LAZARO CARRIED THE URN out onto the bridge. He walked slowly, carefully, not only because he was leading a funeral procession (if four people can be called a procession) but because he’d had two martinis at lunch and was paying some attention to the gaps between the ties. They’d eaten at the Breckinridge Club, where Judge Dupree played cards with Sunbeam and Hateful and the Stork, where black waiters in white jackets stepped softly across the creaking floors with trays loaded with high-cholesterol food. Lazaro had once been a waiter at a beach hotel in Mexico. Now he was an illegal immigrant—he was hoping to get a student visa—carrying a jar of ashes onto a defunct railroad bridge that crossed the Ohio River. His eyes were behind sunglasses. He was wearing a pale blue summer suit, which he must have found in the closet of his late patron and employer—it didn’t quite fit—and a white shirt and a pair of tasseled, hand-stitched, calfskin loafers. Morgan had been with Lazaro in New York when Lazaro bought the shoes. He’d worn them out the door and then he and Morgan had strolled uptown, Laz with his jacket hung on his shoulders European-style and his eyes trying to keep up with the scenery and his feet a good inch off the pavement. They had stopped at a hotel on Madison Avenue where they drank two bourbons apiece and where, as they were leaving, passing through the lobby, they saw Mickey Rooney on the arm of a blonde a half foot taller. At least Morgan thought it was Mickey Rooney. What he was more certain about, both then and now, was Laz saying in the bar, “If Louis die, I come to New York to live,” and then dolefully tapping cigarette ash into the glass ashtray and some minutes later grabbing Morgan by the wrist and saying, “You like to buy watch, mister? No? How about nice hombre with beautiful shoes?” Morgan had laughed and then realized that the latter offer was not a joke.
When Morgan first saw the ovoid-shaped urn, he thought of an egg in an egg holder, having just that morning watched his father eat his very soft-boiled brown egg from a ceramic one. (His father eating breakfast was, all in all, not a very appetizing sight; it was what happened to the thick, yeastless whole wheat toast—it was broken up into Communion-size bits and dipped into the undercooked egg—that got to Morgan.) The urn was about a foot high, a cherrywood egg rising out of a square cherrywood pedestal. It had brass handles and an acorn on the lid and it seemed too grand for Uncle Louis. Of course, it was true that Uncle Louis’s funeral instructions, written in pencil on a sheet of sketchbook paper on which there were doodles (clouds? a sleeping dog?), had not specified a type of urn for his ashes. What he had written was: “My dear Laz, I don’t want a church service or anything like that. Just bake me and then sprinkle me in the Ohio. The Big Four Bridge would be a nice bridge to be sprinkled from. My cousin Billy will help you with the details, if there are any.”
ONE AFTERNOON TWO months earlier, in February 1985, Lazaro had called Morgan at his office in New York. Morgan was putting the finishing touches on a profile of the owner of a chain of budget motels. The man was a buttoned-down, tight-fisted jerk who waved his Wharton MBA in your face, but Morgan had softened his edges. It was an accommodation you made when you worked for an editorial arm of the lodging industry.
Lazaro had traded pleasantries with Morgan and then put Uncle Louis on. Uncle Louis had by that point submitted to chemotherapy. The herbal potions prescribed by the Belize witch doctor had not stemmed the tide.
“When the oncologist told me the cancer was ‘indolent,’ what I thought he meant was that it was like some lazy, mild thing, you know? Like an indolent tropical breeze.” Uncle Louis had said this to Morgan on another occasion. Perhaps he’d forgotten. Not that Morgan minded. “But what he really meant was that it wasn’t going to go away; it was going to sit on my couch, like some shiftless, no-account guest, and eat me out of house and home.” Uncle Louis made a throaty noise that was possibly a chuckle and then he started coughing.
Morgan sat with his feet propped on the windowsill, his six cleanly typed pages of mostly factual piffle in his lap, and listened to his father’s cousin cough. It was four in the afternoon in New York and it had been snowing hard for two hours. The city was supposed to be buried by midnight, and Morgan was excited by the prospect. He looked forward to sleeping with Gina as the snow fell past his windows, as wolves came out of their burrows in Central Park and howled their mournful howls.
When Uncle Louis stopped coughing, Morgan said, “That’s what all those chemicals are for, right? To rub out that no-account guest?”
“So they say. Sometimes I think their primary purpose is to make me bald and sick to my stomach. You should see me—I look like Casper the Friendly Ghost after a month of upchucking.”
Morgan had seen Uncle Louis in December. The Duprees (minus Crawford, who spent the holidays in Washington) had gone over to Louis’s on Christmas afternoon. He was wan and his hair had been reduced to a patternless scattering of grayish stubble, but there was still a belly beneath his cardigan. He sat glumly in a high-backed chair. Jacques was at his feet, in a quilted, plaid dog bed (a Christmas gift). Judge Dupree had tried to entertain his cousin with a tale of a railfan trip he’d taken that fall, an adventure that involved chasing a steam engine across Iowa by car, but Louis had interrupted twice to ask where Laz had run off to. When Morgan had gone into the kitchen to get himself a soft drink, he’d found Laz slicing a ham. Laz was wearing a bow tie (a Christmas gift from Uncle Louis, rather silly looking) and tears were running down his face. He said he missed Mexico and the sea and his mother. He babbled in Spanish and a tear dropped among the black cloves that pimpled the top of the pink ham. In New York, late on the evening when they had seen either Mickey Rooney or his double on the arm of the tall blonde, after they had had dinner at a tandoori place on Columbus Avenue with Morgan’s wife-to-be, after Gina had gone home to her little efficiency and Morgan and Laz had one more drink at Morgan’s apartment (where Laz was staying until Uncle Louis returned from Belize), they had a round of sex, which Morgan had regretted and also found too tumultuous to dismiss. Two months later, Morgan, with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass inscribed with the names of the Kentucky Derby winners from Aristides to Sunny’s Halo, had resisted the impulse to put his arms around his father’s cousin’s tearful boyfriend.
Snow hurtled by Morgan’s window, as if it were fleeing something. Morgan asked Uncle Louis if Laz was taking good care of him.
“Sometimes the poor boy goes out and gets muy borracho. Don’t you, Laz?” If Laz made an answer, Morgan didn’t hear it. “It’s not much fun looking after a sick person. I wouldn’t mind getting muy borracho myself. Except I have been sober as your proverbial dad for most of a decade now and also I have to leave room in my veins for cytosine arabinoside and other things I couldn’t pronounce if you paid me. Did I tell you that Laz found my pistol, that teeny-weeny one I bought to defend myself against criminals with long ago?”
Morgan said, “No.”
“It was in a benne wafer tin in the pantry. I told him to throw it away.”
“Good idea,” Morgan said. He noticed a typo in his profile. He had made the motel tycoon’s hair “salt-and-peeper.”
“But enough about me,” Uncle Louis said. “I was calling to ask what you and Gina might like for a wedding gift.”
The wedding was scheduled for May, which, given the weather, seemed very far off.
Morgan said, “You shouldn’t bother about that.” Morgan was thinking he would walk home through the snow. That would make arriving there more pleasurable.
“A waffle iron? An asparagus platter? Cutlery?” These things were all presumably jokes. Or perhaps not. “Tell me your heart’s desire and Laz and I will get it for you.”
“If you and Laz came,” Morgan said, “that would be great. I like waffles, too.”
Later, as he was walking home through the snow that got into his ears and down his neck and under his pants cuffs, a slog during which he imagined himself as a typo, a mistake that was slowly being whited out by some diligent editorial hand, it occurred to him that he might have asked Uncle Louis for one of his paintings or drawings as a wedding gift. There was a charcoal of Laz, a nude, which Morgan had seen last summer. Gina might have liked to have it.
THE BIG FOUR BRIDGE, which was built late in the nineteenth century, had not carried rail traffic since 1968. It had been abandoned when its owner, the New York Central, merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and nobody had yet figured out what to do with it. At lunch, Judge Dupree said he’d heard it might be turned into a pedestrian mall, except that some people from Indiana had objected on the grounds that they didn’t want Kentuckians to be able to walk into their state. The Ohio River was there for a reason.
Crawford said to Laz, “They don’t want our rednecks to mix with their rednecks. And they want our dark-skinned people to stay over here. Don’t want to mess up the gene pool.”
Laz, who was eating a cheeseburger for lunch, smiled genially. Some of the terms Crawford used were probably new to Laz.
Anyway, it was illegal for a person of any state (not to mention a Mexican alien) to walk on the bridge, a fact that Judge Dupree ordinarily would not have turned a blind eye to. If he’d been willing to pull strings, he might have gotten permission to disperse his cousin’s remains from the bridge. He wasn’t totally above pulling strings, but he preferred not to, and he hadn’t done so in this case.
It seemed to Morgan as they were driving over to Indiana—the bridge was not easily accessible from the Kentucky side—that the day couldn’t go by too fast for his father, even if he’d had trouble keeping up with Crawford, who had led the two-car caravan. (Crawford, who some years before had climbed the middle span of the bridge, stoned, said he knew the way.) When Judge Dupree got out of his Toyota, after wedging it into a spot in front of a porch full of hookey-playing boys listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd at a high volume, he had said to Morgan, “I guess we shouldn’t dawdle.” When Morgan had reminded his father of the time, twenty-some years before, when he had led his sons and Uncle Louis into the L&N yards, an adventure that involved criminal trespass, Judge Dupree said, “That was bad judgment on my part. Let’s hope this turns out better. At least it’s not raining.”
It was a fine April day, the sky blue with high clouds, the warm air as soft as a bird’s breast. Walking out onto the bridge, Morgan smelled the river below and none of the pollutants that normally plagued the local air. It was that kind of afternoon—certain things had been suspended or set aside. Though it was a workday, the river was full of pleasure boats buzzing about. The calliope on the restored nineteenth-century paddle wheeler docked at the Third Street wharf was playing something gay.
Morgan walked behind Lazaro and ahead of Crawford and his father. As Morgan saw it, it was youth and beauty first, age and (possibly) wisdom at the rear, and confusion in the middle.
Crawford said, “You still afraid of heights, Morg?”
Morgan said, “Yeah, sort of.” He was studying Lazaro’s back, thinking of the train that had plunged off a burning trestle in The General. His father had taken him and Crawford to see The General when they were children. The city’s lone art theater, now long gone, had shown it. The movie had helped to shape Morgan’s views on bridges.
Judge Dupree said, in a small voice, “Maybe we should stop here.”
They were perhaps a hundred yards off the Indiana shore, under the second span. They stepped out of the tracks and onto a steel-plated platform. Two of the span-supporting beams came together here in a V. The spot apparently served as a picnic site: a pile of chicken bones and a brown-bagged quart bottle of beer sat in the V.
For a moment, the four men stood in a huddle, looking at the urn, looking at each other’s shoes. Lazaro, who was sweating along his upper lip, held the urn out from his chest, as if he were inviting someone to take it from him. Morgan thought of himself when he was an acolyte in his parents’ church, standing before the altar in his baggy-sleeved surplice, waiting for the preacher to relieve him of the offertory plates or a Communion vessel. Morgan remembered that Crawford had told him about being chewed out by the preacher, Sandy Broyles’s father, for “one-handing” the pitcher of water used to dilute the wine. “This isn’t a boarding-house, son,” the Reverend Broyles had said.
But there was no preacher here to take the urn from Lazaro’s hands or to read from the Order for the Burial of the Dead. For a moment, Morgan, a nonbeliever, wished there were.
WHEN LAZARO HAD called to say that Louis had died, Morgan was sitting at the window in his darkened apartment, watching the Saturday night pedestrian traffic on his Upper West Side street. Gina had gone to the Thalia to see a horror double bill. Morgan didn’t like horror movies. Also, Gina had said to him that night, as they were eating his omelette avec champignons (which he had for some reason tried to spice up with horseradish), that she wished he wouldn’t be so jealous of her friendships with her New Yorker colleagues. He’d made a remark about all the New Yorker people on the wedding reception guest list—“Do you really know Andy Logan well enough to invite her? And that Hamburger guy, too?”—after spending some time on the phone with his mother, who’d said he really should consider inviting this couple from Louisville and this old family friend from Baltimore (“It’s not that far away, they could easily come up for the day”) and that distant cousin from Raleigh and his cousin Gee who lived right over in New Jersey. And so, after Gina had done the dishes and called Cletus, an ostensibly gay fact checker who lived in the neighborhood, to see if he would accompany her to the Thalia (he would), she’d gone out. That had been four hours ago. During that time, Morgan had watched a basketball game, listened to a scratchy Janis Joplin record, removed several fuzzy-gray items from the vegetable crisper, and read part of a New Yorker piece about the space shuttle. During the last hour, he’d showered and brushed his teeth and poured himself a bourbon.
“He die now, Morgan,” Laz said.
“Just this minute?” Morgan asked. The window was cracked open. It was early April. Spring had advanced to within a block or so of Morgan’s apartment. He could feel its breath on his bare legs.
“Sí. Today. I hold his hand. Esta muy fría.”
This answer raised questions, though all that really mattered, he supposed, was that Uncle Louis was dead. Morgan took a sip of his bourbon and felt it tumble down his throat to his chest, where it dispersed like fireworks fizzles.
On the stoop across the street, a couple was kissing. One brownstone to the east and three floors up, the man who paraded about his apartment in a kimono or less stood at the window and drank a glass of what was white enough to be milk.
“Is the nurse there?” An in-home nursing service had been hired some weeks ago, after the cancer had been found to be spreading, after Uncle Louis had refused to enter the hospital. Morgan’s father had helped with the arrangements and the bills.
“She watch tele-bision.” Laz had trouble with the letter v. “She eat KingFish sandwich on couch in libbing room. She do not prepare new bags for Louis—glucose, you know? Maybe she sleep now. Maybe she went to Sebben-Elebben. Who knows? And so he is died.”
Morgan was confused. How long had Uncle Louis been dead for? Laz’s preference for the present tense befogged matters.
“Call my dad,” Morgan said. He was remembering the warm smell of the inside of Uncle Louis’s fedora, which had briefly been on his head that Thanksgiving night in 1961. He gazed at the man in the kimono, which was untied; he appeared to be wearing tiny black underwear. Maybe the milk, if that’s what it was, was warm, a sleep aid.
“Yesterday he say, ‘I love you, Laz.’” He wrestled the v into that word. “Maybe I go home now. Be camarero.”
What had happened at the end of the night they either did or didn’t see Mickey Rooney popped again into Morgan’s head. He saw himself slumped in the stuffed armchair in his apartment that he’d found on the street, his eyelids listing under the weight of too much liquor, and then he saw Lazaro coming across the floor on his knees, barking like a dog, wearing the wraparound mirror sunglasses he’d bought in Times Square, and then, almost incredibly, licking Morgan’s crotch through his L.L. Bean corduroys. Sober, Morgan might have resisted, but the long and short of it was that he didn’t—he even put his hands in Lazaro’s silky black hair during the act. A moment later, he was considering, as far as he was able to, the possible consequences of what had just happened (as well as noting that the window blinds hadn’t been pulled all the way). What if Laz reported this to Uncle Louis? What if Gina somehow intuited—she was good at intuiting—that her husband-to-be had betrayed her with his father’s cousin’s boyfriend? The most immediate consequence, as Morgan could not help noticing, was that Laz hoped Morgan would return the favor. Laz had stood before him on his two tasseled feet, smiling a big drunken smile, and unloosened himself from his souvenir “I ♥ NY” briefs. “Por favor, hombre,” he said. And Morgan had done it, eyes shut, and then had gone to bed, leaving Lazaro to watch Johnny Carson on his own. Morgan had hardly talked to Laz the next day. His head ached terribly.
“Call my dad, Laz,” Morgan said. “He can help you with the funeral parlor and things. And get the nurse off her ass.”
“OK,” Laz said, and then he started to cry. His cries were tremulous yips mixed with Spanish Morgan didn’t understand. When he stopped, he said, as if he’d just bumped into Morgan on the street, “How is Gina?”
“She’s OK.” The man in the kimono had retired from the window. The couple that had been embracing on the stoop had parted. A man in a trench coat was being led down the block by a troika of borzois. The budding jazz singer who lived above Morgan was loudly making love with her boyfriend. Morgan was waiting for the night when she would break into scat. “You OK, Laz?”
“Sí,” Laz said. “I bring gift to the wedding, OK? He sends me to Oxmoor Mall to buy it. You know? There is store with beautiful fish in tanks. Sometimes I want to be one fish swimming. But then the big fish come and eat you for desayuno.”
Morgan said he liked tropical fish, too. It was calming to watch them.
“Maybe I have store with fish someday.”
“You know my father’s number, don’t you?” Morgan said, trying to steer Laz back to the topic at hand.
“I call now? Not too late?”
Morgan said never mind, he would call.
He replenished his drink first. When he dialed the number, he got his mother, a night owl, who said, before Morgan could get a word in, “I’m glad you called. I was wondering if you should invite the Bagshaws. They’ve watched you grow up from the time you were a baby.”
After Morgan got his father on the phone and repeated the news that his mother had relayed in the course of waking her husband, after his father had hung up (just before, Morgan judged, he lost it), Morgan had sat in the armchair from the street—the fabric was like horsehair, a scratchy texture, a chair in which you could almost do penance—and waited for Gina to come home. He loved her, he really did, even if he was not to be trusted.
ON THE BRIDGE, before they scattered the ashes, Judge Dupree told a story about being in the Kentucky militia with Louis during World War II.
“They sent us out to near Shepherdsville one weekend to march around and shoot at some targets. The captain, a short man named Sherman—Louis called him Tecumseh—was all over Louis. Louis’s boot heels weren’t together when he was standing at attention, his helmet wasn’t on right, he lunged incorrectly when we had bayonet practice. Sherman said, ‘You aren’t going to kill any Japs that way, Mudge. You think this is Arthur Murray?’”
Morgan had a memory of Uncle Louis telling this story, except the person whom Captain Sherman was all over in that version was Morgan’s father. No doubt Sherman had found both men deficient in similar ways.
Judge Dupree, standing a hundred feet above the Ohio River in a lightweight olive suit and a tie decorated with steam engines before the Civil War, the spring sunshine bathing his unsmooth cheeks and his long straight nose that was like a sculptor’s idea of probity and his mild brow that gray hair fell onto, said, “It rained most of the weekend. We were wet as rats by the time we went to bed. We slept in a gym, thank goodness. Louis saw Tecumseh slip out in the middle of the night. ‘Maybe he’s gone to get another haircut,’ Louis said. Tecumseh was bald, you see.”
Crawford, who had relieved Laz of the urn, grinned at this. Morgan put a hand on his head and said to Laz, “Sin hair. The captain had no hair.”
Laz nodded. Morgan wished he would take off the sunglasses. They made him look slightly criminal.
“Louis and I were lying on the floor, talking, and I said, ‘Louis, if Hitler walked into this gym right now, what would you do?’
“And he said, ‘Well, Billy, the first thing I’d do is tell him that if he laid a hand on my cousin, I’d blow his brains out. And the next thing I’d do is blow his brains out.’”
The riverboat calliope was playing something cheerful and old-timey. A gull landed on the span above them, then flew off, calling raucously.
Morgan said, “Thanks, Dad.”
Judge Dupree had removed his glasses and was dabbing at his eyes. “You’re welcome,” he said.
LATER IN THE DAY, near sundown, after each had taken his turn with the ashes, after they’d been escorted off the bridge by a Jeffersonville, Indiana, policeman, after they’d been taken to the station (the officer was young and zealous, and Judge Dupree had refused to pull rank), after Judge Dupree had made a call to a federal marshal in his jurisdiction and had also vouched for Lazaro and after they’d been freed to cross back over the Ohio, Morgan noticed a gray smudge on Lazaro’s shirt. Laz and Crawford and Morgan were by then in the Pine Room, one of Uncle Louis’s watering spots before he’d quit drinking. Judge Dupree had gone home.
The smudge was between the second and third button on Laz’s shirt. Morgan looked at his own hands finning on the table, like fish waiting for something to float down to them. Probably he had traces of Uncle Louis under his fingernails. There was a residue in the urn, which was out in the car. Morgan tried to remember if they’d locked the car.
When Crawford went to use the restroom, Laz said, “Morgan, I make you dinner tonight?” He was still wearing his sunglasses.
Morgan said, “I think I better eat with my parents.” Tomorrow he would fly back to New York and sleep in Gina’s arms. He took a sip of his bourbon, the first drink of the day he’d allowed himself. “Crawford and I will work on Dad to get your visa situation expedited.”
Lazaro seemed unimpressed by this. Or perhaps he didn’t understand the word “expedite.” He said, “OK.”
“I hope you’ll come to the wedding,” Morgan said.
“Maybe,” Laz said.
They talked about money. Uncle Louis had left some to Laz, but he wouldn’t receive it until certain debts had been paid. The house would probably have to be sold.
“I’ll find somebody for you to stay with in New York,” Morgan said. “When you come for the wedding.”
“Boy or girl?” Lazaro was having his third martini of the day. He stirred it with a finger. Morgan felt a loafer on his foot.
Crawford returned to the table and said, “Guess who I saw in the john?”
Morgan didn’t guess. He let Laz’s foot rest on his. What was the harm?
Crawford said, “The Reverend Alfred Lloyd Broyles Sr. You know how it’s a law of thermodynamics that two men standing before urinals with their dicks in their hands can’t pee? So, after about an hour of this, I said, ‘Reverend Broyles, it’s me, Crawford Dupree.’ And he said, ‘Well, goodness gracious, Crawford, what a pleasant surprise!’ And he asked all about you and me, said he’d heard Sandy was going to officiate at your wedding, and told me what he was doing with his golden years, shot a ninety-two today, said that he didn’t know Uncle Louis had died, missed the notice in the paper somehow. I said we’d just scattered him in the river and he said, ‘God bless you, Crawford, and God bless Louis.’”
“And God bless Morgan and Gina,” Lazaro said, raising his martini glass.
“And Lazaro,” Morgan said. “And Jacques.”
“And that waitress over there,” Crawford said, “who smiled at me as I passed by.”