The Art of Disposal (30 page)

“Who the hell's Darnell Davis?” Eddie said.

“Bullfrog,” I said.

“He ain't coming?”

“Funerals give him the creeps.”

“Me too,” Eddie said. “But here I am.”

We sat down in the front row near the casket. Eddie and Irene were next to me. Dotty and the kid were next to them. Ricky Cervetti's wife and kid were in the row right behind us. Frank Conese was a few rows back, with Carlino and Dante. Creeping Jody was way at the back of the room.

Some sappy music came on, and a priest stood at the lectern and said a few this's and that's, and how we were celebrating the ascension of our brother Dan's immortal soul into heaven, and how there would be a small luncheon at Miller's Church on the corner of Southeast 23rd and Oak Street when the service was over. Then he started the Lord's Prayer, and we all chimed in and gave us each day our daily bread, and forgave our trespassers, and asked for deliverance from evil.

Then Eddie walked up to the lectern. “This thing on?” he said, leaning in way too close to the microphone, and nearly deafening some of the little old ladies in back.

“Yeah! Step back,” a male voice called out. “We can hear you.”

“All right, all right,” Eddie said, straightening up and pulling at his tie, a little like Rodney Dangerfield. Then he was quiet for a moment, and the whole room was quiet, and someone coughed very softly, trying hard to contain it, and you could feel everyone waiting for something, anything, to happen.

“I've known Daniel Nussbaum since 1978, when he first came to work at my store. He already had a lot of experience as a salesman, so I didn't have to teach him nothing. He took right to it like a duck takes to water. Best damn salesman I ever had.”

Eddie looked at the next paragraph of his notes.

“I always knew him as Dan the Man. We all did. In fact, the only person who probably ever called him Daniel was his wife, Dotty—a hell of a woman, and way too smart and pretty for a dumb lug like Dan the Man.”

A few people chuckled, and Dotty blew her nose and laughed explosively, the way people do when they're stuffed so full of grief that it has to get out any way it can. Eddie looked at her and winked. She smiled back at him. Now Eddie was really getting his rhythm. He took a cigar from his coat pocket and ran it under his nose.

“Don't worry,” he said, “I ain't gonna light it—not in this day and age. I'm just gonna hold it while I talk, and then it's going with Mister Nussbaum into the great beyond.” Eddie paused again. He turned and looked at the casket. Then he turned back to the crowd. “I sat up late last night, trying to think of a story to show how wonderful Dan the Man Nussbaum really was; and since I couldn't come up with anything, this'll have to do.”

Eddie smiled and waited for laughter, but it was all crickets. He shuffled his paper and cleared his throat. He touched the knot of his tie.

“We had business down in Louisiana. Just closed a deal to bring up five hundred Kirby Heritage II models—a mighty fine vacuum cleaner, even by today's standards. Well, the guy we were meeting, he lived far out in the boonies, in the swampy part of the state, so we had to take a little Cessna one-eighty-two out to his own private runway. Some of these guys in the vacuum cleaner business, way up at the top and whatnot, they do all right. Well, it's hot and muggy as hell when the plane door opens, and me and Dan climb out into the bright heat. Dan sets his suitcase down and holds his hand up to his forehead, like a visor, and he hunches over and looks straight ahead of him.”

Eddie chuckled to himself, as if he was seeing the thing happen again.

“'What is
that
?' he says to me. So I look, and there in the distance, coming right toward us is this weird flying thing, looks like a tiny alien ship or something. And it keeps on coming. Dan the Man, at first he looks excited, happy, like a little kid, but then his excitement changes to fear, 'cause the thing is flying right at him. He screams, 'ahhhhhhhh!'”

Eddie imitated him, ducking and covering his face, and a bunch of people in the audience laughed.

“Turns out to be a grasshopper. One of them huge ones that you only see down south, so big, well” —Eddie held up the cigar like it was a model, and he was giving a lecture in a science class. “That grasshopper could've landed on this here cigar and had a hell of a time trying to fit on it. That green monster lands right on Dan the Man's shirt, and he screams like a little schoolgirl, and I'm doubled over laughing, and he's trying to flick this huge bug off his shirt, but the thing's smitten with him I guess, and it's walking right up to his face. He's running around in circles, trying to flick it off, and now even the pilot is laughing, and still that grasshopper won't go.

“And you all know Dan. Pretty tough guy. He could win a bar fight one against two, no problem. But a grasshopper? That done him in.”

Eddie laughed, but then it looked like a huge drop of sadness fell right down from the ceiling and pulled his face down with it. He turned toward the casket, where Dan's plastic head was still lying there with closed eyes and strange black nostrils, and a mouth that couldn't smile or frown. Eddie walked over and touched one of Dan the Man's hands that were folded contemplatively across his chest. Then he tucked the cigar into Dan's suit coat pocket, said something that none of us could hear, and walked back to the microphone.

“I'm gonna miss him,” he said.

Eddie took his seat next to me, and I told him he did a good job, and how Dan was probably getting a kick out of it right now if he could still hear us.

Then the rest of us took our turns. I said that Dan was my friend and mentor and taught me more about salesmanship than a thousand college classes ever could, and how he was, in a lot ways, like a father to me.

Then Frank Conese said a few words. He had a great speaking voice, and he mesmerized the whole crowd. Maybe some of them knew who he was, and wondered just what it was that Daniel Nussbaum really did for a living. Frank said that he and Dan the Man went way back, but hadn't spent a lot of time together lately; and how friends will sometimes slip in and out of your life, and just because things ain't always smooth, that don't mean that you don't care about them.

Dotty was too broken up to say much of anything. She cried and melted down, and Eddie had to go up there and lead her away from the casket arm in arm, and it was sweet, and the whole time it was happening Dan the Man just lay there unconcerned, like one of those weird dolls at a touristy wax museum.

Then one of Dan's old high school buddies got up there and said how Dan was the kind of guy that simply lit up a room. Eddie leaned over and whispered how that was a load of horseshit; that Dan the Man, for all of his good qualities, hadn't ever lit up any rooms just by walking into them.

Then all of us pallbearers gathered together, and the funeral men told us how to pick up the casket, and we did it, and carried it out to the hearse; and the long rows of cars drove off to the cemetery, and we assembled again at the grave, where the priest said a few more this's and a few more that's, and splashed some bottled holy water on the closed casket.

And that was that. Dan the Man had gone from a guy that is, to a guy that was.

People wandered off into patches of shade, and shook hands or hugged one another. The cemetery grass smelled fresh and sweet in the hot sun, still damp from the thunderstorm the previous night. The nearby woods buzzed with the sound of cicadas, thrilled with the humid summer day. The family members went up to the casket, one by one, and each plucked off a white rose, and the women tucked theirs behind an ear, while the men stuck theirs into a suit coat pocket, or held it and looked around, wondering what to do.

There was a soybean field on one side of us and a tall white church on the other, flanking the haphazard rows of gravestones, and I thought, well, there are worse places to get stuck in a hole in the ground—like one of those mass graves where Dante's old amigos, the Zetas, stack the departed five or six deep.

People got into their cars, and the cars filed out and away from the graveyard in a long slow line that hiccuped where the gravel road met the highway, as each car blinked its left-turn signal, car after car, pause after pause, starting and stopping, waves of clear heat melting the world above them.

Me and Eddie stood there a while, not saying much, watching the cars drive away, watching the cemetery men roll up the AstroTurf that had framed Dan the Man's casket in an effort to make the raw wormy earth more palatable.

Frank and Dante were standing under a tree in the distance, some women and children gathered around them. An elegant woman flipped her dark hair and grinned and kissed Frank. A kid gripped onto one of Dante's legs and held on like it was a tree trunk, and Dante tried to shake him off, and then he stomped around like a 1960s movie monster while the kid screamed and laughed. Sometimes Frank would look up at us, and then look over at Dante, and they would trade a few mysterious words.

“I think he actually loves that kid,” Eddie said.

“Hitler loved his dog,” I said.

Eddie pulled a short cigar from his coat pocket. He clipped the cap of the cigar. Then he ran it under his nose.

“Back when Frank became boss, there was this mouth-breather causing all sorts of trouble for us. Frank gave this goomba way too many chances, on account of the guy being his nephew. But the rest of the Corporation wanted him gone. The Board of Directors called Dan the Man into a private meeting and gave him the go ahead. So Dan killed the guy.”

Eddie smelled the foot of the cigar.

“Well, Frank didn't like that too much. Asked the Board to equal things out. Put a contract on Dan the Man. Ha!”

That one sharp syllable echoed its way over to Frank and Dante. They looked up at us. They were saying goodbye to their loved ones, sending them off into various black cars.

“The Corporation came down on our side of it. Dan was the best problem solver they ever had. Nobody better. Imagine that prick Conese thinking just 'cause he'd taken over one side of the family—with
my
help—he had the right to get rid of Dan. The Board said no way. But Frank kept pushing for it. Finally they came to me with a suggestion: that we open up shop in a new city and kind of expand the brand. Keep the peace. So that was the deal. And that's why I never got made, Champ.”

“I thought you got skipped over because of the drinking,” I said, and right when I said it I wished like hell I could grab it and reel it back in.

“That didn't help,” Eddie said. The creases in his face looked as deep as if some guy had carved them out with a butter knife. “Well anyway, Dan's gone and Frank's digging up the past. All the old guys are dying off. Frank wants to wipe the slate clean.”

“With you on it,” I said.

“What am I s'posed to do, Champ?”

“Leave town,” I said.

“You can't just walk away.”

“Sure you can.”

“That worked out great for Mark Mason, huh?”

“Me and Carlino and Bullfrog are putting something together,” I said.

“It ain't as easy as making a rhubarb pie, Champ. Tommy Coca, Buttondown Dave. If they was still around, I might have a shot. They always liked me better than Frank. But these new guys, hell, I'm just an old man got kicked to a different city in another lifetime. Old news.”

Eddie put the cigar in his mouth. Then he took it out again and examined the cap as if he'd made a bad cut.

“I hate to think of Dan the Man stuck in that casket for a hundred years,” I said.

“Burned to a crisp, stuffed in a hole: what difference does it make?” Eddie said and shrugged.

I shrugged back. A sparrow landed on a nearby branch and chirped at us earnestly, like it thought we should be able to understand.

Eddie struck a match and held it to the cigar, puffing and spinning the cigar slowly, like it was a miniature galaxy and he was God, getting the whole thing nice and hot and red.

“Don't you ever worry?” I asked.

“About what?”

“Cancer.”

Eddie held the cigar between his teeth, and he used both hands to loosen the knot of his blue and white silk tie.

“Life's too short to worry,” he said. Then he raised his head, to let me know that Frank and Dante were walking toward us between a row of gravestones. When they drew near enough, Frank offered his hand to Eddie, and Eddie took it.

“Sorry for your loss,” Frank said.

“Thanks,” Eddie said.

Dante stood there with his thumbs in his pants pockets, looking like a rotten bloated bratwurst squeezed uncomfortably into a suit and tie.

“You already finish that box I got you?” Frank said, looking at Eddie's cigar.

“I only smoke those on special occasions.”

“And what's this?”

“A sad day,” Eddie said. “And Dan, well, he wasn't exactly your biggest fan, Frank. It wouldn't seem right, me smoking one of your cigars at his funeral.”

Eddie turned his head and spit on the ground. He and Frank stared at each other, a razor sharp invisible wire connecting their mutual hatred. Then Frank opened his arms and gave Eddie a hug, and I watched the veins swell on Eddie's forehead as he hugged him back and tried to hold the cigar away from him.

“You get some rest,” Frank said. “You'll need it.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Eddie said.

Dante shook my hand and then offered his hand to Eddie, and Eddie stood there, unreciprocating, puffing his cigar, looking at Dante's outstretched hand like it was a dog turd on his kitchen floor.

“Poot,” Dante said, pushing forward like a dog on a tight chain. Frank told him to knock it off, and then he smiled the big white smile of a guy who sells wholesale carpet. The four of us stood there, as still as cactuses on a desert hill, Eddie puffing the cigar and sending blue clouds of smoke off into the treetops.

“Mind if I have a word with Ronnie?” Frank said.

“Be my guest.”

“Alone,” Frank said.

“Oh,” Eddie said, and nodded and puffed. “Got a job for him?”

“There's always a job,” Frank said.

“Some easier than others,” Eddie said.

“Some funner than others,” Dante said.