Death Goes Better With Coca-Cola Read online

  I knew she wouldn’t go far, which was my mistake. Because I could have got her in the head, through the back of the brain, easy enough. But I wanted to have that fourth shell still there when my father got back, and instead it was a week and a day before we found that old lady. Alone, I lost her even before it got dark.

  All that next Sunday my father made me walk with him and didn’t say a word, so that I felt like I lived in a house with a stopped-up toilet. Which was what he wanted. All that week I didn’t pick because I was sure I could find her, but I couldn’t.

  And the next Sunday, when we did find her, I found out what my father meant about gut-shots, about stomachs for the sadists. She was in a little swampy hollow. “Any animal goes low to die,” my father said. And she was covered with swarms of blackflies; so that trying to see her was like trying to get to your bed in a strange room. My father took out the skull and cleaned it. The stench made me want to be sick, but I knew what he would say. I got the gun ready. For then he did what I knew he would do. He set the skull up at 100 yards and made me put the shell I’d thought I’d saved into it, into the shattering bone and brain matter.

  “Sometimes you have to waste something,” he said.

  When the war was over, my father left for Oregon. “Your mother can look after the girls,” he told me. “You’ll be okay on your own.” I knew I would be.

  When Aunt Virginia’s husband came home from the war, he was an alcoholic and he died slowly under government care in a VA hospital. The government took care of our needs too, because my father had been a soldier in both wars, even if just a drill sergeant in the second one. I signed up myself in ’49. Been in ever since. I guess you must have done your bit a little later?

  Above the bar where we drink, the big Coors ad, of fireworks bursting across a four-by-three square of plastic night, continues its cycle in many colours. If you have the patience, or the desire, you can figure out the cycle. This next one will be red, you can say, of the imitation Roman candle that arches its way into nothingness. Yellow. Blue. Green. Yin. Red. Blue. Yang. The sun which pales. There are times when you seem conscious of observing inevitability.

  An Opening Day

  Chuck was late because he had been all the way down to New Orleans on the weekend. So I performed our duty alone, by going out on the line-hunt with Vernon and the other farmers in the morning and shaking the pheasants out of the corn. The fields were half-cut, with about twenty rows down and twenty up, so that it made for good shooting, although somewhat mechanical. We walked in a line, as though we were beaters for some rajah who would never arrive. The birds were very well-fed and the older ones, when they couldn’t run, would burst out of the tall corn just at the height of the taller stalks and fly there, down the row, or suddenly across, so that the shots on them were difficult.

  The farmers were very good at those shots, and they were serious and efficient men, so that by noon all of us had our day limits and they left, because of the filled limits and because the moisture was at a good level for the corn and they all had a lot to get in. If it got too damp they had to use dryers and that burned a lot of expensive electricity.

  I ate lunch and when Chuck came we went across the dirt road to where there was a weather-beaten house, once painted a gaudy orange, but now almost penny brown, at the end of a long driveway where the fence was rusty and weak at the corner-posts. Behind the house was a tall, cylindrical crib made of open wire, and still a quarter full of shucked corn, and to the left Interstate 80, so that the fence there was new and taut, and beyond the single open crib, running east along the new fence, was a row of storage bins, the colour of old pewter, closed-in like inverted mugs, three across and forty long and with many cubits of corn inside each one.

  “Let’s try around the open crib,” I suggested. “If it’s good for the Angus it should be good for birds.”

  Nothing stirred up.

  To the right of the crib was a field of timothy and white clover and weeds, crushed by the winds and strong with seed. The field was high in the centre and dipped down on all sides, but most strongly toward us. With the dirt road side it was almost even, but before we could get down into that field now we would have to climb two fences, the second one an old one that ran along what had once been a creek bed, where the field ran its steepest slope. Then the grade curved around on the east side, a little more steeply than on the dirt road side, and sloped one final time to the south, moderately, at the beginning of a long grade that ran down through all of the next farm.

  Over there a herd of forty Angus had trampled everything into mud, but in our field there were only three horses, a white mare and two chestnut ones.

  “Let’s try the crown and then come on down on them once or twice,” Chuck said.

  “Prego,” I replied, but he didn’t smile.

  “Should have a dog,” he said. “One of us should settle down and run a spaniel or two.”

  The last time I had seen him and Mary they had been living in a third-floor flat on the Via Babuino, seemingly enjoying the artist’s life, with lettuce stored in the bathtub to keep it crisp. She had been painting blocked-out women in full primaries, and he translating Montale.

  We went over the fence and started up the hill. The storage bins were at our backs, as was the once gaudy orange house. The horses had left shit in the field, but not much, and they hadn’t been there long enough to trample all the resting spots of the birds. The two chestnut horses ran into the corner by the dirt road while we were coming over the second fence, but the white mare stood steady until our first shot. It was my miss. And then Chuck’s too.

  We hadn’t expected birds on the way up the slope, for we had been counting on coming down from the crown and hearing the birds running ahead of us and flying only when too close to the fence. These went right over our heads, two whirring hens and a cock, and when they were past the storage bins they made a long glide across the Interstate to the fallow fields on the far side.

  “Home safe,” Chuck said.

  The crown was thick with grass cover. Rich soil. You could take a cubic foot of the field there, the timothy, and the air, and the sow-thistles, and the falling seed as you brushed through it, and paint at just that cube for a month, but you would never get it and it would have changed. It changed as quickly as the sun-glints of a Finnish girl shaking out her hair after pulling off a hat of fox fur.

  In a slow curve from the dirt road to the south-east corner ran a wagon rut, and in the clumped grasses beyond that we put up the second cock and missed him too.

  “We’ve been away too long,” I said.

  “I just want them too hard. You’re being pleasant. You’ve already got your tail-feather for the twerp. Mary was doing a picture of him, you know.”

  “She never got to see him.”

  “In that picture you sent us, with Rachel belly-side up in your corn field when she was pregnant. African corn, eh? Not even up to her shoulder. She looked like she had been planted in it and the kid ready to burst out.”

  “You should have tasted that stuff. Awful. Even after we boiled it all night once. But I remember that photograph.”

  “It’ll be a good painting.”

  “She’s serious, eh.”

  “Never was anything else.”

  “Let’s try and work up into that far corner. Might have another chance there, if I don’t pepper one of his steers.”

  “Next time it’ll be better,” he said.

  We walked ten feet in from the wagon ruts, making a lot of noise, and when we did get near the angle where the fences met, a hen went up over the sagging board gate, and then a cock.

  “There he is,” Chuck had said.

  “Prego,” I laughed. Chuck tumbled him.

  “It must have been an Italian bird,” he said. “If you knew one more word of Italian, it probably would have flown back to us. Did you see the way he stopped
and listened to you?”

  We had to shoo away the cattle to get the bird. We went back over the board gate and through the thick timothy. The one hundred and twenty storage bins along Interstate 80 were not quite out of our sight. As the sun hit them from a lower angle they looked less like pewter.

  In front of us, across the dirt road, Vernon had a goodly portion of his field of corn picked and shucked out and sitting yellow as nuggets in the wagons and bins.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it over there.” I said, “The way one man would put in a whole field of corn with no more tool than a hand hoe and his back.

  “The government gave us a house on a hill and I gave the hill to a gardener of one of the Party bosses and that gardener and his wife for months cleared it all of scrub and cultivated it and planted it, with only a machete and a hand hoe; must have been almost an acre, but all of it on an incline like a dropped ice-cream cone, and the rains came early and hard, before he had it properly mounded, and the top of the field was washed clean and the bottom was silted up and the middle of the field was bared-out, so that the corn borers got at it and out of that whole field they cleared no more than six or seven bushels of corn about the size of your hand.”

  My pants were burred and seeded.

  “Here you know, Chuck, even Vernon’s paranoid about the Chinese; figures they’ll attack sooner or later. A Quaker, but he killed his two birds this morning. Keeping in shape.”

  Down in New Orleans, Chuck hadn’t convinced Mary to rejoin him, and now he didn’t want to look at things seriously, didn’t want me to talk. He offered me his pheasant while we plucked it, but I said no, we’d share the feast. Rachel would cook the three at once. With real wine. We continued on the slow diagonal curve of the wheel ruts, across the empty field of dry timothy, the blowing seeds, until we got to Chuck’s grey Volkswagen and could drive home.

  The Winter Stiffs

  “Well, then I threw them down from the cat. The two that were solid, I mean. Old Carleton Carl we just unloaded him like cordwood and took him into the blacksmith’s and piled him up neat in the corner. Some of them men outside had never seen anybody dead like that before, but I just flung them other two down, and they caught them as they could.

  “The blacksmith didn’t say much, just set to work on the flange or whatever it was I had come in for. ‘Not much I can do with them until they thaw some,’ he said. Sask and old Billy Ball were leaned up against the wall over nearest to the forge. The blacksmith he just hammered away with his back to them. Then there was this belch, you know when the gas gets warmed up in the stomach it has to get out. This belch comes out, and that blacksmith didn’t even turn around. ‘Just keep quiet you,’ he said. ‘I’ll get around to you in your turn.’”

  The Finn laughed when he told it, when he got to that part.

  “I’ll get around to you in your turn, Ha.”

  His muscles ripple with laughter. His mouth is a child’s moon of red and white flesh and teeth.

  But in France they have been saying for some time now that you can’t do character anymore; this is the age of the regimented number, of K, and all that. And it is true perhaps. Even in Ste. Vitale they have all become masters of nausea and accidie, which makes it difficult to deal with those who belch back at our condition. What the writer should do, we all know, is to make a list of some sort, somewhat scientific, but also new and somewhat unusual. The habitual phrases of the Finn, for example:

  Breed.

  Old Gutshot and his brother Buttshot.

  Let’s go grunt at the moose.

  How’d you like to breed that.

  Happy as a Jew in a junkyard — or a Finn in a Swedish pussy house.

  Yes, it’s about half the moose in Milwaukee I killed like that and damn near all in Chicago.

  Your skating rink needs flooding (to a bald man).

  So I bred her until dawn.

  Two things that won’t stick in a beggar’s throat: hot pork and a big lie.

  Fifteen hundred dollars last year on kid support and alley money and legals.

  And God made fifty percent to screw the other fifty percent and keep us all happy.

  Breed, bred, and the joys of breeding.

  The cuntless cunt-book (for Playboy).

  And then the fight began. (As in: and I was down in Montana myself once too, and walked into a bar with all those men in sheep-coats, scraped my hobnails where they would do the most good, picked out the biggest man there, and said — here’s to Montana, where mountains are big and the men are men PAUSE and it’s every sassy sheep better look out for herself on Saturday night. And then the fight began).

  Such a list saves you all those forbidden descriptive words: crude, prejudiced, energetic, life-flowing. But even so it is difficult to find the right garbage can for such a person as the Finn. He is six feet three, with his hair brushed down. He will not be crammed in. “I’ve got eight inches for you too, sweetie,” I can hear him say to the lyricists of decay as they attempt to jam the lid on.

  “Eight inches for you too, sweetie!” Before he returns to the story of the frozen men, as the Finn often does, perhaps this time starting earlier back, lining her up from a different angle.

  “I was thirteen that winter and we lived right in there by Kettle Falls you know, so no teacher was going to be dumb enough to come in for the three of us pike heads. I was thirteen and I wasn’t going to waste the whole damn winter so I went off to work in Dirkson’s camp, doing the water bucket stuff. And then that one big night it snowed hard everybody but me and old man Dirkson had gone in to town, a thirteen-mile walk, and Sunday come and nobody was back. It had snowed all night, must have been five or six feet down. ‘I guess you think you can drive the cat in and clear the road,’ Dirkson said.

  “There was something he just had to get fixed. I’d fooled around with the levers and he stood there and told me which to push for what and I worked it out. A little grind there and there. I was pretty big for thirteen, five feet eight with my hair brushed up, but all I had to do was follow the road if I could. The snow had stopped. I went cruising along, happy as a Finn you know where, when all of a sudden there’s this bump, bump, bump. Like I hit a log or something. And it was Carleton Carl. All broken up like cordwood, neat as could be. Snapped him like dry pine in August, it was that cold. Coconut brittle. So I piled him and went on more slowly, expecting more, and sure enough there was Sask and old Billy Ball. Must have started out all liquored up to walk home before the storm, or in the storm. Doesn’t much matter which now.

  “So I took them all into the blacksmith’s. Sask and Billy I flung down. I can’t remember who caught them, but whoever it was they went white a little. It was still ten below. They hadn’t ever seen anybody dead like that. Somebody wanted to get a sack for Carl, but I said never to mind. We just piled him up like cordwood in the corner of the blacksmith’s. Blacksmith came in and hammered out a new flange or whatever it was Dirkson had sent me in with. With Sask and old Billy Ball leaning in the corner like two halves of a telegraph pole.

  “Being ignored like that must have insulted old Billy some, because then he let out a belch at us, you know when the gas gets warmed up in the stomach it has to get out, and it’d frighten a gypsy, but blacksmith didn’t even miss a stroke. ‘I’ll get around to you in your turn,’ he said. ‘Just take it easy.’”

  The Finn laughs when he tells it, when he gets to that part, from whatever angle of vision. His mouth is a child’s moon of laughter.

  But in Toronto of course, people are more civilized. In the mornings I take my son out for a walk early, before the streets get salted with people. The morning after writing this down there is an old, single woman feeding the pigeons in the Walmer and Lowther roundabout, near where the Eatons had a mansion in another era. Jon doesn’t bother the pigeons, but he loves to see them go up and he laughs and says birds over and over again when t
hey are just off the ground and their feathers are flashes of many shades of grey and white. And I let him. But the old single woman who is throwing seeds on the ground for them becomes annoyed as the pigeons rise in their tawdry flight.

  “What is he doing here so early,” she says. “Why do you let him do that? That’s not the right way to raise a boy, to frighten my pigeons like that. My pigeons. My pigeons.” She looks as though she would like to fly after them, but Manufacturer’s Life has shackled a fifty-pound gold egg to her left ankle. With a silver chain. A thin ankle.

  And I, unable to condemn her egg of lonely assurance, I call her lady. “It’s a public roundabout, lady,” I say. You know that gentle tone with which we in Toronto can say lady, when we mean, really, something entirely different.

  In the Distant Singing Guts of the Moment

  When we got to the cove she dove overboard. The beach was still an eighth mile ashore, hidden from the rest of the lake by a spit of rock and spruce. That beach a boomerang of sand to my eyes, gritty sand of my youth and fears, moving away from us, as we sailed through the cove, in two directions in the same moment: up under the spruce needles withered where the white sand sparkled like salt loosely broadcast over the pumpernickel, and back toward us through the shallow waves, as the eye returns, to where the lake sand ridged itself deeper out of sight below the waters in a pattern of split and loosened pieces of corrugated cardboard. Eighteen, her body nearly fatty, she jumped up on the gunwale, steadied herself there for a moment while the dingy heeled, tilting her body as a loon tilts up his tail before a dive, poising silently until the keel of the dingy had almost broken water, and then she dove deep, away from the overturning dingy, away from my shouts. She came up spluttering and laughing, swam until her feet hit the ridged bottom, and then ran in the waves toward the beach, ran fleetly. Dolphins of kicked water accompanied her.