The Hollywood Trilogy (6 page)

After a while Jim handed me a box of Kleenex, which I used to wipe my eyes and blow my nose.

Then I could think again, calm inside. All the fuss and bother to come, the funeral, the arrangements, the lawyers, even for poor Grandpa the lawyers would come around, the selection of a plot, buying a coffin, all that crap. I thought maybe it would have been better not to have seen him lying there and let the birds have their feast. It would be easier, cleaner and cheaper, and Grandpa wouldn't mind, he wasn't there anymore, you only needed to look at the body to see that Grandpa wasn't in there anymore.

The anxious feeling began to go away. I was thinking: Well, it was a good way to die after a long life, out there scowling at the bugs on the trees and then wacko, no fuss, no muss, no long drawnout pain, no months or years in bed, Grandpa hated to have people wait on him, and now there would be none of that, he liked to get up at chickenfart, as he put it, and
get out there
, and
get to it
, and now he wouldn't have to lay in bed while everybody else got up and at it and he couldn't. It was a good way to die. No helplessness, no humiliation, no begging.

I reached out and shut his eyes and they stayed shut. I pushed the tip of his tongue back into his mouth and closed the lips, and he looked peaceful. I went into the kitchen. Jim had laid out six lines of coke on an ivory-backed hand mirror that belonged to Cousin Mallie, and gave me the mirror and a striped drinking straw.

“These are for you,” he said.

I did the lines and felt better. We went out on the porch. The sun was high enough to put half the porch in shade, so we pulled up a couple of chairs by Grandpa and sat. It was still an utterly peaceful afternoon. The birds had gone away, maybe they knew they were out of luck here, I don't know, but the sky was blue and empty. We sat for a while, not talking. I cried a couple of times and had to go in the house and blow my nose, thinking how strange it was, I could think about Grandpa very calmly, how it was all right that he was gone, how it had to happen someday and this day was as good as any,
and then these tears would rush up out of me and I would sort of yell and then sit there holding the sides of my chair and bellow, like, until the snot was running out of my nose, and then I'd get up and head for the bathroom. Jim paid no attention to me; he just sat there looking out over the view and rocking in his chair, like he had lived there all his life.

Finally I came back, my face all washed and my nose blown for about the fiftieth time, and I said, “That's all.” I sat down again. Jim had a can of beer and offered it to me.

“No, thanks,” I said. I giggled. “I'm trying to quit.”

“Maybe we should bury Grandpa,” Jim said.

“How do you mean?” I asked, but I knew what he meant.

“You know, just pick a pretty spot out by the trees, dig a hole, and bury him. There's some champagne in the refrigerator.”

“I know,” I said. “It's mine. They never touch it.”

“We wouldn't have to tell anybody. Hell, it's nobody's business anyway, except Grandpa's . . .”

“And he can't complain,” I said. “But what about the family? We'll be cheating them out of a funeral.”

“Tough tiddy,” Jim said. I took a sip of his beer. “We could tell them a story,” Jim said.

“Grandpa ran off,” I said.

“A big fat Avon lady, with a suitcase full of cosmetics,” I said.

“She took one look at Grandpa, and he took one look at her . . .”

“And that's the last we saw of either of them.”

“Just another missing person,” I said.

“Meanwhile, he'll be safe in the ground,” Jim said.

“Safe from Avon ladies and funeral homes,” I said.

“Buzzards and relatives.”

“Fuck it, let's
do
it.”

“Grandpa would have had it
done
, by now. . . .”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“He died with his boots on.”

There it was, I started bellowing again, went into the kitchen and started throwing things. Jim waited outside until I had made quite a mess, but I didn't feel so bad anymore.

I started to clean the kitchen but Jim said no, let him do it, and I did, opening a bottle of champagne and smoking a joint out on the porch by Grandpa. I could hear Jim cleaning up, sweeping the broken stuff off the floor, singing one of his damned songs about how great it was to be in love on such a wonderful day. Even after all these years and the events of the day, it was something to hear the way Jim could land on a note, not the greatest singer in the world, just a guy who could hit the notes and fill them out and make you glad to hear him do it.

I began to wonder where to put Grandpa, and after a while I let out a huge laugh, and Jim stuck his head out: “What's funny?”

“I was just thinking, the only place on the fucking mountainside where you can dig more'n a couple of inches is right about where Grandpa fell.”

“You mean we carried him all the way up here for nothing?”

The burial itself came off pretty well. We got out long-handled shovels from under the porch, and I got Grandpa's old favorite patchwork quilt that I think his wife made before she died so long ago, and we wrapped Grandpa in the quilt and carried him back down to the orchard and then dug the hole for him. There was only about six inches of topsoil, most of it broken up into clods, and below that the ground was loose yellowish dirt, easy enough to dig. It was sometime after nightfall when we finally put Grandpa down into the hole and started shoveling dirt over him, and the moon had come up nearly full across the Valley of the Moon by the time we had packed him in and smoothed over the dirt. The champagne was almost gone. I held the last bottle up to the moonlight.

“There's enough for one last toast,” I said. We each took a drink. My body was covered with sweat and dust, my nose hurt from all the cocaine, but in the moonlight everything looked eerie and beautiful.

“Grandpa,” I said. “He was the spirit of the Old West.”

“The last cowboy,” Jim said.

“A real dirt farmer,” I said.

“Do you know what?” Jim said. “Please don't take me wrong.”

“I won't,” I said. “What?”

“I think we should dance on his grave,” Jim said. “Not as any kind of insult . . .”

“I understand,” I said.

“You know, to kind of celebrate the number of graves Grandpa danced on in his time . . .”

But I was already holding out my hands, and Jim took them, and lightly, while he hummed “The Hora,” we danced under the moon. There was nothing particularly appropriate about the music, it's just what Jim came up with. He hummed it faster and faster, and we danced faster and faster until I got dizzy and fell down. I watched Jim finish the dance himself, his eyes shut, his hands up in the air, circling slowly around the grave and the apricot tree. He wasn't singing “The Hora” anymore, it was just,
“Ah-yah! Ahhh-yah! Ahh-yah!”

Later we carried the shovels back up to the house, and Jim went in to bed and actually got some sleep while I sat up in the living room at the old wicker table by the windows, writing a letter to my cousin Harold, telling him what we had done and where Grandpa was buried. If he wanted, I would come back for a regular funeral, but the odd thing was, after me and Jim got back to Hollywood, Harold called me up and told me the family had had their own funeral down at the gravesite, which Harold and a couple of the other men had done a better job of covering up, and that nothing else was planned. That strange Okie tact again, maybe.

JIM'S RENT-A-CAR was a little black bullet designed to go fast as hell for a couple of years and then fly apart. The next morning, somewhat after chickenfart, we packed ourselves into the car and headed down the mountain. I had stuck my note where they would find it. Jim had read it over breakfast coffee and approved. With seven hours' sleep for three days, Jim had to do a little snorting to wake up properly, and I joined him. It was a bluesky day, warm and pleasant, running down the valley toward the Black Point cutoff. We didn't talk or play the radio, Jim just drove and I looked at the view, which I didn't normally get to do because usually I was behind the wheel. I did wonder if this wasn't going to be my last trip down to Hollywood, but I didn't bring the subject up. Jim knew my feelings and I knew his.

After Black Point we ran along the side of a slough, the road itself up on a levee, as we headed west toward the Coast Range, where we would pick up 101. There were lots of cattails and reeds in the slough, plenty of redwing blackbirds and some long-legged, long-beaked white birds that could have been cranes or egrets or something, beautiful as hell, wading slowly through the shallow water. I just got glimpses of them as we whizzed by, Jim having
the car up to sixty or seventy most of the time. The traffic was light this time of day, although we whipped around a few farmers' trucks.

“This must be the last two-lane road in America,” Jim said.

Just then a big white Chevy pickup truck whizzed past us barreling down the road, and I saw something funny:

“What the hell they doing?” I said.

Something sticking out the passenger side of the car, then I hear the
snap!
and see the white bird jerked away and over into the water, and we sped past the white bird in time to see a spreading stain of red on its feathers.

“They shot that bird!” I yelled at Jim. Another snapping sound, and looking ahead I could see that they had rifles out both sides. Jim speeded up.

“Pissants!” he yelled. The little black bullet car zoomed forward, almost breaking my neck.

We pulled up next to the white Chevy. I rolled down my window and looked up into the cab of the truck, seeing the tip of the rifle and the straw cowboy hat, the mean, unformed dumb young country face behind the wheel. There were three of them in there, and I could see the punk next to the driver lift up, grinning with all his gums and teeth.

Their faces just barely had time to register recognition when Jim swerved the rent-a-car sharply into the front fender of the Chevy pickup, hard, jamming, the metal screaming in shock, the pickup bucking like a scared horse as it passed over the gravel roadside and the lip of the slough, and then suddenly plunged down the bank and into the water.

I looked back just in time to see the truck go over on its side in the black muddy water, sending up a filthy spray and then quickly sinking in the mud. It was a miracle the driver was able to keep the truck from bashing into the bank and killing them all. I'm certain they were okay, maybe a broken arm or two, and I surely didn't give a shit.

“Let's turn on the radio,” Jim said.

“Fuck, yes,” I said.

THE TROUBLE with turning on the radio in a car with Jim is that he will either be gloomy because of what he hears (I guess) or he will sing along with the cut, especially if it's one of his, and you might think it would be a double
blessing to be an audience of one for a popular singing star harmonizing with himself, but take my word for it, it isn't such a treat. You have to wear a fixed smile and wave your hand, or tap the dashboard to show that you are with it, or Jim will change the station in the middle of the tune—“You don't like it!”—and the whole thing starts again, or he will turn the radio off and drive along at forty miles an hour dead silent, and just as I am about to broach some topic or other, he will burst out
a capella
some new song or part of a song, and there you go again, forced to grin and tap your foot and nod your head, and when he yells at me, “Isn't that
great?
” I still have to worry about my response because one way he might brood for an hour and another he might just keep singing some awful song that will never be recorded.