Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories Read online

  He was watching Evan, though not facing him directly, his rifle held in both hands across his body, holding it as he might have carried it walking to the barn, holding it lightly, but with the barrel almost squarely on Evan.

  She saw the man look at her quickly, then back to Evan, edging one foot out as if to stand more firmly. Evan was looking at him now—Chris was sure of that—though he hadn’t moved and the rifle he’d taken from Vince remained at his side.

  She watched them, feeling the silence like a tight string between them, waiting to be broken by a word or a movement or whatever it would take. It could happen. It wasn’t a dream. She was standing here watching them, feeling it, not knowing what to do, but knowing it could happen.

  Until Evan spoke, the sound of his voice coming quietly out of the silence.

  “What are you and I supposed to do, shoot it out?”

  She saw the man’s face begin to relax, a smile forming slowly. “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

  “Chris.” Evan glanced toward her. “You better get out of those wet clothes.” When she hesitated Evan moved toward the man in the doorway.

  “I think your wife got the wrong idea about us,” the man said. He stepped back. “Seems to’ve put her in a state of nerves.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Evan said mildly. He looked at Chris again, offering his hand. “Come on, you don’t want to catch cold.” And when she came to him he put his hand on her shoulder, moving her past them. “I’ll be just a minute.”

  Chris stopped on the ramp. “Evan, I’m calling the state police.”

  Evan looked at the man, close to him now. “Do you think we need the police?”

  “What for?” The man frowned thoughtfully, then glanced at Vince still leaning on the car door. “Because of him? Vince didn’t mean anything. I mean it’s nothing we can’t settle among ourselves, is it?”

  “No police,” Evan said, looking at Chris again.

  “Evan, these men—”

  “Go on. You’re just afraid you’re going to miss something.” He smiled, motioning her gently to leave. “Go on now.”

  All the way across the yard, every few steps, Chris would glance back at them. Evan watched her until she reached the house. But once inside, looking out through the door window, she saw him turn again to the man with the rifle. They walked into the barn together.

  Call the police. She knew it was the safest thing to do, what her father would do, and right away, without wasting a moment. It was foolish to take a chance, to assume the whole thing settled while both of them were still with Evan. Still, Chris waited.

  She waited until the yellow convertible backed out of the barn and rolled down the ramp. She waited until it came around with its rumbling engine sound and she saw Evan between the two men in the front seat. Chris backed away from the door. When the car stopped by the porch she moved quickly through the living room to the front hall and picked up the telephone receiver.

  There were footsteps on the back porch. But no sound of the door opening.

  Then they were taking him! He tried to get in the house, but they caught him, pulled him back to the car.

  But there was no car sound.

  Chris waited as long as there was something to imagine, until all the possibilities began crisscrossing through her mind in confusion and she couldn’t wait a moment longer. She jammed the receiver down on the hook and ran back to the kitchen.

  Evan and the tall, hunch-shouldered one stood at the foot of the steps, both of them holding an open bottle of beer. Vince was in the car looking straight ahead. Evan was pointing beyond the car, and when his hand came down the other man nodded. They talked for at least five minutes, shifting their weight, nodding, Evan shaking his head when the man offered a cigarette. Finally they finished their beers. The man said something else to Evan, got in the car, and a moment later the yellow convertible was gone.

  Chris opened the door as Evan came up the steps.

  “After what they did, you end up drinking beer with them.”

  “Well, I offered—I don’t know why—he said OK. I don’t know, it just happened.”

  “I might never understand you,” Chris said. Her shoulders rose as she inhaled, then dropped as she let her breath out slowly. “But at least they’re gone.”

  “They’ll be back Saturday,” Evan said. “To fix the door.”

  Chris stared at him. “You took their word they’d be back?”

  “And their license number.”

  “But . . . they could deny ever being here.”

  “Not with yellow paint marks on the door and a headlight rim somewhere under the hay. I pointed that out to Frank.”

  “Frank?”

  “The skinny one. He wasn’t such a bad guy. The other one was feeling sick to his stomach. I didn’t talk much to him.”

  Chris stepped out on the porch. “Evan, answer me one question. Were you afraid?”

  He was stooping, putting the empty beer bottles into the case. “Sure I was. In the barn.”

  “But you wouldn’t let me call the police.”

  “It was over by then.”

  “You make it sound so easy. Like it was nothing at all.”

  “I don’t know.” Evan stood up. “There was no reason to get excited when it was all over.”

  Chris shook her head wonderingly. “What a salesman you’d make.”

  “You sound like your dad.”

  “You don’t even realize you would, do you?”

  Evan shrugged. “I might make a good bartender, but I don’t think I’d want to be one.”

  “Easy Ev.” She said it thoughtfully, watching him pick up the beer case and push the door open with his hip. He was inside for a few minutes, then was standing in the doorway again.

  “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “Evan, do you know something? I think Dad could take a few lessons from you.”

  “What made you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking, too,” Chris said. “What if I called him not to come tomorrow?”

  “You said he was looking forward to it.”

  “Well, I was thinking, what if just you and I went out? And you could teach me all about hunting and things.”

  Evan nodded. “That’d be fine.”

  “After all,” Chris said, “if we’re going to be living out here . . .”

  The Bull Ring at Blisston

  1959

  WHERE ELADIO MONTOYA CROSSED the ditch, leaving the tomato field for the gravel road, three men stood watching the yellow station wagon coming toward them. It had turned off the highway a moment before and now came trailing a swirling cloud of fine dust and with a rattling sound of stones striking the underbody. The three men stood at the edge of the road waiting for the vehicle to pass. But when it seemed almost to be going by, its front end dipped suddenly and it came to a skidding stop in the gravel.

  Eladio saw Sherman David at the wheel, sitting low in the seat but with his elbow on the window ledge. A girl in a tan sunback dress sat next to him. She was holding a highball glass, which she passed to Sherman David as he raised his right hand. He glanced down at a clipboard propped against the steering wheel, then up, and said, “I’m looking for Eladio Montoya.”

  The man nearest David muttered something in Spanish, shaking his head. He looked around, as did the two with him, and when he saw Eladio standing close by, his eyebrows went up and he said, “You’re right here!” And to Sherman David, “That’s him, right here.”

  “You’re Eladio Montoya?” David asked, studying him sullenly.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then get in.”

  Eladio hesitated. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “It’s plain to see they’ve all got a guilty conscience,” David said to the girl. He wedged the clipboard up over the sun visor and said to Eladio, “Come on, you even get a ride out of it.”

  Eladio opened the rear door, stooped, stepped in. He saw the girl’s face close
to his as he looked up, but her gaze shifted as he slammed the door and the station wagon moved off. It picked up speed for perhaps two hundred feet. Then it braked suddenly, turned in, and backed out of a side lane. A moment later it passed the three men, who were still standing at the edge of the road.

  Before reaching the highway they passed more of the migrant workers returning from the tomato fields. All of them would stop and turn to watch the station wagon go by.

  “Can you imagine,” David said, “crossing the country to get a job picking tomatoes?”

  “I could imagine going to California or Florida,” the girl said. She looked at the empty highball glass in her hand, then extended it out the window. Her hand came back empty and went to her dark hair, smoothing it at the part and holding it lightly against the wind blowing in through the window.

  “I couldn’t imagine living in Michigan,” she said, “unless you had to.”

  “Wait’ll you spend a winter here,” David said.

  “I hope you’re kidding.”

  “We’ll go up north and ski.”

  “We’ll go to Florida and swim.” She half-turned on the seat, placing her arm on the backrest, and looked at Eladio. “What do you do in the winter, go back to Mexico?”

  “I don’t live in Mexico,” Eladio said.

  “Most of them are from Texas,” David said. “About May they get in their junk heaps and drive up to Traverse City to pick cherries. Then August they come down here around Blisston for tomatoes.”

  He came not quite to a full stop at the highway, then turned right, glancing at the girl. “Wait till you see how they live.”

  “I saw,” the girl said. She looked at Eladio again. “You must have lived in Mexico, though, to become a bullfighter.”

  He looked at her with open surprise and wanted to ask how she knew. But he said only, “Yes, during that time I lived there.”

  “I saw a corrida in Mexico City the year before last,” the girl said. “Perhaps you were in it.”

  Eladio shook his head. “Last season was my first—at Juárez.”

  “Then you weren’t a bullfighter very long.”

  “No.”

  “How did you get into it? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Well, for a few years I placed the banderillas”—he raised his hands and brought them thumbs down to indicate placing the barbed sticks in a bull’s neck muscles—“for a matador named Luis Fortuna. Then he was injured badly and before I took my alternative—you know, graduated to the big bulls—he quit and became my manager.”

  The girl listened politely. “I should think there would be more money in bullfighting than picking tomatoes. What made you quit?”

  Just like that, Eladio thought. What made you quit?

  “Because I got tired of it,” he told her.

  He looked out as they turned off the highway to follow a gravel road bordering a field of full-grown corn. Within a quarter of a mile they were in view of a weathered barn and machinery shed and, beyond these, showing clean gray and dull-shining against a background of trees, was a group of Quonset buildings.

  As they approached the barn, David said, “That’s where they live. Believe it or not.”

  “I know,” the girl said patiently.

  “Nine families in the barn,” David explained. “Another in that chicken house there. Three or four more families in the machine shed and a bunch of them in the old house. Look at that”—he extended one finger from the steering wheel—“you ever see so many kids?”

  In front of the barn a dozen children stopped playing to watch the station wagon. In the sunlight a woman stood half-turned, her arms raised to a clothesline of faded denim and khaki. The gaze of the women followed the yellow movement of the vehicle, watching the children now running into the dust that hung in the air behind it.

  Eladio could hear the children and he could feel the women watching, but he kept his eyes on the windshield, looking past the soft wave of the girl’s hair, looking over the curve of her deeply tanned bare shoulder.

  “A good picker can make fifty or sixty dollars a week, with any luck.” The words were those of Eladio’s brother, Tomás Montoya, whose wife and six children lived with him in the chicken house, and whose 1947 sedan needed a secondhand engine before it would take them back to El Paso.

  These things were in and out of his mind as he looked at the girl who threw highball glasses out of the window.

  No, he thought. Maybe that was the first one in her life she has ever thrown. Maybe she has always wanted to do it, so she did. One night in Juarez? I threw an empty Manzanilla bottle at a brick wall, driving along in a car, and throwing it up and over the top of the car. But I was dog-tired and it was late.

  She’s perhaps twenty-one or two, he thought. Ten, eleven, say twelve years younger than this one with the flat, unpleasant face and the hair like rusted wire. This one with the fine shoulders but soft-appearing stomach who has money. Is that what it is between them?

  She acts older than her years. Even sitting and not talking she acts older. Older than you, though you know she isn’t.”

  DAVID LOOKED UP AT the rearview mirror. “Here’s where you get off.” He came to a stop next to the tubular, cast-iron fence which extended out from one of the Quonset buildings and formed a pen that was approximately thirty by fifty feet in area. As the girl opened her door he glanced at her. “Where’re you going?”

  “I’ll wait here while you get the others,” she told him. “I need air more than I do a ride.”

  “Okay.” David looked over his shoulder at Eladio who had gotten out. “And you start limbering up.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Eladio. “For what?”

  “Megan,” David asked. “What did you call it?”

  “A corrida,” the girl answered. “Only this won’t have all the parts, so it won’t be a corrida. Not unless you can find a picador and a banderillero up at the house.”

  “I’ll ask,” David said.

  “Just be sure to bring something for a cape,” the girl said.

  “Wait a minute!” The words came out of Eladio suddenly. But he hesitated then and said more calmly, “Let me understand this. You want me to go in that pen and cape a bull? Is that it?”

  “The bull,” David said. “My red Jersey.”

  “Listen,” Eladio said, still keeping his voice calm, “you don’t just go in and play with an animal like that.”

  “Sure you do,” David said. “If you’re a bullfighter.”

  “Okay. Then I don’t need a job that bad.”

  “You’re not married, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Pretty independent guy.”

  “I said I don’t need the job.”

  David took the clipboard down from the sun visor. He studied a sheet of paper that was attached to it before looking up again. “I’m ready for that one, smart guy. You got a brother working for me. He’s got a wife and six kids. Right?”

  Eladio nodded, watching David carefully.

  “That’s all there is to it,” David said.

  Megan standing on the other side of the car, looked in the window. “Sherm, if you have to do that, let’s forget about it.”

  “Now wait a minute,” David said. “This is supposed to be a brave guy. Playing with bulls is his business. All right, I ask him to play with mine. We have people up at the house expecting this, waiting to see him perform, and if I have to hold a club over his head to make him do it, I will.”

  “I don’t think it’s worth it,” the girl said.

  “It was your idea. You brought it up in the first place!”

  “We were talking about bullfighting,” Megan said patiently. “Yes, I might have brought it up. Then we talked about your bull; and you remembered someone telling you Eladio had been a bullfighter. But you didn’t promise them a bullfight.”

  “Listen—the guy who keeps his coat on, he’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar die contract if I entertain him right.�
�� He glanced at Eladio. “You’re fighting the bull.” The station wagon shot forward leaving Eladio and Megan standing facing each other.

  After a moment Eladio said, “Is he crazy or something?”

  “Hardheaded and also a little drunk,” the girl replied.

  “He’s serious about firing my brother, if I don’t do it?”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “He reminds me of Luis Fortuna.”

  “The man you worked for?”

  Eladio nodded. “Maybe all bosses come from the same tree.”

  The way he said it made her ask, “Why, what did Luis do to you?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “We’ve got time.”

  “Well, I told you I was his banderillero before he quit. He never placed his own. Sometimes he tried, but he did it poorly; so I placed them and sometimes the crowd liked the way I did it. You know, they’d start olé-ing. Well, that made Luis mad. He was jealous of me, but I didn’t know it then. I learned it after he became my manager, after he’d signed me to a no-good contract and picked the worst bulls for me and . . . no, it’s too long a story.

  He looked at the enclosure thoughtfully and after a moment asked, “How does a man get like that? You know, with a mean streak.”

  “I don’t know about Luis; Sherm seems to work at it,” Megan said. “He was left this place along with a tool and die plant in Detroit. Both practically run themselves, so Sherm runs loose.”

  “And you run with him?”

  She hesitated. “We’re going to be married next month.”

  “You don’t seem very sure about it.”

  “And all of a sudden you don’t seem very nervous.”

  “Before walking into the arena,” Eladio said, “you never intentionally worry about the bull. You talk or pray or try to think of other things. But the worry, which is a poor word, is always there.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right.” He asked then, unexpectedly, “Have you known him long?”

  “Sherm? I met him in Florida last winter. Why?”

  “I just wondered. You seem . . . like on your own.”

  “I suppose I am.”