The caller on José Fernandi’s direct line had identified himself as Retired Colonel Larry Grimes, the head of a veterans’ organization, American Legion Post something or other. “We do a lot of volunteer work to take care of our own, the men and women who have served this country with distinction but don’t always have someone to care for them in their hour of need. We make sure that…”
There was some whipping wind in the background, and the man seemed out of breath.
“One of the things we do is give our vets the proper send-off, so to speak, the honors they earned in life, may their souls rest in peace. We make sure they are not forgotten.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say your name…” José started saying.
“It’s Colonel Grimes, Retired, U.S. Marines.”
“Yes, colonel, I’m not sure I am…”
“Well, you see, Mr. Fernandi, we have a burial ceremony coming up at the National Cemetery out here on the island, and we’d like to give P.F.C. Ollarte his due, a well-earned final resting place for his earthly remains.”
Colonel Grimes cleared his throat. “As you know, Mr. Fernandi, it’s been more than a year, and P.F.C. Ollarte’s body is still in the city morgue. We can’t find a surviving relative, so we were looking for a friend, a close person, anyone… We need someone who could sign off, basically, take legal custody of the remains so they can be transferred to our care.”
There was that wind protesting in the distance again.
“Since you were the person who found him…” Colonel Grimes’s voice trailed off. “You… You are the contact in the hospital documentation on file. You are someone who can claim his body per state law and city regulations as a close friend who’s reasonably familiar with the decedent.”
“We were just coworkers.”
“You found his body. You went to do the wellness check on the private, sir.”
“That doesn’t make me a close friend.”
“See, Mr. Fernandi, what I am trying to say is… You are all he’s got, sir.”
José learned from Colonel Grimes that the body of the man he had known as Rangel Ollarte was among the unclaimed remains that had been stored the longest at the city morgue while the mortuary’s office searched for anyone close to him, a love interest, a child, a sibling, even a distant cousin — he had been married once, but she had died; there were no children or surviving siblings; and those second and third cousins who had been reached claimed not to know him. Unclaimed bodies like his would be hauled to a potter’s field by the Bronx; ditches were dug in parallel lines and a chaplain delivered an anonymous blessing before men with shovels and a backhoe operator covered the holes with dirt. His military status caused city officials to wait longer, knowing all burial costs would be covered and storage costs reimbursed.
“What we have in mind would be different, sir. He would have his resting place in a tomb with a slab and a granite headstone. We would have a man of the cloth say a prayer for his soul before we place him among others who served their country honorably, like he did.”
There was that pause on the phone in which one’s ears could detect a current, a noise like the static of the universe.
“It’s the least we can do,” Colonel Grimes said.
***
It wasn’t right for Rangel’s body to be frozen at the mortuary, but how was José to know that it was waiting for him to release it from forced suspension. The thought occurred to him that he had enough problems after his marriage had unraveled to become involved. He was like a fish swimming with its school, swallowing water and shifting shapes with no direction of its own.
The colonel had droned on about honoring men in uniform who had sacrificed their lives for civilians to have their freedoms. He had been describing the fraternal organization’s efforts to preserve the rights of forgotten service members.
“I didn’t even know he had been in the military,” José said. “He never mentioned it.” Then, he was the one leaving a gap between thoughts: “Are you sure you have the right guy?”
“Yes, absolutely: Rangel Wilson Ollarte, Private First Class. Honorably discharged on March 24, 1956. Born in San Germán, Puerto Rico, in 1931. He enlisted in August 1949. He was part of the 65th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army and fought bravely in the Chosin Reservoir. He had earned decorations for marksmanship, national defense service and good conduct. We have compared facial characteristics and dental records with the military registry and have crossmatched with information from the V.A. hospital and other federal and state government files, including the Social Security contributions from work with the nonprofit. He was one of our heroes, sir. No doubt about it.”
José couldn’t avoid picturing Rangel’s body in the deep freeze of a shelf, the darkness, the way it must have turned into a sculpture of flesh. Did he have that expression of his final breath, a resigned surprise that the end had been reached? He thought of a Picasso painting he had seen, a striped cat devouring a black bird, its guts spilling out in a burst of vermilion, a powder blue sky — how concrete the act of death was, and how it ended illusions.
***
He had known Rangel to be a precise man who arrived and left on time, completed every line in the entry interview forms of clients and enunciated words with the care of a language professor, because, as far as José knew, Rangel was a studious man who had a knack for reading poetry in translation. He had gone to community college, then a four-year college and, finally, a school of social work, but he had shown no interest in scaling the hierarchy of nonprofits and was content helping people who came to their offices. He rarely spoke about himself, but José had gathered as much from listening to him talk to clients, and from scraps of conversation they had in the idle hours. Ah, he recalled one other thing: Rangel mostly spent the time between clients methodically working through a daily crossword, first completing the horizontal clues and then the vertical clues, until he finished it. When he hadn’t arrived at the office for days, José knew that something was wrong. Rangel was not someone who would just stop showing up.
José remembered that he got the contact information on file and tried reaching him. The telephone rang five times and went to a worn-out recording, all the esses and tees uttered with punctilious diction. He could hear the shuffling of hands and papers and pictured Rangel rushing to stop the recorder the day when the greeting was made. He discussed the unexplained absence with the office administrator, a woman whose only role seemed to be to get workers to fill out their time sheets. She said she would have to duck Rangel his pay. “You don’t understand,” José told her. “He is probably not well. He never misses work.” She stared blankly, “Well, I can’t pay him if he is not in the office, and he did not call in sick. What do you want me to do?”
That same afternoon, José took the 6 train to the Bronx and got out at a numbered street station where the wall tiles had yellowed from oozing humidity and the lighting was dim, and he walked past a trash receptacle that was bleeding a viscous liquid and went around the wooden seats where a man in ill-fitting clothes lay in a twisted position, facing the back of the bench. He came out to a street where the last hints of afternoon light revealed, in the distance, the boxy shapes of low-rise buildings; as he neared them, he saw a few windows in them were open like toothless grins. Rangel’s address led to a tenement in the middle of a block, which was surrounded by other tenements forming a great wall of weathered brown bricks. He waited by the door until a woman who leaned heavily on a cane stepped out stumbling, propelled, it seemed, by her weight; she stared him in the face and said, “You don’t live here.” He still held the door and walked in, telling her that he was visiting a friend. “Why don’t you call her first?!” José heard her say as the door slammed.
He rode up in one of those narrow elevators where a door swung open rather than sliding in, and he saw, on his way up, the mustard walls of other floors through the checkered circles of the door openings. The elevator stopped with hesitation on the fourth floor, and he exited onto one of those hallways, narrow and tall. He traced his way to the door of the apartment, which was sandwiched between two other doors at the end of the corridor. He knocked again, and again, and again. “Rangel, are you there? It’s me, José!” He leaned his ear on the door and could hear something, a raspy voice, but he couldn’t tell for sure. “It’s José Fernandi from work! We’re worried about you,” he said. “Open the door, please!”
As he walked down to the basement, choosing the stairs, José tried to recall the last time he had seen Rangel, but he couldn’t come up with any definitive memory. It had to have been the previous Friday, when they left the office, but it could have been Thursday or another day that week that they had stood outside the elevator and said something or other about how the fall days were becoming shorter. And Rangel had said that he liked it that way, the soft crisp air, and the way the streets seemed to fade into the graying sky — the kind of thing a poetry reader might casually discuss. That could have been the Friday of the week before. José couldn’t tell.
The building’s superintendent was a short man with a big forehead, slick hair tightly tied around his head, buggy eyes and a ponytail. He had opened the door to his apartment right away, as if he had been watching through the peephole and waiting for someone to knock. When José told him about Rangel not showing up at work, he said he had not seen the man in days, went back inside, and returned with a key chain holding scores of keys. “This not good, man. He is never late with the rent,” he said.
The door to Rangel’s apartment opened with a snap, and it took them a moment to let their brains make sense of the shapes behind a streak of gray light coming off the kitchen windows, which were at the end of the entrance hallway. There was a heaviness in the air that made José’s eyes tear up, an inundation of boiled eggs, sneakers after a rainstorm, unwashed towels, and the flesh and tissues of roadkill at the edges of highways. They walked in, tentatively, and José called Rangel by his name, several times. An old-fashioned radio played the news in a loop of overly detailed weather reports and accounts of crimes in condescending tones. On the kitchen table was a crystal jar, filled halfway with water that was turning thick, and, in it, a bouquet of daisies — they had wilted and browned, and their stems had snapped, making them look like creatures whose necks had been broken and left to hang in shame. The petals that had detached formed a soft embroidery on the tabletop. José thought of the matching floral arrangement left on Rangel’s desk at work.
Just off the kitchen, José spotted the body, face-up between a coffee table and an old brown sofa. He walked up closer, softly calling on Rangel to wake up. He could hear the super’s keys jingling behind him. The eyes were open and fixated on the ceiling, where there was nothing to look at. José noticed his features in a new way: the rings under his eyes, the retracted irises that smacked of desperation; the lips that were puckered, either halfway through an interrupted kiss or retreating in disgust; the large nose subdivided in three lobes and the dark skin of his curled hands, accentuated by the whites of his nails. It was unsettling to see him without the luxuriant wig that he had worn for years; it had fallen off and lay on the floor, like the feathered remains of a crushed bird. The super threw his arms up: “I have to clean all this.” José gave him a look, his eyes hardened. “Sorry,” he said, “He was a good tenant. He never bother nobody, you know.”
***
José took the train uptown, once more, toward the Morrisania section, where Rangel had lived. He exited onto a sidewalk that was losing its battles against weeds and walked past a lot that held dried grass and the garbage tossed by passersby: receipts, plastic bags, cigarette butts, crushed cans, expired bus transfers, the detritus of people enduring life. At the other end of the block, the sleek facade of a new juvenile detention facility loomed with its angular body of bricks, each held within neat lines of grout. He walked toward the rows of houses and tenements and stopped outside the corner bodega closest to the address, thinking that it was a good place to inquire. The loudspeakers were blaring and, by the entrance, a woman in gray sweatpants was bending side to side and rhythmically stretching her lumbar vertebrae, oblivious to him or anybody else. The cashier attendant, a man who had not gotten a haircut in a while but was clean-shaven otherwise, had his eyes fixated on the woman and didn’t turn to look when José placed a bottle of iced tea on the counter.
“Hey, my man, can I ask you a question?” José said.
The man with the mushroom hair looked at him with annoyance.
“You mean another one?”
And, again, without bothering to look at José, he clicked the cashier open, and a small bell rang. José handed him some bills, and the man returned him his change in nickels and pennies, which seemed a hostile action.
“Shoot. What’s the question?” he said as he dropped the coins into José’s palm.
“I wanted to ask if you knew this man.”
José put a photo on the counter that their employer had posted multiple times on its lounge’s bulletin board to celebrate Rangel as Employee of the Month. The bodega man turned the photo slowly, looked at it, then turned it around and returned it.
“Are you some kind of cop?”
“No, man. Do I look like one?”
The guy tightened one side of his face, squinting an eye.
José took the photo back and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Look, he came here every day and got his coffee, half and half, one sugar, every morning around eight, but that was like, I don’t know, last summer. Then he don’t come back.”
“He died. We found him in his apartment after he did not show up to work,” José said. “He just had a heart attack when he was by himself.”
José thought about the incongruity of the loud music, the dancing woman and the conversation that he was having with a stranger about the death of a man he barely knew.
“And what you want from me? Why you asking, if you know he’s dead?”
“I want to know more about him.”
“You don’t make no sense, man.”
“Did you know anyone who knew him? A friend? A relative?”
“Nah, man. They come here, get what they get, and leave.”
José stood there long enough that the cashier guy felt compelled to say something.
“I remember his crazy wig, dude,” he said, covering a laugh with his curled hand. “Like, we all saw that was not his hair, man, what are you tryna pull? And he did one thing, like on Fridays, around evening. He bought himself a few things. Sometimes he got a six-pack of Heinekens. He always got himself one of those, the yellow ones.”
The man pointed to bouquets wrapped in clear plastic and placed in a gray utility bucket with water for their stems. The blooming bunches were bright and daring, having opened their thin petals to undress their puckered hearts.
“I asked him one time if he had a date. How come he was getting them flowers?” the guy said. “I was kidding around, you know. The man got serious, looked at me like I was mad and shit, and he said he got them flowers for his self.”
The music stopped for an instant. “That’s this motherfucking city,” the bodega man said in the interval.
On his way out, José exchanged glances with the woman by the door and noticed the violet dusting around her eyes.
He went to the building where Rangel had lived and found the outside lock was broken, so he went up the stairs, and he leaned his ear on the apartment’s door again. There were the echoes that traveled up and down the building: The opening and closing of distant doors; the rush of water from a showerhead that could have been coming from any apartment; a laugh that also simulated a cry, from one of the lower floors; and his own breathing. He left, stepping slowly down the stairs and out of the building.
Nighttime had brought a mist that made the air smell of water. José looked at the distant windows, some darkened, others bathed in the yellow of incandescence, and he pictured the lives inside — people separated by walls, heat escaping their bodies, like the summer that was dissipating, or the fire that burned in the wicks of prayer candles at the church. The city was draped in a mantle of grays and blacks, the way Rangel would have probably liked it, as he walked by an industrial street where the hammering, drilling, soldiering, cutting and gluing had stopped for the day. He witnessed as streetlamp after streetlamp turned on, each spilling a trembling red shine that traveled in his direction and washed over him. The natural light was escaping, too, and the sidewalks remained dark in spots, but there were glowing auras under each lamplight.
***
He arrived early and was lost in the grounds of the military cemetery, row after row of white headstones that bore the names, the years of birth and death and the branches where each had served. They had pithy inscriptions about the people who had existed in those bodies. He noticed one that read “Dutiful Man” where multiple others had been declared to be a “Dear Father” or “Loving Husband” or “Beloved Friend.” One was a “Beloved Son and Cool Uncle”; another, simply a “Father and Grandad,” no qualifiers. He remembered that he had first thought to leave Rangel’s a blank slate when he was asked to fill out a form, but he woke up in the wee hours with a void in his stomach, and he called Colonel Grimes the following sunrise, agitated that it might be too late. The colonel not only answered, but he offered some directions: The epitaph had to be three words per line, and two lines at most. “Simple is better,” he said. José knew what it needed to be. The proof was sent to him days later.
IN MEMORY OF
RANGEL WILSON OLLARTE
UNITED STATES ARMY
1931-1995
“LIKED YELLOW DAISIES”
José spotted a tent in a grassy area, walked toward it, and found people lingering near several rows of seats; he went to the outer edge of the front row. Families arrived in groups, most gallantly dressed in black attire, and slowly filled the seats; he was wearing the same dark suit he had worn to family court. One woman, maybe ten years younger than José, arrived alone and sat two spots from him. They made eye contact, and he said hello. She smiled with pressed lips.
“I’m here for my grandfather,” she said, and she lifted a framed photograph with the face of a puffy eyed man in a flannel shirt.
“I’m here for, umm… He was, um…”
He was straining and inexplicably choking up.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said.
A man in a blue-jacketed uniform, not too tall, approached them and introduced himself as Retired Colonel Grimes, inquired their names and relations to the deceased. “I’m here as a friend,” José was able to say. The colonel turned to him holding together a face of tightened jaws, searching eyes: “Mr. Fernandi, I commend you for the dedication and loyalty that you are showing for P.F.C. Ollarte, and all of us.” He left promptly and joined his spot among the uniformed retirees who stood stiffly by the memorials.
Black hearses, which were escorted by police patrols in motorcycles, circled the rotunda near that side of the cemetery and gently pulled by the grassy area where they were. A group of uniformed men in white gloves marched toward the funereal vehicles and carefully unloaded five caskets in dark gray and covered with the vivid stripes draped over them. The pallbearers carried them in a slow march to where the holes had been dug and the tombstone markers were placed. They lowered them onto rubber straps. All the surfaces around the holes on the ground were covered in synthetic lining that resembled the pretend grass of mini golf courses. Cemetery workers secured the caskets and one of them went from ditch to ditch and turned levers that randomly creaked, five or six or seven times over, to deposit the remains in their graves.
A man in a cassock said words about the importance of life in the service of others and issued a blessing: “Almighty God, look with pity upon the sorrows of your servants for whom we pray, and give them peace.” Another man in a pristine white uniform, from his shoes to his cap, held a trumpet with a white glove and played a mournful tune that bent in the wind.
Mourners gathered in small groups by the tombstones, open like gaping mouths. José felt the need to walk to the very edge and consider the void. He was the only person by Rangel’s. He looked at the message etched in the stone, and he knew it was right; it was true. He placed yellow daisies by the headstone, turned around, and walked away.
Image by Elly M on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- In Memoriam - May 17, 2026