the prices were higher than I remembered. I thought perhaps we ought to go over to Kmart, see if they had something in sheen green. Something we got tired of wearing, we could use to upholster a chair.
I ended up with a dark blue suit and a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. I bought black shoes, socks, and a belt. I tried the stuff on and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I looked silly. Like a tall, biped pit bull in mourning.
Leonard bought a dark green Western-cut suit, a canary-yellow shirt, and a tie striped up in orange and green and yellow. Shoes he got were black with pointy toes and zippers down the side. Kind of shoes you hoped they stopped making about the time the Dave Clark Five quit making records.
“You’re gonna bury Uncle Chester,” I said. “Not take him on a Caribbean cruise. Show up in that, he might jump out of the box and throw a blanket over you.”
“Jealousy is an ugly thing, Hap.”
“You’re right. I wish I looked like a head-on collision between Dolly Parton and Peter Max.”
We changed back into our clothes, and I paid up because I was the only one working these days, even if it was sporadically, and because Leonard never let me forget it was my fault his leg was messed up. He’d say stuff like, “You know I got this leg messed up on account of you,” then he’d pick something he wanted and I’d pay for it, because what he said was true. Wasn’t for him, my funeral would have come before Uncle Chester’s.
The services were in a little community on the outskirts of LaBorde, and after we went home and hung out awhile, we put the suits on and drove over in Leonard’s wreck with no air-conditioning.
Time we got to the Baptist church where the funeral was being held, we had sweated up good in our new suits, and the hot wind blowing on me made my hair look as if it had been combed with a bush hog. My overall appearance was of someone who had been in a fight and lost.
I got out of the car and Leonard came around and said, “You still got the fucking tag hanging on you.”
I lifted an arm and there was the tag, dangling from the suit sleeve. I felt like Minnie Pearl. Leonard got out his pocket knife and cut it off and we went inside the church.
We paraded by the open coffin, and of course, Uncle Chester hadn’t missed his chance to be guest of honor. He was one ugly sonofabitch, and I figured alive he hadn’t looked much better. He wasn’t very tall, but he was wide, and being dead a few days before they found him hadn’t helped his looks any. The mortician had only succeeded in making him look a bit like a swollen Cabbage Patch Doll.
After the eulogies and prayers and singing and people falling over the coffin and crying whether they wanted to or not, we drove out to a little cemetery in the woods and the coffin was unloaded from an ancient black hearse with a sticker on the back bumper that read BINGO FOR GOD.
Underneath a striped tent, with the hot wind blowing, we stood next to an open grave and the ceremony went on. There was a kind of thespian quality about the whole thing. The only one who seemed to be truly upset was Leonard. He wasn’t saying anything, and he’s too macho to cry in public, but I knew him. I saw the way his hands shook, the tilt of his mouth, the hooding of his eyes.
“It’s a nice enough place to get put down,” I whispered to Leonard.
“You’re dead, you’re dead,” Leonard said. “You told me that. It’s a thing takes the edge off how you feel about your surroundings.”
“Right. Fuck Uncle Chester. Let’s talk fashion. You’ll note no one else here looks like a black fag Roy Rogers but you.”
That got a smile out of him.
During the preacher’s generic marathon tribute to Uncle Chester, I spent some time looking at a pretty black woman in a short, tight black dress standing near us. She, like Leonard, was one of the few not trying out for the Academy Awards. She didn’t look particularly sad, but she was solemn. Now and then she turned and looked at Leonard. I couldn’t tell if he noticed. A heterosexual would have noticed if there was anything romantic in her attitude or not. It can’t be helped. A heterosexual dick senses a pretty woman, no matter what the cultural and social training of its owner, and it’ll always point true north. Or maybe it’s south, now that I think about it.
The preacher finished up a prayer slightly longer than the complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and signaled to lower the coffin.
A long lean guy with his hand on the device that lowers the coffin pushed the lever and the coffin started down, wobbled, righted itself. Someone in the audience let out a sob and went quiet. A woman in front of me, wearing a hat with everything on it but fresh fruit and a strand of barbed wire, shook and let out a wail and waved a hanky.
A moment later it was all over except for the grave diggers throwing dirt in the hole.
There was some hand-shaking and talking, and most of the crowd came over and spoke to Leonard and said how sorry they were, looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, suspicious because I was white, or maybe because they assumed I was Leonard’s lover. It was bad enough they had a relative or acquaintance who was queer, but shit, looked like he was fucking a white guy.
We were invited, not with great enthusiasm, to a gathering of friends and family, but Leonard passed, and the crowd faded out. The pretty woman in black came over and smiled at Leonard and shook his hand and said she was sorry.
“I’m Florida Grange. I was your uncle’s lawyer, Mr. Pine,” she said. “Guess I still am. You’re in the will. I’ll make it official if you’ll come by my office tomorrow. Here’s my card. And here’s the key to his house. You get that and some money.”
Leonard took the key and card and stood there looking stunned. I said, “Hello, Miss Grange, my name’s Hap Collins.”
“Hello,” she said, and shook my hand.
“You know my uncle well?” Leonard asked.
“No. Not really,” Florida Grange said, and she went away, and so did we.
3.
Uncle Chester’s house was in that part of LaBorde called the black section of town by some, nigger town by others, and the East Side by all the rest.
It was a run-down section that ten years ago had been in pretty good shape because it was on the edge of the white community before the white community moved farther west and the streets were abandoned here in favor of putting maintenance where the real money and power were, amongst the fat-cat honkies.
We drove down Comanche Street and bounced in some potholes deep enough a parachute would have been appropriate, and Leonard pulled up in a driveway spotted with pea gravel and several days’ worth of newspapers.
The house in front of the drive was one story, but large and formerly fine, gone to seed with peeling paint and a roof that had been cheaply repaired with tin and tar. The tin patches caught the sunlight and played hot beams over it and reflected them back against the crumbly bricks of a chimney and the limbs of a great oak that hung over one side of the roof and scratched it and gave the yard below an umbrella of dark shade. There was more tin around the bottom of the house, concealing a crawlspace.
A ten-foot, wisteria-covered post was driven in the ground on the other side of the house, and sticking out from the post were long nails, and the mouths of beer and soft drink bottles engulfed the nails, and many of the bottles looked to have been shot apart or banged apart by rocks and clubs. Glass was heaped at the bottom of the pole like discarded costume jewelry.
I’d seen a rig like that years ago in the yard of an old black carpenter. I didn’t know what it was then, and I didn’t know what it was now. All I could think to call it was a bottle tree.
Front of the long porch some hedges grew wild and ungroomed, like old-fashioned, Afro-style haircuts, and between the hedges some slanting stone steps met the graying boards of the porch, and standing on the boards were two black men and a young black boy.
Before we got out of the car, I said, “Relatives of yours?”
“Not that I recognize,” Leonard said.
We got out and walked up to the porch. The boy looked at us, but the men hardly noticed. The kid popped a
