Burial of the Dead

PLOTS - 13

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It’s not a carnival or a circus or a sideshow. It’s more like an old fashioned church picnic with tables of pies and pastries and cakes and buckets filled with soda pop and bottled water. Two teams of nine play slow pitch softball under lights. Behind the main podium, on a dais of old wood, the Mayor and some Councilmen and Bishop Ravezzi welcome everybody and talk about the changes taking place for the better in the community, while another crowd gathers under the bungee jumpers who fall from heights like a rite of passage.

Bishop Ravezzi stands at the podium and says that generosity is the keystone of community. The people applaud. They like the Bishop who isn’t a bishop or a minister or a priest or anything formal like that. He’s the youngest son of Italian socialists from Buffalo, believers, who believed in the dignity of working men and the evils of greed. He tried the Catholic seminary in the 80’s, but that didn’t work for reasons better left unsaid. So he moved from western New York and settled in the North End of Hartford where he married an African American woman named Leah and opened his own church in an abandoned Used Car lot, attracted a large following and actually did some good.

The celebration on the green had been scheduled for late May when the weather would be warm, but there were problems with City Hall and permits and then there were problems hooking up with the Amazing Levon, which had almost strained Leah’s friendship with Eddie Davis, the Amazing Levon’s manager. After everybody got everything straightened out, they had to move the date up, and not back, to April, and they worried about the cold. But this night seems blessed. A warm front blew through about five and the air is mild and the crowd is large and people are being generous as kids pass through the crowd with buckets for donations and candies to give away.

Orpheus passes a plastic bucket near the outer edge of the crowd and holds it out for one guy who looks at him like he’s a pest or crazy or something.

“What?” the guy says.

“We didn’t charge no admission,” Orph says, “but we still got to pay that motherfucker to fly his ass off.”

“You talk to your parents, like that,” the guy says, as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. He opens it and a credit card falls to the ground. Orph picks it up and reads the name before he hands it back.

“And a’ course we want you to have a good time, Mister Brian Wyman, sir.”

Brian looks at the kid and wishes he’d cut the shit, especially since other people are looking on.

“What are people giving?” Brian asks.

“About a hundred,” Orph says.

Brian hesitates. He says: “Get real, kid.”

“C'mon, man,” Orph whispers, “You want these motherfuckers thinkin’ you’re some kinda’ cheap fuck?”

Brian grabs a twenty, holds it up for Orph to see, and drops it into the bucket.

“Thank you, Mr. Brian Wyman,” Orph says, loud enough for everyone standing nearby to hear. “You are one generous son-of-a-bitch.”

“Got outta’ here,” Brian says under his breath, and Orph leaves, spotting the next mark, thinking this might be too good to be true.

On the far side of the softball game a yellow cement mixer backs up, crosses the field and stops play, making herky-jerk movements till it reaches the plot of land where a backhoe, parked against a fence, digs a four by seven by five grave. The cement mixer backs up to the hole and the workers attach the chute. About thirty yards from the grave there’s a black tour bus like the country stars use with The Amazing Levon airbrushed on the side. Brian watches the crowd gather around the scene, pushing in and up to the yellow police tape and the space cordoned off for the Amazing Levon.