When the Bough Breaks (24 page)

“It’s very weird,” said Raquel, “coming back here. In a fancy car.”

“How long have you been gone?”

“A thousand years.”

She didn’t seem to want to say more so I dropped it. At Fairbanks Place she told me to turn left. The Gutierrez home was at the end of an alley-sized twister that peaked, then turned into a dirt road just above the foothills. A quarter mile further and we’d have been the only humans in the world.

I’d noticed that she had a habit of biting herself—lips, fingers, knuckles—when she was nervous. And she was gnawing at her thumb right now. I wondered what kind of hunger it satisfied.

I drove cautiously—there was scarcely room for a single vehicle—passing young men in T-shirts working on old cars with the dedication of priests before a shrine, children sucking candy-coated fingers. Long ago, the street had been planted with elms that had grown huge. Their roots buckled the sidewalk and weeds grew in the cracks. Branches scraped the roof of the car. An old woman with inflamed legs wrapped in rags pushed a shopping cart full of memories up an incline worthy of San Francisco. Graffiti scarred every free inch of space, proclaiming the immortality of Little Willie Chacon, the Echo Parque Skulls, Los Conquistadores, the Lemoyne Boys and the tongue of Maria Paula Bonilla.

“There.” She pointed to a cottagelike frame house painted light green and roofed with brown tarpaper. The front yard was dry and brown but rimmed with hopeful beds of red geraniums and clusters of orange and yellow poppies that looked like all-day suckers. There was rock trim at the base of the house and a portico over the entry that shadowed a sagging wooden porch upon which a man sat.

“That’s Rafael, the older brother. On the porch.”

I found a parking space next to a Chevy on blocks. I turned the wheels to the curb and locked them in place. We got out of the car, dust spiraling at our heels.

“Rafael!” she called and waved. The man on the porch took a moment to lift his gaze, then he raised his hand—feebly, it seemed.

“I used to live right around the corner,” she said, making it sound like a confession. She led me up a dozen steps and through an open iron gate.

The man on the porch hadn’t risen. He stared at us with apprehension and curiosity and something else that I couldn’t identify. He was pale and thin to the point of being gaunt, with the same curious mixture of Hispanic features and fair coloring as his dead sister. His lips were bloodless, his eyes heavily lidded. He looked like the victim of some systemic disease. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up just below the elbows. It bloused out around his waist, several sizes too large. His trousers were black and looked as if they’d once belonged to a fat man’s suit. His shoes were bubble-toed oxfords, cracked at the tips, worn unlaced with the tongues protruding and revealing thick white socks. His hair was short and combed straight back.

He was in his mid-twenties but he had an old man’s face, a weary, wary mask.

Raquel went to him and kissed him lightly on the top of his head. He looked up at her but was unmoved.

“H’lo, Rocky.”

“Rafael, how are you?”

“O.K.” He nodded his head and it looked for a moment as if it would roll off his neck. He let his eyes settle on me; he was having trouble focusing.

Raquel bit her lip.

“We came by to see you and Andy and your mom. This is Alex Delaware. He works with the police. He’s involved in investigating Elena’s—case.”

His face registered alarm, his hands tightened around the arm of the chair. Then, as if responding to a stage direction to relax, he grinned at me, slumped lower, winked.

“Yeah,” he said.

I held out my hand. He looked at it, puzzled, recognized it as a long-lost friend, and extended his own thin claw.

His arm was pitifully undernourished, a bundle of sticks held together by a sallow paper wrapper. As our fingers touched his sleeve rode up and I saw the track marks. There were lots of them. Most looked old—lumpy charcoal smudges—but a few were freshly pink. One, in particular, was no antique, sporting a pinpoint of blood at its center.

His handshake was moist and tenous. I let go and the arm fell limply to his side.

“Hey, man,” he said, barely audible. “Good to meetja.” He turned away, lost in his own timeless dream-hell. For the first time I heard the oldies music coming from a cheap transistor radio on the floor beside his chair. The puny plastic box crackled with static. The sound reproduction was atrocious, the music had the chalky quality of notes filtered through a mile of mud. Rafael had his head thrown back,
enraptured. To him it was the Celestial Choir transmitting directly to his temporal lobes.

“Rafael,” she smiled.

He looked at her, smiled, nodded off and was gone.

She stared at him, tears in her eyes. I moved toward her and she turned away in shame and rage.

“Goddammit.”

“How long has he been shooting up?”

“Years. But I thought he’d quit. The last I’d heard he’d quit.” She raised her hand to her mouth, swayed, as if ready to fall. I got in position to catch her but she righted herself. “He got hooked in Viet Nam. Came home with a heavy habit. Elena spent lots of time and money trying to help him get off. A dozen times he tried, and each time he slipped back. But he’d been off it for over a year. Elena was so happy about it. He got a job as a boxboy at the Lucky’s on Alvarado.”

She faced me, nostrils flaring, eyes floating like black lilies in a salty pond, lips quivering like harp-strings.

“Everything is falling apart.”

She grasped the newel post on the porch rail for support. I came behind her.

“I’m sorry.”

“He was always the sensitive one. Quiet, never dating, no friends. He got beat up a lot. When their dad died he tried to take over, to be the man of the house. Tradition says the oldest son should do that. But it didn’t work. Nobody took him seriously. They laughed. We all did. So he gave up, as if he’d failed some final test. He dropped out of school, stayed home and read comic books and watched TV all day—just stared at the screen. When the army said they wanted him he seemed glad. Cruz cried to see him go, but he was happy …”

I looked at him, sitting so low he was almost parallel with the ground. Swallowed up by junkie-slumber. His mouth was open and he snored loudly. The radio played “Daddy’s Home.”

Raquel hazarded another look at him, then whipped her head away, disgusted. She wore an expression of noble suffering, an Aztec virgin steeling herself for the ultimate sacrifice.

I put my hands on her shoulders and she leaned back in my arms. She stayed there, tense and unyielding, allowing herself a miser’s ration of tears.

“This is a hell of a start,” she said. Inhaling deeply, she let out her breath in a breeze of wintergreen. She wiped her eyes and turned around. “You must think all I do is weep. Come on, let’s go inside.”

She pulled the screen door open and it slapped sharply against the wood siding of the house.

We stepped into a small front room furnished with old but cared-for relics. It was warm and dark, the windows shut tight and masked by yellowing parchment shades—a room unaccustomed to visitors. Faded lace curtains were tied back from the window frames and matching lace coverlets shielded the arms of the chairs—a sofa and loveseat set upholstered in dark green crushed velvet, the worn spots shiny and the color of jungle parrots, two wicker rockers. A painting of the two dead Kennedy brothers in black velvet hung over the mantel. Carvings in wood and Mexican onyx sat atop lace-covered end tables. There were two floor lamps with beaded shades, a plaster Jesus in agony hanging on the whitewashed wall next to a still life of a straw basket of oranges. Family portraits in ornate frames covered another wall and there was a large graduation picture of Elena suspended high above those. A spider crawled in the space where wall met ceiling.

A door to the right revealed a sliver of white tile. Raquel walked to the sliver and peeked in.

“Señora Cruz?”

The doorway widened and a small, heavy woman appeared, dish-towel in hand. She wore a blue print dress, unbelted, and her gray-black hair was tied back in a bun, held in place by a mock tortoiseshell comb. Silver earrings dangled from her ears and salmon spots of rouge punctuated her cheekbones. Her skin had the delicate, baby-soft look common in old women who had once been beautiful.

“Raquelita!”

She put her towel down, came out, and the two women embraced for a long moment.

When she saw me over Raquel’s shoulder, she smiled. But her face closed up as tight as a pawnbroker’s safe. She pulled away and gave a small bow.

“Señor,” she said, with too much deference, and looked at Raquel, arching one eyebrow.

“Señora Gutierrez.”

Raquel spoke to her in rapid Spanish. I caught the words “Elena,” “policía,” and “doctor.” She ended it with a question.

The older woman listened politely, then shook her head.

“No.” Some things are the same in any language.

Raquel turned to me. “She says she knows nothing more than what she told the police the first time.”

“Can you ask her about the Nemeth boy? They didn’t ask her about that.”

She turned to speak, then stopped.

“Why don’t we take it slowly? It would help if we ate. Let her be a hostess, let her give to us.”

I was genuinely hungry and told her so. She relayed the message to
Mrs. Gutierrez, who nodded and returned to her kitchen.

“Let’s sit down,” Raquel said.

I took the loveseat. She tucked herself into a corner of the sofa.

The señora came back with cookies and fruit and hot coffee. She asked Raquel something.

“She’d like to know if this is substantial enough or would you like some homemade
chorizo?”

“Please tell her this is wonderful. However if you think my accepting
chorizo
would help things along, I’ll oblige.”

Raquel spoke again. A few moments later I was facing a platter of the spicy sausage, rice, refried beans and salad with lemon-oil dressing.

“Muchas gracias, señora.”
I dug in.

I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying, but it sounded and looked like small talk. The two women touched each other a lot, patting hands, stroking cheeks. They smiled, and seemed to forget my presence.

Then suddenly the wind shifted and the laughter turned to tears. Mrs. Gutierrez ran out of the room, seeking the refuge of her kitchen.

Raquel shook her head.

“We were talking about the old times, when Elena and I were little girls. How we used to play secretary in the bushes, pretend we had typewriters and desks out there. It became difficult for her.”

I pushed my plate aside.

“Do you think we should go?” I asked.

“Let’s wait a while.” She poured me more coffee and filled a cup for herself. “It would be more respectful.”

Through the screen door I could see the top of Rafael’s fair head above the rim of the chair. His arm had fallen, so that the fingernails scraped the ground. He was beyond pleasure or pain.

“Did she talk about him?” I asked.

“No. As I told you, it’s easier to deny.”

“But how can he sit there, shooting up, right in front of her, with no pretense?”

“She used to cry a lot about it. After a while you accept the fact that things aren’t going to turn out the way you want them to. She’s had plenty of training in it, believe me. If you asked her about him she’d say he was sick. Just as if he had a cold, or the measles. It’s just a matter of finding the right cure. Have you heard of the
curanderos?”

“The folk doctors? Yes. Lots of the Hispanic patients at the hospital used them along with conventional medicine.”

“Do you know how they operate? By caring. In our culture the cold, distant professional is regarded as someone who simply doesn’t care, who is just as likely to deliver the
mal ojo
—the evil eye—as he is to cure. The
curandero
,on the other hand has little training or technology
at his disposal—a few snake powders, maybe. But he cares. He lives in the community, he is warm, and familiar, has tremendous rapport. In a way, he’s a folk psychologist more than a folk doctor. That’s why I suggested you eat—to establish a personal link. I told her you were a caring person. Otherwise she’d say nothing. She’d be polite, ladylike—Cruz is from the old school—but she’d shut you out just the same.” She sipped at her coffee.

“That’s why the police learned nothing when they came here, why they seldom do in Echo Park, or East L.A., or San Fernando. They’re too professional. No matter how well-meaning they may be, we see them as Anglo robots. You do care, Alex, don’t you?”

“I do.”

She touched my knee.

“Cruz took Rafael to a
curandero
years ago, when he first started dropping out. The man looked into his eyes and said they were empty. He told her it was an illness of the soul, not of the body. That the boy should be given to the church, as a priest or monk, so that he could find a useful role for himself.”

“Not bad advice.”

She sipped her coffee. “No. Some of them are very sophisticated. They live by their wits. Maybe it would have prevented the addiction if she’d followed through. Who knows? But she couldn’t give him up. I wouldn’t be surprised if she blames herself for what he’s become. For everything.”

The door to the kitchen opened. Mrs. Gutierrez came out wearing a black band around her arm and a new face that was more than just fresh makeup. A face hardened to withstand the acid bath of interrogation.

She sat down next to Raquel and whispered to her in Spanish.

“She says you may ask any questions you’d like.”

I nodded with what I hoped was obvious gratitude.

“Please tell the señora that I express my sorrow at her tragic loss and also let her know that I greatly appreciate her taking the time during her period of grief to talk to me.”

The older woman listened to the translation and acknowledged me with a quick movement of her head.

“Ask her, Raquel, if Elena ever talked about her work. Especially during the last year.”