by Alan Drew
“Fiesta Night,” Ben said when he saw it.
“Sí,” Emma said.
Ben joined her at the cutting board, slicing into a bunch of cilantro, relieved that the rules of Fiesta Night would keep them from talking about the serial, about the boyfriend situation, about himself. He had frightened Emma, Ben remembered Rachel saying last week, enough so that Rachel hadn’t let him see his own daughter. He didn’t want to do that again, didn’t want to be that kind of father.
Emma spooned the beef into a bowl and Ben charred the tortillas. When all three of them sat down together, Ben playing an AM station out of L.A. that broadcast Baja norteño music, he took a bite of his taco and said, “Ay, caramba! Este taco es muy picante.”
—
AFTER DINNER, EMMA went out to the barn to tend to the horses. Ben grabbed a couple of beers and put on his sunglasses to save his dilated eye, and he and Rachel settled outside on the porch, sitting on metal chairs beneath the sign that declared the house CASA DE LA WADE. Together they watched Emma, brightly lit and beautiful in the exposed light of the barn, comb out Gus’s flanks.
“I blinked and she grew up,” Ben said.
“She’s not grown up yet,” Rachel said. “Her body’s calling the shots, and her mind’s following.”
Emma stood on her tiptoes now to comb down Gus’s withers. Ben remembered her child’s body, the lean, wiry muscles she exposed without embarrassment. “Still in the Garden of Eden” was how he and Rachel described it. The body just the body and not an object of desire or possession. He hadn’t seen her body in five years, knew almost nothing about it now, a normal loss of intimacy that hadn’t bothered him until recently, until this boy. It was a troublesome thought, he knew, and he didn’t really know what it meant to be having it. Maybe all men thought this about their daughters, felt the loss of that particular closeness. He didn’t know.
“Sorry about the way I reacted the other night,” he said, “when you told me.” He thought about it a second. “I felt robbed, like she was just stolen from me.”
“You can’t keep her,” Rachel said. “But you don’t have to lose her. Ben, this is one of those moments when you have to get it right.”
“I look at her and I see all the ways she can be hurt,” he said.
“That’s called being a parent. It’s a permanent condition.”
When Rachel had told him she was pregnant with Emma, almost fifteen years ago now, he was frightened that he might turn into a monster himself and hurt his own child. He knew the abused sometimes became the abuser, like some sickness gestating in the child. He was so frightened, he wouldn’t change a diaper at first, wouldn’t give Emma a bath. Rachel thought it was simply the stupid limitations of men, and she told him so. But he was terrified. Later he realized that he wasn’t capable of doing such a thing, that his feelings toward his daughter were normal; the love, a love like nothing he had ever felt, was completely and wonderfully paternal, and he knew then he would do anything, any necessary thing, to protect her.
“This professor—this programmer,” Ben said. “Do you trust him? I mean, do you trust him with Emma?”
“Do I trust him?” Rachel said. “Like do I leave him alone with Emma while I go get my nails done?”
“Is he safe?”
“Ben, you have to have a little faith in me.”
“There’s a lot of bad people out there, people you’d never expect.”
“There’re more good than bad.”
He glanced at her. She was right, of course she was right, but it didn’t feel like it.
“You have to have a little faith in your daughter, too,” Rachel said. “That first night at the hospital, I was falling apart. I mean, I couldn’t think straight seeing you like that. It was Emma who calmed me down. She’s tougher than you think.”
Emma had ridden over to the hospital on her bike every day after school. He hadn’t asked her to. She just did it. She had stayed with him, read to him, hunted down nurses when the painkillers wore off.
“So this boy, Lance,” Ben said. “Is he a nice kid?”
“He’s not the brightest bulb,” Rachel said. “But he seems sweet enough. I talked to his parents. They know the situation. I think we’ve got things under control—at least as much as we can.”
“So you took her to the gynecologist?”
“Yes.”
“Got a prescription?”
“Yes.”
Ben nodded, letting that one settle in his chest.
“Ben, you can be upset, but you—we—don’t have much of a choice about this. She’s not ours. We just get to love her.”
—
“GUS IS ITCHING to go riding,” Emma said when Ben came into the barn.
“He misses you when you’re not around,” he said.
She glanced at Ben and then finished the liniment on the back legs, Gus lifting his foot with each touch.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” Ben said. “I wasn’t ready for that. I kind of lost it.”
Her hand stopped on Gus’s knee for a moment, and then she worked the liniment down to the fetlocks.
“Can we just skip talking about it, Dad?” she said. “It’s kind of embarrassing, you know?”
“Yeah, it’s not a topic I’m so comfortable with, either.”
He watched her in silence as she started working a currycomb down Gus’s hindquarters. The horse blew air in appreciation.
“Listen, when I was thirteen,” Ben said, “I met someone. I thought they loved me.” He didn’t know where he was going with this, but somehow he wanted to reach her. He wasn’t sure, though, what it was he wanted her to understand. “This person, they bought me things, took me places, and, because I needed the attention, I thought I”—he started to say “loved” but changed his mind—“cared about this person, too.”
Emma stopped combing the horse, her ear turned toward him, listening.
“I would do anything for this person,” he said, “because I didn’t like myself very much and this person seemed to think I was worth something.” He hesitated, looked out the barn window, and watched a hawk circle on an updraft. “I understood later that it wasn’t love. But not then, not for a long time.”
“So you were in love before Mom?”
“No.”
“Did she dump you?”
He stared at her. “The point is, Em, I want to make sure this boy isn’t using you.”
“He’s not.” She straightened up now and looked at him across Gus’s swayed back.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said.
“You know what hurts me, Dad?” she said. “This.” She pointed in the vague direction of the house. “You up here and me and Mom down there, in that little shitty condo. You know what hurt me? Listening to you two fight at two in the morning, having to speak the few dozen words we know in Spanish at dinner so I don’t have to listen to you scream at each other.”
There were tears in her eyes and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.
“You think I’m stupid?” she said. “You think I can’t make my own decisions?”
“No, I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“You think I don’t like myself very much?”
“I was talking about me.”
“He didn’t pressure me or take advantage of me, you get it?” She looked him straight in the eyes. “I mean, I had to ask him out.” She sighed. “I didn’t tell you,” she said, “because I knew you’d pull all this ‘my little girl’ crap on me and it’d make me feel like Hester Prynne or something. And it does. It makes me feel terrible. Like I’m a slut or something.”
A punch in the gut. “I don’t want you to feel like that.”
“I really like him, Dad.”
“You’re moving a little too fast for me, sweetheart.”
“He’s really nice,” she said. “You’d get along. I mean, you both like waves.”
“I’m trying, Em. I’m trying.”
HUNTING THE
HUNTER
He saw the woman in her open garage, unloading groceries from the trunk of her sedan. He was parked across the street, two houses down, sitting low in the leather seat, sweating in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. He could smell himself, blood and sweat—his insides had leaked down his forearms and dried sticky-wet in the webs of his fingers, his shirt so soaked it felt like molted skin. She hoisted a paper bag to her hip and carried it through the little door at the back of the garage that led to the inside of the house. The door was propped open as though she were asking him inside.
It was late afternoon, the white light beyond the shade of the car setting off starbursts in his eyes. He thought it was the third day since the policeman shot him, but he wasn’t sure. Day and night…night and day were blurred in his head. He remembered the bright lights of the highway patrol cruisers spread across the freeway, the traffic rolling to a stop in front of him. He remembered the way he slipped the car into the stream of other cars riding the emergency lane to the roundabout exit off the freeway to this new town. He remembered finding the raincoat in the trunk of the car, slipping into it to hide the bleeding hole in his arm, buttoning up its skin to become another person, and walking into the drugstore to buy medical gauze and tape. He had smiled at the teenage boy behind the counter, thanked him for the coupon he had slipped into his bag. Back at the car, he’d wrapped the shoulder with the gauze, the blood blooming on the fabric, and taped the edges so tight his arm went numb. He had to keep himself inside himself.
That night, the first one, he’d slept curled up in the driver’s seat of the car, parked in the lot of a twenty-four-hour grocery, people coming and going, buying their milk and eggs, their carts rattling across the cement. Not one person peered inside his window, not one policeman shone his flashlight across the license plate. The second night, he’d parked in a used-car lot, exchanged license plates with one of the cars with a FOR SALE sign in the window, and listened to the sirens of the police cars in other parts of the city. That’s what he’d learned about these people in these safe places: They believed that what was dangerous hid in darkness, lurked down at the railroad tracks, stalked the alleyways between buildings. If he stayed in the open, in the light, where everything was neat and organized, he became invisible to them. He was a shadow man who made his own darkness and hid in it.
She was back now, coming through the door toward the car. She was draped in a sundress, as though she’d just come from the beach. She was younger than he liked, but this town, this new town, was becoming like a room with a lock on it. He had to get out.
Last night when he slept in the used-car lot, he dreamed his father was digging his fingers inside his wound, pushing the bullet deeper into the muscle, shoving it beneath his shoulder bone and between the cage of his ribs and into the pumping muscle of his heart. He had startled awake when a police helicopter burst over the tops of the trees, slashing its light across the cement drainage of the dried-up riverbed below. This morning, he’d tried to get back to the freeway, but a patrol car sat in the grassy circle of the on-ramp. A second patrol car lurked in the circle of the opposite ramp, so he drove the other way, up into the hills, up into the curving roads of the residential streets. That’s how he found her, the woman carrying in her groceries.
He’d used up all the medical gauze, and the bandage was soaked through and he could feel his inside-self emptying into the air. He also needed another car, one that looked nothing like the car he’d stolen. He’d watched her hang the car keys on the hook next to the open garage door.
When she hoisted another grocery bag to her hip, he eased open the driver’s side door, his head spinning a little when he stood. She stopped, the heel of her left foot lifted in mid-step, and turned to glance over her shoulder. He knelt and froze—he was good at being still, good at becoming invisible—and let her feel him. This is what he truly loved, he knew that now—that moment he charged their little world with fear. If he could freeze time, he’d freeze it here and forever feel that charge of fear pass between them. But it didn’t work without becoming death, too. Death the creator and the destroyer of fear.
She turned and started across the garage, toward the open door and the steps into the house. He slipped across the street, silently coming up the driveway as she stepped inside. When he reached the very same steps, he pressed the button to put the garage door down, and the mechanical wheels and chains came to life, rattling the wooden door down the guide rails until it snapped closed.
16
ALL SUNDAY EVENING THE HOUSE phone rang off the hook. He answered none of the calls, just let it go to the answering machine. The Orange County Register wanted an interview. A representative for the Today show was trying to fly him out to New York.
The fog was rolling in tonight, wisps of it coming off the ocean and tendriling down the ridges of the hills. He sat and watched it come in, drowning the land, and listened to the scanner. 904-G: Brush fire in Eagle Rock. 390-F: Under the influence of narcotics. 10-59: Funeral detail.
At 8:33 P.M., a truck came up the road. A Ford Bronco, Lieutenant Hernandez’s truck.
“Thought I’d check in on the hero,” he said, standing in the doorway of the barn. He had a six-pack of Coors dangling from his left hand.
Hernandez had visited the hospital two days before along with Marco and Carolina. They’d dropped off a vase of flowers and a Playboy magazine, ironically wrapped in a bow. “Since you’ll have time on your hands,” Carolina had said, and they all laughed about that, and then they left him alone to rest and read the articles. Hernandez had been up to Ben’s place three times before, all invited.
“I’m on medical leave,” Ben said.
“Yeah, I signed the paperwork.”
Hernandez tossed him a can and took a seat on a metal chair across from Ben’s desk.
“Mayor’s talking about giving you keys to the city,” Hernandez said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Means you’re the story he wants to tell,” Hernandez said. “It’s good marketing.”
Ben nodded and took a sip of the beer.
“Looking a little heavyweight, but not too bad,” Hernandez said, raising the beer at Ben’s eye. “You seeing straight yet?”
“It’s all holy-light shit right now.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You look like a stoner.”
The scanner squawked. 901: Accident—unknown injuries.
“Jonesing, huh?” Hernandez said, nodding toward the scanner.
“Thinking maybe tonight will be the night we catch him.”
“The whole goddamned world’s looking for him.”
“I went up to the house,” Ben said. “You know, the one in Norwalk where he was locked up as a kid?”
Hernandez nodded once.
“There was this woman there, a neighbor,” Ben said. “I’m pretty sure she knew about the kid. People knew what was happening to that boy.”
“It’s a hard thing to believe,” Hernandez said, hearing the question in Ben’s voice, “that a man would do that to a boy. That’s the kind of thing, I guess, that most people don’t want to believe happens. You believe that, you have to believe a whole lot of other things about people.”
415-F: Civil disturbance.
“To be honest,” Hernandez continued, “after years of this job, I wish I knew a little less about people.”
“I drive around this town,” Ben said, “and think about all the shitty things that are happening inside those tidy little houses.”
“That’s the price of knowing,” Hernandez said. “That’s the price of this job.” They were silent a moment. “Doesn’t matter, anymore, what happened to the serial as a kid. Feel sorry for that kid, sure, but that kid’s gone now. He no longer exists.”
Ben nodded and watched the fog erase Quail Hill. He knew it, yes. He’d seen the bodies left behind, seen him choking that woman, and the look in his eyes on the freeway the other night. The serial had taken the evil done to him and turned
it into a greater evil. It didn’t matter anymore that once he was a kid and that kid was delivered into the hands of a person who would destroy him.
“Any leads?” Ben said.
“Thousands of them,” Hernandez said. “The serial’s everywhere, if you believe the tips. Everyone’s bogeyman.” Hernandez took a sip of the beer. “Last confirmed was an hour after you played demolition derby with him. OC sheriff’s helicopter had visual of him on the 91 before being called off because of the wind. Highway patrol got a roadblock up out near Anaheim Hills, but…” He held up his open palms.
“Disappeared?”
“Disappeared.”
Hernandez finished the can and opened another. Tossed a second to Ben. “He’ll bleed to death, probably, if one of us doesn’t catch up to him first. You got a good shot off.”
390: Drunk and disorderly. Hernandez turned the dial down on the scanner.
“Really,” Hernandez said. “Your dad would be proud.”
“My dad would be pissed I’m getting the keys to this city.”
Hernandez laughed and shook his head. “You’re probably right. He was a good man, your dad. No bullshit from him.”
“Nope.”
“You know,” Hernandez said, “I’ve been wondering about some things. Been thinking that since you’ve got some time to mull things over, you might be able to help me out.”
“I’ll do my best,” Ben said, taking a sip of the beer, trying to play it cool.
“I’ve been wondering how you came to be first one on scene at Puente Madera when you were supposed to be cowboying it up in Loma Canyon.”
“Hunch.”
“A hunch?”
“That the killer wasn’t wasting his time up there in the hills,” Ben said. “That he’d know we were hunting for him there.”
“When you didn’t sign off on this Mexican kid’s suicide,” Hernandez said, “I looked into a couple of things. Found out that Coach Wakeland keeps a rental property near the crime scene.”
Ben remembered Hernandez watching him at the crime scene, when he blew up on Wakeland. Hernandez could piece things together; you didn’t make lieutenant by being stupid.