Epitaph Read online

  He pushed a dollar bill into the box.

  "God bless you," she said.

  "I hope so," he answered, but she'd run off to the car behind him and didn't hear him.

  The blocks groaned by. He'd reached a section where fast-food joints had weaseled in between the crumbling hotels. Texas Wacos, Wendys, and Big Jakes separated by red stucco, kneeling palms, and cracked neon. Limp white towels hung from serrated balconies like washed-out coats of arms. Cuban bellboys grabbed smokes outside empty lobbies.

  The natives, mostly old, moved in time to the crippled traffic, clip-clopping along in white mules, their floppy hats casting huge shadows on the pavement. There was a purposefulness to their motion that seemed completely misplaced, as if, bent and beaten, they were merely following some timeworn route, some caravan track in the sand.

  Fred's Fritos, the Crab Corner, the Dunes. The Beachcomber, Wiggles, and FleshDancers-featuring Wendy Whoppers and Ms. Nude Daytona. The traffic thinned out, his pace picked up a little. Soon Miami Beach itself was gone. Referring back to the map, he turned into a street darkened by huge grugru palms, a street saturated with the sickly sweet smell of plantain.

  Now, evidently in the residential district, one block followed another with little change. They'd built their homes in the Spanish style here; only the color of the stucco varied-from red to brown to every combination of pastel. Each house had its small flat lawn, its thick spiral- ing palm, and filigreed iron gate. But it was the overall flatness he noted, as if the heavy Florida air, swollen with moisture from the sea, had pressed everything into a pancake.

  It was quiet too. Except for the occasional bark of an unseen dog, silence permeated the very air, like the humidity, oppressive and inescapable. He flicked on the radio in an effort to pierce it, but the tinny country sounds that bled one into the other as he turned the dial this way and that seemed almost sacrilegious here-think laughter at a funeral-so he turned it back off.

  Now the neighborhood began to change. There was no sharp demarcation, no single street separating the haves from the have-nots, but rather a gradual and insidious progression of ruination. The filigreed iron gates went first, then the grugru palms, as the lawns themselves turned scraggly and spotty. It was, William thought, like driving toward ground zero, bearing witness to the general and increasing denuding of the land, inching closer and closer to that terrible point of impact.

  Which, in this case, was Magnolia Drive. No doubt about it. There was nothing further but swampland, acres of gold and green shaded by thick rippling swarms of badass insects. Magnolia Drive was several blocks long, was devoid of even a single magnolia tree, and looked very much like a repository for trash, of both the inanimate and animate kind. The houses were dilapidated things, slapped together like collages: design thrown out the window, crap piled up the walls. Old hubcaps, ragged pieces of knapsack, sheets of cardboard, all shape and manner of wood, chunks of scorched brick, and even what appeared to be swamp hay had been used in their construction. Their dirt yards were littered with the odds and ends of modern life: broken dolls, cracked china, yellowed newspapers, rusted rolls of chicken wire, crushed fenders, smashed TVs, ripped-open furniture, and half-eaten food. Nervous chickens ran amok from yard to yard pecking fiercely at the ground.

  Mr. Samuels, William thought, had apparently fallen on hard times. His lack of a phone listing, then, was probably due to lack of a phone. In this neck of the woods, having a phone would be pretty far down on the list, right below, he guessed, room fresheners.

  William pulled the car up to the first house, if you could call it that. He stopped too sharply-his head nearly hit the dashboard and he banged his knee on the steering wheel. He got out limping. It was worse than hot here; the air actually hurt. No kidding-it scalded. In addition, it was filled with all sorts of flying insects that got into his eyes and stung him. And the entire area had taken on the scent of the swamp, not to mention its purpose. Magnolia Drive was all about decay.

  He saw his first inhabitant then. An old black man, white curls covering his cheeks like frost, hobbled out of the first house and stared at him.

  "Excuse me," William said. "Could you tell me where 1320 Magnolia Drive is?"

  The black man continued to do what he'd been doing; he stared. Then, almost imperceptibly, he shrugged-just that, and no more.

  William's presence had brought others out-two barefoot black girls in dirty shifts, holding hands as if on a date. A white man with one leg, who scratched his head and looked down at the ground. A black woman who waddled out of the second house toting a baby in her arms.

  "Anyone?" William asked. "Can anyone tell me where 1320 Magnolia Drive is?"

  But Anyone couldn't.

  It wasn't, as William first thought, because they didn't like him, and it wasn't, as he then thought, because they didn't understand him, and it wasn't even, as he finally thought, because they didn't want to.

  It took him twenty minutes or so of skirting nervous chickens and nervous stares, of peeking through open doorways and broken windows, to understand that the reason they couldn't tell him where 1320 Magnolia Drive was, was because there wasn't a 1320 Magnolia Drive. It wasn't there. And, since the map clearly showed that there wasn't another Magnolia Drive in the greater Miami area, that meant it didn't exist. And neither, at least according to what little he could get out of the local inhabitants, did Mr. Samuels. They'd never heard of him.

  So, William thought. What does that mean? He didn't know. He didn't know, of course, a lot of things. What he didn't know, in fact, far outweighed what he did know, which was next to nothing.

  Follow the list-Samuels to Shankin to Timinsky-but what if the list is bogus?

  He was stuck in a swamp, literally and figuratively that's where he was stuck, the way out just as muddy as the way in. Already, he was sinking.

  Yet for all he didn't know, he did know one thing with absolute certainty. For in walking back to the car, the old black man had joined him, sidled up to him as if to talk about the weather or the Dolphins or the price of oil.

  But he wanted to talk about something else.

  "You know his bruddar?" the black man said.

  "Brother? What brother?"

  "Mista Samuels. Mista Samuels's brudda was here lookin' for him too. You know him?"

  "Yes," William said. "I think I do."

  Okay, so he did know one thing then, didn't he?

  That Jean had been there first.

  THREE

  FivE dAys bEfoRE. Ten A.M. the doors swung open and William sprang into action. Sprang being a very relative term for a man pushing eighty-shuffled into action was the way Jilly would put it. Four sweeps from right to left, four sweeps from left to right, the ripped-up OTB tickets eventually forming one big burial mound of yesterday's dreams. There were cruises to the islands in that pile, pool tables, second homes, pink Caddys, and golf trips to Myrtle Beach. No more though. Now they were just fodder, ready to be recycled into tomorrow's desperate fantasies. And William was just the man to do it.

  "You missed a spot," Jilly said, already buried in Gold's Sheet. Jilly, who'd deigned to give William the benefit of his handicapping skills now and then-which, truth be told, bore a remarkable resemblance to Gold's handicapping skills-then deigned to give William a job. Sweeping up the losing tickets three times a week for some cold, off-the-books cash. William hadn't said no.

  "Pamela's Prizes," Jilly said. "Tom's Term."

  These were either horses Jilly liked or horses he called dogs, or horses he'd never heard of. This was the way Jilly communicated-in horsese, and William, who was used to people not exactly talking to him as much as around him, kept sweeping.

  "Sammy's Sambo.

  "Lucy Lu."

  Besides, Jilly had once told him he should make like Mr. Ed.

  "Mr. Ed?" William hadn't understood.

  "Yeah. Mr. Ed never speaks unless he has something to say."

  The implication being that William had nothing worth saying, Wil
liam kept his trap shut and went about his business.

  The first regular of the day-the first regular besides him-was a neat little Italian man named Augie, who was reputed to be connected, mainly because everyone he knew seemed to have the as their middle name. As in Nickie the Nose, or Roni the Horse, or Benny the Shark. Augie always coming to OTB with the morning paper tucked under his arm, which he'd dutifully hand to William, who'd retire to a quiet corner of the room to read. This morning he doffed his cap to Jilly, commented on the weather-hot, isn't it-and put the Queens edition of the Daily News into William's grateful hands.

  And that's, more or less, how William found the obituary.

  It had become a habit of his, reading the obits, a recent habit, like falling asleep in the middle of conversations and clipping toothpaste coupons. Sooner or later, after the race results and discount ads, he'd find himself buried somewhere in the back, where beloved fathers and cherished wives lay among the crematorium ads and latest dew count. And sometimes among the cherished and devoted, he'd find his friends, or at least people he knew.

  Not that this was the reason he read them. He read them for the same reason people scan travelogues on countries they're about to visit, to get to know the territory, to become familiar with it. He was getting on, that's all, beyond getting on, and he wanted to see what the end of the road looked like.

  And whose name should pop up among the newly expired this morning but his, stuck between a local alderman and a onetime exotic dancer. Ralph Ackerman and Tushy Galore, and sitting uncomfortably between them: Jean Goldblum.

  Jean, he'd thought, now there's Jean too, and memories came traipsing into his tired old brain and put their feet up for a chat. One memory in particular, one memory in full vivid Technicolor, that he had no intention of sitting down with.

  Out buster

  Of course the memories didn't listen to him-they never did. The truth was, these sneak attacks were becoming old hat. There he'd be preparing his dinner- okay, preparing usually meant folding the aluminum foil of his TV dinner left or right-but still, and suddenly he'd be staring into Jean's pinched little face, or bothering Santini for the sports section. His oven half open and the frozen peas starting to give his thumb frostbite and Jean sitting there asking him to do him a favor, just a quick little snap-and-run at a local hump motel-if he wouldn't mind of course.

  I said scram.

  Or sometimes it would happen smack in the middle of a conversation with Mr. Brickman, who was always barging through his door asking him to go somewhere. A park, a diner, a lawn chair on the sidewalk-it didn't much matter, all with a cheeriness William found frankly irritating. After all, William had already signed his armistice with life, signed it in blood, as with an enemy who-let's face it-was sooner or later bound to win, and here was Mr. Brickman just about bursting into a chorus of "The Sunny Side of the Street." And William would tell him that he didn't want to go to the park, no thanks, not interested, only to find himself telling Rachel something instead-to leave the light on because he'd be coming home for dinner and please not to forget to walk the dog.

  This old age thing could be downright embarrassing.

  For instance: Jilly was staring at him as if he had Tourette's syndrome. Which meant William had either said something horrifying or simply looked it. Maybe he'd cried out oh no at the news, or worse yet, oh yes. He didn't think he had, but it was entirely possible.

  "Something wrong?" Jilly finally asked him, Augie turning around to stare at him too, William not used to all this attention.

  "Yes," William said. "I just remembered something I have to do."

  "Oh yeah?" Jilly again. "What's that?"

  "Yeah," Augie echoed, "what's that?"

  "A funeral," William said. "I have a funeral to go to."

  The funeral home was stuck in Flushing, which William made it to by taking the number seven bus from Astoria, to the number five bus to Roosevelt Avenue, to the number eight bus to Kissena Boulevard, then hiking it through a kung fu town of Chinese takeouts and Korean fruit stands. No easy task when you're seventy-something, and wondering exactly why you'd bothered to make the trip in the first place.

  The second he'd stepped off the number eight he'd been assaulted by a cacophony of alien sounds. Asians here, Asians there, Asians everywhere-all speaking Asian too. He might've been somewhere in China for all he knew-the most familiar thing he passed was a Chinese cleaners with a lone woman behind the counter, her head laid in her arms as if sobbing.

  William was unaware he'd left Chinatown and entered San Juan until he almost walked into a bunch of Puerto Ricans in sneakers, ankle pants, and rolled-up T-shirts who were lolling against a couple of stripped cars, radios perched on their shoulders like parrots all screaming at once.

  "Hey chief," one of them yelled when he walked by.

  William kept walking.

  "Hey chief, don't you hear me?"

  Yeah, he heard him all right.

  "Hey man, I'm talkin' to you."

  So William turned, thinking-okay, he's talking to you, answer him.

  "Yeah?"

  "Hey, you got a problem or something? You deaf?"

  "No, I'm not deaf."

  "You sure about that. You should get your ears checked out, old man. I think you're one deaf motherfucker."

  "I have to go." He did have to go. So go.

  "You don't want to talk to me? You a busy motherfucker, huh." He put down his radio, handed it over to a smirking girl who looked about fourteen but seemed more like thirty-five. "Maybe you want me to break your fuckin' head instead. You want me to do that?"

  He wore a red headband; face-to-face now he barely reached William's chin.

  "Hey man, I asked you a question. You want me to break your fuckin' head?"

  William said, "No. I don't want that."

  "You're damn right you don't want that, old man. I'll punch your fuckin' head in, motherfucker." The Puerto Rican spat at him. It landed on his left cheek, then dribbled down toward his chin.

  "Hey, I spit on him," the Puerto Rican said. "I spit on this fuckin' maricon."

  William took a fresh handkerchief out of his pocket and slowly wiped it off, wiped it off with a hand he couldn't stop from trembling.

  The Puerto Rican spat at him again, this time close to his eyes, where it burned like chlorine.

  "I'm late," William said. "I'm late for a funeral…" leaving the spit where it was. He could hear the girl laughing, the girl and all the others. A funeral, a fuckin' funeral…

  "You know man, you lucky this ain't your funeral." Laughter again.

  William turned and quickly walked away, faster and faster, the laughter like a finger pointed at his back. It wasn't until he reached the curb that he finally wiped off the spit and threw the handkerchief into the gutter. It lay there like the white flag of a dishonored army. But then, he'd surrendered a long time ago; sure he had.

  The Moses Greenberg Funeral Home was built of gray brick and decorated with donations from a few local artists. There were several lovely swastikas for instance, a Jewish star dripping blood, and a large misshapen heart that said Julio and Maria 4-ever. Trampled rhododendrons threw short brutal shadows on a ragged front lawn.

  There was a schedule board covered in cracked glass: Goldblum, J., it said, One P.M.

  When William walked through the front door, still burning from the spit, the laughter, and the fear, his fear, he felt something familiar. Ahh-death again. Death was something he was getting particularly attuned to these days; it seemed to be everywhere he looked. In the obits, sure, but everywhere else too. All he had to do was glance at the passing traffic and sooner or later he'd spot a hearse followed by a long parade of headlights. Pick up a paper at the supermarket and nine times out of ten someone you'd heard of had killed someone else you'd heard of too. It wasn't his imagination. Death was in the air. Why, he could see it in people's faces, pick it out in the middle of a crowded street, all those shrunken cheeks and wasted bodies that suddenly seeme
d to have joined the daily human traffic. He was definitely developing a nose for death. No two ways about it. Sniffing it out the way others sense guilt. Of course, they were often entwined with each other-sure they were. In his old business, one had often led to the other. And that had been Jean's gift, one of them at least, to sense guilt like a priest. It's uncanny, they used to say, how Jean could tell just by looking.

  William had asked him once how he did it. And Jean had said: "You find yourself in a terrible situation, a situation so terrible that you become like a madman, understand. A situation where you have to do everything imaginable. To survive, understand. You do that, and then you know. Understand?"

  But William hadn't understood; Jean's a little crazy, understand-there were those who used to say that too. Though there were, they'd be quick to add, mitigating circumstances. Jean had suffered a bad experience during the war-that much was known-and though none of them were one hundred percent sure what that experience was, they knew enough. They had eyes. They could see the stark blue numbers on Jean's forearm, and the tattered picture of his wife and young children, one boy, one girl, that he'd drag out on special occasions and stare at, running his fingers over the wrinkled snapshot like a man reading braille.

  Jean, it seemed, had been something of a hero during the German occupation-a Jewish weekly in Brooklyn once tried to write him up, an inspirational piece about this little French Hungarian who risked everything to help smuggle other Jews to safety, to Argentina or Brazil, somewhere, anyway, south. Jean had slammed the door on them. For whatever the whole story was, Jean wasn't going to talk about it. For him, it was a secret affliction. Like a venereal disease maybe, but with all those scars right there under your nose. Mauthausen or Auschwitz or Treblinka or whatever hell on earth Jean had been thrown into had turned him inside out, distorted him into something a little less human. Maybe it had to do with that family that no longer was, with trying to do something noble and being rewarded with a one-way ticket to despair. So they didn't ask him about it, any more than you'd stop to ask the terminally ill about the progress of their funeral arrangements. And if Jean was a little crazy, Jean was also more than a little good.