Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  When they reached the line of cars along Eternal Way, Margaret turned to Mark. “I assume you’re taking my boss home,” she said, hitching a padded shoulder in Steven’s direction. The counselor held the door of the Cadillac open for her.

  “Wait, I’ll go with you,” Steven protested.

  “Please—can’t you see Mr. Corazon and I wish to be alone?”

  The counselor managed a wincing smile, but he looked as if he’d rather have a root canal than drive down the hill with Margaret Kirkham. She waved good-bye to the little group as Mr. Corazon started the car. Steven knew it wasn’t just the wish to put Ray behind her that made her bolt, but also an awkward desire to get out of Mark’s and Steven’s way, no more crowd of three. Steven saw it and felt helpless, watching her drive away, feeling as if he’d failed her. It didn’t seem fair that she had to lose Richard in the bargain, even if he did hate fags.

  Dell and Linda were comforting Heather, who was still the most sniffling of all of them. Mark was already waiting in the Jeep as Sonny touched Steven’s arm. “I’m leaving real early in the morning. If I don’t see you, thanks.”

  “But you’ll be back,” retorted Steven, putting off all finalities.

  Sonny didn’t counter him, letting him believe what he needed to. “You know what, Stevie? You’re practically the only guy who ever left me alone.” A different sort of passion flashed in his eyes, a vast sentimentality worthy of his father, who wept at Little League games. Sonny threw his arms about Steven’s neck. “I’m gonna start over,” he said, choking on the emotion. “Wish me luck.”

  It was so raw and naked, how could Steven be cynical? He found himself wrapping the boy in a bear hug, tears stinging his eyes. “Yeah, good luck,” he whispered fervently, touching wood for all of them.

  He had never held Sonny before, and for all the rippling muscles in his torso, he seemed unaccountably frail, but perhaps it was just the spillover effect of this week’s death and funeral. Certainly Sonny appeared revitalized by the embrace, as if he’d brought off another feeling that didn’t stink of desire. He sauntered away toward the Mercedes, no good-byes for anyone else. He waited for Dell to finish with the women as Steven climbed into the Jeep.

  “Can we please go get out of these clothes,” Steven pleaded. “I can’t stand being a grown-up one more second.”

  “I think you’re very sexy in a suit. Can we go see Victor?”

  Steven felt a sudden knot in the pit of his stomach, as if he’d just been found out. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said.

  “I’d like to.”

  Steven nodded, unable to think of a reason not to. Mark laid a hand on his knee, very gentle, and he covered it with his own. Tears blurred his eyes again, and he realized with an odd shock that he and Mark hadn’t touched at all throughout the burial scene. Was it for Margaret’s sake, or Mr. Corazon’s, that they’d held themselves back? How would anyone have even known they were lovers? Now, as if to redeem the betrayal, Steven raised Mark’s hand to his lips, grazing tenderly over the fingers.

  “I love you, Steven Shaw.”

  Steven nodded, nuzzling his face in Mark’s palm, then pointed left along the rolling hills. Mark had to disengage his hand so he could shift gears. He swung the Jeep in a brisk U-turn, not touching the grass on either side, where the graves came right up to the pavement. Steven gave a vague wave in the direction of the little group remaining.

  Only Heather waved back, always an eye on the boss, even through tears. Linda couldn’t focus on anything but her brother. There was an air of animation about him as he shifted from foot to foot, as if he had just emerged from a long hibernation. Maybe it was being outdoors again, the quick winter green of the lawn on every side. It didn’t seem to matter that it was a cemetery. Something had brought out the gardener in him, like an omen of early spring. As he talked with his hands, he might have been casting seeds in a meadow.

  “So we walk out of the zoo,” he was saying to Heather, “and the little one’s very quiet.” He glanced impishly at Linda, the butt of his story. “‘What’s wrong, poquita? You eat too much licorice?’ She looks at me very serious. ‘Lorenzo,’ she says, ‘I don’t want to be a horse no more. I want to be a panda.’”

  Heather laughed, charmed by the gardener—but softly, so as not to be rude to the dead. Linda smiled coquettishly, falling back into the role of baby sister. Dazed by his sudden good cheer, she had no idea it was she who’d done it. She saw what she wanted to see, that Dell was coming back to life. She’d prayed for nothing else since Halloween. What she wouldn’t see, as he teased her with the past, was how hyper he was. She’d been afraid of his gloom so long that she grasped at anything.

  “So that’s what you are,” said Heather playfully, making Linda blush. Then to Dell: “I thought she was a unicorn.”

  “Because she’s magic,” said Dell.

  “Stop it, both of you,” Linda protested, never good at being the center of a circle.

  “Let me give you girls a piece of advice,” said the older brother, wagging a finger. “Stay away from funerals. The dead, they have each other. Don’t forget now.”

  Bowing his head in a mock courtly way, he spun around to the gray 380. Sonny started the big engine as Dell climbed in. He turned to look one last time at Linda. Both women were smiling, still basking in all that charm. So it must have seemed like a trick of the failing light that he looked so sad. It was as brief as a spasm of pain, and the next moment they were off, but in that half-second the losses of Dell Espinoza were total. Linda went tense with doubt as the Mercedes pulled away. Then Heather turned and grinned at her.

  “He’s wonderful,” she said—she who always found something nice to say about everyone. “And he’s got great taste in baby sisters.”

  Linda smiled at her new friend, and for once let the worry go. Happiness was so simple. She turned to it like a flower in the sun. Fifteen months of being afraid to laugh, afraid to feel, and now it all came back, as easy as riding a bike.

  “C’mon, panda,” Heather said softly, taking her hand. They moved toward the Toyota, walking in a garden where death was banished. Everything was going to be fine now, Linda was sure of it. Not only had she found a friend, but Dell had blessed it. Soon he would cease to be a fugitive, and she would be a secretary, and all of them would laugh together like a family.

  Across the bowl of the hills, where the cemetery’s eastern edge bordered a gully choked with chaparral, dusk was feathering down as Mark and Steven came up the rise. To take the marble edge off death, Forest Lawn had mandated that there would be no gravestones in the park, only bronze plaques set in the lawn, so you had to know where you were going. Victor was between a pair of umbrella pines high on the slope, in an area sparsely populated. The old who did most of the burying couldn’t climb that far. The two men’s feet were wet to the cuffs by the time they reached the site, and both of them were breathing hard. It looked out over the Valley, clear after the rain all the way to the San Bernardinos. They stood there like a pair of mountaineers, catching their wind, not looking down at the grave yet. Steven straddled the plaque, Mark a step below, waiting till he was ready.

  “If you leave flowers, the deer come down and eat them. Sometimes I bring lettuce. Or strawberries.” Steven’s voice was thoughtful, very private, as if Mark weren’t meant to fully understand the protocols of deer. He stooped to the plaque, the wet grass shaggy around it, and still Mark held back. Carefully Steven gathered off the bronze the sprigs of pine needles blown down in the storm. “Well,” he asked dryly, “aren’t you going to say hello?”

  “Hi, Victor.”

  Mark crouched down beside him. The bronze hadn’t tarnished at all yet. It would take the second winter to fur the edges. In block letters it said VICTOR LOUIS OATES, and below that the dates, and below that NO REGRETS.

  “He wanted it just to say ‘Queer,’ but I told him I didn’t want him desecrated.”

  “You think anyone bothers to look at the people
they don’t know?”

  “Sure. Me, I’ve read this whole neighborhood looking for dead fags.” And he waved his arm, taking in the grassy slope from the line of umbrella pines at the crest to the Jeep on the road below, perhaps a thousand graves. “That’s when I used to come every day.”

  “And where are you?” asked Mark, emphasis on the pronoun.

  It might have been a question heavy with metaphysics, but Steven understood it in purely concrete terms. “Right here,” he said, reaching to pat the grass to the left of Victor. “All paid for, just like Ray.”

  A moment’s pause, in which they both stopped to wonder where Mark was going to go. He didn’t even have a will yet. Where Steven was always waffling between having his ashes scattered and getting planted here, Mark was pointedly silent on the subject. Perhaps it didn’t really matter to him, or else it mattered too much.

  “How many, would you say?”

  “How many what?”

  “Dead fags.”

  “Oh, maybe twenty in the last three years.” Unconsciously as he spoke, Steven traced his fingertips across the letters of Victor’s name, as if he were reading Braille. “That’s just counting guys under forty, where it says ‘Beloved Son’ or ‘Baby Brother,’ that kind of thing. Maybe a quote from Hamlet—always a telltale sign.”

  It was five minutes to five, closing time. Lights were coming on all across the Valley, and the traffic on 101, heavy with commuters, rippled like neon in the middle distance. The cloudy sky was darkening, and here on the crest of the ridge they were solitary as shepherds, shivering slightly in their suits.

  “It’s never going to be over, is it?” asked Mark, not really expecting an answer.

  “Someday. Not for us.”

  “Will anyone understand what it was like?” It was curiously easy, perched on the mountain of death, to speak about the future when all of them would be gone.

  “Maybe the gay ones will.”

  “Yeah, but they’ll have to see through all the lies. ’Cause history’s just white folks covering their ass.”

  Mark’s knees hurt from crouching, but the only concession he made to redistributing his weight was to rest a hand on Steven’s shoulder. In a few minutes a pickup truck would rattle along the winding road among the hills, stopping at every parked car. A worker would get out of the truck and, using his hands for a megaphone, shout among the graves that the main gates were closing. Always a car or two overstayed, a fresh widow, a prostrate orphan. A single shouted reminder was usually enough. No one really wanted to spend the night.

  “We might as well travel, huh?” said Mark. “Think of all your discounts.”

  “Great. Where do you want to go?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Okay, but forget India—too many bugs. And Russia, because they can test us at the border and send us to Siberia. Otherwise, we can chalk up some fabulous mileage—”

  “Steven.” Mark tightened his grip on Steven’s shoulder, pointing into the twilight, sharp as an Indian scout. Barely twenty feet away a deer cropped the grass, or at least it looked that way till the animal raised its head, and they saw in its mouth a bunch of flowers. Coolly it watched the two men as it chewed, big ears faintly quivering but otherwise quite unstartled. Living above the cemetery, where everyone came unarmed, it had unlearned the fear of hunters. When it had eaten all the flowery part, letting the stems and leaves fall to the grass, it trotted a few steps down the hill, but even closer to Mark and Steven. Again it dipped to the ground and fetched a fresh bouquet.

  Mark slipped his arm closer about Steven’s neck, hugging him fast. Perhaps it was that—the nearness, the smell of Mark’s hair—that made him cry. Since when had he even isolated the particular smell of Mark? Or perhaps it was something about the deer, its ridiculous trust that men were harmless, or maybe its loss of the wild. They were tears that made no noise, flowing easy because there was someone to hold. Mark gripped him like life itself, looking over his shoulder at the deer. They were all that was left, the three of them, and only a moment more and a shout from below would scatter them.

  12

  Dell Espinoza got up at dawn because he always did. Neither the restlessness nor the dizzy sense of anticipation were any different today, for he was a morning person. What was new was the thrill of stealing away. He dressed himself in the green fatigues, the blue work shirt, the red bandanna, the very uniform in which he had arrived at Steven’s house. Neatly he folded the clothes he’d borrowed from Sonny, which had made him look like any other West Hollywood clone, harmless and shallow.

  He went in the kitchen and forced himself to eat a container of yogurt and a slice of bread to settle his stomach. Then he took the revolver from its hiding place under the firewood one last time, crumpled the brown paper in a ball, and tossed it into the fireplace. He tucked the loaded gun—loaded by Alfonso Nava, because Dell didn’t really want to learn how—in the inside pocket of his denim jacket. When he left Steven’s house it was eyes forward, no looking back, closing the door behind him without so much as a click.

  The first streak of the morning sun shot across the chaparral, highlighting the luminous jade of the sage, aching with scent after yesterday’s rain. Passing Mrs. Tulare’s house, Dell snapped a sprig of wild anis from a bush. He made a tight fist and crushed it in his hand, then brought it to his nose and drank it in. Its licorice smell was wonderfully intense, deeper than a flower and sweeter than an herb.

  No cars were out on Sunset Plaza Drive this early, since nobody in the hills had to be at work till a civilized hour. Dell had the road to himself, striding down the steep grade unencumbered, only the gun reminding him, heavy against his heart, that he carried any baggage. But it didn’t prevent him from appreciating everybody’s lawn and flowering shrubs. He was like an inspector, giving grades to all the gardens as he went by.

  Halfway down to the Strip, he stopped and squinted at a stand of palmetto, rotting because it hadn’t been cleaned of dead fronds. He itched to have his equipment in hand, pruning shears to shape it. Instinctively he reached for the wallet in his pocket, but of course it wasn’t there. If it had been, he would’ve drawn out a card—DELGADO LANDSCAPING—and slipped it in the mailbox at the curb. That’s what he used to do: ride up and down the hills in the pickup, leaving a card wherever a yard looked badly tended, what they called cold-blanketing the neighborhood.

  It was seven by the time he reached the Strip, but he had plenty of time. The bus stop for the 41 East was by a croissant boutique. Dell didn’t have the exact schedule, having lived a notch above his immigrant brothers who had no wheels, but he knew from Linda the wait would not be more than twenty minutes. He sat there placidly and turned his mind to Marcus Flynn.

  Arm in arm with Marcus at the Gay Pride Parade, hip to hip on the Catalina ferry feeding sea gulls, Marcus in cap and gown for the Cal State graduation. The thoughts of a man who was past his grief, who had processed all the agony of dying, burned through it, leaving only the memories of wholeness. He could see the scholarly hunch of Marcus’s shoulders, silent at his desk. Then saw him arched with passion, riding Dell like a stallion, exploding after all those years in the closet. Nothing was lost and nothing broken. At last Dell had become a man who could live in two worlds, the inviolate past and now. The suffering wasn’t part of it anymore.

  The 41 bus came sailing down Sunset, lurching suddenly to the curb like a tanker running aground. The door hissed open, and Dell scooted up the steps, dollar ready in hand. The driver was a black woman wide in the hips. She didn’t pay him any mind as she took the fare, even if the bandanna was a trifle inner-city for this neighborhood. She certainly didn’t care that the dollar was his only cash. He swayed down the aisle of the empty bus as it roared back into traffic, taking a seat in the middle. The bus people were mostly traveling west in the early morning, maids and other workmen bound for the garden districts, Beverly Hills and beyond. From west to east, everyone had at least one car—until late afternoon, when the maids
rode home.

  At Fairfax they turned south, and in front of Thrifty Drugs a second passenger got on. A gaunt, exhausted Latina, sinking under the weight of a pair of plastic shopping bags. As she fumbled in her purse for the fare, Dell took in the heavy surgical stockings, the battered shoes, the shapeless cardigan. Stepping as wide as a sailor, the woman made her way down the aisle, hoisting her heavy bags to clear the seats. In her mid-fifties, though she looked tired enough this morning to die happily of old age.

  As she struggled to sit herself down two rows in front of Dell, the gardener stood up to help her with her bags. She shot him a look of panic, for thieves were everywhere, but his friendly smile won her over. She let him hoist the shopping bags and set them down on the inner seat by the window. She thanked him in Spanish, bowing her head. She wore a black kerchief that reeked of her own widowhood, and a crucifix round her neck, Jesus and all. Dell took the seat across from her as she drew out a small-beaded rosary from her purse.

  It wasn’t that she looked like Beatriz Espinoza, not in the least, and yet she was the same, guileless and long-suffering. Hard to say if California was any sort of promised land for her. She rode the near-empty bus, glazed and turned in on herself, much as she would have ridden the rattletrap line in Morelia, children spilling out the windows and chickens on farmers’ laps. Dell smiled at the vividness of the parallel, but it wasn’t exactly a sentimental longing for his mother. Mostly he saw the woman on the bus as somebody Linda would not become, just as she would never become Beatriz Espinoza. It made him completely calm inside.