Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  I might even have forgiven Pop had he not hit her again, in the final days of her life. Had the blow that blackened her eye loosened the clot that cut the flow of blood to her brain? I didn’t know how the law viewed it but I considered that to be murder. I stared at the back of his bull neck, his hair cropped closely around a bald spot, ears pinned closely to the side of his head like those of a fighting dog, and imagined how difficult it would be for an executioner to kill him, having no neck to fit a rope and no heart to pierce by firing squad. Even the chair might juice him more to monstrous life, like Frankenstein. But the hook of black beneath my mother’s eye had looked more than a few days old and so the direct cause and effect of blow and murder could never be established in a court of law or even in the court of my own heart.

  But I didn’t want him to get away with hitting her that last time, not for any of the times he’d hit her or other members of our family, and imagined, as the pastor read from scripture, how I might wait for him outside the chapel doors after the service ended. I wouldn’t hit him, not then, but I’d finally tell him what I’d been thinking the years I’d spent in court and prison and during the less than a year of freedom I’d so-called enjoyed since my release. He’d take abuse from me no more at the age of sixty-two than forty-two and he was still strong enough to break me in two, but he wouldn’t catch me, and then, and then, and then the fantasy imploded because no matter how much I wanted to I couldn’t imagine hitting Pop, even though, once when driven to a sort of madness, I’d put a gun to his head and ordered him to leave his own house and even I didn’t know whether I would have pulled the trigger had he not left. But I couldn’t imagine hitting him, not sitting those twenty rows back in the chapel where someone who never knew my mother eulogized her, and I realized then that I was doomed to live with my rage at him because I’d never let it go and I could never give it back to him either.

  The pastor finished his eulogy with a solemn glance at the cathedral ceiling and asked everyone to bow their heads in prayer. A strange hacking noise interrupted the silence and turned the pastor’s startled glance to the left front pew, where my father sat, his head in his hands. The pastor cleared his throat and stepped away from the podium to allow him a moment to regain his composure. But the noise that poured from my father grew more alarming, as though his heart and lungs squeezed out his throat, and the effort of disgorging them was slowly strangling him. For a moment, I believed justice was being done and the old bastard was keeling over with a heart attack, struck dead by a rightfully vengeful God, but as I watched him shake uncontrollably, my own heart pounded at its cage of ribs, aware that for the first time in my life, I witnessed my father crying.

  “You sure he wasn’t just choking on a loose tooth?” my sister said over lunch at Denny’s. “The man I knew had no tears in him. No pity, no remorse, no grief over any of the damage he caused.”

  “I thought he was having a heart attack or something.” Rain, blown by the wind, swirled against the window, blurring the view of the parking lot into a smudge of blacktop and colored fenders. “He was crying like he’d just lost everything he had in the world. Like he was out of his mind with grief.”

  “Self-pity, more likely.”

  “He fell flat on his face.”

  “You’re kidding,” Sharon said, meaning, too good to be true.

  Pop had lurched forward from the pew, Ray grabbing at his elbow too late to steady the old man as he pitched forward and struck his head against the carpet. “I think he was trying to get up, to walk to the table where they put her ashes, and he just collapsed.”

  “Don’t tell me you feel sorry for him.” The look of disgust on my sister’s face washed away in nervous laughter.

  Did I feel sorry for him? I had rushed from the chapel, the air in my lungs burning like salt water, and taken refuge behind the rear fender of the Cadillac, parked at some distance from the other cars in the lot. No matter how hard I breathed I felt as though I suffocated, and then, my system perhaps still disoriented by the blow I’d taken to the head a few days before, I vomited on the pavement, again and again, until nothing expelled from my stomach except the air I couldn’t breathe into my lungs. “I don’t know what I felt,” I said. “I went to the funeral expecting to want to kill him.”

  She looked at me, waiting for an explanation. I couldn’t give her one. I had been so angry at my father for so many years that I couldn’t cope with pity and I wondered if, beneath all the scar tissue, a little love still flowed for the old man, like an underground stream buried beneath a mantle of earth and granite. That thought had driven me out of the chapel as though the devil had my tail.

  “Really rocked your world, huh?” Sharon laughed as though she might have been joking but I sensed my sister always laughed after speaking an unpleasant truth, as though truth made her nervous. She had no reason to be nervous around me. I suspected she was just a nervous person and her fidgety gestures and frequent laughter proved that she wanted to please, wanted only to be liked. Considering the number of times my pop beat hell out of her when she was growing up, maybe that wasn’t so surprising a defense mechanism. She talked again about her life in Seattle, repeating many of the details she’d told me the day before, and this time I heard the rehearsed inflections in her story, as though she’d memorized it by frequent telling. She talked nonstop through lunch, setting up such an impassable barrier of chatter that I stopped listening. I don’t think she realized she was such a boor. I gazed out the window at the rain and tuned her so far out, thinking instead about the little studio in Malibu and how much I was going to enjoy living there, that I didn’t realize she was asking me something until she called my birth name.

  “Earth to Mary Alice Baker, you anywhere in the galaxy?”

  “Of course, I’m right here,” I said, wondering what I’d missed.

  “So can I stay?”

  “Sure,” I said, without knowing exactly what I’d agreed to.

  “Great.” Her hands flew open for a brief moment of freedom before she caught them again and clenched them together on the table. “Anne and her husband are fighting like cats and dogs right now and it’s really best I don’t stay another night because not only can’t I get a decent night’s sleep with all that yelling I think it’s better for them too, you know? It’s such a strain to have houseguests when you’re fighting, believe me I’m talking from personal experience here. Remind me never to get married again, okay? Besides, I really really should see Venice Beach before I go, I mean, it’s only like world famous so it would be a shame to drive all the way down, have a long-lost sister living right on the beach, and not visit her place, right? I mean, am I right?”

  “My apartment isn’t very big,” I said.

  “I’ve slept in some pretty small places,” she said, and laughed again. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Then you’re welcome to stay,” I said. “I only have the futon but we can sleep on it together. Like sisters.”

  “Like sisters,” she repeated. “I’d like that.”

  Nine

  THOUGH IT seemed a waste of energy to clean a place I was going to be evicted from at the end of the month, I didn’t want my sister to see me for the slovenly creature I often am and went into a frenzy of cleaning the moment I stepped through the door of my apartment. The Rott tried to bite the broom and jumped his front paws on the counter to help me clean the kitchen sink. When I splashed water on his nose he ran off to hide in the bathroom, where he warned me with a bark that someone was coming up the stairs.

  “Oh, this place is tiny,” Sharon said, poking her head through the open doorway. She wore the same charcoal-gray pantsuit from the day before, carried a gold canvas bag labeled Virsace and a battered gray suitcase. Her glance settled on the short stack of boxes against the wall that I’d packed in a fit of optimism that I’d actually find another place to live. “Are you moving in or out?”

  “Out,” I said, wiping off my hands and stepping forward to kiss her cheek. “T
he landlord doesn’t like dogs.”

  “Well, fuck him then.” Sharon giggled and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. She pointed to heavy security bars striping the only window in the room. “You got a problem with crime in the neighborhood anyway, right?”

  “It’s the beach, you know?” The security bars had been installed by the landlord so long ago they’d rusted shut permanently. “Urban beaches are always high crime areas.”

  “Then I’m glad you’re moving out.” She zippered open the bag’s side compartment and pulled out the latest edition of Scandal Times. “You know I looked for your name but didn’t see it anywhere. Did I buy the wrong paper?”

  “I changed my name.” I pointed to the photo credit beneath the shot of James Dean’s headstone that ran on the front page. “I pretty much go by Nina Zero now.”

  “What kind of name is that?” She laughed at the rudeness of her question and said, “I mean, you have to admit it’s kinda weird, why Zero?”

  “Just where my life was at the time,” I said.

  “Like maybe you were starting from zero?” Sharon looked at me with a sense of understanding I never expected from her.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “I know what that’s like.” She nodded and laughed. “I must’ve started from nothing a half-dozen times in my life. Maybe they can call us the Zero sisters. Or you can be Nina Zero, and I’ll be Lotta Nothin’.”

  She laughed and this time I laughed with her. She pointed to the headline, “RIP Rip-Off—Cult Cloners Dig James Dean.” “Hey, all this shit about space-alien cloners stealing the body of James Dean, is that true?”

  “Sure, in the same way that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are true.” I watched over her shoulder as she flipped through the pages. The edition had hit the supermarket checkout stands that morning. It was the first I’d seen it.

  “There’s one born every minute, that what you’re saying? Hey, your photos are all over this thing!” She pointed to another shot, this one of a fake skull I’d used to double Dean’s, half covered with dirt as though rising from the grave. “So if it wasn’t cloners, who do you think did it?”

  “Teenagers, probably.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s just the kind of thing kids do, playing around with death and the devil,” I said. “Plus I got a call last week from a teen, a runaway from Indiana. I get calls all the time, tips coming in about celebrity sightings, that kind of thing. Then when I’m in Indiana I see a picture of this same girl and her boyfriend, caught by a surveillance camera the night Dean’s bones were stolen.”

  “What girl?” Sharon flipped from page to page, looking. “I read the whole thing and didn’t see anything about a girl.”

  “The paper thought cloners would sell better than teens.”

  “Made it all up, huh? You sound like con artists.”

  “I’d rather think of it as entertainment.”

  “So’s three-card monte,” she said, and laughed. “This girl—what’s her name?”

  “Theresa.”

  “You ever heard of the Church of Divine Thespians?” She didn’t laugh this time, her attention taken by flipping the news pages.

  “Never. Who are they, some new cult?”

  “Just something I read about, musta been another paper, the Enquirer or something.” She pointed to another photograph, this one of the Rott. “Hey, that’s your dog, isn’t it? You were mugged in a parking lot?”

  “I took a picture of somebody didn’t want his picture taken.”

  Sharon ran her hand along the paper, flattening it. “Wow, how exciting. It’s almost like my baby sister is a detective.”

  “Sure, a detective whose job is to invent the truth.”

  “Isn’t that what the cops do all the time? Make up shit to convict people?” She folded the paper back into the side compartment of her purse and asked, “So where’s that famous beach everybody’s always talking about?”

  Sharon seemed less skittish and chatty the more time we spent together, and as we walked the Venice Beach boardwalk at sunset she seemed content to silently watch the human freak show that makes the place Southern California’s second leading tourist attraction. She no longer recited stories about her current life but spoke impulsively, inviting conversation. In prison I’d learned that people use stories as defense mechanisms. Those who preferred to keep relationships distant and superficial told nothing about themselves except shopworn stories that bored any listener after a few tellings. My sister’s playing the energetic saleswoman was nothing more than that, a thin coating of armor that protected her from unwanted intimacy. Maybe we’d broken through that. She must have been feeling my same yearning for family. She didn’t have to spend the night in my apartment. Real estate agents make good money. She could have chosen to stay in a motel.

  We dined that night at a Mexican place on Rose Avenue within walking distance from my apartment. Walking distance meant I could drink, a freedom I celebrated by claiming my fair share of two pitchers of margaritas. We talked about what we remembered about each other, our memories as different as our ages had been. I remembered watching her sneak out of the house late at night to meet boys, and she asked if I remembered the abandoned Nike missile base in the hills outside of town, a favorite party spot. The location had haunted my young mind, I said, until years later I’d gone there to raise a little hell myself. I thought she was going to mention something else about the base, something particularly memorable that had happened there, but she swerved suddenly into memories of teaching me how to read and our games of hide-and-seek. She sometimes felt like a mother to me, she said. Midway into the second pitcher she asked, “I forgot, you ever marry, baby sister?”

  “Once,” I said. “An English paparazzo with legal problems. It was a green-card marriage. I wasn’t supposed to care for him. But I did. We were only married two weeks.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last April.”

  “So the wounds are still fresh.” Her words slid together, alcohol dulling her tongue.

  “I should have gotten over it long ago. I mean, it was only two weeks, right? And he’d lied to me about everything, right from the start. Even now, I don’t know whether he ever truly cared for me. They fished him out of Lake Hollywood one night. He’d been working both sides against the middle in a celebrity blackmail scheme and so they beat him to death.”

  “That’s fucking awful.” Sharon stared at me, pity and awe softening the focus of her eyes. “I wondered, you know, why you dye your hair like that, wear black all the time. You’re in mourning.”

  “No, I looked like this before.”

  She reached across the table to finger the strands of my hair, the alcohol making her more impulsive, just as it made me less guarded. “I bet your hair is still blond, just like it was when you were little, just like my Cassie.”

  “You have a daughter?”

  A truthfulness came into her eyes, what seemed the urge to confess something important. I’d seen the same look from her at our first reunion, just before she’d returned to trivial chatter. “Well, not a daughter exactly. A stepdaughter. Cassie. The daughter of my second ex-husband.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Nine.” Her eyes glistened. She reached for a napkin before the first tear fell.

  “You must miss her,” I said.

  She pressed the napkin to her eyes and nodded. “My ex, fuck him, I couldn’t care less. But I miss Cassie. I wish we could have stayed together, for her sake. And of course I have no legal rights as her former stepmother so I hardly ever get a chance to see her.”

  I wondered whether I should reach out and hold her hand, try to comfort her. The mention of her daughter revealed an emotional depth I hadn’t suspected. Maybe that was one of the reasons I couldn’t cry. I didn’t care deeply enough for anybody. Maybe the most compelling reason to have a child was to have someone to care about so deeply that she could break your heart, like
I’d broken my mother’s heart. I leaned forward and laid my hand over my sister’s on the table.

  “And now it’s too late to have another child, or at least really fucking difficult.” She pulled her hand from mine and fumbled through her purse, strung on the back of her chair. “Mom’s death started me thinking about what would happen to Cassie if I ever kicked. I mean, it’s gotta happen sooner or later, right? Her old man’s an asshole. I can’t trust him. I want to make sure she’s taken care of.” She unfolded a sheet of paper, scrawled to the margins in a careless hand, and laid it on the table. “Will you be my witness?”

  “To what?” I leaned forward, struggling to decipher the words in the dim light.

  “That I’m of sound mind and body.” She laughed as though there might be some doubt to that. “It’s my last will and testament. Somebody has to act as a witness for it to become legal. I read how to do it at the library yesterday.”

  I scanned the document, making out a scribbled word here and there in the dim light. Her daughter was the only beneficiary listed. A straight line three inches long had been drawn across the bottom-right corner of the page, above the words Witnessed by. “Of course I’ll sign it for you,” I said.