Later in the day, when Gus came home from school, he found his mother lying on the living room chaise, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Her head was in bandages.
In bandages!
“Mom?”
“Go away, Gus.”
“What happened?”
“You know what happened. And I’m not sure what you’re up to, but I want you to go away.”
“Fine.”
“But first make me a martini.”
“You don’t drink.”
“I do now,” she said, then barked, “straight up, no olive!”
Gus would have more visions and more hunches. Ivan would appear in more and more dreams, but Ivan would never come right out and say, “Yes, that is the gift I have given you.” And, at first, Gus wasn’t sure how to use the gift, or if he was even supposed to use the gift; Ivan once said, “Just use your instincts,” and Gus had replied, “That’s assuming I have any,” and Ivan simply told him that he did. It would be years and hundreds of miles before someone would understand. Her name was Beatrice Vossenheimer.
Beatrice was really the first true friend he made after landing in Phoenix. She was a minor celebrity on the psychic circuit. That is to say she’d been on a few television shows, serious ones, like 60 Minutes, to talk about the truth of psychic abilities, to separate fact from fiction, disavowing such atrocities as the psychic hotlines, the psychic chat rooms, and that idiot in Los Angeles who called himself the “Corpse Whisperer.” Gus knew she was based in Phoenix and had a robust private practice. So when he arrived he made an appointment and asked for guidance. She told him, in her strange but beautiful vibrato, that he belonged in the valley, that he would do fine here, that life would be easier. That his family had simply misunderstood.
“They did more than misunderstand,” he told Beatrice in her Paradise Valley home. “They basically banished me from Seattle.”
He told her about the murder of Frankie McMahon, a twelve-year-old altar boy from Tacoma. His body was found on the shores of Puget Sound; his head had been bashed in by a rock. There were no suspects. The police were stumped. The investigation lasted sixteen months, and then it was closed. That was maybe a year after Ivan had left Gus with an intangible gift to see things, to sense things, to intuit the abstract. Meg Parker’s injury, alone, at Safeway had not convinced Gus of anything absolute. No, he was still looking for the seafoam-colored box that he had seen in that dream. But he would finally understand that the box was really a collection of whispers from his dead uncle, an ongoing dialogue of sorts, that, at first, made him think he was going insane. He would hear Ivan, in Ivan’s voice, whisper in his ear, “Doughnut,” for example, and later that day his mother would come home with a box of Krispy Kremes. There was the time Ivan whispered, “Bob Dylan,” and about five minutes later Gus turned on the radio and heard “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He told Beatrice about the time Ivan whispered, “Underwear,” and Gus actually spoke back to his uncle and said, “Underwear? You gotta be kidding me,” but later that day in the gym locker room three guys gave him a wedgie.
When he finally told his parents about the messages from Ivan, they dismissed it, called it a funny coincidence. The next morning his mother slapped his face and told him to never speak of Ivan that way again. When he persisted, the Parkers took him to a psychiatrist who gave him some medication for anxiety, which he shared with his friends. Instead of taking the pills orally, they would crush them into silky powder and snort them up their noses and melt into dreamy and blissful reverie. He stopped talking to his parents about the visions and kept going to the psychiatrist for the prescriptions. He made a lot of friends at school, among them the three boys who were prone to giving him wedgies. He’d trade the pills for wedgie exemptions. He even snorted the drugs with Cheryl Hamilton, a star cheerleader who had not given him the time of day until she learned about his stash of sedatives. She would become, eventually, his first fuck. So adults were right, after all. Drugs are bad. Just say no.
He had stopped talking to his parents about his visions, true, but he had not stopped seeing them. He saw good things like weddings and new houses and the sun headed for an otherwise dreary Seattle. He saw six days of sun, in fact, when the meteorologists had predicted more rain. He also saw bad things like mudslides, and earthquakes around the ring of fire. He saw children murdered in the jungle. He saw his sister, Nikki, mangled in a car accident and broke his silence. He warned them. They ignored him. Later he tore into the emergency room at Harborview Medical where his parents were holding vigil, his mother weeping tearlessly. He was on fire. “Is she okay?” he cried.
“She’s in surgery,” his mother whispered. “They tell us she’ll survive. As will Mrs. Ferguson who was driving drunk with Nicole and Jane in the back seat.”
“How’s Jane?” he asked but already knew.
“Jane’s dead,” his father said.
Gus took a deep breath and started to bawl. He blamed them. “Why didn’t you listen to me? Why don’t you take me seriously?”
“Nothing could have prevented Jane’s death,” his mother seethed.
“No,” Gus raged. “You have blood on your hands.”
That was the last straw. His parents took turns smacking him. Right there in the ER. They smacked him hard, and no one bristled.
“You’re meeting with Father Bryson next week,” Warren Parker screamed into his son’s face.
“Father Bryson?”
“Yes. You are a Catholic child,” his mother screeched. “We won’t have you playing with the occult.”
He laughed. “Come on, I’m not a child. I’m almost seventeen. You can’t make me go talk to a priest.”
His father grabbed him by the chin. “As long as you’re living in our house, you will do what we ask of you.”
“Okay, Mr. Cleaver,” Gus said, turning his back to them, leaving the ER.
There was nothing like this. Ever. As a kid he had told little lies to his parents and they had given him little punishments. But now here he was burdened with the truth and no one believed him. He could not deny it. If this was a gift, as Ivan would have him believe, he would rush to the store and return it. He asked Ivan why he would do this to him, but Ivan didn’t answer. Gus stood outside of the hospital, shaking, trembling. Maybe he was going nuts. The sheer fact, the icy chill, that no one believed him turned him inside out. He was lost, alone, helpless; he might as well have been behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
Meeting with Father Bryson, the family priest at St. Catherine’s, was perhaps the best and worst thing that ever happened to Gus Parker. The priest greeted him with a smile and patted Gus on the shoulder as he led him to his office. Gus was surprised to see real books on the shelves, not just the Bible and other religious stuff, but books he recognized like Great Expectations and Moby Dick and The Godfather, which surprised him the most. “I don’t really have anything to confess,” he told the priest.
“Which is why we’re not in a confessional, Gus.”
“Oh.”
They sat.
“Your parents are very worried about you,” Father Bryson said. “Worried about the demons inside of you.”
Gus made a face, a disgusted, sneering face, in lieu of something more verbal like, “Shut the fuck up, Father.”
“I want you to talk to me about these visions you’re having, Gus,” the priest asked him. “And I listen without prejudice. There may be a perfectly good explanation for all this.”
Explanation. For. All. This.
He said nothing but listened to those words echo. He tossed them around in his head as he studied the crucifix on the wall behind Father Bryson.
Explanation. For. All. This.
Explanation. The smile of Frankie McMahon, an altar boy in all his innocence, toothy and fair-skinned.
For. All. This. The sheer terror of Frankie McMahon, running fast from someone. Running along the banks, out of breath, tears streaming down his face.
Explanation. Explan
ation. Explanation.
And then a man’s hand clutching Frankie’s shoulder, dragging him to the ground. A rock bashing his head. And the face of the man, fierce and furious. His eyes demonic and exalted at once. Blood spilled from Frankie’s head. The man rolled the boy into the water and then spun around and raced off up a hill.
“Gus, I need you to talk to me.”
“Oh? Well, I’m having a vision right now.”
Father Bryson crossed his legs and smiled gently. “Would you like to share?”
“No,” Gus said. “I would not.”
The murderer gets into a car, speeds away. There he is speeding, swerving, clipping corners and then, finally, slowing, regaining composure behind the wheel, blending into traffic until he reaches St. Elizabeth’s in Tacoma. The man gets out of the car, confident, orderly, his face betraying none of the evil his hands had just performed. Stoically, the killer approaches the church like a man approaching a confessional. Gus had only ever been to St. Elizabeth’s once. After a sleepover at a cousin’s, he was dragged along for Mass. He remembers little about that, but now he sees the church vividly and the man standing there with his eyes locked on the ominous steeple against a haunted sky. The killer’s lips tremble. He whispers something to heaven, but he doesn’t enter the church. Instead, he turns, walks into the rectory, and closes the door behind him.
“I think I have to leave,” Gus told Father Bryson.
“But, my son, I don’t think we’ve accomplished much.”
“Maybe next time,” Gus said as he rushed from the room.
He was shaking all over.
He ran to the nearest payphone and called 911.
“I know who killed the altar boy in Tacoma,” he told the operator.
She kept him on the phone, asking him urgent questions, but everything was a blur until three police cruisers came whipping around corners, surrounding the payphone.
At first the cops didn’t believe him. Why would they? They threatened to arrest him. They questioned him for hours. Then he led them to the scene and showed them the exact spot, a dimple of earth on the sloping hill, where the murder happened. Despite days of combing the banks, the cops had not identified the exact location where Frankie had been killed; his body could have floated from anywhere. Now they were there. And there was a rock. And bone fragments. And stains that even now, sixteen months after the crime, could harbor a microscopic wonderland of DNA.
Four weeks later Father Lawrence Richardson, the priest at St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church in Tacoma, was taken into custody, charged with the murder of Frankie McMahon. It was all there in the morning paper:
PRIEST ARRESTED IN DEATH OF ALTAR BOY
Victim Had Accused Clergyman of Molestation
The cops had rounded up nearly a dozen altar boys who said Father Richardson had molested many of them and, certainly, had molested Frankie McMahon. Some of them had heard Frankie fighting off the priest. Those same boys heard Frankie threatening to tell his parents. Frankie was not to be seen again.
“Have you read the paper?” Gus asked his father.
“Yes,” his father replied stiffly.
“I guess you could say I nailed it.”
Warren Parker shifted in his chair and said, “Look, Gus, that’s enough.”
It didn’t help Gus’s case when, the next day, this headline appeared in the paper:
POLICE SAY PSYCHIC TEEN SOLVED ALTAR BOY MURDER
And right there alongside the story was a nice photograph, featuring Gus’s winning smile.
And lots of quotes that Gus had given the reporter the night before when someone named Pat Jennings called from the Seattle Post. Actually, Gus had found the newspaper in the trash that morning ; his parents had discarded it that quickly. He would be the next to be discarded. “Your aunt Bettina and uncle Paul have agreed to let you live with them.”
“In Ohio?”
“That’s right,” Meg Parker told her son.
“I don’t think so,” Gus said.
“You don’t have a choice,” his father said. “We’re doing this for the family’s best interests. We can’t have the media camping out here every night, waiting for you to come out with your next prediction.”
“Or to solve the next crime,” his mother added.
“We are guilty by association of your public blasphemy,” his father told him.
“Blasphemy?” Gus asked. “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”
“End of discussion,” his mother said.
But it was not the end of the discussion. Gus refused to go anywhere near Ohio. Instead, Bruce Lightener, the Master of the Wedgie Masters, convinced his parents to let Gus stay in their guest room. At least until graduation. In sharp contrast to his own parents, the Lighteners were thrilled to have a psychic among them. “Can we do a séance?” Doris Lightener asked Gus when he arrived with his first boxes.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lightener. I’m not sure I’m a medium.” He loved their house (decks everywhere, skylights, a ping-pong table, and, to top it off, a swimming pool), loved Mrs. Lightener’s cooking, loved the dogs, and he loved the parrot that said, “Go fuck yourself,” whenever someone passed by its cage. All this, the whole history of Gus Parker’s estrangement from his family, came out during that very first meeting with Beatrice Vossenheimer.
“I think we’ll be kindred spirits,” she said. “But why Phoenix? Was it a vision?”
Gus explained that after graduating from high school he and Bruce moved to LA where they surfed during the day and waited tables at night. About four years later, when Bruce applied to Arizona State University, Gus followed him to Arizona. “So you’re in college?” Beatrice asked.
“I was. I left ASU after one semester. It just wasn’t for me. I love reading. But I just don’t have the head for lectures and research papers. Besides Bruce hooked up with this girl, Naomi, and they took off for New Mexico where they’re now teaching yoga.”
Beatrice looked at him blankly. Then wistfully.
Gus inferred sympathy. “Please, don’t feel bad for me. I don’t regret anything I’ve done so far. I like my life. I like the valley. I don’t know many people here, but I’m at peace. And I’m training to be a sonographer, so it’s not like I’m flippin’ burgers.”
She smiled. “No, in fact, I see you building up quite a nice practice here.”
Gus’s eyes sort of bulged. “You mean like yours?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
Gus shook his head. “That really wasn’t my plan. And that certainly wasn’t my intention to come here and solicit help.”
Again, she smiled. And her eyes twinkled. “I know that. But that is what I see for you. Your own private practice. And maybe it’s selfish of me, but my client list is too big. It’s unmanageable. So perhaps I’ll send you some referrals.”
That was almost twenty years ago.
He sends cards home to Seattle for birthdays and holidays. He has short, awkward calls with his parents. Dead or alive calls, that’s about it. The level of curiosity is mutual.
Gus Parker is fine with the detachment.
“Are you tired? Sleepy?” he asks Ivy when he sees her lying in the hallway outside his bedroom. He’s just come in for the night after meeting with Alex Mills. He’s not sure he convinced the detective of anything, but the hot tea felt good going down.
The dog picks her head up off the floor.
“You waiting for me to come home?”
She gets up. He bends down to give her a kiss. She growls her growl of love. He has known no greater attachment.
The place is a mess. A total mess. Ransack meets cyclone. He’s thought about hiring the lady who cleans the house across the street. Her name is Elsa. Short, round, she’s probably forty, and once she told Gus that she was from a very small village in Bolivia. She made a Bolivian fish stew one night for the neighbors and saved a small portion for him. When she brought it over, Gus took the bowl, and as he did he was jolted. Just f
or a nanosecond he could see it: an image of Elsa on the highway, her car a mangled, crumpled heap. “Don’t drive I-10 tomorrow,” he told her. “Take the surface roads.” She looked at him very seriously, like she, too, was a disciple of mysticism, and said, “Thank you, Gus Parker.” The next morning there was a major wreck at the Baseline exit from I-10. An oil tanker had jackknifed. A swath of the highway looked like war-torn Iraq; among billows of smoke were the remains of cars, tossed around like toys, smashed, shattered, crunched. Elsa’s was not among them. The next day she came over and kissed him on the cheek, said something in Spanish, and left.
After a quick rinse in the shower, Gus climbs into bed and makes room for Ivy. He holds her tight and begins to slip off to sleep when he feels a subtle vibration in the bed. It tremors softly as if it’s in the path of a distant seismic wave. The sensation is familiar to him. He calls it the phantom quake. It has followed him from Seattle to Los Angeles to Phoenix. He thinks once you feel an earthquake it stays with you; once you ride that perfect crest of ocean nothing ever stands still. But now he closes his eyes and sees that woman again. She is closing in on him.
7
Kelly Mills throws the newspaper at her husband. He’s still in bed. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. “Look at you looking all handsome and serious.”
He rolls over, grabs the paper, and gazes at the headline.
DEAD HIKER FOUND AT SOUTH MOUNTAIN
He looks at the photograph. There he is all serious. Brooding, even. But handsome? Hardly. The lines in his face are hard, his skin calloused by the desert. “I look like a drought,” he tells his wife.
“Oh shut up,” she calls from another room. “I’m making coffee.”
He tosses the paper aside. “I’ll have mine with a side of pancakes and eggs,” he says. “Bacon if you got any.”
His wife doesn’t hear him. Or it might be that she’s ignoring him. “Get your ass out of bed,” is her only reply.
“I’m tired,” he whines in three syllables.
“And you think I had an easy week?” she asks, poking her head in the room. “You try cutting a deal for a four-time child molester. You listen to all the backlash. Let’s see how you feel, Detective Crybaby.”
Desert Remains Page 5