ing, there | : i Greg Perreault RITTER'S FUNERAL "Tie sce tse doe nthe tp enw est sac con, Mack suits, black dresses and probably just to piss Ritter off. Ritter would have preferred a thunderstorm or an overcast sky for his funeral, but instead the birds chirped like it was May even though everyone felt like winter. Standing next to the girlfriend, I entered the viewing area and saw my cousin lying in deaths silent black box. His skin had paled from afternoons spent sleeping and evenings spent dancing and shooting up. The funeral home walls were bare and there were no hypocrites with white collars because his note said he didn't want a church service, I remembered the way he sauntered home after he ran out of money and had to drop out of college. He could blow Camel smoke into his mother’s face and tell her to piss off without having. to take the cigarette out of his mouth. I never had what it took to leave college and everything else behind for a smoky bar—but he did. Everyone formed a line behind the casket to say goodbye, but I waited behind them all. I didn't want to see him. The silence was broken when his mother began to sob her way to his casket. I turned to look at his girlfriend and half-expected her to pull her reporter’s notebook. It was her second purse and she kept everything from quotes to phone numbers to her diary entries inside it. One timereg Perreault RITTER'S FUNERAL in the newsroom, | flipped through her notebook and found pages and pages of poetry about Ritter. Hearts and stars surrounded every mention of his name. After he cheated on her the first time, I poured her coffee in the kitchen and patted her hand. “Faith I said, “why did you stay?” She said, “Beauty” and took her hand away the same way she drew away from me now. Shed stared at me with bright, watery blue ‘eyes and lowered her head. My eyes traced the room, falling on pale town outcasts who shared his evenings in clubs and dirty, windowless apartments, All of them were there: Jenny from the bar, Colleen from the Coco Bermuda, Bullet the guy who could do that trick with his, tongue and Navy Jack, who could kick back more Scotch than any three construction workers. Tears began to fall as they stared at his body in silence. Their eyes shifted around as if they were waiting for last rites from a priest who had never been invited. No priest would dribble holy water over his body to see if it would hiss and steam, and then say his prayers, as if they do any good. Finally, Faith turned to ‘me with her rosy cheeks and tear-stained eyes. She creased her brow and pointed with a fingernail, toward Ritter, toward the wooden box. “Why?” I asked. “Look” she pleaded, her voice cracking, I didn't want to get any closer to the mannequin or the box or the smell of embalmed flesh, but the funeral director motioned me forward and I felt my feet shuffling up the carpet anyway. Red velvet disappeared beneath my shoes and I could see Ritter again when we both wore overalls and watched Darkwing Duck and climbed on old Ms. Petrie's roof. Hed been right—everything did look better from her roof—the sky was bluer and closer and the pine’ snowy covering could be knocked off to reveal green. When the cops pulled us off the roof, Ritter smiled like a freshman after his first joint. But now his mouth was taut after years of eatly afternoon cartoons, video games and watching his mom drink her way into walls. His hair had once been blonde when wed spent afternoons in the pool with Grandma, acting like Darkwing Duck and Launchpad as we fought off Steelbeak’s minions. ‘Then I sensed the silent anger in his limbs that slowly killed the sidekick who fought crime with me in my grandma's swimming pool. But as they closed the top and I got one last look at his eyes, I ‘witnessed in his face what I had missed for years. Beauty.