From the Corner of His Eye (4 page)

Chapter 6

EXCEPT FOR THE EFFECTS
of pregnancy, Agnes was petite, and Maria Elena Gonzalez was even smaller. Yet as they sat catercorner to each other at the kitchen table, young women from far different worlds but with remarkably similar personalities, their clash of wills over payment for the English lessons was nearly as monumental as two tectonic plates grinding together deep under the California coast. Maria was determined to pay with cash or services. Agnes insisted that the lessons were an act of friendship, with no compensation required.

“I won’t steal the adjustments of a friend,” Maria proclaimed.

“You’re not taking advantage of me, dear. I’m getting so much pleasure from teaching you, seeing you improve, that I ought to be paying you.”

Maria closed her large ebony eyes and drew a deep breath, moving her lips without making a sound, reviewing something important that she wanted to say correctly. She opened her eyes: “I am thanking the Virgin and Jesus every night that you have been within my life.”

“That’s so sweet, Maria.”

“But I am buying the English,” she said firmly, sliding three one-dollar bills across the table.

Three dollars was six dozen eggs or twelve loaves of bread, and Agnes was never going to take food out of the mouth of a poor woman and her children. She pushed the currency across the table to Maria.

Jaws clenched, lips pressed tightly together, eyes narrowed, Maria shoved the money toward Agnes.

Ignoring the offered payment, Agnes opened a lesson book.

Maria swiveled sideways in her chair, turning away from the three bucks and the book.

Glaring at the back of her friend’s head, Agnes said, “You’re impossible.”

“Wrong. Maria Elena Gonzalez is real.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Don’t know nothing. I be stupid Mexican woman.”

“Stupid is the last thing you are.”

“Always to be stupid now, always with my evil English.”

“Bad English. Your English isn’t evil, it’s just bad.”

“Then you teach.”

“Not for money.”

“Not for free.”

For a few minutes, they sat unmoving: Maria with her back to the table, Agnes staring in frustration at the nape of Maria’s neck and trying to
will
her to come face-to-face again, to be reasonable.

At last Agnes got to her feet. A mild contraction tightened a cincture of pain around her back and belly, and she leaned against the table until the misery passed.

Without a word, she poured a cup of coffee and set it before Maria. She put a homemade raisin scone on a plate and placed it beside the coffee.

Maria sipped the coffee while sitting sideways in her chair, still turned away from the three worn dollar bills.

Agnes left the kitchen by way of the hall, through the swinging door, rather than through the dining room, and when she passed the living-room archway, Joey exploded out of his armchair, dropping the book he had been reading.

“It’s not time,” she said, proceeding to the stairs.

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Trust me, Joey, I’ll be the first to know.”

As Agnes ascended, Joey hurried into the foyer behind her and said, “Where are you going?”

“Upstairs, silly.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Destroy some clothes.”

“Oh.”

She fetched a pair of cuticle scissors from the master bathroom, plucked a red blouse from her closet, and sat on the edge of the bed. Carefully snipping threads with the tiny, pointed blades, she turned the blouse inside out and unraveled a lot of stitches just under the shoulder yoke, ruining the front shirring.

From Joey’s closet, she extracted an old blue blazer that he seldom wore anymore. The lining was sagging, worn, and half rotten. She tore it. With the small scissors, she opened the shoulder seam from the inside.

To the growing pile of ruin, she added one of Joey’s cardigan sweaters, after popping loose one bone button and almost completely detaching a sewn-on patch pocket. A pair of knockabout khaki pants: quickly clip open the seat seam; cut the corner of the wallet pocket, then rip it with both hands; snip loose some stitching and half detach the cuff on the left leg.

She damaged more of Joey’s things than her own solely because he was such a big, dear giant, which made it easier to believe that he was constantly bursting out of his clothes.

Downstairs again, as Agnes reached the foot of the stairs, she began to worry that she had done too thorough a job on the khakis and that the extent of the damage would raise suspicions.

Seeing her, Joey leaped up from his armchair again. He managed to hold on to his book this time, but he stumbled into the footstool and nearly lost his balance.

“When did you have that run-in with the dog?” she asked.

Bewildered, he said, “What dog?”

“Was it yesterday or the day before?”

“Dog? There was no dog.”

Shaking the ravaged khakis at him, she said, “Then what made such a mess of these?”

He stared glumly at the khakis. Although they were old pants, they were a favorite pair when he was puttering around the house on weekends. “Oh,” he said, “
that
dog.”

“It’s a miracle you weren’t bitten.”

“Thank God,” he said, “I had a shovel.”

“You didn’t hit the poor dog with a shovel?” she asked with mock dismay.

“Well, wasn’t it attacking me?”

“But it was only a miniature collie.”

He frowned. “I thought it was a big dog.”

“No, no, dear. It was little Muffin, from next door. A big dog certainly would have torn up both you and the pants. We’ve got to have a credible story.”

“Muffin seems like such a nice little dog.”

“But the breed is nervous, dear. With a nervous breed, you just never know, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Nevertheless, even if Muffin assaulted you, she’s otherwise such a sweet little thing. What would Maria think of you if you told her you’d smashed poor Muffin with a shovel?”

“I was fighting for my life, wasn’t I?”

“She’ll think you’re cruel.”

“I didn’t say I hit the dog.”

Smiling, cocking her head, Agnes regarded him with amused expectation.

Scowling, Joey stared at the floor in puzzlement, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, sighed, turned his attention to the ceiling, and shifted his weight again, for all the world like a trained bear that couldn’t quite remember how to perform its next trick.

Finally, he said, “What I did was grab the shovel, dig a hole really fast, and bury Muffin in it up to her neck—just until she calmed down.”

“That’s your story, huh?”

“And I’m sticking to it.”

“Well, then, you’re lucky that Maria’s English is so evil.”

He said, “Couldn’t you just take her money?”

“Sure. Or why don’t I pull a Rumpelstiltskin and demand one of her children for payment?”

“I liked those pants.”

As she turned away from him and continued along the hall toward the kitchen, Agnes said, “They’ll be as good as new when she’s mended them.”

Behind her, he said, “And is that my gray cardigan? What did you do to my cardigan?”

“If you don’t hush, I’ll set it on fire.”

In the kitchen, Maria was nibbling at the raisin scone.

Agnes dropped the damaged apparel on one of the breakfast-table chairs.

After carefully wiping her fingers on a paper napkin, Maria examined the garments with interest. She earned her living as the seamstress at Bright Beach Dry Cleaners. At the sight of each rent, popped button, and split seam, she clucked her tongue.

Agnes said, “Joey is so hard on his clothes.”

“Men,” Maria commiserated.

Rico, her own husband—a drunkard and a gambler—had run off with another woman, abandoning Maria and their two small daughters. No doubt, he had departed in a spotlessly clean, sharply pressed, perfectly mended ensemble.

The seamstress held up the khakis and raised her eyebrows.

Settling into a chair at the table, Agnes said, “He was attacked by a dog.”

Maria’s eyes widened. “Pit bull? German sheep?”

“Miniature collie.”

“What is like such a dog?”

“Muffin. You know, next door.”

“Little Muffin do
this
?”

“It’s a nervous breed.”

“Qué?”

“Muffin was in a mood.”

“Qué?”

Agnes winced. Already, another contraction. Mild but so soon after the last. She clasped her hands around her immense belly and took slow, deep breaths until the pain passed.

“Well, anyway,” she said, as though Muffin’s uncharacteristic viciousness had been adequately explained, “this mending ought to cover ten more lessons.”

Maria’s face gathered into a frown, like a piece of brown cloth cinched by a series of whipstitches. “Six lessons.”

“Ten.”

“Six.”

“Nine.”

“Seven.”

“Nine.”

“Eight.”

“Done,” Agnes said. “Now put away the three dollars, and let’s have our lesson before my water breaks.”

“Water can break?” Maria asked, looking toward the faucet at the kitchen sink. She sighed. “I have so much to be learned.”

Chapter 7

CLOUDS SWARMED THE
late-afternoon sun, and the Oregon sky grew sapphire where still revealed. Cops gathered like bright-eyed crows in the lengthening shadow of the fire tower.

Because the tower stood on a ridgeline that marked the divide between county and state property, most of the attending constabulary were county deputies, but two state troopers were present, as well.

With the uniformed troopers was a stocky, late-fortyish, brush-cut man in black slacks and a gray herringbone sports jacket. His face was almost pan flat, his first chin weak, his second chin stronger than the first, and his function unknown to Junior. He would have been the least likely man to be noticed in a ten-thousand-man convention of nonentities, if not for the port-wine birthmark that surrounded his right eye, darkening most of the bridge of his nose, brightening half his forehead, and returning around the eye to stain the upper portion of his cheek.

Among themselves, the authorities spoke more often than not in murmurs. Or perhaps Junior was too distracted to hear them clearly.

He was having difficulty focusing his attention on the problem at hand. Through his mind, odd and disconnected thoughts rolled like slow, greasy, eye-of-the-hurricane waves on an ominous sea.

Earlier, after sprinting down the fire road, he had been breathing hard when he reached his Chevy, and by the time that he’d raced to Spruce Hills, the nearest town, he had spiraled down into this strange condition. His driving became so erratic that a black-and-white had tried to pull him over, but by then he was a block from a hospital, and he didn’t stop until he got there, taking the entry drive too sharply, jolting across the curb, nearly slamming into a parked car, sliding to a stop in a no-parking zone at the emergency entrance, lurching like a drunkard as he got out of the Chevy, screaming at the cop to get an ambulance,
get an ambulance.

All the way back to the ridge, sitting up front beside a county deputy in a police cruiser, with an ambulance and other patrol cars racing close behind them, Junior had shaken uncontrollably. When he tried to respond to the officer’s questions, his uncharacteristically thin voice cracked more often than not, and he was able to croak only, “Jesus, dear Jesus,” over and over.

When the highway passed through a sunless ravine, he had broken into a sour sweat at the sight of the bloody pulsing reflections of the revolving rooftop beacons on the bracketing cut-shale walls. Now and then, the siren shrieked to clear traffic ahead, and he felt the urge to scream with it, to let loose a wail of terror and anguish and confusion and loss.

He repressed the scream, however, because he sensed that if he gave voice to it, he wouldn’t be able to silence himself for a long, long time.

Getting out of the stuffy car into air much chillier than it had been when he’d left this place, Junior stood unsteadily as the police and the paramedics gathered around him. Then he led them through the wild grass to Naomi, moving haltingly, stumbling on small stones that the others navigated with ease.

Junior knew that he looked as guilty as any man had ever looked this side of the first apple and the perfect Garden. The sweating, the spasms of violent tremors, the defensive note that he could not keep out of his voice, the inability to look anyone directly in the eyes for more than a few seconds—all were telltales that none of these professionals would overlook. He desperately needed to get a grip on himself, but he couldn’t find a handle.

Now, here, once more to the body of his bride.

Livor mortis had already set in, blood draining to the lowest points of her body, leaving the fronts of her bare legs, one side of each bare arm, and her face ghastly pale.

Her dead gaze was still surprisingly clear. How remarkable that the impact hadn’t caused a starburst hemorrhage in either of her exquisite, lavender-blue eyes. No blood, just surprise.

Junior was aware that all the cops were watching him as he stared down at the body, and he frantically tried to think what an innocent husband would be likely to do or say, but his imagination failed him. His thoughts could not be organized.

His inner turmoil boiled ever more fiercely, and the external evidence of it grew more obvious. In the cool air of the fading afternoon, he perspired as profusely as a man already being strapped into an electric chair; he streamed, gushed. He shook, shook, and he was half convinced that he could hear his bones rattling together like the shells of hard-boiled eggs in a roiling cook pot.

Had he ever thought he could get away with this? He must have been delusional, temporarily mad.

One of the paramedics knelt beside the body, checking Naomi for a pulse, although in these circumstances, his action was such a formality that it was almost harebrained.

Someone eased in closer beside Junior and said, “How did it happen again?”

He looked up into the eyes of the stocky man with the birthmark. They were gray eyes, hard as nailheads, but clear and surprisingly beautiful in that otherwise unfortunate face.

The man’s voice echoed hollowly in Junior’s ears, as if coming from the far end of a tunnel. Or from the terminus of a death-row hallway, on the long walk between the last meal and the execution chamber.

Junior tipped his head back and gazed up toward the section of broken-out railing along the high observation deck.

He was aware of others looking up, too.

Everyone was silent. The day was morgue-still. The crows had fled the sky, but a single hawk glided soundlessly, like justice with its prey in sight, high above the tower.

“She. Was eating. Dried apricots.” Junior spoke almost in a whisper, yet the ridge was so quiet that he had no doubt each of these uniformed but unofficial jurors heard him clearly. “Walking. Around the deck. Paused. The view. She. She. She leaned. Gone.”

Abruptly, Junior Cain turned away from the tower, from the body of his lost love, dropped to his knees, and vomited. Vomited more explosively than he had ever done in the depths of the worst sickness of his life. Bitter, thick, grossly out of proportion to the simple lunch that he had eaten, up came a dreadfully reeking vomitus. He was untroubled by nausea, but his abdominal muscles contracted painfully, so tightly that he thought he would be cinched in two, and up came more, and still more, spasm after spasm, until he spewed a thin gruel green with bile, which surely had to be the last of it, but was not, for here was more bile, so acidic that his gums burned from contact with it—
Oh, God, please no
—still more. His entire body heaving. Choking as he aspirated a piece of something vile. He squeezed his watering eyes shut against the sight of the flood, but he could not block out the stench.

One of the paramedics had stooped beside him to press a cool hand against the nape of his neck. Now this man said urgently, “Kenny! We’ve got hematemesis here!”

Running footsteps, heading toward the ambulance. Apparently Kenny. The second paramedic.

To become a physical therapist, Junior had taken more than massage classes, so he knew what hematemesis meant.
Hematemesis:
vomiting of blood.

Opening his eyes, blinking back his tears just as more agonizing contractions knotted his abdomen, he could see ribbons of red in the watery green mess that gouted from him. Bright red. Gastric blood would be dark. This must be pharyngeal blood. Unless an artery had ruptured in his stomach, torn by the incredible violence of these intransigent spasms, in which case he was puking his life away.

He wondered if the hawk had descended in a constricting gyre, justice coming down, but he could not lift his head to see.

Now, without realizing when it had happened, he had been lowered from his knees to his right side. Head elevated and tilted by one of the paramedics. So he could expel the bile, the blood, rather than choke on it.

The twisting pain in his gut was extraordinary, death raptures. Undiminished antiperistaltic waves coursed through his duodenum, stomach, and esophagus, and now he gasped desperately for air between each expulsion, without much success.

A cold wetness just above the crook of his left elbow. A sting. A tourniquet of flexible rubber tubing had been tied around his left arm, to make a vein swell more visibly, and the sting had been the prick of a hypodermic needle.

They would have given him an antinausea medication. It most likely wasn’t going to work quickly enough to save him.

He thought he heard the soft
swoosh
of knife-edge wings slicing the January air. He dared not look up.

More in his throat.

The agony
.

Darkness poured into his head, as if it were blood rising relentlessly from his flooded stomach and esophagus.