About Grace (36 page)

He missed seven days of work but Dr. Evans took one look at him standing in the entrance to the store in his wrinkled suit with his eyeglasses on and took him back.

Felix's body was brought to Kingstown and incinerated and the ashes poured into a white plastic container with a screw top. This Naaliyah held on her lap through the flights from Kingstown to Bridgetown, to Santiago, to Puerto Montt, and finally into Punta Arenas, in Patagonia, at the end of the continent.

Her letter took two weeks to arrive in Anchorage. When it did, Winkler let Christopher open the envelope. They sat on the orange sofa and Winkler read it aloud.

Dear David
—

The guidebooks say the reason they paint their houses such bright colors is to contrast the colorless landscape. But to call it colorless is ridiculous. I see color everywhere: lenga leaves touched with red, the gold of the pampas, a few crimson flowers still on these bushes that I think are called fire bushes. The blue of the sky, too: not indigo like the Caribbean but a sort of pale blue, washed through with white. Even the sea, the Magellan Strait, is a color: like old silver that has been touched with polish in a few places.

It is late spring here and the insects are mating everywhere. Last night during dinner a big brown moth landed on the window and was joined by another and still another. All males
—
their hair
pencils were so heavy with alkaloids and pheromones that after they left I could still see the ghosts of them powdered on the screen.

I took Papa's ashes to San Gregorio. His primo, José, drove me. José is an accountant. We went out in his sports car down this endless gravel road. Several times I thought the axles might break but Jose kept on driving, banging in and out of potholes. After about an hour we parked on the side of the road. There was nothing but shrubs and lenga trees for miles. With the car shut off, it was very quiet, only the wind. I thought maybe this was a place Papa had once loved but when I asked José he just shrugged and said, “I don't know. It seemed like far enough.” Outside it was very windy and I didn't know how far I ought to go from the car, so I went maybe two hundred meters.

The wind started taking the ashes before I could even get the lid all the way off. José had a couple of bottles of Austral and we toasted Papa with those and it was a little anticlimactic but still, I think he would have liked it. His ashes blowing out across the pampas and even all the way to the road and across it. As I watched an ant came and started tapping a little pebble of him and took up the clump in its mandibles and carried it away
—
a little piece of Papa, back to its nest.

I think I will stay here a bit longer. Could you telephone Professor Houseman for me? I think he'll understand. Use the apartment for as long as you'd like, of course. Keep the caterpillars alive if you can. Say hello please to Christopher.

Christopher nodded gravely. “That's me,” he said. “Christopher.”

“Yes.”

“What is
primo
?”

“I think a cousin. Family of some kind.”

“Family.” The boy looked at Winkler and reached up with both hands and adjusted his crown.

Winkler kept his hands on the letter and tried to fold it and replace it in its envelope. “Like you and me,” he said.

“And Mom,” said Christopher. “And Herman.”

Upstairs someone flushed the toilet and the walls surged with water and in Naaliyah's tiny kitchen the refrigerator motor clicked on and Winkler said, “Yes. You and me and Mom and Herman.”

Herman walked out of the hospital after eight days. He was sixty-six now and this time the bank strung crepe paper from the ceiling tiles and taped balloons to his doorknob and everyone signed a card but he was done, there would be no negotiating. He told Winkler that it took a man to know when to pull himself out of the game and he was trying to be a man.

The following Saturday, Winkler helped him move out of his office, boxing up files, emptying drawers of notepads, carrying binders and hockey trophies down the stairs through the rain to Herman's truck. His files were neat and ordered and the whole extraction took little more than an hour.

On the drive back to his house Herman was quiet and Winkler thought to ask him if he was all right but decided it was best to stay quiet.

But he was all right; he was more than all right. He walked three times a day, a walking stick gripped firmly in his fist, and perhaps he walked a bit slower than before, and more stiffly, holding his chest straight and rigid, as if his heart were in danger of finding a gap in his ribs and tumbling out, but he did not mope. He coaxed moose into the backyard with a salt lick; he bought a birdfeeder and kept it full to the rims. He stowed his skates and goalie pads in one of the upstairs bedrooms and Winkler saw no more of them.

And he extended his timeshare in La Jolla, buying up six additional weeks. “Doctor's orders,” he said, smiling a small, guilty smile. Most nights when Winkler was there, the two of them watching the Canucks or the Aces on TV, Misty would telephone and Herman would take the cordless upstairs to his study and when he came back down he'd be smiling and distracted, as if he had lipstick all over his face, sometimes not even noticing if one of the teams put the puck in the net.

On November 24 he left for La Jolla, a little maroon carry-on over
his shoulder and his brass putter in his hand. His heart pills made a small cylindrical bulge in his shirt pocket beneath the flannel. He, Winkler, and Christopher sat hip to hip in the back of the cab, all three strapped into their seat belts, the smell of Herman's cologne thick around them. Herman let Christopher hold his putter and the boy held it carefully, across his lap, so that the head cover wouldn't get dirty.

In the departures lane a cop hurried cars in and out. Winkler asked the cab to wait and he and the boy followed Herman to the curb.

“I know Grace would've liked to see you off,” Winkler said. Herman waved his hand as if brushing it all away. He picked up Christopher and hugged him and Christopher kissed him on the cheek. “See you in a couple months, champ.”

“Okay,” said Christopher.

It was cold and snow was brewing in the clouds. “Well,” Winkler said. “We'll be here when you come back.”

Herman shook his putter in affirmation. “Good-bye, David. Good-bye, Christopher.”

They watched the doors slide open and Herman drag his suitcase into the concourse. Then they got back into the cab and the driver started it for home.

At work Dr. Evans kept on Winkler about getting his own place. She said she knew a woman who had a one-bedroom downtown with good views and wood floors and a deck out back and would rent it for cheap. That evening they closed the shop and she drove Winkler in her station wagon through the hotel district to First Avenue and F Street to a subdivided triplex by Ship Creek. Within an hour he had signed a lease for the top floor.

Thanksgiving loomed. The malls filled with people forced inside by weather: mothers with strollers, gangs of elderly walkers. Winkler and Gary taped cardboard turkeys and pilgrims in the LensCrafters windows.

“Okay,” Winkler said. “A policeman stops a woman for speeding
and asks to see her license. He says, ‘Lady, it says here that you should be wearing glasses.' The woman says, ‘Well, I have contacts,' and the policeman, he says, ‘I don't care who you know! You're still getting a ticket!'”

Gary shook his head. Winkler stood back, grinning.

He fed the caterpillars their leaves and the insatiable beetles their bark paste and they clicked and murmured their gratitude. Each afternoon he met Christopher outside Chugach Elementary and they rode the bus to Naaliyah's, where they watched the insects, or studied various things under the microscope, or walked the streets, stopping to investigate the things they found, until at six or seven Grace came in her Cavalier to collect him.

Some nights, in the darkness, alone in Naaliyah's apartment, he wondered if in the weeks before he died he might dream ahead to what waited for him. Perhaps he would see hedgerows, or poppy fields, or light on a pasture of ocean, or snow crystals maybe, their evanescence, their plurality. Maybe he'd move through a big house and in each room find a person he had lost: Felix, Sandy, his father, his mother. Maybe he'd dream of nothing, the blankness he had glimpsed on that beach so many years ago, a void in which things moved around him undetected and unheard—something like that biological end, beetle larvae chewing determined, hungry labyrinths through him.

Or maybe he would dream himself back into that first apartment, his closet bedroom, his mother's iron sighing over the ironing board, his father turning the pages of a newspaper, the ghosts of animals stepping quietly through the walls.

In the backseat of the Cavalier, he and Christopher played the old game, finding shapes in the clouds. Once they were explained, Christopher's choices inevitably surprised him: a sleeping dragon with its tail coiled around its head; a sack of marbles, a thin contrail forming the string around the bag's neck.

It was Thanksgiving and earlier in the day Christopher had presented Winkler with one of his poster-sized drawings. In the background stretched the airport, huge and soaring, its facade broken by a hundred little windows, and the white space around it was peppered with the small T shapes of airplanes. Out front, beside a yellow oval that must have been a taxicab, a man held a golf club. On the curb beside him, a stick boy with yellow hair that Winkler knew to be Christopher held hands with a second man wearing enormous eyeglasses.

“That's Herman?”

“Yes,” Christopher answered, madly shy. His fingertip roved to the man with the glasses. “And that's you.” Winkler told him it was the greatest picture he had ever seen and that he would keep it forever, or if not forever then as long as he could.

Grace was driving, in a generous mood—even smiling once in a while in the mirror at Winkler. Her bicycle, clamped to the roof rack, cut the wind. Winkler rode in a baseball cap and Christopher wore his orange construction-paper crown, decorated with stickers and newly reinforced with cardboard. In the backseat between them was a brand-new square-bladed Rittenhouse spade.

They drove out the Glenn Highway, past the army base, past Eagle River, and the landfill, mist breaking across the car's grille. By the time they were alongside the Heavenly Gates Perpetual Care Necropolis a light drizzle had started.

Grace parked at the gate. She pulled on her riding shoes and laced them one after the other by placing them on the dash and hauling down on the laces. There was a bruise on her shin, and the skin there was shiny from her having shaved it so close, and when she shifted, the smell of old sweat came off her biking shorts.

Behind her Christopher and Winkler sat as if waiting out the rain. Grace opened her door and threw a heel onto the hood and leaned over her knee to stretch. Through the open door came the wind, damp and cool. Christopher rested his chin on the sill and peered out his window.

“Rain is always worse hearing it on the roof,” Winkler said. “But once you're out in it, moving around, it'll feel kind of good. You'll see.” The boy's eyes turned up, as if calculating whether or not the rain would feel good.

Grace unclipped her bike from the roof and fit the front wheel's axle into the fork ends. She spun it until the tire was true and clamped the quick-release and affixed the front brake. “You guys have fun,” she said, and leaned in and looked at Christopher, still in the backseat, and rested her bike against the car. She climbed into her seat and reached over the back.

“You'll be warm enough?”

He nodded.

She pulled his collar up and brought it around his neck. “Your crown will get wet,” she said.

Christopher shook his head. They compromised by pulling up the hood. She tugged on his drawstrings, and looked at Winkler beside him, holding the boy's fingers with one hand and the spade with the other, and then she shook her head and said, “I love you, Chris,” and smiled at them both.

Then she pedaled off, starting on the big hill, her legs moving easily and efficiently on the pedals, her back bowed over the crossbar.
They watched until she was nearly at the top of the hill, rounding a bend, and the mist closed over her.

Winkler squeezed Christopher's hand. “You ready?”

The boy shrugged. Winkler walked around the back of the car with the spade and opened the door and took the boy's hand and they set out, climbing toward the cemetery gates with the Cavalier at their backs.

There was a backhoe pulled up behind the office, its arm folded. Inside, the same grizzled attendant pulled back the door, picking his teeth with the cap of a pen.

“We want to buy a tree,” Winkler said. The attendant nodded and pulled up the hood of his poncho and the three of them walked out into the rain. There were maybe two dozen saplings leaning against the back of the office, all with their root-balls wrapped in globes of burlap.

From the other side of the house the big old Newfoundland came loping toward them and Christopher reeled back behind Winkler's legs but the dog pushed forward and lacquered the boy's face with drool.

“What kind of tree you guys want?”

Winkler looked down at Christopher. “What kind of tree?”

But the boy was reaching, gently, for the huge wet dog. “What's his name?”

“Her name,” the attendant said. “Lucy. Lucy Blue.”

Christopher stood for a moment, then reached up and took the big patient dog around the neck, and hugged her. She panted over his shoulder. “Good girl,” the boy said, patting her head. “Good Lucy.”

“Let's pick the tree, okay, Christopher?”

They walked among the saplings looking at each and Christopher spoke softly to Lucy as if consulting her. At last he pointed to the biggest one, an aspen, maybe half of its leaves lying curled around its base. The remaining hundred or so clung to the branches, bright and yellow, flapping slowly in the rain. “That one?”

The boy nodded, his attention on the tree, a diminutive arborist.

Inside the office the attendant rang it up. Winkler asked, “You're sure it's not too late in the season?”

“It's fine.”

“The ground won't be frozen?”

“Not yet.”

“And we can put it anywhere?”

“Anywhere within six feet of the plot.”

Winkler paid him and handed the boy the spade and together with the attendant managed to wrestle the big sapling into a wheelbarrow the graveyard loaned out for just such purpose.

“Pails,” the attendant said. He disappeared into the office, reemerged with two five-gallon buckets, one stacked inside the other, and hung them on a handle of the wheelbarrow.

Then the two of them started off down the rows, the boy jogging out in front with the big shovel dragging behind him, Winkler driving the barrow over the stones in the makeshift path and the branches of the tree bouncing and the big dog following them both.

Halfway up, Christopher stopped and pulled back his hood. He hugged the dog and took off his crown and pinned it into the fur on the dog's head. “Here,” he said, and patted her ribs. “You can wear this a minute. While I help dig.”

They wheeled the tree to Sandy's grave. From up there they could see, far off, the rain falling on the high flanks of the Talkeetnas, falling as snow. Winker stood a moment. The boy offered up the spade. Her plot was maybe six by six, the size of a king mattress. Winkler raised the shovel and drove the blade in.

The smell that came up was of turned earth, moss and ferns. Severed worms flailed in the cuts. The soil was pebbly but the digging was not hard and in ten minutes Winkler had made a sizable crater. Once he finished, he heaved the tree out of the wheelbarrow, rolled it to the edge of the hole, and hacked off the burlap. The boy helped him push it over the lip. Winkler grabbed the sapling's trunk. “Is it straight?”

“I think so.”

“Put some dirt around it then.”

The boy lifted the spade. They filled the hole, and tamped it down. The Newfoundland sat placidly by, the boy's crown cocked between
her ears. Rain flecked the lenses of Winkler's glasses. Christopher stood back and appraised their work. “That's it?”

“That's it. Now we water it.”

They walked back down through the graves to a spigot beside the office and filled their buckets. Christopher at first filled his too much and Winkler had to pour some out until he was able to drag it. Water sloshed over the rims and dampened their boots. They hauled up the pails and poured them over the base of the tree and went back again, hauling up the water, pouring it out, watching it soak through the soil, big Lucy following them both.

“What do you think?” Winkler asked, when they were done.

“It's okay,” the boy said. His hair was soaked, and his pants were muddy to the knees. The wind came up, and moved the highest branches and sent droplets of rain flying through the air. “I like it. I think it will make it.”

“Happy Thanksgiving, Sandy,” Winkler said.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Christopher said.

On the way down, moving back toward the gates, toward the car, the boy began to run, his hood down and his boots splashing, calling, “Go, Lucy, go, Lucy!” and the dog ran along beside him, barking with joy, the crown still somehow clinging to her ears, and Winkler turned once to look back at the tree, standing thin and mostly naked beside Sandy's grave, holding its branches up. Then he hurried on, through the headstones, after the boy.