nagasaki blues

This a compilation of my notes from the last week:

Monday, 10:42 PM

The Japan-to-Tennessee jet lag has decimated my biological clock. It is Monday evening, but I have been asleep for the past six hours, waking to a house empty aside from my father, sitting alone in a darkened living room, hands folded in his lap.

He’s waited to tell me that there’s been an accident, that my uncle was riding his motorcycle home when drag racers overtook him on a quiet stretch of highway, sending him flipping across the well-manicured lawn of a local church. He’s dead at 46. He is dead, and my mother has already gone ahead to be with her family. My mother has been mourning the loss of her brother for four hours while I have been asleep in the guest bedroom, dreaming of girls, beaches, and other things that suddenly seem less important.

“Can you believe it?” he asks me. “That it happened on a motorcycle?”

I can’t.

Tuesday, 9:10 AM

My father’s side of the family is Catholic, well-off, and indisputably pleasant. They are the stuff of Olive Garden commercial clichés, the laughing Italian family passing plates around oversized kitchen tables. In contrast, this side of the family is a patchwork of back-woods personalities and colorful pasts. They are untamed, violent with a righteous desire never to be controlled. They have a history of tattoos, police records, and punch-ups at family reunions. Some might call them stubborn, ignorant even. I call them family, because I know them better.

They are already everywhere, my relatives, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes, teasing new babies and hugging friends they haven’t seen in ages. Everyone is keeping it together, mostly. They are discussing the funeral arrangements in hushed tones, some of them insisting that Randy wanted to be buried in the black leather he rode in, released from us to a soundtrack of AC/DC and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Others among them say no, there has to be a line, there has to be some respect for the sanctity of a funeral. His two daughters are providing no significant input; they are too busy going through pictures, picking out their favorites for a collage to hang beside his casket.

On the coffee table, there’s an old magazine with the following blurb on its cover: We found the secret to long life in a remote village in Africa!

There’s no secret to a long life. It’s either luck or fate, and we can’t control either of them.

* * *

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Tuesday, 3:48 PM

My grandmother is on the phone with someone at the county coroner’s office. Apparently Randy’s body was supposed to be released 18 hours ago, but despite the hospital calling for a vehicle to transport his body to a funeral home, the body was not delivered. Someone has suggested that perhaps an autopsy is being performed, though nobody requested one.

She starts the conversation like this: “Hello. I want to know where my son’s body is. I’d like to bury him tomorrow.”

Somewhere between my diaphragm and stomach, some unnamed piece of me passes into the hereafter with barely a death rattle.

***

***

Tuesday, 4:26 PM

My grandmother has found his body. As suggested, a simple autopsy was being performed, apparently a requirement given the involvement of the highway patrol and the nature of the accident. Most of us are convinced that they were checking to see if he was under the influence at the time of the wreck. He wasn’t. The police in the kitchen are saying that the driver who hit him may have been, though; he claims to have kept his drinking that night to “two beers at dinner” and passed a breathalyzer test, but this wasn’t administered until hours after the accident. These are local police, unsure of how highway patrol has handled the situation.

My grandmother is not seeking retribution. She tells them that Randy wouldn’t have wanted it to get messy or for more kids to lose fathers. These things happen, she says. Boys will be boys or some such thing. I don’t know. All I know is that not an hour ago my fingers touched the blood-stained dirt where a good man met his end underneath the searing metal of a motorcycle engine, and that listening to this makes me feel nothing but violence, quiet and willing to wait. Right now I am willing to tell myself that everyone pays for these transgressions sooner or later in one form or another, but intellectually I know that this is not true. It has never been true.

I keep thinking of the way he died. It wasn’t instantaneous. You can see long gashes across the grass where he tumbled with the bike, like knife slashes across the surface of the earth. You can stand in the spot that he exhaled for the last time and see his house. He was that close to home. Neighbors tried to help, but what could they do? So they waited for the ambulance that didn’t arrive in time, watching from their front porches, heads shaking at the shame of it all, the pity.

Thursday, 11:45 AM

A caravan of Harleys escorted his hearse to the graveyard. The conservatives among us had won out in only the most superficial of ways — he was buried in khaki pants and a dress shirt, but I knew something that some of the others did not.

What wasn’t visible in the casket were his shoes: black leather riding boots, the kind he would have stepped into before hitting the open road to anywhere of value. These, I was sure, would take him where he needed to go. We were denied “Back in Black”, but “Free Bird” could be heard as loud as day when they lowered him into the earth, his family and friends sprinkling his memory with last goodbyes.