The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  Thus she passes the rest of July and August investigating her mother’s secrets. She occupies herself by reading from Sarah’s private collection, sharpening her spiritual vision on Scripture, and stimulating her appetites on the erotica. She also acquaints herself with some titles in the downstairs library, The Old Husband’s Tales of the Seasick Hero and Witherspoon’s Star-Crossed Lovers.

  When she isn’t sleeping or reading she likes to dress up. The daughter of Corn Dog finds that wearing feathers and skins helps her get in touch with the spirits of the animals, as well as her father and mother. So even though she does not hear a further iota from Sarah—just cause, as the worry-wart Laudette points out daily, to be anxious for her mother’s safety—the dips she takes in the bed and bath and the reading material continue to build on her newfound sense of continuousness and identity with her mother. Certainly with all her discoveries she feels no sorrow because she chose to avoid summer school.

  But all things pass. September rolls around and she must report back to Saint Bernard’s and repeat the eighth grade. Up to her elbows in curiosities, the cat girl works some of her mother’s fine feathers into her fall wardrobe. Sitting in her booth at the Kronos Coffee Shop the morning of the first day, the Bee is out of uniform, dressed in a short leather jacket and long leather gloves. Her old friends admit she looks cooler than ever, but while they go on to classes in advanced geometry and the modern novel, Gloria changes back to the horrid SCUBA gear in the Kronos ladies room, and goes to class with girls a year younger than she, who giggle instead of acting as if they know; and she is expected to do work which bored her to death the first time around. She realizes the baby-sitter was right after all: how untenable her position at Saint Bernard’s is! She feels that she is lost, a world away from anything that matters to her.

  The elephant inside her has never forgotten how alarmed she was when she understood that she was going to be put in a uniform. Now, her emotions running wild with teen-age independence juice, she is driven to go out of her way to express the solitary rogue animal in her nature. The beast of burden swears to use whatever resources she can muster to get herself out of Saint Bernard’s. The second day of school she goes on report for wearing a leather jacket, feather cap, and long snakeskin gloves with her SCUBA gear. On the third day, during physical education, she’s caught by the gym teacher Mrs Dick sitting on the bench in the locker room with her black tights down. Cool as a cucumber, she is showing off the ten-inch ivory mushroom to the other girls in the eighth grade.

  It’s too hot an issue for Mrs Twinkler to handle. She wouldn’t touch the precise reason with a ten-foot pole when she calls Laudette to tell her about her decision to expel the disruptive Black girl. She says simply. “I’m afraid Gloria Beatrice was never a Saint Bernard girl to begin with.”

  The Best Thing That Could Have Happened

  The next afternoon the girl without a school is back in the parlor sitting at the piano, wearing just her robe, her dance tights, and ballet slippers. She is passing the time of day trying to get the change right in Dollar Down Blues when the baby-sitter comes in waving a letter and a refund check certifying Gloria’s discharge from Saint Bernard’s.

  “They made it official, Baby, you’re expelled. When you were young you were good, but I swear you’re getting worse with age. When you get in trouble it looks bad for me, as if old Laudette didn’t raise you right. Look here, Mrs Twinkler put it in writing. She says your mental health may not be so good, and that you should be professionally evaluated. Now what am I supposed to do with you? Expelled! No easy feat in a school that charges such undue tuition. Baby, I’m afraid I’m going to have to find a private reform school for you, where spoiled little rich brats go to have their screws tightened.”

  Gloria puts her head down while her sitter reads her the riot act, and she sweats when she hears the threat of reform school, but doesn’t let Laudette see it. “Lawdy,” she says calmly, with exasperation in her voice, “are you through? You’ve got to stop worrying about me. Didn’t the doctor tell you it’s what’s giving you those warts on your feet? Getting kicked out of school is the best thing that could have happened to me. Why do I need to go to school? I’m not ignorant, am I? We’re rich. Why can’t we hire a tutor to tell the state I’m keeping up with my work at home?”

  Miss Lord knows Gloria can read and write and figure, and what the girl doesn’t know about history, geography and science she more than makes up for with her special appreciation of the arts. “No, Baby, you’re too darn smart, that’s the problem. You think you know it all. There’s other things that school teaches you, things you can’t learn from yourself.”

  “Like what?”

  Although Laudette has only a sixth grade education she knows the answer. “Like how to get along with other people, that’s what!”

  The queen-to-be bops her head to the beat of a new generation and is aware of sounds to come, harmonies and progressions that reject the conventional and fly way-out, like a bird off a limb. Ideas whose times have come put their light in many minds simultaneously. Without ever reading modern philosophy, Glory knows what a pain in the ass other people can be. “Lawdy, as far as I’m concerned other people are hell. They’re all about meetings, ceremonies, churches, corporations, schools, nationalist states. Put people together and they race around like rats, ruining the peace and quiet of the natural world. Look at these damned Nastis. They’re trouble because they’re so well organized. Daddy-o once told me a great man said, ‘Civilization is a thing society will never achieve.’ And I believe it. You always told me Emanual said we’d be better off like children or goofing off all the time like lilies of the field, didn’t you? And I read in The Good Book myself that other people won’t be judged for my life, only I will. You’re too goddamn good, Lawdy. Now tell the truth, weren’t you happier when you were taking care of the hot seven than you are now worrying about about how I do in school or whether the staff is working or going to hell? You can lose your soul by worrying about things that don’t matter.”

  Well spoken, young anarchist. Like the devil she can even use Scriptures to get her point across. The baby-sitter is not so blinded by self-assuredness that she cannot admit that there is something in what Gloria is saying, even though she doesn’t like some of the words she uses to say it. “Well for the time being, while I’m thinking about it, I’ll call up a tutor agency and get you one. But you have to promise to get properly dressed and stay that way, and read some books and magazines about the world around you.”

  Gloria starts breathing easier. When Laudette leaves, she skips up and down the keyboard, singing and counting the quarter notes in the Dollar Down Blues.

  The Four Stooges

  When the night comes, Gloria wants to go uptown so badly she can hear it. “Tonight?” She starts asking every evening, but the sitter always says, “No, no, no, I’m too tired tonight.”

  Through a state-accredited home tutoring agency Laudette finds a bovine middle-aged man named George Burger to come to the house. Burger chews gum and lows on for five hours a day in the first story library, telling Gloria all about the Beantown Tea Party, least common denominators, dangling participles, and cumulus clouds.

  When three o’clock rolls around, Gloria runs down to her booth at the Kronos Coffee Shop, drinks coffee, and blows smoke rings.

  “Now that I’m not in school any more,” she tells Thalia, “it’s really swell, no uniform, no hassles. And with the tutor, as long as you pay him, you pass.”

  To manage the money coming into and going out of the house, Sarah has Harry’s accountant. He has instructions to apportion whatever funds Laudette thinks she needs for bringing up Glory; he also pays the bills and the staff’s salary. However the responsibility of looking after those old hands at goofing off hangs entirely around the neck of Miss Lord.

  Since day one, the staff has been in opposition to her; they have never seen her as a friend. Since day one hundred, when she made the complaint to Sarah that w
ould have resulted in Pearly and Mona being fired had she not chosen to let them have another chance, the four of them have shared a grudge against her. They have always called her “squealing rat” behind her back. Now, with the Mrs gone they call her “Miss Lard” to her face. They challenge her authority by neglecting their work. Pearly and Mona go back to spending entirely too much time at the kitchen counter warming their stools over a pot of hot coffee with Kitty and Shepp.

  Laudette knows she is the reason for the snickering in their conversation, the big butt of their jokes. She should fire them, she knows, they dare her to do it, but her X-rated conscience, her effort to imitate Emanual, prevents her from doing so. She is happy being miserable; the persecution by her underlings gives her the opportunity to return good for evil.

  This darn staff is the cross I have to shoulder, she tells herself.

  “Excuse me, Mona, I notice that the flowers in the library have been dead for three days” … “Pearly, did I remind you already that the car needs to be serviced this week?” … “Shepp, perhaps you and Kitty could wash some of those dishes in the sink. Last night I couldn’t find a clean plate to eat from.”

  These most kindly-phrased requests are met with rancorous smirks. The boss is big, but that’s about all. Her apologetic tone earns her nothing but scorn. “We’re just on our break, Miss Lard,” says spokesperson Pearly, affecting his proper Grammar School valet accent that at first so impressed Laudette and now makes her sick. “Doesn’t it say somewhere in the Statutes of Liberty, or the Notice you colonies gave His Majesty that coffee is the inalienable right of every Freewayfaring worker?”

  “I worked for a real lady once,” offers Mona, “whose great-great-grandfather helped throw the tea in Beantown Harbor.”

  “And that tea party was probably over quicker than your coffee break,” Laudette snaps. “It’s been sixty-seven minutes. Now please come on, get lively! There’s work to do!”

  They force her to exercise her authority because they know how reluctant she is to do so; they exchange looks of exasperated patience with one another when they go about their work, leaving Laudette with the feeling that she is a spoilsport, an unreasonable stickler for rules and regulations.

  The staff’s resentment of Laudette is no secret, but something else is. At this point in our story our father Moe is only four years old and my brother and I, both waiting to be born, have respectively twenty-six and nineteen years ahead of us before we are formed in the womb of Glory, so it is not hindsight, but because my brother whose narration I mediate is an omniscientist, having, like the Purple Haze, been to eternity and back, we can be witness to things Grandma Sarah, Harry and Laudette never knew at the time. They could have known, had Laudette made a more thorough investigation of Gloria’s reports of seeing Pearly exchange papers with the man in the yellow suit behind the newsstand.

  It’s easy to see your own flaws in others. The real squealer is not Laudette. The help is more than unhelpful, they are unfaithful. The man behind the stand is none other than Sunset Sam Hunkel, the private investigator hired by Harry’s sister Hilda to keep an eye on the museum and its inhabitants. The paper Sam gives Pearly contains an envelop with money for him and the others. The paper Pearly gives Sam has a written report on the goings-on in the house.

  “What’d’ya got for me this week, Wheatstraw?”

  “The kid got kicked out of school for playing with a dildo. The old lardass broad is going to crack any day now, mark my words.”

  Thus the staff were serpents all along, paid spies who keep their eyes open for any inside information which Hilda might find useful to launch some sort of disinheritance suit either against her brother or his heirs.

  Furthermore the four stooges are motivated to undermine Laudette’s power. Sam always reminds Pearly, “There’s something extra in it if you stir up some trouble where none exists, if you know what I mean.”

  Now that the Mrs is away and the girl is putting a strain on her sitter they all agree that this is the time to test “Miss Lard.” Their work slow-down has the added intent of pushing her into doing something they can stooge about.

  Rats!

  Viper Mad

  Autumn comes to its peak around the Apple, and Laudette walks in the park. Now that she has it, the power that she craved weighs heavily on her stocky shoulders. It’s not so easy when you’re really the one in charge. She sits on a bench, ankle deep in the colors of the falling leaves, breathing the crispy, smoky October gold in the air and counting to ten, going over in her mind the things that worry her and the things that count.

  Most people have a job they can come home from, but mine is always there waiting for me … damn that Sugar! She’s halfway around the world, having a ball with her fruity friends. I’ll bet she’s not worrying. Heaven only knows when we’re going to hear from her. She left me holding the whole bag! The truth is if I don’t worry, who will? Nobody, exactly nobody, that’s who. It’s not my fault that child was born unsocial as a wild animal, and that the staff is content to be malcontent good for nothings. Yes, indeed, I was a lot looser, and happier too, before Sugar came and got me out of Kane’s Top Hat Club. I do declare Baby might be right. I’m sick and tired of being a model of goodness for the baby, of trying to set a proper example. I’ve been working almost thirteen years now and haven’t taken one vacation, and hardly had a day off. I’m taking a vacation now, right where I feel most comfortable. The most important thing is saving my own soul. Let the rest of them go to hell if they want to.

  Through such contemplations, and the smell of burning leaves having tender and nostalgic associations for her, Laudette experiences a measure of the wisdom of detachment. She comes to a mild state of euphoria.

  She spends the following day, Gloria’s fourteenth birthday, hollowing pumpkins and carving faces into them. On the spookiest evening of the year every corner of the house is smiling with the fatuous light of jack-o’-lanterns. Then in honor of Glory she sets fifteen candles on a honey cake and, as she sets the match to the one to grow on, calls the Bee to see by singing “happy birthday.”

  Gloria is happy for the attention, and glad that Laudette is lightening up but, she thinks, what a boring way to spend a birthday! She has to wonder how an in-house party with her sitter can outdo getting dressed up and going to the Cootie Club.

  Knock, knock. Someone’s making a racket at the front door.

  “I wonder who that can be?” says Laudette, with a give-away grin. “Oh, probably, trick or treaters. See who’s there, will you, Baby? Shoo them away.”

  Gloria peeks through the peephole.

  “Boo! Mademoiselle,” says a gravelly voice.

  What a treat! It’s uncles Early and Bones. She notices right away Bones is carrying a leather case that contains his saxophone.

  Laudette invites the staff to join them. “It’s your good-bye party too, snakes. Golden Rules of Xistential kindness or not, you’re fired. First thing in the morning I want you all marching. Funny how it happens to be the Feast of Saints.”

  The stool pigeons know Hilda Swan has a lawyer who will contest Laudette’s authority to fire them. As for now, they turn their noses up at eating cake with the likes of Earl and Bones.

  To make things more fun, Gloria’s uncles spread the world around town that there’s a party going on for a very special young lady on Easy Street. Knock, knock. Ring, ring. In twos, threes, fours, and fives about seventy people, kooky cats as well as elegant ladies and gentlemen, make an entrance, all bearing gifts of cake, ice, beer, wine, and liquor. The group is congenial and not too raucous, considering the racket at the last fruit and nut meeting. Everyone wishes Gloria a happy birthday, and goes off with due respect to find a niche in the house. Even those who crank up the phonograph in the library and set to swinging up and down in the front hall do it with cool.

  Neat, Gloria thinks, it’s like having the Cootie Club right in my own pad.

  After having her cake, she goes with Laudette, her uncles, and abou
t two dozen of her guests into the back parlor and the party really begins. Earl sits right down at the piano and goes into a warm serene spiritual vein, playing full gospel chords that create a peaceful major key sanctuary. Bones takes out his horn, reaches back to his roots too, and uncorks a hank of hymn in a cool sweet hoarse falsetto. In such a small room, the giants of jazz are larger than life.

  The guest of honor has some cushions in the corner for when she takes five from piano practice. Tonight she sits upright there, cross-legged, her heels on her thighs, attentive as a warrior at council, or a swami on cloud nine, taking in the people, the night, and the music. The others take their seats on the remaining chairs and on the floor. When those revellers outside hear the live music rattling the walls, they click off the phonograph and come down the hall to hear.

  Laudette flops on the couch and sighs, “Ah, when I hear music like this, I rest assured my sins are forgiven.”

  Gloria agrees. She closes her eyes, and there is nothing else in the world but the music: the thrill of the thunder sound in the old piano as Earl’s sure, strong, sweaty hands roll like a river. And how clear and loud Uncle Bonesy blows his horn! They slack off together into some minor alternatives, some standard and some idiomatic blues, a passage that builds a bridge into the old ballad I Don’t Give A Darn.

  “Ooh yes,” Laudette murmurs, pleased when she recognizes the tune.