Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

The same night a thirteen-year-old boy had been in West Hollywood.

  Jimmy broke the silence. "You bleed judgments," he said. I realized he was quoting Billy Hatfill.

  "You leave a trail of them wherever you go. You're going to drown in them someday."

  The next thing I knew, the gravel on the side path was spitting out from under my feet as Jimmy called out to me from what sounded like a great distance. Then I was behind the wheel of my Jeep, weaving down Laurel Canyon through low-hanging tree branches turned to dangling skeletons by the pulse of headlights.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed my mother sitting in the passenger seat next to me.

  Her purse rested on her lap, and when she said my name, her mild Cajun accent put the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the first. She crossed one leg over the other, and her floral print dress slid back over her thigh, revealing a varicose vein.

  I punched the radio on and chased my mother's ghost from the car with a blast of rock music. I didn't hallucinate when I was high; I wasn't going to start doing it sober.

  When I was twelve years old, my sister and I were swimming at her friend's pool when, without warning, Candace swam under me and tried to put me on her shoulders. I remember the sudden rush of movement around my legs. I felt her hands trying to find a grip on my thighs as I rocketed up out of the water. I remember hurtling through the air, seeing only oak branches and blue sky and then the flagstone deck rushing up to meet me. I have to take Candace's word on everything that came after.

  That afternoon, even though I was as white as an eggshell, I sprang to my feet and started walking toward the house. When Candace tried to block me, I gave her a lazy and bemused smile that sent a chill up her spine, walked a few steps past her, and collapsed. For months afterwards, Candace called me Dead Walker.

  Now I felt like Dead Walker again, a creature seeking only to move, without the sense to know that the life had been knocked out of him.

  An hour and a half after I got home, I stopped pacing my apartment and pulled my desk chair out onto my tiny balcony. The night was so clear I could make out the winking running lights of jets coming in for a landing at LAX. Every few seconds they disappeared behind the twinkling humpback of Baldwin Hills. At ten to eleven, a familiar-looking Ford Explorer turned onto my street. It pulled to a stop right behind my parked Jeep, and Brenda Wilton stepped out. "You got a parking permit for me?" she called up to me with a smile.

  I just stared at her.

  "We've got a date tonight," she said. "Plummer Park. One A.M., remember?"

  I found my parking permit in my desk drawer and threw it down to her. She thanked me loudly. Soon I was standing in the kitchen as she rooted through my fridge.

  "You should really get some juice or something," she said. "All you've got is coffee and water, which cancel each other out." She straightened and turned around, which allowed me to see the strange bulge against her right hip, just above the waistband of her black slacks.

  "Got any movies?" she asked.

  I made a vague gesture toward the entertainment center. She placed her hands on her hips and frowned at me. "He doesn't think you did what Daniel Brady did. No matter how drunk you were."

  I was tempted to tell her that in alcoholic blackouts I had urinated on bars, called members of racial minorities by hateful epithets, and started small fires in other people's apartments. 'What makes him so sure?" I asked. "He's known me less than a week."

  "He says it's not your truth," she answered.

  "What does that mean?"

  "He says you go for strong, domineering men. So you can win them over or something. He said you like to be controlled for a little while, and then you get tired of it and move on. Nothing about that fits with ..." She waved a hand in the air to finish the sentence.

  "Maybe I flipped," I said.

  Her jaw hardened. "Maybe the fact that you're so willing to believe you did something like that is the real problem, little man." Her words settled heavily in my chest. "You only find faith when you need it. You need it, so find some."

  She sat down on the love seat and crossed her ankles on the coffee table.” You have TiVo?"

  When I just stood there, she gave me her full attention. "He thinks it's something you did in New Orleans, maybe. He says this Scott Koffler character already set you off with something some bartender down in the French Quarter told him. Maybe the guy gave him something else."

  I bowed my head, and I heard her let out a long sigh. "On the morning of nine-eleven, Jimmy spent twenty minutes trying to convince me that those planes were flown by white supremacists who wanted to avenge the execution of Timothy McVeigh. He's not right about everything. He's had a run of good luck lately, maybe because you guys are dealing with a bunch of twenty-year-olds who took all their major life lessons from video games and movies. But don't tell him I said that."

  "I won't."

  "Look, I'm just saying Jimmy's imagination's been burning like a brush fire, and you've been following along, collecting the real stuff out of the debris. Maybe this time it's burning too hot."

  "I should have knocked on my neighbors' doors when I got home," I said, my voice thick. "I should have given them a description of Corey and Koffler and asked them if either one of them was here last Wednesday night. Maybe I should have given them a description of the boy, too.

  But I couldn't."

  Brenda Wilton was the last person I wanted to cry in front of, but I didn't have a say in the matter.

  "I quit drinking because I hadn't wrapped my car around a tree," I managed to get out. "I hadn't gone to jail. I hadn't run over anyone in a crosswalk. Now Jimmy thinks I might have done something even worse. Forgive me for being callous, but I would have preferred to find out back when I still had something to take the edge off."

  "You've still got something to take the edge off," she said. "You always will. You're just not using it anymore. That's all."

  She had stumped me.

  'Why'd you drink so much?" she asked with what sounded like genuine curiosity.

  "Because I didn't know what else to do," I said.

  Her brow wrinkled, and I saw a narrow skepticism in her eyes that told me she had never looked at an entire kitchen and seen nothing but a hundred weapons that could be used to kill her in her sleep, that she had never become convinced a plane was going to crash simply because she was on it. I figured I shouldn't bother to say anything more, but I did. She had come to me and not the other way around.

  "Because I wake up every morning with a hundred voices in my head telling me I won't make it to the end of the day. Because for some reason, I could look right at my sister's stomach after they cut her open for her C-section and hold her hand at the same time, but I couldn't bring myself to get the fucking mail."

  "And now?" she asked.

  "I have something else to do."

  "Yeah," she said. "Like convince yourself that you harmed a child."

  Brenda got to her feet and stretched. She noticed that I was staring at her. "Those voices you mentioned," she said. "They're all you. Try telling them to fuck off. See what happens."

  "You want me to tell myself to fuck off?"

  "Something like that," she said. "This is getting too existential for me. Is there a twenty-four-hour grocery store around here?"

  "Pavilions," I said. "Why?"

  "'Cause you need some juice." Her expression was suddenly grave. "This Koffler guy said he had something to say to you tonight?" she asked. I nodded. "Something you haven't heard before?" I told her she was correct. She leaned forward intently. "Here's the deal. No matter what he says, you come back to the house with me tonight."

  When I didn't answer, she said my full name in a tone of voice that made it sound like a threat.

  "Deal," I said.

  "Good," she said. " 'Cause if it wasn't a deal, I was going to use this to shoot you in the fucking leg." She tapped the bulge against her right hip and headed for the door.

  I followed
her out of the apartment, wondering if she had come to protect me from Scott Koffler or the liquor store just up the street.

  At twenty minutes after one, Brenda and I were sitting in my parked Jeep across the street from Plummer Park, a dense rectangle of green space that housed community rooms, several tennis courts, and plenty of space for old Russian men to play chess. In the night darkness, the walls of the tennis courts stole the definition from the low-hanging branches.

  Brenda was sitting in the backseat, her breaths loud but even. I was behind the wheel. At my feet sat a brown paper bag with a half-empty bottle of Tropicana orange juice inside.

  "Call him again," Brenda said.

  "I've called him twice," I said. "No answer."

  A pair of headlights turned off Fountain Avenue and headed toward us. My heart skipped. I gripped the steering wheel as the car approached. It was a black Toyota Camry with an elderly woman peering over the wheel. She drove right past us.

  "Why did you bring the gun?" I asked.

  "Why does anyone bring a gun anywhere?"

  "You have a permit for it?"

  "Little man," she said, "a homicide detective at the LA sheriff's department is responsible for the fact that I had to kill a man to save my husband's life. If I wanted, I could get a permit to land planes on Mulholland Drive."

  I knew now that she was as nervous as I was. Another twenty minutes elapsed. I felt her hand come to rest on my right wrist. "He's a no-show, little man. Let's go."

  "I want to go to Palmdale."

  "What's in Palmdale?" she asked, even though I was sure she knew.

  "His mother's house."

  She withdrew her hand. "We had a deal."

  Earlier, after we had returned to my apartment from the grocery store, she had insisted that I pack a change of clothes and whatever else I needed from my apartment before we headed over to Plummer Park. "This isn't just about my sanity or safety, is it?"

  "I've got something to show you," she said. "Jimmy hasn't seen it."

  I guessed that she hadn't shown it to Jimmy because she was convinced he was going to pull the plug and she didn't want him to bury whatever this information was.

  "I'm listening," I said.

  "McCormick," she said. "Corey's new last name. Old last name. Whatever. All I did was plug it into Google, but I got something. It's interesting."

  I turned in my seat. She was staring out the passenger window, her face laced by the fractured light from a nearby street lamp. "Let's go back to the house and I'll show it to you," she said.

  "Why do you have so much faith in me all of a sudden?"

  "Jimmy's going to write this book whether he likes it or not," she said. "Child molesters. No child molesters. It doesn't matter. He's going to write it. Trust me." She sighed. "And you're the major character, whether he likes it or not. Whether you like it or not too, for that matter."

  "Okay," I said, even though I didn't quite have her meaning yet.

  "Jimmy says there's always a point where the major character takes over and the author's just a spectator," he said. "It's his least favorite part of the process, but it's gotta happen. That's where we are, little man. It's time for Jimmy to get out of your way."

  She gave me a few seconds to absorb this. "But the major character doesn't die. Not in Jimmy's books, at least. That's where I come in."

  "Okay," I said.

  "You see why we got off on the wrong foot?" she asked.

  "Not really. No."

  "It was a misunderstanding," she said. "You thought I was trying to protect Jimmy."

  I wasn't sure whether to be frightened by her protective instincts or moved by them. After a while, she said, "Spend your life with a man whose life's work consists of nailing nightmares to a bulletin board, and you might sound as crazy as I do."

  "Jimmy didn't tell you to come with me tonight, did he?"

  She shrugged. I started the car and was just about to turn onto Fountain Avenue when my cell phone rang in my lap. I hit the brake. I answered and no one responded.

  "Scott?"

  I heard a sharp gasp. "You need to come here." It was Nate Bain's voice, and it had a hollowed-out sound to it. I said his name and several seconds of silence went by. "Just come here," he repeated, emotion swelling under his words.

  "Where are you?"

  I felt Brenda's hand close on my right shoulder. Nate erupted into hysterical sobs that sounded too much like screams. He stuttered the name of a popular bathhouse that was just west of La Brea Avenue. Then the line went dead.

  I turned off Fountain Avenue and saw shadows emerging from the entrance to a dark warehouse several blocks ahead. The shadows walked with bowed heads and quick steps. The neon sign above the front door read Slick. It was one of the area's more popular gay bathhouses. Its patrons were fleeing as if a photographer had started snapping pictures inside.

  I pulled to the curb across the street, jumped out, heard Brenda slam the door behind me, grabbed my cell phone, and dialed Nate's number. I heard a chirping ring from in between the parked cars several feet away. We found Nate sitting on the curb between two car bumpers. He was rocking back and forth, his arms wrapped around his knees, his mouth open as he tried to breathe.

  I sank down in front of him and took his face in both hands. His eyes were wild and wet, his spiky hair twisted. "I didn't use," he managed. "I didn't use." He repeated the words over and over again, his voice waning.

  "What happened?"

  He choked out something that sounded more like anguish than words. Brenda stood behind him on the sidewalk, her eyes probing the entrance of the bathhouse. I turned and saw a tall black woman with Brenda's strong build emerge from the entrance. As the woman passed under the neon sign, I saw that she had a man's strong jawline, wide unblinking eyes, and cheeks caked with glitter. She threw her long braided hair extensions off one shoulder with the back of her hand and hurried off, addressing the sidewalk in front of her in some sort of drug-fueled babble.

  As I ran across the street, Brenda shouted my name. I threw the entrance door open to find a wiry guy blocking my path. He wore a backward baseball cap, a T-shirt that bore the bathhouse's logo, and a thousand piercings in his nose and ears. "We're closed!" he shouted. I tried to shove past him and he grabbed my wrists. "We're fucking closed!" he shrieked.

  He hit the wall next to me after I shoved him. I threw open the second door and found myself in a narrow corridor lined with half-open doors. Dim industrial lights lined the ceiling overhead, above a metal grate that formed a kind of drop ceiling. The walls and doors were particleboard painted black. They shook with the thumping bass beat of a popular dance song that I had heard in brighter places than this.

  I heard the second door fly open behind me and saw Brenda moving toward me through the dim squares of light. "Whatcha doing, little man?" she called, trying to keep her voice hostage-negotiation-casual but speaking loud enough to be heard above the music. From the expression on her face, I was sure Nate had told her something that had brought her hand to the bulge against her hip. "Police are on their way, Adam."

  I moved off down the hallway, pushing open stall doors as I went. The panicked patrons had left behind twisted pairs of underwear, used condoms, and overturned bottles of lube. I turned and found myself facing a stall door that stood all the way open. The cubicle had a single bed in the center and a nautical-style lamp behind a metal cage that had a red bulb in it. It threw a dull glow across a swell of belly and two pork-chop-shaped legs that stuck out from a towel.

  I felt tiny pinpricks in my shoulders and upper back. The man on the bed was Scott Koffler.

  His hands had been posed prayerfully on his bare chest, but his head was twisted to one side. A slick of vomit led from his mouth to the floor. A thin red line gleamed across his throat. The gash was shallow and had emitted barely any blood.

  At my feet was a crumpled water bottle. It had no label and looked as if it had been crushed by a fist. But the top of the bottle was mangled in a d
ifferent way. Scraped. Twisted. Chewed.

  Suddenly I saw it. I saw the blade being held to Koffler's throat as the bottle was shoved inside his mouth, its contents forced down by his assailant's other hand. Probably GHB. A derivative of body-building products that could induce either a euphoric high or an immediate blockage of blood flow to the brain, especially when it was mixed with alcohol.

  Brenda told me I needed to go. I met her eyes. The red semidarkness between us seemed to ripple and shimmer, and she seemed evanescent, distant. I knew what was she was saying to me, knew that she thought Billy Hatfill had something incriminating on me, something I had done in a blackout. Something I would never want the police to know about. But I couldn't react to her, and when she said my name again, there was panic in her voice.

  "He set a trap," I said. "He knew I'd be at the park waiting for him. Then he followed Nate."

  Brenda pulled me away from the bed, into the narrow corridor outside. I allowed her to guide me without taking my eyes off of Scott Koffler's body. His hands were crossed over his chest, a towel wrapped loosely around his waist. He was posed in the same way as my good friend Paul Martinez, when several months earlier his body had been discovered in a bathhouse just like this one. As Brenda herded me down the corridor, I was thrust back onto a darkened West Hollywood street corner as Billy Hatfill asked me if I still thought about Paul. Paul, whose funeral I had walked out of in a quiet rage over his friends' inappropriateness and disrespect.

  Paul, one of the first friends I had made after moving to LA.

  I heard Billy Hatfill telling me I was going to drown in my judgments one day. Then I saw myself as I had been rendered by Corey Howard's hand, sleeping peacefully and dreaming of steel windmills. The image was replaced by a young boy's face, his eyes heavy, as it was lifted into my vision by a gloved hand. Then I was back in the bathhouse hallway, on my knees, inches from my own vomit, as I heard the sound of approaching sirens.

  Brenda's hand was on my back.

  "I'm not going anywhere," I told her.

  Chapter 13

  The first officers to respond were Deputies John O'Brien and Frank Murton. They were with the special problems unit of the West Hollywood substation. Several months earlier, they had taken me on a ride-along so they could show me how they politely pushed the transgendered prostitutes and their parolee customers farther toward Highland Avenue with ceaseless questions about the quality of their life choices and talk of recovery programs.