The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (62 page)

THE OLD WING of the El Paso Veterans Hospital had housed First World War veterans and veterans of the Spanish and Mexican wars who had contracted tropical fevers and lung diseases. Supposedly they responded to El Paso’s dry climate. Most of the old wing had been taken up with the oxygen tanks and compressors, the hiss and hum of respirators for lungs seared with mustard gas in the First World War. Leah had pushed Max in a wheelchair down the dim, high-ceilinged halls of the old wing during visitors’ hours. But few of the old men had visitors. They had been sent far from their homes for the dry, warm climate, and gradually they had lost touch with their families and their lives before the war. Although they sat upright in bed, green plastic tubing from nostril to oxygen tanks, their eyes were motionless and blank. Max saw these men had been dead for years—worse than dead to their families, who got no insurance money for a vegetable hooked to a machine.

The new wing was full of Second World War and Korean War veterans, although new policy had placed patients in hospitals as close as possible to their homes. Max had noted that most visitors came for the “temporary admissions” like Max—people who could walk out the front door again. Families soon recognized when a man was as good as dead. Max had found no fault with his mother and sister or Leah. They had not left him for dead. All of them wanted to move to El Paso until Max had yelled at all of them—he was getting out. He wasn’t permanent like the other poor bastards in wheelchairs.

Max observed the permanent “wheelies”: they tended to marry bulldozer-sized social workers in their forties; wheelies married loudmouths who abused them. “Wheelie’s” huge social-worker wife threw him out of his chair when they had fights. While he was in a wheelchair himself, Max could not avoid these monologues from the wheelies. Max swallowed a pill and settled back with his eyes closed. Here is an army colonel’s son who talks a blue streak. He had broken his neck in a swimming-pool accident when he was fifteen and drunk. He tells Max he feels out of place there.

“Wheelie” must return to the veterans’ hospital from time to time for the bedsores he gets on his legs and butt, despite the sheepskins his huge wife buys for his wheelchair and bed. Wheelie has lifetime benefits from the veterans’ hospital because his neck broke at National Guard summer training camp. Max opens his eyes from time to time or nods and says “yeah” and “ah-huh,” but Max is not listening to Wheelie so much as he is drifting along in his own thoughts when Wheelie whispers that his prick gets hard and the women can’t get enough of it.

THE MORNING THEY HAD KILLED Mike Blue and hit Max, the world had changed for Max. He had seen everything—every person—differently from before. Then gradually the truth had emerged for Max: he had already begun the change after the plane crash. The hit on him and Uncle Mike had been far worse than the plane crash. Max was beginning to wonder, how many chances did Death get in five
years? What kind of lottery was it anyway? How soon before Max’s number did come up?

When Max had awakened, he did not recognize any of the people around the bed in his hospital room. Some were obviously hospital staff, but Max knew the others assembled there must be his family members. He looked at the women and tried to guess which might be his wife. Max had lost all sense of connection with the world the instant the .38 slugs hit his chest. Max had told Leah exactly how he felt; emotional bonds between everyone and himself had been severed.

Max kept other thoughts to himself because he knew how people were, especially his family, and the thoughts were thoughts better left in silence. The thoughts were always about death. One death or many deaths: how many times, how many ways, did a man die? Max knew there was nothing after death. Nothingness and silence. The silence and the emptiness were darkness. Max had recovered consciousness after the plane crash, but he had never forgotten the darkness and the silence that flowed endlessly. There were no devils or Jesus. Death was the dark, deep earth that blotted out the light of a vast blue sky Max called life.

In his delirium after the shooting Max had confused memories of the shooting with earlier memories of the plane crash Max never knew he had. The shooting and the plane crash had become a single nightmare, darkness flooding light until Max awoke sweating with terror.

The priest who had visited Max at the hospital after the shooting urged Max to meditate and pray for the precious gift of faith he had lost. Max did not tell the priest he had spent days and weeks drifting on painkillers meditating on death; all forms of death. All death was natural; murder and war were natural; rape and incest were also natural acts. Serial murderers who chewed their signatures on victims’ breasts and buttocks and even the baby-fuckers—they were all consequences of human evolution.

Now years later, Max thinks of himself as an executive producer of one-night-only performances, dramas played out in the warm California night breezes, in a phone booth in downtown Long Beach. All Max had done was dial a phone number and listen while the pigeon repeats, “Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?” until .22-pistol shots snap
pop! pop!
and Max hangs up.

Max believed in death because death contained certainty. The changes in once-living tissue, the decay, were absolute. The dead were truly destroyed and gone. Max was fascinated by the thought that death terminated all being; death changed a man to a pile of rotting waste.

Max believed killing a man was doing him a favor; life insurance policies were good once the widow and family were cleared by police and private investigations. The men and women Max had got contracts for all deserved it. “Don’t play if you can’t pay.” Max had had little cards printed up for the hits. Cops ate up weird messages on calling cards left at the crime scene. Cops were criminals at heart. Leave the calling card and the cops would think they had a serial killer on their hands. Cops liked to believe the victims had it coming, so the printed cards were the finishing touch. “What goes around comes around,” was printed on another batch of cards. The cards had functioned as codes to alert contract-holders the job had been performed by Max. Max never lifted a finger, or if he did, he was hundreds, even thousands, of miles away lifting only a telephone receiver.

Max had spent considerable time thinking about the best modes of assassination. Max preferred the word
assassination
because each death had been “political.” Max had made a set of guidelines he followed. A death that disgraced or discredited the victim was, of course, the form of death most in demand in the international business world. The value of this guideline could easily be seen in the Philippines, where Marcos had made the mistake of assassinating Aquino at the airport, instead of the whorehouse. The result had been instant sainthood for Aquino and political jet-power for his widow.

Max favors .22 caliber pumped four times into the nape of the neck, point-blank, followed by a liberal dousing of white gas. Sign the .22-caliber bullet “Anonymous.” Under microscopes in the crime lab, even the best ballistics men could not distinguish which .22 had fired the bullet.

Arson after the hit was almost a necessity nowadays, due to the increasing sensitivity of lab tests for hair, blood, skin, and fibers. Fire took care of everything. Max had followed the fishing-boat murders in Alaska because the State had been able to produce so little physical evidence at the murder trial. The secrets of success had been a cheap .22 rifle and five gallons of white gas. The intense heat from the fire had melted dental fillings and the teeth of the corpses had shattered so that no identification on one corpse was ever made. Max liked to think of himself as somewhat a scholar, an expert in a very narrow field. He had favorites that regrettably no one would ever know about.

Max believed the ordinary details and normal circumstances of accidental death had been the components of his success. The one-car accident at night, the hit and run while the subject jogs a residential
street, the garden hose to the car exhaust and the victim at the wheel with the engine running; irrefutable accidents. People slipped and died of blows to the head in tubs and showers all the time. People suffered strokes and heart failure in hot tubs; people died all the time while swimming laps.

Max had favorites. A lawyer had been found facedown in the swimming pool in his shorts with a wedge-shaped gash in the back of his skull. Tucson police were as stupid as they were corrupt. Tucson police saw accidents where Max had only tried for unsolved homicides. The lawyer had gone to a small apartment complex he owned to collect rents early one Sunday afternoon. Tucson police had ruled the death a swimming accident, and the head wound a result of “colliding with the edge of the diving board.” The guy who had whacked the lawyer had panicked and thrown the golf putter into a big tree near the swimming pool. Only by accident had a gardener found the golf club in the tree. Weeks had passed and the dead lawyer was just another unsolved murder.

Max had always delivered top-quality work because he had been careful to observe and to refine his methods. The key to success was to give the cops ample simple explanations for the death. Any appearance of even a remote possibility of accident or suicide was explanation enough to satisfy police and relieve them of further investigative work.

Max called the categories “big time” and “small time,” although they were all murder or
assassination,
the word Max increasingly preferred. In the “small” category Max had one or two he liked: the swimming-pool accident and the motorcycle accident. Max the choreographer and designer had been home asleep while “subcontractors” had followed his blueprints all night. They had done the neck-breaking and had then loaded the corpse, with his motorcycle, and driven them to a little grove of paloverde trees growing by the Speedway Exit ramp off I-10. Max had rather liked that it was March and the paloverdes had been thick with bright yellow blossoms when they had hung the “motorcyclist” upside down in a paloverde and left the bike appropriately skidded and smashed lying at the bottom of the exit ramp. Max had liked the newspaper report that a woman on her way to work had sighted “strange fruit” in the flowering desert tree at six o’clock in the morning.

MAX RUNS HIS BUSINESS from the men’s locker room of a municipal golf course. He uses the pay telephone in the lobby or outside the Jacuzzi. As far as local people know, Max is a retired businessman who plays golf every day for his health. But Max goes to the golf course every day for the light, and for the blue vastness of the sky. He played golf to savor the single instant of perfection when the ball and the head of the club met in absolute alignment, and the ball arched gracefully above the pale ribbon of grass. Max loved the purity of natural physics and geometry. When he watched the arch of the ball against the sun, Max thought of the great cathedrals he had seen in Europe where light was celebrated as the presence of God. After the shooting Max could remain indoors only a few hours before he felt claustrophobic. He returns to the house only for messages. Weather permitting, Max takes a nap on a chaise lounge on the patio. At night Max no longer sleeps more than a few hours.