The Hummingbird's Cage (4 page)

The dog was limp, her head lolling. As I stared at her broken body, an incongruent thought raced through my mind:
When a regular shovel won't do the job.

It wasn't my grave I'd been digging, but hers.

Jim halted in front of me, the corners of his mouth working like a tic, his eyes bright. “Take it,” he said, holding the body out.

Numbly I gathered the dog in my arms; she was still warm, still soft. I could feel her firm ribs, so familiar. But there was no trace of the familiar thrum of a beating heart.

I looked at Jim, awaiting orders.

“Go on, stupid,” he said. “Dump it in.”

At once I turned and knelt at the hole. I leaned forward and slid her body into it. I arranged the legs, the head, to approximate something natural. I smoothed her white ruff, my hand lingering, but only for a moment. Then I stood up again.

Jim leaned the shovel back against the shed and wiped his hands on his trousers. “Don't forget to clean this. Use the hose. And oil the blade so it won't rust.”

He nodded at the dog.

“Now cover that up.”

There was no malice in his voice. No exultation. He sounded like any sane man might.

My legs buckled. I was on my hands and knees when he drove off.

On
Jim's last day off, he took Laurel and me grocery shopping. He drove us into Wheeler to the Food Land market, and as a family we walked the aisles, Jim holding Laurel by the hand and I pushing the cart. He has lived in this town for thirteen years, since moving here from some town or other in Utah—the exact location keeps changing when he talks about it—and one way or another he knows everybody. They greet him warmly in the produce section or at the meat counter or by the bakery, and he shakes their hands and asks after the family, the kids, chatting about work, the weather, what's biting right now.

I can tell by their easy banter that they like him. They like us. They don't like me necessarily, because I am so reserved with them, and so very quiet, so deficient in small talk that I give them nothing of substance to form any real opinion. If
pressed, they would probably say there's nothing about me to actively
dislike
. But they do like us as a unit.

As often as not, Jim will take us shopping like this. If he knows he'll be working, and a grocery trip is required, he will make out a list ahead of time and go over the particulars with me so I understand to buy the multigrain bread he likes, for instance, and not the whole wheat. Or the rump roast rather than the round. He will estimate the total cost, including tax, and give me enough cash to cover it. Afterward, he will check the receipt against the change, which he pockets.

Besides the Expedition, we also have a car, an old Toyota compact, which I may use with permission, for approved trips. Before and after his shifts, he writes down the mileage in a small notebook. He alone gases it up, and I know from the fuel gauge that he never puts in more than a quarter tank. He changes the oil himself. Rotates the tires. If it needs servicing, which it rarely does, he has a mechanic friend who does the work on his time off for spare cash.

From outside our fishbowl, Jim is a solicitous husband who takes care of his family. He is a hard worker with a responsible job. Good company with his friends. To women, still a striking man in his uniform.

He's invited out often for a beer after work, a weekend barbecue, but usually begs off. Family time, he'll say. For us as a couple, the invitations come less often and are nearly always refused. Some invitations aren't so easy to turn down—when a colleague retires, for instance, usually a ranking officer—and the occasion must be observed.

Two nights ago, for instance, the sheriff's wife threw a retirement party for a captain with twenty-seven years under his belt. She held it in their lovely home on a southside hill
overlooking Wheeler. The weather was warm and the night was so soft, the party spilled over into their garden—it was well irrigated, green with new sod, landscaped with huge bougainvillea bushes that were heavy with scarlet bracts. I sat in a corner under a trellis of flowering vines, smelling their sweetness, listening to the Tejano music in the background, the bursts of laughter. Lanterns hung over the brick walkway; the boughs of an acacia tree glittered with strings of lights. If you closed your eyes, you could be almost anywhere.

The evening was going so well that a band of Jim's buddies didn't want it to end. After the speeches, the toasts, the cake decorated like a fishing boat, after the sheriff's wife began thanking everyone for coming, they urged Jim to join them as they moved the festivities to the Javelina Saloon, and Jim had had just enough rum and Cokes to break with habit and accept this time.

The Javelina isn't as rough as it once was. I understand that years ago it was a dive frequented by the sort of drunks who pried hubcaps from the cars parked in the business lot next door so they could bankroll their next binge—usually on a cheap, fortified wine called Garden Delight. Then it was turned into a biker bar, with loud Harleys in and out at all hours, straddled by rough-looking riders who wore dark T-shirts with slogans like
Bikers Eat Their Dead
. The bikers scared off the hard-core winos, many of whom turned in desperation to infusing Aqua Net hair spray into big gallon jugs of water. It made a cheap and wretched home brew they called “ocean.”

One winter night, a brushfire ignited behind the saloon and ripped through an adjacent field where a half dozen hard-cores were camped out with their wine bottles and jugs of
ocean. Most managed to stagger off, but one woman couldn't get out in time. She burned alive. They never determined the exact cause of the blaze. It might have been a campfire that the wind had whipped out of control. Or it might have been a lit cigarette deliberately tossed into a patch of dry grass by someone who wasn't about to have his Harley stripped for parts.

Life is cheap in such places, but that brushfire convinced the city council to demand a crackdown on liquor establishments that cater to rough trade. The Javelina closed down. It reopened again weeks later under new management, the Harley decor still in place, because it was too costly to change out. Some bikers still drop in when they pass through town on the interstates. But now its main clientele is mostly working class—not least of all local police officers and deputies looking to kick back or decompress.

I had never been inside the Javelina before, but I'd often seen its big billboard from the east-west highway—the giant wild boar, tusked and razor-backed, charging at some unknown target in the distance.

You could hear classic country music from the parking lot and smell the Marlboro smoke and beer. I could swear I caught a whiff of gunpowder, too. Inside, the music thumped and a small disco ball revolved above couples slow dancing or boot-scooting on a dance floor thick with sawdust and stained with tobacco juice. But the color scheme was still orange and black, and a vintage Harley Davidson, stripped of its engine, hung from the ceiling above the bar.

I felt conspicuous from the start in a dress that was two sizes too big and shapeless from neck to knees. Jim's choice. The other wives seemed to glisten in their tight, pretty, shiny fabrics. In their high-heeled sandals and sling-backs. Hair
curled and tucked just so, or flat-ironed till it streamed like water. Their lips were painted red, mauve and pink, and more often than not parted wide in laughter. They leaned into their men, slapping their shoulders playfully, pulling them to the dance floor. I watched them and my heart began to race, my palms to sweat. I struggled to catch my breath.

“You all right, honey?”

I looked up at a waitress with short champagne hair and gray roots, ruby lips and a look of concern in her eyes.

“Could I have some water, please?” I asked.

“You sure can,” she said. “And what can I get for the rest of you?”

“Hey, Edie, when you gonna throw out that crap?” said an officer named Munoz, gesturing at the Harley suspended from the ceiling.

“Well, hell, I like that crap,” Edie said. “Reminds me of the good ol' days when we had a classier clientele.”

The officers hooted.

“You miss those biker freaks?” snorted an officer named Sandoval.

“I miss their
tips
.” Edie rubbed her thumb and forefingers together. “You SOBs are tight as a frog's ass.”

The others broke into more gales of laughter, but not Jim. He didn't like profanity in women. I thought he was choosing to ignore Edie, but after she left with the drink orders, he grinned and said:

“Well, there goes her tip.”

The others thought he was joking.

The banter went on and on. I watched them as if I were outside looking in. As if I were pressing my face against a cold windowpane, marveling that people inside the bright room
could be so easy with one another, so quick to laugh. I marveled the way I would if I were to parachute into some tribal village in the Amazon or Africa. It had all become something foreign to me. An alien culture. I had understood it once—once, I'd even enjoyed it—but not anymore.

I had lost all facility with people. All interest. All connection.

Worse, I began to look around the table, suspicious, searching their faces for telltale signs. For cracks in those happy, deceitful masks they presented to the world. Wondering what awful things they, too, were hiding.

The waitress returned to hand out the drinks. Sandoval's wife—CeCe, I think—called out: “Edie, when you gonna get a mechanical bull in here?”

Her husband grimaced. “Now, what in the hell would you want with a thing like that?”

“You never know—I might like to do a little bull ridin'.”

He swept his arm around her and grinned. “Well, sweetheart, it's your lucky night.”

In the midst of the guffaws, two big hands came down on Jim's shoulders from behind and a voice boomed, “You son of a bitch!”

Jim recognized it at once; so did I. It was the same deputy who had come knocking on our door one day to help Jim deliver an object lesson. The buddy who had turned a 911 call into a fishing date. His name was Frank.

Jim and Frank shook hands in greeting and slapped each other's shoulders and inquired after each other's wives, as if I weren't there to answer for myself. Then Frank leaned in close and muttered something in Jim's ear. Whatever the news was, it wasn't good. The grin froze on Jim's face. He stared back at
Frank and said something I couldn't hear; then they both moved away to the bar. Jim didn't return for a long time.

Close to midnight, most of the couples at our table had left. I was spent, nursing a single Dos Equis all evening, but Jim was downing Coors after Coors and growing more garrulous. When Edie came around next, he gave a
What the hell
shrug and ordered a double tequila with lime. This was not a good sign.

Munoz shook his head at him. “How in hell you expect to get home, man?”

Jim leaned back in his chair, bloodshot eyes glistening. “The way I always do when I tie one on—lights up, siren wailing.”

Munoz chuckled, but his eyes were wary. He gestured at me and my Dos Equis and smiled. “Joanna here will drive you guys home. She's been a good girl.”

“Fuck that,” Jim snorted. “We'd just end up in a ditch somewhere.”

Crack
.

Munoz exchanged a surprised look with his wife, both clearly uncomfortable now.

Edie brought Jim his double shot. He slammed it and ordered another. “Easy,” Munoz murmured. “Easy.”

When the second one came, Jim smirked and toasted him with it.

Before Munoz could respond—if he had even planned to—he glanced past Jim to something at the other side of the saloon, and his jaw dropped a bit. “Ho-ly,” he murmured. Jim turned to look. So did I.

A woman had walked into the Javelina.

That's the truest way I can describe it, except to amend it
this way: a woman didn't just walk into the Javelina—she commandeered it.

She was tall and lithe and sturdy. As tall as Jim—taller, if you counted the two-inch heels on her biker boots. Her hair was so black it shone blue, and all of it cascaded down her back like a waterfall. She looked to be in her early thirties, and wore jeans and a studded black leather jacket. She stripped off her leather riding gloves as she strode to the bar like she owned the place. The crowd parted to make room.

At her side, leaving no less of a wake, was a big man with salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache. He was also dressed in leather, and gave every impression that he could, should circumstances call for it, eat the dead.

“Is that Bernadette?” Munoz murmured.

And suddenly I understood everything—Frank's muttered message, Jim's abrupt mood shift and his hard drinking, which was so uncharacteristic for him. I had never met Bernadette, but for years Jim had made certain I knew
of
her, usually in explicit detail. She was his girlfriend from long ago, and the woman he most enjoyed comparing me to. Never, of course, in my favor.

I knew she was a mix of Navajo, Hispanic and Irish and grew up on a sheep ranch on the northern end of the reservation, near Cuba. She had left Wheeler—and Jim—before I'd ever come here. As far as I knew, this was her first time back.

Seeing the woman in the flesh, I understood why in Jim's estimation I had always come up short, and always would.

Jim was staring intently at her, glowering, working his jaw. He was breaking into a sweat, his fist squeezing the empty shot glass. Bernadette was speaking with the bartender, who nodded in our direction. She turned to look. If she was put off by
Jim's presence, she didn't show it in the least; she didn't take in my presence at all. She turned her back and resumed her conversation with the man she'd come in with.

Jim stood, and for a moment I thought he intended to leave. I stood, too, and picked up my handbag and jacket. But he took no note of me and headed for the bar. Uncertain, I trailed behind.

He stood staring at her back for some time without speaking. He stared so hard I thought he would bore tiny, smoking holes in her leather jacket. If she knew he was there, she didn't show it.

Finally he said, “I see you're still drinking tequila.”

She took her time turning around. When she did, she surprised me. She barely glanced at Jim at all when she raised her shot glass and answered with a dismissive, “I still have a lot of regrets.”

Mostly, she turned her attention past Jim and on me, appraising me in a puzzled way that became almost sad. Then pitying. I hugged my jacket for protection against that look, suddenly and profoundly mortified.

When she finished with me, she turned to Jim. “I hear you're still on the force. Congratulations—never thought you'd last.” She smiled over her shoulder at her burly friend. “Where are my manners? Allow me to make introductions. Jim, this is my
hombre
, Sam. And, Sam, this is the reason I got my
Jim Is a Prick
tattoo.”

Sam chuckled.

Bernadette leaned back against Sam and stroked his stubble lovingly. “He laughs because it's true.” She turned to Jim. “Want to know where I put it?”