man was. The woman looked bi-racial; an Asian-American mix.
The man appeared to have been gutted, the bloody crater where his liver and lights should have been gaping and apparent even from across the street. Someone had ripped his right arm off at the elbow. The woman looked… stuck together somehow. Parts of her seemed to have been torn apart and knitted back together by a hyperactive, three–year-old speed freak. They were pale, those two…
“Obadiah…”
Their eyes hooded, slashes of darkness, twin abysses…
“Obadiah, close your mouth. People are staring…”
I was frozen, paralyzed by the sudden wash of cold terror that blossomed in the pit of my stomach.
What the hell…?
The gutted man raised his left hand and pointed at me.
Pain exploded in my right arm.
“Owww!”
I looked down to see Lenore pinching the skin of my right triceps between her immaculate, diamond-hard nails. It was a trick she’d perfected back when I was a mouthy, unruly teenager. The slicing agony always served to bring my focus back to the here and now.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I snapped.
“You were gaping,” Lenore said calmly. “You know I hate gaping.”
I looked back across Riverside Drive , my eyes scanning the sidewalk, and the entrance to the park beyond: There was no sign of the mutilated couple. They had vanished. The sense of eerie dislocation that attended their appearance was fading, like a stubborn migraine after a stiff whiskey transfusion.
I shook my head, hoping to clear the cloud of confusion that surrounded me. What had I just seen? Was I so upset by Marcus’s death that I was hallucinating?
“Lenny, is that you?”
I turned toward the speaker.
Limping toward Lenore and me was an escapee from a Walter Brennan film. The man’s bedraggled appearance lent him the air of a mad prophet recently returned from the wilderness.
The newcomer was as thin as the Nixon Administration’s record on public disclosure, and he moved with great care, like a soldier with a live grenade up his ass.
“Neville,” Lenore whispered. “It’s been a long time.”
“You’re as beautiful as ever, Lenny,” the crusty prophet said.
“Lenny” smiled. Neither of them spoke for a moment, as mourners swirled around us. Then the crusty prophet turned to me.
“Is this the kid?” he said.
I was struck by the change in my mother. She seemed self-conscious in this man’s presence. Her eyes had lost their usual hawk-like focus. For the first time in recent memory she looked... uncertain.
Her uncharacteristic behavior put me on the defensive.
Even though we spent most of our time either screaming at or ignoring each other, the dormant protective impulse common to the sons of single mothers rose up in me. I stepped forward and extended my right hand.
“Obadiah Grudge,” I said. “And you are?”
The crusty prophet stared at me for a moment. Then he extended his right hand.
“Forgive me,” Lenore said. “Neville Kowalski, this is... my son, Obadiah.”
“How d’you do,” Kowalski said as he shook my hand.
His grip was cool, surprisingly firm. An unexpected strength pulsed through his hand and up my arm.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said.
Kowalski winced as if I’d leveled a charge.
“I’m sure your mother’s...”
“I’ve never told him about you and Marcus, Neville,” Lenore said, hastily.
The crusty prophet’s eyebrows shot up like a pair of startled gray caterpillars.
“Well, I s’pose that’s fer the best,” Kowalski said, winking at me. “Not everyone is as understanding as Lenny here.”
A few yards away, the hearse rolled up to the curb. Two black-suited funeral attendants got out and ran around back to open the loading door.
“What?” I said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Understanding about what?”
The doors to the cathedral opened and my father’s coffin was carried out by six men. Three were