The Third Silence Read Free

am mentally incapacitated, so I must play along. What is the password?”
    Hot catalpas. I squeaked, “Is it you?”
    “Perhaps. I say, ‘Fergus,’ and then what do you say?”
    She was so strange, I felt like I’d known her all my life, and she couldn’t have chosen a poem I knew better. How could I ever have walked past her without saying hi? I loved her. I said,
    “Who will go drive with Fergus now,
    And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,
    And dance upon the level shore?
    Young man, lift up your russet brow,
    And lift your tender eyelids, maid…”
    I stopped, because I couldn’t think what came next.
    She said,
    “And brood on hopes and fear no more.
    And no more turn aside and brood
    Upon love’s bitter mystery…”
    She let the words trail away.
    “Mystery,” I said. “The reason I called…” It wasn’t the whole reason, really, but I went on. “Would you tell me about Dario Fuentes?”
    “I already did,” she said, her voice the color of fog.
    “Okay, he loved poetry, right?”
    “We spent almost every evening at the coffeehouse. Candles, guitars, poetry, love.”
    “And he loved the sea?”
    “He loved the sea and he loved me.”
    “And you loved him.”
    “Western wind, when wilt thou blow? I am still in love with him.”
    “But he’s dead.” Thirty years ago, and she still felt for him? I wondered whether that made her insane. She didn’t seem crazy to me.
    “Yes. He’s dead. I want someone besides me to remember him.”
    “How did he die?”
    “What they did to him in jail,” she said. “He was never the same afterward. He hanged himself.”
    * * *
    My father didn’t come home till late, after Mom was asleep. I was sitting at the kitchen table when Dad came in looking as saggy as his gun belt, dead tired. “You should be in bed,” he said.
    I shook my head. “Can’t sleep.”
    He stood there and studied me. Looking up at him, I saw something sad in his eyes.
    Finally he asked, “How much do you know?”
    It was hard to keep looking up at him, so I watched my own hands lying like dead doves on the table. I said, “They were in college together, right? And it was the sixties, so everybody was protesting authority and everything. Dario Fuentes stopped his car in the middle of the square one day and locked it and painted flowers on it till the police hauled him off to jail.”
    My father said, “It was different back then. A lot of tension.”
    “You were, what, about ten years old?”
    “Snot-nosed kid eavesdropping.”
    I raised my eyes to him. “Was it Grandpa?”
    He sighed and sat down across the table from me. I waited awhile before he said, “If this gets in the news…for the first time I’m glad my father is dead.”
    I nodded, waiting some more.
    He said, “That woman today wouldn’t cooperate. She wouldn’t even state her name. Do you know her name?”
    I shook my head. “Was it Grandpa who took Dario Fuentes in?”
    Dad closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with his fingers. He said, “It made him sick, what happened.” He shifted his hands back to massage his scalp. “Yes, he took the Fuentes kid in. Longhair pretty-boy hippie blocking the square, painting goddamn daisies on his Volkswagen. Dad roughed him up some. You know how your grandfather was, an old-style cop. He and the other officers smacked the Fuentes kid around, and then they put him in the holding cell with some guys they figured would teach him a lesson.”
    He stopped. Put his hands on the table like mine. I asked, “They beat him up?”
    Dad shook his head. “Worse than that,” he said, not looking at me.
    There was a moment like snowfall.
    I whispered, “Oh my God.” My whole body clenched like a fist.
    In a low voice Dad said, “My father never meant it to get so ugly. He tried to stop it, but nobody would back him up. He tried to get the kid out, drop the charges, but the captain wouldn’t let him.”
    “My God.”
    “They let the Fuentes kid go the next day, and