"Too bad. Nice size on that girl. Great smile. What did she die from? Automobile? That is what takes most of the young ones."
"Some kind of flu with a high fever and kidney failure."
"I tell people it's the bugs striking back. Those laboratories go after the bugs with powerful new poisons and it stands to reason that the ones that live through it, they get twice and nasty as they ever were before. Of course, John and Gretel's folks, they died premature, but it wasn't sickness. I suppose you want her in the family plot. Dumb-ass question. You wouldn't be here if you didn't."
"Can we go right ahead with it?"
"Don't you remember how it was before? There's got to be the permit, and they've got to have vital statistics for the records, and there's the fee."
"The office is closed."
'A know. They used to stay open Saturday morning, but not lately."
'Eve got a copy of the death certificate here, and I've got her birth certificate, marriage certificate, and final decree of divorce. Here, you can have them."
He tools them and then tried to give them back to me, saying, 'I don't have anything to do with the office part."
"And if the permit hasn't gone up since last time, here's the fifty dollars."
He hesitated and finally took it. '] guess we could do it now and I could give them this stuff Monday. But don't you want any words said? She said the words for her brother."
The Green Ripper
"As I will for her."
The Tuckerman plot was in that part of the cemetery where the stones were flush with the ground which, as he had mentioned when I had seen him before, made mowing a lot easier. While he went to get the post-hole digger from his shed, I opened the carton. The urn was shinier than I had expected it to be, and more ornate. It looked like a large gold goblet with a lid.
She had owned a small worn book of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. She had read two of them over her brother's grave. She had marked the ones she liked best. There were three short ones I wanted to read.
I could just make out the place where the old man had dug the hole before, for John Tuckerman's urn. He chose a new spot and asked me if it was all right. I approved of it and asked him if I could dig.
'leave the dirt close and neat," he said.
He watched me as I chunlred the tool down, lifting the bite of earth in the blades, setting it aside each time, close and neat. Once it was down over a foot, it began to get me in the small of the back. It is an awkward posture, an awkward way to lift
When it was deep enough, he stopped me. I lifted the urn out of the box and, kneeling, lowered it to the bottom of the hole. I stood up then and read the first two poems, the longer ones. My voice had a harsh and meaningless sound in the stillness, like somebody sawing a board. I said the words I saw on the page without comprehending their meaning. Then I read the one she had read to her dead brother, called "Parting."
"My life closed twice before its close It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me
"So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And an we need of hell."
I bent and dropped the faded blue book down the hole, and then, kneeling, using both hands, I cupped up the dirt and filled the hole and tamped it down, replaced the circle of turf I had cut with the digger, and with the edge of my hand brushed away the loose dirt into the grass roots.
'No marker for her either?" he asked.
"I don't think so. Neither of them had children to come and look for the place." The oblong of marble, level with the earth, reading TUCKERMAN, was enough.
"Those words were line the ones she read that time. Is that some kind of one of these new religions?"
`'Sort of."
The Green Ripper
'I thought so. There's a lot of them these days. I guess having one is better than having none, but it makes you wonder." He looked down toward the office and the road. "Where'd you park?"
"I walked out from the bus station."
"Where are you going? Back to Florida?"
"I haven't decided."
"This town isn't as bad as some. If you need work, maybe I can think of somebody you could go ask. You look sort of down on your luck, mister."
"Thanks. If I come back this way, I'll look you up."
When I looked back from the road he was still watching me. I waved. He waved and turned away, back to his work fixing the scars where somebody had torn up the turf doing funny stunts in an autos mobile. I dug my duffel bag out of the bushes where I had hidden it and shouldered it with the wide strap over my left shoulder, the bag bumping against my right hip. My poncho was strapped to the duffel bag. I wore work shoes, dark-green twill trousers, a faded old khaki shirt, a brown felt hat, a gray cardigan sweater. I had sandy stubble on my jaws and neck. Before leaving Florida, I'd had my hair clipped down to a Marine basic cut, which could have been a prison cut. I carried in my shirt pocket, for the right occasion, a pair of glasses with gold-colored rims, hardly any correction in the lenses, and one bow fixed with black electrician's tape. I wanted to attract a second look from the av erage cop, but without stirring enough curiosity for him to want to check me out. But if he did check me out, I had some credentials. I had an expired Florida driver's license with my picture on it, and I had a fragile tattered copy of army discharge papers, and a social security card sandwiched in plastic. They were wrapped in a plastic pouch and were in the compartment in the end of the duffel bag. They all said I was Thomas J. McGraw, address General Delivery, Osprey, Florida, occupation commercial fisherman.
'~Well, officer, it was like this. My old lady died and I sold off our stuff and the trailer, and I thought I'd come out here and poke around and see if I could locate our daughter Kathy. She took off six years ago when she was fourteen, and we heard from her two years ago, some postcards from San Francisco, and Petaluma and Ukiah. She said she was joining up with some kind of church Me, I come here by Greyhound bus."
As I walked, I wrote my autobiography, and the story of my marriage, and my wife's death. I made Peg and Kathy into real people. I made Tom McGraw into a real person. As I walked, I went over and over the imaginary events of my life until I could see them. I outlined my own personality. I was not too quick of wit, and I tended to lose jobs through getting drunk and not showing up. When I worked, I was a hard worker. I was a man of great pride. I did not suffer unkind remarks about my
The Green Ripper character or my station in life. I was a womanizer when I was in my cups. Peg had been a staunch churchwoman. I went with her a couple times a year. I shared most of my political opinions with Archie Bunker. As I walked, I talked to imaginary people, talked as Tom McGraw would talk to them. He was servile when he talked to people in power. He was affable as a dog with his peers. He was nasty to those he considered beneath him. I worked my way into the role.
Long, long ago, I had known an actress. Susan was twenty-four. I was sixteen. She was working in summer theater. I was working in the country hotel where she was staying. She was a lanky lady who cussed, wore pants, and smoked thin little cigars. I found her monstrously exciting. I was worried about myself that year. There had been an episode with a loud chubby girl who, true to locker-room gossip, was willing to put out. But she was so loud that I was less than able. I could almost but not quite count it as the first time. I could lie to others but not to myself, and I had the dread fear Lolly would tell everybody. I was worried about myself.
Though I was a head taller than the actress, she didn't want to be seen with me around town. I would walk out into the country, and she would come along in her borrowed car and we would go up into the hills and park and go walking together. In August, after we had gotten into the habit of making a bed from a blanket and spruce bows, in hidden places, while we were resting from each other, I told her about Lolly and about my fears. She laughed her deep harsh startling laugh and told me that I had less to worry about than anybody she had ever known. It was very comforting
It was repertory theater, and she had to refresh her memory in a lot of roles. It startled me the way she could turn herself into an entirely different person. We would sit in the shade and I would give her her cues from the playscript, and then we would walk and she would become the character in the play. I had to ask her questions, any questions, and she would respond as that person would have responded. She explained that it was the best way to do it. One had to invent a past that fitted, and memories that fitted. She explained that once you were totally inside a false identity, secure in it, you could handle the unexpected on stage in a way con- sistent with the character.
And I had used that afterward, many times, and now I was using it again. Susan taught me a lot. Once she got me past the initial shyness, she showed me and told me all the ways I could increase her pleasure while delaying mine. It gave me a wonderful feeling of domination and control to be able to turn that strong, tense, mature female person into gasping, grasping, shuddering incoherence. I was in love with her, of course. I could not stand the thought of the summer ending. I told her I
The Green Ripper loved her, and I was going to come to New York to be close to her.
I will always remember the way she cupped both hands on my face and looked deeply into my eyes. "Travis, you are a very very sweet boy, and you are going to become one hell of a man. But if I ever find you outside my apartment door, I am going to have the doorman throw you out on your ass. We can end it right now or next week, whichever you choose. But end it we will, boyo, with no loose ends. No letters, no phone calls, no visits. Ever."
And that's how it was.
So now I walked my way deeper into my Tom McGraw role. Trucks whuffed by, with the trailing turbulence tugging at my clothes. Divided highway. Route 101. Looking for the daughter lost. Too many years ago.
This didn't have the bare rolling look of the hills near the sea below San Francisco. There was more water here, rivers and lakes and forest country. I had flown into San Francisco as Travis McGee, taxied to a Holiday Inn near Fisherman's Wharf, and spent a day assembling a wardrobe to go with the new identity I had bought from a reliable source in Miami. The McGee identity fitted into a suitcase. I stored it and paid six months in advance. The storage receipt was the only link, and I didn't want it on me. Small things can be hidden in public places. There was a bank of new storage lockers in the bus station. They were not quite flush against the rear wall. I taped it at shoulder height to the back of the lockers, out of sight. E I could stand up, I could get it back. If I wanted it back.
I gave up walking when the heel of my right foot began to bother me. The work shoes were too heavy for one who had spent such a chunk of his life barefoot. I wished I had taken the bus.
I found a good place to hitch a ride. I hate to see the damn fools on the highways hitching in the wrong places. It is a waste of energy. You have to be where they can see you a long way off, and where you stand out well against the background. They have to be able to see a lot of highway beyond you, and they have to spot a place where they can pull off. You have to make a gesture at each car, a big sweeping one. You leave the duffel bag at your feet and you take your hat off, and you smile wide enough to show some teeth. An animal will roll onto his back to demonstrate his harmlessness. A man will grin. It is better to trust the animal.
A gaunt old man in a rattle-bang Ford pickup stopped at high noon and picked me up. He wore banker's clothes and a peaked cap that said Oakland Raiders.
"Only going as far as Lake Mendocino, friend," he said.
"Is that past Isaiah?"
"Next door. I can drop you off before I make my turn. Get in." He looked back, waiting for a hole in the traffic, and when one came along, he jumped into it with surprising acceleration.
"Don't know this country, oh?"
"Don't know it at an. This is the ilrst time for me."
Hunting work?"
"Well, I might have to do some to keep going. But mostly I'm trying to get some kind of trace of my little girl. I think she's out here somewhere."
'`There's a lot of young girls out here somewhere. There was a time in the sixties when they'd come drifting up from San Francisco. Communes and farming and all. What they call alternative life" styles. Potheads, mosey. No offense. I'm not saying your girl is one of those. She missing long?"
"Six years."
"Hear anything from her in all that time?"
"One time, and that was four years ago. She'll be
The Green Ripper twenty now. Peg and me, we married young. Kathy was sixteen when we got those cards from her. They came over a month or so. They never gave an address we could write back to. They were mailed in San Francisco, and then the very last one was from Ukiah. It said she was joining up with some kind of church and we should forget about her forever. You know, when you've got just the one kid, you don't forget like that. It took the heart out of Peg. She died a while back, and after I sold off a little piece of land and the trailer and an old skiff, I thought I might as well use the money trying to find her."