Now that memory had broken free and all Donnally saw when he imagined that place was a little girl molested by her father… a young Mauricio… and a gunshot.
A snowdrift climbed up Donnally’s windshield. He took a sip of coffee and wondered what it was about death that got your mind interlocking things, like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without having the picture to tell you what you’re aiming for, and not even knowing whether all the pieces came from the same box.
What’s the picture supposed to be? he asked himself as he rolled down his window and drained the cup on the ground. And what am I supposed to say when I find her?
Hi, Anna, my name is Harlan. Your father molested you as a kid. I thought you should know.
Hi, Anna, my name is Harlan. You used to have a brother. I thought you should know.
Hi, Anna, my name is Harlan. Your brother murdered your father. I thought you should know.
Donnally turned the ignition and flicked on the wipers. He stretched his arm along the top of the bench seat and looked through the rear cab window as he backed up between the pines and the rows of headstones until he reached the dirt road that bisected the cemetery. He then shifted into drive and headed toward Main Street.
Screw him. I ain’t nobody’s postman.
Chapter 3
Son of a bitch.
The words rushed through Donnally’s mind even before he was awake, as though he was providing a voice-over for his own dream.
He saw himself in the mid-1970s standing across the street from Berkeley High School. He was wearing a serape and a soiled cap and holding a short-handled hoe. Hippies were flashing him two-fingered peace signs or raising clenched fists in claimed solidarity with farmworkers striking in the Central Valley.
Cops kept ordering him to move along, but he circled back hour after hour, day after day, until he spotted a Mexican girl walking toward the bus stop.
Son of a bitch.
Even after Donnally rolled over and looked at the glowing digital clock, the image stayed with him. He knew he was awake. No doubt about that. It was just that he was still dreaming.
Now the girl turned toward him and headed down the sidewalk, her hand jittering against the chain-link fence enclosing the basketball courts.
She stopped two feet away and said, “Everybody’s got to be from somewhere, Harlan. Where am I from?”
A Buddhist monk in an orange robe walked up to them. Not a Hare Krishna chanting bullshit and beating drums, but a real one. Bald as citrus and skinny as a carrot.
They turned toward him.
Then a clash of cymbals.
Donnally reached for the telephone before he understood it was ringing.
“We’re out of half-and-half,” his waitress said, not giving him a chance to say hello.
He sat up on the edge of the bed. “Go get some from Mauricio’s.”
“I’m sure whatever he had is spoiled by now,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t have a key.”
Donnally rubbed his temples to clear his mind.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Mauricio’s dead. He looked again at the clock. Five A.M. The Food Mart wasn’t open yet. “I’ve got some in the fridge. I’ll bring it down.”
He lowered the handset back into its cradle, wondering why he’d never before made the mistake of thinking someone was alive after they’d passed away.
Never once had he thought of picking up the phone and calling his grandmother after she died, even though he felt a connection to her that transcended her death. He’d heard about other people doing that, and other things, too. Looking for birthday cards after the birthdays had stopped. Worrying about whether their grandmother would fall and hurt herself. Wondering how white carnations would look on her dining table.
Except Donnally never forgot that his grandmother’s table was out in his garage, disassembled and leaning against the wall, and her chairs were lined up by the cafe door for people to sit on while waiting for a table to open up.
It was only Mauricio who wouldn’t go away.
He slipped on Levi’s and a parka, retrieved a carton of half-and-half from the refrigerator, and drove it downtown. He parked behind the restaurant and entered through the back door because he wasn’t in the mood to banter with the guys from the Caterpillar dealership, or from the Valley Bank, or from the feed store, or with the retired sheriff who planted himself at the counter each morning as if the red Naugahyde stool on which he sat was his throne.
Donnally knew that Mauricio was dead for them; it was only his possessions that were still alive. He’d already heard people talking about how Mauricio’s house could be used as a real estate office and how his front yard would be perfect for displaying tractors or snowmobiles. Just about everybody in town had been driving by and wondering what was going to happen with the Aguilera place, and many were conniving about how they could get it cheap.
Donnally glanced toward the dining room and spotted ex-sheriff Wade Pipkins’s waves of white hair mounding up beyond the pass-through counter from the kitchen. He suspected that Pipkins was going to miss Mauricio more than anyone else. Not miss Mauricio the person, just the idea of him. Miss the opportunity to opine about what was wrong with U.S. immigration policy loud enough for Mauricio to hear. Miss giving Mauricio the stare he otherwise reserved for homeless people and suspects and Hispanic day laborers.
For Pipkins, all Hispanics were Mexicans. Even the Guatemalans, and Salvadorans, and Peruvians. He called them Pancho or Paco or Pedro. And when he looked at them, all he wanted to see was their hats off and their gazes lowered, especially when he was hiring them to clear brush on the dozens of properties he owned in the county.
The popping of bacon grease on the grill brought Donnally back to the present and to the cold half-and-half in his hand.
“Thanks, boss.” Will, Donnally’s cook, reached out a tattooed arm to take the carton. “The funeral go okay?”
Donnally shrugged. “What could go wrong?”
“I don’t know.” Will smiled, then pointed through the window toward the abandoned cars and rusting washing machines in Mauricio’s side yard. “He never seemed to get around to finishing anything he started.”
Will’s smiled faded and he lowered his voice, as if not wanting to be overheard by Pipkins.
“What’s this I hear about the name on the stone? Singleton came by. He said the name was Quintero or Quintana or something.”
That was another reason not to bother with a headstone, Donnally thought. There would be less to explain.
Donnally responded with the lie he’d worked out as he’d driven back from the cemetery the day before.
“Mauricio always used his grandfather’s last name out of respect,” Donnally said, “on his mother’s side.”
“That the kind of thing Mexicans do?”
“Yeah,” Donnally said, “lots of them.”
Donnally looked around the kitchen, then glanced at his waitress standing behind the counter.
“Can you two handle things for a couple of days?” Donnally asked.
“Sure, boss. I’ll even keep Ruby at my place if you want. Where’re you going?”
Donnally thought for a moment. He wasn’t sure of the where, or even the why. He finally settled on an answer that didn’t even satisfy himself.
“Let’s just say I’m going to deliver a letter.”
Chapter 4
“Get off my property,” a deep male voice yelled at Donnally through the closed front door of the West Berkeley cottage.
The smell of rot and mold infused Donnally’s nostrils, seeping from the yard behind him that had long since gone native with generations of intermingled grasses and weeds: the green, the yellow, and the brown composted by rain and heat and trampling shoes. Even the house’s blue paint seemed to have surrendered, fading into the gray of the bleached wood siding underneath.