A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

  So, if the clumping noise wasn't the morning paper, then what the hell was it? Was it a clomping or a clumping noise?

  Dana edged over to her bedroom window and peered around the curtain. The sun was peeking over the horizon and the only person up and moving was the old lady who lived in the house across the street.

  When Dana was a kid she thought that house was haunted. Now that she was grown up, she knew that house was haunted. The rumor was that the little old lady who lived there, Willie Mae, had killed her husband in 1962, decapitated him with a hacksaw and sat his severed head out for the garbage. Dana sometimes saw his headless shadow roaming the house looking for his head.

  Willie Mae was already up and about and winterizing her flower beds by throwing hay over everything. Willie Mae was the spitting image of those little troll dolls. She had fly-away blue-tinted hair, big gnarled feet and a bulbous nose. She straightened up from her hay tossing, put a hand on the small of her back and stretched. She peered over toward Dana's house. Dana squatted down real quick so she wouldn't be spotted. After a few seconds Dana poked her nose back over the windowsill and had another look-see.

  Willie Mae was still looking toward Dana's front porch, but now she had her hand held up and was shading her eyes. She lifted the eyeglasses that were hanging from a dirty string around her neck and perched them on her nose.

  Willie Mae stumbled backwards like whatever she'd seen had slapped her in the face. She turned and ran pell-mell for her front door.

  Dana had never seen the old woman move so fast. She pressed her nose against the window and tried to see whatever had sent Willie Mae scurrying for her house. That was when she noticed the ice cream truck parked in the driveway. So Kimmy had come home. She squinted at the front porch and didn't see anything except—

  What the heck is that?

  —a foot. A foot with red toenails was hanging off the porch. The foot was connected to a shin and the shin was connected to a knee and the knee was connected to a she-didn't-know-what because she couldn't see that far, but Dana really hoped it was connected to a body because the thought of a leg all by itself on her front porch was enough to make her queasy. And that was saying something because Dana didn't quease up easily. Normally she had the stomach of a goat.

  Dana ran out her bedroom door, leaped down the stairs two at a time with her bathrobe-cape flying behind her, hit the floor with both feet and bounded for the front door.

  She stopped. She took a deep breath and counted to fifteen (a multiple of three) inside her head. She screwed her courage to the sticking point, opened the front door a crack and peeked outside.

  Kimmy was lying on the front porch, naked, tits up.

  Dana closed the door so quickly, she almost squished her own nose.

  She shut her eyes and thought about what she just saw. Was Kimmy napping on the front porch?

  Dana opened the door and peeked out. Kimmy was still there. Naked and motionless. She studied Kimmy, but she couldn't discern any movement. It sure looked like she wasn't breathing. She shut the door.

  Holy crap. Kimmy is dead. That is Kimmy's dead, naked body on my front porch.

  Dana opened the door, took three deep breaths and stepped out onto the porch. She stared at Kimmy's unbreathing body. Dana's brain told her feet to move, but her feet either weren't listening or they were glued to the porch boards.

  She didn't have to check for a pulse to know Kimmy was dead. She could see that she wasn't breathing. An armadillo with tire tracks down its middle laying tits up in the middle of the highway couldn't have been any more dead.

  Dana wished she'd had some coffee before Kimmy had gone and died and thrown herself on the porch. This was going to screw up her getaway.

  She heard a far-off siren and this time her feet started running before her mind told them to. She followed her feet down the porch steps and through the front yard. She ran as fast as her feet would carry her with her long blue bathrobe-cape flowing behind her.

  Dana only ran as far as her own backyard before she pulled a Dooley. Somehow, her left foot got hung up in her bathrobe-cape. The dangling belt wrapped itself around her ankle like a skeleton's hand reaching up from the grave and its bony fingers yanked her foot out from under her and she flew butt-first and head-second around the corner of the house. She had enough forward momentum going that she rolled the next thirty yards.

  While performing these acrobatic somersaults, she saw the topsy-turvy world flash by her eyes. It was like looking at a scrapbook upside down while it spun on a lazy susan in the middle of a merry-go-round on a Ferris wheel. She saw the back of her house; a close-up of grass; a pile of petrified dog doody; a pink and orange sunrise; the back porch; and more dried-up doody.

  As these snapshots whirred by and her body was otherwise engaged with rolling, her brain had time to think. It thought about Dead Kimmy. It thought about who had killed Dead Kimmy. Her brain knew it wasn't her. At this point she was the only suspect she could safely rule out. Sure, Dana hated Kimmy enough to kill her, but somebody had beat her to it. The murderer could be Ellen. Maybe Leona poofed her even though she had asked her not to. Or maybe Maw Maw did the honors. Dana realized if she thought about it hard enough she could find a motive for everybody in town—spurned lovers, unrequited lovers (not many of those), wives of lovers, husbands of lovers, lovers of lovers, you name it.

  As Dana rolled, she asked herself a question: Why did I run when I found her dead? She answered the question: Because she was on my porch and that made it look like I did it and I panicked. Dana believed herself, but she didn't think the police would. I didn't kill Kimmy, but it sure looks like I did.

  Half the town could testify that she had a motive. She had advertised her loathing for Dead Kimmy and not too subtly either. Dana reviewed the list of things she did or said that could incriminate her: There were those highway signs. Puddinhead caught her about to chunk a hunk of concrete at Kimmy. She followed Kimmy in a police cruiser and yelled over the speaker at her. Brenda, the waitress at BJ's, had overheard her talking about killing Kimmy. She'd told Ellen she wished Kimmy would go away. She wrote about getting rid of Kimmy on her to-do list. And to top it all off, she'd become an alcoholic and everybody knew they did things they didn't remember afterward. She had Dooleyed this one up but good.

  Dana rolled to a stop with her nose about three inches away from a fresh grave. She could bury Dead Kimmy's butthole out here with the squirrel buttholes. But there wasn't enough time for digging.

  Dana untangled her limbs and sat up. She was sitting on top of the storm cellar doors. She took that as an omen and decided to do what any sane person would do when it looked like they'd murdered their girlfriend and said girlfriend was lying naked on their front porch—hide the body in the cellar.

  They couldn't arrest her if there was no body. If there was no body, how would they know there was a murder? Dana had watched enough CSI to know that much.

  ***

  Kimmy was dead weight. Dana tried to pick her up and sling her over her shoulder in a fireman's carry, but ended up dropping her on her head. It was a good thing she was dead because that would have hurt.

  The police siren wailed closer and that sent Dana into hyperdrive. A hefty shot of adrenaline coursed through her veins and you know how those people who are good and scared can lift up the front end of a car to get the little kid out from under the tire? That was pure-dee bullcrap because Dana still couldn't pick her up. Instead, she grabbed Dead Kimmy's legs, turned her back to her, hitched Kimmy's knees around her waist and drug her like she was a Clydesdale pulling a beer wagon.

  If Kimmy weren't dead and feeling no pain, Dana might have felt bad about dragging Dead Kimmy's bare ass over the grass and gravel. And—in a passive-aggressive move—over a couple of piles of doggy doody. What was the harm? Dead Kimmy was dead and it made Dana feel better, so why not.

  She put Kimmy's legs down long enough to fling open the storm cellar doors. She then reversed direction and backed down th
e cellar steps, pulling Dead Kimmy by her ankles. Dana's stomach lurched each time Dead Kimmy's head banged down the steps. It reminded her of the time she'd tried to bust open a coconut by throwing it on the sidewalk.

  She pulled Dead Kimmy over to the middle of the cellar's dirt floor, ran back up the steps, grabbed one door handle and then the other and clanged them shut. And just in time too, because Dana heard tires screech to a stop on the street and a siren let out one last long Whoooooop whoop whoop before it cut out.

  Dana headed back down the steps, but—

  Crapola !

  —the hem of her bathrobe-cape was caught in the doors and instead of going down the steps, she found herself hanging in midair. The robe was grabbing her under her arms and her toes couldn't touch the ground. Her feet were still in running mode, moving back and forth, and she looked like Fred Flintstone where his feet move in a big blur before they catch ground and take off. Dana swung back and forth a couple of times, using her legs as momentum like a kid on a swing. Finally, her arms slipped out of the robe and she was tossed to the floor in a heap right beside Dead Kimmy.

  She didn't dare open the doors again to retrieve her bathrobe-cape since the police were there already. She had to hope and pray that they wouldn't see any fuzzy blue material poking out of the doors.

  She wished Wonder Woman had an invisible cape like that Harry Potter character. No, wait, he had a cape of invisibility. What she needed was a cape that was invisible.

  She crawled over to the far wall, rested her back against the cold concrete and hugged her knees to her chest. A good five minutes passed before she realized she was crying.

  She swiped away the tears, disgusted with her weakness.

  Wonder Woman doesn't cry.

  She didn't even know why she was crying. Was she crying for Dead Kimmy or was she crying for herself ? Maybe she was crying for Ellen and what would never be. Probably she was crying for all of those reasons.

  Dana snorted the tears back up and tried to clear her mind enough to think. But the only clear thought that came to mind was that she was up that famous creek without a paddle. If Willie Mae saw Dana moving the body, the police were going to head back this way. If those doors opened up and they found her down here with a naked dead body...How would she explain that?

  WWWWD? What would Wonder Woman do?

  Wonder Woman would've called the police and told them she found a dead body. Too late for that now.

  Dana looked at Dead Kimmy, but she just stared back with glassy eyes and was no help whatsoever. Dead Kimmy looked so vulnerable all naked and not breathing. She was lying on her back and her man-made boobs had low air pressure and were drooping off to her sides. Her nipples were pointing in different directions like Marty Feldman's eyes.

  Dana rolled Dead Kimmy over onto her stomach so she didn't have to look at those weird eyes. Her real eyes, not her nipples.

  No sooner had she sat back down than a thought hit her. She could pray. It couldn't hurt anything. The only trouble was she'd never said a prayer on her own before. Dana and Jesus had never been on what you might call speaking terms. The closest she'd ever come to being religious was when she was nine years old and went to summer Bible School. She made a picture of Jesus out of macaroni, pinto beans and Elmer's glue. Then she ate it. She hoped Jesus wasn't still mad about that.

  Dana squished her eyes shut and prayed out loud, "Dear God…" She stopped. Did God have a first name? How did He know she was praying to Him and not some other god named God? That was when inspiration hit her upside the head. Why should she pray to only one god? Why not hedge her bets and pray to them all? She started her prayer over, "Dear God, Buddha, Allah, Athena, Jehovah, Zeus and that one god with eight arms: Please help me dispose of Dead Kimmy's body so nobody will find out and please don't let me get arrested for her murder."

  She figured as long as she was asking for stuff, she might as well go whole hog. "And please let me be a rich and famous writer." She knew that might be asking too much since she was writing for the niche market of lesbian fiction. She amended her prayer, "And if the rich and famous part is too hard at least let me win one of those Goldie awards. Okay, thanks. Goodbye and amen."

  Dana hung up the line and opened her eyes. As soon as she did, she realized she wasn't quite through with her prayer. She quickly shut her eyes again. "Are you all still there? You haven't hung up, have you? Listen, you can forget all that other stuff if you'll grant me one wish: Can you get Ellen to love me back?"

  Sixteen

  After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only about five minutes, Dana crawled across the dirt floor and sat on the bottom step. She took a deep breath and held it while she counted to thirty-three.

  She heard voices. She quietly crawled up the stairs and listened with her ear pressed against the double doors.

  "I don't see a thing, lady."

  Dana would recognize that voice anywhere. It was Puddinhead. That was good and bad. It was bad because Puddinhead wanted to put Dana away forever and would think this was a great opportunity. It was good because Puddinhead was too stupid to figure out how to do such a thing.

  Dana heard Willie Mae's voice crackle like two pieces of Velcro being pulled apart, "She was on the porch, I'm telling you. Dead. And as naked as the day she was born."

  Puddinhead replied, "Where is this body now? Dead, naked bodies don't get up and walk off."

  "I didn't say she walked off," Granny snapped. "Somebody carried her off. Probably one of those hemophiliacs who like to have sex with dead people."

  "Necrophiliac," Dana muttered.

  "So, you're proposing that a woman got naked, died on the front porch and then somebody stole the body for sexual purposes?" Puddinhead said.

  "Can you think of another reason she was there and now she isn't?" Willie Mae asked.

  "Maybe she was never there to begin with?"

  "Don't sass me, young man."

  "Or maybe she wasn't even dead. Just sunbathing."

  "In October? On a porch? Are you calling me a liar, young man?"

  "No, ma'am, I'm not accusing you of lying," Puddinhead said. "I'm saying you called last week about a gunshot next door and it turned out your neighbor was watching Cops with the volume at full blast. Then a couple of days later you called about a woman abusing her child and it was some cats going at it in the alley. Now you call and say there's a dead, naked woman across the street and some sexual deviant stole her body. "

  Dana put her hand over her mouth to stifle her giggles.

  "Where are you going?" Willie Mae asked.

  "I'm going to drive up and down the neighborhood looking for a sexual predator having sexual intercourse with a dead naked woman."

  "I'm going to report you to your superiors! There's no respect anymore. There was a time when concerned citizens got some respect, when officers of the law actually cared about…" Willie Mae grumbled, her voice fading as she walked away.

  Dana kept her ear pressed to the doors until she heard the faint sound of a car engine turn over and drive away. She counted to three hundred and then creaked open the cellar doors. She peeked out.

  All was clear.

  Dana's mission was to get Dead Kimmy out of the cellar and as far away as possible from her house. She grabbed her bathrobe-cape and threw it back over her shoulders, knotting the arms around her neck. She inched out of the cellar, laid belly down in the grass and army crawled across the backyard toward the driveway and the ice cream truck.

  She peered around the corner of the house. Willie Mae was nowhere to be seen and her old car was gone. She probably had gone to file a report on Puddinhead.

  Dana duck-walked over to the ice cream truck and jumped behind the wheel. Thank God, the keys were left in the ignition. She turned the engine over and flinched when “Jesus Loves Me” blared through the roof speaker.

  She slumped down in the bucket seat, hoping a casual observer would mistake the top of her head for Maw Maw's head. Using only the side
mirrors, she managed to back the truck across the yard and right up alongside the open storm cellar in only one try.

  Dana left the engine running and went back down into the cellar. She whipped off her bathrobe-cape and wrestled Dead Kimmy into it. Dana was thankful that rigor mortis hadn't set in yet because it would be awful to have to break her arms to get her into the bathrobe-cape. She tied the belt around Dead Kimmy's waist and hefted her into a sitting position. Squatting behind her, she wrapped her arms around Dead Kimmy's chest and lifted. She got her about three feet off the floor before Dead Kimmy slipped out of her grasp and plunked down hard on her butt.

  The next time Dana tried to lift her, she had her arms around Dead Kimmy's waist and her hands locked together. This time she got her all the way into a standing position, but it was like balancing a wet noodle on its end and Dead Kimmy crumpled to the ground.

  Dana gave up before her back gave out. She grabbed Dead Kimmy by the wrists and drug her to the bottom of the stairs. She pulled as hard as she could and managed to get Dead Kimmy's butt off the floor and about three stairs up. Dana leaned her back, buried her right shoulder into Dead Kimmy's belly, flopped her top half over her shoulder and lifted.

  Dana staggered under Dead Kimmy's dead weight up the stairs and into the daylight. She dropped the body, ran around the ice cream truck and opened the passenger door.

  She raced back to Dead Kimmy, drug her up alongside the door and wadded her inside. Dead Kimmy ended up with her head in the floorboard, her butt in the seat and her feet on the dashboard. She was curled up tighter than a rolly-polly bug. It took Dana another five minutes of pushing and pulling before she got Dead Kimmy's feet below her head.

  Dana turned to shut the door when she heard a noise like sweaty thighs ripping off a vinyl car seat. She looked at Dead Kimmy and saw that she had slid down in her seat and that the noise she heard actually was sweaty skin sliding down vinyl. Dana pushed Dead Kimmy's butt back up into the seat and, this time, held her in place with the seat belt.