by Andrew Post
“Yes, in my house, Ted. I’m looking right at…Rover, as we speak.”
“So you want him taken to the special farm in the sky, is what you’re saying?”
“Yes, Ted. Do you have somebody?”
“Well, a buddy of mine said he just made a new friend. They haven’t used them before, but this might be a way for them to get a try-out.”
“I don’t want somebody who’s brand new to this shit, man. I need somebody who knows what they’re doing. Don’t you have a cleaner or somebody who specializes in dead…dogs?”
“I have a cleaner, yes, but he is currently on vacation in the Keys with his grandkids.”
“That doesn’t help me much.”
“No, it does not. All right, here, I got their address; I’ll text it to you. Hawthorne Funeral Home. Ask for Amber.”
“Wait. A funeral home will take care of a dead dog?” Frank said, pulling the phone away from his ear a second to check the screen. The text Ted had sent had the address. A neighborhood across town, not far from where Frank used to live with his wife.
“According to my buddy,” Ted said, “they’ve hit hard times and they’re looking for a side hustle.”
“So they’re first-timers?”
“Would you prefer to bury Rover in your backyard?”
“Okay, so what do I do? Just drive it over to this Amber person in my car, or what?”
“Well, you could try emailing it to her but, forgive my doubting nature, I don’t think that’ll work real good.”
Frank knuckled his forehead. His arm still hurt. All he could smell was alcohol swabs, blood, and gunpowder, filling each breath. “They’ll take it no questions asked?”
“According to my guy, yeah. Should be as easy as returning a video to the video store. Chick he said he talked to apparently sounded real enthusiastic about starting ASAP.”
“Should be easy as that? Should be? I don’t like should, Ted.”
“What do you want me to do about it, Frank? I can’t leave. I got the kids here. Nadine’s still in Cedar Rapids.”
“Have you at least met this funeral home chick, this Amber person?”
“I haven’t, no.”
“What if I get there and she freaks out and changes her mind? What then?”
“Let’s pause a second, Frank, and discuss your options as they presently stand in front of you. You have a dead dog in your house and you don’t want Rover’s friends to be disappointed tomorrow morning finding out he’s dead, because they might get mad at you and bite you a little – or a lot. With it currently…nine thirty-six now, that leaves you only a handful of hours to decide what you wanna do. You can take Rover to the funeral home and risk her potential freak out or you can sit there and get rabies tomorrow morning wishing you’d taken the chance and gone.”
“What do I do with Rover if she changes her mind?”
Ted sighed. “That I don’t know, Frank. You’ll just have to bury him somewhere, I guess, and hope they find him long after you’ve gone up to the special farm in the sky following a long, happy life.”
* * *
There were dents in the carpet where their rented furniture used to stand. Amber and Jolene shouted at each other, their voices echoing in the empty reception area of the funeral home.
“Do you have any idea how illegal that is?” Jolene was saying.
“I know it’s illegal. It’s super illegal. But think about what kind of money we could make. The dude I talked to said he pays a thousand dollars per gallon of blood, if it’s O-negative. Think about that. We probably dump hundreds of gallons into the waste tank every year. We were flushing money down the toilet, Jolene. And two hundred thousand dollars for one kidney! Nobody will know if we take one stupid little kidney from somebody. Who’ll check?”
“But you haven’t met this Rhino guy. You’ve only texted with him. Anyone can sound trustworthy through text messages. What if it’s some kind of, you know, sting or something? It’s almost worse if he is legit. Then we’re in some kind of criminal underworld, in people’s favor and shit. I don’t want that. I just wanna run a regular business, doing what we do, and not have to worry about the police kicking down our door because we’re trafficking human body parts.”
“I kind of thought you’d be more receptive to this idea,” Amber said. “I mean, I knew you’d pitch a fit at first but…you made a lot of good points.” She winced.
Jolene’s hands went numb. “What?”
“Thing is, I already agreed to it.”
The color ran out of Jolene’s face. “You what?”
“I told Rhino we’d start parting up bodies. They want something by the end of the week.”
Jolene held her stomach. “Don’t say that. Don’t say parting up. God, even the lingo is fucking horrifying.”
Amber led Jolene over to the reception desk and had her sit in the office chair. Setting aside her glasses, Jolene sat with her face in her hands. “We should’ve just went bankrupt, got regular jobs, called it when things started getting rough the first time.”
Amber knelt in front of Jolene, hands resting on her friend’s knees. “Look, I know this is scary. I don’t know about you, but I can’t work for anybody but myself. Call me spoiled, call me a bad employee or whatever, but I only wanna work with you, J-Bird. We don’t have to do this forever. Just enough to get us out of the hole. Three drop-offs to Rhino, max, I swear. After that we can discuss whether or not we want to keep going with it.”
“I don’t want to discuss us keeping going with it. I want to discuss whether we should start at all, Amber. Why the hell did you tell them we’d do it before you talked to me? This is my business too. I know my name’s not on the sign but I work here, I live here. This fucks with not only my job, but my home too. We live here.”
“I know we live here, I know. And this is drastic. This is a big change, for sure. But I made a huge decision I knew you wouldn’t follow me on. Sometimes people need a push. Sometimes you need a push. And if this works out well and we start doing really good, we can maybe sell this place off and go move somewhere warm, say fuck you to Minnesota winters once and for all. This can be not only what pulls us out of the hole – Jolene, look at me – maybe this won’t just pull us out of the hole, but launch us out of it. We can be done working altogether. Think about that. Not working for ourselves, not for anybody. Isn’t that the dream? We can be retired before we’re forty.”
“I still don’t like this.”
Amber’s knees started to hurt from kneeling so she sat on the desk next to Jolene. She reached out and took Jolene’s hands and held them cupped in hers. “You said something to me once that really freaked me out. I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah.”
“I came to your dorm one night and your roommate said you had gone to the showers. I thought that was weird because you’ve always been a morning shower person – and you still are. But I went down to the bathroom and I found you with both your wrists cut and an entire bottle of aspirin in your belly. And when I tried pulling you out of that bathroom stall, do you remember what you said to me?”
“Leave me,” Jolene said.
“Yes. You wanted to just close the door and act like I never saw you in there.”
“I wasn’t doing very well.”
“Well, not to make excuses for you but, I mean, it was the first time you were away from your family. You didn’t know anybody in Minnesota. But you met me, right? And we hung out, we watched movies, we played video games down in the common room, we smoked pot, we hooked up with guys, we shared a guy that one time I don’t think you like to think about…”
Jolene closed her eyes. “Could we maybe not…?”
“We had a blast, as you’re supposed to in college. My point is, you wanted me to leave you to bleed to death in that bathroom. But I wouldn’t. We weren’t really c
lose then, but we are now and I think we owe a lot of our friendship, and who we are as a team, to that night. And when I say this, I’m not meaning to make you feel bad, but sometimes, sometimes I have to drag you toward things that, at first blush, may not seem like the right decision. And with this, today, this could possibly be—”
“No, no, no, you can stop right there. I was trying to kill myself and you convinced me to go to the hospital because you couldn’t bear the thought of having left me there to die.”
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking about that night. And I think you’re right, we do owe a lot of our friendship to that night – how we work as a team, like you said. But you’ve been holding that over my head for years how you saved my life. You tell anybody who’ll listen about that night. Every time we go to the bar you tell somebody that fucking story. Oh, I saved Jolene’s life, Oh, Jolene was so depressed but she’s sitting here right beside me now because of me, aren’t I so great?”
Amber let go of Jolene’s hands. “Would you have preferred I left you?”
“I asked you to, didn’t I?”
“Oh don’t get all fucking emo about it,” Amber said, sneering. “Do you still wanna kill yourself?”
“No, I don’t. I took the lessons, did the workbooks, got on and off medication, and I don’t wanna kill myself – but I don’t want to get murdered either, Amber. And that’s the likely result if we start messing around with fucking criminals. I don’t know shit about that world, or how to act, or any of the code words or even if there are code words. You may’ve saved my life once, twelve years ago, but you’re threatening it now, by getting us involved in this. Do you see that?”
“Nobody wants to kill anybody. As long as we don’t fuck things up and don’t strike up a conversation about it with the first cop we see, we’ll be fine. We will figure it out. Feel our way through it, same as us taking over this place. Baby steps.”
Jolene shook her head until Amber shut up. “I can’t do this, Amber,” she said. “This is where I draw the line. Either you text them back and say you changed your mind, you won’t do it, or I’m gonna go pack my shit and leave.”
“You’d seriously just go?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. Minute I finally found a way for us to fucking survive this shit-storm, you want to give up. I swear you want to be fucking depressed.”
“I’m not who I was. And you’re not who you were anymore either. We were going to start our own funeral home, have no ties with your dad. But when he handed you this place, you saw it as a free ride. You didn’t have to do anything but let me do all the work while you do makeup, badly, and try to drink yourself to death. And I was fine doing most of the heavy lifting; I felt I owed you. But I don’t feel I do anymore. We’re square.”
“Fine,” Amber said, face reddening. “Go then, bitch. Fucking leave. Go back to Mommy and Daddy and kill yourself in their bathroom. See if they bother taking their thirty-year-old loser daughter to the hospital. Maybe if you ask them they’ll just leave you like I should’ve.”
Jolene stood. “Take that back.” Her hands balled into fists at her sides.
“Go pack your shit, like said you were gonna, and go. Do it. Go.”
“I really want to hit you right now.”
“Then do it. Commit to something. You keep saying a bunch of shit, follow through. Go ahead. I’ll close my eyes and you really wind up and hit me right here in the fucking—”
The doorbell rang.
The room emptied of air.
Amber and Jolene stood facing each other in their empty reception room, all anger falling from their faces.
Amber whispered, “Did the doorbell just ring or am I having a stroke?”
“If you are, then I’m having one too.”
They scrambled around the reception desk and peered into the CCTV screens. No one was at the back garage door, but out front a middle-aged guy in cargo shorts, sneakers, and a dark T-shirt was standing on their porch. They watched him reach forward and press the doorbell again, then knock, then shift from foot to foot, and ring the bell a third time.
“Who the fuck is that?” Amber whispered.
“I don’t know.” Jolene glanced up over the CCTV screen to look at the front door, where he stood just on the other side. “Could it be Rhino?”
“You’re so smart. I didn’t even think of that. Should we just answer it and ask?”
“This is your thing,” Jolene said. “I don’t know what’s protocol.”
“What if he’s a cop?”
“He’s not dressed like a cop.”
“Doesn’t mean he isn’t one.”
“True,” Amber said. “So what do we do?”
“I have no idea. Answer it?”
“Look, if that is a cop and this is, you know, the end,” Amber said, “I’m really sorry for all that shit I said a second ago, I—”
“Stop, it’s fine. We have to deal with this guy. He’s not going away.”
“Let’s turn off all the lights,” Amber said, “and pretend we’re not home.”
“Because that’ll work. That won’t be obvious at all.”
The bell rang again.
“Okay,” Amber said, “I think I’m gonna just answer it.”
“Don’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!” Jolene whisper-shouted. “Fuck, this is so fucked up.”
“Come with me. We’ll answer the door together.”
“Because we’re so intimidating, right? Us in our Dollar Store flip-flops.”
“Come over here. Come on. We’ll answer it together. Ready? You do the talking.”
“What? No! This is your deal. You do the talking.”
“Fine, fine, fine, okay. Ready?”
Jolene swallowed, nodded. “Okay.”
Amber pulled open the door an inch and peered out at the guy in the shorts standing on their front steps. She dropped her voice low and narrowed her eyes, though she was about ready to piss herself. “Who’re you?”
“Hi. I was told to come here if, uh, I had something to drop off.”
Amber noticed the man’s hair was wet and freshly combed. He smelled like shampoo. But under his fingernails, each had a dark red something. He must’ve seen her notice and put his hands in his pockets.
“Is this a test?” she said. “Are you Rhino?”
He frowned. “Am I a rhino?”
“Not a rhino, the Rhino. Is your name Rhino?”
“No. It’s not. I was told to come here if I had something to drop off.” His gray-blue eyes moved between Amber and Jolene. “Is one of you Amber?”
“How do you know my name?” Amber said, noticing the Band-Aid on the inside of his left elbow, the faint red dot in the center. Either a junkie or gave blood today. Something.
“Our mutual friend, I guess you’d call him, told me to come here and ask for Amber. Said if I had something like I have with me, out in my car, I was to bring it here and you’d take care of it.” He glanced back, toward the funeral home sign in the front yard, half-buried under weeds. “I suppose you cremate them, huh?”
“We don’t do cremations anymore,” Amber said. “You need all kinds of expensive permits and stuff for that. Hey. Look at me, guy. Who said you could drop things off here?”
“He’s a friend of mine, he’s my supplier.” He withdrew his hands from his pockets to press them out flat toward Amber and Jolene, in surrender. “Listen, I don’t want a hard time. I just really need something out of my possession before the end of the night. It’s kind of an emergency. They said you were new to this, well, so am I. I’ve never done anything like this before in my life.”
He seemed sincere enough. Amber decided he wasn’t bullshitting and opened the door the rest of the way. “Come in.”
They let h
im in and quickly closed the door. Amber watched him carefully as he ran his eyes around the reception area, the bare wood-paneled walls and the lighter sections of the carpet where the furniture had stood up until earlier today.
Amber moved to stand in front of the door.
Jolene, clearly not sure what to do with her hands, stood far off to the side, staring holes into Amber, her forehead shiny with sweat.
“Hot one tonight, isn’t it?” the guy said.
“Yeah,” Jolene said. “High nineties tomorrow.”
“Is that right? Jeez.”
“Good for Fourth of July though,” Jolene said. “Supposed to be clear too.”
The guy was nodding. “Cool.”
Amber rolled her eyes.
“What?” Jolene said.
“Nothing.”
The guy turned around to face them again. “So should I just back in to the driveway? I don’t mean to rush this, but I really need to get home.”
“What’s your name?” Amber said. “You know mine so I think it’s only fair.”
He hesitated before saying, “Frank Goode.”
“I’m Jolene,” Jolene said.
“Hi,” Frank said.
“Hello. How are you?”
“I’ve been better.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Jesus Christ,” Amber said.
Frank said, “So, uh, is money supposed to be exchanged here or something? Because I didn’t think to bring any with me, if that’s the case. I could go to the ATM. Or are you supposed to pay me, maybe? I don’t know how this works.”
“I think we’re supposed to pay you,” Amber said. “They didn’t say. But we’re currently strapped at the moment too. Can we maybe work that out later?”
“Sure, yeah, that’d be fine.” Frank drew his keys from his pocket. “So I’ll go out and back my car in, okay?”
“Wait.” Amber kept her back pressed to the door, blocking his way. “Are you, uh, a cop or something? I have to ask.”
“No,” Frank said. “You know that whole thing about them having to tell you they’re a cop if you ask if they’re a cop isn’t real, right?”
“Not helping your case much, buddy.”