White Horses Page 8

  It was late afternoon when King and Teresa sat in the parked car, talking to each other for the last time. King lit a cigarette, Teresa ran the empty Coke bottle beneath her lip and played a soft, shallow tune.

  “You keep drinking that stuff and you’re going to get poisoning of the stomach,” King said, pointing at the soda bottle.

  “I’m not afraid of poison.” Teresa shrugged.

  Every time King inhaled on his cigarette, he coughed. They both stared straight ahead, watching dragonflies dart by the windshield.

  “I was in love with her,” King told his daughter. “It just turned out wrong,” he said. “It turned out she thought I was somebody I’m not.”

  Teresa knew then that if she looked at him she would cry.

  “I brought you something from southern California,” King told her. He reached over and flipped open the glove compartment. He took out a brown paper bag and handed it to Teresa. Inside were a dozen apricots; they shone like trapped sunlight.

  Teresa thanked him and closed up the bag—it seemed darker when she did, and she rattled the bag to make sure the fruit was still inside.

  “As far as your mother and Silver are concerned, I wasn’t here,” King said.

  “All right,” Teresa agreed. “You weren’t here.”

  “Maybe you’ll forget me,” King Connors said as he took a last drag on his cigarette. “I know you might. But I’ve got to save myself, understand? I’ve got a life, too, you know.”

  Teresa opened the car door and got out. She walked quickly, her eyes straight ahead; she didn’t turn when she heard the car pull away, she didn’t even wave. By the time she did look back, King Connors had already disappeared. So she walked on, and as she avoided the cracks in the cement, she took King Connors’s name and respelled it a dozen times, until the letters added up to no name at all. By the time she reached home, Teresa was through with her father’s name—it had been crossed out just like the name of any deserter. And before she went into the house, Teresa walked to the trashcan and lifted the cover, and when she threw the bag of apricots inside it fell so quickly that it might have been a bag of stones, rather than fruit the color of the sun.

  That summer Teresa was sick even more than usual. She didn’t want to walk out to the reservoir beyond Cannon’s Field to go swimming, she dreaded supermarkets, parks, all public places; she was certain that she would fall into a deep sleep and a crowd would gather around her. And so, Teresa spent most of June and July alone. Dina was busy preparing for her weekends with Bergen, Silver had so many girlfriends he gave them appointments and grief one at a time, and hadn’t the energy for anything else. Although Teresa had avoided nearly everyone at school, and didn’t give anyone a chance to speak to her, she did have one friend, Maureen, the only daughter of the Raleighs, who lived right next door. On days when Teresa felt safe from her sleeping spells, the two girls sat in the yard; nearby Atlas and Reggie dug holes in the earth and panted with the heat. Teresa and Maureen counted hummingbirds and bees, and regretted being fourteen. At two o’clock, when the ice-cream truck drove along Divisadero Street, they bought raspberry Popsicles, which dripped onto the cement as they walked back home.

  “What about sex?” Maureen asked one day.

  “What about it?” Teresa asked. She had never mentioned Cosmo to Maureen, she had never confided in her friend, not once. In fact, Teresa had never trusted anyone with her private thoughts, not even Silver. They were stored inside her head, where they swirled about, rattling next to her brain, and those dark thoughts were what Teresa thought privacy was all about.

  “Do you know anyone who’s ever done it?” Maureen asked. Teresa shook her head; she refused to think of what she had done in the back seat of Cosmo’s car as sex. “I bet Silver’s done it,” Maureen whispered. “I’ll bet you anything he has.”

  “No,” Teresa said, but she couldn’t help but wonder about Annette in New Mexico, and the dozens of girls who telephoned.

  “Ask him,” Maureen said, “I’ll bet you anything he has.”

  “Come on,” Teresa said, erasing those thoughts of Silver with women who knew secrets about love, “let’s go over to your house.”

  In return for allowing her to sidestep the topic of sex, Teresa let Maureen play the piano for her.

  “First,” Maureen said, as she sat on the piano bench in the Raleighs’ living room, “the title song from the movie Charade, starring Cary Grant.”

  Teresa sat on a bone-colored loveseat and listened to Maureen play. Outside, on the Raleighs’ front porch, Atlas whined and nosed the screen door.

  “Now,” Maureen said, turning to Teresa when she had finished her first number, “the title song from the memorable play, Oklahoma.”

  Atlas whined even louder, he was beginning to howl. Teresa tiptoed over to the door. “Go away,” she told the collie. She and Atlas stared at each other. “Can’t you be good like Reggie?” she asked him.

  Atlas was quiet enough through the rest of the song, and Maureen finished with a flourish of chords. “Well, what do you think?” she asked when she was through.

  Teresa walked over to the piano and ran one finger across the keys. She had not liked Maureen’s performance—the heavy crashes, the jarring mistakes—but if she herself could play, Teresa imagined a much different sort of music: the sweetest octaves, the most musical chords, light but growing stronger with every note. “I wish I could play,” Teresa admitted.

  The other girl beamed. “I could teach you,” she said. “I’ve had lessons for nearly five years.”

  Teresa considered. “I couldn’t pay you,” she said.

  “You could give me your black velvet skirt,” Maureen suggested.

  As they were about to agree to a deal, Dina ran over from next door and banged on the screen door. “Teresa,” she cried. “Get out here.”

  Teresa ran out to the porch; Dina’s hair fell into her eyes, there was blood on her hands. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Dina said.

  The piano in the living room no longer mattered, all thoughts of lessons disappeared immediately. Teresa forgot about the music she wanted to make; she stared at the blood on her mother’s hands. She feared that Silver had been attacked by a gang of thieves, a knife had been twisted into his heart, or that Bergen had been shot by a convict he had helped send to jail years ago for nonpayment of alimony.

  “It’s Reggie,” Dina said. “Something’s wrong with Reggie.”

  Teresa and Dina ran next door, following a trail of blood, Atlas at their heels. They were out of breath by the time they reached the back porch.

  “He’s under there,” Dina whispered as they both peered beneath the porch. “He won’t come out.”

  “Reggie,” Teresa called to the old dog. Atlas sat beside her as she crouched in the dirt; he whined, just as he had on Maureen’s porch.

  “He won’t come out,” Teresa told her mother.

  Dina went into the house and returned with a clean white sheet. She folded the sheet in half and then signaled to Teresa. “We’ll have to pull him out,” she told her daughter. “Then we’ll put him in this.”

  It was Teresa who reached under the porch and pulled Reggie out. Atlas shivered and pawed the ground. The other dog had hemorrhaged, and so much blood had poured out that he didn’t even whimper when Dina and Teresa put him on top of the sheet. Dina was pale, she ground her teeth. “Old age,” she told Teresa. “This is what happens.”

  Each of them carried an edge of the sheet, with Reggie inside the makeshift hammock. They walked the half mile to the animal hospital, leaving a thin trail of blood on the cement, as if a small bird had stepped in red paint and had then walked over every inch of Divisadero Street. Dina held the sheet with her arms behind her, she faced straight ahead. Once she turned and called to Teresa, “If he doesn’t die, we’ll have to have him killed.”

  “No,” Teresa said.

  “Put to sleep,” Dina amended. They walked as quickly as Reggie’s weight would allow.
“They call it ‘put to sleep,’ and believe me they don’t do it for free.”

  “We won’t do it,” Teresa insisted.

  “It’s all suffering anyway,” Dina called over her shoulder. “That’s what life is.”

  Atlas waited on the steps of the animal hospital when they went in. But here was no hope: Reggie was thirteen, almost as old as Teresa, and he had died while they were carrying him down the street. On the walk home, the collie stayed nearly half a block behind them; Dina walked in military fashion, her mouth set.

  “That’s life,” she reminded Teresa.

  It had been a summer of loss, a year of departures. And now Teresa stared at the cement as she walked home; she concentrated on not thinking about King Connors, and Renée, and the old dog they had just carried to the animal hospital. When they got home, Dina went inside to cook dinner, just as if she hadn’t carried a sheet permanently stained with blood. But Teresa stayed outside in the yard. As Dina opened the refrigerator and reached for a package of chopped meat, Teresa slipped under the porch. She tried to get the collie to come and sit with her; she clicked her tongue and patted the ground, but Atlas turned away and stretched beneath the eucalyptus trees.

  Under the porch it was damp and dark; the roots of the wisteria that hung above the doorway were woven through the earth. Teresa leaned her head against the cool dirt and closed her eyes. If she tried she could imagine that she was floating on the curls of music—she was better than any pianist, she was a musician in her mind, she moved with arpeggios, she flew higher with every chord.

  When they found her, the following morning, Teresa’s knees were pulled up and there were spider webs in her hair. Dina had searched the house the night before, Silver had borrowed a car and driven through the neighborhood calling her name.

  “I’m going to kill her,” Silver said as he and Dina bent down to watch Teresa sleep under the porch.

  “Let her sleep,” Dina whispered.

  “I’ve been up all night looking for her,” Silver said. “I’m going to break her neck.”

  Teresa shifted positions: her hair caught on a stem of wisteria root; she dreamed of moonlight and low octaves.

  “Shit,” Silver said. When he stood up, he noticed dried blood on his hand where he had leaned on the earth.

  “Reggie.” Dina nodded at the blood.

  “Fucking dog,” Silver said as he wiped the blood off on his pressed blue jeans.

  They pulled Teresa out and Silver carried her upstairs to her own room. She didn’t wake up, she had no sense of being carried, and when she woke she wouldn’t remember being put in her own bed, between fresh sheets in a room where the shades were drawn and the darkness was nearly as thick as it had been beneath the back porch.

  Lately there were times when Silver envied Teresa’s sleeping sickness, there were days when he wished he didn’t have to wake up. Every day was the same for him; he walked over to Leona’s Restaurant to clean last night’s dinner off white china plates, he stood over a sink of steaming hot water and grease. Even the nights and the weekends seemed pointless; getting drunk, getting laid, driving in a friend’s car at ninety miles an hour—all of it seemed tame as toast, and so repetitive that Silver could walk through every scene with his eyes closed. It was the time in his life when Silver first realized that everything he had always wished for just might not materialize. A year earlier he had dreamed of freedom as he walked out of the corridors of the high school for the last time. He wanted a car, money in his pockets, his choice of a dozen girls, all hot for him, all ready to open their legs in the back seat of his fancy car. But as it turned out there was no car, and no money, though he still had women—blondes who had eyed him in school waited for him by the kitchen door of Leona’s, waitresses who were nearly Dina’s age slipped him their phone numbers. But none of these women mattered, none could erase the fact that his hands were scarred from burning dishwater, that he lived with the cold humiliation of having lost something he had never had.

  Silver drank more than before; when he went out with friends—many of them still in high school, concerned with things Silver had long ago disregarded—Silver was always the biggest drinker. He stuck to tequila, liquor as mysterious as he imagined himself to be. He longed for prairies; he would ride a wild hone like the ones the men Dina called Arias rode; his hair would grow as long and tangled as weeds. He wanted polished turquoise and women in white and instead he got dishwater and telephone numbers scrawled on the backs of matchbooks. At the age of seventeen he was bitter—he wanted to make a killing, to take some chances. He felt himself drawn to something hotter than his own life, something that would make the Santa Rosa sidewalks sizzle, something in the area of crime.

  Slowly, Silver began to avoid his old friends. Some nights he went downtown alone, to the pool hall on Sixteenth Street, or a bar called the Dragon. He studied men older than himself—men with tattoos, with pasts in prison or on the road. He bought a knife with an ivory handle, and eavesdropped on the conversations of drug dealers. He was convinced that sooner or later he would hit a winning streak, it was all a question of timing, just a matter of time.

  The first crime was nothing much—anyone with too little money and a little fire would have done the same. Silver enlisted two old friends, Eddie and Roland; together they managed to steal nearly two hundred dollars from the cash register at the Texaco station while the attendant wasn’t looking.

  “Kid stuff,” Angel Gregory said to Silver at the bar of the Dragon when Silver boasted about the heist.

  “Oh yeah?” Silver said to the older man. He reached into his pocket for a roll of bills and showed them to Gregory. “What do you call this?”

  Gregory smiled and reached for his own billfold. Inside a diamond-studded money clip were fifties and hundreds; even Silver was impressed. “Let me know when you’re ready for the big time,” Gregory said. “Call me when you quit honing around.”

  Silver knew that Gregory earned his money in drug deals—at least once a month Gregory traveled to San Francisco and brought back cocaine and marijuana.

  “You mean you’re looking for a partner?” Silver asked that night at the bar.

  “Partner?” Gregory said. “Shit. I’m looking for a runner. Someone to make trips into the city for me.”

  Silver turned down the offer right then; he was no one’s errand boy. And he wasn’t too certain how he felt about dealing in drugs; if he worked out of the house the old detective, Bergen, would be nosing around. And anyway, Silver had plans of his own—with the profits from the first job he bought a gun from Jim, the old dishwasher at Leona’s who had served time in Vacaville for armed robbery.

  “You sure you know how to work it?” the dishwasher asked when they stood out in the alley behind the restaurant.

  Silver was jumpy, but he stuck the gun in the waist of his jeans as if he had carried it all his life. “Sure,” he said. “I know how to work it.”

  “Got the safety catch on?” Jim teased.

  Silver quickly reached for the gun and checked it. “Of course I’ve got the catch on,” he said.

  “Takes practice,” Jim said before they walked back into the kitchen. “A life of crime takes practice and hard work. But I think you’ve got what it takes,” he said, patting Silver’s shoulder. “All you’ve got to do is practice.”

  After Silver left the restaurant that night he strode home like an Apache, invincible and dark, he was an outlaw of seventeen who planned to knock over the Denny’s Restaurant just outside town. That same week, late one night, when the horizon was pale blue and crimson, the three old friends pulled into Denny’s parking lot in an Oldsmobile borrowed from Roland’s brother-in-law. Roland stayed in the car, the gears set; he watched as Eddie and Silver got out and walked into the brightly lit restaurant. Inside, two truckdrivers on an all-night run to Eureka sat at the counter eating bacon and eggs. The waitress curled a strand of blond hair around her finger and leaned her elbows on the countertop. Silver and Eddie sat on th
e stools nearest the cash register; they ordered coffee, black, and didn’t even bother to give the waitress a smile. They waited for the truckdrivers to finish their late-night breakfast, pay, and leave. When the truck pulled out of the parking lot, shivers ran down Silver’s spine. But he was under control; he finished his coffee and then told Eddie to pay.

  Eddie stood next to the waitress as she rang up their bill; when the drawer of the register flew open, Eddie shot Silver a worried look and waited for Silver’s okay. Silver nodded and stood up; he hid the register from the view of any passing car on the road. “Go ahead,” he told Eddie.

  “Give us everything you’ve got,” Eddie told the waitress.

  “Gladly,” the waitress said, and she winked.

  “The money,” Silver said roughly. He took out the gun and pointed it at her. “All of it.”

  “Shit,” the waitress said, and she loaded the paper bag Eddie handed her with bills. “I’m going to get fired,” she told Silver.

  “So what?” Silver shrugged. “What the hell do you care about a crappy job like this for?”

  Eddie put the bag full of money into his pocket and edged toward the door.

  “You just forget you ever saw us,” Silver told the waitress. He waved the gun in the air and then returned it to the waistband of his jeans. “If you remember us well enough to describe us, I’ll remember you. And I’ll come back for you,” Silver warned. He turned and walked out of Denny’s; Eddie was waiting outside the front door.

  “Come on,” Silver said, walking on to the car. Silver sat in the passenger seat. Eddie got into the back; he waved the paper bag in the air.