What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [85]
To say you saw this would mean you envied her. To say you saw this would mean you, too, looked at Dan Watson.
That night, there was another man in the back. You could tell by the way that girl brought her voice inward, her eyes squinting as if to confirm what she had recognized, and her easy flirtation with Dan Watson hardened into a forced gesture. Something had changed within her. You turned your head to look back there because you knew she was ashamed—all along she should have been ashamed, the way she held the edge of her baby blue satin cowgirl dress, and those boots. Those boots! You hardly had time to register where you had seen those boots when that look flickered across her face, and you turned to study who was in the back, which face was going to shimmer into the person who could make her so apprehensive. Back there, though, stood a line of short Mexican men with no dates, hands in their pockets, their white T-shirts gleaming through the cigarette smoke.
You don’t tell the ladies any of this because you don’t know where to start. She wore boots she’d stolen from Mr. Carson, but what did that fact say about her murder? A line of short Mexican men stared at her through the smoke, but what did that say about the one the police ended up deporting?
Or this: A few days later, on a Monday, as you stepped out of the shop’s back room into the dusty alley out back, a little jar sitting on top of the garbage can. At first you thought it was from your clean-cut boyfriend, the jar sealed tight, with its label removed, and but inside lay a card from the Mexican bingo game, tilted to the side. A picture of a rose. Such specificity! Such imagination! la rosa and the number 41. Not your language. Colors in the faded scheme of the Mexican restaurant on the corner, that dusty blue, that exhausted pink. The gift was for that girl, but you crammed the jar into your purse as you scanned the empty alley. Around the corner, you tossed it into one of the city’s corner trash bins.
You don’t tell the ladies about that. What would this fact mean? What is the fact? That there was a jar? Or that the girl never received it?
Another jar appeared, its Gerber baby-food label missing and inside a store of shelled walnuts. The only reason you didn’t take it was the dark shape of a head ducking around the building at the end of the alley, studying, watching, guarding. Off you went, as you always would, rounding the corner, and just a ways down stood a short Mexican man in a white T-shirt, everything about his slender body tight and worked, as if he’d gathered those walnuts himself, up in Pixley in the center of the Valley, where the harvest had been going on, and when you passed him—this Mexican man who had no business just standing on a street corner like that—you understood that something had gone on between him and that girl, something Dan Watson didn’t know about, something that girl had held close to her when she measured the sultriness of her singing.
These are facts. Everyone in town has facts. They bring them out into the open to give them sense, even when there is none to be made. But you saw it. You put it all together.
That night, the girl held a hand at her throat, as if the thick cotton of a cold was catching. She had begged off singing. The crowd had been disappointed when Dan Watson made the announcement, but they lured her onstage with determined applause. She sang a Patsy Cline number very poorly, and even though she was showered with polite clapping, she made a funny