CHAPTER 5

 

My dad. He’s the whole fucking reason Donna and I aren’t together. Well, some of it.

I got this phone call. Mom. This is two months after I made parole.

“I tried all day yesterday to reach you,” she said. “Your father passed away, Jake.” She was trying not to cry way it sounded, without much luck. Every other word was a sniffle.

“I was out,” I said. “Looking for a job. When’s the funeral?”

I remember looking at my hands to see if they were shaking. They weren’t.

When we drove up to the funeral home in South Bend I looked at my watch. 1:48 it said in digits. We were supposed to be there at 1:30.

“Fuck,” I said to Donna. In one way I was glad. I didn’t want to go to my father’s service with a whore. My mother would have picked up on it right away and there would have been something. I just sat in the car in the parking lot, fired up a cigarette. Donna reached over, grabbed my cigarette to light her own.

“How come we’re not going in?” she said. “How come you’re not a pallbearer?”

“How come you’re not Miss Indiana?” I said back. She shut up and moved closer to her own window, blowing smoke out the window.

“Why’m I running this air conditioner when you got the goddamn window open?” I said, when she turned her head.

When the procession started out I turned on my lights and waited for the last car. Then I became the last car. I had no idea which cemetery they were all headed for.

A rent-a-cop came up at the cemetery and asked what I was doing.

“That’s my father they’re burying over there,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, like that was fine with him, whatever, and he just stood there awhile by my car door looking over at the mob of people gathered around the mound of dirt you could see from where we were. Donna still hadn’t said anything since the funeral home.

There was a tent set up beside the dirt for those who wanted to get out of the sun. I thought I could see my mother but we were quite a ways away so I’m not sure. It looked like her from there, but then I’d never seen her in a black dress or a hat and she looked different. Maybe it was one of my aunts. From a distance who knows? The rent-a-cop kept standing there about two feet away and he just stared at the preacher even though where we were you couldn’t hear anything.

“I didn’t know cemeteries had their own police force,” I said, trying to keep a conversation from happening. “You lose a lot of bodies?” What was this guy’s problem anyway? He muttered something when he saw it wasn’t a joke I was making and walked away. I thought he was going to walk over to my father’s funeral but halfway there, he made a military turn and went instead toward another funeral that was taking place about two hundred yards away. They were planting them all over the place it looked like.

“Shouldn’t you go up or something?” Donna asked.

“Shouldn’t you mind your own business?” I shot back. “I might’ve gone up if we hadn’t been so fucking late. If you didn’t have to comb your hair forty thousand times, we’d been on time.” She had nothing to say to that. That was good. I was getting a mood, a real bad one. She wanted to play the dozens I could spot her eleven and still wipe the floor with her ass.

After a while, it was all over. The people started getting back in their cars. It was my mother, I saw now. She got in the lead car, the one with the funeral home chauffeur and the little plastic flag, and I think she spotted me. She kind of hesitated, looking our way like she was nearsighted and then climbed in the back with somebody looked like my Aunt Millie. She was helping her, holding her elbow.

I waited until the last car had left and then I got out and walked toward the big pile of dirt.

There he was in this black coffin. The ropes they’d used to lower him were still there, the ends snaked in esses in the dirt. Yellow shit, looked like clay. I bet the guys dug the graves were glad they had machines to do it now instead of having to use shovels. I stood there for a few minutes looking down at the casket. I just stood there looking and nothing came up in my mind. No thoughts at all, nothing. I looked over at the car and could barely see Donna’s head. Looked like she’d laid down in the seat to take a nap, just the top of her head showing where she leaned it against the door.

I just about jumped out of my skin when a voice said, right at my elbow. “Your dad, huh?”

It was that fucking rent-a-cop.

“I guess,” I said. “My mother got in a limo so it wasn’t her. You got a smoke on you?”

He gave me a funny look and then tapped one out of the pack he took from his shirt pocket. He held up his lighter but it kept going out in the breeze. “Here,” I said, grabbing it out of his hand. I got it lit after two, three tries, cupping my hand around it.

“How come you didn’t go up for the service,” he said. The guy was a nosy cocksucker. I slid my hand in my trouser pocket and felt the knife there. Taking a drag on my cigarette, I looked around. There wasn’t anybody around, only the people at the other funeral and it didn’t look like any of them could see us very well. There was a little hill between us and one of those mausoleums in the way, and the few people I could spot weren’t looking our way at all.

“You talk too much,” I said. I slid the knife out and pushed the button. He saw the knife and his eyes widened.

“Hey, buddy...”

“I got your ‘hey, buddy’ hangin’, Ace,” I said. “Get the fuck out of my face. Go bother somebody else.”

I don’t know why I lit the guy up like that. For a minute, I actually thought I was going to zip him. Fucking state trooper wannabe. He walked away very quickly, muttering under his breath when he was far enough away he thought I couldn’t hear him.

There wasn’t any real reason for even considering shanking this guy or even scaring him like I did but I didn’t feel particularly bad about it. Fucking rent-a-cops are zeros anyway. In fact, I felt kind of good about the whole thing. I folded the knife and put it back in my pocket.

I took a deep, last drag on the cigarette and flipped it down on top of the coffin. “There you go, Dad,” I said, looking down. “I forgot to bring flowers so I hope this is all right.” I spoke aloud, as if he could hear me and then I started laughing. I couldn’t help it.

Well, I said in my head, and then aloud. “Well.”

Donna started laying on the horn, a long blast and then another and then she really laid on it.

“Well, Pappy,” I said. “Well, well, well.”

Time I got back to the car it was starting to overheat. Steam was curling from the hood. I decided not to check it out there but find a gas station and see what the problem was. I wondered where I was going to spend the night.