by Tawni O'Dell
She picks up a hunting knife I confiscated from three kids last night who were in the process of slashing the tires on another kid’s pickup because he stole one of their girlfriends. I explained to them that girlfriends can be lured, enticed, manipulated, duped, dazzled, misled, and bought, but they can’t be stolen. Then I showed them how to throw the knife into a tree and get it to stick. None of them knew how to do it. Kids don’t develop life skills anymore. None of them could belch the Pledge of Allegiance either.
She opens the glove compartment to put the knife inside and finds Reese’s mug shot.
“Reese Raynor is getting out of jail?” she says. “I thought they threw away the key.”
She brings the fax close to her face. I have the irrational urge to swipe it away from her for fear just the image of him could inflict some kind of bodily harm.
“God, that was so long ago. Let’s see, that was your senior year. You’d already signed with the Bears. Your accident happened right around the same time,” she ends slowly, and looks over at me with her eyes narrowed into slits of blue.
“Why do you have this?” she asks.
“It’s part of my job.”
“Since when do you care about anything that’s part of your job?”
I try to take it from her, but she holds it out of my reach.
“I never understood any of that,” she goes on. “Crystal was such a quiet little thing. No one even knew she was dating Reese, and then one day—bam—she’s pregnant and marrying him and didn’t even finish high school. Reese Raynor. How could anybody have sex with Reese Raynor? Jess I can understand. He was cute.”
“They’re identical twins,” I remind her.
“Only when they’re together. When you see them apart, they don’t look anything alike.”
She sets the picture on the seat between us and goes back to cleaning up my mess. I glance down at his face. She’s right. He doesn’t look like Jess. She’s always pointing out something nobody needs to know until she points it out, and then you wonder how you got through life so far without realizing it yourself.
3
THE PINK-AND-GOLD MEMORIAL ROOM AT LYLE’S FUNERAL HOME is packed, and I’m happy for Zo. I knew she’d been hoping for a big turnout when her time finally came. It was always the first thing she mentioned when she told me about the latest funeral she had been to. “People were standing,” was her highest praise.
People are standing at her service. All the seats are filled. I can’t stand for long periods of time because of my knee, but I’m not concerned. Jolene only has to pause for a moment in the back of the room and cast her gaze searchingly over the sea of folding-chair mourners for men to start shifting and rising. Within a matter of minutes, we’re seated.
During twenty-five years as administrators of Safe Haven, an eighty-bed convalescent and elder-care home on the outskirts of Centresburg, Zo and my mother have been directly and indirectly involved with the families of just about everybody who lives around here. Apparently most of them felt that Zo was worth paying final respects to.
The fact that my mother didn’t is a social faux pas that won’t be easily forgiven by some people, but anyone who knows my mother also knows she isn’t acting out of disrespect; she’s simply being true to her pragmatic nature. She’s a great celebrator of life and life in the hereafter; death is a distraction from both and serves no purpose in her mind, so she won’t waste her time on it. Not even two hours for a funeral.
She also doesn’t put much stock in what she refers to as “religious events,” which includes anything that takes place in a church or involves a minister.
She used to be a churchgoer. She attended Coal Run’s Methodist church her whole life; then she married Dad and started going to the nearest Ukrainian Catholic church in Union City with him. It was a dark, cramped, wooden place clouded with incense and Slavic chanting. The services were excruciatingly long, because the sermons were delivered twice: first in Ukrainian, then in a begrudging English. Even in the height of summer, no one could crack a window, because some ancient, hollow-eyed woman in a threadbare sweater with famine and war carved in her face would totter over and close it.
After Dad was killed, Mom stopped going. A lot of people whispered behind her back that she had strayed from God, but I knew better. She wouldn’t have anything to do with either church, yet she still read her Bible, still made us say our bedtime prayers, still scolded Val whenever he took the Lord’s name in vain. She hadn’t stopped believing in God’s existence the way I had. She had just stopped believing that she owed him anything.
Zo’s casket sits in front of a wall of dusty pink satin curtains trimmed in gold fringe beneath a chandelier dripping glass tears.
She would have been happy with the surroundings. Even though her own home was decorated simply, she had a secret love for the flamboyant. She loved Las Vegas. She was always telling Jolene how she envied the glitter gels young girls could smear on their faces, hair, and bodies these days. She never went to work without wearing one of her big fake gemstone pins on her polyester suit-jacket lapel. She had six that I knew of: a ladybug, a frog, a red motorcycle, an American flag, the initial Z, and a watering can.
As I stare at the gaudiness surrounding her now, every detail of the room where she took her last breath comes rushing at me: the yarn diamonds of an orange, green, and yellow afghan hung over the back of the couch; a gold-fringed pink satin souvenir throw pillow with a flaking silk screen of a Vegas slot machine on it; piles of Reader’s Digest and Better Homes and Gardens magazines stacked on the coffee table; her black leather Bible lying on a side table with the red ribbon bookmark always marking a different place in the solid shininess of the copper-edged pages; the framed photograph of her dead husband standing on the back of an out-of-tune upright piano between her son Randy’s high-school senior photo and a shadowy, bedroom-eyed portrait of Christ.
Nothing in her living room ever changed from the time I was a child until now, except for the eventual arrival of a color TV set and the reluctant replacing of the couch and carpeting due to wear and tear.
Jolene and I used to spend a lot of time there, along with a lot of other kids. Zo was the founder of a relief society for the widows and children of the Gertie miners. She lived alone with Randy—the miracle baby that she wasn’t able to conceive until she was almost forty—in a big, three-story brick farmhouse originally owned by her well-to-do grandfather. Her doors were kept open for any woman who needed a baby-sitter or advice or simply someone to talk to.
She used her own money to establish the financial-aid fund. She had a bit from an inheritance. Her mother had been the only child of the head cashier of Centresburg’s First National Bank. His wife died when Zo’s mother was a baby, and his life centered on his daughter from then on. He had high hopes for her to marry well when she grew up and spared no expense to make sure it would happen by sending her to an exclusive girls’ school in Philadelphia with the wish that she’d meet and mingle with the right class of boy. He was understandably upset when she came back home from school one summer and fell in love with a miner.
But his new son-in-law won him over, and long before he died, he gave Zo’s parents the house on two hundred acres of land to live in and another large parcel of property that Zo would eventually use as the site of Safe Haven. When her grandfather did die, Zo’s parents inherited a nice sum of money, too.
The farmhouse was far from a mansion, but it was a palace compared to the three-room company houses the other miners lived in. Zo’s father shared his good fortune and treated the place like communal company property. During the booming coal-town days when Zo was a child, it was always filled with miners and their families. When she was a grown woman and raising her own child, it was still filled, but this time only with the families.
Not even the sound or the smell changed over the years. The loud, solemn ticking of her grandfather’s grandfather clock and the scent of lemon-fresh Pledge are the first things I remember fr
om the first time I stepped through her door over thirty years ago and the last things I remember as I stepped out two days ago after calling the coroner and picking up her arthritic fist, dangling over the side of the couch, clutching a coupon for twenty cents off Ziploc sandwich bags, and placing it on the small hill of her chest, where it lay with the other one like two jagged lumps of broken clay. I had been fifteen minutes late picking her up to go grocery shopping.
Directly in front of the casket is Zo’s son, Randy—Ebbie’s father—sitting in the first row with his wife and two legitimate children.
According to Jolene, she and Eb haven’t seen him for about two years. He lives in Maryland and works for a company that sells medical supplies to hospitals. In any given year, Jolene can tell how well the bedpan market did by the price of the Christmas present he sends to Eb.
He moved out of state when Eb was a baby to try to find a job after Franklin Tires closed. Jolene says he used to come and visit them a lot, even though it was a six-hour drive, but then he got married and the visiting stopped. It had nothing to do with his wife, he assured Jolene. He was just busy at work, and it had suddenly occurred to him that the drive was too long.
Jolene was upset for a while, not for herself but for Eb. She said Randy really seemed to like him, and she could already see the attachment forming. If he had met the wifey just a year later, the bond might have been too strong to break.
I know that’s the main reason she didn’t bring Eb today. Not because she didn’t want him to see his grandma dead, but because she didn’t want him to see his dad so alive.
I glance around the room. Some people are looking at me like they know who I am, and most of them do. Some are looking at me like they know me personally, and most of them don’t. Some are looking at me like they’re trying to figure out who I am and once they do, they’ll be forced to ask someone if I am who they think I am. Some are looking at me like they already understand the difference between knowing who I am and who I was. Others will figure this out later. To some the difference won’t matter. Others will be happy about it or depressed as hell.
Regardless, at some point today, I will be at least a fleeting thought in the mind of everyone in attendance at Zo Craig’s funeral, and I can’t help feeling that she knew this and wanted it.
“Who is that?” Jolene whispers in my ear.
She has her neck craned, looking toward the back of the room. There’s someone standing inside the door leaning against the wall. His clothes are ragged. He’s dirty and unshaven, his presence a vulgar violation against the pink-flocked wallpaper, like finding a cigarette butt in a little girl’s jewelry box.
I can’t stop staring at him. Something about him bothers me, besides his lack of respect for an old lady’s funeral. He’s wearing a Cuban military cap, the kind Fidel Castro wears and the kind Mr. Perez wore during his youth. He has the brim pulled down low enough to hide his eyes. Long, dark hair grazes the shoulders of his fatigue-green jacket. One leg in torn camouflage pants ends in a scuffed leather army boot. The other ends in a heavy black shoe.
“Who is that?” Jolene asks again. “Do you think Zo knew him? He looks like he just crawled out of a jungle.”
“Jesus,” I say out loud.
A dozen pairs of outraged eyes turn on me.
“Sorry,” I say, and begin to stand up without realizing it.
“Where are you going?” Jolene asks.
I don’t answer her. I make my way slowly down the aisle. The closer I get, the more certain I am that it’s him, even though everything about him is wrong.
He would never attend a funeral poorly dressed. I went to the mass burial of the Gertie miners with him. Mom let me ride in his truck. I remember hesitating at the passenger-side door and staring at him in his dark blue suit and tie and hard-soled shoes and bare head with no ball cap. His hands glowed raw and pink from the scrubbing he had given them, and he smelled like his mom’s Dove soap. I wasn’t sure it was him until he leaned over and belched, “Get the hell in the truck.”
He would have never let his hair grow long. Fag hair, he would’ve called it. Sissy hair. Pussy hair.
And why would he come back to a place he had avoided for over thirty years to attend the funeral of a woman he didn’t know? He didn’t come back for his own mother’s funeral.
His hand rests against one of his legs with the palm turned out and a cigarette held loosely between two fingers. I get a sick feeling in my gut that quickly turns to a restrained excitement as I realize the reason for the two different shoes. He has a fake leg. It’s the proof I need.
My mind reels back to the day Maxine opened her mailbox and received the news from the Department of Defense. She crumpled to her knees and began to sob before she even opened the envelope.
It was near dinnertime, and Steve and I were playing in my front yard. My mom was on the front porch with Jolene, snapping the ends off string beans and dropping them into a big blue bowl of cold water. She went rushing over to Maxine, with Jolene running along behind her. Maxine held the envelope out to her. We could see her hand was shaking. Mom took it and opened it and pulled out the letter. She read it silently with her lips moving. Then she burst into tears, too.
Soon they were hugging and kissing each other and crying even harder. I didn’t get it at all. It was Steve who finally said, “I think they’re crying ’cause they’re happy.”
Maxine looked up at us and waved the letter in the air. Her tears had made her mascara run and streaked her face black the way the soot had stuck to my mom’s tears the day Gertie blew.
“Val’s coming home!” she cried. “He’s hurt, but he’s coming home!”
Val’s coming home. I had waited three years to hear those words. They became my mantra. I chanted them in my head every night before I fell asleep. I said them to my mom at the breakfast table, and she’d smile and nod. I repeated them to myself in time to the ticking of the clock on my classroom wall as I labored through the endless schooldays. I told Dr. Ed, and he gave me a bag of red lollipops to give to Val when he came home; red was his favorite when he was a kid.
My mom helped me make a banner. I wrote the news on the sidewalk with a piece of bony: VAL’S COMING HOME.
But he never did.
He leans forward a little off the wall and tilts his head up enough so I can see his eyes.
I know I must be grinning from ear to ear. I want to hug him, but I know that’s out of the question. His only forms of physical affection were handshakes, head rubs, and shoves. I’m too big for a head rub, but in my heart, I’m still too little for a handshake. I think about shoving him, but then I decide that might not be the greatest thing to do to a guy with one leg. I try not to think about his missing leg, everything leading up to it, and everything after it.
I can’t think of a single thing to say to him.
“Hey,” I finally blurt out. “How have you been?”
He slowly brings the cigarette to his lips and looks right at me. His stare is impenetrable, his eyes full of conviction yet somehow vacant, like the eyes in portraits of saints and sovereigns and dead war heroes.
“You mean recently? Or for the past thirty-some years?” he asks me in a much deeper, raspier voice than the one I remember, but I have to remind myself that he was still a child the last time I saw him, not much older than Josh.
To me he was always an adult. He did a man’s job and made a man’s paycheck and had a man’s responsibilities. He didn’t have a wife or even a steady girlfriend, but he had his mom to take care of, and a truck.
“Recently,” I suggest.
He blows a cloud of smoke into the funeral home and squints through it, his attention drawn briefly to Jolene the way it would be drawn to a shiny new quarter in a handful of oxidized change. She begins to smile at him. For Jolene smiling at men is a reflex action, like braking for children on bicycles. Apparently a thought interferes with her instincts, because this smile doesn’t fully materialize.
She tur
ns her head to face forward again, gets her compact out of her purse, and holds the mirror to her face to check her makeup.
“I feel like shit,” he says.
He doesn’t look down at his missing leg, and neither do I, but I assume this is what he’s referring to.
“Would you like my chair?” I ask him.
“Would you like my hat?” he asks me.
“Why would I want your hat?”
“Why would I want your chair?”
I search his eyes for any sign of recognition. It seems like he remembers me. He’s talking to me like he does, or is he just putting up with me because I’m talking to him?
“Do you remember me?” I blurt out.
“You’re Rado Zoschenko’s kid,” he says without looking at me.
“That’s pretty good,” I say, smiling. “Remembering who I am. After all these years. I mean, the last time you saw me, I was a little kid. I was six.”
“I’ve seen you since then.”
“You have? Where?”
“When you broke your leg, it was in every sports section of every newspaper and on every sports segment of every TV news show.”
“How’d you know it was me?”
“Well, let’s see,” he begins, still not looking at me. “I suppose it would have been pretty stupid for me to think the Ivan Zoschenko from Coal Run, PA—population five twenty-three—that I used to live next door to and who would have been the same age as this football player and now that he was grown up looked a helluva lot like his father would be you.”
“I get the point,” I say, nodding, my smile having turned into an idiot’s grin by now.
“I’ve also had a subscription to the local piece-of-crap newspaper all these years, and there were a couple years there where you couldn’t open the thing without seeing a picture of you holding a football and running across a field like a bull with your head down.”
