It had been the morphine. They’d given it to him and he lasted not long after because the drug slowed his heart rate and body function down, made him comfortable, and allowed him to die at peace.
I understood in that moment why Mom had held off the morphine: She knew not giving it to him, he’d be around longer. Life would never be the same for her, I realized while standing, staring at my dead brother. Her firstborn, the child she favored over all of us, and had taken care of most of his life, was gone. It was the opposite of natural order—he had gone before her. Mark’s death, not to mention burying him on her birthday and the death of her husband a few years later, would break my mother into thousands of tiny pieces.
I cannot hear George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” without thinking of Mark. Not sure if it was his favorite song, or it was on the radio once when he played the role of big brother, holding me up on his shoulders, carrying me around our yard in East Hartford, protecting me from falling. The person I need to remember.
One of the strangest things about my oldest brother being dead today is that I am now older than he was when he died. I never considered this. He was always the eldest, the big brother, the unspoken guardian. Regardless how his life turned out, Mark Anthony Phelps Sr. was our brother; he was a father and a son. Throughout the course of the thirty-seven years of my life leading up to Mark’s passing, I’d never seen our father cry. Not one tear. Yet, while we sat, as families do, in the front row, inside the same funeral home where we’d said good-bye to Diane eight years earlier, I looked on as my dad, his shoulders bouncing up and down, cried. It was as though he’d held back the tears all his life, each one reserved for this day he undoubtedly knew—as far back as Mark’s teenage years—he’d bear witness to.
PART THREE
FAITH
35
A NEW PURPOSE
“You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how
to doubt.... Faith is . . . a decision, a judgment that is
fully and deliberately taken in the light of a truth that
cannot be proven. . . .”
—Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
OSCAR PATTERSON (PSEUDONYM) STOOD AND STARED AT THE BLOWN radiator in his truck. He’d been waiting for a serviceman to come out and have a look since about two o’clock, on the morning of September 4, 1992. Now somewhere near 9:00 A.M., Oscar wondered when in the hell the guy was going to show up.
On Highway 99, in Livingston, California, the Blueberry Hill Café was a popular stopover for truckers looking for a bite to eat, fuel, some road porn, a shower, paid female company, and maybe even what they needed most: rest. The joint had changed over the years. In the 1990s, the front of the café faced Highway 99. Well-known by truckers, the Blueberry functioned more along the lines of your traditional truck stop with access directly off the highway. It had a large, unpaved, powdered-dirt parking area in back. The southbound side of Highway 99 ran out front of the main entrance; the northbound side just beyond that; there was a dirt connector in between the north and south lanes, allowing traffic on either side to pull in. The Blueberry was a bona fide greasy spoon, with hookers roaming the lot and amphetamine dealers waiting in cars, looking to unload Black Beauties, TickTock, Redneck Cocaine and, of course, heroin for the working girls.
As Oscar waited, he grew bored. He was parked one hundred feet south of the restaurant building. About 150 yards from there was a field with a few stray walnut trees and what looked to be an abandoned house some distance away from one of the trees. Near the nine o’clock hour, his repairman nowhere in sight, Oscar walked out into the field to find a tree he could sit under. It wasn’t hot yet, but the sun was out and that scorching California dry heat was coming.
After walking through the dirt parking lot and into the field, happening upon a walnut tree, its limbs draped down like spider legs, several nearly touching the ground, Oscar saw something. Positioned in an area near the trunk of the tree, in a section with no hanging limbs or other debris, Oscar adjusted his eyes and was shocked to be staring at a dead woman. She lay faceup, her head leaning to her left. From a distance, because of the hanging limbs and foliage, “[she would have been] difficult to see unless you were very close,” a report of the crime scene said. Standing next to Oscar’s truck, or in the Blueberry parking lot, there was no chance of seeing her.
She’d been dead for some time. Her corpse was bloated and bugs had gotten to her, with “a high concentration of maggots on the head and facial area.” This initial report claimed a “large amount of blood in the head . . . and in the victim’s vaginal area.” Her dark brown skirt was “rolled up above her waist.” She had foxtails—common meadow grass, small, brushlike, pointy spikes, found all over this particular region of the west—stuck to her clothes and hair. She wore socks, but no shoes. There were no footprints, other than Oscar’s, anywhere. That vacant house stood about forty yards east of her body, where “a sandal, a pair of men’s underwear, a lunch box, assorted business letters and a Styrofoam coffee cup” would be uncovered, ultimately written off by investigators as “nothing . . . related to the body.”
Without giving any indication as to how it was known, the report said that “the victim sustained her injuries and died at another location,” but “was then left . . . where she was found.”
She was initially described as a “Hispanic female adult” between twenty and thirty. She wore a red pullover short-sleeved top, red panties, white, woolen, ankle-high socks. Her shoes were not at the scene (nor would they be recovered). She had one tattoo: a “bird flying into the sun” (on her lower-left abdomen). She wore a wristwatch on her left arm, along with a wedding band. Two gold chains hung around her neck, an earring in her right ear. There was an empty Budweiser can on the ground, close to her head. Eight inches south of her body was a “piece of cloth material.”
Upon removing her from the scene, investigators found no blood underneath her head or vaginal area, leading them to believe that what, at first, seemed to be bloodied areas (face and vagina) was decomposition fluids leaking from those areas, both locations on the ground slithering with maggots.