“How do you expect me to remember something that happened so long ago?”
“I’m sure you won’t have to think very hard to remember, Mrs. Benedict, because you have never forgotten, not even for a minute,” Reeves replied, opening his briefcase and removing the magazine that had triggered her son’s attack. “What does this ranch mean to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Were King and you ever in a place like this?”
“We’ve been a lot of places; we moved all the time while I looked for work. We picked cotton at several places like that.”
“When King was fourteen?”
“Maybe; I don’t remember.”
“Please, don’t make things more difficult for me, because we don’t have much time. I want to help you. We’re playing on the same team, Bel; I’m not your enemy.”
Bel Benedict was silent, looking at the photograph with an expression of obdurate dignity, while Gregory Reeves watched admiringly, thinking what a beauty she must have been as a young woman and that had she been born in a different time or under different circumstances she could have married a powerful man who would have sported his sleek pantheress on his arm and no one would have dared object to her race.
“All right, Mr. Reeves, I’m backed into a corner,” she said at last, sighing. “If I keep my mouth shut, like I have for forty years, my baby will end up a helpless old man without a cent to his name, and if I tell what happened, I’ll go to jail and my boy will be all alone.”
“There may be still another way. If you consult me as your lawyer, anything you say will be confidential and won’t go beyond these four walls, I promise you.”
“You mean you can’t report me?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Then I want you to be my lawyer; I’m going to need one anyway,” she decided after another long pause. “It was self-defense, as they call it, but who’s going to believe me? I was a poor black woman passing through the most racist part of Texas. My son and I worked our way from farm to farm, earning a living at any job I could find; all I had was one suitcase of clothes and two arms to work. I had terrible headaches in those days. I didn’t want to, but I kept getting into fights. I attracted trouble like flypaper draws flies. I never lasted anywhere very long; something always happened to make us move on. I was surprised when this big-time farmer gave me a job; all the rest of his workers were braceros, Latino men, but it was the season for picking cotton, and I thought he was hard up for help. I couldn’t stay where the men lived, so he gave Baby and me a dirty old cabin on the far side of his land, a long ways away, where a truck came to pick us up in the morning and took us back at the end of the day. It was a good job, but the boss had his eye on me. I knew we were headed for trouble, but I was willing to put up with a lot; I promise you, I couldn’t be that picky. I had my priorities in order, and putting food in my son’s mouth always came first. Why did it matter if I had to go to bed with some man? Ten or twenty minutes and it was all over and you could put it right out of your mind. But he was one of those men who can’t do it like everyone else; he liked to use his fists, and if he didn’t draw blood, he couldn’t do what he came for. Who would have suspected? He seemed like such a good man, his workers respected him, he paid a fair wage, he went to church every Sunday—he was a model boss. I let him rough me up a couple of times and call me a filthy nigger and worse. He wasn’t the first; you kind of get used to it . . . and what woman hasn’t taken her licks? That Sunday Baby was off playing baseball when the man drove up in his truck. I was alone, and I could see in his face what he was looking for; besides, I could smell the liquor on him. I’m not real sure what happened, Mr. Reeves, but I know he had pulled off his belt and was going at me hot and heavy, and I think I screamed, and that’s when Baby came in and got between us and the man hit him hard with his fist. Baby hit the back of his head against the corner of the table. I saw my boy lying senseless on the floor, and I didn’t even have to think. . . . I picked up his baseball bat and swung at the man’s head. Just one swing with all my heart . . . and I killed him. When Baby came to, I washed off his wound; he had a real bad gash, but I couldn’t take him to a hospital, where they would ask a lot of questions; I stopped the blood with cold water and some clean rags. I got the boss’s body into his truck, covered it over with gunnysacks, and hid the truck away from the house. I waited till dark, drove twenty miles away from the farm, and ran the truck into a ravine. Nobody knew. Then I walked the five hours back to the cabin. I remember I slept with a clean conscience the rest of the night and the next morning was at the door waiting to be picked up for work, as if nothing had happened. My son and I never talked about any of it. The police found the body and thought the man had had too much to drink and run his truck off the road. They questioned the braceros, but if anyone had seen anything they didn’t tell it, and that’s as far as it went. A little later Baby and I left that place and never set foot in Texas again. Isn’t that life for you, Mr. Reeves? That forty years later that ghost would come back to haunt me?”
“Has it weighed on your conscience?” Reeves asked, thinking of the deaths he carried on his.
“Never, may the good Lord forgive me. That man was looking to be killed.”
“My friend Carmen, who has more common sense than anyone I know, told me once that we don’t need to confess what no one asks to know.”
“But it will come out in the trial, Mr. Reeves.”
“Does King still have that scar on his head?”
“Yes; it was a bad one, because we couldn’t get stitches.”
“We’ll show that when he was fourteen he hit his head when he fell against a table, but if we’re lucky we won’t have to tell the rest of the story. If I can find an expert who will connect the first fall with the accident on the construction site, maybe we can settle the case without going to court, Mrs. Benedict.”
At the pretrial deposition, Ming O’Brien testified that King Benedict’s profile fit that for psychogenic amnesia, and given the lack of improvement to date, he would probably never recover. She explained that the record of his injuries corresponded with the normal causes for that disorder: King had a difficult childhood and youth and suffered a severe blow to the head during adolescence; before the accident he was under great pressure, and he was a depressive by temperament. When he fell from the scaffold he suffered a trauma similar to the earlier injury, and he had regressed and taken refuge in amnesia as a defense against the problems he was facing. The insurance company lawyers did everything they could to discredit the diagnosis but were brought up short by the quiet conviction of the doctor, who produced a large stack of volumes with references to similar cases. In addition, the detectives hired to shadow Benedict had nothing but photographs of the suspect playing with an electric train, reading adventure stories, and playing war in a soldier’s uniform. The judge, a matronly woman as upright as Ming O’Brien, summoned the defense lawyers to her chambers and suggested that it would be to their benefit to make payment without further delay, because if the case went to trial they could lose much more. Judging from my considerable experience, she said, the members of any jury will be generous with this poor man and his long-suffering mother, as I would be if I were one of them. After two days of arguing back and forth, the insurance lawyers conceded. Gregory Reeves celebrated their victory by taking Bel, King, and David to Disneyland, where they lost themselves in a fantastic world of animals that talk, lights that turn night to day, and machines that defy the laws of physics and the mysteries of time. Upon their return, Reeves helped Bel purchase a modest house in the country and invest the remainder of the insurance money so that she and King could count on a pension for the rest of their days.
• • •
When Dai lost interest in his computer and began to use aftershave lotion and peer at himself in the mirror with a desolate air, Carmen Morales invited him out to dinner for a talk, following their custom of making dates when they wanted to discuss something important. Their li
ves had become more complicated, and with the years they had lost some portion of the affectionate intimacy that earlier united them, but they were still very close. Dai as a teenager looked like his Latino father, though he was more intense and somber. He had inherited none of Juan José’s spirit for adventure nor any of Carmen’s explosive personality; he was an introverted and rather solemn boy, too serious for his age. When he was four or five he had begun to show an extraordinary aptitude for mathematics, and from then on had been treated like a prodigy by everyone except his adoptive mother. His teachers showed him off on television programs and in contests, where he solved complex equations in his head. He had won a number of prizes, including a motorcycle before he was old enough to ride. His inherent pride was in danger of becoming arrogance, but Carmen kept him in line by putting him to work in her factory during vacations so he would have contact with working people and know from the time he was a boy how hard it is to earn a living. She also stimulated his curiosity and opened his mind to other cultures. At fifteen, Dai had traveled in Asia, Africa, and several countries of South America; he spoke some Spanish and a little Vietnamese, he had the financial end of his mother’s business at his fingertips, he had a savings account, and several universities had offered him scholarships for the future. While the entire nation was debating the crisis of values among young people and the disastrous educational system that had created a generation of lazy ignoramuses, Dai was studying hard, working, and in his free time exploring the library and playing with his computer. In his room he had a small altar with the photograph Leo Galupi had faked of his mother and father, along with a wooden cross, a small clay Buddha, and a magazine clipping of the earth seen from a space shuttle. He was not sociable, he preferred being alone, and had always considered Carmen his sole and dearest companion. This likable boy, satisfied with his life and comfortable with being a lone wolf, changed abruptly toward the end of the spring. He spent hours getting ready to go out, began to dress, talk, and move like a rock singer, left the house at strange hours, and made massive efforts to be accepted by schoolmates whose company he once scorned. He renounced his passion for mathematics because he wanted to be one of the crowd and mathematics made him different from his friends. When his mother saw him painfully trying to plaster down his stubborn hair with styling gel, dabbing toothpaste on his pimples, and pacing back and forth by the telephone, she knew the time of idyllic complicity with her son was at an end and suffered a fit of jealousy she did not dare confess even to Gregory Reeves during their Monday conversations. Carmen now had Tamar shops throughout the world and counted on an efficient team of employees to manage her business while she designed new lines and promoted the company’s image. She had bought a frame house in the midst of huge trees in the Berkeley hills, where she lived with her son and her mother. Pedro Morales had been dead for several years. When he knew he was going to die, he refused to go to the hospital; he did not want his life to be prolonged by artificial means and was afraid the medical bills would ruin his family and his wife would be out in the street. He had worked a lifetime to provide for his small tribe and refused to allow what he had won to be wiped out at the end. He was very proud of his family, especially Carmen and his grandson Dai, in whom he saw the reincarnation of his son Juan José. He departed this world without leaving behind any loose ends and with a sense of having fulfilled his destiny in his own good time. Inmaculada was by her husband’s side in his last days and then consoled her grieving sons and daughters, son- and daughters-in-law, and many grandchildren. After the patriarch died, the family did not drift apart, because Inmaculada made sure the bonds of affection and mutual assistance never slackened. After the burial, she decided to stay with Carmen for a while, and within a few weeks divided her belongings and sold the house. For years she had put her heart into acquiring furniture and decorations, testimony to their prosperity, but when she lost her husband, material possessions no longer held any meaning. You spend the first part of your life collecting things, she said, and the second half getting rid of them. She kept only the bed she had shared with Pedro Morales for half a century, because she wanted to die in it one day. She had changed very little, as if frozen at an indeterminate age; the strength of her Indian ancestry seemed to protect her from the wasting of body and the waning of memory. She had never been more lucid; she was a steadfast, diligent old woman impervious to fatigue, weakness, or bad health. She took charge of Carmen’s domestic arrangements with militant fervor; she had brought up six children in hard times in a barrio, and this house filled with comforts offered no challenges to her. It was difficult to keep her from breaking her back washing clothes or beating eggs; she was one for keeping busy. Idleness breeds illness, she always said to justify herself if she was caught on a ladder washing windows or on her knees setting traps for the raccoons forming a colony in the foundations of the house. She continued to cook Mexican dishes that only Dai and she enjoyed because Carmen was always on a diet. She rose early in the morning to water her vegetable and herb gardens, to clean and cook and wash, and she was the last to go to bed, after telephoning her children in different cities in the country—a part, she thought, of her responsibility for keeping tabs on all her descendants. The habit of doing for others was too deeply rooted to change in her old age, but she was the first to denigrate her domesticity. Years before, she had secretly applauded Carmen when she returned from her travels a “liberated gringa,” as Pedro Morales grumblingly called her. And it was one of her most heartfelt delights that Carmen earned a better living than her brothers, compensation for Inmaculada’s own lifetime of deferring to men. Carmen forced her mother to use modern appliances and buy tortillas in plastic bags, and opened an account for her in the bank, to which Inmaculada accorded the same devotion she reserved for her prayerbook. Inmaculada was the first to notice that Dai had entered a phase of unrequited love, and she transmitted that knowledge to her daughter.
“Tell me everything,” Carmen commanded when she and Dai were seated in the restaurant.
Dai tried to deny that anything was wrong but was betrayed by his forsaken air and his blushing: embarrassment turned his dark skin beet red. His mother gave no quarter, and by dessert he had no choice but to confess—dazed with chocolate cake and squirming in his chair—that he couldn’t sleep or study or think or live; the hours dragged by as he sat by the telephone, waiting for a call that never came. What can I do, Mama? I know she looks down on me because I’m not white and I don’t play football. Why was I born? Why did you come get me in Vietnam and bring me up so different from everyone else? I don’t know the names of the rock bands, and I’m the only moron who calls Orientals Asiatics and blacks Afro-Americans, or worries about holes in the ozone layer or beggars in the street or the war against Nicaragua—I’m the only politically correct person in the whole blessed school. No one gives a good goddamn about those things, Mama; life is pure shit, and if Karen doesn’t call me today I swear I’m going to climb on my motorcycle and drive it off a cliff, because I can’t live without her. Carmen Morales interrupted his monologue with a slap on the face that resounded like a slammed door through the esoteric peace of the vegetarian restaurant. She had never struck him before. Dai put his hand to his cheek, so surprised that the litany of laments froze on his lips.
“Don’t ever say that again, about killing yourself, you hear me?”
“It’s just a manner of speaking, Mama!”
“I don’t want to hear it, even joking. You’re going to live out your life, no matter how much it hurts. And now tell me, who is this wretched girl who thinks she’s too good for my son?”
Karen, it turned out, was a classmate who like every other girl in the school was in love with the captain of the football team, with whom Dai could not compete even in his dreams. The next day Carmen drove her son to school to get a look at the girl; she saw a baby-faced, washed-out blonde, half hidden behind a bubble-gum bubble. She sighed with relief, sure that Dai would recover from his lovesickness and quickly
find someone more interesting, and also sure that even if he didn’t, there was nothing she could do—she could no longer protect him from his own experiences and suffering, as she had tried to do when he was small. Later Carmen realized that her feeling of relief was occasioned by more than the sight of the insipid girl and her own certainty that Dai would not suffer over her forever. She was beginning to sense that there were advantages to her son’s living his own life. For the first time in the thirteen years they had been together, she could think of herself as a separate and individual person. Until then Dai had been an extension of her being and she of his: Siamese twins joined at the heart, Inmaculada always said. That evening her mother found her sitting in the kitchen before a cup of mango tea, staring at the dark shadows of the trees in the last light of day.
“Do you think I look old, Mama?”
“Older than last year, but younger than next, may it please God,” Inmaculada replied.