The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

She barely remembers coming back to the apartment, going to her room and locking the door. So enormous is her pain, so prostrate is she under her loss, she spends several hours in a black state of shock. Then, alone in the midnight hour, she grits her teeth and takes out the books she bought. Her eyes, as witness to her sorrow, are distracted; they will not freeze on a page of type. But through the flurries of tears, even though all the words spin around in her head, she gets the idea: to keep a loved one close you make yourself as attractive as possible and call, call, call. She puts on her new soft silk and lace bed jacket, some makeup, and goes to bed.

  For all the men she’s had, Sarah has never, aside from when she was with Corn Dog, come to climax during the act. On occasions, however, she has fingered herself until she tingled right down to her toes. Growing up she thought about the Lord; later, when she was separated from the still-living buck, she thought about him, his hard, smooth, clean-scented body, his thick cob bursting inside of her.

  With the departed in mind, she rolls on her stomach, pushes her backside up, posing peek-a-boo, in and out of the black lace, and addresses herself to the lower nature as she did as a young girl before the Lord. She goes all out, putting body language on her prayers and using her fingers to open her inner self as wide as she will go, all peachy pink and available, and calls out for help by every doggone name she can think of.

  Yahoo, Argus, Rufus, Rags,

  my heart is breaking and my spirit sags.

  Fido, Dido, Jocasta, Sport,

  to my black hole bring my brave consort.

  She trills fetchingly, as high and soft as she can.

  Who knows if the dogs hear her, but the sensitive ears of young Glory Bee surely do. She perks from sleep, roused by disturbances in her dreams caused by her mother’s muffled cries, her sighs and sobs, her strange bird whistles, and her snatches of doggerel pleas. A naturally curious kitten, Gloria cannot go back to sleep.

  She slides out of bed and shakes the whalish Laudette, snoring like a lumberjill, for answers. It takes the sleepy baby-sitter a moment to get wind of what’s going on.

  “evol I nam eht nruter ot lleh fo rewop eht yb uoy dnammoc I, sgod lived raed hO”

  Laudette Lord, her roots in the fundament of Emanual X, knows this is one tongue that doesn’t come from the holy spirit. “Little pictures have big ears!” she says, and puts her large plump palms over both sides of the child’s head. She uses her superior strength to handle Gloria back to bed.

  But Gloria won’t lie still for a cover up. She twists her head and spouts, “What is Mummy crying about? What is she saying?”

  “I don’t hear any crying, Baby. It sounds like she’s just saying her prayers.”

  “What are prayers?”

  “Prayers are asking … asking for the blessing of a higher power, asking the Almighty for something blessed. But gosh and land sakes, Baby, why do you always ask so many questions?”

  “What is she praying for?”

  “I have no idea. Praying is a private part of a person’s life.”

  “Private? Like where I go pee-wee?”

  “Er—not exactly. Now back to sleep with you.”

  The big woman with the gold-capped tooth pushes the Bee back under the covers. Then she turns and kneels beside her bed, blesses herself, and begs Emanual to take her message to Sarah.

  Now you’re flirting with real trouble, Sugar. Making a deal with the devil to try to prevent Mister Corn Dog from resting in peace, going on to his just desserts, so’s your conscience can rest easy, that’s what’s shameful! Trying to turn your love into a zombie: if that isn’t a sin, I don’t know what is.

  The Business Opportunity that Lasts a Lifetime

  Although it does no good, Sarah’s vain wishing keeps her from becoming a hopeless case. She collects shelves of the world’s least known literature, books on black magic, witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, alchemy, the left hand path, the dark side of the street, and adds them to the new library she’s started with the rare editions she’s been getting from Mister Goldman, one of the men who support her on her pedestal. Nor can the book lover overlook the physical love stories from the recesses of the Paradise Book Shop. Now that she is older, more experienced, she finds words more stimulating than pictures to get herself in the mood that her witchcraft manuals tell her is so crucial for magic. At bedtime, to find relief from grief, guilt, and the horrible feeling of endless falling, she burns candles by the gross, browses books by anonymous authors, and rubs herself while reading the exploits of the heroes and heroines, trying to get the climactic feeling of being merged with the buck. She prays to the dogs to bring her love back from the dead or to lead her to that permanent out-of-her-body experience.

  Foxie, Roxie, Moxie, Hyena,

  fetch me that boy with the golden wiener.

  Tippy, Tappy, Nippy, Lappy,

  take me away, make it snappy.

  She feels there is life ahead, but no way can she come by a thrill. The more urgently she tries, the more her grief and guilt kill her pleasure and send her falling with no bottom in sight. By morning her womanhood is sore and chafed, her concentration has given way to melancholy, and, dead tired, she falls into a fitful, nervous slump, plagued by gut-wrenching, plummetting dreams that have her pulling out her hair as she sleeps.

  Naturally all of Sarah’s rituals and litanies cannot restore the literal body of the dead back to his spirit, or separate her soul from her body, but these rites do seed the destiny of the celebrant, and prepare her for uncommon adventures. The dogs of the underworld, ministers of justice to obverse interests, are also the dispensers of worldly wealth and power. More so than the Lord, they work in mysterious ways, and answer appeals extra roundaboutly.

  The living man to whom she is closest is Harry Swan. Swan, a notorious playboy, is something like a boyfriend to her. He is twice her age rather than three times it. He cares about her, or professes to anyway, and was not so easily brushed off when her world collapsed and she went into seclusion.

  The death of H Thornton Swan Senior, his father, is the ingenious first step which the infernal mechanics, those canine wizards of quanta, pass up to her. In recent years the Freeway economy has gone downhill. Many Freewayfarers are out of work, while great amounts of money sink into the pockets of a few. Swan is a name that means energy, tools, weapons, lumber. Thorco fuels the wheels of progress, with wells and refineries in the Lone Star and Golden States. Lightning Hammer Industries is a plant that takes up twenty square blocks in the Garden State, specializing in tools and dies, bits and pieces to drill the earth. There is also Supreme Motors, a Motown plant which manufactures armored vehicles, tanks, and fighter airplane parts. The next big war will be fought in the air, as well as earth and sea. Yes, Senior Swan is a man whose material assets weigh heavily but he cannot take an atom of them with him.

  Senior Swan’s death is unknown to the mourning Sarah. Blind to all else but the grief in her heart, she will not take Harry’s call. And when she goes out for her daily walk it’s around the wharf, then straight down to the Paradise and back.

  Come Shepherd, come Collie, come Boxer, come Spitz, bring me my Corn Dog, or tear me to bits.

  Two weeks later, June is bursting with chestnut blossoms, and Sarah is in her room lost in dog verse when Harry calls her again, this time from the hotel lobby.

  Laudette, happy for an excuse to interrupt this nonsense, knocks on Sarah’s locked door. “It’s Sir Harry on the house line, Sugar,” she says. “He’s asking if he can come up. He says it’s something important.”

  “Harry?” She expects Laudette to lie for her. “Remind him he shouldn’t call me, I’ll call him. Tell him I have a yeast infection. I need to be alone. It’s so itchy I’m out of my mind.”

  Without going into such personal detail Laudette relays the lady’s apologies. She listens to Swan’s reply and then conveys his message through the closed door to Sarah. “Sir Harry says what he’s here for won’t take long, Sugar. It’s business, he says. It�
��s about his father.”

  “His father?”

  “His father died a couple of weeks ago. I told you, but you just floated by. Sir Harry’s been down in Angel Town, at the funeral, and settling up affairs. They read the will yesterday.”

  Oh boy! Sarah thinks. The thought of money spontaneously makes her put aside loss for gain, her dead for Harry’s, for a moment at least. She takes the call. “Oh, you poor dear, I’m so sorry. Come right up.” While Harry waits for a lift she puts her black veil in a drawer and she finds herself, to her disgust, running to her vanity to quickly redden the peaches in her cheeks, the cherries in her lips, and comb her goldilocks smooth.

  Harry comes in and his kiss lets her know that now, more than three weeks since they’ve been together, he wouldn’t mind a woman with a little froth at the lips, that he has an itch too. But with Sarah plainly unresponsive, he accepts a drink, takes a seat and says. “Well, dear old Dad is dead at last.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You needn’t be. We never got along well. I didn’t come here to be consoled. There’s a problem with his will. I have a proposal that I think you might be interested in.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” Never being one to confide in a woman, the playboy finishes his drink, and holds his glass out for more. Feeling more comfortable and finding Sarah solicitous, he begins to talk freely.

  “Dad got rich because he wasn’t afraid to push himself into the right place at the right time. When I was growing up all he did was work; he was never at home. Mother was a society lady; collected art, went to lunch, rather fragile and high-strung. One thing, life in the Swan house was never fun. Soon after my parents were married Mother got pregnant. There were complications. When she gave birth to my sister Hilda, the doctors told her ‘never again’, that she was lucky to be alive. Dad was not an understanding man. He became angry with the doctors and angry with Mother. He wanted a son. He wanted one so badly he made do with what he had. He took my sister out hunting and fishing, taught her to play baseball, and brought her on his business trips. Early on, before he struck oil and made his first million, while Hilda was growing up, he still had time to be a father. Her seventh birthday was the day he made the strike on some land he had leased down in the Lone Star State. He nicknamed well sixty-six ‘Hilda’.

  “Sis was cut from the same bolt as Dad. Even as a child, I’m told, she was serious, hard-working, and not one for frippery. As she grew up it became obvious she was bent for oil, and spent plenty of time with Dad, learning the business.

  “When Hilda was fourteen Mother made the mistake of getting pregnant again. It was touch and go, but she had me and survived. I was born, but my sister, fifteen years my senior, was already the son my father never had. By now Thorco was a giant. Dad had hundreds of productive wells, and a gold mine in each. With all this capital he expanded into many other fields. It was hard work, long hours, and few days off.

  “Dad never touched a drop of alcohol as long as he lived. Mother drank more than she should have. It was an awful marriage, locked in a vicious cycle: she drank because she was neglected, he neglected her because she drank. In time he did more than neglect her, he condemned her as weak and lazy. As a child I heard him complain about Mother, and women in general, calling them inferior, ineffectual, vulnerable, helpless. Somehow Hilda felt exempt from all his ranting.

  “I stayed with Mother, but she, active in her ladies’ club or passed out, was hardly ever around for me. To make up for their negligence, my folks spoiled me with toys and, best of all, money. I was just like them, a chip off the old blocks, only too happy to take what I could get, and not get too mushy on family sentiment. Great, I thought, keep your love, Dad and Mother, I love money better than I love you, too.

  “When I was ten Mother croaked, choked to death at one of her ladies’ luncheons on a bone in the chicken salad. One minute she was there laughing, the next dead and gone, with her head in the sorbet. Her companions were either too squeamish or too soused to figure out how to help her. It was a shock, and I missed her, sort of, but I didn’t cry, not even at the funeral. I went to a psychiatrist once. He said I probably wasn’t in touch with my feelings. Probably not. But I looked at it this way: why not make the best of a bad situation?

  “After she was buried I came home, played with my toy trains and went up to sleep, as if it were any other day. The next day it was as if Mother never existed. Of course my father hated me for it, hated me for enjoying myself with the things that money could buy, instead of being miserable about what they couldn’t, like his love. After all, money was the reason I was a latch-key child. At least I was grateful the latch was twenty-four karat. Dad wanted me to suffer because of being neglected, and it really upset him that I enjoyed my life not only despite but because he was so distant.

  “After I graduated college, Sis, who was forewoman in our father’s fields, hated me for being soft, for wanting to take it easy and have some fun in life. ‘We are nicely rich. Why work?’ I would say to her, and she would scowl at me. She believed that hard work, long hours, and making money purified the soul. ‘Even the lowest animal works for its daily bread,’ she would tell me. ‘Squirrels gather nuts whether they need them or not.’

  “As I grew up I came to understand what a tough one Hilda was, a born battle-axe, a hatchet woman. She was oddly religious, had no spirit, but took a cue from Dad and made a big show about church. It was their superstitious way of disarming the competition. Although they would never admit it, even to themselves, in their business affairs my sister and father were completely without ethics. Deceit was justified whenever and wherever an opportunity to make money came up.

  “I guess I took more after Mother, would rather spend than earn. I have no guilt about it. Since the age of reason I knew that Thorco was a huge predatory monster. The oil business has the public over a barrel and can squeeze as hard as it likes. That’s the law of the jungle, I guess, big fish can’t help their size, they have to eat smaller ones. But I’d be damned if I’d grow up to be like Dad or Sis, pat myself on the back for doing it, say ‘I earned it’ and feel that sanctimony and self-deception cleans up the money.

  “So, I became a playboy. They openly despised me for being weak and decadent, and disapproved of my indifference to the business, which they never really invited me into anyway. I’d say that if I’m going to be selfish I would rather enjoy than despise myself for doing it. They criticized my eating, drinking, and especially my habit of making merry with what they thought of as the weaker sex—I know I can come clean with you, Cupcake, I’ve had a lot of women in my life …”

  Sarah nods and smiles, appreciating Swan’s candor.

  “I should have known they would turn on me sooner or later. Dad’s will has a couple of catches in it. First off, it leaves fifty-one percent of everything to Sis. I don’t mind this because I’m sure her business decisions are better than mine, more cut-throat, that is, anyway. It’ll be more than worth the two points to let her do it. But here are the rubs. Dad also made her the executrix of his estate; he has given her complete power of attorney and put my share in her trust. And this is the real stab in the back from the grave. I don’t get my part so easily. The will says that in order for me to inherit a cent I have to be married and, within a reasonable time after the honeymoon, permanently settled down. It even cuts off my present allowance! I’ve never been one to save. I don’t like that at all. I’ll be on the street in two months. And even after I comply with the conditions the money won’t come in one lump sum but in quarterly allowance checks, dividends more substantial than what I’m presently drawing but nevertheless a check to make sure I stay in line. If I get a divorce, if I am caught outside of marriage, or my wife is, if we are not settled down together under one roof, poof, I’m disinherited. And I have no doubts my sister plans to enforce the will to the letter.”

  Harry has said a mouthful. Sarah almost wants to say, “Say no more, man, I know it all. My own father had the
same self-righteous bug up his ass.” However, she holds her tongue. She doesn’t want to spoil the pose of the perfect lady. Sensing what comes next, she pours Swan a third round, as he leans forward and gets down to the business opportunity that lasts a lifetime.

  “Cupcake, I want you to be my lawfully wedded wife.”

  She takes a cigarette from the box on the table, lets Harry light it for her, and blows the smoke in his face. “You can’t be serious, Harry. I’m a young girl, half your age. People will say you robbed the cradle.”

  “I’m not robbing. I’m paying for it with real money. And anyway I’ve never been one to care what people said.”

  What quantities give the quality of “real” to money? Harry estimates the total value of his inheritance should be somewhere around thirty million dollars.

  At twenty-one Sarah is no longer a babe in the woods. She knows she won’t get any younger, and while she figures she has a good ten years of “modelling” left, she also knows that the business is not the kind that will grow with time. She looks at Harry, and Harry looks at her. He winks. She wonders if the playboy knows her for what she is, and lets her sugar-coat it. Would there be friction between them should the details of her career come to light at some later time? Shouldn’t she be as frank with him as he was with her, and tell him in some parenthetical remark, that she’s been around the block a few times herself? He seems to be one who doesn’t judge, so he won’t be judged in return. But Sarah decides to be vague, hold her tongue and keep her cards close to her breast. The only one she’s being asked to play is a promise of faithfulness from now on.

  But she wavers about whether she could possibly marry. Certainly she feels that with the shock waves ripping through her because of what happened with Corn Dog, she could never go back to booking strange men for money, or ever again have any sensual enjoyment in the sex act with anyone other than Corn Dog or his shadow. Obsessed, she must keep her daily calling on the dogs, appealing to them to keep her love’s spirit close. Harry does say he loves her, that’s more than the others say, and more than she can say about him. She does love how he opens up doors for her and glows when he’s around her, a flattering light that makes her feel a bit lighter, as if she were something special, a goddess. Surely she does see in him something more than a client. Halfway to hell is far enough. If her period of mourning is permanent and if in her own eyes she is terminally disgraced, what does it matter if she marries or not?