What You See in the Dark (3 page)

People who don’t know English love that Patsy Cline record from last year, all the times her song came over the radio when there was nothing else to listen to, a deep, luxurious voice for a woman, more expressive than the chirpy girl groups indistinguishable from one another. The guitar starts in and they all recognize the beginning of “Walkin’ After Midnight” and the girl seems to look at the audience straight on, the first words a little quiet and her voice too high. But the couple performs the song well, the girl’s hands shaking a bit before she steadies them on the microphone. She closes her eyes for a long while, as if she needs to concentrate, but then opens them again, as if she knows that she has to face everyone to feel the song. She begins to look around the room as she sings, moving her arms as if she were walking down a Bakersfield street, keeping tempo with the guitar, the song close enough to what everyone has been accustomed to on the radio. Her voice does not have the depth of Patsy Cline’s, dark water swirling, but she manages to make the song tell a kind of story, as if anybody could be walking down the late-night streets of Bakersfield, haunted by that searching, but hopeful about it, no danger whatsoever. People nod their heads along to the guitar’s polite strum, the English
words familiar, the way English becomes familiar enough with repetition, her fringe dancing, glittering along.

For the second number, after small but prolonged applause, the girl almost turns her back to them to look at her boyfriend as he begins the first notes. Everyone sees him motion her to turn around, reminding her that she has an audience, and so she positions herself in a sideways posture, a little awkward, but it is clear what is going to happen. She needs to face him, and the notes off the guitar sing to the audience in a prolonged introduction, the melody immediately familiar to some, others needing to wait for the words. It is clear what is going to happen: they are going to sing to each other, her boyfriend a little hidden in the dark, away from the half-moon of the spotlight. And now everyone has something to privately admire: the shape of Dan’s muscular thigh perched off the stool, tapping in tune; the girl’s still-trembling hand on the microphone; Dan’s superb coordination over the guitar strings; the girl’s narrow, beautiful waist. They begin singing the song and right away the people who need the words remember the Everly Brothers and their shiny innocence, their politely combed hair. But tonight, “All I Have to Do Is Dream” comes over as a different song altogether—not two brothers and teenage heartbreak, but a more adult, public affirmation. The girl wavers but stays on the slow, hopeful tempo, watching her boyfriend, who sings back to her in a surprising tenor. This is love. This is what it is supposed to be like—a handsome man and a girl who comes from nothing, and now everything changes because he has arrived. A girl becomes a woman, devoted at last because her man
has exhibited the courage to be tender. That’s the way you hear the song, as a shopgirl in a small city, and you see that it all depends on who is listening and why, who grasps a date’s hand in the dark as the song goes on, who knows what the words were actually saying.

Just two songs. Nothing worth the grand pronouncement of an advertisement in the paper. He was a better singer than she was and even played the guitar, but he stands away from the circle of spotlight and allows her to take her bows. “¡Bravo!” call out some of the Spanish-speaking men. “¡Bravo!” As if they understood every word, as if they didn’t notice Dan Watson making a proprietary motion around her delicate waist when she moves toward the back of the cantina. They cheer her all the way out, for just two songs, as if she has fulfilled whatever promise the advertisement in the newspaper suggested, her embrace of the microphone, of them, the dark beauty of her skin, her face, her voice.

After the tables are stacked, the dancing begins, a lot of ballads in both English and Spanish to keep the mood going, the women falling into their men’s arms, heads on shoulders and eyes closed. You do the same to your date, his shoulder too thin to carry your defeat. People could think you were in love with this boy, maybe imagine it was something close to that girl and the bartender, resonant and tremulous. But you can only close your eyes in disappointment that the smell of the neck you’ve nestled into is of Ivory soap, of Prell shampoo and no cologne, one of the Everly Brothers and not that man. Sweet pronouncements have their place, but no man should be singing about a
broken heart, about longing. He should be there to fix it, the way Dan sang tonight, the words saying one thing but his thigh on the stool saying another, his longing a stage act because he already has what he desired.

With your eyes closed, you think of what it will be like to go back to work at the shoe store, working alongside that girl, how hard it will be not to seem jealous about every good thing that has come her way. It won’t be long before she quits the job altogether, stepping through the doorway never to return, leaving you to go through the days without any exit of your own.

Your head is heavy on your date’s shoulder. People dance for a short while, but the cantina begins to empty by eleven o’clock. It is a Sunday night after all and tomorrow morning is work. But the routine for the night seems to have been set, more or less. November rolls on and again the same advertisement appears in the paper and the picture begins to make sense to people: La Reina has a story to tell, but you have to listen to the songs she chooses in order to understand it. You have to put a story together against what you might already have heard on the street about her. The songs will tell you how she’s become a queen, has become fit to be treated like one. You have to watch her sing to Dan, and know that he doesn’t care where she comes from or who her family is. People begin to come in more and more, deep into November, on into December, convinced that she’ll sing a song that explains her stage name or even something in Spanish to prove she knows it, the way her boyfriend taps the microphone at the beginning of their two-song sets, “Uno, dos, tres.”

The cold fog settles into Bakersfield, and even in the worst of its thickness, the cars prowl out along Union Avenue and maneuver into the gravel parking lot, ladies shivering in their dresses and short jackets. Maybe tonight she will sing “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Their love is bigger than yours, truer, headed for a certain destination. It is wiping away jealousy and loneliness with nothing but song and sincerity, the simplicity of it almost unfair. You can listen as she sings “Tears on My Pillow,” but the truth of her world makes the song cruel to hear, the will to sacrifice the heart all over again with possibly nothing in return, the heart never forgetting. How could this be true for her? Her boyfriend is right there, even if he is in the dark, and never leaving, so she can sing all the loneliness she wants. It will never touch her.

In December, the ads keep appearing, but with Christmas coming and New Year’s Eve and the general lack of work out in the fields, the cantina begins to slow down a bit. Still, there is the ad, something to look at on a Sunday night when there will be no going out, when the sweet but earnest twenty-three-year-old is left breathless on the phone when he is told no. La Reina opens her soul out on the page, familiar to many now. A hard rain begins that night and lasts all through the morning, steady, the clouds lingering over the Pacific Ocean for days before swirling in. When next week’s edition of the paper is thrown on the doorstep, the paperboy misses his target and it lands in a bush. The paper soaks through. Because there is nothing else to do, the rain keeping everyone indoors, you lay the paper out on the kitchen table to dry in the steamed-up
warmth of the house. The ink has run, but parts are salvageable, the news of the entire city spread out for inspection.

There, on page 3, is a picture of the bowling alley over near Chester Avenue, a police officer standing in front. There is the girl’s name in the text. There is Dan Watson’s. Page 1 is ink-smeared from the rain and nearly impossible to read, but it is clear something terrible has happened. She was twenty-three.

There is what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.

Phone calls ricochet all around town. The rain keeps most people from venturing out, or else speculation would be the subject at every bar, every coffee shop, every diner and café. She lived in the apartment above the bowling alley and was a quiet girl, according to the landlord’s account in the newspaper. On the night the rainstorm began, said some who claimed to have been in the cantina the very night she was killed, the two of them had a terrible fight. Others said that never happened, that the couple had been seen at the movies. The stairwell up to her apartment had a side wall smeared in blood, someone said. The newspaper reported she had been beaten to death. You can kill someone with your bare hands. A man can kill a woman that way. Even a sweet, earnest boy is capable of that, if he thinks about it, if he recognizes his power, his weight, his thrust, his fists coming down. On page 8 of the paper, the advertisement for Las Cuatro Copas still runs, La Reina with her mouth open.

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, but the newspaper never says why—that’s something you hear only on the street. All winter long, the splintered green door remains locked, a strange brightness in the dull of the January fog.

Two

T
he Actress was set to arrive in Bakersfield in the morning. She would be driven from Los Angeles, picked up from the studio at 6 a.m. sharp in a black sedan, and carried over the mountains into the city of Bakersfield to meet with the Director. She was a dedicated actress, script in hand as the sedan wound its way out of the quiet Los Angeles morning, a croissant and a carton of juice to sate her appetite. The driver respected her need for silence, her head bent over the script. She fought the nausea of reading against the car’s steady thrum.

The Director had told her explicitly not to worry much about the entire script: they were shooting only two exterior shots, coming quietly into Bakersfield without a lot of fanfare, and the rest would be filmed at a Los Angeles studio. The Actress already knew her lines, but it never hurt to read again or to review scenes that had nothing to do with her. The exteriors were to be shot on the outskirts of the city, somewhere along Highway 99: A woman is driving a car on a road, all alone. The woman has no one to talk to, hence the Actress had no real lines to rehearse. But the Actress knew, at the very least, that
her facial expressions would have to match the mood of the final edit, would have to match what she saw in the parentheticals scattered all over the script: there would be voice-overs, something else telling the story besides her own face.