'You don't want to talk to me? You a busy motherfucker, huh.' He put down his radio, handed it over to a smirking girl who looked about fourteen but seemed more like thirty-five. 'Maybe you want me to break your fuckin' head instead. You want me to do that?'
He wore a red headband; face-to-face now he barely reached William's chin.
'Hey man, I asked you a question. You want me to break your fuckin' head?'
William said, 'No. I don't want that.'
'You're damn right you don't want that, old man. I'll punch your fuckin' head in, motherfucker.' The Puerto Rican spat at him. It landed on his left cheek, then dribbled down toward his chin.
'Hey, I spit on him,' the Puerto Rican said. 'I spit on this fuckin' maricon.'
William took a fresh handkerchief out of his pocket and slowly wiped it off, wiped it off with a hand he couldn't stop from trembling.
The Puerto Rican spat at him again, this time close to his eyes, where it burned like chlorine.
'I'm late,' William said. 'I'm late for a funeral…' leaving the spit where it was. He could hear the girl laughing, the girl and all the others. A funeral, a fuckin' funeral…
'You know man, you lucky this ain't your funeral.' Laughter again.
William turned and quickly walked away, faster and faster, the laughter like a finger pointed at his back. It wasn't until he reached the curb that he finally wiped off the spit and threw the handkerchief into the gutter. It lay there like the white flag of a dishonored army. But then, he'd surrendered a long time ago; sure he had.
The Moses Greenberg Funeral Home was built of gray brick and decorated with donations from a few local artists. There were several lovely swastikas for instance, a Jewish star dripping blood, and a large misshapen heart that said Julio and Maria 4-ever. Trampled rhododendrons threw short brutal shadows on a ragged front lawn.
There was a schedule board covered in cracked glass: Goldblum, J., it said, One P.M.
When William walked through the front door, still burning from the spit, the laughter, and the fear, his fear, he felt something familiar. Ahh-death again. Death was something he was getting particularly attuned to these days; it seemed to be everywhere he looked. In the obits, sure, but everywhere else too. All he had to do was glance at the passing traffic and sooner or later he'd spot a hearse followed by a long parade of headlights. Pick up a paper at the supermarket and nine times out of ten someone you'd heard of had killed someone else you'd heard of too. It wasn't his imagination. Death was in the air. Why, he could see it in people's faces, pick it out in the middle of a crowded street, all those shrunken cheeks and wasted bodies that suddenly seemed to have joined the daily human traffic. He was definitely developing a nose for death. No two ways about it. Sniffing it out the way others sense guilt. Of course, they were often entwined with each other-sure they were. In his old business, one had often led to the other. And that had been Jean's gift, one of them at least, to sense guilt like a priest. It's uncanny, they used to say, how Jean could tell just by looking.
William had asked him once how he did it. And Jean had said: 'You find yourself in a terrible situation, a situation so terrible that you become like a madman, understand. A situation where you have to do everything imaginable. To survive, understand. You do that, and then you know. Understand?'
But William hadn't understood; Jean's a little crazy, understand-there were those who used to say that too. Though there were, they'd be quick to add, mitigating circumstances. Jean had suffered a bad experience during the war-that much was known-and though none of them were one hundred percent sure what that experience was, they knew enough. They had eyes. They could see the stark blue numbers on Jean's forearm, and the tattered picture of his wife and young children, one boy, one girl, that he'd drag out on special occasions and stare at, running his fingers over the wrinkled snapshot like a man reading braille.
Jean, it seemed, had been something of a hero during the German occupation-a Jewish weekly in Brooklyn once tried to write him up, an inspirational piece about this little French Hungarian who risked everything to help smuggle other Jews to safety, to Argentina or Brazil, somewhere, anyway, south. Jean had slammed the door on them. For whatever the whole story was, Jean wasn't going to talk about it. For him, it was a secret affliction. Like a venereal disease maybe, but with all those scars right there under your nose. Mauthausen or Auschwitz or Treblinka or whatever hell on earth Jean had been thrown into had turned him inside out, distorted him into something a little less human. Maybe it had to do with that family that no longer was, with trying to do something noble and being rewarded with a one-way ticket to despair. So they didn't ask him about it, any more than you'd stop to ask the terminally ill about the progress of their funeral arrangements. And if Jean was a little crazy, Jean was also more than a little good.
Now, however, he was neither. A man, older than William-which these days was saying something-sat on a bent bridge chair just inside the front door. He wore a faded prayer shawl across his shoulders and an unmistakably sullen expression across his face. Well, why not. William supposed he'd be just a little sullen too if the only people he talked to all day were next of kin. Off to the right a half-covered aluminum table supported a lone bottle of Mogen David. Used cups, some crumpled, some half filled, surrounded the bottle like a stillborn litter. Maybe it was unavoidable-in the Moses Greenberg Funeral Home, everything looked like death. There were other men there-who, by the way, didn't look so hot either; one against the far wall, another two engaged in conversation, whispering to each other as if plotting something dangerous.
William was late.
'Friend or family?' the old man by the door asked him without really bothering to look up.
'Friend?' William replied, as if asking, thinking that there really ought to be a third category for these kinds of occasions, old acquaintance maybe.
'Well, you're late. The service is over.'
'Sorry.'
'You don't have to apologize to me. I just work here. And you don't have to apologize to the family, because there is none. Not here, anyway. You're it. Except for the landlord.' He nodded at the man leaning against the wall. 'Put a yarmulke on.'
William reached into a wooden bin where yarmulkes of the kind Mr. Brickman wore on the High Holy Days lay in a soft multicolored heap. He picked a black one, black for death-Jonathan Weinberg's Bar Mitzvah it said in faded gold letters on the inside-then placed it on his head, just over his bald spot, okay, more of a region these days, and walked into the parlor.
A simple closed coffin lay at the front of the room.
I'm sorry, William thought when he'd walked past the empty seats to the end of the aisle. I'm sorry it ends like this, Jean. Like this. I'm sorry the seats aren't filled for you.
And then, touched by this feeling of pity, this notion that maybe Jean had meant more to him than he'd realized, he decided to open the coffin. To say his goodbye face-to-face.
He peeled back the top section; heavy and unoiled, it opened with a wrenching screech.
It was Jean. It wasn't Jean.
That was the only way to put it. And for a brief moment, he wasn't exactly sure why. After all, the features seemed just about the same: those thick eyebrows, the hollow cheeks, the drooped lip. Of course, he was dead. No doubt about that. But it was more than that, something else entirely. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen him, walking out of the office with a single box under his arm, why hello there, Jean, and then, like that, he understood. Jean had never been defined by his looks. He'd been defined by his, well… passion. For his work, for his regrettable parade of cases. Remember? Give him a new one and he'd get all lit up with a kind of perverse expectation, the way a house cat gets when its dinner lands by a half-open window. He'd just about lick his lips, Jean would. Then it would be days, weeks, of peek-a-boo, of coming and going, of in and out and where's he gone to, with the occasional glimpse of sly exultation as the case unfolded, as it turned to red, a euphemism Jean had coined due to his peculiar habit of changing files as a case progressed. The first file white, the last red, and the irony, William was convinced, firmly intended. For white was the color of innocence, something his clients could rarely claim, and red the color of penance, something they rarely did. But if his cases weren't exactly admirable, his passion was; at the very least it made him top-shelf at what he did. It made him Jean. Death had robbed him of the only thing that made him recognizable.
His hands, delicate hands for that body, were crossed over his chest like an Indian chief who'd died in battle, the kind that Randolph Scott was always running across and warning stupid white settler number eight million and one to leave alone. It was bad juju to touch a chief on his way to the underworld. Of course, no one ever listened to him, and before you knew it, half the Apache nation was out looking for their scalps. And now William wondered if he'd been just a little stupid himself. He wasn't the only one. As he reached down and took Jean's left hand in his,
