the Pallbearers (2010) (3 page)

The rider pulled to a stop in the parking lot, put down a foot, shut off the bike, and racked the kickstand. Then he climbed off and walked up the path toward us.

"Jack Straw. Sorry I'm so late," he said, addressing Ms. Peterson. "You look pissed, so you must be Diamond."

She looked at his outfit then flicked her gaze at me. "That's what you're planning on wearing?"

"All I got, Toots." When he smiled, he showed us one gold-boxed tooth in front.

I'm a cop. My job is to read people, and from jump this guy was coming off as dirt. He had a career criminal vibe. If I ran him through the system, I was sure his package would contain a fat list of priors. At least, that was my instant take. He was twenty-eight or thirty and handsome in a greasy, Tommy Lee way. His attitude suggested he thought he was pretty damn hot.

Then he took off his heavy leather biker jacket. Underneath, he had on a white tank. Tattoos covered both arms and confirmed my suspicions--spiderwebs at each elbow, crude drawings, and the names of old girlfriends written on both forearms. A walking billboard. It was mostly prison work, done in that hard-to-miss, strange, green
-
blue ink that the California penal system uses.

He turned and looked me up and down.

"You a cop?" he asked, making me as quickly as I had just made him. Cops and cons can do that.

"Yeah, but I'm only here as a friend of Walter Dix," I said coldly. "I won't tell your P
. O
. you skipped out of work early."

"Hey, come on. Don't bake me, dude. I just asked." Then he put his hand out to me, and since I had no choice, I shook it. He turned back to face Diamond.

"I work at a motorcycle shop in Long Beach. My boss is a dick and made me finish a ring job I was doing on a flathead Harley." He looked over at Alexa.

"This is my wife, Alexa," I said. He held his appraisal for a few seconds too long. A frank sexual inventory. He'd made me as a cop quickly, but seemed to have missed the fact that, besides being gorgeous, underneath her simple black sheath Alexa was also LAPD blue. I watched as he mentally undressed her. If Mr. Straw didn't cut it out, he was soon going to be keeping that boxed tooth in a tooth box.

"Let's go inside. We need to pick our spots," Diamond said. "Mrs. Scully, you can wait inside the church. It's starting to fill up, so you better get a seat."

Alexa nodded and moved toward the little chapel. I followed Diamond Peterson and Jack Straw into the small rectory beside the church. Three other people were waiting. Apparently, there were just going to be the standard six pallbearers.

It was a strange bunch, all veterans of the group home. We were all dressed differently, and all of us were from different time periods at Huntington House.

The oldest was a stocky Hispanic man in his early fifties with a low forehead and a full head of thick black hair, silvering at the temples. He must have been from Walt's early years at the home in the late sixties. He was wearing an inexpensive off-the-rack black suit. His knuckles were scarred and looked like long ago he'd had old gang tattoos removed. They were big bony hands that could hurt you.

He introduced himself as Sabas Vargas and said he was an attorney in East L
. A
. My guess from the scraped knuckles and the hardline set of his mouth was that his practice in the barrio probably involved getting vato killers their prison walking papers.

Standing next to him was a woman in her mid-to-late thirties. Trim body, short hair, conservative print dress. She was very mannered, tightly wrapped, and efficient looking. Her name was Victoria Lavicki. Diamond made the introductions and said that Victoria was a CPA with the well-known downtown accounting firm of Kinney and Glass. From her approximate age, I figured we'd probably just missed each other at the home. She said she'd been at Huntington House for six years in the eighties, which was a long stay, but I still held the record.

The last introduction was Seriana Cotton, an imposing specimen about six feet tall and twenty-three years old. She was African American and wore an Army corporal's dress uniform with a row of combat ribbons. The uniform patch on her shoulder identified her as a soldier in the Third Armed Cavalry Division. Seriana was physically fit and had a no-nonsense demeanor. She was one of those rare women who could accurately be described as handsome. Corporal Cotton did not smile as she met us but said that she was about to return to Iraq for her second tour.

"Okay," Diamond said. "We'll put the men on three of the four corners because that's where the weight is. I need one woman to take the last corner. You look like the best bet, Corporal," she said, smiling at Seriana Cotton.

"IYrfgood for it, ma'am," Seriana replied.

"Victoria and I wall take the middle."

I didn't know who put Diamond Peterson in charge, but she was organized, so no one was complaining.

"You can decide who takes the front and who gets the back, but let's do it now because the service needs to start. Once it's over, the hearse will be waiting out front. Carry the casket out the door and the driver will instruct you on how best to slide it into the hearse. He told me there's rollers in the back to help get it inside."

We spent a minute lining up in our correct places, around an imaginary coffin, then nodded to each other. We were ready.

It was strange looking into their faces. All of them had started right where I had, all had come out someplace completely different. Six graduates of Huntington House. Pops favorites.

Or at least that's what I thought at the time, even though I couldn't understand why he'd picked me. Why else, I reasoned, would he have wanted the six of us to carrv his coffin?

Chapter
5

The Catholic priest was Father Mike Leary. He was a surfing buddy of Walts, and he kept the service loose and unstructured to go with Pops hang-ten personality. He started with a benediction and a few prayers, then launched right into a free-form discussion.

Memories of Walter Dix. Old surf stories, starting with the one about Pop almost getting eaten by a tiger shark just outside the break at Rincon. After the tigers first pass, Pop had started stripping off his wet suit, throwing it in the water. The suit ballooned with air and the tiger shark hit it hard, taking it to the bottom.

"That bad boy musta been shitting rubber for a week," our priest joked.

That loosened up the atmosphere and got the ball rolling. One by one, members of the congregation came up and added to the memories.

Jack Straw told a story about stealing candy out of a market tw
o w
eeks after he was put in Huntington House. Pop found him hiding in his room that night, chowing down. He made Jack go back to the store and stood there while he confessed to the manager, who was so impressed, he gave Jack a part-time job as a box boy.

"After that, I was stealing so much candy, I went into business selling it to the rest of you jerks in the rec center," he joked.

We laughed at the stories. I had no funny stories to add. Pop had saved me, but there was nothing humorous about it. He had done it by steadfastly looking past my anger and giving me support and counsel. So I kept quiet and listened. The service was a trip into the past. Happy memories--pure Walter Dix.

After the stories, Father Leary pulled down a screen and turned on a video projector. Shots of long-ago Christmas parties flickered on white acetate. Lots of little kids sitting around in the rec center while Pop, as Santa, handed out presents.

Then it was Easter-egg hunts on the old dirt athletic field, which I assumed was gone now because Pop had told me on my last visit years ago that it was being replaced with expensive rubberized turf. There were pictures of half a dozen Halloween parties over the years, with twenty or more kids dressed for trick-or-treating. Pop was leading the festivities, an unlikely surfing Elvis in a black wig, high
-
collared Hawaiian shirt, and board shorts. He was helping kids into the vans to be taken to the rich neighborhoods, where we always went because the candy was safer and more plentiful.

The video shots were cobbled together from years' and years' worth of these events. Some in the chapel were crying at the loss, some were leaning forward, trying to catch glimpses of themselves. In the video, Pop's hair and clothes changed with the years, but he never seemed to get any older. In all of them, he looked just as I remembered him--happy, full of energy, involved in making our lives more bearable. It was hard not to marvel at the energy he had put into us.

One thought kept bugging me. How could a man so devoted decide to go out into his backyard and blow his head off with a shotgun? How could Pop have done that?

Alexa must have sensed my mood because she took my hand and squeezed it. I looked over, trying to find myself in all this, trying to come out of it more or less the way I went in. But my betrayal, if that's what it was, kept weighing heavily on me, causing emptiness and reevaluation.

After the service, I got up from the pew and, along with my fellow pallbearers, grasped the chrome rails of the heavy mahogany coffin. We lifted it up off its stand and, while a young man with stringy blond surf hair played a mournful song on the harmonica, carried the flower-laden box slowly out of the crowded church, making our way down the stone path.

I was on the left front, across from the badly dressed Jack Straw in his frayed tank top. I was keeping my eyes up, trying to give Walt's last journey the respect that I'd foiled to provide during his life.

We stopped at the hearse, and under the instructions of the black
-
suited driver, Jack and I set the leading edge of the coffin into a chrome tray on rollers. We then stepped aside as the next two behind us pushed the box into the shiny, humpbacked black Cadillac. Seriana Cotton and Sabas Vargas pushed the back end of the coffin into the hearse and stood with the rest of us as the driver closed the door.

"That's it," Diamond said. "There's no graveside service, so we don't go to the cemetery." She handed each of us a slip of paper. A computer printed invitation that read:

Please join us in celebration of a magnificent) life.

"There's a reception following this back at Huntington House," she said. Then for some reason she turned to me and asked, "Do you need a map to find it?"

I didn't know if it was a cold shot or just a friendly question.

"I can find it," I said stiffly. "I lived there on and off for ten years."

I could see one or two others up by the steps also handing out invitations as the rest of the mourners left the church.

"See you there," Diamond said to all of us.

I said good-bye to my fellow pallbearers and headed with Alexa to our car.

We were just getting inside when I heard a woman call my name. I turned. Theresa Rodriguez was hurrying across the lot toward us.

"Its Terry," she said, as if anyone could ever forget that face.

"Hey, Terry. God, its so good to see you," I responded, trying to enjoy the reunion, although back then we'd not been close. Back then, I made no effort to know anyone. I leaned forward, and, for the first time in our lives, we hugged. She felt thin under her dark-green pantsuit. She'd always been skinny, and in thirty years, that hadn't changed.

"This is my wife, Alexa," I said, nodding to Alexa. "Terry and I were in Huntington House together."

"Old buddies, then," Alexa said, smiling, not reacting at all to Terry's melted face. In twenty-five years, because of her scars, Theresa Rodriguez hadn't changed or aged. She looked just as hideous today as she always had.

"You going to the reception?" I asked.

"Yeah." For the first time since I'd known her, I realized that under all that scar tissue her brown eyes were dark and richly beautiful. Why had I never noticed that before? Then she said, "You're a cop now, right?"

"Yes, Terry. I am."

"Somebody inside said you work in homicide."

"That's right."

"You believe this suicide nonsense?"

I looked at her, trying to come up with just the right answer. I felt myself hovering on the edge of something. I felt Hawaii slipping slowly away.

"Hard to say," I hedged.

"I think it's bogus," she stated flatly.

I thought about it, not giving her much more than my street-hard cop face.

"Pop wouldn't voluntarily take a sand ride," she said.

"We don't know that, Terry."

She stood right in front of me, her scarred face making her expression impossible to read.

"What are you doing now?" I asked to change the subject.

"I work for Child Protective Services. Never got out of the system. I'm trying to make it better for the ones that follow."

"That's very cool," I said. "Well, see you at the reception, I guess."

"Okay, see you there," she answered.

I got into the car next to Alexa, feeling the heat from the sun
-
cooked interior. I was still struggling to gather my feelings. To put them back in some kind of order.

"What's a sand ride?" Alexa asked, interrupting my thoughts.