Ed King (20 page)

Ed decided not to call Tracy—in fact, not to call her ever. He put an ad in the paper:
’66 GTO new black paint, bucket seats, Hurst shifter, 4-barrel 389, cherry condition, AC, lo mi
. He priced it to sell; he wanted to be rid of it. On Friday he got a half dozen calls, and on Saturday morning he took the first offer. By twelve-thirty he was parked near the Bleitz Home in Alice’s Peugeot, watching funeral-goers make their way into the chapel. A white hearse was already parked on Florentia Street, gleamingly in place for the imminent casket, waiting to bear Walter Cousins to his grave. Ed saw its groomed and suited driver round it once, perhaps to inspect the tires and polish. The mourners were dressed in somber warm-weather wear and, Ed noticed, were careful parkers—they settled their cars between the white lines in the lot with appropriate, funereal consideration. Ed decided that the man he’d killed had enjoyed a solid middle-class life, because everyone drove clean late-model cars, and no one wore anything that anyone else present could construe as disrespectful to his memory. His mourners processed from the parking lot to the chapel
door with decorous lack of hurry. They converged, hugged, clasped shoulders, shook hands, then passed through the door in intimate cliques. If it was possible for there to be a nice day for a funeral, this had to be one—not so warm that mourners would sweat, and not so cold that, standing in the cemetery, they would want things to speed along because their feet were chilled. Ed realized that one version or another of the arrival scene he was witnessing happened every day—people attended funerals—but until now always in someone else’s world. He’d never been to a funeral, or inside a funeral home, and the only time he’d visited a cemetery was drunkenly, late at night, with fellow delinquents. On that occasion, Ed had felt uncomfortable seeing his cohorts pissing merrily on graves, but hadn’t said a word to them about it, though he’d wanted to give a lecture about respect for the dead and basic decency. The fact was, even as he’d run almost nightly with those losers, he’d felt no kinship for what he believed was their view of the world, or for their conduct in life. But now, having run a guy off the road and killed him, he couldn’t really claim he was better than they were, could he? Indeed, he was, by any measure, worse.

Ed drove off and made a downcast survey of the Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery. He parked and strolled as if visiting graves until the white hearse came slowly through the gates at the head of a motorcade. Then, pretending to be preoccupied with a tragedy of his own, he stood just off from the gathering at Walter Cousins’s grave, to listen and watch. The woman who had to be Walter Cousins’s wife stood by his casket with a tremulous chin, and with the upper half of her face shrouded by a black hat. On her right, with her arm looped tightly through her mother’s, was the girl who had to be Walter Cousins’s daughter, without any chin trembling but with a firmly set expression that told equally of grief. On Mrs. Cousins’s left was a skinhead in a black coat and tie who kept looking at the sky as if in exhortation, while crying, his nose and eyes red. This, no doubt, was Walter Cousins’s son, who at the moment wasn’t holding up his end of things as the remaining male pillar of the family.

The funeral party included cross- and torch-bearers. At the head of the freshly dug grave stood a priest or pastor—Ed didn’t know which—but anyway a priestly-looking figure in a black robe with a white collar, who said, “Following today’s interment, all present are invited to assemble at the Cousins home for refreshments and remembrance.” The ensuing
ritual was surprisingly brief. The priest read from a prayer book as the coffin was lowered. Then he handed the book to someone, took up a shovel, and dropped dirt into the hole. Others came forward to add to his work, and as each took the shovel, the priest said, “The Lord be with you.” When that was done, he announced that they should join him in the Lord’s Prayer, and everyone did. There was an “Amen,” and people started leaving. Ed feigned study of a marker as they passed him, but he did note that Walter Cousins’s wife, underneath her hat, wore heavy makeup that was beginning to fracture; that his son, up close, was beyond-the-pale bereft; and that his daughter—he couldn’t help himself—wasn’t bad-looking.

He followed them to their home in Greenwood. Their square of lawn was burned blond, but the house siding looked newly painted. A hummingbird feeder hung from an eave. In the driveway a folded canvas tarp and an aluminum ladder were shoved against a rockery beside a snarled pile of garden hose. The garage door was open; Ed saw a small workbench, some tools hanging from pegboard, paint cans, a push mower, a snow shovel, and a pile of newspapers. Mourners kept arriving and parking, many moving toward the door with dishes in hand. Through the front window, Ed saw them milling. At one point Walter Cousins’s daughter appeared on the porch with a cigarette, a lighter, and a guy who might have been her boyfriend. They came down the walk and leaned against a car to smoke and talk, both with their arms folded. The guy held his cigarette without any indication of need, but Walter Cousins’s daughter inhaled and exhaled like a machine. After a while, she opened the passenger-side door, scrambled a little, and emerged with another cigarette. Ed referred to the obituary in his shirt pocket. Her name was Tina. She was born in 1959, so she was four years older than he was. He noted her car, a banana-yellow Malibu with boycott grapes on the bumper and, as he drove off, narrowly passing it, a University of Washington parking decal in the corner of the windshield.

School at Nathan Hale began. On the first morning, at eight o’clock, Ed’s old cohorts smoked outside a back door, and Ed smoked half a cigarette with them before tossing the other half and going in. He was a junior now. In American History, the teacher passed out a study sheet with a list of names and dates: Magellan, Columbus, Ponce de León, Cortés, de Soto, Amerigo Vespucci, all the usual suspects. Ed, perusing it, sighed and
dropped his head. “Not more of this,” he said to himself. The same thing happened in second-period English. A syllabus was handed out indicating units on Elements of the Persuasive Essay, Sentence Structure, and Proper Use of Punctuation. In Intro to Chemistry they would start with the periodic table; in Algebra, Ed knew he could teach the class. The day ended with another ritual half-cigarette, after which Ed got a friend to drop him in the University District.

On campus, he searched the parking lots for Tina Cousins’s banana-yellow Malibu. He couldn’t find it. The lot near the football stadium held five thousand cars. The next day, he skipped chemistry and algebra and tried again to find the Malibu. Despite a longer and more determined search, this time in rain, he again struck out. It occurred to him that the campus parking decal he’d seen on the Malibu might have been old—that Tina Cousins might not even be a student at the University of Washington and might never have been. Maybe she’d bought the car with the decal on it and had never bothered to take it off. So what a lame shot in the dark he was taking—all this wandering looking for a car. What for, anyway? Supposing he found the car, or supposing he got another look at Tina Cousins. How would that change anything? He’d still feel terrible. He’d still feel worried that the law would catch up with him. He’d still have to carry his guilt.

He knew the answer. The answer was to keep an eye on the Cousins house in Greenwood until Tina showed up. He watched on Tuesday night, again on Wednesday night, and then, on Thursday night, at about seven, the banana-yellow Malibu pulled into the driveway. Tina got out, in blue jeans and a shawl, and went inside.

Ed listened to the radio and waited. More than two hours passed. Nobody bothered him. The light was pretty low when Tina came out. Ed followed her south on 99. She got off at 50th and made her way to the U District. Tina was an impatient driver who changed lanes a lot, but he kept up. When she parked in a student lot, he did, too, and followed on foot until she went into McMahon Hall, a dormitory.

The next morning at eight, Ed was sitting on a bench outside of McMahon with a campus map in his hands. Eventually, Tina Cousins, this time in a longer, more flowing paisley shawl, came out the front door with another girl. She lit up immediately, and so did her friend. Tina carried a woven jute bag of books that looked like a small gunny sack. She had a nice head of hair and a turned-up nose. The other girl was taller
but not better-looking. Ed stood as they approached and indicated his map. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are we right here?” He put his finger on the map, then handed it to Tina. “What I’m trying to find is the Art Building,” he said. “I’m really sorry to bother you.”

Tina poked her cigarette between her lips, took the map, and turned it around until it corresponded to reality. She told Ed that if he walked in
that
direction he’d come to Art. Ed studied the pores in her face, the flare of her nostrils, the flange of her ear, her hairline, her tufted eyebrows, and her smattering of moles. There was a soft blond down on Tina’s bare forearms. She was a little overweight, but that was okay—the extra weight looked healthy, stout. Rousing himself from his survey, Ed pretended to study the map and ended up studying Tina’s hands. He was stalling. He didn’t want Tina to move on yet. “Can I talk to you?” he asked. “Privately?”

“No,” answered Tina.

“Please. I need to talk to you.”

“No, you don’t,” Tina snapped. “I don’t hang around with jocks.”

She handed him his map and pressed on summarily. The other girl gave Ed a brief once-over, then stepped in beside Tina. Tina shifted her book bag to her left arm. Smoke curled around her cheek. “I’m not a jock,” Ed called, but weakly. The air had gone out of him. He’d been dismissed.

He took a bus home. Things, suddenly, looked strange, he noticed. His childhood neighborhood of mature trees and rolling lawns, where the houses were set far back for privacy, looked, to Ed, devoid of life, as if everyone had fled just ahead of the apocalypse. The general affluence and serenity of Castle Drive—maples, rhododendrons, curved walks, paneled doors—gave way, now, to the darkness of time: each lavishly maintained home was, in Ed’s head, a mere façade, each a scrim of manufacturing raised against darkness. Why was it that the mere sight of cars in their drives, on this day but not the one before, reminded him that the universe was headed toward … nothing? Why was it that Castle Drive looked not just wan but, on this day, primed for catastrophe? A haze had descended over everything for Ed. He walked with his head bowed so as not to take it in, but even the sidewalk was depressing.

At home, in the driveway, Simon maneuvered a remote-controlled car via a handheld console with a short, flopping antenna. As Ed approached, Simon showed off a little—figure-eights, slick backup maneuvers,
high-speed turns, and comical stops and starts between his skinny legs, which were blotchy and pink from the hem of his shorts to the tops of his white cotton socks. Simon was fifteen, his hair was kinky, his lips were meaty, and his arms were puny. He’d skipped a grade and, like Ed, was in eleventh, but he looked like he ought to be in seventh. His T-shirt was a couple of sizes too big, and his glasses gave him a pop-eyed look. That Simon was such a nerd that he played with plastic toys and smacked his lips when he ate—these were facts that, most of the time, made Ed hate him. But now, with the evening light going slowly out of everything, fraternal guilt loomed mightily for Ed, so that, out of character, he put an arm around Simon. “What?” said Simon. “Faggot.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Let go of me, you fag.” Simon slipped from Ed’s embrace and moved to the far side of the driveway. “Leave me alone,” he said.

Ed went to bed and didn’t get up in the morning. Alice called Nathan Hale’s attendance office to excuse him, then brought Ed a buttered bagel, which he didn’t eat, and orange juice, which he didn’t drink. “Eddie,” she said, “what else can I do for you?” and he answered, “I must have the flu.”

When she was gone, he went back to his obsessive train of thought: “I’m a murderer, I killed someone. This is something I can’t make go away. This is a fact now, that I killed someone. Me, a stupid upper-middle-class kid who thought he was a hot-rodder, who thought he was so cool. I’ll never get over it. I’ll never live it down. I’m going to feel guilty for as long as I live. I killed somebody, I killed a human being, I killed Walter Cousins, who wasn’t hurting anything, who had a wife and two kids—I killed him.”

Alice brought Ed soup for dinner, which he ate because he had to eat it to make her go away, but which, disturbingly, he couldn’t taste. Then he had to make Dan go away by saying he felt better and hoped to go to school in the morning. Then it was night, and, with his pillow over his head, Ed didn’t sleep; he just worried, and hated himself. And in the morning he started another day of not taking a shower, not brushing his teeth, not getting out of bed, not eating or drinking—or eating just enough to make Alice go away—in fact, not doing anything except lying there with his sheet over his head. What a person would have seen of him, if a person was looking, was a long, inert rise—the way corpses are portrayed on TV, in morgues—but inside, in his tent world, Ed wasn’t a corpse. Instead, he seethed gigantically, his mind on fire with self-loathing.

That afternoon, he had a visitor—Simon—who announced himself by saying, “Where’s
Phaser Strike
?”

“Simon—help me.”

Simon began rifling through the game cartridges in Ed’s desk drawers. “What?” he said. “
Lander
. And
Eighteen Wheeler
! I asked you like a billion times if you had any of my stuff. This isn’t
fair
. Jesus.”

Ed said, “Simon, I’m messed up.”

Simon started stacking video-game cassettes. “Here’s
Phaser
,” he said. “I
knew
you had it.”

“This is a nightmare. I’m in hell. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me.”

“Ha-ha-ha. You’re sick,
Edeleh
, and I don’t feel sorry for you one little bit. In fact, I like you better when you’re sick, except you’re always sick.
In the head
.”