The Revenant Road (4 page)

6

An Affair to Dismember:

Part Two

The only thing longer than a Catholic wedding is a Catholic funeral. As mourners flooded out of St. Theresa’s Cathedral I stood on the steps, doing deep knee bends in an effort to force the blood that had pooled in my lower legs back up to my brain.

St. Theresa’s overlooked the
Hudson River
and the West Side Highway. To the east,
Harlem
was waking up. Hip-hop music blared from a passing S.U.V., the bass beatdown an incongruous accompaniment to the occasion of my father’s final, fatal shuffle.

“Stop that,” a familiar voice hissed. “You look like you’re about to run a footrace.”

My mother Lenore is what the old Italians used to call a “ball-breaker.” The fact that she’d once graced the covers of such publications as
Vogue
,
Redbook,
and
Essence
belies the fact that she can decapitate a man at twenty paces with one slash of her tongue.

“I didn’t even know he was Catholic,” I said.

Lenore shrugged. “When we were married Marcus didn’t believe in organized religion. I suppose as he got older...”

“He got soft?” I smirked.

Lenore glared at me. For the briefest of moments an emotion that I didn’t recognize flickered in her eyes.

“Obadiah,” she said. “Your father was a good man.”

I afforded her the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for men who masturbate in public.

“Obadiah, listen to me...”

“Who are all these people?” I said, changing the subject.

We were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the coffin and pallbearers to appear.

“There must be three-hundred people here I don’t recognize.”

“Your father had a lot of… friends,” Lenore said.

For some reason I got the feeling “friends” wasn’t the word she’d wanted to use. We’d only gotten the details of Marcus’s death a day before the funeral. He’d been traveling on business to
Seattle
with a client, a millionaire interested in developing a large tract of land using Marcus as the general contractor. According to my mother’s lawyer, Marcus Grudge owned and operated a successful construction firm somewhere in
Northern California
.

I’d never been invited to visit Marcus’s place of business. I knew next to nothing about it. After leaving us in the seventies, he’d conducted most interactions through a parsimonious attorney named Oliver Quip. Child support, alimony payments, Christmas cards and a terse letter addressed to me on every birthday were the only regular contact we’d had with him.

The prospective business partners had chartered a small plane in
San Francisco
intending to fly to
Seattle
to inspect the project. They never made it: Their plane went down somewhere in the Cascade Mountain range.

It had taken the authorities nearly nine weeks to locate Marcus’s plane. By the time we were notified of the accident he had been dead for nearly two months.

The mutilated couple standing on the far side of
Riverside Drive
snapped me out of my morbid musings. They were Asian, at least the man was. The woman looked bi-racial; an Asian-American mix.

The man appeared to have been gutted, the bloody crater where his liver and lights should have been gaping and apparent even from across the street. Someone had ripped his right arm off at the elbow.  The woman looked…
stuck together
somehow. Parts of her seemed to have been torn apart and knitted back together by a hyperactive, three–year-old speed freak. They were pale, those two…

“Obadiah…”

Their eyes hooded, slashes of darkness, twin abysses…

“Obadiah, close your mouth. People are staring…”

I was frozen, paralyzed by the sudden wash of cold terror that blossomed in the pit of my stomach.

What the hell…?

The gutted man raised his left hand and pointed at me.     

Pain exploded in my right arm.

“Owww!”

I looked down to see Lenore pinching the skin of my right triceps between her immaculate, diamond-hard nails. It was a trick she’d perfected back when I was a mouthy, unruly teenager. The slicing agony always served to bring my focus back to the here and now.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I snapped.

“You were gaping,” Lenore said calmly. “You know I hate gaping.”

I looked back across
Riverside Drive
, my eyes scanning the sidewalk, and the entrance to the park beyond: There was no sign of the mutilated couple. They had vanished. The sense of eerie dislocation that attended their appearance was fading, like a stubborn migraine after a stiff whiskey transfusion.

I shook my head, hoping to clear the cloud of confusion that surrounded me. What had I just seen? Was I so upset by Marcus’s death that I was hallucinating? 

“Lenny, is that you?”

I turned toward the speaker.

Limping toward Lenore and me was an escapee from a Walter Brennan film. The man’s bedraggled appearance lent him the air of a mad prophet recently returned from the wilderness.

The newcomer was as thin as the Nixon Administration’s record on public disclosure, and he moved with great care, like a soldier with a live grenade up his ass.

“Neville,” Lenore whispered. “It’s been a long time.”

“You’re as beautiful as ever, Lenny,” the crusty prophet said.

“Lenny” smiled. Neither of them spoke for a moment, as mourners swirled around us. Then the crusty prophet turned to me.

“Is this the kid?” he said.

I was struck by the change in my mother. She seemed self-conscious in this man’s presence. Her eyes had lost their usual hawk-like focus. For the first time in recent memory she looked... uncertain.

Her uncharacteristic behavior put me on the defensive.     

Even though we spent most of our time either screaming at or ignoring each other, the dormant protective impulse common to the sons of single mothers rose up in me. I stepped forward and extended my right hand.

“Obadiah Grudge,” I said. “And you are?”

The crusty prophet stared at me for a moment. Then he extended his right hand.

“Forgive me,” Lenore said. “Neville Kowalski, this is... my son, Obadiah.”

“How d’you do,” Kowalski said as he shook my hand.

His grip was cool, surprisingly firm. An unexpected strength pulsed through his hand and up my arm.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said.

Kowalski winced as if I’d leveled a charge.

“I’m sure your mother’s...”

“I’ve never told him about you and Marcus, Neville,” Lenore said, hastily.

The crusty prophet’s eyebrows shot up like a pair of startled gray caterpillars.

“Well, I s’pose that’s fer the best,” Kowalski said, winking at me. “Not everyone is as understanding as Lenny here.” 

A few yards away, the hearse rolled up to the curb. Two black-suited funeral attendants got out and ran around back to open the loading door.

“What?” I said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Understanding about what?”

  The doors to the cathedral opened and my father’s coffin was carried out by six men. Three were employees of the funeral home. One of the men was a cousin of my father’s whom I’d last seen at a family reunion in
Arkansas
when I was ten years old.

  I didn’t recognize the other two pallbearers. One of them, a burly redhead who’d wept openly at the funeral, glanced over to where we stood on the steps of the cathedral. Kowalski stepped in closer.

  “Listen, son,” he said. “I know you and your dad weren’t close. But he wanted me to ask a favor of you when his time came.”

  “What kind of favor?” I said.

  “Marcus requested that you be one of his pallbearers.”

  At a signal from the burly redhead the men carrying the coffin stopped. The redheaded man nodded at Kowalski.

“That I be
what
?” I said, unbelieving.

Kowalski nodded. “We talked about it a lot,” he said. “Marcus told me if he went first he wanted you on hand to help cart the old bastard out.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

Kowalski shrugged. “So how ‘bout it, son?”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

Around us, people were beginning to stare. Since I didn’t know what else to say, I said, “Sure.”

I walked up the steps and replaced one of the employees. Kowalski took up a position behind me. As we descended, Kowalski laid his hand on my left bicep, increasing his creepy factor by about two million percent.

“Your father and I were partners for thirty years, Obadiah,” Kowalski whispered. “We shared a life that few people would understand, or approve of. He was a great man.”

I nodded, more to keep my skin from crawling over my head like a tight wool sweater than in agreement.

“Thanks,” I said.                            

“He was a man of good and noble purpose,” Kowalski continued. “You’ve inherited a powerful legacy.”

As I gripped the handle of my father’s coffin I felt a nagging certainty that I’d missed something.

We carried the coffin to the hearse and slid it into the back. The driver slammed the door, climbed into the front seat, started the car and drove off toward the cemetery. I turned to see Kowalski and Lenore embracing on the steps like long-separated siblings.

What the Hell’s going on?
I thought.

Kowalski lifted his head from my mother’s shoulder. Our eyes met.

The crusty prophet burst into tears.