“Kitchen. She was one of the ones that sailed through the loyalty test, and in the time since, she’s been a model gavilán. I think he was even considering moving her up to top corps. So he didn’t hesitate when she asked for a meeting. Christ, he even sent me to make coffee after she arrived,” he says.
“She must have found a way to unlock the deckside door so the others could get in. As soon as the commotion started I cracked the pocket doors and started shooting. She dragged him out of the fray, out of my sightline. I thought it was a protective move ….”
He falters, then resumes his expressionless narration. “I think she’s a late recruit to this, not part of the original ambush. Not that it matters. There’s still a driver outside in the gavilán limo they used. He, or she, is Remi’s and Ana’s business to finish. Got it? Now go.”
But even when I’m moving again, I’m not done asking.
“Did Toño kill Celia, or did you?”
“I took her out. Just as I was the one who brought her to the gavilanes in the first place,” I hear misery in his voice.
“Was he still alive when you killed her? Did he see it?”
“He knew,” he says.
“Good.” My voice is so cold it makes his head jerk back.
His limo is parked on the street just behind the privacy fence. I throw my duffle in the back seat then myself in after it. Neto starts the limo as soon as he’s inside and we’re tearing through the streets of Hastings. I hear him make a call, and then a low and urgent conversation in Spanish, a click, silence.
Hawks are creatures of day, wolves nocturnal. Hawks live from the plummet to earth, wolves from the leap from it. There is no commonality to these predators. But beneath the skin, where Toño’s and my souls resided and our hearts beat, we were mated for life. I know whatever my life now brings it’ll be nothing to what I’ve lost.
“What’s going to happen to Remi and the others?” I ask.
“If the gavilán in the car gets away, he’ll disappear or come after us, rogue or with others. He’s probably in league with another gang. I didn’t stop to check ink, but Remi and Ana will. As of this moment I only count those two gavilanes as loyal. They’ll dispose of the bodies, clean the house of any gavilán traces, that’s it,” he answers through the open partition. “Then they’re out of there. We’re broken. The gavilanes are nothing without Toño.”
“Do you have instaskin, money, whatever you need to keep going?” I ask.
“Didn’t you hear me, America? I have nothing now. I am nothing.”
“Don’t call me America. Anything else, but never that, understand?”
We ride in silence for a while.
“Where are we going?”
“The place I know he’d want me to take you,” he says.
Midway to Smithville I manage to climb through the partition to the front seat. He looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
“You loved him?” I ask once I’ve settled and buckled myself in.
“Of course I loved him. He was my blood. And my best friend. And the only person in world I could completely trust.”
“Not the only one,” I say.
I peel one of his hands off the steering wheel and put it on the small round belly only Toño and I knew about.
“Christ,” he says as he wrenches his hand away and back onto the steering wheel. He doesn’t say anything else. I watch the tears leak out of his eyes and roll down his cheeks unchecked. They catch the glint of the stars.
“He knew?” he asks finally.
“Yes. He was happy.”
“It makes it worse,” he says after a moment.
“Not for me,” I say. I keep my hands on my stomach, a thin veil of skin and muscle the only barrier between me and the tiny heart beating steady beneath it.
After a long time Neto moves his hand off the steering wheel again and places it on my belly. I cover his hand with both of mine.
“Stay in Smithville,” I say. “Help me raise him to be a Gavilán. Be his uncle. Or second cousin. Or whatever the actual blood relationship is.”
“Family is family,” he gives me a bitter smile.
He never does give me an answer about staying, but when we pull into the trailer park and the lights go on in my parents’ house, he follows me in the door.
Del: Sgraffitto
1.
I’m at the Alphabet having a drink with my friend Kurt. It’s a rare thing these days. I don’t much like coming down off the hill.
He’s bartending tonight, and the bar is quiet. None of the Blandon U. kids are back yet, which means my friend has a chance to actually sit for a spell. But he doesn’t. He leans against the inside of the bar, keeping an eye on Hoots who looks like he might decide to spew. Any second now. On the other end of the bar, thank God, since I’ve already spent two hours at the laundromat this week.
Kurt and I don’t actually talk much. Never have. Less now that people think I’ve gone loco. Not that Kurt doesn’t think so too, it’s just that in his book friendship means hanging through the crazy patches.
Everyone knows your business in Smithville. Hell, two hours after I got the divorce papers to sign I had people stopping me in the streets to express their sympathies. I made the mistake of opening the envelope in the post-office as soon as I had signed for it. Marceline Yeadon, the postmistress for the past centennial or so, must have broken the news to every person who walked through the door. Maybe she left notes for the mail carriers as well.
But it isn’t the impending divorce that’s put me in my current person-to-be-leary-of status. It wasn’t my show at the small Smithville art gallery, either, though that may have given the rumors a nudge. No, it was Ray’s funeral that convinced people I’d lost it. My decision to sit with the inks, specifically. Tolerance Smithvillians understood, closeness … not so much.
It was before the inkatorium was built, though talk of a big build had already started circulating. Nearly everyone in town turned out on that sunny Tuesday. First Presbyterian hadn’t seen a funeral quite so well attended since the time of the town fathers.
Chato and the crew showed up in suits they had purchased from the thrift shop for the occasion. They were scrubbed and brillantined into shades of soft brown and black patent, and sat in the back two pews of the church. When I arrived the service had already started and all the real Smithvillians had taken care to leave me choice empty pew spots up front. I sat next to Chato. He’s pretty stoic but on that day he kept wiping his eyes and it felt good to know he’d be missing Ray with the same quasi-filial ache I was feeling.
Later I drove the inks to the cemetery for the interment – most of them fit themselves in the open back of my pick-up as if we were all going to a carpet job – and they insisted on placing plastic rosaries and prayer cards on the casket. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pastor Lennox so alarmed.
I inherited everything: business, properties, the whole mini empire. After probate it amounted to a tidy sum. More if I had sold the business then, while we were making money hand over fist. But I kept it going for as long as I could. In truth, Chato and Chema were the only people I could stand being around for any length of time. If I lost them, I’d surely have turned into a hermit like French Louie up in the Adirondacks. The inks were more than coworkers. More than friends. They were the erratics who’d slid into this moraine and found that a brother had been deposited here before them.
“I’m drunker than five men,” Hoots says at my shoulder. He’s found his way here without my noticing; I’ve been too enmeshed in thinking about the past to smell the present and run.
“Congratulations,” I say.
“Hey, you still have those apartments up on Jackson Road?” Hoots leans way too close to my face when he asks it.
“Sold them soon after I closed the carpeting business,” I say, edging away while I glance up at the game playing silently on the bar’s TV screen. “Nobody wanted to rent after they found out Ray had housed the temporary inks there.”
“People get weird when they hear about diseases,” Kurt puts in.
“None of the crew was sick,” I say. “But they probably ended up at the inkatorium anyway.”
“I don’t think so,” Hoots says. “I’ve got a friend up there and she says there aren’t any locals.”
“You sure she can tell one ink from another?” I say.
There’s so much contempt in my words, Kurt gives me a warning look.
“Hey, man, I think it might be time to head home,” he says to Hoots.
“Yessh.” Hoots drains his glass, then turns around and starts on his way to the door.
Kurt scoots down the bar after Hoots to make sure he gets out the door without incident. When he comes back, he’s shaking his head. “You know, one time he fell into a snow bank after leaving here and he was so drunk he couldn’t get up out of it. If he hadn’t been fished out by a couple of college kids we might have found him frozen there the next morning. Hootsicle.”
“What makes a man turn into that?”
Kurt gives me a look. “What you’re doing.”
I look down at my drink. I’ve developed a taste for shots of Bacardi 151, nice and neat. “I don’t drink that much.”
“Naw, man, but you’re leaking life. Just like Hoots.”
“Since when did you major in philosophy?”
“Since never. But I’ve got eyes.”
“I’m fine.”
He takes a pull on his beer. When he’s bartending he nurses one glass all night. “So what did happen to the inks from your crew?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Ah yeah.” He knows I’m lying, but he’s too good a friend to call me on it.
When the inkatorium opened Chato and Chema had come up to my cabin to say goodbye. They saw what it meant before I did. No inks were going to be working and walking the streets of Smithville anymore.
I think we drank a lot that night. I’m pretty sure I was the one who came up with the plan. Then again, maybe I asked the land itself and it said yes in that molten, charismatic tongue I’ve been given to decipher.
They’re living in my woods. In the canvas outfitter tents I’ve purchased from Cabela’s with Roy’s pocket change. The homesites are permanent as far as I’m concerned, and by some weird and incomprehensible ink communication system, more of them find their way to us each week. To put down stakes on these hidden 200 acres of Smithville that map the shape of my heart.
Believe it or not, I’m happy. How can I not be? For the first time in years, my heart is full.
* * *
Harper is a piece of work. A lot of the other farmers criticize the condition of his barnyard. The way his cows’ hooves curl up into elf shoes because he neglects to trim them, or the way his heifers’ flanks cake with manure soup after rain has made his ponds overflow.
“I think you better get down to my farm,” he tells me when we chance upon each other at the grocery store after I leave the Alphabet. Everyone else has moved to a different register because, let’s face it, he smells of cow shit.
“Yeah? Why’s that?” I ask.
“I need to talk to you about what’s straying from your property onto mine,” he says, eyes hard and fanatical.
He’s my neighbor, but not who I would have chosen to live next to.
“Problem?” I say.
“You might call it that.”
It’s been a month of problems already. Everyone’s on edge from the doings downstate: the mobs, the state of emergency, the fallout from the fires. And up here we’ve gotten so fed up with the roadblocks – which haven’t produced a single ink arrest, only drug and alcohol-related ones – that we’ve started calling them ‘Sweeney’s Cash Cows’.
Though they’re careful to stay within the confines of our boreal realm unless they’re fully instaskinned, I wonder whether my ink enclave has been discovered and the meeting I arrange with Harper is to be a ransoming. He’s always hurting for money, maybe we’re talking payment for silence.
I arrive at his unkempt barn around sundown. I wait while he hooks his cows to the milking machines and motions at the kid who’s helping him to complete the task, then I follow him into the farmhouse.
“Sit,” he says, waving at a kitchen chair painted in a chippy, faded yellow.
He sets a water kettle on the stove, then turns to stare at me.
“They say you’ve got some hidden ink in your background,” he says.
“Nope. Skin.” It’s a term I hate, but no matter. It’s what Smithville folk always called my grandmother, even though she had far more French ancestry than Black Seminole.
“I knew your grandma and grandpap, you know.”
“I’ve heard.”
“She was a good woman, no matter her blood.”
Maybe because of her blood. But I don’t say it.
“Pretty, too. In her way. Lots of men envied your grandpap.”
“We reminiscing, Harper?”
“No.” He takes the kettle off, pours water into a pot with two teabags. He watches it turn dark, I wait.
“I think I got something belongs to you,” he says finally.
“Doubtful. I haven’t misplaced anything.”
“Thing is, even if it isn’t yours, I don’t think anyone but you would want it.”
“What is it?”
He doesn’t answer. After pouring me a cup, he ducks out of the kitchen.
I debate whether to follow him.
When he comes back, he’s got a folded paper in his hands.
He looks at me. “You got some people living on your land who shouldn’t be.”
“And if I did?”
“It’s nothing to me,” he says. “I believe in live and let live.”
“Admirable.”
He cocks his head and looks as if he’s trying to figure whether I’m making fun of him. He must decide not because he hands me the paper. When I unfold it I see the front cover of the exhibition notes from my art show. For a moment my disbelief that he’d go to an art show battles with curiosity about the gallery staff’s reaction when they saw him there. Or smelled him.
“I saw your pictures,” he says.
“And, what’d you think?”
“Didn’t know what to think,” he says. “But the thing is, I have a really good memory for faces.”
“Yeah?”
“And, see,” he says, “I found one of your paintings sleeping between some bales of my heifers’ hay this morning.”
“What?”
“In my barn. Asleep.” He sounds as if he’s trying to explain to someone with mental retardation. “One of yours. You know, marked.”
He ducks out of the kitchen again. This time he comes back with a person in tow. He’s leading her by her wrist. It’s blue with lines. In front of her, and behind – as the wake left by a ship cutting through heavy waters – a spray of tiny golden bees.
She doesn’t look up through the veil of heavy blond hair.
“What do you want, Harper?” I ask. My voice is strained beyond recognition.
“Nothing,” he says.
“Why not?” I edge closer to her. After a few seconds I reach for her hand. I don’t remember it being this small. In my memory she lives grander, bigger.
“I’m your neighbor,” he says. “You’d do the same if a heifer wandered onto your pasture, wouldn’t you?”
“She’s not a heifer.”
“I know,” he says. Maybe it’s a trick of my ears, but his voice seems gentler and kinder than it’s been.
She doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t look at me. I look at the sad, painted walls.
“Now what?” I ask. The hand in mine is practically lifeless. I don’t want to think how it got that way. I don’t want to think how it got here.
“Now you take her home,” Harper says.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Thank you,” I say.
He waves it away.
&n
bsp; “Meche,” I bend to whisper in her ear.
The honey eyes that turn on me seem to see me for the first time.
“Del?” she says. “I finally found you.”
2.
The chatter of the land gets loud when I bring Meche on it. I can feel its hum, its deep-chested rumble, without having to lay my hand on its surface. As I shoot a hand out to steady her when she stumbles, I feel beneath her skin, an answering hum. As if she is harmonizing without words.
I guide her through the woods and down to my cabin without any conversation passing between us. Once she’s upstairs in one of the loft bedrooms, she curls on top of the bedclothes and instantly falls asleep. With her coloring and the weight loss that has turned her gangly and big-eyed, she looks like a fawn caught dozing in its hideaway of high grass.
When I go back downstairs, Chato and Chema are there already, sitting at the table with open beers in hand.
“Just make yourselves at home,” I grumble. “Are those the last two beers?”
“Yes,” says Chato, handing me another, unopened one. They have a standing dinner invitation, these two. Of all the inks they are my compas, as they name it. Meaning more than buddies or friends, more like godparents. The child we all share responsibility for is under our feet, around our homes, in our blood. I know they have their own ways of communicating with it; I don’t ask how.
“Hey, Boss,” says Chato. “I hear we have a guest.”
I walk over to the kitchen. I’ve left a hen of the woods mushroom soaking to loosen the grit that hides in fungal channels. I drain the mushroom, dry it to damp with a dish towel.
“Harper,” I say, “found an ink wandering on his property.”
“Problem?” Chema asks.
I shrug, start dicing the big mushroom.
“Who?” Chato asks. Wandering onto adjacent property and getting caught with tat in evidence ranks among the gravest on his list of sins.
“Not one of us,” I say.
“We’re going to have to get another tent,” Chema says. “And you might have to buy another composting toilet, what we have is running at capacity already.”
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