The Lay of the Land (9 page)
“I guess I’d have to think about that,” I say. Though not for long. This is news I don’t need to hear. Though, of course, it’s exactly what people who stand outside funeral homes while the body’s inside cooling always yak about. Now it can be told: Who he fucked, aren’t we glad we’re smarter, where’d the money go, isn’t it a credit to us he’s in there and we’re out here.
Bud wheezes a little laughlike noise down in his throat. “You need to hear what she said, though. This Professor Novadradski. Naturally it’d be a Ruskie.”
I think a moment about Ernie mugging his “Rooshan” accent and pounding the table at the Manasquan Bar years and years behind us now, when Russian meant something.
“Nyet, nyet, nyet,”
he’d growled and shouted that night about some crazy thing, took off one of his loafers and pounded it like Khrushchev, sweated and drank vodka like a Cossack. We all laughed till we cried.
“What she said was—and I got this from Thor Blainer” (the defrocked Unitarian minister). “He said the male nurse out at Delaware-Vue came in and gave Ernie the big shot because he’d been having a pretty rough time there for a day or so. Just walked in and did the deed. And in about three minutes, Ernie quit breathing, without ever saying anything. Then this Russian woman—right down in his face—starts saying his name over and over. ‘Er-nie, Er-nie. Vat’re you tinking? How dus you feel? Dus you see some colors? Vich vunz? Are you colt? Dus you hear dis voice?’ She said it, of course, in a soothing way, so she wouldn’t scare him out of coming back if he wanted to.”
Lloyd’s heard enough and heads off around the side of the building to check on the Expedition, its headlights still shining into the mist. Some sound audible only to undertakers has reached his ears, alerting him that a new matter needs his expertise. He ambles away, hands down in his topcoat pockets, leaning forward like he’s curious about something. Lloyd’s heard these stories a jillion times: corpses suddenly sitting up on the draining table; fingers clutching out for a last touch before the fluid gurgles in; bodies inexplicably rearranged in the casket, as if the occupant had been capering about when the lights were out. The human species isn’t supposed to go down willingly. Lloyd knows this better than Kierkegaard.
“Okay, Lawrence,” I hear Lloyd say from around the side. “Let’s get ’er going now.”
A tall young black man dressed in a shiny black suit, white shirt and skinny tie, and bundled into a bulky green-and-silver Eagles parka with a screaming eagle over the left breast, emerges from the porte-cochère beside the building. He’s flashing a big knowing grin, as if something supposed to be serious—but not really—has gone on inside. He stops and shares whatever it is with Lloyd, who’s facing down, listening, but who then just shakes his head in small-scale amazement. I know this young man. He is Lawrence “Scooter” Lewis, surviving son of the deceased Everick Lewis, and nephew of the now also deceased Wardell, enterprising brothers who made buckets of dough in the early nineties gentrifying beaten-up Negro housing in the Wallace Hill section of town and selling it to newcomer white Yuppies. I sold them two houses on Clio Street myself. Lawrence, I happen to know, went to Bucknell on a track scholarship but didn’t last, then entered the Army Airborne and came home to find his niche in town. It’s not an unusual narrative, even in Haddam. Scooter, who’s younger-looking than his years, gives me a sweet smile and a small wave of unexpected recognition across the lawn, then turns and walks back toward his waiting Expedition before he’s seen that I’ve waved back.
“Now hear me out, Frank.” Bud’s short upper lip begins to curl into a sneer. I’m not going to be glad to have heard this story, whatever it is. I hope Ernie has had the good grace in death to be still and not make a fool of himself. “The second this Ruskie gal quits saying ‘Ernie, Er-nie,’ she puts her ear down close to him, where she can hear the slightest sound. And when the room’s quiet, she hears—she swears—what sounds like a voice. But it’s coming from Ernie’s
stomach
!” Bud flashes another astonished smile, which wipes away his sneer. “I swear to God, Frank.
She
swears the voice was saying ‘I’m here. I’m still here.’ Out of his
goddamn
stomach.” Bud looks exactly like the old-time actor Percy Helton, round, raspy-voiced, craven and mean, his fishy eyes saucered in mock horror that is actually gleeful. “Doesn’t that beat the shit out of everything you ever heard?”
Bud, for some reason, opens his mouth as if a sound was meant to emerge, but none does, so that (having already looked in Lloyd’s nose) I now have to see his short, thick, mealy, café au lait–colored tongue, broad across as Maryland, and, I’m sure, exuding vapors I don’t want to get close to. Men. Sometimes the world is way too full of them. What I’d give this second for a woman’s ministering smell and touch. Men can be the worst companions in the world. Dogs are better.
“She also said he was alive in a sexual sense. What do you think about that?” Bud blinks his sulfurous little peepers while fingering his half-glasses-on-a-string outside his black overcoat.
“Death’s like turning off the TV, Bud. Sometimes a little light stays on in the middle. It’s not worth wondering about. It’s like where does the Internet live? Or can hermits have guests?”
“That’s bullshit,” Bud snarls.
“You probably hear more bullshit than I do, Bud.” I smile another mirthless, unwelcoming smile.
Snow of the thin, stinging variety has begun to skitter before the burly November wind, turning the St. Augustine greener and crunchy. Sharp bits nick my ears, catch in my eyelids, sprinkle the jaunty-angled top of Bud’s tweed hat. Contrary to expectation, I wish I was inside, standing vigil beside Ernie in his box, and not out here. I remember a night years past when a young, lean but no less an asshole Buddy Sloat—still practicing divorce law and before the unexamined life of lamps caught his fancy—started a row over, of all things, whether a deaf man who rapes a deaf woman deserves a deaf jury. Bud’s view was he didn’t. The other guy, an otolaryngologist named Pete McConnicky, a member of the Divorced Men’s Club, thought the whole thing was a joke and kept looking around the bar for someone to agree with him and ease the pressure Bud felt about needing to be right about everything. Finally, McConnicky just smacked Bud in the mouth and left, which made everybody applaud. For a while, we all referred to Bud as “Slugger Sloat,” and laughed behind his back. It’d be satisfying now to hit Bud in the mouth and send him back to the lamp store crying.
Bud, however, doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. He watches the Black-Mariah Expedition creep out from the porte-cochère, wipers flapping crusts of new snow, big headlight globes cutting the flurry, gray exhaust thickening in the cold. Ernie McAuliffe’s dark casket is in the windowed, curtained luggage-compartment, as lonely and uncelebrated as death itself—just the way Ernie wanted it, no matter how his belly ached to disagree. Scooter Lewis sits high in the driver’s seat, shining face solemn in self-conscious caution. Lloyd watches from the grass beside the driveway. He probably has another of these occasions in half an hour. The funeral business is not so different from running a restaurant.
Unexpectedly, though, before Scooter can navigate the big Expedition out onto the street and turn up toward Constitution and the cemetery, a squad of Battle of Haddam re-enactors (Continentals) comes higgledy-piggledy, hot-footing it around the corner at the bottom end of Willow Street. These “patriots” are running, muskets in hand, heavy-gaited, their homespun socks ragged down to the ankles, shirttails flapping, beating a hasty retreat, or so it seems, from a smaller but crisply organized company of red-coated British Grenadiers hurrying around the same corner in a stiff little formation, their muskets at order arms, bayonets glinting, black regimental belts and boots, crimson tunics and high furry hats catching what muted light there is. They present an impressive aspect. The Continentals have been whooping and shouting warnings and orders on the run. “Get to the cemetery and deploy.” One’s waving an arm. “Don’t fire till you see the whites of your eyes.” From the funeral home lawn, I see this man is an Asian and small and rounded in his homespuns, though his command voice has real authority.
The Redcoats, once onto the corner, very smartly form two lines of five, crosswise of the street, five kneeling, five standing behind. A tall, skeletal officer hurries up beside them and without any buildup barks an Englishy-sounding command, raises a bulky cutlass into the New Jersey air. The Grenadiers shoulder their weapons, cock their hammers, aim down their barrels and—right in the middle of Willow Street, in the cold misting snow, as it must’ve been back in 1780—cut loose up the street at the Americans, who’re just in front of Mangum & Gayden’s (in time to be shot) and blocking Scooter Lewis’s path in his Expedition.
The English musketry produces a loud, unserious cracking sound and gives out a preposterous amount of white smoke from barrel and breech. The Continentals, swarming past the funeral home, turn as the volley goes off, and from various positions—kneeling, standing, crouching, lying on the yellow-striped asphalt—fire back with similar unserious cracks and smoke expenditures. And right away, two Brits go right over as stiff as duckpins. Three Continentals also get it—one who’s taken cover behind the hearse’s fender, with Ernie in the back. The Americans make a much more anguished spectacle out of dying than the English, who seem to know better how to expire. (It’s a strange sight, I’ll admit.) The remaining Grenadiers calmly begin to reload, using ramrods and flinting devices, while the Continentals—forefathers to guerrillas and terrorists the world over—just turn and begin hightailing it again, whooping and hoo-hawing up to Constitution, where they clamber around the corner and are gone. It hasn’t taken two minutes to fight the Battle of Willow Street.
Lloyd Mangum, Bud Sloat and I, with Scooter behind the wheel of his hearse, have simply stood in the wet grass and borne silent witness. No humans have emerged from neighbor houses to inquire what’s what. Musket smoke drifts sideways in the snowy, foggy Willow Street atmosphere and engulfs for an instant my Suburban, parked on the other side. The sound of the Continentals, shouting orders and yahooing, echoes through the yards and silent sycamores. Other muskets discharge streets away, other manly shouts are audible above the muffled sound of campaign snares and a bugle. It is almost stirring, though I’m not in the mood. Ernie, once a combatant himself, would’ve gotten a charge out of it. He’d have wondered, as I do, if any of the soldiers were girls.
The British—minus two—have now re-formed as a moving square and begun marching back around the corner onto Green Street. The three “dead” Continentals have recovered life and begun strolling back down Willow, muskets on their shoulders, barrel ends forward, looking to join up with their enemies, who’re now waiting, dusting off their jodhpurs. A clattering blue New Jersey Waste truck lumbers around the corner. Two teenage black boys cling outside to the hold-on bars, making wagon-master noises to signal the stops. It’s “pickup Tuesday.” Oversized green plastic cans sit at the end of each driveway, beside red recycling tubs. Details I haven’t noticed.
The black kids on the garbage truck say something sassy to the Continentals that makes the boys crack up and swing outward on their handgrips like amazing acrobats. Neither of them is fazed when one irregular points a musket at them and simulates a volley, though it makes the soldiers laugh as they disappear around the corner.
“You know what Ernie’s putting on his gravestone?” Lloyd’s come to stand beside me, Old Spice gunk a halo around him. He has a wheeze deep down in his chest, and the coarse black follicles around the helix of his left ear are the same as in his nose. Lloyd is a man not much made in America now, though once there were plenty: men without preconditions or sharp angles the world has to contend with, men who go to work, entertain important, unsensational duties, get home on time, mix a hefty brown drink after six, enjoy the company of the Mrs. till ten, catch the early news, then trudge off to bed and blissful sleep. I don’t usually like being around men my age—since they always make me feel old—but Lloyd’s the exception. I like him immensely, with his somber, pensive, throwback visage of times and shaving lotions of yore. He is good value—earnest, sympathetic, solid to the bone and not overcomplicated—just the way you’d hope your undertaker would be. Tom Benivalle, in his secret best sense of himself, is Lloyd, which is what I found likable about him. He’s aware of who he pretends to be. Though Benivalle’s the modern version, with angles and twitchy cell-phone impatience that things might not turn out right. All of it in an Italian pasta box.
“What’s that?” I say to Lloyd about Ernie’s gravestone. Bud has wandered up the funeral home steps and is just entering the front door. Snow’s falling harder now, though it won’t last. My Philadelphia early-bird news channel didn’t even mention snow when I woke at six.
“He’s putting
He suffered fools cheerfully.
” Lloyd’s pale blue lantern-jaw face rearranges itself from somber to happy.
I look at Lloyd again but, due to the difference in our heights, am forced—again—to look right up his hairy spelunkle of a left nostril. “That’s great.”
Scooter Lewis, in the Expedition, has let the New Jersey Waste truck rumble past and begins negotiating a respectful turn onto Willow. He has another serious game face on. No winks or smiles or eye rolls. The garbage truck boys stare back at the hearse mistrustfully.
“Ernie’d have liked having a battle in the middle of his funeral, don’t you think, Frank? An un-funeral.” Ernie liked to put
un
in front of words to make fun of them. Un-drunk. Un-vacation. Un-rich. “It was at a time when I was still un-rich.” When he said it, we all said it. Un-fuck. Un-Jersey.
“I’m surprised everyone doesn’t ask for a battle,” I say. “Or at least a skirmish.” I’ve never discussed “arrangements” with Lloyd, but perhaps I should, since I have a deadly disease.
“I wouldn’t stay in business long if they did.” Lloyd exhales a breath he seems to have been holding in for some time. Lloyd has seen Ernie in the last hour, dead as a posthole digger, but seems to be none the worse for it.
