The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said.

  I slipped my bathrobe on and followed her into her bedroom, where she began packing in a distracted manner, as if her mind was coursing along a half-dozen tracks.

  “It’s odd,” she said, carefully folding a slip. “My two regrets in life were that we weren’t close and that I had lost my daughter. Now suddenly you’re both back in my life.” She tossed the slip into her suitcase, undoing the folds. “In each case a crisis brought us together.” She threw some blouses on the bed. “I’ve always believed good can come out of suffering. This proves it, doesn’t it?”

  “I know I’m grateful for you,” I said. “I’m sure she will be, too.”

  I hoped she would not detect the skepticism beneath my minimal response, but the notion of a stranger showing up in the middle of the night with a hard-luck story, claiming to be family, awoke my professional instincts, which naturally suspected the worst. Had Vicky turned up on my doorstep, I’d have a lot of questions before I embraced her into the warm bosom of the family. I hoped that once her excitement wore off, the same questions would occur to Elena.

  “Her last name is Trujillo,” Elena said, cramming the last of her clothes into her suitcase. “Her little boy’s name is Angel. Angelito.” She gave his name the Spanish pronunciation: Ahn-hel-ito. “Joanne said he looks like he’s nine or ten. I’m a grandmother, Henry. Can you imagine?”

  “How did she get Trujillo as a last name?”

  “It must be her husband’s name.” She took a step back from the bed and her suitcase popped open. “Damn!”

  She sat on the bed and began to weep. I sat down beside her and put my arm around her. “What is it, Elena?”

  “I’ve prayed for the day when I would see my daughter and now I—I’m afraid.”

  Gently, I asked, “Afraid of what?”

  “The girl I saw fifteen years ago in that group home didn’t have much of a future ahead of her,” she replied. “I might have made a difference then, but I was a coward. She must be almost thirty now. God knows how she turned out. It’s not a good sign that she’s running away from an abusive husband. Maybe her coming isn’t a blessing, Henry. Maybe it’s a reproach.”

  Although she had articulated some of my own doubts, my fueling them would only make the reunion harder. “Whatever trouble she’s in, we’ll deal with it together.”

  “You? You shouldn’t even be out of bed,” she said, wiping her eyes, but I could tell she was reassured.

  “Let’s start with the packing,” I said, and together we repacked her suitcase so that everything fit.

  I woke in the middle of the night and realized that, for the first time since I’d had the heart attack, I was completely alone. My stomach began to churn anxiety while my head went spinning on what ifs. What if I had another attack and couldn’t reach the phone? What if the paramedics couldn’t find the house? What if I died this time and didn’t come back? I lay there with my finger pressed to my pulse. After a minute, I wondered whether I was really prepared to spend the rest of my life obsessively monitoring my pulse and worrying if the next heart beat would be the last. Hayward was right: Everyone died of something and I would probably die of heart disease. Fretting about when would not delay the moment. I relaxed, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes. I did not fall asleep immediately, but when I finally did, I didn’t wake again until it was light.

  That afternoon I was sitting on a chaise-longue on the deck with my shirt off, taking in the sun and nodding off over a volume of Supreme Court advance sheets, when I heard a woman exclaim, “Henry!”

  I opened my eyes and turned my head. Inez Montoya was poised above the back of the chaise, about to grab my shoulders.

  I barked out a grumpy, “Don’t do that.”

  “Dios mío,” she said. “They told me you almost died and I find the door unlocked and you out here not moving.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a cigarette, clicked her lighter on, then stopped. “Shit, I guess I shouldn’t smoke around you.”

  “Just be careful not to ignite the canyon. What brings you down from Sacramento?”

  She pulled up a chair and sucked on the cigarette impatiently; the same way she went through life. Her clothes hung on her—she was in a thin phase—and her strong bones showed in her long, dark face, which had always reminded me of the face of a female Aztec deity. Inez was not, however, the presiding goddess of a local volcano, she was something called the secretary of state, a position to which she had been elected the previous spring in the Democratic landslide that gave California its first Democratic governor in sixteen years. We had known each other for more than two decades, first meeting as young public defenders. She had gone into politics, as tough-minded and hard-nosed as the men with whom she competed, until slowly but steadily she climbed the political ladder to become the first Latina to hold statewide office, albeit an office that no one, including Inez, seemed to know the function of exactly. That wasn’t the point: It gave her national visibility, which she planned to put to good use when the senior senator from California retired in six years. Why she maintained our friendship was a mystery to me, since I imagined I was a great disappointment to her.

  “I have a fund-raiser in Santa Monica tomorrow. Movie ladies. Plus I wanted to see you. Who’s taking care of you?”

  “Different friends drop by,” I said. “Today it’s the Kwans from next door. Everyone brings a casserole. Where’s yours?”

  She crushed her cigarette beneath an elegant sandal and said, “Listen, m’ijo, my cooking would send you back to the hospital. Anyway, I brought you something better than a casserole.”

  She dropped a diskette into my lap.

  “What’s this?”

  “Judicial application,” she said. “I had one of my staff download it for you.”

  “You want me to apply for a judgeship?”

  “The governor got eighty percent of the Latino vote,” she said. “I figure I’m responsible for twenty percent. That’s worth a couple of judges.”

  “Oh, I see. For a minute there, I thought it might have something to do with my qualifications.”

  She lit another cigarette. “Spoken like a true male,” she said, clicking her lighter shut. “Don’t tell me it never crossed your mind when you were arguing to some payaso in a black robe, that you couldn’t do a better job.”

  I temporized. “They’re not all clowns. All right, yes, I’ve thought about it.”

  “Pues, I can do this for you. Just fill out the form.”

  I picked up the diskette. “All right. It can be my occupational therapy.”

  “Always a smart-ass remark,” she said. She put out her cigarette and studied me with an expression that seemed to mingle concern for me and fear for her own mortality. “You’re skin and bones. How bad was it?”

  “They tell me I actually died for about a minute,” I said. “If you stand close enough, you can still smell the sulfur from the fire and brimstone. Have you figured out what the secretary of state does yet?”

  “She runs for senator,” she said, then added in her bossiest voice. “And don’t die again.”

  Elena called that evening, and from the weariness in her voice when she greeted me, I knew the reunion had not been one of unmitigated joy.

  “Is she your daughter, Elena?”

  “Yes,” she said. “She is definitely my daughter.” Her words were emphatic, but her tone was neutral, cautious. “She showed me the paper with my address on it that I gave the social worker. She’s also the spitting image of Mom.”

  That startled me. In our generation, my mother’s genetic heritage had been overwhelmed by my father’s, whom both my sister and I resembled. “Then she doesn’t look like us,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “but Angel looks exactly like you when you were ten. It’s eerie. I keep calling him Henry.”

  That was more startling still. “Does he know about me?”

  “I showed him a picture of you when you were a boy.
He kept asking to see it, so I finally gave it to him.”

  “What are they like?”

  In the silence that followed, I discerned that she was choosing her words carefully. “A step or two up from street people,” she said. “Vicky’s had a hard life but it hasn’t made her hard. She is pretty closed-mouth, though. But then I was the mother who abandoned her, so I can’t expect her to trust me right away.”

  “Has she told you anything more about why she came to you?”

  “She said her husband was in prison for beating her until last month, when they released him. The first thing he did was find her and beat her for having gone to the police the last time. She went to a women’s shelter in San Francisco, but they asked her to leave. Everyone she knows also knows him, so she came here.”

  “Why was she asked to leave the shelter?”

  Another careful silence. “She said it was because she’s a Christian and the women who ran the shelter weren’t.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “She belongs to one of those storefront Pentecostal churches that have sprung up in the barrios the last twenty years. You know, what we used to call Holy Rollers. Vicky’s very serious about her religion. Most women’s shelters are secular, to say the least. I can imagine her giving her born-again spiel to a lesbian social worker.”

  “Has she given it to you and Joanne yet?”

  “She’s let drop a couple of disapproving references to lifestyles, but so far we haven’t had that conversation.” She added quickly, as if in mitigation. “Don’t misunderstand, Henry. I respect her faith. I think it’s all that has kept her from the kind of street life I was afraid that she had had.”

  “No evidence of drugs?”

  “No,” she said. “She really doesn’t seem the type.”

  “What’s the boy like?”

  Without hesitation, she replied, “He radiates intelligence and he’s so self-possessed you forget he’s a child.”

  “Children who don’t seem like children have generally had a pretty rough time of it,” I observed. “Has he been abused, too?”

  “If he has, it wasn’t by her,” she said. “They’re so close they’re almost telepathic. Vicky’s intelligent, too, Henry, though she didn’t get much education. I think she sees Angel’s potential and she’s tried to give him stability, but this man she married, he sounds like her worst mistake.”

  “Has she told you what she wants?”

  “She says she needs a little time to get herself together.”

  “Does she work?”

  “She told me she was a maid at a hotel in the city. She gave up her job because she was afraid her husband would turn up while she was at work.”

  “What’s her husband’s name?”

  “Peter. Peter Trujillo.”

  “Do you know what prison he was in?”

  “San Quentin. Why?”

  “I can probably pull his rap sheet.”

  “His what?”

  “His criminal record. It would tell us what he was convicted of, when he was paroled and under what conditions. If he was convicted of some kind of spousal abuse crime and he’s stalking her, he could be tossed back into the prison on a parole violation.”

  I could tell she was tempted, but she said, “I need to establish trust with her. What you’re suggesting sounds too much like going behind her back or trying to run her life.”

  “These domestic violence situations can be terribly volatile, Elena, and they tend to escalate. I don’t like the idea of this guy showing up at your house with a gun and a grudge.”

  “According to Vicky, he doesn’t know anything about me. That’s why she came here.”

  “That’s hard to believe if they were married any length of time,” I said. “Finding out who your natural mother is, that’s big news. Don’t you think she would have told him?”

  “I think she always meant for me to be her last resort,” Elena said.

  “I’d still be worried.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “As hard as this is, Henry, I can’t tell you how happy I am that she and Angel are here. All I want now is to spend as much time as I can with them. I’ll tell her what you told me about her husband being in violation of his parole, and maybe we can find a lawyer who specializes in domestic violence cases.”

  “I’ll get you a referral,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s talk tomorrow, and, Henry, don’t worry. You should be happy, too. Overnight, our family’s been doubled.”

  Yeah, I thought, not counting the psycho husband. “I can’t wait to meet them,” I said.

  The next morning, I called around and got the names of a couple of lawyers in the San Francisco area who handled domestic violence cases. Then I called a contact in the sheriff’s office and persuaded him to get me Peter Trujillo’s rap sheet. A few minutes later, I called him back and asked him to pull the criminal history, if any, of my niece as well.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Michael Nava

  cover design by Angela Goddard

  978-1-4532-9769-8

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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