Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (32 page)

"It was some kid you don't know," he said, lowering my curiosity. "He lives in the opposite direction from you. I think he lives somewhere near Melody Ranch."

Melody Ranch was a cheap roadhouse dance hall where there were a lot of fistfights on the weekend between drunken men who would never sit in the chair where Harry Truman was sitting. It was out of my territory, so the kid was an unknown competitor, just another vulture circling the alcoholism of this "old" night watchman.

I used to wonder what he would do if somebody actually came to the sawmill at night and tried to steal something. He had a thin beer-brittle physique. Some men get fat when they drink a lot of beer. Others just get thinner until their bones come to resemble dried-out weeds. He was that type.

Also, there is something else that I haven't mentioned about him. He was a very fancy dresser and his clothes were immaculately neat and clean.

Sometimes he wore a suit with a tie while he watched the sawmill with a faithful bottle of beer in his hand. He looked like an insurance agent instead of a night watchman. I wondered about his capability and desire to defend the sawmill against sawmill thieves because he looked as if he couldn't defend a marshmallow against a three-year-old.

Perhaps he had a gun.

I asked him about that once.

"What do I need a gun for?" was his reply.

I didn't pursue that subject but finally I had to ask him what he would do if somebody came and tried to steal something.

"I'd let them steal the whole God-damn sawmill. I wouldn't help them load it, though. I wouldn't want to get my clothes dirty. They only pay me fifty dollars a month to watch this God-forsaken place, plus I get to live in this shack for nothing and they take care of my utilities."

He laughed when he said the words: "my utilities." Then he said them again but this time much louder, "My utilities!" and laughing even louder. I tried to think what was so funny, but I couldn't, so I left.

Anyway, that was a few months ago and this was now and I had a sack of beer bottles and I was ready to go on my way again. I had to get back to the pond.

The people who brought their furniture with them when they went fishing would be arriving soon, and they were much more interesting than this carefully dressed "old" beer-drinking sawmill night watchman who didn't give a damn if thieves came and took the whole place, mill, pond, logs, lumber, and just left him there drinking beer with everything gone except for his little shack and his weed-like chair on the front porch.

"I have to be going," I said, taking a step back and away from his world.

"Well, don't go to Mobile, Alabama," he said, starting to laugh.

My second step was a little more hurried.

"Mobile, Alabama!" he repeated:

 

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust

 

The afternoon sun was appropriately lower in the sky and the wind was beginning to die down and there was an advanced feeling of evening approaching with its refreshing contents and renewed hope after a long hot summer afternoon.

While I'm a quarter of a mile away, walking back to the pond with a sack of beer bottles over my shoulder, I'll talk about something else that is more interesting than just walking along various well-worn paths and then railroad tracks leading to a final path ending or perhaps beginning at the pond again.

As a child I was very interested when other children died. There was no doubt about it that I was a morbid kid and when other children died, it always fanned the flames of my forensic curiosity.

Later, in February of 1948, this curiosity would become a personal reality and engulf and turn my life upside down and inside out like
Alice in Wonderland
taking place in a cemetery with the white rabbit as an undertaker and Alice wearing a grave-eaten shroud to play her games in.

But in my life before that was to happen, I was fascinated by dead children and the aftermath of their passing. I think it all perhaps began in 1940 when we moved into an apartment that was annexed to a funeral parlor.

The apartment had once been a functioning part of the mortuary. I don't know exactly what part, but the undertaker to get a little extra cash had changed the former dead space of his funeral parlor into an apartment where we lived for a few months in the late spring of 1940.

I used to get up in the mornings and watch the
funerals out the window. I had to stand on a chair because I was five years old and I wanted a good view.

I seem to remember they held some funerals early in the morning because everybody would still be asleep in the apartment and I would be wearing my pajamas.

To get at the funerals I had to roll up a window shade that was particularly difficult for my dexterity to handle, but somehow I managed it and then pulled a chair over and stood on top of it and watched the funerals.

We moved into the apartment late one afternoon and the next morning while everybody was still asleep, I got up and wandered into the front room. I looked sleepily under the window shade and there was my first funeral as big as death.

The hearse was parked maybe thirty feet away. Can you imagine how big that hearse seemed? That's very close for a hearse to be to a five-year-old. It seemed to me to be the size of a movie that for some very strange reason they had painted black.

That's when I first went and got the chair and pulled the window shade up after quite a struggle and moved the chair into a very good funeral-viewing position and climbed on top of it.

I did this all very quietly because I didn't want to wake anybody up in the house. Adults always like to disrupt what kids are doing, no matter what it is except
if it's something the kid doesn't like. If the kid doesn't like it, the adults will let him keep on doing it forever, but if the kid likes it...

The hearse was filled with flowers.

There were so many flowers in the hearse that ever since then flowers have always made me feel uneasy. I like flowers but sometimes I feel uncomfortable being in their presence. I've never let it get out of control, but I've had it ever since that morning in 1940 when I watched my first funeral.

For a while the hearse and all its flowers were just standing there alone except for two men dressed in black who seemed not to be in a hurry, just waiting. They could almost have been flowers themselves: some kind of black daffodils.

One of them was smoking a cigarette. He had smoked it down so short that it looked as if the butt were going to set his hand on fire. The other one kept stroking a long very black moustache that looked as if it had jumped off the hearse and right onto his face, but it didn't seem to bother him.

You probably want to know how I knew I was watching a funeral if I was only five years old and I had never seen this sort of thing before and nobody had told me about such goings on. The answer to this is very simple: I saw one in the movies, just a week before and figured it out for myself.

After a while the two men who were waiting beside the hearse went into the funeral parlor and then people started coming out. The people were all very somber and moved appropriately. They seemed to be in slow motion. Though I was close to them, standing on my chair, it was difficult to hear what they were saying.

This was becoming very interesting.

I could hardly wait to see what would happen next.

The two men in black came back out with some other men carrying the coffin. They put it in the back of the hearse. Actually, they had to sort of stuff it in because of all the flowers, but somehow they managed it and the two men got into the front seat where the living travelled.

The mourners walked very
s l o w l y
and started getting into parked cars. The cars all had one-word signs on their windshields, but I didn't know what the word said. It would be years before I figured it out.

Pretty soon everybody was gone and the street was very quiet in the wake of their departure. The first thing I heard after they were gone was a bird singing just outside the window.

I got down from the chair and went back to my bed. I lay there staring at the ceiling and digesting what I had just seen. I stayed in bed until everybody else woke up.

When I heard them moving around in the kitchen,
I got up and joined them. They were still sleepy and making some coffee to begin the war of another day.

They asked me if I'd had a good night's sleep.

For an unknown reason I pondered their question, which really didn't even need a reply. I mean, I could have said any little thing and that would have been OK, but I stood there, thinking hard about it.

They continued what they were already doing and immediately forgot that they had asked me something. People aren't really interested for any length of time if a five-year-old had a good night's sleep, and that's what was happening to me.

"Yes, I did," I finally said.

"Did what?" they asked.

"Had a good night's sleep."

"Oh," they said, looking at me curiously because they had forgotten what they had asked me. Adults are always doing that with children.

Anyway, I got up early and watched the funerals after that. There of course wasn't a funeral every morning and I was disappointed when there wasn't one. I went back to bed and hoped that there would be a funeral the next morning.

There were other funerals going on during the day but I didn't care about them very much.

I was strictly a morning funeral child.

For the first two weeks I did that, everybody stayed asleep in the apartment. Then one morning
somebody got up early and found me standing on a chair in the front room, with my pajamas on, looking out the window at a funeral.

They came up quietly behind me and looked at what I was watching with total attention, so much so that I didn't even hear them come up.

I must have been a very strange sight.

"What are you doing?" they asked, but they could see what I was doing, so in a way, it was a wasted question.

"Looking out the window," I said.

"Looking out the window at a funeral. You're a weird kid."

I have to agree that observation was right on the money.

They said that they wanted to have a serious conversation with me later on, but they forgot about it and so the serious conversation never took place.

The undertaker had a wife and a little daughter. They lived in the funeral parlor along with the dead people. The daughter was a year older than I. She was six and had very cold hands. I guess living in a funeral parlor gave a person cold hands.

I wondered what her life was like in there with dead people coming and going like somber wind. When we played we always played outside. I didn't ask her if she wanted to come into my house and play be
cause I was afraid she would ask me to come and play in her house.

Once I asked her if she was ever afraid of having dead people around the house.

"Why should I?" she said. "They're dead. They can't hurt anybody."

That was one way of looking at it, but it was not mine.

I also once asked if she ever listened to
Inner Sanctum.
I thought it would be very terrifying to listen to
Inner Sanctum
in a funeral parlor. It would be one of the worst experiences a person could ever have because listening to
Inner Sanctum
was scary enough but inside a funeral parlor! How could you stop from screaming or ever get to sleep again.

"Sure," she said. "But my favorite program is
Grand Central Station.
I like the sound of the trains and the people coming and going. They have interesting stories."

"What about
Inner Sanctum
?" I said, returning to the subject of
Inner Sanctum
which was the most important thing on my mind. At a time like this who wanted to hear about
Grand Central Station ?

"
Inner Sanctum
is..." she said, pausing, "... corny."

CORNY!
INNER SANCTUM.
CORNY!

I was stunned.

"Corny," she repeated, almost whispering it to get a certain dramatic effect.

If
Inner Sanctum
was corny, then how in the hell did she get such cold hands. Where did they come from? A Cracker Jack box? So when I played with her, I always avoided games that required hand holding.

She had long blond hair, but her hair wasn't cold, only her hands were cold and I treated them like the plague. Once she wanted to play ring-around-the-rosy, just the two of us, holding hands. I told her my mother was sick and I had to go get her a glass of water.

"I didn't know your mother was sick," she said. "You didn't mention it until now. How come?" The undertaker's daughter was too smart for her own good.

I was hard pressed for a reply.

If my mother had really been sick, that's the kind of thing kids tell each other right off the bat. A sick mother is a newsworthy topic. I kept thinking as hard as I could. Meanwhile, avoiding her cold hands by putting my hands safely in my pockets and taking a couple of steps backwards toward my house.

But I couldn't think of a God-damn thing to say.

I just stood there like an idiot with an imaginary sick mother who didn't need tending to.

"I've got to get her a glass of water," I finally said, desperately and ran into the house.

Someday I would be six years old, too, and be able to come up with fast questions, too.

"What are you doing in here?" my mother said when I came into the house. "It's a beautiful day. Go outside and play."

"I have to go to the toilet," I said.

"Oh," she said, rapidly losing her interest in me. "Well, go to the toilet and then go back outside and play. I don't want to see you in here. It's too nice a day."

I had no plans to stay inside. It was only a last ditch stand to keep away from the hands of the undertaker's daughter. I started toward a meaningless and unneeded pee-pee when there was a knock at the door.

My mother went to answer it.

Though I hadn't the slightest idea who was there, I knew that somehow it did not bring good tidings.