What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [8]
Your head is heavy on your date’s shoulder. People dance for a short while, but the cantina begins to empty by eleven o’clock. It is a Sunday night after all and tomorrow morning is work. But the routine for the night seems to have been set, more or less. November rolls on and again the same advertisement appears in the paper and the picture begins to make sense to people: La Reina has a story to tell, but you have to listen to the songs she chooses in order to understand it. You have to put a story together against what you might already have heard on the street about her. The songs will tell you how she’s become a queen, has become fit to be treated like one. You have to watch her sing to Dan, and know that he doesn’t care where she comes from or who her family is. People begin to come in more and more, deep into November, on into December, convinced that she’ll sing a song that explains her stage name or even something in Spanish to prove she knows it, the way her boyfriend taps the microphone at the beginning of their two-song sets, “Uno, dos, tres.”
The cold fog settles into Bakersfield, and even in the worst of its thickness, the cars prowl out along Union Avenue and maneuver into the gravel parking lot, ladies shivering in their dresses and short jackets. Maybe tonight she will sing “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Their love is bigger than yours, truer, headed for a certain destination. It is wiping away jealousy and loneliness with nothing but song and sincerity, the simplicity of it almost unfair. You can listen as she sings “Tears on My Pillow,” but the truth of her world makes the song cruel to hear, the will to sacrifice the heart all over again with possibly nothing in return, the heart never forgetting. How could this be true for her? Her boyfriend is right there, even if he is in the dark, and never leaving, so she can sing all the loneliness she wants. It will never touch her.
In December, the ads keep appearing, but with Christmas coming and New Year’s Eve and the general lack of work out in the fields, the cantina begins to slow down a bit. Still, there is the ad, something to look at on a Sunday night when there will be no going out, when the sweet but earnest twenty-three-year-old is left breathless on the phone when he is told no. La Reina opens her soul out on the page, familiar to many now. A hard rain begins that night and lasts all through the morning, steady, the clouds lingering over the Pacific Ocean for days before swirling in. When next week’s edition of the paper is thrown on the doorstep, the paperboy misses his target and it lands in a bush. The paper soaks through. Because there is nothing else to do, the rain keeping everyone indoors, you lay the paper out on the kitchen table to dry in the steamed-up warmth of the house. The ink has run, but parts are salvageable, the news of the entire city spread out for inspection.
There, on page 3, is a picture of the bowling alley over near Chester Avenue, a police officer standing in front. There is the girl’s name in the text. There is Dan Watson’s. Page 1 is ink-smeared from the rain and nearly impossible to read, but it is clear something terrible has happened. She was twenty-three.
There is what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.
Phone calls ricochet all around town. The rain keeps most people from venturing out, or else speculation would be the subject at every bar, every coffee shop, every diner and café. She lived in the apartment above the bowling alley and was a quiet girl, according to the landlord’s account in the newspaper. On the night the rainstorm began, said some who claimed to have been in the cantina the very night she was killed, the two of them had a terrible fight. Others said that never happened, that the couple had been