by Tony Burgess
FOUR
The worst thing about funerals is that the guest of honour is a dead person. We will never get over this, standing around in the parking lot after it’s done, realizing too late that, in fact, someone had been terribly wrong about the proceedings. Someone must have, at some point, thought that the deceased would be able to take over if things went poorly. And, of course, they always do. We know this, our bright bellies pink with shame, we know that a funeral will go badly. The dull throb of feeling. The host feels the tight roll of paper holding up his chest and thinks to himself: how utterly useless it was to have ever been alive at all. The host is anxiously dying, if not dead altogether — looking like he had never been here, never spoken to us, never walked. This is the core of the anxiety: the dead person never walked by the end of our yard, bouncing his hand on a cedar rail. Or worse: he never cared about anything; shot like an evil device he barely registered with us, except to maybe drink too much, or lie to us. Or, we remember him hanging, like a terrible leaf of blood, draining the conversation, always bending us toward him when we had a hundred better things to do.
Well, that’s about enough.
Our unhappiness is adequate. A stick tapping sloppily on a cymbal sounds like rain. It’s then, when the prickles of water sweep up off the road under our departing cars, that we know a natural place has risen beneath us. It has said the word “sad” in an adequate way, and nothing at all is lacking.
The Minister has been speaking for some time, quoting scripture, using what seem to be fairly pat segues to move into the themes of resurrection and the sacrifice of an only son. The Mayor realizes that the exact same service was given last fall when that Bartlett boy was impaled on a rebar.
We don’t know what to say about this boy.
Suicide is a completely new way to die in Caesarea, and on this particular day its newness has kept people very far away from church. The minister pushes his glasses up his nose and looks out through the purple cross in the window. The Mayor notices Robin Gorley sitting in the front row. He’s sitting forward and looks tense, with his hands pulling on the back of the pew in front him. What’s he so nervous about? Oh God. Don’t tell me that fool is going to speak. The Mayor turns his knees to the side as Gorley is summoned to the pulpit.
He is obviously drunk and wears a green suit and grey porkpie hat that makes him look like a gangster from the fifties. Even the colours suggest the pale pencilled tones of a cheap colour movie. He reaches the pulpit and looks despondently at the Minister, who he startles. The Minister sweeps his hand swiftly across the front of his face and Gorley almost trips, reaching for his hat with both hands. Gorley’s hair is wet and curly and flat against his glistening forehead. Perfect, slick sickles curve out behind his tiny ears. His cheeks are a glossy blend of yellow and white, mulled delicately by red wires. He lowers his head far down his chest, sure that he is the worst person that has ever stood here, and that he must compensate for this by hanging his head lower than anyone before him ever has. He clutches his hat against his chest, grateful for the small circle over his lungs he can hide with it. He licks his open lips and drops the hat.
“Oh. My name is Robin Gorley … I’m the Mayor of Buddy Holly, where Kyle Finn use to live. His, uh, parents, uh, asked me to say a couple of things about him …”
The Mayor looks around and sees a couple huddled against each other at the other end of the church.
The parents.
“I knew Kyle since he was a little boy. And I guess, I knew, like everyone did, that he had a hard time being happy. Writin’ the poetry was what he did, I guess, and that’s somethin’ we might never understand. How sensitive you have to be to, uh, put it down in words … like he …”
Gorley looks up, is suddenly conscious that he is bathed in sweat, that everyone is watching in horror as dark patches appear on his suit.
“I guess there is one thing that I know about it though, about all this. I think that something was going on with Kyle. I think that as bad as it was, what it was, was that it got worse. I think it got to the point where he couldn’t say how bad he felt. He just couldn’t say it. I don’t know what I’d do if things were that bad, so I figure he … And I think I know it. He started to get used to the idea of being dead. Got used to it every day I bet. And I bet he needed to tell somebody. And so, that’s what he’s done, that’s all. He has told us that he is dead.”
Gorley puts a hand up to his face and he draws it against his cheek through his jowl. He’s testing for tears, but there are none. He takes a shallow breath, holding air in his open mouth, and looks up with wide eyes. He doesn’t blink them and they appear huge and startled.
“So. We’re all gonna miss him. I know a lot of people liked the poor guy. I don’t know where they are today. But anyway, we’re here. So on behalf of all of us … Goodbye Kyle.”
FIVE
The funeral has had a numbing effect on the Mayor. He stands on a hill in the cemetery, among a cluster of thin upright headstones. Below him a man is shoveling dirt from an orange mound, bright and fresh against brown grass. His grief is a powerful shield of metaphors that have separated him from normal emotion. Not a shield, exactly, but a large iron bell that has been lowered over him and rung loudly. In the paralyzing tone that follows, he cannot escape the sense that his fingers have become webbed with sharp memories of Kyle Finn: a boy running out of the post office with his parents’ mail. He would walk home, the long walk back to Buddy Holly.
The Mayor didn’t particularly like the boy, or any of the boys from Buddy Holly. They were always persevering, walking great distances. They always seemed, just by the way they sprang like loose elastic, to be overrunning the quiet town.
Now the Mayor is suspended in an iron bell of metaphors. Feeling this, he is aware that his thoughts are glassing, forking off like cracks in a silhouette.
He is unsettled. A conspiracy of metaphors has hijacked him, taken over. Somewhere something doesn’t trust me to feel my way through things. He spots Gorley trailing behind the Minister as he crosses the road at the west end of the cemetery. The Minister is heading for a car parked on the shoulder. Gorley is soliciting the Minister, explaining something with hat in hand. From here, he appears small, the right size and distance to carry out his relentless degradation. Like an insecure child he is seeking his father’s approval.
That stupid bastard ruins everything.
The Mayor’s grieving found him by way of this little toad and, Robert thinks, when Gorley’s feelings found their strength when he spoke back there, they must have hated him, because they left him, they left him for me.
The Mayor steps off the hill and walks slowly, not wanting to reach the road until Gorley and the Minister have bid each other farewell. He stops in front of a shiny headstone, larger than most, newer. The sun is gleaming off the polish and the Mayor has to step to the side to see the inscription. Two angels with fat bellies are flying in at forty-five degree angles at the top corners. They are blowing on short squat trumpets, and a strip of cloth, carved with folds, is held across their hips. It covers their genitals and is pinned by the jutting base of their stomachs. An inscription: Mon corps marcher à la nuit. And below: John Barrymore Quincy Adams Mendez. At the bottom there’s a tropical island with a single palm tree blowing in a strong breeze.
Robert remembers him. He died last winter in a snowmobile accident — so many people were killed on snowmobiles last winter. The Mayor feels a flinch of official guilt.
I can’t legislate against stupidity.
He turns his head quickly over his shoulder to see if the cars have pulled away yet. The road is empty except for a lone figure standing just inside the gate. That’s Barry. Guess he’s waiting for his wife to pick him up. The Mayor walks toward him and calls out to get his attention. As he approaches he notices that the contractor has been crying and is somewhat panicked by the Mayor’s presence.
“Hey Ba
rry!”
“Hi there, how ya doin’?”
“Well, y’know, this business is bad.”
“Yeah, it’s a goddamn shame.”
“Poor kid. How’s the parents doing, do you know?”
“Oh, I haven’t talked to them, but they gotta be tore up something terrible. Helluva way to lose a son.”
“Can’t even imagine.”
“No, Christ, I hope they don’t blame themselves.”
“Who knows. They probably do, that’s the way it goes with these things.”
“I guess. Shouldn’t though. Fuckin’ thing should never have happened.”
“Hung himself, is that right?”
“Yeah, cut off a piece of the clothesline from the back of his family’s trailer and hung himself from a tree right on the lot. Middle of the friggin’ afternoon.”
“Jeez, you’d think someone would’a seen him. They’re packed in there like sardines.”
“Yeah, well, no one did.”
“Who found him?”
“Little brother.”
“Oh no. That poor little kid. I saw him this morning. You know what, Barry? The kid had been drinking.”
“Well, he’s not the only one, apparently a bunch of kids were into it this morning over at Buddy Holly. There was a cruiser out there, they had to escort each boy to his family’s trailer. One kid drank so much he was taken to the hospital.”
“Good god! What’s going on over there?”
“Don’t know, one kid’s still missin’.”
“Well, let’s keep an eye out, eh? He shows up here I want him shipped back pronto.”
“Oh yeah, there’s a cruiser in town right now lookin’ for him. Here comes my wife. Listen Mayor, it’s a helluva business all this, and a hell of a time to ask, but I got a job that’s being held up by some zoning bullshit and I need town approval before I can break ground.”
“Oh, where is it?”
“Well it’s at the end of Piny Point, out there.”
“Breakin’ ground? There’s no ground out there, it’s all rock.”
“Yeah, tell me about it, the whole thing’s a challenge I’ll tell you.”
“Well I guess so. What does the zoning specify exactly?”
The car door slams as Barry’s wife steps out onto the road.
“Oops. I gotta motor. Thanks a lot, eh Mr. Mayor.”
Barry pulls away from the Mayor to cross the road, timing it so that he must dash in order to get across ahead of a car approaching from the west at a high speed. The Mayor steps back between the stone pillars at the gate of the cemetery and shields his eyes from the sun to watch Barry run into his wife, kiss her, then wheel around to the passenger side of the car. He waves once quickly then bows his head. He’s waiting for his wife to enter the car and unlock his door. She turns to wave at the Mayor.
Marion. Marion.
Marion.
Marion. Marion. Marion.
Marion cast the spell.
SIX
After the death of her boyfriend, the violent, senseless murder of her boyfriend, the blinding horror of his pointless death, Kathy was able to move forward based on a single realization: that the universe, which she referred to like a pronoun, must have a very organized vendetta against frivolous people. Jack had been a lovely, silly person. And Kathy knew that the universe saw him coming from a mile away — then picked him off like a gopher.
To Kathy the entire universe had the heart of an assassin: cold and calculating, with deadly patience, it waited, with a high-powered crossbow resting on its knees like black wings of metal, for someone to flutter out across the road and look up embarrassed. Then it killed that person with a solid titanium arrow right through neck.
It pinned Jack to the heat at the side of the road. He was killed by a stranger. By someone who slips away through the woods, on tiptoe, stopping occasionally to pick up the instruments of torture that he drops, until he is gone, forever.
Like Jack. Forever.
Kathy sometimes wonders if the same gravity that Jack ignored was working on the Mayor, deforming him over the years, pulling him down, making him so bizarrely short. Kathy decided that she would implement her knowledge, and she never strayed far from serious statements, pulling all conversation close to a reckoning, excavating every moment for its direst secrets. She also felt that to protect people she must always remind them, in even the lightest moments — perhaps especially in the lightest moments — that everything was at stake. The end of the world hung its hat at the precise moment when a person laughed in the face of small dangers, white lies, little offences.
In the spring following the death of Dr. Mendez, the vicious murder of the man she loved, and the suicide of a tender young boy made Kathy understand that a gravity, a grave, had slipped under her town. She might be the only person who understood how closely things should be watched from here on in. In the future, or at least after this, Kathy would meet with the council of an adjacent town and discuss the process of amalgamation. Of joining two towns by a hyphen.
She will accomplish this and become the Mayor of the new town of Caesarea–Buddy Holly. She will do this because she believes it’s the only way to save her town from mindlessness and Caesarea’s silly weather-based vacation culture.
Caesarea must be married to the poor, smoke-stained, mourning town of Buddy Holly.
For every ridiculous ribbon she will cut as Mayor, a speech will be given about the day-care crisis in the populated pits within their new town. She’ll crawl toward the assassin, undetected, waving people low in the grass behind her, teaching them to whisper cautions to their neighbours, to take care of each other lest they should be gunned down in their own front yards.
Her vision will catch fire in her constituents’ eyes, and they’ll take on her mission with passionate zeal. The town of Buddy Holly will become a sacred garden, its soil black and bursting with jewels. Its veins of clay, streaking across its lush groves, a pious sign that others before us handed out beach balls while the ground in Buddy Holly burned to ashes beneath children’s feet. The people in Caesarea will mark themselves with this memory by staying religiously out of the sun in the summer. They’ll leave the summer to visitors who do not know better. Eventually, the visitors will stay away, frightened off by a town full of strange, pale people, who hide in the back of their shops.
The following winter her people will feel a vibrating thrill in the cold air: Kathy tells them that they have passed an important mark, that they will no longer be tempted. And on Christmas Eve hundreds will gather shoeless in the deep snows of the Buddy Holly Trailer Park, waiting with beaming faces for the frost to pick their feet from their legs.
The following spring Kathy will sit weeping on the bench in front of Bletcher’s Video.
Many have died. No one would be well again.
She will watch the sun rise on the melting snow and turn her head, exposing her strong veins to the titanium arrow that will soon strike.
Of course this hasn’t happened yet, so there is a version, not even suggested by this account of the future, where the heart of Kathy’s universe isn’t an assassin at all. It’s merely a pronoun, a pointer that can be directed — and can gather itself in the empty spaces that contain our welfare. And so, in this version, Kathy’s town is forced to amalgamate and she is made an unwilling political candidate by the outgoing Mayor.
Neither is likely to happen. In fact, what Kathy does in Caesarea is barely remarkable for anything but its guesswork. It is her guesswork that pulls everything past Caesarea.
SEVEN
The town hall is packed. There’s the mayors of both Caesarea and Buddy Holly; the Treasurer and her husband, the contractor; Kathy and representatives from a variety of local fellowships. Everyone is gathered on this day, standing, attending, listening to the local private investigator, Dominic Faruzi.<
br />
Faruzi is a popular man, not a particularly good or necessary professional, but a man given to elaborate war stories, first-hand pictures of the fragility of the human body. He’s also, less predictably, a witness to bizarre instances of resurrection — he’s seen people die and return. Faruzi has been summoned today to address the problems of Caesarea’s children. Its drunk and suicidal, pig-like thug children with violent eyes. Children who, for some reason or other, have never been exposed to a single decent idea and so are more dangerous than wild animals. Faruzi is not speaking to this directly; instead, to warm his audience up, he is recounting a scene from his old days on the force.
“Oh God ya. That’s nothing. Nothin’. I remember back in ’68. This cult thing’s nothin’ new. We had it all along, way back then. I got a call to this apartment one time in Yorkville, used to be a hippy place. Tea rooms and arty types. Anyway, I get a call to this one place ’cause the neighbours are reporting this weird smell comin’ from next door. So I go up there and I smell it. Oh, man, it’s a smell I know well — a smell I still carry around in my guts. I know that there’s a dead body behind that door.
“So I go get the super to let me in and he does. When the door opens it’s, just, pow! Real strong. I thought: gotta be more’n one. But also I’m smellin’, as I make my way past a line of boots and shoes in the hall, there’s a kind of burnt smell. Charred. Hard to describe. A cooking odour. Anyway, I know there’s nobody alive in this place, but the smell is so powerful, so offensive, that I draw my weapon. I got my sidearm out and I’m ready to blast away if the smell gets too strong. Strange things go through your head in these types of situations, I’ll tell ya … then I see it.”