Читать книгу One Life - David Lida - Страница 13

WHERE THE DEVIL LOST HIS PONCHO

The house was squat and square, of cinder block and cement. One of these days they might get around to painting the facade. It was one story tall with rebar popping out of the roof. In towns like Ojeras, rebar represents hope: hope that one of these days there will be money to build a second story.

The woman behind the door was a foot shorter than me, her face crosshatched with wrinkles. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun, the top button of a flimsy black sweater fastened across her chest. Although she looked like The Mummy’s little sister, she was probably no older than sixty. That’s how carefree life is in towns like this.

“Sorry to bother you, señora,” I said, offering a pleasant smile. “I’m looking for someone who I believe lives in this town. His name is Juventino Escobar.”

Although she understood me perfectly well, she was going to take as long as she needed to size me up before answering. Who was I? A slender gringo in need of a haircut, in black jeans and a carelessly ironed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A black backpack over my shoulder. My presence couldn’t possibly mean good news. Did I want to kidnap Juventino? Arrest him? Sell him drugs, or buy some? Could she trust anyone who spoke with an accent like mine? Did I represent the CIA? The FBI? The DEA? Disneyland?

“Do you know Juventino by any chance?” I asked. I wasn’t going to stand in her doorway all day, particularly in the early September sunshine that baked the earth after the rain. If she thought the existence of her neighbors was a state secret, there was always the next house. And the next one and the next one, each with its own plucky rebar.

“No,” she said finally. “I don’t know him.”

“Okay,” I said. “Many thanks, señora. So sorry to bother you.” I turned my back. The taxi was parked across the street.

“But I know his mother.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Excellent. Where does she live?”

“They say he might have come back. From el gabacho. I don’t know.” El gabacho. Also known as los States, Norteamérica, Gringolandia, or el otro lado.

Waving my hand, I motioned for the taxi driver to come over. Despite all the years I had lived in this country, I never understood when a Mexican gave directions. He would never send you left or right, east or west. It was always “up” or “down.”

The cabdriver lived more than two hours away in Puroaire. He was slender with short hair and a winning smile. As the woman explained how he would have to go up there, and then down the other way, somewhere over the rainbow, he nodded sagely, as if he understood perfectly. He might have been to Ojeras before, but he didn’t know it very well. He got us lost along the way.

“Did you get all that?” I asked, once we were back in the cab.

“Yes, absolutely,” he said. After a pause, he added, “But if I didn’t, we can ask someone else.”

Sometime before the next millennium, the local bureaucrats might decide that it would be worthwhile to pave more than the two central streets of Ojeras rather than divert public funds into their own pockets. Don’t hold your breath. Driving down the dirt streets, we kicked up a dust storm, passing more short and fat houses with rebar tilting toward the sky.

The town plaza was so tiny you could fit it in your wallet. It was ringed with trees, which had been pruned into perfect little squares like green marshmallows on sticks. There were iron busts of four men—los hombres ilustres—local poets, professors, politicians. The clock in the church’s skinny spire read ten to three, 24-7.

Brown-skinned adolescents kicked a soccer ball despite the afternoon heat, wearing their caps sideways and pants that stopped at their knees. Two chattering girls barely out of their teens walked down the street, each pregnant. A lady in a blue apron waved the flies away from quesadillas she had fried in boiling oil for invisible customers, next to a white plastic table covered in a plaid plastic cloth. There were few men around. The absent were mostly in el gabacho.

The closer we got to the edge of town, the more primitive the houses became. Adobe or clapboard slats for walls, corrugated laminate for the roof. Sheets of torn plastic instead of windows. Bent, crooked doors fastened with a chain and a padlock, or with nothing at all. Finally we got to a huge crater covered in rocks and mud. It was a circle about three city blocks in diameter and fifty feet in depth, and it looked like the surface of an undiscovered planet. On the other side were more shacks.

“She lives up the hill there,” said the driver. “Sorry, but my car won’t get through that hole.”

“No problem. I’ll walk.”

Clambering through the stones and mud was my exercise for the day. I tried to walk around the brackish, soupy puddles, some of which glowed with a rainbow chemical swirl. I had to go back and forth only once. Poor Juventino’s mother had to do it day after day, if her son gave her any money for groceries.

I had high hopes for Juventino. He had been married to Marta, one of Esperanza’s older sisters. The promising facts were that he was not an actual family member, that he and Marta had split up years earlier, and that he lived in another town. He had nothing to lose, no one to protect, no more diplomatic duty to perform. If I was lucky, he would have axes to grind. A witness like that can spill all kinds of dirt.

By the time I had traversed the crater, my black sneakers were covered in mud. The huts were so ramshackle they looked like they’d fall over if you leaned against a wall. A dry, hot wind kicked up a whirlpool of dust. If dirt were expensive everyone in Ojeras would be a millionaire.

Four dogs lay in the middle of the road, in shades of matted gray and beige. Mama was mangy and bloated with milk, and had about nineteen nipples. Her boys were lean. I could see their ribs, the flesh rising and setting with their breath. As I got closer they started to growl. What could they possibly have been protecting? Was anyone actually hiding a stash of something inside one of those broken-down shacks? The wrong questions to ask in a Mexican Podunk.

They snarled more loudly as I approached. The smallest one, a disheveled silver mutt, got up and yapped at the top of his high-pitched lungs. Why is it that the tiniest dogs always sound as if they’d swallowed a microphone? He scampered to my side. “It’s okay,” I said in a velvety but stern purr. I was perennially hopeful an utterance like that would shut up a barking dog, but it never did. He only bleated more loudly.

Let him yap. I ignored him and walked on. Dogs liked me—or so I thought until the son of a bitch set his teeth around my ankle and broke skin. I kicked him away. It hurt, but the shock was worse. I just stood there as he yapped, a how could you? expression on my face.

I bent over and pulled down my sock. I was bleeding. Not heavily. A steady, ladylike trickle. The defense team would get a kick out of this. If they needed any proof of my dedication, there it was written in red. Not only was I willing to crawl through dust and mud, I would suffer dog bites to try to save Esperanza Morales’s life. I scowled at the mutt through narrowed eyes. He just kept yapping. I pulled back my leg as if I was going to kick him, but he didn’t even flinch.

I realized I had an audience, outside the last house on the right. Another ancient sixty-year-old, her thick legs rooted in the ground like old oaks. Her flesh was a wobbly mass under a striped serape she wore despite the midday heat. Two other women, their middles swollen after multiple pregnancies, in jeans and T-shirts. One sat sifting through a bowl of dried beans, picking out the little stones; the other folded raggedy clothes she picked from a washline. A tiny girl stared. The three adults did not acknowledge the gringo in their midst inspecting his dog bite. I hoped that my victimhood would at least make them sympathetic to my cause.

I limped in a straight line to the old one. If she wasn’t Juventino’s mom, I was Pancho Villa. “Buenas tardes,” I said. “Señora Escobar? My name is Richard.”

She just stared at me. Who the hell was I? How did I know her name?

“Juventino’s mother?” I asked.

She wouldn’t say yes and she wouldn’t say no, not until I showed my cards. She just kept looking at me, her arms folded across her chest.

“Is Juventino around?” I asked. “We have friends in common in los States. I have regards from Esperanza Morales.”

“Let me see if he’s here,” she said, and walked inside.

I turned around and smiled at the other women. They were Juventino’s sisters, or sisters-in-law. One had her eyes on the bowl of beans, while the other’s arm was wrapped around the child. Through enormous brown eyes the kid looked at me as if I were the Werewolf of London. “Hola, guapa,” I said, and waved. She buried her head in her mother’s pubis.

He emerged from the adobe. Short, lean, muscular. A battered Dallas Cowboys cap. A thick black moustache like a hero of the Mexican Revolution, a three-day growth of beard. Watery black eyes. A gray T-shirt with multiple holes—who knows what color it had been when new? An emblem of the Virgin of Guadalupe around his neck. He nodded. I told him to call me Richard and shook his hand. “I’m here on behalf of Esperanza Morales,” I said. “Could we please talk for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” he said.

We were standing on the dirt path to his house. “Thanks,” I said. “Where can we talk?”

“Here.”

I looked down at my ankle. The blood was saturating the dirt and mud on my sneaker. “Could we sit down somewhere?” I said, adding, “I got bit by one of those dogs down the street. I’m bleeding.”

Juventino looked around. “You can sit there,” he said, indicating a pile of rocks with his chin. I could have stayed in Ojeras for ten years and he never would have invited me inside. I squatted on the rocks and removed a stenographer’s notebook from my backpack, a pen from my pocket. Juventino stood over me like Zeus.

“You know that Esperanza’s in jail, right?” I asked.

He paused before answering, as if it had been a trick question. “I think I heard something about that.”

“She’s in jail for murder in Louisiana, in el gabacho,” I said. “The prosecutor wants to give her the death penalty, Juventino.”

“Ooff,” he said, pointing his chin and making an ambiguous moue. He might have felt sorry for her, or he may have been impressed with her achievement.

What I had said about the death penalty simplified the story. She was charged with capital murder for killing a baby, which made her eligible for death. The prosecution had stated that they might seek the maximum penalty, but they always say that when the victim is less than seven years old. They could change their minds up to the last minute, even during the trial, even while the jury deliberated. Until the district attorney made up his mind to go for broke or to accept a plea bargain for a lesser charge, the state had to pay for my investigation.

I let the idea of the death penalty sink in for a minute, before saying, “I work for her lawyer. I’m an investigator. My job is to put together the story of her life, to show the prosecutor that she’s a human being who deserves mercy. Who doesn’t deserve to die.” I spoke slowly and as quietly as possible. Juventino’s mother and sisters were only two or three yards away, pretending not to listen. “You were married to Marta, right?”

“Yes.”

“When was that?” He scrunched up his features, as if I’d asked him to solve a multivariable calculus problem. He didn’t answer. “When did you and Marta split up?”

“A long time ago.”

“Okay, but, like, how long?” No response. “A year ago? Five years ago? More?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

For Mexican villagers, chronology was at best vague. Sometimes you had to let issues of time roll out with the tide. I hoped that Marta would be more specific when I caught up with her in Morelia. “Tell me about her family,” I said.

“They were buena gente,” he said. Good people.

They were always “good people.” Most people who are facing death row come from families in whose bosoms there is systematic abuse, neglect, violence, and poverty to the point of malnutrition. If you hit the jackpot, you’ll get learning disabilities, brain damage, or mental illness as well—that’s good luck because according to the Supreme Court, you’re not supposed to execute someone who is mentally ill. But to hear the witnesses tell it, they were always “good people.”

“Good in what way?” I asked.

“Good people,” he repeated, looking at me quizzically.

“Good how? Good, like hardworking? Good, like generous, like giving away their food and their money to people who needed it more than they did? Good, like petting dogs and cats?”

A list of questions like that is what is known as leading the witness. You are not supposed to do it. You are supposed to stand there through silences so long that you could drive a convoy of trucks through them. You are supposed to wait for them to answer until your hair turns gray and your teeth fall out and an archaeologist discovers your fossil in the desert after the next ice age. In the real world, at least with someone like Juventino, at times you have to give them a menu of answers to choose from.

“They worked very hard,” he said. He removed his cap and scratched his black hair, brushed away from his forehead. “Don Fernando”—that was Esperanza’s father—“he helped me to find work.”

Reading between the lines: Don Fernando might have beat his wife and children with a skillet every Friday night after dinner, he might have stolen from his neighbors, raped his own grandchildren, and, on some Aztec nostalgia trip, cut out the hearts of his contemporaries and eaten them while they still beat four to the bar. But he helped Juventino find work spreading cement or picking beans. So he was “good people.”

“And what about Esperanza? What was she like?”

“Tranquila,” he said.

How I grew to hate that word. Tranquila: Easygoing. Calm. Peaceful. Quiet. Every single Mexican in jail in the United States is, above all, tranquilo, at least according to their relatives and friends, colleagues and classmates, teachers and doctors.

“Tranquila in what way, Juventino?” I asked. Now he looked at me as if I were a moron. How many ways were there to be tranquila? “Tranquila, as in she was quiet and didn’t say very much? Tranquila, like she was easygoing and helped other people? Tranquila, like if there was a difficult situation, she would try to solve the problem?”

Juventino stopped to consider the choices on the menu, and then something happened to his face. His brow relaxed, and the pupils of his eyes acquired a sheen of glaze like that which envelopes a Krispy Kreme doughnut. He gave up; this was too complex for him. I tried to reel him back.

“Remember, Juventino,” I said. “The state of Louisiana wants to kill Esperanza. I’m trying to help save her life.”

I rolled down my sock to get another glimpse of the wound. The teeth marks and the blood and the dirt were starting to look like the preliminary sketch of an abstract painting. I would need to buy a bottle of iodine on the road to Puroaire, maybe even see a doctor. They would be reimbursable expenses. For the moment, I was hoping against hope that the sight of the wound would help Juventino remember some salient detail about Esperanza or her family.

“She didn’t say much,” he said. Then he held up his hands, tilted his head to one side. “At least not to me. But she was good people.”

For the next twenty minutes I tried every which way to get something, anything, out of the poor guy. I asked each question five times with slight variations, offered him every option I could think of. If his answers weighed in at three syllables, it was a miracle. Finally, I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I just looked at him impassively, hoping the mirror of my face might inspire some memory.

He could tell I was unsatisfied. He only shrugged. “¿Qué quieres que te diga?” he said. In this instance, it was only a figure of speech. But I had an answer prepared for him.

“What do I want you to say, Juventino? You really want to know? Then here goes: I want you to tell me a story. And please, make it a horrible one. A tale of poverty and misery, of incest and abuse, of starvation and terror, of family violence so hair-raising and horrifying that anyone who listens to it will have nightmares forever. If you can include mental retardation, we’re off to the races.

“It has to be a tragic Aristotelian narrative that corresponds to the fundamental order of the universe. There has to be a chain of cause and effect that begins the day Esperanza is born into wretchedness and has its inevitable climax at the moment she kills her baby. Which leads inexorably to her arrest, and for a denouement, the demonstration that she has been a saint in jail and is not only no longer a threat to society but a penitent and productive individual.

“You following me, Juventino? Most importantly, make the story devastatingly sad. The grief, the gloom, the desolation have to be so overwhelming that they will bring even the hardest-hearted, most vengeful Louisiana district attorney to tears. It has to be so heartbreaking that, after hearing it, jurors would rather cut their own throats than send her to the gas chamber.”

Of course I didn’t actually say any of that. I realized that Juventino had no story to tell, absolutely nothing to say about Esperanza or her family. Why should he? In half an hour, I tried to force him into what was probably more conversation than he’d had in the previous month. I asked him to reflect on things to which he’d never given a second’s thought, things that had nothing to do with his existence or survival. In Ojeras, Juventino plants and harvests corn and beans in season, and during the intervals between farmwork, he tries to lay a little cement or hang drywall. That is, if he’s not in California, Ohio, or North Carolina, hiding in the shadows while scrounging for any employment that will give him a little money to send home to his mother and sisters.

“Juventino,” I said, “when I go home, I prepare memos for the lawyers about every conversation I’ve had with each person. I’m seeing a lot of people, and sometimes I realize I have forgotten something important. If that happens, would it be okay if I called you?”

“Sure,” he said.

“What’s your phone number?”

We listened to the birds warble in the trees for a while. Finally, he said, “I don’t have a phone.”

“You don’t have a phone at home?” He shook his head. “A cell phone?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s your address?”

He pointed to the adobe house. “I live there.”

I nodded. “What’s the name of this street?”

Another long pause. “Mamá!” he called. “What’s the name of the street where we live?”

The wobbly lady in the serape shrugged her shoulders. That they did not know the name of their street is not as insane as it sounds. In towns like Ojeras, people tend to identify addresses not by names or numbers, but with a little travelogue: “It’s down by the bakery,” or “It’s up where Lula’s grandmother lives,” or “It’s next door to where the gringo got bit by the dog.” It was the last house on the last street in the back of a one-burro town in the middle of nowhere. As they say here, donde el diablo perdió el poncho—where the devil lost his poncho. The street may not even have had a name. If there had been a sign, half the residents wouldn’t have been able to read it.

“You can just say Ojeras,” said Juventino, “in the municipality of Puroaire, the state of Michoacán, in México.”

It crossed my mind that all this might have been an elaborate put-on. That Juventino was holding out on me, malevolently playing stupid for whatever reason he had up his sleeve: mistrust, perversity, petty revenge against Marta or Esperanza. But I looked into his glazed-doughnut eyes and my gut told me he wasn’t clever or willful enough to withhold important information. He just didn’t have any. Sometimes a potential witness can be a huge disappointment, but it’s rarely their fault. They would help you if they could.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

“Para servirle,” he said.

I put my notebook back in my knapsack, the pen in my pocket. I stood up to leave.

“What did you say your name was?” asked Juventino.

“Richard,” I said.

“Can I ask you a question?” said Juventino.

“As many as you like.”

He scratched his belly. “Is she guilty?”

People frequently ask me that. Most of the time, the answer is “hell, yes,” but I would never say so. “I honestly don’t know, Juventino,” I said. “I wasn’t there. There are a few things in this case that don’t make sense. For now, I’m just trying to convince the prosecutor not to kill her. If we get death off the table, then there will be other options.” Life without the possibility of parole, for example. Staring at metal bars and concrete walls forever, even if she lives to be two hundred.

He nodded. “I don’t believe she killed the baby,” he said.

I held my breath. You never know what little miracle they might have up their sleeves. “What makes you say that, Juventino?”

He shrugged. “Because she’s good people,” he said.

I limped back to the taxi. The driver put the car into gear and we began the trip back. There is always a moment of exhilaration looking out that flyspecked windshield as a town disappears and you hit the highway. It took two and a half hours to get here and would be another two and a half to get back. Plus an hour in Ojeras, another to write up the memo. Seven hours: seven hundred dollars. Not a bad day, if I didn’t get rabies.