The Funeral Makers (8 page)

“I saw
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
three times at the Watertown drive-in. And I got tears running down my face each time. You tell anyone I said that and I'll black both your eyes.”

—Chester Lee (Exhaling Smoke) to

Amy Joy (After the Act), 1957

In the field above the Lawler house and nearly hidden in trees sat the defunct American Legion Hall, a large square building with white paint peeling from its boards. The door was fastened to the jamb by only the top hinge. There was a hole where the doorknob had been. Inside, the tables and chairs were still arranged for the Saturday nights of the past. Some empty liquor bottles sat on the shelves behind the bar. The small stage built to accommodate the musicians was piled high with boxes of odds and ends. A microphone stand grew out of the heap like a leafless tree. The windows had been broken, some still holding shards of glass. The guilty rocks were still scattered about on the floor. A bartender's manual lay unopened on the bar. The floor, made of wide pine boards that had been varnished by the women's auxiliary, had begun to sag. A swallow's nest clung to one corner of the high-ceilinged room. Beneath it, a pile of dried droppings on the floor and a few feathers were the only reminders of the family that had been raised there.

Amy Joy put her fingers through the hole where the knob had been and opened the door carefully. The last hinge squeaked and threatened to let go. Inside, she waited as her eyes adjusted to the light, then tested the floor in front of her with her foot. When it convinced her it would carry her weight, she crossed between the tables and chairs to the bar. The only sound in the empty hall was when she snapped a pink blob of bubble gum she had bought from the traveling grocery truck that morning.

Nightfall was not far away and the room was dim.

“Chester Lee?” Amy Joy asked the empty room. There was the sound of an occasional car passing on the road outside. She had taken extra precaution in not being seen, as Chester had instructed her. She had come through the field behind the building and only when no cars were heard approaching did she run to the front and slip inside. Now, alone, the emptiness engulfed her. What if a crazy man wanted for murder had hitchhiked up from downstate and was watching her now from behind the boxes on the stage, running his finger up and down the sharp blade of a knife.

“Chester Lee, are you trying to scare me?” Amy Joy said this as loudly as she could without shouting, and tears filled her eyes. She had spent all afternoon in her room with her lipsticks and makeup laboring to achieve just the right effect. She had come to the Legion Hall of her own free will, against her parents' wishes, against the very Bible. She had done this because of the raging love she felt for a man, and to give that man her innocence. For the latter, at least, she had certainly expected him to be waiting there to scoop her up into his arms. The filmstrip she had been running all day in her mind of how the events would go was not what she was seeing now. The stab of loneliness, the sharp twinge in her stomach was, she felt sure, a sign of womanhood, of adult love.

The door squeaked as someone opened it and Amy Joy thought again of killers from downstate. Maybe even
out
of
state
, where mutilations and weird sex crimes were committed. Her hand cupped her mouth, but she was careful not to smear her lipstick. Only if death was imminent could Amy Joy be that careless with lipstick. She squatted down behind the bar, as much as her tight pants would allow, and waited. Steps came toward the bar and stopped.

“Amy Joy?” It was Chester Lee.

“You scared me to death, Chester Gifford,” Amy Joy said. “And where were you? You said to be here at six o'clock and you'd be waiting for me.”

“This is why,” Chester said and held up a bottle full of a thick, dark liquid. He was very pleased with himself.

“What is it?” Amy Joy giggled and reached out to touch the bottle.

“Only about the best damn wine you can get this side of Bangor,” Chester bragged.

“That ain't a wine bottle,” said a suspicious Amy Joy. “It's a mason jar.”

“Amy Joy, how old are you? Any fool knows that wine don't
have
to come in a bottle. This is some of Old Ned's blackberry wine and it's laced with a little bit of whiskey.”

“That could kill us,” said Amy Joy.

“Old Ned has sold this stuff to people as far away as Bangor. People who know a lot more about wine than me or you. And there's a hunter from Portland who heads straight for Old Ned's every time he comes up for hunting season. Says he couldn't hit an elephant at two feet without it.”

“It stinks.”

“Do you wanna sound fourteen all your life? That means that it's aged. Don't you know wine has to get old and smelly to be good? Now come downstairs and stop being so spoiled.”

Amy Joy followed him down the narrow stairs to the basement. Chester lit one wooden match off another until he found the kerosene lamp. The contents of one corner of the building came into focus. A twin bed with a thin mattress was carefully made up. A woolen coat had been folded to make a pillow. A huge poster of a Harley-Davidson was tacked to the wall above the bed. A potato barrel turned upside down made a table that held a black comb with several teeth missing and the rearview mirror of a car. Along the wall were cans of soup and vegetables and several bottles of homemade moxie. On an apple crate next to the bed, Chester had placed a Pepsi bottle full of goldenrod. The dim light of the lamp hid the dust balls and mice droppings in the corners where Chester had swept them that morning.

“It's beautiful.”

“I figured you'd like it.” Chester pulled two Dixie cups out of the sack he had carried the wine in and filled them. Amy Joy's first sip went down with difficulty. She was not used to drinking any liquor, and Old Ned's homemade concoction was a challenge for even hardened guzzlers.

“You might've brought tin cups instead. The wine might eat up these paper ones,” said Amy Joy, who had noticed a slight fizzing in her cup.

“Will you just drink it and shut up?”

They lay back on the cot, Chester's head on the pillow-coat, Amy Joy's head on Chester's arm.

“I sure miss the old Saturday nights upstairs, when the Legion was going full blast.”

“Tell me what those days was like.” Amy Joy looked up at Chester in adoration of the grown man that he was. She watched the ends of his mustache twitch in the lamplight like the tiny arms of a conductor, getting the best out of his words. She was enamored of the mustache.

“There'll never be anything like 'em again. Not in our time,” Chester said and poured himself more wine. Amy Joy snuggled closer.

“People would start getting here about seven or eight. Hardly anybody wore their work clothes. The women usually had gone to Watertown and got their hair done up. Had it all curled and sprayed. And if there'd been any good sales that day, them that could afford it had on new clothes. Bonnie played here then with his band. Now he's working in Connecticut in a factory that makes a little part to go on airplanes.”

“There's a lot of Mattagash people working in Connecticut,” said Amy Joy, and sipped her wine. “Daddy says it's 'cause the lumbering business is so slack.” Chester Lee didn't want to discuss the economy.

“Bonnie played the guitar, and his baby brother, Alton, played the drums. He had a guy named Boss Robbins singing and playing bass. Lord, that man sounded just like Ernest Tubb. If you shut your eyes when he sang ‘Walking the Floor,' the hair would raise up on your neck. They say he got the music somewhere back on his momma's side. Boss Robbins was from over by Caribou. He's probably gonna be a big star someday if he ain't already.”

“I don't think I ever heard him on the radio,” said Amy Joy. Chester's fingers went quickly to the buttons on Amy Joy's blouse and undid them.

“You could get a shot for twenty cents in them days. The war was over. Folks had their spirits up. I was fifteen when the war ended and real disappointed I wasn't old enough to have killed a German or two. Maybe drove one of them big tanks.”

A mouse scurried across the top floor and Amy Joy shuddered. Chester held her tighter.

“You'd have loved it, Amy Joy. The dancing and joking. And every Saturday night there was a fight or two. You could bet on it. The Swedes from New Sweden would drive up and stand around the bar looking at our women, who were all dumb enough to look back. They thought potato farmers like the Swedes was more civilized than lumberjacks. They was all big men, too, and real towheaded. We used to call 'em buttercup heads and a fight was bound to start. The girls would scream and run for cover. I'll never forget the night one of the Swedes told Willie O'Brian to take the door. Willie just said, ‘OK,' walked over to the door, took it off its hinges, put it in his car, and beat it for home. The Legion commander made him bring it back the next day. You don't remember Willie O'Brian. He was poling his canoe upriver not long after that to do some fishing and the lightning hit him.”

There was a silence between them in memory of Willie O'Brian. Then Chester told Amy Joy about Willie's wife, Margaret. The whole town knew how Willie beat her severely during his drunken brawls. A month after his death, she hanged herself at the age of twenty-nine.

“Used to a beating and no one to give it to her,” Chester said to Amy Joy. “At least that's what Margaret's mother said at her funeral.” Chester had the enthralled Amy Joy out of her blouse and was fumbling with the buttons on her pants.

“On special occasions, the women's auxiliary would put up pretty decorations. And have box lunches. And door prizes. It was just like the movies in them days, Amy Joy. Now look at it up there. All going to hell and to the mice and swallows. And a man's got to drive thirty miles to Watertown to sit on a bar stool and drink.”

“I wish I'd have been growed up then,” said Amy Joy, becoming maudlin with the wine. “It must've been just like
Gone
with
the
Wind
.”

“It was a lot like that, all right,” said Chester.

“Chester Lee, I'm scared. Are you sure we're doing the right thing?”

“Honey bun, of course I'm sure. This is as right as it was between Adam and Eve.”

“But they got thrown out of the Garden of Eden.”

“Amy Joy, Mattagash, Maine, is a long way from the Garden of Eden. Believe me, this is the best place in the world to get throwed out of.”

“I guess,” said Amy Joy, and let Chester take the Dixie cup from her hand. He put it next to his on the apple crate.

“There's just one thing, Amy Joy. I never ever want to have to go up against your daddy about this. It ain't that I'm afraid of him. It's just that never having been to school much myself, I got a lot of respect for a principal. So don't you dare tell a soul. This'll be our little secret.”

“I won't tell anybody, Chester. Especially Daddy. He's the meanest man that ever drew a breath.”

Chester kissed Amy Joy's neck and ran his hand along her chubby thigh.

“Why did you fall for me?” he asked, still struggling with the complicated network of buttons on Amy Joy's pants.

“I don't know. I guess it's because you look so much like Eddie Fisher,” Amy Joy said and deposited her gum on the headboard of the bed. She had to assist Chester Lee as he peeled the tight pants from her hips, knocking off the flip-flops.

“Eddie Fisher? Really? Because of my hair or my face?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Eddie Fisher don't have a mustache.”

“You're still the spittin' image of him.”

“No kiddin'?” said Chester. As he eased himself onto his plump devotee, Amy Joy closed her eyes tightly, feeling a stronger kinship to Debbie Reynolds than she had ever felt before.

“If Isadora Duncan was living in Mattagash today, she'd be up against this same shit.”

—Violet La Forge,

Painting Her Toenails, 1959

Violet La Forge opened the door of her room an inch when she heard the familiar rapping. It was hard for her eyes to adjust to the silhouette outside because she always kept the room in darkness on nights when she expected Ed. That way the Pinkhams would not see who was coming or going from Room 3. Seeing it was indeed Ed, Violet quickly pirouetted and dropped to one knee, extending an arm out in welcome. She had practiced this all evening, in the event that Ed managed to get away from home.

“I didn't think you were coming tonight,” she said after she had planted a wet kiss on his lips.

Ed gathered her up as close to him as he could, allowing for the bulge of his stomach, and held her without speaking.

“Come,” said Violet taking his hand. “Come sit here on the bed and let Violet give you a nice back rub. She's got you all upset again and your muscles are crying for love.”

“They've
all
got me upset,” said Ed. “The whole damn family. Sicily's oldest sister is in a coma and the other one is up from Portland with her family of skulls and crossbones. They're all in comas too, but they're still walking around. They're staying here in the motel.”

“Oh my gosh, that must be them right next door. That must be her I talked to last night.”

“You'd know if it was Pearl. She isn't easy to meet and forget.”

“This woman was real pushy.”

“That's her.”

Ed took his shoes off and sighed.

“Eddie, if you don't transform that negative energy they create inside you into positive energy, you'll only meet them again in your next life and the cycle will start all over again.” Violet was rubbing like a sculptress.

“Yeah, well remind me to take a shotgun with me when I leave this life,” said Ed. “That way I'll be ready.”

“Oh, Edward, you don't mean that.” Violet was always thrilled to hear Sicily or her family get trampled into the ground beneath Ed's feet. It was not easy for an
artiste
to double as a mistress.

“I'll have to be careful when I leave,” Ed told her.

“You will be. I'll see to it. I'll put you inside my purse and carry you out.”

“I can't stay long.”

“That's nothing new. You never can.”

“For Christ's sake.
You're
not going to start, are you? Don't tell me I've jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.” Ed flopped onto the bed and flipped a cigarette out of his pack. Before he could light it, Violet, biting her lip, took the book of matches from him and struck one up. In the orange glow she saw the sad lines around his eyes and on his forehead that seemed deeper than the last time she had noticed them there. She bent to circle his temples lightly with her fingers.

“Last night I left the house to come here and suddenly I couldn't. Do you know what I did, Violet?”

Not caring that she shook her head in the darkness, Ed went on.

“I went down to the river and skipped rock after rock across the water. I couldn't even see if they were skipping or not. I just threw them like we did as kids in the millpond behind our house.”

“In Massachusetts?” Violet leaned over and lit a candle protruding from a wine bottle that was a colorful mountain of dribbled wax.

“In Massachusetts,” said Ed. “If anyone had told me back then, when I was a kid, that I'd end up going to the ends of the earth to live, end up living with a woman I pity but don't love, with a daughter who can't stand to look me in the eye, I'd have jumped into that pond and so help me, if I had to hang on to rocks on the bottom, I wouldn't have come back up.”

“You poor baby,” Violet said as she kissed the tip of his nose. “You're feeling so lonely tonight.”

“I'm always lonely, Violet. Don't you know that? Doesn't anyone in this goddamned town ever see inside people?”

Violet reached into the sack Ed had brought under his arm. It said BLANCHE'S MARKET and held two six-packs of cold beer.

“Violet, look at my hands,” he said and held one out to her. “Look at the skin. What do you see?”

Violet brought the candle in for a close inspection, then, kissing the hand in question, said, “I see a very long life line.”

“You don't understand.” Ed drank the first bottle out of the sack and reached for a second. The earlier beer he had consumed, as well as several shots of bourbon from the bottle hidden in his study, were turning his stomach warm and fuzzy.

“What don't I understand?”

“That I didn't come to you for any answers. When
I
look at this hand I see crepe paper. Now I don't really care what
you
see.
I
see crepe paper. And my whole damn life is crepe paper. Hell, you can sit back in a town like this and just about plan your life. Lay it all out like a big ugly blueprint. A vacation every year if you can afford it. A kid here. A couple kids there. Then a grandkid. The mortgage gets paid and then you wait to die. That's where that word comes from. Mortgage. From death. Then there's the waiting and rocking on the front porch, like dogs watching cars go by until the kidneys go, or the heart, or bladder, or one morning you just don't get up because you're sick of looking into the mirror at age spots and sunken cheeks. You get tired of taking your teeth out of the goddamn glass by the bedside. And then there's the funeral. Do you know what the best excitement is around here? It's when someone dies who isn't supposed to. Dies before his time. When that ambulance goes by, women would throw their babies to the wolves just to find out who it's come for. It seems to brighten their day, unless it's one of their own. It keeps them feeling alive. It keeps them happy that it isn't them who's taking that ride to the cemetery in the back of some hearse.”

“Ed, I don't know what to make of this,” Violet said honestly.

“And Sicily,” Ed went on as though Violet hadn't spoken, as though she weren't in the room with him, “you can't blame her. I've heard that old son of a bitch Reverend was the hardest, coldest bastard that ever walked when it came to his own children. I feel sorry for Sicily, yet what would she do if I left her? Take night classes, learn accounting or real estate?”

“Edward Lawler, are you going to spoil our evening together? We don't have that many, you know, and I had something special planned.” As Violet spoke she pulled several flimsy scarves of various colors from her dresser drawer and began to lay them on the bed. “In the three weeks we've been seeing each other, I've never danced for you in person. So, because you're so special to me, I'm gonna give you a command performance.”

Ed lay a few minutes looking at the candle's tongue flicking, as though trying to catch flies for food, manna from heaven that had fallen through the very roof of Violet La Forge's room in the Albert Pinkham Family Motel. He wished he was smoking a cigarette but didn't want to expend the energy it took to light one up.

“Well?” asked Violet.

“Sure.” He decided the cigarette was worth the bother. And there was beer. It could be worse than this. Much worse. He could be in the middle of his own living room, inhaling the horrible breath of the Ivys that filled the air like embalming fluid. Still on his back, Ed looked over the mound of his stomach at Violet, who was busy entwining the scarves around her body in what seemed to be an ordered sequence, at least in the ballroom of Violet's mind. He thought how the candlelight was kind to Violet, how the soft flickers washed away the lines not even a thick layer of makeup could cover.

“This is my own dance. I put it all together myself. It's about Isadora Duncan's life. Each movement comes from individual feelings, just like she said it should. It's in three parts.”

Ed slid up on the bed and into a sitting position. It was hard for him to concentrate on Violet's words. The pain inside him was worse, probably brought on by the entire army of Sicily's family. Sometimes he thought of the pain as a kind of tumor that grew and sprawled inside his gut, pushing his stomach out so that it hung like bread dough over his belt. It was not beer nor food that had created his body. It was pain.

“The first part is about her life in France and first performance in the United States.”

Inside his body of fat was a college athlete who had worked hard to see his muscles strong and his body toned. For years he swore he would one day go on an all-out plan to lose the weight, would take up some sport again. Maybe basketball. Maybe a hobby that called for a physical workout. He could coach a team of kids in football. No one played football in Mattagash. No one played basketball. There was no gymnasium. No one did anything but work hard, long hours in the woods and drink hard and long on Saturday nights.

“The second part represents the anguish she felt when her two sweet little children were killed in a car wreck.”

There were times, getting out of a chair or a bed, that the slender young man inside could barely lift the heavy body. Then the heart pumped more than it should. The lungs hurt from nicotine. The liver swelled with alcohol. And the truth about himself settled down like lead with such a thud that he hurried to the whiskey bottle in his study, and only with two straight shots tossed quickly down his throat could he quell the demons of regret and free his hands from shaking. It was then that the calm settled in, and the warmth in his stomach allowed him to turn to old yearbook pictures and look down at the confident face of the young Ed Lawler, study the muscled body lines, and think about dusting off his old football the next day and rallying the boys into a game.

“The third part is very sad and is done with this long black scarf. I call it the ‘Scarf of Death' and it's about how her scarf got caught in that car and choked her.”

Violet launched into her dance, hands and arms flailing like cobras, scarves aflutter, and when it was over, Ed was only relieved. The first part was almost indiscernible from the last. Only to Violet was there symbolism and interpretation.

“It was lovely,” he told her, and she smiled, looking girlish in the candlelight, gyrating her hips for him as she said, “
Thanks
.” The dance had stripped her of all the scarves, as though she really hadn't stripped but simply followed the dance routine. It made her less ridiculous to him. She was naked before him and he looked at her. Her body was holding up well. The exercise it got, in spite of the quality of the dancing, was enough to keep the lines well defined. She sipped only an occasional glass of wine, ate only fruit and vegetables. At forty-six she looked years younger. And that's what brought him to her. She had served her body, not abused it. That was the power she unknowingly wielded as she did her countless sit-ups and stretching exercises. And when he came to lay his head against her bosom, he ignored the fact that modern dancer or not, she was a stripper in Watertown. Because after the ridiculous scarves had been cast aside the first night he watched her dance, he had seen the body beneath and the respect she paid it, even if it was out of fear of aging, or fear of being too old to make a living. And he came to her on nights when his own terror became too great and it seemed his angry heart was refusing the heavy workload. He came to her and held onto her firm thighs, pressed his heavy belly against her solid one, thinking he was safe. Certain she could save him.

Violet came to sit on the edge of the bed, fanning the cigarette smoke away from her face.

“You hate breathing smoke into your lungs, don't you?” he asked.

“It's worth it if it's your smoke.”

“I should quit.”

“You would if you were happy, and what you need to make you happy is the perfect woman for you.”

“I don't think there is one for me,” Ed said as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Not unless it's Aphrodite rising up from her clamshell.”

“Aphrodite? She danced at the Purple Tortoise just before I did down in Boston.”

“I don't think it's the same one, Violet.”

“Well, that's funny because when I was dancing that circuit I ran into this weird dancer who had an act just like that. She carried this record player with her that played only sounds of ocean and waves. I would have sworn that she called herself Aphrodite. She had this big clamshell made out of plaster of Paris, and one night she goes to step out of it, and the side broke and crumbled.”

“Aphrodite broke her clamshell?”

“She cut her foot real bad and tried to sue Dewey. He owned the Purple Tortoise. Dewey said she had a reputation for causing trouble. How did you ever meet her?”

“Trust me, Violet, it's not the same girl.”

Ed rolled his modern dancer over on her back and pushed between her thighs. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. With the excess weight he carried, everything was becoming a chore, even making love to Violet. He was always afraid that he might be too heavy for her, that he might relax the weight he balanced over her and come crashing down like a house. Touching the firmness of her legs, he felt a sorrowful wave come washing up inside him and before he could stop it, it burst out, and the tears he hadn't shed since childhood came with it.

A shocked Violet clasped his head to her chest and held him, rocking him, saying, “There, there,” and wiping away tears that ran into the lines of his face. He fell asleep feeling the warmth of her body flowing into his, rejuvenating him.

Only Violet was awake to hear Marvin Sr. unlock the door to number 4. She listened two hours later as Pearl came in and heard their soft voices through the wall as they said good night. With Ed asleep in her arms, she watched the candle burn slowly down until it flickered and went out. She saw traces of dawn come to the window, and wanting to hold the man she loved in her bed forever, she lay as still as she could, not even moving to cover herself with a blanket when cold crept up her arms. But regardless of how still Violet lay, an instinct born from years of marriage, of being bound to the clock, stirred inside Sicily's sleeping husband, and he came wide-awake, saying, “Jesus Christ, it's daylight!” and reaching for his shoes.