Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  Forty-One

  WE BURIED my sister at a cemetery in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, about a half-dozen miles from where she’d been born and one hundred yards from the ashes of the woman who had birthed her. We buried her in a simple blue dress from the suitcase the police had pulled from the trunk of her car, found two days after her death on a side street near Hollywood Forever Cemetery. We felt better consigning her to the earth wearing something a little more personal than a body bag from the morgue. My mother’s ashes lay shelved in the mausoleum down the hill, near the cemetery’s entrance. I tried to believe she was as close to us in spirit as her earthly remains and failed. I couldn’t feel her anywhere. In truth, I couldn’t feel much of anything.

  We met at the cemetery gates and drove toward the grave site together, a funeral procession of three cars, five people, and one dog. Just past the gates we passed a nondescript Chevy sedan parked outside the office of the funeral director. I didn’t know that particular vehicle but I could recognize a government-issue detective’s car when I saw one. I noticed Cassie also eyed the car as we cleared the gates. She rode in front, Jason and the Rott in back. We’d almost lost Jason at the motel when I explained that Sven was their blood father. He was quick to figure that meant he and Cassie were brother and sister and ran off into the night, not to return until two in the morning, drunk and weeping. Cassie had taken care of him. The news hadn’t seemed to distress her; to the contrary, she said she was glad to hear it because it meant that Jason would always be part of her life. Boyfriends come and go, but you’re stuck with family.

  The bargain plot we’d bought for Sharon lay in the far corner of the cemetery, overlooking a junkyard-scramble of scrapped oil derricks to the north and the Antelope Valley Freeway slicing across the base of the San Gabriel Mountains to the east. The grave was cut into a hillside so steep the casket would slide into the hole like a drawer. An advance from Scandal Times saved my sister from a county-financed cremation, the modern equivalent of a pauper’s grave. The casket had been cobbled together in unlined, rough pine—the best I could afford. Cassie and I brought flowers stolen from the yards of houses we’d passed along the way. Sharon would have preferred stolen to store-bought, we figured, the way she’d preferred most things in her life. Ben and Frank had opted to acquire flowers the more traditional way. Neither had known my sister but both volunteered to help me put her to rest. They were more family to me than she had ever been.

  The five of us stood around the hole in the ground and stared at the casket set on rollers beside it. We said nothing, the late-winter sky bleaching from crayon blue to bone white near the sun, the traffic hissing from the not-so-distant freeway, the hole at our feet swallowing our thoughts before it swallowed my sister. We hadn’t hired a rental-pastor to read Scripture. We didn’t think Sharon would have wanted one. It was Jason who finally broke the silence. He said, “What do you remember most about her?”

  “That she was never there,” Cassie said.

  “But she wanted to be there,” I said. “She just couldn’t.”

  “Even when I was little I’d look at her like, what’s wrong? What’s the matter, Mom? Why are you crying? And she’d like, scream at me. Then my stepdad and her, they’d get into these, like, screaming fights, and she’d come into my room and scream at me again.”

  “The good things,” Jason said. The wind blew his dyed black bangs and his hand darted forward to protect his eyes.

  “She read to me when I was little,” Cassie said.

  A memory flared across the years, of my sister sitting at my bedside, reading. “She read to you?” I tried to remember more, how she’d looked, the name of the book, anything.

  “Every night. And she liked to dress me up, you know, real girlish.” Her laugh was small and nervous, almost like her mother’s, and she reached down to finger her black T-shirt. “You can see how well that took. I didn’t even have to change clothes for the funeral.”

  “Green Eggs and Ham,” I said.

  Cassie’s expression pitied me, as though I’d suddenly lost my sanity and spouted nonsense, but then she too remembered. “She loved that book. Read it to me a hundred times. How does it go? ‘Do you like green eggs and ham?’ ”

  I closed my eyes, saw her face in my mind like an old Kodachrome print, long hair straight down her back, eyes scrunched together as she read. “ ‘I do not like them, Sam-I-am. I do not like green eggs and ham.’ ”

  Cassie nodded along as I spoke. “That’s right. Then it goes something like, ‘Would you like them here or there?’…”

  “ ‘I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like’…” Midway through the line I heard Frank’s and Ben’s voices to my left, and Cassie’s off my shoulder, and next to her Jason’s voice, less steady than the others but still there, and it was like we were singing a hymn. “…‘green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam-I-am.’ ” Then Cassie thought to say “Amen,” and I guessed that meant the service was over. I tossed my ragged bouquet of flowers—daisies, a rose, and the first wildflowers of spring—onto my sister’s casket. Cassie stepped around me and dropped her bunch like a rock onto the pine. “G’bye, Ma,” she said. “Hardly knew ya.”

  I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and stepped toward the car. She pulled away. “I think I’ll stay behind a few minutes, with Jason.” Her glance, hard and scared, pinned a spot on the horizon. I turned to observe Detective Dougan lumbering toward our vehicles, parked along the access road. Given her family history, she could spot a cop at distance. I couldn’t blame her for avoiding the police, certainly not after I’d told her what happened to Theresa.

  “Think I’ll stick around, too,” Ben said. “Enjoy the view a while.” In his own taciturn way he was volunteering to watch her while I was gone, like he watched the Rott. He got along with the dog. I didn’t know how well he’d get along with my niece.

  “I’ll walk you up,” Frank said.

  I knew that cops liked to go to the funerals of murder victims. Not to mourn the deceased but to see who showed up to gloat or peep on the ceremony. Dougan slipped something from beneath his armpit when we got close to talking distance. The latest edition of Scandal Times. He spread the front page open on his chest, face out, as though we hadn’t yet seen it.

  “How much of this is fiction?” he asked. “Ninety-eight percent? Or only ninety-five?”

  The front-page photograph spread across the upper-left quarter of the page. The lens on the Marlboro-cam is about as clear as the bottom of a Coke bottle and the exposure time is hit-and-miss, but I’d hit. Sven stood in the photograph as though spotlit, two very human-looking bones braced across his chest and the giant face of Valentino staring down at him, his nostrils streaming smoke like an angry demon’s. “Celebrity Bone-Napping Cult Exposed,” screamed the headline. “Exclusive Photos and Story,” shouted the subhead. I’d briefed Dougan on what I’d found at the old Nike base the night I’d left it. I’d expected him to use the information to request a search warrant. He hadn’t believed me then any more than he seemed to believe the story now.

  Frank leaned forward to examine the text, pointed to the byline. “They spelled my name right, at least.”

  “Mine too,” I added.

  “That has to count for two percent right there,” he said.

  The corner of Dougan’s walrus moustache lifted to a flash of teeth, as though he might lurch forward at any moment to bite a chunk out of Frank’s skull. “Two percent accuracy is about average for this roll of toilet paper.”

  “Sometimes they don’t even get my name right,” Frank said, playing along. “If they spell my name right, I’m happy.”

  “Speaking of names, I forget, what was this guy’s name again?” Dougan stubbed his forefinger against the front-page photograph. “I thought it was Sven but funny enough when I looked him up in the computers I didn’t find a social security number or driver’s license. You don’t happen to have a last name, do you?
”

  Frank had traced the ownership of the former Nike base to a company registered in the Bahamas that was in turn a subsidiary of companies registered in Belize and the Cayman Islands, a corporate shell game played to conceal the identity of an owner who probably wouldn’t turn out to be Sven anyway. “We’re still looking,” I said.

  Dougan folded the paper in half and for a moment I thought he was going to fling it across the grave markers, disgusted, but instead he wedged it back under his arm and folded his arms across his chest. “When you get a name, give me a call.” He nodded at Frank to include him in the comment and turned to walk away.

  “What about Theresa?” I said.

  His foot scuffed over a grave marker and he looked down to read the name. “She’ll be extradited. Only a matter of time.” He looked up from the headstone and slapped at his coat pocket. “Almost forgot to give this to you.” He fingered a thin, white envelope from his side pocket. “We found the enclosed item in your sister’s personal possession, put it in the case file for purposes of identification, and forgot about it until today. Should have been with the effects given to you when we signed over the body. My fault.” He scuffed a shoe over the headstone again after I took the envelope, then walked away, not looking back.

  “Well, hell,” Frank said.

  “What?”

  “The story will be dead in a week if he doesn’t investigate.”

  “Let it die, then.” I moved toward the trunk of the Cadillac, planning to take a quick look at the envelope’s contents and toss it into Sharon’s suitcase. Neither Cassie nor I knew what to do with the few personal things she owned. Give them to Goodwill, probably. My nineteen grand had vaporized. Maybe it would turn up later in her bank account. If it did, her will bequeathed the money to Cassie.

  “I didn’t get it onto the front page to see it die in a week.” Frank followed me to the trunk and pulled out the keys to his Honda. “You know the story this bumped from the lead?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “ ‘The Sex Life of Stars: A Tragic Tale of Lurid Loves Lost.’ ”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d read that.”

  “See what I mean? The competition is tough.” He keyed the door to his Honda. “Gotta work hard if you want to stay on the front page of Scandal Times.”

  I gave him a little wave, thanked him for coming. He shrugged and called out the window, “Sorry about your sister.”

  I returned the shrug and watched the Honda until it crested the hill and I couldn’t see it anymore. Then I keyed the trunk and pulled forward Sharon’s suitcase, a battered gray Samsonite knockoff made in China. Just looking at it, I should have known my sister’s story about her life as a successful real estate agent was a con. I flipped the latches. I recognized the gray pantsuit she’d worn the day I met her, in the viewing room where my mother lay coffined, and the jeans and cotton blouse she’d worn the night we’d gone for Mexican food. I gently brushed aside her underwear, neatly folded into thirds. Six plain-white cotton panties and one black lace. The sight of them felt like an intrusion.

  Dougan had lick-sealed the envelope. I stuck the tip of the trunk key under the flap, sawed it open, and shook a small color photograph onto the pantsuit’s gray rayon. Four figures stood in front of a one-story wood and stucco family home built in the 1950s, a thin and balding lawn at their feet and the right front fender of a late-1960s Chevy pickup truck in the drive. The smallest of the four, a young girl about six years old, wore a dark green jumpsuit short enough to show her scraped, red knees. A teenager with strawberry-blond hair draped her arm casually over the little girl’s shoulder and smiled at the camera with the desperate kind of happiness seen in last-place beauty pageant contestants, her smile a grimaced demand to love her rather than a true expression of pleasure. A woman in her mid-forties stood next to the teenager, her permed hair rising from her head like a bubble and her hands at her sides as though she did not touch people easily. The click of the shutter had caught a crease of lines across her brow and again at the far corners of her eyes. An outside observer might suppose she squinted at the lens, unable to see it, not recognizing the look as the wince of a woman perpetually distanced by pain. The face of the barrel-chested figure on the far right of the composition had been blacked out by ballpoint. Sharon had tried to blot him from the photograph but he was physically so much larger than the other figures that she had instead transformed him into a shadow looming over us all.

  The emotion, when it struck, was not rage. I know rage. I’m comfortable with it. Rage is an old friend. Rage animates me, for better or worse. This emotion crippled me, rooting my legs so heavily to earth I couldn’t move from the back of the trunk, away from the car, away from the weight of pain. I leaned forward, too weak to stand upright, and gripped the rim of the trunk to brace myself. Grief rolled through me like a storm surge that takes everything with it, and yes, I cried, but I didn’t cry with just my throat or eyes, I cried from every muscle and organ of my being; every cell within me writhed as though drowning. I cried for the hurtful things I’d said and done to my sister and to my mother and for the compliments I’d neglected to give them, the good deeds left forever undone; and I cried from love for my dead husband and for my hatred of my father and for the deaths of those I’d known and loved but never grieved except through rage. Seven years of pain surged through me, seven years of crying for no one, not even myself. I cried for all that had been given to me and all that had been taken away, yes, but most of all I cried at last for me, because though I tried to believe I cried for all my lost loved ones, they left voids when ripped from me and so I mourned the dead spots in my soul where they once had thrived.

  My niece said, “Your dog is howling like he’s dying in there and you don’t even let him out?” The car rocked with the opening of a door and a moment later the Rott thudded into the back of my leg. I’d left him locked in the car for the service. When he looked up at me I wondered whether the empathy of dogs was real or imagined. Cassie peered around the edge of the trunk, fear guarding her glance. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  And then, I was.

  Acknowledgments

  THE NOVELIST’S ability to convincingly render the most arcane subjects is often due to the guidance given by persons truly knowledgeable about things novelists only pretend to know. The experts whose advice guided me in the preparation of this manuscript included priests, parole agents, lawyers, filmmakers, and photographers. Special thanks are owed to Meredith Murray, who kindly shared with me details of a petty crime that are mirrored in this fiction. Thanks also to Allen Plone, who always seems to know the answer to everything I ask. This book and the two novels that precede it owe an intellectual debt to City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, urban and environmental histories of Southern California by Mike Davis that have helped to clarify my vision of Los Angeles as a city of unbearable beauty and dread.

  This manuscript was edited by Amanda Murray at Simon & Schuster, who proved an ideal reader.

  I owe a debt of hospitality to the inhabitants of the city of Prague and the Catalan village of San Pol de Mar, where this book was written. Dekuji Vám, prátelé. Gràcies, amics.

  About the Author

  A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and UCLA, ROBERT M. EVERSZ pounded the pavements of Hollywood for a decade before fleeing to Europe to write his four novels about Nina Zero and the American obsession with celebrity culture: Shooting Elvis, Killing Paparazzi, Burning Garbo, and Digging James Dean. One of the leading literary voices in Prague, the setting for his novel Gypsy Hearts, he helped found the Prague Summer Writers’ Workshop, now the Prague Summer Program, where he currently serves on the faculty. His novels are widely translated and have appeared on critical best-of-year lists from Oslo’s Aftenposten to The Washington Post.

 

 
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