Nothing to Declare Read online

  He passed Tillton and Sons twice before he realized he’d mistaken it for a residence. It was on the outskirts of Ellsworth, where the town street changed to rural blacktop, a three-story Greek Revival with a small placard at the head of the long drive and a columned portico at the entrance. A sound of sobbing washed in muted waves from behind the front door while Jesse rang the bell and stamped his snowy feet on the mortuary doormat. “Welcome,” the thing said, in large black letters.

  He waited under the portico for an answer, shoving his scarf deeper into his collar, but the sorrow built and built with no hint of release. He rang again. Nothing. When he could think of no reason to return to his car, Jesse straightened his coat and let himself inside.

  Within the large foyer a young woman was simultaneously bawling, smoking a cigarette, and attempting to pull a down jacket from a coat rack. Jesse couldn’t turn away from her: her red face and bitten nails, grief carved into the hollows in her cheeks. How would it feel to hold her in his arms?

  The woman apparently had put herself together in a hurry because her blouse was misbuttoned and her shirttails bunched at her waist. Amazing, the energy with which she rammed her arms into her jacket sleeves, shifting her cigarette from hand to hand. Jesse felt his face go red in embarrassment. His own loss had grown shamefully thin in comparison.

  A man appeared in the hall, a middle-aged fellow in a proper black suit. His gait had a professional steadiness and he wore a small, pale rose in his lapel. He cooed—shh, shh—and his white hands stretched in comfort toward one and all. But the woman backed away from him and spat directly in his face as he drew near, derailing his motion. “Fuck you and fuck your shitty secretary job,” she said. “Fuck this entire fucking place.” The man’s jaw worked silently as he wiped away the saliva dripping down the bridge of his nose.

  The woman stormed the doorway where she halted and swept her arm across the entry table, scattering black-bordered leaflets to the floor. “See this, it’s me leaving.”

  In final farewell, she stamped out her cigarette into the Persian runner and blew both of them a kiss goodbye.

  Jesse realized he was clenching his fists as if her insults were directed at him. This was his first Christian funeral parlor—maybe hysteria was in long supply, even among employees. On closer observation, the director was much younger than he’d guessed, not too far out of his teens. Jesse was going to get everything wrong, it seemed. He took on the uncomfortable notion that he would be the one expected to lend solace.

  “Not your most perfect day,” he said. He gave the undertaker his name.

  “Candace,” the man sighed. “My assistant. I had to let her go, language, lateness, and so forth. No excuse for it. She has a troubled spirit, as you might guess.” The man’s attention looked past him to the spot where Candace had kissed the air goodbye.

  He turned back to Jesse. “Yes. For Mr. Balakian. Good of you to come. Please, my apologies. James Tillton.” The man extended a hand, noticed the glaze of spit on his fingers and let them drop. “My sincere condolences on your loss.” Tillton’s breath, Lord help him, smelled of peanut butter.

  They went to the sales office, where the undertaker sat behind a writing table and filled out a printed form while Jesse inspected the several coffins fanned out between door and sitting area. He passed his hand over the glistening surface of one, warm from the overhead bulb. His fingertips left a smear.

  Perhaps it was the overheated room, but when it was time to conclude his business, Jesse found himself unsteady on his feet, and he sat gratefully and poised Tillton’s fat Mont Blanc over the document. It was hard to settle on any line in particular, though the word DECEDENT was repeated with nasty frequency. “What is this?” Jesse asked.

  “Sorry, I thought you understood. Our agreement, Mr. Kerf. Goods and services. I’ve learned over the years to dispense with the business side first. Puts a perspective on it. I find that important.”

  “Perspective,” Jesse said. “That’s what I like. The whole panorama.”

  Tillton brought out some full-color brochures and asked Jesse what kind of ceremony he wanted.

  “Ceremony? None. No ceremony. Marty won’t care about a ceremony.”

  “Without explicit instructions, we can never speak for the deceased, Mr. Kerf. What we provide, then, is for the living.”

  “No ceremony.”

  “The casket?” Tillton’s gaze alighted on a dark brown number to Jesse’s left. Jesse appraised the eager tilt of the man’s chin. He shook his head. No casket.

  Tillton’s eyelids flickered briefly. Cremation was a perfectly acceptable alternative. They had a selection of urns for every wallet.

  “Mr. Tillton. Give me what’s simplest. What’s easiest. No muss, no fuss.”

  “The least expensive, I imagine?”

  Jesse found a place to sign and scrawled his name. “Exactly. I knew my friend. Unless you do Viking funerals on Lake Winnipesaukee, I’m sure he’d want me to spend my money on some single malt and raise a glass and nothing more.

  Tillton slid the form back, made a few notations, the jaw in motion. “A simple cremation. Plain container, $1,300. You may pick up the cremains in the morning.

  Jesse rose, stumbling slightly. His foot had fallen asleep and he knocked it sharply against the table leg. A little pain was good for the system, the flare along the nerves.

  “Payment in advance, if you don’t mind,” Tillton said.

  “Will you take a California check?”

  The undertaker sniffed and informed him that checks were not permitted. Credit cards, however, were perfectly all right, and while Jesse signed the slip, the undertaker brought up the subject of a showing.

  “A showing?”

  “Thought you might want to say goodbye to your friend. It’s not required, of course. All right if you decline. Some don’t have the stomach for it.”

  “No. A showing. That sounds good.”

  The coffin next to Jesse shone with lemon oil. He remembered the smell from his childhood and his mother’s constant campaign to keep their house agleam. The image of Jesse’s face bent around the curving wood. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s have our showing.” He tried a step toward the door and found his foot no longer tingled.

  Marty’s face was the faded umber of old piano ivory. It rested on a field of mauve silk, and the mouth revealed a thoughtful pose, lips slightly apart, a hint of teeth. Keeping a secret, perhaps, or hiding a lie. The late afternoon sun gilded the features with a rosy bloom. Life in death, so the Bible promised.

  Jesse edged his chair a few inches nearer to the coffin. Marty’s hair was absurdly lustrous, blacker than he remembered, falling in curls that seemed to billow against the silk. Jesse leaned in. The interior was doused with perfume that overlaid but could not mask Marty’s own rich aroma, the harsh animal scent of death. The smell was dense and provocative and offered a reminder: end of the day, we turn to trash.

  Jesse waited for the overall picture to disengage into its individual parts, a trick from his time as an art major, a concentration of the eye. In such a state he’d stare at the model for an hour and tease the body out of the lines his pencil made, considering volume and space alone. His favorite had been Greta, a blonde.

  A glint moved across the coffin’s brass fittings. Dark soon, the same wintry emptiness he’d driven through last night. The viewing room window gave out onto a vast meadow that was fading from sight with the passage of the sun. It got darker here than in California, was this possible?

  Shadows traversed the mahogany sides of the box. The wood was splintered at the bottom edge and mended more than once—a viewing coffin, rented by the hour, used how many times before, ten, twenty, a hundred? The half lid revealed the body down to the top button of its suit where the crossed hands lay against the chest. The shirt cuffs bore tan stains at the rim, used in a previous wearing, he guessed, a package deal with the rental casket. The cowboy boots, Jesse wondered. What had become of Marty’s boots? />
  He grabbed at the closed section of the lid and it flew open with a snap and fell away from his grip. Marty’s legs rattled against the sides of the box.

  The body was naked from the waist down. The clothing ended a few inches above the belt-line, a bleached dickey beneath a false front of a coat that buckled around the body with elastic straps. Yes—exactly right, a practical solution yet sly, the sort Marty would devise. It did him honor.

  A patch of soiled cloth covered the groin, and tea-colored bruises mottled the bottoms of the legs where the blood had settled. A yellow and blue wound in the left side bulged with gauze. The spleen—such a small injury, but enough to bleed out Marty’s life. The body was otherwise unmarked, but its feet were bare.

  “I come from a long line of carpet thieves and stealers of sheep,” Marty had liked to say, waving his grand Armenian nose in your face as proof. From this angle, Jesse could see the cotton that filled the nostrils. Sometimes the line ends. Jesse closed both coffin doors. Marty Balakian had been his friend and his enemy. Now he was nothing—an artifact, a thing. Jesse would ask about the boots before he left.

  THREE

  JESSE. HEY, JESSE. Look at him moseying around my kitchen hunting for my coffee. Jet lag and a heavy conscience runs a backhoe through your REM—the man can’t do what’s needed without some good caffeine. It’s in the back cupboard, Little Brother, in an airtight canister, stainless steel, just like I taught you. Bingo, got it first try, you’re doing fine. The grinder’s in the cabinet to the left. See how the boy still takes my lead? Same as always.

  I like the coat—he popped for cashmere, very smooth. And that gray at the temples, those serious lines by the corners of his mouth—Jesse’s aged well. Buffed up in L.A., no question. It’s a requirement out there, is how I hear it, a necessary element. He makes a good impression. I forgot he was that tall.

  He looks tense, though, his neck and shoulders all in knots. It’s a mesh of trigger points, the upper back, he’s got to be in pain. Too bad—I guess I fucked him up. Hey, Jesse, take care of how you eat and sleep. Stamina is key and you’re bound to burn through every ounce before you’re done, trust me. It goes with the job description—Next of Kin. You don’t have to thank me. De nada.

  I used to make him laugh. He needed to—he had a deficiency, a vitamin lack. A bad chromosome. He took a push or he’d forget he was alive. One time, we laughed for an hour, hardly stopped for a breath.

  We were stoned—weren’t we always? Stoned quite often in the old days—grass, hash, a merry catalog of alkaloids. Then the old days ended, but a few of us didn’t abandon our habits, a few of us bravely ventured on. We saw our duty. Till the ‘80s. The ‘80s brought the best of us to our knees. Reagan, Wall Street, don’t make me give you the list.

  OK, for accuracy’s sake, I switched over to bourbon, top-shelf exclusively, Blanton’s or Knob Creek. Whiskey’s a nice body high—that smoky flavor, a taste of carcinogens at the back of the throat, the tough-guy kick. Bourbon meshed with the ‘80s, didn’t it? Weed, I don’t know, I couldn’t hack it suddenly. Too much something—excess wattage, maybe, too much particularity when I wanted mush. Look, we’re born with how many brain cells? A billion or two, who cares, more than we need. I was pleased to offer the donation and bourbon was happy to receive.

  We hadn’t made the move to California, Jesse and me, the night we laughed. California was in our future but we didn’t know it. We were friends, we hung out—Chinatown lunches, rock shows on the Common, street demos—we attended to the present. Somerville friends, we had that link, local boys.

  Jesse was in college at Northeastern. He had a scholarship and took art classes, mooned over the models, as I recall, worried his sweet mom and dad. It was an ugly scene, Northeastern—trolley cars slamming on the rails, and the Huntington Y down the block, its torn-up pool tables, riffraff on the steps eyeing marks as they walked by. Jesse’s dorm room was a killer—concrete 180 degrees out all the windows and a fair view of the projects. Moderating the asphalt required a high percentage of Jesse being elsewhere, so he slept through lecture halls and ignored Friday night mixers, slid papers under his teachers’ doors weeks after they were due. I did my bit as general helpmate and nasty influence. More than a decade I had on the boy—I offered the perspective of years.

  The night we laughed, we were at my place in North Cambridge, wasted on black Afghan hash. Two tokes sit on you like two tons. The subject falls onto that guy, that Japanese guy, he was a writer, wasn’t he, an actor, too, a movie director? The man was major in Japan. He died—a suicide, but designed with an eye to style, with élan. There were many lovely features to that particular demise—disembowelment, beheading, political theory.

  Somehow the guy has a private army, so he tries a coup to bring back the Golden Age. Who wouldn’t? But naturally, the coup goes sour: hello seppuku, hello entrails and decapitation. It was all part of the plan.

  Nevertheless, rumor has it the man failed to make a good death, a personal weakness at the finale. The Japanese have criteria, don’t they, high expectations, and our guy fumbled. Jesse can’t see beyond the failure. For him the writer’s poor result defines the event from top to bottom.

  I say the specifics aren’t important, they’re annoying. What we require is right brain only—coup, sword, death, the overall scheme. Jesse refuses, he has to flay the topic inside out, to see what we can learn. OK, I’ll play along, I say, let’s be Talmudic. There is one question that has me confused. The head, I ask. How many bounces when it hits the floor?

  Jesse laughs—it takes him by surprise. He opens his mouth and roars. Laughter swallows him up—it’s kind of beautiful to watch, the autonomous nervous system in control. Guess what: I am laughing too. I can’t stop, and neither can he. We laugh until we don’t know where we are or who we are or why. One hour. That’s how it was—I joked and Jesse laughed. I laughed back.

  A good death, Jesse. Don’t be too fussy, now.

  He was due at Lieb’s office in an hour. Jesse foresaw a stack of documents to sign and another check to write. Loss was a business that operated with its own rules and conditions like everything else. The lawyer’s growl resounded in Jesse’s ear, his gutter mouth, the snort. The morning was destined to try his patience; it would be a form of torture. But afterward there’d be the packing up and selling off and then home free. At the restaurant this moment, Manuel and the boys would be proofing the ciabatta on its second rise.

  The box of ashes stood on Marty’s kitchen table, fresh from the trunk where it had ridden next to the lizard boots. Cremains—a word for the ages, one the mortician had insisted on repeating as often as possible. Jesse shook the box back and forth and heard a sifting, an indistinct rattle. Marty’s smile had gold in it, he remembered. Jesse carried the box from room to room, wondering where it belonged.

  In the past, Marty’s talk had been full of houses—caves on Crete, palapas on the Sea of Cortez—the houses they’d live in, the women who’d warm their beds and cook them spicy tidbits, experiences like a string of shining pearls. “Tell me where to get in line,” Jesse had said. “What do I have to do? I’m packed.”

  Marty sighed. “We do nothing, we take our time. Fate drives the bus, not us.”

  Jesse studied himself in Marty’s bathroom mirror, his face so white and trembling it seemed his tan had faded in a single day. The world is built on actions, not on fate. Did Marty ever learn?

  He brought the box of ashes to the bedroom floor where it caught a stripe of morning light. A stale scent drifted up from Marty’s scattered T-shirts and jeans and the mildewed sateen of his quilt, from the window curtains mapped with cobwebs. Coins were tossed in all directions, glints of silver on the dark wood floor. Jesse evened the bed sheets and squared the coverlet into a bundle ready for Goodwill.

  He thought it prudent to put together an accounting for the lawyer: kitchen table, three chairs, futon, desk, laptop computer, and of course the books, a list filling less than a page in his Day Runner. T
he computer was propped on Marty’s desk, its screen open and locked on password control. The glass surface reflected ghostly particles of Jesse’s movements as though it were keeping him under surveillance.

  For now, all that was left was to air out the room, and the draft brought in the homely smells of wood smoke and washday chlorine. Marty’s view looked out onto a familiar Somerville prospect of backyard clotheslines and snow-caked religious statuary. Above Jesse icicles lined the eave like soldiers. The largest one was broader than his arm at its root and twice as long; its blue-white skin captured the swift motion of clouds.

  Jesse hoisted himself onto the sill. Now he discerned the icicle’s flaws: veins of sooty black staining every layer. He rapped the ice with a knuckle and it shivered, then Jesse struck again with all his strength. The icicle hurled past as though he’d let fly an arrow. Its broken remnants scattered across six feet of hard-packed snow.

  Jesse drove toward Lieb’s faster than the roads allowed, and he rechecked Marty’s watch to verify the time. The Rolex had been lying in a bowl of ticket stubs and loose change, an Oyster Chronometer worth thousands, just the thing for the driver of a Lincoln. He grunted with pleasure as he admired the lump of calibrated chrome. It was a fake, it had to be. Why hadn’t he thought of it before, the fuzzy quality to the logo and a clamminess in how the bracelet pressed onto his skin. If he weren’t careful, it would turn him green. At a stop sign, Jesse brought his wrist up to his face and felt against the sensitive flesh of his ear the barest hum.

  FOUR

  THE WOMAN IN THE PAINTING had been drawn as a hollow-ribbed nude with prominent nipples and a dangerous patch of black at the join of her thighs. Her scowl offered the impression it was the process of law that had stripped her bare, and Jesse wondered whether Lieb had chosen her as inspiration or threat. Beneath her stare, he listened to the cadence of the argument coming from the lawyer’s executive suite.