Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “What do the new ones show?” I finally managed.

  “Same kind of stuff, Terry. Same place. Different girl.”

  TWENTY

  I made it from the courthouse to the inmate transport bus without the press getting to me—they are kept behind a fence several hundred feet away from the prisoner loading zone. You can make it from the building to the bus in just six quick steps. I settled into my caged compartment at the back of the bus, the same ignominious chamber that had held me—for my own protection—during the short ride from jail to courthouse. But the photographers and professional shooters of video know their way around the county landscape, and at least a dozen of them were standing at the corner of Civic Center Drive and Fifth, where my bus was forced to stop for a light, and the caged compartment housing the animal Terry Naughton was duly photographed. I slunk down out of sight and felt the handcuffs biting into my wrists. There have probably been lower moments in my self-regard, but I can’t remember one, and that is saying a lot.

  Through the good graces of Loren, I managed to get from the jail to the parking lot disguised as a custodian. Loren’s kindly assistant—Rex Wilkers—met me at the Intake-Release Center with a short-sleeved blue shirt that said “Allen” over the pocket, a matching blue cap and a stick-on mustache that matched my hair color not at all. I wondered if it was some wry joke on Loren’s part—the name Allen—then decided it was just something they had handy. But it worked. We embedded ourselves behind a pair of young Latino men who spilled into freedom and the waiting arms and kisses of a small crowd of relatives and friends. We cut across a sidewalk and used a relaxed but forceful stride to disappear into the parking lot. Wilkers had parked up close, and we were enclosed in the semi-security of his dark-windowed Porsche before anyone was the wiser. He dropped me off at the airport, and a few minutes later I paid my way through the long-term parking gate and rolled toward the Interstate.

  The afternoon was breezy and warm and the hillsides of south Orange County were still green from the winter rains. The wild artichokes sprinkled the hills between the on-ramps with their thorny purple blooms. A flock of ravens pestered a red-shouldered hawk that was perched on the power line over an auto mall, but the old bird looked too tired to fly; he just hunched within his insolent feathers and ignored the cackling multitude around him. Hang in there, buddy, I thought: from a chickenhawk to a red-shouldered one.

  I was driving toward home—Melinda’s, now—without any real idea of why. I was quite a bit less than unwelcome there. Maybe I would arrive as the search warrant was being carried out. And the friendly little hamlet of Laguna Beach was the last place I wanted my face to be seen. But still I headed south on the 405 until I realized the senselessness of it. Then I got off at a big retail complex and went to the movies. I sat in the middle of the dark and nearly empty theater, watching a Hollywood star solve a crime by cloning the memory of a dead victim via frozen seminal fluid implanted in a rat The rat had electrodes attached to its tiny conical head, which then translated its thoughts into 35 mm, SurroundSound images that advanced the plot, complete with music. What effects. I concluded idly that I was, and always had been, in the wrong business.

  The haze descended again. I walked from theater to theater, trying to find a movie that might keep it away. No way. I watched the films through a filter I couldn’t take off, through the darkly clouded lens of my predicament. For a while I pretended that this was all over; I had been exonerated and offered back my job as head of CAY. I imagined walking into the department building for the first time, seeing my new work station—surely, the old one would have been turned over to someone else by then; I imagined looking into the faces of the deputies I worked with, and the secretaries and the support staff and the cafeteria workers and even Shopping Carter, and I wondered how on earth they would ever believe, ever really, truly, 100 percent believe that I was not just an innocent man, but a good one. It was hard to imagine. The Irish in me said to fight, hold up my head and walk proudly into whatever wrath awaited me in the coming days, and, later, when I was proven innocent, to do likewise with every person I encountered. I told myself that I would evolve to that, I would rise to the occasion. But for now I was defeated and I wanted little more than a dark room, a large bottle of Herradura and my laptop computer, through which I might contact I. R. Shroud and arrange through him to obtain certain images—just as someone before me, I had reason to hope, had already done.

  I thought of Matthew, as I often do when I’m miserable. Good memories can help offset a bad present, but they can also make it worse. It’s always hard to remember the living, vibrant Matt, and not remember the cold, bluing boy who died in my arms as I ran up Coast Highway toward the walk-in clinic that hot summer day. In fact, the parts of that past always come together in my memory, to form a complete, contradictory whole. Matthew’s life becomes Matthew’s death. It is not a remembrance that heals the heart or comforts the soul. It is not a remembrance I can happily live with, but I can hardly conceive of living without it. A drowning man clings to small branches.

  As I sat in the theater I thought of one of the last movies Matt and Ardith and I had really enjoyed together, which was The Lion King. I thought of all the merchandise that we bought for him, with pictures of the characters on it. Lion King coloring books. Lion King sing-along tapes. Lion King bedsheets. An aerosol can of Lion King shave cream and a wooden Lion King razor. I remembered bringing a chair into the bathroom for Matt to stand on as we looked into the same mirror and he mimicked my shaving procedure, remembered the way he got more of the stuff in his hair and ears than on his cheeks, remembered Ardith’s proud exclamations of smoothness as she ran her hand over his face when her men were finished. For a moment I could even smell the faint scent of the cream. I remembered the way that, even then, Matthew’s competitive spirit had shown itself: if I shaved one time, he would shave twice; if I shaved twice, he would shave three times; when Ardith judged our shaves as having the same closeness—she only did this once—Matt shaved again to come in first.

  And, as I knew it would, thinking about my living son led me unwaveringly to his death. He was expired by the time we lay him on the doctor’s table and I was cleverly locked out of the examination room. I know that now. For five days Ardith and I waited with desperate anticipation for the autopsy results. We believed that the why of his death would free us from a mystery too heavy to bear. Why? Why Matthew? Why us? Why me? It didn’t. The facts of his death, when they were known, only filled us with a sense of luck-lessness so profound we could hardly look at each other after we knew them. I’m always saddened when I read of crime victims who believe that an arrest of the perpetrator, guilty verdict, a stiff sentence, a death penalty will bring “closure” to their agony. People want the mystery solved, the criminal put to death, the amends made. They think they’ll feel better, that it will put an end to their pain as they know it. For me, all the autopsy report brought was an unbearable acknowledgment of the permanency of Matt’s absence. I got fucking closure, all right. Final, absolute and irreversible. But this was not how I wanted to feel at all. I didn’t want closure, or anything like it. I didn’t want his memory to end on a table in a walk-in medical clinic. No. I wanted continuity. And not only a continuation of Matthew’s life—though I knew that was impossible—but a continuation of the life around me, of Ardith and me as husband and wife, of the pulse of our little household, of the paperboy in the morning and the mockingbirds in the evening and the long silences during which we would let our fingers touch across the dinner table and wonder. But we got closure to that, too, and plenty of it. We lost our way. The wind died. The compass fogged. Landfall vanished and the paddles were too small to get us very far. Where were we trying to go, anyway?

  Be careful what you wish for.

  What I saw most clearly about his death is what I always see: the top of his wet blond-brown head pressed into the crook of my neck, nearly out of eyesight, my big hand behind it, holding him close for warmth and saf
ety and with the conviction that somehow my beating heart would connect to his beating heart if they were just held close enough—it was still beating, wasn’t it? Why are his arms suddenly loose and dangling? And I saw the fractured, up-and-down images along Pacific Coast Highway—the pink homes and white stores, the red oleander and the deep green pine trees, the bright cars and gawking walkers—as they wavered, laboring past us, saw me raising my knees high and digging my bare toes into the sidewalk and stretching my stride longer and longer and holding on to Matt for dear life as I gasped closer to the walk-in clinic. It seemed to get further and further away.

  This is what I come back to when I think of him and this is why he is the most heartbreaking and beautiful memory in my life.

  It was dusk when I drove past my apartment in the metro district. I had circled the complex twice, and the parking area twice, to see if I was being followed. There was no practical way that a reporter could find out about this place so quickly, but I also knew that some straightforward prying into my bank accounts—and the transfers wired to the management company here—would eventually blow my cover. A radio talk show was taking call-ins about me, and the thrust of the opinion was for life imprisonment, castration or execution. Everyone felt betrayed. The host was calling me “Naughty Naughton.” I couldn’t take much. Satisfied that my apartment wasn’t surrounded by a lynch mob, I parked and made my way in, hunched over like a tired Allen returning from his day on the job. I had a bag of fast food and a bag of Herradura.

  Donna sat at the little dinette by the window. She gave a start when she saw my cap and shirt, and the ill-matched but successful mustaches.

  She stood and we looked at each other for a long beat. Her dark eyes, simultaneously inquiring and restrained, were glassy and rimmed in red.

  “ ‘Lo, Al.”

  “Hi, Donna,” I said, uncertainly. “Check the oil and tires?”

  “They’re in good shape.”

  “Long day at the pumps.”

  “I can imagine. Here …”

  She walked across the room to me, lifted off my cap and gently pulled away the gummy mustaches.

  “You looked petrified in court today,” she said.

  “I was.”

  “Runnels seems capable.”

  “I think he is.”

  “If you don’t know he is, get another lawyer.”

  “I think he is, Donna, or I wouldn’t goddamned hire him, now would I?”

  “I’m sorry. Settle down.”

  “Settling down is not possible.”

  “I know that… um … hey, I put some beer in the freezer.”

  “Let’s quickly crack a couple.”

  She put the mustaches inside the cap and set the cap on the kitchen counter. She put my fast food in the oven and my tequila in the refrigerator. I looked out the window while she got the beer. I was still looking out it when she handed me a bottle.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “I absolutely did not do it. I know I sound like fucking O. J., but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything they say I did. The FBI will prove it. I’m getting my own examiner.”

  She said nothing for a moment, but she let her eyes walk my face and pry my soul.

  “I want you to know,” she said, “that if you feel a deep need to reassure me that you’re not a child molester then I’ll walk out of this apartment and out of your life, forever. I believe you and I’m in this with you. We have to get that part straight right now.”

  I pondered this. “I needed to say it to you.”

  “Said. Closed. Done.”

  I felt a river of gratitude and love rush from my heart and charge into the channels of my body. I was shaking and there was a high-pitched whine arcing inside my head from ear to ear.

  “Sit down, Terry. Drink your beer.”

  I sat.

  I turned on the TV and watched the local news. There was a brief report about me—no pictures except a personnel shot that I’m sure Ishmael leaked—and a video shot by Channel 4 that showed my transport bus. I watched it like it was a story about another human, wholly unconnected to myself. My heart raced and my head got light.

  So I switched to the Angels’ Baseball Warmup Show. Jim Edmonds talked about how he played the outfield, how if you weren’t willing to sacrifice your body out there, you’d never be a good fielder. He said he didn’t think about it, really, it was just part of his personality. They showed some clips of him picking fly balls off of wall tops, snatching hard line drives midrun, tumbling forever across a green field to finally rise with his arm stretched skyward and a white ball in his glove. He was so beautiful I wanted to cry. In fact, I did.

  I was aware of Donna looking at me, then going into the bedroom. I heard the bathwater running. Then she came back past me and into the kitchen and shuffled in a drawer and walked past me again—past my riveted, teary-eyed adoration of Jim Edmonds making a perfect peg from center field to the plate—and into the bedroom once more.

  A few minutes later she came out, took my hand and helped me up. I was boneless. I wiped my face and looked at her briefly, then down.

  “Come with me, Terry.”

  She took my hand and I followed her into the bedroom. There I stopped, startled. The bed was moved away from the far wall and in its place was a stool. The painting that hung above the bed was removed, as was the hook that held it. To my left was a tall tripod topped by a heavy-duty, commercial video camera that was pointing toward the stool. Next to the tripod was a big light setup that was aimed at the now blank wall.

  “What?” I managed. “What?”

  “You know what,” she said very gently, almost sweetly. “I was going to explain it first, but there’s something we need to do. Please, come with me, Terry.”

  She led me into the bathroom and shut the door. It was dark, but there was a warm orange light around us. The tub was full. A layer of suds floated a few inches from the top and steam wafted up through the suds. There was a candle in the soap dish and another two floating down in the bubbles. I started crying harder then, with the big chest shakes and that distorted mask of woe we all wear from time to time. I must have looked beyond pathetic. But just the fact that Donna had gone to this trouble for me—for me—made the tears pour out faster. She must really believe me. She helped me out of my clothes and into the water. I sat there like a kid at first, feeling the hot liquid under the feathery suds. She rubbed my neck and shoulders with her strong hands. I melted down through the bubbles to my chin and looked blearily across the downy white plain to the orange nest of light bobbing down by my upraised knees. It looked like a town at the foot of steep mountains, a hundred miles away. I listened to the break of tiny bubbles. I could see the outline of Donna’s shoulders and head just beyond.

  “Something need saying, Terry?”

  “I love you.”

  “Umm.”

  Pleased but not satisfied, this was Donna Mason’s polite way of both accepting and rejecting.

  “When this is all over . ..”

  But I never finished. I just watched the light of the distant village under the big peaks and wondered what the tiny people who lived there were doing. Did they know that one shift of the giant’s thighs would send their whole stinking civilization down to the bottom? So I was careful when I got out a long while later, careful not to sink them. Donna helped me dry off, then she took me into the bedroom/soundstage and guided me past the camera and lights to our bed, now pushed against the far wall under a window from which you could see the bean field and the freeway. We lay down together. She turned me on my front and smoothed some sweet-smelling oil over me, working it in with her palms and fingers: neck, shoulders, arms and hands, back, butt, thighs and calves, ankles and feet, then back up to the butt again. I was gorged with desire by then—the desire of desperation—and I felt myself working against the mattress in a slow circular motion. She turned me over and I looked down to watch her head moving slowly up and down on
me. On me. Sometime later she was above, with a fragrant arm resting on either side of my head. Then she straightened and looked up to the ceiling while we found a rhythm and kept it. She smoothed her hands over my face and combed her fingernails through my damp hair and brushed my eyelids closed with her fingertips.

  After a short nap I woke up to find myself bundled safely in Donna’s arms. Her breasts smelled like perfume and warm skin. I said it was time for a large amount of Herradura over ice.

  “I’d wait,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ve got to get dressed real sharp and comb your hair back. I’d shave, too, if I were you. I’d also use the eyedrops in the cabinet in there. Then you’re going on air, Terry Naughton. And you’re going to answer my questions. And you’re going to tell our CNB viewers what you did and didn’t do. I’d think about your answers to the cave question while you get ready. It’s an odd thing, if a grown man sleeps in a cave some summer nights, when he’s got a soft bed less than a mile away. You need to tell it and I need to hear it. Truth first. Tequila later.”

  “Don’t ask me about Matt.”

  She stared at me a long moment. “Agreed.”

  I will never forget that interview.

  Donna: Your name and occupation?

  Me: Terry Naughton. I’m unemployed. I was a sergeant with the Orange County Sheriff.

  Donna: What area of law enforcement did you work in?

  Me: CAY. That’s Crimes Against Youth. I’m—I was—head of the unit.

  Donna: What happened?

  Me: They’ve charged me with a crime I didn’t commit. More than one crime. So, currently I’m on unpaid leave until the matter is resolved.

  Donna: What are the crimes?

  Me: Sex with minors. Girls. I didn’t do it.

  Donna: Do they have evidence against you?

  Me: No. They have falsified documents that appear to be photographs. But they’re not real.