The door opened as if in slow motion. A second or two later, Luiza’s head peeked through the crack.
It’s possible she was as apprehensive as I was. She’d probably been wondering what awaited her on the other side of the door. Or was it something else? Maybe she knew exactly what awaited her-had been prepped and primed.
He’ll be standing back from the door to protect himself. He’ll be armed and dangerous. But don’t worry-so are we.
I whispered hello to Mr. Smith, assured Mr. Wesson that we were, in fact, locked and loaded.
Luiza’s little body followed her head though the door.
She averted my eyes, turned around, and began pulling the linen cart into the room. Sunlight shot past her shoulder, illuminated the twisted bedsheets and jumbled clothing, the litter fest that had become home.
I danced a few steps to my right, in an effort to improve my sight line. The dazzling sun felt like splinters of glass.
The first rule of guerrilla warfare is what?
Try to catch them with their eyes to the sun.
I rushed past her, slammed the door, and relocked the latch.
Luiza turned at the sound of the chain being lifted back into position. She looked, well, nervous.
“How long do you need?” I asked her.
She shrugged without answering me. Instead she pulled a black industrial-size plastic trash bag from the cart and began filling it up with the detritus of two weeks.
I took a seat on the only chair in the room and carefully watched her.
“Where you from, Luiza?”
“Ecuador,” she answered, not bothering to look in my direction. She wore plastic yellow gloves on both hands.
“How long have you been here?”
“Two year,” she answered.
“Two year, huh? You have family here?”
“My husband,” she said, this time taking a quick peek at me.
“Your husband. That’s nice.”
It might sound like we were engaging in polite small talk. You’d be wrong. I was conducting an Abu Ghraib-like interrogation. Minus the humiliating photographs and electrical wires.
“Has anyone been asking about me, Luiza?”
“I don’ understand…”
“I’m asking you if anyone-anyone at all-has asked you a question about me? Like, who is that man in number four? Like that?”
“No,” she said.
“Good, okay. Great. So no one’s said anything to you?”
“The manager.”
“The manager?” I felt a sudden flush of fear. “The manager asked about me?”
Luiza nodded.
“What did he say?”
“He ask why you no let me clean the room.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I tell him you no want me to clean. You sleeping. Or you working.”
That had been my story when she’d knocked on the door. That I was sleeping. Or I was working. That she should please come back tomorrow. Tomorrow had become two weeks.
“I have been working,” I said. “See,” pointing to the laptop sitting open on top of the cluttered desk. I am writing this as fast as I can.
She nodded.
“I write… plays. That’s why I don’t answer the door. Because I don’t want to be disturbed. Because I’m finishing a play. You can tell him that.”
“Okay.”
“Great. Almost done.”
Luiza didn’t really appear interested in whether I was done or not. She made a hurried visit into the bathroom, towels in hand, then quickly reappeared and commenced vacuuming.
“Other man ask me too,” she said, after she’d attached the trash bag to her cart and begun rolling it back to the door.
“What? What did you say, Luiza?”
“Other man. He ask me who you are,” she said. “I forget.”
TWENTY-THREE
I turned out to be two times over legal.
Drunk enough, at least, not to have noticed Sheriff Swenson placing his size eleven black boot directly in my path. I noticed it on my neck. Lying on the ground, my cheek pressed against asphalt still warm from the desert sun, I felt its blunt weight and unmistakable message about hierarchy.
I assumed this might be it. It being my life. It was going to end here, on this empty road in the middle of the California desert.
The sheriff, it turned out, was simply making a point about the consequences of reckless behavior.
Point taken.
I blew into a Breathalyzer, was interrogated as to where I’d hit what, got cited for driving while intoxicated and for leaving the scene of an accident-make that two accidents.
Then, astonishingly, I was let go.
He could’ve given me a night in jail to contemplate my crimes, something he reminded me of as a way to let me know how easy he was being on me.
I said thank you.
Thank you isn’t what I was thinking.
He never saw the pickup. How’s that possible?
Somehow, contrary to all the laws of physics, he’d missed a blue pickup dogging my tail at ninety miles an hour.
Where had the pickup gone? Maybe he’d seen the police lights and eased off the pedal, drifted to a stop, taken off down a side street.
Maybe Swenson hadn’t seen it.
I considered the sickening possibility that I was hallucinating.
There was that face in the bowling alley, the same one I later saw lit up by a bug zapper-it had vanished on me twice.
Was it possible I wasn’t okay in the head? That, like Dennis Flaherty, I was in dire need of some industrial-strength psychotropics?
No.
It’s easy to question yourself lying in bed at 1 in the morning, with a throbbing Chianti hangover and a Miata sitting in your driveway that has a date with the junkyard compactor.
Something else was going on.
I pulled Benjamin’s note out of my bedside drawer.
Happy hundred birthday.
It was grammatically flawed, of course. Odd I hadn’t noticed that before. Happy hundredth birthday was what he should’ve written. How old would the letter writer be if it really were her son? I reached into the drawer for the picture of the two of them-still marred by faint spots of blood.
It must’ve been winter. When the picture was taken.
Not that winters were particularly cold around here. Cold enough to don a tan wool jacket and dress your only child in a brown corduroy coat with five black buttons. She was holding him under his arms and it looked like he was maybe ticklish, had spent the previous minute while the photographer was framing the shot fidgeting in her lap and giggling out loud. He wore this charming bucktoothed grin, as if any second he was going to burst into raucous laughter. They say photographs can’t steal your soul-but every so often they can hold it hostage.
Who was the photographer?
Belinda’s husband? Trying to commemorate this moment for posterity? What moment? They were sitting under the sign for the Littleton Flats Café. Maybe they’d celebrated the day with a special lunch? Celebrated what? Benjamin’s graduation from kindergarten? He looked to be about 6 then.
Jimmy’s age.
The disaster must’ve happened soon after the picture was taken. Maybe that’s why the picture was so haunting-because of what was to come.
Those three days of unrelenting rain-unusual for the desert, sure, but sometimes it happened. Mother Nature went on the rag, and all hell broke loose.
Or cement walls did.
Just another Sunday morning in Littleton Flats.
Maybe Benjamin was looking at the funny papers, just learning to read, Jane running and Dick throwing and Spot barking, and maybe wondering why all these walking and running and throwing kids were white, or maybe not-maybe kids were still color-blind at that age. Maybe all he was thinking about that morning was when his mom was finally going to get home and bake some of her peach pie. I don’t know if Belinda baked peach pies-she was probably too busy cleaning that white family’s home in Littleton, what most black people did back then if they wanted to put food on the table. Maybe Belinda was making beds, cooking breakfast, cleaning up the kids she’d been stuck with that weekend when she heard that first rumble, like thunder, only it was a clear day-not a cloud in the sky. How odd, she must’ve thought-all of them must’ve thought-to be hearing thunder when there wasn’t a rain cloud to be seen.