Memorial

XXVI.Ray

HE was thinking about his kids. Ghulpa said, with a kind of wonder, that he’d never spoken so much about them as he had to the visiting cop. He shrugged and stared at her teeth, which seemed to have found tortured new angles in their effort to escape her mouth and view the world.

BG was right. (Thankfully, she never judged him on that, or any account.) He’d done wrong by them and it pained him to talk of the past. Sure, things had soured between husband and wife, but was that any reason to excommunicate his own children, his blood? Cut them off at the root? They were good kids. Tough times back then, economically — a lot of keeping up with the Joneses. It killed Ray not to be able to provide: the Don Ho vacations, the once-a-week to Chasen’s, the new car every year and whatnot. God bless, but Marj was a ballbuster, she was rough on him for not being a bigger breadwinner, bitched him out right in front of the kids. That hurt. The bottom line was, no one could hold a candle to his father-in-law. That sentiment was always front and center. Ray actually liked the guy, which made it even harder.

He used to take the brood miniature golfing on Robertson just to get away from her. That’s what got him on the entrepreneurial kick. He secured a loan against the house her dad bought for them so he could buy in to Kidz Links, a 9 hole course that Chess and Joanie loved. $15,000 was a shitload of money back then. (He thought he could make it work but his partner was a thief.) The Links had bridges and tunnels and little windmills that swatted the ball away if you didn’t time it right — all kinds of fun things. The children played for free, of course, and got popular at school. Finally, it folded. Ray wanted so much more for them than he could give. It never sat well with him the way he treated his boy. When he was 5 years old, Chester used to ask for money every time the ice cream truck came. For a while Ray said the truck played that tune only when it was out of stock — the ice cream man’s way of saying “sorry” to the neighborhood. His thieving partner got a laugh out of that and played along. They told Chess to stay inside until it went away so the driver wouldn’t feel bad. It worked for about a week until he got wise and bawled his eyes out. Now Ray wondered, What was in my head?

He wondered plenty: where they were: if his children were even alive. You never knew. People had accidents and abductions (he crossed himself reflexively). Maybe Chess was in prison for torching an ice cream truck…the girl would be close to 40 now. He called Joanie his “princess.” Back then all the dads called their daughters Princess. Chester, he called—what—Chesterfield. (That’s what Ray used to smoke.) Occasionally, he thought of trying to get in touch with Marj. He couldn’t remember who told him but the old man knew she had remarried, a wealthy guy, one of those country-club types. A real-life duffer with no time for kiddie links. A breadwinner. He wondered if they’d had kids themselves. Maybe so…or he could have had some from another marriage. Eight Is Enough. Yours, Mine and Ours…anything was possible. Ray imagined large family gatherings in La Jolla or Oceanside or Carlsbad, seersucker Sunday brunches on the yacht. Champagne and Eggs Benedict. Probably a corporate man. Someone his ex father-in-law would approve of.

Maybe Ray was even a grandfather now, the thought of which compounded his remorse. At the same time, the possibility made it easier to distance himself. There were so many chasms to cross. He could do some of that in his head, too old for the rest. What was the point of raking himself over the coals? There was a whole horde out there just like him: the gimpy fellow you passed on the sidewalk, the lonesome-looking lady boozer waiting for the light to change. Everyone had a history. Still, a divorce or even the death of a child was one thing but the deliberate amputation of a life, 2 lives, a wounding of innocents through absence born of self-indulgence, cowardice, or plain perversity was a cardinal sin. You heard about those sort of people but mostly they were mentally ill, vagrants or jail faces. At the end of his tug-of-war, Raymond Rausch considered himself an ordinary retiree who’d grown insular, dependent upon his dog and a woman from a country that was as exotic as whatever high tone beachside town he fantasized harbored Marj’s new life. Maybe the kids lived in Europe, where they’d been to boarding school, and learned other languages. They could have become doctors or lawyers. Chester might even be working for the ACLU! Wouldn’t that be something…Or maybe Marjorie was dead — again, he crossed himself. Joanie and Chester would probably spit if they saw him on the street. Not that they’d know who he was. He’d have to be wearing a sandwich board saying JOAN AND CHESTER RAUSCH’S FATHER, WITH THE DNA TO PROVE IT.

Ghulpa sensed his reflective mood and let him be. He sat in front of the TV eating lentils and rice. A great Cold Case was on. Somewhere in California. Marine has a fight with his pregnant wife. Leaves the house to go to Jack in the Box and cool off. 10 or 11 at night. Only gone about 45 minutes but in that time, a serial killer breaks in and bashes his old lady in the head. Rapes her. Later, neighbors say the Marine and his wife fought a lot. The swabbed semen belongs to just 15 % of the population — the Marine being in that group. (The days before DNA.) Wife loses the kid but survives. Her short-term memory isn’t so good but she remembers all the trouble between them and tells police that he did it. They lock his ass away. After 4 years in San Quentin, the guy says one day his body begins to shake so violently that he decides to throw himself off the tier and end it. That’s when the lightbulb goes off: he’s in prison for a reason, and everything will sort itself out. 16 years go by. It’s friggin Papillon. The Cold Casers finally get on it. Track down the real killer, currently in the penitentiary, a black sonofabitch who bashed in ladies’ heads. That was his MO — bash and rape. Killed about 7 of ’em. The Basher and the Cold Casers have a heart-to-heart. They tell him he’s done a lot of bad things in his life that he can’t make good. But there’s one case where he still can make a difference. Ask him about the Marine. Turns out the Basher’s a Marine too. Tells the cops it was the only one of his crimes that ever really bothered him — because a fellow Marine had been falsely accused. Semper Fidelis! He confesses, and they release the husband. State gives him a hundred dollars a day for all the years of incarceration. Something like that. Comes out to $600,000. He cuts a check to the lawyer for 200 grand and blows the rest in the stock market. “If God wanted me to be rich, I’d win the lottery. So it’s not that big a deal. But paycheck to paycheck that’s my life back, my prayer. And that’s what I got.” He’s free.

Ghulpa joined him for the last 15 minutes of the program.

“They broke in your house too,” she said sagely, before collecting his bright orange bowl for a refill. “Just like that monster. Don’t you forget it.”

Ray said he wanted to visit Friar in the morning.

He was going to take him home, no matter what the doctors said.