This Day's Death

by John Rechy

  They left again, she was sick again, they returned, left. Soon Estela didn’t come back. Only Jim.

  Three years ago—his mother once again ill—Jim returned to El Paso and stayed, though he had not intended to. He stayed to go to college. And this, too, stilled the alluring anarchy: Soon after, Barbara came back unexpectedly to El Paso, living now in an apartment separate from her uncle and working as an artist for an advertising agency; the casual but strongly sexual relationship between them resumed as if it had not been interrupted.

  Though apprehensive of his mother’s reaction, Jim brought Barbara to meet her. The two spoke warmly, for long, Mrs. Girard complimenting Barbara on her Spanish, which, though careful and correct, was nevertheless accented; “charmingly so,” his mother contended. “She’s lovely,” Barbara told him later. Though apparently each had won the other over, Jim nevertheless had a feeling of role playing, which would eventually be abandoned. Or was he curiously disappointed the two had gotten on so well? . . . He chose not to bring Barbara often to his home.

  Although Jim intended to move out of his mother’s house and into his own apartment, there was always a good reason for postponing it: Either his mother wasn’t too well or the apartments he saw didn’t suit him or he decided to wait longer thereby saving money for the years at lawschool by living at home now. There was always a reason for staying.

  Often he felt on probation from the anarchy in his past; often he longed for it, resenting the straight life as a cop-out. He had forced his whole world to change: He attended school, studied, worked, exercised, cultivated very few friends other than Barbara, Lloyd, Ellen.

  And: Jim had a feeling of pleasure at seeing his mother happy those years—and financially secure with what he was now able to provide from the excellent salary Lloyd paid him and what Estela still contributed monthly for her support. He had a feeling of a promise finally kept.

  Last summer he got his degree at the local university. Encouraged by Lloyd to take a vacation before his enrollment at lawschool next year, Jim went back to Los Angeles, intending to stay two weeks. His mother went with him: the first time they had traveled together; and it was a happy trip, which they took slowly. They stayed in Phoenix overnight, and he drove her around the city. In Los Angeles she stayed with Estela. Jim stayed alone in a motel. Last summer.

  Summer.

  As if it had waited patiently for his return, another war flared on a second front.

  He was arrested and jailed.

  JIM OPENS THE FRONT DOOR IN RESPONSE TO THE RINGING. The revived wind attacks swiftly in gusts which come like stifled sighs.

  There, sheltering her hair from the wind, is a slight Mexican woman of forty or more years. Her enormous dark eyes are slanted heavily with black pencil. She smiles ingratiatingly at Jim. Her black hair, with no trace of white, is piled multistoried. Slim, tiny—a miniature—pretty, she’s meticulously dressed; she wears gloves. But there’s more than a touch of exaggeration; an unconscious parody of modishness.

  “Buenos días. I’m from the employment office,” she says in Spanish, and the smile is anxious. She hands him a printed and typed card.

  “Good morning,” Jim answers, also in Spanish. The card: “Texas Employment Commission. . . . Miss Lucía Hernandez-Ybarra. . . . Domestic—general housework.”

  Just as, momentarily, he had blocked the path of the oxygen tank earlier: Jim now stands undecided before this woman. Each “temporary” adjustment to accommodate his mother’s illness has become permanent. Order was being shattered. Then would the hiring of this woman be another irretrievable move?—the complete abdication by his mother of all that still, tenuously, strung together the fragments of ritual order? And yet: this consideration: her growing reliance on him—this woman’s presence might be the necessary warning of his resistance.

  But, resenting her presence, he glances sharply away from her, as if to search another alternative; and he sees: flowers. By the side of the house. (Flowers. A vicissitude of memories: His mother planted them. Spring. “I love the beginning of life,” she said. A bathtub, yellow flowers floating in it. Two huge bouquets to be made from them. November Ist. The day of the dead. Shawled in black mourning, his mother kneeling mysteriously in the desert.)

  Until today it had been an unusually mild winter; there had been no freeze, and so the flowers remained unseasonably long. There are roses, their edges barely turning brown; star-shaped white flowers only slightly withered; clusters of strange red ones which never open; and, abundantly: the yellow flowers—chrysanthemums—which Jim associates with death.

  Jim lets the woman in.

  “Gracias.” Inside: “A pretty room,” she says eagerly. “And what a lovely tree!” She’s looking at a gaudy palmtree, about four feet tall, made out of brightly dyed ostrich feathers. His mother saw it in a curiosity shop in Los Angeles, liked it—but balked strictly at the $35.00 it cost. Jim went back later and bought it for her; she cherished the garish tree.

  “The job is only temporary,” Jim explains quickly. “A few days.”

  Not answering, the woman smiles eagerly. Almost fiercely. Despite the nets of tiny wrinkles about her heavily painted eyes, she looks like a child playing adult; but: a crazy child, playing too realistically. “And the lady of the house?” she asks, as if to ensure her employment; and she removes her gloves. “May I report to her?” She speaks good Spanish—the Spanish of Mexico City—not border Pocho, which is Mexican patois.

  “My mother’s asleep right now—she’s not well today,” Jim says. “There’s everything in the refrigerator for lunch, and you can make her some hot tea—and whatever you think.” He speaks quickly, anxious to delegate what, falling to him, would become an aspect of defeat.

  “Very well, youngman,” she says. “What is the lady of the house sick from?”

  “She’s just tired, she’s just . . . sick,” Jim answers. As if it somehow explains his mother’s illness, he adds illogically: “She’s the best mother in the world, she’s just tired—from—so much.”

  Feeling unaccountably guilty, he returns impulsively to his mother’s room.

  Eyes open, she’s breathing harshly.

  Suddenly her hands grasp at nothing, like spiders in a web; she clutches behind her, the cane falls with a shattering sound, it bangs against the oxygen tank: sounds which rend his mind. And her battered voice assaults it: “Call Esperanza!” She corrects herself: “Estela—call Estela! Help me!”

  Panic blazes. He’s afraid. He feels savagely cruel for having conceived of a war between them. This time it is different from other times! He lifts the telephone, to call the doctor—to get her to the hospital.

  “What hurts you, Mother?”

  “I don’t . . . know!” she gasps. "I’m dying!”

  In that moment, as if again it had called to him, he looks at the portrait of his father. Now his father seems completely triumphant.

  Jim lays the telephone down.

  I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying! Now: Echoes of echoes. Coldly: His earlier determination not to give in to her returns. This time is no different from the other times of dying, when she was pacified the moment she managed to evoke in him the feelings of childhood, slaughtered him with her love, he tells himself. It’s got to stop—this time. And the war flares again. But if it is different today? he vacillates. When it is different, I’ll know. How! I just will. . . . But to give in to her demands calms her. That’s surrender—and then there will be another surrender—and then — . . . But if it is different! No. She’s just fighting more frantically because today I’ve resisted, that’s why it’s been the longest spell. Her control threatened, she’s flailing. And he’s convinced they’ve embarked on the most critical phase of the war.

  Having heard the crash of the cane, Miss Lucía Hernandez-Ybarra rushed into the room. She frowns at the oxygen tank: as if unexpectedly recognizing an enemy. She takes Mrs. Girard’s hand in one of her own, and then she covers it with th
e other. More than a mere pressing, it seems to be a drawing out of something, a pulling outward; and she closes her eyes tightly as if in profound concentration. “I’m Lucía, I’m here to help you, you’re going to be well,” she said firmly.

  Mrs. Girard says to her; “Please pray for us!” And with the other hand, weakly, she covers the woman’s hand on hers: as if they had made a sudden pact.

  Miss Lucía found him in the den, the door still open. “She’s such a beautiful woman,” she says, and adds crazily: “But, then, the head contains much blood—many veins; they— . . .” And without transition, as if the tangle of irrelevancies constitutes her credentials for this job: “I cried in my mother’s womb.” She looks eagerly at him as if to gauge whether or not he believes her. “My mother heard me. If a child cries in its mother’s womb, it can feel things others can’t,” she reminds him of the Mexican superstition. “And I cried in my mother’s womb. And when I was a child, they took me to kiss a dying man, so he would go easily, without pain, into death.”

  Jim imagines: The terrified child. The dying old man. Mexican women in black shawls, hands clenched in supplication. Men in the background. Howled Mexican mourning. And the child is brought forth cruelly—protesting. “Kiss the man so he’ll go gently to his grave!” . . . This same woman leaning over his mother earlier. He’s about to tell her they won’t need her after all when she blurts:

  “But, more times, people get well! You know, fate isn’t written; there are many stars! Your mother will be well soon.” And then: “Will you tell me where the tea is?”

  He reacts with strange, sudden fury. “I don’t know where anything is in the kitchen, lady!” he shouts. The anger has to do with resentment of implied surrender. He relents: “I’m sorry, but I really don’t know where things are.”

  Anxious to understand, Miss Lucia says: “Oh, I know how difficult illness can be—for the sick as well as the healthy. Well, blood was meant for bleeding— . . . I was sick myself for very long. I wanted to go into the mountains and die among the coyotes. That tank in your mother’s bedroom, I recognize it; it breathes one’s life out. Since then, I’ve been migrating like a bird. That’s my life. I used to tell my mother (she’s dead now), ‘I’m more tired than you’; and she said, ‘But where did you come from?—from me.’ And I would say, ‘But that’s been so many years.’ And she said, ‘Birth, plus all those years!’ But your mother doesn’t look old, she looks very beautiful. I’ll help her.”

  He’ll let her stay through today, Jim declares, responding to the intensity with which she spoke. But only through today.

  Moments later: There’s a rush of wind into the den, where Jim retreated again. He goes to check the front door. The wind has thrust it open.

  Outside, Miss Lucía is carrying a shabby suitcase. Though small, it pulls her tiny frame, as if it represents the weight of her life. Loudly, to be heard over the wind, she calls urgently to Jim: “I thought you might need me to stay at night, so I came prepared with my things, I can sleep anywhere, on a couch, on a blanket, on the floor—anywhere! . . . I don’t have a place to stay,” she admits wearily.

  And the tension of the day is so taut in Jim that it almost frees itself as defensive laughter. Instead, he takes the bag from her and carries it in. “There’s a folding bed, you can stay tonight,” he tells her. Although he felt sorry for her, this thought too goaded his decision: She’ll fix breakfast if my mother doesn’t do it tomorrow. If so, that particularly crucial battle will at least be postponed.

  “Gracias,” she says.

  Looking at this woman—this intruder, like the oxygen tank, even if it’s only for a day and a night—Jim thinks: You’re going to be well, Mother, even if I have to force you to be.

  And he imagines her in her dark room: also intransigent, evaluating the war, organizing her strategy.

  Jim closes the door of the den: attempting to shut out his mother’s dark world. The telephone. A black reminder of another threat. Los Angeles. Why hasn’t Alan called? He said early. That can mean early afternoon. A trial— . . . No. Today—it will all be dismissed today.

  Outside (through the wide window he can see): the mass of windclouds and suspended dirt has swallowed the mountain. Dust has trapped the sun.

  Jim can hear the sounds of Miss Lucía in the kitchen. (He remembers: Other times when he had work to do at home, his mother kept the house uncannily still so he wouldn’t be disturbed.) Despite his reluctance to hire her, he feels relief, this moment; a mediator is managing the house.

  Squelching a compulsion to look in again on his mother, he sits at his desk by the window, intending to force his split attention on the work he brought home. He begins to transcribe from notes, and translate into English, the statement he took from a witness to an accident a few days ago in a case Lloyd is handling: “I was walking along the 1000 block of Yandell Blvd in El Paso when I saw a car moving in a westerly direction— . . .”

  Jim remembers: “. . . —a southerly direction.” Green.

  He sets aside the statement and reaches automatically for a brown envelope in a drawer. The thick envelope is sealed heavily with wrapping tape. He tears it open. He pulls out several papers. He picks out the copy of the arrest report Daniels filed. So familiar now. The bad typing, garbled grammar: “Off. Jones informed def. Girard that he had the right to remain silent & and that if he gives up the right that anything that he might say could be used against him in court of law and that he had the right to speak with an atty. and to have which present during questioning. . .

  Lies. When you entered the cops’ world, laws didn’t exist. “It’s not uncommon for cops to gang up on one man and beat him, kick him,” Alan had told Jim; “some of my clients weren’t allowed to call anyone for days. One got pneumonia, he was in a damp cell, handcuffed. They keep the handcuffs on others so tight they cut into the skin. Another came to my office with his wrists torn from the handcuffs—after he was finally allowed to call a bondsman. If they don’t feel like it, they won’t let you make any telephone call. I’m sure that murder happens in jail and it’s called suicide, or heart attack. Actually, you were treated royally, Jim—they must have taken a liking to you. Once you’re arrested, it’s their world.” Their filthy cop-world: Daniels beating Steve handcuffed. And the cop at the booking—behind the counter screened like a cage—pouncing on the small container among Jim’s keys, change. “What’s this?”—triumphantly. Daniels immediately opening it, smelling it; disappointed: It was only a chapstick. Daniels—so close then; Jim’s fists, as if moved by an anger of their own, closing now that the handcuffs were removed; and he knows: If Daniels hadn’t moved, he would have hit the cop—right there in the station.

  Jim pulls out other sheets: Request and Order Fixing Bail. (“Hour of arrest: 5:10. Jail confined: Los Angeles Central. Description: . . . Eyes: Blue.” And Daniels’ eyes. Muddy. Bewildered. On Jim. Those moments, that afternoon. Green sunglasses removed. Fear. Yes, there was actually fear in Daniels’ eyes when he confronted him—and didn’t arrest him. Daniels, a part of the iron knot. Beyond the arrest? Fear in his eyes. Steve’s eyes. A hand— . . .) The copy of the transcript of Daniels’ testimony at the preliminary hearing—neat pages, each line numbered. So apathetic. Indexed: Direct Examination, Cross, Redirect, Recross; all testimony reduced to questions and answers, even those designations reduced further to “Q.” and “A.” Still other sheets: Jim’s numbered notes cataloguing the contradictions in Daniels’ statements, notes prepared as if he were drawing a brief, carefully—obsessively; using his experience in investigating accidents; page citations, general headings. Drafts of the crucial exhibit, and photographs: to be entered. (Jim remembers: Going back. “A high-crime locale.” Shadows. “A muggers’ paradise” Alan had called it clumsily the day he went there—immediately embarrassed: “I’m sorry, Jim, I only meant—. . .” Shadows. And the awful feeling of duplicating that day. He counted steps. And his ears reverberated with the fired words: “You’re under arrest!”)
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  Jim tries to view these sheets as the district attorney might be doing right now in Los Angeles. Instead, each word evokes that day, and infinite days following—the rollings and twistings that leveled into the trance driving him, that afternoon. Not guilty. But I was there. “But you were there,” said Frank Edmondson. “You were there, weren’t you, Jim?” Roy asked. There. (Green. Smoky haze. Footsteps running.) There. The source of another verdict to be rendered. Not guilty! But: Guilty?

  Jim stares at the black X on the scribbled piece of paper—a copy of the one entered as an exhibit at the preliminary hearing. Remembers: Alan to Daniels: “Will you draw a map— . . .” Daniels: “I don’t see why— . . .” Alan: “Because we need one.” Daniels, evasively: “I prefer words.” Alan: “Draw us a map anyway . . . now a dotted line . . . a solid line . . . arrows. Put an X.” With defiance, angrily, Daniels slashed it on the paper. Jim tensed—but from Alan’s expression he knew immediately that Daniels had placed the X exactly where Alan wanted it.

  The sheets slide off Jim’s desk, fall in disorder to the floor. Tension snaps. God! damn! Daniels! Jim’s hatred of the cop pushes his imagination to this: a moment; he’s found out when the cop leaves the station. He waits. In that second he knows there are times when murder may be justified.

  Angrily he reaches for the scattered papers, gathers them. Words, phrases, sentences out of sequence assault him: