Gregorio had mounted a small slateboard with a chalk holder next to the hallway telephone, but the only messages I’d ever seen on it were rare ones for me to call the Club. I’d never seen either of the other two tenants use the phone or known them to receive a call. One of them, Moises, was older than Gregorio and almost deaf. Even though he had one of those old-time ear horns, you still had to shout into it. The other resident was Sergio, a nervous little man who worked as the night clerk for a motor hotel on the beach. He kept to his room all day and was said to have no friends at all.
Tonight the slateboard was blank, as usual. At the far end of the hall the kitchen door shone brightly. I wasn’t surprised to find Gregorio in there, sitting at the table, sipping a bottle of beer and reading a movie magazine, his wire-rim glasses low on his nose. It was his habit to stay up all night and go to bed at dawn and sleep till noon. He said he had not been able to sleep at night for the past thirty-two years. He’d never said why and I’d never asked.
The kitchen was big and high-ceilinged and a large heavy dining table stood in its center. I helped myself to a beer from the icebox and pried off the cap with an opener hung on the door handle by a wire hook and sat across the table from him. I took a pack of Camels from my coat and shook one out for myself and then slid the pack across the table to him and we both lit up. He looked tired and a little glass-eyed. There had probably been plenty to drink at the Morales party.
He tapped a hand on the article he’d been reading. He could speak and read English much better than the rest of the residents of La Colonia, not counting the kids. “Do you know what those Hollywood assholes said after they gave Fred Astaire his screen test?”
Fred Astaire was Gregorio’s favorite movie star. The old man had seen Top Hat three times already.
He looked down at the article. “They said he couldn’t act very good and the women wouldn’t like him because he was ‘slightly bald.’ But they said he could at least ‘dance a little.’”
He peered at me over the rim of his glasses. “That’s like saying Jack Dempsey could punch a little, no?” He shook his head. “Assholes.”
I drank my beer and leafed through a magazine from the stack on the table. Gregorio said I’d missed a good party. They roasted a kid on a spit in Morales’ backyard and there were platters of every kind of dish and enough beer and tequila for everybody to get as drunk as he wanted. He’d never seen so many visitors to a Colonia party as this time. Morales’ brother had come down from Beaumont. Ortega’s brother and sister-in-law up from Lake Jackson. Avila’s uncle and cousin and the uncle’s goddaughter, who was pretty but didn’t talk much, had come all the way from Brownsville. And a cousin of the Gutierrez brothers, a car mechanic from Victoria, had come too. Turned out he was a hell of a singer and guitar player and he’d been the hit of the party.
“Sorry I missed it,” I said. The wind was blowing a little harder now, and tree branches scraped the side of the building. I finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the garbage can.
“Happy new year, viejo,” I said, and headed for the stairs.
“Feliz año nuevo, kid,” the old man said.
My room was chilly, so I took the extra blanket out of the wardrobe and spread it over the one already on the bed. I got undressed, then opened the briefcase and took out the guns. I put the .380 on the bedside stand. The Mexican revolver went under the pillow. I turned off the light and got in bed and listened to the wind and rasping branches for a while before I fell asleep.
I woke in darkness to a sound I thought I recognized but I couldn’t immediately place it. The wind had ceased. For a moment I thought maybe I’d been dreaming—and then realized I still heard it. A car motor. Down in the lane and beginning to move away.
A Model T.
I swung out of bed and went to the window, released the shade to go fluttering up on its spindle, raised the window sash and pushed open the screen frame and stuck my head out into a chilly drizzle.
In the light of the streetlamp, a lettuce-green Model T sedan without a left front fender was turning onto Mechanic Street. I saw the dark form of the driver but I couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in the car. The T rattled down the street and then its single taillight went out of sight.
I stood at the open window a moment longer before I pictured what I must look like—gawking out at an empty street, shivering in my underwear, getting my head wet. I cursed and let the screen frame down and closed the window. My wristwatch was on the table and I struck a match to read the time. Almost six. From the time I was old enough to do chores on the ranch until the day I left there in the hurry I did, I had always been up well before this hour.
But I wasn’t on the ranch now, and what I wanted was more sleep. I ran a towel through my hair and got back in bed.
And couldn’t get the green Ford out of my mind.
Bullshit, the Ford…I was thinking about the girl.
I wondered if she’d been in the car just now. I remembered her look under the traffic light, how it caught me flatfooted for one big heartbeat and got me rankled for some damn reason. Which, it occurred to me, probably had something to do with my edginess the rest of the evening.
The realization agitated me all the more because I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it earlier. Not much ever got under my skin, but when something did I damn well knew what and why and I knew how to get rid of it.
Little chippy. What’d she think she was trying to pull?
She had to be the one Gregorio had mentioned, the one at the party, the goddaughter of Avila’s aunt and uncle. All the way from Brownsville, Gregorio said. Had they just now been getting an early start on the long drive back? They sure as hell weren’t going to the movies at five in the morning or to a picnic on the beach. How far to Brownsville? Way more than three hundred miles, probably closer to four. All-day drive and then some—especially in that old T.
Christ’s sake, I told myself, who cared?
Some face on her, though.
Yeah, right—but there were pretty faces everywhere, hundreds in this town alone.
Not like that one.
Bullshit. It wasn’t that special. Besides, I didn’t see anything except her face. For all I knew she had an ass like an Oldsmobile.
Not likely.
For all I knew she was married.
A married woman came to Morales’ party with her godfather? How much sense did that make?
What’s sense got to do with anything? Besides, the old man said Avila’s cousin had come too. For all I knew he was her beau…
So it went, while I lay there staring at the ceiling and the New Year slowly dawned.
On the second-floor balcony of the casa grande of the Hacienda de Las Cadenas, César Calveras Dogal is taking his noon brandy and awaiting the arrival of his foreman, El Segundo.
The great house stands on a long low bluff, and the balcony affords a vista beyond the mesquite woods along the north wall of the hacienda compound. To the northeast Don César can see the meander of the shallow Río Cadenas whose origin is high in the dark sierras and whose flow through a venous array of irrigation ditches nurtures the estate’s tenacious pasturelands and its meager gardens. He can see all the way to the Ciénaga de las Palmas, glinting like a little glass sliver five miles away. In truth the ciénaga has no palms at all and is but a muddy marsh where the river drains and quits. Almost forty miles beyond the ciénaga, in the blue-hazed distance, lies the hard road from Escalón to Monclova. The surrounding country is dense with cactus and thickets of mesquite, and the mountains at the horizons are long and blue.