I don’t know if Wendell would have wanted it that way or not. That’s what you say about things that happen after somebody dies–He would have wanted it that way. But Wendell never seemed to know what he wanted when he was alive, so it’s hard to say what he would want dead.
I guess he wanted to be dead, because that’s how it happened. He did it himself with a .22 after years of trying with Royal Gate vodka.
I had met Wendell in Vacaville just as I was finishing a deuce and a half for assault. Later when he got out he looked me up in Grants Pass and hung around for the better part of the next four years. We worked off and on as industrial painters, doing those jobs that other people wouldn’t do–like scraping and spray-coating the insides of silos and storage tanks. Shit work, no worse doing it hungover. On a regular basis Wendell would disappear on an extended drunk, come back broke and looking bad from as far away as Portland or Sacramento. Anyway, there ain’t much to say about Wendell’s life. I never heard him tell an interesting story. I don’t suppose he remembered much. He was maybe 32 or 33 when he pulled the trigger.
His mother and sister came down from Butte for the funeral. They just signed the papers and had him cremated. There wasn’t a service per se, though one night at the local gin mill we had sort of a wake for him, with the regulars trying to think up nice things to say about Wendell. Well, he was quiet and never caused much trouble, and, amazingly enough, no one there could remember that Wendell owed them anything.
It was back of my place where Wendell done himself. He had a room back there. The night of the wake at the bar his sister, who was getting fairly sloshed herself, gave me the urn thing with the ashes and told me that as Wendell’s best friend (news to me) I should decide what to do with him.
The next afternoon when I stopped at the bar for a drink the bartender pulled the urn out from underneath the bar and said he believed I had forgotten this the night before. Which I had. I had never been responsible for taking Wendell home before. Besides, where was a better final resting place than at the side table near the ladies room door?
Well, sitting there at the bar with Wendell just beyond the ashtray, I started asking people what they thought I should do with him. Someone remembered there was a spot up on the coast Wendell used to go to. Kicking Horse Bay. Sometimes when he’d reappear he’d say that’s where he’d been, up fishing at Kicking Horse Bay. It wasn’t over a hundred miles away, an out of the way place, and the shore fishing could be good there when conditions were right. Though I never knew Wendell to have any fishing gear.
I was between silos, as it were, drinking up my paycheck while the fumes cleared out of my head. Drinking tequila. Wendell’s sister was there; she hadn’t left town yet. So she and I were drinking tequila and beers with Wendell pushed back on the bar between us. I’m trying to give him back to her–family and all, what’s right–when she suggests we just take him up to Kicking Horse Bay and feed him to his fishes. Well, cast his ashes into the waves of the only place anyone could remember Wendell ever saying he liked. She’d drive. So we agreed to that and had a toast on it, and the bartender set up drinks all around, including one for Wendell. a double shot of Royal Gate. And his sister reached over, unscrewed the top of the urn-thing and tossed it in to him.
It was still pretty early, around dusk, so we decided to just do it, and we set out–Wendell’s sister, myself and a guy named Rob who just wanted to go for the ride. We stopped at a liquor store and stocked up with tequila, beer and Royal Gate, and Wendell’s sister drove. It took longer than it should have, as we stopped often along the way to take a slash and replace it at various roadhouses. Wendell’s sister kept tossing toasts into his urn.
It’s a tough rut of a road on the way down to Kicking Horse Bay once the blacktop ends. I made Wendells’s sister stop finally about a quarter of a mile above the beach (women never listen to reason) and we stumbled and cussed each other the rest of the way–me with the flashlight, she with the urn, and Rob carrying the bottles.
It was nice down on the beach. There was a little moon out in the clouds, the sea picking it up and making it brighter. Wendell’s sister and I were through cussing one another. Rob turned out to have hidden talents and pulled a harmonica out of a pocket and played appropriate tunes. We toasted Wendell, his sister occasionally remembering to give him his.
After a while we’d finished everything we’d brought to drink and it was time to say goodbye to Wendell and haul our asses back up to the car. I sat there trying to think up the absolutely right last sentence to say, then went to pick up Wendell, who was heavier now and sloshed when I moved him. Rob was clinking through the pile of empties looking for one last drink–it would be a long dry haul home at this time of night. I was standing with Wendell in my arms about to deliver my eight word obit when Wendell’s sister yanked at my coat tail and I sat back down on the beach with an umph and a slosh from Wendell.
She proposed one last drink to old asshole Wendell. I pointed out we were all out. Well, she said, I’ll finally have one on him. And she took Wendell from where he was sitting between my legs, unscrewed him, and dipped her empty plastic cup in there. The big chunks is bones, she informed us.
In the morning, when she and I awoke on the beach tucked together spoonstyle against the cold, Rob was nowhere to be seen and Wendell’s urn was bone dry.
John Enright: Reality Salad 