Ironweed - William Kennedy [1]
“A little chilly,” he said, “but it’s gonna be a nice day.”
“If it don’t puke,” said Rudy.
“You goddamn cuckoo bird, you don’t talk about the weather that way. You got a nice day, take it. Why you wanna talk about the sky pukin’ on us?”
“My mother was a full-blooded Cherokee,” Rudy said.
“You’re a liar. Your old lady was a Mex, that’s why you got them high cheekbones. Indian I don’t buy.”
“She come off the reservation in Skokie, Illinois, went down to Chicago, and got a job sellin’ peanuts at Wrigley Field.”
“They ain’t got any Indians in Illinois. I never seen one damn Indian all the time I was out there.”
“They keep to themselves,” Rudy said.
The truck passed the last inhabited section of the cemetery and moved toward a hill where raw earth was being loosened by five men with pickaxes and shovels. The driver parked and unhitched the tailgate, and Francis and Rudy leaped down. The two then joined the other five in loading the truck with the fresh dirt. Rudy mumbled aloud as he shoveled: “I’m workin’ it out.”
“What the hell you workin’ out now?” Francis asked.
“The worms,” Rudy said. “How many worms you get in a truckload of dirt.”
“You countin’ ‘em?”
“Hundred and eight so far,” said Rudy.
“Dizzy bedbug,” said Francis.
When the truck was fully loaded Francis and Rudy climbed atop the dirt and the driver rode them to a slope where a score of graves of the freshly dead sent up the smell of sweet putrescence, the incense of unearned mortality and interrupted dreams. The driver, who seemed inured to such odors, parked as close to the new graves as possible and Rudy and Francis then carried shovelfuls of dirt to the dead while the driver dozed in the truck. Some of the dead had been buried two or three months, and yet their coffins were still burrowing deeper into the rainsoftened earth. The gravid weight of the days they had lived was now seeking its equivalent level in firstborn death, creating a rectangular hollow on the surface of each grave. Some of the coffins seemed to be on their way to middle earth. None of the graves were yet marked with headstones, but a few were decorated with an American flag on a small stick, or bunches of faded cloth flowers in clay pots. Rudy and Francis filled in one hollow, then another. Dead gladiolas, still vaguely yellow in their brown stage of death, drooped in a basket at the head of the grave of Louis (Daddy Big) Dugan, the Albany pool hustler who had died only a week or so ago from inhaling his own vomit. Daddy Big, trying futilely to memorize anew the fading memories of how he used to apply topspin and reverse English to the cue ball, recognized Franny Phelan, even though he had not seen him in twenty years.
“I wonder who’s under this one,” Francis said.
“Probably some Catholic,” Rudy said.
“Of course it’s some Catholic, you birdbrain, it’s a Catholic cemetery.”
“They let Protestants in sometimes,” Rudy said.
“They do like hell.”
“Sometimes they let Jews in too. And Indians.”
Daddy Big remembered the shape of Franny’s mouth from the first day he saw him playing ball for Albany at Chadwick Park. Daddy Big sat down front in the bleachers behind the third-base line and watched Franny on the hot corner, watched him climb into the bleachers after a foul pop fly that would have hit Daddy Big right in the chest if Franny hadn’t stood on his own ear to make the catch. Daddy Big saw Franny smile after making it, and even though his teeth were almost gone now, Franny smiled that same familiar way as he scattered fresh dirt on Daddy Big