The End of FUN (9 page)

“Lord, we thank you for this day and all your blessings. Adam, here, is still young, oh Lord, and thinks he may live forever, but the truth is death awaits us all, and only those who have accepted your son as their savior will live again to see your eternal kingdom. The rest, have mercy on their poor, tormented souls. In Jesus's name we pray. Amen.”

Damn, lady. So what did that mean for my grandfather? Endless fire? It was weird that someone who could sing such a beautiful song could also at the same time be so full of it. Join our team! And if you don't join our team, burn forever in hell! Some team. If that's how the game works, I don't want to play.

“Um, thanks,” I said.

“No problem. Nice to meet you, Adam.”

The woman, Anne, shook my hand one more time, stepped up into a big white truck, gave a wave, and drove away.

So then it was just me out there. Still, I wasn't ready to leave yet. How can I explain it? It was freezing, but I just didn't feel like leaving. The funeral had left me in a strange mood. I wandered back into the cemetery and stood under the oak tree not far from my grandpa's grave. The leaves were gone and it loomed overhead, a giant schematic of a circulatory system, gnarled branches veining a pale sky. A storm was moving in. The first flakes were beginning to fall.

Jesus, it was a miserable day.

By the time I got to my dad's it had started to snow. I mean
really
snow: gathering heavy on the bushes and the roof and the bare branches of the elm tree he was always threatening to cut down. I was heading in to warm up, but Dad stopped me in the doorway.

“Gimme one of your shoes.”

“What?”

“Gimme a shoe.”

“Why?”

“Because. Take it off.” He was sipping something from an old army canteen, one of those metal ones with the chain on the lid. He aimed the lid at my left shoe. “Gimme that one there.”

“No.”

“Yes. Just do it.” His breath smelled like gin.

Fine. I gave him the shoe, my green Osmos
™
IV.

“Bones!” he called.

A big gray dog stepped out from behind the recliner. Some kind of Weimaraner maybe. You know the phrase
at death's door
? That's what this one looked like, its front paw wrapped up in bandages, limping over to my dad like a dog in one of those Humane Society ads—one of the real bedraggled ones whose sad orphan hearts have never felt love and whose lips have never once tasted Purina
®
Ultra all-protein high energy revitalizing dog food (YAY!).

“Hey! Don't give him my shoe!”

“It's a
her
.”

Dad gave the dog my shoe.

She took it in her mouth and limped back behind the recliner.

“Why'd you do that? I don't want her eating my shoe!”

“She's not! Look!”

I found the dog curled up in the corner with my shoe. She wasn't eating it, but she
was
licking it, very delicately, like a tender ice-cream cone. Next to my shoe, sort of nestled up against her belly, were two flip-flops and a pair of my dad's boots.

“What's she doing? Since when do you have a dog?”

“She's playing mom,” said Dad. “And she isn't mine. I'm just the one who found her. She was hanging around your grandpa's place—no collar or tags. That neighbor lady, Anne, she said she hadn't seen the dog before. So it's a mystery. No one knows the dog's real name but the dog. Isn't that right, girl? We've been calling her Bones on account of how skinny she is. But technically speaking she belongs to you.”

“What do you mean—technically?”

“You always wanted a dog, didn't you?”

“Yeah, when I was like, ten. And you wouldn't let me get one because of your allergies.”

“What allergies?”

“You know—how you're allergic to dogs.”

Dad blinked. “I'm not allergic to dogs.”

“OK, so you lied to me. What's up with the stupid dog?”

“She's been through a lot, Aaron. I should never have taken her to the vet—and especially not that incompetent shit Doctor Aguilar. Well, he
calls
himself a doctor. See, when I found her she was in bad shape. Paw all torn up. Skinny as a rail. Got her here and noticed she was lactating, so I went back to look for the puppies, but I couldn't find any. I took her to the vet to get her paw checked out, and I told the guy he may as well fix her, too, because I didn't want any more puppies…
so the doctor fixed her
.”

“I don't get it.”

“She was
pregnant
, Aaron. That sonofabitch performed a puppy abortion—and the
only
reason I even know is because he tried to charge me extra for it! I told him, ‘
When I said “fix her” I obviously meant tie off her tubes—NOT kill her puppies
.' Your sister was profoundly upset. She thinks the dog has PTSD. She went to the vet's and read him the riot act….The point is, like I said, the dog—she's yours.”

“Yeah—no. I don't want an old dog.”

“Well, hold on. You haven't seen the thing yet.”

“What thing?”

“The thing I wanted to show you.” He tipped back the canteen and swallowed the rest. “You thirsty? I've got some Sparkl*Juice
™
.”

YAY! for Sparkl*Juice
™
but not really, because IMHO it's pretty disgusting actually, and especially the diet kind, which is what my dad had. He poured me a glass and then tipped off his canteen, and then he went to the bedroom to get whatever it was he was going to get, and I sat down on the couch and looked around at the old house.

Same as it always was. Same furniture, same smell. Except there was one new thing—only it wasn't new. It was a record player, like an old ancient cabinet set. Sitting in the corner. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. There was also something weird: where the record should go there was a pair of women's undies.

Not just any undies, either. Silky red and with black lace around the edges and this sheer mesh—like a screen door almost—in the crotchal area.

Dad came back down the hall carrying a book.

I held up the undies. “This the thing you wanted to talk about?”

“Where'd you get those?”

“I dig the mesh. You wear these when you go jogging?”

“Gimme those,” he said.

He took the undies and handed me the book. “Have a look at that.”

But I wasn't ready to look. I wanted to talk about the undies.

“How'd they end up on the record player?”

“None of your business.”

“Well, it kind of is. I don't know if I want to stay at a place where unsanitary and possibly diseased undergarments are just lying around everywhere—I might catch something.”

“Just look at the damn book.”

Fine. It was a yellow-and-blue book with a picture of a man and a treasure box on the cover.
True Tales of Buried Treasure
by Edward Rowe Snow. It took me a moment to remember where I'd seen it before.

“Hey. Grandpa was trying to get me to read this when I stayed with him that summer.”

“It was on the floor next to him. Look inside.”

A folded piece of paper marked page ix of the introduction. Part of a passage had been underlined in black pen:

My continuous word of warning is that you should never be discouraged by failure, and never expect success. Then if you don't find the treasure, you will not be too disappointed, and if you are successful, you'll be able to stand it more gracefully.

“Now check out the bookmark.”

A scrap of yellow notebook paper folded in quarters. I unfolded it. There was a message, a typed message. I mean like
actually
typed, like with an actual typewriter—and from the looks of it a highly malfunctional one, with a messed-up ink ribbon and a doubled
D
key.