Shy (32 page)

Stanley was still locked inside his father’s bedroom. It sounded like he was rearranging the furniture.

“Hope he doesn’t knock any walls out, the dumb shit,” Frank said as he hurried through his cereal.

He hadn’t cried yet this morning, but I knew the upcoming ordeal would be hard for Frank. He had loved his dad very much. And the business end of dying is truly an ordeal, an ordeal that comes right when a person is at their most vulnerable. Working in a bank, I had seen a lot of the turmoil firsthand. I had even caused a bit of it, refusing access to accounts to loved ones, freezing monies until a death certificate was provided, confiscating ATM cards. It was all perfectly legal, and sometimes a necessity, but it was still pretty cold-blooded. It was one of the things I had hated most about the job.

My Toyota was still acting goofy since our marathon ride across country, so we decided to take Joe’s pickup into town. We were just headed out the door when Stanley finally emerged from Joe’s bedroom.

He looked like he had been up all night—unshaven, still wearing the clothes he’d had on the night before, his hair sticking straight up off the top of his head like he had spent the last few hours experimenting with nuclear fusion. His eyes were red and bleary. I knew why when he reached into the fridge without so much as a how-do-you-do and snatched another beer off the rack. He had been drinking all night.

Not only did he look like crap, he also looked pretty darned pleased with himself. Even more than he usually did, and that was saying something, the prick.

“Found it,” he announced, just one notch below gloating.

“The will?” I asked.

But Stanley ignored me. His eyes were trained on Frank. “Pop must have been cracking up those last few days. He actually drew a treasure map to the will. Anyway, I found the map. By the time you get back from town, I’ll have it figured out and I’ll have the will in my hot little hands, and I’ll tell you something, Frank. If it says what I think it’s going to say, you’d better find yourself a good lawyer. I’m not going to let him leave this spread to you alone. It’s half mine. Just because you pulled a few more years’ worth of weeds on it than I did is no reason for him to leave me out in the cold. I’ll have my share, by God, or I’ll burn the place to the ground. That’s a promise.”

By the time Stanley finished talking, Frank was so mad he was shaking. “Do what you have to do,
brother
.” He spoke the words with a dangerous calm, then turned and walked away.

I meekly followed. I had never seen Frank that mad before. Wow. I was getting a hard-on. Of course, a happy Frank gave me a hard-on too, so I couldn’t really read too much into it.

“Bye, girls,” Stanley cooed as we walked out the door.

“Bye, shit-for-brains,” I muttered, following Frank outside.

I heard Stanley spitting out a nasty laugh as I pulled the door shut behind us.

S
IMMONS
F
UNERAL
H
OME
was on the outskirts of town in a renovated gothic monstrosity that must have once housed the Hoosier version of the Addams family. Or the Munsters. I wasn’t sure which. I fully expected Lurch or Thing to greet us at the door but they must have been out to lunch. Nothing met us at the door except the reek of a million forgotten mums and carnations and the faint, but lingering, stench of formaldehyde and heartache.

Simon Simmons was a little wiry guy who looked like he had been marinating in his own embalming fluid too long. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. And not much meat either. We found him behind a desk in a back room filled with brochures of caskets and funeral plots and a full array of Amway products. I guess he offered a little something for everybody, dead or alive.

When he was at rest, Simmons wore a dour expression on his pinched little face, just as you would expect a mortician to do. But when he smiled, he positively glowed. Every square inch of his face came alive like the flowering of a neutron bomb. He was obviously a happy man deep down inside, in spite of his chosen line of work, and damned if he was going to let anyone prove otherwise.

Frank and I presented ourselves, and he flew to his feet all aflutter like a frightened starling. His black suit and wispy black hair and the fact he was so damned scrawny helped heighten the bird impression. We needed no introductions, of course. He had met us the night before. It was Mr. Simmons who had driven the hearse to pick up Joe’s body.

We had so much to think about, Frank and I, and so many plans to make, and we were both still so stunned by Joe’s sudden passing that we didn’t have time to pamper ourselves with issues of social anxiety. Shyness was the last thing on our minds. So we simply did what we came to do, without the usual display of nail-chewing angst and histrionics.

Simmons eyed Frank up and down like he was measuring him for an eternity suit. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you. I didn’t want to mention it last night out at the farm, what with everything else going on, but I knew you when you were about knee-high to a woollyworm.” Then he laughed. He seemed to laugh a lot, and when he did laugh, he sounded like he meant it. He was without a doubt the happiest undertaker I had ever met in my life.

“How’s that?” Frank asked. “How did you know me?” He was busy casting nervous glances at the casket photos and other funerary paraphernalia scattered around, but he was still polite. Frank was always polite.

“Son, your pa and I go way back. I guess you don’t know this, but we served in Vietnam together.”

That caught Frank’s attention. “You did?”

“Yes, sir, we did.” And Simmons laughed again. A big old cackle. Just like a happy vulture. Or a jovial condor. One could almost imagine his feathers fluffing up in glee. “Your pa helped me through the loss of a loved one once.” Simmons glanced at me, giving me a friendly nod in the process. “A loved one not unlike your friend Tom here, I reckon. He was a fine man, your daddy. And a good soldier too. Joe Wells had a good heart. And a fair heart. And a brave one. He surely did. I don’t think he ever looked down on a soul in his life. Everybody was equal in his eyes, and that’s a fact.”

Frank glanced at me at the same moment I glanced at him. This was the guy Joe had told us about. The guy who lost his lover in the war. It had to be.

Simmons saw that we knew the story about the same time that we realized who he was. He could see it in our eyes, I guess. “I see he told you.” Then Simon Simmons really let loose with a mountainous laugh that must have got the corpses chuckling in other parts of the building no matter what state of decomposition they were in. “He told me I put a curse on him, you know.”

Frank was smiling wide, watching the little gay undertaker flap around like a bantam rooster. “A curse?”

“Yeah. A curse. A gay one, in fact. He said it was my fault his two boys ended up light on their feet. Said I must have done something to his chromosomes back there in the jungle somehow when we were fighting the Vietcong. Maybe when I drank from his thermos. Or when he drank from mine. I told your daddy he was nuts, but now seeing you boys, I’m not so sure. Lovers, are you?”

“Yes, sir,” Frank and I said at the very same moment. It almost sounded rehearsed.

Simmons smiled. “It’s nice to hear you say it like that, in unison and all, in the same voice with the same conviction. Maybe you’ll beat the odds and actually make a go of it, like my buddy and I did until—well, until he died. I hope you do, anyway. There ain’t nothing like living in the shadow of love, boys. Nothing. Remember that. Say, Frank, what was your brother’s name? Stumpy?”

Frank laughed for the first time in two days. “Stanley. His name is Stanley.”

Simmons knocked on his head with a knuckle like a maple farmer checking the sap on the inside of a tree. I could have sworn I heard a faint bonking sound when he did. “Oh yeah. Stanley. “

“A true putz,” Frank said. And the three of us laughed. Simmons went so far as to turn beet-red and bend over and pound on his knees for about ten seconds. Lord, what a happy guy.

And in the space of a heartbeat, he turned solemn. Just like that. One second he was howling with mirth and the next second he looked like his favorite dog had just been run over by a dump truck. “I’ve got something for you, Frank. Your daddy left it with me to give to you when this day came. Either you or Stumpy. I mean Stanley. I guess Joe didn’t put much faith in banks or lawyers.”

“No, he didn’t,” Frank said, curious, watching Simmons go to a beat-up old filing cabinet in the corner of the room and fish around for a minute until he pulled out a business-sized manila envelope. This he handed to Frank. When Frank had his hands on it, Simmons took a step backward and clasped his hands behind his back, as if to say he now considered his obligation fulfilled to the letter.

“It’s your daddy’s will,” Simmons explained. “He asked me a few months ago to put it away somewhere safe. It was right after he found out he was sick, I reckon. I’ve been holding onto it ever since.”

Frank and I were speechless. We both stared at the envelope in Frank’s hand. We didn’t need to open it. We knew what it said. But if this was truly the will, then what the hell was Stanley’s treasure map leading to? What was it Stanley was going to find when he finished looking for whatever it was Joe had sent him scampering off to look for?

Apparently the same questions were running through Frank’s mind that were running through mine. It didn’t take either one of us long to figure it out. At the very same moment, we turned to each other, and said, “The prank.”

Frank looked back down at the envelope. “My God,” he said. “Pop’s going to lead Stanley on a wild goose chase for this will, and then we’re gonna have to deal with him when he finds out it was all a joke. Shit, Pop. What were you thinking?”

Simmons cocked his head to the side and watched us for a minute, then said, “I don’t pretend to know what you boys are talking about, but I can see you’ve got things to do. So let’s finish up our business, and I’ll let you be on your way. Now most of the business has already been taken care of. Your daddy was real insistent on how he wanted things done.”

When Simmons was finished talking, twenty minutes later, we knew what had been done, what needed to be done, and how much money it would all cost, which in the grand scheme of things wasn’t that much. Joe had been pretty thorough in his preparations.

Simmons gave us the name and number of a florist who wouldn’t overcharge us for floral arrangements. He handed over a fistful of death certificates which he said we would need sooner or later for various things, and not to worry about the cost, that was his contribution to the enterprise. He gave us a phone number to the local newspaper for handling the obituary and made Frank promise to come right back with his father’s suit as soon as we could go out to the farm to get it. We hadn’t thought to bring it with us. We picked out the music for the service, a couple of hymns Frank remembered from Bible school when he was a kid, decided how many funeral cars we would need for the procession to the graveyard, and decided on a tent so everybody wouldn’t have to stand in the hot sun during the graveside services.

And that was it.

Joseph Allen Wells would be on view at the Simmons Funeral Home by six o’clock that evening (if we got his suit to him on time) in the mid-range oak casket with the bronze handles and the silver damask lining which he had picked out and paid for a decade earlier. Two days later he would be interred at the Nine Mile Greene County Cemetery in plot #326, which he had also picked out a decade earlier when he buried his wife, Melissa Joanne Wells, in plot #325, right next door. The dual headstone was already in place. The stonecutter just had to carve a date on Frank’s side of it to let posterity know when he died. Simmons would send us a bill for that work when it was finished to our satisfaction.

Suddenly the business of Frank’s father’s funeral was completed and we found ourselves, Frank and I, a little breathless, back out on the street after Simon Simmons ushered us out the back door with armfuls of mortuary pamphlets, perpetual care brochures, a couple of ice-cold diet sodas from his vending machine since it was so goddamn hot, and a shoebox full of Amway samples.

In a state of shock, or close to it, we aimed ourselves toward the truck and home.

Now we had to go head-to-head with Stumpy, and neither one of us was looking forward to
that
confrontation, you can rest assured.

I
T
DIDN
’
T
feel like going home, knowing Joe wasn’t there. For either of us.

We parked between my Toyota and Stanley’s rental car, heaved ourselves out of the truck cab like a couple of hundred-year-old men, that’s how despondent and worn out we were, and headed for the house, still lugging all our booty from Simon Simmons. The Amway laundry detergent looked especially enticing. I wondered if it was formulated to work on ground-in cow shit.

When we opened the front door, it felt like we were stepping into an oven. A big, hot, silent oven.

Too silent.

“Pedro!” I called out.

Not a peep.

“Stanley!” Frank yelled.

Nothing.

“Well, this can’t be good,” Frank muttered.

We dumped all our crap on the kitchen table and went straight to Joe’s room. Or what
used
to be Joe’s room. Since he was no longer residing on the same mortal plane as the rest of us, we supposed it could be
anybody’s
room now. Or nobody’s.

Whoever it now belonged to, the place was a shambles. Stanley had done everything but bring in earthmoving equipment in his search for Joe’s will. The dresser drawers were on the floor with all their belongings spilled out in every direction. The mattress was off the bed and leaning against the wall, and all the clothes in the closet had been flung, piece by piece, through the door and onto the bathroom floor. It looked like every pocket in every garment had been turned out.

Stanley had obviously been a man on a mission. The dick.