“So,” I finally said. “How long are you in town?”
The next afternoon we were at the Oakdale Cemetery, out on Clowney Road. Mama still hadn’t surfaced and I had the same hollowed-out feeling inside, but I did my best to push it away and focus on Portis. After all, it was his goddamn funeral.
The mortician told us all about the “resting facility” where Portis would be until the thaw and then explained what a nice casket they’d secured for him. He went on and on about how they worked him up like they did all their clients—like we were supposed to throw roses at his feet because he’d done the job the county paid him for—because he’d taken the time to extend basic human decency to someone who couldn’t afford it.
There was a preacher at the grave when we got outside and I stood huddled between Starr and Bobby while he said some words. It was cold and there was a low, gray sky. Beyond the clouds was a little reef of blue but I didn’t try to see it as some hopeful symbol. Portis was dead. There was nothing that could change that fact and I didn’t see the point in pretending otherwise. The snow fell in a mist and the preacher read from his Bible.
I didn’t bother to listen to the verse. I didn’t care what the preacher said, so long as he was willing to stand there and say something. Portis might have detested religion in life but there was going to be something to his death besides sticking him in a warehouse and walking away.
It was bad enough what they’d done to him on the television. I saw the news the night before, at Wanda’s. Bobby’s mom had the satellite on and she let it run in the living room while we ate. I tried to ignore it, but I was facing the screen and she played the volume too loud. I was grateful for the meal, but she might have realized that our grief was not being aided by the constant, blaring reminder Portis had been killed.
They kept flashing old mug shots of the deceased and made no distinctions between Portis and the others. The hardboiled journalists at 5&2 News—experienced in the reporting of minor grease fires and advancements in bass fishing technology—said the dead were all “drug users and dealers” and listed their criminal histories below their mugs like baseball statistics.
In a strange turn, which I will not pretend saddened me, the coward Krebs had launched his snowmobile into a pine tree and died just hours after he left Portis to bleed out in the snow. He was probably trying to flee the country, like Portis predicted, or going to ditch the murder weapon he still had in his possession when they found him.
I can’t say exactly how I felt when I learned of Shelton Potter’s suicide, but I was not surprised. He had looked so far away and alone in that trailer and I think he had already decided how his life would end. I never had to go for the shotgun because Shelton was going to do it himself.
I watched the entirety of that sorry newscast and kept thinking they were going to cut in with a special report on a freshly discovered body. A Jane Doe they’d found slumped over the wheel of a Pontiac Bonneville—but that report never came. The body count remained at four and though anchorman Dick Crutchman never said so out loud, you could tell all along what he was thinking. There are four dead thugs in the north hills and we are all probably better off for it.
The preacher didn’t waste much time on Portis. The charity package got us about five minutes of his holy ramblings before he slammed his Bible shut and stomped off for the warmth of the funeral parlor. I stared at Portis’s snowy patch of grass, there was no marking yet to identify it as his own, and Starr finally took me by the elbow and led me away.
We walked among the rows of graves, a bunch of cement headstones with some names etched in. Sorry plots that were not graced with the lamenting angels and Jesus statues that held court across the highway. In the end, you can’t even die your way out of being poor.
I knew it was stupid but it irked me to think of some of those rich bastards, buried in a tomb like King Tut and not half the man Portis Dale turned out to be.
“They got it all wrong in the news,” I said. “About that shootout being over drugs.”
“How’s that?”
“Portis was done with that shit,” I said. “He was quit.”
“What were they shooting over then?”
“I don’t know. But it wasn’t crank.”
“It doesn’t even matter,” Starr said. “Either way he’s gone.”
I turned around to see Bobby trailing behind us. He was looking off at the highway and had his hands stuffed deep in his coat pockets.
“I think it matters,” I said, “when they put out a pack of lies about somebody that isn’t even here to defend himself.”
“It wasn’t like Portis was a model citizen.”
“Not being one thing doesn’t make you another.”
“To some people it does,” said Starr.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
“You two were always a lot alike, you know. You and Portis.”