Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

In his airplane seat, the Director floated halfway between a mild nap and the fluttering of his eyes, fully awake to the world, but he remained in the magic of the audience’s response to the long sequence, a standing ovation right in the middle of his film. All the papers made mention of the moment. They cheered his restraint, his elegant answer to prurience, as much as they cheered his return, as if acknowledging how much they’d taken for granted his enormous skill and grandeur, the great pleasure he had given them. Back in the world of the airplane, the lights low, his wife turning the pages of her magazine, his mind refused to leave that space where the applause deafened and would not yield, and he let himself drown in the cascade of acclaim. There was no star in the sequence, no blond arching to reach for a pair of scissors, no blond in a fitted pea green jacket fending off an attack of crows. Just the camera on the landing. Just him.

He opened his eyes for a moment and caught the stewardess in first class observing him. Her eyes made as if to shift away, but then she moved forward, smiling, as if to check whether he needed something. He needed nothing. He closed his eyes once more, and soon enough he was back in the audience, enjoying its echo, the shouts of approval, the keen embrace of complete adoration.

The ring on your finger means a beginning is coming, but also an end. This is the aim in this town, to get a ring on the finger, to be ushered past the white fence and the rich red roses, to be pulled out of the rain. To step into a church and then step out of it, back out into the Bakersfield sunshine, but not alone, and all around are people who have joined themselves to others in the same way. The ring means you’ll be a wife, and the clean-cut boy who presented it has already promised you will no longer have to work in the shoe store. A beginning, but an end. No more toiling for Mr. Carson, no more long hours in the hot stuffiness of the store’s back room. A wife need not work. A wife gets a bouquet of promises: devotion, security, honor, hard work from her husband’s hands. The clean-cut boy wants no wife of his working, and this satisfies you. You have deserved this all along.

But the ring also means no more being the center. No more being able to lean toward the women patrons when they come not to try on shoes but to gossip, to let you in on whatever rumor floats around town.

In December, in early January, after the girl was murdered, the clientele had come in droves. Mr. Carson had pursed his lips at the women who arrived in the shop, who hardly even glanced at the merchandise, didn’t even bother to pretend. He stuffed his face with danish to keep himself from speaking out, not wanting to chastise his best customers at the height of the holiday buying season, but he bristled at the same thing you bristled at: the lack of decorum in these ladies, their visible thirst for word about that girl, the way they looked at the heavy curtain leading to the back room of the shop, as if tracing her steps would tell them everything they wanted to know about her. You wanted to point out the inexpensive black flats that the girl liked to wear— These, right here, you wanted to tell them — knowing the ladies in the group would feel a proximity to that girl just by the weight of her shoes, the smallest detail budding into significance.

But what could you have said to them? What did you know? You saw nothing. You weren’t there. You weren’t in her shoes.

“She was such a quiet girl,” you told them. This was true, but you didn’t want to tell them much more than that.

The ladies all knew about Dan Watson. Their feigned expressions of surprise didn’t convince you. They knew his mother from the town café, but his mother wasn’t in his swagger. His good mother wasn’t in the way he stepped out of his truck, cocked his hips as he lit a cigarette, waiting to cross the street. You know they had all looked at him with longing. He was no clean-cut boy like your soon-to-be husband, no straight line across the back of his neck from a dutiful Monday-morning haircut.

Actions like that should surprise no one. All around town, if people had only put their heads together, done the hard work of separating rumor from truth, of confirming what had been seen and not heard, nothing should have surprised anyone.

You didn’t tell these ladies much, no, not in December in the early days of the shock, and not in January, when it felt as if it might be best to toss out an observation, like a coin into a pool of water, just to see the ripples. But then the ring changed everything, and with it came a promise that you would be able to put all such ugliness to rest, never again having to step into Mr. Carson’s store, not one more reminder of that girl, living and breathing as she once was, coming around to haunt you. Marriage was coming for you, and with it would come a startling privacy, you nested in your brand-new home, guarding the things you learned about the family you would be married into: your husband-to-be the middle brother of three boys, the other two living in suspicious bachelorhood.

Marriage was going to save you from having to say anything at all to these ladies. You didn’t tell them about the last time you had been escorted to Las Cuatro Copas, your boyfriend eager to see what all the fuss had been about, those illustrations in the town newspaper and the drive-in shut down for the winter. If the murder hadn’t happened, perhaps you would’ve been able to make small talk about the crudeness of the cantina, the unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans and how maybe Bakersfield shouldn’t be allowing such a thing. Or maybe you would’ve complimented the cheap but delicious taquitos served up by that girl, who looked only at your boyfriend, not willing to look you in the eye, not willing to acknowledge that she needed another job, that she even knew you. But you wouldn’t tell the women that — you’d tell them only about the cheap food, point to this as perhaps one of the reasons the night was such a weekly success. None of you would admit that it was really about Dan Watson up onstage. None of you would admit that it was the way that girl sang, the way her head turned to look at Dan Watson while she held a long note. The little storm he created inside her pushed to get out: you could all see it, how he was teaching her to sing, to let go of whatever caught in her throat. He shaped the thrust of her shoulder when she stood sideways to the audience, hand on the microphone, all those men looking at her. The more she sang, the more comfortable she became with their looking, the more she wanted their looks.

To say you saw this would mean you envied her. To say you saw this would mean you, too, looked at Dan Watson.

That night, there was another man in the back. You could tell by the way that girl brought her voice inward, her eyes squinting as if to confirm what she had recognized, and her easy flirtation with Dan Watson hardened into a forced gesture. Something had changed within her. You turned your head to look back there because you knew she was ashamed — all along she should have been ashamed, the way she held the edge of her baby blue satin cowgirl dress, and those boots. Those boots! You hardly had time to register where you had seen those boots when that look flickered across her face, and you turned to study who was in the back, which face was going to shimmer into the person who could make her so apprehensive. Back there, though, stood a line of short Mexican men with no dates, hands in their pockets, their white T-shirts gleaming through the cigarette smoke.

You don’t tell the ladies any of this because you don’t know where to start. She wore boots she’d stolen from Mr. Carson, but what did that fact say about her murder? A line of short Mexican men stared at her through the smoke, but what did that say about the one the police ended up deporting?