Lying with the Dead (14 page)

“Save that for a priest. Your sins, I mean. Not your sarcasm. I’m worried about the state of your soul.”

“From what I gather from Candy, you’re worried about your own soul.”

“Naturally I am.” She taps the Kent in the vague direction of an ashtray. A live cinder goes dead as it falls to the carpet. “At my age who wouldn’t be?”

“I’m confident you’ll do beautifully on Judgment Day.”

“I don’t count on it. That’s why I pray so hard. What the hell, these days I pray for the church. I never thought it’d come to this—me praying for its soul instead of depending on it to save mine. You must have heard about the scandals here.”

“They’ve had trouble in Ireland too,” I say.

“Priests! Ireland!” She spits out the words the way she would a nasty shred of tobacco. “I had a bellyful of them hanging around my parents’ house on St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Thought your family didn’t go in for Irish holidays.”

“We weren’t professional Irish, if that’s what you mean. We didn’t wear green derbies and drink green beer and sing ‘Danny Boy.’ None of that malarkey. Like my mother said, ‘If Ireland was so great, why’d we leave it?’”

“To keep from starving to death,” I suggest.

“It wasn’t hunger that brought us here. It was to escape the English. Now you’re living with them, like a traitor.”

“I thought we were talking about your soul.”

“It’s your soul that’s in question. My father boasted he’d kill an Englishman before he died. Now it’s up to you.”

“Yeah, murdering a limey, that’ll put me in a state of grace.”

She uncrosses her legs. She can’t seem to get comfortable. “But priests, getting back to them,” she says, “they’d drink a couple of jars and get tight as ticks and start talking smut. Many’s the time one of them touched me where he shouldn’t have. They were always after me to sit on their laps. The nuns warned us girls never to sit on a man’s lap unless we put down a magazine first. But with the priests I knew, you’d need to put down a phone book. Now they’ve gone in for little boys,” she says, more animated by the moment. “Doesn’t shock me a bit. When it comes to men, nothing does.”

“The way you talk I’m surprised you’re still a Catholic.”

“It’d take more than a few bad priests, even a bad pope, to shake my faith.”

“With that attitude, you shouldn’t have any trouble at the Pearly Gates. What worries me is your health and happiness here and now.”

She screws up her face like a jeweler with a loupe discovering a fake diamond. “Is that why Candy ran off with Maury? So you can nag me about assisted living? Are you trying to make me sell my home and move into a roach nest?”

“I’m here because you asked me to come.”

“Assisted dying is what it amounts to.”

“If you’d rather live at home, Mom, that’s your choice. But what’ll you do if Candy moves away with Lawrence?”

She peers at the ash on her Kent. “I’ll be dead by then.”

“Let’s hope not. Let’s hope you live a long, long time.”

“Why? So I can be Candy’s matron of honor?”

“Wouldn’t you like to see your daughter married?”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Mom, Mom. You’ve been through a lot in your life. You spent so many years looking after us, why not let us take care of you?”

“What a bunch of crap. You don’t intend to take care of me. You’ll pay a team of darkies to do it. A goddamn waste of money. There won’t be a cent left for you kids.”

“Don’t worry about leaving me money.”

“I’m not. It’s for Candy and Maury. I’ve been laying aside a little for them each month. Now you want me to piss away my nest egg.”

“Wait a minute. You’ve been saving what I send you?”

“Part of it.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or howl. Whether to shit or go blind, as my foulmouthed mother often sums up her quandaries. During the most vigorous bull market in history, she’s been parking cash in a savings account that probably draws no interest.

“That money was for you,” I say.

“Once it’s in my name, I’ll do what I damn well please with it. If you don’t like it, quit writing the checks.”

Her sheer ballsiness is breathtaking. “Look, I didn’t travel all the way from London to argue with you,” I say.

“Good, because I’m not up to fighting either. I’d like you to look over the stuff Candy and I found in the cedar chest. There may be things you’d be interested in keeping.”

“Shall we do it together?”

“No, you go ahead. I’ll finish my prayers and my cigarette.”

My overcoat, draped over the back of the chair, describes the outline of a torso, like a chalk drawing at a crime scene. I feel as deflated as the coat. Still, I smile and plant a kiss on the crown of her head. Her hair smells not of the rankness that permeates the house, but almost refreshingly of cigarette smoke.

Upstairs, I step into the room that used to be mine, then mine and Maury’s after his parole. The walls, formerly covered with movie posters and baseball pennants, are bare, and the floor space is crammed with beds. Two twins from Candy’s room have been squeezed in along with the ones Maury and I slept on. Leaning over them to a window, I look out at the backyard. The rusty stanchions of the clothesline jut up from bare earth like a pair of crucifixes. The emptiness between them begs for a third cross.

In what Mom calls the library, the cedar chest is the size of a child’s coffin. The lid lifts not on a corpse, but on something almost as painful to me—fossils of family history. Photographs, Christmas and birthday cards, my grade school and high school reports, playbills from college, clippings from British reviews. Everything ready to be sorted, discarded, or salvaged. Whatever I wish.

And what I wish fervently at the moment is to vanish. I want to get out of here and back to Tamzin and my snug conservatory. Instead, like a forensic coroner at a mass grave, I suppress my personal revulsion and sit next to the cedar chest and concentrate on learning what the dead—and under this rubric, I include the boy I used to be—have to teach the living.

Mom seems to have saved everything except my fingernail parings and navel lint. There’s the blue-beaded bracelet I wore home from the maternity ward, a hank of my blond baby hair, and an envelope of teeth, yellow as kernels of corn, that the tooth fairy exchanged for dimes. Whatever bizarre freight of emotion these mementos carry for her, I’m tempted to declare that they mean nothing to me. But that’s not true. Otherwise I wouldn’t fear that if I saved this midden heap and shipped it to London, the past would own me. Yet how can I discard it without insulting Mom and showing that I don’t value what she treasures?

I browse through a few letters, full of false bravado, that I mailed soon after I settled in England. Then there are the curt notes that I’ve taken to enclosing along with Mom’s monthly check. Each one includes less and less of myself. It’s only the hand-drawn cards I did in grade school that suggest the true depth of feeling that used to connect us. Every Christmas and Easter I composed a spiritual bouquet, reckoning on sheets of loose-leaf paper the number of Masses, Communions, and Rosaries I dedicated to the salvation of her soul. How can she have any doubt that she’s well fixed for eternity?

Deeper into the cedar chest, I dig down to another sheaf of newspaper clippings. They’re not about me. Yellow with age and as delicate as antique lace, they deal with Maury and the murder. I handle them with care. No, with caution. I’m not convinced I’m supposed to read them. This information—the headlines about the “Boy Killer,” “The Bad Seed”—has always been off-limits.

But then another possibility presents itself. Maybe Mom decided the time has come, and that’s why she sent me up here—to find material for my memoir.

I break out in a sweat, a cold one, yet remain clearheaded as I read on. Under the clippings, a buckram folder contains the paperwork from Maury’s original booking and a transcript of his confession, neatly typed at the County Service Building hours after the killing. Are these relics of his childhood the equivalent, in Mom’s mind, to my baby teeth and hair? What did she save for Candy—her leg brace? It hits me that at last I’m getting an answer to the question that years ago got my head slammed into a wall.

My mother and father were arguing in the kitchen. I remembered all the things he did to me, and I got really mad. I waited outside the kitchen door, thinking what to do. I opened the door and went in where they were hollering. I told them to stop. My father saw me and I knew by his look that he’d punish me for sticking my nose into his business which I had been brought up never to do. There were knives in the kitchen drawer and I took out the biggest one, the butcher knife. He ran at me, and I held the knife in front of me to keep him away. But he didn’t stop and his belly bumped into the knife. I pushed it into him. I don’t remember how far. I was crying and my mother was screaming and my father fell on the floor and blood came out of his mouth. Mom grabbed the butcher knife and said we better call an ambulance.

This sounds more or less like my brother—in the same way that stage dialogue sounds more or less like a fictional character. What’s missing are Maury’s verbal tics and some indication of the off-kilter cadence of his voice. The confession doesn’t suggest anything of the impression he made the same day on the psychiatric staff at Clifton T. Perkins Criminal Mental Health Clinic. They concluded that he displayed symptoms of “morbid ideation,” “thought disorganization,” “easy distractibility,” “sensory integration disorder,” “attention impulse disorder,” and “manic behavior.” The transcript of his admission interview almost makes me weep.

Staff:
Where are your parents?

Patient:
Mom’s at home. Dad’s probably in hell.

Staff:
Why did you kill your father?

Patient:
Do I have to say what I already said?

Staff:
Not if you don’t feel like it. Does it bother you to talk about it?

Patient:
I get dizzy.

Staff:
Why?

Patient:
I don’t know.

Staff:
Were you dizzy when you stabbed your father?

Patient:
Yeah. Everything was spinning.

Staff:
Could you describe yourself? What kind of boy you are?

Patient:
I try to be polite and clean.

Staff:
Anything else? Anything you like or dislike?

Patient:
I don’t like people that cuss and yell at me. I stay away from them.

Staff:
Did your father do that?

Patient:
Yeah, a lot.

Staff:
And your mother?

Patient:
Less than my father.

Staff:
What do you think is going to happen to you?

Patient:
I don’t know. I guess I’ll stay here or go someplace else.

Staff:
Where?

Patient:
Maybe reform school.

Staff:
Why do you think that?

Patient:
I don’t know. Maybe when I’m twenty-one they’ll put me in prison.

Summary:
Maury believes that he is a normal child, that he is no different from any other boy, except it takes him a little longer to do his homework. He says that he will never marry because that brings too many problems.

Predisposition:
Passive-aggressive personality

Impairment:
Severe

Prognosis:
Guarded

There’s a loud thump; Mom groans on the stairs. She sounds hurt. I pitch to my feet, spilling papers off my lap. But before I have a chance to rush to her, she crawls into the room on her hands and knees.

“Sit down,” she wheezes. “There’s something I better tell you.”

Maury

When we’re out of Mom’s house, the stink stays inside and Candy and I stand next to her car catching our breath. There’s cloud everyplace, from the top of the sky down to the ground, and we add our clouds to it, like the puffs of cigarette smoke from Mom’s mouth. I don’t like looking up the street where the houses disappear and dark windows and black roofs float in the air with nothing underneath them.

Candy unlocks the car with the clicker on her key ring. It chirps like a frog. I make the sound myself. Before they bulldozed the creek, I caught frogs behind the house. Turtles and lizards too. Never a snake. I saw them, but I knew Mom wouldn’t let me bring them in the house. She believes they’re all poison. Now in winter they’re sleeping, warm underground. Or else they’re dead.

In the car a good smell comes off Candy and off the little green cardboard Christmas tree that swings from her rearview mirror. “Where would you like to go?” she asks. “What would you like to see?”

“All this cloud, there’s nothing to see.”

“The fog’ll burn off.”

“Burn?”

“It’ll lift. Go away. I’m glad to drive you wherever you want.” She revs the engine and starts driving before I make up my mind. The cloud rolls over the hood and onto the roof. “There must be places you’d like to visit,” she says, “even if everything has changed.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Yeah, it’s changed? Or yeah, there’s places you’d like to visit?”

“Yeah, it’s changed.”

“What changes have you noticed?” she asks.

She’s staring at me instead of the road. It’s a thing Nicky does that scares me. Even in clear weather in the desert, you can’t tell what’s ahead. In this cloud, there could be a car, a wall. “Dead,” I say, afraid what we’ll bump into.

“Dead?” From Candy’s voice I know I’ve made a mistake.

“There’s more dead people than when we lived here.”

“But we’re still alive. So’s Mom.”

“Why does it smell that way in her house?”

“What way?”

“Like cats.” I worry how deep this cloud is.

“Mom’s cats passed away a long time ago.”

“I still smell them.”

“Maybe it’s because she’s been sick.”

“And she’ll die like the cats?”

“We hope not. Mom’s different from a cat. She has a soul.” Candy talks like she did giving Communion to Mom. “She’ll be in heaven, and we’ll join her there when we die.”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll be in the other place.”

“Oh, Maury, that’s not true.”

“Yeah, it is. Because of what I did.”

“That was a long time ago. You were punished and forgiven.”

“Still …”

“Do you go to Mass and Communion in California?” She keeps tunneling into cloud where we could crash head-on into anything.

“Whenever there’s a Mexican to drive me.”

“A Mexican?”

“They’re the only Catholics around.”

Stopped at a red light, Candy doesn’t notice it turn green. She’s staring so hard at me, she doesn’t see it go yellow, then red again. A car behind us honks, and Candy zips across the intersection. More horns blow, and a truck just misses smashing us.

“I better watch what I’m doing.” She laughs like it’s a joke. But I hear in her voice that it’s not funny. “Now where shall we go?” she asks. “Your choice.”

“Patuxent.”

“You’re kidding. Why would you want to do that?”

“To see Cole.”

“Who’s Cole?”

“A friend.”

“An inmate?” The joking has gone out of her voice.

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t realize you were in touch with anyone at Patuxent.”

“I’m not.”

“Then how do you know he’s still there?”

“You kill a cop, they never let you out.”

Candy brushes a hand at her hair. When her bangs flip off her forehead, she looks like Mom, only younger and prettier and with a skinny leg in her boot.

“After being cooped up at Patuxent for a dozen years, it surprises me you want to visit,” she says.

“You visited.”

“That was to see you. Somebody I love.”

I don’t tell her how I feel about Cole. “If it’s too much trouble, don’t bother.”

“It’s not too much trouble.” Her hand is at her hair again. “If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

She tugs the wheel and the tires squeal and we tunnel back through the cloud. It hits me that Cole could be dead. I don’t mention this to Candy. It’s too late. Now that the idea is in my brain, I have to learn whether he’s alive or not. Your problem is you don’t think, Nicky always says. But my problem is I can’t stop thinking about a thing once I start.

I don’t recall how old Cole is. Not like Mom, but he’s way up there and doesn’t have long to go. All the years he’s been locked up, I figure he’d rather burn than be buried in another box. But it could be he doesn’t get to choose. That’s how it is in prison. They say, and you do what they say, or else it’s into the hole.

If he hasn’t shaved, his mouth’ll be as whiskery as Mom’s. But I bet there’ll be glass between us. So no touching. Just looking and pressing hands against the glass, like me looking through the car window where trucks rip by so fast I’m afraid they’ll suck me out onto the highway.

I change from the window to looking at Candy, and she says, “This used to be farmland, with people selling vegetables beside the road. On the drive home from Patuxent, we’d buy fresh corn and tomatoes. Do you remember that, Maury?”

“I wasn’t in the car.”

“I mean the times when we visited you.”

“Yeah.” A fire flickers from drawer to drawer in the box in my head, and I follow it, hunting for Cole and a place to be with him. But passing cars and trucks set off a racket, and in the side mirror headlights burn out of the cloud like the point of Mom’s cigarette. My mind can’t find a safe spot.

“Do you remember visiting me when I was in the hospital?” Candy asks.

“I remember the little girl in the machine.”

“Yes, an iron lung.”

“Did she ever get out of it? Or is she like Cole, in for life?”

“I don’t know, Maury.”

By the time we’re on the parking lot at Patuxent the cloud’s gone, just like Candy promised. Or maybe it was never here to start with. The sun feels nice, but it makes a pool under me on the pavement, and I step away. The lockup building stares back at me through two tall chain-link fences.

They’re easy to climb, these fences, till you hit the barbed wire on top. I saw a guy tangle himself up there trying to escape. Guards hollered for him to climb down, and when he didn’t, they said they’d shoot, and when he still didn’t, they shot him. He hung there a long time, his clothes snagged in the wire. They had to take a ladder and cut him down, just like I cut the tree branches from the fence at Nicky’s house. I don’t want to think about any of this. But like Cole, whether he’s alive or dead, it sticks in my brain.

“Ready?” Candy asks, locking up with the frog chirper.

We go into the gatehouse through a glass door so thick it shuts with the sound of the safe where Nicky keeps her money. For a minute we’re locked between one glass door and the next. It’s so tight, I have trouble breathing. Then at a buzz we move through a metal detector into the big room where everybody waits. I make the buzzing noise to myself. It’s Sunday and there are as many people here as in church this morning. It smells like feet and dogs, and I’d never lie down on this floor.

A guard drags a police dog on a leash, telling it, “C’mon, checkup, checkup.” And it snuffles at shoes and bags and up and down your legs. These people don’t mind. They come every week, they’re used to a dog with its nose in their privates. But when the teeth and wet tongue get near Candy, she flinches.

A black guard in a booth talks through a microphone and matches our names against the visitors list. When I ask for Cole, he looks at me. He looks so long, I have to look away. I’m scared he thinks there’s a mistake and I belong back in jail.

“Ole Cole,” he says, “he ain’t too popular these days. Ain’t had visitor one since I been on staff. You kin?”

“He’s a friend,” Candy talks for me.

“Cole’s visitor list, it’s years, it’s decades, out of date,” the guard says.

“My brother traveled a long way,” Candy tells him. “He traveled from California to visit his friend.”

“Ain’t up to me. His name’s on the list, and I’ll let him through. But inside they might could decide no and send him back.”

“Can I go in with him?” Candy asks.

“No, ma’am.” There’s a radio in the booth and it’s singing that rhyming music about ditches and bitches and ass and grass. “Nobody gets in ’less his name’s down here. And yours ain’t.”

“I’ll be in the car,” Candy tells me, smiling—maybe because she’s glad to wait outside. Now I’m not sure I want to go in. But people behind us are pushing and the guard whistles through his teeth, waiting. “Stay as long as you like,” Candy says.

“It’s an hour, max,” the guard says.

The ground in the yard is frozen. Under my feet there’s an echo, like from an escape tunnel some con is digging. The wind that blew away the cloud pushes at me. But it doesn’t have the sand in it that stings you in Slab City. My shadow pours out ahead of me. Every blade of grass is dead, and there’s not a tree or bush to hide behind.

The building swarms with the smell I lived with when I was a boy. Bad food and bad gas and bad men. People talk about jail and think bars. But the worst is the smell and the banging steel doors. The noise shakes the cellblock, and that shaking is in my voice when I tell a guard at a desk my name and Cole’s.

The belt around his belly has holsters for handcuffs, a walkie-talkie, and a nightstick. No gun. I don’t know whether he believes I belong here or not. His questions come down so fast I can’t keep up. They come down like snow, the first flakes melting and making wet spots. Then flurry after flurry, they pile up, and my head is as full as the glass ball at Mom’s house where a blizzard buries the miniature town.

The guard says Cole’s sick. Been sick for years. The guard doesn’t let on from what. He might be sick from anything. In prison they’ve got diseases, and you can catch them. Or they catch you. I don’t ask. Probably the guard wouldn’t tell me. Probably he doesn’t have to unless I’m a blood relative. He knows I’m on Cole’s visitors list, but tells me he doesn’t have to let me in.

“I came from California,” I say what Candy said to the guard at the gate. “I came on a bus.” I pull the plastic bus from my pocket.

He laughs. “Must have been a tight fit.”

“I sat in the sixth row.” I hold it out for him to look at.

“I get the picture. Lemme call upstairs and ask the supervisor do we make an exception for you.”

Ten minutes. I count them on the clock on the wall. I don’t do it out loud. I watch the red hand circle and the black hand jump, and I count to myself. Then the guard says I’m an exception and orders me to empty my pockets and put everything, including the bus, in a locker and he’ll hold the key.

A different guard leads me through steel doors, downstairs to a tier that I never knew about. It smells like soap and the purple medicine Nicky paints on me when I cut myself. None of the men look really sick. Still, they’re cuffed to beds. One or two call out to me.

“Hush up,” the guard tells them. Then he whispers, “Buncha skull-fucked toads.”

The last bed in the line is behind hanging sheets, and the inmate is tied with wires and tubes, not cuffs. They snake into his arms and up his nose and between his legs. Stuff drips in and out of him. Mostly out, so that his face has that collapsed look of a cantaloupe that’s gone bad. He has less hair than Quinn, just baby wisps above his ears. It doesn’t smell like straw. Still, I know by his eyes that it’s Cole.

I lean down and look at him and he looks at me. His eyes are full of water like you’d see on a rainy street. It’s hard to say whether he recognizes me. To remind him who I am, I do what he used to do. I spread my fingers over his head. His scalp feels paper thin. I could crush it with one squeeze. But I hold on, remembering him holding me, teaching me, being my father. Nothing, not even the water in his eyes, budges.

“I don’t know as I’d do that if I was you,” the guard says. “They claim you can’t catch it. But why run the risk?”

“Sleep,” I whisper to Cole. “You’re going to sleep for a long time.”

When I’m ready, we walk back past the men cuffed to their beds.

“How long you known Cole?” the guard at the desk asks.

“Since I was a boy.”

“Do you know his family? Anybody we could notify?”

“He had a wife and kids, but they never visited.”

“We need to decide what to do.”

“You mean burn him or bury him in a box?”

The guard gives me a look. “That’s not my department.”

“I know he’d rather burn, not end up in a box.”

“Like I say, it ain’t up to me. Unless you’re kin, it ain’t up to you either.”

When I fetch my belongings from the locker, I say, “I’d like to leave him something.”

“What?” The guard eyes my plastic bus.

“Money for cigarettes and candy.”

“He’s finished smoking, and all his food drips through that tube in his nose.”

I hand him ten dollars.

“It’s your money, man. I’ll take it,” he says, “and when Cole passes, I’ll toss it in the kitty for the Christmas party.”

He has to write up a receipt that I sign so no one accuses him of stealing. But he writes the date wrong and has to do it over again. Then carrying the pink slip of paper, I cross the yard, and the wind blows it out of my hand. The paper flaps in the dead grass, and I chase it. Like a butterfly, it lands here, lands there. Nicky’s afraid of anything with wings, even moths. I catch them without hurting them and set them free. But Nicky stomps them flat. Which is what I do with the receipt. Stomp it. A corner of it flaps at the side of my shoe, one wing still flying. I fold it in half and stuff it in my back pocket.

In the gatehouse, I spot a guard at the glass door spying on me, probably wondering what I stuffed in my pocket. I look over my shoulder like I left something behind, like pieces of me have broken off.

Candy’s in the car, and the windshield mists from her breathing. She switches on the engine, and the glass starts to clear. I bet the mist is gone before I get there. I walk slow to make sure I win.