Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Instead of going downstairs, I drove over to Personnel, caught the last guy there, his computer already off. He rebooted, told me about the flex hours they got to work—if he stayed till six o’clock four days a week, he could leave at noon Friday.

  I looked at the clock: five forty-four.

  “Name?” he said, fingers cocked over the keyboard like spider legs.

  I opened my mouth, didn’t know. “Detective Godder’s ex, I can’t remember.”

  The personnel guy looked up to me, knew I was lying but found her anyway, because I’d caught him ducking out twenty minutes early. Her name was Reyna Cruz. She was only in the system because Richard was having the alimony garnished from his check each month. Five-hundred and fifty dollars. It why he’d moved in with me, probably. The checks were deposited into a bank downtown.

  I shook my head in defeat, stood from the personnel guy’s monitor: for the bank, I would need a warrant, and for the warrant, I would need a detective.

  The personnel guy just shrugged again, tabbed ahead one screen, as if on accident.

  Reyna Cruz’s address.

  I closed my eyes in thanks and he printed it for me, and I followed it to her half-brick house, kept saying it to the odometer: “Twenty-eight cents a mile.”

  She lived up on Bishop, her backyard butted up against the old tracks on their hump of burned gravel. I sat in the car looking at her house for long minutes, dusk falling all around, my radio scanning through all the six o’clock news updates. It was too early, though—they were saving the big stuff for the end. The Lote Bravo stuff. I turned it off, tried to get straight what I might say to Richard’s ex-wife, and how, then finally just stood into the heat, closed my door.

  It was eleven steps up to her porch. I counted them twice.

  She was standing on the other side of the screen waiting for me.

  “Come in,” she said, her eyes registering the tinge of blue around my left eye.

  I nodded thanks and stepped past her, saying it to myself as if I’d been asking the question: she was taller than me. Her hair blacker, less chemically abused, her skin perfect. No make-up. Beautiful the same way some women are blonde, or brunette. With her, it wasn’t on purpose. But that wasn’t all. It was—I don’t know. The way she carried herself, even in those first few moments, it was from another decade, another culture. My father’s. The story I was already telling myself about her was that her father had been a don, had had a hacienda, a remuda, a Spanish land grant, that he’d been a bigotudo with movie star eyes.

  Another way to say it was that she was the Mexican woman from whom the rest of us had been cut. The Spanish señorita with just one generation of Indio in her. Not enough to wash away her Old World bearing, her confidence, that sense of belonging wherever she happened to be, but just enough to color her brown, let her survive under a different sun.

  And still Richard had found her.

  I sat down, apologized for coming by after working hours.

  She shook her head no, no, said, “I was at work during work hours, yes?”

  I smiled, was so aware I’d been in jail all afternoon, sleeping, wrinkling my clothes, my hair. The only thing I’d checked in the rearview mirror was my eye-liner. It was so thick now it was like looking through binoculars.

  “If you don’t mind…” Reyna Cruz said, hesitantly, “how did you find my address?” It wasn’t a challenge, more like she just wanted to know where the information leak was, so she could have it plugged. After I was gone.

  “In the computer,” I said, scanning her living room without meaning to, for signs of Richard: an old wedding photo; a glass of sugary tea he’d left when I pulled up. A child wearing five-hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of clothes, dental work, and, with a mother as beautiful as Reyna Cruz, therapy. Years of it.

  Reyna Cruz nodded as if she’d been expecting that, the computer.

  “Marco,” she said, “sí?”

  I had to look deep into the carpet.

  “I don’t want to get him into trouble,” I said, falling into my father’s overcomplete syntax. The way he had of holding his lips after each word, something he’d probably picked up learning English, when he’d have to wait, see if he’d said what he’d meant to say.

  Reyna Cruz nodded, sat back. “He’s new,” she said. “It’s not his fault.”

  I looked up from the carpet, to her.

  “He wasn’t a—a Marco, though,” I said. I was feeling my way through now. “He was white… Anglo. Practically transparent.”

  “And in love,” Reyna Cruz added, smiling.

  I shrugged—it was a compliment, I think—looked to the door, still open, just the screen, then around the living room, then to her. She was waiting.

  “You’re not from the center, then?” she said.

  “I’m—” I tried, unsure what I was. “I know Richard.”

  Reyna Cruz held my eyes long enough that I could see them change, start to see me differently. Like she didn’t even mean for it to, her arm crossed the distance between us, the tips of her fingers to the side of my face.

  “You’re the new me, then,” she said.

  “I’m with the police,” I said, looking to the open door again

  She nodded, had been expecting this, it seemed.

  “And now you’re here,” she said, pointing at my eye with both of hers.

  I touched it too, self-conscious. “That’s why you left him?” I asked.

  “Is that what he’s saying?”

  “He’s not saying anything.”

  She smiled. “That’s the only answer I would have believed, Ms…?”

  “Marta. Villarreal.”

  She nodded, accepting my name.

  “He doesn’t like to be violent,” she said, taking Richard up again. “He just is. It was… the first time?” I nodded, lied. “And now he’s… pulling his—su fantasma routine, I take it?”

  Yes. His ghost routine. She was feeling out my Spanish, too. Gauging Richard’s predilections, his taste. If it was still the same.

  “He feels bad about it,” she went on, “about you. He’ll punish himself. Alcohol, fighting, whatever. It’s a pattern, a cycle with him. The only way he knows to apologize. Some men send roses. Richard, he walks through the thorns. In some ways it’s more romantic, I guess.”

  “This is his third day gone,” I said.

  She was sitting on the edge of her seat, knees tight together. “He’s not Jesus,” she said, and I smiled: this was El Paso. Jesus was built into every alcove we had, surrounded by electric candles.

  “How’d you meet?” I asked, suddenly. “If you don’t mind, I mean.”

  Reyna Cruz sat back, her hands palm down on the soft arms of her chair.

  “You know, probably,” she said. “He’s encantador, Richard. Other… less important things. But I guess you never knew him when he was young—like you, now. Back then, he could go either way. A man who talked, a husband, a dad, or…”

  “Or what he is.”

  She nodded.

  I had to look away.

  “He is a father, anyway, right?”

  She understood the distinction.

  “Our daughter is seventeen in August,” she said. “She has his eyes, his anger at small things that don’t bend to her will. But she’s learning to focus it, to use it.” She shrugged. “The good part of him, I think he left it behind for me, in CC.”

  “CC?”

  “Cruz de la Cruz,” Reyna Cruz said. “It was Richard’s idea. He was twenty-two, just five years older than she is now.”

  “She didn’t take his name?”

  “He didn’t give it to her. Said it was too white.”

  “Does he ever see her?”

  “I think that would—” she started. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

  I looked away. Said, like I didn’t want to, “He was on that—that task force…”

  “Las Hijas de Juarez,” Reyna Cruz finished, cutting me off.

>   “Muertas,” I said, for hijas.

  “Like your name,” she said back.

  She stared at me a long time, finally nodded.

  “One of my cousins,” she said. “Nineteen ninety-three. It was when he—when Richard got interested, started his box.”

  “Box?”

  “Clippings, reports. He was going to solve it, be the American hero. Kept it all in his old Army box. I should tell you this too. When we broke up, when he left, it wasn’t because he kept hitting me. At the time I was telling myself if that was all, I could take it, me quedaba. That it wasn’t that bad, that there was worse.” She stopped talking, thinking about what to say next. “I told you he left, though. Se fue. I couldn’t keep him in El Paso anymore was the thing. He was always out there in the desert, walking, buscando huesos, looking for little dead girls when he had a live one here at home.”

  “You lived here?”

  She nodded: this house.

  “One day, one time,” she said, lifting her chin to the past, to 1994, maybe 1995, “he just—he didn’t come back. He never told me, of course, because he’s who—how he is—but I think he found one of those girls, maybe. After walking so long. Before anybody else, he found one.” She smiled, shook her head. “And I think then he probably saw what had been done to her, y se miro las manos, saw what he was doing here, to his daughter, to me, that the person he was looking to catch so bad was himself, so he just… I don’t know. Gave up. It’s a hard thing to know about yourself, Ms. Villarreal.”

  “He never told me.”

  “He wouldn’t. He can’t.”

  I nodded. Swallowed and heard it loud in my ears. Stood, unsteady.

  “Do you have any pictures of him, from then?” I said.

  Reyna Cruz looked at me again for a long time, finally nodded.

  “I do,” she said, “yes. But you can’t see them. If you see them, then you’ll try to convince yourself that that man, the one who would name his daughter like that, that he was still in there somewhere.”

  I touched the screen door, had to leave.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll turn up soon.”

  Reyna Cruz, standing too, nodded.

  “And what will you do then?” she said, handing me a card. It was for her center, a battered women’s place. I slid it into the front pocket of my slacks and kept my hand around it for the eleven steps back down to street level, the thirteen across the sidewalk to my car.

  All I could think about was his box, his Army box.

  All the ones in my hall now were cardboard. They were heavy, though, like papers. Files. Crime scene photographs.

  I shook my head no, don’t think about this, then heard a car door close behind me, then another and another, like fire crackers.

  In the rearview it was a carload of dark girls swirling up the street, up the sidewalk.

  I looked to the clock on the dash—ten till seven—to the mirror again, and almost saw her, I think, Cruz de la Cruz, but made myself look away. Drive.

  The first message on my machine when I got home was Davidson. He was calling from lock-up, for a ride. Two hours ago. I rang his cell phone, got his voice mail. His message was different now. It said he was probably asleep, not out killing anybody.

  The second message was Nate. “Call me” was all he said.

  He picked up on the first half-ring, said, “I figured it the fuck out, Marta.”

  “What?” I said, quieter.

  “How he’s getting in. It’s not the roses, the roses were just, I don’t know. Coincidence.” He laughed, getting ready for the next part: “It’s the garage doors. All three houses had them, even the one down in Segundo, right?”

  In my kitchen, I nodded. “How?”

  “Remember last year, when that… I don’t know. When those junkies or whoever were breaking into all those rich people houses? Remember how? It was the fucking garages, Marta. They were bypassing the codes or some shit.”

  “Have you told anybody this?”

  “You,” he said. “My LT. That one—Madrone.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said back.

  We hung up without saying goodbye and I walked through my house turning on lights then sat on the couch. The ten o’clock news led with the Lote Bravo Rapist, active again. North of the border now. I reached over to my Frankenstein phone, took it off the hook.

  After the news I did one of the two things I’d promised not to: opened the boxes Richard had left in the hall. The one I both wanted and didn’t want was third from the front, the one I’d almost kicked.

  I spread the contents all around me in the hall—hundreds of dead girls, smuggled-out copies of their autopsies, field notes from the Chihuahuan cop or two who had written anything down. One bag even had a loop of dusty hair in it. I dropped it, was breathing too hard.

  This was what Richard had had tacked up in his study. The room he’d been living in for too long.

  I pushed myself back to the wall, hugged my shins with my arms and closed my eyes, then tried to stack the papers back together, couldn’t. Closed my eyes to start over and opened them to a yellowed sheet with my first name on it, no last.

  It was birth records, a whole series of them—a whole drawer. Not the adoption papers he was supposed to have got for me, but the moments before the adoption.

  Because I wasn’t ready to see them yet, maybe wasn’t going to be, ever, I just looked at them a little, for seconds at a time—sex, birth weight, race; caesarean?—then did the second thing I’d promised myself not to do: filled the bath with water, laid in it like Rosario Flores, lower and lower, until I was only breathing through my nose. For an hour it felt like. And then I went deeper, let my head go under, my hair staying on the surface, so that I could see the bare bulb above the sink through it, and then, suddenly, I couldn’t.

  I surfaced slow, eyes already open, no water splashing.

  The lights had gone out. All over the house.

  Without having to think about it, I knew it was the breaker. In this house, I couldn’t even have the oven and the microwave on at the same time.

  I stood, the water slipping down me.

  Or maybe it wasn’t just my house, but the whole city, because of the news. The blackness I’d started with Lote Bravo. I wrapped a towel around me then pulled my sweats up, then my shirt over the towel, then let the towel fall. Only girls in horror movies traipse through the dark house in nothing.

  I took an exacto from the bathroom drawer, spun it twice around my finger and felt along the wall for the utility.

  Like my father had taught me, I had a flashlight magneted to the door of the breaker box. The batteries were weak, but enough: the main switch was flipped over, the reflective white tape shining. I set my exacto down so I could flip it back without stabbing myself in the eye. It took two tries, but the second time, the lights flickered on, then died just as fast.

  I smiled at myself: of course. All the lights I’d turned on after talking to Nate were still on. I went through the house, turning them off, and was back to the utility before I felt the nakedness of no exacto: I’d left it on the speaker in the living room, when I’d had to shake the flashlight, get it working again.

  It was too late for it now, though. I pushed the breaker up with the palm of my right hand and the light above me came on. It was the only one.

  I nodded, breathing hard, then felt it through my fingertips, coming through the dryer: a trembling. The whole house shaking. It was even pulling the light in the utility room down low enough that I could see the bulb, not just the brightness.

  The garage door. It was groaning up. Springs, chains, weight, tension. That was what had tripped the breaker.

  I reached over, pulled the switch towards me, plunging the house into darkness again.

  For the next four minutes, there were no sounds. It was long enough for me to understand that there was somebody at the keypad set in the wood frame just outside the garage door. Becaus
e the door itself wouldn’t remember it was coming up.

  Now I went through the house turning all the light switches back to ON. All of them except the light between my bedroom and the door that led to the garage. The one that, now, could push the breaker over. Seventy-five watts for a flash, then darkness.

  The last thing I got were my sunglasses, so my pupils would already be dilated, ready. After that I just stood in the utility, counting to three, and, the third time through, turned the power back on, ran blind for the garage, slipping into the dead girl photographs on the floor, clawing up, out, falling up to the window in the door that led to the garage, my finger on the light switch of the only dead light in the house. The door rising again, slowly. First a crack of streetlight, then six inches, then it was two feet, denim legs, then, for the fraction of a second before I turned the light on above me, flipping the breaker again, a man, tall, thin, waiting, holding something easy and loose by his right leg. A blade, a pair of blades.

  His other hand rose, reaching for me across fourteen feet, and then everything went black. Just our voices:

  —“Dad.”

  —“Martina.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  He was here to save me from the Lote Bravo Rapist again. To cut my hair, because he’d seen the news, the photographs of Jennifer Rice and Carrie Mena and Rosario Flores. How we all could have been sisters. Would be in death, over Liz P.’s shoulder.

  I wasn’t fifteen, though. And, anyway, he had no right, wasn’t my real father.

  Times like this, I envied Davidson his hippie parents, not lying to him about anything, telling him from the moment he could understand that they were just watching him, taking care of him because his real mother couldn’t. Like a young bird fallen from the nest, into their hands.