And I laugh.
At first it’s a quiet, stifled giggle, but then it progresses to a belly-shaking guffaw, and finally to hysterical side-splitting screeching. I slap a hand over my mouth so I don’t attract the attention of any neighbors, if I haven’t already. I scramble to my feet, look around the parking lot, and walk back to the garage.
This time I creep inside and sidle up to the hissing snake. I reach out a trembling hand and, grimacing at the thought of touching those reptilian scales, I yank the snake’s head from the driver’s window. It twists and turns in my hands, trying to bite me, spraying its venom in my face before I throw it on the cement floor and stomp on its twitching body.
I pull open the hearse’s door. The car smells like elderly flesh and raw sewage. Uncle Sterling looks peaceful and relaxed except for his bulging eyeballs. But, they always did bulge. They reminded me of those little pug dogs. I will not be making any pick-ups for cops in this vehicle. I reach across Sterling’s prodigious belly and switch off the ignition. The stomped snake stops hissing.
I stand there, crouched over my uncle, examining the exploded petechiae in his eyes and the indigo tint staining his lips. Beneath his ugly brown waistcoat his white-shirted chest is still. Cautiously, not wanting to fall onto him, I lean closer to his mouth. I listen for any trace of breath.
That’s when he turns and gets right in my face.
“You killed Billie, you little bastard,” he hisses.
I headbutt the fucker a good one, cracking his nose, and he plays dead again.
I know he’s reading my mind, though, laughing at my rage.
“Well, you killed my parents, you greedy old fuck!”
~
Here’s what happened to my parents— and don’t ask me how I know because I’m not entirely sure how I came by this information. Eavesdropping as a child is my best guess. My parents and I lived in an historic brick townhouse about two blocks from the parlor. Life was good. I remember my Daddy swinging me around in his arms, my Mama singing to me as we rocked. My earliest memories are indeed good ones. But the good times didn’t last long.
My granddaddy died leaving the funeral parlor to his two sons, my Daddy and Uncle Sterling. Business was good back then and Daddy and Uncle Sterling made a ton of money. My Daddy, though, was what you might call a visionary. He foresaw the decline of the funeral industry way before it ever occurred to anyone else. He kept an eye on advances in science and medicine, saw the steady growth in the number of joggers in the Park. Daddy was highly observant and a realist. He spoke to Uncle Sterling at length about selling the business. Sterling resisted, of course, not wanting to give up the decades-old family business. Daddy told Sterling that he was quitting the parlor to take work over at the docks, and that Sterling would be smart to find other employment as well. But, Sterling refused, said it was akin to treason, abandoning the family business.
So, one night, as I lay tucked into my first big-boy bed, all cozy and safe, with my parents sound asleep in their room next door, I could hear Daddy snoring.
Then, with my tender ears, I heard a creaking on the staircase.
The hinges on my parents’ door gave the familiar squeak.
Then, I heard a balloon popping.
Only it wasn’t a balloon.
Then there was screaming.
My Mama.
I shook the safety railing on my bed, trying to get out, and cried my lungs out for her.
“Mama! Mama!” I screamed and cried for her to come get me.
Another balloon popped in their room and the only sound was my crying.
The police called it a murder-suicide.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the policeman said. I stared at the gun in his holster.
It was the first time I’d heard that phrase, or at least understood its meaning.
I was four.
I went to live at the parlor with Sterling and Billie.
~
I punch Sterling in the side of the neck. I pull my head out of the car, lean back bracing myself in the doorframe, and I proceed to kick Sterling in the side.
The sole of my shoe leaves dusty triangular impressions on his black jacket.
Hundreds of them.
I am a sweaty mess.
I reach into the car and pull my green tie out of Sterling’s collar, stuffing it in my pocket.
The snake on the floor starts to really creep me out. It’s doing something. A dance of some sort. Squirming and turning. The sight of the reptile and the smell from the car smother me and I vomit all over the door threshold and the gray-painted concrete floor.
I run into the house and call the detective who phoned earlier about the Broad Street pick-up.
“Sir,” I breathe into the phone, “can you come over right away? It’s my uncle. Yeah, Sterling. He’s um, he’s... I think he’s dead.” For some reason, tears slide from my eyes. I hated that prick.
The detective offers his condolences and says he’ll be right over.
I’m sorry for your loss.
~
Detective What’s-his-name, whom I’ve known for years, pulls into the driveway in an unmarked squad car. A Crown Victoria, I believe. A piece of gravel shoots up from beneath one of his tires and strikes me in the arm.
“Well, it’s a suicide all right,” he says, mindful not to step in my reeking puddle of vomit. “I wouldn’t tell the insurance company that, though. I’m sure we can come up with something else.”
He picks up the snake from the garage floor. It’s only an empty skin now. The bastard shed it and slithered away. I’ll have to keep my eye out.
Detective So-and-so makes some notes in his little leather-bound notepad regarding the condition of the body— not a mark on the victim, but stiff as a, well, stiff— exactly how I found him.
“Okay, I’ll help you get him inside. No sense in taking him to the hospital or anything. Take him right to the embalming room, huh?” He looks at the stains on my jacket, the pointed end of my green tie poking out of my pocket, my expressionless face. “Then, we can head over to the Broad Street scene. I hear it’s a real mess.” Detective Fuckhead takes a whiff of Uncle Sterling’s last pantload and makes a face. “Guess we’ll have to take the other car, huh?”
Yeah, ya think?
~
Out at The Home, in Aunt Billie’s hissing and pinging tomb, Sterling’s lawyer drones on about who cares what. Yeah, I get the parlor and all the related junk, enough money to stock supplies and keep the lights on for a couple of months. Aunt Billie wins an all-expense-paid stay in the scenic Home until she dies.
Everybody’s happy. Actually, I don’t know whether Aunt Billie is happy or not, but it’s not like she can argue with the lawyer or anything.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the lawyer says.
I could kill him right now, strangle him with the green tie that’s still in my pocket, making me smell like car exhaust. I also smell like puke. I haven’t changed my clothes or slept all night.
I make all the arrangements for Sterling’s funeral. About one hundred and fifty people will attend, some of them Savannah’s most well-regarded and influential citizens, some just randomly chosen hobos plucked from park benches. I don’t give a shit. I set up Sterling’s cheap eighteen gauge silver casket in the Peace parlor— his least favorite and his least favorite. As he saw fit to name me as the executor of his estate, I can do whatever I damn well please. I could have hired a balloon animal bending clown to deliver the eulogy if I’d wanted to. I don’t give a fuck what the will says. It’s all gibberish to me. More stupid archaic rules. And the lawyer isn’t here to say anything, anyway.
I have what feels like a massive, unbearable toothache in the side of my head.
The following day, Peace fills up until it’s standing room only. The chief of police delivers a soulful tear-jerking tribute. Then, some woman, whose name I keep forgetting, sings ‘Amazing Grace,’ which Sterling hated. Yeomen of the Guard, my ass. I won’t have any of
that crap. A video montage plays on a computer, projected onto a movie screen off to the side of the parlor. Oh, how he would have hated that. Some of the pictures I included were portraits Four and I staged after his death. We put him in shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt for some of them. Bastard.
And then it’s over.
The pall bearers, led by Four, grab the casket by its rails and glide down the center aisle, heading for the loading dock. The crowd files past me, leaving me to sit alone in a folding chair in the back row of Serenity.
I’m sorry for your loss.
“Hey, long time, no see, huh?”
A familiar velvet baritone breathes in my ear, startling me.
I jump and jerk my head around. I hadn’t heard anyone approach, nor had I sensed anyone’s presence. The hairs on the back of my neck bristle and my arms break out in gooseflesh.
This is how Avery came to work for me.
With me.
Against me.
Chapter 21 – Caleb
I hardly know what to do with myself the day after the funeral. Neighbors and friends of Uncle Sterling drop by bearing trays of lasagna, dozens of homemade chocolate chip cookies, all loaded with their condolences.
I’m sorry for your loss.
I want to hit and kick every last one of them in their stomachs.
Avery tiptoes into the kitchen, stretching and stifling a groan, as I’m having my coffee.
“Good morning. Do you happen to get the newspaper or anything?” he asks, pouring himself a cup of coffee, carefully examining half a dozen cookies before picking one up and taking a tiny nibble. “So, do you plan to start training me today?” he says, wiping down the white Formica counter with a sponge. “The conference won’t occupy my full day, just this morning.”
He’s officially in town for a meeting of doctors working in the field of reanimation. He’s into that, but we’ll get to that later.
“Yes,” I say, “I’m just not quite sure where to begin.”
“I’ve heard the beginning is a suitable place.” He sips his coffee, making a sour face, adding three teaspoons of sugar, stirring. “What do you do when someone comes in here, crying and weeping, wanting to set up a funeral?” He takes another nibble of his cookie and blows on his coffee.
And so it begins.
After we get through breakfast and he returns from his meeting, I set him up at my Montrachet-style desk, while I move all my belongings to Uncle Sterling’s old desk, which is much less coffin-like than my old one. His desk is a no-nonsense gunmetal job, no drawers. Just as I finish filing away Sterling’s funeral paperwork in the file cabinet behind me, the doorbell heralds a customer’s arrival. Avery follows me to the front of the parlor like a hesitant shadow.
“Hello, welcome to Exley & Sons Funeral Parlor. How may I be of assistance?” I smile at a tearful old woman and a sobbing younger one. I grab a box of tissues from a sideboard and offer it to the women. I wear a commercial concerned look and give them a sober nod.
“It’s my husband,” sobs the young woman. “He died today of lymphoma.” She sobs harder. The older woman hugs her and straightens the young woman’s black pill-box veiled hat.
Tragic.
More like the same old story, just another day at the office.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Once the women perch on the navy wingback chairs in front of my old desk, I offer them the wastebasket in which to toss their soggy tissues. “I assure you that you and your loved one will be treated with the utmost respect and dignity at this most painful time. I, of course, will oversee the entire process of helping your husband reach his final resting place,” I say to the widow.
She honks into a new tissue. The women blink at me dabbing at their red eyes with fresh black spotted tissues.
I don’t know where Avery has disappeared to, but he’s missing a prime learning opportunity.
I show the women caskets (they choose a moderately priced twenty gauge steel model with satin lining), discuss details of the service (they have a Presbyterian minister to do a reading and a dear friend to say the eulogy), arrange transport to the chosen cemetery (either Avery or I will drive them in a limousine, while the other drives the hearse, out to Boneventure), and then I detail the price of the package they’ve chosen. Optimal sale. Well, minus the Montrachet.
“Ma’am,” I say to the young widow, taking her free hand, “there is one more service we offer which we have not yet mentioned to you.” I reach my hand over to the computer keyboard and click on the Hollywood Forever website. It shows them the same media montage that I’d shown Four. “We are just getting started with our own production of multi-media presentations like this one.” They watch for a minute or so. “I understand this may be overwhelming to you at this very moment, so you don’t need to make a decision right now, but might you be interested in something like this? It will preserve the memory of your dear husband, reminding you of all the good times you shared. Also, you may order copies on DVD to send to far-flung relatives who might not be able to attend the service here.”
I spy Avery peeking around the doorway, poking the last crumb of a cookie into his mouth. He stares at me. I scowl at him.
The women look at each other with somber expressions, the younger one nods.
They want the video montage, including a full-color package of post-mortem photographs, with the deceased posed on his beloved Harley Davidson motorcycle.
~
Meeting Avery was the highlight of my college career. He was a lot smarter than me and did a lot more interesting work. What I remember most clearly is his work with the animals.
“I don’t know, getting it to work on dogs is one thing,” Avery had said, peering at me over the exsanguinating canine stretched on the table between us in his Safar Center lab. “But, humans... I don’t know, Caleb.” He adjusted the arterial tube that penetrated the dog’s neck. A snake of black cherry fluid wound through the clear plastic hose and emptied into an insulated steel receptacle at Avery’s knee. He flicked on the Duotronic IV (oddly enough, an embalming machine) he used as a saline infusion pump, gerry-rigged to a cooling tank. A second tube inserted into the dog’s femur delivered a stream of cold saline solution directly to its circulatory system.
I had placed my hand on the animal’s rib cage, feeling its skin cool, its heart slow beneath my palm.
Avery had been my best, and really only, friend during my course of study at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science. He was a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, studying neurology, participating in a study involving therapeutic hypothermia at the school’s Safar Center for Resuscitation Research. He’d been working on bringing dogs back to life after they had died of various causes, including but not limited to cardiac arrest and brain trauma.
We’d met at the Andy Warhol Museum, at the big Jake Wolfram ‘O.C. Barbie’ exhibit, the one based on some bizarre boy band murder. Anyhow, we got to discussing the complexities of the vagus nerve featured in one of the installation pieces and we became fast friends.
Avery was from Encino, California and hated the Midwest almost as much as I did. He also had a strong interest in the newly deceased, which was what had brought him to Pitt’s School of Medicine and the Safar Center. We had a lot in common, from our interest in biological science to a love of modern art.
I was thrilled to see him at Uncle Sterling’s funeral.
We hadn’t talked in years.
~
“You really think we can make something of this business?” I ask him now as we sift through all the papers Sterling had hidden from me for years.
Poring over the accounting ledgers we’d found after breaking open Uncle Sterling’s safe, Avery’s mouth hangs open. “I’m not entirely sure. It seems your uncle had a boatload of debt.” The spreadsheets we find on Sterling’s computer are just as damning (his password was easy to figure out: Billie317). Overwhelming, crushing debt. No wonder Uncle Sterling took his life. I almost fel
t sorry for him. Or wanted to, anyway. “It’s going to take something extremely clever and possibly illegal to get out of this mess.”
Silence.
Avery and I look at each other.
I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it, too.
Chapter 22 – Caleb
The service bell at the kitchen door buzzes. My pen jumps and scratches a line across my crossword puzzle. The sound also stabs me through the eye socket. I struggle out of my chair, dizzy and nauseous, and step over to the door. Scarlet. I open the door but not too much.
Her eye make-up runs down her white face, reminding me of a mime. I want to slam the door in her French clown face. She shoves the door open, hitting me in the shoulder as she crashes her way into the kitchen. “That’s it, it’s over.” She collapses in a blubbery heap on the dusty, crumby floor, and holds a piece of paper out in my direction. I don’t want to, but I grab it out of her fat hand.
Dear Ms. Lawson, the letter begins. While you possess some impressive credentials, we regret to inform you that the intern position you applied for has been filled. Best of luck in finding a suitable position. It’s signed by some dildo at a production company in L.A.
“So?” I say, dropping the letter on her bowed head.
“That’s it,” she says, sniffling at me. “That was the last application. And, you know what? That was even a fucking unpaid internship.” She sobs like she’s dying or something.
I don’t need this. I spin on my heel and head up to bed. She throws a shoe at me. It misses.
I pass Avery on the stairs. He’s wearing my clothes again. I wish he’d get some of his own.
~
Scarlet pads into the kitchen wearing Avery’s (my) white cotton button-down shirt, the one with the yellow underarm stains. I bang my coffee mug on the oak table and gape at her bird’s nest of green hair, catching a glimpse of her pink satin panties as she pulls the milk from the refrigerator.
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