by Alfredo Vea
Jesse looked toward Carolina, whose large dark eyes were refusing to meet his. He was going to Tracy and she knew it. There would be no talking today, no explanations today, and she was more than angry about it. He walked toward her, stopping just in front of her. Using both hands, he reached out, cupping her pouting face in his palms, his thumbs caressing her lips.
“Topolina,” he whispered softly. Lifting her face he kissed her gently, then walked to his car. Eddy touched Carolina’s hand and followed Jesse. When they turned Eddy’s car onto highway 101 South, they could see her, still standing in the middle of the motel parking lot, her face filled with tears of utter disbelief.
“I’ve never seen you kiss her,” said Eddy quietly. “I’ve never seen you kiss her.”
Margie Skelley Dixon was nothing at all like her brother Bernard. She was tiny and delicate, with strawberry-blond hair and long, elastic fingers that seemed double-jointed. Her wrists, her ears, and the flesh of her neck were almost transparent. Her smile was soft and humane. Premature worry lines had already pleated the corners of her eyes, eyes that were clear blue and direct evidence of an inquisitive, agile mind. Using her dreams as cement, and huge, hardbound editions of Dickens and Joyce as bricks, she spent her days and nights building a wall of books between herself and her appointed destiny.
Genetics and the suffocating limitations of Tracy had joined forces and doomed her to a future in a trailer court or a stark tract home somewhere in the Central Valley, to a life of television and tabloids and preparing meals in which every organic object is mummified with batter, then chicken-fried and smothered with white gravy.
Through the mail she ordered cookbooks from all over the world and spent long evenings memorizing their contents and imagining the exotic flavors while touching the photos with her fingertips. In time she would be able to discern the spices present in any given recipe simply by caressing a photograph of the final dish. It was her fervent hope that the recipes for coquilles St. -Jacques and ratatouille Provençale would eventually displace the constant impulse to stuff a hot dog with Velveeta and then wrap it with bacon. She prayed that saltimboca would jump into her mouth and dislodge her taste for lard. Her bookshelves were crammed with Berlitz courses in nine different languages. The walls of her bedroom were a collage of maps and travel guides.
Every chance she got, she would drive the fifty-five miles into San Francisco to savor pad Thai, caldo de camarones, and ziti Tartufo. She would spend endless hours at the aquatic park listening to the African drummers and basking in the sound of exotic tongues. Using will power alone, she hoped against hope to plug the holes in the cultural sieve that was her heritage—her hillbilly heart. This woman labored against providence with every breath she took.
“Nous sommes ici,” sang Margie as the car pulled onto a dusty dirt road on the outskirts of Modesto. Her lilting voice belied the growing terror in her heart. She exited the car and walked slowly toward a large, weathered barn. She walked as though she were on the surface of Jupiter; the weight of her own reticence coupled with the weight of her determination had caused her shoulders and hips to sag visibly. In front of her the wide front door of the barn had been chained and padlocked.
“¿Dónde están las llaves?” she muttered as she pored through her crowded purse. After opening the lock, she pulled at the huge door but was unable to move it. Eddy and Jesse had to lift the door, then tug on it in unison before it finally yawned open.
“When he lost his job, he sold almost everything,” Margie said as she led the way into the barn. “He even sold his rider lawn mower, his precious John Deere, and he didn’t even have a lawn. But some things he just couldn’t sell.”
Jesse and his investigator stood awestricken at what they saw. Covering every wall was an array of weaponry that only the best-equipped armies could match. In the far corner of the barn was a deuce-and-a-half truck, and behind that was a battered armored personnel carrier, probably of Korean War vintage. The hack wall of the barn was covered with an array of semi-automatic weapons, including old M-1s and M-14s, and at least three .38-calibre “grease guns.”
There was a rack of M-16s to the left, a crate of hand grenades, and one ancient mortar tube. The mortar rounds were lying next to it like a pile of discarded soda bottles. The ground to the right was covered with ammunition boxes, tent halves, entrenching tools, and one M-60 machine gun. Hanging from the rafters were huge Confederate and Nazi flags. Behind the flags hung a cheap tapestry depicting the Last Supper. Judas’s face had been painted black and a large nose had been added.
“My brothers, Bernard and Richard, are in the local militia,” whispered Margie. “This is their company headquarters.”
There was a table near the door that was covered with yellowed periodicals—tracts from the Posse Comitatus, an SS action team in Michigan, and a worn copy of the Turner Diaries. Margie ran her fingers over the photos on the front page of one of the tracts. “Tasteless,” she said to no one.
A chill went down Jesse’s spine as he stared at the weaponry around him. Not even the San Francisco Police Department had this kind of armory. Eddy walked cautiously outside to see if anyone was lurking nearby.
“Don’t worry,” said Margie, “they won’t come out here today. They’re on maneuvers in Manteca.” Margie’s face contorted as she spoke the Spanish word for lard.
“Maneuvers?” asked Jesse.
“They take about three hours putting on jungle fatigues and their camouflage makeup, then they crawl around in the dirt for about five minutes before they pull a muscle or puke their breakfast. Then they break out the beer and hot dogs and tell phony war stories. It’s truly ridiculous. They use walkie-talkies to talk between the picnic tables. ‘Apache One to Apache Niner; you got any mayonnaise on your table? Over.’ ”
Margie laughed at her own imitation of her brother Richard’s voice. As her laughter slowly died, she walked toward a large object that was covered with a dusty tarp. It had been placed into the far right corner of the barn. With one hand she grabbed a corner of the tarp and began to pull. As the object was slowly revealed, Jesse and Eddy stared in anxious anticipation. There was a wry smile on Eddy’s face as the canvas tarp moved across the midsection of the object. It was a huge, wooden bed. The large, thick quilt that covered the mattress was made from an American flag. Soon, all that remained hidden by the tarp was the headboard.
“Are you ready? Están listos?” said Margie. Jesse assumed that her sense of the dramatic was showing, but quickly changed his mind. There was something else in her voice—a cold and cutting edge. “Are you ready?” she repeated, as though those three words were the only possible words appropriate for this moment. No one answered, so she quickly pulled the tarp to the floor. “It was never Bernard,” whispered Margie as the object came into view. “It was always Richard.”
Jesse’s stare immediately turned to glee.
“Photograph it, Eddy!” he screamed, laughing and walking in circles, unable to contain his joy. “Photograph it, then let’s remove the headboard! We’re gonna lash it to the car. Come here, Margie.”
He threw his arms around Margie Skelley Dixon, lifting her off the floor with the force of his embrace.
“Eddy,” exclaimed Jesse, “remind me to call Chez Panisse on the way back to San Francisco. I’ll make reservations for six. Are you still seeing that English professor from Merced? ”
Margie nodded.
“I’m going to buy you the best dinner you ever had. We’ll drink two bottles of Margaux, Premier Grand Cru.” Then Jesse noticed that the same hint of sadness had returned to her face. He lowered her to her feet. With a hand on each of her shoulders, he held her at arm’s length and forced her to look into his eyes.
“Listen, Margie, you’re not choosing between brothers. That’s not what you’re doing. You’re making sure that the truth is known. You’re bringing just a little bit of justice to a world that needs it very bad!y.”
“That’s not why I’m sad,” said Mar
gie softly. “I always knew this day was coming. I always knew there was something wrong with my niece Minnie. The little girl was never, ever happy. The poor thing was never given the chance to be a child. She’s never wanted to have a doll or to play house. God!” sighed Margie. “She was having sex years before she got her period. That son of a bitch took away her first childhood crush, her first prom, the nervous joy of her wedding night. I’m sad because I suspected this long ago and did absolutely nothing about it. I didn’t want to believe it was happening to her.”
“Minnie’s just a child,” said Eddy. “There’s still hope for her. Children can heal.”
“Her mother is not going to be there for her,” added Jesse in his softest voice. “She’s probably known what her husband has been doing all these years and closed her eyes to it. But little Minnie will have an aunt, an aunt who understands this kind of pain very well, and who, in spite of it, has managed to fall in love twice.”
Margie turned to face the lawyer.
“How did you know? she asked.
“I don’t know how I knew,” said Jesse, unaware of the fact that he had placed the jade stone beneath his tongue. “But I know that you’re running away. All those arcane books, all those languages you speak … I’ve never seen anyone run so hard. You’re trying to escape from far more than just Spam kabobs and Velveeta pick-me-ups.”
“Will I have to testify against my own brother?”
“You might not have to,” answered Jesse. “This bed and the DNA testing that I’m going to order might be enough. It’s Minnie that I’m worried about. To this day she hasn’t had the courage to name her true assailant. She’s given a description that could fit either brother and she’s pointed to a picture of the supreme being, but she might have been pointing to the eagle. She’s never given a name. She has never spoken the name out loud. She’s going to have to see this headboard again and have the courage to tell the whole truth. I’m sure she’s scared to death of her father.”
“I know I was,” whispered Margie.
“If she refuses to name him, we may have to put this case in front of twelve people. If the prosecutor is hardheaded, you might have to take the stand. A jury will have to decide which of the two eagles has savaged little girls——this one or the one on Bernard’s chest. To my mind, this bedstead is enough for a reasonable doubt. I know it’ll shatter Minnie’s world into a thousand pieces, but it may be a world that needs shattering. It won’t be easy, but you can help her make it. You are her family now, Margie.”
Jesse smiled at Margie.
“Have you ever eaten at Chez Panisse?”
Margie shook her head but smiled. To her, Chez Panisse was Mecca, the farthest place on earth from Chez Boeuf. Jesse reached into his coat for the tiny recorder and began by entering the day and date, location, exact time, and those present. Then he began to describe the bed.
“It is a handmade, queen-size, pine bed—a four-poster. The bedspread is a quilt made from pieces of American flags. The large headboard is hand-carved and hand-painted in red, white, and blue. There is a globe that is crossed at its center by a banner that reads ‘U.S. Marines, Semper Fidelis.’ On the surface of the globe is a map of Vietnam. Above the globe and clutching it in its talons is a huge American eagle in bas-relief. The wings of the eagle span the entire headboard, the white wing tips touching the twin posts. A child lying on this bed, her father’s bed, would see an eagle spreading its wings over her head. She would see this eagle whether or not her father was present….”
The recording ended abruptly as Margie ran sobbing from the barn. The cold specificity of Jesse’s description had summoned up old and painful memories.
“Margie … was on this bed, too,” said Eddy who slapped his right palm against his forehead. He had finally grasped the meaning of Jesse’s comments to Margie. He winced with disgust, then turned his face away from Jesse. There were tears in his eyes. Suddenly recalling that little Minnie had stated that she could not see the eagle during the rapes, Eddy blurted out a sentence filled with pain. “She couldn’t see an eagle because his big perverted ass completely covered her tiny body.”
Jesse nodded his agreement.
“They ought to hang that son of a bitch from a telephone pole—by his nuts.”
“That would be too good for him,” said Jesse as he walked toward the bed. He placed his hand on the quilt. It was a bed of living, waking nightmares, a mattress of cold fusion, a machine built to destroy the budding hippocampus and create girls who have no memory—girts who live in an eternal present that is their only defense against a terrible past, little girls devoid of romance.
Jesse’s voice dropped down to less than a whisper. Girls like Margie and little Minnie had seen war and would live to share the nightmare.
“Besides, the perverted bastard might like it.”
Jesse and Eddy dismantled the bed and strapped the eagle to the roof of the car. Then both men walked to the side of the barn, where they found a water faucet. Ten minutes of vigorous rubbing beneath the spigot could not wash away the vileness that clung to their hands. The ride back to San Francisco would be a quiet and painful one. A hellish wooden harpy would be flying just above their heads, and in the back seat, where Margie lay silently, the world would be turned upside-down.
For the first time in years she was once again lying beneath Southeast Asia, the odd pain of familiar blood pinning her to the sheets, the pain of rambling and senseless consanguinity pelting her thighs, battering her small legs, stunning her ears with the misshapen drek that rode upon her brother’s breath.
“Are you ready?”
As the car left the Modesto city limits, Margie writhed and shivered in the arctic wastes of the backseat. She bit her wrist to drive her brother Richard’s voice from her mind. A warm flow of blood across her palm was just enough warmth to keep her from freezing solid. Even after her memories were suppressed, the weight of the wings above her head forced tears to her eyes. Wings like those lifted no one, carried no one to heaven. It had been years before she learned that those strange, upside-down, and reversed words meant “always faithful.”
Nothing more was said on the trip back to San Francisco. As Jesse drove, Eddy chewed absentmindedly on his Spam musubi. ‘l’he odor of seaweed and pork shoulder began to fill the car. Just a few miles from the Bay Bridge, Jesse thought he heard the high-pitched voice of a little girl coming from the blackness of the backseat.
“God is watching.”
11
the women’s chorus
fEight eyes and seven breasts—Persephone and her three sisters gathered together at the family home perched on the outskirts of Alexandria. None of the women lived in town anymore. It was 1978, and all four had taken husbands and were living elsewhere. The house was une trés petite maison, a small wooden house filled with tiny, warm bedrooms and a single great room: the kitchen. The women were seated in a circle near the stove, the chairs having been purloined from the huge table in the center of the room.
The home was set in a quiet neighborhood with narrow cobbled streets completely shaded by maple trees. Each shade tree was flattered by the cloying, loving arms of a Chinese wisteria. Each wisteria vine was caressed by bees.
The chorus of women sat in the great room surrounded by memories and photographs of their magnificent mother. Though all four sisters were powerful women in their own right, none of them could hold a candle to their mother. It was she who had turned the tide in the thirties, when it looked as though the Depression would wash them all away.
Lysistrata, a small Creole village on the fringe of Alexandria, had been named by Lizzie Boudreaux, their mother. It was she who had seen that the town had been mapped out and incorporated, that a proper library had been built, and that the patch of land was named after her favorite Greek play. It was she who had the strength to demand that all the new husbands refrain from joining the military. It was she who had given the sisters unity and direction when the foolish men enlisted anyway. I
f each sister had been a point of the compass, she had been their magnetic north.
On every wall of the great room was a photograph or a painting of Miss Lizzie, her long arms outstretched and so lithe and blithely weightless, her toes ever en point. She was the only Creole or black woman ever to dance prima ballerina at the Atlanta Ballet. Here she is a sylphid in flashing white; there she is a sloe-eyed gitana in somber red and insolent gold; here she sits, surrounded by daughters; there she is flanked by the entire corps de ballet. In one small photograph, she is sleeping in a casket, her once weightless legs now leaden. There are flowers enough—cast onstage by wild and inconsolable admirers—to hide the metal bier and the gaping hole beside it.
The four women sat quietly in the kitchen, readying themselves for the strange task at hand. Their father, Priapus Boudreaux, was seated—stiff and erect—in a wooden chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by his daughters. Out in the parlor, a group of their father’s friends was waiting to see the final product. A chorus of old men, they were bedecked with medals and ribbons from the Great War. Nostalgia sagged from their faces like a second layer of old skin.
Shy and sheepish now, Priapus was once the largest man in the county, a man who could outpull a mule. Gray and bent and self-effacing now, he was once the proud consort to terpsichorean royalty. His dinner jacket, tattered and passé, is covered with a pink towel, and the old man has removed his thick glasses. Without his lenses, he had no power whatsoever. Tonight, as he did on every other night of his married life, he had surrendered to the women of his family.
One of the sisters, Cleonice Fontenot—the one with a single breast—began to cut the old man’s graying hair, while the other sisters remarked, one after another, upon the still-handsorne man who was their father.
“Leave enough hair for me to work with,” said the fourth sister. Her name was Lampi Le Jeune. Her full first name was something that she will never disclose.