Red Admirable

Lily is now our Greenwich Village Correspondent! She writes from a place where cocktails are poured at five and frail women smoke Marlboros inside. In this Greenwich Village, there’s always a good chance that a glass of flat tonic will be mistaken for tap water in the morning. Dashing men in brass-buttoned uniforms determine how quickly you are whooshed to your floor, and once you get there, a woman in house dress will already be peering at you with her chain lock still fastened.

I have found that at Lily’s house, it is almost always essential to serve pâté.

She hasn’t always been writing from the cradle of such civilization, however. This story is from Berkeley. Things didn’t melt as much on the East Coast:

The Lone Ranger’s Grave

You wouldn’t think the Lone Ranger would have a grave. Eileen couldn’t pin down who the Lone Ranger was when she thought about it. She knew he hung around the household vocabulary with Uncle Sam and the Sandman, but there was little she could say about him. So she smiled silently when the woman told her they were looking for the Lone Ranger’s grave and wished she’d listened more to her father.

Her father loved Westerns and scoured the newspaper TV listings for their titles every morning. He thought she was looking too. But she found them oppressive and depressing: those endless stretches of thirsty sand with the occasional plateau, sunken back into the ground at the angle of a dying ship, the same sad saloon in every town in every movie, the overturned glasses, the blood-stained shirts, and the lack of women and trees. But how could she tell him? Not while he searched so eagerly for another version of “The O.K. Corral” to watch together. And so she sat, and watched, and imagined she was developing agoraphobia.

She tried meditation techniques to keep the Western world on the screen and out of her mind. But this only backfired. Sometimes, when she concentrated, a thin line of sand would start to trickle from the television set onto the floor. Once a bullet ricocheted off the coffee table. Her father was delighted by this and let the sand pile up and spread around the living room floor, forming miniature plains and dunes. Eileen woke up one morning to find he had planted tiny cactus plants around the furniture legs. But her mother made him clean it all up because she couldn’t very well have the Head of the Uppercrest Cemetery Board of Trustees getting sand in his shoes and thorns in his ankles when he came over for cocktails.

They lived on the edge of the cemetery and Eileen’s mother, Laine, worked as a receptionist in the Crypt. Laine relished her hours receiving burial plot reservations by phone and running her manicured fingertips over the polished marble surfaces. Eileen and her father were repelled by the Crypt: the scentlessness of its marble walls, floors, benches, and the rows upon rows of book-shaped urns. They couldn’t understand why Laine’s beloved patrons paid so much to put their ashes in an empty book. Eileen thought she’d rather have an urn shaped like a pineapple and her father chose a horse. He was a night man at the Oakland Zoo and specialized in the care of miniature nocturnal horses. Sometimes he would ride one of the larger ones around the Zoo grounds performing his other duties. They stayed in the house most summer days, watching Westerns and drinking room temperature root beers.

Laine’s office served the outdoor burial grounds as well as the Crypt. Visitors would often come to her searching for the grave of some distant relative or long lost friend and, if they acted slightly important or wore gold jewelry, Laine would send them to her house across the cemetery for a “personal guided tour.” Eileen and her father could tell a visitor was approaching because of the slight breeze that would drift in the window; there was no wind in the cemetery except for air wafted by their walking. Eileen and her father would draw lots for who had to play tour guide while the impatient visitor rapped at their screen door. Eileen always picked the shorter straw, and her father almost always decided he would actually like to go out too, unless an especially good Western was on. An especially good Western meant an especially bad Western for Eileen and she was especially glad to get out.

The tours were not hard to give. Eileen had a stock of visitors’ guides to distribute with a map of the cemetery and a key to the “Graves of Notable Persons.” The importance of these important persons, however, required extensive notation. Entries usually ran something like, “Fredrik Delger: German shoemaker who became Oakland’s first millionaire,” or “Henry A. Snow: Zoologist and African big game hunter, his family kitchen is reconstructed in the Oakland Museum.” They were just the sort of people that Eileen’s mother would have deemed worthy of a private tour.

The visitors were just the sort of people who would one day appear on the list of Notable Persons for totally un-noteworthy reasons themselves. Once they got over their annoyance at being made to wait, they usually lightened up a bit. Eileen pointed out the notable graves and monuments and didn’t speak much in between because she wasn’t good at walking backwards. She liked the chance to be out of the house and away from the suffocating sand dribbling out of the TV set. Outside she could dream about watching murder mysteries or film noirs classics full of plush red couches, and loud city streets, and women with deadly smiles. The cemetery grass was well watered, though graying, and the gravestones were familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, whichever route she took. Most of all there were hills, and valleys, and slopes, which relieved her mind from the infinite horizon of the West.

—

“We’re looking for the Lone Ranger’s grave,” said the woman. Eileen had just answered the door after drawing a shorter straw. She looked slowly at the small cluster of middle-aged women wearing nice slacks and large sunglasses. They were looking expectantly back at her. Eileen really couldn’t remember the Lone Ranger being on the list of Notable Persons, but she told them to wait while she went to get the visitors’ guide. “Oh, that’s all right,” said the first woman reaching into her purse, “I’ve got one from when we were here last time.”

“That was ten years ago,” said a second woman. “The Ladies’ Cemetery Inspection Society only visits each site once a decade,” she finished, beaming as if this were a great accomplishment.

“Oh,” said Eileen looking down in confusion to where the first woman pointed on her yellowing visitors’ guide. “The Lone Ranger” was printed on the list with no further explanation.

“And we just had to see the Lone Ranger’s grave since we missed it last time,” chirped a third woman. Eileen felt her father looking over her shoulder. “The Lone Ranger,” he said quietly and picked up his hat. Eileen knew he’d rather see a real-life Lone Ranger’s grave than keep watching “their” movie.

The first woman introduced herself as Dora and the other two as Nora and Cora. The five of them started out down the gravel path with Eileen in the lead, still confused about who the Lone Ranger was and how he could have a grave there. Dora, Nora, and Cora chatted happily about the upkeep of the grounds while Eileen’s father sauntered along behind them, looking eagerly ahead.

Eileen followed the guide into an unfamiliar sector of the cemetery. The grass, she noticed, was drier, and the trees sparser. Then she saw a thin line of sand sliding down the side of a gravestone, accumulating in a pile. This happened sometimes; a gravestone would get dried out and begin to disintegrate like a sand castle in the sun. But it seemed the asphalt road underfoot was also crumbling. The gravel bits got smaller and looser until finally they were walking on a path of sand. Cora began to complain her high heels were sinking in and Nora said she had a propensity for sunstroke. Eileen didn’t much like where they’d gotten to either, but the truth was she didn’t know where they were.

The sun beat down on them like hot bricks and a dry wind curled close to the earth. Most of the gravestones had completely dissolved into sand, except for some which had risen into great heaving plateaus. And all around Eileen was so much horizon, unbroken by a single tree. She had an urge to bury her head in the sand. In front of them was the Lone Ranger’s grave.

The five of them stood in the sun reading the inscription. “The Lone Ranger,” it read, in quotation marks. An explanation followed on a large plaque beneath the stone. This, it explained, was the “real Lone Ranger,” not one of the film or radio stars that Dora, Nora, and Cora had been expecting. This “real Lone Ranger” was named John D. Hayes. He was simply a run-of-the-mill Texas Ranger who happened to have a friend in the radio business who cited him as the “inspiration” for the famous program. The two of them even managed to finagle a good portion of the royalty profits for themselves. In his later days he had moved to Oakland, opened up a chain of rather sleazy boarding houses, and become the neighborhood loan shark, leading many to call him the “Loan Ranger.”

Dora, Cora, and Nora did not look amused. It was all that Eileen would have expected from the inspiration for a Western character. But her father looked crushed. He read the inscription twice over and his eyes fell to the ground. “But he never had a name,” he said. “He had to hide his identity after his fellow five rangers were massacred by an outlaw gang. He shot guns out of outlaws’ hands from 100 yards away. He was the ‘daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains who led the fight for law and order in the early West!’”

“Well at least there’s a nice portrait of him on the stone,” said Cora.

“That’ll get high rankings for the cemetery.” Eileen and her father looked despairingly at the ultimate disappointment. It was one of those chintzy color photograph engravings that they disliked even more than book-shaped urns. The Lone Ranger, who looked more like a Robber Baron, was greedily grinning his loan-shark smile.

“And he always, always wore a mask,” Eileen’s father finished gravely.

Nora, Cora, and Dora started muttering about the lack of irrigation in this section and made it clear that they were ready to be lead back. But Eileen and her father stayed where they stood.

“You know,” he said to her, looking around them, “I don’t like all this sand so much after all.” She smiled while the frustrated visitors started back down the path by themselves. “Maybe we should watch a murder mystery tonight.”

“Yes,” she said, “I think I’d like that.” The dry wind grew cool and swept the grains of sand away as they walked back to their house on the edge of the cemetery and started to talk about other kinds of movies.