The Wave Read online

  These thoughts went through my head again and again. Then Nella came bounding out with a white box the size of a loaf of bread under her arm.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long,” she said at my window. “But I had it in the closet somewhere.”

  She shoved the box at me.

  “What is it?”

  “A phone left over from my last place. I didn’t like the way it looked after I painted, so I bought another one.”

  “Why you giving it to me?”

  “Because you said you broke yours, and I want you to call me the minute you get in.”

  The kiss she gave me through that window was the most passionate I’d ever known. It stayed with me all the way back to my garage-home.

  “Errol?” she asked, answering the phone.

  “Uh-huh. Who did you expect?”

  “Take off your clothes,” she replied.

  We made love over the phone line, something I had never done before. She was upset when I didn’t have coconut oil, but she finally settled for virgin olive. In the beginning, I hardly knew what to say to her. She made me explain every move and sensation, what things felt like and how they appeared. After a while I got the hang of it. She got very excited when I told her to get down on her knees.

  It was three o’clock before we said our good-byes. After that, we’d call back every five minutes or so just to make sure that love was still there.

  So when the phone rang at ten to four, I answered, “Hey,” with certainty that she’d be there kissing my ear.

  “Airy, your line’s been busy all night.”

  I knew everything in that moment. Maybe I wasn’t sure of how or why or even who, but I knew that my life as I had known it was somehow over. The man on the line was close to me; very much so. My father had used those same words many times after I’d moved out and he’d tried to call. He was never angry, just frustrated and maybe a little frightened.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, Airy—Papa.”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “It’s so cold here, Airy. So cold,” he said, as if my reminding him about death brought back the chill.

  “Where are you?”

  “There’s a hut behind the trees. In the woods beyond the graveyard. You can see my stone from here. They leave in the nighttime. I sleep on the ground with the sun between the leaves so they don’t find me and put me back.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Papa. Papa.”

  “My father is dead.”

  “It’s so cold, so cold. I sleep in the trees. No clothes.”

  “Listen, man,” I said, my temper running hot with the hormones in my veins. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Cold,” he said. “Papa . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Hello?”

  Maybe ten seconds passed, and then there was a single rapping note, and I knew that he’d put the receiver down on a table.

  4

  I was at the Fox Hills Memorial Park at seven the next morning. Papa was out there somewhere, just a flat cement disk among thousands. The cemetery director’s office was open, but no one was there, so I studied the maps out in front of the building, trying to remember where my father was buried. NY-UEP-CT-1598 was his number. That meant the New Yard in Upper Elysian Park, Circle Terrace, at lot number 1598.

  I hadn’t been to see Papa in six years. And the graveyard was immense. I had never been there alone. I followed the procession from the chapel the first time, behind the minister we hired to provide the service. My only other visits were with my mother and my sister, Angelique. I never paid attention to which way we were going.

  I studied the map for a long time, taking notes and trying to get my bearings by scanning the grounds now and then. Finally I set out to find his stone by myself for the first time since his death.

  It took over an hour to locate him.

  The New Yard was at the far end of a long curving path that went up a hill and through a section of the graveyard that, as far as I could tell, had no name. I came upon a place called Celestial Gardens, which led me to the New Yard. This was the largest and least expensive area of the cemetery. There were more than a dozen different sections whose names had nothing to do with their placement. There was no Elysian Park or Lower Elysian Park. I wandered through Green Pastures, Holy Rest, and Heavenly Pines before coming upon Upper Elysian Park.

  There were five thousand cement disks and more spread out before me. I think it was the immensity of death that brought me to tears again. I hadn’t slept at all the night before. In my mind’s eye, I’d picture my father, emaciated and dying, one moment and then Nella’s smile the next. It’s a wonder I found the stone at all.

  Arthur Bontemps Porter III

  Born

  September 19, 1935

  Died

  January 1, 1996

  There was no quote or endearing memorial, just the dates and a name. He never believed in God. He didn’t think about death at all. There was no will or life insurance policy, not even a provision for his plot.

  “We never liked to think about that kind of thing,” my mother said in his defense. “I mean . . . life is so short anyway, why think about dying?”

  At forty-nine she had to go to work at the neighborhood newspaper, the Olympic Gazette, answering phones, editing articles, interviewing local residents, and even mopping floors for a subsistence salary.

  Angelique and I helped her out as much as we could, but now I made very little, and Angie had to watch her money because she was having a baby with her husband, Lon.

  The grass around his stone was dirty. I could see the dark soil between the long green blades. I knelt before the grave and pinched the loose soil between my fingers. It was moist and icy cold.

  “What you got there?”

  I yelped and jumped three paces, spinning around in midair.

  I saw the man standing on the concrete path a few feet from my father’s grave, but his features didn’t register at first. I didn’t know if he was white or black, thin or fat.

  “What do you want?” I cried.

  “Nothing, son,” the man said.

  He was wearing gray coveralls, not naked.

  “Did he die recently?”

  “What?” I asked. “What did you say?”

  “Sometimes people come up here years after they lost somebody. Maybe for the first time. It makes the loss feel real.”

  He was an older man, white. His hair was all gray, and his eyes, I think, were blue. He carried a stick with a nail at the end. Speared on that nail was a Cracker Jack box that someone had carelessly thrown away.

  “I’m Errol Porter,” I said. “This is my father’s grave.”

  “Fathers,” the man said. “It’s hard on a son to lose the man who made him. Fathers were once God in a child’s eye.”

  “I miss him,” I said.

  “I’ll leave you, then. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “Wait.”

  “Yes?”

  “What—what’s this dirt here in the grass? Is that normal?”

  The groundskeeper took a step off the pathway and approached the cut-rate grave. He knelt, as I had done, and touched the soil.

  “Rain,” he said with certainty.

  “It hasn’t rained in two weeks,” I said.

  “But when it does, sometimes the soil comes up. Sometimes it washes down from the parks.”

  He gestured toward a wooded area not twenty-five feet from the grave. Looking into the thicket of sapling pines, I thought about the woods my late-night caller had claimed to live in.

  “Is there a building back there?” I asked.

  “Why?” The groundskeeper was suddenly alert, suspicious, even.

  “When I came here with my mother, after Dad died, I went off in the woods somewhere to have a cigarette. I remember a small building that had a telephone and a desk.”

  “Somebody broke in there over the last week. Some bum livin’ it up and using the
night watchman’s phone.”

  “Wouldn’t the night watchman see a man using his phone?” I asked.

  “Eric gets spooked out here at night. He spends most of his time down at the main office. He only comes up to make his rounds. We used to have three men at night, but the board of directors got tired of payin’ for it. All they got’s Eric now, and Eric’s a chicken.”

  “How come there’s no soil on the other graves?”

  “It pools up in one place or another,” the elder man said. “I’m Jacob, Errol. Been workin’ at Fox for forty-two years. You want me to clean off your father’s plot?”

  “I can’t afford it,” I said. “Lost my job a while back and, well, thanks anyway.”

  “You’re a good boy, Errol,” Jacob said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I only hope my own children feel as much love for me when I’m dead and gone.”

  “I’m sure they will,” I said. “I’m sure they will.”

  5

  The borders of the cemetery had high stone and concrete fences protecting the parks. The sides of the walls were embedded with glass and crowned with coiled razor wire. I wore a heavy-duty canvas apron, heavy kiln gloves, and work boots to scale the twelve-foot walls. With these garments, the master builder’s canvas tarp, and an aluminum ladder from the pottery studio, I made my way, at two A.M., to the southern edge of the graveyard. That was just off the freeway exit, behind a dense landscape of California pines.

  “Are you totally insane?” Nella had asked me.

  We were on our four o’clock lunch break. Just before I told her about my plan, we had been kissing in the clay closet.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t explain it, honey.” It was the first endearment I had used with her.

  “There must be some reason you got for doing something so crazy.”

  “It was the way he said that he’d been calling. The way he said the words. The—the inflection,” I said, reaching for the right term. “It was exactly, exactly, the way my father always complained after I had been on the phone a long time. I mean . . . He could have heard my nickname. He could have looked me up in the phone book and just said Airy because it sounded right. Or—or maybe he once knew an Errol and called him that. But he said exactly the same words, just like my father did. There’s no way he could have faked that. Somehow he has to know me or my father. I have to go.”

  I expected Nella to argue with me, to tell me that I was too crazy to date. But instead she took me home, brought me to her bed, and made love to me as if I were more than twice the man I felt.

  At one A.M. I reluctantly left her side.

  “Aren’t you afraid to go?” she asked me.

  “He was my father, Nella,” I said. “I know this guy must just be crazy, but I owe him something. His memory, I mean.”

  An elemental light shone in Nella’s bayou-colored eyes. She let her fingers run down my naked thigh, and then kissed my knee.

  “At least we’ll have this,” she said, “before the ghosts out there take you to the Necropolis.”

  Her words came back to me as I tossed the thick canvas over the razor wire. Nella wasn’t afraid that I’d be arrested, but that I’d be captured by the spirits of the dead.

  The ladder was eight feet high, and the ground was uneven. I stood on the top rung struggling to maintain balance in my clumsy clothes. When I leaped onto the tarp, the ladder fell over. I had to catch onto the wire through the tarp. And even though I wore thick gloves, one of the razors cut into the ring finger of my right hand. I felt blood in my glove. I kicked and pulled, making it to the top of the wall, buoyed by the fierce coiled wire.

  I stopped to catch my breath, feeling safe for the moment. But then the wire shifted and I fell down the inner wall, through a thick network of branches, and to the ground below.

  I hit the earth so hard that for a moment all I knew was pain. I pulled off the gloves and held the bleeding finger to stanch the wound and ride out the throbbing ache in my pelvis. As soon as I was able, I got to my feet hoping that nothing was broken. By then I didn’t care about the man who said he was my father. All I wanted was to get out of there, to get home to my own bed and to Shelly . . .

  I hadn’t thought home to Shelly in a long time. The air was cold on my neck. My hip hurt, but I could walk. Moonlight winked between the branches and pine needles. I took a deep breath and then stifled a laugh. I had made it over that fearsome wall. Nella’s lovemaking came back to me, and I whispered, “Yeah.”

  I didn’t know exactly where I was, but NY-UEP-CT-1598 was somewhere in that part of the cemetery. I clambered up a steep incline through the stand of shrub pine until I came to a plateau of monuments. This was the rich neighborhood, where the wealthy could spread out for their long rest.

  There were great statues of angels in alabaster and obsidian that glowed under the three-quarter moon. The caskets were housed in small buildings barred by golden gates. Fresh flowers decorated many of the crypts. Long speeches were etched into stone tablets on almost every burial place.

  I limped through the small town of death on a path made from huge, hewn granite plates.

  I heard the voice first, before I realized that he was singing. An electric torch shone a little way off to my left.

  When a ma-aan loves a woe-man . . .

  It must be Eric, I thought, the cowardly night watchman, singing to protect himself from the dead.

  He can do her no wrong . . .

  I crouched down beside a gated tomb, under the shadow of a great rectangular monolith of black marble. Eric made his way quickly between the vaults, his torch swinging and his voice quavering with fear and love. The last verse I heard him sing—turn his back on his best friend/If he puts her down—faded behind a small hill.

  I made my way back into the stand of pines to keep from being seen and maybe to find the way to the little hut the crazed hobo had been calling me from.

  He attacked me as soon as I was in the landscaped forest, grabbing me from behind and pinning my arms to my sides. I fell to the ground under his weight, thinking that maybe I was going to be murdered. And then I worried that maybe this really was some spirit who intended to drag me down into hell.

  6

  The man on top of me was naked and foul-smelling. We struggled, but I couldn’t exactly call it a fight. He was almost embracing me.

  “Airy! Errol! Honey! I’m alive!”

  He was skinny, as my father had been in those last months, but this man was young—and strong. He was kissing my face, all elbows and knees, like a child so excited he didn’t know whether to laugh or go insane.

  I pushed him off. He struggled to get back on top of me, to embrace me, but I pushed him off again.

  “Errol,” he pleaded.

  He got to his feet and held out his hands as if in prayer. The light of the moon illuminated his face. He was a young man, younger than I, and very dark-skinned, as my father had been. He had a mane of matted hair filled with twigs and clods of dirt. His mouth was yowling silently. His eyes were wide with fright and desire.

  His penis was uncircumcised, large and ebony, again like my father.

  But my father hadn’t had a full head of hair since before I was born. He was nearly sixty-one when he died.

  “Errol.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Papa,” he said, slapping his chest with both hands.

  He went down on his knees and looked up at me. The fear drained from his face, and I could see that this man might well be a younger version of my father. A thought occurred to me. Maybe there was something to what the distressed young man was saying. Maybe he was a messenger from my past.

  “Here,” I said, stripping off my heavy apron. “Put this on.”

  His body was rank with human odors. While tying the back strap, I gagged on the smell.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said.

  The grin on his face was that of a penitent’s gratitude to a
high lord’s nod. He ran with me, ahead of me, backward at times—babbling things I couldn’t understand because he was laughing while he talked.

  We got to the place in the wall where my canvas carpet had been laid.

  “We have to climb over somehow,” I said. “I had a ladder to get here, but it fell on the other side.”

  Grinning, the youth calling himself my father scaled the tree whose branches I had fallen through. For a moment I lost sight of him in the boughs. Then I saw him jump a good four feet onto the tarp. He was laughing, and then he was gone. I was sure he’d broken his neck, but what could I do?

  I tried to climb the tree, but my cut finger was swollen by then, and my baby finger still hurt, too.

  I heard the sound of wrenching metal from the other side and then “Airy!”

  The wild man’s head had popped up at the top of the wall. He climbed to the middle of the tarp, maintaining his balance in the center. He started moving his hands one after the other in a lifting motion, and the ladder, its brace broken off, appeared over his shoulder and then came down to my side of the wall.

  “Climb up, Airy,” he called. “Climb up.”

  I placed the ladder against the wall, making sure the upper rung was secured by the razor wire under the canvas. When I got to the tarp, the maniac helped me keep my balance. Together we lowered one end of the broken ladder down to the outer wall of the graveyard. The young black man clambered down first and then steadied the ladder for me to follow.

  It was easy even with my wounded fingers. The experience made me remember times with my father when I was a child. He made things so easy. He’d always been good with his hands. Master carpenters marveled at his work around our home.

  “Climb down so good,” he said with a wide grin that reminded me of some of the African students I’d known at school. The Africans seemed less guarded, where American blacks kept humor on a lower, more controllable register.