by Webb, Betty
I held very still, waiting. The snake didn’t move. It was waiting, too.
“The bus passed me. It was going slow along the street and it was all lit up inside. The people inside were making a lot of noise. Some were singing. But someone was also screaming, a woman. A child was screaming, too, crying, ‘No, Mommy! No!’ Then the back door to the bus, the one people are supposed to leave from, it flew open and I could see the yellow-haired woman holding you with one hand. In the other hand she had a big gun. She was pointing it at you. Above all the singing voices, I could hear her screaming, ‘I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her! Get away from me and let me do it!’
“Then some man, I could not see him well but he was darker than her, he reached down to grab the gun. But it was too late. The yellow-haired woman, she fired the gun. You stopped screaming and fell into the street. You fell right at my feet, where the good God had planned for you to fall.”
The snake squeezed tighter. “You say the man tried to take the gun?”
She nodded. “He had his hands around the gun. He must not have wanted her to shoot you.”
“You are certain that the woman who shot me had yellow hair? Hair like mine?”
The low buzz from the family surrounding us quieted. Agnezia picked up a Corona and took several hesitant sips. She didn’t drink like a drinker. She set her beer down slowly, wiped her mouth, and gave me another sorrowful look.
“I am sorry, Tina. The light from the bus was very bright on her and I will always remember her face. She looked much as you do today, very beautiful. Except she had no scar.”
No, of course she didn’t. Just as my face was free of blemish until my mother shot me.
I couldn’t stand to hear any more. I stood up, brushing away patting hands, arms that offered clumsy embraces. “I’m going for a walk.”
Dusty jumped up and reached for me. I brushed his hands away, too. “Leave me alone.”
I left them all staring at me, staring at the odd, scarred, yellow-haired woman who had wanted to know so much and who now wanted to know so little. With my back straight, my eyes wide against the glaring sun, I walked back along the tumbled-rock beach towards the hotel, away from the noisy cantinas, the music, the laughter. The only things I wanted to hear were surf and gulls. I wanted to think nothing, to feel nothing, to be nothing.
I don’t know how long I walked but when I finally stopped, I could no longer see Agnezia’s Cantina and the Hotel Vina Del Mar was little more than an angular shape on the cliff. Volcanic boulders cast long shadows on the beach. At some point, the gulls had ceased their raucous cries. The roar of the surf had descended to a murmur. Suddenly exhausted, I sat down on a volcanic rock and stared out to sea.
Part of me, I realized, had always known. The nightmare I’d had right after Clarice’s murder had not been about her, it had been about my mother. The gun was my mother’s gun. The voice was my mother’s voice. The promise to kill, my mother’s promise. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, the memory of that night lurked to ambush me again and again in my dreams. No wonder, then, that all my life I had been plagued with insomnia, that I always went to bed terrified of sleep, surrendering to it only when sheer exhaustion lowered my defenses and the book I’d taken to keep me awake slipped from my hands. Wherever she might really be right now, my mother remained a constant fixture in that twilight life, waiting for me with a gun.
What had my mother found so unlovable about me that she had tried to take my life? I was four years old, a child. What were my sins? What acts could a child of that age perform to earn so much hatred, so much rage? I remembered the beatings I had endured from some of my foster homes, the rapes, the thousands of humiliations, the betrayals. What had all those people, in total agreement with my mother, seen in me that I couldn’t see?
What was wrong with me, had always been wrong with me?
The knowledge the afternoon had thrust at me hammered home a hard lesson. Almost everyone I had ever known, even Malik Toshumbe, had taken their right to live for granted. But that wasn’t true of me. I’d always felt like a cheat, as if by simply breathing in the earth’s air, I was stealing precious resources away from the rest of humanity. I felt like a nothing, a creature with no right to live. Something precious, something that all other human beings owned in abundance, had been left out of the biological stew as it formed in my mother’s womb.
And that’s why I’d always felt that I had to earn my right to life, the real reason I became a cop. To protect all the others, the lucky stiffs who had a right to be here. I wasn’t really human. I was just a tool to be used in defense of the others, little more than a human gun.
Now that I knew that, really understood it, I didn’t want to go on. It was just too hard.
Crimson and violet streaked the sky as the sun slipped towards the ocean. Two pelicans waddled up the beach towards me, their mouths open, hissing dark threats. Twilight would fall soon, bringing the evening’s chill. It occurred to me that if I was going to kill myself, I might as well do it now while the water was still warm.
But I sat there a little longer, imagining how it would be to start swimming towards that fiery sun, to swim and swim until my arms grew too tired to swim any more. Then I thought about how it would feel to slip beneath the surface, to sink towards the ocean floor, to lie dreamless among the seaweed.
I thought about it until I realized that although I did not really want to live, I wasn’t yet ready to do anything about it.
After that realization, there was nothing else to do but turn around, go back to the cantina.
To hear the rest.
The others had gone, but Agnezia and Dusty still sat at the table I had abandoned earlier. Agnezia’s face was taut with strain, but Dusty’s looked no different than usual. He was used to my ways.
“Tina, I am so sorry.” Tentatively, she put her hand on mine, expecting me to brush it away again.
But I didn’t. Grasping her hand firmly, I told the biggest lie I’d ever told in my worthless life. “Thank you for saving me.”
She began to weep again. “The good God, he put me there for you.”
If the good God was so protective of me, I wondered bitterly, why did the bastard let me get shot in the first place? And then shot two more times? How about that drug dealer who knifed me back in ’92, and who left me with a six-inch scar on my left breast? Or the batterer who had almost choked me to death before he could be subdued? These God-worshippers were always so blind to the truth. I wanted to stand up and scream that there was no God, but if there was, He was a serial killer with a sadistic sense of humor.
But I didn’t. Agnezia had saved my life and deserved respect.
“Yes, God sent you to be my guardian angel,” I lied again.
I heard a choking noise and looked around to see Dusty sitting there with a half-smile on his face. He’d heard my diatribes about religion, knew what I thought about the fools who packed the pews every Sunday. He shook his head slightly at me, warning me not to lay it on too thick.
Agnezia was oblivious to my dishonesty. “You must come with me to my house where my family has prepared a great meal in your honor. You must tell us all about your life, about what you have done, where you have been. We all want to know. You have grown into a beautiful, strong woman, my Tina, and we want to know what glories you have accomplished.”
Glories?
I’d disappoint them, just as I had disappointed everyone else.
My mother had just been the first of a very long list. But I smiled and agreed. I was hungry.
And acting halfway normal was always easier during a meal.
Agnezia had married as soon as she returned to Mexico. She had seven children, ten grandchildren, and a handsome husband named Umberto who was the chef at her cantina. She had done well for herself. Her house was neither large nor luxurious according to American standards, but it placed her squarely in Mexico’s middle class. The rooms were freshly whitewashed, with bright sombreros and serapes covering
the walls. Above the tiled fireplace in the living room hung a picture of a laughing Jesus, one of the first I had ever seen of him with dark eyes and hair—which if he really existed, he probably had.
Gaily painted wooden chairs completed a conversational grouping made up of gold-crushed velvet, and on the floor, hand-woven rugs used all the colors of the rainbow. Oddly, the overall effect was not gaudy, just cheerful. Madeline, my artist foster mother, would probably have told me that was probably because all the colors used were colors that existed together in nature. Blue for the sea, gold for the sun, red for the bougainvillea that cascaded over the town, green for the palms lining the seafront. The colors might be bright, but when used in the same proportions found in nature, they worked.
Near the door leading into the kitchen was an altar surrounded by fresh flowers, the Madonna guarding this one as she had Mrs. Albundo’s. The pictures included every person sitting at the dining room table, and even a few people I didn’t recognize. But one picture stood out, a picture cut from a Phoenix newspaper of a blond-haired child with a bandage over her eye. Underneath was the caption, “Do you know this little girl?”
Mine was the only picture with a silver frame.
“My family, it is still growing,” Agnezia said, as she finished introducing all her family members. “Angelina, my youngest, she is pregnant again. We think it will be twins.”
Angelina, who was sitting next to a startlingly handsome young man, blushed and ducked her head. He nudged her in the side with his elbow and said something in Spanish I didn’t understand. It made her giggle and cover her mouth.
“Angelina, Stephan, I have told you not to be dirty at the table,” Umberto, Agnezia’s husband, admonished even though his eyes were laughing. He and the grandchildren were loading the long dining table with serving platters heaped with shrimp, oysters, chicken-and beef-stuffed enchiladas, chili rellenos, rice, beans, and piles and piles of hot tortillas.
I started to reach for a tortilla, then stopped when I saw everyone’s hands assume the prayer position. Agnezia began saying Grace, and out of consideration for her Anglo guests, she said it in English. She thanked God for the table’s bounty, the success of her cantina, and called down blessings upon family, friends and neighbors. Then, in that sing-song voice common to those who have committed a long list to memory, began petitioning her deity to help the troubled members of the family. She prayed for someone name Olivera who lived in Nogales and suffered from some sort of secret trouble. She prayed for Carlos, jailed in Los Angeles. At the very end, Agnezia prayed, “And may the good God keep our Tina safe and protect her always, wherever she is.”
There was a gasp around the table, then giggles. Blushing, Agnezia looked over at me. “I guess He has already answered the prayer.”
Umberto smiled at his wife and asked, “Now that we know Tina is safe, do we drop her from the list?”
Agnezia shook her head. “No, mi corazon. I think our Tina still needs our prayers.”
By the look she gave me, I felt that Agnezia had somehow heard my thoughts as I’d sat on the rock, staring out to sea. But I’d be damned if I ever admitted to them. “I’m fine,” I said, looking her straight in the eyes. “Just fine.”
In all my life, I’d never seen a woman’s eyes grow so loving yet at the same time, so sad.
I decided to consider Agnezia my mother, and let the real one remain in the past.
I never wanted to look in that woman’s eyes.
Chapter 24
“So do I call you Tina now?” Kryzinski asked.
I was sitting in his office filling out the police report about the Papago Park shooter, even though Kryzinski and I both knew that the chances of finding him were slim to zip. Or at least slim until we I.D.’d Clarice’s murderer.
It was Saturday. Dusty and I had stayed another day in Rocky Point, getting to know Agnezia’s family, walking on the silver beach, making love on clean, white sheets. But now Dusty had returned to the ranch, and I was trying my best to continue my life as if I didn’t know what I knew, as if what I’d discovered hadn’t half killed me.
“Lena will do fine, thanks.” Why should I feel loyalty to a name given to me by an attempted murderer?
Kryzinski shifted in his seat. I couldn’t tell if he was as uncomfortable with the expression on my face as Jimmy had been, or if it was just his silly suit. Today he was wearing a shiny blue Western suit with cream-colored piping, and ostrich-skin boots.
He looked at me warily, as if unsure whether I’d cry, scream, collapse, or heave his computer through the window. “Ah, have you read the paper yet this morning?”
I shook my head. I’d been too busy convincing Jimmy that I was fine, thank you, just fine.
“Then you need to hear about Alison Garwood,” he said.
“What about her?” I was still struggling with the incident report. Even during my own days on the force, I had hated filling out police reports. Too many lines of tiny print, too many pages, too much attention to detail. A misquote now, a faulty recollection committed to paper, and perps walked.
“Kobe put her in the hospital.”
I jerked my head up. “What?”
Kryzinski nodded. “You remember she was pregnant? Well, not anymore. He beat her so bad this time that she miscarried. She’s also got her jaw wired together and a couple of cracked ribs. Her left eye socket? The creepoid shattered it. She’s gonna have to go a few rounds with the plastic surgeon this time.”
The pencil snapped in my hand and I let it fall to the floor. It wasn’t that I was surprised. I wasn’t. Once a man begins to batter, he’s started down a road from which there is no turning back. The violence escalates until slaps turn into punches, bites become knife attacks, thrown ashtrays become bullets. Yet such was the denial on the part of the victims that they pretended they couldn’t see the increasing savagery of the attacks. Chances were good that Alison was right now lying in her hospital bed, wondering whether to call a cab to take her back home or to have Jay come and get her.
Then something Kryzinski said jogged a memory.
“Did you say she had a shattered eye socket?” I remembered Clarice’s face, the shattered eye socket, and it occurred to me—could Jay have set up Gus Baylor? Was he smarter than any of us had given him credit for? Was Clarice’s murder simply one more case of domestic violence after all?
“Yeah, a shattered eye socket. The left one.” Kryzinski’s eyes met mine. He was thinking what I was thinking.
I leaned over, picked up the broken pencil, and held out my hand for a new one. Within ten minutes I’d finished filling out the incident report and Kryzinski told me he’d find some sucker, probably the young patrolman I’d met a few days earlier, to type it up for him. Then I’d need to sign it.
“Yeah, yeah. Call me and let me know when you want me to come back down. Um, what hospital is Alison in?”
He looked at me hard. “Scottsdale Memorial. You sure you’re okay?”
I threw him a bright, lying smile and left.
Alison looked even worse than I expected. Her face was swollen the size of a Phoenix Suns basketball and just about the same color. Purple and orange bruises obscured the skin to the point where she could have been any race, any sex. Her very humanity had been stripped, leaving her reduced to nothing more than a throbbing vessel of pain.
We had a lot in common, Alison and I.
I sat down on the chair beside her, knowing better than to ask her how she felt. “I know you can’t talk, Alison, so I’m going to tell you what I need to tell you and then I’ll leave. If you go back home, he’s going to kill you, just as he might have already killed someone else. Men like Jay don’t change. He may cry, he may beg you not to leave him, but once you give in and stay, he’ll have learned that no matter how hard he beats you, you’ll always forgive him. Save your life, Alison. Leave him now.”
A tear slipped out of the purple slit that remained of her right eye. The left was invisible, hidden under layers of band
ages. She tried to say something, but with her wired jaw the words emerged as gibberish.
Her grief took me out of my own so for a while, I sat there with her in silence. Eventually, I patted her hand and placed a card on her nightstand. “This is for My Sister’s Place. It’s a woman’s shelter, and all you need to do is call them, and they’ll take you to a safe place where Jay can’t find you.”
Her face was so damaged that I couldn’t tell if she was receptive to what I was saying or not. I hoped for both our sakes that she was. If Jay wound up killing her, as he seemed ready to do, I didn’t know how I’d handle it. Since leaving the police force, I’d lost my professional detachment. I wanted to get Jay Kobe in a small, dark room and do to him what he’d done to Alison…
And maybe Clarice.
Saturday or not, the office was open when I got back. Over my protests, Jimmy had decided to skip his weekend plans. He was on the computer again, checking out the history of every single bus that had ever been registered in New Mexico. Unlike me, he was humming with contentment.
He stopped humming when I walked through the door and he saw my face.
“Are you okay?”
Why did the whole world keep asking me that? “I’m fine, dammit, fine!”
He looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind and turned back to his computer. I sat down at my desk and pretended to be busy. After a while, Jimmy spun his chair around and asked, “How’s that woman? Alison Garwood?”
“I think she might go back to him.”
Jimmy surprised me by looking angry, something he almost never did. “I had a cousin like that, up in Utah. Every time her husband beat her, she’d pretend it was the only time it had ever happened. Tunnel vision. She’d never look at the big picture, she’d just focus on the most recent beating, like—he wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t served the steak medium instead of medium rare.”