Early Graves (9 page)

“That is the understatement of the week,” Dave said.

They had moved him. This was a different room. That was all he knew. Not even whether it was day or night. He seemed to see the rainy rectangle of a window sometimes, sometimes the glare of fluorescents. Once a keen little beam of light drilled first into one eye, then the other. Once he had a wide-angle vision of a white room, one wallpapered.
See that wallpaper? Billy’s hand. He loved things to be pretty.
A dark face bent over him. “Dixon?” Dave said, but it wasn’t Dixon. He knew the name. Patek. A Swiss watch. That was what it was. Then everything was nothing for a long time. Or what seemed a long time.

Patel. That was the right name. The Pakistani doctor. Dave smiled and opened his eyes. Amanda stood by the bed. She wore a jacket too large in the shoulders, and a man’s hat, domed, flat-brimmed. “Dave? How do you feel?” Nothing again for a long time. Then he was riding through the rain in the unmarked police car driven by Samuels. He was gasping for breath. He was very sick. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I guess I’m going to pass out.” And a voice beside him said, “It’s okay, Dave. You’re going to be okay.” He opened his eyes, and it wasn’t Samuels, it was Cecil. He was holding Dave’s hand. He turned his beautiful head to say to someone, “He’s coming out of it.” But he wasn’t.

Kevin Nakamura grinned at him from the foot of the bed. The room was bright with sunshine. “Hey,” he said, “I got the Valiant back all right.” Then nurses crowded around in white. He was in a henhouse. He was four years old. His father had told him about all those eggs. Dave wanted the eggs. The chickens flapped and squawked around him. White feathers flew like snow. It was his last attempt at crime. No snow now. Blackness again. Then the faces beside the bed were Leppard’s blunt black one, and that of his superior, Captain Ken Barker—steel-gray hair, heavy brow ridges, a broken nose. Dave said, “I only dropped two.”

Barker said, “You’re a tough man to look out for.”

“Stay home after this, please?” Leppard said. “You put yourself out on the streets, he’s going to jump you again.”

“I’ll stay home when you’ve caught him,” Dave said.

And that was all of that. The next faces were Madge Dunstan’s handsome, horsey one, looking aggrieved, and Tom Owens’s, with the odd yellow eyes. “Have a drink,” Dave told them. “It’ll cheer you up.”

“I was the one who gave Dodge your card,” Owens said.

“Jesus.” Dave fought a tangle of tubes and wires, and struggled to sit up. His shoulder hurt, but the pain was dim, far off. They had drugged him half to death. Owens’s bony face kept blurring and coming back into focus. Madge bent over Dave, trying to help him, poking and tugging at pillows. Dave reached out to Owens. “When?” he said. “When did you give it to him?”

“Day before he was killed,” Owens said. “He came to me. Said a blackmailer was after him. He needed advice. You were the best advice I could give him.”

Dave sagged back on the pillows. “Water, Madge? I’m so bloody dry.” He opened his eyes. It was daytime. Beyond the window he saw the tops of tall palms bending in a wind. Rain was falling again. Madge held a glass of water to his mouth. He took a few small swallows. It tired him. “What the hell happened to me?”

“Anaphylactic reaction.” Now a young man in white bent over him, bespectacled, balding, with a coppery moustache. He smelled of vitamin B. “To antibiotics. You didn’t warn the emergency room staff.”

“It never happened before,” Dave said. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, now we all know.” The doctor grinned. “And it won’t happen again, will it?”

“I sincerely hope not,” Dave said.

Cecil too wore a jacket too long and too wide in the shoulders, sleeves rolled halfway up the forearms, the shirt cuffs with them. Blowsy trousers, the extra material crumpled by a cloth belt cinched at his narrow waist. He looked ashamed, standing in the doorway of Dave’s hospital room, the light of the busy hallway behind him, where food carts passed, the soles of shoes squeaked, medicine carts jingled, trays of dishes and glassware. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I wasn’t ready for it. It was just too gruesome.”

Dave nodded. “You said that on the phone.”

“They put me in a surgeon’s gown and mask and cap.” Cecil came and sat by Dave’s bed. “Took me to the ward. I found the room, but I couldn’t go in.”

“The gown and mask weren’t to protect you.” Carmen Lopez stepped out of the shadows into the circle of lamplight around the bed. She wore another neat, dark sweatshirt, jeans, jogging shoes. In the soft glow of the lamp, her face shone like a smooth brown wood carving. “It was to keep you from infecting them. You couldn’t get nothing from them. Not just breathing. AIDS don’t work that way.”

“I know,” Cecil said. “It wasn’t that. I wasn’t afraid of that. It was something else. I don’t know the name of it. I couldn’t make myself go in that room. Two of them in there—Tinker and one named Faircloth. Skeletons, Dave. Tinker’s my age. He looked seventy. I couldn’t go in.”

“I’m sorry I sent you.” Dave sat in the bed and pushed at the supper on his tray. “I wasn’t thinking. When I have this need to know, sometimes I’m callous.”

“Hell, you have a right to know,” Cecil said. “I’m supposed to be a newsman.” He snorted, shook his head in disgust. “I panicked. What I saw in ten seconds through that door—I’ll never forget it. And I ran down the hall, tearing off the mask and cap and gown, and I got the hell out of there.” He gave a bleak laugh at himself. “Rain never felt so good to me, so clean. I just stood there on the sidewalk outside old Junipero Serra and turned my face up and held out my hands and let it wash me, soak me.”

“It’s how everybody feels at first,” Carmen said. “But it isn’t sewage, you know, filth. It’s just an animal you can’t see, a virus that grabs hold of the T cells and kills them. A live thing in the blood. You have to remind yourself of that all the time.”

Dave set the spun aluminum dome over his supper. It was bland, colorless. Hospital food. He wished he’d got Max to sneak him in something decent. But he wouldn’t have felt like eating that, either. Not under these conditions. He said to Carmen, “It was good of you to go. What did Tinker say?”

“I told him how they all must have known the one who stabbed him—otherwise he couldn’t have got so close to do it, otherwise they would have fought, or tried to fight.” She smiled wanly. “You know, Art was feisty. Like a little
gallo
—what do you say, a fighting rooster? He had to be, where we grew up in Boyle Heights. He was small, and the boys called him names because he was pretty like a little doll, all right? And he learned to fight. He wouldn’t let nobody stick him with a knife like that.”

“Art was blind,” Dave reminded her. “What did Tinker say?”

She moved her dark, thick eyebrows, lifted and let fall her chunky shoulders. “He don’t know who it was. It could have been somebody Sean had sex with sometime. But Sean had sex with hundreds of men. He lived half his life at the baths. And he didn’t stop there. He had sex in parks, alleys, cars, everyplace.”

“It made it nice for Tinker,” Cecil said.

Her laugh was sad. “He loved Sean. They started out together, came out together in junior high, okay? And Tinker, all he ever wanted was Sean O’Reilly. For the rest of his life, you know?” She sighed, trying to smile. “He could have been a priest, couldn’t he? It was like that with him. Eternal love. He lays there now too weak to get up, spots all over him, infections wrecking him inside, weighs eighty pounds, okay? Dying. And it’s love he talks about. How he loved Sean. How beautiful he was. He says he don’t believe in God, but he wishes he did, so then he’d believe you don’t die like a sheep or something, you go to heaven. He’d like to find Sean waiting for him in heaven.”

“The men’s room,” Dave said.

She blinked, then gave another sad laugh. “Yeah, right. All he gave Tinker was grief and loneliness.”

“And AIDS,” Cecil said. “So Tinker doesn’t know which of Sean’s hundreds of tricks came back to kill him, right?”

“That was Sean’s one kindness to him,” Carmen said. “He never brought them home.” She stood and went to the window to gaze into the rainy dusk. “And you know what Tinker says? I mean, he raved for a while, like I was Luke Skywalker, and we were in that spaceship.
Star Wars,
all right? There’s parasites in his brain. He don’t know what’s happening, sometimes. But then he knew who I was again, and he told me, ‘It wasn’t Sean gave me AIDS. It was somebody a long time ago, years ago, when I thought I should live like Sean, and I went with maybe a dozen boys. I didn’t like it. It made me hate myself, and I quit. But it was then I got AIDS. It stays inside you, waiting.’ He looked at me, tears running down his face, shaking his poor head on the pillow, like a skull. ‘It wasn’t Sean,’ he kept saying. ‘I just know it wasn’t Sean.’”

“Someone else wasn’t so sure,” Dave said. “The description of the skinny boy with long blond hair didn’t bring anyone to mind?”

“Not to Tinker,” Carmen said. “But Faircloth was listening. He had magazines all over his bed. He was cutting out pictures of naked boys and pasting them in a scrapbook.”

“For future reference?” Cecil said. “What future?”

“Faircloth isn’t going to die,” Carmen said. “That’s what he says.” She looked at Dave. “He laid down the scissors, and he said, “That sounds like Hoppy Wentworth.’”

“Good.” Cecil stood up. “Where do we find him?”

“Sit down,” Carmen said. “He died last Christmas.”

“W
HAT TELEVISION SHOWS YOU”
—a pale-skinned, unshaven man named Rogers set a carton of books inside a yellow rental truck in a Van Nuys driveway—“is some poor woman whose husband was a druggie who used dirty needles and gave her AIDS.” Rogers wore denim cutoffs, a sweaty tank top, and rubber sandals. He drew a hairy forearm across his forehead to wipe away sweat. “She’s skin and bones, right? So feeble she can hardly talk. And she’s leaving behind this brood of dear little children. Orphans. It’s pathetic.” Dave put him in his middle thirties. He was running to fat. Wind with a promise of rain in it stirred his thinning hair. “Made you want to cry. I did cry.”

“Right,” Dave said. “Moving. I saw it.”

“And that newsmagazine piece?” Rogers hiked himself up into the truck that held furniture draped in blankets, plastic baskets of clothes, mattress and box spring against the walls, television set, stereo equipment, cartons of pots and pans, records, tapes, books. Rogers’s voice came muffled from the truck. “About that wonderful doctor in Brooklyn, or someplace. The cover story. Damned good. But it’s mostly about this lovely young Latino woman dying of AIDS. Contracted it from a bisexual lover seven years before she met her present husband. Beautiful, tragic young woman, right? Right.” He jumped down out of the truck, grabbed one door and banged it closed, grabbed the other and banged it closed. “But is it women he really looks after most? No. Not in that area. It’s druggies.” He worked iron bolts to fasten the doors shut. “Which is also a warp.” He faced Dave again, brushing his hands together. “Who really has AIDS? Gays, that’s who. But they get shoved away inside the story, don’t they? You just know the editor was quaking in his shoes when he faced the fact he had to mention who the ones are dying like flies from AIDS. Not pretty young women. Nasty, nasty gays.”

“Now, are you sure that’s it?” A middle-aged woman came down the walk. She brandished a newly bought floor mop like a weapon. She wore jeans, tennis shoes, sweatshirt, rubber gloves. A dish towel was tied over her hair. “Because I’m going to scrub and sterilize this house from top to bottom, and I don’t want you coming back to pick up something you forgot, understand? You’re out for good as of this minute.”

“Me and my retroviruses,” Rogers told her.

“Listen to him.” The woman said this to Dave. She had knobby jaws and squinty eyes. “He jokes—about a thing like that. Spreads a deadly, disgusting disease through a house he rents from a decent, innocent person, and never says word one. Not word one.” She blinked fury at Roger. “Not brave enough to come out from the start and say what you and Frank Prohaska were to each other, oh, no. ‘We’s just bachelors.’” Her thin mouth writhed over bright false teeth when she spoke the word. “Bringing women from your office here, making believe they meant something to you.” She snapped at Dave, “Do you know what he is?”

“That’s a complicated question,” Dave said.

“Nothing complicated about it,” she said. “A pervert—that’s what. And Frank dying of that—that—filthy, slimy disease. In my house. And this one lying about it. Oh, it’s just a cold, an upset stomach, an allergy. Ugh!”

“You loved our barbecues,” Rogers said. “You and old Brad. All those free wine coolers. Sunday after Sunday.”

“I want to throw up when I think of it,” she said. “I ought to report you to the health department. I ought to call the police and have you locked up.” She waved the mop in his face. “Get out. Get right out of here this minute, Don Rogers. I can’t wait to forget you.”

“Particularly since you owe me sixteen hundred bucks,” Rogers said. “Don’t say it, Flo. It’s in the lease. I’ve got a copy. I’ll take you to court. I’m a lawyer, remember?” He moved along to the cab of the truck, climbed up behind the wheel. The woman ran after him.

“When I send you a bill for the cleaning,” she squawked up at him, “we’ll see who owes who what.”

Rogers slammed the cab door and started the engine. He snapped the parking brake loose and backed rapidly out the driveway. When the double rear wheels hit the street, he cramped the steering leftward, and when the truck turned, its cargo shifted. Glass and china smashed. Dave heard it as he got into the Jaguar at the curb. He drove after the truck. When it drew to a halt at a main cross street a few blocks on, he pulled alongside it, tapped his horn. Rogers looked out at him. Blankly. Then with recognition. A coffeeshop stood on an opposite corner—deep-eaved shake roof, thick beam ends, dark glass, rugged stone, planters rich with leafage. Dave pointed to the place. Rogers nodded. The traffic light changed. Rogers drove into the coffeeshop parking lot and found a place for the truck at the far end under a clump of ragged banana trees. Dave parked. They walked into the coffeeshop together.