For Joe Pulver.

Eulogy for a Difficult Man

by Laird Barron

He hurt me when we shook hands the last time I saw him

He squeezed and squeezed as if he wanted to crack a stone, before he drove

Away at the wheel of a rusted Dodge Charger

Through the dusty, green-lined ever-after

Shot himself in California in a cabin near the tree line with a pistol

That held two bullets

One chambered and a spare just in case

He bounced at the Black Stars in his wilder days

That’s how he got the scar

I was surprised when, after so many years, he shaved off his mustache

(the cookie duster)

Said the park service preferred their rangers clean cut

I laughed and I shouldn’t have

The two of us chopping wood at his cabin on the mountain

During the presidential election, the one that turned out the way it did

Radio reception faded to static cold as the termination dust on its way

Down from the bare rock summit blowing under the sill of the plywood door

Elk horns and the yellow blanket I hung there to save us

We hunkered near the fire while it gnawed split pine

Red shadows dripped across his face that kept going in and out like the static

He told me state parks are lousy with serial killers

National parks are even worse

If (when) someone murders you

Defiles you and divides the corpse and not a shred is ever found

The shape with the ax is always a shape you know.

Another time he said when he was a kid he kept a lame canary

Brown and white with a crooked leg

The canary weighed twenty-one grams the morning it dropped dead

To the bottom of the cage on a newspaper photograph of

Richard Speck smiling in captivity

Make of it (he winked slyly) what you will and of course I did

Slept with a Green River knife under my pillow for going on fifteen years

Meanwhile, he called over his shoulder

I’ll be right back as he walked into the forest and never came out

Been a while since anybody has