“Who put him back in bed?”
“We both did. Bill did mostly, I guess.”
“Here—maybe we should adjourn to another room,” Dr. Schooner suggested.
“In a minute.” Navarro knelt by the bed and picked up a pillow from the floor beside it—bare, no slipcase. He asked the wife, “Would you have been the only one in the house around the time of”—he sought a word other than death but couldn’t find one—“when his time came?”
“I was alone downstairs.”
“Did you strip this pillow?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Where’s the pillowcase? Any idea?”
“The pillowcase?”
“Just curious.”
“The hamper’s in the bathroom. That’d be the logical place, I guess.”
“Could Nelson have put it there? Did he have the strength?”
She came closer to the corpse and pulled back the sheet to bare the astonished death mask—blue-gray, openmouthed, with deep-sunk, wide-open, porcelain eyes—and said, “This is Nelson Fairchild, Sr. He could’ve done anything at just about any time. If he wanted to right now he could probably jump up and spit in your eye. There’d probably be no truer epitaph than that.”
She didn’t replace the blankets until Schooner cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, Donna.”
“Let me just peek in the bathroom a second,” Navarro said.
“Whatever you have to do, Officer,” she said.
Schooner directed him across the hall, and he went into a small chamber and found the lightswitch and then the clothes hamper. Among the musty pyjamas and towels, all of which felt like artifacts because in them lingered the life that had just been lost, he found the pillowcase. Holding it up before the light, he examined a patch of half-dried saliva and mucus in the center of the white material, of a size and shape, he would have wagered, that nearly matched the corpse’s open mouth. He bunched it up and threw it back into the dirty laundry.
When he came out, Donna Winslow was gone. But Schooner was still hanging around. “What’s all this about a pillow?” he asked, following Navarro down the stairs.
Navarro shrugged. “Details, details.”
“You want him cut up?”
“Do you?”
“I asked you first.”
By now they were about to enter the kitchen, to which Donna Winslow had returned and where she now stood beside the table, pouring out cups of coffee for the two sons.
“I don’t see where it’s required in this case,” Navarro suddenly concluded.
It stunned him that he had said it, because the statement ran straight up against his duty and training, which at a time like this required him to initiate all sorts of procedures. He was almost sure the man had been murdered.
What had him stalled was the added certainty that this had been a mercy killing. Probably perpetrated by this poor tired woman.
“I was seconds too late,” the younger brother said. “Something’s gonna be missing forever. At the end of time it’s all gonna come up short!”
It occurred to Navarro that the younger brother could have done the killing. But everything he knew about people told him this one wouldn’t hurt anybody intentionally.
“Would anyone like some coffee?” Donna said.
“No. Thanks. I’m going,” Navarro said.
The older brother sighed and stared at his coffee, his hands circling the cup and his arms stretched out straight. Navarro could see that it was hitting him now, everything attending the death of a family member. Guilt. Relief. And a white curtain over the future.
To Donna Winslow he said, “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief. We’re satisfied he passed on as a normal consequence of his illness.”
“I’ll call the mortuary in a minute,” Schooner told them all. “Let me just see the officer to his car.”
Outside, Schooner held the car’s door as Navarro got in. He rapped with his knuckles on the roof, basically a nonspecific gesture, one that might have meant, case closed; but maybe not, because he failed to shut the door. “I guess you can see for yourself this is a colorful bunch.”
Navarro said nothing, and hoped the doctor wouldn’t say too much.
Schooner took several short breaths, as if suffering a spate of indigestion. “Look,” he said finally, miserably, “it’s my signature that goes on the death certificate. If this family gets a notion, they’ll be in everybody’s hair till Judgment Day.”
Navarro coughed. Cleared his throat. “You bet.”
“They think they’re important. The old man’s famous up and down this coast, a big property owner, sort of a semisociopath. I knew him well, and I can tell you that most of the rumors you’ll hear about him are true.”
“Who owns the property now that he’s dead?”
“I couldn’t say for sure. From what I know of him I’d guess most of his holdings go to his sons, the lunatic Fairchild boys. Donna wouldn’t—I mean to say, I doubt if Donna…”
“She doesn’t profit from his death.”
“No,” the doctor said.
The dawn seemed ready to light up. Navarro hadn’t realized he’d been here that long. Perhaps it was an illusion created by the ocean’s phosphorescence or something like that…He sat back in the seat, feeling tired in a cranky, unpleasant way. But all in all, this hadn’t been so bad. He’d seen real killings, occasions where he’d reached the blood half a block before he met the person it was flowing from. “Well,” he told the Doctor, “tag him and bag him, and let’s all get some sleep.”
“Fine.”
One of the brothers had just come from the house. “Gotta go,” Navarro said.
“All right, sir. I’ll get him shipped out.”
Navarro said goodbye and headed north, away from Gualala, toward Anchor Bay and toward Point Arena. In his rear view he saw the Porsche leave the drive and turn south.
Nobody had complained about the lack of an autopsy. Navarro could have promised the doctor they wouldn’t hear a word from Donna Winslow…though now, today, he knew his reasons for believing that had been completely wrong.
Thinking back on it now, Navarro wished he’d found some excuse to show up at the funeral. No reason it should have occurred to him at the time, but if he’d come around the Catholic cemetery in Manchester that day he’d have seen the whole crew in one spot, the living and the dead.
He shuffled through Nelson Junior’s letter, looking for the part about the funeral—if he remembered right it started on a page winding up the description of one of Fairchild’s boring, pointless dreams, but finally for once a dream in which Fairchild had been feeling good, everybody had been joyful and content—
content and having fun, and I’m not annoying, I’m comic. It’s happy, pleasant—some part of me must be that way. But I don’t want to meet that part. Why should a man who’s plotted murder dream happy moments?
I haven’t been damned by dreams. Haven’t had dreams that fall into the classes described in the Talmud, prophetic, oracular, therapeutic, spontaneous, provoked, and so on, or dreams where long-sought answers come, answers that disappear at dawn—Wait, it suddenly comes back to me that Mother was at the dream’s periphery. I can see her but not her face, now let me think, basically she’s dressed as she was at the cemetery, in fact I see now that this dream is a reprise or a revision of Father’s funeral. Curious as hell that you never met her. I really don’t think you recognized her when she turned up at the service and didn’t say a word. Sorry, turned up? No, she was an apparition, she signaled that all the prophecies had been accomplished, her gown was blacker than if it had actually been black, if it had actually been a gown.
You, Winona, or anybody who happens to make such arrangements for me: I want a plot in the same graveyard, the Catholic cemetery south of Manchester, there by the sea, at the end of the world. Not because my family’s in it but just because it’s such a pleasant grove, with that long soft grass and the giant kneeling cypre
sses whose prayers have outlived all the griefs and crimes of the people beneath them, and the cliffs from which probably their souls plunged out after their funerals into the endless cycling of the water. Nice to anticipate getting buried in a place where you wouldn’t mind, actually, residing in life.
Did you know Dad’s was my very first funeral? We weren’t invited to our grandparents’. Nothing for a child there anyhow, what’s to experience, basically a static display around an open grave, almost like Christmas but with a coffin instead of a manger and a pile of dirt instead of straw, a kind of reverse Nativity scene composed mostly of people you haven’t run into in a while—I guess, in the case of you and Mom, people you’ve never even met. But there was only one total stranger there—Father himself. He’d worked up something to amaze us all! He’d turned himself into a thing in a box, he’d accomplished the ultimate refusal. Of course we all knew he’d have arranged his own service, the cheapest one possible, practically nothing to it, and almost nobody welcome.
And what about William, did you get a load of William? All dressed up with that self-inflicted haircut and that suit from Hell? He looked like Stalin-Goes-to-Church, I mean you’d have thought he not Dad was the one worked up for the occasion by some unaesthetic mortician’s helper. He did however appear calm. Let’s give him that. Three nights before, he went quivering through the house insisting that he’d gotten some sort of telepathic summons from dying Father. Balanced beside the chasm of schizophrenic relapse, man, I thought he was going over. And what I wouldn’t give to see him now and talk with him and hear him set the gibberish rolling out of his brain. I’d take him by the ears and kiss his mouth…Now I see he never grew. Nobody does. We stay children and only the pretending and the games and the dreams grow old. Billy. Billy. It hurts!
Well, at the funeral I couldn’t have looked any less embalmed than Bill did I suppose. I started out that week blockading myself the usual way, with wine, but it didn’t work right because of the increasing awfulness of the hangovers. Woke up the third day, Funeral Day, with my soul hollowed out.
Then the funeral, with Mom coming uninvited and the two wives looking at each other across the abyss of this guy, this black hole in our lives who never let any light out of the horizon of his immense gravity. Donna didn’t throw her arms around my mother, but you saw as clearly as I that each respected the other’s right to be there. It spoke well of our father that he’d chosen two women capable of trading respect—didn’t it?
Father Tom orated monotonically, stoically, without shame. Priests! Once they had spine. Drove such as my father from the doors of the churches, held them off with shotguns on Sunday morning. Does gracious acceptance have them admitting every sinner nowadays, or is it apathy, hypocrisy? Donna hadn’t called him to the deathbed. He’d dropped around the mortuary next morning and unctioned the corpse. So Father Tom with his birdlike face and perplexed eyes sprinkles a few verses over Dad while out there in the ocean Carla Frizelli drifts unforgiven, unconfessed. And then he left us, his coffin swaying on canvas belts over the void, lowered over chromed rollers onto cheap green felt by two drunkards in aluminum hard hats. I’d seen one of them in the Tastee-Cone just outside Point Arena once, talking trash with a little girl. She couldn’t have been ten years old but she was puffing on a cigarette. Then they stepped back, the two diggers, so we could line up to toss down dirt onto my father.
No thief ever beat him, no enemy, no rival. His children he put in the same category as thieves. Detractors, partakers, leeches, swine. He withheld, defended against us with fire, tossed us slop. Well, give him this much: death didn’t just walk up and inhale him. He wasn’t exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.
I guess you know Mother didn’t talk with anybody at the funeral, not a word. But you don’t know she didn’t speak afterward either, not even to me. I stood beside her looking out over the ocean. I’d watched him shrink away. I’d learned how much bigger the sea could be. But she was getting it all at once—how endless the world is without him! I’d seen her like that once before, out back of the Blue Whale Motel where we lived for a while when I was seven, maybe eight, and back then, as now, I stood beside her a few minutes until she turned and wandered off along the cliffside. There is something ineradicable about a woman walking into the wind. Everyone remembers their mother at this most unmotherly moment, her hair behaving like a cloud. And seeing it at any time afterward returns us to that motherless feeling. I believe in beauty. Especially in these moments that make us children again.
Naturally the whole time between the death and the funeral had been crazy, spent phoning innumerable people and getting phoned by innumerable others—Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata (no. 21 in C Major, opus 53) the nervous urgent silent-movie allegro con brio part, I love that phrase, con brio, connoting brutishness—mainly I telephoned lawyers because I wasn’t waiting around for any formal reading, I wanted it straight, had my father actually willed my entire share of his estate to my wife? Oh yeah. And had he died before he could change the document? You know the answer to that one. And what about the ten thousand goddamn acres? He’d put in what’s known as a “timber clause,” deeded it in, from now until forever the place would be a kind of zoo for big old trees. My wife and brother owned all of it now, all of it. Of course I co-owned half with my wife, but only until she divorced me. Unless—before she could arrange a will that prevented my owning it after her death—I brought about her death.
But you don’t understand, Winona. I didn’t want to kill you. Not anymore. Not since the moment I stood beside you thinking I’d done just that. And can I ask you now: were you actually sleeping? Anyway you don’t understand that in the dark bedroom that night I wasn’t gloating but wishing you back to life, realizing I didn’t want you ever to suffer the moment of your death—still don’t, still, I really don’t—and coming to love you perfectly. I mean selflessly and with disinterest as only the completed unapproachable dead can be loved. Because that’s what I thought you were. I’m even compelled by his death to love my father that way. Even though the stripes stay fresh, those wounds—I can feel them all over me, I can see them on Bill, almost spelling words, a thousand scars—he not only hurt us but with a certain careless cruelty taught us to carry on hurting ourselves after he stopped. And I love him.
You don’t know about the last thing that happened that night, I mean the night Father died, and you won’t believe me when I tell you, why should you believe me, I’ve always been a liar, but anyhow little Winona do you know this one stretch of the ridge road where it narrows and in April the beautiful purple trumpets called naked ladies bloom right along the edge for about a half a mile? I started crying so hard that right at that spot I was forced to let the car head off the asphalt. I must have crushed a hundred bloomless naked ladies as I pulled to the side of the road.
Before long I had to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing there. It was so dark I couldn’t see the dashboard, much less the world outside, if there was one, or had everything lapsed back to a formless pretime ungeometry with nothing in it but a lowing sound, small, far-off, agonized, as of something dying or being born? And what exactly was that sound?
Behind me the fog brightened and brightened, until the huge aurora suddenly burst and shrank to the size of two headlights. I waited for the vehicle to pass and pull the darkness closed behind it, but it didn’t pass. Very near to my car, about a hundred feet behind me, it slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. Its headlights went off. Then nothing. It just sat there in the dark.
In a minute I believed I saw the brief glow in my rearview mirror of the other’s dome light. But I couldn’t make out any sound of the other’s door opening or closing. I wasn’t sure if I heard footsteps or not. I didn’t turn around and look back. You know how the back roads at night unease me. It feels like hallowed ground. In Mendocino County so many beings seem to be awake when everybody should be sleeping, beings creating themselves, stirring and boiling and mumbling the
ir prayers, sex-slayers and sacrificial maniacs, Jesus-wants-to-kill-you polygamists and Christian cannibals…Treefrog Jenny the castrator lived for years on the Boonville Road. And in West Point, you remember they found those seven skeletons in a single grave? And whoever dug that grave may still be living back here, may be awake tonight…Now I heard the footsteps coming. I jammed the pedal, cranked the starter, flooded the thing, had to wait there lame. On the other hand, I felt ridiculous. This could be some roadway Samaritan, this could even be some friend of mine, somebody coming to help the helpless. Or to destroy the voiceless. Because I knew I had no voice. Like one of those dreams where you can’t scream. I could barely grip the key and turn it in the ignition.
Then the car wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t, and in a sort of happy torment I ground the starter till the battery gave out and then I let my heart break for every failure, for every bit of shit, and especially for us, for you and me. You see, I was on my way back to your place. I wanted to tell you what I’d just discovered about love—that in fact we need another word for it now, because this one we’ve maimed and crumpled, trotting it out to express our cheapest passions—all right, I admit they’re not cheap, these passions, sometimes they exact an astonishing tribute—but they fade, they—look at it this way, they shoot up like miraculous fountains but dribble away into mud. And I wanted to promise you that these feelings, my lust for Melissa, my fever for the land, the timber, the money, they aren’t love. But now I was broken down and sobbing in my bullshit machine with the future lovely flowers mashed beneath my wheels because I couldn’t get to you. Now listen. Way down there’s something I long for. I don’t think for you it’s possible to comprehend how I wish for this thing, how hungry I get sometimes for this thing I can taste on the wind, when the night carries a sweet teenage music, for a whole history that can’t be mine, a tale of you and me: I’m baffled by school, I play the guitar, I work at the Texaco. I find you on your mother’s porch. You wait for me while I’m in the Army. Sometimes I can feel it sliding by me like a twisted self in the house of mirrors, and I realize that’s my life, and I am the distortion. There is the world, and here is the mirror. Here the car won’t work and my father lies like granite in his bedroom and the wind scrapes against the grass and the moon goes down leaving such darkness I can’t see my way to walk, and a stranger steps toward me on the road. And the rain that left everything so wet and cold hangs out over the sea in the night miles away with its ghostly tuba and faint horns, playing for the dance of the dead.