“You kept a picture of him all these years?”
“Not exactly. It was in with Benny’s stuff, and his wife was gonna throw it out when he died. There was all this stuff she was just taking to the trash. Didn’t mean anything to her, you know? Doesn’t mean all that much to me, either, but it was the most important stuff in the world to Benny, so I rescued it.”
I stand up, feeling disconnected from my body. Feeling like I’m in a dream or a movie or something else besides my life, which seems to be all I can feel just now. I go over to the desk in the corner and open the top drawer. There’s a policeman’s shield and a couple of fishing lures or flies or whatever you call them, and a sportsman’s knife of some sort, and a photo of Leonard DiMitri. I know it’s him because he’s in a policeman’s uniform, full dress blues, and he’s wearing a name tag. And I recognize him, in that funny half recognition you sometimes get with a face you’ve never seen before. Because the parts I recognize are me. Granted, we also look a lot different. Of course we do. He’s a white guy and I’m as much Asian and black as I am white, but looks go deeper than that. People go deeper than that. There’s the jawline, and the brow. And something around the mouth.
I pick it up. And I know I’m not giving it back.
“I need this,” I say. “I need to keep this.”
“Sure, whatever,” Chet says. “My daughter’ll just throw it out when I’m gone.”
I sit down by his bed again, noticing that my hands are shaking just the tiniest bit. I just keep looking at the photo. Neither one of us says anything for what seems like a long time.
Then I say, “If Pearl did what you say she did…If she killed—” I almost said “my father.” I almost said “If she killed my father.” And I don’t want to say that. It feels like a confidence, a private thing. Something I don’t want this dying man to know about me. Something I’m not ready to share with anybody, so especially not with Chet. “If she killed the man in this picture, she had a reason why she did what she did. I’m not saying she was justified, that killing’s ever justified. Just that if you could go back and get inside her head and know everything, then you’d know why. Because I know there must have been a why. Because Pearl wouldn’t do a thing like that for no reason. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
I look up from the photo, into Chet’s eyes. For the first time, I see emotion there. A positive emotion, like he’s leaning in to me. Striving for some kind of closeness.
“Of course I do,” he says.
“You do?” Once again something feels like it’s happened too easily.
“Sure. What do you think I was trying to explain to you about Benny?”
My brain shuts down and I decide I can’t think about these things anymore, at least not now. I’m tired from this.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“I thought we were clear on that.”
“I’m talking about her…remains. Where are they?”
“Oh,” he says. “That. Out in the middle of nowhere. Halfway to hell and gone.”
“So you don’t know? Or you won’t say?”
“I don’t know that I can even remember. It was a long time ago.”
“You didn’t go by there four or five times that year like you did with my house?”
“No. No, not there. Didn’t wanta go back there.”
We fall quiet, and I feel a trace of anger forming. Because I wanted two things from him and he only gave me one. I think it’s been waiting, wanting to form. But then he dropped this picture in my hand and changed the subject. But now, with that anger, I feel better.
Chet breaks the still. “I was sitting in the car that night for what felt like forever. Looking around. I can still see the spot like it was yesterday. I can see the angle of the power lines, and the way the road curved. But I could never tell you how to get there. I know what route we took to go up into the mountains. But I don’t know the name of it. I just know the spot where we turned off. Maybe if my life depended on it I could even poke around and find it. The general place, anyway, maybe not the exact spot. But only if I was out there, you know?”
“Okay then,” I say. “Let’s go.”
He looks at me blankly for a second. “You’re kidding.”
“Not at all.”
“I’m a dying guy here.”
“If you were willing to let me strangle you to death, you can hardly argue with me taking you for a ride. The ride is much less likely to be fatal.”
“Except my daughter’ll kill me.”
“Okay, fine,” I say. “We’ll go with the strangulation.”
“Get my coat out of the closet,” Chet says.
We’ve been cruising around out here in the mountains for more than two hours now, Chet’s wheelchair in the backseat. Chet chewing on his nails even though there’s nothing left to chew on, really. Half the time on roads that may not even be roads. More like fire roads or something.
The sky is heavy and dark, like it wants to rain again. It’s close to the same time of year that Pearl disappeared. We’re coming up on an anniversary shortly.
“What do you think?” I say. I’m starting to get impatient. I’m starting to feel like we’ve covered the same territory more than once.
“Must be further up,” he says. He sounds distracted. “Unless we passed it already.”
I slam on the brakes and skid a few feet in the dirt. Chet flies forward against the restraints of his seat belt like a sock doll.
“You’re not really going to help me here, are you, Chet?”
He looks in my direction but not into my eyes. Then away again, out the window, to the same mountain scenery we’ve been seeing for hours. Rocks and scrubby trees. “No, I’m trying, really.”
But I know he’s lying from the way he avoids my eyes.
I sigh and rub my eyes and sit back with my eyes closed, admitting defeat. Knowing he came out here to get me off his back, not to help me. Not to give me what I need. I have the picture of my father in my shirt pocket. I can feel the stiffness of it. I try to focus on that instead. But two parents doesn’t seem like asking too much. Especially since they’re both long dead.
“I have to get out,” Chet says. He’s talking like a kindergartner asking to go to the boys’ room. “I have to have a smoke.”
“Bullshit. You’re already dying from that crap. Why do you need to keep doing it?”
“You never smoked, huh? I can tell. Please. Really. It’s important.”
I sigh again. Then I get out and pull his wheelchair out of the back of my car. Unfold it and bring it around to the passenger side. Help him out. Help him fall into it. He falls heavily for a man who weighs near nothing at all.
I lean on the car, and he takes a pack out of his coat pocket and lights up. Pulls a deep hit. When he releases it, a cloud of smoke flies in my direction and I wave it away again. Go around him to stand on the upwind side. We look out over the valley together for a long time.
“It’s gonna be real hard on my family,” he says. “When all this hits the fan.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Chet.”
“You know,” he says. “Sure you know.”
I don’t argue with him. I wonder if he’s fully cognizant. If he’s in his right mind.
“I have to pee,” he says.
“Okay, fine. Go pee.”
“Not that easy. You gotta help me.”
“You’re not serious, right?”
“No, I mean it. I can’t get my chair over those rocks. At least help me get behind that scrub. Some kind of privacy.”
“Chet, there’s no one within ten miles of here. I’ll look the other way.”
“A man’s got his dignity,” he says. He sounds like he’s crying, or just at the edge of it. He swipes at his nose with the back of his coat sleeve.
So I wheel his chair over the rocks and around the scrub.
“Help me stand up,�
�� he says.
“Oh hell, Chet, can’t you just sort of turn sideways?”
“I’ll piss all over myself if I try. Come on. Just do this one thing.”
I lift him out of the chair and we stand together; I’m holding him up with one arm around his shoulder. I look the other way, off toward the valley. Watch the storm clouds piling up. Thinking they look the way I feel. Dark and building.
Then I wheel him back to the car. Pile him in.
“Okay,” I say. “I give up. I’ll take you back.”
And I turn the car around on that tight little unpaved road and head back.
Three, four, five miles later, he shouts out, startling me.
“Stop right here!”
I slam on the brakes, and we sit there a moment in silence.
“Is this the spot?” I ask.
“Pretty close to it, yeah.”
“Did you know that on the way out?”
“Yeah.”
I pull on the hand brake and shut down the engine.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just that I know you’re gonna go straight to the authorities with this, and they’ll dig up this whole damn mountainside, and I was just thinking how awful this is gonna be for my kids, even if I’m already gone.”
I breathe a minute and then say, “I wasn’t actually planning to try to dig her up.”
“Oh,” he says. “You weren’t?”
“I wasn’t thinking that way, no.”
“Okay. Why then? I mean, why not?”
I’m not sure how to explain. Should I tell him how I feel about the thought of a backhoe or even a handheld shovel slicing through the tiny vertebrae of her neck or spine? Or just try to explain that the body is not the heart of the issue here? That it’s more about a reverence for the last place on earth visited by her soul. About my wanting to visit that place, too.
About marking the spot.
But it’s all hazy and hard to pin down, so I just say, “I’m not sure how to explain.”
“Get the chair,” he says. “I’ll show you as best I can.”
I wheel him as far as possible across the rocks, but the chair gets hung up over and over, and it’s getting hard on both of us. Finally I lift him up onto my back and carry him piggyback. Every now and then one bony hand appears beside my head, pointing the way. I feel as if I’m in the presence of ghosts. Plural.
“Stop here,” he says after a mile or so.
I set him down, and he folds onto himself in the dirt. Looks around.
“It’s either the side of this hill or the side of that one,” he says. “I’m not jacking you around. I’m really trying. But things change, you know? Erosion, and trees fall down, and things don’t look just exactly the same. But if you’re not really digging, just wanting to see the place, it’s right around here somewhere. Over there or over there. I’m sorry I can’t say closer than that. I really tried.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s okay.”
I look around and breathe. Memorize the site in every possible way, so I can always find it again. Much the way I’m sure Chet did that night. I raise my face to the wind and feel for signs of Pearl around here somewhere, but there’s no one here but us. I’m sure he’s right—I believe this is the right place. But it’s been washed clean now. The past has moved aside.
“You know,” Chet says, “that thing you said about how if you knew everything about somebody, then you’d understand? I think that might be true of everything. Everybody. I think if you walked every minute of somebody’s life in his shoes then everything he did would make sense to you, even the bad things. That’s why I left the force. Went out on a stress pension. When you stop seeing differences between them and you, you gotta quit and go home.”
I pick him up onto my back, and we begin the long walk to the car.
By the time we get to his house, he’s out cold. Head back on the seat, mouth open. Worn down from the trip, I suppose.
I pull up in front of his house and I’m struck with an awful thought. I pick up one of his wrists and feel around for a pulse. I’m not sure what I feel or if I feel anything at all, and my gut turns icy and tingly. But after a second I find it. A pulse. Weak, but there. I beep my horn lightly, and his daughter comes out and takes over. Opens out the wheelchair, lifts him back in. He never wakes up.
She turns a horrible look in my direction. Holds a hand in front of his nose feeling for breath. I can tell when she gets it. When she realizes he’s just sleeping. The look softens, and she turns her eyes on me in a whole different way.
“Get what you wanted?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think so. I’m not really sure what I wanted. But I got something.”
While I’m driving back up the coast I look at my watch. I’ll be about ten minutes late to pick up the kids at school. So I step on it, hoping to get back some of that time. My wife is home with the new baby, and besides, we have only the one car. They’ll wait for me. They’re good kids. They know I wouldn’t leave them waiting long.
I wonder if I should tell them what I learned today. Mitchell is at that age where he jumps from the middle of the room all the way onto his bed and pretends it’s just a game. Says he does it for no reason in particular. He doesn’t know he didn’t invent the fear of something under the bed. That it didn’t start with him.
Pearl still every now and then crawls into bed with us, claiming a bad dream. We all have these bogeymen, from the time we’re old enough to reason, they just don’t have any faces or names. We’re all scared of something but we can’t quite put our finger on what. Today I looked over my shoulder and saw mine. Memorized faces and took names.
What I can’t figure out is whether I should be comforted or terrified by what I discovered. There is no bogeyman. Just a bunch of flawed humans, some more flawed than others, but more or less cut from the same human mold.
MITCH, age 50: the marker
It’s raining on the top of this mountain. We’re huddled up here in a tent, hoping it will pass. It’s dark, and a little windy. I wanted to put off this trip until after the storm, but it’s an anniversary of sorts. It’s the day Pearl left Leonard at my house and disappeared, with twenty-five years added on.
And it’s the rainy season, just like it was then.
I was thinking maybe leave the kids at home, but Leonard promised, and he hates to break a promise to them. Or to anybody else, for that matter. And a different night was out of the question. He didn’t say it was because of the significance of the date. He didn’t have to. Some things are just there, and anybody with eyes can see them.
All he said was, “Worst that can happen, they’ll get wet.”
And it’s true, really. Why does the rain trouble me more in a tent than it would in a house? I can’t even say.
So I called in sick at school, they called up a substitute teacher, and here we are.
Mitchy is out like a light but Pearl is sitting up with us, in the light of the lantern, leaning against Leonard’s side.
Now and then she looks up and watches shadows flicker across the inside dome of the tent. You can see her listening, hearing the wind buffet the fabric in irregular gusts. It’s just that right amount of fear. Just enough for a kid to handle, providing some part of the kid is in direct contact with some part of the parent.
“I was just thinking,” Leonard says. “I was just thinking how close I came to missing all this.”
“That crossed my mind, too,” I say.
He looks down at Pearl, who looks up into his eyes to see what she’s done right all of a sudden.
He cups her chin in one of his hands. “I mean, not only would I not have gotten a chance to see this face, but nobody else in the world would have, either.”
Pearl makes a face. Crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out. A way of diffusing the compliment.
“I stand corrected,” Leonard says. “The world might’ve gotten by.”
After Pearl is asleep, her back up against her br
other, I ask Leonard a question I’ve been meaning to ask.
“Did you want to hurt him? Maybe just some part of you? Some little instinct out for revenge? Or maybe just justice?”
I ask because in the past I’ve noticed things I thought were missing in Leonard, but they were only delayed.
We sit still and listen to the rain hammer on the fabric of the tent dome. We’re still dry in here, though.
“That’s what got Pearl. Somebody out for justice.”
“That might not stop you from wanting to, though.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t want to. I thought I would. But it just wasn’t there.”
“What if you had met the other guy?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”
“He killed your mother.”
“Yeah, and my mother killed my father,” he says. “And I still have to believe that she had her reasons. How can I hate the guy who killed my mother without hating the woman who killed my father? It’s almost exactly the same crime.”
I lie down. In time Leonard does the same. Our hands are clasped behind our heads.
Leonard says, “Leonard Devereaux Kowalski Sung DiMitri. And to think I started life as the boy with no last name.”
“And I was so excited when I found one for you.”
“Well, back then it was a pretty big deal. I mean, it seemed like an issue. I took it hard. I thought I didn’t belong anywhere. Never occurred to me it would turn out I belong a lot of different places at once. All over the place. Right now I belong right here. On this mountain. Thanks for coming up here with me, Mitch.”
After ten or fifteen minutes goes by, I look over and see that he’s fallen asleep. His face looks young in the soft lantern light. More the way I knew him as a boy. Another one of those faces the world would have been poorer without.
I blow out the lantern and try to get some sleep myself.
When I wake up it’s nearly light, and the rain has stopped. The children are asleep beside me, but not Leonard.
I open the tent flap.
He’s about a hundred feet away, standing on a slope of tumbled rocks, facing away from me. His shirt is off, and he’s standing out in the cold in nothing but his jeans, his arms straight out from his sides, the tattoo visible even from here. There’s a mist, a sort of wet, heavy fog hanging over the mountain, and Leonard is standing on the approximate site of his mother’s grave, and he is a cross.
Love in the Present Tense Page 20