What You See in the Dark Read online

  The pickup truck is absolutely still—or is it moving? There is no telling what they are or are not doing in there. Who could push away Dan Watson? Because the speaker is off, from way over in the distance a girl’s furious moans carry along the dirt lane, then some quiet laughter from people sitting on their hoods, watching the movie. Whoever heard that laughter—how people react when exposed to that kind of desire, with laughter or disgust or disapproval—might stop what they were doing. But it’s happening all across the darkness, panties slipping off and resting playfully on the gearshift, on the radio knob. Yours is twenty-three and doesn’t know what he’s doing and he admits that he’s a virgin in a terrified voice. He thrusts and it feels good only because you close your eyes and picture yourself in the pickup truck instead, the way Dan walks, the waitresses who feel dirty for thinking of him that way because they knew him when he was a little, little boy. They know his mother. You close your eyes and think of Dan but concentrate on this boy, holding him at the hips when he begins rocking too fast, getting carried away to a point when he won’t be able to control himself. He’s sweet in his earnestness—he truly is—and he stops when you tell him to do so, his face covered in sweat. He looks like he is about to cry.

  Car engines begin to turn on even before the movie is over, and horns blast at the disorder—some people want to know who committed the murder, who made the beautiful girl scream like that. The pickup truck stands absolutely still, the silhouettes hard to pick out now because of the shifting lights and shadows. It’s time to sit back up in the seat, since people are watching now, and adjust bras, close blouses. More and more cars begin to pull out, so many there’s actually a line for the exit. It is better to wait. The twenty-three-year-old boy is in love. You can tell by the way he sits there, his pants back on, but the bulge straining. He wants a kiss.

  That is the difference between him and a man like Dan. This boy hasn’t yet learned the power of wielding his body—giving it over—like a little boat on an ocean, the thing you cling to, getting rocked to sleep by the waves. He thinks he’s in love.

  And why shouldn’t he, after a night like that? It’s easy to think that’s what love is, after being naked in front of someone for the first time, as if it truly were an act of tenderness, of sacred honor. In truth, love crumbles into something else, an answer to lying awake at two in the morning, when the body demands one thing and one thing only. The cars drive back into the sleepy streets of Bakersfield, letting off dates at the porch-lit houses, last kisses before the neighborhood dogs begin to bark at the idling engines. Soon the boy will start the hand-holding and the flowers—cheap grocery-store flowers, not Holliday’s, but flowers nonetheless because that’s what sweet, earnest boys do.

  After October, the drive-in closes for the winter. Saturday nights become a slow circle around a little stretch of Union Avenue, the streetlights glimmering off the new wax jobs. Cars stop over at the Jolly Kone hamburger stand or at the edges of the dark city park. Winter fog keeps many people home, as if the cold were unbearable. Still, as the weeks go on, the bars begin to do substantial business, especially the ones that serve a little food early enough to draw a crowd that stays the entire evening. Traveling bands arrive in Bakersfield for special appearances, the bars competing with one another for the best of Los Angeles, sometimes even selling tickets in advance at the record shop.

  In the newspaper, a little ad appears in mid-November, a curious drawing. A dark-skinned woman stands in front of a microphone. “La Reina,” says the ad. “Este Domingo.” And below is the address to Las Cuatro Copas. It is a drawing, not a photograph. It is that girl. Undeniably. There is something provocative about the advertisement, something deliberate about its simplicity, the fact that she is a local talent. Customers from the shoe store will surely recognize her. You leave the newspaper on the storeroom counter, conspicuous, to show her that you’ve seen it, but she says nothing about it. In the drawing, she stands in front of the microphone with her lips open, but who knows what might come out of her mouth. The advertisement appears again later in the week in an evening edition, same bold type, same language, same held note. At the shoe store, you swear people are peeking through the windows to get a glimpse of her. It isn’t surprising when, on Sunday night, Las Cuatro Copas is packed, not one table unoccupied.

  People arrive dressed as if it were a Saturday, all fine ties and shiny boots and dresses. No one licks their fingers after eating the chicken legs and taquitos, the plates carried away just as quickly as they arrived. Conversations float by in Spanish—all of them in Spanish. Some of the Mexican men have even come with blond American women, heedless of the hard glares. These couples have little to say to each other, though sometimes the women jabber on to fill the quiet space between them. Here, everyone is out in the open—it is clear who brought whom, who is being distracted, who is being worn away by jealousy, and who is going to be brokenhearted. It is not the drive-in, where the darkness lulls everyone into thinking that lust is an easy, clean jump over to the wide path of love on the other side. In the dim club, the true complications of being in love show themselves in flashes, like a wedding ring catching a burst of light. A dark-haired woman drinks too much for so early in the evening and you can tell she’s trying but unable to leave the man who brought her. A very young couple sits over near the back, sitting so close together they seem almost afraid of being affected by everyone around them, and the way the young man nods at the girl when she comes around for an order—nods but doesn’t say much of anything—you can tell that neither he nor his young date speak English. He is surprised that the girl takes his order in Spanish with ease. That man over there gives another woman the once-over, his hand distracted on his own date’s back. Both women notice and look away in hard, granite anger.

  Who knows, really, why they came tonight, if they’ve been paying attention to that girl and noticed her comings and goings. Who knows why they thought this evening warranted ironing a fresh shirt instead of just airing out the one from the night before, damp as it was from dancing and smoky when you put your nose to it. But here they were, their tables cleared but not stacked over in the corner as they usually were on dancing nights. Maybe later, but now just their clean tables and their chairs to sit in and a last round of drinks, the girl gone to the back of the club and the lights dimmed even further, so dark the crowd actually goes quiet and focuses on the small halo of light at the center of the cantina. So quiet you can hear the boots of the bartender boyfriend against the wood floor as he approaches the light, guitar in one hand, a microphone stand in the other, the cord snaking behind him. Someone rises from the crowd to pull over a blue velvet stool for him and Dan says thanks, tapping his fingers against the microphone. “Uno, dos, tres,” he says, perfectly, which prompts an almost nervous laughter from some in the crowd. You think: He knows how to speak Spanish. He might understand what people have been saying. The microphone in working order, he waves off to the side, and out of the dark comes the waitress girl, out of her serving apron and wearing instead a beautiful cowgirl dress. Baby blue satin with white fringe. Of course, you notice that she’s wearing what look like last season’s brown boots, and you foolishly try to make her see that you’ve noticed, but your face is lost in the dark. The boots don’t match the dress, but it’s too dark for anyone else to really care. All eyes are on the gorgeous satin, the way it catches what little light there is, the arrow detailing beginning at her shoulder and descending, circling each breast, the silver lacing deep inside the fringe, which sparkles to attention when she adjusts the microphone.

  “Ready?” she says to Dan, and that says everything to the audience: she will be singing in English, no matter what the sign said. She doesn’t look anything like the picture’s promise, and the Spanish nickname feels misleading. But people came because they had seen her around town with Dan Watson. Or because they knew the woman who had been her mother, or they had heard about how she’d been left to bring herself up all alone after her mother left
. They came because this girl was going to sing about either love or pain, and some of them felt as if they already knew the story behind both.

  People who don’t know English love that Patsy Cline record from last year, all the times her song came over the radio when there was nothing else to listen to, a deep, luxurious voice for a woman, more expressive than the chirpy girl groups indistinguishable from one another. The guitar starts in and they all recognize the beginning of “Walkin’ After Midnight” and the girl seems to look at the audience straight on, the first words a little quiet and her voice too high. But the couple performs the song well, the girl’s hands shaking a bit before she steadies them on the microphone. She closes her eyes for a long while, as if she needs to concentrate, but then opens them again, as if she knows that she has to face everyone to feel the song. She begins to look around the room as she sings, moving her arms as if she were walking down a Bakersfield street, keeping tempo with the guitar, the song close enough to what everyone has been accustomed to on the radio. Her voice does not have the depth of Patsy Cline’s, dark water swirling, but she manages to make the song tell a kind of story, as if anybody could be walking down the late-night streets of Bakersfield, haunted by that searching, but hopeful about it, no danger whatsoever. People nod their heads along to the guitar’s polite strum, the English words familiar, the way English becomes familiar enough with repetition, her fringe dancing, glittering along.

  For the second number, after small but prolonged applause, the girl almost turns her back to them to look at her boyfriend as he begins the first notes. Everyone sees him motion her to turn around, reminding her that she has an audience, and so she positions herself in a sideways posture, a little awkward, but it is clear what is going to happen. She needs to face him, and the notes off the guitar sing to the audience in a prolonged introduction, the melody immediately familiar to some, others needing to wait for the words. It is clear what is going to happen: they are going to sing to each other, her boyfriend a little hidden in the dark, away from the half-moon of the spotlight. And now everyone has something to privately admire: the shape of Dan’s muscular thigh perched off the stool, tapping in tune; the girl’s still-trembling hand on the microphone; Dan’s superb coordination over the guitar strings; the girl’s narrow, beautiful waist. They begin singing the song and right away the people who need the words remember the Everly Brothers and their shiny innocence, their politely combed hair. But tonight, “All I Have to Do Is Dream” comes over as a different song altogether—not two brothers and teenage heartbreak, but a more adult, public affirmation. The girl wavers but stays on the slow, hopeful tempo, watching her boyfriend, who sings back to her in a surprising tenor. This is love. This is what it is supposed to be like—a handsome man and a girl who comes from nothing, and now everything changes because he has arrived. A girl becomes a woman, devoted at last because her man has exhibited the courage to be tender. That’s the way you hear the song, as a shopgirl in a small city, and you see that it all depends on who is listening and why, who grasps a date’s hand in the dark as the song goes on, who knows what the words were actually saying.

  Just two songs. Nothing worth the grand pronouncement of an advertisement in the paper. He was a better singer than she was and even played the guitar, but he stands away from the circle of spotlight and allows her to take her bows. “¡Bravo!” call out some of the Spanish-speaking men. “¡Bravo!” As if they understood every word, as if they didn’t notice Dan Watson making a proprietary motion around her delicate waist when she moves toward the back of the cantina. They cheer her all the way out, for just two songs, as if she has fulfilled whatever promise the advertisement in the newspaper suggested, her embrace of the microphone, of them, the dark beauty of her skin, her face, her voice.

  After the tables are stacked, the dancing begins, a lot of ballads in both English and Spanish to keep the mood going, the women falling into their men’s arms, heads on shoulders and eyes closed. You do the same to your date, his shoulder too thin to carry your defeat. People could think you were in love with this boy, maybe imagine it was something close to that girl and the bartender, resonant and tremulous. But you can only close your eyes in disappointment that the smell of the neck you’ve nestled into is of Ivory soap, of Prell shampoo and no cologne, one of the Everly Brothers and not that man. Sweet pronouncements have their place, but no man should be singing about a broken heart, about longing. He should be there to fix it, the way Dan sang tonight, the words saying one thing but his thigh on the stool saying another, his longing a stage act because he already has what he desired.

  With your eyes closed, you think of what it will be like to go back to work at the shoe store, working alongside that girl, how hard it will be not to seem jealous about every good thing that has come her way. It won’t be long before she quits the job altogether, stepping through the doorway never to return, leaving you to go through the days without any exit of your own.

  Your head is heavy on your date’s shoulder. People dance for a short while, but the cantina begins to empty by eleven o’clock. It is a Sunday night after all and tomorrow morning is work. But the routine for the night seems to have been set, more or less. November rolls on and again the same advertisement appears in the paper and the picture begins to make sense to people: La Reina has a story to tell, but you have to listen to the songs she chooses in order to understand it. You have to put a story together against what you might already have heard on the street about her. The songs will tell you how she’s become a queen, has become fit to be treated like one. You have to watch her sing to Dan, and know that he doesn’t care where she comes from or who her family is. People begin to come in more and more, deep into November, on into December, convinced that she’ll sing a song that explains her stage name or even something in Spanish to prove she knows it, the way her boyfriend taps the microphone at the beginning of their two-song sets, “Uno, dos, tres.”

  The cold fog settles into Bakersfield, and even in the worst of its thickness, the cars prowl out along Union Avenue and maneuver into the gravel parking lot, ladies shivering in their dresses and short jackets. Maybe tonight she will sing “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Their love is bigger than yours, truer, headed for a certain destination. It is wiping away jealousy and loneliness with nothing but song and sincerity, the simplicity of it almost unfair. You can listen as she sings “Tears on My Pillow,” but the truth of her world makes the song cruel to hear, the will to sacrifice the heart all over again with possibly nothing in return, the heart never forgetting. How could this be true for her? Her boyfriend is right there, even if he is in the dark, and never leaving, so she can sing all the loneliness she wants. It will never touch her.

  In December, the ads keep appearing, but with Christmas coming and New Year’s Eve and the general lack of work out in the fields, the cantina begins to slow down a bit. Still, there is the ad, something to look at on a Sunday night when there will be no going out, when the sweet but earnest twenty-three-year-old is left breathless on the phone when he is told no. La Reina opens her soul out on the page, familiar to many now. A hard rain begins that night and lasts all through the morning, steady, the clouds lingering over the Pacific Ocean for days before swirling in. When next week’s edition of the paper is thrown on the doorstep, the paperboy misses his target and it lands in a bush. The paper soaks through. Because there is nothing else to do, the rain keeping everyone indoors, you lay the paper out on the kitchen table to dry in the steamed-up warmth of the house. The ink has run, but parts are salvageable, the news of the entire city spread out for inspection.

  There, on page 3, is a picture of the bowling alley over near Chester Avenue, a police officer standing in front. There is the girl’s name in the text. There is Dan Watson’s. Page 1 is ink-smeared from the rain and nearly impossible to read, but it is clear something terrible has happened. She was twenty-three.

  There is what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to
experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.

  Phone calls ricochet all around town. The rain keeps most people from venturing out, or else speculation would be the subject at every bar, every coffee shop, every diner and café. She lived in the apartment above the bowling alley and was a quiet girl, according to the landlord’s account in the newspaper. On the night the rainstorm began, said some who claimed to have been in the cantina the very night she was killed, the two of them had a terrible fight. Others said that never happened, that the couple had been seen at the movies. The stairwell up to her apartment had a side wall smeared in blood, someone said. The newspaper reported she had been beaten to death. You can kill someone with your bare hands. A man can kill a woman that way. Even a sweet, earnest boy is capable of that, if he thinks about it, if he recognizes his power, his weight, his thrust, his fists coming down. On page 8 of the paper, the advertisement for Las Cuatro Copas still runs, La Reina with her mouth open.

  She had been stealing money. She had been pregnant with his child. She had been caught with another man. The landlord refuses to rent the apartment. He cannot get the blood off the wall.

  There is what you see and what you make of it: You know she stole those boots from the store’s inventory. You know for sure. You can confirm it by the totals coming up short in the ledger. But you keep that to yourself.