Marvel and a Wonder (33 page)

* * *

In the front of the age-old Winn-Dixie, its white facade withered and peeling, there were two children riding the mechanical carousel, a boy and girl, brother and sister, the boy on a green frog, the girl on a silver pony. “Again,” the little girl kept saying. The mother, wanting to avoid another blowout with her husband—who was busy spending Saturday afternoon in bed trying to get sober—decided to take as much time with the grocery shopping as possible. She searched through her purse, found another fifty cents, and slipped the coins into the machine, the two children galloping on with joy, their faces pink with excitement. The mother lit a menthol cigarette and wondered if she ought to call her sister. Deb always had an extra room. She held up a tentative finger to her sore face, thinking on it. Her left eye was turning blue-black, and no matter how much makeup she used, it was obvious what it was. She sighed, took a long drag on her menthol, and saw something moving fast between the rows and rows of parked cars, something fearsome and unequivocal, like a vision, insistent in its own opulence. She turned and stared at it full-on, a white horse, unsaddled, unbridled, clambering directly across the Winn-Dixie parking lot at a steady bolt, its hooves striking the pavement with a metallic ring. The children gaped, all three of them, this small forlorn family, for a moment at least, feeling blessed.

* * *

It did not matter if she was lost: the important thing was to keep moving. Anyway, it was better than just standing around waiting to get killed. The girl Rylee had thrown her gold high heels into a gutter a few miles back, finding it easier to go barefoot. Then she found a phone booth, searching for the bus station’s address, tearing the soft yellow page from its binding. The bus stop was on Charlotte Avenue, somewhere on the other side of town. Already the sky had started to go dark. She walked on, sure she could feel the black pickup pulling beside her.

About seven miles from the bus stop, the girl stopped tumbling forward on her bare feet and remembered she was broke. She had no money and nothing on her worth anything. She had pawned whatever jewelry she had back in Arkansas and that asshole Brian had pocketed the small roll of bills they had gotten for it. She did not think she could do what she knew she might have to for the bus fare, though she had done all sorts of things in the past, as recently as a few days ago with the dealer they had met in Marked Tree, the old biker with prison tattoos and sun-spotted hands, who, at once, decided Rylee would be part of the transaction. He had been in two different federal institutions, or so he claimed, not bothering to take off his pants. When he placed his pockmarked hands on her bare shoulders, the age showing around his wrinkled eyes and mouth, it occurred to her that what was happening was kind of like incest. Moments later, when he ejaculated, it was quick and violent, though what was lasting was not the sensation of his bristly flesh, but the oddly grateful look Brian gave her when he returned to the motel room. He was a fucking coward and did not care for her, which she realized as soon as she met his face.

It seemed she had been surrounded by men her whole life who were weaker than her and she felt she would never get out from under them. So there, in the middle of River Hills Drive, her left foot stiff and scraped pink, she rifled through her purse, then her wallet, then purse again, searching for a rolled-up bill, a flattened twenty. But there was nothing, nothing but a silver dime and two dull pennies, which she had known was all there was before she had even bothered to look. She stared down at the coins, feeling betrayed. The bus ticket was thirty dollars, which was twenty-nine dollars and eighty-eight cents more than she had. She spat at the ground and slung the purse over her shoulder, trudging on.

At the next intersection some black children were playing ghost-in-the-graveyard in the middle of the street. It was a game she faintly remembered: a girl was standing with her eyes closed, hands folded over her face, while the other children ran in all directions, flinging themselves under porches, over railings, underneath parked cars. Rylee stood there smiling dumbly as the young girl counted out loud, “Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred!” The girl dropped her hands from her eyes and was startled to see Rylee standing there, her face caked in dirt, smudged makeup across her eyes, a bruise appearing along her chin, barefoot, reaching out desperately from the half-shadows of fallen darkness. “Help me,” Rylee hissed, her mouth cracked and dried, “help me,” to which the young girl screamed, quickly disappearing behind the corner of a small house. Rylee paused there, feeling the exhaustion and emptiness of the last nineteen years of her life, and sat on the front steps of the nearest house, peering down at her dirty toes.

A few minutes later, two girls approached, both under the age of ten and wearing the same handmade outfits—blue dresses sewn from a grubby floral pattern. They walked up to Rylee without suspicion and asked her what was wrong and what had happened to her shoes and where did she live. Rylee stared at them and began to lie, knowing that in doing so they would never trust a white stranger again. She told them she was a country singer who was lost. She told them her tour bus had broken down. She told them back home, in Texas, she had two mansions, each with its own guitar-shaped swimming pool. She told them she had dozens of gold records on her bedroom wall and she could send each of them one if they wanted. She told them she only needed a few cents so she could call her bodyguards who were probably worried out of their minds about her. When the two sisters came back with their mother’s vinyl pocketbook, searching through it for change, Rylee snatched the wallet from the eldest girl’s hands and took off running faster than she ever had. She did not feel shame at that moment, only regret, regret that what she was now running toward was nowhere near as lovely nor welcoming as what she had said.

_________________

As they sped across the Southern city, the boy glancing out the window at the crumbling midcentury facades lined with decay—the square-shaped brick buildings, the once baroque electric signs advertising joints and jukes that no were longer open—he lost track of the one thing his grandfather had warned him of. The truck wound down, its engine having seized up, the vehicle coasting to a stop just past the intersection of Lufton and Gatewood. The boy stared at the wheel as if it had somehow failed him, the grandfather groaning awake with a snort.

“What is it?”

Quentin, unsure, knowing and not yet knowing—not wanting to know, as it would mean he had failed his grandfather—tried the key again and again, the ignition switching on and off, though the truck refused to start.

“I don’t know. It just died on me.”

“It did, did it? When was the last time we filled it?”

“I dunno. While we were on the highway.”

“That was awhile back, wasn’t it?” The grandfather looked the boy directly in the eye.

Quentin glanced down at the gas gauge with a cumbersome feeling of guilt. “It says there’s still some in there, but I guess maybe we ran out.”

The old man reset the white hat upon his head. “Well, son, I’d have to say you’re probably right.”

Embarrassed, the boy asked, “What do we do now?”

“We got to find some gas.”

“There was a gas station a couple blocks back.”

“You grab the gas can from the back. We’ll have to walk that way and see if it’s where you remember it.”

“No,” the boy said, feeling brave suddenly, hoping this show of courage would somehow make up for his mistake. “I’ll go. You wait here. Just in case.”

“In case of what?” the old man said with a short smile.

“In case someone tries to take the truck. In case someone tries to tow it or something.”

The grandfather nodded, proud of the boy, of the shape he was trying to make of himself at that very moment. “You got money?”

The boy said he did, then turned to meet his grandfather’s eyes once more, and hurried off. He snatched the metal gas can from the bed of the pickup and ran as fast as he could in the direction of where he thought he had seen a gas station a half-mile back.

* * *

Rick felt faint, his head swooping down, heavy lids folding over his eyes; he pulled to the side of the road, feeling sick to his stomach, the hood of the pickup before him seeming soft and fluttery. Good God, that girl had done a number on him. He looked up from his tingling hands, out the passenger-side window, to where a couple of black kids were playing cops and robbers. As the pickup slowly trailed past, they all froze, watching it go, suspicious of the man with the bleeding eye, a red oil rag held up against the left side of his face. A boy, no older than five or six, braver than the rest, raised a cap gun—a chrome-painted, six-chambered Colt—aimed at Rick, and fired three times, each shot echoing with a sharp, burnt-smelling explosion. Rick took it as a verdict that the boy—like all children and some keen, undomesticated animals—had an innate sense about these kinds of things: life and death, morality and immorality.

The boy had seen something in Rick West’s face and had fired three times to try to ward off the sudden appearance of evil. But it could not be forestalled, not like that, not ever maybe. The pickup coasted on, Rick turning away from the children, feeling unmoored, feeling as he did when he was a young man in the navy, as he did the day he awoke to find himself in the brig with the dried flakes of some dumb Filipino’s blood in the webbed crevices of his hands. He decided in that moment, clutching the steering wheel firmly in his hands, that if he found the horse, he would take it and run. He would find it, get his eye fixed, see if he couldn’t chase the girl down, drop her into a ditch somewhere, and sell the horse for whatever he could get.

* * *

Among the Mexicans awaiting work that Saturday in the Home Depot’s parking lot was Reynaldo, who tried to look unconcerned. He leaned up against a parked car and ate a green apple, the last remains of his lunch. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the borders of the parking lot for the white man from the suburbs—a kind, older stranger who had hired him three times this week already—but it was now past four o’clock.

“
A donde su güero?
” his compatriot Luis asked.

Reynaldo shrugged his shoulders and glanced around, still hoping to see the silver station wagon once again loaded up with landscaping supplies—shovels, dirt, black plastic trays overburdened with mums, sweet potato vine filling the backseat. The white man told Reynaldo he was selling his house—the man was a professor and was getting a divorce; he had been cheating on his wife with a student and his wife had found out—and so he was now trying to clean the place up before he put it on the market. The white man talked all day, incessantly, some of which Reynaldo understood, most of which he did not. But he paid Rey incredibly well and even fed him, pork one day, flank steak another. He had even given Reynaldo a book, a cloth-bound hardcover edition of
Don Juan
, the book written entirely in English. Though the words themselves were mostly indecipherable, Reynaldo still found the gesture profound. In the little room he kept in his sister-in-law’s house, the book had been prominently placed beside a photo of his wife Luisa and their two children.

“
A donde su güero?
” Luis asked again, this time elbowing Reynaldo roughly in his ribs.

“
No se,
” Reynaldo whispered, holding the side of his hand up against his eyes. “
Es tarde
.” Just then he saw something silver cross his line of sight. His mood lightened, thinking it was the white man’s car, the small globes of sunlight obscuring the actual shape of the thing, before Luis and some of the others began to whistle, “
Caballo! Caballo!
”

It was a horse.

The others started to clap their hands and stomp their feet, the horse speeding past them in a quick, wide circle, then starting back again, its hooves hitting the pavement with an irregular metal clang. It passed in front of him once and looped around, Reynaldo making himself very still, shushing the others around him, the horse sniffing the air with its great pink nostrils. A shiny, silver-embellished bridle was set upon its long snout. Rey blinked and slowly held out the half-eaten apple. The horse paused, turning its head wide, then circled back, sniffing at the air once more. Rey took a cautious step forward, the horse snorting a little, the apple still held aloft, Rey pausing to take in the animal’s smell, its nervous, spasmodic quickness. The horse moved forward cautiously, snuffling the stranger’s palm, taking the apple into its jaws with its yellowed teeth. Reynaldo slowly extended his other hand, placing it along the side of the horse’s head.

The rest of them waited in the parking lot, watching. Reynaldo kept his hand placed against the animal’s throat, gently stroking it, whispering what sounded like a song. Soon he was walking slowly, step by step at first, the animal following him, snuffling his hand again. Then he took hold of the bridle. He was now leading the horse from the parking lot, thinking if he could only keep it from getting excited and walk it the five or six blocks to his sister-in-law’s yard, then all of the waiting, all of the fear—the long walk into San Diego, lying there on the beach, robbed by a group of fellow illegals he had traveled with, leaving his mother and wife, his children, his town, all of it—all of it would have been worth something.

* * *

On the other side of an abandoned lot was the gas station, bordered by the shadow of the highway. The boy saw there was no way to reach it except by climbing over a wire fence which was ringed at odd, haphazard intervals with heavily banded barbed wire. The street he had been walking along had become a dead end, an empty block of rectangular, tomblike warehouses and deserted factories, windows punched out. Posted along the wire fence were three different signs that warned against trespassing. The boy studied them, looked around, saw he was alone, then tossed the empty metal gas can over the ridge of the fence. It landed on the other side with a pitiful clang. He unbuttoned his jacket, struggled to the top of the fence, placed his jacket over the rusty-looking barbs, and heaved himself over, already sweaty, already out of breath. He fell on his knees in the dust on the other side and wheezed a little, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. He stood upright and noticed a strange-looking shack pieced together by slats of discarded boards, unwanted scraps of wood paneling, drywall, and warped two-by-fours. He waited a moment to be sure no one was around and then leaned over, grabbing the gas can, and unhooked his jacket from the fence. He walked quickly, scraping his shoes in the dirt, feeling proud, lips pursed, loudly whistling the theme from
Donkey Kong
to himself.