Live Bait

‘Good.’

‘And I’m sorry he hurt you.’

Lily gave him a smug look. ‘And all this time, I’m the bad person. By the way, Sol called tonight while you were closing up the greenhouse. You’re a pallbearer, you know.’

‘I know.’

She smiled a little. ‘Morey picked out his casket years ago. He used to go to the funeral home and play poker with Sol, and one day, he comes home and says, “Lily, I picked out my casket today. It’s bronze and it’s heavy, and the pallbearers are going to pull out their backs carrying me. This will help out Harvey, the chiropractor, whose business has been bad.” ’

Marty smiled, thinking that sounded just like Morey. ‘I didn’t know he played poker.’

‘He only played with Sol because he could beat him. And sometimes that Ben person.’

‘Who’s Ben?’

‘A nobody.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘He’s a putz. A stinker.’

‘And Morey liked him?’

Lily shrugged. ‘You know Morey. He was hopeless. He liked everybody, whether they deserved it or not. Besides, they went way back.’

‘Funny I never met him.’

‘They weren’t that close. Mostly they went fishing. Couple, three times a year, maybe some poker sometimes.’

Marty turned his head very slowly to look at her. ‘Morey went fishing?’

‘Of course he did… oh, turn on the sound. Quick.’ She squiggled forward to put her feet on the floor and propped her elbows on her knees, eyes fixed on the TV. ‘Look, it’s extra innings.’

Marty looked at her in amazement. ‘You like baseball?’

She snatched the remote and turned on the sound herself. ‘Of course I like baseball. These are gentlemen. They hardly ever knock each other down, and they smile a lot when they do something good.’

He watched, bemused, as she got caught up in the game, thinking how little he had learned about Lily in all the years he’d loved her daughter. He’d spent most of his time with Morey, practicing that age-old gender division that happens when families get together. Lily was the mystery in the kitchen; but Morey was the man, the friend, the substitute father he had come to love and know so well.

Except he’d never known about the fishing, and that troubled him. Maybe he hadn’t known Morey as well as he thought.

He let his mind travel back to a day well over a year ago, not long before his life had fallen apart. He and Morey had driven Hannah and Lily fifty miles north of the city to an antique shop that charged twice as much as any closer to home. On the way back, they’d stopped at a rural gas station/convenience store for ice cream and drinks.

‘Marty, get over here. Look at this.’ Morey was standing at an upright cooler that held milk, cheese, and other perishables, looking into an adjacent water tank with a noisy bubbler, shaking his head.

Marty peered into the tank and grimaced at a writhing black mass of leeches. On top of the tank all manner of worms squirmed in cups of sawdust and dirt. ‘This is disgusting. What’s wrong with these worms? How come the white ones are in sawdust?’

‘I should know this?’ Morey gestured a young clerk over to the tank. ‘This isn’t against the health code?’

‘Uh… are you an inspector or something?’

‘No, no, I’m not an inspector, but it’s common sense. There are leeches next to the milk.’

‘And worms,’ Marty added.

‘That’s just the live bait,’ the clerk replied. ‘That tank there’s the live well, and that’s the dry bait on top.’

Morey snorted. ‘Of course it’s live. It’s moving. This is disgusting.’

‘Uh… we get a lot of fishermen in here.’

‘Fishing. Bah. And they call themselves sportsmen. What kind of a sport is it that you impale helpless creatures on a wire hook so you can throw it in the water and impale bigger helpless creatures?

‘Well, they’re just worms and leeches and stuff.’

‘To you, maybe. Tell me. Did you see that Spielberg movie?’

‘Oh, hey, yeah, man, I’ve seen them all.’

‘Really. I’m impressed. You saw Schindler’s List?’

‘Uh… you sure Spielberg did it?’

‘Never mind. The one I’m talking about had dinosaurs.’

‘Oh, yeah, Jurassic Park, sure. I saw that one four times. The sequels kind of sucked, but the first one really rocked.’

‘Then you’ll remember where they tied up the goat so the big dinosaur would come?’

‘Oh yeah, that was gross.’

‘And did you feel sorry for the little goat?’

‘Well, sure, sort of. I mean it was scared, crying and stuff.’

‘Live bait. Like these worms.’

The clerk gave Morey a blank look.

Morey shook his finger at him. ‘There’s an important lesson here. Do you know what it is? I’ll tell you. One man’s worm is another man’s goat. Remember that.’

She’s wrong, Marty thought as he drifted back from his reverie. No matter what Lily said, no matter what anybody said, Morey Gilbert was no fisherman.

19

The unseasonable heat continued on the morning of Morey Gilbert’s funeral, and meteorologists predicted yet another day of sunny skies and temperatures in the eighties. Old-timers in the state sat on sun-drenched porches, paging through their well-thumbed Farmer’s Almanacs as if they were the writings of Nostradamus, searching history for a similar Minnesota April heat wave, and finding none. But fifteen hundred miles north, deep into the Canadian territories, the belly of an enormous cold front began to sag toward the American Midwest. A change was coming.

The Uptown Precinct had called for five extra patrols to manage the traffic converging on the synagogue where Morey Gilbert’s service was held. By ten in the morning there was standing room only inside; by eleven, when the service began, the crowd had spilled out onto the lawn, the sidewalk, and ultimately the street itself. The numbers were in the hundreds, and there was no hope of moving them, and simply no place to move them to, so the street had finally been closed for three blocks in either direction. Not one resident or motorist complained. Even the cops, initially irritated to be diverted to traffic management, were eventually moved by the size and reverent demeanor of the crowd, and became caught up in the sense that they were more honor guard than enforcers, there to witness the passage of a great man. None of them understood it, and later could only say, ‘You had to be there.’

Three hours later Magozzi and Gino sat in the unmarked outside Lily Gilbert’s house behind the nursery, watching a small army of black-clad mourners funnel through the front door.

‘You know, I think half the city showed up at the cemetery. I don’t know how the hell she’s going to squeeze them all into that cracker box,’ Gino commented.

‘It’s a private reception. Family and friends only. These are the people who knew him best; the ones we want to listen to.’