Shatterday

  Behind the latinos the Rolls Corniche took one last roll, hit the crumbling hillside and went off like a can of beer shaken in a centrifuge. It blew apart scattering hot metal and parts of Jimmy allover the Santa Monica Mountains.

  Say goodbye to Kercher O. J. Crowstairs.

  “I’m not feeling too giddy about all this, now that we’re alone,” Jimmy said from the screen. “You five are the most I’ve got left. Everybody else has been taken care of; okay, they’re okay; I took good care of them, in the ancillary sections of the will. But you five are the big scores, and I wanted you to hear it straight from. me.”

  He stopped, wiped his mouth. Jimmy nervous? Come on, give me a break here.

  “Missy, you’re first,” he said, looking all the way to his left, directly where Mississippi was slouched in her seat, long legs crossed straight out in front of her. “You get The Kerch Corporation and all its holdings.”

  SylviaTheCunt gasped, off to my left. The smell of cardiac arrest was there in the library.

  Jimmy went on. “You keep it running. There’s the land up at Lake Isabella, we own it free and clear now, and it’ll be built up pretty big within the next five years, they’re putting in that Kern County International Airport. Keep adding to the art, find a place to show it, something nice and stately like the Norton Simon Museum… you know… something toney and really chi-chi. Set your own salary, keep on as much of the staff as you need, hire more, fire some, do what the hell you want with it. It was just a dodge to keep the tax fuckers off my carcass, anyhow. You make it into something terrific, kiddo. I love you, babe. You watched out for me real good.”

  Missy was crying. Toughest woman I ever met, but she—even she—lost it when Jimmy went to work at the top of his form. In Iran there’s a word—zirangī—it means cleverness, or wiliness. The Machiavellian quality. It’s much admired by the Shiites. Jimmy would have been a smash in Islam.

  “And for the record,” Jimmy added, “let it be known that never once in all the years you and I worked together, did we once so much as fondle each other’s genitalia. The bantlings will need their gossip, m’love; and they’ll fasten first on she who was my amanuensis. Let the slushfaces herewith take note: you and I worked together for fifteen years plus however many more wash under the bridge from the date of this taping before I bite the big one, mostly on the basis of your being the best goddamned pool-shooter I ever met. I would have fired your tidy ass a million times, kiddo, if it hadn’t been that you shot the most unbelievable three-bank cushions into the hip pockets.”

  Missy was dry now. And smiling gently.

  Then he turned to Brandon Winslow sitting right beside her.

  “Bran, my friend… I’ve done you right, and I’ve done you wrong. But you never once treated me like a hotshot, and for that I cannot thank you enough. Other people were in awe, or they wanted to drink my blood, or they came sharpshooting. But you were my friend and my colleague, and you started out as something like my student but went beyond what I could show you. And you maintained, chum. You make the Hall of Fame for hanging in there. So this house is yours. The house and the grounds and everything in it. Live here, and change it any way you want to make your nest the way I made it my nest. I built the west wing full of separate apartments for other writers who need a place to flop. I never could afford to buy San Simeon from the state of California; I always thought the old Hearst castle would be a dynamite place for a no-obligation writers’ colony where kids who had the real stuff could come and work without worrying about rent or getting fed. So lay in half a dozen real outlaws, Bran. And the only rule ought to be that they can stay and be happy as long as they write. If they turn into leaners, if you catch them sitting around all day watching The Price is Right boot their asses into the street. But if they’re producing, they can live here forever. Alone is okay, but loneliness can kill a good writer… you know that. Give them a community of sharp, witty minds… and three squares a day. You’ll be the only landlord who writes books that chew on the hearts of the literary establishment.

  “Do it for me and for you, Bran.”

  SylviaTheCunt was making sounds like the Titanic going down.

  Then Jimmy looked straight ahead. At Leslie.

  He didn’t say anything. He just stared.

  Leslie took it for about thirty seconds. Then she got up and walked to the side of the room where she stood with her arms folded, watching the screen, still curious, but—once having freed herself of Jimmy’s power—unwilling to let him manipulate her beyond a certain point of tolerable terror.

  Now Jimmy was staring at an empty seat.

  She’s insensitive, or maybe desensitized; but she’s tough. Which also explains how she could have stayed married to him as long as she did. High-fashion barbed wire wrapped in Spandex.

  “Leslie, you did okay in the settlement. But I suppose you rate more than a standard ‘I’m sorry,’ which doesn’t count for shit…”

  “You can say that again,” Leslie murmured from the side of the room.

  “… so the Corporation is depositing a million in the Bermuda account for you; I’ve signed over ownership of the magazine to your name; Kenny will transfer the chalet at Villarvolard to you… so you can keep that ski bum of yours on the string a little longer; and Missy’ll find a letter in the safe that transfers a substantial block of non-voting stock in The Kerch Corporation to you. Stay out of the business, take the dividends, and try to remember me fondly.”

  “Right,” Leslie said from the side of the room.

  Now he looked all the way to his right, directly at SylviaTheCunt, who had to know what was coming. There was still a lot in the till, and from what Jimmy had said of her in years past I knew she’d be bolted to that chair till the final farthing had been accounted for; but, for a wonder, she had to know what was on the way.

  “To my beloved sister, Sylvia…

  “And that’s the first time in over twenty years I’ve said your name without adding the sobriquet. Seems truncated, but these are formal proceedings and I want to do it without flaw so after I’ve finished talking to you—which you’ll sit through right to the last syllable on just the off-chance that I might act like a brother even though we both know I despise you with a pure, blue flame of loathing, and you might be able to cadge a few bucks—where was I? Fouled in my own syntax. Oh, yeah, I was saying you’ll sit through all this maleficent defoedation—Kenny, if she needs help with that, stop the tape and get her the definitions—you’ll find them in something called Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, in the reference shelf to the left of my typewriter in the office—shit, I lost myself again. Oh, yeah, I remember. You’ll sit through it because you cling to greedy hope like a leech on floating garbage. You figure I can’t be that big a prick after all these years, and so you’ll wait for the last rotten word I’m going to speak to you, sister dearest. And I’m doing this without flaw so that you won’t even have a scintilla of hope that you can contest this will. It’s solid, Sylvia; ironclad, rockribbed, diamond-encrusted solid.

  “And the bottom line is that you get zip.

  “Not a cent.

  “Not a penny.

  “Not a farthing.

  “Not a grubnik. (Which is worth 13¢ American.)

  “Not even a Blue Chip Stamp.

  “Nothing is what you get. Nada, nyet, nihil, nil, nihilum! Nothing, because if I have any dislike of women as a species it comes from you. Nothing because if I haven’t been able, my whole life, entirely to trust a woman, it’s because of what you ran on me when I was a kid.

  “Sylvia, I don’t think I’ve ever had a chance to tell you how deeply and thoroughly I loathe you. No, that isn’t even correctly put. I loathed you for most of my life, but about twelve years ago I just sort of dropped you out of the universe. You ceased to exist. You were never there.

  “I know you can’t doubt that, because you were on the other end of the phone that time when—”

  SylviaTheCunt screamed.

  “Stop
it! Stop him right now!”

  Kenny Gross moved in from the shadowy rear of the library and cut off the Betamax. The screen went white. So did SylviaTheCunt. She was on her feet, the veins standing out in her forehead; a dumpy, big-bosomed woman in middle years. Jimmy always said she was one of those pathetic creatures that had been assembled by The Great Engineer in the Sky without a love mechanism in her. It didn’t take a writer to see that. She had the look of old stone walls that had never even been considered for monuments or pyramids or standing circles.

  “This is criminal!” she shouted. She clutched her purse to her stomach and kept hitting it with her fist. She wanted to strike out at something more offensive, but that was under dirt now. ‘‘I’ll fight this! I will!”

  Missy came around her chair. She towered over SylviaTheCunt and looked down at her, eyes blazing. It may not have been Jimmy reborn, but the spirit had floated out of the grave, off the silent screen, and had entered the body of his most stalwart defender. “You won’t do shit, dolly. You knew what he had for you. You’ve always known. He hasn’t spoken to you for twenty years till now. You’ll fight? It is to laugh, dolly! He left the Corporation to me and I’ll put ten fucking thousand attorneys on it. We’ll block you and tie you up and make you look like the scumbag you are. Wanna fight, dolly? I’m waiting!”

  It drained her. Bran came around and took her by the shoulders and took her back to her seat. Missy slumped down, murmuring, “That bitch… she hated him… she never thought he’d make it…” Bran whispered soft things close to her ear and she quieted down.

  “For the record I’d suggest you watch the rest of the videotape, no matter how distasteful,” Kenny Gross said to SylviaTheCunt. “In the event you do contemplate any legal action. Or if you prefer, you can wait in the living room and when the tape is finished I can run this section for you alone.”

  She stared at him with animosity. She looked around the room at the rest of us, her eyes like slag-heaps. Then she went back and resumed her seat.

  Jimmy was really putting us through it. It reminded me of the piece he had written after his mother’s funeral, where SylviaTheCunt had stood up right in the middle of the eulogy he had written and was reading, and had started screaming that Jimmy was defiling her mother’s funeral. It had shattered Jimmy. He could almost have forgiven her anything she’d done to him as a kid, as a young man, as an adult: but not that. She was doing it again.

  It was posthumous revenge, but it didn’t ennoble Jimmy in the least. And it was hell for the rest of us.

  The attorney started the tape again, and for the next twenty minutes Jimmy rang every charge he could on the woman. How she had brutalized him as a child, with specific deeds that he had remembered with that quirky selective memory of his. Affronts and mean tricks that were almost ludicrous but which, if you remembered how susceptible you were as a little kid, were monstrously cruel. How she had fucked over her own kids, Jimmy’s nephew and niece. How she had beaten down her husband, whom Jimmy had liked even though he wouldn’t stand up to her. How she had become a deplorable human being—racist, bigoted, coarse, provincial and, for Jimmy the most inexcusable of all, bone-stick-stone stupid.

  For twenty minutes we all averted our eyes as Jimmy got into it like a ‘lude-stoked jazz musician trying to blow Bud Powell back from the Great Beyond. It was a bravura ugly performance, many riffs, a lot of high shrieking runs and a lot of low animal growls. None of us could look. There are beasts that go right in and suck the marrow, clean the bones to a glistening white.

  But SylviaTheCunt looked.

  With hard, mean eyes; straight up at the screen; locked in eternal combat with the creature for whom she had seldom felt anything but the most destructive kind of sibling rivalry.

  Jimmy once told me how he had gotten SylviaTheCunt to stop pulling his hair. He said one time when she grabbed a fistful of his straight, brown hair he had gritted his teeth and started turning his body in her grasp. Around and around until the hair pulled so tight the pain went all the way to the soles of his feet. It was so horrible, so excruciating, that she had been appalled at how painful it must have been… and she let him loose. And whenever she would try it again, he would inflict that pain on himself. Until she was so horrified by it that she stopped. “That’s how I developed a very high threshold for pain,” he had said.

  I remember when he got done telling me that… I was gritting my teeth.

  But finally, thank God finally, Jimmy had had all of it even he could handle. He had turned and turned till the pain was insupportable, even for him. Even my best friend, Jimmy, with that seemingly limitless capacity for revenge, for not just getting even, but for getting a bit more of the vigorish in shylock interest, even he had had all he could stomach. And not a moment too soon.

  “You can stop it now,” SylviaTheCunt said. And she stood up. The screen went white again, lights came on in the library where evening had descended, and Jimmy’s sister looked around at all of us.

  “You haven’t heard the last of me,” she said softly, and then she left. You haven’t heard the last of me.

  But I had the sure feeling that we had; we had heard the last of her. Jimmy had called in all the debts from his childhood.

  We sat down again, the lights went off, the Betamax went on, and Jimmy turned his head slightly to the left, looking straight at me in my chair. He had saved me for last and he said, “Larry, buddy? You out there?”

  We were driving from Chicago to New Orleans in an attempt to make Mardi Gras, which we would miss by a full day, arriving on Ash Wednesday, because in the next five miles we would spin out across the snow-covered highway, escape being piledriven by an oncoming truck by inches, plunge off the side of the road, and bury the Corvette headfirst to its rear wheels in snowbanks fifteen feet deep. But we were still five miles away from missing Mardi Gras when he said the thing I remember most clearly from all the years that we knew each other.

  He was driving. He said, “You know the one thing about me that I’m terrified anyone will ever find out. The one lie that makes all of my life a lie.”

  “I do?”

  “Yep. You know it, but you don’t know you know it.”

  “That makes no sense. If I knew it, then I’d know it.”

  “You know more about me than anyone else, and you have the data; but you don’t know how much I fear it, how frightened I am that it might come out.”

  “I’ll never tell.”

  “You might. Get pissed off at me sometime in the future; I might screw you; you might let it slip without knowing it.”

  “Never. I’ll never tell a living soul; honest to God, you can trust me, Rocco: I’ll take the filthy secret to my grave.”

  “No, I’ll take it to my grave. But you might still tell it.”

  “If you’re dead there’d be no way you could protect against that, is there?”

  He thought about that for a while. This was before he married Leslie. We were good and close friends, whatever that meant. But he thought about it, seriously thought about this terrible thing I knew that he was ashamed of, the one thing in a life like his so filled with things any normal human being might find the cause of sleepless nights, that didn’t bother him in the slightest way. He thought about the knowledge I possessed, this Damoclean sword I held over his life and his career and his work in which he revealed everything. Everything except the one bit of knowledge that made all of his life a lie.

  And he said, “I’ll have to figure out a way to keep you quiet after I’m dead.”

  “Good luck,” I said, laughing lightly; and then we hit the icy patch and started to spin out.

  He looked straight at me, having saved me for last.

  “Larry, I herewith make you the executor of my literary estate. You have control of every novel, short story, essay, article, review, anthology and introduction I ever wrote. All those millions of words are in your care, buddy. You’re the one they’ll have to come to if they want to reprint even one of my commas
.”

  I sat stunned. If he had done me the way he’d done SylviaTheCunt, taken this last chance to purge all the swamp animosity of a lifetime… or if he had done me the way he’d done Leslie, tried to clear his conscience of real or fancied harm he’ d visited on her… if he’ d done me as he’ d done Missy and Bran, paid off for loyalty and friendship and domination of their lives… I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  But, oh you malicious wonderful sonofabitch! You did the one thing I cannot bear: you tied me to you forever.

  Malicious? Probably not. It was just Jimmy insuring his memory. Going for posterity, and dragging me along with him, kicking and screaming every micromillimeter of the way. What a mind, what a fucking sweetly conniving mind. I couldn’t even condemn him; hate him, yes, revile him, yes, rail at what he was doing, yes—against which I had no defense—but he was merely demonstrating as a perfect paradigm for his whole breakneck plunge of a life… the ugliness of simply being human.

  I sat stunned. And the voice of the turtle was heard in the library: “Would you mind cutting it for a minute?”

  Turtle, the voice was mine; stunned, I sat in the darkness. The sound of very old, rinkytink music played distantly in the empty concert hall of my head.

  Jimmy had set me up to be either his servant or his Griswold.

  Poe. Jimmy got the idea from Poe.

  He saw himself as Edgar Allan, cut off in his prime from the benefits of posterity’s accolades; he saw me as the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold, but a Griswold who was walled up himself, not free to blacken Poe’s name, a Griswold never free of the sound of the tell-tale heart, Jimmy’s heart, still beating, his will indomitable, his presence felt until the last moment of my own Griswold-trapped life.

  We had talked of this. Poe was one of Jimmy’s idols. He was more than an amusing storyteller to me. But Jimmy even had a puppet made of Edgar Allan, had it hanging in the living room as an ever-present reminder of what heights fantasy could reach.