Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

Harlan Donnally gazed down at the weathered Hispanic face framed by the white pillowcase, then reached out and gripped the little mans shoulder. Withered skin and fragile bone met his hand, a body thinned first by the creeping starvation of failed chemotherapy and now by the pneumonia that would kill him.

This wasnt the first time that Donnally had found himself standing at the precipice of death. Not only had he watched others die, but a decade earlier hed looked up from a San Francisco sidewalk at paramedics fighting his descent into the void that would soon claim Mauricio Aguilera.

Despite the name on the signs hed followed through the Northern California hospital, in Donnallys mind it wasnt really a hospice, a way station, for the man lying in the bed was neither a stranger in Mount Shasta nor passing through on a pilgrimage.

In truth, it was a dying room, a place of endings, not of passages, and of final conversations for those with the courage to have them.

Donnally had seen enough of death to know that for most visitors the rooms along the hallway were nothing more than temples of silent pretense, their fluorescent lights falling on pairs of cowboy boots shifting on linoleum, on wordless men in church shirts and pressed Levis, on fidgeting hands of scrubbed children, and on women fretting over untucked sheets and unfluffed pillows.

But only one set of boots occupied the sand-colored floor of Mauricios room.

You got better things to do, Mauricio said in a whisper, looking up at Donnally, his thinning black hair matted against his head, his face lined like a parched desert lake. He coughed and wiped his mouth. Than watch a man die.

Donnally pulled over a chair. He clenched his jaw as he sat down, anticipating the bite in his hip joint, trying not to let his face show the pain. It was a move hed practiced for months during his rehab, hoping to deceive the San Francisco Police Department doctors whod been determined to retire him out on disability.

But the move hadnt worked then, and didnt work now.

Mauricio glanced toward Donnallys hip. Why dont you just get a new one? He licked his lips and swallowed hard. I heard the nurse talking about her father titanium. He struggled to smile. Like a golf club. He can square dance again He raised his eyebrows. And everything.

Donnally shrugged. Im used to it.

Mauricio stared up at the ceiling fixture set into the sound-muting tiles, and then said, Youve got to let go of the past, Harlan.

Donnally knew Mauricio wasnt talking only about the Mission District shootout that had ended his career ten years earlier, for there always had been a duality in their conversations, one that sometimes left Donnally stranded in the shadowed gap between Mauricios words and his thoughts.

Give me a good reason, Donnally said.

Ill tell you what I figured out lying here all these weeks. If youre going to be dead to the present, you might as well not be alive at all.

Donnally slipped his. 32 semiautomatic from the pocket of his jeans and extended it butt-first toward Mauricio.

You want to shoot me and get it over with? Donnally asked.

Mauricio waved it off. Been there. Done that.

Donnally lowered the gun and squinted at Mauricio, trying to detect a killer behind the mask of the gentle man who fed stray dogs, freed kitchen spiders into his backyard, and gave shelter to the homeless passing through town.

You what? Donnally asked.

In a decade of running their businesses side by side, Donnally figured hed heard all of Mauricios stories. Knew each step in his migration from Guadalajara to Tijuana, to the pima cotton fields in Southern Arizona, to the California Central Valley, and then to Sacramento. Attending adult school at night, and then community college, working toward the American Dream. And finally moving north to Mount Shasta after hed saved enough money to open his own business: an unnamed fix-it shop and junkyard next to Donnallys Lone Mountain Cafe.

Mauricio blinked, but didnt respond. Donnally figured he was trying to decide what version of his past to tell, for hed never told the same tale twice, or at least the same one twice in the same way.

Perched at Donnallys counter before daybreak, sipping black coffee, looking out through scratched eyeglasses, hed talk about when he first met Cesar Chavez outside the Gallo vineyard in Modesto-

Or was it during the pesticide protest in Delano?

Or maybe at the grape boycott march to the capitol?

For the first few months after Donnally moved up from San Francisco and bought the cafe, hed look over at Mauricio and wonder what he was hiding. Back then, when Donnally was still steered by a detectives habit of mind, he plumbed for the big truth beneath the little lies. In the end, he came to view Mauricio less as fact than fiction, as a poet of his own life, sometimes just following his words to their own destination, with truth somehow nestled in the sounds and rhythms.

Listening to Mauricio day after day, watching him nurse his coffee, Donnally often wondered whether there was any real difference between Mauricios poetic recreations of his past and his own fathers evasions and self-deceptions-except for the rage it generated in him.

Donnally slipped the gun back into his pocket.

What do you mean? Donnally asked. Been there, done that. You shot somebody?

Mauricio still didnt answer. He just stared vacant-eyed at the ceiling as though his mind had moved on to something else.

Donnally settled back in his chair. There was no reason to press the issue. Mauricios kind of poetry couldnt be created on demand. And Mauricio knew better than Donnally how much time he had left to compose it.

A priest came by last night, Mauricio finally said, his voice stronger. A young guy. Skinny as a calaveras, a skeleton, and pale as fog. He smiled, then glanced toward the hallway. Everybody around here thinks all Mexicans are Catholics waiting for the magical words to escort them to the afterlife. He laid his hand on his chest. But the truth is that campesinos like me are Indian first and Mexican second, and the Day of the Dead is the only sacrament we need.

You talk to him anyway?

Mauricio shook his head. I pretended I was asleep. He said some stuff in Latin. I think it made him feel better.

Donnally peered at Mauricio. What about you?

I didnt get the sense he was doing it for me. It was more like he was getting extra credit on a take-home assignment.

That was the one thing he and Mauricio agreed on, but for different reasons. For Mauricio, religion was a straitjacket. For Donnally, it was an unknowable ocean.

He the only one whos dropped in? Donnally asked.

The third. I feel like one of those guys at the county fair who sits on the little seat above the water and people throw softballs at the target. He smiled again. Whichever child of the cloth dunks me wins a teddy bear and a place in heaven.

The window rattled as a logging truck passing by compression-braked its descent toward the center of town.

Mauricio waited for the clattering to fade, then said, A Mormon lady dropped in, too. She told me that shed be coming back to baptize me after Im dead.

Donnallys eyebrows furrowed and he drew back. Isnt that a little late? I thought the whole idea was that you needed the right state of mind to go to heaven. Seems to me that if youre dead you cant have any state of mind at all.

Mauricio looked out of the window at the snow-dusted pines surrounding the one-story hospital, then back at Donnally.

Im not so sure about that, Mauricio said. What do you think? We go somewhere after we die?

Sure. In the ground or up in smoke.

I mean after that.

Donnally leaned in toward Mauricio. You worried about something?