The Famous and the Dead

45



Bradley drove his Cayenne fast up the dirt road, leaving the Buddhist meditation center in the dust. As the road climbed into the rocky hills and narrowed, he was forced to slow, and miles later it went from bad to nothing and he parked and stepped out. They stood in a small prairie of mine tailings that glittered blue and green.

“Well, it’s pretty country,” said Owens.

“We have a bit of a hike. It’s good you wore the hiking boots.”

“I don’t get why we had to come this far to talk in private.”

“You’ll see.” Bradley got his phone out and found the GPS coordinates he’d surreptitiously recorded shortly after meeting Beatrice. He’d memorized them but this was a double check, and his memory was good. He called Erin, who sounded well. Then Reyes, who was stationed outside Erin’s room at Imperial Mercy: Nothing unusual there in the maternity unit.

He worked on the backpack and took the coiled rope. “Bring your jacket. It’ll be cold and windy up there.”

“You still haven’t told me where we’re going, or why.”

“I’m about to commence. Let’s walk side-by-side. Do you know what Mike is?”

“Well, of course I do. He’s very honest.”

“I’m going to show you what it leads to.”

The angle of ascent was slight at first, and there was a well-worn game trail to follow. The trail gradually vanished and the sand became gravel and the gravel became rocks and the rocks became boulders. They stopped on top of a hillock and looked back at Highway 395 stretching out of sight to the north, and miles east, the acres of bright photovoltaic mirrors facing the cloud-dampened sun, and the dome of the prison tucked into the distant hills.

“I wonder why he never told you about Beatrice,” said Bradley.

“Who is she? Is she meeting us way up here?”

Soon they were climbing between rocks that were far taller than they were, great boulders piled with haphazard grace, some of which looked perilously out of balance. Bradley remembered some of this and he pictured Mike in his bright golf garb, nimbly scaling the mountain ahead of him, chiding him about getting back to the gym. He heard Owens breathing hard and he waited for her to catch up. Even in jeans and hiking boots and a flannel shirt and a ball cap, she was soberingly beautiful. She looked up and smiled. Hard to believe that Owens had once been willing to kill herself, only to be plucked from death and later partnered by Mike Finnegan. They picked their way up around the towering rocks. Finally they found themselves on the small, level plateau. The wind was strong and cold. Owens pulled on the sweater she’d tied around her waist. Bradley looked to where the doleful iron girders of the mine entrance slouched, framing the sudden blackness beyond and below. “We’re here.”

He set the coiled rope and his backpack on the same boulder where Mike had set his cooler, then went to the opening of the mineshaft. He got as close as he could, bracing both hands on the rough rusted girders. “Beatrice! It’s Bradley Jones here. Mike’s partner.”

“Bradley! Are you alright? Is he with you?”

“I’m fine. Owens is with me. She’s another partner of Mike’s.”

“Owens, he never told me about you. You have such a beautiful name!”

Bradley turned and looked at Owens. Her face had gone pale and her lips were parted as if she were about to speak but she said nothing.

“She’s an angel,” said Bradley. “Mike threw her down there ninety-four years ago. In six more, he has to let her out.”

“I’ve never seen an angel.”

“You’re about to.”

“I feel very light and strange right now.”

“Answer her. About your beautiful name.”

“Um, yes, thank you, Beatrice. I was named for the Owens River because my great-grandfather was a fisherman who loved it.”

“I love fishermen and fishers of men. Does Mike know you two are here?”

“No,” Bradley called down. “He’d have a conniption if he knew.”

“That word was so popular a short century ago. I do miss it. But . . . why are you here? Did you bring me beer and meat sticks?”

“I’ve got something better.”

“Pork rinds?”

“A rope to get you out.”

“Oh dear. Father in heaven. DEAR FATHER IN HEAVEN! Bradley and Owens, you will be blessed for this! Give me just a few minutes to get ready. I’ve been saving a dress.”

• • •

Beatrice was a filthy bag of skin and bones and she smelled terribly. Her dress was brittle and decaying and had once been some shade of blue. Her skin was startlingly white beneath the ground-in dirt and her reddish brown hair had grown to twice the length of her body. She was tall and her arms and legs were emaciated and her head seemed too large. When Bradley first took hold of her outstretched hand, he thought the bones would break. He guessed her weight at eighty pounds.

They sat on boulders in the cold sunshine, far enough apart so that Beatrice’s stench didn’t offend Bradley and Owens. Bradley broke out the snacks and Beatrice ate rapidly and quickly finished off three beers. Owens ate nothing and said little but Bradley saw that her color was beginning to return and that she seemed deeply troubled. Her posture was different. She kept looking at the angel with a combination of shame and doubt that Bradley had never seen in her.

Bradley couldn’t tell the color of Beatrice’s eyes because the sunlight, after ninety-four years of her going without, was too intense to allow her anything but an occasional, tearful squint. She’d bitten off her nails at about one inch, and sanded them on the rock flanks of the mine, she explained, and she thought they looked pretty good. She had kept her teeth from growing too long for lack of use by gently sanding them with a smooth, hard rock, and she’d brushed them with an unneeded undershirt until it decomposed, then afterward, for a decade or two, with her fingers. Bradley saw that she was vain and proud of her appearance, given the challenges.

They talked a little about automobiles and current events, but mainly Beatrice ate and drank. She lowered the dress modestly but enough to let the sun hit her neck and shoulders. He body hair had grown out in all of the predictable places. After a longish silence she licked the cheese-snack dust off her fingernails, then shaded her eyes with one hand and squinted at Bradley, then Owens. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said. “You, Bradley, are recently partnered with Mike. You are a recent father. Mike of course wants to influence the child, raise him as the son of a devil. Correct?” Bradley nodded, though he had no idea how Beatrice knew this, unless she had the same thought-reading powers that Mike had. “Yes, that’s exactly how I know. You, Owens of the river, have been long partnered with Mike. You have done his asking. You have been loyal. Faultless. Even slavish. Now, Bradley wants to break with Mike and betray him to one Charlie Hood. Some kind of religious leader, I suspect. Oh, a lawman? Then the reason, the real reason that Bradley has brought us all together here, is that he needs our help. Count me in, Bradley. I’d love to go after Mike. But, Owens? I sense your profound divisions. I must assume that Mike has enlisted your help in taking over management of the son, Thomas. So, you are hurt that Mike would strip you from his daily life and assign you to Bradley as a wife, stepmother, and . . . guardian. Hurt, because you love him. You truly, genuinely love Mike because he met you at death’s door and pulled you back inside the house of the living.”

“Enough,” said Owens.

“Would either of you like these last few crackers? No? Who is this Hood and why do you believe he can handle Mike? ‘Taking him down,’ as you apparently like to say now, is not going to be easy. He’s as strong as ten men, and you cannot kill him. Just for starters.”

“We can deceive him,” said Bradley. “That’s how we do it.”

“Difficult at best,” said Beatrice. Then she squinted again at Owens and nodded impatiently. Bradley was impressed by the limber velocity of her mind. “But you can deceive him, can’t you, Owens? Because he loves you, too, as you love him. And he trusts you.”

Owens fixed Bradley with another strange stare. “I don’t know. I need time to think.”

Beatrice noisily bit into an apple. “This project could be very, very satisfying. I am so tired right now. This is more activity than I’ve had in nearly a century. All I’ve really been able to do is pray and learn how to sleep. And talk to myself to keep my vocal chords from fusing together. Keeping up my appearance took some time, but it’s amazing how long twenty-four hours are. I’m really tired of all those Psalms.”

“We’ve got a long walk,” said Bradley.

“My feet will be tender and I’ll have to carry my hair in my arms. But I’m sure I can manage.”

“I brought you a pair of athletic shoes and a dress. But you already have a dress.” He dug deep into the backpack and held up a new pair of shoes, white with pink trim, still linked by a plastic tie. He had come that close to shoplifting them from a busy sporting goods store the day before, then caught himself and paid full retail, in cash, with money he’d earned as an LASD deputy.

“Bradley Jones—you angel, you.”

• • •

They headed for a Target in San Bernardino for basics. Beatrice was impressed by the speed and comfort of modern cars, and their numbers, and the staggering human population. “This was mostly cows and crops in nineteen-seventeen,” she said. “Now it’s so much more interesting.” The wide aisles and bright lights and abundant merchandise of the Target amazed her. She lifted and piled her hair into one of the red plastic shopping carts and aimed it straight for the television screens flickering away back in Electronics. A security guard approached and asked her for ID and Bradley badged the older man and told him to get lost. Then off to women’s clothing.

Beatrice drew more than a little attention in the store so they bought shears and pulled over in Norco, found a park, and Owens cut off her hair well above her shoulders. Bradley placed a length of the shorn hair on the ground and paced it off: twelve feet, approximately. He couldn’t quite see leaving it behind so he collected and laid it all out lengthwise, then took one big handful at a time and coiled it, hand around elbow, twisting it tightly, just as he had coiled the rescue rope, then tightly knotting the ends. The hair made five thick cables, which he lay in the back of the Cayenne. Beatrice bathed in the park restroom with a new bar of soap and a new towel and came out a few minutes later in new clothes of her choosing: Dickie’s work pants and a blue fleece vest over a tie-dyed T-shirt. She reeked of Heaven Sent. She slept in back all the way to Buenavista.

Outside the hospital room Bradley introduced Reyes to Beatrice. The old snake-bit cop studied her skeptically, then limped off to get coffee. In the room Bradley introduced Erin to Beatrice, who touched Thomas’s cheek lovingly and gave Erin a long hug, then asked where the cafeteria was. Owens went into Erin’s room and closed the door behind her. Bradley and Beatrice went to the cafeteria and took their food trays out in the hospital courtyard so she could get some of the mild desert sun. They sat with Reyes. “Hospitals haven’t really changed that much,” she said. “I don’t recognize much of the medical equipment, but the atmosphere is the same, and the smells and the general sense of gravity and efficiency. More buzzers. More female doctors, thank heaven. The food’s better, too. Why do you limp, former Chief Reyes?”

“Rattlesnake.”

“Oh? One fell into my mineshaft a few years ago. Crotalus mitchelli.”

“Sounds like that movie,” said Reyes. “Did it bite you?”

“No, the poor thing was stunned. I grabbed it behind the head and ate it.”

Reyes laughed, then suddenly stopped. Nearly an hour later Owens came outside with a tray of her own. She sat down without a word and ate while Beatrice examined Bradley’s cell phone. At first she thought he was teasing her about its alleged powers. Bradley dialed and Owens’s phone buzzed and when Beatrice answered it, it was indeed Bradley, simultaneously speaking from the phone and from three feet away. “Electricity has come a long way. I’ve got so much to understand.”

“That’s nothing,” said Bradley. He shot video of her and played it back and she was speechless.

“I’ll do it,” said Owens, interrupting. “I can’t let anyone ruin Thomas. Not even Mike.”

“You chose the right thing,” said Reyes.

On that chill evening they brought Erin and Thomas back to Hood’s home in Buenavista. On the radio news Bradley heard that the suspect in the slaying of an ATF agent in El Centro and the bombing of the ATF field office in Buenavista was expected to survive his gunshot wounds, apparently self-inflicted.