by Rich Leder
The grown men rolled across the kitchen floor, grabbing each other in headlocks like they were twelve and nine years old.
Danny had length and leverage, but Mike had weight and surprise and experience—he had wrestled in school all the way to tenth grade when his shoulder was dislocated in a brutal pin that had ended his junior varsity career. Danny had run track until cigarettes and pot and beer and girls distracted him. He’s still fucking distracted, Mike thought as he fought for control and tried to squeeze the life out of his brother.
“I didn’t lose it, you crazy asshole,” Danny said, fighting back hard. “Gary Shuler took it before I could place my bet.”
“The stand-up comedian?” Mike said, and then everything got strange, which is to say stranger still.
THIS IS WHAT INSANITY MUST FEEL LIKE
Competing with the grief and emptiness he felt for his mother, the befuddlement and rage he felt for being fired, the exasperation and fury he felt for his idiot, irresponsible brother, the apoplexy and terror he felt for the bat-shit crazy Judd Martin, and the confusion and fear and incredulity he felt for Jenny, the Cowgirl Stripper who brought dead dogs to life, competing with all of this was the muscle memory of his high school wrestling moves.
Ankle picks and arm cuts and Piute rolls and cradles. Arm drags and takedowns and half Nelsons and full Nelsons. Mike and Danny rolled across the kitchen, covering themselves with spilled milk and soggy Frosted Flakes.
“How do you know Gary Shuler?” Danny said, leaning a forearm into Mike’s throat.
“How do you know him?” Mike said, executing a reverse and shoving Danny’s face into the floor.
“I signed him to a ninety-day deal,” Danny said, reaching back and digging his fingers into Mike’s face, looking for an eyeball to poke. “He’s a new client. He followed me to the track.”
Mike chomped down on Danny’s middle finger, which, instead of an eyeball, had found Mike’s mouth—a super personal fuck you. Danny screamed and pulled his hand away.
“Why did he follow you to the track?” Jenny said. The Frosted Flakes had landed at her feet. She lifted the box and snacked on the dry sugary cereal.
“To keep me alive. He thought I’d lose the money and then Harvey and Omar would kill me,” Danny said, punching Mike while shooting his legs around and sitting up in such a way that Mike was behind him, his arms wrapped around Danny’s waist
Mike groaned and grunted and strained to control his brother, leaning into him, pulling him one way and then the other, muscling him back down on his stomach. “You would’ve lost the money. You know why? Because you’re a loser. You’ve always been a loser. When you were six years old, you were a loser. And every year after that you became a bigger loser than you were the year before. It made me sick to my stomach to grow up in the same house as you. All my life, I’ve wished you were never born.”
“I mean this from my heart, Mike. I’ve wanted to kill you since Dad left,” Danny said. “I fantasize about killing you. Killing you would be better than sex. Every night, before I go to bed, I pray to God that one day he lets me kill you.”
“Who are Harvey and Omar?” Jenny said.
Danny threw an elbow that caught Mike in the ear. It hurt like hell, but Mike refused to let go. The last time they had fought like this, they were fifteen and twelve and Danny got the upper hand and made Mike cry uncle. There was no goddamn way he was crying uncle this time. They smashed into the overturned table and then crashed into the lower cabinets. This is what insanity must feel like, Mike thought, when a thin slice of your consciousness knows you’ve lost your grip on reality but can’t do a damn thing about it because the rest of you has gone stone-cold crazy.
“A dwarf and a giant,” Danny said. “Sadistic loan shark and his violent sidekick.”
“Ahab and Ishmael,” Mike said, remembering the Hello Kitty, the river stones, and the Bose Wave. “We had a pool party.”
“What do they have to do with it?” Jenny said.
“They gave Greenburg the seventy-five cash and found out about Chachi,” Danny said. “They don’t believe it’s the same dog. They think I bought a two-hundred-dollar poodle at PetSmart and was going to put the rest on a horse, which I was. And I would’ve won four hundred grand, except I never made the bet because of Gary Shuler.”
Mike was flabby and out of shape and his muscles, such as they were, were getting tired, though not as tired as his brain, which was ready to release the final thin line connecting him to the real world. But that final release, Mike sensed, the letting go of what was once his reality, is where he would find the final animal burst of power he needed to choke the ever-loving shit out of his brother.
“This is your fault,” Mike said, cutting the last line and forcing Danny facedown onto the kitchen floor (Danny’s arms under his chest). Mike put all his weight on him, pushing Danny down through the ground, crushing his ribcage, making it hard for his brother to breathe. “You sucked me into your fucked up world, and now my world is as fucked up as yours,” Mike said. “I’ve lost my job, my life, my family, my wife. I’ve lost everything because of you. You know what? You can pay me back by dying.”
“You can’t kill me, Mike,” Danny said, grunting the words out, finding it harder and harder to fill his lungs with air.
“Why not?” Mike said. His body ached, his head hurt, the kitchen was spinning, his nipples were on fire, and the “M” on his chest was throbbing.
“The Oath,” Danny said, coughing and spitting. The way his arms were pinned, his elbows were being pulverized into bone dust.
“Fuck The Oath,” Mike said.
“If you kill me, you break The Oath you swore on Mom’s dying heart,” Danny said. “You’ll burn in hell with Linda.”
“Mom’s in heaven,” Mike said, and saying those words out loud made tears come to his eyes. For the first time since she had died, he allowed himself to see the vision of her having a heart attack at El Caballero Country Club, keeling over her desk, clenching her chest, blinded with pain. He began to cry. But still he would not release the pressure he was putting on Danny. He was physically forcing his flim-flam man brother into and through the floor, where he could then metaphorically bury him forever.
“Not if you break The Oath,” Danny said. “If you swear an oath to someone and then break it, that person goes to hell too, for making you swear an oath you later broke.”
Now Mike saw the paramedics picking his mother up off the floor, strapping her into the gurney, and rolling her out of the club and into the ambulance, oxygen mask in place, IV dripping, Bob Cutting in the background saying, “So goeth the rock of El Cab.” “That’s not true,” Mike said, and he heard his own voice and thought, I sound like a lost fucking soul because I am a lost fucking soul. I am without a soul. I am soulless.
“Ask Jenny,” Danny said.
“Is that true?” Mike said to Jenny.
Jenny placed the box of Frosted Flakes on the counter, grabbed a kitchen chair, and moved it right next to the brothers, who were snorting and grunting and wheezing. She sat beside them and said, “What’s true is that if we don’t undo The Oath, you two will kill each other, and I’ll never get my money. So first, we undo The Oath.”
“How do we do that?” Mike said. He was red in the face and felt like he was having a heart attack like his mother. Cramping pain gripped him from his calves up his thighs through his buttocks and up his back across his chest and down his arms. His head was exploding. Below him, Danny was turning blue.
“I bring your mother back to life,” Jenny said, “and we get her to release you.”
Mike let go of Danny and fell back on his butt against the lower cabinets, Frosted Flakes plastered to the side of his face and somehow stuck up his ass, pulling at his hair, tears streaming down his face. He had never felt so upside down and inside out. Gravity? No gravity? He could no longer tell. “This is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy, this is cra
zy…”
Danny rolled onto his back, soaked with spilled milk, trying to regain feeling in his ribcage and elbows. “The funeral’s tomorrow,” he said, rasping.
“Then you have to hurry,” Jenny said.
A WHOLE OTHER CAN OF SHIT
Danny decided that doom was on the horizon because the plan included Paul the Pervert. The clown stood beside the Pathfinder, smoking his horrendous cigar, wearing his bloodstained, rat-shit costume, his supinated Docksiders, his creepy makeup, and his rainbow wig, watching Mike and Danny argue about whether the back seat should be up or down.
“We’re not going to sit her up like a fucking puppet. We’re going to lay her down in the back and cover her with a sheet. Rest in peace, Dan. Ever heard of it?” Mike said, putting his hand on the rear seat to push it in the down position. Both back doors were open, and Mike was leaning into the Nissan on one side, and Danny was leaning into it on the other side, holding the seat in its up position.
“She won’t know the difference,” Danny said.
Since their Frosted Flakes fight in the kitchen, they had both showered again and stayed on opposite sides of the house until it was time to drive to George Edwards Mortuary in Mission Hills on Chatsworth. Now it was time: eleven o’clock on Friday night. It was one hundred five degrees.
“If we get pulled over and she’s sitting up, we can say she’s asleep,” Danny said. “What do we say if she’s lying down in the back under a sheet, Mike? Use your head. Cops don’t like corpses in cars in the middle of the night.”
“Cops pull us over, I’ll put my arm around her, and we’ll make out like sloppy drunks,” Paul said.
“You know she’s dead, right?” Danny said.
“Dead chicks dig me,” Paul said.
“I am not sitting in the same car as this clown,” Mike said.
Paul the Pervert was part of the plan because the George Edwards Mortuary had a security system that was wired into the electric panel, and the clown, who was working for LA Water and Power, a guy on the line when he got electrocuted on Fairfax, was the only one Danny knew who A: could find and flip the breaker to kill all the power in the building, B: was idiotic enough to come along and steal a dead woman from a funeral home, and C: was so entirely insane that no jury anywhere would believe his testimony should they get arrested and hauled into court.
The back seat stayed up, and the ride to Mission Hills was silent. Danny drove, Mike rode shotgun, and Paul sat behind the driver. Danny used the quiet time to consider the items that were bothering him.
Item number one was that he was driving to a mortuary to steal his dead mother’s body so that Jenny could breathe on her and bring her back to life. He knew this was an item he had to reconcile, but the idea of it was so big and bright and hot it was like looking into the sun.
So he turned away and considered item number two, which was the seventy-five thousand dollars in cash money that Gary Shuler had taken from him before he could place what would have been the winning four-hundred-thousand-dollar bet on Let There Be Linda. He couldn’t begin to understand how or why that had happened, and thinking about it gave him a headache.
So he moved on to item number three, which was the fact that Harvey and Omar were going to kill him if he couldn’t resolve issue number two, so scratch contemplating item number three, which was a tad too frightening to consider while he was driving to a freaking mortuary.
Instead, he marched forward to item number four, which is where his brain had wanted to go since he’d decided to consider the items that were bothering him.
Item number four was Jenny.
Four point one was the color of Jenny’s eyes. They were brown the first time he’d met her, green later on, and blue today. He had surreptitiously looked and looked and looked at her since she’d arrived in the afternoon to collect her sixty thousand dollars, and he didn’t think she was wearing contacts. And if she wasn’t wearing colored lenses, then what the hell was happening with her eyes?
Four point two was her clothes. What was with the sexy cowgirl get-up? Where did that come from? Jenny had gone from a Catholic school mouse to a super model in three days. Normal women don’t do that, Danny thought. Of course, normal women don’t raise the dead, so there was that. And her lacy black bra. There was that too.
But it was four point three that rang all the bells and blew all the whistles. I can’t get her out of my mind, Danny thought. She’s a smoking hot mystery, and I can’t get her out of my mind.
The reason item four point three was a problem was because Danny had a rule about falling for clients, and the rule was: don’t do it. Falling for clients was bad for business. Falling for any woman, in fact, was bad for business. But Jenny was definitely not just any woman, and now he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He would have to make some decisions about that, formulate some kind of plan of attack, but not right now because right now they had arrived at the George Edwards Mortuary.
As the mortuary’s accountant, Mike had known what kind of security system George Edwards had installed—and what it cost, and how much of the purchase price could be deducted as a business expense—and Mike had told the clown, and the clown had seen that system all around LA.
Paul had said that killing the main breaker would cut off the security system but that the security company would read that as a power outage and not a break-in, that they would contact LA Water and Power to report the outage and that they would then call the business owner and tell him the same thing. And because they weren’t calling with news of a break-in but instead were calling to say that LA Water and Power was going to check on the outage and fix it fast, then probably the business owner wouldn’t drive to the mortuary in the middle of the night and might not even contact the police. And even if the police were contacted, it wouldn’t be reported as an emergency, so the cops might take their time cruising by.
In the clown’s estimation, they would have fifteen minutes to get inside the building, collect the deceased, and drive back to Mike’s house in Woodland Hills.
Danny pulled the Pathfinder into the mortuary, drove around to the back of the building, and parked under the wide porte-cochere next to a hearse, no doubt the hearse that would carry his mother to the cemetery tomorrow morning after the service.
Paul found the breaker box on the side of the funeral home and killed the main switch. All the interior and exterior lights went out. Mike shined a flashlight on the back door, Danny kicked it in, and the three of them stood there looking at the open doorway. As expected, no alarm went off. It was coal black inside the building, and it was silent. The time was eleven thirty.
Mike wore a black suit with a black tie and looked like John Belushi in The Blues Brothers. Danny wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and black Nikes. They looked like abject amateurs for the illegal task at hand, but compared to Paul the Pervert, who stood beside them in his rat-shit clown gear, they looked like consummate professionals.
“She’s not going to get up and walk over here,” Paul said.
“Stop talking,” Mike said.
“Let’s go,” Danny said.
They went through the busted back door into the mortuary. Pointing his flashlight ahead of them, Mike led the way through the maze of carpeted hallways to the huge viewing room. They stopped in the double doorway, and Mike shined his light from one end of the room to the other.
George had set out more than one hundred folding chairs in the vast open area because Mike had told him to expect a big crowd, which is what El Cab general manager Bob Cutting had told Mike, to expect a big crowd. At the far end of the viewing room, there was an open casket between the plush curtains.
“We’re the first funeral tomorrow morning?” Danny said to Mike.
“First funeral,” Mike said.
“So she’s definitely in the casket?” Danny said.
“Definitely in the casket,” Mike said.
“We should do this,” Danny said.
“We should,” Mike said.
“Walk right over there and do it,” Danny said.
“Walk right over there,” Mike said.
But they just stood in the dark silence, looking across the sea of seats at their mother’s open casket, illuminated by the beam of Mike’s flashlight.
What the fuck am I doing? Danny thought. It’s one thing for a person’s life to spin wildly out of control, for a person to lose his house and his office and get wrapped up with a cocaine-addicted dentist and a crazy comedian cop and a sadistic dwarf loan shark, but it’s another thing altogether for a person to bust into a mortuary and steal his dead mother out of her casket. That’s a whole other can of shit.
To open that can of shit, Danny discovered, was to ride a speeding roller coaster down memory lane, which is where Danny went. There he was with Linda at Little League practice, glowing with pride that his mom could hit ground balls to the infield better than any of the dads. There he was in the kitchen of the small yellow house, scarfing down his mother’s enchiladas—the best enchiladas anywhere, ever. There he was in high school, his mother defending him to the asshole assistant principal after Danny had been caught cutting biology class to sit in on another theater class. There he was, and there he was, and there he was, and there he was…and there she was, right now, dead of a heart attack and lying in the open casket across the black windowless room.
Mike turned off his flashlight, and they stood there for what seemed like thirty minutes but was in fact only three. They were surrounded by dark utter silence. No ticking clocks, no whirring HVAC, no phones ringing, no piped-in Muzak, no padded footsteps hurrying down carpeted halls. It was, Danny imagined, like standing deep inside a mountain tunnel—no light, no sound, no air, no world. Except his brother was beside him. And so was Paul the Pervert.
“She’s not going to get up and walk over here,” the clown said.
“Stop talking,” Mike said.