So Special in Dayville Page 12

  Ruiz stoops to pick up a joint fallen in the long grass. Deliberately taunting the young man, he holds it just out of his reach. “You do something to his girlfriend? Something bad?” Alejandro, hungrily eyeing the joint, recoils, shame twisting his expression. Ruiz flicks the joint at the other’s eyes. “Something you got to be high to forget, hombre?”

  ***

  Across the kitchen table, Crystal faces Ajeno. “Baby,” she asks, “don’t you ever worry ’bout missing your chance for happiness? Life’s short, they say.”

  “Short?”

  “Yeah, I mean we’ve only so much time in this life. It’s short.”

  “That’s silly.” Ajeno holds his hand just an inch off the tabletop. “Time not short. Time is small.”

  The girl frowns. “Small?”

  “Sure.” He straightens to hold two of his fingers very close together. “Time is tiny. Stretches but is really itty-bitty. A dot existing only here.” Grinning wildly, he points to the ground.

  “You mean in this apartment?” When Ajeno frowns, shaking his head, she quizzes, “Oh, you mean in Dayville?”

  He hesitates before nodding. “Yeah, sure.”

  Crystal studies his expression. She hates to think that he might only be pretending to be silly. But after Darla Sue’s comment about sociopaths, she can’t help but wonder. So, now she watches him all the time. She’s even set him little traps to test him. Unfortunately, it was the last trap that broke her foot. The night before, she deliberately stuck her foot into the fat man’s path. Her hope had been that when it was gently trod upon, Ajeno would confess remorse and she’d have proof of his compassion.

  “Aiiiieee!” She had screamed in agony. The bones near her heel and toes audibly crunched beneath his shoe.

  The fat man, his lips forming a perfect O, went very still, just staring at her. She pointed, pain having rendered her mute, to his shoe mashing her foot. Ajeno’s eyes followed her finger. She’d pointed again as sobs replaced her screams. He picked up his foot experimentally and made a point of checking its sole. Now freed, Crystal threw herself into a nearby chair. She was doubled up in pain, her tears falling to their dirty carpet.

  “Hey, it’s okay, Crystal.” Ajeno pointed to the clean sole of his shoe. “See? I didn’t step in nothing.”

  ***

  Five buildings over from the Eden Palace is the tampon factory where Ruiz works nights. This night, Ruiz is walking his security guard patrol with a light step. The day has been profitable. Not only is Sanderson on the hook, but Ruiz made a sweet wad of cash on the stolen BMW. Plus, he now has more info on the fat cook!

  He stops to pick up a stray piece of merchandise that’s broken free of its packaging. He studies it, his flesh touching plastic that will likely someday touch the vaginal lining of a complete stranger. Normally this would excite him, but not tonight. Instead the bullet-shaped plastic, awaiting insertion, puts a damper on his good mood. Insertion, blood, bullets—is this what everything comes down to in the end?

  Minutes later, his route takes him up to the rooftop, and he stares upward. When he was fifteen, his father was killed, murdered, and Ruiz, the child, had hit the streets. He lived in cardboard boxes, under bridges, and in abandoned buildings. Often he’d wonder whether he’d live to see the next day’s sun. But a glance at the stars always reassured Ruiz. In them, he’d found a home.

  ***

  The fat man’s most favorite place in all the world, except for his mattress, is his bathroom. Chipped tiles hang on its walls, a worn sheen surrounding the toilet like the skin of an ancient snake. If Ajeno had any aesthetic sense, he’d know the bathroom to be squalid, but to him it’s beautiful. He especially likes the paper, wadded from glossy magazines, that stuffs the holes of its missing ceramic. They tickle his naked flesh as the floor groans beneath his tread.

  Now, gently, he turns the thumb latch on the doorknob. Then, lightly closing the pink, fuzzy toilet lid, he uses it as a seat. His sigh is anticipatory. He digs his fingers into a flimsy paper box resting on the sink. Success! Slowly . . . sensuously . . . shamefully, he digs a cotton swab down deep into his ear canal. It pierces the greasy, oily, fatty wax. Moving it back and forth, he moans in ecstasy.

  “Ajeno,” yells Crystal, outside the door. Its brass knob rattles as she tries to open it. The fat man’s nose quivers as perspiration pops freely from the girl’s pores. “What are you doing in there? Ajeno, answer me, right this minute!”

  Pleasure takes him. The plastic moves even more slowly, titillating his nerve endings. Then it jumps back and forth until a full-throated scream takes the fat man to the peak of gratification. “Oh yes! Yes!!”

  “Ajeno, you stop that right now!”

  ***

  The next morning, when Crystal pours iced tea into Darla Sue’s glass, she’s tempted to ask a question. In fact, it’s the question that’s given her the strength to clump all the way up the fire stairs in her foot cast. Nervously, she glances around as she and Darla Sue sit at the kitchen table in the Stoffers’ mothball-stinking penthouse apartment.

  “Do you,” she asks with more than a hint of embarrassment, “think, it . . . means anything if you’ve never had sex with your fiancé?”

  Darla Sue snorts while amending the tea with most of the contents of her flask. “Most natural thing in the world! Conrad and I haven’t had sex in years!”

  “Really?” Crystal sags with relief. She wasn’t expecting this. “So, it’s okay for a couple not to . . .”

  Arching an eyebrow, Darla Sue emits a ladylike belch. “Lock and load?” When Crystal reluctantly nods, the older woman gulps more of her iced tea. “Normal or not, I’d be grateful if I was you. Why, you and Ajeno having sex would be like . . .” She searches the air for a metaphor. “You know about the Hindenburg, don’tcha? Well, it’d be like the Hindenburg trying to land on a postage stamp!” She cackles at the image. “Not only technically difficult, but the postage stamp would be . . . is there a nice word for obliterated?” She begins slurring her words, “If you know what I meanth.”

  Chapter Seven

  At the Elite Sleep, Enrique Ruiz reads from the small notebook he carries in his pocket. His observations on stars are always written in pencil. It pleases him not to use a digital device. Script on paper is the hardest form of data to steal. His lips curl as he makes neat notations of his favorite stars. They remind him so much of one safely encased in his heart.

  His mother, Gabriella, was such a star. She graced anyone who ever met her with the most beautiful light. Even the Mexican cactus hugging the stucco flaking off their apartment building responded by blooming more than any other cacti in the village. She’d sing to its spiny leaves before skipping past on her way to the Mercado Central at the corner of Third and Fish Street. With her high Indian cheekbones and long Mexican braids, she actually shone; joy and love radiated from her with the carelessness of the very rich in spirit.

  Little Enrique was her especial pride and joy. And she delighted in cooking his meals, her long, tapered fingers, deeply calloused from sewing his clothes, adding just the right spices. From her, Ruiz learned of love.

  It was his father, Herve, who taught him of death.

  One evening, a month after Enrique’s tenth birthday, at the autumn end of the rainy season, Herve stopped eating the meal laid out by Gabriella. All three of them were seated at a humble table of scrubbed pine planks. With much gravity, he wiped the pozole juice from his lips. His napkin folded, he stood, the legs of his chair making scratching sounds against the floor. “Briella,” he said to his wife, “you have not changed your mind?”

  “Cariño, how can I?” She reached a hand across the table to ruffle Enrique’s hair as he slurped spicy broth. “What you do for money is wrong, both in the eyes of God and of the law. It is dangerous! Every time you leave our home, I fear for your safety. I tell you, it is the wrong way to raise a child. Enrique and I must go back to my parents until . . .”

  “Until?” Herve contemplated her del
icate features somberly. Their disagreements about his smuggling of bootlegged DVDs over the border, an early form of datos trafficking in the nineties, had been going on for months.

  Eyes shining with tears, she nodded tremulously. “Until you stop this and come back to me. To the life we always talked about. To the family we can still have.”

  Enrique, the boy, then glanced up. As a child, he was still privy to an animal’s instinct. And at that moment, he could feel what Gabriella obviously could not.

  She reached out a hand as if to grasp her husband’s. “Mi corazon, por favor entiendas.”

  Herve recoiled as if she had bit him. Expressionless, he lifted his hand from where it’d been hidden in the baggy folds of his pants.

  It was the first time Enrique had seen a gun so close. The explosion of it firing stunned him. Almost more so than the blood staining Gabriella’s crucifix. She never uttered a word. In that moment, before falling dead to the floor, she just stared, eyes widened in horror.

  Enrique can still taste the chunks of meat from the pozole cooling in his mouth. He couldn’t swallow it—not with his mother’s blood staining the tabletop. Nor could he relax enough to spit it out on the floor, next to where she lay. Instead, his cheeks bulging, heart racing, he sat frozen, looking up at his father. What, he wondered, will it feel like to die?

  Herve swung the gun in his direction. “And you,” he asked, “you think what I do for money is wrong?”

  Enrique stared. He was aware of his mother having gone somewhere distant, alien. But even being so remote, she was waiting for him, he knew, just outside his skin. Waiting for a trigger’s pull. “Mami, Mami!” He then trembled so hard that his father likely mistook the spasm for a head shake.

  “Good.” Herve’s eyes traveled disinterestedly over the lifeless body. “I have work to do tonight. Don’t expect me until late. You will clean this up after doing the dishes, yes?”

  The boy coughed past the meat chunk. “Si, Padre.” He waited, no longer feeling the remote presence waiting for him. A quick glance around the room showed it to look alien. Had it been he, not his mama, who’d been pushed into another place? A strange place where the surfaces stayed the same but everything beneath turned cold and senseless?

  Disposing of his mother’s body made the boy, so it seemed, complicit in her murder. Sometimes he dreams of it happening all over again. The pozole steaming in the bowls. The three of them sitting at the table. Dishes of chopped green chile and onion, refried beans. And of his mother’s special treat for Enrique, candied pumpkins. Only, in his dreams, he would be the one standing with a gun in his hand. He was the one pulling the trigger.

  Enrique spent much of that night preparing his mother’s body. First, he cleaned it, as well as he could, of the blood. Then he thought. And thought. He was too small to carry it to where it could be buried. And love and loyalty thumped with every beat of his heart that she would not end up, as so many others (it was whispered about the village) had, rotting in the garbage dump.

  Alone, he extinguished the light, throwing the room into darkness. He needed to think. So, sitting on the floor beside the body, he thought, his arms hugged around his little knees, rocking back and forth. “Oh, Mami! Oh, Mami,” he cried, “what should I do?” His eyes, bathed in tears, were tightly closed in order not to see. Not to see. “No voy a mirar,” he whispered, sniffling.

  Abruptly, coolness blew in through an open window. His eyes flew open. He saw the silk flowers on his mother’s altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe dancing in the vase.

  The moon that night was full. And, glancing out the window, Enrique saw at least a thousand stars filling the sky. When finally he dropped his gaze, he saw how the moon’s light bathed the room; everything was in a pearlescent glow, vibrating. Had he died after all? The room’s familiar furnishings looked strange, somehow . . . holy. On the shadowy altar, next to a carafe of fresh water, the vase of flowers, and two thick candles, was a face looking straight at him!

  It was the Virgin’s face, painted on a piece of cardboard. Enrique could swear that one of her painted eyes slowly winked at him. And suddenly, sitting next to his mother’s corpse, alone in a darkened apartment, abandoned by a father who’d considered killing him, didn’t seem so intolerable. Sad, yes, but not so much that he feared going mad.

  Thoughts began whispering inside his head and continued for a long time until finally they were loud enough to hear. It was his mother’s voice. Gabriella had always told him, “I am a part of you, hijo. I am like the host you take at Mass. Always with you,” she’d touch his chest, “in here. Always.”

  Understanding dawned on him. Yes, like the Holy Eucharist. Now he knew what to do. Steeling himself, he stripped the body of all clothing; he pocketed the thin, gold wedding band and bloodied crucifix to later bury at the consecrated cemetery.

  Early the next morning, when the town’s old, blind butcher wheeled his cart, its front wheel squeaking loudly, through the village streets, collecting meat to be sliced, grounded, or cubed to order, Enrique was ready. Having wrapped the body in plastic, he requested the old man’s help in loading it into the cart. It was not far from where the butcher worked. The Calle de Nuestra Señora de Bienaventurados los Pobres was a narrow alley off the village’s main street. “Molida de res?” asked the butcher.

  “Si, ground, says Mama.” Enrique resisted asking the old man to take care in the handling of his mother’s corpse. It might make him suspicious. By feel alone, the old man knew only meat and knives and how to shape one with the other. Enrique knew this since the whole village was aware of how the old, blind butcher would obliviously slice and dice the bodies of domestic pets laid out for the trashman to claim. And in one disastrous incident, a live parrot left warbling on the sidewalk by a forgetful child.

  Gabriella’s death was never reported, but still everyone seemed to know. Enrique could tell by the way her absence was never questioned, her name hardly mentioned.

  The men of the village began falling silent at Herve’s approach. And if he stopped near them while drinking at the cantina, they’d make a point of saying his name warmly. But, furtively, they’d edge themselves away to distant corners.

  Old women, especially those with predatory moles, would purse their lips, creased in old lipstick, whenever he’d pass them on a village street, their distain a greater stench than that rising from his unwashed clothes.

  Hatred soon replaced Enrique’s fear of his father. He could barely tolerate hearing his beast-like sounds while gulping chili con carne. Time passed in a haze. Maybe two or three years. Enrique wasn’t sure. Dates on a calendar meant less to him than the bodily strength that came with his body growing taller and his muscles expanding.

  It was a period of waiting. Waiting for the day he knew was coming. In the meantime he worked hard at school, knowing that his time of learning would be short. And even though their village’s school had few books, his teacher would often lend him books on science, the one discipline he favored.

  Then, one year, when the rainy season again ended, and the Eucharist of his mother’s body had been exhausted of sacrament, Enrique packed his meager belongings into a market sack. But before leaving, he prepared one last meal for Herve—a large, steaming bowl of pozole amid gleaming dishes of chopped green chiles and onion. He even included the candied pumpkins and refried beans. He wondered if his father would even remember. If he did, he gave no sign that night.

  The boy had thought it only fitting to include dozens of flowering heads from Gabriella’s beloved cactus in the soup. People about the village liked whispering about their effect. Said how they’d make you see God. And that’s exactly what Enrique wanted, for his father to witness the Lord’s anger for what he’d done.

  Enrique found strange satisfaction in watching his father’s death agonies. And when it was over, he waited until the deepest, darkest corner of night. He was older and stronger now. So, as villagers slept about him and stars glittered overhead, he dragged the shoeless bo
dy of his father to the town dump. He knew that the next morning, birds would feast on Herve’s eyes, squabbling over their meat.

  Teenage Enrique smiled. The image of his father’s eyes being pecked out, their darkness shattered, tickled him. He regretted not being able to witness it himself. But by daybreak, he’d be gone, following the night’s path, with only the money and the revolver taken from Herve’s pockets, a stolen textbook on astronomy, and the market sack stuffed with Enrique’s clothes.

  ***

  From across a lamp-lit Tenth Street, John Doe gives the nod to an agent. To the dark-skinned one who’s preparing to slip into Mom’s Diner disguised as a factory worker. They’ve narrowed the search down to half a dozen businesses where the FRC trafficker might be embedded. Doe is guessing that the trafficker is hiding in plain sight by pretending to be a worker. So, Doe is sending his best agents into each business to schmooze the clientele and staff for leads.

  Almost simultaneously, Ruiz lets himself out the diner’s back door. He calculates that he’s got twenty minutes to collect Sanderson’s FRC and return to the diner before Jones notices his absence. Swiftly, he moves down the alley.

  A harsh light shining from a security fixture hung on the side of a condom factory illuminates only half the alley, leaving the other half dead-black. Ruiz quickens his step, hairs tickling the back of his neck. He’s reassured, though, by seeing, just ahead, the alley’s mouth—its juncture with Blue Moon Boulevard.

  But just before he reaches this intersection, a big man wearing a red flannel shirt steps from the shadows. Automatically, Ruiz steps back, putting distance between them. He makes a grab for the automatic in his waistband. But he’s grabbed from behind by a steel arm. It locks itself over his windpipe as his legs are kicked out from under him and his gun taken.

  He’s falling. The grit of rough asphalt stabs the flesh of his palms. The big guy, around fifty with receding hair, a fat gut, and the sucking voice of a denture-wearer, bends low over him, punching him hard in the stomach, knocking the wind out of Ruiz.