Lying with the Dead Page 4

  Maury, who loved animals, dropped to the ground next to it, and rocked and moaned. I felt sick and upchucked on my Mary Jane sandals.

  “When I think about it—” Mom breaks my train of thought. “Maury, when he was born, seemed like any other baby. Slept a lot, didn’t cry much. You need to nurse them, read their minds. The little devil’s got no words. But I quit breast-feeding him because he was a biter.”

  This is my cue to say, “Don’t blame yourself, Mom.”

  “Soon as he could walk,” she continues, “he did nothing but fall on his noggin. Not a week passed that we didn’t have to rush him to the emergency room for stitches. That’s the difference between Maury and Quinn. Quinn could fall in shit and hop out smelling like a rose. But poor Maury, his life is one long stumble of fits and starts and stutters and farts. The last straw, the final blow, was you coming down with polio.”

  “How did my polio hurt Maury?”

  “He loved you!” Mom exclaims, shedding a long ash from her Kent. “You were his favorite. Those months you were in the hospital, he never stopped moaning.”

  Having polio was a pretty poor time in my life too, but I’ve grown accustomed to being a bit-part player in the family melodrama. The main plot has always been about Mom or Maury or finally and forever about Quinn.

  Shoving up off the sofa, Mom announces, “I have to pee,” and walks briskly across the living room. Perhaps this spryness is meant to prove she doesn’t need to be in an old folks’ home. But at the bottom of the staircase she hesitates and like a tightrope walker slides a foot forward, then teeters and grabs the banister. She climbs a step at a time, planting her left foot and pulling the right one up after it, planting the left foot, pulling up the right.

  There’s a sympathetic twinge in my leg, and I want to run and help her. And at the same time, I want to run away.

  Maury

  My room in Nicky’s house is at the top of the stairs, under the slanted roof. First time she showed it to me, she said, “Painted green, it’s like you’re in a tent.” It reminded me of Mom’s attic back in Maryland. After my parole from Patuxent, I spent months up there building my boat. Not a model. A big one, fourteen feet long. I stretched out in the bottom of it and stared at the nails in the rafters like I do at the stars over Slab City. Once I finished the boat, I planned to float across the Chesapeake Bay and into the ocean. Instead, I caught a bus to California.

  In the desert summer, eight months long, the window unit in my room shakes and jangles and shoots lukewarm air across the bed. It’s strong enough to blow the hairs on my bare arms and legs, but never cold enough to stop me from sweating. This time of year, I like it with the AC off so I can hear the wind against the roof. It sounds like snow, but it’s sand. Hissing through my teeth, I can make the same sound.

  We don’t get snow in the desert. Only up in the mountains. Some days, in the bright sun, the dunes look like snowdrifts, but when you press your hand to the ground, it’s hot even in winter.

  Long as it’s been since I touched snow, I still dream about it. Nicky claims it’s natural to dream about blizzards in a place that’s hot. “Just like up north where it’s freezing, you dream about a warm beach,” she says.

  I don’t really dream about any kind of weather except snow, and it’s more I’m remembering being a little boy and praying and watching for the first flakes to fall. If they stuck to the streets and turned slippery, that meant no school tomorrow. And if it got deep, then Dad couldn’t drive home from wherever he was playing cards and we’d all have a free day. I prayed for snow that would never melt.

  At Patuxent, I used to watch it from my cell window. The glass had a spiderweb of wire in it so you couldn’t break it and cut your wrists. As the snow came down and covered the yard, I got more and more excited, hoping when it was knee deep they’d let us go outside and have a snowball fight. Of course they never did.

  After dinner I’m in bed hissing the snow sound on the roof when Nicky shouts that I’ve got a phone call. That has to mean Mom or Candy, and because I’ve been remembering winter in Maryland, it’s like the call’s an answer to a brain message from me. But then I’m always remembering them and they almost never call.

  From the top stair I watch Nicky at the bottom. She’s a big woman and blocks my way to the phone. I wait for her to move. She grins and makes me squeeze past, knowing I hate to be touched.

  One night right after I moved to Slab City, she rubbed up against me in the hallway and I felt static, like I do walking over a rug on a cold day in the wrong shoes.

  “Anything the matter?” she asked, seeing me jerk back.

  “You surprised me, is all.”

  She crowded in close again. She always wears baggy cotton dresses, the kind they sell across the border, with bright flowers sewn on the front. There’s no guessing what’s underneath. She has a good smile and her face is dark brown so her teeth shine. She tells people all the time that she has Indian blood. I believe her. When she stepped near me, I dropped back more.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You a homo?”

  I told her I wasn’t. “I just don’t need problems in my life.”

  “What kind of problem can it be working all day and hiding in your room at night?”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “Don’t you ever get lonely?”

  “I have all the company I need.” I didn’t mention the drawers in the box in my head and how I can be with Candy or Quinn or Cole whenever I want.

  “Me, I’m lonely,” she said. Her husband, who left her this place, died years ago.

  “I’ll be your friend,” I said. “But not that kind.”

  I thought she understood. Still, there’s times she stands so near I feel a shock, and she thinks it’s funny. Now she steps aside, and I walk down the hall to the table with the telephone. The table’s another thing she bought across the border—a big round tray with jagged edges and hammer marks on the copper. I sit on the leather stool beside it, and Nicky stays close enough that she hears what Mom has to say.

  Mom does most of the talking, and she talks loud. She asks me to come home one last time. I say I haven’t ever been home since I left, so this would be the first time. She isn’t listening. She says she has something to give me and something to tell me in person. With her talking and Nicky listening, I start to feel dizzy. But I don’t dare lie down on the floor and rock. Not with Nicky’s broad brown feet in their sandals taking up so much space. Her toenails are blood red.

  When Mom hangs up, Nicky says, “She’s got something to give you.”

  I need to go to my room and think. But Nicky blocks the stairs and says, “I bet it’s money.”

  “She’s not rich.”

  “I hope it’s money.”

  Nicky has money on the brain. In her job I guess she’s got to. You can’t always trust people in trailers. Some of them leave Slab City in the middle of the night, skipping out on months of rent. I pay for my room and meals with chores, not cash. Nicky has to have a machine to keep it all straight in her head—the money she’s owed, what’s dribbling in, and what’s leaking out. There’s a computer on a desk in the dining room, and she shoos me in there to show me the problem.

  The screen has white numbers running across it. Maybe they add up to her. To me they just stream on and on, down one blue page and onto the next. Nicky moves them with her finger, saying, “See, see.” But what I’m watching is her fingernail tapping at what she calls “the mouse.” I don’t know why that name. It looks like a clamshell.

  “I’m almost broke,” she says, “I might have to sell the property and move away. What’ll you do?”

  “Go with you.”

  “Not without money or a job you won’t. I’ll barely have enough to live on myself.”

  I fix my eyes on her finger. Then the screen. So many numbers, so much debt. I doubt whoever buys the place from Nicky’ll let me stay on.

  “Is there room for you at your mother’s house?” she asks
.

  “I don’t think so.” Mom’s the one that sent me packing in the first place.

  “Then you better damn well hope it’s money she has to give you. Who’s going to pay your way back east?”

  “My brother, Quinn.”

  “Can you stay with him?

  “No, he lives on the other side of the ocean. What would I do there?”

  She switches something that makes the numbers disappear from the screen. “You’re not all that much company,” she says, “but I’d hate to lose you.”

  I don’t say it, but I’d hate to lose her too.

  Back upstairs in bed, I think about money and how to get it. I shut my eyes and wonder what Mom has to tell me. Will she say it’s all been a big mistake? Not that things didn’t really happen, but that I looked at them wrong and didn’t understand. Her asking me to leave Maryland, it wasn’t that she didn’t love me. It was just the cops kept picking on me.

  With the sand blowing against the roof and me wishing it was snow, I might as well be outside on a slab and wishing I was on an airplane. It’s stupid to worry about money or what Mom has to tell me when the biggest worry is she’s old and she’s dying. She didn’t say it on the phone. She didn’t have to. I know when you’re old, you die. Unless you’re already dead when you’re young, like Dad. Then they lock you in a box and bury you in the ground. Unless they burn you. I’d rather a box. I know boxes. I lived in one for twelve years and there’s the box in my head where I have everything stored. Burning is something I can’t bear to think about. But Mom always has her own ideas.

  Quinn

  On my daily hike through Hampstead I carry the Oresteia, reminded of years at the University of Maryland when I crossed the campus feeling simultaneously self-conscious and self-congratulatory about the paperback in my hand. I never went anywhere, not even a football game, without something to read. There wasn’t a moment to spare in my forced march of education and improvement.

  But whereas those books buoyed me up with promises of a vivid future, the Oresteia has been dragging me down and into the past. Say what you will about Aeschylus, he isn’t reluctant to depress his audience. A close reading of the trilogy, much of it out loud to savor the cadence of the verse, has left me, as I guess Greek tragedy is meant to, more than a little heartsick. It’s been like plunging into a submarine cave wearing a defective air tank and a mask that wildly magnifies every detail. I can see where I’m going, but have no confidence I’ll get out alive.

  Curses that run on for generations, dead fathers, frenzied mothers, sacrificed children, and pursuing Furies. At times I have the impression that I’m not reading so much as reliving my family history. Seven pages into Agamemnon, I trip on a line that tempts me to abandon the whole project. “We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart / the pain of pain remembered comes again.”

  I don’t want to remember the pain. I thought I had put it behind me when I settled in England. But now after nights of violent dreams, I stand in the bathroom each morning under the pulsing nozzle of the power shower and try to wash Aeschylus off me. It doesn’t work.

  Is there any bigger bore than one who inflicts his nightmares on a captive audience? In plays and movies, dream sequences strike me as pretentious at best, lazy exposition at worst. I detest the trite symbolism, the dark foreboding, and Freudian mumbo-jumbo. And yet the pressure to keep my dreams private seethes in my skull. Memories rush over me like those yobs on the tube who elbow passengers, itching for a fight.

  Some days I wake convinced that I’ve committed a great crime and I’m haunted with guilt. It’s then that I recall Mom’s promise to me as a kid. She swore she’d always love me. She swore she’d love me even if I killed somebody. I didn’t doubt her for a second. After all, she loved Maury. But she repeated her vow so often, I started to suspect that she had a person in mind for me to murder.

  Ratcheting up my nerves and irascibility these days, negotiations with BBC have turned, as Mal pungently expresses it, tits up. They say they still want me. And despite my disquiet over the Oresteia, I still want them. I desperately want the part, both out of pride and frankly because of the payday. But they’ve oh so politely declined to meet my quote.

  Like every actor of my stature, I have “my quote”—the price I feel I should command. BBC has offered a “no-quote” deal, a low-ball figure that they promise will never be made public. We’re in an industry, however, where there are no secrets and everyone can calculate your value down to the last decimal point. As soon as you accept a no-quote contract, you can kiss your quote good-bye and gird yourself for a career of cut-rate paychecks.

  As the dickering drags on and Aeschylus eats deeper into my dreams, I find that the random abrasions of daily life—a shoulder bump on the High Street, an inept bank clerk, an impertinent question from an interviewer—fill me with unreasonable anger. The English winter seems gloomier, the view from my conservatory dull, lifeless. Suddenly I start to stumble on the brick pavement and curse out loud.

  Then things turn worse. I get into a scuffle at a cab stand when a drunken couple breaks into line ahead of me. In the States the incident would pass unnoticed. But in the UK, the bottom-feeding tabloids are omnivorous and they play it as a man-bites-dog story. “Furious Yank Actor Defends British Queue,” reads the headline. Friends notice I have a black eye and rib me that I’d better mind the booze or else take boxing lessons.

  The good-natured joshing stops when I explode at a press conference. Fed up with an outrageous line of rottweiler questioning, I clamp a hand over a reporter’s mouth and shout that I won’t speak again until the harassment ceases. That the reporter is a woman doesn’t help matters. The upshot—an out-of-court settlement and a caution from my accountant that further impersonations of Russell Crowe should be shelved until my assets match the Australian’s.

  I downplay these dustups, urbanely citing the show biz mantra that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’d worry me far more, I maintain, if my outbursts didn’t make the papers. But inside I’m spoiling for trouble.

  One drizzly afternoon as I cross Golder’s Green en route to my weekly doubles match, two teenagers shout, “Look at the fucking tennis tosser.” I call them a couple of assholes. Insult follows insult, menace leads to menace, everything expressed in alternating British and American obscenity. It might have been amusing, laughable, if one boy didn’t pull a shiny object from the pocket of his hoodie. Sure it’s a knife, I unsheathe my racket, a male menopausal model brand-named the Thunderstick, and let both of them have a taste of it. One lout comes away with a fractured wrist, the other with a string pattern on his mug. I come away with an unflattering picture in the evening papers and charges of serious affray. What I imagined was a knife proves to be a cell phone. The boy claims he was terrified by my behavior and intended to dial 999.

  In America, this series of farces might lead to a plea for the court’s mercy and an agreement to enroll in anger management. But to avoid the full weight of British justice, I have to submit to a battery of assessments and a course of treatment by a bona fide, pipe-sucking psychoanalyst. His offices are not far from me, at the bottom of Fitzjohn’s Avenue, down near the Tavistock Center, where a bronze statue of Sigmund Freud broods over the stalled uphill traffic.

  Dr. Rokoko, a burly New Zealander of distant Maori antecedents, looks as if he belongs on a rugby pitch. When he rolls up his shirtsleeves, it’s a shock that he doesn’t have tribal tattoos on his massive forearms. Far from the caring-sharing type, he has a scrum half’s blunt, no bullshit manner. Or perhaps this is just the position he takes with antisocial offenders assigned to him by the court. Our sessions commence not with an invitation to confide my problems, but a pugnacious interrogation delivered in a clipped antipodean accent.

  “Inny histry of childhood vilence?”

  “Are you asking what I experienced or what I observed?” Eager to get this over with and to reveal no more than absolutely required, I start off with the intention of speaki
ng as little as possible about Mom, Dad, and Maury. I figure any mention of Dad’s murder is likely to keep me in mandatory observation for the rest of my life.

  “I’m asking did you git in many fights growing up?”

  “Very few. Actually none.”

  I don’t mention that this was the one advantage of having a convicted killer for a brother. Nobody messed with me for fear that I might prove to be as unhinged as Maury. By the time I reached high school there were a few hard-ass delinquents who might have relished taking their chances, but by then Maury was home on parole to protect me.

  “So you claim,” Dr. Rokoko says, “that you never hit anybody until recently?”

  “Correct.”

  “And no one hit you?”

  “Never.” I deliver the lie with complete aplomb.

  “Inny histry of ibuse?”

  “Physical? Verbal? Sexual?” I ask.

  “Sexual. Let’s start with that,” he says, tamping tobacco into his pipe.

  It’s difficult to suppress my normally expansive nature; my impulse is to be a raconteur, an entertainer.

  I’ve long dined out on comic tales of Mom’s bare-knuckled discipline. In addition to leaching the sting from old wounds, people’s laughter allows me to savor the humor myself. A tiny woman terrorizing her family and everybody else who crosses her path—the very idea has intrinsic hilarity. But Dr. Rokoko’s question about sex abuse taps into unrehearsed territory, and I have no better explanation of what surges from me than I do of the berserk episodes that sentenced me to a shrink in the first place.

  Behind our house, I tell him, there was a copse of woods. As a boy, Maury had a tree shack back there. By the time I was in school, nothing remained of it except rusty nails in an oak tree and a clear patch around its trunk. On warm afternoons, this lonely latchkey kid sat in the shade doing his homework or daydreaming until Mom and Candy got off work and fixed dinner.

  One day, to my amazement, a man had pitched camp under the tree and was roasting hotdogs over a bonfire. He must have been in his early twenties, a dozen years older than me. My automatic instinct was to run. Yet I stayed. Worse, I stepped into the clearing.