Points of Departure (20 page)

Before he leaves, he and Tomas shake
hands. They will do business.

That evening, Tomas buys tequila with money from the American. Other men from the village come to hear him brag of his success. Dolores watches from the doorway of the house.

The men sit on the rusting hulk of an old car that was abandoned on the edge of the
malpais
. The car’s wheels were stolen long ago. Now the car rests on its belly, and men perch on its rusted
hood. They drink tequila and laugh loudly. The light from the setting sun paints them red. Their shadows stretch away into the
malpais
.

Dolores dreams that night of devils One is feathered like a rooster and he struts through the dream, puffing out his chest and preening his shiny horns. Another has a bulging belly, like an old sow with a litter. His ears are hairy, like the ears of a pig, and
his horns curl like goat horns.

Tomas has little to say at breakfast. His eyes are red and weary looking, and he complains that his head hurts. He pushes Esperanza away when she comes to kiss him good morning. “Make more devils,” he tells Dolores before he goes to the fields.

She comforts Esperanza and makes devils of clay. In her hands, the fat devil becomes fatter. Her fingers smooth the round
curve of his belly, a pig’s belly supported by spindly legs. His ears droop mournfully as he dries in the sun. He is a ridiculous devil, a child’s toy, but somehow she cannot laugh at him.

From a handful of clay, she makes the strutting rooster devil, with his puffed out chest and his nose like a beak. The devil looks foolish, but Dolores is uneasy. The devils stink of dark and ancient places,
and she remembers her grandfather’s tales.

“Never call the evil one by name,” her grandfather told her. “If you do, you will call him to you and give him power.”

She pats the clay, molding the delicate shapes of devil’s horns and wondering what her grandfather would say about these toys. A breeze blows from the
malpais
and she feels ill, weak, and feverish.

Tomas insists on bringing the devils
into the house that evening. He sets them on a shelf beside the bed, pokes the fat one in the belly, and laughs.

Again, Tomas and his friends sit on the old car and drink tequila. Dolores goes to bed, but she does not sleep. She can hear Tomas talking and the laughter of his friends.

And she hears other sounds—small sounds, like mice searching for grains of corn on the dirt floor. She lies awake,
knowing that the devils are moving on the shelf, their claws scratching against the wood.

She is awake when Tomas stumbles into the house. He brings his bottle of tequila with him: she hears the clink of glass as he sets the bottle down by the bed, the rustle of clothing as he takes off his shirt. He lies beside her in the bed, and she turns toward him. His breath stinks of tequila, and he pulls
her toward him, pressing his lips against her throat. He makes love to her in the darkness, but she thinks of the devils, watching from the shelf. The bed sings, but she is silent. At last, Tomas sleeps.

While her husband and daughter sleep, Dolores listens to the devils moving on the shelf. In the morning, the devils are quiet, standing as if they had never moved. That morning, on her way to
fetch water from the public fountain, Dolores stops at the house of the
curandera
, the village healer and herbalist.

Doña Ramon’s house and yard have a pungent smell from the drying herbs in the rafters and the growing herbs in the yard. Esperanza stays close by her mother, her eyes wide, a little fearful of Doña Ramon.

Dolores tells Doña Ramon of the American who wants devils, of her terrible
dreams, and of the sounds she hears at night.

The old woman nods. “These devils will bring you bad luck,” she says. “When you make them, you give the devil power. You call the devils from the
malpais
to your house.”

“What can I do?” Dolores asks.

“Stop making devils.”

“The American wants devils,” Dolores says.

“Then you will have bad luck.”

That afternoon, Dolores makes whistles shaped like
doves and owls and coyotes and frogs, simple toys that will make children happy and will bring no devils to her house. As she works, Esperanza plays beside her in the mud, making round balls of clay and patting them flat to make mud tortillas.

When Tomas comes home that evening, he examines Dolores’s new pottery. There is not a single devil. “The American told you to make devils,” he says to
her. “Why do you make these toys?”

“I do not like the devils,” Dolores tells him softly. “They will bring bad luck.”

Tomas scowls. “These devils will bring us money. And money will bring us luck.”

She shakes her head. “The
curandera
told me that these clay devils will bring real devils from the
malpais
to our house.”

Tomas laughs. It is wicked, hurting laughter with no joy in it. “Why do I
have such a stupid wife?” he asks. “There are no devils in the
malpais
. Those are stories to scare children.”

Dolores shakes her head again, suddenly stubborn. “I can’t make devils,” she says. “I—”

Tomas strikes without warning, an open-handed slap that nearly knocks her down. “Why do I have such a stupid wife?” he shouts. “The American wants devils and you will make devils.” When he strikes
her again, Dolores falls to her knees and clutches her head, weeping. He stands over her for a moment, his hand raised as if to strike again. When she looks up at him, he scowls at her, the expression of a young boy who has been denied something he wants. “You must make devils,” he says.

“Then we will have money, and we can buy you a new dress.” Reluctantly, she nods her head. Then he tells her
to dry her tears and helps her to her feet.

That night, Tomas drinks with his friends, finishing the tequila that he bought with the American’s money. Dolores dreams of a bat-winged devil who dances on a platform of human skulls, a feathered devil who clutches two weeping children in its talons; a snake devil who has caught a naked woman in his coils.

The next morning, Dolores makes devils:
the snake with the captive woman; the bat-winged dancer; the bird devil and the children. Her head aches and she is weary before the day is half over.

When Tomas comes home, he sees her work and smiles.

“These will bring money,” he says, but she does not answer. He puts them on the shelf with the others and, because there is no more tequila, his friends do not come to visit. He sits alone on
the rusting car and drowses in the setting sun. Dolores watches from the kitchen door; she does not like seeing him sitting so near the
malpais
when the night is coming. She goes to him. “Come in the house,” she says. “It is not good to be out here.”

He smiles, and his face looks unfamiliar in the red light of sunset. “You shouldn’t fear the devils,” he says. “The devils will make us rich. The
devils will buy you new dresses and build us a new house.”

She takes his hand and he follows her into the house, obedient as a sleepwalker. They go to bed and he sleeps; Esperanza sleeps. And Dolores hears whispering.

“Dolores,” they say. “We will make you strong. We will give you money. We will give you power.” Tiny voices, dry as the wind from the desert. “Listen to us.”

Tomas turns in his
sleep, and Dolores hears him moan softly, as if crying out in a dream. He is a weak man, susceptible to the devils’ promises. They have promised him riches, then tempted him with drink. He is weak, but she is strong. She hears the whispering voices, but she does not listen.

In the faint light of early dawn Dolores leaves her bed and carries the devils out to the edge of the
malpais
. She lines
them up side by side on the hood of the old car. They stare at her with bulging eyes, threaten her with their claws.

She takes a large stick from the ground and clubs the snake devil who holds the woman captive, smashing the unfired clay into pieces. The light of the sun warms her as she lifts her club to strike again.

A
FALLING STAR
dropped precipitously from the sky over San Francisco, slicing through the hazy air with a trail of blue-white fire. Mrs. Laura Jenkins stared out her kitchen window, transfixed in the act of scrubbing a pot. The kitchen window looked out toward the pair of soft gray-green hills known as Twin Peaks. The falling star appeared over the Twin
Peaks radio tower and slashed across the sky, heading toward her house.

Make a wish, Mrs. Jenkins thought, but no wish came to mind. Only an ill-defined feeling of loss and longing. She did not know what, exactly, to wish for.

Looking out at the deep blue evening sky, Mrs. Jenkins remembered another falling star, long ago. Andrea had been ten, and Mrs. Jenkins had accompanied her daughter’s
Girl Scout troop on a weekend camping trip. On a crisp cold evening, Mrs. Jenkins and Andrea were out gathering firewood. In the west, the sky was a deep royal blue, darkening to black overhead. When a falling star streaked across the darkness with a burst of fire, Mrs. Jenkins called out, “Make a wish! Quick, before it fades.”

Andrea, wise beyond her years, shook her head contemptuously. “That’s
silly,” she said. “It’s a piece of rock falling to earth from outer space. How could it grant a wish?”

Then Andrea scampered back to the campfire with an armload of wood, leaving her mother to blink at the first stars in the evening sky.

Mrs. Jenkins was a timid woman, pale and frail boned, but beneath that weakness was a stubborn streak. Mrs. Jenkins didn’t know how, but it seemed likely to
her that a falling star could grant a wish. At least, the magic of falling stars seemed no less unlikely than many other things that people accepted without question. Things like wristwatch calculators and astronauts on the moon and horoscopes and UFOs. If people could believe in those things, Mrs. Jenkins felt she had the right to believe in falling stars. No matter how much her daughter scoffed.

Mrs. Jenkins pulled her flannel bathrobe more tightly around her. She dropped a few ice cubes into a tumbler and poured herself some Old Bushmills Irish whiskey. The ice cubes crackled on a high brittle note, like shards of frozen laughter. With the first sip of whiskey, Mrs. Jenkins felt, as always, a touch of guilt. Ever since Andrea had moved away to New York, where the lights and career prospects
were brighter, Mrs. Jenkins had relied on the relaxing influence of alcohol. Mr. Jenkins, a fast-talking used-car salesman, had departed long ago: one year after the birth of their daughter, he had walked down to the corner market for a six-pack, and he had never returned. Mrs. Jenkins lived alone in a two-bedroom flat, the top floor of a Victorian house that had been divided into apartments.

Whiskey soothed her restless thoughts of Andrea and helped her sleep. Whiskey kept her company, whiskey held her hand and gave her comfort, whiskey kept her warm in a cold world. She needed the whiskey when the flat seemed so large and empty and New York seemed impossibly far away.

On Monday, the morning after the falling star, Mrs. Jenkins found a strange hair in her bathroom sink. It was a long
red-gold hair that coiled around the drainhole like a snake ready to strike. Mrs. Jenkins’s own hair was short, curly, and brown touched with gray. She picked up the strange hair on a tissue and frowned at it.

Mrs. Jenkins was the only person who used her bathroom and she cleaned it carefully once a week. There was no explanation for the red-gold hair. Yet there it was, glinting in the morning
sun, a puzzle, an anomaly.

She had no time to consider the strange hair. She had to hurry to her job as school librarian at Putnam Avenue School, where she had worked for the past thirty years. She threw the hair into the trash and dismissed it from her mind.

She took the bus to work. The bus was crowded with kids on their way to school, men and women on their way to work. Mrs. Jenkins sat in
an aisle seat, her purse in her lap, her hands folded over it protectively. An old man wandered down the aisle, stopped beside Mrs. Jenkins’s seat, and reached up to grab the strap just over her head. He was raggedly dressed in an old sport coat and jeans, he desperately needed a shave, and he smelled strongly of Old Spice and faintly of urine. But he smiled at Mrs. Jenkins, and she, without thinking,
smiled back. The look in his eyes was vague and unfocused. “Did you see the light in the sky last night?” he said conversationally to Mrs. Jenkins.

“The falling star,” she said. “Yes, I did.”

The old man swayed with the movement of the bus. “An alien spaceship,” he said softly. “Coming in for a landing.” His tone was gentle and matter-of-fact. “I saw it fall from the sky and go down the storm
drain. Just like that. Right down into the sewers.” He nodded, still smiling at her in a dreamy way. “Most people don’t know that the aliens live in the sewers. The government denies it. But I saw them land.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Jenkins nervously. She always tried to be agreeable to crazy people. She turned hex head and pretended to be looking out the window for her stop.

“Watch out for them,”
said the man behind her back.

When her stop came, she fled the bus and did not look back until she was safely at the door to the school.

Something about the man and his interpretation of the falling star had disturbed her, but she put it out of her mind.

That evening, when she returned from work, she opened the cupboard to get a can of soup and discovered that all the graham crackers were gone.
The empty box lay on its side, brown wax paper wrappers crumpled within. She had purchased the graham crackers to make a pie crust, and she remembered using only half the box. She picked up the empty box and shook it uneasily. Even if she had finished off the box of crackers, surely she would have thrown the package away. She would not have left it empty on the shelf. It was as odd and as inexplicable
as the hair in the sink. Finally, she threw the empty box away and closed the cupboard tightly, as if closing something in.

Over the next few days, she kept losing things. A package of gum vanished from her bedside table. Potato chips and peanuts disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. The packages remained, but the food was gone. And not just food, but other things as well: a wave-rounded fragment
of green glass that she had found on the beach; a cheap kerchief made of silky material printed with a, bold floral pattern; a gaudy rhinestone brooch that she had bought on a whim. On Wednesday, when she came home from work, it seemed to her that the things on her dressing table—her hairbrush, her perfume, her jewelry box and knickknacks had been rearranged subtly, nudged this way and that.