Where You Once Belonged(44)

“Ask them to sing something happier,” she said.

“I don’t know any Spanish songs. Just ‘La Cucaracha.’ ”

“You would,” she said. She smiled at the singers. When they were finished we applauded and they went on.

In a little while the waitress brought us our food. There was a small Mexican flag on a stick on the table and if we wanted anything more we could run the flag up and she would see it and come back. When we had finished eating I said: “Don’t you boys want some sopapillas now?”

“What are they?”

“They’re like pockets. They’re made of dough and deep-fried. You can put honey inside them.”

“Okay.”

“Run the flag up, then.”

They ran the flag up the stick and the waitress came over to the table.

“These boys want a sopapilla,” I said. “So do I.”

“Three of them?”

“Do you want one, Jessie?”

“Of course.”

“Four of them. With honey.”

The waitress cleared our plates and went back to the kitchen to put in the order. While she was gone there was a sudden racket on the cliff above the pool. Two men were arguing with one another, shouting nonsense and pretending to fight; then they each pulled guns and shot tremendously several times, but threw the guns down when they were empty and began to fistfight. They struggled on the lip of the cliff again until one, the bad one, was slugged hard and he fell forward in an arc off the cliff and dove into the pool. Then he climbed out, streaming water, and he and the man above him yelled again at one another while people applauded and whistled. I looked at TJ and Bobby. They were stunned.

“They were just fooling, weren’t they?” Bobby said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”

“There wasn’t any blood.”

“Wasn’t there?”

“I didn’t see any blood,” Bobby said.

“Well. It looked pretty real to me.”

“They were just fooling,” TJ said. “You could tell because of the way he dived.”

They looked at me solemnly, studying my face. Finally I winked. Then they grinned.

Afterward we ate the sopapillas, leaning over the table, dripping honey onto the plates. Jessie and I ordered coffee while the boys explored the cave in the back room where there was a cache of jewels and other gems studded in the plastered roof. Later they came back talking excitedly and I paid the bill and we left. It was getting dark outside now and the air was cooler again, as it always is in the evening in Colorado even in the summer.

When we were in the car, TJ leaned forward from the backseat and said without being prompted: “Thank you for taking us to these places today.”

“Oh. Well, you’re welcome. It was your mother’s idea too.”

“Thank you, Mom,” Bobby said.

“We had a good time, didn’t we, honey?”

We went home then. It was almost eleven-thirty by the time we arrived in Holt. On the way TJ and Bobby went to sleep in the backseat while Jessie and I talked quietly and looked out at the flat dark open country and held hands. She slept a little too, leaning against my shoulder. Then she woke again as I slowed down, driving into town. I stopped at their apartment on Hawthorne Street and we walked the boys inside to their bedroom. They were asleep on their feet and I don’t think they really woke up. Jessie opened their window and left the door open so there would be a cross draft of air.

When we were back in the living room I said: “I’d better go home now. It’s late.”

“Are you very tired?”

“I’m tired, but it’s been a wonderful day. I think the boys had a good time.”

“They did,” she said. “But why don’t you stay the night? You never have.”

“I haven’t wanted to cause you any trouble.”

“It isn’t any trouble. But I suppose you mean the people in town.”

“I didn’t want them to see me leave in the morning. It seems different if I leave in the night.”

“Don’t you think they talk about us anyway?”

“Probably.”

“What difference can it make, then?”

“I don’t know. I’m being stupid, I guess.”

“You’re not being stupid. You’re just trying to be nice. Now are you going to take me to bed or not?”

“Well hell,” I said. “If you insist.”

“I do,” she said. “Come to bed, please.”

We went back to her bedroom. We felt very close when we were in bed together, and then afterward, before we slept, we looked out the opened window toward the streetlamp while the light played on her face and her shoulders and breasts, and we talked a little, and at last went to sleep with her head on my arm and her dark brown hair, like silk, smooth against my face.

That was in the summer on a Sunday in the middle of August. Then in the fall on a Saturday afternoon in November, Jack Burdette suddenly appeared in Holt once more.





? 10 ?

No one believed it at first. Then suddenly it was true: he was back in town again after eight years. He was driving a red Cadillac and after he had been sitting in the car for an hour on Main Street while people went by in front of him, shopping, paying too little heed to what they saw to understand who it was, Ralph Bird had finally recognized him. And so in the early evening Bud Sealy arrested him and hit him once in the back of the head with a gun and then forced him into the backseat of the police car and drove him around the corner and up the block to the courthouse on Albany Street and put him in jail.