The Art of Disposal (13 page)

“These old English writers,” Dan said. “Buncha fags in tights with feather pens. I'll take a good movie any day. Something with Stevie Seagal. Schwarzenegger. Marlon Brando.”

“Brando was a fag,” Gideon said.

Dan the Man looked like he'd just opened up an audit letter from the IRS.

“Get outta here,” he said. “Superman's Dad?”

Gideon nodded and smiled, happy to have dented any little part of Dan the Man's psyche.

“James Dean, sure. Not Brando,” Dan said.

“Fuck Marlon Brando,” Gideon said. “I don't even wanna be here right now. Can we get this shit done, or what?”

Gideon turned the flashlight on and handed it to me. I aimed it while he took the battery out of the Park Avenue, drained the air-conditioning fluid, and tinkered around with a few other things that needed to be removed.

“You're up,” he said. He lit a cigarette and watched us as we went through the Park Avenue for any important items. I took all the papers from the glove compartment; Dan the Man looked around under the seats.

“Check it out,” Dan said to me, holding up what looked like a dead black jellyfish. “Ricky's gloves.”

“Let me see,” I said, and I walked around to his side of the car. He handed them to me. I tried them on.

“Perfect fit,” Dan said. “Keep 'em.”

“Nah,” I said and took them off.

“Keep 'em,” Dan said. “Ricky would want you to have 'em.”

I put them in my back pocket. A few minutes later, the Park Avenue was in the machine and getting squeezed; the metal screeching, the glass exploding. I thought about what Dan said—how Ricky would “want me to have them.”

We love to speak for the dead. They tend to see things our way. But Ricky wouldn't want me to have those gloves. I killed him. I had the feeling that if I ever ran into him after I died, out on that lake of ice in Dante's Hell, he'd probably spit in my face, split my skull with a hatchet, and carve my Femurs into cross-country skis.

I slept for thirteen hours when I got back home. It was a deep sleep, but not pleasant. Each scene was one of terror; every landscape was slightly tilted, or soured by an unnatural hue. I went through most terrain without even using my legs, somehow floating just above the ground as if pulled along by a cruel magnetic force.

Amid the many foggy nightmares, one stands out. I was at the office. Everything about it felt wrong, like the whole gang had vanished.

“Hello,” I said.

No one answered.

Eddie wasn't there. Neither was Dan the Man. I sat on the couch and waited, like I was at Doc Brillman's office. I watched the fish swim by. In the dream, the aquarium was grander than it was in real life. Full of anemones and clownfish. An octopus stared back at me with sinister eyes.

Tall Terry walked out from the back room. I was quite shocked to see him, considering he'd been dead for a long while, but in a dream you quickly adapt to the improbable.

“Terry,” I said. “How goes it?”

He didn't say anything to me. Just stood there with his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. That's when I saw the other hands floating there a few feet away from him.

“Whose hands are those?” I asked.

“They ain't hands,” he said. “They're gloves.” And he was right. I watched them hover, bobbing up and down like they were riding on a warm current of air. Black leather gloves, empty on the inside, stuffed full of invisible hands.

“Hey Terry,” I said, getting nervous, “whose gloves are those?”

“They're your gloves,” he said and pointed at me; and when he said it, it was like the spell of a sorcerer, for they started drifting toward me.

“No, no. They're Ricky's gloves,” I said. I made a crucifix with my index fingers and held it up, not wanting the gloves to come any closer.

“They're yours now,” Terry said. Then he gasped, put a hand up to his chest and held it there flat. He leaned over and put the other hand on his knee. “My chest,” he said.

“Heart attack,” I said.

“Thanks, Einstein.”

“How can a dead guy have a heart attack?”

“Ask the man upstairs.”

“Some afterlife,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” Tall Terry said.

The gloves came closer and closer, until I could even see the blemishes in the leather, and the fingers moved around like worms and reached for my neck like they were teaching themselves the best way to strangle a guy. They say that if you die in a dream, you die in real life. It wasn't my time, I guess. As soon as the gloves started killing me, I reared up in bed and tried to unwrap myself from the tangle of damp sheets. It took me a second to realize that I was still alive and back on the short-side of eternity.

I sat at the window, wishing I had a cigarette even though I'd quit many years ago. If there was ever a good time for a smoke, it's when you're awake in the middle of a cloudless purple night, with the window open, staring at the other distant buildings, imagining other lives. All of the world gets damp at night, like the earth keeps blinking its watery eye.

I made a cup of black tea, and I took my
Gulliver's Travels
off the shelf and read Emily's inscription, over and over, pretending that she was simply in another room. I could hear her voice if I really worked at it. I closed my eyes and summoned her face against the black space, and it floated there reluctantly, and sometimes broke apart like it didn't want to visit me at all. I watched her for a little while, forcing her to stay until she finally broke apart for good and spun off in every direction, followed by a gang of weird green triangles and squares.

Then I went back to a conversation I'd had with Emily, many years ago, while we were lying in bed on a similar kind of night…

“I got a letter from a dead man once,” she said.

“Yeah? Who was it from. Mark Twain?” I said.

She got up out of the bed and grabbed her purse, and she fished around through a million jingly things until she found her pack of smokes. She clicked on the little bedside lamp, lit a cigarette, and passed it over to me. Then she got another one going for herself.

“Senior year of high school… Mister Julian, the English teacher, he gives us this assignment. Since we're about to graduate and go off into the real world, he tells us to have one of our parents write us a letter, and we're s'posed to write one to them. He said how letter-writing was a dying art form. Most of the class thought it was dumb, but I kind of liked Mister Julian. He was cute. That was all we had to do for our final paper in his class: get one of our parents to write us a letter, and we write one to them.”

“What were you supposed to say?” I asked.

She ashed her cigarette. “Anything. I mean, I think his whole aim was to have them give us their advice for a bright future, you know?”

“Sure,” I said.

“He collected all of the letters. In a pillow-case. To hold, and mail them exactly one year later, so we could see how much we'd changed since the end of high school. See what our parents wanted to say to us, but had a hard time saying to our face. A letter is good for that.”

“Did he pay for the stamps?” I said.

Looking back on it, I was always asking some kind of dumb question like that.

“That would be, like, sixty-some stamps,” she said. “Of course he didn't.”

“So you brought them in already stamped.”

“Duh,” she said.

“All right, all right. So what happened?”

“You know what happened,” she said.

I thought hard, but I didn't know what she meant. You'd need two cabinets to file away all of the dates and names and memories that a woman will expect you to remember.

“The accident,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and looking at me like I was a dolt.

“Christ, I'm sorry,” I said. “I forgot you were that young when it happened.”

Her Dad had died in a car accident, one of those odd ones that never get put in the movies. He was driving by himself, out on a country road, and a deer ran in front of the car. It rolled up and broke through the windshield.

“I forgot all about the letter,” Emily said. “Everything was a daze, just taking care of my Mom. Bringing her hot washcloths to lay over her eyes. I barely remember that year. I didn't go straight to college. My Mom was a wreck. Craig was still in high school, so I stayed at home. I stayed at home and I did what was right.”

She was crying a little, but Emily was tough.

“One day Mom goes out to the mailbox, and when she comes back in, her hands are shaking. She drops the bills all over the floor, and hands me that letter. Dead for a whole year. I hugged my Mom and we cried, and it felt like we were slow dancing in the hallway. Her head on my shoulder. I put the letter under my pillow at night. I held it up to the light. But I couldn't open it. Once I opened the envelope, I could never have that moment again—where my Dad would be saying something new to me, like he was still alive.”

“What did it say?”

“I'm still waiting to open it,” she said, and pushed a hand from her chin across her face and right through her hair. She crawled on top of me and I pulled her in tight, like I was trying to meld us into one stronger person.

They always talk about other fish in the sea, but what that really means is that your big tuna got away, and you're stuck sorting through smelly sardines. One time I gave Greedy Pete Bruen a hundred bucks to run a background check on Emily. She's remarried. Two kids. I bet they all pile into their minivan, go to the Christmas tree farm, and chop down a perfect tree; and when they get back home and kick the snow off their boots, the whole house smells like potpourri and warm apple cider.

I let Emily drift away from me for good, and I shut the window. I grabbed twenty bucks and decided to take a walk to the 7-11. I didn't even know what I wanted to buy, but it was something to do. Thank God for all-night stores.

It was quiet outside. No trees rustled. No cars passed. I walked to the main road, turned right, and pretended that I was the last guy on earth. Streetlights aimed their dreary yellow eyes at the road beneath them.

I heard something breathing. Under a streetlight, I saw a peach-colored gang of possums, gathered in a circle, in a spot where the tall grass was dead and the ground was level and bare. As I drew near, one of them turned and hissed like a dragon. I was close enough to see its ragged gums and wavy grin. No possum is winning a beauty prize any time soon, that's for sure. They waddled off, grudgingly, like some gypsy family, into the dark.

They'd been eating a dead raccoon. I squatted down and studied him, and wondered what kind of life he'd led, and if he had a family that was out looking for him right now. I don't know how smart a raccoon is, but I do know that animals are a whole lot smarter than we'd like to admit. Maybe a raccoon has hopes and dreams and doesn't want to die. A raccoon has delicate hands, like the hands of a small child. One of those hands was reaching out and clutching at the night air.

A skinny white kid was working the counter at the 7-11, reading a book. I walked to the back of the store and grabbed an iced tea from one of those ponderous coolers with multiple doors, where there's so much of everything that there's never anything you really want; and when I got back to the counter I said:

“What are you reading?”

The kid hopped off of the tall stool where he sat, closed the book, and pushed his long hair off of his face. He held up the book so I could see the title.

“Gulliver's Travels,” I said. I shook my head and grinned. “You reading it for school or something?”

“I'm reading it to
read
,” the kid said, with youthful surliness.

“Synchronicity,” I said.

“What's that?”

“I was just looking at my own copy of Gulliver, right before I walked over here. And here you are, reading the very same book. That's synchronicity.”

“Amazing,” the kid said, in a flat voice, with a flat face.

I set my twenty on the counter and walked out with my iced tea.

“Hey,” the kid said with his real voice, “what about your change?”

“Keep it,” I said, looking back at him.

“It's only a buck eighty-nine,” he said.

“Buy yourself some Mark Twain,” I said.

The smile on the kid's face was worth a whole lot more than eighteen bucks, and when I was outside I looked back through the glass, and the kid was there counting out the bills he could keep after putting the buck eighty-nine in the drawer. He looked up and waved and made a fist and pumped it in the air a couple of times, like he was saying,
hey man, you're all right
…

Killing Ricky took something out of me. I saw things as they were, and there was a whole lot more ugliness than I remembered. Marcia kept up with her weekly delivery, but her eyes made me sick, for they were the same eyes that she used on her husband and kids. I walked every night and checked on the progress of that dead raccoon. Skin-first it withered away, still grasping at the emptiness, as rotten as a heap of old fruit. It made me think of Ricky Cervetti, dripping into the earth around Eugene's eerie cabin.

One night, on my walk past the dead raccoon, my phone rang.

“Get to Eddie's house,” Dan the Man said.

“What for?”

“Barney,” he said.

“What about him?”

“Poison,” he said.

When I knocked on the front door, Irene answered. She looked like a lady who'd just gotten the ransom call on her newborn baby. She was wearing a white nightie, and she had curlers in her hair, just like they wear in the old t.v. shows. She showed me out to the back patio, where Dan the Man, Eddie Sesto, and Mac McDyer were crouched on the ground, under the soft porch-light, commiserating like guys in a hospital E.R.

Barney the pug was lying on his blue blanket between the three of them, his tongue hanging out to one side.

“Look here,” Eddie said to me. He stood up and handed me a postcard.

“Greetings From The Black Hills,” I read aloud.

Mac McDyer switched out an I.V. in Barney's back leg. Dan the Man smoked a cigarette, coughed a lot, and watched the procedure.

“What's wrong with him?” I asked Mac.