An Occasional Hell Page 2

  Eventually he overcame his friend’s absence and the absence of his own passion and with time he gained a reputation for solid yeomanlike work. He steered away from any case too ambitious for a one-man operation, and, as Los Angeles changed, he changed too in the opposite direction, creeping backward toward the fifties as the city galloped through the seventies.

  As street gangs proliferated, their members enrolling in night school to sharpen their business acumen, learning the rules of supply and demand, memorizing the Periodic Table, schmoozing with South American entrepeneurs, Ernest DeWalt snooped on unfaithful wives and husbands. He saw more tits and ass each week than in a month of HBO. While other investigators sank small fortunes in hi-tech listening devices and state of the art surveillance gadgetry, DeWalt maintained fidelity to his telephoto lens. He worked the uppercrust neighborhoods and made a conscious attempt to stay well within their borders. He knew that the rest of the world was out there, the dirty needles and dirty fucks, the methadone grocery lines and the bag sniffers and the punks and pukes and paltry lives, but he had no use for them, no truck, as his uncle used to say.

  Then one of the uppercrusters hired DeWalt to locate a prodigal son, and DeWalt in his typical workmanlike way located him, spotted him finally on a street in Indio and followed him to a four-star hotel and went inside the hotel and found the boy’s door standing open and walked across the threshold and caught three slugs from a .380 automatic fired by the coke-brave prodigal son, who had mistaken DeWalt for the lover his lover was doing on the side.

  Don’t be bitter, DeWalt. The boy apologized, didn’t he? It was a natural mistake.

  Sometimes even now DeWalt could hear the dialysis machine clicking in his ear. He could hear his blood churning through the wash and wear cycle. It was a maddening sound, that barely audible whoosh, that sudless agitation of his soul. He had come out of it all right, though. He wore a fourth hole in his gut now, this one for the catheter just below his naval. Four times a day he needed to find a clean and quiet place so that he could unroll from around his waist that long tube attached to the catheter, and unroll the empty plastic bag attached to the tube, and lay the bag on the floor and watch it fill with fluid from his peritoneal cavity. Then he would clamp off the tube and dispose of the full two-liter bag, then attach a new bag, this one filled with the dialyzing solution called Dialysate. He would drain this solution into his peritoneal cavity, then wrap the tube and emptied bag around his waist again, tuck in his shirt, buckle his pants, and be perfectly all right.

  It was called continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis and it kept him off the big machine. Maybe someday he would have a kidney transplant but AB positive blood was difficult to match. Lots of things were difficult to match. But maybe someday it would happen.

  Sure, DeWalt. And maybe someday the world will be filled with peace and love, and we’ll all sit around singing harmony and crocheting doilies.

  Ironically, it had been DeWalt’s liver, not his kidneys, shot by the jealous coke-head. DeWalt lost so much blood as he lay there on the Turkish rug that his unscathed kidneys turned themselves off—which is how the body protects itself, DeWalt learned later; the body shuts down all nonessential functions so as to keep itself alive. He eventually recovered five percent renal activity, which meant that he sometimes was still required to visit the men’s room, although a large thimble would serve just as well as a urinal.

  He had to restrict his fluid intact these days but he was okay. He couldn’t drink alcohol anymore but he was just fine. He had to maintain a low potassium, sodium-restricted diet, and he had to take medication to keep his blood pressure down, and he had to guard against catheter infections, which might lead to peritonitis, but otherwise he was doing swell.

  There was an additional side effect too but he didn’t have a girlfriend anyway so it really did not matter, he was A number one.

  Top of the heap, DeWalt. King of the hill.

  It was during his convalescence that he, having already resigned as an investigator—a decision made facedown on the Turkish carpet—became a writer. In the beginning he did not know whether he could write or not but this did not worry him because he had read hundreds of books and many of their authors could not write either. He had enough characters and plots in his memorybank to keep him busy for the next twenty years if necessary, if his uncooperative organs allowed him to hang around that long, and they probably would not.

  To his delight and later dismay he found that he had a knack for writing, a facility that surprised himself and everyone who knew him and what surprised him even more was the extent to which he enjoyed those hours with pen in hand and a yellow legal pad balanced on his knees. He liked how on good days he would evaporate but for the hand holding the pen and the knees bracing the tablet, that his teeth would not ache from too much clenching, nor his head pound, nor his neck be as stiff as a post.

  He liked disappearing between bags and he even came to enjoy the second bag exchange of the day, it was the most trancelike of the daily treatments, the most meditative and salubrious. He finished it, after a morning of writing, feeling truly cleansed; although he knew it was the writing that had cleansed him, the writing that expurgated more of his poisonous fluids than did the dialysis.

  So he could write, he decided, but he was no writer. The type of book he could write was popular enough, in fact too popular, and that was what bothered him. Its easy success made him feel like a woman who sits behind a glass wall and talks dirty and fondles herself while her paying customer, on the other side of the wall, masturbates. DeWalt did not have the spleen for another book, just as he did not have the kidneys or the liver to be an investigator again. What choices were left to a hollowed-out has-been such as himself?

  There were two choices but he did not like the taste of the first one, it tasted of cold metal and smoke and there was no telling what the aftertaste would be. The other choice was to slink away to the has-beens’ sanctum sanctorum, where there are always vacancies and the benefit package is good.

  DeWalt moved back east then, through the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and into that quiet heartland where by all appearances the carcinomas of drugs and despair had not spread. They had spread there too of course and were easily detectable if you wanted to look closely, but they were also easy to ignore and that was what DeWalt decided to do. It was a small college and the perfect place for a two-time washout with a couple of body parts missing. He felt comfortable in his old suits again and with money from the novel he was able to buy a small house on a quiet street. He had a twenty-five-year-old bachelor’s degree in political science but he was hired by the English Department to conduct two courses each semester, a workshop in The Writing of Popular Fiction, and the other, because his book had been made into a movie and because he had actually lived in Los Angeles, a course called by the college catalogue The Visual Metaphor and called by DeWalt An Excuse to Watch Movies for Academic Credit.

  There were seldom more than twenty students in each of his classes, and maybe one or two of them had actually read his book. They either lionized him or ignored him and for the most part they talked of harmless things and none of them ever tried to shoot him.

  He never finished the second novel, which he had begun while waiting for the first one to appear, and he had no intention now of ever finishing it, and when a colleague or student asked how it was coming along he always answered, “Just fine, thank you. It’s coming along just fine.”

  He was a wholly useless and expendable adjunct to the college and he was comfortable as such. All too soon he would be a fifty-year-old man with no romantic attachments and he had made himself more or less comfortable with that too. Not so long ago he had lain in a hospitable bed for two months and he had thought about life and his in particular, and he had decided finally that none of it amounted to anything in the end, it was here and then gone and if you left any tracks at all they would not last long either, and he was trying to get comfortable with that as well.


  Then Alex Catanzaro, a colleague from the History Department, had gotten his brain parted with a musketball. DeWalt watched Catanzaro’s widow grieving on TV, he had seen her lash out at the reporters, and he had tried not to feel curious about any of it. Then Elizabeth Catanzaro telephoned him. Her response to his refusal of help—that awful silence of hers coming through the receiver, that quivering breath and nothing else, no words at all for the next thirty seconds until he finally hung up—that tremulous silence of hers so unsettled him that he now felt compelled to tell her no in person, and now, on his way to do so, he once again felt too big for his favorite old summer suit, he felt pinched by it, choked, as if it were shrinking at that very moment.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the beginning, the more one learns, the more there is to learn. The thing you have been constructing seems to change of its own volition. You place it in the center of the table and you try to view it from another side, another angle. If you are lucky and attentive, it will tell you something new.…

  “Good morning, beauty,” Alex said.

  Jeri slid in smiling and kissed him quickly. Then she sat back against the door as he drove away from the courthouse and toward the river. He was in a hurry but careful not to drive that way. She was with him now so there was no need to drive too fast, there was no need to draw attention to his car, which many people might recognize.

  It was a gray August morning and Jeri had brought the smell of it into the car with her, the scent of summer dew and sweet damp shadows, and unbelievably she smelled too of the heavy clouds and the low rumbling thunder, every nuance of the morning filtered through her warmth and scent so that it all became an extension of her, properties of the day otherwise inconsequential until her nearness gave them meaning.

  And you can smell her yourself, can’t you, DeWalt? Not Jeri exactly but the scent of a couple of young women just like her, that nosegay freshness and the cloud-wet fragrance of desire. That’s one ability you haven’t lost, the art of unsolicited memory, and one you would be better off without.

  Between them on the seat lay Alex’s briefcase, a soft-sided black leather attache case with one snap that did not work, a birthday present from his wife ten, maybe eleven years earlier. The briefcase was stuffed with tablets and bulging manila folders filled with newspaper clippings and magazine tearsheets, the research for his book. He carried it with him every Saturday morning but he would not open it until mid-afternoon when alone in his study, alone with the dulcet exhaustion of another secret morning, of this one just begun.

  He kept the briefcase in the middle of the seat to prevent Jeri from sliding too close. He did not want to have to remind her not to. He was as hungry for closeness as she was but he could wait until they were safer. He could wait but knew that she would not without that barrier between them. She was young and heedless and wanted everything right away. This was one of the qualities he loved her for but it was also what he feared the most. Her marriage was not important to her, nor was her job or his nor what people might say about them. He enjoyed being the only important aspect of her life but at the same time he worried about it. It was flattering to a man his age but it was also very dangerous.

  “God, it’s been such a long week,” she whispered, as if even inside the moving car somebody might be listening.

  To see her eyes watching him that way excited him, those doe eyes so bright with impatience. She was wearing straw sandals and a pale rose-colored dress he would undo by untying the tiny straps behind her neck. He knew she wore nothing underneath the dress and this excited him too. He wanted to take a hand off the steering wheel but he would not let himself do it just yet. When they had crossed the bridge and there were no more houses he would do it. He would lay a hand just above her knee and then suddenly she would be against him, her mouth against his ear and her hand slipping inside his shirt.

  “Once a week just isn’t enough anymore,” she said, and still with her back to the door she stretched out a leg and rubbed the back of his calf with her toes.

  “I know, baby,” he answered, smiling, enjoying the self-denial, and stared straight ahead.

  “I want it every night.”

  He almost reached for her then but stopped himself. It was always better when he waited.

  “And every morning,” she said, her toes pushing under his thigh now, one foot raised to the seat so that if he wanted to he could confirm with a glance what she was wearing beneath the summer dress.

  “And twice every afternoon,” she said.

  He looked at the mist on the river now, and as the car came onto the bridge he rolled his window down so that he could smell the mist, its sadness and its longing.

  “Four times a day?” he asked. “What do you think I am—a machine?”

  “You could do it,” she told him. “I know you could.”

  And now because she knew he would not stop her she picked up his briefcase and laid it on the back seat and with the next motion she seemed to be half-atop him, kneeling beside him with one hand on the back of his neck and the other at his belt.

  “Wait,” he said, but was glad when she ignored him. And now that she was lying on the seat and had her head in his lap he could not keep himself from driving faster.

  This is slipping toward burlesque, DeWalt. Better stick with what you know.

  Later they would discuss how they had spent their week and any interesting things that had happened. Discussion was impossible now however and like everything else it could wait. Before Alex met Jeri he had lived a long time without the madness of sex—not without sex itself but the wonderful terrible insane burn of desire—and having enjoyed it again for the past eighteen months he did not want to ever be without it. He found that he could work happily and energetically until at least midweek knowing what awaited him on Saturday. By Thursday he would be incapable of not thinking ahead to it and it would distract him from his work, but the early part of the week was always wonderful. He felt young and strong again, a confident and unassailable man. He flirted with other students and with one of his colleagues in particular and he sometimes toyed with the idea of having an affair with her too because he was sure he could pull it off.

  Then Thursday would come and he would catch a faint whiff of Jeri’s perfume. That vague musky odor might rise up off his briefcase, or be waiting when he climbed into his car. Then it was Saturday as it was Saturday now with her scent going through him with every breath, and his hands wet on the steering wheel and his mouth dry, his lungs aching and his chest feeling crushed. He knew how she looked underneath that dress and as he drove he pictured his hand letting the straps fall free, and then even with four miles to go it was not enough to just picture this happening so he slipped a hand behind her neck and freed the small bow.

  “Oh god,” she said, as if gasping for air, the nipple suddenly hard between his fingers. He drove with his left hand and he kept watching the speedometer, glancing into the rearview mirror and then down at her blonde head moving and her mouth so hungry and warm and it had never been like this before no not with anyone else and he put a hand beneath her dress and the slickness of her thighs and she gasped again but then shoved herself hard against his hand “Oh god Alex I want you to fuck me. I want to suck you too but I want you to fuck me, I wish you had two cocks I want you all through me, this is the way I want to die.”

  Too much, DeWalt. Whatever happened to understatement and subtlety? Say what you mean but don’t say too much.

  Silence is the only voice that truly says anything, DeWalt.

  But sometimes even silence lies. Think of this as compensation for the silence.

  Usually she did not become so excited until after they had been parked for several minutes. But it was getting bad for her lately and she seemed more eager each Saturday morning. In fact he sometimes envisioned having to fuck her right there in the courthouse parking lot before she would let him drive away. Right there in the dooryard of justice. He would stand her up against the wooden door. Her
body banging against it. Loud knocks echoing down the tiled halls. The janitor in the boiler room sipping his coffee, cocking an ear.…

  DeWalt, please. This is getting ridiculous.

  Sometimes her eagerness worried him but for now it warmed and fueled his own. The river and its mist were running along beside them now and very soon he would be turning onto the narrow dirt lane and he could turn his full attention to what she was so expertly doing to him. Her thighs were clamped around his hand and her ass moving slow and rhythmically and she was using her tongue even though this was not the most practical position for it. She wanted everything right away and for the moment he had to agree that immediately was the best way to have it.

  Three hours later he was dead with a significant portion of his brain dislodged, his body naked but for his wristwatch and wedding band. The car keys were still in the ignition, the radio tuned to an easy listening station but the battery weak by the time the police arrived. One of Jeri’s sandals, the left one, was found inside the car, in the back seat with Alex’s briefcase and her neatly folded summer dress, the second shoe some twenty yards down the lane. Not far from the shoe lay her handbag, spilled open, shoulder strap broken. Other than that, Jeri Gillen had disappeared.

  “Hello, I’m calling for Mr. Ernest DeWalt?”

  “This is he.”

  “I’m sorry for disturbing you so early in the morning, Mr. DeWalt, but … my name is Beth Catanzaro. My husband Alex taught at the college with you. I mean not actually with you but—”

  “Yes, of course. I’m very sorry, Mrs. Catanzaro. It’s a … a terrible, terrible thing that’s happened. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Yes, well.…”

  She gathers herself with a long slow breath, a tremulous breath he hears quivering going in and also when released just as slowly. He is standing on the threshold of his kitchen, standing at the end of the telephone cord’s reach, watching as at the other end of the kitchen his omelet fries in a skillet. It is a three-egg omelet fat with Monterey Jack cheese, slices of red bell pepper, tomato and onion and capicola ham, and as it is filling the kitchen with its wonderful aroma it is burning because a woman somewhere unknown miles away is struggling to keep the tears from her voice. He will not hurry her but those are his last three eggs.