“I had a guy like that once,” says Ruth. “Forty years ago. Haven’t seen him since. I think of him often. I dream about him. In my dreams he’s never aged, and neither have I. I also love my husband.”
“I know the feeling.”
I see that Ruth is thinking about him. She comes out of it.
“Was he suspicious about the car?”
“I told him I rented it.”
Ruth eyes me in a way that makes me glad she’s on my side. Very glad.
“In your presence, did Allison wipe her fingerprints off the interior of your Sentra?”
This is a fastball but I pull it.
“Yes. She had a box of wet wipes in her satchel.”
“Good. Because the DA might try to get fancy on us, say all the prints in the Cadillac are yours.”
“Well, some of them are. And Hood’s.”
“If she wiped down the Sentra, then she would have wiped down the Caddy, too.”
“I would think.”
“So your prints are in both cars and hers are in neither.”
“I don’t know what she did in the Caddy.”
“No, how could you?”
38
I spend the rest of the day with my boys and Ernest, moving back into our home down in Valley Center. It’s blazing hot but the sky is clear and the air is clean and I feel a great relief spreading through me as I look out at my home and the barn and the big oak tree and the pond.
Bradley boards and Jordan fishes. I love the sound of the skateboard wheels on the wooden half pipe and I love the sight of Jordan out there trying to fool the crafty bass that live in the cattails near the pond’s south edge. Baby Kenny rides Ernest’s broad shoulders, his tiny hands clamped to his father’s ears.
The dogs bound around the property, re-pissing on things and fruitlessly chasing the rabbits and ground squirrels and bullfrogs.
Ernest is very quiet as always, but I can see the hurt in his face since I told him about the new arrangement here. It’ll be tough for a while. I don’t doubt for a second that Ernest will find suitable female company-he’s got the look and the talk when he needs it. I won’t let him brood. I’ve gotten to know some of the single women down here. They’re country craftsman types-horse people and farmers and makers of things-and they like Ernest’s broad-backed humility and good humor. I may try to nudge one or two his way. No matter what I’m doing with whom, I’m going to keep Ernest in my life and in Kenny’s life as much as Ernest wants to be. We need him. We need all the fathers we can get.
Bradley’s father, of course, cut out after I shot him. I’ve told him a thousand times that he’s welcome around here. He comes around now and then but he acts like a dog that’s been kicked too hard too often. His wife is bitterly ugly which pleases me. He is now a man almost completely devoid of everything I was once attracted to. He still has good teeth.
Sometimes it’s hard to understand why his son is a prince. Even at sixteen Bradley is wise, charming, articulate, acutely aware of others and the world around him, mentally incisive, athletically gifted, physically beautiful, flawlessly polite and agonizingly shy. He tested at 160 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test they gave him this year. The results embarrassed him. He’s pushing six feet tall already and still growing. They call him Radley on the varsity football team, where he started at wide receiver and safety last year as a sophomore. He hits extremely hard. His freshman English teacher called me to say he was the most talented writer she’d ever had, and you know how much I value the opinions of teachers. On the downside, he bores easily and has a genuine appetite for risk and danger. He has little if any sense of his own mortality. But with his black hair to his shoulders and his chocolate eyes and his silly goatee he looks like a god-in-training, a poet-warrior, a hero. I’ll take some of the credit for that but I think history is more responsible for Bradley than any of us are. Now I sound like my mom.
So I look at Bradley out the window and I know it’s time for me to have the talk with him. The truth of me and Jack and Joaquin, of the old clothes and the Cahuilla arrow and the head preserved in alcohol out in the barn. The truth of Allison Murrieta and the diamonds and Lupercio and Harold and Gerald and the cops in Bakersfield. The truth of Hood, who knows a small part of this.
Is it Bradley’s truth, too?
You can see the pickle I’m in. Few mothers on earth would send their son into the world as an outlaw, even the world’s most handsome and potentially successful. But if Bradley is who I think he is, he suspects already. He’s seen me the same way Hood and my mother have seen me, and although Bradley hasn’t quite put it all together, he might. The truth can make us free but it can also lead us to prison or get us killed.
I may say nothing to Bradley and let him figure it out or not. In spite of the long reach of history, there is plenty of free choice to be had: I didn’t have to carry Bradley to term but I chose to, and I didn’t have to kill Lupercio but I did.
But without my great-uncle Jack I would not have found the beginnings of my story, and without me Bradley might never find his. Send him into the world without the truth of who he is? I don’t know. Maybe an absence of truth would be the most valuable gift I could ever give him-a chilling notion.
Jordan’s dad is dead of cancer and that’s a shame. Great guy. Ernest means a lot to Jordan although there is an empty and yearning place in the heart of a boy whose father has died. Jordan told me that he was very impressed by the calm and bravery of Deputy Hood because he fought in Iraq.
When Jordan asks if he’ll see Hood again, I tell him I’m not sure.
To be honest I can’t blame Hood for what he did. I said some ugly things to him but that was just anger and humiliation. Allison may well be the death of me, and for Hood to have seen me in her puts him on a different plane than other people. My mother told me that someone would see that Allison was me, or that I was Allison, and that person would have a special connection to me. My mother has a strangely fated but romantic view of things-half Mexican folktale and half paperback bodice-ripper. I don’t know how romantic it is, but Hood was the one who made the connection. He saw. And boy, did I see him.
But as soon as Hood saw, he was really stuck because he’s a cop and it’s his job to put people like me behind bars. The fact that I was, and still am, abundantly hot for him only made matters worse. I played him like a good guitar. Talk about star-crossed.
I don’t see a way to keep Hood. The DA might drop the charges against me but Hood won’t. I might be able to persuade him into an occasional sexual escapade but that would be small potatoes to us now. There for a while, when he was having me and knowing who I was, it was hard on Hood’s soul. I weakened him. I think he’s stronger now that I know he knows. The spell is broken. I really wish I could cast it again but Hood has that thing inside, the simple Man Thing that you just can’t get around. He let me around it while he made up his mind what to do with me. But I can’t get around it without his permission. And I don’t think I’ll get that again.
If Allison vanished, never to return, Hood might accommodate me. Might not. I think it would stick in his craw forever if he let a car-thieving armed robber who committed murder go free on his watch. Hood’s not wired to let that happen. And Allison isn’t going to vanish, because I need her. I’m not wired to let that happen.
There are three things I want to square with Hood.
One is that secret of his, from Iraq. He never told me what happened there but I know it’s something he believes he did wrong and it haunts him. I think it hurts him to keep it inside. A gusano. I want to know so I can bear a little of it for him, my contribution to the war.