Burial of the Dead

SEASONAL COLDS - Louis LaPorta

LOUIS LAPORTA

The kids on the skateboards look like rich white kids from the upper east side who’d clean up nice with a blazer and a club tie. But it’s Autumn and clear and bright in New York and everybody’s out, and the kids with the studs-and-needles-look, slaves to the seductive powers of self mutilation, are full of juice and careless, as they dare each other to try something on wheels that’ll defy nature, gravity or expectations.

The youngest kid’s the wild man taking chances, popping down steps, straddling the concrete collar of the circus maximus fountains. He’s smaller than the other two so he tries harder, and when he almost plows into an old woman loping along with a walker, Officer Louis LaPorta, off-duty, a tourist in the Big Apple, grabs the kid by the collar and tells him and his buddies to get the hell out of there. They take off, screaming like Johnny Rebs, and give Laporta the finger before they disappear down Fifth Avenue and into the Park.

“Fuckin kids,” LaPorta says to nobody as the old woman continues on with the reach, set, step and reach routine, inches at a time, oblivious, another New Yorker, unmoved by wild white kids or the tough looking guy who intervened. LaPorta thinks that in Hartford this might have been a news story, but in New York it’s not worthy of one word.

He shakes his arms as if dusting off the unpleasantness and looks north to 79th Street and the stream of cabs that bear to the right as they pummel down the avenue, slowing, stopping before the plaza and the grand steps to the Museum. He checks his watch and looks to the green light farther north and a second wave of cabs, certain she’s on her way, that she will show up. He’s not nervous or worried about it, more surprised than anything about her phone call and the invitation to spend the afternoon in New York. He figures she must really love art, or knows how to pretend to love art so as to make the whole thing seem proper and above-board, even if it carries the whiff of something clandestine and not quite right. LaPorta remembers her from the afternoon at Coop Johnson’s house after Mrs. Johnson’s funeral. He remembers her husband too, Taylor or Tyler, and he remembers the talk they had about Mr. Johnson and Cal Stevens, the guy with the silver bucket on his head, the guy who died in jail. LaPorta’s a cop and he’s been trained to remember these kinds of things, though his memory fails to recall her looks other than an image that relies on the easy description of stock terms – short, petite, shapely, spirited, almost perky and blonde.

“Louis,” she says, and he turns and sees her, surprised, startled that she’d approached from a different direction, catching breath as he takes her in and stock descriptions give way to other words, gathering himself, having lost the lead time he would have used to strike the pose of perfect composure.

“Mrs. Bach,” he says.

“How polite,” she says, “but we’re in New York now, so let’s do as the locals do and call me by my first name.”

“Muffy,” he says.

“Now, that wasn’t so hard was it?”

“No, not hard at all.”

They start up the steps and halfway to the entrance Muffy Bach turns and looks across Fifth Avenue. “I can’t remember,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“O, nothing. It’s just that when I was very young, I attended a debutante ball here and afterwards we had a party in my roommate’s friend’s apartment. More than an apartment, really, it was a three story mansion built into one of these buildings. Had it’s own elevator. I remember how much that impressed me. To think, a family that had their very own elevator. In one of these buildings. O, well, our past is made up of so many little tea bags of information, don’t you think?”