This Day's Death Read online

  Without uttering a sound, his mother seems to answer:

  But can’t you understand I’m becoming old?

  I’m not ready to die, he protests wordlessly, but with less anger; there’s so much life— . . .

  The limp form seemed to have no answer. It merely tossed slightly and sighed.

  Savagely, a terrible image claws at Jim’s mind;

  A speeding car! She’s beside him! He swerves deliberately! Sharply! Off the road! The car rolls down desert slopes! It turns! twists! crashes. Fire erupts! The flaming justice consumes him and her—together.

  Quickly to smother those ugly, frightening, awful, disturbing, abrupt, violent thoughts, he reaches out tenderly to touch his mother’s face, gently. Then he covers her body with the quilt which in her anxiety to get up earlier (she was anxious to be well, he insists), she must have flung carelessly to the floor. He goes to the living room and picks up her cane, and he hangs it over the back of her bed. A somber sentinel carefully guarding her illness.

  He withdraws from her dark room into his own retreat. Hesitatingly, he finally closes the door to the den. He looks out the window at the crushed tumbleweed which only last night had raged across the desert, alive.

  And he thinks of the prison he could be sent to in Los Angeles.

  “BUT YOU WON’T BE, YOU KNOW YOU WON’T GO TO prison.”

  Roy Stuart had quickly assured him of that months ago in Los Angeles after the arraignment, had done so in fact from the day after Jim was released on bail. Handsome, and somewhat shy, Roy, Jim’s age, has been his friend for years—from a time when Jim lived in Los Angeles and both worked the night-shift in an aircraft plant. Now, years later, Roy was successful in real estate.

  Jim reminds himself of that conversation with Roy.

  “Hell, Jim, you’ve always been a winner. And the risks you’ve taken! Remember when you and that guy took that car joy-riding with those girls you’d picked up and you were turning on with pot right on Hollywood Boulevard, past all those cops. And the time— . . . Hell, Jim, you’ve gotten away practically with— . . .” It was too late to stop. “. . . —murder,” Roy finished, embarrassed by the ordinarily meaningless phrase. The dark eyes stared at Jim. “You’ve always been a winner,” he repeated.

  But it was precisely that, Jim couldn’t help thinking then. Maybe that’s all over, and this is the trap.

  “You’ll be acquitted,” Roy had insisted. “With your fantastic luck. And the case you’ve got,” he added hurriedly. “At the preliminary hearing the judge will throw the case out. They’ll probably drop the charges before then. It’s not even like you to worry.”

  Indeed all his life Jim had known he would emerge victorious from whatever he was involved in, whether it was a gymnastic meet or, later, scholastic competition; confident about the girls he made easily in the cities he fled to; confident that the dangers he rashly exposed himself to—turning on in public places, taking cars, always temporarily and just for the hell of it—would not entrap him; confident—once he had checked the anarchy—about his waiting career as a lawyer: a paradox which soon became inevitable in the charmed life.

  This time, right after he was bailed—when he stood outside and smelled the moist hot-night air and knew he was free, for then—and knew, therefore, that for those long hours in jail he had not been free—he felt tense. His mind only then grasped entirely the menace of what had occurred. He felt cold in the sweaty night.

  The gray prison building loomed behind him like a squat giant. Jim felt the awesome power of that amorphous something called the law.

  It was as if he had stumbled on fate. As if something had happened which was not meant to happen. No, not to him. Rather, then, it was like stumbling on someone else’s fate, accidentally springing a trap intended for another—but now, crazily, he must pursue the resultant tortuous course.

  “. . . —and you say you’re innocent— . . .” Roy had said that afternoon after the arraignment.

  “Diggit, man, I don’t give a damn if you believe me or not,” Jim said angrily.

  “What I’m trying to say is that even if you weren’t— . . .” Roy implied his suspicions. “I mean, your case—and theirs; they haven’t got one. Even if it did come to trial—and it won’t—even if you weren’t innocent—. . .”

  Now safely in El Paso, far away from the world of his arrest, Jim remembers that conversation with Roy Stuart; but he didn’t find the reassurance he tried to search for in it.

  Instead, a riot of memories from the cluttered day of his arrest attacks his mind fiercely, the sights and sounds of an afternoon, late: Summer in Los Angeles.

  Green. “You’re under arrest!” (And: An alley, anger inundating his body, a fist closing a pair of staring eyes, a wallet green with money. A girl’s bloodied thighs squirming, cum-smeared dress. . . .) Steve’s voice protesting into the cascading silence the savage blows of the dark cop: Whooack! Whooo-ack!—while Jim felt the restraining pressure of the blond cop’s gun. The ride to the glasshouse—the Los Angeles jail. Alone with the dark cop—thin, ugly, face pitted—young: Daniels: “I’ll see you go to prison!” (I saw the bastard earlier! Was it him!) The pay telephone behind the bars. The call to his mother at his sister’s house, telling her he wouldn’t be over for dinner after all, that they might not be able to return to El Paso next week. Steve’s call to his wife: lying that he was working very late; asking about his son. The hurried call to Roy. Steve taken to the jail-tank, that squirming, crammed, decayed mouth gobbling scores of resigned imprisoned bodies. Jim in a cell alone. The infernally barred doors, desolate hollowness as they close. The claustrophobic horror. A name called, a barred door opens, closes. Clanggggggggg! Someone summoned for the bondsman. The filthy toilet, a squat distorted midget, an obscene brown-rimmed presence guarding the cell. Tired skeletons of metal cots. Hours crawling. Footsteps. Still not for him. From somewhere within the pithy entrails of the jail someone yelling: Ahhhhh-ahhhhhhh! The howl exploded un-defined, and it ricocheted from cell to cell—throttled suddenly. The lights were smothered. Finally: his release. The outside air. And the formal accusation, black on white: “The said James Girard . . . accused by the district attorney . . . the crime of . . . a felony.”

  Jim’s mind retreats sharply from that white sheet. To this: the dead tree outside his home, now, in Texas. But quickly to this: Black trees. Driving into the darkness, shadows Peeing the hostile glare of the headlights. And there it was, his own car, suspended in the flooding light, the only real object in the black-frozen world. Later: Naked, his body stretched on a peeled red bed. The voice soothing him in the red darkness: “I’ll take care of you—. . . What are you doing? Are you crazy?! No wonder they locked you up! Don’t!” On the Poor: the naked figures. And facing the bed, the portrait of a stony-smiling woman, reminding him of a girl’s ice-white lips on his body, her hair thrashing.

  Forcing the shutter of his mind to close tightly on the roiling images, Jim pulls his thoughts away determinedly from the memories stalking him from Los Angeles. What they turn to is this:

  His mother’s dark room.

  He reaches instantly for the ringing telephone. Alan Bryant, his attorney in Los Angeles. The expected miracle— . . .

  It’s his mother’s doctor, Tom del Valle. “How is she, Jim?”

  “She had one of those spells again this morning. Should we put her in the hospital again?” he asks tensely.

  “No,” the doctor says flatly. “The new tests are negative; that’s what I called to tell you.” More than a doctor, Tom del Valle was the best friend of Jim’s dead brother.

  “But something’s wrong,” Jim says. “She gets these spells more often—and her nose bled a lot yesterday. At first I thought the blood was coming from her mouth—it wasn’t, she was swallowing and— . . .”

  “The nosebleeds are actually good at this time; they relieve the pressure, and her headaches— . . .”

  “But all those pills— . . .”

  “She’s gon
e to too many doctors, Jim; and she may still be taking their medication. You’ll have to take those other pills from her. I’m giving her some new shots—and perhaps you could inject her with dramamine when these spells get very severe— . . .”

  “No!” Jim protested immediately. (His mother. His father. So close. She injected him. Remembers: The needle— . . .) “What about the accident we were in?” Jim interrupts his thoughts. He’s impatient, for that moment, to sustain a deduction all but made. “Do you think that has anything to do with it?” A small truck had lunged into his car recently at a stoplight when they were returning from the grocery store. That bare jostling triggered—or seemed to trigger—something that was already waiting in her: a hint of the mysterious illness; as if, already preparing, it must grasp for its reality, a logical cause—or so Jim will begin alternately to suspect.

  “It was minor,” the doctor is saying, “and she was already beginning to get the spells intensely. . . . She has been very worried about your going back and forth to Los Angeles,” he said abruptly.

  “I’ve told her, I’m doing some research work for the lawyer I work for,” Jim says hurriedly. The lie he just verbalized again, the lie he’s told his mother and his sister to cover his trips to Los Angeles, sounds false even to him. (God damn Daniels! Someday I’ll— . . . !) “Besides,” he adds impatiently, “I’ve lived away from her for years, for chrissake; I can take care of myself.”

  “Yes—and she always got sick after you’d been away for a time, and you’d come back—and then you’d leave—until she got sick again. It’s like a battle between you.”

  Unexpected as those words came, Jim accepted them easily.

  A fierce battle.

  Suspicions taking harsh shape. Verbalized by someone else. Her strange, undiagnosable illness—hints of it strewing her life. A mounting struggle. A battle? Or have the battles been fought, are the skirmishes over? The war—. . . War—after all the rebellious years of flight, haunted by her constant memory like a pursuing ghost—through New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Dallas, Chicago, New Orleans—those sexual graveyards—as he moved restlessly—urgently—from girl to woman to girl to woman—as if to stifle with those encounters that memory of his mother. After those cities and those haunted years— . . . ? War?

  “But what if there is something physically wrong?”

  Only when he heard the doctor begin to answer did Jim fully realize he had spoken aloud the doubt that could cancel a waging of . . . the “war.”

  “She’s sixty-five,” the doctor was saying slowly, fluctuating now. “A lot of things begin to go wrong. There’s always the possibility—the probability even—of something we haven’t found. It’s important to remember that, even if so far I haven’t been able to locate any physical reason for these spells. In fact, I wanted to tell you that I’d like to contact a neurologist for additional tests next week, just to rule out— . . .”

  Jim felt afraid and alone. “Of course; if you think— . . .” And so there was that powerful doubt. It could turn the “war” into a brutal, one-sided slaughter: he, Jim, battling his mother as she sank, desolately alone, into some ineffable physical illness. War was possible only if both waged it.

  “But whether it’s physical or not,” the doctor goes on, “you can’t die with her the way she sometimes— . . .” He stopped, as if realizing he’d gone into an area too dangerously mined with explosive traps. “For now, I think an oxygen tank in the house would help,” he said quickly. “It helps her in my office.”

  “An oxygen tent!”

  “No—a tank; it brings her back, as she says. I can have one rented for her and send it over right away. It’s not too expensive.”

  “Sure—anything that will help.”

  There’s a sound like that of a mattress when it springs—to Jim, a sound not unlike that of a sniping rifle aimed at him.

  Crrrrrack!

  “I think she’s getting up!” (She’ll light the candle, she’ll say the prayers, she’ll— . . .)

  The doctor says quickly, “I’ll send the tank, I’m sure it will help.”

  Anxiously Jim walks into the living room; now he stands outside the open door of her bedroom. She had merely shifted her position; but her eyes are still closed, her rosary dangles from one hand.

  Even so—and still—a part of him insists she’ll soon be well enough to fulfill the previously thwarted morning ritual, a ritual rapidly gaining importance in that it assures him that things are still in some kind of order.

  Returning to the den, he leaves the door open this time—just as he’s begun to leave his bedroom door open at night. (A skirmish already lost; another one now, he tallies involuntarily.)

  How much will the oxygen tank cost?

  He wished immediately that hadn’t occurred to him.

  He stares at the still telephone as if to force it to ring. He imagines the magic words that would end one part of the nightmare: Long distance calling for Mr. Jim Girard. . . . Go ahead, Mr. Bryant. . . . Jim, it’s Alan. The district attorney has agreed to— . . . Despite the abortive attempts to stop the legal machinery months ago before the preliminary hearing, it would end now, finally there would be no trial.

  But the telephone refuses to ring.

  The shutter of Jim’s mind opens again on the previously blocked images:

  Los Angeles. . . . Months ago. . . .

  LOS ANGELES. MONTHS AGO.

  An icy-blond woman who looked like a harsh stereotype of a Lesbian presided during Jim’s arraignment. Square shoulders very rigid in the stark robe behind which she seemed determined to hide whatever of femininity she might have possessed, she thrust out charges—accusations—like rapid bullets at a file of handcuffed men, resigned losers standing in front of her as if before a firing squad. Men who hadn’t found anyone to bail them out, they remained in jail while the machinery of the courts inched on.

  “I will not allow you to represent yourselves in pro. per. unless and until you can prove to me— . . .” the mannish judge continued. And a tangle of unintelligible legal phrases tumbled out of her fish mouth, a barrage even an attorney might have difficulty following: bullet- words shot vindictively as if at a personal enemy at the defeated men before her; and pausing periodically in a slapping gesture of her contempt, like a bull-sergeant barking commands, she would ask them:

  “Do?

  “You?

  “Understand?”

  —never, it occurred sharply to Jim, considering that even one of the men before her might be innocent. (And the thought he avoided, which he still had difficulty comprehending fully: I’m in real danger!) The mere accusation began the punishment.

  Today’s was a routine attendance for Jim. Reading of the charges was waived, and a date was set for the next appearance.

  Now he would return to Texas.

  Jim and his mother drove back across awesome desert mountains, orange and blue, the desert gleaming white, yellow.

  “You’re pensive, my Son. Why?” she asked him.

  “No reason, Mother.” The rest of the trip he forced himself to appear cheerful.

  Throughout the following weeks in El Paso, Jim clung to one hope which his attorney had strongly indicated existed: that the district attorney would decide, “because of lack of evidence,” not to prosecute. And so during that interim, an unknown man constantly invaded Jim’s thoughts: the district attorney. A man who had never seen him and whom he had never seen, their lives never crossing—that man would decide his fate. And the man who had set into motion the intertwined gears—the cop, Daniels—he constantly assaulted Jim’s thoughts, triggering rage and hatred—a hatred he had never felt so keenly for anyone before. (He remembered: Two knives, poised, ready to tear flesh. But that wasn’t hatred—even if I had killed him. What that was— . . . He couldn’t name it.)

  The miracle didn’t happen—not then. “They’re going ahead with it,” Alan Bryant had written Jim; adding: “I’m sorry, Jim, but you’ll have to com
e back for a preliminary hearing—but don’t worry; this certainly doesn’t mean it will come to trial.”

  Jim told his mother he was going to Los Angeles on a matter for Lloyd Maxwell, the attorney he works for in El Paso. To Lloyd, he also lied: His sister in Los Angeles had become sick; a near breakdown after her recent divorce. (And that was not impossible. An auburn-haired beauty just past thirty—and very close, always, to Jim—Estela had already been married and divorced three times.) Since neither Lloyd nor his wife speaks Spanish well—and Jim’s mother knows hardly any English—he was able to keep both sets of stories separate. To Barbara Lewis, his girl, he told a vague combination of both stories.

  He discouraged his mother from returning with him that time. His tension might manifest itself to her. Besides, he expected to be gone only a few days. Yet he left his things in order at home, transferring money from savings (from the money he’ll be using for lawschool in spring) so his mother would have no difficulty withdrawing it if— . . . if things dragged on.

  To Los Angeles. His second trip in less than two months. (The first had begun as a vacation to “celebrate” his having just gotten his college degree in El Paso; his mother stayed at his sister’s, he in a motel.) Along the miles of cactus-strewn desert, he glanced often at the empty place beside him in his car.

  Once again, the blond mannish woman-judge presided, but only to assign them to another courtroom and anoher judge for the preliminary hearing that same afternoon. On the basis of that testimony, the case would or would not be set for actual trial.

  It was a savage Los Angeles day, the heat unendurable. The air conditioners in the Hall of Justice whirred futilely.

  And waiting outside and in the steaming courtroom, Jim saw:

  Lost angels.

  The lost defendant angels of this city of lost angels. The same haunted, hunting, lost breed of faces he had been among on the insomniac streets of exile America. Why predominantly now the young in these courtrooms?

  Jim’s thoughts were sliced off sharply. “That’s the son of a bitch!” In the sudden anger that rushed him, he said that to Roy, who had again come to court with him.