“Listen to me, Airy,” GT said. “I’ll tell you something that only I could know. Look under the top center drawer of your mother’s bureau in the bedroom. Read what I wrote and see when I wrote it. Look at the pictures, and then dig where I say.”
“Top center drawer,” I said to make sure I got it right.
“If that doesn’t prove it, you will never know happiness.”
After that I went to bed. GT said he’d rested enough and that he wanted to stare at my books to see if he could remember how to read.
From the moment my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. I dreamed about Shelly. She was on her knees before Thomas Willens. He had a huge black erection (which was odd, because he’s a white guy), and she was naked with her hands tied behind her back. She was sucking and kissing his hard-on passionately. It was as if she had been starving and this was her first meal in many days.
14
GT was gone when I woke up. He had taken One Hundred Years of Solitude from its place on the shelf. There was also a sweater missing, but he’d left my tennis shoes.
Shelly hadn’t sent me any more notes, so I logged off. I made a bowl of sweet oatmeal and topped that with sliced bananas that I grilled in the broiler. But by the time I sat down to eat, I had no appetite.
When I was in the shower, the bandage on my sliced finger lost its stick and fell off. That was the first time I realized that my hands no longer hurt. You could still see where the razor wire had cut, but the skin underneath had healed. The swelling was gone. There was crust from the scab, but that just brushed off like sand. My smashed nail was almost completely healed. I remember thinking that at least I was healing well.
I seemed to be over Shelly, and Nella was now in my life. The crazy kid was gone. Maybe I’d even call AT&T and get a job working in Visual Basic or Web design.
It wasn’t until about ten that I thought about the top center drawer of my mother’s bureau.
I loved my mother, but she had always been distant, like the moon. I had never had long talks with her, and she didn’t seem to understand emotional pain. If I was sick, she’d take my temperature. If I had a fever, she gave me children’s aspirin. But if I was heartbroken over some little girl, she’d just say, “In a hundred years, none of this will matter.”
I had always thought that my mother was immune to passionate love. That’s why the thought of her having an affair was so strange to me. Her role was one of regularity and emotional invulnerability.
She went to work at the Olympic Gazette every morning at eight-thirty, came home for a forty-five-minute lunch at one, and then went back to work until at least six but more often until eight or nine. She never got sick or lazy. She never varied her schedule for anything unless somebody in the family was ill.
I hurried off to the pottery studio and had finished most of my chores before Nella arrived.
Instead of saying hello, she kissed me. I liked that.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“Your father?”
“GT. He took a book and a sweater and went on his way.”
“No. He wouldn’t do something like that.” Nella’s disbelief almost convinced me that he might be there when I returned home.
“You sound like you know him,” I said.
“He talked a lot while you were getting your mother,” Nella said. “He told us about the giant life of numbers under the ground. He said that that life was bubbling up and all of our fears for all the years we’ve been here would soon melt away. He said that all of the dreams human beings have had would be realized and then seen as paltry things.”
“And that means he wouldn’t just leave?”
“He told us how much he loved you and Angelique. He wanted to spend time with you.”
“But did he tell you about his mission?” I asked.
“No.”
“Last night he said that he’d been given a mission. But that he didn’t remember what it was yet.”
“What mission?”
“Yeah. One shudders to think.”
“Is that why you’re here so early?” Nella asked me. “Because your father was gone and you were lonely?”
“He’s not my father. He’s a nut. And I came in early because I have to go do something.”
“What?”
“File my divorce papers.”
“Oh.” Nella smiled. “Now that you’re a free man, you will want to bed every woman you can.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to sleep with a hundred women. All of them named Nella Bombury.”
That made the island woman grin.
I got to my mother’s apartment at 1:55. My sister and I both had keys. I knocked to be sure, but nobody answered. I went in through the front door and down the left hall, which ended at my parents’ door. The furniture in my parents’ bedroom had not changed since I could remember. There was a queen-size bed, a small maple desk, and a maple bureau with a wide mirror and three rows of drawers. I pulled out the top middle drawer, half expecting to find nothing while hoping for another memory from my father through his bastard son.
There was a manila folder taped to the underside of the drawer. The tape was yellowed and brittle. It had obviously been there for many years. The tape broke away when I tried to peel it off, and the folder fell into my hands. I sat there in a half-lotus position, afraid, suddenly, of what I might have found.
There was a full-length mirror leaned up against the wall across from me. I watched myself for a moment or two, wondering how I might have kept from coming to this place and time. Maybe if I hadn’t gone to the graveyard. I tried to think my way back to that decision, but it was gone, and I was there like a thief in my mother’s house, unable to stop moving forward.
The folder contained a dozen eight-and-a-half-by-eleven glossy black-and-white photographs and a letter penned in purple ink.
The detective had found a way to put a hole in the wall of the motel room where my mother and Bobby Bliss had their trysts. He had probably taken hundreds of photos, but these twelve were certainly the most damning.
At first I didn’t think it was my mother. Maybe, I thought, the detective had fooled my father by showing him pictures of another woman with Bobby Bliss—a woman who resembled his wife. But looking closer, I saw that it was her. It was just that she was unfamiliar to me because I’d never seen that kind of ardor in her face. One shot after another showed her contorted visage, her adoring his erection, her slung over his shoulder, her screaming and begging for his touch.
My mother’s lover was a bronze-colored man with a shaven head and big muscles. He had a thick mustache that would have made women think he was handsome.
I imagined how my father must have felt and how my mother would feel if she knew that pictures like this existed. I determined never to tell her.
But that was before I read the letter.
September 19, 1984
This letter is a confession penned by Arthur Bontemps Porter III on the date above. I write these words while my wife is sleeping in her bed. Our bed. I don’t know who will read this or under what circumstances, but these are the pictures that have driven me to a terrible act. My wife has made me a cuckold and has therefore given me no other way out.
The man in the pictures with Maddie is Robert Randolph Bliss, an unemployed maintenance man who lived in Culver City. For a short while he worked at the hospital where my wife’s brother was operated on. I suppose that is where the affair began. I think it must have gone on for a long time. For months I suspected but said nothing. When I finally confronted her, she lied and said that they had parted. But while I was at work, they would still meet. I hired the detective and he brought me the proof.
I went to Mr. Bliss and offered him twenty-five thousand dollars to break it off with my wife. I told him that I wanted a letter from him that I could deliver into her hands. The letter would say that he was leaving her, that he never loved her.
I had saved that twenty-five thousand for us to travel aro
und the world, first-class. But I was willing to throw it away on revenge.
I met Bliss in our home while my wife was away, thinking she was going to meet him. He made a date with her and then brought me the letter. I gave him the cash in a big plastic folder. While he was counting his lucre, I shot him in the left eye.
I buried him, along with all the other evidence, under the wood floor of the back room in the garage.
I put Bliss’s note in an envelope with Maddie’s name typed on it, and sealed it. When she came home, I gave it to her. I told her that I found the note under our door when I came home. She cried all night, telling me that it was her time of month. I comforted her with a whiskey and some nice words, knowing all the while that I had slaughtered her Mr. Bliss and put him in a garbage-bag coffin not ten feet from where she started her car.
In the next few months she will be sad. Bliss’s family, if he has any, will also rue his disappearance.
He’s dead and gone and Maddie is inconsolable.
I’ve had my revenge but I feel no better for the retribution. I realize that she was lost to me before ever meeting that man. Now that I have killed him, I know that if he were alive again, I’d let him live. Because I know now that there is no cure for the pain.
Arthur Bontemps Porter III
The floorboards were loose in the toolroom at the back of the garage. I cleared the dirt away from the corpse with only a broom. He was wrapped in six garbage bags tied together in the center to keep him from smelling up the area. The skin had shrunk up next to his bones. Upon his chest lay a corroded .22 pistol, the murder weapon. Next to the body bags was a plastic envelope that held the twenty-five thousand dollars, all in twenty-dollar bills.
The guilt my father felt kept him from holding on to the money. He probably threw it down in a last moment of passion. Or maybe he buried it later, hoping somehow to serve penance for the damage he’d done.
15
“It is a crime to disturb a crime scene, Mr. Porter,” Detective Lehman Burke said to me a few days later.
I was sitting in the third-floor interrogation room of the Wilshire Precinct.
I had called the police the day after finding the letter and the corpse. At first I thought that I could just let it go. It was a crime of passion, committed over twenty years ago. The murderer was dead, had been for nine years.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night. I kept remembering my father’s brief reference to Bobby Bliss’s family. His mother or sister or maybe even his children who never knew what became of him.
The next morning I went to my mother after a brief visit with Nella.
My mom read the letter once and handed it back to me.
“That boy told you about this?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Call the police,” she told me.
And I did.
“I know that, Officer Burke,” I said. “But you have to understand. The person who told me about the letter was very irresponsible, and I had no reason to believe that Mr. Bliss was actually dead. As a matter of fact, I had never heard of him before a few days ago.”
“You should have called the police,” he insisted.
“Well, I didn’t,” I said. “I looked where the letter said to look.”
“And you didn’t call us for twenty-four hours,” Burke added.
“I know. I didn’t see where it mattered. That man was my mother’s lover, and he was murdered by my father. You can see where I might have had some conflict at bringing up so much pain.”
“The law is the law, Mr. Porter.”
Burke was a Negro, as am I. The same tone but not the same color, exactly. Where my skin has a maple-brown hue, he had more of an ashen undertone. He had a slender build and a thick mustache like Bobby Bliss had. He smoked one cigarette after another directly under a NO SMOKING sign, but I didn’t complain.
“Did you find anything in the grave with him?” Burke asked. “Other than the gun, I mean.”
“No. Like what?”
“I don’t know. He said in the note that he put all the evidence in the grave with Bliss. Sounds to me like he could have meant the money.”
“I don’t know what he did with the money,” I said. “I have no idea.”
Burke stared hard at me.
I tried not to look guilty.
Finally he said, “Tell me more about this young man you call GT.”
I went through the story again, telling him about the late-night calls and the meeting at the graveyard. I told him about all the things GT seemed to know concerning our family and my suspicion that he was the son of a second family in Georgia.
“And he was the one who told you about this letter?” Burke asked for the twentieth time.
“Yes. He told me about it the night before he left.”
“On his mission?”
“Yes.”
“It sounds crazy,” Burke said. Then he paused to see if I wanted to change any part of my story.
“It sure does,” I agreed.
“And you didn’t find any money in the grave?”
“No, sir.”
“And you knew nothing about the murder before you read the letter?”
“I was a child when that letter was written.”
“And you have no idea who this GT is?”
“He told me that he was my father,” I said. “He said that he rose up out of the grave.”
“And you say he stayed at your apartment for a few days?”
“Two,” I said. “Two days.”
“Mr. Porter,” Burke said rather formally, “would you give a team of my men permission to search your house?”
“My house? The body was at my mother’s place. He’s been dead twenty years. What could you possibly find at my house?”
“So you refuse?” Detective Burke inquired.
“No,” I said. “I can even tell you there’s a tumbler on my sink that GT was the last one to touch. I haven’t been to my house much since the body was found. My mom, you know. She needs the company.”
And that was that. The police took my keys and searched the house, looking for GT’s fingerprints and maybe the cash my father mentioned. My mother, who had always been removed and aloof, entered a period of grief that made her seem like a completely different woman. She’d read my father’s confession many times over. She even went out to see the body before the police came.
“What did you think happened to him?” I asked her on the first night after she learned about the murder.
“I thought he’d left me. That’s what the note said.”
“And you never suspected anything?”
“No,” she said.
“Did you love him?”
She was silent for many long minutes before answering. “Bobby was a wild man. He carried a straight razor in his pocket and sometimes a gun. He was working as a janitor at the hospital where Uncle Mortie had gone for open-heart surgery. He was nice to me, and after Mortie got better, Bobby called one day. He said that he was in the neighborhood and wanted to drop by. For some reason, I just couldn’t say no.”
“He was so wild that you thought he might just have run away one day?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I was so sad, and your father was very kind to me.” My mother had a broken look. “Now I suppose that was all guilt. But I’m sure those pictures cut him way down deep.”
“Why didn’t you and Dad break up?”
“We loved each other in our own way,” she said. “And . . .
and . . . there was you and Angie. Our problems didn’t have to be yours, too.”
I took the twenty-five thousand dollars to Nella’s house right after I decided to tell my mother about the crime. I told Nella that she could have three thousand just to hold on to it for me.
“I’ll hold all of it,” Nella told me. “I only take what money I have earned.”
I don’t know why I took the mo
ney. Maybe I was afraid the police would have kept it, or maybe I thought that seeing the money Bobby Bliss agreed to take would break my mother’s heart. But looking back on it, I guess it was because I was so broke, and in some way it felt like a gift from my father to keep me from sinking too low.
Except for the past mayhem, things weren’t too bad. GT was gone. The world was looking better. I had a line of gold-and-green celadon-glazed mugs thrown on the wheel and then altered to look something like fat Chinese ducks. I’d thrown and fired over six hundred mugs and planned to sell them at the street fair for twelve dollars each. It wasn’t a lot of money, after expenses, but at least it was a start.
I visited Angie a little more often, and about every other night I spent wining and dining the lovely Ms. Bombury with money I’d stolen from a murdered man’s grave.
16
The phone rang at two-thirty the morning before the crafts sale. I was up wrapping and boxing mugs for the show. The bell at that hour gave me a chill. As the days had gone by, I’d begun to be afraid of GT. He was obviously crazy; mentally unstable and physically very strong—a bad combination. He had information about me and my family that I’d never suspected. And even though I knew he couldn’t have had anything to do with Bobby Bliss’s death, I still associated him with that violent act.
I let the phone go to the answering machine so as not to have to speak if it was GT on the line.
“Errol, this is Lon. If you’re there, pick up.”
There was noise in the background that made it plain my sister’s husband wasn’t calling from their home.
“What is it, Lon?”
“It’s Anj. She’s real sick.”
“Where are you?”
The Wave Page 6
