where she sank into the cushioned seat and wept.
Then I turned to Marceno. 'I'll do it,' I said.
'You?'
'Yes,' I told him. And I did.
I put my hand on the driver's-side door and pulled the handle. Nothing happened. I yanked, quite hard, and the door fell away, right off the car, hinges rusted to nothingness. I jumped backward. Inside the driver's side we saw an enormous mass of mushrooms crowding against each other, falling with thick abundance over the seat and floor and everywhere, covering like a thick blanket whatever might be below them, and I felt just strong enough to step forward and brush my hands against them, and what I saw made all of us understand that we were gazing not just into a buried car but a dripping, imperfectly sealed crypt- what I saw was a woman's watch and a curled brown athletic shoe and a rotten swath of a flowered material such as might be used to make a summer dress. What I saw was what remained of Jay Rainey's mother.
Yes, as the official tests would later prove- some remaining teeth, a bit of hair, the serial number in the car's engine blockthis was what was left of Jay's mother, aged thirty-nine years old when she died, a woman who had not abandoned her only child, her strapping, beautiful son, but- judging from the position of the car in the field- had gone looking for him, perhaps catching a taint of herbicide floating on the night air, which meant that she found her death.
Marceno's men lay a section of plastic sheeting on the ground and on it they put what they found: one earring, a wedding ring, the running shoes, a necklace of semiprecious stone, and a small clay dog. Marceno examined it and handed it to me. It was heavy in the hand, and I wiped the dirt from it. The creature had a certain crude sweetness and had been glazed. I turned it over, my thumb finding the lettering on the belly: JAY R. 4TH GRADE.
We pried open the trunk of the car, and in it were the following items: a plastic gasoline can, a beach chair, an aluminum baseball bat, and rubber flip-flops. No suitcases, no items suggesting a flight from a bad marriage. I turned to Marceno. He and his men stood silently, understanding what the artifacts meant, tribally respectful of them and the earthen rituals of death.
Martha Hallock sat in her car, weeping fitfully. 'My girl,' she sobbed. 'My sweet girl.' How had I not figured out that she was Jay's grandmother?
Marceno and I walked away from the car toward the ocean.
'She sold me the land, you know,' he said. 'He owned it but she sold it to me.'
'I think she knew somebody was buried here, feared it might be true.'
'Who?'
'Her daughter, Jay Rainey's mother. Her nephew, Poppy, knew for sure, must have been the one to bury her. There was an accident with herbicide. The mother disappeared that same night, everyone thought she'd left the husband. But Martha knew, somewhere inside her.'
Marceno ran his fingers through his hair, demoralized by the waste and stupidity of everything. 'Poppy was just putting a little more earth on top of the car, that's all?'
'It looks that way.'
'And this man Herschel happened along,' confirmed Marceno. 'Said what are you doing? And they got in a fight. That could cause a heart attack right there.'
'Or Poppy told him what he was doing. Or Herschel figured it out. Or Herschel knew what had happened and was afraid it'd be discovered.'
Marceno studied the rusted hulk of the Toyota.
'Poppy was desperate,' I went on. 'Once the vineyard was planted it would be a very long time, if ever, before the car would be discovered.'
'He would be dead.'
'More importantly, Jay Rainey would be dead.'
'I don't understand.'
'Poppy was probably the one who left the herbicide sprayer on. He killed Jay's mother. Found her, panicked, buried the car.'
'Even if the ground was soft, that would still take hours.'
'He had a bulldozer. He could've found her a few hours before dawn.'
Marceno knelt down to touch the earth. 'So he was trying to spare Jay Rainey from finding out?'
'I think he probably didn't want to face manslaughter charges. You could begin there.'
'But did Rainey know?'
'I don't think so. At least not until recently,' I said. 'He found out in the Havana Room.'
Marceno dusted off his suit and faced me, ever the tidy international businessman. 'So, are we done then?'
'Not quite.'
'Hmm?'
'I want to know why you didn't come to the steakhouse when I called and told you Poppy had arrived there.'
He inspected his fingernails. 'I didn't feel it was necessary, Mr. Wy-eth.'
'But I had the information you wanted.'
No answer. Marceno's silence felt cold. He adjusted his watchstalling, I figured, preparing an explanation. 'This man H.J. came to my office,' he finally said. 'Full of threats.' He looked at me and shrugged, as if the rest of it was obvious.
'What happened?'
'We made an agreement. We were both looking for the same people. It wasn't supposed to-' He appeared to sense that I could still cause him enormous trouble. 'I owe you an apology.'
'It was just business for you,' I muttered.
But this was not the way Marceno chose to understand himself, and his eyes found their way back to the rusted hulk sitting atop the earth, the blanket of mushrooms inside. 'Men died for nothing. For money, for wine.'
Not Jay, I thought.
I will tell now four more things. I will tell why I slept very poorly the next few days; I will tell what I did with Jay's estate, including his letters to his daughter, Sally Cowles; I will tell what I said to her about her true father; and I will tell what passed between me and Allison Sparks in our last conversation, during which we discussed the terrible events in the Havana Room.
Knowing only two things, that Jay lay in the field near death, and that his mother stopped her car before him, one can surmise the horror she felt as she saw her son fallen to the earth. She would naturally have wanted to open the door and rush to him. But did she pause? In an instinct of self-preservation, perhaps smelling or tasting the herbicide that had already come in through the window or air vents? Did she sense that she needed to back up in the soft earth and flee? And was Jay in any way aware of the headlights upon him, did he know it was his mother? Perhaps she called to him. Perhaps he knew that she was affected by the herbicide. In any case she must have looked upon him, seen him dying, and then known she was dying herself. These are the lost seconds of Jay Rainey's lost life. Seconds that yet tick forward unknown. And, I wondered, did Jay have any remembrance of the lights of his mother's car or her voice or perhaps even the sight of her slumped form against the dashboard, or even out the door, dying in the field? Had there been one molecule of this memory? Did he think that she had gone looking for him, that he had unknowingly drawn her to her death? That, too, was undiscoverable. One might infer from his pursuit of his lost daughter that the answer was yes- that there was within him a hidden call of the flesh, to find the flesh that was of him and of those from whom he'd come. These are the deep pressures of being human, and those of us who are parents feel the forwardness of our flesh even as we know our own is failing. The rhythmic scything away of the previous generation forces our attention to our children, for if we do not have our children, then, knowing ourselves to be doomed, we do not have anything. People who don't have children often take violent exception to the idea that their lives are in any way existentially different from the lives of those who do have children, and to this I only laugh darkly to myself and think, Well yes, you may think that, but you are already dead, my friend. I am also already dead, yet live on in my son, who will have his son or daughter when I am dispersed
