“Escúsame?” she called. This was ridiculous. Her heart was thudding in her rib cage like fists hitting a punching bag, and her mouth was dry and tasted of metal. Hello-o, she thought crazily, wondering if she might start giggling. I’m responsible for the death of somebody’s husband around here…!
She curled her fingers around the door handle, and after a moment pulled it open against the resistance of creaking hinges.
On the mantel against the far wall an ofrenda had been set up, an altar, a figured silk scarf laid across a little embroidered cushion with framed photographs set up on it and around it, and two stylized, fancifully painted wooden skulls at either end of the display, like bookends. Preparation for El Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead. On the wall over it was hung a heart-shaped frame, its interior occupied by a gold-colored crucifix and a small clock face. She noted that the time was nearly noon.
She stepped inside, letting the screen door slap closed behind her.
Abruptly startled, she blinked her eyes shut—and a flash of red through her closed eyelids, and then a little mechanical whirring sound, let her know that the woman had taken her picture with an instamatic camera. To add to the ofrenda? wondered Elizalde in bewilderment as she opened her eyes and blinked at the woman’s silhouette. But I’m not dead….
Then her knees and the palms of her hands hit the carpet as a tremendous, stunning bang shook the room, and she was up and spinning and punching the screen door aside as another gunshot bruised her eardrums; she had clenched her eyes shut an instant before the shot, and so the splinters from the struck oak doorframe just stung her eyelids.
She felt one of her sneaker soles slap the porch boards—and then the porch had hit her again, and she was falling, and the dirt of the yard slammed against her hip and elbow as another bang crashed behind her and a plume of white dust sprang up from the sidewalk.
Rolling to her feet, she sprinted slantways across the barren yard and pelted away back south down the Amado Street sidewalk. She had to run in a slapping, flat-footed gait, for her feet kept feeling the impacts with the pavement before they actually occurred.
A one-story travel-agency building, apparently closed, loomed at the corner on her left, and she skidded around its wall tightly enough to have knocked over anyone who might have been walking up on the other side—but the sidewalk, the whole narrow street, was empty.
In an alley-fronting parking lot across the street an old lime-green couch was propped against the back wall of another retail-looking building, and she crossed the street toward it—forcing herself to shuffle along, to stroll, rather than flail and stamp and wheeze as she had been doing.
Her lungs felt seared, and the back of her head tingled in anticipation of savage pursuit, but nobody had yelled or audibly begun running across the asphalt by the time she stepped up the curb and crossed to the couch.
She thought she could hide behind it, crouch in the cool shadow of it, until dark, and then creep away. Her teeth were clenched, and her face was cold with shame. Why did I go there? she was screaming in her head, why did I rip open her old wounds, and mine, and—She remembered the shots, and rolling on the dirt, and running so clumsily, and she opened her eyes wide with the effort of forcing those things out of her attention, concentrating instead on the blue sky behind the shaggy palm trees and the telephone wires and the whirling crows.
Dizzy, she looked down and put her hand on the couch. The couch arm was fibrous and oily under her hand—gristly—but she realized that she had felt the texture of it only when she had actually touched it. The weird anticipation of sensations had apparently stopped when she had been crossing the street.
“Did you leave that here?” piped a close young man’s voice, speaking in English.
Elizalde looked up guiltily. The back door of the building had been standing open, and now a fat white man with a scruffy beard was leaning out of it. He was wearing cutoff jeans, and his belly was stretching a stained example of the sleeveless undershirts she had always thought of as wifebeater undershirts.
She realized that she had forgotten what he had asked her. “I’m sorry?”
He peered up and down the alley. “Did you hear gunshots just now?”
“A truck was backfiring on Amado,” said Elizalde, keeping her voice casual.
The fat man nodded, “So is it yours?”
“The truck?” Her face was suddenly hot, and she knew she was either blushing or pale, for she had almost said, The gun?
“The couch,” he said impatiently. “Did you put it here?”
“Oh,” Elizalde said, “no. I was just looking at it.”
“Somebody dumped it here. We find all kinds of crap back here. People think they can unload any old junk.” He eyed the couch with disfavor. “Probably some big old black lady gave birth on it. And her mother before that. We got better furniture inside, if you got any money.”
Elizalde blinked at him, trickles of disgust beginning to puddle in the scraped, blown-out emptiness of her mind. And where were you born, she thought—on a culture dish in a VD lab, I’d judge. But all she said was, “Furniture?”
“Yeah, secondhand. And books, kitchenware, ropa usada. Had Jackie Onassis in here the other day.”
Elizalde had caught her breath at last, and she could smell beer on him. She nodded and made herself smile as she stepped past him into the store. “Yeah, she was telling me about it.”
Inside were racks of pitiful clothes, bright cheap blouses and sun hats and colorful pants, that seemed still to carry an optimistic whiff, long stale now, of their original purchases at sunny swap meets and canvas-tent beachside stands. And there were shelves of books—hardcover junior-college texts, paperback science fiction and romances—and rows of family-battered Formica and particleboard-and-wood-veneer tables, covered with ceramic ashtrays and wrecked food processors and, somehow, a lot of fondue pots. A white-glass vase had been knocked over on one table, spilling a sheaf of dried flowers. My quinceañera bouquet, she thought as she looked at them. Withered roses, and husks of lilies, and a stiffened spray of forgive-me-nots.
“Begin life anew,” advised the drunk bearded man, who had followed her back inside.
Life a-old, she thought. This was an accumulation of the crumbled shells of lives, collapsed when the owners had become absent, piled here now like broken cast-off snakeskins, some pieces still big enough to show outlines of departed personalities.
Well, Elizalde thought, I’m kind of a broken personality myself. I should hide in here for a while, at least long enough to see if cop sirens go past on the street outside, or angry Rochas or Gonzalvezes come bursting in. If they do, I’ll just drape myself over one of these fine tables and be as inconspicuous as a skeleton hiding in a scrimshaw shop.
But nobody did come in at all, and the traffic outside was uneventful. The sunny October Los Angeles day had apparently swallowed up the gunshots without a ripple and was rolling on. Elizalde bought a Rastafari knitted tarn—red, gold, black, and green—big enough to tuck her long black hair up into, and a tan size-fourteen Harve Benard jumpsuit that had no doubt had an interesting history. Three dollars paid for the whole bundle at the counter by the street door, and the bearded man didn’t even remark on it when Elizalde swept the cap forward over her head and then pulled the jumpsuit on right over her jeans and sweatshirt.
After she had pushed open the door and walked a block back south toward Sixth Street, she realized that she had taken on the humbled, slope-shouldered gait she remembered in many of her patients; and she was pleased at the instinctive mimicry, during the few moments it took her to realize that it was not mimickry at all, but natural.