Eleven Twenty-Three (15 page)

“Mom,” I say, stopping in my tracks. “I’m
absolutely fine. I’d probably be more upset if your
cats
died than I am right now.”

“Don’t talk about my cats dying, please.”

“Sorry.”

“Where is Hajime?” Tara asks. “Is he here
yet?”

“He’ll be here last minute, as usual,” I say.
“Well…let’s go and say hello.”

“Was there no viewing?” Tara whispers in my
ear.

“Not after the way he died, there wasn’t,” I
respond back, and extend my arm for the first handshake.

Everyone is friendly enough. They offer
condolences to my mother and me, and my grandparents both burst
into tears and wrap us in a vice-like hug that lasts for what seems
a very long time. The uncles shake my hand, and the aunts put their
arms around me and pat my back while lightly kissing my cheek and
saying how sorry they are. The nameless cousins and old friends
simply mill around and look sad for my mother and me. The twins,
Luke and Lance, smoke cigarettes and stay far away from the
group.

“I haven’t seen you in so long,” my Aunt
Linda says. “How is teaching going?”

“Um…fine. I’m doing it in China,
actually.”

“
China?
” she repeats, dumbfounded and
wiping at her nose. “What on earth
for
?”

“I live there for the time-being. Tara and I
both do. Have you met Tara?”

I introduce my girlfriend to my aunt, the
vacuum. Then I introduce her to the grandparents, who could care
less and instead talk about how young he was, and that he did not
need to die the way he did. I watch my mother with concern as she
makes small talk with the uncles and cousins. I nod and try to
smile when family and old acquaintances of my father’s go on about
how much older I’ve gotten, and how I look great. I tell them they
do, too. But I’m lying. Everyone is a wreck.

The casket is closed. There are two enlarged
pictures of my father on each side of the polished black coffin,
one more recent in front of what looks like the Space Needle, the
other taken when he was thirty and I was still a child. In both, he
hides behind that expensive haircut and toothy smile, the same
smile that won over my mother and Cindy and about a thousand
clients and friends, even as he robbed them of everything. There
are flowers decorating the entire room, orchids and lilacs and
roses and belladonna, along with boxes of tissues in every pew.
Cindy is a mess, already seated up in the front of the chamber. Her
blond hair looks nice, but her face is a crumpled ruin. I wonder to
myself how she feels right now, especially in lieu of how her
husband passed.

“Layne, you and your mother have a seat
reserved up in front with us,” my grandfather whispers. “Your
girlfriend can come too, if she likes.”

“Hello, Meredith,” Cindy coughs when we pass
in front of her to sit.

“How are you holding up, Cindy?” Mom asks,
hiding anything she may want to say or do right now very well.

“I’m—okay,” she says. “Layne, you look nice.
How are you doing?”

“I’m fine, Cindy,” I mutter. “Sorry
about—well, sorry.”

Cindy nods and inspects her lap. I move away
from her.

I sit at the end of the front pew. My mother
sits down next to me and takes my hand and gives it a sharp
squeeze.

“We’re going to make it through this,” she
whispers emphatically into my ear. “Everyone will.”

Immediately after she says this, something
inside her breaks and she begins sobbing.

I almost feel bad for Cindy now, thinking
back on what my mother told me long distance three days ago.

The girl was the one to call, but it was the
day after it happened, long after she had left the suite. She had
taken all of his money, his cell phone, and even stripped him of
his wedding band and gold watch, a gift from my mother. The pills
were gone, too.

When Cindy got the call, she was afforded
little opportunity to grieve amidst all of the new information that
had surfaced. One revelation was that my father had become addicted
to OxyContin following a minor back surgery last year, and when he
tried to kick that habit, became re-addicted to Vicodin and
Hydrocodone. The other big news was that those “business trips” he
had been taking recently had actually been cliché sabbaticals to
fuck a rather expensive prostitute named Clementine. My father had
been employing the services of the well-known twenty-year-old call
girl for over four months before he died. He was with her in their
usual honeymoon suite at a Holiday Inn just outside of Portland the
night it happened. He had already been taking pills that evening
with the girl, and made matters worse when he had a couple of
drinks in the hotel bar with her.

It was not long after the two began another
round of foreplay back in the room that my father’s heart beat
became irregular, sweat squeezed out of every pore in his body,
blue-white foam gurgled from his mouth, his capillaries burst, his
heart stopped, and he died.

I’m not sure how Mom knows this. I doubt that
Cindy would have told her. The only thing that comes to mind is
that it was Aunt Linda, who always got along well with my mother
and not so well with her much more successful brother. But I am
glad she knows, and I am glad that she told me. It seems better
this way. Any doubts regarding our antipathy toward this man are
instantly eradicated, and we are left secure with the fact that we
are, in fact, burying a villain.

Hajime shows up not long after Pastor Robbins
begins his sermon and eulogy. He is wearing a black button up shirt
and almost invisible black tie, but his pants have cargo pockets
and I bite my lip to keep from laughing. He smiles at me and mouths
an “Are you all right?” before giving me the thumbs up and sitting
down in one of the last rows, behind the twins and my dad’s old
friend who used to call me “Layne-Change.”

I notice when I look back at Hajime that the
funeral home is only a little over halfway full this morning. Dad
would have been disappointed by this. He always demanded a
capacity-sized crowd for anything that involved him.

Only the slightest hints are ever given
during the sermon about what really happened. Sin and corruption
are mentioned, along with excess and the importance of faith and
being true to yourself and your family even when faced with the
opportunity to ignore all of it and lose yourself in the
temptations of a dying world. Robbins runs his hand through his
thinning black hair and clenches his fists when he mentions how
young Paul Lester Prescott was, and how shameful and tragic his
death is. He glances uncomfortably at me when it comes to the part
about the importance of family in times such as these, and peeks at
my mother’s face as he mentions the loving wife Paul left
behind.

He never once looks at Cindy.

“Paul Prescott was a fun-loving, caring man
that I knew very well since he was
this
big, folks. In fact,
I recall the day he received the news that he would be a father.
Now this guy was clueless, everyone: just out of college, just
getting started in the real estate business, still living in a tiny
apartment with Meredith—but that didn’t stop him from being wild
with excitement. No sirree. He already had a list of Biblical names
for both boys and girls, and wanted to go through it with me to
find the best one. Then he wanted to discuss how old was old enough
to have your child baptized. After that it was a request that I
pray for him and his wife and their upcoming child. Then we had a
long discussion on how to reconcile a good, moral life for his
child with a sinful, wanton planet lurking just outside their front
door. He asked me if I thought he was ready to be a father, and I
told him ‘of course.’ It went on like this for almost an hour, and
after that, well, he was quiet for a minute, and you know what he
finally asked me before he left?”

The crowd waits in rapt attention. My cousin
Mary’s newborn begins to cry and Mary quickly evacuates the
room.

“He said, ‘Pastor, I just got one more
question for you now that we’ve gotten all the other stuff worked
out. It’s kind of important,’ and I said, ‘Go ahead, Paul.’ And he
asked me, ‘What exactly do I do with it once it’s born?’”

Everyone in the funeral home laughs pensively
at this anecdote by the preacher, all except my mother and me. We
don’t laugh because Pastor Robbins never gave young Paul Prescott
an answer.

11:14:23 AM

Mother and I ride with Cindy in the lead car
on the way to Oak Meadow. Tara and Hajime follow in my Accord. In
the front seat of our car, the driver coughs and furtively tries to
write text messages on his cell. None go through, and he scowls. In
the back seat, no one says anything. Our composure has been
restored by the tapering rain, the cold day, and a realization
between us that things really aren’t so bad. But our voices are
gone; there is nothing to talk about.

The cemetery grass is wet and gray in the dim
sunlight, and there is already a small crowd gathering underneath
the shadow of a weeping oak tree on the far side of the compound.
The rest of the cars are parked and I rejoin Tara and Hajime. They
don’t say much other than asking the obligatory questions about my
mother, about Cindy, and about me. A moment of guilt passes when I
answer, “We’re all fine.”

The friends, old business partners, and
drinking buddies are gone now, as the burial is meant for relatives
only. The twenty-five or so family members line up on three sides
of the coffin, which is suspended over a hole in the earth by two
green straps and a lowering apparatus. Pastor Robbins stands at the
head of the box, scratching at his forehead with his left hand and
wielding a Bible in his right.

Hajime keeps trying to peer into the earth
beneath the coffin once the preacher begins talking. Tara looks at
me, waiting for a reaction. When she receives none, she smoothes
out the fabric of her black skirt.

Robbins gives a short speech on salvation,
and of the golden streets and diamond palaces of heaven. I glance
at my Timex.

11:20:23.

Aunt Linda coughs. My mother sniffs and looks
at the oak tree’s roots a few feet behind the grandparents. I
glance at the shoes my cousin Arnold is wearing. They’re blue and
black sneakers. Uncle Oliver clenches his eyes shut and runs his
hand through greasy lifeless hair. I look back at my watch and
swallow what tastes like citric acid. I’m not sure why I suddenly
feel so queasy. Maybe I’m catching whatever it is my mother was
warning me about.

11:21:10.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside
the still waters—”

I have heard these words before, but only now
do they mean anything, and that meaning is this: the world is a
better place without him.

Tara grimaces and gently rubs her stomach.
Hajime’s facade does not crack, but he leans heavily on his right
side. My head begins to defy gravity, and I glance back down at my
wrist again.

11:21—it turns 11:22. I want this to be
over.

“And yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me,
Lord—”

When I look back up, I notice that suddenly
Pastor Robbins is sweating profusely even though it is very cold
outside this morning. He wipes at his brow and I notice his face is
red. My grandparents take a seat in one of the complimentary
plastic chairs a couple of feet behind them, and my grandfather
pats his wife’s hand delicately. He whispers something reassuring
into her ear. My mother scratches at her face and narrows her eyes,
looking up at pale sky and a freshly deposited chemtrail over our
heads. The birds stop chirping and the wind dies down and
everything is still, silent.

This is when I know without a doubt that
something terrible is about to happen.

“Surely…goodness and mercy shall…follow
me…all the days of my life…and I will dwell—”

Pastor Robbins stops, begins breathing
heavily. Fear grips me and I clench Tara’s hand in mine.

“I will dwell—”

He stops short again and begins taking
methodical steps toward Uncle Stan, who tries not to notice what is
happening and focuses very carefully on the yellow flowers that
adorn my father’s coffin.

“I will dwell—”

I look at my watch. Pastor Robbins stands
directly in front of my uncle and gathers a deep breath. Everyone
at the funeral is uncomfortable, fully cogniscient of dark times
approaching.

11:23:05.

“And I will
dwell
in the house of the
Lord
forever!”
Pastor Robbins heaves, and with one quick
motion of the hand not gripping the Bible, he pops open the sheath
attached to Uncle Stan’s belt. He removes the pocketknife from
inside and extends the longest blade.

Then, without a moment’s hesitation, the
pastor slices open Uncle Stan’s throat.

He never drops the Bible.

We open our mouths and widen our eyes at the
sight of the blood that spigots out, but no one can move.

Aunt Linda then collapses to her haunches,
presses the palms of her hands deftly against her ears, and
releases a banshee-like scream just before one of my cousins kicks
her hard in the chin, sending her flying backward and landing on
her side. Teeth fall out of her mouth and she chokes up red
spit.

Pastor Robbins takes the soaked pocketknife
and begins jabbing it violently into his own neck. It’s surprising
how much blood comes from the wounds.

In one instant, everything falls apart.

They start killing each other.

For a moment the scene is simply too much to
take in, garbled staticky transmissions and stuttering
incomprehensible images bathed in sunlight and blood.