Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  They drove down the dirt road. At the wooden tables near the open barn door, his sons waited. The shirtless man was Sidney Chabert. Same age as Lafayette. His arms gone soft, his navel a deep darker hole in his belly when he squatted in front of Gustave to apologize, to say he hadn’t done it. Then he walked away.

  Maybe he had. He had the look of love, and years of sadness around his eyebrows. One of those downturn-mouth, down-slant-eyes young men.

  Could be him. He’d never had her.

  You act like God before, his wife had said. Maybe Chabert’s son had acted like God.

  Enrique had the .45 in the dash drawer. He had the rifle in the truckbed, in the toolbox.

  But they picked Chabert up on the road outside the gate, because Gustave needed him to point out the apartment. He wanted his grandson.

  ***

  THE ALLEY WAS a narrow dusty lane, almost like a tunnel in places from the pepper trees and bushes. Enrique drove past slowly. This wasn’t like hunting McQuine, where he’d known every place the man drank. It wasn’t like Atwater, where he had months to think while Atwater taunted him.

  No shopping cart. No one walking. Glorette’s tall friend—with the ruined face—was nowhere. He’d have to find her, too. Unless whoever had killed Glorette had come back for her.

  The apartment was Jacaranda Gardens, but only three palm trees stood dusty in the courtyard. No garden. Gustave brought her son down the apartment stairs. The boy with hair in those little twists. Sticking up from his head like when Lafayette’s boy drew pictures of the sun with rays coming out.

  Victor. He climbed into the truckbed and sat with his back against the cab. A bag at his feet. Gustave had told him nothing yet. Enrique could tell. Enrique said to him, “You know Sidney?”

  “Some dude work at the video store?”

  “He ever with your maman?”

  Victor frowned. “No. Why? She at the hospital again?”

  Gustave said, “She get sick, and he call us. We take her home.”

  Victor said, “How sick?”

  “She bad off. She okay when she leave you tonight?”

  “I wasn’t home. I was checking out registration for city college.”

  Enrique said, “Where Alfonso?”

  Victor squinted up at him and said, “How would I know?”

  Enrique knew he couldn’t press the boy, that they needed to get back to Sarrat, but the alley was only two blocks away, and men still walking, and Alfonso had to have seen something. He rode with the boy who sold drugs at the Launderland on the corner.

  “He your cousin,” Enrique said.

  Victor leaned his head back against the cab’s window and looked up at the sky. “Sorry, Uncle Enrique. Even in the complicated arcane way we identify family, he’s not really my cousin. Alfonso’s pops and Clarette are brother and sister, so that makes them related to Lafayette and Reynaldo. But my moms? Nope. And whoever the motherfucker was responsible for my genetics—he definitely isn’t hanging around here for Alfonso to identify as someone who might want to buy rock. So let’s just go.”

  He spoke like a professor, someone just visiting with them. Getting a ride to a dinner.

  “I’ma find that knucklehead,” Reynaldo said, getting in the truckbed.

  Victor shrugged and closed his eyes against the streetlight above him.

  VICTOR DIDN’T CRY. He didn’t kneel down and hug his mother, or touch her. He slid down onto the floor and sat with his back to the couch, her ribs just behind his head, and with his forearms on his knees, rested there with his eyes closed.

  Marie-Claire must have washed the smell from Glorette. Somehow Glorette smelled like his wife. She was lying stiff, half on her side, her legs covered with a blanket.

  “You hungry?” Marie-Claire said to Victor. He didn’t open his eyes or his mouth.

  Enrique looked at Victor’s shoes, the fat white ladder of the laces. It was as if the boy had sat there a hundred times, while his mother slept oblivious on a couch just behind him, maybe in the morning before school, just after he’d tied his shoes.

  He was orphelin now. No mother, never a father. Mo tou soule, Enrique wanted to say to him. You seventeen. I was orphelin when I turn four, me. Gustave seven. We tou soule. No one. Seventeen—that year I kill the first one.

  Victor’s hands and arms were unmarked. No cane scars. No fingers missing. But when he turned his wrist, Enrique saw words written in ink all over his palm.

  Gustave whispered to Victor, “She okay when we go. She must just get tire. Her heart.”

  Enrique stood up, and Gustave moved, too. But Victor said without opening his eyes, “Can you just chill for a minute, Grandpère?”

  Gustave sat in the wing chair facing the couch. Marie-Claire met Enrique’s eyes. The kitchen.

  When he stood at the sink to pour one more cup of coffee, she put her hand on his and pushed it to the old white-enameled drainboard. She kept her voice down. “You can’t leave her here.”

  “Can’t take her nowhere else. They find her in a basket.”

  She looked at his face. He glanced out the window at the eight small grove houses he’d cleaned and painted all those years ago, before he went to get her and the other girls. “You think we gon bury her here? Up there by her maman? We can’t just bury her. We all get arrested. Probably ten law we break. Move a body, don’t call police. You move a car after you hit somebody, they take you in.”

  He said, “All that done now. The first one move the body, him, and they bring her here. Can’t put her back, no.” He looked at his wife’s bare heels, the edge of dry skin, in her slippers.

  He said, “You call police, they find something in the barn. They find Bettina house full of dirt, take her boys away. They find Alfonso, he have a gun, sure.”

  Marie-Claire washed her hands at the sink and put water on her neck and her shoulders, wetting the edge of her nightdress. Then she said, “You ain’t God.”

  “Non. C’est vrai I ain’t God.” And I ain’t the other, he thought. Mo tou soule. What he’d chanted to himself when he walked miles through the snow and trees in France. When he walked miles along the Mississippi after he’d pushed the New Orleans man into the river. Mo tou soule. Me, I’m all alone.

  Except when he was with Gustave. Gustave didn’t go to war; Gustave worked the sugarcane and orange groves back in Louisiana. Something with his heart. Something they heard.

  “You act like God before,” she said. Her nostrils widened, the only sign she was angry. Her lips always curved the same—she didn’t even know how much breath she needed when she wanted to fight, but it had always been easy for him to see. “Back then.”

  She meant back when he killed McQuine. She didn’t know about the others.

  McQuine had raped three girls. He said Marie-Claire was next—told Enrique that, smiling, his fat straining at the white shirt under his tie, scalp pink where his hair was combed back in furrows.

  “God say eye for eye. He don’t do that, but they say he say it. I ain’t God. I do what Gustave want.”

  She looked down the hallway, and then Gustave came to the kitchen. Marie-Claire poured him a small white cup of coffee. He held it for a moment and then said in French, “All they do, cut her up. He ain’t need to see that. His maman cut up.”

  Enrique waited. He felt in his pocket for the pack of Swisher Sweets, but it was empty.

  Gustave drank the rest of the coffee. He said, “I take the boy home.”

  Back in the front room, Victor’s head had sunk onto his knees, and his arms covered the back of his neck. Gustave whispered to him, lifted him up by the elbow, and took him across the street. He would sleep in the bed that used to be his mother’s.

  Then Marie-Claire knelt beside the couch and said, “You go get Archuleta.”

  “Ramon?”

  She shook her head. “The other one.”

  “You think Archuleta do this?” Enrique looked at the two tiny half-moon cuts on Glorette’s collarbone.

  She
twisted her neck and frowned up at him, her face lifted like a sunflower planted in the wrong place. “The uncle. The priest.”

  He nodded. “I get him in the morning.”

  “You find him now,” she said, voice low and vicious. “She die without a blessing. In this heat—we have to make the vigil tomorrow, and bury after that.” She faced him, her arms folded in that shelf below her breasts. “You ain’t God. Just sometime you think so.”

  “The priest retire now.” Then he said, “Mais oui, you right. I get him.”

  ***

  HIS SONS HAD gone down to the barn to drink beer and wait. He didn’t want them to ride back to Palm Avenue. If they found out one of the men in the alley had killed her, Reynaldo would try and beat him to death right there. If it was over drugs, if one of the Navigator boys was angry with Glorette, Alfonso was the one with the gun. He had to know who’d done it.

  They’d turned on the floodlights that hung from the ramada. Beto had helped him build the ramada—wooden structure like a scaffold, and every year a new palm-frond roof. He’d been born up the river, in the Cahuilla village along the bluffs of the river north of here. His father and uncles had dug most of the canals that brought the water to the groves. After they died or were chased off the land and ended up back in the desert, Beto worked day labor in the groves or trimmed trees in the winter. He slept in camps he made along the river, in places he’d known since he was a child.

  Under the ramada, they worked on the trucks and tractors in the summer, cleaned guns and sharpened tools on the wooden tables.

  The fringes of palm fronds glowed silver. “We need the coffin,” Enrique told Lafayette. “Bury tomorrow night.”

  “What? You crazy?” Reynaldo said. “You can’t be buryin people without—”

  Lafayette interrupted him. “Without what? Sidney’s right, man. You gon call Law & Order Rio Seco? Find out how many fools done been with her tonight?”

  But Reynaldo didn’t back down. He paced in the dirt, his boots lifting dust that hung in the light. “Cause if they find out she died from smokin some bad rock, ain’t nobody killed her. Then ain’t no need for us to hunt no hardhead.”

  Enrique said, “She don’t put herself in a basket, no.”

  “Why not?” Reynaldo said. “How you know she ain’t tired and climbed in there to take a nap?”

  Lafayette shook his head. “In them heels? You can’t get in no basket. Sidney said look like somebody put her in there.”

  “Sidney might be the fool need to get got himself.” Reynaldo still pacing.

  Enrique reached into his shirt pocket for Swisher Sweets. But he’d smoked the last cigarillo while walking the irrigation. He said, “You measure the wood, and I go get the priest.”

  “Oh, cause you want to do it yourself, right?” Lafayette fixed him with a stare like his mother’s.

  “Your maman tell me get the priest.”

  “That’s all—just bury her, and it’s all cool. Nothin else.”

  “Can’t bury with no coffin. You and Reynaldo know how to cut the wood, make it nice. You work on all them house.”

  “Build a damn coffin in the barn,” Reynaldo grumbled. “Like Twilight Zone”

  But then Lafayette said, “You remember we watched that thing on TV where they were up in the mountains, and they just put the body up on a shelf? Vultures and shit, man. And the Indians used to leave bodies up in trees, cause the ground was frozen. They couldn’t bury nobody til it thawed.”

  Reynaldo said, “Ain’t frozen here. So damn hot and dry the ground like a brick. You can’t dig no hole tomorrow.”

  Enrique said without thinking, “I done it before.”

  Reynaldo cocked his head.

  Enrique threw the empty cigar packet into the barrel by the door. “Bury a dog, me, before you was born. Up on that hill. In August.”

  “A dog.”

  “Oui. A dog.”

  He’d buried Atwater in August. Near the stone houses.

  Lafayette looked at his father. “You ain’t never let us have a dog. Cause of coyotes.” He ran his tongue over his teeth and sat at the wooden table. “You tryin to find out who did it. And we up here with the body.”

  “You bring her here,” Enrique said to his son.

  Lafayette shook his head. “Bettina was right. You act like this a kingdom.”

  Act like he a king and this his damn kingdom, she shouted when Enrique told her she had to move out of her grove house. Ain’t no fuckin king.

  Lafayette stared right into Enrique’s eyes. Near forty. His cheeks heavier than Enrique’s would ever be, because he ate meat all the time. Chicken and pig. Hamburgers after his football games, when he was young. Meat and football and beer. His arms still muscled, twice the size of his father’s. “What if the cops show up out here?”

  Enrique kept his voice the same as always. He felt like he was talking to Beto, all those years ago. A body. “Who tell where we put her? She need to be bury up there by her maman. Police don’t care. They call her—”

  She was a whore. They would say a different word. They wouldn’t know Fantine had confessed to Marie-Claire one night that Glorette had fallen in love, and the love was like pure rum lit up—purple flames when you threw it into a campfire down by the river. Marie-Claire had told him in the dark of their bedroom, “Fantine say she never feel like that. She cry and cry, they been drinkin down there with them boy, and no one ever love her like that. Cause Glorette look like she do. And this musician—play the flute and the drum—he a grown man. Twenty-two. He done left her behind. And Glorette havin a baby.”

  “I guess you right,” Reynaldo said, finally. He walked over to the far end of the barn, past the old harrows and a few smudge pots. Wood was stacked on shelves against the wall. Douglas fir and pine, from when they’d had to saw boards to replace the wood floors in two of the grove houses and lay a new floor for Marie-Claire’s kitchen ten years ago.

  Reynaldo turned and said, “No human involved. I heard some cops say it. We were at Sundown and they talked about some Mexican guy got run over. No papers. They called it NHI. No big deal.”

  LA REINA AVENUE ran along Archuleta’s grove, then his, and then crossed the arroyo and headed into the city. The only way to get out to his place. A thousand times he’d driven this road.

  He turned onto Palm Avenue, the four-lane that cut through Rio Seco, and worked his way back toward the alley. Two Mexican women sat hunched at a bus stop and stood when they saw the truck. Their hair was dyed the dark red of pomegranate husk, and one was missing teeth on the left side. They wore sports bras, like Glorette, and tiny skirts.

  He drove very slowly past the Launderland. The blue Navigator was parked in one of the five spaces before the front door. A Mexican woman carried out two baskets of laundry—clean and folded, one piled atop the other like a tower that reached above her face. She put them in the back seat of a little Corolla and drove away.

  When he circled around again, Jazen was standing, arms folded, leaning agains the door, staring at Enrique stone-faced. He was going to fat, his huge white t-shirt with a dark shadow at the waist where his belly touched the cloth; he had always been loud, bully voice constant when Enrique saw him with Alfonso at the liquor store or anywhere else, the kind of boy who never worried his loudness would scare away his food or bring someone to where he hid. Because he always had Alfonso to watch, from the passenger seat.

  But not now. Jazen was alone. He kept his eyes cool, chin high, and Enrique knew he must have called for a replacement. Alfonso was hiding somewhere. After a few more minutes, a slight dark boy, maybe sixteen, slid out from the other side of the parking lot and got into the Navigator. Jazen tilted his head at Enrique, and they drove away.

  He didn’t follow them. Jazen wouldn’t have killed Glorette—she bought drugs from him. Alfonso wouldn’t have shot his cousin. But he must be hiding because he knew who’d touched her.

  The women probably walked the same route every night, but who knew
where the men took them if they got into a car. He could have killed her in a car and then put her in the shopping cart. The alley was still empty. The man could be cruising around, still looking for another one, or wondering where the body went.

  His watch said 1:16. Archuleta.

  There were three cars in the parking lot at Sundown Liquor. Two old Japanese cars—Corolla and a Honda—with rough-looking men in their fifties drinking paper-bag beer. They were talking to each other out the open windows. They both glanced up at him and then went back to saying something about the Raiders. The other vehicle was a brown van parked in the far corner, with a woman sitting in the passenger seat, looking out the window so he could see only the back of her head. She wore a red scarf with tails hanging soft on her wide square neck.

  Archuleta sat in his special chair at the counter. He’d bought Sundown Liquor twenty years ago; he lost his left leg to diabetes about ten years ago, and the stump ended halfway up a thigh massive as sewer pipe. He was about fifty now, with his belly and chest huge behind the Cuban-style white shirt, his beard going gray. Enrique knew he had a shotgun under the counter.

  “You out late,” he said to Enrique. But his eyes were on the man over at the cold cases.

  “Water all them tree,” Enrique said, knowing Archuleta knew he was lying. “See I’m out them cigar.”

  Archuleta reached into the case before him and got out a pack of Swisher Sweets. He glanced at the other man again, and Enrique moved his own eyes. Dark skin, square black goatee like a new paintbrush on his chin, and slanted eyes. He brought two cold bottles of malt liquor to the counter and lifted his chin at Enrique. “You done, Pops?”

  Archuleta swept the cigars to the side and rang up the bottles. He didn’t speak. The man gave him a twenty, and Archuleta put the change on the scarred black Formica counter. “Hot like fuckin Vegas out here,” the man said, holding a bottle in each hand like bowling pins. “But no lights and no goddamn money.”

  Archuleta said, “Three hour drive get you back to Vegas.”