Authors: Alfredo Vea
“I have to go up and visit Calvin tonight. I promised his mother. God”—he exhaled deeply—“I’m not really sure that I have the energy for another life makeover!”
Everyone at the table understood what Jesse meant by the phrase “life makeover.” It referred to the agonizing, time-consuming process that he had developed over the years to prepare all his clients for the rigors of the courtroom and for the frightening possibility that a semiliterate, bookless, wordless, and thoughtless young man who was accused of premeditated murder would have to take the stand and explain himself to twelve people—twelve white people who would never deign to set foot in his world, who would clean their shoes if they ever did. Twelve people who would swear an oath to judge Calvin fairly, without preconceptions or prejudice, but who would also lock their car doors if they noticed him walking nearby.
“But that’s not the worst part,” he said. “I have to go visit the supreme being, too.”
“Oh shit!” moaned Newton. “I was wondering who had that idiot’s case. Oh Jesus, Jesse, you’ve got my sympathy! Make sure you bring up some Handi Wipes and a bottle of spray disinfectant! That dude is bad news.”
“Not to mention breath mints,” smiled Jesse. “It seems that the price of racial supremacy is a set of really bad teeth. I’m bringing up more than Handi Wipes. I’m bringing up alcohol swabs and a battery of IQ tests, graded, stamped and sealed by Dr. Wooden.” Jesse looked at his watch. “In fact, I’m meeting the doctor and my investigator up on the seventh floor in just about ten minutes.”
“The IQ tests again.” Newton laughed.
“Yeah,” answered Jesse. “Normally I have to pull this arrow from my quiver once every two or three years. Lately it seems like I’ve been doing it once a month. It’s like I said before, stupidity is its own best defense.”
“I’m surprised the supreme being would ever agree to it,” said Matt, whose distaste for the man was obvious.
“I goaded him into it,” said Jesse. “Actually, it was quite easy to do. Besides, this test was fun. My guess is that Dr. Wooden pulls the questions from one of those trivia games or from his history books. Who was Berengaria of Navarre? Name the sons of Eleanor of Aqui tane. What was the Counter-Reformation? Now that I think of it, this is the second time this year I’ve had to do it. I swear, I almost died laughing when I got to the question that asked us to list the twelve tribes of Israel.”
“Hell, I couldn’t answer that question,” exclaimed Freya Horne. “Could you?”
“Of course.” Jesse laughed and winked at her. “Even the least-educated Mexican peasant can answer those questions! But you should’ve seen sweet mr. supreme when he got to that question. I thought he was going to explode in the interview room. The veins on his red neck were just about to burst and all of his tattoos were stretching. But the question after that one was even worse. ‘Name three jazz musicians who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance.’ The supreme being almost shit in his Christian Identity pants. When we got to the questions about syncopated rhythms, Red Garland’s right-hand technique and cigar-cutter saxophones, he smashed his pencil lead on the paper. It’s taken some time, but I think I have my relationship with the supreme being all worked out.”
“Let there be darkness,” said Chris Gauger.
People were standing up now, grabbing their books, jackets, and briefcases. Some were gulping down the dregs of their coffee and swearing never to buy the dishwater brew again. Someone who had eaten the oily wonton soup was hurriedly looking for his bottle of Maalox. They were heading off to open law books and read advance sheets, to peer into another failed life, to view the uglier faces of desire, to examine a twisted moment of grief or cruelty, to take it on—to assume its weight for a client who could not or would not, for a client who should not.
“Why is it that you are taking IQ tests with one of your clients?” asked a departing voice.
“Because el señor supremo is a white supremacist,” answered Freya, who had been fired by the repugnant man in a previous case. She continued speaking as she walked toward the jail elevator. “He hates just about everyone: Japanese, Irish, Italians, Samoans, Jews, Mexicans, Africans. He hates the National Endowment for the Arts, the Boy Scouts, librarians… everybody. But here’s the best part of all: he believes himself to be a great legal mind.”
“Yeah,” added Jesse with a large smile, “and the winner of this IQ test gets to be the lawyer.”
The entire group walked to the elevators. Chris wadded up his paper cup, spread his fingers for a four-seam fastball, took careful aim at a trash can, then missed it by a mile. Behind them the cooks were mopping the floors and setting the chairs on top of the tables. As the elevator doors were closing, leaving behind an empty hallway, the voice of one defense lawyer could still be heard referring to the sadomasochistic murder case.
“What on earth do you think the mayonnaise was for? Listen, I once had this guy…”
At the same moment that the elevator filled with defense lawyers began rising up the hollow spine of the building, three women were leaving the coroner’s office and climbing silently into a taxi that was headed for the San Francisco airport. The sisters of Persephone Flyer had just arranged to have the body of their loved one flown back home to Alexandria, Louisiana. When they learned that there were no claimants for Mai’s body, they shipped her back to Alexandria to be buried next to their dear Persephone.
Once back home, they would shoo away that old mortician and spend a full night, from sunset to sunrise, with their dear sisters. None of them knew if the tradition, the deep need for this death watch, was French, Indian, or African, but they all knew it had to be done. It had always been done this way. The moment the three sisters had learned of the death, they had begun the process of carefully choosing the clothing in which Persephone would be buried. Now their hands would dress her, their eyes would remember her, and their lips would fill the air with stories of her life.
As the eldest sister held Persephone’s heavy, sleeping head, the other sisters carefully bathed her with her favorite beauty soap, then moistened her with fragrant oils, removing as much evidence of the coroner’s hand as they could. No one would mention the scalpel cuts on her fingers. One sister would quietly cover them with soft daubs of foundation makeup.
“My, my, but that scar she got when she shinnied up that telephone pole still hasn’t gone away,” said the youngest sister.
“C‘esttrop dommage.
These panties,” she said softly as she pulled a pair of pink panties past the knees, “were the ones she wore on her wedding day. Damn if they don’t still fit. Look here, her tummy’s as tight as a schoolgirl’s. C’est
incroyable!”
The others would agree. There were no stretch marks on her tummy. No burgeoning fetus had spread her hips. How she had wanted those telltale marks. One sister would begin to cry. One would whisper that Persephone had miscarried out of loneliness. Two of them would lift her midsection. Another would pull up a pair of cinnamon pantyhose to cover the panties. Then one of the sisters would remove a limp, lacy bra from a brown bag and lovingly relate the tale of Persephone’s adolescent fear that her breasts would never grow. Laughter would rise up from the mortuary at midnight as they recounted Persephone’s subsequent, anguished prayers that her swelling breasts not grow any larger.
“Mon Dieu,
she was so all-fired worried about her titties, about becoming as top-heavy as Mama! Remember back when I had my breast removed? Remember what she did? ”
All three sisters laughed the only laughter of the night that was not pierced by poignancy.
“She read somewhere about some crazy doctor over in Baton Rouge who did a mastectomy on a lady and removed the wrong breast. Well, Persephone got so fired up about it that she ran into my hospital room that evening before my operation, pulled down my gown in front of God and company, and with a felt-tipped pen wrote a sentence on my good breast!”
“Leave this one alone!” screamed the three sisters in unison.
As the laughter diminished, the oldest sister opened a brown bag, then stood to let the cloth and thread in her hands fall down to its full length.
“She bought this dear dress when she found out she was pregnant. I had never seen her so happy.”
Together, they lifted her arms and upper body and pulled the maternity dress down until the fit was perfect. A small pillow was then placed on her abdomen beneath the pantyhose. She would lie for eternity in her second trimester. One sister saw to the matching shoes and handbag while the other three worked on the makeup. She would have her favorite French perfume and her favorite lipstick and rouge. Her lips would be as red as pomegranate.
“I am applying thick, colored putty to her chin,” the sister would tearfully chant, “so that her poor pores will have absolutely no way to breathe. I’m daubing on slashes of rouge here and here to add emphasis to the high cheekbones she never had.”
Her precious earrings, bought by her husband while on leave in Thailand, would be hung from her lobes. One sister would lovingly brush dark mascara onto Persephone’s lashes while another squeezed a lash curler over each closed, unmoving eye. A pair of small, pink toe shoes was placed in her hand to further hide the cuts. Persephone had broken her mother’s heart by quitting ballet. As they washed and combed her hair, none of them would ever mention the dark bullet hole hidden beneath her locks.
When Persephone was ready, they would move on to Mai, a sister they had never met. The three had gone to the Amazon Luncheonette and collected Persephone’s belongings. One of the sisters had found the beautiful red
aó daì
hanging in the closet along with silk slippers and panties. They would lift Mai’s body and dress her in the
aó daì
.
“Have you ever seen such beautiful skin?”
“Have you ever seen such hair?”
“Do you think that she and Persephone… well, you know?” asked one sister sheepishly.
“I sure as hell hope they did,” spat out another sister. “Men ain’t nothing but grief and trouble.”
In soft, dancing candlelight they would pass the earliest morning in tale after tale of childhood and youth and courtship. None would feel the chill or the dark or the orange warmth of a waking sun.
“Wasn’t Persephone’s husband so handsome!
Si beau!
That Creole boy had such a smile. Now, there was a real ladies’ man. I didn’t think she would ever trap that boy. Didn’t they make such a beautiful couple?”
“He should have come back from Vietnam after that first tour, and stayed home with her, where he belonged. What on earth was it about that godforsaken war that made him keep going back? Why do men keep going off to fight?”
“It was that war that took them both. It was that war that took Mai and her man. As I live and breathe, it was that war.”
Each sister would alternately giggle, then sob, then sigh. At daybreak the ancient mortician would shuffle quietly into his small office and hear the women talking outside his door as they left their sisters alone. He walked into the room they had just exited. The cold, hard room was ablaze with candlelight. The air about his face was filled with femininity and perfume. There was a warmth on the mortician’s skin that he had never experienced in this old, drafty building.
The women lying there looked strangely contented, almost alive. He shook his head. His lifetime of professional experience could never match what the sisters had done. The world outside had delivered an unclaimed body and a dead, barren woman to his premises. In the morning he would bury a mother-to-be whose face was flushed with joy, and a beautiful Vietnamese bride. Somehow they had accomplished so much more than mere cosmetics ever could. Slowly, he walked to his office to call for the hearse and the limousine. The three women would be back for the burial in just a few hours. They had been very insistent. Everything had to be ready.
As the chorus of women left, they were a strange admixture of mirth and mourning—staunch, straight, powerful, but momentarily enfeebled women who were missing a precious part of themselves. In hours they would be back, renewed and imperious as ever and leading squads and troops of family. Wearing white gloves, veiled hats, somber dresses, their shoulders weighed down by epaulets of grief, they would shout orders here and make firm, incontrovertible suggestions there. They would direct the movements of flesh and blood as it embraced and relinquished its own.
Their eyes beneath their darkened brows would be surging with tears and memories. Their families—their silent, obedient husbands and polite children—would be following behind them, rolling in their wake like the leaves of fall.
Jesse Pasadoble rode the elevator toward the top floor of the seven-story building. As usual, the walls of the lift were smeared with antipolice graffiti and the floor was littered with cigarette butts and newly discarded property envelopes. As with every ride in this machine, the sloppy, sideways movements of the car reminded him of the Huey helicopters he had once ridden. As he approached the felony cellblocks, he braced himself by grabbing a handrail as he began to experience the familiar yet still disconcerting sensation that his upper body was being pulled to the side and downward toward the floor.
Every ride up to the seventh floor was always the same; it was as though the force of gravity itself were contorted and twisted whenever the elevator rose past the sixth floor. In actuality it was not a gravitational effect at all but a temporal effect—a severe warpage of nearby space caused by the presence of so much time concentrated in such a restricted area.
The jail reminded Jesse of the famous Mystery Spot, a small roadside attraction in the mountains above Santa Cruz. All the tasteless billboards leading up to the attraction claimed that the physical laws did not apply within the confines of the weird little building. Metal balls dropped to the floor would roll mysteriously uphill. People who were standing erect seemed to be lying down. Feathers fell faster than rocks. All perspectives were skewed.