The Collar Out of Space

by Albert J. Manachino

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

The way Annette did the dirty deed was so simple, so lucid, it made me wonder why I hadn’t figured out the routine. Scarsi certainly knew how to croak in style. “No Italian funeral,” he wisecracked. “I don’t like cement blocks.”

We laid him out, or, he laid himself out on the guestroom bed surrounded by flowers. There was a continuous parade of mourners throughout the day, employees of the Nightmare Brick Company who came to pay their last respects. I suspected he’d hinted around they’d better view him or look for new jobs.

All in all, he looked better as a stiff than he had in life, which wasn’t saying much when you considered Scarsi was several hundred years old to begin with. He looked neater anyway.

The knock came at eleven p.m. June was in the kitchen making her third or fourth urn of coffee and laying out another tray of Pastry. Thinking it was just another mourner. I opened the door.

“Frank!”

June’s uncle stood on the front steps. He looked as fresh as any of the people who had visited us that day. You couldn’t have told he’d been planted twenty-five years except that his burial outfit had crumbled away. The only thing that stood between him and total indecency was the bough of a shrub that leaned over the steps and an old-fashioned high collar and tie still clinging stubbornly around his neck.

“I’m going to surprise June,” he said after exchanging the customary insults.

“You certainly are,” I agreed, hustling him into the Millennium Turkey.

Frank was too small to wear any of my clothes and too big to wear any of the grandchildren’s. At that time of night the only place still open was a tuxedo rental. I got him fitted out as well as possible and we returned home.

The big emotional moment when niece and uncle faced each other after an absence of a quarter century was a big letdown. Here’s the great passion-filled moment... verbatim.

“You look great, Frank.”

“You too, June. Put on a little weight, haven’t you?”

She should have after twenty-five years of Italian cooking and four kids.

“Yeah, you know how it is with these guinea diets.”

“Yes,” he spoke sadly, “all starch.” He had a crust, his idea of Sunday dinner was a pot of boiled potatoes and a six-pack.

“How was it in the great hereafter?”

“Rightfully, I don’t remember. Maybe I’m not supposed to. There’s a vague recollection of a rocking motion and an all-pervasive heat and dampness.”

Just as I thought. He was experiencing an ancestral memory of his days in the African treetops. There must have been a land bridge between Africa and Ireland at one time. Frank always did regard me as a dubious family acquisition.

“The only reason you people learned to walk upright,” I told him in my characteristically winning manner, “is because they invented the wheelbarrow.”

All this was lousy timing on June’s part. Being summer vacation time, the grandchildren and their parents were scattered the length and breadth of the U. S. of A. There was no one to trot out for his inspection. All we could show him was Scarsi, which didn’t seem to thrill him.

“Couldn’t you have done any better than that?”

“Look! You baboon,” I began.

“We were lucky to get any kind of stand-in,” June interceded.

* * *

A summary of the week that followed:

Modern times weren’t a turn-on for Frank. We turned him loose for a few days with a bankroll. He went back, and we thought he would, to his former neighborhood. All his old cronies were gone. The few familiar faces he encountered acted as if they wished he hadn’t. These were usually priests, including the one he used to go to confession when he felt like confessing, which wasn’t often.

“My God!” he gasped. “Father O’Shea must be in his nineties.”

“They’re long-lived because they don’t marry,” I explained. For this I got June’s elbow in my side.

The old coot he’d shared a room with for twenty years had passed away. After much difficulty, Frank located the grave and left a bunch of handpicked daisies on the tombstone.

“Larry was so tight, I’m sure it was all he did for me,” he said by way of an explanation. Again, some crust. Frank tossed nickels around as if they were manhole covers.

And all the time, I was turning over ways of removing that collar from around Annette’s neck.

After a week of flailing around, Frank buttonholed me in the back yard. “I can’t take it,” he confessed. “It was great seeing you and June again but there’s nothing for me except the Lassie reruns and I saw them thirty years ago. I want to go back.”

I made the arrangements with Annette. “Wake me up again in another twenty-five years.”

“By then I’ll be able to drop in on you personally.”

“Not where I am, the atmosphere will be too rarified for you.” Those were his last words.

* * *

That was that. Frank disappeared as unspectacularly as he’d showed up. I was to forget about him till the end of the month when I received a bill for $125.

“Oh, damn!” I swore, “I forgot about the rented tuxedo.” But that was to come later. At the time, all I thought of was getting rid of that snooping collar. I woke Scarsi up.

“I can’t afford the overtime,” I began as a preliminary. Turn your talents to getting rid of that collar.”

“No problem,” he assured me. “Normally I charge a straight hundred bucks for that, but inasmuch as you’re a friend of mine, I’ll do it for eighty-five.” He sat on the edge of the bed and lit one of those godawful cigars he was addicted to.

Some time later, after Annette had knocked over a flower stand with a sixty-dollar vase on it, I noticed the collar was gone.

“How did you do it?” I asked Scarsi the next time I ran into him.

“Like you said, paisano, I turned her inside out and made her spit it out.”

To Challenge 427...