Alice sighed and looked away, as if embarrassed. “So many men.”
It took Raymer a moment to realize they weren’t talking about Becka anymore. She was looking at the columns of names on the memorial.
“Boys, most of them,” he said.
“Yes, boys. My son is there.”
Which was untrue. She and Gus were childless. She’d been married before, but his understanding was there’d been no offspring from that marriage either.
“War is a terrible thing.”
“Yes,” he agreed. Three names in the Vietnam grouping belonged to classmates of his.
“Becka wanted children.”
“No,” he said, remembering the only time they’d discussed it. Becka had been adamantly opposed, so he’d pretended he didn’t want any, either. “I don’t think she did, actually.”
“I’ll ask her next time.”
“Can I give you a lift home, Alice?”
“Should I go home?”
“Gus said you should,” Raymer told her. A lie, though it’s what he would have said had he been aware she’d slipped her leash again.
“Gus loves me,” she said, as if reporting a curious, little-known fact.
They rose and Raymer walked her over to his Jetta and helped her inside. They didn’t speak again until he pulled in to the driveway of the old Victorian where she and Gus lived, the last house on Upper Main, across from the entrance to Sans Souci Park. Before getting out, she turned to face him. “I keep trying to remember who you are,” she said.
—
“WHERE IN THE WORLD did they find this guy?” Raymer whispered to Gus.
The clergyman delivering the eulogy actually looked a bit like Alice. He had shoulder-length hair, and the intricate, multicolored stitching on his gauzy, flowing tunic suggested…what? That he had a girlfriend? That he embroidered in his spare time instead of watching sports on TV? There was something viscerally repellent about him, Raymer decided, though it took him a minute to figure out what. With no shirt collar visible above the neckline of the tunic, neither cuffs at the wrist nor socks at the ankle, he gave the impression of being naked underneath his glorified shift, and Raymer was visited by an unwanted vision of the man’s dark, swinging genitalia.
“For more than four decades,” Reverend Tunic intoned, “Judge Barton Flatt was the voice of justice and reason in our fair city. That was the phrase he used to describe this place we all hold dear. Our fair city.”
Raymer stifled a groan. He was reasonably confident that His Honor had never once uttered any such words. In fact Flatt had exhibited little affection of any kind, except for an abstract concept he called “small-town justice,” which he claimed to dispense. How that differed from other kinds of justice Raymer never had the temerity to ask, but he suspected it meant “likely to be reversed in a higher court.” Proud of his maverick reputation, the judge had rendered his verdicts with the resigned air of a man who knew all too well that other legal minds would in the fullness of time see things differently. Our fair city? Raymer didn’t think so.
Dear God was it hot. He could feel distinct rivulets of perspiration tracking down his chest, between his shoulder blades and from beneath his armpits, all this moisture puddling in his bunched-up jockeys. At the bottom of the open grave, which was a good six feet deep, was a patch of shade that Raymer found himself genuinely longing for. That far down it would be cool and fresh smelling. How pleasant it would be to just crawl in and curl up, to rest in such coolness. Okay, there were probably finer things for a man to desire, but in all honesty he couldn’t bring any of them to mind. His encounter with poor Alice, and her referencing Becka out of the blue, had caused his spirits — already near low ebb — to plummet further. Since his wife’s death a year ago — okay, fine, so he would think about her — he simply hadn’t been himself. Most mornings, even after a good night’s sleep, he woke up feeling so dull and lethargic that he had to talk himself into getting out of bed. Also, his appetites were on the fritz. His sex drive had disappeared completely, and down at the station Charice often had to remind him to eat. Grief, was how she explained it, but Raymer had his doubts. Sure, he’d loved Becka once, loved her with his whole heart, and the way she’d died was indescribably horrible, but now he was mostly just curious to know who she’d been about to run off with.
Gus nudged him, his voice barely audible. “How’s your speech coming?”
“Almost done,” Raymer assured him, though he hadn’t written a word. Monday’s big event, the capstone of the holiday weekend, the renaming of the middle school in honor of Beryl Peoples, was something else he’d tried unsuccessfully to weasel out of. Somehow Gus had found out he’d been Miss Beryl’s student and had immediately dragooned him into the proceedings. Raymer explained he was a C-plus student at best and could hardly exemplify her teaching prowess. Why not ask somebody who’d at least gotten a good grade? Because the smart kids, Gus informed him, had all moved away, as you’d expect. No, Raymer would have to do it. Earlier in the week he’d sat down with a yellow legal pad and made a couple feeble attempts before giving up. This afternoon he’d try again. If he came up empty, he’d ask Charice to write something.
“Our…fair…city,” Reverend Tunic repeated in mock wonder. Through rhetoric alone, the man had worked himself into a state approaching rapture, and he opened his arms wide, as if to embrace all of Bath, though at the moment his only constituency, apart from the handful of wilting mourners, were those in graves that extended in all directions as far as the eye could see. “As we lay this giant of a man to rest, perhaps we should pause to reflect on what he meant by those words.”
Giant of a man? Five foot six, a hundred and forty pounds, tops. Raymer could’ve clean and jerked this particular giant and given him a good, long toss. In fact, on more than one occasion, he’d imagined doing that very thing.
“Did he mean that here in Schuyler County we’re blessed with an abundance of natural beauty and an embarrassment of resources? Of mountains and lakes and streams and springs?”
Springs? Why bring them up? In Bath they’d all run dry.
“Of cool, dense forests where once trod swift, silent Iroquois in their soft, supple moccasins?”
Iroquois? Raymer’s heart sank. If fucking Indians were creeping into the judge’s eulogy, on what possible grounds might anything else be deemed irrelevant?
“I believe he did,” declared Reverend Tunic. “But was this all he meant?”
Raymer was willing to stipulate that this was the sum total of the deceased’s intention if that meant they could all go home, but no such luck.
“I for one believe that this was not all.”
Was it conceivable that this doofus represented an actual church somewhere? He seemed more the start-your-own-religion sort of guy. Or was he some kind of interfaith minister on loan from the college in Schuyler Springs, where he was charged with soothing all the students’ sensibilities in the unlikely event they sobered up long enough to have any. An academic affiliation might explain both his windy nonsense and the confidence with which he delivered it. Still, you had to wonder what sort of instructions he’d been given. Hadn’t anyone informed him that Judge Flatt had been Bath’s foremost atheist? That this was why there’d been no church service? Did he not understand that his appearance here today was a reluctant concession to the man’s status as a public figure and the community’s desire to pay its final respects? (Okay, Raymer himself felt no such need but conceded that others might.) Reverend Tunic, far from comprehending he’d been given an ass-backward task, seemed convinced it was his duty to deliver the same sermon he’d have preached from his own pulpit to honor the passing of his own beloved deacon. Or, at the very least, to ensure that these proceedings would require the same amount of time under the broiling sun as they’d have taken indoors with the AC blasting.