Have Mercy (Have a Life #1) (6 page)

The Griffin and Bang and Raymond played a couple of songs to ear-splitting applause from the kids packed into the Trap and the late arrivals in the driveway, then Raymond with a big grin introduced us, saying
Have Mercy
was a group that was going to be big one day
peut etre
, and Tim jumped up and motioned for me and Captain Kirby to take the stage.  Raymond joined The Griffin and Bang at the front of the crowd and we played
Hole in the Sky,
the song Tim wrote for the occasion and The Griffin actually paid attention in spite of the Goth girl’s pawing because the song was really cool.  When it was over, he asked me if I wrote it and it took every bit of integrity I had not to lie and say yes. 

              “You should talk to my man,” The Griffin said to Tim, by which he meant his manager who was meeting them in Houston in a couple of days.  “Send him a demo.”

              “Can I call him or what?” Tim asked.

              “No, I’ll have him call you,” The Griffin said.

              And I watched Tim enter that twilight zone where everything is possible as he wrote down the chords for The Griffin and repeated the lyrics, and I was jealous that it wasn’t me as The Griffin nodded his approval and patted Tim’s shoulder.  If only I could be free of school and move to Houston where I just
knew
songs would pour out of me.

              “I have to talk to you,” I told The Griffin.  “It’s important.  I have a presentation which will explain everything,” which I felt kind of ridiculous saying in a garage full of people high on music and alcohol and pot.  Like I was Mr. Dow bullet pointing in the Dark Ages to an audience of irate villagers.  Boy, would Mr. Dow have a fit when he found out I was dropping out of school.

              “Sure, babe.  What’s this about?” 

              “It’s about school.”

              “Sure, let’s see what you got.”

              The Griffin always smiled like he was proud of me when I gave him printouts.  See, this is the thing about The Griffin.  When he’s noticing you with his huge blue eyes and he has this half smile on his face reacting to what you’re saying, he’s
with
you, like you’re the only thing in the world that matters to him. 

              “Let me get my laptop,” I said, and by the time I ran up to my room to get my laptop and returned to the basement, the Goth girl, whose name I found out from one of her friends was Evelyn—like
who
is named
Evelyn
who hasn’t been
dead
for a hundred years?—was leading The Griffin to the bus where the bus driver, a skinny old guy who’s been with The Griffin since I was ten and who wasn’t allowed to leave his post, closed the door behind them.

                It was two o’clock in the morning.  Jane would be home soon from the prom.  A couple of people had brought their own guitars and set up with Tim and Raymond and Bang and the music had an air of exhilaration that you get when musicians, previously unknown to one another, discover each other though music.  It’s an un-reproducible sound, the music of discovery, trading fours, the language of one soul, two souls, three having a conversation without words. 

              There must have been seventy people in the garage and the driveway grooving and dancing and spilling across the street and the lights were on in all the houses around us and I was wondering when the cops would arrive when Captain Kirby found me.  “This is like the best party ever!” she said.  Captain Kirby had never told me where she lived or who she lived with.  We had only known each other for two days, true, but all of a sudden it seemed like a giant omission.  “Don’t you have to tell your mom or dad or somebody where you are?” 

              “My mom’s working.”

              “
Now
?”

              “
Your
mom is working, too.”

              Somehow I never thought of chaperoning as work.

              “See,” Captain Kirby said, “This is what I want when I’m on my own.  A house where people can feel they can come and hang out.  With music and food.”

              “I thought you hated pizza and Chinese take-out.  That you thought it wasn’t really food.”

              “I do.  I mean, I hate it as a regular diet.  But it’s great for a party.”

              ”Maybe you can help Jane with a whole food menu the next time the band comes.”

              She grimaced. 

              I didn’t approve of Captain Kirby backing down on her food ideals.  I would have to expand my opinion of Captain Kirby to include this profoundly contradictory information.

              “Why don’t we bring your mom some food?” I asked, suddenly wanting to be away from the scene which didn’t seem to involve me now that The Griffin was in the bus with that girl.  “Does she eat pizza?”  A Papa John’s delivery van had made the third delivery of the night a half hour ago—Jane must have told them to time their drop offs—and the pizza was still warm.

              Captain Kirby considered this as she looked around the best party she ever attended.  “She wouldn’t mind, I guess.”

              Her mother had the VW van and Captain Kirby didn’t have a bike.  I told her she could take Tim’s who was high as a kite on himself and was jamming with Raymond and Bang and talking to them like he was their freakin equal—which I guess they thought he was because they were tweaking his song so they must have thought it was worth something—and he didn’t even notice we were going.  I kept my eyes straight ahead as we pedaled past the bus and into the damp early morning air.  The box of pizza was strapped to the carrier on my rear fender.  We rode about two miles into town when I shouted to her, “Where are we going?” and she pointed straight ahead to a row of big mansions that used to house the steel magnates in the last century, but were now mostly broken up into doctor offices, a couple were apartment buildings, and one was Kulick’s Funeral Home which is where we turned into the circular driveway.

“Your mom works
here
?” I asked.

              “My mom isn’t a people person,” Captain Kirby said. She hopped off her bike and put her index finger up to her lips. 

              “I don’t think anyone in here can hear us,” I said.

              “The owners are very light sleepers.” 

              We walked our bikes around back.  The VW van was parked in the lot.  Captain Kirby pushed Tim’s bike out of sight behind a rhododendron bush and after unstrapping the pizza box I did the same, then we went down a wrought iron stairway and she tugged on a chain hanging from a bell which rang really loudly with each pull and after what seemed like an hour, a woman in a white lab coat, goggles, face mask, paper hair net and rubber gloves opened the door.  She looked at us over her goggles which she had pushed down her nose.

              “Oh, Janet, it’s you,” the woman said.  “Who’s this?”

              “My friend, Mercy.”

              “Well, come in, but you have to be really quiet.”

              We followed her through two rooms—she had to unlock both their doors—until we arrived at a room lit by florescent lights with a table in the middle with a dead body lying on it covered with a paper blanket.  I’d only seen dead bodies before in movies.  The place stank like the sulfur kids put on at night to dry up their zits.  It was all pretty creepy and I felt a little nauseous.  I handed Mrs. Kirby the box of pizza.  “Janet said you might be hungry.”

              “Isn’t that thoughtful,” she said, putting the box on the dead body’s stomach, then changing her mind and putting it on a chair.  It was a woman.  “I’m almost finished with this one.  I’m waiting for the pancake to dry.”

              She pushed her goggles back over her eyes and applied nail polish to the fingernails of the dead woman’s hands which looked like they were a thousand years old. 

              “Frosted shell pink,” Captain Kirby said.  “Everyone looks good in frosted shell pink.  Especially if they have ridges in their nails from being sick a long time.”  She obviously had strong opinions about her mother’s work, but I thought she was definitely wrong about the frosted shell pink.  Jane would die—or something—before she would be seen in frosted shell pink.

              “My mom does their make-up,” Captain Kirby said, answering the question I wasn’t sure how to ask. 

              A metal make-up case was open on a stainless stand next to the corpse table.  For someone’s mother—and despite the frosted nail polish—Mrs. Kirby had very hip taste in cosmetics: Urban Decay, Mac, Tarte.  She finished the woman’s nails—no need to warn her to let them dry for an hour—and started on her hair.  She pulled a blue-gray extension out of a drawer in the stainless stand and attached it to the woman’s head—cutting it so it fit in with the woman’s bob.  I had stopped feeling nauseous and was thinking that this was like being in a beauty parlor where you didn’t have to make small talk.

              “If you’re going to watch so closely put on a mask,” Mrs. Kirby said.  She pulled one out her lab coat and handed it to me. 

              I had never seen a
real
dead person—two of my grandparents had died but I didn’t go to their funerals because one lived in Akron and the other in Detroit—and I was surprised at how unmoved I felt.  I thought I should be crying my eyes out.  Maybe it was the total stillness of the body—I mean no one alive is that still even when they’re sleeping—that made me feel the woman wasn’t real.  I wanted to touch her forehead to see how it felt, but I knew that would be disrespectful. 

              “If you’re going to touch, you need gloves.”  Mrs. Kirby was obviously a mind-reader.  “But I wouldn’t.  You have to get used to it like Janet or you’ll have nightmares.”

              “Do you know who she is?”

              “Mrs. Joseph McGouldrick is her name,” Mrs. Kirby answered me.  “She had eleven children and thirty-nine grandchildren.”  She finished up with eyebrow pencil and lipstick and blush.  The blush was the only weird note.  “That’s who she
was
.”

              Captain Kirby came up next to us and looked at her mother’s handiwork.  “Gorgeous, Mom.  As usual.”

              Mrs. Kirby washed up and took off her lab coat and goggles, putting them in a locker.  She tossed her hairnet and gloves and mask, gesturing for me to give her mine, in a trash can, then pulled the paper blanket over the woman’s face and turned out the lights.  “Let’s go,” she said.

              We walked back through the two locked rooms—Mrs. Kirby told me that it was a tradition to keep bodies under double lock because bodies were regularly stolen in the Middle Ages when medical students wanted to study cadavers—I wondered if Mr. Dow knew about
that
, how we haven’t advanced in that regard since the Middle Ages—and we went outside and climbed into the beat-up VW van.  The back seats had been taken out and two living room chairs were in their place.  Captain Kirby indicated that I should take one “Please, you’re our guest” while she sat on the floor and her mother sat in the other chair. 

              “A long day,” Mrs. Kirby said.  “I did a boy who’d been in a car accident this afternoon. Very messy.” 

              Without her protective gear on, Mrs. Kirby looked like a normal woman, probably prettier than most of the mothers I knew, except Jane of course. 

              “Mom used to do make-up in Los Angeles, for Vanna White,” Captain Kirby said.  She waited for me to acknowledge that I knew Vanna White, but I didn’t.  “It doesn’t matter.  She was just this bitch on a game show.”

              “She wasn’t a bitch,” Mrs. Kirby said, seeming alarmed at her daughter’s harsh assessment of Vanna White.  “We just didn’t see eye to eye.”   She had brought the box of pizza with her and she opened it now.  “This looks lovely,” she said.

              “Maybe we could go to your house and eat it there,” I said.  It seemed so weird to be sitting in someone’s van, pretending it was a house.  But that’s what it was it seemed like.  The easy chairs.  Pictures were taped to the windows which were covered in black privacy shields.  Two TV trays were folded up against the back of the driver’s seat.   

              “Or we could go to your house,” Mrs. Kirby said.

              “We’re having a party there.  It’s just a bunch of kids.  I don’t think you would like it.”  I was surprised that Captain Kirby hadn’t told her mother about it.

              “Well this is fine with me,” Mrs. Kirby said.  “And the pizza is scrumptious.  Yum.”  It was fake Mom Talk.

              “We have to get back to the party, Mom,” Captain Kirby said.  “You all right here?”

              “I’m fine.” 

                We said good-night-nice-to-meetcha etcetera and as Captain Kirby slid the side door closed I noticed two sleeping bags rolled up against the passenger seat.  I had mistaken them for pillows in the dark.  We fetched our bicycles from behind the rhododendrons and rode silently for a couple of minutes. 

              “Mom wants me to go back to culinary arts summer camp so I can become a chef and all.  She traded our housing vouchers to pay for it.  This’ll be my second year.”             

              “Okay,” I said.

              “I think that’s very cool of her, don’t you?”

              “Very cool,” I said.

              “She’s a great mom, like yours.” 

              I actually didn’t know what to say, and while I was dithering to myself about where to store the fact that Captain Kirby was basically
homeless
, my phone vibrated.  I’m not a big texter.  As I said, there are people who live on their phones and then there are the rest of us.  So getting a text was a big deal.  I thought maybe Jane needed something.

              “Wait a minute,” I yelled to Captain Kirby who’d pulled ahead of me.  I coasted to the curb and read the text, which was from Tim.  He said that it was all over the net that some student from another high school was bragging that he bedded a teacher from the senior prom.  He thought I should know.

              Captain Kirby had turned her bike around.  My hands were shaking as I reread the message.  “Do you feel sick?” she asked.  “Hey, you okay?”

              Why did Tim think I should know?  Did he think it was
Jane?
  He didn’t say he thought it was Jane or that anyone had said it was Jane.  It
couldn’t
be Jane.  I mentally pictured the teachers who I knew were chaperones at the prom.  It had to be Jane. Who else?

              “Actually,” I said, “I’m not okay.”