I got up, unsure of what either Estelle or Reuben intended.
“He’ll go into town to see a doctor if we’ll take him to the field first,” Estelle said.
“You’re ill, Reuben?” I asked. The answer was obvious, but I wanted the old man to talk to me, to recognize my presence.
“No, not so much,” the old man replied. His voice was husky and forced. “But my niece, here-” He shook his head. “Can’t leave an old man in peace.”
“Yes, he is ill, sir.” She tapped the center of her own chest with an index finger and shook her head.
“You want an ambulance to meet us at the county road?”
“No. He won’t do that. I think he’ll be all right if we just take it real slow. Francis has his medical bag in the car if we need it.”
She ushered Reuben toward the door, stopping for a moment to wrap his sheepskin coat tightly around him. He looked at me, the ghost of a smile wrinkling the corners of his eyes.
“Are you finished with my field?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Good. You know-” he drifted off for a second, then said, “my wife is buried down there, you know.”
“I didn’t know that.” In fact I did know that his wife had been laid to rest in All Saints’ Cemetery in Posadas a decade before, but who knew what ghosts had played in the old man’s mind since then.
“She is. She told me not to go down there. That’s why I didn’t come to answer your questions.”
“My questions?”
He lifted his bony shoulders in that slight, characteristic Mexican shrug of dismissal. “You and the others-”
“We need to get him out to the car,” Estelle said, and the two of us all but carried the fragile old man to the Isuzu.
“I’ll get in first, sir,” Estelle said, and climbed in so she was sitting between the sleeping baby and Reuben. Francis reached back and touched Reuben’s hand as the old man settled into the seat and I closed the door.
“Don Reuben,” he said. Reuben Fuentes looked at him as he might a friendly stranger and said nothing.
“He wants to see the field first,” I said. “There’s a turnoff just down the path a bit. It takes us right out to the pasture without having to walk in from the road.”
Francis didn’t argue or press the moment with Reuben. He turned around with a quick glance at me and a raised eyebrow, then started the truck. In a moment we were jouncing back out the two-track.
Just beyond the first wash a faint path bore off to the left. Following Reuben’s whispered directions, we turned off the worn path and nosed through brush and scrub.
Occasionally an oak twig would etch its way along the truck’s paint, and I glanced back at Estelle.
She and the old man were deep in another of their private, silent conversations.
In less than fifty yards the brush fell away and we entered the northeast corner of the big pasture, a field that sloped down to the county road almost a quarter of a mile distant.
I pointed toward the west. “We want to head right for that outcropping down there, Francis. Right where the grove of oaks is the thickest.” He threaded the truck between rocks and cactus, making way toward the west side of the pasture where the oak grove formed a necklace around the bottom of the limestone outcropping.
The jouncing finally awakened young Francis Carlos. He blinked awake, yawned mightily, said, “Ummmm,” and settled in again.
“This is the spot,” I said and Francis pulled to a stop a dozen paces from the gravesite. I glanced down toward the county road and saw that Eddie Mitchell’s county car was still parked in Reuben’s two-track. Since we had approached from the rear, the deputy obviously hadn’t seen us…he wouldn’t have recognized the Guzmans’ truck, and would certainly have been prompted to action by the sight of someone driving through the field of evidence.
“Yes,” Reuben said behind me. “I remember this spot.” As well he should, I thought, since he had buried his three dogs in this hole not a week before. “I want to get out.”
“You shouldn’t, Tio. Just tell us about it.”
“This is where I buried my dogs,” he said.
“I know, Tio.”
“They were poisoned.”
“Yes.”
“The man who did that…he was…cobarde. The dogs never hurt anybody.”
He leaned forward and I saw that he was looking through the windshield at the disturbed earth. The grave was still open, the mound of dirt just visible.
“We took the bodies for tests, Reuben,” I said. “We wanted to know what kind of poison killed the dogs. Maybe that way we can find who did it.”
“Cobarde,” he repeated.
I turned to Estelle. “Does he know who did it? Did he say?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why don’t you talk to me,” Reuben said. His voice was stronger, fueled with indignation that I considered him so infirm that I would speak as if he weren’t present.
“All right,” I said. “Who killed your dogs, Reuben?”
He mumbled something and looked off toward the east. I watched him, finding it difficult to believe that a week ago this frail old man had dug a hole nearly eighteen inches deep and a yard square.
“I buried them myself,” he said and I knew then that that would be the extent of his story. “I want to get out of the car.”
This time, Estelle didn’t protest, and Reuben moved as if he were tapping some last reserve of energy. He walked around the open door, putting a hand on the truck’s fender for support with Estelle at his other elbow. I knew we were humoring him, probably pointlessly so. But in his mental wanderings, some small kernel of information might surface, might be of use.
He stood in the wind and the cold at the edge of that sorry hole in the ground and looked down at the fresh earth.
“This is it,” he said.
“I don’t want you catching cold, Tio.” Estelle reached over and pulled his collar up higher.
“This is where I buried my dogs,” he repeated. “Right here.” He turned to look at me. “You could have just asked me.”
“I did ask, Reuben,” I said gently.
“If you had asked me, I would have told you the dogs were here.” I let that pass without comment. I trusted Estelle’s instinct about how much to push the old man’s memory.
“Why did you dig so deep?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
He gestured with considerable irritation. “So deep. Por Dios. It took me two hours to scratch the earth, and mira. You dig this caverna. What did you think you would find?”
I shrugged. “We removed the animals, that’s all. When the lab is finished, we’ll…we’ll put them back. We’ll rebury them.”
“Good.” His single word came out flat and final. He turned toward the truck. “Tomame a casa, Estelita. Me canso del viento.”
We did leave then, but it wasn’t to take Reuben home. Instead, we drove him to Posadas General Hospital. He spent the rest of the day with an oxygen tube in his nose and strange chemicals dripping into the blue vein of his left arm. Francis slipped into his world of medicine as effortlessly as if he were a resident.
We hadn’t been at the hospital for more than twenty minutes before Sheriff Martin Holman tracked us down and had me paged to the telephone. He kept his ranting to a minimum. It took me only five minutes to convince him that the drip tubes stuck in Reuben’s arm weren’t long enough to allow the old man to reach Mexico.
18
There was nothing Estelle or I could do for Reuben Fuentes at Posadas General Hospital. Dr. Francis Guzman settled into an endless round of conferences with the medical staff. What there was to talk about, I didn’t know. Reuben’s condition seemed simple enough to me.
The old man was comatose, drifting up to consciousness only fleetingly and never lucid. I was no medical expert, but I could see that he was simply worn out.