She sounded like she was back into drugs and absolutely crazy; I told her I didn’t know an exorcist and, hoping to end our discussion, told her I had to leave, that I had friends waiting for me and we were on our way to Mass. She told me Michael was at her house and that all he did was sit alone in the dark staring at the wall. She wanted me to call him and invite him to the service. I remembered her story about his greed and deception, and some part of my legal training made me inquisitive, made me want to question him and find out the truth. I hung up, after promising to see her the following day, and then I dialed Michael’s number.
A sheepish, meek voice answered, softer than I expected. When I asked what Michael was doing, he came right out and told me he was sitting in the dark, staring at the wall. What surprised me was how easily and openly he admitted it, as if it was the most normal thing a person could do on Christmas Eve. Feeling pity for him, I invited him along to the evening services and he stated he didn’t have a ride. I detected a deep current of helplessness, and perhaps in the back of my mind I was curious about what had become of him, how he had lost all his money. I called a friend, told him where Michael lived, and he agreed to pick Michael up.
I told my friends to leave without me and that I would catch up to them after Michael came over. When he arrived, he didn’t look or act the way I expected—I guess I had imagined someone more polished. He was around thirty-eight, six feet tall, had a long neck, a small paunch, long arms that dangled at his sides, messy black hair, and brown eyes that kept darting about. I noticed right away there was something wrong with him, as if he were underwater, moving around by some strange current rather than by his own efforts. He seemed to be on sedatives; he acted disoriented and clumsy, like a boy on a hike who had lost his way. He stood almost unnoticed against my kitchen sink, enveloped in a vulnerable quietness that one usually observes in trauma victims. I had the impression that he was a patient man and someone who got plenty of sleep.
He was likeable, his manner submissive in an appealing and trusting way. As we drove he told me his side of the story. It was different from his sister’s version of how he had squandered his inheritance and ended up penniless on the streets. In fact, it was dismally worse. He had been arrested a few times for dealing drugs, drank a bottle of cleaning fluid while in jail, was moved to a criminal asylum, and had been heavily sedated. A later diagnosis concluded he was manic-depressive and he was given medication. On his release he was under strict supervision, had to go see his caseworker twice a week and his parole officer every morning, give random urine tests, and attend group counseling for mentally disturbed felons.
Despite his medication, Michael’s manner of speaking was straightforward and he didn’t embellish even the smallest detail. He said his sister Carmen was a liar. She always lied about everything. She was the one who called the cops on him the times he got busted; he was trying to protect her assets, until she sold the houses and apartments out from under him to buy herself drugs; she even depleted her savings account, then stole his credit cards and emptied all his bank accounts, which contained quite a lot of money.
But as he told me this, he didn’t seem bothered. With a blank face—no expressions of surprise or resentment—and in a matter-of-fact way, he told how he lost the money, admitting that he had been foolish and even stupid, but implied that life was what it was and had happened the way it happened. He spoke about his years of degeneracy and indulgence in behaviors normally considered obscene as though they were merely an amusing walk in the park on a Sunday morning. He had enjoyed the most disgusting pleasures and experienced the filthiest fantasies and he showed no regret for having done so.
After having heard both sides, I realized that Carmen and Michael loved and hated each other, though Michael felt more love than hatred. They both wanted to blame the other for their failures, but Michael understood that his condition was the result of taking too many drugs for too long. Each was probably responsible for losing their share of the inheritance. Carmen would not accept the loss though, while Michael had embraced his folly. When I asked Michael about his mother’s wishes for her ashes to be dispersed at the mountaintop, he promptly concurred that it had been her wish. Then I asked him whether his father or mother had been affectionate toward him, and he said they had probably hugged him twice in his life. Again, he gave no evidence that this was at all out of the ordinary or upsetting to him.
I’m not sure how I got so entangled—maybe I felt pity or was simply being generous—but on a nice warm Saturday I found myself packing lunches and leaving with Michael and his sister to scatter ashes in the mountains.
Carmen had become thinner. I suspected she was smoking crack. Her mind was worse than ever: she was hilariously grinning one moment, then deeply morose the next; briefly upset about world affairs and a moment later sullen over her personal life; she seemed by turns panicked and overjoyed. I would be very glad when we were finished and I could say good-bye to both of them, I thought, but for the moment they evoked my sympathy. Plus I was feeling some strange need for compensation, a karmic balancing for some of the things I had done.
As we drove east to the mountains, I tried to imagine Michael in his new Porsche, with millions in the bank, expensive clothes, and apartment complexes, jet-setting everywhere, gambling in Vegas with a baby doll on each arm. I knew that’s how it had been but I just couldn’t see it. Carmen sat in the back jabbering incoherently to the vase between her lap, promising the ashes that they would be set free and her mother’s spirit appeased.
We arrived at the peak and it was a little cooler than I expected. I put on my jacket and gloves. Carmen carefully cradled the vase in her hands and Michael looked around groggily, waiting to be directed. There were tourists milling about, hikers and mountain bikers on the trails, so I suggested we walk a bit to get away from everyone. I thought it might be nice to find a place where they could say their last farewells to their mother in private. We followed a path along the cliff for about an hour until we found the perfect spot. There was an overhang and beyond it the most beautiful canyons. We stood on the ridge and formed a circle.
“Okay,” I said, “you pray, then we’ll toss the ashes over the edge. That’ll be enough to free her.”
“That’s a good idea,” Carmen said; she pulled the cork off the vase and dragged out a plastic bag. She opened it. “Now everyone close your eyes and pray.”
With my eyes shut, I heard the wind blowing through the pine trees and birds chirping. I started to feel myself swaying in the wind and had to open them to regain my balance. When I did, I saw that Michael had not closed his eyes but was staring out to the city below.
“I can see where we used to live, Carmen,” he blurted out.
“You’re supposed to be praying,” she scolded him. “Okay, now we do it.” She reached into the bag and cupped a handful of ashes, stepped to the edge, and scattered the black gritty dust over the air. “Now your turn,” she indicated, nodding to Michael.
“I can’t,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“I can’t.”
“You better,” she ordered. She pushed him close to the edge and shoved the plastic bag into his hands.
He flung the bag over the cliff as if it were scalding his hands. It caught in some pine branches about fifty feet below.
Carmen said, “I can’t believe you did that, stupid! Now she’ll never be free, she’s in that bag. Some deer is going to eat her, or a raccoon or something, and she’ll become animal shit! Stupid!” She accosted him, yelling in his face, until I stepped between them, afraid he might fall over the cliff.
“Okay,” I said, “there’s nothing we can do. Maybe we say another prayer and then leave.”
“No, we can’t,” Carmen insisted. “One of us has to climb down there and get the bag. We promised we’d release her spirit and we have to do that or we’ll be haunted by her spirit and have nightmares or something worse.”
“We can’t climb down there,” I s
aid with astonishment. “Are you crazy?”
“You have to,” she demanded.
I looked at Michael and he shrugged. I looked at her and she stared back.
“You have to,” she repeated.
“Why can’t you?”
“I’m on meds... I’d fall.”
“She’s not my mother and this is crazy, that’s a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet.”
“What the hell, then I’ll do it,” Carmen said and started for the edge; she crouched down and placed a foot on a branch.
I cried, “Stop!” I grabbed her and lifted her up on her feet.
“I guess I’ll do it.”
I stepped gingerly to the rock lip, breathed deeply, and looked down at the bag. From the ledge I could see all the canyons and tall pine trees and sharp protruding rock cliffs below. I turned around and faced Michael.
“I don’t understand why you couldn’t touch the damn ashes. They’re not going to poison you, it’s your mother. If I bring them back up you better scatter them.”
He trembled with repulsion and said, “I’ll try.”
“That’s the worst thing that could have happened,” Carmen complained. “Her spirit’s imprisoned forever now.”
I said, “Here, hold these—last thing I need to do is lose them.” I handed Michael my wallet and keys. “I’ll climb down and get it.” Carefully, I started to inch my way down.
I could hear Carmen above saying, “Bastard you are. I will never rest in peace, nor will she, knowing her ashes are trapped in that plastic bag.”
I chose my steps cautiously, checking the firmness of rocks, roots, and branches. After what seemed like an eternity, I finally reached the bag, unsnagged it, and had it tightly in my grip. Instead of bringing it back up, I called to them, “I’m going to scatter them from here...”
“Sure,” Carmen called down, “do whatever you want.”
Her statement sounded strange somehow.
“What do you mean,” I called back. I slowly opened the bag and then looked up. Michael had a glum expression, but Carmen was smiling down at me. The ashes felt coarser than I expected, and then it hit me: it was black sand.
In my confusion, I shifted my weight slightly off balance and my foot slipped and my body tilted out. To steady myself, I reached out for a branch, but it broke. Glancing up I saw Carmen open my wallet and take out the money and credit cards. I watched her take Michael’s hand and lead him down the path to my car. My wallet went right past me as I fell, hurtling down ten thousand feet into the canyon below, and I realized with sad irony, she had fucked me after all.
Bull’s Blood
Franklin rose early on Saturday morning, made himself a cup of coffee and toast, and after eating, went into the garage. He grabbed a box off the dwindling stack and carried it into his study. Almost three months after he and Lynn had bought their house, he hoped to finally finish unpacking, and with a mixture of relief and annoyance that this was how he was spending his Saturday morning, he began sorting through the religious statues, paperback novels, poetry books, family photographs, old tax returns, and receipts. Most of this he threw in the trash pile. Then he opened a manila envelope and smiled when he saw what it contained: a photograph showing both of them covered in blood, taken six years before, after he first met Lynn.
A year before the photograph was taken, Franklin was still married. He was hurt but not surprised when his wife informed him that she had filed for divorce. They’d been having problems for three years, and he never really had faith that he could make it work. Something inside him had given up because none of his efforts had succeeded—marital counseling, individual therapy, and other remedies all failed to improve their relationship. He was thirty-nine and played bass guitar and congas in a salsa band; at the same time that his nine-year marriage dissolved, the band disintegrated and his close friends moved away. Of the ones that remained, two killed themselves and the rest became complacent—all they wanted out of life was to have enough people for volleyball and a barbecue at the park on Sunday.
The same weekend his wife informed him she had filed, he packed his clothes in boxes, put them in his pickup, and drove away with one last sight of her in his rearview mirror: standing in the yard, a glazed rage in her eyes and a scowl on her face. He left her everything—house, car, furniture, and appliances. He knew that he would never marry again because it would inevitably end for some horrible reason—something unseen, unplanned, but lurking there in the dark, in the near future, waiting for the right time to spring out at him and shatter his trust.
He never fully understood why his marriage soured, but he tried to accept that that’s how life was: One day the good things— commitment, laughter, love, passion—were there, and the next, poof!, they were gone, leaving a residue of misery staining everything he looked at.
The work he had put into making a good life for his family never went the way it should have, and he felt that he was not good at the ups and downs of marriage, not good at sitting down and discussing what was on his wife’s mind—things that mattered and which he now assumed might have salvaged his relationship.
But it wasn’t in his nature to change, to take on another way of listening and acting and living, another way of caring and being with someone. He was too afraid—to wander in the dark, groping here and there, hoping his lover’s hand would be there when he needed it. He could only go on as he was, and perhaps one day he and his wife could sit across from each other at a table in a coffee shop and simply talk, two acquaintances with mutual respect. He didn’t believe in happiness but he could settle for stability, an unchanging continuum with no surprises.
But Franklin underestimated the damage the breakup would do to him. He rented a second-floor, two-room apartment downtown, with sliding doors on a balcony that opened to a park across the street, and while his ex-wife traveled and vacationed as if she were free and sixteen again, he spent his days listlessly pacing from one room to the other, leaning his elbows on the balcony railing, watching couples and retirees walk their dogs and come and go in the park until it was late and he went to sleep on his futon mattress on the floor.
He felt incapable of stepping outside his door and engaging anyone on any level for any reason. Over the next few weeks he became more isolated and grew increasingly bereft and melancholy.
On the day Franklin turned forty, he found himself reviewing his life. He bleakly admitted to himself that it amounted to very little. Like his former friends’ lives, his was mediocre at best, and now he felt pulled down by an undertow of despair. He thought briefly about going to night school for computer programming, accounting, or real estate, but persistent inertia paralyzed him—something deep inside him was growing more and more afraid. He was falling apart, and how deep into the abyss he was going to nosedive he didn’t know.
* * *
Six months before he met Lynn, he had closed himself in his apartment and started drinking gin and experimenting with drugs. He began to have thoughts of killing himself. He was haunted by the possibility that his life would always be like this, and the razor-sharp slivers of fear punctured the edges of his mind at all hours, intruding into his dreams and thoughts as he looked at people passing below his balcony or heard them step ponderously in the hallway past his door. He had even called his dealer to ask him to bring over a pistol along with his next delivery. He later eyed the pistol lying on the coffee table, luring him to try the ultimate high; he guessed that if he got drunk or high enough, the odds of his taking his own life were better than fifty–fifty.
He abandoned basic hygiene and walked around in boxers and a T-shirt, unshaved and unwashed. His attempt at socializing was to drink every night at the corner bar, and he became a prolific womanizer. He wanted to enjoy as many women in as many ways as possible and not think about where his life was going or how it might end. One young prostitute believed he had been bewitched and that evil spirits inhabited him, and he believed her but could do nothing about it. He resigned
himself to living under the pall of damnation. To his mind, this was justification for his ongoing self-destruction.
* * *
Perhaps because of the elevation or from the fatigue after having driven twelve hundred miles from New Mexico to Salt Lake City, the beer hit Franklin harder than usual. He was on his sixth cup, sitting in the arena next to his cousin Louis, who had been eliminated earlier in the saddle bronc category at the Salt Lake City national rodeo finals.
A huge theater screen suspended from the coliseum ceiling flashed the next event: the women’s barrel racing finals. The screen showed the contestants—pretty, ponytailed blond and brunette cowgirls with strong, sensuous, compact bodies.
Franklin didn’t expect to be enjoying himself, but now that he was here he silently thanked his cousin, who had forced him to come. A few days before, Louis had run into Franklin’s ex-wife at the grocery store, and she told him about Franklin’s bizarre behavior—his refusal to answer the door or the telephone, the boozing, the womanizing, the drugs—his overall descent into hell. Later Louis went over to Franklin’s, without even inquiring whether he wanted company, and ordered, “You’re going to get some fresh air, see some pretty women, and party with me—get your stuff, we’re leaving.”
Before Franklin could make a sound, Louis choked off any protest with a forearm under Franklin’s chin, pinning him against the wall, commanding, “I’m inviting you to a party, and I don’t aim to be turned down by family. Get on it now ’fore I put a boot up that ass!”
At the rodeo, Franklin couldn’t help but smile as he watched Louis get crushed like a bag of potato chips by a crazed, man killing bull and, in another competition, stamped in the dust by a red-eyed bucking bronc. To witness healthy men and women, seemingly of sound mind, put their lives on the line for eight seconds gave him a reprieve from his own self-destructive habits and pulled him out of his dark mood. As he saw it, they were even crazier than he was.
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