Ditch Rider (16 page)

18

T
HE
K
ID SPENT
Sunday afternoon lying on the sofa watching a baseball game and keeping to his vow of silence. I spent the afternoon working in the front yard waiting to see if Danny would pedal by. My front yard is surrounded by a low wooden fence. The enclosure is about the size of a bathroom, but I found enough to do. There were Siberian elm shoots everywhere. I gave them a tug, but they didn't want to come out of the holes they'd burrowed in the ground, so I took a pair of clippers and snipped them off at the root. When I had a pile I carried it down the driveway and dumped it behind the garage.

I continued my weed therapy by stepping outside my yard and working the area in front of the fence, which gave me a clear view of the trailer. Leo's truck and Sonia's Thoroughbred Toyota were parked out front. If anyone came out I'd see them and they'd see me, but nobody did. The shoulder of Mirador Road was where the tough weeds grew. They were about eighteen inches tall, with sage green leaves and a delicate lavender flower, but were hard and thorny as a homegirl. I yanked at them and got bloody fingers and a palm full of prickers. I went back to the garage, found an old pair of gloves and continued tugging. Weeding isn't fun, but at least you can see that you've accomplished something. The ice-cream truck drove by tinkling lullaby and good night, but it didn't pull anybody out of their homes.

The pricker pile was building and I was getting hot and sweaty when the Kid pushed open the door to take a commercial, pee and/or silence break.

“You're gardening, chiquita?” he said.

“So?”

“I never saw you do that before.”

“Isn't there a baseball game on?”

“Sure,” he said, shutting the door.

I returned to my tugging. My gray nemesis climbed up the courtyard wall and studied me as if it might pounce. I threw a handful of weeds in its direction and it leapt down only to reappear on the far side of the courtyard still watching, but beyond the reach of my throwing arm. All my bad dreams and dark thoughts seemed to have coalesced into the form of a street cat hungry for my catnip patch. The pacing and watching could be seen as my punishment for giving in and feeding its addiction. I know it's better to face your demons than it is to sublimate them, but I was getting sick of this one. “You don't have to supply every junkie on the block,” I told myself. “You could get rid of this cat by yanking the catnip out.” I was thinking about doing it when I heard the squeal of Danny's bike. The cat heard it, too, and raced
down
the driveway.

I straightened up and let go of the weed I'd been tugging. The best thing about gardening is how good it feels to stop. I put my hand against my back and stretched a kink out. Danny was approaching from an unexpected direction—the ditch instead of the trailer—and looking hot and sweaty himself.

He pedaled up beside me, dropped his kickstand to the ground and watched the cat as it disappeared behind the house. “That cat gives me a hinky feeling,” he said. “Like Goosebumps.”

“I don't like it either,” I replied.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Weeding.”

“Can I help?”

“I'm done. How about a glass of water or lemonade?”

“Lemonade,” he said.

I went into the house, came back with two lemonades and we sat down on the
banco
in the courtyard to drink them.

“Patricia told me you've been following her on your bike,” I began.

“Sometimes I do,” he said.

“Are you worried about her?”

He nodded. “Look what happened to my sister.”

“You're nine years old, Danny.” The dangerous age, when a boy would do anything to be accepted. “You should leave this stuff to the grown-ups.” He gave me a look that implied he didn't think the grown-ups had been doing so hot so far. “You miss your sister, don't you?”

“A lot.” He swung his heels and kicked the
banco.
“She could be mean, but she didn't let anybody punk me.”

“Somebody tried to punk you?”

“The gangs thought I was a Four O because my dad used to be, but I'm not.”

“Your dad tries real hard to keep you out of the gangs, doesn't he?”

“Yeah, but he doesn't live here and Cheyanne did.”

“She and your dad fought?”

He nodded. “All the time.”

“Did they fight the night she got beat up?”

“No.” Today his hair was grease-free and it fell into loose and floppy bangs. He brushed them away from his face. “She was in her room. Him and me, we were watching TV.”

“What was it that got Cheyanne out of the house? Do you know?”

“I think somebody beeped her and she climbed out the window.”

“
Cheyanne had a beeper?”

He finished his lemonade and put the glass down on the
banco.
“It was an old one of Patricia's. She said it was big and ugly and it didn't even vibrate. She didn't want it no more.”

“What happened to the beeper after Cheyanne went to the D Home?” I asked.

“I have it.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“No.”

“Did you show it to your mom or dad?”

“Cheyanne said not to. She said they'd go off if they knew. I locked in the last message she got.”

“Could I see it?”

He saw that I wasn't about to go off and said, “Okay.”

He biked down the road and in a few minutes came back with the beeper hidden under his shirt. We took it into the courtyard and shut the door behind us. The beeper looked like a guy's model, plain and black with a belt clip on the side. I could see why Patricia wanted a new one. Since I was beeper-illiterate, I asked Danny to show me how it worked.

“When somebody calls you, see, their message or their number shows up here.” He pointed to the tiny LCD screen, which happened to be blank at the moment. “Some beepers have letters, but those ones cost a lot. Kids don't have that kind, so they use the numbers for letters. This beeper only has numbers. You can leave a code if you want to so people will know it's you.”

“A code?”

“That's like a tag,” he said.

I stared at the blank little screen, but it told me nothing. Danny pushed the lock-in button. A little padlock appeared in the corner and the number 6656 showed up. “That's the code of the person who called Cheyanne,” he said.

“What does it mean?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No.”

“Do those numbers represent letters?”

“5 is S, but 6 isn't anything.”

“Could it be a B?”

“No. That's 8.”

He pushed another button and what looked like a phone number came up. “I think that's a beeper number,” he said.

“
How can you tell?”

“Because the beeper company that everybody goes to uses those first three numbers.”

He pushed the button again and the sequence 01*10*17335 appeared. “That means see you at the ditch at ten.”

“Huh?”

He flipped the pager over and showed me the numbers reversed and upside down. “5 is S, 3 is E, 17 is U. That's see you. 01 is a d or an a. But this time I think it's a d and it means ditch. Star is at. And 10 is 10.”

“Oh,” I said.

“There are a lot of messages that kids send. 177 0 177 or 303, that's MOM. 304 upside down, that means hoe.”

“As in whore?”

“Right. 304*55318008, do you know what that means?”

“I can't imagine.”

“Do you have any of those yellow stick-on things?”

“Post-its?”

“Yeah.”

I went inside and got him a pad of Post-its and a pen. He wrote the message down for me, but I couldn't decipher it.

“Look at it upside down.”

I still couldn't imagine what it meant.

“Boobless hoe,” he said.

The creative imagination of kids boggled the mind. The game was time-consuming and seductive. Already I was wondering if the word boggle could translate into numbers.

“‘17*31707*1,'” Danny wrote. “That's I love you.”

“I'll remember that,” I said. “Are there any other messages stored?”

“No. With this beeper you can only lock in one.”

“Did you call the number?” I asked him.

Danny nodded. “I called one time when I was at my dad's for the weekend. I left his number but nobody called back. Some people don't answer even when they get your message. They say they forgot their beeper or their battery went dead. Or they got a lot of messages and the first ones were erased.”

“I think it would be better if you didn't try again.”

“Okay,” he said. He actually seemed relieved to be finally turning the matter over to an adult.

“Do you want the beeper back?”

“
You keep it,” he said. “Are you going to call the number?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe when you find who that person is you'll find out that my sister didn't kill anybody.”

“Maybe so.”

“Somebody has to prove she didn't do it,” he said with the same fire in his eyes that I'd seen in his dad's.

“I'll do my best,” I said.

He got on his bike and rode home without indicating whether he thought my best would be good enough.

******

I went inside and called Information to see if any of my suspects' beeper numbers were listed and found out that the phone company doesn't list beeper numbers. The police could track the number down if they had just cause, but I couldn't turn it over without my client's consent (which I didn't think would be forthcoming) or involving Danny further, and I didn't want to do that. I dialed the phone number Danny had locked in and got a generic female voice telling me to key in my number at the tone. I thought about leaving a message, but my imagination wasn't up to the job of translating what I had to say into numerical form, so I punched in my office number and hung up. I didn't want to be waiting around my house for some delinquent to show up or call me back. In a way, beepers resembled ditches. They were a current that flowed through the valley. Once you put your number out there you gave someone the power to answer and let the water flow or to shut you off.

I went into the living room, where the baseball game was still on the tube. Nobody happened to be spitting in anybody else's face. The outfielders stood around staring into their gloves and looking bored as oysters. The Kid was sound asleep on the sofa. That's precisely the effect baseball has on me.

I cooked Chile Willies for dinner, and we ate them when the Kid woke up. We watched
Lois and Clark
and a bad movie. I locked up tight before we went to bed. The Kid had reconciliation on his mind, but mine was somewhere else. He rolled over and went to sleep. I lay awake listening for the squeal of a bike, the howl of a cat or the wailing of La Llorona. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed it was the middle of the night and the rattlesnake cat was curled up beside the ditch waiting to eat or get eaten.

19

I
GOT TO
my office Monday all too aware that my number was out there on the beeper network. My law office is where I go to be reminded of how hard people can be. Home is where I'd like to forget. My home number has been unlisted since I became a lawyer, and I intended to keep it that way. My office has burglar bars on the windows and proximity to downtown law enforcement, and I have Anna at the door to keep an eye out for riffraff and punks. On Lead that can keep you occupied 24-7. When it's quitting time I can lock the door and walk away. When you own a house you can never walk away. I told Anna that I'd placed a call that might mean trouble, to keep the door locked and not let anybody in until I saw who it was and gave my approval.

“I'm okay,” she said. “I've got red pepper spray.”

“This could be more like semiautomatics than pepper spray,” I replied.

“Who'd you call? A postal employee?”

“I don't know who it is. It's a number that was locked in a pager Cheyanne had the night she was beat up.”

“Uh-oh,” Anna said. “Gangbangers.”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

“Girl or guy?”

“I don't know.”

“Guy, I hope. I can handle them, but those
cholas
are tough.” Anna had certain
chola
attributes herself—tons of hair, a don't-mess-with-me attitude, long fingernails and a high fear threshold. “Do you know what the girls have to do to rank in?”

“Screw?”

“Fight. The girls that are in already beat up the wannabe.”

“What kind of weapons do they use?”

“Their hands and their feet. They kick. They punch.”

“I couldn't do it,” I said. I didn't have any trouble punching guys out, but for me hitting a woman was taboo.

“It wouldn't bother me,” Anna said.

“That's because you have sisters.”

“We were always fighting. My sister Maria was in a gang. She and her friends liked to play the
guys
against each other and get them to fight.”

“What happened to your sister?”

“She had a baby and moved to Las Cruces.”

“Be careful,” I said, going into my office.

“No problem,” Anna replied, taking her red pepper spray out of her purse and laying it on her desk.

Trying to get some work done was like waiting for water to boil with the burner on low. Waiting for the phone to ring is a feeling every woman knows all too well. You used to be able to relieve the anxiety by performing the stupid woman's trick of calling the guy, then hanging up when he answered. But now your number could appear on a screen and give away your obsession. Caller ID could change mating rituals forever.