At least they’d made a night of it, dragging themselves all the way down Main in the snow before stumbling upon Zeek, who was up against the inside corner of a white-scratched Plexiglas bus shelter smoking a tiny, reed-thin, crack-laced joint, jittery with cold and stretched nerves. Inside the shelter, headlights bled like long sizzling lines of melting ice across the milky Plexiglas. The men had a powwow, snorting the cold air, gulping from the neck of a bottle of Boone’s Farm cherry wine Zeek had stolen from another wino at knifepoint. When that was gone, Zeek materialized — actually saying the word abracadabra — from behind Roy’s head a bottle of Thunderbird, and, opening it, put it to Roy’s lips and let him tilt his head back for as long as he wanted. He fed Roy the wine the way you’d feed a baby. Burping the old fuck; making sure he wasn’t getting too much air. And even though he was stoned numb, he still got the faint pleasure of seeing the old guy’s blood nourished.
Perhaps it is the nature of some weddings to have as their undercurrent the possibility of great violence and tragedy; perhaps that alone is what we hear buzzing beneath the music, the silent movement of balloons and tossed confetti over the hiss of starched gowns, the embrace of tight collars and cummerbunds. The DJ knew this. He understood it well.
Coming back from the bar with another Scotch, Standard considered the stale business atmosphere of Elma, the depleted economic resources of that part of the state, and a recent study indicating a severe shortage of piping material and rising prices because of Islamic wars in regions of the globe he was hard-pressed to locate on a map. He felt ready for some shift in the world. The music was easing. There was a sudden lull. A chunk of the general chatter was gone, and many people — standing and sitting — seemed to shift course, like a flock of geese changing direction in midflight. Just before he turned to see Roy staggering in the doorway, he recalled Melville going down the rickety stairs of his office, shoulders straight, braced by the pin-striped suit. The Standard Piping sign, wind-blistered, in need of repair, hung limp in the background. He’d given a halfhearted lift of his fist to the kid, wanting to yell something out but knowing that things have changed and that the Melvilles of the world have prevailed. It isn’t any use. He went back into the office and sat down on his duct-taped chair and thought about it — not exactly seething, but nursing the tight anger that he kept inside him all the way through the summer and into the winter, feeling it as he stepped from his Lincoln Towncar into the cold, across the lobby of the hotel and into his fourth (or was it fifth?) Scotch. So when he turned and saw Roy, the deep wrinkles dwelling on the homeless man’s face, the old navy watch cap politely in his hand, he felt a sharp pleasure at knowing there was going to be a general ruckus. The stench, the shit smell, was already drifting around.
There is a stillness that only the destitute know. And Arno felt it keenly, helping Roy get comfortable, tucking the folds of his old army coat around the man’s skull. He went out to the stairs to smoke — not out of respect or politeness but as an excuse to get out. It had been four months since summer, when nights were easy and they went to the woods outside of town and sat around the scrapwood campfire near Roy’s wigwam, enjoying the fruits of a day scavenging dumpsters. The smoke from his Camel conjoined with that of his breath as he blew it out. It was well below zero. The cloud of smoke and breath seemed to stand still. Fuck, he said softly, fuck fuck fuck, flicking the butt out into the darkness.
Around the moment when Roy died, Susan Porter-Horton was brushing her teeth, still adjusting herself to the height of the sink in their new house. The gooseneck faucet plated in real gold got in her way when she washed her face. She made a note to herself that she would have the faucets replaced as soon as things settled in; she’d wait until the pretenses of those first few weeks of being married were over and she was secure enough to make suggestions of that sort. The long, rambling split-level with postmodern flourishes had been built for Melville’s first wife. It was full of ghosts from the past. Vows weren’t simply washed away even by legal procedures, divorce lawyers or hate. She rinsed her toothbrush and slipped it back into the gold-plate holder, and stared at her face, flabby cheeks, pale, bloodless lips and eyes she didn’t trust anymore.
(In Spain, after making love to Peter, she lies in bed listening to the wind, arriving hot from the coast of Africa, draw through the windows; she then for a moment, a fleeting moment, goes over a long list of changes she made in the house — she thinks of the faucets, their elegant arches, the fine bone handles, and wonders if she’d have them back now. She gets up, silently, moves across the cool floor. On the bed the large bulk of the ex-Marine heaves and sighs, floating amid his own dreams.)
Every gesture becomes grand around death. Arno went back inside and saw that Roy was shivering violently. At a loss for what to do, he did what came naturally and, parting his shirt, lay atop the old guy, holding his weight on his knees and his elbows so he wouldn’t crush his ribs; he held this position for as long as he could until he slid down and their stubbled cheeks touched. (They’d shaved a week ago at the Baptist mission, side by side, Arno helping out, drawing the Good News razor along the sunken cheeks of his friend — swishing it in the hot water. There had been a sense then in the air of the impending death when, in the shower, Roy’s knees weakened and he slid down to the tiles under the steam. There was none of the slaphappy towel play that had — a year ago — accompanied the early stages of the love between the men, just after they swore over that bottle together. Arno showered alone, while Roy, dried off and dressed, talked to Grant, the pastor. He showered alone so he could masturbate, sliding the bulk of a bar of Irish Spring up and down the sides of his cock — no shame whatsoever coming from the sweet act. The love of his hands for his cock were as pure as any form of love available. It was clean, Godly love in the land of the lonely. It took five minutes. The water was warm to hot depending on the use of water in the soup kitchen where the volunteer ladies were rinsing the glasses as they came in. He was thinking soft, lovely thoughts. He was thinking about a girl he knew when he was in tenth grade named Wendy.) Ten minutes later he left Roy’s body to freeze.
The men outside the Hilton waiting for Roy to come out that night did so the way anybody would wait for a savior. They sat dreamily considering what was about to transpire: he’d come out brashly with a shit-eating grin and his arms loaded with booty, snaking past the high school kid in the uniform, swagging his hips in a drunkard’s dance of victory while they hooted and hollered. It was their way. They knew how to celebrate the small victories. The men with the arduous determination of stoics. Now and then, after a while, one of them muttered: “I wonder what happened to the old fuck.” And another said: “Oh give the old shit a chance, he’ll be out. I’m sure he will. For Jesus fuck’s sake. Give the guy a chance.”1 But there was no such Second Coming, of course, and all that kept coming that night and the next was the snow. It fell in great clumps. It fell in a fine powder. It fell in an edgy sleet.
THE WIDOW PREDICAMENT
THE HANDSHAKE with Hugh Lawson turned into a soft wrestling match, a quiet force of fingers against each other along with the soft pumping motion the act required. Outside, the wind-swept rain drew itself into a lull, opening a place into which the people could depart. He leaned close to her, not too close but close enough so he could lower his voice into an intimate whisper—“I’m sorry for your loss.” She in turn said what every widow has to say to such sympathy, what she’d been saying for weeks on end to all kinds of words and advice, over tuna casseroles and cups of coffee, looking out her kitchen window (because that’s where most of the post-death rituals took place) at the long procession of the Hudson River moving through the first few weeks of November. “It’s all right,” she said, still with his hand in hers because the whole thing really only took a second — a pause before someone said it’s stopping, and another batch of people went out the door into the cool air. “I’m fine.”