Steven Havill - Scavengers

“I’m not expecting anything there,” Estelle said. She stretched up and kissed Francis and then stood with her left hand hooked around his neck. “You’ll be home in a bit?”

“Yep.”

As Estelle slipped behind the wheel, her mother watched with a scowl. Teresa reached out with her left hand and with the back of her fingers flicked at the barrel of the shotgun that rested in its vertical bracket beside the radio stack as if it were an annoying insect. “This is nice,” she said.

“It goes with the car, Mamá .”

Teresa Reyes sniffed and turned to study the world out the side window as Estelle pulled away from the curb.

“Do you remember Paulita Saenz, Mamá ? ” For a moment she didn’t think that Teresa had heard her, and she glanced across at the tiny woman. Her mother sat with her right elbow on the door’s armrest, index finger lying pensively across her lips.

“Is that what this is all about?”

Taking that as a yes , Estelle added, “Her son’s in trouble. Do you remember Eurelio?”

Teresa’s eyebrows went up a little. “I don’t think I ever met him, you know,” she said. “The last time I saw that girl Paulita was…” She hesitated, lower lip projected in thought. “Maybe twenty years ago. Maybe that long.” She leaned her head on her hand. “What’s her boy done?”

“We’re not sure. We think he’s involved somehow in the death of a couple of Mexican nationals.”

“Ah.”

“Do you remember the Madrids? Lucy and Wally?”

“They live down in Maria.”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t recall them.”

Estelle smiled at the contradiction, the standard tactic to steer away from disagreeable topics of conversation. “They have two sons we need to talk to as well.”

“ Los hijos… ” Teresa murmured.

“I think Reuben knew them, didn’t he? Lucy and Wally, I mean?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Your great-uncle knew everybody.”

With a pang of nostalgia, Estelle remembered her great-uncle as she had seen him last-eighty-nine years old, unable to attend to even the most basic bodily functions. One by one, those functions had switched off until he lay in the hospital bed an empty shell. “I wish I had known him better when I was younger,” Estelle said.

“No, you don’t,” Teresa replied, and the starch in her reply surprised Estelle. She could remember the man’s quick, white-toothed smile and his mane of hair that had turned gray before he was thirty. Of the man himself, Estelle could remember little beyond those final impressions. “He cut a swath on both sides of the border,” Teresa said. “I always thought some jealous husband was going to shoot him.”

“I guess they never caught up with him,” Estelle laughed. They turned south from Bustos onto Twelfth Street. “I need to go down to Maria for a few minutes this morning, Mamá . Then after lunch you and I will go to Tres Santos.”

Teresa nodded. “That’s good.” Her arthritic fingers were already fumbling for the door handle as the patrol car pulled into the driveway.

Estelle switched off the car and got out.

“Hi, gang!”

She turned and saw Irma Sedillos standing on the small porch, holding the storm door open. Irma stepped outside and let the door close behind her.

“Captain Naranjo is on the phone, Estelle. From Mexico.”

Estelle stopped, her mother’s door half open. “Right now, you mean?”

“I told him you had just driven up, and he said he’d wait.”

“You go ahead,” Teresa Reyes said. She had both feet out of the car and one hand on the door, preparing for the effort to stand upright.

“Would you tell him I’ll call him right back? Just have him leave the number where he’s at. I’ll be about five minutes.”

Irma nodded and retreated inside.

Estelle bent down, wrapped her left arm around her mother’s shoulders and with her right hand on the older woman’s elbow, lifted her out of the car and to her feet.

“You’re pretty strong, hija ,” Teresa said. “You always surprise me.”

Estelle got the walker out of the back seat and handed it to her mother. “Do you want the chair?”

“No, this is fine,” Teresa said. She settled some of her weight tentatively on the aluminum walker as if afraid it might collapse. “It might take me a while.”

“We have all day, Mamá . ”

Teresa flashed a smile, her strong teeth good for another eighty years. “Wouldn’t that be nice,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be nice.” She looked toward the front door, fixing that in her mind as the destination, and then navigated around the car door so that Estelle could close it.

Five-year-old Francisco appeared in the doorway. “Where did you go?” he said to his grandmother.

Teresa stopped and rested both hands on the walker handle. “ Andando a la caza de pinacates, hijo. ”

Francisco’s black eyebrows knit together as his forehead puckered in a frown. “No you weren’t,” he said cautiously and looked around at Irma for confirmation. Surely Abuela had not been out hunting the first stinkbugs of the season without telling him.

“Here’s one right here,” Teresa said, and moved the walker delicately. Sure enough, one of the comical black beetles had decided that the heat bouncing off the concrete of the sidewalk and the house’s foundation had moved spring ahead of the actual calendar. He was posed by the sidewalk, tail up in the air. “He walked all this way, just like me.”

Francisco ducked his head, giggled, and bolted back into the house. “ Abuela ’s back!” they heard him shout to Carlos, but the younger boy was not so easily dislodged from whatever engrossed him at the moment.

“ Hijos, ” Teresa Reyes said as if that proved the thesis of some earlier conversation.

With her mother inside and tucked in her favorite chair with the oxygen tubes looped around her head like a high-tech necklace, Estelle paused for a moment in the middle of the small living room to slow the whirlwind that was her elder son. She clamped him in a bearhug as she said to Irma, “Did Naranjo leave his number?”

“He’s still holding,” Irma replied, and then lowered her voice. “He sounds like a movie star or something.”

Estelle laughed and aimed Francisco toward Irma. “He doesn’t need to hear that,” she said, and went to the phone in the kitchen. During her various dealings with the Mexican policeman over the years, it had always been abundantly clear that Naranjo remained a bachelor at heart, despite his long and apparently happy marriage. His prowl had extended for decades.

“ Capitán, buenos días. Lo siento la tardanza, ” she said in Spanish.

“Ah,” Naranjo said. “It’s good to hear from you, Señora Guzman.” His English was flawless and elegantly accented, as if he were trying to imitate Ricardo Montalban. “My office told me that you called, and I knew it must be important.” He chuckled. “Or at least, I hoped it would be. How is your mother, by the way?”

“She’s fine. Just tired. I just brought her home.”

“A remarkable woman. I hope you will give her my very best wishes.”

“I’ll do that,” Estelle said, at the same time wondering when her mother and Tomás Naranjo had crossed paths. In his early fifties and having served in the Judiciales for nearly thirty years, Naranjo had become something of an institution in his district. “I was hoping that I could ask your assistance with a case we’re working at the moment.”

“Nothing would please me more.”

“We have two homicide victims whom I believe are Mexican nationals, captain. They were apparently working up here for a month, cutting firewood on a large ranch near the community of Mule Creek, up in Grant County.”