Afterlife (41 page)

Mark slipped his arm closer about Steven's neck, hugging him fast. Perhaps it was that—the nearness, the smell of Mark's hair—that made him cry. Since when had he even isolated the particular smell of Mark? Or perhaps it was something about the deer, its ridiculous trust that men were harmless, or maybe its loss of the wild. They were tears that made no noise, flowing easy because there was someone to hold. Mark gripped him like life itself, looking over his shoulder at the deer. They were all that was left, the three of them, and only a moment more and a shout from below would scatter them.

12

Dell Espinoza got up at dawn because he always did. Neither the restlessness nor the dizzy sense of anticipation were any different today, for he was a morning person. What was new was the thrill of stealing away. He dressed himself in the green fatigues, the blue work shirt, the red bandanna, the very uniform in which he had arrived at Steven's house. Neatly he folded the clothes he'd borrowed from Sonny, which had made him look like any other West Hollywood clone, harmless and shallow.

He went in the kitchen and forced himself to eat a container of yogurt and a slice of bread to settle his stomach. Then he took the revolver from its hiding place under the firewood one last time, crumpled the brown paper in a ball, and tossed it into the fireplace. He tucked the loaded gun—loaded by Alfonso Nava, because Dell didn't really want to learn how—in the inside pocket of his denim jacket. When he left Steven's house it was eyes forward, no looking back, closing the door behind him without so much as a click.

The first streak of the morning sun shot across the chaparral, highlighting the luminous jade of the sage, aching with scent after yesterday's rain. Passing Mrs. Tulare's house, Dell snapped a sprig of wild anis from a bush. He made a tight fist and crushed it in his hand, then brought it to his nose and drank it in. Its licorice smell was wonderfully intense, deeper than a flower and sweeter than an herb.

No cars were out on Sunset Plaza Drive this early, since nobody in the hills had to be at work till a civilized hour. Dell had the road to himself, striding down the steep grade unencumbered, only the gun reminding him, heavy against his heart, that he carried any baggage. But it didn't prevent him from appreciating everybody's lawn and flowering shrubs. He was like an inspector, giving grades to all the gardens as he went by.

Halfway down to the Strip, he stopped and squinted at a stand of palmetto, rotting because it hadn't been cleaned of dead fronds. He itched to have his equipment in hand, pruning shears to shape it. Instinctively he reached for the wallet in his pocket, but of course it wasn't there. If it had been, he would've drawn out a card—
DELGADO LANDSCAPING
—and slipped it in the mailbox at the curb. That's what he used to do: ride up and down the hills in the pickup, leaving a card wherever a yard looked badly tended, what they called cold-blanketing the neighborhood.

It was seven by the time he reached the Strip, but he had plenty of time. The bus stop for the 41 East was by a croissant boutique. Dell didn't have the exact schedule, having lived a notch above his immigrant brothers who had no wheels, but he knew from Linda the wait would not be more than twenty minutes. He sat there placidly and turned his mind to Marcus Flynn.

Arm in arm with Marcus at the Gay Pride Parade, hip to hip on the Catalina ferry feeding sea gulls, Marcus in cap and gown for the Cal State graduation. The thoughts of a man who was past his grief, who had processed all the agony of dying, burned through it, leaving only the memories of wholeness. He could see the scholarly hunch of Marcus's shoulders, silent at his desk. Then saw him arched with passion, riding Dell like a stallion, exploding after all those years in the closet. Nothing was lost and nothing broken. At last Dell had become a man who could live in two worlds, the inviolate past and now. The suffering wasn't part of it anymore.

The 41 bus came sailing down Sunset, lurching suddenly to the curb like a tanker running aground. The door hissed open, and Dell scooted up the steps, dollar ready in hand. The driver was a black woman wide in the hips. She didn't pay him any mind as she took the fare, even if the bandanna was a trifle inner-city for this neighborhood. She certainly didn't care that the dollar was his only cash. He swayed down the aisle of the empty bus as it roared back into traffic, taking a seat in the middle. The bus people were mostly traveling west in the early morning, maids and other workmen bound for the garden districts, Beverly Hills and beyond. From west to east, everyone had at least one car—until late afternoon, when the maids rode home.

At Fairfax they turned south, and in front of Thrifty Drugs a second passenger got on. A gaunt, exhausted Latina, sinking under the weight of a pair of plastic shopping bags. As she fumbled in her purse for the fare, Dell took in the heavy surgical stockings, the battered shoes, the shapeless cardigan. Stepping as wide as a sailor, the woman made her way down the aisle, hoisting her heavy bags to clear the seats. In her mid-fifties, though she looked tired enough this morning to die happily of old age.

As she struggled to sit herself down two rows in front of Dell, the gardener stood up to help her with her bags. She shot him a look of panic, for thieves were everywhere, but his friendly smile won her over. She let him hoist the shopping bags and set them down on the inner seat by the window. She thanked him in Spanish, bowing her head. She wore a black kerchief that reeked of her own widowhood, and a crucifix round her neck, Jesus and all. Dell took the seat across from her as she drew out a small-beaded rosary from her purse.

It wasn't that she looked like Beatriz Espinoza, not in the least, and yet she was the same, guileless and long-suffering. Hard to say if California was any sort of promised land for her. She rode the near-empty bus, glazed and turned in on herself, much as she would have ridden the rattletrap line in Morelia, children spilling out the windows and chickens on farmers' laps. Dell smiled at the vividness of the parallel, but it wasn't exactly a sentimental longing for his mother. Mostly he saw the woman on the bus as somebody Linda would not become, just as she would never become Beatriz Espinoza. It made him completely calm inside.

At Farmers' Market the bus began to fill—Samoans, Filipinos, old Jews from Fairfax—and it headed down Third to downtown like a melting pot on wheels. Riders sat on all sides of Dell and the gaunt woman. No one dared to interrupt the reverie of her prayer to push aside her bags and sit by the window. As they came toward Korea-town, Dell began rubbing his hands on the thighs of his pants, to make the sweat go away. A man in the aisle beside him jostled his shoulder, but Dell smiled and didn't lose his temper. Anger wasn't part of it at all anymore. Anger might have veered him from the path. This was passionless, indifferent, not quite real.

He reached to yank the cord, but somebody got there first, buzzing the driver to stop at the corner of Third and Emery Place. Dell Espinoza stood up with care, huddling his left shoulder like a slightly broken wing. He wouldn't have bothered the woman across the aisle, but she looked up abruptly from her rosary and said, “Nice boy.”

He fixed her with a helpless look, a hair-trigger second of doubt. “Pray for me,
madre
,” he said. Then the crowd in the aisle stood back for him to pass, and his face was composed again, a mask of inertia as he hurried down the steps and out of the bus. It roared away, enveloping him in a brown cloud of exhaust.

He could see the parking lot was practically full. As he strolled along the sidewalk toward the church, he noticed that the neon sign across the portico was still lit, even in the morning sun. At the foot of the wide stone steps was a signboard, felt behind glass with tack-on letters. The text of the day was
I AM THE ROCK AND THE REDEEMER.
Below Mother Evangeline's name were listed the Sunday services. Below that, in block yellow letters set off with borders, like a special on a menu, it read: “1st of the Month. Family Prayer and Breakfast. 7:30
A.M.
” Nobody lingered on the steps outside, the way the young men in Morelia did, halfway in and halfway out of Mass.

Dell opened the tall oak door, expecting a cool dank breeze, startled instead by the bright lights and stifling heat thrown off by the cable equipment. He stood in the back to get his bearings. The crowd was standing-room-only, as polyglot a mix as on Halloween. The flood of the TV lights streamed over their heads, bathing the altar and pulpit. An Asian man in a suit stood at the pulpit, wrapping his tentative English around a passage from St. Paul. Mother Evangeline, in proper white vestments, sat on a sort of Tudor throne, downstage right of the altar. Even now she was on—rapt with attention, willing the reader to stumble through and break the language barrier, turning her honey-blond head to gaze directly into the light.

Dell was standing in a group of men who'd given their seats to the women and children. There was no way he could advance down the center aisle and get closer. Any move he made out of the shadows at the back would fix him in the light, his every gesture naked. Restlessly he scanned the baseboards, hoping the cable fed to an outlet he could disarm. And he suddenly locked eyes with the pale young man in the glasses.

Mother Evangeline's aide was standing slightly apart from the overflow crowd, directly beneath the control booth. As before, he had a fan of memos in his hand. Instantly he looked away from Dell, then two seconds later looked again.
Kenneth
, Dell remembered now, letting his own eyes drift to the front, but always homing back to the man in the shadows.

Clearly Kenneth didn't recognize him—dressed as a ghoul last time, disconnected from his manhood—and just as clearly the aide was cruising him this morning. There weren't a lot of single men in the Church of Family Love, and no one dressed so raw and sexy. Kenneth looked as if he could taste the bandanna. Dell smiled lazily.

The reader finished. Mother Evangeline rose from her throne and approached the pulpit, buoyed by the waves of applause that erupted to greet her. The cheering and clapping didn't seem out of place in the church, perhaps because of the game-show lights. Dell reached a hand to his crotch and lightly cupped his balls, casting a sidelong look at Kenneth. The aide was beside himself, memos fluttering, a thin mustache of sweat beading on his upper lip.

“Children of joy,” said Mother Evangeline, “let us sing the morning. The armies of righteousness grow. Today we are welcoming viewers from Durham, North Carolina, and Lawrence, Kansas. Let's open our hearts and greet them.”

Again the roaring swelled in the old Congregational church, like a halftime cheer, the children especially shouting with pleasure. Dell stroked the length of his dick where it lolled down the leg of his pants, pressing the fabric against it so it stood out in lurid outline. Kenneth was riveted. Meanwhile, Mother was telling the flock about her latest crusade, just completed, culminating in back-to-back appearances on Sally Jesse Raphael and Geraldo. Once more Kenneth caught Dell's eye and nodded toward the side aisle. At first the gardener didn't understand, not having started teasing with any goal in mind except to make Kenneth crazy. But the aide was making motions, indicating Dell should follow him.

“Losing one election makes no difference,” Mother declared. “It only means we have to give more. Decent family people like us have had enough. Next time we'll win—because who's on our side?”

“God!” they shouted like a battle cry.

Kenneth nodded again up the side aisle, more impatient now. About halfway down were the heavy velvet drapes that separated the church proper from the offices and storerooms. The idea seemed to be that Kenneth would suck him off back there, perhaps in among the choir robes. Dell hesitated a moment more, but he had no other plans. He moved toward Kenneth, and the aide turned and strolled purposefully down the aisle.

“I want every one of you here to choose a sinner—a blasphemer, a Communist, a sodomite. And then I want you to bombard that sinner with prayers!”

Dell followed Kenneth a few paces behind, and no one in the congregation gave the two of them a second look, because they were all accustomed to Kenneth darting about. He reached the velvet curtains and waited for Dell Espinoza. The expression on the aide's face was completely self-possessed. He was as casual as if he were showing Dell the way to the water cooler. When the gardener reached him, he gestured for Dell to precede him through the drapes. Dell, more courtly still, nodded humbly and drew one of the drapes aside, indicating he would follow. Kenneth swept through to the vestibule, his heart bursting with the promise of a little joy. Then Dell let the curtain fall back into place.

And here he was at last, twenty feet from the pulpit. None of it was planned. He'd never once walked through it in his head. But he had no hesitation, walking quickly past the front pews and directly into the glare of light below the pulpit.

“Come, all you sinners, and win with us!” exulted Mother Evangeline. Again there were cheers. She saw the man in the bandanna moving toward her, but her view was hazy because of the lights. She was used to people seized with God, stumbling forward to be reborn. The congregation was still applauding as Dell Espinoza pulled the gun from his jacket.

The ones who saw it first, in the front pews, froze in horror, but none of them was ready to step out into television. Dell pointed the gun at Mother, who threw out her hands to stop it, praying for once in her life. He shot directly into her face, no hate anymore, no reason. The force of it flung her backward, falling against the altar. Dell could hear the voice of the crowd change from cheering to wailing in pain.

Mother's white robe was ghastly now, and she had no face at all, though her arms still flailed to protect it. Dell turned as the crowd surged forward, blinking into the holy light. Kenneth was lurching toward him from the left, and a hundred more from the congregation. Dell seemed perplexed, not having figured the next part out. It was really almost an afterthought that he put the gun in his mouth.