Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  She stopped nearby, barely glancing at me. A good thing, for I had those edgy looks. Mostly black hair, go-to-the-devil eyes, nose like a box cutter, all the rest of me—after 47 years on earth--as scuffed as a badly used whip. Hard from long hikes through the desert, rough from work-outs on the heavy bag. To her, I looked reluctant to join Rhea’s current circle of friends, and she felt the same. So we stood together but apart, watching those friends play out their rituals, trying to define the departed life by gauging those left behind.

  To my eye it was not a very edifying sight. To our front, events were unfolding much as I had expected. Grief was not much in evidence. The old woman did not move or speak. As for the rest, there were no tears, only a kind of tortured nervousness. The tall man in the seersucker suit was the most composed, but even he was a poor picture of sorrow. Instead of folding his hands before him in the approved way, he had locked his wrists behind him in a parade-rest attitude. The blazer-clad beefcake—his name was Bracknall—once or twice shuffled his feet as if to walk away, but thought better of it and stayed put. The tarts whispered angrily to each other, no doubt working out some point of procedure. Finally, one snatched the flowers from the other and dropped them by the grave with an air of having satisfied protocol. Her companion cut a sideways glance, clearly disagreeing.

  At long last, when it seemed the afternoon would stretch out forever, that we were in for eternal punishment, suffering Hell without the inconvenience of Judgment Day, the ceremony began to wind down. The priest’s words tailed off in the wind. He crossed himself and murmured. He closed his book and approached the open pit. The group swayed to the front. And, at some signal imperceptible to me, the gravedigger hurried forward, offering a shovel full of dirt. The priest took a handful, so dry that it puffed from his fingers, and flung it downward to strike the lid of the casket. At this point, the young woman with the green hair who had been weeping suddenly fell quiet.

  Silence, at last, and a feeling of relief came over me. The weeping had not been right, now it was done. The world was correcting itself, preparing to move on, and I, more than most, was ready for that.

  Then, from the young woman’s direction, I heard a rustling sound.

  When I half-turned to look, she was bending over her duffel bag, one hand inside, grasping for something. The hand emerged clutching a white silk handkerchief—to blot her tears, I thought. But no. It was a memorial she was after, one of her own making. From her left middle finger she extracted a gold ring and slipped the handkerchief through it to bind the shape she was producing. She smoothed it out, made it perfect. Then she marched past the small group, demonstrating a certainty of purpose that I had not expected. She placed her creation near the grave, anchored it with a small stone, stood silently for a moment, turned and slipped away.

  Though the faces of the proto-mourners were turned from me, their bodies came erect in a peculiar way. They were shocked and so was I. Wherever their interests lay, they knew the truth, and there was something strange about this. Even to the evil, the line between them and the proper world is a comforting one. They rank themselves in terms of their darkness, they know what is appropriate. Black symbols for black deeds, and we all go about our business. But what they saw here—what I saw—was an image of purity and forgiveness and justice. At the edge of Rhea’s entrance to the underworld, the young woman had placed a white cloth angel.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stories never play out exactly as you expect them to, though the writer—particularly, the reporter—struggles constantly to impose his will on the world. This person is bad, that one is good, even the surprise ending is the usual surprise ending; we have seen it all before. Life is a series of formulas that gradually reveal themselves: goodness is the child who turns in the packet of money found on the playground; evil is the senator who cheats the poor; heroism is the airman shot down among enemies who hides in the woods eating bugs until he is rescued.

  I had written my own story about Rhea Montero, written it in my head, that is, because my editors would have deemed it unpublishable. They would have said it was undocumented, and that was true. There were no police reports, e-mail transcripts, internal memos. There were only patterns of action, personal connections, information whispered to me by frightened people, mostly undocumented themselves, who then slipped back into anonymity. But what I did know of the story left no room for a true mourner at Rhea’s funeral. That is why the young woman’s actions vexed me. I had to convince myself she was an anomaly, not the personification of a theme I had missed. That would require some small investigation, but not much. I would grill her, lay a few verbal traps, shock her with my deep knowledge. This should not be difficult. I expected that by early evening the patterns of the world would be re-aligned with those in my brain, and I would be cooling off in red nylon Nike swimming trunks (though I had no pool) sipping a virgin margarita on my saltillo-tiled patio, and wondering gloomily where my next major story was coming from.

  The ceremony was over and the crowd was slipping away. Bracknall glanced furtively at the stranger as he passed, and I saw that he had some interest in her. That was his interest: women—though somewhat younger than this one. I stepped to intercept her before he could make his move. She was bending to collect her duffel bag, sagging a bit now that her rush of emotion was spent. Gravel dust smudged the bag and her sandals, and I sensed she had not expected all this dust.

  “Do you have transport back to town?”

  I use the British expressions when they serve, though my Irish forebears would curse me for being so snuggled–up with the enemy. British-isms give an impression of civility, or of superiority, which in America is the same thing. In this case, I knew the formality would allay fears that I was a sexual predator, though I felt like one because, as usual, the desert had increased my personal intensity. I could smell the odor of sweat and sorrow on her patchouli-scented skin, exuding vulnerability. At close range her blue eyes were deep.

  “No,” she said, easily shouldering the bag. She was strong. Perhaps the green hair went with some avant-garde form of regular exercise—t’ai chi or yoga—and American girls are never ashamed of their strength. “I’d appreciate a ride.” She paused, making sure that I took her meaning and knew her destination. “Back to Phoenix.” She did not know where I had come from, and that again suggested she was an outsider, and possibly useful.

  “Back to Phoenix, yes,” I said, extending a hand. “Michael Callan.”

  “Daly Marcus.” Her palm touched mine gracefully. Another sign of the artist.

  * * * *

  In the car, with the crisp desolation moving by us on either side, she was quiet for a long time. I wanted to break the silence, but these are difficult situations even if you don’t want something from the bereaved. And, as a reporter, I always did. For everyone’s sake, it’s important to strike the right tone, and I did my best, searching my memory for the proper cliché. Finally, I said, brilliantly:

  “She’s gone to a better place, you know.”

  In fact, who knew where she had gone? Daly heard me, but didn’t register the words. Her eyes slipped my way, but they were focused somewhere far in the past. She seemed to be moving along the path of memory as one moves along a shadowy church aisle, the crucified Christ looking down with eyes of plaster. I wanted to draw her away from that path, but how to start? I couldn’t fall back on the dead person’s charming actions: the sock worn in place of a hat, the habit of drawing faces in whipped cream. That was not Rhea. No, the Devil does not eat cotton candy.

  Abruptly, Daly did the job for me, as she was to do so often in the coming days, issuing one of those meaningful glances that I powerfully mistrust.

  “Do you know what a guardian angel is?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course.” I was Irish, after all, and it would be hard to plead ignorance of a tenet of the Catholic faith.

  It was as if she hadn’t heard me
. She was making her own point.

  “It’s an angel God assigns to watch over you,” she said. “Your personal angel. It’s as real as your teeth.”

  Yes, of course.

  “So that’s what you put on Rhea’s grave,” I said. “An image of her personal angel.” What a conflicted angel that must be.

  She shook her head impatiently. “No, of course not. That’s my angel. That’s Rhea herself.”

  I could only stare, so long that I let the car drift. An oncoming car blared its horn, ripped on past us, barely missing. I jerked back on course, my heart hammering.

  “Rhea was my guardian angel,” Daly continued, oblivious. “I wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for her. I wouldn’t be making angels for a living. She was the most important person I ever knew.”

  What was I supposed to say to that? “She was incredibly resourceful.”

  “I’d say.” Her voice broke. “She did things nobody even thought of.”

  And that was certainly true. “You were good friends, then?”

  “Best friends.” No uncertainty. “She was all I had.”

  She curled back toward the window and wept quietly, her shoulders trembling against the printed cotton of her peasant dress, hugging her grief, not willing to distribute it before the world. Mourning her best friend. Mourning a fantasy, I supposed, though that only made her grief more touching—sincerity pursuing falsehood. Rhea had no friends. I kept trying to convince myself otherwise, but that’s what it came down to. And it was unlikely she had shared anything recently with Daly. Daly’s traveling kit, her impromptu arrival at the funeral, indicated she lived far away. Still, she might know something about Rhea, possibly a great deal.

  I desperately wanted that information. I wanted to finish Rhea off, destroy her as a memory. And I wanted to do myself some professional good. Daly might know enough to rescue the story I had labored over for three months. Or at least she might know enough to put me back on track. I thought of the huge, now-ineffectual, file in the antique Steelcase filing cabinet in my bedroom, of the scraps of evidence meticulously gathered, the half-anecdotes, the thin net of information on which I had hoped to build my tale. Without something new, all that work was lost.

  The effort had been ruined by Rhea’s death, which removed a vital story element--“the bad guy.” That’s the person, male or female, who alone is made to shoulder the guilt shared by many people, many social conditions, many accidents of history. Terrible journalists actually believe in “the bad guy.” Excellent ones don’t, but they love the concept. God bless “the bad guy.”

  If you think my understanding of the essential falsity of my profession detracts from my enthusiasm for it, you are wrong. It’s a great game, only intermittently demanding, and it puts food on my table and dollars in my wallet.

  It does, at least, as long as I come up with material no one else can produce. I’m an investigative reporter, you see. But I wasn’t always so. When I arrived in Arizona in 1976, I billed myself as a feature writer, able to turn out poignant stories about life on the streets. And why not? As a kid I’d lived there, hadn’t I? Surviving the low life, I’d learned things no-one should ever know, and the darkness I’d absorbed made my stories quiver and jump. That quality landed me my first Arizona job in a Phoenix suburb, reporting for the Mesa Chronicle.

  Over the years, some of those stories bubbling up from the street carried the whiff of corruption. Illegal immigrants being bled out by extortionate check-cashers, old women losing their savings to religious hustlers, small landholders being bulldozed by gilt-edged developers. The Valley needed some cleaning up and I was just the one to do it, so I thought. Fight the beast, don’t become it. Easier said than done. Phoenix was a nervy place, and its rottenness was intoxicating. I’d lived with the crime and slick dealing and dirty doing, written about the muck, and. gotten too close to it. Covering for sources, rationalizing bad behavior, falling in with false company. The road to perdition is paved with good intentions. I still had my good intentions, though—and I still had my skills. Five years before, those skills had carried me to the big newspaper, the Phoenix Scribe. Now all I had to do was keep my job.

  Daly Marcus could help me with that, if she chose to. I said to her:

  “Would you like a drink?”

  * * * *

  I don’t drink myself, of course. I am not sociable. It’s not that I am against fun, but every drink I don’t take is a fist in my dead father’s face. There’s my fun. There’s my heart’s recreation. There’s the wheel within my wheel. And thank God I’ve had a hard time of it, not drinking. Thank God I’ve been pushed and shoved to drink, because pushing back has made me what I am today.

  If it had been easy not to drink, if I’d fallen in with health fanatics when I was young, my not drinking wouldn’t have been so glorious. But the reporters I partied with in Ireland when I first broke into the business were whiskey bangers and Guinness heads and gin suckers. What sweethearts. They drank and their lips sagged and their noses dripped and their words slurred. I chuckled and slapped them on the back and whacked the bar and drank more club soda. I’d drink seven club sodas and tell them they were falling behind because they’d only had five whiskeys. They would get irritated and point at their temples as if I was crazy. Then they would take the game seriously and they’d drink more and more, trying to match me with a whiskey for every club soda. And the next morning they’d be sagging out of their seats and groaning and rushing for the bathrooms, and I’d be there to steal their prime assignments because they couldn’t perform and I’d feel just fine.

  Even the editors, except for my friend Patrick O’Connell (and how long did he last?), thought I was screwy. They drank, but not as much, because they had old biddies at home who’d kick their backsides if they got drunk and sacked and couldn’t bring home the gelt or otherwise couldn’t perform. And they’d shake their heads about having to send out Temperance Nelly to cover a story instead of a real man. Still, they knew I would deliver. Love me, hate me, despise me, I do the job. A particularly vicious critic would say I have that Protestant work ethic. That’s not true, now. I have the Catholic work ethic. Guilt drives me, and all the ghosts I left behind.

  * * * *

  I don’t drink, but I know all the places to drink. Tempe, though it is a newly-glossed university suburb, still offers the best places in the Valley of the Sun to take alcohol at mid-afternoon if you range outside the downtown plasticked-over by Starbucks, the Cold Stone Creamery and Pizzeria Uno’s. In the mid-1970s, the central area was dowdy and dying, and it offered shabby charm. The hallways of the cheapjack Casa Loma Apartments were clamorous with rock music and loamy with the smells of hoggish sex and hotplate cooking. There was a biker bar in the basement called The Cave full of synthetic stalactites. Up and down the street, head shops mingled with second-hand stores offering low-grade antiques. The Valley Art Theater struggled back and forth between art films and soft porn, gasping for customers. Now you can’t go three steps downtown without tripping over a franchise place, and the Valley Art, preening from a million-dollar makeover, has stadium seating and digital sound. Emerging from a cutting-edge film, you can gobble Fat Burgers and formula pizza and high-butterfat-content ice cream.

  But a few years ago when I escorted Daly there, grunge and desperation were not gone from Tempe. The city still had places that dipped their toes in the gutter, where the atmosphere enveloped me like a comfortable suit that I’d worn until it was out at the pockets. In its distant purlieus were bars frequented by decayed accountants and lost gamblers, bars smelling faintly of stale peanuts and vomited beer, dead-end havens decorated by madmen in themes of Punk’s Citadel, Seafarer’s Roost or Old Circus. Even today, the disreputable descendants of some of these saloons survive, God bless them.

  I took Daly to one of the hardest-edged blast-palaces of the day, the Gigantic Salmon Pub, in a strip mall on University Boulevard
. It had its peculiar charms. In addition to the modern juke, there was an antique Rock-Ola, one of the thrones in the men’s room had a broken horseshoe-cover, and each of those thrones was labeled “Freud’s Mom.” Despite these attractions, the place was almost empty. A male with a high-school body and a 40-year-old drinking face lolled at the bar, making determined passes at a stein of draft. Two seats down, a tourist, apparently dead, had collapsed next to a pitcher of martinis. An old man and an old woman occupied a corner table, staring past each other. Come to the cabaret, old chum. Come to the cabaret.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We took a shadowy booth in the rear, and Daly got a quick gin-and-lime inside her. That surprised me, for it did not fit the picture I had been developing of her personality. I had thought red wine, but she needed hard liquor, and she needed me to know what Rhea, in her view, had been like. And all that led back to the tale in which Rhea had saved her.

  “She could have been killed, but she stepped in,” Daly said. “She didn’t consider herself where I was involved. She always took care of me.”

  She nodded naively, as a child does, asserting a truth heard from an adult. Her cigarette stuttered smoke into the horrid saloon air—not a filtered, half-measure cigarette, but a Camel, the brand I’d smoked before I gave it up. No doubt she was a bundle of inconsistency: t’ai chi, yoga, health food, natural fibers, and the noxious gases grinding down the bronchial tubes. So I’d thought when she borrowed it from the bartender, but I never saw her smoke another. It was simply the extremity of her situation that caused her to grasp at a habit that she, like me, had discarded long before.

  “She was quite courageous, then? I never heard that story.”

  This was a reporter’s trick: letting her believe I had heard many personal stories from Rhea, but not this one, that I had been a Rhea confidant. I had been everything else, but not a confidant. Rhea had been quite close-mouthed on most subjects, especially those that touched on her past. We did everything together for three months, and I learned too much about myself, nothing important about her. Until the end.