The Revenant Road Read Online Free Page A

publishing industry, the literary establishment and the public.
    “Call me a snob,” I said to the hopeful driver. “But I’d rather let a one-eyed baboon shave my balls with a rusty hacksaw than waste my time writing such inane bullshit.”
    To my savage satisfaction, the driver’s hopeful expression died. He pushed a button on the steering wheel and raised the privacy screen between us without another word.
    “It’s your mother,” Carla said. 
    I shot her a look full of the promise of murder.
    She handed me the phone and looked out the window.
    “Yeah, mother. What’s up?”
    Three minutes later, we were heading for my mother’s house in Bronxville.
    My hands were shaking. As the car turned around and headed North, toward the suburbs of Westchester County , I willed them to be still. When I looked at my watch the trembling returned, worse than before: Death had come to call on an old family acquaintance.
    She was right on schedule.

     

 
     
     
    6
    An Affair to Dismember:
    Part Two
     
    The only thing longer than a Catholic wedding is a Catholic funeral. As mourners flooded out of St. Theresa’s Cathedral I stood on the steps, doing deep knee bends in an effort to force the blood that had pooled in my lower legs back up to my brain.
    St. Theresa’s overlooked the Hudson River and the West Side Highway. To the east, Harlem was waking up. Hip-hop music blared from a passing S.U.V., the bass beatdown an incongruous accompaniment to the occasion of my father’s final, fatal shuffle.
    “Stop that,” a familiar voice hissed. “You look like you’re about to run a footrace.”
    My mother Lenore is what the old Italians used to call a “ball-breaker.” The fact that she’d once graced the covers of such publications as Vogue , Redbook, and Essence belies the fact that she can decapitate a man at twenty paces with one slash of her tongue.
    “I didn’t even know he was Catholic,” I said.
    Lenore shrugged. “When we were married Marcus didn’t believe in organized religion. I suppose as he got older...”
    “He got soft?” I smirked.
    Lenore glared at me. For the briefest of moments an emotion that I didn’t recognize flickered in her eyes.
    “Obadiah,” she said. “Your father was a good man.”
    I afforded her the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for men who masturbate in public.
    “Obadiah, listen to me...”
    “Who are all these people?” I said, changing the subject.
    We were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the coffin and pallbearers to appear.
    “There must be three-hundred people here I don’t recognize.”
    “Your father had a lot of… friends,” Lenore said.
    For some reason I got the feeling “friends” wasn’t the word she’d wanted to use. We’d only gotten the details of Marcus’s death a day before the funeral. He’d been traveling on business to Seattle with a client, a millionaire interested in developing a large tract of land using Marcus as the general contractor. According to my mother’s lawyer, Marcus Grudge owned and operated a successful construction firm somewhere in Northern California .
    I’d never been invited to visit Marcus’s place of business. I knew next to nothing about it. After leaving us in the seventies, he’d conducted most interactions through a parsimonious attorney named Oliver Quip. Child support, alimony payments, Christmas cards and a terse letter addressed to me on every birthday were the only regular contact we’d had with him.
    The prospective business partners had chartered a small plane in San Francisco intending to fly to Seattle to inspect the project. They never made it: Their plane went down somewhere in the Cascade Mountain range.
    It had taken the authorities nearly nine weeks to locate Marcus’s plane. By the time we were notified of the accident he had been dead for nearly two months.
    The mutilated couple standing on the far side of Riverside Drive snapped me out of my morbid musings. They were Asian, at least the