Three Hundred and Fifty Dollars
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
He spotted a liquor store across the street, and thought, why not, leaping a puddle and trotting over to it. He was going to need a consolation prize after this job. He bought a pint of Jim Beam and tucked it in his inside coat pocket. Just as he stepped outside, he saw a cab sitting at a stoplight a block away. He ran hard, hailing for all he was worth, his other hand pressing the bottle against his ribs.
“Oakvale Funeral Home,” he said breathlessly. “Corner of Mission and Vine.”
It was all right now, he was going to make it, and after the funeral he would get some groceries and pay his rent. But as he sat there gasping for breath, his head lolling on the seat, the fear clutched him again in the pit of his stomach. First there was the job to get through.
He hadn’t wanted it from the start and now, as the cab and the clock approached the unavoidable moment, the doubts he had tried to drink under the table surrounded him like a jeering crowd. Suppose “Mr. Musik” was some voyeuristic sub-species of necrophiliac? Should that matter to a “surrogate-at-large,” especially one who was legally and financially hanging by his fingernails? Your Walking Window on the World, he thought, squeezing his earlobe until it hurt. Anybody, any world, that was the way it had to be if you weren’t one of the photogenic assholes with network connections.
He’d tried to be one of the G-rated guys; it just hadn’t worked out. He didn’t have the Look, or the luck. He never had. No, his job was to do what he’d been paid to do: turn on the camera, maintain a steady, tracking gaze, and see everything. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the call. It had come early in the morning, waking him out of a dreamless sleep.
* * *
“Mr. Nelby?” The squeaky voice had sounded doubtful, irritated.
“Yes,” he said, and hearing the sleep and whisky in his voice, he added with strained vivacity: “This is Ed Nelby, The All-Seeing Eye Guy. How may I help you?”
“Not sure you can,” the voice said sulkily. “I saw your ad on TV, figured I’d call and get your rates.”
He sat up, kneading the muscles at the base of his neck, and looked at his watch: 6:55. His twenty-second spot on the Want-Ad Channel was run after two a.m — all he could afford, they wanted your fingers and toes for primetime — and a lot of his customers called in the wee hours, taking quite literally his “Pick up the phone now!” This one at least had waited until morning. He switched on the desk lamp, shading his eye from the glare, and readied the pad and pencil he’d been using since they repossessed his laptop.
“I charge fifty dollars for the personal channel hookup and a hundred per hour of on-air time. If you can find cheaper rates than that, I’ll give you a whole day gratis.” He was waking up now, getting the hard-sell snap in his voice.
“Sounds okay. Do you do anything besides that Walk-in-the-Park stuff or Date With the Girl Next Door?”
He was half-expecting the guy to be one of the innumerable dirty old men shut up in those fortresses they called retirement villages, who usually requested the under-the-counter, X-rated versions of his “Night on the Town” and “The Girl Next Door.” That was how he’d gotten in trouble with the FCC the first time, and since his surrogate license was on probation at the moment, he couldn’t afford to get caught a third time pandering to the corrupted tastes of his clients.
“I’m at your service, sir,” he said, “as long as it’s legal.”
“Now, you got that eye camera like the ad shows, and it really looks like an eye, right?” the man went on in his doubtful, biting tone.
“Like a glass eye, yes.”
“So you walk into a situation and nobody knows the camera’s rolling? They can’t tell?”
“It’s a Hideyoshi.” He lit a cigarette and opened the blinds. “The best. Very hard to spot.”
“Okay, then. I’d like you to attend a funeral.”
My God, why me? he thought. Why do the freaks always zero in on me? “All right,” he said. “Whose?”
“The name’s — her name was — Jennifer Crichton.”
At that point Nelby cringed away from the voice’s proximity, as if the man’s lips had brushed his ear.
“The viewing is at eleven this morning at the Oakvale Funeral Home. Know where it is?”
“I can find it. Are you a friend of the family, sir?” he felt compelled to ask.
“Yes I am,” chirped the voice emphatically. “I’d like to be there, but something very important has come up and I can’t go, so I figured you could go in my place and I could watch it on TV while I’m... waiting for this appointment that my business depends on. You see what I mean?”
“Of course, Mr...?”
“Musik. With a ‘k.’”
Fake name flitted through his mind. “Okay, Mr. Musik. You want to be there in spirit, pay your respects through me. Fine, no problem. But wouldn’t the family object to a stranger attending the service?”
“When is another mourner unwelcome at a funeral?” returned the other. “And Jennifer had so many friends.” The voice trailed off to a whisper, then almost shrieked out: “You will be sure to dress appropriately?”
“That goes without saying,” said Nelby, relieved by these signs of grief. Maybe his suspicions had been groundless, based on his own sordid imagination. “I’ll wear my Sunday best. Now, I need your personal channel code and a billing address.”
After giving him the channel code, Mr. Musik said: “Suppose I were to wire you a flat fee in cash before the funeral, say three fifty. Would that be okay?”
“Well, yes, certainly.”
“Good. The money will be at Western Union in your name at nine o’clock, which should give you plenty of time to make it to the funeral by eleven.”
“I’ll begin the broadcast at eleven sharp. Shall I mention your name to the family?”
“Uh, no, it might be better if I make my apologies personally. Well, thank you, Mr. Nelby. I’ll be tuning in at eleven o’clock.”
He’d hung up grinning at the thought of the money, but as the morning wore on, he liked the idea less and less. It had a sick smell to it, which even the sight of his dingy apartment with its square and rectangular dust spots where the furniture used to be failed to dissipate. But he was long past the point where he could afford to be picky; two months rent past.
* * *
Glancing at the cab driver to make certain he wasn’t watching, Nelby took off his eyepatch and stuck it in his pocket. From his coat pocket he drew out a small teak wood box with Japanese characters inlaid with mother-of-pearl on the lid, and fastened with a gold clasp. Inside it was a niche of black velvet for storing the camera, and on the inner side of the lid, a miniature remote panel with an electric eye. He held the red electric eye up to the micro-camera and pushed the ‘on’ button; a green light indicated that the camera was running. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard: just before eleven.
A minute later they stopped in front of a one-story colonial-style building with two hearses in the driveway and an oak-shaded parking lot full of cars. He paid the driver and stood on the sidewalk, reluctant to move despite the water sluicing off the brim of his hat and soaking into his shoulders, watching people with umbrellas and raincoats entering through the double doors flanked by black-suited ushers. Mr. Musik’s whispered phrase ran through his mind: “And Jennifer had so many friends.”
Squaring his shoulders, Nelby took off his hat, and adopting the grave, dignified gait of an elderly couple in front of him (as much to maintain the steadiness of the picture as to blend in), he passed slowly through the double doors.
Somewhere in the city a man was sitting in front of a television, seeing and hearing everything Nelby saw. He was hearing the doleful organ music piped in through discreetly hidden speakers, seeing the heavy face of the usher with its fresh shaving cut browning at the corner of the fleshy mouth, and the shift of perspective as Nelby turned to look at the scoured pink hand laid on his shoulder, then to the other hand pointing out an empty folding chair, and now he was seeing the rows of heads, some hatted and black-veiled, and beyond them, the erupting hues of flowers clustered in brightly-wrapped baskets around an ornate white coffin on a table draped with black satin.
Row by row, from the front to the back, people were getting up and filing slowly past the coffin, some hardly glancing down, others pausing to stare for a long moment before returning to their seats. Nelby crossed the blue-carpeted foyer and found his way to an empty chair at the end of one of the middle rows, his heart thumping oppressively in his chest. What was wrong with him? Nobody had noticed him, or remarked on the way he systematically swept the room with his gaze. The camera made no sound. There’s nothing to worry about, he assured himself. True, his breath smelled of liquor, but no one was going to say anything about that.
He noticed for the first time the large number of teenagers sitting around him and realized with a slight shock that Jennifer Crichton must have been very young. He caught a whiff of perfume and looked to his right. Seated next to him, apparently alone, was a young girl of high school age, wearing a dark green dress under a black raincoat. Her head was bowed and her eyes closed as if in prayer, and her small hands, resting palms up in her lap, seemed to await the clasp of comforting hands. Her straight, heavy hair, luminously blonde against the black of her raincoat, framed a delicate rather than a pretty face, with features as minimal as a doll’s. She had one of those translucent Northern complexions that only partially conceal the veins but impart in compensation an unfading blush to the cheeks.
As he stared at her, fascinated in spite of his unease, her lips began to form silent words. He looked away quickly, stung by sudden shame, and in the same moment she raised her head and looked at him. Her small blue eyes searched his face, seeking recognition or perhaps a mirror of her own suffering, and as he looked back at her, he felt and resisted the impulse to cover the camera with his hand.
There was something he’d forgotten, something buried in his past: the way strangers at funerals felt free to speak intimately about the deceased as they never could when the person was alive. This girl, a real mourner experiencing real grief, was about to speak to him, an imposter crashing a funeral for a client, and somehow he would have to respond.
At that moment the people in his row got up to view the body, and he and the girl, the last two in line, rose to join the procession. He walked with his shoulders hunched, unconsciously moving his feet in time to the syrupy organ rendition of “Rock of Ages.” He was acutely aware of his hands for some reason; they seemed to dangle conspicuously at his sides. He put them in his pockets, pulled them out, held his lapels, finally folding them in front of him like a church deacon, keeping his gaze on the girl’s back and her lovely fall of hair, as yellow as fresh-shucked corn.
He saw an old woman stoop and kiss the corpse’s face, place something in the casket and move on. Now it was only he and the girl looking down at the rouged, wooden face in its frilly niche. The deceased was a dark-haired girl no older than seventeen, her hands crossed over her chest, wearing a knee-length white dress with white stockings and a white sweater buttoned primly to the neck. Nelby was shocked to see stuffed animals in the coffin, a pink bear in the crook of her elbow and a white rabbit tucked between her ribs and the satin lining.
The girl said something inaudible while he was staring at the animals, and without thinking he whispered, “Pardon me?”
“She never wore her hair like that,” the girl repeated, as if offended by the sight. “Covering her forehead. She always wore it back.”
“Yes,” he said in a strangled whisper, feeling the sweat gathering in his palms and under his clothes.
“It must be because they had to... cover the bruises,” she went on in a vehement stage whisper, nodding her head in understanding, her thin lips pressed tightly together. “That must be it.” A deep V had formed between her eyebrows and her eyes were angry. Her expression alarmed him.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
