by Alan Drew
“Dime-store tin and a Chevy.”
“You want to get a bite tonight?” she said. “I know a great quiche place.”
He laughed; he got the stupid joke. “And you know how I like quiche.”
“The body needs sustenance.”
He looked at his watch. “I gotta get some paperwork done at the station.”
She crushed the cigarette against the leg of the metal table. “Yeah, all right.”
He leaned forward, put his hands on the table between them. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to call,” he said, his voice quiet. “It’s just…”
She touched his right hand, stroked the edge of it with her thumb. She could feel the heat rise in his palms. “Forget about it, Ben,” she said. “I’m not losing any sleep over it.”
6
AT 6:17 THE NEXT MORNING, Ben was climbing out of the drainage ditch that moated the strawberry field. He’d changed into jeans and a sweatshirt—no khakis, no button-down, no necktie. He wanted to blend in. The western half of the field was empty, yellow police tape fluttering in the wind, a black-and-white parked on the street, keeping an eye on things. Beyond the black-and-white, a front-loader toppled an avocado tree, the gnashing of its mechanics carried in the wind. There were at least two dozen pickers working the eastern half of the field. From this distance they looked like foraging animals, backs bowed in the sun, stripping the plants clean of fruit.
As soon as he stepped into the field, a picker shoved two fingers between his lips and whistled. Two women bolted, dropped their buckets and fists of strawberries, and stumbled down the rows. Others shuffled away, glancing to see if Ben was in pursuit, but three others simply ignored him and bent again to the fruit. Ben recognized one of them.
“Right back at it, huh?” Ben said, when he got to him.
The Mexican stripped three strawberries from a plant, looked at them closely, and tossed the fruit into a bucket that was slung over his shoulder.
“You all need to eat, right?” the picker said.
“I hate strawberries.”
“Me, too.”
Ben watched the other pickers scurry into the cardboard houses, a woman snatching a half-naked boy who was pissing in the street. Suddenly the camp seemed deserted, a jumble of discarded boxes bleached by the sun.
“You’re legal, right?” Ben said. “That’s why you didn’t run?”
“I’ve got papers,” he said, “if you need to see them. They usually don’t ask until later, though.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not those guys,” Ben said. “I don’t give a damn, really. There’s a demand, you fill it.”
Ben plucked a strawberry off the vine and held it in his palm. It was bruised, and a splotch of pulp smudged his fingers.
“The whole field is infested,” the man said. “Black rot.”
Ben dropped the berry and wiped his fingers on his pants leg.
“Foreman wants us out here anyway,” the man said. “They’ll still sell it.”
The man shuffled down the row and started working on the next shrub. The hunch of his back suggested a warped spine, muscles broken down from years of labor, but his hands moved with a gentle dexterity and the fruit seemed to leap off the stem into his fingers.
“You know the boy, right?” Ben said. “El muchacho. You knew him?”
Ben watched the man’s jaw go hard, grinding his teeth. A shadow swept across the plants. Ben looked up, hawk wings passing in front of the white sun.
“The woman in the corner of the room yesterday,” Ben said. “The one crying. Is she the mother?”
“No se,” the man said.
“You don’t know?” he said. “Or you won’t say?”
The man stood and grimaced. Nose-to-nose with him, Ben saw that they were close in age. In the darkness of the cardboard house the other morning he had looked older, but in the early-morning light Ben saw that they could have gone to school together.
“Look. You people either don’t give a damn,” the man said, mimicking Ben’s inflection, “or you give a damn. But no one cares, me entiende?”
Yeah, he got it.
“Shit happens out here and you all just stay over there”—he looked toward the houses lining the field—“where it’s all nice and clean.”
“I care what happened to this kid,” Ben said. “If I didn’t, I’d be at home, feet up, drinking a cerveza.”
The man thumbed the brim of his hat off his brow; a line of paler skin creased his forehead.
“You know,” he said, “busting out a Spanish word here and there don’t mean nothing. You’re still a gringo cop, cerveza or no cerveza.”
“Where were you Tuesday night, two A.M.?” Ben asked.
“I was faceup on my cot, watching the wind shake the walls.”
“Anybody vouch for you?”
“You gonna play this TV-cop bullshit with me?”
“I think I want to see those papers now.”
The man broke his stare and looked off toward the mountains in the east, hunks of thrust-up land hovering above the band of smog.
“I knew the boy,” the Mexican finally said. “I liked him.” The man wouldn’t look at Ben, just stared at the suspended peaks. A man doesn’t look you in the face, he’s being honest, embarrassed by his feelings. One of those general truths Ben had learned over the years. “He was a good boy. Gave us hope.”
“Hope?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Hope, you know? That thing you come to this shitty place for?” He kept staring at the mountains, a crust of snow on the tip of Mount San Antonio. “You been there?” the man said, nodding toward the peaks.
“Yeah,” Ben said.
“What’s it like?” he said. “What’s snow like?”
“Cold,” Ben said.
The man laughed cynically and bent to the strawberries again.
“The mother the one who can vouch for you?”
“No,” the Mexican said. “My wife, but we got kids, and you’ll have to arrest me before I let you near them.” The man weeded a clump of dandelion, garnishing the muck in the bucket. “Now I gotta get to work. They’re weighing at four-thirty.”
Ben nodded, watching the front-loader flatten the avocado grove. Maybe the man had papers but his wife was illegal. Talk to the police, you get sent back. It was the law, when certain men wanted to use it. The gangs in East L.A. had exploited this, used the law as another form of terror. No snitching or we’ll call immigration, and they’ll dump your pinche ass on the other side of the fence.
“Your back isn’t good,” Ben said to the man. “You seen a doctor?”
The man shot Ben a who-you-kidding look and inched down the row. Ben joined him. The Mexican kept an eye on Ben for a few moments and then ignored him. If the gringo wanted to pick strawberries, he seemed to think, let him. The man was right: Most of the berries were rotten, bruised and bleeding juice, but a few remained on each bush. Ben plucked them from the stems and placed them in plastic cases fitted together inside the wheelbarrow. When they were five plants down, Ben returned to the wheelbarrow and rolled it down the line. The man said nothing, just looked Ben in the eye.
“Name’s Ben Wade,” he said, lifting a strawberry from the stem. It was a good one, shining red in the sun. “My grandfather used to work the fields. When he first got here in ’34.” Ben pressed his knees into the sun-bleached dirt, the heat of it burning through his jeans. “He came here when the windstorms hit Kansas and destroyed everything.” He found another good fruit and placed it in the plastic container. The man glanced at the berry, pulled it out.
“No,” the man said, pointing to a tiny mark hidden beneath the green leaves. “This’ll make people sick.”
They went down the row together, five minutes in silence, picking the fruit, tossing the rotten, packaging the few worth selling. Ben barely remembered his grandfather, but he knew the story. The southern Kansas farm. The “black snow” of ’34. Winds billowing dry soil into a two-thousand-foot undulating wall
that peppered the clapboard house with pebbles. The family huddled together in the pitch-black living room, the sand scouring their teeth, the dust sucked into their lungs. A milky blind spot in Ben’s father’s eye had attested to the day: The dirt had sandpapered his iris. When the storm finally passed the next morning, the west side of the house was buried to the eaves. The barn leaned east, the whole thing swaying toward collapse. Inside the barn, the chickens clayed still, their beaks open in frozen gasps. The land was drifted with soil; great heaves of it duned the cornfields and sludged the well. Who knew about the horses and the sheep lost out there on the land? And before the month passed, a man in a suit with a police escort stood on the porch with papers saying the bank owned the property.
Ben wondered what it must have been like for his grandfather, a man who held property once, a man with a Model A, a man with chickens and livestock and his own garden, bent in a field like a tenant farmer. Then even that job was taken away by the waves of Mexican immigrants. The anger he must have felt, the rage Ben felt now radiating from this man—rage that breaks down the body, wilting it toward the soil. That’s why Ben didn’t like the raids; he was barely a generation removed from this world.
“Something’s wrong about this boy’s death,” Ben finally said. “Murder or suicide, neither add up.”
“The whole pinche world don’t add up.” The man leaned back on his haunches. “I was awake,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “The wind had me up all night. I had to tie the corner of the ceiling down with packing twine. I didn’t hear anything. Replayed the whole night in my head, wondering if I missed something, wondering if I could have done something, you know, but all I remember is the wind.”
Ben pulled the slip of paper he’d taken from the boy out of his back pocket and showed it to the man.
“You recognize this handwriting?”
The man looked at it, glanced at the mountains, then stared too hard at Ben when he said, “No.”
“Nothing?” Ben said.
“No, man,” he said, his voice aggravated. “Just some writing.”
“I need to talk to his mother,” Ben said, standing up now.
The man said nothing, just kept his face to the ground, his hands working the fruit.
“Entiendes?” Ben said.
The Mexican looked up at Ben. “She’s got other kids,” he said. “Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I get it,” he said. Natasha was right yesterday: something else to protect.
Ben stood there, watching the man shuffle down the row, the wind whipping bulldozer dust across the fields. The yellow machine tipped an avocado tree, the roots clinging to the soil, the front-loader and tree locked in stasis before the roots ripped loose and the trunk fell.
“They’ll keep the body for a few weeks,” Ben said. “After that they’ll donate it to UC Med School.” Ben pulled his card from his wallet and handed it to the man. “You think of something,” Ben said, “there’s that phone over at the Texaco station.”
The man blinked, found out: Just as Ben thought, this man had made the call about the kid’s body. The Mexican slipped the card into the chest pocket of his sweat-wet shirt.
“There was another boy,” the man said.
“Another?” Ben said. The Mexican wasn’t going to give up the mother, her other children. Ben respected him for it.
“Someone he knew from the school.”
“He went to school?”
“We got him a fake address,” he said. “From someone sympathetic to us.”
“This sympathetic person’s name?”
“You think I’m going to tell you that?”
“I’ll find out.”
“Then find out,” he said. “You can explain to the other kids why they can’t go to school. Kids are allowed, but not without an address.”
“This person is letting others use the address?”
The man glanced at the San Gabriels again. He stayed silent.
“The boy wanted to go to the mountains,” the man said in answer to the question. “I said I’d take him one day.” He shook his head.
“What about this other boy, the one from school?” Ben pressed.
The man glanced at Ben. “I found them together in the orange groves one day,” he said, hesitating. “The boy’s mother’s a good Catholic, tu comprendes?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“I told him I wouldn’t tell her,” he said. “I promised him.”
“You feel guilty now?”
The man nodded. “Promises,” the man said. “Maybe some aren’t worth keeping.” He tossed a disintegrated strawberry into the bucket. “He was a good boy. Confused, but good.”
“You got a name for this school friend?” Ben said.
“Neil.”
“Last name?”
“No,” he said. “Just Neil.”
—
THERE WERE FIVE Neils registered at the high school: Neil Cleffi, Neil Kowolski, Neil Peck, Neil Roth, Neil Wolfe.
As soon as the students were hunkered down in their first-period classes, Ben was in the attendance office, going through the class lists with Helen Galloway, a fifty-something widow who still wore her wedding ring.
“What do you know about these kids?” Ben said. “Any gossip?”
“All business?” she said, arching her eyebrows. “How about a hello? A hug?”
She tugged Ben’s shoulders toward her and forced her affection on him, her hand swiping up and down his back. Behind her, hanging on the wall above the typewriter, was a picture of her dead son, Paul, a Marine dressed in his black formals, his white cap pulled low over his brow; he was killed in the barracks bombing in Beirut in ’83. Helen was the eyes and ears of the school. Most of the stuff that flew under the radar of the rest of the administration, Helen knew about. If you knew kids were absent, it wasn’t difficult to find out why. Years ago, Helen was the one who finally called Ben’s mother when he stopped going to school, spending his days down at the beach, riding waves. She was the only one who called—not the assistant principal of discipline, not his teachers, not the swim coach. He’d hated her for it then.
“I heard about you and Rachel,” she said, her hands on his shoulders and looking up at him. “I’m sorry.”
“I appreciate it,” he said.
“Married too young,” Helen said. “I told you.”
“You did.” When he was missing class and showing up with forged excuses, she always told him: Nice girl, but don’t be in any hurry. Marriage doesn’t come with a get-your-life-back guarantee. “But what can you tell a kid?” Ben said.
“You can tell them the world,” she said. “But their ear canals haven’t made it to their brains yet.”
She glanced at the picture on the wall, just for a second, something habitual, as though to check that her son’s face was still there. Helen kept other kids out of trouble, but she couldn’t help her son. In high school, Paul hung out in the smoking section and spent his senior year stoned in a black van in the student parking lot, listening to Mötley Crüe with the metalheads. He was arrested three times, once by Ben. The boy missed graduation, earned his GED over the summer, and then signed up for the Few and the Proud and got blown to bits in his sleep in a cinder-block room in a foreign country.
“It’s too bad,” she said. “I like Rachel.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“How’s Emma handling it?” she said.
“With sarcasm and disdain.”
“Be patient with her,” Helen said. “Some kids feel like it’s their fault.”
“I’ve told her it’s not,” he said.
“Tell her again,” she said. “She crossing over from the junior high school next year?”
“Yep, unless I can afford sending her to Mater Dei.”
He and Rachel had been saving money to send Emma to the private school before the divorce, a fund the legal fees cut into. Rachel had never been sold on the idea anyway, pointing out that people moved to Sa
nta Elena because of the good public schools. Why shouldn’t they, he’d argued at the time, give her the best if they could? They were giving her the best, Rachel countered, by moving back to Santa Elena. Regardless, he’d prefer his daughter getting her reading, writing, and arithmetic elsewhere over the next three years, and he added to the savings account each month to that end.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Helen said. “She’s got a boyfriend, I’ve noticed.”
“Yep.”
“He’s a mess,” she said. “But a nice kid.”
“Be great if he wasn’t a mess and was a nice kid.”
“Would be, wouldn’t it?” she said, patting his hand. “Kids are a mess. That’s the only way to explain them.”
“Neil Cleffi?” she said now, settling onto her swivel chair and sliding it across the floor to get a file. Helen was overweight and rarely lifted her body from her chair, but she could race the wheels across the concrete floor with a single push of her left foot. “Freshman. Hasn’t hit puberty yet. Runs around rabbit-earing girls. Neil Peck. Junior. The perfect kid. Associated Student Body. Calculus Club. Long-distance track.” She started spinning her hand in the air. “Wears Top-Siders and pastel polo shirts. Never misses a day. Blah, blah, blah. He’ll probably be president one day.”
There was a knock on the door and Assistant Principal Bryce Rutledge stumbled in. “How many kids we have on this field trip to the tar p—” He stopped. “Ben, I didn’t know you were here. Someone park their bike illegally?” he said, with an I’m-a-funny-guy grin straining his face.
“Just visiting with Helen,” Ben said. He had never liked Rutledge, didn’t now.
“Catching up,” Helen said.
A half hour earlier, Ben had sat in his cruiser outside the admin office, listening to the dispatch scanner. A Mercedes keyed in the parking lot of an office complex. Expired registration on a landscaping truck. Then silence, the empty static of the perfect job. He knew teachers were looking out their windows while jotting formulas on chalkboards, watching his car with one eye while they read Shakespeare to sleeping kids. Why was he here? Who was he coming for? Had they paid their parking tickets? He saw his former teachers and friends around town—at the grocery, sitting in the waiting room at the car wash, throwing Frisbees in La Bonita Park. He could cite them for sipping beer in the park or for their illegally tinted side windows. He could pull over Brian Cappecci, a famous stoner in school and now a chemistry teacher, and search his glove compartment for a clip and some shake in a plastic bag. Ben knew it was there; people changed but not that much. He could set up a raid of the massage parlor Mr. Powers visited, but he was a lonely old man, had been a lonely middle-aged man when he taught Ben calculus, and that would only make him lonelier—and disgraced. Ben knew these things, and others, and people in town suspected he knew, too, and the fear that he knew their secrets earned Ben a disdainful respect. People’s guilt kept them in line. The fear of being exposed made them play it safe in other areas of their lives. In a way, a safe town owed its calm to the small immorality; it offered a taste of passion in a world that feared it.