“Would you like to see him?” Lester interrupts.
Miss Mendoza nods.
“We’ll take you,” Lester tells her.
She looks at me clutching the Bible and asks, “Are jou from church?”
Before I have a chance to answer she wheels around and heads out the door, saying, “I put dress on. Follow me.”
Lester follows her, but I hold back, taking time to reexamine the display of Polaroids.
Ever since my father’s death I’ve rehearsed a single version of how his body was discovered, how he was found, and now I try to re-create how and when that version entered my unchallenged memory.
I think my mother must have told me.
I think Mary must have told the version she remembered from the State Police. A milkman, she had said. A milkman had discovered him on his morning route through Shenandoah National Park, and for years I thought about that milkman in his milk truck on his milk route through the milky morning in the Park and how he must have felt coming on a body of a man hanging from a tree, the horror and the shock of it, and what he did that instant, if he got out of his truck right away or if he prayed and what he told his wife when he got home that night and if he had trouble falling asleep and if the image of my father gave him nightmares.
I had always felt that different waves had radiated outward from my father’s death, one of them capsizing my mother, another overwhelming my sister and myself, still others touching on the lives of those who stood beneath him on that day and had to bring him down.
I think of this each time there is a circumstance that calls for the retrieval of the dead, when crews go through the parishes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when crews tunnel through remains, encrypted under the twin towers. Once the dead have entered on the world that we inhabit, once they’re here, in front of us, how can we pretend that life and death do not exist in one continuum?
Sometimes I wonder if the milkman quit his job that morning or took a long vacation, moved to another state or went back to work next day as if nothing extra-ordinary had happened.
The degrees of separation between the milkman and myself were too few, and too intense, for me to ever exile him completely from my mind, but now, in light of what the story really was that April morning the milkman version seems a fairy tale and I’m surprised I never asked myself, Who the hell is there to get a milk delivery in a National Park, anyway? You, I almost say out loud, touching my finger to an image of Mr. Edwards in his doorman uniform, you’re the man that I’ve been looking for. And maybe if we’re lucky, you’ll recover from this incident, regain consciousness so we can talk.
Because life just throws those miracles our way, doesn’t it?
I take two Polaroids — the ones with Ann-Margret and Dean Martin — and slip them inside the Bible just as Lester presses his head against the screen outside and says, “You need to see this. Right away.”
I follow him along the ramp to Miss Mendoza’s door, at which he steps aside to let me enter, and my initial response is, “What is this place?”
A museum, it appears.
The layout is the same as in the former house, but larger, the walls have been pushed back but the relative dimensions are identical. In the living room, to the left, low bookshelves skirt the perimeter, every inch of shelf space filled with artifacts — Kachina dolls, reed baskets, clay pipes, beaded bags, black and red clay pottery, drums, carved fetishes. They radiate an inner life, each one of them, and the temptation is to take each treasure in hand — to touch — which may explain why the only times I’ve seen such items on display there’s a protective pane of glass between me and their powerful attraction.
On the floor and draped over the sofa are hand-woven rugs emblazoned in the geometric patterns of the Plains tribes, and in the center of the longest wall two beaded buckskin dresses hang from a carved pole festooned with leather fringe and feathers.
But what captures my gaze is the array, on every wall, living room and dining room, of framed black-and-white and gold-toned photographs.
These are Curtises, I breathe.
Not gravures, which are as common as salt and cheap to manufacture, over-produced by galleries for the gullible at a couple hundred dollars a pop. No, these are originals, hand tinted prints from Curtis’s glass plates, worth — I’m guessing — tens of thousands of dollars each.
Miss Mendoza zooms around the dining table, a coffee pot in hand, and tells us, “I don’ change a thin’ in here from time that I inherit”
“—you inherited all this?”
“This house, the one next door.”
Lester draws the bracelet and the headdress from his shoulder bag and sets them on the table. “I believe these must belong to you.”
She nods.
“Every now an’ then I sen’ Johnny out to sell some thin’s. When I need money.”
“My father made this bracelet,” Lester tells her. He shows her the jeweler’s mark that matches the twin one on his forearm.
“Then jou mus’ keep it.”
“Please, Miss Mendoza—”
“—Clarita.”
“Clarita. I don’t think you understand what this is worth.”
“—plenty more where it comes from.”
“But Miss Mendoza—” I begin.
“—Clarita.”
“Clarita. I’m no expert, but—”
“—you’re sitting on a fortune,” Lester volunteers.
“How did you — where did all this come from?” I ask her.
“—was Tio Rico’s. With el jefe. They live here.”
“—el jefe?”
“Tio ’Uardo. They were, jou know, how jou say—?”
She crosses two fingers of one hand in front of us.
“—tight?” I guess.
“—mens. Two mens. Tio Rico, hees my mother’s brother, she live over there, in the house I rent to Johnny. Her house, with me, after I am born. She cook an’ clean for thees house, an’ for all other house.” She draws a circle around the outside court with her outstretched hand. “She clean for all the boys.”
“—the boys?”
“Jou know — nightclub boys. Dancers. Very nice.”
I look out the window at the gingerbread fronts of the little houses on the courtyard and reason this was quite the community, in its hey day.
“But that doesn’t explain where all this—”
“It was jefe’s. Tio ’Uardo’s.”
“Ed-uardo?”
“—si.”
“Do you have a picture of this Eduardo?”
She takes a scrapbook from the top drawer of the breakfront.
“Help jourselve. Chicita in the picture, she is me. Beautiful lady — Lupe, madre mio. Handsome man — Enrico, tio. Other man in how jou say las gafas—glasses? — that one ees Eduardo.” She points the wheelchair toward the living room. “I go get dress.”
She goes, and Lester and I page through the scrapbook. Someone kept it with a persnickety archival diligence and an unintentional comic flair for writing. “The Lovely Lupe in Her Floral Apron with Carne Asada” reads the caption under one snapshot of an attractive young woman posing with a platter of food decades ago in this very dining room. “Enrico, El Toreador!” reads the quip beneath another picture of a handsome young Mexican man, shirtless, with a pair of garden shears outside this very house. There are pictures of groups of men assembled at an outdoor party in the court — pictures of what appear to be camping expeditions in the desert — pictures of a tent beside a stream where some sort of gold-extraction apparatus had been set up — pictures taken in the bare Nevada mountains — and then a picture whose caption reads, “Our First Gold Nugget,” where the handsome Mexican man holds a nugget of gold in his palm while he stares into the eyes of an older man in glasses, who stares back at him, adoringly. This is followed by a number of pictures taken through the years where the two men, never actually touching, pose in such a way, unguarded, that one, even after all these years, can hardly fail to sense their erotic charge nor fail to see that they’re in love.