All remnants of a recent sudden rain were gone, and he tipped the visor down against the cold sun and drove in the slow lane, thinking back to the death of Gordon Strickland as he headed for Orleans.
The letter had been propped against the sugar bowl, a white envelope with his name written across it. Much like a letter in a story, it could have been on a mantel. There was one in the living room, holding photographs of Strickland’s parents in antique frames, snapshots of a few men standing together, hips slung in swimming suits with towels hung from shoulders and arms touching on a sandy beach, one of a woman in a broad, theatrical hat, her face unrecognizable in shadow under the brim.
It was seven-thirty when he found it, having slept through Strickland’s leaving. A suicide letter, nothing less, and Carlos had read it with great care, then read it again, and though it was that, it held no despair, but a certain reasoning and a plan for the future. Yet it need not have been written, and before he took it to the sink and burned it, he read it once again.
It was the AIDS and a certain insurance policy. Strickland wrote that he was failing now and the policy had a rider that wouldn’t cover that. But it would cover accident, and the beneficiary was the hospice movement, in the name of a certain man involved with him in that, a Larry Paradise, and there would be no note for him, but he would see to the use of the money properly. He’d sold most everything of value now, and he’d no longer be going to Boston with his New England materials.
There was two thousand dollars in the envelope, wrapped in a sleeve of paper with his name and the words severance pay written across it, and Carlos folded the money neatly and put it in his pocket. Then he drank his coffee and sat at the table and looked out the salt-stained windows. Sparrows danced on the deck rail, and when they left he got up and filled his cup again, then went to his basement room and dressed himself. He worked around the house for the next four days. There was cleaning to be done, tile work in the shower in one of the bathrooms, and in the evenings, when the work was done, he listened to Ives and to pieces by other composers. He went to bed early. The phone rang a few times, but he didn’t answer it, just left the calls to the machine. Then Peter Blue arrived and said the words and Gordon Strickland’s death became actual, and Carlos swallowed up that relationship and the contents of the letter too.
He’d called from Peter’s house before leaving.
“Still completely out,” Charlie said.
“What are the doctors saying?”
“What they’ve been saying. Pneumonia. The fever at least. They say it’s too soon for HIV symptoms, so it isn’t that.”
“Not even delirium?”
“No. Nothing. It was the fact he cracked his head. Falling, you know? That’s what Paradise said. He heard it. Quite a whack I guess. The doctors say that too. Are you coming back?”
“Not just yet,” Carlos said.
“Well, that’s okay. There’s plenty of us here. He doesn’t seem in any real danger. They’ve done tests. Nothing severe. Concussion they think.”
Carlos wondered if Peter was dreaming, in the way he had, just a week ago in the solarium.
Someone had the locks changed, and he’d had to go round to the deck and crawl under it to a basement window for a way in. There were boats out on the bay, April sailors, and the cold breeze blew in and he could hear hints of voices. Then the wind turned and they were gone and he was down on his knees and moving among the pilings into sandy dampness.
The shades were drawn, and it was dark in the living room, and when he flicked the light there was nothing, and he’d had to return to the basement again to throw the master switch. The furniture was covered with white sheets, but the top of the oak desk was as Strickland had left it, papers and medical pamphlets and a ceramic bowl holding pens and rubber bands at the corner, and he could imagine him sitting there in the twilight working, and he touched the warm wood of the surface as he fished in the bottom drawer for the flashlight, then opened the upper drawers, one of which had not been closed tight again, and saw evidence of the search in the mild disorder, clips spilled from the shallow tray, a curling at a paper’s edge.
The air was musty, and he couldn’t hear the wash on the bay’s shore at all through the closed windows, and he went to a window and raised it and felt the breeze come in against his chest and flow past him, clearing the staleness. Then he closed the window again and headed down the hallway to the library.
Things were pretty much as he’d left them, though the floor lamp had been moved and books and journals had been taken down from the shelves. They rested on the floor and in the chair. An abandoned search, he thought. No documents here. He checked the tape deck; the Ives was still there.
He stuffed the flashlight in his pocket, then went to the center of the case and pushed the books to the side, enough so he could get his hand in at the corner of the shelf. His fingers found the indentation and the peg, an eighthinch of thin doweling protruding just a little from the hole he’d bored for it. He pushed it in until he heard the faint click of the disengaging latch. Then he pulled at the bookcase edge and it moved away from the wall on its hinges, like a door, and he stepped around behind it and fished the flashlight from his pocket and sent the beam into the opening.
It was a small and narrow opening, no more than two feet high and one wide, a doorway into the back of a closet in the room beyond, where he’d built the false wall, to be a temporary hiding place for those valuable documents that passed through. Some were missing now, and he had a copy of the lists, but the beam showed nothing at the mouth, and he got down on his knees and turned and edged his shoulders into the space, then crooked his wrist and shone the flashlight to the left and craned his neck and looked there, nothing but a bent nail shining in the beam’s circle on the hard wood, a few blond curls of pine shavings. He edged back out of the tight opening and turned the other way and shuffled ahead on his knees to look in again, the beam sliding to the right, and then his head jerked back and cracked against the lintel at the top and his eyes phased out of focus and then came back again, and he was looking into the teeth and vacant eyes of another face, no more than inches from his own.
It was the skull face of a real human skull, upon a black pedestal, and its grin was particular beyond the common, and the light shone in the U of gold at the right incisor and upon the lightning crack near the suture at its temple, but it couldn’t reach beyond the protruding shine of the orbits, and it seemed the eyes might be there, deep in those black wells, and that he might touch their gelatinous pupils with his fingertips as he reached into the sockets. He found the skull lighter than he thought he might, and lifted it on extended fingers and set it carefully to the side, where it seemed to watch him like some perfectly objective witness as he reached across its stolid grin and back behind it for the small cardboard box.
He took the skull along, its empty gaze looking up from under his arm, and placed it at the end of Strickland’s desk below the photographs on the mantel. Then he stacked the papers and pamphlets to the side and took the lists from his pocket and lifted the glassine envelopes from the cardboard box, and in the dim and dusty light of the table lamp, surrounded by the ghostly shapes of covered furniture, the skull looking at him, he came upon his own name on the official deed and another name above it, one he didn’t recognize, that it negated. The date beside that name was 1920, and to the side of his name 1961 had been penned in. He’d been fourteen years old then and his father had left, and he too was getting ready to leave Mexico. There were small seals and what he took to be notary stamp impressions beside each name. The document was laced with a faded red ribbon and was written out in a formal old Spanish and was sealed with a wax emblem, the figure of a stone cathedral and a man on horseback recognizable as Obregón.