by Noreen Ayres
An hour later, we stood in the sunken-level family room of Tranquilino Avalos, looking at wire sections stapled to wood plaques. Monty said, “He’s nuts about this stuff. Devil’s rope. Him and Lupita go all over collectin’.” Every wall bore eighteen-inch samples, replete with prongs, barbs, stars, leaves, spurs, or razor spirals. Between the displays hung Indian rugs, a picture of a woman carrying baskets, and straw hats. “He paid four hundred dollars for a piece not any bigger’n that,” Monty said, pointing to a length of bird’s-feet not mounted but lying bare next to a rusty branding iron on the mantel.
The house smelled of sausage, peppers, onions, and egg, as Mr. Avalos brought a black two-handled griddle to the dining table and set it on what looked like ordinary outdoor bricks. He said, “If you don’t eat it, the dogs will.” There were four place settings of blue plates and peach-colored cups on pale green terry cloth hand towels. Four place settings, but I saw only Mr. Avalos and a wisp of what I took to be his wife, clutching her robe as she sped down the hallway and disappeared into a room.
A coyote in full howl, cut out of white pine and wearing a pale green neckerchief, stood guard by the railing that separated the family room from the dining area. Over the table near the ceiling on the wall were two crosshatched muskets with lashed bayonets.
Mr. Avalos retreated to the kitchen, coming back with a pitcher of orange juice and a glass coffee pot. His movements were as smooth and quick as anyone who knew exactly how many steps could be saved within the confines of a house he’d loved forty years. He sat nearest the kitchen.
Pouring juice into the glass next to his, he glanced up once as Monty took a seat. “How about you?” he asked, barely meeting my eyes.
“Please,” I said. I was starved. The old man poured, then swept a clutch of breakfast jambalaya onto my blue-fired plate. He spread his toast with jelly while Monty pincered stiff bacon strips off a small yellow platter with his knife and fork and dropped them onto my plate.
“Say,” Monty said, “I can’t get that rotten kid of yours to commit to a time to help me out with my manure pit. We talk, he doesn’t show. Hell, what am I doin’? I just tattled to his daddy.” Monty was only talking to be talking. There wasn’t any conviction in it.
Mr. Avalos thoughtfully chewed his food as he set a biscuit on the rim of my plate. As soon as I broke the biscuit, the butter dish was under my nose.
He said, “Paulie drinks too much. Like you said.”
“He does like the amber,” Monty said. “I guess his mom being sick. You want me kick his butt?”
“His brother died of the same thing.”
“I didn’t know that, Mr. Avalos,” Monty said.
The old man nodded as if to say now you do.
“I’ll have a yammer at him, get him straightened out for you,” Monty said.
Mr. Avalos said, “He’ll be all right.”
We sat in silence for a while, and then I said, “What started you on wire, Mr. Avalos? That’s a pretty impressive collection you have.”
His face became a paler shade of tan in the morning light. “I just liked the looks of it,” he said. “I got my first piece from a man in Visalia. World War One military wire.”
“Wouldn’t want to run along it in the dark,” Monty said. “You’d squeal like a pig caught under the gate.”
“That’s sure amusing,” I said. Monty chewed and smiled at the same time.
Mr. Avalos moved food around on his plate. “Entanglement wire, 1915. The British, first with the patent. They made tanks to get over the wire.”
“Are there a lot of people into wire?” I asked, thinking about the wire from Ortega Highway.
Mr. Avalos shook his head. “Man runs the big hardware store in town, he collects. Otherwise mostly in the Central Valley, Bakersfield. There’s museums for it,” he said, oil coating his lips. He spoke to Monty again, “I got a birthday present from Paulie the other day. Solid copper off the Hearst ranch.”
“You mean the Hearst ranch, up by Morro Bay?”
The old man drew a diagram in the air with his fork and forefinger. “Diamond shapes ever few inches. Makes it stronger. No hooks. Mr. Hearst didn’t like his animals hurting theirselves on wire. No bob wire, he said. Screwworms get in the wound and fester.”
Mr. Avalos handed me the pie tin full of biscuits. Half of the first biscuit still lay on my plate but I took one because it was easier than saying no.
He arced his fork back over his shoulder. “Daley’s ‘Vicious Wamego,’” he said. “Patent: October 29, 1878. The seller didn’t know what he had. I can get seventy dollars a length at the shows, and I got a whole roll for a hundred bucks. It’s out in the shed.”
My heart double-flipped because all along I’d been trying to figure what excuse I could use to get out to the shed; then here it was, an invitation, one I was afraid to even think too hard about, not really wanting to go see again the spot where Bernie Williams died.
“Thanks, but we got to find this one’s wallet,” Monty said. “I’ll tell you though, if any one of them hog jockeys found it, by now they’re cuttin’ coke lines with the credit cards. Hell, Brandy, maybe it’s still around. Stranger things have happened.”
Mr. Avalos’s face went dark. He said, “I don’t like that stuff on my farm. I don’t like that Switchie. I think he does that stuff.”
“I know you don’t, Mr. Avalos. Don’t worry about him. You see him with that pretty Jolene? She’s one of my waitresses,” he said. “Like Brandy here. Not as smart as this one, though.”
“Thanks for talking like I’m not here.”
“He’s no good,” Mr. Avalos said. “He could get Paulie in trouble again.”
“Paulie wouldn’t hire nobody to run his equipment he didn’t trust, Mr. Avalos. Maybe if he’s been hittin’ the sauce a little too much, he knows he shouldn’t be operatin’ equipment. Maybe Switchie can help him, you know what I mean?” He reached for the coffeepot and poured for Mr. Avalos. “You’re quiet over there,” Monty said to me, chasing a bell pepper with the last bite of his biscuit and giving me the narrow eye.
I shrugged and stood and stacked dishes, like the good little waitress I was supposed to be.
The old man said, “I could get somebody to go talk to him. There’s some farmers.” He stood now too, and brought dishes to the kitchen while I was there.
“Switchie? Naw, don’t do anythin’ like that, Mr. Avalos. He ain’t fit to shoot at when you want to unload your gun. Ah now, I don’t mean that. At one time, yeah, I know he dug PCP, hog, angel dust. He was spikin’ between the toes even while he was in the slammer. And you know who brought it to him in the cage? Sergeant of the guards. But take me for example. I messed up, now I’m just a broke businessman and a weekend motorhead. A man can reform.”
The muscles in Mr. Avalos’s jaw spasmed as he scraped food into a plastic sieve in the sink.
Out in the weed patch by the pigsties, butterflies bounced like yo-yos over the yellow mustard flowers and artichoke thistles. I squinted down the lane and looked for any telltale scrap of Smokey on the wire.
“What were you doin’ all the way down here?”
“I told you, I was looking at the pigs. All that poundage. It’s kind of intriguing, all that walking around.” I hung back at the first structure, as if that’s all the farther I’d gone the day before, and kind of looked around on the ground. “Oh, I’ll never find my wallet, Monty. Let’s go.”
“No, no, we’re goin’ to do this right.” He grabbed my hand and tugged me along. I felt a flash of fear. “You go in here? Look at these guys,” he said, hauling me along into the main corridor of the first stable. “Just look at them happy faces.”
“The tusks don’t do a lot for me,” I said, “smiling or not.”
“I had an old stag once, four tusks, forty-four teem, no nuts. Bought him off a guy that had him sold already. Paid fifty more just ’cause I liked his looks, and you know what? Twice he scared off rustlers intent on bootleggin’ my hard-
earned bacon. Made a hell of a fuss. You here?” he asked, “this far down?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Here’s one just farrowed,” he said, stopping at a pen with a red sow big as a couch, lying on her side with a dozen watermelon-striped piglets latched to each teat. Her eyes were barely cracked. She was grinning as a slow fly buzzed over her stiff pink eyelashes. “If she was mine, I’d pipe her in some music so she won’t go stompin’ her young.”
“They do that?”
“They can. Hell, hyenas right out of the womb start killin’ each other before they even open their eyes, so this ain’t so bad. Mama says, ‘This here’s just too many folks around the house.’ See, you gotta keep ’em calm. Now Mr. Avalos, he raises for the carcass trade. Me, I raise for reproduction, and I don’t want any tidal waves goin’ on with hormones and such. No pig PMS, no sperm gettin’ wasted on the ground. That’s why I didn’t want you to come visit me yesterday, but a guy I got helpin’ me says mine are done now for a bit. All wore out.” He smiled and made like he was chewing gum though I knew he didn’t have any in his mouth. I got a chill that went clear through to the top of my head.
As we entered the stable nearest the shed, the two young workers hauling the goat I saw slaughtered the day before squeezed around the shed with a rope tight around a black hog’s neck and strung over its back and around its hindquarters like a prisoner wearing a waist chain, or like a large, portable pig valise complete with handle, except this one weighed three hundred pounds. The worker at the rear was whapping the pig’s haunch with a stick, and the poor beast was squawling and digging in.
Monty advanced on the man and told him, “Hold up, hold up, there.” Taking the rope and waving the men back, he said, “There’s no need for that there,” and began making long soothing sounds to the pig as the two men stood by. He said, mixing his comments to the workers and the hog in equal proportion, “Easy does it, easy. Kill ’em with kindness, compadres. Whatsa matter, baby? You just want to go in there and get you a date, China punky? Easy, now, easy.” At the back corner of the far-end sty, a sow stalked and switched her tail so hard it popped against the boards.
The boar lunged at Monty, trading positions, teeth chattering. Foam boiled in its mouth and streamed out by the tusks. Monty lowered his voice and his knees at the same time and hummed reassuringly, patting the neck and the sides but while holding the rope handle. “There, baby. There, baby,” he said.
He swung open the gate ahead of him, grabbed hold of the tail at the base, and guided him in. The romancer trotted in, took one look at his beloved, and became jelly, standing long enough for Monty to unknot the rope and slip it off. Then the hog remembered his role, tossed his head twice, and began strutting toward the sow as she walked warily along the sides.
Monty closed the gate and handed the rope to the Mexican and said, “I seen a ninety-pound woman sweet-talk a boar up a loadin’ ramp backwards. Treat ’em with kmdness,” he said. “The ladies will do whatever you want ’em to do.” The men looked tired and sweaty and I thought they probably didn’t even understand English, but the one nearest Monty took the rope, the whites of his eyes shining like porcelain, nodded, and touched the gate latch to see that it held. Monty turned to me and said, “Lesson number one.”
I said, “You think somebody’d find my wallet, strip it, and toss it in there?” meaning the shed.
“Well, let’s us just go take a look, and we can tell Paulie’s dad we saw his wire,” Monty said, and he quickly exited the sty and strode around the side to the far door. “Don’t get fresh with me now, in here, will ya? I can get my feelin’s hurt real easy.”
“I’ll sure try my best,” I said.
Inside, the light broke over rusted rakes, a two-wheeled flatbed trailer with its tongue across sacks of finisher feed, and four squares of shadowed, empty pigsties I hadn’t seen from my vantage point at the window when Agent Bernie Williams was killed. The shed seemed much larger from the inside, and I tried to get my reverse bearings to see the post Bernie Williams was standing by when his life’s blood drained away. The smell of hogs and ripe hay hung heavy in the air.
Four posts supported the raw crossbeams, and as I looked around the interior, I glanced at the dirt floor near the post where I expected to see patterns of stain. But I saw nothing there, nothing at all. Glancing away because I didn’t want to stare, I said, “Oh look, this must be where Mr. Avalos cuts his wire,” and I went toward two short bales of it standing on their ends near a crude workbench. On the bench were curls of cable and sheet metal and a pair of gloves with which it looked like you could handle fire. Leather plates were riveted to the palms and fingers. Nearby was a wire-cutting tool with curved blades and orange rubber handles.
I plucked a piece of double-strand wire with half-inch-high diamond shapes along the shaft. “Mr. Hearst wire,” I said. It was copper. And it was also the same as one of the pieces Joe Sanders and I took from the trash barrel on Ortega Highway.
Monty took it from my hand, holding it vertical and inspecting it. “Treat ’em with kindness,” he said.
I wanted the wire cutters, but how was I going to sneak orange-handled wire cutters safely into my pocket, and do so without contamination?
Then Monty reached over and picked the cutters up as if he read my mind. He snipped a few times, then put them down. And then, suddenly, he turned me by the shoulders and looked down at me and I could see it coming, the kiss, but was startled by it, and didn’t move out of the way. His lips were hot and the hard ridge of his fly pressed against my crotch; the edge of the workbench cut into my back. He released me and said, “That’s overdue.”
“I don’t want to make love to you, Monty, so quit it. You just don’t get everything you want in this world, hard as that may be for you to believe.”
He went and stood in the doorway looking out and squinting in the bright light with his hands parked on his hips. “We could use one more good rain,” he said.
I moved to the back of the shed, looking for anything. The absence of blood on the floor didn’t bother me so much; investigators could pick up traces with no problem. So what did I want, a body under a buckrake? I made a quick walk down to the end, came back as Monty moved off into the yard, swinging his arms in circles to relieve kinks in his shoulders, I guessed. Darting over to the workbench, I took the bird-beak wire cutters, lifted my blouse, and nestled them under in the side piece of my bra under my arm. A holster. I tucked back in, and when I was going out the door I looked for body drag marks or tarry blood spots in the soil and watched Monty trudge up the slope toward the ground where the rally was held. When I got to him and said I didn’t think it was worth looking for the wallet anymore, he answered saying he was going to go wet the willows. If I wanted to come along, he wouldn’t object.
26
Monty hadn’t murdered me yet. I was supposed to follow him out to tour his pig palace. The suggestion didn’t bother me. I had the wire cutters, feeble evidence that they were. No decent place to put them, but I was feeling bold and strong. What did I care if Captain Exner’s nonvisible plainclothes were out getting their hair done? Smokey was on the job.
Stashed under my front seat was a small towel I use when checking the oil level in my car. I rid my ribs of the wire cutters lifted off Tranquilino Avalos’s gouged workbench by folding the cutters in the rag and slipping the bundle under the seat.
Trailing Monty to the freeway, the molded snake head staring back at me from the fender and people driving slow up alongside to admire and fear, I felt split, disenjoined, belonging, ultimately, to no one. In undercover work, the whole internal package upends, for you are engaged in deception, and unless by nature you enjoy fooling people, deception takes its sure and dreadful toll.
When I was a stripper, I met women who danced on the stage and prostituted on the side. One of the best of the dancers told me to watch out, don’t fall for the quick money; not because you’d get arrested, abused, addicted, or infected, but because so
mething would happen to you inside. A gradual shade closes over the person you once were. Ten years older than I, Frazier Baldwin was an international mix of compelling beauty, disciplined, talented, and in her own way generous. It wasn’t until later that I realized I had seldom seen Frazier smile, and when she had it was only at her son, not even for me. By accident years later I came across an article about her in a women’s magazine. She was featured as the head of a real estate development corporation. In the accompanying photo, she wore a bright yellow suit with a soft pink, green, and black scarf, and her dark hair was now shoulder length. She was gazing out a skyline-charted window, comfortable, even placid, but without a smile.
As I drove along studying Monty’s rippling shirt and wild hair, I tried to bore into his back and see his heart, and I wondered what my husband these several years dead would have thought of his Smokey girl. Bill Brandon, for all his twenty-eight years, was a wise old soul. Some people seem born to a special vision. You can identify that quirk sometimes on a toddler’s face, that seriousness as they observe a world they know should be on better behavior, juicy fingers stuck in their mouths and hair askew and eyes too big for their faces, but something going on back there about which you almost don’t want to know. If Bill knew what I was doing undercover and out of decent cover for Monty Blackman, what would he say? He’d say, baby, you know what’s right. Do it. And he would have forgiven the missteps because he already knew they were coming; the worst of heartache is surprise. What I felt for Bill was not worship, but respect and a deep physical attraction, which, when you rub them down to their inevitability, we simply call love. And what Bernie Williams and all heroes—the dead cops and the living mothers and the maimed soldiers and even my Bill, who died from some crim’s hepatitis-gifted needle—what all the heroes offer us, is an idea of honor. So that while I was presently and dishonorably befooling a Morris “Monty” Blackman who looked so easily spoiled on a highway and in whose face I had lied repeatedly, maybe it all was, in the final tally, forgivable.