“It’s a safety issue, ma’am. Nobody should be hunting with a weapon in this condition.”
“Will it work?”
“Yes, but not well, and it could—”
“Just give me the bullets for it, please, honey. I have things to do.”
He stared at her a moment. He glanced at the loose flesh of her bare arms, his eyes passing quickly over her sagging breasts that had once commanded such attention, this rising feeling that there was so little to lose now, really, and hurry up. Just hurry the hell up.
He began reading something etched into the side of one of the barrels. “Twelve-gauge, two-and-three-quarter-inch.” He looked down at her. “And you don’t know what he’s hunting?”
“I told you, hogs.”
“Double-aughts should do it.” He leaned back into her VW and set Don’s gun on the seat. Lois reached into her purse and pulled out her credit card and a ten-dollar bill.
“Would you mind bringing them to me? I don’t feel so good.”
“Not a problem.” He plucked the card from between her fingers. “Can I interest you in a cleaning kit, too?”
Lois shook her head. “Take the cash, honey. It’s for you.”
“I’m afraid I can’t accept gratuities, ma’am. I’ll be right back.”
She was about to call to him to take her Advil and ring that up too, but he was already walking fast to the automatic doors of the entrance, and it wasn’t like she’d meant to steal them anyway. Maybe later she’d pay for them. Maybe then.
She sat heavily back behind the wheel and started the engine and opened all the windows. She’d been cold only moments ago, but now she was hot and she put the AC on low and pointed one of the vents at her face. She wanted that water she’d left near the cans of WD-40, and she wanted that Clay Moore to get out here soon, for she could feel herself beginning to lose something she needed in order to do what had to be done. It was that damn bottle of water, and it was this damn Advil, the feeling she was breaking the law when all she’d ever done her whole life was follow the rules that other people felt free to break, but not her, not Lois Dubie. And now this shotgun lay across her backseat like some massive pen for a contract she wasn’t sure she wanted to sign, not with her name or with her hand, though when Clay Moore walked back across the lot, his khaki pants loose around his skinny legs, her credit card in one hand and a white plastic bag hanging from the other, she noticed that she signed her slip and took her card and bag with a smile and a gratitude that came not from the last twenty minutes, but from the last twenty-three years of not being able to do the one thing that should’ve been done. And now she was moving, dropping that heavy bag beside her purse and pulling out of the lot, a lone gull gliding low in front of her, flapping its wings once before dipping over the bridge railing and out of sight.
46
AT A Starbucks just off Gulf Boulevard, Susan sat at the window and called Noni’s shop, the phone beginning to ring in her ear. Outside on the patio a young couple sat at a small round table, and they were the age of her students, both of them in shorts and flip-flops, the girl laughing at something the boy just said. Lois’s business phone rang and rang, then the answering machine picked up and Marianne’s warm recorded voice informed whoever was calling that the store was open from eleven a.m. to seven p.m. Susan hung up and called Noni’s house. But there was no answer there, either, and Susan could see her grandmother squinting at the caller ID on the kitchen phone and letting it ring. Susan was tempted to call Noni’s flip phone again, too, but it was probably turned off and buried in Lois’s purse anyway. Susan glanced at her laptop clock. She had an hour and a half before the shop opened, and she would call then. She could smell coffee and cinnamon, and she thought she might be able to eat something, maybe a scone.
She opened her file.
“He was a big ugly prick and he knew it and your poor mother couldn’t take a breath without him okaying it first.”
She tapped herself three of four lines down into the screen’s bright blankness. Latin music was playing—an accordion and horns and drums that made her think of South America, then Mexico, then Gustavo. She began to see her and Gustavo lying together on his bed.
Gustavo couldn’t read, and so I would read to him. His rented room was on the first floor, and he would pull out the window screen then help me climb in. After we made love, we smoked cigarettes and I’d lie back on his shoulder and read to him from whatever I was reading. Jane Eyre, I think, though it could have been Wuthering Heights. No, it was Jane Eyre because at the start of the novel Gustavo kept asking why Jane was sent to the Red Room.
“Because her aunt is mean.”
“Like your abuela.”
She could hear the smile in his voice but his sincerity too. A month or so earlier Gustavo had asked her why she lived with her grandmother and not her mother and father, and Susan Lori had told him her dark little fairy tale of loss and privation she still believed then, her parents’ car sinking to the bottom of that cold, fast-moving water. Gustavo leaned over and kissed her forehead and eyebrows three times. He told her he loved her. And Susan Lori felt she’d opened a door she should not have just so she could hear those three words. He said he did not know that books had real lives in them, and he liked how this story of this girl so far away so long ago made him think of when he was a boy.
It was the first time I’d ever felt what it was like to give someone something useful. Those afternoons reading to Gustavo, I felt what a holy person must feel, that I was in possession of something deeply private and sustaining but available to anyone, and even though I had to stop often and explain words and English phrases to him, it was like I could feel I had this power and I was giving it to him so he could have it too.
Dear Stranger,
Susan Lori loved Gustavo most because he led her to what she could do, though it would be years before she would do it, and then he was gone.
No note. No phone call.
Just his unrelenting absence.
Susan stared at that line. She glanced out the window. Her fingers began to move again.
Afternoons, he would pick her up at the high school. He worked the second shift at the citrus plant and he’d pull up in his El Camino and they’d have just under an hour before he had to punch in. Usually she’d be hungry and he’d drive her through the Taco Bell drive-through for a burrito and a Coke. Or they’d get coffee somewhere. Sometimes, if they really needed it, he’d drive her to his place on Pinellas, his landlords at work in the fields or whatever it was they did, and Susan and Gustavo would make love so fast she only had time to take off her jeans and underwear. His walls were bare. His small dresser had nothing on it but a plastic Virgin Mary and a carton of cigarettes. She was on the pill then, Lois had made sure of that. That doctor in Punta Gorda had written Susan a prescription after asking her only two questions.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Are you sexually active?”
“What do you think?”
He waited, his gray eyes on her over the rim of his glasses. He was looking at her like she was an imposition on his entire day, and she had about one more second before he moved on to more important things.
“Yes.”
Right after Gustavo came, always inside her, he’d tell her he loved her in English and in Spanish. And she said those three words back. She said them back because she believed them when she said them, because on those nights and Sunday afternoons when he did not have to go to work, the smell of orange pulp coming from his clothes and hair and skin, he asked her to read to him from books she loved, and it was like she was letting him into parts of her that were far more personal than what was between her legs. She began to think of what would come next for them, that they would get their own place or she could move in with him, live with him in that small room in the back of that one-story house on Pinellas. Or they could move far away together.
And when he dropped me off at the county road hours l
ater, even on those nights when I knew Lois would start screaming at me, I felt good inside and out. Not dirty. Not ashamed. Not like a misfit. But like someone with a higher calling that could only come to fruition if it was shared.
Then it was a Monday afternoon in April, and Susan Lori stood in the high school parking lot waiting. The buses had gone. The kids with cars had all driven off. She stood in the quarter shade of the palm tree on a strip of dirt between the teachers’ parking lot and where the students parked. Her math teacher, Mrs. Schmidt, walked out into the sun for her car. She had her purse over her shoulder and her briefcase in her hand, and she was fiddling with her car keys and squinting at Susan leaning against the palm. Sweating there. Thirsty. Ready to leave.
“Do you need a lift?”
Susan thanked her and told her no. “My boyfriend’s coming.” She had never referred to him that way, even to herself, and she liked those words coming out of her.
“Well, wait inside, honey. You’ll get heatstroke out here.” And she climbed into her car and drove off and Susan Lori waited.
After an hour, she began walking. She walked right to his house on Pinellas. She knew he’d be at work by then, but she had to see it anyway. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he needed her. But the driveway was empty. Beside the front stoop was a concrete planter she hadn’t noticed before. It was cracked to its rim, and brown soil spilled out onto the dirt.
Gustavo didn’t come the next afternoon, either, so Susan walked to the phone booth in front of the Taco Bell and called the citrus plant. It was hot in that booth. It smelled like dried piss, the glass cloudy and scratched. She was put on hold twice before a man got on and without a greeting said, “He don’t work here no more.”
“What? Who?”
“Soto. You’re calling about Soto, right? He quit.” The man hung up, and there was the drone of a dial tone, the passing cars, my heart beating through the trapped air in my mouth. I walked to his house on Pinellas and there was a rusted station wagon in the driveway and I knocked on the door. A woman answered. She was old and she was Mexican, and I asked her where I could find Gustavo.
“Stavo? He go back home.”
“When?”
She shrugged. From inside the house came the smell of hot oil on a burner. There was a TV on, and Susan Lori could smell frying tortillas. “No lo sé. He go home for his family. I have cooking.” She smiled and closed the door.
Out the window, past the empty patio, and down an embankment, was a man-made channel of still green water, a rise of condominiums on one bank, Gulf Boulevard on the other, cars passing by fast.
Susan Lori stood on that stoop as if she had not heard what she’d just heard. Go home for his family. His mother and sister. Susan knocked again on the door. She waited and knocked. When no one came she moved around the side of the house to Gustavo’s room and she pushed the screen out of the window and climbed in. A floorboard squeaked under her weight. She crept over to his open door and closed it. His bed was made. His walls were still bare. She pulled open his bureau drawers, and they were empty and smelled like dried wood. There were no cigarettes. There was no Virgin Mary.
She sat on Gustavo’s bed. Then she lay on it, then she curled up on it. His pillow smelled faintly of oranges and sweat and her.
In the days and nights after, all she did was cry and sleep. For almost a week she told Noni that she was sick, and when she finally had to go back to school she ignored every boy and girl there, she ignored her homework and even her own reading, and everything she looked at—the teachers’ cars in the parking lot under the sun, a green lizard on the sidewalk, a smiley face inked into a bathroom-stall wall—all were signs of nothing but a loveless world. And the feeling that was moving through her blood was, Of course.
Like spending a long day under the sun and then comes the wind and the rain and you’re never really surprised.
She needed to stop and call Noni. She hoped she hadn’t gone into her shop this morning, but she probably had. She wanted to hear Lois’s voice. She wanted to hear that slightly bitchy tone and that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph accent from up north. She wanted to apologize to her.
But for what?
Susan’s face heated. She swallowed and shook her head. She wrote: I let in Gustavo far deeper than I ever let in the woman who raised me. Then, over a month after he disappeared, his letter came. Susan Lori pulled it out of the mailbox right after school. There were big stamps that read “AeroMexico,” the letters printed over the profile of some ancient soldier. There was no return address, but in black pen was:
Suzin Dooby
Country Road
Arcadia, Florida USA
Maybe I tore that letter open and read it right there. Or maybe I ran with it into the house. I don’t remember. But it was as if there was new air to breathe. As if that thick, desolate air had been pulled away by an all-loving hand because there had been a terrible mistake and everything that had gone wrong would now go right.
Suzindooby,
My boy is very sick. I lie to you. I am sorry for this. I never forget you.
Gustavo Soto
The paper was the color of sunsets, garlands of roses in the corners, and they burned my fingers. I read that letter so many times it became like a curse and like a prayer: I lie to you. I never forget you. I lie to you. I never forget you.
Many years later, sick in bed with a fever, living with one man or another, I typed Gustavo’s name into the computer. But there were so many of them, most of them in Mexico, old ones and fat ones, gangsters with neck tattoos, a businessman in a tuxedo smiling under the sun. There was a withered fisherman and a young unsmiling boy with his arm around a girl in a white dress. And there was a priest. I stopped and stared at that priest’s face. There was how straight he stood, the way he held his head, the way my Gustavo had, like he knew just where he stood but would never apologize for it. Of course it was not Gustavo, but I stared at that man a long time. Then I closed my computer and slept a sick sleep.
A priest? Yes, because my time with Gustavo had felt sacred. And it came to me, in those long broken months after, that only hurting this deeply could reveal the soul, that if there was a soul this must be it, some central eternal part of you in love with the world.
But the world has to love you, too, and it didn’t.
My cheek on Gustavo’s bare shoulder, my book resting inches above his rising and falling abdomen. I loved how smooth and hairless he was. I loved his smell and the slick of his sweat against my skin. I loved how his tongue moved inside me and inside my mouth, even when he tasted like cigarettes or me. And nobody would listen as intently to what I read to him ever again. It was like he was trying to learn not just the language itself, but how to enter the story with me so that he might enter himself, so that he might unlock some door that would lead him to who he was meant to be and how he was meant to live.
And then he left me, and when I learned that he had only shared some of himself with me when I’d shared everything with him, well, maybe that’s what I learned to do too. Fucking those boys at Gainesville, it was like I’d invited them into one part of me while another part, the deeper part, the part that loved, went to a back room and shut the door till it was over. Then, when all the clumsy furious pumping was through, especially with pale Peter Wilke, I stepped out of that back room and opened my book and read to him, but he did not even begin to listen as deeply or as hungrily as Gustavo had. Instead, he stared at me like I was an actress delivering lines, and he’d get hard and want to do it again.
Then came Chad from New Jersey and all the rest and I didn’t even try with them. They could have my body while the very center of me locked myself in that back room, or they could have me only when I’d come back out, but none of them could have both at once, the way Gustavo had when I was sixteen. Then came Delaney, and I gave her both at the same time, but Delaney’s tongue and fingers and mouth were not enough, and then there was Bobby and his passion for Coleman’s free jazz, the light in Bobby’s ey
es and the sweat breaking out on the top of his bald head as he sautéed spinach at the stove and showed me everything he loved.
It made me want to show him too, but I didn’t. Instead I moved in with him. I opened my legs for him while what I loved went into the back room and closed the door. Except I didn’t lock it. I kept it slightly ajar and listened to the dissonant chaos of what this Bobby Dunn loved. Over time, it made me want to love again what I used to love, and I picked up my Corina novel and started again. Then, a Sunday after too much coffee, what I loved sitting on the threshold of the open door now, I read what I had of Corina, and Bobby told me it was genius and he meant it, and I felt myself stand and walk away from that back room and the next day at the office of the justice of the peace across from a Staples parking lot on Seminole Drive, we got married.
Now when we made love I did not retreat to the back room, but nor did I slip into the legs and belly and chest of the woman I was. I seemed to be stuck halfway between, a stasis my enemy loved, and so I began to feel nothing. I felt nothing for Corina Soto, the poor Mexican girl in Culiacán. I felt nothing for my husband Bobby Dunn. And it wasn’t because I’d fallen out of love, because I’d never fallen in love in the first place. There had been no falling at all, just a careful walk from the back room to—what? To that oneness. Which was—
Trust. Faith. Letting go into the belief that everything would be all right.
My face in the mirror, feeling nothing as I stared at it, feeling nothing as I took my hair in one hand and raised the scissors to it and started cutting.
The patter of rain on concrete. It was coming down on the patio and the man-made channel. Out on the boulevard the driver of a passing sedan put on his windshield wipers, and they slapped and slapped and slapped. Blues was playing now, a chugging harmonica being pierced by an electric guitar. Behind the counter a pretty black girl was laughing with someone Susan could not see. She needed to call Lois. She needed to hear her grandmother’s strident voice.
Gone So Long Page 36