The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Fifteen

I went back down the short flight of steps into my grandfather’s old office. I paused there and thought for a moment of taking something as some kind of keepsake, but, really, what would I take? What would possibly mean anything to me? A putter? There was nothing there that could bring back something I’d never had.

As I was standing there looking around, though, I saw something that I hadn’t noticed on my previous visit. Tacked to one of the golf club racks on the wall was an old Polaroid snapshot of Santo with my grandfather, standing alongside one of the bright hazards on the mini-golf course. Both of them had their putters raised above their heads in jubilation. My grandfather’s head was thrown back in what appeared to be a full-throated howl of laughter. Santo was facing the camera directly, but his eyes were shut above a wide smile that lifted his entire face and made him look impossibly young. It was a wonderful photo, and made all the more beautiful by the slightly off and unreal colors that were so typical of photographs from that period.

I thought about taking the photo with me, but it seemed like an act of desecration, so I left it where it was and went back down to the street. I took a glance through the front window of the bar and saw Santo still sitting in exactly the same position as when I had left him. It was just on the bleak gray edge of darkness and the fog was again beginning to roll in off the river.

I put my head down and ran all the way back across town to my motel.

I tried to take a nap when I got back to my room, but found that I couldn’t sleep. I was too restless and wound up, out of my routine and wholly confused. I couldn’t really pin down any of the thoughts that were rolling around in my head.

I got back up, dressed, pulled on my hooded sweatshirt, and walked back downtown in search of something to eat. The only place that was open on the Main Street was the little café, Lally’s, where I’d had breakfast.

The same woman who had been working on my previous visit was the only person in the place. She was standing behind the counter, doing a crossword puzzle while she leaned against the wall next to the window to the kitchen.

“Hey,” she said when I came through the door. “You look like a guy who’d be pretty good at crossword puzzles. What’s ‘Updike’s Rabbit’ mean?”

I sat down at the counter and she slapped the newspaper and the pen down in front of me. I picked up the pen and stared at the puzzle for a moment. “Five letters,” I said. “Angstrom won’t fit.”

“Then it must be Harry,” the waitress said, and took the pen from my fingers, leaned across the counter, and filled in the blanks.

“That’s pretty good,” I said. “But why’d you ask me?”

She smiled and jabbed at me with the pen. “I was just testing you,” she said. “There aren’t more than a handful of people who come in here who are any help at all when it comes to crossword puzzles. Your grandfather, by the way, was always pretty good at helping me out of a jam. When I really get stuck I wait until Bob Porter shows up. He can finish a puzzle in the time it takes him to drink a cup of coffee.”

“For some reason that doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

“You’ve already met Bob?” the waitress asked.

“I have,” I said. “Although I can’t say that we’re on a first-name basis. I was just in his office earlier today. The guy struck me as a bit of a nut.”

“Everybody’s a bit of a nut, don’t you think?” she said. “This town is full of strange people. Bob Porter’s one of the more interesting ones. I’ve always been sort of surprised that a guy like that would stick around a dinky little place like this. I don’t know what the hell he does with himself.”

“I’m surprised you’d stick around,” I said.

She shrugged and filled in some more letters on the crossword puzzle.

“Shouldn’t they make you wear a name badge?” I said.

“Why would they make me wear a name badge?” she said. “Everybody already knows my name. Did you want a cup of coffee?”

“Sure,” I said. “Yes, please.”

As she poured my coffee she said, “So how are you doing? Are you taking care of business?”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I’m gradually figuring out most of the basic nuts and bolts stuff, but it’s amazing how complicated it is. There are all sorts of details I’d never thought of.”

“Is there going to be a funeral?” she asked.

“Nobody seems much interested in that idea,” I said. “His body’s at the funeral home, and I guess he’s going to be cremated.”

“Who’s ‘nobody’?” she said. “It seems strange that there wouldn’t at least be a memorial service.”

“We could easily get into a sort of Abbott and Costello routine here,” I said. “It’s hard to define nobody, really, particularly when I don’t know a soul in this town. At any rate, I have no idea who anybody or nobody is, but whoever they are, they aren’t exactly clamoring to give my grandfather any kind of sendoff. He apparently doesn’t have any remaining family around here, and he doesn’t seem to have had any close friends.”

“What about Santo?” she asked.

“Santo says my grandfather wouldn’t have wanted a funeral,” I said. “He said it wasn’t his style, and he wouldn’t have liked the fuss. I’m guessing maybe that’s just Santo’s way of trying to deal with the apparent absence of any fuss whatsoever.”

Another customer arrived, a middle-aged character in clanking, unzipped galoshes who clomped down the aisle and took a seat in the corner booth near the window. The waitress slapped the crossword puzzle and pen down in front of me, grabbed a pot of coffee, and excused herself.

“I’m Jeri, by the way,” she said when she returned to the counter. “Or J, to a lot of people who’ve known me forever. Jerilynne’s my real name, but I hated it growing up, and always had a hard time getting anyone to call me Jeri, despite the fact that I used to announce that as my preference every single time teachers took roll call on the first day of school.”

“It’s a perfectly fine name,” I said.

“Try to spell it,” she said, as she refilled my coffee cup and handed me a menu.

I made a couple failed attempts at spelling out her name before she took the pen from me and wrote ‘J-E-R-I-L-Y-N-N-E’ across the top of the newspaper on the counter.

“I’m a firm believer that a first name shouldn’t have more than two syllables,” she said.

I thought about this for a moment and then said, “I don’t know, I guess I’d tend to take it on a case-by-case basis.”

She shook her head. “Once I reach a conclusion I stick with it,” she said. “I don’t have much patience for waffling.”

She shrugged and then did this thing where she rolled a pen slowly through the fingers of her right hand, one by one, without ever touching it with her left.

“My grandpa and grandma knew your grandparents pretty well,” she said. “My grandma knew your grandmother forever. They used to play bridge together. And my grandmother remembers taking my mother over to Charlie’s place when he still had his little Christmas village on the roof every year, and she took me to the putt-putt course when I was just a little kid. She has pictures, if for some reason you’re interested in seeing them.”

"Your grandmother knew my father’s mother?" I said.

“Your grandmother,” she said. “Yes. They went way back.”

“I know nothing about her,” I said. “Her name has barely come up in this at all, and my father almost never spoke of her when I was growing up. There were a couple photos of my father in Charlie’s apartment, but as far as I know none of my grandmother. I’d love to see those pictures.”

Two older guys wearing coveralls and feed caps came in at that moment and interrupted our conversation. Jeri picked up the phone on the wall behind the counter, punched in some numbers, and spoke briefly to someone.

“That’s Les,” she said. “He’s the cook. He lives in an apartment upstairs and has been working here forever. Whenever there’s a lull he goes up to his apartment and smokes pot and watches TV. Are you going to get something to eat?”

“Yes,” I said. “That was the original plan.”

“I’d recommend you keep it simple,” she said, and again left with a pot of coffee to attend to the new customers. By the time she got back behind the counter a fat and sleepy-looking guy had appeared in the kitchen and was tying on a dirty apron. Jeri tore off two slips of paper from her pad, clipped them to the wheel above the window to the kitchen, and gave it a spin.

“How simple?” I asked as I studied the menu.

“Hamburger simple,” she said.

“I guess I’ll have a hamburger, then.”

“Good choice,” she said.

“Could I get cheese on that? And some fries?”

“That shouldn’t complicate things too much,” she said, and added my order to the wheel. I could see the cook fiddling intently at a radio dial in the kitchen. “Hey Les,” Jeri said. “Customers. Orders. Time to cook.”

He looked in her direction with a blank expression on his face. “It’s all hamburgers and fries, Les,” she said. “Nice and easy. No need to even caffeinate.”

After rousing Les to action, Jeri said to me, “Excuse me just a minute. Piss break. I’ll be right back.”

When she returned I said, “You haven’t answered my question about why you’re still hanging around Bryton.”

“It wasn’t phrased as a question,” she said. “I believe it was simply an expression of surprise.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then let’s change it to a question.”

 “It’s really just the usual sort of story,” She said. “You live in Chicago, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you’ve lived there all your life?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “I was born in California, moved to Chicago when I was a little kid, and lived briefly in Virginia while my father was getting his business off the ground.”

“Is that where your parents are from?” she said. “Chicago, I mean?”

“Well, my dad’s originally from here, obviously,” I said, “but he settled in Chicago after he got out of the Army. My mother’s from Illinois, and worked in Chicago from the time she was a young woman. She met my dad there.”

Jeri nodded. “Well, this is where I’m from,” she said. “Both of my parents were born and raised here. My grandparents as well, and they’ve lived here all their lives. Nobody on either side of my family ever had any inclination to go anywhere else, I guess. My grandmother has never even done much traveling. These days she and her husband will go up to Dubuque to the riverboat casino once in awhile, but they’re not restless people. I suppose they like it here, more or less.”

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question about you,” I said.

“I’m getting there,” she said. “It’s a long, boring story. I hated growing up here. It’s a dinky little town and there wasn’t anything to do. You could ride your bike around in the summer and go exactly nowhere. There was the one theater downtown, and then there was Wiesner’s Drive-In. For some reason, from the time I was in junior high school there were many more boys than girls in Bryton, which made it even tougher to be a girl. It was very competitive. I could play that game, but it bored me, and made it hard to make friends. One of the few friends I did manage to make had an older brother –much older, four years—and after he graduated from high school he moved to Minneapolis to go to college. I’d had a crush on this guy since I was a kid. He played the guitar, of course, and wore his hair longer than anybody else. Which meant that he was pretty much on his own down here, and mostly kept to himself. Anyway, when he started coming back for the summers when he was in college he was becoming more and more interesting. He worked in a record store up there, and he’d bring records back with him. We used to sit in their basement listening to his stereo. He hardly ever said anything, but that just made him, and the music, and, by extension, Minneapolis all the more interesting to me.”

“What sort of music did he like?” I asked.

“Oh, just whatever was the big deal at the time in the record store where he worked, which was pretty much anything that wasn’t on the radio,” she said. “The Clash, of course, but just generally punk rock, I suppose. Then indie rock.” She shrugged. "And all those bands that were big in Minneapolis. And then Seattle or Portland or wherever. Even the goofy hipsters have to have their little scenes, and as soon as the average college douche bags come on board they go looking for something new. God forbid anything they like could ever be popular."

“I know that world,” I said. “I’m sure I know a lot of people just like that guy.”

“That’s because there are a lot of guys just like that guy,” she said. “I moved to Minneapolis when I finished high school, and the place was just lousy with them. Of course, that was why I went there, and they were exactly the sorts of guys I was looking for. It wasn’t hard to find them, that’s for sure. I thought I was going to get a job and eventually go to college, but between all the lousy jobs and going out to see music every night and going to parties I never did get my shit together enough to even apply to the university. There were a lot of guys just like the guy I thought I was looking for, and there were also a lot of girls just like me. I wasn’t a groupie, exactly, but that's probably how I was perceived. Unfortunately none of the bands I liked were ever big enough to actually have groupies. Instead, they had girls like me, which was even better; we had jobs and apartments and some of us even had cars. I went from having deadbeat musicians crashing on my couch to having them living with me to, eventually, living off me.”

She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It was actually sort of fun for awhile.”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “All sorts of things happened. A baby, for instance. And the guy who fucked that baby into me told me the day after I got home from the hospital, ‘I can’t really see myself as a father.’ To which I might have said, ‘Tough luck, Bud, it’s not a matter of perception, it’s biology, pure and simple.’ But the truth, of course, is that it is a matter of perception, and I couldn’t see him as a father either. I also knew that though I had every right to expect him to share some of the financial responsibility for my son, it wasn’t going to happen. This was a guy who could barely feed himself, and I didn’t see him changing anytime soon. I was twenty-six years old and still working as a waitress. I toughed it out for six months and then I did the lazy and uninspired thing and came back here. Notice, though, that I didn’t say ‘home.’ I live with my grandparents, or, rather, with my grandmother and her third husband; I guess you’d call him my step-grandfather.”

She shrugged, raised her eyebrows, and gave me what I will call a smirk. "Turns out I kind of like this little place. It's a pretty easy place to get by," she said. "Who knows? I might end up stuck here forever."

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Fourteen

I’ll admit that I’d initially been excited by the idea of getting out of Chicago and taking a road trip. I hadn’t gone anywhere for such a long time. I also, I suppose, was somewhat intrigued by the prospect of getting some kind of glimpse of my grandfather’s life up close, and of perhaps gaining a little perspective on his estrangement from my father in the process. I’d never had any firsthand experience with death, and there was a weird sort of fascination in assuming responsibility for the final affairs of a man whose passing didn’t involve any sort of real, personal grief on my part.

My early reservations in Bryton had been primarily motivated by laziness, stemming from the almost immediate realization that what I had thought of as a road trip was, in fact, going to be a major pain in the ass. Now, though, sitting in that office deep in the mess and mystery of my grandfather’s life, what I was feeling was a combination of ambivalence and shame.

Through the little window of the office door I could see Santo sitting at the bar in the gloomy aquatic light. I watched him for a moment, and he never moved a muscle. I never even saw him blink. He looked convincingly bereft as he sat there staring into space.

I got up and went in and sat down at the end of the bar. Santo didn’t look up or acknowledge my presence. I suppose at least a full minute passed in silence before he finally turned partway in my direction and gave me that sad smile.

“How do things look?” he asked.

I shrugged and got up from my barstool and walked over to the jukebox against the back wall. I gestured to the machine and asked, “Does this thing work?”

Santo nodded and said, “Of course. A guy comes in regularly to keep it running. I don’t like it much, but Charlie always said you couldn’t have a proper bar without a jukebox.”

I fished in my pocket for some quarters, but realized that I had no change. Santo pulled himself up until he was kneeling on his barstool, leaned across the bar, and came up with a roll of quarters from somewhere, which he tossed across the room to me.

I loaded the machine up with coins and surveyed the selections. I wasn’t much surprised to see several dozen Top 40 hits from my own high school days –stuff like ZZ Top, Def Leppard, and AC/DC. I was, though, pleasantly surprised to discover that roughly half the records on the jukebox were old country songs and classic rock and roll. There was also a small assortment of vintage soul hits and pop standards.

“I’m pretty impressed,” I said to Santo.

He shrugged. “A lot of those are Bob Porter's,” he said. “And some of the other old customers would bring in records or make requests. Charlie liked to play with that thing and change the records from time to time.”

I punched in some Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, and Earnest Tubb, a couple records each by Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks, and a Sinatra tune.

I settled back in on a barstool and Santo put a beer down in front of me.

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the jukebox.

“Not at all,” Santo said. He was slumped forward on his stool with his hands clasped in his lap and his chin on his chest. He looked like a man who could fall asleep anywhere, the kind of guy who survives on little catnaps throughout the day. We listened to three or four songs in silence. Santo’s eyes were closed and it almost looked like he was praying intently.

I waited until his eyes opened before speaking again. As “Walking the Floor Over You” gave way to “Run Through the Jungle,” Santo’s head snapped back up and he blinked his eyes several times as if to get his bearings.

“It really does seem like none of my business,” I said, “but did you –or do you—have access to the money in that checking account?”

Santo shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “I never used it, never wrote a check in all the years I’ve been here at the bar. I was just never comfortable with it, and it was Charlie’s money. It gave him something to do, and I liked for him to know how things were going. He always did the books and paid the bills.”

“So he just paid you out of the checking account every two weeks?” I asked.

“More or less,” Santo said. “I could always ask him for more money at any time, and I suppose I could have asked about a raise, but I never did. What did I need money for? I always got by just fine on what he gave me, and I’ve managed to put some away. Charlie was generous with me, and this is pretty much my life right here. I spent almost every night here, and a good part of each day, and there’s a little store just up the street where I can go for something to eat. We generally had breakfast together at Lally’s downtown.”

“How long did you say you’ve been running the bar?” I asked.

He thought about it for a moment, and actually appeared to tick off the years on his fingers.

“Almost forty years,” he said. “Thirty-eight years in April.”

“What would happen if the bar was sold?” I asked.

 “To me?” he said, and then shrugged and shook his head slowly. “We’ve talked about selling the place for a number of years, but then what would we do? That was always the question, I suppose. Neither of us ever had much interest in going anywhere else. I kept expecting Charlie to hatch another one of his big plans, but after he closed the golf course he settled down.” He sat and thought for a moment. “To answer your question, I guess I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll get along, I suppose. I can take care of myself.”

I drank my beer and listened to the music. “Get Off of My Cloud” was playing, and the scratchy old 45 sounded great in the empty bar. I was exhausted, and hungry; I tried to remember when I’d last had something to eat. Was it that morning that I’d stopped at the café downtown for breakfast? Or was that the day before? The entire time I’d been in Bryton I’d been subsisting on garbage from the convenience store across the road from the motel. The night before I’d had nothing but beer and a bag of pretzels.

I was doodling absent-mindedly on a cocktail napkin when Santo said, “Perhaps someone would buy the bar who would keep me around. I’ve been running this place for so long now that everybody in town knows me.”

I drummed on the bar with a pen and thought briefly about this idea. It gave me a headache.

“It doesn’t look like there’s a will,” I said, glancing at Santo out of the corner of my eye. His back was to me now and he was staring straight ahead, glaring at his reflection in the long mirror behind the bar. “You mentioned Bob Porter. I saw him earlier today. He tells me that in all likelihood my grandfather’s estate will eventually be turned over to the family, such as it is. My father, I’m fairly sure, would like to be done with it all as quickly as possible.”

Santo just sat there, hunched into himself on his barstool. If he’d even heard what I said he gave no indication and offered no response.

“Porter has warned me that this could be a long drawn out process,” I said. “Apparently there is always the possibility of complications in these situations, bureaucratic stuff.”

Santo swiveled on his barstool to face me. “I get up in the morning and I still can’t believe Charlie is gone," he said. "It almost bothers me that people can just go on with their lives as if nothing happened.”

This indictment, I supposed, included me, perhaps pointedly. I still wasn’t sure, however, that I ever really understood what Santo was saying, or whether there was any sort of gamesmanship involved with the things he told me.

“Look,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve got work to do, and I’m beat to shit and hungry. I’ll get out of your hair. I suppose I’ll go down to the bank tomorrow to see if I can find out anything more there. After that I guess I’ll talk to Porter and try to get the ball rolling. I’d really like you to know, though, that I’d welcome your input or opinions on any of this.”

“What good would my input be to you?” Santo said. This question didn’t come off as angry or hostile, or even bitter. It actually struck me that he was genuinely confused as to why I would solicit his opinion.

“I’d very much like to give you every chance to carry on with your life exactly as you did before,” I told him.

Santo stared at me for a moment. He had this way of very slightly but perceptibly darting back and forth from one of your eyes to the other, as if each might somehow convey a different series of perhaps contradictory messages.

“It would be impossible for me to carry on with my life exactly as I did before,” he said. He shook his head once more and stared down at his hands, which were now moving like windshield wipers on the scarred surface of the bar. He looked almost like he was studying a chess move, or like some distant and damaged god watching children make snow angels in a world he no longer recognized.

“Did you see the newspaper?” he asked.

“What newspaper?” I said.

Santo got up from his stool and shuffled down the bar. He fished a paper from somewhere and tossed it to me. I was still puzzled, and Santo gave me a jerk of his head and said, “Charlie’s notice.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten about that. So you already got that taken care of?”

Santo took the newspaper from my hands and snapped it open, folded it neatly in half, and handed it back to me. I looked over the half dozen obituaries and found my grandfather’s name. There was a photograph of him as a very young man. He looked exactly like I remembered my father looking from when I was a child, which for some reason made me feel a tinge of real sadness for perhaps the first time.

I read the thing over. It was virtually the same version Santo had showed me the day before.

“That’s very nice,” I said. “I’m sure he’d be pleased. Where’d you get that great photo?”

“That’s mine,” Santo said. “Charlie gave me that.”

I nodded. “He looks just like my father,” I said.

“Yes,” Santo said. “He always did.”

I remembered that the man I had identified at the hospital had been entirely unrecognizable to me. There had been absolutely no family resemblance that I could see. Perhaps, I now thought, I had simply not looked hard, or long, enough. I had only seen the head and shoulders of the man in the morgue, and his face had been turned to the side so that I was allowed only a brief glimpse of his emaciated profile. His eyes had been mercifully closed, and his white hair was disheveled. I wished at that moment that I had taken a longer look, and studied that man’s face for some trace of my father.

“Well, look, Santo,” I said. “I’m going to take off and head back to my motel. As I said, I’ll do some more poking around in the morning, but why don’t you try to think about how you might like to see this all handled and what you’d like to get out of it. I’d hate to leave you high and dry.”

“You do what needs to be done,” Santo said. “I’ll get by. As I said, I have a little money set aside, and Bob Porter tells me that I’m eligible for some sort of government pension. I’m getting up there in years, and I don’t need much to get along.”

Santo had turned away from me and was sitting there slumped on his barstool, staring off into space in the direction of the jukebox. I stood on the other side of the bar, watching him for what seemed like several moments, wondering who he was and how he had ever come into my grandfather’s life. These questions, of course, had been going through my mind almost from the moment I had first encountered him outside my motel room. It wasn’t in my nature to ask seriously probing questions –I’d long since learned that to do so seldom yielded satisfactory answers—and there was also something essentially guarded in Santo’s personality that made me wary of attempting to prod him for too many details.

The real truth, as I’ve since discovered, is that there were a great number of things that I simply –or not so simply—and truly did not want to know. There are still a great number of things that I have no interest in knowing, and I’m fully aware that many of them might well fall under the category of what some people might call the truth.

“I honestly feel bad that I’m here doing my father’s dirty work,” I told Santo. “I apologize for that. And I’m sorry for my father, regardless of what he might actually think himself.”

“I’m sorry also,” Santo said. “I’m especially sorry your father isn’t here. It would have meant so much.”

“To my grandfather or to you?” I asked.

“To both of us,” he said.

I was already standing near the door, and realized that during this bit of conversation I had taken the door handle in my hand.

“Well,” I said. “I’m sorry. I wish I had some better answers and comfort to offer you.”

“I’m sure you’re doing the best that you can” Santo said. “I know how pleased Charlie would have been to see you standing here in his bar.”

I thought about that, and had a brief image of that meeting that would now never take place. I realized that I could have made the effort at any time to meet my grandfather. It was a four-hour drive from Chicago.

Santo had still not turned to face me.

“Good night, Santo,” I told him. “I’m sure we’ll see each other at some point tomorrow.”

He didn’t turn or even acknowledge that he had heard what I’d said, and as I left the bar Frank Sinatra was singing from the jukebox.

I closed the door and stepped out into the already failing light of late afternoon. On a whim I decided to climb the stairs to the rooftop to take another look at my grandfather’s golf course. It really was an amazing thing to behold, particularly in the crepuscular winter light and with the river creeping through town in the distance. I stood there and tried to imagine what it must have looked like the day it opened, tried to imagine the shrieking riot of color stretched out there on the roof above that town of relentless gray and beige and dirty brick. I tried to imagine the sound of laughter rolling down into the street below. And I tried, finally, to imagine this ridiculous and wonderful thing as the big dream of one man’s life.

I was my father’s son, though, and I could not imagine that. And that realization made me sadder than I'd felt in a long, long time.

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Thirteen

I stood up from my chair. “I’m sorry if I’ve seemed insensitive,” I said. “I knew absolutely nothing of Santo. I’d never so much as heard his name mentioned before I came here. And I still know nothing of the circumstances that led to my father’s estrangement from my grandfather.”

Porter gave me that blank look again. “I find that a bit hard to believe,” he said.

It was my turn to shrug. Porter bugged me. He was getting on my nerves, and I certainly didn’t relish the thought of having to deal with him any further, even on a purely professional basis. That notion, in fact, seemed impossible. I couldn’t imagine how such a disorderly character managed to maintain a law practice, even in that little out-of-the-way place.

“Look,” I said. “I have to be honest with you. I just want to get this stuff figured out and settled so I can go home. I don’t know what more I can tell you.”

“I can understand that,” Porter said. “You’re in an unenviable position, certainly. I must imagine you have a far more interesting life you’re anxious to return to. Dig around some more and see if a will turns up. I’m fairly certain, based on what I knew of your grandfather, that that’s not going to happen. He never spoke to me about a will, and to the best of my knowledge there’s not one on file anywhere in town. Who knows, though? We may be in for a surprise. But anything even the least bit informal you might find in his papers would be subject to challenge, certainly, so I think we can all proceed on the assumption that we’re working without a will.”

“In which case?” I asked.

“It seems to me we’ve already covered that ground,” Porter said, and sighed dramatically. “In which case you –or, rather, your father—will in all likelihood end up with the bulk of your grandfather’s estate. You’ll get pounded by the taxman, of course, but I’d wager, as I’ve said, that it will be a rather surprising collection of assets.”

“I don’t think any of us are particularly interested in this as any kind of a financial windfall,” I said.

Porter raised his eyebrows. “Of course not,” he said.

“I need to get going,” I said, and turned toward the door.

“I’m sure we’ll speak again soon,” Porter said.

“I sincerely hope that’s not the case,” I said.

Porter smiled at me, an odd smile that seemed both sympathetic and patronizing. “I’m sorry for your predicament,” he said. “And if you’ll excuse me for saying so, shame on your father.”

As I opened the door and glanced back into the office, Porter was already brandishing another can of that fucking Shasta soda. I gave him a feeble wave, and he called out after me, “Good luck. Keep me posted.”

I walked back down the street in the direction of my grandfather’s apartment. It was still early afternoon, I knew, but I wasn’t sure of the exact time. I’ve never owned a watch, and Bryton was not a town that had a surplus of public clocks. The bar, I discovered, was not yet open, but there was a note taped to the door with my name written across the otherwise blank front in large, blocky, and almost childlike writing.

I removed the note and unfolded the slip of paper. There was a key to the door of the bar, Santo had written, in the entryway of the apartment, with a labeled key ring. “Make yourself home,” the note said.

I climbed the stairs to the apartment and fetched the key. It was a murky day, one of those afternoons in late December that has the constant feel of both six a.m. and lingering dusk.  Inside the bar the few dirty, rectangular windows facing the street were so cluttered with multi-colored neon beer signs and posters for various liquors and local sports teams that whatever outside light managed to make its way through made only the feeblest of dents in the gloom. The place was permeated with a permanent, fermenting staleness, and the disorienting half-light made me think of a twilit carnival or a restaurant aquarium.

Standing there in that empty bar I once again had the awkward feeling that I was trespassing.

I made my way to the back room, where there was a neat office with two sturdy metal desks along the same wall, separated by perhaps five feet. A tall, ancient safe of the sort you’ll often see in old film noir occupied the space between the desks. The office was so neat and Spartan that I suspected Santo had tidied up in preparation for my visit. If there had been anything to hide or dispose of, he’d certainly had plenty of time and opportunity to do so. One desk was bare with the exception of an empty metal basket. The other desk, which I assumed was Santo’s, was neat but obviously had been regularly and recently in use; its matching metal basket was full of loose papers, bills, invoices, and catalogs, and there was a small collection of books –a fat Webster’s dictionary, a Spanish-English dictionary, various bar guides, phone books, and an assortment of state and federal tax manuals—carefully arranged by size between bookends.

There was a Christmas card propped up next to a lamp on the desk. In one more inexcusable breach I opened this card and read the inscription, which was written on the fold facing the generic message, “Wishing you every joy of the Season, and the happiest of New Years.” There were a couple brief paragraphs in Spanish, which I do not speak or read. The note closed with a single sentence, and a signature, printed, “Charlie.”

I was nervous about being caught red-handed –and I knew what I was doing was wrong—but I sat down at the desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the Spanish-English dictionary and attempted to translate the note on the card. I got nowhere with the longer sentences in the first paragraphs. My grandfather’s handwriting was eerily similar to my father’s, and almost equally illegible to me. It likely would have been so even if the writing had been English. I gave up and moved on to that last sentence, which consisted of four words. Two of the words were the same. I figured it out pretty easily, or at least I thought I did. The line, I felt sure, was, “My heart, one heart.”

I closed the card and propped it up against the base of the lamp.

Do I wish I had not read that card?

Of course I wish I hadn’t read that card. My regret at having done so lingered for quite a long time.

For some reason not entirely clear to me, though, the card made me angry. Surely, I thought, Santo had deliberately left it there –or, more likely, placed it there—for me to see. How did I know it was even legitimate? I didn’t know a damn thing about my grandfather, and even less about Santo. I had no idea if my grandfather spoke or wrote Spanish, although I had some recollection of someone, perhaps Santo himself, telling me that he had taught Santo to speak English.

Porter had already insinuated –actually, he had more than insinuated—that Santo had likely gone through everything by this time. Who knew what he might have thrown away or hidden?

I fished the scrap of paper on which Santo had written the combination to the safe from my pocket. When had that been? I sat there for a moment at the desk and tried again to get the chronology of the last several days in order. I had to think hard and eventually consult a calendar on the wall to even determine what day it was. It seemed impossible to me that I had been in that town for such a relatively short time, and it seemed even more impossible –inconceivable, really—to imagine spending the amount of time this project was likely to require holed up in that place.

I’d been ridiculously naïve, of course. I thought I was being somehow virtuous, although now that I was actually there and in the thick of it I couldn’t say on whose behalf, precisely, I was being virtuous. I had imagined I was embarking on some kind of adventure, and it was a convenient excuse to skip out on my static life for a brief time. I recognized –almost in that instant, I think—some of the old resentments I harbored against my father surfacing in a distant place in the back of my mind. Porter, I realized, was right to cast shame on my father for his conduct in this whole sorry affair. At some level, of course, I’d realized this right from the beginning, which had been the primary reason I had resisted calling my mother. She would have seized on this fact in an instant, and would have been furious with both my father and me.

I was reluctant, but nonetheless determined, to have a look in the safe. I was hoping it would somehow confirm my worst suspicions about Santo. He obviously had access to that safe, whenever he wanted. If my grandfather had been as casual about his finances as I had been led to believe, I couldn’t imagine there’d be much of an accounting system in place to stop Santo from helping himself to whatever he wanted. I also recognized, however, that Santo likely wouldn’t have been foolish enough to leave any such obvious clues for me. In the first place, what the hell could I have found there that would have confirmed these suspicions? I honestly had no idea. How would I even recognize any clear indications of embezzlement? I wouldn’t even have the slightest idea what to look for. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much money a little bar like that might make.

At the very least, though, I hoped that there would, in fact, be something in the safe that would lead me to my grandfather’s bank.

I knelt down and fiddled with the dial of the safe. It was, as I said, a very old, solid iron box, and the dial was so tight that I had to exert considerable pressure just to get the thing to turn. I made several attempts at the combination, but Santo had given me nothing in the way of proper instructions, just a set of three numbers. I don’t think I’d worked a combination lock since high school, and I couldn’t get the damn thing to open.

I was crouched in front of the safe and muttering with exasperation when I heard Santo’s voice behind me: “Three times to the left, twice all the way around to the right, and once to the left.”

I was so startled by his appearance that I scrambled to my feet. I realized with some embarrassment that I had thrown my hands straight in the air. Santo raised his own hands in the air and smiled.

“Here,” he said. “Would you like some help with that?”

He stepped past me and squatted in front of the safe. “It’s a tricky one,” he said. “Your grandfather could never seem to get it to work, either. Some times he’d call me in an angry mood because he’d been struggling to get this safe open for more than an hour.”

I heard the click of the tumblers and the snap of the dead bolt as Santo jerked the handle and eased the heavy door open. He stood up and stepped aside, extending his right hand in the direction of the open safe, as if he had just concluded a magic trick. “It’s all yours,” he said with a little smile that seemed both sad and genuine. “I’ll leave you alone now. If you need me I’ll be in the bar doing some work.”

I waited for a moment after Santo left the office, and then knelt down again next to the open safe. There was a top shelf that had a small pile of loose papers, and I took them down and shuffled through them at the desk. They appeared to be various licenses, old inspection and tax certificates, and random, mostly dated receipts and invoices for things like neon signs, a microwave oven, cigarette machine, pool table, and assorted bills for building repair and maintenance going back almost twenty years.

I sat at my grandfather’s desk and looked over every one of these things; there was no will, and nothing even remotely in the way of a personal document.

The bottom of the safe had neat rows of change, rolls of coins and paper-clipped stacks of ones, fives, tens, and twenties. There was a note –in what I now recognized as Santo’s handwriting—taped to the door that said, “Change should ALWAYS be $500.” Alongside the change was an old plastic bank bag the size of a woman’s pocketbook. Inside this bag was a huge wad of loose cash –I didn’t count it, but it looked like a substantial amount of money—and a checkbook from the Farmer’s Bank in town. The checks were imprinted with the bold-faced title, “D. Links, Inc.,” and my grandfather’s name and address. The register at the back of the checkbook was neat and updated through the last missing check. I was staggered to see that the balance was $73,218.52. I noticed that my grandfather paid Santo $625 every two weeks. Most of the other checks seemed to be for supplies or expenses related to running the bar. Looking back through the check register I also saw that a check for $185 was written the first of every month to –at least this was how it was recorded—“138 Daswell.”

I removed the local phonebook from a shelf next to the desk –a phonebook that was as slim as a weekly magazine—and looked up Santo’s name on a hunch; sure enough, it was right there, next to his address, 138 Daswell, and the phone number. I wasn’t quite sure what to conclude from this –that they didn’t, in fact, live together? That my grandfather was merely some kind of benevolent benefactor or caretaker for this man who seemed entirely capable of taking care of himself? Is that what I wanted to believe? I didn’t know. For some reason it appalled me to think so.

I put the checkbook back in the bank bag and replaced the bag in the safe. My inventory of the safe was complete; there was nothing else in there, nothing else that would be of any use to me. There was nothing there to suggest any hanky panky, at least so far as my grandfather’s finances as they related to the bar were concerned. Santo could certainly, at the very least, have cleaned out the contents of the bank bag. There was no indication, however, as to whether or not he had access to the funds in the checking account, but he had obviously, at the very least, had plenty of opportunities to hide the checkbook from me.

The whole thing –and whatever scenarios I cared to entertain—seemed pathetic to me. When I received the phone call from the hospital I should have waited out my father, or made the urgency of the situation clearer to the secretary at his office. I suspected then –and I continue to suspect—that my father would have sat on his hands nonetheless, certain that I, or someone else, would take care of things. I also have no doubt that even if I’d managed to track him down immediately, I still would have ended up making the trip to Iowa.

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Twelve

After I’d left Richard Fleming’s office late that afternoon I walked back to the motel and got in my car. I drove out into the country outside of town, following the river. It was strange to me how many little communities were sprawled so close together in the countryside out there. It seemed like there was another virtually identical town every ten or fifteen miles along that road. They all had a 24-hour Casey’s convenience store and gas station right on the street that ran through town, with a tidy Main Street tucked away off the state highway. These brightly lit convenience stores were often the only sign of life in these towns, beyond the desolate neon signs of the old bars downtown.

There were places where the road wound its way high above the river, and I pulled off at a gravel lot that was marked with a “Scenic Overlook” sign. It was, I realized, incredibly beautiful country, and nothing like I would have expected to find in Iowa. On both sides of the river from where I was parked there were high bluffs. The sky was once again spitting light snow, and I stood there for quite a long time staring at the dark river crawling its way south. I could see all the way down to the steeples and water tower of the next little town, where a blue iron bridge was suspended in the fog.

I managed to sleep in the next morning, and later walked down to the old storefront out of which Robert Porter, the city’s attorney, conducted his business. I had the paperwork from my father’s lawyer, delegating me to act on the family’s behalf. Porter seemed to be expecting me however –I had the sense that he’d received a call shortly after I’d left the city office the previous afternoon, perhaps warning him that I was poking around—and never asked to see any of the documentation.

Porter was a graceless and paunchy middle-aged character, manic in the manner of someone with poor social skills or ingrained eccentricity cultivated in cultural isolation. He had a disheveled head of thinning, dirty blond hair that he was constantly raking with his right hand. He was also flushed and filmy; I noticed a blood pressure cuff sitting in the middle of his desk, along with a handful of caramel colored prescription bottles. He offered me the chair facing his desk, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was already occupied by a teetering and disorderly pile of notebooks, loose papers, and manila folders. When he eventually noticed my hesitation, Porter lumbered around the desk, swept up the pile of stuff in his arms, and unceremoniously pitched the lot of it into a corner.

“Pardon my sloth,” he said. “I’m afraid my office would never pass muster with the Feng Shui zealots.”

I sat down in the chair and Porter commenced to drumming nervously on the prescription bottles with a pen, creating an unnerving rattle of pills being joggled about. A B-52’s CD was playing at an almost subliminal level in the boombox that was perched precariously on a ledge behind Porter’s desk, and his pill-bottle percussion was syncopated to this music, in a manner of speaking, at least. There were numerous glass display cases full of beetles –many of them huge and outrageously fluorescent—all over the office. Porter noticed me studying the beetles and shrugged.

“A terrible hobby,” he said. “And also, I’m afraid, wholly inexplicable. What can I say? I love the damn things.”

“Many of them are quite beautiful,” I said.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Porter said. “Although I’m not quite sure what that says about your aesthetic judgment. I’ll admit, however, that I do find them both magnificent and mysterious.”

“Do you catch them yourself?” I asked.

Porter snorted. “Me? Oh, lord no. I’m not that far gone. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever encounter me trundling around in the jungle stalking bugs, or anything else for that matter. I get them in the mail from various far-flung members of a tribe of entomological obsessives. They come dehydrated, in little envelopes. I soak them in saline solution and perform a small mortuary procedure to coax and tease them back into a more life-like shape. Then I pin them to a board and let them dry. It’s a ridiculous waste of time, but, as I said, it gives me some odd pleasure, and one cannot live without odd pleasures.”

With a great, almost alarming grunt, Porter shoved himself away from his desk abruptly, the castors of his chair squeaking loudly as he slid backwards, paddling at the floor with his feet. He came to rest beside a miniature refrigerator and fished inside.

“Can I interest you in a can of cold Shasta cola?” he asked. I declined and he heaved himself back to his desk with two cans of soda in his lap anyway, and deposited them atop the other clutter on his desk.

“You’ll excuse my great thirst,” he said, popping the top on one of the cans of soda. He jerked his head straight back and proceeded to pour what seemed like half the can of cola into his mouth, or, rather, directly down his throat. I watched this production incredulously, Porter’s Adam’s apple bobbing spastically. I’d never see anyone drink a beverage quite like Porter drank that can of soda. Three times in rapid succession he threw his head back and guzzled from the can. It couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds, and when he was finished with this incredible display he flung the empty can across the room in the general direction of a garbage bucket that was outfitted with a miniature basketball backboard and net, the backboard emblazoned with the logo of the Iowa Hawkeyes.

The can rattled off something in the general vicinity and Porter turned his attention back to me.

“Your grandfather was a decent fellow,” he said.

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “I didn’t, unfortunately, know him.”

“Yes,” Porter said. “That’s my understanding. It’s too bad. He had a tough battle these last few years, and he’d always been such an energetic man. It was sad. I can’t help but feel that he deserved a good deal better than he got. He brought a strange sort of vision to this generally fouled little place. Be that as it may, let’s take stock, if you will. From your position as emissary how would you say things stand at the moment?”

I told him that I wasn’t entirely clear on that issue, and that I had been told that he might be able to assist me. I also explained that I had not thus far turned up a will and was working from an almost wholesale ignorance of my grandfather’s life.

“Well, then,” he said. “I’d say you’re working with a considerable handicap.” Porter shrugged, scratched his head, and proceeded to guzzle down the second can of soda exactly as he had the first. He once again flung the empty off into the general disorder of his office, after which he leaned so far back in his chair that I feared he might topple over. He stared vacantly at the ceiling for an unnerving length of time.

“I don’t think I could ever bring myself to dance,” he eventually said. “But if I were ever to dance, I like to imagine it would be to a B-52’s record. What we are listening to here is the soundtrack to my brief and unsuccessful attempt to be the local Bohemian.”

I studied Porter a little more closely and tried to imagine him as a Bohemian awkwardly attempting to dance to the B-52’s. I couldn’t do it.

Porter was still lost in his reverie, and had commenced once more to drumming on his prescription bottles.

“I saw the B-52’s several times,” he said. “This was before one of them kicked the bucket. AIDS, I think it was. They always put on a fun and excellent show, very theatrical. At the time, of course, I’d never heard, or seen, anything like them. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that a town like this hardly prepares you for the spectacles of the outside world. I once considered myself something of a knowledgeable music fan. I believe I may have owned the first and only Television record in this community, and I was so excited by the damn thing that I tried to host a listening party in my home. Three people showed up, and they all left early and unimpressed.”

At this point I decided in the interests of…well, self interest to try to steer Porter back to matters that were more personally pressing.

“So,” I said. “Suppose no will turns up? Then what?”

Porter ignored me for a moment. He was in the middle of what appeared to be a ferocious drum solo.

“Happens all the time,” he finally said, flinging his pen in the air and lunging across his desk in an unsuccessful attempt to catch it on the way back down. “Or at least more often than it should. It can be an expensive headache, not to mention, for many people, a considerable heartache, but it’s really pretty cut-and-dried all around. The contested wills are the things that will truly give you fits and tie up a lot of time and money. You might be astonished at the extent to which some people will court ruination out of nothing but spite.”

I tried again to steer Porter back on track. “But if there is no will?” I asked.

Porter sighed dramatically. “Absent a will we’ll get you set up with an administrator, and we’ll proceed to disperse the assets of the estate in a reasonably orderly fashion. You’ll notice I said ‘reasonably orderly.’ There is always the potential for surprises, but I know a little something of your family’s history in this town, and I shouldn’t think we’d have any long lost relatives crawling out from under rocks during the probate process. You never know, though. You just never can tell. Your grandfather leaves behind a number of rather interesting assets.”

Porter got up from his desk and disappeared around a corner. I listened as he took a long, sputtering piss. He clearly hadn’t bothered to close the door to the bathroom. When he reemerged he collapsed back into his chair and stared across the desk at me.

“In the perhaps likely event that your grandfather’s property passes to the immediate family, do you or your father have any plans to make accommodations for Santo?” he asked.

I told Porter that it was unclear where things stood with Santo, which was about as honest and simultaneously disingenuous an answer as I could give at the time. Porter shrugged and raised his eyebrows.

“Will your father be coming to town?” he asked.

“That’s not likely,” I said. “He’s out of the country on business, and I don’t expect him back for quite some time.”

“You’re in touch, I assume?” Porter said.

I told him that I’d spoken with my father on a couple occasions since I’d been in town.

“You likely know more of the history between my father and my grandfather than I do,” I said. “But I think my father would just like to wrap this thing up as quickly as possible. He’s not particularly interested in the money.”

“I’m sure,” Porter said.

The whole time he was talking to me, I noticed, Porter was fidgeting, drumming on his prescription bottles, scooting back and forth in his chair, and shuffling things around on his desk.

“As I’m sure you’re aware, this is a small town,” he said, after another of his distracted pauses. “You live in a big city, is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “Chicago.”

“Raised there?” Porter asked.

“More or less,” I said.

“Have you much experience with small towns?” he asked.

I admitted that I had none, and Porter nodded vigorously and did that thing with his eyebrows again.

“I’ll admit that I got quite a kick out of your grandfather,” he said. “He traveled an unusual path, particularly for this town. People always talked, of course; that will happen anywhere. But Charlie was a tough old bird. He held up remarkably well, and I always admired the way he stuck around and eventually managed to become something of a fixture in town. And there was, so far as I could tell, very little in the way of compromising. Charlie always did things on his own terms, and that’s not the easiest way to go through life, particularly in a place like this.”

“I don’t suppose it is,” I said. “In that sense he sounds like my father.”

Porter shook his head. “He was an interesting man,” he said. “I helped him out on a number of occasions. Despite his reputation as a bit of a gambler, Charlie never did anything he couldn’t pay for, and over time he developed a decent head for business. I think you’ll find that his finances are pretty well squared away.”

“I hope so,” I said. “I’ll be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about business, and I’m not particularly well equipped to deal with too many complications. Purely out of laziness I’d love to see this thing go as smoothly as possible.”

“Of course,” Porter said. He stared at me for a long moment, studying, it almost seemed, my hands. “I’m afraid, however, that based on my own experience things seldom go ‘smoothly’ when someone dies, particularly if there are intestate issues to be sorted out. Death can be a very complicated and frustrating bureaucracy. But, be that as it may, I’d have to imagine that besides the property, which is certainly not without value, your grandfather probably had quite a bit of money squirreled away somewhere. I think the bar, being as it is, more or less, the only game in town, has been a fairly lucrative investment for him. I’m also quite certain there is no debt of any consequence attached to the estate.” He shrugged and ran a hand through his hair, and then glanced at his watch very deliberately.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I’m not keeping you.”

“Keeping me?” Porter said. “Good heavens. Keeping me from what? You’re keeping me company. A legal practice is hardly a thriving business in this town. This is, in fact, a town distinguished –if it is distinguished by anything at all—by a lack of thriving businesses.”

The phone on Porter’s desk rang, and he snatched up the receiver and said, “Yes?”

He listened for perhaps fifteen seconds and then said, “The notion of convenience generally means next to nothing to me, of course, but, yes, in this particular instance that might indeed be a better idea. Why don’t you give me a ring a little bit later and I’ll see what I can find out.”

He hung up the phone without anything in the way of a goodbye and turned his attention again to me.

“Regardless of issues of solvency, even in intestate or probate cases where the direction of things may seem quite clear, it can still be rather complicated to untangle these situations,” he said. “I’m afraid that, given what little I have to work with at the moment, I can’t give you much of an idea what to expect.”

I asked him if, pending the resolution of these legal issues, I could nonetheless proceed with the cleaning out of my grandfather’s apartment and sorting through his things.

“Who’s going to stop you?” Porter shrugged. “Perhaps you’ll turn up a will. You’ll probably also want to go through the papers in Charlie’s office at the bar. I should, however, tell you that I spoke with Santo the day after your grandfather’s death, and he seemed virtually certain there was no will. That would certainly be consistent with what I knew of your grandfather. I might also suppose that Santo has already turned the office and apartment upside down, but I don’t know that with any certainty.”

“I believe I mentioned this,” I said. “But I never actually met my grandfather. What I know of his life is the little I’ve been able to piece together since I arrived in town, and that isn’t, of course, much. My father never really spoke of him, or at least not in any detail that I can remember.”

Porter grunted and gave me another one of his nods.

“I knew your father growing up,” he said. “He was several years ahead of me in school, but I certainly remember him. He was one hell of a good basketball player, and smart as a whip in school. Charlie was always quite proud of him, but things happen. We all know that. Things happen all the time, to all sorts of families, and sometimes for no particular reason that we can put our finger on. Other times, of course, they happen for perfectly good reasons, but that’s neither here nor there. You can’t get bogged down in reasons. I myself have a younger brother I haven’t heard from in years. He left town long ago and was apparently just absorbed by America, as will happen.”

I chose once again to interrupt this digression.

“My point is that I have no way of knowing how things stood,” I said. “I have no idea what my grandfather might have been thinking or how he might have wished for things to be handled. I do think that my father wouldn’t be terribly happy to know that Santo was going through my grandfather’s things. Suppose he found a will? What would stop him from simply disposing of it?”

Porter shook his head. “Nothing, I suppose,” he said. “Although it wouldn’t be that simple. And, logically, why would he do something like that?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Maybe he wouldn’t like the terms or conditions of the will.”

“Were there, in fact, a will,” Porter said. “I’ve no doubt Santo would like the terms or conditions just fine.”

“I’m just trying to understand the situation,” I said.

“Of course,” Porter said. “Your assumption –and I likely share this assumption—is that if Santo was going through your grandfather’s things looking for a will, it was likely with the hope that he would find one that bequeathed him at least a portion of the estate. It would do him no good to dispose of any document that did not include any such stipulation or provision, since in the absence of any will at all, virtually all of the assets would be turned over to the immediate family.”

For a brief moment Porter looked as if he was vaguely disgusted with me. For my part, I was increasingly befuddled by his strange and digressive manner, and by his seeming ability to maintain a tenuous hold on the conversation at hand while constantly preoccupied with other matters. At any rate, I could have sworn I saw the spasm of a wince, followed by a disapproving jerk of his head.

He broke the awkward silence that followed these last comments by rolling backwards once more in his chair in pursuit of yet another can of soda, which he proceeded to maniacally chug down exactly as he had the previous two, this time, however, without moving from in front of the open refrigerator.

“I should think you might find something poignant in that last speculation,” he said over his shoulder. “I find it very sad indeed.” He shook his head again as if to give this point emphasis, and paddled himself back to a position behind his desk.

“I cannot even imagine,” he said.

“Imagine what?” I asked, and once more he fixed me with an uncomfortably long and unusually blank stare, as if he were gazing upon a foreign substance on his front porch that he could not quite identify.

“That,” he eventually snapped. “That man going through your grandfather’s things hoping to find something that he already knows does not exist. That man alone in his grief; I think I might be comfortable using that word in this particular instance. We might also perhaps try to imagine Santo going through that apartment hoping to salvage personal mementoes that would mean absolutely nothing to you or any other member of your family, items possibly of interest to him that would in all likelihood end up in some dumpster. I don’t believe that either one of them had another truly close friend or family member in this town, or anywhere else, for that matter. Santo Javier has done nothing but run that miserable little bar for as long as I’ve known him.”

“I’m sure my grandfather must have paid him some kind of salary,” I said.

“Of course he paid him some kind of salary,” Porter said. “Good God. But more importantly, your grandfather essentially gave him a life.”