This Day's Death

by John Rechy

  “Like a jealous lover,” Roy startles him by saying. “It always has to be the other guy— . . .”

  The strange thought makes Jim afraid of Daniels for the first time—a sudden, momentary fear he dispels quickly: “What hits me over and over is that all it took is one lie—bang!—and I had to go through the whole fucking nightmare. How often does it happen, only worse? Miraculously I had some bread saved—but someone without money— . . .”

  “. . . —just surrenders to whatever the hell they want to do with him,” Roy finishes. “If no one misses him, he just stays in jail until someone decides to let him out—maybe.”

  The maze of barred cells.

  “It could happen to anyone,” Jim realizes incredulously. “A psyched-up cop or district attorney could accuse anyone of any crime, and you’d have to fight it, guilty or not. And when we’re acquitted, that won’t be enough. Jesus—and even people who are really caught committing the . . . ‘crime’ . . . I’m charged with— . . . Fifteen years in prison!”

  “It won’t happen,” Roy tells him.

  “But it’s in their goddamn statutes—just that fact!—and all some twisted mothering judge has to say is, ‘Fifteen years’ . . . ! And even if it had happened, what ‘crime’?” he says obsessively. “And it would have happened— . . .”

  “It would have happened,” Roy repeats.

  “Yes. But suddenly I walked away.”

  “Does Alan know that?”

  “Yes—he knows everything—why I was there, that it would have happened—but that it didn’t. The cop lied.”

  At last Roy seems ready to believe him. Then he said with anger: “Goddamnit, Jim, why the hell did you go to that fucking park? You could have come to me!”

  Of course. Had Jim known? Perhaps it had been deliberate blindness. Roy, his close friend. Of course. He accepted it easily. “I didn’t know,” he said, awkwardly.

  “Maybe you didn’t want to.”

  “Maybe.” Feeling cornered, Jim stands up, tries to explain to Roy that on that afternoon of the trance it was someone else who moved into the green. “It wasn’t really me,” he insists. “Not the me sitting here talking to you. Earlier that afternoon, I had been with a girl I met on the Strip; she— . . .”

  “But when you went to the park, you knew— . . .”

  “Yes—but— . . .” (The remembrance of Emory broke the trance.) “Remember the night I called you from jail? You telephoned a friend who called someone else who knew a bondsman? The guy who finally contacted the bondsman came along— . . .”

  “Yes, I know him.”

  “You already know what happened?”

  “No.”

  “The bondsman split, and the guy with him offered to drive me to the park to get my car; he said he knew a road they didn’t close at night.” (My car trapped in the dark, the bright headlights from his car bringing it into sudden white life; Steve’s car still abandoned in the shadows.) “I was nervous, he asked me to his pad for a drink, it was about 2:00 in the morning, I kept drinking.” (I wanted to get drunk, to wipe it all away.) “He insisted I stay—there are two beds in the bedroom—and of course I must have known. When I had undressed and I was in bed— . . .” (He was sitting on the other bed. The room was red, a red lamp on, pinkish walls; and there was a painting of a woman smiling—leering—and before the beds were two large white statues of naked men.) “. . . —he came over and put his hand on my thigh.” (‘I’ll take care of you,’ he said.) “Suddenly I was angry.” (Fighting everything—the cops, Steve, the reason I had gone to the park—that especially, the reason I had gone to the park.) “I pushed him away.” (He yelled, ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?! No wonder they locked you up!’ Because by then all I could see was that leering red woman in the painting—and then only those naked statues, and I was striking at them. They smashed on the floor. And he kept yelling, ‘Don’t!—are you crazy!’) “What I’m trying to say is that although I went to the park knowingly that afternoon— . . .” He paused, waited, wondered exactly what he wanted to explain. “It wasn’t really me,” he repeats. What he means is that even now he feels no sense of identity within the world that has brought him into court. Compassion for it, yes. An outrage that tears him, for the cruelty. But it was still as if he had stumbled on another’s fate.

  Before Roy might ask him to stay, feeling suddenly as if his friend of years were a new person, one who had removed a mask, Jim got up. “I’ve got to split, I’m worried about my mother, she’s been sick— . . . I might go over before I go to the motel.”

  “Sure,” Roy says, understanding. “And, Jim, if I don’t talk to you before Friday, good luck. But you won’t need it, you’ve had nothing but good luck all your life.”

  Thursday morning it all started quickly. Estela hadn’t gone to work again. After a restless night, Mrs. Girard had asked for a doctor. “I’m taking her back to mine,” Estela told Jim. “She saw him yesterday,” she adds ominously.

  “Does her ankle bother her?” Jim asks, hoping for a clearly physical manifestation—but knowing, fearing, the answer.

  “No. She says she doesn’t know what’s wrong; it’s that vague thing— . . .”

  When they were ready to leave for the doctor’s, his mother announced she was too dizzy to go—perhaps the doctor would come to the house.

  It was as if an electric current had been connected. “Mother! Stop it! Damn it, don’t start again!” Jim shouted.

  Miss Lucía cautions him by touching his arm lightly. Glass bracelets, several now, gleam on her wrists. She goes to Mrs. Girard, who’s lying in bed again. “Pray to Santa Esmeralda,” she created a saint. “She’s the patroness of — . . . Of the most difficult illnesses! The black illnesses! The ones that— . . .” She pauses, concentrating with closed eyes. “. . .—ones that doctors can’t find reasons for. Esmeralda is a jewel, Señora Girard; the emerald, which is green like the fruitful blessed earth before the snake marred it. That’s why you pray to Santa Esmeralda from the depths of darkness— . . .”

  “Maybe she wants to go back home,” Jim tells his sister when they’re alone in the living room. “Maybe she resents my having brought her back so soon. Or maybe she thinks I want to stay. And she wants to go back to her home. Her doctors. She doesn’t understand I have to stay until— . . . But goddamnit why the hell should I give her any reason for my staying!” He no longer referred to his work for Lloyd; it was now merely his “unfinished business.”

  “I’m going to take her for a ride,” Estela says with forced optimism. Jim noticed her hand shook as she lit a cigarette. “She needs some fresh air—that’s all; I’ll drive her to the beach.” But she returned moments later: “She says she’s too dizzy for the car. Goddamnit!” she said. “What kind of illness is it that comes and goes like hers?” (Is she remembering all the times of strange illness, the times of dying?)

  Jim said nothing. But he remembered: The neurological examination the doctor had proposed. And if— . . . ? No. It’s the same as always, the mysterious illness without physical cause.

  Like a messenger between two opposing camps, Miss Lucía comes into the room. “Your mother wants to know if perhaps Dr. del Valle might be called in El Paso and asked what to do.”

  Jim closes his eyes. “No,” he says.

  “No,” Estela echoes sharply.

  And so Estela had joined the deadly game—war.

  Miss Lucía, putting it all crazily into perspective, said firmly: “The moon: is powerful enough: to control the tides!”

  “She’ll never let go of us!” Estela says abruptly—words apparently long on the surface of her mind. “That’s what her illnesses were always about—reducing us to children. Even when I forced myself not to go back to her every time she got sick, I was mortified; I would cry and cry— . . . We’ll have to be calm,” she tells herself. “I’m going to insist she get up, I’ll bring her in here.”

  Jim recognizes his own pattern of painful fluctuation.

  Estela
is guiding their mother tenderly into the living room, demanding—like him—that she be well. “Sit here, Mother,” she says solicitously. “It’s a good time to make flowers; I’ll get the paper— . . .”

  “My eyes hurt too much, my Daughter,” Mrs. Girard rejects the idea. “They’ve been smarting lately.”

  “I’ll take you to an eye doctor!” Estela says tensely. Absently she turns the television on.

  It wasn’t until they saw tears stalking Mrs. Girard’s cheeks that they looked at the television screen. The documentary camera had focused on old, shriveled people in an old-people’s home. Estela shut the picture off quickly.

  Friday. Today.

  Steve and Edmondson are suddenly silent as Jim approaches them in the corridor of the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice. After saying hello, Steve looks away hurriedly. Alan has just turned into the corridor from the elevator. Steve starts to walk away.

  Edmondson says immediately to Alan: “Look, Alan, I’ve discussed this with Steve, and I’ve spoken to the district attorney about pleading guilty to a charge of 647(b). It’s a misdemeanor—disorderly conduct. And Steve has agreed. I’m sure the judge will accept the idea. I’m sure he doesn’t want to go to the park. After all, he’s an old man with asthma— . . .”

  Jim’s body froze.

  Alan says, casually and with an indulgent smile: “How about it, Jim?—will you accept?”—as if he already knew Jim’s answer.

  “Hell no!” Jim says.

  Edmondson breaks in: “Look—even if I wasn’t guilty, I’d accept it.”

  “What do you mean—even if— . . . ?” Jim starts.

  Steve moves farther away.

  Jim calls him back angrily. “What’s this crap about guilty?”

  Steve says: “To a misdemeanor, Jim! Just so it will all end!”

  And so would there be no victory—not total defeat for Daniels?

  “I’m not going to cop out,” Jim says. “Let the judge haul his ass out there and we’ll prove the cop lied.”

  “You may as well face the alternatives,” Edmondson says. “If the judge goes to the park and things aren’t exactly as you described them in your testimony, he won’t feel too kindly toward you, I can assure you of that much. You seem to forget this is a sex crime,” he said primly. “And the felony conviction carries a punishment of up to fifteen years in prison!”

  Alan says testily to Edmondson: “Oh, come on, Frank, stop trying to frighten us. . . . And there was no . . . ‘crime.’”

  Edmondson retreats a step, looking personally injured.

  Alan says to Jim: “This is the way it is: The reduced charge isn’t a registrable offense. It’s a vague charge dealing vaguely with soliciting or allowing solicitation. The sentence would be a fine, possibly no probation at all—and the matter can be expunged in a year—blotted out of the records as if it hadn’t existed.”

  Even within the senseless labyrinth of these courts, it all seemed too absurd—to be offered a charge of guilty to an offense not even charged, to be found guilty of something later expunged.

  “The cop is lying,” Jim says. “I won’t cop out.”

  “Good,” Alan says firmly. “We won’t accept it.”

  “I’ll see about that!” Edmondson snaps. “I’m not going to let my client commit suicide.”

  “Or take up much more of your time!” Jim says.

  “I’ll tell the district attorney my client accepts, and the judge will— . . .” And he storms into the courtroom.

  Alan goes in behind him.

  Steve says: “I’m sorry, Jim—but my wife— . . . A reduced charge—it’s a definite fine, and no registration—probably not even probation—and it can be expunged in a year. Just to end it, Jim!”

  “You’re pleading guilty to something you weren’t even charged with, man!”

  “Just to end it!” Steve repeats urgently.

  “We’re going to the park,” Alan says victoriously. “The judge wouldn’t accept one plea and not the other— . . .”

  “I want Daniels to know I turned down the cop-out plea,” Jim tells Alan.

  “He already knows,” Alan said.

  In the courtroom: The judge looks even fatter today to Jim; perhaps bloated, jowly.

  Daniels and Jones are both here.

  “I understand we’re going to Griffith Park now, gentlemen,” Cory is saying. “We’ll have to return to court for argument and decision; so give me an agreeable date that will fit in your calendars, counsel.”

  Their calendars. . . . It won’t end today, Jim realizes.

  Cory has continued: “I don’t think we can handle it at all next week, counsel; we have a full calendar on Monday, and we have to finish early because of other matters; Tuesday and Wednesday are chuck-a-block. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday we will be dark.”

  Chuck-a-block . . . will be dark. . . . The tired, inappropriate attempts at cuteness slice into Jim.

  Cory: “I’ll hear arguments— . . . two weeks from today, Friday, at eleven o’clock, the— . . .”

  Two weeks.

  Edmondson is repeating his suspicious stipulation of the earlier day, that “the inspection of the premises be done without all the court personnel present.”

  Cory: “I’ll see you in the park, gentlemen.”

  Green.

  Speeding in his car along ascending miles of park road leading to the area of the black X. Jim sees cars everywhere—sexhunters cruise the hunting places to the sides of the road. He reaches the patch of forest within whose depths is the grotto. Fifteen cars are squeezed against the long margin of the road bordering that peripheral area. At least fifteen hunters to find within the green dusk! He parks. The day is warm and humid. Leaving his jacket in the car, he enters the frozen green world: And it was like retracing awake the outline of a dream. He shakes his head, rousing himself from the magnetism of the remembered trance. Hurry! Already he’s attracted five hunters gravitating toward him out of the green haze as if in a slow-motion waltz. His voice pulling down the silence violently, “You’d better split,” he says, “there’s a trial coming here.” The words shatter the green spell, the five scatter quickly out of the area. Another man, hearing Jim’s words, materializes from the depth of the trees, moves out. At least nine more to find. There’s another. “Split!” Another. Concentrating only on the sections the court will pass, Jim discovers other secluded pockets along trails, under arched branches, within the thick brush. By tight tacit agreement, this area, like the miles that precede and follow it along the road, seems to belong only to the sexhunters and—like rival gangs—to the cops attempting to trap them. No one else enters here. Now into the grotto. A man waits there, he makes an unequivocal motion of invitation to Jim with his lips and tongue. Jim warns him about the trial. Seven more sexhunters to be found before the others arrive; and the area—the size of a small, forested park within the huge park itself—seems larger today. Out of the grotto. A man approaches Jim, Jim tells him about the trial. Another. Five more to find. Turning into an angled path—jarred, he comes on two men in a clearing—in the open: Pants lowered to his knees, one leans against a tree, the other kneels before him. Straightening up quickly at the sound of footsteps, they separate like intimate ghosts. Jim tells them too. Three more! Where? Somewhere in the vortex of green. And no time to find them now. The others will be arriving. He rushes into the main path leading to the road.

  Edmondson is already here with Steve, has caught sight of Jim and is approaching him rapidly. “The judge will be here any moment!—for God’s sake don’t let him see you rousting all these people!”

  Amid the sound of hastily closed doors and starting motors, the men Jim warned are moving out of the area. But the exodus has left three cars unaccounted for.

  Alan arrives, followed by the district attorney. Now the two cops, in an old, obviously city-requisitioned automobile. Behind them, Cory drives up in a Rolls Royce. Heavily—and in an ill-fitting but expensive suit—he emerged from the awesome
vehicle. He scrutinized the area like a newsreel politician visiting a battlefield he will flee after only a few short moments—later to announce in depth his judgment on the war. Shirt open, perspiring, Jim stands on the path.

  From that distance, both stopping, the youngman in the open shirt and the oldman in the loose suit, faced each other.

  Then, turning, Cory said something to Alan, who led them along the path.

  With the imminent feeling of a trap closing on two sides, Jim realizes that a man—a sexhunter—is approaching him from within the forested area. Ahead—but unseen by the man—the court is inching in. In moments they’ll be in full view of each other. Jim turns quickly up the path. “Split, man; there’s a trial— . . .” Intercepting the panic, the man cuts sharply off the path, taking a different route to the main road. Jim waits for the others.

  As the entourage moves along the path—which ascends as the brush thickens—Cory, already wheezing, begins to cough convulsively. The attorneys stop solicitously. “I’m all right—cough, cough, cough!—I’m all right,” Cory says with obvious irritation. “Let’s—cough!—get on with it, counsel!”

  Alan is explaining: “This is the fork—the point forty feet away from the grotto, your honor.”

  “Officer Daniels,” Cory calls to the cop, who is moving along in back with Jones, “show us—cough!—where you were standing when you saw what you say you did—cough!”

  Daniels looks toward the grotto. It’s completely swallowed by trees and brush; he studies the path. “A lot of this thicket wasn’t here then,” he said.