Mark Rogers: The Dead

© 1989

Dead.

But fathers are immortal, Gary Holland thought as he swung his white Pinto wagon into the parking lot of Van Nuys and Monahan, the biggest funeral parlor in Bayside Point. Easing to a halt, he switched off the ignition.

God. If fathers can die, who can’t?

He stared blankly at the funeral home. The man who had raised him, taught him, shaped him, had been scythed from his life with a single stroke. Gary felt as though some part of him had been amputated; memories of his father seemed like feelings in a missing limb, bitter reminders of something that had disappeared forever.

Unless there’s an afterlife, like Mom says, Gary told himself.

But that was bullshit.

He got out of the car. It was a fine summer evening, not too hot; some of the parking-lot lights had already come on in the thickening dusk, and there was a heavy but pleasant smell of flowers and green leaves from the trees lining Beichmann Avenue.

He crossed the lot, passing his mother’s Jetta and his brother Max’s Maverick. There were few other cars, but it was early yet. His father had been an important man in Bayside Point, and Gary expected the viewing would be well-attended.

Entering the parlor, he stopped in the lobby. He had been to Van Nuys and Monahan’s several times, once for his grandmother, twice for pals of his father. Everything in the lobby was just as he remembered it-same tacky landscape paintings and gold velvet wallpaper embossed with harps and trumpets, same expensive aquarium setup with the same dead goldfish floating at the top.

Voices off to the left. He looked toward the office, where his mother, his wife Linda, and Max were talking to Mr. Van Nuys. Noticing Gary, Max smirked the way he always did when he spotted his little brother. Feeling like he was twelve again, suddenly forgetting where he was, Gary almost flipped him the bird, and was stayed only by the thought that his mother would see. Signing the memorial book, he headed for the chapel with the board marked “ Holland.”

Inside, the first thing he noticed was that the coffin was closed. Strange; this was supposed to be a viewing after all. It wasn’t as if his father had had some kind of horrible accident.

Going up the aisle, Gary settled in the front row. In his family, mourners were expected to kneel beside the coffin and pray. But having been basically agnostic since his early teens, (inexplicably, considering his upbringing) he had no intention of making the pretense, especially when there was no one else in the room to please; nor had he ever been too keen on the purely secular pleasure of gazing longingly on a preserved face.

Yet all that was what you were supposed to do if the coffin was open. What was the procedure when the box was shut?

Disturbed and uncomfortable, he looked at the flowers. They were arranged in the usual wreaths and crosses, the messages that you’d expect. The ironic thing was that a sizeable percentage were anthuriums, flowers with bright red leaves that looked like they were sticking their tongues-or worse-out. It was a sick joke. His father hated anthuriums. Gary had heard him joke more than once that he’d rather die than have “those damn things” at his funeral.

Reading the ribbons, Gary saw that all but one of the anthurium displays had been sent by people who hadn’t been too close to his dad, construction-business acquaintances. Gary reasoned they hadn’t known how Max Sr. had felt about them.

Uncle Buddy, on the other hand, had no such excuse. Gary clearly remembered his father and Buddy discussing the matter in a bar after Grandma’s viewing. Sending those flowers was classic Uncle Buddy; the old boy was a hellish pain in the ass under the misapprehension (deliberate, Gary thought) that he was a non-stop scream. Gary had seen his father’s old senior yearbook; Buddy, his fraternal twin, had given “Laff Riot” as his nickname, and had had his eyes slightly crossed in the photo. Gary cringed inwardly at the idea of talking to him, and worse yet, the probability that Buddy and Uncle Dennis would insist on taking him and Max out for a few drinks. The prospect was grim indeed, especially without his father to act as a buffer. Gary looked back at the coffin.

God, Dad, he thought. You can’t really be in there, can you ? How can you bedead?

He wondered when the others would join him, surprised Linda and Max Jr. hadn’t already. He doubted a chat with old Mr. Van Nuys could be all that interesting.

He realized that he couldn’t hear them anymore. When he first entered the chapel, their voices had carried quite clearly. Now there was only the low hum of the air conditioner.

Momentarily, even that stopped. A disquieting touch, but air conditioners did that from time to time…didn’t they?

He laughed and looked down into his lap. His hands were a horrible shade of pink. All the corpses he had ever seen in funeral parlors had been that color. It was the lights of course, those strange pink lights installed along the sides of the ceiling. Born with a talent for seeing through things, he had guessed during his very first viewing that the purpose of the lights was to make the stiff’s skin-color look more lifelike-or perhaps to make the live folks look more like the stiff, so it wouldn’t suffer by comparison. The effect was very peculiar. It reminded him of when he had gotten red tempera on his hands back in high school and had been unable to rinse all the paint off. There had been this thin pink film-

There came a faint sigh of rushing air, then a click. He stood and turned. The chapel doors were closed. Had the staff shut them by mistake? The room was definitely supposed to be open-just like the coffin. Had Max done it? All those years in the Corps hadn’t dimmed Max’s sometimes outrageous sense of humor.

This simply wasn’t his style, though. Not in a funeral home, at any rate. There wasn’t enough of Uncle Buddy in him. Max was funnier, for one thing. But now that Gary thought about it, if Buddy was out there…

He heard a hollow thump, and turned again. Where had it come from? Air conditioner, he thought. There was a vent in the wall, right above the hanging cross.

Another thump.

Not from the vent, he decided. His gaze drifted downward.

To the coffin.

“No way,” he laughed-just as a third thump, louder than the others, sounded insistently in the shining bronze casket.

Can’t be alive. He’s been em-

Thump

– balmed.

First horror, then hope rushed through Gary. There had been a mistake. He ran to the coffin.

“Mom!” he cried. “Mr. Van Nuys!”

He tried to pry the latches open. They might as well have been welded to the bronze.

He’s going to suffocate, Gary thought. He spun and dashed up the aisle, shouting for help. Reaching the doors, he tugged on them shouting, but they were locked. Panic mounted inside him; were those shrieks from the coffin now?

He threw himself against the doors. Heavy paneled oak, they didn’t budge. Lunging against them, he doubled, tripled his efforts.

He heard a crack; something gave. A bark of triumph burst from his lips.

It was only when he crashed once more into the wood and felt a tremendous shout of pain inside his shoulder that he realized what he had done to himself.

Panting, grimacing, he fell back. Starting at his fingers, hot tingling numbness spread up his arm and out into his chest, smothering the agony from his broken bone.