Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

  “It looks like a body!” Jesse was saying excitedly, pointing down at the table. “Look. See? Here are the veins, in red—and all these little yellow arteries— … And here's the heart, where they all join!”

  Lisa peered over his shoulder. He was looking at a map of Los Angeles. “How can a map look like a body? Those aren't veins, they're freeways and streets. Oh, you!” she said impatiently.

  Jesse continued to study the map. It did, too, look like a distorted body, its limbs pulled every which way.

  Orin studied the map. “It looks like the body of a ghost,” he said.

  “How could a ghost have a body?” Jesse laughed.

  Outside, Orin stopped at the motel office to pay for that day's rent. Jesse and Lisa stayed a distance away. Orin seemed unconcerned by that.

  As they approached the car—this time Jesse noticed—Orin touched its trunk, barely, yes, fingers just gliding as if testing to see how dusty it was, but he touched it; had he seen him do that other times?

  They drove into the hot day. Clearly it would be one of those times—tacitly accepted during breakfast, when no suggestion was made—when their destination would be determined spontaneously. But their reaction to the night journey into the park yesterday precluded a recurrence without Jesse's and Lisa's agreement.

  Lisa sat in back, adoring the technicolored splendor of the scenery everywhere. Here and there colored blossoms were so thick it was as if the earth were bleeding. In the distant hills, the giant sign that proclaimed HOLLYWOOD in huge letters continued to thrill her. Yellow, curled flowers, splotched with red, blazed on a lawn.

  “Burning birds,” Lisa named them. Again? “Bridesmaid's bouquets,” she quickly dubbed others.

  It was a dramatic day—the wind had swept the sky blue. Leafy, flaring palm trees were able to shake away the still-mild assaults of today's wind.

  When they had first arrived in the city, they had heard an announcement on the radio that warned of a “smog alert.” A smog alert!—it had sounded strange to Lisa and Jesse. Orin had explained that meant that smog—a combination of fog and smoke, from cars, factories—was so thick on a particular day that people were being advised not to drive unless they had to, that way reducing the dirty fumes. These days, the wind pushed it away. But wads of it would appear at times on the horizon, as if waiting to make a poisonous incursion into the city. But not now, not today—today the sky was blue, blue!

  “We've been in Los Angeles several days now, and it still thrills me,” Lisa said. “I love it, so much, more and more. And it seems like a lifetime, a wonderful lifetime here, because it's been so full and wonderful,” she exulted. “I'm so happy to be with you two!” Impulsively she leaned over and touched Orin and Jesse on their shoulders. She allowed her fingers to rest there for moments.

  Jesse's flesh tingled, as if an electric current were flowing, in warm binding, from his shoulder, through Lisa, to Orin. He was sorry when Lisa removed her touch. It would have been good to ride that way, a longer time. “Yeah,” Jesse said, wondering what Orin had felt. Orin had changed his life, he realized anew; just simply because at a certain time in the steaming desert he had been waiting for a ride. The wonder of it struck him over and over. “Yeah—it is good.”

  Happily, Lisa began humming a tune from a movie. “The all-times had beautiful music. Max Steiner—I remember his name; he wrote the most beautiful movie music of all. I don't care if I ever see a new movie again, just the all-times, over and over.” Yet she thought of the two “new” ones they had seen recently. She pushed them away with her continued humming. “That's from Forever Amber!” she remembered.

  “I'll say one thing,” Jesse James complimented her—but not too emphatically, “you sure got a good memory.”

  “Yes, I do,” Lisa admitted. “I think I'm much smarter than I used to think.”

  “You remember real good,” was all Jesse allowed.

  “Amber loved that Bruce so much—and he took her child and left her for a mealymouth.” She sighed. “They were always doing that—leaving them. I cried so much.”

  “For her or for the kid?” Orin asked.

  “Well, of course I cried for— …” Lisa frowned. She looked to her side. She hadn't brought Pearl along—again. “I cried for …”It was suddenly puzzling and important. Whom had she cried for? She touched the place where Pearl would have been. Whom? Lisa jerked her head, looking out, severing sudden memories of the woman who “could have been a movie star”—who blamed her for— … being born. “Sometimes,” Orin said, “you've got to cry for yourself.”

  Jesse didn't understand, but he felt sad. Crying for yourself!

  The elegant Cadillac purred along Hancock Park, blocks of stately mansions proclaiming old, established—entrenched—wealth.

  “Oooo, could we buy a place like that?” Lisa pointed to a magnificent house sprawling, the lightest shade of amber, over a lawn of perfect green.

  Those words jerked Jesse into last night's dream-filtered memory about money. Jesse heard himself: “Orin could; he said last night he's got— …” The certainty abandoned him. “Lots of money, didn't— …?”

  Orin turned the radio on.

  A pang of anger punctured the closeness Jesse had felt when Lisa had touched them both. He shot a slanted look at Orin. It wasn't rare for Orin to manipulate the radio impulsively, not even hear—or seem not to hear—what anyone asked him, but this time Jesse felt sure he had turned it on to avert his question. He hadn't even formed it completely. What exactly had Orin said about the old woman and Sister Woman? Just that he was bringing her money. What if it was a hundred dollars? Jesse's spirits collapsed. The words he thought he'd heard before he fell asleep last night dimmed further. But Sister Woman had seemed to react the night Orin left a message—a note passed on to her from the operator? And if so, there had to be much more than just a few dollars. And in one of her sermons she had seemed actually to be talking about Orin, to Orin—and he'd written her he was coming. Jesus Christ!—was he really—really—in touch with her?

  “Oh, see that house.” Lisa pointed to a magnificent mansion. Mournful willow trees flanked it. “It's a famous one; I saw pictures of it; it belonged to a theater actress— …” She was pointing to the house once owned by Karen Stone, murdered in Rome, or so the newspapers posturing at outrage claimed, by a vagrant Italian youngman, whom she had apparently invited into her apartment.

  “… —of civil rights groups protesting the finding that Officer Norris Weston was found to have acted responsibly in the shooting death of the black woman in Watts earlier this year,” the radio announcer was finishing. “And on another front, the White House has confirmed that Judge Stephen Stephens III of Los Angeles is one of five men being considered to fill the seat vacated earlier this year on the Supreme Court by the death of— …”

  “How ugly!” Lisa pointed to a billboard.

  They had long left the mournful house and the area of exclusive old wealth, and they were driving now along a section of the city of squat hardware shops and stucco bungalows colored desperately. These blemished patches of city recur with jagged regularity among the flowers and trees.

  Orin slowed down to see what Lisa had pointed to.

  “LOS ANGELES DESTROYED HOURLY!” the billboard screeched.

  A drawing depicted a terrified man running, open mouth petrified in a scream. Behind him, a traumatized woman stood on a cracking sidewalk split by earthquake. Beyond, other figures fled from an avalanche of lapping water. Waves of orange fire raged, palm trees crashed.

  “See It All Happen On The Universal Studios Tour,” words at the bottom of the poster invited.

  “That's in my guidebook, remember?” Jesse connected.

  “But not that ugly. Drive away quick, Orin,” Lisa said.

  “… —extending the Santa Ana conditions,” the weather announcer said. Then another announcer on the radio introduced “Social Notes from All Over.” “European Solidarity workers, American factory workers, an
d even Italy's Red Brigade terrorists,” a woman's easy voice was declaring, “will have roles in shaping women's and menswear this season, according to designer Brian Lorring, whom I interviewed recently in his ultramodern home. Thus an industry that built its reputation on beachwear and jeans has discovered life beyond leisure. Brian, what do you foresee?” A man's voice followed: “Darling, we're going to see a look dominated by—well—industrial and military influences.” “Among your rich clients?” the woman inquired. “Darling,” the man said, “the whole point about being rich in our time is that you don't wear rich out. The radical-worker look will— …”

  Orin shifted the radio to— …

  “The Western and country station—wowee!” Jesse James welcomed, claiming a victory for himself. Or had he been allowed one? he revised more soberly.

  Whatever. Soon the radio was singing about destinations to the land where broken hearts are mended.

  They ate at a Howard Johnson's restaurant—incongruous pseudo-New England facade and, inside, neat rows of orange and blue booths; they ate hungrily as if to fill the drain of yesterday's events. Still there were no suggestions or questions about how they would spend the rest of the day.

  “Does it seem like you're driving inside a body?” Orin asked Jesse only minutes later when they glided into a freeway. “Like when you looked at the map?”

  Jesse pondered his feelings. “Not when you're on it,” he said, disappointed. Less so when he consulted his guidebook and learned that: “There's six hundred miles of freeway within the city, and if you stretched them all out end to end you'd get from here to Phoenix, wow!”

  Not yet mid-afternoon, the traffic flowed. Chrome captured slivers of sun in blades of flashing silver, like bullets.

  Orin moved the car swiftly out of the freeway.

  The wind had begun to push with growing force. Leafy crowns of palm trees shook.

  Orin stopped the car on a side street, adjacent to a series of vacant abandoned lots. Pretty purple and yellow weeds crept throughout the tenacious remains of the dusty foundations of houses long ago cleared away for the nearby freeways.

  Orin got out of the car, looking toward the slope adjacent to the lanes of freeway. He stood over the concrete network as if from this distance he could untangle it into discernible order.

  Jesse got out of the car. He traced Orin's gaze—he saw only cars beginning to slow in the stases that are part of the city's freeway rituals.

  So intense, Lisa thought inside the car. Jesse is getting to look like Orin sometimes, that intense. Or trying to. Automatically she walked out. The recurrent whoosh! of cars and the surge of wind created a sound like that of the thrusts of the ocean, turbulent water shoved against the edges of the land.

  The three stood overlooking a section where almost all the freeways of the city, or their extensions, crash into a twisted star. Arcs of concrete sweep over streets at that point in intricate interconnection. Cars move in every direction, in long, long files. Untangling from the tight noose of traffic here, they scatter into the vast city, its myriad destinations.

  High above this point—to the side of the crushed fields—a rise of land furry with grass and brush and thick trees grows into an uncultivated hill, right in the midst of the city and over the freeways—a patch of forest. Now shaken by the wind, leaves ahead changed periodically to silver green, then dark green, their two sides.

  Jesse and Orin moved closer to the slope over the freeways. Flowered vines crawl thickly to the very edge of the concrete many feet below.

  Lisa saw the two men on the viny grass, among tiny eruptions of white and orange flowers like expiring miniature stars.

  Growing nervous and impatient, the traffic below became thicker on the freeways, cars shoving into slowing lanes. Lisa could feel the reverberations of stalling motors, as if the earth were trembling. Moving closer—but still away from Orin and Jesse—she stared down into the quagmire of metal, chrome, and concrete. Her ears were assaulted by the mechanical roar competing with the growling wind. As if wiped away by a giant hand, everything blurred before her. Dizzy, she closed her eyes. Her breath came in sudden pants, her heart pulsed against her ears, and she felt panic.

  When she opened her eyes again, removing her hands from her ears, she saw Jesse and Orin running toward her. They seemed exhilarated.

  Although he had to shout to be heard over the wind and the roar of cars, it was as if Orin had whispered the words, he spoke them so evenly over the clashing sounds:

  “You'll stay with me, both of you?”

  Stay with him? Could they leave if they wanted? Jesse wondered in a moment which would certainly change. Trust me. … Had a decision already been made?—as far back as the Texas desert? Jesse allowed himself to feel what he had pulled away from at the sight of Orin's moistened face last night: Orin had been crying—not sweating—but that was all right because Cody cried, too! Jesse felt now that Orin had been crying for all three of them. “I just about guess we've got to!” he shouted, feeling a sweep of joy.

  “Will you, Lisa?” Orin repeated. The reddish blond hair whipped across his face, then back, leaving imploring sad eyes.

  Trust me. Despite last night's anger and doubts—which she had buried today—Lisa nodded. Yes, extending the idle dream, the aimless journeys.

  Jesse laughed exultantly. He ran toward the green forested hill over the freeway. He thrust his laughter against the roar of the wind and the cars battling beyond, below.

  Orin threw his head back and joined Jesse's laughter.

  Lisa drew away from them. She ran across the barren field, back to the car—away from this game. A dream, a game!—the edges of reality stabbed at her.

  Jesse continued to climb, higher, concealed now by the green thickness of the hill until he emerged near the rusted remains of what must have been a water-supply tank, a tall cylinder long abandoned, oxidized dusty orange. A metallic ladder clung to its side. The ladder was flimsy. Jesse's boots were aware of the give in the rotted rungs. Locating the firmest part of the railing, he held on to it and thrust out his body at a slant from the top. White heat embraced him. Whatever Cagney—Cody—had yelled, he had yelled it triumphantly as bullets zinged and white flames exploded like a huge black and white orchid.

  Still laughing, Jesse shouted at the wind, “Come and get me!”

  Carla: “Roses in Hell”

  Her sweat saturated the newspapers and rags on which she lay. She welcomed the moisture. It cooled her as she slept, or tried to sleep. “Sleep” was a glazed limbo of subdued awareness kept alert for assault.

  A foot kicked her bare legs. Farther into the hollow made permanent night after night by other bodies that hid in the maze of ledges, she forced her bony frame—which hurt more than its forty-nine years should allow. Aroused by the connection with hurting flesh, the foot kicked again more forcefully.

  Carla reached back to protect the shopping bag, which contained everything she owned this moment—a mirror pressed between cardboards, an almost toothless hairbrush, maybe a skirt or even a dress, a stolen tube of lipstick, a perfume bottle—and the ashes of long-dried roses.

  Icy light stunned her eyesight.

  “This one's a woman!” said the man's excited voice from behind the frosted flashlight.

  A stick explored intimately between her legs. “Yeah,” another voice affirmed.

  Standing up, Carla clasped the cloth bag against her thighs. Her sight struggled to recover from the assault of white light encircled by the blowing night. She saw electric smears of white, orange, green, blue; distant blurs. Two dark-uniformed bodies came into focus before her.

  The stick outlined her dried breasts. “Get outta here, dirty bitch!”

  The cops moved on, rousting scraggly living ghosts concealed throughout the many levels of these lawns.

  Where was she?

  The beach! No…. A railroad station? A hospital room? A clean one, a filthy one, one bellowing with invisible pain. A bus depot? A storefront? A subway
tunnel warmed by gasps of steam? Against shadows? Cringing from advancing feet bringing roses?

  Carla studied the night. The electric smears shaped into lighted signs radiating on top of encroaching, sleek buildings. Orange and green on white: UNION 76. Cool, illuminated blue: ATLANTIC RICHFIELD PLAZA.

  As bodies shuffled to other hollows, Carla crawled back into the same cove, rearranging the papers and rags left there from an earlier occupancy. Her fingers touching the brownish bag, the dusty roses, she floated again within the limbo that replaced sleep, floated until the rusted sun burst through the tarnished horizon and she heard the urgent rustling of leaves coming from the body-carved cove nearest her. The cops were back! She knotted her body so that when they kicked this time, the lunging feet would connect with her buttocks, still the softest part of her emaciated form. Both hands hugged the shopping bag.

  She heard ugly aroused laughter and the beginning of a scream, throttled as it began to rip the hot dusk. Rushing feet carried away the sick laughter. Safer to remain hidden, she knew. She shoved the bag between her legs. Silence extended. She peered out.

  On the sidewalk—and against distant palm trees pulled into reality by the beginning morning—stood a tiny man of perhaps seventy years. He looked like an aged doll—frayed clothes; long white hair; delicate, almost fragile features. A garish red bandanna decorated his skinny neck. No—not a bandanna! The red line across his neck broke into the flowing anarchy of astonished blood.

  Dragging her bag, Carla clawed her way with one hand into the thicker part of the ledge. Twigs cut her skin. She forced her body through to the other side of the lawn and emerged onto exposed grass. Responding to a new ambush, other tattered bodies crawled out of leafy pockets.

  Carla stood a safe distance away, on the sloping lawn. She saw the whirling colored lights of a police car, heard the siren screaming into her ears coming for her, wailing its accusation: Your fault, it's your fault! Now two cops hovered over the fallen man. Then an ambulance came and took the body away and she was on a stretcher, her hands tied over her as if she were dead.