by Robin Beeman
“Right,” I said. “Let’s talk about how their radio was tuned to ‘Randy’s.’ ”
“I just thought it was interesting. That’s the same station we listen to late at night.”
“That’s the station everyone listens to,” Lorraine said.
“Thank you, Lorraine,” I said, reaching out to pick up one of her onion rings. Just as I was about to take a bite, a small white-haired man came into the restaurant and paused in the doorway to stare down the row of booths.
“I know what you’re all talking about!” he said loud enough for everybody to stop whatever they were doing and look at him. He, in turn, took the time to fix each person for an instant with his own look. He had a narrow face and huge white eyebrows like the wings of a moth over tiny, glaring black eyes.
“Oh my God,” Lorraine said. “It’s the minister from the church over in Bethel. He preached at our church once.”
There was a sudden silence as the white-haired man raised his arms and said, “Remember Proverbs! ‘Can a man take fire to his bosom, and his garments not be burned?’ ” Then he turned and walked out. A nervous laughter began and closed the gap he’d left.
I broke the crust of the onion ring with my teeth and let the flavor of the soft onion rest on my tongue. “I want to find the place where they parked.”
“No you don’t,” Lorraine said. She gave Tom a pleading look, as if he might talk sense to me.
“It’s miles away,” Tom said. “Almost to the state line.”
“You don’t have to come,” I said and stood up and dangled the keys to the ridiculous Studebaker in front of them.
She didn’t. But Tom did. We took Little Savannah Road north for eleven miles and then turned east toward Mississippi and drove for another three or four miles on a narrow blacktop and then turned off on a gravel road through clay hills and pine woods. I had a map that the blue-haired waitress had drawn for me on a napkin.
We weren’t the only ones on the trail. We followed a pickup through a cloud of red dust. The pickup turned off and wound along a logging road and then stopped in a clearing. There was another car already there, an old Plymouth with a man and woman in the front seat. They started up the engine and drove away as soon as we pulled up. The two guys in the pickup stopped but kept the engine running and looked out of the window, the driver motioning and pointing. Then they drove off, too.
“It’s just you and me,” I said to Tom when the dust settled. I had turned off the engine. “And this is it.”
“Yeah,” he said softly and opened the door. He stepped out and looked around.
I got out my side. The sun had made the smell of pine strong like incense in the hot dry air. Cicada sounds grew and then died as we walked toward the edge of the clearing. Through the pines the leaves of a sweet gum tree flashed red as the sun angled down on it.
Tom sat on a log. I sat beside him.
“Why do you care about this so much?” he asked. It was a good question.
“I don’t know. It just seems important.”
“I don’t understand. They were two people you didn’t even know.”
“It’s real, Tom,” I said, annoyed at this detachment. I almost wished Meat had let him look in the car. “What they did and what happened to them is real. It’s the only thing in the whole world right now that seems real to me.”
“What do you want from this?” he asked.
“To take fire to my bosom, Tom. Like the man said.”
“You scare me,” he said and got up and went back to the car. Neither of us spoke all of the way home.
“Tomorrow night,” I said when I dropped him off.
That night I lay in my bed and listened through the walls for any sounds that might come from my parents’ room. There never were any. Every night mother stayed up reading or sewing and my father went to bed early. At nine-thirty each night, my father went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he went to their room and put on his pajamas, read in bed for about ten minutes and then turned off the bed light. At ten-thirty or eleven, my mother turned off the lights in the living room and the kitchen and came upstairs to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, put Nivea cream on her face, and went into their bedroom. They never closed the door entirely, but left it open a crack so that if either my brother or I moaned in the night or tossed in our beds, we would instantly be heard and attended. The partially open door was to let us know that they lay in their bed on call. Whatever else they did in that bed they did in such cautious silence that I had grown to suspect that my brother and I were both adopted.
As I listened for my parents to make some sound, I thought about her, about the pink dress she left and the rabbit-fur jacket she wore. About eating cotton candy when she was stranded on the top of the Ferris wheel with a man whose wife and mother-in-law and children were all in church. Wondering why she was on the wheel at all, looking down at the light bulbs on the spokes, and the blurred faces of the crowd looking up, and wanting only to be with him in the dark and to touch him, wanting only to get back to earth and into the dark and touch him.
We were in Tom’s mother’s Buick on the backseat. It was Saturday night and we were parked in the clearing at the end of a logging road in the piney woods. We had turned the radio to “Randy’s Record Shop,” and it was playing rhythm and blues from some mountaintop in Tennessee. The heater was on but Tom had all four windows opened an inch. He would go along with me—but only so far.
We kissed. His arm was around me and I had my head up. I opened my mouth for his tongue. His free hand came up under my blouse and unhooked my brassiere. I unbuttoned his shirt and reached under his undershirt and felt skin. I slid my hands down and started on his belt buckle. He reached under my skirt and tugged on my panties. We got undressed quickly. I had the rubbers. I had taken them from my father’s store. He kept them behind the counter so that people would have to ask for them.
In a minute Tom was sitting naked on top of me. Behind him two beams from the headlamps of an approaching car reached through the trees and found him. The beams struck his body and he became a silhouette with light flaring behind him like the pale flames from an eclipsed star. He shivered as if the flames were cold and I shivered too and then felt him inside of me. Then the lights went out and left us once more in the dark.
She was buried on Monday. I cut class and walked the six blocks from the school to the cemetery. I didn’t want either Tom or Lorraine with me. There was only a handful of people at the graveside, but cars, driving extra slow, passed by almost constantly. It started to rain about halfway through the service, a cold sleety rain. I stood under a tree until the service was over and then I went home and went to bed.
He was buried the next day in a cemetery up at Bethel. I didn’t go. There’s only so much you can learn from things like this.
The Realm of the Ordinary
WHEN I BROUGHT my aunt her groceries, she was on the phone to the cemetery—All Souls. It’s an old one—though not the oldest—and the crypts of most of the families we know are there. This is New Orleans, you understand, and because the town is literally floating, we put our dead in tombs above the ground and wait for time, not worms, to do the job.
My aunt Liz is my mother’s older sister, and, like my mother, she’s small and feisty. “Well, how much does it cost to move bones from the upper level?” Liz said into the phone. It’s an ancient wall phone and she had to stand on tiptoe to talk into it. For years she’s had to stand on tiptoe to talk into the phone and that may account for the fact that she always sounds breathless and exasperated to whoever happens to be on the other end. I love Liz’s voice. You could grate cheese with it.
I never appreciated the New Orleans accent, a combination of magnolia consonants and Brooklyn vowels, until now that I’m a thirty-six-year-old refugee from a dozen bland years in California. I’d gone west because I heard it never rained there and that mosquitoes and cockroaches were seen only in cameo appearances in horror movies. In California, I’d ma
rried, divorced, and held a series of jobs just good enough to delay what I’d always known would be my inevitable return to this soggy place.
“What do you mean, a coffin has to be biodegradable? That’s soap, isn’t it?” she said and motioned for me to sit down. “Listen, my niece Maggie is here. She does my shopping for me and I have to visit with her.”
I began to unpack groceries, moving aside an almost empty bottle of Coca-Cola, an ashtray full of the twisted stumps of cigarettes, and a half-dozen glasses with various levels of the brown liquid in the bottoms. Liz hasn’t had company. She just takes down a new glass whenever she has another drink of Coke. Toward the end of the day she washes up. She scowled as she listened. When she saw me looking at her she pointed to the phone and then twirled her index finger next to her temple. “You’re an idiot,” she said finally into the mouthpiece and slammed the earpiece into its stirrup.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“I’m moving Raymond’s bones,” she said. “Did you get Coke?”
I whipped out a big bottle and twisted off the cap. She reached into the freezer for a tray of ice and began to pop cubes into two fresh glasses.
“Raymond’s bones?”
“I’m losing sleep over this.” She sat and lit a Lucky with a kitchen match. “His sister Lucille is dying. She’s got cancer and she’s not going to make it. She’s not going to want to be buried in Lake Charles. She’s going to want to come back here and join the rest of the bunch.”
“So?”
“So? So Raymond’s on the top level now, but when Lucille dies, she’ll get his place. That’s the way it is. When someone dies, out goes the old coffin, in goes the new, and the latest bones get thrown in with the others down below. After that happens I’ll never know which are his when I get our own crypt. You look at a pile of bones and how are you going to tell who’s who?”
“I thought you were going to be buried in Raymond’s family’s crypt, too.”
“I changed my mind.”
I kept unpacking the bags and putting things away. Two packages of CDM coffee and chickory. Rice. Red beans. Ham hocks. Bologna. Pay Day candy bars. A carton of Luckies. Cinnamon rolls. Liz doesn’t want to see anything green on her plate—not even parsley.
“I never liked his family and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be buried in that crypt with them. They were nothing but snobs—all of them. His mother pretended she couldn’t remember my name. She always called me Helene. That was a girlfriend of his from tenth grade. I didn’t even like the way that family smelled.” She tore open a bag of potato chips and began crunching them. She wasn’t wearing her dentures and the ability to crunch without teeth seemed to calm her a bit.
This new preoccupation with death came as a surprise to me. Liz is the least sentimental human alive and, as far as I could remember, she had never even acknowledged mortality. After Raymond died, her primary mourning activity seemed to be reorganizing closet space.
“Do you have to do it right away?” I asked.
“After they shove Lucille in there, it’s all over for Raymond.” The fire on the end of the Lucky flared beneath her widened nostrils. “I’m moving his bones.”
Raymond had been a short man, a dapper dresser in his day. Almost a dandy. He and Liz were quite a couple. There are pictures of them everywhere in the house. He in white linen. She a bride in a fancy wedding dress in spite of the Depression. It was a big wedding in Mater Dolorosa Church. His bones would be small bones, delicate. An anthropologist in the future would get the wrong idea of what we looked like if he had only Raymond’s bones to go by.
“You’re on Social Security,” I said. “Do you have any idea how much a crypt costs?”
“We could buy one together,” Liz answered, her brighteyed slyness almost veiled by a puff of smoke.
“No,” I said. “Car payments are bad enough. The present is all I can handle.”
Liz slammed back her Coke the way someone would a shot of whiskey.
We weren’t protected by a single cloud on the day Liz chose for our visit to the cemetery. The sun was fierce, and the city of the dead became a testing place for the living. Last night’s rain turned to steam around our feet.
“It’s awfully hot for May,” I said. Liz gave me a look of scorn. Heat was part of the process of living in New Orleans, a component of les bon temps. Each time I complained about it to anyone in my family, that person looked at me with suspicion. Liz had an umbrella shading her. She’d offered me one when we left the house and I’d refused. I never felt right carrying an umbrella when it wasn’t raining.
Liz had found the crypt—no mean feat considering the acres of unmarked trails between all those hundreds of buildings of white plastered brick. She stood mumbling the names inscribed on the rectangle of marble that sealed the entrance to the tomb. “Not one but Raymond worth a nickel,” she said as I came closer. “I’m doing him a favor. Would you want to rise with that group? What do you think his mother’s going to be wearing?”
It was a question I had never thought to contemplate—attire for the last really big party on earth.
“Not what she was buried in, I’ll bet,” Liz went on. “More like the dress she wore when she was queen of one of those balls—when they still had money.” She rapped on the marble with her wedding ring. “Anybody home?” She grinned. She was wearing her dentures and they seemed too bright and new for her face. She rapped again and pretended to listen.
At the sound of this rapping a young man poked his head around from the shady side of the crypt and studied us. He had tight dark curls and skin the color of the Coca-Cola he held in one hand. In his other hand was half an oyster sandwich.
Liz looked up from her own pool of shade, startled, and then smiled with approval at the cola. “The real thing,” she said.
He nodded, a solemn young man in a New Orleans Saints T-shirt and faded but recently pressed khaki slacks. His eyes were as pale as foam. “You ladies need something?” he asked, courteous, his voice ten degrees cooler than the day.
“Just money,” Liz said.
“Ahhh, money,” he said and took a bite of the sandwich. I watched his teeth close over the gold-crusted body of the oyster and watched him chew, a ruminant.
“We want to take out my uncle’s bones and find another crypt for them—and for my aunt too—when she dies,” I found myself saying. I’m not normally so forthcoming with strangers but his silence was like a vacuum cleaner sucking explanations.
Liz looked up at me over her shoulder, surprise lowering her jaw, revealing those glossy dentures. “That’s about the size of it,” she said. “The only thing standing in my way is money.”
He swallowed and washed down the food with a large chug of cola. “I understand. I’m looking for work.”
“Well, I’d like to help you, but I’d be hard pressed to get together ten cents for a shoe shine,” she said.
He nodded, as though this were a perfectly reasonable position.
“Let’s go,” I said. Surrounded by the white walls of the crypts, I felt like something being cooked.
“Well, now you’ve seen it,” Liz said to me and rapped once more on the marble. Then she looked up at the young man who was still standing there. “You did say you wanted work, didn’t you?”
“I did,” he said, as thoughtful as ever. “And I do.”
“Give me something to write on, Maggie,” she said. I found a scrap of paper, the back of a grocery receipt, and then a stub of pencil, and I watched her scribble away. “It’s on the river side of the avenue.”
He looked at the paper. “I’ll find it,” he said.
Back home, Liz propped the fan in front of an open window and put her feet on a chair. They were swollen like two small loaves of bread. Her face, without the dentures, had collapsed. She looked smaller than ever, and, for the first time I could remember, pitiful. “Tell me why I’m a foolish old woman,” she said.
I poured Coke over ice and placed the glass in her han
d. “You’re a foolish old woman because whatever happens after your death—or Raymond’s death—isn’t important.”
“Why don’t I believe that?” she asked.
“I’ve done this before,” he said. I held the beam of light on a huge screwdriver that seemed like an extension of his right forefinger, a wand. Barely an hour earlier, Liz had wakened me with a summons to her house because Jean Felice—that was his name—said he needed someone to drive him. He and I now stood in front of Raymond’s family crypt. I half expected clouds to roll over and lightning to streak.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I wasn’t sure that I liked any of this, and I wasn’t made more comfortable by the knowledge that I was with a pro.
“So many ladies get lonely for their men—for their dear departed. They want them back in their lives. I help the poor widows. You wouldn’t believe how many lonely widows there are.”
The night was damp—and cool—but not cold enough for the chill that crept up my back. This was more than an eccentric errand for a distressed relative. I was robbing a grave. And all because when I’d walked into Liz’s house just moments ago, I’d been unable to resist the sight of her—elated, her hair red once more and crackling with sparks—dancing around the kitchen with Jean Felice.
From beyond the cemetery walls came the rattle of streetcar wheels on track. I had no idea they ran so late—or so early. “What do you mean, you do this a lot?”
“Oh, not a lot,” he said, his voice low and as reassuring as I wanted it to be. “Just enough.”
As he began to remove the top-right screw, the beam of light began to jump like the bouncing ball in an old movie sing-along.
“Have you given a thought to the final place for you and yours?” he asked in a steadying tone.
“I’m divorced. I probably won’t even know where his bones are buried. Or his ashes strewn. Or whatever.”
“Oh,” Jean Felice said, and I couldn’t miss the disappointment in his voice. Losing track of a loved one, or even a once-loved one, I realized, must have seemed to him like a betrayal, or, at least, a failure. I stifled the desire to apologize as he placed a screw in his shirt pocket.