“All we got is sherry. The only reason I asked is because you always say you don’t care what kind.”
So much for decisions, Devon thought, and went upstairs to take a shower.
After dinner Devon walked by herself in the warm still night. The sound of her footsteps, inaudible to a human being, was picked up by a barn owl. He hissed a warning to his mate, who was hunting for rats outside the packing shed and underneath the bleachers where the men ate their lunch. Devon sat on the bottom step of the bleachers. Both owls flew silently over her head and vanished into the tamarisk trees that ringed the reservoir. She had often heard the owls between twilight and dawn, but this was the first time she had more than a glimpse of their faces, and it was a shock to her to discover that they didn’t look like birds at all but like monkeys or ugly children, accidentally winged.
The water, which in the daytime appeared murky and hardly fit even for irrigating, shone in the moonlight as if it were clean enough to drink. She remembered a giant scoop probing the muddy depths for Robert, and bringing up old tires and wine bottles and beer cans, pieces of lumber and rusting machinery, and finally, the baby bones which Valenzuela had carried away in a shoe box. Months later she’d asked Valenzuela about the bones. He said the baby had probably been born to one of the girls who followed the migrants. Staring down at the water Devon thought of the dead child and the long-gone mother, and of Valenzuela simultaneously crossing himself and cursing as he packed the bones into the little shoe-box coffin.
Suddenly a match flared on the opposite side of the reservoir and moments later the smell of cigarette smoke floated across the water. She knew that members of the Estivar household were forbidden to smoke — “The air,” Estivar said, “is already dry and hot and dirty enough” — and she was a little uneasy and more than a little curious. She rose and began moving quietly along the dusty path. She had a flashlight in her hand but there was no need to turn it on.
“Jaime?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In the moonlight Jaime’s face was as ghostly white as the barn owl’s. But he was neither winged nor wild and he made no attempt to escape. Instead, he took another deep drag of the cigarette, letting the smoke curl up out of his mouth and around his head like ectoplasm. Nothing materialized except a voice: “Smoke is supposed to keep the mosquitoes away.”
“And does it?”
“I’ve only been bit twice so far.” He scratched his left ankle with the toe of his right shoe. The wooden crate he was sitting on creaked rheumatically at the joints. “You going to tell my folks on me?”
“No, but they’ll find out some time.”
“Not tonight, anyhow. She went to bed with a headache and he’s gone.”
“Where?”
“He didn’t say. He had a phone call and left the house, looking like he was glad of an excuse to get away.”
“Why would that be, Jaime?”
“Him and Mom were fighting, they’d been at it ever since court.”
“I didn’t know your parents ever fought.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He took another drag on the cigarette and blew smoke, slowly and scientifically, at a mosquito that was buzzing at his forearm. “He gets mean, she gets nervous. Sometimes vice versa.”
“Money,” she said. “That’s what most couples fight about, I suppose.”
“Not them.”
“No?”
“They fight about people. Us kids mostly, only like tonight it was about other people.”
She realized that she shouldn’t be standing in the dark prying information out of a fourteen-year-old boy but she made no move to leave or to alter the course of the conversation. It was the first time she’d ever really heard Jaime talk. He sounded cool and rational, like an elderly man assessing the problems of a pair of youngsters.
She said, “What other people?”
“Everybody whose name came up.”
“Did my name come up?”
“A little bit.”
“How little?”
“It was just about you and Mr. Bishop. Him and my dad don’t groove, and my dad’s afraid Mr. Bishop might get to be boss of the ranch some day. I mean, if he married you—”
“Yes, I see.”
“But my mom says you’d never marry him on account of his mal ojo, evil eye.”
“Do you believe in things like that?”
“I guess not. He’s got funny eyes, though. Sometimes it’s better not to take a chance.”
“Thank you for the advice, Jaime.”
“That’s okay.”
The owls appeared again, flying low and in utter silence over the reservoir. One of them had a rat in its claws. The rat’s tail, bright with blood, swung gently in the moonlight.
“People with mal ojo,” Devon said, “what do they do?”
“They just look at you.”
“Then what?”
“Then you got a jinx.”
“Like Carla Lopez.”
“Yeah, like Carla Lopez.” Jaime hesitated. “She was one of the people my mom and dad were quarreling about tonight. There was a big argument over which of them hired her to work for us summer before last and which of them got the idea of hiring somebody in the first place. Mom said it was my dad’s idea because Carla Lopez had worked for the Bishops the previous summer and my dad couldn’t let Mr. Bishop be ahead of him like that.”
“Did Carla cause any trouble when she was staying at your house?”
“Not for me. But she dangled herself in front of my brothers.”
“She what?”
“Dangled herself. You know, like a drum majorette.”
“I see.”
“My two older brothers, both of them already had steady girl friends, so they didn’t pay so much attention. But Felipe, he really twitched. So did the cop.”
“What cop?”
“Valenzuela. He used to make excuses to come out to the house, things like talking to my dad about the wetback problem, but he came to see her.” Jaime lowered his voice as though he suspected one of the trees might be bugged. “The word got around at school not to tangle with any of the Lopez family because they had protection. Even Felipe stayed away from them.”
“Why do you say, even Felipe?”
“He was a good fighter, he took a mail-order course in karate. Anyway, he left at the end of summer. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life messing with fertilizers and bug sprays, so he went to find a job in the city.”
This was the story Jaime had been given, and it made sense. It was also reinforced by the arrival now and then of letters which Estivar read aloud at the evening meaclass="underline" “Dear Folks, Here I am in Seattle working at an aircraft factory, making good money and feeling fine...” Whether it was the words themselves or the slow deliberate way Estivar read them, to Jaime the letters didn’t sound natural. That Felipe should write at all wasn’t natural. He was too impatient. The thoughts that skittered across his mind couldn’t be caught by a pen and pinned down to paper. Still, the letters came: “Dear Folks, I won’t be able to fly home for Christmas, so here is ten dollars for Jaime to buy a new sweater...”
He couldn’t see the expression on Devon’s face but he knew she was watching him and he felt vulnerable and guilty. He wished the subject of Felipe hadn’t come up. It was as if he’d been tricked into it by the night, the soft-talking woman, the reservoir catching the moon’s rays like a giant mal ojo.
He rose abruptly, dropping the cigarette on the ground and stamping on it. “Felipe had no connection with the viseros that did the killing. He was gone before they were even hired. Anyway, my mom says maybe the viseros didn’t do it, it’s easy to accuse people when they aren’t around to defend themselves.”