A NOVEL
BY JOHN RECHY
grove press, inc., new York
Copyright © 1969 by John Rechy
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“For What It’s Worth” by Stephen Stills, copyright © 1967 by Cotillion Music, Inc., Ten West Music & Springalo Toones. Used by permission.
eISBN 978-0-8021-9316-2
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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For their invaluable encouragement and opinions during the writing of this book, I would like to thank:
W. E. GILLESPIE, RICHARD MILLER, FLORIANO VECCHI, AND PAUL T. CARUTHERS.
for my mother
and
for the memory
of John W. Thompson
. . . this day’s death denounced, if aught I see,
Will prove no sudden, but a slow-paced evil. . . .
—MILTON, Paradise Lost
There’s something happening here,
What it is ain’t exactly clear,
There’s a man with a gun over there,
Telling me I got to beware. . . .
—THE BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD,
For What It’s Worth
LAST NIGHT THE WIND BLEW ACROSS EMPTY MILES OF Texas desert, and gathering dust into slashing gray clouds it thrust them against the city.
Through the window of his bedroom, and in the peculiar iron-brightness of all stormy nights, Jim Girard saw the storm, a materialized dream of desolation: A tumbleweed raged along the streets, sheets of dust suddenly suspended by a shifting current glided eerily toward the ground, trees crouched to Escape the swallowing funnels.
Jim remembered: Once as a child six years old in a Southwest windstorm when the wind grasped at the sear Texas ground with swirling fingers a tumbleweed clawed furiously toward him and he dodged swiftly but the giant weed did too, thrusting itself against him, tearing at his face, arms, hands, ripping at him like a frantic animal until battling it with his clenched fists but the wind driving it with increasing force against him he felt surrounded by the dried twigs. Finally managing to wrench away from the path of the sweeping wind, he freed himself of the wiry clutch. The tumbleweed whirled away.
As much as he has always hated the wind since then—perhaps even from before then (its terrible dark cries. . .), Jim sat up in bed last night and watched its violent thrashing. Resigned to sleeplessness, he tried to focus his total attention on the turbulence. He did that to avoid hearing, even while he strained to listen for, other, more menacing sounds.
Did he hear them now?
Footsteps? The shuffling of her feet pulling her body. And the awful tapping of her cane, as insistent as the stalking approach of doom. Signals to be followed by the cold beam of her flashlight knifing the dark from the adjoining bedroom. (Or: A glass breaks, a bottle falls, pills scatter nervously: commanding attention like a sudden scream. Another light shatters the dark.) Sounds and sights that smash the night into the jagged black fragments of insomniac nightmare.
But he only imagined the familiar sounds. What he heard must have been the automatic furnace lighting up, the night chilled by the rampaging wind. Perhaps it was the refrigerator turning off. But it wasn’t her. Not the night-splitting tapping of her cane. Not yet.
Now other sounds, remembered—equally threatening echoes—seep into his consciousness. Footsteps heard months ago. Along a dark corridor. In a jail. In a jail cell miles away in Los Angeles.
And this thought raids his awareness as it does at startled intervals throughout the day, at night dragging him violently out of sleep:
What will happen to her if I go to prison!
That was last night.
This morning, swimming reluctantly out of the disorder of restless sleep into whose black depths he thankfully submerged himself (the footsteps had not come, blessedly they hadn’t come throughout the night, did not invade the sleep into which he was finally pulled past the waves of an awake nightmare: a ride to jail, frozen trees, barred doors shutting—the metallic sound ramming into each cell . . .), he wakes with a feeling of undefined panic, which quickly melds into this: Is she awake, unconscious?
Jim got out of bed quickly. It’s early.
The photograph of his mother as she was ten years ago—when he was sixteen—smiles gently at him from his dresser. In her spidery handwriting (which he would grow so used to in her regular letters during the times, the years, he was away—in so many cities) she had written: “To My Son, With The Greatest Love, Which Is The Love Of A Mother.”
He looks away from the photograph—and again out of the window of his bedroom.
It’s the kind of cruelly beautiful morning that tears the heart with its insistence on resurrection. False resurrection. The sky is blue, blue.
Avoiding looking in the direction of his mother’s room—apprehensive of definite knowledge of her condition, he hurries into the bathroom, closing the door immediately.
Lean, very handsome, with bluish green eyes lightened by his dark hair, long dark lashes, his face shows no sign of the ponderous weariness of these past days, weeks—months. Nor does his body, shirtless, seem to have lost any weight; it’s a hard, muscular, gymnast’s body—a long slender torso making him appear somewhat taller than he is.
He bends over the basin to wash his face.
Like wounds in the plaster, elongated drops of blood, dry, slash the wall. The blood that gushed from her mouth. Urgently he grabs a towel, moistens it, rubs off the blood, futilely trying to erase the memories which that produced. (“Blood!” “It’s all right, Mother!” “Blood!” “Calm down, Mother!” “Help me!—help me!” And between choked words her blood was thick like melting wax.)
Putting on his shirt, he moves swiftly out of the bathroom, still postponing knowledge of her condition. He withdraws into a wood-paneled den, the room farthest from hers in the small attractive house bordered by a grill-enclosed lawn: This room has been a retreat for him even in much better days: Returning to his hometown three years ago intending to stay only briefly again, he remained instead to go through college. In June he’ll enter lawschool.
The wide window frame gives the day at least a visual order: a blue Texas sky mockingly peaceful after the wailing night. That false hint of spring, resurrection. Except that: Beyond the gray mountains that rim this border city, a mass of dark clouds could as easily be preparing to retreat after the night’s storm as to invade the sky in flanking wings. And something else challenges the spurious clarity and peace of this Southwest day viewed through a window: the skeleton of a tree, a tumbleweed crushed windless, dry and dead, against it. Despite the awesome span of naked new sky, they proclaim the season of winter and dying, on this December day, a Friday, in El Paso, Texas.
His mind magnetized toward his mother’s dark room, Jim longs to hear the sounds that last night would have flung him into depression, conveying messages of her
gasping restlessness; in the morning, they bring relief that she’s well—though a hope often crushed during the course of the day.
True, there had been similar spells before—all her life; but they were interludes—short—yes, frightening, but brief—interludes amid long periods of well-being, and therefore in control. Now abruptly the times of good health were the interludes among the lengthening times of iron illness.
Does she know what happened in Los Angeles?—and that, barring the miracle he relies on, he’ll have to return? For the fourth time in less than five months. For a trial. His. (The People of the State of California vs James Girard— . . . he read from the sheet posted on a board outside a courtroom. And his body exploded with hatred for Daniels—the cop, the ugly cop—and Jim felt the terrible rage that makes murder seem the only possible justice: The hated face shatters into a blossom of blood.) No, she can’t know. But the suspicion haunts him.
Now a sound seizes the terrible silence in the house.
She’s getting up! She’s well!
Then silence.
It wasn’t her. A noise from outside. Not the shuffling of her feet, the thumping of the cane on which she leans more and more for support, the long sad sigh with which she begins each day now.
This time unequivocally he heard the cane, her pulling feet.
Tap . . . tap . . . tap.
Water-faucet running: She’s in the bathroom. . . . A metallic vibration: She’s passed the grilled guard over the floor furnace. . . . A muffled sound against the wall: She’s leaning on it for support. He gets up swiftly to help her. But a warning restrains him at the closed door: Don’t!
Tap . . . tap.
She’s approaching, on her way to the kitchen.
Tap— . . .
Now long, long, long moments are suspended without further sound. Then again, resuming:
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
In flooding relief he knows she’s all right. Now she’ll light the candle in the kitchen to San Martín de Porres, her favorite saint, a gaudy reproduction pasted on the wall. She’ll say the usual prayers. Then she’ll prepare breakfast carefully, as always. And he’ll thank her as always, and she’ll smile the radiant smile which evokes the ghost of the outrageous beauty she had been. . . . Acts fulfilling a ritual vastly important by assuring him that the yawning chaos is checked.
Then: Crash!
And a moaned, “Dios mío!”—“My God!”
Jim heard the collapse as if it had been an explosion within his mind.
He opens the door. His mother lies crumpled on the floor, a pitiful heap of blue nightclothes.
His mind fills in instantly what he didn’t see: Wavering as she leaned on her cane and moved to the kitchen to light the candle, she lost control again.
“Mother!”
Leaning over the limp form, he watches it intently. Is she breathing! (He remembers: A child— . . . A boy, himself: his sister Estela beside him: “Is she—. . . ?”) He can’t tell. In panic, he stares closer at her. Gratefully he sees the cloth of her robe rise and fall on her chest. She has made no indication of pain. Relieved, he bends to lift her, to carry her back to her room.
Then she opens her eyes, beautiful faded-green eyes, lighter green each day as if the cataracts which smear them had begun to dilute the green of her irises. For only that moment, perhaps as a signal to him that she’s alive, she opened the faded, incredibly beautiful eyes.
But with unbelievable strength, she reached out her frail trembling hand—a vein purple and stark like a broken star where the doctor’s needle penetrated it—and she clutched his strong, young, firm, alive hand very tightly until, finger by finger, and urgently, as if in moments their hands would become locked forever—he released her hold from his hand.
Leaving the cane behind, rejecting its implications, he carries her back to her bed.
“Mother, are you all right?” he asks in Spanish, the only language she understands—though she knows some words and phrases of English and French.
There are no bruises from the fall. Already, her remarkable coloring is returning. He sits wearily on the edge of her bed. Automatically he takes her wrist, lightly, begins to rub her arm; stops, knowing how futile that is. He could get the alcohol, hold it to her to smell, rub the back of her neck with it; he could prop her head—all the things he’s done so very often before, even as a child; and so recently. Or call the doctor. Again. (The way he and his sister would do in icy panic when they were children and she was sick. He remembers: “Mother’s dying!” And the odor of rubbing alcohol.) Yes, he could do all those things. Again. The charade of making her well. But why? What good? What change!
And for a moment, the face he saw seemed to be that of a stranger, of someone new in his life. Mother, he said soundlessly, as if to associate her with the person he’d known so intimately.
The shaded room commands his attention. It’s as if he’s entered a grave. A heavy twilight darkness. Pale-lavender drapes intercept whatever of light Escapes the drawn blinds.
There are dead roses in a vase, their petals—the color of dried blood—ready to disintegrate. The roses he sent her on her saint’s day, the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She had resisted adamantly each time he suggested the flowers were ready to be thrown out; instead, illogically, she kept adding water to them, as if to force the dead leaves to bloom again. (Dead roses. He remembers: Yellow flowers. Death. The desert. Wind. His Mother’s black veil.)
On a small table is a foot-high statue of the mourning Mother of Sorrows. The body is shrouded in black velvet, silver amulets pinned to it—each a testament to a fulfilled exhortation. And there are, also, two tiny hearts pinned among the other amulets—black hearts added by his mother—bitterly—after the death of her older daughter, her older son. Years ago.
On a matching table by his mother’s bed, there is a spectrum of pills and capsules; weird, vicious little pills, like plastic gleaming eyes; pills for her headaches, nosebleeds, blood pressure, for the fainting spells, the hot flashes, vertigo; pills to tranquilize her, pills to raise her spirits; crazy pills, given to her by a string of doctors to whom she’s turned frantically.
Jim looks away from them.
On her dresser, which is white, azure-bordered, is a clutter of glass figurines—saints and Virgin Marys, angels, ballerinas, crystal birds, her cherished figurine of a boy and a girl under a sheltering umbrella. . . . For him this collection is a symbol of a certain inner frailty which might be her major strength.
Now something else commands Jim’s attention—as insistently as if it had called his name: the photograph which hangs over his mother’s bed, an oval-framed portrait of his father, now dead. Handsome and distinguished—and austere and stern—the slender French face stares at Jim.
Triumphant—or so it seems to Jim at that moment. He remembers: Two knives ready— . . . He turns angrily from the photograph of his father.
And sees, now dead on the table, the flashlight which comes alive only at night when she uses it instead of the lamp to search for a pill. That—and, on the floor, cords tangled, the automatic electric heater and the vaporizer he got her when she complained of trouble breathing—both dormant now also—they emphasize the barely contained panic which may erupt in a moment in this room.
“Are you okay, Mother?” he asks. Though she has never before entirely lost her ability to speak during the spells, she doesn’t answer. “Are you all right?” he insists she respond.
“La cosa,” she sighs finally; and he feels relief, at least for that. “The thing”—the name she’s given her nameless illness. She searches under the pillow for her rosary, her anchor in whatever stormy waters she’s preparing to plunge into. Wearily her head turns toward the pillow—but also toward him—rejecting something clearly not him.
And he knows she’s closing still another symbolic door to her dark room.
What is she thinking of?
The thought rips his mind.
W
hat is she remembering? What is she feeling? Is she recalling the time when my brother wasn’t dead?—when I hadn’t fled from her?—when my sister wasn’t married?—when my . . . father . . . was alive? Jim wonders. Is she thinking of the times my sister and I were sick—and how she nursed us with such devotion?—and do those memories crush her now into this gray immobility? . . . Is she remembering the “grave” in the desert she no longer visits? Is she mourning the woman she was? Or is she trying to avoid all the memories? Or remembering—or trying to avoid remembering—the hatred that smashed our house? Yes, and that afternoon—the two knives prepared to slash at flesh. (And I would have killed him then—just as he would have killed me.) What is she withdrawing from? From all the painful memories of hatred raging at love? And what is she withdrawing into? he wonders, knowing that, yes, she’s closed still another symbolic door in her dark, dark room.
And as he stared down with a sudden mixture of anger and love at the form of his mother—this enigma he knows so well—it seemed very clear to him, in that sudden moment. that she would always be very careful to leave one entrance to her black room open to him, to share the darkness.
Is that what you want, goddamnit—for me to die with you?
Suddenly: His mind grabbed for and formed the thoughts which had hovered, nebulous, over his consciousness, unrecognized but felt, like the painful manifestations of a sickness. That thought had erupted from the black stirrings of his whole life, exploded out of layers of tenderness and love which had crushed the dark emotional rollings, pressurizing them for years—pressurizing all the resentments against a love which overwhelms, like sudden nausea, a love he knew was too powerful to be slaughtered: resentment for all the times he tore himself away from her only to return; and rage and resentment and love fused now:
Is that what you want?—for me to give you back the life you thrust on me?—to die with you? his mind demands of the limp form. Can’t you understand I’m young!