The Watchman (20 page)

Oh, I know. I know, Jase, she cried in a breath, squeezing his knee with the tips of her fingernails.

It's such a damned shame, he said sadly. That being in love can't be like that. Sometimes with Jill—even though I know I don't want to do that to her—I wish there was some kind of drug we could take that would make it be like that. The way it is afterwards with you and me.

She kept quite still, letting him say it out; once more, with the tip of her index finger, thoughtfully tracing the veins on the back of his hand.

Because I couldn't even imagine what it would be like doing it to Jill, he said. I don't somehow ever let myself think about it much. If we ever did it I'd probably die or go up in flames, I guess. Cris, does it make you sore when I talk about Jill?

No, she said slowly, drawing the vowel out somberly.

And not jealous? he said.

No, she chuckled oddly. No, Jason, not jealous.

What does it make you feel? he said. Your voice tells me it makes you feel something.

Afraid, she said softly. It makes me feel afraid.

Why? I won't stop seeing you, he said. As long as you still want me to.

I didn't mean that, she said.

Still, you know I'd want to see you, he said, stroking her hair, the little moist tendrils of it at her nape.

You couldn't see me, she said sadly, if you were dead, Jase.

Why do you keep on saying that, Cris? he said.

Because I know it's so, she said. That if you keep on dating Jill it's only a matter of time.

Do you know who it is that would want to kill me? he said.

Yes, she whispered.

And because it seemed to him as if his fingers rested on the cold knob of the door to the last dark room of all he could not ask her Who; and would not because, indeed, he need not: all of the fireflash thunder of the racketing meadow and the skidding bullets burning away like hot, brass hornets into the dark, all of that now suddenly returned again, real again, into his consciousness.

The same one who killed Cole? he whispered, cold.

Yes.

And you think the same one would kill me, too?

Jase, you don't want my answers to these questions, she said, lifting her head suddenly. Why ask them. It won't change whatever you decide to do. I'm completely resigned. All my life I've spent trying to change the way things are and the things people move towards like a blind man tapping his white cane along a road toward a humming railroad track. And the train always comes and the blind man's always there under the wheels. No matter how many times I learn and learn it over and again I always forget. But it's never any good. Deep down something sensible in me has learned that much, at least. When I was six years old there was a man that stray kittens always followed because his pockets were always packed with catnip—you know him: Joe Tzchak, my father's deputy. Well, one morning—it was my sixth birthday—Tzchak brought me this kitten and it was beautiful with a face like a brown and white pansy and it had a ribbon round its neck with a little bell. Jase, I waited till Tzchak and my father were gone and I threw mangoes at that little kitten till it went away. And all that night I could hear its bell tinkling somewhere out beyond the old Mexican agava tree and I'd get out of bed and go to the screen door and throw more mangoes till it finally went away. And then I cried myself to sleep.

Because it was Tzchak that gave it to you? he said. You didn't like him so was that why?

I loathed and despised him, she said. I always have. I always will. But that wasn't the reason. I would have cherished that httle kitten. But I knew if I kept it and loved it, someday it would die. Jase, I don't mind losing things— people—I've been losing things and people all my life. But, at least, I can tell myself that somewhere in the world they

are alive. And knowing they're alive in the world is as good as if they are alive in the house Vm in. But dying—Jase, I can't stand it when things—when people I love die.

But now he seemed distant from her; his eyes lost in the streetlit curtains at her window.

What's wrong, Jase?

Oh, something I would ask you if I thought it wouldn't make you sore.

It won't make me sore, she laughed.

I won't ask you, he said gravely.

Now that does make me sore, she laughed again. Tell me. Ask me what you want,

I don't know how to say it.

She studied his face carefully in the twilight of the room.

Well, she said. It's about Jill. That's plain.

He nodded, keeping his eyes carefully averted from that measuring, sensitive stare. She got up suddenly, straightened her housecoat and got a cigarette.

If it will make it easier for you, Jason, she said, her lashes dark against the flesh of her cheeks, yellowed in the match flare. I'll ask the question for you. And I'll answer it. Even though you may be sorry I did. You want to know if Jill's a virgin, don't you?

Not, he said, that it would matter either way how I felt about her.

But that's what you wanted to ask me, wasn't it, Jase?

Yes.

She walked away from him, parted the curtains, looked down into the cold, clear crystal moonlight on the autumn street.

I said I'd answer anything you asked me, Jase, she said. And then you asked me that. Maybe I can't keep my promise. Because, however I tell it to you—you won't quite understand. You'll think I'm trying to spoil something—wanting to dirty up some vision of Jill you've got in your mind. And even if I tell you I wouldn't be meaning to do that—you'll still think it. And it's a hard story to tell—it's hard to make it sound even like something that ever happened once. But it did. Jesus, it really did.

He looked at her gloomily in the dark.

You should see your face even now, she said. Even when I've just gone this far. Well, you asked me, Jase. No, Jill has never slept with a boy—not that I ever knew—and I would know, or Father, at least, would know. Because, you

see my father never developed particularly sharp eyesight about these things until a thing happened that gave him reason to.

Now she stopped, thrusting her cigarette into the ashtray, smiled at him and gave a small shrug, flinging her arms out to either side of her in a little helpless gesture and letting them fall against her hips.

Jase, she murmured. Let's go in the bedroom. I can't talk in here. It scares me to hear myself telling it and not having someone close to hold onto.

In the dark, on the bed, he lay clothed beside her, stroking her shuddering arms beneath the fabric of her robe and all the while she was shaking and jumping in little starts as if she were seized by a chill, instead of thoughts.

Hold me, Jase. Hold me. Oh, God, I'm so scared.

But so anxious and savage was her embrace of him that he could not hft his arms to comfort her.

It's so terrible, raced her hot whisper in his neck. So terrible even remembering it. It scares me like it was here and now all over again. And the strange thing is—I wasn't even there when it happened. I only knew about it from old Juanita who told me—and from all the murderous proof of it I saw burning in my father's eyes.

What was it happened, Cris? he said.

But wait! she whispered, punching his shoulder with her palm. Don't make me tell it the way it should be told—from the beginning. Because I can't tell it that way, Jase. There's so much that goes before.

Well, tell me about old Juanita, he said.

Who? Oh, Juanita. She was the old Indian nurse that took care of us when we were little. And even before that—before Jill even—she took care of Mama. I never could understand why Father always kept her—he couldn't afford a maid for Mama even as cheap as Indians come. And she was horrible inside—half-crazy with pulque and marijuana every night after Father had gone to bed. It was as if she had some kind of hold on him—no not sex: he worshiped and adored Mama too much for any other woman. Though Juanita was beautiful, I suppose, even if only in a savage way: a tall woman, graceful and straight—she could have been any age because she was never going to get old and wrinkled like the peons' wives do. Maybe there was Aztec blood in her or some race old and tall and lost. Her skin was dark and her eyes were so black that in certain lamphght

they didn't look like eyes at all: more like holes shot there with a gun; and she had a flashing smile of stunning moon-white teeth all except one, in the front, and it was dead and had turned that blue you see inside of certain sea shells: the color of a black pearl. And nothing anyone could ever tell Father about Juanita ever swayed his loyalty to her—it was as though he felt he owed her some kind of debt, a justice: there were some who said her husband had been shot in the legs and kicked to death long years before by some old drunken lawman. So maybe that was it—Father being a sheriff, too: he may have thought it was a justice: an atonement for his calling and for the breed of men his calling usually makes. Or maybe it was just that he couldn't afford any better servant for Mama. Because there had to be a maid—nothing was too good for Mama. He wouldn't let Mama wash a plate at night or even sew a button on because he said she had a lady's hands—too genteel and soft for that. So, even before Jill was born, Juanita was always there, taking care of Mama, and sometimes the both of them, for all I know, laughing at Father's back. Lord, I'd dread ever to have a man love me like he loved Mama—as if she didn't belong to this earth or to any other: the child of angels and no mortal woman at all. Maybe that's what was wrong—what made her like she was. Maybe she didn't want to be worshiped but just loved. Well, I'll never know. Father was away a lot and before Jill came it was just Mama and Juanita together alone in that old falling-down house we lived in by the bay. But even if he had been there I don't think he would have known—I don't think he ever would have seen. And if he'd seen I don't think he'd have believed it anyway: that it was going on.

What was going on, Cris? he whispered to her, cradling her in his arms, in the dark: her shakes had not subsided yet

The men, she said. The other men.

You mean your mother had—friends?

Yes, she said. Six maybe—ten—maybe a dozen. She always had a lover who'd come and toss pebbles on the panes the minute Father had ridden out of sight. And the queer thing is that I heard them tell of this in the town when I was nine and ten years old—it was street-talk, common as gossip of new oil strikes or hurricanes or elections. And I never could understand why Father never heard—well, they were afraid to tell all the wild legends of Mama's lovers in his presence. And yet I don't think he would have believed them even if he'd heard—Juanita bathing Mama in the

old tin tub, powdering her, laying out her fancies and kimonos before the lover came. Father's a Sheriff and yet he never seems to see the things that happen in the streets. It's always like he had fixed his eyes in the heavens, expecting to catch the angels at some misdemeanor, looking always for some far more awful crime than humans could imagine; some terrible harm he maybe had seen once strike, like lightning, against some loved one once—or maybe against himself. It's true, Jase—except for boys that he catches chasing Jill—Father can't even see what men are doing round him in the street. It's as if he paces the sidewalks of the towns with his head thrust back, policing the stars, watching God for some felony he knows, sooner or later, he'll catch Him at. And since that awful night—the night of the thing with Jill—he's worse. He seems even more certain now that heaven's a crooked game: and so awful have been the crimes it's done against the ones he loves, he knows he's right. So maybe that's why he never saw, never even guessed, and wouldn't have believed it if they'd told him about Mama's lovers. With Juanita it was something more terrible than any of the rest of it, in a way—she never had a lover of her own. They said she never wanted another man after that Sherijff kicked her man to death, and so instead she seemed to take a secondhand pleasure in the lovers Mama had—pouring wine for them in the dusky dark, sometimes coming into the hallway outside Mama's room when she'd be in bed with one of them, and play the guitar and sing some old, dark love song from her childhood in Durango. And when I was little —and Mama dead so long—Juanita would come to my room at night and tell me about all of them, all Mama's lovers, their good looks, the way they made love. She knew I wouldn't, couldn't run to Father with her tales. Because he wouldn't have believed. Sometimes at night even yet I wake up and hear Juanita's low voice whispering in the dark: "Chiquita, if you are very fortunate when you become a woman you will have a lover like that fine young soldier who used to come and stay with your mother in the old days." And on and on like that, Jase. Like she hated Father for something that happened long ago. As if she lived mainly for the pleasure of seeing him lose something behind his back and laughing at him for thinking any woman ever born could be that much goddess. And telling it all to me those nights in the dark by my bed as if she hated me, too—

because I was the thing that had made Mama die and spoil Juanita's games.

Your father never knew, he said. But didn't your mother worry he'd come home some night too soon?

He did come home one night, she said. And even then it wasn't Mama who got caught. Oh, it's all so just, in a way, for a man to be deceived that way—thinking of any woman that way. And yet so awful, too. Still Mama never worried he would catch her. It's very funny, Jase, but it's only when a woman starts getting careful that she's caught. Because when she starts getting careful it's because she wants to get caught. To hurt some man. Or to have him hurt her. For some women being hurt's a kind of love—the recognition that, at least, her man knows she's there. And so Mama never bothered—never cared. And so naturally never got caught. It's almost as if Nature is on the side of women like Mama: protecting them because they're too busy making love to bother with such a pettiness as hiding it. Maybe that's the reason girls like me can be careless for years and maybe only get pregnant once or twice or never, and then some poor little kid does it once with her boy friend in a back seat and the very first time she's knocked up.