ancestors.
The feds’ forensic team had retrieved all the information they could from the detective’s body, but the question still remained: What had killed him?
No one knew. The scientists wanted to have the burial postponed as long as possible to do their tests, especially after word filtered through to them from local law enforcement regarding the slew of similarly disposed-of bodies in the area surrounding Evelyn over the last few years. However, the pressure was on to have the service, both from the wife and from Pearce’s friends on the force.
“Shouldn’t have to keep the man on ice like that,” I heard some black-clad cop say before the service.
“Fuckin’ A, man,” said another. “Unless it’s a rape.”
“Yeah, that’s a different story,” said the other.
I slipped on my sunglasses and kept on walking. In my brown suit I stuck out like a sore thumb caked in shit.
His wife was sitting up front, weeping, and I guess his closest friends were up there too, because he really didn’t have any blood family left alive. I saw his partner, Van Buren, up there in the front row, and I pretended not to. Then there were a few rows of lawenforcement types, all wide in the shoulders, and behind them were some of the townsfolk who’d come out to pay their respects. I was mixed in with that crowd. No one back there was crying for the man, but I was, under my shades.
Off in the distance, behind some trees and shrubs and so on, was a small handful of chaps who were no doubt
The priest went on and on, talking about goodness, service, care, the Lord, and finally, ashes and dust. The wife broke down twice. The second time, they had to hold her up because they were worried she’d fall in the hole with the coffin or some such thing, injure herself and the baby in her belly.
It occurred to me that Pearce was like a father figure to me. On the one hand that was ridiculous because I was older than him and he only thought he knew me. Instead of locking me up for chronic disorderly conduct, he gave me a chance to prove I was a decent man. But on the other hand, at the age of forty, I still wouldn’t have had anything that resembled a normal life if it wasn’t for him.
His casket was closed, but I pictured him. I know that his wife helped him tie his tie every morning because he hated doing it. I think she would have insisted on being the one to do it for him one last time when they were dressing the body. I now knew that was the kind of woman she was.
Anyway, being at Wild Oaks got me thinking about my own father, roasting in hell, as he must be.
My old man fought the Nazis in the Second World War. A few years after, my father settled down with a woman named Rosemary, and then I came along, as did my brother, Jeffrey. My little brother lived only a week and a day.
My childhood was fine and dandy because my mother was kind and my father was a war hero. My grandfather, Jacob Higgins, amazed me with more stories from the Great War than I could shake my tiny fist at. Everything was aces.
My grandfather died when I was eight years old. He was ninety-nine years old, but he looked great and still had a swagger to his step like Robert Mitchum. What had finally done him in was a car accident. A head-on collision with one of those fast and fancy foreign cars that had begun to spring up on the roads, like the kind James Dean had died in. After that, the mood around my childhood home changed. The folks got a lot quieter than they were known to be. The reason, of course, was that my father had assumed the mantle of the beast.
The curse of the wolf had started with my grandfather’s father, a man who lived to be a hundred and fifty (or thereabouts), and had passed down the bloodstream, father to son, so when Jacob Higgins bit the bullet, my father became a werewolf. He knew it was coming. The curse had not been kept a secret from him like it had been with me. I had no idea that anything like this could happen outside of a Lon Chaney movie.
My father’s secret didn’t interfere with our home life too much, save for the silence and secrets I could almost taste, hanging in the air like dandelion spores, but once a month, my daddy would disappear, and I never knew where he went. He was a bus driver, but I never felt it would be good to ask why such a job required business trips on a regular basis. I think there was a part of me that believed, or at least wished, that he was a government agent, like in the Jimmy Cagney movies.
I was in high school as the whole situation in Vietnam was going down. A lot of older kids from my neighborhood were being sent back in caskets, and as a token of the nation’s appreciation for the lives of the young, the grieving parents were given folded flags. My best friend Ben’s brother got killed over there.
I had no intention of ever going to war with anybody. My concept of war was hitting someone with a piece of metal I boosted from shop class and that was about it. Wars lasted as long as it took to hold a grudge and for a teacher to turn his head.
I wasn’t politically active, which was kind of looked at as a sin by certain people, but everything that was going on in the world hardly seemed to me to be my problem. I mean, I wanted to play baseball. I’d picked up the passion for it from the television, then Little League. I was the best first baseman my high school had ever seen, and I had big dreams for myself, all of which included Doris, the greatest girl who’s ever lived. The girl of my dreams.
Whatever I did, I wanted her with me. There was no way I was going to go overseas to some godforsaken country no one had ever heard of. There was no way I wasn’t going to go pro and have Doris hanging off my arm like Marilyn Monroe, telling jokes and making the whole world wish they were me.
Doris was amazing. She was funny, smart, had silky brown hair done up like the hot wife from
I wanted to run. The prospect of being a deserter didn’t mean anything to me, even if it meant I could never play baseball in the major leagues. My dream up to that point, as far-fetched as it was, was to win the World Series—and I wanted to be a goddamn Pittsburgh Pirate doing it.
However, if denying my part in the American War Machine would destroy the possibility of living that dream, then so be it. I wanted to pack a bag, pick Doris up on my bike, and hit the road. I didn’t care, so long as I had her with me. That’s how much our life together meant to me.
I talked with my father about it. He was the man I respected most, and I was proud to be his son. We went out back of the house where we had these flowering bushes, and a couple of trees. In one of those trees hung a tire from a rope. When I was a little kid, I was always on that thing. I even read on it. The course that life was steering me toward sucked—how one can be purely happy out back of the house and then be forced to dwell in a blood- drenched war zone. It hardly seemed like this was the way the world was supposed to be. It just didn’t seem fair.
“Dad, I don’t think I can go,” I whispered.
I didn’t feel good saying such a thing to my father. He had been a soldier raised by another soldier. It would’ve been so much easier to just take off with Doris and not tell anybody. That’s what I should have done.
“I don’t want to die. Ben’s brother died, and I’m not about to end up like that.”
“You sayin’ you’re better than that dead boy?” he said.
“Of course not, but no one deserves to die over there.”
“Son,” he said, “I ain’t going to tell you what the government likes to say, because most of the time it’s bunk, but there are times in life you gotta play by other people’s rules, no matter how crazy they are, just to get by. It ain’t fair, but that’s the way it is.”
“So I should throw my life away to play by someone else’s stupid rules?”
“It may not be right, what’s happening over there, but the fact that it’s happening cannot be denied. Taking off may be what you want to do, but there would be real-world consequences you’d have to face after making the decision to run.”
“I can live without baseball,” I said bravely.
