Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  A younger woman appeared in the hallway, looking concerned, and then the March girl was there. She made him immediately, turning and disappearing around the corner, so Jimmy pushed past the old woman into the front room, following the March girl deeper into the house. Down the hallway, to a room at the end. He entered in time to see her legs waggling through an open window. He turned back down the hall, the old woman yelling at him in Spanish, Jimmy pushing her aside, marching into the warm yellow kitchen and then out the door into the bright back lot.

  Three kids, two girls and a boy, riding a tricycle in the dirt. The boy steering, the girls holding on to his shoulders. Other houses and back lots crammed in close. A fierce-looking pit bull chained to a metal stake on the other side of the fence. The March girl stood at the end of the lot. She wouldn’t try to climb. Slow as he was, he’d get to her before she made it. The children stopped riding and looked up at the commotion. One of the girls rang the metal bell strapped to the handlebars. Jimmy looked up and the March girl was moving toward him. He wasn’t sure what she was doing and then she stopped in front of the kids, blocking them somewhat. She yelled to them and they moved away. Jimmy tried to smile, took a step forward. Held his hands out, empty. Said, Honey, I just want to talk.

  There was a roar and the March girl yelled and something blistered open in Jimmy’s left leg, the meat just above his knee. He fell forward into the March girl and she assumed his weight reflexively and then backed away, letting him fall. Jimmy turned his head to see the old woman standing in the kitchen doorway holding a battered rifle, smoke leaking from the barrel. He looked down at his leg. Not a direct hit, but direct enough, knocking out a chunk of his thigh. He felt nothing. This was shock or this was his leg numb already from the sickness.

  Faces in the windows of the neighboring houses. Dogs barking at the gunshot. There was a man in the next lot, unchaining the pit bull and dragging the animal toward the gate, pointing the dog at Jimmy. Jimmy pulled his gun from his waistband and pointed it at the old woman but the rifle she was holding looked single-shot, so he turned it back on the man with the dog on the other side of the fence. The March girl had gathered the children and was moving them back inside the house. Black spots swimming in Jimmy’s eyes. He tried to stand, fell, tried to stand again. Upright at last. He kept the gun trained on the man with the dog and walked through the gate into the neighboring lot. Into the house there, through the kitchen, the front room, out onto the street. Dizzy, the sun too bright. His legs working, though, so he made his way toward the Ford. Listening for he didn’t know what. A siren, men shouting. Oh, this was fucking rich. They’d love this story back at the station. Jimmy shot by an old woman with a rifle that looked like it had been at the Alamo. Hobbling toward the car. No feeling below his belt, his legs moving purely by instinct. Left, right, left. Even a baby could do it. They’d love this back at the station, this would get some real guffaws at his expense. He’d left the March girl back there. He’d made a very loud noise. This was not the way things were done. He was trailing blood along the street and listening for whatever might be coming. The Ford was very far away. He fell to his knees and knew that the pain should be tremendous but there was nothing. Tried to get up but could not. He would not stay on his knees, though, he had never been on his knees for anyone and he wouldn’t start now, so he unfolded all the way down, lying on his belly in the street. Arms out, the gun still in his hand. Dust in his mouth, the aftertaste of the firewater.

  They’d love this back at the station but he’d be damned if they’d ever see him on his knees.

  5

  The bus drove back through the towns. Dickie sat alone, looked for the bald man, for Walter. Even if the change in appearance had worked and Dickie had lost them for a night, they’d have recovered, would be gaining ground.

  They pulled over for a few hours so the driver could sleep in his seat. Dickie fought the impulse to get another car, go back to Hannah. He fought the impulse to find a drink. He sat in the shade outside the bus and watched the few faces that passed, hummed a tune in his head, one of the records Hannah had played back in L.A., a wordless blues that had seeped into his dreams.

  In the afternoon, they started again. The bus passed low stands of manzanita, sandy tracts of pitchfork cactus, an open field where there was some police action, men staring at bodies in the grass. They drove through the third town and Dickie looked at the rooftops of the houses beyond the main street, trying to discern which one belonged to Inés and Esmeralda.

  They stopped for gas at a station by the plaza and Dickie asked the driver how long they’d be staying. It wouldn’t take much time to run back to the house to check on Hannah, but the driver said he was just filling the tank and then they would leave again. He didn’t seem to care why Dickie had been riding his bus all day.

  The plaza was empty except for birds. At the far end Dickie could see the old man with the shopping bag walking down the steps of the church. The driver finished and gave a short whistle to Dickie and they got back onto the bus.

  They made the reverse circuit, most of the same riders getting on at the stops by the rancho road, sitting heavily in their seats, their faces streaked with sweat. A few of the men passed bottles of beer across the aisle. The sun was low, disappearing behind the far hills. Henry March got back on the bus, carrying his suitcase and tripod. He looked over the riders’ faces again, quickly, before taking his seat.

  It was dark by the time March got off at the plaza in the center of his town. Dickie waited for the bus to continue on a few streets before he stood and walked to the front and told the driver to let him off. The streets were getting full again, night crowds spilling out of the bars. A mariachi band was playing in a far corner of the plaza. The brass echoed off the surrounding walls, receding as Dickie moved past. A few blocks later, he found March on a quiet road of mostly abandoned storefronts, walking with his head down, in and out of the streetlight glow. Dickie stood back and watched March stop and unlock a door and enter. The door closed behind him. Dickie waited another few minutes and thought of Hannah again and started down the street, keeping out of the lights.

  The door March had entered was a thick metal slab in a wall without windows. But the door just prior was open and the space was lit. Dickie stepped inside. It was a gallery, with framed pictures hanging on the cinderblock walls. A work light was blazing in the far corner, flooding the room. The room so bright that the windows facing the street now looked black. Dickie blind to whatever moved outside.

  He walked forward and looked at the pictures. Images of faces, mostly Mexican men and women, workers like the people on the bus, looking straight ahead, or just slightly to one side, with a similar oblique gaze, almost always intent, questioning, as if they were attempting to make sense of what they were seeing. The faces close to the lens, but seemingly without any knowledge of the camera. No vanity or ego. Private things.

  He turned. The pictures mounted on the wall behind him were the same as those behind the subjects in the pictures he’d been staring at. To the side of the image he’d been studying there was a small hole. He covered it with his thumb. There were other holes along the wall, between the picture frames, all at different heights. He stood between the two pictures in front of him with his thumb over the first discovered hole. It seemed that if he took a step to either side he would fall into something, through something.

  There was no noise but there was a presence and Dickie looked to the front of the gallery and Henry March was standing in the doorway. He was without his hat, and his white hair was combed back from his forehead. The sunglass clips were off his glasses. His voice was deep and even and quiet. A ghost’s voice.

  “Someone sent you.”

  Dickie nodded.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dickie couldn’t see the man’s eyes. Even without the sunglass clips, March’s lenses held the glare from the work light.r />
  “I’m looking for a man named Henry March,” Dickie said. He didn’t know if the man still thought of himself by that name, if the name still meant anything to him. Dickie knew how possible it was to forget. Names, connections, memories. These were things they were supposed to leave behind.

  He could see no change in the man with the name now in the room. March stood perfectly still except for a slight movement in his right hand, his thumb and forefinger rubbing together. A tic, maybe, or the neuron misfirings of age.

  Dickie said, “People are coming for his daughter to get to him. They might already be here. Her name is Hannah. I don’t know how long I can keep her safe.”

  The movement of March’s thumb against his forefinger. Dickie realized he still had his own finger pressed to the hole in the wall. He let his arm drop slowly to his side.

  “If I’m speaking to the wrong man,” Dickie said, “then I apologize for bringing you trouble. If you’re the wrong man then they’ll just continue on after his daughter. And that’s none of your concern.”

  Dickie watched March for some sign or recognition, some spark of memory. The man made no movement except for his thumb, his finger.

  This was what happened. Dickie understood. This was what happened to men like them. Everything cut away. Even color cut away. The white ghost in this place. Dickie here, someday. A man in a room looking through holes in the walls.

  Dickie walked toward the door. When he was a few feet away March stepped to one side to let him pass.

  “I came here,” Dickie said, “because I was told that you have a reputation for cleaning things up.”

  Dickie crossed into the doorway, their bodies close, and the ghost spoke again.

  “And his son?”

  Dickie stopped.

  The ghost said, “This man’s son?”

  Dickie shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “His wife?”

  “She’s gone,” Dickie said. He passed over the threshold, back onto the street. “I’m sorry. She’s already gone.”

  6

  1 bookcase

  1 lot of electrical small parts including microphones, etc.

  2 cameras, mounted

  1 camera, loose

  1 tripod

  2 buckets paint, black

  1 folding card table

  2 sealed-beam work lights with clips

  2 extension cords

  Assorted cans of meat, vegetables, fruit

  1 chair

  1 electric hot plate

  1 ceramic coffeepot

  1 lamp

  1 cot with sleeping bag

  1 cardboard suitcase, with film

  1 recorder, with headphones

  1 man, standing, listening

  The ghost, alone in his room.

  * * *

  There was a name now, in the air around him. He sat on the edge of his cot in the darkness and the name buzzed like a fly, circling. He swatted at it with an open hand but it was insistent, its small noise growing larger, the only sound he could hear.

  In the beginning he had come to this country, working his way south, changing towns, rooms within towns every few months. A room in _______ with crying children on the other side of the thin wall. A room in _______ with a sheet in the window to block the sun and keep out the birds. He stayed off the streets as much as possible. When he was on the streets, he watched for Americans, white faces.

  He had some money. He learned the language. He paid a woman in _______ to sit with him three times a week and go through books, line by line. He went to the towns’ small, shabby cinemas. He practiced his Spanish in the dark, speaking along with the faces on screen, watching the same films two or three times a week. He grew to know Mexican cinema of all stripes, the actors and actresses, the names of the directors and cinematographers. He found the novelas some of the films were based on and picked his way through the grammar, the familiar plots, hoarding words. Alone in his rooms, he read the novelas aloud to hear his voice carrying the sound.

  He did not read the newspapers. He wanted to know of nothing beyond the spaces he moved within. He kept a small radio and there was a station that arrived when the weather was warm that played film music most of the night. He was constantly wanting for sleep. It took him months to get used to the diet, the oversweet drinks. He took to rolling his own cigarettes because the Mexican cigarettes were unpalatable. The coffee was good, though, dark and rich. The coffee made up for the cigarettes. He grew accustomed to taking it with milk. Moving rooms, moving towns. He finally visited a dentist in _______ about the pain in his teeth and the man pulled the rotten bone from his mouth and set metal in its place. An infection set in and he was delirious for days, his face throbbing like a guitar string. He found himself at the house of the woman who taught him Spanish and she brought him inside and bent him over the sink in her bathroom and placed towels soaked in tequila in his mouth until his fever had subsided. He was left with the taste of metal in his gums, on his tongue. This faded but never left him entirely. The new teeth buzzed sometimes, in parts of certain towns. Coming into a radio field, perhaps, some kind of invisible current.

  There were other Americans in the towns, criminals, artists, alcoholic businessmen fleeing their losses or their wives. In later years, young men began to appear, avoiding war, unkempt, bearded, believing that hair made a disguise, false names made a disguise. Not understanding the difference between hiding and disappearing.

  Spiders in his room the size of a child’s fist.

  He bought a camera and lenses and a tripod. Films of various quality. He found work as a photographer and then as something else, developing a reputation as a man who could settle delicate matters. He traveled to the ranchos in the north or the villas by the sea and took photographs at lavish first communions or quinceañeras, and afterward the father of the girl would take him aside, into an office or bedroom and ask him to deal with something, destroy something, speak with someone discreetly. Criminals and whores, young women with babies. Paying them when possible, bus fare to leave town, sending them somewhere they couldn’t cause trouble for the wealthy father of the child in their arms.

  El Güero Fotógrafo. A name he disliked because he thought it would draw more attention than his skin alone. Or sometimes he was called La Escoba, which he was assured was not an insult, just a statement of fact. Or sometimes the ghost, the white ghost, a name given to him by the curious, timorous children of his wealthy patrons.

  The fly buzzed in the dark room, growing louder, more insistent.

  He traveled on foot or by bus if he was going a great distance. Up to the ranchos for a wedding or an anniversary. Sometimes accepting his patrons’ hospitality and spending the night in a back room while the guests drank and danced in the fields. Laughter and song and fireworks in the night. He would be up with the sun and back down to the towns to deal with an indiscretion or a gambling debt or a bad investment, letting the men in question know that this was the final payment, that any further compensation would not come in pesos.

  There were times when men would not accept money or threats. There were other ways of dealing with these situations and this was something he knew how to do, this was a skill he had acquired. Distancing himself from the moment. The action taking place in front of him but seeming very far away. This is who he was. He was a man who could do these things.

  He had no history prior to Mexico. Every morning when he woke he cleared his mind of any memory, any name that might be waiting there.

  The money was not as important to him as the accumulation of favors, respect, fear. This created something of a protective ring, a thin perimeter of men who were powerful in these small worlds and who needed and feared him and so would alert him to any danger coming his way.

  After many years he settled in the string of coastal towns at the end of the peninsula. Dr
y places, despite the closeness of the sea. Everything was dust. He stood waiting to cross the main town street and the buses and pickup trucks passed by flinging dust. He could taste it on his tongue, feel it in his eyelashes. The furniture in his room sat under a thin film of it. Every night he took apart his camera and lenses and brushed the dust loose. His hand on the windowsill in the evening comes away powder white.

  In _______ he came across a pair of storefronts on the south side of the street. The larger of the two had wide plate-glass windows at the front where he could see the entirety of the sun’s daylong arc, the slow progression of light across the town. The smaller storefront had a thick metal door, an old, impenetrable-looking thing, green with calcium, striped with rust. There was a sink and a toilet at the back of the room. There were no windows. The man who sold him the rooms told him that the larger one had been a barbershop at some point in the past and that the other, the room with the door, had once secured something valuable, though he didn’t know what.

  So this was where he lived, in the smaller room with the door, without windows. A card table, a lamp, a hot plate, a sleeping bag on a cot. A monk’s cell.

  He stood and waited for the bus on the rancho road. Holding his suitcase of camera and lenses, his tripod. The motes of dust in the evening air moving like a flock, rising and falling, turning in unison to disappear, and for seconds it seems that the air is clear but then they turn again together and catch the last of the sun and it is like a thousand little golden doors closing.