Beyond This Point Are Monsters Read Free Page A

intended to make him appear respectable and, hopefully, beyond reproach, merely em­phasized his uneasiness, his mistrust of this latest turn of events. If there was to be official recognition of Robert Osborne’s death, it should take place not in court but in church, with prayers and pleadings and long somber words intoned by gray-faced priests.
    Estivar had brought his wife, Ysobel, with him for moral support and because she refused to stay home. She was a mestiza, half-Indian, with high red-bronze cheek­bones and flat black eyes that looked blind and missed nothing. She held her neck rigid and her body erect, refus­ing to surrender to the motion of the car.
    In the seat behind Ysobel, Dulzura sat sideways and stretched her legs out straight in front of her in order to save her stockings at the knees. She wore a giant of a dress, with dwarf horses galloping around the hem and across the pockets. She’d purchased the dress for a weekend trip to the races in Agua Caliente, but the man who proposed the trip failed to show up. The only time Dulzura felt bitter about his defection was when she thought of the money she might have won.
    â€œFive hundred pesos, maybe,” she said aloud to no one in particular. “That’s forty dollars.”
    Beside Dulzura sat Lum Wing, the elderly Chinese who cooked for the men. He never associated with them, he merely arrived when they did, carrying a bag with his clothes in it and a padlocked wooden case containing his collection of knives, his whetstone sharpener and a chess set; and when the men left, he left, but not with them or even in the same direction if he could help it.
    Lum Wing sucked on the stem of an unlit corncob pipe, wondering what exactly was expected of him. A man in uniform had handed him a piece of paper and told him he’d better show up, by God, or else. He had a premoni­tion, based on some facts he thought no one else knew, that he would end up in jail. And when a good cook landed in jail, no one was ever in a hurry to set him free, that much he’d learned from experience. Out of nervousness he’d been swallowing air all morning and every now and then the excess would escape in a long loud burp.
    Ysobel spoke to her husband in Spanish. “Tell him to stop making those disgusting noises.”
    â€œHe can’t help it.”
    â€œDo you suppose he’s sick?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt seems to me he looks more yellow than the last time I saw him. Perhaps it’s contagious. I’m beginning not to feel so well myself.”
    â€œMe too,” Dulzura said. “I think we should stop off at a place in Boca de Rio and have something to steady our nerves.”
    â€œYou know what she means by something. Not coffee, I can tell you. And wouldn’t it look splendid to have us walk into the courthouse with her reeling drunk.”
    Estivar braked the car sharply and ordered them both to keep quiet, and the journey continued for a while in silence. Past the lemon groves sweet with the scent of blossoms, past the acres of stubble where the alfalfa had been cut, and the field of ripening pumpkins which Estivar’s youngest son, Jaime, had grown to take into Boca de Rio for Halloween jack-o’-lanterns and Thanksgiving pies.
    Jaime was fourteen. He lay now on his stomach in the back of the station wagon, gnawing his right thumbnail and wondering if the kids at school knew where he was and what he had to do. Maybe they were already blowing it up into something wild like he was a friend of the fuzz. Word like that could put a guy down for the rest of his life.
    It was the pumpkins that had done it to him. During the last week in October he had delivered some of them to school for the fair and the rest to a grocery store in Boca de Rio. The following Saturday Jaime was ordered by his father to take one of the small tractors and plow the pump­kin vines under. The machine turned up the butterfly knife in the