The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  Mastiff, Turnspit, Shepherd, Schnauzer,

  here is my crescent, my rebel rouser.

  She tweets parenthetically.

  Husky, Tiny, Lurcher, Bowwow,

  I need my underdog for a game of pow wow.

  There are more things in heaven and earth than Harry has dreamed of in his playboy philosophy. He is a man of the world’s surface. He knows nothing of what is beneath it, beyond it, within it. Her soft whiteness, her tender and juicy pink folds, are enough in themselves to spark him. But the bells, books, and candles, the strangeness of her ritual makes his heart pound with a new and powerful flood of love.

  Hoochie, Cootchie, Poochie, Moochie,

  fetch me my Corn Dog for a little smoochie.

  It’s a moment of discovery for him in more ways than one. Because of Sarah’s class act he found himself actually enjoying the opera. Now the man of this world finds he has a secret yen for things that are out of it. But “Corn Dog”? Up until now he has suspected that this Cornie, Cornelius or Cornwallis, was a fiction. But it seems, from the emotion he sees his wife displaying, that she does love a dead Cornie! Corn Dog! With a name like that he must be for real. An Indigen, maybe. That would explain it. Whatever, he gets the idea that the affair that produced Gloria was unsanctioned, a mismatch. No doubt it was puppy love gone astray.

  He listens to Sarah say her prayers, hears her pucker and whistle, and watches with mounting excitement as she stretches and exercises her womanhood, pressing her smooth white thighs into the soft down clasped between her knees. He has to lower his head a bit to see her fingers wandering, smoothing the creases and cracks, red-painted nails tickling her pinkest places. For all her stroking she seems neither hot nor wet. He, however, so long deprived, finds his breathing heavy. He has the feeling of falling, swirling in a whirlpool of love and desire. Although her invitation might be for someone else, he cannot resist answering the call. Maybe he can help. Sitting down gently on the edge of the bed, he kisses her lightly between the shoulder blades and proceeds south. She comes back from the nether world when she feels her husband’s head between her legs. “What? Harry! I didn’t even hear you come in. What are you doing? Oh, no dice tonight, dear, my head is splitting! Now, out with you. Please!”

  ‘Don’t Hand Me That Hash’

  Harry’s frustration mounts. His timidity is in business only; in the battle of the sexes his instinct is to stand up to anything if it means a match. Competition is just the thing to give the sportsman an edge. No, he doesn’t mind bucking with another man for a woman’s affections. But if the man is dead? The dead are the stiffest competition. They certainly can do no wrong.

  In any case this is his honeymoon. He cannot go back to blackjack and leave Sarah dry humping the dead in the hotel room. He takes her away from the games of Mondo Banco and off to James-land, Jujuba, a rough diamond in the crown of the Isle of Grammar’s colonies on the Dark Continent. Once again, at the hotel in the Capitol, Sarah asserts her right to separate sleeping accommodations. The following morning she appears smartly dressed and deadly perfect, ready to set out into the bush. Although they are going by four-wheel-drive vehicle, she is in a Grammar School habit: the boots, jodhpurs and crop of the riding academy. Poor love-hungry Harry feels his heart melt and his breath shorten when he sees her. Her figure is so striking that the bearers all have to adjust their loin cloths.

  Into the grassland they go. Here Harry does not expect his sister to be quite so dogged in her spying; he certainly feels safer around the native guides and porters than the throngs of tourists milling about the casinos and hotel lobbies. But sadly, there is no other female in the hunting party but Sarah. It is she or no one.

  When time comes for camp, Sarah has her bearers set up her tent away from her husband’s. They make jokes among themselves in their native tongue, and Harry can tell that they are saying the great white hunter is not master of his own marriage.

  He must earn the respect of the natives and get his wife’s attention. The next day, while they are tracking a lion, they feel the rumble from a herd of antelope thundering through the grass. Harry seizes the opportunity to show off what a great shot he can be. He goes to one knee, aims, and bushwhacks a slow one, shooting it in the behind as it hops by. It flops, and Harry approaches, puts his big gun between the flailing beast’s eyes, and fires. Sarah witnesses his demonstration, and is thoroughly sickened rather than impressed by it. The unsportsmanlike conduct in the way that man sports makes her yearn all the more for paradise lost, heavy petting with her best friend Cornie Dog.

  She chokes on emotion when she remembers that spring, taking the primrose path out of Zion to where he waited. Green in love, she laid back and let him take a licking. He brushed her font and scratched the spice of her sex with his nose. She pulled him by his ears up to snuff in the swelling wet tabernacle. In the embrace that followed she tasted her own wilderness in his kisses, and was at one with the salty, sweaty, sweet and sour, holy spirit bouquet of her body. If the God of her father was good, that moment’s puppy love would have lasted an eternity.

  If those days were heaven this night is hell. The hunter, fresh from the kill, comes to her tent and tries to turn her head with the dog-eat-dog side of animal nature, antelope steak.

  “Harry, don’t hand me that hash. What kind of a man shoots a defenseless deer in the back and then executes it?”

  Harry doesn’t know the answer. He killed on an instinct to be a big shot in her eyes and those of the bearers, and to prove his love for her by providing her with fresh meat. He can’t explain it if she, who inspired the display, doesn’t understand. Standing there speechless, hot for her, he thinks how exciting she is when she’s angry. Under the influence of his own desire, he still thinks she will swoon and surrender if he sweeps her off her feet. The gentleman loses some gentleness. He grabs his woman by the pucker in her safari pants and tries to bend her backwards and force a kiss. The good game gets away, wipes her mouth and snarls, “How dare you! I’m not just some animal you can use for target practice.”

  Realizing how off the mark is his shot, Harry bows his head and apologizes. “I’m sorry. I really am.” At the same time he is digging in his heels stubbornly, making it clear that he is not leaving her tent unless she shows some him some gesture of feminine kindness. “I love you,” he says. “All I want is you.”

  “Harry, damn you, you’re not living up to your half of the bargain. I’ve honored and obeyed my pledge, and done my best to look like a good wife, one you can be proud of, one that you can take out and show off. Even in front of those maids I behaved every inch a lady.”

  She would stick to her guns and ask him to leave, but looking down on him, she thinks of all she’s done since she left Zion. She sees in her husband something of the beasts in Dejection Junction, those low-life men she first modelled for as she made her way west. It never ceases to amaze Sarah how, once in the upright position, a man’s manhood leaves him little in the way of pride or principles. A pretty woman needn’t do much to cut him down to size. “Harry, what am I going to do with you?” she says as she briskly begins unbuttoning her shirt. Her shoulders and breasts, white as cold cream, are visions of delight. She unbuckles her belt, takes her snow white legs out of her pants and stands up to him, knees apart, buff naked. “Here, look but don’t touch. If you really love me back off and whack off.”

  In an act of fallacious feminism, she half-opens herself to him. The sight of the happy hunting grounds hits the bull’s eye in his mind. He sinks to his knees and, in a sexual misexperience, fires, spilling the beans from his pea shooter all over everything from the antelope steak on the table to the zebra skin rug on the floor.

  Marching in like a lion, Harry goes out like a lamb. The native guides sitting around the camp fire have not taken their peripheral vision off the white goddess for a moment, and are naturally extravigilant around bedtime. When the great white hunter passes them by they chuckle softly, letting him know they have been looking at the sil
houettes and listening to the sounds that are the same in any language.

  The following morning Harry arranges for them to get to the nearest airport. And thus the honeymoon is over, far ahead of schedule.

  Going to the Dogs

  Meanwhile Gloria has found herself a home in Swan’s house. She lays successful claim to the sheikish den where the playboy first made his successful advance on her mother. It’s as much a circus as a place to sleep. Swan, now married and halfway settled down, has little use for his old trap. With all the fabric, Mahabharatan muslin and Shunyuese silk, billowing from the walls and ceilings, and the pillows and animal skin rugs on the floor, Gloria, the tentdweller, doesn’t need to do much to make herself comfortable.

  She is happy to see her mother and stepfather home early and greets them with clapping, jumping, singing, and dancing.

  The three-year-old can see the low spirits that inhabit her mother, poor Mummy, but does not let them faze her. She laughs and dances anyway as Sarah, plainly exhausted and uncomfortable on all fronts, drags herself upstairs, barely saying hello. At least Gloria gets a hug from Harry. The child is sensitive to the love-starvation in him, and stays close to him for the remainder of the day. She plays quietly in the corner of the living room with her blankets, a baby doll, and a stuffed bear, and all the while keeps an eye on her stepfather, the lonely man lying on the couch under his moose head trophy, listening to an opera on the radio. When Laudette says it’s time for bed she goes to Harry to say goodnight and collect another hug.

  “Daddy-o!”

  “Gee Bee! Let me tuck you in. Come on.”

  It’s back to the den for Gloria. Under the big top there’s no particular place to tuck her in. Most nights she just bounces around the mountainous maharaja-sized cushions until she comes to rest somewhere. Tonight she wants to hit the pillows hard. Swan spots her as she jumps up on the window seat, and off into the pile of feathers and fabric. It doesn’t take much coaxing to get him to toss her up so she will land on the pile even harder. Big, long-boned, gravity-ridden Gloria is not an easy throw, heavy even for the muscular, ship-shape Swan, but she is having so much fun that she makes him forget his troubles and reminds him of the glories of yesterday: when he and her mother before they were married were rolling and tumbling on those pillows. Gloria’s laughter is so infectious, a hearty gale of giggles, that lonely Swan has to laugh at himself. She senses the lightening of his mood and it rouses her spirits. She shrieks and laughs so hard Swan becomes concerned that she’s gone beyond just simple merrymaking, and may be having a fit or convulsion.

  Omniscient Miss Lord gets wind of the whoopee and comes to see what all the fun is about. Swan expresses his concern about Gloria’s antics.

  “Oh, no, Sir,” Laudette says, “I wouldn’t worry if I were you. Children can take a whole heap of happiness. I never saw one get a conniption from it yet. It does me good to see Baby having an all-out good time like this. I mean she’s always content, so to be happy she has to be extra happy, if you follow me. Now into bed, you little heathen. Can I get you a cup of warm milk, Sir Harry?”

  “Yes, thank you, Miss Lord, that would be very nice.”

  In the kitchen Harry seizes the opportunity to see what the well-posted baby sitter has to say about the skids his wife is on and if perhaps Laudette could intercede with her on his behalf. He slides into the topic by musing over his milk, “If only Gloria could share some of her good cheer with her mother. I don’t have to tell you, our honeymoon was a disaster. I’m afraid she hasn’t been herself lately, since before the wedding, really. Have you noticed?”

  Laudette, pledged to never tell what she knows, is a woman of truth and must be indirect. “Oh. She’s been herself all right, Sir. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but that girl you married, she might look like a goddess, but forgive my saying so, she’s far from perfect through and through. On the inside she’s not all there. Don’t get me wrong, she’s smart and all, has read more books than anybody I know, but she does have some screws missing.”

  “Do you know anything about these magic rituals?”

  Laudette wants to say, I sure do, and somebody around here ought to put his foot down and end them. But she is very careful not to go that far. She understands that someone stepping in and trying to straighten Sarah out might warp her all the more, make her bad for good. Laudette’s lips are sealed forever about Corn Dog, but she wonders how much of the truth Harry knows about the woman he married, that she is no fancy lady from back east but a teenage runaway from some fundamentalist camptown in the Beehive State. After more deliberation, Laudette doesn’t see how it would hurt to discuss with Harry the nature of Sarah’s disease, and its general rather than precise causes.

  “Now, I’m glad you brought that up. Yes, sir, I do know she prays to a bad god. And I think her going to the dogs is a crying shame. If you ask me, she’s spiting herself for the way she was brought up.”

  “What do you mean? She said—”

  “Never mind what she said. Oh well, maybe I said too much already, Sir Harry, but I guess by now it’s no secret that Sugar’s never been within two thousand miles of Beantown. I’ll tell you another thing—just promise never to tell her where you heard it—that girl’s just wishful thinking when she says her daddy was a liberal artist or scientist, cardiographer or whatever. He was the Shibbolite Bookkeeper, plain and simple, from Zion, Beehive. And from what she told me, he ate, slept, walked, talked, and had his bowel movements all in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Prophet. Amen.”

  “I did notice that once when I asked her about her religion and what sort of training she was planning on offering to Gloria, she got very edgy.”

  “So now you know why that is. She figures nothing to abide, nothing to hide; shove nothing down the little one’s throat, there’s nothing for her to spit up later.”

  “It seems to work. Gloria, as far as I can tell, seems perfectly well-adjusted, always cheerful, as you say, and it’s obvious she’s very mature for her age.”

  “As far as Baby goes, she may be the exception that proves the rule. People aren’t likely to be happy without having some respect for God drummed into them. But don’t you worry about her, Sir, either. I’ll see to it Baby gets her share of X Rays and Good Book stories. A little fear of hell never hurt anyone.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “We don’t want that child growing up worshipping you-know-who like her mother.”

  “Yes, Miss Lord, we certainly don’t.”

  “I’m glad you know what I mean. You see, Sir, Sugar’s not bad, but the way she’s going, she’s not getting any better. One day she’s low as if she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders, and the next time you see her, she’s uppity and on edge. Why, yes, I think you’re right. If consistency is a sign of maturity, Baby ought to be the mother, rather than the other way around.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Well, I know you modern people may laugh at me, but I think that when the Almighty makes a person so sweet-looking as Sugar, it’s not always such a blessing. A girl gets used to hearing what a sweet dream baby she is to look at all the time, and when she feels those crabby apples that are normal—we all got them inside of us—acting up, she doesn’t want to pop them out, and be done with them. She doesn’t want to mess up her appearance, you see. Instead she puts a little extra candy-coating on her face, polishes herself up, and things get worse underneath instead of better. Finally the pressure builds and she has like a gas pain in her mind, and what stinky stuff’s been stewing inside has to come out.”

  Harry thinks there may be some valid points in Laudette’s theory and now that they have dropped their guards and are getting chatty he comes to the item he is really curious about. “Now, what do you know about this Corn Dog? Has she ever mentioned him to you? He would be Gloria’s father, would he not?”

  Laudette thought this might come up, so she doesn’t act surprised. She is all set to be true to her word. “‘Corn D
og?’ She laughs. “Whatever are you talking about, Sir Harry? Sounds like it would be Almighty good with chile peppers and mustard sauce though! No, like Sugar explained to you, all I know is that she was involved with some fancy fellow named Duke. She says he was Gloria’s father. I don’t know if they were really married or not, or he passed away or if he left her or she left him. But I do think she loved him, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, Sir. Hmm, maybe ‘Corn Dog’ was her pet name for him. But whoever it is, what’s done is done, and she’s going to have to learn to live for today and love the one the Almighty gave her to love. No?” Laudette gives the milk-fed Swan a boost.

  “Amen to that,” says Harry, breathing fifty percent of a sigh of relief, the even odds he thinks that Laudette is telling the truth. “Even so I guess I’ve been quite a fool. How long was Gloria’s father dead when we were married? A few weeks, a month? And how many other lovers did she have?” Then he realizes the compromising position he is putting Laudette in and lets up. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot, Miss Lord. I was just trying to get some information because I am concerned about my wife.”

  “Of course you are, Sir Harry,” says Laudette pleased not to be pressured. “I’ve told you all I know; she was a mixed up kid, but I don’t think she’s a lost cause by any means. Don’t give up hope. Once bad luck has done some damage the best thing we can do is pray for Providence to undo it. I’ve seen worse, plenty worse, get better, begin to see the good in their lives and be grateful.”

  Sure, sure, she was mixed up, thinks Swan, though she sure knew which side her bread was buttered on when she went through with the wedding. Sis said she was a cold-blooded professional but it didn’t register. She took me at my word and really did marry me only for the money. Rats!

  “So in other words she loves me far, far less than I her?”