Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (26 page)

After the first day on my route, I located a barbershop and told the grinning old Mexican what I wanted. He tsk-tsked as my straight reddish-blond locks fell, but I couldn't be bothered with braiding or
bobby pins anymore. I was bemused to discover my hair curled, wispy flips this way and that, without the weight.

The customers on my route were mainly Anglos and Mexicans, a few native Indians. I deliberately ignored many of the UPS rules: I got to know the regulars, enjoyed the few minutes of idle chatter, usually about the heat or the contents of the package I'd delivered, and I was offered enough iced tea or water that I didn't need my water jug. I liked that they were all generally happy to see me. I even started picking up some Spanish words:
hola
and
qué pasa
,
gracias
,
de nada
, and
cómo se dice
. I enjoyed the way they felt in my mouth, the indulgent smiles the natives gave me as they corrected my pronunciation or repeated a word several times until I could control the vowels. I was an utter failure at rolling my
r
's.

I started at 8:00 in the morning and finished anywhere between 5:00 and 6:00 in the evening. It was physically hard work—the heat and the wind through the truck and the constant rattling over less-than-serviceable roads wore me down so that by quitting time both my brain and body were numb, and the promise of the cool pleasure of the shower became a single-minded purpose.

Back at the house, I'd lean against the shower wall under the sharp needles of water, raking my fingernails hard across my flesh, scraping up grayish pills of dried sweat and dead skin to find the new underneath, wondering how long before all six layers were born of this place, finally downing half a beer in a single swallow before the second half went as rinse for what was left of my hair.

 

The damn cat, as I taken to calling her—and she was a her—relaxed out of her crouch and took to lying on her side purring, watching me, tail flicking irregularly at some imagined slight. Any attempt to move her from her spot resulted in the same arched hissing threat of the first day. I'd discovered where she came in, a hole under the house by the hot-water heater in the closet. I waited until she left the house one evening, hunting out back for prairie dogs or chipmunks or birds, and then boarded up the hole. An hour later, she let forth an ungodly screech that did not stop. I endured ten minutes of her protest then pried loose the board. She slipped
swiftly up and out into the room where she furiously licked her fur.

I was defeated and not a little admiring of her tenacity. She didn't demand much of me, only access to the house. I became accustomed to the purr and the watchful gaze, and after the first week she joined me on the porch after my shower, where she lapped milk, I drank beer and smoked cigarettes, and we watched the sky turn from apricot to lilac to ragged strips of plum before night fell for good and stars danced out across the world like rain scattered on a mountain lake.

The street came alive as the sun began to drop and people migrated outside to porches or lawn chairs set up in the shade of juniper, pine, and oak trees. Unasked, the two Mexican children from next door came over the second week, shyly approaching my porch. They stood at the bottom of the stairs, smiling at me, until I smiled back. It seemed impolite to snub them, and I soon looked forward to their nightly visit.

One of them was a boy, I'd discovered; Isael was seven and his sister, Luisa, was five. They talked, and I listened. Their chatter wove the darkening strands of night into a cocoon of suspended time that was soothing. The ash gray cat let them scratch under her neck, something she'd refused me the couple of times I'd tried. They named her Luz, which they said meant light.

“She is not so dark as the other
gatos
,” Luisa explained, “
y cuando
the sun hits, the fur is like hot light, so we call her Luz,
si
?”

I looked at the cat, splayed out across the wood, her purr a deep rumble of fading thunder, and thought she was still a damn cat, but I told Luisa that Luz was a grand name, and she giggled, stuffing her fist into her mouth.

Isael and Luisa brought me lizards, grasshoppers, beetles, and lightning bugs and showed off their latest scratches and bruises. I bought a hummingbird feeder, and we tried to imitate the Rufous hummingbirds' noisy trill and laughed at the pugnacious antics of the males fighting for territory. Isael taught me the names of some of the plants: yucca and agave, ocotilla and creosote, mesquite and prickly pear. And the Mexican evening primrose, which was my favorite; it bloomed only once, for just an evening, the long, delicate petals a startling spot of color. Luisa and Isael played with my water hose, making dark whorls in the dirt, writing their names in my front yard, until their mother chased them in for the night.

Eva Posidas, my landlady, had sent several dishes over by way of her granddaughter, Marisela, the mother of Luisa and Isael—pork and corn tamales, black beans cooked long and low with bits of meat and green chiles and some other unknown green substance, corn and chile enchiladas with a spicy red sauce. Marisela brought me homemade tortillas and something that resembled grits. She told me her husband, Jose, the father of Luisa and Isael, would help me with anything that needed fixing on the house. “
Abuelita
said we are to watch over you, Sarita,” she told me, her words only slightly accented. I told Marisela that the house was fine, and I was pretty self-sufficient. She laughed in consternation at this comment, her lips moving like butterfly wings.

Luisa and Isael liked to tell me stories about their family. They told me their great-grandmother, Eva Posidas, had grown up in a small village in Mexico and come here many years ago with her parents and eight siblings. They told me she could be fierce, their
abuelita
, “as angry as the prickly pear,” Isael said.

“But not to us.” Luisa ran her fingers the wrong way across the damn cat's fur. “Just to the people who make her insides itch.”

“Or if she forgets something,” Isael said. “She doesn't like forgetting, and she forgets a lot.”

Luisa reached over and pinched Isael. “You aren't supposed to say bad things about people.”

“Eh, eh, no pinching,” I said. Isael scowled at Luisa. “Tell me more about your grandmother's family.” I rubbed his knee where Luisa's fingers had dug in.

“They were the first ones here,
guelita
's family,” he said slowly, still scowling at Luisa. “They built much of what you see. My great
tío
built your house with his own hands. They named this town for a special tree that lives in the woods near Moon Mountain.
Guelita
says it's a healing tree, there are many of them, and she has found many good plants there.”

“Guelita?”

Luisa pointed toward Eva Posidas's house. “Grandmother.
Guelita
.”

“I thought ‘
abuelita'
was grandmother.”

“It is. They both are,” Luisa explained.

“Ah.” I nodded as if I understood. “And where is Moon Mountain?”

Isael waved his hand toward the west. “Out there. I've been twice. I even heard it sing once.”

“The mountain?”

Isael looked at me strangely. “Sometimes, Sarita, you are funny when I don't think you mean to be funny.”

I lowered my head slightly and grinned at him in mock horror. “No one's ever told me that before, Isael.”

“That's bad?”

“No,” I reassured him. “It's funny.”

He paused for a moment, clearly trying to determine how it was funny, before he said, “The tree. They are the ones who sing.”

“Really? What did the trees sing?”

Isael shook his head slowly. “They don't have words, just,” he shrugged one shoulder, “singing. You have to believe though, to hear it sing.”

“
Guelita
taught us,” Luisa said. “She's a
curandera
.”

“I see. And what does a
curandera
do?”

“She makes all the pains go away,” Luisa explained. “She cracks an egg over your head and,” she slapped her hands together, “it's gone. I'm going to be one when I grow up.
Guelita
said so.”

“But you must want them to go away,
el dolor
,” Isael said. “You must ask for the help.”

“Ah.” I nodded thoughtfully, trying to keep my expression serious.

I liked their myths and stories, and I liked their names—Luisa, Isael, Eva Posidas, Marisela, Jose—they tasted like liquid chocolate on my tongue. I liked the easy way they accepted me into the neighborhood, never asking questions about who I was or where I'd come from. Everyone seemed remarkably accepting and friendly, nodding or raising a hand when I passed by, and I soon came to recognize their figures and faces. Half the town was related in some way. Mostly it was a quiet place with people living simple lives—no tragedies, no crime—although dirt bikes and off-road vehicles sometimes raced along the trails behind my house, and music boomed from radios in cars driven by teenagers late on a Friday or Saturday night. Occasionally there was a fight, but mostly
with words. Isael told me I needed to watch out for snakes and bears when I went out walking in the evening.

Across the street, under a stand of tall, toothpick pine trees, lived an elderly man, who, as far as I could tell, rarely left the worn bench on the front lawn, and a woman of uncertain age who was either wife or daughter, perhaps a sister. She too brought me food—cornbread and some kind of tasteless, overcooked beans with tomatoes. She hadn't said much after handing me the food with a quick, hesitant smile. “Let me know if he bothers you.” She gestured vaguely back across the street. “He can get noisy at times.”

I couldn't imagine how the old man would bother me. He simply sat. His bald head was covered with copper freckles, some the size of pennies. Light blue eyes hid beneath great bushy eyebrows that seemed more like caricatures than features. The only part of him that moved occasionally was his head or his hands readjusting themselves on the cane he clasped firmly in front of him. Frequently he stared at me. At first it was unnerving when I sat out on the porch, until I decided he wasn't really seeing me. I took to waving at him when I left in the morning and when I came back at night. I never got a response: perhaps I imagined his eyes widening or a look of puzzlement crossing his face, but his stoicism became a challenge. Luisa and Isael said he talked to angels.

“Do you believe in angels?” Isael asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Luisa frowned and tapped me on the knee. “You need to believe more.”

“I'll work on it,” I whispered to her, if only to wipe the lines of concern from her brow.

I saw the man in the pickup truck several times around town, and we always nodded in acknowledgment. His truck was parked in front of Eva Posidas's house frequently. Luisa and Isael told me he was their mother's cousin, Enrique, and that he caught coyotes, mule deer, squirrels, and bears.

“Sometimes,” Luisa said in a breathy whisper, her sticky body sprawled across my knee, “even rats!”

“Once, a cougar,” Isael said proudly.

“For eating?” I asked, which they thought was very funny.

“For the government,” Isael said.

It was several weeks before I learned from Marisela that he worked for the county as an animal control officer. When I asked her how he got into that kind of work, she grew unusually solemn and said, “We all have a gift; that is his.”

“Animals?”

“Lost things,” she said.

“Cougars and rats and bears get lost?” I asked.

“Everything gets lost sooner or later,” she said, and changed the subject.

When I started thinking about his hands, or the easy way he'd chuckled, or the fine, sugar lines around his eyes that begged to be touched, I drank more beer or chased Luisa and Isael around the yard with a stream of water from the hose.

Mostly there was little energy for thinking, and I was content to let each day unfold.

I had quickly taken to sleeping with the windows open, enjoying the soft, barely cool, night breezes that lulled me to a deep sleep, only to waken frequently at two or three in the morning with that same heart-stopping abruptness that had sent me fleeing weeks ago. Each time I reached forward for the voice, longing yet fearing the timbre of the whisper, but here the room was silent and empty, save for the rustle of the trees and the sense that something had just left.

Unable to fall back asleep, I'd get in the car, glide out the driveway and down the street with my lights off, then hit the gas and lights simultaneously, roaming back roads at high speeds, the green glow of the dashboard comforting, letting the wind and the hum of the tires drown out any vestige of where I'd come from—of other nights of cruising, of guns and terse commands, the squeal of tires, feet pounding the pavement; a man falling backward into water, hands outstretched; dried, burning eyes and the stink of exhaust and stale cigarettes; flies on a door; the refineries burning late at night, coughing up cloudy belches of orange flames; coffee-and adrenaline-fed highs; black roads snaking past buildings looming like great metal beasts; pink halogen lights promising a false dawn for hours.

Some nights, I screamed, letting my voice and the wind and the tearing pain in my throat obliterate vision, smell, thought. Some
nights I played with the seduction of letting the tires take me off the road into warm blackness, just letting go and succumbing to whatever was chasing me.

Once, just as daylight broke, I crested a hill and slammed my brakes on at the sight of a city laid out in front of me like an enormous turtle of lights. The ungodly power of all I'd done swept over me in a cold, shuddering rush, and I pressed my head hard against the steering wheel. When I looked up, hands were descending, the same translucent hands I'd dreamed my first night in this land—five, eight of them, floating and dancing down around my car with a fan of light growing from behind.