I sat on the bench and lit a smoke and handed it to Basil, then lit one for myself.
“I wish to God I couldn’t,” I said.
“And I wish to God you could understand me for once. You know that?”
“No, I don’t. I’ve got no idea what you mean.”
“Of course you don’t. You never do, and never have. You’ve never understood a thing about me.”
“We get ourselves out of here in one piece,” I said, and grinned, “I promise we can go to counseling. How’s that sound?”
“I love you, too,” Basil said. “So, so much.”
Lucky for us he’d remembered to bring his suitcase in before Dinky and I wrecked his Cruiser. We stripped our clothes and argued over who’d wear what. Basil pointed at my shriveled up dong and asked how I’d gotten a shroom to grow in my crotch. I called him a rich boy. I called him a monkey-fucking banana dick. Then I put on one of his dress shirts, with the French cuffs and polka dots, and a red velvet vest over that, and lo and behold, I looked like a numbskull in the hand-me-downs of his brother the mime. Basil went to see about the girls.
In its way the earth had gone quiet, the solemn trees, the heaving sky. Veils of rain continued to fall, the lake was hidden, there was only mud, only trees and sky. But soon a woman cried out, and soon another began to scream, Lucille louder than Avey at first, though presently they were wailing as one, cries with pain enough to rend the hardest man, ah, exactly what we needed. Hardly had I thought to investigate than Basil stood beside me again, his face as long and blue as ever a face could be.
He lifted me off the ground and squeezed till I lost my breath. I could feel him shaking, his whole body in tremors, ambushed by a life of hurt. It was only some years later, or so it seemed, that he gave in, his voice a boom in my ear, nothing comprehensible. Shaking and sobbing, he just held me tight.
“He’s dead, AJ. I went in to see him… He was just dead.”
Basil said that, and his face dropped away like a coin off a cliff. I fell dizzy with pictures of catheters and cotton and chromium rails, and screens above flowers and sirens, too, host after host, and widowers and widows, the injustice of their eyes, and needles, and hoses, and smocks, and tubes…
A hand lay on my brow, cool as a spring, I could smell Avey’s breath and hair. We lay on the bed we’d slept in, a cheap coverlet scratching at my jaw. An old chiffonier stood across the room with its small brass tub of imitation flowers. Next to it was a smattering of novels from the World’s Best Reading and a painting of Jesus in a dime store frame. Lucille was perched on a cedar chest, her arms around her knees. Basil sat beside me, with a smoke.
“Are you okay?” Avey ran her fingers through my hair, they were light and soft.
“Where is he?”
“Sssshhhh.”
I looked into her eyes. I nuzzled in her hair. “I’m okay. I’m fine.”
Basil went to Lucille, he held Lucille’s hand. They were silent.
“Where is he?”
“In there,” Lucille said.
For a moment the room seemed crooked, everything floaty with mist. Then it cleared, and I was on my feet, steady as could be by Avey, her hand on my leg.
There was a door.
I went in. By the bed I got down. I got down on my knees. But I did not look. Not at him, his face. I couldn’t. For a long time I sat that way…
His face. Not his face…
No can. Maybe never, maybe not never, not knowing when, maybe never…
Laid there, he, it, he, a cold stiff thing, stretched out like a dummy, CPR, a hand, not like his face had been, not jaundiced, not sweaty and pained, hands of a workman never done work, no not. And fingers, thick, blunt at the tips, where thick hard nails were growing still, no, not growing, not life, never again, not, no, no pulseless mush but veins, and blue cording, and thickish veins, ah, heavy, ah, like ugly crappy wire. Little blond hairs not vanished, no not, no not, and thousands of hole-dots, and lines connect dots, not color in, no not, no not, no not, design, no design, no not, never, nothing, no, where wrinkles there, and cold, so cold, hand in hand, so cold, so cold, no not, not, not, not think meat, not think friend, not friend, not think, no not, no nothing there, nothing, no, not, no, no, no, no, not, no not, no not not, not, not. And you will look, now, yes, you will look. At him. At not him, at not it but him, but Dinky, look at him, no, look at him, yes, you, now, yes, because, because, because. And there, yes, and there now, and there. And it’s okay, you are there, you are fine, it’s okay, it is okay, everything’s okay, it is…
Peaceful is not the word. Dinky’s face was not peaceful. That, I thought, was the big untruth, this business of peace suffusing the dead. But though it looked nothing at all like peace, my friend’s lifeless face, neither did it look sad, nor helpless, nor anguished, nor anything of the sort. Content, perhaps. Or perhaps nothing is more like it. More like it, yes, Dinky had a face of nothing, a face no longer burdened, with worry, with fear, with anything to speak of, desire, anger, rage — that was all.
I wiped my mouth. I wiped my eyes. My fingers shook, and my hand. But then I made that hand touch him, his face, his mouth, his eyes, everything he’d been, my damp hand on his dead face, which wasn’t cold but cool. And that was all. It rested there, I let it, my hand on his brow, and then I began to sob, and everything left me, all my thoughts and all my words swallowed up by that good cry. You son of a bitch, you, you beautiful mother fucker, you, who couldn’t stand another day. I pulled the sheet to his chin and made it straight. I shouldn’t thank you, I thought, but I can’t help it. Thank you, Dinky, thank you, Stuyvesant Wainwright, IV. And then I pulled the sheet over his face and smoothed it again, and then I said, Thank you, again, I said, thank you… Yes, I said, thanks, I said, you old bastard, thanks.
THE WAY WE LOVE THE DEAD’S GOT NOTHING TO do with how we love the living.
I’d be hauling down some road with a mackerel sky against the dawn, watching crows in the fields or egrets in rice, and like fear it would hit me I couldn’t go home expecting his voice on the line whenever I called, rambling about the game he’d just bought or the stripper he’d had that photo-op with, with the massive tits she let him squash his face into while the cameras ticked and flashed. Or before that, before I’d moved to these podunk lands, when I was still a sofa-surfer, tripping place-to-place with my bag of books, I’d be hanging at the Strada or Milano, watching the students and the freaks, the little rich daddy’s girls, the hard-nosed punks shouting for coin enough to make them puke, the date-rape jug heads and beret-wearing doofs with their euro smokes and foreign mags, and it would hit me, uncanny as hell, the friend I thought I’d known like the day, different every time, saying or doing what I couldn’t recall him saying or doing while he was yet alive.
The only thing sure I could say about Dinky was he’d taken off for that whorehouse in the sky — that and how every time I thought of him, I was loving him. But the Dinky of my eulogies had no part in the Dinky I had known. The Dinky of my eulogies was the Dinky of my grief, the Dinky of my heart gone soft. He was never the kid I’d witnessed barfing off a terrace, the kid with a bag of speed grumbling about the law, who cringed at the thought of his father, wanting nothing more than to satisfy the man, at whatever cost to his own small needs. The sob stories he used to spew had lapsed into murk the moment he had himself. And even if he did resemble that, it wasn’t his fault. Always he floated before me as the angel done wrong. He’d lost his way among the dangers of this shithole world, then found himself in a haunted house. The cards had turned up cold. The cookie had crumbled on another guy’s plate, the milk was forever spilling. The only way he could get what mattered most — a simple embrace, just acceptance, just love — was to die. Well, now he’d got his wish. I can’t speak for his family, but I can for us buddies: Dinky died, and we were sorry, and we loved the son of a bitch now like we never had while he was here to take it.