by John Rechy
Jesse bounded toward the huge rocks at the end of the sandy strip. Lisa followed. The craggy wall was so steep they had to climb it by grasping protrusions of stone with their hands. Beyond, they faced an expanse of savage scarred rocks swept by water.
Orin sat many feet away, staring toward the ocean. His shoulders were hunched, his hands in his pockets.
“Orin!” Lisa shouted.
He looked back at them. He stood. He waved. “I am here,” he said. Then he made his way toward them, his body pressing against the rocks, his feet anchored carefully to narrow cracks. Lisa held out her hand, and he linked his to it.
“You scared us!” Lisa said.
“Went out there in the dark, had to see it,” Orin said.
“See what?” Jesse longed for an easy answer.
“What there is,” Orin said.
They moved down the rocks to the crescent of beach.
He had buried the blind woman at last—the way he had buried the bird in the desert, suspecting it all perhaps as far back as then, Lisa thought.
On the curved edge of the beach, they splashed water on their faces, arms. They laughed easily now—not with last night's hysteria. They touched playfully, intimately at times. They moistened their own and each other's clothes, pressing them to their bodies, letting the wind iron them that way, quickly in the heat. They felt fresh as they climbed the rocks back to the main part of the beach.
Early wanderers were there, coastline tramps with purple brown faces, fishing poles, bundles; erecting lean-to's, making fires for cooking—before the sunbathers and tanned surfers invaded in tribes and drove them away.
The Cadillac waited for them. When they were all inside and Orin had started the motor, he got out, the car idling. Jesse turned back quickly; Lisa looked in the rearview mirror. Both saw the trunk of the car open, then close. Orin returned, and they rode back toward the highway.
“I am real hungry!” Orin announced. Jesse and Lisa echoed him, reflecting his easy mood.
Along the highway, weekend beach traffic, undaunted by the canyon fires and redirected from the areas where flames blocked the roads, was snarling early. At Alice's Restaurant, on stilts over the beach, they had breakfast. They ordered everything! —extending the natural laughter as they ate.
“Might as well use up some of that money, now that it's all ours,” Orin said between bites of food.
Just like him! Just like that! Jesse looked at Orin in awe—and relief. He felt no greed, no—he had in the days earlier, for moments, yes; now he just felt relief that a future that included him and Lisa and Orin had been acknowledged. Jesse James had never been happier in his life!
Lisa felt the same happiness—and relief. The money had had no reality for her until now; it had belonged with that woman, who was gone. And now it merely made her feel peaceful, happy with Orin and Jesse. The tension was gone, left behind on those deserted rocks where Orin had sat, abandoning his nightmare, she felt sure as she looked at Orin. A calm new man was emerging, sane now. Sane now.
Orin left a bountiful tip. And when he paid, Jesse noticed, the wallet was filled with bills, no longer separated into days. That's what he'd gotten just now from the trunk.
Back on the highway, traffic increased with cars on their journey to the beaches. Hints of coolness nudged the heat. Traffic thickened, but the Cadillac was moving in lanes away from it, toward the freeway, away from the canyon fires, toward the city bathed in new light.
They were on the Santa Monica Freeway. Beyond, everywhere, palm trees bobbed out of the azure of a smogless morning.
Occasionally they still bent with the wind, but less so, resisting more easily. The rim of the distant fires seemed contained in a luminous band, its smoke blowing away from the city.
Jesse turned on the radio; it was set on the news station. “… —scandal when it was first bought and painted lime green,” the voice of the announcer was saying. “Its garishly painted nude statues attracted crowds and notoriety. Its thirty-eight rooms have been vacant since a fire caused extensive damage. Now the mansion is being restored, beginning tomorrow.”
Jesse shifted the dial. He knew he no longer had to bother to check Orin's expression for disapproval. Country and Western sounds filled the car. What's gone, what's left—wiped away by what's to come, the song accepted.
Look at him, so different in a good way, Lisa continued to study Orin, calm, smiling. She felt the soothing happiness, warm, close.
On their side of the freeway, traffic was even sparser now. On the opposite lane the mechanical crush increased. Soon it would peak in the minutes before noon.
The indigo Cadillac flowed along the freeway, toward a crystalline blue sky, toward palm trees increasingly serene, toward buildings cleansed by fresh wind pushing away the stagnant heat of days and nights.
Wide spaces between shooting cars, sparse traffic moves rapidly at this hour on Sundays in an area where all the freeways, or their extensions, converge, connecting all the sections of the city and its outskirts, and all its varied lives. Separated from the San Diego and the Long Beach freeways, the Santa Monica Freeway collides into the Harbor Freeway, which splits into the Hollywood and Santa Ana freeways—east and west, north and south—before it attaches itself to the Pasadena Freeway and rushing joins the San Bernardino Freeway in one direction and in the other the Golden State Freeway, which grasps the Ventura Freeway.
The beautiful indigo Cadillac entered that limbo of freeways now.
It was almost noon.
“This is where we were that afternoon!” Jesse recognized the area excitedly. He pointed to the thickly forested slope of hill he had climbed above the freeways.
“That's where we're going to throw the rifle,” Orin said. “Take it apart, scatter the pieces so no one can find it.”
With sadness, Jesse remembered the captured man in the park. Yes, it was right to undo the rifle this way.
Another welcome burial! Lisa accepted. Now, Orin was ordering the past insanity. It was over. How different today was from that other day.
Orin directed the car off the freeway. There it was, the weedy lot. Above freeways the silent trees loomed. Orin parked the car on the same street. They got out—Jesse shirtless and deep-tanned, Lisa golden and beautiful, Orin boyish and handsome. All laughing, they stood on the partition that separates the grassy decline into the freeways from the hill above.
Orin opened the trunk door of the car and he brought out the rifle. He undid the bedroll around it. The rifle was dark. Lisa took Pearl from the back seat.
Jesse looked at the rifle. “Easy to take it apart,” he said to Orin. Now they would all throw its parts into the thick greenness above the traffic moving fast and uninterrupted below.
The rifle was so light Orin held it in one hand. He tilted his head, looking at the black weapon. He located the switch that would release the magazine.
When she gazed down into the freeway this time, Lisa felt no fear. The happiness that the past had contained would be retained. Only the nightmare was over—had not shaped, really. She felt Orin's peace, Jesse's, her own, as if the wind, increasingly cleansed now of sullied heat, were gathering the peace around them. She laughed happily. Orin and Jesse laughed joyously with her. They stood near the green grass and vines sprinkled with pale lavender flowers. Lisa looked at the doll in her hands. She studied it carefully.
“You think he intended to use the weapon, Orin?” Jesse pondered.
“Depends,” Orin said.
That word. Lisa clutched Pearl suddenly to her.
Jesse laughed abruptly. “Down there! Look! Probably got a flat tire on their brand-new car!”
Just below, a dark and light blue Chevrolet, shiny in the noon sun, moved off the freeway onto its shoulder.
When she saw the blue-toned car come to a total stop, Lisa felt a resurgence of the heat. “You can't tell for sure from way up here, Jesse!” she said urgently. “It isn't them!”
“Who?” Orin asked casually, ready t
o release the black magazine.
“That funny woman we kept running into everywhere,” Jesse answered, “and her husband who never said anything, remember?—she kept laughing all the time like she was having such a great time, said they just bought a new blue Chevrolet.” He laughed again. “The one down there sure looks like the one we saw. They're probably on their way to that Gathering of Souls— …”He stopped.
Darkness captured Orin's face. “No!” he screamed. His thumb retreated from the release lever and his index finger touched the rifle's trigger.
Bullets sprayed the freeway below, Orin jerked the rifle away, it swirled in an arc, bullets spat into an extension of another freeway, he pulled the rifle up, a tracer among invisible bullets bolted out, an orange splinter of a fatal star twisting into an overpass beyond.
“No!” Lisa covered her eyes.
“No!” Jesse screamed.
“No,” Orin barely whispered. He removed his finger from where it had released the safety, had barely touched the trigger. He looked down at the rifle as if only now discovering its horror. “No.”
Below, in the freeway, metal, chrome, glass smashed above the shrieks of brakes. Human screams crashed against death. A car hurtled up a slope, another veered against it on its side—both contained in a blossom of swirling flames. The repeated sound of metal assaulting metal ground into a deafening roar. Untouched by the bullets, other cars collided into twisted iron sculpture. Two bodies spun out of the vortex of fire. Flames grasped another lane, another car. Out of bursting orange and red, a body ran along the freeway and fell under the spattering of shredded steel and glass. Beyond, in an extension of this freeway, more metal fused in hard jolts. Fire rose as if from the earth itself. On the overpass, which a tracer bullet seemed to have ignited, flames sprouted and raced in slender devouring lines. Running figures fell, others escaped into the grassy slopes. In broken cars, bodies froze, others rushed out, falling—rising or surrendering to springing death. In three separate limbs of the murdered freeways, triumphant fire spat flames. The recurring clashing of metal on metal, of horns blaring, choking, of glass bursting—and screams, screams—all extended the shrieking roar. Thick shreds of smoke shrouded the sky over wounded bodies and bleeding death, and bodies standing unhurt—all tossed out on the freeway as if by a raging, indifferent force.
Then the lanes seemed awesomely quiet. There was a strange hollow silence that contained its own roaring sounds.
Orin still looked down at the weapon that had unleashed the massive devastation.
Unbelieving, his ears deafened by the chain of eruptions, Jesse stared at him.
Lisa opened her eyes and looked at Orin. He seemed startled, terrified, confused. He still clung to the rifle, as if he could withdraw its destruction. Lisa felt a long, soundless scream implode within her—and him, and Jesse.
Orin shook his head as if to clear his mind, understand what had occurred.
Below, the two-toned blue Chevrolet moved away, untouched.
Smoke rose toward Orin, Jesse, Lisa. And soon distant sirens pierced the paralyzed roar.
Orin rubbed his eyes, as if to break a trance. One hand reached out, to touch Lisa's shoulder. As if that contact snapped the trance, he shouted loudly, to be heard, “Run away, Lisa!”
Lisa shook her head. “No!” she screamed and clutched the frayed doll.
“Yes, run away!” Jesse shouted just as loudly—knowing that she must and that Orin knew why. When he felt her body trembling, Jesse realized his arm, too, was embracing her.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Lisa yelled.
“Now!” Orin insisted. “Not much time! Now, Lisa! Run up into that hill!” he yelled, as if the force of his words would push her. “You've got to! You and Jesse!”
“You both come with me!” Lisa shouted. “You and Jesse and— …!”
“Can't!” Orin cried. His eyes shifted across the street, toward the hill. “They'd follow all of us that way. I have to stay here—with the rifle—-draw them here while you and Jesse— …”
“No, no, no, no, no!”
“One of us has to escape, Lisa, and it has to be you.” In a deliberate, definite tone, Jesse altered Orin's exhortation.
“No!” Lisa screamed. “No!”
Orin's eyes searched the horizon. Still touching her shoulder, he rushed words: “Throw the doll away, Lisa! Throw the doll away! She's dead and you're alive!”
Lisa flung the doll into the smashed pit below.
“Now live, Lisa!” Orin yelled. He pushed her gently but forcefully away.
At the same time that a part of her soul flung itself backward to lock forever with Orin and Jesse, Lisa felt her body rushing away, understanding that she could save them only by fleeing from their deaths and with their lives—not by dying for them or with them. Her body hurled itself beyond the edge of the freeway, across the concrete separation, and into the forested hill.
Watching her disappear into the thick, concealing coves of tall trees and sprawled sheltering shadows, the rifle still in his hand, Orin turned to Jesse. “You, too, Jesse! Run! Quick! Just barely time enough!”
Jesse looked toward where Lisa had vanished—a moment ago, minutes, already forever. He said silently, Run, Lisa, live!
Orin screamed, “Run, Jesse!”
No. Jesse looked at Orin and shook his head. No. He stood next to Orin and waited.
And then sirens and the whir of helicopter blades gathered distantly, and then surrounded them, and then enclosed them in a narrowing swirl of lights. Out of the slashing sounds, whirling lights, and gray, choking smoke, policemen in dark uniforms and gas masks crouched.
“Run, Jesse!” Orin yelled. He waited for seconds, staring at Jesse.
Jesse shook his head, decisively. No.
Orin nodded. Then he held the mysterious weapon with both his hands, and he raised it mutely over his head, directing fire to him from the crouching dark-uniformed figures. His body wrenched and then fell on the green earth. A circle of blood on his chest grew, finding its shape, the shape of a deadly liquid rose.
Only when he saw the body crumble on the vines and flowers did Jesse hear the bullets that had killed Orin. Jesse flung himself on the ground. With pain—but also with the triumph of his total loyalty—Jesse stared at the familiar face of his friend. He took the weapon from the hand that still touched it, stood up, and prepared to shout Cody's last words, remembered at last—I made it, Ma! Top of the world!—but still he could not form them, because in that eternal pinpoint of a moment Cody's meaning was replaced by his own. Sobbing, Jesse James whispered instead:
“I made it … Pa.”
At that moment he saw or thought he saw the indigo Cadillac explode into a huge orchid of roiling black and white flames out of which bills of money flew from the car's rent trunk—money—or leaves—dark green leaves scattering in terror or freedom into the wind.
Jesse fired into the sun—a slash of cold white—shattering the white heat.
Pulled in many directions by stinging bullets, Jesse fell on Orin's body.
Within spilling shadows, under long green branches, Lisa heard the blast of shots. They forced her gaze back. Did she see or imagine—or feel—Orin and Jesse twisting into death? The shots ricocheted, trapped in her mind, killing Orin and Jesse over and over and over and over as she continued to climb. Weeds and brush and broken branches scratched at her legs, hands. Bloodied perspiration glued dark smoke and ashes to her face and body as she pulled herself up through tangles of thicket—resting for moments or longer, moving again, climbing, knowing—and only because shadows lengthened—that time was moving, too, had not even paused for death. Again she looked down through gaps between trees, as if she might yet discover the terror erased.
Flooding water and foam poured out of giant hoses below, far, far below. Steam hissed. Fumes wound grappling shadows of smoke into the wet heat, into stalled time.
Mandy Lang-Jones stood above the freeway and surveyed the stilled catastrophe as clos
e as she could come. Rushing television crews had descended to record the spattered horror. Among wires of cameras, Mandy Lang-Jones tried to estimate the number of dead. Sparse Sunday traffic had allowed cars to escape past smoldering flames, probably keeping the deaths low. But it would still be a top national story for days, and the perfect hook for her series on mass killings!
Mandy mussed her hair, touched her face with ashes, moistened her eyelids with spit, and located her body so that millions of screens would frame her against the frozen holocaust and the glow of flames in the canyons. She faced electronic eyes. Her voice throbbed into the microphone: “This is Mandy Lang-Jones! I am standing at the site of one of the worst mass slaughters in recent times! The two snipers who fired into the freeways have been killed by police, who speculate they belonged to a splinter radical group! Beyond that, all that is known is that on this hot June day, an act of meaningless violence— …”
Beyond, the sound of sirens rose, fell, floated away with the whir of helicopters—farther, fading into crushed silence.
On the shadowed hill, the encompassing verdure, Lisa pulled her eyes away from the blurred terror and pushed her body against the stagnant heat. Gathering sorrow threatened to choke her. So quickly, Orin and Jesse were remembered images, echoes of words, cries and laughter!—beloved strangers whose voices were stilled now forever. Forever! So quickly and that sudden and for ever! Protesting that sudden, mysterious, immutable silence, she screamed, and the screams tore from her body:
“Orin! Jesse!”
Trembling, she rested crying on soft earth. What had Orin fired at? The fatal trigger—pulled on purpose? Aimed at nothing, in panic, despair, sorrow, betrayal, lost hope? No! He had touched the trigger accidentally!
She grasped at twisted roots and pulled herself up through gray shadows. Orin and Jesse were dead. And so was Pearl Chavez.
Lisa climbed toward streaks of sky barely tinged by distant, dying flames.
A dark silhouette on the crest of a hill, she stood above black ruins, blackened stones, and she felt the blessing of a cool breeze. Wiping away sweat and tears streaked with blood, she heard the indistinct murmuring of lingering wind, whispered curses left among the dark green pines. She listened intently, determined to drain out of the secret sounds those she needed in order to live. She heard them!—in the brushed leaves; thought she heard echoes of Orin's and Jesse's exhortation: Live, Lisa!
