Paraíso

  The shrink didn’t say anything.

  “They blew up before they made it to their big issue, you know. The one they originally came to see you about. They never got past the mother stuff—what she might have done to Wendy as a kid. At least that’s what I hear from both of them.”

  “Claire …”

  “The issue they never got to is pretty simple, to refresh your memory. She thinks he ratted on her about her affair in Briarcliffe. You remember, with the director? He says he kept her secret, and you know what? I kind of believe him. He thinks there just might have been someone else involved who blew the whistle. I thought maybe you could shed some—”

  “You know I can’t discuss any of this, Claire,” the shrink cut in. Talking through his nose. “It’s doctor-patient.”

  “It was years ago. Isn’t there a statute of limitations or something?”

  “No, there isn’t. Plus, I couldn’t really remember.” He asked his secretary for one more second.

  “You must have a file, though, right?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What do they say about compassion and understanding in the New Age, Daniel?” God, she was losing it! “I’d love to see your tree again. And your boy. Suppose I drop by this evening?”

  “Claire …”

  “Who knows what’ll happen in Mexico. The truth could save their lives.”

  “Claire, I’ve got to go. I’ve got three patients stacked up out there.”

  “I’m on my way. Shouldn’t be more than four hours or so. I haven’t seen Susie in a coon’s age either.”

  “Claire, what you’re asking me to do, I could lose my license.”

  “I won’t tell a soul. Do you think I’m crazy?” She had to laugh.

  He didn’t laugh back. She could almost hear him thinking. “Didn’t you tell me after the blowup that the mother had made it clear to Wendy that her brother was responsible?”

  “But what if she’d found out some other way, someone else had tipped her? That she just wanted the brother to be blamed. You know she died in a car wreck a week later and Peter’s sure she killed herself. Wendy was in no shape to take notice. The mother was a psychopath, Daniel. She knew she’d wrecked her children’s lives and she couldn’t live with herself. I’d like to set it straight after all these years.”

  He sighed. “Look. I’ll go through the file, Claire. If I see anything in it I think could help you, I’ll let you know.”

  She let out her breath gently. “Well, thanks, Daniel. Give Susie my best, okay?”

  Her excuses for staying at home had worn thin, and she spent the rest of the day at the gallery. New Age the fuck indeed! She was sure she’d never hear from the shrink again and was amazed when she got home to find his message on the answering machine.

  Before he had agreed to see Wendy, Daniel had taken the unusual precaution of consulting a lawyer. He’d be dealing with a well-connected Eastern family. Who knew what kind of legal minefield he might be stumbling into?

  The lawyer made some inquiries. Apparently, there’d been a lawsuit filed against the trucking company after the mother’s death. The papers would be a matter of public record. As far as Daniel knew, neither child had been informed of the suit—understandable not to upset them with it. It never came up in the sessions, and it wasn’t his business to tell them. Very possibly there was nothing there. But he thought checking the papers out for clues might be worth the trouble.

  Claire walked to the bathroom and stared at her image in the mirror. Cocking her head and trying a smile. A frown. The smile looked better. The weather lines in the corners of her eyes were getting deeper but weren’t unattractive. What was she doing? Getting in deeper and deeper. So the mother had killed herself. Maybe. A piece of the puzzle, but only a piece.

  Claire began to think maybe a little junket to Philadelphia would stop her brooding about Mexico. Why not? A least she’d be doing something, not just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. How long could it take? Three days at most. Things were slow at the gallery. She knew from college an associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she could drop by with some slides by the misty-landscape artist the gallery was featuring. Her mother had moved to Florida after her father died, but she still had friends in Bryn Mawr. Maybe she could hang out a little. She could see what had happened to the Davis place.

  I, Wendy Davis

  The desk clerk at the Hotel California stared at my damp, disheveled clothes, grinned, nodded, and told me where my sister was living: left on the dusty little road that slants down behind the church and the town square into the valley, across the valley floor past a little mud and wattle restaurant, through big old cottonwoods and eucalypti, orange and avocado groves, and chili and onion fields. When the road starts up the other side, it’ll be on the left-hand corner in a grove of taco palms. You can’t miss it.

  I walked it in twenty minutes, knocked on the door, and called her name. Gave it a slow count of ten and called again. Taco palms rustling in the afternoon breeze, a rooster crowing, a dog barking, kids playing in the schoolyard a little farther up the street, an unmuffled truck approaching from that direction, clattering past, and receding down into the valley where I’d come from.

  Omigod! What are you doing here? Your school doesn’t get out till Friday.

  Well, there was a fire, so there.

  A fire? Was it a dorm or something? Was anybody hurt?

  No, it was the chapel. Burned to the ground.

  The porch featured a hide-covered rocking chair flanked by a small wood table with a paperback face up: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I peered in a window to a small white room full of what looked like Indian art.

  Then a deep bass bellowing started up beyond the taco palms: eeee-eeee-eeee. A contented sound, more of a mooing than a bellowing. As it got louder, I could hear the crunch of footsteps on the dusty road.

  A big man was walking toward me backlit by the sun, so his face was in shadow, walking loosely as if not entirely in control of his arms and legs and making that sound. Nearing the porch, he waved and made a louder noise that sounded like eeeep.

  The man stopped and turned slightly so his face came into the sunlight. So empty you couldn’t look at it for more than a second. A black hole of a face that you could disappear into if you looked too long.

  His hand came out, large but smooth and boneless, and hovered in the air to heavy breathing. It was only money he wanted. He was used to getting it from my sister, now he’d get it from me. Rich gringos, the two of us.

  I pulled my soggy wallet from my back pocket, selected a dollar bill, and put it in the pink, soft hand. For a minute there was silence. Then a real bellow, a roar. The bill fluttered to the ground, and the hand it had been in clasped the other hand and wrung it in despair. Bellow on bellow with almost no interval for breath.

  The man’s open mouth was huge and his teeth looked perfect: not one filling in sight. His tongue was thick and pink like a crying baby’s in a cartoon. I moved backward a couple of steps so that the man wasn’t bellowing right into my face and tried to figure out what to do. Two women had come out of the house up the street and were standing there watching and talking to each other. A campesino on his way to the fields stopped with his hoe over his shoulder and a lunch bag slung on it. The big man watched me out of his empty eyes as the bellowing continued.

  Then a young girl in a dark blue school jumper ran up the lane and handed something to the bellowing man. The noise stopped as suddenly as it had started. The man began peeling the paper wrapping off the thing that had been handed to him, and I saw it was a Hershey chocolate bar with almonds.

  “She always gives him chocolate,” the girl said. “Every day he comes for it.”

  The man was holding the Hershey bar in both hands like a squirrel, taking little nibbles and smiling as if nothing had happened. “I just gave him a dollar,” I said.

  She laughed. “A dollar? Where in the United States do you come
from?”

  “Filadelfeeia.” Was that how you pronounced it in Spanish?

  “Really? That’s where she comes from. You look a lot like her.”

  “Because I’m her brother.”

  “Yes, I knew it. But how did you get here with the roads gone?”

  I told her about the Bug, the beach, the dolphin rescue, the tide, watching the Bug disappear beneath the waves, and my rescue the next day by a boatload of fishermen. After my stint in Costa Rica my Spanish was good, but Mexican Spanish is much purer. I wondered what she thought of my accent.

  “You needed to see her very much.” The girl nodded gravely. “I understand.”

  “So, where is she?” The big man was nibbling the last of the Hershey bar and following our conversation like a dog watching a ping-pong game.

  “I don’t know. Not far, claro. Jefe, go away. There’s no more chocolate. The chocolate’s finished. No more today, Jefe. All gone. Are you worried about him?”

  “Jefe? Why?”

  “I mean, for your sister. You don’t have to worry. They operated on him a few years ago. He’s calm and tranquil now, see?” She giggled. “Pobrecito. He can’t remember. Listen, do you want to wait for her here? She’ll be back soon. I can get a key from my grandmother, it’s our house, you see.”

  “I’d feel like I was trespassing.”

  She looked shocked. “But she’s your sister. She would want you here, no? And she is alone now, too. La artista will not be back until the roads open.” She seemed to be about to say something more, but thought better of it.

  “La artista?”

  “From Mexico City.” Was the girl blushing? “She went back for a little while. They are sharing the house, you know?”

  She left to get the key and Jefe drifted away, bellowing softly. The sun was just beginning to hit the edge of the porch; sitting in the rocking chair, I took off my damp shoes and socks and just sat there wiggling my toes in the warmth, waiting for my pants and shirt to dry, and feeling weirdly comfortable for the second time in a little more than a week.

  The girl came back with the house key, unlocked the door, and showed me into the little white living room–kitchen with its adjoining gallery. She kept her back to the portrait of Isabel the artista … una loca, she explained, who had once played the accordion desnuda in the teatro.

  I was no expert, but the art looked impressive. Colorful, wild, and original, like Elizabeth Murray. In the tiny guest room, my sister’s photographic gear on the little unused cot, folded clothes on the shelves along with a dolphin skull, sea snake skeletons, shells of oysters, abalones, pectens, driftwood shapes.

  The girl paused awkwardly at the doorway of the main bedroom. “Well, I have to go now. My grandmother’s making tortillas.” After she’d left, I stood there looking at the rumpled double bed with its Mexican blankets, wondering if my sister had ever made love with her best friend, Claire.

  I waited on the porch while the sun slid behind the taco palms and the high cirrus clouds turned neon. After dark I went inside and heated a can of chili for dinner with a shot or two of Sauza Reposado tequila from the bottle on the shelf over the sideboard. Then I found myself gravitating to the bed.

  A reading lamp clamped to the head of the wrought-iron bedstead cast a yellowish cone of light over my upper body as I riffled through The Sound and the Fury. Caddy the wayward sister and Benjy the idiot. When I stopped reading and let the book slide off my chest onto the floor, I realized my entire body was under tremendous strain. I tried to relax the muscles one by one, like someone turning off the lights in a bedroom for the night, with a disturbing mixture of musk and Chanel No. 5 from the bed sheets wafting up around me.

  Finally, the tense muscle on the inside of my left thigh began to cramp. I pushed from the bed onto my feet and paced up and down the dark room, stretching and kneading the muscle. Yellow light from the weak reading lamp projected an enormous, misshapen shadow on the wall.

  In that diffuse light, on a ledge above the bed, I could now make out a notebook—the kind of composition notebook our mother always bought for us before we were sent away to school. The notebooks had black-and-white-marbled cardboard covers, stitched (not glued) pages, and they lasted forever. The shadow reached out its twisted arm and took the notebook down.

  Many entries were in the form of letters—some to me. I read with my heart thumping, my face burning, and my ears tuned for the crunch of her feet on the sandy road, turning into the yard.

  Set off from the other entries, at the end of the notebook, I came across the following:

  LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  I, Wendy E. Davis, being of relatively sound mind and body, do hereby submit this Instrument as my final Will and Testament, superseding all others in the event of my Death.

  I hereby place all my financial holdings now under management by Marlowe M. Gregers, Esq., of Pasadena, California, and any other financial holdings I may possess in any form whatsoever anywhere in the world, or that I may possess at any time in the future, in Trust under the following conditions:

  1. My brother, Peter A. Davis, of New York City, is hereby appointed sole Executor, Trustee, and Conservator in perpetuity. He is also charged with distributing my personal possessions to whom he sees fit.

  2. In the event I am survived by Issue:

  a. If Issue still be minor, I appoint my brother sole legal guardian, and I would beg he adopt same as his own, trust monies to provide all due appropriate support.

  b. If Issue has attained majority, my brother will use trust monies to provide same with the best education possible and nothing more.

  3. He should make all due provision for the support where necessary of Isabel Martinez Contreras, of Mexico City, DF, Mexico, and her issue, should she have any.

  4. For Augustine Nuñez Delgado (aka Felipe Reyes, amigo del pueblo), of Paraíso, Baja California Sur, Mexico, he should make all due provision for facilitation of good deeds, and realization of noble dreams.

  My brother, in his infinite wisdom, will determine when these conditions have been fulfilled. The remaining monies will then be subsumed into a subsidiary Trust in the name of our mother, Ava C. Davis (deceased), to be administered for the benefit of abused and/or molested girls.

  Should my brother, Peter A. Davis, predecease me, I leave all above holdings to Claire Barstow, of Livingston, Montana, with exactly the same provisions as those listed above, except for my personal possessions, which I leave to Isabel Martinez Contreras.

  If predeceased by both my brother and my Issue, such holdings will pass directly to the above referenced Ava C. Davis Trust.

  ADDENDUM:

  In the event I am unable to tell him in person

  The document ended there. It was after midnight. I put the notebook back on the ledge and went out onto the porch, carrying the copy of The Sound and the Fury, which I replaced on the table. For once it was quiet—not a dog, not a rooster, not a truck, not a note of music. The stars illuminated the landscape with no differentiation, no shadows, but with everything clearly visible, even the mountains.

  Foul Play

  The sound of whistling woke me just before dawn, a run of clear notes that didn’t sound local, possibly not even Mexican. More like an oud number from the Sahara.

  Gray light seeped through the windows of my sister’s house. Through the open door I could see the outline of a taco palm silhouetted against the sky, with one fading star caught in the topmost fronds. Slow footsteps crunched past on the sandy road, doves cooed, and the strange whistling continued.

  I needed to see who the whistler might be, so I got up, put on my still-dampish clothes, and went out into the gray yard. Cool air penetrating my lungs, carrying a sharp herbal smell. Wood smoke rising from the house down the lane where the schoolgirl lived with her grandmother.

  But the whistling had stopped. Nobody in sight. The cool air was making me shiver, and my sister still had not come back.

  I was swinging the handle of the manua
l coffee grinder when I heard a car pull into the yard outside—crunch of tires, engine purring, then stopping, door opening and closing with an oddly familiar heavy chunk … a kind of aural déjà vu.

  A Mexican man, nicely dressed in pressed jeans, a striped long-sleeved shirt, and wearing a black Western hat, was walking up from my father’s old green Mercedes. When I opened the door and stepped out on the porch, the man stopped and just stood there. His green eyes registered nothing, like a cat’s.

  I had the high ground. I waited for the man’s eyes to shift, and when at last they did, I said in Spanish, “I think I know that car.”

  “Oh really? Where from?” The man spoke uninflected California English.

  “It used to belong to my father.”

  “It’s a piece of shit.” The man grinned. “I’ve been working on it for four months. Only just got it running.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “Just about everything. Would have been easier to scrap it and get a new engine.”

  “Total rebuild, hunh?”

  “Pretty close.”

  “What happened? Water in the oil?”

  The man nodded approvingly. “Rust pinhole from the water pump. The pump was integrated right into the engine block. Less than a quarter inch clearance. The worst design I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few.”

  “I bet you have.” I nodded back. “It’s lucky my sister was able to find you. You’re probably the only guy in Baja who could have done this work, right?”

  The man cocked his head and ignored the question. “So you’re the brother? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I said.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. “Well, where is she?” the man said finally. “I’ve come to take her for a test drive.” He walked to the foot of the stairs and called her name. Waited for a count of five and called again.

  “You’re wasting your breath,” I said.

  “What the fuck do you mean?” The man was up the stairs and into the house. “Wendy? Wendy!”