“The beauty of things must be that they end.” —Jack Kerouac

Elbows on the bar, Spider McNulty was giving careful directions to the bartender. “No, no mixes. No juices. Just Patron agave tequila, right? Splash of fresh lime juice. A splash of Cointreau. Shaken with ice, but no ice in the drink.”

“That’s all booze,” she said.

Spider was nonplussed. Like he needed a college coed bartender to remind him what he was drinking. “Yes. Like a martini. It’s a Mexican martini.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you. Oh, and I’m going to sit at that table by the window.”

“I’ll bring it over.”

“That’s grand . . .” She was walking away when he added, “as they say in Dublin.”

He picked up his Barnes and Noble bag and lumbered over to the window, where he lowered his bulk onto the seat. He spilled the contents of the bag over the table. A copy of The Last Temptation of Christ, a cd of Emmylou Harris and two post cards of Key West, which is where he was, and had been for over twenty years. One post card featured the sign for Route 1, and the words, “Key West, The End of the Road.” The other, a hot babe in a stringy bathing suit holding a conch shell up to her ear and smiling invitingly. Spider had been unable to decide between the two. As a Jack Kerouac guy, Buddy would appreciate the subtle reference to the road. Spider had been thinking a lot about Buddy, his old pal back in Lowell, Mass, since Norm Brunelle had told him that Buddy was not in the best of health. Cancer. He thought a post card might cheer him up, but upon consideration, he decided that you couldn’t send a pal who was sick a card that mentioned the end of the road. He turned over the card with the hot babe and began to write his old friend’s address in Lowell.

The bartender arrived with Spider’s single drink on a tray. “Would you like to see a lunch menu?”

“Maybe in a while.”

She set a napkin on the table and placed the brimming drink on it.

“Thank you.”

She smiled, nodded and left, swinging the tray beside her like the carefree little girl she had probably been not so very long ago. Probably, but who knows what anyone’s life has been.

Spider lifted the drink carefully and sipped. “First of the day,” as Buddy used to say. He looked out the window across the deck, where a small crowd sat eating lunch or perusing menus. A rough-hewn sign pointed south: “Habana 150 Miles.” Two young women leaned toward each other over their table as they ate. The one facing him, a blonde, was listening intently to her friend, who was recounting a story, no doubt, from the animated movements of her head and hands. The blonde’s eyes widened, fork suspended over her plate. Then, covering her mouth, she sat back and laughed, her shoulder’s shaking. Spider’s chest filled with a hollow ache as he watched her. It was not a longing for her, nor the certainty that such a woman would never desire him again. His libido had receded with his hairline. It was her youth itself he envied. Her eyes shone, and her thick hair shone, too. Grace and power and confidence and strength; she held them all within the aura of Beauty.

There was a time, he knew, when he had been, in his way, the complement to what she was now. Lean and strong and damned near fearless. A man in his prime. He remembered the day he was carrying a bundle of shingles, shirtless, toward a ladder at a job site. A carload of women had driven by honking the horn, hooting at him. They were laughing in the sun as they passed, and he laughed, too. God, it was good. Youth! He and Buddy Brooks on the road to Montreal with the windows down, blasting Derek and the Dominoes Live at the Fillmore. “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” But nothing was sad back then, really. The 70’s. He had no bad memories of the 70’s. A lot of years and a lot of pounds ago. Love and life was a book with many pages yet to be turned, many chapters to be written. Buddy had his arm in a sling during their first trip to Montreal; he’d broken it just the day before they left, having slipped on a patch of ice outside the Press Club. He was in some pain, and Spider stopped at a packy and bought him a bottle of Jameson. By the time they got to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Spider saw that Buddy had killed most of the bottle, and realized that the music had stopped because he had begun putting out his cigarettes in the tape player, thinking it was the ashtray. Fuckin’ Buddy—beautiful.

Spider took another sip of his tequila drink and settled down, staring at the blank post card, sucking the tip of his pen and considering what to write. “Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful!” No. Something more serious. Norm didn’t know how sick Buddy was, or what kind of cancer he had, but he said he had heard that he “wasn’t good.” Spider McNulty shivered in the sun recalling those words. “Not good,” was always a euphemism for “dying.”

Amigo! He wrote across the top.

Spider closed his eyes and thought. All the way back to Boy Scouts, where he had first met Buddy, who was still Arthur Brooks back then. They grew up together, looking for Indian arrowheads on Fort Hill, building lean-to shelters in the woods, and later carousing and drinking and chasing women in the days, and nights, when the drinking age was eighteen. Once they took the train into Boston to see Stephen Stills at the Garden, and ended up in the Combat Zone after the show. Two guys came up and one held two fingers in front of his lips and said to Buddy, “Hey, man, gimme a smoke.”

“I got no cigarettes,” Buddy said. Spider could still picture him standing there on the sidewalk with his unkempt blond hair and his Fu Man Chu mustache.

The guy said, “What you mean you got no ciragettes? You’re smokin’ a fuckin’ cigarette. You got a pack in your pocket.”

“I mean I got no cigarettes for you! Screw!”

Spider didn’t really feel like getting in a brawl in the Combat Zone, and he said in a low voice, “Just give him a cigarette, Buddy. What’s the big deal?”

“No. I’m not gonna give him shit!”

“Gimme a fuckin’ cigarette, now!” the loudmouth guy said, bouncing on the souls of his feet, fists clenched, like he was showing his friend how to get respect in the Zone.

Buddy got that wild glint in his eye. It was a look Spider had seen before that said, I’m tougher than you. I’m crazier than you. And if you are not willing to go all the way—all the way, until one of us can’t get off this sidewalk, then walk on. It ain’t worth a cigarette. He threw down his own cigarette and it sprayed motes of orange cinders at his feet. “You lookin’ for trouble? You came to the right place.”

Spider was not too happy that Buddy had chosen this moment for his display of pride or principle, and was glad that the guy’s friend stayed out of it, which allowed him to stay out of it. The fight lasted about thirty seconds, maybe less. It was a toe to toe exchange, with Buddy gradually pushing forward, fists slamming his opponent. The loudmouth was soon reeling, and he backed off suddenly and put his hands up to signal he’d had enough, but Buddy kept swinging, pounding the guy until he went down, staggered to his feet, and ran, followed by his less enthusiastic friend. Buddy pulled a paper bag out of a bin and wiped some blood off his knuckles. “Let’s see some strippers,” he said, and off they went to the Naked Eye Cabaret.

Amigo! When they got a little older, they got into mountain climbing, returning to their childhood scout training, and Buddy was reading The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac and his poet pals climb Matterhorn Peak in California. Spider recalled the best of their trips. They had camped by Greeley Pond, at the foot of Mount Osceola, where they met two French Canadian women, Nicole and Bernice. They hit it off right away. It was August in the White Mountains, and that night the Earth was passing through the Perseids. The four of them climbed onto the roof of the shelter to watch the meteor showers, lying on their backs under the bright wheeling stars. The sky was so thick with meteors shedding trails of sparks across the black sky that Nicole said that they should get down or they might be hit, and the others had a good laugh about that. Later, around the fire, it was a mystical experience, as if they were alone on some alternate plane of existence, four hearts beating within a small circle of light. Beyond the glow of the fire, the world was curtained in impenetrable darkness, a darkness so dense that it seemed to press against the light. Was it an ancestral foreboding that made them sense the glint of eyes watching them from the heart of that profound night? No, the owl was certainly hunting, and after they had huddled on the raised deck of the shelter, they heard the cry of a fisher cat like the howl of some forlorn child. Spider had said a quick prayer, and the women had, too, in French, but Buddy only laughed and invited Bernice into his sleeping bag, where he could “protect her better.” The girls were not easy, though, and insisted they would have to get to know them, which was why he and Buddy had taken so many later trips to Montreal. When Bernice finally did get to know Buddy, she asked him to marry her, and he said he thought she’d never ask.

Amigo! What next to say? He hadn’t seen him now in eight years. That was the last time Spider had been in Lowell, for his mother’s funeral, and Buddy was there with Bernice, and after the funeral they went to the Rainbow Café and Dan Webster played, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “Danny Boy,” slowly and jazzily on the piano, and Buddy told him he was damned sorry to see his mother go. “She always loved you, Buddy,” Spider said. His old friend draped his arm around his shoulder. “Christ, how many times did she feed me at her table over the years?” He shook his head and dabbed at his eyes with his fingers. Then he said, “But—the wheel turns.” Words that were simple and true. And now the wheel was turning again, throwing Buddy to the ground. He leaned over the post card and began to write.

* * *

A hospital bed was set up for Buddy Brooks in the living room. After some months on what he jokingly called, “the hospital-rehab merry-go-round,” he had been sent home for the final time. There would be no more chemo, no more ambulance rides, no more surgeries; only heating pads, and oxycodone, and now, morphine. He slept a lot, most of the day, it seemed, but then Bernice would look and see those eyes of startling blue, suddenly open in his pale, drawn face, and Buddy watching her, and she would stroke his forehead and talk to him and he would smile, and sometimes he would say a few words and sometimes she would understand him. And she was so happy when he stayed awake for a long time, a half hour or more, because she could feel his presence, a presence that she knew might cease to be at any moment. She would try to get some broth into him, or some Ensure, though the doctor said he would lose the will to eat, soon, and that trying to feed him would only prolong the inevitable or maybe cause him to choke.

On Thursday night, his children, John and Kate, spent hours by his bed, but Bernice told them to go home and sleep, there was nothing they could do. The doctor came on Friday morning, saying once more that the end was near, but that she could not predict the day or the hour. The children called out of work and returned. Buddy opened his eyes in the morning and Bernice said, “John and Kate are here.” They all heard him say, “God bless ‘em,” before he drifted off again.

The mail arrived just after lunch, and Bernice came in and took the chair beside his bed. “Buddy, you have a post card from Spider McNulty,” she said. “From Florida.” The eyelids lifted and once more the eyes appeared, not fuddled and glossy but bright and even observant. “A post card from Spider,” she repeated. She held the photo of the sexy beach woman in his line of vision, but his eyes fixed on the window and the white March sky beyond the bare oak branches. She turned the card over. “He writes: Amigo! Norman says you’re sick. Very sorry to hear that Buddy. Get well if you can, or…” She paused and stroked the chemo-thinned hair the color of the pillow on which it rested. “Get well if you can, or like Hendrix said I will see you on the other side. I’m toasting you right now with the first of the day. Ever your best friend, The Spider

The stricken man said nothing, but a single tear crept from the corner of his left eye. Buddy’s wife and children leaned toward him, gripping the metal rail of the hospital bed as they whispered words of comfort to him because the doctor said he could hear them. In the afternoon, the intervals between his breaths became longer until it seemed he was suspended between life and death, and Bernice clutched her rosary and whispered Je vous salue, Marie pleine de grâce; le Seigneur est avec vous.

The doctor was right. He did hear her voice. His mind rushed backward across the plain of life. He walked with his children along the Merrimack River, pointing at the boats moored under the pink and purple stippled sunset sky. The murmur of that dear voice drew him toward a night beneath the stars. Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni. He did not know if that night was behind him or before him or if he was there now. He stretched out a hand to pull Bernice up the granite back of the Chimney on the Eastern Approach to the heights above. From the stony summit of Osceola, they saw great mountains of shivering pine rolling toward the horizon like waves on the sea. Sweat glistened on their sun-drenched brows as they paused to drink some water and look across the vast expanse of Waterville Valley. The four of them were young and smiling, forever. Osceola! Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.

“Sola,” they heard him whisper. He raised a hand toward her and Bernice took it in hers and held it tight. “Sola,” he said once more, but they did not know what that meant. They waited, their own breath nearly as suspended as the dying man’s. After what seemed an impossible hiatus, Buddy Brooks pulled a last ragged breath, and his wife and children waited for some time for another. They were all quiet as Bernice continued to whisper her prayers for the soul she sensed departing, and when at length she leaned over to kiss his forehead, he was already growing cold.

# # #

Stephen O’Connor is a writer from Lowell, Massachusetts, where a lot of his fiction is set, and which Jack Kerouac once called, “The most interesting city in America.” He’s the author of the story collection, Smokestack Lightning, and of the novels The Spy in the City of Books, and The Witch at Rivermouth.