Wrong Thing (13 page)

On the car stereo, Robert Earl Keen sang, “Things ain't never what they seem/When you find you been livin' in your own dream.” The car was parked on a dirt lot near the prison, but the Kid had the engine idling so that the air conditioning would run. But the air conditioning was weak, and the Kid had never felt heat like this, not even at the height of summer in Santa Fe. Everything was so bright, and the air seemed to be on fire. He had driven Vanjii up to the checkpoint, but they wouldn't let him go any further. They'd told him to wait for her down the road. He'd hoped to find a cafe nearby with air conditioning, but there wasn't one. He'd have to drive further into town for that, and he didn't want to not be there when Vanjii came out of the prison. So he sat where he was, listening to the stereo, watching the twenty or so people who were having a vigil to protest the death penalty. The execution was scheduled for three o'clock. It was now about a minute past.

As Vanjii stood facing the curtain, waiting for it to be opened, she thought it would be like watching a movie, that her uncle would be far away. When the guy pulled back the curtain, it wasn't like that at all. Her uncle was so close that she could almost have reached out and touched him if it hadn't been for the glass. He was covered by a sheet almost to his neck, so she couldn't see what had happened to his arm, and there was no sign of any tubes leading to him. He looked like he was lying in bed waiting for someone to bring him coffee and a newspaper. He was too big, too real, for it to be true.

A man came into the execution room. He stood at the foot of the gurney and looked at her uncle. A speaker was turned on, and she heard the man ask, “Inmate Griego, is there anything you'd like to say before the sentence is carried out?”

Her uncle looked at her, but she didn't know what kind of look it was. Then he looked at the man. “No,” he said.

The speaker was turned off. The man left. Her uncle looked at her and smiled, then closed his eyes and turned his head away.

Vanjii watched him suffocate. His face seemed to swell and pull away from his head. It was as though a series of explosions were taking place under his skin. His lips flapped like clothes on a line being blown by the wind. She looked at Chuck. He put his arm around her. The blank expression on his face was melting, and she knew without asking that he had never lost a client before.

After about a minute, her uncle was just lying there, his face still. Vanjii was Catholic, and had expected to see some indication that he was leaving, going somewhere else, departing the ruined body. But there was nothing.

Everyone stood and looked at the body for a while. Then there was an announcement that the execution had been completed at 3:05. The curtain was closed.

Vanjii looked around her. In the front row, along with her uncle's witnesses, there were four relatives of the man he'd killed. One was a very old woman with an oxygen tube attached to her nose. She was crying. The others were men in their forties, and they just looked dumbfounded. The other rows were made up of reporters and some local political figures. Vanjii didn't know who they were. One of the reporters laughed and slapped the county attorney on the back, saying, “They finally got it done. That did my old heart good.” The reporter's name was Jeremy Ruvin. At the time, Vanjii didn't know his name and had no reason to think she would ever see him again.

“I know Jesus was glad you came,” Chuck said to her.

“Yeah.”

“One of my colleagues was going to come too . . . I don't know why he didn't.”

Vanjii didn't say anything.

“I did everything I could. I liked him.”

“He told me you were good to him,” she said.

The Kid saw Vanjii come walking down the road with a guy in a suit, who he figured must be her uncle's lawyer. When they got closer to where he was, they stopped and talked for a few minutes. Then they shook hands, and Vanjii walked to the Kid's car, opened the door on the passenger side, got in.

“Did they do it?” asked the Kid.

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” She leaned over and put her head on his shoulder. He put an arm around her.

“What do you want to do now?” He asked her. “Where do you want to go?”

“I don't care. But I don't want to stay here.”

“Here? You mean Arizona, or just Florence?”

“Just Florence.”

“How about we go to Phoenix, then? Since you lived there, and it's on the way home . . . ”

“Yeah. That'd be cool.”

The drive to Phoenix took a little more than an hour. As he drove, the Kid said, “I don't know what it was like for you, so I ain't gonna try to make you talk about it. If you don't want to, that's okay. But if you do want to, you can . . . ”

“I know,” she said. “It's not that I don't want to talk about it. I just don't know what to say about it. I don't even think anything about it. I don't know what to think.”

“But you're okay?”

“Yeah.”

She told him Phoenix wasn't the same as it had been when she lived there. It wasn't like anyplace he had ever seen in real life. It reminded him of science-fiction movies he'd seen, like maybe
Blade Runner.
The streets were jammed with cars, but there were no people on the sidewalks, nobody walking anywhere. Most of the residential streets didn't even have sidewalks. There were no individual stores or cafes or bars on the streets, only strip malls where such businesses were housed. It seemed as though every main street was lined with car dealerships. The streets were broad, the buildings were stucco, the sun was merciless, and the freeways cast shadows everywhere.

It had been a small town, and then a small city. But now it was the fifth-largest city in the country. Development was running riot and so was the homicide rate. Thousands of people were moving there every year, but few of them planned to stay. They just wanted to make some money while there was money to be made, before the water ran out and the boom gave way to a slump. Most of the money coming in never touched most of the people who lived there; Arizona is a “right to work” state, which means no right to job security, benefits, or a living wage. The media conducted polls that showed that half of the city's residents would leave if they could.

The Kid drove in on I-10, Vanjii sitting quietly beside him. “Where should we go?” he asked her as he took the Seventh Street exit.

“I don't know . . . Want to see where I used to live?”

“Yeah.”

He followed her directions, and ended up outside an apartment complex at Fifteenth Avenue and Grand. The barrio was just south of the freeway, but the neighborhood on the north side was a million miles away. The houses on the north were big, expensive, and well maintained, and the residents, though they had brown skin, were white on the inside—they had money, and many of them didn't speak Spanish. To the south, the houses were small and faded, and there were liquor stores, pawnshops and single-occupancy motels.

The Kid parked the car on the street, and followed Vanjii into the complex. They stopped outside a ground-floor apartment. “This is it,” she said. “Number five.”

“How many rooms are there?”

“Two bedrooms. My mom had one, and me and my sister had the other one.”

“Does it feel weird, being here now?”

“Nah. I was too little to really remember it now. C'mon.” She started walking back to the car.

The Kid didn't know what to say to her. He had been seeing her for a month, and he had never known her to be quiet. He didn't know what would be the right thing to say to her about her uncle and what she had seen happen.

He touched her hair. “It's cool being here with you.”

She smiled at him, but didn't say anything.

He started the car and they drove around for a while, but every street looked like every other street. Traffic was so dense that driving just a few miles felt like a road trip. The Kid had been to Los Angeles a few times, and he thought that driving on a street in Phoenix was like driving on a freeway in LA. “Where's downtown?” he asked Vanjii, thinking they could go there, park the car, get out and walk around.

Vanjii laughed, and when they drove downtown he understood why. There was nothing to explain why the district was known as “downtown.” There were a few bars and restaurants, but there was nobody walking anywhere, and nowhere for them to walk to. People just parked their cars outside their destination and went inside.

“It ain't Santa Fe, huh?” said Vanjii.

They drove along Monroe Street, and the Kid noticed an Irish bar called McCaffrey's. It was five o'clock, and there was one vacant parking space across the street from the bar. The Kid took it as a sign.

As they walked towards the bar, the Kid saw that there was a hotel next door to it, called the San Carlos. It was one of the few buildings that looked as though it might have been around for a while.

“Hey, I got an idea,” he said. “Instead of driving back tonight, let's stay at this hotel and go back in the morning.”

“You paying?”

“Yeah.”

They checked into the hotel, then went next door to McCaffrey's. The Kid liked the place; it was crowded and friendly, but not intrusive. Even though it was brightly lit, it somehow had an air of dark, rich warmth. They sat at a table and drank beer.

“Sorry I'm being so weird,” Vanjii said to him.

“Weird? Shit, you just saw your uncle die. I ain't expecting you to party.”

“It's not ‘cause of my uncle. I could say it is, but it's not.”

“Then what is it?”

“ . . . You.”

“What have I done?”

“I don't get you.” She sat in silence for a moment, thinking he would ask her what she meant, but he didn't. “I just don't know why you're doing this shit.”

“Doing what shit?”

“As soon as you met me, you took me to the hospital and took care of me. You only met me a few weeks ago. I mention that I want to go to Arizona and see my uncle, and right away you say you'll drive me . . . ”

“So what's wrong with that?”

“There ain't nothing wrong with that. I just . . . Look, why are you so good to me?”

“I like you.” He thought for a second and then smiled. “I
like you
like you.”

Her eyes were huge in the lamplight of the bar. “Know something?” she said. “I love you.”

Nobody had ever said it to him before, and he had never said it to anybody. He probably wouldn't have said it to her if she hadn't said it to him first, but now he said it and it didn't even feel weird. “I love you,” he said.

They just sat there and looked at each other, and then the Kid smiled and said, “In fact, I
love you
love you.”

Both of them laughing now, leaning across the table, their faces together, Vanjii's eyes wet and overflowing.

Later, they went to their hotel room. They were both quite drunk. The Kid watched Vanjii slip the straps of her blue dress off her shoulders, letting the dress fall from her body to make a pool at her feet, a pool she stepped out of. She was wearing white panties and no bra. She was already so wet from looking at the Kid, wanting him, that there was a spreading dark stain on the panties. He watched her take them off. She got in bed with him and they lay on their sides, holding each other and talking softly as they fucked for hours. When the Kid fell asleep, Vanjii lay close to him, watching his lips flutter with every breath he exhaled. She touched her face, feeling his dried come on her skin. She remembered her uncle looking up from the gurney.