All the Dead Yale Men Read Online Free PDF

the younger cop.
    â€œShitload of paperwork,” said my father. “And what would it accomplish?”
    â€œNot much,” said Meerschaum.
    â€œSo, why don’t you sit down and have a drink, like old friends?” said my father.
    â€œI’m not your friend,” said the younger cop.
    â€œI’m going off duty,” said Meerschaum.
    The younger cop gave him a look and then said, “Fine.”
    Billy Meerschaum sat down. My father told Meerschaum a joke about a Russian gymnast and a French seagull, and it was so obscene that Meerschaum, a man of forty who had been a cop for fifteen years, couldn’t tell it to me at the funeral without blushing.
    Then my father got up and started walking home.
    He went through Harvard Square, where the panhandlers sat here and there on the sidewalk, one with a sign that said, “Blind and with cerebral palsy, hit by fire engine . . . ,” and where a man, known as the Raver, stood in the middle of the sidewalk and spoke, in a loud clear voice, about how he had been up in a flying saucer and that he had learned from the aliens, who were wearing uniforms of people who worked at Burger King, something called Zen and the Art of the Cosmic. He said, for instance, that life was just a breath, that it came and went. This is how, he said, one could appreciate the beauty of the stars. Herewas the way, he said, the shortness of time is what makes for the possibility of beauty.
    My father came along in sneakers that were almost dried out, but still making a little sound like a washing machine that won’t drain completely.
    The driveway of his house was filled with cars, and even from the street my father heard the students who had come into the house, at his forgotten invitation, to have a piñata party. They were used to his forgetting. My father taught diplomatic history and had made friends with his Latin American students (all the better to say, one afternoon, “Hey, Cedro, here’s an old friend from Washington I’d like you to meet—a good guy”), and they came every year near the end of May to drink and celebrate the spring with a piñata, tequila, and food that came from the cuisines of Argentina (steaks, mostly), Central America (fried plantain), and Mexico (tacos with cilantro).
    My father came into the house and then to the backyard, where the piñata was suspended from the frame for the awning of the porch. Ten or so students stood around, dancing to Mexican brass, and when my father came outside, they shouted, and one of them, a dark-haired Mexican woman, took him under the piñata where they danced and where the other students formed a circle around them. The students had made margaritas and now the pitchers were almost empty, covered with little rills of water where the mist on the glass had condensed. All of the students had been drinking on empty stomachs, and they had gone from nervous sobriety to outright hilarity, faces red, eyes bloodshot, shirts untucked, straps of dresses off shoulders. My father came in and drank the last of the margaritas. It was a May afternoon, warm, seductive, right at the end of the academic year.
    The piñata was bright red, covered with small curls of shiny paper, and its legs were stiff. The head of the thing was like asmall ironing board, and its eyes were as dark as a can of black shoe polish. One of the students pulled on a rope as the students blindfolded one and then another, making jokes about bondage and how it was done in Buenos Aries after dark. Then they went after the piñata with a baseball bat. The students couldn’t have hit the piñata if it had been hanging there like a balloon, let alone being moved up and down on a clothesline through a pulley. But here is where my father’s reflexes came in.
    They blindfolded him and gave him the Louisville Slugger, and he stood there, in the middle of the circle of the men and women from Latin American, mostly short