If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (26 page)

•   •   •

M
r. Farrell was a short, fat bald man whose head was sweating because the air-conditioning was on the fritz. I had gone to school with his daughter, Patrice; we’d been lab partners in eleventh-grade Earth Science and used to sneak out to the corner bathroom, where nobody hung out, to smoke cigarettes under the ugly fluorescent lights. Farrell’s was the most popular funeral home in Elephant Beach; people spoke of Mr. Farrell as though he was the Picasso of the corpse world. He would spend whatever time it took, pulling all-nighters if necessary, to make loved ones look as alive as possible. It was said that his bodies were so lifelike you almost forgot they were dead.

“Luke McCallister!” he cried, coming toward us. He grasped Luke’s hand in his own. “Welcome back, welcome home! You’re looking very fit, sir. Very fit, indeed.” I was thinking Mr. Farrell truly was a man of
superior talents, in that he managed to successfully combine a hearty cheerfulness with a ghoulish aura that befitted his surroundings.

“Mr. Farrell,” Luke said quietly.

“And who is this?” Mr. Farrell turned toward me with an inquiring smile.

I stuck out my hand. “I’m Katie Hanson, Mr. Farrell,” I said. “I went to school with Patrice. We were in the same science class.”

He shook my hand politely and then turned and led us to one of the blue velvet love seats in front of the phony fireplace in the anteroom. You could tell it was phony because the logs were lit and it was mid-August. He stood facing us and his features changed into a sober mask. “Regarding the deceased,” he said gravely. “Mr. Ronkowski. We have a slight problem, I’m afraid. I have to have a family member sign the release forms.”

“He has no family, man,” Luke said. “There’s no next of kin. His wish was to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over the water. That’s what we’re here to arrange.”

Mr. Farrell cleared his throat and tugged at the collar of his wet white shirt. He looked stifled in his black suit and I wanted to tell him to take off his jacket and tie and be comfortable. But it wasn’t my place. He was not my guest, I was his. By comparison, Luke, in his faded jeans and flip-flops, strands of his honeyed hair falling out of a rubber band, looked as cool as if he’d just walked out of the ocean.

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Luke,” Mr. Farrell said, his face a sympathetic study. “There’s no will, no written directives, and there’s the matter of—”

“Mr. Farrell, the man was a member of the United States military.” Luke spoke crisply, as though delivering a report. “He served two tours in Vietnam. He was at Khe Sanh. He lost his leg in battle. He earned a Purple Heart. He spent the last days before his untimely death living in a fleabag hotel that cost three dollars and fifty cents a night. He drank
himself to death and now he’s been dead almost one week. He’s laying up in your funeral home and, for some bullshit paperwork that means nothing, we’re delaying his last wish. His last wish, in the form of a verbal command to me, was to have his ashes scattered over the ocean. Are you going to deny a serviceman who sacrificed a limb for his country his last wish on this earth, sir? Are you really going to do that? Because there’s no written word, no fucking family signature from a family that doesn’t exist?”

I looked at Luke, amazed. He spoke softly, mechanically, his words slicing the air like small knives. His face never changed expression the whole time he was talking, but I watched his left fist clench and unclench and Mr. Farrell saw it, too, his glance flickering downward. I’d seen the way his face flinched when Luke said “fucking.” You’d think a funeral director would have heard those words before, would be used to them.

“Luke, now, of course I respect the man’s service record,” Mr. Farrell said. “Of course we all want to do as much as possible for our boys—”

“We’re not boys,” Luke said, and something loosened in his voice. His body tightened.

“Mr. Farrell,” I said quickly, “we’re Mitch’s—we’re Mr. Ronkowski’s only people. He doesn’t have anyone else. We’re his people, Mr. Farrell. We just want to remember him well. We’re having a ceremony on the beach, and then we’re having a dinner for him, for his friends who—who loved him. Can’t you help us, please? Mr. Farrell, can’t you please help us?”

Mr. Farrell looked from me to Luke. He looked back to me again. “Of course I’ll help,” he said, so sincerely you wanted to believe him. “Of course I’ll help you honor this man who sacrificed so much for his country.”

“Just burn the fucking body,” Luke said, and Mr. Farrell’s face finally collapsed so that all the careful signs of counterfeit emotion came together in surprise and anger and contempt and sorrow.

•   •   •

W
hat’d you tell him?” Luke asked.

We were sitting in the Treasure Chest Bar and Grill, not far from Farrell’s, by the marina under the bridge. The long, polished bar faced the water and the boats rocking the harbor. It was the kind of local place you came to for birthdays and other special occasions. They were known for their soft-shell crabs. I looked around for Charlie Brennan, Marcel’s father, who practically lived at the Treasure Chest, but it was probably too early for him to be there. I had been to the Treasure Chest before with my family, but I’d never sat at the bar, drinking vodka and grapefruit juice, watching the sun drag the dregs of daylight across the bay.

Luke was drinking Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. I sipped my drink slowly. I wasn’t used to drinking this early in the evening and I’d had only a coffee ice-cream cone with sprinkles since breakfast.

“I told him you were really cut up about Mitch’s death,” I said carefully, not looking at him. Luke had stormed out to the car, after telling Mr. Farrell to burn Mitch’s body. “I told him you had both been in the war and he had to make allowances.”

Luke laughed. His laugh sounded dry, dusty. He fumbled for his cigarettes. “‘Allowances,’” he said. He held the pack out to me and I took one, even though I had my own. He lit us both from the same match. We sat, smoking, and I was surprised at how comfortable I felt, how calm.
This is Luke,
I thought, watching his velvet eyes staring at the boats outside the window.
This is Luke
.

“He liked you,” Luke said suddenly, his eyes on the sunset outside the windows. “Mitch.”

“I liked him, too,” I said.

“No, man, you’re not getting my meaning,” Luke said. “I mean, he dug the shit out of you.”

It took a minute for what he was saying to sink in. “No,” I said quietly. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Was for him,” Luke said.

“I never—” I started. “He never—”

“He didn’t tell you because he thought it would get weird, and he didn’t want that. ‘That little girl is my sunshine,’ that’s what he said about you.” Luke grinned. “Little girl with a big mouth.”

Tears came to my eyes, fell down my face. Luke looked over at me, startled.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, I was kidding, man, I just—”

“It’s not that,” I said brokenly. I thought about that last time I’d sat with Mitch, talking about Luke, the construction workers hassling him. All the times we’d hung out, he’d never said a word. Even his eyes had stayed silent. I thought about the rolled-up cuff of his pants, the wooden leg. “Five fingers of love,” he’d said, laughing.

I wept.

Luke didn’t say anything. He let me cry. He handed me a stack of cocktail napkins from the pile in the little box on the bar. He dropped some, and as he bent over the barstool to retrieve them, his tee shirt rode up his back and I caught a glimpse of the scar, a shiny crisscross of what looked like tiny hearts sewn together in a jagged line across his back.

I wiped my nose carefully and stuffed the cocktail napkins in the pocket of my cutoffs. “Do I look like I was crying?” I asked Luke. He laughed. Then he took a cocktail napkin and leaned forward and brushed my right cheek. “Not anymore,” he said. He put the napkin underneath his drink.

“What about the rest of it?” he asked. “The ceremony on the beach? The dinner? Is any of that really happening?”

I shrugged. “Beats me,” I said, but the more I thought about it, the better an idea it seemed. I could see us, all our people, on the beach at sunset. Everyone who wanted to saying his or her piece, sharing a stoned memory, whatever. And then we could head over to The Starlight for
some kind of buffet supper spread that I’d seen them put on when the Chamber of Commerce held one of their meetings there when they were tired of the VFW hall and wanted a view of the water.

“I mean, really, man, why not?” I said to Luke. “I think Mitch would have liked it,” and hearing myself say the words, I knew it was true.

Luke sighed. It had a heavy sound. “What?” I asked, and then it occurred to me, like a sudden hard slap on the shoulder. “Oh God, did you—was it—was it something he asked you to do for him? Like, by yourself? Is that what—”

Luke held up his hand. “No, man. Really, no. Look, we were drunk. He was shit-faced, which apparently was pretty normal for him, right? Cat kept a bottle in his pocket, a bottle in his room, and lived on top of a bar. Total coverage every hour of the day and night.”

I asked what had been on my mind and everyone else’s. “Luke,” I said. I stopped to savor the taste of his name in my mouth. “Did he say anything to you? Was it just drunk talk or was he planning to—to kill himself and giving you, like, last-minute instructions?”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “We were talking about body bags,” he said, in the same dry voice he’d used at The Starlight Lounge, which made him sound older than everyone else. “The indignity of body bags. Like how stupid they look, like big, shapeless pieces of shit instead of human beings. That’s what we were talking about, man. That’s what led to his historic statement. Is it what he really wanted? Is it what he would have said if he knew it was going to be last call for real? How the fuck should I know? I mean, dig it, I barely knew the cat. But since it was the only reference to his own demise anyone remembers, and since he apparently never was sober, it’s the only intel we’ve got to go on.” He looked at me with a little half smile. “That’s army talk for—”

“I know what it means.”

“You want another drink?” Luke asked, opening his wallet, laying a ten-dollar bill on the bar. I nodded. “Sure,” I said. I looked out the wide
windows. The sun was gone but it wasn’t full dark yet. The sky was a deep blue, with splashes of orange on the horizon. I looked up at a lone star glowing so brightly in the sky that it had to be a planet, Venus or Mars, something. I shivered at the beauty of nights like this, remembering other nights as beautiful when I’d looked up at the stars and made a wish.

I went for my own wallet, an Indian braided piece I’d gotten at Heads Up. Luke put his fingers over mine and pushed them down. “I’ve got it,” he said, as the bartender brought us our drinks. The skin on my knuckles felt electric. I could feel the brush of his fingers along my spine, light as feathers falling from a dream. This first touch. Luke.

•   •   •

L
en sighed, running a hand through his silvery hair. “I miss him, you know?” he said, staring out the porthole window behind the bar. “Sometimes it was a pain in the ass, the way he’d get tanked and just go on and on. He used to come in first thing when I opened, I’d be trying to count out the drawer and he always made me lose my count. But now it’s like I’m waiting for him to come through the door, start his infernal yakking.” He shook his head and moved down the bar to his other customers.

We were passing the hat to pay for the cremation and any extras for Mitch’s ceremony. Everyone was into it, from the derelicts that lived in the rooms at The Starlight Hotel to Desi and Angie, up at Eddy’s. “We used to shoot the shit,” Desi said, handing me a twenty from the register. “He was good people.” Fiona Feeney came into the lounge one night and handed me an envelope filled with bills; the Hitters had taken up a private collection spearheaded by Jimmy Murphy, who’d liked listening to Mitch’s war stories. He himself had wanted to be a Green Beret but was kept from enlisting because of a heart murmur. When he was drunk, he would play “The Ballad of the Green Berets” over and over again on the
jukebox. “His idea of a vicarious thrill,” Fiona said. “Listening to tales of blood and guts and bayonets.” The cremation was going to cost three hundred dollars. Len said he’d throw in the buffet, with a couple of pitchers of beer, maybe some sangria. “Tastes like cat piss, but it seems to be popular with the ladies,” he’d said, winking at me.

“That’ll work,” Luke said. “That’s great, man, really. Thanks.”

“Really, Len,” I said, and meant it. He was doing everyone a solid.

The ceremony was going to be on the Friday night of the weekend before Labor Day weekend, on Comanche Beach. I had run into Luke on my way up to Eddy’s for an egg cream and he’d asked me to come with him to talk to Len about the party afterward. It was the third or fourth time in my life, being in a bar during daylight. I felt daring and decadent, even if I was only drinking ginger ale. We were sitting in the corner by the jukebox. Otis Redding was singing “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” It made me think that summer was all but over; you could smell it in the lift to the wind at night. You’d wake up at five in the morning, looking for blankets, when for months you’d slept with only your sheets for shelter.

“Here’s something, though,” Len said, making his way back down the bar to us. “The wife called, what’s her name, Rosemary. She wanted to know what was happening with the, you know, if there was going to be a funeral or some such.”

“Fuck her,” Luke said serenely. I loved the way he said things like that, as though he was just making conversation. “I mean, pardon my French, but what’s it to her?”

“Well, technically, they’re still married,” Len said. “She’s entitled to his benefits. Maybe the thought of his disability check softened her up, made her more sentimental.”

“Does she want a funeral now?” I asked. “Does she want to take him back to—”

“I told her about the, you know, the cremation,” Len said. “Reminded her of our previous conversation, in which she wanted no part of it.
Asked her, did she have other plans before we went ahead with the actual, you know, the cremating. She said she was just looking for some kind of closure.”