Saul and Patsy (29 page)

“She got cold,” the crow said. “I think she went back to the car.”

“She was
scared,
man,” the garbage can said. “That’s all it was.”

“She was crying, too,” the caterpillar told them. “I’m pretty sure. What a wuss.”

“Well, anyway,” Saul said. He held out the shovel. “All right. Here’s the deal. These are Gordy’s ashes. We have to bury him. He’s been undead. When the ashes aren’t buried, you get the undead thing happening. You get the hauntings. So who among you wants to dig?”

“
I
can’t,” the garbage can said. “I don’t have arms.”

“Give me that.” Little Hans had finally spoken up. He didn’t sound like a high school student, but maybe he was; maybe he was really Henry Olschanski. He might have been anything. Saul handed him the shovel, and Little Hans began digging with it, his motions reflecting strength and fury. He was obviously practiced with shovels and knew how to use them. He was wearing heavy black leather boots, and he pitched the sharp blade of the shovel into the topsoil, which he lifted and cast off into the distance—the creatures were standing behind him—before arriving at the dirt beneath it, and then the clay. He hit a rock, and he scraped the shovel head around it, then threw the shovel onto the ground and dropped down on his hands and knees and scrabbled with his fingers around until he had a grasp of it, whereupon he lifted it out and heaved it on the dirt pile in front of him.

“I’m glad we brought him along,” the Himmel said. “He’s a force.”

Little Hans picked up the shovel again and resumed digging. “Anyone else want to do this?” he asked in a deep bass voice, between breaths, while he dug, but none of the creatures replied.

“Mr. Bernstein,” the crow asked. “It’s your turn.”

“It’s okay,” Saul told him. “Little Hans is doing a fine job.” Standing there, amid the creatures, Saul reached up and touched his nose, confirming that it was, in fact, broken.

Working in what still seemed to be a total, life-defining rage, Little Hans continued to shovel until the hole was large enough for the jar, and then spacious enough for the box, and then, five minutes later, much larger than it needed to be for their purposes, as if he had been unable to stop, as if the shoveling was a kind of maniacal nightmare gravedigger assignment, tunneling down to the dark he met up with every night, not just this one. Finally, with the smell of sweat in the cold air drifting off of him, he rested.

“Is that deep enough?” he asked. He glanced around.

“Deeper than it needs to be,” Saul said. “Deep enough for everybody.”

“This is creepy,” the crow said with distinct pleasure in his voice.

“Who wants to lower him in?” Saul asked, glancing around at where the group appeared to be, all of them half-unseeable, obscure. He held the box out. None of the creatures took it.

“
You
need to do it,” the caterpillar said. “Where’s your wife? Maybe she should, too.”

“She’s not here,” Saul said. “She’s not here.” He waited. “Anyone want to touch the box before I put it into the ground?” The caterpillar reached out, and then the crow raised a wing, and the Himmel touched it, but the rest drew back. It was just too much for them.

“How come you didn’t bury it sooner?” the wolf asked.

“You don’t always bury the ashes,” Saul said. “Sometimes you keep them around. That was my mistake. That’s how come we had zombies around town.” With as much tenderness as he could summon, Saul, still bent over, carried the box to the hole that Little Hans had dug, and he lowered it until it rested there, on its deep layer of clay. He stood up again, as straight as he could make himself go with his back out, and he waited, looking at the pitch-black assembly. There was an expressive air pocket of silence. Off in the distance, very faintly, he could hear a jet in the night sky, and, also in the background, freeway noise. The music from
The Day the Earth Stood Still
was no longer audible, but the truck was still playing AC/DC.

“We need a blessing,” Saul said.

“What the fuck. What blessing?” the crow asked. “What kinda shit is that? He was a total loser. An asshole. Besides, he’s dead.”

“He won’t leave you alone unless you give him a blessing,” Saul said. “That’s why you’re here.”

The creatures were silent.

“This isn’t going to work unless someone says a blessing over him. That’s how it’s done. Either bless him or leave. That’s how it’s done.” His back was causing him excruciating pain now.

“This is America,” the garbage can said. “We don’t do that here.”

“Bullshit,” Saul said, and the creatures seemed surprised that he knew the word.

“
You
have to do it,” the wolf said. “
You
were his teacher.”

“I can’t,” Saul said. “I never went to services. My mother never took me to a temple or a synagogue. She didn’t believe in that. She still doesn’t. Nobody taught me blessings. And I don’t do them either, except for this, this time, now.” Saul tried to look at them all, but it was so dark he couldn’t quite see them. They had to do it; he could not. “Doesn’t
anyone
here know a blessing? Doesn’t anyone here know how to be human? Somebody here must. Doesn’t anyone here go to church? Or a temple? Or to an
anything
where they do blessings?”

“We do,” the wolf said. “Me and my sister and our parents.” The other creatures nodded. “I just wish we had a flashlight.”

“Well, say something,” Saul told him. “Say what they say. We don’t need a flashlight for that. This is what you all came for. I swear to you, if the wolf comes up with something . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, and the darkness around him seemed to shift inwardly.

“L-l-l-l-l-l-lord, help help help hellllllp,” the wolf said, before giving up.

“That’s okay,” Saul told him. “Try some more.”

“Amen amen amen amen,” the wolf stuttered. “Please thou please thou let-t-t-t-t-t us depart in please. Peas.” There was a long silence. “I c-c-c-c-c-can’t do it,” the wolf admitted.

“Yes, you can,” Saul said.

“A-a-a-a-awake and mourn, ye heirs of h-h-h-hell,” the wolf said.

“No, that’s a curse,” Saul said. “Try again.”

The wolf began again tentatively, as if by rote, and then seemed to find his voice. “Many many many many. M-m-m-may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord bless you and k-k-k-k-keep you,” he said, giving the foreign-sounding words a hallucinated, studied attention, as if he were dredging them up from his memory, and then, because he was half-singing, his voice rose in conviction, its pitch deepening with intensity. “May the Lord be g-g-g-g-g-gracious unto you,” he said, no longer intimidated by the words, since he wasn’t stumbling over them so badly now. “May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace both this day and forevermore,” the wolf concluded, reciting the final phrase in a high, steady, clear voice, as if the meaning of the words had come home to him and he was now their bearer. The hanged woman started to say “Amen,” then stopped herself. The crow appeared to be angrily agitated and shifted his weight from one claw to another. A fragment of the moon appeared from behind a cloud, and Saul saw the crow more clearly, saw how agitated he had become, how he hated the blessing: he was nearly in a fighter’s stance.

“There,” Saul said, keeping his voice authoritative and steady. “That was good.” He handed the shovel to the caterpillar. “Here,” he said. “You have to drop some dirt down there.”

Slowly and reluctantly, the caterpillar took the shovel and flung dirt into the hole. The shovel went around the group, all except for the malign, armless garbage can, until the hole was nearly covered up. At last the shovel returned to Saul, and he filled in the rest of the dirt. He tried to straighten up, could not, but at least knew what he wanted to say.

“Go home, children,” he instructed them. “Go home.”

The group of creatures trudged back across his backyard, around the house, into the front yard, one of them, the Himmel, picking up the gasoline can and the matches, and then they made their way toward the truck and the car. Among them, only Little Hans stood up perfectly straight. The others walked with the errant slouch of defeat.

“See ya,” the crow said, making the words sound like a threat. The garbage can had already positioned itself in the backseat. The crow got in behind the wheel of the Plymouth, next to the bubble-gum boygirl, put the car into gear, and with a spinning of wheels and a screeching, drove away, followed by the truck, whose radio was now playing Rush.

Carrying his shovel, with a last glance at the burning rosebush, now sputtering out, Saul, his own face burning with pain, limped toward the house, with its one broken window, its wife and child still safe inside, upstairs, for the moment, this one night.

Twenty-three

“You thought you were so tough,” the crow said to the boygirl. “You just
chickened
out. Just like a little girl.” He cackled. “The girl came out all over you. You have to have balls to be a boy, didn’t anyone tell you? Maybe you should have dressed yourself up as a chicken.” The crow was thinking that the evening was now totally and completely whacked: he had been planning on doing some serious hilarious damage and asking the boygirl to give him a blowjob later, when the fun was almost over, when the house was burning. Not that she’d do it, but it would be worth asking her just to see the look on her face lit by the flames. Now he didn’t feel like drinking, or fucking, or fighting—he didn’t feel like doing
anything
enjoyable. He was completely bummed out, and the feeling was conclusive.

“The air was cold,” the boygirl said. “Besides,
I
chickened out? What’s all that stuff in the backseat? Rocks, paint, paintbrushes, gasoline, dynamite?
You
could’ve, like, just set fire to his house if you had the nerve, like you were planning to.”

“Oh, right. Like
you
weren’t scared. Anyway, I didn’t go running and crying back to the car when he brought those ashes outside,” the crow said.

“Okay, then what
are
you going to do with all that?” The boygirl pointed to the paraphernalia of pranksterism and terror on the backseat next to the garbage can.

“I don’t know,” the crow muttered. “Keep it for later.”

“What later? This is later. To use on who?”

“There’s
always
people to use it on.” The crow laughed and reached under the seat and opened another can of beer. “Innocent bystanders and people like that.”

“That’s not very nice,” the boygirl said. “Opening a beer and not offering me any. Where’d you steal it from?”

“Sorrrrrry, bitch,” the crow said. “You want a beer?”

“Don’t you call me that. Don’t you call me a bitch.”

“Oh yeah?” the crow asked. He shook the beer can with his finger plugged over the opening and then aimed the spray at the passenger side, wetting down her face and her shirt and the leather jacket. Then he laughed. “There’s your beer.”

“You
dickhead,
” the boygirl said. “Take me home, you piece of shit. At least it’s
your
leather jacket you’re ruining.” The boygirl put her hands on the wheel to turn it. The car weaved unsteadily down the residential street, narrowly missing a parked car.

“Children, children,” the garbage can said, laughing.

The crow’s mood had changed. Now he would have to clean the car, thanks to what she had made him do. He would have to deodorize the Plymouth’s interior. His jacket could smell of beer just fine. Thinking about all this work in store for him, the crow recognized that his rage was her fault. Now he
did
feel like doing something: taking the boygirl by force if he had to, the bitch, with the garbage can watching—and the image of how he would do it settled down on him the way the robin settles down on the worm. He would take her out there into the dirt and the dark and pull her apart if he had to, just open her up and brute-fuck her to death. And when he was finished with her, he would leave her out in the middle of nowhere to find her own way home, that is, if she could still walk, bloody and seeping. He drank down the rest of the beer. At last: here it was: some serious damage.

The car accelerated, and the night, kept at bay till now by the neighborhood streetlights, gradually enveloped them as they hurried on toward the outskirts of the city and the fields of farmland beyond it.

Twenty-four

“It won’t work,” Patsy said. “You can’t import religion and ritual like that, not as a local anesthetic. It only works when the whole community believes in it. A ritual engaged in by part of the community is just schmaltz, just window dressing. If they’re going to make us outcasts of God, Saul, that’s it. We’re going to be outcasts of God
forever
.”

“Hmmm.” He was falling asleep. “I love you, Patsy,” he said. “It
did
work.”

“You’re going to have to go see a doctor tomorrow about your nose and your back, Saul.”

“Hmm.” He was lying in bed in a fetal position.

“Not that I don’t admire you, Saul, for trying to help those kids out.”

“Hmmm. Love you.”

“The baby’s been moving a little tonight. Guess I can’t blame him,” Patsy said.

“Hmm.” He was almost asleep by now.

“As for you, I love you more than you will
ever
know. By the way, Saul, what did you bury back there? What did you use for those ashes? The ones you said were Gordy’s? What were they?”

Part Four

Twenty-five

At certain times, particularly on the days when she was working at the Baltimore food bank—it didn’t take much more than a certain cast of light in the office or the connected warehouse to cause her to be plunged into these moments of thoughtfulness—Delia would involuntarily remember her late husband, Saul and Howie’s father, and a picture of him would rise up in her mind, usually a random mental snapshot in which her husband was getting dressed for work, knotting his tie or making an effort to get the lint off his suit before he kissed her goodbye and left the house for the firm where he labored as a patent lawyer, and at such moments it occurred to her that now, twenty years after his death, she thought of him more than she ever had when they were married, a marriage that at the time had felt more like a business arrangement than a real marriage, lacking as it did much of any real passion on either side, or so she thought. They were both ready to get married when they had met as seniors at the university and a year later had married each other out of convenience more than anything else, though she had pretended to be crazy about him with her friends and family for the sake of appearances, and because she thought she should.

With many women she knew, especially the divorcées, the memory of the husband just faded out through an act of will. Men left behind their objects; women left behind the memory of their looks.

But with Delia the process had been different. You could sometimes love someone, as it turned out,
after
that person was gone, though not before. One of life’s larger ironies, its habit of making what was absent, visible. That was what had happened to her, and this odd recognition had followed lately from the fling she had had with that boy, the young man who had worked on her yard. Perhaps this paradox was commonplace, but she doubted it. The death, the absence of her husband, sweetened the memory of the life. Sweetened it almost intolerably. In life her husband might have been, well, exasperating and bound by habit and, on occasion, repulsive: now and then he would rub his scalp, for example, then examine his fingertips for dandruff, and, if there happened to be any dandruff there near the fingernails, he would, if he thought no one was watching, slyly slip the fingertips close to his nose, for a smell. Awful. In life, it was a disgusting habit. But now, long after his death, picturing it, Delia felt tender toward it, and him. It pierced her. The gesture made her see the child in him, which, all day long, he was at pains to conceal.

Another odd feature of her long-dead husband’s remnants, her memory of him, was that whenever she thought of him, her thoughts were accompanied by no name. In death he had seemingly lost the name he had had in life. He had turned into a man, into
him,
into the images she possessed of him, and his smells, and his gestures, his curiosities as a human being and as her companion, and the ways—pokey and tentative—he had touched her as a lover and husband who, truth be told, did not linger much over the niceties but who sometimes cooked for her and brought her breakfast in bed on Sunday mornings, all these images and smells added up to the memory of the man she had married and had known. She recognized that he had been utterly faithful to her because women as a gender and group and class simply did not occupy his thoughts very much. Somehow, you could detect his obliviousness to other women just by looking at him—he did not have a roving eye. As an adult man, his thoughts had turned completely to the schematics of providing for her and their two children, without, really, much conversation at the dinner table except for expediencies and plans, and then, one day, he was gone, before the conversations might really have started. He wanted, more than anything else, to be a utility-husband and a professional at business, and then he was professionally dead, slumped over the steering wheel, blocking traffic. His life had appeared to have had no purpose except as a husband and father and a lawyer. Nevertheless, he had helped to ease Delia through this life by being her companion and being, in his way, considerate and thoughtful. Now, in death, he had lost his name, though she said it from time to time when she was by herself, mostly in order to preserve it, so that someone here on Earth would still say it: Norman. A plain old name. But he wasn’t Norman anymore. He was those images he had left behind, and their accompanying gestures, and the associated scents, and he was also the father of the two children he had, with her, helped to bring into the world. He had become real once he became imaginary.

Working in the food bank, she wondered sometimes what it felt like to have a coronary thrombosis, whether you even knew what had hit you before you were out of this life, gone.

She had loved, in a very different manner, having an adolescent boy lover because now she knew what that experience was like to go through, once you were a full-grown adult. She had gotten it out of her system (again). Really, the whole experience had been an exercise in nostalgia, at being in high school one more time, and being desired. And loved, a little. It was a wonder to her that the boy had wanted her at all, even for a few weeks. The experience had left a few traces for which she was grateful—it was as if life had arranged something like a cookout for her at the top of a mountain—but now, back to her normal routines, working during the day and going back to the house at night and fixing dinner for herself and pouring her nightly glass of Merlot, she was newly reconciled, first, to herself, and, second, to the idea that she might meet someone else, someone more her age, or she might not, ever, and anyway the meeting or not-meeting would not make much of a difference, one way or another. She was through with the belief that having a relationship, or relationships generally, would in any way validate her life. She liked living alone.

She had wanted to convey this truth to her son Saul. She didn’t feel jealous of Patsy, but she just didn’t appreciate the way they had been married to each other and still were married to each other. He was—for this behavior of his there was an old word that no one used anymore—uxorious. They were always touching each other and telling each other how much they loved each other, and they did this routine in public, and it got tiresome after a while. Delia especially didn’t like to see her son doting over his wife. She would have liked it better if they had been able to take their love for each other for granted, as if it were permanent and assured, and, similarly, she would have liked it if he could keep some of his emotions to himself. He should make certain adult assumptions, as everyone did, and then get on with things.

Delia had never heard a man say “I love you” as often as Saul said it to his wife, in front of her, Delia—in front of everybody. Delia supposed that some women liked that. They became used to the sweet talk and expected it as if it were their birthright. But you didn’t cast out that phrase in public where everyone could hear it.

Saul doted on his wife, he doted on their children, he had doted over that boy who shot himself, and he was a sentimentalist, but that was how he was, how he always had been, ever since his father had died. He was a doter. He doted. How close this was to “dotage”! The etymology of the words—Delia as a Scrabble player took pride in her knowledge of words—must be related. She would look it up. She blamed herself for the way Saul had turned out. She had told him to be careful of his baby brother, to take care of him, noting his fragility; and some element had changed in Saul thereafter. He had become, in a sense that was difficult to pinpoint, a caretaker. He took care of things. A person shouldn’t live like that. Caretakers were servants.

Well, Delia thought, laughing inwardly as she did an inventory of cartons of soup, she should talk. He came by it honestly. If only he would leave that dreadful little city snuggled away in Michigan! But he seemed to like it. Still, it was no place for a Jew; big cities had all the advantages. The doctors were more expert, the concerts had more adventurous programs, the friends conversed more freely, and you could get a few of the amenities, including the
New York Times
delivered to your doorstep every morning—you didn’t go around in a cloud of unknowing.

And then Delia let her thoughts drift to her other son, to Howie, who had moved, first to Oakland and then to Moraga and then to Berkeley and then back to Oakland, and who seemed, just now, to have a steady job, working, as he said, “in retail,” though he still occasionally called her and asked for a bit of money (he called these loans “investments”), the scamp, and because Delia liked having a purpose in Howie’s life, she could never refuse him. He had grown used to having money around and missed it terribly when it was no longer there. It wouldn’t end well, Delia feared, it wouldn’t end well at all, but once they had emerged into their own lives, your children’s fragility was theirs and not yours. Handsome Howie, her bankrupt baby. Who was so attractive that his looks had been his fate in life but who seemed to love . . . well, anyone? Who knew?

The thought of her younger son disturbed her, so she called up images of her grandchildren, Mary Esther, and the baby, Theo, who had been born with a handsome face but also a birthmark on his arm, an odd disfigurement in the shape of the state of Vermont. But it was tucked away where no one could see, thank God, and he’d been born with ten fingers and ten toes, and Delia had been there two weeks after he was born, and, my goodness, he was such a quiet and intelligent-looking child. His sister was already developing a mouth on her. She said, when she saw her little brother, that she wanted to throw him into the wastebasket.

She had watched Saul dressing Emmy in her snowsuit. As a father, he exhibited great tenderness, which had a touch of vanity in it, but even so . . .

Delia realized that she had lost count, by virtue of her daydreaming, and returned to her work. As she did, she heard the sound of two cars colliding out on the street. Immediately she looked up and saw through the doorway a man in a threadbare suit getting out of his car dazedly. In front of him, a teenager, a girl, sat behind the wheel of her car, on her face a broad staring smile, of shock. Her car’s windshield had cracked in a spiderweb pattern where her head had struck it, and blood was beginning to ooze down from her forehead toward her self-sustaining grin. In slow motion, her hands lifted themselves to her face, to feel it, to detect if it was still there. Delia dropped what she was doing to rush out to the street, to try to help, to murmur some consolation to the threadbare man and the smiling bleeding girl.