Everybody Dies

"Of what?"

"My gift to you the Christmas before last. A ham from one of my very own hogs."

"It was very generous."

"And what could be a more suitable gift for a Jewish vegetarian?" He shook his head at the memory. "And what a gracious woman she is. She thanked me so warmly that it was hours before it struck me what an inappropriate gift I'd brought her. Did she cook it for you?"

She would have, if I'd wanted, but why should Elaine cook something she's not going to eat? I eat enough meat when I'm away from the house. Home or away, though, I might have had trouble with that ham. The first time Mick and I met, I was looking for a girl who'd disappeared. It turned out she'd been killed by her lover, a young man who worked for Mick. He'd disposed of her corpse by feeding it to the hogs. Mick, outraged when he found out, had dispensed poetic justice, and the hogs had dined a second time. The ham he'd brought us was from a different generation of swine, and had no doubt been fattened on grain and table scraps, but I was just as happy to give it to Jim Faber, whose enjoyment of it was uncomplicated by a knowledge of its history.

"A friend of mine had it for Christmas," I said. "Said it was the best ham he ever tasted."

"Sweet and tender."

"So he said."

Andy Buckley threw down the shovel, climbed up out of the hole, and drank most of a can of ale in a single long swallow. "Christ," he said, "that's thirsty work."

"Twenty-dollar eggs and thousand-dollar hams," Mick said. "It's a grand career for a man, agriculture. However could a man fail at it?"

I grabbed the shovel and went to work.

I took my turn and Mick took his. Halfway through it he leaned on his shovel and sighed. "I'll feel this tomorrow," he said. "All this work. But it's a good feeling for all that."

"Honest exercise."

"It's little enough of it I get in the ordinary course of things. How about yourself?"

"I do a lot of walking."

"That's the best exercise of all, or so they say."

"That and pushing yourself away from the table."

"Ah, that's the hardest, and gets no easier with age."

"Elaine goes to the gym," I said. "Three times a week. I tried, but it bores me to death."

"But you walk."

"I walk."

He dug out his flask, and moonlight glinted off the silver. He took a drink and put it away, took up the shovel again. He said, "I should come here more. I take long walks when I'm here, you know. And do chores, though I suspect O'Gara has to do them over again once I've left. I've no talent for farming."

"But you enjoy being here."

"I do, and yet I'm never here. And if I enjoy it so, why am I always itching to get back to the city?"

"You miss the action," Andy suggested.

"Do I? I didn't miss it so much when I was with the brothers."

"The monks," I said.

He nodded. "The Thessalonian Brothers. In Staten Island, just a ferryboat ride fromManhattan, but you'd think you were a world away."

"When were you there last? It was just this spring, wasn't it?"

"The last two weeks of May. June, July, August, September. Four months ago, close enough. Next time you'll have to come with me."

"Yeah, right."

"And why not?"

"Mick, I'm not even Catholic."

"Who's to say what you are or aren't? You've come to Mass with me."

"That's for twenty minutes, not two weeks I'd feel out of place."

"You wouldn't. It's a retreat. Have you never done a retreat?"

I shook my head. "A friend of mine goes sometimes," I said.

"To the Thessalonians?"

"To the Zen Buddhists. They're not that far from here, now that I think of it. Is there a town near here called Livingston Manor?"

"Indeed there is, and 'tis not far at all."

"Well, the monastery's near there. He's been three or four times."

"Is he a Buddhist, then?"

"He was brought up Catholic, but he's been away from the church for ages."

"And so he goes to the Buddhists for retreat. Have I met him, this friend of yours?"

"I don't think so. But he and his wife ate that ham you gave me."

"And pronounced it good, I believe you said."

"The best he ever tasted."

"High praise from a Zen Buddhist. Ah, Jesus, it's a strange old world, isn't it?" He clambered out of the hole. "Have one more go at it," he said, handing the shovel to Andy. "I think it's good enough as it is, but no harm if you even it up a bit."

Andy took his turn. I was feeling a chill now. I picked up my windbreaker from where I'd tossed it, put it on. The wind blew a cloud in front of the moon, and we lost a little of our light. The cloud passed and the moonlight came back. It was a waxing moon, and in a couple of days it would be full.

Gibbous- that's the word for the moon when there's more than half of it showing. It's Elaine's word. Well, Webster's, I suppose, but I learned it from her. And she was the one who told me that, if you fill a barrel inIowa with seawater, the moon will cause tides in that water. And that blood's chemical makeup is very close to that of seawater, and the moon's tidal pull works in our veins.

Just some thoughts I had, under a gibbous moon…

"That'll do," Mick said, and Andy tossed the shovel and Mick gave him a hand out of the hole, and Andy got a flashlight from the glove compartment and aimed its beam down into the hole, and we all looked at it and pronounced it acceptable. And then we went to the car and Mick sighed heavily and unlocked the trunk.

For an instant I had the thought that it would be empty. There'd be the spare, of course, and a jack and a lug wrench, and maybe an old blanket and a couple of rags. But other than that it would be empty.

Just a passing thought, blowing across my mind like the cloud across the moon. I didn't really expect the trunk to be empty.

And of course it wasn't.

I don't know that it's my story to tell.

It's Mick's, really, far more than it's mine. He should be the one to tell it. But he won't.

There are others whose story it is as well. Every story belongs to everyone who has any part in it, and there were quite a few people who had a part in this one. It's none of their story as much as it's Mick's, but they could tell it, singly or in chorus, one way or another.

But they won't.

Nor will he, whose story it is more than anyone's. I've never known a better storyteller, and he could make a meal of this one, but it's not going to happen. He'll never tell it.

And I was there, after all. For some of the begi

And I'm here to tell it. And, for some reason, I can't not tell it.

So I guess it's up to me.

Earlier that same night, a Wednesday, I'd gone to an AA meeting. Afterward I'd had a cup of coffee with Jim Faber and a couple of others, and when I got home Elaine said that Mick had called. "He said perhaps you could stop in," she said. "He didn't come right out and say it was urgent, but that was the impression I got."

So I got my windbreaker from the closet and put it on, and halfway to Grogan's I zipped it up. It was September, and a very transitional sort of September, with days like August and nights like October. Days to remind you of where you'd been, nights to make sure you knew where you were going.

I lived for something like twenty years in a room at the Hotel Northwestern, on the north side ofFifty-seventh Street a few doors east ofNinth Avenue. When I moved, finally, it was right across the street, to the Parc Vendôme, a large prewar building where Elaine and I have a spacious fourteenth-floor apartment with views south and west.

And I walked south and west, south toFiftieth Street, west toTenth Avenue. Grogan's is on the southeast corner, an old Irish taproom of the sort that is getting harder and harder to find in Hell's Kitchen, and indeed throughoutNew York. A floor of inch-square black and white tiles, a stamped tin ceiling, a long mahogany bar, a matching mirrored backbar. An office in the back, where Mick kept guns and cash and records, and sometimes napped on a long green leather couch. An alcove to the left of the office, with a dartboard at the end of it, under a stuffed sailfish. Doors on the right-hand wall of the alcove, leading to the restrooms.