James Siegel - Epitaph

He heard the beep of the Dial-A-Cab just as he was leaving his room. Mr. Leonati opened his door and peered out at him.

"Off again?" he whispered.

"Just for an hour."

"It's raining," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Where's your umbrella?"

Good question. Where was his umbrella? Better yet, did he actually have an umbrella, or did he just used to have one but not any longer?

"Take mine," Mr. Leonati said, ever generous with his suitcases, travel tips, and now umbrellas. "Five bucks from a guy on the corner."

"Thanks."

When William finally arrived downstairs, then finally opened and closed his five-dollar umbrella, and finally crawled into the backseat of the taxi, it looked very much like William was finally going to become the victim of urban angst. One of those unfortunate people who happen to get on the nerves or get on the bad side of or just get in the way of a seriously pissed-off member of a service industry. The taxi driver was upset with him, with him or with his day or his job or with all of the above. He glared at William and cursed at him in an unfamiliar language, Turkish maybe or Russian or Romanian-something, anyway, that was Greek to him. You couldn't mistake the tone though: The tone said if I had a gun I would shoot you with it. It made William wonder if they put those bulletproof dividers in taxis to protect the drivers from the passengers or vice versa. He was glad, anyway, that it was there.

He told him the address, which seemed to calm him down a little, or at least shut him up. The rain swept across the windshield like runoff from a flood, bubbling up against the back window like seltzer. The cab didn't so much as drive its way there as slosh its way there, through knee-high puddles black as oil. And the humidity seemed to have followed him from Florida; it felt like he was pasted to the seat.

"Cherry Avenue," the driver said after fifteen minutes or so, or actually Cherkavy or Sherrynue or something anyway that sounded enough like Cherry Avenue for William to think that it actually was. William paid him, making sure to leave a healthy tip, so that he might stay that way too. He got out.

Right into a puddle. It was up to his ankles and surprisingly cold. He dodged the cab's ensuing wake, for that was the only word to describe it, and opened up Mr. Leonati's umbrella again.

Ten-thirty-two Cherry Avenue was at the end of the block. It was too dark to make out much of it, but the address was clearly decipherable on the tin mailbox by the garden gate.

William walked into the garden-arborvitaes and aza- leas-and up to the front door. He knocked.

"Come in," he heard Mr. Shankin say.

William opened the door onto pitch blackness.

"Let me turn the light on," Mr. Shankin said. "Come on in."

William stepped in, and then remembered, just a bit embarrassed now, that he'd forgotten to close Mr. Leonati's umbrella. Which, as it turned out, might have been bad manners but wasn't too bad a thing. After all, according to those who would later piece it together, it saved his life.

Someone had been walking their dog, a gray Chihuahua named Mitzi, extremely fussy about where it deposited its Chihuahua-sized excrement. It liked to deposit it after ten, and it liked to deposit it on Cherry Avenue-just about where the last house stood, because its owner let Mitzi do it on the lawn there. No one ever complained because no one lived in that house anymore. Because of the fire. Which had gutted its insides and left a hole about thirty feet deep.

Which is why, when the owner of the gray Chihuahua saw William walk in the front door, she thought that man must be lost or that man must be mistaken or just that man must be crazy. And went off to investigate. Which, like the open umbrella, was a good thing-for that too helped save William's life.

The umbrella first-five dollars off some guy on the corner-but in its own fashion, sturdy enough. Which, as it turned out, it had to be.

For when William took his second step into the house, he thought, for the briefest moment, that he was stepping onto the softest carpet. Carpet soft as air, which unfortunately, it was. He fell-just like in those dreams of falling, where it seems to take forever to reach the bottom, as if you're suspended by parachutes. In this case he was suspended by Mr. Leonati's five-dollar umbrella, which, half closed when he stepped into air, sprouted into full flower a quarter into his descent and helped, ever so slightly, but ever so critically, to deaden his fall. He landed with a thud on a pile of mud and lumber. And mercifully, blacked out.

And if it wasn't for the owner of Mitzi the Chihuahua, who arrived at the door about a minute later, he no doubt would have stayed that way. Permanently. She, of course, couldn't see anything at first. But she'd seen him go in and she hadn't seen him come out, which meant there was only one place he could've gone: down. She left, yapping Chihuahua in tow, to find, one: flashlight. And, two: husband. Which, by the way, allowed the inhospitable Mr. Shankin to leave unnoticed. That, however, was figured out later when William was bandaged up and conscious. For the moment, he was neither.

The owner of the yapping Mitzi-whose toilet routine was in the process of being royally screwed up and was letting everybody but everybody know it-returned not only with flashlight and husband, but husband's friend as well, both of whom thought she was crazy and both of whom said so. But when she shone her flashlight into the pit, revealing the what-must-have-been-ghastly sight, they apologized, sort of, which means they stopped calling her crazy bitch and starting calling the fire department.

It took six firemen to get him out, two to lower themselves down into the hole attached to safety lines, two to pull him out-tightly strapped to a canvas stretcher- and two to complain about it. About the heat in there, about the rain out there, about the spaced-out geezer down there. All in all, they would have rather been fighting fires. Anyway, William slowly surfaced, like the disappeared person in a magic act come back to the stage, still, by the way, mercifully unconscious.

Mercifully, because the fall had broken two ribs, one navicular bone, and one toe, not to mention given him a nasty bruise on the head. This they ascertained at Booth Memorial Hospital after a half a dozen X rays. Which is just about where he woke up. And screamed. They quickly shot him with painkiller and back he went, back to dreamland.

They never took a police report. He told them-the doctors and admitting administrators-that he'd gotten the wrong house, that's all; he'd gotten confused, entered the wrong house, and paid for it. Honest. One look at the birth date on his out-of-date driver's license and they had no trouble believing him. They asked him a lot of questions having to do with his memory and a few more about Farmer Brown having two dozen eggs and needing to give half a dozen to one neighbor and two or four or a dozen more to his other. Farmer Brown was one generous farmer, William thought. At the rate he was giving out eggs, he'd be on a federal subsidy program in no time. Perhaps if he, William, didn't have Alzheimer's, Farmer Brown did. Sooner or later they were going to find him sleeping with his cattle. Or just walking into the wrong farmhouse in the middle of the night and knocking himself unconscious.

The question, the real question here, the question they should have been asking if they'd known enough to ask it, was why William was lying. That was an interesting one, absolutely. After all, he could have told them the literal truth, that he was in the middle of an investigation and that he was just trying to get to the bottom of things-ha, ha. Or he could have told them a half-truth, or maybe a quarter or sixteenth-which would have merely mentioned a particular or two maybe: phone call, taxi, and free fall. But he didn't. Maybe he didn't because they'd really think he was crazy then-who's the old guy think he is, Mickey Spillane? Or maybe he didn't because he really didn't have that much to tell anyway. Much that made any sense at least. Or maybe he didn't because he was determined to finish it just the way he'd started it. By himself. Those were good reasons, each and every one of them. Sure they were. They just didn't happen to be the right reasons. The actual reason he hadn't told them the truth had nothing to do with finishing what he'd started, because it had everything to do with his recent decision to not finish at all. His very recent decision. So recent, in fact, he'd barely had time to tell himself. Himself was pleased though. The road had been exhilarating, at the very least interesting, but he was getting off. In fact, there was the exit sign straight up ahead.