Shatterday (23 page)

I took it. "Thank you very much."

"How do you feel?"

"Dandy. Just dandy."

"That was awful."

I looked a surprised look. "Oh, really? It usually brings down the house. The awestruck expressions of the crowd—are usually upon me."
Back
the fuck
off
!

"My God," she said, "you know you're even starting to talk like him?"

Have you never perceived that before, my love? Have you never caught on that my interior monologues are
never
in my own voice, never the way I write or speak? They are pure Jimmy. That quicksilver turn of the phrase, all that heat and color; not the plodding, methodical, reasonably reasoned wise uncle with good, solid thinking of Laurence Bedloe, but rather the bold, sure spring of the tiger, and I believe in you. Never caught that, eh? How sad, how sorry: if I were to write up the relationship between the Recently Departed and Larry Bedloe it would be in the assumed voice of Kerch Jimmy. You didn't pick up on that? You're simply not paying attention.

"The hamster isn't the most awful I've ever heard," I said, "although it is in the top tenth of a percentile of the most awful."

"What are you
talking
about? Are you okay?"

"The
most
awful, I guess, was something Missy told me. She said that when she was a kid Down South they used to take baby ducks and chicks, and they'd bury them up to their no-necks in the dirt, and then they'd run the lawn mower over them. Now
that
is yucchh."

Her face was all pulled out of shape. "I'm calling the doctor."

There was a set of silver-backed military brushes on the counter. I picked them up and started brushing back my wet hair, I looked at her in the mirror and said, "Very good idea. You call the doctor. Make it a voodoo doctor, if you can get Inboard to clear a line to Haiti. Get a specialist in resurrection. Tell him we're not sure Jimmy is completely all the way dead . . . that he seems to be clinging ferociously to life …
your
life,
my
life,
Bran's
life …"

She started to cry. I put the brushes down and turned to her; but I didn't take her in my arms, usually
pro forma
. I just stared at her. She had the heels of her hands in her eyes and she was starting to get into it.

"Come on, Leslie! Pack it in, darlin'!"

She fell against me, put her arms around me.

"Then," I said, "he pushed her away." And I pushed her away.

She looked at me. She said, "What?"

"He stared back at her," I said, "and said simply, 'We don't walk backward, do we? You're his wife; you'll
always
be his wife, even if you remarry, even if you're canonized; he owns you. You say no, but five years from now you'll make a deal with Simon & Schuster and have poor Bran out there ghost-write your memoirs—I
Was Kercher's
Koncubine
.' And he shook his head sadly," I said, "and he walked to the door and walked out." And then I walked past her to the door and walked out.

Not so hard ghostwriting in the voice of a ghost.

•

They all looked at me as I reentered the library. I patted the Abominable Snowman on the belly and resumed my appointed seat, ready to let Jimmy have another go at me. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails would have been a happier prospect.

They were still looking at me as Leslie came in. "Something I ate, perhaps. An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of underdone potato. More of gravy than of grave. Do let's continue with the show." All but Leslie continued to stare at me, touched by astonishment. Ah, of what good are literary allusions in the Land of Functional Illiterates, close on the borders of the Kingdom of the Blind?

But we continued.

The videotape began playing again, and once again we were in this library, weeks ago, only a moment after Bran had identified Jimmy as Jimmy and caused me to lose a perfectly lovely breakfast from Du-Par's Farmhouse. The tall, thin black woman I didn't recognize now spoke, as the camera came in on her.

"My name is Eusona Parker, and I have been Mr. Crowstairs's housekeeper for eighteen, going on nineteen years; and that's him sitting right there; and don't nobody try to say he's not in his sound mind and body 'cause I have known him all these years and he's just as sharp and clean and neat as a pin as he's ever been. Is that what I'm supposed to say?"

No wonder I didn't recognize her. Eusona Parker had lost about eighty pounds.

Every Wednesday. That was Eusona's day. I'd only seen her half a dozen times through the years, when I was in Los Angeles and visiting Jimmy. But if anyone knew his state of health, it was Ms. Parker. She had been more of a true mother to Jimmy than his own natural mother. What I remembered best about her was the "hearing aid."

She had a memory that should have been on display in the Smithsonian. It might be three or four years between our seeing each other; but when I'd come out of the blue guest room searching for coffee early on a Wednesday morning during one of my visits, there would be Eusona, dusting Jimmy's vast, endless hoard of
tchotchkes
; and she'd look up and grin as if I'd been there uninterruptedly for years, and she'd say, "Good morning, Larry, sleep good?" And I'd scream at her, "Hello, Eusona, how are you?" And she'd answer, "Doin' just fine, Larry; water's still hot." And I'd scream, "Thanks, Eusona."

The reason I screamed was that she wore a hearing aid. One of those little button things shoved into her ear, the cord trailing down to disappear into the capacious pocket of her wraparound apron where the shape of the battery pack bulged.

And we went oil that way, amiably, until one time she stopped me in the back corridor leading to the greenhouse, took me by the hand like a small boy who's been caught eating worms in the schoolyard, and she said, "Mr. Bedloe, why do you always scream at me?"

She never called Jimmy "Mr. Crowstairs" unless he was behaving badly or living with a woman who left globs of mascara on the mirror in the bathroom, and she never called me anything but Larry unless I had left my bed unmade. Ms. Parker made it clear she was a house
keeper
, not a maid; and if I slept in it, I ought to make it when I got out of it. "Mr. Bedloe" was her way of politely saying
pay close attention now, asshole
.

"Why, uh, I'm sorry, Eusona," I said, terribly embarrassed as one can only be embarrassed when one has been caught staring at the empty place between eyes and mouth where a leper's nose has fallen off. "I was speaking loudly because I wanted you to hear me."

"Well, I'm not hard of hearin', dear."

That
dear
of hers: butter would not have melted in her mouth. I've never understood what that meant, it never made sense to me, butter not melting. Whatever it meant, it's what that
dear
was all about. The dear you use when you say, "No,
dear
, the round hole is for the
round
peg."

"You're not?"

"No, Mr. Bedloe, dear, I'm not hard of hearing."

Mr. Bedloe
and
dear.

"But you wear a hearing aid."

"
Mistuh
Bedloe, this is not a hearing aid." And she pulled the earphone of the transistor radio in her apron, out of her car and, faintly, like fairy trumpets, I heard the tinny sound of Steve Garvey batting the brains out of the Cardinals' relief pitcher, bottom of the seventh, two out, a man on third.

All that went through my head as Kenneth L. Gross said, "Yes, Miss Parker, that's all you have to do, is identify Mr. Crowstairs."

"That's him. I said it."

"Thank you, Miss Parker."

"Neat as a pin, everything right in place; always been like that, eighteen going on nineteen years."

"
Thank
you, Miss Parker."

"You're welcome, dear."

Then Missy identified him; then Jimmy as testator stated the date and stated that the will being made on that date took precedence over all other wills previously made by him, including any that might be found written in cuneiform on stone tablets by gas station attendants roaming in the Nevada deserts.

Then the roundelay went like this:

Kenny: Are you executing this document or prepared to execute this document with a complete satisfaction on your part that it says what you wish it to say, and that you understand it in its entirety?

Jimmy: Affirmative. And it should be noted for the record that the last person to marry a duck lived four hundred years ago.

Kenny: Choke. Are you prepared to execute this document and accordingly state for the record, in my presence and in the presence of witnesses, that in so doing you are not acting under duress, undue influence, or under the influence of any drug or other substance that may impair your mental capacity?

Jimmy: I had a Coca-Cola about half an hour ago, does that count?

Kenny: No sir, it does not. Please!

Jimmy: Are you sure, Kenny? I mean, if you take a piece of raw meat and you put it in a glass of Coke and leave it overnight it comes out looking like something from a James Bond movie. You know, all those little piranha bubbles in there, they could chew the shit out of your brain cells.

Kenny:
It doesn't count
,
damn it
!

Jimmy: Then how about all the stuff I put up my nose just before we started filming?

Kenny:
Aaaargh
!

Jimmy: Okay, okay, take it easy. I'm just clowning. I don't use dope, you know that. Everybody knows it. I couldn't possibly write the crap I write if I was ripped. Having my nostrils Tefloned was just for a lark, you know that.

The attorney laid his head down on his arms and pounded the tabletop with his fist. It was pathetic what Jimmy was doing to this poor soul. We all looked around in the semidark but Kenneth L. Gross was back there in the shadows, no doubt chewing through the bit of his pipe.

On the screen Jimmy was being upbraided by his three witnesses. They whipped him into a semblance of probity and urged Kenny Gross to resume the proceedings.

The attorney said, "Therefore, in my presence and in the presence of the witnesses, God help us, is it your wish that you now execute the document and that we sign the document as witnesses thereto?"

Client responded in the affirmative.

"I will then ask, Mr. Crowstairs, that you now initial each and every page in the lower right-hand corner …"

"I'm left-handed."

"Then do it in the lower
left
-hand corner but for God's sake initial the damned thing already!" He was shouting; it seemed to quell Jimmy. He started initialing. Gross went on weakly, "Up to but not including the signature page. For your information and for the record, this is being done so that no pages can be substituted in the future into this document."

He was standing now, over Jimmy's right shoulder, behind him, turning the pages to verify each one was properly initialed (and possibly to insure that Jimmy didn't sign
Herman Melville or Frederick
VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg
).

It went on that way without hindrance. Jimmy had clearly grown bored with the activity and even bored with the japery that had made the proceedings minimally tolerable. Jimmy reached the signature page and filled in the location of execution of the will, then the date, and then he signed it. Then each of the witnesses signed location, date and name. The latter two added their place of residence. The will was returned to Gross, who asked if Jimmy wanted the will kept in the attorney's vault and a conformed copy provided to Jimmy, or if the client wanted to keep the original with a conformed copy in Gross's possession. Jimmy waved a hand negligently. "You keep it; send me a copy."

Gross said he would do so and, painfully aware that the juice was running out of the presentation, said, "For the record, the witnesses need not be present during any videotaping portion which is about to occur and the only people who will be present will be myself, Mr. Crowstairs, and the two camera persons."

Yo-ho-ho. Here we go. Up there on the screen Missy, Bran and Eusona Parker rose, walked out of camera range and damned certainly out of the room, and Gross turned to Jimmy and said, "Mr. Crowstairs, if you wish, you may say some words to your beneficiaries or for that matter, to anyone who may have been excluded by you under your last will which we have just executed."

He placed what was obviously a seating diagram of this room as Jimmy had planned it to be arranged on the desk in front of Jimmy, got up, and backed out of camera range. Now all we had on the screen was Jimmy sitting behind his desk, hands folded demurely, staring out at us, looking right to left as if he really could see us, back there four months ago when he had known for certain that he would live forever.

He looked first at SylviaTheCunt, then at me, then at Leslie, then at Bran who was seeing and hearing this for the first time—which may have been why he hadn't attended the burial ceremonies—and finally, at my right but Jimmy's extreme left, Missy. She hadn't spoken all day.

But I'd make book she knew what was coming.

Jimmy stared at us, and we stared back at him. He kept us waiting. I don't know what the others wanted—vindication, protestations of love, vast wealth, security for their twilight years, remorse, the slam bang of gin and vermouth, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings—but all I wanted was to be turned loose. Tempest-tossed, righteous card-carrying wretched refuse, I merely yearned to breathe free. To sever the bond with Jimmy, I heard a sound, I'll tell you what that sound sounded like:

On July 28, 1945, a foggy Saturday on the East Coast, Army Air Forces Lt. Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr. took off from Bedford, Massachusetts in a B-25 light bomber for La Guardia Field in New York. A few minutes after 10:00 A.M. Lt. Col. Smith crashed his two-engine bomber into the north side of the Empire State Building at the level of the 78th and 79th floors.

On the 75th floor of the Empire State Building an office worker who had come in to do some extra work over the weekend heard a sound. A terrifying, ominous, hurtling-toward-him sound. He looked out the window to see, emerging from the fog, ten tons of screaming airplane rushing toward him at 225 m.p.h.