“My sincere condolences,” said Buddy. “I never had the good fortune to know that fine lady, but I know what she meant to you, Leo. You have to walk the harsh road of life alone now.” He clapped his shoulder. “But at least you got a friend in Buddy Sandifer. Anything I can do, you name it.”
Leo’s head came up. “Excuse me. I ain’t being much of a host. I’ll give you some coffee.”
Anything to get out of that hall. Buddy followed his employee along the passageway to the rear. The farther they went, the feebler the light. But at last Leo opened a door that turned out to be the entrance to the kitchen.
Buddy felt a rush of well-being. “Swell place, Leo, real swell.” The room looked spotless; the linoleum had such a high sheen that Buddy walked gingerly. “Shame to track up this fresh polish,” said he, keeping his heels in the air. He took a seat at the oilcloth-covered table and observed that even the ketchup bottle there was crustless around the cap though not new.
Leo himself though was a mess in the light: unshaven, uncombed, and with yellow egg on the bosom of the robe.
“Must be hell for you,” Buddy said compassionately. “If the insurance don’t cover the arrangements, you just say the word and I’ll help out.”
Though he had been crazy on the phone and abstracted thus far in person, Leo now reassumed the personality he had always displayed at the lot. “That’s mighty white of you, Buddy.” Yet the contrast between his appearance and his sudden reasonable manner was bizarre.
Buddy watched him go to the stove and get the coffeepot, already filled and presumably warm. However, after Leo had poured him a cup, brought the milk bottle from the Frigidaire, and indicated the sugar bowl, he found the coffee stone-cold.
“Walsh’s is making the arrangements, I guess?” Buddy asked, naming the best-known of the local funeral homes. When they bought their new hearse, the Walsh brothers got a better deal from Buddy for the old one than if they had used it as trade-in. Buddy felt a superstitious need to oblige morticians. Then he made a nice profit from the eight college boys who bought it in common and decorated the panels with comic slogans like “Life goes from bed to hearse.”
Leo nodded. But then, just as Buddy had thought he was back to normal, he stirred his own cold coffee with a dirty forefinger. He narrowed his reddened eyes. “You take me for a fool, don’t you?”
“What the devil,” said Buddy.
“Hoho, I got you figured out.”
If fool there was, it was Buddy, for coming here. “Let’s not start that nutsy stuff again, Leo.” He shot his hand into the air. “Reason I came, if you wanna hear it, is my gun is missing from the office. I thought the crazy way you was talking, you might of taken it to do away with yourself.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Leo said, leaning back in his chair and smiling grandly.
Buddy pushed his cup away and rose. “In view of your recent loss, I won’t get into a argument with you. But I’ll say this, Leo: I wish you’d ask the doc for a bromide or something. You need rest. You had a shock, nothing to be ashamed of—”
Leo took the pistol from a pocket of his bathrobe. Just as Buddy’s heart collided with his tonsils, however, Leo reversed the weapon and pushed it butt-first across the tablecloth.
Buddy seized the gun and dropped it into his jacket. He breathed deeply. “Much obliged, Leo. Now, whyn’t you try to get some rest before going down the funeral home? Take a shot of Nervine if you got any or at least a couple aspirin.”
The man was cracked, but without his gun he was harmless. If Leo stayed in this state after his mother was under ground, Buddy planned to see old Doc Klingman on the matter. Maybe Leo could use a term in Greenlawn, the local nut hatch. When Buddy was twelve he found his own mother had been there for the two months following his birth. Few families went without a relative, if only an in-law’s cousin, who was, had been, or would be in Greenlawn; it was no disgrace.
Leo said stolidly: “The Walsh boys are bringing her here. She wanted to be laid out in the living room. I couldn’t never count how many times she told me that. She didn’t go down the business district in maybe fifteen years, and definitely did not want to break her record when she was dead. Course, they had to take her down there for embalming; no way to get around that.”
“Got to honor the wishes of the departed,” said Buddy. “There used to be a lot of that when I was a kid: laying-out in the home of the deceased. That thing seemed to go out with the horse. I for one don’t know why. It’s kinda nice.”
“Well, it’s homey,” said Leo. He looked and sounded normal again, and Buddy would have loved to know why he took the pistol, but did not dare ask and perhaps set him off again.
“Gee,” said Buddy. “It’s quick, ain’t it? I gather she passed away yesterday some time.”
Leo brightened. “Walsh’s didn’t have any other bodies on hand. I guess that was lucky anyway.”
Buddy said: “Now, Leo, you get some rest like I said.”
“I got to make a lot of coffee and get some cake at the bakery.”
“For pity sake, Leo, people don’t come to laying-outs for the refreshments. You don’t get none if the body is laid out at the funeral home.”
“You get coffee,” Leo said stubbornly.
“But that’s only if you do business with the Walshes, like us. They take you in the office, where they got that electric percolator. But they never have cake.”
“But this,” Leo said defiantly, “was her home.”
Buddy opened the kitchen door onto the gloom of the hallway. “I’ll send a floral arrangement soon as they can get it here. You stay where you are. I can find my own way out.”
Leo looked at him desperately. “Say, Buddy,” he said, “I should of asked you before borrowing the gun.”
Buddy waved at him, pretending indifference. “I won’t mention it again.”
“I had to do a job,” said Leo, his eyes flickering. “I had this parrot, see, ever since I was a kid. He didn’t like women. He hated my mother, but funny, when he saw she died, he started screaming and wouldn’t stop unless the cage was covered. And even after the Walshes come and took her away, Boy still screamed if you took the cover off. So that’s no life for a bird. So he wouldn’t touch his sunflower seeds when I dosed them with rat poison, and I lived with him for years, I couldn’t bear to wring his neck or use a butcher knife, so I went over and returned that money and got your gun, and come back, and I took him outside and opened the cage door. He wouldn’t come out at first because one time I did that and opened the door and when he was on the grass I sprayed him with the hose and he was mad as hell and yelled, ‘Fire!’ which I never heard him say before nor since. Generally the only thing he said was ‘Hi, Boy’ and ‘Bum.’ So he had his eye on that pistol, which must of looked like a hose to him, and I put it in my pocket till he walked out onto the pile of dried grass Ralph stacks at the end of the yard, which I cover the flowerbeds with in the winter along with the leaves. A grasshopper walks out of it, and Boy sees it, looks down, I get the pistol out and blow his head off.”
Leo plunged his own head into his folded arms and moaned in grief.
“You can get mighty attached to a pet,” said Buddy.
Leo’s tear-stained face came up, howling: “I shouldn’t of done it! I could have given him away. I could have given him to Ralph.”
Buddy regarded this as a close call. He now observed that Leo’s real anguish was due to the loss of the parrot and not his mother. They might keep him in Greenlawn forever once they got hold of him.
“You had enough tragedies for one day,” he said, conscious of the weight of the gun in his pocket. He put his hand there so it would not swing against the doorjamb as he turned and went along the hall.
He opened the front door on four men who were mounting the porch with a large packing crate. One of the pair at the leading corners was a Walsh.
“Hi, Buddy,” said he. “Catch that screendoor, willya?”
“Hi, Roy.” Buddy
did as requested, stepping aside. Howie Walsh and a colored helper had the back end.
Howie, who was younger than Roy, shook his head at the sight of the entrance. “This baby’ll never make that,” said he. The Negro seemed to echo these sentiments with a shining grin.
“It’s them screendoor hinges,” said Roy. “Buddy’s got her as far back as she’ll go, right?”
“Right,” said Buddy.
“Say, Bud, ya mind? Ask Leo for a screwdriver to get them hinges off. I’d ask him, but he’s the bereaved.”
“I’ll go, Roy,” said the white helper, a husky, tanned young fellow who worked summers as a lifeguard at the public pool.
“Wait a minute,” Buddy said, getting out his combination penknife/nail file. Holding the door with his ass, he found that the screwheads yielded to his file.
They put the box down while he worked. The colored guy began to whistle softly. “Cut that out,” Roy ordered.
When Buddy was done he jiggled the screws in his hand and said: “Plain pine box, huh?” He raised his eyebrows at Leo’s stinginess.
Roy peered within the doorway to see whether Leo was nearby, then said discreetly, within a cupped hand: “It just goes in the ground; that’s the way he figures.”
“What’s it inside, just wood full of splinters for Jesus’ sake?” asked Buddy.
Roy leaned closer to him. “She won’t be laid out in it. We’re supposed to arrange her on the couch, like she fell asleep.”
“With the Woman’s Home Companion in her hand,” Howie said. The Negro joined him in a snicker.
“You ain’t serious.”
“Well, the magazine is just Howie’s joke,” said Roy, bending to take his corner. “The rest is correct.” He looked up. “Hey, Leo’s here, isn’t he? I don’t want to act on my own responsibility in a matter like this. People get riled up about little details.”
They maneuvered the coffin through the door. “Now what?” said Howie as they halted in the entrance hall.
Buddy squeezed past them, saying he would get Leo. But when he reached the kitchen his employee had vanished. Where would he go in that filthy bathrobe? Through the window he got an answer: Leo was down at the end of the yard, staring at a flowerbed. It did not seem tasteful to shout, so Buddy left the house and walked to him.
“They’re here with the body.”
Leo was looking at a mound of fresh earth. “I don’t know if I ought to leave him here. Some alley cat might dig him up.”
Buddy returned to the house. “He’s out there at the grave of his fucking parrot,” he told Roy. “This thing has loosened his screws. You better go ahead. I’m gonna call Doc Klingman to give him a sedative.”
“I gotta have authorization from somebody for the arrangement of this body,” said Roy. “I can’t just dump it on the davenport.” The Negro chuckled. Dressed in dark clothing, he was hard to discern in the darkened hall now the door was closed.
“He works for you, Buddy,” said Howie. “How about it? He don’t have any relatives I know of.”
Buddy said: “Better find the living room first.”
Roy Walsh opened a door on the right, looked in, and said: “This is it.”
Buddy entered the room, which was even darker than the hall. Not only were the window shades down; the heavy opaque curtains were closed. The four men plodded in with the coffin. Buddy squinted about in search of light, but found only one lamp, a floor model with a thick shade from which hung a beaded fringe.
“Hell with this,” he said, opening the curtains and running the shade up on a window. “We can close them again when you’re done, if he wants that.”
It was an old room, wallpapered in a brown figure against a tan ground. Buddy hated dreary wallpaper. The sofa was upholstered in green plush. Above it hung two silhouettes on silver paper: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
“Wait a minute,” said Buddy to the advancing men and removed a magazine holder from the floor just ahead of them. It held several clean copies of The National Geographic and a crinkled, damp-stained Liberty that looked as if it had been used under a flowerpot: you could see the ring.
“Catch that rocker, too, willya, Bud?” said Howie, who wanted to swing his end around. Buddy scooted it away on its runners.
They lowered the box to the carpet. Realizing the corpse would shortly be revealed, Buddy grew queasy.
Addressing Roy, he said: “You guys know your business. You don’t need me. Leo’ll be in in a minute.” He headed out.
Howie called: “Hey, Buddy.” When Buddy turned, the cover was already off the coffin; must have been on there loose, could have fallen off it if they had tripped. “I think you have to agree we did a nice job,” Howie said, smiling smugly down on the deceased.
There was nothing for it but that Buddy come back and admire. He saw a younger face than he had expected, painted in bright rouge and brighter lipstick.
Roy said, standing back, hands on hips: “What do you think?”
“I never knew the lady,” said Buddy.
“Is that a fact?”
“Not a gray hair on her head.” He could see no great resemblance to Leo. No doubt she had been a good-looker when young, with a nose that was at once delicate yet strong. “Awful lot of make-up.”
“Them was the instructions,” said Roy, reaching in to take the shoulders of the body.
At this Buddy went away again and stared at the china figures on a whatnot shelf in the corner, not turning back until the four men had lifted the dead woman out and put her on the davenport.
“Now what do you think about this afghan?” Roy asked. “Like this, maybe?” He had spread it over her lower body.
Howie said: “She wouldn’t be laying here with her shoes on.”
Roy agreed, and Howie took them off and paired them neatly on the floor at the end of the sofa.
The four men stood back and regarded the tableau. The young white helper pointed at a maroon satin cushion, the decorative kind never used practically, which lay flat on a footstool, the golden corner-tassels dangling.
“Pillow’d be nice.”
“That’s a crackerjack idea,” Roy said with verve. He fetched it and put it under her head, which had previously been mounted on the little end-bolster of low elevation, part of the upholstery.,
Buddy couldn’t get over the garish make-up job, to complete which Roy now pulled from his pocket a box of Coty powder, removed the puff, and patted the corpse’s face with it. Suddenly he handed the box to Howie and put the index finger of his freed hand under his nose to inhibit a sneeze.
“Now,” he said, stepping back, “what do you think, Buddy?” As soon as he took his finger away he sneezed anyhow.
“Swell from where I stand, Roy. But maybe Leo—”
“Good enough for me,” Roy said. “We got to get back. Two more bodies come in just as we were leaving: old Jack McCord and the little Hunnicut boy who died of infantile paralysis, poor little shaver. It never rains but it pours.” He looked at the box. “I’d like to leave this here, but no matter where you stick it, people fall over it. Also it gives what you call a ghoulish impression. Tell Leo we’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
The four men bent to pick up the coffin.
“See you, Bud,” said Howie, going out the door.
“Not soon, I hope,” Buddy replied. The colored guy favored him with one last grin over the shoulder.
Alone with her, Buddy looked again at Leo’s mother. She must have been real nice-looking as recently as twenty years before, when he had been seventeen. He had started out a year earlier, with a woman of forty-two.
But it was creepy to think of sex in the presence of a corpse, even one painted like a whore. Nor did he have the patience to encounter Leo again.
He went out to his car.
chapter 9
IN CONTRAST to Leo’s late mother, Laverne wore no make-up whatever, and her hair was up in curlers. She had on an old opaque slip that was more modest than most of he
r dresses.
“You never come this early,” she said sullenly.
“Thanks for the big welcome,” said Buddy, who on entering had clasped her from behind, hands on breasts, groin between the bulbs of her bottom, but she had coldly twisted away. He sat at the kitchen table, still brooding over the rebuff.
“I had a bad time this morning,” he said.
“Who didn’t?”
What could be her beef, with the rent paid and nothing to do but curl her hair? But he did not say this aloud. Instead he gave a simplified version of his annoyances: Leo’s mother’s death, Leo’s crackup.
“If he don’t come out of it, I need me a new salesman.”
Laverne’s curlered head did not turn. Seen from the back, her slip was sacklike, with no shape at all. Down towards the hem it bore a pointed scorch mark from the tip of an iron. Buddy put more self-pity in his voice. “As if I needed another problem.”
This brought her around. “What other problems have you got?”
There was a kind of jealousy in her question. Buddy pulled back his chin. “What’s eating you, Laverne?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing at all, Buddy. I really like sitting here day after day, waiting for you to come and get your ashes hauled and then run home.”
“Well, do you have to get foul-mouthed about it? We been through that time and time again and I explained it thoroughly. What did I just tell you yesterday?”
“To turn over so you could do it dog-style.”
Buddy flushed with repulsion. “For Christ’s sake, Laverne, come on up out of the sewer.”
She grinned bitterly. “Yesterday was Sunday, and that’s all I can recall. Saturday you said you was working on the situation. Yesterday you never referred to it. You never do refer to it unless I ask, in all these months.” She pulled a chair from under the table and plumped herself down upon it. “I’ve been thinking a lot this whole weekend.”
“I been doing more than thinking,” said Buddy, leaning earnestly across the bare enamel tabletop.
She knitted her penciled eyebrows. “Which means?”
He leaned back, as if in assurance. “You just trust me.”