Black Alibi (4 page)

“
Madrecita
,” the girl implored dolorously, “why can’t Pedro go for a change? I work all day in the laundry and I’m tired.”

“Pedro can’t be trusted to go, and you know it. He throws the money up in the air all the way there, and then the first thing you know he loses it.”

“Why can’t you use sticks or papers until tomorrow? Why do I have to go now?”

“Is paper charcoal? How long does it last? It flames and then it’s gone!” This reminded her. She desisted momentarily from her broom cudgeling to waddle back to the russet-tiled
brasero
she had quitted some time before. She snatched up a palm-leaf fan, jerked aside an earthenware receptacle, and anxiously fanned the orifice thus exposed until it had begun to glow a dull red again from below. “See that?” she said accusingly. “It’s going down already! If it goes out—”

She rushed back for the broom, this time bent on inflicting the final stage of chastisement, all else having failed: an actual belaboring about the shoulders. In the face of this onset, the girl at last retreated as far as the doorway itself, but then she still hovered there, as though hoping against hope to win some miraculous last-minute reprieve.

A small boy of nine or ten, the aforementioned Pedro, pulled his face out of a bowl it had been buried in until now and remarked jeeringly: “I know what she’s afraid of. She’s afraid of the jaguar.”

The girl flashed him a parenthetic look that was an admission. Then, as though the first reference to it, by coming from someone else, had been enough to free her own powers of expression at long last, she began to importune her mother, in a half-eager, half-bated voice: “They say there’s one around somewhere. They say a rich lady had it on a string, and it got away and it hasn’t been found yet. I heard the girls talking about it in the laundry today—”

The broom was arrested only momentarily. “A jaguar? What’s that, one of those things they have in the mountains?”

“They’re big and they jump on you,” said the impish Pedro, with a sidelong look at his sister that showed what prompted him to make the remark.

The Senora Delgado wasn’t having any of this nonsense. She was too hard-working and careworn to take into account anything not of and within her daily toil and habits. “Did you ever meet one of those things yet when you went to the
tienda
for me?” she bellowed.

The girl swallowed, shook her head mutely.

“Then you won’t meet one this time either! Now get Out! Do as I told you!” And she gave the broom such a backward swing of final purpose that the girl disengaged the door behind her and slunk out backwards, big liquid black eyes, still futilely pleading, the last to go.

The exasperated Senora Delgado laid her broom aside and returned to her interrupted duties, grumbling darkly and shaking her head. But a moment later the door had stealthily reopened and the girl was attempting to sidle in again unnoticed behind her back.

She caught her just in time, made a tempestuous start in that direction, but the door had closed a second time before she was able to reach it, and the girl was once more outside.

The Senora Delgado took care of that by driving the mid-section bolt home, not without a great deal of difficulty. It was rusted from lack of use. It probably hadn’t been driven home into its socket for years past. Their door was never barred; there was nothing in the place that anyone would have cared to make off with. Flakes of scabrous rust fell off the bolt and a little cloud of dust winged up as she finally jammed it all the way in, by main force, and compelled to use both her sculpturesque forearms to master it.

Then she shook her hand at the sightless wooden barrier. “Now you’ll stay out there until you’ve done my bidding! You won’t get in again until you’ve brought that charcoal back with you!”

Outside the girl cowered for a moment in the shelter of the set-in doorway. She gave her
rebozo
a tightening pluck over her mouth. That was to ward off the night air, known to be unhealthful; keep it out of her nostrils and breathing passages. Only strangers, Americans and such, braved it. She peered cautiously up one way and down the other, along the grubby, uptilted little slum lane her house faced. Not straight, but gradually curving. No sidewalks, just a middle of the way. A single wan lamppost gleamed dismally at the far end of it, leaving the rest in shadow. But she had to go down the other way, where there wasn’t any. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere on it. They were all indoors already at this hour. They worked too hard around here. To stay out at night, that was for the rich. On a night of fiesta, that was different. Or for the head of the house to step down to the cantina for a few hours, that also was a different matter. Even while there they were not Out Ofl the street itself, they were indoors.

Well, it wasn’t far. She couldn’t get in again until she’d fetched it, so the quicker she did, the better. She struck out boldly from the doorway, moved down the middle of the road, arms tightly clasping her sides under the ends of her
rebozo
, eyes watchfully going from side to side in the oval gap it left for her face.

She rounded the sort of blunted corner the alley made in turning in to join the next one below. For a moment she could glimpse the diluted, tawny light shining out from the inside of the
tienda
, down there ahead of her. This new thoroughfare continued the steady downward course her own had maintained. This whole quarter of the city had been built down a slope leading to the dried-up bed of what had once been a river.

But right while she sighted it, as though it had only been waiting long enough for her to identify it, it went out. Old lady Calderón had closed up for the night. No system of clock entered into this; she couldn’t, as a matter of fact, read one, and didn’t have one, any more than any of the rest of them did. She closed up whenever there had been a long-enough lapse after the last customer to suggest that there weren’t going to be any more that night. Thus one night she might close at ten, the next at eleven, the next at nine.

The girl gave a warning hail from where she was, to try to hold her at the door until she could get there; she began to run fleetly down toward it. She got there just too late; the padlock was on the inside. This being a depot that dealt in valuables such as sugar, candles, chick-peas, et cetera, it was kept locked during the night, unlike the domiciles around.

She could still make out a faint gleam of candlelight coming from behind a hanging at the rear when she put her face close to the glass display window to one side of the door. Electricity for the front part of the store, candlelight for the living quarters at the back, that was the natural order of things, nothing surprising in that. She pounded her palm on the window hopefully.

The hanging was withdrawn diagonally and old lady Calderón showed herself, already in a partial state of deshabille, which consisted of being barefooted and of a braid of platinum hair having been uncoiled from her head and allowed to dangle down in front of one shoulder.

“I just want a little bag of charcoal for my father’s supper!” Teresa Delgado called through the glass between her hands.

The
tienda
-keeper shook her head, motioned her away, while she continued working her way down to the bottom of the braid. “Manana.”

“It’ll just take a second. While you’re standing there talking you could measure it out—” She held up the coin for her to see.

“It means taking off the lock again, putting on the light, digging down in the sack. It’s too much trouble. Once I close I close.” The hanging fell vertical again, blotting her out.

The girl turned away frustratedly. Now she’d either have to go home without it or she’d have to go all the way down to that other store, streets away, over on the other side of the viaduct. That was the nearest one there was to here. The viaduct was a parapet of solid masonry supporting a boulevard that crossed the former river bed at a height equal to its sides. You had to go through an arched passageway tunneled through its base to get over to the other side. It had always, even before now (now being that rumor), given her the creeps to have to pass through there late like this, when there was no one much around any more. It was so black while it lasted.

But if she went back without the charcoal, her mother wouldn’t let her in. Or, if she did, would probably disbelieve her about the store being closed and would take the broom to her some more.

The more embodied fear always overcomes the more formless one, even when it is the lesser of the two. She reluctantly resumed her descent toward the causeway ahead, instead of turning back for home.

When she got down to it and was about to enter, she took a deep breath, stored up enough air to see her through to the other side. It was black and impenetrable. The slant of the ground outside prevented what reflection there was from street lights in the distance from entering, beyond a slight indentation at its very mouth. You’d think they’d have a light hanging in it at least, or just outside up over the entrance. Well, they’d tried to many times, but the kids who played around here in the daytime had always ended up by busting it in a day or two, so finally they didn’t try to keep one going any more.

Her footsteps began to echo hollowly the minute the unseen rounded roof had closed over her, and the stonework all around made it a little damper and mustier. Once, a year or so ago, somebody had been found dead in here, with a knife in him and his pockets— But she didn’t want to think of that now.This was no time for it.

She had quickened her gait unconsciously, from the moment of entering. Her eyes, brilliant and large at all times, must have been enormous in the gloom, though they couldn’t be seen.
Gracias a Dios
, it wasn’t very long, just about the width of the boulevard that ran atop it. She was halfway through to the other side now. Her footfalls went bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, like the thumping of gourds, the stones above giving the sound back to the stones below.

There—she could see the other opening ahead of her; she was coming Out. She began to breathe again, and, only in doing so, realized she hadn’t been until now. It wasn’t very much lighter out ahead than it was in here; a few motes of dark blue or gray mingled with the smooth-textured black to make it seem threadbare, that was all. But the deep resonance of her tread began to dwindle a little, and the air to become a little less damply oppressive. Those were the chief signals of approaching emergence, rather than vision itself.

And then, as she hurried to meet the open again, she happened to glance over to one side of her. For no reason, or for whatever reason it is that draws the vacant glance when there seems to be no cause yet there is. Her throat swelled with suddenly congested breath. What was that? The stonework must be wet over there, there must be some slight seepage of water trickling down between their seams. For she caught a sort of reflected gleam, an iridescent winking, as though light from outside the tunnel mouth—

But there wasn’t any light outside the passage, nothing that could strike that far in, create such a high light against the stone tunnel facing. It was not expansive, in a sheet; nor yet was it continuous, in a perpendicular thread, such as watet might have made. If it was water, it was in the shape of two drops, side by side. Two elongated, almost slitted drops; rod-shaped; like bacilli seen through a microscope. Faintly wavering, as if with inner heat carried upward behind them, in a fuming sulphurous yellow green. Yet not distinct, not clearly etched against the blackness, nothing like that. Rather a diffuse, a thin-surfaced glistening that, but for the blackness itself, which gave the eye, her eye, nothing else to rest upon, would have escaped her notice entirely.

They weren’t eyes, were they—other eyes? So steadily maintaining their twoness, their equidistance, their taut, stretched-out suggestion of wicked peering— No, of course not. How could they be? What would eyes be doing in here, and—and whose would they be anyway, and— Just don’t let them be; don’t
think
they are; if you think they aren’t, they won’t be. Only light glinting from the wetted projection of two small roughnesses, two unevennesses in the stonework, side by side, that was all.

It had sidled back to the rearward now, as her feet continued to do their duty, like soldiers who continue to carry out previously received orders long past the ability of the commanding officer to issue or even be able to think up new ones. She didn’t dare turn to look back, once the continuity of her line of vision had been broken; she was afraid her carefully patched explanation couldn’t stand the confirmation of a second look, might fall to pieces at it.

A few short steps more, and the night sky had opened around her again. Look, a star. Another. Oh, the beautiful openness of night. Space to run in. Even the darkness a lesser darkness, with color beneath its surface: sooted white and submerged green and blue. The gourds of her measured tread became the rattle of her flying feet, one end of her
rebozo
winging out behind her.

She only stopped again when the silvery pallor of the store, falling in a fan across the ground, lay just ahead, around a turn in the crooked byway. How beautif4il it seemed, with its bedraggled fringe of paper strung across the front of it, limp from many rains, and with the colors it had once been dyed transferred to streaks down the stucco wall. How friendly that dissonant jangle of the bell cord attached to the door sounded as she pushed her way in. What a lovely place to be in, with its smell of hemp and cordage and kerosene.

The old Basque who ran it came out of the back, still smacking his lips from his own meal, beret left on his head even while he ate. He knew her by sight. “Ah, Teresita.” He shook his head as he weighed out the charcoal. “They shouldn’t send you out alone so late,
hijita
.”

She was brave, now that she was safe again. She wasn’t going to admit how frightened she’d been herself just now. She fluttered her fingers in rotation on the edge of his counter. “What can happen to me? This is Ciudad Real.”

“Many things can happen,” he said enigmatically.