Michael Mewshaw - Lying with the Dead

TO ARDEN PENELOPE MEWSHAW, MY FIRST GRANDCHILD

Everything in nature has a lyrical essence, a tragic destiny and a comic existence.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

I know the stars by heart. Not their names. Not what youd find out through a telescope. But I know when they rise and when they fade, the ones that bring winter snow in the mountains and spring rain in the dry wash. Whatever the season I wake up in the dark and step outside and watch for the light. Its a long watch, and even when the weathers freezing I want to lie down in the sand and fall back to sleep. To stay awake I make a sound in my mouth thats like the wind scraping across the desert, and pretty soon my head starts in on memories of all those years ago at home.

That was back east in Maryland. Now I live out west in the Slab City. Its not a real city, just a crossroads near the California-Arizona line where people from around the country park their trailers. Old and young, retired or out of work, they spend the winter here. Then when the summer heats up they pack and leave, and I stay put and fix the slabs. The trailers leak water and oil and whatnot on the concrete. I wash that off and check for cracks and places that have chipped. Theres times I have to rebuild a whole foundation before folks roll in for fall.

Nicky, shes the woman I work for and live with, she has me fix the fence around her property. Its barbed wire, but not near as high as at a prison. Bushes and baby trees grow through it, and if you let them get big, the branches eat the barbed wire strand by strand. They can tug the fence straight down. So Nicky has me chop off the limbs. Afterward theres chunks of wood stuck on the wire like strips of meat hung out to dry. I dont care to look at them.

My favorite job is carrying cinder blocks on a hod. A hod is a contraption, a kind of tilted box on a stick. The Mexican that trucks in the blocks unloads them into the box on my shoulder and I lug them out to the slabs. Each trip the blocks on the hod make a different design, a checkerboard of hollows and solids and black-and-gray squares. But just half-thinking about it, I can keep them straight in my mind, like I keep track of my memories in the box in my head.

This box in my head is big, with dozens of drawers. It reminds me of the wooden chest in the prison library where inmates used to work on their appeals. Day after day they crowded around it, dragging out these long drawers, flipping through the cards, then banging them back into the slots. I imitated the sound, a sort of pistol-shot noise, but quiet so only I heard it.

In the morning when Im waiting and humming and watching the mountains for the first sign of daylight, Ill go to the box in my head and crack open a drawer. Ill sniff it and taste it, and if it doesnt smell too bad or taste too bitter Ill dip into it for a spell. Most times its Cole I hunt for and crawl in with. Otherwise Ill pass from drawer to drawer, visiting Mom and Candy and Quinn. Whenever they telephone, once or twice a year, theres buzzing in my ears and water in my eyes, and its hard to find words. But in my head, in their separate drawers, things are clear, and I have no trouble talking.

Sometimes I visit myself as a kid. The memory drawers go back to when I was little enough for Dad to give me a bath in the kitchen sink. He set my bare ass on the cold drainboard and shoved my head under the spigot and scrubbed my hair with a bar of soap. The suds burned my eyes. But he didnt stop. He plopped me on my feet and dried me with a starchy towel. His hands rubbed hard, like he was roughing me up, punishing me for something. Electricity went everywhere on my skin. Thats when I did the thing Ill never forget. I balled up my fist and punched Dad in the face. He dropped his hands and the towel fell in the sink, and I busted out crying, knowing hed hit me back.

Thats one drawer I stay away from. Theres others I break into, Im so eager to climb inside. Only two drawers Ive never been able to open. The first I figure has to be the day Dad died. The second I dont have any idea what it holds and Im afraid to find out.

The morning sky fades from black to blue, the stars blink out, and the world turns bright without them. I see the empty slabs all around me, and barbed wire with hanging wood chunks around the slabs. Nickys house is off in a corner. Its an adobe as brown and smooth as a mud daubers nest.

The thing I like about living in the desert, theres not so many changes. Just hot and hotter, then a winter that goes by so quick you dont know where it went. No trees changing colors, no leaves falling, then burning with that sweet smoke that smothered me in Maryland, and none of the flowers that choked my nose in spring. Those in-between times were the worst, and Im glad to live without them.

The same hour each day a plane from the West Coast swooshes past, up so high it barely leaves a nail scratch on the sky. In my mouth the wind sound becomes a motor. Id love to fly. I know what it is to float. I feel that in my head a lot. But just once Id love to be up there, looking down at the states between here and home.

The plane crosses the mountains from peak to peak. Theyre shaped in steps, like a moving staircase in a department store. But the mountains stay still, and its the sun that jumps over the snow on the high places in a sort of signal that might mean good news or bad.

When I assure people that Im happy and I love where I live, they presume that I mean London itselfthe theater, the world-class museums, the Regency mansions and growing numbers of restaurants run by celebrity chefs. The whole vast thrumming multicultural megalopolis. But I feel little connection to that guidebook clich. What I love is the leafy enclave of Hampstead, tucked away in the northwest corner of the city. For me it serves as a refuge, which despite its well-burnished history, carries no echo of my own fractious past.

Im an actor, one whose career has reversed the arc traveled by an illustrious line of British entertainers. Unlike, lets say, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, and Bob Hope, who crawled out of the English gutter, emigrated to the States, and reinvented themselves as Hollywood stars, I fled a scruffy precinct of the New World for the gentility of the Old. I traded the giant golden jackpot of America for a life of human and very handsome dimensions.

Plenty of Londoners dont share my enthusiasm for Hampstead, and Ive taken considerable ribbing because of the neighborhoods reputation for designer-label living. Friends from edgier areas dismiss mine as trendy, snobbish, twee, a zone of house-proud toffs and politically correct kooksthe kind of constituency represented in Parliament by Glenda Jackson, for Gods sake.

I dont bother to argue back. Nor do I waste my breath explaining that the village has historically attracted residents fleeing natural disasters and man-made catastrophes. The English raced to Hampsteads high ground to escape the Plague, the Great Fire, the flooding Thames and its miasmal vapors. The street names aloneWell Walk, the Vale of Healthpromised miraculous restoration to a roll call of famous consumptives and neurasthenics who flocked here. So who can fault me for settling in happily after the tumult of my childhood in Maryland?

Every day on my afternoon walk up Frognal Lane as I reflect on the life Ive made for myself, it occurs to me that it resembles the red brick path I follow. Lovingly arranged, meticulously tended, each brick has been laid in place like a piece of a beautiful mosaic. The overall pattern remains pleasantly comforting even if a deep-buried tree root does occasionally rumple the surface.