Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (24 page)

“So what?” Roberto glared at her. Just for an instant he saw in his mind’s eye an image of a slim, dark man walking along in an orchard slapping the trunks of the twisty fruit trees, encouraging them as if they were cattle. Something from when he was a baby at the family ranch, it must be, days he only knew from what Great-uncle Tilo or Mina might say. He made a fierce mental grab for the image, trying to hold onto it — that must be Dad, what did he really look like? — but the old lady wouldn’t let him. She had to go on talking.

“Plenty of Spanish landholders were cheated out of their property in this state, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case right here. Now that that’s understood — are you still hungry?”

“Shut your mouth, I’m thinking!” But it was too late. The scrap of memory blinked out. He was left standing there like a fool.

Suddenly the teacher, Miss Stern walked up to him and held out her plate. Her face was shiny with sweat, and he could see her trying to talk, swallowing and licking her lips, and not being able to. Too scared.

He had a headache now, and he had no appetite at all. “Just set it down there on the ground,” he growled. What had the man
looked
like?

She bent and put her half-filled plate on the flagstones near his foot. Then she walked over to the back patio wall and stood holding onto it, facing away from them all.

Roberto looked down at the plate and nudged it with his boot. He said loudly to Blanca, “How can you eat that shit, anyhow?”

Moving sharp the way you do when you’re mad and you don’t care who knows it, the old lady stepped over and grabbed up the plate, like Roberto was nothing, a statue or something.

“Hey!” he said. “What the hell you think you’re doing?”

She whistled up the hillside at the Doberman. “We don’t waste food in this house. I’m going to feed this to the dogs.”

“They already got fed,” Bobbie said quickly.

Roberto yelled, “Fuck the dogs! You want to do something, you ask me first!” And he yanked up the shotgun and fired, felt the kick, the crash, heard the yelp, heard it break off sharp. A good shot, satisfying. He felt loose inside, melted with release.

Bobbie moaned, “Shit, Beto, what did you do that for? He wasn’t hurting anything.”

The dog on the hillside was just a dark heap now, one rear leg jerking automatically in the air. Everyone stared, except Jeff, who sat crumpled like a bag of laundry, his head covered by his crossed arms. The teacher held onto the wall with both hands. The two girls grabbed each other and breathed in little screams. Spacey Joyce just hugged herself and blinked.

Even the old woman was quiet now. The paper plate shook in her hands. Food tumbled off onto the paving at her feet.

You worry about me, lady, not about ancient history or some stupid ghost.

Bobbie sounded like he was nearly crying. “He’s dead. I can see it from here, he’s quit moving. You killed him for nothing. What did you do that for?”

Roberto stared at him. Was he crazy, or what? It was to show these people not to mess with us, that’s what for! To teach the old lady a lesson! And it worked too, you could see that looking around at their faces. What about that, you smart-asses? Dumb Roberto from the valley that just came along for the ride with his smart cousin to your dopey class. A shotgun made a lot of difference, more than just the old pistol alone. They’ll remember.

But all he said was — and he sounded so cool, he was proud of himself — “I just wanted to make sure this old shotgun works, that’s all.”

What was wrong with Blanca? She was holding her ear with her good hand, like she still heard the shotgun blast.

Well, what did you think, little sister? You wanted to come along so bad — what did you think it was going to be like?

Bobbie hadn’t seen Blanca having an attack in a long time. He had forgotten what it was like, man — awful.

Beto had told him to bring one of the wooden chairs from the kitchen here to the bedroom. Blanca sat there sort of stiff with her eyes bulging and her skin sweat-shiny. She was like a pump that had gone bad, wheezing the air in and out real slow with a horrible straining sound. She had a weird bluish color, and there were big dark sweat patches under the arms of her blouse and down the middle of the back.

She looked as if she was dying. She looked mad, too. She was fighting the asthma, you could tell.

Beto was setting up the steamer for her, cursing low and steady to himself as he fiddled with the little bottle of stuff you used to keep the minerals in the water from jamming the thing. He had the shotgun right by him on the floor. That damn shotgun, why did Mrs. Howard have to have a thing like that here?

This was her room. Bobbie smelled talcum and perfume, faint but clear. The door to the closet was open a little, showing some long robes and dresses among the blouses and shirts. He stood by the writing table at the window, about as far as he could get from Blanca, feeling useless, waiting for Beto to tell him he wasn’t needed any more and could go.

He thought mournfully, if it wasn’t for me asking Beto to come to art class with me, none of this would be happening. I wouldn’t be standing in this strange house with a gun in my hand to keep kids from my own class in line, and Beto wouldn’t have gone and killed somebody’s dog. She loved the dog, too, you could tell by how she was careful to tell us about him so nobody would get worried when they first saw him, him being a Doberman. If it wasn’t for me inviting Roberto along. If it wasn’t — thinking like that made him want to cry. He fiddled with some pencils stuck in a pottery cup. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Beto was supposed to be on the road by now, hitching with some stranger, while I got Blanca on back home.

Thinking she was going to travel to Canada with Beto! Look at her!

Blanca began to cough again. She spat into a napkin clutched in her shaking hand.

Oh God, Bobbie thought, praying with all his heart, oh God, don’t let me ever be sick like that. I’ll be good, I’ll help out at home, I’ll go be a priest if that’s what you want, but don’t let me ever be sick like that. Or sick like that skeleton Englishman, either, the guy in the next room. Bobbie had heard him coughing earlier.

It was like a hospital around here. People that sick, they shouldn’t be allowed to run around loose. It’s too awful for everybody else.

He wished he’d told Mrs. Howard how sorry he was about her dog.

Beto got up and stood holding the shotgun and glowering down at the steamer like he’d like to shoot the thing. When the steam finally started to come, he jerked a blanket off the bed. He put it over Blanca’s shoulders.

“Shit,” he said. “Well, that’s that, anyhow. We’re not going anywhere tonight.”

Dorothea, kept out of the studio that evening to answer the phone if it should ring, sat with the two Cantu boys in the living room and watched tv. They looked for news of themselves. She watched a continual replay, inside her mind, of the death of Mars.

She was overwhelmed by remorse. What was the good of all her confidence now? You thought you could handle it, she thought bitterly. The Wise Woman of the Bookstore, so sure she could bring everybody through unscathed just by being calm, clear-headed, and firm.

When did I start to get so angry, so foolishly furious? When he forced me to call Mary and tell lies about the safety of other people’s children so that those lies can be passed along to the parents. And poor Ricky! How dare these people add so much as a straw to what he carried already?

Where the hell is that ghost when I really need it? A quirk of imagination, a flicker in the field of vision, but no damn help. The first shot has been fired, and it was my fault. There could be others.

So now we’re down to plain, quivering, animal fear, and maybe that’s a good thing. It’s real, at any rate.

At least the sister, Blanca, had the sensitivity, if that was what it was, to get sick after Mars died. Not like Bobbie, protesting but never really challenging his cousin. And never would. God damn these people, crashing into my life like this!

“Listen,” Bobbie said tensely.

The tv announced a special report on “the Pinto Street problem,” as the announcer called it. Roberto, with the pistol on the table beside him and the shotgun across his knees, leaned eagerly forward. Like a child, for god’s sake, an armed, dangerous, bad-tempered child watching tv.

On the screen, a solemn-faced Chicano announcer intoned a brief speech about real-estate fraud and political rebellion, harking back to the sixties, mentioning the Tierra Amarilla raid and its aftermath. Then a camera-pan of a dirt street, small houses neat or shabby, some trailers, a man in khakis and an undershirt staring into the camera for an instant and then turning away.

What the announcer said was lost for a moment in Roberto’s remark, “What’s that jerk doing there? That’s Betsy Armijo’s brother. He lives down in the South Valley.”

A civil servant with pink-tinted eyeglasses made a statement in monotone exonerating his office. There was a shot of a heavy blond man, identified as a prominent local land developer, averting his face from the camera as he climbed hastily into his car.

“Never saw that guy on Pinto Street,” Roberto said.

Bobbie said, “No, but I bet he’s the one who sent that ‘inspector’ down there.”

Then they were looking at two people with bloodied heads slumped in the back seat of a police car, and somebody else knelt over a sprawled figure with its shirt rucked up, taut belly exposed. A riot, the voice-over said. A riot about the YMCA? Could that be? Pictures of two young men, labeled left-wing agitators or something equivalent in news-ese, were flashed. They had been arrested at the riot. Several others were still being sought. The wounding of a policeman and the death of a local man caught in the crossfire.

“Hear that?” Roberto demanded, turning toward Dorothea. “Well, there was no crossfire. They did all the shooting, the cops did.”

Dorothea rubbed her eyes. Good Lord, she knew more about the judge’s damned two-hundred-year-old revolution than she did about this story unfolding before her on television. She seldom read beyond the headlines of the papers. She was ignorant.

No, not ignorant; that was untrue. Uninformed about this particular incident, yes, but basically ignorant, no. You know. You always know, somewhere at the back of your mind.

One reason for putting aside the paper unread is the repetitiousness of the stories. It is so often the same: if it had been a white kid reaching into his pocket for his money-clip, which the off-duty cop “thought was a gun,” the fatal shots would not have been fired. If Pinto Street had been in another part of town, inhabited by another class of people, there would have been no riot, no police, no death.

But it’s not my fault, she groaned dismally to herself. I’ve chosen a different kind of life, reclusive, creative. I’m not made for rough currents like these.

A wizened old man with a stained hat on was saying that the people of Pinto Street had never intended any violence, let alone burning down the Y. They had now formed a householders’ block association, responsible people, no young hotheads mind you, to deal with the city.

“What hotheads?” Roberto said. “Does Mr. Garduño mean us?”

He means you, Dorothea thought. You’re the purged “wild element” that nobody has to be scared of any more, nobody has to send cops to control. Pinto Street marches on, away from you, in the time-honored tradition of revolt. Ask the judge, he knows. He should come to you, my boy, to educate you — not to me.