Under the Rose Page 24

  Tom couldn’t let this pass. Mindful of the jibe about his not living, he had argued with more assurance than he felt, ‘No, no! Films tell you what the trends are. That’s why you got to watch them. With all the brains and money that go into them, they have to reflect current thinking. Violence is going to take over. That’s their message. Breakdown. It’ll be every man for himself. I don’t worry. I have my guns. I’ve always been a rugged individualist. I’ll stop being a chiropractor if they bring in socialized medicine. I wouldn’t work for that. I’d get another job. Adaptation is the name of the game. Individualism. Being self-sufficient.’

  For Gary this was the sort of day-dreaming which had brought down Rafael.

  Was it?

  Wrapping an old T-shirt round a broom, Tom buffed the dojo floor while casting an occasional glance up at the dragon-and-knight images on its walls. He hadn’t really looked at them in years and, now that he did, was surprised to find the dragons – robotic, feral, breathing fire – more impressive than the knights. Martin, with his fiery accidents, was a sort of dragon. Or a Merlin: a faker who even faked himself. Tom guessed that he took steroids, for his muscles were oddly swollen. Poor Rafael, though he had shown the valour of a knight errant by single-handedly giving three nasty guys their comeuppance, did not look at all like the knights in Tom’s blow-ups.

  These bestrode their space. Their muscles thrust past armour-plating whose scaly bristle made them too look dragonlike. The effect was futuristic and mediaeval: a blend Tom enjoyed. It was as though the future held the best of the past in store: Paradise Two, a sequel to Eden. Later, would come the Fall.

  ‘It’s coming,’ he kept telling his class. ‘There were several films about it recently.’ He mentioned the actresses’ names. ‘Great-looking gals!’ As his listeners savoured this, he pulsed with their breathing pattern. Gals interested him most at a remove. ‘There’s a trend.’

  ‘Tom, those are films!’

  ‘No! Films’, Tom had insisted, ‘are real!’ He corrected that. ‘They anticipate reality. The thinking that goes into them does.’

  Putting away his broom, he wondered who would come to class today. Not Martin, not Jim, not Rafael. Then the door was pushed open and there was Gary with a gal whom Tom recognized as Rafael’s wife, Elena. Small but feisty, at one time she’d started training here, then decided she’d be better off in a women’s self-defence class. Tom, not really wanting women around, had been relieved. He liked her though, and she had been very good about visiting his mother in her last months. The two, surprisingly, had grown close and Elena had spent whole days with the dying woman.

  Greeting her, he asked about Rafael and was told he was bearing up.

  It turned out she needed a favour. With Rafael in jail, the bank had foreclosed their mortgage and taken their house, so now they had nowhere to store their furniture. It was in a truck outside. Could she leave it here?

  ‘Just for a bit,’ she begged and explained that she hoped to rent a place soon.

  ‘It could go upstairs,’ Gary told Tom, ‘in your mother’s old apartment.’

  Six months earlier, Heppy, Tom’s mother, had died, leaving a clutter of Norman Rockwell plates, flimsy side-tables with sugar-stick legs and knickknacks so alien to Tom that, after shipping what she’d asked him to ship to cousins in Salt Lake City, he had given the rest to the Salvation Army. Only the room, where she had spent her last months, was intact. She’d had a house in Pasadena until her arthritis got bad and Tom brought her here where he could keep an eye on her during the day. She had died upstairs. Maybe it was as well to crowd out her ghost.

  ‘Sure,’ he agreed.

  So instead of a karate class, there was a furniture-moving session with everyone who turned up for training pitching in. Tom relished the sociability, as neighbours dropped by, containers too big to move were broken into and objects piled on his strip of lawn. As in a garage sale, private things were incongruously displayed. A chest-expander lay between a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe, a juicer and a bathroom scales. A long package was possibly a rifle, and a box of cakes was an offering from the girl whose misfortunes had sparked off Rafael’s troubles. Elena introduced her: Juana. They were cousins. Tom, though he hadn’t met her until now, knew her story from Rafael and the L.A. Times.

  He tried not to stare. She couldn’t be more than sixteen.

  ‘Just fourteen when it happened,’ Rafael had told the class. Gangsters, he explained, had kidnapped her from her village in Mexico, then smuggled her here to LA to be a sexual slave.

  ‘Slavey?’

  ‘Slave! She was a slave! They paid her nothing and kept her locked up.’

  ‘Your having us on!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What sort of gangsters?’

  ‘Small-time ones. They own a bar in East LA where they made her work.’

  The scenario seemed to belong to another place and time. Tom imagined the young Liz Taylor as Juana whose age suggested a fanciful romp with periwigs and tricorne hats. ‘Yer money or yer life, yer ducats or yer wife!’ Or an ad. ‘Pray, take these instead,’ cries the captive girl, offering brand-name chocolates to the heavies who lower their muskets, lick their lips and accept the bargain. In a darker mood, your thoughts could slide to the stolen children whose hearts and kidneys are allegedly sold to rich or desperate First World parents.

  The reality was less harrowing since, by the time Rafael heard of it, Juana had been found. Her family, into which he had meanwhile married, had known who to blame – pistoleros who had moved to Los Angeles – so her brother, though himself a child, had set out in pursuit. Making his way across the border then, though he had neither money nor English, to the LA barrio where people from his part of Mexico lived, the boy had succeeded in picking up the trail of the men who, with violent thrift, were using and abusing his sister as maid-of-all-work and whore.

  ‘So he got her home? Back to Mexico?’

  ‘Yeah, but it took a while.’

  ‘What a feat though! Like Samson and Goliath!’

  ‘The newspapers helped. They made a story of it.’

  ‘How old did you say he was?’

  ‘About like the kid in The Thief of Baghdad?’

  ‘Or Les Misérables.’

  Without movie-world lore, the thing would have been too alien to understand. As it was, the class had to look with a new eye at their old pal, Raffo, who must, they now saw, have a Mexican border slicing through his mind: a division as hard to negotiate as a Rio Grande in flood.

  *

  ‘Pan Mexicano?’

  Juana was offering cake. Oozing cream from a sugary slit, it looked even less salubrious than the ones with which Rafael’s Mom had failed to tempt Tom twenty years ago. Juana had removed her jacket and revealed blue-veined arms. A waif. A Dickens girl. Her skin, he saw from close up, was poor. Probably ate the wrong diet and needed further salvation. In a film, the make-up people would have provided this and Tom, to his amused surprise, imagined himself transfiguring her, as the orphaned Little Lord Fauntleroy had been transfigured, in a lace-collared velvet suit. Instead, he accepted her cake and a coffee – Elena must have unpacked her own percolator, for he never drank the stuff – then walked off to find somewhere to rid himself of both.

  *

  The kidnappers, Raffo had told the shocked dojo, had gone scot free. They must have done a deal with the police though, naturally, he didn’t know details. Maybe they were stool pigeons? Part of an undercover anti-drug-or-smuggling-squad? Juana was sure some of the clients she’d been forced to service were cops. By now the newspapers had lost interest – or been warned off?

  Vigorously kicking the air and, with it, the dreamed-up faces of pistoleros, the class considered their society’s loss of virtue. When had the rot set in? Kick. With President Kennedy’s death? The cover-up? Kick. Water- or Irangate? Kossovo? Kick, kick and kick again! Somewhere faith had been lost. Mislaid. Roundhouse kick.

  ‘Again with the other leg,’ encourage
d Tom. ‘Add a backfist to the face, elbow strike, upper block and back kick. Pulverize the opposition. Yell kiai! Turn. Keep together! More spirit! And again!’

  Few of us, he reflected, were the straight bamboo shoots empty of selfishness that we would have wished. The scourges and avengers. The new brooms. Excited advice, though, was lavished on Rafael – most of it, Tom saw with hindsight, unwise.

  He tried to recall what he’d said himself, but was interrupted by Elena who wanted to be shown how to use the barbecue. Next came a debate over who should go to the store for refreshments and what they should buy. Beer? Mineral water? Juice? Tom didn’t join in.

  There was a debt owing to that girl. ‘A debt outstanding!’ Hearing the words hammer in his head, he wondered if they were his? His words to Raffo? They had a boom which reminded Tom of his father more than fifty years ago. A pillar of pin-striped darkness looming up to make him cry. Acrid-smelling. Fuming and unpredictable. ‘Young man,’ it scolded, ‘you owe … owe …’ What? To whom? ‘To me,’ boomed Pop and slid menacingly into focus. ‘And you’ll pay, young man! I’ll see to that. Don’t cringe! Cringing doesn’t impress me. I have a duty to bring you up right, even if your mother spoils you. A duty to society!’ Stiff collar. Stiff-judging mouth! Huge, terrifying fist! Slamming down, it blocked out the light as Tom fell on his back and his ears rang from the blow. Strong smells of alcohol. Once Pop dislocated Tom’s shoulder. Then, somehow, he died and Tom and Mom came West. In the train, she sang a rhyme which Tom misinterpreted:

  A penny for a cotton ball,

  Tuppence for a needle!

  That’s the way the money goes,

  And POP goes the weasel!

  Bang! Blow Pop away! Pop-the-Weasel! Wasn’t that what had happened?

  Maybe the voice in Tom’s head was an echo of his own? ‘This city’s lost its virtue!’ That was his all right! He must have been remembering the lost, radiant, Pop-free LA in which he grew up: clear air, innocent leafiness, sun spraying like yellow petals and nothing to be afraid of. Even in the canyons the only danger was from coyotes which would eat a baby if its mother was an airhead and wandered off, leaving it on a rug. There had been one such case, he recalled – but things went wrong in Eden too. Eden. The jacaranda trees seemed to unravel the sky when their blossoms opened in a blaze as blue as the sea – which was there too, rippling like shaken silk. Warm and salty. Luminous, unpolluted and safe.

  ‘We’re safe,’ his mother whispered, ‘safe, safe, safe and we’ll never go back! Never! We’ll stay here together.’

  So they did. She wasn’t the sort of mother who’d leave him alone on a rug. Nor he her.

  *

  Elena, back from the store with charcoal and lighters, paused to watch Gary fix the barbecue and to tell Tom how much more culture meant to Mexicans than it did to people here. ‘That’s why Rafael is so impressed by your studies. He used to tell me how when you talked of the things you cared about, it went right over the heads of the class. It went over his head too but he loved listening. And he admires your beliefs. He says you are one of the last men to have principles the way the great Americans did. Ah, good! Gary’s got the fire going. I’d better bring the food.’

  *

  Dusk found Tom sitting at the head of a table – Elena’s table which had been set up in his mother’s dining room – picking at take-away Mexican food. From politeness, he let fajitas and chile relleno be piled on his plate, though he remained proof against beer. Dos Xs. The two women were to spend some nights here. Gary had brokered the decision while Tom was ringing the hospital where Jim turned out to be less badly injured than had been feared. He was in stable condition and could have visitors soon. Tom asked about his eye but the gal at the other end of the phone was slow-witted and didn’t seem to understand.

  He was pleased to see Juana eat. She was not at all like the small Elizabeth Taylor, but thinnish and frail like a plant in need of a stake. Her wrists were the size of his two middle fingers and there were shadows under her eyes.

  Watching him watch, Elena whispered, ‘She had to leave home and come back here because of the disgrace. People were calling her the gringos’ whore.’ Her brothers, murmured Elena, were treated as pimps, even the one who’d rescued her. ‘She needs someone older to look after her. Don’t you like those fajitas? There’s no fat on them.’

  Tom said sure he did and put some chicken on his fork. Cancer, he remembered reading. They buy the good bits of cancerous chickens and cover them with chile. He hid the chicken under some onion. No way would he eat this.

  ‘You don’t eat much,’ said Elena, catching him.

  Tom said he’d had something earlier.

  ‘Juana starved herself when she got home,’ said Elena. ‘Trying to get rid of her ass and tits from shame at being a woman. That’s what the doctor said, so her mother sent her to me. It’s not a convenient time to have her, but how could I say “no”? She can’t go back there. There’s nothing there anyway.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Tom thought of a drive he had taken to Baja California where the First World meets the Third and green land yields to parched brown. A mile or so south of this, he’d taken a wrong turn into an encampment of derelicts sitting by a bonfire. It was dusk and the air was thick with ashes or maybe bats. Some of them stood up and closed in on his car. They waved their arms menacingly – but were bought off with the price of a few beers.

  Pocketing it, they’d looked shrunken and forlorn and the thought grazed him that maybe they’d merely been directing him to the nearest hotel, a place where you could drink margaritas and listen to mariachis while the sun set over the Pacific. Where else would the gringo driver of a car like his be heading? He had no Spanish, and money, his only currency, seemed to disappoint them. Perhaps they had been hoping for news of the First World which, though inaccessible to themselves, was just up the road?

  ‘Rafael’, Elena was saying, ‘sees you as his model. His father is jealous. He never liked his doing karate.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Elena looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Does his father blame me for Rafael’s trouble?’

  ‘Sure he does, but don’t let that bother you. It’s how Chicano families are! The parents are fearful but the kids want to stand up for themselves. Rafael thinks of you as his North American father. Really! And your mother was a heroine for me too. Heppy! So brave when she had to defend you from your father! She told me how he’d get drunk and beat you senseless until she was sure he’d turn you into an idiot or maybe kill you, if she didn’t kill him. And how then she had to explain this to a jury which had been turned against her by photographs of his head with the eye hanging out like a loose knob. I’m sorry, am I upsetting you? No. I know you’re proud of her! She had such courage! And heart! Corage y corazon! She was such a small woman, no bigger than Juana, yet she told me she snatched up that statuette without thinking whether it would do the job – or of what would happen if it didn’t. It was just there on a side table and could have been made of anything – ceramic, glass, but she was lucky and it was made of lead. That helped with the jury. That it wasn’t premeditated. Oh I’m sure even they admired her. Anyway they found her innocent. That was great – even if she did have to leave home later. Like Juana. Juries try to be fair but gossip doesn’t. Do you know that if I’m letting Juana stay with me at a time like this, it’s in memory of Heppy?’

  While she talked, Elena was removing plates and bringing on a ‘flan’. Some sort of custard. Taken up by her reminiscences, she said no more about Tom not touching his food. He felt badly about that, recognizing a primitive violation of – what? Solidarity? Also he was hungry. Maybe that stuff about cancerous chickens wasn’t true? Too late now to change his mind. Elena had scraped the plates into a garbage bag. Pinkish refried beans mingled with tomato sauce. The business about his father’s eye shocked him. Had he suppressed it? Tried to give it to Jim? ‘Hanging out like a loose knob?’ Yes, that was how it had been. A drooping tassel. On whom?
Jim? Pop? For moments their heads fused and swam inside his own. Nacreous and messy, the eye swayed unattributably. What colour had his father’s been anyway? Pop’s popped eye! Now back in its socket, it lit up in Tom’s memory and scanned him knowingly. It expressed pure rage and Tom was dazed with fear. Behind Pop’s head, Tom’s mother raised the statuette and he, despite his daze, saw – and stayed silent until his father’s exploding head splashed substances which, later, had to be washed from Tom’s hair. Could he have imagined this? Could he?

  Blinking, he rose. ‘I’ve got to phone about Jim,’ he told the table and went down to his office.

  ‘How about his eyes?’ he insisted when he got through. ‘Are they injured?’

  He was told that the patient’s vision did not seem impaired. Tests would be run later but as of now no injuries to the ocular region appeared to have been sustained.

  Tom went into the bathroom where he rolled his own guilty eyes at the mirror and threw water on his face. His mother had clearly needed to reminisce and rid herself of her memories, and he’d never let her. Couldn’t bear to be left with them himself. Oh well, too late now! Pop goes the weasel! Try and forget it all. They were both dead.

  Or should he see a shrink?

  He went back up to find Gary leaving along with a neighbour who had helped with the moving and stayed to eat. Elena was loading the dishwasher. She asked about Jim, then remarked that he and Martin had been trying to raise money to help pay for Rafael’s appeal.

  ‘For that and Jim’s downpayment. Well, they blew it. Poor Jim!’ She turned on the machine.

  Its heave echoed the sensation in Tom’s head.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he harried on a rising note.