by Tariq Shah
As we crawled along with the other cars on the freeway, I start thinking of Charlie Maple, the nothing-memory of him that I learned about in the newspaper.
US Navy. Veteran of the Vietnam War. Made lieutenant after a couple tours in the sopping lowland jungle cloaking the DMZ. This was a couple months before Ray came on the television, before that awful call to Vince.
The notice read: Sunday, between the hours of 11am and 2pm, at which time he will be interred at Green-Wood Cemetery.
To rest among the green woods there, and the green everything else.
It was a soupy late autumn day. Everyone was already graveside when I pulled up, massed around an arthritic tree trunk whose canopy did little to protect them. A dozen or so mourners, the only ones populating the cemetery grounds. The committal was only just underway. I remember wading through the fallen leaves, so many were there, as though coming to shore. Careful to keep a respectful distance, I crept forth, just in time to catch the priest intone: Death is in your hands…
Some of the headstones were still lichened and green as limes, stood crooked, like teeth needing braces, or the blunt, cracked thumbnails of an old god in a millennial coma. In a few weeks they’d be frosted, silver shields gleaming in the winter’s thin anti-sunlight.
I wanted to observe from afar, unobtrusively, but got nearer to better hear the priest.
… Whoever believes in me shall live even in death and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.
Maple was a Catholic, a city kid, hurled his purple heart at the feet of the House of Congress in ’71, or maybe ’72. Then he was a married man, a company man, a father of four daughters full of promise. He had a fall. I overheard a couple lamenting it. He tripped down the subway steps at Fulton Center. His brother insists he was pushed. He must have been his brother, since their faces cracked and creased in the same places about the eyes and nose when he winced through the grief brought less by the priest’s words, more by the young daughter of the daughter of the dead lieutenant. I studied the great big photo of his smiling, ecstatic face resting on the easel behind the casket. A face too young to crack so early, but that’s war, as the saying goes.
Having endured mortar fire, heavy artillery, guerilla snipers lurking closer every night, fever, leeches, and all sorts of rot and rash of the body, Charlie had a fall, broke his head, could not be put back together again. His final act stopping morning traffic into the city. Maybe that suited him just fine.
…And the hour of death unknown…
I couldn’t help admiring the granddaughter playing with her Barbie, as the earthmover loomed behind her, inert, a yellow scorpion of tawdry steel, deep in slumber. The brother holding Charlie’s cane, absurdly cradling it in against his chest, as though for protection against all that’s out there, as one cradles a rifle, even one prone to inopportune malfunction.
In a fit of boredom and frustration, the granddaughter tossed her doll into the grave before anyone could thwart her, and it was quickly engulfed in soil made the color and consistency of browned, ground chuck by the drizzle. Mother holding back daughter to keep her from rescuing her friend. Tantrum, hard slap that makes everyone’s face go red.
“We’ll get you a new one on the way home,” said mom, mushing the girl’s teary face in her grip, then hurrying off in embarrassment and dragging her along.
“But what about her?” She pointed a stern finger to where her Barbie had landed. Out of answers and patience, mom just gave a weary sigh, continuing to haul her daughter along while making up an answer that would satisfy.
… Lighten their sense of loss with your presence…
We all focused back on him in the bright, starched white collar and bifocals spotted with rain, despite his hooded slicker.
No one really noticed or seemed to care about my presence at first, so I got closer still, until I was in the center of the horseshoe the others had formed around the earth’s open hole.
…Through disobedience to your law we fell from grace and death entered the world…
Gradually, and one by one, the family sensed an imposter. I disregarded their glances, cleared throats, each ahem sent my way, until I felt a soft but insistent tap on my shoulder. I didn’t turn from the priest. He kept going, reading from his little book. I was enjoying myself.
… at your voice the tombs will open and all the just who sleep in your peace will rise and sing…
“If you’re not a friend, I ask that you move on,” said a weathered voice near my ear. I imagined that it belonged to an old man, perhaps the father, a war buddy, but I don’t know, I didn’t bother turning toward it.
Was this what it was like? Wendy, was it at all like this?
…And gently wipe every tear from your eyes…
Thinking of him. Thinking of her. The voice in my ear saying, “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
I spat in the grass between my feet. The most-lush daffodils flanking either side of the coffin. I resisted the unsettling urge to French kiss each petal, or gobble them down by the handful. I took a step closer. That’s when the rifle reports jolted us all out of our skins. It dawned on me I’m the only one in dirty jeans, that I was wearing my Use Your Illusion t-shirt. What I’d slept in. Red flag right there.
Coffee brown birds in a row of scrawny poplars fled after the bang, as though giving chase to the lead rounds bellowing off to heaven. Birds are silly things. The power of flight gives them naive convictions about what’s possible.
I turned my attention to the polished bolt action of the rifles as the soldiers reloaded in their impeccable white gloves and awaited the command to fire again, to shatter this moment, like a livid gust slamming shut a storm door.
I never saw the face belonging to the voice. After the third volley split through the quieting air, I wandered away with the others to where I’d parked my car and decided to skip the banquet hall reception. How could I ever tell this to Vince? My hands were trembling as I drove through the gates, and I felt one of the old headaches looming behind my eyes, but my heart was singing out to Charlie; my heart was singing the dead awake.
*
Being one of the last to arrive at Marsden & Goolsby Funeral Services, we park in the nail salon lot across the street and navigate four lanes of traffic and plowed snow to reach the funeral home driveway.
“You know, I just realized—Ray died never knowing—in all likelihood at least—never having experienced a blowjob. And that’s kind of sad. He’ll never—”
Vin smacks me across the mouth. At first I’m confused. He looks surprised himself.
We’re just outside the chapel, off to the side of the building, in the snow between the parked cars and the fire exit. I lunge at him, take him to the ground, where we grapple to a stalemate.
Even at his wedding, except for during the actual ceremony, he’d been on my case about my drinking too early, too hard, even though he was matching me drink for drink. It was maybe sound advice, I admit, but we were warring, in our constant, low-grade way, and when it’s like that between people, the line that shall not be crossed is never clear. That was just a week or two before I moved, but here we are, picking up just where we left off.
“Truce?” I say.
Huffing and puffing, Vince shrugs.
We brush dead leaves and snow off our clothes.
“It is a shame, I suppose,” he says.
“All I’m saying.”
Always bickering, snapping. Just like family. Vince goes in but I stay outside for a minute. I need a calm-down cigarette. This is our united front.
*
At each funeral, there were breakdowns, uncomfortable dead-air moments between myself and strangers attempting to bridge a chasm.
Bachman’s daughter swore she’d never forgive her father for catching pneumonia. Vlad’s brother swore to me he felt his dead sibling somehow attached to his heart, as if by piano wire, which made it painful to go on the long evening strolls he normally enjoyed. He really said this to me. I co
uldn’t help giggling a bit. He did too, just before falling to pieces. Everything, and everyone—ridiculous.
Just listen and out they come—tragic confessions, vicious little honesties, bitter outpourings spit like pushpins from the mourners’ mouths.
I would find something, inevitably. I’d let them off the hook for whatever it was. And I’d return home reassured of my own invincibility and with a wider appreciation for the mysterious ways of creation.
Finishing my smoke, I wander around to the back of the funeral home. As I’m making the corner though, I come across a woman, alone in the rear lot. It takes me a second to register Marcy’s face. She looks scrawny and lost, meandering through the landscaping blocking the view of the adjacent homes.
“I just needed some air,” she says, when she notices I’ve seen her.
“Me too.”
“You look nice.”
“Oh, thanks. Sorry we’re late, we just got stuck in traffic.”
Marcy is no longer listening, though. She isn’t even looking at me.
“Bring him back, Ant. I want him back here. He needs his mom.” She brings her fist down lightly on my chest, like she’s knocking on a little door, seeing straight through my body.
“I can’t, Marcy.”
“Bring him back, Ant. I’m going mad.”
I shake my head at this. “I don’t know how.”
Marcy nods at me, though it’s all a confused front, all hurt, as though English were now unfathomable to her. But she remains there, knocking clumps of snow from a spruce tree limb. The dust glitters around her. I wipe my eyes. I have to leave. I suddenly need to be closer to the warmth of the living.
*
Father Devin Leper talks with a certain tick; it makes him nervously yank on his shirt collar, as if it were too snug around the neck. He introduces himself and offers me his bony hand.
“I’m a friend of the family,” I say.
“Please, most everyone has assembled in our visitation chapel, if you’ll follow me. Did the Channel 9 news crew arrive yet?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“They said they would come. Then again, they always say that…”
We head into the short, wide hall, where a crowd mingles. I clear my throat as we approach, and nod at those faces I recognize. Father Leper, tall and gaunt, floats throughout the room, expressing his sympathies again and again.
Vince leans against a Steinway in the corner. I’m slowly making the rounds, embracing relatives, shaking hands with friends, and avoiding introductions with the few I’ve never seen before.
“What can you say about these freak accidents?” cousin Patricia says to me. She nibbles at the square of coffee cake she’s got loosely wrapped in a napkin. I give her question some thought.
“Nothing,” I say. “You can’t say anything, really.”
“And yet—I have to. We all have to keep on saying these empty, meaningless things to each other.”
Vince’s Uncle Miles says to her, “They ought to ban ownership of the breed. They shouldn’t be kept as pets. I’ll say that much. Get a lab. Get a poodle.”
Patricia glances at him, listening, but makes no reply. Angling it so it fits, she negotiates the rest of the pastry into her mouth.
I make my way to the back of the line formed to pass Ray’s casket when Marcy appears at the chapel doors like an outlaw with unfinished business at a saloon. The withering stare she casts about the room seems a dare to stop her. As it falls upon the faces of all her loved ones, less loved now, they wilt. But there is no acknowledgment in her eyes, nothing registers, moving as though the place was vacant.
How many times had I seen that look? It was only the little kids that got it, after taking a basketball to the face some big kid chucked at them, after being pantsed in front of everyone, after someone claimed carnal knowledge of their mother, and they storm over to the big kid, the last straw crushed in their fists, and they confuse rage for the ability to fight. Had those looks ever led to anything good? I don’t think I ever stuck around to witness the massacre.
Shouldering her way through the crowd, no one here would like anything more than to make way.
Dan’s behind her then, fishing for her hand through the other limbs pressing around her, saying, “C’mon, Marce,” in a whisper, “C’mon now, Marcy, I know. Let’s keep it together, for our boy.”
But she’s already before the coffin, caressing the shellacked surface. He is afraid of touching her. I see him thinking twice— hand floating inches above her arm, her waist, her right shoulder blade, as though unstable fields of psychic energy would dissolve whatever fingers made contact.
She has obliterated the line. Guests scatter for open seats, or clear stretches of wall. Briefly, the room is silent. I can hear Marcy’s long blue nails, clicking like talons along the coffin’s spotless lid, as she gazes down at her boy’s form, even though it’s closed. I see the fingerprints she leaves there too, after Dan pulls her away.
“It’s what you wanted, remember?” he says. “Vin, we need some help up front. Ant? Heck are you doing here…”
Vince shrugs my way as Dan drags him off to Marcy, sulking against the staircase, walled off by blushing pallbearers.
I trail them down the hall, silent for the carpet, though Dan’s priority seems to be speed rather than discretion. At the far end of the hall there’s a left, and at the top of a five-step staircase, a kind of lounge or break room that seems meant for next of kin. I stay at the bottom, close enough to hear, standing against the wall by a pedestal displaying a marble bust of some woman with ridiculous hair. I can see three or so pairs of legs arranged around those of a wooden table.
“You’ll feel better,” Dan says. “I’m just trying to help you get through this.”
“That’s very sensible of you, Daniel. You’re so rational.”
“Honey—I don’t—it hurts me to see you like this.”
She gasps, “Oh, I’ve embarrassed you.”
“Vince—”
“I’ve ruined this for you, haven’t I. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. You had—let me guess—a vision for the look of your son’s wake and I’ve bent that all out of shape.”
“Goddamn it. Vince, give ’em here.”
“Good boy, Vince.”
“Thank you, Vince. I’m sorry. You can get back there. We’ll talk later.”
I see Vince stand, back up from the table. What I hear is sort of slurred but really, unmistakable—Marcy struggling. Her mouth sounds covered. Marcy coughing, retching. Dan’s prudent, good-doctor’s voice, telling her to swallow, saying it’s for the best, it’s supposed to help.
Vin busts me eavesdropping as he comes down the stairs, taking two at a time. But he doesn’t say a word, just strides into the back doors like the Incredible Hulk, everything fine and just jim-dandy, right past Father Leper, who is just outside, still holding out hope for Channel 9 to show.
*
I follow him out to the four-lane road, but miss the light and have to wait. Everything is lights and waiting around to cross crosswalks in this dump. Everything is timing. Vince fronts like he doesn’t see I’m right here.
“Gonna ditch me?” I yell.
But Vince unlocks the car and gets in. I cross when the light’s finally green again. Going casually, as if doing so rendered the threat of being marooned here preposterous, even though it’s not. I’ve ditched him before. He’s ditched me. Those days were long ago, those betrayals petty, only devised to give the feeling we were gangsters fleeing a job gone south, or to see the other in dire straits for a second.
However, whether desertion in the wastes of suburban Wisconsin is or was ever on the table, Vince’s still idling in the Cutlass when I reach him there. He even lets me get in.
“The ground is too hard for burial, this deep into winter,” I say, and light a cigarette. “Using the backhoe can seem callous, unless requested by the bereaved. Same for the jackhammer. If this place has the facilit
ies, perhaps a grave-thawer, it may not be an issue. Whether Dan and Marcy plan to cremate, or simply wait for spring, I don’t know. Dan looks to be handling it pretty well though…”
“That’s Dan for you, isn’t it,” Vince says.
“What’s he again? A anesthesiologist?”
“Real estate broker.”
“Could’ve told them I was coming…”
Vince puts us in reverse and backs out. “It slipped my mind, Ant. Not everything’s about you…”
“Where to now? Another errand to run? Off to the pharmacy, I mean cemetery? Which is which, I can’t tell anymore.”
“Don’t you have a plane to catch or something? Thought you were done here. What you want to head back to Ray’s place for? Need a kielbasa fix?”
“I’ve got time yet.”
“Oh, come on.” He stomps on the brakes. The force jerks the car.
“Hey, at least the brakes work.”
Vince puts us in park and lifts his bandaged hand. “See this? Well guess what, Ant. It hurt. And guess what else, it still fucking hurts.” Vince unvelcros the straps of the neoprene brace with a trembling hand and chucks it on the dash. The gauze beneath it has gone maroon in splotches. “You could use a change.”
“Me and everyone else.” Wheezing out in pain, he peels off the sticky strips clinging to his wrist. His breath puffs out in the frosted afternoon light.
Underneath, Vince’s hand is distended and unclean, mushroom blue about the knuckles, sutures protruding like a line of thick black in-grown hairs. “Turns out when you punch a concrete column as hard as you can, the concrete wins. There was a bolt screwing the sign in place, a fat son of a gun, and gave me these cuts.
“Now pay attention, Ant, it gets complicated—you punch a concrete column and bust up your shit, and what they do nowadays is when you do that shit, the doctor gives you a bunch of little magic pills that kill the pain. Just like that, old buddy. So quit looking at me like I’m some kind of fucking—Jack the Ripper or whatever.”