Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

The black kids on the garbage truck say something sassy to the Continentals that makes the boys crack up and swing outward on their handgrips like amazing acrobats. Neither of them is fazed when one irregular points a musket at them and simulates a volley, though it makes the soldiers laugh as they disappear around the corner.

“You know what Ernie’s putting on his gravestone?” Lloyd’s come to stand beside me, Old Spice gunk a halo around him. He has a wheeze deep down in his chest, and the coarse black follicles around the helix of his left ear are the same as in his nose. Lloyd is a man not much made in America now, though once there were plenty: men without preconditions or sharp angles the world has to contend with, men who go to work, entertain important, unsensational duties, get home on time, mix a hefty brown drink after six, enjoy the company of the Mrs. till ten, catch the early news, then trudge off to bed and blissful sleep. I don’t usually like being around men my age — since they always make me feel old — but Lloyd’s the exception. I like him immensely, with his somber, pensive, throwback visage of times and shaving lotions of yore. He is good value — earnest, sympathetic, solid to the bone and not overcomplicated — just the way you’d hope your undertaker would be. Tom Benivalle, in his secret best sense of himself, is Lloyd, which is what I found likable about him. He’s aware of who he pretends to be. Though Benivalle’s the modern version, with angles and twitchy cell-phone impatience that things might not turn out right. All of it in an Italian pasta box.

“What’s that?” I say to Lloyd about Ernie’s gravestone. Bud has wandered up the funeral home steps and is just entering the front door. Snow’s falling harder now, though it won’t last. My Philadelphia early-bird news channel didn’t even mention snow when I woke at six.

“He’s putting He suffered fools cheerfully. ” Lloyd’s pale blue lantern-jaw face rearranges itself from somber to happy.

I look at Lloyd again but, due to the difference in our heights, am forced — again — to look right up his hairy spelunkle of a left nostril. “That’s great.”

Scooter Lewis, in the Expedition, has let the New Jersey Waste truck rumble past and begins negotiating a respectful turn onto Willow. He has another serious game face on. No winks or smiles or eye rolls. The garbage truck boys stare back at the hearse mistrustfully.

“Ernie’d have liked having a battle in the middle of his funeral, don’t you think, Frank? An un-funeral.” Ernie liked to put un in front of words to make fun of them. Un-drunk. Un-vacation. Un-rich. “It was at a time when I was still un-rich.” When he said it, we all said it. Un-fuck. Un-Jersey.

“I’m surprised everyone doesn’t ask for a battle,” I say. “Or at least a skirmish.” I’ve never discussed “arrangements” with Lloyd, but perhaps I should, since I have a deadly disease.

“I wouldn’t stay in business long if they did.” Lloyd exhales a breath he seems to have been holding in for some time. Lloyd has seen Ernie in the last hour, dead as a posthole digger, but seems to be none the worse for it.

“What business would you be in, Lloyd, if you weren’t in the dead-person business?”

“Oh, lord.” He’s watching the Expedition bearing our friend come to a stop at Constitution, red blinker flashing a left turn. Scooter, in the driver’s seat, cranes his neck both directions, then eases out and silently disappears toward the cemetery. Lloyd is satisfied. “I’ve sure thought about it, Frank. Hazeltine”—Lloyd’s well-upholstered wife, named for God only knows what tribe of abject Pennsylvania Kallikaks—“would like me to sell it out. To some chain. Quit livin’ in a funeral home. Her family are all potato farmers in PA. They don’t get this here. Kids’re in Nevada.”

One of Lloyd’s three is my son Paul’s age — twenty-seven — and, unlike my son, who has a career in the greeting-card industry, is a computer wizard who started his own mail-order business selling office furniture made from recycled organic food products and now owns six vintage Porsches and an airplane.

Lloyd frowns at the thought of Pennsylvania potatoes and retirement. “But I don’t know.”

“Is it the smell of the embalming fluid or the sob of the crowd, you think, Lloyd?” Lloyd doesn’t answer, though he has a good sense of humor and I know is letting these words silently amuse him. It is his gift. There’s no use having a somber day cloud everything.

“So what’s the plan for Thanksgiving, Frank? The family? The works?” Lloyd’s oblivious to what my “family” entails, except “those two kids.” I’ve, after all, been gone eight years. Lloyd’s likely picturing his own brood: Hazeltine, Hedrick, Lloyd, Jr., and Kitty — the funeral-directing Mangums of Haddam. “You’re living where right now?” (As if I was a Bedouin.)

“Sea-Clift, Lloyd.” I smile to let him know it’s a positive change and he’s asked me about it before. “Over on the Shore.”

“Yep, I get it. That’s nice. Real nice, over there.”

We both turn to a storm door closing, a cough, a footfall. Bud’s coming down the steps, walking a little gimpy, as if he’s worried about slipping. The snow’s sticking but no longer falling.

“Looks like you got some more business in there, Lloyd. The Van Tuyll girl. And who’s that old party?” Bud resettles his dick under his London Fog, which is why he was walking bowlegged. He went in for a piss, which is what I’d like to do, but not in there.

“Harvey Effing’s mother,” Lloyd says reluctantly. “She was ninety-four.”

“Oh my God,” Bud says. He’s been nosing around the other viewing rooms after his leak and without even taking off his Irish hat, having a whiff of different deaths. It’s made him giddy. “‘Paging Mr. Effing. Call for Mr. Effing. Effing party of two.’ We used to play that on Harvey up at the Princeton Club.” Bud the clubman is pleased by this memory. He’s done with the matter of noises from Ernie’s innards and their possible cosmic significance. We’re just three men out on the snowy front walk again, waiting for permission to disengage. To remain longer threatens divulgences, confidences, the connection of dots in no need of connecting. The job description for mourner is simply to stay on message.

I’m, however, hungry as a leopard and realize I’m standing with my mouth partway open in anticipation of food, just the way a leopard would. Having to piss a lot makes me not drink much, which makes me forget to eat. Though it’s also because I have no more words I want to speak.

“How’s the realty business, Frank?” Bud says insincerely.

“It’s great, Bud. How’s lamps?” I close my yap and try to smile.

“Couldn’t be brighter. But let me ask you something, Frank.” Bud pushes his little cold hands officiously down in his coat pockets and spaces his saddle oxfords wider apart and sways back like a racetrack tout.

The grassy ground is already turning bare again as the snow vanishes. It could easily begin to rain. I’m not sure I don’t detect the pre-auditory rumble of thunder. “I hope it’s simple, Bud.” I’m not in the mood for complexity. Or candor. Or honesty. Or anything, including jokes.

“It’s something I started asking people when I’m selling them a lamp, you know?” Bud beetles his brow in a look appropriate to philosophical inquiry.

I cast a wary eye Lloyd’s way. He’s looking at his brogans again, jeweled with dampness. I’m sure he’s already taken this quiz.

“What’ve you learned in the realty business, Frank? In how many years now?”

“I don’t remember.”