“We’re going to keep him a few days while they go off on a little trip. Understand, Jolly, this isn’t the right way—there’s never been anything like this in my family before—but they’re going to straighten things out.”
“Well, where’d she come from? Who is she?”
Mattawilde’s mouth tightened briefly, then relaxed again. “I don’t know, for sure,” she said. “I haven’t met her yet. Jamie wanted things to be—better first.”
“Jeez,” Jolly commented.
“And you just watch yourself when the time comes, young man.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Things will work out. Look at that hair and eyes. The spittin’ image,” she reflected.
“Yeh,” Jolly said and unconsciously touched his own blond hair. “Aren’t we going to eat?” he asked.
“Oh, Lordy,” his mother said. She heaved herself up from the chair. “I pert’ neally forgot all about supper. You run get some dry clothes and bring ’em in here to change where they’s a fire and you can keep a eye on Him.” The pronoun was deified.
“Jeez,” said Jolly. “I’m an uncle again, Granny! Wait’ll I tell Luke. He’ll never be an uncle.”
“You’re not plannin’ to go out again in this rain, are you?” Mattawilde said. She came back to the doorway from the kitchen and peered around it to see if the boy was safe.
The store lights and the neon of Whiskey Row were on in the town when Jolly crossed the plaza two hours later. The fish in the iron-railed pond were hidden from sight, resting on the bottom of their public wetness while the rain kept up a mass of constantly converging circles over their heads. Teddy Roosevelt and his green steed charged the coming night. A few people hurried from awning to awning in front of J. C. Penney’s and Sears and the dime store.
Jolly approached the Meaders Mortuary from the front, instead of from the alley as he usually did. The pillared façade rose blankly and starkly white in the gray evening. No lights shone from the windows either downstairs or upstairs, which should have been the first sign that something was different about the mortuary this night. Jolly tried the front door and found it locked. “Funny,” he said. He walked around the side, ducking under the heavy-hanging willows. From near the back a blue-white light filtered through Venetian blinds, causing the rain drops to flicker as they fell. Someone was in the office. At the window Jolly could make out, in narrow horizontal strips, the back of George Meaders, apparently asleep at his desk.
He tried the next door, the one that led to the music room from the outside, and found it unlocked. Once inside he made his way cautiously to the office, guided by the blue-white neon light.
At the doorway he stopped and viewed the sleeping man at the desk. George Meaders’ fingers still rested lightly on the round desk ashtray. In it a cigarette burned, a long ash bent along the inner curve of the bowl. From a half-open desk drawer the brown neck of a whiskey bottle stretched, topless. George Meaders breathed easily. Jolly wondered why Luke and Mrs. Meaders would have gone out and left him sleeping like that. But then, maybe they didn’t know.
“Mr. Meaders,” Jolly said.
The man made a chewing noise with his mouth and rolled his head.
“Mr. Meaders!” Jolly touched the sleeping man’s shoulder.
George Meaders raised his head slowly, the gray hair hanging limply over his forehead. For a moment he seemed not to see anything but only stared over the top of his desk toward the opposite wall. Then he felt Jolly’s hand on his shoulder and whirled toward him, his eyes wild and unfocused.
“Sorry to startle you, sir,” Jolly said. He moved away from the desk and George Meaders’ staring face. “Is Luke home? I just came by to see Luke.” Jolly feigned interest in a framed magazine photograph of a blue lake set beneath a single snow-capped blue mountain.
When Mr. Meaders did not answer, Jolly turned back to him, expecting to find him asleep again. Instead, he was reaching the whiskey bottle out of the drawer, and having some difficulty doing it, and with the other hand he was holding a glass already a third full. He concentrated, tight-lipped, on the job of pouring. He was about to replace the bottle when he stopped and seemed confused. He then drew another glass from the drawer and poured it half full. He extended the glass feebly. “Here,” he said. “For you.”
Jolly took the glass of whiskey because he couldn’t think what else to do. He watched George Meaders drink from the full glass, cough, and then swivel in his chair so that he leaned over the desk, the glass in both hands. He lifted his eyes to Jolly. They were bleary and red.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Meaders? What’s wrong?”
“You don’t know?”
“No, sir. What should I know?”
“No. Of course you don’t know. How could you.”
“Please, sir. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jolly felt the chill from his wet raincoat.
Luke’s father drew a great shuddering breath, and it seemed to take all his strength. “Luke is dead.”
Jolly watched his face and knew unquestioningly that what he had heard was true. Luke’s father, suddenly more gray than before, wiped his shirt sleeve over his eyes and rested his face for a moment on the crook of his arm. Jolly felt the room pitch crazily and then come back into place. “No,” he whispered. “No.” He sat in a chair and saw George Meaders raise his head and search for a moment before his eyes found Jolly’s again.
“How, Mr. Meaders? How?”
“Ambulance,” Mr. Meaders said. “He went out on a call.”
“Where?” Jolly spoke breathlessly, urgent that Mr. Meaders would hurry, would tell quickly—as if it mattered. It did matter.
Luke’s father waved his hand vaguely. “Arrowhead,” he said. That would be nearly fifteen miles.
“Was he alone? What happened? I thought he was going to the County to pick up a body.”
“Yes, alone. The—I went for that one. No one to go—” His words disappeared in soundless sobs, and he held his hand over his eyes.
“What have they done—where is he now, Mr. Meaders? Have they brought him in?”
George Meaders removed the hand from over his eyes and ran his finger around the lip of the glass that he still held. “Andersen went out to get him. He’s here.”
“You mean here in the mortuary? The preparation room?”
“Yes.” Luke’s father continued to stare at the glass, but his eyes filled, and when he blinked the tears coursed down the creases of his face beside his nose.
Jolly looked away and fought against the lump that rose from the pit of his stomach to his throat. He watched the blue mountain until the room settled again. He said “Did you—has he been—”
“Yes. Andersen’s in there now. All except the trocar. I couldn’t let him.” George Meaders broke down and wept openly, his head cradled on one arm, the other still reaching toward the glass of whiskey.
Jolly stood and looked at the glass he held. He set it on the desk. “Go up and go to bed, Mr. Meaders.” He touched the man’s arm. “Go on,” he said gently. “I’ll—I’ll lock up down here.” He met George Meaders’ gaze. They stared at each other for a moment, and the old man looked relieved.
“Thank you, Jolly,” Luke’s father said.
Jolly watched him climb the stairs that led from the office to the floor above. He turned to see Caleb Andersen just entering the room.
“Meaders gone up?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Jolly said. “Have you—are you—is it finished?” he asked.
Caleb Andersen reached his hat down from the coat tree. “Yes,” he sighed. “Except for the trocar. He ought to let me do that. It’s got to be done.”
“Mr. Andersen, tell me—tell me what happened.”
“It’s a shame,” he said. He lifted the glass of whiskey from the desk and drank. “No goddam need for it, neither.”
Jolly sat on the bottom step of the stairs and waited for Caleb Andersen to go on.
“That blond whore from Freddy’s and one a her studs. They didn’t even need no ambulance. Just a wrecker.”
He drank again from the glass and then jammed his hat on his head. “Probably got to foolin’ with him in the car and he ran off the road. Lucky. That kind’s always lucky. All she got out of it was a bump on the head that’ll give her a headache for a week.”
Caleb Andersen set the empty glass on the desk and turned to Jolly. “Can you close up around here? I’m going. I’m sick to my stomach.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jolly.
Jolly walked through the chapel and the music room in the dark. He opened the door of the preparation room and felt for the light switch. The neon tubes flickered twice and then held, shedding their cold light over the room, the stretcher, the calendar girl, the blood-vessel chart, the embalming machine, the sheeted figure on the stainless steel table that could be raised or lowered or tilted like a seesaw.
Before he pulled back the sheet, Jolly took the long steel needle from its cabinet. He opened a quart jar of pink embalming fluid and turned his face from the sharp odor of formaldehyde. He screwed the needle onto the jar. He set the jar on a shelf near the head of the table. He lifted back the sheet slowly and gazed long at the umber, translucent face, grinless and calm beneath the straight black hair. Jolly pushed the hair away from Luke’s face, but it settled back naturally over his eyes. He lifted it again and saw the large blue crease that dented Luke’s skull, running from above his left eye to his hairline.
Farther down, as the sheet was pulled away, was the plump chest with its new black hair lying flat. Then the hands appeared just above the spot where the trocar must go, the left folded over the right, incongruously placed, the nails broken and in need of cleaning. Then came the rampant black hair again and the genitals, lying harmless and limp and lopsided. A few inches farther down was the tiny incision closed now with sutures.
Jolly chose a spot, low on the abdomen, where the sun-darkened skin gave way to a short band of lighter skin. He placed the drill-like needle exactly on that line and turned his body half away from Luke’s face. The trocar pierced the flesh and sank deep. The pink liquid gurgled in the bottle.
He looked to Luke’s face, half expecting to see him grimace with pain. No expression flitted across the lips, wired shut forever from the inside and sealed with wax.
“You crazy,” Jolly said. “You crazy bastard moron. Probably driving a thousand miles an hour in the rain.” Jolly felt his own stomach knot and then loosen and begin to jerk. “I think I’ll just put your damn flowers on the wrong grave. Or better, I’ll spread ’em all over the goddam road.”
He changed the position of the trocar, and it waved before his eyes as something seen in a watery mirror. “I’m laughing. See Luke? I’m doing it again, and this time you can’t do a goddam thing about it. I’m laughing, Luke, I’m laughing.”
The trocar gurgled again, and the pink liquid was gone.
Jolly pulled the instrument back and saw the little round hole that remained, just on the line of the dark flesh and the lighter flesh. A pale edge of liquid formed around the hole.
“You want another belly-button, Luke?” He screwed the plastic button into the hole, pressing harder than was needed. “There.” The firm flesh rose slowly into place. “Now you’re all sewed, sealed, and screwed.” Jolly took off his glasses and ran the sleeve of his damp jacket over his eyes. “Get it, Luke? You’ve
really
been screwed this time, buddy. You been screwed good!”
He pulled the sheet back up. Before he covered Luke’s face, he swept back the sheaf of black hair again. “And can’t you keep your goddam hair combed, you crazy moron,” he said.
Jolly left the preparation room with the bare neon light still burning. In the music room he stopped beside the old organ and ran his hand along its black curves. He walked on, through the chapel, into the office. The light was still on. Jolly moved with determination. He set the two glasses in the desk drawer and closed it. He opened the narrow center desk drawer and searched among its contents. Not finding what he sought, he took from it a paper clip. This he unbent into a single wire. Holding it between his teeth he bent small notches along more than an inch of it. He turned to the wooden filing cabinet and inserted the wire in the lock of the middle drawer. Carefully he twisted the wire like a miniature crank until finally it caught and the lock clicked open.
He spread open the graveyard chart on the floor. He knelt beside it and swung it around until the arrow in the bottom corner pointed north. Starting at the mausoleum, he searched west with his finger, bending low in order to read the names printed in the little oblong boxes. He found it without much trouble. OSMENT, one of the boxes read. It was just about where he thought it should be. He moved his finger back to the big center square and carefully counted the rows, the aisles, the curves in the path.
Jolly refolded the chart along its deep-creased lines and returned it to the filing cabinet. He twisted the bent wire until the lock clicked again. He flung the wire toward the wastebasket and shut off the light.
He walked through the chapel in total darkness. In the music room he cracked his shin against a chair, and the chair clattered loudly against the wall. He stopped to rub the hurt briefly, then guided by the light under the door, he re-entered the preparation room.
He found Luke’s clothes piled in a heap on a chair. He lifted the pants and ran his hand into the right front pocket. He pulled out the two keys on a brass chain, decorated with a tiny black telescope through which one could see a bulbous naked woman if he held the telescope to the light. Jolly dropped the pants back onto the chair and let himself out the back door. He had carefully avoided the steel table with the body of Luke on it like some shapeless biscuit-man beneath the sheet.
The Blue Goose objected noisily, then started. Jolly backed it out of the garage and turned down the muddy alley. The rain shied across the headlights in streaks of yellow and silver. He drove through town, past where the night neon cast wavering reflections out onto the wet streets, past Rosy’s Tavern that glowed warmly on the corner.
He turned onto the Shaker Village Road and drove unhurriedly past the old yellowed houses, over the bridge and the railroad tracks, into the jumbled, loud clutter of Shaker Village. There, outside the unpainted wooden fence of a wrecking yard, was the Meaders’ white ambulance, its nose just lowering from the hoist of a wrecker. Jolly stopped the Blue Goose, and watched while two men in greasy overalls and caps worked in the glare from the tow-truck’s spotlights. Finally, one man climbed into the truck and drove it a few feet away, then both men went through a gate in the wooden fence into the wrecking yard.