Lake Overturn (33 page)

“Why don’t you include pictures of her in the slide show? There’s pictures of all the other missionaries.”

“I . . . She is in the pictures.”

“Yes, one, the group photo, in the back row.”

“Connie—”

“Because when I was thinking about it the other day, when I was told you were engaged, I figured, either you didn’t mention it because you’ve lied to her, and you’re not going to marry her”—Connie paused to allow Bill to weakly shake his head—“or because you thought the women in the groups we visited would be more likely to give money to a handsome single man.”

Bill took a deep breath. “In my prep meetings with the missions board, before I came to Idaho, they suggested that might be the case.”

“I find it difficult to believe that the missions board would have you lie—”

“I don’t like that word, Connie.”

“I don’t like it either,” she hissed, aware that if she spoke as loudly as she wanted to, the other aides would hear. “A Christian
shouldn’t
like it. A Christian shouldn’t
do
it. I find it difficult to believe that the missions board would have you
lie
to women’s groups in order to make a few extra dollars.”

Bill lifted his chin. “A few dollars, in my line of work, can save a life.”

Connie raised the back of her left hand to face Bill, and pressed her wedding ring with her thumb. “I still wear it, Bill, twelve years later. When I take it off to do dishes, my fingers don’t fit together anymore. Why? Because I follow the Bible
to the letter
. God says to follow it to the letter, or not at all. You know the verses. You teach them!”

“Everything I do,” Bill said with an angry tremor, “is for my mission. Everything. It is the whole of my life. I live for those disadvantaged, uneducated people, Connie.”

“And for Janey Tanner. Don’t forget her.” Connie couldn’t help it—tears were rising. “Well, I’ll pray for you, Bill. And for those disadvantaged, uneducated people, and for Janey Tanner.” Connie walked around the counter, sat down at the desk, and sheltered her eyes. When she looked up again, Bill was gone. She took his gift and dropped it into the wastebasket.

T
HAT NIGHT, ENRIQUE
plucked the trees from the model one by one, quietly and without much fuss, so his mother, who was in the kitchen talking on the phone, wouldn’t ask what he was doing. Bits of green-painted newspaper came away with the trees like clumps of grass; these he tore off and rolled into balls. Then he peeled the glue from the trees’ flat bases. He did the same for all the houses, the school, and the church. The rubbery blobs of glue came off clean, sometimes showing reversed impressions of the tiny words that were printed on the bottom of the pieces—the name of the manufacturer and an identifying number. Then Enrique took all the trees and buildings to his bedroom and lined them up on top of his bookshelf. After Christmas vacation he would return them to their boxes, which he had kept in the closet, and give them back to Mr. Hall. At last he would see what this man looked like—how his eyebrows would lift upon finding his mistress’s son here, not to challenge him but to return his gift. A chagrined shadow would pass over the man’s handsome, weathered face before he threw back his shoulders and straightened his tie and said, “Thank you, young man,” accepting the handles of the shopping bag. Then Enrique would jump on his bike and jet off before Mr. Hall could say another word. Mr. Hall would turn, walk down the echoing hall, and open a large, ornately carved door to reveal his special room: a wonderland of cities and forests, clock towers, Ferris wheels, all ticking and whirring mechanically as trains dashed in and out of mountains riddled with tunnels like Swiss cheese.

Returning the gift would be an experiment, just as this submission to Miriam’s new vision of the model was an experiment. With a little scientific distance, things that would otherwise hurt became, simply, interesting.

Chapter 17

O
h my
God
,” said Penny, Miriam’s cousin who was visiting from Stockton, California, for Christmas, and who apparently didn’t mind taking the Lord’s name in vain. “You’ll never guess what I found over there.” She had just returned from the dark, cobwebby recesses of the cellar to the lighted corner where Enrique and Miriam had set up a pile of bean bags and old, mildew-smelling sofa cushions.

“What?” Miriam asked.

Enrique barely looked up from the little papier-mâché palm tree he was painting.

“Babies’ brains!” From behind her back, Penny presented a Mason jar in which peaches, halved and brownish, swam in syrup.

Miriam practically screamed with laughter. “Gross!”

Penny threatened Miriam with the jar and spoke in a wicked-witch voice: “Mmm! Babies’ brains.”

“Get those away from me!”

“They’re nutritious.”

“Gross!”

“You guys are so immature,” Enrique said. “They’re peaches.”

Penny’s smile dropped and her head cocked. “No shit, Enrique,” she said.

Miriam and Enrique both looked down shyly. Bad words still stung them a little.

Penny wore a miniature bowler hat on the back of her head, but you would never know looking at her face-on. Her bangs, which were bleached white, had been teased into a rat’s nest that sprang up several inches before plunging over one eye. From under the chaos of her hair dangled an earring that resembled a checkerboard from a dollhouse. She turned and disappeared again into the dark part of the cellar.

“She’s not helping,” Enrique said. The whole reason they had gotten Miriam’s brother to bring the model over here in the bed of his truck was because she had promised a comfortable place to work, and a helpful cousin.

“She’s entertaining us,” Miriam replied.

“She’s entertaining
you
.”

Miriam just shrugged. She tied a knot around a small bundle of straw. She cut the string, then chewed with the scissors into the straw about three inches under the knot. Then she dug a knuckle into the bunch, forming it into a cone: the roof of a grass hut. “Looks good, huh?” she said, holding it up for Enrique.

“Oh my
God
!” Penny cried. She came around the corner and blew the dust off another Mason jar, this one containing stewed tomatoes. “Monkey hearts!”

“Ew!” Miriam cried.

“The tape’s over,” Enrique said.

Penny put down the jar and squatted before the pink portable cassette player she had brought down.

“Put on Cyndi Lauper,” Miriam said.

“That
poser
?”

In the short time Enrique had spent with Penny, she had used this word countless times. It seemed an odd favorite for the girl who posed more than anyone he had ever met. Only yesterday, in the record store in the mall, she had made a game of picking up albums by the bands she liked, and mimicking the dramatic expressions of the weirdos on the covers—a look of shock, all teeth bared: the Human League; a Satanic scowl, chin tucked, eyes menacing: Siouxsie & the Banshees. Miriam had eaten this up, of course.

“I thought she was your favorite,” Miriam said.

“She was never my favorite. She dressed Wave but she didn’t
sing
Wave.” Apparently New Wave was so entrenched in Penny’s psyche that it was no longer “New.” What a poser!

Penny’s rebuke silenced Miriam, who returned to her grass hut. Enrique, too, returned to his work, until, suddenly, the lights went out. Miriam emitted a little shriek. Then the music started, and a flashlight illuminated Penny’s face from underneath. “Let me take your hand, I’m shaking like milk . . .” she lip-synched as she lurked across the cellar’s empty space and tossed her head, “turning, turning blue all over the windows and the floors.” She draped herself across the furnace, snarled, rolled her eyes in their sockets. Her eyelids, which caught the light from her flashlight-microphone, fluttered like moth wings. The effect was more that of a silent-movie Dracula than a rock singer. Miriam cheered. Penny picked up her jar of monkey hearts, cupped it like a lover’s head, and sang to it. “The two of us together again. It’s just the same, a stupid game.” Then, during an interlude of synthesizers and bass, Penny lit the jar from below and swirled the water, creating a homemade lava lamp that cast blobby shadows across the puffy insulation that bulged between the ceiling beams like pink tissue between bones.

When the song ended, Enrique himself rose and turned on the light, worried that Penny would continue to lip-synch the entire record.

“That was totally awesome!” Miriam cried. “Who was that?”

“The Cure.”

“Rad!”

“Did
you
like that song, Enrique?” Penny asked, overly solicitous.

Enrique shrugged, as if the Cure were old hat to him. If Miriam could be ridiculous enough to use one of Penny’s words, he could use Jay’s: “Pretty cool.”

When they had finished their afternoon’s work, one of the farm hands, who was heading into town anyway, gave Enrique a ride to the Circle-K. As he walked through the trailer park and up Robin Lane, Enrique didn’t notice the dusty old Plymouth, so the first indication that something was amiss was the warmth and the cigarette smell that met him when he opened the door. He stepped in and glanced at the thermostat. The X of tape was gone. His first thought was, Jay turned it up. But, of course, Jay was gone. Lina was in the kitchen, seesawing a large knife back and forth on its blade using the heel of her hand, which was covered in a plastic bag. This was how she diced chilies, and she usually only diced chilies on the weekend.

“Mom—” said Enrique, then stopped himself from pointing out that it was warm in here, lest she turn it back down.

Lina looked up from her task, her lips pursed. She nodded toward the living room. “Say hello,” she said.

Of course. Cigarette smell.

The old man—
his
old man—had been so still, bent in places like a rolled-up rug propped in the corner of the sofa, that Enrique hadn’t noticed him. The man leaned forward to park his cigarette in the ashtray (the one Lina kept in the top of the cupboard only for him) and beckoned Enrique by lifting his chin, which bristled with white and black slivers.

Enrique shot a glance at his mother, but she had returned to her dicing and didn’t look up.

“Hi,” Enrique said.

The old man’s long, leathery arms lifted like those of a marionette. Enrique sat down on the couch at a couple feet’s distance, and the man draped his arms around his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. “You been good?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

The man picked up his cigarette. “I been in Nevada, countin’ cattle. They got me countin’ and drivin’ the truck as they throw out hay. And overseein’ the migrants. And I do some of the things they used to have a vet out to do. Hornin’ calves.” The man’s eyes, set like chips of coal deep in his head, turned from Enrique back to the television as he spoke. They were like Jay’s eyes. “One day they had me in the house answerin’ the phone, ’cause their daughter had to drive to Winnemucca to help her aunt or somethin’. Felt weird gittin’ paid for sittin’, but I s’pose that’s what some folks do all their lives. Sit and move papers from one pile to another and git paid for it.”

Enrique was stunned. This was the longest string of words he had ever heard his father speak. Something had shaken loose in him.

And he wasn’t done. “Fella named Warren, he’s the owner, sits on the county commission. You start to see how things work. He gits to own the land and make the rules that he’ll have to follow. He ran for the legislature a few years ago, and probably will again. Then his son’ll run the ranch, and run it by the rules his father and the other owners make. Be able to divert the water and graze the cows wherever they want. Been good to me, though. I don’t fault them for makin’ the rules, just wish I coulda known how things worked earlier, so I coulda had a part, given more to you all.”

As far as Enrique knew, his father had never sent them a dime. “Um, I’m gonna help my mom,” he said.

The lines in the man’s face all tilted up into an inquisitive, perhaps hurt, expression, but he didn’t stop Enrique from leaving.

“He’s talking,” Lina said simply.

“How long is he going to stay?”

“Not long, I’m sure.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“You used to like it when he came.”

“Yeah, back when I was a kid and he brought presents.”

From the firm set of her jaw, Enrique could tell Lina was going to give him nothing, say nothing against her husband.

But inside, Lina had buffered herself with memories of Chuck. The only way to endure the presence of that ghost sitting in her living room was to pick up the love she had been denying herself in the past weeks and pull it around her shoulders like a blanket.

Over dinner the man told about the different ways of horning cattle. He spoke without lifting his eyes, almost as if he were speaking into a microphone hidden in his collar, recording everything he knew and remembered so it would survive him, a condemned man determined to leave a record. In the past, he told them, they swabbed the calves’ heads with acid, which burned into the bone and prevented horns from growing. But it was hard to keep the acid from dripping into the calves’ eyes, blinding them. Now they waited until nubs appeared on the calves’ heads and gouged them out with specially designed clippers. Jorge had learned to use them. His eyes flicked up in pride with this revelation: they no longer had to call out a vet to horn the calves—he could do it.

Enrique had been determined not to ask his father any questions. But now the sweet young calf he had conjured blinked his Bambi-eyes in fright as he was zapped with a cattle prod into the chute with the other calves. Up the ramp he was driven, toward Enrique’s father, who worked handles that led, through madly scissoring machinery, to chomping stainless-steel jaws. “Why do you have to horn them at all?” Enrique asked. “Why don’t you just leave them alone?”

“Imagine you’re one of three hunnerd head of cattle in a field, all jabbin’ each other. You ain’t even fightin’, just stabbin’ your neighbor in the flank when you lift your head. We’d have to patch up a cow every day.”

Enrique’s father talked like any cowboy, not a trace of Spanish in his mouth pushing vowels up into his nose and consonants toward his teeth. Why was it that his mother had her faint accent when she, like his father, had been raised in the United States? Because they spoke Spanish at the Hacienda. But also, Enrique now suspected, she
chose
her accent, just as she chose to speak Spanish to him when he was growing up. She had instilled it in him as his language of comfort and happy bedtime thoughts, the language he loved in. She had hobbled him with it. Only now was he ridding himself of this version of baby-talk by pushing words back on his tongue. No wonder he had felt so lonely since he had stopped speaking Spanish. It was her fault. She should have been speaking English to him from the start.

After dinner, Enrique’s father called him from the kitchen back to the sofa. “Do you know who you’re named after?” he asked.

“Your brother.”

Enrique’s father nodded. Nothing in the man’s face prepared Enrique for what followed. The voice of another man came out of him, a man speaking from the back of a church—singing, even, in vibrato: “He’s dead.” His face froze again, then he opened his mouth and inhaled.

He’s crying
, Enrique realized. The dried-up old man didn’t make tears. A flash of pity in Enrique was quickly overwhelmed by embarrassment. He wanted to get up and leave. And why shouldn’t he? He didn’t owe this man anything. Enrique boldly rose and went to his room.

Tomorrow, the last school day before Christmas break, there would be cookies and gift exchanges. Teachers hadn’t bothered to assign any homework, so Enrique had nothing to do once confined in his room. He took the trees and houses off the bookshelf and arranged them into a little village on the bed. Then he rearranged them into a ring, so the villagers shared a circular park. Downtown, which consisted of the church and the school, stood apart, atop the knoll of his pillow. He noticed the long, late-afternoon shadows his reading lamp cast across his bedspread. He unclipped the lamp and moved it in an arc over his bed, changing the shadows from morning to noon to night.
How’s that, Mrs. Cuddlebone?

Try again, Enrique
. He clipped the lamp to a drawer, to be suspended at sunset, shoved some clothes under the bedspread, and reerected the village so it now occupied the slope of a valley.

Lina, too, went to her room early and sat in bed with a
Reader’s Digest.
Then, when she was just about to turn out the light, the door handle turned, and the door opened to reveal Jorge’s long frame. He bowed his head—was it a gesture of polite submission or one of a man used to running into door frames?

“No,” Lina said, sitting up in bed.

“No?”

“You’re sleeping in the other bedroom, Jorge. Go on.”

“Man should sleep with his wife.”

She shook her head. “You had your chance.”

Jorge stepped in and sat at the edge of the bed. He lay one long hand on the ridge at Lina’s ankle. “I’m sorry about that, Lina. It’s one of the things I been wanting to tell you, that I’m sorry.”

Lina pulled her leg away, swiveled in bed, and stood. She took Jorge by the shoulders and steered him out. “Tomorrow,” she said as she closed the door. He stood there a long time—she could feel him through the door, radiating like heat—before he moved away and she heard the
flick-flick-flick
of the lighter. Not so long ago, she had dreamed of an apology from Jorge, and wished for him to share her bed every night. How far she had come!

The next afternoon Enrique again shut himself in his room with his little village, attempting to make it feel more like a model and less like a toy, more like homework and less like playtime. He was missing his favorite shows because the old man was out there. He and his little village had fallen under siege by an evil troll outside the city wall. How had this come to pass? The answer he came up with followed the loosened logic of the make-believe village: Enrique had unintentionally brought on the arrival not only of his father but of Penny, by opening his borders, by calling a truce with Miriam. The lone wolf must balance the cost of loneliness against the threat of encroachment.