John Lescroart - Dead Irish

The gravesite seemed different. They had put the stone up, was one thing. “Edward John Cochran, Jr.-1962- 1988.”

He wished he could somehow wipe off the last numbers, make them not have happened. Go back with his wife and kids to two weeks ago and just stop everything right there for all time.

Kneeling on the wet morning ground, he thought about the last time he’d seen Eddie alive, the disagreement they’d had. He wished it hadn’t happened, the same way he wished every tiny event of the last week hadn’t ever been, as though any small change might have prevented what was.

Anyway, the argument hadn’t been important. And it wasn’t as if father and son hadn’t gotten along in general. Sometimes Eddie got a little carried away with his brains, was all, maybe thought his dad was a little too salt-of-the-earth.

Ed didn’t know. Maybe he was a little simple. Things seemed to work for him, though. What was so tough, you had to get all worked up over them? He didn’t get it. You just did your job, you were faithful to your wife, you stuck by your friends. That was it.

Not, he knew, that there weren’t hard questions. Like Eddie’s problem with his boss. Sure, that wasn’t easy to figure out. Maybe the man was in trouble, and getting deeper. But Big Ed really believed it wasn’t Eddie’s problem. If it got too serious, Eddie could just go get another job for a couple of months before starting graduate school. There were tons of options.

All of ’em gone.

He moved back into the shade and pulled himself up to sit on a horizontal cypress branch.

He guessed he’d come up here to say a few prayers, but for some reason, they weren’t coming out very well. His mind kept jumping.

Or rather, remembering…

“What if,” Eddie had said, “what if you’d been alive in Germany in the thirties and had seen what was going on with Hitler? Would that have been your business?”

“Well, sure.”

“So where do you draw the line?”

And Ed had sat there in the trophy room surrounded by the memorabilia of his family’s life and said: “It’s a commonsense thing. You figure where it’s going to hit you.”

“So what if you weren’t Jewish and you had a good government job in the Third Reich? It wouldn’t have hit you at all?”

“Yeah, but there you’re talking evil.”

“God versus the devil, huh?”

Big Ed realized how dumb that sounded. “I guess you also have to figure out if it’s a big enough issue. If it is, you get in it.”

“How about if getting in it early might keep an issue from getting big in the first place?”

He couldn’t help smiling as he thought back on it. How’d he raised this white knight?

He had changed tacks. “What’s the matter, are you bored at home? Not enough to do?” Meaning it to be funny.

But Eddie didn’t have much of a sense of humor about his notion of right and wrong. He hadn’t actually spoken harshly to his dad, but Big Ed could tell he’d said the wrong thing. “Sometimes,” Eddie said, “there are just things you’ve got to do, even if everything in your life is rosy, or it’s inconvenient.”

“I agree with you,” he’d said, placating. “All I’m saying is you’ve got to pick your shots. You waste your ammo taking target practice, and when real shooting time comes you’re out of luck.”

That’s really what he’d said, and suddenly it brought him up short. He had really talked about guns and ammo. And then, less than a week later…

If there was a connection, he thought, between that talk and his son’s death…

His brain jumped again. What had Eddie said about his boss- Polk at Army Distributing? Something about him and his wife and the business. Was it just that they were in some kind of trouble, or was that only what Big Ed remembered?

Across the cemetery, through the trees, a black limo was pulling slowly up the hill, leading another group of cars to another hole in the ground.

No, he was sure Eddie hadn’t said what it was. Big Ed kicked at the ground, then stood up. Goddamn, he thought. I should have listened to him, not argued with him. Maybe I’d have some idea now about the why of it all.

They’d laid the sod over Eddie’s grave. It was a good job, he noticed, all but seamless. As he’d done countless other times working at the Park, he walked the sod’s edge, pressing it into its bed. He wanted the grass over this grave to grow.

Nobody home.

No surprise there.

He put his books on the table adjacent to the front door and walked back to his bedroom.

Probably out do-gooding somewhere. Making Frannie feel better by taking her to lunch or a museum or a park. Never mind it’s my last day of finals, never mind how I might feel about Eddie being gone. Never mind anything about ol’ Steven.

And Eddie was gone. He was dead. Eddie dead. Say it say it say it.

She hadn’t made the bed again. Well, that experiment had certainly worked. Sure, Mom told him it was his job, but funny, it hadn’t been Eddie’s, or Mick’s. Or if it had been, they hadn’t done it and Mom had covered. But she didn’t cover for him. Not one time. And every day he left the bed unmade, hoping she’d come in, as he’d seen her do every day with his brothers in their room. She’d cluck disapprovingly-but then make the beds.

He turned on the television. Game shows. Give me a break. He couldn’t believe all the smiling and crapola for a couple of questions that he’d known every answer to since he was about six.

He and Eddie, testing each other on dumb things, but loving it:

What island is Tokyo on?

Name the Pharaoh who believed in one god. What was that god’s name?

Who was Alben Barkley?

What kind of books did Yogi Berra read on the road?

Yeah. Well, that was over.

He punched the remote and killed the sound. Watch a game show without sound someday if you want to see what they’re really all about.

So, he thought, summer vacation!

He pulled the window blinds up and looked out onto his backyard, with its orderly flowers and its fence that he and his dad would patch for the hundredth time in the next few weeks.

Back to the bed, into the drawer there next to it. Snap the switchblade-open and shut. And there was that guy’s card. What does the dart mean?

He closed the switchblade and laid it on his stomach, then crossed hands behind his head on the pillow. You think that guy Hardy was really doing something about Eddie? What could he do? Eddie was in the ground, so what could it matter?

He blinked hard, wiping a hand over a leaking eye. Standing up abruptly, switchblade in pocket, card in pocket, he went to the window again and stared at the fence. Pop was going to have to fix it himself. That wasn’t his summer.

He looked back at the unmade bed and nodded. That told him everything he needed to know. What a joke hanging around waiting for something to change. It was all right here to see if you opened your eyes.

It might be hot now, but he wouldn’t be tonight, so he grabbed a jacket and carried it outside over his shoulder. Uncle Jim crossed his mind-maybe he ought to go and talk to him? Sometimes he said a few things that made sense. Not always, but once in a while.

But he’d already walked two blocks down to 19th, which was the opposite direction anyway, and it would be just too much trouble-one last little fling at trying to salvage what he knew couldn’t be.

Time to grow up, Stevie.

He stood at the corner of Taraval and 19th, watching the traffic line up, waiting for the light, southbound. He stuck out his thumb.

ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL day. This was getting weird, Hardy thought as he opened the window in his bedroom to let in the fragrant air.