The Many Opinions He Encountered
When Oswald Lemur killed himself, nobody was surprised. No one said he was so young or had so much potential. No one said what a shock it was or fell grim about the mouth because life can be over in a second. No. It was simple as pie. Ossie had been in a downturn for a long time.
He left a note on his bedside table. He wrote that even though we’d grown apart, I was his greatest friend. An abiding sadness lived behind everything he did. It turned everything into shame. Made all happiness into embarrassment. All hope into folly. He’d tried to get away from it, but the day had finally come.
We were just kids when we met. He was killing everyone in four square. He had on a mustard-stained American flag tee, a pair of camo shorts, and worn-out tennis shoes. We hid in the slide and told each other our favorite curse words. Mine was crap. His was hell. Kids ran by, kicking mulch and screaming.
Next day I dared him to throw a rock at Eddie Ferguson’s big bald head. He wound up and actually hit his mark. Little Eddie collapsed in the sun and cried. We ran away laughing but also afraid. We’d only seen violence on television.
I loved him immediately. I wanted to hide with him in the slide forever.
We got our hands on firecrackers, which adults treated like Ouija and tarot cards, and set them off everywhere. After weeks of pyromania, we’d blown up maybe a hundred public toilets and burned down a good acre of Mr. Robinson’s corn. Nobody found us out. It was our secret.
Then we got serious. We got into good books and proper European art and corrected our grammar. We were adolescent rednecks who didn’t want to accept our place––belligerent, just smart enough to know we wanted more but not wise enough to realize it was a pipe dream. We didn’t even know what more was. If we’d had to say it, we wanted immortality. One day, when our generation was just a footnote, our names might still mean something. We decided that one morning on the school bus. It was winter and we drew our names on the fogged-up windows.
Ossie + Bud.
On and on and on.
But that was all kid stuff, and kid stuff becomes a problem if you don’t know when to put it away. Ossie didn’t know when to put it away. Ossie wanted to be a writer, but it was clear from even then he’d never become anything. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to be a writer, but that he wanted to be anything at all. He’d betrayed a stroke of optimism and the world didn’t like it, had to crush his dream. He couldn’t take it on the chin like the rest of us. He believed in the nothingness that he was, and believing in yourself is standing all alone.
I had a job fitting pipe in the city. It didn’t pay well. Nothing ever paid well. When Ossie died it was July and the foreman wouldn’t give me time off, so I quit. I went home, looking for answers. Some say death can’t provide answers, only more questions. I don’t know about that.
Things in Huntingtown were like I left them, but different. Like coming back to a dream you’d had as a kid and everything’s lost its glow. All spray-painted and strip-malled, and the carnival’s left town. I drove in over the train tracks, trying to find the right song on the radio. My tires hummed on the gravel and I rode with the windows down the whole way, my back sweating through my shirt and into the driver’s seat.
I stayed at the old Surrey Inn. People stayed there when they got too fucked up at the Mexican restaurant next door. The Inn had never recovered from when a truck ran through the front door in 2010. All the linens were musty and hadn’t been properly flushed of jism. I checked into my room and went to see Ossie’s ex-wife.
This was the day before the funeral service. I hadn’t seen Kris in years, but we’d kept in touch a little after their divorce. It was her who left him. We had coffee or dinner a couple times. Our conversations were soft and dumb. After a while, she said it was strange for us to act like old friends. I don’t know what I’d expected. Nobody ended up happy. But the way she forgot me––like old furniture––I felt harmed.
I knocked on her door. A handsome man opened it. He had a sharp beard and haircut from the wrong side of World War II. Before I could introduce myself, he called over his shoulder—“Kristine, Kristine, he’s here”—and glared at me before he walked away. I was in the wrong place.
Kris and I sat in the living room. The guy’s name was Dan. I could hear him in the kitchen messing with pots and silverware. Very industrious. A lamp next to the couch made me feel like I was in a commercial. Kris looked different. Her hair was down and straight. She was thinner, more rigid, like if she moved the wrong way her skin would break open. She was pensive in a way that confirmed the strict boundary between us.
“Hi, Kris.” I put my hand on her shoulder, and she didn’t move.
“People don’t call me that anymore. I never liked it, anyway. It really sounds like a boy’s name.”
“Well, I’m sorry about Os. Damn sorry.”
“That’s all you can say.”
“It’s a tragedy.”
“Well, I’m sorry too. But it didn’t have to be like that. Nobody wants to say what it really is, but I know it. Even the way you’re looking at me. They say damn sorry but really what they mean is...why didn’t you save him?”
Guilt. Ossie milked it out of everyone.
“There’s nothing to it,” she went on. “It’s just embarrassing. I know it’s a rotten thing to say. But it’s true.”
“Sure.” I patted her back, which seemed like the right thing. “I’m to say some words at the service, but this is why I had to see you. I was wondering if you’d rather do it. It’s years since we even spoke.”
She sat up.
“No. I won’t be at the funeral, Bud. I can’t make a scene like that.”
“I guess not.”
“You two were close as can be. I used to be jealous. Sometimes I even thought, and I wasn’t the only one, by the way, that you two had a life of your own together...your fishing trips and whatnot.”
“But we were all friends in those days.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Maybe for you.”
“What do you mean?”
Apple cider was popping in my chest. “It’s easy for you,” I said. “You just leave people behind like nothing ever happened.”
“You’re the one who left, Bud. You left us here.”
For what? A bunch of lackluster jobs. Never getting anywhere. So-called freedom from this place. “I’m here now,” was all I said.
“Yeah. You go to the funeral and talk. Make sure he’s dressed up proper. Nice tie and everything.”
“It’ll be a closed casket.”
“Then you’ll leave again, back to wherever. Like nothing ever happened.” She said it mockingly. With contempt.
We’d gotten loud. Dan entered the room wearing an apron. He looked sort of tough.
I put my hand on his shoulder and felt his shirt. My fingers didn’t like it. All this playing pretend. “I guess y’all are getting ready to fuck,” I said. “Do you fuck all the time? Are you going to fuck on this couch? Where I’m sitting? I better leave, huh?”
I put on a show while Dan tried to wrestle me out the front door. He threw me backward over the couch. I threw the lamp at him, but it missed and broke a hole in the wall. When I got back to the Inn the front desk attendant was playing sudoku. She scratched her head at a difficult column.
“What happened to you, mister?” she asked.
“Do you have any ice?”
“Let’s see.” She opened a varnish-colored mini fridge behind the desk. “Nope,” she said. “Just frozen peas, carrots, corn, orange juice–oh! and seasonal medley.”
I had two black eyes and a gash on my cheek. My room was cold. I fell asleep with frozen corn on my forehead and The Sound of Music playing on television.
I went to see Ossie’s mother the day of the funeral service. Walking up the driveway, I saw the shed in the backyard, with its old, besotted shingles and dusty windows, where Ossie had retrieved his father’s weapon and turned it on himself, making death the linchpin of everything he’d ever done or failed to do. I was all tied up in it. I still didn’t understand.
I helped Mrs. Lemur reach a scrapbook from the high shelf in her bedroom closet. She had a box TV on her dresser and an old waterbed. I peeked into Ossie’s room across the hall. It still had the same cactus and tumbleweed wallpaper. A shred of daylight flapped through the blinds, into the hallway. A layer of dust rested on everything. I poked through Ossie’s desk hoping to find his writing in it. There was nothing. It seemed all he ever got down was a suicide note.
Mrs. Lemur poured me a cup of coffee with a shaky hand. We sat at the table and picked through photos for the service. In one of them, Ossie and I were dressed up as cowboys. Our arms hung over each other’s shoulders. I remembered nights of laughter and gossip and drinking whiskey from a plastic water bottle. I put the photo in my pocket. She wouldn’t notice; she had trouble with her memory.
“Excuse Mr. Lemur, Bud. He just hasn’t been right recently.”
She pulled out a photo of Ossie sitting on his father’s lap. Henry Lemur had moved out years ago. When his wife’s mind started going, he left. He only came around now to mow the lawn. He’d been running the weed whacker when his old gun went off.
“I tell him a gun is nothing without the will to use it, and Oswald is a grown boy who don’t need permission for things.”
“That’s alright, Miss Sally,” I said.
“Fathers and sons.” She leaned over the photo, gently scratching it with her finger, having visions. “They don’t understand each other. A father always wants his son to be something else. Only sees the boy’s potential for being a man. The boy can never just be a boy. He’s got to be strong as his daddy.”
“You and Mr. Henry did alright.”
“Stronger. But neither of them will be men now. One leaves the other behind. It’s a call to guard the other from opening a door. If one opens the door, the other cannot enter. He’ll never find out what’s behind it.”
“Right. The door.” My nose started to leak blood. I shoved a napkin up my nostril.
“He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?” she asked. “Please make sure he looks nice.”
“It’s a closed casket.”
“I mean how you talk about him. Say decent things. Don’t you know he needs a friend?”
I spun my coffee round and round with a spoon. Half an hour later she asked me who I was and what I was doing in her house. I helped her onto the couch so she wouldn’t fall or nothing. She was so thin. She stared off for a while. I turned on a lamp. She smiled like someone was telling her good news.
My suit jacket had a white stain on the back from the last wedding I went to. I never thought to get it cleaned. Some things you can’t ever prepare for.
Ossie’s old dad was slouched on the front steps of Lee Funeral Parlor. The sun had started to fall behind the trees. The evening air was getting sticky. As I approached, he tucked his flask into his pocket, but then recognized me and removed it, turned it back for a drink. I thought about running away, but I didn’t.
Mr. Henry wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “What happened to your face?” he asked.
“I was attacked by a very small and ugly man. He had a hammer.”
“I feel like laying down on the train tracks. Want?” He sloshed the flask at me.
I took it and drank.
“You and that boy were always the same damn way,” he said. “Except for now. You couldn’t be more different now.”
“I wish I was like you,” I said. “You’re drunk.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s not. Nothing has to go no way. This is what he chose. This is the day we made for ourselves.”
We listened out in the tree line for birds and distant humming trucks.
“I went down the river last week in the old jon,” Mr. Henry said. “I bought the freshest bull lips and they’s expensive now. Out all day with those finest materials. Know what I caught?”
“Probably nothing.”
“Not a thing. Oswald loved that little boat. He loved everything. We’d go out and catch ten bushels with a bag of chicken necks. Crab...oyster... fishes...”
You never could talk to Mr. Henry about serious things like presidents or death. Time in the military had calcified his brain.
“I visited Miss Sally this morning,” I told him. “She didn’t know who I was.”
“God bless everything.”
The sun dropped lower, made the sky purple and orange. We drank. The breeze pushed the humidity away. I helped Mr. Henry up and we entered through the parlor’s black door. He sat by himself in the front row. I recognized people milling around like something out of an old TV show. All those people who stayed in town and never left. Even Eddie Ferguson was there, balder than ever. He still had a little scar on the crown of his head.
Dane Maylor was picking his fingernails near the entrance, a cartoon of grief. One of the old crowd with regular aspirations, or delusions. Maylor had patched together a career teaching freshmen at state colleges. He spent more money on gas than anyone in the county, driving hours between rinky-dink campuses for a check that barely broke him even. That way he called himself a legitimate writer, though to my knowledge he never published any kind of book.
Maylor made his way over with lean measured strides, a faker baker smile, like a politician, tightening his face.
“Thank you for coming, Bud. He would’ve wanted us all here, all of his friends,” he said like he’d invented funerals.
I put some tissues in my pocket in case someone cried around me.
“He gave me some work a couple months back, maybe a year ago, or two years,” Maylor was going on.
I should’ve had another drink. I looked around for Mr. Henry but that old wizard was gone.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“He gave me this stack of manuscripts, came right into my office with them. Strictly juvenilia. I told him I was busy, hardly had the time. All very polite. But he begged me. I felt awful putting him off. You know he wasn’t much a writer?”
“Hardly seems to matter now.”
“Bad writing never matters.”
“What did you do with it?”
“That’s where it gets nauseous. After, you know, all this, I sent the papers back to his mother. This week, they’re right back in my mailbox. She calls me on the phone, says Please, Mr. Maylor, please, these need to be published. It was his dream. His dream. It’s pure tragedy. Poor Ossie thought the only way to publish was to kill himself, but not even that’ll do it.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad.”
“It was dogshit baloney.”
“Christ. Why are you telling me this?”
“I thought you might want the manuscripts. Please. They’re burning a hole in my heart.”
“Fine,” I said, half-thankful, but what I meant to say was Being like you is worse than being dead. You parade around like one thing but really you’re something else.
It was time for me to take the podium, a solo microphone next to the casket. I put a hand on the closed lid. The cheapest variety. A projector shot a beam of light right through me. A slideshow on the back wall showed all those photos of Ossie from when we were kids. All except the one in my pocket. My shadow made a human-shaped hole in the images. A negative space. My head hurt. I wanted to capture everything we were to each other, see if those distant years meant anything. It came together like slowly focusing a pair of binoculars. Lilacs and daffodils stuffed in our pockets. Running, running through the corn. Dirty fingernails. Hot slides and deer stands and firecrackers going off bang! bang! bang! catching the world on fire. Canoes in the river going out so far we question if we know the way back, and turns out we don’t, but if we just keep following the tide we’ll be alright.
The room looked up, some wiping tears. It smelled like candlewax and rubbing alcohol. The whole place colored beige. Maylor stood in the back with a big stack of Ossie’s papers, flaunting. I focused on Mr. Henry’s empty chair.
“Here he is,” I said. “Here’s my old friend.”
The room leaned in.
“We’re not so different from the dead, I think.”
The room held its breath.
“One foot in the grave.”
The room cocked its brow.
“Just one foot.”
The room crossed its toes.
The projector light washed over me.
Ossie, Ossie. You great bambino, you sonofabitch, you genius, you fool, you scoundrel, you saint, you failure, you legend, you coward, you warrior. You never stood a chance.
The room fell into a chatter as I sat and dropped my head into my hands.
I picked up my head and everyone was gone. I’d stayed too long. There was no reason for me to be there. Mr. Henry was passed out in the bushes by the parking lot. He’d gone to get a bottle. He still had it clutched in his hand. I went to grab the bottle, and he jerked it away like instinct. He started up and wiped the drool off his chin. “Oh, Bud," he rasped like the last breath of a dying man. “I just can’t make a scene like that.”
A train clattered somewhere beyond the tree line, cruising on rusty tracks in the dark.
The attendant was asleep at the front desk of the Inn, face in her ink-smeared puzzle. I laid out Ossie’s papers all over the floor of my room. Some five-hundred pages. It was all there. I set the photo of us on my bedside table. I’d leave tomorrow. I always end up back here anyway. I go through empty intervals of time. Jobs, people, listless breathing. Nothing happens until I return, and return, and return.
I put the corn on my head and shut my eyes. I dreamed of Ossie and me riding stallions across an endless plain, carrying our lives in our saddles, dipping into a green valley. I’m going faster to keep apace, holding close so he won’t leave me in the dust.
Owen Edwards is from Huntingtown, Maryland. He is an editor for BRUISER and author of the forthcoming chapbook Pieces of Was. His writing has appeared in HAD and the Rose Books Reader. His website is owenpauledwards.com.