The Rainy Season Page 6

  He followed the hallway to the first door he came to, which he opened, stepping inside and shutting it behind him. He took a candle from his pants pocket, fixed it into a pewter holder, lit the candle, and held it overhead, casting a flickering glow all around him. He was in Alejandro’s bedchamber. It was an austerely decorated room: dark wood paneling, heavily carved furniture in the Spanish style, a bureau, a bed, and two large chests that stood side by side on the floor. There were two paintings on the wall, both of rugged seacoasts. He set the candle on the bureau and opened the top drawer, moving things aside gingerly. Alejandro was obsessively neat, and he would notice immediately if his things had been disturbed.

  He reached into his coat pocket and removed the cowry shell, which he still carried in the glove. He pushed the fabric of the glove away from the shell, being careful not to touch it, and he watched it intently for the telltale glow. The shell sat inertly on the folds of white cloth. One by one he opened the drawers in the bureau and shut them again. There was no hint of illumination in the seashell. He moved on to the chests on the floor, opening the first of them and looking into the interior. The contents were hidden by a blanket, which he lifted to reveal what lay beneath. There were photographs, books, what might be clothing, all of it arranged in such a way as to suggest that it had lain undisturbed for a long time. The contents apparently had no effect at all on the cowry, and he wondered abruptly if Father Santos was absolutely certain that the shell would respond, whether he had intended for Colin to depend on it utterly, or whether it would come down simply to ransacking the room. He opened the second chest, discovered nothing, and closed both of them up again. After a last quick glance around the room, he picked up the candle and went through a second door into the library.

  It had been in the library that Alejandro had entertained them months ago. Somehow Alejandro had struck Colin as dashing and interesting then. He had seemed to have no knowledge of the books in his own library, something that he had been obscurely proud of, and in the course of the evening he had tossed a book now and then into the fire, suggesting that the books burned more brightly than oak logs, laughing when both Jeanette and May had protested. Colin had pretended to find his cavalier attitude amusing, something that he recalled now with a sense of shame.

  The drawers in the library desk were nearly empty. He didn’t need the cowry to see that there was no crystal hidden inside. The books on the library shelves also apparently hid nothing. He heard the clock chime again: three o’clock now, and suddenly the time seemed short. He hastened around the room, the house seeming suddenly vast to him. And there was no reason at all to believe that Alejandro hadn’t taken the crystal with him. This entire search was quite possibly entirely futile, in which case risk was senseless, worse than senseless.

  He went out into the hall again, found a third room, and entered, carrying the candle. It was a parlor, but it had a closed-up feel to it, and aside from some stiff-looking chairs and simple wooden tables, there was little furniture in it—nowhere, certainly, to hide anything. He wandered around the room anyway, filled with a growing futility, looking impatiently into two narrow drawers in a tobacco table. Why he had ever thought that Alejandro would leave the crystal unattended, he couldn’t any longer recall, and he hurried back into the library, rejecting the idea of going through the rest of the house. All of this looked to him now like monumental foolishness, senseless risk. Surely the crystal wouldn’t be in the kitchen, say, or in any other room used by the rest of the household. It might easily be buried in the garden, or in Alejandro’s saddlebags in the barn, or at the bottom of a jar of molasses. It might be on the moon, for all the good it would do him.

  But then, just as he made up his mind to get out, he saw that the cowry was glowing. At first glance he took the glow to be candlelight, but clearly it wasn’t. The shell itself appeared to be restored—not the weathered and streaked object that he had seen in the mission courtyard and had been carrying from room to room, but the pristine shell that Father Santos had first shown him in the cellar. The glow came from within the shell, illuminating the wreathing smoke, which seemed actually to move now, languidly, the shape undulating slowly as if in a breath of wind.

  He looked around him, but there was no apparent hiding place nearby aside from the fireplace itself. He lay the glowing seashell on the mantel and pushed at the stones, running the candlelight over the mortar between them. With the fireplace poker he pushed at the burnt logs in the grate, sliding the cowry into the firebox itself. If anything the glow diminished within the stone confines of the box, but glowed doubly brightly on the mantel. He felt along the wooden edges, looking for a hidden latch. Finally, in desperation, he pushed against the front of the mantel itself, and the entire wooden structure of the thing depressed inward and then sprang back out, the front face opening away from the rest of the mantel. The cowry tumbled backward, falling into the opening, and without thinking he snatched at it, catching it with his fingers and closing his hand over it. …

  … and at once he felt as if he were falling, headfirst down a dark well. Then, with a sudden jolt, someone J stood before him—a bearded man, scowling, holding a narrow stick in his hand. He knew it was a stick without seeing it—he remembered that it was a stick—and recoiled even as the man swung it at him. He felt the sharp pain of the stick hitting his wrist, and in that instant he dropped the cowry, heard the clatter of the object falling on stone and the clang of metal against metal. He staggered backward, caught himself on the desk in the room, and found himself staring at the fireplace tools, which lay now on the hearth next to the fallen cowry. His mind was clouded with confusion, and he put his hand to his forehead, recalling the racing fear that had filled his head only moments ago, the loss of himself, the presence of someone else’s mind within his own. …

  Groggily, he picked up the iron tools, hanging them on their rack and listening again to the house. He heard what must be a door creaking open and the sound of low voices, and he stood up and groped in the darkness of the hidden space within the mantel. He found the glove, but continued to search until he found, pushed toward the back of the space, a leather bag with something solid inside. He took it out, glanced at it hastily, and slipped it into his pocket, then picked up the fallen cowry with the glove, shoved it into another pocket, and pushed the mantel closed before going straight out into the hall.

  There were footfalls in the house now, and he hurried through Alejandro’s bedroom and into the now-lamplit hall beyond, where he ran straight into a short, black-haired woman who carried a cast-iron pan. She shrieked in fear, and surprised, swung the pan over her head, then turned and fled back into the bedroom again, slamming the door shut behind Colin, who heard the crack of the frying pan pounding against the door. He fumbled with the window latch, hearing a shouting behind him now, expecting the woman to burst into the room at any moment. The window pushed open so suddenly that he staggered out through it, onto the porch, feeling the night wind on his face. He ran forward, thumping in his stocking feet across the floorboards, saw a dark shape materialize at the far corner, stopped, and headed back up the porch in the opposite direction, toward the back of the house now. A light grew directly ahead of him—someone hidden by the corner of the house, coming fast toward the corner.

  He vaulted the porch railing and ran into the darkness of the sycamore trees, hearing shouting behind him now. There was simply no place to hide, and so he ran straight out into the open again and down the road toward the distant oak trees. There was the crack of gunfire, once, twice, and he ran flat out, his heart pounding, straight into the trees where he realized for the first time that he had left his boots behind. He kept on, deeper into the darkness, picking out a path through fallen debris and rocks, slowing down only as much as he had to.

  Soon he angled toward the road again. There was no sound of pursuit, no more gunfire. Without boots his progress was painfully slow; on the open road, at least, he could run. And in fact there was no one on the road when
he got there. Whoever had chased him out of the house hadn’t followed him. It was a safe bet, though, that they would roust out someone who would follow him, and without hesitation, he ran again, pacing himself, thanking God for the darkness. It was only when he had gotten safely to his buggy and was away down the road, out of Vieja Canyon, that he considered his success. He found that his hands were shaking almost uncontrollably, though, and that fact alone took the edge off any possible exultation—that and his lost boots. His lost boots, he realized, might easily hang him.

  13

  JEREMY AND NICK watched the path from a stand of bamboo out in the arroyo. The sack lay among broken stalks and leaves, and Nick glanced at it nervously, as if it contained a coiled snake. He looked back out through the thicket, but the darkness of the night and the rise of the bank made it nearly impossible to say for sure whether anyone was waiting for them. Jeremy had been crying, which was embarrassing for Nick, although he was more fearful than embarrassed, and he glanced at his friend now, hoping that he was over whatever it was he had seen.

  “I guess he’s gone,” Nick said. Jeremy’s slack face seemed drained of emotion, as if whatever had entered him had taken part of Jeremy with it when it had departed. “Are you okay?”

  A moment passed before Jeremy nodded.

  Relieved, Nick said, “We better go. I saw him walk back into the trees a long time ago.” This was a lie, but it was necessary. It was getting late. He stood up, and then Jeremy stood up, waiting for Nick to pick up the sack and step out into the moonlight before starting out himself. Nick climbed the bank first, ducking before he reached the top, keeping low and out of sight, crab-stepping along while he scanned the edge of the grove. He motioned to his friend and waited for him before he jogged down the path, toward the neighborhood and their bicycles, holding the sack out away from him so that it wouldn’t brush his body. The thing in the sack was worth fifty dollars, and yet part of him wanted to throw it way to hell out into the arroyo, just to get rid of it, whatever it was.

  The tiny saucer had appeared to him to be crisscrossed with a thousand cracks, like a spiderwebbed windshield. By now it was probably broken to pieces anyway—in which case they would never get their fifty dollars, and Jeremy would have gotten scared witless for no reason at all.

  Eucalyptus trees loomed up on their left, and the creekbed narrowed on their right, separated from the marshy lowlands by a hill of sandstone now. The shadows were deep in among the trees, which pushed up against the redwood fence of someone’s backyard. The ground was littered with scaled-off bark and broken limbs, and the air was heavy with the perfume of eucalyptus gum and sodden leaves. Nick slowed to a walk, looking hard in among the trees. He realized suddenly that his friend had stopped, and was standing still some distance behind him.

  Nick followed Jeremy’s gaze and saw, a few feet back in among the ragged tree shadows, the figure of a man, which disengaged itself from the tree shadows and moved out toward the path.

  14

  BETSY WAS AWAKENED at seven by the sound of the big jets firing up at Mueller Airport half a mile to the east. She had never gotten used to the sound of the engines, a roar that vibrated through the cinder-block walls of the house in Austin where she had lived all her life. On any given morning, she would drift off to sleep again, and the engine noise would become part of her dreams. She was aware that it was raining, too, and in the silences between the jets roaring to life, she could hear the sound of the drops pinging off the aluminum roof over their small front porch and the gurgle of rainwater running in the gutters and downspouts outside the window. Even in the rain, the big black grackles were calling to each other up and down the block. She wondered what day it was, whether it was a school day, and then she recalled that her mother was dead, and suddenly she knew she wouldn’t fall back asleep, even though it was Saturday morning.

  She sat up in bed and drew her curtains back, looking out onto the lawn and the big puddle that had formed in the low part beneath the swing under the elm tree. The morning was gray, the curb trees heavy with rainwater, their trunks stained black like the asphalt street. She slipped her hand under her pillow and found the little wooden box that she’d hidden under there last night.

  She listened for movement in the hallway outside the door, but there was only silence. Holding the box carefully in her hand, she tipped it toward the daylight through the window and opened the lid, tilting it back on its hinge. Inside lay the glass inkwell, the squat neck of the bottle bent crazily to one side as if the glass had at one time gotten hot and started to melt. The base of the bottle was crisscrossed with dirty surface-deep cracks, and the clarity of the blue-tinted glass walls was obscured by cloudy patches, so that the bottle looked as if it had lain for years in the depths of a furnace. As far as she knew it hadn’t; it had belonged to her grandmother, who had given it to her mother a long time ago. Her mother had told Betsy that it was a family heirloom, and the most precious thing she had: it was a memory, she had said, of Betsy’s grandmother.

  The day had come when Betsy had finally understood this, although she didn’t understand the bottle itself at all. It wasn’t just any old inkwell, and it wasn’t just made out of any old glass. Although it was probably her imagination, the shape of the cloudy patches in the walls of the thing seemed to change subtly over time—too slowly for her to observe the changes, slower even than the hour hand on a clock. She stared at those clouds now, and it was easy to believe that she was looking into an almost infinite blue sky, and that the clouds were drifting on a slow wind from somewhere far away.

  A flurry of raindrops spattered against the window, and she watched the rivulets of water running on the glass, obscuring the view of the street and the lawn, isolating her from the world. Carefully she spilled the glass trinket out of the shallow wooden box and onto the rumpled bedspread. For a moment she let it lie there, her gaze wandering from the bedspread to the hundreds of books in the bookcases, and back to the window again and the rainy morning. Slowly, without looking at the inkwell, she let her hand drift down along a ridge of bedspread until she knew she was nearly touching the blue glass. It seemed to her that the air was heavier around it, that it resisted her touch, but only in some feeble, almost teasing way. She closed her fingers partway around it, still not quite touching it, then shut her eyes and pressed her hand against the warm, living glass …

  … immediately she was dreaming, although even in her dreaming she was wary, ready to drop the inkwell when she had to. She seemed to hover over herself, as if she were floating above the woman lying on the bed below—not her own bed—and at the same time she was the woman who lay on that bed. She was in an old room made of wood, and there was sunlight through open windows and warm air blowing the curtains, as if it were breezy outside. She could smell something on the breeze—flowers, she guessed. She remembered this from last time, and the memory relaxed her, because she knew what was coming, and there wouldn’t be any surprises. An old woman stood at a dresser with a basin of steaming water on top of it, and the bed was covered with sheets. The woman was a midwife, waiting for another contraction, although right now, thank God, she was in-between. The midwife was speaking, her words unintelligible, distant, and slow, like the droning of a fly on a windowpane. She breathed heavily through her mouth, her eyes fixed for the moment on the woman who sat on the chair by the window, asleep after a long night. Outside, clouds drifted in the blue haze of the heavens, and their shapes made her think of the misty clouds in the glass walls of the inkwell that she held in her hand. A wave of confusion passed over her, and for a moment she felt as if she would fall from where she floated above the bed, and the woman below her was a stranger again. She held tight to the inkwell, picturing herself seeping into the woman on the bed like water into sand, and once again the two of them merged, and she lay waiting for another contraction.

  She felt a growing pressure and she shut her eyes, breathing more heavily, tensing her body, readying herself for the pain. She could feel the
baby moving within her, and the feeling was inexpressibly beautiful, the long-awaited promise of months of anticipation, of carrying within her this tiny living person, flesh of her flesh. And then the joy faded and was replaced by a deep sadness. She pictured the face of the child’s father, felt the hot shame of their not being wed, denied the shame with her intellect just as the contraction hit her and her body lurched sideways with the pain and she heard herself cry out, saw the midwife step toward the bed, saw the woman in the chair awaken with a look of surprised alarm. …

  Betsy realized that she had dropped the inkwell. She sat breathing heavily, confused by the sound of the rain and staring with unfocused eyes at a picture on the wall. She looked at the inkwell on the bed cover. It had changed its shape while she had been holding it—just as it had last time: the distortion was lessened, the glass clearer, although even as she watched she could see it changing again, losing its glow, the neck of the bottle very slowly sagging back into its original distorted shape.

  This was only the second time that she had actually held the inkwell for more than a second or two. Last time she had dropped the inkwell sooner, at the first faint pain of the coming contraction. There was something compelling about that pain, even though she hadn’t been able to hold on through it, something that fired her curiosity beyond its normal bounds. And the growing clarity of the dream contained in the inkwell made her long to know more, about herself, about the woman on the bed and the woman who sat in the window, as if she were watching rapid brush strokes covering blank canvas, revealing a deeper and deeper mystery that she had only to let herself fall into.