Roy’s two sons both cried on the phone when Bob finally reached them from the lobby of a pizza restaurant whose main dining area was filled with coin-operated cars and rocket ships. Bob had been calling their house every few hours, not knowing when they would get back from their camping trip.
“So... where is he?” Jim asked, controlling himself, giving the word he a kind of humiliated non-emphasis. His usually hale and hearty foghorn of a voice trembled over the phone, as if he was afraid of the answer.
Bob had to tell his nephews that their father was refrigerated and that the funeral home couldn’t do anything with the body until they had received written authorization from the next of kin.
Refrigerated must be one of the less comforting funeral home euphemisms—though the people who devised that vocabulary were probably right that to a grieving family the word frozen would sound a bit too industrial.
The receiver Bob was talking on had been sprayed with a strawberry-flavored deodorant so strong that he didn’t want to put his mouth directly against it, so he had to speak louder than he really wanted to, which made him feel even more conspicuous than usual, in the midst of soft electronic music, wearing the paisley tie and blue cord jacket he still had on from this afternoon’s discussion with the lawyers. In summer, around here, anything but shorts would be conspicuous.
The phone stood by itself against the wall of a sort of corral area where parents stood together, and their kids ran around making loops in all directions, some with arms swept back like the wings of a jet. At the place where the corral narrowed to a sort of chute that led to the ordering counter, a tall college boy, with a smile that never changed, marked every hand with an ink stamper, gently lifting even little babies’ wrists, as the families were moved through the turnstiles. From there they proceeded toward the kiddie ride area containing dozens of miniature Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cars and Harley-Davidsons, like the stationary rides outside the front door of a supermarket, their headlights gently nodding up and down; or into the room beyond it, full of “Top Gun” and “Terminator” video games and a whole lineup of Skee-Ball setups along one wall; or to the showroom, at the far end of the indoor space, where the human-sized figures of rabbits and chickens, plush as carnival prizes, swiveled back and forth, and a precise electronic chorus of clown voices sang “Happy Birthday” cranked up into a hyperactive 4/4 foxtrot.
The worst thing about making this call was that Bob had to start talking business with these kids, or at least with the older one, right away, while they were still crying. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to leave here, and he’d end up having to drive Roy’s Oldsmobile around Fort Pierce for another week, waiting to get the last of his brother’s loose ends tied up, having to sleep for another week on the slippery plastic air mattress he’d bought at Kmart after he had Roy’s furniture taken away.
Retired people are instinctively supposed to love Florida, but every time Bob got behind the wheel of that loose-springed station wagon, all he could think about was how great he’d feel on the day he got that wallowing boat of a car headed north on 1-95. Every time he thought about it, his palms would start to itch on the steering wheel.
Maybe Dorothy had hoped he would love it and would want them to move down. Every time she called him from home, she asked him how the weather was, even though he knew she watched The Weather Channel when he wasn’t there.
“Not cold,” he would say.
A man who had spent half his life as a salesman should have known better than to die without a will. Bob had tried diplomatically to bring it up with Roy in the hospital one night, during a commercial break.
“Do you have anything specific that you would like me to say to Jim and Rich?” Bob had asked him at one point, but he couldn’t even get his brother to turn his face away from the hospital television.
“What, are you trying to get me in the ground already?” he said, and Bob let it drop.
Now he had to pick it up again. The funeral home wouldn’t release or cremate the body until the next of kin had sent written authorization, along with a check for storage and cremation costs. As Bob explained this to Jim, he could hear his nephew’s voice changing register, very quickly, from tears to anger, the way people have learned to do from watching those afternoon talk shows that were just becoming big in syndication the year Bob retired from the business.
“Let me get this straight,” Jim said, and Bob could hear, along with the gathering anger, a family note, a harmonic of the same strong deal closer’s voice coming out. Near the phone, somebody’s father had just put fifty cents into a game where kids threw beanbags into Bozo the Clown’s mouth, and the distant “Happy Birthday” was drowned out by a circus march dizzy with slide trombones. “You say this so-called funeral home won’t release the body until we pay them $235?”
“I don’t like it either,” Bob said. “But without any written instructions, that’s how they have to do it.” This was as close as Bob wanted to come to getting into a discussion of the word intestate.
“So what you’re saying is that they’re holding my dad’s body as a fucking hostage?”
With every beanbag throw, no matter how far off it was, the open space of Bozo’s mouth boomed positive comments: “That’s the spirit, partner!” or “Whoa, Nellie! Good try!”
“Jim, I can’t stay down here and fight with these people. If you don’t have the money, I’ll pay it, but what I do need from you-”
“I’m not paying them, and you’re not paying them.” His voice was rising, a distorted buzz in the earpiece. “Nobody’s paying them a goddamn cent! Do you fucking hear me?”
Bob moved the receiver a few inches from his ear. He could imagine Jim, and his younger brother Rich, on the other end of the line, up there in Pennsylvania, probably in the kitchen of some bungalow with dishes piled in the sink, both of them standing there red-eyed, big, strapping right-wing kids whose father couldn’t afford to send them to college and who couldn’t get it together to go on their own, any more than they could get it together to hop on a Capitol Air Skybudget flight for the whole three months that they knew their father was down here dying. The last time Bob had seen them, a year ago when he came over to help Roy pack up the station wagon for Florida, the two boys had been working out so much on the Nautilus that they looked as if they were wearing football shoulder pads under their T-shirts.
Jim’s voice was out of control now, up to the pitch where people, especially fat people, stand up on camera and point fingers at each other like pistols.
“If those people think they can extort money from me just because I’m too far away to do anything about it, well they can kiss my motherfucking—”
Here there was a slam and a crackle over the line, and then the sound clicked through a few switchings of empty channels until it lapsed back into a dial tone, just as Bozo’s electronically synthesized drum and trombone music abruptly slammed shut midphrase during “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” “Happy Birthday” had also stopped at the other end of the restaurant, leaving the lobby bathed in a kind of endless chirp in the upper registers, a blend of all the children’s voices, not frantic but almost peaceful, like starlings up north when they gather in trees.
His brother had been dead for three days, which was long enough for Bob to start seeing potential jokes popping up in places where they didn’t belong. Anybody who has worked in syndicated television or has had anything to do with cartoons knows that what was supposed to happen now was that the phone should ring again immediately, and Bob should pick it up, and he should hear the one word—“ass”—before the phone was slammed down again.
But of course Jim and Rich didn’t have the number. Bob accessed MCI again, called, and got a busy signal. It was still busy when he called again two minutes later, and by this time he figured that Jim must have broken the phone.
* * *
Bob was hungry, and the pizza smelled better and better the farther he got from the strawberry fragrance of the phone receiver, but this wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to eat. If you sat at a table here without any kids, they’d think you were some kind of weirdo, and they’d be right. You’d have to put some kiddie-sized plates across from you, maybe with half-chewed pizza slices on them, and then people would think you were here with your children (or grandchildren, more likely; most of the parents here, chunky and smooth in pleated shorts and bright collarless T-shirts, looked younger than Bob’s own daughters).
People would look at the uneaten slices across from you, and they would think your kids were away from the table rolling Skee-Balls or hunched at the controls of the “Desert Storm” tank simulator—like in the old Bob Newhart Show episode where Elliot Carlin had no date for a banquet and draped a woman’s sweater over the chair next to him, telling everybody the whole night that she was in the bathroom. Strange how references from the shows he’d been selling all these years to local television stations kept coming into play in the real things he was thinking about. Another sign that he had retired too early.
The people who would have liked this restaurant would have been Roy’s family, if such places had existed in the years when he still had a house and a wife and was making enough money to have a little fun with. Jimmie and Richie would have raced around from pachinko to helicopter to the interactive video Kawasaki that actually leaned into the curves, and Roy’s big laugh would boom out through the game room, strong as Bozo’s.
What a family. When they came to visit at Bob’s house, Bob’s daughters would hide their better toys from “the Destroyers.” Roy loved anything that resembled a party. He was fascinated by comedy record albums, always bringing one or two new ones that he played on Bob’s hi-fi, until it was so late at night that Roy was the only one laughing. Then Roy and Maude and the kids would all sleep late into the morning, as Bob’s family tiptoed through breakfast.
* * *
Jim called the apartment that night. With all the furniture gone, the sound of the telephone resonated off the Sheetrock walls.
“I’m sorry I lost it like that, Uncle Bob,” he said, so softly that Bob had to press the receiver against his ear. “The whole phone was just trashed. I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you.”
Roy’s little one-bedroom efficiency apartment was bare, the cupboards sponged off, the carpets steam cleaned by a company whose advertising card had come to Roy’s mailbox the day he died. Bob had sold back the furniture, the lamps, and even the big splashy oil paintings of city skylines and yacht marinas to the same dealer Roy had bought them from. Bob sat on a metal folding chair under the fluorescent fixture of the kitchen nook, the only place with enough light now to read the paper.
They agreed on a tentative date for a memorial service up north, then moved on to settling the few details that Jim needed to take care of himself. He hardly sounded like the same person who had been shouting so loud on the phone a few hours ago.
Whenever Bob thought about his nephew, he imagined the kid still twelve years old, he and Richie dashing across the garden Bob had just planted. He remembered one time in particular, when the grown-ups were on the porch having drinks, and Jim’s voice came bellowing out from the backyard through a megaphone made from rolled poster paper, so loud that the whole neighborhood could hear, “Now hear this! Now hear this! Uncle Bob’s scarecrow is on fire!”
* * *
What does a man know about his brother? A big voice, a big handshake, bad luck. When the scrambling to get furniture trucked away slowed down, Bob had ended up with a carload of things he knew nobody wanted, but he didn’t dare take responsibility for throwing them out. Whole boxes of monaural comedy albums going back to Shelley Berman. Pay stubs, Social Security statements, handwritten envelopes rubber-banded together, big, glossy folders from something called the Family Bargain Network, describing “Ten Building Blocks on the Horizon of Telemarketing Prosperity.” Is building blocks on the horizon a mixed metaphor? Before Roy got sick he’d had a part-time job, working out of the apartment, selling magazine subscriptions by phone. The entire sales pitch was printed out on three glossy pages: “Hi there! Could I speak to the lady of the house, please?”
For the whole year he lived in Florida, even including the three months when he already knew he had cancer, Roy had also been answering personal ads from the back pages of supermarket tabloids. He put a classified advertisement of his own in the same newspaper that said Satan’s face had appeared above the White House.
The letters that had come in, always in fountain pen, in careful, grammar school cursive, said things like “Hello, lonely stranger” and “Are you the person I’m looking for?”
The only letter different from the rest was from a young blonde girl who had sent a nude Polaroid, her eyes red from the flash. Bob read a few sentences of her letter, until he came to the code word generous.
One of the last things Bob had to do—after he had made sure that Jim was proceeding to ask around and find out where there was a fax machine on which he could send word to the funeral home—was to send some kind of acknowledgment back to all the people who had written to Roy.
It made Bob feel like a bastard, but there were so many people to write to that he had no choice but to answer them with a form letter:
Dear Friend:
I’m sorry to report to you that my brother, Roy Pollard, passed away in Fort Pierce, Florida, on June 28 after a brief illness.
He mentioned several times before he died how much he had been cheered by the kind and friendly mail he had received. Thank you for helping to brighten the last months of his life. In lieu of flowers or condolences, I know that my brother would appreciate contributions made in his name to the American Cancer Society.
Sincerely, Robert R. Pollard
He took it to the twenty-four-hour Kinko’s across from the apartment complex. Even after midnight it wasn’t easy crossing the street on foot. One carload of kids in an old Plymouth Fury were so amused to see a man actually trying to cross the six lanes of Fort Pierce Boulevard that they whooped and honked and reached their hands out and pounded the car doors as they roared past.
After the envelopes were filled and addressed and stamped and sealed, Bob stood out on the balcony and watched the traffic and listened to the dry tire sound from all directions. After all the phone calls and the hours of carrying boxes down to the car, back and forth between the chill of the apartment and the blanket of heat outside, with his shirt soaked through, this was the first time in three days he’d had a chance just to stand out here and think about Roy being dead and not have to do something about it. The television was already packed in the back of the car, along with books and comedy records, so much weight pressing down the back of the station wagon that when Bob had tried to drive the car at night, people kept blinking their lights even though he had his low beams on.
The only thing he had forgotten to do was clean up all the cigarette butts that were lying out here on the concrete balcony. Maybe the last cigarette Roy ever smoked was out here, when he already knew he was going into the hospital—but no, Bob remembered, he was still smoking even in the hospital. At that point it didn’t matter. He was so doped up that the cigarette kept falling out of his mouth, and Bob had to help him scramble after it in the rumpled bedsheets, while the voices of defense lawyers droned from a tiny color TV at the end of a long jointed arm connected to the same bedside console where the buttons to call the nurse were located.
What does a man know about his brother? When Bob left the hospital that night to go back to the apartment, Roy looked at him and said, “Thanks.” Bob thought he just meant thanks for finding the cigarette. But the phone in the apartment was already ringing by the time he got the door open, and Roy was dead.
People think about weird things. As Bob drove back to the hospital that night, the only thing he could bring himself to think about was television, a business that he was thinking more and more he should have stayed with for a few more years at least, instead of ending up as a not quite old man talking shop to himself in traffic on the way to say good-bye to someone who would not be able to hear him because he was dead.
The main thing Bob couldn’t stop thinking about, there in Roy’s loose-springed car, was that Roy had been watching the same trial on his little television for twelve hours a day, and it was still only half over. In all his years in the syndication business, cataloging and summarizing episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Adam 12 for little stations that couldn’t afford to buy the whole run, Bob had learned how important it is for a story always to have a beginning and an end, and that the upshot of a story, even My Favorite Martian, always has to affirm that we live in an orderly universe, where the vast majority of people are basically decent, where school bullies are reduced to tears in front of the class, and criminals, as if to affirm how hopeless it is to be a criminal in the first place, will try to escape in the last ten minutes by climbing up tall construction scaffolds that have been already surrounded by the police. An old human instinct, maybe, to climb a tree and hope the lion will get tired of waiting and go away. And now Roy was cheated out of his right to see the end of the story, to see that two thousand dollar suit led away for the last time, all the heavy television watchers waving good-bye from their Barcaloungers.
* * *
The Oldsmobile lost its power steering on 1-95 in South Carolina, next to a billboard for a giant tourist and truck stop complex called South of the Border, in which a little figure named Pedro, whose head and sombrero extended a few feet above the main part of the sign, was saying “SEÑOR WANTS A COLD DREENK, I THEENK.”
Bob drove along the shoulder at twenty miles an hour as the front end screeched and smoked, and tractor trailers, streamlined with plastic fairings, slammed past, jolting the Oldsmobile in a wave of displaced air.
From the South of the Border Service Center, he called the number on Roy’s Keystone Motor Club booklet to see if they would reimburse him for the tow and got a girl on the line who spoke with a New York accent so rich and zaftig that Bob remembered all at once how long he’d been away from the real world and how much he wanted to get that car moving north again.
Bob had always wondered what it is about being retired that pulls so many people south—maybe the same gravity that pulls the flesh of their faces down—into the heat and the flatness and the kids cruising around in boom-boom cars and the towns that blend into each other with nothing to mark the beginning of one and the end of another except a new name on the side of another windowless bank building. Dorothy talked about it sometimes, feeling him out on the subject, but whatever that geographical force was that affected everybody else so strongly, it hadn’t gotten him yet.
Each pay phone in this row of carrels opposite the fuel desk had in front of it a full ashtray the size of a cereal bowl. A yellow sheet of paper taped in each carrel announced RETURN LOADS AVAILABLE TO THE WEST COAST. To his right a picture window overlooked one end of the parking lot, where Bob could see a trailer with steps leading up to a door in the side of it and a sign above the door announcing FAMILY MINISTRIES OF THE OPEN ROAD.
Beside the center window, which looked out to where the big slope-nosed trucks were fueling up, Bob could see an entire rotating rack of bumper stickers for sale, saying things like CLINTON DOESN’T INHALE—HE SUCKS! and HONK IF YOU ALREADY KNOW WHO MURDERED VINCE FOSTER.
* * *
All day the hiss of air-conditioning came down from a register in the ceiling beside the bathroom door. Roy’s ashes rested next to the “Pedro’s Hints for Guests” folder on the counter that ran the length of the motel room, across from the two double beds. The ashes had come in a box much bigger than Bob expected, about half the size of a shoe box, wrapped in brown paper, bearing a label with Roy’s name typed below the “Memorial Concepts” logo.
It wasn’t a bad room, for South of the Border. Out of curiosity he bought TV Guide in the convenience store and found out about a local show called Little Audrey and Friends, with some of the same King Features shorts that his company had done so well reselling when nobody else in the business was interested.
He walked around the whole South of the Border complex, from the reptile display to Pedro’s Cantina to Senor Bang-Bang’s Fireworks Supermarket, where men and boys dressed identically in shorts and T-shirts hurried in and hurried out, with the gaudy shapes and colors of explosives protruding from the tops of brown shopping bags.
He wandered through the truck stop parking lot, surrounded by the gargling roar of hundreds of idling diesel engines, an incredible sound, spreading out for a hundred acres, the earth alive. One of the companies, a big fleet called Covenant Transport, carried the same antiabortion message on the rear of every trailer. Bob wondered briefly what would happen if any driver ever dared to say anything about carrying a placard he might not agree with, but with all the combustion noise around, the thought didn’t last very long. Never had Bob had such a clear understanding of all the things meant and implied by the term non-union.
The car came back so late Thursday afternoon that he’d already checked in for another night. He walked around some more and went swimming while the pool wasn’t yet busy and there were still only a few families checked in for the night, only a few kids thumping along the concrete on their heels, the way kids always walk in bare feet around a pool.
At least it was good to hear real kids around. The motel before this one had been in Florence, South Carolina, which is apparently the place where people all over the South come for cheap dentures and bridgework. The sign in front of his Comfort Inn had said “WELCOME DENTAL PATIENTS.” An entire vending machine in the lobby sold nothing but painkillers: aspirin, buffered aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, methyl salicylate.
* * *
Even through the careful wrapping of brown paper, the ashes had started to give off a strange smell, hard and scratchy, like the upper notes of somebody’s bad breath—unless it was the car, maybe an ashtray in back that he’d forgotten to clean out. It was the Forth of July. He drove and drove in the thick traffic, on three lanes of pavement that seemed to get whiter and whiter as the day got hotter and hotter.
What poem is that line from: “a little boy thinking long thoughts”? He’d read it somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. Now he was thinking his own long thoughts, thoughts about as far as you could get from whatever that poem was actually supposed to be about, as he sat there, driving, with nothing else to do, the easiest job in the world, in the continuous machine of traffic, across a field of tiny tobacco seedlings, through the cooked pulpy sweetness of a paper mill town.
Long thoughts. You can think one thought for the whole time it takes to get from the top of one rise to the top of the next and another thought starting from the point where you first see the McDonald’s arches on a pole hundreds of feet high and ending at the moment you get to it. What you learn from driving all day is that the longer you can think about something, the simpler it becomes. Really two thoughts, over and over, touch each other at different angles: What it’s like to be alive, in a car, bored, tired—or in the hospital, trying to say thanks when there’s so much poison in your blood that your face is a deep yellow and your brother doesn’t know if you mean thanks for finding the cigarette or thanks for being my brother. And then what it’s like, or more accurately what it’s not like, to be a bunch of stuff in a little box in the backseat for Jim and Rich to scatter in the surf at Wildwood, New Jersey, unless that’s not legal anymore.
Thinking. Soon it began to get dark, and up ahead he saw the bursts of a municipal fireworks display starting. He watched it as he passed, the perfect spheres blooming in the late dusk, and a few miles later some more going off. Something about the South is so friendly, even through car windows, that it doesn’t matter that all the rotten things you know about it are true. To drive through those states is like visiting an entire nation where nobody ever gets cancer. It was nice to be able to see the fireworks shows one after another, sometimes the displays from two different towns at the same time, the far off Christmas bulb colors flashing over the black horizon of trees.
This was always Roy’s favorite holiday. He and the boys would drive down to Delaware and come back with whole hundred dollar assortments of rockets and flowerpots and buzz bombs and Roman candles and Black Cats and lady fingers, all those dense and bright paper colors and shapes spread out on the porch under a floodlight. His kids always had cherry bombs and M-8os to set off under coffee cans, made in the old short Maxwell House shape that they don’t sell anymore, sending them high up into the trees in front of a house.
Bob passed a Howard Johnson lodge with a Vacancy sign. He could have pulled in, but some fireworks were still going off in the distance, and he still had some more things to keep thinking about. You get tired in a car, but it’s just as much work to stop as it is not to, so you go on, watching, driving, thinking. He was going to have to remember to wrap the ashes in a plastic bag if the smell got any worse, if that’s where it was actually coming from.
He noticed for the first time that those bursts are prettier from far away, when you can’t hear anybody saying “oooh” and “aaah,” but you can see the spheres and the colors, and you don’t have to think about how many hours of television those families are watching on the nights when there aren’t any fireworks or what sort of things they are teaching their kids about angels during the designated half hour of every night when the television is supposed to be off.
He had planned to find a motel an hour ago, just to be sure he didn’t get stuck with a hundred miles of No Vacancy signs, but for now the car was humming, those circles of lights were bursting out of nothing in the darkness, and he didn’t have to go to the bathroom, so he figured he’d just go and go and take a chance on a motel somewhere an hour or so to the north after the firework displays had gone dark and everybody was back home watching television.