C is for Corpse

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah, sure."

He was quiet as I headed across town and turned left onto the secondary road that cuts along the back side of Santa Teresa at the base of the foothills. The sky was a flat blue and cloudless, looking like semigloss paint that had been applied with a roller. It was hot, and the hills were brown and dry, laid out like a pile of kindling. The long grasses near the road had bleached out to a pale gold, and once in a while, I caught sight of lizards perched up on big rocks, looking as gray and still as twigs.

The road twisted, two lanes of blacktop angling back and forth up the side of the mountain. I downshifted twice and my little VW still complained of the climb.

"I thought I remembered something," Bobby said after a while. "But I can't seem to pin it down. That's why I had to see Kitty."

"What kind of thing?"

"I had an address book. One of those small leather-bound types about the size of a playing card. Cheap. Red. I gave it to someone for safekeeping and now I have no idea who." He paused, shaking his head with puzzlement.

"You don't remember why it was important?"

"No. I remember feeling anxious about it, thinking I better not have it in my possession because it was dangerous to me, so I passed it on. At the time-and I remember this part clearly-I figured I could retrieve it later." He shrugged, snorting derisively. "So much for that."

"Was this before the accident or afterwards?"

"Don't know. I just remember giving it to someone."

"Wouldn't it be dangerous to whoever you gave it to?"

"I don't think so. God." He slid down on his spine so he could rest his head on the back of the seat. He peered through the windshield, following the line of gray hills up to the left where the pass cuts through at the crest. "I hate this feeling. I hate knowing I once knew something and having no access to it. It's just an image with nothing attached to it. There aren't any memory cues so I have no way to place it in time. It's like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with a whole hunk knocked off on the floor."

"But how does it work when you forget like that? Is there any retrieving the information or is it just gone?"

"Oh, sometimes it'll come back, but usually it's blank… like a hole in the bottom of a box. Whatever used to be there has spilled out along the way."

"What made you think of it in the first place?"

"I don't know. I was looking through a desk drawer and came across the red leather memo pad that was part of the same set. Suddenly, I got this flash." He fell silent. I glanced over at him and realized how tense he was. He was massaging his bad hand, milking the fingers as if they were long rubber teats.

"Kitty didn't know anything about it?"

He shook his head.

"How's she doing?"

"She's up and around. I guess Derek's going over to see her later on…" He paused. We were reaching the crest of the hill and a muscle near his left eye had started to jump.

"Are you going to be all right with this?" I asked.

He was staring intently at the side of the road. "Just up here. Slow down and pull over if you can."

I checked my rearview mirror. There were three cars behind me, but the road was narrowing from three lanes to two. I eased over to the right and found a gravel shoulder where I could park. The bridge, with its low concrete guardrails, was about ten yards ahead. Bobby sat there, staring to his right.

Where the road descends from the summit, the whole valley opens out, hills sweeping back as far as the eye can see to a range of lavender mountains pasted against the rim of the sky. The August heat shimmered in silence. The land seemed vast and primitive, looking as it must have looked for thousands of years. In the distance, live oaks dotted the landscape, as snaggy and dark and hunched as buffalo.

There'd been no rain for months and the vista seemed chalky and pale, the color washed out.

Closer to us, the roadside dropped away into the treacherous canyon that had nearly marked Bobby's death nine months ago. A length of metal railing had been replaced, but where the bridge began, there was still a chunk of concrete missing.

"The other car started ramming us from behind just as we came over the rim of the hill," he said. I thought he meant to continue, so I waited.

He walked forward a few feet, gravel crunching under his shoes. He was clearly uneasy as he peered down the rocky slope. I looked back over my shoulder at the few cars passing. No one paid the slightest attention to us.

I studied the scene, picking out one of the scarred boulders I'd seen in the photograph, and farther down, the raw, jagged stump where a scrub oak had been snapped off at the base. I knew the Santa Teresa police had swept the area clean of debris from the accident, so there was no need to whip out a magnifying glass or creep around picking fibers from the underbrush.

Bobby turned to me. "Have you ever been close to death?"

"Yes."

"I remember thinking, This is it. I'm gone.' I disco

"But you hung on."

"Hey, my mother willed it. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw her face. And when I closed my eyes, I heard her voice. She'd say, 'We're going to make it, Bobby. We're going to do this, you and I."

He was silent again. I thought, Jesus, what must it be like to have a mother who could love you that way? My parents had died when I was five, in a freak car accident. We'd been on a Sunday outing, driving up to Lompoc, when a huge boulder tumbled down the mountain and smashed through the windshield. My father had died instantly and we'd crashed. I'd been in the backseat, thrust down against the floorboards on impact, wedged in by the crushed frame. My mother had lingered, moaning and crying, sinking into a silence finally that I sensed was ominous and forever. It had taken them hours to extract me from the wreckage, trapped there with the dead whom I loved who had left me for all time. After that, I was raised by a no-nonsense aunt who had done her best, who had loved me deeply, but with a matter-of-factness that had failed to nourish some part of me.

Bobby had been infused with a love of such magnitude that it had brought him back from the grave. It was odd, when he was so broken, that I experienced an envy that made tears well up in my eyes. I felt a laugh burble and he turned a puzzled glance on me.

I took out a Kleenex and blew my nose. "I just realized how much I envy you," I said.

He smiled ruefully. "That's a first."

We got back in the car. There'd been no blinding recall, no sudden recollection of forgotten facts, but I'd seen the miry pit into which he had been flung and I'd felt the bond between us strengthened.

"Have you been up here since the accident?"

"No. I never had the nerve and no one ever suggested it. Made me sweat."

I started the car. "How about a beer?"

"How about a bourbon on the rocks?"

We went to the Stage Coach Tavern, just off the main road, and talked for the rest of the afternoon.