In An Arid Land (28 page)

The house had calmed when we got home, but Crissy was up all night coughing and wheezing, and in the morning she looked like she was close to death. Her skin had a gray tint to it and her eyes were dark and frightened. She needed help, Marie said. And I guess that's what made me decide to do it. That, and, when I remember who I was then, it was also the prospect of easy money and a night's-worth of blind excitement.

When he told Marie she let loose with a fit, calling us both losers and saying, "This is just what we need both of you in the penitentiary or dead somewhere in Mexico." To me she said, "I thought you had more sense." They argued for two days. He would leave, come back and leave again. She talked about how after all those years of living "low and fast" she thought she'd finally changed her life into "something resembling normal," but now she saw that people like her and David never really changed. "There is in fact only one kind of life for each person in this world," she said. "There's respectable and non-respectable and it's just nonsense to think you can ever be anything else."

This kind of talk went on until I had almost changed my mind. Then Crissy took a turn for the worse one night to the point that it sounded like she was drowning when she tried to catch her breath. We had to take her to the hospital. The doctor did something to her to make it better, but the hospital wouldn't let her stay even overnight, as she wasn't "serious" in their book and Marie and David were very far in arears on old bills.

In the truck, Marie said, "All right, do it. I guess you're going to whether I agree or not, and a mother with a sick child can't be choosy. But far as I'm concerned I know nothing about it. Do you hear me?" She let out a huff then and shoved Crissy onto my lap, like she was tired of the weight, and all the way home she was quiet, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window at something far away.

By now the outcome must appear obvious: that something went wrong with the scheme, that there was an accident or a double cross or that we got busted. But it was nothing like that, and this is the part I'm still trying to understand.

The night of the deal came and went just fine. We flew in the dark for about two hours, close above the hill tops, to what appeared to be a village. We landed on a road in the glare of headlights. Two men showed themselves. David spoke to them in Spanish. Then the four of us loaded half a dozen bales of marijuana into the plane. The smell was so strong that by the time we landed in a slight drizzle up in the mountains I had the feeling I'd been smoking the stuff steadily for a month or more.

It was an airstrip on a ranch. Again two men were waiting for us: the rancher and his son, about my age. We unloaded the bales into a pickup, covered it all with a tarp, and then David and I flew away into the mist. The only problem occurred back at Alpine Regional. David overshot the runway and the landing gears stuck in the mud as hard as if it were plaster of paris holding down the plane. He screamed at the plane and cursed and banged his fist against the controls until he sort of caught himself.

"David," I said but he just stared. "David!" I yelled and shook him and he came out of it, muttering, "They'll smell it. Anybody gets within fifty feet of this crate and they'll smell it." In the drizzle a man appeared from the control room, but I saw him in time and went over to him, convinced him we could take care of it. And we did. We hitched up a chain to the truck and freed the plane, then he taxied her very slowly to the farthest reaches of the field where we spent an hour cleaning it out.

At home Marie was in a state. The house was so full of her cigarette smoke that it was like stepping into a cloud. She said, "I don't want to hear a word about it," and then she closed herself up with Crissy back in their bedroom. David made himself a pallet of sleeping bags on the floor in my room. We all went to bed, but none of us slept that night. Marie was up and down. I heard her pawing through the icebox and muttering to old Shepherd Fred as if she were asking advice. In the glow of Crissy's night light I watched David's hands shake, saw his lips moving as he tried to moisten a parched mouth.

Outlaws we were not. But this is the part that baffled me, given what I knew about David and Marie, how long they had lived with uncertainty. The next morning and for days afterward as we waited for word from the rancher there was a kind of a sickness about the house. They hardly spoke to each other except to snap short responses to questions, and everybody's eyes were glassy from lack of sleep. David kept saying, "Something's gone wrong," and he drank a steady stream of beer and Old Crow as if it were medicine. Marie was so twisted up with fear that she called in to work and stayed home in bed, and she kept Crissy out of school. Whenever a car passed on the lonely dirt road out front David would leap up and peek out the window. He even talked to me of buying a pistol, but then he said, "It wouldn't do any good, I'd never use it." Smiling numbly at the floor, he said, "Maybe cyanide pills would be better, one for each of us."

Once, when we'd run out of food, and David and I tried to make a trip to the grocery store, he began to tremble so when we got into town that he had to pull off the road and let me drive. Over dinner that night he started talking about forgetting the whole deal, saying he'd been an idiot to think something like this would ever work for us and that because he was involved something was bound to go wrong. He called himself a "jinx on us." He said we should just pack up and move away, try to start out new. Which touched off Marie like I'd never seen before.

Holding a skillet in her hand she screamed at him for a fool and a coward, saying he'd put us all in jeopardy and now he'd just have to find the guts to go on with it. The sounds of mockery and challenge were in her voice.

"There's something wrong with you, David," she said. "You're lacking something that the rest of us have got inside somewhere."

He sat there and took it, staring at the floor like he was being whipped, until finally he said, "I don't intend to ever see the inside of a prison again, for you or anybody else."

"I hope you're right," she said. "But it's a little late to be worrying about that. What are we supposed to live on, David?"

Just then, in that moment of silence, there came a knock on the front door. A ripple of panic moved over each of us. It might have been the sheriff for all we knew at that point. The faces above the table were ragged and blanched. Then David did something strange. It was something that, when I remember this well, it was what changed everything; it made everything turn and veer off in a different direction. David's whole body was trembling when he leaned over and said gently, "Crissy, sweetheart, would you go see who it is and ask them to wait?"

Crissy gave him a sweet smile and started to leave, but Marie grabbed her by the shoulder and put her back in her chair.

"I'll get it," I said.

"No," said Marie. "David'll get it. Won't you, David?"

"Let him alone, Marie."

"Quiet," she said. "This has to do with more than just answering the door. This has to do with the past, doesn't it, David? This has to do with everything, doesn't it, David?"

"Shut up, Marie," he said softly, but she didn't listen.

"This has to do with sending other people to do your own nasty business, doesn't it, David? That you've been doing all your life and you're still trying to do it. Isn't that right, David?" She paused, breathing hard, and I watched him wither and writhe on his chair as she continued. "I may not be much to speak of, but I finish what I start and I don't send little girls, or young boys either for that matter you know what I'm talking about, David?I don't send other people to do what I ought to do myself so as to put them in danger. And I'm just a woman." She snorted a mean laugh then, the kind of laugh you hate to hear in a woman who's your sister. "Come on, David."

"Let it go, Marie," I said.

"No, it's too late for that. We can't let it go anymore."

The knock came again.

"Get up, David," she said. "Or I'll leave this house right now and you'll never see me again as long as you live."

At that she fell into her chair and stared at him like she was trying to force him to look up and meet her eyes.

"Do you hear me, David?"

David lifted his heavy body. There was something fierce but weary-looking about his face. For a moment he just stood there, straddling the chair, gazing at the top of the table. And all of a sudden he marched out of the kitchen. We heard his footsteps on the floor of the living room and then the front door opened. He returned in less than a minute, a good sign. Glancing at me, he nodded once and then moved around the kitchen in a panicky haste. He tossed down his beer and chased it with a gulp of Old Crow and then opened another beer. He said, "Don't leave the house," and he started out again. Marie called to him to wait a minute, but I told her to shut up and be still and I got up to follow him. In the dark living room he stopped me. He said he'd changed his mind and that I should stay with Marie and Crissy. He said he'd be back inside of three hours. He said, "Take care" Then he smiled at me oddly like he wanted to mention something else but it wouldn't gel in his mind. So he shook my hand, once, firmly, and he was out the door before I could speak or move.

That was the last time I saw the man I call David Smith. And to this day I don't know exactly what happened up there in the mountains when he went to collect our share. What I remember of that night is how long it was, and quiet, and still the sort of quiet, the sort of stillness you associate with a vigil and how cold it was in the house.

We waited for him all through the wee hours. Then about sun-up a truck pulled into the yard. I peeked out the window, hoping, but it turned out to be the rancher's son standing on the porch. He looked awful. His freckled face was frightened and tired and dirty under his dirty cowboy hat. I stepped out and followed him to his truck where two canvas tote bags were waiting for me. He said, "I'm awful sorry about this, mister." When he looked up I knew. From his eyes, I suppose. There was something missing in them, like the eyes of men I'd seen in the war.

"There was a crash," he said. "We don't know what went wrong. The weather was clear, the plane sounded fine. But soon as he cleared the ground that old rig went right for this hill up there."

He kept glancing around as he talked, as if something huge and horrible were lurking in the desert. It was quite a risk, his coming back down there to bring us what was ours. None of this was a part of the plan and he had his own problems now and he wanted to be gone from there as soon as possible.

"Right before he took off he must have heaved these two sacks out the window. That's how he'd asked for it: 'Split up the money two ways,' he told us. There's enough in there for you and your sister to get away and start out new somewheres. That's what I'd suggest. And you better hurry. We all better hurry."

The rancher's son got in his truck then and drove off into the pretty sunrise as I turned for the house, thinking of Marie and Crissy, and trying to figure how I was going to say it to her, how I would have to state the simple facts coldly and call it an accident. I thought about the trouble we were in. I thought about running. There was Marie on the porch in her robe and furry slippers, a cigarette in her mouth, her arms holding herself just below her breasts. At that moment she looked weathered and worn out, like some old gal you might find behind the counter of an all-night truck stop in a worthless town such as Gallup, New Mexico. She said, "It's all over, isn't it."

III

Shame, in my book, works like this. Once you've done a rotten thing, once you've turned on somebody that once was yours, once you've let good sense or courage or whatever push loyalty to some deep dungeon in your gut, some place that you'll never find it again well, once you've done this you've set yourself a new path in life and you have no choice but to go on down it.

By the time we settled everything that day, packed what was necessary, retrieved the truck from the airport and got out of town on a back road, it was late afternoon. At Van Horn, a dusty little stop up on I-10, we took a room at an old motor court called The Sands. Back of the motel was a weedy lot where we parked the truck and the cycle so they couldn't be seen, and then I walked up Business 10 to a Church's Chicken place and brought home supper. After we ate, Marie put Crissy to bed and then the dog let it be known that he needed a walk to relieve himself. Marie followed me when I went out with him and in the lot behind the motel we sat on the tailgate of the truck while the dog was searching around for a place to make his mark. Marie hadn't opened her mouth for hours, but suddenly she said, "You know what I wish?" and I looked at her, ready to listen.