Good. At least someone around here knew how she felt.
Emmy’s hands fluttered like hummingbirds as she watched from the couch. It wouldn’t surprise Esther if she started screaming, “Sacrilege!” or “Blasphemer!” or something, she was so worked up in a righteous tizzy.
Esther had to keep the peace, but she felt a scream building, and knew if she set her glass down, it would crack. She was Jake’s wife in the eyes of God and the law, and now his widow. Why was she trapped between these women with no claim on Jake, these strangers who had divided him up between themselves, and left her only his debts and his name, like a stain on her life?
Esther prodded, “And what will you have?”
Evangeline started. “Just water. Thanks.”
Esther took another tug on her scotch, swirling the dregs and melting ice. “Really.”
An octave deeper than was safe for a man of his size, Mathias intoned, “I don’t think you can be a decent Christian and a drunk.”
Esther laughed. “Oh, honey. Everybody at the Last Supper was sloshed.”
“Including poor old Jesus,” Christian joined in. “What do you think that whole water-into-wine thing was about?”
Emmy glowered. “I don’t think that’s funny at all…”
“Interesting you should say that,” Jasper threw in, “cuz I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. When Jesus went out in the garden and did that whole ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken me’ thing? Flat out, that boy was hammered.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this…”
“No. Think about it,” Jasper went on, casually as if discussing sports trivia. “He knew he was about to die. And not just a regular death, but a horrible, torturous, agonizing death.”
“Yes, but—”
“You don’t think he was terrified?”
“He was the Son of God!”
“Yeah, yeah. But he was also just a man, right? That was the whole point. He came down to earth, as one of us. And suffered like us. So he could show us how to live, even with all this pain and misery.”
“Well, yes! But—”
“Lady, I’m just sayin’: if he wasn’t just a man, with the same fears that I have, then his sacrifice doesn’t mean shit to me. He might as well be Superman.”
Esther started laughing, stunned at her own amusement. Whatever or whoever Jasper was, she was suddenly glad he was here. “So you’re saying…”
“I’m just sayin’ that boy was drunk as a skunk. And I don’t blame him a bit. Thanks, man.”
Eddie handed him a scotch, then gestured to Christian. “One for you.”
Christian took it with a nod and smile of thanks, then turned to Jasper.
“Let’s go outside and have a smoke. Let them get down to business.”
“Sounds like a plan. Excuse us, ladies.”
Esther watched the men go out. Evangeline clearly balked just short of following them, but simply stood beside the fire and wet her lips with the water Eddie brought her.
Emmy and Matthias traded hissing whispers with their heads together like a lawyer and client kibbutzing during a trial. Matthias covered his mouth with one hand as if to block anyone reading his lips, but the frenetic chopping motion of his other hand made it clear what he was urging Emmy to do.
Emmy seemed sincerely clueless about the church’s real holdings, and worse, she sincerely believed that there was a church. Esther had let Jake follow his vocation, do his own thing—Know Your Self, Grow Your Self, thanks, Mom and Dad—and she never intruded, because he was so very good at making you want to believe him.
The whole thing was little more than a scam, she accepted that; but with Emmy’s twisted faith for a foundation, it had almost become a cult.
Esther studied Evangeline as she looked into the fire, lost in her own painful thoughts. The single-malt heat of her blood urged her to do her duty as a widow and drag this whore out of her house by her red hair, but she was sick to death of being the only one who stuck to the script.
She knew Jake had other friends, other associates, of whom she could only remember a name or a face or two. None of them had contacted her after Jake died, but she was aware of people watching her, of being followed. If anyone knew the truth about Jake and would share it with her, it was this woman, who seemed to silently curse her water as she sipped it.
Whatever the awful truth was, she needed to know, and now, before she caved in to denial and started to make a saint of him, like that poor twit Emmy. Evangeline had been to the bottom and clawed her way back, it was plain to see.
Show me the way, Esther pleaded. Show me the way out of love with that bastard—
Chapter Eight
The backyard was nearly as expansive as the front, cut off by the garage and the black metal fence down at the vanishing point, where the fallow pastures and trails of the back nine acres gradually gave way to the open desert.
It was clear, from back here, that this place really was the legendary hippie school Jasper made fun of, all the way through his own childhood hell. It was long enough to house half a dozen classrooms, easy, and still give the family some breathing space.
Jasper could imagine kids aged six to twelve, convening on this lawn to sit in the lotus position with their mandala coloring books and infinite assortments of magic crayons, in order to better understand themselves as rainbow warriors in a world that would thoroughly kick their pacifist asses the second they stepped outside.
And to think that the former Mrs. Connaway actually grew up in this place. And then wound up with Jake. Talk about the return of the repressed. It blew his mind how some people could be born into total freedom, and spend their whole lives looking for a cage.
But at least the swimming pool was nice; or it would have been, if it weren’t green with scum. Gone to shit. Like the lawn. Like the playground equipment. He wondered what kept Eddie so busy that he’d let the place go to hell.
They stood in the strange, dark yard and tried to pretend they felt at ease.
While the ill wind blew, and the shadows danced.
Jasper lit a cigarette, surveyed the empty property. Christian pulled out another joint.
“Dude,” Jasper said. “This is just ugly, here.”
“What did you expect? The whole place reeks of Jake. Gimme your lighter.”
Jasper nodded, handed it over. Christian lit the joint. It took a couple of tries.
“I just hope this shit works out.”
Christian held up the wait-a-second finger, inhaled hard, and croaked, “Our girl? She’s rough and ready.”
“Oh, yeah, no doubt. She could skin those people alive. It’s her brokenness I’m concerned about.”
“Okay. So it’s not what they might do to her,” Christian said, passing the joint, “but what she might do to herself.”
“Exactly.” Inhaling large, and thinking…
When he first met Evangeline two years ago, it felt like they’d almost instantly broken through to something real. There was pain and a deeply broken foundation that put her out there where bodies collided without really touching, but Jasper wanted her in spite of her damage, not because of it.
It looked, for about a week, like it might even work.
He wanted to tell her things he never told anybody; but when she did the same, up jumped the Devil.
And his name was Jake.
The things that fucker had made her do, the damage he’d inflicted on her just because he could…Jasper had seen love twist people into some awful shapes before, but when he knew all there was to know about Evangeline, he just could not accept it.
Because no matter how much he cared for her, and no matter how hard she tried to build a new life, she was not done with it. With him.
So long as Jake was alive, he held her in thrall.
Jasper could not resist a damsel in distress, but without Christian, he would have walked from Evangeline. Christian took her into his sewing circle and offered her a life outside of Jake. On
e that built up from the inside, with no sexual pressure involved.
Somehow, she and Jasper had gradually turned it from lovers to friends to more than friends: more like older brother and younger sister, with an undercurrent of perpetual, only slightly incestuous sizzle.
If that was wrong, fuck it: they weren’t actually siblings; and when you got right down to it, real honest-to-God human feelings were always deeper and weirder than the puny little labels they were dealt.
So they stuck with each other, stood up for each other, progressively grew even closer than before.
And then—in one of those sudden reversals of fate that made you wonder if maybe Somebody Up There wasn’t listening—the world had finally given Jake Connaway as good as he’d given.
What that would mean, in the long run, no one could say. But one thing was for certain.
If Evangeline needed backup, her boys were there.
Brother Jasper. Sister Christian.
Brothers and sisters, to the end…
A sudden, surprising burst of thunder rocked Jasper from his reverie. He followed Christian’s gaze to the cold moon above, watched vapor shadows race overhead like cracks in the sky, felt a chill run through him that ran deeper than the autumn night.
From inside, they could hear the strident sound of women’s voices. But it was muted by the door, the receding rumble, and the rising howl of the wind.
Something unaccountably sank in the pit of his stomach, and made the shot of booze in his belly freeze into black ice.
From the look on Christian’s face, he was feeling it, too. “Oh, man,” said his friend, with a kind of awe. “There is something going on here—”
“Yeah, yeah—”
“You know? And I’m not just talking about this place. This is way the fuck bigger than Jake. It’s like—”
“Like a hurricane’s coming.”
They looked at each other, with mounting apprehension. The wind was dry and charged with positive ions, a Santa Ana, with not enough moisture in a thousand miles of sky to make a raindrop.
Then what were those ragged, black clouds racing across the moon?
“Oh, man, we’re not on hurricane watch, are we?”
“Far as I heard, they weren’t even expecting this storm, or what ever the fuck it is.”
“Well, I don’t know, then,” Christian said. “But I’ll tell you what. There is something really wrong with to night.”
Christian was dragging him down into worry, and Jasper didn’t work that way. “Something wrong with the weed, maybe. Relax.”
“I didn’t figure you much for Bible study.”
“I’m a complicated guy,” Jasper said, stifling a giggle. They had shared more than a hundred deep conversations about religion, and fixed all its insoluble problems and forgotten them, more times than either could count. “I’m not saying I know if I believe all that shit in the book, but I feel something out there…”
“Nothing wrong with that. Nobody knows what’s out there, but that’s no reason to go making crazy shit up.”
“Crazy like Adam and Eve riding dinosaurs to church? Or crazy like gays are Satan’s pep squad?”
“The whole banquet of bullshit. But what with the mood and the man of the hour and all, I was thinking more about the Rapture. End of the world. Armageddon.”
“Christian!” Jasper blew out pot smoke in an explosion of mock shock. “A confirmed atheist, and a fudge-punching atheist to boot.” He shook his head, took another hit. “I feel your pain, man.”
“Shut up, I didn’t mean it like that…”
“No, sincerely…I know what you mean. Everybody has questions. Religion has answers. Crazy answers are better than no answers at all. At least they think they know what’s coming, and how to prepare for it.”
“You think praying and pledging all your extra money to a TV preacher is the right way to prepare for the end?”
“Hell no! But it makes them feel better. And what can you do, if the end is coming?”
“Roll a fatty, hug your loved ones, and kiss your ass good-bye.”
“Exactly. Religion doesn’t make them crazy. Being human does. It’s human nature to think an end is coming, because we all have to die alone. But the world goes on, and knowing that kind of freaks us out even more than knowing we’re going to die.
“Everybody freaks out about the end. Nuclear war. Y2K. Global warming. Invaders from Mars. It’s natural to expect the end, and it’s human to hope somebody out there has a good reason for ending it. What you’re feeling is natural. But what’s happening…”
Christian now recognized the creeping tone of gloom in his friend’s voice. “So you think the world ends not with a bang, but with a weak-ass party?”
Jasper smiled at his friend’s sardonic tone, but his eyes remained pinned on the horizon, a thousand miles away.
“No, not the end,” he said. “But maybe the beginning of something we’re not ready for, at all.”
Part II
Mopping Up The Hard Parts With Gray
Chapter Nine
Gray was so grateful not to have to drive.
The sinister white Cadillac cruised the desert highway like a shark on a blood trail. Lightning flashed as it rounded the bend and swerved onto the off-ramp, but only sped up as it left the highway for the two-lane road, wending its way toward home.
In the passenger seat, Gray pulled out a smoke. He was a gaunt, jaundiced hard-ass in a rumpled black suit, with hair the color of ashes. Not counting occasional blackouts, he hadn’t slept in almost sixty-four hours, but his hands were steady.
He didn’t ever want to sleep again.
His head throbbed like impacted wisdom teeth, and his ears still rang. The stink of cordite and formaldehyde was like plugs of charred steel wool in his nostrils. But he didn’t have to watch the road, or his mouth, except to put the bottle in it, and then the cigarette, chasing each other.
And in between, he talked.
Meanwhile, the driver reached up and thumbed the dome light on, then checked out the pair of Polaroids in his hand.
The images were crude, overexposed, and tinted pea soup green from the mysterious process that made the prints expose themselves. Crude and harder to find every year, but if you didn’t fuck around with computers and didn’t want some nosy fucker at the photo lab sticking his nose in your business, it was still the only choice for the serious documentary photographer.
The first was a casual portrait of Frankie, eyes crossed and corkscrewed up to take in the hole in his forehead. That his lower jaw, his scalp and most of his face were scraped off long before the coup de grace was essential to really getting what the artist intended, with this particular masterpiece.
“Nice,” said the driver.
It took a bit of squinting and a lot of faith to accept that the second was of Sugar: just as dead, but chopped and smashed like the dregs of a piñata.
“Wow,” said the driver, genuinely touched. “Very nice.”
“Thanks,” said Gray. “I made ’em myself.”
Gray never liked to brag, but he truly relished talking about what he did to Frankie and Sugar. When he confessed the whole soup-to-poop affair, he could relive it from without, stand back and admire the balls and the discipline he’d shown. Oh, if only there were a hundred of him—
The driver did not ask any questions at first, just soaked it up and smiled.
Nobody else understood or accepted the real Gray.
When Jake’s corpse turned up in the desert, Gray was half dead himself, in the bag after a binge. But he reined in his hangover and went to work. The fuckwit sheriff ran the case with bloodhound diligence, but raced off right away on the wrong trail. Esther told them what she’d been told, that he was in retreat at a cabin in Apple Valley, so they went up there to shake down the meth kitchens and burglars.
Only Gray understood and accepted the real Jake.
So only he knew where to look.
At a shitbox dive bar in S
an Bernardino, he found a barfly who knew the skank who took Jake home, and liked her well enough to eat only soup for the rest of his life. Why did these losers always play tough until things got permanent?
Gray found Sugar’s condo tossed and empty. Blood seeping up through three layers of hastily dumped throw rugs and trash bags in the family room, the TV still on and tuned to the public access channel.
A short paper chase yielded a multitude of angles. Frankie and Sugar fought a lot. Frankie was a tweaker, a drunk, and an impulsive idiot. Gray figured he came in and stabbed Jake in the back in a white heat, because he’d never have the stones to kill in cold blood.
The state of the place told Gray how he clobbered Sugar, then took the body out to the desert in a drop cloth from the attached garage. Maybe he took Sugar with him, and maybe he left her here.
He picked up the phone and hit redial. The display showed a Riverside number in speed-dial memory—MOM. A bleary, cracked hag’s voice came on the line cursing. “She don’t want to speak to you, you shitbird! You go see the police and turn yourself in, if you’re any kind of man…”
Gray stole a Ford Escort off the street and was in Riverside in half an hour.
In a rickety single-wide trailer in the Viking’s Rest Motor Court, Sugar and her mother, Margie, gargled vodka and fought over the remote until midnight. Gray smoked cigarettes and played angles in his head until the lights went out in the neighbors’ trailers.
When the blaring TV from Margie’s trailer was the only sound in the sultry night, he cracked a couple amyl nitrate vials under his nose to get into character, and came calling.
The screen door was locked, but he slashed it with his penknife.
Margie was passed out in the back bedroom, snoring to drown out Celebrity Rehab. Sugar drowsed on the couch, drooling from her fat, broken lips and swelled-shut eye.
Gray took Margie first, quietly. Pillow over the face to muffle three sharp knocks on the noggin with the butt of his pistol, to streamline the smothering.
Movies were full of shit. People struggled a lot harder in real life, when you tried to take their lives; and in Gray’s vast experience, the less they had to live for, the harder they usually fought.
Jake's Wake Page 4
