Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

of Little Judith after work. I sat with her in the evenings and tried to keep her from dwelling on too many unpleasant aspects of the thing. I also took her around here and there for things she had to attend to. Twice I took her to the funeral parlor. She collapsed the firsf time. I wouldn't go inside the place myself. I wanted to *emember poor Harry as he used to be.
    The day before the service all of us at the shop chipped in thirty-eight bucks for a funeral spray. I was delegated to go and pick it out since I'd been close to Harry. I remembered a florist's not too far from my place. So I drove home, fixed some lunch, then drove to Howard's House of Flowers. It was in this shopping center along with a pharmacy, a barber shop, a bank and a travel agency. I parked the car and hadn't taken more than a couple of steps when my eye was caught by this big poster in the travel agency window. I went over to the window and stood for a while. Mexico. There was this giant stone face grinning down like the sun over a blue sea filled with little sailboats that looked like white paper napkins. On the beach, women in bikinis lounged around in sun glasses, or else played badminton. I looked at all the posters in the window, including those for Germany and Merrie England, but I kept going back to that grinning sun, the beach, the women, and the little boats. Finally I combed my hair in the reflection from the window, straightened my shoulders, and went on to the florist's.
    The next morning Frank Klovee came to work wearing slacks, white shirt and tie. He said if any of us wanted to go see Harry off it was all right with him. Most of the guys went home to change, took in the funeral, and then took the rest of the afternoon off. Jimmy had set up a little buffet at the Red Fox in honor of Harry. He had different kinds of dip, potato chips and sandwiches. I didn't go to the funeral but I did drop by the Red Fox later in the afternoon. Little Judith was there, sure. She was dressed up and moving around the place like she'd had a heavy dose of shell shock. Mike Demarest was there too, and I could see him looking her over from time to time. She went from one guy to another talking about Harry and saying things like, "Harry thought the world of you, Gus." Or, "Harry would have wanted it that way." Or, "Harry would have liked that part best. Harry was just that sort." Two or three guys hugged her and patted her on the hips and carried on so that I almost asked them to leave off. A few old pods drifted in, guys that Harry probably hadn't exchanged a dozen words with in his life—if he'd ever even laid eyes on them—and said what a tragedy it was, and threw down beer and sandwiches. Little Judith and I stayed around till the place emptied out around seven. Then I took her home.
    You've probably guessed some of the rest of the story by now. Little Judith and I started keeping company after Harry's death. We went to the movies nearly every night and then to a bar or else to her place. We only went back to the Red Fox once, and then we decided not to go there any more, but to go to new places instead —places where she and Harry had never been. One Sunday not long after the funeral the two of us went out to Golden Gate Cemetery to put a pot of flowers on Harry's grave. But they hadn't put his marker in yet, so we spent an hour looking for it and were still not able to find the goddamn grave. Little Judith kept running around from one spot to another calling, "Here it is! Here it is!" But the plot always turned out to belong to somebody else. We finally left, both of us feeling depressed.
    In August we drove down to L.A. to have a look at the boat. It was a fine piece of work Harry's uncle had kept it in prime shape and TomAs, the Mexican boy who looked after it, said he wouldn't
    be afraid to take it around the world. Little Judith and I just looked at it and then looked at each other. It's seldom anything turns out to be better than you expected it to be. Usually it's the other way around. But that's the way it was with this boat—better than anything we'd dreamed. On our way back to San Francisco we decided to take it on a little cruise the next month. And so we set out on our trip in September, just before the Labor Day weekend.
    As I said, a lot of things have changed since Harry's deatn. Even Little Judith is out of the picture now, gone in a way that is tragic and still has me wondering. It was somewhere off the Baja coast that it