The Empire of the Dead (19 page)

I struggled to rise from the beanbag. “Right,” I said.

“You
are
judging me. You're pissed that I didn't come meet you. But that's what I'm trying to say—”

“Really, Mil. Let's get to bed.”

“You're judging Dad, too, you know. Don't deny it.” She swayed on the shag carpet. “You laughed at him just as much as I did.”

“Dad? I never laughed at him. What's this about Dad?”

“And
I
am on—” She nearly fell into my arms. “—I am on a goddamn spiritual path, Frankie, okay? So don't screw with me.”

“This is pointless, Mil. In the morning. We'll talk then, okay?”

“You don't know what it's like, Frankie. Never even tried. Too goody-goody.”

“Who's judging who now?”

“You'll never know what it's like to dig so deep into yourself, you're like the wick inside the candle wax—the
candle wax
, man—knowing part of you's burning somewhere, burning you up from the inside out, and one day all the wax will melt and you'll be as free as the ash in the air!”

I stepped away from her, tried to make a joke. “Well, Sister Mil, eh? Can we get some sleep now?”

She picked up her bag. “I'm leaving,” she said.

“Mil, how did we get into this? I didn't mean—”

“I'm going to sleep with a friend. This place is too small for both of us. I'll see you in the morning. We'll get some breakfast or something.”

“Mildred—”

“There's food in the fridge.” She stumbled toward the door, stopped and turned. “It really is good to see you, Frankie.” And then she was gone.

I couldn't sleep. When I'd left her here and gone back to school, Mom scolded me. “You're letting me down again, Frankie. You need to look after her.”

“Mom, she's a grown woman,” I'd said. “I've got myself to think about.”

Now, I surveyed the room, the squalor to which I'd condemned my sister. No one was going to mistake
me
for a saint.

I'd gotten used to the smell. I picked up the loose Styrofoam pellets, but the trash can in the kitchen was full so I left the pellets in a pile on the floor. I dragged my duffel into the bedroom. The sheets were stiff and yellow. On the red-striped pillow sat Mildred's old teddy bear, the one she used to sleep with as a girl. He smelled of old milk. I clutched him to my chest and stretched out on the floor.

Mil didn't show for breakfast. Or lunch. I couldn't find a key so I left the door unlocked and wandered into town. Students tossed Frisbees on the high school grounds. Downtown, I sat on the steps of a boarded-up Savings and Loan and watched men across the street, on the curb, share a flask. I had brought a drawing pad and a charcoal pencil but nothing inspired me. How had Rauschenberg made anything of himself, coming from here? He had once said, in an interview, “Painting relates both to art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.” I'd never understood what he meant.

Late in the day, when I returned to Mildred's apartment, I found the door wide open, the television gone. I rushed to the bedroom closet. My duffel was missing, too. A few pairs of pants, shirts, a transistor radio. “Son of a bitch!” I yelled. It occurred to me Mildred
might have taken the things and pawned them. In any case, I had my wallet, and I'd kept my bus ticket in my pocket.

The stuffed bear stared at me. George Harrison stared at God. “Hell,” I said to the room. “I guess that's it.” I stuck two twenties on the freezer door with a fridge magnet. Maybe Mildred would get them, or maybe I had just made some crackhead's day. I picked up my drawing pad and walked to the bus station.

Lori and I spent the next day in bed, getting high, making love. She was the perfect ministering angel, her blonde hair a festival of light.

Six months later, Mil disappeared. Mom was frantic on the phone. I went back to Port Arthur. It seemed I could never escape it.

The apartment manager told me Mildred owed him nothing. He thought she'd gone someplace with an out-of-work oil man. She didn't want to stay in touch, fine, I thought. I was tired of the burden of her. Mom was furious at me, but it was a quiet fury. “Texans,” she said. “How is it I raised a couple of damn Texans?”

Of all the ways I feared Mil would die, asthma was not a candidate. Cigarettes, I guessed. Alcohol. An overdose.

When we finally got the autopsy report, we learned that just before her death Mildred's lung capacity had dropped to nearly zero. For at least a week she had been a walking corpse.

A jogger discovered her body in the south end-zone of the TJ High School football stadium. Apparently, she had scaled the fence around 2 a.m. For what purpose, no one knows. She had, on her person, a pack of Marlboros and an unopened bottle of Old Charter. She weighed ninety-seven pounds.

It's not clear where she'd been living. She had given her teddy bear and the George Harrison poster to a friend at work. None of her other things were found.

Mom left me to make the funeral arrangements. She'd exhausted herself when Dad died just a few months earlier (she'd buried him
quickly, giving me no time to make it back for the ceremony). “I asked you to do this one thing for me, to look after your sister,” Mom told me. Her voice was brittle, faint. “Just this one little thing.”

I had Mil cremated and scattered her ashes on the Sabine River.

The moon is shrinking. I read that yesterday in the paper. My father would have appreciated this. Scientists at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum announced they have “deduced the moon's dwindling size from cracks on the surface seen in images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.” As the moon's core has cooled and contracted, the outer crust has fragmented into faults, with one side of each fracture slipping over the other, reducing the moon's size by about two hundred yards, or the length of two football fields.

On the surface of the moon, just before he meets Piccarda Donati, Dante does not know what substance he inhabits or how his body can mix with Heaven's insubstantiality. How can “one dimension contain another?” he asks. The moon “took me into itself / as water does a ray of light / and yet remains unsundered and serene.”

These days, the elements I once moved through so effortlessly have evaporated. My world has shrunk. Lori and I divorced a decade ago. My mother died last year in Amarillo in an assisted-living facility. In truth, she had diminished for me, little by little, as my father's memory erased her. I buried her next to him: my final link to the past.

I'm comfortable now teaching high school art classes, eating takeout in the evenings, still dreaming of getting to Italy. I'm fond of my American Originals: Rauschenberg, the intriguing shadows cast by homeless men huddled in the parking lot of the empty Astrodome, an occasional high school freshman who scrawls an arresting sentence on an exam. You never know what you'll come across in the great state of Texas.

I do a little painting, culling images from my sketchbooks, and
sometimes exhibit in a local gallery. Solitude contents me, and most of the time I don't wrestle with loneliness. I would not claim to be living a saintly life, but at least I am living lightly on—in?—the world, and doing no harm that I can see. And so I go about my days. As with Janis:
Nothing left to lose.

Except for this. One last cherished memory.
The danger lies in forgetting.

That day on the river. After we'd drifted a while.

Mildred said, “I keep thinking, where did everything turn? When did I realize I couldn't get back to
before
? That night … you know the one I mean … I've always wished I hadn't been so high. I've wondered if I could have helped Dad more.”

“I wish … well, I wish a lot of things about that night,” I said. “And you did okay. Really.”

Mildred nodded. “Our lives didn't end then, did they?”

“No. Of course not.”

She nodded again. Mosquitoes troubled her face. She brushed them away. Old wooden pilings, abandoned since the Civil War, poked up out of the river. The water had a variegated sheen, thick and pale. People had tossed hubcaps, busted microwave ovens, and U joints into the stream. Mildred and I held hands and floated past the remains of a Weed Eater. A heron rose fluttering from the water.

“Bless Janis,” Mildred said.

A dream of birds.

And then I wake recalling my father.

Later, just before my morning show at the planetarium, I catch a crosstown bus to Oak Cliff. After a few short blocks, the bus pulls up to a dusty intersection separating a residential neighborhood from a small business district. A tennis-shoe army gets on: half a dozen Mexican women, on their way to housecleaning jobs in south Dallas neighborhoods. They've come from a 7-Eleven parking lot, where they kissed their husbands or boyfriends goodbye. As the women board the bus, pickups come for the men, taking them (I imagine) to construction sites or distant fields for a day of strawberry- or apple-picking. The men remind me of my father, an oil man when he was younger: stringy arms, the permanent squint characteristic of field workers and drillers exposed to the sun. Some of the women are accompanied by children. They nestle crusty noses between the ladies' breasts, loose inside faded print dresses, and fall asleep. A dark-eyed boy in a stained T-shirt, sitting across the aisle from me, gives me a beautiful smile then closes his eyes. Two stops later, the women gather kids, rags, spritzers, and toilet-bowl brushes. They get off the bus and march toward unpainted, ramshackle houses, places whose owners, from all indications, can't afford housekeepers. The homes are old, ornate in their decay. Possibly the occupants are clinging to some lost glory, a proud history, refusing to accept changes of fortune.

My stop is surrounded by hobby shops, pawnbrokers, hardware
stores, and bail bondsmen. The Yucca Theater sits in the middle of the block. An old-fashioned place, like the Oklahoma City theaters my mother took me to when I was a child. On the dirty, cracked marquee above the entrance, a set of plastic letters: O A T.
Patton? On the Waterfront?
I can't remember recent titles. I haven't seen a memorable movie in years, though my ex used to drag me to matinees every Sunday. Nothing stuck with me. I have no idea what Karen and I saw. Am
I
the problem or is the film industry not what it used to be?

A torn John Wayne poster sags in a glass case—“Now Showing”—next to the ticket booth. I step through the open doorway. Dust, Lysol, stale popcorn. An air conditioner rattles in a corner, but the lobby is hot and close. A man in a red vest slumps beside a flickering Coke machine, which casts the only light in the place. The glow turns his jowly face green. “Come right in,” he says to me. He sounds like Vincent Price. An elegant croak. “Everything goes. If you see something you like—concession equipment, carpets, seats—make an offer.”

I nod my thanks, step past him into the auditorium. Empty. Dingy rectangular screen. A leopard, a lion, and a wolf are painted among stone arches on the walls—the animals are badly faded. Broke-backed seats. Sticky aisles. Someone has swept trash into a pile near a door with a cobwebbed
EXIT
sign: ripped ticket stubs, business cards, partial phone numbers scribbled on slips of paper. The air conditioner shudders to a stop.

Eggplant-colored curtains line the sides of the screen. I came here hoping I could use the material to replace the fraying drapes in the Star Room's entryway: my last grand gesture before leaving the planetarium. The curtains are dusty but nice and thick. I finger their folds, listen to a critter—a mouse? a rat?—skitter beneath the seats.

Not Vincent Price. Lyndon Johnson.
That's
who the fellow in the lobby reminded me of … and it occurs to me: an old theater in Oak Cliff. What was it called? The Texan? Yes. The Texan Theater. Grassy knoll. Officer Tippett. It all comes back. When Lee Harvey
Oswald ducked into the Texan Theater after allegedly shooting Officer Tippett, two old combat movies were playing:
War Is Hell
and
Cry of Battle
. Why do I know this? It's my Lone Star legacy. But also, in graduate school, during study breaks, a group of us traded conspiracy trivia—a mindless relief from the chaos theory we were to be tested on at the end of the term. “Chaos or conspiracy?” someone would say. “Chance or plan? You decide.” JFK ruled these sessions. His assassination offered a depthless pool of conflicting possibilities. Chaos or conspiracy? Burch Burroughs, the manager of the Texan Theater, claims Oswald paid to attend the double feature at 1 p.m. and bought a bag of popcorn at 1:15. What do the Dallas police records say? Oswald snuck in
without
paying at around 1:30. Chaos or conspiracy? Bernard Haire, a shop owner next to the Texan, claims he saw officers detain Oswald—or someone who
looked
like him—in the alley behind the theater. He didn't resist. The Dallas police? Oswald was pulled, kicking and screaming, out of the front entrance before a gathering crowd.

Oswald. Ruby. An American revolution. Right here in Big D, my father used to joke.

Well. Dad's murderer would have a thing or two to say to those boys.

I step away from the curtains and take a seat in the front row. In bas-relief, in the theater's cheap stone walls, next to the leopard, lion, and wolf, sketchy figures stand and sit. They appear to have been painted once, a lavish mural, but the colors have worn away. The figures remind me of classical nudes—Titian, maybe—abstract forms melting into one another.

Titian is dead.

John Wayne is dead.

So is Vincent Price.

Behind me, a shuffle, a creak. I turn. A man lingers in the back row. He says hello. In the dim light it takes me a moment to notice he's wearing a priest's collar. I rise. “I'm buying the curtains,” I say.
My voice echoes in the high-ceilinged room. “I mean, just so you know.”