Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [130]
Over these years, David had news of his son from the “Mexican telegraph,” his relatives in Rito. His second cousin Carlota was Little Bill’s nanny; she smuggled snapshots and announced when the boy walked, talked, learned to swim.
When he was three years sober, David wrote to Billie, enclosing a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars to begin repaying what he’d come to regard as his debt, and begged to meet his son. The money was refused. He went to Rito hoping to talk to her and was met with a court summons alleging harassment. David didn’t fight the restraining order: too many of his relatives worked for Billie Fitzgerald, and he didn’t want to endanger their livelihoods. He put the five thousand dollars into an account that would pass to Little Bill at the age of eighteen, and kept paying into it until the sum amounted to over thirty thousand dollars.
“I told myself I was making amends to Billie by staying out of her way, by letting her dictate the terms,” David told Lewis and Libby. “But maybe I was just taking the easier, softer way.”
Libby kicked at her bedclothes. “Yes, because Little Bill’s the sweetest human being. It’s too terrible that you don’t know him.”
“Oh,” David said softly, “but I do.”
THE SUMMER after Gayle died of breast cancer, David went to stay with his aunt and uncle in Rito. “I needed to come home, whatever that meant.” He obeyed the restraining order, kept off all Fitzgerald property, laid low, and finally began learning curanderismo from his uncle. He helped treat patients, met with other curanderos, gathered medicinal herbs, slowly pulling through his grief. In the afternoons, he took long hikes in the hills. On the Chapman Peak trail, up above the lake, maybe four miles from any road, he rounded a bend and saw his son picking leaves off a manzanita bush.
The boy was blocking the trail and David had to stop. He’d spied on his son for years, though always at a great distance, and to see him this close and alone was a confusing, complicated shock. Bill was twelve then, strongly built, his warm brown skin smooth as water, his hair thick like David’s, curly like his mother’s.
“I was terrified,” David told them. “I’d trained myself to think of this moment only as a liability: it meant I was breaking the law, crossing Billie, possibly endangering all my relatives employed by the Fitzgeralds. I’d never once imagined how the love would swallow up every other concern.”
The boy talked to him as he would’ve to any other adult. He was collecting leaves for biology and needed three of each type. “Are these obovate?” He held up a manzanita sprig.
David didn’t recall much leaf typology, but told the boy that if you smashed manzanita leaves and berries together, then made a tea from the mash, you could soothe a sore throat.
The boy listened, placed the manzanita leaves carefully into a nylon knapsack, and proceeded up the trail to a sage bush. “These are lanceolate,” he said.
“Steep a couple handfuls of those leaves in a pan of hot water,” David said, “and you could ease your aching feet.”
They proceeded from sage to monkey flower, lemonade plant to sugarbush, their first conversation a cataloging of the chaparral. Bill classified the leaf and David recited its medicinal properties until, without warning, the boy said, “Okay, that’s it. Thanks a lot,” and trotted off down the trail.
David sat on a rock waiting to get his breathing back to normal. The boy was so lovely, so much his very flesh.
Taking the same trail the next day, he found his son at the same manzanita bush. David tried to be cavalier. “Picking more leaves?”
His son faced him with an expression of contempt only adolescents can muster. “Look,” he said. “I already know you’re my dad.”
On a dare from friends, a classmate in catechism at St. Catherine’s had run up to Little Bill and said, “Your father’s that crazy brujo, David Ibañez.”
“Is that what