Rules for being dead, p.17
Rules for Being Dead, page 17
It was all going so well—and then I died. I bought the farm that I wouldn’t let him buy.
Money. That’s what he wanted. And I wouldn’t give it to him. The savings bonds that my father had given the boys when they were first born, or their college money that we were already tucking away, week by week, or what we’d put away for our own rainy day, in our joint savings account …
Our money. The bank.
It hits me for the first time, and I go into free fall, remembering even more of that last Wednesday, the part that was so bad I couldn’t remember it, until now.
It wasn’t just Corey’s pills I’d gone downtown to buy, or tickets for some silly last-minute movie at the Ritz; it was to get my escape money from the bank. The boys always loved going there with me because the tellers made such a fuss over them, adding to their little passbooks and getting them their Social Security numbers, and letting them know they were “real citizens” now. The bank had cookies and coffee in the lounge downstairs, apple cider in the fall.
That fateful day, the cookies were there, but my money wasn’t. L.E. had already beat me to it; our bank account was empty, and he’d cashed out the boys’ savings bonds without my permission. The poor bank teller thought I already knew.
Ha! I wanted to tell the poor dear. The wife’s always the last to know.
That’s why, in a daze, I bought our three tickets to see The Pied Piper at the Ritz, a dollar and twenty cents, nearly all the money I had left in the world besides some spare change at the bottom of my purse, barely enough for popcorn. A movie or a future? At that point, the movie won out. I just wanted to lose myself, to be in the dark somewhere so I could figure out what to do next. I could plot in the dark while the boys had fun. They could laugh, and I could cry.
Just two nights left alive on this earth and there we were, watching what turned out to be the scariest movie any of us had ever seen. A man in a patchwork cape comes to an old German village and says he can get rid of all their rats—they have a lot of them—by playing a song on his flute.
“Okay, go ahead, do it.”
After he does, they won’t pay him what they promised.
“Okay, I’ll take away all your children. Then you’ll have to pay to get them back.”
I’m making it all sound sillier, simpler than it was. It was … unearthly.
He plays the same song on his flute that he played for the rats, and the children follow him into the woods, hypnotized by his song, laughing and singing and having the time of their short little lives. They come to a wall of rocks that’s so thick it’s like a mountain they can’t pass, and they think all their fun has come to an end. But the Pied Piper plays his flute one last time, and the wall magically opens up. The children scamper through the narrow passageway to the wonderful, bright, shining life that’s waiting for them on the other side.
Then the mountain closes, and the children all disappear.
Except for one.
That’s the part that killed me: the little boy who gets left behind because he’s crippled and on crutches and can’t run as fast as the others. You see him all alone, banging his crutch against the rocks, trying to wedge them open and screaming, “Let me in, let me in, let me in.”
That little boy was like my Corey, with his angel disease. Screaming to be normal.
Let me in let me in make me well make me well don’t let me die…
Corey squeezed my hand as we watched the movie at the Ritz, maybe because he saw me crying, maybe because he felt the same thing about the boy with the crutches. He knew that he’d always have his own version of a crutch to drag around with him.
When we got home, the boys knew something was wrong. I took one of my pills from Dr. Hill to calm down and tried to turn it all into a game. I threw one of my old scrap-work quilts around my shoulders and took Clarke’s flutophone, and I marched the boys up and down the hall, singing that we’d get rid of the rats, one way or another.
Then I marched us outside into the front yard.
Then I marched us down the street, onto Woodleigh Drive, doing a little jig as I tried to bring that flutophone to life.
Maybe I’d taken more than one pill.
Every neighbor came outside on their porches to look at us. The boys were embarrassed, but something had taken over me. I couldn’t stop. The boys pulled at me and begged me to go back home—“Everybody’s looking at us!”—but I wouldn’t do it.
I started laughing and crying, “Let us in, let us in,” then “I have your children and you’re going to have to pay to get them back! Pay me the money you took from me!”
Clarke grabbed the quilt off me and ran back home with it, and I was there by myself. I had my clothes on underneath, but I might as well have been naked. Corey held my hand and walked me back home, saying, “I’ll let you in,” in the tenderest little voice I’ve ever heard.
L.E. was there by the time we got back.
“What the fuck are you doing, parading around like that? Have you lost your mind?”
“No, HAVE YOU—going around with that whore! If you want to talk about parading somebody through town …”
The boys were standing in the hallway, too afraid to know what to do. I didn’t care.
Unlike what I had told that poor ticket woman, just trying to get by at the Ritz, I didn’t care about anything anymore except telling L.E. off, one last time.
“Are you going to leave us? Is that the plan? Take our money? Go off with her? Well, just do it, because we’re going too! I’m the Pied Piper in case you haven’t noticed, and I’m going to play my magic song all the way to Plano. That big rock candy mountain is going to open up for us, and the only rat left in this town is going to be you! I’m taking the boys with me and you’ll never see them again!”
I grabbed the flutophone that I used to hypnotize rats and children and started banging it against him, like I had with the skillet. The skillet was strong, tempered metal, made to last. A cheap plastic flutophone wasn’t. It broke into shards, flying all over the hallway.
“Creola, calm down. You’re scaring the boys.”
“YOU CALM THE FUCK DOWN! You’re the one who’s scaring them! And now you’ve taken all their money … oh yes, I know about that too!”
“I will kill you if you don’t start flying right! I have tried my best to help you, we all have, but I am not going to let you run around embarrassing your children like this!”
“They’re your children too, or have you forgotten that?”
I grabbed one of the plastic shards and tried to gouge it into my wrist, to hack an escape for all the blood that was boiling inside there, but Clarke grabbed me and held me still before he also started attacking his father, his little boy fists flying into his father’s strong shoulders. “Leave her alone! This is all your fault! She’s sick … can’t you see! And you’re not helping. You’re a drunk, and that’s why she acts like this! We all wish you were dead! Just leave us alone!”
“Creola, I’m leaving you, I swear …”
“Okay, go ahead, do it.” I snarled the same thing at him that the Germans had said to the Pied Piper.
And he did.
— L.E. —
That night, L.E. took a brand-new bottle of Jim Beam that he kept hidden under the car’s driver’s seat, pulled it out, and put it on the seat next to him. He clutched the screw-top cap on it so hard he broke the paper seal, but he didn’t touch a drop. He drove out to the new part of town, where McKinney was expanding. It looked like the New World yet to come.
He needed a new world.
Ten acres of scrub brush and clusters of trees and a stream that snaked through it all, dividing the acreage in half. On one side, a pond. It already had some fish in it; he’d stock it with more. They’d be pioneers, living off the land. He’d make it pay for itself. Pay back the money he’d just taken out of their bank account to buy it with. He’d raise things; he’d build them a house they could retire to, if he could only patch things up with Creola. He’d teach the boys how to fish and hunt and protect what was theirs. He’d give them driving lessons in the old stick-shift truck that came with the farm. He’d teach them to shoot at tin cans. He had a rifle and a pistol, no use letting them go to waste except for the once-a-year deer-hunting trip he took.
He’d finally be the kind of father he’d always wanted to be—the father he hadn’t had; he didn’t even know who his father was—as he showed Clarke and Corey how to bend the rifle in half and drop in ammunition, then snap it back into place and hold it straight out, propped up against their little shoulders. He’d tell them it would kick, and they would laugh because that’s something they thought you could only do with a leg. It would be good, to teach them about the different meanings of words. He’d show them he was just as smart as Creola was. If Clarke loved words so much, L.E. would show him that he loved words too.
He didn’t mind them having their heads in books and movies all the time; he wanted them to be smart. And he wanted them to have manners. He’d taught them to answer the phone by saying, “Perkins residence. Clarke speaking. Corey speaking.” Even the boys made fun of that and balked every time he made them do it, but it was a sign of respect. A sign of pride for their house. He didn’t even have a phone growing up; he barely had a house. But that didn’t stop him. He wouldn’t let Creola think he was some old hillbilly who didn’t know how to act around decent people. Manners were fine, but the boys needed toughening up on top of them. They needed fresh air. He’d teach them how to get out of the car and open up the barbed-wire gate that fenced off the property, then close it back up so nobody else could get in. It was the barrier that said, “This Is Ours! Everybody Else Keep Out!” For L.E. and the boys, it would be like the private, backyard clubhouse the boys had with Mike Willis and Jim Poston across the street. Maybe they wouldn’t even get a phone out here. They’d just stand on the land and shout out “Perkins Residence!” They wouldn’t need to get in touch with other people, outsiders. They would just need each other.
All those things he could say in his head to Clarke and Corey, about all the things he wanted them to have and to do, but he couldn’t say to them in person because he got so tongue-tied at the very enormity of having children. He wanted to give them things, buy things for them, so they’d love him. He didn’t know if they could ever love him just for himself, not the way he’d been at least.
When he and Creola first got married, they didn’t have anything and didn’t need anything except each other. L.E. didn’t even have a suit to wear at their ceremony, just his uniform from the army. They got married at the justice of the peace, and L.E. had promised Creola they’d redo it all, when they had money for a real wedding. Redo it, when they had “a plan and a plot and a promise.”
They made love for the first time on their wedding night. Creola started crying, not because it hurt, she said, but because she was so happy. Through her tears, she started talking about babies and getting her teacher’s license and their first little house. That night, she told L.E. about every dream she had for them, and he agreed with every single one of them. He prayed to God right before he slipped off to sleep—and he didn’t often use God’s name except as a curse—and asked Him for the strength to make all his wife’s dreams come true.
Could this new farm be one of them, a dream come true, before it was too late?
The night his wife pretended to be the Pied Piper, he stayed out all that night on the farm that was already his, at least in his own mind. He drove through the gate, and in the glare of his car headlights he found the spot where he wanted to build his Ponderosa. He began marking it off with giant steps, dragging fallen-down tree branches and rocks from place to place, and outlining the footprint of his dream house with them.
And in the morning, to prove it hadn’t all been a dream, he drove to the real estate office in town and put a down payment on their future, with the entire savings he’d taken out of his and Creola’s bank account and the boys’ savings bonds.
Only after he signed the property deed did he take a drink—the entire bottle, in fact—terrified at what he had just done.
That was then.
This was now, some six months later, and he was still drunk and terrified.
He couldn’t raise two boys alone, without a mother. Without a wife.
He’d tried to, he really had. He’d tried to do all those things with them he’d first seen in his head: he’d taught them to shoot at old tin cans and calendars he nailed up to trees. They hated it. He’d told them his joke about how the rifle would “kick,” but they hadn’t laughed the way he’d imagined they would. They’d cried and said it hurt too much. Clarke dropped the rifle the first time it happened to him and almost killed them all when it fired accidentally.
L. E. had said—a last-ditch effort—that the fresh air would blow all the bad germs off Clarke, but Clarke had sassed back that there were more germs out in the country than in town. There were rabbit feces and deer feces and whatever snakes left behind, and you couldn’t help but step in it.
L.E. was grateful Clarke had said even that much to him; his children barely talked to him anymore after he’d hit Clarke. He’d tried and tried to make up for it; he’d given them extra money for the concession stand at the Ritz and bought Clarke some of the Nancy Drew books he loved so much, but nothing helped. Even with three people living inside, the house stayed as silent as it had been when he’d found his dead wife in it.
How could he take care of two little children who wouldn’t even speak to him? He couldn’t afford Mrs. Angel for the rest of his life. Is that who he wanted raising his boys anyway, a babysitter? Somebody he drove home every night because she didn’t have her own car? A drop-off mother, that’s who she was. Could a new wife get his kids to start talking to him again, like they used to? Could they move away from Woodleigh Drive, with all its bad memories, and start out here fresh, in the country, on the Ponderosa?
It hadn’t worked with his first wife. Would it work with a second one?
— RITA —
She’d told Perkins about every moment of Harold’s death, mostly so Perkins could see what was waiting for him if he didn’t quit drinking, but Perkins didn’t take the hint. He just wouldn’t talk about Creola, at least not about what killed her. He told Rita that they had fought a lot that last week, that he thought she was planning on leaving him. And then, she had left, but not in a way anyone expected. She just up and died. But what actually caused it? A heart attack? An accident? The coroner guessed a brain aneurysm, but that’s all it really was, a guess. But even if it was an aneurysm, what caused it? Rita was no doctor, but if something in your head explodes, doesn’t something have to cause it? They didn’t know because Perkins wouldn’t let them do an autopsy; he said he didn’t want her body being desecrated like that. Wouldn’t you want to know what killed your wife? L.E. said that was the past and it wouldn’t bring her back alive, and he was all about the future now. In business, you might miss one sell, but you couldn’t dwell on it. You had to get back on the horse and keep selling.
Rita snorted back at him, “Does that make me the horse then?”
“I’m not playing. I want you to marry me.”
The night she’d spent over at his house had been a disaster, even though she’d left early in the morning before the boys got up. There would not be a repeat of that. Rita was more worried about upsetting Corey and Clarke by being there than she was about upsetting Perkins by not being there.
It would be day trips only from now on. One Sunday, Perkins took all of them to a rodeo in Oklahoma where Clarke got bored and said he didn’t like seeing animals used like that. Rita bought both boys mosaic-beaded belts and fake arrowheads in the souvenir shop there, but Clarke said Indians scared him. They might come back and scalp him since Texas was just over the border. For everything Rita offered up to him, he had a counteroffer.
That’s why she was so surprised when Clarke asked her to help out with his Cub Scout skit at school. They were doing a medley of “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees and “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” and Clarke needed a go-go minidress in Day-Glo material so it would light up when they turned on the black light.
“Rita is not making you a shitass dress,” Perkins said.
“She made me a nightgown from Mother’s sheets!” Clarke snapped back in his defense.
“If he needs it for his little skit, Perkins, I’ll make it.” Rita was trapped between the two of them, the peacekeeper.
“He’ll be a Monkee or he’ll be nobody. He’ll quit before I let him wear a goddamn dress.”
“But my friends voted for me! It’s the best part! They said I’d make a better Nancy Sinatra than I’d make a Michael Nesmith, which was the only boy part left. I’m the ‘comic relief.’ I get to wear a wig. And go-go boots!”
Perkins shook his head in disbelief. “A dress? A wig?”
“The Monkees have to wear wigs too. It’s not a sissy thing.”
“It better not be a sissy thing, little mister.”
Rita ended up making Clarke the dress—in shiny canary yellow—but the night was a disaster anyway. Nobody wore the damn thing. The canary flew away.
Rita had been so excited; she was making inroads with Clarke, and it was yet another outside thing Perkins had taken her to: the big Cub Scout jamboree where all the troops in town gathered together to compete for best skit. Rita’s giddiness wasn’t just about them finally announcing they were a couple, no more sneaking around; it was about supporting Clarke. Doing everything she could to help him fit in, even if it meant helping him dress like Nancy Sinatra.
The den mothers were serving refreshments before it started, homemade cookies and lime-sherbet punch with ginger ale. Mrs. Gidney, whose daughter’s go-go boots Clarke was wearing, had gone to ladle it out and found a fly—a single fly, wings spread, face-up—floating dead on an igloo of melting green sherbet in one of the cut-glass punch bowls. She started to just scoop it out and throw it away before anyone else saw, but another mother—from the nicer part of town—caught her and said “You can’t serve that! You have to throw the whole thing away!”
