“I didn’t commit anything. You don’t have to commit anything to land in jail here. You just have to look as though you did or might or could.”
“I never thought you looked especially criminal,” Gilly said. “Perhaps a little on the sly side at times. You know, cunning, crafty. Maybe it’s your glasses. Do you have to wear them?”
“No, I wear them for fun.”
“You don’t have to sound so mad. It was a perfectly simple question. Everyone seems awfully touchy tonight. Reed got mad at me because I refused to fire Marco’s new nurse. He’s jealous. She’s a good nurse and I enjoy talking to her. He won’t admit that I have to see other people for a change instead of spending all my time listening to him yak about food and Violet Smith about religion. Poor Reed. I think he’d like to marry me, but someone got his bootees mixed up in the nursery.”
“Marry you?”
“Not me as in me, me as in money.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“He’s a boy. Boys are for girls. Or in Reed’s case, for other boys. If he should ever become insistent, I’ll give him a nice bonus and tell him to get lost. He’ll be leaving eventually, anyway, when Marco—” The sentence dangled unfinished like a half-knotted noose. “All right, your job’s over, Aragon. You might as well come home.”
“My other trip home lasted less than forty-eight hours.”
“This one will be permanent. I’m tired, you’re tired.”
“I have to stay here awhile.”
“You’re to come back now,” she said sharply. “We’ll settle the account. It’s probably cost me a bundle already, bribing half the people in Baja and paying for all the margaritas you’ve been swilling.”
“Margaritas don’t swill easy. I charge extra.”
“By the way, I intend to go over your expense account line by line.”
“Do that. I’ll submit it to you when I return.”
“Which will be tomorrow.”
“No.”
“You’re not hearing me, Aragon. I said—”
“I heard you and I said no. I’m going to stay here and look for the girl.”
“Wait. Listen to me—”
“Good night, Gilly.”
He put down the phone and ordered another margarita to see if it could be swilled. It couldn’t. He used it to clean his teeth — it had a very stimulating effect on the gums — and went to bed.
Nineteen
It was Sunday.
The fog of the previous night had been driven back to sea by the sun. The wet leaves of the camellias were dark-green mirrors, and the cypress trees were covered with drops of water that caught the sun and looked like tiny glass Christmas balls.
“A beautiful day,” Gilly told Marco when she brought his breakfast. “It’s so clear, the mountains look as though you could reach out and touch them. When Mrs. Morrison gets here she’ll wheel you around to the front of the house so you can see them for yourself... I know you don’t like her, but you will. And Reed can’t work every day. He went to see his mother at a rest home in Oxnard; she’s a little balmy. That’s his story, anyway. Actually, I’m not even sure he has a mother. But he must have had at one time or another, so what does it matter?”
He stared, one-eyed, at the ceiling.
“The sky? There’s not a cloud in sight and it’s very blue, like cornflowers. Remember the cornflowers I wore at our wedding? I wanted to keep them but you said not to bother, there’d be a thousand others. But I’ve never seen any since that were quite that blue.”
He was sorry.
“Oh well, they’d be faded by this time, anyway. It’s not important. I must keep reminding myself to separate what’s important from what isn’t.” She pulled open the drapes. Beyond the tips of his pygmy forest of plants, the sea shimmered like molten silver. “The kelp beds look purple... I wonder why they call that war decoration the Purple Heart. Do you know?”
He didn’t know. He’d almost forgotten there was such a thing. What else had he forgotten? A minute here, a week there, or great whole chunks of time? Things were moving inside his head, in directions he could no longer control. Sometimes they met and merged, or they broke off and parts disappeared.
Years flowed in and flowed out of his mind like tides, leaving pools of memories full of small living things. Sometimes the tides stopped, the pools dried up and nothing lived in them any longer. A strange man came and helped him move his bowels. A strange woman sat beside him, claiming to be his wife. Another strange woman had been sent by the Lord to save him, but he didn’t know from what. Strangers walked in and out while Gilly and Violet Smith and Reed hid behind clouds or in forests under snow, disappeared around corners and below horizons.
But today was very clear. It was today. The woman was Gilly, his wife. Soldiers got Purple Hearts for being wounded in action. Purpleheart was also a timber from South America named for its color. Masses of kelp looked purple from a distance; close up they were copper-colored and the leaves felt slimy when you swam over them. The woman with the morning newspaper and the glass of orange juice with the plastic tube in it was his wife, Gilly. She was a little balmy, like Reed’s mother.
She cranked up his bed and put the plastic tube in his mouth. “Drink up.”
He drank. He would have liked to tell her about the timber purpleheart, but she probably wouldn’t consider it important. Now that she was dividing things up into important and nonimportant, he wondered where he belonged. Maybe in the middle, leaning toward the non.
“That’s a good boy,” she said when he finished the orange juice. “Are you hungry this morning?”
No. But he let the egg slither down his throat.
“Violet Smith made you some of her special Sunday toast.”
The toast was cut into cubes, soaked in warm milk and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and wheat germ. She spooned it into his mouth, giving him several minutes to swallow each spoonful. During these intervals she read aloud items from the newspaper.
Threat of a local bus strike was now believed ended. A government building on Downing Street had been bombed by the IRA. Dow-Jones went up twenty-four points during the past week. Heavy rains in Northern California were expected to hit the lower part of the state late tomorrow or Tuesday. Nine students were shot a few miles from Buenos Aires. A Los Angeles woman was found guilty of embezzling thirty thousand dollars from Crocker National Bank. The Coast Guard rescued a young couple becalmed five miles from shore in a small sailboat.
“I don’t see anything in the paper about the magistrate who was murdered in Rio Seco. Aragon told me about it last night on the phone. Hernandez I believe his name was. It’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it, that he was the magistrate who took a bribe to release B. J. from jail. What a vicious man he must have been, allowing people to rot in jail until they got enough money to buy their way out. He deserved to be murdered, don’t you think so, dear?”
He went on swallowing Violet Smith’s special Sunday toast. It tasted like Monday morning.
Violet Smith came for the tray. She was dressed for church in a brown suit with an elaborate feathered hat given to her by a former employer. She talked across and around Marco almost as if he’d died during the night and no one had bothered to move the body.
“Did he like the toast, Mrs. Decker?”
“He didn’t complain,” Gilly said dryly.
“What do you think of my hat, is it too dressy?”
“No.”
“Since I’m not allowed to wear jewelry anymore, I thought a few feathers would liven things up... Is he through?”
“Yes.”
“Poor soul, I hope he can’t taste too good. That wheat-germ stuff is nauseous. Reed bought it for his virility last week.” Violet Smith picked up the tray. “I wonder if I could speak to you in private for a minute. I don’t want him to hear. He has enough trouble already.”