by Urban Waite
“You know Edna’s not going to need you anymore,” Eli said, still standing there on the sidewalk, watching Tom until Tom tugged at Jeanie’s leash a little, urging her on. “This is out of your hands now. The sooner you and Edna understand that, the better off this town will be. You know that, right?”
“I’m not much more than a farmer these days,” Tom said, walking now, not looking back as he made his way toward the basement offices and whatever he’d find there.
Ray leaned his weight onto the shovel and looked in the hole. It was about six feet in length and three feet in depth. Sweat collected on his brow and then ran the length of his face, dripping from his chin and speckling the ground. Across the grave from him, Luis sat with his back to the big oak tree, drinking from a canteen of water. The wrapped body of Ray’s father lay next to him on the ground. Farther on, he saw Billy where he sat fifty feet off, resting against a far oak watching Ray.
“You could have gone with them,” Ray said, looking across at Luis. “You probably should have.”
“Here,” Luis said, tossing the canteen to Ray. “Rest a little and let me work.” He lifted himself from the ground and brought with him a pick that was leaning against the trunk of the oak.
Ray unscrewed the top of the canteen and stood staring into the darkness within. The feel of water inside the thin metal body, cold against the sides. For a while now he’d felt life sliding away from him. His daily routines gone. The guilt risen inside him over what had happened to Marianne, about what he’d done all those years before, working for Memo and putting his wife in that position. The pills his only defense against much of it, the dried look of his wife’s eyes as he’d looked into them for the last time, always open in his memories of her. Like some part of him that was forever awake, but would never rise. She was many things to him, but the most she would now ever be—Ray knew—was a body in a grave only fifty feet away.
In the hole, Luis raised the pick and began to chip away at the earth, loosening the clay soil. “You didn’t have to stay,” Ray said.
“I stayed because it’s my place to stay,” Luis said, pausing in his work. “I saw who did this to him, and I didn’t do a thing about it. I was scared, and I wanted to do something but I couldn’t.”
“You did nothing wrong, Luis.”
“I did everything wrong,” Luis said. He was looking up at Ray, and already there was a fresh sheen of sweat on his forehead.
“The ones who did this,” Ray said, “you know them? You’ll testify against them if it comes to that?”
“I’ve done my part to hurt this town. I’ve drunk their liquor and paid their way through this town and it’s all led to this.”
“Dario?” Ray said. “The bar in town?”
“You know the one, same place it’s always been. Everything has changed through the years, and I’ve been too much of a fool to see it.” Luis raised the pick and brought it down into the earth. He raised it again and brought it down again, the huff of his breath now heard. “I’ve been drunk for too many years,” he said. “I should have seen what I was doing. Going through life with blinders on. Your father saw it. This last year, spending time with the unions trying to build the town, while I spent my time investing in its fall. Now the workers are leaving, the wells drying up, while Dario keeps digging farther in.
“Two nights ago I was sitting in that bar,” Luis went on. “The place seemed ready to self-destruct—the whole town, like a black hole opening up to swallow down every street and building. Everyone talking about how they were going to burn the Tate Bulger wells out. All of it seems so stupid now, your father dead, and all he’s done to protect this town at an end.”
Ray watched him where he worked in the grave. Nearby, under the oak, his father’s body wrapped in a patterned floral tablecloth of forget-me-nots. The blue coloring of the sheet stained red in places where the blood came through. “What’s going to happen to Billy?” Ray asked.
“He’s my responsibility now,” Luis said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll watch over him most of the time, and Tom will take him sometimes. It will be just like it’s been.”
“I’m sorry about all this,” Ray said. He didn’t know what else to say. He knew he couldn’t stay. At one time, only days before, he’d thought something different, but he knew he’d given that right up and it wasn’t his place anymore, not at all. “Gus was his real father,” Ray said.
He tried to remember his father the way he used to be, the way things used to be, before Ray had taken up with Memo. Before the wells on his father’s property had gone dry and Ray had been forced to leave the land he worked every day with Luis and his father. “You’ve done nothing wrong, Luis,” Ray said. “You’re not like me. You’ve got nothing to blame yourself over.”
Looking up at the sun now slowly beginning to set beyond the western hills, Ray estimated the time. His father’s body on the ground next to the grave. Never enough time. Everything running out on him and a world he’d long since pushed away now collapsing all around him. He tried to remember how he’d felt all those years before, when life had seemed so figured out and solid. What had he thought? Who had he been? The image of himself all those years ago nothing but a paper cutout of a man that seemed to bend now with the wind.
“Luis,” he said, waiting for his uncle to look up at him. “I can’t stay around here anymore. I know I should, but there just isn’t time.”
“I know,” Luis said. He had turned to face Ray, putting the pick aside and climbing from the hole. “You be careful out there. Gus would have said the same.” Luis reached a hand out to Ray and waited. “You’re going to be okay, you know that, right?”
Ray took Luis’s hand. “One way or another I know that,” Ray said. “I wish I could stay and see this finished.” He let go of his uncle’s hand and nodded a good-bye, pausing to look to his father there on the ground, before turning and walking toward the house, the boy watching him still.
“Tom told me you read lips,” Ray said, stopping for a moment and waiting for the boy to nod his head. “I’m sorry about Gus. None of this should have happened and I don’t know if you’ll ever understand quite what I mean. I don’t expect you to and in some ways I don’t want you to either.” He stepped a little closer, scrubbing at his face with a single hand. “I’ve never been a good person. I’m not made for this world, not anymore. You’ll figure that out someday, like I figured it for myself.” He paused, taking time, but not really knowing what else to say. Ten years had passed and he’d abandoned the boy without even a postcard sent in all that.
He took another step and now he was close to the boy, his son, and he knelt within arm’s reach of the boy and put a hand out to Billy’s cheek, trying as best he could to make the connection. “I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I can’t say anything more than that.”
Billy turned and looked away. The brief warm touch still there on Ray’s hand where his fingers had grazed his son’s cheek.
He was aware that behind him Luis had stopped working and was listening to everything Ray said. The boy, his son, just sitting there, looking away from Ray. “I deserve that,” Ray said, “I deserve far worse and someday I hope it will be better between us.” He had no idea if the boy understood him. His face turned away as Ray stood, waiting only a moment before walking away. His feet carrying him toward his father’s house, where he knew everything inside was just as it had always been.
These bodies,” Dario said, “you thoug
ht I’d know something about them?”
Kelly looked across the bar at the men sitting opposite. “They seemed like the type of customer that might be in here.”
This made him smile even bigger. “What,” he said, “Mexicans?”
“Out-of-towners.”
Dario smirked and looked across the bar at the men on the other side. Medina down the far side of the bar, polishing the same glasses over and over again.
“You always this busy during the day?” Kelly asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Around lunch we get a lot of these guys coming in here.”
“I don’t see much food.”
“We don’t have a lot of customers come in here looking for food,” Dario said.
“I bet.” She made a quick pass of the room with her eyes. “What type of customers would you say you get in here?”
“The hardworking American type,” he said.
“I can see that,” she said. “There’s not much to it. Just you and Medina?”
“It’s usually about all we need.”
“And if you need more?”
“We make do.”
“These men oil workers? They hardworking American types?”
“After the layoffs they’ve been coming in less and less, saving their money or heading north for work.”
“Worry you?” Kelly said. “Your business drying up.”
“There’s always other ways to make a little extra.”
“Blue-plate specials?”
“There’s always something,” Dario said again.
Kelly finished her soda water. She thought over what had just been said.
“Would you like another?” Dario asked, motioning to the empty glass on the bar.
“No,” Kelly said.
Dario held her gaze for a moment. She could tell he wanted her to say more, to keep talking, but there was nothing left to say. She got up to go. She could feel the weight of the gun belt around her hips, the cuffs, the flashlight, the radio. All the various things that made her what she was. Sheriff, law, protector—though she was starting to think there wasn’t much point in it. She was standing with a hand on the bar, aware that everyone’s eyes were on her, almost willing her to leave. “Do you mind if I ask you one more thing?”
“Go ahead.”
“You heard about the boy in the hospital?”
“I heard about him.”
“Does that seem strange to you? Nothing for years and then in the same day this boy is murdered, followed that night by three more?”
“It’s a horrible thing.”
“Yes,” she said. She looked at the empty glass on the bar, just for something to look at, a distraction from what she really wanted to ask. “There’s a rumor going around that the boy was related to the cartel in some way.”
“Is that what you think?”
“The same rumor has been going around about you,” Kelly said.
Dario smiled. “Cartel.” He blew off the word with a little passing movement of his hand. “That type of thing is back home in Mexico. Not here.”
“Back home?”
“Juarez.”
“What did you do before you moved to the States?”
“I was a police officer.”
Kelly looked at him, trying to decide if he was being serious.
“Hard to believe?”
“Honestly, yes.”
“It’s the truth,” Dario said. “You can look it up.”
“Rough town,” Kelly said.
“Very rough. There was a lot of violence. A lot of murders.”
“Is that why you left?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is very peaceful here.”
“It was very peaceful here,” Kelly corrected.
“Yes,” he said. “You are right. It was.”
She looked at the empty glass again. The men talking in low, controlled voices, occasionally glancing over at them. Kelly knew just by standing there she was making them uncomfortable and in the same moment she wondered if she had pressed her luck coming here.
“Would you like something else?” Dario said.
“No, I’m fine.”
Dario reached out a hand and took the empty glass off the bar.
Kelly considered him where he sat. Whether he was telling her the truth she didn’t know. Perhaps he’d said that thing about being a cop just to try to get sympathy from her, perhaps it was true. She dropped her eyes to the floor, nothing outside for her. No place for her to go. “I want your advice on something,” she said, speaking not to Dario, but to the coffee cup in front of him, like she was talking to herself, sounding out the question as she asked it. “What would it take for this to go away? For this town to go back to the way it used to be, to the peace you say it’s known for?”
Dario breathed out and for the first time she realized he’d been holding back, letting her speak, waiting even, for what she might say to him. “There is no going back,” he said.
“I didn’t tell you everything,” Kelly said. She raised her eyes to his and waited. When no response came she told him about the Bronco outside of town, about the DEA and the Border Patrol. She said it was over. “Whatever game we’ve been playing here in this town, it’s over, it’s done, there is nothing more for any of us,” she said.
Dario lifted the coffee cup and then put it back down, he wet his lips with his tongue. “There’s always something to look forward to,” he said.
“You miss being a cop?”
“No,” he said, “but I think I understand something about it, something about that life and why you came in here looking to talk with me.”
“Why’s that?”
“You want something more from this life,” Dario said. “The things that go on here, that wear away at you every day, that just keep coming. They’re all the same to you and me, to people like us. Shouldn’t we want more, a little break from the monotony?”
She didn’t have an answer for him and pausing to consider what this meant, she asked, “What if the rumors are true?”
“What rumors?” Dario asked.
“That you’re working for the cartel.”
“What if they are?” he said.
“You know if I find something and it leads me here, I won’t be back just to talk.”
“I know,” Dario said.
“You’ve run a good business. Really quite impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“But it’s slipping away from you,” Kelly said. “Don’t you see that? Don’t you see how it’s going to end for you in this town?”
“I’m just a barkeeper,” Dario said. “That’s all. I don’t intend to give that up now.”
When Tom led Jeanie into the department Pierce sent them straight through to the sheriff’s office in the back, where Tollville was waiting. He and Tollville had been friends once, or as close to it as the distance would allow, and Tom stood looking at the back of Tollville’s head for a long time before he finally went in and shook the man’s hand.
“It’s been a while,” Tollville said. He was sitting in the chair reserved for guests and he had turned slightly to look up at Tom where he stood by the filing cabinets and papers in the corner of the small office.
“I didn’t think they’d send you” was all Tom could think to say.
“Edna called me directly. I was wondering when she might, and to tell you the truth I’d bee
n expecting the call a day ago.”
Tom looked around the room for a place to sit. The desk in the center of the room with Kelly’s chair on one side and Tollville sitting in the other. “I doubt she’d mind,” Tollville said, raising his hand off his lap toward the chair opposite.
Looking around the office for a second, searching for something to do with Jeanie, Tom lifted the desk a little, toed the grip of Jeanie’s leash beneath the leg, and then let the desk down. When he was satisfied the desk would hold her, he sat.
Sitting across from him, Tom thought that Tollville looked much the same. Skinny with close-cropped hair and the hollow cheeks suggesting he didn’t have the time for a good meal or didn’t much care. As he used to, he wore a suit even in the heat of the late-afternoon sun coming through the windows, the motes of dust strangely milky as the sun set away in the west. The jacket he wore rumpled beneath the pits. The only change Tom could identify about him was the whiteness in the man’s hair.
“You look the same,” Tom said.
Tollville offered a weak smile. He had his hand out on a manila folder that lay flat on the desk, and he worked his fingers over it a couple times. “Edna told me you’ve been helping her out,” he said.
“That’s right,” Tom said, watching the man’s fingers dance over the folder on the desk.
“Well, even if you weren’t, I’d still want to talk with you.”
Tom looked out of the office to where Pierce sat, going through a stack of paperwork. The young deputy the only one in the department and a collection of empty desks and chairs all around him.
“Edna faxed up a copy of some prints she took off a dead man they found a few miles outside of town, sitting in a stolen Bronco.” Tollville slid the manila folder across the desk and waited for Tom to take it. “I took a helicopter down just because I thought I needed to be here.” Tollville watched Tom where he sat, his eyes jumping from the folder on the desk to Tom’s eyes. “Recognize him?”