like a snake charmer fishing cobras from his wicker basket, wholly impervious to fang and by now safely immune to its venom. And how sometimes, it’s the other way around.
Funerals are kind of fun, yes. I’ve cultivated a taste. It’s become a kind of social pursuit. It was a kink, of a kind.
But now Ray. I see his face, the one in the photograph the reporter in the field held up to the camera, with its fresh acne, and his right cheek’s dimple deeper than I remember, and him already taller than his mother, and I’m having trouble sustaining a positive mental attitude. Now, a python’s double-jointed jaws, Death opens wide. But, what do I know about such creatures?
*
I consider putting all of this to big old Hank, who, after sucking down his third screwdriver beside me on the plane, gets talkative, wonders why I’m flying, what with the weather—Chicago had a heavy white Christmas chased by a short thaw, but the Channel 9 weather guy predicts a monster on the horizon. I say, “funeral,” as though it were a destination wedding.
He’s a day trader on the futures market. Manicured nails, plump baby face, silver cufflinks. He would think I’m horsing around, some sort of wise guy, and eventually expect a rational explanation, request a change of seats. But I’m coming clean.
“Ever play with matches as a kid?” I ask.
He clears his throat and nods, uncertain, as a pocket of choppy weather jostles the cabin, making Hank spill half his drink all over his nifty polka dot tie. After glancing down the aisle, he sucks the alcohol directly from the raw blue silk.
I pretend not to notice. Outside the window, Illinois’ patchwork of snow-dusted farmland scrolls underneath us, the color of month-old bread. The freeways and interstates carving colossal esoteric runes into it. The tiny black trees that suture it all together.
“Vince and I,” I say, “we used to slick our arms in Aqua Net and light ourselves on fire. Our new rippling blue sleeves blowing our minds. Funerals are like that now. Only everyone else is burning for real, and I’m completely fine.” I down the dregs of my coffee. “You ever do that?”
Hank buckles his safety belt, says he can’t stand landings, so I drop it. All this turbulence is getting to me, too.
*
I’m back home, braving O’Hare’s crowds—the holidays are through but concourse K is still a nightmarish glut of holly jolly backwash—slowpoke vacationers and duty-free shopaholics, Bing Crosby, and on-sale candy cane pyramid displays that all hound me faster for the exits.
It’s been a few years since I last saw Vince, who is on his way to get me out of here. We are off to Big Bend, to bury what’s left of his little cousin—Ray.
I heard about it on the morning news. I caught the tail end of the broadcast. The young face on the screen seemed an organic extension of something startling in its familiarity to me. The sensational nature of the incident pushed the story into wider media markets, I think. All the way to the East Coast.
So I gave Vince a call. I said I would come out. Give a show of support. Though I could have done less, I said it was the least I could do. Vince and his family sort of took me in after my own family’s disintegration.
The last time I saw Ray, I think, he was eight and I had just finished school. It was Vince’s birthday, middle autumn sometime. We cooked out. I remember Vince giving Ray his first taste of liquor, a swig from his Solo cup of Captain Morgan-and-whatever. Then spending the afternoon with them, shooting hoops in the drive, a few old folks in lawn chairs giving color commentary.
I remember watching Ray take that sip and Vince asking him, “How you like the taste of that?”
Ray made this sour face and said, “Beer’s better.” All the old folks ate that right up.
*
Slinking out past the baggage carousels, I have a post-flight cigarette that hits me so hard I swoon and gag like a rookie. But the parking garage fumes are a pleasant surprise. There is something I find nostalgic in the odor—all maple syrup and gasoline and the exhaust of a couple hundred idling taxicabs.
It’s been around five years since I’ve been back, and yet the puddles of slush by the wall where smokers shelter from the cruel gusts seem pitiless as ever, black and bottomless, an inky soup. I’ve missed even them.
Here the sky yawns white all day, then rips your head off like afterburners once the sun falls off the horizon. But when the cold comes, it comes like a dream, lugging the dark in a big black sack. And my body readjusts to the old song it knows by heart.
Planes arrive and depart. I know Vince’s circling around here somewhere, eyes peeled for someone I barely resemble now. I forget the kind of car he drives. It’s one of those big dependable American makes, four doors and the type of interior that’s not the leather option. The sort of car they don’t really make anymore, built with a once-fine quality and craftsmanship that has long since fallen out of practice. One of those made-up names that seems real.
But who knows what state it’s in. I smear out the smoke and wait on the outer traffic island for some kind of sign of him.
*
My dad never drank. That lent him a certain polish that Ruby, the other woman, must have found magnetic. He was always the designated driver, the voice of reason drumming sense into whomever was first to get rowdy at dinner parties, the one who really had no patience for Mom’s drunk juggling, and who more than anything, seemed to love to be the one to carry her up to bed.
I, on the other hand, loved it when she drunk-juggled. She always started off small. We’d be in the kitchen getting dinner ready, Dad either home or on his way.
“Hey, Ant, check this out,” she’d say—never when I was looking at her—and when I did, she’d have a couple fingerling potatoes going with one hand, while the other swirled a cast iron pan of chopped onions.
I would applaud her, then resume whatever homework, finger painting, or action figure brawl I’d been absorbed with.
A little bit later I would hear, “Uh oh!”
I’d look up again, and there’d be red and green bell peppers vaulting into the air. And then the salt shaker, a few tablespoons. By her third glass of merlot she’d be on to the chef’s knife, the cleaver, three or four champagne flutes.
One time, instead of the performance, I watched her face. Despite all that deadly hardware being airborne, her expression wasn’t one of deep focus, but simple amusement. She was only interested in my wonder, beholding this marvelous act, this peculiar talent of hers.
When she caught me looking at her, she winked. Then, calmly, she closed her eyes. Mom kept the spectacle going until a flute hit the floor, exploded, and we both laughed our heads off.
She was gifted with the hands of a surgeon. They never trembled, or fumbled, or missed, even in the numbing winter mornings and dark. Her hands were steady, clever instruments, and worked with an agile precision that I found beautiful to watch.
For a long time I believed her touch cured the migraines I would get as a boy. Her palms were dry and cool, soft as calfskin, and seemed to draw the pulse from its place behind my eyes. But the relief came from some other place, I think now.
She
