Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (26 page)

“Well,” she said judiciously, “love’s not the same for old people, is it?”

“Yes it is,” he said, stung despite himself. “Just the same, bar a few minor details. We’re neither of us senile, you know, gray hairs to the contrary.”

“Then there’s you being sick,” she went on. “Though I bet you don’t let that stop you.”

“Blanca, I don’t wish to discuss my personal life or Dorothea’s. We’re both entitled to our privacy.”

“‘Privacy,’” she mimicked the short “i.” “Does everyone in England sound like you?”

“Does everyone in America sound like you?”

She giggled. Then she said, “What I think is, she’s not woman enough for you. All she does is sit here in her nice house and feed her nice dogs. She doesn’t even watch the tv or she’d have known all about us. She’s one of these arty people with no guts, a chicken, man. Otherwise she’d have eloped with you when you were still okay.”

“I never asked her to.”

“Not even when you were both young? I bet you did ask her. I bet her parents were mad because you were a foreigner, and they gave her a real hard time about you. So you went traveling, but she was afraid to run away with you and came out here to sort of bury her sorrows.”

What a romance! He had to smile.

Blanca said seriously, “Why do you smile like she couldn’t be in love with you? You’re not
so
bad looking, and I like how you talk.”

To divert her, he said, “I did ask a woman once to come traveling with me. But she died.”

“How?”

“She was burnt up in a fire.”

Blanca emitted a horrified, satisfied groan. “Ugh, God, that’s awful. Was she pretty?”

“Glorious.” Had she been beautiful? Scarcely mattered now, did it?

“What did you do after that?”

“Got drunk, sulked and brooded, traveled.”

“Dorothea should have gone with you and consoled you,” she said firmly.

He almost laughed. “We’d not met then, Dorothea and I. And now…” He stopped uncertainly. And now, what? He thought suddenly of his own Aunt Nell and her long-time friend, Captain Carpenter. They had slept together for all those years before the captain died and widowed a dull woman who was far less devastated by his passing than poor intense Nell. One way or another all love stories ended in parting. Not a subject fit for discussion with a child.

She said confidently, “I’m going traveling with Beto, to help him and keep him company. It’s all arranged.”

“Surely not!” he exclaimed. He regretted this involuntary response as soon as it was out of his mouth. “That is — Blanca, you’re far too intelligent to want to live on the run.”

“What do you care?”

“How old are you?”

“Don’t start that,” she warned. “Just because I’m small, people always think I’m a baby.”

“You’re certainly not a baby,” he said, irritated at his own tactlessness. “But you are young, and you do have a health condition, not to mention that cast on your arm. You’d be a serious liability to your brother, surely you must see that. He can’t intend to drag you further into danger with him.”

“So what am I supposed to do, then?” she challenged him. “Sit around and rot with my damn asthma? End up taking care of my mother while everybody else takes off and has a great life? That’s what the whole world expects, man, but I’m not going to do it.”

“Why not?” he countered sharply. “You’d probably do it very well, and there are worse fates, for Heaven’s sake. I doubt very much that your natural bent is for being a fugitive from the law.”

“Oh no?” she said with a surprising and unlovely gleam of cunning. “How do you think Beto got this far? He was so mad and scared after the riot, he could hardly think of a thing for himself. If I hadn’t figured out how to escape, he’d still be hiding down by the river in Albuquerque. He needs me to help him stop the right cars for a hitch north and to get people to help him.”

Christ, he thought, this is no time for lies and fantasy. As well say if I find the right doctor my cancer will miraculously vanish.

“Nonsense, Blanca! This is nonsense, and you know it as well as I. You must see that what you’ve said is nothing but a story. Your brother knows, if you don’t. You gave him a clear signal tonight — your attack after supper. No, let me finish. You saw the dog killed and you realized then how serious all this is, and how foolish and unfair it would be to encumber your brother with an invalid companion. So you underlined your condition with an attack.”

She glowered at him. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“What’s happened to Roberto would have happened, more or less, without your part in it,” he went on. “You are not his guardian angel, nor is he yours. He needs to be free to find the people who are essential to him, and you must find yours as well. Not merely whoever is familiar and close at hand — I mean the people you discover a spiritual affinity with.” Excellent, he thought caustically, do you think you’re back at Winchester debating your fellow upper-formers? He tried a different level.

“Think of the people who seem to take hold of your heart as soon as you meet them. Think of someone who moved into your neighborhood and you knew at once that this person would be your friend; or a teacher you loved from the first day of class.”

She shook her head in denial, her truculence replaced by confusion.

“I’m not saying this very well,” he sighed. “You see, I think planning for Beto seems important to you now because you don’t see any life for yourself except with your brother. But you must not be afraid to use your imagination for yourself, extend your vision to your own future — what you, Blanca, can do on your own in the world with the people who are meant to be part of your life. We all have to move outward from our families to find those people.”

Still no reply, and he was too tired to go on. He drifted for a minute, or perhaps it was longer, and he had to ask her to repeat herself when she finally did speak.

“Are you all right?” she said, bent near to look at him very closely with enormous eyes.

“Just tired,” he said.

She stood up straight, gazing loftily down on him, a pretty female goblin, big-headed and skinny-legged. “Then I’ll go back to my room. I’m not going to talk about Beto with you any more.”

“Very well,” he said. “Talk about anything you like.” But he owed her more courtesy than that after giving her such a long, sententious speech — not what she had bargained for surely. “Blanca, please stay and talk. Later on, when I feel better, perhaps you’d like to hear about an old Englishman’s travels in the world.”

“What should I talk about?” she said warily.

“A place I’ll never visit, I’m afraid. Will you tell me about Pinto Street?”

Before long she was caught up in her account of life in her mother’s house, the neighbors, her on-again, off-again relationship with school. Sometimes he drowsed, sometimes he listened. Slowly, he began picking out elements of what she said, and these elements circled in his mind, condensing into a pattern that he felt on the verge of understanding: the incident of the neighbor-boy stopped and rousted by police because he was out alone after dark in an Anglo neighborhood; comments about unemployment benefits never received because you had only fifteen days to file an appeal, and that was not enough time to find a lawyer who would do that sort of poorly paid work; people falling afoul of the welfare rules; food-stamp restrictions; having their furniture repossessed even as the staples came out and it fell apart.

With withering scorn Blanca described how the police were trying to “explain” the riot by producing two young “radicals” they had arrested. Cobb’s book fresh in his thoughts, Ricky remembered how in similar circumstances the French police, under all regimes, had manipulated their own arrest patterns according to whatever was politically acceptable to the government of the day.

Dorothea’s dream judge would know all about this, he thought. Is that why he’s come? Is that why, if he’s mine, I’ve brought him with me to her?

He could not hold and follow the thought, because another kept intruding, over-riding everything else: why am
I
here, talking at midnight with a child and waiting for the onset of pain? Who can need me so badly here, to bring me at such cost? Who can need a useless, craven, trembling wreck? Who needs a dead man?

Ellie jerked her body from one position to another, struggling for sleep. She resisted the impulse to look at her watch. It could only tell her that her desperate efforts had taken her a mere ten minutes deeper into the night, or that another full hour, that should have gone for sleep, had inched out of existence leaving her that much less possibility of rest.

She had a sudden, brilliantly clear image of herself standing in bright sunlight, very young in jeans and a western shirt, looking down in astonished wonder at something incredible. A monarch butterfly, almost as big as her childish hand when it opened its wings to bask, had come fluttering through the air and had landed on the buckle of her belt. There it perched, slowly flexing the brilliant panels of its wings like a gift from some unimaginably benevolent and powerful source.

She had been, what, nine? Ten? She never could pinpoint her few memories of childhood. It was one of the summers she had spent at camp. She had stood holding her breath for a long time, afraid that some twitch of her body might send the bright creature flying again.

The butterfly had clung there, seemingly oblivious to any threat or danger. She had even walked around behind the cabins without disturbing it, avoiding the other kids because she knew they would spoil it if they could. When the monarch had finally flitted up and away from her, she had not felt abandoned. She was still the girl the butterfly came to, and the fact that the butterfly had left her had no bearing on that singularity.

One sunny passage of perfection, indescribable to others (as she had discovered afterwards) and never again achieved —

That small Ellie, slim and exalted in her beloved cowboy clothes — her belt buckle had been a nickel-plated relief of a bronco-buster — and graced by an inexplicable, transitory wonder, was at the high point of her life. Unknowingly, that child stood on a summit. Ever since: downhill.

Roberto dreamed of scorpions, the kind they show in the movies, close-up so you can see how ugly they are, like they’re more than just, well, bugs.

They were on everything, just laying there, waiting for him to touch something, sit somewhere, take a step even.

He grabbed the blankets off his bed and began slamming around with them, trying to sweep the scorpions off the dresser-top and the window sill. But they clung to the blanket and crawled toward him, or they flew. The air was full of buzzing scorpions.

He woke up twisted in a blanket on the floor, gasping for breath.

Just a room, a room in the old woman’s house. The tv was still on, a blank gray screen, that was where the buzzing came from. The thickness of the air, that was moisture from Blanca’s steamer burbling away in the other room where it was set up on a stack of books next to her bed.

Bobbie was asleep on the couch, snoring, with his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. A wonder he didn’t have his stupid thumb in his mouth. He had wrapped himself in an old Navajo blanket pulled down from the wall, a dusty, raggy thing.

Why the hell wasn’t he outside, on watch? No, Roberto remembered now; he had been going to take the first watch himself, prowling out there to make sure no cops snuck up on them. Only he’d fallen asleep in front of the damn tv instead. Shit.