When the knock sounded on the door she almost didn’t hear it. She whirled to face the door and found she couldn’t speak. The knock came again, more prolonged and a little louder.
“Come in,” she said. She cleared her throat and repeated. “Come in.” As the door opened her hands went to her hair lightly, and then she stood from the chair.
“Hi,” he said and grinned. He closed the door.
“Hi, Jamie. Come in. Here, sit down. What’s in the sack? Here, sit here.” She had found her voice again, but now it was running away from her. “I put on my blue dress,” she said.
Still grinning, he set the sack on the dresser and stepped nearer. “I see. You didn’t have to do that for me. I didn’t think we were going to church or anything.”
She moved back a step, involuntarily. “Wait a minute, Jamie.” She moved again so that his back was toward the crib. “Is that a bottle? Sit here.” She turned the chair for him. “You want some ice?”
Jamie laughed. “OK. Have it your way.” He sat on the chair and tilted it back against the side of the bed. He watched her open the icebox and take out a sack of store-bought cubes. “You’re still OK, Mandy,” he said.
“Sure. I’m just fine.” She kept her back toward him and worked slowly over the ice and glasses.
“You’re not kidding.”
“You look different, Jamie. I mean, sort of white. Pale like.” She turned with the glasses.
“Well, never mind that.” He took the glass she extended. “Here, sit.” He spread his legs some and dropped his hand on one knee.
She stepped back and drank from the glass. Might as well tell him now, she figured. Might as well see what’s going to happen. She took another drink and moved past the foot of her bed and placed one hand on the crib. Jamie turned to watch her.
“Come here,” she said.
“What the hell you got there?” He stood and peered over the bed. “Well, I’ll be damned. That a baby?”
“Yes. Come here.”
He stood beside her. “You got a husband around here someplace?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Do you like him?”
Jamie laughed shortly. “Well, yeh. I guess so. A kid’s a kid, I guess.” He drank the last of his drink. The ice cubes rattled in the glass. “Where’d you get him? Do you know—well, I mean, is he yours?”
“Yes,” she said and faced him. “And yours.”
“What?” He grinned. “What are you talking about? And I’m dry again.”
She touched his arm. “Wait, Jamie. I’m saying this is our baby. Yours and mine.”
He watched her face for a long moment while the room whirled in front of her eyes. “What do you mean, it’s ours, for chrissake? I haven’t even seen you for years.”
“Two years, Jamie. You left before I knew.”
“How do you know it’s mine?”
“I know what you’re thinking. And a lot of it’s true. But not till after, Jamie. Not till long after.” She turned from his eyes toward the crib again. “He’s yours, all right,” she said. “Look at him, Jamie. Can’t you see?”
He walked across the room. “No, I don’t want to.” His mind went back to that other baby, the one he himself had delivered. His stomach turned again. It always did. He wondered if it would ever not turn when he thought of that or saw pictures of new-born babies. Or even older babies. He sat down abruptly in the chair.
“Jamie? Listen, Jamie, I know we—”
“Shut up for a minute, can you? Just shut up for a minute.” He bent forward with his hands on his face.
Mandy watched him from where she stood beside the crib. She held the railing tight with her hand to keep herself still. She stared at his back where the muscles were taut beneath the shirt, and at his head where the white, long fingertips were buried in his black hair. She knew that black hair, too; knew the coarse feel of it, had twisted it about her own fingers, and right now her fingers itched. God, she thought, what will he do? How else could I have said it? She could not know, of course, that it was less her news that troubled him, had only reminded him of another time and place.
“I’m going now,” he said at last.
Be calm. Be reasonable. “Jamie, listen.” She touched his shoulder. “You don’t have to go.” Maybe it would work again. After all, it had in the first place. “Look. You can stick around, can’t you? We could—well,” she laughed, “we could pick up where we stopped. Look, we’ll forget about—”
Jamie placed both hands on her shoulders. “Stop, Mandy. It’s not that. I’ll come back tomorrow night.”
“Will you, Jamie?”
“Yes,” he grinned. “I promise. Only not now. Not right now.”
She saw the gray door close from where she stood in the center of the room. She watched it as if it might open again and no longer be gray. At last she twisted her arms to the side to unfasten the pins in the blue dress.
SOMEONE did die in Cortez on the next day, Saturday. A businessman, the nondescript man who sold typewriters at Case and Walker, and who plaited his long side hair over the top of his balding head. He left the store early in the afternoon, just to lie down awhile, he said, because his breath was short. Dozens, perhaps a hundred people passed him on the sidewalk as he walked the four blocks to his small house. Probably Jolly saw him pass from the store window at Penney’s where he worked each Saturday and some afternoons helping the window decorator when he was not down in the basement licking price tags to stick on socks or shirts or underwear. At any rate, the man’s breath grew shorter when he climbed the steps to his house, and it stopped altogether a few minutes after he had undressed and gone to bed.
When Jolly left the store at six o’clock, Luke was in front, leaning against the fender of the mortuary limousine. “Climb in, Jeeves,” he called.
“Jeez, Luke. I can’t drive a hearse.”
“It isn’t a hearse. And you might as well learn.”
Jolly backed the long car out into the street. “Where?”
“The mortuary.”
“The mortuary? Christ, I got to eat dinner sometime, you know.” Jolly cautiously negotiated a corner that took them farther away from his own house. “What you grinning about?”
“We got one!” cried Luke exuberantly.
“One what? Talk sense.”
“We got a case! A
body.
Dad promised to hold off till I can get you there and all. Hurry up, goddamit. You drive like an old lady or something.”
“But I got to eat dinner,” said Jolly as he turned the car onto the Meaders’ tree-shaded street.
“You can eat later.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You chickenin’ out on me?”
“Hell, no, I’m not chickenin’ out on anything. Here. You drive this train in the garage. I’ll probably take off about six fenders.”
George Meaders was waiting at his desk when Luke led Jolly in triumphantly. “Well, Jolly. Are you ready?” he asked.
Jolly answered with some difficulty. “Yes, sir.”
“Let’s get started then. This takes about an hour.” He unlocked a drawer of his desk and deliberately set out a tall brown bottle of whiskey and a glass. He reflected a moment and then said, “You guys want a snort?”
Jolly turned to Luke for his clue. Luke beamed. “Yes, sir! Don’t we, Jolly.”
“Yeh. Yes, sir.”
Luke’s father reached into the drawer for two more shot glasses and ceremoniously filled the three. He handed one to each of the boys. “Now this isn’t sippin’ whiskey. It goes down in one bad gulp.” He tipped back his head and drained the glass. Luke and Jolly did likewise. Tears sprang to Jolly’s eyes almost instantly as the liquid seared all the way down to his stomach, but he was determined not to sputter and cough, whatever else he did.
“Steadies the hands,” said George Meaders, heaving himself from his chair. “Come on, you two. We got an hour’s work ahead of us.”
The preparation room was disappointingly sterile, to Jolly’s way of thinking. He forced himself to look about the white-painted room before focusing on the “case.” One wall of the small room was lined with glass-fronted cabinets and held also a calendar depicting a big-breasted and denuded girl, her hands on her stiffly-locked knees, turned obliquely hind-wise to the camera, below whom ran the caption, “Our Supplies Are Better in the End,” and below that in big letters, Adams-Addison Mortuary Supplies, Inc.
Against the opposite wall was set a large sink and a counter that held a contraption with hoses that resembled an office water cooler. The third wall was bare except for a chart such as Jolly had seen in biology class, tracing the veins and arteries in red and blue on a male figure, sans genitals. Near the fourth wall, by the door, lay a sheeted and lumpy figure. It lay on the wheeled stretcher from the hearse just as it had been placed sometime that afternoon.
George Meaders took off his coat and flung it onto a chair with his tie. He rolled back the sleeves of his wilted white shirt. Then he stepped over the stretcher and flipped back the sheet. “OK, you boys put him on the table,” he said, indicating the high stainless steel operating table that could be pumped up or down like a barber’s chair, or tilted like a see-saw.
“Why’s he naked?” asked Jolly, stepping to the side of the stretcher opposite Luke. He hadn’t expected the body to be naked. He hesitated before placing his hands under the white shoulders.
Luke grinned. “He died in his sleep this afternoon. Heart. I guess he slept in the raw. You better get over here on the same side as me. You have to lift a body both from the same side.”
“Oh.” Jolly stood next to Luke and together they slid their arms under the dead man’s body and lifted. He was surprisingly heavy, and although not cold actually, his skin felt like candle wax; cool, but sort of soft and not unpleasant.
Jolly stood by and watched Luke and his father begin their work. Luke explained in an adulteration of technical language and his brand of slang each step of the procedure.
“He’s making the incision there,” indicating his father cutting a short lengthwise slit in the inside flesh of the thigh near the groin, “so he can get at a vein and a artery. You have to sever the vessels—one to let the blood out and the other to pump the embalming fluid in.”
Luke’s father clamped off the artery and vein on one side of the incision and attached a small yellow tube to one. The other end of the tube he placed in the sink. He then attached a similar tube, a red one, twining from the odd machine, to the other blood vessel.
“That one pumps in the fluid,” explained Luke, “while the blood flows into the sink through the yellow one.” He waited for his father’s nod to switch on the machine. It hummed. The red tube undulated briefly as the pink liquid began flowing into the dead man’s body.
“Is that all there is to it?” asked Jolly.
“Nearly,” Luke winked. “Except the trocar. And he’ll probably hafta make another incision under the arm since this guy’s been dead quite a few hours. If he was fresh, one cut would do ’er.”
Luke slipped a small rubber half-sphere under each eyelid of the body and closed the lids. “These here are rough, see? They keep the eyelids from coming open during a funeral and all, which shakes up the people considerable.”
“God, I’ll bet,” Jolly concurred.
“Now he’s gonna tie the mouth. Watch this.”
Jolly found it hard to watch Luke’s father wire the jaws shut from the inside, pull the wire tight, twist it and snip it off just outside the teeth. “When he seals the lips shut, you could never tell it,” said Luke.
“Okay, Jolly,” said Luke’s father. “We’re ready for the trocar.” He handed the instrument to Jolly. It amounted to a quart jar of the pink fluid from the top of which projected a ten-inch, heavy needle that ended in a triangular-shaped point.
“Thanks, sir, but I’ll just watch you this first time.” Jolly extended the instrument to George Meaders gingerly.
“No, you go ahead. Just shove it in the cavity about here.” He indicated a spot slightly above and to the side of the navel.
“You do it, Luke,” Jolly pleaded.
“Go ahead, chicken. He can’t feel it.”
Luke took Jolly’s hands and pointed the needle at the desired spot.
“Shove,”
he said. Jolly shoved. The needle pierced the skin and slipped into the body with surprising ease.
“Now what?”
“Fine,” said George Meaders. “Now as the fluid drains into the cavity, just keep pointing the needle in different directions and at different depths until all the fluid’s gone.”
Jolly set his teeth and reminded himself that the man, indeed, could not feel the trocar probe his insides. The pink embalming fluid flowed out through the drill-sized needle slowly and evenly, disappearing somewhere under the flesh, filling the cavity. Each time the trocar bumped against or pierced an organ inside the dead man’s body, Jolly could feel the marshy impact transmitted to his hands. He suppressed a hysterical giggle that rose unasked from the bottom of his stomach.
“What’re you snorting about, horse’s patootie?” asked Luke at his side.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, what’s so funny?”
The giggle burst from Jolly’s lips despite his efforts to hold it. His shoulders trembled convulsively, and tears sprang down on his cheeks.
“Oh, Christ, there he goes again. You can pick the craziest times to get the gigglzes. You shoulda seen him at the movie the other night, Dad. The only person in the whole damn theater that laughed at the ending.”
George Meaders looked up from his work. From above his steel-rimmed glasses he watched Jolly intently for a moment, then bent his attention to the suture he was tying. “Hum,” he said.
“Had to wait about thirty hours for him to calm down before we could walk out in the goddam lobby,” Luke went on. “All right, Osment, all
right.
Jeez, you give me the heebie-jeebies.”
The liquid in the glass jar gurgled once and was gone.
“Remove it now,” Luke’s father said.
Jolly watched the needle slide out, clean. He had not expected it to be clean. The hole in the dead man’s flesh remained open, a light wetness formed around its edge.
“Here,” said Luke, extending a small plastic article to Jolly, “button him up.”
Jolly held the item in his hand and turned it over. It resembled a button on one side, but on the other it rose to a tiny screw-shaped pyramid. He looked at Luke perplexed.
“Watch,” said Luke. He took the button from Jolly, pushed it into the hole in the dead man’s flesh, and screwed it twice. “Now he won’t leak.”
Jolly stared at the button incongruously attached to the pale flesh. He felt another giggle rise toward his throat but stalled it by looking away and speaking rapidly. “Now whataya do? When do you put the makeup on him? Do you put shorts or anything on him before you put on his regular clothes? When’s the funeral?”
When Luke and his father had dressed the man in a white shirt and blue tie and a dark, pin-stripe suit, after transferring him to another table, George Meaders bent over the body once more and combed the gray hair smoothly back from his forehead. Suddenly Jolly allowed himself to recall that this was, or had been, a human being. The naked figure on whom they had just performed a miracle against decay became again a reposed, middle-aged man who had been—until this afternoon when he lay down for a nap—a busy, breathing, working man, someone’s relative, someone’s husband, someone’s enemy; someone’s father now at rest, ridiculously, on a bare wooden table in a suit without any back to it, furnished as part of the expense of being inalienably dead.
“Christ, I’m hungry. And Mom’ll be madder’n hell. Drive me, Luke?”