Funerals for Horses (retail) Page 15

  As if Virgil read my mind, he said, “There are a lot more easy opportunities in investments than in astronomy.”

  I asked what easy had to do with anything, but he didn’t answer. Just before I left, he said he was surprised, pleasantly surprised, to see me again, to see how I grew up. He couldn’t quite find the words to say more.

  If he could have spoken the truth, without fear of hurting me, I think he would have said he was surprised I grew up at all.

  People could have said things like that in front of me. I liked the truth, if I ever heard it. But no one ever did.

  No one except Shane, and Shane was gone.

  EYES OF THE WILD MAN

  As I step out into the cool morning, Yozzy wanders up to greet me, and I offer her a hatful of water, which she gratefully accepts. I wish I had more to give her, or to give myself, but we have drunk almost all the water already.

  I have two pieces of beef jerky left. I chew on one slowly, remembering the warm faces of Everett and May.

  It’s about six-thirty, I’m guessing, which means five-thirty in California, and I wonder if Willie is out, walking briskly around the concrete lake. And I wonder, is she thinking about me now? Someone has to think about me now.

  The sky is empty, the landscape empty. I slip back inside Simon’s house, into cool shade, and it’s empty. Tears come, and I let them, comforted by the flow of them on my cheeks, like company.

  Did I really come all this way to find emptiness, which I held in such a vast supply at home?

  I will not leave until I know.

  Hours later the moon comes out, before dusk, and it asks, what if you never know? What if your question has no answer?

  I hear Yozzy’s hooves against the stone; she asks for more water. I give her the last, though I’m thirsty. I eat the last piece of beef.

  I look to the moon, who smiles and says, if you need to find even more emptiness, you could always die here yourself.

  I decline.

  I look around for Yozzy, but she’s out on the open plain, seeking better grazing. I pick up her hackamore and blanket, throw my bedroll on my shoulder. Will she be relieved when I tell her we’re going home? Or will she be disappointed in me, and will I see that in the depth of her dark, liquid eye?

  I never learn.

  As I cup my hands to call her name, I see a shadow, east against the mesa. Fear grips me, running along my belly like river water. It never occurs to me it might be Simon, which is as it should be, because then, as he comes closer, I feel no disappointment.

  I dive back inside Simon’s house, but that’s a mistake, because surely he is coming this way. Whoever he is, I am in his house. Whoever he is, he is not Simon. I watch him from the sheltered darkness. He is a wild man. A white man, but not one of us. His hair, thick and tangled, shines white and fine in the dying sun, his unmanageable beard just slightly darker. An older man, but strong enough to be dangerous. He comes close, to Simon’s fire pit, and I’m trapped inside his house. He carries a rifle and drags the gutted carcass of a deer. His eyes appear gray in the slant of light. He wears dirty underwear and a tattered blanket thrown as a cape across his shoulders.

  He leaves the carcass in the dirt, and I see he also drags a burlap sack filled with gnarled pieces of fallen branches, which he lays on the ground in a careful order. He must have traveled far, I think, for a bag of wood like this.

  He works methodically, shoveling handfuls of dirt into the fire pit to form a new, drier floor.

  He pulls a long hunting knife from its sheath, hidden somewhere beneath his cape, and shaves thick curls of kindling from a soft branch.

  He is faced partly away from me, and as I watch his profile, he moves with a certain grace, but it’s an angry grace, I think, a grace I might not have recognized yesterday, or the day before. Then I realize I am looking at my brother Simon’s killer. What else can he be? He is not Simon, but he has Simon’s wallet. Or he did. He is not Simon, but I followed him from the spot of Simon’s ordeal.

  I wonder: Is my mission only to kill the man who killed my brother? Or to bring him to justice, to bring Sarah her answer, so she can wear black, and start slowly over? So that I can sleep, and return to marginal sanity, knowing I have done the only thing left worth doing?

  If so, I hope it brings something more than emptiness. His rifle leans against the stone wall of the mesa, and I know I must take him now, win or lose. I must use my only weapon: surprise. I must not let him corner me here.

  I can’t get to the rifle, not without going through him. I wait, I watch, I feel my time run down. I wonder with a chill if he’ll see Yozzy. If he’ll try to catch her. Or shoot her. I wonder: If I die, will she be brave enough and accepting enough to go home without me?

  If she does, Everett will say a prayer for me. I could do worse. I’m scared, but I’m not sorry I came. I will die with dignity, or I’ll win. Yozzy would have no preference, but then, Yozzy is a horse, for which I envy her.

  He lays the knife down, bends over the fire pit, and I launch myself into flight. I have only one smooth movement left to my life, unless I do this exactly right. My hand grazes the knife but misses, and I can’t afford to stop. I hit his back with all my weight, send him sprawling hard across his half-laid firewood, and as I land on his back, I hear the wind escape him. This gives me a split second to untangle myself, struggling for breath, and I return for the knife.

  He rolls onto his back, and I land on his belly, and press the point of the knife to his throat until the skin dimples lightly. I do not draw blood.

  I feel a stiff pain in my gut, because I wanted to see Simon’s eyes, even though I knew it could not be Simon. I wanted it to be, when I got closer, but, like looking at the moon through Virgil’s telescope, the closeness further destroys the illusion. These hard gray eyes do not belong to my brother, and so must belong to his killer. He tries to draw a breath, to release a sound, but I stop him with a hiss that scares even me. I am wild enough to match him.

  Though it’s an odd time to care, I realize I haven’t seen myself in a mirror in weeks, and I wonder how I look to this wild man, this killer. Maybe I look more vicious than he. Maybe I am.

  “I might kill you,” I say, in a scratchy whisper. “Even if you hold still I might kill you, so definitely don’t move.”

  As I hear myself say it, I think I’m an actress, buying his compliance with a lie. I will not kill him, except to save my life, but I have a right to lean on his ignorance of my nature. Then I think of him as my brother’s killer and I wonder: Would I?

  “What have you done with my brother Simon?”

  The words echo loud, the cry of a warrior. At the corner of my eye I see Yozzy’s head snap up.

  My prisoner utters a strange sound, a barely human sound, but questioning, in a universal tone.

  I hold the flat, sharp edge of the knife along his carotid artery. I could. I might.

  “Simon. My brother Simon. You had his wallet. Where did you get it? What did you do to him? Talk. Now.”

  He utters a sound, but I can’t make it out. Maybe he doesn’t speak English. Maybe he is truly wild, raised by wolves. Maybe his father was a coyote, and by night he stalked me, and tried to take Yozzy away. Maybe the moon is right, and my question has no answer. Maybe I came all this way to learn only that.

  I become aware of myself, sitting on his chest, and I want to pull away. But if I do, I give him an opening, a chance at the upper hand.

  “I can’t understand you. Do you speak English?”

  He nods slightly. I’m not giving him much room for expression in the way I hold his knife.

  “Then say it. Where is my brother Simon? What did you do to him?”

  His eyes change. They broaden and soften, into some semblance of humanity, and I feel a wave of gooseflesh along my arms, and a buzzing tremble all down my belly, in the place that knows things it will not say. The place I try to break with an ax, to free my tears, but they must become thin to slip through the walls.
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  I think of a song from Jewish religious school. So high, you cant get over it, so low, you cant get under it, so wide, you cant get around it.

  I shake the words away again.

  I want to cry, right now. For my brother Simon, and for myself, and somehow, inexplicably, for my sorry prisoner. But I can’t let him see me cry if I’m about to kill him, and it’s not completely out of the question.

  He looks into my eyes, and I’m afraid he’ll see the chink of my emotion, but before I turn my face away, I see that he is crying. Big, heavy tears that roll away from the far corners of his eyes, and his mouth twists like a child’s, showing the cracks in his life, in this moment.

  He says something. I sense it’s in English, because I think I make out one word. It sounds like, “Sorry.”

  “What?” I shout. “I can’t hear you.” I won’t lighten up on him. I won’t feel sorry for him. I can’t. I didn’t come all this way to love my brother’s murderer.

  That feeling returns, rippling the skin on my arms and belly. I don’t want to kill this man, I don’t want to hate him, but if I came all this way, lived through all this to learn a bond with Simon’s killer, then I don’t want the lesson. I’d sooner hand him the knife.

  And now he knows it. We touch a moment in time when if I am to kill him I must do it now, and if I am not to kill him, then the balance of power shifts back to him. I cannot arrest him. I cannot bring him all the way to justice from here. The arm of the law is not that long. And I am not the law.

  He jerks underneath me, aware of the perfect moment to unbalance me. In fact, he has already unbalanced me, by proving I won’t cut his throat. And now he performs a sudden, literal version of the insult, and performs it well. I fall away from him, he stumbles backwards over the fire pit, falls sprawling and tumbling on his back along the rocks to the plain. The knife flies out of my hand, I can’t see where to. He scrambles to his feet and runs away.

  I still have his gun.

  I pick it up and aim at him, and follow him through his own rifle sight, running away, claiming victory. I have taken your brother Simon and now I will take your opportunity for revenge, the kind that lets you sleep at night. Unless you pull the trigger.

  But he’s nearly out of range now, and I am not a sharpshooter. I am not a cowboy or a Navajo. I’ve never held a gun before. It’s too late.

  As I lower the rifle scope I see Yozzy, head up, watching me at some distance, chewing grass, her jaw working, her eyes following only me. Not the running figure. Me. I set the rifle down on the red dirt of the mesa and she returns her attention to the scrubby grass.

  She’s right, of course. We did not come all this way for revenge.

  THEN:

  About a week before my thirty-third birthday, he woke me out of a sound sleep with his phone call. I thought it was Simon. It almost always was.

  Instead, a voice I hadn’t heard for more than twelve years, and didn’t recognize, even when he told me his name. I’d never spoken to him on the phone before; I supposed that was why.

  “I’ll bet you don’t even remember me.”

  “Shane, that’s the dumbest thing you ever said to me.”

  “Okay.”

  They say you always remember your first, but to further complicate the situation, he was my only. Still, after all that time.

  “How did you find me?”

  “From information. How many Ella Ginsbergs you think are listed?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Not far.”

  He warned me in advance that he wasn’t traveling alone. If he came by, he’d have to bring his friend Raphael. I didn’t mind. The fact that Raphael was smart enough to love Shane didn’t preclude our getting along.

  He also warned me that he didn’t look the same.

  I opened my front door and there they were, two strangers. One rugged, dark and handsome—but not Shane—one pale, emaciated, eyes gray and sunken—maybe Shane, but only because one of them had to be.

  What could be so strong, I wondered, so much stronger than a vital human body, to bring such change, to replace health and good humor with an image of itself? To cause me to look into the eyes of a man and see only disease, not the host of the man.

  Raphael held Shane’s arm and helped him in, helped him sit down in a soft overstuffed chair.

  “Where do you live now?” I asked him, and he exchanged a look with Raphael. I knew he had come with an agenda, a sort of desperation. In fact, I’d known it on the phone. Sometimes, at the very bottom of our lives, we must ask ourselves, isn’t there some fool who used to love me?

  “We’re sort of homeless,” he said. “I’m too sick to work. Raphael lost his job in Phoenix because they found out I was sick.”

  Then I knew what was so strong.

  I jumped up from my seat on the couch, and Raphael jumped up, defensive, as if about to be shown the door, which I suppose he was used to. I threw the couch cushions in all directions, and drew out the folding bed, and told Shane he was in no shape to be up, and if he held on for a minute, I’d get him some sheets.

  Raphael got a job in this new place where no one knew them, and we pooled our resources to buy more sheets, about ten sets more over the following week, so we could change Shane’s bed three or four times a day.

  Raphael did all the laundry, changed the bedding by himself when Shane grew too sick to get up and sit elsewhere, and took the brunt of the ugly work with cheer. It was accepted that I did poorly around sickness; it was never judged or questioned. The attitude prevailed that I was doing enough.

  I did the easy things, held his hand and read him bedtime stories, John Irving and J.D. Salinger and Anais Nin. And the night he rocked with a coughing fit that wanted to tear his body apart from itself, I threw my arms around him to hold him together. When he fell quiet I told him I loved him, and he laughed.

  “Big mistake,” he said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear.

  By morning he’d fallen into a coma, and we called an ambulance to take him to County Hospital. I dropped by after work to hold his hand and read him bedtime stories. John Irving. J.D. Salinger. Anais Nin.

  Only for a couple of days.

  When Shane was dead, Raphael gathered a bereavement group—one that had never existed before—with a handwritten note on the hospital bulletin board. We gathered at my house, and he and I held hands all through it, every Tuesday and Thursday night, feeling lucky that we had each other, someone else who mourned our identical loss.

  We held each other on the couch for long hours afterwards, and when the hugging tried to deepen out, to become more, I reminded him that he still hadn’t been tested. This made him quiet, and killed the mood.

  More than two months passed before I managed to pack him into my run-down Oldsmobile and drive him to the health department, where they made him wait three silent, drawn days for his test results.

  When he came out of that room, I didn’t ask. I could tell.

  He talked about it in the group that night, and learned he wasn’t the only one, not even close, and then Raphael and Ed and Jonathan and Jamey and David and Mark and Carey learned to mourn themselves, while they were at it. Funny how much harder that is.

  Raphael had a photo of Shane, taken in the last days, and he kept it in the corner of the mirror. When he moved to his own apartment, I asked him to please take it away.

  I preferred to remember Shane in the stream of light from the living room, his hair falling onto my forehead. Every day that he had lived with me, I searched for some verification of that old him, but the old was gone.

  Sometime in 1989 my Oldsmobile got stolen, which was no great loss, but that old leather jacket had been left behind the seat, and that was.

  So much for living in the past.

  BREAKING BREAD

  I have his gun, his knife, his water bottles, his evening kill. I have his home. For the moment that is everything I’ve been needing. I find some satisfaction in that. I have not been left completely
empty-handed; even as he has taken from me, I have forced him to give some small concession in return.

  I finish the fire he started, restacking the branches, scattered when I attacked him, resetting the spit and its stick braces, which we knocked away. Before undergoing the tedious process of rubbing two sticks together, I search the cave and find three boxes of wooden matches stuffed into an old ammunition case.

  With the fire going well, I unsheathe the knife again, and attempt to sever and skin a haunch of the deer. It’s a grisly process, and I stand outside myself as I do it, knowing I might not have been capable of the act last week, or last night.

  I think about another deer, one I found once on the highway, on my way to Sacramento to visit Simon. She’d been hit, paralyzed at some low point on her spine, and I stopped and helped carry her back half off the highway. A passing motorist told me not to touch her, she’d hurt me. She bled on me, but she didn’t hurt me. A man from Fish and Game came out and shot her through the ear. It was fast and clean.

  On my next trip I stopped and tried to salvage her skull, but the animals had carried most everything away.

  I force my mind back to the present, against its will.

  I wonder what I must look like by now. I know I’m filthy, but I’d like to see my own eyes, to see if I look wild, like Simon’s killer, and if I’d know myself apart from him.

  I look down at the skin, still slightly bloody, draped across my knees, and I realize that now almost everything any of us dreamed is here. The cave, the deerskin, the fire. Everything but Simon. I throw the skin down below.

  I’m not sure what to do with the balance of the carcass. I can’t eat it all, and I can’t stop thinking of it as a mutilated corpse. I can’t pretend I don’t know it will draw the coyotes. But I can’t throw it off the bluff. It’s too heavy. So I do something I can’t imagine I would do. Maybe I do it to prove I’m stronger every minute than I was the minute before. I cut the head off the deer with the wild man’s knife. I can’t cut through the bone. I have to snap it. The neck bone gives way with a sickening crack. I throw the head to the dirt beneath me. Maybe the coyotes will take it and go away. Maybe it will be enough for them. If not, there’s more. I control dinner—mine and theirs. I can even control a coyote.