Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  The man said, “What, you don’t want my money? Come on, now. This New York money.”

  “California sweat on it now,” Archuleta said, and rang up the cigars for Enrique.

  The woman appeared just outside the glass door. The headscarf, her arms folded. The man held both bottles up and she snatched the door open. “We goin back to Vegas tonight or next year? Tired a this country-ass place. Country-ass bitches. I rather head back to New York.”

  The man said, “You don’t pick the place.” He went sideways out the door and it closed. Her mouth moved with no sound and he prodded her in the back with the butt of one bottle, toward the van.

  Archuleta said, “You’re never here this late.”

  Lafayette and Reynaldo usually got him the cigars before they came home. He looked out into the parking lot, where the van was pulling out fast, tires slipping for a second on the sand tracked in from the alley. His sons usually sat under the pepper tree at the side of the lot, toward the back. The battered folding chairs were empty.

  “Sidney Chabert come in here tonight?” Enrique took the penny nail from his pocket and slit the plastic on the Swisher Sweets.

  Archuleta frowned and said, “You makin a joke?”

  “Why?”

  “He don’t like to come in if I’m workin. Cause of the leg.”

  “What?” Enrique put the cigarillo in his mouth, tasted the paper.

  “He burnt up my leg. Workin at the hospital. They all give him a hard time about it. But he came in here about half an hour ago and bought a Corona. Looked me in the eye and told me get him a lime out the case.”

  So Chabert was feeling good. Enrique nodded. “Your uncle retire now. The priest.”

  Archuleta nodded. “Him and my dad go fishing down at Ensenada once a month.”

  “Where he live?”

  Archuleta raised his brows. “My uncle? In one of those senior apartments where they clean and cook. But he always wants my mom to bring him enchiladas and shrimp. He’s eighty-four.”

  Enrique looked out the window again, at the entrance to the alley. “You got his address?”

  “What the hell, Mr. Antoine? He’s asleep. Late to be knockin on an old man’s door.”

  “You call him in the morning? Tell him come to Sarrat soon as he can.”

  “Everyone okay?”

  “My wife. She need to see him. She got some with her heart.”

  Archuleta wrote something on a piece of paper. Blue letters. He handed it to Enrique.

  “I ain’t got my glasses.”

  Archuleta shrugged and said, “I’ll call him in the morning.”

  Enrique said, “You see Alfonso?”

  Archuleta shook his head. “Happy not to see those little fools,” he said. Suddenly Enrique remembered his grandson saying eejit. The way the Irish boy said idiot. “Happy when they don’t play that music in the parking lot for an hour.” He bit his big pink lips and said, “You know what? The drums hurt my leg. So damn loud it bumps up against my bone and hurts.” He patted his thigh.

  THE NARROW STREETS were crowded with apartment buildings where she’d lived, each one set longways like boxcars with black railings along the sides. He parked across the street from this last one and smoked one cigarillo. No one came in or out of the cement courtyard—the windows were all closed tight and the swamp coolers humming hard. But someone lit a cigarette, and then another. Two embers like animal eyes. Spaced on the balcony.

  It was nearly 2 am. He couldn’t knock on the door of a senior retirement complex now. Marie-Claire knew that.

  What did she want?

  He moved the truck to the space under a pepper tree near the mouth of the alley. The brown van drove slowly down the dirt path, the top nearly scraping the low-hanging branches of the wild tobacco tree that arched over the fence. The woman’s arm hung out the window. But she was arguing with the driver—her face turned away.

  The dust twisted and settled, and he lit one more cigarillo. Then Enrique heard the rattle of a shopping cart. Two blocks away? The wheels grated across asphalt, and then the rattle changed in the dirt of the alley.

  Sidney. He pushed the cart toward the wild tobacco tree and stood there. Shoulders shaking. Crying. Then he scraped leaves and dirt into a pile near the fence. Trying to cover something near the wild tobacco tree.

  Beto had told him the first night, “We can smoke this.” The leaves bitter and harsh.

  Enrique pulled the .45 from the dash drawer. He aimed it out the open window.

  Drive-by. That’s what Lafayette called it. Alfonso and Jazen riding past shooting at people they didn’t even have to look in the eye.

  He got out and put the .45 in the waistband of his workpants. He crossed the street. Sidney had one hand on the cart handle and one holding the balled-up shirt like a blue cabbage.

  “That the cart?”

  Sidney’s face was smeared with wet. One drop on his bare chest. “Yeah. I left it behind the Sundown dumpster but that seemed wrong. Nowhere to put it. I can’t leave it here because it probably has my DNA or something.” He held up the shirt. “And this, too. I put it on a dead person.” He looked up at the sky like he was trying to hold in the water from his eyes.

  “What you bury?”

  “Vomit.”

  Enrique looked at the pile of dirt. “Why you sick?”

  “Cause she was dead!”

  “You sick cause you kill her.” Enrique saw a glitter on the last knuckle of the smallest finger of Sidney’s left hand. A tiny flower ring. Glorette’s. “You the one.”

  Sidney threw the shirt in the cart. “You know what? Just fuckin pop me! Yeah. Go head. My life ain’t worth shit right now anyway. Insurance for my kid if you pop me.”

  “How you know I got a gun?”

  “What—you gonna strangle me? Shit.” He threw out his arms so his chest gleamed. “Go head. Cap me. Pop me. Whatever.”

  Enrique felt the 45 handle hard against his skin. He couldn’t have her so he killed her. Crying. The one burnt them bodies in the hospital.

  Sidney walked toward him. “Do it.”

  Enrique turned away from the eyes blurred and huge with tears. The name in green letters on his chest. A daughter. Sidney wasn’t going anywhere. He must not have a car. The shopping cart glinted in the streetlight. He had to live close by.

  Maybe he’d feel so guilty he’d go home and kill himself. Then Enrique wouldn’t have to do it.

  When he turned, a pepper branch stroked his face like hair and he flung it out of the way. He got back into the cab without looking to see where Sidney went, or whether he stayed there by the cart.

  EVERY TIME HE left the Westside, and the city behind, the freeway underpasses and exhaust and trash in the vacant lots, every time he steered the truck onto La Reina Road, he paused to smell the water.

  The scent of warm silver running down the canal. His water and Archuleta’s.

  He drove slowly through the Washington navels through his gate. His daughter-in-law’s car parked in the yard now. He unscrewed the hose and lay it silently in the truckbed. He didn’t want to see his wife, or Glorette, or anyone else.

  He needed to look for Alfonso at the box houses. And there would be an extra hose at the shed. Enrique had to soak the ground at the cemetery. It had been over a hundred for ten days. It would be 112 tomorrow.

  The brilliant white sheets wrapped around her body. The two dirty flowered sheets he and Beto had wound around Atwater, once he was dead. Before they buried him and built the rock-walled shed in a square above his body and then poured a cement floor.

  Enrique had kept tools and spare engine parts and orange crates there for years, just beside the stone houses where the Italians used to make boxes with the labels of La Reina, a beautiful olive-skinned woman with a crown of black braids, holding an orange in her hand as if it were that round thing a queen held when she sat on her throne.

  It was where Bettina had been living for the past six months, ever since Enrique told her
she had to move from the house next door to Gustave. She kept trash in the yard, and Enrique had seen raccoons, ants, and two coyotes in her yard. Her house was filthy, her boys sleeping all day and not going to school, and truant officers or social workers would come onto his place. Just like they had in the seventies when her mother Claudine started drinking. He couldn’t have police come down that gravel road again. Never.

  Bettina had shouted, “Like this a fuckin kingdom and you the king.”

  The three boxmakers’ houses had been built back in 1900, at the eastern edge of the navel acreage. He parked in the clearing. On the cement slab of the open shed, someone had parked a white golf cart with the name Webster painted on the side.

  It was 3 am now, and the blue-green light of the TV filled the small window like swaying ocean water. One trashcan by the front door had a white plastic bag spilling out chicken bones scattered by animals, and the other was full of crushed beer cans. Her two young boys recycled—they brought him the cans, and he gave them ten or fifteen dollars, because she never bought them shoes.

  He banged on the door. He could see her sleeping on the couch. She rose slowly, her shoulders huge and pink as hams in the black tank top. “What?” she said, her voice thick.

  “Alfonso here?” he said.

  “No. I ain’t seen him for two, three days. What he do?”

  “That for you to know,” Enrique said, peering past her. No man on the couch with her. Only one other room in the house, where the boys slept. “You the maman.”

  “He grown,” she said, half-closing the door.

  He put his hand against it and pushed. “You golf now?”

  She peered out at the golf cart on the cement slab. “I ain’t seen that, neither.” She shrugged. “Maybe Alfonso hang out with Tiger Woods.”

  He let her close the door. He walked over to the shed. The faucet dry.

  The four walls built from hundreds of stones Enrique and Beto had pulled from alongside the Santa Ana River for nearly a year. They had piled up the stones in the eucalyptus windbreak while they decided how to kill Atwater.

  He uncoiled the dusty black hose. Bettina never watered anything. He and Beto had walked back and forth from the river to the trees, and then, when the body was wrapped in two sheets—that’s all Atwater deserved, two old sheets with faded flowers—they had to soak the ground. It was August back then, too. August 8, 1959. No hose. Just them filling buckets of water from the irrigation pumps and walking back and forth to pour it slowly into the shallow hole they’d scratched. Wet the soil and dig some more, all night.

  Beto was Indian. 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 sharpened tools in the late summer. He slept in camps he made along the river, in places he’d known since he was a child.

  After they poured this cement slab, Beto left for a year. When he came back, it was different. He said, “You know he was wrong, but you’re wrong, too.”

  Enrique bent to look inside the golf cart. It was parked over Atwater’s body, which would be bones now, five feet down. In the ignition was a tiny key.

  THE CEMETERY AND old adobe chapel were up on the rise between his grove and Archuleta’s. Enrique took the coiled hoses from the truckbed and attached them to the one at the faucet near the chapel. Back when the land was divided and the trees planted, the chapel was built and blessed by Archuletas, the only ones who lived along the river until Northcutt.

  But no one had come for a Mass here since Anjolie died five years ago. Then the last priest retired, and Archuleta’s uncle had been sent to tell them he could visit the chapel and cemetery only if they requested at the diocese, because there weren’t enough priests to go around.

  “No young men want to give up everything,” Father Archuleta said, cheerfully, his round brown face smooth as a loquat seed, his soft hands like grubs when he took Enrique’s fingers in his. “Not anymore.”

  When the four hoses were attached, he chose the rectangle of earth five feet from Anjolie’s grave. The headstone read Anjolie Marie Picard. Beloved Wife & Mother.

  Enrique remembered her hiding in the wooden armoire from Mr. McQuine.

  He laid the trickle of water in the center of where they would bury Glorette. The drops slid out and remained whole on the hard ground for long moments. Like mercury. Then they disappeared. The drip had to be perfect or the water would run away.

  All those years in Louisiana, on the oyster boats, hauling in the load scraped up from the bottom with the tongs, sorting through with the cudgel and cracking the oysters apart, he had to keep throwing water from the deck.

  When he worked the canefields for Mr. McQuine, storms filled every ditch. He and Gustave had to open gates to Bayou Sarrat to keep the young cane from drowning.

  But here—he paid for the water, moved it around carefully like molten money, and even in winter, the rain was hardly ever enough.

  He needed picks and shovels.

  THE TOOLSHED WAS in the eucalyptus windbreak near the river. A narrow dirt road ran from the chapel to the acreage along the Santa Ana River. A mockingbird called from the trees, just like years ago. There was always one male here, and one in the pecan trees behind Gustave’s house. They always started after midnight.

  Back when he and Beto were digging, two mockingbirds fought over their territory by singing, each song more elaborate and frenzied than the next. When he stopped to rest, his hands bloody from carrying the rocks, Enrique could hear the patterns in the songs. The same sounds over and over.

  AFTER THEY LET him out, when the war was over, he’d walked from Camp Anza to the river, and then spent his two leave days studying the orange groves that grew on the east side. The other soldiers had gone to Los Angeles. He’d told them to drop him off at the edge of Rio Seco.

  The Santa Ana was so shallow and clear that he waded across it, kept on through the sandy earth past the river, the willows that smelled medicinal, and came to the eucalyptus windbreak all along the citrus. The oranges were bigger than the satsumas he’d worked in Louisiana. There was no fence. He wandered, then slept in a camp by a hollow downed cottonwood.

  Beto came in the morning, holding a knife by his leg. Enrique put up his hands.

  They talked all day, in the heat. Beto worked during harvest in Northcutt’s groves. When Northcutt hired Enrique, he commented on his name, asked if he was born in Mexico, and Enrique shook his head. “America,” he said.

  He learned to eat burritos for breakfast with the other grove workers in the small shotgun houses. After five years, Northcutt decided to retire back in Massachusetts, and he hired Atwater, who’d come to him for a job after they fought together in Italy. Atwater would manage the place until he could sell it.

  Atwater emptied the grove houses and said he had to clean out the Mexican dirt.

  “The barn. You boys can sleep there til I decide what to do with this place. I might paint them grove houses and call some people I know in El Dorado. Arkansas got good workers. Not like Mexicans. And niggers—not so many niggers here. That’s why I like it. I think I’m gonna stay here so I ain’t gotta see so many niggers. We got pine lumber in El Dorado. I like these here trees you ain’t gotta fell.”

  It was winter. Every night Atwater sat up on the porch of Northcutt’s white house and drank beer. He’d call Beto and Enrique up to work on his truck, and words spooled out of his mouth with steam.

  “Yeah, I’d sell to a Mexican before I’d sell to a nigger. Maybe the right Mexican. Cause a Mexican, maybe he used to live here before all them wars. Least he got some kinda claim on the place even if he’s so lazy he’d barely grow enough oranges to feed all his relatives. But that’s better than a nigger. A nigger got no claim at all. Shoulda sent ever last one of them back to Africa soon’s it was done. They got no claim her
e. Rather run a place into the ground than work it. Seen it happen over and over in Arkansas—let a nigger work a place and they run it down so nobody ever want to live there again. Wouldn’t be enough to clean it. Have to burn the damn house down.”

  He threw another beer can into the barrel he kept off the porch.

  “Beto, you claim you’re a Indian. Then you wouldn’t want no place like this, right? Cause a Indian like to move around. Go from pow-wow to pow-wow.”

  In the riverbed, Beto had shown Enrique the straight stems of arrow-root where his father had taught him to make arrow shafts. Wild tobacco. Gourd for making soap. Jimsonweed—that made men crazy.

  “We could get him to drink it—make him see visions and maybe knock him out, but he might shoot us. He got that 45. He might think we’re ghosts.”

  IT WAS 4 am. For the first time in seventy-two years—since the moments after the soldiers shot his mother and Gustave caught him by the face, fingers hooked behind Enrique’s ears, and pulled him down to hide—he didn’t want to sit with Gustave.

  His mother’s body floating down the swollen Mississippi River, her back to the sky, her blouse rising with air inside like a blister. The baby tucked inside her front, drowning underneath her.

  She was buried nowhere. She could have ended on a snag in the river’s edge, with all the wood and broken houses and other dead animals—horses and cows and pigs. He hadn’t been able to think of that for years. Not until he was in a forest in France, sitting next to the body of the German, which would freeze and then disappear under snow. How quickly would the German rot in spring before someone found him?

  Had his mother decomposed with the other animals, until their flesh was soft enough to be eaten by the fish and birds?

  Had she and the baby floated down the center of the river for miles, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and sunk to the bottom where pirates and treasure lay? The treasure and bones his aunt told him about, from Lafitte?

  The birds were finished. Enrique smelled the damp earth from where he’d irrigated earlier. Not a love song, his own daughter Fantine had told Glorette, when they were small, sitting in this truck cab with him one night when they’d come out to get tools. He’s not telling the other birds he loves them. He’s telling them this is his territory and they better not come in. That’s what my science teacher said. You should have come to class.