Dead End in Norvelt (11 page)

“What do the dead care if I smell?” I asked. “They are
dead
and they’re bound to smell worse than me.”

“Well, I’m not dead!” she snapped back. “And it is what I care that counts.” Then she nudged me toward the bathroom with her hip. “Now don’t forget to use soap.”

I took the fastest shower I could. I didn’t use soap but when I got out of the shower I splashed myself with Dad’s bottle of Old Spice. I figured it made me smell like I was Admiral Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay. “Damn the torpedoes,” I quoted boldly, “and full speed ahead!” I wrapped a skimpy towel around my waist and danced and pranced out of the bathroom and up the hall like I was a Union ship dodging Confederate mines.

Mom was in her room ironing a white shirt for me. “What are you doing?” I asked when I waltzed up to her. “I’m not going to church. I’m going to see a dead Hells Angel whose face looks like roadkill with a beard.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “No matter who that poor man is he deserves our respect. He was once someone’s little angel baby.”

“You mean
Hells
Angel baby,” I pointed out. “I should be dressed like the devil in honor of that guy.”

“Even the devil wears clean underpants,” she said, pointing the threatening tip of the hot iron at my skimpy towel. “And put on clean socks, pants, a belt, an undershirt, comb your hair, brush your teeth, and put on your shoes, and when you do all of that I’ll be waiting at the door with your perfectly ironed white shirt and then you can leave the house.”

“How do you remember all that stuff?” I asked over my shoulder as I ran back down the hall.

“I have it
memorized
,” she shouted behind me, “because I’m forced to say it every day of your animal boy life!”

By the time I did everything Mom told me to do she was standing at the porch door holding my shirt out like a bullfighting cape. I wiggled my arms into the sleeves. She buttoned me up the front as I buttoned my cuffs, then I tucked my shirttails in. “Thanks, Mom,” I said, and gave her a kiss and fled.

“Hey!” Dad called behind me as I ran past him. “Where are you going? I still need your help.”

“Miss Volker called!” I yelled over my shoulder, and kept running toward her house. “There is a dead guy she has to see!”

“If only she were next,” Dad hollered back. “Then we’d get some of this work done around here.”

*   *   *

Miss Volker was already sitting in her car. “Hurry,” she called from the passenger window. “I just cooked my hands so I can use my fingers to examine the body.” She was wearing quilted oven mitts in order to keep her hands warm.

I started the car and put it in Drive. “Hang on,” I warned her. “I think I’m getting better at this.” I punched the gas pedal to the floor. The back tires shot gravel through the open garage door and we blasted down the driveway. The tires squealed as we turned onto the Norvelt road and about thirty seconds later I hit the brakes and we swerved crazily into the parking lot at the Huffer Funeral Parlor.

“You’re a fast learner,” she remarked. “You’ve gone from slowpoke to safety hazard in one day.”

I grinned with pride. But that was my last grin for a while.

Mr. Huffer was waiting for us in the back room where he prepared all the cadavers. It smelled of formaldehyde. I knew it looked like a mad scientist’s laboratory because Bunny had shown it to me when it was unoccupied. There was a work table topped with a big yellowed marble slab that had a drainage groove carved around it. I remembered seeing that because it looked like one of the Aztec sacrificial altar stones where the victims had their hearts cut out and the blood snaked along the groove and down into a beautiful golden cup that would then be offered up with the still-beating heart to satisfy the bloody appetite of the Aztec gods. But with the Hells Angel on the slab I kept my eyes lowered and stared down at my shoes. I may have been a big talker to Bunny and Mom, but I didn’t want to see that dead man. Just the thought of his roadkill body made me queasy and I knew my nose would spew like a busted dike if I even peeked at him.

Bunny stood next to me and tapped me on the leg. “You okay?” she whispered.

“Sure,” I said with false bravery, and stupidly took a step forward which was a mistake, because next to my foot was a bucket filled with thick human fluids. Don’t look into the bucket again, I warned myself and jerked my head away. I took a deep breath and lifted my head for just long enough to see the victim’s mangled boots on display at the far end of the table.

“They had to cut the boots off of him,” Bunny informed me. “He was really clobbered.”

I looked back down at my shoes and took another deep breath. I closed my eyes but the room began to spin so I opened them a bit.

“Did you see the tattoos?” she asked.

She knew I hadn’t and she knew I never would. I hadn’t looked at a dead person since she made me touch that man’s unnaturally stiff neck.

“Then I’ll tell you about them,” she said, and without waiting for me to answer she continued. “On one leg is a spiraling black snake with a 666 in its open mouth, and a devil’s tail is twisting around his other leg.”

I could see everything she said as if it were a wall painting inside the cave of my own skull. Somehow the tattoos were even more gruesome when they were tattooed on the
inside
of my mind. I could run out of the room, but the image of his legs would still be dead inside of me and chasing after me for a lifetime.

I took a step back and quickly touched my nose. I glanced at my finger—no blood yet—but to be on the safe side I kept my hand pressed over my mouth like a window awning. I didn’t want to drip blood on my clean white shirt.

“Clearly,” I heard Miss Volker say from where the victim’s head would be, “there can be no doubt that the main cause of death is a massive skull fracture.”

“No doubt about it,” Mr. Huffer agreed sadly, and I imagined he struck his classic one-hand-on-hip mournful pose while his other hand reached out to pat someone on the shoulder. That’s what made him look like a human teapot. “This is the most massive head fracture I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Even worse than that of Dan Eakins.”

“Of course it’s worse!” Miss Volker said impatiently. “Dan was only split through the head with the pig-shaped weather vane that flew off a barn. Now let me see that police report.”

I heard her rustle through some papers for a minute before she began to speak. “It’s hard to believe a man could dance this much,” she remarked. “Because it says here that he started dancing a jig in a Mount Pleasant bar then danced out the door. Some drivers claimed to have just missed hitting him as he danced all the way here, and that is three miles from where he started. Mr. Spizz was the last to see him—said he was putting air in his tricycle tires up at Bob Fenton’s gas station early this morning after poisoning rats at the dump when the stranger strutted by, and a couple minutes later he was flattened.”

Mr. Huffer cleared his throat. “And,” he began, “the truck driver said the last thing he saw was the man gyrating wildly with his arms and legs pumping up and down as if he was on the dance floor.”

Bunny sidled up to me and whispered, “Did you see the big meat cleaver tattoo on his chest?”

“You know I didn’t,” I replied impatiently, and felt a shiver of fear run up my spine.

“What is great about it,” she said, ignoring me as I swayed back and forth in my white shirt like a bowling pin about to fall over, “is that it looks like the cleaver has chopped open his flesh so you can see his open heart, which is black. And in the middle of the black heart is the laughing red face of the devil. Isn’t that spooky?”

I couldn’t listen to her anymore. My head felt like a balloon that was swelling up and about to blow into another massive head fracture.

“Okay,” Miss Volker said dramatically. “I’ll sign the death certificate and release the body to you and you can do with him what you will.” Her voice had become really loud and I thought it was because I was about to faint. I felt my forehead. It was hot. Hang in there, I said to myself.

I knew that Miss Volker’s hands must be cold by now and she’d be ready to leave. I was right, and in a moment I heard the slow scrawling of the pen on the death certificate. “There,” she said, “he’s all yours.”

“I can keep the body in the freezer for a few days,” Mr. Huffer said evenly, “but if no one claims him then the Norvelt paupers’ fund will only pay for cremation. I’d like to give him a proper burial but no one will pay for it.”

“Good enough,” Miss Volker said. “We’ve done all we can.”

Bunny tapped me on the shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “The show is over and it looks like you just saw a ghost.”

I staggered out the back door and into the parking lot and took a deep breath. “I’ve seen a million dead people in the movies,” I said. “But real ones nearly kill me.”

“The movies are all fake,” she remarked. “They use animal blood. And they never give you the
smell
of death. I do admit this was the deadest guy I’ve ever seen. I mean, he was really flat.”

I was so relieved when Miss Volker came out. Quickly I helped her into the car and started it up. “Do you want me to assist with the obit?” I asked, and gunned the engine as we burned rubber onto the road.

“I’ll have to ponder this one overnight,” she said, lost in thought. “The dancing part reminds me of something, of some convulsive condition I read about once. I’ll do some research. Come down in the morning and we’ll tackle the obit.” Then she pointed at my shirt. “Your nose is leaking.”

I looked down. The big red splotch on my shirt looked like a real bleeding heart.

“Mom’s gonna kill me,” I moaned. “This shirt is still mostly new.”

“Bring the shirt tomorrow,” she said. “I have some chemicals in the garage that will send that stain to the Promised Land.”

“Great,” I said. “Because if Mom sees this she’ll send me to the Promised Land.”

“We can’t allow that to happen,” she remarked. “You are my right-hand man.”

I glanced at her hands. They were crossed in her lap like two old gloves.

10

The next day
, as usual, Miss Volker called early but Mom was up even earlier. It was her day to cook for the Norvelt Meals for the Elderly program, and she was singing along with the radio as she chopped mushrooms she had gathered up in the woods by the town dump. After a quick breakfast I cleaned myself up a bit then hid my bloody white shirt in a bag and walked swiftly toward the back door. “See you later,” I called out.

“Not so fast,” Mom ordered. “When you come back I want you to deliver these casseroles to the Community Center. Mr. Spizz will deliver them to the ladies who called in for a home-cooked meal.”

“Mr. Spizz,” I said with disgust. “Doesn’t he bug you?”

“Yes,” she said. “But in a small town you have to forgive people for their faults no matter if you want to or not.”

“I guess,” I said, wishing he’d forgive me for forgetting about the weeds and rip up the ticket.

“So don’t be too late,” she cautioned. “Old people like to eat dinner at four in the afternoon, and they get ornery if they get too hungry.”

“I’ll be on time,” I promised. Then I was out the door. Dad was on the tractor, still working with the heavy road roller in order to flatten the waves out of the runway. In the summer he liked to get started early on chores before the sun blazed down on him.

“Hey!” he yelled when he saw me, and cut the engine back. “You still have some diggin’ to finish.” He pointed toward the bomb shelter and the sharpness in his voice and the stiffness of his jabbing pointer finger told me he meant business.

“Hey!” I yelled back, and shrugged forlornly. “I still have to help Miss Volker.” I kicked a rock toward her house.

“You should be helping me out around here,” he said, “instead of working for that nut who’s got one foot in the grave.”

I pointed toward the kitchen and lowered my voice. “I’m just following orders.”

He gave me an I-know-what-you-mean look and put the tractor back to work, and I happily ran down to Miss Volker’s house thinking I had really dodged a bullet. Nothing could be worse than digging that fake bomb shelter. It was a project as imaginary as digging a hole to China. At least Dad’s work would lead to something. Once he finished the runway he could fly away. Once I finished digging the bomb shelter I would probably be buried in it.

When I entered Miss Volker’s living room she was standing in front of the needlepoint map of Norvelt and looking over the small number of surviving original homesteaders. There were medical textbooks opened to various pages and spread out across my little writing desk, the couch, the floor, and anywhere she could find free space. She must have been up all night.

“We have a huge day today,” she announced enthusiastically, “and I have it organized just right in my mind. First, we go down to the drugstore to get some supplies for your nose operation and some wax for my hands. Then we’ll come back—I’ll heat up my hands, do the operation, and then dictate the obit to you. Got it?”

“Yep,” I said uneasily, “except I have to make sure to get Mom’s casseroles to the Community Center on time.”

“Do I get one?” she asked, and held up her hands. “About all I can grab is a cookie.”

“Only if you sign up for it in advance,” I explained. “Call the Community Center and get on the home meals delivery list.”

“Can you request anything you want?” she asked. “I’m a vegetarian.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Mom would cook anything for you.”

“Well, let’s get our day started,” she suggested. “It’s a big one.”

I grabbed her purse and followed her out to the car, happy to drive again.

In less than three minutes we entered the Rumbaugh drugstore. Miss Volker marched toward the back and showed me where the blocks of special wax were kept.

“Can’t you just take a pill for your hands?” I asked as we strolled down the aisle of instant fix-it supplies for bad stomachs, headaches, excess mucus, and other ailments.