This Day's Death

by John Rechy

  He waited forlornly as she walked toward the tunnel through which they would board the plane. He watched her, so erect suddenly—Miss Lucía beside her.

  Suddenly Mrs. Girard turned in seeming bewilderment. She waved in his direction. No, not a wave—it was her familiar benifiction. She seemed so terribly small and unprotected as she advanced away from him.

  THE IMAGE OF HIS MOTHER, HER EYES BEHIND THE DARK glasses, pursued him to Roy’s house.

  “We were convicted,” he tells Roy hurriedly.

  “Oh, Jesus, no.”

  “And I don’t understand why. Cory went to the park! He saw. We proved Daniels was lying. Cory heard him contradict himself over and over! Why did that son of a bitch find us guilty? Why?”

  “Maybe because you fought it,” Roy said slowly. “Maybe because you wouldn’t accept the reduced charge—maybe he thought he was being big when he offered it—and you challenged him— . . .”

  “Poor Steve,” Jim says. “What can he tell his wife? Maybe he still won’t have to. I’ve never met her, but I keep thinking of her. . . . And Steve wanted to accept the cop-out plea—but I kept insisting— . . .”

  “Don’t blame yourself for that, Jim; maybe that’s why the judge found you guilty, because Steve did accept the reduced charge and that made him think it happened. Maybe Steve’s having a prior arrest— . . . Or maybe because he saw all those men in the park and knew that’s why people go there. Who the hell knows? Maybe he found himself guilty. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that you’re young and he’s old.”

  “Defendants should judge the judges!” Jim said. “And Alan! All the assurances. Was he lying all along?—even about being able to get the charge dismissed?—just so it would drag out and he could keep raising his goddamn fee? Did he ever really try to contact the district attorney to dismiss the charges?” All the doubts he had protectively rejected about Alan now surrounded him.

  “Maybe he just blundered,” Roy said.

  Now by reflex Jim grabs at the lurking miracle. “There’s still a strong probability Cory will make the charge a misdemeanor rather than the felony. Alan says at this point he’s like God—he can do anything he wants.”

  “It will happen,” Roy insists. “Things never go wrong for you, Jim.”

  Jim says: “It’s incredible! A man says you’re guilty, and you’re guilty. It doesn’t make any difference that what he says you’re guilty of didn’t happen. And he says you go to prison, and you go. Fifteen years! That’s what those bastards can send you up for!”

  “But you won’t go to prison, Jim. It never happens.”

  “Never?”

  “Hardly ever.”

  He would have to wait a month and a half for the sentence—a deliberate refinement of torture? He felt an acute nausea for all law.

  “The probation officer, he was cool—but what if he was conning me?” Jim stops. Will Miller finally be revealed as the enemy, too? “They put you so uptight—so paranoid, man. One afternoon in El Paso, in a canyon outside the city, a man was trying to put the make on me, I know that now; but then I was sure he was a cop, alerted by Daniels— . . .”

  Daniels— . . .

  Daniels. . . .

  Daniels.

  Glancing at his watch, Jim decides impulsively to call his mother.

  Miss Lucía answers: “We just got here. We soared like birds.”

  “How is my mother?”

  “Very well! We prayed all the way. Here she is.”

  “Mother, how are you?” And he feels his heart explode with love for her.

  “I’m home,” she said triumphantly. “In my own home!”

  After hanging up, he decided abruptly to go back to El Paso the next morning rather than stay in Los Angeles until the sentencing.

  It was then—that moment of deciding to return to El Paso—that the meaning of Miller’s interjected explanation after he had answered he would be going to lawschool next June permeated the layers of resistance blocking the full implications of what had occurred in court today. With a word, Cory could wipe out that future.

  He left Los Angeles early the next day, speeding straight through, and arrived in El Paso that evening.

  Though he had not told her he was returning, Mrs. Girard had only to hear the car to know it was him. She waited at the door.

  Riding on the kinetic force of the miracles which had propelled his adult life, Jim lived—tried to live—those intervening days and weeks as if there had been no major upheaval. Terrified of idleness, he worked tirelessly. Even so, he exhausted himself nightly by working out at home or in a gym. But unexpectedly the thought of having been convicted on a lie, the sentence to be faced, jarred him; he was still caught in the invisible trap.

  Swallowed by attorney’s fees and the expenses of five trips back and forth, his savings—including now that part recovered from the minor accident—dwindled. For long, even future earnings would be eaten into; there was the money he owed Alan. He tried to think of the present only as the end of a past which might yet result in resurrection.

  The determination of his future waited. Lawschool, law (which he wanted now passionately to enter, as an initiated challenger of it)—that future might miraculously survive a misdemeanor conviction; yes, that was possible even in the deviled area of sex. But a felony would slice it off like a sharp, sure, deadly knife.

  He still told no one, though Lloyd was often alone in the office with him, allowing long intervals of silence for Jim to fill. But he couldn’t—couldn’t even tell him yet he would have to return to Los Angeles. It was a nightmare he would have to live out himself.

  Though he continued to see Barbara as often as before, unfairly he cut the trend of closeness between them; he sealed himself emotionally from her again. She waited and, he knew with regret, felt cheated. Certainly, like Lloyd, she must know he was in trouble; but she never questioned him. They had sex. But more often he would lie silently beside her in bed very long.

  True to her implied promise that she would be well once she was home, in her home (though, returning to El Paso, Jim had not given her the opportunity to prove or disprove Estela’s prediction that her illness would quickly send for them again), his mother continued well, happy; and Jim again chose not to pursue the additional tests the doctor had mentioned that terrible December morning.

  As her closeness to Mrs. Girard increased, Miss Lucía’s eccentricities came to appear normal. Jim learned to pick out the pertinent parts of her conversation while merely listening to the irrelevancies. He grew accustomed to her exaggerated way of dress—steadily, she added decorations.

  Although it was still winter, it seemed like glorious spring in El Paso. Even the flowers were deceived into premature resurrection. Miss Lucía planted seeds, while his mother, using her cane and wearing a wide-brimmed hat to shield her from even the mild sun, inspected them. Every other day, Miss Lucía watered. One Saturday—while his mother napped—Jim saw Miss Lucía planting seeds in the garden.

  Suddenly she stood up, as if listening to something. Her heavily painted face underwent a vicissitude of expressions as if she were reacting to changing scenes in her mind. She frowned, and then she made a movement of protest with her hand—as if she were resisting an invisible attack. Her face livid, the paint on her face became a stark mask. She returned silently into the house.

  Mrs. Girard had gone to bed early, after praying with Miss Lucía. In the living room Miss Lucía sat watching a Mexican program—“Noches Rancheras”—“Country Nights.” Charros in enormous hats, young women in dazzling sequined dresses sang in full voices racked with Mexican emotion. Jim was in the den working when he became aware of Miss Lucía’s sobbing. He went into the living room. Quickly, she got up, closed the door to Mrs. Girard’s bedroom, to shelter her from whatever would occur now. All at once she seemed to be looking for somewhere in the small house to Escape. Her strange little face, framed by mountains of curls, turned to one side, then the other; and her eyes, already enormous, seem
ed to want to expand in order to magnify some corner to hide in. She made a series of undecided gestures about her head.

  “Miss Lucía, what’s the matter?” Jim asks.

  “Where’s my— . . . ?” she started, still searching about her. “Where’s my— . . .?”

  “What?” Jim asks her.

  “What?” she seems to ask herself. And then she was sobbing again. “What!” It was as if she herself didn’t know what was overwhelming her.

  “Why are you crying?”

  Dazed—standing in the middle of the room—her eyes wild, “I’m not crying!” she protested as the tears flowed. “Why should I cry?—for the first time in very long I feel— . . . warm!—with your mother. Why should I cry? I’m not sad! Look, look! See how happy I am!”

  The cheap glass jewelry flung tiny pins of colored lights about her as, trying to sing and laugh over the sobs, she began to do a dance. It was as if a puppet had rebelled against its strings in an anarchic parody of movement accompanied by the sound of pain and forced, sung laughter.

  “See how happy I am! I’m dancing!”

  Suddenly, all movement, all sound stopped—as if she had caught a leering glimpse of herself out of control.

  After that, she continued as before—adoring his mother. Jim was able to dismiss the disturbing incident as merely another manifestation of her erratic behavior, like her manner of dress; behavior which in fact seemed to be at least partly a basis for the closeness between the two women.

  Assaulting Jim constantly was the knowledge that very soon he would have to go back to the despised courtroom to be sentenced.

  Then there was a moment when he defied the vast absurdity of invisible power with this pristine logic: He just wouldn’t return. The next moment he knew he had to—that the blind power could stalk him vengefully.

  Jim tells his mother: “I’ll have to return to Los Angeles, Mother. You’ll have to decide whether you’ll come with me or not.” He hopes she’ll say yes so she’ll be with his sister, despite Estela’s flaring impatience the last time.

  Mrs. Girard said nothing.

  But the next day began with a decisive pound of her cane on the floor, a sound which beat into his mind like an announcement of doom. Her sigh was like a knife. As she passed the open door of his bedroom, where he still lay in bed, he heard her say: “My poor Son”—as if she regretted but could not stop the horror she would be putting him through. Because that day and in the days that followed, the familiar pattern recurred, the hints of the mysterious illness.

  Is she moving toward siege?

  Why always in terms of war?

  This time when he searched her past for an answer, he realized that to do so entailed questioning the sum of her life—what she had been that made her what she had become, is: And that necessitates the brutal questioning of all the times of sacrifice—all the pain, turbulence that shaped the long night of her life. Was he prepared to question what she had been? To render a judgment on her life?

  As the tension between mother and son grew, he thought again in terms of the fulfillment of an emotional contract for destruction.

  Only a few days before he returned to Los Angeles—and when Miss Lucía was at the store—his mother’s illness engulfed him as if in one final flailing before she resigned herself to the threat of his leaving—if indeed that was its immediate origin.

  Her hand brushing her chest desperately as if to pull out the very heart of her anxiety, “I’m dying!” she cried frantically.

  It was those two words that enflamed his anger. She had lain in the dusky darkness of her room all day. Suddenly the world seemed to shrink for him into one black smear through which he saw only her dark glasses. In that second—which was all at once a continuation of that long winter day of dying—he wanted finally to bring it all down. “You’re not sick!” he shouted at her. “Goddamnit, stop it!”

  “I don’t want to be sick!” she gasps, her hands clawing at the air. “You think I’m responsible! What do you want me to do!”

  (What, my Son?)

  And what indeed did he want her to do? Stop being old? Become young again? Re-live their lives and undo the deadly knot of years? What indeed?

  Yet the seeming rationality of her question enraged him even further. Certain at that moment that her illness had no physical origin whatever, finally he shouted his verdict on her life: “I want you to stop trying to kill me with your goddamn love!—which isn’t love, Mother. It’s hate!”

  Hate—the fatal buried word had been unlocked at last.

  In despair she reached to grasp his hand. He recoiled from her.

  Suddenly she began to slide off the bed, to clutch for her cane; upsetting the table. Pills cascaded like bullets. She managed to stand, her body straight, rigid, her head raised, the veins on her neck straining.

  “I— . . . !” she started.

  And that word turned into a long, long scream. And her hands covered her ears as if to disassociate herself from its terror. It was a scream which contained all the anguish, the hell of her life. It was, finally, a protest against the years of silence, against her husband’s rage. A protest against the deaths of her beloved son and daughter. Against the labor demanded to bring them all to life, the blood shed to thrust out those new lives, leaving an emptiness within her which nothing could fill. A cry for the savage pain of flesh ripped from flesh with a part of her soul. Torn flesh rebelling to be free from her, to assume—her remaining son, her daughter, her torn flesh—a life of its own apart from its source—her womb. Her.

  He closed his eyes as the scream ended. It was that moment when one enters another’s being, to feel, to know, be. He glimpsed her infinite sorrow in that long protesting scream, and for that fleeting moment—already fading—he thought he understood her mysterious illness.

  “I do love you, Mother,” he said, holding her hand.

  His words seemed to loosen her body. The passive, un-protesting woman she had been returned. She sat on the bed. “And I,” she said, taking his hand, “adore you with all my soul.”

  The days before he left, it was as if his assurance of love had charged her with life. He told her he would be gone only a few days and that this time definitely his business in Los Angeles would end.

  She decided she would not return with him this time. (And Jim remembered Estela’s warning: She wants us to go back to her.)

  He paid all bills, he transferred to her name what money there was left. He arranged other matters so that she would have complete control over everything.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Miss Lucía promised.

  “I know,” Jim said. He would leave in a few moments. It would be his sixth trip to Los Angeles in eight months. He had merely told Lloyd and Barbara that he had to return to California.

  Mrs. Girard blessed him and kissed him, the moisture on her cheek telling him what he knew.

  (Prison! What would happen to her!)

  He searched her face, wanting to carry an indelible picture of her as she was now, so well.

  But along the highway to Los Angeles what he remembers are her faded eyes behind the dark glasses.

  “WHO THE HELL IS THAT GIRL?”

  A pretty youngwoman with amber hair had walked into the courtroom with Steve. She sat in back while Steve came up to Jim. He knows the answer before Steve says, “She’s my wife, Jim,” and incongruously, as if he weren’t fully aware of what was happening to them, “I’d like you to meet her, she’s— . . .”

  “Jesuschrist, don’t you know why we’re here?” Jim interrupts angrily. “Why the hell didn’t you bring your kid too?” he asks savagely.

  “I had to tell her,” Steve says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me today.”

  Instantly regretting the cruelty, “I know—I’m sorry, Steve,” Jim apologizes.

  Sitting where a jury would be, Alan and Edmondson are reading gravely from some loose sheets—the probation reports. A file of papers before him, Miller sits at the long
table before the judge’s platform—and, vacant now, it’s exactly that: a platform, from whose elevation Cory will look down. Roy came with Jim today; for the first time he had greeted Steve amicably. A scatter of other defendants with their attorneys also await sentencing, faces taut. The court recorder, the same woman, is here. And the tanuniformed cop—armed—sits by the telephone; handcuffs, gun: Cory’s power: along with: contempt citations, prison, force.

  Jim has been watching Alan tensely for a reaction to the reports. Now he sees him smile broadly. Moments later he’s leading Jim to the back of the courtroom. “Exactly like I promised!” he’s saying. “It’s an outstanding probation report. He’s made a most uncommonly strong recommendation for leniency—the judge couldn’t ignore that. He even seems to imply that the judgment was incorrect,” he adds.

  Jim glances toward Miller. He had not turned out to be the enemy after all. An unexpected ally, like Hall. Hall? No, not him. Even with his obvious disapproval of these cases coming to trial—and in their case he had certainly known the cop was lying—even so, he still tried them. And there had been that moment at the trial when the prosecutor in him had seized him totally. No, finally not Hall.

  Edmondson is speaking seriously to Steve.

  “Did you see Steve’s report?” Jim asks quickly.

  “Yes—it’s good too. . . . Miller believed you, Jim—you convinced him,” he repeats. “Now remember,” he begins explaining again carefully what he’s explained before: “Under California law, a judge doesn’t determine the length of a sentence; the Adult Authority would take over where an actual term in prison is involved. That won’t apply in your case because there won’t be a prison sentence. There’ll be a fine—a short period of probation, if any—under a year automatically reduces the felony to a misdemeanor. For it to remain a felony, the sentence would have to be to prison for over a year, served or suspended; and that won’t happen.”

  Who had made these laws and rules, with all their incomprehensible punishments, their perverse violation of logic?—the arbitrary degrees of revenge?