Three Hundred and Fifty Dollars
by Jeffrey Greene
|
Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
“I’m sure that’s the reason,” he said, and then took her by the arm and gently propelled her past the coffin. She let herself be escorted back to her seat, her face churning with anger and bewilderment. When they sat down she pointed to a veiled woman in the front row next to a bull-necked man sitting straight and rigid in his chair, as if grief had turned him to stone.
The girl said, “Her mother was knitting her that sweater for her birthday.” There was wonder in her voice, and a nascent irony.
Nelby tried not to think about his client watching the corpse’s face with its new hairdo on his TV screen, or the stuffed animals or the sweater; he tried to think only of how drunk he was going to get when this was over.
The girl searched his face again, and for a second he thought she had noticed the eye camera. “How well did you know Jennifer?” she asked.
“Not... well,” he said. “Were you close friends?”
“We weren’t that close when she died,” she admitted with a troubled frown. “But I felt we were going to get close again. She was popular, I wasn’t; I’m not. Her other friends resented me ’cause I wasn’t in their little clique; hated me for knowing her before they did. We were best friends in junior high, see. We used to dress up for Halloween together, like Southern belles in Gone With the Wind. I never minded playing a supporting role. She could be Scarlett O’Hara every time for all I cared. It was enough just to be with her, you know?”
“Sure, yeah.” He could feel the liquor sweating out of him, losing his buzz, losing it all.
“She had this... talent for making people love her. Anybody.” Her sweeping gesture included everyone in the room, even him. “She was going to be the Homecoming Queen. At least the Sweetheart.” She looked at her hands, clenched them into fists, and her face again twisted with rage. “When I think about the bastard who...” — a sob shook her shoulders — “who just left her in the...” She broke down, her hands covering her face, and several heads down the row turned to stare.
Nelby put out a tentative hand to comfort her, but rested it on the back of her chair instead. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, trying not to look at her, and got up from his chair. Following the usher’s directing finger, he walked quickly down the hallway to a bathroom faintly penetrated by the strains of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” He locked himself in a stall and pulled out the bottle. He took quick slugs, as fast as he could get them down, until the bottle was half-empty and his head began a languorous sway on his neck.
He capped the bottle and stuck it carelessly in his pants pocket, then went to a sink and rinsed his mouth out. He splashed water on his face, and thrusting it close to the mirror (seeing it in his mind’s eye dripping in brutal close-up on Mr. Musik’s TV screen), he said, “Goddamn you for getting me into this.” His face seemed to shrink and wither in the mirror, wincing in disgust at what it had just heard. “Goddamn me, I meant to say,” he said, smiling sickly, and made a gesture at the mirror that was both apologetic and disgusted. “Skip it. Sorry.”
He turned away, dried his face, and headed back down the hall, walking with a precise, almost mincing care. Guided back to his seat by the color of the girl’s hair, he sat down, a trifle heavily, and leaning over, mumbled: “Thank God for your beautiful hair.” She looked up in surprise, saw the redness of one eye, smelled the liquor on his breath, and seemed to be wondering, not for the first time, who this person was. She pointed to the preacher, indicating with a nod to Nelby that he should listen.
The preacher delivering the eulogy was a heavy man in a black suit that looked slept in. He had thick white hair parted on the side and droopy eyes that closed in prayer each time he paused for breath or to gather his thoughts. There was a sleepy, sing-song rhythm to his deep voice, lulling and hypnotic.
“Trying to deal with their feelins by hating. Hatred and grief sitting hand in hand in this room. I can feel it. Some of you might be sayin’: ‘May the man who did this to Jennifer burn in Hell forever.’ Well, I say to those people here and now: it’s not our place. We don’t know who he was, or even if it was a ‘he,’ we don’t none of us know who drove the car that ran her down and kept goin’. That cut short the life of a kind and lovely girl, a daughter of the church that we all loved like our own. Somebody knows who he is, though, rest assured. That Somebody is God. God knows and God will judge. That’s His job. Our job is to mourn Jennifer and remember her. That’s what she’d want us to do.”
“Hit and run?” Nelby said. He reached over and gripped the girl by the arm. “It was hit and run!?” he repeated, so loudly that even the preacher peered curiously in his direction. He stared wildly at her.
She nodded. “You didn’t know?” she asked, misinterpreting his horrified expression.
He shook his head, thinking: Not a pervert, and not a friend of the family, either. ‘Mr. Musik’ — Mr. Hit-and-Run. No. Nelby thought furiously, Not a pervert, a coward trying to put a band-aid on his conscience by sending me to his victim’s funeral. That’s why he picked me, somebody who couldn’t afford to go to the police. He chose his accomplice well, bought him for the princely sum of three hundred and fifty dollars.
“Quite the bastard, aren’t you?” he said aloud, pressing his finger against the camera until he groaned in pain. Feeling the girl’s hand trying to dislodge his convulsive grip on her arm, he let go of her and lurched to his feet.
He stumbled up the aisle and out the double doors, unaware that the girl had noticed his hat on the floor, picked it up and followed him out. He staggered into the rain, but he was very drunk and his shoes were the slippery kind with leather soles, and he fell hard on the sidewalk. Feeling the bottle break in his pocket, he laughed.
He rose to his knees and clawed at his face. He saw the girl running toward him, slowed by her high-heeled shoes, and then he got to his feet, turned and threw the glass eye as hard as he could on the pavement, then fell again, this time into the grass.
He was sitting with sprawled legs on the grass when she reached him, his chin sunk on his chest, going through his pockets with blood-smeared hands. The blood welled thickly through his pants pocket, and seeing it, she dropped the hat she was holding out and knelt down beside him. He looked up and saw her wince at the sight of his empty eye socket, gaping like a wound in his face. She lowered her eyes and tried to daub the flow of blood with her handkerchief.
He grunted in pain and said, “There’s glass in there. You might get cut.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head, grimacing, then said, “There it is,” and pulled the eyepatch out of his coat pocket. He put it on and looked at her. The rain had plastered his pittance of hair against his temples and drawn down in scarlet threads the blood smearing his cheek. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Laura.”
“Mine’s Ed. Would you help me stand up, Laura?”
When he was steady on his feet and taken the hat she held out to him, he said, “Guess I better get to a doctor.”
“I’ll call an ambulance.”
“No, thank you, Laura, I’ll find a cab. You should go back inside, get out of this rain.” He walked a few careful steps, then turned and limped back to her. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
He saw that she was staring down with a puzzled expression at the micro camera, seeing but not understanding the shattered insides spilling out of one end, her attention held by the still-intact pupil. She looked up at him and opened her mouth as if to speak, then, as if noticing for the first time the water dripping from the soaked ends of her hair, she shivered, turned and walked quickly back to the funeral.
He watched her until she was gone, then, feeling the blood trickling down his leg, he limped across the street and hailed a cab.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
