I nodded.
“What you just saw was a funeral procession,” Lilian continued. “We’re having a vigil with ice cream and cookies too.” She smiled. “Wanna come?”
I looked at my brother. He nodded, fast.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll come.”
My brother put his arm around Lilian’s waist, and the three of us started walking along.
The air was misty and full of night steam. Way far away you could hear the boats coming home to the harbor. They moaned like empty five-gallon jugs will if you blow into them right enough. Up above in the sky a swinging white searchlight swept east and west and back again. Our eyes followed it, and it came to settle on the tile frontporch of Lily’s preacher-daddy’s house.
The preacher stood on the tile porch doling out cookies to dozens of children, many of whom had not partaken in the procession. Beside them, in the front planter, little Clara knelt in her Easter dress beside a mound of freshly dug earth.
“She’s so serious,” Lilian said.
The grave was about five feet deep, so the noise of Gabriel’s possible scratchings could not be heard, and the shoebox sat balanced on the lip of the gravesite. Clara was crying harder than ever, and her shoulders rose and fell. Her preacher-daddy stood on the front-porch staring at her sympathetically. He looked like the most exhausted man in the world.
His right elbow leaned tiredly on the sagging handle of a plastic shovel, and he wore the black-and-white attire a preacher is accustomed to wearing at such ceremonies, only the top three buttons of his clerical shirt were unbuttoned, and the upper half of his fly was undone. He had a pale, serious, preacher’s face that bore an expression of unbearable weariness, and he was constantly patting the heads of the children, asking them whether they wanted more refreshments. For all his silent misery he seemed a decent host, and when at last the supply of cookies ran out I half-expected him to break off a gingerbread windowsill and divvy that up evenly, but he merely raised his hands a little, cocked his head to one side, and declared in a sad but strong and honest voice, “Sorry, it seems we’re all out of cookies.”
Out of respect for “the Reverend,” as the children called him, and in especial regard for Clara and Clara’s Gabriel, who seemed to have been a neighborhood favorite, the children remained despite a lack of cookies. And so, after they had settled down, and after an appropriate late night calm had presented itself, the Reverend let the plastic shovel fall to his side. He approached his daughter Clara and took her in his arms. She was about the size of a basketball.
“Clara,” he said, brushing a strand of hair away from the folds of her eyes, “recite for all your friends the prayer your father taught you, recite the prayer that is so fitting and true on this dark August night.”
Clara smiled bravely at her daddy. Then she brought her hands across her face and said the prayer that her daddy had taught her.
“Dear Father,” Clara said, “I was born with nothing, and will die with nothing. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. May His name be praised. Amen.”
All the children clapped. I clapped too.
The Reverend lowered the shoebox into the grave. For the sake of formality, he kicked a bit of dirt over it.
“Remember you are dust,” he said. “And unto dust you shall return.”
There certainly was a lot of dust on the Reverend’s shoes. There certainly goddamn was. I turned to my brother.
“Can we start going to church?” I asked.
Our daddy went to church every Sunday. He was the only one in the family who went. He wouldn’t talk about it none and he wouldn’t take us neither. I had never been dying to go, and ditto for my brother. He barely knew what a church was.
He frowned. “No. No way.”
Lilian overheard him. A look of terror fell across her face. She drew my brother’s hand from around her waist and took a step back. She looked at him.
“Don’t you go to church?”
My brother shook his head and wrinkled his nose. It was like he’d smelled something really bad.
“Ain’t you even a Baptist?”
My brother shook his head again.
“Don’t you believe in the good news of Our Lord?”
“No,” my brother said. “I used to think Christ was a company till a couple years back.”
Lilian screamed. Then she fainted.
The Reverend drew a long breath and hurried over to attend to his eldest daughter. He lifted her in his arms and brought her inside. All the children followed.
Many of the kids went directly to the Reverend’s refrigerator and proceeded to rifle through it. They shouldn’t have done that. The best we could find was a container of Hershey’s syrup. I drank it down in one toss and ran outside and Buicked on the rosebushes. I supposed it was my turn.
Back inside the Reverend’s house I joined my brother on the outer edge of the circle surrounding Lilian. The preacher sat beside his daughter on a violet davenport, patting her face and hands. “Wake up now, Lilian. Wake up, precious angel.”
The children were all very quiet.
One of them asked was she going to die.
The Reverend shook his head dolefully. “Eventually,” he sighed. “Eventually.”
My brother touched my shoulder.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We walked through the frontdoor and out across the lawn. It was darker now.
“I thought you were going to marry that girl,” I said.
My brother took out his canteen and drank from it. “Well,” he said, “you thought wrong.”
He stopped to check his reflection in a pool of rainwater on the hood of a used car. He swept his hair to the side of his forehead and slapped his face repeatedly and lightly.
“I’m still here,” he said. “I’m still here.”
He pressed the pockets of his eyes with his fingertips.
I looked at him.
“Of course you are.”
He cleared his throat. Gabriel settled suddenly on his shoulder and looked at my brother and flew away.
“You can never be too sure,” he said.
He did not put the canteen away—not yet. He took one last long swig from its tipped mouth and broke out into another moonstruck run. He hollered at the heavens like a dog in heat, then the night swallowed his body.
“I’ll catch up with you!” I cried, but he did not reply.
I was alone.
I passed the house where the children had danced beneath the spray of the sprinkler. The grass lay flat in spots where they’d tread, and the green blades glistened like stained-glass slivers. A woman sat on the front-porch of the house. She had blue eyes, and I said hello.
“Hello,” she said.
I didn’t even know who she was.
Caritas looked like a row of candles, and though it was the busiest, most colorful street in the city, it seemed to progress in black-and-white slow motion. The streetlamps and benches and bright orange traffic pylons all felt damp and waxy to the touch, and rainwater crept down narrow gray gutters uttering threats and halfheard curses. For all the arcades, for all the bars and blue-ribbon carlots, the night seemed permanently stilled, and my brother and me strode cautiously through it like the only two people in an unmoving world. Cops in wornblue uniforms leaned like tired statues against the frames of telephone booths, pedestrians stood slackshouldered on trafficdead corners, and a steady stream of cigarette butts dribbled from the yawning mouth of a sewer. I took off my shoes and felt the gutterwater cover my toes. It was as thick and warm as chicken gravy. My brother’s face became a balled-up piece of litter. He was disgusted.
“Put your shoes on,” he said. “You want to get hookworm?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s pleasurable.”
“Pleasurable?” he snorted. “Pleasurable, my ass.” He snatched my shoes away from me and began to undo the laces. He had trouble with a double-knot. “You get hookworm in yo
ur foot and that’s all she wrote. Pleasurable? No damn sir. Little bugger’ll burrow its way through your heel, have your ankle for a snack, gnaw a path clean through your leg, settle down for supper in the tub of your stomach, then make a beeline straight for your ticker. That’s his dessert.” He bit the doubleknot hard with the front of his teeth. “And once that feller gets to your heart,” he said, “boy, it’s curtains.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t so much uneducated as misinformed.
“You got it all mixed up,” I told him. “It’s the tapeworm that eats out your insides, and the heartworm that eats out your heart.”
He seemed to consider this from a philosophical distance, then his forehead swelled with the stuff of brilliant answers.
“Naw!” he said. “That ain’t it at all, least not halfways.” He pushed me out from the gutter and made me sit on the ground and put my shoes on. “A worm that eats your guts, sure, that’s a tapeworm. Everybody knows that.” I struggled with the double-knot he hadn’t undone. “But the worm that eats out your ticker,” he said, jabbing his chest with the stub of his thumb, “that’s what they call that ’ere tickertape worm.”
I let my head loll a little, then I looked up.
“Either way,” I said, “it don’t have anything to do with no hookworms, which are harmless as far as I’m concerned.”
He huffed. “Little you know.”
Just then, several ladies passed us. One of them said something and looked my brother over and touched the front of his pants. My brother lost his breath. When they were gone he said, “Hookworms, hmph. Turn you into a hooker.”
I asked him what a hooker was, but he didn’t answer me.
We watched the ladies vanish. One of them got whistled at and the other three did running tap dances to open cardoors.
“Why don’t them women just walk regular?” I asked.
“Because,” he said, and didn’t finish what he was saying.
At the end of Caritas McDonald’s golden arches rose like the gates of heaven itself. Drivers dimmed their headlights as they drove beneath them. We stood far away, but through the glass front of the restaurant we could see several lines of people. Each customer craned his head above the head of the customer before him, and the order board above the counter danced with numbers and food and drink items. It made me hungry just looking at it.
“What’re we gonna have?” I asked.
My brother had just finished drinking from his canteen.
“Because he was not dead.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Neither, I supposed, did he.
“Because who was not dead?”
He reached up and brushed something off his shoulder. His head cleared.
“A couple Big Macs,” he answered, swallowing and burping twice, “if we’re lucky.”
We came to rest beneath a revolving clock anchored in the parking lot of a neighborhood bank. The clock stood high in the air and read, “10:14.” It was an hour slow. I told my brother what time it really was and he said, “Jesus Christ, that can’t be right!” I told him to believe what he wanted to believe, and he grabbed his head in his hands. He said something quietly to himself, then went to the pole and wrapped his arms around it. After a while I told him we had to get going. He spun around with his hands out in front of him and said “okay” about twenty-five times. When he left he walked crooked.
The bank bordered a supermarket which stood directly before the McDonald’s where Number One worked. It was closing time at the grocery store and the bagboys were out rounding up buggies. Red-white-and-blue streamers hung between copper-colored parking lot lamppoles, and the streamers made a flapping noise in the late night breeze. Pools of oil-streaked rainwater had collected on the lot, and I could see my own body scatter in a million wavering pieces as I tread unflinching through them. Neither me nor my brother walked around puddles, but whereas I crossed them flatfooted, my brother did a duckwaddle heel-to-toe, toe-to-heel, as if that would make his feet less wet. It didn’t. It only took him twice as long to ruin his shoes as much or more.
I crossed a shallow white disk of water and spit backwards into it. When I turned to see how my brother was doing, I found him heels up in the same pool of water. He was staring directly before him, at four bag-boys on the far edge of the parking lot. They were smoking cigarettes and getting paid doing it.
“Cocky goodfornothing no-account bastards,” my brother said. “Three and a half an hour just to pick their lousy asses.” He hated bagboys. “The rest of us folks get to do it for free.”
He kicked up some water and it fell all over me.
“I’m going to steal a cart,” he said. He didn’t need to.
I glanced back over to where the bagboys were and noticed that four more had appeared. They were large.
I looked at my brother.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “They’ll see you.”
He looked at me.
“They can see me now.”
I shook my head.
“No matter, you shouldn’t do it. They’ll catch you and hold you down and run your face over with a whole team of buggies.”
My brother shoved his hands beneath his armpits.
“I dare them to.”
He walked over to a nearby cart corral and snatched away the biggest buggy he could find. It was every bit as quiet as a train, and all the bagboys swung around.
“Hey!” one hollered. “Where you think you’re going with that cart, dudeski?”
My brother paid no mind to him. He brought the cart to me and displayed it as if he’d just bought it. He ran his hand over the metal cage, lifted it up to test the wheels, and unfolded the kiddie seat, which bore a plastic placard. The placard was in red and black and read: “$100 Cash Reward For Information Leading To The Prosecution Of Cart Thieves.”
“What’s it say?” my brother asked me.
“Just what you think it does,” I told him.
The bagboys had begun to mill about. They were all smoking cigarettes for the sole purpose, I imagined, of tossing them fiercely down to the ground.
My brother looked from the cart to me.
“Get in,” he said.
I didn’t know if I wanted to. I didn’t know if the choice was left to me.
“Do I have to?” I asked.
My brother shook his head.
“No. You don’t have to.”
Another bagboy called out to us: “Hey! You kids! You better bring that groc’ry cart over here! You better bring it back right goddamn now!”
My brother looked from me to the cart.
“Get in,” he repeated.
I looked over at the bagboys. They were all gathered in a tight contracting knot. They were still large.
“You sure I don’t have to?” I asked. “You say the choice is up to me?”
My brother nodded. His Adam’s apple kept nodding its head.
“Get back over here with that groc’ry cart!” a bag-boy hollered. “We ain’t gonna tell you again! Get it over here this second or you’ll both be dead meat in a damn quick minute!” He added: “And I mean it!” He looked like he meant it too. He had arms the size of davenport cushions and a face like the blistered bottom of a foot. When my brother didn’t answer him he let out a rebel yell and came charging toward us. The rest of the bag-boys followed like bloodhounds.
For the final time my brother looked from me to the cart and back again.
“Get in,” he said.
I looked at him sideways.
“Listen—” I began, but couldn’t continue. Beneath my brother’s army jacket his chest was beaded with sweat, and I could see the muscles of his heart swell and flutter. I imagined he was nervous; he certainly had a right to be. We could hear the bagboys getting nearer. The thing was I’d never seen my brother scared before, and it seemed to reduce him to half his normal size. I cleared my throat and looked him in the eye. “If I get in this cart, it’ll be because I want to,” I said. “Not because
you want me to. I’m tired of you all the time bossing and ordering me around, sick of you all the time telling me to do this or that. It ain’t brotherly. If I hop into this buggy, you better realize that it isn’t you telling me that I got to do it this way or I got to do it another, that it isn’t you saying what’s right and proper for somebody other than yourself. You understand?” I said. “Is that the way it’s gonna be if I get into this shopping cart here?”
My brother didn’t say a word. His face could’ve been uncut stone for all I knew. When the bagboys were so close we could smell the stale Pall Malls on their breath, my brother hoisted me up by the waist and left me ass-high in the shopping cart.
“Goddamn you,” he said. “I asked you to get in.”
It was like a rollercoaster, sort of, only flat, rainwater cutting like speedboat spray in the spinning path of the buggy’s wheels. We tore along, me upside down to a backward passing world, the blood of my body settling swollen in the hollow jug of my head. We flew past lotlamps and lamplights and concrete yellow curbs at a speed twice the sound of anything, one hundred thousand times the speed and sound of everything—the rattle of the wheels tattling clickclickclick and the rumble of the cage rushing thrushthrushthrush and the war-whoops of my brother booking redfaced wingfooted outofbreath and asshauling past the rapid slapping of eight rabid bagboys. Down a quick invisible curb and onto the lot of the McDonald’s, cars braking, tires squealing, folks cursing and jabbering at the static-mouth of a paint-peeled pickup window—“Welcome to McDonald’s. May I take your order?” —up another, smoother curb across the chirping clay cadence of four and twenty floor tile, passing suddenly and unavoidably through twelve tables of terrified diners, smack into a solid wall of polished glass, me thinking finally and breathlessly as my brother’s hands abandoned the steering bar of the runaway cart: “So, this is it. This is the moment not worth waiting for. Close your eyes and take a deep breath and try to remember what comes before nothing.” Then, the absolute and all-complete shattering of glass, slivers of which stick upended in me asswards—but not only me: caterwauling customers, barking police officers, cornfed rednecks and floor-stricken grandmothers.
Life in the Land of the Living Page 5
