This Day's Death Page 7

  It became darker, black shadows sheltered other, intimate young couples scattered over the park. Rashly, Jim reached out for this girl. Not angrily, but easily, she resisted his cocky, clumsy—actually urgent—advances. Angered and depressed by the rejection, he walked away from her. Nevertheless, he turned up the next afternoon—but deliberately later. And she was there.

  This time, though, he didn’t approach her. Merely nodding in greeting to her—and she nodded back—he remained a few feet away from her—by a square stone bench under a heavy wooden shelter. Showing off—removing his shirt—he chinned himself expertly on an exposed board, glancing in her direction to make sure she was looking—and quickly away when she was. Simultaneously, they both laughed.

  They saw each other often after that. She was born in Virginia, he learned, but had been living with her uncle and his wife in El Paso since she was five. She never mentioned her mother or father. Assuming they were dead, Jim never asked about them—a course both would pursue, of never questioning the other. When he could keep the car he made deliveries in—or when she could get her uncle’s car—they would drive into the glorious Texas desert (which turns scorched amber at dusk, the sky a deep purple then, like no other in the world), often to sit by the sandy Rio Grande, which is hardly a river here: a strait of sugary sand. Once they climbed Mount Cristo Rey—which is outside the city—climbing past crude religious figures embedded in the mountain. At the top, before a giant statue of an Indian-looking Christ, they both made the sign of the cross—laughing embarrassedly afterwards, suggesting the other had done it first, apologizing quickly to each other for their automatic reaction from a time clearly past in both their lives.

  Subsequently, Jim met Barbara’s uncle and his wife, amiable, pleasant people whom he liked and who liked him. But he didn’t take Barbara to his home then.

  It was not until weeks later that he made it with Barbara—in her house when they were alone. Although there had been the determination to conquer the girl who had initially rejected his advances—yes, that—and, too, although there was the compulsive—selfish—rash, angered, driven sexuality of the youngman—boy—he still was—a rashness she controlled—even so, with Barbara, it was more than the exciting slaughter for him. Although not the first girl he had made, she was the first he had ever kissed. And he saw her again and again.

  Jim graduated from highschool and for a short while after worked full-time for the same drugstore. Despising the thought of regimentation he nevertheless decided—suddenly—to volunteer for the draft. Eventually it would take him anyway, he knew, and the prospect of merely waiting was a gray one. He was eighteen. He hated to leave his mother—yes, very much—at the same time that he longed to separate himself—hated especially to leave her with his father.

  But by then Jim’s father had almost sealed himself in silence, no longer even asserting his anger. He was with his wife only when they sat quietly to eat. And when she injected him with the insulin. At those times, they still remained together afterwards, standing very close for those few strange moments, the life-prolonging needle in her hand.

  Jim explained, very carefully, to his mother that he was volunteering for the draft because eventually it would take him anyway. She listened in silence.

  Jim saw Barbara almost every day now until he left. Yet despite the sexual intimacy which recurred at every opportunity, there was a casualness in the relationship. No demand was made, no declaration of any involvement ever verbalized or solicited. The last time he was with her before he would leave for the army, he said so long to her and she to him as if they would see each other the next day. There was not even the suggestion nor the offer to write—nor, even, to be with each other again in the future.

  Until the last, Jim’s mother avoided facing her son’s departure. Within days of his going, she began a shirt for him—something she had not done since he had started to buy his own clothes; a shirt she worked on, slowly.

  The morning he left (he got up before dawn), he went into her room. She had lain sleepless (remembering, perhaps, when her other son had left—to be slaughtered in war, buried somewhere far away from her). She sat up immediately, hugging Jim.

  “I’m going now, Mother.”

  “But your shirt isn’t finished,” she protested.

  “You can send it to me, I’ll write you immediately.” He felt her tears on his cheek, and his own throat choked.

  “I’ll miss you like my own life,” she said, and kissed him.

  “And I’ll miss you too, Mother.”

  “I love you, my Son.”

  “So do I, Mother.”

  Jim walked quietly past his father’s room. For a moment, he stopped. The door was ajar—something very rare. Usually his father closed himself in at night. There was a light on in the room.

  Jim put his hand on the knob, the other one ready to knock. No. He walked out of the house. Quickly.

  Three months later Jim returned to El Paso on emergency leave from Kentucky, where he was stationed with an infantry unit.

  That morning his company had gone through a physical fitness test; and Jim had pushed himself to do two hundred consecutive leg-raises—while the sergeant in charge, impressed, called aloud each accumulating number: over one hundred more than anyone else. Moments later, Jim was doubled over, retching violently in reaction to the severe exertion. Then the telegram came informing him that his father was gravely ill.

  Home again, Jim learned this from Estela, who had returned from Los Angeles:

  Their father had died only hours earlier after rousing himself from a coma to rant against the invasion of death and once again to curse Jim, Estela, and their mother. Yet at the very last, he reached for his wife’s hand and he sighed:

  “Please— . . .”

  Jim felt—acutely—the absence of his father—rather, of a father: a profound loss of something he had never really had, never would now have. An intimate stranger had passed, never now to be known. Never. Never. All that was left of him was this: Clearing the drawers of the desk his father had clung to from the days of his law practice in Mexico, Jim found a paper carefully lettered “Last Will and Testament.” The rest of it was blank.

  Jim called Barbara. She was gone. To San Francisco.

  At her husband’s gravesite, his mother held Jim’s hand tightly—as if she had waited these many years to accept his offer to take care of her.

  HE STANDS BY HIS MOTHER’S BEDSIDE. HE HAS BROUGHT her a cup of coffee, which rests steaming on the table beside her bed. Instant coffee. Fixing only two cups, he drank his in the kitchen, standing. A battle lost? No, a skirmish. She did try to get up. The symbolic ritual of her fixing breakfast is still intact (but he knows it isn’t), and the coffee he brought her may yet propel the December morning into motion.

  “Drink some coffee, Mother,” he says gently—but he knows in advance that if she responds, he won’t hold the cup for her to sip; that would be a major battle lost, he warns himself.

  She opens her eyes, looks at him—then toward her new weapon: the oxygen tank: pale-orange: the color of purgatory. It seems to give her the necessary strength to shed the heavy weight of the spell; and like an addict exposed to a more tempting drug, anxious to secure the oxygen’s magic, she props herself on an elbow. Demanding that she be well enough to handle herself—and feeling that each act of solicitation is a degree of surrender to her in the war they are—may be—waging—she to live through him, he to free himself—Jim doesn’t move—but his body tenses to restrain itself. Then he remembers: the crash outside the door of the den earlier—Mother! . . . A skirmish lost: He props pillows behind her head, to brace her.

  Immediately after their father’s funeral, Estela fled back to Los Angeles. Counting on an army allotment his mother would now qualify for through him—and money he and Estela would send—Jim moved his mother quickly away from memories of the gray house and into the white, neat, flowered one she chose—located in a comfortable neighborhood. It had two bedrooms.


  She’s staring at the tank. “It’s oxygen, Mother,” he says, though he knows she’s recognized it. His voice is determinedly calm, refusing to acknowledge any serious illness; today is no different from other times, he keeps insisting, when she was ill (but not this long, not this intensely). He remembers: yesterday she lay in her bed, surrounded by bottles of peroxide, alcohol, Anacin, her pills; smears of blood on her face; her nose, a blocked wound, stopped up with Oxycel gauze. “The doctor says it will bring you out of these spells.”

  “Yes, my Son?”

  She sighed those familiar words. As always when she speaks them—and she does so often—she strains toward him, as if expecting an answer, long withheld, to a vastly important question he alone can answer. “Yes, my Son?” Leaning tensely toward him, as if to hear exactly, correctly, whatever he will say, she waits for some answer. What does she want me to say?! That I love her? he asks himself. But she knows that.

  “Drink the coffee, Mother.” Though he wanted with all his heart to convey his love for her, that was all he could say, because suddenly his mind shouted at her: Let me go! And he groped through an inventory of “reasons” to blame her for— . . . What? Everything! His being here; her strange illness; and even— . . . There won’t be a trial!

  He came back to El Paso a year and several months after his father’s funeral, which had sealed an emptiness that had always been there. He returned after the army, this time to tell his mother he was leaving the city. Leaving her. He was going to New York. An actual and symbolic island.

  “Thank you, my son.” His mother reaches for the coffee. Her hands quiver like trapped butterflies—a signal he’s grown to recognize of her surfacing fear. (Of what! Does she know?—senses? Los Angeles. Not guilty.) He looks away, thwarting the signal of her fear; but the visual signal becomes aural: The spoon, in her trembling hand, makes a tinkling sound against the cup.

  A day several years ago: Until she saw his bag packed—a single army bag he had kept—she hadn’t acknowledged he was leaving—as she hadn’t acknowledged his leaving for the army. “Give me your hand, my Son,” she said softly—as if she was sure the remembered binding magic of that contact would keep him here. Perhaps suspecting it might, he bent instead over her small figure and kissed her on the head. Her blessing followed him: “Que Dios, María, Jesus, y José te guien en el buen camino.” “May God, Mary, Jesus, and Joseph guide you on the right path.”

  Accosted by the darkness of his mother’s room and feeling trapped in it, he draws the blinds, pulls the purple drapes, expelling the darkness. Resenting the violation of her sanctuary, his mother blinks—although little light has entered—it’s becoming increasingly gray outside: Blue sky surrendering to dark clouds as the day moves from resurrection to anarchy to the death of winter.

  Winter. Spring. Summer.

  Summer. An afternoon. Los Angeles. At this very moment, is Alan Bryant showing the district attorney the piece of paper with the tangle of arrows? And: the dark, vengeful X slashed on it.

  His mother drinks the coffee. “Thank you, my Son,” she says again. She begins immediately to edge out of her imprisoning bed, toward the saffron chair. Already she’s draped her robe about her shoulders, slipped her feet into the waiting slippers. Is she well? Or only responding to the prospect of the oxygen?

  Encouraged by her having drunk the coffee—and knowing, with certainty for that moment, that it’s vastly important to her well-being—and to his!—that she accomplish the motions herself, Jim lets her take, alone, the short steps to the saffron chair; but, barely touching her, he stands near her like an adult guiding a child on its first steps, hands ready to support at the first uncertain move.

  Sitting, erect, on the saffron chair, she puts on her dark- green glasses. But he feels her gaze, behind the dark glasses, nailed to him as if searching a clue as to whether what is being done for her—the preparation to give her the oxygen—is being done with love or resentment. Panic swims in her eyes. Does she sense the declaration of war? Is she herself preparing now to wage it ferociously?

  New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, Los Angeles, New Orleans. El Paso. His past, a series of rebellious incidents then seemingly unrelated, now spliced for a summation of his life?

  Loosely he ties the strap which secures the plastic mask (attached to the pale-orange tank by a slender tube) over the middle part of his mother’s face. Now he adjusts the levers to release the oxygen. A clear fluid begins to bubble. She breathes the oxygen. Deeply. The tank too seems to be breathing—as if each gives the other life. The room, even breathing now, is alive with illness.

  Sunlight flows into the room—clouds parted outside. His mother blinks against the light, turns from it, even behind the dark glasses; she closes her eyes—withdrawing even further, locking still another door.

  He was gone off and on and for three years after his release from the army. A longing to affirm—rather, to seize—life, crowding experiences as if there was not time enough, led him to the edges of risks and dangers, experiences he attempted, vainly, to intensify with marijuana, pills; longing for something so powerful that it would release— . . . When it seemed that only in physical movement was there Escape, he took cars with carelessly left keys—but always he returned them after the hours of flight. To send his share of money for his mother’s support, matched by Estela, he worked sporadically, attending gas stations, cleaning lawns outside the city, instructing in a gym. Miraculously unscathed, he moved through emotional jungles of potentially complicated relationships with the girls he often lived—stayed—with. . . . It was the time of seminal rage against the hypocrisies of the entrenched order. The young were flailing, soon to riot. Jim shared that rage, yes, very much, but alone. Because he felt unaccountably exiled even from the exiles he moved among, as if the shape of his own particular exile were still to be discovered.

  Shrouded in what may be imaginary illness; taking deep breaths of the oxygen; wallowing in waves of hypochondria; hidden: in this room, behind the dark glasses, behind the closed eyes—or so it seems to Jim: His mother sits enthroned now among the props of her illness, surrounded by them as if they affirm its reality.

  What will happen to her if I go to prison?!

  Not guilty. It can’t happen. What time is it in Los Angeles? An hour earlier there. Alan. The district attorney. Looking at the photographs: gray and black, the shadowy tangles. And: Red, orange, blue. Green. Another piece of paper, spidery lines on it. And: Black. The X. A black X like an unknown factor still to be determined.

  Away from his mother those years, her memory haunted him, no matter how he tried to lose it. He was free of it only for the length of his angry sexual encounters (“Why don’t you get it over with and rape someone in a dark park?” a girl asked him): the only experience which stilled a hidden horror. Yet each experience left him unfulfilled and immediately ready for another such encounter. When the turbulence became excessive, he longed for his mother like an anchor to save him.

  “I’m choking!”

  His mother’s sudden cry pulled his mind away from his thoughts. She grasps at the plastic mask.

  “What’s wrong, Mother!”

  “La cosa— . . .” she says. “The thing— . . .” The nameless illness. “My head! Help me, Salvador!” she cries, calling him by the name of her dead son. “Call— . . .”

  But he doesn’t move. He stares at her as if he were a mere spectator—no, a numbed participant—in this recurrent scene of hysteria. And so the oxygen tank was merely another in her arsenal of weapons, to be displayed, a threat, a materialization of her illness, he thinks without surprise.

  “I’m dying!” she gasps, as if determined to inject him with her panic.

  I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying! Accumulated echoes.
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br />   He felt a dam of anger, gathering for years, threatening to flood. A determination not to respond to her franticness grew in him, not to give in to her gasped demands, as he has the last three days (and so many other times!)—calling the doctor, pacifying her—and then she was well. Not today, he tells himself, braced for a major thrust in the war he’s named between them. But what if she’s really sick this time? There are the additional tests— . . . No! It’s no different from other times, he insists. And if I let her— . . . Not that he believes she’s pretending illness. No. It’s the nature of her illness he resists—an illness, therefore, not to be cured—but fought. He removes the plastic mask from her, coils the tube, turns the levers, hangs the mask on the suddenly dormant tank—concentrating profoundly on his every move in order to control the fury.

  Her battered voice challenges his determination to stay calm: “It’s different this time!” she says. “It’s— . . .” She puts her hand urgently on her chest, then raises it to her throat, now her forehead—a gesture attempting to localize what may have no location.

  The pendulum of her illness has swung widely, he knows; the day is irretrievably shattered.

  She’s searching for her cane, she tries to get up, leans on the oxygen tank for support, almost overturns it. He holds her quickly, leads her to bed.

  “What pill?” she says. “I had to take— . . .” She opens bottles, inspects them, recognizing the pills uncannily.

  Rage, pity, love: In horror he watches this newly emerging stranger who looks at him before surrendering again to her protective bed and sighs: “My poor Son.”

  Viewed in retrospect, a pattern of encounters, skirmishes, battles between mother and son developed during the years Jim was away. A telephone call or a letter—from a neighbor, a friend—would come: “Your mother is gravely ill.” She never wrote or called to that effect herself; he could never accuse her of summoning him back. Each time, he returned, Estela would come back, their mother would go to the hospital. (Sights, sounds stored, to accost them at irregular times throughout their lives: hospitals and the odor of illness—antiseptic, alcoholic; colors: yellowish walls, pallid lights; sounds: muffled.) They waited anxiously in hallways for word from a nurse that their mother was well—and when it came, they never knew what her illness had been.