Afterlife (21 page)

The ghoul visibly relaxed, moving across the street and plucking the ticket off his windshield. The door of the truck was never locked, since anything worth stealing—the garden tools, the blower—were jumbled together in the open bed. Dell Espinoza climbed into the cab and reached across to the glove box. He flung the ticket in with fifty more, an avalanche of violations. From the visor he took a packet of Mexican cigarettes, drew one out, and lit it. He had stopped smoking two weeks after he met Marcus Flint, and started again four weeks ago, right after the first water scare.

He drove over to Fountain and headed east to Hollywood. Beside him on the seat was a potted gardenia, with three blooms fully articulated. The fragrance was absurdly intense, plangent with summer. Dell rolled the window down, and the wind ruffled his fright wig. He was thinking about the four young men with the placards. He figured they must've marched in Washington two weeks ago. Dell had seen the pictures in the gay rags—waves of marchers from every state, men and women being dragged off the Supreme Court steps. These were the same men and women who used to sit in the living room on Lucile, but younger and younger now, kids who were radicalized in college or even high school. Marcus would have been overwhelmed with joy to see it, aching for his own gay students to know themselves before they learned to love the prison of being safe.

Dell was stirred himself by the swaggering boys, but unlike Marcus he had no wish to join them arm in arm. He stayed at a certain remove, just outside the door the way he had on Lucile, letting the rhetoric filter in as he lay on his bed. He was never a man of words, never one for a group. Not that he didn't feel a yearning envy for the boys. They were bonded and fierce and rollicking, as if not being alone somehow gave them a way to laugh about it. Dell couldn't imagine laughing. No wonder he didn't quite believe they were dying.

He'd called the water department again four days after the first incident. By then the lunacy was at full pitch, with farmers in the Imperial Valley fearful of using tainted water on their vegetables, demanding Colorado runoff. This time Dell reported that he'd sabotaged the Hollywood Reservoir. But no mention was made of the threat on the news that night, or the next day either, even though Dell had called all three networks from the Pioneer Chicken phone booth.

Apparently the authorities had decided the threat was psychological, and they weren't going to give the AIDS terrorist any sort of forum, especially before an election. Dell watched the hysteria play out around his original call, the pleas for reason and the flood of information, and realized what was missing was demands. So he put in a call to the County Board of Supervisors, who were withholding funds for testing sites, and warned that if the money wasn't released, one of the supervisors would be abducted and injected with the virus. This had a nice Red Guard ring to it, and Dell used the same script when he called the Federal Building, demanding release of a drug that people were smuggling in from China.

A brief, vague reference surfaced on the evening news, but again they withheld the details. It was merely indicated that the Castaic terrorist was continuing to make crank calls. Voice analysis had convinced the police they were dealing with a gay hispanic man in his mid-thirties, probably dying of AIDS, probably in the last stages of dementia. This enraged gay activists, who demanded to know how you could ascertain a person's sexual orientation from his voice. Confronted at a news briefing, head pig Sheriff Noonan raised a bushy Irish brow, held up a limp wrist, and said, “The lisp gives 'em away every time.” At which there was an immediate outcry, but the sheriff didn't apologize. He knew his constituents.

In any case, the last thing the gay community needed was another criminal. Even Dell could see that. The psychos who picked up street kids and dismembered them, molesters running Cub Scout troops—there was more than enough material already for the tabloids. Dell suddenly realized Marcus would be ashamed of him if he hurt the larger cause of his people. The crank calls stopped; the bloodmail died. Still the composite of the suspect would resurface at the sheriff's weekly briefings, as he trailed through the laundry list of unsolved crimes. But Dell Espinoza had got away scot-free because his terrorist days were over, just like Patty Hearst's. The phone was reserved again for the normal sort of interchange—getting off with the 976 crowd.

He drove south to Third and headed through Koreatown, the lettering of its signs looking more like code than language. But if the Koreans owned the stores on Third, the polyglot mix of peoples here in East Hollywood ran the gamut: Vietnamese, Pakistanis, Latinos from every banana republic. Thirty years ago it was all white-bread. The old Congregational Church, at the corner of Emery Place, where Dell pulled into the parking lot, stood serene in its gray stone skirts. Only the purest Aryan need apply, its yearning steeple seemed to proclaim.

Dell nosed the pickup into an empty space by the parish house, one of a set of outbuildings that ringed the ragged park behind the church like a cloister. He glanced at his face in the rearview mirror, checking his makeup. He reached over and cradled the potted gardenia in his arm, lugging it after him out of the truck.

Even in the misty dark there were children laughing under the trees, clustered around the open double doors of the parish house. As Dell approached across the grass, he could see them dressed as pirates and witches and Saturday-morning heroes. They bore a certain tribal resemblance to the revelers of West Hollywood. Their parents stood by in raincoats, hovering over them with umbrellas. The kids turned and laughed when they saw the grown-up ghoul. The parents smiled their careful polyglot smiles—Thai, Bengali, Mayan—and parted to let Dell through.

He stepped inside to the ruckus of a party breaking up. Dozens more children milled around Sunday-school tables, covered with the detritus of cider and cookies. Here too the melting pot was the operative principle. All the old Congregationalists were long gone, fled to the burbs. The immigrant parents moving among the tables were proud and happy, trading off cameras and helping the little witches fix their masks. Dell stood beaming benevolently. For a moment it seemed he had come to the opposite place of his isolation and darkness, that he shared in the triumph of the new Americans, gathered together in fellowship. He may have even wished it.

But that wasn't why he was here. His red eyes scanned the room and picked out the whitest woman, a honey blonde in her mid-forties, sleek in a beige wool suit. She was clearly more expensive than all the immigrant mothers. Standing beside her was a pale young man in a pinstripe suit and glasses, murmuring in her ear as he read from a sheaf of memos in his hand. The honey blonde nodded, taking it in, but the serene encompassing smile never left her lifted face. She began to speak, and at the first sound of her lush and lulling voice, the room fell into a reverent silence.

“My friends, my children,” said Mother Evangeline, “the laughter we hear tonight is the joy of salvation. We are the true family of God.” As her eyes scanned the faces of her sheep, she caught sight of the ghoul, bigger than all the costumed kids. Mother's gelatinous smile flickered, as if she didn't quite get the joke, but Dell was grinning at her so sweetly she went right on. “All our enemies are on the run,” she declared, her bell-like tone gleaming with the language of the pulpit. “The heathen and the pornographer, the whore and the sodomite. They are the ones who bring hell to earth, and it's time we sent them back where they came from.” Beside her the pale young man fretfully shuffled his memos. “Ours is the kingdom, don't ever forget it. And thank God for AIDS. Sometimes He is a God of wrath before He is a God of love. And we are His army. Remember that next Tuesday. Yes on 81!”

At this she flung out her arms like a politician, and her flock cheered, especially the children, waving their witches' wands and pirate swords. Automatically Mother Evangeline began to move toward the doors, as if she was late for her next appearance. The bespectacled man followed earnestly behind. As her parishioners stood aside, some of them seemed to want to reach and touch her garment. They were all ex-Catholics, and the old ways of idolatry died hard. They loved Mother Evangeline's evangelism, her Nieman's vestments and her enemies lists, but they also wanted a Blessed Virgin.

Mother played them skillfully, now intimate as a radio shrink, now aloof as a prophet. Just at the door she stooped to smile at a young Filipino boy dressed like a little policeman. His flustered father behind him whipped the hat from the boy's head, and Mother reached out and stroked the jet-black hair.

“Do you love Jesus?” she asked, almost a whisper. The boy nodded gravely. “You'll grow up to be one of his soldiers,” she said, running an appreciative hand down the brass buttons on his blue jacket.

She rose to her feet. The father was tipsy with joy, looking as if he would gladly let the blood of his firstborn if the evangelist only asked. As Mother turned and waved a hand over the group in a final benediction, Dell stepped forward. “Mother,” he said prayerfully, and she looked at him once again as if there must be a joke here, one of the adults in costume for a reason, perhaps to do magic tricks for the children. “I brought this for the altar,” said Dell, shrugging the gardenia in his arm. “For All Saints. To pray for the soul of my own beautiful mother.”

“Of course,” she replied, smiling thinly, as if it was all a bit Roman for her taste. “Kenneth will let you in.”

She continued out the doors to greet the overflow, and the young man nodded for Dell to follow. They passed Mother Evangeline gathering little soldiers into her arms. Walking beside Kenneth across the courtyard, Dell kept the gardenia hoisted up between them to discourage conversation. But Kenneth seemed to have other things on his mind, still shuffling his memos like a Tarot deck. They reached the oaken doors of the church, and Kenneth pulled back his jacket to unhook a ring of keys. He unlocked the door and let the ghoul precede him.

In the vestibule the only light was the
EXIT
sign above the doors, but Dell moved forcefully through the curtains and into the sanctuary, not wanting to seem unfamiliar with the geography. Two coronas of electric candles lit the altar at the north end, but otherwise the high stone space was dank and cursed with darkness. Again Dell moved forward, single-minded as a choirboy. He nodded at the Jesus cross that hung from the velvet backcloth.

Besides the candles, the altar was bare, no flowers or holy vessels. Dell set the gardenia down dead center, turning it so the blooms all faced him. He stepped back a foot to study the effect and became aware of Kenneth standing to the side, waiting not so patiently, fingering his memos like beads. Dell hadn't thought this through at all, didn't know how he would get the moment alone he needed. Perhaps it was the sanctity of the place that gave him the inspiration: he turned to Kenneth, a supplicating wince suffusing his red-rimmed eyes.

“I'd like to pray for her,” he said meekly.

Kenneth's mouth twitched, and his shoulders squirmed in the pinstripe suit, as if he might be being asked to join in. This wasn't the meditative branch of theology. Dell waited quietly, letting the other man clutch for a way out.

“For sure,” said Kenneth. “Why don't you just let yourself out when you're done. The door'll lock behind you.”

He shuffled away a couple of feet, but almost as if he didn't dare turn his back on the ghoul. Dell wasn't sure how he knew, yet he understood in that moment that Kenneth was queer. A flutter in the hand that held the memos, a slight uncertainty in his gait—not so much the mark of being gay as being in the closet, as if he were suffocating in his own skin. Dell didn't know how to use the knowledge, except to stand in contemptuous silence while Kenneth skittered out of there. As if Dell's own openness—the savage pride he had learned from Marcus—shone through his black disguise, banishing the other man.

And suddenly Dell was alone in the church, carte blanche. He'd figured if he was lucky he'd get half a minute, just enough time to douse the altar, but now his mind raced with bigger plans. He stepped forward and retrieved the gardenia, then darted across and through the curtains into the vestibule. Ahead were the double exit doors, to the left a dark hallway. His heart pounding, Dell headed into the shadows, not even fearful of bumping into a wall. He was seized by a sort of radar now.

He hadn't expected to encounter Mother Evangeline herself. Last night when he heard her radio sermon—exhorting the faithful to “vote for God”—he only knew he had to desecrate her temple. The first door he tried on the right was the choir room. Its windows faced the grassy courtyard by the parking lot, where the families were gathering their goblin troops, getting ready to go home. In the dim reflected light from the lampposts, Dell could see racks of choir robes along one wall and an upright piano facing crooked rows of folding chairs. Nothing worth desecrating here.

Dell withdrew and closed the door, continuing down the hall, bearing the drunken perfume of gardenia wherever he moved. The next door to the left was a windowless storeroom. Dell hazarded flipping on the light. Here were the altar linens, the candle snuffs, a couple of dusty prie-dieus. But the most unwieldy object was a great bronze plaque that used to be fixed to the church facade, proclaiming with Gothic certainty:
NEIGHBORHOOD CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
.

What had replaced it on the church porch was a ribbon of glowing neon—
FAMILY CHURCH OF ETERNAL LIGHT
—but everyone knew the place as Mother Evangeline's. Here in the storeroom lay the quaint trappings of the old religion, pointless and shorn of power. Mother required none of it, preferring instead the video booth installed at the back of the sanctuary, giving her cable access beyond the dreams of a neighborhood preacher.

As Dell flipped off the light and continued down the hall, he could feel a curious memory trace of his days as an altar boy, when he'd wait for Father Diego to finish his confessions. Even at eight years old Dell kept his sins to himself. Bearing the holy water into Mass behind Father Diego, he'd known he was damned eternally, twice damned for daring to touch the implements of transfiguration, and all because he diddled his cousin Alvaro. Now he felt that strange thrill of damnation again, moving deeper into the dark.