One

If you had been across the street, pretending to investigate the local summer roses outside Holliday’s Flower Shop, you could have seen them through the café’s plate glass, the two sitting in a booth by the window, eating lunch. You could have seen them even if you had been inside the shop, peering from behind the window display of native Bakersfield succulents, wide-faced California sunflowers, blue flax in hanging pots. The two of them sat in full view of everyone passing by, minding their own business. Their mouths moved alternately in long, drawn-out soliloquies, or sometimes they paused and deliberated, as if they had to choose their words carefully, grinning if they spoke at the same time. The girl was eating a thin sandwich and taking short sips from a thick glass of cola. The man ate with a knife and fork, his elbows up in a sawing motion, his eyes sometimes looking down to concentrate.

He was the most handsome man in town for sure, and his mother owned a little motel out on the highway. He always seemed to be wearing only brand-new shirts: no one could keep shirts that color, that softness, time after time, hanging them to dry stiff on a backyard line.

He would be a good man to marry.

They were eating in the café located on one of the choice corners on a better stretch of Union Avenue, the café that still had the plate-glass windows all the way down to the sidewalk, one of the few places that still did after the ’52 earthquake. You could see the entire booth through those windows: the table, the red vinyl, their dishes, the waitress’s white shoes when she came by to check on them, how the girl crossed her feet and rocked them nervously. She was not dressed as crisply as he was. Even if her clothes looked clean and pressed, you could tell right off that the day she began wearing nice things around town was the day the two of them had done more than talk and have lunch. His mother, whom everybody knew, had worked at the café since before the earthquake, and the waitresses who served him at any of the shifts --- breakfast, lunch, dinner, or late-night coffee and cherry pie --- had all known him as a boy, so it was hard to tell if their attentions to him were motherly or something more flirtatious.

And yet the one to grab his attention was that skinny brown girl who lived above the bowling alley. Always on foot, always staring into the windows of the record shop, of the TG&Y, of the furniture store, of the Rexall, even of the shoe store where you worked, as if she hadn’t set up the displays herself. A very plain girl, not too tall, with slender hips, and hair as dark as her mother’s. Her mother had worked at the café, too --- with his mother, in fact --- almost eight or nine years ago. No doubt his mother remembered.

You could see that girl walking to work at the shoe store, back and forth, going to her apartment during the lunch hour, then home again by the end of the day, no matter what the Valley weather brought: summer heat, fall rains, the terrible winter fog. Even in late November and December, when the sun had gone down by near five o’clock and the streets fell dark, she would walk home alone after the store closed. And that’s how it should have stayed, a plain girl like that all alone.

But now this: a thin sandwich and Dan Watson, who was surely going to pay for it, then the waitress coming round with the dessert menu, the girl glancing at the clock, Dan urging her to choose something, then clearly instructing the waitress to hurry back. The waitress indulges him, of course, he being who he is, and comes back with two small silver dishes of vanilla ice cream. He leans over and spoons a small scoop of her ice cream into the cola glass. There is still a lot of soda left, the way she has been sipping it, savoring it. He points for her to take a taste and she does so warily, as if she’s never tasted anything like it before. But you have to believe she never has, once that look crosses her face, an amused arch of her eyebrows and a nod of approval.

How people change when they get a taste of the good life! When suddenly the dollar bills in your hand can go for things you want instead of need. A fork-and-knife meal at the café; scarves and pearl chokers; pendants and brooches; jewelry boxes with ballerinas springing to attention; that lovely sound of pushing rings and earrings and bracelets against each other while you’re searching. Flowers from Holliday’s like the good husbands do: tulips and Easter lilies from Los Angeles in the springtime, a wrist corsage for attending a wedding. A car trip over to the coast, to Morro Bay and the enormous, beautiful rock basking just off the shoreline. A day in Hollywood, the exhilaration of knowing movie stars breathe in the very same sunshine. Silk blouses brought home in delicate paper; dresses that require dry cleaning; lingerie so elegant it refuses to be scandalous.

Is that the life she knows she has ahead of her, the way she is sitting there, her feet rocking nervously after nearly a whole hour? Does she know how every young woman in town wants exactly this? Does she know that people turn their heads to watch them leave the café, to watch him open the door of his Ford truck for her? Does she know people discuss what they’ve seen, what his mother must think?

Summer carries on, the heat still scorching into September. Harvest time has arrived in Bakersfield and more people have come into town looking for work, whole caravans sometimes. Faces are not as familiar as before, not at the supermarkets, not on the downtown streets. Bakersfield is the open door to the southern part of the state, and the workers come pouring through. So many people have arrived that it becomes difficult to find parking spots, to buy fresh meat, even to get a bench at the Jolly Kone hamburger stand. But this will be short lived --- by the end of October, after much of the late-summer crop has been brought in from the fields, the town will go back to normal. The strangers will leave, counting their money, and Bakersfield will wait for those first few weeks of November when the sky goes gray and the fog rolls in over the coastal range and lingers for months on end.

In all the commotion of the harvest boom, most people don’t notice that the girl is no longer walking the streets to work. At the lunch hour, she’s nowhere to be seen over near Chester Avenue, where her apartment is. But at the shoe store, she’s there sure enough, dutifully stepping from the back storage room when Mr. Carson snaps his fingers and tells her the sizes he needs. She never says a word unless a Spanish-speaking customer comes in: this is why she was hired. Mr. Carson cannot refuse the potential business from these customers and leaves the girl to tend to them, stepping away and occupying himself with other business. The girl points to several shoes --- she never used to do that! --- and smiles boldly at the Spanish-speaking customers, bringing out boxes and boxes for inspection.

Enough word has gotten around town about her eye for beautiful shoes, for high heels that don’t necessarily strain the arches, for knowing a budget without having to ask. She moves with confidence and assurance, even if she is not allowed to ring up the sales on her own. She stands nearby to translate, and you handle the money: you, the girl who should be trusted, the kind of girl that should end up with a man like the one she has.

She is no longer walking the streets, but riding around with Dan Watson, her elbow resting on the truck door while they drive with the windows rolled down. The two of them at the café for lunch sometimes, the waitresses acting as if nothing could be less ordinary. The two of them stepping out of the record shop several times a week with brown-papered packages stuck under his arms. People saying, by late September, that she’s picked up a second job, serving drinks to the patrons over at Las Cuatro Copas, the place where her boyfriend tends bar, and the owner of the rival place across the street is peeved because even the white crowd has trickled over there just to get a look at her.

Las Cuatro Copas isn’t the best cantina in town, but if you go there, you would do well to put on your best long skirt, the wider the better because there’s good music for dancing. Farther up Union Avenue is a grander space --- a real nightclub --- with a terrazzo dance floor so smooth you have to hang on tight to your partner to keep from slipping, and gorgeous dining rooms off to the sides with a full wait staff and a Los Angeles menu of roast beef and rib-eye steaks and Cornish hens. But Las Cuatro Copas does just fine by itself. It welcomes everyone, the little tables crowded as people sit to eat and drink until the kitchen closes at eight thirty. All the while, that girl comes around with plates of chicken legs and taquitos and bottles of beer, along with the check on a green slip of paper with her neat handwriting, and she collects the bills and brings everything over to Dan Watson, hurrying people along with their meals because the tables get put away for the dancing. Not enough space for a wide skirt to flow out full, and a wooden floor that sends up dust, but it’s dancing all the same. Friday nights or Sundays or Wednesdays, she’s there, handing the green slips of paper over to her boyfriend and waiting for the change, the two of them running the place smooth as smoke.

But you don’t have to go to the cantina to see all of that if jealousy gets to be too much. You can avert your gaze as they exit the supermarket, where he comes out holding two paper bags stuffed full of food. Or pretend not to see them loading boxes of tequila into the truck bed over at the discount liquor store.

They show up everywhere: just a little west of Bakersfield, just far enough away from the city lights, is the local drive-in theater, a line of cars idling at the dusty entrance at sundown. A concession stand sits in the middle, and everyone goes there for big striped boxes of popcorn and hot dogs and candy, cradling everything close so only one trip is necessary. Horns beep whenever a car pulls in with its lights on, even though the sky is still lit orange with sundown and the double bill nowhere near beginning. Music comes in over the speakers, old big-band numbers that no one listens to anymore. Some couples sit out on the hoods after the engines have cooled down. The people returning from the concession stand darken to shadows as dusk finally breaks into night and the first feature starts, always something of mild interest: a monster movie with a beautiful blond raising her hands to her ears and screaming, then a pursuit with gunfire popping through the speakers all up and down the drive-in lot. Laughter carries across several cars, friends having spotted each other and walking over to say hello. Car trunks pop open quickly for six-packs to be brought out. By the end of the first film, night has settled in deep, and the drive-in lights up once more to help people make their way to the concession stand and the bathrooms, where the girls walk together in threes and edge for space at the mirrors, everyone finding out who came with whom.

She’s there, that girl. You looked for her among the faces surrounding the bathroom mirrors, but she was nowhere to be found. But you know she’s there --- you spotted Dan Watson’s beautiful form gliding across the dusty lane toward the concession stand. He returns now to his pickup, just ahead, holding a box of popcorn in his hand and sporting a cowboy hat, his jeans taut, everything lean and hard the way he glides from one end of the windshield to the other before disappearing into the cab of his truck. That girl is the other shadow. He is handing her the box. Ten minutes later, the lot darkens and the second feature begins --- a detective story. You can tell by the hat the lead actor is wearing. No one wears hats like that around here, unless they’re from Los Angeles. On-screen, a beautiful girl screams before a pair of anonymous hands close around her neck and she collapses as if struck by a sudden urge to sleep. She did not scream as terribly as the beautiful blond who was attacked by the monster in that other movie, but somehow it was more real, more probable, and enough to make you turn your head away and look out past the edge of the drive-in’s lot, the stretch of oil fields, the ring of mountains to the south and east of Bakersfield, to Los Angeles. Is that where the movie is set, where something like this could happen?

No one seems to care about questions like that, not by how the shadows in the cars ahead begin to blend together, one by one. Some stay separate, but most don’t. There’s been beer and slugs of whiskey and lipstick applied in the bathroom mirror and cigarettes and sweet talk. Hands on knees and short whispers and legs shaved that evening, baby smooth. All over town, getting ready, everyone knowing --- or hoping --- the evening would come to this, a lot of sweet talk in a dark car and the squeak of the vinyl as your polite date slides over. The taste of the beer in his mouth, slightly bitter, but sweet, too, the surprise thatmentastesweetinside. All ofthem. Roughbutsweet. Your hand on his cheek to feel the itch of his whiskers, what you can’t see but can feel. Forceful but sweet, and it’s that sweetness that calms the alarm about where his hands move, sometimes above the knee or underneath the hem at the back of your blouse, just two fingertips in that hollow space at the bottom of the spine. Forceful but gentle at the same time, his mouth moving to your neck, the smell of his hair, Prell shampoo just like your own. A moan escapes from your mouth, uncontrollable, because his weight is delicious and so is the thought that he’s leaving that sweet taste of his mouth on your skin. He reaches over to turn the knob down on the speaker, and the movie goes mute and you watch the screen while he’s occupied, the detective at a desk saying something into a phone, how you have to guess what he’s saying, the way you have to guess at everything in life --- what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.

You can see Dan over in his pickup truck. His shadow has merged with the other one, slipped into the same space, the passenger side of the cab. It is that girl. It must be. She knows that sweet taste, too, what that space in the hollow of his back feels like. A moan comes out of your mouth just from thinking about him, and here, in this dark car, this boy --- earnest but inconsequential, strong but too sweet --- hears your moan and lets his hands glide up, cautious, to the unworkable bridge of the bra hooks. There is patience and inexperience all over the drive-in, some hands retreating in defeat, and then there are others, like his, that manage and move quickly before being denied. On-screen, the detective lights a cigarette and seems to look out at all the cars. There is a woman whom the detective loves, too, but in the movie, you already know he’s going to have to wait to get to her. And still, it won’t be this, an earnest but inconsequential boy who is sweating at the brow from nerves and delirium, his mouth impatient at each nipple. He has never felt a pair of breasts before, not by the way his hands clamor underneath your bra. He has to learn to open the blouse completely first, how to caress buttons. He has to learn to be gentle and enjoy the feel of skin, give pleasure instead of just taking it. But right now, his eyes round out, dewy and unblinking at his first sight of rosy nipples. He is twenty-three but still a boy. He puts his mouth on each nipple and has to have his hand guided to your other breast. You reach down to feel him because this is what he wants, what he needs, and there’s just the sound now of months and months of his desires finally being met. He’s doing the moaning now, the teenage voice from years ago stuck in his throat as his thick cowboy belt buckle gets undone for him and the top button released. He wore brand-new underwear --- the elastic is too tight --- and there is his warm thickness. It’s enormous and probably beautiful, but he’s too young and inexperienced to know that yet. His stomach is coated with that familiar stickiness and he rests his forehead on the car door while he’s fondled. Who can tell what he is thinking, a soft hand stroking him hard enough that he actually has to pull away, but keeping his forehead on the door as if he’s ashamed? The detective on the screen is giving chase along the dark streets of a city, but no one cares about the pursuit. A car just ahead is bobbing ever so slightly. There is nothing wrong with wanting like this. Even better with a young man of twenty-three, still mired in shame: he won’t be bragging to anyone, still thinking what he’s doing is dirty, and you can go back to work at the shoe store with no one ever gossiping about you. His hands have to be brought down to the wet warmth that he’s never come close to, even in his imagination, his fingers guided around and inside. He’s a sweet boy, but you know, after he drops you off, that he’ll be smelling those fingers all the way home.

The pickup truck is absolutely still --- or is it moving? There is no telling what they are or are not doing in there. Who could push away Dan Watson? Because the speaker is off, from way over in the distance a girl’s furious moans carry along the dirt lane, then some quiet laughter from people sitting on their hoods, watching the movie. Whoever heard that laughter --- how people react when exposed to that kind of desire, with laughter or disgust or disapproval --- might stop what they were doing. But it’s happening all across the darkness, panties slipping off and resting playfully on the gearshift, on the radio knob. Yours is twenty-three and doesn’t know what he’s doing and he admits that he’s a virgin in a terrified voice. He thrusts and it feels good only because you close your eyes and picture yourself in the pickup truck instead, the way Dan walks, the waitresses who feel dirty for thinking of him that way because they knew him when he was a little, little boy. They know his mother. You close your eyes and think of Dan but concentrate on this boy, holding him at the hips when he begins rocking too fast, getting carried away to a point when he won’t be able to control himself. He’s sweet in his earnestness --- he truly is --- and he stops when you tell him to do so, his face covered in sweat. He looks like he is about to cry.

Car engines begin to turn on even before the movie is over, and horns blast at the disorder --- some people want to know who committed the murder, who made the beautiful girl scream like that. The pickup truck stands absolutely still, the silhouettes hard to pick out now because of the shifting lights and shadows. It’s time to sit back up in the seat, since people are watching now, and adjust bras, close blouses. More and more cars begin to pull out, so many there’s actually a line for the exit. It is better to wait. The twenty-three-year-old boy is in love. You can tell by the way he sits there, his pants back on, but the bulge straining. He wants a kiss.

That is the difference between him and a man like Dan. This boy hasn’t yet learned the power of wielding his body --- giving it over --- like a little boat on an ocean, the thing you cling to, getting rocked to sleep by the waves. He thinks he’s in love.

And why shouldn’t he, after a night like that? It’s easy to think that’s what love is, after being naked in front of someone for the first time, as if it truly were an act of tenderness, of sacred honor. In truth, love crumbles into something else, an answer to lying awake at two in the morning, when the body demands one thing and one thing only. The cars drive back into the sleepy streets of Bakersfield, letting off dates at the porch-lit houses, last kisses before the neighborhood dogs begin to bark at the idling engines. Soon the boy will start the hand-holding and the flowers --- cheap grocery-store flowers, not Holliday’s, but flowers nonetheless because that’s what sweet, earnest boys do.

After October, the drive-in closes for the winter. Saturday nights become a slow circle around a little stretch of Union Avenue, the streetlights glimmering off the new wax jobs. Cars stop over at the Jolly Kone hamburger stand or at the edges of the dark city park. Winter fog keeps many people home, as if the cold were unbearable. Still, as the weeks go on, the bars begin to do substantial business, especially the ones that serve a little food early enough to draw a crowd that stays the entire evening. Traveling bands arrive in Bakersfield for special appearances, the bars competing with one another for the best of Los Angeles, sometimes even selling tickets in advance at the record shop.

In the newspaper, a little ad appears in mid-November, a curious drawing. A dark-skinned woman stands in front of a microphone. “La Reina,” says the ad. “Este Domingo.” And below is the address to Las Cuatro Copas. It is a drawing, not a photograph. It is that girl. Undeniably. There is something provocative about the advertisement, something deliberate about its simplicity, the fact that she is a local talent. Customers from the shoe store will surely recognize her. You leave the newspaper on the storeroom counter, conspicuous, to show her that you’ve seen it, but she says nothing about it. In the drawing, she stands in front of the microphone with her lips open, but who knows what might come out of her mouth. The advertisement appears again later in the week in an evening edition, same bold type, same language, same held note. At the shoe store, you swear people are peeking through the windows to get a glimpse of her. It isn’t surprising when, on Sunday night, Las Cuatro Copas is packed, not one table unoccupied.

People arrive dressed as if it were a Saturday, all fine ties and shiny boots and dresses. No one licks their fingers after eating the chicken legs and taquitos, the plates carried away just as quickly as they arrived. Conversations float by in Spanish --- all of them in Spanish. Some of the Mexican men have even come with blond American women, heedless of the hard glares. These couples have little to say to each other, though sometimes the women jabber on to fill the quiet space between them. Here, everyone is out in the open --- it is clear who brought whom, who is being distracted, who is being worn away by jealousy, and who is going to be brokenhearted. It is not the drive-in, where the darkness lulls everyone into thinking that lust is an easy, clean jump over to the wide path of love on the other side. In the dim club, the true complications of being in love show themselves in flashes, like a wedding ring catching a burst of light. A dark-haired woman drinks too much for so early in the evening and you can tell she’s trying but unable to leave the man who brought her. A very young couple sits over near the back, sitting so close together they seem almost afraid of being affected by everyone around them, and the way the young man nods at the girl when she comes around for an order --- nods but doesn’t say much of anything --- you can tell that neither he nor his young date speak English. He is surprised that the girl takes his order in Spanish with ease. That man over there gives another woman the once-over, his hand distracted on his own date’s back. Both women notice and look away in hard, granite anger.

Who knows, really, why they came tonight, if they’ve been paying attention to that girl and noticed her comings and goings. Who knows why they thought this evening warranted ironing a fresh shirt instead of just airing out the one from the night before, damp as it was from dancing and smoky when you put your nose to it. But here they were, their tables cleared but not stacked over in the corner as they usually were on dancing nights. Maybe later, but now just their clean tables and their chairs to sit in and a last round of drinks, the girl gone to the back of the club and the lights dimmed even further, so dark the crowd actually goes quiet and focuses on the small halo of light at the center of the cantina. So quiet you can hear the boots of the bartender boyfriend against the wood floor as he approaches the light, guitar in one hand, a microphone stand in the other, the cord snaking behind him. Someone rises from the crowd to pull over a blue velvet stool for him and Dan says thanks, tapping his fingers against the microphone. “Uno, dos, tres,” he says, perfectly, which prompts an almost nervous laughter from some in the crowd. You think: He knows how to speak Spanish. He might understand what people have been saying. The microphone in working order, he waves off to the side, and out of the dark comes the waitress girl, out of her serving apron and wearing instead a beautiful cowgirl dress. Baby blue satin with white fringe. Of course, you notice that she’s wearing what look like last season’s brown boots, and you foolishly try to make her see that you’ve noticed, but your face is lost in the dark. The boots don’t match the dress, but it’s too dark for anyone else to really care. All eyes are on the gorgeous satin, the way it catches what little light there is, the arrow detailing beginning at her shoulder and descending, circling each breast, the silver lacing deep inside the fringe, which sparkles to attention when she adjusts the microphone.

“Ready?” she says to Dan, and that says everything to the audience: she will be singing in English, no matter what the sign said. She doesn’t look anything like the picture’s promise, and the Spanish nickname feels misleading. But people came because they had seen her around town with Dan Watson. Or because they knew the woman who had been her mother, or they had heard about how she’d been left to bring herself up all alone after her mother left. They came because this girl was going to sing about either love or pain, and some of them felt as if they already knew the story behind both.

People who don’t know English love that Patsy Cline record from last year, all the times her song came over the radio when there was nothing else to listen to, a deep, luxurious voice for a woman, more expressive than the chirpy girl groups indistinguishable from one another. The guitar starts in and they all recognize the beginning of “Walkin’ After Midnight” and the girl seems to look at the audience straight on, the first words a little quiet and her voice too high. But the couple performs the song well, the girl’s hands shaking a bit before she steadies them on the microphone. She closes her eyes for a long while, as if she needs to concentrate, but then opens them again, as if she knows that she has to face everyone to feel the song. She begins to look around the room as she sings, moving her arms as if she were walking down a Bakersfield street, keeping tempo with the guitar, the song close enough to what everyone has been accustomed to on the radio. Her voice does not have the depth of Patsy Cline’s, dark water swirling, but she manages to make the song tell a kind of story, as if anybody could be walking down the late-night streets of Bakersfield, haunted by that searching, but hopeful about it, no danger whatsoever. People nod their heads along to the guitar’s polite strum, the English words familiar, the way English becomes familiar enough with repetition, her fringe dancing, glittering along.

For the second number, after small but prolonged applause, the girl almost turns her back to them to look at her boyfriend as he begins the first notes. Everyone sees him motion her to turn around, reminding her that she has an audience, and so she positions herself in a sideways posture, a little awkward, but it is clear what is going to happen. She needs to face him, and the notes off the guitar sing to the audience in a prolonged introduction, the melody immediately familiar to some, others needing to wait for the words. It is clear what is going to happen: they are going to sing to each other, her boyfriend a little hidden in the dark, away from the half-moon of the spotlight. And now everyone has something to privately admire: the shape of Dan’s muscular thigh perched off the stool, tapping in tune; the girl’s still-trembling hand on the microphone; Dan’s superb coordination over the guitar strings; the girl’s narrow, beautiful waist. They begin singing the song and right away the people who need the words remember the Everly Brothers and their shiny innocence, their politely combed hair. But tonight, “All I Have to Do Is Dream” comes over as a different song altogether --- not two brothers and teenage heartbreak, but a more adult, public affirmation. The girl wavers but stays on the slow, hopeful tempo, watching her boyfriend, who sings back to her in a surprising tenor. This is love. This is what it is supposed to be like --- a handsome man and a girl who comes from nothing, and now everything changes because he has arrived. A girl becomes a woman, devoted at last because her man has exhibited the courage to be tender. That’s the way you hear the song, as a shopgirl in a small city, and you see that it all depends on who is listening and why, who grasps a date’s hand in the dark as the song goes on, who knows what the words were actually saying.

Just two songs. Nothing worth the grand pronouncement of an advertisement in the paper. He was a better singer than she was and even played the guitar, but he stands away from the circle of spotlight and allows her to take her bows. “¡Bravo!” call out some of the Spanish-speaking men. “¡Bravo!” As if they understood every word, as if they didn’t notice Dan Watson making a proprietary motion around her delicate waist when she moves toward the back of the cantina. They cheer her all the way out, for just two songs, as if she has fulfilled whatever promise the advertisement in the newspaper suggested, her embrace of the microphone, of them, the dark beauty of her skin, her face, her voice.

After the tables are stacked, the dancing begins, a lot of ballads in both English and Spanish to keep the mood going, the women falling into their men’s arms, heads on shoulders and eyes closed. You do the same to your date, his shoulder too thin to carry your defeat. People could think you were in love with this boy, maybe imagine it was something close to that girl and the bartender, resonant and tremulous. But you can only close your eyes in disappointment that the smell of the neck you’ve nestled into is of Ivory soap, of Prell shampoo and no cologne, one of the Everly Brothers and not that man. Sweet pronouncements have their place, but no man should be singing about a broken heart, about longing. He should be there to fix it, the way Dan sang tonight, the words saying one thing but his thigh on the stool saying another, his longing a stage act because he already has what he desired.

With your eyes closed, you think of what it will be like to go back to work at the shoe store, working alongside that girl, how hard it will be not to seem jealous about every good thing that has come her way. It won’t be long before she quits the job altogether, stepping through the doorway never to return, leaving you to go through the days without any exit of your own.

Your head is heavy on your date’s shoulder. People dance for a short while, but the cantina begins to empty by eleven o’clock. It is a Sunday night after all and tomorrow morning is work. But the routine for the night seems to have been set, more or less. November rolls on and again the same advertisement appears in the paper and the picture begins to make sense to people: La Reina has a story to tell, but you have to listen to the songs she chooses in order to understand it. You have to put a story together against what you might already have heard on the street about her. The songs will tell you how she’s become a queen, has become fit to be treated like one. You have to watch her sing to Dan, and know that he doesn’t care where she comes from or who her family is. People begin to come in more and more, deep into November, on into December, convinced that she’ll sing a song that explains her stage name or even something in Spanish to prove she knows it, the way her boyfriend taps the microphone at the beginning of their two-song sets, “Uno, dos, tres.”

The cold fog settles into Bakersfield, and even in the worst of its thickness, the cars prowl out along Union Avenue and maneuver into the gravel parking lot, ladies shivering in their dresses and short jackets. Maybe tonight she will sing “I Only Have Eyes for You.” Their love is bigger than yours, truer, headed for a certain destination. It is wiping away jealousy and loneliness with nothing but song and sincerity, the simplicity of it almost unfair. You can listen as she sings “Tears on My Pillow,” but the truth of her world makes the song cruel to hear, the will to sacrifice the heart all over again with possibly nothing in return, the heart never forgetting. How could this be true for her? Her boyfriend is right there, even if he is in the dark, and never leaving, so she can sing all the loneliness she wants. It will never touch her.

In December, the ads keep appearing, but with Christmas coming and New Year’s Eve and the general lack of work out in the fields, the cantina begins to slow down a bit. Still, there is the ad, something to look at on a Sunday night when there will be no going out, when the sweet but earnest twentythree-year-old is left breathless on the phone when he is told no. La Reina opens her soul out on the page, familiar to many now. A hard rain begins that night and lasts all through the morning, steady, the clouds lingering over the Pacific Ocean for days before swirling in. When next week’s edition of the paper is thrown on the doorstep, the paperboy misses his target and it lands in a bush. The paper soaks through. Because there is nothing else to do, the rain keeping everyone indoors, you lay the paper out on the kitchen table to dry in the steamed-up warmth of the house. The ink has run, but parts are salvageable, the news of the entire city spread out for inspection.

There, on page 3, is a picture of the bowling alley over near Chester Avenue, a police officer standing in front. There is the girl’s name in the text. There is Dan Watson’s. Page 1 is ink-smeared from the rain and nearly impossible to read, but it is clear something terrible has happened. She was twenty-three.

There is what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.

Phone calls ricochet all around town. The rain keeps most people from venturing out, or else speculation would be the subject at every bar, every coffee shop, every diner and café. She lived in the apartment above the bowling alley and was a quiet girl, according to the landlord’s account in the newspaper. On the night the rainstorm began, said some who claimed to have been in the cantina the very night she was killed, the two of them had a terrible fight. Others said that never happened, that the couple had been seen at the movies. The stairwell up to her apartment had a side wall smeared in blood, someone said. The newspaper reported she had been beaten to death. You can kill someone with your bare hands. A man can kill a woman that way. Even a sweet, earnest boy is capable of that, if he thinks about it, if he recognizes his power, his weight, his thrust, his fists coming down. On page 8 of the paper, the advertisement for Las Cuatro Copas still runs, La Reina with her mouth open.

She had been stealing money. She had been pregnant with his child. She had been caught with another man. The landlord refuses to rent the apartment. He cannot get the blood off the wall.

There is what you see and what you make of it: You know she stole those boots from the store’s inventory. You know for sure. You can confirm it by the totals coming up short in the ledger. But you keep that to yourself.

Dan Watson disappears, and by the time the newspaper reports this, it is old news, if news at all. The newspaper cannot say anything except that the situation is under investigation. The rain clears up and patrons in the café discuss it with the waitresses when Dan’s mother is not on shift. They scoff at the paper, calling it a situation and not a murder. Someone calls the paper and admonishes them for having run the cantina’s advertisement. But there are still some who don’t know that the girl and La Reina are one and the same.

You can hear people discuss it as December goes on, but no one goes into the uglier details. Was there really blood on the wall? At the drive-in movie, the beautiful woman was strangled to death, but she slumped over as if in a sudden sleep. Music thrummed ominously. At the drive-in movie, boys and men undid bras and pulled off panties, eager to get to the wet warmth underneath the skirts. Maybe not every girl let them. There was that one who moaned hard, enjoying it, and the laughter from people sitting on the hoods of their cars. But not every girl was like that. Not every girl allowed that. Maybe Dan never did that with her at the drive-in. The landlord said she was a nice girl. You could see how she sang, how she chose songs that were always about love, Dan stepping out of the record shop with brown-papered packages. But then again, all the songs nowadays were about love, whether you lost it or found it or gave it away.

At the café, no one talks about it when Dan’s mother is on shift. No one can imagine what it is like to be the mother of a man like that. All the waitresses who flirted with him can only talk about remembering him when he was a little, little boy.

The rain lets up and is promptly replaced by the fog. There are Mexican men at the corner grocery store near the girl’s apartment, waiting every morning for fieldwork. They sit watching people driving by slowly to get a look at the splintered green door that opens to that stairwell, or at the dark window of the girl’s apartment. They watch people actually go up to the door and try the knob. Her face was beaten so badly, goes the story around town, that there was a closed casket. Others say she had no funeral at all, that she was just buried in what they call the public side of the city cemetery because she didn’t have any people in Bakersfield.

She was twenty-three. The cemetery put a little marker about the size of a fist over in a corner lot --- teresagarza --- because city regulations mandate that no graves go unmarked.

In late December, Dan Watson is nowhere to be found. Later, the police detain one of the Mexican men from across the street, that bunch of men who sit around the corner grocery waiting for work. That man, people say, was another boyfriend, but by this point, no one really knows the story anymore. The rest of the Mexican workers scatter for days, not returning, but it doesn’t matter. By January, work is scarce. All of Bakersfield has to tighten its wallet as the thick of winter settles in.

Hardly anyone comes to the shoe store, even out of curiosity, and you rest your elbows on the counter and count the days until spring. The Mexican man is deported, but the newspaper never says why --- that’s something you hear only on the street. All winter long, the splintered green door remains locked, a strange brightness in the dull of the January fog.

Excerpted from What You See in the Dark © Copyright 2012 by Manuel Muñoz. Reprinted with permission by Algonquin Books. All rights reserved.