At Ease with the Dead Read online

  “Tomorrow.”

  Alice said, “Have you given up, then, on finding the remains?”

  Till now, we hadn’t spoken about my reason for being in their city. I nodded. “As far as El Paso is concerned. I’ll see if I can locate your friend Peter Yazzie on the Reservation. But that’s a long shot. And even if I find him, he probably won’t be able to help.”

  “Did you get any help from Martin Halbert?”

  “Some.” I had decided before I arrived here that I wouldn’t tell her about Brian DeFore and her mother. “He seems a pretty nice guy.”

  Alice smiled. “He is.” She turned to her granddaughter. “Isn’t he, Lisa?”

  “Very nice,” Lisa said. She turned to me. “Sad, I think, but very nice. He and I dated for a while. A few years ago.”

  “Why sad?” I asked her, telling myself that I was asking only because the answer might somehow bear upon the case. Ignoring the flicker of—what? irritation? jealousy?—that said Lisa was far too young for him. Ignoring, too, the urge to linger over the observation that she dated older men.

  Lisa shrugged lightly. “He wants children, and he can’t have them.”

  “He can’t adopt one?” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” she said. She smiled wryly. “It wouldn’t fulfill the same dynastic urges.”

  Alice said, almost defensively, “Martin’s very proud of his father, and very proud of his father’s company. He’s given up the day-to-day running of the business to write a book about it.”

  Lisa said, “The book’s become a sort of substitute for the child he can’t have.”

  Alice thought about that for a moment. “Perhaps. Men like to leave something behind. Monuments to posterity. But he’s still a very nice man, and very bright. One of my best students. And one of the few oilmen in Texas—in the country, for that matter—who’s demonstrated a concern for the environment.”

  Lisa leaned slightly toward me, cupped a slender hand around her smiling mouth, and said in a stage whisper: “Don’t get her started on the oil companies.”

  Alice turned to her, eyebrows arched, and grandly said, “One day you’ll be a feeble and senile old woman yourself. I only hope that you find yourself saddled with wretched, thankless grandchildren who sit there and mock you.”

  Lisa laughed. “Granny, I’ll be feeble and senile before you are.”

  Alice smiled and turned to me. “It’s not merely the oil companies, although certainly they share the blame.” She shrugged her angular shoulders. “Finally, of course, it’s the human race.”

  Lisa smiled at me. “Alice thinks we’re a rogue species.”

  Alice said seriously, “I do, yes. If you see the world as an organism, a single entity, which of course it is, then you can’t help but see the human race as a kind of virus on its surface, actively engaged in killing off the host.”

  I took a sip of wine. “That sounds like a pretty bleak way to look at it.”

  She smiled. “Well, at least we’re doing it more swiftly these days. That’s something, I suppose. We’re putting her out of her misery more quickly. We can dig hydrocarbons out of the soil, where they’ve lain dead and buried for millennia, burn them at an absolutely staggering rate, and destroy the entire atmosphere. We can bulldoze and dynamite and torch the tree forests, thousands of acres of them a day, and deplete the major source of oxygen for the planet. We can spill millions of tons of industrial waste into the seas, and kill off the plankton that provide the ultimate basis for all aquatic life.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and smiled. “Pretty bleak.”

  Another smile from Alice. “The irony is that from another perspective, equally valid, the human race is quite simply the pinnacle of evolution. Really quite a remarkable thing, isn’t it: Matter become conscious of itself.” She shrugged again, her smile became rueful. “Not conscious enough, alas.”

  I said, “You don’t think there’s any hope?”

  She shook her head. “Not for us, at any rate. Not for the human race. We’re doomed, thank goodness. But I like to think that life of some kind will survive. Cockroaches, perhaps. Sharks. Some kind of new, mutated bacteria that thrives on radiation. Who knows? Life, after all, doesn’t care who lives it.”

  “And what do we do in the meantime?”

  Another shrug of her square thin shoulders. “If we’re inclined toward morality, I suppose we try to contribute as little as possible to the destruction. And I suppose that, collectively and individually, we take a kind of comfort from the fact that no matter how bad things are at the moment, they’re the very best they’ll ever be, from now on.”

  “And,” said Lisa Wright, smiling, “we take coffee and brandy in the living room.”

  The end of the world notwithstanding, there were a couple of questions I had to ask Alice Wright. In the living room, over the coffee and cognac, I did.

  “Alice,” I said, “you told me that your mother found out about the woman your father was seeing. Do you know how?”

  She and Lisa were on the sofa. Alice sat upright as though doing afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace, both feet squarely on the carpet, cup and saucer squarely in her lap. Lisa sat with her long legs tucked beneath herself, one long feline arm stretched out along the sofa’s back, the silk of her sleeve a line of flame against the cream-colored fabric. I sat across the room in one of the two upholstered chairs that matched the sofa. A piano piece—something by Eric Satie, I think—was playing softly on the stereo.

  At the question, Alice frowned slightly. “Learned about the woman, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  She cocked her head thoughtfully. “You know, I don’t, really.” She smiled. “Isn’t that curious. I assumed at the time that my father had told her. But that can’t’ve been the case. Why would he?”

  Lisa said, “Because he wanted a divorce?”

  Alice shook her head. “No. If he’d asked her for a divorce then, I would’ve known about it. I don’t think he mentioned divorce until that last day.”

  I said, “But even then, you never actually heard him ask for one.”

  “No. No, but I’m convinced he did.”

  I nodded. “Do you remember a man named Jordan Lowery? He was a professor of oil geology at the school.”

  She smiled. “Jordan. Of course. For the longest time I had a terrible crush on him. Physically he was probably the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Absolutely stunning.” Another smile as she inclined her head confidentially. “But a terrible rogue. What they used to call a cad. He cut quite a swath through the female half of El Paso. There were stories, I remember, about him leaping out of windows to avoid outraged husbands.” She smiled once more and sipped at her coffee. “His son, Emmett, teaches at the university now.”

  “I met him the other day,” I said.

  “Poor Emmett. There are all sorts of ways the sins of the fathers can be visited upon the sons. In Emmett’s case, they simply replicated themselves. He became a womanizer like his father.”

  She took a sip of coffee. “Jordan didn’t marry till he was in his late forties. He really didn’t have any interest in children, didn’t quite know what to do with them. Emmett was an only child, and he spent most of his life trying to get his father’s attention and approval. And I suppose he’s still trying, although Jordan’s been dead for thirty years now.”

  Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters—somehow I’d gotten tangled in a web of family relationships stretching back to the twenties, a snarl of bygone lusts and longings, bygone loves and hates. I sipped at my brandy and asked her, “How did Jordan get along with your father?”

  “Well enough, I suppose. Jordan was always pleasant and deferential.” Another smile. “But he was also ambitious, so I’ve no way of knowing how genuine that was.”

  “How’d your father get along with him?”

  “I think my father rather envied Jordan his freedom. His roguery.” A smile. “With a wife like the one he had, one can hardly blame him.�
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  “How’d your mother feel about him?”

  She frowned. “The subject never really came up. Not in front of me, at any rate. Disapproving, I should think, given her feelings about sex.”

  I nodded. This wasn’t the time—the time might never come—to tell her that her mother’s feelings about sex had probably been a good deal more complicated than she believed.

  I said, “Do you think it’s possible that Jordan might’ve been involved in your father’s death?”

  She blinked, surprised. “Why would he be? He was ambitious, as I say, and he liked the things money could buy, but why kill my father? To obtain his position? The salary wasn’t that much larger. And why on earth steal the remains of a Navajo Indian?

  A good question, one I’d asked myself. I still didn’t have an answer for it.

  I stayed there at the Wrights’ for another half an hour, finishing up the coffee and brandy. As I was leaving, both Alice and Lisa insisted that I come see them the next time I visited El Paso.

  When I thanked them for the dinner and said good-bye, I was careful not to look down at the breasts sliding comfortably beneath the red silk of Lisa’s blouse. And I was careful not to invite either of them—I couldn’t invite Alice without inviting Lisa—to get in touch with me if they ever came to Santa Fe. Outside their house, walking to the Subaru, proud of myself, I slapped an invisible merit badge on my back. After only a moment, it felt like a sack of potatoes.

  I parked the station wagon in the motel lot and walked down the sidewalk. My room was set back down a kind of alleyway, an alcove in the building. The alleyway was lit by two spotlights, one bolted high up onto each wall.

  I’d reached the door, snagged the keys from my blazer pocket, when I heard the scuff of shoe leather against cement. I turned.

  There were three of them, moving toward me without any hurry. They were all big, and they all wore stocking masks.

  11

  For an instant, absurdly, I thought they were the three men from Lake Asayi. Somehow they’d tracked me down, spent months doing it, and now finally they were going to take their revenge.

  But these three were larger and they were considerably more menacing.

  There’s something obscene and horrific about a stocking mask. The taut translucent fabric distorts the face, reminding you of the malleability of flesh, its fragility, its transience. It transforms the eyes and mouth to evil slits, the nose to a grotesque blob, turns them all into a vision, dreadful, repellent, vaguely remembered from ancient sweat-soaked dreams.

  The man in the middle, probably the leader, was the biggest of the three. He wore jeans and a zippered red windbreaker. I think the two outriders were wearing jeans too, but by this time I had stopped paying attention to anyone’s attire.

  The instinctive reaction was terror. Run. Scream and gibber if you must, but run.

  But the wall was at my back. Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

  Forget the door. They’d be on top of me by the time I unlocked it, and then we’d all be inside the room. Where they could kick me to pieces in privacy and comfort.

  There was a foot of space between the two outriders and the wall and another foot between each of them and the leader.

  They were about three yards away now, still moving toward me, slowly, relentlessly. No one had said a word.

  When you can’t retreat and when surrender seems most likely fatal, you attack. It was the only choice I had. The only option that gave me the possibility of leaving that alley without being very badly hurt, or very badly dead.

  I sucked in a deep lungful of air. Then, raising my arms in front of me like a tackle, bellowing the way I had at Lake Asayi, I ran at them.

  For a moment, startled, they stopped their advance. The man in the center put his hands to grapple with mine, and I kicked him in the crotch as hard as I could. He doubled over, hissing, and I rammed him toward the outrider on my left.

  The motel key was still in my hand and I held it like a dagger. As I swerved around the big man in the center, I stabbed out toward the outrider on the right, clawing it across his face. I felt the nylon stocking rip and the flesh beneath it split apart.

  He shrieked, and then I was past him, on my way to the alley’s entrance.

  And then I wasn’t. The man on the left had untangled himself from the leader and dived for me. His hand snared my ankle and I went down.

  I hit the cement skidding on my knees and the palms of my hands. Cloth and skin shredded beneath me. I tumbled over in a roll, more momentum than strategy, and then I was up again, stumbling, but stumbling in the right direction. I was at the entrance when a diesel cab slammed into my back.

  Suddenly I was moving more quickly than my legs wanted to. I shot toward the Subaru, and I would’ve shattered my shins against the bumper if I hadn’t slammed my wounded hands against the hood. I went spinning over the fender and came down on hands and knees in the space between the station wagon and the next car.

  I pushed myself up, but by then one of them was at me, slamming a fist into my kidney. I gasped and swung around and struck out wildly, backhanded. My knuckles crashed into his face and he jerked back, and then the other man was there and a fist was coming in for my throat. I dodged away but it smashed against my shoulder, and then the first guy was back, pummeling me. Fists happened for a while, and kicks and gouges, a flurry of hands and elbows and knees, and then finally they had me, arms and legs pinioned, and everyone was breathing heavily, and the third man, the leader, was limping toward us from the entrance to the alleyway with a knife in his hand.

  Fifty yards away, cars cruised serenely by. Just another Thursday night in El Paso.

  Walking with a slight stoop, the leader limped closer. For the first time I noticed, under the taut nylon, beneath the deformed nose, a smudge of gray.

  A mustache. Have to remember that.

  Why? So I could put it on the résumé?

  “Hijo de puta,” the leader said calmly. Son of a whore.

  They were the first words anyone had spoken since I stepped out of the Subaru.

  He was about five feet away when suddenly he was lit up, brilliantly, as though by flood lights. And suddenly a car horn was exploding behind me, honking frantically, off and on. I felt the two men at my sides wrench themselves around to look, and then the leader was shouting “Vamanos,” over the blare of the horn. And then they were gone and I was leaning, head lowered, against the Subaru.

  I heard a car door slam, heard a quick clicking of heels against pavement. I felt a hand on my back, and Lisa Wright was saying, “Joshua? Joshua?”

  “Joshua, you’re being ridiculous,” Lisa Wright called out from the bedroom, beyond the thin wooden door.

  “Probably,” I called out over my shoulder.

  “You should see a doctor.”

  “Uh-huh.” This was the third or fourth time she’d told me.

  In socks and shorts I bent forward and studied my face in the mirror. A small triangular gouge at the curve of my cheek—one of the men in the alley must’ve been wearing a ring. The wound had stopped bleeding and started throbbing.

  Lisa called out: “Why do grown men sometimes act like idiots?”

  “Beats me.”

  She had helped me get the first-aid kit from the glove compartment of the Subaru—my hands had a hard time with the car door. I’d made her wait in the chair while I did my repairs in the bathroom. It had taken me a while, because I couldn’t begin until I caught my breath and stopped shaking.

  But finally I’d been able to clean myself off, smear Neosporin on my palms, wrap them with gauze, and tape them.

  Now, assessing the damage in the mirror, I decided I was lucky. I still had all my teeth. My lip was split, but that had stopped bleeding too. By tomorrow morning, probably, it would be the size of a flounder. By then, too, I’d have a nice bruise highlighting that gouge, and two or three more down along my rib cage. But no ribs were cracked, no bones were broken. The worst visible injur
y was to the knees of my pants, which’d been vaporized, and to my palms, which’d been scraped raw.

  So had my pride. The three men had frightened me, and badly. Even now, safe in the bathroom, I still could see those smooth bullet-shaped heads coming toward me.

  Fortunately for all of us, wounded pride doesn’t show.

  Outwardly, I seemed almost presentable, and if it weren’t for every muscle in my body feeling as though it’d been hacksawed into pieces, and for my hands feeling as though I’d been juggling hot waffle irons, I was absolutely tip-top.

  The pain would be worse later, when I stopped moving. Thing to do now was keep moving.

  I opened the door a crack and asked Lisa to get me a clean shirt and a clean pair of jeans from my suitcase. A few moments later she was there in her red Oriental outfit, handing them over.

  “Let me drive you to the emergency room,” she said.

  “No thanks,” I told her.

  I was holding the door open by only five inches. Lisa suddenly smiled. The blue eyes looked down the length of the door, looked back at my face, and she said, “It’s not as though you’ve got something I haven’t seen before, you know.”

  I smiled back. “Then you’re not missing anything now. Thanks for the clothes. See you in a minute.”

  I closed the door and leaned against it. My virtue, such as it was, still intact.

  But the rest of me feeling a bit foolish. I’d be blushing next and fluttering my eyelashes.

  Gingerly, using only my fingertips, I eased into the khaki shirt and buttoned it. Gingerly I pulled on the jeans and zippered them. No problem at all, except for Lisa’s presence fifteen feet away. If she hadn’t been there, I could’ve whimpered and screamed all I wanted.

  I fished my wallet out of the ruined jeans and levered it into my back pocket. Then I opened the door and stepped out into the room.

  Lisa sat silently in the chair, watching me. She’d hung her coat—a black, full-length wool job, like a London bobby’s uniform coat—on the rack by the door.

  I crossed the room to my suitcase, which lay open on the chair by the television. I dug out my flashy sky-blue running shoes—$14.95 at Payless—and brought them over to the bed. Sat down, slipped them on, laced them up.