Call the Devil by His Oldest Name (7 page)

He walked back down the line of traffic, returning moments later with a small camp shovel. Working gently to avoid scarring the truck's weathered paint job, he scraped the mess off and dumped it on the roadside.

“Thanks,” Ruth told him when he came back to her window. “I really didn't want to show up here with cow dung all over my car.”

“You shouldn't have anything else to worry about. The gate's about fifty yards ahead and our security's tight from here on in.”

“Ask him his name.” Clarinda poked Ruth in the ribs. “He's kind of hot.”

“Hey, what's your name?” blurted her cousin awkwardly. “So I can thank you officially.”

“Gabe Benge,” he replied cheerfully. “Coordinator of all this with a lady named Ruth Walkingstick, who I'm hoping will show up pretty soon.”

Ruth began to laugh, and rolled her window all the way down. “I'm right here, Gabe,” she said, extending her hand. “You just shoveled cow manure off my car.”

Nine

PAZ SAT IN the
front seat of the van, the sun hot on his face, Ruperta's gaze hot on the back of his head. “It's a trap, Paz,” she'd cried when he told her what they were going to do. “We don't get sent out for babies. Señora must have found out we're
ilegalidads
. She's sending us to the
police!
”

“No, no.” Paz had taken Ruperta in his arms, wishing he could tell her about the Scorpions; yet knowing if he did, she would probably fall to the floor, paralyzed with fear. “Señora just wants us to help Gordo. If she wanted to turn us in, she would not waste her gas taking us to the police. She would just call them to come here.”

To his great relief, Ruperta saw the logic of his words. As she resumed folding their clothes into their battered suitcase, he stuffed the money from their mayonnaise jar into his pocket and put his
cuchillo
back down in his sock. Ruperta did not know it yet, but neither of them would ever see this room again.

Now he sat up straight in the van, twisting around every five minutes or so, giving Ruperta a reassuring wink, but also looking to see if anyone followed them. He'd spotted the Scorpion just as they left, leaning against the scraggly tree that grew at the end of the drive. He was tall and wiry, with a thin black mustache that bracketed the corners of his mouth. For an instant their eyes met, then Gordo pulled onto the road, the van's tires throwing up little pebbles that no doubt peppered the man's face.
Please God,
prayed Paz, the sweat breaking out on his forehead.
Today let him be the one blinded.

Such roads in this country, he told himself as he twisted around again to gaze anxiously out the windshield. No dangerous potholes, no washed-out bridges eternally awaiting repair. Nothing to prevent you from putting hundreds of miles between you and the thing you feared, unless, of course that thing was a Scorpion. He squirmed, remembering the bite of the
riata.
Señora's fancy van and this good road would only buy him time. Eventually they would find him. Not once had they failed.

“We're going to the mountains,” Gordo an­nounced, speaking for the first time since they'd pulled out onto the highway. “We're going to save a baby from some bad people.”

“What kind of bad people?” Ruperta asked her question with eyes so wide that Paz almost laughed. What kind of bad person could Gordo possibly know who would compare with a Scorpion?

“Gypsies,” Gordo explained. “Gypsies that look like Indians.”

“Gypsies?”

Paz watched Ruperta dig in her purse for their little dictionary.
Gypsy
must not be used on her American soap operas, where she'd learned much of her English.

“That's right.” Gordo nodded deeply, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “Gypsies act nice to your face, but alone, they beat their babies when they cry. And if they cry a lot, they just leave them in the forest, for the coyotes to eat.”

Paz frowned. He'd never heard of any Gypsies who did such things, but this was America, where people gunned down total strangers just for cutting them off in traffic. Anyway, what did he care about Gordo and his Gypsy baby? In a few hours, he and Ruperta would be gone.

“How old is the baby?” Ruperta's voice was soft with concern.

“Three months,” replied Gordo. “They call her Lily.”

Paz looked back at Ruperta, again secretly checking to see if anyone was following them.

Only a Greyhound bus, way in the distance. So far, so good.

“Of course they won't want to give her up,” Gordo continued. “So we might have to trick them.” His cold gray eyes speared Paz like a fish.
He knows
, thought Paz, panic once again crawling up his throat.
He knows all about the Scorpions. All about before.

“You and Ruperta need to do exactly as I say. Otherwise, there'll be trouble.”

Paz made his face a mask before Logan's hard eyes, but reached down and touched the cool ivory handle of the cuchillo in his sock.
Oh, yes, my fat friend
, he responded silently.
Try to keep us from escaping the Scorpions, there will be trouble indeed.

They stopped for gas, then turned south, toward Atlanta. Paz felt cheered, somehow. In the year they'd spent in America, they'd stayed the longest in Atlanta, where they'd lived with his cousin Raoul. He and Ruperta loved the big, flashy city and wanted to stay, but Raoul had advised him to keep moving north. “You won't be safe here,” he warned Paz. “The Scorpions know Atlanta, and even though the American cops now hunt Arabs, eventually they will catch you, too. Here,” he said, giving him a slip of paper with a name and an address scrawled on it. “Julio Mendez's cousin has just quit working for this lady in Tennessee. She is very rich, and will now perhaps need someone new. Anyway, it will be safer for you up there.” So they took a bus to Nashville, then walked the thirty miles to Señora's grand house. She hadn't wanted to hire them at first, but Ruperta, who didn't mind making a fool of herself with her bad English, convinced her truthfully that she was an excel­lent maid, and untruthfully that Paz knew all about cattle and farming. Until now, it had worked out well. The cows were easy enough to figure out, and Ruperta kept Señora's fancy fur­niture and crystal chandeliers free of dust. Though Ruperta missed her friends in Atlanta, she liked having a bedroom all to themselves and a bathroom where roaches did not scatter each time the light came on.

They drove through a smaller town, then out into the country beyond. The land here was flat, but surrounded by tall gold mountains. A sharp breeze scuttled leaves along their route, and by the side of the road, men in overalls sold apples and firewood from the backs of their trucks. They passed campsite after campsite—Smoky Hollow, Whispering Pines, Unaka Creek. At one called Hillbilly Heaven, Paz saw a sign in the shape of an arrowhead that read “Save Our­ Bones.” Three cop cars sat opposite the entrance, holding back a crowd of angry, hard-hatted
obreros
waving signs. Two long-haired men wear­ing red T-shirts stood at the entrance of the campground, their arms crossed against their chests, their faces hard and unforgiving.

“What's going on?” Ruperta leaned forward from the backseat.

Paz fought the tightness in his chest he always felt whenever he saw American cops; he sank down lower in his seat. “Sit down, Ruperta,” he told her in Spanish. “And be quiet.”

Gordo touched the bill of his cap at the cops who leaned against their patrol cars, then turned into the campground, pulling up beside one of the long-haired men.

“You here for the rally?” The young man leaned against the van. Paz gripped the handle, ready to bolt. This Indian didn't sound like any he'd ever seen in the movies. Maybe Ruperta had been right. Maybe Señora and Gordo had brought them to some kind of camp where the cops rounded up all the
ilegalidads
before they sent them back. Señora would do such a thing for money; Gordo would help her just for a laugh.

“Yep,” said Gordo.

“There's a twenty-dollar fee per carload. You with any tribe?”

“Croatan,” Gordo replied. When the young man stared at him blankly, he added, “Lumbees, to you young'uns.”

The guard checked his clipboard. “Okay. We've got a few of you guys here. Go to the top of the hill and take a right. The Lumbees are down on the far side of the creek.”

Paz watched Gordo pull his wallet from his pocket and hand the guard a twenty-dollar bill. “Thanks.” The young man took the money and waved them through. Paz's grip on the door handle loosened as Gordo drove forward and the troopers grew smaller in the van's side mirror. Maybe Gordo wasn't taking them to some kind of internment center, after all. Maybe they had indeed come to a Gypsy camp. It didn't matter to him. For now, he had enough to do keeping an eye on the cops and watching for a singularly tall man with a death-head bracelet tattooed on his wrist.

Two hundred miles to the west, at the old white farmhouse where Paz and Ruperta had begun their journey, Edwina Templeton lay dozing on the only truly comfortable sofa she owned. Located in a mudroom off the kitchen, the sofa sat beneath the west-facing windows of the room where she'd shoved it just for rare moments like this, when she was the only soul in the big house and the afternoon sun made the worn leather upholstery feel like butter on her skin.

“Doc, no!” Edwina cried aloud, her eyes fluttering open, awakened by an edge-of-sleep dream that blurred the lines between reality and somnolent fantasy. She sat up, her ears sharp, wondering if Duncan had prematurely returned. Quickly she rose from the sofa, brushing the wrinkles from the long white lab coat she wore. Never had she been able to stand the thought of anyone watching her sleep.

She walked to the kitchen and looked out the back door. The van was nowhere in sight. The only noise she heard was the comfortable
tock
of her Philadelphia tall case clock in the hall. She started to relax again. She was still alone.

She put a kettle of water on to boil. As she reached in the cabinet for the Lady Grey tea she saved for special occasions, she caught sight of the day's mail resting on the counter, a thick, cream-colored vellum envelope addressed to her in an elegant, sloping hand.

Her heart began to beat fast all over again. Today, just after Duncan's departure, the mailman had delivered an item sought by many but extended to few—an invitation to put her house on the Christmas Tour of Homes.

She stared at the thick envelope, lost in thought. The missive from the society matrons of Williamson County signified, for her, the end of a long journey. She'd had the misfortune to grow up poor in a county of great wealth. Her parents lived in a trailer park just down the road from this very property. Though her mother had real talent as a seamstress and had worked hard to make sure she looked nice, she'd walked to school when others rode, eschewed after-school skating parties to earn money baby-sitting, and prayed to God that none of her classmates would ever drive by to see her father in his undershirt, passed out drunk on their front steps. She'd started the first grade as “Edwina”; she'd finished high school as “Whinny,” a name the boys gave her because they said she looked like she should be pulling a plow.

However equine she might have looked, she had brains enough to make herself useful to their general practitioner neighbor, Dr. Skinner. She baby-sat, with admirable patience, his one re­tarded son and then, when the boy died, she took over the housekeeping as Mrs. Skinner methodically anesthetized herself into oblivion with Seconal and Myers's rum. Edwina was surprised one night when the doctor caressed her thigh as she served him dinner; she took pleasure a few nights later when he squeezed her breasts as she washed the dishes. When he called her into his examination room and pulled her skirt up and her pants down, she realized that she might have lucked into something. What exactly, she wasn't certain, but it sure looked like a way out of the trailer park and into the plusher ranks of the smug people she'd gone to school with.

She'd quickly learned how to please the doctor in ways he'd never imagined: in exchange, she extracted his promise to send her to nursing school. By the time she graduated, Mrs. Skinner had died, and she came back to work for Dr. Skinner as lover, nurse, then co-conspirator, when one of Nashville's wealthiest debs made a secret visit to this house late one night and bled out on the table. The furor over that didn't end until eighteen months later, when Doc walked out to the barn and mainlined enough Thorazine to kill a horse. Edwina wound up with this house, which she'd lived in and turned, over the past forty years, into the mostly legal operation it was today.

The acceptance, however, that she'd sought since high school eluded her. She tried to live like the women she envied: shopping at the right stores, lunching at the right restaurants, generously supporting horse shows and golf tournaments for various charities. She'd been commended for her efforts, too—been given plaques by Planned Parenthood and the Tennessee Adoption League. Yet, for all her good work, as she walked to her car from the eleven o'clock service at St. Phillip's, she sometimes saw the women she'd known as girls giggling among themselves, the name “Whinny” reaching her ears like a long-ago taunt borne on an endless breeze.

“Maybe not anymore, though,” she said aloud, taking the now-shrieking kettle off the burner. Maybe that moron Duncan would bring back some kind of baby she could make some money on. Maybe she would be able to buy that antique bed she'd been salivating over in the New Orleans auction catalog. If she could get it shipped here and set up in the downstairs bedroom in time, it would knock the knickers off those Christmas tour bitches. They would be sick with envy. They would finally see her for what she truly was. And they would never dream of calling her “Whinny” again.