by Brian Hodge
"I come and I put flowers on all the graves. They're all buried together. Family plot. Except this year. I'm a couple of days early and all the graves are empty."
The chainsmoking detective snorted like a bloodhound on a hit of cayenne. This guy's story kept mutating. This guy was from Los fucking Angeles. Too-long workdays always started like this.
At least dead people didn't have to eat bullshit by the spoonful.
3.
"Yeah, you! Pssst!"
4.
Russ debarks. En route to the rental counters he watches outbound fliers suffer security. He has already been processed. Now he is invisible.
By rote, he stacks 'em up and knocks 'em down. Car, hotel, room service. Good tipping renders one less invisible. He hates being called sir or Mister Pitt.
Valley View Memorial Park reeks of mown lawn in need of more irrigation. Too countrified for his nose. He could smell his way to the family plot if he was blind.
Mondo bucks have gone to secure the "right" suburb in this here Necropolis. His sister Darianne has a better view post mortem than she'd ever enjoyed while breathing.
It is like a circle for psychomancy, a Druid ring of granite and marble markers. The eldest stone is for Ross Wright Christian Loret, great maternal grandfather. At the hub of the circle is Mister Mort.
Mister Mort reaches skyward to snatch chunks of heaven. The beatific expression chiseled onto his face suggests he can see something we can't; something wonderful. Lunch, perhaps. He is quite androgynous. Miz Mort, perhaps. He is the only tenant not dead, because the igneous rock from which he is carved has never lived.
Mister Mort is enrobed and sandaled, very Biblical. From the foot of his pedestal to the end of his upstretched fingertip is about fifteen feet.
The ceiling in Darianne's studio apartment had been touchable from the floor. On Mister Mort's imposing plinth is engraved the family name in letters eighteen inches high.
PITT.
Very big deal.
A name shown no mercy by any grade-schooler. It rhymes with too many facile cusswords and suggests too many bodily functions. Russ has suffered for his name. In the Westwood phonebook he once found a listing for a family actually named Sauerbutt. Now that would be a genuine nightmare.
Russ wonders if having a weird name was one of the last things on Darianne's mind when she died. She had spent her final month in an ICU, withering like a carnation out of water on a hot day and never savoring full consciousness. Killed by her own blood. Her brain stopped working and Darianne went to meet Mister Mort.
Russ has developed the affectation of talking to the statue, since he has heard that talking to, yourself is a sign that you are crazy. The name Mister Mort is his invention. There is no one around to contest this. Russ shuts the iron gate to the footpath and strolls among dead strangers. He sees Mister Mort gradually poke over the hummock to greet him. He always sees the upstretched fingertip first. Every time.
"Allo, Monsieur Mort," Russ says to himself in a feelthy French accent.
A manicured trail engirds the circle of grave markers like the outer edge of a wagon wheel. One can mosey around the circle and browse the
Pitt family timeline of Beloved Mothers and Loving Fathers and Julia Bernford Pitt, who at six months had suffocated on her own malfunctioning infant pipework, and whose plot marker is engraved with a lamb, a fashion popular through the Roaring Twenties.
Here is Darianne, of course, and Ricky. His half-sister Simone. And Mom and Dad and Grandpa, alias Leaver Millard Mortimer Pitt. It occurs to Russ that he has named Mister Mort for his grandfather, unconsciously.
He is passing down a name after all.
That one is still a big enough deal to guilt Russ out whenever he is two drinks past his ceiling and sleeping solo. No kids. The Pitt line ceases when Russ ceases. Morn had dutifully doled forth a lot of well-meaning grief on this topic. Some people, thinks Russ, progress solely in terms of animal bottom lines. If you have graduated, are not imprisoned or terminally ill and are married, then reproduction was the only party topic left for those Christmas and birthday phone calls. Mother's Day. Father's
Day. Thanksgiving. Enough federally-sanctioned caesurae in the work calendar to make Russ second-guess his own life until it hitched and broke.
Mom and Dad are interred side-by-side. If Russ faces the graves, looking more or less dead into Mister Mort's groin, Dad is on the right.
Dad was a southpaw. His favored hand is not the one nearest the resting place of his only wife. Russ wonders if such oversights perturb the departed.
Mom to the left. Then Dad. Celeste Christine and Harvey Millard Pitt. Stroke and a car crash. The tombstones return Russ' gaze and nag. Why didn't you ever make us grandparents?
Because dogs can mate, Russ thinks, too defensively. Spawning takes no talent. Stupid people do it accidentally. Building, incorporating, investing, thinking your way into a name for yourself, this is an itinerary that can still speed Russ' pulse. Rising to the top of your chosen field. Doing well enough to afford such lavish burial real estate.
Dad had set up that last one, before dying himself.
Russ plans to be cremated and scattered. Back to the elements. That way, you never have to worry about being dug up.
Now he can see the plots. A ring of holes, empty graves all. Adrenaline floods. Coffin-sized automat slots in the soil, their dirt floors exposed to sunlight. A barrier of bright yellow tape that repeats DO NOT CROSS over and over. Russ crosses, gape-mouthed, trying to ask the first question, puzzling whom to ask.
Pssst. From the grove.
Russ turns. An incredibly filthy derelict is summoning him from behind the forked bole of a gigantic cottonwood tree. Grinning.
This is too bloody much. Not what Russ needs in his life. He screams epithets at the bum.
The cops staking out the gravesite swoop. By the time Russ can produce any meaningful ID his day had turned to garbage.
What bum, the cops ask. We didn't see any bum. Just you.
Russ has never experienced a bona fide hallucination. This possibility scares him.
At the station the police say they will need to detain him until they can think up different questions. There is no local precedent for this degree of desecration. No investigative method that will hint at the location of the bodies.
Graveyards always appear deceptively safe in daylight.
5.
Russell was thankful to wait in the holding tank. Not a cell, nor as creepy as an interrogation cubicle with ashtrays and a one-way mirror. The old Russell would have craved a cigarette about now; at least Maggie had helped him that far.
From the tank he could see activity in the corridor. Two payphones were mounted on the cinderblock wall above his bench. Steel doors and a hand-through window like the one drive-up tellers used. He'd signed a form that noted he was self-employed. Right now, machines were busy stalking and verifying everything he had ever done.
He carried no pocket change and had no family to phone. There was no one he genuinely wished to advise of his predicament.
Ten more minutes and they'd cut him loose and he'd be out of this mess. A quarter-hour clocked off and he told himself again: Ten more minutes.
Russell's company was called Aloft Limited. As in holding things aloft, that is, suspended. Hanging. Russell Pitt was a coathanger baron. Aloft manufactured wire ones, chrome ones, unthievable plastic ones for hotels. Fancy wooden ones that matched the grooming racks sold by Playboy. Millions of hangers for America's garment needs. People required hangers for everything. To unlock their cars. To wire that stubborn trunk lid shut. To abort unwanted progeny, if the government got any more medieval.
Aloft had successfully branched into mannequins, which were really extremely elaborate coathangers. Aloft had innovated nipples and pubic mounds for their surrogate women, pecs and crotch lumps for the males.
The destruction of defective mannequins had provided the entertainment at one company party. Russell had pre
sided. Layered craniums got gleefully pulverized with baseball bats; it was a lot like a seal hunt with no blood. The employees had laughed rather too stridently amid all this drinking and bashing. Russell had been pretty sure they weren't clobbering the Boss by proxy
When Russell took his own turn at bat, he had thought of his elder half-sister, Simone. Simone had been ash-blonde. The mannequin had been bald because wigs cost money. Nevertheless, the substitution had come easily in his mind's eye. KABOOM. Simone's stand-in head exploded into colored dust real good.
Some grudges outlast those who foment them.
Simone had swung in on a vine from Mom's side of the family at age thirteen, to promptly drive Russell as berserk as any teenager can any preteen. Their first squabble had come over bedroom assignments–who got one to themselves, and who had to share. Young Russell was billeted with younger brother Ricky. It had been his first taste of sexism.
On the day Russell knew Simone's casket was being lowered into the humid embrace of Valley View's turf, he had thought to himself: Here's a room all to yourself, Simone. Like the fit? Snug but accommodating? Enjoy.
Simone had waved bye-bye to the world of mortals from the shooting end of a hypodermic needle.
"Pitts? Or Pitt?"
Russell snapped to, imagining he had just heard another pssst! A cop was casing him through scratchy Plexiglas. Bail had been duly posted.
By whom? Nobody knew he was in Lewistone today. He'd escaped Lewistone long ago to make good in the real world. Success via coathanger. Lewistone was fly-over country.
Bail was bail. The cop guessed some relative, not knowing how absurd this assumption was.
Russell saw his benefactor through the booking desk mirror as he was issued a sealed plastic bag containing his personal property. It was the derelict from the cemetery, the one who had entreated him from behind the trees. The hallucination. He was seedy and threadbare and filthy. He did not smell like an illusion.
His eyes were the technical blue of clean cocktail ice, and gave him away.
It was Grandpa. He still had grave dirt on him.
6.
"Gawdamn. Haven't had me a cup of coffee this good in, what is it? Seventeen years."
It had been that long since Grandpa had presumably gone to meet a maker who wouldn't toss him back into the world like a runt trout.
"You are not my grandfather. You cannot be my grandfather. I will not allow you to be my grandfather."
"Ain't up to you, kiddo."
Grandpa had always called him kiddo.
The man sitting across from Russell harrumphed. Mold sifted from his dry nostrils. Russell watched it swirl in contrails in the coffee. The old man did not seem to mind it. He signaled for another refill and paid close attention to the waitress' legs.
"Leaver Millard Mortimer Pitt." The old man was jaunty and enjoying the hell out of this. "Born at home in Bourbon County, Kentucky, town by the name of Anniford, twenty-ninth of April, eighteen and eighty-seven. My Daddy read me about Jack the Ripper when I was three. I was born a Pittenhaus but the family was Danish. Daddy changed the name when he and Mom and my older brother Francis emigrated. Mom always called Daddy 'Da.' His full name was Frits Whelan Carlsen Pittenhaus and he built outrigger vessels. You saw him a grand total of once, when you were a sprout, and you didn't say anything momentous, but you did throw up on him on account of you ate some stale fish."
This was just too quaint. With too many mystery ingredients.
"You generally saw more of your momma's father. Grandpa Ross."
"You looked all this up," Russell interposed. "Or invented it. I don't–"
"Hold on." The old man's hand was up. "Damn, but it's fine to see what you've grown into. I don't expect you to believe a word of this hooey, Russell. Not yet, no how. You still take after your momma the skeptic. But there ain't no rush. You're just going to sit and chatter awhile with some old coot nutty enough to sling your ass clear of the pokey, because your tailor says you have manners. And I'm gonna drink me about a gallon of this coffee. Thank the saints coffee is still a constant, what with the way everything else in the world flips channels every five seconds. You sit and pay attention. And I'll do the convincing. Deal?"
Russell scanned the restaurant. No candid video. No solace. He shrugged. Never did he speak to street grubs or panhandlers; rigidly he kept eyes front and veered from their open palms and slurred pitches. If you engaged them on any level, even by acknowledging their mere presence, you were courting trouble. This was a lifetime of bum karma catching up with him.
"By damn."
Was this to recapture his attention?
"Sorry. S'j ust I'm having a helluva spell not crushing you to death with a hug, son. Grandson. Jesus H."
That touched Russell. A bit.
He yawned and waved a hand. Get on with it and maybe I'll catch some sleep today, he thought. I'll tune you out and think my way clear over a hot cuppa. The real Grandpa would have just shucked the sleepy seeds from a nap of nearly two decades. Rip Van Pitt. Prattle away.
"Now, the way I see it, you're toting around a world of hurt on account of there was just too goddamn much tragedy pent up in our family. Whole clan dropping like skeeters left and right; a clean house in a decade and change, and only you left. My gosh, the weight of that. You never was much a-one for family rituals–Exmas get-togethers and all that."
Grandpa had always referred to Christmas as Exmas. He had one of those senses of humor that said, by god, if it was funny in 1938, it's funny now gad-dammit.
"So let me ask you: Why do you make this dogged trip every year, on the day your Daddy died?" Impatient, he overrode Russell's response with a hand wave identical to the one Russell had just used. "I'll tell ya. It was because you forevermore had to do things your own way, you prideful son of a gun. Ain't traditions you was contrary to. It was tired, hackneyed, clichéd traditions clenched your butt. You never had to howl to the Moon that you loved your Daddy. You proved it by making that trip, faithfully, year-in, year-out, regular as a postman. A pragmatist like you. Now that's gotta be love."
Not necessarily, Russell thought. Try guilt.
"Now, I loved your Daddy too. Still do. And I never got to say all the neat stuff I'd planned to say to him, either. All that parental bushwah you store in the attic of your head, for later. Tell you one thing, though–neither him nor me liked that Maggie very much."
"Hang on." Russell felt air hitting the dirty laundry of his life, trying to ventilate it. "My father loved her. He understood about the divorce."
"Bull balls. He was polite to her. He was relieved when you two split up because she would have nailed you to a headshrinker's sofa to the tune of thirteen big ones a year. I was relieved, too."
Russell's grandfather had died three years prior to his first marriage, to Elise.
"I know what you're thinking." The old man waggled a finger. Grave dirt beneath the nail. "I chessed that out with your Daddy the way I'm talking to you, right now."
Russell let his cup down gently. Coffee sloshed like sulfuric acid in his stomach.
"Okay–you did see all them holes, am I right?"
"I saw them." Russell fizzled.
"Well. There ya go, then."
Grandpa–if Grandpa this was–signaled for another refill. Could caffeine keep the dead up all night, fidgeting?
Something smacked the coffee shop window right next to their booth. Russell flinched, then saw flecks of scorched flesh sticking to the thick glass.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," he said.
"Nahh. You flatter him. It's just your Daddy."
7.
Russ pounds his way through Aloft's quarterly tax estimate and an ugly migraine. His assistant Debra glides in ashen-faced, without knocking, to inform him that his father has just been pronounced DOA following a vehicular collision two thousand miles to the east.
She does not tell him over the intercom. Nice of her. He puts his papers down after neatening the stack, and tells her to please
shut the door.
Alone, he sits in his office thinking, well, that's it, the last of them.
There are no family photos or memorabilia decorating his wall space. There are certificates of achievement. A couple of civic commendations and a plaque from the C of C. An over-lit 8x10 of Russ shaking hands with the mayor. A color shot of Russ posed next to his factory gate for a Leisure Section article entitled "His Hang-Ups are Our Hang-Ups." A blank patch where there used to be a framed photo of him and Maggie having dinner at Chasen's. But no family. None built by him, nor foisted upon him. No dynasty.
The day his marriage to Maggie had been declared null and void, he'd stowed that last shot. It is as if Maggie has died for awhile, but she doesn't do him the courtesy. After a period just long enough to calm his pain and paranoia, she will burgle her way back into his life with her annoying and judgmental letters…
When Russ checks the clock again it has gone dark outside. Debra loiters. In case he needs coffee. Or something. His father has died today.
It occurs to Russ that he possesses no photographs of himself and his father together in the same shot. None. Not since he was twelve.
Leaver Wright Millard Pitt had departed this world at the wheel of a Lincoln Towne Car after catapulting through an inadequate guardrail and a Rosenman Dairies tanker. The truck driver had spotted gushing gas and hauled ass for seven steps before concussion lifted him off his feet and knocked out his front teeth on the pavement. Raw milk had rained over the off-ramp, sputtering the flames.
Russell remembered the stupid canned music at the funeral service.
Once Dad had taken up residence at Mister Mort's sandaled feet, Valley View's fertilization was complete in terms of Pitts but for Russell's vacant berth. One year following Dad's interment, Russell had decided to repeat the eastward trip. Habit stuck.