From the Corner of His Eye, Page 2

  After catching his breath and coming to grips with his amazing audacity, Junior moved along the platform, past the broken-away railing. From a secure position, he leaned out and peered down.

  She was so tiny, a pale spot on the dark grass and stone. On her back. One leg bent under her at an impossible angle. Right arm at her side, left arm flung out as if she were waving. A radiant nimbus of golden hair fanned around her head.

  He loved her so much that he couldn’t bear to look at her. He turned away from the railing, crossed the platform, and sat with his back against the wall of the lookout station.

  For a while, he wept uncontrollably. Losing Naomi, he had lost more than a wife, more than a friend and lover, more than a soul mate. He had lost a part of his own physical being: He was hollow inside, as though the very meat and bone at the core of him had been torn out and replaced by a void, black and cold. Horror and despair racked him, and he was tormented by thoughts of self-destruction.

  But then he felt better.

  Not good, but definitely better.

  Naomi had dropped the bag of dried apricots before she plummeted from the tower. He crawled to it, extracted a piece of fruit, and chewed slowly, savoring the morsel. Sweet.

  Eventually he squirmed on his belly to the gap in the railing, where he gazed straight down at his lost love far below. She was in precisely the same position as when he’d first looked.

  Of course, he hadn’t expected her to be dancing. A fifteen-story fall all but certainly quashed the urge to boogie.

  From this height, he could not see any blood. He was sure that some blood must have been spilled.

  The air was still, no breeze whatsoever. The sentinel firs and pines stood as motionless as those mysterious stone heads that faced the sea on Easter Island.

  Naomi dead. So alive only moments ago, now gone. Unthinkable.

  The sky was the delft-blue of a tea set that his mother had owned. Mounds of clouds to the east, like clotted cream. Buttery, the sun.

  Hungry, he ate another apricot.

  No hawks above. No visible movement anywhere in this fastness.

  Below, Naomi still dead.

  How strange life is. How fragile. You never know what stunning development lies around the next corner.

  Junior’s shock had given way to a profound sense of wonder. For most of his young life, he had understood that the world was deeply mysterious, ruled by fate. Now, because of this tragedy, he realized that the human mind and heart were no less enigmatic than the rest of creation.

  Who would have thought that Junior Cain was capable of such a sudden, violent act as this?

  Not Naomi.

  Not Junior himself, in fact. How passionately he had loved this woman. How fiercely he had cherished her. He’d thought he couldn’t live without her.

  He’d been wrong. Naomi down there, still very dead, and him up here, alive. His brief suicidal impulse had passed, and now he knew that he would get through this tragedy somehow, that the pain would eventually subside, that the sharp sense of loss would be dulled by time, and that eventually he might even love someone again.

  Indeed, in spite of his grief and anguish, he regarded the future with more optimism, interest, and excitement than he’d felt in a long time. If he was capable of this, then he was different from the man he’d always imagined himself to be, more complex, more dynamic. Wow.

  He sighed. Tempting as it was to lie here, gazing down at dead Naomi, daydreaming about a bolder and more colorful future than any that he’d previously imagined, he had much to accomplish before the afternoon was done. His life was going to be busy for a while.

  Chapter 4

  THROUGH THE ROSE-PATTERNED glasswork in the front door, as the bell rang again, Joe saw Maria Gonzalez: tinted red here and green there, beveled in some places and crackled in others, her face a mosaic of petal and leaf shapes.

  When Joey opened the door, Maria half bowed her head, kept her eyes lowered, and said, “I must be Maria Gonzalez.”

  “Yes, Maria, I know who you are.” He was, as ever, charmed by her shyness and by her brave struggle with English.

  Although Joey stepped back and held the door open wide, Maria remained on the porch. “I will to see Mrs. Agnes.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Please come in.”

  She still hesitated. “For the English.”

  “She has plenty of that. More than I can usually cope with.”

  Maria frowned, not yet proficient enough in her new language to understand his joke.

  Afraid that she would think he was teasing or even mocking her, Joe gathered considerable earnestness into his voice. “Maria, please, come in. Mi casa es su casa.”

  She glanced at him, then quickly looked away.

  Her timidity was only partly due to shyness. Another part of it was cultural. She was of that class, in Mexico, that never made direct eye contact with anyone who might be considered a patrón.

  He wanted to tell her that this was America, where no one was required to bow to anyone else, where one’s station at birth was not a prison, but an open door, a starting point. This was always the land of tomorrow.

  Considering Joe’s great size, his rough face, and his tendency to glower when he encountered injustice or its effects, anything he said to Maria about her excessive self-effacement might seem to be argumentative. He didn’t want to have to return to the kitchen to inform Aggie that he had frightened away her student.

  For an awkward moment, he thought that they might remain at this impasse—Maria staring at her feet, Joe gazing down at the top of her humbled head—until some angel blew the horn of Judgment and the dead rose from their graves to glory.

  Then an invisible dog, in the form of a sudden breeze, scampered across the porch, lashing Maria with its tail. It sniffed curiously at the threshold and, panting, entered the house, bringing the small brown woman after it, as though she held it on a leash.

  Closing the door, Joe said, “Aggie’s in the kitchen.”

  Maria inspected the foyer carpet as intently as she had examined the floor of the porch. “You please to tell her I am Maria?”

  “Just go on back to the kitchen. She’s waiting for you.”

  “The kitchen? On myself?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “To the kitchen on myself?”

  “By yourself,” he corrected, smiling as he got her meaning. “Yes, of course. You know where it is.”

  Maria nodded, crossed the foyer to the living-room archway, turned, and dared to meet his eyes briefly. “Thank you.”

  As he watched her move through the living room and disappear into the dining room, Joe didn’t at first grasp why she had thanked him. Then he realized she was grateful that he trusted her not to steal when unaccompanied.

  Evidently, she was accustomed to being an object of suspicion, not because she was unreliable, but simply because she was Maria Elena Gonzalez, who had traveled north from Hermosillo, Mexico, in search of a better life.

  Although saddened by this reminder of the stupidity and meanness of the world, Joe refused to dwell on negative thoughts. Their firstborn was soon to arrive, and years from now, he wanted to be able to recall this day as a shining time, characterized entirely by sweet—if nervous—anticipation and by the joy of the birth.

  In the living room, he sat in his favorite armchair and tried to read You Only Live Twice, the latest novel about James Bond. He couldn’t relate to the story. Bond had survived ten thousand threats and vanquished villains by the hundred, but he didn’t know anything about the complications that could transform ordinary labor into a mortal trial for mother and baby.

  Chapter 5

  DOWN, DOWN, THROUGH the shadows and the shredded spider webs, down through the astringent creosote stink and the underlying foulness of black mold, Junior descended the tower stairs with utmost caution. If he tripped on a loose tread and fell and broke a leg, he might lie here for days, dying of thirst or infection or of exposure if the weather turned coole
r, tormented by whatever predators found him helpless in the night.

  Hiking into the wilds alone was never wise. He always relied on the buddy system, sharing the risk, but his buddy had been Naomi, and she wasn’t here for him anymore.

  When he was all the way down, when he was out from under the tower, he hurried toward the dirt lane. The car was hours away by the challenging overland route they had taken to get here, but maybe half an hour—at most forty-five minutes—away if he returned by the fire road.

  After only a few steps, Junior halted. He dared not bring the authorities back to this ridge top only to discover that poor Naomi, though critically injured, was still clinging to life.

  One hundred fifty feet, approximately fifteen stories, was not a fall that anyone could be expected to survive. On the other hand, miracles do occasionally happen.

  Not miracles in the sense of gods and angels and saints goofing around in human affairs. Junior didn’t believe in any such nonsense.

  “But amazing singularities do happen,” he muttered, because he had a relentlessly mathematical-scientific view of existence, which allowed for many astounding anomalies, for mysteries of astonishing mechanical effect, but which provided no room for the supernatural.

  With more trepidation than seemed reasonable, he circled the base of the tower. Tall grass and weeds tickled his bare calves. At this season, no insects were buzzing, no gnats trying to sip at the sweat on his brow. Slowly, warily, he approached the crumpled form of his fallen wife.

  In fourteen months of marriage, Naomi never raised her voice to him, was never cross with him. She never looked for a fault in a person if she could find a virtue, and she was the type who could find a virtue in everyone but child molesters and…

  Well, and murderers.

  He dreaded finding her still alive, because for the first time in their relationship, she would surely be filled with reproach. She would no doubt have harsh, perhaps bitter, words for him, and even if he could quickly silence her, his lovely memories of their marriage would be tarnished forever. Henceforth, every time he thought of his golden Naomi, he would hear her shrill accusations, see her beautiful face contorted and made ugly by anger.

  How sad it would be to have so many cherished recollections spoiled forever.

  He rounded the northwest corner of the tower and saw Naomi lying where he expected her to be, not sitting up and brushing the pine needles out of her hair, just lying twisted and still.

  Nevertheless, he halted, reluctant to go closer. He studied her from a safe distance, squinting in the bright sunlight, alert for the slightest twitch. In the windless, bugless, lifeless silence, he listened, half expecting her to take up one of her favorite songs—“Somewhere over the Rainbow” or “What a Wonderful World”—but in a thin, crushed, tuneless voice choked with blood and rattling with broken cartilage.

  He was working himself into a state, and for no good reason. She was almost certainly dead, but he had to be sure, and to be sure, he had to take a closer look. No way around it. A quick look and then away, away, into an eventful and interesting future.

  As soon as he stepped closer, he knew why he had been reluctant to approach Naomi. He had been afraid that her beautiful face would be hideously disfigured, torn and crushed.

  Junior was squeamish.

  He didn’t like war movies or mystery flicks in which people were shot or stabbed, or even discreetly poisoned, because they always had to show you the body, as if you couldn’t take their word for it that someone had been killed and just get on with the plot. He preferred love stories and comedies.

  He’d once picked up a Mickey Spillane thriller and been sickened by the relentless violence. He’d almost been unable to finish the book, but he considered it a character flaw not to complete a project that one had begun, even if the task was to read a repulsively bloody novel.

  In war movies and thrillers, he immensely enjoyed the action. The action didn’t trouble him. He was disturbed by the aftermath.

  Too many moviemakers and novelists were intent on showing you the aftermath, as if that were as important as the story itself. The entertaining part, however, was the movement, the action, not the consequences. If you had a runaway train scene, and the train hit a busload of nuns at a crossing, smashing it the hell out of the way and roaring on, you wanted to follow that train, not go back and see what had happened to the luckless nuns; dead or alive, the nuns were history once the damn bus was slammed off the tracks, and what mattered was the train: not consequences, but momentum.

  Now, here on this sunny ridge in Oregon, miles from any train and farther still from any nuns, Junior applied this artistic insight to his own situation, overcame his squeamishness, and regained some momentum of his own. He approached his fallen wife, stood over her, and stared down into her fixed eyes as he said, “Naomi?”

  He didn’t know why he’d spoken her name, because at first sight of her face, he was certain that she was dead. He detected a note of melancholy in his voice, and he supposed that already he was missing her.

  If her eyes had shifted focus in response to his voice, if she had blinked to acknowledge him, Junior might not have been entirely displeased, depending on her condition. Paralyzed from the neck down and posing no physical threat, brain damaged to the extent that she couldn’t speak or write, or in any other way convey to the police what had happened to her, yet with her beauty largely intact, she might still have been able to enrich his life in many ways. Under the right circumstances, with sweet Naomi as gloriously attractive as ever but as pliable and unjudgmental as a doll, Junior might have been willing to give her a home—and care.

  Talk about action without consequences.

  She was, however, as dead as a toad in the wake of a Mack truck, and of no more interest to him now than would be a busload of train-smacked nuns.

  Remarkably, her face was nearly as stunning as ever. She had landed faceup, so the damage was largely to her spine and the back of her head. Junior didn’t want to think about what her posterior cranium might look like; happily, her cascading golden hair hid the truth. Her facial features were ever so slightly distorted, which suggested the greater ruin underneath, but the result was neither sad nor grotesque: Indeed, the distortion gave her the lopsided, perky, and altogether appealing grin of a mischievous gamine, lips parted as though she had just said something wonderfully witty.

  He was puzzled that so few traces of gore stained her rocky bed, until he realized that she had died instantly upon impact. Stopped so abruptly, her heart hadn’t pumped blood out of her wounds.

  He knelt beside her and gently touched her face. Her skin was still warm.

  Ever the sentimentalist, Junior kissed her good-bye. Only once. Lingeringly, but only once, and with no tongue involved.

  Then he returned to the fire road and headed south along that serpentine dirt track at a fast walk. When he reached the first turn in the narrow road, he paused to look back toward the top of the ridge.

  The high tower imprinted its ominous black geometry upon the sky. The surrounding forest seemed to shrink from it, as if nature chose no longer to embrace the structure.

  Above the tower and to one side, three crows had appeared as though by spontaneous generation. They circled over the spot where Naomi lay like Sleeping Beauty, kissed but unawakened.

  Crows are carrion eaters.

  Reminding himself that action was what mattered, not aftermath, Junior Cain resumed his journey down the fire road. He moved at an easy jog now instead of a fast walk, chanting aloud in the way that Marines chanted when they ran in training groups, but because he did not know any Marine chants, he grunted the words to “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” without melody, roughly in time with his footfalls, on his way to neither the halls of Montezuma nor the shores of Tripoli, but to a future that now promised to be one of exceptional experience and unending surprises.

  Chapter 6

  EXCEPT FOR THE EFFECTS of pregnancy, Agnes was petite, and Maria Elena Gonzal
ez was even smaller. Yet as they sat catercorner to each other at the kitchen table, young women from far different worlds but with remarkably similar personalities, their clash of wills over payment for the English lessons was nearly as monumental as two tectonic plates grinding together deep under the California coast. Maria was determined to pay with cash or services. Agnes insisted that the lessons were an act of friendship, with no compensation required.

  “I won’t steal the adjustments of a friend,” Maria proclaimed.

  “You’re not taking advantage of me, dear. I’m getting so much pleasure from teaching you, seeing you improve, that I ought to be paying you.”

  Maria closed her large ebony eyes and drew a deep breath, moving her lips without making a sound, reviewing something important that she wanted to say correctly. She opened her eyes: “I am thanking the Virgin and Jesus every night that you have been within my life.”

  “That’s so sweet, Maria.”

  “But I am buying the English,” she said firmly, sliding three one-dollar bills across the table.

  Three dollars was six dozen eggs or twelve loaves of bread, and Agnes was never going to take food out of the mouth of a poor woman and her children. She pushed the currency across the table to Maria.

  Jaws clenched, lips pressed tightly together, eyes narrowed, Maria shoved the money toward Agnes.

  Ignoring the offered payment, Agnes opened a lesson book.

  Maria swiveled sideways in her chair, turning away from the three bucks and the book.

  Glaring at the back of her friend’s head, Agnes said, “You’re impossible.”

  “Wrong. Maria Elena Gonzalez is real.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  “Don’t know nothing. I be stupid Mexican woman.”

  “Stupid is the last thing you are.”

  “Always to be stupid now, always with my evil English.”

  “Bad English. Your English isn’t evil, it’s just bad.”

  “Then you teach.”

  “Not for money.”

  “Not for free.”

  For a few minutes, they sat unmoving: Maria with her back to the table, Agnes staring in frustration at the nape of Maria’s neck and trying to will her to come face-to-face again, to be reasonable.

  At last Agnes got to her feet. A mild contraction tightened a cincture of pain around her back and belly, and she leaned against the table until the misery passed.

  Without a word, she poured a cup of coffee and set it before Maria. She put a homemade raisin scone on a plate and placed it beside the coffee.

  Maria sipped the coffee while sitting sideways in her chair, still turned away from the three worn dollar bills.

  Agnes left the kitchen by way of the hall, through the swinging door, rather than through the dining room, and when she passed the living-room archway, Joey exploded out of his armchair, dropping the book he had been reading.

  “It’s not time,” she said, proceeding to the stairs.

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Trust me, Joey, I’ll be the first to know.”

  As Agnes ascended, Joey hurried into the foyer behind her and said, “Where are you going?”

  “Upstairs, silly.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Destroy some clothes.”

  “Oh.”

  She fetched a pair of cuticle scissors from the master bathroom, plucked a red blouse from her closet, and sat on the edge of the bed. Carefully snipping threads with the tiny, pointed blades, she turned the blouse inside out and unraveled a lot of stitches just under the shoulder yoke, ruining the front shirring.

  From Joey’s closet, she extracted an old blue blazer that he seldom wore