Deceived

by James Scott Bell

  It was clear he was dead. She knew that without going down to see.

  He was a motorcycle rider. His big, old Harley was on its side about ten feet from the body. His legs were bent and so was he. Like a pretzel of flesh and bone.

  “Honey, are you coming back here or not?”

  She ignored him and started to make her way down the rocks.

  Let him try to follow, she thought. He can follow me now. He can bring up the rear if that’s what he wants. He can run away from life if he wants. I’m not going with him.

  Keep moving.

  Liz wasn’t the sure-footed goat Arty was, so she had to be careful. But as she quickened her pace she gained more confidence. Just before reaching the bottom of the — what was it? a gorge? — she felt like she could easily master these rocks. That she could jump and stride and go wherever she wanted.

  She always knew she could master anything she put her mind to.

  She reached the body. For a half-second she thought he might move. Maybe he wasn’t dead after all. Maybe he was just hurt and needed their help.

  But there was no sign of breathing. She reached out to touch his arm. He was as still and cold as stone.

  He was a big man, wearing the least amount of helmet allowable by law. A glorified skullcap. Didn’t do him any good, from the looks of things, because his neck was probably broken.

  Face up he was, eyes open in death, skin the color of clamshells, a bit of dry tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth.

  “Don’t touch anything!”

  Arty. His voice startled her. She turned. He was almost charging down the rocks.

  Slip, will you?

  “Is he alive?” Arty said.

  “Does he look alive?” Liz spat the words like hot rivets. “Oh, that’s terrible.” Arty was now by her side. He looked up. “There’s a dirt path right over there. I’ve seen kids on bikes there, and it’s not good. He must have just gone right over. We need to call this in.”

  “Wait a second,” Liz said. “We don’t even know who this guy is.”

  “We don’t need to.”

  “He’s not going anywhere, Arty.”

  He looked at her like she was some strange creature he’d never seen before.

  “I suppose we could look for an ID,” Arty said.

  “Good,” she said. “You do that. Look in his pockets.”

  “Yeah.”

  He went to the body. Liz let him. She didn’t care one way or the other about the man. Who he was didn’t matter a bit. But the death was something different. Radically different. Beautifully different, in a way.

  As Arty looked at the body, Liz checked the overturned Harley. A nice piece of machinery, with silver-studded black saddlebags.

  Maybe the ID was in one of the bags.

  “Don’t touch that,” Arty called.

  She ignored him. She unbuckled the two straps on the up-facing bag, opened the flap, and bent over so she could look inside.

  Some sacks, like stuffed gym socks, were inside. She fished one out. It was buff-colored canvas. She hefted it. It felt like a sack of marbles. It had a little zipper on top. She unzipped the bag.

  “What is it?” Arty said.

  “Get over here,” she said.

  “You’re a young man,” Mrs. Axelrod said. “Why aren’t you married?”

  Mac kept his head under the hood, pretending he didn’t hear. “Almost got it, Mrs. Axelrod.”

  “How’s that?”

  Good. Subject changed. Mac gave the wrench a final turn, then pulled out from under the iron shell. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. It was a scorcher today.

  “Should fire right up,” Mac said. “You want to give it a try?”

  “No, you go right ahead. But a young man like you should be married. Why aren’t — ”

  “I’ll do ’er right now.” He went quickly to the driver’s seat of the ’95 Buick, put the key in, and started it up. He hoped his automotive triumph would distract Mrs. Axelrod from asking the question again.

  “It’s fine now,” Mac said, getting out. “If it ever — ”

  “Come up to the porch,” Mrs. Axelrod said, waving her cane toward the house. “Got something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Can’t it wait, Mrs. Axelrod?” He always called her that. It seemed respectful to the oldest living member of the congregation. She was eighty-seven and therefore had a full fifty years on him. Calling her Edie just didn’t seem right.

  “No, it can’t wait,” Mrs. Axelrod said, clipped and final. She’d have been a good prison guard. Give her a cane with an electric prod, and zappo. Even so, Mac liked her. She spoke her mind. You knew where you stood. She was short, plump, and colored her hair nut brown. She always wore dresses, which put her more than a little out of style in the laid-back canyon community.

  Here, among ex-hippies, aging Baby Boomers, struggling artists, outlaw bikers, an assortment of young families — and ex-cons fighting to stay on the straight and narrow — Mrs. Edie Axelrod was almost like a queen.

  She, along with her late husband, Elmer, had been one of two founding families of Pack Canyon Community Church. When she spoke, people at the church hopped to it. She did not abuse her position so much as assert it. She was the “keeper of the books,” Pastor Jon told Mac once. “The Energizer Cornerstone.”

  And so, dutifully, Mac trudged to the front porch of the mini-Victorian that had been built in the 1930s. Back then — Mrs. Axelrod was fond of saying, almost as often as she saw you — Pack Canyon was little more than a couple of ranches and a notorious bordello for some of Hollywood’s sneaky male stars. The canyon still had a little of that frontier feel, though after the Boomers discovered it in the 1980s, it got a little more suburban.

  The site of the bordello now housed the Pack Canyon Market. You could shop for food there. Maybe pick up a can of peaches in the very room Errol Flynn once favored. That’s the way store manager Henry Weinhouse liked to tell it, anyway.

  Mrs. Axelrod had Mac sit in a wooden rocker. She sat in the other rocker next to a table. On the table was a pitcher of iced tea and two elegant, frosted glasses.

  “Now then,” she said, pouring tea for both, “have you given any thought to your future?”

  Future? He hardly had a present. “I’m just glad to be alive and living in Pack Canyon.”

  “But where is your basket?” she said.

  “Basket?”

  Mrs. Axelrod tapped her cane on the wooden planks of the porch. “Mr. Axelrod always said a man should put all his eggs in one basket, then watch that basket!”

  “Sounds like a wise man,” Mac said.

  “I see a little Elmer in you.”

  Mac took a swallow of iced tea. He didn’t know if he wanted any Elmer in him. He had enough trouble keeping Mac in check.

  “Elmer was a man’s man,” Mrs. Axelrod said. “You don’t find many of those around anymore, sad to say. Lots of men going to the beauty parlor now. I remember when men started to wear earrings. Earrings!”

  “It’s outrageous,” Mac said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-seven, ma’am.”

  “Don’t call me ma’am. You should be married. Have you ever been married?”

  “Mrs. Axelrod — ”

  “Why aren’t you? The sea is full of fish. All you’ve got to do is put some bait on your hook.”

  His head started throbbing. The right side. The side with the fragments. The hot claws would be coming soon.

  “You do believe in marriage, don’t you?” Mrs. Axelrod said.

  “Yes, I do,” Mac said.

  “Well then, why — ”

  “I was married, Mrs. Axelrod. But, as you know, I did some time in prison.”

  Her eyebrows went skyward. “And your wife?”

  “She decided she didn’t want to be married to a con. Can’t say as I blame her.”

  “But you’re reformed,” she said. “You are a Christian man no
w.”

  “That’s an ongoing project, Mrs. Axelrod.”

  “I like you,” she said.

  “Well, thank you. I — ” The claws sank into his head. His eyes watered. He had to get out of there before he started saying, or doing, things he shouldn’t.

  He had to call Arty.

  Arty was the only guy who knew everything, the only one who understood.

  Mac stood up. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Axelrod. I have to go.”

  “We’re not finished talking.”

  “I’m not feeling too good.” Pinpricks of fire heated his skull, and it started to implode.

  “Come inside,” the widow said. “Maybe the heat — ”

  “I’m sorry,” Mac said, then ran down the steps and across the lawn. He heard Mrs. Axelrod hitting the wood with her cane.

  “Rocky!”

  His tough-guy voice. It turned Rocky’s bones to sticks. It was the sound of beer and shots. Boyd did bad things when he chased whiskey with beer.

  “Where are you?”

  She continued to pack the suitcase. She didn’t bother folding anything. This was not for a pleasure cruise. This was to get the heck out. Fast. Sort it all out later. If she stopped now, she might not do it at all.

  Boyd Martin had a hold on her. When he was sober, he was more caring than any guy she’d ever been with — which wasn’t so many, but by comparison he stood out. The others wanted one thing, and only wanted that as long as they didn’t have to look at her face too much. Boyd, she always felt, wanted her.

  When he was sober.

  The first time he took her to dinner, he’d put his hand softly on her face, his palm over the scar that ran from the corner of her left eye in a half-moon to the corner of her lips. He said, “You’re beautiful.” The way he said it wasn’t just a line. Or maybe she just wanted to believe it wasn’t.

  When he was sober, he could make her believe almost anything.

  But when he drank, he was Mr. Hyde. And he made her drink with him. The drinking dulled the pain when he screamed at her, so she figured it was worth it. But it stopped being worth it last night. It was one too many episodes, like the shot that takes you from drunk to passed out.

  All over horticulture.

  She was reading a gardening book, late, when he got home from the poker game. Boyd played on Fridays at a house in South Pasadena.

  He came into the apartment smelling of beer and cigar smoke. And he wanted her in bed. She said no, she had to read her book.

  It was an excuse, but partly true. The one thing she looked forward to when they got married — someday — was having a house with a garden. She’d always loved plants and flowers. They were a way of making something beautiful, something she would never be. Gardening was a way to feel beauty, and ever since she could remember, that was what she wanted to feel.

  Boyd grabbed the book, looked at it, cursed. She asked for it back and he slapped her.

  The blow was stunning in its suddenness and in its anger. He had come close to hitting her before, and once pushed her down on the bed.

  Now this.

  He looked surprised for a second, then got a hard look and said, “This is an apartment, you dummy. We don’t have no house for a garden, so quit reading about it.” He threw the book across the room. It hit the table where they kept a cup of loose change. The cup spilled and coins hit the hardwood floor like a hard, metallic rain.

  The sound of which only fueled Boyd’s inner fire. “Clean that up!”

  She cleaned it up because she didn’t want to fight and because she wanted him to pass out before he asked her again to get into bed with him.

  She knew she had to get out. As much as she wanted to still believe in him, she had to leave. Today.

  But she hadn’t expected Boyd to come home in the middle of the afternoon, hammered.

  She faced him now. “Boyd, we need some time away from each other.”

  “Stupid thing t’say,” he said.

  She scooped her underwear from the top drawer of the bureau and tossed it in the suitcase.

  “Stop!” he ordered. His six-foot-four-inch frame filled the bedroom door. Before his stomach developed its beer-soaked circumference, he’d been a pretty fair linebacker. Played one season for the University of Utah, then dropped out of school.

  He’d been making good money working for a pool ser vice, getting some Beverly Hills and Brentwood accounts. But the drinking, always the drinking. He’d been fired recently for downing shots of Jack Dan-iels, then falling into a pool and almost drowning.

  Rocky said, “I think it’s a good idea if we take some time to think things out.”

  “You can think right here.”

  “I can’t.”

  He called her a name.

  “I’m going to stay with Geena for a while,” she said.

  She turned to the bureau again. Boyd came up behind her, his boot heels banging the hardwood floor like muffled gun blasts. She whirled as he threw the suitcase over the bed. The contents spilled on the floor.

  “You and me, we’re gonna talk it out right here,” he said.

  “Boyd, don’t.”

  “Chill, spill, take a pill.”

  He was going into his bad rapper routine. Boyd thought for a time he could make it as a buffer version of Eminem. He lacked only two things — talent and sobriety.

  Speaking softly, Rocky said, “Baby, listen. Just some time to think. We haven’t had that for a long time.”

  His eyes were flame red. He kept blinking. “You think you can do better?” he said.

  “That’s not what this is about,” she said. “Look, let’s set a date, next week, we’ll go out to Miceli’s and have dinner.”

  Maybe there was still a chance with him. She loved him, right? Wanted to love him. Wanted it to be right and to last.

  “Don’t go,” he said and sat heavily on the bed. Little boy lost. That’s what they were, two lost people who’d found each other. It wasn’t good that way. At least one of them had to know where they were going.

  She sat next to him and put her arm around his shoulder. He was shaking. “Come on, baby. It’ll be good this way for a while. Just a while, huh?”

  Boyd said nothing.

  “I could try to get more work,” she said. If she tried, she could get more files. Maybe even the singing thing would finally happen for her. She could dream, right?

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  “We’ll talk soon.”

  “No, I mean it, don’t go. No go, that’s what I said.”

  He stood.

  She stood.

  “Let me call you tonight,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  She put her hand on his cheek.

  He slapped it away.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Let’s go out somewhere,” he said.

  Rocky turned, shaking her head. She had to pick up the suitcase and start packing again. This was pointless.

  “Wait.” He closed the suitcase. “Let’s cool off, huh?”

  “I’m cool now.”

  “One hour. Will you give me one hour?”

  “No.”

  He sat on top of the suitcase. “Now that’s just not nice.”

  “Get off the suitcase, Boyd.”

  He smiled.

  “Don’t act like this,” she said.

  “You don’t act like this.”

  He grabbed her wrist, pulled her and twisted her, so she sat on his lap. He kissed her, clumsy and hard. She turned her face away.

  “Come on,” Boyd said. His arms were around her, tight.

  He kissed her again. She let him. Kiss it all away, she thought. All the bad. Make me believe we can make something out of this dirty, stinking mess.

  His foul breath filled her nostrils. She thought she might retch. She pushed his chest, hard, and in doing so fell backward, sprawling on the floor.

  “See?” Boyd said. “Don’t fight.”

  He reached for her b
ut she scrambled away. She got to her feet, grabbed her purse. If she didn’t keep going, she thought, she never would. And in not going, she’d die a little.

  She heard him grunting. Heard the boots on the floor. She rushed out the door before he could reach her.

  She walked fast, up her dismal street toward Franklin Avenue. She caught a glimpse of the Hollywood sign. The noted landmark, the beacon of dreams for so many, now a mocker of her own dreams of being a singer.

  What prospects did this town have for her anymore? And who was she kidding? Life was unfair, and she’d been dealt cards from the bottom of the deck.

  She was eight when the dog mauled her. She’d been playing in the backyard, making houses for bees. They had bees who liked the blossoms of the apricot tree, and she thought she’d make houses on the ground out of leaves and sticks. She thought she’d get a little honey later and put a few drops inside. The bees would catch on and find a nice home, courtesy of Roxanne Julie Towne.

  She heard the cracking of wood.

  The Townes had a fence between their house and the Lloyd family. Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd were nice, but they had a son, Rick, who was fifteen and not very nice. He already had tattoos and a bunch of friends who made noise late into the night.

  Now there was another crack, and a plank in the fence kicked up like a dancer’s leg. Went back down, then up again.

  A snout came through. A dog. A black dog. One she’d seen before and been scared of.

  One that she wanted to stay away from.

  It turned toward her, snarling. She always wanted to be friends with dogs. She loved dogs.

  This dog didn’t want to be friends.

  It charged.

  Roxanne screamed and tried to get up to run, but her foot slipped on the bee house.

  Then the dog was on her. She could still remember the saliva and the teeth, but nothing else until she woke up in the hospital.

  Rocky was almost to Franklin now. As she sometimes did, without wanting to, she thought about what her life would have been like without the scar. No kids shouting “scar face” at her. No spending her childhood and adolescence isolated in her own inner world.

  Maybe she would have had a boyfriend, a senior prom, college, a recording contract, a movie even.

  Yeah, she thought. And maybe unicorns dance on rainbows.