ONE OWNER, PART II: WON’T LAST by Mike Harvkey

Keith left the baby sleeping on his jacket and got out of the truck to stretch. Southwest Kansas, late morning of the following day. He and Krystal had found fair sleep in the lot of the motel before them now, and it was free mind you, appearing lonesome at dawn in the long dissipation of a dose of eyedropper acid and this newfound roadlight. He stretched and sampled the building squatting before him. It would never make the postcards.
It came to him how pleased he was with present company. Yes, it was the company of a baby, and so not yet worth much, but time would see her grow long and lithe. Vocab would dawn, words of importance. Her ladyness would flower and the math came easy: grown in full by the time Keith hit thirty-four. Life of Jesus, plus change. A full feather-blonde with big big love for Keith Dillard who’d cared for her those many years with such passion and brain, the only real man she’d ever known, the only man she had any desire to know. It struck him then that Utah may very well have to figure in their future.
Keith had awoken feeling generous. A quarter twinkled among wrappers on his dash. The room near the pay phone was open with the maid’s cart at the door and a radio playing country songs. Someplace near off a dog barked in an unusual way, steady and straight as a march. Robot dog like the Japanese got. Keith stood with the phone in hand and a voice in his ear saying, Yeah?
Oh hey Kevin, Keith said.
You are fucking dead. Where are you?
How’s it going?
Where the fuck are you?
There was a noise in the phone and Julie huffed into it. Is Krystal all right?
She’s great.
Goddamn it! Kevin said. Where the fuck are you at?
They know about the truck, Keith.
Yeah I figured.
Where are you at, motherfucker?
You call the cops yet?
Kevin said, No, at the same time Julie said, We had to. Then Kevin said, Goddamn it Julie, and Julie said, Sorry.
Great, Keith said.
You stole our fucking daughter, dickhole, what’d you expect?
I don’t know.
She’s not a VCR.
We’re family.
Jesus! Are you brain damaged!? What is your problem?
I don’t have a problem.
Kevin, Julie said. Krystal is only seven months, Keith. Has she been crying?
Not much.
Well, she will.
Goddamn right.
She’s been pretty good, actually.
Well when she starts crying she’s not gonna stop, because what she wants then is the breast and you can’t give it to her, can you? You ready for that?
You stupid fuck. You fucking idiot.
Keith, have you thought about how destructive you are?
Keith changed ears on the phone. He said, Get a load of this dog, and held the phone out over the lot. It barked like a plains train coming. Keith pulled the phone back and said, You hear that?
I think he’s lost it.
Be nice.
Nice!?
Hey Kevin, before I forget, you oughta treat Julie better, that’s one thing.
Oh Jesus.
Your brother and I are married, Keith.
I know.
You are so dead you don’t even know it.
You don’t deserve her, Kevin. And you don’t treat Krystal any better, always smoothing her hair down with your spit. You ever think it might stink? Your breath ain’t the best I ever smelled, you know. Why do you do that anyway? She’s a baby, who cares if she has messed up hair? Fuck! Am I right? I’m sorry to have to say all this, but it’s pretty much the way it is. Half of Low Hill knows it too. Julie’s too good a woman for you.
That’s sweet, Keith.
There followed a pocket of noise and one of the lines went out with clicks and scrapes. Kevin’s voice came through low and wet as a puddle, hands cupped on the mouth hole. Keith, he said, I am gonna find you, and I am gonna kill you, do you hear me? I am gonna fucking kill you with a stick. You’re dead! Dead! I’m gonna fucking choke the life out of you until your eyeballs explode. Where’s my kid, you fucking cock!?
Keith didn’t need any more of that sort of talk, bring him down in a hurry. He put the phone away and squinted at the too-bright circle of sun coming over the lot before the low-built motel. Ball of fire, made his head hurt. He stood around awhile, dragging wake-up lids over dry eye. His truck, he noticed now, was blocking somebody in. He’d rolled in and slept where it stopped without care. Plus he’d been higher than heaven. But nobody’d come out bitching. He stuck his head in the room standing open by the maid cart and said, Hello? No answers came. He said, This place any good to stay at? He looked at the diner across the lot. Window glare of silver, bright and shaking like a fish. Somebody in there was sleeping, for God’s sake, inch from their eggs, meaning: the coffee was weak. Keith didn’t want to entertain the thought. He needed this morning’s cup to be a lightning strike. Ma’am? he said, going in the room. Two beds sat tight and flat, two-tone floor tiles with butt burns from maybe every other occupant, a wall mirror cut to fit around the tan phone, its hanging cord doubled in the glass. Keith was prepared to negotiate the terms of his stay.
He looked for some time at the black man on the floor before saying anything to him. The reason being it was an odd sight to come upon: old black maid, male no less, face-down on the floor, hand still around the Spic-n-Span. By the hair and skin of him, Keith took him for well into his retirement time, though actual retirement had finally come upon him against his will. Keith got his shoe under the man’s hip. It rose under Keith’s foot like a loose coupling. Mister? Keith said, then he got out of there, got out quick, ran for the office past the diner, and passing the diner he first slowed, then stopped and stood looking at one of the large silvery windows. The dog’s steady march crossed the road at his back.
Everyone in the diner was deceased. No two ways about it. Keith studied a fat man with a fallen-back head near the window. A ball cap lay on the seat behind him and his mouth was wide with food. Two flies were having a picnic in there. Both the man’s hands rested near his plate on the table, rings on almost all fingers, fat golden bands digging into ballooning skin. Keith took the door and went in. The smell of cooked coffee and opened fish met him at the seat yourself sign. No thanks. On the floor in plain sight lay a round woman with her waitress skirt hiked and a pantyhose run from knee to nether. Around her spread a large food spill: splash of chicken soup, crackers sodden, club sandwich taken apart by the fall. The countertop held a large black coffee in a large white cup and it was cold. A second waitress sat behind the counter in a clump, supported in part by the dessert case, in part by death. Keith walked among the diners starting to feel ill and perplexed. No one had any blood on them. There were no bullet casings on the floor. Finally his thinking was: the food. Plus: Good thing I slept in. He figured the negro maid for an onsite eater as well, probably forced to pay for it too, ten percent discount perhaps, fifteen at most if he was lucky, which he wasn’t so it was probably only the ten. Keith circled the seating area one time and ended at the register, all its cash flapping in the wind coming through the door he’d left open to the air, commanding him: take us away, Keith Dillard! Take us to a better place! He took the cash in his hand like a big paper brick.
He got out of there quick, nearly spilling Krystal off the seat but with a hand there to keep her. Boy am I glad you didn’t see what I just saw, darlin’, he said. People ain’t too pretty when they die. Working the column shift for third, Keith caught the canine with his side-eye. It stood alone in a sweeping opposite field, way back off road, near the top of the ridge, chained to a post, surrounded by a ring of upset earth from its endless run around. Its bark sailed down and up the sweep of that sun-browned field and into Keith’s ear, and beyond, though no one beyond was left to hear it. Keith said to the dog, You’re not kidding.
Kansas had given the Dillards all it had to offer, Keith decided, so they headed south on 50 across the thin neck of Oklahoma, stopping twice for gas and road food pulled from wall pegs. The first stop came an hour after the Kansan diner, and Keith took some time to freshen himself in the sink around the side. He pulled the truck near and heard Krystal crying through two doors. Going out of there under the high glare of the gas island, Keith saw the counter woman lying face down half-out the door. He stopped and sat with the road before him, her behind him, watching her sure stillness in his mirrors. Okay, Keith said, This shit’s getting a little weird. Krystal had tired herself out with a fit and was finding a moment’s comfort in the tip of Keith’s finger. He let up the clutch and crossed the access road, got the highway on their tires.
They drove while they ate and broke Oklahoma’s neck going ninety. With the windows open the hot wind came in loud enough to drown Krystal’s unending lament. Keith tried pushing fingertips on her gums but it never worked for more than a minute. His right side jean leg was damp from the spit wipe. By nightfall they got Texas under them, but the first town could’ve as easily been Mexican. Smell the meat hanging on the air. Witness the source: taco truck parked on dirt off the main road. Keith turned to rope around and get at it. Krystal hadn’t stopped her scream since Oklahoma, and Keith was so hungry he’d contemplated eating her.
He ordered six tacos from a lady up high. She asked did he want cerveza and he said in fact he did, very much so and come to think of it, just one wouldn’t cut it. He got two, wrapped in sheets of yellow school paper and drank them walking circles on the sidewalk in an effort to awaken the dead leg from so much road. A group of boys went at the taco window with a fury Keith figured made them hers. Another short one was up in the truck with the cook, just the bushy black head-top of him. The taco lady was tobacco brown and stretched of skin. A pink thin shirt hung below large ageless breasts that got Keith to thinking. ¿Cómo su llama? he said.
Isabel, she said.
Soy Keith.
Keith.
Yep.
Okay, I hope ju like the tacos.
Gracias, he said. They were delicioso. He kept standing where he was looking up at her and she was looking down at him. Can I talk to you a minute? ¿Por favor?
Isabel left the taco truck by shuffling sideways to a thin door at back, through which she also passed sideways. She came around with those boys attached to her. She appeared to be dragging them as she walked, sideways, to Keith.
She said, ¿Qué pasa?
I wanna show you something in my truck.
Where ju truck? Her face folded into peligroso mode just like that.
Right there.
Okay. She followed sideways with her boys tied up in her legs. Keith pulled the door, rider’s side. Krystal was all in his jacket. Isabel’s face glowed. Peligroso no more. Ohhhh, she said, drawn-out and in the top registers. ¡Qué bonita!
I know, Keith said. Pick her up if you want.
Ohhh, Isabel said, scooting both hands underneath and lifting her with no real effort. What her name?
Bonnie, Keith said.
Hola Bonnie, hola. Bonnie, bonita, I see I see. She laid her on her shoulder and gently bobbed, with her own children watching from below. She es too beautiful for ju.
I know it.
Isabel held her awhile and then handed her back. As soon as Keith had her she started suffering. Ohhh, Isabel said. It okay, he no so bad.
She’s been like this for hours.
Where is the mother?
Keith looked off at the lonesome road. He thought to pass his tired off for sad and said, We don’t know.
What is this mean, ju don’t know?
She vamos. Vamos al . . . no sé.
Isabel’s mouth fell open to golden teeth on both low sides. ¡Qué lástima! she said. What about the feeding?
I’ve been using store-bought.
This is no good for ju baby. She need la madre.
I know.
This is no good for her, compadre.
I know.
Isabel swayed in the pull of her boys. She watched Keith a long while before turning her attention to the taco truck. It had started to rock from the pushing of a pack of boys and the man inside was shouting, ¡Chingado! ¡Chingado!
Isabel said, Ju come back at ten.
The town was a goner. Plywooded storefronts up and down Main, a street of improper name since the big migration elsewhere. Unofficial rename of Muerte, Keith thought. Mexican girls pulled strollers and hand-held their short ones. Keith took the town once, under a minute, circled back for a donut shop lit in a corner mall stripped of all other commerce. Keith got two big glazed cakes and some dark water they were calling coffee, then took a newspaper off a table and sat near the window so he could eyeball his possessions. The paper was local and en español but he gave it a go; he’d had some Spanish toward an Associate’s back at Longview C. C. There was nothing in it about those dead people in Kansas. He figured maybe it was on TV. TV liked their sob stories. Diner of the Dead, Death on a Four-Top, The Special was Death, or some such thing. The paper called where he was Lamesa, a name Keith didn’t recognize. He got the map from his truck and then a refill of the dark water they called coffee. He ran his finger across Oklahoma. Leaving Kansas he’d decided on Houston for his ultimate intent, but it turned out different: hours of accidental southward had got him to Lamesa, tiny black dot of fading import. Houston was many hours east.
The donut house had only two takers: Keith and an older man. The girl-aged employee was rolling a joint behind the counter, as good a use of downtime as any, Keith figured. For some time Keith gave the old man his eye: squashed face with gray stubble sitting on his jaw like hand-cut lawn. Texas nights were as hot as a bathtub but the man had his woolly hat on. He was bent nose-near a cheap magazine with great intent. He looked up grinning and Keith nodded and gave a donut lift by way of how-do. The man looked around, out the window, at the counter, at everyplace but Keith, and then turned his intent back to the magazine. In his hand was a small glass piece held up to his eye to read through. The other eye contracted into a hump of pale hairy folds. Keith went up for dos mas donuts so he could get a peek at the old man’s interest. That glass piece was a lens from some long-gone pair of specs, and the magazine was an order form for long johns. The man looked up grinning as Keith sat, so Keith said, How’s it going?
Pretty fair, the man said. He didn’t look exactly at Keith.
When’s the winter hit this place? Keith said.
Don’t know, I don’t live here. Ask her.
The employee had the rolled joint behind her ear and was turned away reading a paper and sucking soda through a straw without use of hand. She said, It don’t.
Around ten Keith said his goodbyes. The taco truck was closed and dark when Keith got back, but Isabel was on the sidewalk with her boys on her skirt. The man from inside lay on the ground with his head bent from a tree trunk. Keith pulled up and Isabel climbed in. She said something in Spanish that made her boys run to the man in the dirt. They piled on top of him and he yelled, ¡Chinga!
Okay, Isabel said, using her fingers to dig her breast from her shirt. Ju be the gentleman. Keith looked elsewhere. Her boys laughed in the dirt. She said, Okay . . . okay now . . . come on . . . ju come . . . here ju go . . . here ju go . . . I sorry.
There’s no rush, Keith said. Tranquilo.
I don’t think that means what ju think, she said, stuffing the first breast back in and pulling out the other. Come on now . . . come on ju . . . where is the milk . . . ¿dónde está la leche? . . . I know ju in there, you milk . . . Bonnie she need ju, okay. Come out for little Bonnie . . . come on out.
Keith looked and saw the pearl appear. He watched a moment and said, If there’s any left after, I’m game.
She shook her head, but there was a smile in it, and teeth in the smile, white and gold. She said, Ju are no so old.
No.
Is the mother no so old the same?
Keith put his hands on the wheel and said, I’m actually kinda fighting to hold the anger I feel for your whole race under wraps.
¿Qué? ¿Mexicanos?
No, women.
Oh, the gender ju mean.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. The whole lot of you.
¿Por qué?
Name it. But I’m fighting here, so forgive me if I say or do anything hateful. Lo siento, okay? I’m not prepared to be held responsible for my actions.
Pues . . . so far so good.
Yeah but I just might.
I no delicate, compadre.
Don’t call me compadre. I don’t want nothing nice right now, no bueno, not after what I been through with the likes of you.
Is fine with me, because I am wanting nothing nice to begin with.
Krystal worked her hunger out on Isabel and the boys played in the dirt off the road. Keith decided to give Lamesa a shot. Krystal seemed to like it. He found a good spot to park in where they could sleep the night. He gave her the cab and took the bed, lying to the air beneath a sheltering tree. In the morning he spent ten minutes cleaning the dried purple fallen tree fruit from his hair. At dawn Keith went in search of the taco truck. He found it, but not Isabel. The man from the night before was running the show. A bunch of Mexicans were standing around waiting. When they cleared off Keith got a burrito for two dollars that weighed a pound plus. The taco man gave him the familiar nod. Keith said, Hola, and ate in his truck with the door open for air. At ten that night he went back to the spot where they’d been the night before and found Isabel again. When he got out she saw him and laughed. She was outside the taco truck. She said something quick in Spanish and shook one of her breasts. The man in the taco truck laughed. Isabel smiled at Keith and put up her arms. Café con leche, she said.
Sí, Keith said. Por favor.
For a week Keith and Krystal slept in the spot below the tree. Keith fed Krystal formula in daylight, and Isabel at night. He ordered his lunch from the man when he was alone in the taco truck and the lines had retired. The meal was big enough for all day and only two dollars. The fourth night Keith sat in his truck holding Krystal and waiting for Isabel to finish with the taco work. She was in it with the man and they were taking longer than usual. Finally she came with her boys on her skirt shuffling sideways. She got in, leaving the door open so her boys could gather at her knees. Bonnie she need milk more than like this, she said.
I know.
¿Dónde está su madre?
No sé. I’m doing the best I can.
Isabel spoke to her boys in Spanish and they ran across the road and started pushing against the taco truck. The man yelled, ¡No! from inside. Isabel said, My husband, he say is okay for ju live with us.
Do what? Keith said.
Bonnie she is needing the breast, compadre.
Yeah, but.
Is okay. She turned back to the truck and yelled, ¡Chetto!
The man came out the door of the truck and chased the boys across the road swatting a towel at them. He came to the truck and said, Hola.
Keith said, Hola.
Is okay he come, no? Isabel said.
Sí, sí, mi casa es grande, amigo, no problema.
Isabel and her boys climbed up in the back of his truck and Keith followed them to their house, which was maybe grande by Mexican standards. Pulling in, Chetto hit the horn and blasted la cucaracha over the rooftops. Upwards of ten dogs lounged in the dirt yard spotted with toys and parts pulled off the taco truck and left in need of attention that probably only ever came from boys or dogs. Keith wanted no part of it, truth be told, but Krystal went near coma after Isabel’s fill-ups and he liked the peace that came to him then. Plus there was this: a Mexican family in a Texas shack would be near the bottom of the list of places to look for Keith Dillard and his feather-haired borrowed girl.
Isabel’s family gave him a tiny room in the front of the house with heavy black blankets on the windows. It had been the boys’ room and featured a cartoon Chihuahua quilt on the twin bed, mucho movie posters on the walls, and busted toys all over the floor. Chetto wheeled in a crib he’d made himself with a baby already in it, small and brown. My son, he said. Juan.
How old is he?
He is almost one year.
He’s tiny, Keith said.
Sí, Chetto said.
They got Krystal in next to pequeño Juan. She was younger and twice his size. Keith and Chetto stood watching them sleep. Keith said, How old are you, Chetto?
I am four y ocho.
Forty-eight.
Sí.
And Isabel?
Isabel she is about the same. Poco menos. She love the childrens. She love the sex. Chetto grinned and pumped his fist out in front of his crotch ¿Entiendes? he said. ¡Mi Dios!
Sí.
She love the sex like some crazy person. Chetto moved both arms at his side and pushed his hips. Mm-mm-mm. ¿Sí?
Sí, Keith said. Loco.
Early in the morning of the next day the doorbell started barking and didn’t stop and the house filled with the steady noise of a gathered crowd. Keith sat up on the bed and saw that the crib was gone. He left the room half expecting to walk into some sort of freakshow with him as main attraction.
Most of the gathered were Mexican. They sat around or leaned on walls. Sofas held small sleeping women. A man near the door nodded at Keith when he wandered in and Keith said, Isabel? A gesture sent him back through the house. There were more people in the hall, standing around or sitting on the floor, and two women left the bathroom together. Keith said, Isabel? and the women pointed at a closed door at the back. Keith knocked and heard some Spanish, after which he just waited.
Isabel opened the door and led an old woman out by the arm. Isabel had a bag of herbs and Spanish words for her. The woman shuffled off and Isabel told Keith, Bonnie, she in here with me, she okay. An old Mexican man walked into the room and took off his pants. The crib sat below an open window with the two babies practically on top of each other in it. The man kicked his pants away and pulled himself onto a low padded table and lay face up, speaking Spanish and rubbing his left side. Isabel said, She be okay with me, and pushed Keith from the room.
Out in the yard Keith saw that the taco truck was gone. A dozen cars and trucks blocked Keith’s own truck from leaving. People inside them slept or smoked or watched Keith. He noticed a small head through the passenger window of his truck, two actually. He got to it and opened the door. Two of Isabel’s boys laughed and tried to open the other door to get out but they couldn’t and instead hopped on the seat like popcorn. The glove box was open and cassettes, wrappers and trash covered the floor. Keith got in and shut the door so it was him and the popcorn boys in the truck like they had someplace to go. He leaned down to scoop up the spill. Right on top was the home bottle of eyeball acid he’d taken from Honey Lightfoot. The boys said something in Spanish. The bottle cap was loose and the outside was slick. Keith couldn’t remember how full it was when he got it. ¿Habla inglés? he asked the boys. They jerked their heads. The one at the door tried again to open it. Keith held the bottle by the bottom and said, ¿Entiendes?
The boys said, Sí.
Acid, he said. He made a quick burning sound that made them jump and then laugh.
Muy uh . . . muy um . . . ¿inferma, sí? Uh . . . esta no chocolate.
Candy! one of the boys said and reached for the bottle, which Keith pulled back and held out the other way.
¡No! ¿Esta no candy, entiendes? ¡No toque! ¡No toque! ¿Comprende?
Sí.
Okay, vamos. Keith reached past them to open the door, which they spilled out of as soon as they could. Keith checked the lid on the bottle and pushed it to the back of the glove box.
Winter in Texas was to Keith reason enough to stay put awhile. The perfect night breeze and an unending supply of cerveza y leche Mexicana. After two days Keith volunteered for taco help, which was better than sitting around the house with thirty hurting Mexicans. Chetto drove and Keith got the knife. They’d hit the first stop before seven and people were waiting. They’d dish for an hour, pack up and go four blocks and do it again. In the hour lull between breakfast and lunch they’d have their own. A month into it Chetto said, You no wear the ring, which opened a new chapter in their conversing.
No, Keith said.
How long you were married?
About a year. Uno año.
Bonnie’s madre, ¿dónde está?
I don’t know, Chetto. She was pretty messed up.
Oh. The drugs?
Keith nodded. A lot of drugs. Mucho drugs.
Mm. Qué lástima. It is a pity.
Entiendo qué lástima.
Ah. Lo siento.
De nada. Por favor. Hablo un poco español, muy poco.
You getting better since before.
It’s cool how it just comes.
So you wife, what is her name?
Julie.
What was she look like?
Ah, qué bonita, Chetto. She was thin.
Oh.
But not too thin.
Sí.
She had a good shape on her.
Sí sí.
And she had long brown hair that always smelled like beer, like cerveza.
Mm. And her chi chis? Chetto held his hands cupped chest high. ¿Grandes?
Sí. Muy grande. Grande, gordo, perfecto. Like mountains.
Mm, Chetto said, looking off to picture it. Keith, let me to ask, the one thing, what it was?
No, uh, no entiendo.
The one thing it most um, it most about her, in you mind now.
Keith took a moment to consider this question no one else had ever asked him. She liked music, Chetto. She had her own tape deck she brought with her everywhere. She’d bring it to somebody’s house and play her music the whole time. She’d bring it in the car. She might be in the back, and you’d be driving someplace playing the car radio, and there would always be this other music right behind your head. It drove my brother nuts.
You brother and she they were close?
Keith took a bite and chewed. He was none too happy having almost stepped in it. They were, he said.
He must been upset her leaving.
He was, Keith said. I think he still is.
They would return to the house after their lunch runs. Isabel would finish with her patients by two and take a closed door nap with Chetto that always rattled the windowpanes. Keith would sit by himself outside in ponderance until the boys came up with a ball and he’d be drafted for play until Chetto got up and Isabel had the meal on.
They all sat down to eat in the front room at a long table they brought out each day for supper and put away as soon as they were done. Isabel never sat longer than three bites from all the needs. Going from the table to the kitchen, she said, ¿Usted oyó qué sucedió en Huston?
No, Chetto said.
They calling it plague. Tanta gente muerta.
¿Cuándo?
Isabel shrugged. Juanita me dijo hoy.
Keith said, How many people died?
No sé. Muchas. Most they die were living near highway. They checking trucks now, they thinking it maybe chemical o algo, no sé.
Huh.
¿Qué?
Oh, Keith said. I was just . . . uh, the same thing sorta happened in Kansas. I think it was food poisoning there, though. Chetto nodded and scraped his plate with bread. Isabel shook her head and began clearing the table. When Chetto finished he went to prep the truck for the supper, and by five the family went to the first stop, where a dozen people clapped and whistled when the taco truck appeared.
Over the coming weeks Keith heard from Isabel of other towns taken by the plague, they were calling it. More towns fell and an odd pattern emerged that did nothing to stop it: only people living near the interstate were touched, and it stretched north from Houston into Oklahoma, and east through Kansas to Missouri.
But in Lamesa it was nothing but a story to tell, a ghost story, and that Texas winter was the finest Keith had ever known. He had a knack for cooking Mexican and even for getting up early, which he’d never expected. And Krystal turned one.
One night late in January the moon hung low and just above the trees which made it look enormous and close. Chetto and Keith were putting everything away for the night in the truck. Isabel stood outside in the moon’s gray wash with her boys on her skirt and Krystal on her breast. The wind came and Krystal’s feather white hair spread like a fan. Chetto poked his head out the opening again. He’d been doing it all night. Keith said, ¿Qué pasa, Chetto?
Chingado perro, Chetto said.
¿Dónde?
No sé. But yip yip yip, no stop.
Keith went to the opening. Isabel looked up and they both smiled at her in different ways. Chetto asked her in Spanish if she heard the dog. After the time he’d spent with them, Keith got most of what they said. He wouldn’t be surprised if Krystal’s first word was en español.
Sí, Isabel said, lifting an arm and pointing off. She looked back at Chetto and said, Villaragosa?
Mm, Chetto said, nodding slowly.
I don’t hear any dog, Keith said.
How can you no hear? Is close. Listen.
Keith listened, he listened good, he wanted to hear it, and maybe he did hear it. The boys were all talking, Isabel was singing a bolero to Bonnie, the palm branches rubbed against themselves in the wind coming down the road. Out on the main street there was traffic, many mufflers in need of repair. In short: a lot of noise.
Chetto pulled out of the window and continued the close-down of the truck. He said, You know story of Villaragosa?
No, Keith said.
In the middle of Oaxaca, Mexico, there had once been a prosperous village named Villaragosa. It was known as the crown jewel of Oaxaca for over a century, and many families lived there, raising children who went on to Mexico City or to America and worked as dentists, doctors . . . professional people of prominence and respect. Then one day the people of Villaragosa woke to the sound of a barking dog. There had always been dogs in the village, and they barked as dogs would bark, but this dog was different. The people of the village went out to see it, and soon almost all of Villaragosa had come to the square where the fountain stood in the center. There the dog stood. It barked one-two-three-four, mechanical and steady. Some approached it with care, holding out their hands for reassurance, but the dog was uninterested in their scent. Others went to their homes and returned with bones from their tables, which they threw to the dog. The bones collected at its feet, untouched. The people of Villaragosa eventually tired of the dog and went back to their houses, shutting their windows to his sound. The dog barked all night and all the next day, at the end of which the news came: someone had died. However, this was an old man who was alone and so no one paid much attention to his passing, until someone said that the man hadn’t come out to see the dog. People wondered, had he not heard it, how could that be? Word spread quickly through the town that there were many like the old man who hadn’t come out to see the dog. Panic came upon them, and that night three more people died. None of them had come to see the dog; had they not heard it either? That day there began the exodus from Villaragosa, started by a single family leaving in the midday sun. The third night others died, and the following day more families left. It continued like this, just as the dog continued to stand in the square by the fountain barking in the same way. Within a week Villaragosa stood empty, abandoned, the scent of the dead the only sign that life had ever been there at all. Only then did the dog leave the square. He walked through the empty streets of Villaragosa and took the southern road toward another town.
The state of Keith’s face made Chetto laugh. Outside, Chetto’s family laughed, even if they didn’t know why. Is okay, amigo.
Keith shook his head and busied himself, tried to grin it away. He figured anyone who knew him wouldn’t be convinced by the grin. He wasn’t sure if Chetto and Isabel qualified. He said, So what’s it mean?
Chetto shrugged. What you thinking? Maybe the dog, it making it happen?
No sé. I guess, yeah. It seemed like it in the story.
Maybe the dog, it was the warning.
Keith looked out through the opening. Isabel had Krystal on her shoulder. Krystal had grown tall in the time they’d spent there, and her feet, bare and black-bottomed, hung past Isabel’s belt. Keith said, A warning of what?
Para la muerte.
But what brought the death?
Chetto took a drink and held the beer in his mouth, puffing out his cheeks before swallowing. He shrugged. No sé, compadre. Is just story of a dog. No soy profesor.
It’s not just a story, Keith said.
Pues . . .
I saw a dog like that.
¿Qué? ¿Dónde? Keith thought Chetto asked it awful quickly.
In Kansas. At the diner where those people died I told you about.
But you hear it barking?
Sí.
Mm, Chetto said. He shrugged and drank up. Is okay because you hear it. It is only who no hear it that will die.
Pues, Keith said. What about this dog? I don’t hear this dog. Keith was pointing.
Chetto took a step towards Keith. The truck was small inside and one step did the trick. He looked in Keith’s face, took hold of his shoulders with both hands. Keith stood a solid foot above Chetto, but Chetto had always been the man in the house. Chetto shook his head and said, I was kidding, compadre, there is no dog here. Chetto laughed and Keith grinned and shook his head many times. He and Chetto finished their beers and started others Chetto pulled from the ice. But Keith watched Chetto closely for a while, and Isabel, where she was outside and surrounded by her children and the moon, and he wasn’t convinced.
That night Keith sat up late getting his thoughts on paper for Isabel and Chetto, most of it put down in Spanish, probably misspelled, but it made him feel in some way accomplished. He wrote down who he was, all the big truths. He gave Bonnie’s real name, but said he liked them calling her Bonnie and figured he’d uphold the tradition. It had a fullness of name the other one lacked and was somehow softer, like the Mexican women. Keith thanked Isabel and Chetto separately and said he’d miss their boys, which was true, and not just because they were the only brothers Bonnie had. She’d switched identities and crested her first year with them, and Keith wrote that year one was the most important of all the years she’d have. Finally he wrote to them that the events of Kansas and Oklahoma had been on his mind more than he’d shown. And now the Villaragosa story as well. I can’t help but wonder, he wrote near the end, if I don’t bear some of the blame for what’s happening.
Because he had come to love them and wanted no harm to come, Keith left the next day. Some gifts he’d got he put on his bed with his written thoughts. He backed the truck out slowly in the very center of the night.
Keith now knew the town of Lamesa as well as he did Low Hill. He’d divided his life unevenly between them, and a few Lamesa months had beat twenty-plus years of home.
The donut shop was just opening when he got to it. The employee was twice Keith’s lateral size and seemed more annoyed than tired, unlike Keith, who waited to be let in and entered with Krystal asleep on his shoulder. He spoke his order as a whisper on her hair. A box of donuts and some milk and the biggest dark water that fit in a cup, and Keith asked the employee if he knew of someone he’d seen in there before. Keith described the man but there was no memory of him. He asked about the female employee who’d spent her time rolling joints. She’d quit, Keith was told. The good ones always did. Odds against him, Keith still gave the employee the plain letter-sized envelope he’d come in with.
What’s that for? the employee said.
It’s for the guy I was telling you about.
I said I never saw him, and I’ve been here two months.
Two months ain’t so long. He might come back. It won’t hurt you to keep it.
The employee took the envelope in hand. After a moment he looked up and said, It’s a pair of glasses?
Just the frames, Keith said.
He took Krystal and his coffee and her little milk and their donuts out to the truck. When they had highway underneath them and the sun was hinting on the eastern edge, he looked at the one-year-old on the seat with the loose belt and wind pulling at her long white hair. She held the milk cup in both hands, drinking it by herself and watching the towns they passed with what looked to Keith like understanding. Texas had turned her to Bonnie and taken all her helpless months away, and for that Keith thanked it.

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Mike Harvkey won first prize in Zoetrope All-Story’s 2003 Short Fiction Contest. This is his first publication in a national literary magazine.