She said, “I thought you might have changed your mind.”
“I need the money.”
“Come in.”
“We can talk out here.”
“It’s too cold. Come in,” she said again, and this time he obeyed.
He looked too tired to argue. There were dark blue semicircles under his eyes, almost the color of the work clothes he wore, and he kept sniffling and wiping his nose with his sleeve like a child with a cold. She suspected that he’d picked up a drug habit along the way, perhaps in some Mexican prison, perhaps in one of the local barrios. She wouldn’t ask him where he’d spent the long year and what he’d done to survive. Her only questions would be important ones.
“Where is he, Felipe?”
He turned and stared at the door closing behind him as if he had a sudden impulse to pull it open and run back into the darkness.
“Don’t be nervous,” she said. “I promised you on the phone that I wouldn’t press charges, wouldn’t even tell anyone I’d seen you. All I want is the truth, the truth in exchange for the money. That’s a fair bargain, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“Where is he?”
“The sea, I put him in the sea.”
“Robert was a very strong swimmer. He might have—”
“No. He was dead, wrapped in blankets.”
Her hands reached up and touched her face as though she could feel pieces of it loosening. “You killed him, Felipe.”
“It wasn’t my fault. He attacked me, he was going to murder me like he did the—”
“Then you wrapped him in blankets.”
“Yes.”
“Robert was a big man, you couldn’t have done that by yourself.” Her voice was cool and calm. “You must come and sit down quietly and tell me about it.”
“We can talk here.”
“I’m paying a great deal of money for this conversation. I might as well be comfortable during the course of it. Come along.”
After a moment’s hesitation he followed her into the living room. She’d forgotten how short he was, hardly bigger than Robert had been at fifteen, the year he suddenly started to grow. Felipe was twenty now, it was too late for him to start growing. He would always look like a boy, a sad strange sick little boy with a ravenous appetite and poor digestion.
“Sit down, Felipe.”
“No.”
“Very well.”
He stood in front of the fireplace, pale and tense. On the backgammon table between the two wing chairs the game was still in progress but no one had made a move for a long time. Dust covered the board, the thrown dice, the plastic players.
She saw him staring at the board. “Do you play backgammon?”
“No.”
“I taught Robert the game when he was fifteen.”
Backgammon wasn’t the only game Robert had learned at fifteen. The others weren’t so innocent, the players were real and each throw of the dice was irrevocable. During the past year she had spent whole days thinking of how differently she would handle things if she had another chance; she would protect him, keep him away from corrupters like Ruth, even if she had to lock him in his room.
She said, “Where have you been living?”
“Tijuana.”
“And you saw my reward offer in the paper?”
“Yes.”
“Weren’t you afraid of walking into a trap by coming here tonight?”
“Some. But I figured you didn’t want the police around any more than I did.”
“Are you on drugs, Felipe?”
He didn’t answer.
“Amphetamines?”
His eyes had begun to water and he seemed to be looking at her through little crystal balls. There was no future in any of them. “It’s none of your business. All I want is to earn the money and get out of here.”
“Please don’t shout. I hate angry sounds. I’ve had to cover up so many of them. Yes, yes, I still play the piano,” she said, as if he’d asked, as if he cared. “I make quite a few mistakes, but it doesn’t matter because nobody hears me, and the walls are too thick... Why did you kill him, Felipe?”
“It wasn’t my fault, none of it was my fault. I wasn’t even living at the ranch when it happened. I only went back that night to try and get some money from my father. I was a little roughed up from fighting — I ran into Luis Lopez in a bar in Boca — and that put my father in a bad mood. He wouldn’t give me a nickel, so I decided to go over to the mess hall and touch Lum Wing for a loan. If my father had given me some money, like he should have, I’d never have been anywhere near that mess hall, I’d never—”
“I don’t want to hear your excuses. Just report what happened.”
“Rob — Mr. Osborne saw the light in the mess hall and came in to investigate. He asked me what I was doing there and I told him. He said Lum Wing was asleep and I wasn’t to bother him. And I said why not, money’s no use to an old man like that, all he does is carry it around. Anyway, we started arguing back and forth.”
“Did you ask Robert for money?”
“No more than what he owed me.”
“Robert had borrowed money from you?”
“No, but he owed it to me for my loyalty. I never said a word to anybody about seeing him come in from the field right after his father’s accident. He was carrying a two-by-four and it had blood on it. I had climbed up one of the date palms looking for a rat’s nest and I watched him throw the two-by-four into the reservoir. I was just a kid, ten years old, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut.” He blinked, remembering. “I was always climbing up crazy places where no one would think of looking. That’s how I found out about him and Mrs. Bishop, I used to see them meet. It went on for years, until he got sick of her and she walked into the river. It was no accident, like the police claimed... Well, I never said a word about those things to anybody. I figured he owed me something for my loyalty.”
“In other words, you tried to blackmail him.”
“I asked him to pay me a debt.”
“And he refused.”
“He came at me, he hurt me bad. He’d have killed me if it hadn’t been for the knife I took from Luis Lopez. I hardly remember the fight, except he suddenly fell on the floor and there was blood all over. I could tell he was dead. I didn’t know what to do except get away from there fast. I started to run but I caught my sleeve on a yucca spike outside the door. I was trying to get loose when I looked around and saw my father. He was staring at the knife in my hand. He said, ‘What have you done?’ and I said I got mixed up in a fight between Mr. Osborne and one of the migrants.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Yes. But he said no one else would. I had a bad reputation for fighting and Mr. Osborne was an Anglo and things would go hard for me.”
“So he helped you.”
“Yes. He thought we should make it look like a robbery, so he gave me Mr. Osborne’s wallet and told me to throw it away like I was to throw away the knife. He brought some blankets from the bunkhouse and we wrapped Mr. Osborne in them and put him in the back of the old red pickup. My father said no one would miss it. That was when the dog suddenly appeared. I kicked at him to make him go away and he bit me, he bit me on the leg, and when I drove off he chased the truck. I don’t remember the truck hitting him.”
“Did you leave the ranch before the migrants returned from Boca de Rio?”
“Yes.”
“And of course it was quite simple for Estivar to handle them. He had hired them, he paid them, he gave them their orders; he spoke their language and was a member of their race. All he had to do was tell them the boss had been murdered and they’d better get out of there fast if they wanted to avoid trouble. Their papers were forged, they couldn’t afford to argue, so they left.”