Half World: A Novel (35 page)

4

They drove to the last town before the coast. Dickie had traded Bert’s Mercedes for the motel owners’ pickup while the couple was out working in the chicken yard. Two criminal acts, suddenly, that Hannah had been a party to. He had pulled her down into this so quickly. She could see how it happened now. One move, another, and then there was no way of going back.

Dickie steered the truck along the town’s crowded streets. There were people everywhere, drinking, singing, pushing into bars. Mexicans and tourists, some Americans. Strings of colored lights hanging low across the alleyways. The traffic moved slowly, cars and buses and flatbed trucks, horns honking when the revelers passed.

They found a hostel in the center of town. Four floors, with more partiers sitting in the long rows of open windows, drinking, laughing, shouting down to those on the street below. They paid for a room on the top floor. Many of the doors in the hallways were open, young men and women passing through with drinks in their hands. Dickie kept Hannah moving, into their room at the end of the hall.

A single mattress on the floor, a water basin and a pitcher on a table, an open window with a sheet hanging for a curtain. Dickie stood in the window for a few moments; too long, Hannah thought, before he finally pulled the sheet closed. One light, a single bare-bulbed lamp on
an empty fruit crate by the mattress. Dickie emptied the bag from the Tijuana pharmacy. Scissors and hair dye, an electric razor. She sat on the crate and Dickie cut her hair, his hands moving at the nape of her neck, brushing the tops of her ears. She bent over the basin and he worked the dye through. They sat smoking, waiting for the color to set, and then she leaned over the basin again and he stood behind her, poured cool water from the pitcher, rinsing the dye clear, squeezing it loose with his hands. A brunette now, in the mirror, with what looked like a guerrilla cut, the kind of uneven chop she saw in news photographs of overseas extremists, women who left bombs in cafés and busy marketplaces.

Dickie took off his shirt and sat on the crate and she cut his hair, wrestling with the thick tangles, pushing his head one way and then another in an attempt to keep things symmetrical. She finally dropped the scissors and took after him with the electric razor. How many years is this? she said, and he made a sour face. The beard was next, one hand on his chest to steady herself, moving the buzzing machine up his cheeks in long, slow strokes.

When she was finished he stood in front of her in the mirror and they looked at the strange reflections. Lean distillations, reductions of their former selves. Her hands hung at her sides, still tingling from the work and the razor.

Hannah saw a last lock of hair on the crest of his clavicle, the bare skin there. He said something that she didn’t quite hear. Her hands hot and buzzing. She leaned forward into his shoulder and blew.

*   *   *

Once it was dark and they’d changed clothes, he sent her down the back staircase, told her to exit through the alley behind the hostel. Get onto the main street and stay in the crowds. Don’t look back. There was a parking lot they’d passed on the edge of town and she was to go there and wait. If he didn’t arrive within an hour he told her to come back to the town center, find an American, ask to be taken to the police. Tell them everything.

He followed Hannah to the back door, watched while she made her
way to the end of the alley, toward the crowd on the street beyond. He looked back over his shoulder one last time, then started after her.

The street was full and loud, cheers and songs and firecracker explosions like gunfire. Gunfire, possibly. He struggled to keep Hannah in view, her new profile, while watching other faces in the crowd. Looking for Walter or Julian or Sarah. He knew that they must be there, somewhere, that they must have followed this far. This was the only chance of losing them, even temporarily, before they reached the coastal towns. A new haircut, a shave, a separation.

Men held drinks out to him, women grabbed at his arms. He pushed through, watching Hannah, looking for Walter, looking for the man he’d seen back in Los Angeles, the old bald man watching them at the cabaret bar and then back at Hannah’s studio. Someone from Zelinsky or Father Bill, he didn’t know which. He wasn’t sure that it mattered anymore.

A rousing cheer from the crowd and then the sounds of brass and guitar, a man’s high voice, a mariachi band moving through. The crowd parted to make way, cutting Dickie off from his view of Hannah, seeing and then losing her again. Dickie trying to stay calm, moving forward, restraining himself from the impulse to pull or shove, careful not to draw attention. The band appeared, crossed directly in front of Dickie, the trumpet blasts filling his chest, Dickie losing Hannah and then seeing her again for a moment before she was swallowed by the crowd.

*   *   *

She walked with her hands deep in her sweatshirt pockets, her head down, moving through the crush of bodies, bumping shoulders, hips. She tried to think of herself as someone else, with a new face, a new name. Imagining that if she believed it then it would be true, and they would look right through her, she could pass free to the other side.

Horn honks. The sound of a band somewhere behind her. Hannah bumping elbows, chests. At every touch feeling sure that there would be a shout, a hand on her shoulder, at her throat, pulling her away into the dark.

*   *   *

He walked twice around the perimeter of the parking lot. There was a single light high on a wooden pole in the center but the edges of the lot were dark. Full of cars, many with U.S. plates. He didn’t see her and didn’t see her and then something hit his arm, a small stone. He turned and another hit him in the chest and there she was, a few rows away, crouching between cars, watching him, shaking, rocks in her hand.

PART FIVE

Half-World

1

The bum and the March girl had given themselves pretty good witness-protection jobs. Jimmy had almost lost them. The bum looked like a new man, younger, harder, more defined without all that hair. Not unlike the dodgers and deserters already in the coastal towns, kids with military-issue cuts, eyes dark from lack of sleep, too many drugs, fear.

The bum had traded the Mercedes for a pickup, so Jimmy traded the Lincoln, did it the old way, getting out at a stop sign and walking to the green Ford in front of him, sticking his gun in the window.
Vámanos
.

There was a string of towns along the water, with no significant differences between them that Jimmy could see. Noisy, loose, dusty. Bars, tchotchke shops, maybe a movie theater. Churches, more bars. The main streets empty during the day but nearly solid with bodies at night. It seemed a transient place, without memory or history, wiped clean by the ocean wind every morning.

He could be here. Here or somewhere close. This was a place Henry March could live unnoticed.

Jimmy had first seen the station wagon when he crossed the border. Two men and a girl inside, following the bum’s Mercedes and then the pickup. They’d gotten turned around in the first town, when the bum and the March girl changed appearance, and so now they were following Jimmy instead.

Jimmy trailed the pickup, careful to keep enough distance so that the station wagon would stay lost. In the third town he placed the bum and the March girl and when night fell he headed back to the outskirts, parked the Ford, waited.

He’d bought a bottle of something to help dull the pain. The liquid was thin and clear but foul-smelling. The man at the liquor store spoke a little English, said that the expat kids drank it to get rid of hangovers and VD. Jimmy pulled the bottle from the glove box, covered his nose with his wrist, drank. It tasted like it smelled. He put his gun on the seat, lay back, waited.

There was a streetlight about a hundred feet from the car, bright, throwing shadows across the road, into the vacant lot on the other side. He closed his eyes and when he opened them sometime later there were two figures standing beside the car, guns pointed in at him through the open window. Young men, one black and tall, the other white and short and balding, with a mustache that hung down over his mouth.

Jimmy stayed prone on the seat, one hand open in surrender, the other still folded under the back of his head, his fingers now tingling and swollen with sleep.

He said, “Squires send you?”

No answer. He could see another figure out at the edge of the light, pacing. The girl, long-haired and thin.

The mustached kid said, “You’re after Richard Ashby.”

“Is that his name?”

“He said they would send someone.”

“He was right.”

The muscles in their faces jumped as they watched Jimmy, the bones in their gun hands twitching. He couldn’t see their eyes but figured they were on something high decibel.

The kid licked the bottom of his mustache. “The girl he’s with.”

“What about her?”

“You can have Ashby.”

“We’re making a deal here?”

“We can shoot you right now.”

“My guess is you already would’ve done that.”

Jimmy waited, watched them twitch, fingers on their triggers.

“The girl doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “Whatever you do with her is none of my business.”

The kid licked his mustache, nodded. “There it is, then.”

“There it is,” Jimmy said.

He needed to shift on the seat, relieve some of the pressure in his groin, but he resisted the urge. The kids watched him and finally the taller kid sniffed hard. Jimmy wasn’t sure if this was a signal to the short kid or if he just didn’t want to reach up to wipe his nose but at the sound they backed away from the car, shrinking in Jimmy’s line of sight and then gone, just the sound of their shoes on the gravel road. Jimmy pulled himself up by the steering wheel and picked up his gun and watched the three kids jump across the grassy ditch and up into the empty lot. He shook his sleeping hand, trying to get some feeling back, then got out of the car, leaving the door open behind him, crossing the road and stepping down one side of the ditch, up the other, and then out across the lot, the kids maybe halfway to the road on the other side, stopping to light cigarettes with their backs still to Jimmy, his left hand still dead. The kids walking again, Jimmy gaining ground, watching their backs as he followed. He was breathing hard already but still gaining, backlit by the harsh white streetlight. His shadow grew, stretching out across the lot and when the head of his shadow passed underfoot of the kids the girl saw it and turned and Jimmy fired, hitting the short kid in the back and then the tall kid turned and fired wildly into the light and Jimmy fired again and hit him in the chest, banking on the guess that the girl was unarmed or slow to her weapon and he was right and so he shot her in the chest, now no more than twenty feet away. Couldn’t be more exposed in the floodlit empty lot, so he shot them each one more time on the ground, the crack of the gun echoing in the cold air.

Their station wagon was parked on the far road. He opened the backpacks they’d left, found a bunch of Denver Dan’s science-fiction books, some ammunition, baggies of pills. Was about to toss it all back into the
car when he came across a brown paper bundle, something wrapped inside. He spun it loose and Henry March’s ledger fell into his hands.

He stood for a moment, holding the book. He didn’t open it. He didn’t need to open it. He’d seen it so often in his dreams. What this book contained. What these kids knew. What the bum knew, maybe. What March’s daughter knew.

Sixteen years of nightmares. He was shaking. He’d lost most of the strength in his arms and hands. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt fear like this. All because of a little book. This thing’s existence. This man’s existence. What had he been doing, all this time up on the mountain? Not waiting. Hiding.

Jimmy dropped the ledger back into the car. He pulled a couple of sweatshirts from the seat and tied them together. Unscrewed the gas cap, fed one of the sweatshirt’s arms down into the tank. He found a lighter in the glove box and held the flame under the far end of the sweatshirt until it caught. Sixteen years. He stood and watched the flame until he was sure it was strong enough to travel and then he crossed the lot again, past the three kids lying in the grass.

2

They entered one of the coastal towns that Gael had told Hannah was on the bus route. She counted on a calendar in her head, how much time had passed since she’d last known the date. It was Tuesday; tomorrow would be Wednesday, the day Gael had told her that the white ghost rode up to his father’s ranch.

Dickie didn’t want to stay at another hostel, they were too open and crowded, so they drove the streets away from the town center, into long rows of stucco houses, close-set, electrical wires running between them along the low roofs. Some of the houses with dogs chained in the front lots, some with kids playing. Everything beige and orange and brown. Hannah saw a sign in a window that said
Cuarto
, a Spanish word she knew, so she told Dickie to stop the car. A young woman answered the door. There was an older woman working in the kitchen beyond and three children, a boy and two girls. The woman spoke some English, for which Hannah was grateful.

When she started back toward Dickie there was an unfamiliar car there, a green Plymouth hatchback, and it took Hannah a moment to remember that they had abandoned the pickup, that this was their current vehicle.

She got back into the car, closed the door.

“They’d rather rent it for a month,” she said. “A week, at least.”

“Tell her we’ll pay for a week.”

Hannah didn’t say anything and then Dickie said, “What is it?”

“I don’t want to bring something to them.”

“We won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We won’t be here long enough.” He took his eyes from the mirror, watched her until she turned to him.

“Give her the money,” he said. “Trust me.”

*   *   *

They lay in bed, whispering. There was a light behind the house and it shone through the curtains, leaving dim strips of white across the floor, the bed. They could hear one of the women out in the kitchen, the older woman probably, Inés. Clatter of pots on the stove. The others were asleep, Inés’s daughter Esmeralda and Esmeralda’s children, Ramón and Eva and Luz.

“If it’s him,” Dickie said, “he’ll recognize you.”

“He hasn’t seen me in sixteen years.”

“You’re his daughter.”

“So I stay here, with the women and children.”

“Hannah, please.”

It was the first time since they’d left Los Angeles that he’d said her name. They’d come up with other names and had used them checking in to the motel, the hostel, but they’d never said them aloud. They’d spoken to each other for days without names.

“If it’s him?” she said.

“Then I’ll take you to him.”

“And then what?”

“That’s up to you.”

*   *   *

They were up before the sun and Dickie left out the back, crossing the small dirt lot toward the neighbor’s yard. Hannah went out into the kitchen and found Inés washing dishes, looking out the window over the sink, watching Dickie climb her fence.

She had breakfast with the children at the kitchen table. Fresh tortillas with beans and eggs and chorizo. Inés didn’t look at Hannah. She worked at the stove, the sink, chopping vegetables on the counter. Esmeralda came into the kitchen with a glass of milk in her hand and a textbook under one arm, kissed the children, checked the progress on their plates, left again to study in the front room.

Hannah sat on the bed with the book she’d found in Bert’s car. The photograph of her father was there. She’d brought it with her and kept it in the pages of the western. She tried to imagine Dickie moving through the town, riding the bus, looking for an older iteration of the man in the picture. That morning while he was getting dressed, he’d looked at her in the mirror over the dresser and said that he was sorry. She’d asked him what he was sorry for and he’d simply lifted his hands, as if that was the answer to the question. Everything.

The children were playing in the backyard. Hannah parted the curtains, watched for a while. Then she got her camera and went through the back door into the bright morning sun. The girls were kicking a soccer ball and Ramón was riding a purple tricycle. Inés sat on the steps, smoking a cigarette, pushing ash from her apron. Hannah sat beside her and after a while she asked if she could take pictures of the children. Inés nodded and Hannah stood and moved along the fence line, snapping the shutter, and then the children noticed and started mugging for the camera, stretching their mouths with their fingers and sticking out their tongues. Hannah moved in, got down on her knees, encouraging them. Ramón came over and wanted to hold the camera, so she helped him with its weight and he turned it on his grandmother and said,
¡Diga whiskey!
and Inés frowned and waved him off. The girls posed on the tricycle. Hannah stepped away to light her own cigarette, her back to the fence. The children waved and called to her in singsong and she smiled and gestured to the cigarette, patience, patience, but then Luz ran out and grabbed her by the leg, so Hannah stubbed the cigarette on the bottom of her shoe and allowed herself to be pulled back into the yard, into the laughter and ringing of the tricycle bell.