The cold fog settles into Bakersfield, and even in the worst of its thickness, the cars prowl out along Union Avenue and maneuver into the gravel parking lot, ladies shivering in their dresses and short jackets. Maybe tonight she will sing “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Their love is bigger than yours, truer, headed for a certain destination. It is wiping away jealousy and loneliness with nothing but song and sincerity, the simplicity of it almost unfair. You can listen as she sings “Tears on My Pillow,” but the truth of her world makes the song cruel to hear, the will to sacrifice the heart all over again with possibly nothing in return, the heart never forgetting. How could this be true for her? Her boyfriend is right there, even if he is in the dark, and never leaving, so she can sing all the loneliness she wants. It will never touch her.
In December, the ads keep appearing, but with Christmas coming and New Year’s Eve and the general lack of work out in the fields, the cantina begins to slow down a bit. Still, there is the ad, something to look at on a Sunday night when there will be no going out, when the sweet but earnest twenty-three-year-old is left breathless on the phone when he is told no. La Reina opens her soul out on the page, familiar to many now. A hard rain begins that night and lasts all through the morning, steady, the clouds lingering over the Pacific Ocean for days before swirling in. When next week’s edition of the paper is thrown on the doorstep, the paperboy misses his target and it lands in a bush. The paper soaks through. Because there is nothing else to do, the rain keeping everyone indoors, you lay the paper out on the kitchen table to dry in the steamed-up warmth of the house. The ink has run, but parts are salvageable, the news of the entire city spread out for inspection.
There, on page 3, is a picture of the bowling alley over near Chester Avenue, a police officer standing in front. There is the girl’s name in the text. There is Dan Watson’s. Page 1 is ink-smeared from the rain and nearly impossible to read, but it is clear something terrible has happened. She was twenty-three.
There is what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.
Phone calls ricochet all around town. The rain keeps most people from venturing out, or else speculation would be the subject at every bar, every coffee shop, every diner and café. She lived in the apartment above the bowling alley and was a quiet girl, according to the landlord’s account in the newspaper. On the night the rainstorm began, said some who claimed to have been in the cantina the very night she was killed, the two of them had a terrible fight. Others said that never happened, that the couple had been seen at the movies. The stairwell up to her apartment had a side wall smeared in blood, someone said. The newspaper reported she had been beaten to death. You can kill someone with your bare hands. A man can kill a woman that way. Even a sweet, earnest boy is capable of that, if he thinks about it, if he recognizes his power, his weight, his thrust, his fists coming down. On page 8 of the paper, the advertisement for Las Cuatro Copas still runs, La Reina with her mouth open.
She had been stealing money. She had been pregnant with his child. She had been caught with another man. The landlord refuses to rent the apartment. He cannot get the blood off the wall.
There is what you see and what you make of it: You know she stole those boots from the store’s inventory. You know for sure. You can confirm it by the totals coming up short in the ledger. But you keep that to yourself.
Dan Watson disappears, and by the time the newspaper reports this, it is old news, if news at all. The newspaper cannot say anything except that the situation is under investigation. The rain clears up and patrons in the café discuss it with the waitresses when Dan’s mother is not on shift. They scoff at the paper, calling it a situation and not a murder. Someone calls the paper and admonishes them for having run the cantina’s advertisement. But there are still some who don’t know that the girl and La Reina are one and the same.
You can hear people discuss it as December goes on, but no one goes into the uglier details. Was there really blood on the wall? At the drive-in movie, the beautiful woman was strangled to death, but she slumped over as if in a sudden sleep. Music thrummed ominously. At the drive-in movie, boys and men undid bras and pulled off panties, eager to get to the wet warmth underneath the skirts. Maybe not every girl let them. There was that one who moaned hard, enjoying it, and the laughter from people sitting on the hoods of their cars. But not every girl was like that. Not every girl allowed that. Maybe Dan never did that with her at the drive-in. The landlord said she was a nice girl. You could see how she sang, how she chose songs that were always about love, Dan stepping out of the record shop with brown-papered packages. But then again, all the songs nowadays were about love, whether you lost it or found it or gave it away.
At the café, no one talks about it when Dan’s mother is on shift. No one can imagine what it is like to be the mother of a man like that. All the waitresses who flirted with him can only talk about remembering him when he was a little, little boy.
The rain lets up and is promptly replaced by the fog. There are Mexican men at the corner grocery store near the girl’s apartment, waiting every morning for fieldwork. They sit watching people driving by slowly to get a look at the splintered green door that opens to that stairwell, or at the dark window of the girl’s apartment. They watch people actually go up to the door and try the knob. Her face was beaten so badly, goes the story around town, that there was a closed casket. Others say she had no funeral at all, that she was just buried in what they call the public side of the city cemetery because she didn’t have any people in Bakersfield.
She was twenty-three. The cemetery put a little marker about the size of a fist over in a corner lot — teresa garza — because city regulations mandate that no graves go unmarked.
In late December, Dan Watson is nowhere to be found. Later, the police detain one of the Mexican men from across the street, that bunch of men who sit around the corner grocery waiting for work. That man, people say, was another boyfriend, but by this point, no one really knows the story anymore. The rest of the Mexican workers scatter for days, not returning, but it doesn’t matter. By January, work is scarce. All of Bakersfield has to tighten its wallet as the thick of winter settles in. Hardly anyone comes to the shoe store, even out of curiosity, and you rest your elbows on the counter and count the days until spring. The Mexican man is deported, but the newspaper never says why — that’s something you hear only on the street. All winter long, the splintered green door remains locked, a strange brightness in the dull of the January fog.
Two
The Actress was set to arrive in Bakersfield in the morning. She would be driven from Los Angeles, picked up from the studio at 6 a.m. sharp in a black sedan, and carried over the mountains into the city of Bakersfield to meet with the Director. She was a dedicated actress, script in hand as the sedan wound its way out of the quiet Los Angeles morning, a croissant and a carton of juice to sate her appetite. The driver respected her need for silence, her head bent over the script. She fought the nausea of reading against the car’s steady thrum.
The Director had told her explicitly not to worry much about the entire script: they were shooting only two exterior shots, coming quietly into Bakersfield without a lot of fanfare, and the rest would be filmed at a Los Angeles studio. The Actress already knew her lines, but it never hurt to read again or to review scenes that had nothing to do with her. The exteriors were to be shot on the outskirts of the city, somewhere along Highway 99: A woman is driving a car on a road, all alone. The woman has no one to talk to, hence the Actress had no real lines to rehearse. But the Actress knew, at the very least, that her facial expressions would have to match the mood of the final edit, would have to match what she saw in the parentheticals scattered all over the script: there would be voice-overs, something else telling the story besides her own face.