“Dive. You know, skydive?”
“No,” I said, “can’t say that I have.” I was lost.
“We called him Clear,” he said. “His official name on his kennel papers is Severe Clear because his eyes were the exact color of the sky on a perfect skydiving day, called a severe clear day.” Not sure if I was supposed to comment, I remained silent. “I was Airborne. I used to dive,” Mr. Drake said, looking up for the first time from his place on the floor.
I nodded.
“I dove for sport later in life. When Betty brought this little guy home from the kennel and I saw those eyes, I knew exactly what we were going to name him. Either of you guys have dogs?”
Tom and I nodded. Tom has a chocolate Lab, and I have a Yorkshire terrier, so we know what it’s like to be attached to a dog. People who don’t have pets don’t realize what a big presence they are in the house, but they each have their own personalities. They become part of the family.
We expressed our sympathies to the Drakes and Mr. Drake escorted the still crying Mrs. Drake out of the kitchen while we loaded the eighty-pound husky onto the cot and took him back to the funeral home. The Drakes stood on the front stoop and watched as we pulled away. Mrs. Drake hugged herself while Mr. Drake stood with his arm around his wife’s shoulders.
The next day I took Clear to the animal crematorium, and later in the week transferred his ashes from the little plastic box that held his remains to a small blue painted steel urn.
I got busy, and it was two weeks before I was able to deliver the urn to Mrs. Drake. When she saw the urn with the name Severe Clear on the brass nameplate, she started to cry. “I thought the color was fitting,” I told her.
She just nodded through her tears. Finally, she regained her composure enough to ask, “How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing. Just count this as a favor from one dog owner to another.”
“Thank you so much,” she gushed. “Could I invite you in?” I declined, saying I was busy. As I turned to leave, Mrs. Drake said, “We miss him so much, you know. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Gabe. You have made this really easy.”
I thanked her for her kind words and bid her goodbye, and chalked the whole thing up to good karma.
Now, I’m not trying to toot my own horn, telling people they’ll “get something” for doing a good deed. I certainly wasn’t looking to get anything from the Drakes. But in the ten years that have elapsed since I went to their household in the middle of the night to get Severe Clear, both of Mrs. Drake’s parents have died and she called me, remembering my kindness. And recently, when Mr. Drake died, Mrs. Drake called me to take care of him. We placed the blue urn in his casket.
“It just seems fitting,” Mrs. Drake said.
I agreed.
CHAPTER 11
Roadblock
I grew up in the city. My favorite time of year is winter. There is nothing more beautiful than a snowy cityscape. The whiteness blankets the filth and urban ugliness with cleanliness and soft edges while the urbanites run for the shelter of their giant buildings, leaving the streets deserted. The only problem is that the snow makes my job damn near impossible to do, or so I found out the hard way one night when I nearly quit, but I’ll get to that later.
I was a career infantry officer in the Army. Got commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant, saw some combat, got decommissioned with silver oak leaves—a light colonel. I traveled around the world several times over and saw a lot of things. Some good. Some bad. But it was all interesting. My career propelled a troubled eighteen-year-old boy out of an equally troubled area, gave him an education, and gave him a life. I shudder to think what would have become of me if I hadn’t joined the Army. I’d probably be in prison, or worse.
When I retired from the Army at age fifty-four I didn’t know what to do with myself. I still got up at 5 A.M., I still kept my hair high and tight, and I still rolled my socks the Army way. It’s hard to know what to do when nobody’s giving you orders, if all you know is how to take orders. My wife finally shooed me out of the house. I was driving her crazy.
I took some classes, volunteered, and even tried a new hobby—watercolor. I found I hate watercolor. My colors always ran together and I all I ever got was a big brown mess and elevated blood pressure. The classes bored me, and the volunteering… let’s just say I’ve found that I’m too old to change the world, or too tired. I can’t decide. I was like a ship in a storm without a tiller.
Then my mother died and everything changed.
We called the undertaker my family has used in town for ages: Pickering and Sons, Inc. They came to my house, where my mother had been living with us, and did the removal. The next day I went in and met with the owner, Thomas F. Pickering, V, to make arrangements.
It wasn’t a sad occasion. My mother was old, and it was her time. She had lived the hard life of a single parent, trying to feed herself and her son by cleaning hotel rooms. My wife and I were planning on burying her in the cemetery plot we were eventually planning to use ourselves. No fuss. No fanfare. I told Thomas Pickering my plans, and afterward we got to talking. I told him how as a boy, when I lived in the city near their old funeral home, I used to wash cars for his grandfather, Thomas F. Pickering, III, and do other little jobs to earn a bit of money to blow at the five-and-dime store. I then proceeded to tell Mr. Pickering how if I hadn’t gotten into mischief and subsequently gone into the service to avoid jail time, I could easily have envisioned myself as an undertaker.
I was half joking.
“It’s never too late,” Mr. Pickering told me and handed me his card.
It was an impressive card, cream-colored linen stock with raised ink lettering bearing fancy script and the family crest.
“We use part-time employees all the time, and I’m always looking for reliable help.”
“I don’t know, sir—”
He interrupted. “Please. It’s Tom.”
I laughed. “Sorry. Force of habit. Back to what I was saying. I’ll be pushing sixty real hard in a few years. I imagine you need strapping young recruits to do this job.”
He shrugged. “Obviously you need to have some strength, but older guys can do it just as well. I’ve found that older people are much more reliable than the younger crowd. I call some twenty-something part-timer on a Friday evening and what’s he tell me?”
“He’s gotten into the sauce?”
“Exactly!” Tom exclaimed and pounded the desk. He stroked his silver goatee, looked at me, and winked. “Not that I don’t like a pop every now and again, but you can’t go pick up a body when you’re drunk. It’s not professional, and it’s dangerous.”
I was listening.
“Well, Nicholas, if you find you’re ever interested in pursuing that second career, or just looking for something to keep you busy, give me a call. I’d be happy to add you to my roster. Besides,” he said and gestured across his giant mahogany desk to me, “you don’t give yourself enough credit. You look as fit and trim as any twenty-year-old who has ever worked here.” And it was true that the Army had instilled in me a rigorous schedule of exercise that kept me limber and free of the paunch many of my peers were plagued with.
I placed his fancy card in my shirt pocket. We settled up the bill and later that week buried my mother.
Tom’s card sat on my bureau for a couple of months. I suffered through some more interminable watercolor attempts and too many sessions of a dreary class at the senior learning center (a name I hate) called “Manifest Destiny: Land Bondage of the American Indians” before I mustered the courage to pick up the phone. Tom hired me right on the spot. Soon I was doing removals for the firm, a week on, a week off. When I am “on” I carry a pager with me twenty-four hours a day. Another gentleman and I work together, alternating. He does a removal and I do
