The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang

Author:Jay Caspian Kang
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307953902
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-06T21:00:00+00:00

FINCH DIDN’T QUITE know what to make of anything yet and had already forgotten his mental note to go to the hospital, so he peeled out of the parking lot at Sloat and headed south. He had always loved driving down the 1 past Pacifica through Devil’s Slide, especially in the fall, when the furrowed fields around Half Moon Bay sagged with their heavy, orange fruit. The uselessness of everything that grew down the 1 had appealed to him as a kid: the pumpkins, the kiwi farms, the trust fund projects with their silly, reassuring crops: pie fillings, star fruit, Brussels sprouts. His junior year in high school, he had lain down with Loretta Neill in a pumpkin patch down near the Princeton Jetty. Staring up at the array of stars, Finch gave what amounted to a spoken word performance of Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta,” a song he had picked almost entirely out of the great coincidence that there was a song with the same name as his girlfriend. He could still remember each word, just as he could still remember the startling pungent smell on his fingers, the bumping of teeth, the chirp of his own brain celebrating the start of something new. Hundreds of pumpkins, swollen, moonlit, stood sentry as Finch and Loretta squirmed and pushed and then wallowed a bit in the cocoons of their guilt. Afterward, they lay on their backs and he explained why Townes Van Zandt was a real singer and Johnny Cash, whom she loved, was just a charming impostor. He was always ruining these moments with his awkwardly timed vitriol. He honestly thought Loretta’s life would be improved if she upgraded from Johnny Cash to Townes, just as he honestly believed that his teachers would be better off dead, or that his parents would be better off if they took acid at least once a month and smoked weed every day. Loretta, he remembered, had said that Townes was ugly, and a misogynist, to boot. All his women were kindly whores or wives with impossibly warm hearts. Everyone was always leaving. Even Loretta, she explained, is a carousing bartender whom Townes only likes because he can have her any time. Finch had nothing to say. She huddled deeper into his houndstooth coat and sighed. He squeezed her fingers and felt happy anticipating the rest of the night: the planned stop-in at the Denny’s in Pacifica, her flushed cheeks, unraveling hair, the wordless car ride back home, both of them listening to Guy Clark, the median between Townes and Johnny Cash, on the tinny speakers of his mother’s beat-up Mercedes. Back then, at the height of their young love, Finch, who had never bent in anything, imagined the hundreds of compromises he could make for Loretta.

Through the pastel sameness of Daly City’s row houses, old Finch’s mind stayed on Loretta, who had died at nineteen of meningitis. Loretta! Her chicken legs, her tuft of dry, pale yellow hair, her asymmetrical eyebrows, the persistence of her wool, earflapped ski caps, the way she kept both hands on her forty when she drank.

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