When she died she left no unfinished business that I knew of. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, no underwear at the foot of the bed. Her will was recently prepared and seemed to accurately reflect the state of her mind. I saw a bumper sticker on a 4 × 4 in an Albertson’s parking lot the other day: “Are you prepared to meet your maker?” it said. “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven or hell?” A more relevant question for Joan might be: “Would your house be dirty if you died tonight, your nest a mess?”
Joan’s house was immaculate—that’s how prepared she was. She didn’t need me to do her cleaning, only her distributing. The place was delicate, neat, cluttered with knickknacks and polished furniture with spindly legs. The obligatory R. C. Gorman print of a melancholy woman was on the wall. The air was stale and thick with something that made breathing difficult: must, maybe, but there aren’t any mold-producing seasons in Albuquerque. It was tempting to walk out of there, close the door behind me, turn the whole place over to an auction house and have them send everyone a check, but I didn’t.
I went instead to the desk that was earmarked for Sylvia Hamel, a cousin in Ithaca, New York, opened a drawer and moved on to the next question, not how prepared anyone is to die but whether they had lived. If Joan had lived, I hadn’t noticed; I hadn’t looked. It’s a voyeuristic feeling to be going through somebody else’s desk, a guilty thrill like sneaking a peek at a lover’s papers after he’s gone to work, because there is always the possibility you will come across something you’ll wish you hadn’t. Along with the receipts of paid bills and little boxes stocked with paper clips, erasers and rubber bands, I found a book with a pink and yellow flowered cover. “The Journal of Joan Hamel, Her Thoughts on Birds and Life” was written neatly on a white label with a fine-tipped pen. Dig deeply enough into someone’s closed drawers and you find an aspiring writer. I knew a woman once who went to a workshop in Santa Fe to learn to keep a journal. She was told to appoint someone she trusted to destroy it when she died, so family and friends wouldn’t find all the mean things that had been written about them. Apparently Joan hadn’t trusted anyone that much; on the other hand maybe she hadn’t written anything nasty, or maybe the journal had been programmed to self-destruct at the touch of a slandered family member.
Being a likely candidate I was about to gingerly pick it up when the phone rang once, twice, a loud twang that cut through the stale air, a wrong number or a computer, maybe, reaching out into consumerland to sell a lifetime supply of Kodak film, or to offer a free trip to Florida if I could only identify the tune. Everyone who knew Joan knew she was dead, they’d been at the funeral. The estate shouldn’t be paying for a phone that wasn’t used; I made a mental note to tell my secretary, Anna, to get it disconnected. Three rings, four. The National Enquirer says the dead tap into Mountain Bell, call up sometimes and report from the other side. I picked it up.
“Is Joan home? This is March Augusta calling.” It was a friendly voice, Western, masculine, a voice with space and time in it, a voice that sounded like it had something to give, nothing to sell, a new refinement, maybe, in telemarketing. I waited a moment to see if the program would continue. It didn’t, so I spoke to the pause. “Where are you calling from?”
“Fire Pond, Montana. Is Joan out?”
“Uh… no.”
“Something wrong?” It was a kind, concerned voice, youngish, though, for Joan.
“You a friend of hers?”
“Yes, I am. I’m an outfitter and a naturalist in Montana. Joan has been on a number of my field trips. Is she sick?”
“Worse. She’s dead. A massive coronary, last week.”
“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It was sudden. She didn’t suffer,” I added stupidly.
“It’s hard to believe. Joan had such stamina. She was a great woman, one of my most knowledgeable birders.”
“Joan?”
“You bet. We all have to die sooner or later, but it’s a real shame it happened now. We’ve got a bird in Montana this fall that Joan’s been wanting to see, an Arctic gyrfalcon. They rarely come this far south and hardly ever so early in the year, but this one has been hanging around. It’s a rare opportunity because ordinarily you’d have to go all the way to the Arctic to find one. It’s a prime specimen, too, an extremely large and rare white female, a passager on its first migration. Joan was coming up next week. She’d paid for the trip and everything. I was just calling to give her some last-minute information. I feel real bad about this because to see this bird was Joan’s dream and now it won’t come true.” Apparently they liked to talk in Montana. Well, it was his dime. “Are you related?”
“I’m her niece.”
“Oh, wait a minute, I know. She told me about you. You’re the lawyer, right? And you’ve got a man’s name. Raymond? Michael?”
“Neil,” I said.
“Joan was real proud of you.”
“Of me?” That was a surprise, coming as it was from a woman who’d once told me I’d had more than enough men in my life and also that my old friend Cuervo Gold wasn’t doing me any good.
“She thought you were a modern woman, brave and independent. She talked about you a lot, like you were the daughter she’d never had. I’d like to make a contribution in her name to the Falcon Fund, it’s a cause she believed in.”
“Why not? No point in sending flowers.”
“A portion of the money she paid for this trip was actually going into the Falcon Fund, but I’d be glad to return all of it, if you think I should, although the plane ticket’s probably a discount fare that’s nonrefundable.”
“If the fund was something Joan cared about they can have the money.”
“It seems too bad. Since the trip is going to take place anyway, someone should take advantage of it. Would you like to come?”
“Me? A birding expedition?”
“Why not? You a couch potato?”
There was a time when I used to go on trips at the drop of a telephone and even go hiking, too. “I think I could keep up wherever Joan could. She was my aunt, you know, a good thirty years older than I am.”
“Geriatrics isn’t a requirement to come on a field trip. We take all ages. You got something better to do next week?”
“I do have a law practice.” What was on next week? Another real estate closing, divorce negotiations.
“Well, if there’s any way you could come, we’d love to have you. Joan thought a lot of you and it would have made her real happy to know you were taking her place. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“Give me your number and I’ll think about it,” I said. I picked up the journal and the airline ticket that had been lying underneath it, and I left the house where the air had a taste not of mold but of guilt.
******
When I got to the frame and stucco building on Lead that I call office it was lunchtime. My partner, Brink, and my secretary, Anna, had gotten Grande Macs to go from McDonald’s. The hamburgers, fries and green chile weren’t visible in the mound of cartons and paper on Anna’s desk, but they were there—I knew it from the deep fat smell. Brink’s vanishing belt buckle indicates that he fat- and carbohydrate-loads regularly, but not in preparation for any road race or for attacking the work load on his desk. A messy desk doesn’t necessarily mean the person who sits behind it does anything.
Anna carries her junk food well. She likes short skirts and tight pants that show she is no more than a size six. Her hair, however, is size twenty, but today she was wearing it pulled back in some kind of lavender pouf that matched her nail polish. With her long, dagger-shaped nails she picked out a French fry.
“You want one?” she asked.
uNo,” I replied, having made a lunch stop at Baja Tacos. They were having a burrito sale, but I’d limited myself to one, which I held in a paper bag in my hand. The mingled food odors could make any client who wandered in wonder what kind of junk food palace he or she had stumbled onto, New Mex picante or
American grease. Clients didn’t wander in, however—Anna told me so daily. You had to go out and find them. I’d been out and what I’d found was a phone that needed to be disconnected.
“Anna, would you call Mountain Bell and tell them to disconnect my aunt Joan’s phone?”
“You mean … now?” She bit slowly into the Grande Mac.
“After you finish lunch, naturally. Tell them to send the last bill to me.”
“You got it.”
“How’s that matter going?” asked Brink, blinking slowly behind his aquarium-strength glasses.
“Okay. I may have to go to Montana next week.”
“Montana? What for?”
“Some unfinished business of Joan’s.” Brink looked worried, a permanent condition for him. “Don’t worry, if I go the estate will pay for it.”
“But who will take care of your caseload?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You got something better to do?”
“Well,” he sniffed, “I do have clients of my own.”
None that I’d noticed lately. Anna finished her lunch, crumpled up the wrappers and threw them away. “You got some messages,” she said, handing over the pink slips.
“Thanks.”
“Oh, yeah, one more. Your mechanic called and said he’d come by later.”
“Car problems … again?” asked Brink.
“Maybe,” I replied. I went into my office, closed the door, unwrapped and ate the burrito, then flipped through the messages. Nothing there that couldn’t wait until later this afternoon or next year. I looked at my desk calendar for the week to come. Judy Bates Larrow was working on her second divorce, which should be a cinch now that she had some experience. Toni Arrowsmith was closing on her condo, a routine matter—even Brink could handle that.
I got out the ticket I’d found in Joan’s desk, round trip Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Fire Pond, Montana. An airline ticket is as good as cash, unless it’s a discount fare that can only be used from noon Monday to noon Thursday, that must be paid for at least a week in advance, and that—at a savings of several hundred dollars—is nonrefundable. It’s the only way I fly. Anybody who got her hands on one of these tickets couldn’t cash it in, but she could use it. Why should the airline get the estate’s money for nothing when it could fly me to Montana? I turned the calendar page to Tuesday, November 12, and on it I wrote “Falcon?”
I did some paperwork, took some calls. By the time I left the office at six, Anna and Brink were long gone. The message from the mechanic, a.k.a. the Kid, my lover, my friend, meant he was coming for dinner, a habit he’d fallen into as soon as I started keeping food in the house. I was ready for him with chips in the cupboard and Tecate in the fridge, but I had a stop to make on the way home.
Albuquerque is a logical city with perpendicular streets named after the elements (Silver, Gold, Copper, Lead), the states (Wyoming, Louisiana, New York), the numbers (First, Second, Third). It lies near (but not near enough to be shadowed by) the Sandias, elephantine hulks of gray mountains. I turned my Rabbit down Coal, cut across descendingly numbered streets and headed for the drugstore on Central.
What I wanted was behind the cash register, which meant I’d have to ask. The guy manning the register had a Neanderthal physique: a massively boned forehead, a short thick neck and long arms. The kind of guy who picks up a club when he’s hungry, throws on a skin when it’s cold, punches you in the shoulder—hard—when he wants you, a cul-de-sac on evolution’s highway. Not the person to entrust with your deeper feelings or more subtle thoughts. But it was minimum-wage work, a job that probably paid between $3.60 and $3.80 an hour depending on experience. What could you expect?
“I’ll take a box of those,” I said, pointing to what I wanted.
“Skin or latex?”
What was the difference? “I don’t care.”
He sized me up: messy hair, makeup that had gone south, lawyer’s clothes. “Latex,” he said. “Receptacle end?”
“Why not?”
He laid the box on the counter, the happy couple silhouetted against a pink and aqua sunset. “You’re in luck. They’re on sale this week for $3.99 a box.”
“Two for $10?” I asked, this being the very same drugstore that advertised stick-on digital clocks, one for $1.98 or two for $5.00.
“Just because I have a short neck and sloping forehead doesn’t mean I’m stupid,” the guy said, taking my money.
“Just because I’m buying condoms doesn’t mean I’m smart,” I replied.
******
The Kid sat on my sofa corroding the top of his Tecate can by pouring salt on it and squeezing lime juice on top of that, dipping blue corn chips in the red-hot salsa.
“Kid, I may be going to Montana next week,” I said.
“Montana? Why you go there?” Taos was the northern limit of his range. Now that it was November and winter coming on, make that Corrales.
I sat down, cleared a place on the coffee table for my bottle of Cuervo Gold and a glass. I took the salt and rubbed a little on the rim of the glass, splashed some Gold over the ice. “Well, my aunt Joan died—I told you that.”
He nodded, sipped at the rotting aluminum.
“A guy in Montana… ”
“What guy?”
“A friend of Joan’s, an outfitter, a nice guy. He was leading a field trip she was going on to look at a rare bird.”
“What she do that for?”
“I don’t know. Why do people do anything? Some people spend their lives hiking into remote places wearing sneakers and carrying binoculars. They keep a record of all the birds they see and call it a life list. The one who has the most birds, especially rare ones, on his or her life list wins.”
The Kid shrugged, made no sense to him.
“Anyway, Joan was planning on going on a field trip next week. She’d already paid for it. It was her dream to see this particular bird, and since it was her dream and she didn’t live to do it, and since the guy probably doesn’t want to return the money, he asked me if I’d go.”
“What’s this guy’s name?”
“March.”
“That’s a month, not a name.”
“What difference does it make? I’m not going because of him, I’m going because I feel guilty that I never paid any attention to Joan while she was alive and because this trip was her unfulfilled dream and you shouldn’t just trash people’s dreams when they go.”
The Kid mulled that over for a minute, or at least I thought he did, but when he spoke it turned out his mind was on birds, too, and dreams. For small creatures, lighter than air, birds carry a lot of symbolic baggage. They always have.
“I used to keep pigeons, Chiquita, when I was a boy on my rooftop in Mexico.”
I never knew that, as the Kid rarely talked to me about his childhood; when he did there was a faraway light in his eyes.
“I had a pigeon once, Blanca. She was bigger than all the birds. She won a lot of races, all the way from Querétaro, one hundred and fifty miles.”
I had a vision of Blanca flying over purple mountains, flat mesas, high above the route so treacherous to buses and burros and people. The white pigeon and her black shadow, circling the plaza in colonial Querétaro and returning to her Kid on the edge of the biggest slum in the Western world.
“When I come up here my brother go up on the roof and break their necks—like that.” The Kid snapped his black-tipped mechanic’s fingers.
I flinched. “That’s terrible.”
He shrugged, but the faraway light had gone out. “He killed her, too. There was no one to feed them or fly them after I come here. So you going?” He gestured north toward Montana, the bigger sky, the wilder West.
“I guess so.” It wouldn’t be the first week that we hadn’t met. What was bothering the Kid? I took one last sip of my tequila and put the glass down. “Why don’t we go to bed,” I said.
We were deep in the retrograde eighties and there was a kille
r virus on the loose aimed at the gay, the addicted, the black, the Hispanic, the alien, the adventurous. Responsibility was the only sane response. No more unsheathed love, no more diaphragm and cream. The sunset box was on the bedside table. “Both you and your partner will be more relaxed knowing you are protected by Trojan brand condoms…” it said. Protection from disease, 99.67 percent reliable when used properly, perfect for those who can or will not remain monogamous.
I sat down on the unmade bed. My speech had been prepared, revised, rewritten, revised again. I am a lawyer after all, careful, precise. Here’s how it went: “Look, Kid, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. We don’t see each other all the time. I never ask you about the rest of your life, you don’t ask me about mine. I don’t want to know. But, maybe, it would be better now if we, um, took precautions, and…”
“You mean you want me to use these things?” He picked up the box with the tips of his fingers like it was something slick and dead.
“Well…”
“I never.” He put the box down.
“Me neither.”
Timing is of the essence in law and in life, only there’s an inner clock and an outer clock. The outer clock is digital, relentless, flashes red numbers, makes appointments, shows up in court on time. It’s the clock that lawyers follow. The inner clock is a pendulum blown off track by every vagrant wind, a lovers’ clock, a poet’s clock, the clock that Latin America runs by. It tells you when things feel right, when they don’t … if you’re willing to listen. I’d planned this speech and scheduled it for tonight, but it had been blown off course; I hadn’t noticed.
“Now you’re going to Montana with this April, so you want me to start using these things?”
“It has nothing to do with that, I was going to ask you anyway.”
“Yeah, I think about it,” he said, taking off his clothes, getting under the covers and turning his back to me.
“Kid . . .”
“I’m tired, we talk in the morning.”
North of the Border Page 17
