by Johnny Shaw
The next hour was heaven and hell. The heaven of being close to Angie, filled with that first-date anticipation. Our bodies close. Her skin warm. A lifelong memory happening in the present. The hell was in trying to do everything in my power to not get an erection. I felt like a boner would send the wrong message and potentially ruin the moment. I’m more of a romantic than I let on.
Wide awake and needing a distraction, I went back through the time I had spent with Yolanda. It was important to me that I could still see her face. Her living face, not the one at the bottom of the cistern. That one would be with me forever. Her brief but important cameo in my life deserved to be remembered.
I thought back to the first time I saw Yolanda alighting from Alejandro’s van. Marveling at her sheer presence. The morning we spent together, the quiet ease. Our time spent not in conversation, but in moments. The way Pop’s face lit up when he saw her. I knew it had been something more than a roll in the hay. Far more important than I’ll ever know. Without intending to, she forced me to realize that I didn’t know Pop as well as I thought. That night after she visited Pop, it wasn’t the last time I saw her. I saw her at Pop’s service. But our final private moment was when we said good-bye that night. That light kiss and a hint of regret as she stepped back into Alejandro’s van. Like she was aware of the finality in our good-bye.
She didn’t have her overnight bag.
My body reacted to the revelation. I tried to sit up, but my arm was completely asleep from Angie’s weight. I had to lift it with my good hand and shake it until the pins and needles came and eventually blood returned.
When Yolanda went to meet Pop and when she was at the house, she had a small overnight bag with her. But in the back of Alejandro’s van, she hadn’t been carrying anything.
If she had simply left her overnight bag, I would have seen it. It would be on top of the mess. If she hadn’t forgotten it, there was only one other possibility. She had left it on purpose. She had hidden it. She had planned to return for it. At Pop’s service, she had come to pay her respects, but had she come for something more? To retrieve her bag?
Where was it? What was in it?
I shook Angie very lightly, eliciting little more than a deep groan and a stinging punch on the arm. I awkwardly tried to slide from under her, getting more groans but eventually slipping out and rolling onto the floor.
I crawled into the kitchen and made coffee as quietly as I could. My labors at silence were moot, as the popping of shotguns clamored outside. Apparently the early bird doesn’t just get the worm, but it gets killed for the effort.
When I sat down with my first cup of black coffee, I went through it again. Yolanda had her bag when we left Harris Convalescent. I distinctly remember her holding it in her lap on the drive. Her pose had been so demure. I could picture it clearly. What about when we had arrived at the house? Bobby had been there. He and I left for a few hours. Gophers. Digging holes. She would have had plenty of time to hide it.
There was something in the bag that hadn’t been there when she first arrived.
Why wouldn’t she take it with her?
Alejandro. He was her ride. If whatever it was had any value, she couldn’t have trusted him. Nobody could trust him. Whatever it was, she was afraid that Alejandro would take it from her. Maybe he had a habit of checking her purse. So she hid her purse to retrieve it later. And with Pop’s death, her first opportunity arose.
It could be anywhere. The house was huge and full. You could hide a hippopotamus in plain sight among the clutter in any room. I finished my coffee as the dread of searching the entire house sank in. It would take days, even weeks. Looking for something that might not even be there.
Then I saw it. I was staring at it. Right in front of me. Not the overnight bag. The flowers. In the middle of the dining room table. They were wilted and dead, but when Yolanda had placed them there, they had been fresh and beautiful. I hadn’t looked closely at the white, bell-shaped flowers until that moment.
I knew that plant. We called it ditchweed. I don’t know its real name. It grew wild all over the Valley. Finally, my past experiments with hallucinogens had a practical application. In high school Bobby had heard from either someone’s cousin or a dog-eared copy of High Times that you could get high from eating it. In a constant state of teenage boredom, that was expert enough for me. I had smoked oregano, licked frogs, and drank two bottles of Robitussin on similar information.
The oregano and frogs yielded nothing. Robing is comparatively expensive for little reward. And I wouldn’t recommend ditchweed, unless you consider a rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, the inability to pee, and constipation a good time. If you do, have at it.
Of course Yolanda couldn’t hide it inside. She needed to know that she could get to it. The house could be locked. I wasn’t in on the secret. If she left it in the house, even hidden, I might still have found it. But outside. It was obvious I wasn’t that diligent about the yard work. It was easy to hide something where no one was looking.
I threw on my boots and walked out into the warm morning. I lit my first cigarette of the day, feeling the synapses pop and clarity rise. The shotgun fire felt like it was inside my head, loud and close. I looked to the rising sun on the horizon to see the silhouettes of a dozen hunters in the fields and on the ditch banks. They plodded through the dirt with little joy, raising their shotguns regularly to fire into the air. On the second day of dove season, killing had become routine.
I began at the water pump and then walked around the perimeter of the house, eyes to the ground.
Sure enough, at the side of the house against the short stucco wall was a patch of ditchweed. Only a few of its distinct white flowers still remained. Getting closer to the plant, the smell hit me. I had forgotten how pungent its odor was. The flowers smelled like rotting garbage.
I got on my knees, examining the area for I’m not sure what, but knowing I had to look. It’s not what was there, but what wasn’t. I found a freshly dug hole. A hole just big enough to fit an overnight bag in.
I ran my fingers through the still-visible thin lines in the dirt made by the small hand that had dug the hole. Whatever Yolanda had hidden, whatever she had dug up the night of Pop’s funeral, it was gone. And most likely, it had gotten Yolanda killed.
I lit a cigarette and watched the hunters against the sunrise. About a half dozen cigarettes later and still in the same position, I figured out who I needed to talk to.
“Angie?” I whispered softly, loud enough to wake her, but not enough to scare her. She rolled a little onto her side and wiped at some spit at the corner of her mouth. She blinked her eyes open and stared at me like she had no idea who I was.
“I drank too much,” she said. “My brain hurts me in my brain.”
“I need your truck, and you need to come with me,” I said.
She rolled back over and pulled the couch cushion over her head.
“There’s coffee. You want me to get you some coffee?”
She made a grunting sound, indicating that she was now bored with this conversation.
“I’m not going to leave you here alone, and I have to go. You have to get up.”
She lifted the cushion and squinted at me. “Have you considered fucking yourself instead?”
I said, “Alejandro is out there. He’s a little erratic, to say the least. I don’t know if he knows I live here. I doubt if he’d try anything in the middle of the day, but I’m not going to take that chance. I ain’t leaving you alone in the one place he might show up.”
Angie’s eyes opened big, her hand coming to her mouth.
“What? What’s wrong?” I looked over my shoulder, expecting to find someone standing right behind me. The room was empty. I turned back to Angie.
She said, “I tried to fuck you last night.”
I smiled.
“Oh my God. I’m just remembering. Oh God. How fucking embarrassing.”
“You failed, so it’s cool. Forget about it.”
“No way. What about Alejandro?”
“In case of psycho, use shotgun,” she said and covered her face back under the cushion.
“I’ll get your clothes,” I said, standing up. “Where did you leave them? Oh yeah. I believe you left them on the bedroom floor when you got all naked for me.”
That woke her up. The cushion hit me in the face. And a fist gave me a charley horse, only because it missed my nuts by two inches.
“I need to know what Pop was keeping from me,” I said to Red the moment he answered the door.
Red Fidler filled the frame of his front door and stared at me with overt boredom. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth, sucking at something between his teeth.
“I need some answers,” I said.
“Well, James,” he said, “when a man and woman love each other very much…”
“Funny. If he told anyone what was going on, he told you. You were Pop’s best friend. His lawyer, too. What did you bring him that day I saw you at Harris Convalescent?”
Red answered with a disinterested stare.
I brought out the big guns. “Did you know he had a son?”
That got an eyebrow raise, then, “I’m looking at him, aren’t I?”
“You know what I mean. Did you know he had a son in Mexico?”
“Why don’t you come inside and I’ll explain the intricacies of client/lawyer confidentiality? I can elucidate for you why I am not going to tell you a thing about anything.”
“You’re going to get lawyer on me? Your client is dead. It’s time I knew.”
Red squinted past me. He nodded toward Angie, who had her eyes closed and her head against the passenger window of her truck. “Ask your girlfriend in too. You might not remember, having been gone so long, but it gets a touch hot out here in the desert. Hate to see her melt.”
“She’s got water. Told me she needed to sweat a little. I asked her twice.”
“Good for you. Took me a time to learn the hard way. Woman tells you what she wants, you listen.”
“Especially this one. She hits.”
“Son,” Red said, “they all hit.”
Red’s house was meat-locker cold, the recirculated air simultaneously stale and brisk. It smelled like beef broth and dead flowers. He led me to a side room that had been made into a home office. It didn’t look like he used it much. The only thing on the desk was a half-finished crossword. I sat in the folding chair across from the desk as Red fell into his worn brown leather chair.
“Now what is it you think I’m going to tell you?” Red said.
“That day I saw you, I need to know what you brought to my father’s room. What did he ask you to bring him?”
He said nothing. His face offered me nothing. This wasn’t a guy I wanted to play hold ’em with.
“I think whatever it was got someone killed,” I said.
That got a reaction, but not much of one. He picked up his pipe and cleaned the bowl with a small pocketknife. “I heard about the whore. Real shame. Heard it was some sort of accident.”
“Don’t know who you heard that from, but I saw the body. I carried her out of that water. Not a chance in hell. Yolanda, that was her name. The whore’s name. She was murdered. Don’t matter if they bury it. That’s politics bullshit. I’m talking truth. Someone killed her.”
He nodded. “And that has what to do with you? To do with me?”
“You brought something to my father, which he gave to Yolanda. I’m convinced of it. Whatever it was got her killed. You’re keeping something from me. Keeping a dead man’s secret. It makes me wonder what else you’re hiding. I just told you I know about the kid. Is there something else?”
“I am keeping a dead man’s secret because the dead man asked me to. His secrets died with him. If he didn’t want you to know, let it go at that.”
“One of those secrets is out. If my father had a son, that changes things.”
Red knocked the pipe against the rim of his trash can and then examined it. “Look, I get it. You found that girl’s body. You feel responsible. That’s noble in its own dumb way. But you’re not responsible. It’s just a bad coincidence. As far as the kid goes, you’re even further removed.”
“So you knew.”
He blew into the stem of the pipe.
“You’re not going to tell me?” I said.
“That’s right. I’m not going to tell you. My word means something.”
I stewed, trying to figure my next move.
Red continued. “You got to remember, I’ve known your father longer than you’ve known him. We went through a lot of doors. I owe more to our friendship than anything you got. You’re his blood, but he was like mine. If your father wanted to tell you his secrets, he would have. Why can’t you respect that? Nothing you do will change anything.”
That hurt. Because about some things, he was right. Pop told stories. I had a slew of true and elaborative tales from Pop, but there were a lot of gaps in there. The stories were ribald tales, hardly personal. I was digging in a place that Pop had deliberately and successfully kept away from me. Pop had attempted to settle his relationship with Yolanda before he died. The problem was that he thought Yolanda would be long gone with her son. That she would be happy and safe in Guadalajara, not dead in a concrete cistern and her boy abandoned.
Red had Pop’s secrets, and all that left me was stories.
“Is Mrs. Fidler around?” I asked.
“She’s in the back. Tending to her roses or her sweet peas or something. You want to say hello? She’d love to see you.”
“I don’t know all of my father’s secrets, but I know some. I may not’ve come back to the desert, but Pop and I talked on the phone, wrote a lot of letters.”
Red laughed. “So you’re going to put the screws to me? That it? You got something on me? You’re going to blackmail me? Honestly, you might be giving me my first opportunity as an old geezer to call someone a whipper-snapper.”
“If I have to, I will.”
“I don’t know what you think you know, but there ain’t nothing you can blackmail me with.”
“How long you been married?”
Red paused, giving me a curious, yet cautious look. “Forty years in November. Sweet of you to ask. I’ll tell you where we register. Probably Crate and Barrel—she loves that junk.”
“Forty years? That’s strange. Because I remember Pop writing me and telling me a story about you and him in San Felipe. Something about a bottle of mezcal con gusano, puppy love, and a surprisingly convincing transvestite. But I thought he said that happened thirty-five years ago. I still have the letter, so I can always check the date.”
He kept his poker face, but a bead of sweat ran down his temple. And in this icebox, I knew that meant I had touched a nerve.
I continued, not wanting to let him off the mat. “Even if Pop was tight with his secrets, he seemed to be pretty open with yours. You two went to the dog track in San Luis Rio Colorado like twenty years back, right? As Pop’s story goes, you ended up selling your wedding ring to some Mex usurero to cover some bad bets on the little ponies. Made for a hell of a good story. So you said Mrs. Fidler’s in the back? I think I will say hi. What’d you tell her? You lost it? Got mugged?”
I stared at him. He stared at me.
After several moments, he said, “You were always a little fuck.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
Red packed the bowl of his pipe, taking his sweet damn time to get it just right. When he finally had the pipe lit, he said, “I’ll tell you everything, but that’s how it’s going to be. Every damn thing. You really want that? You want every detail? You really want to know all your father’s secrets? Your father was my friend, my best friend. Don’t mean he couldn’t be a bastard.”
“What I want isn’t important. I need to know.”
“I was there the day you were born. Day your mother died. You knew that, but
you didn’t know her. You never knew them as a couple except in a photo. I was in the waiting room with your father. Can still see him sitting there. His face blank, his body like the air was taken out. Dumbly holding a handful of cheap cigars. Hell, cigars. A different time. Known your father fifty years, more. That’s the only time I ever saw him cry sober. He was scared and destroyed and even happy. Every feeling a man can have and he was feeling them all at once. He was completely broken. With a responsibility he wasn’t ready for. A loss that cold-cocked him and a burden he hadn’t wanted. I’m talking about you, James.”
I listened, feeling heat rise to my face.
“When Big Jack met your mother, he was in his fifties and she was twenty-six, twenty-seven, young. Even at that age, Jack was wild. A bachelor, a drinker, a gambler, an up and down troublemaker. Those stories he told you, I bet you got the toned-down versions. Son of a bitch found trouble at every turn. But it’s not like he was stupid. Don’t know no one that read as much. He knew things. A good man, but it was like his back was always against a wall. Least the way he acted. He had been on his own so long, he didn’t know better. He didn’t know but surviving. A lot of Depression kids like that, but none more than Big Jack. Your mother, Barbara, she tamed him.
“Jack loved your mother. That is a fact. She was the only thing to that point, up until you came along, that he ever gave a good goddamn about. Least as I could tell. I mean, we were friends, but only to a point. He was completely devoted to Barb. You have to be when you’re facing that kind of age difference. It wasn’t like she was marrying him for his money. He didn’t have none. Never was that good a farmer. At first, people talked, but the talk died as soon as people saw them together. They could see it. They glowed with it. Everyone wanted what they had. They had something that was so good, it had to end in tragedy.
“On the day you were born, Barbara was taken away from Jack. It wasn’t a possibility that he had ever contemplated. Your birth was supposed to be a blessing, not a curse. To his credit, he never blamed you. But in that single moment, his life changed drastically. He had known he was going to be a father. He had come to terms with that, but he was of a different generation. He had waited to marry. Waited even longer to have children. And when he decided to have a kid, it was because it’s what Barb wanted. He wanted to give her everything she wanted. She wanted a kid, she got it. The plan, spoken or implied, was she takes care of you, raises you. He does the father stuff: works, plays catch, goes to games, teaches you to swear, punishes you, goes hunting, fishing, and the rest of the father things. But without her, when it was left to him, he didn’t want the job.