Читать книгу Spirit Walk - Jay Treiber - Страница 11

Four

Kevin rolled in from Tucson just after eight o’clock Thursday morning and stopped at the same Circle K which had stood at the west edge of Douglas some thirty-five years now. The woman behind the counter, Yesenia Romero, was the same clerk hired the day the place opened for business. He could tell that Yesi, though she didn’t let on, recognized him. For how many times as a youngster had he purchased beer and cheap wine illegally across that very counter? He put down his Danish and coffee and the woman did not look up at him.

“How you doing, kiddo?”

“I’m okay, Yesi.” He said this as though that interim span of time had been a week instead of thirty years. “I’m in Tucson now.”

“S’what Oli tells me. Me dicen que estás muy bien.”

“Gracias a Dios.” he said. “I’m still here, still walking around.”

“¿Qué más se puede esperar?” she said. What more can you expect?

When Kevin pulled out of the Circle K, he noted the beautiful morning, his mood elevated now that he’d made the decision to come here. He’d driven Pan American Avenue no more than a block, when he caught a flickering in his rearview mirror—police lights, that of a Border Patrol cruiser, in fact. It took him a moment to realize those lights were meant for him. Having lived in southern Arizona most of his life, Kevin had been stopped by Border Patrol a half dozen times, but never for more than a routine check. This part of the state bore a number of rotating checkpoints, and anyone who lived close to the Mexican border was accustomed to the dark green uniforms of these federal agents.

The young man who stepped up to his vehicle was blue-eyed and square-bodied with a buzz haircut and a slight paunch and seemed interchangeable with every Border Patrol agent he’d ever seen.

“Good morning, sir,” he said through Kevin’s open window. But after that, the agent seemed at a loss. Kevin recognized the same confusion he’d seen in his students’ faces over the years when they tried to pretend they understood something—Derrida’s concept of relative truth or Edmund Wilson’s views on Faulkner.

“Can I help you out with anything?” Kevin asked.

“Well,” the officer said. “I just need to see some identification.”

“Okay,” Kevin said, opening his wallet, which he’d pulled out as soon as he’d seen the flashing lights.

The agent took his driver’s license, said thank you, and walked slowly back to his vehicle, peering down at the document cupped in his hand as though he’d picked up some interesting artifact, a pot shard or arrow head.

His back still turned to Kevin, the agent reached through his window and picked up a hand radio. As he spoke into the receiver, he moved his arms, and Kevin sensed something in the movement, sheepishness perhaps, like an adolescent explaining a dented fender to his parents.

When the officer came back to Kevin’s SUV, he hesitated before handing Kevin the license.

“Is everything okay?” Kevin asked.

“Oh, yes,” the agent said. “We, um, received a call on a vehicle like this—just routine. You’re okay.”

“You sure?”

The agent nodded, looked toward downtown, then back at Kevin. “Sorry for the inconvenience, sir. Have a nice day.”

The incident left Kevin perplexed, though the recondite agendas of law enforcement, especially the Border Patrol, had always been a mystery and of little interest to him. He checked into the Frontera Motel a little while later, after driving around town for a bit. Outwardly, Douglas had changed little. The buildings that lined G Avenue, though ramshackle, looked generally the same. The government brick had endured well over a hundred years. Most of the structures were stucco, and patches of that brick showed through the less maintained edifices. The better part of the downtown had been built in the crib-row, parapet façade urban architecture of the early twentieth century, so that the building-lined street looked almost like a time capsule of 1915 small-town America, flecked unselfconsciously with elements of its southwest border-region environment. Touches of green, red, and white, the colors of the Mexican flag, had found their way subtly into the grain of the townscape. The sign heralding La Frontera Bar and Grill sported letters alternating those colors, the Modern Look discount clothing wore them in proud, foot-wide swaths across the awning, the barber pole at the door of Albert Garcia’s shop bore a green stripe along with the usual white and red.

Kevin noted that all but a few of the old prominent businesses—Ortega’s Shoes, Thompson Jewelers, Douglas Drug—had been absorbed in the last few years by “big boxes”—Wal Mart, Target, and Ace Hardware had lumbered into even this remotest of regions. There seemed a gut-it-out toughness to the faces of the old survivors. “Good for you guys,” he said aloud. “Good for you.”

He made a jaunt by the high school to discover the cinder-block structure had recently had two wings added, a hopeful sign. He remembered his Senior English class, how Mr. Roth began every class session by writing a quote on the board—often Shakespeare, sometimes Milton or Donne. The kids in the 10:00 a.m. class had tittered one morning at the words, “No man is an island,” whereby the middle-aged teacher smiled and raised an index finger, his signature gesture. “You may poke fun now, you guys, but such words tend to burrow into the mind and stay. You’ll come to appreciate them in later years.” And this was true for Kevin McNally, for whom works like Hamlet and Paradise Lost, rather than fading quickly from the consciousness, took root and grew. In April of the spring semester, he had read ahead of the class in Macbeth, encountering the bloody king’s dark soliloquy: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow/creeps by this petty pace from day to day… The words in the passage were astoundingly apt, the very shape of Kevin’s dark feelings at the time; even then he’d had a sense that the tome in his lap—the Riverside Shakespeare, now growing august and dusty on his office bookshelf—somehow spoke his future.

“Things have changed more than you think,” Olivia Hallot told him. They’d met for breakfast at the Corazón Hotel. The building had originally been a colossal mission, the oldest standing structure in the state. Sometime shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, an architect had recast the place into a hotel, and thus it stayed. No record of the original architect or when it was built was known to exist, so there hung a mystery about the place, which for many was the defining feature of the county. Kevin had been struck immediately by the familiar smells of the dining area, the cooking chorizo and eggs, ham and sausage that cloyed into the room from the kitchen—while Olivia Hallot claimed that some things had changed, the smells of the old diner had not.

He sunk his fork into his red-eye gravy and biscuits. “I haven’t seen much of it. High school’s bigger.”

“That’s from a bond-issue vote,” Olivia said. “The money source has changed. And it’s no longer Phelps Dodge.” P.D., as locals tended to call it, had been a copper mining conglomerate that had fairly owned Cochise County for over a century. The company had folded up twenty-nine years before, leaving the cities it had built around it stranded. Douglas’s proximity to Mexico and the quaint uniqueness of Bisbee had kept them alive. Much of the new money source Olivia had mentioned came from black-market smuggling along the border.

The suggestion, however faint, of the illegal drug trade killed the conversation for the moment, and they looked self-consciously down at their food as they ate. “Well,” Kevin said finally. “It’s good to see this old place again.”

Olivia nodded and looked around the room, though they both knew Kevin had meant the town, the valley, the spirit of home and birthplace. “It’s good to see that it’s survived.” The old high ceiling and dark, early-American woodwork of the dining area had been meticulously maintained.

“I found an article in the library I think you need to look at. On microfilm.”

“Oh yeah?” Kevin said. He forked in another mouthful of biscuits and gravy.

“I didn’t print it out—just took a look. It’s from November of ‘76.” Olivia had not looked up from her food.

Kevin stopped chewing, swallowed with some effort.

Olivia raised her head finally, caught his eye. “Xavier Zaragoza wrote it—after the state police had put things together. Not much to it but the basic facts, but the article kind of pushed that incident back out into the open for me. Made me look at things again—try to remember.”

Kevin had put down his fork, though he had not been conscious of it.

Olivia looked down at her plate. “I’m working hard to not upset you, but I think it would help you to look at it before we actually went out there,” she said. A pair of busboys rattled dishes into tubs and a waitress whisked by their table with a tray full of food. “I know you’re only trying to help, Oli,” Kevin said. “And I appreciate it.”

Olivia nodded. “Your mom sure looks forward to seeing you,” she said.

Kevin smiled. “And I her.”

“She and Tracy are staying at the Gilbert’s guest house for the weekend. There’s room for you, too.”

“Well,” Kevin said. “I think it’s more convenient for everyone that I stay at the motel. I brought work with me.”

Olivia measured him a moment, went back to her food. “She’s glad you finally called. It’d been a while.”

“My work is fairly consuming.”

They ate quietly, knowing Kevin’s work was the least of his preoccupations. The divorce two years before had been an emotional hit, though the warning signs had appeared for a decade, and Kevin had ignored them. His daughters, both in college, had known well before their mother had even phoned an attorney. The youngest, Cinda, was attending Pima at the time of the break-up, and showed up in Kevin’s office the afternoon of the day her mother, Janice, had announced her intentions to him.

“Dad,” the girl said, shaking her head now for the third time. “There is no other man. You need to start seeing the you-and-mom thing better.”

His daughter had stood but obviously had one more bit of wisdom for her father. “You and mom were together for a long time, but she finally understands that you guys have finished with your thing. Time to take another road. You need to understand that, too.”

For the next eighteen months, Kevin endured the usual distress that attends such trauma. His alcohol consumption increased, and though he had quit smoking twelve years before, he briefly picked up the habit again, so that often he found himself lecturing on Barth or Updike hoarse from the twenty cigarettes and dozen scotch-rocks he’d consumed the night before. The dating aspect compounded the difficulties. Most women within ten years of his age were already attached, and those available were most often at least twenty-five years his junior.

Then Jessica stepped into his life. The young Ph.D. had been newly hired in the science department fall semester about a year after the divorce. Though just three years clear of thirty, she was brilliant and mature, a bookish blond girl with a quiet beauty, whose sexiness, as one came to know her, unfurled like a flag. She’d minored in English as an undergrad and loved twentieth-century American lit, Kevin’s specialty. They’d been together three months now and had announced their love to each other a few weeks before. And so Kevin’s life had begun to settle. He’d stopped the smoking and tried to drink no more than three scotches at a sitting, which was most nights of the week. The comforting sting of alcohol on his blood was harder to let go of than the cigarettes.

He lay in his bed at the Frontera Motel regretting he had not brought Jessica with him. He’d planned to read a while and nap, but he could not bring himself to engage in Tobias Wolf’s latest book, Our Story Begins. His better sense, though, told him that he’d made the right decision not to drag Jessica into the old hurt with him, not now, when the relationship was so fresh.

His mind kept tracking back to a face he’d seen two hours before, after breakfast. The face belonged to an old Hispanic man whom Kevin had noticed as he left the restaurant at The Corazón. He’d only caught a glimpse of the man, who wore shoulder-length gray hair, but Kevin couldn’t shake the feeling he’d seen him somewhere before. He’d written it off as déjà vu, simply a trick of the brain. But the man’s face had planted itself between him and the page he struggled to read.

Before he met his mother and sister for dinner, Kevin, despite what he’d told Olivia earlier, had decided to stop at the city library. He wanted to make the first move, visit in on his past before it paid a visit to him.