The lid on the inside of the casket had a drum set embroidered onto it. I felt so bad about that.
I looked around at all the people at the viewing and got so angry at them. They thought they knew Seth. I wasn’t sure many of them knew anything about him.
I wanted to leave something in his casket. I searched my pockets, but they were empty. All I found was a little scrap of paper — a gas station receipt. I didn’t have a pen. I shoved the receipt back in my pocket.
I had to get out of there. The walls of the funeral home were collapsing. Still, I almost cracked up laughing when I thought about the sound that the cymbal made when it smashed into Ethan. That. I wanted to do that — to all those people — but I didn’t.
I went out to the parking lot for some air. Seth’s brother was standing there, smoking another cigarette.
“I’m no good at these things,” he said.
“Your brother’s dead,” I said. It was so stupid, it just came out.
Mark said he recognized me from the photographs. “Seth said good things about you when we were together upstate.”
“Oh?”
“The lake house. That funeral.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about all of it,” I said.
He looked down at his shiny shoes. A stupid thing occurred to me. Another reason to be mad at somebody else over what had happened. Mark had given Seth the tip on that horse at the Kentucky Derby. Smartie Jones. If Seth hadn’t won all that money, he’d probably still be alive.
“You were recording an album?”
“Yeah, we were,” I muttered.
“I just wanted you to know that if you needed anything for it, I’d help.”
I nodded. Sure. It was a good gesture, but Seth was dead. What was I going to do with Mark’s money? I politely declined his offer.
“That’s alright, it’s over.”
“It’s over, yeah. It is, right?”
The doors opened, and people started to stream out. Of course, knowing that crowd, a good lot of them wanted to go over to the bar. It was walking distance. We crossed the street and went a block up to Spider Bar. The lights were off (as usual). Everywhere I looked, someone was smoking a cigarette. Walking in off the street was like breaking some heavy fog that’d crawled into the mouth of a cave and stayed to live. Your eyes slowly adjusted. Then the rest of the world was too right, even under splintered moonlight.
I could drink now. I could drink everything. I didn’t give a fuck anymore. I wanted to get so drunk I’d walk out on the railroad tracks and fall over and lie there until I got crushed. Cut in half. All of the above.
We gathered across the whole bar, filling it up. Gail’s stand-in bartender, a kid with long-ass sideburns and a nose ring, couldn’t keep up. Whiskey shots for everyone. Beers. Beers. More beers. But somehow the sorrowful mood rapidly slipped away. The sadness attempted to lift, because it couldn’t battle against the alcohol. The jukebox helped too.
I was talking to Mark for a while; he had a lot of questions. He wanted to know what was gonna happen to my living situation now that Seth was gone. Would I be able to make up his slot of the rent? I explained that our rental situation was … weird.
“In what way?”
“We haven’t paid rent in four months.”
Aldo leaned in, “In life everybody needs an escape plan.”
“True.”
Mark told me that his grandfather was in a prison camp as a child.
“The family got out. When he got old, he built a stone house on a lake. First he built the escape tunnel, then he built the house.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” said Aldo. “Where is it? Where does it go?”
“It’s in the master bedroom and goes into the wine cellar and out to the river.”
“American dream,” Aldo said, “escape.”
Feral bought more shots. Aldo bought more shots. Gail kept giving me quarters for the jukebox.
“Pick some songs, hon. You always pick the best songs.”
Everyone kept knocking drinks back. It was not fun. It was not jubilant. It was drinking to survive.
I looked down the bar. Denise Santalucia was standing behind Shannon. They hadn’t been acquainted yet. Shannon was drunk. Denise looked on edge. Shannon started to lightly sob. “I miss my love,” I heard her say.
Denise stiffened. “Who?”
“Seth,” Shannon said. “My Seth.”
Denise stepped up, “Seth was my guy. Who are you?” Shannon pointed to the tattoo on her shoulder blade, all raw and swollen. Denise reached back and slapped that raw tattoo as hard as she could. With her next motion, Denise kicked the barstool out from underneath Shannon, who went down to the floor — hard.
The bar got shook up. By the time I could even think to react, Gail was pulling Denise out of the bar into the streetlights and the rain. It looked just like one of those old G.L.O.W. matches. She had that little girl up in her arms in a bear hold, with her legs kicking, elbows being thrown, and lots of squirming. After Denise was carried out by Gail, who had to push the door open with one of her feet as she came to it, someone helped Shannon off the carpet. She wasn’t hurt, but she was in shock. What’d just happened?
We kept drinking, but it wasn’t the same in there. Death kept seeping in.
Aldo said, “That little girl has some fire in her.”
When we all separated, it felt, in a way, like the last time any of us would ever see each other again — as if Seth had been the only thing that could ever link us together.
The Blue Samurai
I drove back to lagoon house. Most of my things were already in cardboard boxes. I’d been packing. I was moving out. I didn’t want to be there any longer. When I walked in the door, Feral was at the kitchen table. He’d been eating a peanut butter sandwich.
“We’ve got a problem,” is what he said, but I couldn’t understand a word of it on account of the peanut butter sandwich.
“What?”
He gulped down a glass of water, frowning.
“I’ll show you,” he said, wiping his chin. “I fucked up, and I didn’t know how to break the news to you.”
He stood up from the table, and we walked back outside. At the A-Team van, he opened up the back doors and pulled back the gray painter’s tarp. Beneath was something … troubling. It was the original Andy Warhol print that had been hanging in K Neon’s ocean house. The Blue Samurai.
“You fucking stole that?!”
“I know, right?! Crazy.”
“CRAZY?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!”
“What do I do?”
“Bring it back,” I said.
“You’re outta your mind.”
“Well,” I said, “what was your plan? To sell it at Englishtown flea market?”
Feral shrugged. His eyes went wide. “I have no idea what my plan was. I dunno … find some bigwig-connected black market arts dealer.”
“And that didn’t work?”
“No!” he shouted. “No, that didn’t work.” Then he whispered, “Bro, I don’t wanna go to prison.”
“I’ll talk to K.”
Feral yanked the painting out of the van and carried it to the backyard, where the deck used to be.
“Not happening,” he said, setting the canvas down on the sharp red stones. “Just gonna have to take matters into my own hands.”
From the collapsed shed, he pulled out a metal jug of gasoline left over from when he’d had the boat. I watched, shell-shocked, as he began to douse the painting. Then he tossed his electric blue bic lighter on the canvas. In the wind, we watched it burn. The smoke — thick, black, and doomed — uncoiled like a bad luck snake.