In an area of service outbuildings, lawn equipment sheds Corky turns a corner seeing nobody’s in sight and unzips and takes out his cock tender and bruised like a banana past its prime and pisses into a mound of broken concrete and purple flowering thistles resolutely not looking at the glittering arc of his piss nor what it’s wetting, he’s superstitious never looks at any substance liquid or solid excreted from his body in dread of seeing telltale streaks or clots of red. Scared cards can’t win but fuck that, some things you don’t want to know.
What’s the prostate gland Corky doesn’t exactly want to know either. His Uncle Brendan McClure dying of cancer of the prostate and the word in the neighborhood was, Poor Brendan’s dying of cancer of the balls! No respect. Which is the God-damned fucking least you can expect from the world when you’re dying of cancer.
Corky’s anxious thinking about it. How sudden and sharp his need to piss, sometimes. Waking him out of a deep sleep where in the past in rambling confused dreams he’d be searching for a lavatory for what seemed like hours never finding one in working order or if he did there’d be women present until finally he’d wake up needing to go to the bathroom so the idiotic dreams made sense, but the need wasn’t urgent exactly, not painful like this other. And last night!—so drunk he’d pissed his pants. Uncle Hock all over again. At the age of nineteen Corky’d caught a dose of the clap—what Dr. O’Malley pronounced with fastidious disdain “gon-or-rhea”—and he’d had trouble pissing, scared as hell but in a few months the antibiotics worked thank Christ and he hadn’t had any trouble again for more than twenty years. But now?
Corky doesn’t want to think about it.
(Now he’s a bachelor again, no wife nosing into his affairs “for his own good,” checking his calendar to make sure he doesn’t cancel out on doctor’s and dentist’s appointments as he’s in the habit of doing—Corky’s on his own. Going to hell in his own style.)
As the pressure on his bladder lessens Corky’s feeling better, by the time he zips up he’ll have forgotten these worries. Almost a sweet sensation, pissing. Nothing like it unless it’s taking a really good shit, the kind that empties you out practically like coming with your asshole but nobody talks about. Strange the pleasures the body gives nobody talks about.
Is it possible, coming with your asshole?—fucking up the ass, what queers do together, “gays” they call themselves now, buggering it used to be, mysterious. The guys joked about it in school but what was it exactly Corky’d wondered, why’d you want to do such a dirty thing, or have it done to you, like being a cunt. Taking somebody else’s jism, in the ass or in the mouth, Jesus, what perverts can think of!—a guy making himself into a cunt.
What he’d like to do, go back to Kiki Zaller’s some night and fuck her in the cunt and the ass and the mouth then piss all over her and drop a lighted match on her—her calling him “pervert”!
What hurt is, Corky’d sort of thought the bitch liked him. For sure, he’d been nice to her. All his Irish charm, putting himself out for her, why hadn’t it worked?
Plenty of other women have been hot for Corky Corcoran, and there’s plenty to come. So fuck Kiki Zaller.
And Marilee Plummer: calling him “Freckhead” why not come out and say “Fuckhead”?
No, but Corky doesn’t mean that. It’s a terrible thing, it’s really shitty, that Marilee’s dead. Any beef you’ve got with anybody, it has to end with Death.
Except Al Fenske: Corky wishes there was a hell, the fucker’d be burning in it.
What he’d like: exhume Fenske’s corpse and piss on it.
What he’d like: go back in time and this time he tells them what they want to hear, yes he saw the car yes he saw the license plate yes he swears to God he saw.
You, Jerome. Our only witness.
Not blind for Christ’s sake are you?
Not blind.
Corky’s feeling a lot better now, anger’s a lot better than fear. Zips himself up like he actually has been fucking and feeling good about it and about himself as, God knows, he hasn’t been, lately.
Hearing a bird’s sweet liquid cry from somewhere in the woods. A solitary sound, wavering, then stronger, rising like a soprano and Corky realizes he’s been hearing birds since coming to Mount Moriah, watching the mourners at Marilee’s grave, his binoculars bringing him up so close he’d almost think remembering afterward he’d been able to hear the minister’s words and the sounds of weeping, yes he’d been there.
Corky figures the Plummer mourners are still in the cemetery. You’re not in a hurry to leave when it’s somebody you care about—leaving them in the ground. When he’d decided to cut out two girls of maybe eleven very dark-skinned and in long black dresses like nightgowns were doing something with a floral display, giant lilies, positioning it at the head of the grave as their elders sang and clapped and prayed. The minister holding a Bible high over his head with both hands.
Corky’s whistling strolling back to his car. Undetected, invisible—it’s a terrific feeling. That late-night TV movie The Invisible Man—Corky’d loved it, as a kid.
So this is the Mount Moriah Crematorium. Great old building. If he had time he’d explore it a little, also the view from up here, it’s like you’re in a low-flying plane—church spires, water towers, the red-winking WWUC-TV tower, high-rise buildings along Seneca, Meridian, Decatur and Union Boulevard clear to the Chateauguay River and the green-glassy office towers of downtown, the Hyatt, the Marriott, Bank of America, Union Trust and the Dominion Bridge and Fort Pearce, Ontario, hazy with distance and to the east the Chateauguay Valley and to the west Lake Erie flattened like it’s a metal sheet out to a horizon dissolving in red mist, cloud banks ribbed like an old-fashioned washboard. Corky sucks in a deep breath. His city. Where he’s known. Where he’s important to a lot of people.
Nothing like death to revive the living. Right?
Thinking magnanimously he’ll drop in on Charlotte after all. Owes that much to her. Poor dumb bitch. See how she’s doing as the wife of a legitimately rich man and what kind of house they have where she’ll try to get you to drink: Don’t and maybe Charlotte will have connected with Thalia and the danger’s over and if Corky’s really lucky Thalia herself will be there with her mother.
The family reunited. It’s possible, isn’t it?
The orangey-golden glow of the old bricks, the heavy bluish-black slate roof, the kid’s-castle look of the turrets and gables and mock battlements, Mount Moriah Crematorium is something. Corky has a fantasy some years from now, the building threatened by demolition—there’s been talk for at least fifteen years of building a new modern crematorium elsewhere in the city—and Corcoran, Inc., steps in to buy it, rescue it, preserve it as a local historical landmark.
At the rear, though, the crematorium isn’t very glamorous or romantic just a shabby old building run by the city. Trash bins and Dumpsters and Corky can’t resist peering inside, what kind of trash does a place like this throw out?—the usual papers and cardboard and Styrofoam and plastic sheets but also chunks of what Corky’d swear is bone—unless maybe it’s broken plaster. Hard to tell. Corky pokes some of it with a finger and it’s more porous than it looks. Somebody said, a crematorium doesn’t burn a corpse to powder-fine ashes like people think and it’s sentimental bullshit to request your ashes “scattered” in some favorite place because there are New York State health laws against that and in fact the crematorium workers clear out the furnaces like anybody does if they can get away with it (and in Union City for sure they’re going to get away with it seventy-five percent of the time), shoveling chunks of bone and ashes into bins in the cellar then parceling a certain amount of it out into these tall ebony urns you pay a lot for like it’s some big holy deal and you’re thinking this is your wife or husband or parents in the urn when obviously it’s a mix of strangers including some old bums shipped direct from the morgue to the crematory because nobody gives a shit for them while they’re alive but now they’re yours.
At least, in a grave, Corky’s thinking, the old-fashioned way, the way he wants to go, there’s no confusion who you are. No fucking around with a corpse you can actually see in the coffin and you see the coffin going in the ground.
Corky jerks his hand out of the trash—it’s covered in gray dust like gypsum powder. No smell.
Overhead, Corky sees, there’s a gargoyle peering down at him from a window ledge. Long skinny face and grinning mouth and slits for eyes like those ornamental plaster masks at the theater where Charlotte’s group used to put on their plays. Like a clown face, but not quite.
Around in front there’s the Caddy, parked embarrassingly crooked like the driver was practically pissing his pants in a hurry to get out, or a woman driver. Corky runs his eye quick over the car telling himself it doesn’t look too bad, the worst scratch is on the other side and the dirt will wash off; in fact there’s a car wash on Schoonover on the way to Charlotte’s. Corky Corcoran’s got too much pride to show up in Chateauguay at his ex-wife’s then at Congressman Vic Slattery’s house driving a car that looks like half the pigeons in Union City have been shitting on it.
6:06 P.M. Corky’s got his car keys in his hand but out of the corner of his eye he’s been noticing some new arrivals, drove up in a new-model Lexus, a make of car Corky’s impressed with, a party of middle-aged people climbing the granite stairs to the front entrance and next thing he knows Corky’s following after, not that he’s interested in them, though one of the women, silvery-blond hair like Kim Novak’s long ago and a black silk designer suit fitting her high round little ass just right, catches his eye. Corky’s curious about the inside of this weird building, now’s his chance. He figures a cremation ceremony is about to begin and he’ll be mistaken for one of the mourners, in fact he is a mourner, that’s his business on Mount Moriah today.
Inside, a foyer with a vaulted ceiling, marble floor and voices echoing and a man with a bald pate and gray curling wings of hair in back turning toward him with what looks like, not a smile but a frown of recognition, and Corky in his confusion stammers, “—Father DeLucca?” but in the next instant he sees, asshole, the man doesn’t even look that much like his old Jesuit teacher who anyway is dead! Fortunately the old guy doesn’t hear Corky, he’s an official of the crematorium smooth and unctuous as a funeral parlor host directing people toward the chapel, murmuring to Corky, “You’re with the van Heusen party, yes?” and Corky says, “Sure,” and passes by.
Father DeLucca! What is this, the second time thinking you’ve seen a dead man in two days?
Need a drink. A drink? but no drinks in the reception room as far as Corky can see, Jesus what a weird overdecorated place like a nigger brothel as you’d imagine it, bloodstone marble wall panels and bronze bas-relief columns and a chandelier like a Fourth of July sparkler low enough to graze your head, mildewed carpet bright green as AstroTurf. Corky no more than sticks his head in this room before he retreats, feels almost a gagging sensation like he’s underground and this is a tomb and these other people, strangers, milling around with him, they’re all trapped in the tomb.
Some of these strangers glancing quizzically at Corky Corcoran with that kind of faint smile that means Do I know you? Am I supposed to know you? but Corky’s a moving target.
He’s looking for the silvery-blond in the black silk designer suit. Maybe she’s the widow?
Great place to hook up with a well-to-do widow. Anybody who’d buy a Lexus, passing over a Caddy or a Lincoln or a Mercedes, has got dough to toss around; and without giving much of a damn that anybody knows it. That’s class.
But the reception room’s emptying out, the service in the chapel is about to begin. Corky sees the silvery-blond ahead, in the company of some old farts. Is Corky the youngest guy here?
So many years, working as Ross Drummond’s right-hand man, and on the City Council, and around town—Corky Corcoran was always the youngest guy in the room. Youngest, best-looking, brashest. Sexiest.
Too bad Corky isn’t free to explore the crematorium by himself. See where the oven—ovens?—are. The bone-and-ash bins. The urns. The cadaver storage room. Must be a small morgue, somewhere on the premises. At the rear of the foyer there’s a wrought-iron spiral staircase leading—where? A mezzanine landing, and then—the roof? The clock tower? (Corky wouldn’t mind locating a men’s room, too. Washing a faint odor of urine from his fingers and that suspicious gypsum dust.) The corridor leading to the chapel has a carved oak ceiling curved as in a tunnel; it’s windowless, and somberly lit by fake torches held by creepy little stone hands poking out of the walls. Wild! And everywhere there’s pink veined marble like fatty beef and Victorian filigree, trompe l’oeil woodsy scenes with nymphs and satyrs, Charlotte would get off on this “antique” crap, the very opposite of the clean stark no-bullshit Frank Lloyd Wright style Corky’s architectural tastes were shaped by at Rensselaer.
Christ, it is close in here, like a tomb. Humid air in spite of ventilator fans (at least Corky hears a vibrating-rattling in the background: must mean ventilation?) like everybody’s breathing everybody else’s expelled breaths. Whiffs now and then of nostril-pinching disinfectant and something faintly rancid, meaty-fatty-scorched like a greasy oven when the heat’s turned on high—you don’t want to know what that smell is.
Still, burning’s clean. Got to be the most sanitary method. Isn’t that what Hindus have done for thousands of years—funeral pyres. Billions and trillions of people, you’d have bodies piled up from here to the moon. Not the respect for the individual soul you get in Christianity, more primitive but it sure is practical.
“Sir?—in here.” A porky-faced youngish balding guy is all but plucking at Corky’s sleeve, urging him to enter the chapel, must be a crematorium official, Corky gives him a cold unsmiling stare don’t touch me, fuckface. But the guy just smiles, smiles and looks through him to the next customer. “Sir?—Madam?—in here. Please.”
Corky’s reminded of Tales from the Crypt, lurid comic books he’d read as a kid sometimes scaring himself so he couldn’t sleep, what if all of us are being ushered into an actual crematorium oven under the mistaken notion we’re just visitors?
Even now, the fiery oven is being stoked up. The oven that isn’t at the front of the chapel hidden by those plush red velvet drapes but surrounds the chapel so stepping inside the chapel you’re stepping inside the oven, right? And once the doors are closed, no exit.
Corky pauses, annoying fat-face who’s eager to get the “van Heusen” party into the chapel, peering at verse engraved in aged ivory on the archway—
With Earth’s first clay they did the last man knead,
And then of the last harvest sow’d the seed;
Yea, the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.
This is by “Omar Khayyam” of whom Corky’s heard. Some Arab? Turk? Corky’s impressed by the logic of it, though it’s God-damned depressing First clay, last man, fuck that, what about me?
Whoever “Omar Khayyam” was, he wasn’t an American. That’s fucking obvious.
Recorded organ music is being piped into the chapel, thunderous chords like grinding your back molars, must be Bach. A fond running joke between him and Christina, any music Corky’d hear on the radio of a certain “baroque” type he’d say must be Bach. He’s uneasy being herded into a chapel, having to sit in a pew, any kind of religious atmosphere repels him. Too much church as a kid like all Catholic kids so the very look of a churchy interior makes him slightly nauseated but now he’s here, he’s here, might as well see it through, what the hell.
You’ll never guess what I did on the way over here—imagining Charlotte’s expression, Sandra’s and Vic’s. Corky Corcoran, what a character!
Corky settles reluctantly in a rear pew, farthest outside corner, suppressing a nervous yawn. The sweet potato pie is still a fist-sized mound in his gut. The caffeine zinging through his veins is fading fast. Need a drink, friend?—reach for a Bud. And h
e can’t smoke in here, fuck it.
Corky Corcoran with not enough grief of his own, insinuating himself into the grief of strangers. Is that what he’s doing?
And these strangers, well-heeled and most of them older, are casting him curious looks, welcome but curious, Hello son! who are you, son! why sitting so far away in that corner? Corky counts twenty-three mourners including new arrivals who are shuffling in, one old guy struggling with a walker (not Buck Glover: though looking enough like him to be his brother), two hefty corseted black-clad ladies with their arms linked, a guy Corky’s age with a squirrelly head, a younger woman severe-faced as Thalia but not half as good-looking, stiff as a broomstick and as sexy. All these people knowing one another greeting one another in muted little cries and murmurs, handshakes, hugs, not much visible grief as at poor Marilee’s grave so Corky guesses the death of this “van Heusen” hadn’t come as any surprise or any great loss probably some poor old bastard better off dead. “Van Heusen” means old Dutch family, rich tradesmen on the Chateauguay and property owners in western New York for generations, “van Fleet,” “van Roojen,” “van Buren”—which reminds Corky, Jesus! he never did call Andy to apologize for fucking up the other night: better do that tonight or Andy will be Corky’s enemy for life—“van Tassel,” only got bought out by the Japs a few years ago. Corky sees the silvery-blond is sitting almost directly in front of him but there’s a bald fatty behind her, fuck it Corky can’t see her face but his impression is she’s good-looking in that sort of snooty seasoned cosmetic way Charlotte has gotten to be, cool bitches who’ll look right through you though they can see you’re undressing them in your head.
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