Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “Do you know anything more about what happened?” Mom said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just what you know. I haven’t been trying to find out.”

  “There’s going to have to be a thorough investigation,” Dad said, bringing his hands together and nodding, as if he’d just then decided to conduct the inquiry himself. “This isn’t Tijuana or somewhere. They can’t just come here and carry on like it was.”

  “We were a little surprised,” Mom said, tilting her head in a way that suggested tactfulness, “to learn how … involved Sarah had gotten. We didn’t think of her that way.”

  “It was recent,” I said.

  “We sent letters to Senator Moynihan and Senator Javits,” Mom said.

  “A different letter for each of them,” added Dad. “You can’t appeal to a Javits the way you would a Moynihan. Pat’s stuffy, but he’s from the streets.”

  “You’ll come home with us when this is over,” Mom said.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Dad said, sitting on the bed, resting his weight on his hands. “Killing an American girl was just about the stupidest thing those bastards could have done. People are never going to forget this.”

  “I guess Sarah would be glad of that,” I said. I was hearing my voice as if it were coming from a different spot in the room.

  “It’s a terrible thing to say, I guess,” Mom said, coming to my side and putting her arm through mine, sensing, I think, that I might lose my balance at any moment, “but we’re going to have to sit down soon and talk this whole thing through. This is going to involve you in all kinds of ways and maybe you’d like a chance to figure out just how you’re going to handle it.” Mom had worked for twenty-one years for a state assemblyman named Earl Corvino, whose motto was Let’s Minimize the Impact. Mom had gotten a pretty raw deal from Corvino but she’d learned a few things while she was at it.

  That night, I moved into Danny and Caroline’s room; I couldn’t afford my own room and, more, I couldn’t bear being alone. I was still accepting the truth of Sarah’s death one cell at a time. With Danny and Caroline, I felt protected; they would know what to do if I suddenly fell into ten thousand pieces.

  We stayed up late talking. I remember laughing. I remember Caroline recalling the tricky little current events quizzes Mom forced us to take over breakfast. What kind of plane was Captain Jerry Powers flying on his mission over Russia when the Soviets shot him down. Answer: a U-2. Right but wrong, silly: his name isn’t Jerry, it’s Gary. Like fanatical gardeners working in soil of questionable fertility, our parents slaved over us with a kind of diligence that certainly included love but was not confined to it. And now here we were, the three of us, bound together not only by the normal genetic magic of siblings but by the sort of loopy heroic narrative that binds veterans of a long war. Veterans of the Asian wars wear those satin jackets that say on the back I Know I’m Going to Heaven Because I’ve Spent My Time in Hell and then have a drawing of Korea or Vietnam. Danny had wanted us to wear jackets that said the same thing but with a picture of our genteel shabby brownstone in Brooklyn instead.

  The war of our childhoods had been all the more peculiar and exhausting because it had all been waged quite clearly and endlessly for our own good. And here we were, the sum of their efforts: Danny was a fly-by-night businessman living six golden miles above his means; Caroline was a painter without enough money to buy paint, with two children and a tough marriage; and I was almost a lawyer. Yet, none of us worked the swing shift; none of us carried our lunch in a pail. We’d hightailed it out of our class.

  We drank a few bottles of tepid wine and fell asleep. But I was up again before dawn. My heart was pounding as if I were being chased. I lay in bed listening to the air conditioner, to the deep, almost musical breathing of my brother, the slow rich exhalations of my sister, and it seemed that this thicket of horror and loss into which I’d been tossed had always been my life. It was impossible to believe that there had ever been any happiness.

  The sun was getting ready to crest and another day without her was going to begin. And in New Orleans, too; the city of her longing. How she missed the smells of the place, the grillwork, the shotgun houses, the music, the tall icy drinks … We ought to have spent more time here. Tears were rolling into the corners of my mouth and I rubbed my face with the harsh, starchy sheet. I got out of bed and dressed in silence. Then down to the lobby, where the night man at the desk was reading Our Lady of the Flowers and the porter was walking slowly over the tiled floors, pushing an ammonia-soaked mop in front of him. I just sat there with my hands between my knees, staring straight ahead. A while later, I looked up and Danny was standing there. He hadn’t bothered to dress. He was in blue silk pajamas. His eyes were a similar color. His hair was the same light tan as the Minnesota farmland seen from the plane. His face was angular, his mouth a little tense: he never looked tired.

  “Are you losing your mind?” he asked, crouching down before me, putting his bony, powerful hands on my knees.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You look terrible,” he said. “And you’ve got to get through this whole fucking day. You’ve got the funeral. And there’s going to be reporters, questions, everything. This is going to be very hard.”

  “It’s just the beginning,” I said.

  “I know. But let’s get through today. Come on. Follow me. I’ve got something for you.” He got up and put his hand out for me. He put his other arm around my shoulders and took me back to the room.

  Caroline sat up in bed as we walked in. It was not yet seven in the morning. Caroline slept in her underwear and a black T-shirt. She had brown hair and dark eyes; her jaw was square, her cheekbones high— she would never go pasty like the rest of us. Her looks fit her dramatic personality. “What are you guys doing?” she asked. In childhood, she’d been our ringleader, but life had been tougher on her and now poverty and disorganization made her uncertain.

  “I’m going to medicate Fielding,” Danny said. He pulled his Mark Cross bag from beneath the bed and flipped it open. Zippered into a little side compartment was a tinfoil packet. My stomach lurched but only for a moment, like a drunk trying to get out of his chair but then giving up. Danny opened the foil packet and inside was a dingy powder, caked on the top, loose on the bottom.

  “Are you seriously doing this?” asked Caroline. “I know what that is.”

  “You’ve got something else to get him through this?” Danny asked, the confidence blowing through his voice like a stiff breeze.

  “And what’s he supposed to do tomorrow?” Caroline asked.

  “Tomorrow he can flip out. At least half the world won’t be watching.”

  Is this what I think it is?” I asked.

  “Yes. OK now, just take a little.”

  “Am I going to be sick?”

  “Why would I give you something to make you sick? Just don’t take too much.”

  “I suppose you’ll be joining him,” Caroline said.

  “And how ’bout yourself, Sis?” asked Danny.

  “Forget it,” said Caroline. “In my neighborhood, this is no game. A junkie ripped off Rudy’s lunch money last week.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” said Danny, handing me a piece of candy-striped straw.

  AND SO AS I walked into Sarah’s funeral it was within the soft armor of two snorts of heroin, each the size of a match head. The service was in a Catholic church, though Eugene was barely Catholic and Dorothy was nominally Episcopalian. It was the same church I’d gone to with Sarah for her grandfather’s funeral: St. Matthew’s. The whole issue of Catholicism was suddenly very touchy. It wasn’t as if the Williamses blamed the Church for what happened, but clearly mere were elements in the Church they did blame. After all, Sarah had been in Minneapolis to deliver three Chilean refugees to a Maryknoll convent, where they were to be given sanctuary. The Williamses had had it with priests and they’d had it with me. I was not expected to sit in the first pew with the family but had
to find a place among the fifty or sixty others who made up the human periphery of Sarah’s short life.

  To get into the church, I had to make my way past a surprising number of reporters and photographers, not only from our own press but from papers around the world. In the car my parents had been trying to prepare me for the questions—the answers to which they feared would be tied to the tail of my own political future like a string of tin cans—but I could scarcely respond to their promptings. As we got close to the church my body began to sweat like mad and I felt so faint that I lay my head back and the sun came through the back window of the taxi and struck my forehead and eyes like a hot yellow maul. When we pulled next to the curb and into the fractured chaotic shade of a tall magnolia tree, the press clustered around the car. Some of them made a decent attempt to appear respectful, though others were too disassociated, too ambitious to care. “OK, here we go,” said Dad, and I realized that in ways he could not quite know or control he was glad for the commotion: he had always wanted to help make history, the way some men forever embrace the ambition to write a novel or paint a great mural, and here at last we were, we lowly four, with the ear of the world cocked in our direction and its great glassy eye blinking at us every hundredth of a second.

  “Mr. Pierce … ”

  “Hey Fielding. Fielding … ”

  “One second, one second … ”

  Across St. Charles Avenue, opposite the church, a small knot of people holding placards stood vigil. The signs read SARAH WILLIAMS— VICTIM OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM, and STOP SUPPORTING CHILEAN NAZIS. Someone had managed to enlarge a picture of Sarah, and this picket sign, outlined in black, was at the front of the group. Someone with a deep, sonorous voice called out, “Compañera Sarah Williams,” and the others responded: “Presente. ”Then the deep voice said, “Ahora,” and the others said “Y siempre.” Sarah Williams. Here with us. Now. And forever.

  I had been following Danny’s lead through the reporters and into the church, but the chanting across the street had stopped me cold. I had expected the heroin to cancel, or at least slow, my mental processes, but in fact my thoughts were coming fast and loose—yet encased in a kind of dark, soft silk, rendered more or less harmless. It occurred to me that those people across the street were trying to steal Sarah’s death away from me and then it occurred to me that that was perfectly all right. If they wanted it so badly, they could have it.

  One of the TV reporters took advantage of my slowing down and stuck a microphone under my nose. He was an open-faced young fellow with thinning sandy hair, freckles, a seersucker suit, a classy drawl.

  “Who do you hold responsible for Sarah’s death, Fielding?” he asked me.

  I took a deep breath and everyone then knew I was going to answer the question: they had that radar working. Other microphones craned in my direction. I felt Danny’s fierce, bony fingers on my wrist and Dad’s hand on the small of my back. I was dimly aware that here was the spot where I was expected to blame the U.S. government for the whole thing, but I couldn’t do that, even if I wanted to I couldn’t do it. Anyhow, it was all so much more complicated than that. “Me,” I finally said. “Myself.”

  And with that, fifty more questions came hurtling toward me but Danny pulled me hard and Dad kept his hand at my back, steering me through the reporters, who felt nothing about blocking our way with their shoulders, elbows, even their cameras. I thought I heard Dad murmur something to me, something on the order of That’s the way it’s done, boy, but I wasn’t sure. I was feeling the heat.

  We were walking up the stairs to the church door now. The reporters had for some reason agreed not to follow that far. I guess it looked bad on film to see them chasing people straight into church, their wires spread out behind them like cracks in the earth.

  My family and I sat toward the back of the church. We stumbled over the feet of some people who looked to me as if they came from Sarah’s mother’s side of the family: I could place those broad, milky faces, those flexible, slightly frowning mouths, the thick wrists, the meaty calves. I sat between Caroline and my mother and they each took my hand. I nodded my head a few times, trying to give them the feeling I was all right, that I was going to make it through this somehow and they ought not worry. My skin seemed suddenly to come hideously alive but I refused to disgrace us by clawing away at myself. I heard a low moan, a strangled bit of weeping, and I leaned forward for a moment and looked at my father, whose face, though uncovered, was contorted in pain. I felt a lurch of anger, even contempt: if I was going to sit through this, then he sure as hell could, too.

  I looked around the church, careful not to take in the altar, behind which I knew was Sarah’s coffin. Off toward the door to another, smaller chapel, sat Sarah’s friend Father Mileski, along with Father Stanton and Sister Anne—they’d all worked together at Resurrection House with Sarah in Chicago. Mileski was pulling at his dark coarse Russian beard and weeping openly. I wondered how a priest could weep so at a funeral; I wondered if he’d lost all faith. Stanton, twenty years older than Mileski, frail, white-haired, with sunken cheeks and mild blue eyes, sat bolt upright and stared at the altar, with a look on his face as if some piece of clerical gaucherie were being committed. Sister Anne’s eyes were averted; she seemed to be in prayer, with her lips moving rapidly, silently.

  Across the aisle were some people who I guessed were from Eugene’s side: mournful ectomorphs with dark angry eyebrows and long tapered fingers.

  Bobby Charbonnet was there with his pert, efficient-looking wife. Bobby had lived across the street from Sarah when she was growing up. She had focused all the excoriating heat of her emerging sexuality on him—rapturous mash notes, nighttime unveilings in her bedroom, whose little windows faced his. Bobby had been terrified and it wasn’t until he was safely away at the University of North Carolina that he had dared to respond to her—but then, of course, it was too late. His delayed response had provided the emotional balance, and gave Sarah a chance to move away from him. From then on they were friends. He and Sarah had once taken me on a black music tour of New Orleans. We heard the Meters in one bar, Professional Longhair in another, and then visited an old piano player named Tuts Washington in his tiny, redolent house, where we sat with Tuts and watched TV—Vice President Agnew was resigning his office on all the channels.

  I looked at Bobby and he finally noticed me: he brought his pale, delicate hand up to his throat and shook his head, and then Nina, his wife, made a gesture to me that I took to mean we would talk later on—though when I thought about it later I realized it could not possibly have meant that. We scarcely knew each other and now it was too late to begin. Sarah’s death had sealed her old life off from me once and for all.

  At last, I looked toward the front row. Sarah’s parents and her sisters were sitting there with the backs of their heads toward me. Sarah’s mother wore a dark gray hat with a black veil pinned to her auburn hair. Eugene’s bald spot was shimmering with perspiration. Carrie was there with her husband, Jack. A tough-looking duo, they ran a couple of oyster bars in the French Quarter. They’d never had much use for me or for Sarah, really; they’d treated us as if we were not quite welcome customers, with that mixture of courtesy and disdain that can be so painful. Sarah’s other older sister, Tammy, was there, finally separated from her awful husband. She turned around. Her heavy face was swollen and blotchy, as if she’d been attacked by hornets. When she saw I was looking at her she put up her hand in a gesture of greeting and sympathy and I raised my hand—how incredibly heavy it suddenly felt—as if to touch her.

  From somewhere, organ music was playing: tepid, faintly religious, like spiritual Muzak. I tried to lower myself into the well of my feelings but I seemed to be stuck, frozen in some indeterminate darkness within. It was the drug and I felt a rip of shame, a revulsion with myself. It seemed crummy to have come to her funeral in a narcotic haze. If this was the time to say our last good-byes, then I ought to have kept myself open to whatever grueling chaos of feeli
ng the day had in store. I tried to move away from the drug, which seemed now to fill me like a wheelbarrow of sand, but I could tell without really trying very hard that it was simply impossible. The music was playing on and on and then it suddenly stopped and I heard snuffling. From beyond the church door, across the street, the demonstrators were still chanting and in that brief churchy silence we heard them, too: Compañera Sarah Williams—presente—ahora—y siempre.

  Shut up and go home, I thought, but without hatred or conviction. I shifted in my seat, settling in for whatever was next. I already had had the first inkling that time was moving on—hideously empty but beginning to pick up new color and weight: those distant voices, the people in this church, my own slow, doped-up heart. I had already survived. This loss would forever embrace my life but it would not stop it, and if I look back honestly at those last few moments in church before Father Laroque grasped the pulpit with his angry white hand and began his torrent of clichés, I realized now what I could not quite know or admit then—that I had already begun to adjust to life without her. I was not going to blow my brains out or slit my throat. It seemed clear there was only one reasonable thing to do and that was press on and continue to build my life as I’d been putting it together step by step since I’d been eight years old—the age I’d been when I realized that what I wanted to be was not left fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers but president of the United States.

  2

  I PERSISTED FOR five years, taking little ceremonial Japanese steps toward my goal, when suddenly the hook of fate caught onto my belt loop and lifted me up by my pants. I was finished with law school and had passed through a couple of years’ seasoning in a top law firm and now was in harness with the Cook County prosecutor’s office. I kept my conscience from slashing my ambition to ribbons by now and again trying to patch one of those selective holes in the net of justice through which the slimiest, best-connected crooks traditionally passed. But now I was being offered a rather dirty deal myself and I was going through all the motions of thinking about it, though I knew in an instant I was going to say yes.