Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (19 page)

The strange thing was the brass—undersheriffs Woolton and Vega, Captain Burns and Lieutenant Ishmael—and even Jim Wade himself. They seemed to linger around the station, looking at me. Wade from behind the glass of his office. Ishmael during strolls past my work station. Woolton and Vega from a coffee machine that lies at a diagonal from my desk, to and from which there is a clear sight line. Burns peeked at me once over the top of my divider and said he was looking for Frances, but everybody knew she wasn’t in. How couldn’t he?

It was Friday afternoon, and like a lot of other workplaces on Friday afternoon, the department usually went through a communal exhale. Nobody was exhaling. No talk of weekend plans, none of the usual goofy pleasantries that mark the end of the workweek for most of us. Instead there was a rigid silence in the air, and a feeling of anticipation. It was especially odd, also, because Wade’s swanky annual equestrian show and benefit for County Youth Services—called simply the Orange Classic—was set for Sunday. This weekend, the last in April, was always a high time for Jim and the whole Sheriff Department. In fact, I wondered what he was doing still in his office, looking gray and grim as a shark, with all the work he had to do to get his ranch ready for the fling.

I stuck my head in his door.

“What gives?”

He looked at me and shook his head, but said nothing. So I beat it. Kick some furniture and people start to think you’re dangerous. I wasn’t worried. I had more important things to do than worry about why the Sheriff Department heavies were all treating me like I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe.

Fridays I usually leave work an hour early and visit Matt. He’s up in Newport Beach, on a bluff that overlooks the Pacific. It’s between the department and Laguna, right on my way home.

Ardith is often there, too, as she was on this unsettling Friday, already standing on the grass by the grave when I pulled up and parked along the curb.

It’s blustery and cool up the bluff, on almost any day of the year. That Friday the breeze was quite stiff coming off the ocean toward us. Out on the sea the triangles of sails cut slowly through the whitecaps. The water was dark gray and the end of the earth was just a thin black line with the blue of an April sky above it. Catalina Island lay offshore, clearly revealed by the wind.

Ardith had her long black coat on, and her curly blond hair was tangled by the breeze. The dark solidity of her shape and the lightness of her hair stood out against the green of the cemetery grass. She wore jeans under the coat and little black boots that laced to just above her ankles, and a red scarf around her neck. When she looked at me I was struck by the sun-browned color of her skin, but I always am. Ardith has a face of summer: bronze skin and straw-yellow hair and eyes blue as desert sky. She is a California girl. Grew up here, like I did. She works for a ritzy hotel now, group bookings. Her lips are slender and pretty and they turn downward at the edges, giving her a look of etched sadness. A spray of wrinkles beside each of her striking eyes echoes the turn of her mouth and reminds me that Ardith and the world and I are all growing older by the second.

“Hi,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled faintly.

“Hi, Terry.”

I stood across the headstone from her. It’s a flat stone, flush with the ground, because the upright style isn’t allowed here. We picked a red granite one, on the theory that red was cheerful and youthful. The letters are a cursive script rather than the more formal blocked ones; again, we were trying for something more upbeat than conventional. It’s hard to say if it worked. I guess that depends on your mood. The red is red, all right, but the sun seems to have dulled it more than its neighbors of slate gray and black. No matter how many times I spray and wipe it with the glass cleaner and paper towels I keep in my trunk, it maintains a dull barrier instead of the glistening red patina I’d envisioned when we ordered it. I’ve doubted in my more somber hours that the concept of an upbeat headstone is a sound one.

I knelt, sprayed off the stone and wiped it with one paper towel, then another. Opaque streaks formed in the heat of the rock, then shrunk away.
Matthew Paul Naughton.
I picked off the dead grass that always jumps onto the stone when you nudge the paper towel against the edges of the lawn as you wipe. It’s the springy Bermuda grass that has lots of dry dead blades in it.

I stood and looked down. It wasn’t very good, but no matter how many times you wipe that granite, it looks the same. I can imagine the shape and size and condition of what lies beneath that headstone, but only vaguely, and not for long. I don’t mean to be morbid, it just happens. I always blot out that kind of thinking with memories of my beautiful robust son, alive in the world. I go from the horrible to the beautiful in just a beat of the heart, then travel back to the here and now. The trouble is the here and now has a big empty space in it. You don’t want that space to be empty. So you try to fill it with something. Imagination is a poor substitute for living flesh and flowing blood, for the sound of voice and the thrill of touch. You do what you can.

“That granite just won’t come clean,” I said.

“It’s all right, Terry.”

I monitor Ardith’s voice for every nuance and subtlety, every shading and slant. It’s a sweet, low, calm voice—she used to read radio commercials years ago—but it sends a buzz of nerves through my body like it came from a wall socket. We were married ten years and ten years is a long time. It was a good marriage. When Matthew died it collapsed, like a building with dynamite in the foundation. We were the walls. She fell toward me and I fell toward her and we missed. If we hadn’t, maybe the building would have stayed up somehow. She held me solely and fully responsible for what happened to Matt. I did, too, but for different reasons. You don’t continue to live with a person under those conditions. You have to get away. At least I did.

We had different ideas on how to raise our son. It was always something like this—

If we went to the mountains Ardith would worry about the bears eating Matthew.

I’d say,
The bears won’t eat Matt. He’s too bony.

If we went to Mexico Ardith would worry about him being stolen and sold as a blue-eyed gringo.

I’d say,
Maybe they’ll pay for his college.

If
we went to the desert she’d worry about rattlesnakes.

I’d say,
Don’t worry, he’s too big to eat.

If we went to the beach she’d worry about the sharks.

I’d say,
That kid could outswim any shark.

She thought he was doomed for tragedy and I thought he was invincible. Now I guess I agree with her.

So fuck me, and fuck the way I was.

“Work go okay this week?” I asked.

“Um-hm,” she said. “The world still loves Southern California. I don’t know why.”

“How’d the Mitsubishi guys go?”

“All they wanted to do was play golf.”

“I guess that was easy to arrange.”

“Oh, yes. You?”

“That guy took another girl. We got her back today, more or less okay.”

“I’ve been seeing the news. Made me wish you’d catch up with him and shoot him about a hundred times.”

“I’ve had that pleasant daydream, too.”

“All the things that can happen to children in this world, and there’s somebody out there, doing that. I just don’t understand.”

“They’re different than the rest of us.”

She didn’t say it—she never would—but I knew what she was thinking:
and you feel just a little bit sorry for them, don’t you, Terry?

I took the spray bottle and paper towels back to the car. I got out the big old beach towel and walked back to the grave with it, unfolded and spread it out on the grass. It’s a faded blue one, with seahorses and starfish and little holes. The thing about this cemetery is, to sit on the grass next to your loved one, you have to sit on someone else. You’d have to stay directly in front of the stone to observe the property lines. But then you’d be sitting on Matthew’s chest, I guess. Anyway, we always sit at opposite ends of the towel. The red stone is in front of us, then the smooth green grass sloping away, dotted with flower arrangements. Beyond the grass you can see the city reservoir of still gray water mirrored with clouds, then the proud towers of Newport Center—expensive stores, corporate this and that—then the ocean, way out to the sky. It’s a good place to think about living and dying.

Ardith and I meet here almost every week. Some Fridays she’ll miss and some I will. It didn’t start out that way. About six months after Matt was buried—three months after I moved out of the house—we just happened to be here at the same time. It was excruciatingly difficult to be around her then. Independently, we’d decided that Friday afternoons would be our time to visit, and neither one of us would back down. Sticking to our guns, no matter how vague or even destructive they might be, is something we’ve both always been good at. And through our stubbornness came an accommodation that seems to be necessary for both of us, though necessary for reasons I only partially understand. For me, seeing Ardith reminds me, fully and honestly, of what I did to her son. One of the things I come here for is an outside shot at her forgiveness. For her, I can’t say exactly why she comes, but I think it has something to do with wanting to forgive me, which she can’t She can’t because to do it, she’d have to admit that she blames me for Matthew. She’s never admitted that, but she believes it I will and I do. But we still show up, most Fridays, knowing full well who’s on the guest list.

A lot of it is just small talk.

I remarked about the weather.

She told me about her car.

I asked if her homeowners’ insurance had paid out.

Our home—now Ardith’s home—was burglarized a few months ago and she’s had problems collecting. They took some costume jewelry and a clock radio, and that was about it.

The insurance had finally paid up.

I asked about her photography, which is one of Ardith’s loves from college years, and she said she hadn’t shot much lately. She takes great pictures, lots of mood and emotion in them.

“I get out the old albums sometimes,” she said. “All that stuff of you and Matt. Some of it’s quite beautiful. But all of it makes me cry.”

Those pictures—Matt and I wrestling on the floor, Matt and I goofing at the beach, Matt and I doing you name it—would have made me cry, too. Ardith seemed to follow us around with her camera for every one of those five short years.

Small talk has a way of getting bigger when you’ve been through the things that Ardith and I have been through. This time, she changed the subject.

“Did you see the notice this mortuary ran in the paper?”

“Yeah. I called. They said they were computerizing their list of ‘property owners.’ Said not to worry.”

“Well, they told me the same thing, so I worried. I thought about that cemetery up in L.A. County, where they just dug up the old ones and cremated them, then sold the plots to new people.”

“I don’t think they’ll try that here,” I said.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because if they do, we’ll see the earth has been disturbed and I’ll personally throw each and every one of them in jail.”

“You tell them that on the phone?”

“In fact, I did.”

“Good.”

I reached into my jacket pocket and brought out the flask of Herradura I keep in the trunk of the car, along with the spray bottle, paper and beach towel. Jordan Ishmael looked into the trunk one day and saw the box and what was in it, and because it’s a county sedan, he had to say something about lugging around personal stuff. I told him the towel was for my son and the tequila was for his ex-wife and that shut him up. As I took a pull on the liquor I thought back to the bizarre expression on Ishmael’s face at the station just a few hours ago. I thought of the look on Frances’s face, too, the day before. Same look, I thought: confused and pissed off and frightened and utterly bloodthirsty. You’d think I’d have better things to remember with the remains of my son just a few feet away.

I offered her the flask and she took a sip.

“Still blacking out on this stuff?”

“No. I’ve cut back a lot.”

“Those were some scary times.”

“Dumb.”

She handed back the flask. “You’re not built for booze. It just takes too much to put you down where you like to be.”

“I really don’t want to be there anymore. I nip maybe a half pint a night now, usually less. Maybe a beer or two.”

“That’s still an awful lot of booze.”

“A little less every week. I’m going to be okay with it, Ardith.”

“You’re not going to be young forever.”

“I’m not even young now.”

“You still go to that cave? Drink and smoke and sleep it off?”

“I still like it out there. No pass-out nights, recently.”

“That you can remember.”

“No, really. I’m over the worst of it.”

I looked down the slope to where a fresh grave was being dug. Gravediggers don’t use shovels now; they use CAT backhoes. They carry the lining vaults around in little trailers attached to little tractors. The ones here all go about their work with an indifference that makes me wince sometimes. It’s just a business, really, just a living. You can’t expect them to stare off toward the Pacific and think of the boy they buried almost two years ago.