by Molly Gloss
She sat on the back seat holding on to the quilt while Lyle went out to clear the exhaust pipe, and when he had the engine going and the heater, she climbed stiffly over the seat and put her hands and feet in the tepid gush of air. She looked past Lyle, out the cleared side window.
“I don’t think it snowed too much more after we stopped,” she said, making a cautious choice of words, deciding not to give shape to their situation by naming it “lost.”
Lyle may have been engaged in something like that himself. He made a low, grumping sound. “They wouldn’t know snow in this part of the country if it fell on them.” He put his thick, big-knuckled hands under the heater vent, rubbed them briskly together. “I’ll lay odds the plow’s already come by on that road back there.”
In pale daylight they trudged along the car’s obliterated back trail, lifting feet high, setting them down carefully in knee-deep powder. Lyle held her hand: he was disposed to think of her as frail, though not as a result of old age, simply old fictions. They went back along a flattish track, the way they must have come in the car, to another flat place that seemed to wind between rises and may have been the road. Lyle kicked down through the snow seeking the asphalt, while Claire stood with her hands in her coat pockets, staring out against the gray. The land seemed only vaguely like the one they had traveled in other weather, low smooth rises and sometimes in the gullies clumps of box elder, or along the slopes the wide-crowned canyon oaks, looking hunched now under shawls of snow.
“Lyle, isn’t that a house?”
He left off his kicking and followed where she was pointing, south and east, a small chip of darkness beside the larger, rounder form of a single big tree. He put one hand flat above his eyes, peering. He was the long-sighted one, without eyeglasses even now, on the day when his children would have celebrated his seventy-third birthday. “Might be,” he said finally.
They left the place that might have been a road and went toward the place that might have been a house, striking out for it in a straight line, high-stepping in the snow. The slopes that had seemed trivial became now unexpectedly formidable. In a little while Lyle left off holding her hand, and they each climbed alone, swinging arms to balance, gusting clouds of their breath in the chill air.
They often were out of sight of the house—if that was what it was—and the distance gradually seemed to dilate. In the clear, chalk-gray light, without curbs or neighbors lawns to measure against, they remained always a mile from it. The snow began to warm and weaken, and their shoes made loose plopping sounds when they set them in the slush. Claire, under the coat, the wool sweater, the doubled stockings, began to sweat.
Once, Lyle stood bent with his hands resting on his knees and called to her. “Maybe we ought to go back to the car.”
There had been a moment, as the first cold light had come in the opened window, when she had seen suddenly, clearly, a little headline: “Elderly Couple Found Dead in Stranded Auto.” But now, in the wet flat daylight, she was only miserable and sodden and tired, and there was no melodrama in any of this, or even the possibility of it. And she was more stubborn then he, liked it less when they must turn back from anything they’d started for. She stood wide-legged, resting her fists on her hips, considering Lyle’s pink, unpressed face. “We’re more than halfway there now, don’t you think?”
So they went on over the little hills.
It was, in fact, a house. Claire was able to see it, finally, from the next to last hillock, standing higher there where stones had been piled up or had fallen down in a sort of cairn.
“Someone’s little summer cabin,” Claire said, and looked back to Lyle for confirmation. He toiled up to the rocks without lifting his head. His mouth was open, puckered, sucking in the air with a wheeze like an asthmatic.
Old man, she thought suddenly. She was, despite his little masculine fantasies, the harder and stronger one, ever had been. She would outlive him. She had chided him with that occasionally, but the conceit, the mischief went out of it now all at once, and it lay deflated and heavy and cold against her chest.
When he had come up to where she was, she put one hand on his arched back, patting through the bulk of his clothes.
“Poor old baby,” she said, teasing a little, irresistibly.
“Out of shape,” he said, all on one panting exhale of air. She waited with one hand still on his back while he gained his breath. “I’m gonna start walking more,” he said. “Read that, more than once. Walking is better for you than that jogging business.” He straightened stiffly, squinting out toward the small house. “Well, hell,” he said. “Won’t be anybody there. No phone either. Should’ve stayed with the car or followed up the road.”
Claire looked behind them. From where they stood, there was no seeing the car, just the broken track of their feet going away across the snow, and she had a sudden, not clear, premonition, one of several now in this strange long day. As she looked around again at Lyle, he sat down without warning in the watery snow.
She made a quick small sound of surprise, of embarrassed amusement, standing there above him. It was rather a long moment later before she was able to make a truer sound, looking down on the face he turned up to her, white against the whitened stones.
“Lyle. Oh Lyle. Oh.”
It had been a great, childish fear of his that he might be buried or burned mistakenly when he was not yet truly dead. There were occasional small pieces in the newspaper, some person who sat up suddenly or blinked an eye as the mortician readied his tools, and Lyle would always fold the page there and tap it with his finger and hand it over to her to read. “Now don’t you bury me until I’m stone cold.”
She sat beside him through the rest of the morning, with her sweater folded up under his head, and she held his hand until the hand she held was utterly cold and stiff and sooty gray, like the snow that lay in little icy doilies on the rocks around them.
At one point early on, she wept a little. But, as had been the case now for several years, she found tears less satisfying and less necessary than they once had been. Afterward she only sat beside him, holding his hand, with her chill wet feet tucked under her buttocks.
Finally she went on the rest of the way to the little cabin, found it silent, locked, the windows shuttered. She’d had in mind that she might find something there, a blanket or a sheet, something, to cover Lyle’s body. But she was unwilling to break in, even if it were possible. So she went back to him again, and as she came back from that distance, his body lying on the snow seemed quite small, unprotected. She had thought she might strike out for the car, but found she couldn’t go off again and leave Lyle lying so alone.
She began to think of covering his body with stones, with the stones that were piled up or had fallen down all around them. But in the afternoon a little snow began to fall, fine and brittle, the flakes gathering individually in Lyle’s eyelashes, the sparse hair along his brow, the seams beside his nose. And in the snowfall, in her dry grief and fatigue, she waited and watched as he was slowly settled beneath this more gentle white comforter.
And she slept briefly, resting against the stones, dreaming she was a child, lifted and carried sleep-heavy against her daddy’s chest, her long thin legs dangling cold beneath the carriage robe.
Unforeseen
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE stucco bungalows over in the hilly part of Los Feliz, on a narrow street with a high bank on one side and houses built down the slope on the other side so their roofs were not very much above road level. This house was on the high side, perched above the street with a long reach of stone steps climbing up from the sidewalk to the porch. Steep yard overgrown with flowers. Italian cypresses along the edge of the porch trimmed short and chunky to make a hedgerow. A fence along the sidewalk with a gate and a coded lock to keep out rapists and burglars but the fence no more than six feet high and charmingly made of wood; any serious burglar or rapist would have been over that fence quicker than sin, it wouldn’t have stopped anybody except maybe slack
er pot-heads cruising around looking for an open door and a helpful note tacked to the jamb, jewelry in the bottom drawer under the T-shirts.
I pushed the admit button, which made a squawking sound inside the house loud enough I could hear it clear down at the sidewalk—loud enough to wake the dead, which, yeah, is a professional joke so old it ought to be retired but I still like it, it still gets a smirk out of some people. In the right crowd. After a minute a woman said something through the speaker box, a few unintelligible words, and I said, “RDI, I’m here about your mother,” which was a leap, since I didn’t actually know if the garbled voice belonged to the claimant, whose name was Madison Truesdale and who had checked the box Daughter of Deceased and who was black, which I mention only because twelve or fifteen Madisons had cluttered up the rolls of every school I’d gone to since first grade, and every one of them had been white. Anyway, she clicked the lock open and I went up the steps to the porch and she swung the door wide open for me. She was maybe forty, impressively tall, her mouth more than a little bit too wide. She wore pale yellow slacks that didn’t look good on her.
I said, smiling slightly, “You should have asked to see my ID before you let me through the gate.” I was serious. You get a little paranoid about security when you do this kind of work. A fair number of the claims showing up on my desktop are violent deaths: a woman opening the door to a neatly dressed guy she doesn’t know; somebody putting up a six-foot wooden fence and calling it good. Not that better security would have kept Madison Truesdale’s mother from being dead, but people should at least try to load the dice.
She gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I was expecting you,” she said, in an aristocratic tone of you-be-damnedness.
I let it go. Really, it was her choice whether to play it safe, and anyway her house was just off that tricky Hollywood Boulevard/Sunset Boulevard intersection, which meant statistically she was way more likely to die in a car wreck than murdered by a guy jumping her fence.
I said—the standard patter, so I could later say I’d warned her up front—“The forensics report and the accident reconstruction report have both come in and been approved, but this is, I want to emphasize, still an investigation. A lot of people don’t understand the somewhat narrow criteria for coverage, and the purpose of an on-site interview is to close the door on any disqualifying factors. You should know: a significant number of claims are eventually denied.” I tipped up the last word of the sentence so she’d know I was asking a question.
“Of course.” Her face, her tone of voice, said: You are not talking to a thickwit. Which probably meant that Madison Truesdale had read the claims form, and especially the FAQ page. Unfortunately for her, the phrase “snowball’s chance” was nowhere on that page.
There was a metal porch chair and a tile-top table just to one side of the door; I figured the stain on the back of the chair was blood. “Was your mother sitting here?” I asked her.
Her mother had been dead all of twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t have been surprised if this question provoked some tears. But she only flattened her wide mouth, nodded, said, “Yes. In that chair.”
I sat down in the chair and looked out over the tops of the pruned cypresses. I’d been wondering if there was a view from the porch, which there was, the classic L.A. view of hills thickly dotted with houses in a greenscape of palm trees, pepper trees, unpruned cypresses. Smutty sky over it all, of course, this was July, high smog season, and brushfires as usual over in Griffith Park.
“I thought you’d want to come inside and go over the claim,” the woman said after a moment, frowning, but not seeming particularly unhappy with me sitting there, making myself comfortable in the chair where her mother had died. I sometimes tried to chafe them like that, just to get an early sounding of their feelings.
“Yes, sure,” I said.
When I stood up, she didn’t move out of the doorway to let me pass through. “I think I’d better see your ID first,” she said, which I guess comes under the heading Better Late Than Never, but if I was a serial murderer I’d have pushed my way inside the house and had her on the floor several minutes ago, and by now might have been quietly disarticulating her corpse.
“Forbes Kipfer,” I said, and showed her the ID and waited while she studied the virtual me and then lifted her eyes and studied the biologic me.
“You don’t look very happy in this photograph, Mr. Kipfer,” she said when she handed it back.
I hardly knew what to say to that, but what popped out was, “It’s not a happy job,” which was true but not something I’d ever said to a claimant. She nodded, as if this answer didn’t surprise her at all. So: maybe not a thickwit, Madison Truesdale.
• • •
Every morning there’s at least a hundred claims waiting on my desktop, twice that on Monday because they pile up over the weekend. But fuck. Fuck Monday. The first skim is easy, it’s always easy. Every goddamn morning I’m denying claims for old folks who died in bed. You have to wonder what in hell people are thinking when they file a claim for their eighty-nine-year-old grandpa with a history of emphysema or congestive heart failure, you wonder whether anybody reads the Policy Summary in the first place, or pays any attention to the bold print on the Declarations, Exclusions, and Special Provisions page.
Then you toss out the cancer cases—most of the deaths by illness, period, regardless of age. There are the obvious issues: if what killed you was something that couldn’t be cured while you were alive, it won’t suddenly become remediable when you’re dead. If it was systemic, or triggered by a gene that hasn’t been parsed yet, you’re out of luck until the science catches up. But sometimes it’s a question of Specifically Excepted Perils. “We do not insure against loss directly or indirectly caused by, resulting from, contributed to, aggravated by, or which would not have occurred but for any of the following, blah blah blah.” You’re responsible for your own health, is the bottom line. Or we’re all responsible in a general way, the whole country, on account of fucking up the air and water. Claims involving death from illness rarely make it past Investigation, and usually come to nothing in Dispute Resolution. Little kids, and young mothers who leave three orphans, okay, those are the hard ones. But if you’re dealing for the house, it’s your job to deal out hands that go bust. Live with it or quit the game.
Then you weed through the accidentals and the homicides. Some of those are easy too: the gang-bangers and drug dealers making it their life’s work to shoot and knife each other. The working girls who get in the line of fire, and the cops and firefighters. You throw out the idiots piloting private planes, mountain climbers, kite surfers. Everybody bites the dust sometime but if you hurry toward it dangling from a belay or rushing into a burning building, don’t expect an RD policy to come to your rescue.
After that it gets imprecise, and this is where research and experience comes into play. A standard RD policy has thirty-five pages of print so small you need a magnifier to read it, and it’s full of trapdoors—densely worded sub-paragraphs or clauses a sharp investigator can cite to deny a claim. Death by homicide, you learn early on, can often be pinned to Uninsured Location—they picked the wrong neighborhood to live in, or they were driving down the wrong street—and you back it up with statistics. I hardly ever send in car crashes any more, not even the outrageously bizarre ones. A pickup truck traveling the interstate skids on a patch of oil, climbs up and over the lane abutment, T-bones a school bus traveling in the other direction, knocks the bus flying; it lands wheels-down on a two-lane county road at the only point where the road comes close to the highway and the bus then rolls into a guy out for a Sunday drive in his cherry 1963 Ford Fairlane: I sent in a claim for the Sunday driver, and Accident Reconstruction sent it back with a note saying they’d seen almost that same scenario half a dozen times. Anybody who gets into a moving vehicle is just asking to be killed, is what they said. Car, motorcycle—Christ! motorcycle!—plane, train, bicycle, there’s almost always a way to deny those claims un
der the heading Personal Liability or in some cases Acts, Errors and Omissions.
We don’t throw out everything sports related, but we try. The first time I got a claim for a minor league third base umpire hit in the neck—a foul ball crushed his artery against his spinal column and he was dead before he could think Safe!—I checked the box for Unforeseeable and the box for Nonhazardous Activity, and wrote what I thought was a pretty persuasive argument that umpiring minor league baseball was essentially riskless in terms of life-ending events, and this poor sap had just been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Half an inch in one direction or the other and the ball would have left a bruise. Couple of inches, it would have missed him entirely. Well, a message came down from a statistician in the home office: Baseballs in the neck kill two or three people every year in the minor leagues alone, not to mention college, high school, pro ball. Mr. Third Base Umpire hereinafter referred to as Claimant could reasonably be expected to know bodily injury could arise from said activity, blah blah.
So by the time you throw out most of the deaths by illness, most of the accidents, and all the obvious “natural causes,” you’ve winnowed the pile down to a small handful of deaths, mostly freakish things that maybe nobody could have foreseen or avoided. Statistical anomalies. What you’re left with is people minding their own business and the sky falls on their head.
• • •
We went inside. It was the kind of poorly thought-out space you see in these old unrenovated houses, the front door dividing the room neatly into living and dining, hallway piercing the middle of the far wall, glimpse of kitchen through a doorway on the right side of the hall, glimpse of a tiny bathroom at the far end, couple of closed doors on the left side that must have been bedrooms. Los Feliz was a real estate hotbed, people bought these places, remodeled them with track lights, raised ceilings, bamboo floors, but this one looked pretty much the way it must have looked when it was built, with dusty plate-shaped light fixtures in the low ceilings, oak hardwoods with the finish worn down to dull bare wood in all the high traffic pathways. My guess: Madison Truesdale’s mother had put her spare change into paying the premiums on her RD policy. If she had asked, I’d have told her to put the money into bamboo floors.
