WHEN GRANDMOTHER AGNES passed away, Jake Daugherty stood over her casket before they snapped it shut, reached into the right-hand pocket of the black suit the mortician had rented him and pulled out his set of teeth. Agnes clutched the rosary beads in one hand across her heart. Grandfather placed his dentures in the other, positioning them over her breast. Father, Mother, my brother, Westley, and I circled the coffin, touched.
Two years later Westley passed away. Grace and he had recently purchased a house in a subdivision outside Toledo, Ohio, that six months earlier had been a beet farm. Heretofore strangers, Westley and several neighbors labored weekends to erect decks on the backs of each other’s neo-colonial homes. Elaborate affairs, these summer conceits cantilevered over raw backyards with precipitous drop-offs. The cedar decks were half as large as the homes’ interiors where the drywall mud bouquet still lingered. Three months into the project—his was next up on the list—following a Saturday morning’s work of hammering deck joists into place, Westley swanned pearl-white through the open slider of his neighbor’s house, complained of stomach cramps, then bent over and died.
At the closing-of-the-lid ceremony not a single family member was surprised when young Lucien, who’s as tall as Grace, drew a sixteen-ounce claw hammer from under his suit jacket and pried open his father’s hands.
“What in Christ’s name are they gonna dump in my coffin?” Pap whispered.
Following the burial and feed at Westley’s house—Grace and Mother had gone to bed—Father and I remained seated at the dining room table that groaned from the mourners’ goodwill: two turkeys, a honey-baked ham, several Tupperware crocks of potato salad and coleslaw, baskets of rolls and cheese Danishes, a chocolate cake.
“Is it a celebration or a damn funeral?” Pap groused. We’d begun drinking in the hearse on the way to the cemetery, and he’d become a little ornery. “I mean look at all this crap. Did you hear them out there in the kitchen tonight, laughin’ and swillin’ Westley’s last case of Rolling Rock, makin’ plans to construct a colossal deck off the back-end of their East Jesus clubhouse in Wes’ honor, memorializing it with a tombstone plaque? And Grace—did you notice how touched she was?”
“What could she say, Pap?”
“Young Lucien sitting next to the sink, darkening up, not saying a damn word. ‘You bastards!’ that’s what he was thinking, James. ‘If it weren’t for all of you neighbors wantin’ to be sittin’ outside with your strawberry wives every night watchin’ the sun dip into the beet farm and swattin’ the damn mosquitoes off your fat asses on the deck my daddy helped build for you, he’d be sittin’ here with us now. Fuck your memorial!’ That’s what he was thinking, wasn’t he, James?”
“These people understand death, Pap. The boy’s too young to grasp it.”
“Well, how do you goddamn grasp it?”
Father was thinking maybe he was supposed to be next in line. But Westley beat the old man into the sod.
“Shit, it could be me,” I said.
“I can feel it in my bones, it’s me,” he said, rising. He walked over to the missing deck’s slider, staring down into the ravine. “Can I confess something to you?” he asked.
“Don’t become all teary-eyed on me now,” I laughed.
“Who am I supposed to tell—Margaret?”
Margaret was my mother and she stopped listening to him twenty years ago. He sliced a wedge of ham off its shank.
“Let me put that on a roll with some lettuce and mayonnaise for you, Pap.”
“Goddamnit, Junior . . . now don’t tell me how to eat!”
I sat back in the chair. The house was dead quiet. I kept picturing Westley floating in the periwinkle viewing room with his eyes glued shut and a prophylactic grin on his once-sweet face that froze to a mask of terror when he slipped to his knees. The Stanley framing hammer in his stiff hand, a rubber over its red handle for comfort gripping—the incongruity of it all. What would the anthropologists say when they unearthed King Westley Tutankhamen Daugherty’s bier one millennium from now to confront a skeleton with a death grip on a claw hammer? And Agnes Daugherty several hundred yards away, clasping a set of uppers and lowers in one hand, rosary beads in another? When Johnny Prioletti, our neighbor, died, his widow tossed his Bobby Jones’, a fresh deck of cards, and a bottle of Jim Beam into her stiff’s canoe.
“Are you listening to me?” Pap said.
“Yes,” I said. “Goddamnit, yes.”
“Son, I can’t get an erection anymore.”
I just stared at him.
“You hear what I’m tellin’ you? Used to be any excuse of the opposite sex, their legs, perfume, even passing the millinery shop on Washington Street, for Chrissake, it’d jump up—in confession, too, or when I damn near got drafted for World War II.” He paused, chewing off more of the ham he held between his fingers. “Now I can’t will the sonofabitch to raise its head. Even when I pet it.” He grinned slyly.
“Oh, you’re pulling my leg, goddamnit.”
“It’s how the Maker lets us know when we ain’t got much time left, James. My friends all think I drop it into your mother at least twice a week. Ain’t so. Her pussy’s drier than an Okie dust bowl.”
I turned out the light and headed toward the stairway.
“Oh, don’t get so goddamn prissy!” he laughed, collegially embracing me, gently pushing me back into my chair. The moonlight cast an eerie, fluorescent pall over the food. “I’m just telllin’ you like it is, boy. No tumbling weed even rolling through your mother’s thing. It’s a lunarscape, for Chrissake. Wouldn’t matter anyway. ’Cause I’ve told you what’s been ailing me: my dog won’t raise its ornery head for love nor money. Tired, Son. Over. Kaput. I’m an old man.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Pap.”
“Old man Nowles sure gussied Wes up good, didn’t he? Huh? Christ, our boy looked like they colored his face with pastels. Say, you’ll regret not taking the opportunity we got between us now. Listen to what I’m tellin’ you, Son. And it ain’t the booze talkin’, goddamnit! Your pecker collapses on you like a five-and-dime card-table leg before your ticker ever gives out.”
He was stretching to win me now.
“Let me ask you a personal question. I don’t wish to offend you.” He offered me a cigarette. “But we’re friends, right?”
“Right.”
“Dear friends.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Father and son, right? A team.”
“Right.”
“Some things you ’n me shared we couldn’t with nobody else, right?”
“Right.”
“Even with our loving wives, huh?” He slurred “loving.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Do you masturbate?”
“Oh, for Chrissake, Pap!”
“Well, of course you do. Now, how do you accompany yourself?”
“Accompany myself?”
“You goddamn well know what I mean, Jimmy.”
“Enough of this shit. Let’s go to bed.”
“Pictures. The old head projectionist. You know . . . what’s sprocketing up in the old noggin.” He sighed. “What kind of pictures do you roll inside your fucking head when you’re whacking off, James!”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You sure you don’t want a slice of this?” He jabbed at the ham. In the morning the women would throw it into the soup.
“Chiaroscuro, is that the word? Her shoes, the cheap jewelry she wore. And if I concentrated hard enough, I’d even get the picture show in my head to fabricate the fragrance she wore that evening. White Shoulders. Honest to Christ, I can still smell it.
“The reel would open in the back seat of my car, me unfastening her rayon blouse, it’s catchin’ the light in the evening sky like pond water, she’s rollin’ down hose over her dimpled knees and droppin’ her tiny shoes into the driver’s seat. Jesus. Both of us gettin’ baby-ass naked. The car windows sweatin’ and I ain’t worryin’ a damn about the battery dying, for the old Delco’s red-lit in the dashboard playin’ a Dorsey tune. Two trombones waaa-waaaing in the front seat and me ’n’ her’s about to do it in the back.”
Father stood and walked into the doorway’s grotto. I could barely make him out. Hand shadows glided painterly across Westley’s empty walls.
“The perfume, Jimmy—like the projectionist up in my head poured some vials of efflorescence onto the sprockets—because as her body rose up to meet me, so did her earthly scent. Like I’d just spaded her. I coaxed her outside the automobile and shuddered watchin’ the moon drop its cold shaft across her backside, then straddle her milky breasts. And when I pushed her down into the fresh loam, Jimmy, making our body bed, up in the old Delco, Dexter Gordon’s wailing Body and Soul, accompanying our moanin’, while the old farmer’s sprocketing his dream upstairs in his iron bed—Son, it was all sorghum-sweet, sour and bittery bliss. Dexter’s roller-coastin’ low tones and squeals, the projectionist’s clacking it all for eternity, and . . .”
Father slumped back into his chair. We were shadows now. He lit a cigarette. It arced back and forth across his argent face like a beat-farm firefly.
“God only knows how many times that single feature rolled upstairs in my bedroom, Jimmy. Down in East Jesus she strolled off with other lovers, but in that reel she remained fresh as her bloody perfume that muddy night. And your mother asleep downstairs.”
The old man’s voice grew plaintive now. Talking to himself in a hush. The light in the room unforgiving, the food on the table funereal. We should have been on a porch swing out in the meadow. Or in a Packard Phaeton alongside a metallic lake in Maine, for it felt like we were out sitting on one of Westley’s new decks, the harsh light of suburbia baking down on us.
“James,” he said.
“Yes, Pap. Go on.”
“The silver nitrate’s peeled off my celluloid, boy. It’s gone bad in the can. I sprocket it up now, ’n all I get are shards, blank frames. She won’t rise to the occasion. I coax, cajole. Then like life ascending out of a chemical bath . . . she begins to rise in a red light. Her breasts, I remember. The scar river runnin’ indigo into and out of her navel. And the moon, a flickering headlamp, begins to trace her torso, stopping at her . . . but she slips back away from me, Jimmy! Back down into the cistern on the old man’s farm. And the fucking static’s killin’ Dexter in our front seat, and my car’s goddamn doors flappin’ open like gills of a beached pickerel . . .
“I want to go to bed, James.”
“You are crying, Father.”
He rubbed his face bemusedly. “By God . . . Huh? I’ll be damned. I don’t have any idea where they come from either.”
“Pap . . . it’s melancholia.”
“Sad? Why? They buried your brother today with his claw hammer. What’s so fucking melancholic about that? And you, I’ve got you, dear friend, sittin’ next to me. In the old car. Listening to our radio. Lester Young . . . ,” he said. “See if you can dial up the Prez, Son. And ask her if she’s needin’ anything.”
“Who?”
“Genevieve, the young lady in the back seat. The woman with her legs crossed and smokin’ Pall Malls. Is there anything she’s wantin’?” He stood and wandered over to the sliders, staring down into the hollow.
“No, Pap. She’s says she’s all set.”
“Me too,” he said, turning in the shadows. “Let’s be off then.”
The light of the beet farm’s sky cast its mirrory blade across his face as he stood there waiting for me to take his hand. I walked toward him, placed my arms tightly about his chest and squeezed hard. Then caught our reflection in the slider’s glass.
Westley’s, too.