All About Jane's Ranch

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hanes downshifted the old Citroen, pulled it onto the shoulder, kicking up dust, braking until the car finally slowed to a stop. “Aqui?” she asked before he shut off the engine.

Lili squinted across a barren, late-November stubble field off Toluca Highway 15. “Sure. Why not?” she said, staring through the dust at a highway sign, one arrow pointing to Morelia in the west, the other arrow straight ahead to San Miguel. She reached for her bag in the back and leaned against the rusty door until it fell open. She climbed out, squinting east into the sun. Trucks and cars passed her, rushing wind, whining engines. Lili pointed toward the ditch below. “I’m going down there,” she called out over the roar of a northbound bus.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Hanes leaned over and stuck her head out of the passenger window, glaring at the surroundings. “I think I’ll just stay in the car and smoke.”

The hill was steeper than it looked, rocky and covered with thorn bushes. Lili’s flats slipped on the dry, bare dirt, and she finally had to slide down more or less, past the garbage—bottles, fast food wrappers and God knew what else— until she reached the bottom of the drainage ditch. She looked down. The dry rutted earth, the trash yielded nothing, explained nothing. What had she expected? Revelation? Epiphany? Is that why she’d come here? Lili prodded herself as she stumbled over the uneven dirt, climbed up the other side of the drainage ditch. She looked back at Hanes, waved and pointed east. She would head out that way.

Three weeks ago in someplace like this ditch, somewhere along this road, someone– the police? she’d never found out for sure—had found what was left of Vivienne’s body after the feral dogs, the hot sun, the maggots had gone at it. “Esta bien. Ahora,” she could still hear Doctor Gonzalez’s voice, telling the men to lift the sheet, would never forget the shock of what came next.

Looking across the vast, empty field, she smelled the dry air. About a quarter mile away, she could see a building, some sort of factory surrounded by a high chain link fence. She wondered who owned the field. What had Vivienne been doing walking here? Who had taken her to this place? Had Vivienne even known where she was? Lili slipped off her shoulder bag and pulled out the cross Fatima had made for her sister— gaudy, bright with plastic flowers and pop beads. Lili wanted to find the right place for it, facing north, the direction the Aztecs believed was the place of death and new beginnings. The wind blew hair into Lili’s mouth and eyes. She turned around to see how far she’d ventured from the car. Hanes leaned on it, smoking. She waved, and Hanes nodded an acknowledgement.

Lili wondered why was she doing this for her, schlepping her out to this god-forsaken place? Nothing came for free. She would owe her something. Asi es. That’s the way it is here, she thought, trudging across the dry furrows, her ankles twisting in the narrow little ravines. But, so did Hanes. When she paid her back, she would have to make sure she was beholden to her. No one could ever let the score be even.

Lili changed course, turned south, and walked down an old bean row, one foot in front of the other, toward a rock outcropping. The rocks faced north toward the Xinantecatl volcano. Lili would place Fatima’s cross there, aimed at the snowcapped caldera. The tin milagros, the colored glitter would shine in the sunrise. A passing farmer or a factory worker might read the words, “Fallacio aqui Vivienne Golden,” and wonder who she was, what had happened. It was something, Lili told herself, some kind of record. She owed her sister that much at least.

Reaching the large boulders, she could feel blisters bubbling on the back of her heels. She hadn’t known it would be this strenuous, the ballet flats taken from Vivienne’s closet inadequate to the hike. Lili glanced at her watch and looked up. It was almost noon, the sun poised in the middle of the southern sky. She could still hear the distant traffic, but it was muted now that she was farther away from the highway. She waited for a truck to pass, for the sound to recede before she hit one of the boulders with her bag, intending to startle any rock cascabel before he startled her. When she didn’t hear the buzz of rattlers, she knelt and started to chip away at the dry soil, flinging bits of caked dirt and pebbles with the point of the cross. This solitary ceremony felt more like goodbye than the one Hellmann had arranged in his yard with the rabbi, this small useless act more suited to her sister’s carelessness. Lili didn’t want to use the word crazy. She wasn’t sure it meant anything anymore. In the face of death, maybe we are all crazy, she thought, scraping dirt with the pointed end of the cross, the sun warm on the back of her head. Lili twisted the cross in the dirt, drilling away at the hardpan, drilling away at the memory—Hellmann saying such a blessing to me, saying your mother, saying the white rose and the red, the intimacy of his words. The dry, bare ground weakened, a sudden collapse, and the cross sank into the dirt.

Lili mounded dirt up around the wood, but the cross wobbled. She would need stones, something to make it sturdier. She stood, dusted her knees, and bent to gather rocks, as many as she could carry. They were an easy burden, easy compared to what she had taken on—quitting her job at Woodside High, living alone in Mexico City, running a gallery.

Lili poured the stones around the cross, knelt and pushed them up against the wood, then looked west, back to Hanes as a green Mexican highway patrol car pulled off the road and backed up toward the old Citroen. She looked at her watch— one o’clock. Lili stood, shading her eyes. Hanes got out of the car and walked toward the cop car. Lili watched the cop get out, watched them chat—nothing to be alarmed about—the cops just checking, no doubt. Lili knelt back in front of the cross.

Lili turned her hand and Vivienne’s gold ring, the one she had squeezed on her finger in the operating room, glinted in the sun. She should bury it under the cross, she thought, and she dug up the mound she had just made, pulled the ring off her finger and dropped it in the hole. And if it were stolen? she asked herself, mounding the stones in place again around the cross. Some part of Vivienne would be carried by someone else. Lili would share that with a stranger. “Goodbye, Viv.” Those were the only words she had left.

A car horn blasted. Lili looked towards the highway. The policeman stood on the shoulder above the ditch, waving his arms, beckoning her to hurry. She turned and headed through the dusty furrows and dried grass toward the highway.

“Es privada, senora.” Private property. The policeman held out his hand and pulled Lili up the embankment.

“You could get shot or something, I gather,” Hanes said.

Lili opened the car door and sat down, glad to have the shade over her. She slipped off one of the flats and shook red dust onto the ground, heard the cop asking about the old car—quantos anos? Where do you get the parts? Lili saw Hanes’s hand reach through the window and pull a knob. The car hood popped open.

Lili was filled with a sudden—what could she call it—strangeness. Not the place. She had grown up here with the dry brown fields, the summer monsoons, the clear, thin air. It was something else–the strangeness of herself in a familiar place, as if her glasses prescription had changed all of a sudden, or she was too small for her clothes. Everything around her felt too big, too blurry. She pulled her leg up on the dash and took off the other shoe. For so long, she had been glued to Vivienne, had lived in reaction to her— worried, protective, irritated. Still, Vivienne had surrounded her like a veil all these years. Who would Lili be without her? Vivienne had been the only one who shared her early life, who knew how bad it had been. They had both been the daughters of exiles, always different, never safe. And now, after taking such different paths —one wild, one secure— here they were in a desolate field, surrounded by garbage. Lili felt closer to her sister than she ever had before. She looked toward the cross, flickering in the sun, and fought back tears. She had been so angry at all of them for Vivienne’s whole life, but what did it matter? Which had done more damage—Lili’s truth or Vivienne’s lies?

The hood of the car slammed down. The cop turned to go.

“Momento,” Lili called out. “You said this was private property. Who owns this field?

The cop pointed to the factory in the distance, circled his hand three hundred and sixty degrees. “Cementomex,” he said. “All this is owned by Cementomex.”

Hanes started up the car, drove to the next exit, turned around a glorieta and headed south toward the Mexico City.

Lili stared at the rising mountains, blue haze in the distance. “Cementomex,” she said.

“Best not to think about it, Lili,” Hanes said. “Not thinking—survival skill numero uno down here. You’re in the world of ni modo now.”

The road began to switchback up the north face of the mountain. Lili opened the window for fresh air and smelled pine needles, sappy bark. She knew there was a national park—Desierto de los Leones— nearby where Indians set up markets, roasted pigs, where you could buy carnitas if you were brave. Vivienne had been brave enough, Lili remembered. She had watched her sister straddle a log bench at an Indian stall, had watched the man pull the pig out of a charred dirt pit, slice it on a tortilla and hand it to her sister, his fingers grease-stained. “Exquisito,” Vivienne had said.

That’s what Vivienne had wanted—an exquisite life. She had almost made it, except for the wiring in her brain, the way she read things wrong. Lili saw the policeman wave his hand in a circle. Cementomex. Had her sister read that wrong?

Had she? Lili felt a cloud pass across her sunny hopes for her future. Don’t be silly, she told herself, shaking the gloom away.

On the other side of the mountain, the highway widened, began to descend into the hillsides surrounding the city, past little settlements, ranchos, pueblitos, their shabby buildings tucked into crevices and ravines. A road sign caught her eye. San Jeronimo Acazulco 5 km. “Hanes, turn off here,” she said, pointing to the sign. Carlito, she remembered. “Estoy en el estudio en el Desierto,” he’d said in the phone message at the gallery. The desierto. The park, of course. The card he’d thrown at her told her the rest. She really needed to tell him about Vivienne herself.

The man in the corner tienda said he knew Carlito, el artista. Lili bought a couple of cokes, some dusty bags of chips, and the man came from around the cash register, stepped outside his store and pointed down the block. “Left,” he said, “and then right down the hill.”

Hanes eased the old car down the washboarded road, past graffiti-covered mud walls. “Aqui estamos,” she said, stopping in front of a run-down colonial house, its whitewashed exterior chipped and stained. “Totalmente jodido, Jesus. Where the hell are we?”

Lili got out of the car. “ Hello,” she called out. “Hello.” She peered through one of the small, dirty windows. The place seemed abandoned. No welcoming pots of geraniums hung on the wall or grew out of coffee cans by the door. A garage attached to the loggia was open, but no car, only a damp oil stain on the already stained concrete.

“Hello.” Lili walked into the central courtyard. “Carlito?” Only dogs answered back, yelping up and down the ravine.

A large pine tree in the middle of the courtyard had dropped a dead branch on the ragged flagstones. Cool shadows pooled under the tree’s limbs. A couple of torn canvas chairs sagged under the tree, empty. Lili tried a door. Unlocked. The kitchen. It smelled of too-ripe fruit and sour rags. Lili pulled the door shut.

She wandered through the loggia to the side of the house, where an orchard had thrived once—apricots, apples and plums— but Carlito had let it go wild. Last summer’s harvest lay on the ground, rotting, and the trees hadn’t been pruned in years. Suckers sprouted from the roots. Water shoots stuck out from the trees in all directions, and weeds had dried and flattened all around. Lili peered through a window. No one. “Hello,” she called out again.

The sun felt hot, and Lili stood in the warmth, smelling the straw-like scent of the dry weeds, listening to the wasps swarm the fallen plums. This had been one of her sister’s places. Maybe she had dragged a chair here and sunbathed, drying her hair with lemon juice, listening to the wasps. I just want to walk in her footsteps for a while, Lili had told Joel.

Lili pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil from her bag and scratched out a note asking Carlito to call her. Maybe he knew where Vivienne had been the night she disappeared. Maybe she had even been here and had wandered off. Lili went back into the sour-smelling kitchen and put the note on the table.

“No one was there. I left a note.” Lili slid into the passenger seat.

“He had to be there,” Hanes said, backing the car up the hill. “No one in his right mind leaves his door unlocked in Mexico if he not there. He was hiding from you.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Who knows. You’re a stranger. Extranjeros equal bad news. It’s probably a La Malinche thing, the conquest and all.”

They got home around four, and Hanes asked to keep the car to pick up Gabi at the gallery. Did she want anything? Lili shook her head. Just a shower, a glass of wine.

Her hair was still dripping when she opened the doors to the roof garden. A dark wind had swept down from the north in the late afternoon, damp and smoggy, smelling of rain. She walked to the edge of the terrace and looked down. Below her tumbled a riot of buildings, colors, honking horns, green parks. Lili could see the Pemex Tower and, around it, the horizon. She could even imagine the slight curve of the earth where her old life waited on the other side ready to pull her back if she weren’t careful.

She lifted her wineglass to her lips and sipped, tasting the earth of northern Mexico in the rough, red wine. It was another world down here. No, not just another world. What had Vivienne said? There were worlds within worlds here.

Swirling the wine in the glass, she remembered that late night conversation with her sister, one of the last ones they’d had. They’d been sitting in Vivienne’s living room, Vivienne pouring herself another gimlet, a drink a British artist in Merida had introduced her to. She was describing his restored henequen plantation outside of Merida— the colors, the cold plunge pools outside the bedrooms to combat the horrible heat, the screaming monkeys, how the artist served her iced gimlets on the terrace. “There are worlds within worlds here, Lili,” Vivienne said, slurring the words. “You go through one, and another, and then you’re lost for good.”

Lili heard the iron gates clang below, heard a car engine, and looked over the railing. Alejandro got out of his car and beeped his car lock with an automatic key. She squinted at the sky, darkening like a bruise with the coming storm, and shuddered. He was one of those worlds, wasn’t he? Ah, but where could it lead?

The shadowy fresno trees along Avenida Obregon were already drooping under the coming downpour. When the first drops fell, she walked inside, pulled the doors closed and turned out the light.

For a moment, standing in the dark, she let herself feel how much she wanted to find out.