So Special in Dayville Page 11

  She tries to ignore the air now crying between rows of trailers. “But if you two could just have a relationship—”

  “What? And let him steal more from us?” She steps closer to Crystal. “Do you know what your Ajeno has done to us?” With the younger woman’s headshake, Maria Garcia fairly spits the words: “Debt. Every pound of fat he carries has brought debt. Our debt. Money we had to borrow just to feed him or to buy cloth for me to ruin my eyes putting clothes on his back!”

  “But parents always sacrifice for children—”

  “Yes, for their children! Not for the greedy children of thieves too lazy to raise their own sons and daughters. For eighteen years I try to tell this. I try to tell the hospital, the social workers, the city council, the FBI—I try to tell any who would listen that Ajeno did not come from me!” She trembles as if from remembered rage. “And I tell them that he did not come from here. But no, they did not listen. They did not listen when he was a day old or seventeen years old. So finally, I say, ‘Enough!’ And when he is legally an adult,” she slaps her hands together as if brushing dust, “I tell him, ‘Go.’”

  The girl turns stern as if Maria Garcia has just handed in late homework. “And did you know he was homeless for a long time after that? He couldn’t even take care of himself.”

  “He was a grown man, was he not? When I was eighteen, I was married. Fernando was not much older. We had plans. We come to this country with dreams. I was to be a social worker. To help my people. And Fernando was to open his own business to pass onto our children.” She takes a step toward the young woman, her expression intense. “Then do you know what happened?”

  “No,” Crystal steps back nervously, “what?”

  “Then we are tied to an enormous anchor that drags us to the bottom of the sea. By no fault of ours, we are cursed by a mouth that does nothing but eat, eat, eat!”

  “But surely you can’t blame a child for—”

  “For being a cancer slowly killing my husband? Fernando couldn’t save the money needed to start his own business. Not when Ajeno, at eight years old, was eating more than three grown men every night! Instead, he must take factory work. And me?” She takes another step closer to Crystal. “How could I become a social worker when every free minute of my time was consumed with cooking his meals?”

  “But that’s what you don’t understand!” cries the girl, stopping now in the open doorway. “Ajeno’s just like you—he’s practically a social worker himself. You should see how he helps people! He literally saved my life, and he finds complete strangers places to sleep and helps them cope and—”

  “WHAT GOOD IS THIS TO ME?” shrieks Maria Garcia. “I should be glad that he ruins our lives so he can help strangers? Is this what you mean?”

  “Well, no, not exactly—”

  “Then why did you come to me?” Pain twists her lips. “To change my mind about a—”

  The girl tries to cut her off, “I understand your feelings.”

  “You, a child yourself, understand?!” Maria Garcia pushes the girl down the steps by the sheer explosiveness of her rage. “I try to be a good woman, a good Christian, but if I had known . . .” Her voice trembles. “If I had known, God forgive me, I’d have smothered him as he lay in the crib.” Her boney fingers reach down to snatch at the girl’s arm, and Crystal winces as the other squeezes hard. “Take my warning: you must leave him. He is the hungry one. Leave this place! It is la maldición of the powerful ones. Cursed, I tell you!”

  The girl breaks free and stumbles back onto the path leading to the road. “No, he’s really very sweet. You just don’t understand . . .” The words die in her throat as the older woman, shaking her head, reaches over the still-senseless body of Alejandro to slam shut the trailer door.

  “He’s really very sweet,” repeats Crystal dully as the woman she had met earlier, still carrying the baby, clumps with heavy footsteps behind her on the road. The woman’s wild laughter, now reignited, follows the girl as, at first, she walks quickly and then breaks into a panicked run toward the trailer park’s only exit.

  Even as Crystal flies back to the bus stop, she can’t understand why Maria Garcia claims not to be Ajeno’s mother.

  But, then, the girl wasn’t even born when an immensely fat woman, clothed in stitched-together nurses’ uniforms had, one morning, visited a hospital nursery not far from where Maria lay exhausted after childbirth. Crystal never saw how this woman altered birth records, how she gave Maria two baby boys instead of just one. Or of how she’d dumped the contents of her lunch cooler into an empty bassinet. These contents had squirmed as the woman munched an apple which had also been in the cooler. The woman’s eyes traveled idly over the large, pink baby who was smacking its lips hungrily next to a much smaller brown baby.

  An over-worked-looking doctor suddenly entered the nursery. He bustled, preoccupied, retrieving a chart hanging from a nearby bassinet.

  Spreading her mammoth arms wide, the fat woman waited impassively as the doctor used her breasts as a desk upon which to impatiently flip through the chart, making notes. A click of the doctor’s ballpoint pen and he was gone, leaving the fat woman to finish her apple.

  Nor did Crystal see how a young Maria Garcia protested at the next feeding when a real nurse plopped the big pink baby into a young Maria’s arms, “But me, I had just one baby.”

  The nurse, checking the records, eyed her suspiciously. “Birth certificates don’t lie, Mrs. Garcia. You wouldn’t be trying to abandon your baby, would you?”

  “No!” The young woman, eyes fixed on the smaller baby whimpering in the second bassinet, thrust out the wriggling pink baby for the nurse to take. “I just want my baby. Please, please give him to me.”

  “Package deal, I’m afraid,” said the nurse bluntly. “We’re not selling cars here, Mrs. Garcia. You come in with two babies, you leave with two babies. Hospital can’t afford leftovers. Not with the number of deliveries we handle.”

  “But I had just one baby!”

  The nurse pushed a clipboard holding a birth certificate beneath the young mother’s nose. “I only know what this record says. And the record says we owe you two babies. Congratulations on having twins.”

  “But the babies, they are so . . . different.”

  “Not to worry. You’re still traumatized by labor, Mrs. Garcia. Everything will make sense tomorrow.” The nurse jerked her head at the big pink baby, whose mouth was puckering like a drunk on a three-day bender. “But best feed the fat one first. Or else he’s gonna let loose hollering and wake up all the babies in the nursery.”

  ***

  Just as twilight begins that night to fade, Ruiz drops by the crack whore’s apartment to check on the Dawdleman baby. He leaves almost immediately upon finding both woman and baby peacefully watching reality shows on a small flat-screen television.

  Taking Brennan Boulevard to 49th Street, he then stops in front of a restaurant that advertises itself as selling fresh fish. A quick glance at his phone shows that he’s early. Relaxing against the outside wall of the upscale restaurant, he flicks his gaze to the horizon. There, the moon has slipped over a tree line. It looks neither large or small. “Tonight,” he says to himself, “it is a normal moon. And so it spins, circling my head like a buzzard for meat.” Tasting this image, he continues gazing at the milky disc. He marvels at how placid, motionless, it looks hanging in the distance.

  Some nights, when the moon glows brightly and is very full, hidden sporadically by skittering clouds, it strikes him fancifully as a door—a portal of light that might expand, getting bigger and bigger. He imagines its enormity growing to encompass the earth. A huge, silent crescent expelling darkness. The luminescence would then engulf everything—buildings, streets, people, Ruiz himself, transforming everything into itself. The Mexican smiles in contemplation.

  But his grin now falters as he sniffs. Pushing himself off the brick wall, he continues to sniff, even sniffing at the brick itself. Something stinks. The restaurant,
with its tasteful faux boxwood planters at the entrance, reeks of its main ingredient. Ruiz tries not to show his disgust as an expensively coiffed couple sporting silver hair approach the front door. He guesses that even near-rancid fish (which is all Dayville can claim since it’s inland by hundreds of miles with polluted rivers and no airport to speak of) can be expensive due to its rarity. And an expensive rarity, by definition, is glamorous, which, in turn, makes it even more expensive.

  The male partner of the coiffed silver couple grins dismissively at Ruiz and hands him a plastic key fob. “There’s a big tip in it, son, if you park the Beemer nearby. I don’t have all day to wait for you to retrieve it from the other side of town! Got it?”

  Ruiz stares at him. Of two minds, he finally settles on a tight grin showing many teeth. “Yes, it is fully understood.”

  “You’re a good hombre,son.”

  A sleek man in a tailored business suit brushes past the coiffed couple in the doorway, leaving the restaurant just as they enter. Ruiz glances at his phone to check the photo he has of his target. Exact match! The sleek man hasn’t even glanced at him, but Ruiz knows his type. He easily catches up to him as the other comes abreast of a Mercedes convertible. “You are Mr. Sanderson?”

  “Well, yes I a-” The businessman has turned around with the ready smile of one with a healthy bank account. But the smile falters upon the man seeing an unfamiliar face. “Who are you?”

  Ruiz smiles. “I am a friend.” Licking his lips, he slips a photograph out of his pocket. It has his cell-phone number written on the back. Flipping it right-side-up, he glances appreciatively at its image before tucking it inside the businessman’s coat pocket. “I am a very good friend.”

  The other man steps back, bumping the side of the Mercedes. “Don’t make me call the cops!”

  Ruiz, still smiling, holds up his hands, palms out as if in surrender. “I want no trouble, Mr. Sanderson.”

  “How do you know me?” Fear is quickly replacing belligerence in the other man’s eyes.

  “Good day, Mr. Sanderson.”

  “Hey,” yells Sanderson after him, “who are you?”

  Ruiz ignores him. Fingering the coiffed stranger’s car fob in his pocket, he ambles slowly down the sidewalk in the direction of a silver BMW. He doesn’t have to turn around to know that Sanderson’s already retrieved the photograph from his pocket. Imagining the other man’s look of horror, he smiles.

  ***

  At the Eden Palace, Crystal sits on the stoop talking to Darla Sue’s husband, Conrad, the building manager. Talking helps dull the pain in her foot, which has been encased in a cast since the night before.

  “So,” she rushes on, “you can see what I mean about the smell in the shower.”

  Conrad, looking bored, glances away from her to stomp his shoe on something green that’s growing up through a crack in the concrete.

  “Oh!” she gasps, “Wasn’t that a flower?”

  “Nah, just a weed.”

  ***

  Weeds are, in fact, mostly what Enrique Ruiz notices as he descends the steps of the city bus at Los Arroyos and Main. He sold the BMW from the fish restaurant to a dealer down by the docks for some nice pocket change. But even with this cherry to his day, the mystery of the fat cook continues to nag.

  La Vivienda Temporal is not hard for him to find. And there, after three tries with other Garcias, he finds the Garcias that cared for Ajeno from babydom through boyhood. Mobile homes, clotheslines, and cheap children’s toys litter, rather than claim, the ten acres. The trailer park is dark on this gloomy afternoon, which smells of rain. Only the bony figure of a young man can be seen, collapsed on the steps of a double-wide with pink shutters.

  Ruiz steps carefully through the wild vegetation, vigilant for snakes. He has to speak loudly to get the young man’s attention. But, having done so, he convinces Alejandro that he works for the U.S. Government. “I am a delegate of the Office of Transnational Relations.”

  The other, wearing a slack expression, jerks his right hand, which holds a half-smoked joint. His nervousness convinces Ruiz that he accepts the story. Latinos in Dayville, even those who’ve obtained citizenship, are understandably nervous when it comes to the government. They call them “the ones with power.”

  Again, Alejandro twitches. “Okay, but why you bugging me, man? I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

  Ruiz stays silent. Dealing with addicts is easy for him. They respond well to intimidation and the promise of returning to a drug-induced stupor. As he inhales deeply, the young man’s eyes widen to the point of popping.

  Moving away from the trailer step where Alejandro sits, Ruiz takes his time looking over the double-wide. “You have a brother, yes?”

  “Yeah, sorta.” When the tall man lifts an eyebrow and repeats Alejandro’s last word, the full story of Ajeno being expunged from the family on their eighteenth birthday erupts from the young man. He leaves nothing out; his hands shake so badly that he drops the joint. “And then we eat cake after he leaves.”

  “Ajeno,” says Ruiz, “he was a good brother?”

  “Yeah, sure, man. He was okay.”

  “Okay does not mean good.”

  Alejandro shrugs. “What can I say, man? He was my brother.” Thought moves uneasily in his dulled expression. “He . . . uh. Oh, right! I remember now. He kept me from getting beat up in school. Everyone knew Ajeno was my brother, so the bullies, they leave me alone.”

  Surprised, Ruiz asks, “The bullies were afraid of Ajeno?”

  “Huh? Oh, well, maybe not afraid. They were . . . uh.” Alejandro thoughtfully licks his lips until, frustrated, he shrugs. “Hell, why you asking me? They just left him alone, is all. And because of that, they left me alone.”

  “Tranquilo! I am just saying that growing up was good for you.” Ruiz fights to keep the envy from his voice. “You had a brother to protect you, parents who loved you. . . .”

  “Yeah, sure,” agrees the younger man even as something flickers in his dilated eyes. He bends down, patting the dirt for the joint. “Being a kid’s hard though.” He shoots a quick glance up at Ruiz. “You know?”

  Ruiz nods. “I know.”

  “Like, man, I used to have the worst terrors, you know, at night?” Having retrieved the wadded paper, Alejandro wipes his nose with the back of his hand. This is a common mannerism with him, as his nose drips frequently. “I tell Mama about ’em, but she says how the visions aren’t real. She tells me to stop screaming and go back to sleep. She says if I wake Ajeno up, who’s sleeping next to me, then she will have to cook for him. She says how she will beat me if this happens.”

  Trembling, his lower lip pushes itself in and out. “But I tell you, the visions . . . the visions . . .” He shakes his head while retrieving a lighter from his pocket. “Scary shit, man.” Ruiz mumbles a vague encouragement. Alejandro looks to his feet. “And always the same, man, always the same. Shiny white pieces making a really,” his eyes open very wide, “big, perfect circle, and in its center . . .”

  “Yes?” Ruiz is interested in spite of himself. Usually the hallucinations of addicts bore him. “The center?”

  Alejandro shakes his head, disgust tainting his expression. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Tell me.” The steel in the tall man’s voice is unmistakable, but, even so, a long pause settles between them before he again has to urge, “What is at the center of this perfect circle of white pieces?”

  “Darkness, hombre . . . darkness.”

  “You mean, there is not anything in the center—it is empty?”

  Frustrated in his attempt to relight the joint, Alejandro lifts a horrified gaze to the other. “No, it wasn’t empty.” He stumbles to his feet, hands feeling behind him for the trailer door. “Not empty, man.”

  Ruiz’s cell beats a tribal rhythm in his pocket. Lips curling, he lets it ring many times before answering. “Hello, Mr. Sanderson.” Ruiz has guessed, through long years of experience, who’s calling, even with a block
ed caller ID. “You are well this evening?”

  The voice on the other end of the call is shaking. “I wanna know who the hell you are, Mister!”

  “I told you earlier, Mr. Sanderson. I am just a friend.”

  Silence answers and Ruiz makes himself comfortable, motioning for Alejandro to wait. Finally a single word is carried over the line. It is spoken so quietly that Ruiz has to strain to hear it. “How?”

  “How,” replies the tall man easily, “is not so important, I think, as what.”

  “What what?” the other says nonsensically.

  “Exactly, Mr. Sanderson. We will talk in three days. Expect it.” Ruiz ends the call.

  Beau Louie Sanderson is not his usual FRC conduit. He’s strictly upper-management, boardroom material. But he’s the best chance Ruiz has for obtaining the FRC for a certain type of women’s belt. Sanderson, he knows, will have to be handled differently than line supervisors or janitorial workers or even the random net junkie. Bribery and manipulation will not work with him.

  But once Ruiz’s operatives trailed the businessman for a week, Ruiz knew he’d found Sanderson’s weak spot. The next three days will see Sanderson stewing in his own suspense. Then, at the end of seventy-two hours, he’ll be ready to deal.

  Ruiz returns his attention to Alejandro, who looks disoriented. “So your brother, he has many friends?”

  The young man shrugs, his fingers moving from jean pockets to shirt pockets. Ruiz can guess he’s searching for another joint. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

  The older man senses tension. “Girlfriends?”

  “Why,” bursts Alejandro, frowning suspiciously, “is everyone asking suddenly ’bout Ajeno? And why you want to know about his girlfriends?”

  “Is there a reason you do not want to talk about his girlfriends?” Ruiz presses the point. “Maybe you are jealous of his women?”

  The young man’s reddened eyes open even wider, appearing enormous in their dilation. “You know . . . don’t you?”

  “I know everything,” agrees Ruiz.

  “That was a long time ago, man! Why you got to bring that up again?” Alejandro’s voice rises to a whine. “Like I don’t got enough horrors in my head.”