Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

Broomeville Bulletin, October 12, 2009

Sheilah Crimmins, age 47, was found dead in her automobile on State Route 356 early Thursday morning. The county coroner has ruled that the deceased died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to reports, Ms. Crimmins had a history of substance abuse and was distraught over recently losing her job at Broomeville Junior-Senior High, where she’d been employed as a guidance counselor for eleven years. She was a lifelong resident of Broomeville and is survived by her older brother, Ronald, also of Broomeville.

Well, that was bullshit, as far as Ronald was concerned. This was what he’d told Doc the day the newspaper report had come out, which was the day after the police had told him what was going to be in the report, which was a week after Sheilah had died. Ronald was sitting across Doc’s counter from Doc. Doc, in his early sixties, was about fifteen years older than Ronald. He was from Broomeville, too, but Doc must have gone away at some point in his life, because then he’d come back with Crystal, grouchy Crystal. But anyway, as far as Ronald could remember, Doc had always been on the other side of that counter, with his spatula and his greasy apron and his yellow-arm-pitted T-shirt. This seemed like the only thing there was to know about him. But now, Ronald had just discovered another thing.

“You’re the coroner?”

“Elected.”

“I didn’t vote for you.”

Doc nodded. He picked up the coffee pot and refilled Ronald’s cup. There was no one else in the place. There was basically never anyone else in the place. “Well, somebody did,” Doc said.

“My sister never owned a gun,” Ronald said, “let alone fired a gun.”

“I am sorry,” Doc said.

“If she killed herself,” Ronald said, “then why was the window blown out?” Because this was what the police told him: a bullet had gone through the passenger’s side window, destroying it. Meanwhile his sister’s dead body had been found in the driver’s seat.

“There were two bullets fired,” Doc said. “One through the window, and then one into her head.”

“Why would she fire a bullet through her own window?” Ronald wanted to know.

“Why was she stuck in a snowbank? Same reason she shot out the window before she shot herself. She was really drunk, Ronald,” Doc said. “I’m sorry, but she was.”

“But she was always really drunk,” Ronald said. “Why would she kill herself?”

Doc shrugged, as if to say, Hey, I’m just the coroner. “She’d just lost her job,” he said. “Maybe she was distraught.”

“That’s bullshit,” Ronald said.

“What part?”

“ All of it. ”

And it was. Ronald knew this because of what had happened earlier that night. The new guidance counselor had shaken Ronald’s fucked-up hand at the baseball game, and it’d bothered the new guidance counselor not at all, and later on Sheilah had said, “Your hand didn’t work.”

“I’m sorry,” Ronald had said.

“Hey, it’s all good,” Sheilah had said. They were sitting in the kitchen in the house they shared, which before that had been the house they’d shared with their parents. Sheilah was drinking vodka out of a juice glass. No ice or mixer or fruit or anything. At least she wasn’t drinking it straight out of the bottle. “I wasn’t much good as a guidance counselor anyway.”

“Maybe you’ll end up being good at something else,” Ronald had said, and Sheilah had lifted her glass in his direction.

“Maybe I already am,” she’d said. It’d made Ronald so sad to hear his sister say this. But Sheilah had not seemed sad saying it . She did not seem like a person who three hours later, after all the vodka in the house was gone, on the way to doing more of what she was good at at the Lumber Lodge, would decide, You know, maybe I will kill myself, and then somehow, somewhere, from someone, get a gun and then drive herself into a snowbank and then shoot a window and then herself. It was bullshit and Doc was bullshit and the county that had elected him was bullshit and the town in the county and everyone in it was bullshit, including the principal who had fired his sister for bullshit reasons and then hired this guidance counselor, this bullshit Swede or whatever he was, and the bullshit principal’s wife, who was bullshit herself if for no other reason than she’d served Ronald’s sister so many drinks and made so many people laugh at Sheilah and not love her the way Ronald, her bullshit older brother, had loved her, and he, Ronald, was the biggest bullshit of all with his bullshit hand, which was not magic or any bullshit like that, it was just mangled and disgusting and weak and pathetic and it did not tell him anything, it did not tell him, for instance, not to have a funeral for Sheilah, he decided on his own not to have one, because he was afraid that no one would come to the funeral and how awful that would be, and can you believe that bullshit, oh God, he had not even had a proper funeral for his sister, his only sister, instead he had had her cremated, which is the bullshit term for what you do when you don’t know what to do with a dead person’s body, and then after he did that, he did not know what to do with her ashes, either, there was no special enough place for him to scatter her ashes, no place she loved, and so he just kept the urn on the top of the kitchen cabinet with the dust and that fondue pot, and sometimes when he tried to remember her, to remember her when they were young, for instance that time when their mother was reading a book to them, maybe Sheilah was three and Ronald was six and the book had an armadillo in it and Sheilah said, “What means armadillo?” and Ronald and their mother laughed, it was cute, how she’d said that, and so they laughed, and Sheilah didn’t know why they were laughing or what armadillo meant, and so she said, really mad now, “What means it?” and then they laughed even harder, but whenever he tried to think of that person, of that time, the urn and the supposed self-inflicted gunshot wound to the face and the shot-out passenger’s side window and the car in the snowbank and the alcohol in the bloodstream and all that bullshit got in the way, and the only way he knew to get that bullshit out of the way was to find out who murdered his sister, and it was probably one of two people, either the principal or the new guidance counselor, or maybe it was both, either way, he would find out, he would prove it, and if he couldn’t prove who killed her, then maybe he would just go ahead and kill both of them, and while he was at it maybe he’d kill all of them, maybe he’d kill every single human being in this town and then let the coroner deal with that bullshit, unless Ronald decided to kill the coroner, too.

Good morning.” This was Matty, talking to Ellen. It was three in the morning. It was after three in the morning. She’d just gotten home, had tiptoed into the room, and had slipped into their bed. Now she was just lying there, hands clasped over her chest, staring at the ceiling, in the way of married people who have slunk into bed too late and think they’ve gotten away with it and are now wondering, Now what? Matty knew this because he’d been, and somewhat still was, the slinker, the wonderer.

“Good morning.”

“Jesus!” Ellen said, sitting up straight. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Well,” Matty said. “I’m not.”

The wind roared. It would be even colder tomorrow. It would snow some more, too. The wind roared, the windows rattled in their frames. Matty had grown up in this house; he’d bought it from his parents right before they moved to Florida and then died — not on the beach or the golf course, as is the dream, but from a carbon monoxide leak in their condo while they watched television in the middle of the afternoon. Anyway, Matty had lived in this house his entire life, more or less. When the wind was up, the windows had always rattled in their fucking frames. His father had never done anything about it, and so neither had Matty. God, it sounds like the glass is going to break. But no, the glass won’t break, because the glass has never broken. God, I should have lived somewhere else, Matty thought. Anywhere else. But where?