What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [9]
She had been stealing money. She had been pregnant with his child. She had been caught with another man. The landlord refuses to rent the apartment. He cannot get the blood off the wall.
There is what you see and what you make of it: You know she stole those boots from the store’s inventory. You know for sure. You can confirm it by the totals coming up short in the ledger. But you keep that to yourself.
Dan Watson disappears, and by the time the newspaper reports this, it is old news, if news at all. The newspaper cannot say anything except that the situation is under investigation. The rain clears up and patrons in the café discuss it with the waitresses when Dan’s mother is not on shift. They scoff at the paper, calling it a situation and not a murder. Someone calls the paper and admonishes them for having run the cantina’s advertisement. But there are still some who don’t know that the girl and La Reina are one and the same.
You can hear people discuss it as December goes on, but no one goes into the uglier details. Was there really blood on the wall? At the drive-in movie, the beautiful woman was strangled to death, but she slumped over as if in a sudden sleep. Music thrummed ominously. At the drive-in movie, boys and men undid bras and pulled off panties, eager to get to the wet warmth underneath the skirts. Maybe not every girl let them. There was that one who moaned hard, enjoying it, and the laughter from people sitting on the hoods of their cars. But not every girl was like that. Not every girl allowed that. Maybe Dan never did that with her at the drive-in. The landlord said she was a nice girl. You could see how she sang, how she chose songs that were always about love, Dan stepping out of the record shop with brown-papered packages. But then again, all the songs nowadays were about love, whether you lost it or found it or gave it away.
At the café, no one talks about it when Dan’s mother is on shift. No one can imagine what it is like to be the mother of a man like that. All the waitresses who flirted with him can only talk about remembering him when he was a little, little boy.
The rain lets up and is promptly replaced by the fog. There are Mexican men at the corner grocery store near the girl’s apartment, waiting every morning for fieldwork. They sit watching people driving by slowly to get a look at the splintered green door that opens to that stairwell, or at the dark window of the girl’s apartment. They watch people actually go up to the door and try the knob. Her face was beaten so badly, goes the story around town, that there was a closed casket. Others say she had no funeral at all, that she was just buried in what they call the public side of the city cemetery because she didn’t have any people in Bakersfield.
She was twenty-three. The cemetery put a little marker about the size of a fist over in a corner lot—teresa garza—because city regulations mandate that no graves go unmarked.
In late December, Dan Watson is nowhere to be found. Later, the police detain one of the Mexican men from across the street, that bunch of men who sit around the corner grocery waiting for work. That man, people say, was another boyfriend, but by this point, no one really knows the story anymore. The rest of the Mexican workers scatter for days, not returning, but it doesn’t matter. By January, work is scarce. All of Bakersfield has to tighten its wallet as the thick of winter settles in. Hardly anyone comes to the shoe store, even out of curiosity, and you rest your elbows on the counter and count the days until spring. The Mexican man is deported,