Margaret Millar - Beyond This Point Are Monsters

In Devons dream they were searching the reservoir again for Robert. It was almost the way it had happened the first time, with the Mexican policeman, Valenzuela, shouting orders to his men, and the young divers standing around in rubber suits with aqualungs strapped to their backs.

In the dream Devon watched, mute and helpless, from the ranch house. The real Devon had gone out to protest to Estivar, the foreman: Why are they looking for him in there? They have to look every place, Mrs. Osborne. The waters so dirty. Roberts a very clean person. Yes, maam. He would never have gone in such dirty water. He might not have had much to say about it, maam.

The water, used only for irrigation, was too murky for the divers to work, and in the end the police used a giant scoop and strainer. They spent hours dragging the bottom. All they found were rusting pieces of machinery and old tires and pieces of lumber and the muddy bones of a newborn baby. Finding the nameless, faceless child had upset the policeman, Valenzuela, more than finding a dozen Roberts. It was as if the Roberts of this world always did something to deserve their fate, however bloody or wet or feverish. But the child, the baby Goddamn, Valenzuela said, crossing himself, and took the little pile of bones away in a shoe box.

She woke up to the sound of Dulzura knocking on the bedroom door.

Mrs. Osborne? You awake? The door opened no more than a crack. You better get up now. Breakfast is on the stove.

Its early, Devon said. Only six-thirty.

But this is the day. Have you forgot?

No. Not very likely. Shed signed the petition herself while the lawyer watched, looking relieved that shed finally consented.

Dulzuras small fat hand trembled on the door. Im scared. Everybody will be staring at me.

You only have to tell the truth.

How am I sure of the truth after all this time? And if I lie after swearing on the Bible, Estivar says theyll put me in jail.

He was joking.

He didnt laugh.

They wont put you in jail, Devon said. Ill be ready for breakfast in ten minutes.

But she lay still, listening to Dulzuras leaden step on the stairs and the grumbling of the wind as it went round and round the house trying to get in. The autumn night had been warm. Devons short brown hair was moist and her nightgown clung damply to her body, as though she herself had been fished out of the reservoir and stretched on the bed to dry, a half-drowned mermaid.

Dulzura would tell the truth, of course, because it was too simple to distort: after dinner Robert had gone out to look for his dog and on the way hed stopped in the kitchen to see Dulzura. He wished her a happy birthday, kidded her about getting to be a big girl and went out the back door toward the garage.

Roberts car was still there, the top down, the key in the ignition. Estivar said it was bad policy to leave the car like that, it was too much of a temptation to the Mexican migrant workers who came to harvest lemons in the spring and crate tomatoes in the summer and pick cantaloupe in the fall. Every group of migrants that had arrived and departed during the past year undoubtedly knew about the car, but no attempt had ever been made to steal it. Perhaps Estivar had warned them severely or perhaps they thought such a car would have a curse on it. Whatever the reason, it lay dead and undisturbed under its shroud of dust.

The tides of migrants that came and went were governed by the sun the way the ocean tides were governed by the moon. It was now October, the peak season of the year, and the bunkhouse was full. Devon had no personal connection with the migrant workers. They spoke no English, and Estivar discouraged her from trying to communicate with them in her high school Spanish. She didnt know their names or where they came from. Small and hungry, they moved across her fields like rodents. Must have been a couple of wetbacks, one of the deputies said. Must have robbed and killed him and buried him some place. We have no wetbacks here, Estivar said sharply. Later Estivar told Devon that the deputy was a very ignorant man because the term wetbacks, mojados, was applicable only in Texas where the U.S.-Mexican border was the Rio Grande River; here, in California, where the border was marked by miles of barbed-wire fence, the illegal entrants were properly called alambres, wires.

Devon got out of bed and went over to the window to pull aside the drapes. She had long since moved out of the bedroom shed shared with Robert into the smallest room on the second floor of the ranch house. Small rooms were less lonely, easier to fill. This one, which faced south, had a sweeping view of the river valley, and in the distance the parched hills of Tijuana with its wooden shacks and its domed cathedral the same color as the mustard they sold for hot dogs at the race track and the bull ring. Tijuana looked best at night when it became a cluster of starry lights on the horizon, or at dawn when the cathedral dome turned pink and the shacks were still hidden by darkness.

Through the open window Devon could hear the phone ringing in the kitchen below and Dulzura answering it, her voice shrill as a parrots because telephones made her nervous. A minute later she was at the bedroom door again, breathing heavily from exertion and resentment.

Its his mother, says its important.

Tell her Ill call her back.

She dont like to wait.

No, Devon thought, Roberts mother didnt like to wait. But she had waited, the same as the rest of them, for the sound of a doorbell, a phone, a car in the driveway, a step in the hall; she had waited for a letter, a telegram, a postcard, a message from a friend or a stranger.

Tell her Ill call her back, Devon said.

From the window she could see, too, the rows of tamarisks planted to break the wind and protect the reservoir from blowing sand. To the east was the dry riverbed and to the west the fields of tomatoes, already harvested. The fields were alive with small birds. They swooped between the rows of plants, fluttered among the yellowing leaves, pecked at the rotting remains of fruit and searched the ground for fallen seeds and insects. Estivar could identify every one of them. He called them by their Mexican names, which made them all seem foreign and exotic to Devon until she found out that many of them were birds shed known back home. The chupamirto was just a hummingbird, the cardelina a goldfinch, the golondrina a swallow.

Other things which had familiar names were not familiar at all. To Devon, born and brought up on the East Coast, rain was what spoiled a picnic or a trip to the zoo, not something people measured in tenths of inches like misers with molten gold. And a river had always been a permanent thing, like the Hudson or the Delaware or the Potomac. The river she watched now from her bedroom window was bone-dry most of the year, yet sometimes it turned into a rampaging torrent strong enough to carry a truck downstream. There were few bridges. It was generally assumed that when it rained hard, people would have sense enough to stay home or stick to the main highway; and when it was dry, they simply drove or walked across the riverbed as if it were a special road, untaxed and maintenance-free.

The far side of the river marked the boundary line of the next ranch, which belonged to Leo Bishop. When Robert brought her home as his bride a year and a half ago, Leo Bishop was the first neighbor shed met. Robert asked her to be especially nice to him because hed lost his wife suddenly and tragically during the winter. Devon had done her best, but there were still times when he seemed as foreign to her as any of the