by D R Lowrey
“Check.”
“But there are no chairs.”
Trivial details, thought Nigel, drawing close to the blocking Mrs. Sandoval.
“A stand-up wedding. Latest thing. Good for the health. Cam Logan had one,” yelled Nigel while drawing in his stomach and sliding to her right.
Mrs. Sandoval spun around as he clipped her shoulder on the way out.
*****
By the time Nigel made the final turn toward the Sandoval estate, the kung pao chicken and beef broccoli vapor was thick enough to slice with a chopstick. Halfway down the drive, he noticed a pedestrian in the road ahead. Could Jack Watt have come to his senses at the eleventh hour? If so, Nigel would give him a lift to the bus station and provide him with all the Chinese takeout he could bear.
As Nigel closed, he saw it was not Jack, but Mr. Sandoval fleeing the nuptials. The man walked in a slow shuffle but, sartorially speaking, he had spanned continents since first arriving. His current outfit, displaying not a single piece of roadkill, consisted of the most extravagant threads from the vintage section of Gastrick’s closet. A smart fitting Nehru jacket topped a pair of purple paisley bell-bottoms. Esmerelda’s work, perhaps.
“What ho,” yelled Nigel sticking his head out the car window. “There’s a wedding up at the house in an hour. If you keep walking this way, you’ll miss the festivities.”
“It’s my ex-wife, isn’t it?”
“She’s just the half of it. There’s a chap too.”
“I don’t want to see it.”
“Honestly, I don’t want to see it either, but I’ll show up for the party. Skip the vows. They’re for cows. Here to browse, then carouse. That’s my motto.”
“You don’t have a dent in your head.”
“No, admittedly not, but I wouldn’t let that stop me. I think we can find you a nice hat.”
“I don’t want to see my ex-wife get married. I don’t have a problem with her doing it, I just don’t want to see it.”
“I’m with you. I don’t want to see it either, but if you drink enough, it’ll be blurry.”
“Right,” said Mr. Sandoval, slipping his hand into his knapsack and pulling out a bottle of the brown stuff.
“I see. Having your own party. If you’re going to do that, the least I can do is provide dinner.” Nigel reached to the backseat and grabbed one of the twenty-four bags from Panda Empress. “I hope you like Chinese.”
“If I don’t, the birds will.”
“I’d like nothing better than to stop and share a stump, but duty calls. Au revoir.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thinking Out of the Box
After shuttling twenty-three bags of Panda Empress and two large pizzas into the kitchen through the back entrance, Nigel inspected the entrance hall. He was comforted by the sight of several lovely flower arrangements, delivered as promised. He was less comforted by the sight of a casket.
There, at the geographic center of the entrance hall, atop a waist-high platform, sat a gleaming, copper-colored, highly unanticipated casket. One might have thought that such a thing appearing midday, mid-residence, out of the bloody freakin’ blue, would have attracted a crowd. Not, apparently, at the Sandoval estate.
Nigel circled the burnished receptacle in a clockwise direction. Having completed the circle, he repeated the process in the anticlockwise direction. He squatted and looked underneath for hidden panels, thinking someone might have booked a magician for the wedding, then backed away and scratched his head. He didn’t recall ordering a casket. The flowers had been absurdly expensive, but not casket-level money. Stepping up to the handsome object, he rapped softly three times on the lid.
No reply.
He lowered his ear to the copper-clad box.
Quiet as a tomb in there.
Nigel stepped back to contemplate. Opening it did not appeal. He had seen enough movies to know that uncorking random coffins seldom ended well. He decided he had not contemplated enough.
He gazed at the fancy corpse container for some time before noticing that the lid was not tightly shut, as if an object impeded its full closure. He peered into the meager separation. Darkness. Pulling away, he spotted the source of the obstruction—the tips of three fingers.
Nigel leaped three feet up and two back. Not right, he thought. Not right at all.
He’d been under the impression that caskets were like Disneyland rides—hands should remain inside at all times. Occupants of caskets should be, on the whole, pretty darn well behaved. He could not envision a scheme where fingers should be given outside access. Coming as it did minutes before a wedding, the whole scenario was too troubling by half.
Nigel had no choice but to open the deathly box. How? From behind? Should I lift and duck? Should I have a mallet and wooden stake handy? He opted for the quick peek.
Placing two hands flat on the casket lid, he pushed just enough for a glance inside. As soon as eyes met interior, Nigel dropped the lid and stiffened as if run through lengthwise with a skewer.
“Owwwww,” came a voice from the interior.
“Eeeeee,” came a voice from Nigel’s interior.
“What happened? What are you doing?” said a muffled voice from within.
“Esmerelda?”
The casket lid pushed upward from the inside. Within lay an almost unrecognizable version of Esmerelda. This woman’s philosophy as far as facial upkeep had previously tended toward the painfully natural. On this occasion, however, she had gone full-on cosmetological. Colors from the rainbows of every planet smudged her face.
“That hurt my fingers,” she said through turquoise-colored lips.
“Sorry. Didn’t expect to see you there. You’re okay? I mean, not dead or anything?”
“Do I look dead? I just wanted to engage the experience. Never been in a coffin before. It’s a trip. I was a bit nervous about the wedding, so I crawled in here and pretended to be dead. What a gas! It made me feel so…so…alive.”
“Yes, I’ve heard death does that for a person.”
“Then you opened the lid and the spell was broken.”
“Sorry to have resurrected you. Believe me, not my intention, but when I saw this casket where a wedding is about to take place, something came over me. Curiosity, I suppose.”
“How long to the ceremony?”
“Twenty minutes, but I’ve not seen a soul. Perhaps everyone has found a casket to curl up in. Now that you’re up, help me push this one to the side.”
“Push it to the side? Why? It’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful maybe, but hardly appropriate.”
“It’s completely appropriate,” said Esmerelda. “Like a wedding, the casket is a symbol of passage, of transformation, a part of the great continuum—”
“More like the great discontinuum.”
“I say we keep the casket here for the ceremony. It works. A casket at a wedding ceremony—a token of mystical crossings, of life’s great bridges. Magical. If we had a birth symbol, we’d have the whole set.”
“Maybe I can run to the hospital and find a woman in labor. While I do that, you can arrange a human sacrifice. Let’s not do this thing halfway.”
“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”
“You think? Maybe coming across an inhabited coffin has given me a different perspective. But you’re the officiant of this wingding, so if you want a casket, we’ll have a casket. It just seems to me that the bride and groom, given their…eh…stage in life, might feel they’re being rushed. I mean, having a casket at their wedding seems a little suggestive in all the wrong ways. And, knowing what I know about this couple, they don’t need suggestions.”
“Don’t be silly. A casket awaits us all. But not me, no. No casket, no graveyard. I’m to have a sustainable death. Just my nude body in a field under a newly planted tree to be called Esmerelda.”
“A fruit tree, no doubt.”
“Mmmmmm. Organic apples.”
“While you’re picturing y
ourself transforming into apples, I’m going up to see how the groom is getting on. You might want to check on the bride. If either one is making trouble, we’ve got a place to stuff them.” Nigel turned to walk away but, unfortunately, his hearing had returned sufficiently to sense the doorbell.
Opening the door to an overly familiar droopy-faced detective, Nigel said, “Oh, it’s you.”
“It is I. I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Blandwater-Cummings.”
“That makes one of us.” Nigel assumed the detective’s visit was for a bad reason. He had not been known to visit for anything else. But when the detective led off his visit with a prolonged demonstration of neck elasticity, Nigel grew impatient. “Is there something I can get you? An Uber, perhaps?”
“What is that?” said the detective, extending an arm to point around Nigel.
“You’re a detective, and you have to ask that?”
“Is that a casket?”
“A tisket, a tasket, a copper-colored casket. I’ll bet they never make fun of you down at the station.”
“What is a woman doing in that casket?”
“What do women usually do in caskets?”
“She’s sitting up,” said the detective.
“Let’s take that as a positive, shall we? Maybe the funeral home will give us a refund.”
“That’s Esmerelda. I talked to her the other day.”
“So, it was you. We knew something got ahold of her. Boredom drove her to an early grave. I’ll say one thing, you’re cleaner than a ball peen hammer.”
“She’s walking away.”
“Is she? She must have heard your voice. I’d be walking too if I wasn’t paid to stand here.”
“Are you finished with this nonsense?” said the detective.
“If you don’t like my nonsense, then tell me who you wish to see so you can get on with your own.”
“I’ll see you, for a start.”
“You’ve already seen me. I’m tired of being seen. We should stop seeing each other.”
“Come Monday, I am confident—”
“Come Monday you’ll be confident? I bet you say that every Saturday.”
“On Monday, I am confident that I’ll be returning with a warrant for your arrest.”
“A warrant for my arrest?” Nigel carried a long fuse, but recent events had burned it down considerably. With a fast-approaching wedding ceremony, he had no time for this detective. What he did have was a head of steam in need of a vent. “You can’t fool me, see,” he said in his best American gangster. “I know your game, see. You got nothin’, copper. Nothin’. Threaten me with this phony warrant story so I’ll leave town, eh? Claim the killer skipped just as you were closing in, eh? Take credit for solving a crime with no evidence, eh? It’s a frame-up, I tell ya, and it ain’t gonna work, copper. You know why it ain’t gonna work?”
Not expecting such an onslaught, the detective stepped back while flashing a greenish tint in the vicinity of the gills. “Why?” he asked with a fragile bravado.
“Because I’m stayin’, see. I’m callin’ your bluff, flatfoot. You ain’t pinnin’ no rap on me. You dirty rat—”
“Detective Winjack,” interjected a dragonly female voice. “I’m glad you’re here. I have observations that might be of interest. Certainly of more interest than anything from this imbecile.”
Mother-in-law led the detective away by the forearm, her head covered in a one-piece turban/veil ensemble.
Nigel had never seen her in such a getup, but the beige, sparkly material looked familiar. As she walked away, the headgear’s twin tails entwined at the back of the neck and trailing down her back gave up its secret. They were the sleeves of one of Annie’s favorite blouses.
With zero hour fast approaching, Nigel bounded up the stairs to the groom’s quarters. “Doing okay in there? Need anything?” he asked after knocking.
The door opened. Jack Watt displayed himself in a standard black tuxedo. “What do you think? Adequate?”
“Adequate, yes,” said a wincing Nigel. “If adequate were adequate.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll alert you here and now, Abuelita, your little chickadee, will not be dressed in traditional garb. Not by a long shot. You’ve seen a peacock?”
“Sure.”
“A toucan?”
“Yeah.”
“A bird of paradise?”
“In pictures.”
“Take one of each, toss them into a blender, whirl them around a bit, and look inside. That’s Abuelita’s idea of a wedding dress.”
“You think she’d prefer something a little louder?”
“Louder? Something that screams bloody murder, I should think.”
“I chose this because nobody told me different. Truth is, I’d rather wear almost anything else.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Nigel.
“If you have a better idea, I’m game.”
Nigel led him to Gastrick’s closet, the contents of which had barely begun to be plundered. The former butler/convict was a man not of style, but of 800 styles, if one cared to stretch the word to its limit. The possibilities for an adventurous groom were endless.
Jack Watt, as it turned out, had a fine eye for the ridiculous. He held a jacket up to his neck. “Eh? What dya t’ink hyere?” he said in his best Bronx.
“What’s up, doc?” said Nigel, the suit appearing to be a knockoff of an original worn by Bugs Bunny in Racketeer Rabbit—wide-lapels, double-breasted, gray with triple thick chartreuse pinstripes.
Jack found a blood-red dress shirt, which he matched with a black tie dotted with images of garish socks. The ensemble was bottomed out with the matching black socks spotted with images of brightly colored neckties.
Jack Watt put on the suit, though it may be more fitting to say the suit swallowed Jack Watt. Once unshackled from the closet, these were threads on a rampage. Jack, playing the part of the colorless mannequin, would be its hostage for the evening.
Nigel and Jack took a moment to admire their creation. It was the kind of suit that preceded the wearer into any room, screaming, “Pull my finger.”
“You’ve somehow captured the spirit of this solemn occasion perfectly,” said Nigel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
With this Ring
At the appointed time, guests congregated—not as planned in the great white tent that now floated as fine ash across Louisiana—but in the home’s central entry hall. Let us set the scene.
Esmerelda, seated in a lotus position atop the casket, welcomed the guests with closed eyes and crossed arms. An unearthly hum was sometimes emitted during her meditations. Or were they incantations? Stefanie the Sane stood wrapped in her own arms while semilistening to her semimonthly husband prattle on about the craftsmanship of casket makers. Nigel’s private eye wife occupied her own bubble a few feet from her invisible ghoul mother, who was busy filling the head of that rubber-faced Columboob with her own convenient conspiracies. Grumps, suspended between a folding chair and his army helmet, watched for any signs of Englishmen. Even before the principals arrived, the scene had the look of a Halloween party waiting for the arrival of the punch bowl. Mr. Sandoval, not present but presumably sharing the shade of a large tree with a sizable bottle, was probably by now warm and fuzzy.
Nigel and Jack Watt sauntered down the stairs and assumed positions in front of the casket.
“Well, here we are,” said Nigel.
“Here are we,” said Jack.
Jack Watt, being the groom and wearing as rude a conversation piece as had ever been exhibited inside the gates of Asylum Sandoval, had expected a few high-fives and “look at yous.” The lack of any such reaction—of any reaction at all—left him feeling severely self-conscious. It was like showing up at the office in clown makeup and having no one notice. Perhaps the clothing choice was too subtle for the audience.
Nigel, catching Annie’s eye from across the room, nodded and winked. Her blank gaze turned into a puck
er at the sight of Jack’s suit. Jack Watt, perhaps sensing the reaction, straightened the knot on his sock-tie and pulled up his tie-socks. Nigel assured him he looked splendid and that it would all make sense once the bride appeared. The bride and Mrs. Sandoval, however, were nowhere to be seen.
“Pssssst.”
“Is that you?” a haunted Nigel said to Jack Watt.
“I hope not,” said Jack Watt to the haunted Nigel.
“Pssssst.”
“Sure it isn’t you?” asked Nigel. “Check your suit. Your left shoulder looks low.”
“Pssssst. Mr. Nigel, pssssst,” whispered a voice.
Nigel shuffled toward a drapery that had apparently learned to speak. “What’s up?” he whispered to the talkative curtains.
“Abuelita is ready. Position the groom and start the music.”
“The music?”
“The ‘Wedding March.’ When the music begins, Abuelita will enter from the east.”
“From the east?”
“Yes, but we’re waiting for the music.”
“Very well,” said Nigel, not feeling very well at all. He shuffled to Jack Watt. “Your bride will come from the east,” whispered Nigel.
“Which way is east?”
“Don’t know. Keep your head on a swivel. When you see your bride, you’ll know where east is because she’ll be coming from there when she comes.”
“And she’ll be drivin’ six white horses when she comes? When she comes?”
“Don’t know for sure about that,” said Nigel. “Be ready for anything.” He hoofed it for the kitchen, stopping long enough to announce, “Wedding. Warning. Wedding to begin in five minutes. Warning. Wedding. Take your places, people.”
In the kitchen, Nigel rummaged through drawers to locate a roll of parchment paper. Pulling a comb from his pocket, he quickly constructed his musical instrument.
The residents milled about like cows awaiting a hay drop while Esmerelda remained motionless atop the casket, positioned between two small containers emitting acrid clouds smelling of marijuana, rubber, leaves, gunpowder, and toast. In other words, every variety of smoke native to Texas. The irritating atmosphere was soon made more so by a tuneless series of blips, warbles, hums, and drones emanating from the kitchen. The raspy sounds eventually congealed into a recognizable tune. Recognizable, perhaps, but not pleasant. New Antigua had heard nothing like it since that Fourth of July celebration in 1997 when the high school orchestra played “Flight of the Bumblebee,” triggering a mad orgy among the city’s cicada population.