We went to a park to dump the ashes there, but there were a whole bunch of teenagers around and I didn’t want them to roll on him while having sex. Boyce was obsessed with the idea of blowing a handful of Hank’s ashes in someone’s eyes, so he kept suggesting we go to a bad area of town to try to get mugged. None of us really knew how Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease works, but since it’s like mad cow disease, we were afraid someone else might get it if we threw Hank into someone’s eyes, or put him in their coffee, or sent him to Dr. Keegman's office in a jack-in-the-box. So we kept driving, and once we stopped to eat at a diner. Hank sat next to me.
Sammy and Boyce said what we did with Hank was up to me, and I said that I didn’t like the idea of scattering him anywhere. I liked to visit graves and talk to the headstones. When I first told that to Rachel she said there wasn’t anything more human than needing to talk to the deceased, and since death didn’t sting anymore I should go ahead and talk to my father. Well, in Hank’s case, his brain liquefied so it’s hard to say if there was a sting or any kind of pain, but I still wanted him to be buried somewhere. Sammy said that if my mother was buried at a Ruby Tuesday’s, maybe we could bury Hank at a T.G.I.Friday's. I said Hank was better than that, so Boyce said Applebee’s. But I said Hank was better than any restaurant lawn, and he was going to be buried some place nice.
I don’t know any place nice, so we went instead to the Roger Malvin Country Club which is also a bird sanctuary. There are sandhill cranes there, along with a whole bunch of ducks, and some mergansers, too, all because of the water on some of the holes. Once I went there to see the birds but got kicked out by a marshal who drove around in a golf cart. He asked where my clubs were, so I asked him the same thing. He said he was there working, and I told him the same. Then he told me to get the hell out of there, and I told him to do the same. Then we stared at each other for a long time because he didn’t know what to do. Later, a man who sold beer from the back of a golf cart came by and warned me the police were coming, so he gave me a ride out of there.
One of the greens at Roger Malvin had some woods on one side of it and a marsh on the other side. We took Hank’s ashes there and buried them real deep a few yards inside the woods. Then we went and sat on the green. It’s October so they didn’t turn on the sprinklers, and we had a nice view of Hank’s gravestone we made out of rocks, as well as the marsh on the other side.
It didn’t take long before we heard a night heron in the marsh. Boyce and Sammy were quiet so I could listen to him. I told them he was hunting. We wondered if some animal dug up Hank’s ashes and ate them if it would go crazy. Sammy said since Hank hallucinated about robins, maybe a robin would hallucinate about Hank. Probably though the earthworms would eat Hank’s ashes, and then the robin would eat the earthworms, therefore it’s hard to tell if the robin would hallucinate about Hank, earthworms, or something else entirely. We all agreed that the next time we saw a bird fly into a window we’d all think of Hank Gradowski.Eventually the night heron found something to eat, and I promised I’d come back to Hole 14 with a better tombstone for Hank.
