The Art of Disposal (29 page)

“I keep seeing this one thing, Ronnie. I was about your age. On a job. I set outside of the guy's apartment building for a good three hours, just pretending to read the newspaper. Waiting for him to get home. Nice sunny day, sitting on a bench in a courtyard. Trees in these concrete things in the middle of it. That long courtyard is empty. Not a living thing 'cept birds. Then I hear someone coming.”

He snagged a hit of oxygen.

“Little crippled girl comes walking through the courtyard. That's what I thought she was anyway. But she gets closer, and I see she's a full-growed woman, but kind of shrunk. Like a dorf.”

“Dwarf,” I said.

“Yeah, a dorf. She looks back over her shoulder, and she thinks she's all alone in that courtyard. She don't see me. Just her and them trees. So she lifts her crutches up. Starts running. Running fast but all weird like, on account of her twisted legs.

“And she has the biggest smile, Ronnie. Real big and white. And she looks up and closes her eyes and she runs. Then she passes by me, and she sees me there all of a sudden. Looks right at me, like I just shined a flashlight on a possum. Freezes right up. The big smile is gone, and she's back on her crutches again. I almost say to her, 'hey, don't stop. You run real nice.' But I don't say nothing. She hobbles off, and I sit there all alone again, waiting for my target to show his lousy face—and I hate that deadbeat even worse, and decide I'm gonna rough him up.

“It's a hell of a thing, Ronnie. I been seeing that lady for twenty some years, every night when I close my eyes. I see that little dorf-broad running real happy-like when she thinks no one's looking, then shrinking up when a pair of eyes is on her. And it seems like it means something. Like if I could write it down the way that Sam Coleslaw could do it, I could turn it into something real pretty.”

I looked at Dan the Man, deep in the valley of the shadow of death, and I wondered how I would die when they called my number. With too much time to think it over, like him, or hit quick in the back of the head? Then I thought how it doesn't really matter either way. The end result is the same infinite nap.

“I'm glad you liked the book,” I said.

“You want it back?”

“Keep it.”

“What do I need it for?”

He wheezed, and something loose rattled around in his throat.

“Keep it,” I said again.

“Thanks for stopping by,” Dan the Man said.

I stood up. I stretched out my right hand.

He took it. We shook for a long time. He didn't want to let go. Neither did I. I cupped my other hand around it. So did he. We stayed like that, a mess of four arms and a ball of hands.

“You scared to die?”

“The dead guys got it easy,” he said. “It's the living guys gotta worry all day and night. I can't wait to see Tall Terry. And maybe I'll see Ricky Cervetti down there too, roasting on one of them turny barbeque things; you know, the kind they put pigs on.”

“Spits,” I said.

“Yeah, spits. While we're over them hot coals, I'll tell him how sorry I am. You want I should tell him anything?”

“Tell him I'm gonna kill Frank Conese.”

My phone rang and rang, and I lay there in bed not wanting to get up and answer it. It was so late that it was almost early. I looked at my alarm clock, and it read 4:19. No one's ever gotten good news on the phone at 4:19 in the morning, so I let it ring, and I rolled back over and shut my eyes—but the party at the other end refused to give up. Finally, I pushed the sheets off and moaned and cursed the whole goddamn world.

“Sorry to wake you up,” Eddie said.

“What is it?” I said, already knowing the answer.

“Just got off the phone with Dotty. Get dressed, Champ. I'll pick you up.”

Eddie picked me up and we drove in silence over to Dan the Man's house. I could feel my arms getting itchier, and the back of my throat was dry, and I wondered if some kind of cancer had sprouted up from a fertile patch in my own dark soul.

Dan's kid was at the house. I'd only met him once. Since he'd gone off to college, he was never around. The kid shook our hands and said thanks for coming over, and he looked a little sad, but not as sad as I thought he should.

Dotty was dressed up like she was hosting a fancy dinner party. She walked around, brought us coffee, made smalltalk: deep in that vacuous denial stage of grief. Dan the Man was dead but he was still in the living room, under a blue bed sheet with faint white daisies on it. It would take her a few weeks, alone in the house, to realize he was never coming back.

We drank coffee and talked about how swell of a guy Dan was, and the sun came up like it always does, slowly filling the kitchen with a happier kind of light; and Dotty clicked off the bulb that was on above the kitchen table. Outside, the birds chirped and hopped on the backyard feeders, and kicked sunflower seed hulls around. The world's joy goes on. If it stopped for every death, it would never get started again.

Eddie called the right people, and he hugged Dotty and told her he'd be back later that day to help plan the funeral.

On the way out the door, Dotty handed me the book. The cover showed the Ancient Mariner tied to the mast of the ship, riding through the worst of the storm.

Eddie flew the flags at half mast, so to speak, and gave a reprieve to all the deadbeats who owed money. My collection route had never been easier. Since I was giving good news, I felt like a good guy; like a postman, or a guy who delivers baked goods to homeless shelters. It warmed me up inside each time a debtor shook my hand and smiled, and told me he was sorry to hear about Dan's untimely passing, and how he'd have the money next week, and a big thanks to Eddie Sesto.

The bar owners all liked Dan the Man, and they liked him even more when I gave them the news that they could keep the profits from the pinball machines and pool tables that week. A gift, from Eddie. And when I told them about Eddie's “suggested donation” to Dan's family, there wasn't a single one that didn't fork over the three hundred bucks.

I thought a lot about those tortoises on the Galapagos islands. They can live to be two hundred years old. And those giant Sequoias in Northern California? Some of them were saplings back when King Tut was putting on his eyeliner. Who picks these different lifespans, and what kind of God decides that a person is only worth sixty, seventy, ninety years? Maybe God is right. Most of us aren't worth fifty years, but some of us, like my Grandpa Jim, are worth a thousand.

There was a stretch of four days before the funeral. I went to Eddie's house and told him to get out of town as soon as the funeral was over. Pack up and take Irene to a nice hotel.

“I don't run,” he said. “Frank wants me, let him come and get me.”

I gave him a scrap of paper with an address written on it, and I told him to look for me there if things went from bad to worse.

“What is it?” he said, putting on his reading glasses.

“Farmhouse. Where I grew up.”

“Who lives there now?”

“Empty five years, since my Aunt Stella died.”

“Are there chickens?” Eddie said, tucking the scrap of paper into his pocket. “I like chickens.”

The night before Dan's funeral, it rained angry sheets. The wind kicked up and scraped at the sides of houses. I sat up and stared out my living room window. The rain was so heavy that the window seemed to be a piece of melting plastic, bending, shifting, turning the bright spot of the streetlamp into a runny mess.

I made a pot of black tea. The Walther PPK with the custom brass-catcher was lying on my coffee table, and I thought back to the day when Dan gifted it to me outside of the Totsy, when the cancer was just a vague and scary idea.

A guy named Eyebrows made that brass-catcher for me, custom.

But even a guy like Dan the Man leaves some brass behind. I sat there and watched that wicked rain run down the window pane. My phone rang.

“Figures it would rain,” Eddie said. “Goddamn rain.”

“Might clear up by tomorrow,” I said.

“You drinking?”

“Black tea,” I said.

“Care if I swing by?”

An hour later, Eddie Sesto was sitting on my crummy couch, drinking a black tea and flipping through a Scientific American magazine.

“Quantum foam?” he said. “You really read this shit?”

I said I did.

“I got a question for you, egghead. Dan the Man's here one day, talking to us. Next day he's gone. So where did he go? I mean, is he up there looking down on us?”

“What do you think?” I said.

“I'd like to think he is.”

“So go ahead and think it.”

Eddie took a sip of tea. “What do you think?” he said.

“Is he looking down on us? Nah. If there is some kind of afterlife, he's light years away by now. A speck of an atom, recycled and turned into something else.”

“You think he might be, you know—down there?” Eddie said, and pointed at the floor. “On account of some of the bad things he done.”

“What do you think?”

“Could be. But I don't like to think about it.”

“So don't,” I said.

Eddie took another sip of tea. “Goddamn rain,” he said.

“It'll clear up.”

“It better,” Eddie said.

We sat for some time, Eddie licking his thumb and slowly working through the pages of the magazine. Sometimes he'd look up and scan my apartment walls.

“What a dump,” he said. “You make good money now. Move already.”

“Best to live below your means.”

“This is like a three foot hole below your means.”

“I was planning on moving, right after that thing with Ricky. Dan was s'posed to help me.”

“So why didn't you?”

“Dan got sick.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

“Yeah,” I said.

We both sipped our tea.

“Dotty. She was all right with cremation?” I said.

“No Sir.”

“But you talked her into it?”

“Nope,” Eddie said. “Only asked her once. Then I talked to Scordino. Set up Dan with a plush black casket. The whole traditional deal.”

“But we promised him,” I said.

“He'll get over it. Funerals ain't for the dead guy anyway.”

I stood up and walked to the kitchen. I put some tap water into the kettle. The rain rolled down the window pane. The kitchen light flickered. I put some new leaves in the mesh basket and lowered it into the iron teapot.

“It's good tea you got,” Eddie said.

“Keemum Dao Ming.”

“Excuse me?”

“The tea,” I said.

“Sounds like one of Thin's old buddies. One of them Chinese gangsters.”

“It does,” I said.

“I miss that skinny Chink.”

“Me too,” I said.

I heard the water boiling, and the kettle-switch clicked and turned itself off. I poured the hot water over the dry tea leaves. They came to life, uncurled, and the water turned red.

“There ain't no better place to hide a body than another man's grave,” Eddie said.

Back when Scordino Sr. was alive, before his kid took over the business, Eddie and Dan the Man used the funeral home to get rid of problems. For a small fee, Scordino Sr. would put the problem corpse right under the corpse of the paying customer.

But Scordino Jr. isn't anything like his old man. He kicks Eddie three percent of his overall profit, and he handles the funerals of any of our friends or family, but Eddie let him steer the business mostly legit.

It's not like it is in the movies, not for guys like us anyway: the guys off in the corner of the family. No lavish funeral with made guys in bright red ties and black suits. No cops in sunglasses watching from across the street. Our services are just like any other: friends and family, nephews and nieces, a priest who barely knows the poor dead bastard, and mediocre homemade potato salad.

We never had a funeral for Ricky Cervetti. He's still alive somewhere. That's what Eddie tells Ricky's wife.
I heard he was down in Key Largo. Ran off with some young broad.
Or Eddie might whiten the lie and say that maybe some bad guys really did get Ricky after all, but that he doesn't know a goddamn thing about it.

I hate seeing Ricky's wife and kid, so of course they were the first people who greeted me when I walked into Scordino's.

“You heard anything?” she whispered to me, while we were hugging.

I told her I hadn't.

“I know he's dead, Ronnie. I'm very psychic.”

Or psycho, I thought. She kept hugging me.

“At least Dotty gets to see the body,” she whispered. “Poor Ricky. He wasn't no angel, but I loved him.”

Wasn't no angel
? That guy would bang anything that spread its legs. She let loose with the tears, and I patted her back and told her I'd keep working on it, but maybe he really
was
alive somewhere down in the Keys. He did like the water.

I met up with Eddie at the coffee percolator, which sat on a table in front of a posterboard covered with photos of Dan the Man when he was young, Dan the Man when he was thirty-something, and Dan the Man as I knew him. There were two or three dozen cards, upright and half-open on the table. Creeping Jody's geranium sat in the middle of all the cards.

“You seen him yet?” Eddie said. “It don't look like him.”

“Never does,” I said.

“I wonder why.”

“You ever see a locust shell, left behind on a tree?”

“Sure,” Eddie said.

“Same thing.”

“At least it stopped raining, Champ.”

“I told you it would clear up.”

“I got a real doozy for show and tell.”

“The grasshopper story?” I said.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, disappointed.

“Dan told me you'd tell it.”

“Prick,” Eddie said, looking at a picture of a young smiling Dan the Man riding a merry-go-round with his kid. Eddie reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a sheet of folded paper. He opened it, examined the writing, laughed to himself a bit, and folded it up again.

“Notes?” I said.

Eddie peeked out at the people in the main room of the parlor, all of them filing in and taking their seats. “Go-time,” he said, patting me on the back.

We walked into the main room and strolled past the flower arrangements, some done up like wreaths, propped up high on easels; some down low to the ground in squat vases that framed the black casket. “
With Deepest Sympathy —Darnell Davis
” read one of them, under a collection of pink and white orchids.