Between Heaven and Here Page 5

  “I call. Nobody there.”

  Gustave looked up at the palms, electric in the moonlight. Sidney stared up, too. He said, “You know why I took her? Cause I saw rats running across the phone wires, and I couldn’t hang with that. I just took her.”

  Gustave said, “You did right. You take me to where she live. I tell her boy she call me, and I come and get her, and she die at home. On the couch. She just give out.”

  Enrique nodded. “Her heart just stop on her.” He threw his cigar butt into the dirt. He said, “Then I take care the rest, me.”

  Gustave knew what he meant.

  They would build a coffin for Glorette, and dig the hole in the old cemetery where no one but Sarrat people came. Victor would say good-bye to her. The only church would be their words, the way it had been on the levee. Then Victor would sleep in her room.

  Sidney took them down the next street to the apartment building. The stucco walls were gray. The wrought-iron railings were black. The windows were shuttered with old sheets and broken shades. The word Picard was written in pen on the mail slot for number sixteen.

  Gustave climbed the pebbled stairs slowly. The railing felt rough and pitted, as if someone had cooked on the iron. But he smelled no food here.

  The door felt hollow when he knocked. He called softly, “Victor. Victor.” But no one answered.

  He pushed, and the door gave way. The lock had been broken many times. In the living room, a futon lay in the corner near the heating vent. A glass-topped table and two chairs sat near the window. The Formica counter held nothing but Shasta cola and a plain paper bag. Inside were empty cornhusks streaked with orange grease. Tamales.

  The bedroom door was closed. He went inside quietly. What if Victor had a gun?

  But his grandson was asleep. His ears were covered with headphones, and his arms were gripped tightly around something on his chest, under the blanket. Sharp corners. Maybe CD cases. A pile of books lay close to his head. The cell phone must be under his pillow, or his back, Gustave thought, and he sat down on the carpet.

  A bowl beside him on the floor, a lone dried noodle like a worm trying to crawl up the side. Carpet with strands tangled and dirty like more worms. He would take Victor to his house, and Victor would hate it, and hate the oranges, and the beans. He would want hamburgers, and Gustave would buy them. He wouldn’t say what he said last time. “I make my meat in fall, when Lanier bring me some pig for that freezer. We buy a whole pig. Not no piece of pink sponge in some plastic. Enrique and me have to have some good meat.”

  On the levee, Net had carried the meat to her fire, laid it on a pan there, and when her baby woke, she’d tied the baby to her breast, inside her shirt, to keep her quiet. But the soldiers smelled the smoke. The fat rising in the black. They came with their guns and said, “Where you get that meat? That a knife?” Net went toward them with the knife and they shot her. She fell into the water and went under, and only her broad back showed when she surfaced downstream and floated away.

  The other women screamed and screamed and the soldiers pushed at the people surging toward them. They didn’t shoot again. Gustave pulled the half-burned meat from the fire and squatted near Enrique. He tore pieces from the ham and pushed them into Enrique’s mouth, shielding him from the people. Enrique pulled at his hands, and he saw the blood glistening on his knuckles.

  Victor’s shoes, under the covers, made lumps like bread loaves. Gustave cupped his palms over his eyebrows, moving the loose skin there back and forth like he always had when he waited, on the levee, in the barracks, in the cane fields.

  His grandson slept like the dead.

  Seventeen. Never had a job. Half-grown. That was what the soldiers called the boys on the levee. “Take the grown ones. They don’t want to come, you get them half-grown niggers. They got small hands but they got two. Shovel take two hands.”

  He didn’t want to frighten the boy. Something like pink seashells lay on the floor near the mattress. Gustave leaned down to touch them. When had he gone to the ocean? No—these were hulls of pistachios. A small bag, like you’d get at the liquor store. He held the shells in his palm. He could hear the engine of Lafayette’s truck outside. He could see the palm fronds up close from this second-floor window. Dates like small gold worlds, way too high for anyone to pick.

  NIGHTBIRDS

  ENRIQUE WORKED THE irrigation on the Valencia grove until midnight. Gustave got tired around eleven, and Enrique drove him home. Then he took the truck back to the grove to check the gopher traps. 109 yesterday. The gophers were chewing through PVC pipe like it was hollow peppermint stick. In August, the trees would wither in a few days without water.

  He stood in the kitchen drinking one last cup of coffee when he heard his son’s truck. The tools bouncing loose in the metal bed like always on the gravel road.

  He went to the front window. Lafayette was carrying a woman up the lawn.

  A thin woman. Her head lolling back like an actress in some movie, but then Lafayette moved his arm up and the head nestled back against his chest. Her hair fell over his arm like a black waterfall.

  Glorette.

  Enrique saw her only a few times a year, when Gustave had him drive to whatever apartment she’d landed in—each place a dim cave where her son would look up from his bed on the floor. What they called it—some Japanese word. They went if the boy was sick or needed money.

  Her hair was always in a twist on top of her head. Chignon, the women used to call it back in Louisiana. So high it was a complicated structure. But tonight the hair was loose over Lafayette’s arm, swaying against his leg.

  Dead.

  They came up the slope, Reynaldo just behind. Like they were killers. Her feet in high heels, dangling.

  THEY PUT HER on Marie-Claire’s couch. Pale green. Enrique never sat on her couch. He was always dirty from the groves. He sat on the porch to drink his coffee, and left his boots in the wooden orange crate she put on the side of the house for him. Then he went straight to the bedroom to change.

  Glorette lay with her feet splayed, her mouth open. The first thing he thought—Marie-Claire come out here, she see a body on that couch.

  “Quo faire?” he said to his sons.

  Lafayette held out his hands, palms up, like he didn’t know whether he should wash them, like he didn’t know how his hands had done that.

  Done what?

  Reynaldo kept rubbing his thick eyebrows like he always did when he was confused, when he was waiting for his older brother to talk first, to see if there was anything he needed to refute or deny or explain.

  “Man, I ain’t never touched a dead body before,” Lafayette said, quiet.

  Reynaldo said, “Me neither,” which he didn’t need to say, because he did nothing without his brother.

  Then Enrique smelled urine. Like when he’d killed the German. His heart felt a hot bloom—a dried plum fattening up in hot water.

  He looked down at her face. The most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, even more beautiful than her mother, who’d been famous in Louisiana when they were young. Her mother Anjolie was Marie-Claire’s distant cousin. Gustave had gone back to Louisiana to get her, taken her from the house where she’d been locked up in an armoire to protect her until Enrique killed—

  Killed the third one.

  His sons looked up.

  SHE’D BEEN JUST one of the children running in and out of the house, where Marie-Claire always had food. His daughter Fantine, and Glorette—racing the boys in the groves, the soles of their bare feet like pink shrimp. Then Fantine refusing to hoe the weeds out of the irrigation ditches, hiding in trees and behind hedges to read, always reading, grown paler and thin and narrow-eyed and hateful. Glorette’s face suddenly shaped like a pansy, with that same symmetrical shape but her cheekbones gleaming. Skin gold as a mothwing. Men following her everywhere.

  One day, when he was a boy and he’d been taken to New Orleans to help an old man deliver sacks of oysters, they’d walked out of the res
taurant on Royal Street. Djokic, the old man, had told him to wait outside a doorway. Niggers couldn’t shop in the French Quarter. But a boy could wait near the window, if he was on an errand with a white man. The sun shone on the glittering stones inside. One made into a dragonfly. Emerald wings, ruby eyes, gold thorax. And a dragonfly lighted on the wooden ledge of the window, facing its twin. Dragonflies were everywhere that spring, hovering while his aunt washed clothes in her yard. But this one didn’t move for a long time, waiting for the other, until Djokic came out slamming the door.

  Glorette’s forehead was darker gold now. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. She had dust on her elbows.

  He felt the hotness and blood moving velvet soft because his brain was already considering the pieces. Place to place like roof corner to low tree branch—the first strand of a spiderweb—random threads at first. The complicated puzzle and planning. The smell was already deepening in the heat.

  He lifted up her hand—thin and small as a child, but with long fingers held curved and graceful even in death. Fantine had always been jealous of Glorette’s effortless beauty, the way she moved. No blood under her arm, near her ribs. She wore a black bra like runners on TV, and tight pants, and her stomach was unmarked. Her feet dirty. Her high heels worn down—miles of walking—and brown with dust. A pink scar—perfect circle—that must have been a cigarette burn on one ankle. He moved her head just for a moment, to see her neck, but he didn’t want to touch her hair. No blood. She hadn’t been shot. Not even with a small-caliber bullet. She hadn’t been cut.

  He looked outside. Gustave’s house was just down the gravel road. Gustave was walking slowly up the lawn with Lafayette and Reynaldo. And now he saw a man sitting in the truckbed, head in his hands. Shirtless, dark-skinned, looking away from the house.

  If he was the one, he wouldn’t be sitting in the truck. Because even though no one knew how many men Enrique had killed, everyone knew about Mr. McQuine.

  Glorette worked the alleys. She was probably found there or in some dirty apartment. And now it was the terrible exhilaration of the puzzle that made him wide awake, already seeing the apartment stairs and wrought-iron railings, the place where he would watch. He felt as if he were thirty again. The complicated pieces of tracking, and how he’d find the man, or figure out if it was the young man in the truck.

  He turned to see his wife in the doorway. He was ashamed of the quickening inside his chest and throat and behind his eyes. He hadn’t even thought of her. Just of Gustave and how his face would look coming into the room, seeing his only child. And he’d forgotten the grandson.

  “YOU BRING ME a body? Like we in Louisiana?” she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself like she was cold, even though the heat hadn’t broken yet for the night. “That Glorette?”

  She moved toward the couch and touched the loose hair on the forehead. “You bring her here?”

  Enrique said, “Them two.” What he always called his sons. The shorthand of being married.

  She bent over the couch, her spine like a rope of tiny boudin sausage showing through the nightdress. She was shaking.

  But when Gustave came inside, Enrique couldn’t look at his face. The face he had seen more than any other his whole life. Not mother. Not wife. Not children. Only Gustave, since he was four and Gustave seven. Every single day except when Enrique was in Germany, and when he’d first come here to California after the war, alone.

  Gustave touched her shoulder, and her forehead. Like he and Marie-Claire were baptizing her. The sweat under his white t-shirt made darker maps at his back. When he raised up, his face was like a mask. Enrique was relieved. They had both learned how to keep their faces that way since they were small, since they were orphelin on the riverbank and they knew the rest of their lives, people would use crying—even the stretched-out mouth of wanting to cry, of considering tears—as weakness. Reason to beat them with a stick.

  ’Tite mulee, Gustave used to whisper to him, in whatever shack or camp they lay, shivering in their clothes. We just baby mule. Mule don’t cry. Mule kick. Or bite.

  HE WENT TO the kitchen to wash his hands.

  Two new boxes of cereal on the counter. That meant his grandsons were asleep in the back bedroom. Lafayette’s wife always brought two boxes because it was expensive and the boys ate it dry out of bowls, like little dogs. An old man pirate cartoon. Cap’n Crunch.

  That damn cartoon his grandson had drawn. The box with the knife and dripping blood.

  His granddaughter staring at the man on the TV, saying, “Serial means a row?”

  Enrique didn’t see the face of the German he’d killed until he turned him over. The helmet covered the face—ice crystals on the eyebrows. But he smelled it, sometimes, the smell of sweat that froze and then melted and froze again. The smell of shit from the woods, and cheese. The German had cheese in his pocket, probably stolen from a farmhouse nearby.

  It was the forest outside a village in France. Why couldn’t he remember the name? The Germans were as scattered as the Americans after the firefight. For each farmhouse, Enrique didn’t know who was watching—for a lone man moving through the trees. So he’d taken days to circle back. The snow piled like soapsuds on the pine branches. Sodden gray under his boots.

  Even though Enrique hadn’t eaten in almost two days, he didn’t touch the cheese. Milky and ripe from the pocket, from the body. White. White. The snow and the cheese and the eyebrows and the teeth, when the lips curled back after the body lay in the snow and he turned it over. The blood on his knife already freezing.

  Would killed me, him. Called me nigger first. That’s what he told Gustave, when he got back. Gustave nodded.

  But he knew that wasn’t true. Maybe the German would have pretended not to see him. Let him walk past, in the forest, to keep trying to find his company. Maybe the German would never call someone nigger. Maybe he would have thought Enrique was Mexican, like some of the other soldiers thought.

  He was the only man Enrique regretted killing, sixty years later.

  He heard his wife walk down the hallway. Was she looking for a winding sheet? This was 2000. No one used a winding sheet. You took a body to the mortuary. But he and Gustave would bury Glorette here, on his land. The orange groves, the small chapel, the cemetery between his land and Ramon Archuleta’s grove.

  His land because he’d killed Atwater. Who said he’d never sell to a nigger.

  He had shot at countless others in France, but their bodies lay tangled in the distance, and no one knew whose bullets had killed them, or whose grenades. But four men he had killed with his hands. The only one that sent a wash of guilt along his back—like a hand passed along his shoulderblades—was the German. Because his teeth were so small, his gums so pink and new, and his throat unshaven—Enrique knew he was a boy. He might have scared the boy off, and gone past him.

  The other three men had to die. The boy from New Orleans would have shot him. Enrique knew he had a gun inside the shirt. Mr. McQuine would have murdered Marie-Claire or another girl.

  Atwater never threatened him. Not his body.

  Every time he saw the nights he’d killed them—dark blue of past midnight, and trees black each time—he remembered that there was no other way. Different birds but night sounds.

  Now he was seventy-six years old, and he would have to take care of whoever had killed Glorette.

  A row. No other way to put it, because he was planning every detail.

  “WHAT THE HELL are you drawing?” his daughter-in-law Clarette said to Reynaldo Jr. last week. Enrique was watching TV with his grandsons. He liked to see the backs of the boys’ heads, the small skulls through hair. He tried to imagine which one might work the groves.

  Reynaldo Jr. said, “This band Green Jelly—they got a song called ‘Cereal Killer.’ Everybody’s drawing what they think it looks like.” He’d sketched a long knife through the blue coat of the old man pirate, and red blood dripping from the cereal box.

  Danae said, “Like t
hat man—he picked up boys and killed them and threw them on the freeway.” On the television was a white man with glasses and fat cheeks like uncooked biscuit.

  His daughter-in-law said, “I told you not to listen to that. Serial means in a row. Like a series,” she said. “A guy who kills several people in the same way. Nobody evil like that coming all the way out here. Now stop being in grown folks’ business.”

  “But Cap’n Crunch could be a good cereal killer name,” the boy said softly. “Like, a dude that crunches the bones after they’re dead. That would be funny.”

  “Don’t joke about that,” she said. She was in her uniform. She was a guard at the youth prison in Chino. “Not funny.” She put a bag with other clothes on the table. She had to work Saturdays, and the kids stayed with Marie-Claire. He always got dirty in the groves, and Marie-Claire made him change.

  “Alfonso said when he was in Chino he knew a serial killer.”

  “He met a lot of people he didn’t like.”

  “Alfonso didn’t say he didn’t like him. He just said he was a serial killer. He calls Chino, like, the Club. He always says, When I was in the Club…”

  “Alfonso’s an idiot,” Clarette said.

  Rey Jr. said, “There’s a boy from Ireland in my class. He says eejit instead of idiot.”

  “You need to close that mouth before you get in trouble.”

  “I can’t chew with my mouth closed.”

  “You better try.”

  HE HAD KILLED the first two quickly, without thought. Water and knife. He had planned the other two. Fire and poison.

  That was not a row.

  Gustave came into the kitchen and said, “She ain’t had none to steal. Why they kill her?” He washed his face at the sink and then said, “They taken Chabert son to the barn.”