Fifteen Minutes to Live

by Phoef Sutton

  “Where is she?” he asked again. “Tell me or I’ll kill you, I swear I will.”

  Martin fell limp in his hands.

  The man let Martin fall to the floor again, crossed to the door and switched on the light and then Martin recognized Carl.

  “Where is she?”

  Carl’s eyes were wild. His hair was matted with blood and there was a comically large bump on the back of his head.

  “Don’t you think I’ll kill you?” he went on.

  Martin didn’t answer.

  “Tell me where Jesse is.”

  Martin blinked at him, looking foolish there, with papers from the boxes still crumpled underneath him where he’d been dragged. “Jesse’s dead.”

  “You better hope that’s not true.” Carl crossed to the workshop table and picked up a hammer. “Where is she?” he asked.

  “She’s dead.” His voice was quiet and without emotion and he wasn’t even trying to get up. “I thought you saw it all. Or your friend did. That’s right, you had a friend. He saw her jumping in and saw us watching her. Watching the waves take her further and further away until we couldn’t see her anymore. So she’s gone. They’re all gone. Jeff and Jesse. Now Frank, too. I’m the only one who remembers.”

  “What happened to Jeff?” Carl said, stepping forward, hammer in his hand.

  “Nothing, he’s fine.”

  “You just said he was gone.”

  “I was mistaken.”

  Carl squatted next to him and grabbed his wrist and held up the hammer. “I’ll break your hand.”

  “Why?” He seemed only mildly curious.

  “What happened to Frank?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “My brother was never strong. I don’t think what I did was wrong, not in itself. But it was more than he could take, I should have seen that.”

  “What was more than he could take?”

  “Watching her die. We’d all been doing that for months, but now…now there was no choice. No way out for her at all. So I just let her swim away. But he was there. I should have let him go in after her, because he was dead from then on. Last night was just a formality.”

  “So that made it okay to kill him?”

  “To do what?”

  “Where is she?”

  He wiped his eyes and focused on Carl for the first time. “Are you all right? What’s that blood by your ear?”

  “You hit me with a two by four.”

  “A concussion can be very serious.”

  He shoved Martin back with the head of the hammer. “Where is she?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “You know that’s a lie.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She didn’t drown. She made it to shore. She made it to me and I’m not going to let you hurt her again.”

  “A concussion can do very serious things.”

  “Frank came here last night to get that letter and you killed him.”

  “What letter?”

  “The one you said was from Jeff. It was a lie, wasn’t it?”

  “I understand. You never got to make peace with her. And it’s too late now. Frank felt the same way.”

  Carl turned away and walked to the pain spattered sink. He turned the spigot, cupped his hands full of cold water and splashed it on his face. The pain in his head was only just leaving and he still felt dizzy sometimes. He’d scraped the side of his car on a guardrail on the way over because the world had seemed to split in two on him.

  He applied a little water to the sticky matted hair on the back of his head and turned back to Martin. He hadn’t moved. Carl rummaged through the scattered papers on the oil stained floor. They were letters mostly. From Jesse and Frank. Notes dating back to grade school between the two brothers. Love letters from Jesse to Martin. One or two from Jesse to Frank. The souvenirs of a lifetime. Martin looked at him as he glanced through them, but didn’t say anything. He’d been throwing his whole past away.

  Carl picked up a picture of Frank and Jesse and Martin all in front of Frank’s cabin in the desert. Happier days, he thought, slipping it into his pocket. The letters from Jeff were in a separate bundle. He found the one he’d been looking for and read it again and again under the naked bulb. Martin just stared at him.

  Carl had read it five times. “There’s no date on this,” he said to Martin. “He doesn’t name the month or the season. He could have written this any time. Your maid’s from Peru, isn’t she? She could have jut sent it to her people and had them send it back here, so it would be postmarked after Jesse died. He never left here did he?”

  Martin glanced down to the floor like a guilty schoolboy. Carl rushed to him and lifted him up by the armpits, shoving him against the wall. The blood pulsed in Carl’s head, the pain almost blinding him. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Where is Jeff?”

  The pain ebbed and he watched Martin’s eyes; they were too dead to bother lying. “Jeff is fine.”

  He let Martin go and he slumped onto the floor again. Carl crouched down there with him. “Do you know where she is, Martin?” He wasn’t demanding anymore. “Do you know if she’s okay?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you still loved her. You’d think if so many people loved you, you wouldn’t die so fucking alone.”

  Carl looked at the wrecked man, lying amidst the crumpled papers. “Do you really believe she’s dead?”

  “I saw her drown. I thought that would be the end of it.” He eyed Carl, curious. “You think I hurt Frank? Why would I do that? He was my brother.”

  “He was your wife’s lover.”

  Martin laughed, just once. “Oh, that…” He got up on his knees and started rooting through the piles of letters that surrounded him.

  “What are you doing?” Carl asked.

  Martin pulled one of the letters out and handed it to Carl. “I know you won’t believe me. Let Jesse tell you.”

  Carl looked at the letter, recognizing Jesse’s handwriting. He retreated to the light to read it. While he read, Martin talked on, knowing he was being ignored. “I loved her too. No one seems to believe that. Okay, I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t suffer the way you and Frank did. Maybe I didn’t feel it as deeply. But just because I’m shallow, that doesn’t mean I can’t love.”

  Carl lowered the letter and looked at Martin. What little blood had been in Carl’s face was gone now and he was white as a ghost. He asked Martin a few questions, his voice trembling. Martin answered them as best he could, not wanting to blacken his brother’s memory too deeply.

  Then Carl swung open the garage door and walked back to his car in the dazzling sunlight. He took the two letters with him. Just as well; two less to throw away. When he was gone. Martin gathered up the letters and pictures and put them back in the boxes for the trash men to collect.

  Carl had forgotten to turn off the sprinklers. They were still going when he got home, drenching the two-by-four as it glistened among the heavy blades of grass. He remembered it falling next to him, then rising to strike him again.

  He remembered what he’d heard on the all-news station on the way home. A teen-ager had tried to kill herself this morning by tying a plastic bag around her head. She was in the hospital now in a coma. The day before she’d accused a teacher of molesting her, she had not been believed. The school board was investigating the way the principal had handled the situation. The police had tried to interview the accused teacher, but he had apparently gone into hiding. An APB was posted for him now. His name was Ted Ryan.

  Carl remembered him. He remembered a lot of things. So he knew where he had to go now.

  THIRTY-THREE

  There were four of them on the boat when it pulled out of the Marina and headed into open ocean. It was a homey gathering; a brother and a sister and two brothers going for
a pleasure cruise. Jeff had only been back for a day and a half, but already it felt like an eternity.

  Jeff never saw the ocean except when he was in the North. He knew that the ocean was down there too, but the notion of going to the beach was, of course, an impossibility and even now it seemed a luxury that was almost sinful.

  Jessica would have laughed at him for that. She would have told him to stop acting so superior, that being a lawyer was nothing to be ashamed of. Then Jeff would ask what Martin charged and how he helped those who couldn’t pay; the U.S. legal system would come into question and things would get ugly.

  But that was how it would have been. Now there was only silence and quiet politeness and no one else to take his mind off the obscenity of Los Angeles.

  Father Tim had tried to dissuade him from coming home this time. Jeff knew he was afraid he wouldn’t come back. Jeff always struck people as soft and even after a year of proving himself, there was still suspicion that a glimpse of the good life would be enough to turn him off the track. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Nothing here seemed like home.

  L.A. was a sprawling, decaying mess, uglier by far than the most wretched village he’d ministered to. Of course, Jesse would have laughed at that statement too, and called him a reverse snob.

  But she was not there to argue with him now. She was sitting on the deck, staring at the sky in silence, while he huddled with Martin and Frank and watched her. No, Frank watched her. Martin drove (he was sure that wasn’t the right word) the boat with perfect concentration.

  “It’s one of the few places where she’s at peace,” Frank said. “I suppose there’s something neutral about it. She used to sail when she was young.”

  “I know that,” Jeff said.

  More silence. The wake behind them was funnel shaped, like the tail of a fish.

  People even suffered differently here. They get strange diseases of the soul that leave them untouched physically but empty out their interiors, like a child hollowing a Jack-o’-Lantern.

  Jessica did not know who he was. Martin had been vague and typically clinical in his letter. Frank had been secretive and typically apologetic in his phone call. Nothing they had said had prepared him for the idea that she wouldn’t know him. Frank and Martin were disappointed too. They had hoped for something from this reunion, what he wasn’t sure. A shock, perhaps, that would bring it all back.

  Instead there was nothing, only a glimmer of fear because she did see something familiar in the face, but transformed in a way that unnerved her. Martin and Frank were simply strangers, no more, no less. But his face that claimed to be her brother’s and had enough of his shadow that it seemed like he had swallowed Jeff up, this was frightening. He was like a premonition to her, a frightening vision of the future. She locked herself in a room and didn’t come out till she forgot about the incident. That took about fifteen minutes.

  After that Martin insisted that they keep Jeff’s identity from her; it was too disturbing. So she accepted him as another stranger, only looking at him oddly now and then as if something was about to come to her. It didn’t.

  Martin turned off the motor and the boat began to drift on the placid blue water. There was one other boat, a dirty fishing trowel (another wrong word, he was sure) on the horizon. He belched again, finding it a necessary way to keep his stomach in check. Martin pulled out a large knife and began to whittle on a bit of white wood. An oddly down home exercise, Jeff thought.

  “Are you making something?” he asked.

  Martin looked up at him in surprise. “I suppose I should think of something. My doctor recommended I take up a hobby for my blood pressure.”

  Typical, thought Jeff. Those with no problems must find them to use the worry parts of their brains. But wasn’t it cruel of Jeff to say this man had no problems? Where was Jessica to chastise him?

  Jessica was sitting over there, looking at the fishing scow (that sounded better). Frank said she was the same girl he’d always known; she’d just lost the years between then and now. Martin said it was because of something growing in her brain. He said that after it took her soul (but those weren’t his words) there would be nothing to do but make her peaceful.

  But there was nothing ill about his sister; she looked as healthy as he had ever seen her, even if a bit overweight. She was simply emptying her mind of dross, Jeff thought. How much was there really worth remembering, after all?

  They said she thought she was seventeen and he remembered her then. She didn’t look too much different to him. One’s older siblings are always the same age; older. She had her first boyfriend then, Carl, and he loved to play with Jeff. They would all go together to the movies. He saw Star Wars with Carl. They had ice cream. He had been sorry when Carl broke up with his sister and had never liked any of her other boyfriends.

  Seventeen had been a good age for Jessica and it didn’t surprise him that she should retreat there, now that her brain was being eaten. After high school she had seemed to wander, never finding a use for her intelligence and her emotions. She drifted from relationship to relationship. He half suspected her of getting an abortion, but he thrust the idea from his mind as being too horrible to consider.

  If he had been able to convert her, he felt sure her life would have been very different. But she’d been too threatened by his own calling for him to even speak of it to her. It had been jealousy, he supposed. She’d been more parent to him than his mother and father, so when he accepted The Church it had seemed like a rejection of her. The way she’d acted, he might have been joining some cult, indeed that was exactly how she thought of Catholicism, despite being half-heartedly raised in it herself. And when he had embraced liberation theology, which even he recognized as fanaticism, she was sure he’d gone mad. She’d been able to picture him as a nice Bing Crosby priest in the suburbs somewhere, but going down to Peru and working with Communists was more than she could bear.

  But she bore it. She teased him, but she never cut him off. She didn’t understand him, but she was still his sister and that would never change. Even now it hadn’t changed, and if he could just go back to being the brother she recognized, she’d take care of him as always. That was of course what she had always wanted, even before the disease, for him not to grow up. So even the thing in her brain hadn’t changed things, just made them more concrete.

  The aimlessness of her life was his greatest pain. In a way it hurt him far more than the starvation and maiming he’d witnessed in the South. Partly that was because she was his family, but that wasn’t everything. It was the waste that hurt. The people in Ayacucho had no chances. To grow up and old without losing a loved one, without being crippled in your heart or body was an impossibility. Jessica had every possibility, every advantage. Food on the table and a safe house and a promise of that forever. Now she sat there, looking at the waves, living only in weird quarter hour fragments. Martin and Frank were heartbroken at this change, but to Jeff it seemed only an intensification of her normal condition. She had always sat there and only hoped each moment would be pleasant. He didn’t think there was anything growing in her brain. It was just the nothingness of her life taking over. And it was the same with all of them, Jeff thought, looking at Martin and Frank. Jessica was just the only one honest enough to die from it.

  If she could have found the Lord, if he could have helped her to that, then he would have made a difference on this earth, a difference that mattered to him more than the gushing arteries he’d stopped and the crying children he’d comforted. They had suffered more, but they were strangers to him. In his own home he’d failed.

  Of course, it wasn’t too late. He could convert her now. And then she’d forget it all in five minutes and he’d have to do it all over again and a gain. It might be a worthwhile way to spend a life.

  Martin stood up and walked into the sunlight, stretching himself and flexing his fingers around the knife.

  “Will you be going back?” Frank asked him.

  “I don’t
know,” he said.

  Frank maneuvered a cigarette into his mouth and lit it, gracefully with his one hand. Jeff remembered the first time he had seen a severed limb. A nine-year-old girl had had her family slaughtered buy the Shining Path terrorists, but in a rare moment of mercy they had only raped her and cut off her arm. Since then he had seen more mangled limbs than he could remember. He doubted that Frank had lost his so dramatically.

  Jeff got up and walked over to his sister. She looked up at him in some surprise, shading her eyes with her hand. A silver necklace glinted around her neck – a little pendant with her name and address on it, like a dog’s I.D. tag. If found lost of wandering, please return to owner, he thought, bitterly.

  “Hi,” she said, with a friendly smile.

  “I’m your brother Jeff,” he said.

  She stared at him, squinting into the sun.

  “That’s right, I’m all grown up. This is like those Twilight Zone episodes we used to sneak downstairs and watch in the middle of the night. A flash forward. You’re getting to see the future.”

  She just kept looking at him, squinting into the sun.

  “I’m going to be a priest. Maybe. I’m living in Peru, helping people. I think you’d be proud of me.”

  She was glancing away from him now, looking for a way out. He was losing her.

  “You married a rich, handsome lawyer. You’re very happy. Everything turns out fine.”

  She stood up and walked to the cabin. Martin and Frank were staring at Jeff, accusing him with their eyes. He’d committed the worst sin; he’d upset her.

  She was looking from face to face, trying to find a point of reference. Martin stepped forward, calming and reassuring.

  “What’s the matter, Jesse? Don’t you recognize us? We’re your parents’ friends, I’m Martin and this is my brother Frank. This is our friend…”