by William Lobb
Now all that remained for Alexandrine to do was wait. The early December days slid into mid-December. The short days, seemingly perpetual darkness and the waiting for the body to be released made the month seem even more grim.
Alex felt no holiday joy. This all seemed to be on her shoulders. She stopped by the bar a few times, and the conversations were often about Frankie. Alex commented to Jack and Pam that Frankie’s legend seemed to grow bigger and more twisted and complex by the day.
It was December twenty-first before Frankie’s body was released to the funeral home. Alex frantically tried to arrange the funeral for the twenty-third, get it over and done with before Christmas. It couldn’t happen. She called New Orleans and said the funeral would be December twenty-seventh, right in the middle of Christmas week. It just had to drag on.
Christmas was dark and ruined for many of Frankie’s friends and the hangers-on at the bar.
It was snowing pretty heavily as the day of the funeral dawned. This day simply had to be a little harder. It was as if Frankie was somehow in charge. Nothing worth doing was ever easy, and to his friends, this was worth doing.
The funeral home was an old Victorian, a confusing building with too many small adjoining rooms and lavish curtains on the windows. Not many flowers, but enough to give the rooms the nauseating smell of death, that sweet, ugly funeral home scent. Rows of folding chairs lined up to the right of the casket. At the front was a small podium.
At the home’s entrance was a small alcove where people could collect and smoke cigarettes, or take off jackets and shake the snow off their shoes. It was crowded with people who seemed a little afraid to come in.
Frankie told anyone who would listen that his recurring nightmare was to be at his own funeral and have all the women he fucked over the years attend. He said he wanted to live to be as old as the old lady. By then, he surmised, most of the girls would either be dead, have moved away, or be too old to travel. Dying so young really screwed up that plan.
Alex sat in the front row with the few remaining members of Frankie’s family. The older, large, poor, black woman sat among Frankie’s very white family, as if it was part of Frankie’s exit plan to make everyone just a little more uneasy. Actually, they all knew each other well and the family thought highly of Alex. His uncle said she was the only friend Frankie had who wasn’t trying to regularly kill him.
A few family members, including the old lady, had hoped someday Frankie would settle down and maybe even marry Alexandrine. She was the sanity he needed in his life. She was his anchor. Alex heard of this idea one time and laughed, “What did I ever do to you people, to wish such a horrible fate on me?” and everyone laughed. Frankie and Alex loved each other, deeply, too deeply to ever let marriage come between them.
Pam arrived and sat next to Alex. A good-sized crew from the bar arrived shortly after. Pam walked up to the rich, dark brown closed casket and knelt down. The white curtains and frilly linen all looked so out of place to Pam, and to everyone; so foreign to the life Frankie lived. She whispered a silent prayer.
Alex stepped up next to her. Alex spoke to Pam in a whisper, “I know he always said he wanted a pine box. This is all a little over-the-top for our friend. I think I was up-sold by the funeral director.” They both laughed.
Pam looked up at her, “He appeared to me in a dream last night, Alex. It was as real as you or I are standing here. I felt him. He’s lost, floating somewhere, like a ship that has lost its mooring. I saw him in a dark and foggy forest. Frankie was calling to me to help him, to show him the way. We haven’t spoken much since that night with the gunshot. I wish we had. I’ve been on the same journey. He seemed to adapt easily to sobriety. I wish I could have helped him. As in everything he did in his life, I think he was working a little too hard to find God”
Zara appeared behind the two of them. She said, “Forgive me for eavesdropping,” and she offered her hand to both Alex and Pam and introduced herself.
Zara smiled, “We will have to talk later about his attempts to understand God when he was with me in the South. Yes, our dear friend tried, way too hard, and the result was always violent and left him feeling defeated.”
Pam said, “It’s not as hard as he made it out to be. Frankie could only survive in conflict. He once told me how peace and calm terrified him, like a poison, like something that would take away his super powers.”
All three women laughed at that thought. They returned to their seats, rigid and uncomfortable, with Zara sitting down next to Pam and Alex in the front row. They watched the others come past the casket and stop by to offer condolences, share a funny story, and then hurry off.
There was a silent rustle and motion that came across the room in a wave as a local minister, a cousin of Alexandrine’s, came to the podium. Robert was a well-dressed young man, possibly thirty, and clean-cut. He smiled at the room, “I am sure everyone here is surprised to see me. Alexandrine asked me to stop by to say a few words. I did not know your friend, but I know he wasn’t a big fan of the church.”
That comment actually brought out some laughter. Robert asked if anyone would mind if he said a quick prayer and everyone bowed their heads. Alex flashed back to the old lady’s funeral about a month ago, and smiled, thinking about what Frankie would do if he knew they were praying for him. He said a prayer for the nonbelievers and the Lord’s Prayer and he sat down.
The three girls sat and watched as about five more girls from the bar came by the casket, then finally Betty. By a quick count, about fifteen of Frankie’s former girlfriends had shown up. Pam said it was a respectable showing and Zara said it probably qualified as his nightmare and they all laughed out loud.
The funeral director came forward and said there was going to be a burial service at the family cemetery and all were asked to form a procession. He asked for some men to be pall bearers. Six guys, including Jack and David, went to volunteer. David said to Jack, “Two of six of his pallbearers are bartenders. That seems fitting.” The two men smiled at each other.
They carried Frankie’s casket to the hearse. Everyone got in their cars. It had started snowing really hard. Jack said to David, “Ride with me. I’m sure we have stories to share.”
They looked at the snow coming down. David said, “He’s going to make this hard right to the end. That’s fitting.” Alex, Pam, Zara, Payton, and David all climbed into Jack’s car and they drove off to the cemetery slowly, spinning in the snow.
As they pulled onto the burial grounds, Alex said, “No more funerals after today. I’ve had my fill. I need a break from all this darkness and sadness.”
Pam added, “I can’t shake that dream. It was so real. I felt him. I know it sounds crazy, but I feel he needs me. He needs to see me. If this snow ever stops, I have to go back to the garage. He’s still there, somehow. I need to go and talk to him.”
Alex said, “I’ll go with you. We’re only supposed to get a few inches of snow. It’s supposed to stop tonight. I’ll go with you in the morning.”
Zara added, “I would like to join you two, if you don’t mind.”
Alex said, “Certainly, you’re welcome to come. We were all his girls; we all were something different to him, but we all loved him and he us.”
The burial was cold and wet and uncomfortable for everyone. There is a surreal beauty to a graveyard in the dead of winter during a heavy snow storm. There were only three colors, white, gray, and black. The cars were parked out by the road, except for the black and gray hearse. People walked in on the unplowed snow, many walking in the tracks of the car that carried their friend. Alex, Pam, and Zara stood together by the open hole in the ground while the pallbearers carried Frankie for his last trip, from the car to the grave, not fifty feet from where the old lady was buried a month before. The shiny brown casket with a large pile of flowers on top stood out starkly against the colorless winter landscape.
They a
ll stood silently in the snow as Robert said another prayer for the nonbelievers. In the middle of this cold, late December snow storm that now was starting to look like a blizzard, the crowd heard a loud bang and a rumble of thunder. Everyone looked at each other and smiled, a few looked up into the rapidly falling flakes and said, “Goodbye, Frankie.”
Chapter Forty-three:
The End-Part One
I don’t know how I got here, or even where this is. Suddenly, I don’t feel the pain. Then I realize I don’t feel anything, nothing at all, only emptiness. It is cold and dark and dreary, but I don’t feel anything, physically or emotionally. I only know I was me, Frankie, and now I’m not. I mean, I’m still me, but I’m not. I’m different. Everything is different.
This cannot be a dream. I recall the pain. I’ve never imagined that kind of pain. I’ve broken a lot of bones before, mostly ribs, but I never ever felt anything like that. So many bullets, I felt my body become the lead as if my flesh and bones were replaced by the bullets. Then finally, almost thankfully, the fire. I felt the flames and I felt my skin burn. I smelled myself burning. I thought it an appropriate end. I think in all that white pain, complete pain, final pain, I laughed at the flames. This was my end, my death. It was mine. It was perfect. It was predestined. I didn’t scream, I let out a moan, a loud and agonizing and aching moan. Then there was nothing, no lights, no tunnels, no welcoming warmth, no God, no angels or demons, just this place.
I’ve had no sense of time since the moment of my death. I am surrounded by a world of gray. Not the ultimate nothingness I used to imagine, instead it’s a dark gray sky, and tall, deformed gray trees. In the distance I see shapes that move. Further, in the distance, I see other beings, other spirits, the others, like me, who died without souls. The ground is covered in old and rotting growth. Everything here is dead and damp and dying. There is no life, only darkness and loss.
One of the other beings, the shapes, is Artie, my grandfather. We cannot talk, but we seem to project thoughts to each other. I do not know what or where this is. It’s simply somewhere else. When we were younger, before I killed him, Sammy and I used to muse about the Ethereal Plane, the domain of ghosts and demons and monsters. This could be that place. There is no God here, no Satan, absolutely no sense of any other power, real or imagined. A complete absence of God, as Artie has pointed out to me. He is happy to be absent from God; the debate is over. There is no God.
His rage is here. I hear his rage, I feel his rage. His rage will never be silenced. He lives in his rage like other men live in air. It feeds him, it sustains him. His rage will burn forever here, like the sun, but there is no sun here, no brightness, only Artie’s rage, the rage of the universe. He tells me he is the one who brought me here, he shares with me no sense of remorse. He just states facts. I inherited his rage, like I inherited his stones. The weight of his life became my burden. Now, here, we share this weight forever. All we have brought with us from our lives is our stones.
There is no time here. No yesterday, no tomorrow, only the endless now. Artie says it will drive me insane. It happened to him. It came fast, like a quick, blind shot to the head. The endless now, the unending, the raging, ceaseless screaming now. Things happen here, but nothing changes. Artie says sometimes someone from the other side will come here to talk to us. He says that will fuel and fire our insanity. Once again, he moans his agonizing moan that is the only sound I hear.
Through the trees and the silent moving shapes, I see the garage, I see the truck where I was ambushed. I still see my body there in the flames, but I am here and free of the flames. The flames silently dance there, like an unending movie loop. I can look down and back across the back yard and look down to the beautiful Hudson River. I am home, here, just in another place, another plane.
Artie tells me to wait. They will come, they will visit. They came for him. I came for him. I came with Cora. We came to visit and talk and cry and to say nice things, to lie. Artie asked me why did I never speak the truth to him, why didn’t I ask him the hard questions? Why was I always afraid of him, why was everyone always afraid? He didn’t mean to scare anyone. He said this place is not all that different from where he was when he was alive, just unchanging. No hope of death, only this ugly, horrible moment for eternity. A prison without walls, a constant knowing that your failure in life has now become the failure you suffer forever.
Eventually, he says, they stop coming. I stopped coming. They visited just long enough to allow themselves to feel better about his death. Then the sting fades away along with their guilt and sadness; then they stop coming. Then, Artie says, is when the dead here finally are completely and totally alone, when they are here in the endless, timeless, hopeless plane, when they stop coming to see you, to talk to you, when they forget you. The young girls go find other men to fuck and laugh with and make babies and lives with. We are abandoned. Then we realize we need to die, but we can’t. Our life, our choices, the stones we carried through our existence have sealed us here, alone, timeless, without hope. That is the moment we realize we are truly alone and abandoned.
That moment, that realization, is when we begin the haunting, that is when we begin our moaning. The haunting is a futile effort to connect to one last person one last time, to just feel that connection, the bond with another, just one last time. We realize as we try to connect that we terrify the ones we love, that we have become someone’s monster. We have become the stuff of nightmares. They run from us. They question their own sanity for knowing what we showed them is real. We become what those we love fear the most. That is when we drown in our emptiness and agony. That is when we begin to wander.
Artie wanders; he comes back here, but he wanders away. He tries to connect. He reaches out. He likes the cemetery that is just up the road. He scares people there. They hear him reaching out across the plane, so close he can hear them and see them, but he is not there. Theirs is a plane of existence. His, ours, is just here, just here and now, forever. This is when, according to Artie, we find our absolute nothing, our plane beyond the gray, the complete and endless nothing. The perfect nothing. They called it The Deep Ethereal. The picture Artie paints makes me wish I’d done things differently when I was alive.
I watch the world. I watch it snow. I see the world change and cars pass by. Out there, things change. In here I just sit and watch. Artie told me he passed through Hell to get here. This is not the realm of Satan; this is a place separate and apart. Even the demon that soured and ruled my life is absent from me here. I’m so alone I wish the demon would come and be with me. I remember the feeling of loneliness the night I found out Pam was with Billy. It was the same feeling the night I realized Zara and I had ended as inexplicably as we had begun. It was gut wrenching. I wanted to die. It was a pain I could not escape, because it was everywhere. I slept with it, I woke with it. It ruled me, it dominated me, and it ruined me.
Alive, at least then there was hope, a possibility of another connection. This is worse. There is no hope, no new connection.
Arthur is right. I feel the insanity creep in. It comes in from the edges of sanity. As if my sanity was a dam, and this silence, this nothing, this complete loneliness is a crack in that dam. It’s different from drugged and insane. This is a purer form of insanity. It is organic, and it comes from deep within. It is the one we never come back from. So I lied earlier. We do feel here, I feel here. I feel the emptiness of being completely disconnected from me, my life, any hope. I am completely alone and I’ll never leave this exact place. I don’t even look forward to death. I was given the gift of death and I squandered that. I sit here in complete nothingness, waiting forever.
I hear muffled voices. Then I see them: Alexandrine, Pam, Zara, and Payton. Pam is out in the front. She stops by the burned and greasy spot where my truck was, just outside the overhead door.
I hear Pam call my name, “Frankie, I’m here. I brought the girls with me. We are all here. I felt you
again last night. I wish we could have talked. There are so many things I wanted to show you, and to tell you. We all love you, Frankie. Each of us in a different way, but we miss you. Talk to me, Frankie. Tell me you know I’m here.”
Chapter Forty-four:
The End-Part Two
When they walked away, I sat there, frozen. It was like looking at an old black-and-white photograph, the edges crinkled and the images fading away. I tried to cry out to them, “Stay!” but all they could hear was a muddled moan, like the wind.
Pam said, “That almost sounded like a sad, lonely wail.”
I sat there as the snow melted. I sat there as the first flowers of spring started to bloom. I sat there as the leaves started to appear on the trees again. The days became longer. The birds came back. I recalled the beauty and warmth of spring, even if my view was veiled though the sad ugly grayness of this strange new world.
Everything was viewed at a distance: the world outside, the strange creatures of this endless night, Artie. All were viewed through the dead and gray opaque trees. One early spring day, I looked out and saw Alexandrine standing in the driveway. She didn’t look up at me. She stood there crying. I could hear her muffled voice. She said, “Frankie, I feel closer to you and your grandmother here than at your graves. I don’t know if you can hear me, I’m going home to the South. I’m packing up my kids and my poverty and my sadness and moving south. Zara has found a place for us to stay near her in New Orleans. I don’t why I came here. I just wanted to say goodbye. I have the money you left me. It will go a long way for me and my kids. I miss you, my best friend, and I’ll always love you.” She stood outside the garage and waited for a ride. As the car she waited on approached, she laughed and said, “Frankie, I dropped off the Rambler. The keys are in it. Goodbye, my friend. I don’t think I’ll pass this way again”