Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  “You know I don’t like to drive on this road in the dark.”

  “It doesn’t get dark until nine.”

  I hadn’t thought this through. “Oh, I dunno. There’s a few things I thought I’d do before the week. Errands. Y’know. Just some odds and ends.”

  She sat back on her heels. “Your father will be sorry.”

  I met her gaze now, finally with some confidence. “No he won’t.”

  She looked at me for a moment more, then gave a single nod and turned her attention back to the stove. “He’s taking a walk around town. If he doesn’t get back before you leave, make sure you find him.”

  “Okay.”

  I escaped to the bedroom to take care of my scanty packing. I brushed my hair, poured water into the basin to wash my face, and only then dared look in the dim and wavy mirror. Had Benencia looked at herself here, too? Was my skull, under the flesh, the same as hers? I covered my face with my hands and breathed against them.

  “I’m all set,” I said when I came out.

  “Drive safe,” Tuah said without looking up.

  “Like you do?”

  “Only after you’ve lived here as long as I have.”

  “Deal.”

  She paused and turned her face toward me. I met her eyes then and saw—love. In an instant I felt the sting of oncoming tears and I blinked and looked down.

  “Well, I hope that’s so,” she said and clanged her trowel against the edge of the bucket. I started for the door.

  “I’ll see you in a few days?” I heard her ask as I crossed onto the porch.

  “Yes, I’ll be back.”

  “Good.”

  I threw my bag in the car and eased away from the cabin. I looked back at it in my rearview mirror—bright and yellow and brave between the pines, white porch posts clean and crisp, white curtains puffing in the windows. Where my family was together, she’d described it. I supposed I was part of that equation now, too.

  I found my father only with some effort and Mac’s help. I saw the dog first, curled in the middle of the upper road, licking his flank. I figured my father couldn’t be far. I parked the car and got out.

  “Dad?”

  “Over here.”

  The direction of his voice wasn’t quite clear. I guessed and walked toward a pair of houses that leaned at parallel angles, like dancers.

  “Am I getting warmer?”

  “Over here.”

  He sat on the front step of one of the houses, jeans cuffed over his work boots, turning something in his hands. I sat beside him.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He held it out to me. It was a horse. A tiny resin horse, prancing, with its uplifted leg broken off a little above the knee. He gestured with his head toward the house behind us.

  “The Diazes’ house. They had twin boys a little older than me.”

  “Oh—yeah.”

  He looked surprised. “You know them?”

  “No—I mean, Tuah’s told me stories.”

  “Of course.” He held up the horse. “They had a whole set of army toys—soldiers, wagons, cannons. This is one of the horses. I just found it here by the porch.”

  “Do you know where they are now? Have you stayed in touch?”

  He shook his head. “They moved away.” He tilted his head back, then looked from side to side. “Like everybody.”

  I had grown up in Los Angeles. All else aside, at least the place that held my childhood would never be a ghost town. It would change, but the changes would say that yes, I’d changed, too. I wondered whether coming here, for him, meant combating a sense that you didn’t really exist. That your own childhood had died. As Benencia’s had.

  “Um, I decided it would be better for me to go back down tonight instead of in the morning.”

  He nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “I think Paul’s trip this time is five days. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “So long, then.”

  “Have a good week.”

  And with that and a nod, I left him on the splitting pine boards of the Diaz family front step, turning the broken horse over and over in his hands.

  31

  Welcome back,” Paul said as he opened the door the next morning. “I was hoping you’d come early. Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  I followed him into the kitchen, got a mug from the cupboard, and held it while he poured. I got sugar from the bowl by the sink while he sat at the kitchen table. I joined him, sitting in Sarah’s spot.

  “How’s everything been?” I asked as I stirred. Good or bad, the answer would give me something new to focus on.

  He made a face. “Mixed bag. We missed you.”

  I looked down at the wake following my spoon around the coffee’s surface. I hadn’t asked just to fill the silence, had I? Life had passed in these brown rooms without me the last couple of days, and I genuinely wanted to capture some piece of what I’d missed. I’d pay almost anything to trade the day I’d had yesterday for one spent here.

  “Sarah?” I asked, looking up.

  He nodded. “I went ahead and moved the rollaway into her room. I hope that’s okay. If you don’t sleep in there she’ll come sleep with you anyway, and I thought you probably didn’t want to have her in the living room with you all night, or getting in bed with you. At least in her own room she’ll stay in her bed. And she’ll need a light on. You probably don’t like that, but I shut it off one night and she woke up hollering.”

  “Oh,” I breathed. “I’m sorry.” God, none of this would have happened if I’d just listened to the part of me that hesitated about letting them go to the Brames’ in the first place. I swallowed hard against nothing. “I’m so sorry.”

  He put his hand on my wrist. “Don’t start with that.” He hesitated a moment, then gave me a pat and pulled his hand back. “It’s okay,” he said.

  I took the spoon out of my coffee, tapped it on the rim, and set it on the plate at the center of the table where another spoon already rested.

  “And Kevin?”

  “He’s pretty—sober.”

  I nodded.

  Then he leaned back and rubbed the back of his neck. “I mighta done something stupid yesterday. I had some time on my hands and thought it might be good to start putting away some of Carrie’s things. You understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “Sarah kinda went to pieces. You know what a packrat she is. She keeps everything—string, broken toys, pieces of paper. Is that just girls? Or is she …” A long blink. “Like her mom? I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure it’s okay.”

  “That’s right. That’s right. I’m sure it is. You must know all about it. But she wants all her mom’s stuff to stay right where it is. And I can’t do that. I just can’t go on doing that forever. I’ve got to start moving on.”

  “Of course.”

  He nodded to himself. “It’s true. It’s true. But I should’ve talked with her about it, that’s for sure. It was the wrong time. I know that. You must know that.”

  “I have no idea.”

  We sat in silence.

  “I left some extra money in the jar. It’s Boom Days this week. You can take the kids to the parade, maybe. Play some carnival games. Get some food. They’ll like that.”

  “Oh—that sounds great.” I took a sip of coffee.

  “Uh.” Paul rubbed the back of his neck. “One more thing, just a heads-up, I’m going to ask about work in the mine. I have to get off the road. We need to be a family. God knows we need the money. And you need to get on with your life. I know that.”

  “But I’m sure—” I cut myself off as I realized that perhaps his reasons for not going to work there long ago were none of my business. At some point, without a doubt, my capacity to sort the threads of what I was and wasn’t supposed to know, of past and present, would fail spectacularly. But he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I should hav
e done it a long time ago,” he said, looking down into his cup. “A long time. Maybe, then—everything could have been different. For Carrie. For us. Maybe.”

  I heard a door creak.

  “Lena!” Sarah thundered into the room and threw herself against my side, arms around my neck. I felt silky fabric under my hands. I tipped my head back enough to see what she was wearing. An emerald women’s blouse. I looked at Paul, who nodded, lips pressed together.

  Figuring out what to do with old bones, it seemed, was a thorny issue for everyone.

  *

  “I wonder,” I said to Poppy later that morning, “if you lost someone, would you rather know or not know if something bad happened to them?”

  We sat on aluminum lawn chairs in her backyard, backs to a broken bed frame, and watched the children try to get the puppies to chase bits of string they dragged around. The sun sparkled off wind chimes and baubles that hung in the trees, and it was easy to imagine the laughing children as untroubled.

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “It’s just—with the kids in the mine …” I shrugged my shoulders, trying to indicate discomfort in a way that would ward off further questions. “It’s just been on my mind. A lot of what-ifs. Like, what if we’d never found them? Would you want to know what happened or just always wonder?”

  She tilted her chin over her shoulder, toward the house. “Ask Mama Ruth.”

  “What?”

  “Her no-good drunk shit of a son, who ran off and left her stuck with me. I think she’d like to know.”

  “Her son? Your—brother?”

  “My husband. Ex-husband.”

  “She’s his mother? Not yours?”

  “Yep.”

  I stared. “You are a saint,” I finally said.

  “She’s not as bad as you think.”

  “I bet she’s worse.”

  Poppy tilted her head. “Have you ever figured out my collection?”

  “I—haven’t thought about it, I guess. It’s just”—I shrugged my shoulders—“part of your house.”

  “Think about how they’re arranged.”

  I tried to picture the living room walls, the chaos of found items that covered it. I’d never been able to spot a connecting thread. The materials? Paper, wood, plastic, metal, twine. Purpose? Things that illustrate, things that inform, things you play with, things that decorate. The shapes? Squares, circles, pieces of clothing, leaves, cutouts. No, it was a purely unsorted jumble of colors and shapes and subjects and textures, crowded together in a way that suggested the articles were either shoving their way to the center or that the collection had started in the center and expanded outward—

  “Everything touches?” Hardly a deep thought, but it was the only one I could muster.

  Poppy threw her hands up in triumph, muumuu rising with them. “Ha! That’s it!” She leaned toward me against the arm of her chair, torqueing its aluminum frame. “Every kind of thing in the world, everything touches something, that touches something, that touches something else. Everything connects. Everything comes back. If you’re two hops away from one thing, you’re next to another, and by touching one you touch them all. A postcard is a postcard and a fork’s a fork, but they all touch each other. I try to do good. Even Mama Ruth, no matter what’s happened, has touched other things and left good behind. I know it.”

  She put a hand on my knee and peered intently into my face. “You came here to help those children and you are. Oh, you are. But honey, you’re touching other things, too.” She gave my knee a pat and leaned back into her chair, which relaxed into balance. “You’re a good girl. That’s just the shape you are. Good will come of whatever you do, sooner or later. That’s just how it works.”

  *

  I sat on the Koffords’ sofa, angled slightly so I could see a patch of light coming from Sarah’s room. I’d sat here earlier to convince Sarah that she could see me from her room and it would be all right to fall asleep alone. Baby steps. But now it was nearly midnight, and Leo was here, after driving down from the ranch this late so we could avoid having this conversation around the children. He hadn’t changed his mind. He was determined to tell the sheriff what we’d found, and didn’t want to have to explain a longer delay than it already was. He faced me while I sat cross-legged, hands in my lap. I hadn’t seen him in light this low before. In the shadows he looked … older.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s no point trying to guess what Tuah would want to know because she doesn’t. Your question only matters if she actually knows she has a choice. She’s accepted one idea, but that doesn’t mean she wants it to stay that way no matter what.”

  I shook my head as I had over and over again. “If we’d found the body just lying there I would agree with you. Absolutely. But whatever happened, it was more horrible than anything she’s ever let herself think about. It would break her heart. It would completely break her heart.”

  “It’s not something she wants to know—but she has a right to know. Would you want somebody to hide something from you because they thought you couldn’t take it? Something that was maybe the most important thing in your life?”

  I looked down at my hands. “I would. I already wish I didn’t know. And if that’s true for me, it’s a thousand times that for her.”

  He leaned forward and took my face in his hands. I looked up, startled.

  “You’re lying,” he whispered. He held my gaze for a moment, then dropped his hands and leaned back. “You’re lying to yourself,” he said, now in a normal voice. “And you don’t even know it. You like to hang back, and I get that. You’ve had some gut shots. You’d like life to be safer, but I really don’t think you’d want somebody else picking and choosing for you.”

  Truth, like water, finds its own path. The beaver dam of sureties I’d pieced together over all these years was already leaking badly, and it didn’t take much to tear a new hole. He was right—there was no such thing as safety. I’d known it for years, even while I continued to look for places to hide. But just because I could acknowledge the truth for myself didn’t mean I thought imposing suffering on my grandmother, at this particular point of her life, was the right thing to do.

  “Look—this is tough,” he went on. “I’m not saying it won’t be awful. But your grandma has you.”

  Did she? To what extent? What would her reaction be, and how long would it last? What kind of support would she need and for how long? Especially after I ripped away faith in her community. The implied commitment was terrifying. But I was sick of being governed by fear. I put my face in my hands.

  “Hey,” he said. He picked at my fingers until I gave up and lowered my hands. “Look, you’re probably right and it’s your aunt, but there’s still a chance you’re wrong. There could be another family somewhere.

  “Have Poppy watch the kids in the morning and then you and I are going to tell the sheriff what we found. We have to. But that’s all we’ll tell them. Let them figure out if it’s Benencia, decide how to handle it themselves. It’s their job. This isn’t all on you. You’re not responsible for everything that happens in the world, you know.”

  I sat without responding for a time. Eventually, against my own will, I nodded.

  32

  Leo escorted the sheriff’s officers to the cave by himself. I wanted to be there, felt I owed it to Benencia to stand as a witness, as family, when she was finally rescued. But I couldn’t figure out what to do with the children, and in truth I wasn’t sure how I would react to watching the actual process of gathering up what remained of my aunt and loading it onto a packhorse for the trip down the mountain. Still, I spent all that day looking up toward Hat Creek and back at my watch. Fix breakfast. They must be driving to the ranch for horses. Dry dishes. They must be riding to the meadow. Fix lunch. They must be at the cave. How long would they stay? Sort laundry. Surely they were on their way back down by now.

  Finally I fished the extra cash out of the jar, shoved it in my pocket, and announced
that we would be going downtown to see what was going on at the festival. We found a parking place behind the Powder Keg, which seemed like unusually good luck until we came around the corner and I realized that a lot of setup was still going on. Men on ladders stood at opposite ends of the bandstand tent across the street, hanging a banner above the stage. BOOM DAYS! it said, with bombs for the Os and at each end a prospector with a pack burro laden with dynamite. At the curb, more men unloaded speakers from the back of a pickup truck. Vendors’ booths lined the street, and though much of the activity involved tables being moved, I could smell food and did see a few other visitors roaming around. We starting drifting from one booth to another as vendors arranged wood carvings or turquoise jewelry, taking food samples where they were offered.

  “Try this,” I said to Kevin as I saw bored annoyance start to rise, handing him a sample piece of a lemon cookie. Or, “It’s like a doughnut,” as we sat at a plastic table and Sarah made a face at the twisted brown lumps of a funnel cake.

  “Why aren’t you eating anything?” Sarah asked.

  “My stomach hurts,” I said.

  “You should drink some Seven-Up,” she offered, taking a mouthful of whipped cream.

  “I will.”

  When the funnel cake was finished, we wandered over to the pen where burros waited for tomorrow’s race. A foal, its eyes furrowed under a thick tuft of fur, glared at us from beneath its mother’s neck.

  “Lookit the baby!” Sarah squealed, pointing between the fence rails.

  “Yeah,” I said. But my eyes were more focused on the traffic behind us. At some point, one of the vehicles would be a coroner’s van carrying Benencia’s remains. Would they be able to figure out who it was? How would I talk to Tuah? How long could I put it off? The questions chased each other in my own hopeless, endless effort to find a way to contain and control what would happen.

  Someone turned on the speakers at the bandstand across the street, which gave off a quick, sharp whine and startled a couple of the burros. I glanced over my shoulder. The courthouse glowered at me over the banner, now swagged jauntily above the stage. Of course the sheriff would figure it out. Of course the body was Benencia’s. And I owed it to Tuah to tell her myself and not leave that job, like a coward, to someone else. But how?