“You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
“It is why we are drawn to babies…” He turned to the mourners. “And to funerals.”
Eddie looked again at the gravesite gathering. He wondered if he’d had a funeral. He wondered if anyone came. He saw the priest reading from the Bible and the mourners lowering their heads. This was the day the Blue Man had been buried, all those years ago. Eddie had been there, a little boy, fidgeting through the ceremony, with no idea of the role he’d played in it.
“I still don’t understand,” Eddie whispered. “What good came from your death?”
“You lived,” the Blue Man answered.
“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The Blue Man put his arms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.”
WITH THAT, THE Blue Man pulled Eddie close. Instantly, Eddie felt everything the Blue Man had felt in his life rushing into him, swimming in his body, the loneliness, the shame, the nervousness, the heart attack. It slid into Eddie like a drawer being closed.
“I am leaving,” the Blue Man whispered in his ear. “This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet.”
“Wait,” Eddie said, pulling back. “Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?”
The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. “Then my death was a waste, just like my life.”
“No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
He stepped back toward the gravesite and smiled. And as he did, his skin turned the loveliest shade of caramel—smooth and unblemished. It was, Eddie thought, the most perfect skin he had ever seen.
“Wait!” Eddie yelled, but he was suddenly whisked into the air, away from the cemetery, soaring above the great gray ocean. Below him, he saw the rooftops of old Ruby Pier, the spires and turrets, the flags flapping in the breeze.
Then it was gone.
SUNDAY, 3 P.M.
Back at the pier, the crowd stood silently around the wreckage of Freddy’s Free Fall. Old women touched their throats. Mothers pulled their children away. Several burly men in tank tops slid to the front, as if this were something they should handle, but once they got there, they, too, only looked on, helpless. The sun baked down, sharpening the shadows, causing them to shield their eyes as if they were saluting.
How bad is it? people whispered. From the back of the crowd, Dominguez burst through, his face red, his maintenance shirt drenched in sweat. He saw the carnage.
“Ahh no, no, Eddie,” he moaned, grabbing his head. Security workers arrived. They pushed people back. But then, they, too, fell into impotent postures, hands on their hips, waiting for the ambulances. It was as if all of them—the mothers, the fathers, the kids with their giant gulp soda cups—were too stunned to look and too stunned to leave. Death was at their feet, as a carnival tune played over the park speakers.
How bad is it? Sirens sounded. Men in uniforms arrived. Yellow tape was stretched around the area. The arcade booths pulled down their grates. The rides were closed indefinitely. Word spread across the beach of the bad thing that had happened, and by sunset, Ruby Pier was empty.
Today Is Eddie’s Birthday
From his bedroom, even with the door closed, Eddie can smell the beefsteak his mother is grilling with green peppers and sweet red onions, a strong, woody odor that he loves.
“Eddd-deee!” she yells from the kitchen. “Where are you? Everyone’s here!”
He rolls off the bed and puts away the comic book. He is 17 today, too old for such things, but he still enjoys the idea—colorful heroes like the Phantom, fighting the bad guys, saving the world. He has given his collection to his school-aged cousins from Romania, who came to America a few months earlier. Eddie’s family met them at the docks and they moved into the bedroom that Eddie shared with his brother, Joe. The cousins cannot speak English, but they like comic books. Anyhow, it gives Eddie an excuse to keep them around.
“There’s the birthday boy,” his mother crows when he rambles into the room. He wears a button-down white shirt and a blue tie, which pinches his muscular neck. A grunt of hellos and raised beer glasses come from the assembled visitors, family, friends, pier workers. Eddie’s father is playing cards in the corner, in a small cloud of cigar smoke.
“Hey, Ma, guess what?” Joe yells out. “Eddie met a girl last night.”
“Oooh. Did he?”
Eddie feels a rush of blood.
“Yeah. Said he’s gonna marry her.”
“Shut yer trap,” Eddie says to Joe.
Joe ignores him. “Yep, he came into the room all google-eyed, and he said, ‘Joe, I met the girl I’m gonna marry!’”
Eddie seethes. “I said shut it!”
“What’s her name, Eddie?” someone asks.
“Does she go to church?”
Eddie goes to his brother and socks him in the arm.
“Owww!”
“Eddie!”
“I told you to shut it!”
Joe blurts out, “And he danced with her at the Stard—!”
Whack.
“Oww!”
“SHUT UP!”
“Eddie! Stop that!!”
Even the Romanian cousins look up now—fighting they understand—as the two brothers grab each other and flail away, clearing the couch, until Eddie’s father puts down his cigar and yells, “Knock it off, before I slap both of ya’s.”
The brothers separate, panting and glaring. Some older relatives smile. One of the aunts whispers, “He must really like this girl.”
Later, after the special steak has been eaten and the candles have been blown out and most of the guests have gone home, Eddie’s mother turns on the radio. There is news about the war in Europe, and Eddie’s father says something about lumber and copper wire being hard to get if things get worse. That will make maintenance of the park nearly impossible.
“Such awful news,” Eddie’s mother says. “Not at a birthday.”
She turns the dial until the small box offers music, an orchestra playing a swing melody, and she smiles and hums along. Then she comes over to Eddie, who is slouched in his chair, picking at the last pieces of cake. She removes her apron, folds it over a chair, and lifts Eddie by the hands.
“Show me how you danced with your new friend,” she says.
“Aw, Ma.”
“Come on.”
Eddie stands as if being led to his execution. His brother smirks. But his mother, with her pretty, round face, keeps humming and stepping back and forth, until Eddie falls into a dance step with her.
“Daaa daa deeee,” she sings with the melody, “…when you’re with meeee…da da…the stars, and the moon…the da…da…da…in June…”
They move around the living room until Eddie breaks down and laughs. He is already taller than his mother by a good six inches, yet she twirls him with ease.
“So,” she whispers, “you like this girl?”
Eddie loses a step.
“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m happy for you.”
They spin to the table, and Eddie’s mother grabs Joe and pulls him up.
“Now you two dance,” she says.
“With him?”
“Ma!”
But she insists and they relent, and soon Joe and Eddie are laughing and stumbling into each other. They join hands and move, swooping up and down in exaggerated circles. Around and around the table they go, to their mother’s delight, a
s the clarinets lead the radio melody and the Romanian cousins clap along and the final wisps of grilled steak evaporate into the party air.
The Second Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
EDDIE FELT HIS FEET TOUCH GROUND. THE sky was changing again, from cobalt blue to charcoal gray, and Eddie was surrounded now by fallen trees and blackened rubble. He grabbed his arms, shoulders, thighs, and calves. He felt stronger than before, but when he tried to touch his toes, he could no longer do so. The limberness was gone. No more childish rubbery sensation. Every muscle he had was as tight as piano wire.
He looked around at the lifeless terrain. On a nearby hill lay a busted wagon and the rotting bones of an animal. Eddie felt a hot wind whip across his face. The sky exploded to a flaming yellow.
And once again, Eddie ran.
He ran differently now, in the hard measured steps of a soldier. He heard thunder—or something like thunder, explosions, or bomb blasts—and he instinctively fell to the ground, landed on his stomach, and pulled himself along by his forearms. The sky burst open and gushed rain, a thick, brownish downpour. Eddie lowered his head and crawled along in the mud, spitting away the dirty water that gathered around his lips.
Finally he felt his head brush against something solid. He looked up to see a rifle dug into the ground, with a helmet sitting atop it and a set of dog tags hanging from the grip. Blinking through the rain, he fingered the dog tags, then scrambled backward wildly into a porous wall of stringy vines that hung from a massive banyan tree. He dove into their darkness. He pulled his knees into a crouch. He tried to catch his breath. Fear had found him, even in heaven.
The name on the dog tags was his.
YOUNG MEN GO to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
When his country entered the war, Eddie woke up early one rainy morning, shaved, combed back his hair, and enlisted. Others were fighting. He would, too.
His mother did not want him to go. His father, when informed of the news, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly.
“When?” was all he asked.
Since he’d never fired an actual rifle, Eddie began to practice at the shooting arcade at Ruby Pier. You paid a nickel and the machine hummed and you squeezed the trigger and fired metal slugs at pictures of jungle animals, a lion or a giraffe. Eddie went every evening, after running the brake levers at the Li’l Folks Miniature Railway. Ruby Pier had added a number of new, smaller attractions, because roller coasters, after the Depression, had become too expensive. The Miniature Railway was pretty much just that, the train cars no higher than a grown man’s thigh.
Eddie, before enlisting, had been working to save money to study engineering. That was his goal—he wanted to build things, even if his brother, Joe, kept saying, “C’mon, Eddie, you aren’t smart enough for that.”
But once the war started, pier business dropped. Most of Eddie’s customers now were women alone with children, their fathers gone to fight. Sometimes the children asked Eddie to lift them over his head, and when Eddie complied, he saw the mothers’ sad smiles: He guessed it was the right lift but the wrong pair of arms. Soon, Eddie figured, he would join those distant men, and his life of greasing tracks and running brake levers would be over. War was his call to manhood. Maybe someone would miss him, too.
On one of those final nights, Eddie was bent over the small arcade rifle, firing with deep concentration. Pang! Pang! He tried to imagine actually shooting at the enemy. Pang! Would they make a noise when he shot them—pang!—or would they just go down, like the lions and giraffes?
Pang! Pang!
“Practicing to kill, are ya, lad?”
Mickey Shea was standing behind Eddie. His hair was the color of French vanilla ice cream, wet with sweat, and his face was red from whatever he’d been drinking. Eddie shrugged and returned to his shooting. Pang! Another hit. Pang! Another.
“Hmmph,” Mickey grunted.
Eddie wished Mickey would go away and let him work on his aim. He could feel the old drunk behind him. He could hear his labored breathing, the nasal hissing in and out, like a bike tire being inflated by a pump.
Eddie kept shooting. Suddenly, he felt a painful grip on his shoulder.
“Listen to me, lad.” Mickey’s voice was a low growl. “War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it, you hear? No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don’t think about who you’re shootin’ or killin’ or why, y’hear me? You want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think.”
He squeezed even harder.
“It’s the thinking that gets you killed.”
Eddie turned and stared at Mickey. Mickey slapped him hard on the cheek and Eddie instinctively raised his fist to retaliate. But Mickey belched and wobbled backward. Then he looked at Eddie as if he were going to cry. The mechanical gun stopped humming. Eddie’s nickel was up.
Young men go to war, sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. A few days later, Eddie packed a duffel bag and left the pier behind.
THE RAIN STOPPED. Eddie, shivering and wet beneath the banyan tree, exhaled a long, hard breath. He pulled the vines apart and saw the rifle and helmet still stuck in the ground. He remembered why soldiers did this: It marked the graves of their dead.
He crawled out on his knees. Off in the distance, below a small ridge, were the remains of a village, bombed and burnt into little more than rubble. For a moment, Eddie stared, his mouth slightly open, his eyes bringing the scene into tighter focus. Then his chest tightened like a man who’d just had bad news broken. This place. He knew it. It had haunted his dreams.
“Smallpox,” a voice suddenly said.
Eddie spun.
“Smallpox. Typhoid. Tetanus. Yellow fever.”
It came from above, somewhere in the tree.
“I never did find out what yellow fever was. Hell. I never met anyone who had it.”
The voice was strong, with a slight Southern drawl and gravelly edges, like a man who’d been yelling for hours.
“I got all those shots for all those diseases and I died here anyhow, healthy as a horse.”
The tree shook. Some small fruit fell in front of Eddie.
“How you like them apples?” the voice said.
Eddie stood up and cleared his throat.
“Come out,” he said.
“Come up,” the voice said.
And Eddie was in the tree, near the top, which was as tall as an office building. His legs straddled a large limb and the earth below seemed a long drop away. Through the smaller branches and thick fig leaves, Eddie could make out the shadowy figure of a man in army fatigues, sitting back against the tree trunk. His face was covered with a coal black substance. His eyes glowed red like tiny bulbs.
Eddie swallowed hard.
“Captain?” he whispered. “Is that you?”
THEY HAD SERVED together in the army. The Captain was Eddie’s commanding officer. They fought in the Philippines and they parted in the Philippines and Eddie had never seen him again. He had heard he’d died in combat.
A wisp of cigarette smoke appeared.
“They explained the rules to you, soldier?”
Eddie looked down. He saw the earth far below, yet he knew he could not fall.
“I’m dead,” he said.
“You got that much right.”
“And you’re dead.”
“Got that right, too.”
“And you’re…my second person?”
The Captain held up his cigarette. He smiled as if to say, “Can you believe you get to smoke up here?” Then he took a long drag and blew out a small white cloud.
“Betcha didn’t expect me, huh?”
EDDIE LEARNED MANY things during the war. He learned to ride atop a tank. He learned to shave
with cold water in his helmet. He learned to be careful when shooting from a foxhole, lest he hit a tree and wound himself with deflected shrapnel.
He learned to smoke. He learned to march. He learned to cross a rope bridge while carrying, all at once, an overcoat, a radio, a carbine, a gas mask, a tripod for a machine gun, a backpack, and several bandoliers on his shoulder. He learned how to drink the worst coffee he’d ever tasted.
He learned a few words in a few foreign languages. He learned to spit a great distance. He learned the nervous cheer of a soldier’s first survived combat, when the men slap each other and smile as if it’s over—We can go home now!—and he learned the sinking depression of a soldier’s second combat, when he realizes the fighting does not stop at one battle, there is more and more after that.
He learned to whistle through his teeth. He learned to sleep on rocky earth. He learned that scabies are itchy little mites that burrow into your skin, especially if you’ve worn the same filthy clothes for a week. He learned a man’s bones really do look white when they burst through the skin.
He learned to pray quickly. He learned in which pocket to keep the letters to his family and Marguerite, in case he should be found dead by his fellow soldiers. He learned that sometimes you are sitting next to a buddy in a dugout, whispering about how hungry you are, and the next instant there is a small whoosh and the buddy slumps over and his hunger is no longer an issue.
He learned, as one year turned to two and two years turned toward three, that even strong, muscular men vomit on their shoes when the transport plane is about to unload them, and even officers talk in their sleep the night before combat.
He learned how to take a prisoner, although he never learned how to become one. Then one night, on a Philippine island, his group came under heavy fire, and they scattered for shelter and the skies were lit and Eddie heard one of his buddies, down in a ditch, weeping like a child, and he yelled at him, “Shut up, will ya!” and he realized the man was crying because there was an enemy soldier standing over him with a rifle at his head, and Eddie felt something cold at his neck and there was one behind him, too.