Chapter 6: The. Downhill Slide

      Rosa and I mutually agreed to take things pretty slow. We weren't a couple of star-struck teenagers who would let our physical desires get out of control and burn down a promising start, we were more like a couple of small mountain streams flowing gently around large boulders and diving beneath fallen logs and emerging on the other side, hoping that at some point a little further down the mountain we'd find a place to merge into something bigger and stronger.

     One day, I borrowed Fitz's truck and took her and Lennie to see an open air production of Romeo and Juliette in a small, oak lined park up the coast. The production began right after sundown. The clearing was abuzz with families and friends chatting while sitting on myriad of  multi-colored quilts. Then when the last magical light of the day extinguished as if by stage direction and the wired lights, strung from tree to tree,  came on, all talk stopped and the play began. We sat on one of Mrs. Cohen's quilts and nibbled on sandwiches she'd packed for us while we watched and listened as some very precocious and talented amateur actor filled the air above our heads with the music of Shakespeare's words. Lennie soon fell fast asleep in his mother's lap, but Rosa was entranced by the story and listened in rapt attention. I couldn't take my eyes off of her face, even had I wanted. 

     She couldn't stop talking about the play all the way home. "I can't get over her foolishness, or their foolishness. He deserves most of the blame. Don't you think so?" She looked at me with such earnestness, that even in the dark I could tell that she was looking for an answer, or at least something that would validate her assumptions.

     "Yeah, I actually do. Men get the blame for a lot of things. They always feel like people are looking for them to make the right decisions. Places a lot of pressure on men with weak shoulders."

       She didn't say anything for a long time, just stared out the window at as much of the road ahead as the headlights and the coastal fog would let her see. Then out of nowhere she asked, "When were you going to tell me about Giancarlo?"

       It was my turn to be silent for a bit, "I didn't want to worry you. I figured you had enough on your plate worrying about Hector hunting you down."

       She was looking at me when I answered, then quickly turned again to face the road. "It's not Hector. It's his brother Johnny. Hector's dead, buried beneath his mother's tool shed." I didn't say anything. I was having a real hard time reconciling my need to keep the truck on the right side of the road with what she'd just told me me. Then, almost in whispered she continued, "His own mother killed him while he was trying to force me to let one of his gangster friends rape me. He had stripped me down and put me in the bath tub trying to freshen me up for his friend. I was fighting back with all my might, and he was trying to hold me down and got mad and started choking me. While it was happening, he wasn't paying attention on anything else, and his mom came in with a machete and brought it down hard across his neck."

       I saw a chance to pull the truck over in a clearing overlooking the ocean, so I did. Outside the truck, the scene was magical with a huge golden moon hung in the sky, illuminating the inside of the truck. I could see Rosa's shoulders trembling and the shiny wet path of the tears flowing down her face.

        It got real strange for a moment, and I mean other worldly strange. When I was in sixth grade, my teacher Mr. Oswald had shown me a picture of Michelangelo's statue of Mary cradling her son Jesus, down from the cross, in her arms. It affected me so much that that night I had the strangest dream of looking out over a moonlight sea while staring at Mary crying while holdingg Jesus in her arms. I woke up in the middle of the night crying myself. And here I was looking at the same scene in real time. I went somewhere inside my head for a moment, and when I snapped out of it, Rosa was staring at me worried.

        "I'm so sorry, Errol. I shouldn't have told you."

        "No. That's not it. I know it sounds strange, but I've been here, I mean, I've seen this in a dream when I was twelve, the same moon, the ocean, a mother weeping while holding her child. I don't know what it all means, but I've seen it."" She was still confused because it wasn't the reaction that she expected, so I switched gears figuring I could think about the weirdness later, and I needed to connect with her. So, I said, "It's understandable, what happened was Hector's fault, tell me what happened afterwards."

     She calmed down enough to tell me that Guadalupe, Hector's mother,  was going to turn herself in and take the consequences, but Rosa reminded her that Hector was moving drugs and the people he worked for were politically connect with judges and police on their payroll. She said she finally convinced Guadalupe that she'd done the only thing she could have done. "I told her that had she not acted, I would be the dead one, and she'd would have been forced to help him cover up the crime. She told me that she wished she had used the machete on her own husband before her sons were born. For some reason, that made me laugh. Then she started laughing and went sat there in that bloody bathroom laughing like a couple maniacs, covered with blood, and me naked as a baby. It was the laughter that cleared our heads enough to come up with a plan."

    "And I thought my dream was weird?"

    That made her smile, "Maybe we're just a couple of escapees from a lunatic asylum."

     "Lunatic asylum is probably right, I don't know if I could vouch for the escapee part. Might be, we have a ways to go."

      "Well, that's all I got. Besides the fact that Giancarlo attacked you thinking that I belong to him, what are you holding back from me Errol?"

      "I told you that I didn't want you to worry. That is one of the good things about men, Rosa. They want to protect the ones who they love. I do have one more thing to share. I don't anymore secrets."

       "All ears."

      "You remember when I told you that Pete didn't kill Floyd. Well, he told me he didn't and convinced me that there were enough people who hated Floyd and could have done it. There was still this one thing that created some doubt. The night my dad walked off into the dark and never came back, my mom came home from her sister's after delivering a baby, and we told her Daddy hadn't come home. So, she sent Grandpa Long out to look for him and a little while later he came back and hitched the mules to our wagon and told Pete to jump up in the seat beside him. A couple hours later, they came back with Daddy's lifeless body lying in the back. Pete wouldn't talk about it for years, but one night he was out drinking with some of his buddies and came home drunk. So, I got on him about making things harder for Mama. He got mad and told me about what happened that morning. Him and Grandpa had found Daddy hanging from an old oak tree. The tree was famous in those parts because it hung out over a ledge that looked out over the whole valley below. It was like Daddy was proclaiming his failures for the whole world to see. Pete had a to take a rope, crawl out on the limb a few feet away from where Daddy was hanging and rope one of Daddy's leg. It was a damn near impossible thing to do, but he did it. He tossed the other end of that rope to Grandpa who tied it to the back of the wagon. Then Pete had to crawl on the limb that Daddy hung from and cut that rope. That's how they dragged Pa back up over the ledge."

      "That's horrible. Poor Pete. But I don't see how that explains Floyd's death."

      Outside of Tulsa, there was this small hill and road that ran up it that curved around this one corner where the good people of Tulsa had inexplicably placed a lone streetlight with one arm hanging out over the ledge. That's where they found Floyd hanging, out over valley for all the honest world could witness his failures as a man. Just like Daddy."

      That was it. All of our secrets were out on the table. Lennie had never woken up once in the entire time almost from the time that the play had begun. We didn't leave right away either. The beauty of the place was just too mesmerizing. We sat there and talked a while about the future that lay before us and almost without addressing the problems we faced, reached an understanding that the vision was worth pursuing and that whatever happened, we would share in both the pain, the effort, and hopefully a common dream. 

     She told me how Hector's brother Johnny had come home looking for  Hector. He had been at a hotel with the two men who had paid Hector for Rosa's services. Rosa and the mom hadn't had time enough to get rid the body yet and had just finished hiding it in the toolshed behind the house. Johnny was anxious, angry and in a hurry, so he attempted to grab Rosa by her arm and take her back to the hotel. He hadn't anticipated the fury of Rosa's resistance and then Guadalupe picked up the machete and told him that Rosa wasn't going anywhere. His mother's stance was totally unexpected and unnerved him. He left the house swearing that he would come back and get to the bottom of things.

     They went back to the shed and Rosa dug a big hole in the floor, and placed Hector in it. Turns out that Hector's dad had a side job cleaning cast iron and there was a nearly full bag of lye in the shed. They poured the lye over Hectors body and filled the hole in. His mother came up with the idea of skimming up the dry sand from the alley and using it to help cover up the new dirt from the hole. Rosa said that the mother had even made a grim joke saying that a toolshed would be the last place that Johnny would ever look for his brother. They decided to smash all of Hector's model planes to make it looked he had done it himself a fit of rage because of Rosa's refusal to give herself over to his plans. The mother said, that Johnny suspected that Rosa was behind Hector's disappearance and had even put up a reward for news of her whereabouts. I swore to her, that despite my suspicions, I still believed that Pete did not kill Floyd. He had fallen into some shakey company but I still believed that was good down deep and incapable of murder.

    The next day, I came home from work and dug a couple old ball gloves that Pete and I had brought with us when we came west. They had been carelessly tossed into a box of things we couldn't bring ourself to leave behind, Dad's work boots, one of Mama's Easter bonnets, Sissie's stuffed bear, a scuffy old baseball and the mitts that we used to play for our school baseball team.  Lennie was sitting on his porch so,  I called him over and we went to the grass covered area between the houses and started tossing the ball around. We were both kind of clumsy at first but quickly got into a nice routine. I caught Rosa looking out the door, and,I couldn't tell for sure, but it looked like she was crying. There is something primal about a man playing catch with his boy, and I think that image may have caught her by surprise. Lennie wasn't my son, but I didn't have a son, and his dad sure as hell wasn't ever going to ever play catch with him, so I questioned if it was very wrong for us to serve as a fill-in for one another.

     All night long, I had wrestled with the story that Rosa told me, and I couldn't wrap my head around Rosa doing the things that she had had to do that night in order to survive and protect her son. She had made me promise that I wouldn't lie to her about anything. The other thing that kept me awake was the deja vu moment where I remembered the dream where I was standing there before a full moon that took up half of the sky and looking at the Madonna holding Jesus's body and crying over his fatal wounds. I finally fell asleep and dreamed about Pete having to climb out on the limb of the oak tree and cutting down Papa's body. I remembered that Mama was inconsolable and cried for days. 

     It started to get dark, and Rosa stuck her head out of the door and called out to Lennie, "Lennie, Vente de la casa; vente comel." She waved to me and smiled. I waved back.  

      Lennie tossed me the glove with a, "Thank's, Errol," then he ran right into his mother's laughing arms.