Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (30 page)

Wouldn’t it be funny, Dorothea thought, if I became someone else right now, if all of a sudden my heart stopped stamping, and I became cool and purposeful and threw away the message of the ghost. If I said, Roberto, take me with you. Maybe in the next instant. But instant followed instant, and she did not.

“Let’s go, if we’re going,” Bobbie said desperately. “Even if she didn’t say anything, even if that guy doesn’t know, we can’t stay around here forever! Somebody will come!”

“Leave him alone,” Blanca said. “Beto knows what to do. He knows we have to go. I’m going to get my things and put them in the truck. And I want to say goodbye to Ricky.”

Roberto said, “We’ll go. But if that guy really doesn’t know, if he doesn’t say anything, there’s no point tipping off the next one to come rolling up to the front door for whatever. We don’t want them poking around any sooner than they have to. We’ll take her truck, so they’ll see it’s gone and they’ll think she’s down in town or something and they’ll just take off again. But we got to get that damn dog off that hillside. Anybody can see it from the front yard.”

Bobbie protested, “Why waste time on that? They could be here any minute —”

“Keep your shirt on, we’re going. It’ll take a minute to pack up the truck anyhow. We should have some water and food and stuff with us. Then we’re going to lock Blanca up with her precious Englishman in there so she can’t hassle us, and we’re going to get out of here — with one of the others in the truck with us for insurance. There’s room for three up front.”

Dorothea stood rigid. She could not speak.

Bobbie licked his lips, looking dismayed. “Who’re we going to take?”

“I don’t know.” Roberto looked at Dorothea, hard-eyed. “One of the girls, they won’t be hard to handle.”

“Beto, we’re going to have enough on our hands without somebody else in the truck,” Bobbie said.

“You think I’m just going to head out with the two of us and no protection? Anybody knows better than that, man. We’ll take somebody. But first you go get that dog and toss it down in the arroyo.”

“Not me,” Bobbie muttered. “I don’t want to touch it.”

Roberto said, “Well, I’m sure not going to do it.” Then he grinned. “I know,” he said. “Go get old Alex to do it. He’s been dying to help us out all along, right? Here’s something for him to do.”

Bobbie held the twenty-two on Alex, who trudged up the hill ahead of him carrying a coil of rusty wire to drag the dog with. When Bobbie looked back over his shoulder, he could see Roberto standing down in the back patio outside the kitchen, shotgun in his hands, watching.

Alex was still crying. Roberto had let him think they were taking him out to hang him with the wire. As soon as they were out of earshot Bobbie had told Alex it was only the dog’s carcass they meant to move, but the guy couldn’t seem to quit crying. It was embarrassing.

“Let’s go, man, all you got to do is move the dog,” Bobbie said again. He was anxious to get it over. Any minute the cops could be swarming all over the place. How could that guy not have seen the dog, how could he not have guessed something was wrong?

Alex moaned and rubbed his eyes, stumbling as he walked.

Bobbie could smell the dog already. Poor dog, nothing but bug food now, he thought. His stomach squirmed. He looked back down at Roberto, wishing they were further away from him. He could still see Roberto’s mean face. Roberto yelled something.

“Do it,” Bobbie urged.

“Well, how?”

“Make a noose, you know, twist the wire. You can slip that over his head and, like, drag him.”

Alex looked like he might throw up. He rubbed his palms on his jeans.

“Come on,” Bobbie said. He stared around, trying to see if there were any cops sneaking through the piñons.

Alex knelt down and started working on the wire. Then he jabbed at Mars with a chunk of wood, levering the head up so he could slip the noose over it.

Bobbie watched out of the corners of his eyes, thinking about that time he found a dead goat in a neighbor’s yard. That was on Pinto Street, when he’d still been real little and hadn’t known any better than to go poking at the dead thing. All he remembered clearly was how stiff and heavy it had seemed, like a toy made with badly cured leather and stuffed with horse-hair.

The dog’s head lolled against the stick, dusty-eyed, gaping. That’s how you look when you’re dead.

Alex pulled at the wire. It tightened around the dog’s neck. His uncle had once told him how in the old days they had to figure how much a man weighed before they hanged him because the force of too long a drop for his weight would jerk his head right off his body.

The dog’s corpse moved like something in a bad dream. There was a pinkish, raggedy hole in its side with white splinters sticking out. Noticing that, he nearly spewed.

He could see Roberto watching them from the patio. Funny how the house from here was just some old building, unrelated to the prison of the studio, which was all Alex really knew of it — that and the kitchen.

I’m not going back in there, he thought. Next time it could really be me, not a dead dog, with wire around my neck.

“Where’m I supposed to put this?” he said.

“Beto says just haul it down into the arroyo there,” Bobbie said.

Alex wrapped the hem of his shirt around his hands and laid hold of the wire, gathering his legs under him like he meant to stand up and start dragging the dog.

Roberto had to be a good shot or very lucky to have hit the dog from down there with just the patio floodlight to see by. Maybe good and lucky both.

I can’t believe I’m going to do this, he thought, feeling a muscle twitching in his thigh. What if it’s too heavy? Down below he saw Roberto kicking at the base of one of the patio benches, bored, only looking up the hillside now and again.

Alex surged up out of his crouch, heaving on the wire with both hands as hard as he could. For a second, when he hit the weight on the end of it, he thought, it’s not going to work, the head will come off —

The round-bellied carcass came up and up and arced clumsily through the air straight at Bobbie. Bobbie threw up the deer rifle cross-wise in both hands to fend the thing off, his mouth wide with revulsion. The corpse struck him and sent him staggering backward down the slope.

Alex sprinted for the skyline.

Dorothea stood by the living room window, looking out. Soon she could celebrate a lucky escape with Ricky while Joyce or Cindy or Sarah or even Ellie jounced along in the truck between the two Cantu boys, trembling with fear. Right and proper, according to the judge. Think of it this way: you may not be more worthy of survival than any of them, but are you less so? That’s what the judge would say. He warned you. Save your life; save your talents; take no risk. Listen to the judge; he knows. But Heavens, how she hated him. Without him, perhaps she would have had the courage to break out of this rictus of fear.

It’s all going wrong. It will never be right again. Like a great black muffled bell, the future tolled in her mind: an endless round of self-loathing and self-justification after the word came back, this child or that one got killed or wounded or psychologically maimed, even, in her place. And there was not a thing she could do to prevent it, because the judge had spoken to her animal core that did not want to be hurt, let alone die. The judge had told her what she wanted to hear.

Something moved on the patio, catching her eye: Roberto, staring up the hillside, flinging the shotgun up to fire.

“The fucker’s getting away!” he screamed.

On the hillside, Mars’s carcass slid sideways into a rock. Bobbie scrambled for the rifle he had dropped. Alex lunged toward the crest of the hill. Astonished, Dorothea saw Alex’s angular shoulders and elbows and big, driving feet all thrusting desperately for safety over the skyline.

Now.
This
moment.

Roberto’s mouth twisted into a tiger snarl. He hunched over the gunsight, and the muzzle tracked Alex’s pounding progress up the hill. The hammers cocked with a fat, rich sound. Alex seemed to run so slowly.

How simple. There was no question after all. We do not permit children to murder children. Dorothea moved.

A howl of protest filled her mind, and something plucked violently at her left hand as she dashed outside. She threw herself across the patio and upon Roberto as if smothering a live grenade. Thunder enveloped her and something hard hit her a swift double wallop in the side and flung her down.

A weight stamped down on the bricks, right next to her face: Roberto’s heavy boot as he arched above her with the empty gun swinging down to brain her where she lay. She could not hear his voice, but she could see him: a child bringing death.

The stock of the shotgun crashed down near enough to fill her nostrils with brick-dust, and then down again on the other side. Roberto grunted with the furious effort of his blows. Yet she was still alive, unable to draw breath to laugh with at the absurdity of it. The stock of the shotgun split with a sharp sound, and Roberto bellowed something in Spanish and slammed the gun like a baseball bat against the trunk of the big cottonwood. The wrecked gun flew out of his hands and clattered onto the table, the bench, the flagstones.

Up on the hill Bobbie shouted, “Should I follow him?”

“What the fuck for, you dumb asshole?” Roberto howled back, his hands clenched together. “He’s gone, that’s all, you retard, you let him go!”

Dorothea could not breathe. Not shot, she was sure — the recoil, of course. The stock had kicked her a good one. Can’t breathe. Does Ricky feel anything like this? Or Blanca, having an attack? Jesus.

She fell thankfully into a darkness in which she did not need to breathe.