As Shel turned back from the squatter camp she noticed that Cesar had wandered toward the house. He stood before one of the windows, turning his head at various angles, as though appraising his birthmark. She imagined him hoping it had grown smaller since the last time he’d inspected it.
“You speak English well,” she said, trying for his attention.
He turned away from his reflection. “You talk a lot,” he said.
“My head hurts. I’m trying not to think about it.” She worked up a comradely smile. “So, anyway, like I said, your English, it’s impressive.”
“I’ve been here awhile,” he said, stopping a couple yards away.
“You sound like a guy I knew once in TJ.”
“Spent some time there as well,” Cesar acknowledged.
“Sending
He shot her a look of sly fascination. “It’s a living. I came over the fence a few times myself.”
Near the chicken pen the squatter children stopped pelting the birds with acorns and started in on each other. They shrieked and giggled. It was murder.
“You didn’t grow up there, in TJ?”
He shook his head. “Chalco.”
“That’s-?”
“A shithole,” he said. In a gentler tone, he added, nodding toward the squatters, “Down near Mexico City. Where people like that come from.”
This was going well, Shel decided. It took some effort for her not to blurt out: Save me.
“Poor Mexico,” she intoned, quoting a saying she’d once heard. “So far from God. So close to the United States.”
Cesar laughed. Beyond him sunlight flared across the easterly hills, creating a horizon that was achingly blue, stippled with clouds flecked gold and red by the rising sun.
“Your friends,” she went on, “they seem to enjoy their work.” It wasn’t till after she’d said it she remembered it was something Dayball had said about himself.
“Dumbfucks.” Cesar cleared his throat and spat. “Worthless. Stupid.”
“They’re large, though. It’s a talent.”
“They think in pictures. Believe in death rays and sorcerers. All spine and no brain.”
“So why are they in there instead of you?”
He turned and looked at her, like he was trying to figure out if he’d been insulted.
“I mean,” she added, “they get to stay in there and play rough. You have to sit out here and be a human being. With the woman.”
Cesar drew on his cigarette and exhaled.
“What’s that mean?” Shel asked.
“The one who goes to town loses his seat.”
He glanced down at her, checking to see if she understood. The anger in his eyes mingled with a breathtaking despair. I wonder, she thought, if anyone’s ever told him he’s depressed.
“How exactly,” she asked, “did you go to town?”
“I was the one who worked up the deal with your old man. Frank the Mess.”
He sighed bitterly and shook his head. She fought an impulse to smile. An outcast, she thought. It seemed strangely hopeful.
“That picture you got from Frank,” she said. “Could I see it?”
Cesar reached inside his jacket, withdrew the snapshot, and handed it to her. It was a picture taken of her by Frank a year or two ago. She was sitting at a table in some forgotten place they’d rented. There was nothing remarkable about the photograph, just one forgettable moment in one forgotten day in a string of over a thousand such days. He’d just shown up and said, “Smile.” She looked weary.
“Why’d Frank give you this?”
“He didn’t,” Cesar said. “We found it in his car.”
She cocked her head. “When?”
“Last time we met, before that fucking disaster out at the junkyard.” He spewed a long trail of smoke and with a flick of his finger sent his cigarette butt flying into the weeds. “I sat with him at the hotel, in the bar, we ran through what was supposed to happen. While he was in with me, Humberto and Pepe, they searched his car.”
Please, Shel thought, no more names.
“Why?”
“He was acting strange.”
“He was drugged.”
Cesar cackled. “Now we know.”
“If you knew he was drugged- ”
“The fact he was loaded, that wasn’t the problem. Half the motherfuckers you deal with anymore are tanked. He just seemed”- he spread out his hand, waving it slowly back and forth- “a little more out of touch than loaded could explain.”
“He was scared.”
Cesar shook his head. “Not scared so much. More like, I don’t know, like nothing would have made him happier than if I’d just stood up at the table and shot him. Get it fucking over with.”
I think I know how he felt, Shel thought. She turned the picture over. On the back, in pencil, Frank had written her name. As though he needed to remind himself who it was on the other side. Cesar reached over and tapped with his finger at the penciled lettering.
“When we found this, Humberto, Pepe, know what they said? ‘Shel- what, like the oil company? A real gusher. Ready to drill.’ ” He withdrew his hand. “Laughed like fucking idiots.”
The sound of another motor came from down the gravel road. A flatbed truck hurtled past the squatter camp down the long line of eucalyptus trees. It arrived in a swirl of black exhaust. Two men rode in the cabin, two more stood in back. As it pulled up behind the Mercedes, Shel spotted within the wood slat framing of the flatbed two bathtubs- the old-fashioned kind, deep, with claw feet. Beside them were several bags of cement.
Cesar put his hand gently under her arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a little further away.”
He lifted her off her perch on the rock and guided her to an oak tree twenty yards from the house. Still barefoot, she walked on her heels, trying to avoid the brown spiny leaves scattered across the yard. When they got to the tree he leaned her up against the trunk, checking to be sure the flatbed couldn’t be seen from there.
Two, she thought. One bathtub for Snuff. The other for Dayball. They’d dump the bodies in, fill the tubs with cement, let it dry, then take them out by boat into the strait, or the deep channel of the Sacramento, wait till dark then drop them over the side, never to be found. Not three, she thought, two. They’re not going to kill you. Not yet.
A gust of wind rustled the oak branches. A flurry of tiny brittle leaves swirled to the ground.
“Such a weird tree,” Cesar said, trying to make conversation. “Come winter, it never loses all its leaves. But it never keeps them, either.”
Shel offered him the photograph. “You can have this back,” she said.
He looked at it in her hand, puzzled, then finally took it. Glancing at the picture and then at her, he said, “Almost didn’t know it was you.”
He was referring to the bruises and cuts on her face. “I’ve looked better,” she admitted.
“Who did that to you?”
“Guess.”
Cesar shook his head in disgust and put the picture back in his pocket. “Fucking loser,” he said. “Anybody could have seen that.”
“Except you and me,” she remarked. “We went to town and lost our seat.”
He chuckled acidly, started to say something then checked himself.
“What else did you find in his car besides my picture?”
“Nothing,” Cesar said. “At least, nothing that would have tipped us off we were going to get fucked.”
“But you were suspicious.”
