The Art of Disposal (41 page)

We bought a few things at the store—red peppers, chickpeas, and rice—and one or two customers walked past us and tried not to look right at Blind Shannon's face. It throws you a little the first time you see her: those sunken eyes and slightly skewed mouth. I told myself that if anyone so much as looked at her the wrong way, or snickered, I'd take them outside and break their nose.

Then I remembered her old German Shepherd, so I asked about him while we were crossing the parking lot and getting back into the truck.

“What was his name again?”

“Andy,” she said.

“Yeah, Andy. Who the hell names a dog Andy?”

“I do,” she said and laughed. “Boy, he was a good dog, too. I miss him.”

“You got another?”

She nodded. “I'm on my third. All Shepherds. This one's name is Max. Does that name sit all right with you?”

“I guess so,” I said. “Where is he?”

“At the home, in the city. I'll be going back when this is through.”

“The home?” I said.

“A community. A blind community. Real nice.”

“Why don't you live with your sister?”

“Ewww,” she said. “No thanks. I like my place in the city. It's good for me.”

“Did they all look alike?”

“Who?”

“The German Shepherds.”

“How would I know?”

“Right,” I said, feeling pretty dumb. “I've never had a dog.”

“What kind of life is that? No dog?”

“I've had a lot of fish,” I said. “Aquariums.”

“You can't hug a fish,” she said.

On the drive back, she asked me where I was staying, and when I told her at the old farmhouse, she said, “No one's lived there in years, have they? And there's no running water.”

I told her it was true that the old place was a bit rundown, but I was an easy customer and the price was just right. Shannon wasn't having it, and I was glad she wasn't having it. I was about to go back to Rittman that afternoon and rent a room at the L&M Motel, or go ahead and scoot on out of town and on to my next stop. Running into Shannon had warmed me up to the idea of sticking around, at least for a day or two. She told me that her older sister was a control freak and kind of drove her nuts, and it would be good to have a third party at the house, to kind of diffuse the family drama.

“I'm a natural-born middle man,” I said.

Shannon's sister folded her arms and tapped her foot, and asked me what I did for a living and why was I hanging out around here anyway?

“Import-export,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Black tea. Scarves. Tibetan meditation bowls.”

“Hmmm,” she said. She looked back at Shannon. “For all we know he's a pervert. And in the middle of the night, while we're asleep, he'll kill us dead.” Then she turned back to me and said, “no offense.”

“None taken,” I said. “Pays to be careful.”

“He's as sweet as apple pie,” Shannon said.

“There's work to get done,” the sister said.

“And we needed someone to help lift the heavy things,” Shannon said.

I ended up staying with Blind Shannon for three days, and I helped the sisters box up items and sort through paperwork. When someone dies, you have to go through the piles of stuff they always swore they'd get around to. The house was musty and it had a lot of white doilies everywhere, but it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the abandoned house where I grew up; and there was hot water and clean towels and comforting footsteps and the voices of real people, bickering about problems of their own.

Shannon came into my room one night, in the total darkness, and slipped under the covers with me. We were clumsy, and it felt like neither one of us had any experience at all, but once we got going, we got it going better than anything I'd had in years. Shannon kissed my neck a lot, and nibbled on my ears. Marcia was a real slouch, looking back on it. Sure, she was pretty on the outside, but boy was she ever rotten on the inside.

I worried that Shannon would get clingy: ask to tag along with me when I left town. But she was way cooler than me. I was the clingy one, trying to talk to her the next morning out in the garden while she picked some fresh thyme; stumbling over my words like a teenager.

Serendipity comes in waves, I guess. I drank a glass of orange juice, and headed out for a run along the same stretch of road. There was nothing out there. Sometimes an old truck would rattle by and cut far into the other lane to give me plenty of room, but the traffic was so sparse that each new vehicle was an event. So when I saw a black Cadillac coming over a distant hill, looking like a hearse, I tried to clear the bad thoughts and keep on running. It's nothing, I said, watching my shoes hit the gravel. But I was also preparing myself, looking left and right to see which way I'd run if the car spooked me.

I hit a straightaway. The Cadillac appeared on the horizon, like a sunspot in the midst of the wavy heat. I ran toward it; it drove toward me. I heard that old Spaghetti Western song in my mind, the one where the guy whistles, and then the wavy horn goes
waaah, weeeh, waaahhhhh
, before the big gunfight at high noon.

The Caddy slowed down. I stopped running and stared at the windshield. It was still too far away to see a driver or passenger. I ducked a little off of the highway. The Cadillac revved up and charged at me, and I ran into the cornfield, pushing my way through the high stalks, imagining the ringing gun shots that would soon be ripping through the green around me. I zig-zagged, hoping to make myself a hard target. My head pounded with the beats of my frightened heart, and the corn stalks bit and scraped at me, and their rustling sounded like laughter.

“Hey Champ, get back here!” a voice called out.

I turned around. “Eddie?” I yelled, my face in a sea of green stalks and droopy leaves.

“No. It's Mother Teresa!” he said.

I pushed my way back through the corn, giddy, almost tripping over my own feet.

“Sounds like a scarecrow come to life,” I heard Eddie say, like he was talking to someone else.

I had a grin on my face like a kid at an ice cream shop. We laughed and hugged and patted each other on the back; and I told him I thought for sure he was dead, and where had he been for Christ's sake, and why in the hell hadn't he called me?

He pulled out that little scrap of paper I'd given him, with the address to the farmhouse.

“I'm trying to find this dump. Can you give me directions?” He had a thumb under one of his suspenders, and he tugged on it, just like he always did.

“Where the hell have you been?” I said.

“I fell off the wagon.” Eddie scrunched his lips, and lowered his eyes.

I looked past him, at the idling Cadillac. Creeping Jody was in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette. “Hey Ronnie,” she said, lowering her sunglasses.

I walked over and gave Jody a peck on the cheek.

“She took care of me, you know. After,” Eddie said.

“Sorry about Irene,” I said.

Eddie raised a hand and shut his eyes. “Let's don't go there.”

“You killed Jack Lomand?” I said.

“That creep ain't so tough. Lomand comes out of the kitchen, gun pointed at me. Nothing I can do. I'm tryin' to get over the fact that I just found my wife. Dead. Done and gone. I ask Jack to let me have one drink before he finishes the job. 'Haven't had a drink in years,' I tell him, 'and I don't wanna die without a final taste of the stuff.' Well, like it does with almost everyone, a grown man who don't drink kind of piques his interest.

“'A teetotaler,' he says, kind of mocking me. 'What are you, a Mormon?' he says. 'So whose booze you gonna take a swig of, Pops? I don't got any.'

“'My wife's,' I tell him.

“'Ohhh… so
she's
the man of the family, huh?' he says. '
Was
the man of the family, I mean.' And then he laughs. I could've tore his throat right out with my bare hands. But one thing I learned about life is that you gotta wait. Be patient. No use letting your emotions take over. It's all timing, see? When I was younger, I used to hang out at this jazz club. One night a really good band come through.”

“Who?” I said.

“No one famous.”

“Oh,” I said, hoping it was Dave Brubeck or Herbie Hancock.

“Drummer sits at our table for a while after their set. That zip Tommy Coca asks him how he keeps the beat. Drummer leans over and says to Tommy, 'you wanna hit that snare as late as you possibly can—but not a second later.' Words of wisdom. So I say to myself, stay calm, hit at the right time, kill Jack Lomand. Irene? She's probably making a quilt in the evening sky, putting the clouds into nice patterns. There ain't no time to be sad. Get too sad, and you're a goner.”

An old baby-blue Ford truck drove by, slowed down, passed the stopped Caddy, and the driver cocked his head to have a good look at us.

“Take a picture, buddy,” Eddie said as the truck rumbled off. Then he went on:

“So he walks me out to the kitchen, gun on my back. I pull out Irene's bottle of scotch. I ask him if he's having one too. 'Sure,' he says. Well, Irene always leaves an icepick out on top of the counter, back near the breadbox. I told her a hundred times to put it away, but this time I'm praying she's been her usual lazy self. And there it is. 'I'm sorry about this,' Jack says. 'So am I,' I say, and I swing around and bury that icepick right in his head. He crawled out to the living room and died. I had a drink or two. Or three. Then I smashed them Kinkade plates on the floor.”

“I thought you loved those plates.”

“I hate them goddamn plates,” Eddie said. His eyes teared up.

“Sorry about Irene,” I said.

Eddie looked at my sweats. “You training for a marathon?”

“It clears my head.”

“Well don't clear it too much, Champ. There might not be anything left.”

I smiled. “Man, am I ever glad to see you Eddie. I thought you were dead.”

“God don't wanna deal with me,” Eddie said.

“Who would?” Jody said.

“Am I talking to you?” Eddie said. Then he lowered his voice. “She saved my life, Champ. Got me back on the wagon. That first taste of the stuff—a thousand tiny sparks go off in my brain. Jekyll and Hyde. I went through a few weeks on the stuff again, and whoah buddy, I'm too old for it. Way too old for it.”

“I'm glad you're all right,” I said.

“You got a cigar shop in this town?”

“Right next to the Haberdashery, across the street from the Fair Trade Boutique.”

“Prick,” Eddie said. “I'm down to my last two. The ones Frank give me.”

“We got gas stations,” I said.

“How is Frank?”

“Dead.”

“Amen,” Eddie said. “You can tell me all about it, over coffee. You do got coffee in this town, don't you?”

“Diner. Decent coffee. Good grub.”

Eddie looked back at Jody. She nodded.

“It's yours?” I said, running my hand along a fin of the Cadillac.

“Going away present. From Art Love.”

“He gave it to you?”

“He
went away
, and I took it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Don't say it like that, Champ: that fat bastard had it coming.”

We drove. I gave Jody directions. I felt like a kid in the backseat with my folks, and they were driving me to the high school dance. Eddie and Jody laughed and bickered, and she poked fun at him, and he poked back at her. It was a fine day. The fields were green. Distant woodland isles, mysterious black and lonely, went on unfettered amid the bland agricultural stretches. The sky was a cool gray-blue, and the Caddy rolled along the highway: thuh-thunk, thuh-thunk, thuh-thunk.

I told Eddie how I was staying with an old friend who was back in town because her Mom passed away.

“How good a friend?” Eddie's reflection said, staring at me in the flipped down visor mirror.

“Good,” I said.

“Real good?”

“Pretty good.”

“Good,” Eddie said.

“She's blind,” I said, for no reason.

“Even better,” Eddie said.

“That's terrible,” Jody said, smacking Eddie's arm.

“No, no. Relax. It ain't good that she's blind—I mean, that's a tough break. But it's good for Ronnie she's blind.”

“Why?” Jody said.

“She won't get scared of his ugly mug,” Eddie said, and laughed.

“Ronnie's a good-looking man,” Jody said. “Better looking than you, Gramps.”

“Oh yeah?” Eddie said. Then he acted like he was offended, even though he was grinning the whole time. “So maybe you'd rather be with him than with me, huh?”

“Of course I would,” Jody said.

Eddie looked at me again in his mirror, and he was all eyes and wild gray eyebrows. “See, I told you she was a smart broad.”

We walked into Nick's Diner. The sign read
Seat Yourself
, so Eddie picked a table in the corner with a red and white checkered cloth, and the waitress came over—the same one I'd seen the other morning—and poured us coffee into thick white mugs. Then she said she'd give us a minute to look over the menu, and she disappeared. Eddie dumped some sugar in his coffee and stirred it around with a spoon. He took a sip.

“Not bad,” he said. He took another. “Not bad at all. Now, tell me all about Frank, and tell me the whole story. The whole goddamn story.”

So I told him the whole goddamn story, and Eddie asked me to repeat the parts he really liked: especially the part where Bullfrog cracked Frank Conese upside the head with the brass owl. We ordered meals and we ate them. We laughed. Jody bumped her coffee mug with her elbow, and it almost tumbled over, but I reached out and caught it just in time.

Eddie told me his plan, and Jody put a hand on his forearm, and they looked like kids asking permission to get married.

“We're picking up right where we left off,” Eddie said.

“I'm not a home-wrecker,” Jody said to me with tight lips.

“He never said that,” Eddie said.

“Well, people can get some ideas,” Jody said, looking down at her coffee; both hands around the mug. “I liked Irene.”

Eddie pulled one of her hands away from the mug and held it tight, and the two of them looked at each other.

“I liked Irene,” Jody said again.

“And she liked you,” Eddie said. He looked at me again. “When you get to be my age, Champ, you realize there ain't no time to waste. I could sit around for years, crying over Irene, looking at myself in the mirror saying woe is me, woe is me. But that ain't what she would've wanted. And if I would've croaked and she would've lived, I sure as hell wouldn't want her to crawl in a hole and die too. When you're my age, Champ, any day might be your last.”