Aftermirth (6 page)

At least, I hoped it would be long.

I told her I was sorry then. Sorry for my anger and for the things I'd said that day, sorry I hadn't stopped her from walking out that door. And most of all, sorry I wanted to live without her—because there was no denying that I did. I sent the apology off into the ether and felt an answering whoosh of certainty that if Jess were here, she'd apologize too and forgive me for all of it, just like I would forgive her. Had already forgiven her.
About damn time, Larssen,
I heard her ghost say.
Took you long enough.

I looked at Elena and Catherine, and then past them, at George's house. I'd had over two years to mourn Jess and come to terms with her death, but they'd only had a few months: three in Elena's case, five in Catherine's. I didn't know what was waiting inside those pink walls, but I would go with them and find out, in the hope that they'd be able to leave a tiny part of their sorrow here, behind them.

I
HALF EXPECTED
the door to be opened by a butler in coattails and white gloves, but George welcomed us himself, the ladies with kisses on the cheek, me with a handshake and a wan smile, and Izzy (who'd been preapproved on the way there) with a pat on the head and a dog treat. “I have two dogs of my own,” he told me, sounding a lot like Ashley Wilkes. “I'd introduce them to Izzy, but they're territorial beasts, and I'm afraid they'd try to have him for breakfast.”

George was tall and slender, fiftyish, with a long, Stan Laurel face, thinning ginger hair and mournful hazel eyes. Like the house and grounds, he looked ready for a garden party. He wore off-
white l
inen pants, pristine white bucks and a salmon-colored pullover. No silk cravat, but I bet he had a drawer full of them in every color.

After the introductions he led us down a hallway and into a huge formal living room full of seriously valuable- and fragile-looking antiques and Oriental rugs. No doubt Scarlett O'Hara or an
Architectural Digest
photographer would have felt right at home, but I was afraid to touch anything. The room was dominated by a life-size oil painting of George and a much younger and better-looking man who must have been his partner. The two of them were holding identical pugs. I smiled; from George's description I'd been picturing a pair of ferocious Dobermans.

George waved to a nice spread of pastries and fruit laid out on a sideboard and told us to help ourselves. No mint juleps, but there was a pitcher of Bloody Marys as well as coffee and tea. We all went for the Bloodies, meanwhile Izzy lapped at some water George had left for him in a gold-rimmed china bowl on an ornate silver tray. “Don't get used to it, buddy,” I told him.

We sat down, me next to Elena on one of the half-dozen sofas in the room and Catherine and George in chairs across from us. An awkward silence fell, and we all looked at Catherine: she'd called this convention. I was prepared for some kind of psychobabbly speech about grief and healing, but she surprised me once again.

“My brother's name was Caleb,” she said, without preamble. “Caleb Breedlove. He was actually my half brother. Our mother left his father and married mine when Cal was two, and I was born a year later. We grew up together in Austin, but he never really liked the city. My dad was a petroleum engineer who worked for the university; Cal's was a hill-country farmer, and that was the life he wanted. As soon as he graduated from high school he moved back to Kerrville to help his father on the farm. I was inconsolable when he left. In spite of our differences, we adored each other. I'll never forget the time in grade school when some jerk in his class told me I wasn't his real sister because we had different daddies. Cal found me crying and broke the kid's nose. He got paddled for it twice, first by the principal and then, when he refused to apologize, by my father, but Cal didn't care. I couldn't have wished for a better big brother. We grew apart over the years, but we made a point of talking on the first of every month, and he always sent me yellow roses on my birthday. That's how I knew something was wrong last April, because the florist didn't come.”

Catherine swallowed hard, and I thought she was going to keep going and tell us how Cal had died. Instead she stopped and turned to me. Expectantly.

I gave her a look:
Why me?
Her glance flickered to Elena and George, and I saw that they were both looking at their hands, struggling. They weren't ready yet, but somehow, because of everything that had happened in the last seventy-two hours, I was.

“My wife had the most beautiful laugh you've ever heard,” I began, and told them our story: how we'd met, all the things I'd loved about her. It came much easier than when I'd told Elena; I wasn't even fighting tears. I stopped before the storm, following Catherine's lead. When I fell silent she gave me an approving nod, and I felt myself glowing like a fourth-grader who'd just gotten a gold star on his long division test.

Elena glanced at George, but he was silent, so she took a deep breath and gave us Julio Santiago, Santa to his friends. Her voice thickened in a couple of places, but she managed to get through it. And when she finished and received her valedictory nod from Catherine, I saw her sit up a little straighter.

“And then they died, all these wonderful people,” George said, startling us all. “One, two, three, and Shane makes four.” The bitterness and raw pain in his voice made me wince in sympathy.

Addressing Elena and me, he said, “Did Catherine tell you how my beloved met his maker?” We nodded, both of us using the smallest possible motions of our heads. “It was my fault, in a way. When we first got together Shane was smoking a pack and a half a day. I'd watched my mother die of lung cancer, and I was always after him to quit. It took me two years of pestering and pleading, but he finally kicked it, and that's when he started with the chewing gum. And it couldn't just be any old gum, oh no, it had to be grape-flavored bubble gum—can you imagine? Like an eight-year-old kid. There was always a fat purple wad of it in his mouth. I came to hate it almost as much as the smoking. One day I lost my temper and told him it made him look like the trailer trash he was. He just laughed and said, ‘Well, you can't blame a cracker for trying to do his forefathers proud.'

George smiled sadly. “Shane didn't take anything seriously, least of all himself. It was one of the main reasons I fell for him. Well, besides the obvious.” He gestured over his shoulder, in the direction of the portrait over the mantel. “I know what people thought when they saw us together: What could a hot young thing like him possibly want with an aging queer like me, besides money? And what could I possibly want with him, besides a hot young piece of tail? They might even have been right at the beginning, but they were wrong in the end. Shane was the love of my life, and I honestly believe I was the love of his.” George turned then, slowly, like he was being pulled against his will, and gazed up at the portrait with such naked longing I had to look away. “Goddamn
gum,
” he said.

“Well at least it wasn't a goddamn
goat,
” Catherine responded, just as heatedly. “Remember the story about how Cal refused to apologize? Well, he was the stubbornest person I ever knew. Once he'd made up his mind about something, Jesus on a white horse couldn't have persuaded him to change it. Which might have been fine if there'd been a brain inside that hard head of his, but the fact is Cal couldn't have poured piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. Don't get me wrong, he was as sweet and loyal as they come, and I loved him to pieces. But
God
he was stupid.”

Three jaws dropped, but Catherine didn't seem to notice. “Cal believed anything he heard or read, and whatever version got to him first was the gospel truth. Obama's a Muslim, they said so on Fox News. Aluminum foil causes Alzheimer's. Stonehenge is an alien homing beacon. Fluoride is a form of mind control the government puts in our drinking water, and watch out because once enough of it builds up in your system you'll do anything they say.”

She let out a choked laugh, and her eyes filled with tears. “He'd been living alone on the farm for six months, ever since his wife Tiffany ran off with the satellite dish repair guy. She withdrew every cent of their savings from the bank on her way out of town, but she left her pet goat behind. Billy—original, huh? Cal never liked that thing. She'd treated it way better than she had him, and I figured he'd turn it into
cabrito.
Instead, my brother got one of his genius ideas. Called me up on the first of April all excited and told me he was in the process of creating a whole new breed of working animal—the Guard Goat—and that Billy was the prototype. A natural, Cal claimed, just like Tony Romo or Robert Redford in that movie. Once he'd had gotten Billy fully trained, Cal planned to patent his techniques and give ‘seminarials' all over the country. If it had been anybody but my brother telling me this, I would have been waiting for the ‘April Fools!' But I knew damn well he was serious. When I asked him what training a Guard Goat entailed, he got all mysterious on me, like I might reveal his secret methods to the breathlessly waiting world of potential Guard Goat breeders. I thought it was hilarious, typical Cal. I wished him luck, told him I loved him and hung up the phone. Three weeks later he was dead. When I went to the house I found all these library books on training techniques for military attack dogs. Basically he'd been teaching this goat to be Rambo—in German. All the commands were in German, and he'd circled some of them and put little notes to himself in the margins, like ‘Say it like you mean it!' and ‘Remember YOU are the top goat!
'
”

Catherine was crying hard now, struggling to get the words out. “He was right, that goat was a prodigy. Either that or it had just had enough of Cal's bad Hitler impersonations, because one day it turned on him and killed him. Butted him thirty-seven times. You know how I know that? Because he captured the whole thing on film.” She started rocking herself, sobbing, but as she went on the sounds changed, and the sobs turned to hysterical laughter. “There's Commandant Cal in his desert fatigue pants and combat boots, standing in the goat pen with this big male with these big honking horns. Cal's giving it hand signals,” Catherine made karate-chop motions with her hands, “and barking orders at it in atrociously accented German:
‘Achtung!' ‘Setz!'
And at first the goat's actually obeying. It's paying attention, it's sitting, it's staying and going down on command, and you can see Cal swelling up with pride, thinking about all the money he's going to make off his seminarials and imagining the look on Tiffany's face when she realizes the gold mine she foolishly walked away from. Then Cal points to a stuffed dummy a few feet away and says,
‘Fass!'
which means ‘Attack!' and the goat's like
Sieg heil!
but instead of charging the dummy it charges Cal and butts him in the thigh,
wham!
And Cal goes down, flat on his back. For a minute he's just lying there in a daze, and then he sits up and rubs his leg and looks at the goat with this wounded expression on his face. ‘What the heck, Billy?' he says. ‘That
hurt
.' And the goat paws the ground and charges him and butts him in the shoulder,
wham!
‘Hey!' Cal yells. He's hopping mad now, his face is bright red and he's practically got steam coming out of his ears. ‘Oh, you've done it now, mister,' he tells the goat as he struggles to his feet. ‘You've crossed the line now.'

Catherine stopped, gasping for air, laughing so hard she could barely speak. “Cal draws himself up and puffs his chest out, by God he's going to show that goat who's boss, and he's shouting
‘Setz!'
and
‘Platz!'
and making his patent-pending Guard Goat hand signals. But the goat doesn't want to sit or go down, what it wants to do is
fass.
This time Cal dodges it, yelling,
‘Nein,
Billy!
Nein!'
but the goat's not having it, oh no, it's trained too long and hard for this moment, and it butts him again,
wham!
And Cal goes back down. He tries to get up but he can't, his legs won't support him, and he's sitting there hollering every German word he can think of. Meanwhile the goat's in full battle mode, and it butts him again,
wham!
So Cal points his finger at it and in his sternest voice, pulls out his last-ditch ace in the hole: ‘Bad goat! Baaaad goat!'
Wham! Wham!
”

It was horrible; it was funny as shit. Catherine was doubled over, and tears and snot were streaming down her face. I couldn't help it, I started laughing too, and then Elena joined in and then George, and before long we were all howling and clutching our bellies. “Bad goat!
Wham!
” Catherine cried, and I shouted, “Volkswagen!
Wham!
” At which point it turned into a free-for-all: “Dachsund!
Wham!
” “Frankfurter!
Wham!
” “Lederhosen!
Wham!
”

Eventually we subsided, the howls turning into sheepish chortles that would soon fade into shamed silence; we could all sense it coming. Catherine looked like she was about to start crying again.

“I read about these two guys in Ireland,” Elena said. “They were driving on a country road, going in opposite directions, and the fog was so incredibly thick and the insides of their windshields were so covered with condensation they couldn't see a thing, so both of them had their heads stuck out the window.” She demonstrated, wrapping her hands around an imaginary steering wheel, craning her neck to one side and squinting. “And then—” She smacked her hands together, front to back.