This Day's Death

by John Rechy

  “The court’s in session!” Edmondson announced.

  Daniels is not here.

  They face Cory.

  The kindly old man Jim had wanted to see has metamorphosed before him into the man he always was—a petulant fat oldman.

  Peremptorily: “The record will show the evidence in this case has been concluded,” Cory is saying, “and that the court did view the premises in the company of Mr. Bryant and Mr. Edmondson, and the defendants and the district attorney and the officers, pursuant to stipulation.”

  For the first time Hall avoided looking at Jim or Steve. “People rest, your honor,” he said. “Waive opening argument.”

  Edmondson: “Submit it, your honor.”

  Alan: “Submit it.”

  Cory: “All right—I am finding the defendants guilty of section 288(a) of the Penal Code of the State of California as charged. Probation and sentence will be set for— . . .”

  A month and a half away!

  Now Alan says with obvious impatience and anger: “Your honor, may defendant Girard be sentenced earlier? He has made five trips from Texas in this matter— . . .”

  Cory: “Counsel, I know absolutely nothing about this man to enable me to sentence him. Under the law I must have a probation report. That takes time.”

  (The awareness: We were really found guilty!)

  Edmondson: “Defendant Travis requests leave to file an application for probation.”

  Alan: “Defendant Girard also.”

  Cory: “Permission will be granted. You may go now to the probation office—. . .”

  Like that—like that, it was ending.

  (We were found guilty—and the cop lied!)

  The jargonistic phrases over, Jim walks out of the courtroom. Down the corridor. Why couldn’t he merely walk away? Why did he have to do what that fat oldman said? It was exactly like this: the nightmare of wanting to run but your legs won’t move. Because they can’t.

  “Jim!” Alan catches up with him.

  “Alan, look, the whole fucking— . . .” Jim says disgustedly. “You just let that son of a bitch— . . .”

  “I don’t blame you for being bitter,” Alan says. “But there was nothing I could do. Look, it will be a light sentence, there won’t be any prison term. Anything more than a very small fine and a few months’ probation would make it a severe sentence. You’ll get probation, if any at all, for less than a year—and that will automatically mean the conviction is reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor.”

  The sputtering miracle, the possibility extended by the arcane reasoning: The sentence determined the degree of the “crime.” Still, Jim is hesitant to grab the proffered hope. “Alan, you’ve promised me so many damned things— . . .” (We were found guilty!)

  “You’re understandably worked up.”

  “You wouldn’t even submit your argument!”

  “Jim, you can’t antagonize a judge who’s made up his mind. Remember, at this point he can convict you of a misdemeanor rather than a felony—remember that,” he kept emphasizing. “We couldn’t irritate him. He still would have found you guilty.”

  “What about an appeal?”

  (We were found guilty of something which didn’t happen!)

  “You haven’t got a chance. There’s no record of what occurred in the park.”

  “God damn Edmondson! Why the hell did you let him insist no court recorder would go to the park?”

  “Look, Jim, I’ll speak to the judge. I know he’ll convict you finally of a misdemeanor; he’ll probably agree to sentence you in absence when he sees the probation report—and the probation report is important. It’s true he doesn’t know anything about you. It’s a court formality.”

  (Cory . . . a good man . . . “the kind of man I can talk to in chambers.”)

  Automatically Jim goes to a telephone, calls his sister’s. “Mother,” he says firmly, “my business is still dragging on, I won’t be able to leave possibly for— . . .” He can’t accept the fact of a month and a half. “. . . —for another week or so.”

  Silence. And then her voice, as firm as his: “Then I want to leave tonight, with Miss Lucía.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Tell Estela to make reservations when she gets home. Miss Lucía can pack. I’ll see you later, Mother.”

  We were found guilty! Even while he reacted in awareness of the verdict, it was still as if a reel would unwind, and new words, new scenes of victory would be substituted.

  In another building, at the probation office—an enormous beehive of partitioned cubicles—a woman behind a desk is telling Alan apathetically that no probation officer can see his client today—not for several days; they’re booked up solid till— . . . He’ll have to make an appointment, she insists. On chairs outlining the waiting room, others—mostly youngmen—sit. There’s a table with more chairs. Alan is explaining Jim’s being from out of state. “I’m sorry, but— . . .” the woman kept repeating with indifference.

  Emerging from the partitioned hall, “What’s the problem, Miss Ward?” a tall man wearing glasses asked the woman. He looks like a highschool science teacher. Alan explained.

  “I’m not going out to lunch today,” the man said; “I can see Mr. Girard.” He extends his hand to Jim. “I’m Miller.”

  Jim feels an instant relief to be away from the court—as if his identity is being restored to him by this man’s courtesy.

  “I’ll see you in a few minutes,” Miller tells him. “In the meantime, I’ll have to ask you to write out an account of what led to your arrest—it’ll become part of the probation report; and it should be addressed to the judge who heard the case. Just tell what happened— . . .”

  “Nothing happened,” Jim said. (Nothing happened—but we were found guilty!)

  “You can sit at that table,” Miller said. “Miss Ward will give you some paper and a pencil. And I’ll see you in my office as soon as you’ve finished.”

  Arranging an appointment for Steve, who looks dazed, Edmondson said curtly to Jim: “Now don’t make an ass of the judge in your report.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Jim’s voice is steely.

  Miller stops along the hall.

  “That if you keep insisting he was wrong, you’ll antagonize him!” Edmondson says.

  “You keep— . . .” Jim starts. “Edmondson, you keep talking— . . . Frank, you— . . . Edmondson, you act like our lives intruded on yours—and the judge’s. All this bull about ‘your honor’ and ‘if the court please’ and ‘respectfully suggest’—man, you should be demanding on our behalfs. Man, don’t you realize it’s our lives—that yours and that judge’s are unchanged?” He’s aware that Miller and the others are listening, and he doesn’t care.

  Edmondson moves to speak to Steve. Jim intercepts him. “I don’t know what Edmondson’s going to tell you, Steve,” Jim says, looking at Steve for the first time since their conviction—thinking: Steve’s wife, his kid. . . . “You do whatever you want when you write your report. But I’m not going to say anything happened that didn’t.”

  “I’m not either, Jim,” Steve said—the only time Jim had heard him speak with conviction.

  “Do what you like,” Edmondson said. And did he realize finally—or would he ever—that they had been convicted on the cop’s lie? Perhaps he honestly believed too firmly in the infallibility of what he had to call justice.

  “You should have been acquitted. There was no evidence,” Alan is saying to Jim—as if apologizing for the courts, the judge, the law. And as if seeing it all very clearly, he adds: “The whole area of homosexuality is so bedeviled with fears. Even among the most liberal people. Even in a robbery case—even in murder!—such flimsy evidence would have resulted in acquittal. I tried a robbery case before that same judge—and a manslaughter—and I won both—on much more substantial evidence on the prosecution’s side. But homosexuality—. . .”

  “You don’t have to wait for me, Alan,” Jim tells him.

  (The awareness, ins
isting to become real: Guilty!)

  “Call me this afternoon, Jim,” Alan says automatically.

  Jim sits at the long table across from a black youngman writing his own report.

  (Has it really happened? Guilty!)

  Jim writes on the paper the receptionist gave him: “Your honor.” He crosses it out with one curt line, he won’t erase; substitutes: “Judge Cory.” He continues writing: “The charge we were found guilty of today didn’t occur. The cop lied. But had it occurred, there would still have been no ‘crime.’ The guilty ones are the cop who lied and the men who chose to believe him despite the evidence—but, more, the men who uphold or ignore the perverted laws that make these charges possible.” Then he went on to outline, carefully, the argument Alan would have presented, the argument Cory would not listen to: forty feet, the distance between them when they were arrested; the description of the grotto as revealed first by the films then by the actual viewing of the area, belying radically Daniels’ description of a place in the open; the several times the cop changed their and his location—from the eastern end to the mouth of the grotto; from twenty to fifteen to only a few feet away; that in the four minutes the cop claimed he watched, he could have logically made an arrest before the two separated at least forty feet. Forty feet. . . . He wrote clearly, convincingly—and with a feeling of frustration.

  Finished, he’s in Miller’s cubicled office. On the wall are some drawings in bright crayons—a square house, sky a blue suspended sheet, trees like green balloons: obviously by a child.

  “My son made those,” Miller said. “He’s a bright kid. This is his photograph on my desk.” He turns it toward Jim.

  Guardedly—suspicious because Miller seems so friendly, “He’s a goodlooking kid,” Jim said. (He remembered: The photograph in Steve’s apartment—Steve’s son.)

  Carefully, Miller reads Jim’s statement. Then he says softly: “As a probation officer, I have to assume that the verdict was correct.”

  Is he the enemy too? Jim wonders.

  “Was there any allegation about your being offered money for a sex act?” Miller surprised him by asking.

  “No,” Jim answers, puzzled.

  “The reason for my question is that you mention in your report that you were offered, and turned down, pleading guilty to a lesser charge—647(b). That misdemeanor charge is very often used in cases of male prostitution.”

  Edmondson hadn’t mentioned that when he had insisted they accept the reduced charge. “Nothing happened,” Jim says firmly. An accusation, a bare accusation—in the courts it seemed to demand an acknowledgment of guilt—to anything! Like echoes in a huge, empty cavern, then, the constant variations on the vast illogic of criminal laws. The jagged shape of those laws was beginning to surprise Jim less and less. At the same time that his bitterness sharpened, he wanted to laugh—defensively—at the profound absurdities.

  Now in a friendly tone Miller has begun to ask him a long series of questions—writing down his answers; personal questions about his background, his family’s; their professions, his; his income; the rent paid on their house. Schooling?

  “I’ll be going to lawschool next year,” Jim answers automatically.

  Pencil stopped sharply in mid-air, Miller looks at him and frowns. “You’ve been convicted of a . . . crime . . . which can ultimately be a felony or a misdemeanor, depending on the type of sentence,” he explained, slowly as if attempting to cut through the jungle of the vengeful-law’s complexity. “As long as there’s no sentence to the state prison, even a suspended one, your conviction is for a misdemeanor. Probation for under a year—or even a county jail sentence for less than a year, served or suspended,” he added quickly, “will also mean a misdemeanor.”

  Vaguely—the fact of his conviction only slowly penetrating his full awareness, as if it must pass through layers of resistance built by the residue of past miracles—Jim understood why Miller had interjected that explanation. Another threat existed. And if— . . .

  But Miller has continued his questions: the cost of the furniture in his home in El Paso, his dependents, marital status. Religion?

  “I was Catholic.”

  “But now what are you?”

  “No religion.”

  “It would impress the court more favorably if you listed a faith.”

  Yes, probably Cory went to church weekly. . . . “No religion,” Jim insisted.

  Miller writes down his answer. More questions. Then he asks him for the names of people who could attest to his character. “Your employer in El Paso would be excellent.”

  “I prefer not to list him,” Jim said immediately.

  “I understand,” Miller says, and he wrote something down. “I know enough.” He stood up, and they shook hands. He glances at Jim’s written report. “I admire your courage, Mr. Girard,” he said quickly.

  The crazy waltz on the freeways—one swallowing another, spewed out as offramps, overpasses, underpasses, onramps. (We were found guilty on a lie!)

  Estela was sitting desolately in her living room, a glass of scotch in her hand.

  Miss Lucía was sorting out a box of costume jewelry and some clothes.

  “How’s Mother— . . .?” Jim starts. He sees the packed bags waiting.

  “She keeps insisting she’ll be sick if she doesn’t leave now. I ask her what she’ll be sick with—but she can’t answer. But I know what her sickness is!” It’s obvious that Estela has been drinking steadily. “It’s revenge. She just can’t forgive us for growing up. Two got away, they died; she’s not going to let us get away.”

  “That doesn’t make sense right now, Estela,” Jim says coolly; "she’s leaving— . . .” (We were found guilty!)

  “Sure—because she wants us to go to her! She’ll summon us back soon enough.”

  “Her illness is the coming of old age,” Miss Lucía says. “When we get old, who knows who we’ll be? . . . Look at the beautiful things your sister gave me,” she announces to Jim as if hypnotized by the colors. She randomly picks out a pair of long orange gloves, a long dress. Jim recognizes clothes his sister had long abandoned in a box to be discarded. Apparently Miss Lucía asked for them. “In every child there’s an old soul shriveled and ancient. Waiting it’s turn,” she went on. “In the old there’s a child — . . .” She held something of white material against the side of her face—like a bridal veil. “All she has to take care of now are—not her children, but—her illnesses.”

  Estela says: “She’s afraid she’ll die without us—that’s why she always sent for us—and she will again. If we’re around, she can pull us with her to die.”

  Now Miss Lucía holds something black over her head as if she had suddenly gone into mourning. “I understand her illness—it’s when you can’t move because the world isn’t what it should be, what you need it to be, what you want it to be, what you demand it to be. . . .”

  “Exactly,” Estela murmured.

  The unfair verdict of guilty just rendered in his life—perhaps that—perhaps resentment paradoxically that his sister is saying the very things he has said, thought—perhaps the recurrent warning reminder of the further examinations suggested by Dr. del Valle—Jim defends his mother: “You can’t be sure—and you can’t remember only that—the bad things; remember when we were sick, she—. . .”

  “. . . —gave us her love in return for our lives. We’re still her children, Goddamnit, Jim—and you know it too. Don’t let her gobble you up! But look at me—I’m so afraid— . . . Three husbands, Jim! Three divorces! Because I’m so goddamned afraid of having children and mangling them!”

  Profoundly moved, Jim touches his sister. “Estela— . . .”

  “I could take her to a place in the mountains, a place with a porch,” Miss Lucía says absently, “and we can sit there and watch the wild peacocks spread their beautiful tails.”

  Estela says contritely: “I know, she did everything for us.”

  Leaning on her cane, Mrs. Girard appears at the d
oor. The dark glasses stare at her son and daughter. “But now I’m worthless,” she said.

  “You’re not worthless, Mother!” both Jim and Estela protested quickly. They hugged her, and she hugged them back.

  “You definitely want to leave, Mother?” Jim asks her. It was as if he were speaking to the dark glasses.

  “Yes,” she said. “Unless— . . . I wish . . . But you can’t come yet, can you, my Son?”

  This time he would let her go, Jim knows. Having announced her illness, she would be ill if she stayed. The only way to thwart it was to let her go, to her home, to El Paso, to her doctors. It was agreed: He would drive them, Estela would stay.

  Miss Lucía tied a bright, bright scarf about her neck; she pinned it with something sparkling. Jim glanced at her. She had begun to look . . . different.

  “I’m ready,” Mrs. Girard says. “I’ll miss you so much, my dear Esperanza!”

  “I’m Estela, Mother,” Estela whispered.

  “Of course—I mean, you, my beloved Daughter. I never have stopped missing you. I wish— . . .”

  “Goodbye, Mother,” Estela says.

  Jim carries the suitcases outside.

  Estela came running to the car. “Mother!” she said. And crying like a child, she embraced her. “Mother, I love you!”

  Estela remained behind, on the sidewalk, waving at the disappearing car.

  At the airport Jim let his mother and Miss Lucía out in front of the airline office. He goes to park the car. (We were found guilty and the charge was a lie!) He met them there, arranged for the tickets. Miss Lucía was a clash of colors—gloves, high heels, hat; the painted face smiled anxiously at everyone who stared at her. Jim walks with them to the waiting area. Soon there’s the call for the passengers to board.

  “I’ll see you very soon, Mother,” Jim tells her.

  “Soon, my Son?” she asks him the “question” in different words.

  For months he had existed in the center of two crises—his mother’s strange illness and the legal trap. Now both fused into one blackness: Mother! Guilty! . . . What will happen to her if I go to prison?