by Richard Ford
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.
“What business would you be in, Lloyd, if you weren’t in the dead-person business?”
“Oh, lord.” He’s watching the Expedition bearing our friend come to a stop at Constitution, red blinker flashing a left turn. Scooter, in the driver’s seat, cranes his neck both directions, then eases out and silently disappears toward the cemetery. Lloyd is satisfied. “I’ve sure thought about it, Frank. Hazeltine”—Lloyd’s well-upholstered wife, named for God only knows what tribe of abject Pennsylvania Kallikaks—“would like me to sell it out. To some chain. Quit livin’ in a funeral home. Her family are all potato farmers in PA. They don’t get this here. Kids’re in Nevada.”
One of Lloyd’s three is my son Paul’s age—twenty-seven—and, unlike my son, who has a career in the greeting-card industry, is a computer wizard who started his own mail-order business selling office furniture made from recycled organic food products and now owns six vintage Porsches and an airplane.
Lloyd frowns at the thought of Pennsylvania potatoes and retirement. “But I don’t know.”
“Is it the smell of the embalming fluid or the sob of the crowd, you think, Lloyd?” Lloyd doesn’t answer, though he has a good sense of humor and I know is letting these words silently amuse him. It is his gift. There’s no use having a somber day cloud everything.
“So what’s the plan for Thanksgiving, Frank? The family? The works?” Lloyd’s oblivious to what my “family” entails, except “those two kids.” I’ve, after all, been gone eight years. Lloyd’s likely picturing his own brood: Hazeltine, Hedrick, Lloyd, Jr., and Kitty—the funeral-directing Mangums of Haddam. “You’re living where right now?” (As if I was a Bedouin.)
“Sea-Clift, Lloyd.” I smile to let him know it’s a positive change and he’s asked me about it before. “Over on the Shore.”
“Yep, I get it. That’s nice. Real nice, over there.”
We both turn to a storm door closing, a cough, a footfall. Bud’s coming down the steps, walking a little gimpy, as if he’s worried about slipping. The snow’s sticking but no longer falling.
“Looks like you got some more business in there, Lloyd. The Van Tuyll girl. And who’s that old party?” Bud resettles his dick under his London Fog, which is why he was walking bowlegged. He went in for a piss, which is what I’d like to do, but not in there.
“Harvey Effing’s mother,” Lloyd says reluctantly. “She was ninety-four.”
“Oh my God,” Bud says. He’s been nosing around the other viewing rooms after his leak and without even taking off his Irish hat, having a whiff of different deaths. It’s made him giddy. “‘Paging Mr. Effing. Call for Mr. Effing. Effing party of two.’ We used to play that on Harvey up at the Princeton Club.” Bud the clubman is pleased by this memory. He’s done with the matter of noises from Ernie’s innards and their possible cosmic significance. We’re just three men out on the snowy front walk again, waiting for permission to disengage. To remain longer threatens divulgences, confidences, the connection of dots in no need of connecting. The job description for mourner is simply to stay on message.
I’m, however, hungry as a leopard and realize I’m standing with my mouth partway open in anticipation of food, just the way a leopard would. Having to piss a lot makes me not drink much, which makes me forget to eat. Though it’s also because I have no more words I want to speak.
“How’s the realty business, Frank?” Bud says insincerely.
“It’s great, Bud. How’s lamps?” I close my yap and try to smile.
“Couldn’t be brighter. But let me ask you something, Frank.” Bud pushes his little cold hands officiously down in his coat pockets and spaces his saddle oxfords wider apart and sways back like a racetrack tout.
The grassy ground is already turning bare again as the snow vanishes. It could easily begin to rain. I’m not sure I don’t detect the pre-auditory rumble of thunder. “I hope it’s simple, Bud.” I’m not in the mood for complexity. Or candor. Or honesty. Or anything, including jokes.
“It’s something I started asking people when I’m selling them a lamp, you know?” Bud beetles his brow in a look appropriate to philosophical inquiry.
I cast a wary eye Lloyd’s way. He’s looking at his brogans again, jeweled with dampness. I’m sure he’s already taken this quiz.
“What’ve you learned in the realty business, Frank? In how many years now?”
> “I don’t remember.”
“Pretty long, though. Twenty years?”
“No. Or yes. I don’t remember.”
Bud sniffs back through his little ruby-veined nose, then wags his shoulders like a boxer. “A while, though.”
“I thought you liked the unexamined life, Bud.”
“For selling lamps,” Bud snaps. “I was at Princeton, Frank, with Poindexter and that crowd. Empirical all the way. I had a scholarship over to Oxford but went on and attended Harvard Law. It was the sixties.”
“I never believe people, Bud.”
“Well, you can sure as shit believe that.”
Bud’s translucent eyelids snap like a crow’s. He’s misunderstood me. He thinks I’ve deprecated his academic accomplishment, about which I couldn’t care less.
“That’s my answer to your question, Bud. How could I not know you went to Princeton? You probably haven’t told me more than four hundred times. I’m sure Harvey Effing’s mother knows you went to Princeton. You probably reminded her when you were in there.”
“Your answer is what?” Bud says.
“My answer is, I tend not to believe people.”
“About what?”
Lloyd groans down in his tussive chest. All day, death, and now questions.
“About anything. It lets people act freely. I realized it one day. A guy told me he was driving back to his motel for his checkbook then coming right back to where we’d been looking at a condo over in Seaside Park. He was going to write me a check for twenty-five thousand on the spot. I knew he exactly intended to. And I was going to stand there and wait till he came back. But I realized, though, that I didn’t believe a fucking thing he said. I just pretended to, to make him feel good. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s a big relief.”
“Did the guy come back,” Lloyd asks.
“He did, and I sold him the condo.”
Bud’s livery lips wrinkle in distaste meant to signify concern. “You’ve gotten deep since your prostate flare-up.”
“My prostate didn’t flare up, you asshole. It had cancer. I believe that, though. If you trust people unnecessarily, it incurs an obligation on everybody. Suspending judgment’s a lot easier. Maybe you can do that with lamps.”
“Makes sense,” Lloyd says quietly. “I probably feel the same way.” He lowers his big funereal brow at Bud as a warning.
“Whatever.” Bud makes a display of looking around the empty yard, as if Harvey Effing’s mother was calling him. The driveway’s empty. Water’s puddling from the melted snow. The postman, in his blue government sweater and blue twill pants, is just traversing the lawn from next door in some wiggly black galoshes he hasn’t bothered to snap. He radiates a wide, welcoming postal-carrier got-something-for-you smile and hands Lloyd a stack of letters bound with a red rubber band.
“That’s great,” Lloyd grunts, and smiles but doesn’t peek at his letters. Surely some are heart-warming thank-yous for all the above-and-beyond kindness by the M&G staff when Uncle Beppo was “taken,” and for the extra time needed so a long-estranged brother could arrive from Quito, especially since Uncle B. wasn’t discovered in his apartment until some time had passed. I wonder what Lloyd’s answer was to the what-have-you-learned question.
“Whatever’s about it,” I say to Bud, who’s still gooning around the yard at nothing. I believe I detect a ghostly Parkinson’s tremor in Bud’s chin, something he may not know about himself. His pudding chin is slightly oscillating, though it may be because I yelled at him and made him nervous. “I want you to understand, Bud. When I didn’t believe the guy’d come back, it wasn’t that I disbelieved him. I just decline to make people have to bear extra responsibility for their own insecure intentions. Having to be believed is too big a burden. I thought you studied philosophy. It isn’t so hard.”
“Okay, that’s fine.” Bud smiles faintly and pats me softly on the front of my barracuda jacket, as if I was about to start throwing punches and needed calming.
“Fuck you, Bud.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. That’s great. Fuck me.” Bud fattens his bunchy cheeks and smirks. The funeral contingent has now lost its funerary decorum. I’m, of course, largely to blame.
“Better get going.” Lloyd’s stuffing his mail into his overcoat pocket.
“Time to,” Bud says. He’s staring straight at Lloyd’s chest, so as not to have to face me. “Hope you feel better, Frank.”
“I feel great, Bud. I hope you feel better. You don’t look so good.”
“Chasing a cold,” Bud says, and commences walking in his gimpy gait across the damp lawn, heading down Willow, back toward Seminary and the unreflective lamp business. It’s why I hate men my age. We all emanate a sense of youth lost and tragedy-on-the-horizon. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for our every little setback.
“Those kids coming to visit, are they?” Lloyd’s happy to be upbeat.
“They sure are, Lloyd.” We’re watching Bud cross Willow, stamping grass and snow-melt off his oxfords, clutching his coat collar up around his neck. He doesn’t look back, though he thinks we’re talking about him.
“You can’t enter the same stream twice, can you, Frank?” Lloyd says.
I look squarely at Lloyd, as if by gazing on him I’ll come to know what he means, since I don’t have the vaguest idea, though I’m certain it has something to do with the life lessons we both know: takes all kinds; for every day, turn, turn, turn; life’d be dull if we were all the same. “Small blessings,” I say solemnly.
“Thanks for showing up. We needed some bodies.” This is not a pun to Lloyd. He is a born literalist and couldn’t survive otherwise.
“It was a good thing,” I lie, and think a thought about Ernie’s epitaph and how smart a cookie he was to know what to say at the end. We should all be that smart, all heed the lesson.
Surprisingly—though probably not that surprisingly—the inside of my Suburban when I climb in is gaseous with stinging, whanging anti-Permanent Period ethers that make me have to run the windows down to get a usable breath. Conceivably it’s low blood sugar from being starved, which makes me clench my jaw. When you have cancer in your nether part, plus a bolus of radiant heavy metal—most of which has spent its payload by now, though it’s my keepsake forever—your systems don’t run on autopilot like they used to. Everything begs for suspicious notice—a headache, loose bowels, erectile virtuosity or its opposite, bloodshot eyes, extra fingernail growth. Dr. Psimos, my Mayo surgeon, explained all this. Though once my procedure was over, he said, nothing on a daily basis would be caused per se by my condition, unless I went prospecting for uranium, in which case my needle would point out the mother lode up my butt.
“It’ll be in your mind, Frank, but that’s about it,” Psimos said, leaning back, self-satisfied in his doctor chair, like a forty-year-old lab-coated Walter Slezak. His tiny Mayo seventh-floor pale-green office walls were full of diplomas—Yale, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Cornell, plus one designating him a graduate of the Suzuki Method of pianism. Those hirsute sausagey digits, capable of injecting hot needles into tender zones, also contained “The Flight of the Bumblebee” in their muscle memory.
It was our presurgical chat, the entire duration of which he sat teasing a bad backlash out of a tiny silver fly reel, using those same meaty fingers, assisted by a surgical clamp and some magnifying spectacles. Out his little window, the entire Mayo skyline—the bland tan hospital edifices, smokestacks, helipads, radar dishes, antennae, winking red beacons, everything but anti-aircraft batteries and ack-acks—projected the reassuring solidity of a health-care Pentagon to wayward pilgrim patients like me and the King of Jordan.
I didn’t know what to say back. I hadn’t had “a procedure” since once in the Marine Corps on my ailing pancreas, which got me out of Vietnam. I knew what was going to happen—the BBs, etc.—and figured the biopsy had already been worse. I wasn’t scared till I found out I shouldn’t be. “Most things that happen to me anymore happen in my mind,�
� I said pathetically. My knees were shaking. I had on red madras Bermudas and a Travel Is a Fool’s Paradise tee-shirt to try to look casual. I’m sure he knew what was happening.
It was a sunny, humid Minnesota Friday, last August. I’d watched the Olympic 4x100 relay that morning at the Travelodge. “Procedures,” it seems, only take place on Mondays. But terrifying doctor chats are all slated for Fridays, to ensure that the maximum stomach-churning, molar-crunching jimjams will fill up your weekend.
“I’m just an ole surgeon around here, Frank.” Psimos held his antique reel away from his jowly, mustachioed Walterish face and frowned at it through his magnifiers. “They don’t pay me millions to think, just cut ’n paste stuff. I’ll fix you up Monday so you’re back firing. But I can’t help what goes on in the brain department. That’s over on West Eleven, across the street.” He gave his heavy Greek brows a couple of insolent flicks.
“I’m looking forward to it,” I said idiotically, my asshole as hard as a peach pit.
“I bet you are.” He smiled. “I bet you really are.”
And that was that.
All this woolly, stinging, air-sucking breathlessness inhabiting my Suburban is about nothing but death, of course—big-D and little-d. The Permanent Period is specifically commissioned to make you quit worrying about your own existence and how everything devolves on your self (most things aren’t about “you” anyway, but about other people) and get you busy doin’ and bein’—the Greek ideal. Psimos, I bet, practices it to perfection, on the links, at the streamside, in the operating theater, at the Suzuki and over lamb patties on the Weber. Surgeons are past masters at achieving connectedness with the great other by making themselves less visible to themselves. Mike Mahoney would love them.
Still, too much death can happen to you before you know it, and has to be staved off like a bad genie and stuffed back in its bottle.
