Anything Could Happen (29 page)

“I need to call Peter,” he said.

A
N
HOUR
later, Peter Wagner was there.

Austin opened the door, and there he was. Peter Wagner. At last. He was real.

He was a tall man, thin, with almost impossibly long arms and legs. He looked to be around sixty, but it was hard to tell. Peter’s eyes were ancient—Austin saw that right away. He might have been immortal with eyes like that, crystal clear and blue gray. There were many lines on his face, some tiny, but some deep as valleys, and his brown hair was shot with silver. His bearing was regal, and he carried a cane but didn’t seem to need it. And although he was dressed casually in slacks and smoking jacket, it was obvious the clothes were expensive. How did one guess the age of such a man?

He put Uncle Bodie to bed, was gone for some time, then joined Guy and Austin, who sat together on the couch.

“How are you boys?” he asked, as if they were the ones who needed help.

“Okay,” Austin replied. “But Uncle Bodie?”

Peter sat down in a chair next to them and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “It is difficult to say. Lucille…. She was special. A most enchanting creature. She will be missed. But by no one more than Bodie.”

“I should have been here,” Austin said, and just like that began to cry again.

“No, do not do that to yourself. Bodie explained. Thou wert with thy lover and there was nothing you could have done had you been here.” He pulled a handkerchief from his front pocket and handed it over. “Here, dear boy.”

“I could have been here so he wouldn’t have been alone when he found her.” Austin wiped his eyes, sniffled, started to hand it back.

“Blow your nose, Austin. It’s all right. I have many more. Keep it.”

Austin did as told, then stared at it. He’d never used a real hankie before. What did you do with it? Surely you didn’t throw it away?

“I am so sorry that this is the way we are meeting for the first time. You are a light in Bodie’s life, and I wish we could have met under better circumstances. I let myself get too busy.”

Austin didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. He tucked the handkerchief in his shirt pocket and finally said, “
Lucille
was the light of his life. I don’t know what he’ll do without her.”

She gives me reason to get up each day, to keep going
, came an echo of Uncle Bodie’s voice
. After all, what would she do without me?

“He will need you, that is for sure,” Peter said. His voice was almost musical, the accent unreadable. As if he had adopted a bit from all the cultures and countries he visited. “Lucille was his best friend, and now she is gone. We are all graced by our pets. I believe it is a dog that proves there must be a God. Why else would such perfect companions exist? I think that Anatole France once said that ‘Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.’”

Austin nodded. “What do we do now?”

“Now, I would like some of your uncle’s sherry. I would like a drink and mayhap you will join me. Then I think you should both go upstairs and sleep in
your
bed tonight.”

“No,” said Austin. “No, I need to stay. I wasn’t here when he needed me.”

“But you
were
,” Peter said. “You were very much here when he needed you. But Bodie will not be alone tonight, worry not, and I am too tall for yon couch. Plus it is a torture device assuredly created by the Spanish Inquisition. I cannot hope to sleep there.”

Despite himself, Austin smiled. He’d never thought the couch was comfortable, but his uncle loved it. Loved all of his furniture, his kitschy things, knickknacks, and pictures.

And Lucille.

“Should we take her to the vet?” Austin asked. “To see what happened? Why she—”

“I asked him the same thing, but he said it was not necessary. Eighteen years happened, young Austin. A dog does not a human lifetime have. If only they did. If only they lived threescore years and ten and we but a decade or two. It would seem more fair. Was it not Samuel Clemens who said, ‘The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s’?”

“I hope we go to the same one,” Austin said. “For Uncle Bodie’s sake. It wouldn’t be heaven for him without her, would it?”

“Ah, yes,” Peter replied. “‘No heaven will not ever Heaven be. Unless my dog is there to welcome me.’”

“Who said that?” Austin asked.

“Why, I did, Austin. And I bastardized it. As for the original author, I believe we do not know. Now. Upstairs with the both of thee. Find solace in each other’s arms. Bodie and I will be here. If I need you this evening, I know where to find you. And if he calls for you, I will call you down.”

“Do you promise?” Austin asked.

“I do, my lad. I do.”

They stood up, and Peter rose with them. He shook their hands, then pulled Austin close, surprising him with the iron quality of his thin chest. “I do say again how sorry I am we did not meet under better circumstances. If only it had been your birthday or one of the nights of the play, which I did see, but you weren’t there that night.”

“You did?” Guy and Austin chorused.

“Indeed. It was amazing.”

“Thank you,” Guy said, and Austin felt a swell of pride at the gentleman’s compliment.

And so they left Peter to watch over Bodie.

Austin was there the whole next day, never leaving his uncle’s side. They did take Lucille to the vet, but to have her cremated. There was no autopsy. Uncle Bodie agreed; it was eighteen years that took her, and he couldn’t bear that she and her beautiful red coat, though turning white, would be cut open.

All the neighbors came over the next few days. Most of the tenants had known Lucille almost her whole life, and grieved her passing. She had been a wonderful dog, bringing delight to many lives. Austin was surprised at all the people who came by. He saw it was Bodie they loved, and everyone wanted to help in any way they could.

Uncle Bodie did not cry after that horrible, fateful afternoon. Not once. He told stories about her, and he laughed sadly when the tale was good. He could often be found staring into some corner of the room, or more likely into some corner of his memories.

“The first time I saw her, she was just this tiny ball of red fluff,” he reminisced. He held out his two hands, cupped them together. “She barely filled my hands, like this.”

Austin tried to imagine her so small.

“And she got into things! Oh, she did. Where there was a will, there was a way for Lucille. She had a mind of her own.”

Austin listened. To every story, every anecdote. He tried to imagine his uncle when he’d first gotten her. He’d been around Peter’s age, as a matter of fact. That was hard to picture as well. He had the image of his uncle as a boy, and what he looked like today, and that was it. His uncle didn’t seem to have pictures, or at least not that he’d shared. Except for that first day, the man was pretty closed about his life. He had secrets for himself only.

“I loved it when she slept with me,” he said. “On my chest when she was little, breathing so lightly that sometimes I would wake her for fear she’d stopped. But no, she was fine. Maybe I would be watching TV or reading a book, and I would look down and she would be peeking up at me from the covers, two tiny black button eyes in that fluffy red face, and I would laugh so! She was my light, Austin. My light.”

Austin and Guy slept in Austin’s room over the following nights and, between the two of them, tried not to leave his side during the day. And meanwhile Austin finally told his uncle where he had been that morning. Reading that play and getting outraged and causing a huge fit and God, now it seemed so foolish. Shouldn’t he be happy that Guy had wanted to include him in his play? Even something painful?

“You’ve forgiven him, of course. Right?” Uncle Bodie asked.

“Oh yes,” Austin assured him.

“And asked for forgiveness?”

“Not
exactly
. But yes.”

“Then you must do it
exactly
,” his uncle said. “Guy just might be the love of your life. Waste not one thing you should have done. Never ever have any should-have-dones.”

“Okay,” Austin said, seeing the wisdom.

“Promise me?”

“I promise,” Austin said.

Two weeks later, Uncle Bodie died.

T
HANK
God for Peter Wagner. He swept in and took care of everything, for Austin was devastated. Hopeless to even begin to know what to do.

He had woken that morning without the smell of brewing coffee. That was not the way things went when it came to Uncle Bodie.

He got up, walked out of his room, and saw the morning light peeking through the sheers of the balcony doors, but that was all. The dining room was dark, as well as the kitchen.
Did I get up early by mistake?
he wondered. A check of the kitchen clock showed he was actually up a little late. The alarm clock must not have been turned on, since it was a Saturday.

Austin knew then.

No
, he said to himself. He went to his uncle’s door and knocked.
Please
no. There was no answer.
He’s old. He sleeps deep
, he lied to himself, for his uncle slept little and lightly. He knocked again. “Uncle Bodie?” he called—quietly at first, and then louder. “Uncle Bodie?”

Austin did then what he’d never done. He opened his uncle’s door and stepped into the dark room, the only light coming in tiny cracks around the pulled blinds.

He could see the shape of the man in his big bed, but he didn’t make any noise. Austin turned on the light and looked and knew. At rest, yes, but Bodie wasn’t asleep, and Austin could see that. People who said dead people looked like they were sleeping were crazy. Uncle Bodie did not look like he was sleeping.

He was holding a picture, and when Austin went to his uncle, he saw it wasn’t a picture of Lucille like he thought it would be, but instead it was of two men—two old men.

He called Peter, and then he went to Guy and he cried. Softly and long and long.

Peter fixed everything. Took care of legal matters, Uncle Bodie’s body—he knew what Boden Spitz wanted done with his body—and the funeral as well. He asked Austin all the right questions, the ones Austin could answer. What do you think? This suit, right? And songs? Bodie loved Johnny Mathis. Surely something by him at the service? It was Peter who made all the calls, even to Austin’s grandparents—Bodie’s sister and brother-in-law. Austin could barely speak to them.

And now the neighbors came to Austin, for they had to come to love him and wanted to try in some way to relieve the hurt. But there was no relieving such pain. His uncle had become a center to Austin’s life, and it was only Guy sleeping at his side that gave him the ability to fall asleep at all. He was all but inconsolable.

“I don’t know how to go on without him,” he said to Guy one night, in the dark, his lover spooned up behind him.

Guy sighed, pulled him closer. “In times like this, I remember the words of one of my heroes,” he said quietly in Austin’s ear.

“Any advice might help.”

“Ever heard of Harvey Fierstein?”

“The Broadway guy?”

Guy squeezed him. “Yeah, the Broadway guy.”

“He was in
Independence Day
too. The guy that said, ‘Ah, crap,’ right before he dies. I think that’s why I say crap all the time.” Surprisingly, he almost laughed. Almost, but not quite.

“Well, he wrote this play that changed my life. It’s called
Torch Song Trilogy,
and they made it into a movie. That’s how I found it. I was too young to see the play. Hell, I saw the movie on videotape. Anyway…. There is this scene near the end. The main character, Arnold Beckoff, is talking to his mother—who he fights with a lot. And he is telling her about the death of his lover and how hard it is to be without him. And she tells him he has to give himself time and that it does get better. She says, ‘It becomes a part of you, like learning to wear a ring or eyeglasses. You get used to it… and that’s good. It’s good because it makes sure you don’t forget. You don’t want to forget him, do you?’”

Austin sucked in a deep breath.

“You don’t, do you? Want to forget him?” He pulled Austin even closer.

“Of course not,” Austin whispered back, and began once more to gently cry.

“Eighty years took Bodie Spitz,” Peter told Austin a day or so later, sitting next to him and pressing some of his uncle’s sweet sherry to his lips. “That and Lucille. She’s what kept him alive since Jimmy’s passing.”

Austin jolted at those words, nearly spilling the glass. “Jimmy?”

Peter nodded solemnly. “Yes, indeed.”

“Jimmy?” Austin asked again. “I don’t understand.”

“His husband, Austin. Did he not mention Jimmy at all? I know he didn’t speak of him often. It was too painful for him, but—”

“But Jimmy got married to a woman,” Austin protested. “That’s why Uncle Bodie left Buckman.”

“Yes. Yes, he did. When he was nineteen, I believe. Jimmy, that is. He had gotten some young woman in the family way, and I am sure you know, in Buckman you marry a woman you get pregnant.”

Austin leaned in, the fog of his grief lifted by his curiosity. “So how, what…?”

“Jimmy Halliburton married that young woman, and a year later he left her and came to Kansas City and found Bodie.”

“What?”
He what? He did what?

“They were together just a year short of fifty years. And never was there a couple who loved each other more.”

“But….” He sat up straight. “Oh my God! The picture.”

“Picture?”

Austin jumped up, ran to his uncle’s room, tried not to look at the bed, but he had to when he couldn’t find the framed photograph that had been clutched in his uncle’s hands.

“Austin?” said Guy, standing at the door.

“I can’t find the picture!” he cried.

Then Peter was there. “Austin, are you all right?”

“When I found Uncle Bodie. He was holding a picture.”

“Ah, yes,” said Peter. “Sorry. It’s okay.” He came into the room, knelt, and pulled a flat box from under Uncle Bodie’s bed. “These are the things I was going to have at the service. Things to help people remember him by. Guy? Do you mind?” Peter nodded at the box and toward the doorway.