Nightlife (24 page)

Justin and April retreated for a while to Erik’s bedroom, probably unchanged for years, merely dusted and vacuumed. A shrine to a younger Erik, high school vintage. Pictures on the walls, Erik on a track team, and shooting his camera for the school rag, and looking silly and dated in a leisure suit with some unknown girl the night of a homecoming dance. A whole life lived, however short, before Erik had ever known such a person as Justin existed.

He sat on Erik’s bed, and April sat beside him. This was where the whole houseful should be. Out there, with the casseroles from hell and the friends and neighbors playing catch-up with one another’s lives, it seemed that Erik was an afterthought.

The funeral was Wednesday afternoon; it pulled a good crowd. A Lutheran church, and it had air-conditioning. The minister possessed some tact and didn’t try to schlep it all off as God’s will. This Justin appreciated. Maybe if he himself met an early expiration date, they could get this guy to launch him into the hereafter. If, say, cirrhosis caught up with him, or his luck ran out while driving home with a buzz on some night.

Or more likely, if he bit off far more than he could chew once they got back to Tampa.

Burial was on the edge of town, along the same stretch he and April had driven in on. Some small, peaceful cemetery atop the gentlest of rises, with a few desolate trees and a good view of the highway. A scattering of fast-food places on toward Shepley. A Burger King and a cemetery, how quaint. For those who must eat and run, he decided. He had to think of
something
else while acting as pallbearer.

While the minister spoke his final official words on the subject of Erik Webber, Justin scanned the crowd. Lingered on those around Erik’s age, possibly former classmates. The difference between him and Erik, and them—it was a subtle thing, but there. Perhaps showing best in the eyes. These people had spent too long playing hangdog in this town where possibilities for the future were as narrow as a strand of vermicelli. He wondered what they thought, having watched this son of Shepley venture forth into the larger world, then watching it send him back literally chewed up and spit out. It confirmed their worst fears.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In dark suits and sober dresses, they stood in concentric rings around Erik’s coffin, suspended above its hole by the machine that would lower it. And after it was down, handfuls of dirt were cast in, and individual flowers. This was the only part of it all that felt truly real. The final tribute, the hands-on farewell. The ritual cleansing. He thought about such things as they had been discussed with April that first night at Apocalips. And now, more than ever, they made sense.

Rituals.

Even when they were painful, they were still crucial.

And letting go was easier when you had the format down.

Dawn’s early light peeked over the land.

There was something oddly comforting about being in the cemetery so early in the day. When most of the world was, at best, still rubbing the sleep from its eyes. Interruptions were scant, or not at all. Communion between souls seemed to have a better shot at dawn.

Justin had taken the Capri from the motel’s lot and driven here alone. April still slept, had no idea he was gone. There was much he wished to share with her, but not all. Never all. All would be forever taboo, and that was as it should be.

He’d had no small amount to drink in the hours following the funeral and burial. As usual, he’d managed little sleep. After a few hours of shallow catnapping at April’s side, a trip at dawn seemed as natural as, well, as dying.

Justin left the Capri on the cemetery drive, allowing an ample walk to Erik’s grave. There would have seemed something vaguely desecratory about driving any closer. At this hour, at least.

He approached. He sat. This rounded mound of still earth. The newest arrival, festooned with bouquets that were already starting to wilt. No headstone as yet; that would come later. Until then there was just a small flat marker indicating who lay here, metal tracks holding sliding interchangeable letters. Like the price-per-pound sign beside a cut of beef.

Justin had not come empty-handed. He still had a couple beers left over from last night’s marathon, had opened one for the short hop to the cemetery. And he drank under the dawning sky, threads of light mingling with darker clouds, blue-gray shadows. Drinking buddies. Bosom buddies. One on the earth, one in it.

“We’re leaving this morning,” he said to this bulge of earth. “And I just wanted to say good-bye.” He smiled ruefully. “We’ve done plenty of crowd scenes in our day. But yesterday, I just couldn’t let that be it for you and me.”

He shook his head, self-conscious. Not the kind that comes from embarrassing yourself publicly, realizing you’re muttering like a fool to no one but yourself. It was, instead, a sense that somewhere Erik could look down and see him, small and hunched in the dawn, vaguely pitiful in the overall scheme of things. And if Erik could, he’d probably laugh at him and tell him to knock off with the muted histrionics and get on with living, because there were whole giant realms whose magnitudes he had no grasp of. Yet.

But I don’t know, I don’t know what that’s all about, so I guess I’m being selfish here, that this is all for me.
So be it. Erik would surely understand.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be back here. I don’t know if I want to. Or if you’d want me to either. Man, I’ve got whole photo albums full of better ways to remember you than this place.” He drank, shut his eyes, and shook his head, remembering promises made. Promises broken. “I’m sorry you’re buried here instead of someplace better. Sorry I let you down. But it just didn’t seem my place to say anything. I guess we all have to make those arrangements ourselves if we want them done.”

He remembered a distant night, the latter college years. Some night when they should have been studying and weren’t. The apartment trashed as usual, a litter of empty bottles. They had watched the late late late show, some forgotten Technicolor epic about Vikings. Hokey, historically inaccurate, and great fun. They cheered and taunted and swashbuckled right along with the Norsemen. But they fell silent at a Viking funeral, watching a longship, timbers blazing, sailing out into a fjord. A sobering moment, in retrospect. They had watched, had held their tongues.

Finally, “If I die first, don’t let them bury me.” Erik looked very serious. “Especially not in Shepley. Steal me if you have to. And do it just like that.” He pointed his long-neck bottle at the screen. “I’d rather go out like that than have people cry over some hole in the ground.”

Justin had said he would.

And now, nearly a decade later, he cast his eyes down in shame. Drunken promises, so easily made in those days. But so pure, so heartfelt. Vital. And so easily broken by neglect.

Again, surely Erik would understand. How he hoped.

“April and I are getting along great. You probably knew we would, didn’t you? She’s special, she really is. And I hope it lasts, I really do. I hope I don’t blow this one too.” He drank, sighed wetly. “It’s like, that was the last great thing you did in this life, you know? Made sure we met each other, forced us on each other for a few hours. You did good. And I thank you for that.”

Justin stood, stretched legs that hadn’t yet loosened for the day. Birds were joining the chorus of their brethren, more by the minute. Down on the highway, a lone car passed, lights still burning in the gloom. Perhaps someone going to an early shift, or leaving a late one. The noise faded, engine and tires a whispering drone that the town swallowed.

He looked back to the grave.

“You probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me. Don’t think I haven’t thought about
that
a lot. I know you’d never blame me—but that doesn’t mean I can’t blame myself.” Now, only now did the tears threaten to start. In the face of guilt. “I’m sorry, Erik. Sorry I screwed up my whole life and dragged you in to help me set it back up again. Because—
look what it cost you.”

He let the tears burn down his cheeks, pain and shame in equal measures, second and third helpings of each. He twisted off the cap of the second bottle he’d brought, stepped up alongside the mound.

“The cops may not give a damn about anything else but Mendoza’s rights, but don’t think I’ll just let it pass. I don’t want this, and maybe it’s stupid and maybe it’s suicide, but I’m gonna do something about it. April thinks it’s a lot of both, but—I can’t let it go. My own neck’s on the line now, anyway.” He tipped a long draught that finished his bottle. “I’m not sure what to do yet, exactly. But I’ve got a few ideas. April says she knows where Mendoza lives, so that gives me a jump on him, ’cause he doesn’t know that about me. I’ll figure it out, man. And I hope you’re watching. He’s gonna go down. I promise you that.”

Justin leaned over the earthen mound and scooped away a couple handfuls of soil near the grave’s head end. He upended the full bottle and jammed it neck-first into the hole he’d made. Letting it gurgle slowly into the ground, the trickle-down effect. He scooped loose soil back over the bottle’s base, sealing it in. Out of sight. Their little secret, ties that bind.

Trying to smile, Justin laid both open hands on the grave, as gently as he might a friend’s shoulder. And leaving the bottle in place, he turned to walk back to the car.

The ritual completed.

Tony Mendoza managed to stay as busy and enterprising as ever while Justin and April were in Ohio.

Lupo’s news lifted his mood considerably early in the week. Just the thing to put those scissors in his hands to trim loose ends. As soon as Lupo came back to the penthouse to report Justin’s whereabouts, they had switched cars, back to the Lincoln, and Lupo had cruised him to a nearby shopping center. This in itself was of no interest, but there was a one-story branch bank near the boulevard. Stucco job ringed by palmettos, looked like some sort of Franciscan mission in the tropics. They rolled past the drive-through and got a fat roll of quarters. Then they glided across the lot to a row of drive-up telephone carrels.

This was one call Tony definitely did not want remotely traceable back to his own numbers, or his long-distance-calling credit card. Today it was a cash-only transaction, no electronic footprints to his doors.

He punched in the number, and then on came the operator to tell him how much coinage to turn loose. Moments later a phone began to ring in Atlanta. Once, twice, answered on the third ring.

“Wrong number,” said a voice, soft as silk and as humorless as a January gale in Michigan.

“Don’t think so,” Tony said. “Do you know who this is?”

“I don’t forget voices. Mister T. How’s the weather down there?”

“Perfect. Except for a cloud or two I wish would be blown away. Think you can do anything about that?”

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” He chuckled. “Yeah, I think I might.”

“How soon?”

“Bad timing for immediate gratification. I have a prior commitment up north. Maybe the end of the week?”

Tony thought a moment. End of this week, shit. Well, it wasn’t as if he had enough acquaintances of this sort to fill up a Rolodex. Farm it out to the Weatherman, and he knew it would be done to perfection. End of the week it would have to be.

“That’ll be fine.”

“I’ll make travel arrangements and send you my arrival time. You can send someone to meet me?”

“You won’t have to walk.”

The line went dead in his ear, and that was that.

As they cruised away, Tony did not relish the need to turn loose in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen grand.

Nope, life did
not
come cheap.

The next few days he merely wanted to walk through, business as usual. And true, business got done. There were, however, distractions.

One was blond, and now unemployed since she had never returned to a cocktail waitressing job after hooking up with him. Which was okay, in a sense, because he didn’t feel his woman should have to work. Might reflect bad on him. However. He wasn’t sure he wanted Sasha around to assume that title. She was fun, an interesting diversion. Had come in handy, no doubt about that. But her appeal was limited. He wasn’t sure how much longer he would be wanting to plug his prong into the same set of holes.