“Ah,” I say, “to hell with it.”
I bite my lip. One pain muffles another, and who cares. Then with a quick little tick, we’re the off yellow of the street lamp overhead. For that moment, we’re lit up, then we keep going.
*
Once we’re into a bit of open road, I say, “How’d that hand happen?”
Vince holds it up like he’s surprised to find it braced and bandaged. “Work accident. Hammered myself,” he says. “Stupid of me. There was a babe walking by. It’s not bad. Tingles more than anything.”
“You should get your balls zapped again. Maybe they didn’t finish the job.”
He coughs. “That was a joint decision. Me and Caroline are fine.” Vince adds, “It’s Marcy and Dan in rough shape…”
He fingers around in the change holder for his pack of Pall Malls. When he finds them he lights up, steering with his knee. We drift from the left lane to old tawdry snow—a running scab of gray snot where the road’s shoulder was. He rolls down the window. Cold air gushes in. The guy behind us beeps and Vince corrects course. I light one too.
He shouts over the roar, “They couldn’t identify the body. So I did.”
“How’d he look?”
“How you think he looked?”
“It was just a question, okay?”
“He looked like everything else Bullets ever got at.”
It’s so easy for me to forget things about people I used to know. Just hearing that name.
I remember trying to teach Bullets tricks when he was a pup. Shake hands, I’d command, tapping his outsized paw. I got bit one day doing that. Just a nip, but that’s when lessons ended, maybe a month before I moved away.
He was our friendly neighborhood dirtbag pervert Gavin Kwasneski’s dog. Even as a kid, Gavin was pretty foul, prone to peeping, cornering girls, lifting skirts, that kind of thing, but that was all one heard about back then. Still, the lore gave us all the creeps and whenever something new happened, we would look askance at him right before looking the other way, preferring thoughts less vile. Years passed.
One afternoon he knocked on my door. He began explaining to me the sex violations that landed him nine months in Joliet Correctional, from which he was freshly released—rehabilitated, a new man, he claimed, with a very off-putting kindness in his voice.
I never knew any of the people Gavin hurt, and aside from these encounters he barely registered in my or Vince’s life at all. He was just one of those things people bury as well as they can. Because that works for a while. One day though, as you’re going about your business, you end up tripping on a tiny little itty-bitty rock in the ground, the rock turns out to be a bone, and you can’t help it—you start digging.
Gavin had a puppy with him. He gathered it up in his arms.
“This is my new doggy,” he said, and held out a vanilla-white pup, its nose pink as a piglet’s.
“Hi, doggy.”
I remember the pup gave a yawn. Gavin dropped him; it hit the ground hard. Then they shuffled over to the next house.
*
“They’re shutting down the high school,” Vince says. He feeds his cigarette through the window slit but it flies back in, onto the backseat.
“Nice. I loved snow days.”
“Not for the weather—for the mourning, you dummy. They’re having some sort of memorial for him on Monday.”
Vince goes to swat out the burning filter with his free hand but he can’t reach. We swerve hard this time.
“Not even two feet of snow on the ground,” he says, “and it’s like twenty out. They won’t even think about closing unless it’s below zero.”
I tell him to just focus on not killing us. Keep a window cracked.
*
I love that funeral parlors are like fake living rooms. How they appear to be equal parts resort hotel lobby and sitcom set for the bereaved. The knockoff Turners and Titians proudly hung in the foyer, the bowl of Starlight Mints, the chandelier around which the staircase dovetails. The ashtrays, all at the ready, inside every desk and coffee table drawer. The raw wood aroma you get opening up the cabinets, of sawdust; the unvacuumed carpeting strangers trample with their dress shoes on, the film of spilt coffee burning on the gummy hotplate.
I love that it could almost be someone’s home, nondescript save the marquee in the drive, the brass plaque beside the doorbell. They try so hard, and yet the further one pokes around, the more abnormal it becomes—the bare cupboards, hollow clocks, empty closets, the absence of cohesion a family brings to a household, with their framed photos, dog-eared Sports Illustrated issues, their toothbrush cups by the sink and the general disorder of socks, muddy sneakers, dishes, junk mail that enlivens the places we inhabit. That there are no watercolor paintings, softball schedules, shopping lists, bright silly magnets—nothing is ever stuck to the door of the fridge.
The whole show—the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum-machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.
I love the hearse, the motorcade following behind it, and the little paper tickets you put in the windshield, and running red lights, headlights on in the daytime. The little plastic hooks by which the living hang potted flowers beside the graves, like lanterns. I love the giant register everyone must sign. I love the bad lemon tea on offer, the stale cookies in their plastic tray, how there’s never milk, only powdered sugar-free creamer. I love that it’s all a terrible party thrown midday, midweek, at a house with never enough parking, nothing at all to do, that no one can stand to be in for more than an hour. Except me.
*
The problem was little Ray had Dan’s .22 revolver pointed right up his own nose when Vince and I got back from our emergency beer run. He was in the TV room, watching Bert and Ernie, just as he’d been when we left ten minutes before. He beamed our way as we walked in and kicked off our shoes.
“Hi, Vin. Hey, Ant,” Ray said, waving hello with the pistol.
Vince froze. “Where the hell you get that? Put that down.”
Ray hugged the gun to his chest.
“That is not a toy, leave it be. I got a surprise for you.”
“A surprise?” He jumped for joy.
“Ray, stop. Listen now: please place that gun on the carpet— nicely. Right now.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, please.”
Ray took a tentative step toward us, then a step back, as he thought it over. “It’s mine. I found it.”
“Goddamn,” said Vince, and he looked at me. I set down the bag of beer.
“Ray,” I said, “what about a trade, yeah? You give me the gun, I’ll give you—these…” I dangled the car keys before him. Ray pointed the handgun at me.
“Cars are better, bud. How about it?” I said, giving them a jingle.
“I’ll even throw in this king-size Snickers,” Vin said. “That seal the deal?”
Ray’s attention reeled back to the TV, to Bert and Ernie counting sheep.
“Ray. The gun…” I said.
“Fine…”
And then the thing went off. Startled, Ray’s hands went to his ears as he started crying and ran off to his room. Vince got the