Ten
After the officers of the law had returned with their notebooks and clipboards to their patrol cars, and after the Action News vans had sped away to the next news site, and after the two reporters from the Five Oaks News-Chronicle had departed, taking the young staff photographer with the shaved head with them, and after the superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, had called to schedule what he called a “strategy session” with Saul for the following week, maybe Tuesday, Saul and Patsy sat in their living room, wondering what would hit them next. They had taken the phone off the hook. Mary Esther toyed with her Busy Box in the playpen, and when she stood and whined (she could stand on her own now and would soon be in the toddler stage; her first words had already been said), Saul took her up to her bedroom. Patsy could hear him singing to her.
Patsy didn’t want to be alone with Saul for the rest of the evening. She dreaded that prospect.
Hurriedly, she called Harold, Saul’s friend, who said he would be over in a matter of minutes, with his wife, Agatha. After putting the phone down and consulting her address book, Patsy called her friend from the bank, in the loan office, Susan. She and Susan were both loan officers in different branches in town. Susan said yes, of course, she would drop everything. She said she didn’t think she could bring her husband, Wyatt. Wyatt was working on the city budget. Then Patsy called Mad Dog Bettermine and the woman he lived with, Karla, and after they agreed to come, she invited another friend, Julie Dusenberg, an instructor in English at Holbein College whom Saul and Patsy had met at a day-care center in town. Julie was a single mom, and she said she’d be over in a jiffy as long as it was okay with them if she brought her daughter, Kate, with her, and as long as it was okay if she didn’t stay until late. Patsy then called Laurie Welsh. Laurie couldn’t come because of the kids — Hugh was gone, Laurie didn’t say where, though Patsy guessed he was probably out drinking — but asked if there was anything else she could do. She had already heard about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. She wanted to be there for her. Before Patsy could say anything, Laurie said she’d bring some cooked chicken by tomorrow, would she be around at ten in the morning?
Still in a nervous rush, Patsy called two high school teachers, the Krolls, Rosanne and Hank. She called Gary Krochock, their funny and embittered divorced single neighbor and insurance agent. They all said that they would drop by. Then, like someone who has been on a binge, she stopped herself.
By the time Saul came back down the stairs, five of their friends were already sitting in the living room, waiting for him, and Patsy knew, just from the look on his face, that he understood why she had invited them, and understood why they were there.
Saul went into the kitchen to bring in the beer, but several of the guests had brought their own and had already opened theirs. When he came back out, the death party, such as it was, had ground to a standstill; an expressive air pocket of dead silence greeted him.
Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was oddly muted, mumbling. It’s a desert in here, Patsy thought, as Saul handed out more beer to his friends. Gordy Himmelman had died storyless. Mad Dog and Karla and Saul had all taught him, but he had drifted invisibly, sullenly, into their classrooms and out again. Harold, the barber, had cut the boy’s hair and had known Gordy’s mother, once upon a time, but he had no stories about her son. No, he hadn’t been a good athlete; no, he didn’t have a good sense of humor; and, no, he wasn’t especially kind or considerate. The one really memorable action he had performed in his life, the one thing that everybody would remember about him and say about him as long as they remembered him or talked about him was that he had shot himself.
Saul and Patsy told the story of how they had stood before the window when it had happened. They told the story of the reporter from Channel Seven, Traci McMahoney.
Julie Dusenberg, the English instructor, hoisting her sleepy daughter, Kate, to her left breast, said it was like a case study. The whole event was like a case study.
“A case study of what?” Hank Kroll asked.
“I don’t know,” Julie Dusenberg said dispiritedly. “A case study of something. Of our time,” she said, finally, in desperation, “that you could deconstruct.”
“Well, it’s already deconstructed,” Gary Krochock said, from where he was stretched out on the floor. He was wearing a University of Oklahoma sweatshirt and was balancing his beer bottle on his stomach. “If it’s in the morgue, it’s completely deconstructed, if you want my opinion. It doesn’t get more deconstructed than that. By the way, did you know that ‘disarticulation’ is a medical term? It means taking the body apart, limb by limb.”
“Don’t tell me that this is going to turn into a discussion of American youth,” Mad Dog said, from his end of the sofa, peering with one eye into his empty beer bottle, “because if this turns into a discussion of American youth, I’m going home right now, no questions asked.” He gave off a slight air of pre-drunkenness. “I don’t want to hear about any of that.”
“But the boy’s dead,” Karla said to him. Karla, Saul noted, was the sexiest woman he had ever known who was not beautiful. She looked like a minor player in a porno movie. “Can’t anyone say anything good about him?”
“No,” Mad Dog said. “And I knew him.” He sat there. “Wait a minute. I thought of something. He made good paper airplanes.”
“But he’s a human soul,” Karla said, slapping him on the arm. “Where’s your charity?”
“Where it belongs,” Mad Dog said. “With you. With us.”
“Poor kid, anyway,” someone half-whispered. “Poor old kid, anyway.”
Susan Palmer all at once spoke up. “I don’t see why we have to feel bad. Patsy? You shouldn’t be feeling all guilty and everything. He wasn’t a charming orphan. He didn’t have asthma. He didn’t run away and then come home again, reformed like the prodigal whatever. He wrote semi-illiterate threatening notes, threatening our friends, and let’s face it, he was a big stinking mess. He destroyed Saul’s beehives, when you lived over there. It’s lucky he didn’t hurt Mary Esther. He came into their front yard and waved a gun around, and he sort of harassed them, and I agree, it’s a trauma, but I don’t see what obligation we have to be sentimental about some little shit.” She waited. “I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away.”
A long silence followed, interrupted by the sounds of beer pouring into mouths. Mad Dog suppressed a belch. Someone — Patsy thought maybe it was Rosanne, who almost never spoke — said, “So what you’re saying is, good riddance.”
“Did I say that?” Susan Palmer asked. “No. I don’t believe I said that.”
Another air pocket of silence opened up. Finally, the insurance agent, Gary Krochock, said, “I’ve got to tell you guys about this dream I had last night. Since we’re talking about the dead and everything. It was extremely weird. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”
“You did what?” Saul asked.
“I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat. We were in this big room, maybe it was a recording studio, which I don’t know much about because I’ve never been in one, but I know there were microphones, and Sinatra is out of the room, but he’s left his hat upside down on the floor. And because I had to take a pee, I pissed into it. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”