Dalva (3 page)

Two modest drinks made me simple-minded. I walked out into the bright sunlight, got in my car, and checked for an address in the boy's file which I brought along for hospital information. I thought I'd reason with the mother in the probability that she was ignorant of the rape. It was the beginning of rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway, and if you are to leave Santa Monica itself you must become a nickel-ante Buddhist. Usually I established a minimal serenity by playing the radio or tapes, but the music didn't work that day.

Now there's a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue. And what kind of rage led the uncle to abuse the boy? I would do my best to see him locked up but my own rage came from within, from another source, while it was the boy who was sinned against. Only the purest of heart can become murderous for others.

I parked on a crowded street in front of the barrio address. A group of boys were loitering against a stucco fence in front of the small bungalow. They taunted me in Spanish.

“Did you come to fuck me, beautiful gringo?”

“You have some growing to do, you miserable little goat turd.”

“I am already big. Do you want to see?”

“I forgot my glasses. How could you be my lover when you spend your days playing with yourself? Is this the house of Franco? Where is his mother?”

The boys, all in their early teens, were delighted with my unexpected gutter Spanish.

“His mother went away with a pimp. Where is our friend?”

The boys shrank back and I turned to see a man striding toward me with implausibly cruel eyes. The eyes startled me because they belonged to someone long dead whom I had loved. I tried to move away but his eyes slowed me and he grabbed my wrist.

“What do you want, bitch?”

“If the mother isn't here I want to speak to the uncle of
Franco.” Now he was twisting my wrist painfully. “I want to stop this man from fucking his nephew to death.”

Still holding my wrist he vaulted the fence and began slapping me. I turned to the boys and said “Please.” At first they were frightened but then the one who had teased me pulled out a collapsed car aerial, stretched it to its full length, and whipped it across the uncle's face. The uncle screamed and let go of my wrist. He turned to attack the boys but they had all taken out their aerials and flailed at the man who ran in circles trying to cover his eyes. The aerials whistled through the air tearing the man's skin and clothing to shreds. He was a bloody, god-awful mess and now I tried to stop the boys but only a police car careening down the street toward us stopped them. The boys ran, one of them slowing to throw a rock at the squad car which broke the windshield. The uncle disappeared into the house and, evidently, out the back door since the police never found him.

The aftermath was predictably unpleasant. I was suspended, then offered a clerkish job, and refusing that, was fired. The dreadful thing to me was that my impulsiveness allowed the uncle to escape, not the number of infractions of social-work rules I had violated. The police made a cursory attempt at a follow-up the next afternoon at the hospital. I went along as a translator but the boy refused to answer any of the questions, telling Inc it was a private matter. I was puzzled by this until in the corridor the police told me that such offenses among country people from Mexico are considered unsuitable for the law. It's something that has to be dealt with individually or by a family member. I said that the boy was far too young to begin to deal with his uncle. The police replied the boy might wait for years until he felt capable.

At dawn a few days later Franco called to say he had sneaked out of the hospital. He insisted that he was fine and would pay me back some day. I was terribly upset because I had visited him the day before and we had had a wonderful time talking, though he still looked very ill. I was frantic and insisted that he call me collect every week, or write me letters. In case he returned to Mexico
I told him to contact my old uncle Paul, the geologist and mining engineer, who lived in Mulege on Baja when he wasn't visiting a girlfriend at Bahia
Kino on the mainland. The boy said he didn't have a pencil and paper but perhaps he would remember. And that was all.

I made coffee and took it out to my small balcony. It was barely light and there was a warm stiff breeze mixed with the odor of salt water, juniper, eucalyptus, oleander, palm. The ocean was rumpled and gray. I think I stayed here this long because of the trees and the ocean. One year when I was having particularly intense problems I sat here for an hour at daylight and an hour at twilight. The landscape helped me to let the problems float out through the top of my head, through my skin, and into the air. I thought at the time of a college professor who told me that Santayana had said that we have religion so as to have another life to run concurrently with the actual world. It seemed my problem was refusing this dualism and trying to make my life my religion.

The wind off the Pacific cooled and the clarity of the air brought on a dim memory, a blurred outline of sensations similar to
déjà-υu.
It was a year or so after World War II, I think. I must have been six or seven and Ruth was three. My father liked to go camping for pleasure and to get away from the farm. The four of us flew up to the Missouri River in the Stinson, landing on a farmer's grass strip. The farmer was an improbably tall Norwegian and helped Dad load the gear on a horse-drawn wagon. We sat on the gear and bedding with Naomi holding Ruth. There was the smell of ripe wheat, the sweating horses, and tobacco from Dad and the farmer. Under the wagon seat I could see manure on the farmer's boots, and through a crack on the wagon floor the ground was moving beneath us. After miles of a trail beside the wheat the wagon moved down a steep hill along a creek bordered by cottonwoods; the creek flowed into the Missouri which was broad, slow, and flat. The grass was deep and there were deer, pheasants, and prairie chickens, flushed by our wagon. Mother started a fire and made coffee while Dad and the farmer set up camp. Then they had coffee with sugar and strong, pungentsmelling whiskey. The farmer left with the wagon and horses. Dad put shells in his shotgun and we walked back up the hill and along the edge of the wheat field where he shot a pheasant and a prairie chicken. I got to carry the birds for a while but they were heavy so I rode on his back. At the camp we all
plucked the feathers off the birds except baby Ruth who put feathers in her mouth. Dad cut up the birds and they browned them, put in carrots, onions, and potatoes. They put the pot over the fire and we all went down to the creek mouth and went swimming. After dinner the setting sun turned the river orange. At night there was an orange moon and I heard coyotes. At first light I watched my parents sleep. Little Ruth opened her eyes, smiled at me, and went back to sleep. I walked alone down to the river. The wind came up strongly and the water smelled raw and fresh. A large eddy and sandbar were full of water birds. There was a bird taller than myself which I recognized from Naomi's Audubon cards as a great blue heron. I walked farther up the bank of the river until I heard them calling “Dalva.” I saw Father walking toward me with a smile. I pointed to the heron and he nodded and picked me up. I let my cheek rub against his unshaven face. Soon after that trip we drove him to the train one October afternoon. They told us his plane was shot down outside of Inchon. We did not get a body back, but buried an empty coffin as a gesture.

Ruth called again this morning with good but tentative news. Sex has returned her sense of playfulness. Her voice is no longer dry and fatigued, though I worry a bit that this is a vaguely manic phase that the family is susceptible to. What she did is have the priest in for dinner, along with his “bodyguard” or chaperone, the older priest with the drinking problem. It was a well-planned campaign to win her last chance to get pregnant: she poached Maine lobsters, chilled them, and served them as an appetizer with a Montrachet. Ted is an oenophile and sends her additions to the cellar they began together. Next was some quail she had marinated, then grilled, and finally a rough-cut filet covered with garlic and pepper, with a Grands Echezeaux and her last bottle of Romanée-Conti. The old priest was a delightful talker and had studied in France in the thirties. He had always been poor and had never drunk such wines, though he had read of them, and he'd be damned if at age seventy-one he'd miss the chance to drink
them. I teased Ruth then about her somber and pious comments on prostitutes when she had served over a thousand dollars' worth of wine in order to make love. She said the old man never did fall asleep, so she had to settle for a quick act standing in the bathroom over the sink looking at each other in the mirror. Now all she had to do was wait and see if she was pregnant while the father went off to work among the poor in Costa Rica.

Here is how it happened to me, how I had my child early in my sixteenth year. It has often occurred to me that I may be a grandmother at forty-five. I tried it out in front of the mirror, whispering
grandma
at myself softly but it was all too unknowable to be effective. But now I am drifting away from it again. Naomi and Ruth feel wordlessly upset that the land will go to Ruth's son, there being no other heirs in the prospect, another reason for the priest mating. None of us mind the name Northridge disappearing, but it would be a shame to see the land leave the family, and Ruth's son professes to hate it and has not visited since his early teens. Enough!

His name was Duane, though he was half Sioux and he gave me many versions of his Sioux name depending on how he felt that day. Grandfather's place, which is the original homestead, is three miles north of the farm. The homestead was a full section, six hundred and forty acres, onto which the other land had been added since 1876, to form a total of some thirty-five hundred acres, which is not that much higher than average for this part of the country. Our good fortune was that the land is bisected by two creeks that form a small river, so that the land was low and particularly fertile, and could easily be irrigated. The central grace note, though, is that my great-grandfather studied botany and agriculture for two years at Cornell College before he entered the Civil War. In fact, an accidental traveler down the county gravel road near Grandfather's
would think he was passing a forest, but this is a little farfetched since the farm is so far from the state highway that there are no accidental travelers. All the trees were planted by Great-grandfather to form shelter belts and windbreaks from the violent weather of the plains, and to provide fuel and lumber in an area where it was scarce and expensive. There are irregular rows of bull pine and ponderosa, and the density of the deciduous caragana, buffalo berry, russian olive, wild cherry, juneberry, wild plum, thornapple, and willow. The final inside rows are the larger green ash, white elm, silver maple, black walnut, european larch, hackberry, wild black cherry. About a decade ago Naomi, through the state conservationists, made the area a designated bird sanctuary in order to keep out hunters. Scarcely anyone visits except for a few ornithologists from universities in the spring and fall. Inside the borders of trees are fields, and ponds, a creek, and inside the most central forty, the original farmhouse. Enough!