Sunland: A Novel

10

• • 80 • • in the middle. Someone fell. And of course, everyone wants to watch that show.” A shadow broke apart the light from a distant lamp. Near the building at the end we saw Mr. Garland Bills walking on a path and dressed in a tuxedo . His hair was combed and as shiny as a black widow’s belly. It was the only time I’d seen him without a tracksuit. Garland Bills saw us and maneuvered sideways defensively, disappearing behind a desert willow. “A strange man,” Mona said. “Not as strange as some,” I said. “You know of others?” “I have a friend.” Mona shifted, and I heard her sandals tap elegantly on the cement. I liked the idea of her playing cello in sandals. And I liked her lissome arms, her lanky disposition. She held herself in a hug. I pulled a photocopied invite from my postal bag. “My grandma’s birthday party is coming up,” I told her. “I remember.” “Look, I have one invitation left,” I said. “It’s going to be the season’s hottest event. Scalpers can’t even get their paws on these. Please tell me you’ll be there.” Ajo Cemetery’s office was inside a humorless white cinderblock building, and everyone in the place had large, sad, watery eyes, as though they were continually crying or being cried at. The secretary marked my payment down in her binder and handed me a receipt. “So, that’s it?” I said. “Congratulations,” the woman said. “Proud owner of a grave.” I got dizzy thinking too much about them, the gravestones, and the heat made me even dizzier. Outside, the sun over-accentuated each one. Each was a person, a reminder. I wandered through the cemetery, the burnt grass smelling of hay, wondering about the dead underneath my feet, the slushy bones inside airtight boxes, the mud everyone eventually became. Cemeteries offered little consolation to those left behind. Replace a person with a stone and it was still just a goddamn stone. The sun needled my neck, and I wondered, when the time came, where would I lie? 10 • • 81 • • I read the names, lives bookended by numbers. 1919–, 1910–, 1987–. Beloved wife. Brother. Father of. Husband to. Loving twins died at birth. My father went into that good night by way of a cottonwood tree branch outside my boyhood window. From memory, from what I remembered: he awoke in the middle of the night, carefully arranged twelve eggs inside a Pyrex bowl, placed the bowl in the middle of our dining room table, and then went to the garage in search of load-bearing vinyl rope. All sensory information from the next morning, after we discovered his body ten feet from the dirt, after the police, the coroner, remains blank. A psychologist later called my fuzzy dream state “disassociation.” Frederick Dulaney, Certified Public Accountant. Sometimes I wondered what his former clients would have thought if they’d known their accountant had died with barely enough in his estate to cover his debts. My mother buried him with his gold wedding ring. My dad had once given me a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle, but the man had never really understood the emotional mechanics that make for a good father. He didn’t believe in translating emotion into sentences. I don’t quite remember him ever saying I love you, I’m proud, good job. It was my childhood job to divine affection out of grunts and mumbles. There must have been decent moments between us, but I was young, and memory was tricky. It was like going to the basement and briefly toggling on the light and then trying to remember the placement of everything in that room years later. And indeed it crushed me, after my father died, the way my mother began looking at me as she once did him, as though I was charged with apologizing for his fatal flaw. I disliked that she saw relics of him in me, commenting on how I had his same nose, his jaw, his eyes, etc. Early on I began to understand how my father’s decision to end his life disturbed my mother. She began sleeping too much and then not sleeping at all. She broke down in line at the stationery store. She went skydiving. She set the goldfish free in a mud puddle. Eventually she declared that we needed to move, but by then Nana had made a warm nest of...