by Rick Riordan
I thought about the papers and lecture notes I'd seen in Aaron Brandon's files — all of them obsessed with the violence of medieval life. I thought of Aaron in the photos I'd seen — a large man, thick-boned, dark-haired, bred from blue-collar stock, a face as dour as his brother's. I tried to think of him as fragile. I said, "When did things become strained between you and Aaron?"
Ines squeezed her palm until it turned mottled. "Christmas — when he went for his final UTSA interview. Aaron insisted on moving back to San Antonio. I hated him for being so stubborn. I hated him for dragging us back to San Antonio. He wasn't ready for the UTSA job or for facing his brother again. But I'd followed him to West Texas. I'd stood by him for five years. I loved him. He was the father of my child and he would've been a good teacher one day. He was learning so much before we came back..."
The winch motor started up again.
I looked at Ines and believed what she said, that this woman had what it took to sustain her husband's career on life support those five years in the Permian Basin, until Aaron had insisted on moving back into his family's orbit, insisted on committing emotional suicide. I found myself growing angry at Aaron
Brandon for that.
And maybe deep down, I was jealous. Maybe part of me was wondering how far I would've gone after graduate school if I'd had someone in my life like Ines Brandon.
Ozzie shouted something. The tow-truck men gave the winch another go. They operated it in short bursts until finally, on try number four, the VW lurched forward. The wreckage of the beast emerged reluctantly out of the muck.
"You were back home in Del Rio the night Aaron was killed?"
Ines nodded. "Michael and I were staying with friends. Paloma called us immediately, but — I still don't remember how I made it back to town safely. I don't remember the drive at all."
"And you'd never heard of Zeta Sanchez before?"
"And never want to again."
"What about justice?"
She slammed her hand against the hood of the police car. The metallic pop was like a hunter's rifle, half a mile distant.
"Justice? Justice is something you get only after your life has gone to hell, Mr. Navarre. It doesn't make anything better. You can criticize me for packing up and running, if you want, but running is the first thing I think of when I wake up in the middle of the night — my son having night terrors down the hall, hiding under a bunch of blankets, crying, calling for his daddy. I just want to run, take Michael, and get the hell away from this place. I want the past to go out with the trash. Do you blame me?"
I watched as the tow truck dragged my upside-down VW onto dry land, the ragtop ripped loose and trailing behind like a mud-stained cape. I found myself thinking about Ana DeLeon in her blue business suit, standing at the window of an abandoned house, looking out over the untended fields of Bexar County.
"Time to pick up the children," Ines said.
For one brief, guilty instant, I let myself fantasize that the words the children had some relevance to my life. Then I turned and trudged back up the slope toward Ines Brandon's car.
THIRTY
The closer Jem and I got to the office, the less Jem spoke. His excitement about the visit to school, his stories about Michael Brandon and the other new friends he'd made started to drain away, replaced by the dread of what was waiting for us back at Erainya's. I had to force myself to turn into the parking lot.
It was Friday, but Kelly was in town anyway, sitting at my desk. She'd washed all the purple dye out of her black hair. Her clothes were black, too — slacks and a tank top and Doc Martens. Her face had the freshly scoured look of recent crying. She was on the phone with some client, telling him there would be a slight delay in our next report.
Jem ran back to his mother's desk and climbed into Erainya's lap. Erainya was also on the phone, talking to the hospital. She looked up and gave me a shake of the head. No change.
Jem put his head on her shoulder and his body went limp.
The toys had been carefully collected off the rug and put to the side in a huge plastic bucket, making the center of the office strangely empty. On George Berton's desk, the Styrofoam hat holder was bald. His paperwork had been removed and added to the stack on my desk.
When Kelly finished her call, she sat staring at the empty space in the middle of the office. Then she looked away, sniffling.
"We're out of Kleenex," she told me. "Wouldn't you know it?"
I reached over and pulled one of George's silk handkerchiefs out of his drawer. "George would probably say, 'You can wipe your nose on my hanky anytime, chiquita.'"
Kelly laughed brokenly, pinched her nose into the handkerchief. "God, I hate this. I hate this."
"I know."
She took my hand, squeezed it hard, tried telling me details, lists of things she'd done since she'd gotten in this morning. She told me about her long phone conversations with Jenny at George's title office, about scrambling to find names of George's kin and coming up with nothing. Friends — hundreds of them. But family? The little information anybody could volunteer was slim and contradictory — an aunt in Monterey, a half-brother in El Paso, a niece in Chicago. Nobody really knew. A dead wife, everybody knew.
I let her talk, only cueing into the words occasionally.
Then the doorbell chimed and Ralph Arguello came in.
In the two years I'd worked at the office, Ralph had come by exactly once, on an evening when he was certain Erainya would be out. Ralph knew how Erainya felt about him and he'd always chosen to respect her feelings. At least until today.
Ralph had forgone the usual XXL Guayabera and jeans for a raw silk suit — milk white, with a black bolo and black ostrich-skin boots. Under the loose cut of his jacket he could've concealed enough weapons to arm his own cult.
His hair was braided into a tight cord. His thick round glasses shimmered as he examined the office — Berton's cleared desk, Erainya and Jem. He zeroed in on Kelly's hand in mine, then after a very long half second seemed to dismiss the sight.
"Vato." He acknowledged me.
He picked off his glasses. This in itself was a rare event, and his naked eyes looked huge and dark, as if the lenses had somehow contained them. Ralph might've been close to legal blindness, but his stare revealed a fierceness you never saw through his glasses — an honest warning of the kind of violence he was capable of.
He held out his arms. Kelly went to him, tried for a stiff, perfunctory hug, but Ralph wouldn't let her pull away. He held her until she melted against him in earnest and started crying.
He looked at me over her shoulder. There was one question in his face, a calm demand that I'd seen before and understood perfectly. When?
Back at her desk, Erainya said a few weary "thank-yous" to the ICU nurse and hung up the phone.
She ruffled Jem's hair, then stared across the room at us. Surprisingly, she did not throw anything at Ralph to drive him from the office. She merely said, "Mr. Arguello."
Ralph nodded, acknowledging the truce. "Ms. Manos. Quepasa?"
"You have to ask?"
He shook his head, then disengaged from Kelly. "And you, mi chica?"
"I'll be okay," Kelly whispered.
He gathered the back of Kelly's hair in his fist — a gesture that would've seemed threatening, proprietary, from anyone else. From Ralph, the gesture was still proprietary, but the tenderness and affection for his niece was unmistakable. He let the glossy black hair fall through his fingers, then nodded at me. "Let's talk."
Erainya said, "Wait."
The silent demand in her eyes was as clear as Ralph's. We will not do anything rash. We will not make things worse.
I nodded assent. "It's okay, Erainya."
She closed her hand around Jem's small fingers, hugging his shoulder tight with the other arm. "Honey, nothing is okay," she told me.
Outside, the afternoon was heating up, the air scented with roasting lamb and pepper from Demo's Greek restaurant next door.
; Ralph said, "Sorry about your car."
"The car is nothing."
He looked at me dubiously. Ralph knew about me and the VW. He'd known me when I'd first gotten it from my mother, my third year of high school. He'd driven in it with me drunk, sober, in danger, on dates. He'd teased me about it mercilessly while he went yearly from luxury car to luxury car and I continued clunking along in my mother's hideous orange hand-me-down. And he knew that the car had been part of who I was.
"Tell me the score," Ralph said.
He listened while I told him of my last few days.
When I was done he took a joint and a lighter from his shirt pocket and lit up. He took a long toke before speaking. "I don't know much about the chiva business, vato. Some things, I got no desire to learn. But I got some ideas where we can find the guy you want."
"Chicharron?"
He nodded.
"And Chich will happily give us a confession?"
"Shit, no, vato. That we take."
The ferocity in his eyes made me shudder.
Through the office window, Kelly and Erainya were standing by my desk now, talking. Jem was making sure all his toys were still there in the bucket.
"I want to keep things legal, Ralphas."
Ralph stared at me.
"I want DeLeon in on what we're doing," I explained. "I don't want to blow her case."
For once, Ralph seemed at a loss for words.
"Ana, huh?" He flicked some ashes toward the pavement.
"You know her," I said.
"Did you ask Ana about that?"
"She said about as much as you are. You object to her coming with us?"
He shrugged. "You want Ana to come along, vato — good luck. You know the rules of association. How you figure she's going to want to spend time around me?"
I tried to read his tone of voice, failed. "You've got no criminal record."
"On the books — no. You figure that matters?"
"I'll tell her we're going to ask around. She wants any control over the process, she'd better come along."
"Should be fun."
"You and DeLeon used to date, or what?"
Ralph took one last hit from his joint, then pinched the end out with his fingers. "How you getting around town these days, vato?"
I pointed to George's red Barracuda.
Ralph put on his glasses, then nodded approval. "Step up. George would appreciate you keeping her company."
"George would shit."
Ralph chuckled. "We meet at the Boots, say four o'clock?"
"I've got classes. Let's make it five-thirty. And you didn't answer my question."
"Tell Kelly good-bye from me, vato. And you understand, you get to hold her hand today only. After that, I got to kill you."
I looked into those Coke-bottle lenses for a few uncomfortable decades before Ralph said, "Kidding, vato. I'm kidding."
The tone of his voice did not comfort me at all.
He went out to his maroon Cadillac, whistling something that sounded oddly like a funeral dirge.
THIRTY-ONE
I was two-for-two at walking into class without lesson plans. I hoped that passing back the essays would make up for it, especially since I'd asked my grad seminar to be ready to discuss three Marie de France lais that I hadn't read in ten years.
Passing back the papers took all of five minutes. Everybody got a B and nobody had any questions. Then I was stuck in front of my eight favorite people with absolutely no clue what to do next.
They'd all come back for more — Sergeant Irwin; Gregory the mail boy; Brian the businessman; Edie and Marfa; the Morticia Addams drag queen; the grunge twins Simon and Blake. None of them had dropped the class. They'd even brought their Marie de France books with them. Shit.
And of course, my department head Professor David Mitchell had come to observe the class. Double shit.
I resorted to that ploy of the desperate — small group work. I broke the class into pairs and had them talk to each other about the lais — to compare Guigemar and Lanval to Bisclavret and look at attitudes toward women in the three stories. Hardly original, but hey.
I circulated from group to group, listening, occasionally asking a question. I hoped that the tightness in my face would be mistaken for keen academic interest rather than weariness and anger and the intense desire to throw up.
Every once in a while I'd sneak a look at Dr. Mitchell in the back of the room. His face was alert, his dress clothes ironed, silver hair neatly combed. Each time he caught my eye he smiled encouragingly, then looked down, frowned, and scribbled something in his notepad.
After milking the group discussion trick for about twenty minutes I got the class back together and acted as scribe for their ideas on the blackboard. I drew bubbles and lines and tried desperately to remember the spelling for misogyny. I am, unfortunately, only a mediocre speller, to the complete glee of everyone who knows I hold a Berkeley Ph.D. in English. I long for a blackboard with a spell checker.
"She's a schemer," Gregory told me. "Woman is a schemer."
I tried to spell schemer. "Why?"
"Jeez — the way the women trick their men. I mean even in Lanval and Guigemar, it's the woman who manipulates. Especially in Bisclavret." Morticia Addams rolled his/her eyes. "Not that damn werewolf story again. You think that chick was wrong? Like, what would you do if you found out your husband ran off into the woods and turned into a wolf every night?"
I was secretly thinking Morticia might find it cool, but I didn't say anything. I waved my chalk invitingly. "Any response to that?"
The businessman's cell phone rang. He muted it and smiled at me apologetically.
Sergeant Irwin sat forward. "I think we've talked about Bisclavret enough. A woman finds out her man's secret, uses that power to destroy him. End of story."
I widened my eyes. "It is?"
Edie looked up from her knitting needles. Her yarn today was powder-blue. "I felt sorry for the wolf."
She looked at Marfa, who nodded sympathetically. "Poor wolf has his clothes stolen, has to stay out in the woods, the faithless wife goes and marries someone else."
I turned and wrote faithless on the board. "Can you relate to her desire for a more... human husband?"
Marfa frowned at her knitting. "I suppose."
"Nothing excuses her betrayal," Sergeant Irwin insisted.
I looked at Professor Mitchell. He was following the conversation, which was perhaps a good sign. Perhaps not. I asked Simon and Blake, "Do you guys feel sorry for the woman at the end?"
Simon grinned. "Oh, man, the nose thing was tight."
I looked at Professor Mitchell. We'd definitely lost him.
I gestured at my class. "Somebody want to recap the nose thing?"
Gregory raised his hand. "The werewolf is saved by the king and kept as a pet. The wife and her new husband come visit the king and Bisclavret recognizes her. He can't talk so he bites her nose off, kills her new husband, leaves her offspring bearing noseless children for the rest of time."
Blake made a fist. "Totally tight."
"The wife reneged on her marriage commitment," the sergeant said. "She was the villain. She got punished, Bisclavret got his humanity back. Happy ending."
"From the wolf's point of view," Morticia said.
Sergeant Irwin shrugged. "You cross a wild animal, you get what you're asking for."
"Anybody else feel sorry for the wife?" I asked.
Apparently nobody did. I steered the conversation back to Lanval and Guigemar, took some more notes on the manipulativeness of women, tried to avoid gagging.
Then, hoping to balance things out, I gave a little lecture on the theory of women as the "fourth estate" — on the woman's voicelessness in medieval society and the ways a woman writer might subtly combat that problem. I got blank looks from Simon and Blake and Brian. A suspicious scowl from Sergeant Irwin. Edie and Marfa didn't take any notes but they did manage to finish knitting two booties.
Fina
lly, mercifully, the period was up. We agreed to continue the discussion on Monday and the class filed out.
Professor Mitchell smiled at me. "Do you have a minute, Tres?"
"Sure."
Actually I had fifteen. Which I desperately needed to use getting ready for the undergrad Chaucer class, but I sat down next to Mitchell.
"That seemed to go well," he said.
"Oh — thanks."
"Getting Brandon's papers back to them quickly was an excellent idea."
"I'm a pretty fast grader. You know — the throw-them-down-the-stairs method."
Mitchell nodded absently. He was drawing little circles on the corner of his notes.
"I was kidding," I added.
He looked up, his focus a hundred miles off. Then he came back to the present and smiled. "Of course."
"Was there something else?"
Professor Mitchell's eyes tightened at the corners. "I heard on the news about Mr. Berton. Is he—"
"He's stable. He's got friends with him around the clock. That's about all we can do for now."
"I'm sorry. It makes it hard for me to say—"
"That the University wants to terminate the investigation?"
Mitchell twirled his pencil. "How would you feel if that were so, Tres?"
"It's understandable. Would Erainya have a few more days to finish up on some loose ends?"
Mitchell let his shoulders relax slightly. "I'll arrange it with the provost."
"Good enough."
Some of the heaviness lifted from his face. He pointed toward my brainstorming on the blackboard. "How is the teaching going so far? How do you feel?"
I wanted to answer like shit, but instead I heard myself say, "I'm enjoying it. It's a change of pace, a way to exercise a different part of myself for a while."