Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (50 page)

“A
m I poisonous?”

“As in harmful, or as in fatal?”

“Poison is poison, Donna.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Let me consider that a moment while you swerve to avoid the mule.”

We were thirty clicks south of the border, between Tijuana and Ensenada, Donna with five days of vacation ahead and I still on leave. Donna, per usual, was shooting video, having never been to Mexico before. We were in her convertible and the top was down, so that made it easy. She had a polka dot scarf over her head. The morning was late and warm and the coastal fog was breaking up to reveal green hills and a hard blue Pacific. The dark highway flowed by under us, divided by a center railing of black and white posts that blurred if you tried to watch them up close. The road is good and wide and encourages velocity. I moved toward the center line on the sweeping downhill curve. The mule’s ears flapped in the slipstream of the car. The roads down here are better than they used to be, but shoulders are not a Mexican concern.

I was driving fast and hadn’t said much, until then. I was anxious over what we’d do with five days together, because we’d never had more than twelve hours straight. Donna’s presence put me in a state of agitation so intense I couldn’t imagine five days with her being anything but good. But I have been misled by passion before, or, maybe, passion has been misled by me. More to the point, Melinda’s verdict was echoing loud in a soul made hollow by Johnny’s death. But I had not asked Donna to Mexico to lose myself in her, as I had tried to do in Melinda—to my shame, I know. What I wanted to do was find myself. And hopefully, to be able to stand the man I discovered.

“First of all, I don’t think you should shoulder more than your fair share of the blame,” she said.

“For what?”

“For anything. You see, that makes a man unhappy, and it makes him feel sorry for himself, and he hogs the road because he’s taken on such a wide load. It’s arrogant to take all the credit for good things, right? Well, taking all the blame is pretty near the same thing.”

“You’re telling me I’m not poisonous.”

“Naw, Terry. All of us choose what we drink. Except the children and the feebleminded, I suppose. They can get suckered.”

“I tried not to misrepresent myself.”

“You’re pretty obviously who you are.”

“But then I messed up and had to lie about it. About you.”

“That truth would have been told.”

“Yeah. But I don’t know what I could have done about Johnny.”

“Then don’t convince yourself that you could have done anything. Just mourn him, Terry. Don’t add him to a list of mistakes you made. That doesn’t do John or you any good.”

I held up the bottle of Herradura we’d bought back in Tijuana. Good dark gold. It was still a little early in the day for power drinking, but I was considering a nip to build an edge, make things festive. Donna had suggested the liter rather than the quart.

“You haven’t had much to drink the last couple of weeks,” she said.

“Pretty light.”

“Feel a bender coming on?”

“Yeah.”

“Pull over. I’ll drive. You can take on spirits, prod your conscience all you can stand.”

I always liked being a passenger. You get to see more.

Donna is a very good driver, fast and alert and aware. So I sat back and inhaled the perpetual trash-burn smell of the Baja coast and watched the blue water hit the black rocks and felt the unhurried sunshine on my neck and legs. Rosarito. Puerto Nuevo. Calafia. La Fonda. We pulled over at Teresa’s, a restaurant that stands alone at the edge of the rocks and has windows looking down a hundred feet to the violent shore. It was just before noon on a weekday so the place was empty of customers, just Teresa’s husband and one of her sons, and Teresa, who does the cooking.

We took a table at the window. Teresa’s has pink walls with posters of bullfighters on it, and lots of Mexican beer advertisements. I’ve been here a lot This time of day the pink warmth of a room built by hand meets the cool blue of a coast indifferent to human effort, right there at the windowpane beside you. This border shimmers with a collision of forces old as time itself. It’s like the glass is the only thing that stands between the one thing and the other. You sit there and feel very mortal, which is to say very alive. Somehow blessed, too.

And Teresa’s slender husband starts you off with a curt
buenas dias
and a shot of good tequila. We sipped and stared out the contested window glass.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

“You’re not even looking at me.”

“I don’t have to.”

“Why, thank you.”

“True story.”

“All your stories are true, aren’t they?”

I thought about this.

“No.”

“Should I know the difference?”

“That would take time.”

“Do we have that?”

“I’ll give you mine if you really want it.”

She looked at me and rested her hand over mine on the tabletop. What a nervy shiver that woman could send through me.

“So,” she said, “if we have time, where should we start? What stories of yours shall we vet?”

“There’s a lot to choose from.”

“I want a specific one.”

“Which?”

“The one you always think about. The one that’s bigger than you. The one that eats at you all day and every day. The one that the tequila gives you the courage to face, and the comfort to avoid.”

“Ah.” I looked at her dark bright eyes, her brown hair released now from the polka dot scarf and curling forth around her face, her pale skin.

Just then, Teresa’s husband came to ask us our preference: small, medium or large lobsters. We got large. He poured us two more shots and Donna asked him to leave the bottle.

“I can see where this is going,” I said, looking at it.

“Drink it up, Terry, if that’s what it’s going to take.”

I poured another shot and sipped it half down. Here we go, I thought.

“Don’t you have some questions about the cause of Matt’s death?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you told me he drowned and that was good enough for me.”

I looked at her for the slightest sign that she was lying. I saw none at all. A dishonest man never trusts someone else.

“You didn’t read his death certificate?”

“You asked me not to. So I didn’t.”

“I asked you not to do a story about what happened to him.”

“Well, we can argue semantics all day. Fact is, I didn’t mention your boy. I did everything I could to make you look good and strong. That interview was a ten-minute love poem to you, whether you understood it or not. Maybe I’m no poet. But I went to some lengths to keep the original out of my boss’s hands. You know, I could take some offense here. I’m trying not to.”

“No, no. Please don’t.”

I tilted back the golden liquid and poured more. I could clearly feel the warmth of our pink room and the cool of the Pacific just behind the glass and the roiling border zone between them where Donna and I sat and waited for the truth to be told. A squad of pelicans coasted by the window in formation, no movement of their wings at all, just big brown birds resting heavily in air. I thought of Matt. I thought of Johnny. I thought of Mary Lou Kidder. I heard a lovely twinkling sound and when I turned to it a girl in a pink dress stood beside the table with some curios to sell. Paper calla lilies in her left hand. An open box of Chiclets on a platform tied around her neck. And a mobile of small onyx birds connected with string in her right. She lifted the birds and in the invisible turmoil of our zone they moved and chimed sweetly against each other.

“No,” I said.

“Here, for all,” said Donna, and put down a twenty on the table. The girl smiled and set down the lilies, then the box of gum, then handed Donna the stone birds. She said
gracias
and ran for the stairs.

“I like these,” she said, holding up the mobile. She hung it over the window latch beside us.

I drank until the ocean outside was impossibly bright, every silver shard owning a specific life of its own, every flash a minor history. The least I could do was offer back a history of my own.

“If you read the certificate of death it refers you to the coroner’s report. I wanted an autopsy because I really wanted to know what happened. On Matt’s, the immediate cause says ‘respiratory arrest.’ The next line says ‘due to’ and the examiner wrote in ‘drowning.’ The third line says ‘due to’ and the examiner left it blank.”

Donna listened and studied me. “So?”

“So, I know him because we both work for the Sheriff-Coroner department. He likes me. He … well.”

Donna nodded and waited.

“When Matt and I were at Shaw’s Cove, it was a lot warmer than this,” I said. “It was late September, with the Santa Anas blowing hot, and I took him out of school because the weather was so good and you could see underwater about fifty feet. No divers there, except us. I remember the sand stinging my ankles while I was putting on my wet suit. I remember real clearly zipping Matt’s up from the back, with that black piece of cord they put on. Matt’s suit was black and yellow, made him look like a bumblebee. I was real proud of him for taking to the water so well—he was just five and not at all fearless—but he knew what he could do and couldn’t. There were so many other things he was afraid of. The dark. Closets. Under his bed. Car washes, the way the vacuum hoses make all that noise and coil up on the racks like big snakes—that scared him out of his wits. Scared of dogs and bugs and buses. But not the ocean. We spent a lot of time together down at Shaw’s Cove, it was kind of my thing with him. His mother, she wouldn’t go out past her knees, and I used to worry that would ruin it for him. Ardith was afraid of anything she couldn’t see under the water, which is a lot. But that fear never got into Matt. We sat on the beach and put our boots and fins on, got our masks ready. I let him go in first like I always did. But I was only a few steps behind him, like I always was. The waves were short and crisp and it was just beautiful, Donna, the way the Santa Anas held up the faces and blew spray off the tops. You looked through the silver mist and then you saw blue sky and then a long low bank of orange brown way out there, which was Catalina with all the smog blown up against it. I remember thinking how great the sunset was going to be that evening. It was cold when I first went under. The water gets down into the suit and your body heat warms it up, that’s how a wet suit works, but that first dive under always gets you. I came up and put my mask on and dove back under and I couldn’t believe how clear it was. Matt was out ahead maybe all of ten yards. That yellow wet suit really showed up good, and his fins were blue and I remember thinking what a perfect little human he was. So we just swam along the rocks on the north, that’s where you see a lot of stuff, right up close to shore like that, octopus and skates and rays, all the surf fish and the little bass that aren’t safe out with the big boys. And up close to the rocks you get the grass, which is green and sometimes straw colored, swaying all together, and all the purple urchins and the green-gray anemones big as dinner plates, and schools of baitfish that look like stainless steel in the sunlight, because there’s plenty of light up by the rocks there—you’re only in, say, three or four feet of water, Donna, at the most You can see the sun slanting in past the surface, looks like raindrops slowed down and stretched out This big school of baitfish came up from behind us and we were there in the middle of them, thousands of fish hauling ass past us in perfect unison. Then this dark shape after them, really fast, and it’s this little black cormorant just swimming his heart out under three feet of water, chasing down his food. When I came up for some breath he was sitting there on the water about ten feet away like he’d been there his whole life. Matt was on the other side of him looking back and smiling, and I remember that smile real clear because when you smile with a mask and snorkel on, your mouth looks distorted and Matt looked funny to start with because the mask was so big for his face. You know? Then we followed the edge of the rocks out to where it’s deeper, maybe ten feet, then twenty, about. Matt came over and he said he wanted to show me how deep he could go and I said go right ahead, I’ll watch. So he dove down and came up, then I dove down a little deeper and came up, and he went deeper than me, and like that. We maybe dove five or six times each. I wasn’t straining or anything. I didn’t think Matt was either, because I kept watching his breathing and how he was doing. It was a contest, but it was a friendly one. Then, I went down the last time and gave a kick or two extra, and when I looked up at Matt he was floating up there looking down at me real peaceful and I drifted back up and broke the surface with a big spit of breath and drank some more air in. And Matt was still floating there, looking down. So I said hey, what’s to see down there, young man, but he didn’t answer. So I swam over and poked his shoulder and he didn’t notice me and I knew it was a shallow-water blackout. So I grabbed his wet-suit collar and lifted it out of the water and his head dangled down on his chest and I slapped him across the face, not hard, but hard enough. That didn’t do anything. So I got his head out of the water and tried to tell if he was breathing, but that’s hard when you’re treading water for two and everything’s wet and moving around, plus the wind blowing you in the face. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing so I got his head locked up between my hands and breathed for him and kicked harder than I’d ever kicked in my life to get him in. You can really move out with those big fins on. Next thing I knew we were on the beach past the waterline and I had his wet-suit stripped down to his waist and I could see he wasn’t breathing so I did CPR. Every cop knows CPR. And you know what happened? He coughed and spit up a bunch of water and started breathing. He was just barely awake, though. There was a flock of seagulls right over us and I thought they were mocking me. Matt’s eyes kind of opened and he was looking at me and the pupils were dilated so big his eyes looked black. He was terrified. But he was breathing. So I got that wet suit the rest of the way off and mine, too, and I took him in both arms and started running. I knew there was a walk-in clinic up Coast Highway and I was going to make it there faster than humanly possible. You know, the way I remember that run isn’t always the same. Sometimes I think it took a long time because all these details come at me, and the details are always standing still when I see them, like this pink hibiscus blossom hanging over a fence by the sidewalk along Coast Highway. I mean, when I think back I can still see that thing, the white stamen in the middle and the yellow pollen stuck to it. Or I can remember the coldness of Matthew’s body against mine, the exact smell of his hair, which was salt water, like you’d figure, but with boy and a little shampoo still in it. I remember holding him tight—I’ll never forget that. Then, other times all I remember is a blur of cars and people and lowering my shoulder into the door of the clinic. I do remember knocking into the examination room where the doctor was, with the nurse talking loud at me, and the look on the face of the lady the doctor was with. I remember it was kind of a struggle giving Matt up. It was like the doctor was pulling away part of me. And I remember lying Matt out on the table and thinking how hopeless he looked. And I remember yelling and the doctor ordering me firmly to get a blanket out of the other exam room, then locking me out. And, of course, the nurse leaving Matt’s room a few minutes later, walking away from me down the hallway, crying. It was five days before we found out what happened to him. We thought the truth would make us feel better. Well, you know how that can go. First, he had an embolism that knocked him out while he was in the water. Then, he almost drowned because he was unconscious. I saved his life at that point. Then, well, Donna, what happened was he was alive when I started off with him up Coast Highway, but when I laid him on the table, he was gone. While I was running, you know? Because of the way I had his head up against me? Because he was cold and I didn’t want to drop him? He didn’t drown. What happened was, I suffocated him.”