river rat: Edgedweller, a preview, part III. So, this is the conclusion of the tenth chapter... There are six more chapters that need tweaking, but the book is basically written. Thank you for your patience and encouragement. Oh, and, wish me luck.
Edgedweller, Chapter 10, Bury me, conclusion.
By the end of the day all the arrangements had been made for cremation and the urn was ready, sitting in the back seat of my truck. It had heft, felt like it looked: permanent. In the kitchen the urn looked like it was made to sit in a place of prominence, like if I were to keep it, to keep him in it, I'd have to make a special nook--an altar--for it to sit.
With that behind me, with something to carry his remains in hand, I found the courage to return the calls of the financial agency that had been hounding me since two days after Garth died. The messages repeated that he'd taken out a policy to cover his debts, and now that he was dead and the due date for his first payment on the consolidation loan he'd taken out had come and gone, they needed a death certificate. The first week of daily messages were soft pedaled, kind, compassionate even. After a week though, the tone leaned more toward the mad demands of a pitbull collection agency.
"All I have is a preliminary death certificate," I tried to sound more distraught than I was feeling at the moment, hoping for some remaining compassion.
"The final one hasn't made it to me and I don't know when it will come." I lied.
"Well..." the person on the phone was flustered and rummaged through some papers, unfamiliar with procedure. At one point he put his hand half over the mouthpiece and asked another in his office for advice. Muffled, I heard, "will a temporary death certificate do?" Even more distant, the reply was "we'll put it in the file-as long as it doesn't say suicide, let the main office worry about it."
"Mr. Sheaffer," he asked with his hand still half covering the phone, clearing his throat, "does it list suicide as cause of death?"
It was surprising, being asked that question a day after finding out it really was a suicide, still not wanting anything to do with the truth, not even having considered it as an option for truth.
"It says: Undetermined," I told him. That was the truth, I thought, the temporary did say it was undetermined.
"Good, good." He sounded relieved. "I mean, of course it would, that's not a way someone commits suicide is it?"
"You wouldn't think so, would you?" The question was rhetorical, but I answered it anyway.
"Of course, not," he trailed off, embarrassed. "Since it's a recent issue of the policy we have to make that clear."
"How recent an issue of a policy and what kind of policy was it exactly?" I asked, feeling heat in my stomach, not wanting to know what the answer was, not really.
"Hmmm, let's see, ummmm..." more paper rustling, a drawer opened and closed. "Issue date: November 31, 1999, a day before he died."
Pause.
"Isn't that some luck," he finished.
"Luck?" Was this guy not getting that the person we were discussing was my brother and he was dead?
"I'm sorry," he gagged the apology. "I only mean that it's lucky that by taking that policy out, when he did, he had all his bills paid upon his death."
"Oh, yeah." I sighed. The assistant, trying to be helpful, had no idea how much meaning, how much sadness, was held in the air that left my lungs.
"Yeah, that's some kind of luck."
The car needed moving, Garth's car. His blue LTD needed to be towed or driven from the parking space blocking the front of the trailer, where the tongue, the tow away hook-up is welded to the frame. I knew I needed to move it and was hoping to put it off another week, but Karyn called, and begged me to help her out.
"Nate, I'm so sorry about Garth." She sounded like she was crying a forced cry, something for my benefit, something hollow. A lighter sparked, and the sound of her lighting a cigarette came over the phone, maybe a joint.
"I'm sorry you lost your home, Karyn." It seemed more appropriate that she would receive an apology, not me.
"I know you think I did it, but Jesus," she exclaimed, before I could say a word about what Garth said. "But he had gas poured down his throat, while he was awake." She drew in hard on the smoke, like she was holding her breath, talking a stoner's talk.
Karyn refered to one of the details the detective also gave me, that the coroner could tell Garth was awake when the gas entered his throat, his lungs. He couldn't have had gas in his throat and lungs without being awake; the fire marshal said it was one of the ways we can be sure he doused himself. Sleeping or unconscious victims don't draw vapor in so deeply.
"I didn't do it." She exhaled. She was getting high while she talked to me.
"I believe you, Karyn." I didn't know if that was true or not.
Part of me wanted to believe that she definitely killed him, that he wasn't so fucked up that he'd do that to himself, set himself on fire-kill the dog and cats. Another part of me wanted to believe that she didn't do it, that people don't just set other people, former lovers especially, on fire.
"Well," she sighed, "the landlord is on my case to get the trailer out of there and they can't move it until Garth's car is moved." Right to business, I thought. The lighter sparked again and she pulled hard on whatever she was smoking.
"The cops told me you have the keys..."
"I'll get over there tonight and haul it away," I cut her off mid-sentence-it felt like Karyn was giving me a direct order-like the sorrow and grieving were over for her and it was time to move on. Good for her, I thought.
Bitch. I thought that, too.
"If the car runs, I'll have it out of there before it gets dark," I added and hung up.
A neighbor gave me a ride to the trailer park where Garth's car sat a silent witness to the scene of his death. His keychain with the big, gold "G" was heavy in my hand. I opened his trunk first after peering into the passenger side window, thinking maybe, just maybe in the car somewhere I'd find a note from him, a goodbye. His trunk was slam full of compact discs. The hundreds that lay melted in the room where he died must've been his current rotation of tunes, not the full compliment of his collection. Days later, the count would end up at three hundred twenty eight discs in all-roughly half what his collection was before we closed the neon shop, before he turned them into a Dali sculpture. It's not clear to me whether the discs in his car were a gift to me or if his trunk was acting as overflow storage from the trailer, or if he felt the locked trunk was the safest place for his precious music collection. In the last hour before sunset I stood alone at the trunk pulling out every liner note page of every jewel case, praying that a slip of paper would fall out explaining the whole reason for killing himself, my goodbye-anything. When winter light gave way to dark, I hopped in the driver's seat, adjusted it, turned the ignition over and pulled out of the park. Turning the wheel, a gritty crunch reminded me of his accident, hitting a deer a few days before he killed himself. I let the big blue car's hood drag me up and over one of the five gallon drums of sand and cigarette butts holding a street sign, crushing the marker as I left.
It was difficult, driving in his car, remembering how he came to own it, and that his hands were the last to touch the steering wheel before mine, the last to turn on the stereo. When the neon shop closed I gave Garth ownership of a life insurance policy-a whole life policy with a growing forty-five hundred dollar cash surrender value-his only retirement. Instead of continuing the payments and building a respectable nest egg, he cashed in the policy and bought the 1974 powder blue hard top LTD. He considered the policy "fun money", something he didn't expect, a bonus party cache, and more than enough reason to junk his Mark IV van with its burned out motor and broken springs. Driving his car, it was also difficult to not run through the list of poor vehicular purchases in his life. The Gran Torino with rattlesnake skin vinyl accent stripes, a '78 Buick Century whose window gaskets he replaced with gobs of clear silicon, the Mark IV party van, a rusted out 280Z that consumed alternators every other tank full of gas-all cars or trucks or vans bought third hand, most of them ready for the scrap yard a month after he drove them off the lot. Like all the cars that came before it, the LTD had a finger drawn gunner's bull's-eye on the inside of the windshield , smeared in the greasy film of pot and cigarette smoke that coated everything inside the car. When Garth honked the horn, imaginary gunfire shot out from the hood, fantasy twin automatic rifles, riddling the cars of inconsiderate drivers wherever he encountered them. I hit the horn and turned my head towards the road, trying to raise an eyebrow the way he used to when he "fired" the guns. It wasn't the same. At home I sorted the pile of receipts and refuse from the passenger seat, setting the important scraps aside to combine with the box of papers Detective Richards handed me the day before and making a pile of the rotting food. There were more than a dozen insufficient funds notices from two banks, each charging twenty-five dollars per returned check: seven hundred, twenty-five dollar's worth in all. Under the driver's seat, tucked into the fabric, as if hidden, an envelope from the insurance and credit agency bulged with loan closing documents. His signature on the bottom line, dated November 31, 1999, was beautiful. I studied every curve, looking for a clue, some signal that the person signing the document-the same person who knew he was about to kill himself-might have given, forewarning a leap into such darkness. His penmanship was perfect, textbook lovely and scribed the same as those I would later match up to all the canceled paychecks retrieved from payroll records at the shop, turning the signatures into a collage. Each "G" standing the same height as the last, and the next.
The stale smell of cigarettes and the funk of rotting, desiccated fast food offal couldn't drive me from the car. I sat behind the wheel, listening to the cd queued up in his stereo, Robin Trower's Bridge of Sighs. The disc player was set to repeat on the title track, a wailing guitar piece that causes me to smell the same smells of that evening whether I hear it in an elevator or on my own stereo. I closed my eyes and breathed the last of him in.
"tap, tap, tap..."
I startled. At the window my wife had her face pressed to the glass, mouthing "are you okay?" in the dark. She'd been there five minutes, looking through the glass wondering if maybe I'd killed myself in his car once I got down to looking through it. Like his suicide was contagious. I'd left the car running for the heater and the music and fallen asleep. It was two a.m.
"Your father called." I rolled down the window to hear her. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," I rubbed my eyes, straightened a kink in my neck. "What's he want?"
"They're having a service," she said, waiting for my reaction. Her breath was a fog around her head. She shivered in the cold and dark, waiting for me to react.
"I got an urn." I told her.
"I saw." I left the urn standing proud in the middle of the kitchen island earlier in the day. "What are you gonna' do about the service?"
"I guess we'll have one," I grunted. "If that's what Dad needs, we'll do it."
Dad did need one, I knew that. His generation wasn't enamored of the modern cremation burial, especially since he worked digging full size graves for years, and with the gruesome, disfiguring nature of Garth's death, some token service would go a long way to healing his sense of loss.
"Come inside."
"As soon as I get these last few papers up from the floor," I told her, motioning to the dark seat next to me.
Truth was, the junk and the papers and the compact discs had been gathered and sorted hours ago, the rotten food stuffed in a plastic store bag like the ones decorating his old neighborhood. The last three hours I'd spent listening to the cd player, over and over again, crying off and on, playing the last thing Garth listened to in his car before he killed himself, before he screamed one last time, "bury me."
