Pacific Beat

Chapter 25

Knees pumping, the thin tire vibrating on the road just below him, the curved handlebars of the borrowed ten-speed tight in his clenched bleeding hands, Joseph slid through the fog and blurring lights of Bayside Drive, drawn by a growing, beckoning purpose.

The urgent breathing around him — did it belong to him, or was it the scoffing recognition of every light that bore into his eyes, every car that swept by so close that he could feel its accusing breath on his arm, every set of eyes behind the darkened windows calling down to the hunters of the world, the killer you seek is southbound on Bayside — surround him, capture him, shoot him down in the dust of his own madness?

Joseph thanked God for the city map he’d studied so long and hard as he charted Ann’s movements all those lonely, thrilling weeks. Darkness here, a narrow winding road, banks of ivy green-black in the night, the comfort of fog and close houses all the way into Corona del Mar, all the way to The Meeting.

His legs were burning and his lungs seemed too small, but Joseph did his best to find a rhythm to sustain him. The biking helmet fit perfectly. His hands upon the bars were sticky with blood; the splitting flesh sent blades of pain up into his wrists and forearms. Up, down, in out, keep to the side, forget your hands, I was a fool to think could live in the same house as a girl who thinks cops are cute.

He could feel the pack balanced on his back, the weight of Ann inside it, beside his best 35 mm, ten rolls of film, a few portraits stuck inside a National Geographic, a clean pair of socks and two T-shirts, two ripe avocados from the tree he had used to escape. The black road charged under him, split by the trembling narrow tire. He pushed up on the handlebars, raised his aching head, then settled back into the rhythm.

At Marguerite, he waited for the WALK sign while his chest pumped and his legs jittered with the effort of standing. When he stepped off the curb, his knees buckled, spilling him into the crosswalk, the bike toppling on top of him. Music blasted from a café on the corner. Two young men helped him up, looked at him strangely, and told him to take it easy. A black Porsche screamed off Coast Highway and flew past, its blond driver screaming with the radio, her hair trailing back like a white-hot flame. So many lights, he thought. So much noise. The helmet helps hide me. Cross the street, Joseph — you are not a child — put one foot in front of the other...

Across finally, climbing carefully onto the curb, he leaned forward into the long, gentle uphill road that would lead him to Ann, to The Meeting. Ann would be there, but would he show? Did the letter get through, did it convince him? He put the thought from his mind. He was too tired to believe that anything more could go wrong. He checked his watch: early.

Joseph stood at the foot of Ann’s grave, just a rectangle of earth still darker than the ground around it. Why was there no headstone? He listened for her, and in his mind he talked to her, trying to offer comforts that, even though he meant them from his heart, still sounded inadequate and thin. It was hard to believe that only a few feet of earth now separated them, after he had worked so hard, come so far, come so close. It was good to feel this close. It was like a small drop of contentment added to an ocean of confusion, and a small drop was better than none at all.

He climbed back up the walkway to the big marble mausoleum, sat down, and rested his back against the cold wall. He turned and looked around the corner at the path down which he would come, if he came, a few minutes from now, according to the letter. His chest ached; his hands were swollen and filled with pain. The bicycle rested in the grass beside him, one wheel turning slowly in the cool May breeze, the helmet resting on the spokes of the other.

He closed his eyes and listened to the chatter of the dead. There is still time to leave all this, he thought. Enough money for a bus to somewhere. Emmett and Edith might help him flee — or would they? No. This is the path I’ve chosen.

As his heart began to still, Joseph pried into his pack and took out the tattered National Geographic of January 1987. It opened automatically to his picture. There he was — his brain, rather — displayed in the eerie neon colors of positron emission tomography. He looked down at the picture again for... what, he wondered, the millionth time in his life? His mind, as displayed, was a swirl of yellows and green, with the offending thalamus burning red-hot against a background of white. That is it, he thought, the source of schizophrenia, the key to me. He read the cutline again, although he had long since memorized it.

Joseph looked at the picture for a long time, focusing on his agitated thalamus, trying to imagine in his real brain a calming, a deceleration of all that... speed. That is what it felt like in there: something going faster than it should, slipping and burning while one part careened out of control, like a tire flung from a race car as the rest of it choked in the smoke caused by the fire.

This is the reason, he thought. This is the reason I am what I am. I am not cruel. I am not hateful. I simply am wired wrong. I am defective in production.

He folded the magazine shut and slid it back into his pack. He felt better. But even with this picture of his trouble, Joseph could never find absolute rest. There was always a part of him that was afraid of the other part. What scared him most wasn’t the strange faraway feeling that sometimes gripped him and seemed literally to pull him a few steps back from reality. He, with the help of the Navane and later the Clozaril, could control that slide away from the actual. What scared him was that at some point he became unaware of himself, and could not for the life of him explain where he was, what he was doing, or how he might have gotten there. One of the first times it had happened was with Lucy Galen in Hardin County. He could remember the story he had told her about the swamp — the money he’d found in the suitcase. He could remember her driving them out there, and he could remember the odd fact of having taken along a knife. But after that, there was no clarity, no remembrance, no hint. He recalled nothing of their walk to the swamp, nothing of ever pulling the knife, certainly nothing of stabbing her repeatedly as Lucy had testified that he had. Nothing of rape, no... nothing of ever having touched Lucy Galen.

Nothing of having ever touched Ann Cruz.

No, he thought, I did not do that. I did not do that. I did not...

Joseph looked out over the graveyard toward the fog-hidden Pacific. He spun the tire on the ten-speed, checked his watch: one minute to go. He lay his hands palms up on his lap and felt the burning pain.

Joseph stared at Ann’s grave. How stupid, he thought. How stupid and young and wrong I was — none of it, none of it, none of it should ever have happened. It had all begun to change just two years after Lucy, in the Lima State Hospital, with Dr. Nancy Hayes. Slowly, she had unraveled him, then put him back together. Slowly, the pieces began to fit. Slowly, he reconstituted himself, one sharp, angular, painful shard at a time, until the vessel was complete again, or at least as finished as it was ever going to be. It was Dr. Hayes who had taken him to Dr. Field, who had seen his problem for the first time, and given him, finally, the right drugs. Strange to think back now, thought Joseph, and understand that it all begins with knowing who you are. You know nothing in life — even with a color picture of your own brain — until you know who you are, and where you came from. Everything that is good follows from that.

Joseph heard the engine growing louder as a car wound up the cemetery road, came into the parking lot, circled around to the chapel. It was a muscular, throaty engine that shut down without a ping or a rattle. A door opened and shut. There were no footsteps for a moment, then the dry tap of shoes on concrete.

He has come, thought Joseph.

He leaned back against the cold marble of the crypt, drew up his knees, and held them close. The footsteps crunched down the gravel walkway behind him, each one louder, each one more filled with the specific sound of parting rocks. The smallest breeze issued past Joseph as the man moved past him, toward Ann. From the back, he looked tall, wide-shouldered but slender. He wore an overcoat. Both hands were lost in the side pockets — would he bring a gun? Him. The man continued on to Ann’s grave, stopping where Joseph had stopped, at the foot, looking down now, hands still deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He stood there a long while, looked once to his left, once to his right, once behind him up the path that he had taken.

Joseph’s heart slammed into his chest. He could feel it knocking against the dried-sweat crispness of his shirt. He stood. “I’m here,” he said.

The man’s head turned, then his body pivoted toward Joseph. Joseph sensed threat, but he moved onto the path anyway. One step at a time, he drew nearer: twenty feet, then ten, enough, close enough to see the breeze lifting the man’s dark brown hair, close enough to see the lined shadows around his mouth. A thousand voices inside Joseph were screaming a thousand different things. Beneath the roar, he heard himself speak.

“I’m Joseph Goins.”

“Hello, Joseph.”

“All of the things I said in my letter were true. The papers I copied from the lawyers are genuine. They never knew I was there.”

“I want to believe you. Come closer.”

His voice sounded so honest. Joseph moved into the dull moonlight. He watched the man’s eyes prying into him. It was one of the hardest looks he had ever felt. It was more penetrating than any doctor’s, but more curious and forgiving than any cop’s. “I’m not sure what I want,” said Joseph.

“I think I understand what you want. Some of what you want.”

“I didn’t kill Ann. I would never kill Ann.”

The man said nothing. Could he blame him?

“I followed her for nine weeks, and took pictures of her. I wasn’t sure... what to do. I saw her, up close, only once.”

The man looked down at the grave for a long moment. “I might understand what you felt.”

“I’m afraid. The police are everywhere. Did you bring them with you?”

The man shook his head. “No. There are things about you, Joseph, I don’t want the police to know.”

“And things about Ann.”

“Yes. Things about Ann.”

“Do you want me to go away?”

The man hesitated. “I wish you hadn’t come. But now, you’re here.”

“Do you wish I hadn’t come enough to kill me?”

A long silence. “No. Of course not.”

The breeze blew against Joseph’s face, swaying the eucalyptus beyond the graves. The man’s hard look came back: It seemed to dismantle him. “I don’t know what to say now.”

“Do you have a place that’s safe?”

“No.”

“I can give you one, if you want it.”

Joseph’s heart jumped. It was beyond the very wildest hope he ever had allowed himself to have. Was it a lie? “I need a place.”

“Will you be quiet, until we figure out what to do?”

“I’ll be silent.”

“You can come closer.”

“I’m afraid of your hands.”

The man pulled them slowly from his pockets, then let them fall to his sides. His face was handsome, lined, sad. It reminded him of his own. He offered his hand. It was strong and moist and confident. “Did you see me that night?”

“Yes, sir. I saw a lot that night.”

“You must be afraid.”

“I don’t believe I killed her. I wouldn’t do that.”

“No. We should go, Joseph,” he said.

“Let me get my things.”

As Joseph gathered up his pack from beside the bicycle, he looked down the pathway to see Mr. Cantrell standing at the grave of Ann — his mother — head bowed in silence.

In a way that he could not comprehend, Joseph Goins had more peace in this instant than in all of the twenty-four anguished, bewildering years that had led him here.