Verdict in the Desert

by Patricia Santos Marcantonio

  Bonita’s whole body jiggled with a “no.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “I think she was too ashamed, Mr. Shaw.”

  “Bonita, did you see what happened on the night that Ben Curry was killed?”

  The big woman shook her head. “Me and my family went to see my cousin. We got home in time to see Ben Curry carried out.”

  Michael put down the tortilla and asked Bonita to testify on María’s behalf at the trial. Chewing her food slowly, Bonita cleaned her hands on her apron. “My husband won’t like it. But I’ll go if you need me. María’s my friend.” The woman stood up, her large eyes ready with tears. “No matter what he did to her, María stayed with him all those years. She even wrote me a letter from jail and asked me to say a rosary for Ben.”

  “A rosary?”

  “So that his soul won’t stay in purgatory and will go to heaven,” Toni said.

  Bonita dried her face with another napkin, gave her approval at the explanation and started rolling more dough. “Eat. I have more.”

  By the time they left Bonita’s house, the sky had melted into orange as it prepared for the night. Michael liked this time of day, when the world seemed in balance. For once.

  “I’ve never felt so welcome in all my life. I think she wanted to adopt me.” He took off his jacket.

  “She was just being hospitable,” Toni said.

  “Well, after three tortillas and butter, I’m glad you talked her out of making us dinner.”

  “It’s a cardinal sin at my house to send anyone home without their stomachs full. My father is the unofficial patron saint of hospitality. Anyone who visits us is served a meal as fast as he can cook, even if it only amounts to potatoes and hamburger meat in a tortilla. When my mother was alive, she poured coffee while my father served up the food.”

  “In my house, you’d get a cup of coffee and a Fig Newton, if you’re lucky.”

  “Do all lawyers make so many jokes?”

  “I’m just trying to impress you. Is it working?”

  “I’ll let you know.” Her eyes darkened, however, as she glanced at María’s house. “I keep thinking about what must have happened that night.” She lit a cigarette and offered him one. He declined.

  “I’ve gotta go in and check out the place. I’ll drive you home.”

  “I’ll go in with you.”

  “It’ll probably be pretty bad in there, Toni.”

  “I can handle it. I hope so, anyway.”

  Crushing out her cigarette, Toni followed him in and at once wished she had stayed outside. “Madre de Dios.” She couldn’t keep her attention away from the large, jagged bloodstain on the kitchen floor. A sin to behold, but also enticing. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Her pretty face hardened at the chaos—the tossed around furniture, smashed glass, the smell of rotting food from the kitchen and the bloodstains scattered on the floor and wall. Michael felt like he had slain something priceless in Toni, which grieved him.

  A framed photo of María and Ben, both smiling on a beach, was smashed on the floor.

  “María’s really in trouble, isn’t she?” Toni asked.

  “Want me to lie to you?”

  Toni shook her head, picked up the photograph and placed it on the television set. On a shelf near the kitchen were several of Ben’s intricate matchstick creations: a cabin, a ship, a skyscraper and a fine castle with turrets and tiny red flags flying. She imagined Ben patiently building at the kitchen table while María crocheted. The happy couple. Toni held up the castle. “How could a man who made something so beautiful hurt a woman?”

  “Life’s not that damn black or white. Even the worst killer loves his mom, and the victims aren’t as innocent as they claim. That’s the biggest lesson I learned when I prosecuted criminals.” Taking the castle from her, Michael placed it back on the shelf.

  “You’re talking about María, too. As small and as scared as she was, she grabbed that knife.” The blood on the floor completed the sentence.

  “Ever seen the ocotillo, Toni?”

  “What?”

  “The ocotillo. A desert plant. It can grow taller than a man, with striking red blossoms, like the top of the plant is on fire. But its stems are covered with thorns.”

  “The good and evil, the beautiful and the thorny. You sound more philosopher than lawyer.”

  “Lawyers make more money. Let’s get some air.”

  They sat on the wooden steps of María’s house. Clouds slipped over the moon as the peach sky melted to purple and then black. From there, they could see Bonita’s house with its windows open and hear lots of friendly voices from within.

  Michael cocked his head. Across the street from María’s house lived the woman on the top of the prosecution’s witness list, in fact, the star witness. A hand parted the curtain, and a slice of face appeared.

  “Who’s watching?” Toni puffed on a cigarette.

  “Lorna Dean Richards. She called the police that night. She called every time María and Ben had a fight.”

  “She’s probably dialing the cops right now, reporting two very suspicious characters at a crime scene.” But Michael didn’t smile as she had hoped.

  He motioned his head toward the house. “Sorry you had to see that, Toni.”

  “It made me think about my parents. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Did they fight?”

  “The only time they ever argued was while they were cooking. My dad complained my mom put too much salt in the food. Their tempers grew hot and died down as quickly. Mostly, I can only remember love between them.” Her cigarette glowed as she took a drag. “That love was so strong I can still feel it sometimes even though my mother is gone.” She had told this man more than she intended. His face held no betrayal but something else she hadn’t expected. “Why are you smiling?”

  “I can’t ever remember when my parents didn’t fight. Nothing so messy. No fists or flying furniture or blood like we saw inside. But simple, plain, solid hatred, hard and tall as the Great Wall of China.”

  “Lo siento.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “‘I’m sorry.’ It sounds nicer in Spanish.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “It’s getting late.”

  Standing up, he held out his hand to help Toni up from the porch step. “Thanks for today, Toni. You did a good job.”

  She took his hand. “So did you.”

  Through the front window of her house, Lorna Dean Richards drank coffee and watched the man and woman drive off in a fancy car. She did call the police to report two suspicious people going through the Curry home but was told that the defense attorney had permission to be there.

  She closed the curtain. She was more than ready to tell her story in court about what had happened the night Ben Curry was murdered. More than that, she enjoyed the peace.

  12

  MOST OF THE MEXICAN MEN who worked the open hearth furnace at Arizona Steel & Iron called it la boca del infierno. The mouth of hell. After all, demon sparks made the air taste silvery and bitter, and the molten metal flowed out of giant buckets like devil’s blood. The machinery hissed their names in that black and charred place. If they tripped and fell into the melted steel from the furnace, they’d bypass purgatory altogether and land right in the fires of torment. To most of the men who worked there, hell couldn’t be as bad as a double shift.

  But Francisco García never tired of watching the fountains of molten metal. He admired this world with its veins of hot steel and a mechanical heart that throbbed. Glowing and fatal, the liquid iron reached a temperature of almost three thousand degrees as it was poured into the cars, sending off golden butterflies of sparks. The cars carried their loads to the rolling mill, where the metal was cast into strong steel bones. His own bones rasped and protested so much now that he took power from the ones he helped create.

  He had come to prefer this hellish world and its belly of seething iron over t
hat of the outdoors. Under the sunniest of skies, he had been forced to pee on the side of fields and live in filthy labor camps with holes in the walls. He had had to put up with farmers who paid shit for his efforts and looked at him as if he would rape their women.

  As a boy, his first memory was of sugar beets. The large, leafy plant opened like a bouquet stuck in the ground. While his mama weeded, he played off to the side of the field with his most valuable possessions, three tiny rusted cars he had found. He made elaborate roads and towns, using sticks for stop signs. He spit in the dirt and built mud houses. Wearing a man’s shirt and straw hat, his mama frequently glanced at him, putting her hand to her eyes to shield the sun. When she spotted him, she would wave. He swore she had a halo of gold around her head, like the saints in the little book they would look through at night under the light of the kerosene lamp. Making sure he was safe, she would return to work chopping weeds for hours with a short-handled hoe.

  In a clearing between two fields in southern Idaho stood a gathering of shacks and a rundown shower house with two stalls to accommodate the hundred or so farmworkers. There were stinky outhouses and a tiny store owned by the farmer, who gladly took back the money he had paid the workers. The place had been called Ramona, after the farmer’s only child.

  After work, his mother cooked a dinner of beans and chicken in their shack, where Francisco could see through cracks in the walls. Outside, other camp residents sang and talked around fires in metal barrels. His mother was slender, and Francisco wondered how she ever had the strength to labor beside the men all day, weeding the beets. Her newly washed black hair hung past her waist, but her eyes seemed far away, as if on the journey ahead of them. A trip to the next field, the next crop. His father had left before he was born, and when he grew up, he never forgave the man for abandoning them. She had no photos of his father, only saying his name was Carlos and that he had come from Sonora, Mexico.

  One night, his mama kissed him as she always did and made the sign of the cross on his forehead. He heard her whisper prayers, and then he fell asleep beside her on the squeaky old bed. Her body was feverish, as if she carried the sun inside her.

  She did not wake.

  “Mamá, get up!” Francisco screamed the next morning.

  When she wouldn’t stir, he ran into the labor camp and shouted for help. He cried as the other workers shook their heads and covered her with a threadbare blanket. Finally, they had to pry his hands away from her so she could be buried in a small cemetery outside of the nearest town. With no money available for a proper marker, someone fashioned a cross from two metal bars and scratched her name on them: ISIDRA GARCÍA.

  Francisco was eight. He was sent by the state to live with his mother’s brother in San Antonio, Texas. His uncle’s family also followed the crops, and the next year Francisco joined them in the fields, bending over plants, eating on wooden pallets and trying to find a place to pee behind trees or bushes. He had given up on any schooling because the family traveled so much. His only regret was not learning to read, but his Aunt Mila and Uncle Edgar taught him to take pride in whatever he did, even in the lowest of jobs. On his nineteenth birthday, Francisco heard a man in a bar talk about a new steel mill in Arizona that paid decent wages—even to Mexican people. The mill did not care if you had an education, only a strong back, the man said. Francisco knew he had to take the chance for a good job, one where he could stay put, plant his own roots and build a better life.

  Before he left, he received a blessing from his Aunt Mila and five dollars from his uncle, along with a book about Emiliano Zapata that had many photographs. He stole a ride on the railroad and hitchhiked until he landed in Borden. At first sight of the mill, he felt its might. In the office, a scrawny white man gave Francisco a friendly smile and helped him fill out his application because he didn’t read. Francisco was grateful because the man gave him respect and even spoke Spanish, although it was the fancy kind with the lisps. Thanking God for his fortune, he was hired and started work the next day. With his first paycheck, he began saving for a house, all the while living in a tiny boardinghouse with ten other workers. His new job was among the fires and metal instead of the sun and earth, but it provided a way to mold his life as he wanted, like the steel he was molding into wire or bars.

  After Francisco married Maricela, it took three years to save for a headstone for his mother. He and his young family traveled to Idaho, and he cried at her grave. For years following his mother’s death, he dreamed of her standing in the fields, wearing the white dress they had buried her in. In his dreams, her straw hat shone like the full moon. Her hair moved in the breeze until she faded away and became the wind kissing his face.

  In the flash of the steel fire, Francisco glanced at his watch and wondered how long he had stood in the middle of the cavernous building over the open hearth. His memories came to him more often now than in his younger days. You will soon be part of memory, of the past, he told himself as he glanced again at his watch.

  Once inside the locker room, Francisco slowed. The inside of his chest blazed hot as the furnace. He stumbled into the bathroom and leaned against the wall, yielding to the burning. Recognizing and giving in to its command over him became the only way to force air back in his tortured lungs. He waited and breathed what air he could manage. Sweat soaked his shirt. At last, the pain let go, like a fighter who was tired of walloping an opponent. He straightened up and wiped the sweat from his eyes with his handkerchief.

  If he had stayed tending to the crops in the fields, he might have been crippled from years of stoop labor. He could have been poisoned by a crop doused with bug killer, lost his arms in a harvest machine or been buried under sacks of seed or grain. All that, and he would still have had to pee on the side of canals, live in shacks with holes and wash in rusted water in farm labor camps. The ache in his lungs amounted to small cost for the good living and the dignity he had found in a place as dark and hot as hell.

  Toni held onto the chain-link fence while she waited for her father to come up the stairs from the tunnel connecting the mill to the outside world. The mill smokestacks jutted into the sky from the gigantic black buildings that resembled stranded arks. When she and Carmen were kids, they begged their mom to let them run the few blocks to the mill entrance to meet their father. During an extra shift, the mill supplied him a meal—usually a tired ham and cheese sandwich, chips, an apple and cookie. She and Carmen fought over the food, mostly the cookie, pawing through the gray box.

  “Where’s our lunch, Daddy?” Carmen would ask when he emerged from the tunnel.

  Often, they found nothing but waxed paper.

  “I got hungry and ate it all,” he said at those times.

  “That’s okay,” Toni would say.

  She would put her hand in his, and they all would walk home. The mill reminded her of a palace where an evil duke lived with his dragon, similar to those in the storybooks she read in the school library. Hills of coal that fed the great fires were like bumps on a dragon’s back. She often glanced back to make sure the dragon didn’t follow them home. As a grown woman she was not fully convinced there was no monster and vaguely anticipated the pulse of scaly wings flying out from the mill.

  She gripped the fence more tightly, watched for her father and waited to apologize. That morning they had argued. She had called him stubborn as a mule for not going to a doctor. Before he went to work, the persistent cough again took hold of his body until his eyes reddened with tears and he gasped for air.

  “It’s only a cold. Don’t be a nag,” he said once he could talk again. His voice became so intense, it left no room for argument.

  She had learned not to quarrel when he sounded like that, and he sounded like that whenever she brought up the cough. She could get nothing more out of Carmen, no matter how much she begged or bullied.

  When Toni had arrived home from Phoenix for good, she was glad she wore sunglasses so her father could not see the immediate worry in her eyes when she
noticed how he had aged. On her previous visits home for holidays, she rationalized away his appearance to hard days at the steel mill. Now his thin, grayish hair had changed to white, and his dark skin had soured to sallowness. More and more, his pace slowed, as if he lugged the whole of the mill on a chain around his ankles. The first time she had heard that cough, she felt her own lungs ablaze. With each visit home, the spells grew more frequent and violent. Life had once again proved that it did not always cooperate with happy expectations. So she packed her car and left Phoenix to be with her father. She told him and Carmen she was moving back because she had missed them. Not a total lie, because she did. However, returning to Borden meant giving up a teaching job and self-reliance. Starting over. But her father was worth all she could give.

  “Toni, you’re daydreaming again.”

  “What? Oh, hi, Jesús.”

  Jesús Torres carried his black metal lunch pail under his arm. His unbuttoned shirt revealed a sculpted chest. Unlike her father, who disliked using the mill showers, Jesús wore clean clothes. Ready-to-go-out clothes. And Jesús did like to go out, which was one of the reasons they broke up while in high school.

  “I heard you were back in town. Did you miss me?”

  “No.” She smiled. “How long have you worked at the mill?”

  He put down his pail and ran a comb through his hair, still wet from the shower. “About four years. My dad got me in. He’s a foreman now. Hell, it’s all right money. I even bought a house.”

  “That’s great, Jesús. You should be proud.”

  “So you’re a teacher?”

  “I got the degree. No job yet.”

  “Didn’t hire you at the school, huh?” He grinned.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re back. You’re still a knockout. Maybe I’ll call you. You know, like old times.”

  “We broke up, remember?”

  Jesús playfully slapped his head and laughed. “I forgot about that.”

  “I didn’t. I busted you making out in your old truck with Emilia Montez when we were supposed to be going steady.”