The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy (13 page)

Cribbs asked us to stand. We did so. Martha was
seated immediately in front of me. Her shoulders rose and fell a bit
more frequently than normal breathing would require, but no sound, no
tears.

Cribbs gestured toward A1. Larry, Dale, the younger
Cribbs, and I positioned ourselves two on a side at the coffin. The
younger Cribbs tugged and pushed the stretcherlike contraption upon
which the coffin rested, and we wheeled it down the aisle. It was a
symbolic journey only, the coffin stopping at the door. We mourners
filed out of the room and the home, leaving Al with the professionals
for maneuvering the coffin into the hearse.

We had come from Martha's house in Carol's
ten-year-old Buick four-door, but a liveried driver awaited us in the
driveway. He stood at parade rest rather than lean against the black
Cadillac limousine. We squeezed in, sitting close and salon-style in
the facing seats. We pulled away from the funeral home, the hearse
sliding behind us, headlights ablaze. Not even Dale attempted
conversation for the next fifteen minutes.

The cemetery had a graveyard's gateway and ground
plan. Given all the hills around Pittsburgh, the terrain was
surprisingly, even disappointingly, level. I couldn't help comparing
Beth's sloping view of the harbor to Al's blind, bleak valley, even
though I knew her site was more comfort to me than to her.

The driver pulled to a stop at a landmark I couldn't
distinguish. He got out and yanked open our door. The comfortable if
claustrophobic interior of the limo had insulated us from the winter
outside. An icy blade of wind plowed through the salon, giving us the
shivers. All exited, we males repeating our superfluous escort of
Al's coffin as we wended between already occupied plots to the open
gash he would fill. I wondered what machinery was necessary to dig
holes in this weather and how simpler generations managed in the old
days.

Two cemetery employees materialized at the grave. I
paid not much attention to the details of what came next. I was
watching Martha as we arranged ourselves, buffeted by the wind and
cold, on one short end of the grave.

The ceremony consisted of a neutral reading by Cribbs
and the slow, steady lowering of the coffin by the cemetery staff
using strong sashes which were recovered as the coffin reached
bottom. The younger Cribbs produced, magicianlike, a small bouquet of
roses. Beginning with Carol, we each in tum broke a blossom off its
stem, bent over the grave and tossed underhand the blossom onto the
coffin. Martha was last. As she edged to the opening, I edged near
her. When she let go her blossom, her eyes rolled back up into her
head and her right leg started to slide forward, like a driver's foot
applying brake pressure in slow motion.

Carol cried out, and Dale
and Larry snapped their heads up. I caught Martha at the shoulders
just as she unconsciously, and perhaps subconsciously, began her
slide down toward A1.

* * *

"She's still asleep. The boys too."

The television showed a boxing match silently
progressing. The fighters were lightweights, neither seeing his tenth
professional light yet. But at five-fifteen on a Saturday afternoon
in February, beggars couldn't be choosers. I had turned the sound off
during the first round to avoid some local 'caster who modeled
himself on Howard Cosell.

Before she went upstairs to check on Martha and the
kids, Carol had been in the kitchen, counting leftovers from last
night's deli spread. Before that, she'd been curled up in one of the
two chairs in the room, thumbing through a magazine while I killed
three vodka/rocks. Now she took the other end of the couch. Within
touching range.

"That Ruthie is a great babysitter," she
said. "She wears Kenny out. All I have to do is feed him an
forget him."

She gave me a big smile. I smiled back.

"And those pills. I'll have to remember the name
of them. They knocked Martha clean out." I

"You'd need a prescription for them," I
said.

"Easy enough. I meet a lot of doctors at the
club. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, you name it."

We had gotten Martha from the cemetery to a local
emergency room, where Dale and I cooled our heels in the waiting room
for a few hours while Larry and Carol rode back with Cribbs to pick
up her car and rejoin us. The doctor, when we finally saw her,
prescribed some tranquilizer/sleeping pills, which we filled on the
way home. Carol changed at her place while dismissing supersitter
Ruthie, then got Martha and the boys bedded down back at the Sachs
residence. She was wearing designer jeans that made a little too much
of her little too ample rump. She also wore a lamb's-wool V-neck
sweater and no apparent breast supporter.

"Not many private eyes, though."

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"Not many private detectives at the club.
Lawyers and doctors and such, but not many detectives."

"Tough way to make a living. Most of us don't."

"I'll bet you're pretty good at it. Can you tell
me about some of your cases'?"

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. Carol was
exhibiting what I call the post-mortem high. When you witness your
first few deaths and burials, particularly in your age group, you
feel so relieved to be quit of the depressing rituals, not to mention
so relieved that you're still alive, that you adopt a partylike
attitude. Gregarious, flirtatious, boisterous. Different people adopt
different attitudes. But they all point in the same direction, toward
life and away from
death.

The only problem, I have found, is that after enough
deaths, especially close ones, you wait at the departure point long
after your fellow mourners have begun moving toward the destination.
You remain a wet blanket at the party.

"Well, can you talk about your cases?" she
said, trying to fill the clumsy silence I was creating.

"Not much," I said. "Professiona1
confidentiality."

"Uh-huh," she said terminally. "Well,
I guess I'1l go check on supper again." She stood up. "What
do you want?"

I suddenly found I couldn't swallow too easily.

Carol really did look a lot like Audrey Hepburn, a
little harder in the`eyes and softer in the hips, but a lot.

"John? What do you want?"

"I want," I started thickly, then forced a
swallow.

"I want you to sit next to me, and hug me until
I fall asleep."

She blinked three or four times, then came over and
knelt down on the couch next to me. She buried her face in my
shoulder and clamped her arms around my neck. We started crying at
about the same time, crying with each other and for each other and
for all the slights and hurts and tragedies that had piled up since
the last time either of us had an other to hug.
 
 

ELEVEN
-•-

I AWAKENED AT 9:30 A.M. CAROL WASN'T THERE BUT A
jackhammer headache was, partly from the straight vodka itself and
partly from the dehydration it causes. I ran my tongue over my front
teeth. They felt furry. I heard cutlery clatter coming from the
kitchen. My stomach growled in reaction. I could feel the death gloom
sliding away, eroded by soothing sleep and growing hunger.

I was stretching and thinking about searching for
aspirin when I heard a faint tapping at the front door. I crossed the
room and opened it.

Dale blew in, borne by an arctic blast. "Christ,
what a climate," I said.

"Oh," he said, pushing back his parka hood,
"you get used to it." He dropped his voice. "How's
Martha doing? We were afraid the telephone might wake her up."

"I think she's fine. I just woke up myself."

"John," said Carol from the kitchen, "who
is it?"

Dale looked from the kitchen to me and cleared his
throat. I guessed my hair and clothes looked like I had just awakened
and, possibly, not alone.

Carol came out. "Oh, hi, Dale, we're just about
to attack your food again. Join us?"

Dale relaxed a little. "That would be fine. All
old friend of Larry's from college is in town and they're out . . .
having dinner."

“
Terrific," said Carol, pirouetting and
heading back to the kitchen. "Martha and the boys—"

She was interrupted by a plaintive "Mommieeeee"
from upstairs. She was by me like a punt returner and halfway up the
steps. "Get started," she said. "I'll be right down."

Dale laid his parka on a chair, and he and I went
into the kitchen. Carol had laid out the now-smaller spread in an
appetizing fan around the table.

"Dale," I said, "do you have any idea
where Martha would keep her aspirin? I got a little drunk after we
got home, and I was just recovering from passing out when you
knocked."

My explanation was a bit elaborate for a mere aspirin
request, but the dismissing of my and Carol's  shadow
relationship seemed to relax Dale even more. "Nooo, but"—he
dug into the pockets of his pants and came up with a one-dozen
tin—"I'm never without these."

He popped the tin, and I thanked him for the two I
took from it. I had washed them down with tap water, and Dale was
halfway through his migraine tales when Carol reappeared in the
doorway.

"Bad news, fellas," she said, sagging her
shoulder into the doorjamb. "Kenny's sick. Fever and
sore-throat. The last thing Martha needs now is a sick Al Junior, so
I'm gonna take Kenny home right away."

"No problem," I said. "I'll stay here
tonight and keep an eye on Martha." .

Carol nodded. "I just looked in on her. She's
dead to the . . . she's sound asleep. Little Al, too."

Dale insisted on making her a sandwich to take back,
and Carol went upstairs to bundle Kenny up. When she came back down,
I walked her to the door.

"Here's your sandwich," I said, sliding it
into her coat pocket. Kenny was completely concealed in a blanket.
"Would you like some help with him?" I said.

"No, thanks," she said. "Lean down,
though, will you?"

I leaned down toward her, and she gave me a quick but
a shade-more-than-friendly kiss on the lips. "If you get lonely
and want to talk, give me a call. I'm in the book. K-r-a-u-s-e."

"I remember," I said. "Thanks."

I opened the tundra turnstile, and she scooted
outside.

When I got back to the
kitchen, the vodka bottle was three fingers lower than I'd remembered
leaving it. Dale sucked liberally from a tumbler with just ice and
clear liquid in it. My vodka memories being too recent and still
powerful, I chose a beer.

* * *

"I don't know. I just don't know .... "

It was nearly eleven o'clock. Dale and I had polished
off two sandwiches each. I was only on my second beer. The vodka tide
was ebbing inexorably from the bottle and toward Dale. At first I
thought he was suffering a post-funeral low. Then the conversation
turned to Larry.

"I just don't know," said Dale for the
third time. He had put in a tough couple of days, too, so I kept up
my part of the conversation.

"Know what?"

"Oh," Dale blinked and sucked up another
mouthful of vodka-"life. The 'where-is-it-all-leading' problem.
I'm forty-six years old. Larry's twenty-nine. I love teaching and
tutoring music, but if it weren't for some family money, I'd . . .
we'd . . . never have been able to afford the house. As it is, I
don't know what I'd do if I needed to buy a new car. I had a German
car, a VW Bug, until three years ago. But after, you know, the
recession, I couldn't, I couldn't stand not buying an American car
with American steel. It's not such a great car, but whenever I
complain about what I've got or where I am, all I have to do is click
on the TV or walk down the street. Do you know what this city's
unemployment rate is?"

"No," I said. "I don't."

Dale grimaced and took another gulp of booze.

"The official rate is fifteen, sixteen percent.
Unofficially, counting the people who've been out of work so long
they're probably not in the computers anymore, the real rate now must
be almost twenty-five percent. Walk down the streets, you'll see
them. Big, strong men in bowling jackets and baseball caps just I
standing on comers. Or waiting in line for any kind of job that's
listed. Their jobs, the industries that made their jobs real, are
gone. Some gone to other countries, some just gone for good. A man
who used to make steel can't feed his family, but I can make a living
teaching piano. You figure it out."

"It is out of whack, a little."

Dale sighed and seemed to run out of steam. Which was
just as well, because I needed some answers before he slid into a
different kind of trance.

"Dale—"

"No, not Dale," he said. "Stanislaw.
That's my real name. Stanislaw Ptarski. I grew up in a little town
fifteen miles from here. My father was in steel. God"—he
laughed—"God, he would have cracked me good for saying that.
That he was 'in steel,' like he was 'in stocks' or 'in banking'. He
was a steelworker, pure and simple. Thirty-six years. He'd tell me
about the Depression, how people pulled together. I'm glad he never
had to see what's happened now. Or hear the name change. After he
died, I found that people didn't want piano lessons from a portly gay
named Stosh Ptarski. I don't know, maybe it hit a little too close to
home, with the ethnic name and all. So I changed it, and people were
much more comfortable with a portly gay named Dale Pahner, like I had
been imported from somewhere else, like I hadn't grown up with them
here and still turned out . . ." He seized up for a minute.