Stunned Corky practically limps back to his car. Jesus, it’s as if he has been fucked, in the face, by a vicious bitch he’d mistaken as a bimbo baton twirler!
Corky’s strategy next is to drive not behind but ahead of the funeral procession, to Mount Moriah Cemetery which he happens to know is their destination. Not that he means to intrude, for sure he doesn’t. Just that he can’t give this up.
Like that guy stalking Thalia. Corky’s forgotten his name.
The one, for her sake, he’d had beaten half to death.
Shortly before 5 P.M. then of this day rough and saw-notched as the underside of Corky’s tooth against his tender tongue, which in nerved-up states he compulsively touches, as compulsively, when alone, he picks at his nose and mutters to himself, Corky sets off for Mount Moriah Cemetery. His head does feel as if somebody’s been hammering on it. And his stomach!—the sweet potato pie, so delicious to eat, lies heavy in his gut as undigested body parts.
O.K. asshole don’t get thinking of that.
You want to make yourself sick, don’t get thinking of that.
And what had that sadistic prick “Wolf” Wiegler said sneering of Marilee Plummer—Nah it isn’t so fresh, it’ll be buried tomorrow—like spitting in your face, the shock of it, you’re talking about a human being who has just died and he’s talking about a corpse.
Dead meat.
Corky thinks, he’ll get his revenge on “Wolf” someday. Like that asshole “Richie Richards.” These guy poisoning the world with their cynicism. Negativism. You’re an American you’re an optimist. You’re an elected official you’re for sure an optimist. Corky remembers a sermon in the St. Thomas chapel, fancy stained-glass place with beautifully carved rosewood pews and Spanish tiles on the floor the bequest of a wealthy alum and in the pulpit there’s this big-deal Jesuit from Loyola of Chicago a theologian he’s called an old buddy of John F. Kennedy it’s boasted and this guy is as different from a Union City parish priest like Father Sullivan as John F. Kennedy’s different from old scumbag Buck Glover delivering the most passionate sermon the St. Thomas boys in their navy blue blazers and red-striped neckties have ever heard The atheist seeks to poison God’s world out of despair of loving Him and by Him being loved.
Now Corky Corcoran’s an atheist. But God damn it, he still loves the world.
Shrewd Corky invisibly leading the funeral procession takes Decatur to Meridian, Meridian to Seneca, this is a part of Union City he knows like the back of his hand, so many years layered in driving it, a succession of cars and the commercial buildings changing with time and Corky Corcoran himself changing with time though unwitnessed by himself thus invisibly. Corcoran, Inc., owns property along this stretch, an office building at Decatur and Ninth, another office building at the Meridian intersection, undistinguished decent-looking slightly shabby and weatherworn brick buildings of the late 1950s though modeled after the old Chicago Commercial style—the large steel-framed windows topped by smaller transom windows in the upper storeys, the lower storeys with wide showcase windows, American merchandise on display even when it’s auto parts, hardware, drugstore stuff, remnant rugs, discount furniture. Meridian looks good to Corky’s quick-assessing eye—that new Kmart taking up practically a city block, a renovated SuperValue Foods, both with monster parking lots, and one of those CineMax theaters showing six or eight or ten films, Corky feels a nanosecond’s pang of regret Nobody to go to the movies with he’d used to go with Thalia sometimes when there was something special she’d wanted to see and when between the ages of maybe eleven and fourteen she didn’t have or hadn’t wanted friends her own age, always so mysterious that kid, subterranean currents her step-Daddy could never fathom nor even her mother poor Charlotte admitting to him once drunk and weeping I never really wanted to have a baby I thought it was something a woman did.
No wonder the bitch never had his kid like she’d promised. No wonder, aged forty-three and feeling like he’s ready to kick the bucket any hour now, Corky Corcoran’s got no children. Not even a daughter.
Northeast on Seneca and Corky’s quick eye counts off FOR RENT, FOR SALE signs, three of them the red-white-blue of Drummond Realty, this is a good reliable commercial stretch though hard hit by Bush’s recession and what he’ll do Corky’s plotting is tomorrow maybe go see the old man before the fund-raiser in Chateauguay and put the bite on him for a loan as Corky’s done in the past both with and without Charlotte knowing. As Ross Drummond says don’t confuse the ladies with finances they think with their cunts.
Crude old bastard for a guy of such monied background, WASP family, foul-mouthed as some of Corky’s own male relatives though a gentleman for sure in the presence of women of his social class. Hell, Corky likes old Ross. Misses him. He’s smiling thinking of the s.o.b. Like a father to Corky, when Corky hadn’t even exactly known he’d needed a father. That day in the office laying his hand heavy on Corky’s skinny shoulder and breathing in Corky’s face in utmost confidence of his power, I like you a lot, kid!—I might just change your life.
Corky’s ascending the hill to Mount Moriah Cemetery which he’s managed to avoid for years since most of the funerals he attends are Catholic and this is a Protestant/nondenominational cemetery and not the classiest one in Union City. Driving first through the residential neighborhood of middle-income houses ringing the hill Corky’s thinking why doesn’t he live in a place like this, his old friend Nick Daugherty lives in a place like this, Average USA, “ranch” houses, “colonials,” on a grid of narrow streets with names like Locust, Elm, Cedar, Maple, Juniper, sleek aluminum siding and fake redwood facades and shrines to the Virgin Mary and antlered deer statues in the identical-sized front yards and in the driveways boats covered in blue plastic on U-Haul rigs. Tomorrow, Memorial Day, unless it’s raining hard, the boats will be out on the river, there’ll be barbecues in the back yards. Portable TVs on the terraces. Kids shooting baskets in the driveways, playing soccer in the streets. Guys washing their cars. Mount Moriah is ninety-five percent white working-class and homeowners take pride in that fact. Corky’s been seeing WARNING: PATROLLED BY MOUNT MORIAH WATCH meaning private citizens in vigilante squads, these guys are serious and licensed to carry firearms, Berettas like the UCPD. (And in fact a high percentage of white cops live in Mount Moriah, restricted by city law to live within the city limits.) Corky Corcoran would be one of them, riding shotgun with his neighbors drinking beer out of cans and maybe passing a joint alert to black faces that don’t belong in this crummy little enclave as an owl’s alert to prey moving on the ground. A number of Irish Hill residents relocated to Mount Moriah, guys Corky went to grade school with, on each of these streets there’s probably somebody he knows, or knew, and who knows him. Hey Corky, welcome home!
Instead, he’s a millionaire with a five-bedroom house in Maiden Vale. Living alone.
Mount Moriah the so-called “mountain” is in fact a “drumlin” formed in the Ice Age by glaciers like most of the weird-shaped and precipitous hills in the region. As a kid Corky’d been taught the local geology and like every other kid forgot most of it except he remembers “Mount Moriah”—one of the Jesuits at St. Thomas describing its particular “ovoid” shape then speaking unexpectedly and with vehemence of the crematorium located there, built after World War I as a private enterprise and taken over by Mohawk County in the 1940s after much local controversy and ill feeling for of course cremation is forbidden by the Catholic Church: how can your body be resurrected on Judgment Day if in fact it’s been burnt totally to hell?
At St. Thomas, teachers and students pondered such theological problems with the gravity, passion, and ingenuity for which the Society of Jesus has been renowned through the centuries.
So Corky’s intrigued by the idea of the crematorium, a forbidden place still in some deep crevice of his mind, though it’s nothing he really wants to think about, it makes him uneasy enough to think about regular burial, any kind of burial, the rites of necessity serving Death. Passing the graveled m
ud-puddled drive leading up to the crematorium, following the main graveled mud-puddled drive beneath a wrought-iron arch MT. MORIAH CEMETERY into a sudden hush of damp rich green and birdsong that affects him strangely—he wants to feel peaceful here, he deserves to feel peaceful here if only for a few minutes, only just can’t, quite.
Driving around aimlessly, at five miles an hour waiting for the Plummer procession to arrive. There are a few other cars in the cemetery so Corky figures he won’t be noticed, recognized. At least if he keeps his distance.
He’s still pissed off by that broad from WWTC coming on to him the way she did. In the relations between man and woman isn’t man supposed to be the aggressor, for Christ’s sake!
Females like that, you can’t fuck gentle you’d have to fuck rough so it hurts. And then they respect you.
Corky’s staring at the rows of graves, so many. Jesus, an entire new section of the cemetery’s been opened up since the last time he was here! You’d think, in the business Corky Corcoran’s in, any familiar landscape developed wouldn’t be a surprise but for some reason it always is, he’s surprised, something in him’s offended, by the sight of change. The evidence of change. At least, change in the landscape that doesn’t bring him any profit.
Corky arrives at the cemetery at 5:15 P.M. and the funeral procession headed by the big black hearse arrives at 5:28 P.M. After it passes the drive where he’s parked he waits a discreet minute or so then follows after. There are eleven cars in the procession not counting the hearse. The second car is a black stretch limo containing, Corky assumes, Marilee’s parents and closest relatives, the windows are dark-tinted so he can’t see even the glimmer of an outline of a face. The other cars are bearing men and women unknown to Corky or so he assumes, he doesn’t dare look at them too closely.
Marilee Plummer’s gravesite isn’t far away. Corky drives slowly past the now parked cars observing covertly out of the corner of his eye what he can—the mourners getting out of their cars, an elderly ashy-skinned woman in dark purple clothes being helped out of the limo, a middle-aged woman in a black turban who might be Marilee’s mother, or an aunt—young men—teenaged kids—one of the burly black men who’d looked to be guarding the front of the church from the media people.
Those leeches, Corky’s relieved to see, haven’t followed the mourners to the cemetery.
He’s the only outsider.
Driving slowly to higher ground like a man intent upon his own private grief then parking close by a ten-foot ivory marble obelisk like a giant prick stained yellow with time and birdshit, climbing out of his car and lighting another cigarette with shaky excited fingers and taking from the trunk a pair of binoculars so rarely used the lenses are gummy requiring spit and tissue to clean, and so out of focus he’s muttering “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” adjusting them, finally able to see the Plummer mourners as if close up as if he’s among their party invisible thus undetected. Corky watches as the pallbearers slide the heavy coffin out of the rear of the hearse and lift it with a tremulous strength he can feel in his own muscles’ sinews and bear it aloft to the freshly dug grave in a hillside and the minister who’s a thickset man in his sixties with skin the color of horse chestnuts speaks to the mourners his cheeks glistening with tears and the faces of the mourners Corky can make out are glistening with tears, some of the faces showing anger, grief, shock like the faces of cattle stunned by blows to the head yet not dead nor even brought yet to their knees. Corky’s staring at these people as he’s never stared at anyone in his life or so he believes. Corky’s staring from a distance of approximately two hundred feet utterly absorbed, fascinated and his mind struck blank. Staring at the woman in the black turban in black drapery regal and stiff in grief as the figurehead of a ship who’s possibly Marilee’s mother and the elderly ashy-skinned woman in purple leaning on the other’s arm who’s possibly Marilee’s grandmother and the brown-skinned black man in his early twenties who’s possibly Marilee’s younger brother if she had a younger brother for if she did he’d look exactly like that kid with his hooded eyes, solid jaw and angry sullen face which not even tears can soften. And staring at the others, backs of heads, faces in two-thirds profile, never has Corky been so lost in concentration in contemplation in the very intensity of being as if every molecule in him is straining to press through the binocular’s lenses as the pulley apparatus lowers the coffin bearing the invisible body slowly and with sickening finality into the moist earthy rectangular hole that’s a grave but might as easily be a mouth of very earth poised to swallow what it is given to receive.
“Jesus!—” Corky mutters aloud. Feeling the terrible lurch of the coffin that’s suddenly in.
He lowers the binoculars dazed and dizzy. The gravesite falls back into the distance, the mourners are mere figures in the distance. No faces. No grief.
Why are you spying on these people, you honky motherfucker?
I’m not spying on them, I’m one of them.
One of them! You’re white, asshole, you’re not one of them.
Corky glances around guiltily. Like he’s been jerking off in a public place and sure somebody’s been watching but, so far as he can gauge, nobody has.
Honky motherfucker, what makes you think you’re one of anybody?
Back in the Caddy driving down from the cemetery careful not to exceed the fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit Corky’s thinking of an interlude he’s all but forgotten, how he’d felt then too this shame-faced sense of having narrowly escaped some catastrophe while half wishing for it. White man! White skin! Devil!—at the same time protesting indignantly, But why? What have I done? The occasion was the first clamorous meeting of the City Council some months ago following the refusal of the Union City Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division to dismiss and condemn Sergeant Dwayne Pickett who’d shot the twelve-year-old Devane Johnson between the shoulder blades and Marcus Steadman before the Council president could even call the meeting to order rose to his feet magisterial in fury denouncing the UCPD and all of City Hall and his fellow Council members as racist pigs and cowards not sparing even the moderate black members of the Council and in the visitors’ gallery on their feet as well were about thirty men and women shouting and cursing and threatening to set fire to City Hall and the UCPD guards of whom there were a dozen on duty that evening unholstered their guns and advanced upon the gallery shouting too and cursing and Corky Corcoran and his fellow Council members (except for Steadman, on his feet and ranting) sat frozen in their cushioned swivel chairs in terror of a sudden eruption of gunfire in which they would die as quickly and as significantly as a flame is snuffed out and Corky’s eye desperately measured the space beneath the Council president’s desk calculating if he dove into that space if he forced the president’s legs out if he drew his knees tight up against his chest if he pushed his chin down onto his chest he could fit in there just fine.
On his way out of the cemetery Corky feels a sudden sharp pinch of his bladder, an urgent need to piss. It strikes him so unexpectedly and with a sensation so close to pain, like a memory of something shameful, he grunts aloud. “God damn!”—next, his prostate’s going. Is that it?
Turns off then for expediency’s sake onto a narrow bumpy puddled drive he doesn’t realize leads to the crematorium until a hundred yards or so along there’s the sudden sign MT. MORIAH CREMATORIUM above an open gate, Corky decides what the hell he’ll drive on in and park, there are a half dozen cars in front of the building plus a shiny metallic-gray Toyota van marked MT. MORIAH CEMETERY ASSOCIATION. Nobody’s around, Corky can stroll to the rear and take a leak and that’s that.
Though he’s lived in Union City all his life, Corky Corcoran has never seen the Mount Moriah Crematorium up close. From below, you can make out the tall weatherworn brick chimney that’s flared at the top, and much of the turreted roof, that’s like the roof of a fairy tale castle; the building is a Union City landmark, more visible in winter than when trees are thick-leafed as now. An architectural oddity of dubious
distinction akin to several other local buildings of its era, pre–and post–World War I, the Masonic temple on Grand Boulevard (with the pair of stone lions guarding its gate that the nuns at Our Lady of Mercy parish school warned their pupils might one day wake and come after little Catholic children and make “living martyrs” of them), the Arts Club at the farther end of Summit Park, the Proxmire “manor” house on Lake Ontario which Corky’s seen only in photos. These old buildings are eyesores, but you’ve got to love them. Part Victorian Gothic, part Richardsonian Romanesque, some neoclassical features tossed in—ornamental columns and pillars and arches, turrets, gables, heavy slate or hammered copper roofs, cornices, carved pediments, gargoyles. Gargoyles! Corky squints upward seeing an impish bearded face squinting down at him from a drainpipe, like a long-lost Corcoran cousin. “Hiya, buster. How’s tricks?” The crematorium has a clock tower, too—stained old orangey-buff brick, that color Corky loves, it’s like a setting sun is reflected in it perpetually. And faintly cracked but still elegant pink limestone. The ornate clock face, which can be seen for miles on a clear day, is the color of a jaundiced eyeball and the spidery black Gothic hands are frozen at 12:02 of some lost day.
Corky shivers, though it’s a balmy humid day. Automatically checks his watch, he’s a guy who lives by his watch—Jesus, already 5:57 P.M.?
(Corky feels a twinge of guilt. Is Charlotte waiting for him? He seems to remember there was a vague agreement of some kind he’d come to see her, she’s under a lot of stress about Thalia, but Corky isn’t sure how binding it is. And he’s got an important dinner date with Vic and Sandra Slattery tonight—that, he isn’t going to miss.)
The heavy oak front doors to the crematorium are shut, the steep granite steps are covered in rotted maple seeds, nobody’s in view and though there’s a sign PRIVATE: NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT Corky casually strolls around to the rear, trailing smoke over his shoulder. He’s well dressed, looks like money and class, brand-new shirt and polished shoes and what the hell, Corky Corcoran goes where he wants especially if he’s got to piss. The building is shabbier around back, and unexpectedly big, as deep as it’s wide, must measure one hundred feet. Garbage cans, Dumpster bins, trash barrels. Corky has a quick thought immediately suppressed—they wouldn’t be dumping human remains back here, would they?
What I Lived For Page 48