We had been at the hospital for an hour when Francis walked back into Reuben’s room. He touched Estelle on the elbow and she stepped away from the bed. I was sitting in one of those extraordinarily uncomfortable vinyl lounge chairs in the corner, reading the “Humor in Uniform” section from a three month old Reader’s Digest. I held the magazine in my right hand while cradling the little bundle that was a snoozing Francis Carlos with my left. I didn’t get up.
“Why don’t you two go get some dinner,” he said.
“Us three, you mean,” I said and laid the magazine down. The infant stirred, yawned, and wrinkled his nose and eyebrows…an expression I’d seen a hundred times on his mother’s face. He fixed huge, luminous brown eyes on my old, wrinkled mug.
Francis thrust his hands in his trouser pockets in that characteristic gesture he used when he knew he had to be patient with other people perhaps not as efficient as himself.
Estelle raised an eyebrow and Francis continued, “I’ve arranged a meeting with Dr. Perrone and Fred Tierney for about five-thirty…it’s the only time I could get the two of them together. I’ll join you as soon as I can.” Fred Tierney was the hospital administrator. It was easy to imagine that he was a little nervous about having the law hanging out in his facility.
“Is there anything we can do?” Estelle asked.
Francis shook his head. “Go eat.” Estelle smiled at her husband and kissed him lightly on the cheek as she stepped past him.
“I thought maybe they’d make you wait,” she said. He shrugged and shook his head. I didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t pry. Estelle reached for her son and I gave him up so I could struggle out of the low chair. We left the hospital, planning to return after dinner.
We ate at the Juan de Onate Cantina on 12th Street, one of Estelle’s favorite haunts in Posadas. The place was dark and ornate, a miniature version of what someone thought a palace in Mexico City might have looked like in 1600. Little Francis Carlos fussed a bit at the darkness and strange smells until his mother let him put a stranglehold on a bottle.
We could have eaten the dinner, generous though it was, in fifteen minutes. But we first waited for Francis and then after he arrived, shortly after six, the three of us spent more than two hours dawdling over the food and catching up on gossip.
Finally, I pushed away the half-full basket of sopaipillas and my empty coffee cup. If I had eaten any more, I’d have been comatose and under the good doctor’s care myself.
“You want to go out to the field tomorrow?”
Estelle frowned. It was the first time in more than an hour that I’d brought up the incident that had summoned her to Posadas. “Yes, sir.”
“Pretty bleak place,” Francis said. He reached across and pulled the sopaipillas within reach. He’d eaten more than I had, which was an accomplishment…especially since he didn’t have the stretched belly capacity.
“You saw most of what there was to see this afternoon, when we took Reuben there,” I said. “A hole in the ground, a few bloodstains.” I held up my hands. “No nifty tire tracks pressed into the ground, no cartridge casings, no nothing.”
“None of it makes sense,” Estelle said.
“No. But there’s a lot of that going around here lately.” She didn’t ask me what I meant by that and I didn’t elaborate.
We left the restaurant and swung by the hospital for a few minutes. Reuben was sleeping quietly, looking tiny and defenseless under the white sheets. They’d given him a bath, probably more out of self-defense than anything else. The monitor over his bed ticked its record of his diminishing vital signs.
After a few minutes we headed for my adobe house on Guadalupe Terrace, deep in the old section of Posadas south of the interstate. The place was huge, sprawling, dark, and comfortable. And it was private, nestled almost in the geographic center of five acres.
Estelle paused a minute with her hand caressing the carved oak of the front door. Francis stood behind her, his son nestled in the crook of his arm.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking…I’m thinking that this feels like coming home.”
I nudged the door open. “Someday you’ll be able to talk some sense into your husband’s thick skull. You and Francis need to get out of those gloomy mountains and come back south, where you belong.”
Estelle laughed and shot an amused look at the young physician. They followed me inside. The old hacienda sprawled all over the lot with a myriad alcoves, nooks, and patios. Every member of a big family would have been able to find a quiet, private corner.
It was all of those rooms that prompted my two sons and two daughters to harass me about being lonely and “rattling around in that old barn,” as my eldest daughter Camille was fond of saying.
I gave Estelle and Francis their choice of five bedrooms. She chose the one in the west wing, the bedroom with the dark, looming, mahogany armario. Camille had fallen in love with that old free-standing Mexican clothes closet when she was only thirteen. Two other deputies and I had nearly busted guts moving it in. It was never going to be moved again-not in my lifetime, anyway.
Estelle tossed her small overnight bag on Camille’s bed. “You want the shutter open?” I asked.
“No. Leave it closed,” she said. “I like the fortress effect.” She smiled a little ruefully and slipped an arm around Francis. “I’m feeling small right now, sir. It’s one of those times when a warm burrow is tempting.”
“That’s why I like this place. The rest of the world doesn’t exist when you close the doors and windows.” I started to swing the bedroom door closed behind me. “I’ll fix us a brandy when you’re ready.”
They settled the kid and then found me out in the kitchen. Estelle stepped down onto the brick floor of the living room and wandered around the room like a little kid, poking into this and that. She stopped at the VCR and examined the single tape, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes deepening. She knew me pretty well.
I handed Francis a brandy and he flopped down in one of the leather chairs, one leg thrown across the arm. Estelle sat down on the other arm of the same chair, hands folded primly on her knees. “Francis and I would like a place like this someday,” she said.
“You won’t find them up north,” I chided her, and she grinned again. Anyone but Estelle would have told me to shut up and mind my own business.
We talked until nearly midnight, and after a while it seemed to me that she had never been gone.
***
The next morning, we drove to the hospital and found no change in Reuben’s condition. He was still unconscious and it seemed to me, looking at the composed, peaceful expression on his pale face, that he had already made up his mind and was simply waiting for his body to follow suit.
Doctor Allen Perrone stuck his head in, beckoned to Francis, and nodded curtly at me. I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. “So what do you think?” I asked, keeping my voice in a hoarse whisper. He glanced at Francis, shrugged, and summed up his medical prognostication in two vague, unhelpful words: “No telling.”
He took Francis by the elbow and said to Estelle, “I need to borrow him for a bit.”
“We were going to go out to Reuben’s place for a little while,” she said. “We should be back in a couple of hours.”
We drove out to the field in my Blazer. Francis Carlos was blabby all the way, gurgling and cooing and twisting his rubbery little face into a wide range of expressions, each one sillier than the last.
Deputy Tom Mears, a part-time officer we had hired away from Bernalillo County after he’d stopped a 9 mm slug in the gut, was parked in Reuben’s driveway. He lifted a finger in salute as we pulled beyond the driveway and parked along the road.
In daylight, the field looked considerably smaller than it had during the raw, unsettled night.
“You don’t want to leave him in the truck?” I asked, as Estelle bundled the infant into a convenient package.