The Living End

Part II The Bottom Line

Ladlehaus was chewing the fat with Ellerbee, reminiscing about his days as an accomplice and accessory.

“You used to be a handbag?” Ellerbee said.

“A handb-? Oh yeah. You know I never used to get jokes? I could tell them once I heard them, I had a good ear, but I never understood why folks laughed. That’s interesting, too,” he said.

“If a fellow told a joke I thought it was a true story. I never laughed at punch lines. It was only when other folks were around and I heard them laugh that I knew.”

““Folks’?” Ellerbee said.

“A hotshot accomplice like you says ‘folks’?”

“Death softens the tongue,” Ladlehaus said, “it kindly’s us.” He barely recognized himself in Ellerbee’s blisters.

“I’ve aged,” he said.

“You were aged to begin with,” Ellerbee said.

“All right,” he said, “let me.” He combed Ladlehaus’s back for a reflection. They were like apes grooming each other.

“It’s how I got into crime in the first place,” Ladlehaus said, turning around, “not getting the point of jokes, I mean.”

Ellerbee said, “Don’t squirm. I know what you mean. When you didn’t laugh they thought you were tough. They perceived as character what was only affliction. They hard-guy’d you, they street corner’d and candy stored you. I know what you mean.”

“They scaffolded my body with switchblades and pieces,” Ladlehaus said.

“I know what you mean.”

“They Saturday night special’d me.

“We can get Ladlehaus,” they’d say. But so tough in their imaginations that at first they wouldn’t risk it.”

“Trigger-happy. I know what you mean. We can only exchange information. Then what happened?”

“The usual.”

“The usual? I didn’t move in your circles. I don’t know what you mean. What was the usual in your circles?”

“They put me behind steering wheels with my headlamps off and my motor running a half block upwind from the scenes of crimes.”

“oh yes.”

“It was progress of a sort, training. Everybody gets better at things, everybody gets the big break.

Opportunity knocks. I never had a record. Did I tell you? I had no record.”

“You told me.”

“I lived to be almost a hundred and died of natural causes-an organic, unbleached death like something brought back from the Health Food Store. And no record.” He looked at his friend, at his cooked face, reduced as ember.

“You know,” he said, “this is very decent of you, Ellerbee. In your position I’m not sure I wouldn’t harbor a grudge.”

“It’s too hot to harbor a grudge,” Ellerbee said. It’s ironic,” Ladlehaus said dreamily, “I was an accomplice to your murder and now we’re good pals.”

“It’s too hot to be good pals,” Ellerbee said, and ran off howling.

God came to Hell. He was very impressive, Ladlehaus thought. He’d seen Him once before, from a distance-a Being in spotless raiment who sat on a magnificent golden throne. He looked different now.

He was clean-shaven and stood before Ladlehaus and the others in a carefully tailored summer suit like a pediatrician in a small town, a smart tie mounted at His throat like a dagger. The flawless linen, light in color as an army field cot, made a quiet statement. He was hatless and seemed immensely comfortable and at ease. Ladlehaus couldn’t judge His age.

“Hi,” God said.

“I’m the Lord. Hot enough for you?” He asked whimsically and frowned at the forced laughter of the damned.

“Relax,” He said, “it’s not what you think This isn’t a harrowing of Hell, there’ll be no gleaning or winnowing. I’m God, not Hodge. It’s only an assembly. How you making out? Are there any questions?” God looked around but there were no takers.

“No?” He continued, “where are My rebels and organizers, My hotshot bizarrerie, all you eggs in one basket curse-God-and- diers? Where are you? You-punks, Beelzebubs, My iambic angels in free fall, what’s doing? There are no free falls, eh? Well, you’re right, and it’s okay if you don’t have questions.

“The only reason I’m here is for ubiquitous training. I’m Himself Himself and I don’t know how I do it. I don’t even remember making this place. There must have been a need for it because everything fits together and I’ve always been a form- follows-function sort of God, but sometimes even I get confused about the details. Omniscience gives Me eyestrain. I’ll let you in on something I wear contacts. Oh yes.

I grind the lenses Myself. They’re very strong. Well, you can imagine.

You’d go blind just trying them on. And omnipotence-that takes it out of you. I mean if you want to work up a sweat try omnipotence for a few seconds. To heck with your jogging and isometrics and crash diets. Answering prayer that another one. Plugged in like the only switchboard operator in the world.

You should hear some of the crap I have to listen to.

“Dear God, put a wave in my hair, I’ll make You novenas for a month of Sundays.”

“Do an earthquake in Paris, Lord, I’ll build a thousand-bed hospital.”

“You like this? You like this sort of thing? Backstage with God? Jehovah’s Hollywood? Yes? Or maybe you’re archeologically inclined? Historically bent, metaphysically. Well here I am. Here I am that I am. God in a good mood. Numero Uno Mover moved. Come on, what would you really like to know?

How I researched the Netherlands? Where I get My ideas?”

“Sir, is there Life before Death?” one of the damned near Ladlehaus called out.

“What’s that,” God said, “graffiti?”

“Is there Life before Death?” the fellow repeated.

“Who’s that? That an old-timer? Is it? Someone here so long his memory’s burned out on him, his engrams charred and gone all ashes? Can’t remember whether breakfast really happened or’s only part of the collective unconscious?

How you doing, old-timer? Ladlehaus, right?” Ladlehaus remained motionless, motionless, that is, as possible in his steamy circumstances, in his smoldering body like a building watched by firemen. He made imperceptible shifts, the floor of Hell like some tightrope where he juggled his weight, redistributing invisible tensions in measured increments of shuffle along his joints and nerves. All he wanted was to lie low in this place where no one could lie low, where even the disciplined reflexes of martyrs and sty lites twitched like thrown dice. And all he could hope was that pain itself-which had never saved anyone might serve him now, permitting him to appear like everyone else, swaying in place like lovers in dance halls beneath Big Bands.

“You, Ladlehaus!” the Big Band leader blared.

Throughout the Underworld the nine thousand, six hundred and forty-three Ladlehauses who had died since the beginning of time, not excepting the accomplice to Ellerbee’s murder, looked up, acknowledged their presence in thirty tongues. These are my family, Ladlehaus thought, and glanced in the direction of the three or four he could actually see. Their blackened forms, lathered with smoke and fire damage, were as meaningless to him, as devoid of kinship, as the dry flinders of ancient bone in museum display cases. Meanwhile God was still out there.

“Not you,” He said petulantly to the others, “the oldtimer.”

He means me, Ladlehaus thought, this shaved and showered squire God in His summer linens means me.

He means me, this commissioned officer Lord with his myrrh and frankincense colognes and aromatics and His Body tingling with morning dip and agency, all the prevailing moods of fettle and immortality.

He means me, and even though he knew there had been a mistake, that he’d not been the one who’d sounded off, Ladlehaus held his tongue. He means me, He makes mistakes.

“So you’re the fellow who spouts graffiti to God, are you?” God said and Ladlehaus was kneeling beneath Him, hocus-pocus’d through Hell, terrified and clonic below God’s rhetorical attention.

“Go,” God said.

“Be off.” And Ladlehaus’s quiet “Yes” was as inaudible to the damned as God’s under-the-breath “Oops”

when He realized His mistake.

And Ladlehaus thought Well, why not? He didn’t know me any better when He sent me here. He didn’t know my heart. I was an accomplice, what’s that? No hit man, no munitions or electronics expert sent from far, no big deal Indy wheel-man and certainly no mastermind. Only an accomplice, a lookout, a man by the door, like a sentry or a commissionaire, say, little more than an eyewitness really. Almost a mascot. And paid accordingly, his always the lowest share, sometimes nothing more than a good dinner and a night on the town. The crimes would have taken place without him. An accomplice, a redcap, a skycap, a sbuffier of suitcases, of doggy bags of boodle, someone with a station wagon, seats that folded down to accommodate cartons of TV sets, stereos. What was the outrage? Even the business of his having been an accomplice to Ellerbee’s murder, though true, was as much talk as anything else, something to give him cachet in his buddy’s eyes, an assertion that he’d left a mark on a pal’s life. And God said “Be off,” and he was off.

The first thing he was aware of was the darkness. A blow of blackness-speleological. He was somewhere secret, somewhere doused. Not void but void’s quenched wilderness. All null subfusc gloom’s bleak eclipse. Hell was downtown by comparison- unless this was Hell too, some lead lined heavy-curtained outpost of it. (And Ladlehaus afraid of the dark.) Was it still the universe?

And then he recalled his heresy-He makes mistakes-and thought he knew. He hasn’t been here, He never made this. And thought: Nihility. I am undone. And bad to laugh because he knew he was right this time. Why, I’m dead, he thought, I’m the only dead man. Hadn’t he, hadn’t all of them, been snatched from life to Hell? He thought of cemeteries. (Why didn’t he know where he was buried? Because he had not been dead, not properly dead.) Of survivors with their little flags and wreaths and flowers, their pebbles laid like calling cards on the tops of tombstones. No one was ever there, that’s why they thought they had to leave their homeopathic evidences on the graves of their loved ones, why they barbered those graves and, stooping, plucked out weeds, overgrowth, fluffing up the ivy over bald spots in the perpetual care. But the loved ones would never know, they weren’t dead, only gone to Hell. (He means me, Ladlehaus thought, He’s quick to anger and He makes mistakes and I’m the only dead man. And Ladlehaus as afraid of death as of darkness because wasn’t it strange that for all his sojourn in Hell he could not recall a moment of real fear?) It was funny, all those Sunday vigils at graveside, solemn funerals and even the children well turned out, sober and spiffy, to say a ceremonial goodbye to a being already fled, the body in the coffin only an illusion, and a lousy illusion at that.” (He’d seen his share of open caskets, the Tussaud effigies actually redolent of wax.) “But no one’s here,” he wanted to shout.

“Until today there were no dead. We are not a pasty people. We’re brindled, varnished as violins and cellos, rusted as bloodstain.”

He missed his pain. Settled as stone, fixed as laminate souvenir or gilded baby shoe, Ladlehaus mourned his root-canal’d nerves, insentient now as string. There was not even phantom pain, the mnemonic liveliness of amputated limbs, and if this was at first a comfort-Ha ha, Ladlehaus thought-it was now, he saw-Ha ha, Ladlehaus thought-the ultimate damnation. People were right to fear the dark, death. It was better in land-mined Hell where one had to watch one’s step, where reflex family’d the damned to mountain goats-We were the Goats of Hell, Ladlehaus thought, proud of the designation as the suede and leathered weekend vicious-leaping puddles of booby trap learning the falls. Almost conceited. Not because of the attention but because of immortality in such disaster circumstances. Not survival or endurance but the simple inability to stop the steeplechase, to be forced to run forever in jeopardous double time the spited sites of the Underworld, punished in its holocaust al climate and periled along its San Andreas fallibilities, stubbing his toes on the terrible rimmed blossoms of its buried volcanos, eternally tenured in its hurricane alleys and tidal wave bays. In life he had known the Alcatraz’d and Leavenworth’d, all the Big Housed, up-the-river’d chain-gang incarcerate. Like himself they had fattened on sheer grudge, but what was their grudge to his own, to that of the infant damned and the rite less stricken?

Temper had tempered him and made him what he had never been as a man, made him, that is, dangerous, lending his very body outrage and turning him into a sort of torch, a real accomplice now to the five-alarm arson of Hell, firing its landscape and using it up with his pain. Which he missed. Because it had kept him company. (What had his friendship with Ellerbee amounted to? Three encounters? Four?

Perhaps eighteen or nineteen minutes all told in all the years he’d been in the Underworld. Hell’s measly coffee break.) Now there was just-He makes mistakes, what did He think He was proving?-lonely painless Ladlehaus, his consciousness locked into his remains like a cry in a doll. (For he felt that that was where he was, somewhere inside his own remains, casketed, coffin’d, pine boxed, in his best suit, the blue wool, the white button-down, the green tie pale as lettuce. But bleached now certainly and in all probability decomposed, the fabric returned not to fiber but to compost, mixed perhaps with his flesh itself so that his duds wore him, an ashen soup, and Ladlehaus only a sort of oil spill tramping his own old beach like a savage footprint. Though this didn’t bother him. He had broken the habit of his body long ago, since old age, before, disabused of flesh, separated from it as from active service.) But it was so dark, dark as pupil, darker.

“I used to be Jay Ladlehaus.” He paused.

“Who did you used to be?” There was no answer.

“So this is death,” he said.

“Well I’m disappointed. It’s very boring. Where I come from-I come from Hell-it wasn’t ever boring.

There was always plenty to do. There was fire, panic in the streets, looting weather. You should have heard us. All those Coconut Grove arias. Our yowls and aiees like the scales of terror. The earthquakes and aftershocks. We could have been holiday makers, folks ripped out of time on weekends in nightclubs, families in bleachers collapsing on Bat Day. Titanicized, Lusitania’d, Hindenburg’d, Pompeii’d. And very little grace under pressure down there, forget your women and children first protocols, your Alfonse and Gastonics. Men were men, I tell you. Men were men, poor devils.

“Well- So what’s happening? Where’s the action? When? Or is it all monologue here? It’s enough to make you laugh-the way they bury us, I mean. Obsequies and exequies. Cortege and kist. Limousines and hearses-death’s dark motor pool. Oh boy. You’d think a government had changed hands. Well- So what do the rest of you Ken and Barbie dolls think? What’s the bottom line, eh?”

“Oatcakes.”

“Oatcakes?” said astonished Ladlehaus.

“Oatcakes is the bottom line?”

“Oatcakes! Oatcakes!” (There had been darkness but not silence. He’d been distraught, nervous. Well sure, he thought, you get nervous in new circumstances -your first day in kindergarten, your grave. Now he listened, hearing what had been suppressed by his anguish and soliloquies. It was a soft and mushy sound, gassy. Amplified it could have been the noise of chemical reactions, of molecules binding, the caducean spiral of doubled helices or the attenuated pop of parthenogenesis like the delicate withdrawal of a lover. It might have been the sound of maggots burrowing or cells touching at some interface of membrane, the hiss of mathematics.) “Hello?” Ladlehaus called.

“Sir?” (“Be off,” God had said.) He saw a way out. If he could just get the fellow’s attention”I’m Jay Ladlehaus,” he shouted, “and through a grievous error I’ve been buried alive. Inadvertently interred.

There wasn’t any foul play, you needn’t be alarmed. You couldn’t get in trouble.

“Honor bright.” We say “Honor bright’ in our family when the truth’s involved and we take a holy oath.

You got a shovel?”

“Oatcakes,” Quiz said.

So, Ladlehaus thought gloomily, it’s my in corporeality No more voice than a giraffe. And settled down with his thoughts for eternity with not even pain left to stimulate him. Not seeing how he could make it and wishing that God had closed down his consciousness too.

“Well it isn’t picturesque,” he said. His hope had been for a peaceful afterlife, something valetudinarian, terminally recuperative, like his last years in the Home perhaps, routinized, doing the small, limited exercises of the old, leaving him with his two bits worth of choice, asking of death’s nurses that his pillows be fluffed, his bed raised inches or lowered, and on nice mornings taking the sun, watching game shows on television in the common room, kibitzing bridge, hooked rugs, the occupational therapies, the innocuous teases and flirtations of the privileged doomed. And hearing the marvelous gossip of his powerless fellows, his own ego-though he’d never been big in that line -sedated, sedate, nival, taking an interest in the wily characters of others, in their visitors and their visitors’ calm embarrassments. He could have made an afterlife of that, not even arrogating to himself wisdom, some avuncular status of elder statesman, content to while away the centuries and millennia as, well, a sort of ghost. It would have been, on a diminishing scale, like hearing the news on the radio, reading the papers. A sort of ghost indeed.

Dybbuk’d into other peoples’ lives, their gripes and confidences a sort of popular music. What could be better? Death like an endless haircut.

“Forget it, Ladlehaus,” he said, “forget it, old fellow.” And resigned him self in what he continued to think of as a cemetery, a wide, deep barracks of death.

Later-it might have been minutes, it could have been days-he heard the voice again.

“Oatcakes,” it said, diminished this time, softened, and Ladlehaus tried again, his heart not in it.

“Excuse me,” he said, “I have been inadvertently interred. Dig where the stone says “Ladlehaus.” He was my cousin. We were very close.”

Quiz heard him. He had heard him yesterday when he had come to eat his lunch on the bench near Ladlehaus’s stone and had discovered that Irene had packed oatcakes for him. Quiz had recently been told by his doctor that he had excessively high blood pressure, hypertension, and, in addition to his diuretics, had been commanded to go on a strict low-fat, low-salt, sugar- free diet. He had been told that he must eat natural foods only.

He did not terribly mind the restriction of sweets and seasonings, but he found the health foods extremely distasteful. Unnatural, if you asked him. The sunflower cakes and shrimp flavored rice wafers, the infinite soybean variations tricked out in the consistency of meats, the greens and queer vegetables, their odd shapes and colors like mock-ups of the private parts of flowers. The little pudding cups of honey with their garnish of wheat germ and lecithin.

“He can live a normal life,” the doctor told Irene. I live a normal life,” Quiz had said.

“Your pressure’s dangerously elevated,” the doctor said.

“Irene, tell him. Am I hyper tense

“He’s cool as a cucumber, Doctor. He don’t ever brood or get angry.”

“Trust me, Mrs. Quiz,” the doctor said, “Mr. Quiz’s triglycerides are off the charts and he has engine room pressure. If you want him around you’ll have to put him on the diet.”

“Ain’t that stuff expensive?”

“What’s your life worth to you, Mr. Quiz?” So he went obediently on the diet.

So he had heard the fellow Ladlehaus. Buried alive. Inadvertently interred. Did Ladlehaus think he was a fool? There were his dates plain as day right there on his tombstone. Dead eleven years. Now how did the fellow expect him to believe a cock-and-bull story like that? Quiz was no spooney. Locked in the ground eleven years and still alive? Impossible. Not worth the bother of a reply really.

Quiz finished his lunch, wiped bits of oatcake from the corner of his mouth with a napkin. Silly, he thought. Lips like a horse’s. Then the diuretics took effect. He’d read that the human body was about 70

percent water. If he kept getting the urge his would be a lot less than that in no time.

“I’ll be landlocked, a Sahara of a man.” He stood up but saw that he was going to be caught short.

Hurriedly the groundskeeper unzipped and relieved himself.

“Can you hear me?” Ladlehaus asked.

“There’s been a terrible mistake. If you’d just get a shovel, sir. Or come back with your mates. Can you hear me?”

Of course Quiz heard him. I’ve got high blood pressure, he wanted to say, I’m not deaf. But he held his tongue, wouldn’t give Ladlehaus the satisfaction, insulting his intelligence like that. He was only a groundskeeper in the new high school’s stadium, Quiz knew, no genius certainly, but no damn fool either.

That was one of the things that got the passively bypertense groundskeeper down. Everybody was always trying to fool you, tell you a tale, make you believe things that weren’t so. Politicians with their promises, the military, the papers, the gorgeous commercials on television. A fellow worked hard and scraped just to keep body and soul together, and right away he was a target for the first man who came along with something to sell. Sometimes, when you didn’t know, you had to go along. Now he might have high blood and he might not and it just wasn’t worth it to him to defy the doctor to find out. But when even the dead lied to you that was something else. That was something he could do something about. He told Irene.

“There’s this dead man near the bleachers,” he said.

“Fellow named Ladlehaus.”

“Oh? Yes?”

“Keeps nagging at me with a cock-and-bull story about being buried alive. Wants me to dig him out.

Calls me ‘sir,” and wants to know do I have a shovel. Dead as a doornail but you should hear some of the stuff he comes up with. I give him high marks for invention.”

“Just ignore him,” Irene said, “don’t let him upset you. Tell him you’ve got high blood, engine room pressure. Tell him your triglycerides are off the charts and he should leave you alone.”

“Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction,” Quiz said. That’s how to deal with him,” the. wife agreed.

“Insulting my intelligence.”

“Called it a name, did he?”

“But I fixed him,” Quiz confided.

“How’s that, my darling?”

“I peed on him.”

Through a kind of sortilege, Ladlehaus’s was the only grave allowed to remain where it was when the city fathers closed down the new section of the municipal cemetery under its right of eminent domain. They picked the site for the new high school after several feasibility studies had been made. Ladlehaus would have been surprised to learn that he lay between the track and the bleachers-like grandstand in a plot of consecrated ground no larger than a child’s bedroom. He would have been astonished to learn that for a time there had been serious talk of naming the new school in his honor. A feasibility study was made.

He had no record so that was in his favor, and he had outlived everyone whom he had ever served as an accomplice. The difficulty was that he had no surviving relatives to speak up for him, and the people in the Home whose gossip and small talk had been the comfort of his last years either did not remember him at all or recalled his appreciative silences and attention as the symptoms of a man far gone in senility.

The upshot was that -the school was named for the contractor who had purchased the honor with a kickback to the chairman of the committee which had done all the feasibility studies. Thus it was that Nick Capiapo High School had gained its name and was not called after a man who had not only had actual conversation with God and who had the distinction, like a player of Monopoly who gets a “Bank Error in Your Favor” card, of receiving the courtesy of His holy “Oops,” but who was the only man in the long sad history of time ever to die.

Reassured by his wife that he had taken the right course with Ladlehaus, Quiz now regularly ate his lunch near Ladlehaus’s grave, hoping the organic scents of honey and fiber, of phallic vegetable and subtropical fruit, of queer nuts heavily milligramed with potent doses of Recommended Daily Allowance, fetid to his own meat-and-potatoes temperament, might prove actually emetic to the dead man’s. For the caretaker, who was neither drawn to nor repudiated the living, hated Ladlehaus and took an active dislike to this decomposing horror beneath the grassy knoll at the bleachers’ bottom. He acknowledged the unreason of his aversion.

“Maybe,” he told Mrs. Quiz, “it goes deeper than his trying out his ghost tricks on me. I’d treat him the same if he was a genie in a bottle. These dead folks have got to be stopped, Irene.”

“Don’t let him bother you. You must concentrate on cleaning up your lipids, on scraping the last pre-digested enzymes off your plate. Don’t let him get your goat, my lover.”

“Him? Bother me? That ain’t the way of it by half. I been teasing him, drawing him in, having him on. I make out there’s a war right here in St. Paul.”

“Here? In the Twin Cities?”

“Between the Twin Cities.”

“Stand at ease, men. Smoke if you got ‘em. That a comedy book you got in your fatigues, Wilson? No, I don’t want to see it. Put it in your pack. Renquist, leave off reading that letter from your sweetheart or you’ll wear it out. All right.

Now the captain wanted me to talk to you about the meaning of this war. He wants you to know what you’re fighting for, and do you understand the underlying geopolitical reasons and whatnot. Well, I’ll tell you what you’re fighting for. So’s the bastards don’t sweep down from Minneapolis and do their will on our St. Paul women. So’s they don’t wreak their wicked ways on our children. Let me tell you something, gentlemen. A St. Paul baby ain’t got no business on the point of a Minneapolis bayonet. You seen for yourselves on Eyewitness News at Ten what happened after Duluth signed the surrender papers with them. Looting, rape, the whole shooting match. Them Duluth idiots thought they could appease the enemy’s blood lust. Well, you seen how far that got ‘em. So it’s no time to be reading comical books, and if you birds ever hope to see peace with honor again you better be prepared to fight for it.

“Whee-herr-whee-herr-whee-herr!

“There’s the air-raid warning, boys. Capiapo, you and your men take cover. You, Phillips, your squad’s in charge of Hill Twelve.

“Hrr-hrr. Hrn. Hrn-hrn.

“It don’t need no fixed bayonets, Sarge. Dey’s our tanks. Ain’ dat so, Gen’rul?

It is, Mr. President.”

History had gone out of whack, current events had run amok. Ladlehaus despaired. Hearing what he did not know were Quiz’s master sergeants and the high blood-pressured man’s High Command, his presidents and sirens and generals and tanks, he accepted in death what he had not known in Hell-that the great issues which curdled and dominated one’s times were shorter-lived and more flexible than personality or character. In his own lifetime he had outlived depressions and dictators, wars and the peace that came between them, outlived the race questions and the religious, all the great ideas and great men who thought them, outlasting the trends and celebrated causes. What he wanted to know was what Wilson thought of his comic book, what Renquist’s sweetheart had to say.

“Is there anything bothering you, Mr. Quiz?” the caretaker’s doctor asked him.

“Mrs. Quiz tells me that you’ve been sticking to your diet and taking your medications, yet your pressure’s as high as it ever was. Are you under any particular stress at work?”

“Some dead man’s been trying to play me for a sucker.”

“Hsst,” Ladlehaus said.

“Hsst, Renquist.”

“He’s trying to get to me through my men,” Quiz told his wife.

“Boys,” Quiz asked the ten- and eleven-year olds who had the Board of Education’s permission to use the facilities of the high school stadium, “do you know what a dirty old man is?”

They made the jokes Quiz had expected them to make when he asked his question, and Quiz smiled patiently at their labored gags and misinformation.

“No, boys,” he said when they had done, “a dirty old man is none of those things. Properly speaking, he’s very sick. For one reason or another his normal sexual needs-do you know what normal sexual needs are, boys?-have not been met and”-he waited for their raucous miniature laughter and hooting to die down-“he has to take his satisfaction in other ways. It’s much the same as hunger. Now I doubt if any of you boys has ever really been hungry, but let’s suppose that your mom never lets you have candy. Let’s suppose you never chew gum or drink soda, that she doesn’t let you eat ice cream or nibble peanuts. That you can’t have fruit. The only sweets she lets you have are vegetables-corn, say, or sweet potato, sugar beets, squash.” He waited for them to mouth the false “yechs” and mime the fake disgust he knew they would mouth and knew they would mime.

“What might happen in such a case, boys, is that you’d grow up with a sick sweet tooth. You wouldn’t know what to do with real candy. A Hershey’s might kill you, you could drown in a Coke.

“It’s the same with dirty old men, boys. Maybe they can’t have a relationship-do you know what a relationship is, boys?-with a person their own age, so they seek out children. Your moms are right, boys, when they tell you not to accept rides from strangers, to take their nickels or share their candy. Children are vulnerable, children. They don’t know the score. You give a dirty old man an inch he’ll take a mile.

His dick will be in your hair, boys, he’ll put your wiener in his pocket. They can’t help themselves, boys, but dirty old men do terrible things. They want to smell your tush while it’s still wet, they want to heft your ballies and blow up your nose. They want to ream and suck, touch and diddle. They want to eat your poo-poo, boys.”

He had their attention.

“Do you know why I say these things to you?”

They couldn’t guess.

“Because I’m thirty-seven years old, boys. Raise your hands if your daddies are older than me.” Nine of the twenty children raised their hands.

“See?” Quiz said, “almost half of you have pops older than I am. They’re not old. I’m not old.

“The other thing I wanted to say, boys, is that I have a good relationship with Irene. Irene is my wife.

We do it three times a week, boys. There’s nothing Irene won’t do for me, boys, and I mean nothing.” He listed the things Irene would do for him.

“Do you know why I tell you these things, boys?”

They couldn’t guess.

“To show I can have a relationship with a person my own age. To show I’m not dirty. I’m not old, I’m not dirty.

“So that when I tell you what I’m going to tell you you’ll know it isn’t just to get you to come over to the grandstand with me.”

The attack had started. Ladlehaus could hear the foot soldiers- their steps too indistinct for men on horseback-running about in the death grounds From time to time he heard what could only have been a child cry out and, once, their commander.

“Cover me, cover me, Flanoy,” the commander commanded.

“Yes, sir, I’ll cover you,” the child shouted. He heard shots of a muffled crispness, reduced by the earth in which he lay to a noise not unlike a cap pistol. He held his breath in the earth, lay still in the grids of gravity that crisscrossed his casket like wires in an electric blanket.

Horrible, he thought, horrible. Attacking a cemetery. Defending it with children. A desperate situation.

He had fought in France in the war. Captured three of the enemy. Who’d turned out to be fifteen-year-old boys. But these kids could not have been even that old. What could they be fighting about? He was disappointed in the living, disappointed in Minneapolis.

“Stop,” Ladlehaus cried.

“This is a cemetery. A man’s buried here.”

“How was the kohlrabi?” Irene asked.

“I dropped the kohlrabi during the charge on that wise guy grave.”

“Kohlrabi’s expensive.”

“You should have heard him. What a howl.”

“Regular katzenjammer, was it?”

“You think it’s right, Irene? Using kids to fight a man’s battles for him?”

“The kids weren’t hurt,” she said.

“Umn,” she said, “oh my,” she said, squeezing his dick, hooking down and kissing it, twirling him about so she could smell his tush.

“Umn. Yurn yum. What’s more important,” she asked hoarsely, her pupils dilated, “that a few kids have bad dreams, or that my hyper tense husband keel over with a stroke just because some nasty old dead man is trying to get his goat? Ooh, what have we here? I think I found the kohlrabi.”

The boys didn’t have bad dreams. They were ten years old, eleven, their ghosts domesticated, accepted, by wonder jaded. ODd on miracle, awe slaked by all unremitting nature’s coups de th6dtre, they were not blase’ so much as comfortable and at ease with the thaurnatological displacements of Ladlehaus’s magic presence. Still he insisted on coming at them with explanations, buried alive stuff, just-happened-to-be-passing-by, to-be-in-the-neighborhood constructions, glossing the stunning marvel of his high connections with death. They knew better, it was stranger to be alive than to be dead. They could read the dates on his marker. Perhaps he’d forgotten.

And forgave him. Not grudging Ladlehaus his lies as the crazy janitor had whose hypertension-they wouldn’t know this, couldn’t- was merely the obversion of his ensnarement by the real. A janitor-they wouldn’t know this-a man of nuts and bolts, of socket wrenches, oil cans, someone a plumber, someone a painter, electrician, carpenter, mechanic-trade winded, testy.

So if they dreamed it was of dirty old men, not ghosts.

“Where were you yesterday, Flanoy?” Ladlehaus asked.

“Yesterday was Sunday.”

They swarmed about his grave, lay down on the low loaf of earth as if it were a pillow. Or stretched out their legs on his marker, their heads lower than their feet. They plucked at the crowded stubble of weeds, winnowing, combing, grooming his mound.

“Does it tickle or pinch when I do this?” a boy asked and pulled a blade of grass from its sheath in Ladlehaus’s grave.

“When you do what?”

For they had come through their war games, outlasted Quiz’s supervision of their play, outlasted their own self-serving enterprises of toy terror and prop fright. (For a while they had dressed up in his death, taking turns being Ladlehaus, running out from beneath the grandstands, flapping their arms as if they waved daggers, making faces, screeching, doing all the tremolo vowel sounds of what they took to be the noise of death. It hadn’t worked.

“It’s not dark enough to be scary,” Muggins, the youngest boy said, and kicked the side of Ladlebaus’s grave.) And settled at last into a sort of intimacy-the period when they teemed about his grave, grazing it like newborn animals at some trough of breast.

They looked up at the sky, their hands behind their heads.

“What’s it like in your casket, Mr. Ladlehaus?”

“Do you sleep?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Does it smell?”

“No.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not now.”

“Is it awful when it rains?”

“What’s worse, the summer or the snow?

“Are you scared?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are there maggots in your mouth, Mr. Ladlehaus? Are there worms in your eye sockets?”

I don’t know. Who’s that? Ryan? You’re a morbid kid, Ryan.”

“Shepherd.”

“You’re morbid, Shepherd.”

“Did you ever see God?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen Jesus?”

“Jesus is God, a*shole.”

“Don’t use that word, Miller.”

“He’s right, Miller. Mr. Ladlehaus: has seen God. He’s an angel. Don’t say ‘a*shole’ near an angel.” The boys giggled.

“Do you know the Devil?”

“I’ve seen the damned,” Ladlehaus said softly.

“What? Speak up.”

“I’ve seen the damned.” It was curious. He was embarrassed to have come from Hell. He felt shame, as if Hell were a shabby address, something wrong-side-of-the-tracks in his history. He’d been pleased when they thought him an angel.

Quiz watched impassively from a distance.

“Be good, boys,” Ladlebaus urged passionately.

“Oh do be good.”

“He’s telling them tales,” the caretaker reported to his wife.

“You boys get away from there,” Quiz said.

“That’s hallowed ground.”

They play in cemeteries now, he thought, and tried to imagine a world where children had to play in cemeteries-death parks. (Not until he asked was he disabused of his notion that there had actually been a war. What disturbed him-it never occurred to him, as it had never occurred to the boys, that the war was for his benefit-were his feelings when he still thought there had actually been a battle-feelings of pride in the shared victory, of justification at the punishmeDt meted out to the invaders from Minneapolis. All these years dead, he thought, all those years in Hell, and still not burned out on his rooter’s interest, still glowing his fan’s supportive heart, still vulnerable his puny team spirit. All those years dead, he thought, and still human. Nothing learned, death wasted on him.) But a world where children could play in cemeteries and nuzzle at his little tit of death. He shuddered. He who could feel nothing, less tactile than glass, his flesh and bone and blood amputated, a spirit cap-side by a loose bundle of pencils, buttons, thread, nevertheless had somewhere somehow something in reserve with which to shudder, feel qualms, willies, jitter, tremor, the mind’s shakes, all its disinterested, volition less flinch. And at what?

Sociology, nothing but sociology. Who had lived in Hell and seen God and who had, it was to be supposed, a mission. Who represented final things, ultimates, whose destiny it was to fetch bottom lines.

A sentimental accomplice, an accessory gone soft. (For he’d felt nothing when the bullet sang which had dropped his pal, Ellerbee, felt nothing for the people-he’d have been a teenager then-at whose muggings he’d assisted, felt nothing presiding at the emptying of wallets, cash drawers, pockets-he had quick hands, it was his kind of work, he was good at it -and once, on a trolley commandeered by his fellows actually belly to belly with the conductor, quickly depressing the metal who sis of the terrified man’s change dispenser, lithely catching the coins in his free hand and rapidly transferring dimes to one pocket, quarters, nickels and pennies to others.) But he had not gone soft. Remorse was not his line of country, no more than sociology. A question plagued him. Not why children played in cemeteries but where the officials were who permitted it. Where, he wondered, was the man who said “Oatcakes”? Or the fellow who’d led the boys in war games? He was outraged that, exiled in earth, appearances had not been kept up. He could imagine the disorder of his grave candy wrappers, popsicle sticks, plugs of gum on his gravestone. He wanted it naked, the litter cleared. It was his fault for talking to them in the first place.

He’d dummy up.

“You! Ladlehaus!”

“Hey, Ladlehaus. The kids won’t come near you. I told them some garbage about hallowed ground.”

“Hey you, Ladlehaus, how’s your cousin?”

“That’s better. That’s the ticket. Silence from the dead. You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone.”

“God is not mocked. He is not fooled. He is not sorrowful. He is not disappointed. He is not expectant.

He is not worried. He doesn’t bold His breath. He does not hope or wish upon a star. He is not waiting till next year or contemplating changes in the lineup. He is not on the edge of His seat. He is complete as spider or bear. As stone or bench he is complete.

“It is only we who are unfinished. And God is indifferent as history. He has not abandoned a world He had never embraced or set much stock in.

” Other preachers tell you to welcome God into your hearts as if He were some new kid in the neighborhood or a fourth for Bridge. What good is such advice? He will not come. He is complete. He has better things to do with His time. He doesn’t accept invitations. He doesn’t go out. He stays home nights. His home is Heaven. Death is His neighborhood. Life is yours.

“He asks nothing of us, beloved. Not our lives, not our hearts. He would not know what to do with such gifts. He would be embarrassed by them. He does not write Thank You notes. He is not gracious. He is not polite or conventional. He has no thought for the thought that counts.

“What would the thought count for?

“He is God and there is an Iron Curtain around Him. His saints are bodyguards, Secret Service.

“Why then be good? Because He will smash us if we aren’t. Those are the rules.

“Let us pray.

“Our Father Who art in Heaven, we, your servants, humbly beseech Thee. Bless World Team Tennis in St. Paul.

“Amen.”

“Yeah yeah, sure sure, Amen,” said a voice in the ground near Ilie Nastase’s feet.

“What’s World Team Tennis?” asked the Lord on High.

“Boys? Boys? Where am I, boys?”

Quiz smiled.

“No need to whisper, Nurse. Mr. Ladlehaus is in coma. There’s reason to believe they coma dream, although I doubt they can actually hear us -particularly when they’re under as deep as this one is.”

Ladlehaus wondered.

“Is he any better today? Let me see the chart, please. Hmn. Wait a minute, did you see this? Never mind, it’s only a smudge. For a minute I thought- Hold it a moment. Look here. The way this line seems to go up. That’s the sort of thing we’re looking for.”

Ladlehaus wondered.

“No, it’s important, I’m glad you called. All right, let me see if that resident was right. By golly, I think he was. Those aren’t smudges. Did you change machines? Right. Excellent. Quite frankly I’m not prepared to say yet just what it means. It’s too early to tell, but this is evidence, this is definitely evidence.

See this trough, this spike. Pass me one of your oatcakes. This is exciting. Extremely so. Now if he can only be made to produce more readings like these, establish a pattern rather than these virtuoso performances, I think we might have real hope of going to them and- See to the IV.” please, Nurse. A man on the mend needs nourishment!”

Ladlehaus hoped.

“I wanted you to see these, Doctor,” the woman said.

I felt so silly,” she said.

“You did just fine, Irene.”

“It’s hopeless. They won’t accept my interpretation of the readings,” Quiz said in a voice as much like his own doctor’s as he could make it.

“Not? Why?”

“They say it’s only an aberration, that the electrical impulses could come from his body heat, that brain death has already taken place.”

“But that’s so unfair, Doctor.”

“She’s right,” Ladlehaus said.

“It hasn’t taken place,” he said.

“It hasn’t. Get me more IV. I hear perfectly. The nurse asked why they won’t accept the readings and you said they think it’s an aberration. It isn’t an aberration.”

“They may be right of course,” Quiz said, though I hate to admit it. Damned vultures. Death with dignity indeed! Folderol. Fiddlededee. The only reason they want to pull the plugs is to get at his fortune and power. All those millions!”

“Don’t let them,” Ladlehaus screamed.

“Don’t let them get at my fortune and power. Oh I know you can’t hear me, but look, look at the machine.

I’ll squeeze out my best brain waves for you. Don’t let them. Those millions are mine. I earned them.”

“It’s a shame,” the nurse said, “after all the good he’s done.”

“All the good, yes,” Ladlehaus said, “all the millions, all the good I’ve done.”

“Look at these, Doctor, would you? They’re slightly different from the others. What do you make of them?”

“Flyspecks, I should think, scratchings of coma dream. But let me have them. Perhaps the judge will grant a stay.”

Ladlehaus hoped.

“Uncle Jay, you high table, five star, Hall of Fame prickl You mashed potato! You spinach leaf! Do you recognize my voice, you bloodless fake? It’s your nephew Jack-Rita’s husband. And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, you cabbage! I’m going to tamper your charts and splash in your brain waves. But I’ll give you a fighting chance. If you’re not dead scream ‘no,” or forever hold your peace.”

“No! No!”

“So. Silence. Ashes to ashes, you salad. just a slight adjustment of the tone arm on your electroencephalogram and- Why, Nurse, you startled me. I was just looking at my uncle’s charts here.”

“Sir, no one is permitted in the Intensive Care Unit unless accompanied by the patient’s physician.”

“I’m his nephew. I thought, seeing he’s dying and all, I’d look in on him and say goodbye in private.”

“No one is permitted in the Intensive Care Unit, no one. If you were Mrs. Ladlehaus herself I’d have to tell you the same thing.”

“Mrs. LaThe blonde bombshell? Me? That twat?”

“You’ll have to leave.”

“Just going, just going. So long, Unc, see you around the victory garden.”

“That will be all, sir. Do I have to call an orderly?”

“Call a garbage truck.”

“Orderly!” “I’m going, I’m going.”

“Thank you, Nurse.”

Ladlehaus was hopeful.

“Well?”

“It’s bad. Here.”

“This is a court order.”

“It’s the court order.” I In sorry.

“Step in, please, Deputy. This is Deputy Evers, Nurse.”

“Ma’am.”

“He’s here to see that we comply with the order.”

“Wait!”

“Wait a moment, Doctor.”

“Nurse?”

“It’s just that I know your convictions about such things. Deputy Evers, this man has taken the Hippocratic oath. Pulling the plug on Mr. Ladlehaus’s life support systems would be a violation of everything the doctor believes. It would go against nature and inclination, and do an injustice not only to his conscience but to his training. I can’t let him do that.”

“I’m sorry, ma’ am but the court or-” “I read the court order, Deputy. I know what it says. What I say is that I can’t let him do it.”

“Look, lady-‘ “I’ll do it myself.”

“Nurse!”

“Please, Doctor. I’m only grateful it was me on duty when the order came down. Deputy, you won’t say a word about this. Not if you’re a Christian.”

“I don’t know. The order says- Sure. Go ahead.”

“Do it now, Nurse. Pull them. The man’s all but dead anyway. He has only his coma dream. You pull that, too, the moment you remove those plugs.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s why I fought so hard to keep him on the L.S.S. But go ahead. The law’s the law.”

“Someone better do it,” the deputy said.

“I’ll do it now, said the goodhearted nurse.

“When I’m geting better?” Ladlehaus cried.

“When I can hear everything you say? When I can practically taste the iodoform in here? When I no longer dream I was ever in Hell? When I have my millions and my power? When I have my blonde bombshell?”

“Pop,” the nurse said.

And poor, dead, puzzled, grounded LadIehaus heard their mean duet laughter and died again, and once again, and kept on dying, in their presence dying, dying beneath them, with each spike and trough of their laughter.

0 * 0 “His name is Quiz.”

They were near him again, not all but some, and this time the man Quiz did not bother to shoo them off.

Ladlehaus sensed arrangement, order. Not the wide barracks of death now-he knew where he was, the child had told him-but rows of folding chairs. He sensed they were chairs, had sensed it that afternoon when a disgruntled Quiz had snapped them into place in the grass, aligned them, something martial in their positioning, discrete as reviewing stand.

Behind him he heard the gruff shuffle of men’s good shoes as they sidestepped along the cement ledges of the grandstand. (He couldn’t know this, couldn’t smell the lightly perfumed faces of the women or the crisp aftershaves and colognes of the men. For him the soft rustle of the women’s dresses might have been the languid swish of flags in a low wind, the brusque adjustments of the men’s trousers like in-gulps of hushed breath.) He listened carefully, but could not make out the words of the adults.

“After the recital my daddy is taking us to Howard Johnson’s. I’m going to have a coffee ice cream soda.”

“Coffee ice cream keeps me up.”

They’re some more of his accomplices, Ladlehaus thought. They’re going to take me for another ride.

Then a woman made an announcement. He listened for some quaver of theatricality in the voice that would give her away, reveal her as the 11 nurse” in a different role. Talk always sounded like talk, never like a speech. Something read aloud or memorized or even willfully extemporaneous could never pass for the flat, halting, intimate flow of unmanaged monologue or conversation. Even a man on the radio, scriptless and talking apparently as he might talk among his friends in a lunchroom, sounded compromised by the weight of his thousand listeners. Even a child at prayer did. But the woman was marvelous. Ladlehaus had to admire the cast Quiz had assembled. She wanted to thank Miss Martin and Miss Boal for their generous and untiring assistance in putting together tonight’s program, extending right down to helping the students tune their instruments. She mustn’t forget to thank the principal, Dr.

Mazlish, for opening up the facilities of the high school to the Community Association of Schools of Arts, or CASA, as it had come to be known. She particularly wanted to thank the parents for encouraging and, she supposed, at times insisting that the children practice their instruments. And, as coordinator for the program, now in its third year, she particularly wanted to thank the children themselves for the devotion they showed to their music and for their willingness to share their accomplishments with the good audience of parents, relatives, and friends who had come out to hear them tonight. Tonight’s recital was only the first. There would be three others with different young performers during the course of the summer. She regretted that the dates for these had not yet been settled or they would have been printed on the back of the program. Speaking of the program, she said, Angela Kinds and Mark Koehler, though listed, would be unable to perform this evening. They would be rescheduled for one of the recitals later in the summer. In the event of inclement weather, she added, arrangements would be made to hold those indoors.

She was magnificent. It was perfectly obvious to Ladlehaus that she had done the whole thing working from small white note cards held discreetly in her right hand.

He had forgotten about music, forgotten harmony, the grand actuality of the reconciled. Forgotten accord and congruence-all the snug coups of correspondence. He did not remember balance. Proportion had slipped his mind and he’d forgotten that here was where the world dovetailed with self, where self tallied with sympathy and distraction alike. He had forgotten dirge and dead- march, scherzo, rondo, jig and reel. He had forgotten the civilized sound of a cello, or that violins indeed sounded like the woe of gypsies. He had not remembered the guitar, lost the sound of flutes, had no recall for the stirring, percussive thump in melody-all the gay kindling points of blood, the incredible flexibility of a piano.

What he had for eyes wept what he had for tears.

A child played “Lightly Row.” He wept. They had Waxman’s “The Puzzle,” Gesanbuch’s “Sun of My Soul.” He wept. Bartok’s “Maypole Dance” was played, Lully’s Gavotte. There was Bach’s Prelude in F, Chopin’s Mazurka in B flat Major, Bohm’s “Gypsy” and Copland’s “The Cat and the Mouse.” He wept for all of them. One of the advanced students-he knew they were students now; professionals would have played better, actors not as well-gave them-for it was “them” now too, the dead man subsumed with the living -Brower Is Three Etudes, and Ladlehaus: sighed, his moods flagrant, ventriloquized by the homeopathic instance of the music, the dead man made generous, tolerant, supportive of all life’s magnificent displacements. Why, I myself am a musician, he thought, my sighs music, my small luxurious whimpers, my soul’s high tempo, its brisk tattoo and call to colors. There is a God, the man who had spoken to Him thought, and murmured, “It’s beautiful. The Lord is with me.”

And He was. He lay over Ladlehaus’s spirit like a flag on a casket.

“I was drawn by the music,” God said.

“I come to all the recitals. I’m going to take Dorset. I like what she did with Bach’s Fantasy in C Minor.”

“Hush, no talking,” said the boy who had identified Quiz.

“That one too,” God said more softly.

“His “Sheep May Safely Graze’ made me all smarmy.”

“No,” Ladlehaus said.

“I give him six months,” He said confidently.

“No,” Ladlehaus pleaded, “it’s Flanoy. Flanoy’s only a child.”

“Oh, please,” said God, “it’s not that I hate children but that I love music.”

Quiz had stationed himself on the bench where he had taken his low-fat, gluten-free, orthomolecular lunches. This was where he heard the disturbance. He rose from the bench and moved beside Ladlehaus’s grave. There, in plain view of the crowd, he began to stomp on Jay Ladlehaus’s marker.

“Hold it down, hold it down, you!”

“Quiz!” Ladlehaus shouted.

The caretaker blenebed. He tried to explain to Mazlish, the principal.

“He knows,” he cried, “he knows who I am.” On his knees he pounded with his fists on Ladlebaus’s grave. He grabbed divots of hallowed ground, sanctified earth, and smeared them across his stone. They tried to drag him away. Quiz wrapped his arms about the dead man’s marker.

“What are you doing?” he screamed, “I’ve got hypertension. I take low-cal minerals, I’m strictly salt-free.

I eat corrective lunch!” “Get him!” Ladlehaus hissed.

“Get him. He’s a composer!”

And God, who knew nothing of their quarrel but owed Ladlebaus a favor, struck Quiz dead.

It would not be so bad, he thought in the momentary shock wave of silence that followed the commotion.

It would not be so bad at all. He would exist in nexus to track meets, to games, to practices and graduations, and spend his death like a man in a prompter’s box beneath all the ceremonies of innocence the St. Paul Board of Education could dream up, spending it as he had spent his life, accomplice to all the lives that were not his own, accessory to them, accomplice and accessory as God.

A composer, he thought, I told Him he was a composer. Well, He makes mistakes, Ladlebaus thought fondly. Ladlehaus sighed and hoped for good weather.

But he did not know that the caretaker’s death had come at a point in the recital when God knew that those children who had already performed would be getting restless, beloved.