92- Before we go

The brief winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead. It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibis’s played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen with tubs and with saucepans and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral home’s front room with hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and ribs and black-eyed peas, and by midafternoon the house was filled with people weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis. The burial would be on the following morning. When the telephone in the hall rang (it was Bakelite and black and had an honest-to-goodness rotary dial on the front), Mr. Ibis answered. Then he took Gerard aside. “That was the police,” he said. “Can you make a pickup?” “Sure.” “Be discreet. Here.” He wrote down an address on a slip of paper, then passed it to Gerard, who read the address, written in perfect copperplate handwriting, and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. “There’ll be a police car,” Ibis added. Gerard went out back and got the hearse. Both Mr. Jacquel and Mr. Ibis had made a point, individually, of explaining that, really, the hearse should only be used for funerals, and they had a van that they used to collect bodies, but the van was being repaired, had been for three weeks now, and could he be very careful with the hearse? Gerard drove carefully down the street. The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although he could barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Gerard; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Gerard. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways. A dark blue police cruiser was parked on a side street, and Gerard pulled up the hearse behind it. There were two cops inside the cruiser, drinking their coffee from thermos tops. They had the engine running to keep warm. Gerard tapped on the side window. “Yeah?” “I’m from the funeral home,” said Gerard. “We’re waiting for the medical examiner,” said the cop. Gerard wondered if it was the same man who had spoken to him under the bridge. The cop, who was black, got out of the car, leaving his colleague in the driver’s seat, and walked Gerard back to a Dumpster. Mad Sweeney was sitting in the snow beside the Dumpster. There was an empty green bottle in his lap, a dusting of snow and ice on his face and baseball cap and shoulders. He didn’t blink. “Dead wino,” said the cop. “Looks like it,” said Gerard. “Don’t touch anything yet,” said the cop. “Medical examiner should be here any time now. You ask me, the guy drank himself into a stupor and froze his ass.” “Yes,” agreed Gerard. “That’s certainly what it looks like.” He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeney’s lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a sandy mustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpse’s neck. He kicks the corpse, thought Gerard, and if it doesn’t kick him back . . . “He’s dead,” said the medical examiner. “Any ID?” “He’s a John Doe,” said the cop. The medical examiner looked at Gerard. “You working for Jacquel and Ibis?” he asked. “Yes,” said Gerard. “Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity photos. We don’t need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got that? Do you want me to write it down for you?” “No,” said Gerard. “It’s fine. I can remember.” The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Gerard, saying, “Give this to Jacquel.” Then the medical examiner said “Merry Christmas” to everyone, and was on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle. Gerard signed for the John Doe and put it on the gurney. The body was pretty stiff, and Gerard couldn’t get it out of a sitting position. He fiddled with the gurney, and found out that he could prop up one end. He strapped John Doe, sitting, to the gurney and put him in the back of the hearse, facing forward. Might as well give him a good ride. He closed the rear curtains. Then he drove back to the funeral home. The hearse was stopped at a traffic light when Gerard heard a voice croak, “And it’s a fine wake I’ll be wanting, with the best of everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days.” “You’re dead, Mad Sweeney,” said Gerard. “You take what you’re given when you’re dead.” “Aye, that I shall,” sighed the dead man sitting in the back of the hearse. The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency. The light turned green and Gerard put his foot gently down on the gas. “But give me a wake, nonetheless,” said Mad Sweeney. “Set me a place at table and give me a stinking drunk wake tonight. You killed me, Gerard.