The Five People You Meet in Heaven (17 page)

No bank statements. No insurance policies. Just a black bow tie, a Chinese restaurant menu, an old deck of cards, a letter with an army medal, and a faded Polaroid of a man by a birthday cake, surrounded by children.

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"Hey," Dominguez called from the other room, "is this what you need?"

He emerged with a stack of envelopes taken from a kitchen drawer, some from a local bank, some from the Veterans Administration. The attorney fingered through them and, without looking up, said, "That'll do." He pulled out one bank statement and made a mental note of the balance. Then, as often happened with these visits, he silently congratulated himself on his own portfolio of stocks, bonds, and a vested retirement plan. It sure beat ending up like this poor slob, with little to show but a tidy kitchen.

The Fifth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

W
HITE
. THERE WAS ONLY WHITE NOW. NO earth, no sky, no horizon between the two. Only a pure and silent white, as noiseless as the deepest snowfall at the quietest sunrise.

White was all Eddie saw. All he heard was his own labored breathing, followed by an echo of that breathing. He inhaled and heard a louder inhale. He exhaled, and it exhaled, too.

Eddie squeezed his eyes shut. Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken, and Eddie knew. His wife was gone. He wanted her desperately, one more minute, half a minute, five more seconds, but there was no way to reach or call or wave or even look at her picture. He felt as if he'd tumbled down steps and was crumpled at the bottom. His soul was vacant. He had no impulse. He hung limp and lifeless in the void, as if on a hook, as if all the fluids had been gored out of him. He might have hung there a day or a month. It might have been a century.

Only at the arrival of a small but haunting noise did he stir, his eyelids lifting heavily. He had already been to four pockets of heaven, met four people, and while each had been mystifying upon arrival, he sensed that this was something altogether different.

The tremor of noise came again, louder now, and Eddie, in a lifelong defense instinct, clenched his fists, only to find his right hand squeezing a cane. His forearms were pocked with liver spots. His fingernails were small and yellowish. His bare legs carried the reddish rash—shingles—

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that had come during his final weeks on earth. He looked away from his hastening decay. In human accounting, his body was near its end.

Now came the sound again, a high-pitched rolling of irregular shrieks and lulls. In life, Eddie had heard this sound in his nightmares, and he shuddered with the memory: the village, the fire, Smitty and this noise, this squealing cackle that, in the end, emerged from his own throat when he tried to speak.

He clenched his teeth, as if that might make it stop, but it continued on, like an unheeded alarm, until Eddie yelled into the choking whiteness: "What is it?
What do you want
?"

With that, the high-pitched noise moved to the background, layered atop a second noise, a loose, relentless rumble—the sound of a running river—and the whiteness shrank to a sun spot reflecting off shimmering waters. Ground appeared beneath Eddie's feet. His cane touched something solid. He was high up on an embankment, where a breeze blew across his face and a mist brought his skin to a moist glaze. He looked down and saw, in the river, the source of those haunting screeches, and he was flushed with the relief of a man who finds, while gripping the baseball bat, that there is no intruder in his house. The sound, this screaming, whistling, thrumming screak, was merely the cacophony of children's voices, thousands of them at play, splashing in the river and shrieking with innocent laughter.

Was this what I'd been dreaming
? he thought.
All this time? Why
?

He studied the small bodies, some jumping, some wading, some carrying buckets while others rolled in the high grass. He noticed a certain calmness to it all, no rough-housing, which you usually saw with kids. He noticed something else. There were no adults. Not even teenagers. These were all small children, with skin the color of dark wood, seemingly monitoring themselves.

And then Eddie's eyes were drawn to a white boulder. A slender young girl stood upon it, apart from the others, facing his direction. She motioned with both her hands, waving him in. He hesitated. She smiled.

She waved again and nodded, as if to say,
Yes, you
.

Eddie lowered his cane to navigate the downward slope. He slipped, his bad knee buckling, his legs giving way. But before he hit the earth, he felt a sudden blast of wind at his back and he was whipped forward and straightened on his feet, and there he was, standing before the little girl as if he'd been there all the time.

106

Today Is Eddie's Birthday

He is 51. A Saturday. It is his first birthday without Marguerite. He
makes Sanka in a paper cup, and eats two pieces of toast with
margarine. In the years after his wife's accident, Eddie shooed away
any birthday celebrations, saying, "Why do I gotta be reminded of that
day for?" It was Marguerite who insisted. She made the cake. She
invited friends. She always purchased one bag of taffy and tied it with
a ribbon. "You can't give away your birthday," she would say.

Now that she's gone, Eddie tries. At work, he straps himself on a
roller coaster curve, high and alone, like a mountain climber. At night,
he watches television in the apartment. He goes to bed early. No cake.

No guests. It is never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary, and the
paleness of surrender becomes the color of Eddies days.

He is 60, a Wednesday. He gets to the shop early. He opens a
brown-bag lunch and rips a piece of bologna off a sandwich. He
attaches it to a hook, then drops the twine down the fishing hole. He
watches it float. Eventually, it disappears, swallowed by the sea.

He is 68, a Saturday. He spreads his pills on the counter. The
telephone rings, Joe, his brother, is calling from Florida. Joe wishes
him happy birthday. Joe talks about his grandson. Joe talks about a
condominium. Eddie says "uh-huh
"
at least 50 times
.

He is 75, a Monday. He puts on his glasses and checks the
maintenance reports. He notices someone missed a shift the night
before and the Squiggly Wiggly Worm Adventure has not been brake-tested. He sighs and takes a placard from the wall—RIDE CLOSED

TEMPORARILY FOR MAINTENANCE—then carries it across the
boardwalk to the Wriggly Worm entrance, where he checks the brake
panel himself
.

He is 82, a Tuesday. A taxi arrives at the park entrance. He slides
inside the front seat, pulling his cane in behind him.

"
Most people like the back
,"
the driver says
.

"You mind?" Eddie asks.

The driver shrugs. "Nah. I don't mind." Eddie looks straight ahead.

He doesn't say that it feels more like driving this way, and he hasn't
driven since they refused him a license two years ago.

107

The taxi takes him to the cemetery. He visits his mother's grave and
his brother's grave and he stands by his father's grave for only a few
moments. As usual, he saves his wife's for last. He leans on the cane
and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy.

He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he
would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.

The Last Lesson

T
HE LITTLE GIRL APPEARED TO BE ASIAN, maybe five or six years old, with a beautiful cinnamon complexion, hair the color of a dark plum, a small flat nose, full lips that spread joyfully over her gapped teeth, and the most arresting eyes, as black as a seal's hide, with a pinhead of white serving as a pupil. She smiled and flapped her hands excitedly until Eddie edged one step closer, whereupon she presented herself.

"Tala," she said, offering her name, her palms on her chest.

"Tala," Eddie repeated.

She smiled as if a game had begun. She pointed to her embroidered blouse, loosely slung over her shoulders and wet with the river water.

"
Baro
," she said.

"Baro."

She touched the woven red fabric that wrapped around her torso and legs. "S
aya."

"
Saya.
"

Then came her cloglike shoes—"
bakya"—
then the iridescent seashells by her feet—"
capiz"—
then a woven bamboo mat—"
banig"—
that was laid out before her. She motioned for Eddie to sit on the mat and she sat, too, her legs curled underneath her.

None of the other children seemed to notice him. They splashed and rolled and collected stones from the river's floor. Eddie watched one boy rub a stone over the body of another, down his back, under his arms.

"Washing," the girl said. "Like our
inas
used to do."

108

"Inas?" Eddie said.

She studied Eddie's face.

"Mommies," she said.

Eddie had heard many children in his life, but in this one's voice, he detected none of the normal hesitation toward adults. He wondered if she and the other children had chosen this riverbank heaven, or if, given their short memories, such a serene landscape had been chosen for them.

She pointed to Eddie's shirt pocket. He looked down. Pipe cleaners.

"These?" he said. He pulled them out and twisted them together, as he had done in his days at the pier. She rose to her knees to examine the process. His hands shook. ''You see? It's a . . ." he finished the last twist

". . . dog."

She took it and smiled—a smile Eddie had seen a thousand times.

"You like that?" he said.

"You burn me," she said.

E
DDIE FELT HIS jaw tighten.

"What did you say?"

"You burn me. You make me fire."

Her voice was flat, like a child reciting a lesson.

"My ina say to wait inside the
nipa
. My ina say to hide."

Eddie lowered his voice, his words slow and deliberate.

"What . . . were you hiding
from
, little girl?"

She fingered the pipe-cleaner dog, then dipped it in the water.

"Sundalong"
she said.

"Sundalong?"

She looked up.

"Soldier."

Eddie felt the word like a knife in his tongue. Images flashed through his head. Soldiers. Explosions. Morton. Smitty. The Captain. The flamethrowers.

"Tala . . ." he whispered.

"Tala," she said, smiling at her own name.

"Why are you here, in heaven?"

109

She lowered the animal.

"You burn me. You make me fire."

Eddie felt a pounding behind his eyes. His head began to rush. His breathing quickened.

"You were in the Philippines . . . the shadow . . . in that hut. . . ."

"The
nipa
. Ina say be safe there. Wait for her. Be safe. Then big noise.

Big fire. You burn me." She shrugged her narrow shoulders. "Not safe."

Eddie swallowed. His hands trembled. He looked into her deep, black eyes and he tried to smile, as if it were a medicine the little girl needed.

She smiled back, but this only made him fall apart. His face collapsed, and he buried it in his palms. His shoulders and lungs gave way. The darkness that had shadowed him all those years was revealing itself at last, it was real, flesh and blood, this child, this lovely child, he had killed her, burned her to death, the bad dreams he'd suffered, he'd deserved every one. He
had
seen something! That shadow in the flame!

Death by his hand!
By his own fiery hand!
A flood of tears soaked through his fingers and his soul seemed to plummet.

He wailed then, and a howl rose within him in a voice he had never heard before, a howl from the very belly of his being, a howl that rumbled the river water and shook the misty air of heaven. His body convulsed, and his head jerked wildly, until the howling gave way to prayerlike utterances, every word expelled in the breathless surge of confession: "I killed you, I KILLED YOU," then a whispered "forgive me," then, "FORGIVE ME, OH, GOD . . ." and finally, "What have I done

. . .
WHAT HAVE I DONE
? . . ." He wept and he wept, until the weeping drained him to a shiver. Then he shook silently, swaying back and forth.

He was kneeling on a mat before the little dark-haired girl, who played with her pipe-cleaner animal along the bank of the flowing river.

A
T SOME POINT, when his anguish had quieted, Eddie felt a tapping on his shoulder. He looked up to see Tala holding out a stone.

"You wash me," she said. She stepped into the water and turned her back to Eddie. Then she pulled the embroidered baro over her head.

He recoiled. Her skin was horribly burned. Her torso and narrow shoulders were black and charred and blistered. When she turned around, the beautiful, innocent face was covered in grotesque scars. Her lips drooped. Only one eye was open. Her hair was gone in patches of burned scalp, covered now by hard, mottled scabs.

110

"You wash me," she said again, holding out the stone.

Eddie dragged himself into the river. He took the stone. His fingers trembled.

"I don't know how. . . ." he mumbled, barely audible. "I never had children. . . ."

She raised her charred hand and Eddie gripped it gently and slowly rubbed the stone along her forearm, until the scars began to loosen. He rubbed harder; they peeled away. He quickened his efforts until the singed flesh fell and the healthy flesh was visible. Then he turned the stone over and rubbed her bony back and tiny shoulders and the nape of her neck and finally her cheeks and her forehead and the skin behind her ears.

She leaned backward into him, resting her head on his collarbone, shutting her eyes as if falling into a nap. He traced gently around the lids. He did the same with her drooped lips, and the scabbed patches on her head, until the plum-colored hair emerged from the roots and the face that he had seen at first was before him again.