and a plume of steam, white and bursting, from the scrubby trees and crab apples out along the tracks. And here it came, clanking into the echoing huge shed. For a moment, she thought she would retrieve her gloves.
She stood and brushed her skirts and struck a pose and waited. Demure, but open. Excited, perhaps, but not overly so. Poised, she would say.
Poised, yes. For Harry.
The big engine rolled in, all frenzy and bellows. Steam burst forth and made twin clouds, one on either side, and the train staff went to the doors and put down small sets of steps and helped weary travelers down and dragged heavy bags to wagons. Porters blew whistles. Three bells rang. Shouts.
All was tumult. A storm of faces and bodies and coats and hats. A fat man in a floor-length coat being berated by a fat woman dragging her coat on the ground. Teresita craned her neck, stood on her toes, moved back and forth on the platform seeking that bright red-cheeked visage of her silly would-be beau. People bumped into her. Men eyed her and tipped their hats. A limping gentleman passed, trailed by two Negro porters hauling a heavy cart overloaded with valises. She impatiently stepped aside, watched for Harry’s bright eyes and sunburned hair, and she smiled thinking he would have a cowlick when she saw him and chided herself to stop being silly—he would no longer be a boy, after all. He’d be a man now. He might even have whiskers. She might not recognize him. Why, he could have been the fat man in the big coat! She smiled. Oh, where—where?
A tall character in a tawny camel overcoat and a pale gray hat blocked her way. This again. She put a hand on his upper arm and politely shoved him a little.
“Excuse me,” she said.
He did not move. Some dark fellow with her father’s mustache. She glanced at him: what an insolent American giant. He was smiling at her. She shook her head. This is not the time for such idiocy, she thought.
“Not now,” she said in her best English.
“Ma’am?” he said softly.
His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. It made her look up again. He gazed steadily at her.
He
wore a dove gray homburg with a wide satin band. He removed his overcoat and hung it over his arm. His vest was black corduroy, and his watch chain looped across his chest. His jacket came down to midthigh and matched the hat, though its lapels were black. A small red pocket handkerchief peeked from his chest pocket. He had a black riverboat gambler’s ribbon tie knotted at his throat. His mustache was abetted by a small triangular patch of whiskers under his lower lip. His face was slender; his eyes like deep pools of black water with diamonds in the bottom of each. They were etched in the corners with laugh lines.
He doffed his hat—his hair was dark, parted on the left.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “Been a while.”
“John?”
He grinned at her.
“The one and only.”
“John Van Order?”
“You were expecting Harry?” He looked wounded, then grinned some more. His grins looked wicked, she was already noting. Like the joke was on the world, not John Van Order. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid Mother would never send her Harry to live with a divorced woman.”
“Excuse me?” she blurted.
He held his hat in one hand and regarded it for a long, silent moment.
“Mrs. Rodriguez,” he said. “You have made a damned mess of your life.”
He put his hat back on. Regarded her with a cool gaze. His eyes never left hers.
She drew herself to her full height. She was indignant, ready to defy him.
But she found herself smiling and blushing.
“True,” she finally said.
They laughed.
“You scared me for a minute,” he said, bending to pick up a small carpetbag. “You had that fightin’ Indian look in your eye.”
“Things,” she said, “have made me… fierce.”
“Sweet little you?”
She punched his arm lightly.
“It has been hard for me!”
“Oh, no doubt.”
They were speaking Spanish, glorious, colloquial ranch Spanish that she hadn’t been free to enjoy for a thousand years.
He glanced around. People were looking at her. “Things get a mite complex when you ain’t looking.” In English.
“¿Qué?” she said.
“Está cabrón,” he explained.
She cast her eyes down. John Van Order. Ay, Dios.
“It is so good to see you,” she said.
“Not many pards in the Saint business?” he said.
“Pards?”
“Amigos. Cuates. Camaradas.”
She smiled. Frowned. “Not many,” she said.
His eyes were at half-mast and he smiled slowly, half nodded.
“I do not understand what has happened to me,” she said. She shook her head. She moved her hands. He watched. He noticed she was nervous. “I think I have made mistakes. But”—she breathed in, looked up at him, brightened—“I am taking charge of my life.”
“ ’Bout time, eh?” he said.
“It is harder than I thought.”
He said, “I can help you with that. I have a little experience in the hard part.”
He took her hand; without thinking, she laced her fingers through his.
“I have a hankering for a cup of coffee,” he said, and they walked through the station together.
They found a small white table in front of a bistro far enough from the windborne fountain spray that they wouldn’t get wet. They sat on uncomfortable iron chairs and they bent to fat white cups of steaming coffee thick with cream and cinnamon. Early afternoon tipped over to dusk, and still they sat. Streetcars periodically drowned out their voices, and they simply sat looking at each other till the cars passed. They leaned toward each other again; they laughed. John slapped the table and pointed his finger at her as she held her hands in front of her face.
Passersby tipped their heads, some of them laughing too behind their fans or newspapers at what they took to be young lovers so giddy at the table. John ordered more coffee and a plate of biscuits with honey in a little pot. It didn’t take long for pigeons to swirl down around them and commence their preening, gurgling circuits on the sidewalk. Both of them tossed crumbs to the sooty doves and shook the table with laughter and small shouts of exultation.
“Any word from Robison Field?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The St. Louis Cardinals! Patsy Donovan? The home-run king?”
“Baseball!” she could be heard to cry by those across the street.
“I guess you don’t know about the Browns either,” he mourned. She stared. “American League?” he offered. She shook her head.
“After seeing you play,” she said, bright-eyed, “the sport was ruined for me.”
“Aw,” he drawled. “Shucks.”
“That was not offered as a compliment.”
John jumped from his seat and threw his arms in the air and Teresita laughed so loud it could be heard all the way to the fountains, and the pigeons exploded in panic but were drawn back by their magnetic greed to the small ingots of biscuit falling to the bricks.
Teresita noticed his hands shaking just a little as he sat back down. And the long distance in his eyes. For all his laughter, his eyes were sad. It had never occurred to her that John Van Order might be a sad man. Or was she simply making him sad in her own mind? Tomás would have said she was already imagining a healing. What would Huila have said?
“Your hand,” she said, as she watched his cup rattle on its saucer. “It is trembling.”
He smiled self-consciously, put his hands in his lap.
“Do I make you nervous?” she asked.
He shook his head, disappointing her.
“Naw,” he drawled. “I’m used to you.”
He squeezed his hands together.
“Drying out,” he said quietly.
She had imagined that, perhaps, possibly, he would offer a piropo to her—some gallant thing about trembling before her beauty… something.
He said, “I had some… times in Chicago.”
“Times?”
“… difficult times.” He nodded at her as if beseeching her to change the subject. “I made a mess of things my own self,” he said. “A little drink. Bad things. You know.”
The waiter came out with a fresh pot and filled their cups again.
“Very kind,” John said.
“My pleasure,” he replied and went back inside.
“I do not know,” she said. “But I can imagine. There was drink in my house.” She left it at that.
The gaslights were sputtering and starting to fire up as lamplighters raised their smoldering punk torches to the glass enclosures; the whole boulevard seemed to be blinking and sparkling as if fireflies had formed twin parades that stretched into the distance.
“I had a little tussle,” said John. “The bottle.” He tipped his head to the side. “It was not my friend.”
He smiled ruefully.
She sipped her coffee and stared into those eyes of his.
“You are better now?” she asked.
“Mother hopes so,” he replied. “Hey, now,” he said. “Don’t you go trying your yerb spells on me.”
“One has to be willing to be healed for it to work,” she noted mildly.
“I’ll do it on my own, thank you very much,” he said. He raised his cup in a toast to the city. “Ladies and gentlemen: John Van Order!”
She ate some biscuit.
“You know,” he continued, “I dreamed of—oh, what? I dreamed of the good life. I always wanted to be a city slicker. Never got to New York.” He put down his coffee and crossed his arms. “That’s the only city in the world. They say the whole thing’s made out of money!” He smiled. She watched. “Didn’t you want the good life?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Maybe a little.” She dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “Yes.”
They laughed again.
He leaned toward her and confessed: “I inherited money when Dad die
d.”
“Oh, John!”
“Lost it all.”
“Oh, John!”
“Cards, whiskey.” He wasn’t foolish enough to say women. “Schemes. Seemed like a plan at that moment. All gone now.”
“John!”
He nodded.
“Can you believe it?”
He looked away, overcome with remorse.
“Fool,” he muttered.
She put her hand over his.
“You know what they say. He who does not run around like a fool in his youth will run around like a fool in his old age.”
He tipped his head.
“They also say,” he replied, “unlucky in gambling, lucky in love.” He huffed a little through his nose.
“Are you lucky in love, John?”
“Never been in love,” he said.
He stared until she looked away.
“At least not that I ever admitted.”
She sighed.
“My, this is good coffee,” she said.
When they stood to leave, he grabbed his little bag.
“Mr. Van Order,” she said. “Where is your luggage?”
He looked at the bag, shrugged. He gestured at his fine outfit. His satchel.
“This is about it,” he said. “Got my razor, my brush, and my mug.”
She took his arm. Felt the gunbelt against her hip as she pressed close.
“I see you brought your pistol,” she noted.
They headed through the first pool of streetlight and into the shadows in between.
“I thought I could pawn it,” he said. “Buy us a steak.”
Their laughter bounced back at them from the storefront windows until they reached the corner and disappeared from sight.
Forty-Four
HIS HAND WAS SHAKING when she took it in hers. The falling night brought a chill, but it wasn’t cool enough to make a man shake. He seemed unsteady—as if his balance had slipped a bit. She was certain he had not been drinking. They stood outside and looked up at the foggy smear of the Milky Way as it made itself more visible with incremental blackness surrounding it. She leaned against his great chest. He was so tall, the Sky Scratcher.
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