“Did he?”
“I swear he did. He’s a good man now . . .”
“Rotten little shit,” Chehalis said.
“Why you looking for him, mister?” Mrs. Chehalis asked me. “What you want with him?”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Talk about what? He ain’t in trouble again; I don’t believe that.”
“No, he’s not in trouble.”
“Then why, mister?”
If I identified myself, told them the real reason I was here, it would likely set him off again, knock her for a loop, and maybe make both of them retreat behind a wall of silence. It was plain that she desperately wanted to forget the rape had ever happened, and that he hadn’t forgotten it or its consequences—the ones he knew about—for a minute in the past twenty-plus years.
I lied, “It’s a legal matter. He may be entitled to a small amount of money.”
“Money, you say?”
“A small amount. It’s complicated, Mrs. Chehalis, and I’d rather explain it to your son. If you could tell me how to get in touch with him—”
“We don’t know how to get in touch with him,” John Chehalis said. “We don’t want nothing to do with that piece of shit, not ever again.”
“Johnny . . .”
“Not ever again, Doris. Not ever again.”
He spat over the railing, wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, and then seemed to draw himself up. “Hell with it,” he said. “Just the fucking hell with it.” He stepped over her legs, clumped down the stairs.
A look of alarm crossed Doris Chehalis’s face. “Oh God,” she said. “Johnny, you come back here, you come back here.”
“Hell with it,” he said, and went off across the lawn and down the edge of the street. Walking fast, then faster, until he was almost running when he reached the corner.
“Oh God,” the woman said again. It was like a moan this time. “Straight to Doniphan’s Bar. He ain’t supposed to drink. He’s got liver troubles; the doctor told him he’ll die if he don’t stop drinking....”
I hesitated. “I could go after him, try to talk him out of it.”
“He won’t listen. He don’t care about nothing but liquor when he gets upset like this. He don’t even care if he lives or dies.”
“The bartender at Doniphan’s know about his condition?”
“He knows. Not up to him to keep a man from drinking, he says. Wouldn’t matter anyway if they quit serving him. He’d just go somewhere else. Drive up to Jackson if he had to. I can’t stop him. Nobody can stop him.” And she started to cry; thin, wet sounds that seemed unnatural in the warm morning stillness.
I didn’t quite know what to do. I felt awkward standing there, with Doris Chehalis’s pain beating against my ears; and I felt bad about myself again. Going to open up the Chehalises’ old wounds too?
It took about three minutes for the weeping to stop. Then, snuffling, Mrs. Chehalis hooked a handkerchief from a pocket in her housedress and blew her nose. The folds of skin on her neck jiggled like a pale, mottled ruff. I looked away. Watching her compose herself was as disturbing as listening to her cry.
“I wish you hadn’t’ve come here,” she said. There was no anger in the remark, or in the one that followed; they were just dull complaints. “I wish you’d’ve found Stevie some other way and left us in peace.”
So did I, but I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Chehalis. I didn’t mean to upset you and your husband. I’m only doing my job.”
“I know. Some money, you said. For Stevie.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll tell you. He’d want me to.”
Money talks; money rules. The lie had tasted bitter in my mouth. So had the words I’m sorry and I’m only doing my job. I’d said them or some variation of them too many times recently. They had the same hollow, defensive ring as the cry of the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials: I was only following orders.
She said, “John, he pretends we don’t know where Stevie lives now. He hasn’t seen our boy in twenty years, don’t ever want to set eyes on him again. I got to sneak away to talk to Stevie on the phone, every couple of months. Last year I took a bus down to Los Gatos to visit him and Sally for two days. Sally’s his wife, a real nice woman. I told John I was visiting my sister in Crescent City. I hate lying to him, but he wouldn’t’ve let me go if I’d told him the truth.”
“Los Gatos,” I said.
“That’s down by San Jose. A real pretty town.”
“Yes, I know.”
“They got a nice house there, up on the side of a hill. It ain’t big but it’s nice, got a real nice view. He works hard, Stevie does—he’s a good provider. All settled down, not a bit wild like he once was. John won’t believe it, just don’t want to let go of his hate for something that happened a long, long time ago. But it’s a fact.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Only thing I wish,” she said, “I wish they’d give me a grandchild. I love kids. Wanted half a dozen myself, but I couldn’t have no more after Stevie. But him and Sally, they never been blessed. Married a long time now . . . I guess they never will be.”
Blessed, I thought. I wondered what she’d say if she knew Stevie had given her a grandchild twenty-three years ago, a grandchild conceived by rape. If anybody ever told her, it would not be me.
I asked, “What does your son do for a living?”
“He’s a salesman. Well, not just a salesman—a district sales representative. That’s a real responsible job.”
“I’m sure it is. What does he sell?”
“Medical supplies. You know, for doctors’ offices and nursing homes and places like that. Travels all over the state, up in Oregon too.”
“For which company?”
“Medi something . . . Med-Equip, that’s it. Short for medical equipment.”
“Located in Los Gatos?”
“San Jose. That’s where his office is.”
“Can you tell me his home address and telephone number?”
“Well, I don’t remember them offhand,” Mrs. Chehalis said. “Used to have a good memory for names and addresses and such, but not anymore. I got Stevie’s written down inside. Hidden where John won’t find the paper.”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble . . .”
“No trouble, not if it means some money for Stevie.” She struggled forward in her chair, struggled to lift herself out of it. I went up onto the porch to help her. “Thank you,” she said. “I got arthritis real bad . . . well, you can see that. Arms and legs, all my joints. Another year and I’ll be in a wheelchair.”
I made no reply, because she didn’t expect one. She wasn’t looking for sympathy, only stating a fact.
She wouldn’t let me help her into the house. Or go inside with her. “It ain’t tidy; I haven’t had a chance to tidy up.” There was a cane propped against the porch railing and she used that for support.
Waiting, I paced the length of the porch. The old wood was spongy with dry rot underfoot. There was the faint smell of jasmine in the air—jasmine and dust and dry rot. The street out front remained empty; not a single car had passed by since I’d been there. What had the Chehalises been watching for when I drove up? Nothing, probably. Nothing in the thin, sad hope of something.
It was five minutes before the screen door flopped open and Doris Chehalis reappeared. In one hand she held a scrap of paper, but before she parted with it she said, “You’ll have to give this back to me. I’d’ve copied everything down for you but I can’t work a pencil so good anymore.”
The address was a number on Eastridge Road in Los Gatos. I wrote it and the phone number in my notebook, and added the name of the San Jose medical supply company. When I returned the paper to Mrs. Chehalis, she tucked it into her dress pocket. As soon as I went away she would take it back inside and hide it again.
“You going straight to Los Gatos to see my boy?” she asked.
“Not today. Possibly tomorrow.”
“We
ll, you tell him Mother sends her love. Tell him I’ll call him real soon. Will you do that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll tell him.”
DONIPHAN’S BAR WAS a hole-in-the-wall on one of the side streets just off Main. Dark, cheerless; the one source of color, an ancient jukebox, had broken, flickering tubes, and the bumper pool table at the rear wore a coat of dust like a child’s abandoned toy. Beer and urine and tobacco odors choked the stagnant air. Empty lives, wasted lives, congregated here to temporarily blot out their troubles, or to try to doctor them with the placebo of cheap alcohol. The bottom of the barrel staring bleary-eyed at the bottom of the bottle.
Half a dozen heads turned my way as I entered, turned away again when the eyes saw I was no one they knew. The one customer who didn’t glance at me was John Chehalis. He sat alone in a booth adjacent to the bumper pool table, holding on to a drink with both hands—hunched over it, surrounding it, like a vulture guarding a chunk of roadkill. His head lifted when I sat down across from him, slowly and without much interest until he recognized me. Then a humorless smile bent one corner of his mouth, dragged it down toward his chin as if an invisible weight had been attached to his lower lip.
“Figured you’d show up,” he said.
“Is that right?”
“Sure. I ain’t as stupid as I look.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
He made a dry, wheezy sound that might have been a chuckle. When it turned into a cough, he raised his glass and drained it. But he wasn’t the fast-guzzling kind of drunk; he was the type who walked his road to oblivion in short strides so that he could spitefully savor each one along the way. The drink he’d just finished was no more than his second since he’d been here. His washed-out eyes were still clear; the brightness in them was cunning, not liquor shine.
He said, “She give you his address?”
“Whose address?”
“The piece of shit’s. Doris give it to you?”
“I thought you didn’t know where your son lives.”
“I know, all right. But she don’t know I know. She don’t think I know she calls him on the phone, either, or been down to see him a few times.” The dry chuckle again. “Ain’t much gets by me,” he said. “Not where he’s concerned.”
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“Not long enough. She tell you how much he’s changed, how hard he works, what a good provider he is?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she’s wrong. Dead wrong. Been lying to herself ever since he was born.”
“In what way is she wrong?”
He said slyly, “Buy me a double shot and I’ll tell you.”
“Your wife says you’re not supposed to drink.”
“That’s right. Be in my grave in a year or two if I don’t quit.”
“Then why don’t you quit?”
“Why should I? Hell, I’m dead already. Been dead for more than twenty years now. I just ain’t been buried yet.”
I had nothing to say to that.
He lit a cigarette, coughed out smoke. “You gonna buy me a double shot? If I’m buying my own, I don’t want company.”
“All right.” It was his coffin. I didn’t like the idea of paying for one of the nails, but he’d meant what he said about not talking if I didn’t.
Chehalis signaled to the bartender. “Another double, Al. Make it Wild Turkey this time. You got any Wild Turkey back there?”
“I got some. You want a chaser?”
“Hell, no.”
I went and got the drink and brought it to him. He sniffed it the way a connoisseur sniffs vintage wine, tasted it with his tongue. “Best damn liquor they make,” he said. “I used to drink it all the time before he ruined things for me.”
“How did your son ruin things for you?”
“You know. Sure you do.”
“How would I? I don’t know anything about your son.”
“Let’s not bullshit each other, okay? Maybe Doris bought that crap about you having some money for him, but I didn’t. I told you, I ain’t as stupid as I look. What are you, some kind of cop?”
“Why would you think that?”
“I know that rotten shit, that’s why. I know him like his mother don’t—she don’t have a clue. What’s he done? Raped some other woman?”
“... You think he’s still raping women?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Do you know of any others besides Jody Everson?”
“Goddamn Everson girl, of all the ones he could’ve picked.” Chehalis jabbed out his cigarette in a chipped ashtray, a bitter, angry gesture, and swallowed more Wild Turkey. “Best job I ever had. Only good job I ever had. And he ruined it, the evil little shit.”
“Evil?”
“You heard me. Evil. What I said before, about stuffing a pillow over his face when he was in diapers—well, I meant it. By Christ, I meant it. Either that or I should’ve broken his miserable neck when he first started getting into trouble.”
“When was that?”
“Nine or ten. Oh, he was a shit even then.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Always smacking other kids. Girls, mostly. Liked to hurt girls with his fists. All right to smack somebody if you got a reason, but he never had a reason. Mean, that’s all, mean clear through. Mean and evil.”
“What about after he left Marlin’s Ferry?”
“Never had nothing to do with him then.”
“So you really don’t know if he kept on attacking women.”
“Sure he did. Sure.”
“But you don’t know it for a fact.”
“Don’t want to know. Not the goddamn details.”
“Or if he’s been arrested since the incident with Jody Everson. Convicted of any crime.”
“Ask him, why don’t you.”
“I may just do that.”
“Sure,” Chehalis said. “Ask him, ask anybody but me. I don’t want to know what he did or does. Unless it’s die. If somebody kills him or he drops dead, then I want to know right away so’s I can buy a bottle of Wild Turkey to celebrate. A whole goddamn bottle to celebrate.”
OUTSIDE I WALKED AROUND the block in the warm sunlight to rid myself of the feel and smell of Doniphan’s Bar. But the cancerous hate of John Chehalis stayed with me long after I’d left lone. How much of what he’d told me was truth and how much the bitter by-product of his hate? Men like Chehalis have to have scapegoats for their shortcomings: the deeper the failure and the greater the bitterness, the more guilty the scapegoat becomes in their eyes. In that respect he was ahead of his time: he belonged in the modern generation, where that attitude has been refined and accepted as part of the group psychotherapy movements. Take little or no responsibility for your own actions, blame all your troubles on your parents, your children, your environment, anything and everybody except yourself.
So which picture of Stephen Chehalis was the true one? His mother’s: a wild but basically good boy who’d “growed up all right”; stable husband, respectable businessman, well-integrated member of society. Or his father’s: evil-born, evil-grown, and still a menace. I wanted to believe Doris Chehalis’s version. If that was the accurate one, then what I could deliver to Stephen Chehalis was something that might be almost as welcome as money—not just the knowledge that he had fathered a daughter, but a chance to do a little honest penance for his youthful sin.
What worried me was the implied pattern of abuse in John Chehalis’s ramblings. He’d used his own fists on his adolescent son, and on the boy’s mother, too; the impression I’d gotten of that was strong. Violence begets violence, cruelty begets cruelty —and sons shape their attitudes toward the opposite sex in large part according to their fathers’. John Chehalis didn’t much like his wife or women in general—that was another strong impression I’d carried away from him, and why I was afraid there was at least some validity to his depiction of his son as an evil seed.
&nb
sp; Until I found out more about Stephen Chehalis’s life the past twenty-odd years, talked to him in person, my duty as I saw it was to protect Melanie Aldrich the best way I knew how. Now more than before, that meant not telling her who her biological father was, or that he was still alive.
Chapter Nine
IT WAS OVERCAST and fifteen degrees cooler in San Francisco. A sharp, gusting wind rumpled the bay, skirled through the hills and canyons of the city at upwards of twenty knots. It had a wet smell, too: we might be in for a little rain tomorrow. All in all it felt like a fine night to curl up in front of a fire.
But it was still early—not quite five o’clock—when I rolled up Van Ness to O’Farrell. Kerry wouldn’t be home until after six, she’d told me last night. So I turned down O’Farrell and went to the office to see how many messages I had accumulated during my two-day absence.
There were several, including one from Barney Rivera at Great Western Insurance. Barney was not one of my favorite people these days—he’d pulled a dirty trick on me a while back and I couldn’t quite forgive him for it—but he gave me a lot of bread-and-butter business that I couldn’t afford to slough away for personal reasons. I made a note to call him back in the morning.
One of the other messages from yesterday was a surprise: “This is Tamara Corbin. The woman you interviewed? I’ve been thinking about what you said and you were right, I did come on like a racist and a sexist. No excuse, I just read you wrong and acted out. There’s so much crap in the world that I get crazy sometimes, take it out on the wrong people. You were right about my dad too. He’d sure have kicked my ass if I’d talked to him the way I talked to you.”
I smiled a little. Definitely a good kid underneath that tough, defensive exterior. It couldn’t have been easy for her to call and leave a message like that. The fact that she’d done it spoke volumes about her character.
For a time I sat listening to the wind flutter something loose up on the roof. Then I called George Agonistes. He was in, and yes, he’d talked to Tamara Corbin and she’d told him about Monday’s fiasco. In some detail, evidently.
“You may not believe this,” he said, “but she isn’t normally like that. Snotty or mean-spirited.”
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