As I left, I let my eyes rest on the row of thick, proud chili plants the Señora had along the side of her house. Chiles rellenos, indeed.
That is how Tamara Miller began to make friends in her neighborhood, and learn that there were services in the community to help women like her, things you could divorce a man for that didn’t involve calling the police. Over the next few weeks I thought she was going to make it. It seemed to me as if the yellow rose nodded at me in approval, when one third Friday of the month went past and on the Saturday morning there she was, at work in her garden. Señora Rodriguez brought other neighbors to see the pale Anglo woman. The smell of chilis and cumin sometimes overcame the dust smell of the plumbing supply yard next door, and Tamara Miller began to blossom like a neglected plant given water and sun. I told myself what a clever fellow I was, to set such a thing in motion.
Why, why do we never learn?
In truth, though, it should have ended happily. In my village it might have, because the women were strong and in and out of each other’s lives all the time, and had brothers and uncles to help them. In this country it is not always that way. It is especially not that way for the poor.
Perhaps if I had not interfered, if I had not arranged for Señora Rodriguez to take Tamara Miller under her wing, then nothing worse would have happened other than a young woman’s black eyes and careful walk. I did mean well, but before the month was out, I saw how wrong I was, and I saw where it would end.
One Wednesday, Señor Miller lost his job. That evening his wife came near to losing her life. If one of Señora Rodriguez’s friends had not been bringing a paper bag full of tomatillos to Tamara Miller and run to call the police, the husband might have murdered her. Instead, he was jailed for two days until his wife came home from the hospital with plaster on her arm. When she would not press charges, he moved back home. He got another job.
Two months later it happened again.
Six weeks after that, again.
I was no longer content in that neighborhood. The inability of the police to stop a man from beating his wife to death preyed on my mind and visited me with nightmares of my own wife’s end. A layer of invisible smoke seemed to lie over the whole area, and the paleta cart became heavier and heavier to push toward it as the cool mornings of autumn came along.
Señora Rodriguez did not give up. She checked on the young woman every day. She brought her food, got her involved in some committee working to ask the city for stop signs. She took her to the doctor to have the plaster removed from her arm, and to the clinic to have stitches taken out, and to the hospital to have her ribs X-rayed, and all the while she talked to Tamara Miller about her options. A divorce, the Women’s Shelter, something called a restraining order. Tamara Miller listened to all the advice, and nodded, and did nothing. She stopped coming out of her house to buy a cup of ice cream from me. Her house ceased to smell of cumin. When I caught glimpses of her, she seemed to me even smaller, stooped over and thin as a broomstick.
When Señora Rodriguez explained to me about restraining orders, I only looked at her. Señor Miller was a powerful young man. He made his living moving heavy objects from trucks to warehouses and back again, and his shoulders were massive. I could not imagine a piece of paper restraining those shoulders. Señora Rodriguez saw the doubt in my eyes, and shrugged. He did not want his wife to leave him; no one in the neighborhood wanted her to stay. The differences in the two points of view were as far apart as those of the government and the rebels in my village. And as likely to lead to bloodshed.
That shrug of Señora Rodriguez’s stayed with me all that day and into the night. I sat long in the doorway of my trailer, the last roses drooping off the vine above my head, looking into the soft darkness and hearing the cars go by. If a woman wants to kill herself, the shrug said, what can we do?
The following day I learned that Tamara Miller had been taken to the hospital. This time she would be in for days, even a week. Her husband was already out on bail.
I stood looking at the child who told me this news, my mind gone dark, until the gentle touch of a hand on mine brought me back.
“You okay, Tío?”
“Yes, of course, Thomas. Oh—here is your juice bar. And you, Lupe, what can I get for you today?”
I did not think that Tamara Miller wished to kill herself. I thought that she was trying to become so small that her husband would not notice her. And I thought that if her husband were removed from her life, just for a time, she might be permitted to breathe, and to see that there were other ways to go ahead.
The old dog, it seemed, had taught Tío a new trick: one that would work for other situations than that of an injured leg and a veterinarian selling animal tranquilizers to people.
I walked back to my home that afternoon feeling light for the first time in weeks. After dark, I retrieved the murderer’s gun from its hiding place, along with the six packets of drugs and the still-thick roll of illicit money. I separated out half the bills, then cleaned and oiled the weapon, taking care not to touch it with my bare hands. When the roads had fallen quiet, I put on my darkest clothing and made my way back into San Felipe.
Miller’s large black pickup truck was not in his driveway. I waited long enough to be certain that I was alone, then crossed the street and went through the gate, up the walk, and took the key from the chipped flowerpot where I had seen Tamara Miller put it.
Inside, after only two days of his wife’s absence, the house had begun to stink like the lair of a carrion eater. A light in the kitchen showed debris on every surface. Beer cans surrounded a large stuffed chair, planted ten feet from the huge television screen.
My only regret was that I had no way of adding the man’s fingerprints to the gun or the packets. However, I found his hair-brush and sifted its contents down over the items on the sink, working them into the money with my gloved hands. (Is it not amazing, what one can learn from the library?) That would have to do.
I was just in the process of hiding everything on a high shelf in the living room when the windows flared with headlights, and a large motor rumbled up the street. It stopped in front of the house. The lights went out, the truck’s door slammed, and a key fumbled at the front door lock.
By then I was inside a room I doubted the man ever set foot in, a tiny space at the back given over to his wife’s sewing projects. I stood in the dark listening to his drunken progress through the house: toilet, refrigerator, the snap of a beer can, the thump of his body going onto the chair. I expected the television to go on, but the silence stretched out…
After a minute, a faint thump, then a snore.
The snores did not fade as I went silently up the hallway toward the front room. There I saw the explanation of the smaller sound: a near-full can of beer had fallen from his slack hand to soak the carpet.
Tamara Miller had been so proud of that carpet, when they installed it the summer before. She told me it took her three years to save the money.
I stood in the doorway, listening to the creature’s snores, and remembered another time I had stood in a doorway, a thousand miles and half a lifetime away.
That door had belonged to a bedroom. That man had been sprawled on his back across a bed, head tipped, neck exposed: an invitation. That time it had been a knife.
But unlike tonight, there was no hesitation. It had taken me weeks to track him down, and although I would gleefully have chained shut his doors and laughed at his shrieks, the house was filled with servants, and discovery would let him slip away for good. So I delayed only to send a quick prayer to my wife and son, shaping the sign of the cross at my breast, before I slid the sharp point into place, and the hot gush shocked my hands.
Tonight, though, I did hesitate. Drugs, money, and the gun used in a murder, all planted on a shelf for the police to find, following an anonymous telephone call.
Was that enough?
The police themselves had failed Tamara Miller. The court system offered her nothing but holes
. Her family was distant, her friends unable to protect her.
If I did not care for her, who would?
Planting the evidence would be far safer—for me: a man known to be a friend of the young wife. A man with no one to say he was home in bed.
But how many more beatings would the safe solution mean for her?
My eyes traveled to the high shelf, then down to the exposed throat. The windows outside showed nothing but silent roadway and the sides of industrial buildings.
With a sigh, I crossed the room and climbed onto the stool to retrieve what I had left there. I pushed the money and the drugs into my coat pocket, and climbed down with the gun.
—
It took three days before the police came to speak with me about the death of Mr. Miller. They were puzzled, and well on their way to calling it a suicide, but wished to be thorough in their investigation. I gave them what they wanted—a sad agreement that he had not been a nice man—and managed to wake no suspicions on their part.
They left. Tamara Miller came home from the hospital. Life went on.
Then one day last September, Señora Rodriguez came driving along my dirt road, at an hour when the cool sea air was beginning to creep over the fields. With her was Tamara Miller.
The two ladies had spent the day making tamales, a thing women do when they wish to share their kitchen with the world. They brought me a plate piled high. I thanked them both, and sat them under my arbor with glasses of the drink I make from my lemons and the rose hips.
I had seen the Señora any number of times since that night. Once or twice she had seemed on the edge of asking a question, only to withdraw it unspoken. She seemed about to do so now, but glanced at her young companion and changed her mind.
Instead, she looked from the rust-dotted surface of my trailer to the worn state of my boots, and said that if I was interested in a job that was less demanding and more steady than selling paletas, she had heard that a janitor’s position was opening up at Guadalupe Middle School.
At the word school, my entire body gave a twist of revulsion: children and blackboards; the hopes of a village drowned in blood. I coughed to conceal my reaction, and gave her polite thanks, saying that I would consider it. Not that I had any intention of doing so.
At the door of her car, Señora Rodriguez paused to admire my rose bush, commenting that it would be a glory in the spring. And then she gave me a look, as if to say that our business was not finished, before she and Tamara Miller got into the car and drove away.
As I sat in my doorway and watched the dust settle, three yellow petals drifted down onto my old hand. After a moment, I looked up.
The pale yellow roses are, in truth, very beautiful.
Y yo soy contento.
And I am content.
12:48
Gordon
Gordon seized the old man’s arm to keep him from collapsing—but Tío snapped back from wherever he had gone, his eyes focusing on Gordon’s.
“Cada puerto? Locks? On all?”
The PT answered, “I don’t know. But none of them open more than a few inches. There’s a car parked in front of the ones on this end. Not sure about that other.”
Over his shoulder, Gordon saw Mina’s bloodstained orange shirt. “Can you stop the bleeding?”
“No. I’ve slowed it, but she needs an ambulance.”
Tío’s office: trap or safety? “Did any of you reach 911?”
Head shakes, all around—God, were these the only students on campus without phones? Gordon jabbed a finger at Tío’s land line. “Pick it up,” he ordered the teary girl perched on the desk beside it. “Is there a dial tone? Dial 9, then 911. Tell them where you are, say we need an ambulance immediately. You, here—” He dug out his phone and thrust it at the nearest set of young fingers. “Text my wife to tell her what’s happening. The rest of you, find a place to sit. We’ll be here for a while.”
12:48
Linda
The noise of the gun was unbelievable, pounding the enclosed space, a series of explosions from that huge pistol in the man’s hand. The students threw themselves against the wall, arms over their heads, weeping in fear. Do something, she howled at herself. Do something, for God’s sake, before—
The shooting stopped, the gun…was the thing empty? She could jump up, now, tackle the shooter, and scream at the kids to run—they could pound on the door to the next room, at least they would—
But before she could get to her feet, the gun spat out a black shape and a full one was slapped in: too late. It began all over again, the BLAM and the ting of brass bits being ejected.
He was aiming across the quad at the cafeteria. Shooting at the dozen or more kids in there, shooting at…
Gordon.
12:49
Gordon
Gordon stood in the doorway where Mina could see him, counting the second series of gunshots. He’d gone blank for a moment at the sight of the girl’s blood, but he thought there might have been sixteen shots in the first series—a fifteen-cartridge magazine with one carried in the chamber. Illegal, but so was shooting up a school.
This time, Gordon kept better count. (TEN) The cafeteria seemed to be the main target. Holes were growing in the nearer set of doors (ELEVEN; TWELVE), and the table he’d shoved against it (THIRTEEN) was now two feet away. He should have taken another two seconds to lock (FOURTEEN) the damn wheels.
(FIFTEEN)
Another pause. It went on. Longer…
12:50
Linda
The gun went empty again. This time, instead of just slapping in a new cartridge and continuing to fire, the man reached for the gym bag at his feet, coming out with another cartridge. In moments, the gun was loaded—but then he reached down to pull out a second weapon, smaller than the first.
As he stood, he glanced up. For the first time, Linda actually saw his face. “Why?” she blurted out. “Why are you doing this?”
“What choice do I have?” His face was handsome and calm and empty of any emotion except determination. “They took everything. Everything I built, invented, invested in, cared for. Everything that was mine. You can’t do that to a man, leave him with nothing, can you? Time someone gets that message across.” He shoved the big gun into the back of his belt and turned to lower the silver-and-black pistol at the quad.
12:50
Gordon
Just as Gordon was beginning to hope Mendez might have taken the shooter down, the firing started again—different now, nowhere near as loud. With less impact on the door. A smaller-caliber weapon.
But for one of the four males at the doorway to Tío’s office, it might have been the start of heavy artillery.
At the second of these new rounds, Brendan’s head tipped, as if someone had said his name; at the fourth, he wheeled and bolted toward the shredded door.
Only the table slowed the boy enough for Gordon to catch up, jerking him away from danger.
“Let me go!” The lithe figure fought to get back into the line of fire. But Gordon had fifty years and twenty pounds on the boy, and his arms held tight.
“Stop it! Brendan, stop—ow, Christ, don’t make me hurt you, you’ve got to tell me what—”
In the end, he had to shout directly into the boy’s ear. “What the hell is it?”
At last the struggles paused. “That’s…” Brendan’s chest heaved against Gordon’s arms, and it took a moment before he could get the words out. “I know that gun. I know who’s shooting. It’s my father.”
THAT MORNING
Tom Atcheson: his story
If Thomas Atcheson had taken his Glock to the board meeting that morning, not one person in the room would have walked out.
His company—his own…FUCKING…company!—stolen from him, in a dribble of cold legal language. Criminal charges? Jesus! Could they possibly imagine they had any right to his labors? Mindless idiots who couldn’t see that a man with a vision might have his own way of pursuing it. Not one of them could see
how stupid they were being. Thomas Atcheson had built this company. He’d shaped it and pushed it and fought for it—and these feeble, parasitic, tiny-minded opportunists…
They had no idea how far he would go to protect what was his. Just like his wife, who’d dared to imagine that her ten years of service was worth half his life’s work—a woman who’d done nothing more than keep house and host a few parties, a woman whose son he’d welcomed and raised and fathered, a woman stupid enough to believe that she could threaten Thomas Atcheson with a divorce that split his company down the middle.
And now these imbeciles—headed by another woman, a damned Mexican hired because of quotas (as if some Chicana could run Atcheson Enterprises!)—these pinheads imagined that they could do to him what his wife had failed to do?
At least they’d had the sense to look frightened, something she hadn’t managed until the very end.
The board meeting had lasted less than half an hour, and then they’d had him escorted from the building. HIM. Escorted. From the building! Atcheson Enterprises had shown its founder to the street.
Rage pounded through his veins. He’d nearly given way to it on the drive home, his hands twitching with the temptation to obliterate that bicyclist who demanded the right of way, that monkey-brained female in the minivan cutting him off. They’d never know how close they came.
Still, he’d arrived home with fenders intact and no blood on his tires. He managed to put on the brakes and turn the key rather than gunning the big engine forward through the garden and into the front door to see how far he could smash before the place came down around his ears…But: no. Control was paramount. He sat in the driveway waiting for his pulse to slow, knowing that if he went straight in, if he tracked that meeting’s shit into his own home, he’d be so angry he’d wreck the place.