The Widower's Two-Step (Tres Navarre #2)(94)

49

The next morning vendors were selling offerings for the dead all along General McMullen Road. The parking lot of the orange stucco strip mall was lined with battered pickup trucks and delivery vans, all covered with wreaths, crosses made of blue silk flowers, pictures of Jesus, flowery frames empty and ready for the insertion of the beloved's pictures. There were tables of foodstuffs—pan muerte, the bread of the dead, fresh tamales, tortillas, black catand pumpkinand skullshaped cookies.

Dia de los Muertos was tomorrow. Today—All Souls' Day—was just a warmup.

Otherwise we would never have been able to turn into San Fernando Cemetery without getting choked in traffic.

The circular maze of oneway drives wasn't empty by a long shot, though. In every section of the cemetery people were unloading the trunks of their cars—coffee cans of marigolds, picnic baskets, all the things their antepasados would need. Old men with trowels were cutting weeds away from the marble plaques, or digging holes for new plants. About half the graves had already been adorned, several buried so thick in flowers they looked like a florist's waste dump.

The less conventional graves had fake cobwebs covering them, flowers planted in jacko'lanterns, little cloth ghosts dangling from strings on the tombstones. Others were fluttering with ribbons and spinning sunflower and flamingoshaped pinwheels.

"Good Lord," Miranda said.

She was dressed in jeans and her boots and an oversized U.C. Berkeley Tshirt she'd borrowed from my closet. Her hair was pulled back in a clasp. Her face, cleanscrubbed and devoid of makeup, looked pale and younger. She wasn't back to normal by a long shot— about every hour her hands would start trembling again, or she'd suddenly start crying, but there were pauses when she seemed surprisingly stable. She'd even given me a weak smile when I'd brought her huevos rancheros for breakfastinfuton. Or maybe what made her smile was the way I looked in the morning after sleeping on the floor with the cat all night. She wouldn't tell me.

We drove around a huge mound of rocks topped with a lifesized stone crucifix. At the base of Jesus' feet a brown mutt dog was taking a nap. We kept driving toward the back of the cemetery, then circled around.

I was looking for a maroon Cadillac.

I finally found it in the centre of the cemetery.

Ralph Arguello was about twenty yards from the curb, standing over his mother, a large woman in a brown sack dress who was kneeling at one of the graves, planting marigolds. Ralph was easy to spot. He was dressed in his outfit of choice—oversized guayabera shirt, jeans, black boots. His black ponytail looked freshly braided. The butt of his .357 had snagged on the edge of the olive shirt, making it anything but concealed. He was holding a bunch of silver Mylar balloons decorated with pictures of trains and cars.

I parked behind the Cadillac. Miranda followed my stare.

"That's your friend?"

"Come on."

We walked between grave markers—most of them flat plaques, mirrored gray granite that reflected the sky perfectly. The mottoes on the tombstones were trilingual— Latin and Spanish and English. The decorations were something totally different—somewhere between ancient Aztec and modern WalMart.

Ralph turned toward us as we walked up. His thick round glasses looked cut from the same material as the Mylar balloons and the tombstones.

It was difficult to tell whether he looked at Miranda or not.

" Vato," he said.

I nodded.

We waited for a while, not saying anything else while Mama Arguello completed saying the rosary over the grave.

At first I didn't realize where we were, what part of the cemetery.

Then I noticed how close together the grave markers were, that each space was no more than two feet wide. They went on like that, row after row, for what looked like a good half acre. Nearby was another marble Jesus, this one surrounded by kids. The Spanish inscription: Suffer the Children.

The decorations around us were sprinkled with Halloween candy, toys, flower arrangements shaped like lambs. Mama Arguello finished her prayers and then took the cluster of balloons from Ralph and tied it on a stake in the grass. The engraving on the marker said: "Jose Domingo Arguello, b. Aug. 8, 1960, d. Aug. 8, 1960. In recuerdo."

The hook on the stake had frayed knots from past years of balloons—all babyblue ribbons, some perhaps decades old.

Mama Arguello smiled and gave me a hug. She smelled of marigolds—a pungent scent like perfume from a jewellery box buried for a hundred years. Then Mama Arguello hugged Miranda, telling her in Spanish that she was glad we could come.

It didn't really matter that Mama Arguello didn't know Miranda. Mama A. had stopped caring about things like that about the time she stopped being able to see. Her glasses, Ralph assured me, were just for show. With or without them, the world for Mama had long ago become a series of blurry spots and lights. It was now mostly about smells and sounds.

"Come with me," she told Miranda. She dug her pudgy brown fingers into Miranda's forearm. "I have some tea."

Miranda looked uncertainly back at me, then at Ralph. Ralph's grin couldn't have made her feel any easier. The old woman led her back to the Cadillac, where she started unloading things into Miranda's arms—a thermos, a picnic basket, two pots of flowers, a large wreath.

Ralph made a small laugh. When he looked down at the tomb marker his smile didn't waver at all.