Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen

with him and play chess, his chess set so oversized—the kings and queens standing six inches high—that my mistakes could be seen from a block away.
    What’s up this weekend? you said.
    â€œWorking. Here and Friendly’s.”
    Yeah, you said. I seen you there.
    I had seen you, too. On weekends you and Bill and Bill’s new girlfriend—a squat, short-haired girl named Jeanine—came in for burgers and ice cream. The sight of the three of you together had struck me as wrong somehow, and clearly it struck you the same way. As Bill and Jeanine sat with their arms around one another, feeding each other spoonfuls of ice cream, you sat looking away, a pained expression on your face. In fact your expression was so wounded it had caused me to wonder if you’d joined the military out of spite, like a rejected lover.
    You blew smoke out your nose, as if some sign of disapproval. I gotta fix Bill’s car tomorrow, you said. Then me and him are going up the beach.
    â€œOh,” I said, the memory of what we had done to you, and you had done to us, flashing through me. “I heard there’s a party up there somewhere.” The kind of lie I was prone to telling in those days, anything to keep up a conversation.
    Yeah, you said. Well, see ya. You took a last drag of your cigarette, tossed it down into the parking lot. Then you belched long and loud, and without another word walked back inside, through the freezer and cutting room, out the swinging doors with their circular plastic windows, whistling all the while a tune that was familiar but hard to place, the notes sent off slow and halfhearted, just shivering in the air, and it took me a moment to recall the lyrics— I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener, that is what I’d really like to be —this song trailing you all the way out of the store, Jesus, Elwood, what a farewell, what an exit. It was the last time I ever saw you. Because the next morning, when you went to fix Bill’s gas tank, which had a leak and which was, he assured you, bone dry (“Bone fucking dry,” he kept saying afterward, crying at the funeral, in bars and stores and the bank and post office and wherever else he ran into people, “I swear to God it was bone fucking dry”), when you got on your back and squirmed underneath the car and touched your soldering iron to the tank it exploded, it killed you.
    â€œJesus,” people said when they heard the news, “that dumb bastard.”
    At the wake, on a table draped in white cloth, stood a gold-framed picture of you, from your last year of school. In the picture you were staring off, openmouthed, your dark eyebrows pushed together in an expression of strained effort, as if you were trying to recall someone’s name, or multiply in your head. Those pictures had, I remembered, been taken in the gymnasium, and we had stood in long lines waiting for our turns in front of the camera. When we finally got to the front of the line, and were seated on a wooden stool in front of a marbled blue backdrop, our friends had stood next to us saying things to make us laugh, and I imagine as your picture was taken someone had told a joke you didn’t get, and the photographer, hating his job, having grown weary of waiting, had snapped the photo in the second before the joke’s intentions announced themselves to you, the second before you smiled.
    At the funeral the priest spoke of you, and your death, in somewhat surprising terms. “Glory be to God!” he said. “One of the Lord’s gentlest lambs has returned to his shepherd!” Your mother sat with her head turned toward the window, staring off as always. She fingered a rosary.
    After the burial people stood around saying how pointless your death was, how stupid. We did a poor job of mourning you. Mostly we spoke of the last time we saw you. (The last time I saw Elwood was at the Laundromat, he was sitting there eating sardines