by John Rechy
“It was a false charge,” Jim says quickly. “A cop, a terrible, crazy, psyched-up, pitiful, sick, twisted cop, he— . . .”
“What was the charge?” Lloyd asks.
“Sex perversion,” Jim says.
Lloyd closes his eyes.
“Listen,” Jim insists. “A crazy cop said he saw a guy go down on me in a park. It didn’t happen, and we proved to the goddamn judge that the cop couldn’t even have seen what he claimed. The judge went to the park, the cop kept changing his testimony, but even so— . . .” Even now he had difficulty grasping the fact of being convicted on the cop’s lie.
“What you were charged with—it didn’t happen,” Lloyd says.
“Not then—no— . . .”
“It didn’t happen!” Lloyd interrupts him emphatically.
“But even if it had, it’s no crime!” Jim says in reaction against a tone in Lloyd’s voice.
“I know, I know!” Lloyd says. “But we’re talking about you now—only you, Jim! And you just assured me it didn’t happen.”
“No, it didn’t happen then,” Jim says.
“You’ll appeal,” Lloyd says firmly.
“There’s not a chance, Lloyd. Even the attorney I had—who loves money—he wouldn’t take it.”
“But your future!”
“That’s over. I’m on probation, for five years. I had to register as— . . . You know damn well no bar association would ever accept me.”
“But it didn’t happen!” Lloyd insists. “There’s still a possibility. I know people— . . . I can— . . .”
“No, it’s over. And maybe, going to school—all that future—maybe it was a cop-out to begin with— . . .”
“But it didn’t happen!” Lloyd repeats obsessively. Then suddenly, incongruously: “Marry Barbara, Jim, I know it can work! Then we’ll decide how to appeal— . . .”
Jim hears himself say: “Lloyd, what I was charged with—it didn’t happen, then. But—listen, please!—later, after the trial, I had to return to the park after I had been sentenced, and then it did happen— . . .”
“Defiance!” Lloyd said like a lawyer offering a cop-out plea. “You wanted to defy them because— . . .”
“No,” Jim said. “It wasn’t only that. When I went back, I wanted it to happen. It was much more than defiance. I wanted to face myself at last. . . . We kissed— . . .” (Green. Mouth on mouth. Bodies pressed.)
Instinctively Lloyd reaches out to touch Jim in a gesture familiar from so many times of fondness. Then, in a sudden daze, disoriented—his hand stopping abruptly—as if to himself he says, “I’ve loved you like a— . . . like a son! Like that. It wasn’t— . . .” He withdrew his extended hand, the begun gesture rejected; and he stares at Jim as if at a stranger.
It was that look—and the previously started, swiftly abandoned gesture of touching him—that made Jim decide instantly: “I’m leaving the job at your office, Lloyd.”
“You don’t have to. You can still— . . .” Lloyd begins automatically. Then: “You’ve got to do what you have to do.”
“Lloyd—thank you—for so much— . . .” Jim starts.
But Lloyd had already turned away and is walking out of the room.
Now in hammerblows Jim has to destroy the past. He drove to Barbara’s.
She kisses him. He eases her away gently. “Your mother, Jim— . . . ?” she asks apprehensively.
“The same, again.”
“I called her while you were gone. I could tell she was sick.” She sits next to him.
As she looks at him in puzzlement, he tells her suddenly about Los Angeles, the trial, the conviction. Of his return to the park. The youngman he kissed.
“None of that makes any difference to me!” she said. “You don’t even have to tell me any more!”
Jim remembers Steve’s wife; the look on her face, stunned, uncomprehending, confused. “It makes a lot of difference,” he told her.
“No,” she insists. “Jim, I came back to El Paso when I learned you were here— . . . I’ve always— . . . I wouldn’t stay here unless— . . . And I tried to match your coolness, but I had to force myself— . . .” As if, finally, her words can magically erase all he’s told her, “Jim, I love you,” she said.
Too late to stop the fatal word, he still placed his finger on her lips. He kissed her on the forehead, knowing that he would not be with her again.
It was deep night when he returned home after a long drive into the dark cavern of desert outside the city.
He sees Miss Lucía’s suitcase in the living room. He hears her and his mother praying in Mrs. Girard’s bedroom. One of Miss Lucía’s made-up prayers. Like an incantation.
Miss Lucía: “Mar.”
His mother, also in Spanish: “Ocean.”
“Mundo.”
“World.”
“Flores.”
“Flowers—two wreaths.”
“Cielo.”
“Sky.”
“Tierra.”
“Earth.”
“Esperanza.”
“Hope. My other Daughter. Esperanza. My Hope.”
“Salvación.”
“Salvation. And Salvador. My other Son. My Salvador. Two wreaths.”
“Silencio.”
“Silence. . . .”
Closing the bedroom door softly, Miss Lucía enters the living room.
Jim glances at her suitcase, questioning its presence apprehensively. Then he stares incredulously at Miss Lucía.
Now she has become a complete parody. The transformation into grotesquerie is complete. She’s wearing gloves—as she did the first day she came to work; but now the gloves, orange, rise in furls to her elbows. She wears bracelets over them. To the sash wound tightly several times about her waist she’s added one of the paper flowers she and Mrs. Girard had made in Los Angeles. The purple-painted slant of her eyes reaches to her temples, almost touching the ringlets of her hair. The white powder on her face is like calcimine. From behind the thick mask topping the scream of colors—as if aware of being trapped finally, her eyes peer desperately, desolately, blackly, intensely.
“And now that you’re back—and it’s all over—now I’ll have to leave,” she said, touching her hair. Her head turned in abrupt movements toward different parts of the room, as if she expects to be assaulted by something that will rush suddenly out of hiding.
The words are so unexpected that he stares uncomprehending at the made-up bird-face before him.
“Now I’ll have to leave you. And her,” she repeats slowly, sadly.
Even for her, the words seemed too illogical. “You mean stop working for—living with—my mother?” he asked incredulously. Even as his money evaporated, he had never considered a time when she would not be with them.
“Yes!”
“But why?”
As if she herself didn’t understand, she uttered words: “It’s beginning again for me. And when it does, I have to be alone. It wouldn’t be fair to subject— . . . I was sick— . . . before— . . . so long. And I haven’t made her well. And when I cried in my mother’s womb— . . . I understand the black sickness. And I don’t want your mother to see me when— . . . I don’t want her to know— . . . She would suffer. Like my mother.”
And so had her dreams finally rioted against some long-averted nightmare? “You don’t have to leave— . . .” he started.
“Yes, yes!” she insisted. “I know. I love your mother. And you too, youngman. I know what’s coming now. The Virgin sustained me until your . . . business . . . was over.”
Was it possible that she had waited for his nightmare to end before she surrendered to hers?
Then she repeats what she had said once before: “Even the Garden of Eden was invaded by the snake. . . . This is how it starts for me.” She touched her forehead nervously—she seemed to want to stretch her painted eye-brows even more. Behind the colored mask, her eyes seemed to want to Escape.
“No, no, it won’t happen here,” she
said. Just barely she touches him on the arm, slightly—a proof to him of her existence during these strange moments.
“When do you want to leave?” he asks her, knowing that, yes, she will leave—as illogically as that, as unreally.
“Tonight,” she said. “Things end at night. . . . But don’t tell your mother till morning,” she warns.
“You have to leave?” he tried once again to challenge the unreality.
She nods. “And perhaps this way your mother will be forced to be well! Lazarus was able to shed death— . . .” she said.
“Where will you go?”
“Back to Mexico,” she answers quickly. “For now. When my mother was sick— . . . She became so thin; I would carry her from place to place, chasing the sun in her room so it would be warm on her. . . . I’ve saved money working here, you’ve been generous.”
It still seemed difficult to grasp. One day she had appeared. Now she would be gone. “Can I drive you somewhere?”
“No—please.”
“Then don’t leave till morning.”
“No—that’s for a beginning.”
She put on her sweater, rolling the sleeves up so that the long orange gloves showed. Then she removed the sweater, the gloves; she put them on again. She touches her glittering earrings—glances in the direction of Mrs. Girard’s bedroom. Already the edges of her eyes are turning into smears of purple paint and tears. She stammers: “Between you—and her—your mother—between you, there’s— . . . something— . . . like a— . . . something powerful!”
Finally had she felt outside? She seemed at that moment to be one of those people doomed never to feel—to know—she’s loved. She would become one of those odd, little, painted women gesturing on the street at imaginary things, Jim knows; the kind of strange, pitiful old women cruel children heckle, laugh at mercilessly, chase.
“Why don’t you stay?” he insisted once more.
“It would be cruel to your mother.” And that was all she said. Making a cross in the direction of Mrs. Girard’s room, she left. Like that. As if she had never existed. As illogically as her crazy thoughts shaped. Like that. She left. Just left.
Jim goes into his mother’s room. (Miss Lucía’s left, his mind keeps telling him. She’s really left.)
He looks at his mother as one looks at a child. I’ll force you to be well again, he thinks, just like you’ve recovered so many times before.
She looks so serene now in the soft gold light barely entering from the living room.
Suddenly:
Had there ever really been a war between them? he wonders. Like the unfair verdict rendered in that courtroom in Los Angeles, was his verdict on her illness—her life—all, all wrong? . . . Her illness—what, really, was it? He looks at the rainbow of pills by her bedside. The reason for the spells—it could be as simple as that. Would he ever know for certain? . . . Had it been, then, all along, from that long December day, a one-sided battle? Waged only by him?
Abruptly, his mother sits up. “My cane—I forgot it. If I get up at night—. . .”
He turns the lamp on. He sees the cane on a chair, begins to get it for her. Instead, he lets her straighten up. She stands, seems to reel, grasps at the swaying oxygen tank. “Oh, God!”
“What, Mother!” And his nerves react like a thousand individual live entities.
“Dizzy— . . . I couldn’t see. I— . . .”
He helps her, he leads her to where the cane is.
In horror he notices that she’s closed her eyes tightly as if walking in total darkness.
Oh, God, she’s rehearsing for blindness! That thought ground into his mind like a jagged glass.
Deliberately he let her walk back alone to her bed, that way forcing her to open her eyes. But she moves even more haltingly than before, her hands feeling for familiar objects to guide her.
In bed again, she sighs: “I wish I could suffer alone—even suffer for you, my Son.” And he knows she means it. “But I can’t—I can’t control it—I can’t help being sick.”
“I know,” he says.
And thinks: Beloved monster. It is a war and I’ll go on fighting you, I won’t surrender. Anger will keep me alive.
“I’ve been sick for so long, my Son,” she says.
“Yes, I know,” he tells her.
“Very sick,” she says, grateful for his acknowledgment. “Is Miss Lucía asleep?”
“Yes. . . .” Miss Lucía’s left, he keeps thinking; she’s really left. “Good night, Mother.”
“Good night, my Son.” He bends over her, kisses her on the forehead. When he turned off the light, she asks: “What, my Son?”
“I didn’t say anything, Mother,” he tells her. But he knows she merely meant to ask the “question”—but he has no answer.
Hardly audibly, the sleeping pill she takes nightly seizing her, she murmurs: “Perhaps . . . after all my excesses . . . after the hundreds of days and nights of dying . . . perhaps . . . I’ll just . . . die . . . quietly . . . in my sleep. . . .”
He feels a great, racking love for her. Love mixed with— . . . He refuses to name it.
And looking at her, he knew that from now to the real, the horrible, the ultimate, the real death which would finally separate them, he would be living with—fighting—her dying each eternal day. And he knows too that she will brand each such day with memories he will carry like deep cuts forever—the wounds of battles increasingly more brutal, the guilt—and the terrible love left empty after her death.
Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
