by Burt Levy
Julie and me had another round of embalming fluid ourselves, and then Carson Flegley came around to take anyone who wanted on a Halloween tour of his mortuary. Truth is, I felt a little nervous about it. I mean, this wasn't exactly the spook train ride at Palisades Park. No, this was the real McCoy, and Julie didn't look real thrilled about the idea, either. But it would've been worse to just stay by the punch bowl and listen to all the catcalls and bolk-ba-bok-bolk chicken cackles when everybody else filed out of the room. So we got in line and followed Carson Flegley down the hall and up a flight of stairs to the second floor. I'd never thought about it before, but every funeral parlor I'd ever seen had either a second floor on it or a wing with no chapels in it, and up those stairs and behind those closed doors was where the actual business part of the funeral parlor business went on. Not the bodies or anything (those are kept down in the Cool Room in the basement), but rather where the dollars-and-cents money transactions take place that pay for things like new hearses and marble headstones and hopped-up MG TDs. There were a couple quiet offices with heavy wooden conference tables off to one side and thick, sound-deadening wallpaper on the walls (so you could handle more than one set of sobbing, red-eyed relatives at a time when business was good) and just across the hall. . . the showroom!
"The what? " somebody asked.
"The showroom," Carson said menacingly, rubbing his hands together and rolling his r's like Bela Lugosi. But everybody was looking at him like they didn't understand, so he switched back to his everyday pip-squeak voice and explained. "You know," he said simply, "for the caskets. . . ." And with that, he opened up the heavy, leather-covered door so we could follow the back of his cape into this low, dimly lit room where a dozen or so caskets of various size, material, color, trim, hardware, and most of all price range were arranged on raised, carpet-covered stands. It looked like Count Dracula's New Car Showroom. "This place gives me the creeps," Julie whispered in my ear.
"Yeah," I whispered right back. "Me, too."
But lots of Carson's other guests seemed to be enjoying the hell out of it, laughing and sniggering and making sick jokes and even lying down in some of the merchandise to try them on for size. "Hey, be careful now," Carson Flegley warned them in his normal, highly excited voice, "those things are expensive! "
"Hey, what's this one over here?" somebody asked.
We wandered over and there on one of the stands was the biggest damn coffin you ever saw. Why, it was as wide across as a damn grand piano, and painted a smooth, creamy ivory with gold gilt trim and handles. Jeez, was it ever huge. "Oh," Carson said sheepishly, "that's what we call our, um, er, well, our Lard-Ass Model. Every big funeral parlor carries one. After all, you gotta have something on hand if a really, ahh, large loved one passes on. . . ."
I looked all around and the only guy anywheres near big enough for it was Big Ed Baumstein. And even he would've had room to spare. Even in his gorilla suit. "Jeez," Big Ed whistled, eyeballing the workmanship, "it looks pretty damn fancy, don't it?"
"Well, uh, it's sort of like this, see," Carson mumbled, even more sheepish than before. "When somebody that large passes away, the family doesn't really have very much to choose from, you know? So we sort of, um, only put the very top-of-the-line model on display."
"What a splendid idea!" Colin St. John toasted from the back of the room. He was dressed up as a damn pilgrim, can you believe it?
"Boy, that thing looks big enough for two!" guillotined French nobleman Charlie Priddle observed.
"It bloody well does, doesn't it?" R.A.F. pilot Tommy Edwards agreed, leaning unsteadily against a nice polished mahogany model. "I say, Buddy, why don't you and your young lady try it on for size?"
"Geez, no, Tommy. I couldn't . . . ."
And of course that was all I had to say to get the catcalls and chicken cackles started up around us, and they kept on growing louder and more insistent until there was nothing left for me and Julie to do but either slink out and never see any of those people ever again or lie down together in that creamy white casket and let them lower the lid on us. Just for a second, you know?
And so there we were, lying side by side in the pitch-black darkness while all the racing people milled around that huge white coffin, laughing and drinking and carrying on. But they might as well have been in another room, since all we could hear was a faint shuffle of feet and a few muffled, indistinguishable voices. It was darker in there than anyplace I'd ever been, but it wasn't scary at all because I could feel Julie all warm and cozy next to me and smell the heavy scent of her gypsy perfume working its way up my nostrils. Without thinking, I let my hand sneak over where it wanted to go. "Hey!" she whispered, not sounding mad at all. "Whaddaya think you're doing, Palumbo?"
"Nothing," I whispered back, leaving my hand exactly where it was. And she let me, too. And that's when I heard myself propose marriage to Miss Julie Finzio, there inside that wide, white casket big enough for two laid out in the showroom of Carson Flegley's funeral home on Halloween night with all my costumed racing friends gathered around us but somehow a million miles away.
I guess there are things in this life that you worry and reason and agonize over and try your best to evaluate in advance, and then there are the things you just do. And even when they turn out wrong, those are always the ones that feel best when you do them. It's like what Tommy once said about driving: "You can't bloody think about what you're going to do. You've got to know. By the time you try to think over a situation and decide what to do, it's generally over." And that's what it was like asking Julie to marry me. No matter what happened afterward or how much it made my guts go hollow at the time, I knew.
When they finally opened the lid, everybody saw that Julie was crying just a little, and I suppose they all thought it was because she was scared or something. Which just goes to show how little any of them knew about my Julie and what kind of a tough, gutsy girl she was. But they'd find out soon enough. No question about it.
Later Carson led all the real die-hard sickos downstairs for a peek in the Cool Room where they kept the stiffs that were waiting to get dressed and planted, but that sounded way too grim for Julie and me. So we just hung back and let all the mainline ghouls file down ahead of us, then headed back into the main parlor, grabbed ourselves another couple bottles of embalming fluid, and went out into the parking lot. It was dark and cold and peaceful out there, with a chilly fall wind rattling through the naked tree branches and a few withered-up leaves scraping across Sherman Boulevard like fiddler crabs scuttling for their holes. You could feel winter coming, and so Julie and I climbed into Old Man Finzio's tow truck and started it up to get the heater going. But we didn't drive off just yet. We just sat there in the cab with the engine running, not turning on the lights or the radio or even saying much of anything. And then Julie leaned over and gave me the best damn kiss she'd ever given me in her life. Not the hottest, maybe, but without question the absolute best.
Then we just kind of sat there, leaning the tops of our heads together against the seat cushion, watching all the costumed party-goers coming out one by one between the pale, yellowish-gold carriage lights flanking the main entrance of Carson Flegley's funeral home. And as I watched them climb into their Jags and MGs and what have yous and heard them pull out on the choke cables and grind the starters and stumble off into the night, I knew deep down inside that I'd be seeing a lot of them again. Especially if they insisted on trying to drive those things through the winter. I knew I'd be going to the races with some of them, too. Oh, maybe not all the races. But at least some of them. I just hoped that would be enough, seeing as how I'd been bitten pretty hard by the racing bug myself, and, no matter what else happens, that's a disease you never really get rid of.
Not hardly.
Copyright Statement
THE LAST OPEN ROAD
COPYRIGHT 1994 BY BURT S. LEVY
PUBLISHED BY
THINK FAST INK L.L.C.
1010 LAKE STREET
O
AK PARK, ILLINOIS
60301
WWW.LASTOPENROAD.COM
E-MAIL: [email protected]
WRITTEN AND MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1ST PRINTING JULY: 1994
2NF PRINTING: OCTOBER, 1995
3RD PRINTING: May, 1998*
4TH PRINTING: FEBRUARY 14TH, 2001
5TH PRINTING: OCTOBER, 2002
6TH PRINTING: JUNE, 2006
*ST. MARTOMS PRESS EDITION
OTHER TITLES BY BS LEVY:
MONTEZUMA'S FERRARI, 1999
A POTSIDE COMPANION, 2001
THE FABULOUS TRASHWAGON, 2002
TOLY'S GHOST, 2006
The 200mph Stemroller, 2010
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE USED OR REPRODUCED IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF BRIEF QUOTATIONS EMBODIED IN CRITICAL ARTICLES OR REVIEWS
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
LEVY, BURT S., 1945-
THE LAST OPEN ROAD
1. SPORTSCAR RACING IN THE 1950'S 2. YOUNG MEN 3. TITLE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 94-60833
ISBN#: 0-9642107-2-X