This Day's Death Read online

  Anxious for encouragement about the dismissal of the charge against him now that his mother’s condition had become so bleak, Jim telephoned Alan.

  “I’m seeing the district attorney for sure this week, and I’ll call you Friday early,” he promised.

  IT’S FRIDAY, EARLY.

  And the telephone rings in the den where Jim sits in El Paso, this December morning.

  It has to be Alan.

  “How is she today, Jim?” It’s Lloyd Maxwell, Jim’s employer and friend, a highly successful attorney in the firm established by his father, dead for many years.

  “She’s sick, Lloyd—but the doctor’s sending an oxygen tank over, and that’ll help her a lot,” Jim tries to assure himself.

  “An oxygen tent!”

  “No—a tank.”

  “You poor kid; I know what it’s like. When my mother—. . . But you know all that. Anyway, don’t come in today.”

  Jim feels grateful; there’s so much he’s grateful to Lloyd for. “I brought some work with me,” he tells Lloyd. Indeed, he had already arranged his work so he could stay home to await Alan’s call.

  “There’s a couple of other things,” Lloyd is saying, “but you can pick them up later—no rush—or I can bring them over or send Ellen. Just don’t worry about anything else.” Ellen is Lloyd’s wife; they’re Jim’s close friends. Both in their early forties now, Lloyd and Ellen were married only a few years ago—right after Lloyd’s mother died, an invalid for twenty years.

  His last year of highschool Jim delivered medicines for a drugstore; and one of the store’s clients was Lloyd’s mother, a friendly, cheerful, affectionate, pretty woman despite the progressive crippling of her frail body. An improbable friendship soon developed between the restless youngman and the fragile woman. Jim often talked with her on the porch of the elegant white-columned house, where she sat in a quilted wheelchair. On one such occasion Jim met Lloyd and Ellen, already Lloyd’s girl for years—and, Jim assumed, his mistress.

  But it wasn’t until the years following Jim’s return from the army that he became close with Lloyd; a bond strengthened each time Jim came back from the cities he fled to, returning because his own mother would be sick. By then Lloyd’s mother, constantly cared for by a nurse, was virtually incapable of significant movement. Her body shriveled, preparing to squeeze out the soul and die—the life seemed to flee to her still luminous eyes. And so despite the difference in their ages, there was this between Jim and Lloyd: the awareness of one’s life shaping about another’s illness.

  While Jim was back in El Paso for what he expected would be another brief interlude, Mrs. Maxwell died. Only the day before Lloyd had said: “Death wouldn’t dare approach her, she’d freeze it with her determination to live.”

  Soon after, Lloyd and Ellen were married. Warm, kind, extremely generous—and resigned to being childless—they came to treat Jim almost as if he were their son; and they encouraged him to remain in El Paso, to go to college on a scholarship, which they were instrumental in getting him. In less than three years—making almost all A’s—Jim had his degree. Now they have offered to put him through lawschool in Austin starting in June—with or without a scholarship, though none of them doubts he will get one. Of course Lloyd has assured Jim of a job as attorney in his lawfirm.

  At first Jim balked at the thought of embracing the profession of law. It had once been his own father’s. Would he be pursuing his crushed ghost? But soon the prospect of law—what appeared to him then as its capacity to set things in order—attracted him powerfully.

  Jim has worked in Lloyd’s lawfirm since shortly after returning to El Paso from New Orleans (fully expecting to leave this city for another; just as, staying, he fully expected to move into an apartment separate from his mother—but didn’t); worked for Lloyd part-time while he went to college, full-time for the past months and until he enters lawschool. Those years, Jim has done everything from extra filing at night, typing, running errands, to, later, investigating accidents and interviewing witnesses on behalf of plaintiff clients whom Lloyd’s firm represents in personal-injury matters. Since Jim speaks and writes fluent Spanish—and has a likable way with people, concerned for them—he is an invaluable asset to Lloyd in a city which is approximately half Chicano and significantly non-English speaking.

  “All those examinations and tests on your mother, and they still can’t find what’s wrong with her: It’s so damn— . . .” Lloyd is saying. “She’s shown no improvement since summer— . . .”

  Summer.

  Jim’s thoughts glide away from Lloyd’s words.

  Summer.

  Gold beaches. Malibu, Venice West, Laguna Beach, Santa Monica. Gold beaches so familiar to him from other like times. Shirtless, deeply tanned, barefoot; on the warm sand again. Feeling that the years in school, the planned future are cop-outs from freedom. Loving its capacity to move and turn, twisting his body on the parallel bars, the rings on the beach. And the easy girls again turbulently. Night: Hollywood Boulevard, underground seething in the angry hours; electric maelstrom stirring yearnings. Streets he prowled again like a panther; searching a darkness within himself not lightened by the grass he smoked again, vainly because it did nothing for him. On pills instead to sustain the prolonged wanderings into dawn and day, again night. And on Sunset along the Strip: an island of released inhibition, hard-rock sounds drowning out, for now, the dead vomited words of the square-world’s authoritative impotence, which might yet enviously crush—with a cop’s bully stick, a gun—the new freedom those sounds asserted. Lure of relief in acid hallucination. Everywhere. The stoned costumed young- men and girls released into their private worlds where they might find the sun in drugs. Darkness whirling within him. A girl’s white mouth. Long hair lashing. Desire hardening into fury. Green. The aura of a world frozen. Green ice. Steve. Green sunglasses. Daniels. Summer. An afternoon. Months ago. Now: A surfacing memory: A wallet in his hand. Green. And overlapping: A red room. “What the hell do you want?” A fist. An alley. Would I have— . . . ?

  “. . . —a woman to cook for both of you—temporarily of course—only until things get better,” Lloyd just said.

  “What? Sorry—I didn’t hear you.”

  “Ellen and I, we think it’s a good idea for you to have a woman there to help you. You can’t keep going back and forth to get food—and you can’t be a cook and nurse.”

  “Neither—and I don’t intend to be either,” Jim says quickly, disturbed by the mere designation.

  “Ellen knows the woman in charge of domestics at the Texas Employment Commission; she’ll send a good woman if you want her.” Being a border city—and a large portion of its population is extremely poor—El Paso has a surfeit of domestics.

  I can’t afford one now! Jim thinks. Again: the acutely resented awareness of money. But in relief at the idea— and knowing it will be only for a few days, perhaps just today—he says, “Sure, Lloyd, that’s fine.”

  “I’ll tell Ellen. Don’t worry, Jim; you know you can turn to us. In any way,” Lloyd says, and adds cautiously: “And . . . you know we’ll help—of course . . . however we can . . . with the situation in Los Angeles.”

  Does he know!—there’s no way—unless— . . . Daniels.

  “My sister’s better now,” Jim says calmly; “she just lost control after her last divorce. But I’m still not sure she’s entirely well,” he hears himself add hastily, in case he might have to lie again. When he returned the last time from California, without his sister, he merely told Lloyd she had decided not to come to El Paso after all.

  “I hope so,” Lloyd says. “You’ve got a hell of a lot on your hands already.”

  It would be a relief to tell him everything, Jim thinks suddenly. I was busted in L.A., it’s serious, but the cop’s lying, he’d say to him. Would he believe him? Even Roy Stuart— . . . Even, perhaps, Steve’s attorney— . . . But he knows he won’t, can’t—won’t ever have to—tell Lloyd.

  As soon as he hangs up, t
he telephone rings again.

  “How is she, Jim?” It’s Barbara.

  “She’s sick, Barbara; she’s in bed now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The doctor’s sending over an oxygen tank, though—and that’ll help her a lot,” Jim says.

  “An oxygen tent!”

  “No—a tank. It’ll help her a lot,” he insists.

  “Jim, have you had breakfast?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going in to work late. I can come over and fix something for you and her—I know how you are about cooking anything.”

  Off and on and for years—with interludes during which he or she, or both separately, have fled to others in vagrant cities—Jim and Barbara have been “lovers.” Casual lovers. They have sex often, but there’s no further commitment, no verbalization of emotion beyond desire.

  “No!” Jim says very quickly. He felt intensely, immediately apprehensive at her offer. The thought of her fixing his breakfast instead of his mother? (She’s fixed it before—but that was in her apartment.) The suspicion that his mother might resent it? (But she likes Barbara very much. . . . Does she?—recurrently he questions that.) Or does it have to do with an implicit commitment, to Barbara, if he lets her fix his breakfast in his home? . . . “Thanks a lot, anyhow, Barbara,” he tries to lessen his abruptness. “I know you’re in a hurry. Maybe I’ll see you later at your pad.”

  This time when he hung up, he didn’t remove his hand from the receiver.

  It’s still early in Los Angeles, he reminds himself. (Early. Moist streets. Fog lifting from the beach.) But he said early. I could call him. A sudden fear. No, he wouldn’t be in his office—that’s why he said he’d call me, he discourages himself from calling Alan. He’s probably talking to the district attorney now, and the district attorney will agree to drop the charges. . . . That part of the nightmare will end today. There won’t be a trial!

  His hand remains on the receiver.

  The doorbell rings.

  There’s a man at the door. Next to him, an oxygen tank. A slender cylinder almost five feet tall, a plastic mask attached to it.

  Standing before it as if deciding whether or not to let it in, Jim stares at it. Then beyond it: Freed from the horizon, the iron clouds are spreading across the blue sky.

  Finally, “I’ll help you bring it in,” Jim tells the man.

  They carry the tank into his mother’s room.

  Eyes closed, she’s breathing heavily. Perhaps to acknowledge Jim’s presence, she raises the fingers of one hand. Barely. With extreme weariness.

  They locate the tank next to the small table which is between her bed and the saffron-colored chair on which she sat so often reading her Mexican Bible, using the rosary as a marker, following the words carefully with its cross.

  The man leaves with the exaggerated muffled movements of people in a mortuary.

  Jim looks at his mother. So peaceful, so beautiful. This beloved creature against whom moments earlier he had conceived waging an intense war. He touches her arm, and that gesture melts all the suspicions, the anger.

  But only momentarily:

  Moving away, he joggles the oxygen tank accidentally, the plastic mask loosens itself by its coiled tube—and rage at his mother and her strange illness inundates him.

  He looks at the tank. It’s pale orange.

  STARING AT THE OXYGEN TANK WHICH JUST INVADED HIS home, suddenly Jim Girard saw it as another weapon on his mother’s side of the war between them.

  These are the weapons on her side: the medicines, the cane, the vaporizer, the oxygen tank: the aura of which—more, their horrible miasma—attempted to define her mysterious illness and so to cloak her in unassailability. And her most powerful weapon: her age. That awful specialness: her relative proximity to death.

  With that gathering arsenal, she suddenly seemed to Jim to be preparing—plotting—for the time of her total dependency on him: and that would constitute her ultimate victory: when in effect she would live through him: snatching back greedily the life she had flung at him.

  And the weapons on his side? One. No, two: his awareness, acute (at least for now, this moment), of the war; and: a rebellious life that demands to assert itself.

  Present for long but rejected strongly, once the suspicion stabbed his consciousness that his mother’s illness has to do with him and her, he thought he saw a terrible pattern: but only now so: only in retrospect.

  It was as if in perfect harmony they had constructed an elaborate trap of intricate architectural design to contain them both. Now it was finished, and he tried to see through the structure to its foundation to see how it had been erected: And he saw a framework of dependency built on dependency mutually intertwined: After his brother’s death when Jim was only a child, she needed Jim urgently and she grasped strongly. He felt her frail engulfing strength, and instinctively he resisted as one resists drowning. Aware of his resistance, that frail strength became more powerful. Soon he needed her—as much to cling back to as to resist. And so it went, the symmetrical construction of the terrible trap.

  Or:

  It was like viewing a geometric progression in reverse; he saw options as they narrowed: at which stage, at which phase, at which time, at what place he could have still Escaped the building trap: this step taken, that one not, another taken in a different direction: sixteen choices, then four, only two, and finally— . . .

  They were, then, like two generals who have moved too far into battle to stop, though each may have hoped to avert the war ultimately. There was the elaborate strategy of each emotional step taken to block the other; a stalemate—then a reshuffling of forces in that entanglement of mutual slaughter, perhaps executing a deadly pact: As a child, thinking she wanted to hear it, Jim promised his mother that when she died (except that he said “if" she died) he would kill himself. She looked at him enigmatically, in silence.

  There were of course the truces between them—which only made the battles more savage: because paradoxically the battles were fought, always, on a field of love.

  But what if it’s not a war? the doubt recurs. She’s becoming old. Tests or not—the doubts oppose—the doctors can’t be sure about her health—and there are—importantly—the additional examinations Dr. del Valle proposed still to be made. And all those pills pulling in opposite directions. And why is it so important to me (is it?) that her illness not be physical, that it be something terrible between us?

  What if I’m wrong!

  Like a lawyer, he weighs the evidence:

  Her life was strewn with acts of sacrifice and unquestioned devotion—and love!—for him and for her daughter. Though she was frail (“powerfully frail”) and gentle, terrified of violence, ferocity was an aspect of her love.

  When there had been little money, with awesome determination—fiercely—she had made sure they continued to eat the special dishes the earlier moneyed times had accustomed them to. To ensure this—lying, and, it might even be contended, stealing—she made clothes for others for extra cash: keeping the fact from her husband (who, true to Latin machismo and his great pride, would never have allowed his wife to work); overestimating the material the work for her secret customers required, saving enough to make Jim’s shirts, even his pants, her daughter’s dresses. When they were sick—from colds accompanied by fever in that drafty house (and she nailed boards to broken windows, ferociously challenging the wind—yet still they got colds: colds and fever which seized Jim as a child, before he developed his body to resist all illness)—when they were sick, she spread love over them like balm on salve. Even that was done with ferocity: although she smiled the gentle smile they would carry forever in their memories. She defied sleep then until she knew they were well. Exhausted, she collapsed in bed for a few hours, only to pull herself, gray from sleeplessness and by now feverish herself, to care for them again. Furiously—but wearing that beautiful smile—she washed their clothes in a tin tub—because dirt, bringing sickness to her children,
was an enemy she must personally eradicate. They would help her carry the tub outside after she had heated the water on the stove. The water, hot enough to purify her children’s clothes, scorched her hands red. She merely rubbed oil on them—and ironed that same night.

  They, the children, grew to expect these acts of her love: because it was what they were born into; it was all they knew: the churning ocean of her love in which they swam. Even when they resisted drowning in it, they loved her back with an equal rage, intensity, need—as the source of their lives—because her love was by now like a physical thing which bathed them, nourished them, lulled them to sleep, stirred them awake.

  And that love would become a weapon:

  There were even then—or so he saw it now—hints of the dark demands she would eventually make for the consummate return of that savage love. Signals, unacknowledged then, now flaring clear and unequivocal; this moment.

  There had always been the recurrent tendency to “faint”: which was, rather, an immediate withdrawing—a weakening, a loosening of her body; this lasted a few minutes followed by cruel headaches, nausea, and a strange listlessness, as if she were preparing to die. Jim remembers: running to their neighbors, his sister Estela, though four years older, behind him: “Mother’s dying!” And he and his sister, and whichever neighbor they had found at home to advise them, would rush back to the mother's bedside. The doctor would have been called from a borrowed telephone. Jim and Estela would hover helplessly over their mother, the threat of the loss of her a soundless wail within them.

  Yet the pressure of her hand holding their child-hands was never more firm—astonishingly firm—than when the dark threat of death occurred—as if she were determined to pull them with her into that dark menacing pit—but only to care for them, even in death, through whatever stormy waters must be invaded into the blackness. To die for them. . . . Dependent on the pressure of her hand as an indication of life (and the source of theirs) and terrified of its absence, the children clung back to her.