Game over, baby.
These days Dieffenbaker had a substantial golf-gut and wore bifocals. Also, he’d lost most of his hair. Sully was amazed at this, because Deef had had a pretty full head of it five years ago, at the unit’s reunion on the Jersey shore. That was the last time, Sully had vowed to himself, that he would party with those guys. They didn’t get better. They didn’t fuckin mellow. Each reunion was more like the cast of Seinfeld on a really mean batch of crank.
‘Want to come outside and have a smoke?’ the new lieutenant asked. ‘Or did you give that up when everyone else did?’
‘Gave it up like everyone else, that’s affirmative.’ They had been standing a little to the left of the coffin by then so the rest of the mourners could get a look and then get past them.
Talking in low tones, the taped music rolling easily over their voices, the draggy salvation soundtrack. The current tune was ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ Sully believed.
He said, ‘I think Pags would’ve preferred—’
“‘Goin’ Up the Country” or “Let’s Work Together,”‘ Dieffenbaker finished, grinning.
Sully grinned back. It was one of those unexpected moments, like a brief sunny break in a day-long spell of rain, when it was okay to remember something — one of those moments when you were, amazingly, almost glad you had been there. ‘Or maybe “Boom Boom,” that one by The Animals,’ he said.
‘Remember Sly Slocum telling Pags he’d stuff that harmonica up his ass if Pags didn’t give it a rest?’
Sully had nodded, still grinning. ‘Said if he shoved it up there far enough, Pags could play
“Red River Valley” when he farted.’ He had glanced fondly back at the coffin, as if expecting Pagano would also be grinning at the memory. Pagano wasn’t. Pagano was just lying there with makeup on his face. Pagano had gotten over. ‘Tell you what — I’ll come outside and watch you smoke.’
‘Done deal.’ Dieffenbaker, who had once given the okay for one of his soldiers to kill another of his soldiers, had started up the chapel’s side aisle, his bald head lighting up with mixed colors as he passed beneath each stained-glass window. Limping after him — he had been limping over half his life now and never noticed anymore — came John Sullivan, Gold Star Chevrolet dealer.
The traffic on I-95 slowed to a crawl and then came to a complete stop, except for the occasional forward twitch in one of the lanes. On the radio ? and The Mysterians had given way to Sly and the Family Stone — ‘Dance to the Music.’ Fuckin Slocum would have been seat-bopping for sure, seat-bopping to the max. Sully put the Caprice demonstrator in Park and tapped in time on the steering wheel.
As the song began to wind down he looked to his right and there was old mamasan in the shotgun seat, not seat-bopping but just sitting there with her yellow hands folded in her lap and her crazy-bright sneakers, those Chuck Taylor knockoffs, planted on the disposable plastic floormat with SULLIVAN CHEVROLET APPRECIATES YOUR BUSINESS printed on it.
‘Hello, you old bitch,’ Sully said, pleased rather than disturbed. When was the last time she’d shown her face? The Tacklins’ New Year’s Eve party, perhaps, the last time Sully had gotten really drunk. ‘Why weren’t you at Pags’s funeral? The new lieutenant asked after you.’
She made no reply, but hey, when did she ever? She only sat there with her hands folded and her black eyes on him, a Halloween vision in green and orange and red. Old mamasan was like no ghost in a Hollywood movie, though; you couldn’t see through her, she never changed her shape, never faded away. She wore a woven piece of twine on one scrawny yellow wrist like a junior-high-school kid’s friendship bracelet. And although you could see every twist of the twine and every wrinkle on her ancient face, you couldn’t smell her and the one time Sully tried to touch her she had disappeared on him. She was a ghost and his head was the haunted house she lived in. Only every now and then (usually without pain and