Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman Page B

house. But your tough-guy bullshit was obsolete even when you could put some torque behind a punch.”
    â€œListen to me,” I began.
    But he cut me off.
    â€œI’m through listening to you. You’re not an educated man, and you’re not in control of this situation. Five minutes of lawyer talk over the phone would have convinced that guy we were a kind of trouble he didn’t want. Instead, we’ve shown him there’s blood in the water here. Maybe we’ve thrown him off the scent, for the moment, with the Steinblatt thing, but he’ll be damn hard to get rid of. And on top of that, you want to let him see us run away. What the hell kind of a plan is that?”
    I recoiled a little from his outburst. “I may not know law books, but I know people,” I stammered. “You don’t understand the kind of man you’re dealing with.”
    â€œI know what kind of man I’m dealing with. An ornery, senile, half-crazy old fuck.”
    Neither of us said much after that. On the way back to Memphis, I looked out at the soybean fields surrounding the casinos and wondered how many folks were buried under them.
    *   *   *
    Something I don’t want to forget:
    On the night Billy was born, Brian brought the baby, wrapped in a blue blanket, out of the delivery room for Rose and me to see.
    The baby was small and very pink, with just a little tuft of light-colored fuzz on his head. When I leaned down to look at him, Billy peered back at me with big, bright eyes, green and wet.
    â€œHi, kid,” I said. “I’m your grandpa. I’m going to help look out for you.”
    â€œI love him so much, Dad,” Brian told me, and his eyes were wet as well.
    â€œIf you ever felt before that your life lacked an animating purpose, I reckon you’re realizing right about now that you’ll never feel that way again,” I said, squeezing his shoulder. “This is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. This is why you try to force a cruel and arbitrary world to take on a shape that makes sense. This is what you are for: to protect this boy. To keep him safe and make sure he knows he’s never alone.”
    â€œYeah, Dad. I think that’s just about right.”
    I found my whiskey flask in my jacket pocket. I took a long belt and handed it to my son. “Well, I know the feeling,” I said.

 
    16
    There was an ass in every one of the two thousand cushy movie-theater seats in the stucco-and-glass auditorium. The church had its sheriff’s deputies trying to untangle the jammed-up traffic in the parking lot. Judging from the attendance at his memorial service, it seemed that despite his unsettling appearance and his gambling problem, dead Larry had been a pretty solid hand at the pastor racket. A lot of people were crying.
    I found a nice perch on the end of an aisle, at the back lip of the room, where I could see the crowd. Tequila slid into the seat next to me. We hadn’t talked about yesterday’s blowout in Tunica, and I suspected we wouldn’t. That wasn’t how things worked in our family.
    He had showed up at the house earlier that morning with fresh bagels and coffee from Starbuck’s. A peace offering.
    I accepted it and let him drive me to the funeral. So now we would pretend it had never happened, although the things he’d said had got under my skin.
    I’d been to the church three times now in the span of a week. This was the life of an old person—going to the same places all the time, over and over, and attending a lot of funerals.
    Somebody had already replaced the carpet on the stage where Kind had bled out. Somebody had repainted the splattered walls. Somebody had mopped up Kind’s various bits and scraped them into a heavy-looking oak casket with brass rails for the pallbearers to grab on to. The box was closed, of course, and it was so completely covered with cascading flowers