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 man’s 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 wasn’t 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 he’d 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 he’d followed through the Northern California hospital, in Donnally’s mind it wasn’t 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 Levi’s, 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 Mauricio’s 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 he’d practiced for months during his rehab, hoping to deceive the San Francisco Police Department doctors who’d been determined to retire him out on disability.

But the move hadn’t worked then, and didn’t work now.

Mauricio glanced toward Donnally’s hip. “Why don’t 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. “I’m used to it.”

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

Donnally knew Mauricio wasn’t 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 Mauricio’s words and his thoughts.

“Give me a good reason,” Donnally said.

“I’ll tell you what I figured out lying here all these weeks. If you’re 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 he’d heard all of Mauricio’s 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 he’d saved enough money to open his own business: an unnamed fix-it shop and junkyard next to Donnally’s Lone Mountain Cafe.

Mauricio blinked, but didn’t respond. Donnally figured he was trying to decide what version of his past to tell, for he’d never told the same tale twice, or at least the same one twice in the same way.

Perched at Donnally’s counter before daybreak, sipping black coffee, looking out through scratched eyeglasses, he’d 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, he’d look over at Mauricio and wonder what he was hiding. Back then, when Donnally was still steered by a detective’s 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 Mauricio’s poetic recreations of his past and his own father’s 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 didn’t 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. Mauricio’s kind of poetry couldn’t 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 didn’t 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 who’s 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 she’d be coming back to baptize me after I’m dead.”

Donnally’s eyebrows furrowed and he drew back. “Isn’t 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 you’re dead you can’t have any state of mind at all.”