Stanley Elkin - The Living End

“Stop,” Ladlehaus cried. “This is a cemetery. A man’s buried here.”

“How was the kohlrabi?” Irene asked.

“I dropped the kohlrabi during the charge on that wiseguy’s grave.”

“Kohlrabi’s expensive.”

“You should have heard him. What a howl.”

“Regular katzenjammer, was it?”

“You think it’s right, Irene? Using kids to fight a man’s battles for him?”

“The kids weren’t hurt,” she said. “Umn,” she said, “oh my,” she said, squeezing his dick, hooking down and kissing it, twirling him about so she could smell his tush. “Umn. Yum yum. What’s more important,” she asked hoarsely, her pupils dilated, “that a few kids have bad dreams, or that my hypertense husband keel over with a stroke just because some nasty old dead man is trying to get his goat? Ooh, what have we here? I think I found the kohlrabi.”

The boys didn’t have bad dreams. They were ten years old, eleven, their ghosts domesticated, accepted, by wonder jaded. O.D.’d on miracle, awe slaked by all unremitting nature’s coups de théâtre, they were not blasé so much as comfortable and at ease with the thaumatological displacements of Ladlehaus’s magic presence. Still he insisted on coming at them with explanations, buried alive stuff, just-happened-to-be-passing-by, to-be-in-the- neighborhood constructions, glossing the stunning marvel of his high connections with death. They knew better, it was stranger to be alive than to be dead. They could read the dates on his marker. Perhaps he’d forgotten.

And forgave him. Not grudging Ladlehaus his lies as the crazy janitor had whose hypertension—they wouldn’t know this, couldn’t—was merely the obversion of his ensnarement by the real. A janitor—they wouldn’t know this —a man of nuts and bolts, of socket wrenches, oil cans, someone a plumber, someone a painter, electrician, carpenter, mechanic—trade winded, testy.

So if they dreamed it was of dirty old men, not ghosts.

“Where were you yesterday, Flanoy?” Ladlehaus asked.

“Yesterday was Sunday.”

They swarmed about his grave, lay down on the low loaf of earth as if it were a pillow. Or stretched out their legs on his marker, their heads lower than their feet. They plucked at the crowded stubble of weeds, winnowing, combing, grooming his mound.

“Does it tickle or pinch when I do this?” a boy asked and pulled a blade of grass from its sheath in Ladlehaus’s grave.

“When you do what?”

For they had come through their war games, outlasted Quiz’s supervision of their play, outlasted their own self-serving enterprises of toy terror and prop fright. (For a while they had dressed up in his death, taking turns being Ladlehaus, running out from beneath the grandstands, flapping their arms as if they waved daggers, making faces, screeching, doing all the tremolo vowel sounds of what they took to be the noise of death. It hadn’t worked. “It’s not dark enough to be scary,” Muggins, the youngest boy said, and kicked the side of Ladlehaus’s grave.) And settled at last into a sort of intimacy—the period when they teemed about his grave, grazing it like newborn animals at some trough of breast.

They looked up at the sky, their hands behind their heads.

“What’s it like in your casket, Mr. Ladlehaus?”

“Do you sleep?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Does it smell?”

“No.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not now.”

“Is it awful when it rains?”

“What’s worse, the summer or the snow?”

“Are you scared?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are there maggots in your mouth, Mr. Ladle- haus? Are there worms in your eye sockets?”

“I don’t know. Who’s that? Ryan? You’re a morbid kid, Ryan.”

“Shepherd.”

“You’re morbid, Shepherd.”

“Did you ever see God?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen Jesus?”

“Jesus is God, asshole.”

“Don’t use that word, Miller.”

“He’s right, Miller. Mr. Ladlehaus has seen God. He’s an angel. Don’t say ‘asshole’ near an angel.”

The boys giggled.

“Do you know the Devil?”

“I’ve seen the damned,” Ladlehaus said softly.

“What? Speak up.”

“I’ve seen the damned.” It was curious. He was embarrassed to have come from Hell. He felt shame, as if Hell were a shabby address, something wrong-side-of-the-tracks in his history. He’d been pleased when they thought him an angel.

Quiz watched impassively from a distance.

“Be good, boys,” Ladlehaus urged passionately. “Oh do be good.”

“He’s telling them tales,” the caretaker reported to his wife.

“You boys get away from there,” Quiz said. “That’s hallowed ground.”

They play in cemeteries now, he thought, and tried to imagine a world where children had to play in cemeteries—death parks. (Not until he asked was he disabused of his notion that there had actually been a war. What disturbed him—it never occurred to him, as it had never occurred to the boys, that the war was never for his benefit—were his feelings when he still thought there had actually been a battle—feelings of pride in the shared victory, of justification at the punishment meted out to the invaders from Minneapolis. All these years dead, he thought, all those years in Hell, and still not burned out on his rooter’s interest, still glowing his fan’s supportive heart, still vulnerable his puny team spirit. All those years dead, he thought, and still human. Nothing learned, death wasted on him.)

But a world where children could play in cemeteries and nuzzle at his little tit of death. He shuddered. He who could feel nothing, less tactile than glass, his flesh and bone and blood amputated, a spirit cap-side by a loose bundle of pencils, buttons, thread, nevertheless had somewhere somehow something in reserve with which to shudder, feel qualms, willies, jitter, tremor, the mind’s shakes, all its disinterested, volitionless flinch. And at what? Sociology, nothing but sociology. Who had lived in Hell and seen God and who had, it was to be supposed, a mission. Who represented final things, ultimates, whose destiny it was to fetch bottom lines. A sentimental accomplice, an accessory gone soft. (For he’d felt nothing when the bullet sang which had dropped his pal, Ellerbee, felt nothing for the people—he’d have been a teenager then—at whose muggings he’d assisted, felt nothing presiding at the emptying of wallets, cash drawers, pockets—he had quick hands, it was his kind of work, he was good at it—and once, on a trolley commandeered by his fellows actually belly to belly with the conductor, quickly depressing the metal whosis of the terrified man’s change dispenser, lithely catching the coins in his free hand and rapidly transferring dimes to one pocket, quarters, nickels and pennies to others.)

But he had not gone soft. Remorse was not his line of country, no more than sociology. A question plagued him. Not why children played in cemeteries but where the officials were who permitted it. Where, he wondered, was the man who said “Oatcakes”? Or the fellow who’d led the boys in war games? He was outraged that, exiled in earth, appearances had not been kept up. He could imagine the disorder of his grave—candy wrappers, popsicle sticks, plugs of gum on his gravestone. He wanted it naked, the litter cleared. It was his fault for talking to them in the first place. He’d dummy up.

“You! Ladlehaus!”

“Hey, Ladlehaus. The kids won’t come near you. I told them some garbage about hallowed ground.”

“Hey you, Ladlehaus, how’s your cousin?”

“That’s better. That’s the ticket. Silence from the dead. You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone.”