Free Dead Boys by RICHARD LANGE Page A

was left?” and was still at it two days later when they choppered him out. But then Bud discovered that if he focused —
squinted
was how he put it — the colors coalesced and he’d find himself starring in the wildest movies.
    It was a revelation. In the midst of all that desperation and fear, where even the birds made sounds like people dying, he could turn in and visit his mom or bang Raquel Welch or eat a steak that doubled in size every time he took a bite. At first he dreamed exclusively of home, but after a while crazier scenarios played themselves out. One night it was pirates, all pirates; the next he rode a bike through Rome, Italy, wearing nothing but skivvies and flip-flops.
    When his tour was up, he returned to the ranch, but he could no longer stomach the early mornings. He wanted to sleep, to dream, till noon, then maybe nap again after lunch, which didn’t sit well with his father, who expected him to pull his weight as he had before. A friend from the army invited him to Buffalo, and the two of them boozed away a couple of good years, screwing hippie chicks and shoveling snow, until the friend started talking to God and decided to shack up with a waitress. Bud split for Florida then, but the humidity down there brought on his first nightmare. He was back in the jungle, carrying a severed hand that had little mouths that wouldn’t stop screaming on the tips of each finger.
Fuck this shit,
he decided, and set out for California.
    It took him ten years to get here. On the way he married and divorced a couple of times, went to barber college, did time for burglary and aggravated assault, learned to weld, and lost the sight in one eye. L.A. was everything he’d hoped it would be, though. As soon as he hit town, he said, he put it in neutral.
    When I met him at the doughnut shop, he was living off VA money in a garage apartment owned by a Filipino slumlord. He slept twelve hours a day and once a month took a five-dollar turnaround bus to Vegas to work on a keno system that was going to make him rich, something that had come to him in one of his dreams. He was full of shit and worse, but who among us wasn’t? I was rooting for him. We all were.
    W HITEY MADE THE arrangements. Apparently he and Bud had discussed the inevitable a number of times and shared with each other their last wishes. That kind of foresight was astonishing to me.
    I’d never been to a funeral before, but I’d seen them on TV, so I knew to wear a tie. Bill asked me to pick him up because his license had been suspended again. “I will be high,” he said, “but ignore it.” I did my best. The whole way there he played bongos on the dashboard and rocked back and forth in his seat. Every so often he’d unpin the fist-size rose he’d stuck to the lapel of his jacket and shove it under my nose and say, “Smell that. Pretty, huh?”
    It was a big church, and new. The ceiling arched over us like an umbrella, and every little sound had an echo. I’d never known Bud to be religious. In fact, the only comment I’d ever heard him make on the subject, while gloating over a particularly profitable chess victory, was “The devil is in the details.” But I guess there were certain times when certain words had to be said, and where else outside of a courtroom were you going to get people to shut up long enough to listen?
    We only took up the first two pews; the rest stretched out behind us like some kind of tricky maze. The mourners were all men except for Nita, the Cambodian lady from the doughnut shop. It was nice that she showed up. A thing like that needed a woman’s tears. I felt the pew vibrating beneath me and noticed that Bill was shaking like a car with its idle out of whack. Ray Ray was on one side of him, Dennis on the other. They each reached over and held one of his hands to calm him.
    Bud’s ashes were in an urn on the altar. The cross suspended behind it was smooth and clean, without a nail hole or a drop of blood. The