In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  “Mother of God,” Alvarez said and crossed himself.

  “Not hardly,” Reader said, and he walked after the girl, just as she pushed through the double-doors and into the sunlight.

  The girl wandered out of the alley alongside the hospital and onto the sidewalk. Afternoon traffic in the street slowed as people gawked from their cars. Reader and Alvarez kept about fifty paces in back of her. She followed the sidewalk toward a wooden bench decorated with an advertisement for a local pawn shop. An elderly woman in a black dress and a little boy in shorts sat on the bench. The boy was eating an ice cream cone.

  “You saw her,” Alvarez was saying. “She was dead.”

  “I saw her,” Reader said. “I see her.”

  “I should call somebody,” Alvarez said. “Who should I call?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Reader said.

  The little boy eating the ice cream cone looked up and saw the naked, twisted lady. The old woman, the boy’s grandmother, looked up, too, and she immediately put her hand to the rosary around her throat and spoke words in Spanish.

  The boy sat staring, his ice cream melting around his hand.

  The dead girl went slowly toward him.

  “Y’all get away from there,” Reader called out.

  The old lady took the boy’s hand and pulled him away.

  His ice cream cone dropped to the sidewalk.

  The dead girl ceased walking and stood with one foot in the broken cone. She swayed as if buffeted by a strong current in a river, and her fingers opened and closed at her sides. Opened and closed.

  “Miss?” Alvarez called out.

  Slowly, she turned.

  Reader was close enough to hear the bones shifting in her hips, a dry grating like the turning of unoiled gears. Her gray skin, he saw, was now blistering in the sun. Big boils welled up like sugar concentrating in a pan. The skin beneath was black when they popped. Her expression was slack, her jaw out of socket and angled oddly. Her one good eye a solid marble of blood.

  Reader put a hand on his pistol.

  The girl landed her slow, mutant gaze on Alvarez, who took a step toward her. Then another.

  “Doc, I wouldn’t do that.”

  Alvarez paid no mind.

  “Doc, stop.”

  He did, but he was now only an arm’s length away from the girl. The medical examiner’s mouth opened and closed in the manner of a man who wanted to say something, perhaps to comfort, perhaps to reassure. The girl’s charred, hairless head turned in a series of staccato movements, her eye wide and the flesh of her cheeks black and paper-thin, her arms and chest and breasts searing in the sun. Alvarez reached out. The girl’s entire head rolled to his hand, the flesh of his wrist just visible beyond the cuff of his white lab coat. Her hands came up to his and she took Alvarez’s proffered hand and turned it in her own, like a slow and stupid child inspecting a toy.

  “Doc,” Reader said. He took a single step toward the medical examiner.

  The dead girl moved, fast. Her hands flew to the medical examiner’s eyes. Her thumbs went beneath his glasses and sank up to the joints in his sockets. Alvarez screamed. Reader ran at the girl and pushed her back. He heard her fingers slip wetly from Alvarez’s eyes. She staggered toward the bus bench. There she regained her footing, and she began to lick the blood from her fingers. Her tongue lolling from her open, cracked mouth. Reader took out his pistol, and the girl came at him, impossibly quick. Reader struck her across the face with the sandalwood butt of his forty-five. He hit her three, four times. Her jaw cracked even wider, nearly unhinged now.

  Alvarez staggered onto the grass beneath a crape myrtle, where he dropped to his knees.

  The dead girl came at Reader a third time, and now he spun his pistol in his right hand so that the barrel pressed into the girl’s gut. The barrel sank into the flesh.

  He fired once.

  The blast was huge and strange and unreal, a thunder-crack on a sunny day.

  The girl flew backward onto the sidewalk and lay still, all about her the stink of dead flesh burning. The blood that fanned the concrete beneath her sizzled and blackened.

  Patients from the hospital stood in a loose circle at the edge of the parking lot, in the shade of the crape myrtles. One of them, a skinny old man with three-day stubble and a poorly cinched robe, craned his neck and said, “Holy fucking shit.” A woman in sweatpants turned and ran for the emergency room entrance. She began to scream for help.

  Reader held up a hand to the crowd and moved to where Alvarez was on his knees at the edge of the sidewalk. “Stay back.”

  The crowd of onlookers made no move to disobey.

  The medical examiner’s eyes were jelly upon his face.

  Someone in the crowd beneath the trees gave out a gasp.

  The girl had begun to move again. She was trying to roll onto her back like a beetle righting itself, rocking left, right, left right. Reader got up from the grass and put his boot on the girl’s shoulder and pushed her down. He stepped on her neck and put the barrel of his gun square above her left breast and pulled the trigger.

  The onlookers cried out and whirled away.

  One man hugged a woman, and another turned and vomited upon the asphalt.

  The girl did not move again.

  Reader wiped the blood that had spattered his cheek and looked at it on his finger.

  “God damn,” he said.

  Twilight came and by then the fireworks Calhoun had brought were almost all shot, save a gross of bottle rockets. The smell of sulphur lingered as Annabelle went about tossing paper plates in a garbage bag. The air above the pool was blue with smoke. Two boys from the Little House of God stood in the motel parking lot, drawing loops of light with a sparkler. Sandy sat in an aluminum lawn chair in his swim trunks, kicking his feet, drinking a root beer from the bottle, a litter of presents and spent wrapping paper on the concrete around him. Diego wore shorts and flip-flops and no shirt and strummed the guitar he had brought from home. His wife sat next to him at a concrete patio table beneath an umbrella. Annabelle watched them from the corner of her eye as she cleaned. Rosendo wore a bright pink dress and sandals and a red silk hibiscus blossom behind her ear. She sat with her back to the table, her swollen belly forward, one hand across it, the other twined in Diego’s hair. Calhoun went about with a beer in hand, kicking a few party balloons into the pool, where they floated atop the water, dark shapes among the Christmas lights and the motel sign’s neon piping, all reflected in the surface along with the day’s fading sky.

  Annabelle kept an eye on Sandy, who kept an eye on Calhoun as he circled the pool.

  Does he know? she wondered. Can a boy sense a thing like that?

  Calhoun had brought the fireworks stuffed into an old leather cowboy boot wrapped in cellophane: bottle rockets, Black Cats, Flaming Snakes, Whistle Chasers, Roman candles, smoke bombs, parachuting soldiers—his present to Sandy. Earlier, Annabelle had put her hands on Sandy’s shoulders and stood him before Calhoun and said, “You remember Mr. Calhoun, don’t you, Sandy?”

  Calhoun’s eyes traveled from the boy to Annabelle and back to the boy. He bent forward and offered one hand to Sandy. “Sandman,” he said solemnly.

  Sandy stared at Calhoun long enough for Annabelle to grow uneasy, but then he shook Calhoun’s hand, and Calhoun said, “That’s the way to do it.”

  “Are those for me?” Sandy asked, pointing at the fireworks.

  “If your mom says it’s okay.”

  Annabelle gave the nod.

  The boys from the Little House of God were dropped at the party by their grandmother. They were brothers, Alfred and Malcolm. The younger of the two, Alfred, was a nose-picker and a tattle. After cake and presents, the boy had run to Annabelle where she sat on the concrete lip of the pool with Calhoun, their jeans rolled up to their knees, calves and feet dangling in the cool blue water. “Sandy isn’t sharing the fireworks,” the boy had said. The older brother, Malcolm, was husky and his eyes were sharp and
cool and set close to the bridge of his nose. After the boys had been swimming for a while, it was Malcolm who stood in the shallow end and amused himself by holding the younger boys under until they squealed and shoved away.

  Later, of course, Annabelle would blame herself. She should have known better, she would think, inviting strange boys to Sandy’s party, boys he had never played with, boys who were older. But they were boys from the church, and she had thought a birthday party without children, with only adults, would have been cold and sad. After all, Sandy was only turning eleven. Later, she would hear her mother’s voice, what had always been the old woman’s threadbare attempt at comfort: Well, you tried. Didn’t you.

  Malcolm and Alfred had opened the last of the bottle rockets and were launching one and two at a time from the now-blackened leather boot, which Calhoun had explained should double as a cannon. They hunkered with a lit punk at the edge of the parking lot where the gravel met the grass, just beyond the chain link surrounding the pool. The rockets went up with a sound like air being unzipped and exploded some fifty feet above the pool.

  “Where the hell is their grandmother?” Annabelle said to Calhoun.

  “Those two are getting more out of the fireworks than Sandy is, that’s for sure,” Calhoun said.

  “He liked them,” she said, stacking three paper plates and tossing them in the bag. “It was a good present.”

  Another report, sharp like a rifle crack.

  Next came a shriek of laughter and Alfred’s nasal voice screeching, “Come see! Come see! Malcolm did it!”

  The two brothers were at the edge of the parking lot, near the brown grass of the ditch along the highway. Alfred was jumping up and down and turning in circles. Malcolm did not move, only stood staring at something in the grass.

  Sandy sat up straight in his chair and looked from Alfred to his mother, then to where Malcolm leaned over, hands on his thighs, inspecting.

  Oh no, Annabelle thought.

  “What is it?” Calhoun said.

  Sandy moved first, quickly.

  Diego set his guitar aside and helped Rosendo to her feet.

  They all gathered round and saw, by the light of Alfred’s sparklers, that Malcolm had killed a box turtle by inserting a bottle rocket, fuse out, into the turtle’s shell. He had slid the firecracker into the soft crevice between the head and shoulder and lit the fuse. The explosion had turned the turtle’s neck and head inside out like the sleeve of a coat. Its legs, they saw, were still attempting to move the body, cogs of flight still spinning in its nerves, some last lick of sense urging nothing at all to make for the grass of the ditch, the asphalt beyond. There were bright spots of yellow pigment on its feet.

  Annabelle put one hand over her mouth.

  “Shit,” Calhoun said.

  Sandy bent down and touched the carapace. He said nothing. Made no sounds. Just hunkered by the turtle and ran his fingers over the rough, dimpled surface of the shell.

  Diego put his arm around his wife.

  Calhoun made fists.

  “Give me those,” Annabelle said.

  Malcolm, transfixed by the thing he had done, did not seem to hear.

  Annabelle grabbed his wrist and squeezed, and the boy cried out and dropped the last of the bottle rockets. She snatched them, moved at an angry clip to the pool, and without hesitating, threw the bottle rockets into it. There they floated among the balloons. She stared at this until the night made it too dark to see the surface of the water, until she felt Calhoun’s hand on her shoulder. She slipped his touch and went back to cleaning up paper and plastic and wrapping paper, shoving it all into black plastic trash bags, which she would throw into the dumpster by the motel office.

  After everyone had gone and the lights were unplugged, Annabelle came down from the house and found Calhoun inside the cafe, bent over the guts of the Select-O-Matic. He had removed the carriage mechanism and set it on a tabletop. The jukebox stood open behind him like a patient anesthetized, a soft blue light glowing inside. Calhoun held a penlight between his teeth as he worked, moving a piece of newsprint back and forth between contact points. Annabelle turned on a light in the kitchen and made coffee and brought out two cups and sat at the table facing Calhoun, her back to the wall. They sat together in a slant of light that framed them and the box neatly. Calhoun worked his way around all the points on the machine as they spoke.

  “Boy asleep?” he asked.

  “Fast,” Annabelle said. She was staring off into the shadows of the garage, the silhouettes of upturned chairs upon their tables.

  “You’re tired,” he said.

  “Weary,” she said. “Big difference.”

  “Like the difference between the cloudburst and the rain that settles in to stay,” he said.

  “Like the night we met,” Annabelle said.

  “I was the cloudburst,” he said.

  She smiled. Remembered something else: sitting in the cab of Calhoun’s pickup in the parking lot of the Saguero Arms in Tyson, one county over, a child in her belly. Through the windshield she could see the Saguero’s pink stucco and blue neon and an old Comanche sitting in a metal rocking chair, the Indian smoking a cigar and wearing a thin pair of chinos, sandals, a sleeveless undershirt, the shirt threadbare and stained, and Calhoun saying, “He thinks it’s his?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He does.” And thinking: I am cursed. Cursed to watch men set up camp in the valley of my heart. To pitch their tents and build their homes—

  “I could tell him, you know,” Calhoun said. “He comes in the bar, four nights a week. I could tell him myself—”

  “I’ll never speak to you again.”

  She had really said that, she thought now. Had she meant it?

  “Shouldn’t have brought those fireworks,” he was saying. “Boys horsing around. Stupid meanness—”

  “Billy,” she said.

  He glanced her way, then back to the jukebox.

  “Billy,” she said again.

  He stopped working.

  “You were the rain,” she said.

  Calhoun looked at her in the slanting shadow and light of the cafe and said nothing. He gave her a smile, small and sad, and this was the smile she had fallen in love with all those years ago, though she had never thought of it this way until now. He went back to work on the Select-O-Matic. “I had a nephew once about Sandy’s age, caught the wrong end of a Roman candle in the face. Always the end of it with fireworks.”

  “You deserve to be his father,” Annabelle said.

  Calhoun smiled to himself this time, the private smile of a man satisfied with the work he has done, and settled the heavy carriage apparatus back into the box. He tightened the screws and reconnected wires and stood back from the job to shine his penlight in Annabelle’s direction, spotlighting her where she sat, and said, “You’re a hell of a woman, Annabelle.”

  “And you’re a good man, Billy Calhoun, and there’s nothing wrong with you, and I should have seen it. All this time.” She leaned toward him and wiped away a smudge of something black from his cheek. “I see it now.”

  “I always thought it was because I was old.”

  “Old and handsome.”

  “Are you flirting with me, Miss Gaskin?”

  “Is it fixed?”

  “Cleaned and connected. This little magnetic piece, kept the records from—”

  “Got a quarter?” she asked.

  Calhoun smiled and reached into his shirt pocket and took out a single coin, as if it had always been there, waiting. She thought maybe it had. She dropped the coin and made her selection. She turned and faced him as the box began to play.

  “Should have known,” he said, “you’d pick Tammy.”

  The woman in the box began to sing.

  “You gonna get up out of that chair and dance with me, Billy Calhoun?” she said, already moving.

  He was. He did.

  Reader stayed that night in Tyson at a little motel called the Saguero Arms. He spent much o
f the evening telling his story to the Crockett County Sheriff and a detective from the state police. The sheriff was a silver-mustached man in a cowboy hat and a loosely knotted tie, and his eyes were heavy but bright, like the eyes of an old owl. “This makes no sense under God’s heaven, ranger,” the sheriff said, and Reader said, “In that, sir, we are in perfect agreement.”

  Reader got his overnight bag and his briefcase from the helicopter where, earlier that day, he had landed the Bell in a little grass field. In a nearby enclosure, a herd of camels grazed. Reader had stood watching them for a while, some rancher’s idea of a bygone West.

  The sheriff, who had offered Reader a ride to the motel, came up and stood beside him and said, “There is no comfort to be had in any truth here. I hope you’ll remember that when you write your reports.”

  Reader stood in the motel’s parking lot and watched the cruiser pull away. He thought of the sheriff in Cole County, the lies he told serving only himself.

  This was not the same, was it.

  It was not.

  He saw a little coffee shop next door and went there to do his paperwork while it was fresh in his mind, but each time he tried to put pencil to form he found that all language and coherent thought fled. A kind waitress, sensing his edge, offered him a second round of pie and coffee on the house. He accepted. An hour later, supplemental narrative still blank, he walked back to his adobe bungalow with the window-unit AC on full blast. Across the street was a liquor store, and he stood outside his door for a while, looking at it, thinking, then turned away and went inside and took up the rotary phone and dialed the hospital to check on the medical examiner’s condition.

  “Airlifted to El Paso,” came the nurse’s report at the desk. “Wasn’t that the damnedest, most horrible thing?”

  “It was,” Reader said.

  “PCP,” the nurse said. “I saw that special on 60 Minutes. Make you tear your own eyes right out of your head.”