North of Montana

“Apparently he didn’t leave because they ran away and got married. Maybe you didn’t know about it.”

Bitterly, “I knew about it.”

“Why did they wait until four years after I was born?”

We are facing each other squarely now. Poppy is alert and still as a snake.

“Let me take a wild guess.” I am feeling an enormous pressure in my chest, a miserable kind of total body ache. “You threatened my father and behaved like a raving bigot until finally you chased him away.”

“I’m the one who raised you!” Poppy shouts, causing me to flinch. “Damn you to hell.”

I say it again in a stronger voice, matching his: “My father left because you chased him away.”

“He was a lowlife beaner who knocked up my daughter, then this guy”—he pauses to shake his head and almost laugh—“keeps coming back and coming back … for five fucking years. Then he marries her against my wishes and that was the last fucking straw.”

“Maybe,” I suggest, “he fucking loved her.”

“You watch your tongue or I’ll give you the back of my hand.”

“And maybe … she fucking loved him.”

We stare at each other. I do not apologize and I do not back off.

“Let’s get it clear now, Poppy, because the sun is going down. Who was Miguel Sanchez?”

Glaring silence.

“Was he from El Salvador?”

“That was the story.”

“So he wasn’t Mexican.”

“What’s the difference?”

“How could Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey have possibly met in 1958?”

“She was stupid enough to let him sweet-talk her over at Patton’s pharmacy on Montana.”

“What was an itinerant worker doing in a drugstore on Montana Avenue? Buying hand cream?”

“His line to Gwen was that he was taking night courses in management at the high school.”

“So now he’s not a migrant laborer, he’s a Ph.D.”

“I’m the one who raised you.” His fist comes down on the padded arm of the sofa and bounces up.

“You stole me from my parents.”

“What’s the matter with you? Have you been smoking crack?”

I stand up with disgust.

“Your mother was a naive silly girl and your father was trash. You think I wanted a little spic baby in the house—”

“Stop.”

“But you turned out to be more white than brown.”

“So you kept the half-breed bastard.”

“It was your grandmother’s idea, then she passed away. Now I was stuck with the two of you. You think your mother could have managed on her own?”

“She would have gone with my father and had a life, and I would have had my parents.”

“All you needed was me.”

I can only stare at him incredulously.

“You’re as naive as your mother,” he explodes suddenly. “I had to send him away. He would have ruined your lives.”

“So you forced him to leave and made sure he’d never come back.”

“That part was out of my hands. The dumb son of a bitch got himself killed.”

I am silent. “How was he killed?”

“I told you he was a migrant worker. He talked back to the foreman one time too many, got into a fight, and got the shit beat out of him, that’s all.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Your mother was devastated,” he continues in a tight voice. “She never wanted you to know. She just couldn’t see that side of him, that he was a hotheaded arrogant bastard.”

“Where was he buried?”

Poppy scowls. “Who knows, probably in some bean field somewhere. They sure didn’t send him home with military honors.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I’m sick and tired of taking the blame.”

A chill passes through me, then something adjusts in my body like a joint that’s been out of whack for a few decades and subtly shifts back into place. I realize that I had always known my father was dead and that he had been killed violently. I have carried an image of him dying with blood on his face — I’ve dreamed it several times — so somebody must have told me or I must have overheard.

“Nobody’s blaming you.”

“Like hell.”

“Look,” I say softly, trying to be conciliatory, “give me the name of your doctor.”

“Next to the bed, but what’s the big deal?”

He picks up a magazine and lies down on the sofa. The shadow cuts across his body like a guillotine. He puts a pillow behind his neck to prop up his head and the sunset light, that amber light of nightmares, catches the worn blue eyes, which are looking at me now over the top of the page with uncensored hate.

I have nowhere to go so I go into the bedroom. The brown curtains are drawn, the maroon cover on the bed pulled tight. On the bedside table there are several new prescription bottles, a shoehorn, keys, and a bill with the name and address of an oncologist in Palm Springs. When I pick it up, I understand why my grandfather doesn’t want me to talk to the doctor. It means acknowledging that the famous omnipotent powerful Everett Morgan Grey, patrol officer, rescuer of children, protector of the superior race, is mortal.

Under “diagnosis” the doctor wrote, “Aggressive B-cell lymphoma.” Special Agent Charles Gonzalez, a nice man who worked the White Collar Crime Squad, was diagnosed with the same thing. I will be granted the shameful wish that came hurtling out of my subconscious as I lay beneath Randall Eberhardt’s hand: Poppy will be dead in a year.

TWENTY

SINCE WORKING the Mason case I have not been in touch with the guys on the Bank Robbery Squad, stranded out here in no-man’s-land waiting for my transfer, and now that I need someone to talk to, nobody is around. I wander through the bullpen like a lost soul, stopping at everybody’s empty desk, until realizing it is the last Friday of the month and they must be having their potluck lunch. I purge the vending machine of all its vanilla creme sandwiches to have something to contribute, but nobody is in the lunchroom, either. I figure they must have gone out to a restaurant until I notice a bunch of people are crowded into the small conference room with the lights out.

Peeking through the blinds I see it’s them all right, Kyle, Frank, Barbara, Rosalind, Donnato, and Duane sitting around the table with piles of goodies on paper plates. But instead of jokes and lively conversation everyone is turned intently toward the television where a videotape is playing of Ana Grey striding up the steps of the Dana Orthopedic Clinic followed by a half dozen federal marshals in orange raid vests. I had lent Barbara a cassette of the Eberhardt arrest given to me by one of the TV stations, not expecting her to make it the afternoon’s feature presentation.

When I open the door, they are surprised to see me in person.

“Take notes, guys. This is how it’s done.”

I unload my handfuls of vanilla creme cookies, then sit beside Barbara and pick a strawberry off her