Warpath

It’d be nice if the rapist would just walk in there, read my reply and throw a fit. Come stomping out. Make a scene. But in reality, out here on the street, it is just a comfortable wave of face after face coming and going. I try and memorize them all so when the new meet comes at the comic book shop—assuming he shows—I’ll be able to ID him on approach and head him off. Take him someplace where we can talk.

The hours pass this way. Shadows leaning heavier to one side than I’d like. I call a sandwich shop down the block. For a ten-dollar tip they exit their front door, walk six storef

ronts down and deliver to my car window.

And more hours pass this way. No reply email. My lower back starts. I can feel my stubble grow into a full beard.

I look at the clock as the bistro draws its shades and flips its sign from open to closed. I pull away, dreading the funeral tomorrow.

14

Wednesday morning

The world overhead seems to know when a funeral is coming.

It builds a fabric of gray, of disappointment and regret and stretches it from horizon to horizon. The breeze brings with it immaterial icicles; little shards just to nip and bite even now in warm weather. Rain cavorts in protesting masses, still swirling in the storm clouds above. Waiting for the bomb bay doors to open.

Molly hugs herself and leans into Graham. “I swear this is the coldest Wednesday morning ever.”

A single streak of lightning snaps in the mounting turmoil. It forebears a message from its brethren: we are coming...and in greater numbers.

This rent-a-pastor better hurry.

Graveside. Clevenger and I stand ridged against the winds. The small strip of hair still clinging to Willibald’s otherwise nude head stirs in the breeze. Those flirty, miniature gales, running their distracting fingers through his remaining comb-over hair while his wife is interred. Bitches can’t even wait for Eudora to be in the ground before they play with her surviving husband.

Willibald looks up to uncooperative weather, snickers. “I made arrangements for this to be fast. Only took a couple of days, you know.”

Graham and I look at one another. For a murder victim, Eudora did get buried quickly. But, I guess it was cut and dry.

“I also made my own arrangements,” Willibald says, giving a lifeless pat to Graham’s elbow. “Keep you from worrying about it.”

“Grandpa—”

“Quiet now. It’s your grandmother’s time.”

An eternity passes by as the thunderheads loom and threaten. The pastor, part of the package deal with the funeral home, drones on and on like he knew anything about Eudora that Willibald didn’t tell him five minutes before the whole thing started. So fake, trying to sound so sincere. So deep and comforting. So plastic. He could sell rust buckets, crack-cocaine or condoms to toddlers with his line of spit-polished horseshit.

Then all at once the funeral party clicks the ratchet that barks with a startling noise, lowering the casket. Each tick on the teeth of those gears puts a gulf between Willibald and his wife. I know that void.

And people peel off. One by one. Small groups. Vanish, like ghosts who have fed to their fill on the sorrow here. Given their marching music by the descending ratchet.

Pull up their collars. A dull mass of black coats and umbrellas being toyed with by incoming winds.

Mumble. Look at the ground. Step over flowers that have fallen from a grave they adorned. Leave.

I kneel, gently take the flowers. Put them back upright on the woman’s grave marker from where they fell.

“She has the same name as your wife, right?” Clevenger, behind me.

“Yes.”

“Soft spot?”

“I don’t like seeing people treat our dead like that.”

“Some dead, you mean.”

I smirk. “There is a difference between decent dead people and the dead people we see.”