The Living End (7 page)

“What might happen in such a case, boys, is that you’d grow up with a sick sweet tooth. You wouldn’t know what to do with real candy. A Hershey’s might kill you, you could drown in a Coke.

“It’s the same with dirty old men, boys. Maybe they can’t have a relationship-do you know what a relationship is, boys?-with a person their own age, so they seek out children. Your moms are right, boys, when they tell you not to accept rides from strangers, to take their nickels or share their candy. Children are vulnerable, children. They don’t know the score. You give a dirty old man an inch he’ll take a mile.

His dick will be in your hair, boys, he’ll put your wiener in his pocket. They can’t help themselves, boys, but dirty old men do terrible things. They want to smell your tush while it’s still wet, they want to heft your ballies and blow up your nose. They want to ream and suck, touch and diddle. They want to eat your poo-poo, boys.”

He had their attention.

“Do you know why I say these things to you?”

They couldn’t guess.

“Because I’m thirty-seven years old, boys. Raise your hands if your daddies are older than me.” Nine of the twenty children raised their hands.

“See?” Quiz said, “almost half of you have pops older than I am. They’re not old. I’m not old.

“The other thing I wanted to say, boys, is that I have a good relationship with Irene. Irene is my wife.

We do it three times a week, boys. There’s nothing Irene won’t do for me, boys, and I mean nothing.” He listed the things Irene would do for him.

“Do you know why I tell you these things, boys?”

They couldn’t guess.

“To show I can have a relationship with a person my own age. To show I’m not dirty. I’m not old, I’m not dirty.

“So that when I tell you what I’m going to tell you you’ll know it isn’t just to get you to come over to the grandstand with me.”

The attack had started. Ladlehaus could hear the foot soldiers- their steps too indistinct for men on horseback-running about in the death grounds From time to time he heard what could only have been a child cry out and, once, their commander.

“Cover me, cover me, Flanoy,” the commander commanded.

“Yes, sir, I’ll cover you,” the child shouted. He heard shots of a muffled crispness, reduced by the earth in which he lay to a noise not unlike a cap pistol. He held his breath in the earth, lay still in the grids of gravity that crisscrossed his casket like wires in an electric blanket.

Horrible, he thought, horrible. Attacking a cemetery. Defending it with children. A desperate situation.

He had fought in France in the war. Captured three of the enemy. Who’d turned out to be fifteen-year-old boys. But these kids could not have been even that old. What could they be fighting about? He was disappointed in the living, disappointed in Minneapolis.

“Stop,” Ladlehaus cried.

“This is a cemetery. A man’s buried here.”

“How was the kohlrabi?” Irene asked.

“I dropped the kohlrabi during the charge on that wise guy grave.”

“Kohlrabi’s expensive.”

“You should have heard him. What a howl.”

“Regular katzenjammer, was it?”

“You think it’s right, Irene? Using kids to fight a man’s battles for him?”

“The kids weren’t hurt,” she said.

“Umn,” she said, “oh my,” she said, squeezing his dick, hooking down and kissing it, twirling him about so she could smell his tush.

“Umn. Yurn yum. What’s more important,” she asked hoarsely, her pupils dilated, “that a few kids have bad dreams, or that my hyper tense husband keel over with a stroke just because some nasty old dead man is trying to get his goat? Ooh, what have we here? I think I found the kohlrabi.”

The boys didn’t have bad dreams. They were ten years old, eleven, their ghosts domesticated, accepted, by wonder jaded. ODd on miracle, awe slaked by all unremitting nature’s coups de th6dtre, they were not blase’ so much as comfortable and at ease with the thaurnatological displacements of Ladlehaus’s magic presence. Still he insisted on coming at them with explanations, buried alive stuff, just-happened-to-be-passing-by, to-be-in-the-neighborhood constructions, glossing the stunning marvel of his high connections with death. They knew better, it was stranger to be alive than to be dead. They could read the dates on his marker. Perhaps he’d forgotten.

And forgave him. Not grudging Ladlehaus his lies as the crazy janitor had whose hypertension-they wouldn’t know this, couldn’t- was merely the obversion of his ensnarement by the real. A janitor-they wouldn’t know this-a man of nuts and bolts, of socket wrenches, oil cans, someone a plumber, someone a painter, electrician, carpenter, mechanic-trade winded, testy.

So if they dreamed it was of dirty old men, not ghosts.

“Where were you yesterday, Flanoy?” Ladlehaus asked.

“Yesterday was Sunday.”

They swarmed about his grave, lay down on the low loaf of earth as if it were a pillow. Or stretched out their legs on his marker, their heads lower than their feet. They plucked at the crowded stubble of weeds, winnowing, combing, grooming his mound.

“Does it tickle or pinch when I do this?” a boy asked and pulled a blade of grass from its sheath in Ladlehaus’s grave.

“When you do what?”

For they had come through their war games, outlasted Quiz’s supervision of their play, outlasted their own self-serving enterprises of toy terror and prop fright. (For a while they had dressed up in his death, taking turns being Ladlehaus, running out from beneath the grandstands, flapping their arms as if they waved daggers, making faces, screeching, doing all the tremolo vowel sounds of what they took to be the noise of death. It hadn’t worked.

“It’s not dark enough to be scary,” Muggins, the youngest boy said, and kicked the side of Ladlebaus’s grave.) And settled at last into a sort of intimacy-the period when they teemed about his grave, grazing it like newborn animals at some trough of breast.

They looked up at the sky, their hands behind their heads.

“What’s it like in your casket, Mr. Ladlehaus?”

“Do you sleep?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Does it smell?”

“No.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not now.”

“Is it awful when it rains?”

“What’s worse, the summer or the snow?

“Are you scared?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are there maggots in your mouth, Mr. Ladlehaus? Are there worms in your eye sockets?”

I don’t know. Who’s that? Ryan? You’re a morbid kid, Ryan.”

“Shepherd.”

“You’re morbid, Shepherd.”

“Did you ever see God?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen Jesus?”

“Jesus is God, asshole.”

“Don’t use that word, Miller.”

“He’s right, Miller. Mr. Ladlehaus: has seen God. He’s an angel. Don’t say ‘asshole’ near an angel.” The boys giggled.

“Do you know the Devil?”

“I’ve seen the damned,” Ladlehaus said softly.

“What? Speak up.”

“I’ve seen the damned.” It was curious. He was embarrassed to have come from Hell. He felt shame, as if Hell were a shabby address, something wrong-side-of-the-tracks in his history. He’d been pleased when they thought him an angel.

Quiz watched impassively from a distance.

“Be good, boys,” Ladlebaus urged passionately.

“Oh do be good.”

“He’s telling them tales,” the caretaker reported to his wife.

“You boys get away from there,” Quiz said.

“That’s hallowed ground.”

They play in cemeteries now, he thought, and tried to imagine a world where children had to play in cemeteries-death parks. (Not until he asked was he disabused of his notion that there had actually been a war. What disturbed him-it never occurred to him, as it had never occurred to the boys, that the war was for his benefit-were his feelings when he still thought there had actually been a battle-feelings of pride in the shared victory, of justification at the punishmeDt meted out to the invaders from Minneapolis. All these years dead, he thought, all those years in Hell, and still not burned out on his rooter’s interest, still glowing his fan’s supportive heart, still vulnerable his puny team spirit. All those years dead, he thought, and still human. Nothing learned, death wasted on him.) But a world where children could play in cemeteries and nuzzle at his little tit of death. He shuddered. He who could feel nothing, less tactile than glass, his flesh and bone and blood amputated, a spirit cap-side by a loose bundle of pencils, buttons, thread, nevertheless had somewhere somehow something in reserve with which to shudder, feel qualms, willies, jitter, tremor, the mind’s shakes, all its disinterested, volition less flinch. And at what?

Sociology, nothing but sociology. Who had lived in Hell and seen God and who had, it was to be supposed, a mission. Who represented final things, ultimates, whose destiny it was to fetch bottom lines.

A sentimental accomplice, an accessory gone soft. (For he’d felt nothing when the bullet sang which had dropped his pal, Ellerbee, felt nothing for the people-he’d have been a teenager then-at whose muggings he’d assisted, felt nothing presiding at the emptying of wallets, cash drawers, pockets-he had quick hands, it was his kind of work, he was good at it -and once, on a trolley commandeered by his fellows actually belly to belly with the conductor, quickly depressing the metal who sis of the terrified man’s change dispenser, lithely catching the coins in his free hand and rapidly transferring dimes to one pocket, quarters, nickels and pennies to others.) But he had not gone soft. Remorse was not his line of country, no more than sociology. A question plagued him. Not why children played in cemeteries but where the officials were who permitted it. Where, he wondered, was the man who said “Oatcakes”? Or the fellow who’d led the boys in war games? He was outraged that, exiled in earth, appearances had not been kept up. He could imagine the disorder of his grave candy wrappers, popsicle sticks, plugs of gum on his gravestone. He wanted it naked, the litter cleared. It was his fault for talking to them in the first place.

He’d dummy up.

“You! Ladlehaus!”

“Hey, Ladlehaus. The kids won’t come near you. I told them some garbage about hallowed ground.”

“Hey you, Ladlehaus, how’s your cousin?”

“That’s better. That’s the ticket. Silence from the dead. You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone.”

“God is not mocked. He is not fooled. He is not sorrowful. He is not disappointed. He is not expectant.

He is not worried. He doesn’t bold His breath. He does not hope or wish upon a star. He is not waiting till next year or contemplating changes in the lineup. He is not on the edge of His seat. He is complete as spider or bear. As stone or bench he is complete.

“It is only we who are unfinished. And God is indifferent as history. He has not abandoned a world He had never embraced or set much stock in.

” Other preachers tell you to welcome God into your hearts as if He were some new kid in the neighborhood or a fourth for Bridge. What good is such advice? He will not come. He is complete. He has better things to do with His time. He doesn’t accept invitations. He doesn’t go out. He stays home nights. His home is Heaven. Death is His neighborhood. Life is yours.

“He asks nothing of us, beloved. Not our lives, not our hearts. He would not know what to do with such gifts. He would be embarrassed by them. He does not write Thank You notes. He is not gracious. He is not polite or conventional. He has no thought for the thought that counts.

“What would the thought count for?

“He is God and there is an Iron Curtain around Him. His saints are bodyguards, Secret Service.

“Why then be good? Because He will smash us if we aren’t. Those are the rules.

“Let us pray.

“Our Father Who art in Heaven, we, your servants, humbly beseech Thee. Bless World Team Tennis in St. Paul.

“Amen.”

“Yeah yeah, sure sure, Amen,” said a voice in the ground near Ilie Nastase’s feet.

“What’s World Team Tennis?” asked the Lord on High.

“Boys? Boys? Where am I, boys?”

Quiz smiled.

“No need to whisper, Nurse. Mr. Ladlehaus is in coma. There’s reason to believe they coma dream, although I doubt they can actually hear us -particularly when they’re under as deep as this one is.”

Ladlehaus wondered.

“Is he any better today? Let me see the chart, please. Hmn. Wait a minute, did you see this? Never mind, it’s only a smudge. For a minute I thought- Hold it a moment. Look here. The way this line seems to go up. That’s the sort of thing we’re looking for.”

Ladlehaus wondered.

“No, it’s important, I’m glad you called. All right, let me see if that resident was right. By golly, I think he was. Those aren’t smudges. Did you change machines? Right. Excellent. Quite frankly I’m not prepared to say yet just what it means. It’s too early to tell, but this is evidence, this is definitely evidence.

See this trough, this spike. Pass me one of your oatcakes. This is exciting. Extremely so. Now if he can only be made to produce more readings like these, establish a pattern rather than these virtuoso performances, I think we might have real hope of going to them and- See to the IV.” please, Nurse. A man on the mend needs nourishment!”

Ladlehaus hoped.

“I wanted you to see these, Doctor,” the woman said.

I felt so silly,” she said.

“You did just fine, Irene.”

“It’s hopeless. They won’t accept my interpretation of the readings,” Quiz said in a voice as much like his own doctor’s as he could make it.

“Not? Why?”

“They say it’s only an aberration, that the electrical impulses could come from his body heat, that brain death has already taken place.”

“But that’s so unfair, Doctor.”

“She’s right,” Ladlehaus said.

“It hasn’t taken place,” he said.

“It hasn’t. Get me more IV. I hear perfectly. The nurse asked why they won’t accept the readings and you said they think it’s an aberration. It isn’t an aberration.”