He was glad he was driving his father home now and praying his spirit would settle in at home in the city. This was not the delivery of inert flesh and bone, this was the final leg of his journey with his father. He bet that Mariana, as a death nurse, was learned in how other cultures dealt with death and must be aware of corpse walking. He made the decision then and there to drive Marty right now to Brooklyn first, then the hospital. He would corpse walk Marty’s spirit all the way home.
“I’ve always hated rewriting, but you make me want to rewrite everything, whatever that means.”
“Ted?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever been in love before?”
“Tonight I realized that I hadn’t, no. But I know now.”
“How do you know?”
“Because my father is dead and I’m next in line. Because everything is new. And I suddenly don’t mind that you listen to disco. That’s love.”
He sang to her quietly and nicely, like a Dan Fogelberg cover of Sly and the Family Stone, “‘At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without you by my side…’”
She laughed softly at his submission to disco. He listened to her breathing again. He was sure he would speak the right words if he just spoke the truth. That was a good feeling, just to be himself was the right thing.
“I’m afraid I’m a strange bird, Ted.”
“You don’t scare me. You’re a parrot in Brooklyn. ‘Oh no, not I…’”
“What if I don’t love you?”
“I’ll wait till you do.”
“You might have to wait a long time.”
They both got quiet. They both listened to the other breathe. They stood in different places on the exact same spot.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
There was a long pause, and then Ted said, “Waiting…”
77.
Ted meandered the back roads back to the city, corpsedriving his dad. He blasted the Dead on the cassette, and sure as hell hoped he wouldn’t get pulled over and have to explain the dead man in the passenger seat.
He spoke to his dad, imagined his responses, heard him, laughed with him. He had the sensation for the first time of seeing through Marty’s eyes now that Marty was gone. And that this would be his duty and his honor as a son from now on. He pointed out things the old man might have remembered; sights of beauty and things and thoughts of interest. Just general bullshit. Life. That was life-just general bullshit. And that was death, too. There really wasn’t any difference.
78.
Ted had told Mariana on the phone that since he was corpse walking, he didn’t want to drop the body off at the hospital, but that he would drive Marty one last time to Brooklyn before surrendering to the authorities. Mariana had consented. Ted loved her willingness to do the weird thing, to say fuck you to protocol. She made him braver and better just by being on the planet. He would imagine new things from now on because he wanted to know what she thought. He hoped so hard that it almost took the form of a prayer, that they would become the close reader of each other’s life.
He pulled up to the curb at Forty-eighth and Ninth at about two a.m. Mariana stood there waiting with Maria outside the diner where they had shared café con leche. The women opened the doors of the Corolla and got in the back. First Maria, and then Mariana, leaned forward and kissed Marty’s cold forehead and whispered private endearments in his ear. Then Mariana angled over Ted’s headrest and kissed Ted deeply and meaningfully on the lips, an apology and half a promise, he hoped, and an incentive to keep waiting. She said as she hugged him, “Ay, papi, Bucky Fucking Dent-conyo.”
The champagne flowed in the Yankee clubhouse. The curse held. In Boston, they were waiting still.
79.
This was Marty’s last water crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Ted decided on the bridge over the tunnel. Ted knew now sometimes you had to go over it, and sometimes you had to go under it, but you had to get across. There was no choice. Ted would corpsedrive his dad over the East River accompanied by Mariana and Maria and the spirits of Whitman and Hart Crane. As they vibrated over the noisy girders of the bridge, they let Crane’s overeloquence speak for all of them, adding an oversound to what was, the past layered on the present; his wonder at man’s godmaking prowess and the steely optimism of the young century added a harmony of sorts to the dirge:
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year…
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
In this manner, on the Brooklyn Bridge, they made their river crossing.
From a couple of blocks away, they noticed a glow coming from Marty’s street. Like it was on fire, but there was no smoke, no sense of danger. When they turned onto his block, it was like they had entered a carnival; it was lit up like a street fair. Like the Feast of San Gennaro on the Lower East Side. As their eyes refocused to the bright lights in the night, Ted saw there were dozens of people milling about on the street, apparently in celebration; in high spirits, it seemed.
What Ted first recognized ahead were the remainder of the gray panthers, minus Tango Sam-Benny, Ivan, and Schtikker-standing at attention, saluting their fallen comrade, all wearing Red Sox caps and jerseys. Ted saw Benny’s kiosk, done up in crepe paper, red and white, the colors of Boston. He looked up at the apartment windows and saw an undulating sea of red, people waving Boston pennant flags. Jose, does that banner yet wave? Sí. It sure as shit does. He turned back to Mariana as if to ask whether she had told the panthers, and she nodded yes.
Ted looked around, took it all in as he drove, as slowly as a diplomatic funeral procession. Folks were dancing in the street, champagne and beer bottles in hand. This was a wake, he realized, a helluva wake. Huge banners were festooned across doorways and streetlamps. He read them out loud-“CONGRATULATIONS SOX!!!” “THE WAIT IS OVER!!!” “BUCKY WHO???!!!” “GOODBYE MARTY WE LOVE YOU.” Loving lies all in red and white, without a trace of Yankee blue. An artistic falsehood truer than the truth. Curveship lending a myth to God. Fuck you, winners. Unto us lowliest sometime sweep. Fuck you, Yankees. Fuck you, Death. Love exercising its awesome powerlessness in the face of mortality.
Because the glow from the streetlamps slow-danced through the car windows as they crept ahead, when Ted looked over at Marty, the play of light on his face seemed to make him smile. Only in darkness is his shadow clear. Ted stopped gently at a spot where the light held his father in such a smile. Marty was home. This was the end.
It was the way Marty wanted his story to be told. The way he wanted to go out.
The final hopeless, glorious charade.
Epilogue: Extra Innings
OCTOBER 28, 2004
It is now the twenty-first century. It is the future and it is already the past. There is no difference. In the future, we know that. We know that now. The Dead know, too, they say, “It’s all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago.” They are all here in a sprawling graveyard, over 365 acres in the middle of the city, holding on to names from three centuries. Almost two million dead. Calvary Cemetery off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
A small group of people walks among the irritable Canada geese that chew the green and brown grass. It’s fall again already. Twenty-six years later, more than ten years ago now, and it’s fall again already. The group consists of four people, an older man and woman, and a young man and woman. Even from a distance, they feel like a family.