Epitaph

THREE

FivE dAys bEfoRE. Ten A.M. the doors swung open and William sprang into action. Sprang being a very relative term for a man pushing eighty-shuffled into action was the way Jilly would put it. Four sweeps from right to left, four sweeps from left to right, the ripped-up OTB tickets eventually forming one big burial mound of yesterday's dreams. There were cruises to the islands in that pile, pool tables, second homes, pink Caddys, and golf trips to Myrtle Beach. No more though. Now they were just fodder, ready to be recycled into tomorrow's desperate fantasies. And William was just the man to do it.

"You missed a spot," Jilly said, already buried in Gold's Sheet. Jilly, who'd deigned to give William the benefit of his handicapping skills now and then-which, truth be told, bore a remarkable resemblance to Gold's handicapping skills-then deigned to give William a job. Sweeping up the losing tickets three times a week for some cold, off-the-books cash. William hadn't said no.

"Pamela's Prizes," Jilly said. "Tom's Term."

These were either horses Jilly liked or horses he called dogs, or horses he'd never heard of. This was the way Jilly communicated-in horsese, and William, who was used to people not exactly talking to him as much as around him, kept sweeping.

"Sammy's Sambo.

"Lucy Lu."

Besides, Jilly had once told him he should make like Mr. Ed.

"Mr. Ed?" William hadn't understood.

"Yeah. Mr. Ed never speaks unless he has something to say."

The implication being that William had nothing worth saying, William kept his trap shut and went about his business.

The first regular of the day-the first regular besides him-was a neat little Italian man named Augie, who was reputed to be connected, mainly because everyone he knew seemed to have the as their middle name. As in Nickie the Nose, or Roni the Horse, or Benny the Shark. Augie always coming to OTB with the morning paper tucked under his arm, which he'd dutifully hand to William, who'd retire to a quiet corner of the room to read. This morning he doffed his cap to Jilly, commented on the weather-hot, isn't it-and put the Queens edition of the Daily News into William's grateful hands.

And that's, more or less, how William found the obituary.

It had become a habit of his, reading the obits, a recent habit, like falling asleep in the middle of conversations and clipping toothpaste coupons. Sooner or later, after the race results and discount ads, he'd find himself buried somewhere in the back, where beloved fathers and cherished wives lay among the crematorium ads and latest dew count. And sometimes among the cherished and devoted, he'd find his friends, or at least people he knew.

Not that this was the reason he read them. He read them for the same reason people scan travelogues on countries they're about to visit, to get to know the territory, to become familiar with it. He was getting on, that's all, beyond getting on, and he wanted to see what the end of the road looked like.

And whose name should pop up among the newly expired this morning but his, stuck between a local alderman and a onetime exotic dancer. Ralph Ackerman and Tushy Galore, and sitting uncomfortably between them: Jean Goldblum.

Jean, he'd thought, now there's Jean too, and memories came traipsing into his tired old brain and put their feet up for a chat. One memory in particular, one memory in full vivid Technicolor, that he had no intention of sitting down with.

Out buster

Of course the memories didn't listen to him-they never did. The truth was, these sneak attacks were becoming old hat. There he'd be preparing his dinner- okay, preparing usually meant folding the aluminum foil of his TV dinner left or right-but still, and suddenly he'd be staring into Jean's pinched little face, or bothering Santini for the sports section. His oven half open and the frozen peas starting to give his thumb frostbite and Jean sitting there asking him to do him a favor, just a quick little snap-and-run at a local hump motel-if he wouldn't mind of course.

I said scram.

Or sometimes it would happen smack in the middle of a conversation with Mr. Brickman, who was always barging through his door asking him to go somewhere. A park, a diner, a lawn chair on the sidewalk-it didn't much matter, all with a cheeriness William found frankly irritating. After all, William had already signed his armistice with life, signed it in blood, as with an enemy who-let's face it-was sooner or later bound to win, and here was Mr. Brickman just about bursting into a chorus of "The Sunny Side of the Street." And William would tell him that he didn't want to go to the park, no thanks, not interested, only to find himself telling Rachel something instead-to leave the light on because he'd be coming home for dinner and please not to forget to walk the dog.

This old age thing could be downright embarrassing.

For instance: Jilly was staring at him as if he had Tourette's syndrome. Which meant William had either said something horrifying or simply looked it. Maybe he'd cried out oh no at the news, or worse yet, oh yes. He didn't think he had, but it was entirely possible.

"Something wrong?" Jilly finally asked him, Augie turning around to stare at him too, William not used to all this attention.

"Yes," William said. "I just remembered something I have to do."

"Oh yeah?" Jilly again. "What's that?"

"Yeah," Augie echoed, "what's that?"

"A funeral," William said. "I have a funeral to go to."

The funeral home was stuck in Flushing, which William made it to by taking the number seven bus from Astoria, to the number five bus to Roosevelt Avenue, to the number eight bus to Kissena Boulevard, then hiking it through a kung fu town of Chinese takeouts and Korean fruit stands. No easy task when you're seventy-something, and wondering exactly why you'd bothered to make the trip in the first place.

The second he'd stepped off the number eight he'd been assaulted by a cacophony of alien sounds. Asians here, Asians there, Asians everywhere-all speaking Asian too. He might've been somewhere in China for all he knew-the most familiar thing he passed was a Chinese cleaners with a lone woman behind the counter, her head laid in her arms as if sobbing.

William was unaware he'd left Chinatown and entered San Juan until he almost walked into a bunch of Puerto Ricans in sneakers, ankle pants, and rolled-up T-shirts who were lolling against a couple of stripped cars, radios perched on their shoulders like parrots all screaming at once.

"Hey chief," one of them yelled when he walked by.

William kept walking.

"Hey chief, don't you hear me?"

Yeah, he heard him all right.

"Hey man, I'm talkin' to you."

So William turned, thinking-okay, he's talking to you, answer him.

"Yeah?"

"Hey, you got a problem or something? You deaf?"

"No, I'm not deaf."

"You sure about that. You should get your ears checked out, old man. I think you're one deaf motherfucker."

"I have to go." He did have to go. So go.

"You don't want to talk to me? You a busy motherfucker, huh." He put down his radio, handed it over to a smirking girl who looked about fourteen but seemed more like thirty-five. "Maybe you want me to break your fuckin' head instead. You want me to do that?"

He wore a red headband; face-to-face now he barely reached William's chin.

"Hey man, I asked you a question. You want me to break your fuckin' head?"

William said, "No. I don't want that."

"You're damn right you don't want that, old man. I'll punch your fuckin' head in, motherfucker." The Puerto Rican spat at him. It landed on his left cheek, then dribbled down toward his chin.

"Hey, I spit on him," the Puerto Rican said. "I spit on this fuckin' maricon."

William took a fresh handkerchief out of his pocket and slowly wiped it off, wiped it off with a hand he couldn't stop from trembling.

The Puerto Rican spat at him again, this time close to his eyes, where it burned like chlorine.

"I'm late," William said. "I'm late for a funeral…" leaving the spit where it was. He could hear the girl laughing, the girl and all the others. A funeral, a fuckin' funeral…

"You know man, you lucky this ain't your funeral." Laughter again.

William turned and quickly walked away, faster and faster, the laughter like a finger pointed at his back. It wasn't until he reached the curb that he finally wiped off the spit and threw the handkerchief into the gutter. It lay there like the white flag of a dishonored army. But then, he'd surrendered a long time ago; sure he had.

The Moses Greenberg Funeral Home was built of gray brick and decorated with donations from a few local artists. There were several lovely swastikas for instance, a Jewish star dripping blood, and a large misshapen heart that said Julio and Maria 4-ever. Trampled rhododendrons threw short brutal shadows on a ragged front lawn.

There was a schedule board covered in cracked glass: Goldblum, J., it said, One P.M.

When William walked through the front door, still burning from the spit, the laughter, and the fear, his fear, he felt something familiar. Ahh-death again. Death was something he was getting particularly attuned to these days; it seemed to be everywhere he looked. In the obits, sure, but everywhere else too. All he had to do was glance at the passing traffic and sooner or later he'd spot a hearse followed by a long parade of headlights. Pick up a paper at the supermarket and nine times out of ten someone you'd heard of had killed someone else you'd heard of too. It wasn't his imagination. Death was in the air. Why, he could see it in people's faces, pick it out in the middle of a crowded street, all those shrunken cheeks and wasted bodies that suddenly seemed to have joined the daily human traffic. He was definitely developing a nose for death. No two ways about it. Sniffing it out the way others sense guilt. Of course, they were often entwined with each other-sure they were. In his old business, one had often led to the other. And that had been Jean's gift, one of them at least, to sense guilt like a priest. It's uncanny, they used to say, how Jean could tell just by looking.

William had asked him once how he did it. And Jean had said: "You find yourself in a terrible situation, a situation so terrible that you become like a madman, understand. A situation where you have to do everything imaginable. To survive, understand. You do that, and then you know. Understand?"

But William hadn't understood; Jean's a little crazy, understand-there were those who used to say that too. Though there were, they'd be quick to add, mitigating circumstances. Jean had suffered a bad experience during the war-that much was known-and though none of them were one hundred percent sure what that experience was, they knew enough. They had eyes. They could see the stark blue numbers on Jean's forearm, and the tattered picture of his wife and young children, one boy, one girl, that he'd drag out on special occasions and stare at, running his fingers over the wrinkled snapshot like a man reading braille.

Jean, it seemed, had been something of a hero during the German occupation-a Jewish weekly in Brooklyn once tried to write him up, an inspirational piece about this little French Hungarian who risked everything to help smuggle other Jews to safety, to Argentina or Brazil, somewhere, anyway, south. Jean had slammed the door on them. For whatever the whole story was, Jean wasn't going to talk about it. For him, it was a secret affliction. Like a venereal disease maybe, but with all those scars right there under your nose. Mauthausen or Auschwitz or Treblinka or whatever hell on earth Jean had been thrown into had turned him inside out, distorted him into something a little less human. Maybe it had to do with that family that no longer was, with trying to do something noble and being rewarded with a one-way ticket to despair. So they didn't ask him about it, any more than you'd stop to ask the terminally ill about the progress of their funeral arrangements. And if Jean was a little crazy, Jean was also more than a little good.

Now, however, he was neither. A man, older than William-which these days was saying something-sat on a bent bridge chair just inside the front door. He wore a faded prayer shawl across his shoulders and an unmistakably sullen expression across his face. Well, why not. William supposed he'd be just a little sullen too if the only people he talked to all day were next of kin. Off to the right a half-covered aluminum table supported a lone bottle of Mogen David. Used cups, some crumpled, some half filled, surrounded the bottle like a stillborn litter. Maybe it was unavoidable-in the Moses Greenberg Funeral Home, everything looked like death. There were other men there-who, by the way, didn't look so hot either; one against the far wall, another two engaged in conversation, whispering to each other as if plotting something dangerous.

William was late.

"Friend or family?" the old man by the door asked him without really bothering to look up.

"Friend?" William replied, as if asking, thinking that there really ought to be a third category for these kinds of occasions, old acquaintance maybe.

"Well, you're late. The service is over."

"Sorry."

"You don't have to apologize to me. I just work here. And you don't have to apologize to the family, because there is none. Not here, anyway. You're it. Except for the landlord." He nodded at the man leaning against the wall. "Put a yarmulke on."

William reached into a wooden bin where yarmulkes of the kind Mr. Brickman wore on the High Holy Days lay in a soft multicolored heap. He picked a black one, black for death-Jonathan Weinberg's Bar Mitzvah it said in faded gold letters on the inside-then placed it on his head, just over his bald spot, okay, more of a region these days, and walked into the parlor.

A simple closed coffin lay at the front of the room.

I'm sorry, William thought when he'd walked past the empty seats to the end of the aisle. I'm sorry it ends like this, Jean. Like this. I'm sorry the seats aren't filled for you.

And then, touched by this feeling of pity, this notion that maybe Jean had meant more to him than he'd realized, he decided to open the coffin. To say his goodbye face-to-face.

He peeled back the top section; heavy and unoiled, it opened with a wrenching screech.

It was Jean. It wasn't Jean.

That was the only way to put it. And for a brief moment, he wasn't exactly sure why. After all, the features seemed just about the same: those thick eyebrows, the hollow cheeks, the drooped lip. Of course, he was dead. No doubt about that. But it was more than that, something else entirely. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen him, walking out of the office with a single box under his arm, why hello there, Jean, and then, like that, he understood. Jean had never been defined by his looks. He'd been defined by his, well… passion. For his work, for his regrettable parade of cases. Remember? Give him a new one and he'd get all lit up with a kind of perverse expectation, the way a house cat gets when its dinner lands by a half-open window. He'd just about lick his lips, Jean would. Then it would be days, weeks, of peek-a-boo, of coming and going, of in and out and where's he gone to, with the occasional glimpse of sly exultation as the case unfolded, as it turned to red, a euphemism Jean had coined due to his peculiar habit of changing files as a case progressed. The first file white, the last red, and the irony, William was convinced, firmly intended. For white was the color of innocence, something his clients could rarely claim, and red the color of penance, something they rarely did. But if his cases weren't exactly admirable, his passion was; at the very least it made him top-shelf at what he did. It made him Jean. Death had robbed him of the only thing that made him recognizable.

His hands, delicate hands for that body, were crossed over his chest like an Indian chief who'd died in battle, the kind that Randolph Scott was always running across and warning stupid white settler number eight million and one to leave alone. It was bad juju to touch a chief on his way to the underworld. Of course, no one ever listened to him, and before you knew it, half the Apache nation was out looking for their scalps. And now William wondered if he'd been just a little stupid himself. He wasn't the only one. As he reached down and took Jean's left hand in his, shaking goodbye for the last time- "Sir! Sir!" William jumped; the sudden sound tore through the silence like a siren. It was the old man; he'd followed him in. "Close the coffin, sir! Close it! We don't open coffins here without permission." His face was flushed; power had been usurped. "Closed coffin. Those were the directions." Where was Randolph Scott when you needed him? "You have to ask permission…" Down went the lid. "Closed," William said. "You have to ask…" the old man muttered, shaking his head and walking back out through the entranceway. William followed him; the old man back on his chair again, rigid and unforgiving. The landlord came over to introduce himself. His name was Rodriguez. Only he wasn't the landlord after all- just the janitor. "I just said I was the fuckin' landlord. The Jews don't respect you unless you own something, know what I mean." Jean had asked him to take care of things if something happened to him. "What exactly did happen to him?" William asked. "Heart attack," Rodriguez said and slapped his chest. "The doctor came too late. He was already gone." "Heart attack," William echoed. Rodriguez hadn't known whom to invite to the funeral. "He didn't have any family, did he?"

"No. He didn't have any family." William thought of that tattered picture; had Jean still kept it with him? held together with Scotch tape, taped and taped so that it became like a laminated ID, which, in a way, it was.

"Just another old guy with nobody," Rodriguez said. "No offense. There's a lot of them in my building-breaks my heart, right. So I put a notice in the paper, okay? I figured if anyone cares, if anyone knows him, maybe they'd come. Like you."

Rodriguez was wearing a yarmulke too, but inside out: Sarah Levy's Bat Mitzvah his head said. He asked how William knew the deceased.

"We used to work together," he said.

"Yeah-I thought it was you."

William must have looked puzzled.

"He's got this picture in his apartment. You, him, and some other guy," he said. "By a door-the Something, Something Detective Agency, right?"

"Three Eyes."

"Right. The Three Eyes Detective Agency. How long ago was that?"

"Long time ago."

"No shit. I bet you could tell some stories, huh?"

"Sure. Lots of stories."

He asked if William wanted it-the picture. There were other things in Jean's apartment too-he could take his pick.

William was going to say no, was going to say that he didn't want anything of Jean's, but then he thought the picture might be nice after all. "Okay," he said.

"Let's go."

"Now?" "Yeah. Now." "What about the burial?" "Cremated," he said. "That's what he wanted." Cremated. Off to some furnace to be burnt up. Like his wife and children went. If they weren't buried, he wouldn't be buried either. He would have wanted it like that, William guessed. Just like that. "So," Rodriguez said. He'd gone back for the half- drained bottle of Mogen David. "What do you say?" "I'll meet you there." "You'll meet me there. Why's that?" "I have something to do." He did have something to do; it had just come to him. "Have it your way. Fifteen-twenty-two Beech Avenue." William said fine. He'd be there in just a little while. When he walked out, the schedule board said Silverman, M.-4:30 P.M. Out with the old, in with the new. The Puerto Ricans were right where he left them, still leaning on wheel-less cars, their radios pouring out the same lyrics, more or less, that they were before. Screw her booty… The boy with the red headband was sharing a tender moment with the smirking girl. He was shoving his hand down her pants, and humping her up and down in time to the music as she whispered into his ear. William stood across the street, staring at them. Do something, he thought. You came back, now do something. Anything. But he didn't of course. Instead he suddenly felt like he did late at night when he'd wake to the sound of the TV he'd forgotten to turn off, something shrill and insistent on, buy this, order that, and him suddenly helpless and immobile, too weary to cross the carpet to turn it off. The TV was simply too far away to do battle with; and now, so were they. The street before him might as well have been a river; he was too old to swim it.

Then the boy saw him. He smiled, and ran his tongue across his girlfriend's ear. They both giggled. William, like something unimportant and ugly, had just been dismissed.

He turned and walked back up the street, his shadow just a stunted half-moon of gray, as if his sudden shame had just made him smaller.