Shaking out the Dead (29 page)



Lee.
Tatum couldn't say his name. She couldn't say anything. Lee looked strung out, and it took her aback. Her eyes darted to Paris, who stood off to the side in the foyer. Rachael peeked from behind Tatum. She blinked, and her mouth opened. She ran to her father. He squatted. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders.

Tatum and Paris exchanged a look above the hug.

“Wow,” Tatum said. “Come in. Come in.”

Lee lifted Rachael, hiked her up, and stepped inside. Paris followed.

“Paris,” Tatum said, “this is Lee, Rachael's dad. And this is Vincent,” she said, gesturing behind her.

Vincent stepped forward, and Lee lowered Rachael to the floor. Vincent extended his hand.

“I'm sorry about your wife,” Vincent said, holding Lee's hand and eye. Lee gave a short nod, acknowledging the expression of sympathy, but Tatum could also see the shadow of distrust crossing his face, perhaps unnerved by being known but not knowing. Then Vincent released Lee's hand and excused himself and knocked on the door across the hall before opening it.

“What are you doing here?” Tatum said, hoping there was the sound of pleasant surprise in her voice.

“I got your message,” Lee said to Tatum. He took Rachael's hand and then took in the apartment. The furniture was a hodge-podge of on-clearance items and secondhand deals. It was not dirty. But by the standards of the affluent suburbs, the place was a dump.

Tatum took hold of her own wrist as though there were a watch on it.

“This is, this is such a surprise,” she said, “but we're on our way to a funeral.” Her eyes darted to Paris then back to Lee. “I guess, if you want, Rachael, you don't have to go.”

Rachael sunk, face and body. This funeral was important to her. She'd helped plan it. It was under her control and a return to the scene of a crime.

“Or your dad can come with us,” Tatum said. “Rachael's been a great help with planning it,” she said to Lee.

Tatum looked at Paris and shrugged, unsure whether one brought guests to a funeral.

“That probably wouldn't be right,” Lee said.

“It would be fine,” Tatum said, “if you want to.”

“I don't know,” Lee said. He looked down at Rachael. Her eyes were pleading with Tatum, pleading that she plead on her behalf. “Do you want me to come?” Lee said to Rachael, pulling her eyes his way.

“I think,” she said, looking at Tatum, “I think we should.” Then her eyes shot upward to her father.

“Shoes then,” Tatum said, and Rachael went off down the hall.

Once she was gone, Tatum turned to Lee. “How long you here for?”

Lee was looking down the hall, the way Rachael had gone.

“Long enough to figure out logistics, I guess,” he said.

“The logistics of what?” Tatum said, her voice and stomach both dropping.



It was good California reefer, fragrant and fresh. Outside Geneva's window, the mountains seemed as if they were on a slow retreat from the highway, giant refugees crossing the prairie. Geneva felt like the car was a capsule moving through a space divorced of time. Without time, the car-capsule drove without seeming to make progress. Geneva told Helene about John, about the food and the fire, about the question he had asked —
what do you want me to do for you?
Geneva told Helene about the sex and John's giant dick.

“I got home,” Geneva said, “and Ralph was dead.”

“What came first?” Helene asked. “Ralph dying or the giant dick?”

“Technically,” Geneva said, “Ralph died first. But those weren't the assumptions under which I was operating.”

“So do you think you killed him?”

“No,” Geneva snapped. “Do you?”

Helene shrugged, but she was just goading her.

“Speaking of giant dicks,” Geneva mumbled, goading back. She turned and looked out the window and noticed, despite the sensation of having traveled nowhere, that they were approaching the exit off of which John lived. “He lives off this exit,” she said.

Helene jerked the steering wheel and took the ramp.

“No, no, no,” Geneva said.

“I want to see this shack of his.”

“No. It's quiet out there. I don't want him to think I'm stalking him.”

“Maybe he'll be flattered.”

“Maybe he'll be frightened.”

“He'll be asleep,” Helene said.

“Go right,” Geneva said at the top of the ramp.

It was darker still off the highway. Helene dug in her purse again as she drove and pulled out an old cassette tape.

“Remember this?” she said, handing it to Geneva.

Geneva took it from her. The ink on the label was faded, but Geneva recognized her own handwriting. It was probably twelve years old at least. The first song was “Almost Cut My Hair.”

“I remember making this,” Geneva said.

“Snap it in.”

But Geneva didn't. She turned it one way and the other, trying to read it in the dashboard lights. She could make out Bowie and Ten Years After from the fading ink. She looked up from the tape and squinted.

“Take the next left.”

Helene took the left off the paved road. The wheels snapped and popped on the gravel.

“What did your Big John have to say about Ralph dying?”

Geneva sighed.

“He asked if I wanted him at the funeral. I told him I needed to step back and do this.”

“The funeral?”

“More than that, I think.”



Though the eulogy was inside, Geneva wore big-ass sunglasses. She did it the way she wanted to, old school. She bypassed the hat but wore a black scarf wrapped like a headband, tying at the nape of her neck. She looked glamorous, very Yoko Ono. There was not a vacuum, but a space around her. Standing near her, you stood in it. She received you from another world.

In the parlor of the bed-and-breakfast, she sat in a red wingback closest to the table with Ralph's pictures and ashes. When she had arrived, the photographs had been arranged chronologically. “Mix these up,” she had said to Helene, and the job had gotten done, though Helene hadn't done it herself. This arrangement was better. No progress and decline. Time, they say, is an illusion. And yet, it always manages to run out.

From behind her sunglasses, Geneva surveyed the room. Apparently, Rachael's father had appeared as though out from the mist. His face did not appeal to Geneva. His energy seemed to ride its surface rather than emerge from deeper inside. Beside him, Rachael seemed in a trance, called by a voice only she could hear. She seemed to move toward her father even though she was standing still.

Hope and fear. That's what Geneva detected in her. The two didn't mix well. Love-me/I'm-afraid-you-won't, mixed together, can taste like hate. Or love. And love. Either way, with the two, the level of devotion involved ran deep.

Geneva's eyes shifted to where Tatum stood behind Lee and Rachael. Geneva knew she had hit a soft spot in Tatum from which there might be no recovery. But what was there to do? Apologize for needing what she needed? Apologize for taking it? Tatum fidgeted. Slightly behind her was Paris, young among the men. He was sure of himself but not of Tatum. But he seemed to be mixing the two up.

Vincent came forward from the back of the room. He stood before the table. Only Geneva sat. Vincent spoke of death.

“We don't know Ralph's reasons,” he said, “for hanging onto his body for so long. It's been a long good-bye.”

He asked the group to bow their heads. Beginnings and endings often have fuzzy lines between them, Geneva thought. But this was death. It was supposed to be crisp and sharp to the point of discomfort, and yet, somehow, it did not seem so.



Behind Tatum, Paris stood listening to the tick of her mind as she worked up her arguments for Lee. She had shared her strategy with Paris. She would try to convince Lee to wait until school was over. Then, summer. This was a whim. Tatum was certain of it. It would wear off. She just needed to buy some time.

“This can't be happening,” she kept saying on the way to the service. Rachael had ridden to the funeral with her father in his rental car, following Tatum and Paris in hers.

“It's going to be okay,” Paris said, and she had looked at him like he had lost his mind. Paris put a hand on Tatum's back as Vincent spoke, but she did not soften beneath it. At least Lee's arrival had diverted Tatum's attention away from Vincent. It was not a thought Paris was proud of. Besides, Lee was as likely to take Tatum from him as Vincent. If Lee took Rachael, Paris knew, Tatum might disappear too, into the loss, and push away whatever else there was to lose. Paris looked at Rachael from behind. She reminded him of a beautiful collie at the end of a leash as she stood at the end of Lee's hand. She knew who owned her. Paris remembered her small body against his in the car. Lee was a hole that could absorb them both, Rachael and Tatum, leaving him alone.

Rachael looked over her shoulder, perhaps feeling his eyes on her back. She and Paris locked eyes for a moment before she turned away, seemingly embarrassed.

Paris thought back to Lee's arrival at Tatum's door. He had felt like a bystander when Vincent stepped up to shake Lee's hand and had wished it was him, not Vincent, holding Lee's hand and eye.

However, the distance had allowed him to examine Lee more closely than he might have been able to close up. If his perception was correct, he had to hand it to Lee. Paris thought Lee could sense that the two other men present were not a team, that there were three of them, three men, each separate, merit and right distributing itself among them, and Lee doing the calculations, trying to work it out.

“Grief is love without the beloved,” Vincent said. “Grief is love turned inside out. Nothing to be afraid of.”

Paris mumbled Amen with the rest of them.

He stepped away from Tatum as the service broke up. Geneva stood and turned to face the room. Helene was at her side. Paris put out his hands as he approached her, and she placed her black-gloved hands in his.