Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

Short fiction

Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

gabrielcoeli 07-31-2005, 4:40 AM
___________________________________________________________

Gabriel Coeli

2115 E 9th St
Vancouver, WA 98660

(360) 737-7714

gabrielcoeli@yahoo.com

Cue the Hallelujahs
A Happy Ending
by
Gabriel Coeli

___________________________________________________________

“There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that think there are two
kinds of people in this world and those who know better.”

I have no idea who said that. I would credit them, but I’ve seriously asked
everyone I know and even borrowed a few books of quotes from the library looking for the originator of that thoughtful witticism. I’ve got nothing.

But I do know that men, at least, can be more or less grouped into two
categories: Breast men and leg men.

Charlie Cohen was a breast man.

I remember watching a program on television a while ago and they had a
psychologist on, a real shrill brown-haired woman who referred to a fixation with
breasts as infantile predisposition. It has something to do with the amount of
attention a man gets from his mother in early childhood. Or the lack thereof. If a
baby boy is allowed to breastfeed too often, too little or not at all, he becomes
obsessed with tits. I guess there’s a “sweet spot” where the baby gets just enough to grow up a leg man, instead.

If I ever have kids, I’m going to shoot for that sweet spot.

I’m sitting at a table in a s***ty diner where I’ve just finished my swing shift, across from a homeless man who is talking to my breasts. He hasn’t shaved in years, but he’s managed to find a shower some time in the last six hours, because his frazzled brown hair, shot liberally with grey, is slicked back and still wet. His skin is pale but full of blood, and his eyes are alert, wide awake. I would say that he looked good for his age if I knew his age; I bear also in mind that homeless men can look ninety and be just forty.

His name is Charlie Cohen, and he has cancer. He lives in a boiler room below the music room of the parochial school at Saint Gabriel the Steadfast Catholic Church. Every weekday morning at ten a.m., he wakes up to the sound of the boys’ choir sending a great big greeting card to God. Every weekday morning, he also wakes up to a cough so rattling and violent that it often gives him a nosebleed.

He is wearing an expensive suit and sneakers that look like they were pulled out of a garbage bin in 1985. He says he’s paying for the coffee we’re drinking. I’ve protested three times, but he seems to be getting offended at the idea that a woman would pay his tab, so I have no current plans to raise another objection. Besides, I’m getting a free drink. Outmoded, patriarchal attitudes have their upsides from time to time.

The lighting is dim, and the plastic upholstery crinkles unpleasantly beneath me. My coffee mug has a chip in it, and it is not the only receptacle in the establishment that could use a bit of replacing. Our waitress is as disillusioned as I am when on the clock. Her name is Rosa, and she is very ugly. Charlie will eventually tip her ten dollars.

Outside, it’s raining. From time to time I shift my gaze from Charlie’s calm eyes to the window. I imagine that the water hitting the glass forms punctuation for our conversation as it slides downwards toward the street. He’ll say something I find surprising, and I’ll see an exclamation point in the water tracks. He’ll trail off, and I’ll watch an ellipsis materialize and disappear.

He’s a bilingual white American, which is rare, and he speaks English with a tortured accent that is at once as down-home as Southern-fried collared greens and as polished as a Broadway actor. He chews on his words lazily, and his years of accumulated “street” colloquialisms are deeply ingrained into his speech, but there is a high end to his cant that wears a sense of refinement like a veil. If his accent could be photographed, it would look like a New England bourgeoisie snoozing in a star-spangled hammock strung between two willows on a humid Mississippi evening. But it’s his French I’ll never forget. When he speaks French it’s as though all of his impediments vanish like wind into another sky and he’s suddenly a laureate at ease. He says things to me that sound beautiful but could easily mean “you have a head that is shaped like a strawberry,” or “please pass the salt.” I can’t tell, because I don’t speak French. I speak Spanish. But I don’t care. It’s a pleasure to hear him speak. And he talks about the French language the way Paris must have talked about Helen of Troy.

Charlie also tells me he is in love with me, and now the raindrops on the window are forming a gentle question mark. I am forced to admit that I’ve never seen him before. He tells me that he’s never come into the restaurant before because he was ashamed. He always watched me through the windows, he said. Four years he’s been watching me. I’m simultaneously flattered and frightened.

I ask him uncomfortably if that’s why he bought the suit, so that he wouldn’t be ashamed when he met me. He smiles and shakes his head, saying “No.”

He says that he killed seven men in Nicaragua, and that is why he has cancer, now. He says that God is cleansing him of his sins before he goes to heaven. Then he asks me to apologize to my people for him and for his country. I start to tell him that I’m Guatemalan, not Nicaraguan, but I think better of it and just nod. He seems satisfied.

He takes one of my hands in his and I’m surprised. One of his hands is soft as a baby’s and the other feels the way gravel roads look. Then he tells me he’s sorry for splurging on the suit. He says he still has some left, still has some left, still has some left. He says he has enough left. He says that he got the suit on discount for just two hundred dollars, marked down from eight hundred dollars, and that he just wanted to look his best when he came to meet me for the first time.

And the last time.

He says that he intended to ask me for a lock of my hair to be buried with, but now that he’s seen it up close, he wouldn’t want to displace a single strand. He looks at my ears, and at my ponytail, which I usually wear in a tight bun at work. Now that I’m off, it’s running all the way down to the small of my back. I swore to my grandfather a long time ago that I wouldn’t ever cut my hair short and I’ve stuck to that promise. My grandfather loved my hair.

Charlie removes a small bound book from his pocket and slides it across the table. I open the book and look at the pages; it’s all in French, and I ask him what it is.

They are his memoirs, he tells me, and his smile looks like it was rear-ended by a piano, but it moves as easily across his face as sunlight.

He excuses himself and stands with some difficulty. I stand, too, and walk him out of the diner. He doesn’t say a word as we exit the restaurant and he remains silent as we stand awkwardly in front. Then he smiles again, that horrible smile, and he turns around and starts to shuffle, slowly and painfully away from me. This man, whom I’ve never seen before, loved me.

I walk up behind him and slip my arms around his waist. My fingers lock around his slightly distended stomach, and I kiss him very lightly on the neck, just behind his ears. I tell him that he is a beautiful man.

I can’t see his face, but I can tell that he has started to smile again. Then he removes my hands from his midsection and walks away.

•

I wake up early the next morning and it is raining, a hot rain like only this town can make. It’s seventy degrees and slimy outside. It’s my day off, today, but I’m not watching daytime talk shows today. I’m thinking of Charlie Cohen.

I put on a coat, take it off, put it back on. It’s hot, but it’s raining. I leave the coat on and walk thirty-seven blocks past bodegas and my s***ty diner and the black boys who play basketball with the intensity and ethic of mailmen, come rain or sleet or snow or whatever. They’re always out there.

I smile at them, and though all of them see me, only one of them smiles back. This town is not soft, and it doesn’t let people be soft. It’s a rough-and-tumble type of stomping grounds, one that produces high school dropouts, petty criminals and alcoholics. It’s the worst place I’ve ever lived, and the only place I ever lived. My mother sometimes points out to me that, logically, it’s also necessarily the best place I’ve ever lived.

Logic is for men. This town is disgusting.

At the end of my journey is Saint Gabriel the Steadfast Catholic Church. I knock at the door of the rectory and Mrs. Ramirez, a friend of my mother’s who works as a parochial secretary, answers the door. She asks if I saw the police on my way in. I remark that I did not. She points out the police car, which is not an uncommon sight on these streets, and says that a homeless man was found dead in the boiler room beneath the music hall. Isn’t that dreadful? she asks me, and I wonder if she’s talking about the fact that a human being is dead or the fact that a homeless man had been sleeping undetected in the boiler room.

I know now that Charlie is dead.

I excuse myself and walk to the school, across the grassless lot that separates it from the cathedral. Peeling paint, warped siding, broken windows and dusty lots are the standout geographic features of my neighborhood, and the church is in no better or worse shape than any of the tenements or corner stores in its shadow. My personal religious feelings aside, this is a God-fearing town, but money to spare for the collection bins at Sunday mass is a bit hard to come by, and St. Gabe’s is starting to show for lack of it.

Sometimes I think about all of the gold and ivory and marble in Rome, where the Pope lives, and I wonder why they can’t send a few hundred dollars to us to get a pothole in the parking lot filled. Maybe it’s politics, or maybe it’s logistics. Maybe if St. Gabe’s had a sudden windfall it would look out of place in a humble neighborhood like this one. Jesus didn’t descend in golden glory, after all. He did it on the sly. He blended in.

Maybe that’s why our cathedral looks so bad all the time. It blends in with this town perfectly.

On the doorstep of the school is a police officer, a tall white man with apparent difficulty growing a full mustache. Next to him are two ambulance drivers. The cop asks if he can help me, and I tell him kind of heavily that I was a friend of the deceased. I don’t stop to consider whether or not I am telling the truth, or whether or not it is a good idea to be connected to a dead homeless man in this town. I don’t stop and correct myself after the word friend, as I should, because Charlie and I knew each other for thirty minutes last plus the time it took me to hug and kiss him. But it feels good to say that we were friends. I suddenly wonder if Charlie had any real friends, anyone who wasn’t completely oblivious to him.

The police officer asks me if I’m the Nicaraguan waitress from the s***ty diner and I start to say that I’m Guatemalan, then just shake my head and reply in the affirmative. He smiles, an expression much more pleasant than Charlie’s, and tells me there’s something I just gotta see.

I walk into the boiler room where Charlie is lying down, dead as cardboard but looking great in that eight hundred-dollar suit. They’re about to lift him on to a stretcher, where a manila body bag lies in wait.

I’ve never seen a dead person before.

It’s not nearly as scary as I thought it’d be. Charlie just looks peaceful. He looks happy. I’ve never seen Charlie unhappy, because I just met him last night, but I can’t imagine that he had a happy life. Lying there, on top of his sleeping bag, he just looks happy.

The police officer points behind the furnace and I notice, in the brown dingy light, the milk jugs full of dimes, nickels and pennies stashed back there.

Lord, there must be fifty of them.

Then the cop hands me a folded piece of paper. On top of it, in childlike handwriting, is the inscription, “To the Nicaraguan waitress at the s***ty diner on Eleventh Avenue.”

I unfold the piece of paper and it says:

Mon chere:

Go to college.

I love you.

A yelp escapes my mouth, a sound like an excited puppy might make, and I slap my hand over my lips. Is it wrong to be happy? I’m here, excited, pleased, joyful that I just “inherited” thousands of dollars in change from a transient, and he’s lying there peacefully, completely unaware of what’s going on.

Or is he aware? I don’t know. I don’t know. I find myself thinking about God and whether He is really up there. For the first time since I stopped believing in God, I start hoping He’s really there.

For Charlie’s sake.

They’ve got Charlie in the body bag now, and they’re zipping him up. I ask them to wait, and then I take a small knife out of my purse and saw off my ponytail, all three feet of it. This I place in the bag with him, and one of the ambulance guys looks like he’s going to cry.

“He wanted a lock of my hair.” I say, and I think of my grandfather. My grandfather loved my hair, and so did Charlie.

They wheel his body out on a stretcher, off to be cremated, or whatever happens to people who die and don’t have an estate. Then again, Charlie did have an estate. Worth a few grand. That’s enough for a cremation.

The police officer tells me he’ll help me bring the change back to my house in his car, and that he won’t tell anyone about the money. He says that if he puts that in his report, the city would take the money to pay for Charlie’s posthumous expenses.

Well, even death ain’t free. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Whoever said that first hit it right on the head.

The cop helps me take the jugs full of clinking dimes and pennies up to his car, two by two, and when we’re finished he drives me all the way home. He even lets me ride in the front seat. On the way home, I wonder how long it must have taken for Charlie to save that much money.

How much money is in those jugs?

Years and years and years to save it. More than four years. Longer than he’d loved me.

The cop pulls up to my house and we unload all but one of the jugs, which I leave in the car with instructions for him to take his wife out somewhere nice. He says he doesn’t have a wife, and he smiles at me. The cop looks about twenty-seven years old when he’s not smiling, but he looks twenty-two when he is. I’m only twenty, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Neither did Charlie.

I say goodbye and walk into the front door of my apartment. My mother is puffing furiously at her lipstick-laden Misty menthol cigarette and examining with great interest one of her toenails. She asks where I’ve been, then (suddenly very loudly) asks where all the change came from. Then (suddenly much louder) gets into a fit about me cutting off my ponytail. She mentions my grandfather six times, and I think of Charlie every time she does.

When I am able to calm her down, I do. Then I tell her everything. And I tell her that I want to go to college. I don’t know that there’s enough in those jugs to get me through college, but maybe there’s enough to help me subsidize a federal loan and stay alive. I tell my mother that I am thinking of being a nurse. She curses in Spanish, lights another cigarette and makes me breakfast.

It’s ten a.m., now, and I am finished eating. It’s time for that daytime talk show with the façade of integrity. I think of Charlie coughing and bleeding. I think of him scrimping and saving. I think of his ugly, ugly shoes.

I go and pull his little book, his memoirs off of the top of the dresser in my bedroom. It smells stale and a little moldy. I open it and stare at the words, uncomprehending.

It’s ten a.m., now, and my mother is applying her eye makeup. She’s a maid at a fleabag motel across town, and she’s off to work.

I can’t help but think that wherever Charlie’s at is better than where he was. It makes me happy to think that he went to Heaven, but I don’t think Hell’s got anything on being homeless, either. I think that wherever Charlie’s at is an improvement.

It’s ten a.m., and I’m thinking of Charlie Cohen. He saved thousands of dollars in pennies, killed seven men in Nicaragua and he loved my hair. I find myself thinking about college. I think I will learn to speak French.

It’s ten a.m. and the choir at Saint Gabe’s will be starting practice any minute.

I imagine the angels in Heaven suiting up in their wings and their robes, getting ready to sing with their own choir. I imagine them ringing in Charlie’s arrival with the most beautiful song anyone ever wrote, and then another even more beautiful than that.

Cue the hallelujahs, boys.

Charlie’s coming home.

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

tgreen 08-02-2005, 2:27 PM
I LOVE this story. I love how you describe Charlie's accent with a picture, I love the characters, I love the rise and fall of the story, and then the rise again. I don't know how to make it better. The title is wonderful. I like the way we learn about the characters. It's very subtle and keeps the story moving and interesting. PUBLISH THIS!!!

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

gabrielcoeli 08-02-2005, 9:40 PM
Thanks for the kind words. I have a novel coming out (Devine Road, Volume I, sorry about the plug) soon but I wouldn't know where to go to get a short story published. And isn't it a bit long? I dunno. But, seriously, thanks a lot.

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

tgreen 08-04-2005, 10:07 AM
At the library or bookstore you can find a copy of the 2005 Writer's market. There is even a special edition for novels and short stories. There are lots of places listed in this book to publish short stories and get paid. I cut and paste your story into MS word to get a word count of about 3,100. Technically a short story is between 2,000 words and 7,000 words. More is considered a Novella and less is a Short Short. Most of the posts on this web site are Short Shorts not Short Stories. Give it a try. If you choose the right publisher you may make $1000 dollars :)

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

jobydog 08-04-2005, 7:53 PM
I loved your story. I thought your description was very original. I agree with tgreen-your should get this published! It's my kind of story. It held my interest and the language was captivating. Beautiful. I also loved the title!

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

hl.harris 08-04-2005, 11:22 PM
I for one welcomed the exubrence of the prose and the subtextual story of Charlie as a means to an end.

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

prayerofjabez 08-10-2005, 5:03 AM

Mmmmm....I like the comprarisons. I kind of like comparisons. How do you manage to pull off the trick of the change in the point of view? I am too much of a novice to say i saw a down part of the piece.

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

CandiBahamas 08-10-2005, 5:37 PM
You could try breaking your piece into paragraphs for starters...

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

gabrielcoeli 08-10-2005, 11:46 PM
Hmmm...I would love to go back and break the story into paragraphs, if I didn't have to use this Java applet that decided to reformat my story for me. Thanks for the insightful and positive criticism, CandiBahamas. Did you bother to read the story? Someone constructive might have told me how to go about reformatting the thing. Then I could have gone back and edited the piece, it could have been fixed and you could still have felt arrogant and superior without LOOKING like it, because you were helpful. Like we're all supposed to be with each other.

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

CandiBahamas 08-11-2005, 12:08 PM
Hey garielcoeli. I often do not read stories for any writer that are not broken into paragraphs. The reason for this is because it takes a lot longer to sort through. I would love to read it, gabriel ; I'd just like to not have to worry about breaking it into paragraphs in my head as I read. That's my main point. Thanks for taking my comment for what it was initially. I did not mean it to come across as arrogant/superior. I guess in my mind, when I saw that the story was not broken into paragraphs, I decided to let you know that that was a key part of this forum. I really (as a writer, I know this) should have re-worded what I was telling you because it did sound harsh. I'm sorry.

OK, here's how to break it up. I'm assuming that you copied and pasted your work into the format as many authors do. When you begin to edit, start from the beginning of the first paragraph and hit the 'enter' key. Do this all the way through. If you want anything in bold or italics, highlight them and press the Italic symbol or the Bold symbol.

Good luck with your piece. I know how it feels when you first come on this site. However, take everyone's criticisms (constructive or otherwise) and use them for your benefit. I look forward to sitting down and reading this through and replying to your piece as a literary work.

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

gabrielcoeli 08-11-2005, 6:12 PM
Okay, I got it now. Sorry for snapping - that's why I shouldn't reply in forums when I've had a s***ty day. I just start flame wars with people because I read something wrong and was feeling sensitive. Thanks for your help.

RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

jobydog 08-11-2005, 6:33 PM
Question for prayerofjabez: what do you mean about the change in the point of view? I'm confused. I didn't see any change in the POV...

Re: RE: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

oldman 12-26-2007, 1:18 PM

Just a thought to all,

Back in the old days, before the internet, when someone wrote something to you and it ticked you off, by the time you got around to finding the time to find the writing paper,envelope and pen and sat down to write a reply, you had calmed down. With the invention of the internet and emails, etc we all tend to answer right away, LIKE RIGHT NOW.

For my own use, I developed the 24 hour rule. If I feel compelled to reply in a tone that might aggravate the situation I write it, let it sit for 24 hours and then either modify it or delete it. Usually most misunderstandings are because we are all in such a rush with jobs, kids, grandchildren (for us lucky ones) andnever take time to really read what someone intended.

Just a thought!

Re: Cue the Hallelujahs - A Happy Ending

oldman 12-26-2007, 1:37 PM
Great story!