He stood up and flicked the last drops of his beer into the flower bed, then dropped the can in a trash bag swollen with more cans. “Actually, I made us a couple of sandwiches.”
“I promised to eat with Jo Anne.”
He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “You asked me about my service time. I was with the 103rd, the Cactus Division. We liberated a subcamp of Dachau. It was quite a place.”
“I appreciate the invitation, Detective Benbow.”
“Wade,” he replied.
* * *
FRIDAY NIGHT THE United Farm Workers of America sponsored a candlelight ser
vice at the site of the Ludlow Massacre. Jo Anne and I went, and so did Spud, Cotton, Maisie, Mr. and Mrs. Lowry, and most of the crew who hadn’t drug up (as it was called) and headed for the Rio Grande Valley. There must have been at least two hundred people gathered by the horizontal metal door and the steps that led down to the cellar that had been built to preserve the hole in the earth where the two women and eleven children were killed by the Colorado militia and Rockefeller’s goons.
The sun was purple in the west, the snow scarlet on the mountain peaks, the hardpan black with shadow, a cold, dusty smell like alkali in the air. The crowd lit their candles, and a Catholic priest with a microphone said a prayer in English and Spanish for the dead miners and their families. The waving yellow glow of the candles on the faces of the two hundred people was the greatest spiritual moment I’d ever known. Jo Anne squeezed my hand, and I knew she felt the same way.
The faces of the people could have come from a Bruegel painting—leathery and work-worn and inured by hardship. Their story was also written in their clothes. The colors were mismatched. Women wore men’s coats. Almost all of them wore tennis shoes. Nearly every couple had children with them, in their arms or around their knees. Most of them did stoop labor and other kinds of backbreaking work but were fat because of their diet. If ever there was a group that resembled Jesus’s early followers, I suspected I was looking at it.
Afterward, a union leader from California made a short speech and gave everyone directions to a dinner at a Catholic church a few miles away. The church was old and small and made of stucco and had settling cracks around the windows and all the other marks of an impoverished parish. Next door was a grammar school with a cafeteria, the serving tables loaded with food. As we were walking to the cafeteria, I saw a school bus turn off the highway and pull into the pasture that served as a parking lot. Marvin was behind the wheel and the first down the steps. He had shaved off his beard, giving his face a liberated look, in his case the angularity of an ax blade. A man I couldn’t see clearly followed him down the steps, then the girls and Stoney.
“Who’s the guy with Marvin?” Jo Anne said.
“I don’t know. Don’t pay attention to them.”
“How does anybody survive tattoos like that?” she said. “His neck and throat look like a chunk of sewer pipe.”
I couldn’t resist and turned my head. The man’s arms were too short for his torso, his throat tattooed with wraparound dragons, his dark hair greased and combed straight back, his biker vest and low-rider faded jeans and stomp-ass combat boots a message to the unwary. He swept up both Orchid with her purple-and-green hair and drooping eyelid, and Lindsey Lou with her pigtails and cowgirl clothes, as though they were collectibles he had won at a carnival.
He was a man I had never wanted to see again.
Jo Anne and I went into the cafeteria. The tables were crowded, with children running between them, the air filled with the smell of onions and chili and tamales and Spanish rice.
“That guy is staring at us,” Jo Anne said.
“Don’t look at him.”
“You know him?”
“No. Let’s get in line. You want a soda?”
“He’s coming over,” she said.
I pretended to wave at a union woman setting up a microphone on a stage, hiding my face behind my arm. Then I realized who I was waving to. “That’s Dolores Huerta,” I said.
“Who?” Jo Anne asked.
“Dolores Huerta. She cofounded the UFW with Cesar Chavez.”
“Hey, Broussard!” the man from the school bus called out.
We were trapped in the line. He was now just a few feet from us. I tried to keep my eyes on Dolores Huerta. Then he was inches away. His odor was a combination of garlic and beer and hair tonic and machine oil and maybe an attempt at soap and water; he was a man who carried his environment with him.
“Broussard, right?”
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“You heard me. You’re Broussard?”