Sunday morning, Gates in his silvery space clothes, Raleigh in his white suit, the two Hayeses left their companions playing five-card stud in the motel room. Weeper Berg, cheered by the morning news report of the recapture of the rest of the Glory Bound Boys, had condescended to teach Mingo how to palm an ace. The brothers drove through the spring-leafy streets out to the hospital to visit Roxanne. “I can’t handle hospitals,” Gates admitted, and said nothing else after that. They were sent by a receptionist up to Ward C. Raleigh, keeping Gates beside him, walked looking for Roxanne down white rows of sickbeds, in them women patients, some young, mostly old; some asleep, most in pain; some recovering, most of them not. Some of the women looked back at him, and while it had never been his habit to speak to strangers, he felt he could not pass their beds without mumbling, “Hello,” to any whose eyes met his.
But he didn’t see Roxanne. An intern sent them up to the intensive care unit. A nurse on duty there sent them to a little waiting room, where they waited and waited, until another, older, nurse slid silently through the door and nodded at them. “You’re here to see Mrs. Fred Zane?” she finally said.
“Yes,” Raleigh said. “Is there some problem?”
“Are you…are you friends of hers…or…”
Raleigh repeated, “Is there some problem?”
The nurse laced her fingers together as if she were going to offer
them a prayer. “I’m terribly sorry. Mrs. Zane isn’t here.” “What do you mean, isn’t here? She went home?”
“Well, no. She passed away two days ago.”
Raleigh just looked at her.
“On Friday,” she was finally compelled to add.
“That’s ridiculous,” Raleigh told her. “He spoke to her on the
phone two days ago, Friday morning.” Hayes wheeled on Gates. “You did, didn’t you, Gates? Did you lie to me?” “No,” mumbled Gates, whose lips had turned blue. “She was here. Right here. She was okay. She said, ‘I’m okay.’ ”
Raleigh spun back to the nurse. “See? There must be some mistake.”
“I’m terribly sorry. You can talk to the doctor if you like. But Mrs. Zane expired in O.R. Friday night.”
“O.R.? Operating?” Raleigh stumbled. “She was having surgery Friday?”
“Emergency surgery,” the nurse admitted. “She began hemorrhaging and was taken to O.R. at elevenP.M. I was on duty. Are you friends of the family?…Are you sure you don’t want to talk to the doctor?…Well, is there anything else I can do for you?”
Raleigh couldn’t think. He knew there were things he had to think of, but he couldn’t find them in his brain. He said, “No thanks.”
“Well, then, if you’ll—”
“Wait. Where is she?”
The nurse offered to find out.
Raleigh turned back to his half-brother Gates, who was looking out the window with a queasy smile on his face. “Gates?”
“…Yeah?”
“Gates.”
“Right, fine.”
“For God’s sake, how awful.”
“Yeah, well. Sorry, Raleigh. All your rush for nothing. Still…” Gates made a weak swipe at his brother’s arm. “You did your best. Sorry.”
Raleigh left Gates alone in the waiting room, while he went to tell the nurse that he would like to talk to the doctor. The nurse handed the doctor a chart, and the doctor translated the long and the short of it to Raleigh. The long of it was several paragraphs of thoroughly obscure Latin-rooted words, for which the doctor had paid so many thousands of dollars in tuition that naturally he wanted to use as many as possible. (And truly they were very valuable words, as valuable and powerful as any other priestly mumbo jumbo—for they meant the considerable difference between his income and that of the nurse—compelling the nurse to call him “sir,” and obey his orders to hand him things that were six inches away.) So the doctor got his money’s worth out of the long of it.
The short of it was that Roxanne Digges Zane had died in the operating room. When Raleigh returned to Gates, his brother had made a paper airplane out of a page of a magazine. He cocked his arm and threw it across the room; it landed in a philodendron plant on a shelf. Then Gates took a breath, rubbed his mustache, and laughed. “Well, let’s face it, Roxanne and I didn’t exactly have all that much more to shoot the breeze about anyhow.”
In the car, Raleigh began oddly to shiver. “Gates, I don’t know what to say.…At least you spoke to her on the phone.”
“Yeah, we summed it up.”
At the funeral home, when Raleigh asked to see Roxanne, a pink man who never spoke above a whisper sat them in a “Private Grief Room,” and brought them a shiny brass cylinder, which he placed sacramentally on a coffee table between a Bible and an ashtray.
“Hi, Mom,” said Gates. “Long time, no see.”
“Gates, please!” Raleigh took the urn out of his brother’s hand. It was cold and smooth and hard. How could it possibly be Roxanne Digges, with her heated temper that flamed out of nowhere and burned anybody in its path, with her rough bawdy laughter and her soft ample skin? How could all that yelling and laughing and dancing and drinking, all that noise and motion and flesh that thirty years ago he had stood watching with so much hatred, how could it all be sealed inside this little cylinder? When he’d stood there hating her as she danced in the bright noise—while his mother sat across town alone with her quiet glass flowers—hating her so much he’d wished her burned to cinders before his eyes; he’d never imagined this. How could anyone be reduced to this? And how could it ever happen, dear God Almighty, to someone he loved?
The pink man was whispering that he was surprised to see them there.
“So are we,” Gates told him.
But the man was surprised because at this very moment they were missing Mrs. Zane’s memorial service at a church across town.
“She went to church?” asked Gates.
“I couldn’t say,” the man whispered.
“For whom,” Raleigh inquired, “are the ah the remains intended?”
“Miss Zane made the arrangements.”
“Miss Zane? Gates, who’s he talking about? Did Roxanne have a daughter?”
Gates turned his face into a parody of the funeral director’s, and whispered piously, “I couldn’t say.”
The church to which they were directed was an eighteenthcentury white clapboard building set in a grove of willows and oaks and worn, tilted tombstones. It was a very old church, comfortable with death, having hosted centuries of funerals. It was so old, it had in the back of its second floor, a slave gallery, installed in old times, so that black people could sit there and overhear the Good News that the last would be first. Into this gallery the two Hayes men slipped, so as not to disturb the service, for a small choir was singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (despite, thought Raleigh, the immediate evidence to the contrary). Apparently this hymn concluded Mrs. Zane’s memorial service, for after “Amen” was hummed, the minister, who looked as old as the church, rambled in befuddlement a few more minutes, then gently told the few people gathered to go in peace. Except for a young woman in the front row, they stood and left, at the slow pace set by the dour organ.
At that moment, Gates started mumbling, “Oh shit, oh fuck, oh no,” slid out of his seat, and crawled behind the pew. Raleigh had expected this. Even if the man hadn’t known his mother from Adam and Eve, still, a breakdown of some sort was only human nature. But now Gates had slithered with his elbows to the back wall, where he was peering over the sill of a small round window. “How the fuck,” he whispered, “did he find out I had a mother?”
“Gates.” Raleigh cleared his throat. “Gosh. I wish there were something I could do.”
“Get me out of here!”
“Yes, of course. Let’s go back to the motel.”
“Motel! Shit!” Gates jerked his brother down beside him. “Did you register under your own name?”
“What?”
“Did you use the n
ame Hayes?”
“Of course I did.” Yes, Gates was overcome; more so than Raleigh had anticipated. He had the eyes of a madman.
“Well, that’s fantastic. He’ll check them all out, you can count on that!”
“He? Gates, try to pull yourself together.”
“Okay fine great fine. Think! All right, he walked past the car. So he doesn’t know what we’re driving. He’ll be looking for my Harley.”
Raleigh had realized by now that his brother was discussing someone real, someone presumably down in the churchyard. He looked out the window. Strolling among the tombstones was a fairly young, slender man wearing a white panama hat and a white suit (not dissimilar to the one Raleigh had on). With him was a blond, beetle-browed, fat-nosed man, easily as large as, if not larger than, Mingo Sheffield. This individual opened a big wicker basket, spread out a checked cloth on the grass, and began laying out a picnic, right there in the cemetery. Leaning against a little flowering dogwood tree, a few of its white petals floating down around him, the man in the panama hat began to point out tombstones to his immense companion. To do so he used a thin white bone cane. This object stabbed Raleigh’s memory like a stiletto. At “Peace and Quiet,” hadn’t Gates been muttering in terror about a man with a white cane?
“Is that…Is that…?” What was the ridiculous name? “Cupid Parisi Calhoun?”
“Right.” Gates nodded. “What a run of luck, hunh? And he’s got Big Nose Solinsky with him. Can you believe it? Sorry, Raleigh, I don’t think this is my day. Definitely.”
“Okay, well, well, slow down, don’t worry, Gates. Don’t worry. We’ll just sit here, and together we’ll, we’ll think this thing through,” said Raleigh Hayes.
Chapter 21
In Which Is Described the Famous Barbecue at “Wild Oaks” AT FIRST, Raleigh did not even recognize Weeper Berg, which was, said Mingo, good news. The convict, having refused to re-dress in Tiny Hackney’s suit, now stood in pants, plucking a dirge on his giant bass fiddle. The pants he wore were very mildewed gray pants with yellow stripes up the sides. With them, he wore a gray moth-eaten military tunic. He now had very short flat white hair and very long sorrowful white mustaches. Mingo felt that he’d done a super-duper job of transforming Mr. Berg from a grandmother into a Civil War veteran; and all he’d needed were scissors, glue, and white shoe polish. But Hayes had time for only a passing skeptical glance, and the caveat that, however white Weeper’s hair or decayed his bowels, he did not look the 140 years old he would necessarily have to be in order to have marched under the Stars and Bars.
“But listen,” said Mingo.
“No.” Hayes was too busy to listen. He was too busy loading the Cadillac, unloading the motorcycle, leaving the U-Haul with a note at a (closed) filling station that rented U-Hauls, telling the motel manager that if anyone dropped by looking for the Hayeses to tell them they were already on their way to Cleveland, Ohio. He was too busy trying to cope with the shock of the hospital; trying to scrub out of his mind the picture of the brass urn; trying to calm down Mingo, who’d never met Roxanne Digges, but nevertheless went to pieces when informed that she was dead. Too busy trying to reason with Weeper, who was already complaining that he’d almost rather wear a dress than the uniform of the shit-kicking South, which he aspersed anywise, and who got tears in his eyes when told that they were now on the run from a crime syndicate as well as the police. Raleigh was too busy sliding down the sheer glass cliff of reason and flailing for a sliver of a fingerhold, to listen to a thing until the phone rang with word from Gates, hidden in the parish kitchen, that they could now return to the church, as the picnicking mobsters had gone.
Naturally, Weeper Berg could not ride Gates’s motorcycle: his mustache would blow off, his legs were too short, he was from Manhattan and didn’t know how to drive. Naturally, Mingo had to confess that he was too chicken to try. Naturally, it was left to Raleigh to straddle, in white pants much tighter than he was accustomed to wearing his trousers, the deadly chrome-crowded machine. Left to him to lurch it onto the street, down which, without stopping for lights, signs, or traffic, he swerved spasmodically, like a drunk escort for the big Cadillac behind him, Mingo at its wheel and the neck of Berg’s fiddle sticking out its rear window.
At the church, under the peaceful willows, they found Gates in conversation with the young woman Raleigh had seen stay so quietly seated at the end of the memorial service. Mingo and Weeper rushed over to offer their condolences and Gates disappeared for a moment inside Mingo’s embrace. “She’s gone to a better place,” Mingo told him, and Berg added that he hoped she’d rest in peace. “I put it in the mental shredder,” said Gates. “You know, what can you do?”
The young woman standing there was transparently a very beautiful young woman. Still, Raleigh was amazed that his brother would pick this time to start flirting with a stranger. But she was not, Gates explained, exactly a stranger, although until then unknown to them. This quiet, plainly dressed woman was Sara Zane, and she was, in fact, the niece of Roxanne’s dead husband Fred. Raleigh was told that she was a local schoolteacher. He assumed she must be also a local martyr, for it appeared that, despite the remoteness of her family connection (and despite what Raleigh vividly recalled about Roxanne’s horrendous temperament in the best of times), Miss Zane had visited her aunt-in-law all through the years of her alcoholic widowhood and the further years of her slow cancer and had sat beside her in the hospital and had arranged this memorial service and was now giving, without rancor, as her reason, “There was no one else.”
In return, Roxanne Digges had bequeathed her niece-in-law her entire estate, which consisted of three items: the furniture in her rented house; Fred’s long-distance truck, which since his death had sat up on blocks in the backyard and there been robbed by vandals of several of its parts; and, third, the hospital bills and funeral expenses not covered by her insurance.
This Sara Zane, her eyes grave blue, her hair dark wings, stood now apologizing to Gates, who was staring at her as if she were the mirage of an oasis. She was apologizing for not having been able to reach him, for having felt it necessary to proceed with the cremation, for the fact that Roxanne had not mentioned him in the will, which she certainly would have done, had she…had she…Had she thought about it, Raleigh silently finished. And, of course, Gates should have the ashes, and of course he should have anything else in Roxanne’s house he wanted. She would be staying there for the next few days in order to pack and clean.
“Listen, really, thank you,” said Gates. “I’ll try to get over there tomorrow. Now, listen, okay? If those two guys come back, you know, the ones who were asking you about me, listen, I never showed, and, far as you know, I never even knew Roxanne was sick. And you never heard of me, okay?”
“All right,” she said tranquilly, with what struck Raleigh as a remarkable lack of curiosity. Had she no questions for this strangerson, wandering the churchyard, having missed his mother’s funeral; mysteriously telling her to deny his existence to any who asked? Had she no questions about his companions, one of them an ancient minuscule man in a Civil War outfit; another, a behemoth shouting out information off gravestones: “Here’s a general! Here’s Oliver Wendell Holmes’s father!”
Sara Zane was unsettling to Raleigh Hayes. It was, well, it was freakish, to meet in a cemetery on the day of Roxanne’s memorial service a young woman with the same name as his own dead mother’s. Miss Zane had clearly also upset Gates, for as soon as she left, he kicked a gravestone and said, “I don’t need this now. I can’t handle it.”
“Handle what?” asked Raleigh. There was much to choose from.
But, “Her!” is what Gates replied, and pointed at Sara Zane driving away in a cheap little car. “That one.”
“A chaste tomato,” Weeper Berg acknowledged.
Now, as soon as he was told why and how Gates was being pursued for a $15,000 debt of honor, Berg wanted details. They didn’t impress him. “Cupid who? Calhoun? Never heard of him, an
d if I never heard of him, not to worry.”
“He’s a Parisi,” said Gates, hurriedly hiding his motorcycle behind broken pews in the back shadows of the rectory garage.
“Spare me my credence,” Berg snorted. “Parisis! Parisis couldn’t hit Faggy Sheffield over there with a bazooka! Frank Parisi, may he rest in peace, shot Simple Sammy Loretto six times in a crummy men’s room, and following after which, he chucked him in the reservoir, and Simple Sammy swam to the other side, of about a mile away, and walked home. So, don’t tell me Parisi. It cuts no ice with me. I am colloquial with Parisis, and I can inform you they are one big marshmallow.”
“He’s got Big Nose Solinsky with him.”
This gave Weeper pause. “The Nose is out of the pen again? He was in for life.”
“Well, he outlived it.”
“…Aghh, he’s a cretin. He’s a slab of concrete.”
“Right. And I don’t want to end up under it. I’m sorry, okay?” Gates found an old rug and threw it over his cycle.
“Yaaduda yaaduda. Listen to me, Gates. I’m an old man. My colon’s let go. I got the jimjams. My pants are too long. My collar’s too big.”
“Weeper, not now, all right?”
“What pals I got left quit the business and are cohabitating in Miami playing lousy shuffleboard. I’m down to nickels and dimes in podunk towns. And, irregardless…you listen…irregardless, I could do a waltz around Big Nose Solinsky, any day, with my mitts cuffed! Any day! So. Not to worry.”
Handling Sin Page 34