Afterlife Page 6

  There was a noise like a bull elephant’s trumpet as Mark replaced the receiver quietly in the cradle. He stood up. Nothing sentimental cluttered his desk—no picture frame, no monogram, no paper-weight. He came around and made an automatic move toward the sofa for his briefcase, then stopped himself. He took a last look around, amazed to think there was no mark of himself here to erase. He gazed at the black Italian leather chair behind the desk. It only seemed to dawn on him now that he’d killed the man who sat there. Bloodlessly: the next keeper of Lou Ciotta’s flame could move in tomorrow.

  Mark turned and left the office. So silent was his crime that when he strolled out of the bungalow, Connie assumed he was going across the way for a meeting with an executive. They still had a hundred and nine calls to go, but she was convinced they could do it before the day was done.

  Scot-free, Mark walked away down the eucalyptus alley, the trees creaking overhead in the furnace breeze of September. A tumbleweed skittered down the New York street. Ghosts of cavalry and Indians waited for “Taps” in the dry wash. The list of names on Mark Inman’s desk would never be cleared, but for once he was unencumbered by all his previous lives. For a dying man, in fact, he moved with a marvelous stride.

  3

  Dell pulled his mustard-yellow truck into a Pioneer Chicken stand on Alvarado. The noon heat was rotten as the dumpster in the parking lot, drizzled with flies. He had two men working in trees in Hancock Park, and he’d promised to bring them lunch. Already late, he drove past the takeout window and nosed in between the dumpster and a bank of three pay phones.

  A couple of Bloods were dealing crack, using one of the phones as an office. They fastened their glittering eyes on Dell as he stepped to the right-hand phone, but saw right off he was too normal, not on the edge at all. If it had been past midnight, they might have killed him on principle, but now he was just another greaseball, meek as a burro, his truck full of tooth-shy rakes and caked shovels.

  Dell drew a square of paper from his work shirt pocket, though he’d already memorized the number. When they answered at the Department of Water and Power, he asked to speak to the commissioner. He didn’t exactly disguise his voice, though he did try for a resolutely American twang, so as not to implicate his people. “Yeah,” he said to the bimbo who answered the commissioner’s phone, “you got a reservoir up by Castaic, right? Well, you got a problem.”

  “I think you want the engineering department, sir.”

  “Oh no, honey, I want you. See, I just dumped a gallon of blood in there.”

  “Let me transfer you to Violations.”

  “It’s AIDS blood.” Finally there was a pause, a break in her bimbo stride. “See what I mean? You got a problem.”

  He hung up. As he strolled over to the takeout window, the Bloods were selling a gram vial to a scrawny girl about sixteen, indifferently pregnant. The glazed boy who took Dell’s order was serenely abstracted from the crimes of the Pioneer parking lot. There was a bucket of chicken for everyone, pimps and dealers and terrorists all. Dell went away with two bags brimful of junk, and not another thought about his threat to the public safety.

  He checked on the men in Hancock Park, who had stripped four trees of their summer growth. He listened, straw hat in hand, while the matron of the house berated him for cutting her elm too close to the bone. Then he raced to the Westside to give bids on two big landscape jobs. Then he made his maintenance rounds, leaf-blowing and watering in the hills above Franklin. These were his oldest clients, who still paid him only fifty a month.

  He knew every green thing in their yards and liked the quiet, for no one was ever home. The autumn blast of heat had killed off all the annuals, but under the trees the flowers would not quit—beds of impatiens, baskets heavy with fuchsia. His grief was at its lowest ebb in the old hill gardens, as he hummed and showered the ferns with spray. Expertly his thumb controlled the flow of water from the hose, as if using a nozzle would be cheating.

  He didn’t even listen to the radio in the truck as he made his rounds. A proper terrorist would’ve been glued to the news, waiting for a bulletin. He picked up his crew in Hancock Park and left them off at a corner on Olympic, where crowds of brown men waited every morning for day-work. He got home around five and dozed in front of the tube. He didn’t seem to pay much heed to the local news, hardly rousing himself when Linda came in to cook up some rice and chicken.

  But there was no report of the incident, though the news stayed on till seven, through four different segments on the National League playoffs. Every half-hour saw an update on a plastics fire in Reseda and a baby born in a hammock. Dell was silent as he ate his supper, Channel 2 droning irrelevantly, while Linda read him a long rambling letter from one of their sisters—a christening and a funeral, all in one week, the seamless web of celebration in the dusty squares of Morelia.

  Abruptly Dell stood up when he finished eating, crossed to the television, and slammed the button to turn it off, the only sign that he was impatient. Still, Linda didn’t take it personally, even when he disappeared into his room without another word. If anything, she thought he was doing better with the pain. Better than she by a long shot. She cleared the dishes and sponged the plastic tablecloth, tears for Marcus stinging her eyes. But she didn’t require any special attention. She kept her sorrow secret. As long as Lorenzo Delgado looked all right and didn’t cough, sad was happy enough.

  Cross-legged on his bed, Dell pulled the scrap of paper from his work shirt and dialed another number. “Channel 4 Action News,” said a man’s clipped voice, reeling with self-importance.

  “Yeah, how come you don’t got a story about the blood in the reservoir?”

  “What story would that be, sir?” Instantly alert, yearning for an anchor spot.

  “I stole it from a lab. It’s contaminated with AIDS. I sure hope they got a good filter up there in Castaic.”

  “Are you claiming responsibility? Are you a group?”

  Dell laughed. “No, man, I’m just a nut. I don’t belong to anyone.”

  He heard a beep and click on the line and hung up fast. He didn’t really believe they could trace the call, but he didn’t want to be recorded either. He ambled into the kitchen as Linda was finished washing up. She said she was going around to collect the rents. First of October already: at least they had left behind the anniversary month. She was wonderful with the tenants, mostly single mothers, who were never on time with money. More like a resident social worker than a landlady, Linda filled out their ADF forms and wrote their letters home to Costa Rica.

  By ten it was on the news. A spokesman from the Water Department said there was no cause for concern. The reservoir in question wasn’t in use and would be brought on line only in severe drought conditions. No evidence of the alleged vandalism had been uncovered by department workers, but the footage was vivid all the same: a crew of men combing the shores of a pristine mountain lake in white space suits, helmeted, with walkie-talkies bleating.

  A nice counterpoint to the anchorman’s insistence: “There is absolutely no way that AIDS could be transmitted in this manner.” Even a gallon of blood was scarcely a part per billion of water. More plutonium fell on Castaic Lake on an average day.

  Nevertheless, there were seven thousand calls to the Water Department between ten and eleven. Linda came back with partial payment on two of the four rents and found her brother prone on the sofa again, flicking the remote from station to station. The switch-boards were clogged to the point of gridlock. A hastily briefed dork from the Mayor’s staff reiterated that nothing had happened and nothing could. No Castaic water was flowing through the system. Every faucet in the L.A. basin was being served by pure Colorado River runoff. The reporters shoved their mikes in his face: “Can you say without any doubt that the water supply is completely safe?” The dork brayed with frustration, trying to talk reason, but the answer was clearly no.

  “Stupid, crazy people,” Linda hissed in contempt, switching her black ponytail. It wasn�
��t certain whether she meant the vandals, the officials, or the hysterical callers; she may not have known herself. Dell chortled and scratched at his mustache. Linda was pleased to see he didn’t let the ignorance and lunacy get under his skin. She didn’t say how little of the rent she had collected, how many dollars from how many months were owed by the Cabrillos and the Rodriguezes.

  She did say, though, with a casualness that was most unlike her that she would leave him his supper cold tomorrow night. Asked it more than said it. He frowned up at her, not knowing how to tell her she owed him nothing. He’d explained to her often enough that he didn’t need to be cooked for, that the last thing he wanted was Linda in a dutiful role, tied like the women of Morelia. He didn’t ask about her plans for tomorrow night. It was none of his business.

  “This girl I ride the bus with,” she said. “Emilia. She asked me to go to Disneyland.” Her brother didn’t say anything, just nodded as he watched the TV screen fill up with a map of California, all its reservoirs dotted in blue. Linda shrugged. “I’ve never been there. Everybody should see it once, right?”

  At last he turned from the news, as if he finally heard the flinching in her voice. “Yeah, well, you make sure you go on Space Mountain,” he said briskly, his onyx eyes shining with intensity. “And the Haunted Mansion. I don’t care how big the line is.”

  He spoke with the same insistence, at once protective and daring, with which he had commanded her to leave the concrete blocks of Morelia—the dead-end spinster’s life, shuttling between her mother’s house and Dr. Sandina’s office. Smiling now, she swore to follow Dell’s itinerary to the letter. She wished him good dreams but didn’t embrace him. Their closeness didn’t allow them to touch; they were both too formal and too discreet. Only once had she ever held him, just after Marcus heaved his final breath, and she’d drawn away as soon as Dell released the first roar of pain.

  “I’ll get you a Mickey Mouse T-shirt,” she said.

  “They’re all gay, you know.” He was playful now and teasing, one eye on the news, but not quite wanting her to go yet. “Mickey, Goofy, the duck—every single one of ’em.”

  “Mickey’s not gay. He’s got Minnie.”

  “Minnie’s a dyke.”

  She laughed. “Don’t tell anyone in Morelia. That’s like saying the saints are gay.”

  “They are.”

  “Now you sound like Marcus.”

  They both laughed now, remembering the caucuses in the living room on Lucile, Marcus shaking his head about some politician or bishop. The closeted ones did the most damage, sabotaging the gay rights planks, throwing a red scare around Marcus and his petitioners. Whenever Marcus heard a homophobe spewing hate, he’d cluck his tongue and roll his eyes, convinced it was all thwarted desire.

  As Dell watched Linda move to leave, quick and lively now that she had his permission for the outing, she looked thirteen again, the girl he’d left behind when he first came north. The pang of love in his heart was a constant wish for her happiness. He tried not to feel too protective, even resisted imagining what this Emilia looked like. He had never seen his sister naked, never thought of her fired with passion. Such things couldn’t be spoken of. Minnie Mouse was the closest they’d ever come.

  He couldn’t seem to focus on the news anymore. The final editorial note was sounding, the anchorman reassuring the viewers that nothing more was at issue here than a crackpot prank. “We owe it to what is most decent in all of us not to panic,” he intoned, “to rise above our basest fears and ignorance.”

  Very stirring, though by noon the next day the DWP would measure a twenty-two percent drop in water consumption throughout the L.A. basin. Looking on the bright side, it was the first real stride anyone had ever made toward water conservation, but nobody looked on the bright side. For days after, there would be footage of the run on bottled water—bottled anything, as long as one didn’t have to drink disease from the kitchen tap.

  Now that he’d set it in motion, Dell had no plans to escalate the matter. By the next night’s news they would be calling it “blood-mail,” and every AIDS organization would roundly condemn the irresponsibility of the terrorist act. By then Dell would be feeling so abstracted from his own deed that they might have been talking about somebody else entirely, even after Channel 4 produced a composite based on the tape of his call: hispanic male, mid-thirties, probably gay.

  He stripped to his shorts, grabbed the spiral notebook from his bedside table, and sprawled in bed with the phone on his chest. The first few numbers he tried were busy, for these were the midnight callers, restless and wired. Then he left an identical dirty message on two machines—calling on a CB from an eighteen-wheeler, looking to find some action at a truck stop. Not his scene especially, but according to the spiral notebook that’s what these two liked. They really ought to meet each other, thought Dell. What did they need a middleman for?

  The first one who answered was Kevin, the kid in Manhattan Beach who still lived with his parents and said he was twenty-four, though he sounded about sixteen. Kevin liked nothing better than to suck an uncut dick. Never been fucked, he hastened to add, the assertion falling somewhere between anxiety and a dare. Mostly he liked Dell to do the dirty talking—which Dell obliged, bringing Kevin to a quick crescendo, so loud it seemed the parents couldn’t help but hear, unless they were full of a midnight rage of their own. For his part, Dell didn’t even bother to take the aforesaid member out of his shorts.

  When Kevin was done gasping, Dell inquired how things were going with his father, a foreman at Hughes Aircraft who thought queers should be gelded. Kevin chafed about wanting a life and a place of his own, to be gay for real. Sternly Dell assured him there was time enough, then warned Kevin as he always did about playing safe, though he knew the young ones felt immortal. AIDS was a middle-aged death to them, like middle age itself.

  “Hey, Lorenzo, I’m hard again.”

  “Yeah, well, put it back in your pants. You gotta get up for school.”

  Kevin gave a wild derisive laugh. He loved the pull between them, big brother/kid brother. Dell had been checking in with him now for almost a month. The spiral notebook page was covered with scribbled details—Kevin’s last term’s grades, his workout routine, the four dudes he hung out with, the girlfriend he pecked good night.

  “So when am I gonna meet you, guy?” asked Kevin, stuck in his little world.

  “Someday,” Dell replied, already pulling back like a camera, till the scene was small and far away. Some night they would know they were ready, he seemed to say, but it didn’t sound soon. In the country of 976, meeting was like commitment, a marriage doomed from the start. Someday meant no. Reality would only spoil it. Face to face they would see that one was still in high school, the other one old enough to be his father. Then what fantasy would they play?

  Yet both of them knew they would speak again. Dell never said a word about himself, or anyway not the truth, especially that Marcus had died of AIDS. In a jerkoff scene it was very bad form to bring up one’s lover, let alone the holocaust. Dell was content to be a kind of scoutmaster to his 976 crew. When he called around he changed like a chameleon—sometimes Italian, sometimes twenty-five, top with bottom urges, rapist, virgin—anything not to be one particular man, especially himself.

  He lay there with the phone still perched on his chest, paging through the notebook. Nobody seemed to fire him tonight. His hundred men with their vital stats were too familiar, too predictable, as hard to quicken as a sleepy wife. Of course he could go back into the pile, pay his twenty cents a minute to the LOAD line and start a new page. But he already had one of every kind.

  Below in the courtyard he could hear Nola Cabrillo coming in drunk with her date. She was squabbling and hissing at the scarfaced brute Ramon, but she would let him in anyway. Her two kids, five and three, who babysat for each other, would pretend to be asleep on the sofa so no one would yell at them. And later on, after the wails of pleasure, Ramon would beat her up; and none
of the tenants would call the cops because they wouldn’t come. Nola Cabrillo was just a domestic incident.

  Dell put the phone and the notebook back on the bedside table. He turned off the light and pounded his pillow, scrunching up and staying on his own side of the bed. Almost unconsciously, not moving his lips, he prayed his double prayer. First to God, if there was a God, that He should reunite Dell and Marcus Flynn in heaven. This heaven was like a library where Marcus would be sitting and reading, parsing his glyphs with wonderful concentration. He could always read even with Dell lying beside him flicking the remote control, watching three stations at once. The second prayer was to Marcus himself, that he should protect his widows.

  Don’t let me drag her down, he said to the dark inside him. Don’t let me get in trouble.

  Between God and Marcus he could only believe in one at a time, and Marcus always won. God was back in Morelia, the queer priest in his gold cloak seething for the altar boys, Beatriz and her useless novenas. God didn’t have enough rage. No doubt the pederast Fathers of Morelia would have found it remarkable that Dell was praying at all. Let him keep it secret if he liked. The thin thread of his nightly prayers would one day lead him back to the confessional. There they would stuff him with sin, bringing him home to the prison where he’d lived before Marcus Flynn.

  But Dell was much further gone than that. He believed the opposite of everything, now that the anger had gone underground. It was all mixed up in his head with the Mayan gods of fire and blood, the stories Marcus had told him about the altars high on the pyramids, where a prisoner’s heart was torn from his chest still beating. That was the God Dell yearned for late at night, a force equal to his own fury. Not even revenge was enough of a reason to believe, for he couldn’t pin the enemy down to any one man. Chaos was what mattered. Watching the world unstring itself, with just a snip of the thread here and there.

  Not that he wished to hurt anyone, except maybe God Himself. He lay there curled on his side in bed, his empty arms resting on the spot where Marcus used to sleep. To go forward at all anymore, it wasn’t a matter of faith but will. Because he was a gardener he would be up at 6 A.M., but everything else had changed. He didn’t trust the red sun would burn off the morning fog, or that he would be strong enough to work. Every single night before he went to sleep, he had to be finished with the world, in case he woke up too sick to go on. All he knew was this: before he went he would do what he had to, whatever it was, to let them know his people wouldn’t go quietly anymore.