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finally what art’s all about, when my doorbell chirred. Almost before it stopped, there was a pounding at the door. And then before I could get to it, the door opened.
    “Lock your fucking door, Lew,” Walsh said, closing it behind him. “Where the hell you think you live?”
    I sat back down. “Don’t you have criminals you ought to be out there catching or something?”
    “They’ll still be there. Always have been. So’s the goddamn paperwork. You got any coffee?”
    “I can make you some.”
    “Don’t bother. Probably had too much already.”
    He went out to the kitchen for a Diet Coke, came back and sank into the wingback’s tired embrace, looking for a hard moment at the bottle on the floor, the cup in my hand.
    “Goddamn it, Lew, what the fuck are you doing here, anyway? You oughta be at the church already. You got people up there waiting for you. You just sitting here getting drunk, that it? Business as usual?”
    “Nope. He’s definitely not getting drunk, Don old friend. Not that he hasn’t tried. Valiantly.”
    “So, what then? You’re just gonna pretend it didn’t happen? You gonna just blow off the whole thing, after all she meant to you? And after all the crap she put up with from you for all those years? Cause you didn’t give her shit when she was alive, man, you know? You know that, I know you do. And it’s damn little enough you can do now.”
    He leaned back, breathed deeply. Held up his empty can in a mock salut. “I’m sorry. I coulda said that better, I guess. Most things I could, these days.”
    “You scored the point, Don. It’s okay.”
    He shook his head, looked out to the patio. “I don’t know, Lew. Ever since Josie and the girls left, everything looks different. I don’t know; I’m one hell of a guy to be giving advice. But sometimes it seems to me like you spend half your life doing everything you can to avoid things and the rest trying to make up for it. I have trouble understanding that. Always have.”
    “So you got another point to make?”
    “Well, I got this point that you better get up off your butt and haul that same sorry thing on over to Verne’s goddamn funeral. That’s the only other point I got. For now, anyway.”
    “I’m not going, Don. I can’t.”
    “Lew.” He sat back again, exhaled deeply. “Listen to me. I swear it, Lew: you’re going. If I have to get a squad down here and have ‘em help me drag you into that church, you’re going. You hear what I’m telling you?”
    “Such devotion and friendship’s a rare thing.”
    “Yeah, Lew, it is. It sure as hell is. But what the fuck would you know about that?”
    I looked at him then and felt tears force their way out onto my face.
    Stones in my passway, as Robert Johnson said. And my road seem dark as night.
    Surely the funeral could not have been conducted in silence—surely (to whatever recondite end) I’ve invented this—but in memory that is how I always see it: several dozen people sitting straight as fences on the hardwood pews, not a sound anywhere, even traffic sounds from outside curiously hushed and transformed as though broadcast from somewhere else, from another world or time, and people moving, when at last they began to do so, as though that silence were substantial, something that resisted, something they had to push through, slowing and drawing out their movements. As though we all had slipped unaware into some timeless deep.
    I remembered James Baldwin’s funeral a few years back. The solemn slow progress of cross and chasuble, and then, breaking over it, tearing that long European sentence apart, the sudden leap and skitter of African drums.
    And that was just how the world came back, sudden, staccato, as Don and I stood on the steps outside the church.
    “Where can I drop you, Lew?”
    “I think I’ll walk back. Maybe swing by the school.”
    “C’mon. It’s five, six miles at least.”
    “I’ll be fine, Don.”
    “No you won’t. You haven’t been fine