Gods and Pawns (Company) Page 12

  “No thanks, Maria, I’m going up,” he said.

  “How’d you—” she said, before the doors closed and the elevator dropped with her.

  “Well, that was creepy,” she remarked aloud.

  Two ambulances had pulled up outside the lobby, sirens wailing, lights flashing. She barely noticed them, striding back to her car. Somebody was always dying at the Evergreen Care Home.

  She drove too fast heading back into LA, through a lurid purple evening shot with red sunlight. Would there be a thunderstorm tonight? An earthquake? The freeway rose and fell like a serpent, offering her chaotic glimpses of the tumbled city as she sped along. Aztec pyramids, palm trees, Babylonian ziggurats, graffiti cryptic as hieroglyphs along the dry river channels. The air was muggy with wet heat, trembling. Something was out of balance somehow, something portended doom; but that was normal for Los Angeles.

  Still, the feeling nagged at her enough to make her pull off the freeway and stop in at the house on Fountain, to check on Tina and the baby.

  Everything looked normal enough there, if sad: old bungalow set back from the street in its unkempt garden, half hidden by banana trees, rubber trees, hibiscus bushes. Even the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign was beginning to be engulfed by creepers. Again, the reproachful little voice in her memory told her Papi used to keep all this so nice…

  “Everything changes,” she replied stolidly, and made her way up the front walk to the door.

  Tina, to her pleasant surprise, was being Good Tina. She was sober, cheerful, and the house was clean. Philip was rolling about in his walker, chewing on a toaster waffle.

  “Baby, look! It’s Auntie!” cried Tina, and Philip grinned and bounced in his walker. He waddled it laboriously across the floor, right up to Maria’s feet, and stared up into her face. Her heart broke with love and she leaned down to scoop him up, kiss his fat little chin and cheeks. He gurgled, waving his waffle.

  “How’s everything been today?” Maria inquired. Tina, washing her hands in the kitchen, shouted:

  “Really fine, Auntie! I cleaned that little storage room behind the garage. Hauled out tons of old junk Grandpa had hoarded in there. Most of it had been rained on and was just a mess, so I trashbagged it, but there was this one box I thought you’d want to see—” She emerged from the kitchen drying her hands on a dishtowel, and tossed it aside as she stooped to lift a cardboard carton from the floor.

  “It’s mostly old photo albums,” she added.

  “That’s the only box that wasn’t ruined?” said Maria, with a sinking feeling. “Honey, some of that stuff was Mama’s, from the house back in Durango—”

  “It was covered in black mold,” Tina told her firmly. “And we have to learn to let go of the past, like my therapist says. Look, I thought we could sit down and look at the pictures together. You should see Grandma’s old movie stuff! It’ll cheer you up. Want a glass of wine?”

  So she had alcohol in the house again. “Okay,” said Maria heavily, and sank down on the couch with the baby.

  But Tina brought out only the one glass, and though Maria disliked Pink Chablis intensely she drank it, grateful that Tina wasn’t joining her.

  They went through the first album, as Philip babbled and reduced his waffle to eggy bits. This album contained a few black and white glossies, glamorous Lupe Montalban’s publicity shots, including one hilarious shot from a monster B-movie where she was standing at the mouth of a cave, screaming in terror at a robot who looked like a trash can. The rest were family snapshots from the fifties, tiny black-and-white images with white scalloped borders.

  “December 25, 1951. See how new the house looked?” said Tina, smiling and pointing. Maria sighed. Everything looked new, and full of light: what a tidy lawn, dichondra for God’s sake, who had dichondra lawns anymore? And the front porch empty and clean, the hibiscus bushes clipped to neat boxes, the front walk straight and clear. Who were the two little girls on Christmas-morning-new tricycles? Why, the pretty one would grow up to be the famous Isabel Aguilar O’Hara, gracing the cover of Vanity Fair only last year! And the older one? Oh, that was her sister. Maria somebody.

  “That was Grandpa, can you believe it?” Tina shook her head at the handsome young man crouched on the walk behind the little girls. “And Grandma. This was before she got sick?”

  “Years before.” Maria peered at the figure half-shadowed on the porch, smiling from a swing chair. “She didn’t get the cancer until I was a sophomore. You look a lot like her.”

  “Why’d she give up acting?”

  “It was just what women did back then, once they married and settled down,” said Maria. And her career was over, thanks to Uncle Porfirio, she added silently.

  “And here you are at your First Communion,” said Tina, “And that’s my mom, and there’s Grandpa and Grandma with the priest, right? And that’s you on a streetcar with Grandpa somewhere.”

  “It’s not a streetcar. That was Angel’s Flight. It was a funicular railroad with two little cars, one block long. It’s gone now; used to be downtown. That’s your mom and your grandmother behind us.”

  “And this is all of you in Chinatown, I guess, huh?” Tina angled the book in the light. “Or is that Olvera Street? The thing I began to wonder about, looking through these, was: who took the pictures? Most of the time it’s Grandma, Grandpa, you and my mom in one shot.”

  “Uncle Porfirio had a camera. He was sort of Papi’s cousin,” said Maria, setting Philip back in his walker. She thought of Hector, staring up dreamy-eyed at the spot of light on his ceiling, and grimaced.

  “What’s the matter?” said Tina, watching her.

  “Nothing.”

  “Was he the one who was a policeman?”

  “LAPD,” Maria affirmed, getting up and going to the kitchen to pour out her wine. “Plainclothes detective. He got killed when I was eleven. That’s why there aren’t that many pictures later on.”

  “How come there’s no pictures of him?”

  “There’s one,” said Maria, returning. She sat down and paged through the book, past the Christmases, past the trips to Disneyland, past the loving color portraits of the brand-new two-tone 1956 Chevy Bel-Air (pink and black!).

  “Here,” she said at last, setting her finger on a shot taken in this very room. A black-and-white picture of Isabel, seated on this very couch, proudly holding up for the camera the cardboard model she’d made for school: Mission San Fernando, with kidney bean tiles glued on its roof.

  “That’s just my mom,” said Tina. She leaned closer. “Oh!”

  The big mirror had still hung over the fireplace back then. Its surface reflected a glimpse of the breakfast nook, otherwise out of sight through the doorway. A man in a suit could just be seen there, seated at the table, head bowed over a newspaper.

  “He looks…mean,” said Tina at last.

  “He was mean,” said Maria. “He was a real hardass, and he had a face like Satan. But he was a good man.”

  And nothing had ever been the same, after he had been killed.

  Tina, watching her face, said a little sharply: “Look, this wasn’t supposed to get you depressed.”

  You’re telling ME not to get depressed? thought Maria. Aloud she said, “I’m sorry. Rough day at work.”

  “Don’t let it get to you. Things are going to get better now! As soon as we sell this place, there’ll be plenty of money,” Tina advised. “We’ll pay off Grandpa’s medical bills. I’ve even been thinking about buying an RV to live in, you know? Philip and me can go see the world! Maybe move out of California, to some place less expensive, huh? And you could come with us. Leave that crappy job. You could get an RV of your own, maybe.”

  Great, thought Maria, And so, from being property owners, we’ll become people who live in trailer parks. “I thought you were going to go back to school and get your degree,” she said.

  “Well, of course I’m going to do that,” said Tina quickly. “A-and get a job, too, of course. I’m already looking. I’ve
got a friend helping me with a résumé.”

  Her hands began to tremble, imperceptibly to anyone but Maria. She closed the album, got to her feet, and headed for the kitchen.

  “I could really do with a glass of wine, after all that dust,” she called in a bright voice. “You want more?”

  Maria drove through the hot night with her windows rolled up, because she had to scream. She screamed obscenities. She drew out one particular four-letter word over three whole blocks, and only stopped because there was a police car in the lane next to hers at the intersection. Uncle Porfirio had been a plainclothes cop.

  Uncle Porfirio, with his holster and badge. Uncle Porfirio with his flat headstone at San Fernando Cemetery.

  Nothing had ever been the same, after he’d been killed.

  Her father had been an amiable young used-car salesman, an orphan as far as he’d known. Hector’s life was fun, and he had a fast car, and he’d never saved a dime, but he owed nobody anything. Then Pearl Harbor had happened, and he’d enlisted. In some distant tropical hell, every man in his unit had fallen to Japanese machine-guns, and he’d fallen, too; but an unknown Good Samaritan carried him out, and he woke up in a field hospital.

  One of the medics there had the same last name as Hector. They compared notes and discovered they were second cousins. Uncle Porfirio became his buddy, the older brother Hector had never had. They went back to Los Angeles together, after the war was over.

  Uncle Porfirio made Hector get a better-paying job, and save his money. He introduced Hector to pretty Lupe Montalban, who was in the movies. When the studio gangster who had been dating Lupe objected, Uncle Porfirio had had a quiet word with him. Uncle Porfirio was best man at Hector and Lupe’s wedding, and cosigned on the loan to buy the house. Uncle Porfirio became godfather to their two baby girls. Uncle Porfirio rented a room from them, in the attic loft above the porch.

  Uncle Porfirio ran their lives.

  Nobody had seemed to mind that, though, except little Maria.

  Forty-six-year-old Maria watched the light change, realized her heart was pounding dangerously, and pulled off Franklin down a residential street so she could calm down. Groping in her purse for the medication, she muttered, “Goddam know-it-all control freak, that’s what you were.”

  “You promised!” eight-year-old Maria had yelled, “You said I could have a real bike if I got straight As, and I did!”

  “Sweetie, I know we promised,” Hector had said. “But—”

  “But Uncle Porfirio reminded us about that freeway ramp they’re building,” Lupe had said firmly. “There’s already too much traffic on Fountain, and it’s only going to get worse. We don’t want you getting killed.”

  Uncle Porfirio hadn’t said anything, just folded his arms and looked opaque.

  So Maria had never gotten a real bike; and if there had in fact been three fatal accidents on their block in the next three years—one of them Bobby Schraeder from next door, smacked off his Schwinn and into the next world by a delivery truck—it wasn’t much consolation.

  And if Uncle Porfirio had taken them to Catalina Island on holidays, and had bought little Isabel her first set of paints, and had known an infallible way to make the Good Humor man stop exactly in front of their house on every one of the long summer evenings of childhood—still, he was never ever wrong, in any argument.

  The last straw, the ultimate injustice, was when he had refused to let Maria go to Camp Stella Mare.

  “Are you nuts?” eleven-year-old-Maria had yelled. “I worked my fingers to the bone to go on this trip! I sold thirty subscriptions to The Tidings!”

  “I know,” Uncle Porfirio had replied. “I bought twenty of them, remember?”

  “Sweetie, it’s a long way up into the mountains, and the roads aren’t good,” said Hector apologetically. “And it’s a rickety old bus. Uncle Porfirio was talking to the mechanic across the street from the convent, and he says the undercarriage is all rusted out. We just don’t feel it’s safe.”

  To which Maria had responded with the worst word she dared to say, and ran sobbing into the backyard.

  She had been sitting on the roof of the garage, staring out at the cars zooming past on the freeway, when Uncle Porfirio came out to find her.

  “Get down off there, mi hija, it’s dangerous,” he said quietly. “You want to break your neck?”

  “I don’t care,” she snapped. “I hate you.”

  He sighed and walked close, vanishing from her sight under the edge of the roof, and a moment later vaulted up beside her. He had always been able to move faster than a cat. She tensed, expecting him to pull her down, but he seated himself instead.

  “You hate me, so you don’t care if you break your neck. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?” he said. “Come on, mi hija, you’re smarter than that. You’re the smart one in the family.”

  “A lot of good it does me,” she said.

  “Well, somebody has to be the smart one. Somebody has to look out for the others, and stop them from doing dumb things that’ll get them killed.”

  “But that’s always you,” she replied. “You always know better than anybody else.”

  “But I won’t always be here,” he said. “And the family’s going to need somebody strong and smart, right? And it’s going to be you, I can tell that already.”

  “Huh,” she said, not mollified. He was silent a moment, and then he said:

  “You remember that man you told me about, the one who was hanging around the fence talking to Isabel?”

  “The creepy man who said he was friends with Mickey Mouse?”

  “That one. It was a good thing you spotted him, baby; he was a really bad guy. Lieutenant Colton and I took him downtown. He’s back in jail now, where he belongs.”

  “Really?” Maria turned to look at him, wide-eyed.

  “Yeah. But Isabel will be mad that the nice man isn’t there to give her candy bars anymore. You think she’d say you were unfair to tell?”

  “Oh, my gosh,” said Maria, appalled. Uncle Porfirio turned to her, holding her gaze with his cold dark stare.

  “You see?” he said. “And you think it’s unfair that you don’t get to go to camp. But I see danger you don’t notice. When you’re a grown lady, you’ll have eyes as sharp as mine. It’s a dangerous world, mi hija.”

  “I don’t want it to be,” she’d cried, furious because she knew he was right again. She’d scrambled down and run into the house, but the truth of what he’d said lay on her heart like an iron bar.

  A week later he’d been murdered, killed while on an undercover operation. His body had been found sprawled on the concrete of the Los Angeles riverbed, so badly beaten the face was unrecognizable, but his gun and his badge were still with him. Maria had thought: See, he made somebody else as mad as he made me, and was instantly horrified at herself.

  And the week after that the Camp Stella Mare bus lost its brakes coming down a steep mountain road, and eleven little girls and two nuns had gone straight to heaven. Maria felt worse then.

  And four years later Lupe had been diagnosed with cancer, and had endured years of interminable indignities in treatment, with Hector scrambling through layoffs and pay cuts in the meanwhile as he tried to care for her. Maria had given up her plans for college and stayed home to help out. Her mother had died anyway, not soon enough for anyone. Maria stopped going to Church, and nobody noticed.

  And Isabel had grown up, begun dating boys, gotten in trouble, presented her parents with Tina, and run off to join an artist’s commune in San Francisco. Isabel never felt guilty about anything. She had sent postcards to Tina from San Francisco, Maui, New York, Paris, Katmandu, and finally Taos. Tina had, understandably, felt this was insufficient attention from her mother, and had gotten her revenge by becoming a severely depressive unemployed single parent.

  And the untended garden had gone wild, full of black wet leaves. The house had shrunk, year by year more shabby. The cars roared by ever louder on the free
way. Gunfire began to punctuate the night. The Communist Invasion/Apocalypse/Nuclear War never happened, but everything else did.

  And at forty-six, in her rusty Buick Century on a darkened street, Maria Aguilar felt the future close on her like steel pincers. It’s a dangerous world, mi hija.

  “Damn you for having the last word,” she whispered. A man strolled past her car.

  “Hi, Maria,” he said, and kept walking. She sat up and stared after him. A white coat: was he the man who’d been waiting at the elevator in the Evergreen Care Home? Narrowing her eyes, she started the car and drove away, checking the mirror frequently to see whether she was being followed.

  “This really frosts the cake, huh?” she muttered aloud. “A goddamn stalker.”

  But nobody seemed to be lying in wait at her apartment. She locked herself in, went straight to the Tupperware bin in which she kept her handgun, removed it and loaded a clip. Then she made the rounds of all her windows, checking for signs of breaking and entry. Satisfied that all was as it should be, she noticed that the light on the answering machine was blinking again.

  “Maria, this is Rob O’Hara. Apparently there’s been some snafu with your father’s nursing home? You need to get it straightened out. Some woman called here because she couldn’t get in touch with you, and now Isabel is very upset. She can’t paint when she’s upset. You know that.”

  Maria made certain the safety catch was in place before putting the pistol to her head and miming blowing her brains out.

  “So please get it taken care of, whatever it is, and if you need money or anything, maybe we can help. By the way, there’s a wonderful review of Isabel’s latest exhibit in The New Yorker. Calls her our generation’s Georgia O’Keeffe. Isn’t that exciting? I thought you’d—”

  Mercifully, the machine cut him off.

  There was another ambulance in front of the Evergreen Care Home when Maria arrived the following evening. She merely glanced at the corpse being wheeled out, shifted her grip on the case of triple-A batteries and shouldered her way into the lobby. To her surprise, Hector was there, staring out though the glass.