Burial of the Dead

SEASONAL COLDS - Billy the Driver

BILLY THE DRIVER

“Cell Phones,” Billy the Driver says as he drives his new Boat east to Waterbury and then north to Meriton, because all the cars on the roads look like cell phones, and all the drivers in the cars look like cell phone drivers, and it confirms a suspicion he’s been working on, that the longer this country hangs around, the more everybody’s going to end up looking like everybody else with features coalescing, all the rough edges smoothed away, all the old world character driven to some outer bank, leaving nothing but the anonymous nothing looks of robots, ad-men, or the mid-level kind of loan officers who try not to look down their noses when they tell you you don’t have the equity or the background or the future for the kind of money you want.

“Cell phones,” Billy says, and he turns off the heater that rattles when it works, and he cracks the window with the sprits of rain striking the window’s edge, raising a mist that dampens his cheek. He grabs a tissue from the box on the seat and blows his nose, feeling the itch in the back of his throat, and he remembers how he used to drink the common cold out of his system with a two or three day toot with two bottles of Jack, a bottle of Old Smugglers and, at the end, a bottle of that Jewish Manny-something-or-other-wine that tasted like cough syrup, oversweet, thick, good enough to knock him out so that when he woke he’d still be sick, but not in the way a cold makes you sick. “But those days are history,” Billy says to himself and he thinks how he never suffered from much other than the drinking when he drank, but has suffered all kinds of ailments since he got sober, the worst being the lung infection two years ago that landed him in the hospital and made him wonder how much karma he’d have to pay back for all the times he did what he wanted to do and only what he wanted to do.

The rain-shower becomes a squall in the hills south of Meriton and he pushes the Buick he bought three months ago from the neighbor woman across the street, getting it for more than it was worth and paying her more than that because she was old and needed the money. The car didn’t run well, hardly started three times out of ten, but he fixed it up in the garage with Darren and Orpheus, the two who were interested in mechanics and wanted to learn about cars. “Good kids,” Billy says to himself, thinking how in this day and age with hysteria running wild in the suburbs with all those SUV moms being certain since the last time they saw a shrink on TV that an older man who spends too much time with boys must be a pervert, a guy like himself, Billy the Driver, a bachelor, almost a loner, takes a risk spending as much time as he does with Darren and Orph. “Well fuck that,” Billy says to himself, because there are precious few places these days where youngsters can find the kind of guidance they’ll need to get themselves through the minefield that’s their lives with the gangs and the drugs and all of that.

“Darren and Orph are good kids and they’re gonna’ learn cars,” Billy says as he makes the turn off Route 8 down the ramp to one of the main streets that falls away into town. He pulls over to the side of the road and rolls down the passenger window and asks the first guy he sees where St. Francis Cemetery might be, and the guy, wearing a toggle coat over one of those white lab coats like a doctor or pharmacist, asks: “Which one, because there are two?” And Billy says: “The one where they’re burying people today,” and the guy looks down Main Street and says: “Drive about two miles down South Main past the Cemetery Ice Cream Shop and you’ll see a low brick wall and the field and the headstones.” Billy looks at his watch. He knows he’s missed the church service; he figures he’ll go straight to the cemetery and meet the funeral there.

He follows the directions and looks about the town, the old streets and buildings, the stores and the store fronts that are probably considered quaint, though Billy never could figure the difference between quaint and run down, since “quaint and funky” is nothing but realtor-talk for “shabby and dangerous.”