Jolly

by John Weston

  Jolly watched him climb the stairs that led from the office to the floor above. He turned to see Caleb Andersen just entering the room.

  “Meaders gone up?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Jolly said. “Have you—are you—is it finished?” he asked.

  Caleb Andersen reached his hat down from the coat tree. “Yes,” he sighed. “Except for the trocar. He ought to let me do that. It’s got to be done.”

  “Mr. Andersen, tell me—tell me what happened.”

  “It’s a shame,” he said. He lifted the glass of whiskey from the desk and drank. “No goddam need for it, neither.”

  Jolly sat on the bottom step of the stairs and waited for Caleb Andersen to go on.

  “That blond whore from Freddy’s and one a her studs. They didn’t even need no ambulance. Just a wrecker.”

  He drank again from the glass and then jammed his hat on his head. “Probably got to foolin’ with him in the car and he ran off the road. Lucky. That kind’s always lucky. All she got out of it was a bump on the head that’ll give her a headache for a week.”

  Caleb Andersen set the empty glass on the desk and turned to Jolly. “Can you close up around here? I’m going. I’m sick to my stomach.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jolly.

  Jolly walked through the chapel and the music room in the dark. He opened the door of the preparation room and felt for the light switch. The neon tubes flickered twice and then held, shedding their cold light over the room, the stretcher, the calendar girl, the blood-vessel chart, the embalming machine, the sheeted figure on the stainless steel table that could be raised or lowered or tilted like a seesaw.

  Before he pulled back the sheet, Jolly took the long steel needle from its cabinet. He opened a quart jar of pink embalming fluid and turned his face from the sharp odor of formaldehyde. He screwed the needle onto the jar. He set the jar on a shelf near the head of the table. He lifted back the sheet slowly and gazed long at the umber, translucent face, grinless and calm beneath the straight black hair. Jolly pushed the hair away from Luke’s face, but it settled back naturally over his eyes. He lifted it again and saw the large blue crease that dented Luke’s skull, running from above his left eye to his hairline.

  Farther down, as the sheet was pulled away, was the plump chest with its new black hair lying flat. Then the hands appeared just above the spot where the trocar must go, the left folded over the right, incongruously placed, the nails broken and in need of cleaning. Then came the rampant black hair again and the genitals, lying harmless and limp and lopsided. A few inches farther down was the tiny incision closed now with sutures.

  Jolly chose a spot, low on the abdomen, where the sun-darkened skin gave way to a short band of lighter skin. He placed the drill-like needle exactly on that line and turned his body half away from Luke’s face. The trocar pierced the flesh and sank deep. The pink liquid gurgled in the bottle.

  He looked to Luke’s face, half expecting to see him grimace with pain. No expression flitted across the lips, wired shut forever from the inside and sealed with wax.

  “You crazy,” Jolly said. “You crazy bastard moron. Probably driving a thousand miles an hour in the rain.” Jolly felt his own stomach knot and then loosen and begin to jerk. “I think I’ll just put your damn flowers on the wrong grave. Or better, I’ll spread ’em all over the goddam road.”

  He changed the position of the trocar, and it waved before his eyes as something seen in a watery mirror. “I’m laughing. See Luke? I’m doing it again, and this time you can’t do a goddam thing about it. I’m laughing, Luke, I’m laughing.”

  The trocar gurgled again, and the pink liquid was gone.

  Jolly pulled the instrument back and saw the little round hole that remained, just on the line of the dark flesh and the lighter flesh. A pale edge of liquid formed around the hole.

  “You want another belly-button, Luke?” He screwed the plastic button into the hole, pressing harder than was needed. “There.” The firm flesh rose slowly into place. “Now you’re all sewed, sealed, and screwed.” Jolly took off his glasses and ran the sleeve of his damp jacket over his eyes. “Get it, Luke? You’ve really been screwed this time, buddy. You been screwed good!”

  He pulled the sheet back up. Before he covered Luke’s face, he swept back the sheaf of black hair again. “And can’t you keep your goddam hair combed, you crazy moron,” he said.

  Jolly left the preparation room with the bare neon light still burning. In the music room he stopped beside the old organ and ran his hand along its black curves. He walked on, through the chapel, into the office. The light was still on. Jolly moved with determination. He set the two glasses in the desk drawer and closed it. He opened the narrow center desk drawer and searched among its contents. Not finding what he sought, he took from it a paper clip. This he unbent into a single wire. Holding it between his teeth he bent small notches along more than an inch of it. He turned to the wooden filing cabinet and inserted the wire in the lock of the middle drawer. Carefully he twisted the wire like a miniature crank until finally it caught and the lock clicked open.

  He spread open the graveyard chart on the floor. He knelt beside it and swung it around until the arrow in the bottom corner pointed north. Starting at the mausoleum, he searched west with his finger, bending low in order to read the names printed in the little oblong boxes. He found it without much trouble. OSMENT, one of the boxes read. It was just about where he thought it should be. He moved his finger back to the big center square and carefully counted the rows, the aisles, the curves in the path.

  Jolly refolded the chart along its deep-creased lines and returned it to the filing cabinet. He twisted the bent wire until the lock clicked again. He flung the wire toward the wastebasket and shut off the light.

  He walked through the chapel in total darkness. In the music room he cracked his shin against a chair, and the chair clattered loudly against the wall. He stopped to rub the hurt briefly, then guided by the light under the door, he re-entered the preparation room.

  He found Luke’s clothes piled in a heap on a chair. He lifted the pants and ran his hand into the right front pocket. He pulled out the two keys on a brass chain, decorated with a tiny black telescope through which one could see a bulbous naked woman if he held the telescope to the light. Jolly dropped the pants back onto the chair and let himself out the back door. He had carefully avoided the steel table with the body of Luke on it like some shapeless biscuit-man beneath the sheet.

  The Blue Goose objected noisily, then started. Jolly backed it out of the garage and turned down the muddy alley. The rain shied across the headlights in streaks of yellow and silver. He drove through town, past where the night neon cast wavering reflections out onto the wet streets, past Rosy’s Tavern that glowed warmly on the corner.

  He turned onto the Shaker Village Road and drove unhurriedly past the old yellowed houses, over the bridge and the railroad tracks, into the jumbled, loud clutter of Shaker Village. There, outside the unpainted wooden fence of a wrecking yard, was the Meaders’ white ambulance, its nose just lowering from the hoist of a wrecker. Jolly stopped the Blue Goose, and watched while two men in greasy overalls and caps worked in the glare from the tow-truck’s spotlights. Finally, one man climbed into the truck and drove it a few feet away, then both men went through a gate in the wooden fence into the wrecking yard.

  Jolly walked cautiously to the ambulance. Its white length was shortened ridiculously. He ran his hand along the smooth right side of the body, around to the other side where the metal was folded and creased and muddied. From where he stood, the hood bent upward like the broken wing of a great bird. He stopped a long time by the door on the driver’s side. The door itself, in fact the whole body from frame to roof, was smashed in as if some giant-child had thrown down his toy in anger. The wheel on that side was missing entirely. Jolly wondered if it was still out there, lying wherever it had bounced to, probably down into a canyon, flinging crazily every few feet as it met anoth
er granite boulder, while above on the road Luke fought the last split second of his life against odds no human could ever match, his hands twisting at the steering wheel even after it had crushed his chest, even as his head cracked among the apparatus of the ambulance—the heavy steel bottle of oxygen, the chromium-plated bed on wheels—even as these flew murderously forward among the neatly rolled bandages, and the little jars of iodine and Merthiolate, and the square white tin box with the red cross that held all the puny contrivances for keeping people alive and their blood inside their veins a few more moments, even as the dark eyes closed part way from their wide terror and stared unblinking into the soft rain that soothed through paneless windows.

  Jolly drove on, along the paved road that stretched darkly for two miles more to where the swooping granite wall began.

  The graveyard seemed darker, if anything, and quieter than the rest of the night. The car’s headlights swept over the rows of stones turned gray from the rain, and over the grass-warmed undulations of the earth. The pine trunks were brown in the car’s lights, but the tops were unseen in the sky. Jolly saw the baskets and sprays of expensive flowers on the first graves. Most were beaten down by the rain and seemed to clutter, rather than decorate.

  “I’m a day late for Memorial Day,” he said.

  He left the Blue Goose standing before the mausoleum. The little coupe seemed to shrink beneath the stone power of the tomb, which loomed more awesome for being only barely visible. He unhooked Luke’s flashlight from the steering column and played the beam over the near gravel walks, choosing carefully. The light made an elongated circle directly before his feet as he walked, counting the squares, the paths. He no longer felt the rain on his clothes or the cold that had come with darkness.

  He stopped. He shined the light over a mound and remembered it as the unmarked grave on which he had cast his bouquet of nasturtiums long ago. The weeds still ranged over it, no better or worse than they had before. No holiday flowers decorated it.

  He stared a long time at the grave, wondering why he was there and why he felt nothing in particular now that he knew for sure. He kicked idly at the weeds along the edge of the loaf of earth. The bright beam of the flashlight, cutting against the black, made him dizzy. His mind passed over the days just gone, jumbling the events in a meaningless whirl. His thoughts came back to Luke lying snugly dead on the steel table that tilted like a seesaw. Jolly felt himself say “Luke is dead” for the first time.

  He kicked at the weeds. They were old and tough and resisted the kicks despite the wetness of the earth. “Goddamit!” he said aloud. “Goddam, goddam.”

  The weeds bent and some began to tear loose, their roots gouging out clumps of dirt as they toppled. Jolly kicked harder with the toe of his shoe, and it would have been difficult to say if his face was wet with tears or rain.

  Suddenly, near the head of the mound, he kicked, and the edge of a tin marker pointed from the earth. He bent down slowly and pulled it the rest of the way out. He squatted, and turning the isinglass side up, he rubbed it. When most of the mud was gone he held it out to the rain until the surface was clean.

  Holding the flashlight in one hand and the marker in the other, by its single long spiked leg, he drew it close to his face to read it. There was nothing on it. The writing had faded, and the only signs that there had ever been writing were the little pale rivulets of blue permanently stained on the paper around the edges.

  Jolly stood with the tin marker in his hands.

  A deep breath, one of those that come without warning, passed through his chest, causing him to straighten abruptly. The rain washed down over his hair and face and ran in tiny streams down the back of his neck and, it seemed, all over his body.

  The marker fell silently into the wet earth, spear first, and sank deep. With his foot Jolly drove the square slice of tin down into the grave until nothing showed of it but a narrow strip at the top, even with the ground.

  He clicked off the light. While his eyes adjusted to the deeper blackness, he faced the rain and let it wash.

  After a time he walked back toward the Blue Goose standing beneath the faceless tower of gray stone. He walked without the light, watching the pebble paths curve beneath his feet.

  The other car was parked behind the Blue Goose. It was some dark color—maroon or maybe black—but it would have been impossible to say which, parked the way it was in the wet shadow of night. Only the dim circles of its white-walled tires told where the car and the road separated.

  The man leaned against the smaller car, his coat collar turned up against the rain, shielding the lighted cigarette in his cupped hand. As Jolly approached, the orange pin of light skittered onto the road and was instantly killed by the rain.

  “Did you find it?”

  Jolly stopped, confused. Then he saw the man. He knew the voice.

  “How did you know—”

  “Never mind.” Jolly felt the hands touch his face on either side. “I know,” the voice said. “I know.”

  EPILOGUE

  Now, therefore, while the youthful hue

  Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

  And while thy willing soul transpires

  At every pore with instant fires,

  Now let us sport us while we may;

  And now, like amorous birds of prey,

  Rather at once our Time devour,

  Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

  Let us roll all our strength and all

  Our sweetness up into one ball,

  And tear our pleasures with rough strife

  Thorough the iron gates of life.

  Thus, though we cannot make our Sun

  Stand still, yet we will make him run.

  —Andrew Marvell