The Bottom (24 page)

“To the Friedmans, you mean?”

She glares at me.

“It’s none of your business to who.”

“Whom.”

“You’re correcting my goddamn grammar now?”

Well, I stop short of saying, “I should cut you some slack. You did come from advertising.”

“You think I don’t know who fed that story to the
Scimitar
? You think I don’t have some connections? And if I know who tipped that rag off about Chenault, don’t you think he’s going to find out, too?”

I clear my throat and stand up. I’ve caught about enough shit for the time being.

“You asked me if I knew how much Wat Chenault was going to sue us for.”

She stops ranting.

“What? Oh. That’s what I think they call a rhetorical question.”

I can hear the sarcasm dripping like a leaky faucet.

I wait a couple of seconds.

“Nevertheless I have an answer for you.”

She looks puzzled.

“On how much he’s going to sue us for. The answer is zero. He is not going to sue us for one fucking cent. At least he won’t as long as I know what I know and don’t tell anybody what I know. You know?”

She is smart enough to let me finish.

“If I’m still working here, Wat Chenault doesn’t sue us for a penny. If I somehow become unemployed, this paper and Chenault are both up to their necks in shit.”

She wants to know more, of course. I tell her she’s on a need-to-know basis, and I’ve decided she doesn’t need to know.

“Now,” I tell her, “if you’ll excuse me, I have a story to write.”

She’s still talking when I walk out, something about insubordination.

Lady, I want to tell her, I was insubordinating when you were still teething.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

X

Sunday, October 6

“D
ude, can’t we make this thing sit still?”

Awesome is having a little trouble finding his sea legs. Hell, he doesn’t do that well with his land legs.

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea in the world bringing him out here, but he’s family now, and this is a family day. Well, family and a few friends. Peggy and Andi are here, of course. And Cindi and Custalow and R.P. McGonnigal, whose latest love interest, a guy with more money than he knows what to do with, is our captain.

And, of course, Les is here.

It’s a big boat.

The water makes me think of Cordell Kusack, whose body might have made it out here to the Bay if it hadn’t gotten snagged on that island in the James. Hopefully he’s been roasting over a spit in hell for a few days.

Les would be pleased by our plan. He always said he wanted his ashes scattered over the Chesapeake. In the year and a half since his death, we have absently wondered from time to time how exactly we were going to do that. It wasn’t Job One. Peggy seemed more than happy to keep what was left of the love of her life sitting in a jar on the mantel. She had few compunctions about telling a few miscreant husbands and boyfriends to hit the road, posthaste, but she kind of wanted to hang on to Les. We all did.

But then I happened to mention it one night when R.P., Andy Peroni, Abe, and I were playing poker. R.P.’s friend was there, sitting in.

I was talking about how hard it was going to be, logistically. I mean we couldn’t just drop his ashes in the York River or some creek up in Annapolis and hope they found their way to the deep water. And none of us had a boat.

“Hell,” R.P.’s partner said, “I’ve got a boat.”

And so here we are, a mile or so offshore with Reedville fading into the haze behind us.

“I think this’ll do,” I tell the captain. Peggy nods.

We heard about a service that puts people’s ashes into biodegradable boxes that will sink “in a minute or two” and not do any further violence to the Bay––in addition to avoiding the too-frequent occurrence of loved ones’ ashes blowing back in the faces of the mourners. So I had Les’s ashes transferred to one of those. We have it beside us on the boat.

Les deserved better than to be picked off with a high-powered rifle by a deranged killer who had it in for everybody on the 1964 Richmond Vees, his last stop in a pro baseball career that never got beyond Triple-A. But, like old Mick Jagger says, you can’t always get what you want.

And so we’re here to do right, the best way we know, by a man who always did right.

I pick up the box and ask if anyone has anything to say.

“Mom?”

“Damn,” Peggy says, “I don’t even go to church. If I start praying, we might get hit by lightning.”

But I say a few words, about him being the best father I never had, and then Andi and Custalow join in. Awesome just says, “Dude. Sleep good.” Finally, Peggy steps up.

“That’s enough. We’ve wasted enough time out here, hauling your ashes, you old bastard.”

I hug her. She and I drop the box off the side of the boat. Andi has brought along some rose petals. She sprinkles them in the water. I watch to make sure she doesn’t get too close to the edge. The baby’s making her kind of front heavy.

And we wait for the box to sink. And wait. And wait.

The captain is following it, very slowly, with his boat as it floats like a cork on the Chesapeake. I remember that, for some reason, Les’s name is on the bottom of the box.

“We have to get it back in,” I tell the captain. He shakes his head and points me to a net with a long handle, no doubt for hauling in rockfish. It’ll do.

I reach over the side of the boat and, with Custalow holding me to keep me from falling in, I pull Les Hacker back out of the Bay.

We open the box and look down at Les’s ashes in the container inside. We scratch our heads for a few minutes. Then I hear Peggy. At first I think she’s crying, but I overestimate my mother’s sentimentality.

“Oh, Les,” she says as she doubles over with laughter, “you always were a good swimmer.”

“Looks like he was headed for Bermuda,” Custalow adds.

Soon we are all howling, even the captain. We expected tears today, but not this kind. And I know that Les would be laughing with us, if he could.

The captain has us half fill the box with water. We set it back in the Bay. In a couple of minutes, it finally starts its slow descent, sinking below a path of rose petals.

R.P. starts opening the beers. We could all use a little closure.