The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  The peach of Zion Beehive spends one last night in the Golden Gate Hotel in the sumptuous bridal suite. The big bed is as soft and inviting as any mire of sin and luxury she could have hoped to wallow around in. The two-faced choir girl’s dreams of ease, comfort, and indulgence are fulfilled but, cruel irony, Sarah couldn’t be more unhappy. She sits uncomfortably in an armchair in the sitting room while Swan pops the cork on the champagne and loads up some crackers with black caviar. She holds one hand over her mouth, rubs her stomach with the other, and shakes her head no when he offers her the gourmet victuals. Jovial Swan is not at all fazed by her refusal. He slurps up the caviar, takes the champagne down in great gobbles, and while doing so maps out the game plan for an eighty-eight day, summer-long, around-the-world chain of honeymoons. Tomorrow they will embark from the Bay Area aboard the luxury liner Regina Mare, voyage south on the Deep Blue Sea, putting in for sun and surf at the resort ports of Guayaca and Costa de las Santas, then through the Isthmania Canal, across the Titanic Ocean to the South of Elysee. They will visit the most fashionable gathering places in the Old World, go on a safari in the Dark Continent, and come back by way of a slow boat from Shunyu.

  The new bride is not so confounded that she does not notice the interruption of her services. The itinerary her husband outlines suits his taste for the sporting life perfectly but holds little interest for her whose practice of sending mental notes, apologies, and enticements to the dead has now become a habitual and rabid obsession. It pains her to leave the area where Corn Dog was last seen alive. The sounds, sights, and smells of the scene of her crime keep her company while she tries to make contact with him. She says, “I thought fifty-fifty meant split down the middle, husband. You never talked the trip over with me, asked where I wanted to go and for how long, or whether I wanted to go at all.”

  “Come now, Cupcake, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. The will does allow us a grace period for a honeymoon before we pick a place to make our home sweet home. Besides, you look as if you could use a vacation. I understand. The wedding was a big strain. The cruise will be relaxing. We have the biggest stateroom on the boat. And I can’t wait to show you the Old World. It will be a thrill to see it together. I’ve rented a splendid place for two weeks in the Emmenthal Altos. It comes with fifteen servants, Old World style. Granted, you might not go for mountain climbing, but the scenery around the chalet is breathtaking; snow-capped peaks and high pine valleys with superb views of the Zimmerschloss. And there are many things to do: horseback riding, shopping in the nearby village of Ritzfrau—very quaint—and you’ll have a chance to meet my friends the Duc and the Duchesse du Fondue. Ever think you’d be dining with real Emmenthaler nobility? And then we go to Mondo Banco. The casinos, of course, can be quite a lot of fun, glamorous, clamorous, very elegant. But even if you don’t catch the gambling bug, I’m certain you’ll find the shopping fabulous there. But have you ever gambled?”

  “No,” the contrary pea lies, “I never have, and I don’t intend to start. As for shopping, funny, now that I can buy anything I want, I find I don’t really want anything. I’d just as soon stay home, curled up with a good book.” Or a bad one, she thinks, reflecting on her growing collection of occult literature and doubting she will find much to add to it in such mundane places as Ritzfrau and Mondo Banco.

  “Oh, you’ll see, it’ll be a grand time.” Harry goes on, his mind splashing in champagne. “Travel will be a welcome change from reading, an extension of the same thing, actually. All right, I admit the hunting trip is more my line than yours, but not every girl gets to see what a big game safari in the Dark Continent is like and to stand in the shadows of Mount Bondo. Anyway you can indulge me a bit, can’t you? The worst is over now, my sweet, and it will be nice to spend some time, just the two of us, won’t it?” The smooth older man figures to have his own way. He reaches out to hold her hand.

  Perhaps in Jujuba, she thinks, the natives might have a trick or two for contacting the dead and keeping them as restless as the living they left behind …

  Sarah has gotten used to going to bed early, tickling herself, and fantasizing about the risen Corn Dog. Until she met Harry she had never spent a whole night with a man, and with him, not many times. She doesn’t want to start making a habit of it now. “You’re right, darling, I’m tired. It’s been such a long day today and tomorrow we leave on the trip, so not tonight, thank you.”

  “But this is our wedding night. Come on, now, Cupcake, we’re married. We can talk openly to one another. We can’t let a little fatigue spoil everything, can we? Probably a little deep tissue massage and seminal hydration would pick you right up.”

  She does not think the joke is funny. “Just to remind you of the deal, my dear: outside you can treat me as the passive half of everything you do and you won’t hear any fuss from me, but on the inside, what you call my deep tissues, I’m still my own woman. I think that for our marriage to work separate bedrooms are in order, don’t you?”

  “Well,” says the playboy, “they say familiarity breeds contempt and absence makes the heart grow fonder … and the frond grow harder. Maybe it is best to pretend we’re not man and wife. I can see how it could make visiting one another seem like a little extramarital fun.”

  Having not touched her for more than seven weeks, the wolf in him is ravenous for her tender flesh. Yet the playboy knows the animal in women; that they’ll starve you if you approach too hungrily. He sits there making sheep eyes at her, hoping she’ll soften up.

  But the look Sarah gives back is anything but tender.

  He falls to one knee in front of her, takes his grim stony-faced wife in his arms and tries to rub her the right way, but the bride bridles, “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m tired. Please, it exhausts me just to think about it. Now, excuse me.” In tears, she rises and runs off to the bedroom, leaving Harry sitting on the couch in the sitting room, out-of-breath and with an uncomfortable tightness in his wedding pants.

  ‘Take a hike’

  “All ashore who’s going ashore!”

  “Bon voyage, Sugar, Sir Harry. Say ‘bye bye’ to Mommy, Baby.”

  That next morning Sarah kisses Laudette and Gloria goodbye and goes along on the playboy philosopher’s dream vacation, but for her the honeymoon is neither sweet nor dreamy. The cruise is bumpy and she spends the first nineteen days with her stomach in her hands and her head in the head, the brass-tooled commode in the Regina Mare’s stateliest accommodation. In bed she is as cold and as off-smelling as a dead fish.

  Harry waits, counting on the palatial chateau he’s let with its majestic views and fresh mountain air, to calm her stomach and stimulate her appetite. Once more on high and dry land, she regains her former model dignity and appeal. On the first night Harry comes to her room with a bouquet of edelweiss and tries to warm her up by talking about the fun they had before they were married.

  “Harry, I thought we married for money not for sex. Now leave me alone. Take a hike, that’s what you came here for, isn’t it?”

  Ooh, nasty, Cupcake, but what a beautiful bitch you are! Harry thinks.

  Her resistance is every bit as compelling as it is aggravating. Frustrated, yet athletic, Swan loves a challenge. He will stick to the old-fashioned courtly ways he thinks will win her over. Marriage has been known to do strange things to a woman’s desires. He relies on what he believes will be a winning strategy. He’s never seen it to fail with a woman: sweet talk her, give her some room, try to be considerate; let her know you care and not press her too hard, but let her see the man in you. Sooner or later. Bingo!

  “Yes, Cupcake, if it’s all right with you, I’ll give my friend Basil a call. We’ll do a little rock climbing, and stay at the lodge for a few nights.”

  With her husband out for the next several nights with the Duc du Fondue, Sarah counts on the time she will have, the time she needs, to reflect and pray, to be alone with the phantoms in her imagination. But she is still not alone. There are servants who come wi
th the house and they invade her privacy. Heidi and Bridget are two maids who continually pester her. The frauleins, stiffly formal and starchy in their uniforms, are nevertheless overly eager when it comes to service. They are hardly older than she but as servants they behave as if they were to the manor downstairs born. If she does not have them fuss over her, they put on condescending airs which intimidate her. They turn up their noses as if she smells of common blood. She wants to dismiss them with the same looseness she shooed her husband away with but she finds, to her greater irritation, that she is pluckless in front of them. She does not want to let these complete strangers know that they are more experienced in the ways of aristocracy than she. Image first, her prayers have to wait while the maids drive her to put on an important face of her own as they wait on her.

  The lady’s day is leisure with no respite. They serve her breakfast in bed; they help her with her correspondence, the lone letter she sends to Laudette and Gloria; then there is a morning bath where they wash her feet and dry her hands so she can page through a magazine. Then a massage by thumby Bridget. At her toilet, they help make her up as a smooth-finished porcelain lady, and dress her as if she were a toy doll. They accept a luncheon invitation on her behalf from the Duchesse du Fondue, and have the driver take her off, staring vacantly out of the back window of the car, to see the neighborhood castle and meet some peers. They see to it that she gets her beauty rest, has her afternoon tea and then in the late afternoon another beauty bath, this in Heidi’s special herbs, with champagne. Dinner and more wine are served her. Finally, after dinner they help her on with her bed clothes and put her to bed. Even then they deprive her of the comfort of crying herself to sleep by insisting she take some blue narcotic pills which go along with the wine to make her too drowsy to call the dogs.

  The playboy philosophy says that gifts will butter her up. Before Harry returns he makes sure he stops in the village so he can come home loaded with presents, sweets for the sweet, Emmenthal chocolates, perfume, flowers, and lingerie, even a fur coat. “I know it’s the middle of the summer but I was thinking these high pine nights can be cool for a delicate flower like you, Cupcake.”

  In fact, the presents make her feel safe and warm, glad Harry is her husband and not some lout. He holds the coat for her to try and she backs in arms first. When he fixes the collar around her shoulders, he nuzzles his nose against her neck. “You’re so soft and sweet, Cupcake! And you smell so good.” She feels the swell in his leather climbing pants.

  Sarah looks inside and finds her eyes looking through Corn Dog’s face. There’s the trolly coming, about to strike her dead. “Aah! Ouch!” She moves her neck as if Harry were being too rough with her. Her husband can protect her on the surface, but he cannot make her feel secure or passionate in her core. Inside she is as cold as ice cream. “Thank you, Harry, but some other time.” She moves beyond his reach. “I’m just not in the mood tonight.”

  Again, Harry is sorry to have lost the suit for her attentions. He bulges with apologies. “I only meant to say I love you, darling.”

  She sees his strategy. Treated nicely, Sarah feels obliged to respond in kind. It’s easier to refuse a horny toad than a gallant prince.

  Harry goes on, “Don’t you feel anything for me at all? You seemed to before we were married.”

  “‘Seemed’ is not ‘is’, Harry. I don’t think you’re capable of understanding what real feelings are. Don’t box me in.”

  The icy way she says this hits him like a slap on the face. But the playboy follows his guaranteed methods of seduction faithfully. He tries to reassure her. “Is it that you have doubts about my love, my Love? For me ‘seems’ and ‘is’ both are. You are the most exciting woman in the world. You’re like a flame I want to burn in. I beg you, marry me for real, not only for convenience but in the spirit of for better or worse. Share yourself with me. Start with what is on your mind, talk to me, and we will work together down to what you have below your waist.” Ever jolly, Harry winks.

  But her relationship to her husband begins where her relationship to her father left off. Her fuse is short and she doesn’t hesitate to explode when she is angry. In fact she adds onto poor Harry’s bill her annoyance with herself over the intimidation she feels from the maids.

  After all, she thinks, my life was richer when I worked on a pay-as-you-come basis, but just because I’ve sold out at the bulk rate that shouldn’t mean I have no place to call home.

  “Goddamn it, man, what I really need is some privacy around here, some time to myself! If you’re not badgering me those damn maids are. All the while you were gone they followed me like dogs wherever I went. I want you to fire them, or at least get them out of my hair, understand? Whoever said this was easy money? Now thanks for the gifts, they’re lovely, but if you would be so kind, please go, I need time to be alone.”

  No sense of humor, the sweet sourpuss pushes him out, locks the door, and gets ready to clam up in her room for the rest of their stay: no maids, no master.

  The more piqued and picky she gets the more beautiful Harry finds her. Boxed in himself in a vicious cycle, loving a woman for not loving him, he is obsessed by the thought of conquest. He will win, he must win this woman’s body, even if he has to become her slave to do it. He must have her because she is impossible to have.

  Yes, Harry loves his wife, but when sex-starvation sets in, in a pinch, anyone will do. He sees how the problem could contain its own solution. Perhaps the maids would find Monsieur more amenable to their services than Madame. Instead of discharging them he will approach them on a physical level. He calls and asks them if they would help him off with his hiking boots and leather pants and soap his feet. He smiles when he sees what a thorough job they do. He sends them out to the village to get some linament for his back. Being the master of the house and they his servants he feels no fault when he goes to their quarters to sniff them out first in private. Are they really as starchy as all that? He goes through their drawers to find out. Starchier!

  But then, under Heidi’s stiff underwire, bra, he finds a camera, and … what!? A letter to Bridget from a private investigator, Sam Hunkel, soliciting their help, giving the details of a plan to drive Sarah mad, seduce him, and get it on film. The maids are his sister’s spies, saboteuses.

  Sis means business, he thinks. I know the puritanical ethic keeps all promises and honors all commitments, but this is worse than I thought.

  “Pack your bags, dear.” He wastes no time telling Sarah. “I think you’re right, this place is rather tiresome.”

  He says nothing about the maids and Sarah doesn’t ask questions. Anything to get home sooner; she doesn’t mind leaving the high country behind, to get on with the next round in this newlywed game.

  ‘No Dice’

  In Mondo Banco Sarah sees no need to take her seat, elbow to elbow, with the wealthy, worldly people who waste time and money playing games of chance. Once a gambler herself, she now has more on her mind than where the chips may fall. Taking every opportunity to be alone and do what she longs for, she stays in her half of the suite in the Hotel de Luxe, prays to the Lords of Death and plays with her memories of Corn Dog.

  Queenie, Prince, Coyote, Set,

  let it come, my longshot bet.

  Acey, Deucey, King, Jack,

  send my brazen brave boy back.

  She sprinkles her prayers liberally with her soft, high whistles.

  Meanwhile Harry is down at the blackjack table wiggling his whiskers at another twenty-one-year-old number named Roxanne. Roxanne is cheap but not free. Lady luck hangs on to his arm and squeezes the inside of his thighs. When he goes to cash in his chips, she is right there along with him.

  After his discovery in Heidi’s drawers Harry is on guard, always looking to see who may be watching him. When he notices a man in a checkered jacket fiddling with a camera, trying to hide behind a potted palm, he thinks the man may not be the tourist he seems, but another one of his sister’s private eyes out to scra
tch his good time. A photograph of him and Roxanne could incriminate and perhaps disinherit him. Better safe than sorry. In two seconds, before the fiddler behind the palm can snap a shot, Harry leaves the curvy Roxanne flat.

  His meat however remains in the motion toward climax and gives the optimist the idea to try his luck with his wife once again. He knocks on her door and jokes, “Room service.” Getting no answer, he puts his ear to the door and hears her whimpering. She mumbles something that sounds like

  Goldie, Blackie, Whitey, Spot,

  fetch me the bone that gets me hot.

  He hears her let out a soft high whistle, there is the faint tinkling of bells, and then a burst of tears.

  “Cupcake,” he says, “are you all right? What are you doing?” He knocks again and again, louder, but the crying jag continues. It is more than he can ignore.

  Using his keys, he comes into her room from his. The room is dark, the only light from a thick, black votive candle on the vanity table. In front of the mirror, it sheds a faint double flicker on the cream white figure on the bed: snow-white Sarah, lying on her stomach, arms beneath her, wearing a white silk chemise. Her bottom is bare, her beautiful legs are astride a pillow. She is so transfixed in her mutterings, her eyes are closed so tightly, with tears seeping through her lids, she does not even notice that he has entered the room.

  The ringing in his ears is coming from a bell collar around her neck. The floor around the bed is strewn with an assortment of books. She is sobbing incantations backwards and forwards. Much of what she says sounds like nonsense to Harry, nevertheless he can see that she is grieving sorely. He approaches quietly, listening to what she is saying.