fortune in inconspicuous places.
Then I looked directly at the cardboard carton for the first time. Firmly taped and tied. Ten inches square, twelve inches tall. All the remains of the physical Gretel.It hefted at about the weight of a sizable cantaloupe.
I sat at the little pull-down writing desk again, and I wrote a letter to Meyer:
I will take this up to the office and give it to Linda and tell her to hold it a few days and then give it to you. By then I will have added the keys to this boat, and to the Munequita and to the car. I will have emptied out the perishables and turned off the compressors and arranged for disconnect on the phone. I am enclosing five hundred in cash I better make that eight hundred to take care of expenses around here. I will have put the phone on temporary disconnect and arranged for my mail to come to you. Today is December 18th. If I am going to be able to make it back here, I will get word to you somehow on or before June 18th. If you don't hear by then, everything here belongs to you. Franlc Payne has a will on file to that effect, witnessed and all. I don't really know what is mak
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John. MacDonald ing me act the way I am acting.. You would know more about that than I, probably. I have this very strong feeling that I am never coming back here, that this part of my life is ending, or that all of my life is ending. I have been bad company a lot of the time the past few years, going sour somehow. Gretel was the cure for that. I came back to life, but not for long. And this is what the stock market guys call a lower low. I just feel futile and ridiculous. You are the best friend I have ever had. Take care of yourself. Make a point of *. If I don't come back, what you should do is move aboard the Flush, peddle your crock boat and the Munequita and the Rolls, and throw a party they will never never forget around here.
I put it in a heavy brown envelope and left it unsealed. It was dark. I tools a walk around my weather decks. The night smelled like diesel fuel. A nearby drunk was singing 'Jingle Bells,' never getting past the sleigh, starting again and again and again. The boulevard hummed and rustled with cars, and there was no sound at all from the sea. A woman laughed, a jet went over, and I went back inside. Somebody working his way into his slip
The Green Ripper made a small wake, and the Flush shifted, sighed, and settled back into stillness.
On the following Saturday morning I found the same man at the Petaluma cemetery, the one Gretel and I had dealt with when we had flown out with John Tuckerman's ashes. He was cultivating and reseeding two parallel curving scars in the soft green turf. He was a broad muscular old man with a bald head and thick black eyebrows. He wore sneakers and crisp khakis. He dropped the tool, dusted his hands, and tilted his head to one side as he looked up at me.
'weren't you here way last spring? With the Tuckerman girl?'
'With Gretel Howard. Her married name.'
'What you got there?'
'QVell... she died. Gretel died. This is her ashes.'
He mopped his face and turned slightly away and looked upward into a tree. He sighed. 'Sorry to hear it. Even if it was a sad time for her, bringing her brother's ashes here, it wasn't hard to see you and she were real close, real happy with each other.'
'Yes, we were.'
'Too bad. Nice size on that girl. Great smile. What did she die from? Automobile? That is what takes most of the young ones.'
'Some kind of flu with a high fever and kidney failure.'
'I tell people it's the bugs striking back. Those laboratories go after the bugs with powerful new poisons and it stands to reason that the ones that live through it, they get twice and nasty as they ever were before. Of course, John and Gretel's folks, they died premature, but it wasn't sickness. I suppose you want her in the family plot. Dumb-ass question. You wouldn't be here if you didn't.'
'Can we go right ahead with it?'
'Don't you remember how it was before? There's got to be the permit, and they've got to have vital statistics for the records, and there's the fee.'
'The office is closed.'
'A know. They used to stay open Saturday morning, but not lately.'
'Eve got a copy of the death certificate here, and I've got her birth certificate, marriage certificate, and final decree of divorce. Here, you can have them.'
He tools them and then tried to give them back to me, saying, 'I don't have anything to do with the office part.'
'And if the permit hasn't gone up since last time, here's the fifty dollars.'
He hesitated and finally took it. '] guess we could do it now and I could give them this stuff Monday. But don't you want any words said? She said the words for her brother.'
The Green Ripper
'As I will for her.'
The Tuckerman plot was in that part of the cemetery where the stones were flush with the ground which, as he had mentioned when I had seen him before, made mowing a lot easier. While he went to get the post-hole digger from his shed, I opened the carton. The urn was shinier than I had expected it to be, and more ornate. It looked like a large gold goblet with a lid.
She had owned a small worn book of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. She had read two of them over her brother's grave. She had marked the ones she liked best. There were three short ones I wanted to read.
I could just make out the place where the old man had dug the hole before, for John Tuckerman's urn. He chose a new spot and asked me if it was all right. I approved of it and asked him if I could dig.
'leave the dirt close and neat,' he said.
He watched me as I chunlred the tool down, lifting the bite of earth in the blades, setting it aside each time, close and neat. Once it was down over a foot, it began to get me in the small of the back. It is an awkward posture, an awkward way to lift
When it was deep enough, he stopped me. I lifted the urn out of the box and, kneeling, lowered it to the bottom of the hole. I stood up then and read the first two poems, the longer ones. My voice had a harsh and meaningless sound in the stillness, like somebody sawing a board. I said the words I saw on the page without comprehending their meaning. Then I read the one she had read to her dead brother, called 'Parting.'
'My life closed twice before its close It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me
'So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And an we need of hell.'
I bent and dropped the faded blue book down the hole, and then, kneeling, using both hands, I cupped up the dirt and filled the hole and tamped it down, replaced the circle of turf I had cut with the digger, and with the edge of my hand brushed away the loose dirt into the grass roots.
'No marker for her either?' he asked.
'I don't think so. Neither of them had children to come and look for the place.' The oblong of marble, level with the earth, reading TUCKERMAN, was enough.
'Those words were line the ones she read that time. Is that some kind of one of these new religions?'
`'Sort of.'
The Green Ripper
'I thought so. There's a lot of them these days. I guess having one is better than having none, but it makes you wonder.' He looked down toward the office and the road. 'Where'd you park?'
'I walked out from the bus station.'
'Where are you going? Back to Florida?'
'I haven't decided.'
'This town isn't as bad as some. If you need work, maybe I can think of somebody you could go ask. You look sort of down on your luck, mister.'
'Thanks. If I come back this way, I'll look you up.'
When I looked back from the road he was still watching me. I waved. He waved and turned away, back to his work fixing the scars where somebody had torn up the turf doing funny stunts in an autos mobile. I dug my duffel bag out of the bushes where I had hidden it and shouldered it with the wide strap over my left shoulder, the bag bumping against my right hip. My poncho was strapped to the duffel bag. I wore work shoes, dark-green twill trousers, a faded old khaki shirt, a brown felt hat, a gray cardigan sweater. I had sandy stubble on my jaws and neck. Before leaving Florida, I'd had my hair clipped down to a Marine basic cut, which could have been a prison cut. I carried in my shirt pocket, for the right occasion, a pair of glasses with gold- colored rims, hardly any correction in the lenses, and one bow fixed with black electrician's tape. I wanted to attract a second look from the av erage cop, but without stirring enough curiosity for him to want to check me out. But if he did check me out, I had some credentials. I had an expired Florida driver's license with my picture on it, and I had a fragile tattered copy of army discharge papers, and a social security card sandwiched in plastic. They were wrapped in a plastic pouch and were in the compartment in the end of the duffel bag. They all said I was Thomas J. McGraw, address General Delivery, Osprey, Florida, occupation commercial fisherman.
'~Well, officer, it was like this. My old lady died and I sold off our stuff and the trailer, and I thought I'd come out here and poke around and see if I could locate our daughter Kathy. She took off six years ago when she was fourteen, and we heard from her two years ago, some postcards from San Francisco, and Petaluma and Ukiah. She
