Soul Survivor

by G. M. Ford

  Guilt’s a funny thing. Sort of a phantom feeling, because you don’t have to be guilty of anything in order to experience it. You can even feel guilty about not feeling guilty, about stuff you had not one damn thing to do with in the first place. It’s like guilt’s an equal opportunity abuser. Another funny thing: people who have the most to feel guilty about generally don’t. Makes my head hurt.

  Truth be told, I’d been a little off my feed ever since I’d turned Art Fowler down. Normally, I like to joke that I gave up guilt for Lent, but ever since Art had darkened my door, I’d been giving myself pep talks about how there was nothing I could have done for him. That it was okay that his long-gone association with my father created in me little sense of obligation. And especially about how some kid I’d taken to a ball game once, no matter what he’d done later in his life, wasn’t my responsibility.

  It was a good story, but deep down inside, I didn’t believe a word of it. When the news story of Art’s suicide flashed across my TV, I felt as if I’d taken the gun and blown his brains out myself. In that instant, I had no doubt that I was diminished and less than the man I’d always imagined myself to be.

  I didn’t have to wonder who it was when the gate bell tinkled on Wednesday afternoon. Since the bell announced somebody was using the remote from the street, and there were only two remotes, the tinkle meant Rebecca was showing up unannounced—which, while not her usual MO, wasn’t all that surprising either, since I hadn’t answered my phone for a couple of days. By now, it was a safe bet that Art Fowler’s deflated corpse had arrived on one of her autopsy tables and had been sliced and diced for the good of humanity.

  We’d had dinner Sunday afternoon and spent the night together. I’d told her the story about Art showing up on my doorstep. She’d done her best to help me rationalize my innocence, but we both knew this was something I was going to have to work out for myself.

  She let herself in. Found me standing next to the kitchen sink, leaning against the counter. “You still beating yourself up, or did you just lose your phone?” she asked as she unwound a bright-purple scarf from around her neck.

  “Full-scale pity party in progress,” I said.

  She threw her coat and scarf over the back of one of the kitchen chairs.

  “That’s what I figured,” she said. She walked over and threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug. We stayed that way for about as long as standing upright permitted. She whispered in my ear, “I know this is going to come as quite a shock, but you’re not a superhero, Leo.” She gave it a moment to sink in. “Contrary to rumor, you can’t cure all the world’s ills, so there’s no sense in making things up.” She hugged me harder. I hugged her back.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said, without letting me go.

  “I could use one about now,” I said, without letting her go.

  “We released Mr. Fowler’s body to the family yesterday. The funeral’s tomorrow. I’ve got a ton of comp time coming. I’ll take the day off. Let’s go to the funeral, and maybe we can put some closure on this thing.”

  I thought it over. As far as I was concerned, maybe was the key concept, and closure was for windows. “When all else fails, nothing like a little symbolism,” I said finally.

  “Can’t hurt, can it?”

  “Okay. Where is it?”

  “Up on the Hill. Saint Mark’s Episcopal. They’re giving him the whole retired-city-official send-off.”

  “And burying him where?”

  She chortled. “Lakeside. Four o’clock,” she said. “Over on the back side of the Hill.”

  My entire family was buried in the Lakeside Cemetery. On the good side of the Hill, with the sweeping views of Portage Bay, the stone angels, and the outsize marble mausoleums. The back side of the Hill was reserved for the less well-heeled and was thus considerably less Baroque. It was location, location, location, even in death.

  “I’ll count it as my annual family graveside visit,” I said.

  “Two birds with one stone . . . an all-around expiation of guilt.”

  Been quite a while since I’d been inside a church, but no spontaneous claps of thunder split the sky as we walked across the parking lot. No basso profundo admonitions from the heavens or accusatory fingers from the great beyond, so we just moseyed over the speed bumps and found a seat about halfway down the aisle.

  First and only time I’d ever been in Saint Mark’s had been to attend the funeral of one of my mother’s friends. I was about ten at the time and could still recall my first glimpse of the inside of the church. Looked like somebody had gotten partway through the construction, given up, and turned the project over to somebody with a completely different vision of how it was supposed to look. Or maybe like the roof had started to collapse, and they’d shored it up with four enormous concrete pillars that didn’t look a bit like they went with the rest of it. Somebody once said that a camel was a horse designed by a committee. That’s what Saint Mark’s looked like to me, then and now.

  My mother had explained that, in a sense at least, I was right. The church construction had begun immediately prior to the Great Depression. When the money ran out, the project defaulted on its loans, and the building was taken over by the bank, who rented the unfinished cathedral to, of all people, the U.S. Army.

  After the Depression ended, the Episcopalians scraped together enough cash to finish the project, but on a considerably less grand scale than the original plan had called for, which, my mother explained, was why the building had a rather fortresslike quality and was thus known locally as “the holy box.”

  If pressed, I generally told people I was a Frisbeeitaranist and that we believed that, when you died, your soul went up on the roof and nobody could get it down. Any number of people I knew didn’t find that in the least bit funny, but I did, and that was all that mattered. For the record, the rest of my family was Catholic. My mother and several of my father’s sisters were big-time donors and fundraisers for the Archdiocese of Seattle. My father? He just wasn’t the type. The only omnipotent being he’d believed in was himself, and the only rewards that held any appeal for him were as far from celestial as you could get. Strictly a here-and-now guy he was.

  Rebecca? She liked to say she was “spiritual” but not religious and never failed to get pissed off when I suggested that notions such as “spiritual” were not only terminally vague but maybe even vapid. We’d been arguing the subject for the better part of thirty years, with no end in sight.

  On the right side of the church, the first five rows were full of bowed heads. On the left side, not so much. We forced ourselves up the aisle, as if leaning into a stiff wind. Wasn’t till we got settled in the pew that I noticed the half mile between us and the rest of the assembled multitude.

  “Lord, we come into your presence to remember and to seek your comfort, for we know that nothing can separate us from your love and that you support us in our sorrow.”

  Rebecca leaned close to my ear. “We should move up,” she whispered.

  She was right. We looked like we’d been expelled from the garden, so we slid out of the pew and tiptoed up front, maybe ten rows back from the altar.

  On the right I could see Martha Fowler and an old lady I figured to be Art’s widow folded together in the front pew. The other side of the aisle, where I figured we’d find Matthew’s father, just a few gray female heads . . . no Phil.

  The whole thing took maybe a half an hour. By the time the motorcade had wound its way to Lakeside Cemetery, a steady west wind had pushed the cloud cover into Idaho, leaving sunshine and bright-blue skies for the graveside service.

  Rather than following the funeral procession into the cemetery, I parked the car down by the cemetery office, and we walked up the hill. I’d always thought it funny that my father’s family had all found it necessary to mark their time on earth with ostentatious graveside architecture, while he lay under a simple stone that offered nothing more than his name and the years of his birth and death.

/>   The ground was squishy from the last snow, welling up around our shoes as we marched along. We slid and slipped our way up the hill. Right before we got to my dad’s final resting place, a weeping marble angel marked my aunt Gene’s. Forty feet north, my uncle Pat’s mausoleum looked big enough to house a Pakistani village. I smiled, took hold of Rebecca’s hand, and lengthened my stride.

  Dad’s gravestone was clean and white. Recently tended. WILLIAM WATERMAN. 1945–2001. My entire family was buried within a hundred feet of where I was standing, and suddenly I could see all their faces. All the white dresses, new suits, communion celebrations, the graduation parties, the family Christmas Eves, and most of all the Thanksgiving dinners, at a table so long that, by the time the pie rolled around, the cigarette smoke completely obscured the far end of the festivities. Rebecca rubbed my shoulder. I took the hint, wrapped my arm around her waist, and pulled us up over the crest of the hill.

  Art’s grave was nearly at the bottom of the west side, peeping through the winter branches at the urbanscape of Capitol Hill. Rebecca and I tiptoed down to the assembled multitude and wedged ourselves in, nodding solemnly at those who met our gazes, until we could see the preacher and grave site.

  “And now to him who is able to keep us from falling, and lift us from the dark valley of despair, to the bright mountain of hope, from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy.”

  Over the years, I’d come to regard funerals as the theater of mass denial, wherein the permanent is made to seem temporary so that the gnawing rat fear in our guts can be kicked back into its cage once again.

  The preacher was winding his way toward eternity, and I was ruminating on a veritable vortex of variables when the first shout found its way to my ears. Not a discernible word, more like an angry current floating on the breeze.

  I sneaked a peek over my shoulder. A TV cameraman was backing over the top of the hill, shooting something on the other side of the rise. Instinctively, I started to turn. Rebecca’s fingers squeezed my upper arm. The don’t you dare stick your nose in squeeze. I squared my shoulders and turned back toward the grave.

  I did pretty good too. Lasted right up to when the preacher stopped talking and just stood there, scripture in hand, looking out over the crowd. I swiveled my head. Protest signs popped up over the brow of the hill. STOP GUN VIOLENCE NOW. PROTECT CHILDREN, NOT GUNS.

  NO MORE! That was as far as I got before the main body of protestors came into view.

  Maybe a dozen of them. Three or four standard-issue Seattle hipsters. Big, bushy beards and the permanent scowl of underemployment. Several of them filming the scene on their phones as they stomped along. A middle-aged couple with two kids in tow was leading the parade. A prematurely purple Goth girl with a red, white, and blue WHAT IS IT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND? sign was the one doing most of the yelling. “Stop now! Stop now!” she bellowed.

  It wasn’t like I made a conscious decision to intervene. Just sorta happened. Next thing I knew, I was circling around the cameraman and bellying up to the family with the PROTECT CHILDREN, NOT GUNS sign.

  “Maybe this isn’t the best time,” I suggested, in my reasonable voice.

  “Stop the madness,” the wife screeched at me.

  I stayed calm. “They’re just putting the guy in the ground. Maybe you could . . . you know, for the sake of his family,” I said.

  The little girl hopped forward and kicked me in the shin.

  “Maybe if you guys . . . ,” I began again.

  I didn’t see the wife step behind me as I approached her husband. Up close, he was about forty, sporting a serious comb-over and about fifty extra pounds.

  “Listen, man,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong . . . I don’t necessarily disagree with your message . . . but, you know, maybe this isn’t the right time to . . .”

  That’s when father-guy’s feet lost their purchase on the slope. His eyes went wide. He waved the picket sign, trying to regain his balance. I fired out a helping hand but caught nothing but air. He was still windmilling his arms as his feet came out from under him. I winced as he smacked into the muck. I leaned forward, extended my hand, ready to haul him back to his feet, when somebody jumped onto my back and began flailing at me with a picket sign.

  “No . . . no . . . I was—” I growled.

  “Don’t you dare,” my assailant shrieked, pounding on my back like a tom-tom. “Don’t you—”

  The third time the wooden placard handle scraped across my face, I lost my sense of humor, reached back, and muscled my attacker up and over my shoulder. The wife face-planted directly in front of my feet and began to groan piteously. I watched openmouthed as she rolled over onto her side and looked my way. She looked like a divot, her howling face covered with mud and half a bale of grass.

  I was still trying to decide which of them to help first when my feet began to move. I swivel hipped myself sideways and dug in like I was skiing, trying to edge with the soles of my shoes. No go. It was like I was on a conveyer belt. I waved my arms, trying desperately to keep myself upright. And then bang. I slid into someone and came to a stop. Someone who rested a video camera on my shoulder and kept whirring away. I groaned.

  Took Mom and Dad a couple of minutes to get themselves upright, scrape off some of the mud, and check one another for damage. By that time, half a dozen guys from the funeral service had cramponed their way up to where I was standing and had begun to cajole the remaining protestors back over the rise.

  The preacher wasted no time. Five minutes later, the service was over and the assembled multitude was slip sliding their way back to their cars. Rebecca had an arm looped around my shoulder.

  “Well . . . that went nicely, didn’t it?” she said.

  I clamped my mouth shut, took Rebecca’s hand in mine, and started sloshing toward the car.

  I felt lousy but was putting on my brave face. Rebecca, as usual, read me like a book. By the time we were halfway back to the car, she’d twice tried to get me off the hook.

  “Hey,” she said, bopping me in the arm. “Maybe we ought to just call it a day.”

  “I made us a reservation at Lark.”

  “We can call. Tell them we won’t be making it.”

  “Nah” passed my lips before it ever visited my brain. “I could use a drink.”

  “Let’s go back to my place,” she pressed. “I’ve got a bottle of Highland Park. We’ll do takeout.”

  I’m not sure listening to reason would have made much of a difference at that point, but we’ll never know for sure, because I was having none of it.

  We spent the next hour and a half eating excellent food and pretending we were having a good time. I’d stuffed the last of the pineapple tarte tatin with ginger-caramel and matcha-almond-crunch ice cream into my tarte hole, any pretense of gaiety had long since hit the bricks, and I felt like a prisoner having his last meal. Rebecca was trying to keep things breezy, but even in romantic restaurant light she looked like she’d rather be having a Pap smear.

  Silence settled over us like a mantle as I drove Rebecca back to her place, walked her to the door, and kiss kissed my goodbyes. By the time I made it back to the top of Capitol Hill, both my attitude and the onshore flow were thick enough to qualify as rain.

  Rolling along Elliott Avenue, I felt like I was made of lead. As if something vital had been removed from my body, leaving only the shell behind. I shook my head in the darkness and heaved a sigh big enough to show up on the Weather Channel.

  My phone began to ring just as I started up Dravus. I ignored it and kept driving. It stopped and then started again. I reached down to pop my seat belt so I could reach the bottom of my pocket, but it stopped ringing again, so I pulled my hand back to the steering wheel and gunned it up the hill, my knuckles white.

  Ring. Ring.

  Fuck. Fuck.

  Whoever wanted to talk to me was big-time serious about it. The phone kept ringing, and I kept silently telling it to piss off. By the time I rounded the corner in front of
the Morrisons’ house, I’d made up my mind to never call whoever was buzzing my balls. Not if I lived to be a thousand would I call that motherfucker back. Oh, how they’d suffer. I’d . . . I’d . . .

  The KING 5 TV remote truck parked on the far side of my driveway pulled me back to the here and now. I grabbed the gate remote from the visor and thumbed the “Open” button. As the gate began to roll across the asphalt, I put the pedal to the metal, screeching a ninety-degree fishtail into my driveway with one hand while pushing the “Close” button with the other. No go. They was too quick for me.

  When I checked the mirror, I could see a shadow flowing down the driveway as the gate closed behind. I stomped on the emergency brake and got out of the car.

  In the purple glow of the streetlight, I saw another guy with a camera fanning out to the left, quickstepping it along the edge of the shrubbery, red light winking, filming me as he hustled over the grass.

  I walked quickly toward the guy with the microphone. He smiled and brought the microphone to his mouth. I matched his grin tooth for tooth, grabbed him by the elbow, and spun him like a top.

  “But—” he blurted as I took hold of his belt with one hand and his collar with the other and began to frog-march him toward the gate.

  “This is private property,” I said to his back. “I’m ordering you to leave. If you don’t, I’m going to call the police, and then I’m going to call your employer and lodge a complaint.”

  “We want to give you a chance to tell your side of the story,” he sputtered as I propelled him over the pavement. “Can you tell us—”

  I had no clue what he was flapping his lips about, and at that point, I didn’t much give a fig. I was reminding myself to hold my temper when parka boy went all macho and decided to extricate himself from my grasp with a single violent twist of his health club–honed body. A bad idea if ever there was one.