It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

  “You won’t feel much of nothing if you got her killed,” Robert said.

  “What is Lou going to say about our dance with Lincoln and his friends?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, the anger draining out of his voice. “He made money off them. He’s probably going to want your fucking head.”

  I said, “He’ll have to get in line.”

  * * *

  I slept for a time in the passenger seat of Robert’s Jeep. The tiredness hit me suddenly, the way it had after I’d shot my father and ran away. It’s strange how we can see ourselves fall into bad habits and claim we want to change them, and yet never really make any effort to do so. I needed time alone again. That was all. I’d never realized why before, but it was simple. By myself I could be myself. But I couldn’t leave town yet. My mother needed me, didn’t she? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe I just wanted her to need me—need me to listen about her hopes and her fears, need me to be patient, to learn, to become a man like my dad, need me to make her proud and bring honor to our family name—but I think she stopped needing any of that stuff when she saw something shift inside me, when I had become more recluse and odd, at twelve years old. I’d never really considered how that would make her feel because I didn’t understand what had happened either. I have trouble remembering what I thought about back then, as a child, that made me want to give up on people, to set myself apart as an outsider.

  Robert said, “Lou is going to kill us.”

  I opened my eyes and stared up at the clouds. “Tell him it was just me.”

  “I won’t be able to lie to him.”

  “You better not go back there then.”

  “I have to,” he said. “I have to help pay Harley’s debt.”

  “What happens to her debt if she dies?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “That’s mighty kind of you.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  He drove back to the gated community. He parked on the road in front of Fat Lou’s house and climbed out. He said, “Take care of my Jeep.”

  “I will,” I said, surprised that he was going to let me borrow it.

  Robert asked, “Where are you going to go now?”

  “I’m going to check in on my mom. Maybe Harley has been by the house. Maybe Lincoln and those assholes didn’t know where she was.”

  “I’d like to believe that,” Robert said.

  “So, believe it. It’s not that hard. She could have been over at a friend’s.”

  “She doesn’t really have friends,” he said. “I don’t think she can trust anybody.”

  “I can’t say I blame her,” I said.

  Robert patted the door. He said, “Let me know if you hear anything.”

  “Let me know if Fat Lou castrates you.”

  “That’s not funny,” he said.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  I waved at him and turned the Jeep around in the wide road. Robert was standing by the gate, his hands around the bars as if he were a prisoner, as I left him to his fate. I tried to drive the speed limit. The wind began to blow. My eyes stung. I wondered what would really happen between Lou and Robert. My best guess was that Robert would serve the rest of his life working for Lou trying to pay back Harley’s debt, and the potential loss of drug money. It beat some of Lou’s associates taking a machete to the legs. Although that wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities either. Lou might have made Robert all golly-gee with his “Robert’s like my son bit,” but I didn’t buy that horseshit.

  Robert was loyal and wasn’t ambitious. That’s what Lou liked about him.

  Those kinds of men were hard to come by in a world where money was king.

  Before I knew it, I was pulling onto my mother’s street. There was a hollow pang in the pit of my stomach as I pulled up by her driveway and Angela’s Tahoe wasn’t sitting there. I knew I’d never see her again, that it might be her father who ended up killing me, and it made me a little sentimental again, about what she and I had once had, and how I’d thrown it all away when I’d chosen to shame my father and things had gotten too far out of hand too quickly.

  I parked in the driveway and sat there a moment. I had hoped that Harley had stopped by like I’d presented as a possibility to Robert, mostly so he wouldn’t worry too much. I ran a hand back through my hair and looked at my clothes. My shirt was torn from where Lincoln had grabbed a hold of me and knocked me back through the door of the club. My shorts were dirty, my knees scraped. It felt like there were slivers in my back but I didn’t know how that could be. I wiped my eyes and released a long breath and climbed out of the Jeep feeling as if I were seventy years old. I looked at the house I’d grown up in. I wasn’t sure what my mom planned to do with it once she died. I didn’t know if she had a will. I didn’t know much of anything and that lack of knowledge made me feel more like a bad son than anything.

  I went to the door. My dad’s service pistol was beneath my shirt. I hadn’t seen Shane at the club, or some of the other bikers who had been at Harley’s house, and I wondered if any of them knew where our mother lived. What would be Harley’s reason in telling them? It wasn’t like they were going to all come by for tea and to talk about the way things used to be better than they were now.

  I knocked and when no one answered, I tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it and called out to let her know who it was. When she didn’t answer, I stepped into the foyer and shut the door quietly behind me because I knew how tired she was from battling the pain, and she might be resting. I told myself I’d sit in the living room for a while and not think at all, that would be for the best, but I also figured once I was in there I’d see my mother smashing my gift on the floor again, or I’d find some remnant of the glass globe that I’d missed upon cleaning up the mess.

  But my mom was in her rocker in the corner of the living room. Harley wasn’t kneeling near the chair, her head in our mother’s lap, crying like a child, like she had been last night, although I wish she had been because it was better to believe my sister was alive and hurting than dead and feeling nothing.

  I sat on the couch. The house still smelled of the cookies Harley had made the day before. The street outside was quiet. I couldn’t hear much of anything. I took a few slow breaths and looked at my mother. I couldn’t hear her breathing. Her hands were shut tightly in her lap. Her lips were a bluish color, her face downcast, her eyes closed so intensely that it must have hurt. I thought she might be awake and ignoring me, holding her breath and counting to a hundred in her head, figuring I’d be gone by the time she finished, when she’d allow herself to breathe again.

  I stood up and crossed over to her. I said, softly, “Mom?”

  I squeezed her shoulder. It felt like squeezing a piece of granite. I put my hand near her nostrils and held it there for at least two minutes. I shook my head and knelt by her chair and stroked her knee. I said, in a thick voice, “You don’t have to worry about the pain anymore.”

  It seemed she should have gone in peace, but looking at her, at the deep, anguished lines in her face, and knowing her history, what she had endured with her husband, and what she’d endured with her strange son, she had gone out with years of suffering. She didn’t deserve that. I cupped my hand over hers and said, “It’s only death, and we all die alone, there’s nothing to cry about…”

  But I cried there in her living room and I held her hand and I felt like a young boy, helpless without his mother. I whispered, “Forgive me. Please forgive me.”

  * * *

  After sitting with my mother’s corpse in the living room for twenty minutes, I grew restless. I went to her bedroom and found my father’s clothes still in their closet. I grabbed a pair of khaki pants and a white polo shirt and changed in front of the closet, kicking my old soiled clothing aside. It was strange wearing my father’s clothes. It was strange how well they fit.

  I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, so I went into the kitchen and cooked a
turkey potpie and sat at the table alone, not tasting the food at all. I drank a glass of water that stank like sour eggs. I pushed myself from the table and forced myself to stand, trying to decide what to do. Harley should know of our mother’s passing, but I had no way to tell her. I thought about leaving my mother there for her to find, but if Harley was gone too, then there wasn’t any point in letting our mother rot in the living room until someone found her. I grabbed a phone book out of the drawer and found Angela’s number. It didn’t surprise me that it was listed, but it did surprise me that I had such a strong urge to call her. I grabbed the cordless phone from next to the coffeepot.

  When she answered and I told her who it was calling, she said, “Did you have anything to do with that mess in South Point?”

  “My mom is dead,” I said, carrying the phone into the living room. I sat on the couch. My limbs felt heavy. I said, “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard, James. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s probably for the best, right? Now she doesn’t have to suffer anymore.”

  “No, she’s suffered enough,” she said.

  She paused a moment, and then said, “Do you want me to come over there?”

  “You used to come over here quite a bit,” I said, looking back over our teens, how she and her father would come and visit and the men would talk and the mothers would hide in the kitchen or complain at or tease the men, and me and Angela would sneak off to the backyard or upstairs to listen to music and make out and find something in each other that we feared we’d never find in anyone else. Nobody realizes how desperate kids can be at times. We forget when we grow up although we carry our desperation with us and tend to hide it. There was a part of me that had grown sick of hiding it and I thought that she might be the only one who would listen, if not understand.

  Angela said, “I can be there in twenty minutes, James. You haven’t called 911, have you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll do it for you and act like I found her.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “You okay?”

  “Peachy,” I lied. “I’ll see you when you get here.”

  She hung up. She said twenty minutes but the way she drove it’d probably be half that. I looked at my mother’s knotted hands. Cocked my head. Noticed a small sliver of paper sticking out of the edge of her palm. I had to pry her fingers open. I picked up the business card. It had Don Gray’s name on it. I wondered if she called him while she was dying to tell him that it was okay to come after me. Or maybe she called him to ask him to forget it, let the past lie and don’t dig it up. I didn’t know. My mother hadn’t clued me in. Then I wondered, a bit paranoid, if Don Gray had gotten sick of waiting for her to pass on and he’d come over and assisted her, leaving his card in her hand as he strangled her to let me know that he was the one to steal her last breath.

  No, that was ludicrous. He’d always loved my mom. She must have called him when she knew she was close to the end there, and she felt alone and needed to hear a familiar voice because neither one of her children were around.

  It made me feel awful to think like that.

  I went outside and crossed the road and knocked on Mr. Dubois’ door. He answered, looked me up and down and said, “You’re a friend of Ms. Jackson’s, aren’t you?”

  “Something like that,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder at my mom’s house and said, “Have you seen anybody over there today besides me and the young lady in the Tahoe?”

  “She’s had a rough time,” he said, leaning forward. He smelled like tuna fish and crackers and old tobacco. “Her son, I forget his name, he’s been gone so long now, he did a horrible thing to that woman.”

  “I heard,” I said. “I’m sure he’d tell her sorry if he could.”

  “Probably,” Mr. Dubois said. “Boys need their mothers. Even when they get as old as I am.” He smiled sadly and shook his head. “I still think about mine sometimes. I miss her. She was a good woman.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  He shook his head again, looked over my shoulder, and said, “There was a cop there earlier. Big, mean-looking guy. He looked familiar, but my eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Shaved head?”

  “That’s him. That was easy to determine.”

  “Did he leave in a hurry, or act like anything was wrong?”

  “Not that I could tell. Is something wrong?”

  “Not anymore,” I said. I thanked him and turned to walk back across the street when he called out for me to hold on a second. When I turned around, he was holding up his finger and disappeared back into his house. He came back out carrying jarred preserves, some type of grape jelly or something. “Would you drop this off over there for her? I know she doesn’t get out much, and my hips hurt so bad anymore that I don’t either.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll make sure she gets them.”

  He handed me the jar and said, “Only other person over there today was her daughter.”

  “Harley?” I said.

  “Yes. That’s her daughter.”

  “What time was she there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a half hour before you showed up again.”

  “Did she look okay?”

  He pointed at his eyes. “They’re horrible,” he said. “She seemed all right from what I could see. She’s turned into a beautiful young woman.” He blushed a little. He said, “I remember when she was a tiny child. They grow up fast. Then they never call. I complain, but I did the same to my folks.” His blush deepened. He held out his hand for me to shake, which I did, holding the jar in my free hand. He said, “Are you a friend of the family?”

  “I’m a friend of Harley’s. Just trying to help out,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good of you. I wish more young people did things like that, the world would be a better place.”

  “I agree, sir,” I said.

  I held up the jar and thanked him again. I crossed the road and, when I got back inside my mother’s house, found it hard to breathe. My vision seemed fuzzy and black dots swam around the hall. I blamed it on a lack of sleep. That sounded good.

  7

  I wanted to call Robert and tell him that Harley had been by the house but I didn’t want to disturb him if Fat Lou was chewing his ass. Plus I was afraid that Lou or someone else would listen in to the conversation and all that would accomplish is to create more grief. The smart choice, had I been that intelligent, would have been to leave town then, at that very moment, despite the fact that Angela was on her way over.

  I’d come home, my mother had died, Harley was still alive. I told myself I wasn’t wanted there, or needed there, but for some reason I couldn’t leave. It might have been that I still needed, somehow, in my own clumsy way, to attempt a true reconciliation with my sister, maybe as well with Angela. What I told her in her Tahoe had been the truth. I would die. I would not go to prison. But I didn’t want to die. Standing there in my mother’s living room, looking at her corpse in the rocker, I didn’t want anyone to die.

  I set the preserves Mr. Dubois had given me in my mother’s lap. I said, “People care about you, you know that? It should make you feel good that you never did anything to make waves…” And I wondered, perplexed, why some of us felt the compulsion to rock the boat, as I had done too many times without any thought to my intentions or the results of my actions.

  A few minutes later there was a soft knock on the front door. I glanced out the window, one hand on the upright piano, and saw Angela’s Tahoe parked in the driveway next to Robert’s Jeep. I let her in. She wrapped her arms around me like she had when we were teenagers and believed that our love would last forever. She squeezed me tightly. I fumbled to get my arms around her and it was awkward and I felt guilty for wanting to kiss her, to know that we were alive, while my mother sat decomposing in her favorite chair only fifteen feet away. When Angela released me, her eyes were red but she wasn’t crying. She must ha
ve done it on the drive over. She said, “Are you okay?”

  “It’s only death,” I said. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

  And upon saying that a memory I had somehow forgotten came back to me in such a blinding flash that I had to hold on to Angela’s arm. My father had told me many times—it’s only death, nothing to be afraid of—when we buried several pets, when I had an especially troublesome dream that woke me with tremors and cold sweats. He’d said it when anybody famous died and everybody seemed to mourn, as if part of the fabric of life they had been part of, had been brutally cut free from the patches they’d used to seal up their leaking hearts...

  It’s only death, nothing to be afraid of, when I was very small and the local pastor—from what I understood later, dealing with his own guilt for boozing and a brief tumble in bed with someone other than his wife—would preach about the fires of hell and of the demons who waited there for those who did not live an upright and honorable life. My dad had assured me, in a soft-mannered way, with his boyish grin—that I had also forgot about through the years—and he’d said, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. God doesn’t care half as much as people do about the kind of person you are. It’s only death. Like a long sleep, and maybe you wake up from it and find yourself right back where you started.”

  I looked at Angela’s face and she looked at mine, her brow wrinkled with worry.

  She held my hand and I didn’t want her to ever let go, yet knew she had to, that this might be the last time I’d ever see her.

  She said, “You’ve got to get out of town, James.”

  “I know I should, but I can’t.”