White Horses Read online

  “Fine,” Bergen said. “Just fine.”

  He appeared that weekend, the back seat of his car loaded with a hundred-pound sack of compost. He was wearing that same madras sports jacket he had worn the first time he came to the door—only now he wore a carnation tucked into the buttonhole. Dina and Teresa watched from the kitchen window as Bergen unloaded the compost.

  “Some men bring bouquets,” Dina said. “He brings a hundred bouquets.”

  “It’s fertilizer!” Teresa said.

  “Don’t be rude,” Dina said. “Open the door for him.” She patted her hair into place, then gave Teresa a shove. Bergen had set the sack by the toolshed. He stood and surveyed the garden, but the way it looked now merged with the way he remembered it, and he saw begonias and healthy rows of corn where now there was nothing more than tall, unruly weeds. Dina had cooked today’s lunch the night before; she had Bergen’s plate on the table before he had walked through the door.

  “You must be hungry,” she told him, concerned, as though he’d traveled all the way from San Francisco on foot.

  “I am,” Bergen admitted. He took off his sports jacket and rolled up his sleeves before he sat down at the table.

  “Hang his coat in the closet,” Dina told Teresa.

  When Teresa returned from the hallway closet, Bergen was quietly eating his lunch and Dina was at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. Teresa sat across from Bergen and watched him eat.

  “So you’re thirteen now,” Bergen said to Teresa.

  “Fourteen,” Teresa corrected him. “Last month was my birthday.”

  “Pisces.” Bergen nodded.

  “Fourteen and one month,” Teresa informed him.

  “Ah,” Bergen said. He cut his baked chicken carefully. “Nearly a grown-up.”

  “Hah,” Dina said from her place at the sink.

  “Children grow up fast these days,” Bergen said.

  “You’re telling me.” Dina held a glass she had just rinsed up to the light. “And they never remember who walked the floor all night with them, they never remember who paid for all their shoes.”

  “No,” Bergen agreed. “They never do.”

  “Did you ever catch a murderer?” Teresa asked.

  “Can’t say that I did,” Bergen told her. “I mostly dealt with divorces, wills, that sort of thing.” When Teresa looked disappointed he added, “I got a bank robber once.” Teresa’s eyes lit up. “He was wanted for back alimony, too—that’s where I came in. He was holed up in Petaluma. A bad character.”

  “Did he try to shoot you?” Teresa asked.

  “He had a gun,” Bergen said. “I suppose he might have tried to shoot me.”

  When Teresa went to get Arnie Bergen some lemonade, the detective stared down at his clean plate. “I guess you think I have a lot of nerve, coming here like this.”

  “How can anyone get through this terrible life without some nerve?” Dina asked.

  “I’ve thought about you a lot since the last time we met,” Bergen said softly.

  Dina checked the tortoise-shell comb in her hair. “How did you like your lunch?” she asked.

  “Delicious,” Bergen said. “Just wonderful.”

  They went out to work together in the garden; the smell of compost drifted over the neighborhood as Bergen followed Dina around the yard. Black and yellow butterflies moved from one tomato seedling to another, even though the ground was still so cold Dina had to wear heavy work gloves. When Silver came home from work at the restaurant, Bergen and Dina were still out in the yard. Teresa was at the kitchen table doing homework.

  Silver went to the screen door and looked out. “What the fuck is this?” he said. “What’s that old detective doing here?”

  “Bergen,” Teresa said. “His name is Arnie Bergen, and he brought fertilizer with him.”

  “That figures,” Silver said as he went to the refrigerator for a beer. “He’s a loser. It’s written all over his face, big letters, loser.” Silver sat at the table, pulled out his pay from Leona’s, and then counted every penny. “Bet you he never solved a case in his life.”

  Bergen came up to Santa Rosa every weekend after that. On Friday nights Dina washed her hair and then she prepared the meal she would serve to Bergen on the following day. If he stayed in town on Saturday night and sometimes he did, Bergen checked in at the Lamplighter Motel on Sixteenth Street. There was a pool at the motel, and Bergen often invited the entire family over to swim. Silver, of course, refused; he wouldn’t have given the detective the right time of day.

  “Why the hell is she wasting her time on him?” he asked Teresa.

  “I don’t know,” Teresa said. “I guess she likes him.”

  But when Teresa asked her mother if she was in love with Bergen, Dina laughed out loud. “That old man?” she said as she stroked cold cream onto her face. “I’m forty-one, he’s close to sixty.”

  “Fifty-two,” Teresa said. “I asked him.”

  “I could never be serious about him,” Dina told her daughter. “You don’t think I’ve sat around waiting my whole life for Bergen, do you?”

  But as Dina spoke, even as she listed Arnie Bergen’s faults, everything she did betrayed her. Every bit of cold cream, every dinner she had made for the detective, the look on her face each time he handed her one of the gifts he brought—loaves of bread, tablecloths, used books, a brown paper bag full of tulip bulbs, a bouquet of wildflowers, poppies, and heather—showed just how delighted she was.

  “You have to understand,” Bergen explained to Teresa one day at the edge of the Lamplighter Motel pool, “your mother doesn’t want to commit herself right now. After all, she’s not a free woman. She’s still legally married.”

  But every Saturday no one would have guessed Bergen and Dina were anything other than husband and wife. Dina cooked dinner and Bergen washed up afterward, wearing an apron tied around his waist. They would play cards or drink wine and listen to the radio. And then, after it was dark, they would sit out on the back porch in the moonlight and watch the yard as if they could hear the iris bulbs stirring beneath the earth, as if they could already smell the October cabbage.

  At first Bergen assumed that someday he would move to Santa Rosa—if not into the house, at least nearby. He had a pension from his days in the service, and his belongings in his apartment in San Francisco could have easily fit into a few cardboard boxes. But Dina wouldn’t hear of it; she liked things the way they were. Every weekend she was certain something would happen: a man would walk into her kitchen and her life would be wonderfully altered. She lived for Saturdays, she was wild about Sunday mornings, thrilled each time Bergen parked his car on the corner of Divisadero Street.

  “For the last time—no,” she said when Bergen once more suggested that he move up to Santa Rosa. “I’m a married woman.”

  “I can find King,” Bergen told her. “I found him before. I found you.”

  Dina shook her head. “Nothing doing,” she told the detective. “Why would I want him found?”

  “To divorce him,” Bergen answered.

  “Hah,” Dina said. “Do you think he’d give me a divorce? Do you think he’d give me anything I wanted?”

  There were times when Bergen saw Dina through a haze of the past—her face was the face in the photograph he had carried in his pocket for so long; she was the girl who had run away, leaving behind a father who mourned her, running in the night toward desire without ever looking back, just running. But there were other times when Bergen saw Dina the way she really was—her fine hair streaked gray, the lines across her forehead and around her eyes where there was once the apricot flesh of youth, print dresses and hair combs made of tortoise-shell and silver. Whenever he saw her as she really was—when she walked across the kitchen to open the refrigerator and get a carton of milk or when she wrapped a sweater around herself and sat out on the back porch and breathed in the odor of the roses that grew at the edge of the yard, whenever he looked at her and saw a woman of forty-one, B
ergen hated King Connors, he hated him more every day. Bergen had forgotten about the touch of time, he blamed King Connors for robbing him of that girl.

  “I could fix it,” Bergen told Dina as they sat side by side on the porch. “I could make him give you a divorce.”

  “You don’t know King. There’s nothing you could say.”

  “Well, then,” Bergen said after a time, speaking just loud enough to be heard above the crickets who sang in the vegetable patch, “I could kill him.”

  Dina didn’t laugh the way some women would have, and she didn’t doubt for a minute that Bergen meant what he said. She looked at the detective with a new sort of passion; she put her arm around him and felt his heat through both his clothes and her own. “My darling,” she said.

  She had never called him by anything other than his name, and now Bergen was trembling with courage and fear. “I could, you know,” he said stubbornly.

  “No,” Dina said. “That’s impossible. It would be a sin. We’ll manage somehow.”

  “All right,” Bergen agreed, though his hands were still sweating and his head was racing with murder plans. “All right,” he said to Dina. “We’ll manage.”

  Teresa was asleep upstairs in her room, Silver wouldn’t be back until the night was through, and so, even though Bergen had already paid for his room at the Lamplighter Motel, they spent the night together in the bed Dina had shared with King Connors for so many year. Dina was shy, but Bergen was as careful as if he held a photograph instead of a woman. And they were sure to be quiet, quiet enough not to wake Teresa, quiet enough to hear their own breathing as they let their bodies travel backward in time, so that Dina still was a seventeen-year-old girl who had never left Santa Fe and Bergen was a young man with stars in his eyes. At five the next morning, only an hour after Silver got home from a night of fast cars and tequila, Bergen tiptoed down the stairs, got into his car, and drove back to the Lamplighter Motel. And when they next saw each other, five hours later, separated by the kitchen table and the Sunday Chronicle, Bergen and Dina acknowledged their night together with a brief smile exchanged so secretly no one would have noticed. And although they would be together from this weekend on, they never spoke about their lovemaking, they treated it like a dream or a slow-moving night film in which they were lovers both in the present and the nonexistent past.

  It was not long after that first night Dina and Bergen spent together that King Connors came back to town. He was staying at the Lamplighter Motel, just down the hall from Bergen, although when Bergen left on Sunday afternoon to go back to San Francisco, King Connors stayed on. The two men never met; they wouldn’t have recognized each other if they had passed the ice machine at the same time, though Bergen was convinced he would know King anywhere and would be able to spot Dina’s husband as easily as he could sight a rattlesnake moving in the tall yellow grass. If Bergen was afraid that King might someday return to claim what was rightfully his—his wife, his house, the garden where Bergen had planted tulips and asparagus—the old detective had nothing to worry about. King Connors wouldn’t have come back to stay for any money; a sack of gold coins couldn’t make him spend another night with Dina or force him to go back and relive the crime of a sad, shared past.

  King Connors wasn’t back to stay, he was back only to ease his mind. He had come to make sure that there was still a roof on the house, that his children weren’t dressed in rags, and that his wife hadn’t wasted away to skin and bones. King had borrowed a car no one would recognize from a lady friend in Los Angeles. He wore a straw hat and a cotton scarf around his neck. If anyone had suddenly spotted him, he would have buried his face in the scarf and sped away in the other direction. He parked on Divisadero Street and studied the house by moonlight: the roof he had put on three years before was still as good as new, no screams came from the upstairs windows, buzzards didn’t circle the chimney and cry through beaks of distress. King’s guilt about leaving home had been eased once Reuben came to stay. But now Reuben was out on his own—he had an apartment in the Valley and a job rebuilding Volvos—and King wanted to be certain that his younger children were doing as well as his eldest. So when King saw Teresa leave the house to walk to school on a Monday morning, he followed her in the borrowed car; when Teresa stopped at the Texaco station to buy a Coke, King pulled up to the pumps, talked to the attendant, then walked to the soda machine. Teresa hadn’t ever expected to see King again, but now when she saw him she wasn’t surprised.

  “How about going for a ride?” King Connors said, easy as pie, just as if he hadn’t been gone for two years.

  “All right,” Teresa found herself saying. She got into the car and they headed down to the River Road.

  “How can you drink a Coke so early in the day?” King Connors said.

  “Easy.” Teresa shrugged. “It’s a matter of taste.”

  They drove out of town and west, crossed the river and then drove alongside it. Teresa stuck her head out the window and closed her eyes. The scent of the river took over, coating the interior of the car, leaving its damp imprint on Teresa’s eyelids, interrupted only by the smell of sulfur when King Connors lit a cigarette and tossed the match out his window.

  “That’s how forest fires start,” Teresa told him.

  “Too early in the season,” King Connors answered. Then he looked at her hard. “Since when do you tell me what to do?”

  Teresa turned away from King, angry that he still felt free to scold her after all this time. She didn’t turn to him until they had reached Guerneville, and King pulled over to park.

  “Why are we stopping here?” she asked.

  “I thought you might need something,” King Connors said. “Some clothes for school?”

  People from Santa Rosa didn’t go shopping in Guerneville unless they had something to hide, unless they were deserters back for only a few hours. “My mother got me everything I need for school,” Teresa said primly. “But I could use another Coke,” she admitted.

  King Connors gave her some money, and Teresa got out of the car.

  “Do you know what’s going to happen to you if you keep drinking so many sodas?” King Connors called through his open window as Teresa crossed the street to go to the drugstore. “You’re going to be struck with stomach complications, that’s what will happen.”

  Teresa kept walking, she opened the drugstore door and went inside; she didn’t bother to listen to King Connors’s advice, why should she? She pulled a bottle out of the cold case, paid the pharmacist, and went back to the car. They sat there, parked, and because King Connors didn’t make a move to drive anywhere else, Teresa settled back and drank her soda. “You still sick?” King asked. “Still have that sleeping disease?”

  “It’s not too bad,” Teresa said. “It’s gotten better ever since we went to New Mexico.” She looked at King, waiting for his reaction.

  “Your goddamn mother,” King said. “I know she dragged you all to New Mexico. Reuben told me. He was living with me for a while.”

  “I know it,” Teresa said, annoyed. “He told me all about his plans. He told me everything, even before he did it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” King said. “And you told your mother?” he guessed. Teresa shot her father a look of disgust. “Of course you didn’t,” King amended. “I know you. You didn’t say a word, kept it all to yourself.”

  “I was the only one he told,” Teresa said proudly.

  “He doesn’t live with me now,” King Connors said. “He’s got his own place. Pretty nice, too. I’ve seen it.”

  “Silver’s dropped out of school,” Teresa informed her father.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” King said.

  “And I might leave home.” She hadn’t the faintest idea what made her say such a thing, she hadn’t thought of running away for some time.

  “Oh?” King Connors said.

  “That’s right,” Teresa said, caught up in it now. “I might be leaving town real soon.”

  “Just where do you thi
nk you’ll be heading?” King asked, and Teresa considered. She thought she might try Oregon, or the East Coast, eventually Canada, the whitest part of Canada where the drifts were up to the rafters. “Because I’ll tell you one thing,” King said now, before Teresa had had a chance to answer him, “you sure as shit aren’t moving in with me. I gave up twenty years, and what good did it do? It didn’t make anybody happy. So just forget about it if that’s what you had in mind.”

  Teresa jerked her head up; she closed her lips so tight that a gush of surprise escaped.

  “I just don’t have room,” King Connors said. “It’s not that I don’t want you—but my place is small as a kennel. Even Reuben understood that.”

  “I never said I wanted to go with you,” Teresa said quickly.

  “All right,” King said. “All right. So long as we both understand.”

  “What makes you think I wanted to go with you?” Teresa said. She turned her head and stared out the window, her eyes burned as if someone had held a match to her eyelids.

  “Don’t take it personally,” King said.

  Teresa turned and glared at him. “My mother’s right—you’re not the right one. She should have waited for somebody better to come along.”

  King Connors nodded and turned the key in the ignition, he made a U turn and headed back to Santa Rosa. Teresa was silent all the way back; as far as she was concerned, they had nothing more to say to each other. But King Connors wouldn’t stop talking now, he went on endlessly about his work: he was a truckdriver, delivering lemons from the groves to huge warehouses, his truck always filled with new fruit. Teresa tried not to listen, but she could swear she smelled lemon flowers, she wondered if her father’s skin would turn yellow, if bees would follow him wherever he went; she took a deep breath, and nearly sobbed when she exhaled.

  Even later, when King stopped the car a block away from the house, he continued to talk about trees: the lemon trees where he worked, the orange trees that grew in the vacant lot behind his apartment building, sweet almond branches that brushed his head each time he walked out his front door. Teresa couldn’t understand how a man could talk so much about a thing like trees, and she had never in her life heard her father say so many words all at one time. From that day on, each time she thought about King Connors, Teresa’s head would be filled with the same scent of lemons there had been that day they drove to Guerneville; sometimes the fragrance would be so strong she would jump and turn around, certain that King was in the room.