From the Corner of His Eye Read Free Page B

student.
    For an awkward moment, he thought that they might remain at this impasse—Maria staring at her feet, Joe gazing down at the top of her humbled head—until some angel blew the horn of Judgment and the dead rose from their graves to glory.
    Then an invisible dog, in the form of a sudden breeze, scampered across the porch, lashing Maria with its tail. It sniffed curiously at the threshold and, panting, entered the house, bringing the small brown woman after it, as though she held it on a leash.
    Closing the door, Joe said, “Aggie’s in the kitchen.”
    Maria inspected the foyer carpet as intently as she had examined the floor of the porch. “You please to tell her I am Maria?”
    “Just go on back to the kitchen. She’s waiting for you.”
    “The kitchen? On myself?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “To the kitchen on myself?”
    “
By
yourself,” he corrected, smiling as he got her meaning. “Yes, of course. You know where it is.”
    Maria nodded, crossed the foyer to the living-room archway, turned, and dared to meet his eyes briefly. “Thank you.”
    As he watched her move through the living room and disappear into the dining room, Joe didn’t at first grasp why she had thanked him. Then he realized she was grateful that he trusted her not to steal when unaccompanied.
    Evidently, she was accustomed to being an object of suspicion, not because she was unreliable, but simply because she was Maria Elena Gonzalez, who had traveled north from Hermosillo, Mexico, in search of a better life.
    Although saddened by this reminder of the stupidity and meanness of the world, Joe refused to dwell on negative thoughts. Their firstborn was soon to arrive, and years from now, he wanted to be able to recall this day as a shining time, characterized entirely by sweet—if nervous—anticipation and by the joy of the birth.
    In the living room, he sat in his favorite armchair and tried to read
You Only Live Twice,
the latest novel about James Bond. He couldn’t relate to the story. Bond had survived ten thousand threats and vanquished villains by the hundred, but he didn’t know anything about the complications that could transform ordinary labor into a mortal trial for mother and baby.

Chapter 5
    DOWN, DOWN, THROUGH the shadows and the shredded spider webs, down through the astringent creosote stink and the underlying foulness of black mold, Junior descended the tower stairs with utmost caution. If he tripped on a loose tread and fell and broke a leg, he might lie here for days, dying of thirst or infection or of exposure if the weather turned cooler, tormented by whatever predators found him helpless in the night.
    Hiking into the wilds alone was never wise. He always relied on the buddy system, sharing the risk, but his buddy had been Naomi, and she wasn’t here for him anymore.
    When he was all the way down, when he was out from under the tower, he hurried toward the dirt lane. The car was hours away by the challenging overland route they had taken to get here, but maybe half an hour—at most forty-five minutes—away if he returned by the fire road.
    After only a few steps, Junior halted. He dared not bring the authorities back to this ridge top only to discover that poor Naomi, though critically injured, was still clinging to life.
    One hundred fifty feet, approximately fifteen stories, was not a fall that anyone could be expected to survive. On the other hand, miracles do occasionally happen.
    Not miracles in the sense of gods and angels and saints goofing around in human affairs. Junior didn’t believe in any such nonsense.
    “But amazing singularities do happen,” he muttered, because he had a relentlessly mathematical-scientific view of existence, which allowed for many astounding anomalies, for mysteries of astonishing mechanical effect, but which provided no room for the supernatural.
    With more trepidation than seemed reasonable, he circled the base of the tower. Tall grass and weeds tickled his bare calves. At