Revival House (9 page)

“Damn,” I say, throwing an arm around his bony shoulders, “that’s what I’m talking about. That old man doesn’t know shit about progress. You need some frightainment in your world— that’ll bring ‘em in. Shake shit up. People will be clamoring for your services, absolutely fucking clamoring. Get advertising, dude.”

“Photography alone is not going to change anything. Neither is using old photos and home video of the deceased. I need something more.”

He sees the light.

In order to breathe life back into death, we need a little drama. Theatrics. Thrills.

But how?

We need to get rid of the old man and keep my pal in one piece.

I wonder...

Chapter 11 – Caleb

The Fillmore photos look fantastic. Mrs. Fillmore smiles down at the prints spread across my desk. Uncle Sterling watches us through narrowed eyes from his own desk across the parlor. He hasn’t been looking very well as of late. He looks exhausted. Maybe he should try Botox or something along those lines.

“Oh, Mr. Exley,” she says, “these are wonderful.” She holds one up in each hand and looks back and forth, from one picture to the other, beaming. “You know, I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I’d agreed to the photography, seeing how I was still in shock and all, but you did such an amazing job. He looks so alive. And happy, even. Thank you so much.”

I peek over at Sterling to make sure he’s hearing all this. His sour expression tells me all I need to know. He’s hearing it all right, but he’s not buying it. He pulls his Miracle Ear out of his ear, the springy white hairs in there popping into view.

Mrs. Fillmore gushes over how happy and alive her dear departed husband appears as she writes me a generous check. She throws her arms around me in tight embrace before she leaves the parlor. It makes me highly uncomfortable, having someone touch me like that. You could say hugs are well outside my comfort zone.

Hydrogen, helium, lithium...

Finally, she releases her grip on me and skips out the front door.

“Well,” I say, perching on my leather chair after she’d gone, smoothing my green tie, “what do you think of that, Uncle?” I shout so he can hear me.

“I think you crashed her husband onto the tile floor and broke his damned head off, that’s what I think,” he shouts back.

I sigh. There is really nothing I can say to that. Fillmore’s head was broken off in the post-portrait fall. But Sterling expected the closed casket anyway, so it wasn’t much of an issue in my mind.

“Sir, with all due respect,” I said, “I have in my hand a check for one thousand five hundred dollars that we would not otherwise have obtained from that client.”

Sterling snorts.

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you, boy? Think you’ve got all the answers. The only thing you know about is disrespect. Playing around with the dead like they’re some kind of dolls is a disgusting blasphemous display. At Exley & Sons, we have always, always fought to keep a certain amount of decorum, a certain aura of dignity surrounding ourselves and our clients. And that’s why families have trusted us, come to us in their most heart-breaking time of need, for centuries.” He whispers the ‘centuries’ part in a scathing hiss. Most dramatic.

I could break his neck in a fraction of a second.

...oxygen...

“Lot of good that’s doing us now,” I say. “Postmortem photography has a rich tradition of its own. It’s the farthest thing from disrespect. And,” I called up the Forever Hollywood website and swung my monitor around to face him, “if you’ll just look at what others are doing to honor the dead now, you might understand how things are changing...”

“Nonsense! There is no room for change in this business. Change. Ha! Look what ‘change’ did for this country, electing that secret-Muslim president when he ran on his slogan of ‘change.’ Well, son, change is not what this business needs. We need more dead people, pure and simple. The way people live now, with their antibacterial soaps and their jogging and damned gym memberships, deaths are just more spread out. Naturally, some of the funeral parlors will be run out of business— there just aren’t enough stiffs to go around anymore. Survival of the fittest— they teach you that at your fancy Yankee school? We’re not big enough to compete with some of the other powerhouses in town. And it doesn’t make much sense for you to go monkeying around with fate.”

He does not see the potential for success here.

“Just leave it alone, boy.”

I shove myself away from my desk and stalk out of the building, slamming the door behind me. I walk over to Forsyth Park, stalking the perimeter as I mumble to myself about the state of my personal affairs.

“Crazy ass,” a low voice says from a cluster of azaleas as I pass by.

I freeze and turn my head to see who had spoken.

Two males laugh from the foliage. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, stick boy.” Two burly frat boys, each clutching a can of what I presume to be beer (the cans are encased in University of Georgia foam can coolers), step into my path.

“Excuse me,” I say, stepping around them to the right. One of them pushes me off the curb and into the street. He does not see the blur of my fist fly into his zygomatic arch, but I guarantee he feels it. I know I do. Oh, the delicious sensation of my own skin meeting stubble-covered elastic skin, followed by phalange and juncturae tendinum penetrating the thin sheet of muscle, the Zygomaticus minor, to land in a satisfying crunch against the sharp unyielding bone beneath. That dull cracking sound. The natural lines in my knuckles open like little red mouths, leaving a trail of my blood on his high and fractured cheekbone. His eyes squint shut, his teeth fall together with a click. I recoil my fist, cock my leg, and place a perfect round kick square into his ribs. My shoe scuffs, the laces dig into the top of my foot, the sound of an air-filled paper bag popping fills the azalea-scented air. The boy doubles over and falls into the bushes.

In case you’re curious, Georgia state law allows citizens the right to commit simple battery if provoked by ‘fighting’ words. This is how I stay out of the state prison system.

A fist glances off the middle of my back and I turn to face my other assailant.

“Dude, what’s your fucking problem?” he asks.

Hydrogen, helium, lithium...

“Sir, I do believe it is you who has the problem.” I throw my hands behind his square head and pull it down to meet my upward thrusting knee. The plane of his forehead bounces off the upper edge of my patella with a resounding smack. He stumbles backward, hands flying to his cranium.

“Okay, okay, holy shit, man, sorry,” he says, holding his head.

The funniest part is he’s still clutching his beer in one hand and hasn’t spilled a drop of it. He looks at his friend rolling into the bushes.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here. Buncha freaks in this fucking town, man.”

I take a Hermes handkerchief from my pocket and rub the scuff off my shoe before wrapping the cloth around my bloodied knuckles. I straighten my tie and continue my walk around the park with a renewed sense of peace.

After a single mile-long lap, I head back home. I let myself in the back door and go downstairs to my basement lab.

~

Why do people have to die?

It is the question that has haunted me my entire life. I don’t know if it’s because of my parents’ murder, my family’s business, or just some in-born curiosity. I sit down at my lab table and open up my notebook computer. Along the far wall, behind glass, in the cabinet, mice scratch in their cages, hamsters run in wheels, lizards sleep on rocks.

Some vague memory from half a foggy lifetime ago drives my brain, stabs it, spurs me on to search for an answer to this damned eternal question. Maybe something from school? I can’t quite remember. The thought dances just out of reach of my memory.

It’s the paradox of my existence: I want the key to immortality, but I need death in order to survive.

Somewhere in the wasteland of my head lurks the answer.

Chapter 12 – Sterling

Foreclosure notice. Bah. I found it stuck in between the double front doors when I opened up this morning. It’s a twin to the one I hid in the safe. That one came about two weeks ago.

I do not know how I ever got this far behind, how things got so desperate. Billie always handled the bookkeeping. Utilities, supplies, automobiles, equipment. And the big bill that she’d never see: the second mortgage. I’d had to borrow money against the parlor when she went to The Home.

My poor, sweet Billie. That boy... that boy took her life, our life. That boy killed her. He was too young and inexperienced to be driving a float. Too young to be drinking. Those things might have been under my control, but he’s still the one who killed her. And, when he did that, he killed the business by shoving this boulder of a debt on top of everything.

I knew we should have never sent him up north. I knew he’d want to change everything once he came home. Damn Yankees and their change and progress. That’s not our way down here. We are far more genteel and civilized. Tell that to a bull-headed college graduate, though, who knows everything.

I don’t know how I’m going to afford to keep Billie in that Home. The borrowed money is nearly gone and Mark Cosgrove down at the First Chatham Bank has declined to lend me any more. I lay awake at night, crying so the boy won’t hear me, remembering the smell of her hair, the curve of her body in the bed beside me. Seeing her in that institution... I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. My eyes tear up just thinking about it. When I walk in the room, she doesn’t even know I’m there. Not even when I’m touching her most intimate lady parts, whispering in her ear how much I love her, how much I miss her. I cry and she doesn’t even feel my tears drop on her flawless face and neck.

I struggle to keep the boy from finding the bills. He’d pitch a fit, maybe even beat the tar out of me. He scares me sometimes. He thinks I don’t notice the rage in his eyes, the holes he punches in his bedroom walls. The way he looks into nothing as if he sees something there. If he knew we were going to lose the parlor, I’m afraid to think of what he might do. I had to quit sending him to that shrink. There just wasn’t enough money for that quackery. Maybe I made a mistake.

I lock up the books in the safe every time I have to leave the front office and keep my computer unplugged so he can’t get at my financial information. I’m sure he’d do something to me if he saw the books. He hates the way I run the parlor. Hates me for taking his parents away.

He hates
me
.

The feeling is mutual.

Maybe I’ll run away, let the lawyer break the news to him that we’re flat broke and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. That boy would have one hell of a job on his hands if I weren’t around. I can’t help but laugh at what misery he’d find staring him in the horsey face. But, he is blood, and I hope he would have sense enough to sell the parlor before they can auction it off. Then he could go off to do something admirable with his sorry excuse of a life, carry on the Exley name with pride. I hope to Christ he stops hanging around haunting Savannah with those ghost tour ghouls he runs around with. Life is too precious to waste on such trivial pursuits.

I don’t know how I’m going to pay The Home for keeping Billie this month. I don’t know how I’m going to keep the lights on in the parlor, or replenish my inventory of various products and supplies. That body lifter’s broken now— idiotic boys and their bright ideas. I reckon it’s all in the Good Lord’s hands now. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Or maybe I do know but I’m not ready to give it a name.

The anxiety is wearing a hole in the lining of my sour stomach. It’s too much. How much can one old man with an idiot nephew take?

Come on, Savannahians, you’re killing me.

Start dying so that I might live.

So that we all might live.

Chapter 13 – Caleb

“So, um,” she blows out a cancerous blue-tinged white cloud, “are you gay?”

Scarlet just mule-kicked me in the balls, blindsided me with a double fist to the back of the neck. I physically double over, sitting on the bench in City Market. My elbows dig into my thighs and I stare at the ground. A broken bottle stabs my temple. My bowels loosen. My stomach and esophagus spasm in a covert dry heave. A violent arrhythmia shreds my heart into the goriest of confetti. I want to sprinkle it over her green tipped spiky black hair and puke in her lap. I want to ram my fist into her pug nose like I’m going for the heavyweight title.

Helium, hydrogen, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, argon, potassium, calcium... Oh, fuck it, it’s not working.

I pull a knife from the sheath I wear beneath my Brooks Brothers jacket. It’s hidden behind my back. I whip it around and draw it across Scarlet’s bloated throat, slicing it like a ripe peach. Passing tourists point and scream as Scarlet gets up and stumbles around, spraying her hot lifeforce onto the gaudy Hawaiian shirts and cheap khaki shorts of gaping bystanders. She turns to look at me, her hand fluttering at the gash I made. Her eyes don’t look so cerulean now. Just a typical muddied blue, full of shit and questions. I shrug my shoulders and tighten my lips, putting my knife away. People run around City Market in a blind panic. Someone snaps my picture with their cell phone.