Darla was, anyway.
Saturday morning, I get up early and drive to Bear Creek to pay a surprise visit to Alvaro Ruiz and three other workers who have agreed to talk to me today. By making it a point to encourage me to talk to Ruiz, I assume Darla suspects he could know more than he is telling about this
murder and is simply scared he will end up getting deported if he talks too much. If he would be willing to say that Jorge Arrazola had acted suspiciously before he took off, it would help enormously.
Of course, what I would like for him to say is that he suddenly remembers he saw Paul Taylor stuffing hundred-dollar bills into Jorge’s hands the night before he took off, but that is a bit much to expect.
It is at least worth a try.
Somehow, even though I can’t remember where I put down my reading glasses half the time, I remember some Spanish from my Peace Corps days and perhaps can establish a rapport with this guy that will loosen him up a little.
I pull into town and stop for some toast at the Cotton Boll, where Mckenzie greets me with a smile and old Mr. Carpenter comes out of the kitchen to remind me to come by to visit him. He seems lonely and I promise that I will. I then head east through town toward the river, resisting the temptation to drive by Angela’s on the off chance she changed her mind and didn’t go to Atlanta. I go nearly thirty years without seeing her and now she is on my mind every day. As I fumble on the seat for the list of workers Eddie faxed to me, it occurs to me this visit won’t entirely be a surprise to Ruiz, since presumably he was around when Eddie announced that it was okay to talk to me.
In the cold morning light I squint at the address I have for him. All it says is “The Landing,” but I remember enough to get me close.
Lasker Huber, a kid in my sixth-grade class, caught his foot under a
submerged tree limb at the Landing and drowned. For weeks afterward, I had nightmares of being caught by a branch and struggling unsuccessfully to free myself. Even now it is the first thing I think about when anyone mentions the L’Anguille River.
Lasker’s family was basically white trash. River rats, we called them.
I liked Lasker. He hadn’t lived long enough to have a chip on his shoulder like the rest of his family. Unless it has changed, the Landing is a boat dock behind a defunct lumber company. A road the city fathers never bothered to name leads down to it. There were some shacks down by the dock, which I doubt have become mansions since I last saw them thirty years ago.
As I suspected, the Landing hasn’t changed much. Though it has been fixed up, I think I recognize Bobby Don Hyslip’s old shack and wonder what happened to him. One hot summer’s night parked in the gravel outside the Dairy Delite-where our most sophisticated joke was to send a younger sibling to ask for “colored water” and laugh hysterically as the help sent him or her around to the drinking fountain for blacks-Bobby Don had taunted me with the hoary gossip of my paternal grandfather’s own sexual escapades. He had infuriated me by calling me a “nigger lover.” My mother had never allowed me to say “nigger,” not out of some passion for equal rights, but because our family was above that sort of thing. The daughter of a physician, she had no intention of doing anything that would allow her, or anyone under her control, to be equated with the Bobby Don Hyslips of the world. She vehemently denied any allegation of sexual misconduct on the part of her father-in-law. As it turned out, Bobby Don was right.
The L’Anguille River, a tributary of a tributary on the way to the Mississippi, was once said to be good for fishing, and may be still, though I never caught any. As I look into the cold greenish water, a pleasant boyhood memory surfaces of a Sunday afternoon outing with my father. We had borrowed or rented a boat and small outboard motor at the dock, and while we were out a fish literally jumped into the boat with us. It was before he had become delusional, but it was hard not to regard the event as an omen that we would be successful if we took up fishing. We did and never caught a single fish. That summer, bonded by bad luck or simply incompetence, we were closer than we would ever be again. I walk up to the door and am astounded when Bobby Don, now a carbon copy of his own father, answers my knock.
He doesn’t quite know me. Balder than I am, fatter, too, he squints at me as if he should recognize me but doesn’t.
“Yeah, who you lookin’ for?”
I try to look into the room behind him, but he fills the door like a bear protecting his den. I get a whiff of cooking odors, onion and grease, and perhaps fish. Talk about white trash: Bobby Don is still writing the book.
“You know where an Alvaro Ruiz lives around here?” I ask, hoping he won’t recognize me.
“Who are you?” Bobby Don demands, staring hard at my face.
“Gideon Page,” I say and then add, hoping my lying is not ridiculously apparent, “You look real familiar.” I feel a curious mixture of
distaste, superiority, and shame. Somehow, this man, by his resentment and boldness as a teenager, has a hold over me after all these years.
“I’m Bobby Don, Gideon. You remember me,” he says, his upper lip curling in a sneer that is familiar after three decades.
“Hell, yeah,” I say, pretending his face is coming back to me.
“You’ve changed a little,” I throw in, beating him to the punch.
“You look like your father.”
To his credit, Bobby Don doesn’t deny it or make a comment about my own.
“What the shit are you doin’ over here?” he asks, offering his right arm, which is covered by a faded red corduroy shirt that stops short of his wrist by a good inch. His jeans look as old as he is. Of course, he wasn’t expecting company either.
Taken aback by this display of friendliness, I nevertheless extend my hand. His palm, as I expected, is rough and hard. Bobby Don must be the only person in Bear Creek not to know already why I’m here.
“I’m a lawyer in Blackwell County, but I’ve got a case here and I’m interviewing some people who might know something about it.”
“Who is it, Donny?” a female voice calls from somewhere in the back.
Whoever, wife or girlfriend, she sounds slightly hung over, too. I hear no children.
“An old friend of mine from when I was a kid,” he calls over his shoulder without a trace of irony.
Friend. He’s got to be kidding! I feel my cheeks begin to burn, but try to say amiably, “I need to find this Ruiz guy. You know where he lives?”
Bobby Don must see something in my face, for his old expression of disdain returns to his own.
“He lives a couple of houses that way,” he grunts, pointing to my left.
“So you’re a lawyer, huh? I should have figured that.”
I know: a gift for gab, though I suspect I know what word Bobby Don would use.
“So, what are you doing these days, Bobby Don?” I say in my snottiest tone.
“Fishing,” he says, giving his answer as much dignity as possible. He gives me a hard stare and shuts the door in my face.
I walk down off his wooden porch and return to the Blazer and back out of his yard. People don’t change, I decide. Yet if Bobby Don knew that my purpose was to get Paul Taylor, I suspect he would approve.
He’s spent his life envying people like Paul.
Alvaro Ruiz’s shack is on higher ground than Bobby Don’s, but I wonder
whether it has ever been flooded. Maybe it only seems that hundred-year floods come every ten years these days. I know I’m glad I haven’t lived on this bank for the last thirty years. In summer the mosquitoes must be like dive-bombers. From the outside the structure looks about a thousand square feet, but unlike Bobby Don’s it has been painted in the last few years. I wonder why he doesn’t live better, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he sends most of his money back to Mexico.
I knock at the door, and wait a full minute before a gray-haired Hispanic with long sideburns and a mustache cautiously sticks his head out. I introduce myself, and at the mention of Eddie’s name, the door opens wide to reveal a short but powerfully built man of about sixty in a red cotton jersey and jeans whose cuffs are folded several times at the bottom, revealing a pair of unpolished Army boots.