It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

  When the phone rang, it drew me away from the past and back to my present situation. I wanted more time to think about what I’d done to myself and the man buried six feet beneath me, but then I was thinking about Lincoln leaning over Derrick and killing him in front of me, and I said into Don Gray’s cell phone, “Robert?”

  But Angela answered. “You are making a lot of waves, James.”

  It figured she’d been working when the call came into dispatch. It wouldn’t have been difficult for her to find out whose residence the gunfire had originated at, or for her to decipher who the guilty parties were. I cleared my throat but couldn’t think of anything to say. Angela said, “Where are you?”

  “I’m sitting next to my dad’s grave.”

  “Stay there,” she said.

  “Are you going to turn me in?”

  “Just stay there, dumbass.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. She ended the call. I waited to hear more sirens in the distance, waited for the nearly silent tread of a dozen SWAT members working like ghosts through the grounds, and what then? What would I do when they told me to put my hands on top of my head? Would I comply? Or would I pull the pistol and start shooting? I didn’t know. I rarely knew what would happen at any moment, and it was starting to weigh on me. I could understand how people needed the routine of daily life if it was for nothing more than an easy comfort to know what came next.

  The cemetery was eerily quiet. I could hear my own heartbeat, solid and slow. Twenty minutes passed before Angela’s maroon SUV pulled into the cemetery and she drove up the narrow aisle to my dad’s grave, which made me wonder how many times she had visited it, either with her father, or possibly alone, in the back of her mind dreaming that she’d find me there saying I was sorry. I didn’t ever see that day coming.

  She got out and closed the door and sat on the tombstone next to me. She said without looking at me, “You really know how to dig your own grave.”

  “Everybody’s gotta be good at something,” I said.

  “You’re a real pro.”

  “Is your dad all right?”

  “He’s angry and when he finds you you’re screwed,” she said.

  I said, “I don’t blame your dad for wanting to kill me.”

  “You don’t?” she said, “I do. He’s supposed to uphold the law, not be a vigilante, or daydream about settling a score. Cops and revenge are a bad combo.”

  “I killed his best friend,” I said. “I would have killed your dad too if I’d had the chance.”

  “That’s not very comforting, James.”

  “Well, it’s the truth. I know I’m a monster in people’s eyes, but I can’t help but wonder how it is I can feel so normal. And the trouble is, as far as I can tell with other people, is that men who fear demons see demons everywhere. I speak from personal experience. I fear them and I see them.”

  Her heels thumped against the headstone she sat upon. She said, “Like people who are always worried they’ll be in a car wreck are eventually in a car wreck?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I just don’t know how I’m really any different than anybody else, but when I look in the mirror I do see something different. It’s like I’m not really there. But then I pay attention to those around me again and it’s like they’re not really there either. It’s confusing sometimes. They don’t seem any happier or worse off than I do, and they don’t seem any better or worse. We all just kind of seem the same, but I know we can’t be because they don’t do things that hurt other people, or at least not many of them do.”

  “I’ve known a lot of people,” she said, “even cops who have been worked up enough that if they went one step further with their anger it would have become blind rage and they would have killed someone. You’re not alone in that, James. Sometimes its righteous anger, and I get that. If I walked into a house where some woman just drowned her baby in the bathtub, I’d want to drown her in that same water, but what would it solve?”

  “I’ve seen that too,” I said. “When I was in the Keys there was at least a few of those guys every week. Some of them married, some fathers, some single. They were a breath away from letting go and being an animal. I don’t know how they kept it under control.”

  “It’s normal to want to strike something, even someone,” Angela said. “Most people don’t because they fear the consequences.” She tilted her head. “Your consequences just haven’t caught up to you yet.”

  “They will,” I said. “But I don’t care about when it happens. I think about how scared Harley is and I think about how my mom must have been lonely all those years without my dad there at her side, and then there’s her estranged, murderous son out there somewhere in the world and she didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and she probably didn’t know which she preferred.”

  “This is the you I loved.”

  We could always do that, start a conversation anywhere and run with it, it didn’t matter what either of us had on our mind, the other one just leapt in, and we rode it out, troubling over things together, or laughing about something the other had noticed that struck them as funny.

  “Yeah? You loved when I talked about horrible things people do to each other?”

  Angela said, “Remember how stupid we all were as kids? Most of us ran around pretending to be what we thought everybody expected us to be, and we were terrified of deviating from that image. You never had that problem. And you were always honest, James. Sometimes maybe too honest.”

  I nodded. I had been honest. Sometimes too honest. Sometimes too unfeeling, sometimes feeling too much. I said, “So what now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want to run away with me?” I smiled at her and she looked down at me and smiled back. She waved me up and I sat by her and she squeezed my hand and shook her head. I said, “Why not? I don’t make good husband material?”

  “I have a life here. I love it here. I don’t want to live on the run.”

  “Those are good reasons,” I said. “You have a good head on your shoulders.”

  Then we sat there for a while, holding hands, with the night and the past and the future yawning out before and behind us.

  I said, “My soul is as good as damned.”

  “Don’t talk like that, James.”

  “I wish I could tell you a lie.”

  “Just tell me that you still love me.”

  “I do,” I said. “I don’t know that I loved you when we were kids, but I do now.”

  She had tears in her eyes. She said, “Will you just leave? Forget about Harley’s problems, she’s a tougher and smarter girl than you give her credit for. Leave, James. For me, that’s what I want.”

  “Someone screwed her over. I thought it was Derrick, I was certain of it for a while. But now I don’t know what to think.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear it, but you need to consider that she lied to you.”

  “About someone stealing the money?”

  “About anything. Don’t you remember how she used to lie all the time when she was little? She got off on it. And she would lie about the smallest things, stuff that didn’t even make sense to lie about.” She slapped my leg and said, “Are you listening to me?”

  For some reason her saying that created some sort of echo in my head. I nodded. I said, “You said you’re not going to run away with me, right?”

  She buried her head in her hands in an overly dramatic way and when she looked back up, she stared at the headstones that ran off into the distance, among the darkness, totems against the storm of life’s passing.

  We would both be in the ground one day, but my body would not lie here where my parents were, where Angela and Harley and Robert and Derrick and so many others would someday be. I would die at someone’s hand, or I would die an old man on the beach, watching the ships out on the ocean as they bobbed upon the water and drifted lazily in the wind. I didn’t know which idea I preferred, but I knew that I wanted Angela to tell me that she loved me
. She had done it a lot when we were eighteen. No one had told me they loved me since, had they? If they had, I don’t know that they meant it, but she did.

  She took my hand again and held it in her lap until my arm began to fall asleep. She leaned her head, her soft hair, against my shoulder. I said, “Come with me.”

  “I can’t, James.”

  “Then at least do what you were meant to do with your life.”

  “Sometimes we think we’re meant to do something but we’re really not.”

  “What made you give up on your dream?”

  “You did,” she said. “Will you shut up now?”

  “No. How did I make you give up?”

  She exhaled loudly and said, “I can’t look at a photograph and not think about the future we had planned. But it was a shared future, it wasn’t just my dream. You took your half, your part, and stole it away with you when you fled.”

  “I think I got that from my father.”

  “Did he do something similar to your mother?”

  “He did.”

  “What did he do, James?”

  “He became a cop. She didn’t want him to. She had her own dreams, but he only had enough strength to carry his own.”

  “Is that why you hated him?”

  “I didn’t hate him,” I said. “I barely thought about him.”

  “That sounds like a form of denial.”

  I glanced around the darkened cemetery and it was quiet and peaceful but for our breathing and the rustle of our clothing. I felt at home there more than I like to admit, and Angela seemed perfectly at ease with me. For some reason, knowing that she accepted me and loved me despite the terrible thing I’d done and the lives I’d destroyed with the pull of a trigger, filled my chest with an ache that I knew would never leave me.

  I was tempted to ask her to flee with me one last time, but I couldn’t. She’d meant what she said about having the life she wanted there and I knew I needed to respect her wishes and not push her into doing something she didn’t want to do.

  Her palm was warm and her fingers hung loosely around my hand. I wished we could wait out eternity there like that, but she jumped down and dusted off the back of her skirt and her face was as pale in the moonlight as Derrick’s had been right before Lincoln blew his brains out and dusted the lawn with pieces of his skull.

  She said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just going to miss you.”

  She rubbed her arms as if a sudden chill seized her. She yawned and then giggled for a second and said, “I’m not used to being up this late anymore. Jesus. Do you ever feel your age?”

  “I feel as if I’ve lived several lifetimes,” I said.

  “Are you going to do the right thing?”

  “Depends what you think the right thing is.”

  “Leave, James, before those bikers find you or my father does. It’s not that difficult.”

  “Maybe I want to go out the way my father went out,” I said.

  She stepped forward and slapped me. My cheek stung. She leaned forward and glared at me. She said, “Say that again and I’ll knock your head off.”

  There were tears in her eyes and her small, compact body shook with anger. I nodded. I said, “I’m sorry, I was just being honest.”

  “You’re telling me you want to die, that you’re welcoming it, and I’m supposed to just accept that,” she said.

  “It’s my life,” I said, bracing myself for her to pummel me with her small, hard fists.

  But she didn’t. She hung her head and wiped her tears away and said, “It was good knowing you, really.”

  “Don’t leave,” I said.

  “You want me to watch you die? Why? So I can carry that around for the rest of my life and never get any rest? You are a bastard, Elmore.”

  “I’ll do the right thing,” I said.

  “Sure you will.”

  Then she walked over to her Tahoe without looking back and she climbed inside and started the engine and pulled away. Alone again, I thought, I just let the best thing in my life go. Why? Is it because I feel I don’t deserve love?

  Who the hell knew? What answers were there? How many times in our lives do we fail to get the right answer because we asked the wrong question?

  I called Harley’s cell phone. It rang and then went to voice mail. I said, “Hey, it’s me. I’m at Dad’s grave. Can you come out here? I want to see you before I leave. I’ll wait an hour, okay?” Then I hung up and stared at the black screen. I figured I should get rid of Don’s phone before he somehow tracked me on it. But I was tired of running, that much was true. And there was a sick, twisted part of me that hoped he would kill me and that Angela would always love me then and she’d always hate him for doing it, but she was right: To burden her with something like that wasn’t love. I was so selfish at times, so needy other times.

  I waited the hour I promised Harley, hoping she’d show up. When she didn’t, I waited another hour. My stomach hurt and my eyelids felt as if they were made of concrete. I whispered to my father’s grave, “She’s not coming and I can’t say I blame her.”

  I knelt in front of his grave and leaned in close so I could read the inscription. It said he was a loving husband and a proud father and that he had died in the line of duty.

  It’s only death, my dad had assured me, in a soft-mannered way, with his boyish grin, when 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...”

  The rock was hard beneath my hands. I tried to cry but no tears would come. I waited a while longer, then pushed myself up and walked toward the iron gates that bordered the cemetery grounds. It was nearly midnight. I wondered if Harley was working at the Lady. I wondered if Robert had gotten my message about his brother. I was certain that he had to know by now regardless, being Derrick’s next of kin. A detective probably went to Lou’s house to give him the news. I could imagine Robert pretty torn up and wanting Lincoln’s blood. My sister was right about that. Me and that old boy were a lot alike.

  I wandered out into the street, thinking that I really had nothing to stay for and really nothing good to return to. Then there was the soft purr of the motor and the slight whisk of brakes and a car door opening, and I thought nothing of it, I was so damn deep in trying to figure out the point of it all, when a foot scraped the pavement behind me and something slammed into the back of my head and I pitched forward, my vision fuzzy, rough hands at my shoulders as they drug me back to the pink Cadillac, someone took my dad’s pistol from the front of my pants, and heaved me into the trunk. It was the morning of Independence Day and I saw stars but I couldn’t see his face as he slammed the trunk shut, yet I could hear her laughing. My sister, I thought, my own fucking sister.

  11

  July 4th

  Angela had warned me about Harley numerous times. It’d been a mistake to call Harley and tell her where I was so that she could come and we could have the last ten years rush up on us like a thief in the night, brandishing that blade of betrayal that hurt when combined with the memory of one loved so dearly.

  I could smell blood in the trunk and I wondered—no, I was certain—that it was Robert’s body, yet I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. It was easy to guess that he’d made some fool play for Lincoln and all those bikers on his own within the hour after hearing of Derrick’s demise.

  I could hear their muffled voices in the car, bleeding through the backseat. It was like any other party night; they were laughing, and probably drunk and running high on methamphetamines, ready to kill because sometimes, sure, killing feels good; especially when it’s someone who has taken some of your blood and spilled it on the ground as simply and as nonchalantly as dumping a bucket of water on that dry, forsaken soil.

  They were dumb sonsofbitches and I kind of felt sorry for them, whoever H
arley had gotten to assist her. I could think that it was only her white-trash boyfriend Lincoln and his friends. The shits had popped me in the back of the head and threw me in the trunk without thinking, or at least not thinking logically. I felt Don’s pistol digging into my bruised lower back. They’d taken my father’s pistol, and it was ironic that if they managed to kill me, it might be with that weapon. But it only had a few rounds of ammunition left in it, if any at all. I couldn’t remember how many shots I’d fired at Shane and Lincoln before they’d murdered Derrick Stevens.

  My sister’s Cadillac held the road soundlessly. Then we were slowing and my heart began to pound. I worked the slide of Don’s gun in the dark to be certain there was a round in the chamber.

  The car stopped.

  Doors opened.

  I heard her laugh again and say something sly, and then a gruff voice told her to stay out of the way. I heard frogs and could imagine the dark, starless night out there, the looming of men over the trunk, ready to jerk me out and drag me close to the waters of the Everglades, the satisfaction Lincoln would feel as he planted a bullet in the back of my skull, and how they would all laugh as he booted my corpse into a bog where the gators lay in wait, ever the elusive and insatiable hunter.

  Their voices were loud, obnoxious, and their footsteps heavy.

  The trunk popped open and it was nearly as dark as I imagined it would be.

  Two men leaned over the back bumper, their hands outstretched.

  I shot the one on the left in the face and he crumpled as I turned the gun on the man to his right, the dark shape trying to backpedal and tripping over his own feet. I shot him twice in the chest and he cried out like a woman and I thought the shape was too large to be Harley.

  Slugs slammed the trunk from off to the passenger side, and I heard Shane’s voice yelling from inside the vehicle for someone to give him a pistol.

  I dove from the back of the car and rolled, lay flat against the wet ground and felt the rain, a soft drizzle cold against the back of my neck. Lincoln’s eyes were bright in the dusk. He shot the trunk twice more. The girl next to him, both of them squatting down, let out a shrill cry, her hands pressed tightly over her ears.