Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

I glanced at Anne. She was drinking her coffee and watching her husband.

Chuck said, “I admired him so much. You know how, when you’re a kid, you have heroes? Well, he was my hero. My brother Roop.” He noisily stirred his coffee.

Anne came to us with a dish loaded with an exotic pink mush. “Saltfish,” Chuck said, rather pleased. “You eat it with bread. Go on. I got it this morning at Conrad’s. That’s the best place for saltfish and bake.”

While Chuck and I ate breakfast, Anne chopped up a chicken with a cleaver, making great slamming noises. I asked her what she was cooking. “Stew chicken,” she said. “I chop it like this and season it. Garlic and onion. Thyme. Chive. Fitweed.”

“Tell Hans about the noise when you put it in the caramel,” Chuck said.

Anne tittered.

“Shoowaaa!” Chuck howled. “The chicken goes, Shoowaaa!”

Their laughter filled the kitchen.

“That stew chicken, Hans?” Chuck said. “It isn’t for you, and it sure isn’t for me. It’s for the bishop.” The bishop was the minister at Anne’s church in Crown Heights. His birthday was coming up and his devotees were getting ready for a week of celebrations. “Appreciation week, they call it,” Chuck said. He snorted. “He should be doing the appreciating. Four daughters in private colleges, all paid for by his followers.”

“He’s a good guy,” Anne said firmly. “You can call him anytime, day or night. And he’ll bury anyone, even a stranger. You don’t get that at the Tabernacle. Our bishop say, It not my church, it God’s. Everybody welcome.”

“Well,” Chuck said, “that’s something I want to talk to you about. Anne? Listen to me. Are you listening? I’m going to tell you something important. Listen to me now.” “I’m listening,” Anne said. She was covering a bowl of curried rice with cling wrap. “Put that down for a moment,” Chuck said. Without hurrying, Anne placed the bowl in the refrigerator. “Yes?” she said, now moving to the sink. Chuck said, “I want to rest here. In Brooklyn. Not Trinidad, not Long Island, not Queens.” Anne did not react. “Did you hear me? In Brooklyn. A cremation, and then an interment of the ashes. Actual burial, I’m saying. No columbarium, no urn garden. I want a real headstone, rising from real turf, with an appropriate inscription. Not just ‘CHUCK RAMKISSOON, BORN 1950, DIED’ whenever—2050.” He looked at me as if he’d just had a brainstorm. “Why not? Why not die a centurion?”

Anne was rinsing dishes.

“Will you respect my wishes?” Chuck said to her.

She remained impassive. I later heard, in the course of some discussion or other, that Anne had already arranged to be buried in Trinidad with her three unmarried sisters. A plot had been bought outside San Juan, their hometown. The four women had even agreed on the outfits each would wear in her coffin. How Chuck was supposed to fit into this underground sorority was unclear.

“Anyhow, you heard me make my declaration with Hans as my witness,” Chuck said. “I’ll put it in writing, so there’ll be no confusion.”

Anne said provocatively, “The graveyard in the city all full up. It full up in Brooklyn, it full up in Queens. You want to be buried in this country, you be buried in Jersey.”

“Who told you that?” Chuck cried. “There’s space at Green-Wood Cemetery. I know this for a fact. I made inquiries.”

Anne said nothing.

“What is it? You think I should spend all eternity in Jersey?”

Anne started laughing. “I just thinking of them parrot. You and them parrot.”

I said, “Parrots?”

Chuck, smiling at his wife and shaking his head, didn’t reply immediately. “There are parrots at the cemetery,” he said. “Monk parakeets. You sometimes see them around here in the summer — small green birds. Actually, you hear them,” Chuck said. “Squawking in the trees. It’s quite unmistakable.”

I must have looked doubtful, because Chuck insisted, “There’s another colony a few blocks from here, at Brooklyn College, and another one down in Marine Park. Years, they’ve been here. Why not? You get wild turkeys in Staten Island and the Bronx. Falcons and red-tailed hawks on the Upper East Side. Raccoons in Prospect Park. I’m telling you, one day, and it won’t be long now, you’re going to have bears, beavers, wolves, inside the city limits. Remember what I said.” Chuck, wiping his mouth, added, “Anyhow, you’ll see the parrots for yourself.”

Anne said, “He don’t want to be tramping round a graveyard.”

“It’s not a graveyard,” Chuck said. “It’s a historic cemetery.”

We got up and went out for a drive.

That is, I drove and Chuck talked — incessantly, indefatigably, virtuosically. If he wasn’t talking to me he was talking on the phone. An intercontinental cast of characters passed through the old Cadillac. From Bangalore there came calls from a man named Nandavanam, who, in association with the Mr. Ramachandran I’d met at Antun’s, apparently was in the process of finalizing a million-dollar sponsorship deal with an Indian corporation. From Hillside, Queens, there was George el-Faizy, an Alexandrian Copt who had produced preliminary drawings of the arena and the rehabilitated hangars for next to no money and still drove a taxi four days a week and indeed had first met Chuck when the latter had hopped into the said taxi on Third Avenue. And, from a private jet to-ing and fro-ing between Los Angeles and London, there was Faruk Patel, the guru on whose top-secret multimillion-dollar participation the further expansion of the cricket venture depended. Even I had heard of Faruk, author of Wandering in the Light and other money-spinning multimedia mumbo jumbo about staving off death and disease by accepting our oneness with the cosmos. I couldn’t quite believe Chuck had this mogul on the line (and in fact Chuck usually spoke to Faruk’s associates); but he had, because it was Chuck Ramkissoon who’d found out that beneath the mystical Californian quackery was a cricket nut with millions of dollars to play with, and who’d tracked down Faruk in Beverly Hills and cornered him and sold him on the idea of the Cricket World Cup coming to New York City and extracted from him a letter of comfort which he proudly showed me. And then there were strictly local characters — lawyers and realtors and painters and roofers and fishmongers and rabbis and secretaries and expediters. There was an official from the Bureau for Immigrant Sports and a man at Accenture and Dr. Flavian Seem of the angel fund. He, Chuck, talked all these people into being — and, if necessary, nonbeing: when Abelsky called, which he repeatedly did, Chuck invariably ignored the call. “I’ve made this man this rich,” he once said, “and this is what I have to put up with. You know when I met him he was driving a limousine? A bum from Moldova who couldn’t wipe his own caca-hole.” If his phone, instead of buzzing, gurgled a few bars of “Für Elise,” he rarely answered, because this was Eliza’s ring tone. “Limits,” he told me. “These things must have limits. But not business. Limits in business are limitations.” He liked nothing better than to put bare feet on the dashboard and hit me with an aphorism. Or a fact. Chuck was a know-it-all on everything from South African grass varieties to industrial paints. His pedagogic streak could be gratuitous: he wouldn’t hesitate, for example, to inform me about Holland’s history of flooding, or to draw my attention to the importance of some pipeline under construction. Best of all, though, he loved to give speeches. I began to understand how he’d been able to extemporize an oration that first day we met: because he was constantly shaping monologues from his ideas and memories and fact-findings as if at any moment he might be called upon to address the joint houses of Congress. As early as June he told me of his preparations for his December presentation to the National Park Service in support of his application to build the cricket arena (“Phase Two” of his great scheme, Phase Three being the operation of the facility). The precise content was top secret. “I can’t tell you anything about it,” he said, “except that it’s going to be dynamite.” Dynamite? Clueless Chuck! He never quite believed that people would sooner not have their understanding of the world blown up, not even by Chuck Ramkissoon.