This Day's Death

by John Rechy

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lloyd dismisses it. “I just wish everything else was in order for you. Including the matter in Los Angeles,” he adds.

  There it was again.

  “I’m sure my sister will be fine,” Jim says.

  “You’ve always been so close to her,” Ellen says.

  “Incidentally,” Lloyd says—not at all incidentally, “I’ve contacted a friend in Austin; you’ll definitely be able to get a job in the legislature. It pays well, and you’ll have time to study. Of course it’s only in session from January to May—if you insist on working. I still think, though, that at least during the first term or so you should only go to school. And I’ve been assured you’ll have the scholarship. With the score you made in the admission test, there’s no doubt.”

  Determined to work—and preferring physical labor while he’ll be studying intensively—Jim had planned to get a job on the freight docks, or with the railroad. Time enough, though, to tell Lloyd that.

  “But with or without a scholarship— . . .” Ellen emphasizes, reassuring him of their help.

  Lloyd says abruptly: “It’s difficult with your mother, isn’t it, Jim? That’s why you’re so pensive and quiet lately. But you mustn’t stop making your plans definite. They will proceed.”

  Ellen goes to the kitchen.

  “It’s just that— . . . today it’s just like I’ve been in a . . . war . . . with my mother,” Jim says.

  Lloyd draws his breath in. He says softly: “Wars inevitably end in slaughter for one and guilt for the other.”

  “I don’t want that,” Jim said immediately. “I want permanent peace.”

  “That’s not possible after the bitterness,” Lloyd said.

  Ellen walks in. “Lloyd has been very— . . . what’s that expression you use, Jim—‘tied up’?”

  “Uptight,” Jim laughs.

  “That’s what he’s been because a judge he dislikes sentenced one of his jurors to jail,” Ellen says.

  Lloyd explains: “A juror came to court wearing a turtleneck sweater—and Judge Evans insisted he had to wear a tie, a cheap flowered affair which the court provided. The juror said it was ridiculous to wear a tie over the sweater and he refused—and Evans cited the man for contempt and gave him thirty days in jail. Of course I’m appealing— . . .”

  Jim thinks of Judge Cory in Los Angeles.

  Lloyd is saying: “Some judges are sick—they clearly want to play God. A judge in Fort Worth actually sentenced a man to fifteen years in prison for passing a bad check for $50.00!—the man was destitute when he passed the check, and he had never been in trouble before! And look what happened in the Dr. Spock trial—the eighty-four-year-old judge kept referring to ‘conspiracy’—the very issue still to be proved— . . . And Judge Hoffman in Chicago, gagging Seale— . . . The whole mockery of the trial . . .”

  Judge Cory.

  “They have so much power,” Lloyd says. “And often they’re bigoted, ignorant men. The sentences they’re giving for marijuana, pills, drugs! The number of false convictions—it’s shocking; I’ve heard officers lie brazenly while smiling at the judge, who knows they’re lying yet allows it. These are surreal times, and the courts mirror them. A Mexican man here in Texas is serving ninety-nine years in jail for possession of marijuana—and a black militant, thirty years for the same offense. And sex charges!—rape, so difficult to prove, so easily charged—yet in some places it’s a capital offense. There’s a judge in California who’s proud of the eighteen death sentences he’s pronounced. It’s difficult—isn’t it?—to conceive of men who actually want to sentence others to death. All judges should be given psychiatric examinations!”

  Judge Cory. “One of the best in the state.”

  “So should cops,” Jim says.

  “Yes—especially after Chicago,” Lloyd agrees.

  “Lloyd should have been a criminal attorney,” Ellen says proudly.

  “He’d be excellent,” Jim says. He thinks suddenly: What would Lloyd say if I told him I’d prefer to go into criminal law? He’d be glad—I know—even if it meant I wouldn’t work for him.

  Ellen answers the telephone. “Jim, it’s for you. Long distance,” she adds, concerned.

  “I’ll take it in the library,” Jim says. He walks there. Slowly. The district attorney has dismissed— . . .

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. James Girard?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Long distance calling. One moment please. . . . Hello, Los Angeles. Ready on your call to El Paso.”

  Then the voice of the girl in Alan’s office earlier: “Thank you, operator; is Mr. Girard on the line?”

  “Yes,” says the operator.

  “Just a moment,” says the girl. “Go ahead, Mr. Bryant.”

  “Hello, Jim? It’s Alan Bryant.”

  “How are you, Alan?”

  “Fine, I’m fine. Except that— . . .”

  Jim’s heart sinks into a black pit.

  “Yeah, Alan?”

  “Well, Jim, you’ll have to come back for the trial.”

  The desert, the highway, crushed birds, towns, cities, Las Cruces, Socorro, Phoenix, unreal motels, Safford, Globe, gas-stations, Indio, Los Angeles, district attorneys, judges, court recorders, cops, lawyers, the Hall of Justice, yellowish light, the odor of railroad stations, wooden benches, old elevators, worn stairs, blind windows, labyrinthine hallways— . . . Steve. Why doesn’t he want to testify? . . . Daniels.

  Jim “saw” the acned face of the cop. For one dreadful moment he acknowledged a union between them, a sinister union: war between them, too; a war still to be declared—of which the legal accusations were only a part.

  “You spoke to the district attorney?” Jim’s voice was asking.

  “Yes—but— . . . Not the way I wanted. I barely managed to talk to him in the hall and for only a few moments. He was catching a plane.”

  “He didn’t see the notes and the transcript?—the exhibits?” Jim’s voice continues.

  Forty feet. Forty.

  “Well, he already has the transcript—but usually they don’t read it until the matter is almost up for trial.” Then he goes on: “But, Jim, I’ve had a terrific idea!—we’ll take films for the court! Come back as soon as you can because it’s important that you be in them—and that we do it immediately.” And he continued enthusiastically reassuring Jim.

  Jim felt no surprise after he hung up, just a pervasive weariness. And so there would be a trial.

  “Is something wrong, Jim?” Ellen asked him when he returned to the living room.

  Surprising himself because of the ease with which he lied—as if all along, through the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes (minutes finally containing all those hours, days, weeks, months of terrible waiting) nevertheless he had known that it would move inexorably to trial, even when he told himself the nightmare would be cut off, like that, with one move—surprising himself because apparently the lie was waiting, he said: “It was a friend of my sister’s. My sister’s not well at all. It looks as if I will have to go back to Los Angeles.” He didn’t look at them, didn’t want to know if there was doubt.

  Lloyd and Ellen were silent.

  Good God, they must know! Jim thought. But, no, there’s no way— . . . Daniels. “I’ll make up the work,” he says hastily. “I’m sorry, Lloyd; if I hadn’t had to go back and forth, I wouldn’t.”

  “I know that,” Lloyd says. Then: “You’re sure we can’t help?” He looks very hard at Jim.

  “No,” Jim says, and wants to blurt: I’m in trouble in Los Angeles! But, no, he’ll have to dream this nightmare out alone.

  They sat to eat in the chandeliered dining room. On the table: flowers. (Death. Barbara. Sirens. Her father. Her mother. His mother. What will happen to her if I— . . . ? Will she come back with me to Los Angeles? Will she be well enough! Maybe I’ll have to leave her in the hospital. It would be better to have her in Los Angeles, with my sister—if things go wrong. But they
won’t!) There was only a scatter of conversation.

  Ellen answered the ringing telephone.

  “Jim, Jim, I’m sorry,” she said, returning to the table. “That was the lady working for you—your mother is very sick.”

  Jim got up quickly.

  “Call us later,” Ellen says.

  “Soon all this will be behind you,” Lloyd assures him. “You’ll be in lawschool— . . .”

  AN IRON-BLACK SKY.

  Jim drove home in the steady drizzle.

  The white house looks deceptively peaceful.

  “She seems very sick, she’s been gasping for breath!” Miss Lucía met him urgently at the door. “She asked if you’d really left, and I told her yes, and she became frantic immediately.”

  That was the flame that ignited his explosive anger: That statement contained all the times of returning to his mother’s side—all, all, all, all the times of illness and dying. He walked into his mother’s dark room, turned the light on. The room, astonished, reeled in light.

  His mother sat up.

  “What, my Son?” The familiar, painful question. Straining toward him for that important answer, still withheld.

  Instantly, pity eroded the anger.

  “I had . . . forgotten you had . . . gone out,” she says.

  Anger attacks him again. “You remembered well enough to get Miss Lucía to call me. Didn’t you tell her to call me?” He saw: the oxygen tank.

  “I was sick!” she groans. “The sacred Virgin knows how sick I’ve been. The headaches— . . . This . . . thing! . . . The dizziness— . . .” She put her hand on her forehead: the terrifying signal. “I’ve been . . . dying— . . .”

  He saw: the pills on the table beside her. Fiercely he begins to remove them; disarming her, removing her weapons. He drops a bottle, the pills scatter on the floor. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! Tiny bullets aimed at him. A machine gun. His world blackened into one focused spot, this room—and her.

  “No, you weren’t dying, Mother!” he shouts at her. “You’re not dying any more than you were dying when Estela and I were children and we’d rush to your bedside and you’d scare the hell out of us! No sicker than all the times I was away and you sent for me!”

  The open declaration of War.

  “I never sent for you when you were away!” she said, her voice suddenly alive with protest.

  “No—you just made sure someone else wrote me or called me. All those times, Mother! And then you were well—when you had us back, like children again—holding your hand— . . .”

  Wearily she covers her ears.

  He looks away from her. The photograph of his father. I’m ranting at her like him! he thinks. Instantly he was sorry. He loved her so much. Yes, this very moment of declaring war, his heart broke with love for her. Yet his anger spilled uncontrollably, recklessly into this: Los Angeles: and it was as if the labyrinthine emotional bond between them had made that inevitable: Two traps fused. Suddenly he wanted to blame her in some monstrous way for the terror in Los Angeles. “If it wasn’t for— . . .” No! He stopped. Not that.

  “Call . . . Estela!” she gasps urgently. “I can’t breathe!”

  “No, Mother, I won’t call Estela.”

  Miss Lucía has come into the room; she’s trying to calm Mrs. Girard by rubbing her arm softly.

  “Leave her alone,” Jim says savagely. “She’s all right.” And he turns to his mother: “I’m tired of it, Mother,” he hears himself say. “Tired of all your illnesses— . . .”

  And she reverses the tide of the battle: In an even, clear, firm voice, she says: “All things . . . end”—slaughtering him with guilt—aiming at the jugular vein of his soul: reminding him—brutally—of her death.

  Refusing to allow her that unfair victory, he checkmates her triumphant move: “You’ll kill me first with your strange illness, Mother!” His turn to slaughter her with guilt. And the war turns against her.

  Her hands restlessly at her throat, her forehead, her chest: “I’m— . . . ill,” she flounders.

  “What is your illness, Mother!” he shouts at her, unable to resist grinding on in his victory. “Name it, for God’s sake!"

  She had sat up. Now—almost as if in some sort of emotional relief—or resignation—she leans back against the pillows.

  “You know what it is?” he went on. “It’s wanting to strangle me!”

  Pain smears her face. She looks at him in disbelief, his words foreign to her, to all she could understand, to all she would ever come to know. Her sacrifices, so many, so total, so unquestioning. That anyone could doubt the nobility of her love— . . . Her own beloved Son! “I have always— . . .” was all she said. Whatever her next words would have been, they choked on anguished sobs which seemed to come from a buried depth of her soul. Tears washed her face.

  And he knows that, after all, he has lost the battle.

  “Mother— . . .”

  Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother.

  Before he rushed out of the house again, he heard her wounded voice explaining to Miss Lucía: “He’s not angry at me!—he’s just desperate because of my illness!—because we love each other so much!”

  The sky is locked. The foggy drizzle has turned into caracoling snow. By morning even the death flowers will be dead.

  As the car lunges away, one image scorches Jim’s mind: Fire. A fear emerging from his childhood, when he left his mother to go to school—and therefore unprotected. Fire. The candle in the kitchen—perhaps lit by Miss Lucía—accidentally turned over. Flames. He remembers: “But who’ll take care of you if the house burns— . . .” “You will— . . .” Then, smothering that memory: Barbara. I need her, he thought.

  He’s there. He knocks on the door of her apartment.

  “Jim, come in,” she calls out; she had left the door open, expecting him. She’s in the bedroom, sitting in bed. She’s wearing a pale-green nightgown, her honey flesh visible through it in smears.

  “Were you asleep?” he asks her. He removes his sweater, speckled with snow.

  “No, I was reading. . . . What’s wrong, Jim?—you seem—. . .”

  He sits on the bed. “I just had a fight with my mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “The worst part is that I almost accused her of— . . .” The double nightmare fusing into one. Summer in Los Angeles.

  “What?”

  He shakes his head. “Things she can’t be responsible for.”

  His mind exploding with a terror he must stifle, he embraces Barbara urgently. She fits her head against his shoulder; and he kisses her hair, then her face. He draws the nightgown off her shoulders, her breasts—hurriedly now as if something terrible may overtake him. Her hands are delving into his shirt, unbuttoning it, drawing it off. Both naked from the waist up, they lie on their sides. She places one of her hands in back of him, at his waist, while her other hand opens the buttons of his pants. Swiftly, he pulls off her nightgown—there’s the sound of tearing—and he removes his pants, quickly, quickly. Mounting her, he presses tightly against her; and he kisses her so hard on the lips, thrusting his tongue into her mouth—the savage anger of other times and places sweeping over him—that even the cry she would have uttered is stifled. To restrain the urgency, she slides from under him. She leans over him, kissing him. Tenderly she burrows her head against his chest, kissing it lightly—as she does often to control the rashness. Her tongue flits downward along the line of hairs above his navel.

  Angrily he twisted his body violently on her as if to freeze all other motion by entering her quickly. But he can’t, his cock won’t harden. Determined to fuck her, he becomes frantic, attempting to insert his soft cock in her, hurting her.

  “Jim, Jim, it’s all right!” she says.

  “What’s all right, goddamnit!” he shouts.

  Overwhelmed by an awful self-judgment, he dresses hurriedly and walks out without a word.

  Snow falls in a myriad dazzling flakes. Shadowy trees bend with
ice as it gathers on leaves that still refuse to surrender.

  With fierce concentration, willing his hand to move, he raises it to turn the ignition key in his car. He steps on the gas pedal. The motor starts rhythmically—a sound so lulling that, even as the car moves, he won’t interrupt it with the lashing of the windshield wipers—until it’s almost impossible to see, until the lights from cars coming in the opposite direction melt in a glare on his windshield. Then: Swooo-hoosh! Swooo-hoosh! Swooo-hoosh! The sound of the impatient wipers, the purring of the motor—it’s as if he’s connected to those sounds. As long as they continue, he’s alive.

  Driving very fast. Away. Out of the city. The desert. Miles. Mountains, like ghosts, obscured by snow. Miles. The desolate highway. No other cars. The highway winding now—ascending—past mountains. His foot presses down tightly on the gas pedal. The darkness into which his car is plunging is merely a projection of his flight. As if a current has been disconnected, emotion lobotomized, he feels a strange calmness. He’s aware only of this: the fascinating darkness and the vibrations of the motor, the whispering of the wipers.

  It was then that his hand reached out easily to stop the motion of the wipers: Swooo!—and stop! in mid arc.

  Immediately snow began to accumulate dangerously on the panes. Then he’s aware that his hand has reached out to turn the headlights off, smothering them. Now, ahead: Only a luminous, beautiful white darkness, and silence violated only by the motor’s whirring. His foot presses harder on the accelerator. He didn’t think: the car will crash, I’ll die; no, it’s as if the hypnotizing white darkness is an inevitable extension of this long day.

  White. Dark.

  Then the lights of a distant car lit his windshield in an icy blaze. And like someone forced suddenly out of a profound trance, Jim quickly turned the headlights on, then the windshield wipers—quickly clearing the still-soft snow on the windshield.

  The car dashing toward him passes him with the blare of its horn.

  Jim spins his car in the middle of the highway and returns to the city.

  “Hello, my Son!”

  Eerily, his mother stands before him in the living room. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes young and clear and bright like gems, her hair carefully arranged, her body—in a golden robe—erect and firm and in complete control. The cane has been abandoned.