The Truth About Death (24 page)

The property Rudy had come to look at was an avocado grove about twenty miles outside of Mission. He picked up the real estate agent at an office on the edge of town and they followed the county highway to a place called Parrotville, where there was a general store and a couple of mobile homes and a fork in the road. The real estate agent, whose name was Barney, indicated the right fork, pointing with his whole arm, his hand held flat, vertical, as if he were giving himself directions. Barney was too big for the little Honda; his stomach rubbed against the dash; he had to spread out his knees and cross his feet over each other, and his head kept banging against the roof. But he didn’t complain. He filled the silence with his plans for golf courses, hospitals, retirement communities, condominiums—all the things Rudy was trying to get away from. But what bothered Rudy was that Barney seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what he, Rudy himself, wanted. He expressed himself in a quasi-poetic style: “It’s a great thing to live on the land,” he said. “There’s times of heartache and weariness, but there’s times of great satisfaction too. Be your own man, your own boss. Live your own life. See the sun come up in the morning, when everything’s still. Go out into the trees at night; hear them grow. See the fruit ripen. It’s like you’re part of nature, part of the great plan of things.” He spoke without looking at Rudy, who was looking in the rearview mirror at the trail of dust they were leaving behind them.

Rudy had in fact felt some of these things, but he hadn’t put them into words. The words made him uncomfortable.
Made the whole thing seem sad and pathetic, like putting a panther in a dirty little cage. Pretty soon the poor thing gets dispirited and just lies there. Something like that happened to Rudy. He was trying to recover the feeling that had led him to Texas in the first place, a feeling that he could only compare to spreading one’s wings, as if one were a bird preparing to take off and leave the world behind. But it was like trying to conjure up an erection when you’re tired and nervous and hungover and you ask yourself,
What am I doing here? What on earth am I doing here?
It really was pathetic, wasn’t it? An old man expecting that there was still some extraordinary happiness in store for him. And foolish. He had a job, a house, family, friends. His old life began to call out to him, to present itself to his imagination in warm, rich colors. Gus Agostino had been good to him. He would miss the South Water Street Market with its big awnings, the fruit and vegetables piled up on the sloping sidewalks, the hum of the rollers, the chuffing of the big trucks, the clatter of dice in Neumann’s Market Bar.

He’d miss his house too, the polished parquetry—scratched by the dogs but still beautiful—of the dining room floor, with its shadow effects created by different kinds of wood; the butcher’s table in the kitchen; the eyebrow windows; the balcony; all the work he’d done—the new soil pipe, a downstairs bathroom, insulation, painting, the curved storm windows he’d built himself; Helen’s bookcases with their funny arches like the curve of some Italian bridge, he could never remember which; the bricks in the patio, which Helen called a
terrazza
; the grape arbor. All these things joined together and spoke in one voice: “You’ll never escape us. You’re rooted in this house. We’ll shelter you and your children and your children’s children. Love and work, that’s what
we represent. Your history, your past is embedded here. This is where you belong. You can’t escape us now.”

The previous owner of the avocado grove had died of a heart attack six months earlier, but his widow hadn’t cleaned out his office, which was at the back of the house. A window opened onto the grove, about three hundred acres. The advertisement had described the trees as “mature,” and Rudy had been afraid he’d find that they were past their prime, but they were in good shape, twenty-five to thirty feet high, alternating rows of Fuerte and Hass, well spaced. Rudy sat at the dead man’s desk, going over the records—irrigation, fertilization, crop production—which were kept in big cardboard boxes with orange backs with
LETTERS
printed on them. You sometimes see boxes like that in lawyers’ offices. Each one was marked
NOV. 1—OCT. 31
—the avocado calendar—followed by the year, starting in 1945.

He could hear Barney talking to the widow, Mrs. Wilson, in the kitchen. They were drinking coffee, and she kept coming in to fill up his cup. Barney said she was considering several offers, but Rudy didn’t believe him. She looked anxious, eager to sell.

Rudy had done his homework; he’d studied the
Avocado Grower’s Handbook
, gotten advice (much of it contradictory) from growers and shippers and brokers whom he’d done business with over the years. He’d brought a checklist with him, and he went down the list item by item:
PCP
s in the water supply, irrigation records, fertilization history, amount of allowable tipburn caused by the nitrogen in the fertilizer, production leaf analysis, chlorides and sodium in the irrigation water, the age and quality and type of irrigation system, the dollar returns per acre, market accessibility, labor, how
much water was necessary to leach the salts out of the soil. He’d gotten a soil profile and a history of low-register thermometer readings in the winter from the Soil Conservation Service of the
USDA
.

But neither the records of the grove nor the county agent nor the former owner’s widow could tell him what he really needed to know: would he be happy here?

Out the window he could see a tractor pulling a wagon up the gentle slope of a hill; he could see the pickers on the ladders with their avocado shears; he could see the wagon silhouetted at the top of the slope. He put the boxes marked
LETTERS
back in order on the shelves, noticing, as he did so, a big Latin dictionary just like Helen’s.

The county agent was talking to one of the pickers about halfway up the hill. He was pointing and gesturing. Rudy and Barney walked toward them, side by side. Barney was puffing. The county agent, who was collecting soil samples with a tube, was speaking in Spanish. Rudy listened. He thought he could almost make out what they were saying. But the soil samples weren’t necessary; he could feel the loose loamy soil under his feet. And he’d checked out the banks by the side of the road.

He looked at his watch. Eleven seventeen. In eight minutes it would be sunrise in Jerusalem. He gave a little laugh that came out like a hiccup. He started to make a joke about the Second Coming. He wanted to tell somebody, anybody, about the letter from his nephew, about the radio program. But something stopped him, a counter-impulse. He turned and started to walk up the hill. “I got to take a leak,” he said. He wanted to wait it out alone. Not that he thought anything was going to happen. Not that at all. But he wanted to think for a minute by himself.

From the top of the hill—not much of a hill, a kind of shallow bluff with a slight drop—he could see in the valley beneath him a river stretching from one horizon to another like a ribbon wrapped around the earth. A ribbon that hadn’t been pulled tight or that had worked itself loose. The Rio Grande. This was the Rio Grande Valley after all. The Rio Grande was the reason he wasn’t standing in the middle of a desert. But he hadn’t counted on it adjoining his property. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen. It was mud colored but shining too, a smooth surface reflecting the bright sunlight. He was so overwhelmed that he forgot for a moment that he had to take a leak. He looked at his watch again. Eleven twenty-one. If you were going to wait for the end of the world, where would you want to be? The radio hostess had advised people to stay in their living rooms, but Rudy thought he’d found a better vantage place. He unzipped his fly and watered the ground, tracing a big
R
, for Rudy. Eleven twenty-three. Two minutes. He watched the second hand on his watch, sweeping time before it, sweeping the seconds away, describing by its movement a mysterious dividing line between past and present. It was a long two minutes; it was like waiting for an egg to boil. You sometimes feel there’s time to write a letter or read a novel or go out and rake the yard. Come
on
. But you can’t do anything about it.
What would it be like?
he wondered. The Second Coming/nuclear holocaust. Which would be worse? He had forty seconds left to think about it. His mind suddenly started racing, traversing his whole life—his wedding day, the births of his children, the death of his wife. And that only took up two seconds. He had thirty-eight seconds to go, an eternity. He counted them: thirty-seven, thirty-six, thirty-five, but he was too impatient. He felt in his pocket for the keys to the rental car. They were
there okay. His wallet was okay too, but it was too fat; there was too much junk in it. He took it out of his pocket and checked the hundred-dollar bill he’d folded up and stuck in the section behind his credit cards. Seven seconds to go. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand, seven! Eight. Nine. Ten. Rudy waited another minute, just to make sure, before heading back down the hill.

The county agent was jotting something down with a pencil on a pad of paper. Barney was lighting a cigar. Rudy kicked a rock, and they both looked up at him, looking for a sign. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t want them to know that he’d decided to buy the property. He didn’t want them to know that in the twinkling of an eye, just like that, the old world had vanished, and a new one had been set in its place.

SNAPSHOTS OF APHRODITE

Rosalind was a Rose garden in flames, DiVita an indefatigable gardener, grafting new pleasures on the ancient stock, forcing them in the hothouse of desire to burst precociously into searing colors. The afternoon clerk at the Delta Towers pulled his thin lips back against his yellow teeth; the old men dozing in wingback chairs stirred and twitched their noses, old dogs smelling a bitch in heat, as she walked across the lobby, her sandals clicking like castanets on the parquet, her young woman’s haunches swaying like long-stemmed roses in a summer breeze, her young woman’s smells concentrated in an alembic of
O Glory Hallelujah
, thought DiVita, fingering the elevator button, summoning a chariot to carry them up to the gates of paradise—a room on the fifteenth floor of the Delta Towers Hotel. Fifteen dollars for the afternoon. A real bargain.

“What does she put on her cunt?” Cosmo, the bartender at the Casino on Taylor Street had asked him. “You can smell it a mile away. It would wake the dead.” He’d raised his fingertips to his nose. “Wait till your pal finds out you’ve been dicking his wife.”

Rosalind’s husband, Graham, a distinguished scholar with an international reputation, DiVita’s mentor and friend, was a good man—a deeply religious man, that is—who brought reason to bear upon his passions and desires. Such a man might have conversed with philosopher kings or banqueted with the blessed saints; but how could he have married his graduate assistant, an Italian girl half his age? And how could a girl like Rosalind have fallen for a man with a monk’s tonsure and a game leg? Though DiVita knew that some girls were attracted to gimps.

They had been married two years, and she had just published a naughty story in
The Gargoyle
, the campus literary magazine, and Graham had threatened to paddle her if she pulled another stunt like that again; he’d put a stop to it in a mighty big hurry, he’d said. He’d threatened to put a private detective on her tail; and every morning he’d drive her across town to the Newberry Library, where she would check the footnotes for the long-awaited second volume of his
History of the Investiture Controversy.
In the evenings he’d pick her up at the front door of the library, unless he was prevented from doing so by his busy schedule. In which case he’d send DiVita.

“It’s just a story, Graham,” DiVita had tried to explain, but Graham taught history, not fiction.

“Just a story? Nobody could make up something like
that.
”

“Graham, she’s twenty-five years old.”

But Graham had waved the question of age aside. “There are places in Africa where they’d put her in a sack with a chicken and a snake and a dog and toss her into the river.”

DiVita didn’t see the sense of it. But he was alarmed, and not without reason. Graham had bought a gun, a pistol, a .38 special snub nose with a two-inch barrel. He’d taken DiVita up to his bedroom to show him.

*    *    *

The fifteenth floor of the Delta Towers had originally been furnished in the style of a turn-of-the-century bordello, and some of the furnishings remained: velvet upholsteries, faded but opulent; lacquered wallpapers with erotic motifs; four-posters; and beveled cheval glasses in every room.

“Okay, Mister, this is going to be the supreme test, and if you fail …”

“Jesus, Rossi, where do you get this stuff?”

“I don’t get it out of a book, I’ll tell you that.”

Did she get it from Graham? DiVita rejected the idea instinctively.

“Where do you get it?”

“Shut up,” she said. “I’ll do the talking. If only you could see yourself now!”

DiVita knew that it couldn’t last, knew that something would happen, something as inevitable as the hour of death. He expected that Graham would discover one of the notes that DiVita left in her pockets and purse. Or someone at the Newberry would get wind of it, or someone would see them coming out of the Delta Towers. He foresaw a scandal, a storm of outrage and indignation, and, at the eye of the hurricane, jealousy—so fair, she was, laughter-loving Aphrodite. Who would not have risked Hephaestus’s golden net for a turn in her bed? What actually happened, however, was totally unexpected, and failed to have the immediate result that DiVita anticipated.

What actually happened was that they were photographed in their hotel room. The door was opened with a passkey, and the security chain was snipped with a menacing tool like the beak of a large and terrible bird, though DiVita didn’t really get a very good look at it. He didn’t move, couldn’t move, for
Rosalind had secured him to the four-poster with two pairs of Fogal dot stockings.