The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (36 page)

The cold, so bitter, sharpened everything to the present, and tempted him further into the snow. He shed his jacket and determined that he would walk for as long as he could manage, out and down from the mountain, into a field of white.

For thirty-six years Luis suffered from psoriasis and crescent-shaped sores at his elbows and the base of his scalp which sometimes bled and set an irritation deep into his bones – about which he never complained. In the year before he died he lost his sight and became so absent that when residents spoke with him they expected no reply. The staff washed and dressed him, fed and managed him from room to room; in the afternoons they sat him in the parlour, where he leaned toward the window, his face turned to and following the sun. Everyone noticed in that last fall less and less response.

Luis died quietly, watched over by another resident, Dorothy Salinas, who’d known him from the day he arrived. And while Salinas could be counted as a friend, she knew little about him – except that he’d spent time in Montreal, and slept rough for a period before returning to the Midwest, where, eventually, he set up a smallholding in Lansing, to which he devoted the majority of his working life. In the month prior to his move to Normal, Luis signed his house and business over to his sons, who in turn sold up as soon as they could then moved their families out of state and did not stay in contact. Luis had no complaints. Only once did he open up and mention that a long time ago he’d followed a course of action he shouldn’t have, and she supposed that Canada was the way he worked this out, and that isolation helped compress this problem to a manageable size.

While preparing his body the funeral home found a tattoo on his right shoulder, an eagle with a standard emblazoned with the word ‘Santo’.

Luis’s family, his two sons with their wives and five children, drove from Florida in a shabby three-day convoy. On the morning of the funeral, under a clean winter sky, the attendants hid in the parking lot between the fat-backed pickups and smoked dope, and they were soon joined by Luis’s younger son, Rick, who spoke without emotion about his father. Luis, by his report, was a man who would not settle, a man agitated at life, deliberately at odds with everything about him. He’d lived with his father just long enough, then fled like his brother before him, because you can only spend so much time with a man who always seems to be in another room or another town, just someplace else. Although he knew that his father had spent time in the Middle East, he wasn’t sure in which country – the subject never came up. There were no stories, no accounts of service, nothing to help him admire the old man. The attendants shared their marijuana and dug their boots into the gravel as they listened. After two deep tokes Rick glanced back at the figures outside the funeral home and said that he should get going, yep, they were off already; then, to their embarrassment, he began to cry. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and said that he didn’t understand why he was crying because he didn’t, no, he never had loved the old man. It wasn’t either that he hated him. Luis was difficult to be with, difficult to like, difficult to love. And when you’re young aren’t you supposed to be unconditionally loved, just loved without having to earn or deserve it? Rick looked across the parking lot for an answer, and found a colourless prospect of tract houses, a scuffed sky, low-slung telegraph cables. When they drove away, he said, that would be it,
finito
: no reason to return. The attendants shifted back on their heels and said, yeah, they supposed it went something like that.

Luis Francesco Hernandez was buried without the family in attendance.

Before Luis, by eighteen years, came Clark, who’d had most of his tongue cut out and his voice box removed. Mathew Clark died unattended in a private room at the BVM Hospice in Albany. Allergic to penicillin, his throat sealed and he choked. A simple clerical error. Five minutes’ inattention. His funeral at the St Eustace Crematorium was small but attended by people who expected a more miserable demise, and were now faced with something sudden and inexplicable.

Clark’s daughter, Elizabeth, eulogized her father as an uncomplicated man, and passed over the details of his absences, how he would up and go without incitement, and how as a child she was convinced he had another family somewhere, another more fulfilling life. She did not speak about the cancer, about the lesions that peppered the soft skin on the back of his hands, his lower arms, his neck, behind his knees, and about how he often struggled for breath. Not many knew, she said, that her father was an artist. In Clark’s hands she tucked a photograph of herself taken when she was five: a small girl standing beside her mother on the banks of the placid Hudson. Her mother’s hand raised uncertainly to steady her hair or wave, clouds running wild in the sky behind them. She remembered that it snowed later that day, and there was something wonderful about how the photograph appeared so summery, when it was in fact her first memory of winter, her first remembered Thanksgiving. The photo was sent to him in Kuwait, or was it Iraq: the corners blunt and creased, where the sun of that hard country, whichever it was, had bleached the colour to milky whites and yellows.

Before Clark came Watts, who at forty-seven was struck by the downtown bus at a crossing in Kansas City: heading from the Holiday Inn to his car, Watts had his mind on a bottle of bourbon.

At Watts’ funeral his wife, Lara, confided to a work colleague that he wasn’t as likeable as everyone made out. Throughout the service she whispered bad stories about him. How, before the christening of their only child she discovered him leaning over the crib calling the baby a cunt. He’d kept it up for an hour, she said, a revolting rapid-fire
cunt-cunt-cunt-cunt-cunt
. Even as she told this story she knew, hand on heart, that he had uttered
can’t – can’t – can’t
in a whisper so low she’d had to kneel beside him to hear. He was sick when he came back, she said, and she was sick herself, had lost a child, carried it in her dead, and later, despite the birth of their son, their marriage had similarly perished. They lived in a small two-room apartment in Missoula, and his depression, his inactivity, had poisoned their lives. But some things you have to set in the past and leave well alone. He had lived his life and she had lived hers, each without regret. As a man of habit his infidelities ran to a timetable. And he was hung, she said, my god how he was hung. Looking back through the chapel she scanned the crowd and was grateful that the woman he was with on the day he died had the sense not to attend the service, and the better sense to clear away the foil, the glass tubes, the pellets of resin from both the hotel room and the car before the police came. A man with one lung who smoked. How dumb, she said, seriously, how stupid is that? The box of paraphernalia was left on her doorstep two days later, minus the drugs, as a hint that everything should be allowed to lie where it landed. The bus company sent flowers to the house. She had to buy a suit, the only one to her memory he’d ever worn, although secretly she harboured a desire to bury him in a novelty costume. Watts had once told her she had a wide and flat mouth: the mouth of a frog. He wasn’t saying she wasn’t pretty, especially her hazel eyes, so complex they sometimes appeared to be struck with gold. Her chestnut hair, her pale New England skin, gifts from her ancestors, but, my god, everything lower than her nose came right out of a cartoon. After he said such things he’d laugh a little as if it were only a tiny mischief, nothing of consequence. It wasn’t that Iraq changed him: he was always duplicitous, always cold, but he’d come back believing that she did not and would never understand him, although he could never say this directly. His behaviour wasn’t due to any syndrome, PTSD, or a result of his work at the burn pits. No, he was wilful, cruel, contemptful even before his departure. The only syndrome Watts suffered was asshole syndrome. As the curtains closed about the coffin, the sound of the rollers overwhelmed the music, she watched with a steady eye and whispered
can’t, can’t, can’t
.

Before Watts came Samuels, whose body was not discovered, and whose death went unrecorded. Two days before Christmas, Samuels bought a car with cash and a fake ID and drove from Illinois to Louisiana, joining Highway 10 at Baton Rouge. The last people he spoke with were a young couple from his hometown, Topeka, Kansas, he found loitering at the entrance to the services. For a moment he believed that they were summoning the courage to rob the diner, and when he realized that they were hesitating because they had no money, he gave them all the change he had, everything from his pockets, and they tried not to stare at the eczema on his arms, at how he shed his skin in fish-like scales. The coincidence of meeting a young couple from his hometown confirmed the rightness of what he was doing, and with the simple gesture of handing over a fistful of coins he felt that he was handing something on. Samuels, who was always short of breath, sat in his car and thought about how perfect this was, of how endings naturally meet beginnings, then got right back out and returned to the restaurant where he sat with the couple and spoke for an hour, uninterrupted, about the work at Camp Liberty in the southern desert of Al-Muthanna. He spoke at length about a member of their unit, Steven Kiprowski, and how you know you should stop something but you don’t, and you know, even as you do nothing, that this will corrode through you, ruin your life. Unbothered about the proper sequence of events, or whether he was or was not making sense, he told his story in full. Thirty minutes after he was done talking he turned off the highway and tipped the car into a swamp, the small doubt occurring to him that this would not be easy.

Four days after the mud had taken him, the upturned car was swept free and marooned on a high tide on the banks under the raised span of the highway. A storm hauled his body out into the Gulf, and Samuels came closer to what he wanted: to become unaccountably small, to disappear, dissipate, to become less than dust.

Pakosta shot himself in the elevator at the UC Santa Barbara Hospital. With his back against the mirror siding he faced the doors and placed the shotgun under his chin, certain that the damage would obliterate his face. His previous attempt, an overdose of whisky and diet and sleeping pills, caused nothing worse than diarrhoea and a restful sleep, and when he revived he blamed his actions on the weather. It wasn’t easy being poor in Santa Barbara, he said, and it wasn’t easy once the weather straightened out to have one day so similar to another. A handsome man with an open face, the nurses felt the tragedy deeply, unaware that Pakosta was a violent drunk who daily harangued the students and college types taking coffee outside the Flat Earth Café on Main Street with strange obscenities. This man would defecate on doorsteps and harass veterans at the town’s shelter: there was little to recommend him, little that remained decent. Like Samuels he suffered from a skin condition, a red blush at his throat which often coincided with a shortness of breath and the feeling that he was under deep water, separate from the world. Carl Pakosta disliked communists, Californians, and Mexicans, and believed that his neighbour, a school-teacher and former union organizer from Oaxaca, had deliberately poisoned his dog, when he knew the responsibility for the animal’s death was his own. His body was cremated at the expense of the city of Santa Barbara. His ashes were scattered by a volunteer in the Garden of Remembrance because of an error that marked him in city records as a veteran.

Pakosta was missed by the regulars at the Flat Earth Café, and by the tour guides on the whale-watching boats who were used to his bullying rants, and how he’d stand at the pier and disabuse the tourists, asking what, seriously, what did they expect to see out there? You take pictures, he said, pictures. You can’t
eat
the whales. In Pakosta’s last months, time folded over itself and he forgot to eat, began to slip from his routine, and the comings and goings of day-trippers, the simple matter of people departing, became unbearable for him. On his last day he ran after the boats and shouted that the sea would swallow them and they would vanish as if they had never been born.

Rem Gunnersen lived long enough to celebrate his second wedding at St Lawrence’s on Lunt Avenue on Chicago’s Northside. For that one day he assured his guests that he was comfortable and grateful that they had come to witness him rectifying an earlier mistake: his separation from his first wife, Cathy, which he was now correcting by re-marrying her, and making her, simultaneously, his first and second wife. Shrunken, unable to eat solid food, he insisted that everything that could be done had been done many times already. It was now a matter of keeping one stride ahead with his medication, of keeping comfortable. The weekend after the wedding Rem’s lung collapsed, and following directions downloaded from the internet his wife administered the morphine she had stored in preparation and sat with him as he faded.

Before his funeral, conducted in the same church, the doctor gave general answers about the source of Rem’s cancer, and while he could not be absolute he agreed that Rem had sickened after his return from Europe, two years after his time in Iraq, and never properly picked up.

Rem’s guests returned to the church, sat in the same small groups, wore the same suits, and learned how, when exchanging vows, Rem had whispered that he was sorry, that life just cheats you, robs time from you right at the moment you find yourself to be truly content. His daughter, Elsa, presented the eulogy, and refused to find comfort. Rem Gunnersen was a good man who had suffered for no reason. Through all of their troubles, despite all of their years apart, neither Cathy nor Elsa had imagined life completely without him. I want to know why, she asked. I want to know what all of this is for.