Prayer for the Dead (23 page)

Dyce lay his new driver’s license on the counter. “I’d like a compact car,” he said.

“Certainly, Mr… . Cohen. Do you have a major credit card, please.”

Dyce produced a Visa card, as freshly minted as the driver’s license, also issued to Roger Cohen. This was the first test of the license since he had bought it for one hundred dollars two days earlier. He had already used the Visa card to get a cash advance against a nonexistent credit line of five thousand, some of which he used to pay for the license and credit card.

Dyce watched closely for any sign of suspicion as Tad went through the paperwork to release the car. If he had any doubts about the authenticity of the documents, none showed on his placid face.

He smiled routinely as he handed the cards back and gave Dyce the keys to his rented vehicle. Dyce carefully replaced the cards in his wallet, an item as new as the cards themselves. Everything about Dyce was new now, from the clothes he wore to the papers in his pockets, all of it financed with the several new cards in his wallet. The bruises on his face had nearly vanished, and the moustache, enhanced with mascara for the driver’s-license photo, was coming in nicely.

Once in the car and on his way out of Bridgeport, Dyce finally relaxed. The ease and simplicity of it all scared him more than anything. To think that an underworld of minor thugs and petty hoods could elude the system so efficiently. He could imagine how his grandfather would have inveighed against them, and how his father would have given them grudging admiration.

It was not until he reached New Haven and turned north on Interstate 91 that Dyce realized he had been automatically assessing Tad, the car-rental clerk. I must be crazy, he thought, thinking about that now. There was no time for it; he was being pursued. It was insane to even think about it and besides, he had vowed to put all of that behind him. It was not as if he
had
to do it. Surely he was enough in control of his emotions to deny himself such a dangerous pleasure. Especially in view of the disruption it had just caused. He promised himself to give it up, to give up even thinking about it. This was the perfect opportunity to start fresh in every way. The past was behind him now and he would keep it there; he was certain he could do it. He would shed the old skin and put on a new one as easily as he had slipped out of the hospital and created a new identity.

There is no way they will ever find me if I behave myself, Dyce thought. Criminals are creatures of habit; that’s how they are caught, everyone knows that. I am not a criminal, in the first place, and in the second I am too bright to let myself do anything stupid. He remembered the man in his hospital room, the one whose eyes seemed to cleave through Dyce’s skull. That man was the danger, Dyce thought. The Others do not frighten me. I could walk past them as if invisible—but the one with the searching eyes … He tried not to think about it.

After an hour Dyce stopped in the town of Waverly. Within five minutes he had located an independent insurance agent working out of a real-estate office, and asked to be taken on part-time as a salesman. The real-estate agent, happily surprised to find a man who was willing to canvass clients as well as do administrative work, hired him immediately.

“Do you know how to work one of these?” the agent asked, patting the personal computer terminal on his desk.

“Some,” said Dyce. “I’m sure I could learn what I need to.”

“I’m sure you could, too,” said the agent. “You seem like a bright guy to me.”

Dyce ran a hand over the terminal as if he were stroking an animal.

“Nice machine,” he said.

His father’s grave was marked by a simple marble stone whose original reddish-brown hue had aged into a darkish pink that seemed inappropriate to Becker. He remembered helping his mother pick out the headstone at a time when she was scarcely capable of making the least decision and the proper headstone struck her as a very important one. Ultimately she had opted for the slight reddish tint over the plain gray because she felt it would reflect some of the softer side of the man. Becker was not aware there was a softer side. He was eighteen and remembered his father as a stem, unyielding maker and enforcer of family law.

“There was much more to your father than you knew,” his mother told him, echoing a sentiment she had expressed to the rebellious boy throughout his teenage years. “He had a very sensitive side, too.”

Even now, many years later, Becker found his mother’s statement hard to believe except as an abstraction: Men can show more sensitivity to their wives than to their adolescent sons. But in reality he could not see how that could apply to
his
father. In his memories, Becker could never conjure up his father’s face. The man was always a looming presence, something large and dark and forbidding just at the edge of Becker’s awareness. He pictured the presence behind him, watching, and somehow in the frame of a doorway, as if just entering. Or just catching the young Becker in the act of something. “Authority,” Becker said to himself now, laughing inwardly as he heard the word coming in Gold’s voice. That looming presence you feel as your father is why you have such difficulty with authority today.

Typical of Gold, Becker thought. Quick and easy and cliched—but possibly right nonetheless.

A bird landed on the tombstone next to his father’s and cocked an eye at Becker briefly before taking to the air again, the white underside of its tail flashing intermittently like a burst of Morse code.

His mother’s stone was a plain gray. Becker had selected it himself ten years after the first one. She had possessed a softer side, too, no doubt, but it was obscured by his father’s shadow. And unlike his father, his mother had no advocate to sing her praises or hold forth for her better aspects. The only thing Becker could recall his father ever said about his wife was in praise of her industry, not her feminine sensitivity.

“Your mother works hard enough without your adding to it,” he had said, referring to some mess or other of the young Becker’s. Indeed, everything Becker did seemed to be resented by one or the other of them as adding to their burdens in life. Becker himself felt like the biggest burden of all, one borne out of duty rather than love or pleasure.

Some people should not have children, Becker thought, including himself in the proscription. They haven’t the gift or the patience for it and they do a bad job. Without knowing they’re botching it, probably. With reasonably good will and decent intentions.

Becker had been squatting on his haunches before the graves. He stood now and looked down at them, two grassy plots marked off at head and foot by stone but bordered laterally only in the mind, part of the broad sweep of tended grass, indistinguishable. Part of the lawn now, Becker thought. Surviving only in my memory, and there only infrequently. But alive in the way an artist lives on in his work; their handicraft walks above them now in the twisted framework of my psyche.

The bird returned, flying close enough to Becker to make him flinch, then flapping off, disoriented.

They weren’t that bad, Becker thought now, granting his parents a half-hearted absolution. They weren’t bad enough to make me the way I am. The rest of it has to come from me, some element uniquely my own.

Then, without thinking or knowing why he did it, Becker stepped forward and stood directly atop his father’s grave. He stomped one foot on the soil, hard enough to leave a mark, then, in a confusion of feelings, he looked around to see if he had been observed before returning to the gravel pathway.

Gold will love it, he thought. His neck and ears were warm with the flush of embarrassment. Gold will have a field day … If I tell him. There is so much I haven’t told him, why start now?

It was not until he had walked for several minutes through the cemetery that Becker realized he had been practically running, trying to escape the shame of his action.

The bird seemed to be following Becker, swooping in erratic, confused figures around him wherever he went. Drunk, thought Becker. It must have eaten some rotting fruit. Drunk—or dying. The symbolism of that was a little too pat and he laughed at himself I am regressing, he thought. I came here to find Dyce, some piece of Dyce, some part of the fiend that I can identify as part of me, and instead I am turning into a sentimental, angry child stomping on my father’s grave, seeking portents like a superstitious mystic.

The bird landed on another headstone, then flew off again, but Becker’s attention was suddenly alerted. Atop the grave marker was a single stone, identical to those on the pathway. The name on the stone was Rosen, a woman who had died five years earlier. Looking about, Becker saw three more stones resting atop monuments, two of them also in the Rosen family, another several yards away in a plot belonging to a Martin Aaron who had died four months ago. Within five minutes Becker had located another ten headstones adorned with rocks from the path.

The caretaker looked at him in puzzlement, trying to figure out what Becker was so excited about. He was an old man, past retirement age, who still spoke with the accent of his native Italy.

“Jews,” he said with a shrug.

“What do you mean?” Becker asked.

“You ask who puts the stones on the graves? I tell you. The Jews.”

“I know the graves are Jewish, but how do you know the people who put the stones on the monuments are Jews?”

“Who else?”

“Have you seen them? Do you know if it’s a man? A woman? More than one?”

“Seen them? What do you mean, have I seen them? Sometimes I see them if I happen to be there. Most times, I don’t see them, but it’s Jews. That’s what they do.”

“What they do?”

The caretaker wondered if it was his English that was the problem. What he was describing was an everyday occurrence for him.

“They visit the grave, they put a stone, a pebble, a little rock on the headstone as a sign that they visit. It’s like a mark, hello, I been here. Somebody else comes by, he sees the stone, he knows Uncle Seymour’s been looked after.”

“Only Jews do this? Leave these stones for markers?”

“Only ones I know about, but hey, there’s no law. Anybody wants to can do it.”

“But it’s a Jewish tradition?”

“Tradition? I don’t know. I’m a good Catholic. They do it, that’s all I know. Every month or so, I go by, I take the stones off. You let them pile up, it looks sloppy, people think nobody’s taking care.”

The car skittered along the shoulder, the wheels spinning over stones and sand, until it veered back onto the road. Dyce’s father put the pint of rye whiskey between his legs and wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve.

“Burns like a bugger going down,” he said, turning his half-crazed eyes toward Dyce and grinning. A blast of horn from a startled motorist in the oncoming lane made Dyce’s father swerve back from the center line.

“Assholes on the road,” said Dysen. “But you got to expect that. We’re in asshole territory now. That’s why your grandpa lives here. They named the place for him.” Dysen paused, waiting to be asked. As usual his son disappointed him. “Assholeville. Named after your grandpa.” Dysen laughed.

The boy continued to watch the road with riveted attention, his hands gripping the dashboard, his feet pressed to the floor as if he could control the car from the passenger’s seat.

“Relax. Will you relax? Sit back in your seat.
I’m
watching the goddamned road. That’s my job, not yours.”

Dyce acted as if he didn’t hear his father. He stared straight ahead, trying to keep the car on the road by strength of will. Mr. Dysen looked over at the boy, ignoring him as usual, trying to thwart him, and felt his anger rising sharply.

“I said
relax,”
he said, and struck the boy with a straight, sharp punch on the shoulder.

Dyce looked at his father, startled but not surprised.

“That was just to get your attention. Now relax.”

The boy sat back, rubbing his shoulder.

“I am relaxed,” Dyce said.

“You’re about as relaxed as your grandpa’s ass muscle. Boy, that came down in a straight line, didn’t it? From old Nate through your mother straight to you. Ass muscles tight as a fist. A fart couldn’t get out of any one of you. Especially your mother.”

Dyce turned away and looked out the side window. Christ, now he’ll sulk, thought Dysen. Can’t say a damned thing about his mother without him acting like that, all teared up and defiant. What the hell does
he
know about her?
I
was the poor bastard who married her. He only had to deal with her for four years before she died. What the hell does he know?

Dysen lifted the bottle to his lips again, just a sip this time. He didn’t want to be drunk when he dealt with asshole Nate—but he sure as hell didn’t want to be cold sober, either … God, it felt good. Not going down; it never stopped burning going down, but when it hit bottom and spread out like warm fingers, it was as good as coming. Get to come in your pants a dozen times or more for the price of a pint. Can’t beat that.

When he looked, Dyce was trying to steer the car from the dashboard again. Dysen relented. It couldn’t be easy, having no mother, and he had to admit that sometimes he was a little tough on the kid himself. It was good he’d only tapped him on the shoulder, Nate got on his high horse if he found bruises on the boy. Especially on the face—that drove him crazy. As if any normal eight-year-old boy wouldn’t have bruises. He had gotten banged up worse than his son ever had, just running around, getting into fights on the playground, whatever. Still, he couldn’t afford to alienate old Nate any more than normal, not as long as the old bastard still had control of his checkbook.

Dysen rumpled Dyce’s hair. “Old Rodger, old Rodger-Dodger, old Rodger-Codger-Lodger-Dodger.”

The boy tipped his head away from his father’s hand, waited a tactful moment, then smoothed his hair.

The little son of a bitch hates me, Dysen thought, furiously. He wanted to smack him across the face, he wanted to pull the car to the side, get out, and kick his ass properly. He clung to the steering wheel until his fingers hurt, steadying himself before he took another drink, which he deserved as a reward for self-control. The warmth of the whiskey brought with it a wave of sentiment and suddenly Dysen was close to tears. My son hates me, he thought. I love the little shit and he hates me. I took care of him all his life, and he can’t stand to have me touch him. But he loves his goddamned grandfather. That old fart could paw the boy all he wanted, pet him like he was a fucking dog, stroke him until it looked unhealthy to Dysen. The little shit never pulled away from that. Stroking and cuddling and kissing like two women. It didn’t look right for men to carry on like that. And whispering to him about Jesus. Christ, that old fart and his Jesus.