Love in the Present Tense (23 page)

LEONARD,
age
30:
look over your shoulder

It's funny, the things you think about. The things that come into your head. Like for example, while I'm driving to Southern California, to this guy's house, I'm thinking about the bogeyman. How I always thought I'd missed my chance to see him, because I didn't look over my shoulder that night Pearl went away. And I wonder, am I really going over there to ask questions, or do I just want to get a look at him now?

The first thing I see is his daughter. She opens the door when I knock. She's a big woman, and she stands blocking the doorway. Stands with her legs splayed apart and her arms crossed over her chest like some vertical pit bull. I've never met her. She gave the letter to Mitch and he gave it to me. But she seems to know who I am. She seems to have been expecting me.

“Not if you're going to hurt him,” she says.

“I'm not,” I say.

I don't expect her to believe me, but then I see that she does. Kind of gradually, but she does. She's looking at my face, and her own face is changing. Slowly, but still changing. So I guess I must have everything in the world on my own face except murder and abuse, which I'm glad to know. At least I'm coming into this the right way.

She stands aside and lets me by.

She follows me to his bedroom, calling directions as we go. The house seems dark and still, as if no one alive lives here at all, not even her. I wonder if she's dying as a way of being sympathetic.

I step into the bedroom and he's there in the bed. One of the men who killed my mother. After all these years, I'm standing in his bedroom taking a good look. His eyes are closed, so I can just look. No other drama for the moment.

All that emotion from all these twenty-five years wells up and races out in his direction, all the anger and the resentment and something that's one or two steps short of hate, but it's too close for my comfort all the same. And then all that emotion falls at his bedside and sits there on the floor looking foolish. Because he's just an old man.

He's terribly thin, arms just bones with skin stretched across, face transparent with dark bags under his eyes. Hair no color at all. The whole man no color at all, as if the color died first, leaving only the body itself to follow.

I wonder what I could possibly have done to this guy, anyway, that would even come close to what he's doing to himself. I think, crime has so many victims. One single crime, against one single person. So many victims.

He opens his eyes. Looks at me like I'm here every day, every time he opens his eyes. “Dora, leave us,” he says.

I expect her to argue but she doesn't. Maybe she argues with everybody else. But when her father says leave us she just fades away. And I'm alone with my bogeyman.

I pull a narrow chair up to the side of his bed and sit down.

He says, “Just warn me what you're going to do, okay? So I can brace for it.”

“Nothing,” I say. “Just ask you two questions.”

We're both still for a moment while he takes that in. Then he reaches for a cigarette from the bedside table. It seems amazing to me. Some people start killing themselves and just don't know when to stop.

“If you don't mind,” I say, “please wait until I'm gone. I won't be here long.”

He brings his hand back down to his side again. Slightly uneasy. “Okay. Shoot with the questions.”

“Tell me about Len.”

“What about him?”

“Len—is that short for Leonard?”

“Yeah, sure. Leonard. Leonard DiMitri was his name. Why?”

The news spreads through my body like heat, starting in my belly and swimming through my bloodstream. I feel like I can't talk until it reaches my toes, or maybe I can't ever talk again. It's what I felt when I read the letter and found out Pearl was dead. Which I knew. I knew this, too. But I guess there's more than one kind of knowing.

“My name is Leonard,” I say, when I'm ready to say something.

“Oh, yeah? That's a coincidence.”

“Maybe.” He doesn't seem to take that in or comment. I realize there's very little emotion in the room with us, between us. If any. Maybe he doesn't have any left. Me, well. I'm not sure what the explanation is for me. “Where can I get a picture of this Leonard DiMitri?”

“In the top drawer of my desk over there in the corner.”

He points and I look over my shoulder, not quite prepared to believe it will be that easy.

“You kept a picture of him all these years?”

“Not exactly. It was in with Benny's stuff, and his wife was gonna throw it out when he died. There was all this stuff she was just taking to the trash. Didn't mean anything to her, you know? Doesn't mean all that much to me, either, but it was the most important stuff in the world to Benny, so I rescued it.”

I stand up, feeling disconnected from my body. Feeling like I'm in a dream or a movie or something else besides my life, which seems to be all I can feel just now. I go over to the desk in the corner and open the top drawer. There's a policeman's shield and a couple of fishing lures or flies or whatever you call them, and a sportsman's knife of some sort, and a photo of Leonard DiMitri. I know it's him because he's in a policeman's uniform, full dress blues, and he's wearing a name tag. And I recognize him, in that funny half recognition you sometimes get with a face you've never seen before. Because the parts I recognize are me. Granted, we also look a lot different. Of course we do. He's a white guy and I'm as much Asian and black as I am white, but looks go deeper than that. People go deeper than that. There's the jawline, and the brow. And something around the mouth.

I pick it up. And I know I'm not giving it back.

“I need this,” I say. “I need to keep this.”

“Sure, whatever,” Chet says. “My daughter'll just throw it out when I'm gone.”

I sit down by his bed again, noticing that my hands are shaking just the tiniest bit. I just keep looking at the photo. Neither one of us says anything for what seems like a long time.

Then I say, “If Pearl did what you say she did…If she killed—” I almost said “my father.” I almost said “If she killed my father.” And I don't want to say that. It feels like a confidence, a private thing. Something I don't want this dying man to know about me. Something I'm not ready to share with anybody, so especially not with Chet. “If she killed the man in this picture, she had a reason why she did what she did. I'm not saying she was justified, that killing's ever justified. Just that if you could go back and get inside her head and know everything, then you'd know why. Because I know there must have been a why. Because Pearl wouldn't do a thing like that for no reason. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?”

I look up from the photo, into Chet's eyes. For the first time, I see emotion there. A positive emotion, like he's leaning in to me. Striving for some kind of closeness.

“Of course I do,” he says.

“You do?” Once again something feels like it's happened too easily.

“Sure. What do you think I was trying to explain to you about Benny?”

My brain shuts down and I decide I can't think about these things anymore, at least not now. I'm tired from this.

“Where is she?” I ask.

“Who?”

“My mother.”

“I thought we were clear on that.”

“I'm talking about her…remains. Where are they?”

“Oh,” he says. “That. Out in the middle of nowhere. Halfway to hell and gone.”

“So you don't know? Or you won't say?”

“I don't know that I can even remember. It was a long time ago.”

“You didn't go by there four or five times that year like you did with my house?”

“No. No, not there. Didn't wanta go back there.”

We fall quiet, and I feel a trace of anger forming. Because I wanted two things from him and he only gave me one. I think it's been waiting, wanting to form. But then he dropped this picture in my hand and changed the subject. But now, with that anger, I feel better.

Chet breaks the still. “I was sitting in the car that night for what felt like forever. Looking around. I can still see the spot like it was yesterday. I can see the angle of the power lines, and the way the road curved. But I could never tell you how to get there. I know what route we took to go up into the mountains. But I don't know the name of it. I just know the spot where we turned off. Maybe if my life depended on it I could even poke around and find it. The general place, anyway, maybe not the exact spot. But only if I was out there, you know?”

“Okay then,” I say. “Let's go.”

He looks at me blankly for a second. “You're kidding.”

“Not at all.”

“I'm a dying guy here.”

“If you were willing to let me strangle you to death, you can hardly argue with me taking you for a ride. The ride is much less likely to be fatal.”

“Except my daughter'll kill me.”

“Okay, fine,” I say. “We'll go with the strangulation.”

“Get my coat out of the closet,” Chet says.

We've been cruising around out here in the mountains for more than two hours now, Chet's wheelchair in the backseat. Chet chewing on his nails even though there's nothing left to chew on, really. Half the time on roads that may not even be roads. More like fire roads or something.

The sky is heavy and dark, like it wants to rain again. It's close to the same time of year that Pearl disappeared. We're coming up on an anniversary shortly.

“What do you think?” I say. I'm starting to get impatient. I'm starting to feel like we've covered the same territory more than once.

“Must be further up,” he says. He sounds distracted. “Unless we passed it already.”

I slam on the brakes and skid a few feet in the dirt. Chet flies forward against the restraints of his seat belt like a sock doll.

“You're not really going to help me here, are you, Chet?”

He looks in my direction but not into my eyes. Then away again, out the window, to the same mountain scenery we've been seeing for hours. Rocks and scrubby trees. “No, I'm trying, really.”

But I know he's lying from the way he avoids my eyes.

I sigh and rub my eyes and sit back with my eyes closed, admitting defeat. Knowing he came out here to get me off his back, not to help me. Not to give me what I need. I have the picture of my father in my shirt pocket. I can feel the stiffness of it. I try to focus on that instead. But two parents doesn't seem like asking too much. Especially since they're both long dead.

“I have to get out,” Chet says. He's talking like a kindergartner asking to go to the boys' room. “I have to have a smoke.”

“Bullshit. You're already dying from that crap. Why do you need to keep doing it?”

“You never smoked, huh? I can tell. Please. Really. It's important.”

I sigh again. Then I get out and pull his wheelchair out of the back of my car. Unfold it and bring it around to the passenger side. Help him out. Help him fall into it. He falls heavily for a man who weighs near nothing at all.

I lean on the car, and he takes a pack out of his coat pocket and lights up. Pulls a deep hit. When he releases it, a cloud of smoke flies in my direction and I wave it away again. Go around him to stand on the upwind side. We look out over the valley together for a long time.

“It's gonna be real hard on my family,” he says. “When all this hits the fan.”

“I'm not sure what you're talking about, Chet.”

“You know,” he says. “Sure you know.”

I don't argue with him. I wonder if he's fully cognizant. If he's in his right mind.

“I have to pee,” he says.

“Okay, fine. Go pee.”

“Not that easy. You gotta help me.”

“You're not serious, right?”

“No, I mean it. I can't get my chair over those rocks. At least help me get behind that scrub. Some kind of privacy.”

“Chet, there's no one within ten miles of here. I'll look the other way.”

“A man's got his dignity,” he says. He sounds like he's crying, or just at the edge of it. He swipes at his nose with the back of his coat sleeve.

So I wheel his chair over the rocks and around the scrub.

“Help me stand up,” he says.

“Oh hell, Chet, can't you just sort of turn sideways?”

“I'll piss all over myself if I try. Come on. Just do this one thing.”

I lift him out of the chair and we stand together; I'm holding him up with one arm around his shoulder. I look the other way, off toward the valley. Watch the storm clouds piling up. Thinking they look the way I feel. Dark and building.

Then I wheel him back to the car. Pile him in.

“Okay,” I say. “I give up. I'll take you back.”

And I turn the car around on that tight little unpaved road and head back.