The Living End Read online

  “They’re the only parents I ever knew. They took me out of the Home when I was an infant.”

  “Look, you want to go to Phoenix, go. Take money out of your secret accounts and go.”

  “Please, May. There’s no secret account. When Mrs. Lesefario died I transferred everything back into joint. Come on, sweetheart, you’re awfully goddamn hard on me.”

  “Well,” she said, drawing the word out. The tone was one she had used as a bride, and although Ellerbee had not often heard it since, it melted him. It was her signal of sudden conciliation, cute surrender, and he held out his arms and they embraced. They went off to the bedroom together.

  “You know,” May said afterwards, “it would be good to run out to Phoenix for a bit. Are you sure the help can manage?”

  “Oh, sure, May, absolutely. They’re a firstrate bunch.” He spoke more forcefully than be felt, not because he lacked confidence in his employees, but because he was still disturbed by an image he had had during climax. Momentarily, fleetingly, he had imagined Mrs. Register beneath him. In the store he was giving last-minute instructions to Kroll, the man who would be his manager during their vacation in Phoenix.

  “I think the Californias,” Ellerbee was saying. “Some of them beat several of even the more immodest French. Let’s do a promotion of a few of the better Californias. What do you think?”

  “They’re a very competitive group of wines,” Kroll said. “I think I’m in basic agreement.” just then three men walked into the shop.

  “Say,” one called from the doorway, “you got something like a Closed sign I could hang in the door here?” Ellerbee stared at him. “Well you don’t have to look at me as if I was nuts,” the man said. “Lots of merchants keep them around. In case they get a sudden toothache or something they can whip out to the dentist. All right, if you ain’t you ain’t.”

  “I want,” the second man said, coming up to the counter where Ellerbee stood with his manager, “to see your register receipts.”

  “What is this?” Kroll demanded.

  “No, don’t,” Ellerbee said to Kroll. “Don’t resist.” He glanced toward the third man to see if he was the one holding the gun, but the man appeared merely to be browsing the bins of Scotch in the back.

  Evidently he hadn’t even heard the first man, and clearly he could not have heard the second.

  Conceivably he could have been a customer.

  “Where’s your gun?” Ellerbee asked the man at the counter.

  “Oh gee,” the man said, “I almost forgot. You got so many things to think about during a stickup-the traffic flow, the timing, who stands where-you sometimes forget the basics. Here,” he said, “here’s my gun, in your kisser,” and he took an immense handgun from his pocket and pointed it at Ellerbee’s face.

  Out of the corner of his eye Ellerbee saw Kroll’s hands fly up. It was so blatant a gesture Ellerbee thought his manager might be trying to attract the customer’s attention. If that was his idea it had worked, for the third man had turned away from the bins and was watching the activity at the counter.

  “Look,” Ellerbee said, “I don’t want anybody hurt.”

  “What’s he say?” said the man at the door who was also holding a pistol now. “He don’t want nobody hurt,” the man at the counter said.

  “Sure,” said the man at the door, “it’s costing him a fortune paying all them salaries to the widows. He’s a good businessman all right.”

  “A better one than you,” the man at the counter said to his confederate sharply. “He knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

  Why, they’re white, Ellerbee thought. They’re white men! He felt oddly justified and wished May were there to see.

  “The register receipts,” the man at the counter coaxed. Ellerbee’s cash register kept a running total on what had been taken in.

  “Just punch Total Tab,” the man instructed Kroll. “Let’s see what we got.” Kroll looked at Ellerbee and Ellerbee nodded. The man reached forward and tore off the tape. He whistled.

  “Nice little place you got here,” he said.

  “What’d we get? Whatd we get?” the man at the door shouted.

  Ellerbee cleared his throat.

  “Do you want to lock the door?” he asked. “So no one else comes in?” He glanced toward the third man.

  “What, and have you kick the alarm while we’re fucking around trying to figure which key opens the place?” said the man at the door. “You’re cute, you’re a cutie. Whatd we get? Let’s see.” He joined the man at the counter. “Holy smoke! jackpot City! We’re into four figures here.” In his excitement he did a foolish thing. He set his revolver down on top of the appetizer table. It lay on the tins of caviar and smoked oysters, the imported cheeses and roasted peanuts. The third man was no more than four feet from the gun, and though Ellerbee saw that the man had caught the robber’s mistake and that by taking one step toward the table he could have picked up the pistol and perhaps foiled the robbery, he made no move. Perhaps he’s one of them, Ellerbee thought, or maybe he just doesn’t want to get involved.

  Ellerbee couldn’t remember ever having seen him. (By now, of course, he recognized all his repeat customers.) He still didn’t know if he were a confederate or just an innocent bystander, but Ellerbee had had enough of violence and hoped that if he were a customer he wouldn’t try anything dumb. He felt no animus toward the man at all. Kroll’s face, however, was all scorn and loathing.

  “Let’s get to work,” the man said who had first read the tape, and then to Kroll and Ellerbee, “Back up there. Go stand by the aperitifs.”

  The third man fell silently into step beside Ellerbee.

  “Listen,” Ellerbee explained as gently as he could, “you won’t find that much cash in the drawer. A lot of our business is Master Charge. We take personal checks.”

  “Don’t worry,” the man said who had set his gun down (and who had taken it up again). “We know about the checks. We got a guy we can sell them to for-what is it, Ron, seventeen cents on the dollar?”

  “Fourteen, and why don’t you shut your mouth, will you? You want to jeopardize these people? What do you make it?”

  Ellerbee went along with his sentiments. He wished the bigmouth would just take the money and not say anything more.

  “Oh, jeopardize,” the man said. “How jeopardized can you get? These people are way past jeopardized.

  About six hundred in cash, a fraction in checks. The rest is all credit card paper.”

  “Take it,” Ron said.

  “You won’t be able to do anything with the charge slips,” Kroll said.

  “Oh yeah?” Ron’s cohort said. “This is modern times, fellow. We got a way we launder Master Charge, BankAmericard, all of it.”

  Ron shook his head and Ellerbee glanced angrily at his manager.

  The whole thing couldn’t have taken four minutes. Ron’s partner took a fifth of Chivas and a bottle of Lafitte ‘47. He’s a doctor, Ellerbee thought.

  “You got a bag?”

  “A bag?” Ellerbee said.

  “A bag, a paper bag, a doggy bag for the boodle.”

  “Behind the counter,” Ellerbee said hopelessly.

  The partner put the cash and the bottle of Chivas into one bag and handed it to Ron, and the wine, checks, and credit charges into a second bag which he held on to himself. They turned to go. They looked exactly like two satisfied customers. They were almost at the door when Ron’s partner nudged Ron.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ron said, and turned back to look at them. “My friend, Jay Ladlehaus, is right,” he said, “you know too much.” Ellerbee heard two distinct shots before he fell. When he came to, the third man was bending over him.

  “You’re not hurt,” Ellerbee said.

  “Me? No.” The pain was terrific, diffuse, but fiercer than anything he had ever felt. He saw himself covered with blood.

  “Where’s Kroll? The other man, my manager?”

  “Kroll’s all right.”


  “He is?” There, right beside you.” He tried to look. They must have blasted Ellerbee’s throat away, half his spinal column. It was impossible for him to move his head.

  “I can’t see him,” he moaned.

  “Kroll’s fine.” The man cradled Ellerbee’s shoulders and neck and shifted him slightly.

  “There. See?” Kroll’s eyes were shut. Oddly, both were blackened. He had fallen in such a way that he seemed to lie on both his arms, retracted behind him into the small of his back like a yogi. His mouth was open and his tongue floated in blood like meat in soup. A slight man, he seemed strangely bloated, and one shin, exposed to Ellerbee’s vision where the trouser leg was hiked up above his sock, was discolored as thundercloud. The man gently set Ellerbee down again.

  “Call an ambulance,” Ellerbee wheezed through his broken throat.

  “No, no. Kroll’s fine.”

  “He’s not conscious.” It was as if his words were being mashed through the tines of a fork.

  “He’ll be all right. Kroll’s fine.”

  “Then for me. Call one for me.” “It’s too late for you,” the man said.

  “For Christ’s sake, will youl” Ellerbee gasped. “I can’t move. You could have grabbed that hoodlum’s gun when he set it down. All right, you were scared, but some of this is your fault. You didn’t lift a finger. At least call an ambulance.”

  “But you’re dead,” he said gently. “Kroll will recover. You passed away when you said ‘move.”

  “Are you crazy? What are you talking about?”

  “Do you feel pain?”

  “What?”

  “Pain. You don’t feel any, do you?” Ellerbee stared at him. “Do you?”

  He didn’t. His pain was gone.

  “Who are you?” Ellerbee said.

  “I’m an angel of death,” the angel of death said. You’re-”

  “An angel of death.” Somehow he had left his body. He could see it lying next to Kroll’s.

  “I’m dead? But if I’m dead-you mean there’s really an afterlife?”

  “Oh boy,” the angel of death said.

  They went to Heaven.

  Ellerbee couldn’t have said how they got there or how long it took, though he had the impression that time had passed, and distance.

  It was rather like a journey in films-a series of quick cuts, of montage. He was probably dreaming, he thought.

  “It’s what they all think,” the angel of death said, “that they’re dreaming. But that isn’t so.”

  “I could have dreamed you said that,” Ellerbee said, “that you read my mind.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could be dreaming all of it, the holdup, everything.”

  The angel of death looked at him.

  “Hobgoblin… I could…” Ellerbee’s voice-if it was a voice-trailed off.

  “Look,” the angel of death said, “I talk too much. I sound like a cabbie with an out-of-town fare. It’s an occupational hazard.”

  “What?”

  “what? Pride. The proprietary air. Showing off death like a booster. Tbanatopography.

  “If you look to your left you’ll see where… Julius Caesar de dum de dum… Shakespeare da da da…

  And dead ahead our Father Adam heigh ho-‘ The tall buildings and the four-star sights. All that Baedeker reality of plaque place and high history. The Fields of Homer and the Plains of Myth. Where who sis got locked in a star and all the Agriculture of the Periodic Table-the South Forty of the Universe, where Hydrogen first bloomed, where Lithium, Berylium, Zirconium, Niobium. Where - Lead failed and Argon came a cropper. The furrows of gold, Bismuth’s orchards.. .. Still think you’re dreaming?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “The language.”

  “Just so,” the angel of death said.

  “When you were alive you had a vocabulary of perhaps seventeen or eighteen hundred words. Who am IF’ “An eschatological angel,”Ellerbee said shyly.

  “One hundred percent,” the angel of death said.

  “Why do we do that?”

  “To heighten perception,” Ellerbee said, and shuddered.

  The angel of death nodded and said nothing more.

  When they were close enough to make out the outlines of Heaven, the angel left him and Ellerbee, not questioning this, went on alone. From this distance it looked to Ellerbee rather like a theme park, but what struck him most forcibly was that it did not seem-for Heavenvery large.

  He traveled as he would on Earth, distance familiar again, volume, mass, and dimension restored, ordinary. (Quotidian, Ellerbee thought.) Indeed, now that he was convinced of his death, nothing seemed particularly strange. If anything, it was all a little familiar. He began to miss May. She would have learned of his death by this time. Difficult as the last year had been, they had loved each other. It had been a good marriage. He regretted again that they had been unable to have children. Children-they would be teenagers now-would have been a comfort to his widow. She still had her looks. Perhaps she would remarry. He did not want her to be lonely.

  He continued toward Heaven and now, only blocks away, he was able to perceive it in detail. It looked more like a theme park than ever. It was enclosed behind a high milky fence, the uprights smooth and round as the poles in subway trains. Beyond the fence were golden streets, a mixed architecture of minaret-spiked mosques, great cathedrals, the rounded domes of classical synagogues, tall pagodas like holy vertebrae, white frame churches with their beautiful steeples, even what Ellerbee took to be a storefront church. There were many mansions. But where were the people?

  Just as he was wondering about this he heard the sound of a gorgeous chorus. It was making a joyful noise.

  “Oh dem golden slippers,” the chorus sang, “Oh dem golden slippers.” It’s the Heavenly Choir, Ellerbee thought. They’ve actually got a Heavenly Choir. He went toward the fence and put his hands on the smooth posts and peered through into Heaven. He heard laughter and caught a glimpse of the running heels of children just disappearing around the corner of a golden street. They all wore shoes.

  Ellerbee walked along the fence for about a mile and came to gates made out of pearl. The Pearly Gates, he thought. There are actually Pearly Gates. An old man in a long white beard sat behind them, a key attached to a sort of cinch that went about his waist.

  “Saint Peter?” Ellerbee ventured. The old man turned his shining countenance upon him.

  “Saint Peter,” Ellerbee said again, “I’m Ellerbee.”

  “I’m Saint Peter,” Saint Peter said.

  “Gosh,” Ellerbee said, “I can’t get over it. It’s all true.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything. Heaven. The streets of gold, the Pearly Gates. You. Your key. The Heavenly Choir. The climate.”

  A soft breeze came up from inside Heaven and Ellerbee sniffed something wonderful in the perfect air.

  He looked toward the venerable old man.

  “Ambrosia,” the Saint said.

  “There’s actually ambrosia,” Ellerbee said.

  “You know,” Saint Peter said, “you never get tired of it, you never even get used to it. He does that to whet our appetite.”

  “You eat in Heaven?”

  “We eat manna.”

  “There’s actually manna,” Ellerbee said. An angel floated by on a fleecy cloud playing a harp. Ellerbee shook his head. He had never heard anything so beautiful.

  “Heaven is everything they say it is,” he said.

  “It’s paradise,” Saint Peter said.

  Then Ellerbee saw an affecting sight. Nearby, husbands were reunited with wives, mothers with their small babes, daddies with their sons, brothers with sisters-all the intricate blood loyalties and enlisted loves. He understood all the relationships without being told-his heightened perception. What was most moving, however, were the old people, related or not, some just lifelong friends, people who had lived together or known one another much the greater part of thei
r lives and then had lost each other. It was immensely touching to Ellerbee to see them gaze fondly into one another’s eyes and then to watch them reach out and touch the patient, ancient faces, wrinkled and even withered but, Ellerbee could tell, unchanged in the loving eyes of the adoring beholder. If there were tears they were tears of joy, tears that melded inextricably with tender laughter. There was rejoicing, there were Hosannas, there was dancing in the golden streets.

  “It’s wonderful,” Ellerbee muttered to himself. He didn’t know where to look first. He would be staring at the beautiful flowing raiments of the angels-There are actually raiments, he thought, there are actually angels-so fine, he imagined, to the touch that just the caress of the cloth must have produced exquisite sensations not matched by anything in life, when something else would strike him. The perfectly proportioned angels’ wings like discrete Gothic windows, the beautiful halos- There are actually halos-like golden quoits, or, in the distance, the lovely green pastures, delicious as fairway-all the perfectly banked turns of Heaven’s geography. He saw philosophers deep in conversation. He saw kings and heroes. It was astonishing to him, like going to an exclusive restaurant one has only read about in columns and spotting, even at first glance, the celebrities one has read about, relaxed, passing the time of day, out in the open, up-front and sharing their high-echelon lives.

  “This is for keeps?” he asked Saint Peter.

  “I mean it goes on like this?”

  “World without end,” Saint Peter said.

  “Where’s . - .”

  “That’s all right, say His name.”

  “God?” Ellerbee whispered.

  Saint Peter looked around.

  “I don’t see Him just… Oh, wait. There!” Ellerbee turned where the old Saint was pointing. He shaded his eyes.

  “There’s no need,” Saint Peter said.

  “But the aura, the light.”

  “Let it shine.”

  He took his hand away fearfully and the light spilled into his eyes like soothing unguents. God was on His throne in the green pastures, Christ at His right Hand. To Ellerbee it looked like a picture taken at a summit conference.