How Town

by Michael Nava

  More disturbing had been the midnight awakening to damp sheets and my underwear caked to my skin. I’d risen quietly, gone into the bathroom and scrubbed my underwear and then taken a washcloth back into my bedroom to work on the sheets. Without ever having been told, I knew this was something I didn’t want my mother to discover. I never associated it with the dreams that preceded my awakening, nor did I remember the dreams very clearly. They seemed composed of sensations more than images: a deep rumbling sensation that began in the pit of my stomach and seemed to flood my chest and then my entire body, a seizure of emotion at once terrifying and thrilling. And somewhere, in all of that, were brief images of myself and a neighbor boy naked, about to dive into the river on a still, hot summer afternoon. I saw the long dense curve of his thigh, his lank penis swinging free as he jumped into the water, splashing me.

  This, I knew, instinctively, was even a more dangerous secret than the damp sheets, the soiled shorts. For hours afterward I’d lie in bed trying not to think about it, praying to be free of these impure thoughts. But always, exhausted and confused, my mind wandered back to that picture and the weight of the sheets against my body became like the weight of another’s body pressed against me. I hadn’t understood what I was trying to tell myself, only that what I felt was physical, like hunger or fatigue, and there was more to it, a kind of wild loneliness and a deep, scary sense of being different.

  Over the years I had learned that only a few of us come to accept that difference. Most of us struggle against our homosexuality and never learn to trust our natures. And if a John McKay comes into our lives, precisely at that moment when we first awaken to what we are, what chance would we have at all? I heard Ben saying, “He made me a queer.” A child’s sexual innocence isn’t moral, it’s literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context in which pleasure alternates with brutality, until the two begin to merge. Who wouldn’t want to kill that horror? Was that what Ben had done?

  I walked on, aware of my reflection in the dark glass of the building next to me. Someone was approaching. I smelled him before I saw him—a stooped-over black man with a soiled kerchief around the frayed explosion of his hair. He looked up at me with bloodshot, hopeful eyes. It was the panhandler I’d given money to weeks earlier. John? No, James.

  “Spare change, mister,” he said blocking my way. He looked at me without recognition.

  “Hello, James,” I said.

  “I don’ know you,” he replied, alarmed.

  “Yes, you do. My name’s Henry, same as your brother up at Folsom.”

  Slowly, he smiled, revealing yellowing stumps of teeth.

  “Oh, yeah. Sure, Henry. You got some spare change for me, Henry?”

  I reached for my wallet and he put out a grimy hand. Suddenly, glass was blowing up behind us. I dropped the wallet as something hard went through my shoulder. In the same second, with shocking speed, James crashed into me, knocking me to the ground, glass flying around us. “Jesus, Jesus,” he moaned. Then there was silence, total, dark silence. My shoulder throbbed. I worked my head around to see blood gushing through my sweater. James lay on me like a stone, his face inches from my face. He wasn’t breathing.

  I heard a siren and panicked. Morrow was coming. Vega. I’d been set up. The dead man pressed against me reeking of booze and piss as his bladder emptied. Blood and urine seeped through his clothes. I began to push him off me, then froze. What if they were still there? The siren got closer, and I heard footsteps running toward us. The blood kept coming from my wound. I laid my head against the pavement and closed my eyes and thought, first of Josh and then of Ben. Ben had set me up. All my fault, I thought, and slipped into the black.

  25

  I WAS WRONG ABOUT BEN. He was waiting for me at the bar in the bank building. Hearing the sirens, he’d gone out to investigate. He saw what happened, figured it was Morrow and turned himself in to a fellow cop at the scene. He’d figured right about Morrow.

  Morrow was the second person to die that night, after James Harrison. After he shot at us he kept driving, catching the I-80 east, toward Reno. A CHP car clocked him at eighty-five miles an hour and tried to flag him down. When he wouldn’t pull over, the chippies gave chase. About twenty miles out of Los Robles, Morrow went through the median strip divider, skidded across four lanes of oncoming traffic and ran into the side of a granite hill. That wasn’t what killed him, though. What killed him was the bullet hole through his head. Self-inflicted, the chippies swore.

  Of all the characters in the cast of People v. Windsor, Morrow was the one I’d known the least and yet it was he who haunted me. I’d think about the two photographs I’d seen of him, pictured in a high school yearbook as a teenage jock and then, fifteen years later, with the kids in the Police Athletic League. Here was a man who had bleakly shouldered the blame for what had been done to him and spent his life in expiation. Had we ever been able to talk, I believe we would have understood each other.

  I never did get to have my chat with Ben Vega. He was represented by a public defender in the criminal case against him for McKay’s murder. He laid the blame on Morrow and, for whatever reason, maybe just to get the thing off the books, maybe because he believed in him, the DA let him plead to voluntary manslaughter, for a five-year term at Folsom. I’d written him a couple of times, but my letters had gone unanswered.

  Meanwhile, the man everyone wanted in prison was free. The charges against Paul were dismissed, of course. Two weeks later he filed a suit against the city for conspiracy to violate his civil rights and a raft of other causes of action. Bob Clayton represented him. After a last appearance for the dismissal I didn’t talk to Paul again. He seemed to harbor a resentment against me and I think he blamed me for not having figured things out earlier. I didn’t lose much sleep over the loss of his friendship. I did have some problems with the thought that he might try to harass Ruth again so, before I left Los Robles, I put her in touch with a lawyer who got a permanent injunction against Paul, preventing him from coming within a thousand feet of her or Carlos.

  Peter was able to obtain a copy of the coroner’s inquest report on Sara. I went over the report carefully and could find no reason to quarrel with the conclusion of accidental death.

  And that was how matters stood on People v. Windsor the third day of December, two months after I’d closed my file. My office was in chaos, half of it packed into boxes and the rest waiting to be packed. With Peter Stein coming into the firm, we’d had to find more space, so we were moving upstairs. Still, move or no move, there was work to be done and I was at my desk, poring over a toxicology report. I made a note and felt a twinge in my shoulder, a souvenir of my last encounter with Detective Morrow.

  “Mail call,” Emma said, flopping a stack of mail on my desk. “If you’d take the day off, Henry, the movers could get their work done a lot faster.”

  “I’m leaving in a few minutes,” I replied without looking up.

  I heard the chair squeak as she sat down. “You are?”

  I looked up at her, smiling. “Josh goes in for some kind of new treatment. I’m taking him to the doctor.”

  She smiled pro forma and then, with worried eyes, asked, “Is he okay?”

  “His T-cell count dropped again. This is all preventive. He was pretty cranky when I talked to him. That’s a good sign.”

  She didn’t look convinced. “Well tell him—” She stopped. “Tell him I care.”

  “He knows, and so do I. Thank you.”

  After she’d gone, I couldn’t get back to work. I studied the picture of Josh I kept on my desk—who knew what the movers would make out of that. It wasn’t a great picture; he was in midlaugh and, consequently, a little blurred. But he looked joyously happy and it was impossible to believe that anything bad could happen to him.

  I picked up the mail, tossing the solicitations, the offers of computers and fax machines and luxurious office space in Century City. Emma had separated out the bills a
nd fees—we’d go over those later. That left the usual handwritten pleas from the imprisoned asking me to take on some hopeless appeal or complaining, for pages and pages, about the quality of my representation. These would all have to be read, and some of them answered. Finally, there were two oversized envelopes. Christmas cards, I thought, tearing open the first one, which had no return address.

  The cover featured a reproduction of a medieval painting of the Nativity. The slender Virgin cradled a child who looked at her with ancient, knowing eyes. I opened the card: “May your holidays be blessed,” it said, and was signed, “Elena.” I weighed the card in my hand. It was as light and flimsy as the bond between my sister and me. But it was palpable, real. I set it aside and picked up the other envelope. This one came from the federal penitentiary at Lompoc and bore, in accordance with prison rules, a stamped “Previously Opened.” The return addressee was prisoner number 2136534592-X, or, as he had been christened, Mark Lewis Windsor.

  Mark. He’d done less well by the criminal justice system than Ben Vega. Indicted by a federal jury on charges arising from his looting of Pioneer Savings & Loan. The best he could do was a plea and eight years. He’d be out in two and a half if all went well. The envelope contained a cheap dime-store Christmas card with Santa on the cover. A folded sheet of plain white paper slipped from inside the card.

  “Dear Hank,” it began in the backhanded, slanting script I recognized from a long time ago. “Justice has been done, ha-ha, but maybe you already heard about that. I should’ve taken you up on your offer to defend me. This place isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it’s bad enough. The drill is, up at 6, slop for breakfast, work (I’m a clerk), lunch, some time in the yard, dinner, lights out at 9. My module’s all so-called white collar criminals so it’s pretty low-key. I’m getting to be friends with an ex-congressman. That kind of place. I’m getting in shape, lifting weights, they call it ‘driving’ around here. Pretty soon I’ll be strong enough to break a hole through the walls. (Note to the censor: that’s a joke.)”

  I smiled and continued reading. “Still have too much time on my hands. I do a lot of thinking. If I had thought this much in high school I would’ve passed trig, but I never did catch on, even with your help. What I’m thinking is, maybe this is a break after all. It was like everything was out of control out there and it was all going down. I don’t know, sometimes I feel like that, other times, I don’t. You were a good friend to me, Hank. I just wanted to tell you that. Take care, Mark.” Below his signature was a “P.S. Lompoc’s not that far from LA.”

  I put the sheet down. He never did know how to ask for things directly. Well, Lompoc really wasn’t that far from LA, and I made a note on my calendar to call about visiting hours.

  Restless suddenly, I bolted up from my desk and put my jacket on. I walked out of my office as if I actually knew where I was going.

  “Are you leaving, Henry?” Emma asked as I passed her desk.

  “Yeah, I won’t be back today,” I said. “You pack it in too, if you want.”

  A ledger opened on her desk, piles of invoices and bills around her, she smirked. “Sure.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “You’re not ready,” I said, entering the bedroom, where Josh stood shirtless and with a sweater in either hand.

  “I never know what to wear to the doctor’s,” he said. “This one.” He held up a pink sweater. “Is it too gay?” He held up the other sweater, a black turtleneck. “Too butch?”

  “Wear anything, Josh.”

  He smiled. “I guess you’re right. They’ll make me take it off anyway and put on one of those gowns.” He pulled the pink sweater over his head. “How come hospital gowns let your butt hang out, Henry? Don’t they know it’s hard enough to be there in the first place without walking around mooning everyone?”

  “We’re going to be late.”

  He sat down at the edge of the bed and tied his shoelaces. “I hate hospitals.”

  I sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulder. “Worried?”

  He sat up. “Can’t you tell? I’m babbling like an idiot.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  He held my hand and we sat in silence for a moment. “I called your sister.”

  “You called Elena? Why?”

  “To wish her a Merry Christmas.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said thank you,” he replied, “and wished me a Merry Christmas back. I told her I was Jewish and she said, so was Jesus.” He smiled at me. “I like her, Henry, but of course I would. She is your sister.” He took a deep breath. “I’m ready now.”

  He got up and held out his hands to me and pulled me up to my feet from the bed, like a child.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Katherine V. Forrest, Jed Mattes, Larry Ashmead, and Eamon Dolan for sweating this one out with me

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Henry Rios Mysteries

  CHAPTER ONE

  I STOOD ON THE sidewalk in front of City Hall in downtown Los Angeles on a warm April morning thinking of my father, who had been dead for a long time, and “Dragnet,” his favorite TV series. City Hall was engraved on the badge that Sergeant Friday flashed weekly in his dour pursuit of law and order, and my father never missed a single episode. He was a big believer in law and order. “Dragnet” fueled his black-and-white vision of the world as consisting of humorless machos like Sergeant Friday and himself battling the forces of evil. In my father’s expansive view this included most Anglos, all blacks, many Mexicans, priests, Jews, lawyers, doctors, people on welfare, the rich, and everyone under forty. He was a great and impartial hater; anyone different from him became an object of his contempt. Homosexuals, had he allowed that such creatures existed, would certainly have qualified.

  As I started up the steps to City Hall I wondered whether my father would have hated me more because I was homosexual or a lawyer. Then I reminded myself that he had never needed a reason to hate me. It was enough that I was not him. For my own part, I no longer hated my father, though, admittedly, this had become easier after his death. Forgiveness was still a problem.

  I took the steps too fast and stopped to catch my breath when I reached the top. I was forty, and I found myself thinking of my father more often now than in all the years since his death. He was ferociously alive in my memory where all the old battles still raged on. Sometimes I had to remind myself not only that he was dead, but that I had been there. He had died in a brightly lit hospital room, slapping away my consoling hand and screaming at my mother, “Mas luz, mas luz.” It had never been clear to me whether he was asking for more light, or crying out in fear at a light he perceived that the rest of us could not see. He had died with that mystery, as with so many others.

  I entered the rotunda of City Hall, a grave, shadowy place, its walls made of great blocks of limestone. Three limp flags hung high above a circular floor of inlaid marble that depicted a Spanish galleon. Around the domed ceiling were eight figures in tile representing the attributes of municipal government: Public Service, Health, Trust, Art, Protection, Education, Law, and Government. I searched in vain for the other four: Expedience, Incompetence, Corruption, and Avarice. Undoubtedly I would encounter them in the hearing I was there to attend.

  Six weeks earlier a bill had been introduced in the state senate by Senator Agustin Peña who represented East Los Angeles. Peña’s bill made it a crime to “actively participate in any criminal street gang with knowledge that its members engage or have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity.” Despite its abridgment of the First Amendment right to free association, the bill had been expected to clear the legislature easily. Even though passage was a foregone conclusion, the senate committee before whom the bill was pending had scheduled a public hearing in Los Angeles.

  The committee’s motives became clear when a Los Angeles Times columnist pointed out that the date of the hearing was also the last day for mayoral candidates to
file for the upcoming June primary. The columnist cynically concluded that Senator Peña planned to use the occasion to announce his entry into the race, positioning himself as the law-and-order candidate. When asked about it, Peña, who had been preparing for months to run, coyly declined comment.

  A few days later, in mid-March, Peña ran over an old man in Sacramento, killing him. At the time, the Senator’s blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit for drunk driving. He was charged with gross vehicular manslaughter. Immediately thereafter, he had entered a drug-and-alcohol rehab called SafeHouse, and had not been heard from since. Two days ago, his office had announced that Peña would be appearing at the hearing to make a statement.

  The hearing had become the hottest ticket in town. I entered the city council chamber, where the hearing was being held to a packed house. The Minicams were out in force representing TV stations as far north as San Francisco. Their presence reminded me that Peña was more than simply a local politician. He was perhaps the ranking Latino officeholder in the state, a symbol of the political aspirations of millions and, until his accident, the person most likely to become the first mayor of Los Angeles of Mexican descent in a hundred and fifty years.

  Although I had met Peña occasionally over the years, most of what I knew about him came from his campaign brochures and the newspapers. The former still portrayed him as the lean idealist who had marched in the dust of Delano with Cesar Chavez a quarter-century earlier. In the latter, he was depicted as a powerful patronage politician. Both accounts agreed that he was effective at his job. Over the years, however, he had become in a vague but unmistakable manner tainted by his success, careless about appearances, arrogant in the pursuit of his objectives. The work shirts and jeans had given way to expensive suits tailored to conceal the growing thickness of his body. From my perspective he was no worse than most politicians, but certainly no better and I might even have voted for him.