Lum Wing would have preferred to get out and walk, but the car didn’t stop to allow him to leave, and besides, there was that ominous piece of paper in his shirt pocket, you better show up, by God, or else... The old man was well aware that he had no control over his own fate. When other people were around, they decided what he should do. It was only when he was by himself that he had choices: solitaire or chess, lime in his gin or lemon, or no gin at all but a dozen or so jimsen seeds. To ensure his privacy, and his times of choice, he had fixed up a corner of the building which was used as a mess hall when the workers were in residence. Between the stove and the cupboard he’d hung a double flannelette sheet borrowed from one of the bunks. After his day’s work was done he retired to his corner to play chess with imaginary partners who were very shrewd and merciless though not quite as shrewd and merciless as Lum Wing himself.
Half of the stove used butane as fuel, the other half used wood or coal. Even on warm nights Lum Wing kept a small fire going with bits of old lumber, or limbs pruned from the trees or blown off in windstorms. He liked the busy but impersonal noise of the burning wood. It helped cover what came out of the darkness on the other side of his flannelette wall — whispers, grunts, snatches of conversation, laughter.
Lum Wing tried to ignore these common sounds of common people and to keep his mind fixed on the ivory silence of kings and queens and knights. But there were times when in spite of himself he recognized a voice in the dark, and when this happened he made tiny plugs out of pieces of paper and pushed them as far into his ears as he could. He knew curiosity killed more men than cats.
He swallowed and regurgitated another mouthful of air.
“...probably his liver,” Ysobel said. “I have been told there are many contagious diseases of the liver.” She took a handkerchief out of her purse and held it tight against her nose and mouth. Her sharp voice was muffled: “Jaime! Do you hear me, Jaime? Answer your mother.”
“Answer your mother, Jaime,” Dulzura said obligingly. “Hey, wake up.”
Jaime’s eyelids twitched slightly. “I’m awake.”
“Well, answer your mother.”
“So I’m answering. What’s she want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ask her.”
Dulzura leaned over the front seat. “He wants to know what do you want?”
“Tell him not to let that Chinaman breathe in his face.”
“She says don’t let the Chinaman breathe in your face.”
“He’s not breathing in my face.”
“Well, if he tries, don’t let him.”
Jaime closed his eyes again. The old lady was getting kookier every day. Personally, he hoped he’d be lucky like Mr. Osborne and die before he got senile.
On the courthouse steps pigeons preened in the sun and walked up and down, looking important like uniformed guards. Beside one of the colonnades Devon saw her lawyer, Franklin Ford, surrounded by half a dozen men. He caught her eye, gave her a quick warning glance and turned away again. As she went past she heard him speaking in his soft slow voice, enunciating each syllable very distinctly as though he were addressing a group of foreigners or idiots:
“...bear in mind that this is a non-adversary proceeding. It is not being opposed by an insurance company, for instance, with a large policy to pay out on Robert Osborne’s life, or by a relative who’s not satisfied with the disposition of Mr. Osborne’s estate. The amount of Mr. Osborne’s insurance is negligible, consisting of a small policy taken out by his parents when he was a child. The terms of his will are clearly stated and have not been challenged; and of his survivors, his wife petitioned the court for this hearing and his mother concurred. So our purpose in today’s hearing is to establish the fact of Robert Osborne’s death and to prove as conclusively as possible how and why and when and where it occurred. Nobody has been accused, nobody is on trial.”
As Devon went into the building she wondered which came closer to the truth, Ford’s “Nobody is on trial,” or Agnes Osborne’s “Of course we are on trial, all of us.”
The door of courtroom number five was open and the spectators’ benches were nearly full. On the right side near the windows Agnes Osborne sat by herself. She wore a blue hat that perched like a jay on her careful blond curls, and a ribbon knit dress the same dark gray as her eyes. If she felt that she was on trial, she gave no sign of it. Her face was expressionless except for one corner of her mouth fixed in a half-smile, as though she was mildly, even a little contemptuously, amused by the situation and the company she found herself in. It was her public face. Her private one was uncertain, disordered, often blotched with tears and mottled with rage.
She watched Devon walk toward her down the aisle, thinking how incongruous she looked in this place of violence and death. Devon should still be wandering around the halls of some college with other nice mousy girls and earnest pimply boys. I must be kinder to her, I must try harder to like her. It’s my fault she’s here.
Mrs. Osborne had thought that if she sent Robert away from the ranch for a couple of months, the scandal about Ruth Bishop’s death would blow over. It was a double error. His absence merely intensified the gossip, and when he returned he brought Devon with him as his wife. Agnes was shocked and hurt. She wanted her son to get married eventually, of course, but not at twenty-three, not to this odd little creature from another part of the world. “Robert, why? Why did you do it?” “Why not? The girl loves me, she thinks I’m great. How about that!”
Devon leaned over and the two women touched cheeks briefly. There was an air of finality about the cool embrace, as if both of them knew it would be one of the last.
At the back of the courtroom, sitting between his father and Dulzura, Jaime was like a patient coming out of an anesthetic and discovering that his moving parts could still move. He did a couple of secret isometric exercises, cleared his throat, hummed a few bars of a TV commercial — “Shut up,” Estivar said — stuck another piece of gum in his mouth, pulled up his socks, cracked his knuckles — “Stop that!” — scratched his ear, rubbed one side of his jaw, pushed the greasy stump of a comb through his hair — “For God’s sake, sit still, will you?”
Jaime crossed his arms over his chest and sat still except for the swinging of a foot against the bench in front and the practically inaudible grinding of his teeth. The scene was different from what he’d expected. He’d thought there would be a lot of fuzz hanging around. But in the whole courtroom only one cop was in sight, an old guy of thirty-five having a drink at the water cooler.
The judge’s bench and the jury box were both empty. Between them a large drawing had been set up on an easel. Even by narrowing his eyes to slits and using all his powers of concentration, Jaime couldn’t make out the contents of the drawing. Maybe it was left over from yesterday or last week and had nothing to do with Mr. Osborne. In spite of the cool act Jaime put on for his friends and the somnolent pose he assumed within the family circle, he still had the lively curiosity of a child.
He whispered to Dulzura, “Hey, move over so I can get out.”
“Where you going?”
“Out, is all.”
“You can get past.”
“I can’t. You’re too fat.”
“You’re one fresh little big-mouth kid,” Dulzura said and heaved herself up and into the aisle.
Casually, hands in pockets, Jaime walked to the front of the courtroom and sat down in the first row of benches. The cop had turned away from the water cooler and was watching him as though he suspected Jaime might pull a caper. Jaime tried to look like the kind of guy who could pull a caper if he wanted to but didn’t feel like it at the moment.