Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

  Officer Weston felt cold excitement pierced by hot pain. His eyes focused, as if through a red veil of steam on the dark-haired, light-complected little girl nearing his parked car.

  Lost Angels: 13

  He chose each one of us to go with him to Sister Woman, and the fourth one is— … “Orin, what is going to happen tomorrow?” Lisa woke startled. She sat up in her bed and looked at Orin.

  Orin lay on the other bed. His eyes were already open, or they opened instantly. His hands were behind his head; his torso was bare—the first time he had slept without his undershirt since that night when he cried, that sexual night, Lisa realized. Opposite him, Jesse woke when she repeated her question.

  Not tomorrow! Jesse knew, turning to give his full attention to Orin's answer. She thinks it's still yesterday-night. Today's Saturday!

  Like a purplish scrim, the drawn curtains filtered the haze of beginning dawn. An edge of the wide window scorched orange by the rising sun threatened another day of ferocious heat. Reflections from the pool outside painted fiery waves on the ceiling.

  Orin said, “I don't know.”

  But today is Saturday! Jesse almost said that aloud and he sat up in bed. Was it possible that Orin didn't really “know"! Cody always knew, exactly.

  Jesse assuaged himself: Orin was talking about the part that depended vaguely on Sister Woman; there were several possibilities there—but each had a definite shape, a definite goal. Reassured, Jesse lay back, although the glow at the window extended like a luminous fan, announcing full morning. Before he closed his eyes, Jesse saw that Orin was shirtless and that Lisa—so beautiful, so very, very beautiful—was staring at Orin.

  It's already tomorrow, Lisa realized, fully awake. As she leaned back in bed, she wanted to hold back the dawn bleeding at the window, to will back the purple haze of an uncommitted day.

  Jesse and Lisa woke again to the sound of water running in the bathroom. The door open, Orin was showering—a liquid shadow of flesh and reddish, water-darkened hair against the translucent curtain. Naked for moments, he emerged—the slender body defined. Surprised by the allowed nudity, Lisa and Jesse looked at the exposed form as he began to dress.

  He had left the shower running, and it was as if that sound was washing away last night's unreality—morning continued to render the turbulent night unreal.

  Lisa was about to close the door to take her shower. Orin said, “It's okay, Lisa.” She showered behind the diaphanous curtain. She felt their gaze, welcomed it.

  Jesse wished his eyes could part the curtain. Even through the translucence, her body glowed. For a moment Lisa, too, revealed her naked body, and then wrapped herself in a soft towel.

  Jesse showered without even drawing the curtain, but he kept his back to the open door because he was hard.

  Submerged for long—threatening and desired—the sensuality among them flowed into the exhilarated brightness bursting into the room as—like always before—the new day swept even further away the unreal, unwanted night. Now, neither Lisa nor Jesse were sure they wanted Orin to fulfill his promise to tell them “everything.”

  All three ready to leave for today's trek, at the door Lisa looked back at Pearl on a chair and almost ran to grab her, at least say good-bye—but she didn't.

  They had breakfast at Denny's on Sunset nearby: eggs and bacon and hotcakes. The intimacy allowed earlier by their nakedness grew—they laughed, their arms would tangle as they reached for syrup, sugar, butter—and they would laugh; their bodies touched, they shifted legs under the table—and they laughed even more. Joining in their happy mood, the waitress told them it was “loads of fun to wait on people who didn't have a jag on.”

  “Well, I just knew we'd run into you again!” said the jubilant woman they had seen yesterday at the Movieland Wax Museum. The hostess was seating her and her husband at a table just feet away from their booth.

  “Well, hello!” Lisa tried to match the woman's dogged gaiety. “Mornin’,” Jesse lengthened a drawl. “Mornin’, ma'am; sir,” Orin greeted courteously.

  The woman's hairdo had barely been damaged by the wind, which had plucked it from its shield of spray only on one side. Her husband could not keep his eyes away from Lisa, who wore a ruffled white blouse, off her shoulders.

  “Well, what do you recommend?” the cheerful woman asked the three, and the waitress. When she and her husband had ordered the Special Number Three with orange juice, she turned back to the booth. “Well, you know the way we just keep running into each other over and over, I wouldn't be surprised if we ran into you tomorrow at the Gathering of Souls.”

  Lisa and Jesse James looked quickly at Orin. With her words, the woman had dredged up what they had buried since the suspended interlude when Lisa woke up briefly this morning. His silver poised in midmovement, Orin stopped eating. He didn't look up.

  “Well, you know, that's really why we're here,” the exuberant woman went on, “for the Gathering of Souls and Sister Woman's fireworks display of miracles; and, well, you know, she's hinted of something very special.”

  Orin put down his silver, softly. He still didn't look up.

  The woman continued her blissful gush. “Well, Lord, the cures that saintly woman has brought about, all those gifts to the Holy Spirit. Well, I just know hundreds of sinners will be slain in the Spirit of the Lamb,” she went on ecstatically, and told them of “the little gift” they had just given themselves—“a new Chevrolet, especially for our drive to the Gathering of Souls tomorrow.” She glowed with rapture. “Well, it's a two-tone blue car.”

  “You might just see us there.” Orin finally looked at her.

  “Well, that would be a joy—like a climax to our running into each other like this. Well, it can't be accidental. Well, it's like Sister Woman says, that there are no accidents under heaven!” She seemed beside herself with jubilation. Her flushed face erupted ino a series of smiles. Tiny utterances of happiness issued from her mouth. “Well, that would be just wonderful!—to run into you at the Silver Chapel on the Hill, for Sister Woman's Gathering of Souls, God love her and her blessed mission! Well, the way she actually extends salvation even to the dead—those who have died in sin!—through the intercession of the living! Well, I call that inspiring—and, well, no one else does it but Sister Woman.”

  “No one but her,” Orin said somberly. He stood to leave. Then anger seemed to push out words: “That's what she says!”

  The woman's laughter stopped. Her breathing came like panting. Then the bountiful good humor returned. “Well, this food is delicious!” she announced jubilantly over her plate.

  As if feeling Lisa's troubled eyes on him, Orin looked at her—and he smiled. She smiled back at him, sexily but shyly. She and Jesse rose to leave with Orin.

  Waving delightedly as the three left the restaurant, the happy woman chimed, “Well, good-bye—or rather, till we meet again.”

  Outside—and the wind was still for almost minutes—they saw a brand new dark and light blue Chevrolet with dealer's license plates.

  “I bet that's their ole new car. Ugly,” Jesse said, doubly proud of the classy Cadillac they'd be getting into. “You're hot as pistols,” he told the Cadillac, and extended his words to Lisa. “That's what Cody said to that Verna when she walked out in a black negligy,” he trumpeted his firm memory. He looked at Lisa—as sexy as that. “No,” he was confused again, “he said Verna'd knock your eyes out—he was hot as pistols.” The very last line of Cody's had hinted of lapping at the edge of his consciousness, but confusion shoved it back.

  A motorcycle cop drove into the parking lot—all black sunglassed authority. Jesse got into the Cadillac quickly. Lisa had to climb over his long legs to sit in the middle. The cop looked at them through the menacing glasses. “What year is it?” He pointed to the car.

  “Fifty-three,” Orin answered, lowering the top.

  “Beauty, real beauty.” The cop looked at the car and Lisa.

  Driving away, Orin said, “Relax, Jesse.”


  “Just got used to being nervous around cops,” Jesse blurted, “'cause I was in the army—just a short time—underage! Kept going AWOL! Real restless! Kicked me out when they found out I was just a kid, and I had to go back to— …” His sudden “confession” stunned him, even while he went on. “And when— …”

  Orin stopped him. “Whatever happened in the past, that won't matter soon. Sister Woman promised. Wipe away all the tears.” He said that happily.

  “Awright, kid!” Jesse said in the same mood.

  Yes, Orin believed that! A fragment of last night's shattered darkness stung Lisa. And now Jesse seemed about to believe it, too! Reality stabbed through the hazy happiness of the day. “I want a flavor of the week!” Lisa rejected it all forcefully—and when they stopped at a red and white Baskin-Robbin's, she immediately began to devour the first of two double-scoop cones!

  In the city on hot weekends, traffic is light in the afternoon; everyone has fled to the beaches early.

  Orin, Jesse, and Lisa rode on Wilshire. “Let's, Orin!” Lisa said when they passed the famous La Brea Tar Pits. Taking the last delicious bite of her second cone, Lisa thought, It will all go on, like this, on and on and on.

  “Yeah, let's!” Each time they had passed the park, Jesse had wanted to stop—but he didn't like being judged by a dismissed choice.

  In an area of several blocks of green park, children played—there was the atmosphere of a fair—roaming clowns performing, people selling balloons like clusters of multicolored grapes; old people resting.

  Among trees and shrubbery is a large pool of tar, millions of years old. Alive still, it bubbles in slow restlessness. Within it, a carefully reconstructed mastodon, a saber-toothed tiger, a giant bear stand petrified, a million years beyond their time.

  As close as they could come to it from behind the wired fence that surrounds the pool, they watched the oily black surface of the tar, reflecting colors like a scummy rainbow.

  “The animals were trapped in the pools!” Jesse learned from a placard nearby. “See,” he explained, “they'd get stuck, and then pre-da-tors—one of them—would pounce on that animal, and they'd all sink into the tar, like quicksand. That's why that one— …” He pointed to a mastodon, entrapped, struggling against the dooming tars. “… —is fighting to get out… . “I wonder if he did,” the awesome question struck him. He went on hurriedly, “And that's how scientists know what the animals looked like, from their bones.”

  And a small mastodon watched the sinking one in horror! Lisa felt sad—imagining the doomed struggle in the thickening trap.

  Orin said, “Millions of years ago, and it was all forming.” He reached up with one hand, feeling the rising wind.

  In awe, Jesse James was silent. Millions of years—and here they were!

  An incongruous modern building houses a museum there. “It contains the reconstructed skeletons of thousands of prehistoric birds and animals! From fossils!” Jesse read from his guidebook. Feeling Lisa's rapidly declining interest, he added, “And there's the skeleton of an Indian maiden!”

  Lisa definitely did not want to go in.

  They walked to the County Art Museum a long block away, a clean white structure of stairs and arches and stately square wings. Orin wanted to see the Modern wing. Lisa would have preferred the Old Masters—and Jesse didn't really care.

  They stood before an enormous painting covering one whole wall. Colors collided with others as if hurled from the dark whirling center of the canvas.

  Outside, the wind increased with the heat. They left the car top up. The radio was set on the news station. “… society. ‘Audiences are so jaded,’ Fred Hay wood told me in an exclusive interview at the Polo Lounge,” a woman's voice said. “Haywood has the job of arranging the entertainment for Rodeo Drive's International Gala Ball. He told me the challenge is to come up with an act that will excite the audience after the eight-course meal catered by the chef of Chez Toi. The exclusive black-tie affair will be limited to two hundred guests. Funds raised by the celebrity affair will go to the Orphaned Children's— …”

  Jesse punched the country and Western station—sure of his right to do so now—turning up the volume so they could hear the singer lament crushed dreams, and praise love sustained.

  Orin turned off the radio. “The old woman, she had sinned grievously,” he said. He faced straight ahead. He clenched the steering wheel tightly with both hands, but his voice was even. “All her life. Steeped in evil.”

  And so just like that, he was keeping last night's promise! Did he want to hear what was coming? Jesse wondered.

  Seated between them, Lisa wished she were in back—to avoid the words.

  “I was her eyes, read to her from her books—stories, everything. But only toward the last. The old woman said Sister Woman looked like a ghost, a messenger from beyond, because by then her eyesight was failing bad. Sister Woman—she spoke the most beautiful words you ever heard—and she spoke cruel ones, too—but you have to hear that, too, so you can choose whichever you want. She said she could wash away all the pain and all the sin. And even after death—if it was too late. The old woman, she listened—and I remember it all so clear. Sister Woman's words, they were like nothing you ever heard. Nothing / ever heard. Nothing the old woman had ever heard, either. So we wrote her. She wrote her first, in her great big letters—and then I wrote for her, what she told me. Wrote Sister Woman everything—all about the sins— …” He closed his eyes, held a long sigh, opened his eyes, repeated: “Sins, blackness, the sin; always, always failing, lower and lower until we almost touched hell.”

  We. … Jesse puzzled over Orin's word.

  “Still alive and touching hell! And Sister Woman answered! She said she understood—everything. Understood everything!” Orin captured one word, softly—as if assuring himself: “Everything.” Now he resumed in a cadenced, slow voice: “The old woman was dying, knew it; too late to save herself—in this life. Just in the next.” He shook his head. A gentle smile touched his lips, then faded. “She got so thin I could lift her with one arm, almost. She's sitting in her bed, and she's saying, ‘Orin, you underline that word proof in that letter; tell that Sister Woman we want proof.’” He paused, as if filtering memories.

  “But she's not here and you are,” Lisa said. She wanted to hold him, shelter him—feeling his controlled pain, the mysterious hurt buried in his memories.

  “Was she real, real old, Orin?” Jesse formed sad words.

  “Fifty. Not quite that.”

  Jesse was jarred. He had thought of her as very, very old, the way Orin spoke.

  Not yet fifty. Lisa, too, had imagined an old, old woman. The shifted reality confused, then disturbed her.

  “The illness just got her,” Orin seemed to answer their silent questions. “Long time a-coming, and then it just took over. But even then the sinning went on.” His words erupted. “I stopped calling her my— … !” The rest choked. “But she stayed so beautiful.” The gentleness returned. “Like a beautiful ghost.”

  Lisa looked at Orin's glazed eyes. Was the dead woman his mother?—the question floated on her consciousness. And the dark sin— … She pulled out of the disturbing currents, rejected the thoughts. No! The woman was just someone he had loved—loved strangely and powerfully… . A woman loved strangely… . Lisa's own troubled memories whirled. Even when she fled from her into the sheltering darkness of the cherished theaters, she was actually searching her, her mother, her mother's past, reflected in the silver black images of abandoned movie heroines, abandoned over and over and over, like her mother—that woman “who could have been a movie star.” “I'm sorry,” Lisa sighed into the wind.

  Again Orin shook his head. “I think—I actually believe—the reason she cursed—her last words were curses!—was to make it real hard—real hard—on God. And Sister Woman. Challenging to the last moment!” He sighed an endless sigh. “So now Sister Woman has to prove to me that the blind woman is saved—out of the fires of
hell. And then I can tell her— …”

  Yes, like Cody talking to his dead Ma in the black wind. “How will she prove it?” Jesse asked quietly.

  “She'll have to know how,” Orin said, again as if the logic was obvious.

  The aimless dream had found direction in a nightmare, and the nightmare could be ended only by waking—but if ended too abruptly, it might abandon Orin forever in its impenetrable darkness. And if Sister Woman did not give him the proof he needed, what?

  The sun spilled long shadows as they drove past the glassy gravestone buildings of Century City.

  “And if she doesn't give you proof, Orin?” Jesse knew he could ask questions now.

  “She will.” Orin's face clouded. The blue eyes deepened.

  “But if— …” Jesse pursued just so far.

  Orin's tone changed. “There's two wills. She wrote each one out by hand—by herself, so careful, each word. All legal. She checked over and over, made sure. I can destroy whichever one I want. Sister Woman knows that. Everything's waiting now. And it's up to her.”

  Jesse inhaled heat, which boiled in his body. He could hardly form the words: “How much money, Orin?”

  “Million. More. Maybe two. Never thought to count it. Lots left for us,” he smiled an important promise. Then he was somber. “When the old woman's at peace, really at peace, at last,” he seemed to speak to himself, “then I will be at peace, too, from her life and her death—and I can let her rest from mine.”

  He had come to bury the dead woman—really bury her, in his mind—whatever she was to him, whoever she was. Lisa thought she heard hints of that now in the recurring echo of some of his haunting erratic words and lessons. To bury her. Was it the dead who reached out in anger to the living—or the living who didn't let go, in greater anger? … All the discarded awarenesses returned to Lisa now, jostling the dream of unperturbed aimless-ness in this languorous city.

  “There's a right time to die—and a wrong time,” Orin's cadenced voice said. “Like if the best that's ever going to happen has already happened and nothing after will be that good; or if the worst is still to come and you couldn't take any more—then that's the right time; but some lives end before they're finished, and then others have to live for them, even die for them.” The wind seemed to echo the rhythm of his words. “Depends.”