Perdido

by Rick Collignon

  Will climbed up the cinder blocks that Lisa had stacked for steps. Before he could knock, the door swung open. Lisa was naked from the waist up. Her jeans were low on her hips. The top button was undone, and a startling patch of white panties showed there. Will didn’t know if he should take the last step forward or back down the steps to his truck. He glanced behind him at the empty yard. Lisa hooked her thumbs in both side pockets and pulled her pants down a little lower. She moved her shoulders back and forth, and her breasts swayed gently. She looked at Will and smiled.

  “You know, your mother’s right over there,” he said. “Probably looking out the window right now.”

  “You don’t think my mother’s seen me like this?”

  “She hasn’t seen me see you like this,” Will said, looking over his shoulder again. He thought one of the curtains had moved. “Your brother could drive up at any time,” he said, turning back.

  “So what are you doing out there?”

  “I just came by to say good morning.”

  “So come in and say it.”

  “I’m on my way to work, Lisa.”

  “Work? What are you, crazy?”

  “You won’t pinch my lip or throw anything?”

  Lisa shrugged, and Will watched the motion of her breasts. “I don’t promise nothing.” She grinned and hooked her index finger at him. “Don’t be shy,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen that one on the end before,” Will said. “Is it a new one?” They were lying on top of the white ruffled bedspread that had been a wedding gift to Lisa’s great-grandmother. A soft, cool odor of mothballs clung to the fabric as if woven into it. Lisa had found it packed away in a trunk in one of the sheds, buried beneath years of junk. In the trunk, along with the bedspread, were a wedding dress, a water-stained Bible written in French, and a small pair of red shoes that had shrunk in the dry-ness and were curled up at the toes. Lisa had told Will that if she ever in this lifetime were foolish enough to marry, she would wear that dress, no matter how worn and yellowed it was. She would wear it proudly in her great-abuela’s memory. When Will had asked what she would do with the shoes, Lisa said that if they continued to shrink, she would wear one in each ear.

  Their legs were sprawled across the bed. Will’s head was against the headboard in an angle that strained the muscles in his neck. He could smell, mixed with the odor of mothballs, the scent of sweat and sex and a little bit of Felix’s Café. He thought that by now, Felipe must surely be at the job site, shoveling cement and muttering to himself. Lisa rolled off him and propped herself up on her elbows. “Which one is new?” she said.

  “The one on the left, on the end. The one that looks like he wants to hide.”

  “That’s not hiding,” she said. “That’s humility.” She let herself fall back down on the bed, twisting some so her head landed on Will’s shoulder. “Hiding,” she said. “That shows what you know. He was in back. I moved him so he could see things.”

  The wall opposite the bed was lined with statues of Saint Francis that varied in size. Some were a foot high. Some as tall as four feet. Some of them held bowls for water. Others had their hands cupped before them. A few were carved out of cedar, their features square and garishly painted, others molded gently out of clay or plaster. One was cut out of steel and badly rusted, his flat feet welded onto a steel plate so he wouldn’t fall over. There must have been twenty-five of them, crowded around the foot of the bed as though they wanted to climb in. Most of them smiled softly, but a couple of the carved ones had a hint of the conquistador about them. As though, Will thought, they might be more concerned with eating than feeding.

  Lisa had gathered these things for years, since childhood, and when Will first saw them standing at the foot of her bed, what he thought was not that the woman he had just met was slightly unbalanced, though he now thought this was half true, but that in the wall of his house was buried a santo of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He didn’t know why he had kept this from Lisa, but he knew that if she found out, of all things that he might do, she would find this the hardest to forgive.

  “I don’t know how you sleep with all of them in here,” Will said.

  “They don’t make noise.”

  “They were cheering a little while ago.”

  “Ha.”

  Will worked his way a little higher up the headboard. Lisa made a moaning sound, and her head slid down to his stomach. He moved her hair from behind her neck and felt the moisture on her skin. “How was work yesterday?” he asked.

  “Eee,” she said, “don’t even ask.” Her mouth was against his skin and her words were muffled. She raised her head a few inches. “A hundred boy scouts came in in two big buses. You know what boy scouts tip? Nothing, that’s what. And you would think with the stupid costumes they wear that they would be neat. Pepe cooked a hundred orders of French toast, and for the rest of the day he was in a bad mood.” Lisa took some of Will’s skin into her mouth and bit down hard enough that he thought she might bite through. “One of those boys was so cute, though. And quiet. Like you would be if you were little again.” She lifted her head slightly, taking Will’s skin with it, and then let go. She rubbed the teeth marks with her hand and then gave his stomach a slap.

  “You should go,” she said.

  “Go? Go where?”

  “To work. Before Felipe comes here looking for you. I can see you later at the baseball game.”

  “There’s a baseball game tonight?” Will said. “You were calling me crazy not so long ago, and now you’re throwing me out.”

  “That was before. You’re no good to me now. Maybe if you go shovel some and make me laugh watching you run after a ball, we can eat that hamburger that’s rotting in your fridge afterwards and then see what’s what.” She climbed over him and got off the bed. She stood looking down at him with her hands on her hips.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said. She stayed by the bed for a few more seconds, smiling, and then waved her fingers at him, turned, and walked out of the room.

  When Will finally got to the job site, it was nearly eleven and Felipe was mixing cement. His mood had gone from bad to foul. Will stopped the truck alongside him and shut off the ignition. The heat from the engine washed against Felipe’s bare arms and over his face.

  “It’s hot,” Will said from inside the cab.

  Felipe grunted and kept mixing. “How would you know?” he said. “You drive around in your truck all morning with the breeze hitting you. And then when we get paid, you still want half the money.”

  Will could see that the redwood for the deck was stacked neatly against the side of the house. “When did Joe get here with the lumber?” he asked.

  “He came so long ago it was like yesterday,” Felipe said. He thought that not only was Will three hours late, but when he did show up all he had to say were things that not even a cow would say. A part of him wished that Will had just stayed away and left him alone to enjoy his bad mood by himself.

  Will climbed out of the truck. He stood next to the wheelbarrow and watched Felipe push the cement back and forth with his shovel. “You remember that time Oc-taviano broke his arm and you took three days off? I didn’t complain, and that was a plaster job.”

  “What plaster job?”

  “The one for that lady outside Las Sombras. The one who had all those goats.”

  “Oh, that lady. No wonder you didn’t complain. She fed you cookies all day and wore those plastic pants.”

  “You liked those plastic pants as much as I did.”

  Felipe grunted. “That was two years ago, jodido. Besides, it wasn’t this hot then.”

  An hour later, Felipe ate his lunch under a piñon tree while Will worked the shovel and wheelbarrow, filling the forms with cement. At one point, Felipe yelled at him, his mouth full of food, “You know, it’s strange, but I sit just a few feet away and I feel cool in the shade when I watch you sweating like a horse.” Just watching Will work while he sat and rested had made Felipe feel
better. “It’s like we’re in different worlds,” he said. He thought that when he was done eating, he would lie back and take a nap.

  Will emptied the wheelbarrow and sat down next to Felipe. He wiped the perspiration from his face with the front of his shirt. “It’s too hot,” he said. “How was the rosary?”

  Felipe thought that at Ray’s rosary, the corpse had been seen singing and Ray’s nephew had said in so many words that Will wouldn’t be around much longer. But he only shrugged. “It was like any other rosary,” he said and looked away.

  Will stretched out on the ground. He could feel pine needles and small stones poking through the shirt into his back. “I thought about that girl last night,” he said. “And I realized there was nothing I could do. I guess there was never anything to do. Maybe it would have been nice to know her name. For somebody to know her name.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have a name,” Felipe said. He watched an ant climb up one side of his leg. When it got to his thigh, he flicked it away with his finger.

  “She was just there,” Will said. “And never anywhere else. Her whole life was on the bridge.” He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he said, “Did you know that the black man’s name was Madewell Brown?”

  Will’s eyes were closed. Felipe could see a scattering of gray in his hair and wrinkles fanning out from his eyes, from crowding forty and a lifetime of squinting away from the sun. “Que Madewell Brown?” Felipe said.

  “He was here years ago,” Will said. “He lived in an old adobe he made his own. And when he left Guadalupe, inside the house were painted thousands of pictures of his children. The whole village went to this house to see these things. Later the place was torn down, and everything Madewell Brown left here disappeared. But he was here once.”

  Felipe stared down at Will. There was still food in his mouth, but he had stopped chewing. “Where’d you hear this story?” he asked.

  “Telesfor Ruiz told me.”

  For a moment, Felipe had no idea who Telesfor Ruiz was, and then he remembered the way one remembers a shadow. He remembered him only as an old man and nothing else. “How come you never told me this?” he said.

  Will opened his eyes and pushed himself up slowly. “What’s to tell?” he said. “Telesfor was my neighbor when I first came here. He was dead for years when I met you. I only think of him sometimes.” Will got to his feet. “I’ll tell you, though, if you ever want to cook a sheep’s head, I know how.”

  They finished pouring the cement around four o’clock. Both of them were beginning to drag with the heat, especially Felipe, who felt like he’d worked a full day before Will had even shown up. The forms were full of cement, an anchor bolt set in each one and the tops troweled smooth. They scattered the leftover sand and gravel in some of the deeper holes in the driveway and then strung out the hose away from the house and washed everything clean. They tossed the tools and the wheelbarrow in the back of Felipe’s truck and then stood looking at their work.

  Felipe let out a breath of air. “There,” he said. “The rotten part’s done.”

  “You think we can get it built tomorrow?”

  “If you come on time.” Felipe looked at Will. “You coming to the game later?”

  “Yeah, I’m going to meet Lisa there. Five-thirty, right?”

  “That’s right,” Felipe said, and suddenly he didn’t feel so tired. It would be a good night to hit a stupid baseball and drink a few beers. He smiled and slapped Will on the shoulder. “See you soon, Will,” he said.

  Fourteen

  THE FIELD WAS CROWDED with people and vehicles when Will arrived a little after five. The game hadn’t started yet. It seemed to Will that a lot more people were hanging about than usual, as though the whole village had spent the day inside waiting for things to cool off and needed some air now. It didn’t feel much cooler, but if you weren’t actually out on the field, Will thought, it would be a good evening to sit under the cottonwoods and drink some beer and think about nothing.

  He drove his truck past the vehicles lining the outfield, hitting the brakes hard once when a group of small children darted in front of him heading who knew where. A woman sitting in the back of a pickup so the bed faced the field yelled out sharply, “Carlos, you watch out.” She turned back to her friends and said, “No,” loudly, and then, as if something had hooked her brain, she looked back at where the kids had been and yelled out, “Carlos, I mean it.” She smiled at Will and shrugged and turned away.

  He swung off the road that would have taken him to his house and drove down the right-field line, the road mazing through cottonwoods. There were cars and trucks parked at angles and shaded by the trees. He pulled to a stop alongside Felipe’s truck. Elena was inside the cab with Octaviano and one of Joe Vigil’s boys. Will could see the boys from the chin up. Their heads were turned together and both of their mouths were moving. He got out of his pickup and leaned on the hood.

  “It’s not so bad here in the shade,” he said.

  Elena was slouched down in the cab. She had one arm dangling out the window, and her head was resting on the edge of the seat. “It doesn’t seem cool to me,” she said and rolled her head toward the kids. “Because of you two with your stupid talk about your stupid baseball cards.”

  Octaviano piped out in a high voice, “They’re not baseball cards.”

  Elena raised her voice. “Baseball, football, beach ball, I don’t care. Go. Get out. Go find your brothers and give me some peace.” She kept her head turned toward them until they finally stopped complaining and climbed out of the truck. “And stay out of the creek,” she said. “Or you know what.” She looked back at Will. “There, that’s a little better. I don’t know why boys are so noisy. I’m one of seven girls, and I swear our house was so quiet.”

  Will smiled and looked past the outfield to where a couple of trucks were creeping in. “There’s a lot of people here,” he said.

  “Boredom,” Elena answered. “And too much heat.” After a few seconds, she added, “So where’s Lisa?”

  Will pushed off the hood of his truck. “She should be here soon.”

  “Are you all right, Will?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Things got messed up, but everything’s all right now.”

  Elena stared at him quietly, and then she too smiled. “Sure,” she said. “I think that if you were in the cab of my truck with my Octaviano and Joe’s boy, you’d fit right in. Go play your game so I can watch something.”

  There was only the semblance of two teams in Guadalupe. One was the loose group of guys Will played with. That included Felipe; Albert and Rudy Duran, who made adobe bricks on their uncle’s land; Juanito García, sort of a plumber; and others who did a little bit of everything. The other team was the eight brothers from the lumberyard and their cousins, all of whom seemed to be six feet tall with thick arms and fast hands. There was never much question as to who would win each game, but, as Rudy once said, “We don’t play to win, jodido. We play to see if there is a God.”

  The lumberyard was playing catch on the first-base side, and as Will walked across the infield, Joe caught the ball thrown by his brother Lawrence and raised his glove in a slight wave. Behind home plate and by himself, Lloyd Romero was holding a beer and staring at a small plastic clicker in his hands as if it had just fallen from the sky. As Will walked by, he looked up and said, “You know how this thing works?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a thing that tells me the balls and the strikes and the outs. So I don’t have to use my fingers.”

  “You’re the umpire?”

  “You have a problem with that?”

  “No,” Will said.

  “Good,” Lloyd said and looked down at the thing in his hand. “Go tell your team that never wins we’re going to start soon.”

  Will’s team was standing around in a loose circle under a cottonwood that spread enough shade to cover all of third base. Their gloves, along with a number of empty beer cans, were throw
n off to the side. Rudy, who was Albert’s older brother and stood a compact five foot four inches, was in the center of the circle. He was wearing a dust-colored T-shirt that Will thought might have been gray, and there was a bandage on his right arm that ran from his wrist to his elbow.

  When Rudy saw Will walking over, he pointed his beer and said, “Fuck no. Put Will on third base. I’m injured. I’ll play right field. I’m not playing third base.”

  “I play right field,” Felipe said.

  “I don’t care where you play,” Rudy said. “I’ll play out there with you. Will, you play third base.”

  Will got a beer out of one of the coolers. “Not me,” he said and took a long drink. “I barely play this game at all.”

  “Who cares if you can play this game, jodido? None of us can play this game. All you got to do is stand there.”

  “What happened to your arm?” Will asked.

  Rudy stood with his arm held out from his body. They all looked at it, the bandage stained and dirty, and Will could see that everyone except Rudy was smiling. Rudy shook his head slowly and blew air out of his mouth. “A qué jodido,” he said. “A pig is what happened to my arm.” He raised his arm up higher. “I almost got it chewed off.”

  Juanito laughed and then choked on his beer and began coughing. Albert, built like his brother but six inches taller, said, “His pig tried to kill him.”