Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (5 page)

Zuckerman has no idea what the big guy is talking about but goes ahead and says, “That’s an interesting angle on things, my friend . . . and it brings to mind that great scene in . . . Haywood? Haywood?” Zuckerman drops his putter. “Haywood?! Haywood?! HAYWOOD!!”

Once in a great while, in the great Muir Woods many miles north of here, a mighty redwood, suffering from blight, tumbles over in a great, heaving plunge, shaking the earth and sending up a plume of debris. When Haywood Allerton finally succumbs to the pain and goes down, hitting the green with all his weight, the manicured, perfectly landscaped, rarified ground of the Pine Ridge Country Club trembles with similar seismic reverberations.

Z
uckerman spares no expense. He has Allerton taken to the best facility money can buy—the Samuel Oschin Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai—not far from Zuckerman’s stately Beverly Hills mansion (which was once owned by Douglas Fairbanks, by the way).

Zuckerman demands immediate attention and puts everything on his Visa. The doctors run the unconscious behemoth through a battery of tests and conclude that Allerton is in his final hours, his immune system shutting down, malabsorption syndrome making him a candidate for a feeding tube, and the administrator at Cedars informs Zuckerman that
hospice
is the only answer, and it’s a miracle the big guy was still walking around, and how about this chilly autumn weather we’re having?

A widower with a lapsed Screen Actor’s Guild membership, Allerton has no insurance and no immediate family other than two estranged daughters living in the Midwest, both of whom are unable to get to L.A. for another week or two, so Zuckerman decides to have Allerton moved to Zuckerman’s sprawling Tudor mansion on Canon for home hospice care.

It is here, five days later, in the elegant parlor in the rear of the house, around which French windows look out on a lovely grove of avocado trees and the hummingbirds play in the wisteria, that Zuckerman realizes what he has to do.

“So your daughter, the older one—Nancy’s her name? She claims you never had a will,” Zuckerman says to the dying man.

Nestled in the folds of a massive orthopedic hospital bed that was brought in by four burly orderlies earlier that week, hooked to a space shuttle’s worth of equipment, Allerton drifts in and out of consciousness, his face a gaunt, gray, sunken mask of torture. The pain constantly ebbs and flows—more
flowing
than
ebbing
lately—and it is agonizing for Zuckerman to watch.

“I don’t know if you hear me anymore, but I just want you to know I got a plan.” Zuckerman sits on the edge of a chair next to the bed, his hand clutching the bed rail so tightly his knuckles whiten.

Allerton’s eyelids flutter. His lips peel away from clenched, yellow teeth. It is unclear whether this is an indication that he understands human speech or he is simply writhing in pain—or both.

It is also unclear how long the machines will keep him alive now, maybe days, weeks. God forbid,
months
. The former folk artist of evil, the greatest heavy ever, a man from a bygone era of analog projectors, now floating in a limbo of misery, kept alive by the same kind of advanced computer technology that replaced his cinematic archetype.

“I’m still your manager, by God,” Zuckerman says, “and I’ll manage this, if you’ll pardon the expression, like a professional.”

Very slowly, with the feeble, tentative shakiness of a wounded sparrow, Allerton’s huge hand moves to the bed rail and covers Zuckerman’s hand.

The gesture leaches tears from the jaded, cynical, heartless agent. “Why, if you’ll pardon my impertinence, did you
do
this to me? Why did you come into my life when I was minding my own business?” The sobbing starts. “I got . . . I got three ex-wives hate my guts, I got . . . I got four kids I barely even know, and you gotta be my friend
now
—maybe the best friend I ever had—you gotta tear my heart out like this . . . you prick!”

Marvin Zuckerman lowers his head and lets the sobs rock through him.

At length the crying passes and he looks up and says softly, “Don’t worry, Haywood, old pal o’ mine, I got a plan.”

A
t one of the most lavish mansions in Beverly Hills the second contractor arrives after dark. Slipping through the shadows of avocado trees—where stars of the silent screen once frolicked and strolled—he finds the rear parlor window and pauses.

He checks the small leather pouch in his black suit coat, checks the instruments tucked inside it, then pries the window glass open and stealthily climbs inside the house.

The man moves to the side of the hospital bed and looks down at its occupant. “He said to make it fast and painless,” the man says, reaching into the pouch and preparing the hypodermic. “Who am I to argue? You get all kinds in this business.”

This man is the real thing—the banality of evil incarnate. He has the face of a hairless mouse, and dead, blank, shoe-button eyes.

Those at death’s door often experience a final moment of lucidity. The big, emaciated man on the bed opens his eyes, gazes up, and looks his executioner in the face. The dying man does not look away. The needle glistens, shedding a tear of fluid.

Although hard to read—and impossible for this mousey hit man to understand—the man on the bed accepts the consequences of what happens next. A good heavy does not look away. He accepts the consequences.

The needle goes in, punctuating the end of Allerton’s suffering.

It’s over within seven seconds.

O
utside the mansion, on his way back to his innocuous little two-door sedan, the second contractor passes a shadowy figure wringing his hands at the foot of the driveway.

“Is it done?” the figure asks.

The mousey gentleman turns and approaches Marvin Zuckerman, and in the pitiless, cold darkness he says, “Oh yeah, we’re good.”

Zuckerman hands over the envelope of cash, an amount he had raised, in trademark fashion, from the insurance reimbursement for the home-care expenses (after putting Allerton on the agency’s payroll).

Pausing to thumb through the bills, the mousey man says, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we agreed on twenty K.”

“It’s short my commission,” Marvin Zuckerman explains. “Fifteen percent.”

The man in black just stares at the grief-stricken, toupee-wearing agent.

A
mitzvah
is a
mitzvah.

But an agent is also an agent.

About “Heavy”

I remember, as a kid, carrying Ray’s collection
R Is for Rocket
around in my Partridge Family lunch box. Flash forward forty years and I’m now toiling in the vineyards of Hollyweird and Publishers’ Row, and always with that magical Bradburian inspiration tucked into the back compartment of my creative lunch box. I now read Ray’s stories to my children at bedtime. The other night, I’m reading “A Sound of Thunder,” and we come to the part where the dinosaur makes its majestic appearance. These words were written in 1952, for God’s sake, but they still ring more vividly and three-dimensionally than any CGI. When presented with the chance to create an original crime story—informed by Bradbury—I felt as though I had been given the shoes from “The Sound of Summer Running.” The Bradbury mythos came over me in a seizure as I spun my little yarn: the sadness at the core of human nature, the love of the Golden Age of Movies, the scabrous view of capitalism, and the plain, unadorned beauty of friendship.

—Jay Bonansinga

THE GIRL IN THE FUNERAL PARLOR

Sam Weller

W
hen I was twenty, I got a job delivering flowers. Three days a week, I drove a maroon-colored Chevy van, the words
FORGET ME NOT
painted on the sides, down barren two-lane western Illinois county roads.

There was a solitude to the job that I liked. As soon as the van was loaded and I drove away from the flower shop, no one could tell me what to do. Sometimes, on busy days, I would be gone for three, four hours, maybe longer. Talk radio and a supersized soda kept me company, and I just lived in my head.

I delivered to offices all over town for all their celebrations—every week someone threw a faux fiesta, marking ersatz holidays like Sweetest Day (seriously, do we really need a Sweetest Day when we have Valentine’s Day?).

Then there were Saturday mornings at churches, where weddings were set up; Saturday afternoons included dropping off arrangements for the following day’s services.

I also delivered to rickety bungalows in our small city, brick apartment buildings in the center square, and lonesome houses miles outside of town. In winter, when it’s dark early and ghosts of snow drift across the rural highways, it’s always a little eerie. After driving down a gravel road to some farm, I’d have to step out into the subzero windchill and go up to the dark house. Sometimes, a dog with an apparent case of rabies would bark after I knocked. I’d wait a minute or two, hoping no one was home except Cujo—then I could just leave. But a light inevitably would blink on. I’d hear heavy footsteps; several dead bolts, one after another after another, being unlatched, and the door would open a sliver. A pale face would peer out.

“Yes?”

“Flower delivery!”

In those moments, out there in the stubbly frozen hinterland, facing some stranger in shadow, I shivered, wondering if I would ever be seen or heard from again.

Without a doubt, though, I found delivering to funeral parlors the weirdest of all. My job was to lay the flowers around the casket. Averting my eyes, I’d crouch and set up the floral sprays and plants quickly around the body and never once look. Sometimes, with a casket spray arrangement, I would actually have to place it on the closed bottom half of the coffin itself.

It felt odd being there, alone with the dead. Here I was, a community-college kid studying English lit and living with his parents, arranging flowers over the mortal remains of the departed. They never knew me while they lived, and I felt like I was violating them in a way. It just felt wrong.

On one of these occasions, at the old Peterson Funeral Home, I encountered Catherine Courington. She was dead, yet more alive than anyone I’d ever known.

It was a morning in June, when specks of sunlight shone brilliantly through oak leaves over the funeral home, casting a champagne glow. The van was packed from end to end and perfumed heavily with fountains of crimson pansies, white lilies, plum peonies, and waxen orchids. The labels on some of the flowers were marked:

PETERSON FUNERAL HOME—COURINGTON SERVICE

The Peterson family had run that funeral home for more than a hundred years, in a Victorian built atop a hill in town that led down to the Rock River. A cupola topped the three-story house, and a winding red-brick walkway led up to a wraparound porch. Hanging geranium baskets twisted in the hot summer breeze. Lead-glass windows, thick and wide, were set on the façade, and they were all gauzed over on the inside with delicate lace curtains.

I parked the van behind the house. The old mansion had a back door, reserved for deliveries. I think this was where they brought in the bodies, to prepare them for the services, but I wasn’t certain. An antiseptic odor that I imagined came from cleaning supplies and embalming fluid hung in the air.

With a bulky arrangement cradled in my arms, I went to the back door. It was opened a crack, so I pushed it wide with my foot. I waited for my eyes to adjust from the bright sunshine. After a while, after calling out and no one answering, I ventured into the darkened back hall. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. No one was around, but that’s the way it was a few hours before a service. I pictured the funeral-home people upstairs, in their administrative offices, hurriedly tending to final details.

The parlor I found up front was long and rectangular, with brass light fixtures and velvety sofas. The papered walls had a textured swirl pattern of moss green. Paintings hung in crusty frames, landscapes of rivers, prairies, and meadows. Over the fireplace was the main painting—of William Peterson, the first of the family proprietors. He looked stern; his cravat was stiff under his chin. I supposed the room looked exactly as it did when old William ran the place. It sort of freaked me out, being alone in that parlor. It was just me and the body in the casket. It was open for viewing. Old William watched me; it was like an episode of
Scooby-Doo,
where only the eyes move in the painting. I laid the floral arrangement below the casket.

But something caught my eye—a flash, and quickly gone. I don’t know why I looked, that day, over to the top of the casket. Perhaps it was the shimmer of long blond hair.

I stood and stared. Jesus. Young—she looked my age, maybe a little older. She wore a cardigan sweater, soft-looking and lilac, and a single strand of pearls. Her face had that slight bloating of the deceased, but it was smooth. A horizontal scar ran across the right side of her forehead, angling down into her manicured eyebrow. It threw off the symmetry of her otherwise perfect face. But in an odd way, it made her look more alluring and enigmatic.

Her eyes were lined in black with little sharp points at the edges, her lips glossed light pink, her hands folded across her chest. The top of a black-and-white polka-dot skirt was visible. You couldn’t see her legs. She looked like she had lived in the fifties. Standing there, I stared. The more I looked, the more I itched to touch that soft sweater, run my fingertips down her arm or across her smooth face. I glanced over my shoulder.

I didn’t, or couldn’t, do it.

I looked down at her face. It occurred to me that I wished for something that could never be: I wanted her eyes to open. I wanted her to speak. I wished it. I really wished it.
Just say something, anything at all.

After a long while, or maybe it was just a minute, I shook my head to clear it. Then I went back out into the glaring sunlight to grab the rest of the flowers. After setting up the last of the arrangements, I looked at a sympathy card affixed to one delivery: Catherine Courington.

I stared down at her one last time, puffed my cheeks, and exhaled. And I did it. I quickly ran my fingertips down the sleeve on her right arm, and it was as petal soft and fuzzy as I’d imagined.

I turned and left.

E
very day that next week, I thought about her. Constantly. I wondered how she died. Sometimes, when I was driving down lonely country roads, passing an occasional car headed in the opposite direction, I imagined our life together, mine and Catherine’s. I knew how we fell in love. I knew how our lives unfolded together, how we’d mark the anniversary of our wedding each year by nothing more than reading passages of our favorite books late into the night. We were soul mates. I knew it at my very core.

Does that sound weird? Probably. But it’s the God’s truth. Haven’t you ever seen a stranger before and something in you is inexplicably drawn to that person? Maybe you knew each other—or were supposed to know each other—or maybe you dreamt of that person, once, long ago? Perhaps, in another reality, an alternative world, if you believe in such things, you did. But in this world, this reality, something kept you apart. Maybe it was as simple as taking one street home rather than the other, choosing one path over another, and fate was circumvented forever because of the most minute of decisions. Is that what happened to me and Catherine?

At night I began dreaming of us. We were seated at a wrought-iron table at an outdoor café. A cathedral bell tolled in the far distance. We sipped coffee and she smiled, revealing a slight chip on her front tooth. We held hands, and I swirled my fingers under her palm, noting the lines, like I was trying to read her future. Her mouth opened. She was about to say something.

Please, say it. Let me hear your voice
.

But I always woke before she said a word.

In another dream she emerged from complete darkness, like she was in a large room or even a warehouse without a single window or light source. She walked forward slowly into a pool of stark light, her blond hair buoyant on her shoulders. She walked with confidence and poise, closer and closer. Her eyes were radiant, with that black eyeliner with the sharp points at the edges. She lifted her hand to me. My heart leapt.
Please, let me hear you.

As she drew near, her face began to melt, like a gruesome wax figure in a Saturday horror matinee. Her makeup ran down her face in streams of color. Then the rest of her face started dripping, her eyes and nose and lips. The molten wax swirled, morphing. As it began to take shape, I knew what it was. It was one of those Mexican Day of the Dead masks—a white skull painted boldly black, red, blue, and yellow, with little white flowers around the sides. In the center, between the eyes, a painted heart dripped three tears.

She opened her mouth.

I’m listening, Catherine.

But something other than words emerged from her lips. It was dark, at first, small and twitching. As it crawled forth it showed itself. Wings. Black and orange. A butterfly fluttered and flew off into the darkness.

After these dreams, I had to know who Catherine Courington was and what had happened to her. But then another thought struck me, a realization of fate, twisted and thwarted: What happens if you meet your soul mate after she has died?

Late one night, after I woke from one of those dreams, I searched the Internet. I didn’t know why I hadn’t before. I guess I felt odd about it, like it was perverted. I knew it was bizarre. I knew no one would understand, so I told no one about Catherine.

In the basement of my parents’ house, where my room was, I sat in front of my computer and typed her name. I found scores of social-networking pages of girls named Catherine Courington. I went through each page, hoping to find her, to find a photograph, to see her. I was hoping for a video clip, to hear her. But after hours, I found nothing. She didn’t have a social-network page.

I did find an unknown English poet with the same name—Catherine Courington, killed in a horse-and-carriage accident in 1882. She had died before any literary success.

I read a title to one of her poems: “The Clock Ticks Unfair.”

Then I found her. I clicked on the link and the page began to load. It was just a small obituary item:

Catherine Courington, 23, of New York City
.

Beloved Daughter of Candace
(née Roberts).

Funeral services, Saturday, June 10, 11
A.M.,

Peterson Funeral Home
, 111 S. Main Street.

T
he next day I delivered flowers in a hurry, moving across town more like a FedEx guy than a flower man. I needed to buy myself an hour so my manager wouldn’t ask where I was.

After looking up the information on Catherine Courington’s mother, I discovered that she lived in a mobile-home park, off a winding highway. I drove out after lunch.

The Fountain Bleu Mobile Home Park sign was faded, and paint was chipping off at the bottom. As I pulled in, a kid ran across the street, chasing a ball. I slammed on the brakes, the van lurching, barely missing him. He was maybe seven or eight, with a crew cut and plenty of freckles. He glared at me.

“Sorry,” I mouthed, and waved. In the side-view mirror, I could see him as I pulled the van forward, standing with his ball, mouth pinched, scowling.

The mobile homes of Fountain Bleu were so run-down that they looked like haunted trailers, with plywood planking and stained bedsheets over the windows. But some had jaunty flower gardens and new shiny mailboxes in front. I found Candace Courington’s mobile home at the end of the street. A Doberman chained to the neighboring mobile home barked, baring its teeth. Across the street, a man working over the engine of an El Camino looked up at me. I nodded. He didn’t say a word or nod back. He wiped sweat from his brow.

Along the walkway leading to the mobile home, plastic flowers spun in the wind. The windows had dusty metal horizontal blinds turned shut. I stepped up to the door and knocked. The guy across the street wiped his oily hands on a towel and watched me. The dog continued to bark, straining against its leash.

The door opened just a bit.

The woman held a lit cigarette in her hand. She had a dome of swimming-pool-blond hair and tired eyes.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Candace Courington?”

“Yes,” she said, looking over my shoulder to the van parked on the street.

“Flower delivery,” I said, extending the arrangement in my arms.

She took it.

“Thanks.” Her cigarette dangled from her lips. She began to close the door.

“I knew your daughter,” I blurted, my words running together, before she could shut the door.