Funerals for Horses (retail) Read online

  He yelled at me. “Well, you just screwed it up.”

  His dark eyebrows tried to knit together in the center. He had a strange nose that seemed to grow upon itself, like a cancer. I didn’t even make up the orders—Herbie did—but I couldn’t say that. I just made myself disappear.

  As soon as I did, he turned on his heels, as though disgusted to have no one left to yell at. That’s how I knew it worked.

  I ran back to the store without the money for the rest of the order. I thought Lois would be mad at me, but I couldn’t bring myself to disappear on her. I owed Lois better than that.

  I told her the story. She got on the phone and asked for “this Larry,” and while she waited, her big round face reddened, and she smoothed her huge apron, as if to keep life in order.

  “Now, listen, you, we don’t have ham sandwiches at Greenblatt’s. We’re a kosher deli, got that? Kosher. Next time you want to order from us you got to pay what you all should have paid today, except you chased my girl away. She’s a kid, see? You see this? You think she’s the owner? The manager? No, she schleps orders. You yell at her one more time you get your lunch someplace else.”

  She slammed down the phone and the ringer resonated among the silent clientele. A force to reckon with, that Lois.

  “You go right back out,” she said, stuffing a bag into my hand, “don’t lose your nerve.” On the way out the door I overheard her tell Herbie, “I just thought who she reminds me of. Benny, that’s who.” I had never heard of Benny.

  Nobody thought the camera store would order again, but they did. They paid me for the previous time, along with a two-dollar tip, and Larry had to sit in the corner until I was gone, like a bad dog. I watched the angle of his face, and when it swept around toward me I went away in my head, and sure enough, he looked right through me like I was a window onto something better.

  That was a great turning point for me. I ran those streets like I owned them, head tucked down to watch the streak of sidewalk cracks rush by. I watched them accumulate like shares of stock, reminding me I had as much right to this city as anyone.

  Because if anyone challenged my ownership, I could be gone.

  When I got back from my last run, Herbie was sitting in his office, an unmarked corner of the storeroom, doing his books.

  “Pull up a chair,” he said. He liked to talk to me at the end of the day, get a sense of how everything had gone.

  There were no chairs, but I pulled up a carton of halvah and sat with my knees tucked up against my chin, my breath still coming in puffs.

  “You’re in good shape,” he said. He twisted a corner of his mustache. Folds and billows of Herbie pushed out against his clothes. He wore normal-sized pants that rode far below his great belly. His eyes laughed, even when I saw nothing to laugh about. Like Santa Claus, though god knows I would never say this to Herbie.

  “So, how did your day go, young lady?”

  “Fine, Herbie. Good. I made seven dollars in tips.”

  “See, the customers like you, Ella. That’s good for everybody.”

  I saw, over Herbie’s desk, a photo of a dog tacked on the bulletin board. I’d seen it before. Beside it hung photos of their two grown children, forty-year-olds with friendly, unintimidating faces, but I liked the dog best. A silly-looking dog, really. Sort of a wire-haired terrier, only no sort in particular. All the different breeds seemed to argue in this one poor little mutt, sending his hair in a wealth of directions. His head hung down, as if cowed by the camera, and the flash lit up his eyes devil red, which didn’t look at home on him at all.

  This time Herbie saw me looking.

  “That’s Benny, god rest his soul.”

  “That’s Benny?”

  “The one and only.”

  I asked Herbie to tell me all about Benny.

  “So, what about him? Good friend. Cried like babies when he passed on, both of us. Why? What do you want to know?”

  “How was Benny like me?”

  Herbie’s chair groaned under his weight as he shifted back into it. His eyes didn’t see the joke anymore.

  “You weren’t supposed to hear that, you know, but it wasn’t an insult. You could do worse than to be like Benny. It’s just... we got him out of the pound, and he always had this look in his eyes. Always braced for the worst even when everything was dandy. We never knew what had happened to him, but it must’ve been really bad, you know? That’s all Lois meant by that. No disrespect.”

  “It’s okay, Herbie, I don’t mind.”

  I found it flattering, that I reminded someone of their dog.

  “Take a sandwich before you go. Take two, one for your brother. Here, I’ll make it myself. What’ll you have, roast beef? Corned beef? Pastrami?”

  “Roast beef is Simon’s favorite.”

  I watched through the glass case as Herbie assembled the sandwiches, thicker with meat than any he sold.

  “Tell your brother Simon we send our regards.”

  Simon wasn’t home yet. I took a bath and got dressed for school, and ate my sandwich without him. I wondered if he’d gotten Friday off from work, for his birthday, and if I should have asked Herbie for Friday off just in case.

  Sometime around six-thirty I began to suspect it would be one of those nights I’d miss Simon entirely. It happened once or twice a week. I left his sandwich on our only table, with a note that said Herbie and Lois sent their regards.

  Then I heard the knock.

  I held still, nothing more at first. Nobody ever knocked on our door. Ever. Not even the landlord, because Simon always paid for our room on the first of the month, never made him come to us. I slid over to the door and hooked the safety chain. “Who’s there?”

  “Is that you, Ella?”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, let me in, sweetie.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, it’s me, Ella. Open the door.”

  “Dad, how did you find us?”

  “Honey, I always knew where you were. You think it’s hard to find where somebody is? You think I’d let my own kids go off where I couldn’t even keep an eye on them? Why aren’t you opening the door, Ella?”

  “Simon’s not here.”

  “So? I got a present. For his birthday. I want him to come to the house Friday, but even if he won’t, he can still have the present. Just open up, sweetie.”

  “Simon doesn’t let me open the door while he’s away.” Actually, it had never come up before, but it sounded damned convincing.

  “But it’s your father.”

  I leaned on the door, my shoulder wedged against it, as though latch, deadbolt and chain would not do the job unaided, but then I felt it come right through the door at me. Like The Blob, only worse, because The Blob is only a movie.

  I jumped back away from the door. The room had only one exit, the one my father contaminated. I unlocked the door. I allowed it to drift open slightly, and as he pushed it, I darted under his arm and ran. I drew myself in, tried to disappear, but it didn’t work. Not on him. He tried to follow me, but I lost him by cutting around the side of the house.

  A spot on my shoulder burned as if I’d touched his jacket, or even his aura, on my dangerous trip through his diseased space. I ran all the way to Sunset Boulevard, caught the bus in the direction opposite of school, got off at Silver Lake Boulevard and walked the mile to Willie’s. She answered the door in her robe and socks. She’d been eating dinner.

  “I should call first, shouldn’t I?”

  “Yes, in the future I’d appreciate that. This time it just so happens your timing is okay.”

  She doesn’t want you here, DeeDee said, but I went in anyway. DeeDee said lots of things I’d learned to ignore.

  Willie ate the last little bits of her TV dinner, then threw away the foil tray.

  “What’s up, Ella?”

  I couldn’t say. I wanted her to tell me how to cleanse the spot on my shoulder without breaking my promise. I wanted to use her shower, to wash myself twenty or
thirty times, as people who feel violated tend to do. But I knew it wouldn’t help. Because it was so much too late. I was his own flesh and blood; what made me think I could duck at this late date?

  I said I wanted to stay until Simon got home.

  She drove me back and walked up with me. Simon was home, resting his head on the table, clutching a set of car keys on a ring in his right hand. Keys I’d never seen before, not his regular ones. He picked up his head, nodded to Willie.

  “I can’t believe he knew where we were this whole time.”

  “He could be lying, Simon. I mean, if he knew all along, why did he miss all those other birthdays?”

  “He said twenty-one was too big to let go by. He gave me his Oldsmobile. Only four years old.”

  “I bet he didn’t know all along.”

  “He knows now.”

  Years later, after we’d moved, Simon confided that our father had threatened him, said he could take me back if Simon didn’t keep in closer touch.

  At the time, with me only fifteen and still feeling a little on the edge, he never mentioned that part at all.

  UNTIL AND UNLESS

  I watch Everett Ankeah’s hands, his fingers as they lace together, his rough palms lined with calluses, like grain on fine wood. I see the rings of calluses as tree rings, revealing Everett’s true age. I press my left knee into those palms, and he slings me up to Yozzy’s back. I ease gently down onto her. After all, it is her back. Not a motorcycle seat, or a bale of straw, but the fine vertebrae of a sentient being.

  Everett hands up my bedroll, which crinkles with something that did not use to belong to me. He has made additions to my bedroll. I hang it by its rope, over my shoulder.

  Something pulls at me, hurting me, as I stare down into Everett’s ageless face. It makes me postpone the moment of moving on.

  “Do you and May have children, Everett?”

  It seems a foolish time to ask, but the alternative is to nudge Yozzy’s sides and head north. I feel the warmth of the Ankeah home at my back.

  “Four.”

  “Where?”

  “Grown and gone.”

  “You don’t look old enough to have four children grown and gone.” In part this is true, all but the ageless part.

  “I told my children the same thing, but they defied me and grew to adulthood.”

  “Kids,” I say, and Everett smiles.

  I reach my hand down to him and he grasps it, and we hold on. I want to say thank you, but his eyes remind about redundancy.

  “We’ll pray for rain,” he says.

  “He-rain,” I say. I know all about Navajo He-rain. Well, not all about it. I know what Everett told me about it, and all I need to know. I know that without it we might die.

  Yozzy turns her head and bumps my leg with her muzzle. She’s right, of course. I allow her to move off toward Simon’s mesa.

  My legs hang loosely against the blanket and her bony sides. I do not tell her which way to go. She tells me. She has seen me stare. She feels the pull as surely as I do.

  She moves with Navajo grace down the hard dirt shoulder of the highway, and I look back. Yozzy does not.

  I look back because I felt at home with May and Everett, as much as I ever have anywhere. I don’t want that time to be gone. But it is gone, and even if I had not left, still it would be gone. Only for the time I was meant to be there could I feel so at peace.

  As the sun rises to taunt me, to sweat the truth from me, I think about Willie, asking me if I loved anyone. Did I love the Greenblatts? Mrs. Hurley? Simon?

  I said I figured I must, but I don’t think that answer rings the bell. What would it feel like, I said, if I did?

  Then later, after I’d met Shane, I ran into Willie’s little room at Mental Health, and said I had it now. Someone I knew I loved.

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, because... I do.”

  “But you still haven’t figured out if you love Simon, and you’re closer to him than anybody.”

  “No, I do love Simon.”

  “But you can’t feel it.”

  “But I feel it with Shane.”

  By the end of the session, she had introduced the possibility of lust, offered to muddy the water, to farther confuse the issue.

  Maybe real love is the one you can’t feel.

  I look back again, to see Everett’s house fade to a pinpoint on the horizon. I wonder if I love Everett and May, and if someday I’ll answer that question without having the example ripped away first.

  Yozzy bumps my knee with her muzzle, a clear way to say, stop that. Yozzy has loved Everett longer than I have, but she puts one steady hoof in front of another and doesn’t look back. But then, Yozzy is a horse, for which I envy her.

  We see no cars, no trucks, no travelers. We see only a flock of dingy white sheep, herded and protected by two lone dogs. They flow like a river across the highway, leaping and colliding in a fluid, choreographed procession.

  The rear dog barks at the rudeness, the intrusion of our presence. He stands in the center of the highway, chastising us, daring us, vocal in his indignation. His rough coat is mottled in three colors, the white of his bib is surprisingly white.

  Yozzy cuts a silent deal with him, winding just as far around his flock as he asks her to. I realize I am still a stranger in this place, and I thank Yozzy with a pat on the neck, for knowing so much that I don’t. For teaching me.

  A brown jackrabbit skitters across the road, then turns north, to Simon’s mesa, bowing away from the highway, and Yozzy bows with him, and continues walking. I would not presume to steer.

  I scan the sky for signs of rain, but the sky is a pale blue, no cloud in sight, and the sun laughs at me. I want to go home, but until and unless I find Simon, I don’t know where that might be.

  THEN:

  Even with my eyes closed, I knew Shane was there, just off my left elbow. I felt him there. When I opened my eyes I saw the sun sink below the stubby wall that separated the pool from the parking lot, and beyond that, the high, forbidding wall of Paramount Studios, just across Gower from Simon’s and my new home. Shane and I sat poolside, alone. The other guys were all at work, except for sleeping Jason, and Eddie and Paul, upstairs in Eddie’s apartment, cooking a donated pork roast for that night’s communal apartment house dinner.

  Simon came through with Sarah, from the parking lot to the sliding glass door that separated our living room from the pool. Simon worked a part-time job in the evenings. I worked two jobs, so Simon could go to school and become an astronomer.

  I was seventeen years old, a high school graduate. I sent Simon back to school after a dream I had, the night after my own graduation. In this dream I sat with Mrs. Hurley on the porch swing, at her old house in Columbus. Mrs. Hurley pulled nips from a bottle of apricot brandy, and we rocked that old porch swing until it creaked. I thought she’d come to deliver advice, but she said nothing at all. Later, upon waking, I knew she’d delivered all the advice I’d ever need, years before, and had come only to offer a timely reminder.

  Moving to the new place had been my idea. The new place had a bedroom. Simon wouldn’t take it, choosing to entertain Sarah in the living room, at the odd times his schedule might permit.

  “We won’t need a bedroom until we’re married,” he had said.

  It was at City College that Simon had met Sarah, though I didn’t realize he had at first, either because he never brought her home to our little room, as I suspect, or because I was gone to work when he did, or both. He had cut classes one Friday afternoon, because the Greenblatts closed early on Friday for the Sabbath, and had taken us both out to lunch as an introduction.

  I couldn’t see anything about her that required an introduction. She looked like Simon, only female, and the energy she sent across the table, though probably not on purpose, felt like Simon, which felt like me. She had always existed there between us, as though our energy had expanded outward until Sarah appeared. She bent over backwards to
be nice to me, and I wanted to tell her I’d like her anyway, just to save her the trouble, but there’s no point arguing with somebody who’s trying to be nice to you.

  I got a club sandwich and a cherry Coke out of the deal, and when she left to go back to class, I told him he’d spend the rest of his life with Sarah, and he said, “I know.” I knew he knew, I just wanted him to know that I knew. Then he assured me that we’d still always be together.

  I left for my appointment with Willie, and sat on the windowsill in her plain room, and talked about Simon, and Sarah, and our future, and rolled the denim of my jeans into little scrolls, until I noticed she was watching. I’d never been troubled by nervous habits, ever, so I stopped, not wanting Willie to think this meant anything in particular.

  I stared out the window, onto the ivy hill, the edge of the freeway pavement, trying to talk, the way I always did, saying nothing at all.

  Then I said, “We won’t always be together, you know.”

  “You’re worried that Sarah will pull you apart.”

  I said, “No,” and I meant it. Sarah wouldn’t do anything to us. Life would pull us apart. Because we were not the same person, my brother Simon and I, and we would not appear in all the same places at all the same times. I didn’t worry this—I knew it.

  Now, by the pool, Simon greeted us. “Hi, Ella,” he said. “Hi, Shane,” and he smiled at me, and Sarah smiled, and then they were inside our apartment, gone. I had seen my brother Simon, a notable occasion.

  Simon didn’t mind when I sat with Shane or Jason, or most other men in the building, but a few of my new friends made him uncomfortable. Shane and Jason had been married over a year, but Eddie and Paul were promiscuous, according to Simon. He had to approve of Shane and Jason—otherwise, how could he show he wasn’t homophobic? I had once accused him of this, using one of many words I learned from my new friends.