“Yes! She is a good woman—she looks like the Santa Maria!”
Mike couldn’t believe what he heard. The woman didn’t look any more like any Santa Maria than Rafo did. The kid was trying to handle things that were too much for him, morals he wasn’t familiar with, all mixed up with religion and saints and motherhood.
And, of course, the right con man had come along at just the right time and found just the right sucker. “The old man’s trying to take you, kid,” Mike warned.
“No!”
Rafo ran again, farther down the hill. For the second time Mike went after him and restrained the boy. “You stupid little bastard! Do you believe everything you hear?” He pointed back to where they had left Porfirio. “That guy’s a shill!”
Rafo looked bewildered—he had never heard the word before—but it held him. There was something frightening in it. “I don’t know what you say.”
“A shill, a shill! That referee guy—he’s setting you up as a sucker, don’t you understand that? Setting you up for the kill!”
It incensed the boy. “You think they cheat me, yes?”
“You’re damn right they cheat you. You know why? Because I’m with you—a gringo!”
“It has nothing to do!”
“You think not? What would’ve happened if a Mexican had won? You think they’d have put the bite on a Mexican?”
“I am a Mexican!”
“But I’m with you—a gringo—fair game—open season!”
Like a slash: “Every greaser cheats a gringo!”
Mike winced. “I didn’t say that!”
“You said it, you said it!”
“I said no such goddamn thing! Don’t hang that on me!”
Nettled, exasperated by the boy, Mike reined himself in. He had to go at it differently, but didn’t know how.
“What the hell’s come over you?” he said. “How did you turn so goddamn soft? When you were in the alleys of Mexico City, you think you’d act like this? No, by Christ, you knew how to take care of yourself! That guy—what was his name?—Zafiro—when he tried to do you out of twenty pesos—twenty lousy pesos—you went back and collected them. This is four hundred!”
“Zafiro was a crook and this is a poor woman—with four children! Even in the alleys I don’t take from children! Do you?”
“When I’m being taken for a sucker, yes!”
“What else would you do for money?”
Infuriated, Mike said, “I don’t do anything just for money!”
“You don’t?” Rafo shot back. “For what did you come to Mexico? For love?”
If he stayed and answered the boy, the answer would have been violence. He turned and went up the hill, toward the truck. In a moment he heard Rafo’s footsteps going down, the other direction.
14
Rafo, making his way in the darkness, thought he should have reached Marta’s house by now. Perhaps he was lost. Yet, he felt certain he wasn’t. There was only one way to go downhill and that was downhill. The reason he wasn’t already there—he had to face it—was because he was in no hurry to get there. What he really wanted to do was go back.
Back to Mike and tell him he was sorry. The argument had gotten angrier than Rafo had intended. But that didn’t change anything—Mike was wrong. Unless . . . perhaps . . . No, he couldn’t make sense of it. He mustn’t try. Just do what felt right to him. Give the damn money to the damn widow and forget about it.
Walking faster now, he came to the house. It was as Porfirio had described it—white adobe with a brown door. But now, coming upon it, Rafo was seized by terrible doubt, for the unadorned clean look of the house suggested that Mike might have been right after all, the widow might not be poor. No signs of poverty anywhere, no signs the boy had come to know as the proofs of poverty—dirt and disrepair, neglect, vandalism, the violations of property by those to whom property is itself a violation. No air of hopelessness.
On the contrary, there were a few signs of—no, certainly not affluence—but of well-being. Fruit vines, for example—blackberry and gooseberry—and an arbor of purple grapes. There was even an outbuilding at a distance from the house, a jacal, larger than an Indian hut where perhaps the widow had stabled a horse or cow or burro, perhaps one of each.
Could Mike have been right? Could Porfirio have been in league with the widow, to cheat the gringo and the gringo’s friend? Rafo didn’t want to think it was so, but if it was . . .
Slowly he approached the door. He waited an instant, then knocked. It seemed a long time before she opened it. He couldn’t see her face, for the light from the kerosene lamp was behind her. Neither of them spoke. When he did, unaccountably, even though he was surer in Spanish and this was the woman’s language as well, he found himself speaking English. Midsentence he stopped, and felt a rush of heat to his cheeks. In Spanish now, he started all over again. He wanted her to have, he said, to have . . . And he couldn’t go on. He extended his hand with the pesos in it and simply stammered, like an infant with a few words, “Aquí—por favor—aquí.”
She was as much at a loss as he was. She thanked him for the gift and rejected it. Without realizing he was going to do it, he found himself pleading with her.
She closed the door.
He thought he had no alternative—he walked away. But he stopped. I was right after all, he told himself with a surge of relief; she is not dishonest or she would have taken the money. That made the rest true as well—what Porfirio had said about her; she was poor.
He turned back to the house, opened the door softly and went in. Indoors, the impoverishment was plain. The furniture was spare and all four children were asleep in the one room of the house. Only the baby, possibly two years old, slept on a petate of cornhusks; the other three children slept on hard board slats, raised a few inches off the dirt floor. Like the baby, the two middle children—a boy and a girl—were asleep. The oldest, however, a girl of perhaps nine or ten, was restive and wakeful.
With Rafo’s entrance, Marta’s unhappiness deepened. She stood there, just the other side of the kerosene lamp, a woman unused to nervousness doing nervous things, not quite clutching her hands together but touching them together, then drawing them apart. Suffering the dilemma of the proud, unwilling to accept charity, yet unable to surrender to the degrading misery of poverty, she didn’t let Rafo say too many words before she interrupted him.
“Go away!” she said. “Why don’t you let me alone? You think you help me? You don’t. You make it worse!”
Rafo was no longer the incoherent child he had been outdoors; he was talking prudently, even cool-headedly, giving her reasons why she should take the money. If he had made an impulsive gesture of some sort, she might have been equally impulsive and accepted it. But he was so reasoned, so quietly persuasive in saying money didn’t mean a damn that, paradoxically, it was she, not he, who behaved irrationally. She started to speak half sentences, she started to quake. She ran past him and fled outdoors.
He followed her only to the threshold. He stood on the doorstep and watched how wildly she ran, as if a pestilence pursued her. He saw her go around the roadway side of the jacal. Then she disappeared. Again he had the impulse to go after her—this time he didn’t.
He turned back to look inside the room. The windows were shut tightly and the house, at the bottom of an airless valley, was stale-smelling and stuffy. He didn’t know whether to go or to stay and wait for Marta to return. He looked at the money in his hand and decided simply to leave it. He went to the table and stacked it neatly, pesos with pesos, centavos with centavos. Departing, he started toward the door, unaware he was observed.
“Mucha’ gracias.”
He turned. It was Marta’s daughter, the older one, fully awake and watching him. He looked at her but said nothing to the girl, wondering if she was older or younger than himself. Younger by a little, he thought, for her e
yes still had a bashful light in them. But not so bashful as he thought for she said gracias again, demanding a response.
“De nada,” he said.
She didn’t ask his name; she ordered it.
He smiled. “Rafo.”
“Nita.”
He found himself doing an embarrassing thing: he bowed a little. The instant he did, he was sorry and prepared himself: she was going to laugh. If she laughed, he vowed to himself, he would say something vulgar.
But she didn’t laugh—there was no time for it. The baby was crying. Nita, alert, sat up and listened to the sound. She was appraising it. She knew the safe outcries and the risky ones. Satisfied this was a safe one, she relaxed. But the baby didn’t. It was shrieking now.
Rafo said, in his politest Spanish, “Excuse me, but your sister is crying.”
“It’s not my sister,” Nita responded. “It’s my brother. His name is Pepe.”
“He’s crying.”
“I know.”
“Pick him up.”
She made a click with her tongue. “I don’t pick him up every time he cries. If I did, he wouldn’t go to sleep again.”
“He certainly won’t go to sleep if you let him cry,” he said. The sound of the child was bothering him. “Pick him up, pick him up!”
“Don’t tell me how to handle my brother!”
She made another click with her tongue and it annoyed him. In the city one of the boys used to do that—he said he had learned it in the country, from Indians—and when he found out Rafo didn’t like it, he taunted him with the sound.
“Pick him up,” he repeated. She made the click again. “That’s ugly!” he said.
She winced. “All city people are stupid!”
“Country people are ugly!” he cried. Then: “If you don’t pick him up, I will!”
“Go ahead. He’ll only scream. Go ahead!”
Rafo picked him up. He could feel the warm wetness of the child’s behind and the wetness of his tears as he held the baby’s face to his own. He held him very close, cuddling, then cradling him. The baby screamed and screamed, then he was still. But when Rafo stopped rocking, the baby cried again, so Rafo rocked again. He didn’t mind rocking. And then, even when he stopped rocking, the baby was still.
Nita watched in wonderment. Rafo caught her eye and saw, again, that same bashful light. He wished he hadn’t said country people are ugly.
* * *
• • •
Mike got into the truck and, unthinking, started the motor up. He was just about to back out of the narrow passageway when he remembered why they had come here and realized it might still be unsafe to depart. On foot he could take a chance, he thought, and sneak up to the zócalo to see if the police had left. But even that would be risky. Better to get in the back of the truck, lie down for the night, give the police enough time to patrol the town and go.
What if they started to patrol the lower town on foot? He didn’t think they would, for he had encountered them first in a roadblock, which meant they were expecting him and Rafo to be in a vehicle—they were policing roads, not alleyways. Anyway, he had to hope he was right; even if he was wrong, he was safer here than on the highways.
As he lay down on the blanket in the back of the truck, he had another thought to bother him. How had he so completely forgotten about the police that he was about to ride recklessly out of this safe hiding place—how had he lost his common sense? He knew Rafo had upset him, had shot a painful slug into him, but had it struck so deep?
What had he come to Mexico for, the boy had asked, for love? Christ, no, for money. Openly, bluntly, for the buck. No subterfuge in that. And if the boy called him a kidnapper—well that’s what he was, admittedly; he had called himself by that very name. The label was old stuff—no news in it. Then why did it rankle when the boy said the same of him? Maybe because he hated the self-righteous way the little Mexican bastard had made the Yankee the symbol of criminal greed, hated the smug hypocrisy of the brat who made the grown-up the symbol of all-for-money-and-love-well-lost.
Or . . . maybe it was because until the boy had said it to him—no matter how often he had said it to himself—he hadn’t believed it to be true. He had taken the cop-out, always the cop-out that the boy was coming of his own free will.
But how could he claim that Rafo was making his own choice when the boy didn’t know all the facts? Worse than being ignorant, the boy was misled. He had been offered a choice between the alleys of the city and a father who loved him. He had chosen the father who loved him. . . . Except that the father didn’t. . . . And if the boy, knowing the father didn’t, had chosen not to go, Mike would have had to take him by force. So what choice did the boy have?
Kidnapper. Criminal.
And, just as the boy charged, money before love, before kindness, before charity, before any of the goodness Mike had ever professed to believe in.
He knew he wouldn’t sleep unless he saw the boy again and told him that he, Mike Milo, the gringo kidnapper, was wrong and the boy was right. Right about what, for Christ sake? Everything? But what was everything? Give the money to the widow—at least that much—get rid of some of the money—do an act of kindness with it. Throw her a sop. No, a sop to himself, to his conscience.
He got out of the truck and walked down the hill, toward the house the old man had described. When he came looking for the brown door, he couldn’t find it, for Rafo had left it open and the brown of it was shadowed in the semidarkness of the room. But the white house was where it was supposed to be and as Mike walked closer to the door and looked inside he knew he had found the right place. For there was Rafo, inside, asleep. The boy was sitting up, his back against the wall. Close to him, also asleep, a pretty child about Rafo’s age, her long black hair veiling half her face. And a baby asleep too, not more than two years old—less perhaps—across Rafo’s lap.
Mike took a step or two closer, inside the room. He saw the other two children, as deep in slumber as the rest. Damn the kid for posing such a sentimental scene, as if a photograph were going to be taken. But then he realized they were asleep and, despite the absence of beds and pillows, how benignly comfortable they looked.
The woman wasn’t there. It puzzled him that she wasn’t and gave him a stir of apprehension, not only for the children but for the woman herself. He wondered about the other building, a little distance from the house. It hadn’t seemed like much, a thing of cane perhaps, or bamboo and sod, more like a large corncrib than a housing for human beings. Still, he would have a look.
Just as he set foot outside the door he heard her. He didn’t know what she was saying but it was clear she was frightened and wanted to know who was prowling in the darkness. He couldn’t see her at first, couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from. He took a step away from the house and she spoke again, more sharply. He wondered where she was and whether she might have a gun in her hand, or a knife.
He stopped walking and held his arms out wide to show himself harmless and vulnerable. She moved out of the shadow of the little barn building. She was still, not a sound, not a flutter. She carried no weapon. She was as vulnerable as he was.
Slowly he moved toward her. When he was close enough to see her, but no closer than that, he started to speak, then stopped, feeling certain she knew no English. Then she said a word, it seemed like only one and it had no meaning for him.
“I speak only English,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said in Spanish.
“If we had a sign language or something . . .” He tried to smile—he wasn’t making it. Then, realizing it made no sense to continue talking, he decided that’s all he could do, and he would have to do it, hoping a word would reach her, or an inflection in his voice. “What I came here for . . . It was Rafo . . . the boy . . . to see if he was safe. . . .”
&nbs
p; She thought from the kindness of his voice that he, like the boy, was offering money. “I do not want it,” she said.
“What he said to me . . .” Mike stopped. He was afraid he was on the verge of lying, so he started over again. “I came to tell him I was wrong.”
She said: “If I have to start to take money like a beggar, I will not be able to stand it!”
“You don’t understand, do you? Christ, try, will you?” Then suddenly he blurted it out—he didn’t know where it came from, he certainly didn’t mean to say it: “I’m getting to where if I don’t quit lying I won’t be able to trust—Like you, for instance—his insides told him to take a chance on you—and mine said no! Maybe I can’t trust mine anymore!”
Her voice was not as steady as before. “No!” she said. “I do not want your money—no!”
He took a half step toward her. “So I came to say I’m sorry—to him—to you too!”
As he moved closer to her, she started to fall apart. “Please. Go away!” she cried. “Do not be kind to me! Go away!”
She couldn’t restrain the tears. She wept and, unable to stand herself for weeping, she fled. He didn’t move. He stood there, envying. How I wish I could cry like you did, lady, and run.
He heard her sobbing somewhere but couldn’t tell where the sound came from. For a moment he wondered if she had gone out into the wide openness of the field. Then he heard her closer—she was inside the hut. Her sobs grew softer.
Hesitantly following her, he came to the entrance of the shack and from where he stood, he now had a better picture of it, dilapidated and nearly roofless. Still outside the hut, he couldn’t see her in the darkness. Staring, he began to think perhaps he had been mistaken—she hadn’t gone inside—for now he heard no sound of her. Perhaps, as he turned the corner of the building, she had heard him and fled into the house. Certainly there was nothing to see inside—only shadows and none of them moving.
Then he heard the soft, almost inaudible sound of the woman, trying not to be heard, trying not to cry.
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